ADAMANT

The Shadow Of The Law

A Green hanging judge in  Santa Clara County California  has ordered the beheading of  two  redwood trees in  Richard Treanor and Carolyn Bissett's backyard.

Oblivious of their carbon footprint, the  scofflaw sequoias have been  casting shadows over neighbor Mark Vargas solar panels. Vargas complained to the district attorney, who charged the couple with violating the state's Solar Shade Control Act, passed by Governor Jerry Brown in 1978,  which  bans trees and shrubs that shade more than 10 percent of someone else's solar panels between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.

Lawyers skilled in chasing tree surgeon's ambulances  should note that Treanor and Bissett planto appeal the court decision.  Here's a link to a shot of the perps  in flagrente perumbro

Up From.......Oh, Never Mind!

Only those  who smile to see the Republican Party marching off to the war of ideas on an empty stomach find comfort in this focused political poll of the intellectual ground state of the  Red States. With the elephant's skull running on empty, no wonder the GOP think tanks are fading. 

Idiocy Of Biblical Proportions

    Of course, nowadays even prequels have prequels

 Until at last, you get back to the future. Which like the past is often so filled with random acts of intellectual vandalism as to be beyond ironic repair-- I didn't perpetrate this one- it's part of the original artwork proudly displayed on the Expelled website.

Of course, they  could try  erasing  "Darwin" , and substituting "Einstein", but then, it might strain even a funny guy like Ben Stein to write a prequel to Mel Brook's The Producers based on the premise that Hitler got  The Bomb.

Maybe Ben should settle for spraypainting " Maciej Giertych" the Discovery Institute Declaration signer who appears in the film.

Will the exposure of Giertych's  peculiar racial views get him Expelled from the final cut? Stay tuned--
it seems his right hand gal was caught on video  in a neo-nazi swastika  torch parade.

Now that's show business!

 

 
 

Claire De Lune

The giant outer planets vast magnetospheres  gather  in the solar wind  like spinnakers , concentrating protons into radiation belts that dwarf the earth's . Our Van Allen belts deliver enough radiation to keep astronauts from lingering - but the vortices of charged particles  whirling around  Jupiter and Saturn and their moons  would strike a human dead in a matter of hours .

The magnetic fields also peel off ions from the moons,  so the plumes of volcanic eruptions on Io end up  as ion beams spiraling into Jupiters magnetic poles rather as the solar wind is concentrated into the Northern Lights on Earth, witness this eerie  ultraviolet image of Io's ionic doppelganger  focused into a point by the capture of field lines linking the magnetosphere of Jupiter and its satellites.  The moon in turn gets roasted by the capture of ions from the gas giant's magnetosphere, inflicting  xenomict radiation damage on the  minerals on its cold surface- an area of astrophysics on which I recently published in Naturwissenschaften , and wrote of here.

Meanwhile on Saturn's moon Enceladus, things are warming up mysteriously- the ice geysers at its south pole have been imaged in the far infrared, and though the false color highs in this photo are still far below freezing  a the data suggest a deep lying liquid water ocean beneath a thick mantle of ice . Since both methane and ammonia are being ejected as well,  the possibility of a life sustaining environment cannot be excluded at this stage

Ein Kleine Rapmusik

The opponents of Expelled have mustered an OK Chorale , and something utterly missing in Ben Stein's  corner of the latest Culture Wars battlefield-a sense of humor:

Dembski For Dummies

A Short Dictionary of  Intelligent Design

 

Authority           Discipline dealing with the self-definition of culture

 

Biology               Decomposition product of emergent phenomena

 

Creationism                 An Information Deficient ideology

 

Death of God            Road kill on the evolutionary highway

 

Evolution      Precarious runaway phenomenon. see  also Fear of God

 

Fear of God              Byproduct of Evolution. C.F.  Teleology

 

God          Expletive teleologists utter on first opening a physics journal

 

Hell               A  Conurbation of Creationists under authoritarian rule

 

Intelligent Design                Outcome of the devolution of teleology

 

Jeremiad               Response to this alphabet by The Discovery Institute

 

Greek verb,

                    What  The Discovery Institute  wants to do to science

 

Legal Fiction     see             Intelligent Design

 

Metaphysics 1. The formal logic of things in the null set

                        2. Set of philosophical operations beginning where physics ends.

 

Noetics             Alias adopted by Intelligent Design after its release on bail.

 

Ontology         What ID knows it does not need.   see Omega Point

 

Polytheism                  Belief system most compatible with ID

 

Quietism        Word which Intelligent Design movement should look up

 

RNA                         David Berlinski’s least favorite molecule.

 

Statistics         Undiscovered country that swallowed up Michael Behe in 2002

 

Teleology              What metaphysicians call self-emergent complexity

 

Uniformitarianism         Belief in the sustainability of stupidity

 

Virial Theorem        Reason for exercising caution in saying “Let There Be Light”

Wedge Strategy           Lobotomy technique most favored by creationists

 

Xenobiosis         Another reason to keep  Earth as The Center Of  The Universe

Y-chromosome                          Leftover from cloning of Eve

 

Zygote                                    A very young Republican

ELECTRIC SILK

Could static cling help keep clothes clean ?   A cross between sparky carpets and microwave plasma ashing- oxidizing  organic materials like wood or paper  with a cold glow in a microwave oven  may give rise to the ultimate form of dry cleaning.

The idea is to create reactive oxygen atoms to chew up dirt by allowing light to generate photoelectrons in  or on the  fiber surface  using a dusting of semiconductor crystals.   Natural fibers like silk and wool are cherished for strength, warmth, water resistance, and texture. But the proteins  of which they are made, like keratin,  lack the stain resistance of  slick synthetics, and can't stand  harsh chemical cleaning.

Monash University and Hong Kong Polytechnic now have a way to make  keratin fibers  that clean themselves by modifying them with Titanium oxide  ( TiO2 ) nanoparticles .Daoud et al., report in Chemistry of Materials (2008) 20, 1242].

They  functionalized wool with carboxylic groups using succinic anhydride, a mild acylating agent , making  the fibers  adherent for anatase TiO2 nanocrystals- a finer form of the white paint pigment . TiO2 is an efficient photocatalyst , and  red wine stains on the wool  dissapeared  on exposure  to a solar light simulator,

Walid A. Daoud says: “Among the different crystalline forms of TiO2, the anatase form shows the highest photocatalytic ability,” “Biomaterials such as keratins are subject to photodegradation in presence of sunlight. They also have poor resistance to heat and strong chemicals and solvents. The nanocrystals reduce their photodegradation by absorbing the light and converting it into self-cleaning power to decompose contamination.”

Nanocrystalline anatase  was chosen because the small particles  higher surface area yields  a higher efficiency of photocatalysis, and the nanoparticles are  so small  as to be invisible. They do not alter the fabric's  texture, color, or feel.

The Oldest Sight Yet Seen

                                                                 

   NASA's Swift gamma ray satellite  was struck last week by a blast of gamma rays from an event half as old as the observable universe.  so violent was the event that had it occurred in  the center of our galaxy, the milky Way would have lit up brighter than the noonday sun. Alerted by Swift, the Very Large Telescope in Chile swung to focus on the burst coordinates and captured a spectrum - the peak luminosity was such that the event was probably visible to the naked eye , making it the oldest sight  so far seen by man  .

Although visible light  photons from events so distant are ordinarily shifted into the infrared and out of sight, this explosion was so violent that its expansion front approached the speed of light , offsetting the red shift due to the expanding universe and rendering it visible

  British Swift researcher Julian Osborne said yesterday :

" the explosion took place 7.5 billion years ago, the photons have only just reached us. Are the photon's wavelength affected? Yes, the cosmological redshift almost doubled the wavelengths by the time they reached us. (The emitting surface was travelling towards us at a very high fraction of the speed of light however, this causes the pre-cosmologically-redshited photons to have a very much shorter wavelength than they would have in the inertial frame of the emitting surface.

There was no prompt dispersed spectrum obtained unfortunately, although the redshift (and thus distance) was determined from a dispersed spectrum of the afterglow about an hour after the burst. .. were  photons emitted in the visible detected?', then the answer is probably, as the REM Italian IR telescope in Chile pointed at the burst within 43 sec and it was still very bright at that time. "

THE GREAT HOP FORWARD

Kim Jung-Il's dictatorial taste in cinema, cuisine, and above all public sculpture remains deeply mysterious, witness the fusion of folk culture and socialist realism in the Lunar Rabbit Zodiac Memorial installed at Pyongyang's uninhabitable 105 story Pyramid Hotel. While a symphony orchestra can be sent to the DPRK in reasonable expectation of returning unscathed from a state banquet, rabbits are another matter

That's why  Easter brings little joy to Karl Szmolinsky, bereft of his pride and joy, Robert der Grosse, the largest rabbit in recorded history. Last year, the 23 pound Prussian Giant Grey uberbunny, scarcely shorter than Kim Jung-Il, fell victim to his aberrant public diplomacy as Robert and 11 other Giant Greys were  dispatched to Kim's establishment "with the aim of setting up a breeding program to alleviate famine" only to end up on the table at the  diminutive  Dear Leader's  2007 birthday banquet.

Der Spiegel reported the  Meisterkaninchenzüchter  of Brandenburg was due to be Kim Jung Il's guest in  setting up a state of the art rabbit warren, but received a  last minute call from a DPRK official canceling the trip. When pressed, North Korea's Berlin embassy issued a denial of any alleged lepicide, but declared the rabbits fate  a secret of state.

The news leaked never the less- foreign guests invited to the banquet praised  the  extraordinary proportions of some of the dishes served -- Herr Smolinsky's better efforts yield upwards of seven kilograms of meat. Which is why, keen to alleviate hunger in the impoverished country, he gave the DPRK a thousand Euro discount on the breeding stock shipment. In 2006, Szmolinsky told  Spiegel Online. "I've sent them 12 rabbits so far, they're in a petting zoo for now." but learning of their liquidation said "North Korea won't be getting any more rabbits from me, they needn't bother asking."

Absent the Hermit Kingdom Hasenpfepper fiend's orgy of lagomorphagy, the eight females and four bucks could have produced 60 bunnies a year.  If fed properly: " I feed them everything-- grain, carrots, a lot of cabbages. At the moment they're getting kale," said Szmolinsky of the winter fare of his 50 surviving charges, adding philosophically: "You can't hang on to them...They cost a lot to feed."  He has a point. An average-- there are no small familles of rabbits-- can  devour pounds of fodder a month.

Is a demarche is in the offing?  Some fear  Hollywood animal rights militants may escalate the atrocity into a  casus belli, by involving  the dreaded Acme Products Corporation, whose retaliatory  arsenal puts Kim's plutonium hobby to shame. There are other powers in the world, and  Beijing, seeped in Manchu game cookery, and anxious to feed hungry Olympiansless fatty fare than roast duck,  may have infiltrated Kim's kitchen, for Szmolinsky reports "China is sending a delegation to inspect my animals. "

Though Robert der Grosse has vanished,  he  left behind a kale-munching  dynasty, including  Robert II, who safe in his hutch in the March of Brandenburg, is growing  rapidly  as spring advances, already looking Eastward across the vast and edible swathe of steppe that extends  unbroken from the Elbe to the Yalu.

The Bras From Boyzil

No Chemistry Please, We're Islamish

Should victory be declared in the war against chemical warfare on the strength of Michael Rubin's  Iranian news round-up in National  Review Online today ?

Rubin, or rather his Farsi literate amanuensis, points out that  the search engine filters in the Islamic Republic are tuned to such an exquisitely puritanical pitch that they show no results for such salacious subjects as the University of Sus[sex]  or the nation of [Bra]zil.

Since Iran is the greatest Internet Power in the region, the impact of  Bowdlerizing the bandwidth of  happy chemical warriors in the Middle East may be profound.

No longer will  mayhem bent researchers of ether gender be able to surf in toxic search of the latest [Arse]nic compounds , or subject to the temptation to fool around with explosive per[man]ganates , pot[ass]ium cyanide, or heaven forbid, [sod]ium.

Dating Demolition

 

A recent paper in Nature shows how quantitative improvements in scientific instruments can bring broad new vistas to light. Carbon 14 dating was devised to date carbon in organic matter, from bones to charcoal, in archaeology, but carbon 14 forms in any material containing nitrogen that is exposed at the Earth’s surface to the neutrons generated by cosmic rays.

The quantitative problem of applying the C14 technique to materials containing mere traces of nitrogen and carbon, like quartz , has been solved in recent years by advances in accelerator mass spectrometry, which allows dates to be calculated even if only a few parts per million of carbon are present.

The Nature paper reports on the exposure of rocks on Baffin Island by glacial ice advancing and retreating over the last few thousand years, but the same technique could just as well date the time at which an obelisk was overthrown, or a wall or column toppled by siege or earthquake. The original buried or bottom end would have been shielded  from cosmic ray C-14 generation by the mass of stone above it, but once flipped or overturned, the exposure of the bottom side to the sky would start the clock of C-14 creation on the bottom , establishing a second, different date for  the beginning of that side's continuous unshielded  exposure ,versus the exposure integral of the  top since  the structure was cut out of its parent rock and erected.

The top of a granite  Obelisk like 'Cleopatra's Needle', for example ,might yield a quartz 14 C age of 3500  while the bottom, reflecting its having been toppled in say, 500 AD might yield one of 1500

Two Opposable Thumbs Down

                               IDIOCY ILLUMINATED

         With apologies to the Bayeux Travesty and the Tres Riche Heures of Chuck Berry    
Expelled Executive Producer Logan Craft is deeply, deeply shocked that a movie critic has seen his  Darwin For Zombies opus without signing a non-disclosure agreement , and that the cad has had the temerity to actually review it.

Craft denies involvement in the online “media alert”  from Media Marketing, shown below, but his film's official movie site displays the  Motive Marketing  logo and the  a firm  was founded  by  Craft's colleague, Promise Media executive Lauer , who writes :

We already had our first security breech [sic] and are asking YOU now for your support to stand up for EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed. Hosted by Ben Stein, EXPELLED contains a critical message at a critical time. As an underdog in Hollywood right now, we need your support.

Recently Robert Moore, a film critic from The Orlando Sentinel pretending to be a minister, snuck into a private screening, did not sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement, and criticized the film the next day in his article.

Yesterday, the  vigilant Producers  expelled P.Z. Myers, a scientists who appears in the film from a preview !

Myers was yanked out of line even before he got to the Non-Disclosure sign-in--little wonder  the invitation Moore received from Promise Media bears the film's splendidly candid subtitle: No Intelligence Allowed-- many of the scientists Stein is depicted interviewing are simply  not there- he is talking to an empty chair. The other half of several "interviews"  are Orwellian  cut and paste jobs assembled from footage of people he's never met,  "answering "  questions he's never put them.

More to the point , producer Mark Mathis failed to notice who else was in line- and got in un-accosted:

Richard Dawkins

The Seven Urban Sins

I envy wrath aimed at lustful pols

who sully New York’s Runyonesque reputation by draining its fleshpots into the hotels of DC. To preserve it, City Journal should lobby City Hall to make the Seven Urban Sins as compulsory as recycling.

Hypocausty
Mirth at the sight of freezing smokers

Sprawlth
Adding houses to existing suburbs or entablature to East Side  garden walls.

Misotaxi
Obtaining  cabs by outrunning women with strollers.
Cyclage
Opening car doors into the paths of foulmouthed  bicycle messengers.
Zabary
Imposing a trans-fat fast on thy neighbor.

Slouche
Aiming pothole water at pedestrians while driving.

Tammany
Encouraging urban delinquency by voting for politicians.

ON THE BEACH

Mar's  Holden crater, as recently imaged by  by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows every sign of being a lakefront beach short of a lifeguard stand and a game of volleyball in progress.  It would of course be nice if the water were still there , and  a hundred degrees warmer, ...

The   finely layered  calm water sediments speak for themselves , and  MRO's instruments also detected clay and other wet environment minerals , researchers report in  Geology . They also assert that  lake lasted long enough to be a potentially habitable environment. This puts Holden hugh on the list of  candidate sites for landing  NASA's Mars Science Laboratory in 2010. (Photo: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

Grin And Bear It

Medvedaev, the name of the new  Soviet   Russian President  Hillary Clinton couldn't quite recollect in last month's debate, means 'Bear', and a bear is indeed his political party's ballot symbol.

So, reports Sans Everything, Russian animal rights activists bent on performance art as political mockery, or:

"inspired  by the  pagan Slavic  connection between human sexuality and the health of Mother Earth...staged an orgy ...at a Russian Biology Museum.

While making love on the floor, the activists chanted slogans about the need for Russia to save its bear population...The signs that the activists are holding up read something to effect that “Screw to save our bears.”

Going To Pot In Penang

  Thou Shalt Not Worship

    Teapots Before Me

A Malaysian woman has been jailed for two years for hooking up with the "teapot worshipping" Sky Kingdom cult, contrary to Sharia law which prohibits born Muslims converting to other religions. Authorities have accordingly  clamped down on the cult and demolished its two-storey sacred teapot symbolising the "purity of water" and "love pouring from heaven".

While Malaysia has constitutional guarantees of freedom of worship, apostasy is off the menu for the Muslim population.

Sharia High Court judge Mohammed Abdullah  said he'd "considered aspects of public interest and the sentiments of Muslims in the country", and told the defendant: "The court is not convinced that the accused has repented and is willing to abandon any teachings contrary to Islam. I pray God will open the doors of your heart, Kamariah."

Ali's lawyer, Sa'adiah Din, protested to reporters: "This has to stop. They can't be sending her again and again to prison for this. She informed the court that she is not a Muslim. She doesn't come under Sharia court anymore."

An appeal hearing will  "consider [Ali's] plea for a lighter sentence and to defer the date of her sentencing", the Malaysia Star notes. ®

And Now A Word from Our Sponsor

I hope Bill Buckley and George Orwell are comparing notes:

Among the 52 organizations, Good , Bad,  & Ugly lending their  503C's to the  claim that next weeks New York conference on the climate non-crisis is  not  funded [directly] by corporations, is one I have celebrated : but whose largess I somehow never expected to receive:

"The Discovery Institute
Discovery Institute is a non-partisan public policy think tank conducting research on technology, science and culture, economics, and foreign affairs. Its mission is to make a positive vision of the future practical. It discovers and promotes ideas in the common-sense tradition of representative government, the free market, and individual liberty. Its mission is promoted through books, reports, legislative testimony, articles, public conferences..."

To that mandate may be added the subsidy of seriously screwing around  with scientific content .the
self explanatory title of my presentation  ' Fossil Hydrogen ', on how shifting fuel sources could mitigate CO2 emissions per kilowatt hour was transformed without my advice or consent  into:

'Coal Power Not at Odds with Reducing Carbon Emissions'

Huh ? It's about closing down  a quarter of the coal mines in existence.
Read the beta version here and compare it with the  bogus title printed in the program of a  conference whose sessions ironically includes

Business & Media Institute Roundtable Panel:
Global Warming Censored

Since  1/52 of the  conference honorarium is  $19.23 , and it costs $ 9.95 a month to run this place , entry-level  Philanthropists may send me a 31 cent monthly  subvention  to earn a coveted  Adamant Distinguished  Discovery Fellowship, and standing room at my next lecture on the subject. In  forlorn hope of a happier relabeling malfunction,its working title is Coal Tar: Key To Peace In The Holy Land ,

CALL IT A DRAW

Can Climate Dissent Fill The Big Tent?

There were several surprises at the climate change conference I attended in New York. The seriously interesting scientific presentation by Roy Spencer contrasted with the belated revelation that the Discovery Institute , reincarnated as " a think tank that promotes free market ideas" , cosponsored the event. Organizers told the media it was convened to refute the contention of Jim Martin of the Colorado department of the Environment, that :

  “You could have a convention of all the scientists who dispute climate change in a relatively small phone booth.”

Seeing the conference banquet crowd had filled a hotel ballroom,  Heartland Institute chairman Jim Bast crowed:

" Hey Jim Martin, does this look like a phone booth to you?"

But when all scientists attending  were asked to step forward for a group photo, 19 scientists appeared in it, reports The New York Times.
The Guinness  record for stuffing a  phone booth  is 22.

Since I didn't count myself, I have to concede there were more than in the picture, but  my  own twenty something  guess is based on the  ~100 presenters, mostly pundits and economists , not the audience.

Smile, You're On Candid Cover

Science is not alone when it comes to dumbing down by popularization. For those indisposed to read the Bible for its prose, kid's television has upchucked 'Veggie Tales , in which Jonah, born again as a stalk of talking asparagus , repeats his voyage of chastisement, and Daniel the articulate turnip ( or is he the walking rutabaga?) emerges still crunchy from the Fiery Furnace.

Nor are ideologies immune. Jonah Goldberg of National Review is all over the map hawking a book with a  cover logo so far in advance of its contents  as to make  reading it moot-- it's vexiligous enough to serve as as the national flag of the People's Republic Of Liebensraumia  in some dark Alternative Universe.

Its iconic  novelty betrays Liberal Fascism's  failure to acknowledge its pedigree. Goldberg is a prolific columnist at the magazine Bill Buckley founded, one that  has drifted as far from its moorings  as The American Mercury did in the decades after the acerbic  H.L.Mencken's demise, witness  NR's link to this self celebration of the book by its author-- Goldberg's blog is a review of his book's bad  reviews by his admirers: 

                             “The We Already Know This Canard”
From a reader:
Mr. Goldberg: I’ve finally figured out what I find so unsatisfying about the complaints.... the standard practice when reviewing a book that is allegedly derivative or unnecessary is to recommend the acknowledged authoritative book on the subject. Funny that in all the reviews I’ve read of LF I haven’t seen a single one that suggested an alternative book to read on the subject of Progressivism and fascism..."

This whitewash does not quite wash, for though the fan letter continues :

"This is a very good point. Since I can say with pretty much total certainty that there is no other single book that comes close to collecting all of these facts in one place," you would think some honest liberal reviewers would say “Goldberg’s all wrong on his interpretation of the facts, but these things are worth knowing.”

, a commenter at Taki's Magazine points out :

" Leftism Revisited by the late Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. Doubtless young Jonah overlooked this book and its author. After all he [R. v.K-L] was just some PhD Austrian fellow employed as the European correspondent for the National Review for about thirty years! As Jonah might say, Who Knew? The book... is magisterial, well researched and footnoted with with original sources. It is in short, everything that Liberal Fascism is not. Of course, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn had the advantage of both knowing what Fascism was and having met a lot of actual Fascists. "

That's putting it mildly, since  Jonah relegates to an end-note Ritter von Kunelt -Leddihn, an astonishingly erudite D. Mult. who addresed my Institute of Politics seminar at Harvard in the 70's. He awoke one unfortunate morning to find his modest Tirolean castle impaled on the proverbial Axis, commandeered  by Germans overrunning the Alps to join their Italian buddies following the Anchluss.

Robert Jastrow : A Tribute By Jim Hansen

If only scientific adversaries would treat their living opponents as well --