ADAMANT

Slow Light

This is not some Victorian watercolor by John Ruskin, but a brand new six month pinhole camera exposure by English photographer Justin Quinell, showing the daily path of the sun over the Avon bridge. the interruptions and missing arcs are due to passing  clouds and days of rain or overcast.

 The left foreground blur is a fast-growing tree!

 

Red State Liebensraum?

 In 1751, Ben Franklin  shrewdly observed that that America’s low population density meant higher wages and lower land prices, incentives to  earlier marriages and more children. The Palin nomination may signify that this has not been lost on Carl Rove, for  Steve Sailer points out in this month's American Conservative that only Mormon Utah exceeds  vast  Alaska rivals  Mormon Utah in white  fertility , with a birth rate  38 percent higher than crowded California. He notes :

This Baby Gap helps paint the electoral map red or blue. In 2004, Bush carried 25 of the top 26 states in the total fertility rate (expected number of babies per woman per lifetime) among whites, while Kerry was victorious in the bottom 16. It’s all about the ratio of land and resources to people. Even excluding Alaska, the counties that Bush carried in 2004 are four times as large in area as Kerry’s counties.

The Reviews Are In

In the LRB, Terry Eagleton reminds us that in

 " 1579, John Stubbs had his right hand cut off for writing a work opposing the marriage of Elizabeth I to a French nobleman. Elizabeth herself urged that the printers of the anti-Anglican Marprelate tracts should be subjected to torture. In 1663, a London printer who published a pamphlet which argued that the monarch should be accountable to his subjects...was...hanged, drawn and quartered."

 "John Dryden was beaten up when leaving a coffee house because of an anonymous poem attributed to his pen" and the " proprietor of Blackwood’s Magazine horsewhipped at least twice by the victims of pugnacious, unsigned reviews... one irate author beat the proprietor of Fraser’s Magazine with a riding crop before fighting a duel with the journal’s dipsomaniac editor" while a vitriolic anonymous review merely " caused the ruptured blood vessel that eventually killed " Keats.

 " There was, however, profit as well as peril in anonymity. " Tobias Smollet t" produced an " unsigned complimentary review of his own Complete History of England. An unattributed notice in the London Chronicle which praised a work by James Boswell as ‘a book of true genius’ was written by Boswell himself... ... Even the high-minded George Eliot anonymously reviewed her partner G.H. Lewes’s life of Goethe, a work she had helped him compose. Not everyone disapproved of such practices. Stanley Morison, who edited the TLS in the 1940s, declared the self-review to be the ideal example of the genre. Coming from a man who ran a journal devoted entirely to anonymous contributions, this was dangerous stuff."

All The News That's Fit To Map

 

                                                                                                                                 It is noteworthy that a generation ago, this asymmetry was drawn from its epicenter  by the late great cartoonist Saul Steinberg:

Of course, publications  change as well as demography Today the culture of cartograpy centers on geophysics , so :

Welcome Stranger

Attitudes towards immigration are all over the map

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

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.

The Stanley Greener ?

In Coal in your stock-car   former  City Journal editor Edward John Craig celebrates Planet Gore's New Math :

Anne Korin from the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security responds to a reader's question about coal:

One pound of coal is about the amount of energy required to light a 40 watt bulb for 24 hours. One pound of coal generates about one kilowatt-hour of power, which depending on the weight of a vehicle will provide 2-6 miles worth of driving in a plug in hybrid.

Since  a gallon of gas weighs about 7 pounds , this seems to be just a restatement of the heat of combustion- and hence the energy content of the fuel, without any attempt to reckon conversion losses.

Were it so simple, a $50 dollar ton of coal would deliver  4,000 to 12,000 miles of driving  equal to roughly $1,000 to $2,500 worth of  gasoline, depending on whether a compact or an SUV is at issue . Since that much gas- say 250 to 750 gallons, far outstrips the realistic yield of less energetic methanol a ton of coal produces-- according to Korin,

" about 121 gallons of methanol. Energy content wise, that's about equivalent to 60 gallons of gasoline. So for a car that gets X miles per gallon of gasoline, running on coal to methanol yields about X/33 miles per pound of coal. Less miles per pound than electricity"

Clearly her argument is confused-  if coal electricity could function as the equivalent of twenty cent a gallon gasoline,  America would get around in a mixed fleet of electrics and Stanley Steamers. If we had gigajoule batteries weighing under a ton, and a good five cent  gearbox for a turbofan.

The Zombie Curve And 'Six Degrees'

Dead Parameters Walking

" Climate sensitivity" , notes Barton Paul Levenson ,

" Is an estimate of how much some factor in a regional or global climate would change with a specific change in some factor affecting it. That's pretty vague, of course. In practice, the term has recently come to mean the change in Earth's surface temperature that could be expected if the ambient level of carbon dioxide were doubled (usually from the preindustrial level of 280 parts per million by volume to 560 ppmv, but sometimes from 300 to 600).

Below are all the estimates I could find in the literature. Not all estimates are equal. Most of these, though not all, include the effects of climate feedbacks such as water vapor. And these estimates include ones which were later shown to be based on flawed models, erroneous reasoning or outright mistakes"

Estimate of its value vary  with scientific sophistication and taste , the peer-reviewed values spanning nearly two orders of magnitude , since the first was put forth by Arrhenius in 1896. While  reasonably complete treatments of the physics have converged into an idealized mathematical consensus, the choice of variables needed to connect the physics to a real planetary system remain , empirically, well controversial- witness Levenson's cautionary graph of how the published ones look over time.

Arrhenius  first result testifies to the force of his  physical intuition- he got the order of magnitude right  with no computers and crude spectrometers -Victorian infrared prisms were carved out of rock salt. But modern instruments , billion dollar  R&D funding , and exploding computer power have not made the data scatter go away. The policy debate can't die until the data flatline, and the last decade's estimates of climate sensitivity  values  still span an order of magnitude.

It would be statistically perverse to point out that the  trend of the four most modern values ( five counting Schneider's 2007 estimate, published shortly after this graph appeared) is not going up.

Lord knows which way the four year trend will point in 2020. Science aside,  funding can be directed just as data are cherry-picked,  and the cynically directed support of groups that deliver high or low end results can bend it either way.Yet there remains  a big difference in the physics pecking order between the merely ornery and often wrong , and those few who prove their contraries -- I'm biased towards Schneider's conclusion because the last time he dared to be contrary, he proved to be right.

It is curious that the two values most closely approximating the production values of the latest  National Geographic Special were respectively published in 1963 and 1896 !

Isn't modern climate science wonderful ?

It Was A Dark And Stormy Short List

In 2005, I did a Wall Street Journal review of 'the Five Best Science Books"
None of my selections made the following chart of how Facebookers favorites stack up against the average SAT scores of the colleges they attend.

George Monbiot's Flying Syntax

"Although Gore does a better job of governing now he is out of office, he was no George Bush."
-- The Guardian

Calfskin's Binding

Short Shrift For Plagiarism's Patron Saint

Eamonn Grogan of Naas in County Kildare reminds us in The London Review of Books that no sooner had Patrick driven the snakes out than Diarmaid, High King of Ireland,  discovered another sort of viper afoot.

Acting as  the legal equivalent of the Supreme Court , the king issued a finding condemning  the Christian missionary Columba, later canonised as Saint Columcille, as an incorrigible plagiarist. Before he settled in Iona, Columcille had taken to visiting monasteries, borrowing books from their libraries and having his own monks copy them for distribution. This drove one abbot, hearing that Columcille was on his way, to  bury his library in the establishment's orchard, provoking Columcille to put a curse on the place.

Things turned nasty when Columcille – a former pupil – plagiarised the  Latin Psalter of  St Finian of Clonard, who petitioned the High King for a definitive judgment on the problem.

Citing Brehon Law on the ownership of animals found wandering, Duarmaid delivered the Solomonical judgment that as the law dictated ,very reasonably, that a calf, wherever found, belonged to its mother, wherever that cow was kept, Colomba had transgressed legal precedent, which the King extended thus:
        As to every Cow its Calf, so to every Book its Copy

100 Googols? Of What ?

Much heard of in math, numbers upward of 100 digits
are rarely seen in physics - now one has surfaced it's :

The Entropy Of Everything -- Mostly Black Holes.

  and is reckoned as ~ Ten to the 102nd power

ArXiv:

High Energy Physics - Theory

What is the entropy of the universe?

Authors: Paul Frampton, Stephen D.H. Hsu, Thomas W. Kephart, David Reeb

(Submitted on 11 Jan 2008)

Abstract: Standard calculations suggest that the entropy of the universe is dominated by black holes, although they comprise only a tiny fraction of its total energy. We give a physical interpretation of this result. Statistical entropy is the logarithm of the number of microstates consistent with the observed macroscopic properties of a system, hence a measure of uncertainty about its precise state. The largest uncertainty in the present and future state of the universe is due to the (unknown) internal microstates of its black holes. We also discuss the qualitative gap between the entropies of black holes and ordinary matter.

I'll Be A Monkey's Dutch Uncle!

The ID movement is farther off target than I thought

Forget about stripping Darwin's Origin Of Species from schoolroom shelves.

The Discovery Institute must first campaign to clear The Disney Channel  of Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, to protect America's schoolchildren from the vicious theories of Washington Irving, AKA Diedrich Knickerbocker, the Godless Whig reprobate and War Of 1812 draft-dodger who unleashed on the young Republic:

“…the startling conjecture of Buffon, Helvetius, and [Erasmus] Darwin, so highly honorable to mankind, and peculiarly complementary to the French nation, that the whole human species are accidentally descended from a remarkable family of monkies!”

                                                  --  A History of New-York
                 From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty     1809

Like A Fish Needs A Bicycle

Nature reports a" new world record in human powered computing has been set by MIT students who used bicycles to power one of the institute’s supercomputers for 20 minutes. As part of the ‘Innovate or Die’ pedal-powered machine contest a nuclear fusion reaction was modeled by the sweat of the students’ brows."

The Missing Link

Though media evolve with alarming speed, they can devolve even faster.  Witness The Wall Street Journal .  Its  hard edged business section goes on grinding  out Pultizers, but its electronic back end, Opinion Journal has become a video arcade that hands out Kewpie Dolls for semantic aggression:  "This column is highly skeptical of global warmism, and we wonder if those who claim to believe in it really do." € writes Editor James Taranto

Though he seems to echo Rush Limbaugh in  criticizing inconvenient science as "politicized"  and styling criticism of creationism " appalling in its arrogance and ignorance." he claims to "lack the time, the inclination and possibly the intellect to delve deeply into the science." which may explain why gravitationism and germ theory of diseasism have so far escaped his attention.

Modern Artery

 A reader reports one of his"dearly departed co-workers spent a great deal of time creating a scale model in stents of Stone Henge. Stent Henge was created with pieces of scrap Nitinol self expanding vascular stents embedded in cured Sylgard 184 elastomer. It is a nearly perfect reproduction of the layout of the famous stone circle in England in a compact package just about the perfect size for a paper weight. It took nearly a year of work during slow periods. "

Knitting stents would make anyone nervous

But Who Was His Science Adviser?

Given the  platform of Independent candidate  Prophet Joseph Smith, who ran for the Presidency in 1844, it's surprising that  Latter Day Saint Mitt Romney should be catching flack for a Massachusetts judge's leniency in allowing a murderer bail .

Mormon missionaries, says Bill Kaufman's fascinating 2004 article in American Enterprise,  distributed Smith's views nationally In November 1843, as he ran against Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Martin Van Buren, on a platform  promising "more economy...less taxes" and a "judicious tariff" and to  "Break the shackles from the poor black man,"

To enforce his writ he asked for "full power to send an army to suppress mobs,"  a hardly surprising request  given that he asked that voters:

"Petition your state legislatures to pardon every convict in their several penitentiaries,blessing them as they go..."

HEH!

Adamant  does try to keep  six months ahead of
The Economist
This time we managed nine:
Geometry is all
Nov 22nd 2007 The Economist print edition

A shape could describe the cosmos and all it contains ONE of the mysteries of the universe is why it should speak the language of mathematics... Now comes a paper which argues that one branch of the subject—geometry—could form the basis of all the laws of physics... that is what Garrett Lisi is proposing...of a structure known to mathematicians as E8... It has 248 dimensions and its structure took 120 years to solve. It was finally tamed earlier this year

CAUSE FOR THANKSGIVING ?

....Blogging : Ye Pilgrim Fathers Worft  Miftake !  

Since 1620 New England hath looked to Antiques Road Show for its Hiftory lessons, but now ye Puritan Broadcafting System insists ye Device shown here, delivered to our shores in 1638, was ye nation's 'first printing press.' God's Teeth--what arrant knavery ! Every school-childe knows it be ye Pilgrim Fathers first PC,

.......         ....Ye Mayflower Compaq

Shakefpeare Hif Clam

Boring as  the drudgery of deep sea dredgery in Icelandic waters  may be , it is electrifying compared to  the life-style of the Arctic Clam. A long and tedious Daily Telegraph piece tells of  a University  of Bangor  oceanography team retrieving a deep water specimen of  Arctica islandica  some  3.4 inches long, in other words, a quahog, along  with some 30 of its fellows. It was transported to the UK  where it died of neglect  before it could be converted into chowder.

However,  when sectioned  by Dr. Alan Wanamaker on a diamond saw ,  a count of  its shell's growth rings revealed that the creature, having  sat on the seabed since 1602, was 405 years old at the time of its demise. Prof Chris Richardson opines:

" it is possible that an investigation of the tissues of these real life Methuselahs might help us to understand the processes of ageing."

Richard Faragher, a gerontologist at Brighton University said:
we know ... what it tastes like. We need to find out how it retains muscle strength, remains cancer-free and keeps its nervous system intact over such a long period of time."

Nonsense - we need to know if it has the skinny on Elizabeth and Essex, and the latest gossip on James I- next time The Sun and OK should be on the quarterdeck to interview the next 400 year old to be dredged up, and take some nude Page Three pix before it turns into obit material for the London Times.

Meanwhile, down under the age old riddle of why penguins smell bad has at last been answered . The PNAS reports the recovery of still viable bacteria from Antarctic  dry valley ice up to eight million years old.

Your Brain On Drugs ?

It's not-- despite its electric acid cool aid look,  this slice of mouse brain gets it psychedelic  colors from biotech  researchers inserting  four genes encoding fluorescent proteins into its parental DNA. Neurons randomly expressing  various combinations and levels of the resulting  proteins can turn any of 90 colors report Jean Livet et al . in Nature. They say this "brainbow" technology  greatly facilitates mapping of neural circuits in healthy and diseased brains.:

"In Brainbow transgenes, Cre/lox recombination is used to create a stochastic choice of expression between three or more fluorescent proteins (XFPs). Integration of tandem Brainbow copies in transgenic mice yielded combinatorial XFP expression, and thus many colours, thereby providing a way to distinguish adjacent neurons and visualize other cellular interactions."

Solid But Spooky Results

You don't see a new kindof phase transition every day. The first evidence for the one to the new state of matter termed a  supersolid emerged in 2004 when a wee can  filled with with liquid helium and squeezed solid at  25 atmospheres was  set  twisting back and forth on a very thin and springy shaft. Below  about 0.2 kelvin-- ,2 degree above absolute zero--the frequency of twisting shot up as though the can had lost mass. implying that some of the helium was not moving while the rest of it continued to twist back and forth-- through itself!

Some things are too simple to be readily understood, and in the very cold world of quantum solids , such things are the norm-if  superfluid liquid helium flows without any resistance Why Not Supersolids ?.

Some doubted this was the supersolidity that had been bravely  hypothesized in the 1960s (Science, 1 July 2005, p. 38) , but newly published work with a single crystal of the problematic stuff in a silicon  can has reduced the uncertainty due to grain boundaries in the earlier work

Crossing The Threshold

Divorce  and Prenuptual Agreement lawyers around the world are toasting the news that reports of a Japanese robot  that delivers professional quality massages have enabled a Dutch  graduate student to successfully defend his PhD  thesis, predicting  the consummation of  human-robot  marriages by the year 2050.

Uncle Sam Wants You

To Join The Ranks Of Impoverished Smokers?
.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Congressional Democrats have chosen an unlikely source to pay for the bulk of their proposed $35 billion increase in children's health coverage... a 156 percent increase in the federal cigarette tax... Democrats...do not dispute that the tax plan would hit poor communities disproportionately, but...All the better, they say, if higher cigarette taxes discourage smoking.

"I'm very happy that we're paying for this," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said... Nearly one-third of all U.S. adults living in poverty are smokers, compared with 23.5 percent of those above the poverty level, according to government statistics. "

Rep. Jack Kingston R-Ga.pointed out that funding the bill 'would require 22 million new smokers'

 

Penguin Kryptonite Panics Peru

We Don't Want Your Steenking Meteorites
Though nature often follows art, it sometimes beggars tabloid headlines. Nostril-curling penguin colonies are an occupational hazard of  hunting meteorites on the Antarctic ice, but  last year searchers scented an even smellier meteorite.                 Photo ASMP Case Western Reserve

Reported in the Antarctic Meteorite Newsletter  this object's chemical and isotopic composition  matches none of the 40,000 other meteorites found in Antarctica. Some scientists suspect it represents an unsampled region of the moon, but others think its brimstone, rotten egg and phosphine reek suggests its hailing from Io, the hellish Jovian moon whose face looks like a pizza with acne because it's pocked with sulfur-spouting volcanoes that also spit sodium ions into Jupiter's radiation belts... ..  .

This ancient Antarctic nuisance may have a modern counterpart. Saturday, with an "orange streak and loud bang" a meteorite struck the Peruvian Alteplano, carving a ten meter crater near lake Titicaca. The stench of the crater and fragments of the meteorite found near it  has reportedly sickened villagers from  nearby Carnacas who come to inspect the crash site.

Many meteorites contain  sulfides like troilite, Fex-Ni1-xS , that can   that can release  the familiar rotten egg stench of hydrogen sulfide. However, a  few are rich in  phosphide minerals like schreibersite , NiP,  which though stable in  the vacuum of space , can release highly toxic phosphine  on reacting with  ground water. In addition to being neurotoxic , phosphine smells like rotten garlic, which might explain reports of headaches,  nausea and vomiting by those on the scene

Junk Mail From _Science _

Politicizing the the AAAS by flogging 
The Editor's remainders:

Dear Russell Seitz,

Your American Association for the Advancement of Science 
membership is up for renewal...as a special thanks for 
responding to this online request, you can access -- 
at no charge - The State of the Planet...

Your fellow members tell us that their desire to learn and
explore led them tocareers in and a life long love of science
...just follow the instructions to access your complimentary
bonus, The State of the Planet...

Beth Rosner, Publisher  Science  magazine

"Science Editor-in-Chief
Donald Kennedy says

“To the editors of Science, these relationships ...compose the most important...issues societies face. Without scientific understanding, those who will make policies in the future will be forced to do so without the most essential tool they could have?”...a compilation of essays...by Kennedy.

At the heart of the book is a landmark 1968 essay in Science, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” “Where have we come in 38 years?” Kennedy asks.

“The big question in the end is not whether science can help. Plainly it could,” writes Kennedy, who served earlier as commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and president of Stanford...In addition to Kennedy..."

Go Wind A Kite

The Economist is struck  by how jet-stream winds are stronger and blow more consistently than ground-level winds, and can carry up to a hundred times more energy. This provides an incentive for to inventing  a whole new technology for harvesting wind: electricity generators that fly.

Sky WindPower of  San Diego,  led by Dave Shepard,proposes a flying generator looks like a cross between a kite and a helicopter. It has four rotors at the points of an H-shaped frame that is tethered to the ground by a long cable. The rotors act as the surface of a kite does, providing the lift needed to keep the platform in the air. As they do so, they also turn dynamos that generate electricity. This power is transmitted to the ground through aluminium cables. Should there be a lull in the wind, the dynamos can be used in reverse as electric motors, to keep the generator airborne.

Mr Shepard thinks he has a way to reduce rotor balance wear and tear.. Stabilising and directing a conventional helicopter requires that the pitch of the individual blades be adjusted with every rotation—up to a thousand times a minute,putting massive stress on the turning mechanism and wears it out rapidly. With a four-rotor arrangement, you can achieve the same effect by changing the pitch of one or two whole rotors, rather than adjusting the pitch of individual blades

In Canada a company called Magenn Power has developed a proposal for a wind generator filled with helium. It turns around a horizontal axis, rather like a water mill, and could fly at an altitude of up to 1km.

Wubbo Ockels of the Delft University of Technology's idea is to launch a kite (without rotor blades) from a ground station, turning a generator as it rises to an altitude of several hundred metres. When it reaches its maximum altitude the kite alters its shape to catch less wind, and can thus be reeled back in using much less energy than it produced when it was being paid out. An arrangement of two or more of these kites could act together to produce a steady supply of power.

While one kite was being released, some of the electricity produced would be used to reel another kite back in, and vice versa. This system has the advantage that it requires only simple parts—generators, kites and cables—and should therefore be much cheaper to build than a conventional wind turbine. To test the idea Dr Ockels's team is building a 100-kilowatt prototype. He hopes to start testing a full-scale device, which would generate 10 megawatts, within five years.

A Bug In The Broadband Paradigm

Kamekaze Kumazemi 
Wage CyberWar On Osaka

Apart from filling the air with an earsplitting 94 decibel drone, the cicada known as the kumazemi is tearing up Japan's fiber optic  internet system. Two to thee inches long, the black cicada (Cryptotympana facialis), endemic in the warmer parts of Japan apparently mistakes fiber optic cables for dead branches suitable for egg laying, and uses its hypodermic-sized ovipositor to riddle them with millimeter holes. Trying to bug a conventional  phone line this way can result in insect electrocution, but the cicadas find optical cables perfectly benign.

Once hatched , their larvae quickly wriggle into the optical junctions and etalon spaces, crashing the local net.  Nippon Telephone and Telegraph West Corporation has responded to over 1000 such attacks in the Osaka area by adding protective layers and redesigning  cables  without the bark-like grooves cicadas mistake for prime real estate.

All Aboard For Planet Gore

The latest lemon to roll off the assembly line at the CEI factoid factory and onto the track at Planet Gore is the assertion that cars beat high speed trains as low emission transport. Relying on Brit blogger Guido Fawkes interpretation of a set of power point slides reminiscent of those  used to snow viewers of Al Gore's road show, CEI refers us to a 2004 study, un-peer reviewed, of course, by the  Institution Of Mechanical Engineers.   

It makes the sound point that a full car can compete on  per passenger fuel efficiency  and CO2 emission with a half empty electric train, if the train is driven by fossil fuel fired electricity. But  the IME study  makes some rather  odd graphic assumptions. Though it  reasonably choses the 5 passenger VW  Passat as its  representative car, it bases all of its worst -case analysis on the five passenger vehicle being 25% full.

Given the Labour Party's ascendancy, Britain is full these days of anti smoking activists, hunt saboteurs, and other villains deserving of being drawn and quartered. Yet one seldom sees a quarter of a felon occupying the passenger seat of a passing car on the M25.  This is bad news for Planet Gore, as with just an intact driver aboard, even a Prius loses out to the IME model's half empty train.   

To be fair, the study points to example of the French TGV train, which draws 90% of its juice from the nuclear grid as it flashes by the green and guillotine-free countryside. Having earlier pointed out the superiority of gin-fueled pedestrians as Green Transport Paradigm, Adamant will happily research the Green prospects of a red wine propelled Paris-Dijon line ,if readers will underwrite the necessary  selections from the dining car's Carte des Grand Crus du Cote D'or. 

One Giant Step For...

.. TREADMILLS  : NASA's Next Big Thing In Alternative Energy !

MIT students James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk  have upstaged NASA's Faster Better Cheaper sweepstakes by calculating  how many people it would take to launch the space shuttle using the seesaw springboard technique pioneered by Wyle E. Coyote of Acme Industries. Why drop a giant boulder over the rim of the Grand canyon when one giant step for mankind by  84,162,203  space cadets can generate enough megaJoules to pop the shuttle into orbit?

Beyond the Goddard Medal and a three daiquiri Cape Canaveral stone crab lunch for eliminating the risk of falling icicles and frozen foam, their Crowd Farm proposal for patron powered eco-rock concerts merits an American Inventors walk-on.

Since their prototype infernal machine turns mechanical energy into electricity when pavement blocks are trod upon,it could morph into a solution to rap music pollution, for a dance floor providing ever more power to loudspeakers as more ravers arrive could drive survivors to plead for Mozart minuets as the noise level passes 170 dB.

Step On Ye Beefe, Chief Yeoman Warder !

'Tis Energy-Intensive, Being a Beefeater

How to Live a Low-Carbon Life notwithstanding, it is far Greener to drive to a Brit butcher shop than hoof it, for according to HM Government, driving a typical UK car 3 miles adds 2 pounds of CO2 to the atmosphere.

Walking  would consume 180 calories, which would take about 4 Oz. of  beef to replace. But raising cattle is so energy intensive that 8 pounds of emissions would be required to power the pedestrian, making it four times more CO2 efficient to send a Sloane Ranger in a Range Rover than have a yeoman hoof it. Shipping  grass-fed New Zealand lamb 11,000 miles to the UK likewise saves 3/4 the carbon dioxide emission of raising it in a green and pleasant English feedlot.

Since a 3 mile hike fueled by a 180 calorie glass of milk releases 1.5 pounds of CO2, Red-blooded True-Blue Greens marching off to the climate wars should tank up on                                              this quality product --
Just 2 ounces of CO2 per 100 calories!

There are even Greener alternative beverages, notably a high-fructose corn syrup tipple called  ' Coca Cola'

Into The Air, Junior Birdmen

Although  the Moller company's flying saucer  sales are presently limited to polo shirts and baseball caps depicting same, the Volantor 7 flying car has actually gotten off the ground.

Slightly- its eight Wankel engine driven fans operate in the ground effect mode, limiting its safe and sane ceiling to ~10 feet, down somewhat from the 36,000 projected for its Model 400, which  though designed like a bat out of hell, antedates the control software stabilizing the Volantor, and has been kept on a very short leash. Here's a clip of the new gadget flying inVolantorily tethered to its crane.

Kudos to Moller for getting it up and out of the ground effect envelope!Ought to be an X-Prize for the first one to fly XC miles on IX gallons of ethanol.

Ten Thousand Days Of Oil

At one hundred million barrels a day, thats how long low end estimates of petroleum reserves can be expected to last. The high end estimates -- three trillion barrels or so-- would  last out the  century.
here's the latest summary of US government and private estimates:

This Is Your Brain On Taxes

The common wisdom that some use but 10 percent of their brain has been proven true by Neurologists at the University of Marseille, who described a cautionary case in The Lancet last week.

After a 44-year-old man complained of paresthesia of the left leg in 2003, CT  and MRI scans of this head revealed " pretty much nothing but a great black hole...a  huge fluid-filled chamber" , described  somewhat euphemistically as  a "massive enlargement" of the lateral ventricles, and a ".thin sheet of actual brain tissue." Dr. Lionel Fuillet, who headed the team that treated the man, told Agence France Presse that  the proverbial gray matter, "was completely pushed back to the inner walls of the cranium."

Tests showed the patient's  IQ is 75 ,but he was not considered physically or mentally disabled. According to The Lancet his condition had not impaired his development or his socialization. He is married with two children and has been gainfully employed by the  Provencal Regional Tax Office  for the last decade.

Tall Story

Six months and 29 stories ago Adamant noted that the Burj  Dubai ( burj is Arabic for 'tower') had reached 112 stories on the way up.

The exact height of the finished skyscraper is still a commercial secret, but now that it has reached 512 meters at the level of  the newly framed 141st floor , 2000 feet is easily with the envelope for the 158 story plus TV spire model  that was among the designs shown by the architects at the project's beginning.

But Dubai has another card up the sleeve of its jebbala.
If a taller structure than the Burj appears the architectural record books,  The United Arab Emirates  can point past its artifical palm shaped island to  the seabed, where bids are open for constructing the Hydropolis  underwater hotel  on the bottom of the Persian Gulf.

The Year Of The Rat

Better Mousetraps For  Bomb-throwing Islamarchists

Things are all too quiet on the War On Terror's Eastern Front .

Two years have passed since China  confiscated 105 tons of "Dushuqiang", a scarily toxic, and hence enormously popular rural rat poison introduced in 1990, but banned after  the 9-11anthrax scare. About 95 percent of the total sales of "Dushuqiang" occured in  Henan,  Anhui and Hubei. The almost tasteless and odorless white powder has figured in mass murders ( one with 38 victims ) and lethal accidents in all three provinces.

This is a vastly more toxic and credible agent of  One Very Bad Adamantane  chemical terrorism than arsenic or cyanide. It's a lot simpler to manufacture than its Geneva nomenclature name suggests--

2,6-Dithia-1,3,5,7-tetrazatricyclo[3.3.1.1(sup3,7)]decane-2,2,6,6 tetroxide

and just five milligrams can kill a man. The adamantane derivative is two orders of magnitude more lethal than Agatha Christie's favorite chemicals,  because Its small molecules' diamond-like structural core bristles with sulfur-nitrogen bonds that render it profoundly cytotoxic. The 250 tons authorities have so far seized are enough to kill every man , woman, child, cat, dog, horse, pig , cow and chicken on the planet, with enough left over to whack weasels and decimate the rat population along with the rest of the Chinese zodiac.

Though Du Qinglin, China's Minister of Agriculture has declared that the suppression of the illegal  poison has "basically reached its target" , it's unclear if destroying 41 Dushuqiang factories has put and end to bootleg production, for proven demand exists among 800,000,000 Chinese living on the land, 100 million of whom are Muslims in provinces bordering  Afghanistan , Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan and sundry other 'Stans.

China's Ministry of Health says the 2005 campaign reduced Dushuqiang accidents, victims and deaths by  75% over the previous year, but local public security departments had been dealing with thousands of cases , and there have been more murders by rat poison since. Even the claimed success rate would leave tons unaccounted for.

Since enterprising suicide bombers have already tried lacing their gadgets with less lethal rodenticides, China's neighbors, and others, may be living in interesting times come 2008, the next Year Of The Rat.

  

A Gutsy Hypothesis

In a Science news article, Swapping Guts for Brains

, Ann Gibbons relates that our carnivorous  ancestor's changing diet was , palaeoanthropologically speaking, a Good Thing --

The idea that as our ancestors began to eat more meat, they took in enough calories at each meal to permit their guts to shrink, saving energy from digestion that in turn helped fuel the brain, is getting new support from studies of birds, fish, and primates.

While Technology Review notes an important corollary to Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham's theory of the consequences of the dawn of cooked cuisine:

human teeth got smaller and duller at around this time, which is the opposite of what would have happened if people had had to rip and chew lots of raw meat

This may have profound evolutionary consequences. If Green Vegans averse to CO2 ban the barbecue, and reverse the million year dental trend ,forcing posterity to adoptively devolve on a diet of raw peanuts and soybeans on the half shell-- behold the face of Homo Vegetans:

Living Darwin Awards

Following a car chase in New Port Richey Florida last week , which officers  broke off because" it could have put others in danger," police are seeking an arrest warrant for accused methamphetamine dealer Francis Wiley on charges of " fleeing to elude"

Driving a Corvette , he earlier led deputies down Interstate 75 at nearly 120 mph. "He is one of the best drivers I've ever seen in my life ," said Lee Michie, a longtime acquaintance. "But he's the worst person I've ever met." According to court records, Wiley , 40 , who has stolen a car, assaulted  his wife , and kicked a state trooper , has no arms and one good leg.

So numerous are the self-taught triple amputee driver's vehicle convictions that it is presently a felony for him to be behind the wheel    [Thanks to the St.Petersburg Times .]

   

Climate Patent Pending

There's nothing exactly wrong with the data in these remarkably similar graphs showing strong correlations to  rising global temperatures.But is anything right about either ? Click them to enlarge. Thanks to Prometheus for catching The International Panel on Climate Change hard at work dimming down its statistical credibility by graphic gamesmanship

SUNS OF DUNE

Can one have too many Tatooines?  A survey of the local galactic neighborhood with the Spitzer Space Telescope finds the original scene of Luke Skywalker gazing at twin setting suns on Tatooine could be as common in fact as fiction.

David Trilling of the University of Arizona in Tucson told  Phil Bernardelli, " binary star  systems produce protoplanetary disks--the necessary precursors for planet formation--at least as often as single stars such as our  sun. "  noting " that binary systems whose stars orbit very close together are even more likely to harbor disks--and, potentially, planets--than single-star systems...There could be countless planets out there with two or more suns."

Until the Spitzer Telescope survey ," all of the systems they observed have comprised two stars orbiting far apart--on the order of 1000 times the distance between Earth and the sun. Many astronomers believed that closely orbiting stars would create too much gravitational chaos to allow stable ."But,  reports the Astrophysical Journal , aiming Spitzer's infrared telescope at 69 binary systems  found evidence of debris disks in 40% -- "slightly more frequent than disks have been discovered around single stars. Trilling and colleagues found disks around 60% of systems with the most tightly orbiting stars, the kind capable of producing twin sunsets like those seen on the fictional Tatooine.

The discovery should serve as another cautionary tale for anyone who relies too much on our own solar system as a model, says astrophysicist Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Astronomers used to think that all gas giant planets such as Jupiter would be far from their suns, for example, he says. But they've now found several "hot Jupiters" close to their stars.. The Spitzer findings just "confirm the general notion that planets are everywhere," he says.

The Sporting News

From today's New York Times :

Cheerleaders suffer more catastrophic injuries than .....female athletes in all  other sports combined.

The Scent Of The Rainbow

"Is there no end to the startling optical properties of butterfly wings?"

The question comes not from Vladimir Nabokov, who was as much a lepidopterist as prose stylist, but Nature Photonics--

"Although it has been known for some time that the nanostructures found on certain tropical butterflies exhibit photonic-bandgap effects and exceedingly high reflectivities, researchers have now demonstrated that they can act as optical vapour sensors that can outperform man-made designs.

Experiments performed by Radislav Potyrailo and his co-workers show that the reflectance spectra of the wing scales are not only highly sensitive to vapours, but also highly selective, giving a markedly different response for vapours from water, methanol, ethanol and three isomers of dichloroethylene. Artificially created replicas of these natural photonic structures could launch a new direction in the design of highly selective chemical sensors with straightforward colorimetric readout that could replace more complicated sensor'

The Day After We Published The Retraction.

The premier of An Inconvenient Truth last year was attended by a flurry of stories about the immanent collapse  of one of the arteries of global heat transfer, the Gulf Stream , including a much cited article in the American Physical Society monthly, Physics Today, which has just belatedly  published this very different view:

Uncertainty over weakening circulation

Barbara Goss Levi's Search and Discovery story (PHYSICS TODAY, April 2006, page 26) discusses evidence of weakening ocean circulation and its possible connection to global warming. The Atlantic Ocean circulation across 25° N latitude has been used as a benchmark for characterizing the mass and heat transport from the tropics to the northern latitudes. The upper portion of this transport includes the Gulf Stream, which is at least partially responsible for a moderate climate in Europe. A weakening of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation and of the Gulf Stream might have the unpleasant consequence of cooling Europe's climate.

Annals Of Mathematics : Transcendental Pickle Slicing

Behold the Heinz Omnihedron.

It's a two dimensional map of one of the strangest and most complex entities in mathematics. Unveiled at MIT today. It represents a 'Lie group' called E8 that  manifests the symmetry of an object boasting as many dimensions as Heinz has varieties.

The mandala-like shadow of its creation shown here took  77 hours on a supercomputer number crunching a  453,060 X 453,060 matrix containing more than 205 billion entries.

The finished product is a 'symmetry operator'  of use to theoretical physicists trying to construct  grand unified theories. A Lie group is a collection of mathematical descriptors that help to illustrate the symmetry of a smooth object,  describing, for example, all the mathematical operations that can be performed on a sphere without changing its appearance. The number of  suchstraightforward Lie groups is infinite, but five 'exceptional groups' also exist, and of them, E8 has defied  complete definition since its discovery in 1887.

What's weirder than weird about it is that while it describes the symmetries of a particular 57-dimensional object , it has 248 dimensions itself. That's one spicy polyhedron.

Please, Sir, May I Have More Dark Matter ?

Those who equate physics and politics were deeply shocked by the behavior of the 7,400 American Physical Society members who convened for their annual meting in Denver last week.

The APS’s congressional relations people were out in force, trying to get physicists to write to their representatives imploring them for cash, but  just 900 could be persuaded to sign the smorgasbord of eloquent begging letters  laid out for the occasion. Mike Lubell, APS’s head of public affairs, says he'll try harder to boost participation next year.

Remember the Name of the Rose , But Forget About The Cat's Meow

Test subjects  exposed to the scent of a rose during memory training recall more if exposed to the same scent as they sleep the night before testing, reports Nature-

"Jan Born of the University of Lübeck and his colleagues exposed people to the smell of roses one evening while they learned the locations of various picture cards laid in a square. Half of them were then given the same odour to smell as they slept, while the other half had an odour-free night. When they were tested the next day, those who'd had a rosy sleep remembered 97% of the locations — without the roses this figure was 86%."

This confirms earlier, anecdotal ,reports involving brimstone, madelaines , and napalm in the morning. but other researchers have discovered that rats trained to fear sounds , given a drug known to cause limited amnesia ,  U0126 , which is not approved for human use , were no longer afraid of the sound they had been reminded of under treatment.

Amateur plant breeders should not attempt  to promote the expression of UO126 by rose DNA, as an unforgettable regulatory katzenjammer may result if Greenpeace gets wind of it.

The Panopticon Bubble

Big Brother is smiling, and not from the grave. Britain's 44 million citizens are presently being overseen by more security cameras than George Orwell  ever dreamed of. That this happened without public complaint reflects a political constellation so dim that the UK's major parties have total  of fewer than 800,000 members combined. Since the parties alone choose the parliamentary candidates, less than 2% of the population of Tony Blair's Cool Britain now determines who gets to govern it.

Yet this implosion of democracy may have a silver lining. With 55 cameras looking over the shoulder of every political busybody , the Realm's Exchequer may be sitting on a fiscal gold mine. Once Britons were forced to pay tax on each pane of glass in their homes. Why not milk surveillance-shy householders by the square inch instead  , for a curtain tax monitored by light meters on the fleet of  BBC trucks already out snooping for unlicensed TV's ?

Some New Laborites ,fearing this so lucrative as to risk the BBC's privatization , may insist curtains be outlawed entirely.  But if they go the way of guns, knives and  glass beer mugs, London's Mayor Red Ken Livingston might retaliate by ordaining  National Health distribute prescription lens caps to Muslims who abominate any surveiling of unveiled flesh. Never fear- dreams of tax revenues too gross to examine must inevitably be curbed by Moore's Law , for it applies equally to pixel catching and number crunching. As camera costs plummet , Britain may soon boast not 55 cameras  per politician , but 365 per Briton , with more coming on line every day.

Since the whole point of Big Brothercams is to keep an eye on everything 24-7,  three shifts of watchers are required. But a third of any nation is always busy catching 40 winks, leaving at most 29 million Britons available for active surveillance.  Since every watcher needs someone to watch in order to justify their job, this presents a problem--at any moment , barely 14 million pairs of wakeful eyes are available to stare the remaining 29 million  Britons into behaving themselves.

So rejoice,Libertarians-- the New Labor Panopticon , like the real estate bubble, may be about to burst.  In case you haven't been watching , 14.2 million all-seeing  camera eyes  are already staring at Britain's green and pleasant land. But before Big Brother succumbs to Orwellian despair at the thought of 200,000 Unwatchables at liberty,  he may want to peruse The Financial Times. Since 1984 became a temporal reality , the brave new world of cybercommerce has come up with something new and completely different. It's called "outsourcing."  Britons, beware -- the eyes of Bangalore will soon be upon you.

The Deep Space Diet

Space tourism may not be to everyone's taste, but it opens the hope that, Out There, even supermodels can eat all they want.

Nature reports the imaging of a pair of twin neutron stars , each sixteen miles in diameter, with gravity 100,000 times stronger than on the face of the  Earth. This may open alarming new perspectives in Chiropractic and Virtual Dieting .

Approaching within 8 miles , the first intrepid  runway astronauts to visit these brave new worlds will experience Spanish Inquisition spinal forces, but at the same time their waistlines should contract to 18 inches or less. This pleasant realization will give way to heavy (~ 5 metric tonne) hearts 4 miles out , and on spiraling in to one mile they will alas discover that a rising tide rips all ships.

 

 

The Continuing Tinfoil Crisis

America's self help mania has blossomed into support groups for those who think the voices in their heads are the work of the Pentagon, intergalactic neer'-do-wells or the Bavarian Illuminati.

Writing in The Washington Post , Sharon Weinberger recently noted that : "Tinfoil Hats , a cultural joke to many," are a sartorial reality to the few , the proud , the profoundly gonzo. Her inquiry into " the image of solitary lunatics wearing tinfoil hats to deflect invisible mind beams." conceals a  profound change in popular culture. One of the nation's oldest and best beloved materials has gone missing--

Tin foil is on the verge of extinction.

" In 2005" says Weinberger ,"a group of MIT students conducted a formal study using aluminum foil and radio signals. Their surprising finding: Tinfoil hats may actually amplify radio frequency signals...while a few Thought Controlees  realized it was a joke at their expense, some saw the findings as an explanation for why tinfoil didn't seem to stop the voices. Others vouched for the material.

"Tinfoil helps tremendously," reports one conference call participant, who describes wrapping it around her body underneath her clothing."Where do you put the tinfoil?" a man asks. "Anywhere, everywhere," she replies. "I even put it in a hat."  The sources of delusion are hard to diagnose, but these  seem to have a common denominator- headgear made of the Wrong Stuff.  As a matter of material fact, no one Weinberg interviewed has tried bona fide tin foil. The stuff has become rarer than hens teeth that rectify the thought waves of  L. Ron Hubbard.

Tin has been synonymous with civilization since it was first alloyed with copper to create the cutting edge of Bronze Age technology. The Greeks and Phoenicians persued it to the ends of the Earth ,and once tin evolved into foil, it backed the mirrors of Versailles and became the medium of Edison's first recording of the human voice. Yet though MIT's metallurgical supply room is lavishly stocked , its shelves have been bare of tin foil for a decade-- its students simply couldn't muster the Right Stuff for their critical experiment.

Until  high powered rolling mills drove it to commercial extinction , soft tin did the office of stiff aluminum foil . As a small child I saw an unforgettable example of the dying art of stannery unveiled and cut asunder-- an embossed heraldic sheet sealing a veritable tin of Danish Christmas cookies. The last I encountered unwrapped soundlessly from  around a sandwich served on a remote Pacific island in 1975. 

The colonial time warp that allowed tin foil's space age survival in the New Hebrides has evaporated , but the ancient grey metal will doubtless flow as long as the solder industry soldiers on. Yet to  minds that imagine themselves left hatless by the machinations of the Tin Cartel , a burning question endures. To what evil purpose are the Gnomes of Zurich and Zinnwald  conspiring to put their glittering hoard?