gregladen | August 31, 2012Today is Mike Haubrich's birthday. Have you checked out his blog lately? A sampling:
On Race and The Republican Party
The Moon Landing
On Original Sin
Matt Young Gets Inside the Ark Park’s Sales Pitch
gregladen | August 31, 2012Hitler finds out that the hoped for Arctic Sea Ice recovery isn't happening, and that Anthropogenic Global Warming is real.
gregladen | August 30, 2012A couple of items for you over at the X Blog. We have His and Hers writing instruments, and I finally made my own Hitler parody called "Hitler finds out that Surly Amy is sending 32 women to the Skeptics Conference in Berlin"
gregladen | August 30, 2012That would be funny.
Tim Dickinson has some pretty amazing investigative reporting in which he notes that the origin story for Romney is that he ...
... took leave of his duties at the private equity firm Bain Capital in 1990 and rode in on a white horse to lead a swift restructuring of Bain & Company, preventing the collapse of the consulting firm where his career began ... campaign aides spun Romney as the wizard behind a "long-shot miracle," bragging that he had "saved bank depositors all over the country $30 million when he saved Bain & Company."
What really happened was…
gregladen | August 30, 2012I like to ask people who believe in reality the following question: "What is the one single piece of evidence that convinces you that reality is real?" The answer is always easily debunked. For example:
"Evidence": Reality is real because I can sense the world around me.
Answer: Senses have been known to fool people, quite often.
"Evidence": Reality is real because if I base predictions on my understanding of it, they are generally accurate, so my understanding of it is probably pretty accurate.
Answer: Predictions are not evidence.
"Evidence": When people from entirely different…
gregladen | August 29, 2012In Minnesota’s Lakes Country, what we sometimes call “Up North,” the people have various degrees of knowledge of the land and its wildlife. Cabin people and campers visit briefly and may learn in detail the workings of a particular lake or patch of forest, but are usually poorly informed of the true nature of the landscape. People with “lake homes” (seasonally used cabins on steroids owned by people who live elsewhere) may spend more time in Lakes Country but actually know less about it than campers might because having central heating and air conditioning, a paved driveway, and big-ass SUV…
gregladen | August 28, 2012This isn't even in the advisories and discussions yet on the Hurricane Center site, but they are calling Isaac a hurricane. Here's a recent snapshot:
Hurricane Isaac
The current track puts Isaac just southwest of New Orleans with the heaviest winds and storm surge along the outer reaches of the delta and Lake Pontchartrain.
Expect a storm surge in Southeastern Louisiana and Mississippi east of where the landfall occurs of 6-12 feet, with diminishing storm surge reaching as far as the Florida West Coast. Rainfall will be between 7 and 14 inches across a large area, with isolated areas…
gregladen | August 28, 2012I am very sorry, but it is hard for me to feel too badly about Randy Lee Tenley getting killed on Highway 93 on Sunday night in Montana. I do, however, feel badly for his family (if he has one) and for the two teenagers who hit him with their cars. A 15 year old driving down the highway at night hit him first, which caused some swerving around of various vehicles, and that's when a car driven by a 17 year old ran him clean over.
Randy Lee Tenley had dressed himself up in a "Ghillie Suit" which is a form of camouflage used by snipers and other soliders so that they look like a bush.…
gregladen | August 28, 2012Isaac is still not a hurricane. It will be one within 24 hours. Right? Right?
Either way, Isaac is big, wet, and windy and long before it makes landfall it will start to cause flooding and wind damage ashore, within the next 24 hours or so. There is a pretty good chance that the storm will be upgraded to hurricane status just before that. Maybe. Well, frankly, I no longer trust Isaac so I'm not making any commitments. I'm tired of these relationships when the other person storm never does what they are expected to do.
Lately the problem has been dry air intruding into the storm, which…
gregladen | August 27, 2012Today, NASA did something never before done, and well, not all that impressive.
Charles Bolden of NASA spoke some words into a microscope, and this voice stream was sent to the Curiosity Rover on Mars, which then sent it back. Hey, I just spent the last 15 minutes swapping monitors around on my computers, and those monitors had cables that had been secured with cable ties and that ran through conduits and stuff. I’m thinking what I did was harder.
According to NASA, Bolden said:
The knowledge we hope to gain from our observation and analysis of Gale Crater will tell us much about the…
gregladen | August 27, 2012.... prolly. At the moment, Isaac has all the pieces in place; winds are high enough, pressure at the center is low enough, and all that. But, the storm is not organized with an eye and nicely formed bands. I imagine that the folks in the Hurricane Prediction Center are annoyed. I suspect they will declare Isaac a Hurricane within a few hours.
There are two big news items to know about. First, Isaac is physically large and wet, and will cause many inches of rain to fall on places that will then flood severely. Second, the center line of the hurricane's track may go right over New Orleans…
gregladen | August 27, 2012I am looking forward to the construction of the meatspace version of the currently on-line only "Creation Science Hall of Fame" on vacant land on Interstate 75 between the Creation Museum and the Ark Park.
Someday this section of Northern Kentucky will be a veritable Miracle Mile of Creationism Related Facilities. It is about this time this industry got some competition. We know that the Invisible Hand of the Free Market is like god and makes everything better. What could possibly go wrong?
Here's the story from the Courier-Journal
Hat Tip: Joe
gregladen | August 27, 2012This is a book for global warming sketpics so they can be more convincing in their skepticism. The title is "The Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism."
Hey, wait a second, I might have that wrong. This might be a book for people who want to take a scientific approach to skepticism about global warming. CLICK HERE to get the PDF file. It is not very big.
And click here to find out more information about where the book comes from.
gregladen | August 27, 2012The good news, if you see Hurricanes as bad, is that Isaac did not turn into a hurricane over night and is having trouble getting its act together. This has caused estimates of the hurricane's maximum strength at the time of land fall to be reduced. Isaac will be a serious storm when it plows into the southern US coast but it will not be an Ivan, Katrina or Andrew.
The bad news is that the predicted track has moved even farther west, so the forward right quadrant, the "Right Punch" of the hurricane, may very well hit New Orleans at a very bad angle and position.
gregladen | August 26, 2012It is time to discuss, once again, the falsehood known as "Hurricane Landfall."
A hurricane is a whopping big thing. A hurricane can be bigger than some states. The physical region across which a hurricane is potentially deadly and damaging is very large, many tens of miles across, sometimes a couple of hundred miles across. The danger zones are often organized like this:
The central storm surge. A central region may have a strong storm surge caused by the low pressure of the storm. This may be dozens of miles wide, but the area of effect is determined as much by the shape of the coastline…
gregladen | August 26, 2012For the second time in a row, storms have interfered with the Republican National Convention. The political party that denies science, and in particular, denies climate change, that thinks NOAA built an Ark and that has no interest in the kind of regulation that saves Libertarians from themselves when Hurricanes hit settled communities, is being messed with by Big Weather.
Which brings us to our discussion of Isaac.
Isaac is still a tropical storm, and he is getting better organized, though slowly. The beginnings of an eye are becoming visible. It is expected that Isaac will become a…
gregladen | August 26, 2012In Defense of Science: An Interview with NCSE’s Eugenie Scott
A few weeks ago I wrote about what happens when people respond to well-established science with disbelief or mistrust. As I noted, this is an occupational risk for researchers who work on vaccines (and journalists who write about them), which is why I told a cautionary tale about rejecting science in the face of super-bugs. The piece resonated with readers, but not in the way I’d hoped. Of nearly 220 comments, the vast majority opposed vaccination, for various reasons, rejecting the science.
As I considered how to respond, I…
gregladen | August 25, 2012World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet is a new book by Michael Chorost. I've not thoroughly read it yet but I've looked through it and I've listened to an interview with Chorost. Here's the book description from Amazon to give you an idea what it is about:
What if digital communication felt as real as being touched?
This question led Michael Chorost to explore profound new ideas triggered by lab research around the world, and the result is the book you now hold. Marvelous and momentous, World Wide Mind takes mind-to-mind communication out of the…