gregladen | September 6, 2017This is a response to "Removing statues of historical figures risks whitewashing history: Science must acknowledge mistakes as it marks its past," a commentary published in Nature. For the most part, the commentary reads like a caution to not un-name things and not remove monuments in at least some if not many cases, though it is a bit more nuanced than that. What is needed, in Nature, is a different position: Find memorials (statues or things named) to scientists who carried out horrible acts such as infecting countless people who are members of repressed groups in order to study disease,…
gregladen | September 2, 2017First, please take two minutes to watch and listen to this, in order to calibrate:
https://youtu.be/g25G1M4EXrQ
Now, remove all liquid containing vessels from the vicinity, put on your head-desk helmet gear, and watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=GUcsAFnwC7k
Then, behold the fact that Jim Bridenstine, who has demanded that President Obama apologize for believing that global warming is real and important, is being appointed to run NASA.
By the way, global warming did not stop in 2003
No surprise here, planetary warming does not care about the election. Now…
gregladen | September 2, 2017There has been a trickle of state or federal level races pitting Democrat against Republican, which potentially serve as a barometer for how politics will actually play out on the ground over the next 18 months or so under the Trump Regime.
In my view, these races have shown two things.
1) Republicans beat Democrats even when all the available evidence strongly suggests that the Republican Party shouldn't even be allowed to exist by any logical analysis of democracy and free society, and the Republicans continue to try as hard as they can to hurt the largest number of people.
2) Democrats…
gregladen | August 31, 2017Three statisticians go hunting for rabbit. They see a rabbit. The first statistician fires and misses, her bullet striking the ground below the beast. The second statistician fires and misses, their bullet striking a branch above the lagomorph. The third statistician, a lazy frequentist, says, "We got it!"
OK, that joke was not 1/5th as funny as any of XKCD's excellent jabs at the frequentist-bayesian debate, but hopefully this will warm you up for a somewhat technical discussion on how to decide if observations about the weather are at all explainable with reference to climate change.
[…
gregladen | August 30, 2017UPDATE Sept 9, AM
Note that tropical storm force winds may start hitting southern Florida around 1 or 2 PM today, Saturday, and will reach central Florida by about 8AM Sunday.
The eye of the storm should be abreast southern Florida at around sunup on Sunday. The storm may remain a major hurricane as it moves all along the west coast, reaching south of Tallahasse, still as a major hurricane, Monday morning.
Irma has interacted with Cuba more than previously expected. The storm also seems likely to move farther west than previously expected.
Moving over very warm waters over the next…
gregladen | August 29, 2017No, this is not a religious reference to Houston or even Trump.
This is, however, a notice that the sci fi classic by Arthur Clarke, The Hammer of God , is suddenly, and I assume temporarily, available for two bucks in Kindle version. Just thought you'd want to know.
gregladen | August 28, 2017Harvey the Invisible Rabbit: Did not exist.
This is a picture of some men.
Since they are men, they have some abilities. They can, for example, knock each other over, and they can play with balls. This is what men do, and this is what these men can do.
This is a picture of some professional NFL foodball players.
They are also men. They can also knock each other over, and they can also play with balls. But the NFL football players are much better at knocking each other over, and you wouldn't believe how great they are at playing with balls.
They are NFL enhanced. They are trained,…
gregladen | August 27, 2017There are two reasons that it is fortunate that the death toll for Harvey is very low, compared to similar size storms at other times and at other places (zero at the time I first wrote this, a few confirmed, maybe ten or so suspected three days after landfall).. One is that all those people didn't die! (Obviously.) The other is that we can ask honest questions about this event, while the event is still fresh in our minds (and, at the moment, actually happening) with the intent of eventually seeking some clarity, without concern trolls biting at our ankles and telling us that we must wait…
gregladen | August 26, 2017Member of the press are so cute. They evolve so slowly. They are like monotremes or something.
It is said again and again that a) government agencies and other entities, especially things like the White House, dump their news late on Fridays because this avoids the normal five-day news cycle and allows hot stories to cool off, and possibly be ignored by Monday and, b) that doesn't really work any more because of social media and cable news, but still c) we will repeat meme one endlessly anyway so that we can look very smart by then repeating memes b) which brings us to d) rinse and repeat.…
gregladen | August 25, 2017You know of Pat Shipman at the very least because of her recent and, dare I say, highly controversial and excellent book The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction. If you've not read it, do so. But, in the mean time, another book she wrote in the same area, The Animal Connection: A New Perspective on What Makes Us Human, is now available on Kindle for two bucks.
Why do humans all over the world take in and nurture other animals? This behavior might seem maladaptive—after all, every mouthful given to another species is one that you cannot eat—but in this…
gregladen | August 25, 2017The following information is cribbed (with permission) from a FACTBOX produced by S&P Global Platts. Petroleum companies in the Gulf, especially around Houston, are are responding to likely shutdowns or possible damage due to the strengthening Hurricane, which is expected to have its largest impacts over the next 36 hours or so (longer for some flooding).
Before giving you these details, I also saw this: A map being circulated around energy industry folks showing the amount of land in Houston that has been made impermeable (by construction of things and surfaces) since the last big…
gregladen | August 24, 2017It suddenly became apparent, just a couple of days ago when President Trump was ranting and raving at a political rally, that the man does not know what clean coal is.
This is a concern because his entire energy policy stems from the assumption that we can mine lots of coal in West Virginia and use that for energy, that this is OK because it will be clean coal.
The term clean coal has been used in three ways, but really, is correctly used in only one way (number 2 of the three below), and when used that way, it is still bogus.
1) The term clean coal, or phrases very close to it, have been…
gregladen | August 24, 2017
Anthill: A Novel
Winner of the 2010 Heartland Prize, Anthill follows the thrilling adventures of a modern-day Huck Finn, enthralled with the "strange, beautiful, and elegant" world of his native Nokobee County. But as developers begin to threaten the endangered marshlands around which he lives, the book’s hero decides to take decisive action. Edward O. Wilson—the world’s greatest living biologist—elegantly balances glimpses of science with the gripping saga of a boy determined to save the world from its most savage ecological predator: man himself.
I bring this up now because the Kindle…
gregladen | August 24, 2017Many years ago I was working on a project that, if I recall correctly, used the basic idea of the mouse-elephant curve to test out some statistical feature of reality or some such thing. Or the reverse. Either way, the point is I was using the mouse-elephant curve data.
What is the mouse-elephant curve? This:
You take all the mammals from mouse to elephant, and plot their metabolic rate or, if you like, brain volume, or any other metric, against body mass. You may or may not log an axis. The final result is supposed to be a straight line that approximates all the points. Then, you can…
gregladen | August 24, 2017Remember the revelation back a year or so ago that Exxon Mobil knew all about the likely effects of the global warming they contributed to, and the subsequent denials by Exxon that this was not true, yada yada yada?
A paper has just come out that confirms what we all said then. From the abstract:
This paper assesses whether ExxonMobil Corporation has in the past misled the general public about climate change. We present an empirical document-by-document textual content analysis and comparison of 187 climate change communications from ExxonMobil, including peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed…
gregladen | August 24, 2017Every now and then, I hear someone giving the Republican Party credit for finally starting to get on board with 20th (or even 19th) century science, and 21st century eyeballs, to accept the idea of climate change. That is annoying whenever it happens because it simply isn't ever true and never will be.
Media Matters for America has a piece critiquing a recent Politico assertion that the tide is turning. Here is some of what they say, click through to the rest.
...
Politico's story...offers two main examples to support its argument: First, the bipartisan House Climate Solutions Caucus "has…
gregladen | August 24, 2017Posting this with no comment because it is expected and so obviously bone-headed Trump:
US President Donald Trump's administration has disbanded a government advisory committee that was intended to help the country prepare for a changing climate.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration established the committee in 2015 to help businesses and state and local governments make use of the next national climate assessment. The legally mandated report, due in 2018, will lay out the latest climate-change science and describe how global warming is likely to affect the United States,…
gregladen | August 24, 2017SEE END OF POST FOR IMPORTANT UPDATE
A while back, I read Confederate Saboteurs: Building the Hunley and Other Secret Weapons of the Civil War by Mark Ragan. The central theme of the book was the invention, more or less, of the submarine and the torpedo, curing the Civil War, but the South.
The torpedo was a very tricky idea at the time. Most of the first ones involved dragging an object with a bomb inside it, or the bomb itself, by a rope, behind a submarine. The submarine would approach the target vessel, and submerge, going under it, and the bomb would hopefully be dragged into the target…
gregladen | August 24, 2017Harvey the Hurricane will hit Texas roughly between Corpus Christi and Victoria (but stay tuned for exact details).
Harvey is passing over water that is significantly warmer than usual, owing to global warming. This storm was too disorganized to even, under normal conditions, to have a name, just a day or so. But, when this storm hits Texas late this week (maybe by the time you are reading this) it is likely to be a Category III storm.
Then, after landfall, the storm will hang around that area for a while dumping huge amounts of rain on the Texas flatness.
The target area may have 15 inches…
gregladen | August 22, 2017Darwin's Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution explores the explorations of Wallace, Huxley, Darwin and Hooker. You don't see this in one book, and it is all very important and, for the moment, cheap at twice the price.
I've never read The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World but I hear it is popular among cat lovers.
Bonus book: Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War is about what was going on in the Bush White House that ultimately lead, as the title indicates, to the Great Land War in Asia…