gregladen | November 25, 2014Yes, I have to post the "stay off the ice" post early this year. There have been several instances over recent weeks of folks wandering onto the ice and needing to be rescued (the most recent, here). This is not yet ice season. That hardish water you see on the surface is like that one person you briefly dated in college ... way to thin and very temporary. (Uncharacteristic joke but somehow I couldn't stop myself.)
Anyway, this is a fictionalized version of a true story recently told to me by two of the people involved. All the names of those still living have been changed. Please do not…
gregladen | November 20, 2014Shawn otto Shawn is the screenwriter and coproducer of the Oscar-nominated film House of Sand and Fog starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. He has also written for several of film and TV's top studios. A few years back he started Science Debate 08, an effort to get a real debate over science policy issues as part of the presidential debate process. I promise you that all of the presidential campaigns have been aware of this effort, and many have agreed, but never all the candidates in one election. So that's politicians running away from science. (We'll see about 2016.)
Anyway,…
gregladen | November 18, 2014Of course they do. To the extent that genes make you anything in particular, though the role of genetics in human behavior is pretty limited.
You've probably heard about the newly reported research in which a genetic link was found to homosexuality in a study of gay brothers. Kelly Servick has a good writeup on it here. The study looked at 409 pairs of gay brothers, and found a region on the X chromosome that was similar across the sample. This sort of shotgun approach, comparing a trait (in this case, gayness) with a bunch of DNA (I oversimplify) is very likely to get results that look real…
gregladen | November 17, 2014The term "Polar Vortex" was thrown around a lot last year, in reference to the persistent mass of very cold air that enveloped much of southern Canada and the US. As you will remember, Rush Limbaugh accused climate scientists and librul meteorologists of making up the polar vortex to scare everyone into thinking climate change is real. You may also remember Al Roker pointing out on national TV and on Twitter that the term "polar vortex" has been in meteorology textbooks for decades.
This year, with a new wave of cold air arriving unseasonably in the upper middle part of the US, the term is…
gregladen | November 17, 2014I just got this press release for the Texas Freedom Nettwork, passing the good news on to you:
PUBLISHERS REMOVE CLIMATE CHANGE DENIALISM FROM TEXAS TEXTBOOKS; PUT EDUCATION AHEAD OF POLITICS
Texas State Board of Education must still vote on adopting the revised textbooks
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 17, 2014
Publishers have agreed to correct or remove inaccurate passages promoting climate change denialism from new social studies textbooks proposed for Texas public schools, a coalition of science and education groups announced this afternoon. This news comes as the State Board of Education…
gregladen | November 14, 2014Check out this new paper in the RNCSE, by John Abraham, John Fasullo, and Me.
gregladen | November 14, 2014A new study just out in Science suggests that we will have an increase in lightning strikes of about 12 percent for every degree C of global warming. That could add up. From the abstract:
Lightning plays an important role in atmospheric chemistry and in the initiation of wildfires, but the impact of global warming on lightning rates is poorly constrained. Here we propose that the lightning flash rate is proportional to the convective available potential energy (CAPE) times the precipitation rate. Using observations, the product of CAPE and precipitation explains 77% of the variance in the…
gregladen | November 14, 2014The data for October has just been added to the NOAA GISS instrument record, which runs from 1880 to the present.
October was the warmest on record, just beating out 2005.
Overall, it is looking increasingly likely that 2014 will tie or beat the record for warmest year in the instrumental record, in terms of surface temperature. This does not count the ocean warming which is substantial. But we tend to look at the surface record as an approximation of global warming.
Here's the graph:
Just looking at the daily values (but from a different database) for November, this is turning out to be…
gregladen | November 12, 2014Have you heard the comet singing? From the Rosetta Blog this press release:
Rosetta’s Plasma Consortium (RPC) has uncovered a mysterious ‘song’ that Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is singing into space. RPC principal investigator Karl-Heinz Glaßmeier, head of Space Physics and Space Sensorics at the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany, tells us more.
Sound_comet2
Artist's impression of the 'singing comet' 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Credit: ESA/Rosetta/NavCam
RPC consists of five instruments on the Rosetta orbiter that provide a wide variety of complementary information about the…
gregladen | November 12, 2014Just so you know, Philae is a lander planning to land on a comet at this moment being landed on by an Earthling Spacecraft, and it is also an island in the Nile.
Before the Rosetta space craft got close, we had no idea what the comet looked like. Now we do. And it looks like Philae!
Coincidence????
gregladen | November 12, 2014Have a look at this new video from Peter Sinclair:
Peter has an interview with Jeff Goodell, contributing editor of Rolling Stone, which you will want to see. They talk about the political aspect of sea level rise in Florida.
More about sea level rise here.
gregladen | November 11, 2014RMU Announces Solar Plant Completion
Rochelle Municipal Utilities, in Rochelle, Illinois, has. started operation of a large Photovoltaic Solar Plant providing power to their water treatment facility. This is a great example of a project that should be done in more places.
In the Spring of 2014, RMU was awarded a $500,000 grant from the Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation to fund construction of the Solar Plant. ICECF provides grants for up to $2/watt or 60% of the system and its installation costs, whichever is less. As a result of the competitive bidding process, Eagle Point Solar…
gregladen | November 9, 2014I noted earlier that the Democratic losses in the House were less than expected given what usually happens during the midterms. It is harder to make such a statement with the Senate because of the lower numbers, with fewer than a tenth of the total number of elections at stake when compared to the house. But, there is a pattern that makes the loss of a few seats in the Senate not unexpected. As is the case with the House race, the null model -- what is expected despite any other political factors -- is that this particular year for Senate races would favor Republicans when a Democrat is in…
gregladen | November 9, 2014Yes, I know, that headline sounds wrong. But I worded it carefully and I assure you it is far more correct than many other headlines we are seeing, about the "historic loss in Congress" with the 2014 election.
The truth is, the party in the White House tends to lose house seats with every midterm election. Over the last half century there have been only two exceptions to that. Also, the second midterm for an 8 year presidency tends to do a bit worse than the first.
In addition to that for the most part, a president's popularity rating drops from the first day of the first term through…
gregladen | November 8, 2014See here to see why you might want to install the Mate flavor of Ubuntu 14.10.
Then, install it and consider doing these things. Get your system up to date. Yes, yes, you just installed it but that install image was old(ish). Update and upgrade now:
First, you probably want to open the Software Center, to to Software and Updates, and enable all the Ubuntu Software Sourcews (other than source and the CDRom option). Then:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Go to Preferences/Additional Drivers and then allow additional drivers, and pick a proprietary driver for your graphics…
gregladen | November 8, 2014With Ubuntu's release a few weeks ago of Ubuntu 14.10, Mate has now become an official flavor of Ubuntu.
There are two pieces of bad news that relate to this that we'll get out of the way. First Ubuntu's default distribution, which uses the Unity Desktop by default, broke a key Linux feature. If you install Ubuntu with Unity, you can't easily change your desktop. Or, if you try, you'll break your system. Ubuntu seems to want you to use Unity no matter what. Second, while at one time all flavors of Ubuntu were treated more or less alike (though the "Default" was gnome) now, the non-Unity…
gregladen | November 5, 2014The Potter Metaphor
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is the first in a series of books that are metaphorical of the central theme of politics and society in the Western world. Voldemort represents purity of race and racism, the good Witches and Wizards of Hogwarts represent the struggle of self aware consensus around the idea of fairness. The key protagonists -- Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley, together with a few others -- succeed because of the diversity in ability they collectively represent.
One of the key moments in J. K. Rowling’s book is the solution of the potions…