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The Great Goswell Copse Zootoca

The unusual fossil mammal skull posted here yesterday was, of course, that of the astrapotheriid astrapothere Astrapotherium magnum, as many as you said. But I'm a bit surprised that more people didn't get it straight away, given that astrapotheres were covered and covered again at Tet Zoo only a couple of months ago. However, I suppose that reading about something doesn't necessarily mean that you know how to identify its fossils... I'm still planning to post a write-up of the CEE Functional Anatomy meeting here ASAP, but haven't had time to finish it yet. Meanwhile... ... the modern animal…

In Memory of John Vlissides

One year ago on Thanksgiving day, my friend John Vlissides died. I'm sure that many of you have heard of John. He was one of the so-called "Gang of Four" who wrote the "Design Patterns" book that set off a huge fad in software engineering (and quite typically for John, he always insisted on pointing out that the reason he was the *fourth* of the GoF was *not* alphabetical). John was also a major contributor to InterViews, one of the early object-oriented GUI frameworks; and a major influence on the recently demonstrated Jazz system from IBM. John and I didn't agree on much. He was a…

GM/BM Friday: Pathological Programming Languages

In real life, I'm not a mathematician; I'm a computer scientist. Still a math geek, mind you, but what I really do is very much in the realm of applied math, researching how to build systems to help people program. One of my pathological obsessions is programming languages. Since I first got exposed to TRS-80 Model 1 BASIC back in middle school, I've been absolutely nuts programming languages. Last time I counted, I'd learned about 130 different languages; and I've picked up more since then. I've written programs most of them. Like I said, I'm nuts. Anyway, I decided that it would be amusing…

An Introduction to Fractals

I thought in addition to the graph theory (which I'm enjoying writing, but doesn't seem to be all that popular), I'd also try doing some writing about fractals. I know pretty much *nothing* about fractals, but I've wanted to learn about them for a while, and one of the advantages of having this blog is that it gives me an excuse to learn about things that that interest me so that I can write about them. Fractals are amazing things. They can be beautiful: everyone has seen beautiful fractal images - like the ones posted by my fellow SBer Karmen. And they're also useful: there are a lot of…

Basic Graphs

Let's talk a bit about graphs, being a tad more formal about them. A graph G is a pair (V,E) where V is a non-empty set of *objects* called vertices, and E is a set of pairs of elements of V called edges where a pair x={a,b} means that vertices a and b are *adjacent*. We also say that edge x is *incident on* both a and b. The number of edges that are incident on a vertex is called the *degree* of a vertex. Take any graph G, and take the sum of the degrees of all vertices. That number will be 2×|E| (2 times the cardinality of the set of edges.) This should be pretty obvious: since each edge…

Death by lightning for giraffes, elephants, sheep and cows

A few posts ago the subject of giraffes and lightning came up in the comments (go here, and scroll down to comments 7, 9 and 10). Thanks to an aborted book project that I've mentioned once or twice (I try not to talk about it too much, it still hurts), I have voluminous files on accidental or surprising deaths. I said I have something on death by lightning and - here - I deliver. It's not much, but then, that's not much of a surprise is it? Lightning represents a significant hazard in the natural world and animals large and small may be killed during storms. The death of elephants following…

Survivor: Pharyngula! Day Five.

Yet more internet melodrama! Several of our unwilling contestants took a shot at the immunity challenge, to comical effect: they either completely failed to be aware of what people find irritating in their posting habits, or in one case, even plagiarized his answer. The result of the vote by the readership: none met the challenge, although several thought Facilis made a good effort, so no one has immunity. What about the vote to see who would be banned? Once again, John Kwok saw an ember of a possibility that he might be selected, and chose to fight it by repeatedly throwing buckets of…

Missouri's shame

This is the t-shirt worn by the marching band of Smith-Cotton high school of Sedalia, Missouri. The 'ascent of man' image is a bit irritating — it is a portrayal of a fallacious idea of directionality in evolution — but the designers had a reasonable goal in mind. Assistant Band Director Brian Kloppenburg said the shirts were designed by him, Band Director Jordan Summers and Main Street Logo. Kloppenburg said the shirts were intended to portray how brass instruments have evolved in music from the 1960s to modern day. Summers said they chose the evolution of man because it was "recognizable…

Michael Craig on Problems at the WSOP

Michael Craig, author of The Professor, the Banker and the Suicide King, a book about the series of games between "the corporation" (a collection of the top pro poker players) and Andy Beal, is fast becoming an indispensible voice in the poker world. On his blog, he posts this article about some of the problems going on at the World Series of Poker and how incompetently it is being run by Harrah's. It makes me sad because in 2001 and 2002, a lot of us waged a public battle with Becky Binion Behnen, some from close up and some with only our words, over many of the same issues and we hoped that…

Slightly Belated Star Talk TV Thoughts

Neil deGrasse Tyson's TV talk show had its debut Monday night on the National Geographic channel, something that's very relevant to my interests. It airs after I go to bed, though, so I set the DVR to record it, and watched it Tuesday afternoon. Then I was too busy yesterday to write about it... Anyway, given how regularly I comment on Tyson's other activities, I figured I really ought to say something. Really, though, my main reaction was "What a very odd format..." If you haven't already seen or read about this, the way it seems to work is that the show is taped in front of a live audience…

I like this book so much I've read it 3 times: Neotropical Companion

The Neotropical Companion by John Kricher came out years ago, in the late 80s if I recall correctly. I've got a copy of it around somewhere. I loved that book because it did a great job integrating all the things in one place: animals, plants, habitats, evolution, etc. Even though I was working in the paleotropics at the time, I found it informative. Then, more recently, I got a revised version of the same book. I've got it around somewhere. It is from the 1990s, I think. Great book, same idea as the first one, but with more in it, and a somewhat larger format. This dates to after my…

A New Human

A few years ago, everyone was in a tizzy over the discovery of Flores Man, curious hominin remains found on an Indonesian island that had a number of astonishing features: they were relatively recent, less than 20,000 years old; they were not modern humans, but of unsettled affinity, with some even arguing that they were like australopithecines; and just as weird, they were tiny, a people only about 3 feet tall with a cranial capacity comparable to a chimpanzee's. This was sensational. Then on top of that, add more controversy with some people claiming that the investigators had it all wrong…

Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask

Here in Minnesota, and in surrounding states, there is some real tension between Native and Immigrant communities. The poorest, most drug-ridden, down trodden and repressed communities here are often Native, and conveniently these communities tend to be (but not always are) located far away from urban areas or other places with a lot of white eyes. Health in Native communities is of major concern to the usual institutions and people that are concerned with such things. Indians make White people nervous. White people are either worried that the Indian has kooties, or are criminals or…

Taking Lego to the Max

Huxley's Aunt and Uncle have given him, as Christmas and Birthday presents, various kits to make Imaginarium style train setups. Imaginarium is like Brio and Thomas the Tank Engine, but generally available as a Toys R Us Brand. He has enough cool bits and pieces to make a kind of double figure eight layout, but the ends can't ever be closed into a continuous loop because we don't have enough pieces of track. Or maybe we do. We keep trying different configurations but it never works. It also may be the case that while Huxley, Amanda and I make great Train Engineers once the tracks are set up…

December Pieces Of My Mind #2

Wearing my early-90s Tolkien Society outfit for tonight's Viking yule feast with the students. Been so long since I wore it that I'd forgotten where I'd put it. It was neatly stacked in the back corner of my closet's top shelf. I'm slow on the uptake. It took me long to realise that the subway gets me through town faster than does the airport bus. It took me even longer to realise that this is somehow true in both directions. Prepping students' yuletide Viking feast is exactly like at a Tolkien Society event c. 1990! No more teaching this year. Only one lecture left in January, then a spring…

'Badder' isnt 'Better': Recombination and Super AIDS

Some people have emailed me this story, concerned about the evolution of a 'recombinant' HIV virus that makes people progress to AIDS much faster than 'regular' HIV. Scientists Find Aggressive New HIV Strain This is the paper they are referring to: Faster Progression to AIDS and AIDS-Related Death Among Seroincident Individuals Infected With Recombinant HIV-1 A3/CRF02_AG Compared With Sub-subtype A3 There is a lot to address here, so I am going to break it up into a few posts. What are 'recombinant viruses'? Are they some new scary development in HIV/AIDS? There are lots of different '…

Steven Erikson, The Crippled God (Spoiler-Free Comments) [Library of Babel]

(This is a post about the concluding volume of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, so if you clicked through here because the title made you expect a rant about religion, you're at the wrong blog.) It's hard to say anything coherent about this other than "Wow." I mean, this is the tenth thousand-page book in an epic fantasy series, and it actually ended! He took all the myriad storylines of the previous nine books, and brought most of them together in a way that made them fit! Most of all, it didn't suck!. It's also sort of hard to write a blog review of the book, because it's the tenth in a…

More empty posturing from Ruloff and Mathis

The producers of Expelled aren't exactly the brightest bunch. Their latest blog entry is a silly whine about me. Paul is one of the stars in the film EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed. He's probably remembering all of the things that he said on camera, when we interviewed him and faithfully recorded it all. That couldn't be making him feel very good. Their movie is doomed if they're relying on my star power to draw in the audiences … and I've noticed that all the early reviews found my performance so unmemorable that they failed to remember what I said. (Trust me, it's the only thing I'm…

Mark Carney reckons most fossil fuels “un-burnable”?

Or so energylivenews says (thanks to J). Their text is: Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney appears to agree most fossil fuels can’t be used if the world is to avoid climate change. At a World Bank event on Friday, he is quoted as saying: “The vast majority of reserves are unburnable.” This is a reference to the idea of a so-called carbon bubble – when investors in oil, gas or coal suppliers lose out on money because the reserves can’t be used. I've bolded his words, the rest is editorial interpolation. I find this particularly irritating. If I'm reading about what Carney thinks, I…

WorldNutDaily Peddles Pseudoscientific Nonsense

It always amuses me that the Worldnutdaily wants to be taken seriously as a news source while constantly blaring huge headlines, complete with flashing red "Breaking News" or "Exclusive" icons, saying things like UFOs: Space Travelers or Demonic Deceivers? It probably goes without saying that most such headlines are little more than advertisements for books that they are selling and hence profit from. The latest such article declares that "Biblical Giants" - the Nephilim - built the pyramids after having sex with human females. And no, I'm not making that up. Perhaps they should change their…

More Moon Deceit

I found this post on Blogesque through John Gorenfeld's site. It details how the Rev. Moon's speeches are often sanitized when translated into English. His translators take out some of the nuttier things he says in order to make them more palatable to non-Moonies. Specifically, he provides a more accurate translation of Moon's speech before the American Clergy Leadership Conference in October of last year and points out that nearly half the speech was redacted in the version that appeared on the Moon website. Among the crazy or creepy things left out: I am the founder of [the] Washington…

White House Gets Pummelled over Miers

The White House is clearly in scramble mode trying to get religious right leaders on board with the MIers nomination, so much so that they have sent envoys to meet with the leaders of various organizations in groups to attempt to calm their fears and get them on board. The Washington Post reports that it's not working very well: The conservative uprising against President Bush escalated yesterday as Republican activists angry over his nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court confronted the president's envoys during a pair of tense closed-door meetings... At one…

The Magazine Experiment: Analog, November 2007

At the recent Worldcon, there were several rounds of the usual Save the Magazines Chorus: short fiction is the lifeblood of the genre, it's where we get our new writers, etc. With the usual subtextual implication that I am a Bad Person because I don't read or subscribe to any SF magazines. (The most annoying version with a rant-by-proxy at the Hugo Awards. This bugged me all the more because the author in question didn't make the trip, and it really doesn't seem right to make somebody else deliver your mini-tirade about the state of the short fiction market. If you can't make the ceremony,…

Cold Atoms for Gravity Probes

This is nearly a month old, now, because I keep saying "Oh, Idon't have time to do this justice-- I'll write about it tomorrow." I really need to stop doing that. Anyway, Physics News Update has a story about a scheme to measure gravity using Bloch oscillations, based on a paper in Physical Review Letters. This is especially interesting to me, because the most important paper of my career made use of Bloch oscillations to get our experimental signal. A quick explanation below the fold: Bloch oscillations are a weird phenomenon you encounter in condensed matter physics. The easiest way to…

Expertise, Elitism and Credibility

A few random items on expertise, elitism and credibility. The first is from an interview with the late Stphen Schneider about the recent PNAS paper on the relative expertise of "convinced" and "unconvinced" climate science activists, an interesting read: About the 'elitist' part: Scientists are really stuck. It's exactly the same thing in medicine, it's the same thing with pilot's licenses and driver's licenses: We don't let just anyone go out there and make any claim that they're an expert, do anything they want, without checking their credibility. Is it elitist to license pilots and doctors…

Summer Reading: Tourist Season

previously reviewed It utterly shocks me every time I make a reference to plastic alligators, Macy's bags with poisonous snakes in them, a guy named Skink or my favorite Bass Lure .... the Double Whammy .... and people look back at me with blank stares. Like, don't you get it? "To be or not to be" jokes or allusions to Sherlock Holmes are always understood. Or at least, people pretend to get them. But does no one read contemporary literature? It is impossible, actually, to explain Carl Hiaasen's novels to anyone without sounding like a fool. All such attempts, made by anybody, start out…

Sunday Chess Problem

Last week's study went over well, so how about another study from Alexis Troitzky? It's white to play and win in this position: There is an astonishing amount of strategy wrapped up in this simple position! Let's start with some general considerations. White must try to promote his pawn as quickly as possible. Something like 1. Bd5, to slow down black's pawn, just won't work after 1. ... Bd3. Once white starts pushing his pawn, black will have to do likewise. Both sides will need one move to move their bishops out of the way of their pawns. At first blush, it seems like white will…

Immunizations: "If your children have been vaccinated against xyz disease, why would you care if others are NOT vaccinated"

I dunno whether this guy is a troll or not, but he asked a question I would love to answer, as it is very, very relevant to things Ive written on this blog before: Finally, if your children have been vaccinated against xyz disease, why would you care if others are NOT vaccinated, surely your children are immune to the effects the disease may pose? Joe might be a troll, but this is a fantastic question that perfectly illustrates how scientifically illiterate and self centered anti-vaxers are*. One of the many things Ive tried to emphasize about your immune system is, the fundamental randomness…

Using HSV-1 to cure metastatic melanoma

Metastatic melanoma is definately one of the Cancers That Suck. We basically have the same treatment options in 2010 as they had back in 1975... and not because we have chemotherapy/immunotherapy that works super great, no reason to change it. Our treatment options just suck, with horrible consequences-- Say you have 100 friends that are diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic melanoma today. One year from today, only about 25, 26 of those friends will still be alive. ~25. Out of 100. Survive one year after diagnosis. Maybe fewer (this paper Im reading says 25.5%, Wikipedia says 9-15%).…

Evilution: Its always going to be smarter than you. Always.

I read a nice review article on viral evilution this weekend that really highlighted, for me, how clueless Creationists (especially Intelligent Design Creationists) are about evilution. Antiviral resistance and impact on viral replication capacity: evolution of viruses under antiviral pressure occurs in three phases. As we saw the last time IDiots tried to talk about HIV-1, Their Arguments Regarding Design focus on mutations rates-- HIV needs to make X mutations to escape a drug, HIV needs to make Y mutations to become climb a fitness peak, etc. What theyre talking about (what theyre clueless…

The Republicans on Biblical Literalism

The subject of biblical literalism came up at last week's Republican / You Tube debate: Joseph: I am Joseph. I am from Dallas, Texas, and how you answer this question will tell us everything we need to know about you. Do you believe every word of this book? Specifically, this book that I am holding in my hand, do you believe this book? In case you were wondering, the book in question was the Bible. Here's what happened next: Cooper: I think we've got a question. Mayor Giuliani? Huckabee: Do I need to help you out, Mayor, on this one? (Laughter) (Applause) Giuliani: Wait a second, you're…

The Howler on Lomborg

Speaking of cranks, all of the recent fuss over Al Gore's testimony to Congress on the subject of global warming has seen the revival of statistician Bjorn Lomborg. You might remember him as the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, the book that was going to set us all straight on the subject of environmentalism. According to Lomborg, everything is much better than we've been led to believe. I only made it through about half of Lomborg's book before conking out. I was not really in a position to assess a lot of his claims. There were some crank warning signs, like the conversion…

Monday Math: Euler's Formula for Perfect Numbers

In last week's post, we discussed Mersenne primes. These were primes of the form: \[ 2^p-1, \phantom{x} \textrm{where} \phantom{x} p \phantom{x} \textrm{is prime.} \] I mentioned that such primes are relevant to the problem of finding perfect numbers. So how about we flesh that out? Let's define a function that takes in positive integers and records the sum of their divisors. We shall denote this function with the Greek letter sigma, so that \[ \sigma(n)=\sum_{d|n} d = \phantom{x} \textrm{the sum of the divisors of} \phantom{x} n. \] Here are some sample values: \[ \sigma(3)=1+3=4…

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest [Library of Babel]

I finished re-reading Infinite Jest this week. I'm a few weeks ahead of the Infinite Summer crowd, which is a little frustrating, because I really want to see what they say about the later bits, but they won't get there for a while yet. Anyway, this is a tough book to summarize, because it's both a very large book, and a very expansive one. You could write elevator pitches about it that would put it in a bunch of different genres-- thriller (terrorists and government agents search for a movie that destroys the brain of anybody who watches it), school story (dope-smoking tennis prodigies try…

Tolkien, Religion, and the Death of Western Culture

I was rather surprised when Friday's quick post about Tolkien spawned a lengthy comment thread full of people arguing against the suggestion that The Lord of the Rings is affected by Tolkien's Catholic faith. I'm no Tolkien scholar, but my impression of the field is that this is simply not a controversial statement, that there is ample material in the reams of letters, early drafts, and other background material showing that this is the case. On reflection, it seems that there are two things going on here. One is that some people seem to think that a book cannot be said to contain Christian…

Reasonably Comfortable Questions: Modern Physics

In the "uncomfortable questions" comment thread, Thony C. suggests: You say you're teaching "modern physics" so how about a running commentary on the stuff your teaching? That's a good suggestion, and I'll start posting some sketchy reports soon. First, though, Bora asks: What is un-modern physics? Roughly speaking, physics gets divided into "Classical Physics" and "Modern Physics," with the dividing line coming right around 1900. "Classical Physics" basically covers fields that were well established before 1900: Newtonian Dynamics, Electricity and Magnetism, most of Thermodynamics, most of…

Camouflaged communication - the secret signals of squid

Two strangers are having a normal conversation in the middle of a large crowd. No one else can see them. No one else can listen in. Thanks to advanced gadgetry, they are talking in coded messages that only they can decipher. These invisible conversationalists sound like they've walked out of a Bond film. But they are entirely real, and their skill at secrecy is biological, not technological. They are squid. Squid and their relatives, the octopus and cuttlefish, are masters of concealment. They have the most sophisticated camouflage abilities in the animal kingdom and use them to avoid…

Temperature a la Galileo

There's famously dozens of ways to measure the height of a building with a barometer. If you're sufficiently clever, you can think of many, many more ways to measure temperature with just about anything. One of the most visually impressive ways to measure temperature is the Galilean thermometer, which is also sometimes called the Galileo thermometer. It consists of little fluid-filled glass bulbs immersed in another liquid. The suspending liquid is itself encased in a long glass tube. Hanging from each of the glass bulbs is a marker with a temperature label. Look at the temperature on…

Project Earth and other stuff

Yesterday I was watching Discovery's Project Earth, avoiding doing homework and grading. It's an interesting show, with ideas ranging from the interesting to the preposterous. The episode I saw proposed launching little lenses into space to scatter a small fraction of the sun's light away from earth. The tests were failures, and more damning but glossed over in the program were the sheer number of launches needed to put a significant number of lenses in space. At that point, why not just use reflective mylar sheets in space? They're much cheaper and you can put a lot more in space with…

Evidence for the Bering Strait Theory of Migration into the Americas

Wang et al., publishing in PLoS Genetics, looked at the genetic diversity in Native American populations from Canada all the way down into South America. They wanted to see whether the genetic diversity observed in Native peoples correlated in any way with geography. If the genetic diversity did not correlate with geography this would suggest that Native people colonized the New world from the Old world at different times in different waves of expansion. If, on the other hand, the genetic diversity correlated well with geography (on a North to South axis of decreasing diversity) this would…

Bling in the Brain: Platinum Coils Reduce Aneurysm Deaths

Physicians are beginning to use a novel therapy for treating aneurysms: the use of a platinum coil, which is threaded to the site of concern and seals off the potential rupture. (More, with pictures and info about aneurysms, under the fold.) What is an Aneurysm? Aneurysms among Americans are both quite prevalent and quite deadly. It describes a local dilation (ballooning or distortion) of a blood vessel, which is usually cause by a build up in pressure due to blockage. When this pressure builds up, the wall of the blood vessel is progressively weakened and the liklihood of bursting increases…

The Week's Best: Evolution, healthcare reform, clever apes, and Cheever in his undies

from a different Daily Dish -- 365 petri dishes, by Klari Reis House of Wisdom, the splendid new blog on Arabic science from Mohammed Yahia, editor of Nature Middle East describes an effort to map the Red Sea's coral reefs with satellite, aerial, adn ship-based technologies. Nice project and a promising new blog. Brain and Mind Ritalin works by boosting dopamine levels, says a story in Technology Review, reporting on a paper in Nature Neuroscience. The effect is to enhance not just attention but the speed of learning. As several tweeters and bloggers have noted, H-Madness is a new group blog…

The World's Fair and the Science Creative Quarterly, together, in the most exceptional, illustrious, splendiferous challenge of the second half of June.

This is what happens when an individual is comfortable with the sciences... Einstein's EEG The World's Fair, in collaboration, with the Science Creative Quarterly is pleased to participate in The ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose raise-money-to-help-science-classrooms-a-thon!. In our case, donations $10 and above via the World's Fair Challenge, will guarantee publication of a science Haiku of your composition over at the SCQ. As Janet over at Adventures in Ethics and Science says: Those of us who blog here at ScienceBlogs think science is cool, important, and worth understanding. If you're reading…

Frightening and Subjective: A Review of A Scanner Darkly

What does a scanner see? Into the head? Into the heart? Does it see into me? Clearly? Or darkly? Think about it this way. Everything that you have ever been or ever will be, everything you have loved, every preference, every joy, every sweet or sordid memory is contained in a squishy mass of about 1.5 kg. That squishy mass is so fragile that whiplash can mortally wound it and so demanding that you must eat constantly to feed it. The slightest change in temperature or decrease in oxygen will leave it useless. True, it is surrounded by a skull -- which from personal experience in anatomy…

Pop Goes the Photomultiplier Tube

How do scientists make glass stronger? Break it. Brookhaven Lab physicists and engineers take this hands-on approach a step further. In order to strengthen the design of glass bulbs known as photomultiplier tubes, the researchers submerge the devices in 500,000 gallons of pressurized water, punch a small hole through their sides, and watch as the glass cracks, crunches, and, just milliseconds later, implodes (see videos below). The implosion of a photomultiplier tube in a tank at BNL, as seen through combined high-speed camera images. Time scale: 6,000 frames per second. Fifty thousand…

Jesus was a defective mutant, born of a cytological error

Why is it that the funny stuff always breaks out when I'm away from the interwebs? The always looney DaveScot takes issue with the claim that the virgin birth of Jesus is biologically unlikely, and cobbles up a bizarre scenario to allow it. Why, I don't know; is ID dependent on the chromosomal status of Jesus Christ, or something? Anyway, DaveScot proposes that 1) meiosis was incomplete in one of Mary's ova, producing an egg that contained 2N chromosomes; 2) this egg also bore a mutation that causes XX individuals to develop as phenotypically male; and 3) something then activated this egg to…

How not to cherrypick

The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition go for a variation of the global warming ended in 1998 cherry pick: "The NIWA record tells us that the current pother on global warming was caused by the sudden temperature increase in New Zealand of 1.8ºC from 1993 to 1998, caused by the El Niño-Southern Oscillation ocean event of 1998. Since then temperatures are plunging, and are currently below the average of the last 50 years. Unfortunately, they have forgotten the first rule of cherrypicking: don't let the rubes see the data you left out. They include a graph of New Zealand temperatures…

DDT use in South Africa

I've written several posts debunking the myth that using DDT is banned, pointing out that is used in places like South Africa. Now Professor Bunyip has finally discovered this fact and slams Tim Blair for spreading the myth: This item from the BBC will have Tim Blair beside himself -- a contortion worth seeing, given that he has long since assumed the initial improbable position of being well up himself. South Africa had stopped using DDT in 1996. Until then the total number of malaria cases was below 10,000 and there were seldom more than 30 deaths per year. But in 2000, [South Africa] saw…

Chinese navy disproves global warming

Christopher Monckton has a lengthy article in the Daily Telegraph where he attempts to debunk the notion that there is significant anthropogenic global warming. The main problem with his article is that he doesn't know what he's writing about it. He offers up an untidy pile of factoids, some of which are true but out of context, some of which are not at all true, and some of which he seems to have conjured up out of thin air. What they all have in common is that they support his position. Monckton seems to be unable to separate the wheat from the chaff. My favourite factoid is this one:…

Counterpoint fails to make correction

Last year on Counterpoint Anthony Watts appeared: Michael Duffy: In which direction does the bias lie? Are you suggesting that the temperature has not got as hot as the American official historical record suggests? Anthony Watts: That's correct. It's an interesting situation. The early arguments against this project said that all of these different biases are going to cancel themselves out and there would be cool biases as well as warm biases, but we discovered that that wasn't the case. The vast majority of them are warm biases, and even such things as people thinking a tree might in fact…