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My picks from ScienceDaily (the Sleep edition)

Daytime Nap Can Benefit A Person's Memory Performance: A brief bout of non-REM sleep (45 minutes) obtained during a daytime nap clearly benefits a person's declarative memory performance, according to a new study. People Had More Intense Dreams After Sept. 11, 2001, Sleep Research Shows: The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, changed our lives in a number of different ways, not only socially and politically, but also in the way in which we dream, according to a new study. Election 2008: Sleep Deprivation A Tough Opponent For Presidential Candidates: The field of presidential contenders…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Does Biology Matter When Predicting How Animals Will Respond To Climate Change?: Most predictions of how animals will move in changing climates rely on statistically relating an animal's current location to environmental conditions. This approach ignores potentially important aspects of an animal's biology including size, physiology, and behavior. Related Evolution Of Male-female Differences Within A Shared Genome: One of the major components of the world's biological diversity are the differences between males and females in traits related to mating, including weapons used when competing for…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Echidna's Sex Life Under Study: A University of Adelaide-led project will study the genetic makeup of one of Australia's most iconic animals, the echidna, to give an unprecedented insight into their sex life and behaviour. World echidna expert Dr Peggy Rismiller and geneticist Dr Frank Grützner will collaborate with the Monarto and Adelaide Zoos and South Australian Museum to learn more about these unique egg-laying mammals known as monotremes. Sharks' 'Bite Force' Under The Spotlight: While sharks instill fear in beachgoers worldwide, they instill a deep sense of curiosity in UT assistant…

Why Are There No Unicorns?

Is natural selection omnipotent or are there developmental constraints to what is possible and it is only from a limited range of possibilities that natural selection has to choose? The tension betwen two schools of thought (sometimes thought of in terms of pro-Gould and anti-Gould, as he has written much about developmental constraints and against vulgar adaptationism) is still alive and well. It is nice to see someone actually do an experimental test of the thesis: Why Are There No Unicorns?: Why are there no unicorns? Perhaps horses develop in a way that cannot be easily modified to…

Global Warming Advances Humanity's "Doomsday Clock"

This graphic shows how close to the midnight of humanity's annihilation that the minute hand approached in the 60 years since the "Doomsday Clock" has been kept. Individual minutes until midnight are depicted as squares on the y-axis, while each year is on the x-axis. The closest the minute hand ever approached midnight was 1953, when it was 2 minutes until midnight, and 1984, when it was three minutes to midnight. The BAS began keeping this clock in 1947. Image source: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Experts who assess the dangers posed to civilization added climate change to the…

No, blogs are not dead, they are on summer vacation

It is always funny to hear how "blogs are dying", being abandoned in droves as bloggers are all moving to Twitter. It's funny how that works - you see fewer posts on a blog, or a couple of bloggers going on a summer hiatus, and the sky is falling! In response to the latest such lament (which includes a seed of an idea that many have already developed at length and detail), I wrote this in the comments, and thought I'd repost it here for more discussion: It is June. Blogospheric summer slump has been observed every summer since blogging started. Nothing surprising: kids are out of school and…

Bugs: They're Not Just For Birds Anymore!

An issue of the Food Insects Newsletter reports that 80 percent of the world's population eats insects intentionally and 100 percent eat insects unintentionally. In fact, if Americans tolerated more insects (you know, like, BUGS) in their food, farmers could significantly reduce the amount of pesticides applied to their crops each year. Additionally, by weight, termites, grasshoppers, caterpillars, weevils, house flies and spiders are better sources of protein than beef, chicken, pork or lamb according to the Entomological Society of America. Also, insects are low in cholesterol and low in…

Nice, but not science...

I am not at the AAAS meeting in San Francisco, even though I am only about 30 minutes from where it is held... So I was interested to see Larry Page addressed the meeting and admonished scientists for their failings AAAS podcast here Apparently science needs to be more entrepreneurial, needs better marketing, and has some problems to solve. Now, I actually agree with science's need to be more entrepreneurial, even though I come from one of the more abstract and useless of the sciences. Science is too conservative, and too many scientists don't think about how their research might be of use…

North Korea info

Nuclear Mangos has a good summary and pointer set on North Korea and its nuke. armscontrolwonk has a good series of informative posts. Including a seismograph image from IRIS which I shamelessly pass on: IRIS says magnitude 4.2, presumably on the Richter scale. I've heard ranges from 3.6 to 4.6 quoted (the scale is inherently ambiguous in absolute scaling). It is a logarithmic energy scale, with magnitude 4.0 corresponding to roughly 1 kiloton of TNT equivalent (or 4.2 trillion Joules). If the South Korean numbers, magnitude 3.6, are right, then it is a dud - only ~ 500 tons of TNT…

ACP 25th Anniversary Workshop on Black Holes

The Aspen Center for Physics is holding its annual series of winter workshops, with the final, double sized workshop being on the astrophysical topic of Black Holes. Aspen Center for Physics Yes, I am there, organizering, Daniel Holz from CV is also here, along with 100+ other luminaries, and, yes, he's also been too busy to blog. The discussion has been lively and broad, covering everything from formation and accretion of low mass stellar black holes, through to mergers of supermassive black holes, via the puzzle of intermediate mass black holes. Wednesday evening, Prof. Andrea Ghez gave…

Climategate: "withold funding... until appropriate action is taken"

"The controversy over "Climategate" continues to heighten as some Pennsylvania legislators question the continuation of Penn State's current research grants -- and possibly even the appropriations the university has been waiting on since July." There were two interesting articles late last week in the Penn State student paper, the Collegian. The first article discusses the University's funding situation. The State appropriation for fiscal year 2009-10, which started July 1st 2009, has still not been approved, the hold-up is legislation on legalising table games, primarily poker. The…

Chad Speaks on $. You listen.

Chad speaks out on the upcoming, devastating, cuts in science and takes on Gordon over where the blame lies. You may be surprised. Either way you ought to read it. Here is my take on the issue, when the news came out last month... The root cause of these cuts is with the White House - the budget process was stymied by their veto threats and by the "silent filibustering" of the individual budget bills in the Senate (where the Republicans threaten to withold "unanimous consent" for bringing the bill to a vote if they don't like it - which is a bluff to filibuster - and for some reason the…

Bad budget news

Bad budget news in the pipeline for science NASAwatch has the NASA budget summary As you know, Bob, the US is already into fiscal year '08 but most of the bugdet bills have not yet been passed, and the government is operating under a continuous resolution (basically rolling over last years budget, pro-rated). A reason the bills are not yet passed, and they must by by friday this week, or the government will shut down, is that President Bush has let it be known that he will veto any bill that goes over his proposed request to Congress. Congress added $22 billion in discretionary spending to…

Can I get funding to torture students? Or should I continue doing it for free?

Well, this certainly sounds like a fun experiment. n a bizarre experiment, academics at The Oxford Centre For Science Of The Mind 'tortured' 12 Roman Catholics and 12 atheists with electric shocks as they studied a painting of the Virgin Mary. They found that the Catholics seemed to be able to block out much of the pain. Except, of course, for a few problems with the experiment. First, an atheist like me would find being afflicted with Catholic iconography would be a compounding of the torture. They did try to control for that by also having subjects contemplate a Renaissance portrait of a…

Finding work in a science-related field: where do you begin?

For aspiring technicians, who live in the right parts of the country, biotech jobs are out there and waiting. But what if you don't want to be a technician? Or what if you're in graduate school, in a post-doc, or have a Ph.D. and simply want to do something else? Where do you begin? How do you know what sorts of positions are going to be a good match for your skills and talents? Is the outlook really as bleak as it may seem? First, the prelude. Most of what I'm going to write will apply to many more people than the small population with Ph.D.s. This little bit of advice is an…

Google to Digitize Lost Library of Alexandria

From the news release: Google to Digitize Lost Library of Alexandria by Paoli du Flippi -- posted @ 4/01/2010 12:01:00 AM PT Today at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California, Executive Dan Clancy, head of the Google Books project, announced plans to digitize the contents of the Lost Ancient Library of Alexandria. Initially, some confusion arose among the assembled media representatives, who immediately began to inquire about the details of dealing with the recalcitrant and xenophobic government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. But Mr. Clancy quickly set the press corps straight…

AIG Financial Products

AIG released its counterparty list AIG Moving Forward - list of counterparties and amounts. So all this was really just to save Goldman Sachs... They got $12.9 billion from the "Maiden Lane" funds the US set up to launder channel funds rapidly to vulnerable financial institutions. 'course Barclays, Deutsche Bank and Societe General also got a bunch of cash along with the other usual suspects. It is mildly curious that some of the lists are sorted by amount paid out, and some are not. Mildly obfuscates the information to those glancing at it. Information Processing has some more interesting…

sailor went to sea sea sea

USS Chung-Hoon is headed for the South China Sea, where there have been recent minor confrontation between US and Chinese vessels Chung-Hoon is a Burke class Aegis destroyer - good radar, but curious choice for sea defence, heavy on missiles and a bit slow and heavy to be playing bumping games. Would have thought a frigate or two would be a better choice, nimbler better against surface harassment. But, she's not the only ship at sea. In fact were W still president, my eyebrows would be twitching, because the Eisenhower is overlapping with the Roosevelt in the Middle East, with the latter…

KITP: evolution of collision products

whee, we make stars go splat again! what exactly does happen when stars collide, just ordinary low mass main sequence stars Glebbeek and Pols A&A 2008 - v 488 p 1007 and p 1017 BSE: binary stellar evolution code - Hurley et al 2002 from Tout et al 1997 - mass is wrong, - lifetime is wrong, - luminosity is wrong If you are using the BSE prescription for merged stars. Other than that it is pretty good... We are adding two stars, M1 and M2 with M1+M2 < 2.5 solar masses assume near parabolic collisions with velocities at infinity small compared to stellar surface escape velocities;…

Mystery Bird: Mallard, Anas platyrhynchos

tags: mystery bird, identify this bird, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Mallard, Anas platyrhynchos, photographed in Arizona. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Richard Ditch, 2005 [larger view]. Date Time Original: 2005:12:10 08:20:56 Exposure Time: 1/400 F-Number: 7.10 ISO: 200 Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: What seems at first regard a completely straightforward identification leads us down a tangled path indeed. Nearly everyone will have…

Mystery Bird: Gilded Flicker, Colaptes chrysoides

tags: Gilded Flicker, Colaptes chrysoides, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Gilded Flicker, Colaptes chrysoides, photographed in Arizona. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Richard Ditch, 2005 [larger view]. Date Time Original: 2005:04:26 15:20:04 Exposure Time: 1/124 F-Number: 16.00 ISO: 200 Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: Forget the bird -- what on earth is that plant? We're used to woodpeckers clambering about in good solid trees: Red-headeds…

Mystery Bird: Flying Royal Tern, Sterna maxima

tags: Royal Tern, Sterna maxima, birds, nature, Image of the Day [Mystery bird] Royal Tern, Sterna maxima, photographed flying over Frenchtown Road, Bolivar Peninsula, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Joseph Kennedy, 22 August 2008 [larger view]. Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/2000s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400. Below the fold is a detailed analysis for how to ID this species .. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: The taxonomically savvy will have noticed that these quizzes are proceeding in roughly…

Update: Housing

I called the landlord's office (again) last Friday to find out what this "rent increase" is about, and the people in the landlord's office had no ideas. As most of you know, I have been trying to find out about this "rent increase" for the past three months, by writing and calling my landlord, but he refuses to explain. Since I live in a rent stabilized apartment, all rent increases must be approved by the city before they are enacted, according to my sources. One of the office workers suggested this "rent increase" was for fixing up my apartment, not knowing that my apartment bathroom had…

Put Maher in the hot seat

Some people are quite rightly appalled that Bill Maher won the Richard Dawkins Award from AAI, and is at the top of the list of speakers at the AAI conference. I sympathize; Maher certainly has some wacky ideas, and I even gave him a mixed review on his movie, Religulous. (I also must repeat a clarification: the Richard Dawkins Award is not given by Richard Dawkins or the Richard Dawkins Foundation: it is an award by Atheist Alliance International, named after Richard Dawkins.) However, let's be clear about the obvious. He is being given this award for making a movie this year that clearly…

Seven worker safety rules remain stuck, stalled, "under review" in Obama White House

Shortly after taking office, the head of the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) acknowledged the troubling slow pace at which new worker safety regulations are put in place.  In a February 2010 speech, David Michaels, PhD, MPH said: "Some standards have taken more than a decade to establish, and that's not an acceptable response when workers are in danger." In a March 2010 speech the OSHA chief added: "Clearly the current system for issuing standards doesn't work well for those it's supposed to benefit - workers.  When rulemaking takes years and even…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Back in August, events and exhibits marked the one-year anniversary of learning that 33 miners who were trapped underground in Chile's San Jose mine were alive. The rescue, which involved drilling a 2,000 foot shaft and lifting out the miners who'd endured 69 days underground, captivated viewers around the world. The New York Times' Alexei Barrionuevo takes a look at how the miners have fared since their rescue, and reports that the trauma of being trapped underground continues to afflict many of them. Their situations are not what one might expect for international celebrities: One year…

Occupational Health News Roundup

A study just published in The Lancet compares the incidence rates of cancers in firefighters who worked at the World Trade Center site during and after the 9/11 attacks to the rates in firefighters not exposed to the disaster or its aftermath. Researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine Montefiore Medical Center and the New York Fire Department's Bureau of Health Services found that WTC firefighters had an overall cancer incidence ratio about 10% higher than that of a general population with similar demographics and 32% higher than that of non-WTC firefighters. Firefighters who…

Two weeks after grain auger disaster, vigil continues for two 17 year old workers

The two 17 year old workers who were entangled two weeks ago in a grain auger remain hospitalized in the OU Medical Center in Oklahoma City. Family and friends of Bryce Gannon, 17 and Tyler Zander, 17 created a Facebook page, "Prayers for Bryce and Tyler," that provides a glimpse of the long road of recovery ahead for them. Both suffered amputation injuries to their legs. The Facebook posts suggest that the two young men have undergone multiple surgeries to treat their wounds and identify potential sources of infections. A post on Monday, Aug 15 reported: "Tyler's surgery to clean his…

Occupational Health News Roundup

This month marks the 10th anniversary of the Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act, which was passed in response to the problem of healthcare workers being exposed to bloodborne pathogens (HIV, hepatitis, etc.) via sharps injuries. The Act directed OSHA to modify its existing bloodborne pathogen standard to require that employers update their exposure control plans to reflect advances in technology (e.g., needleless systems and sharps with injury protection); maintain sharps injury logs; and solicit input from non-managerial employees potentially exposed to contaminated sharps. (View the…

In Canada: a morning walk and a cigarette pack

For part of this summer, I escaped the sweltering heat of central Texas and took refuge in Leamington, Ontario, Canada.  It's a lovely place in southern Ontario on the banks of Lake Erie. From my sister's cottage, I could see Pelee Island on the horizon. On a morning walk, the nose of my golden retriever Laredo drew me to a small, smashed cardboard package. It was an empty pack of DK's Full Flavor Premium Canadian Blend cigarettes. But the product and brand on the label were dwarfed by the graphic warnings on four of the six sides of the box. A cigarette pack I found on the side of the road…

Too much sitting will harm your health

Evidence has been accumulating about the toll of prolonged sitting, and a new systematic review and meta-analysis published in the Archives of Internal Medicine shows just how harmful sedentary habits can be. University of Toronto researcher Aviroop Biswas and colleagues performed a quantitative meta-analyses on 41 studies that measured adults’ sedentary time and reported health outcomes directly associated with death, disease, or use of healthcare services. Their findings won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been following this research. “Greater sedentary time was found to be positively…

Swedish Linux Users: Avoid Elgiganten

As detailed here before, a few Samsung laptop models have a firmware bug that makes them liable to becoming inert bricks if you install Linux. It's a one-way process. This happened to me when I bought an ultrabook from the Elgiganten big-box store last summer. Both Samsung and the store refused to reimburse me for the loss of my machine's use. At the suggestion of my home municipality's consumer advisor (konsumentrådgivare), I took the matter to Allmänna reklamationsnämnden, the National Board for Consumer Disputes (complaint no 2013-10081). My main argument was that installing Linux is a…

Birger's Friday Link Roundup

Ikea’s typhoon rescue relief outguns China’s. Nope. Not surprised that their government does not care much. China Ends One-Child Policy. “Viking-age” ‘gold men’ unearthed in Sweden”. Actually, a bit older than the Vikings... When the workload grows too huge, I recommend a solution found in Terry Pratchett’s Pyramids. The pyramid engineer creates a time loop so different temporal versions of him can work in parallel. Literally “an army of me”. The Welsh language must be perfect for writing sagas about ancient heroes battling it out. Creepy White Guys and Asian Women” *shudders in disgust…

Scam OA Journals: Who's Fooling Whom?

Two years ago I was dismayed to find that a pair of crank authors had managed to slip a pseudo-archaeological paper into a respected geography journal. Last spring they seemed to have pulled off the same trick again, this time with an astronomy journal. Pseudoscience is after all a smelly next-door neighbour of interdisciplinary science.* When I realised that the second paper was in a bogus Open Access journal, I drew the conclusion that the authors had fallen for a scam, paying the OA fee to get published in a journal whose academic standing they had severely misjudged. That's still my…

Monday Miscellany

On Sunday 14 November at 1400 hrs I'm giving a talk on the aristocracy of the 1st millennium AD at the Town Museum of Norrköping, Holmbrogränd. On Monday 15 November I'm speaking at a seminar in Gothenburg about social media and scientific and political communication. My talk will be some time between 1300 and 1600 hrs, and treat of how I as a professional research scholar take part in the writing of Wikipedia. The venue is most likely at the IT University, ForskningsgÃ¥ngen 6 on Lindholmen. On Thursday 9 December some time after lunch I'm speaking at a seminar in Stockholm about the…

Sex Advice From An Amateur

[More about sex,, humour; sex, humor.] One of the perks of keeping a well-visited blog is that you get to spy on people using search engines. Extreme Tracking keeps a list for me of the latest search terms which have led people to Aard. It turns out that they're always largely porn surfers. My entry about the German locksmith who has four children with his long-lost sister / common-law wife attracts continual interest from people who are probably really disappointed to find nothing prurient there. And there's always the people who mistype "big booty" and end up at my entry about Iron Age…

Christmas

I've had this decent idea for a post popping up in my mind twice and then dropping out of it before I had a chance to write myself a note. It's something about fragments, about beginnings of stories stacked onto each other like a collage. Or so I seem to remember. Maybe it will come back to me. So, instead, here are some random jottings about my Christmas. We have a lot of snow and I have been shoveling selected bits away from the yard and the outdoors stairs using a shovel that the previous owner of the house left for us in the garage. I also had to shovel a track to the compost container.…

Christian mental health care: positively medieval

Here's a real horror story: a place called Mercy Ministries claimed to offer psychiatric help to people in Australia, and what they offered instead was nightmarish religious discipline and doctrine. There's something subtle in there, too, that ought to make us ashamed: the Australian reporter calls it an "American-style ministry". Isn't it sad to see that our country is becoming an adjective for idiocy? Anyway, here's one woman's summary of her "treatment". Nine months without medical treatment, nine months without any psychiatric care, nine months of being told she was not a good enough…

The Nightmare World of P.G. Wodehouse

Of late I have spent some time in the nightmare world of P.G. Wodehouse, reading his 1946 novel Joy in the Morning.* Written though it was after WW2, it is set in a timeless travesty of pre-WW1 England. Much of the humour, as you will know, revolves around the interplay between the mentally challenged Bertram Wooster and his manservant Jeeves who possesses Holmes-like intelligence and enormous erudition. Wooster is about 30 and independently wealthy. He spends much of his time at gentleman's clubs, when not getting snagged in extremely contrived intrigues that usually involve people…

The Legacy of Blur

From the title, you can tell I'm not very keen on him. I'm writing this not because my thoughts are terribly valuable on him, but because its a convenient place for me to write this where I'll remember it. Because on previous things - like, say, the invasion of Kosovo - I've tended to forget, after, what my thoughts were, before, under pressure of events. At the moment, Blairs reputation is dominated by the disaster of Iraq. Since this is a real disaster for which he shares a lot of the blame, this is fair (I know it was mostly US troops but our (his) support seems to have been very important…

Good ol' Gribbit At It Again

I know, it's not really sound sport to agitate someone this stupid, but I guess I'm just feeding my inner sadist. Here's his latest bit of nonsense, wherein he makes claims that are either false or completely unknowable about the NSA wiretapping program. He is reacting to an ACLU spokeswoman for speaking out against an attempt in Congress to rubber stamp the NSA programs without any further oversight. First, the false claim: First off, the idea that this is wiretapping is ignorance. The NSA program is a data mining program. They are capturing electronic signals being transmitted from inside…

Judge Dismisses Phone Records Lawsuit

Remember playing tag as a kid, when you had that one spot that was "safe"? If you had your hand on a certain tree, then you could not be tagged 'it'. The Bush administration seems to be treating national security largely as the safe spot, arguing that as long as they claim something is necessary for national security, not only can you not stop them from doing it, you can't even find out if they're doing it. Yesterday, a Federal judge dismissed a lawsuit that sought to stop AT&T from handing over phone records to the NSA because they hadn't proven that the company did that. Never mind that…

Katherine Harris Has Problems

You all remember Katherine Harris, right? She was the state election official in Florida during the 2000 recount, the one that looked and acted like a Stepford wife with a short in the wiring. Well now she's running for the Senate from Florida and running into major problems. Her third campaign manager has now quit, complaining of her bizarre and abusive behavior. She's in hot water for taking illegal campaign contributions from the same defense contractor who was convicted of bribing Duke Cunningham as well. And now this latest defection: Katherine Harris' Senate campaign staff is leaving…

More Anti-ACLU Lies

Agape Press has an article about Rees Lloyd's testimony in favor of HR 2679. As usual, it's chock full of half-truths and falsehoods. And as usual, STACLU cites it approvingly without bothering to correct any of those falsehoods. For instance: The ACLU received half a million dollars from the Alabama Ten Commandments case, and $950,000 in attorneys fees in a lawsuit against the Boy Scouts. Steve Crampton, chief counsel with the AFA Law Center and a constitutional law specialist, says the ACLU is able to collect these fees because of an obscure provision of the Civil Rights Act, which PERA is…

The Pompous and the Pointless

Fake controversies like this just crack me up. The former Archbishop of Canterbury is raising a stink about the next coronation to take place in England, when Prince Charles takes over the throne from his mother: In a television interview to be broadcast later this month, Lord Carey says: "When the time comes for the next coronation there's got to be a number of changes. Very significant changes. The Queen came to the throne at a time when the Church of England was really the only Christian faith in the country. "And there were no Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus around to be in any way evident in the…

Gingrich and God

John Lofton, the reconstructionist wingnut from the Constitution Party, has an interview with Newt Gingrich, author of a new book called The Creator's Gifts: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, that is rather interesting for a couple reasons. First, because Gingrich doesn't seem to know the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: Well, I think it's pretty clear in the original document, the Declaration of Independence of the Founding Fathers, that we are endowed by our Creator certain inalienable rights which are the rights of liberty, life and the…

Ask a ScienceBlogger: Lies and Damned Lies

This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question from On High arrived while I was out of town (see also last week's results), and I've held off answering because I had a huge stack of papers to grade. Of course, time for responding has almost run out, so I guess I ought to say something... The question of the week is: "If you could shake the public and make them understand one scientific idea, what would it be?" Most of the other answers have come in already (and I'm too lazy to link them all), but they divide into two basic categories: answers dealing with the process of science, and answers…

Really Expensive Mothballs

There's a little squib in the New York Times today about the return of the Dawn mission to visit a couple of asteroids, one of their little not-quite-a-full-story things in the "Week in Review" section of the print edition (we get the Sunday Times delivered, because I find it much more civilized to spend a lazy Sunday morning reading a physical newspaper than staring at a computer monitor). The mission was suspended several months ago due to cost overruns, and general budget tightness at NASA these days. Following an appeal, it's been reinstated, with the launch date pushed back a year (…

Sea level lies?

This one is a bit odd; via HotWhopper is the WUWT post Obama was right–‘the rise of the oceans began to slow’. This purports to show a graph of rate-of-SLR, and shows it declining. The graph has no clear source, the post says "h/t to Dr. Pat Michaels". And down in the comments Michaels admits to it, so it must be his. However, it appears to be simply faked [*]. But weirdly, crudely faked [*]. All of this is at HW but: first of all the recent data showing that SLR isn't declining, has been omitted. This is just std.denialist stuff. But then the graph has been smoothed or mangled in some…

Can't think of any more amusing Curry jokes

Not that any of the existing ones are that good, either. Anyway: I slagged off her post on attribution a while ago, and then forgot (or couldn't be bothered) to slag off the nonsense she wrote about uncertainty (although my Judith Curry is now blogging, which is probably a good thing, because now instead of nitpicking other people's blogs she is now attempting to say what she thinks. Unfortunately this results in some very strange things is becoming every more clearly correct. Having to make a coherent argument is quite hard; Curry needs someone to read her stuff before she posts it). Anyway…