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Shrimp on treadmills, laundry-folding robots, and the problem of ridiculing research

I felt a sense of déjà vu Tuesday morning when I heard NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reporting on Senator Tom Coburn's attacks on National Science Foundation-funded research. I realized that the same thing happened last August, and I wrote about it in a post called "Scoring Political Points by Misunderstanding Science." Last year, the report mocked research into addiction and older adults' cognition (among many other projects) because the projects involved administering cocaine to monkeys and introducing senior citizens to Wii games. This year, the projects up for ridicule include research…

Special interest groups and White House stalling worker safety rule

During his first week in office, President Obama promised an Administration defined by "unprecedented level of openness...to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration." But that's not been the case when it comes to a draft worker safety rule developed by federal OSHA. Almost all the participation has been among special interest groups--not the ordinary workers who have the most at stake---and not in a public process that builds trust and is participatory. The proposed regulation would affect workers exposed to respirable…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At Bloomberg BNA, Stephen Lee reports that with fears of deportation looming, undocumented immigrants are becoming afraid to access legal remedies when they’re injured on the job. The article notes that such immigrants are disproportionately employed in hazardous jobs and while they account for just 15 percent of the overall workforce, they account for 18 percent of occupational fatalities. Lee writes: Sofia, a Mexican fieldworker in Santa Rosa, Calif., has a workers’ compensation case in the works after hurting her arm and shoulder pulling vine roots, requiring surgery. But she says she’s…

Health organizations warn about “regulatory reform" bills sweeping Congress

The American Public Health Association, the American Lung Association, and other health protection organizations have put Members of Congress and the Trump Administration on notice: dismantling regulations and slashing agency budgets will have dire consequences for Americans. The groups urged lawmakers to oppose several “regulatory reform” bills which were moving at lightning speed through the House of Representatives. Bills such as: The Searching for and Cutting Regulations that are Unnecessarily Burdensome Act of 2016 (SCRUB Act H.R. 998)) The Regulatory Integrity Act (H.R. 1004) The…

“An empty feeling” following CSB’s report on West Fertilizer disaster, and eating my words

A host of failures led to the explosion of fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate (FGAN) at the West Fertilizer Company on April 17, 2013. This disaster led to the death of 15 people. That’s what I heard during the Chemical Safety Board’s (CSB) public meeting on January 28 at which their investigation report was released. I also heard sadness tinted with frustration from a victim of the disaster. She lost someone who was very close in the blast. She sat quietly behind me at the meeting. Her demeanor was private. I’ll call her Theresa. Like me, Theresa was taking notes on the investigators'…

Researchers link high exposure to air pollution to increased risk of premature birth

Each year, the U.S. spends $26.2 billion on costs associated with preterm birth — that’s birth before 37 weeks of pregnancy. Beyond the costs, babies born too early experience immediate and long-term problems, from developmental disabilities to asthma to hearing loss. For years, scientists have been studying possible environmental contributors, with many finding an association between preterm birth and air pollution. Earlier this week, a new study brought even more depth and clarity to this connection. Published in the journal Environmental Health, the study found that exposure to high levels…

OSHA's beryllium rule: a victim of White House's "regulatory reform" nonsense

Earlier this month, a few dozen individuals and organizations submitted comments to OSHA on its proposed rule to protect beryllium-exposed workers. The lightweight and super strong metal is associated with lung cancer and causes chronic beryllium disease. I've spent some time browsing through many of the submissions and there was one that especially caught my attention. It came from the business consulting group ORCHSE Strategies, LLC. What had me looking twice at the firm's comments was not their views on this provision or that provision. It was something else. ORCHSE Strategies called out…

Poll: Majority of Americans support new school nutrition standards

With national school nutrition standards up for reauthorization in Congress, a new survey finds that most Americans support healthier school meals. Earlier this week, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation released the findings of a national survey in which 86 percent of respondents said they support today’s school nutrition standards and 88 percent support government-funded farm-to-school programs that provide schools with fresh, local produce. In 2010, the signing of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act ushered in the first update of school food and drink nutrition standards in 15 years, and as of June…

Study: Poor eye health prevalent across the U.S. South, where poverty and vision loss often go together

Another day, another study that finds poverty is linked to adverse and often preventable health outcomes. This time, it’s vision loss. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published new data finding that poverty is significantly correlated with severe vision loss, which is defined as being blind or having serious difficulties seeing even with glasses. In examining data from the American Community Survey, researchers found that among counties in the top quartile for severe vision loss, more than 55 percent were also in the top quartile for poverty. The South is home to…

One in three workers have carpal tunnel syndrome at Maryland poultry plant

Imagine a workplace in your town where one of every three employees had the same work-related illness. Better yet, imagine that it was one in three employees in your own workplace. That'd be pretty shocking, right? Well, that's what the CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) found among 191 workers at Amick Farms’ poultry processing plant in Hurlock, MD. Thirty-four percent had carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS). Equally striking, a whopping 76 percent of the workers in the study had evidence of nerve damage in their hands and wrists. The findings of this NIOSH “Health…

An Attempt To Move The Hanging Gardens

About the time of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC, Greek writers started to offer lists of Seven Wonders that the well-read traveller should see. In the 2nd century BC the Hanging Gardens of Babylon began to show up on such lists. The location of Babylon is well known: on the River Euphrates in southern Mesopotamia. But no ruins of the Hanging Gardens have been convincingly identified there. This is because the gardens were actually in another city in another country, according to Stephanie Dalley's new book, The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon. The Greeks got the city…

Lukewarm Normative Scandy Atheism

Because of blogging and my involvement in the skeptical pro-science movement, in recent years I have come into close contact with Americans as never before in my adult life. More than half of Aard's readers are in the US. It's almost like when I met my wife and suddenly learned lots about China. A couple of things recur in people's commentary here, largely on religious and political issues. My outlook is clearly quite exotic to many Americans. I view mainstream US politics as half of a full political spectrum, where voters really only get to choose between two different brands of conservative…

The Sad Demise of Gildor the Elf

I suddenly came to think of my first character in a role-playing game. His name was Gildor, he was an elf and a "fighter" -- I suppose he must have been a soldier actually -- and he came to a sad end. I knew him only briefly. From age twelve to twenty-five I was an avid role-player. Indeed, the person I was then would be really sad to learn that I quit playing eventually. But he would take heart somewhat if he knew that I have lately become a board-game geek instead. It was about the time I turned twelve, in the spring of 1984, that my buddy Ragnar turned me on to the Swedish version of…

Oakland Press Wrong on Intelligent Design

The Oakland Press published an editorial on its website on Saturday about Dick DeVos' statements advocating the teaching of intelligent design in public school science classes. Their editorial stance is essentially to dismiss it as a non-issue brought up by a "frenzied media" or by "anonymous political groups." Speaking as a founding board member of the only organization that has spoken out publicly on the issue, I can only assume that they are referring to Michigan Citizens for Science. Unfortunately, the editorial in the Press fails to address the crux of the issue. They make two primary…

Why Gay Marriage Matters

Here's a website devoted to fighting the proposed gay marriage ban in Wisconsin. And the story on the front page demonstrates why the fight for gay marriage matters - because real people with real families suffer under the status quo. I'll paste a long story from that site below the fold: Lynn and Jean had been together for 15 years when they adopted Katy. Jean had many students who came from homes that lacked the support and love children deserve, and she and Lynn knew they could provide a healthy, happy home for a child who needed one. Katy was home for only nine months when Jean was…

Rumsfeld's Astonishing Judgment

Brig. General Mark Scheid has laid out what many others have been saying since before the Iraq war started in 2003, that Rumsfeld's plan for the war was based on absurdly rosy scenarios that bore little relation to reality. He adds one new element to the story: Rumsfeld actually threatened to fire those in the Pentagon who brought up the need for post-war planning. I'll post a long excerpt below the fold: In 2001, Scheid was a colonel with the Central Command, the unit that oversees U.S. military operations in the Mideast. On Sept. 10, 2001, he was selected to be the chief of logistics war…

More on ACLU's Internal Problems

The NY Sun has another article about the internal problems at the ACLU, this one focusing on Anthony Romero's tenure as executive director, which began shortly before 9/11. One of the main criticisms, and one I agree with completely, is that Romero had no background as a civil libertarian prior to taking over: Mr. Romero, a Bronx native, is the first Hispanic and the first openly gay person to hold the executive director's job. However, he had little prior record of civil liberties activism and has been dogged by complaints that he is not sufficiently devoted to the ACLU's core principles. "…

Pre-College Advising

We're still a month away from the start of classes at most schools, but over at Learning Curves, Becky Hirta has some advice for new students. Some of this is university-specific ("Dress in layers. The University Center is never above 70 degrees; the math building is never below 80 degrees."), and other bits are matters of practical finance ("You don't need a shiny new computer. Save your money."), but the general advice is excellent. There are a couple of things I especially want to highlight, starting with: Often your instructors will tell you exactly what to do. Pay attention to these…

Readercon: Embracing the Uncomfortable

Having spent the weekend at Readercon, I feel like I should talk about it a little. For those who have never been to a SF convention, it's not all people dressing up like space aliens and fairy princesses-- in fact, the cons Kate and I go to tend not to have all that much of the dress-up thing going on. Instead, they're run more like an academic conference, with lots of panel discussions on different topics relating to stuff in the genre. Why this happens is somewhat mystifying, when I stop to think about it, but it's entertaining enough in its way. Anyway, I went to a handful of panels that…

Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band

I'm a little ragged today because Kate and I went up to SPAC last night to see Bruce Springsteen, who is currently touring behind his album of Pete Seeger songs. This was a short-notice concert-- I only got the tickets (as a birthday present) on Sunday-- so this review will be pretty much it as far as blogging today, because I didn't have time to set other posts up for today, and I'm a little tired this morning. I didn't really know what to expect from this show, because the album itself is sort of odd-- Pete Seeger songs and folk standards, done by a huge mob of studio musicians. It's good,…

Wire Torture

With hoops season having wound down, we're slipping into that time of the year when I don't have anything to watch on tv. ESPN shows nothing but baseball, the NBA, and Mel Kiper, and there's very little on regular tv that's worth a damn. Happily, I have a pile of Netflix DVD's from back before basketball season started, and I watched a bunch of episodes of The Wire. Well, most of a bunch of episodes, anyway. The third disc for Season One had a glitch, right at the very end of Episode Nine. Just as things were reaching a climax, the picture went all pixelated, and the sound disappeared, and…

Wind-driven trends in Antarctic sea-ice drift

There's a nice paper out by Holland and Kwok, attributing much of the somewhat-hard-to-understand change in Antarctic sea ice to changes in wind forcing. The growth in Antarctic sea ice, although much smaller than the decrease in the Arctic, is still a bit embarassing; it would be much tidier if it were decreasing. The abstract says: The sea-ice cover around Antarctica has experienced a slight expansion in area over the past decades [1,2]. This small overall increase is the sum of much larger opposing trends in different sectors that have been proposed to result from changes in atmospheric…

Book club: Nierenberg. Part II: Future CO2

I decided to skip over the synthesis - how can I judge that, before reading the chapters its supposed to synthesise? I'll come back to it. Previous: Part I. Chapter 2 "Future carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels" is by Nordhaus and Yohe; and by Ausubel and Nordhaus. Eli has laid into this, but he largely based his post on Oreskes et al. (henceforth, OCS), and I no longer think thats such a good thing to do. They say: Chapter 1, written by Nordhaus, Ausubel, and Gary Yohe,... but this is, a teensy bit wrong. The chapter in question is chapter 2 (chapter 1 is the synthesis) and OCS have…

Muddling Science at Parks and Museums

That's the title of this article from the August 2006 issue of GeoTimes. The article is by Kathryn Hansen. The article details some of the difficulties faced by national parks and museums in communicating science to the public. It begins as follows: STOP: This exhibit is about animal thinking. It contains some things you may agree with, some you may disagree with, and others that may even trouble you. Come explore and see what you think. This disclaimer, attached to a bright red stop sign, is the first material offered to visitors at the Think Tank, an exhibit about animal cognition at…

Priority Expectations and Student-Faculty Conflict

There was a kerfuffle in academic social media a bit earlier this week, kicked off by an anonymous Twitter feed dedicated to complaints about students (which I won't link to, as it's one of those stunt feeds that's mostly an exercise in maximizing clicks by maximizing dickishness). This triggered a bunch of sweeping declarations about the surpassing awfulness of all faculty who have ever thought poorly of a student (which I'm also not going to link, because they were mostly on Twitter and are now even more annoying to find than they were to read). It was a great week for muttered paraphrases…

The Great Blizzard of 2015: Fair to say it is AGW amplified.

About 20 million people are currently under a blizzard warning, and double that under a winter weather advisory, for a storm moving into the Northeast today and tomorrow, with snow falling though Wednesday. Thousands of flights have been cancelled. Wind will be at tropical storm force, and occasionally, hurricane force, and coastal flooding is expected to be epic. The total amounts of snowfall will be over a foot for a very large area, and well over that here and there, though this is very difficult to predict. This is a strong low pressure system that will gather significant energy from a…

Static Electricity Isn't What You Were Taught!

"Electricity can be dangerous. My nephew tried to stick a penny into a plug. Whoever said a penny doesn't go far didn't see him shoot across that floor. I told him he was grounded." -Tim Allen I know what you're thinking. "Of course I know what static electricity is!" Oh, really? Let's go through the basics. You've all (hopefully) gotten to play with a Van de Graaff Generator at some point. It's one of the simplest electricity demonstrations there is. You stand on something like a milk crate, touch your hands to the generator, have someone turn it on, and your hair (for those of you with…

The Telescope's Best Friend? Gravity!

"What do we mean by setting a man free? You cannot free a man who dwells in a desert and is an unfeeling brute. There is no liberty except the liberty of some one making his way towards something. Such a man can be set free if you will teach him the meaning of thirst, and how to trace a path to a well. Only then will he embark upon a course of action that will not be without significance. You could not liberate a stone if there were no law of gravity -- for where will the stone go, once it is quarried?" -Antoine de Saint-Exupery Gravity, on the largest scales, rules everything in the Universe…

Honestly, New York Times? You are entitled to publish all the opinions, but not to endorse your own facts!

Honestly, it is hard to have an honest conversation about science with science obstructors or deniers. That is how you know you are conversing with a denier. You try to have the conversation, and it gets derailed by cherry picking, misdirection, faux misunderstanding, or lies. I don't care how far a person is from understanding a scientific concept or finding. I don't care how complex and nuanced such a finding is. As long as the science is in an area that I comfortable with as a scientist, educator, and science communicator, I'll take up the challenge of transforming scientific mumbo…

The Electoral College Vote Three Days Before The Election

Who will win the electoral vote on Tuesday, November 8th? It is not what you say, but how you say it. For several days now, I've been told by some how totally wrong I am in my various analyses of the electoral map. Half the naysayers say "But but FiveThirtyEight says this, so you are wrong" and the other half say "No, no, Sam Wang at Princeton says that, so you are wrong!" But all along, we've all three been saying something very similar. The difference in how we say it is, Sam Wang says something like "I'll eat my shorts if Clinton doesn't win" and I say "I think Clinton will win, but…

New National Space Policy for the USA!

"Don't wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful." -Mark Victor Hansen Last week, the Obama Administration unveiled their new National Space Policy for the United States of America. This is the first national space policy since Bush's policy from 2006. Do you remember what the main stated goal of the Bush administration was? To "…

Dark Matter Part II: How much Normal Matter is there?

Long you live and high you fly Smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry All you touch and all you see Is all your life will ever be. -Pink Floyd In part I of this series, we talked about a number of different ways -- all using gravity -- to measure the amount of matter in galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and the entire Universe. We got the same measurement no matter which method we used, finding out that 25-30% of the total energy of the Universe is in some type of matter. But, only about 0.5% of the total energy is in stars, which means that nearly all of this matter doesn't give off light! So…

Was there Ever Liquid Water on Mars?

People love to speculate that Mars was once a great place for life to form, and claim that there is plenty of evidence that there used to be oceans and rivers there. But this isn't true. People used to claim there were big Canal-like features on Mars, and used this as evidence that Mars was very wet. It was later realized that these weren't canals, but rather geological features caused by impact craters from astroids. But more recently, people have been claiming that images like the one above are examples of dried-up riverbeds. But this turns out not to be the case. When we take a closer…

It is amazing how little we know about animals

Many 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…

dlamming's Continued Obtuseness

dlamming is back with yet another post where he waves his hands frantically to distract from his own distortions and misrepresentations. He begins: Well, after a number of back-and-forth comments, Ed Brayton finally said "I don't believe that educated people in general have a good idea what evolution is about." If that's not elitist, I don't know what is, so I think I've proved my point. Except that he hasn't shown me to be wrong in my claim that most educated people don't have a good idea what evolutionary theory is all about. How exactly is it "elitist" to point out that people who may be…

Agreeing with Clayton Cramer

I came across this item on Clayton Cramer's blog and, while I typically disagree with him on political matters, I fully agree with some of what he says here. In discussing the Jack Abramoff scandal, he says: Almost all bribery is related to government regulation of the economy or manipulation of the tax code. Yes, you do occasionally find people doing corrupt things for idealistic causes, but not often enough for me to worry about. People risk jail because they want to get rich. The economist Thomas Sowell made the the point some years ago that, "When legislatures control buying and selling,…

Neo-Conservatives and Evolution

There is quite an interesting little battle going on among the folks at the National Review. It began when John Derbyshire posted this item on The Corner about the views of Gertrude Himmelfarb on evolution. If you don't know who Gertrude Himmelfarb is, she is surely among the greatest American intellectuals of the last 100 years (and I say that as someone who disagrees with many, perhaps most, of her views). She is the wife of Irving Kristol, the godfather and founding intellectual of what we today call the neo-conservatives, and she is an historian by training. Despite her brilliance and…

The Dover Case and the School Board Elections

I've been pursuing most of the morning an answer to the question of how the elections last night may change the outcome of the Dover trial. Some have suggested that with the new school board and a presumed change in policy, the case is moot - the policy is reversed, there is no need for a ruling in the case. Others have suggested that it makes no difference at all. The answer appears to be somewhere in between these two. Here is my understanding of the legal situation at this point in all the various aspects. A. Voluntary cessation doctrine. This legal doctrine says that "a defendant's…

What is a diploma worth?

Larry Moran thinks we need more rigorous admission requirements, and Donald Kennedy is not very happy with the state of creationist textbooks. Kennedy is currently serving as an expert witness for the University of California Regents, who are being sued by a group of Christian schools, students and parents for refusing to allow high school courses taught with creationist textbooks to fulfill the laboratory science requirement for UC admission. After reading several creationist biology texts, Kennedy said he found "few instances in which students are being introduced to science as a process—…

Balancing Acts in Science

How do you know when alternative views are real alternatives, and thus should be considered in a "balanced view" vs. when those views are not any longer valid and should be ignored? This sounds like a hard thing to do but it is not as hard as you might think. I suggest two different approaches: "Tipping Points" and "Clues that Something is Wrong Here." The Tipping Point approach works like this: As the percentage of qualified scientists that hold a particular view diminishes, when it reaches about 25 percent or so, the view should continue to be references but as a minority view. Many…

Being a Voyeur of Religion, Politely

This is a post I wrote elsewhere, a while ago, and just realized was never put on this blog, so here it is. I thought of this post and the topic because of the recent data of the Ms Jesus Scroll, which does indeed appear to be old. But they are still arguing about it, of course. Post is slightly revised. A while ago I asked on my Facebook page whether anyone had seen the Dead Sea Scroll exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota. As one might expect, a couple of people, who possibly thought I was joking, noted that the Dead Sea scrolls were part of the Bible, and all that stuff was…

What about those tornadoes?

Are there more tornadoes because of global warming? Are they stronger? Do they occur more frequently outside of the usual tornado season, or are they more common in areas that formerly had few tornadoes? There are problems with all of these questions, and the main problem is the fact that the tornado data isn't very informative. Here's the raw data from the NOAA tornado database, showing the number of tornadoes per year of all intensities greater than one mile long on the ground: (Click on the graph to see the whole thing in case it isn't showing for you.) This looks like more tornadoes…

Catching Fire. The other one.

Catching Fire is apparently a very popular book and/or movie that everyone is very excited about. But Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human is a different a book about some interesting research I was involved in about the origin of our genus, Homo. You can pick up a copy of our paper on this page. We call it "The Cooking Hypothesis." The basic idea can be summarized with these points: 1) Cooking food transformed human ecology. Many potential foods in the environment can't be consumed by humans (or apes in general) without cooking. But adding cooking to our species-specific technology,…

Toby Martin: The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England (part 1)

Toby Martin 2015, The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England This is the definitive study of English cruciform brooches. Now and then a study comes along that is so comprehensive, and so well argued, that nobody will ever be likely to even try to eclipse it. It is my firm belief that future work on English cruciform brooches will strictly be footnotes to Toby Martin. He has collected and presented a huge material, asked interesting questions of it, and dealt with it competently using state-of-the-art methods. I'd be happy to hand this book as a model to any archaeologist anywhere who…

Senator Susan Collins (R) plays political games with pandemic preparedness... and your life

February 2009-- Republican senators, led by a Susan Collins (R-ME) stripped Obamas stimulous package for funding to the CDC and pandemic flu preparedness: "Everybody in the room is concerned about a pandemic flu, but does it belong in this bill? Should we have 870 million dollars in this bill? No, we should not." Stimulus bill headed for passage minus pandemic funds The sums removed included $420 million for pandemic flu and $430 million for biomedical advanced research and development, he reported. March 2009-- Swine flu is born in La Gloria, Mexico. It quickly travels to the US, with…

The Infinity Puzzle by Frank Close

One of the things that is sometimes very frustrating (to me, at least) about popular physics books is that they rush very quickly through the physics that we already know, in order to spend time talking about wildly speculative ideas. This not only gives some of these books a very short shelf life, as their wilder speculations get ruled out, but it does a dis-service to science. Because as cool as some of the things that might be true are, the stuff that we already know is pretty awesome in its own right, and even more amazing for being true. Happily, Frank Close's new book, The Infinity…

Pseudonymity Is the Wrong Solution

I don't think my point quite got across the other day, so let me try phrasing this another way. I think a lot of what's being written about pseudonymity on blogs is missing the real point. The really important question here is not so much whether blog networks should allow pseudonymous blogs as whether employers should allow their employees to blog about what they do in their day jobs. Things like the much-cited Epi-Ren case are not really evidence of the risk of blogging under your own name, they're evidence of the risk of blogging when your employer doesn't want you to. Pseudonymity is a…

Investigating the Field of Saint Olaf

Certain place names over most of agricultural Scandinavia suggest that sacred fields were once prominent features of the landscape there. This was in the 1st Millennium AD, the period I work with. We have places named Field of Thor, Field of Freyr, Field of Frigga, or just Field, and all tend to be central locations in their districts, often lending their names to Medieval Christian parishes after the end of the pagan cult. Place-name scholars are uncertain about exactly what these sacred fields were used for, but it seems likely that they were the sites of seasonal rituals having to do with…

Book Review: Moalem, Survival of the Sickest

Survival of the Sickest is a collection of eight pop-sci essays on medicine from an evolutionary perspective. It does not present any single cohesive line of argument, but the book's title refers to one of the main themes: the idea that common hereditary diseases would not have become widespread in the gene pool unless they once conferred an adaptive edge on individuals. I read the book quite avidly and it is unlikely to disappoint anyone with an interest in the subject. Yet still I feel that it's a flawed piece of work in two important and interlinked respects: scientific credibility and…

Morality and economics

I seem to have run out of variations on Architecture and morality and Weasels ripped my flesh so I thought I'd drop the obscurity for once and use a simple post title which actually described the subject, rather than through several levels of indirection1. The recent trigger to this was mt's The Seventieth Generation wherein mt extolls the virtues of thinking of the future, even the far future, using as an example the building of cathedrals2. I'm all for thinking forwards, of course, but not so happy with mt's climate change is an ethical problem, not merely an economic one, for reasons I'…