General
illconsidered | November 17, 2010I don't like Prince Charles much, but that is just because of all the gossip the world was exposed to when Lady Di still walked this earth, so I can hardly be sure if he deserves that feeling.
So what? Well, it seems Charles is very into eco-friendly sustainability and all that dirty hippy stuff. I was offered a free copy of his new book "Harmony."
Below is an exerpt from HarmonyTheMovie.com
Harmony Movie Trailer from Balcony Films on Vimeo.
Does anyone know anything about it? Should I get a copy for review?
sciencepunk | October 7, 2010Jalopnik has some wonderful pictures of relics from the Soviet Lunar Lander program, abandoned after the success of Apollo 11.
illconsidered | October 5, 2010A few days ago, an environmental organization from England released what can charitably be called an appaling video in support of their campaign to reduce carbon emission 10% per year starting now, in 2010. The group is called 10:10 and the page originally containing the video, now containing an apology, is here. It was removed very quickly following very negative reactions from across the spectrum of environmental ideologies.
The video is a very graphic depiction of various people chosing not to go along with the 1010 campaign being blown to bits, replete with blood and gore spattered on…
illconsidered | August 28, 2010Spend a few minutes at the link below to fill in an online survey about your attitude to climate change and a variety of other issues.
http://www.kwiksurveys.com/online-survey.php?surveyID=HKMKNG_ee191483
Your answers are desired as the reader of a "pro-science" blog, they are confidential and will be used for a research project.
illconsidered | July 30, 2010An excellent article by Michael, again, and an interesting comment thread underneath. I have rarely seen RPJr more forthcoming and clear about his whole angle in the climate policy debate. I also have to confess I see very little value in the "honest broker" concept as he defines and advocates it (Eli is quite right) and no justification for his distasteful attacks on Real Climate and Jim Hansen.
illconsidered | July 30, 2010This is not a reference to the recent three decades of rapidly increasing global temperatures, rather it is a reference to an aniversary of the first appearance of the term "global warming" in the peer reviewed literature. The paper was by Wally Broeker and titled "Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?"
Real Climate has an interesting post on the details of this paper. The short version is that despite numerous considerations in the paper that have played out differently than hypothesized, the overall prediction of temperature by the end of the 20th century was remarkably…
illconsidered | July 29, 2010I lived in Tampa Bay, Florida for 6 months or so. They say it is the lightning capital of the world, I don't know, but there was an awful lot. I loved it!
This is not Tampa, but you get the picture:
(from APOD)
illconsidered | July 14, 2010Check out this interesting essay from Michael Tobis.
Though I am not sure that the solution he hopes for matches the problem as he describes it. Isn't he suggesting we (climate solution advocates) need to come up with our own "New Coke" despite the debacle that proved to be for Coca Cola Co in the eighties?
illconsidered | July 13, 2010Corexit was a big news topic at the beginning of this tragic Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the gulf of Mexico but it seems little talked about now.
There is no question that BP's calculation in its decision to use so much of this toxic chemical prioritizes the cosmetics of the situation over ecological impact and the health of cleanup crews. So much more important is PR that BP has not just refused to provide respirators to displaced fisherman labour crews, they threaten them with firing if they use their own!.
They don't care where the oil-dispersant mixture goes or what it harms as long…
illconsidered | July 8, 2010Many readers have likely noted the phrase "Logging the Onset of the Bottleneck Years" prefacing many editions of the "Another Week of Global Warming News" series.
A recent commenter asked what this means. I forwarded the question to het. I think his reply makes an interesting post.
The term 'bottleneck' refers to the ecological crisis humans are experiencing as resource limits, climate change, species extinction and environmental degradation, exacerbated by population pressure, make daily life more difficult for increasingly large numbers of people.
The term 'bottleneck' has been in the air…
illconsidered | July 7, 2010Via the amusing and insightful musings and insights of Marc Roberts:
(click for slightly larger and more legible image)
I think this is rather apropos given the recent retraction of one of Jonathon Leake's um, let's be kind, "dodgy" bits of journalism from the recent spate of IPCC "gates".
(Cartoon seen at In It For the Gold who uses it for the recent UVA report that again finds no academic misconduct by Mike Mann)
illconsidered | June 16, 2010Things have been pretty quiet around here lately, so the timing is pretty good for my extended trip to the Czech Republic.
I leave in a couple of hours and won't have anything but bare essentials for internet access for the next few days.
Chat about what you wish if you wish and don't forget that 3 links or more puts your comment into mederation where it will sit for quite a while! If you play, play nice!
sciencepunk | June 7, 2010If you could press your ear to a ladybird's chest, what would you hear? Not the steady thump thump of a human heart, but something quite different. Discovery News reports on work carried out by Igor Sokolov and his team at Clarkson University, who used an atomic force microscope to listen to the faint sounds emanating from inside living insects.
Listen to a ladybird
The researchers used this atomic stethoscope to record the internal sounds of other insects including a fly and a mosquito, which you can listen to here.
The work is published in Applied Physics Letters.
illconsidered | June 2, 2010The 2010 hurricane season has begun, and has done so with a hard blow to Guatemala, including dozens of fatalities (83 so far). Ironically, this storm was not particularily violent, not even getting above tropical storm status, but the rainfall was very intense.
As always, the best place to follow the hurricane season is Jeff Master's Weather Underground.
His introductory pst to this season lists the following reasons to worry about the months ahead:
"unprecedented sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic"
the ending of El Nino conditions
a million refugees from the recent earthquake in…
sciencepunk | May 31, 2010Treehugger reports on the work of marine scientists at Brazil's Guaruja Aquarium, who have added a plastic window onto a shark egg so they can watch the fish develop.
In the photo above you can see the fetal bamboo shark attached to a large yolk sac. The video below gives a better view.
After noting that the unborn shark was unaffected by the window on its neonatal world, researchers removed the entire animal from its purse and allowed it to grow inside a perspex container. The work will help shed more light on how young sharks develop, an understanding of which is crucial to the…
sciencepunk | May 24, 2010It's rare that I blog off topic - there's so much cool science in the world that I don't have much time for anything else. But my departure from Facebook has co-incided with something of a global trend, so I thought I may as well explore what people thought.
In case you've been wrapped in roofing felt for the last few weeks, here's the scoop. After a series of embarrassing security flaws and anger over the company's attitude toward privacy, Facebook users are leaving in droves. Or at least, that's the claim - the reality is that there's no viable alternative yet, although some bright…
sciencepunk | May 17, 2010From the Department of Sensible Things That Are Still Quite Funny comes these life size testicles, made with BIOLIKE⢠synthetic tissue. Now you can fondle your balls in public without fear of prosecution! Yours for just $115.
One happy customer reports:
One of the best purchases that I've ever made! Several of my co-workers have thanked me for bring them in and sharing. I'm so glad to have them, then one model is attached to the rear view mirror on my VW Beetle. All I can say is stop playing around and get this real deal!
The only downside is that there are two synthetic tumours embedded…
illconsidered | May 16, 2010Lord Viscount Monckton of Benchley, it turns out, really is a "swivel-eyed maniac". Or at least it is a fair thing to say.
Some month's ago, George Monbiot wrote a bog post about our good friend Monckton that said Monckton has claimed, among other things:
⢠he has read the treaty that will be signed at Copenhagen next week. That's quite a feat of clairvoyance.
⢠The treaty says that "a world government is going to be created".
⢠Greenpeace is "about to impose a communist world government on the world" and President Obama, who sympathises with that aim, will sign up to it.
Monckton made a…
sciencepunk | May 13, 2010Over at Evolutionary Genealogy, Leonard Eisenberg has been thinking about how we're related to other animals. Not so much in the evolutionary sense, but in the familial sense. After all, if your cousin is simply the offspring of your parent's sibling, why not continue that logic back a few hundred millennia or so?
To make a rough estimate of the cousin and removal relationship between you and any other living thing, all one needs to do is count up the generations back to the common ancestor. This sounds easy in theory but is complicated in practice. First, make an estimate of the number of…
illconsidered | May 13, 2010This is very interesting!
It was only after returning to shore and closely examining the photographs they had taken that the researchers allowed themselves to acknowledge that what they had seen was, in fact, a gray whale.
There was only one problem.
There are no gray whales off Israel.
There are no gray whales in the Mediterranean.
There are, in fact, no gray whales in the Atlantic
The prevailing hypothesis is this whale got lost in the Northwest Passage and confused the east west coast of Europe with the east west coast of North America. (oops)
Added Dr. Aviad Scheinin of IMMRAC:
Due to the…