March 2007
Mars - we found the water
Oceans worth of water ice found on mars.
So that pretty much settles it then. We’re going.
Bonus item: caves. Giant caves!
Bleach bombs?
Chlorine gas weapons used in Iraq. Story seems to indicate that these are very low tech although still very nasty. If there were no chemical weapons there when we arrived, they are there now.
UFOS?
New Delhi - with Air Traffic Control video footage etc. That’s rather a lot of documentation for a fake. Doesn’t mean little green men… surveillance drones?
Funny
Tower: “Eastern 702, cleared for takeoff, contact Departure on frequency 124.7″
Eastern 702: “Tower, Eastern 702 switching to Departure. By the way, after we lifted off we saw some kind of dead animal on the far end of the runway.”
Tower: “Continental 635, cleared for takeoff behind Eastern 702, contact Departure on frequency 124.7. Did you copy that report from Eastern 702?”
Continental 635: “Continental 635, cleared for takeoff, roger; and yes, we copied Eastern… we’ve already notified our caterers.”
Ethanol / Direct Injection = 25% more efficient combustion and more power in a smaller engine
MIT team has new engine technology.
Thoughts: nice. Commercializeable? Well, 25% more efficient combustion and more power in a smaller engine is pretty good. However, where do you get the ethanol? Can you run this process on E85 for the ethanol pre-charge and gasoline for the main charge?
The Great Global Warming Swindle
I just watched the extremely controversial Channel 4 British TV program on Global Warming.
It’s interesting to me for two reasons.
Firstly, my own hunch has always been that our understanding of climate is way, way to primitive to be making the kind of political decisions that are being made. Yes, it might be wise to cut CO2 emissions while the jury is out, but instead we have a lot of sound and fury - and no actual emission cuts. And, frankly? Compared to the understanding of climate we’ll have in 100 years it’s fairly clear our current models are laughable. Note that I’m skirting whether I believe in man made global warming or not: yes, the current evidence as reported by the papers says “SURE!” but my gut… we’re just not there yet. Too many little weird anomalies, too much yelling. Something’s not right: we didn’t see this kind of mayhem around, say, AIDS deniers because the HIV-AIDS link was solid and easy to demonstrate. The harsheness of the rhetoric tells me something is wrong.
It may just be that the case isn’t fully baked and, once it is, it’ll settle down. It could also be that there’s a lot more going on with climate than we currently know.
Anyway, all that aside, the second interesting point was realizing that I have no clue what is going on. I’m a pretty reasonable all round general scientist: I can give broadly accurate arm waving descriptions of what’s going on about most phenomena we’ve got good scientific models of (my chemistry, neurology and astrophysics are weak, however.)
But this global warming debate isn’t amenable to that level of understanding: it needs extremely precise and clear understanding of not just individual facts, like what the ice core records say, but also the correlation between facts like how that correlates with temperature records, and exactly how those records are computed. Plus there are additional levels where different branches of science collide: specialists in solar measuring solar output arguing with people studying how plankton create clouds with dimethyl sulfide about which one is responsible for what’s going on. It’s not just hard science, it’s hard, interdisciplinary science with massive political ramifications.
I keep thinking about the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, and two space squid discussing what causes it…
We have a lot of explanations for complex systems, for turbulence, for fluid dynamics and for chaos. But we don’t have much in the way of fundamental understanding of these systems, at the end of the day, and that’s why the climate argument is so damn shaky. You can’t model the atmosphere properly, there are too many factors for one individual to understand all of it, and single facts about things like C02 uptake in water, or subduction of ocean-buried carbon by tectonic activity turn the whole model one way or the other.
We’re in trouble. We need to know, and we don’t, and hundreds of millions of lives might be in the balance.
I hope that this issue raises two new generations of scientists, people who understand how important it is to Know, and are willing to work for it.
Memory erasing in rats
200 year warm period in Europe around the 11th century
Chairman Bruce quoting Kevin Kelly at a Long Term Thinking event
This warming up of agriculture initiated the first vast clear-cutting of European forests. In the short 200 years between 1100 and 1300, from one-third to one-half of European wooded wilderness was deforested to make way for fields and pastures — shaping the lovely farm scenes we now associate with Europe. (Today only Poland has any remaining virgin forests).
Faber says the myth of the medieval warm period is that it was warm. There was all kinds of weather extremes. In 1315 it started to rain for seven years. The newly cleared and naked hills eroded, dams burst, disease spread, and prolonged drought followed.
And not just in Europe. Mesoamerica was jolted by long droughts. The Mayan pyramids at Tikal were engineered to act as water collection reservoirs. The collapse of their empire, and others in South America such as the Inca in Peru, are correlated to prolonged droughts.
Indeed, says Faber, the elephant in the climate room is drought. As recently as the 1800s, prolonged droughts killed 20-30 million people in India during the British Raj period. We have a tendency to believe that modern technology has alleviated our susceptibility to drought, and it has — except for the billions of people on earth today who are living as subsistence farmers.
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Now, remind me again how certain we are that the current warming trend is CO2? I just… I know the urge is to DO SOMETHING but just how sure are we. The poor fit between strong events like the one described here and ambient CO2 levels… you know?
I need to hear a climate change story that really talks about this stuff honestly and in detail. “This is what we know, this is what we don’t know. Yes there were warming events, no we don’t know what caused them, and this is why the current warming trends are different.”
I’d just be more comfy. I grew up in the age of the New Ice Age being the big fear, so I have an inborn skepticism about these kinds of claims. We are basically ignoring most of the rest of the environmental catastrophe - biodiversity loss being top of my list of problems - worrying about something that may, when all is figured out, turn out to be completely outside of our control.
(this is, I’m aware, a contrarian position to take and, if I wasn’t in a massive minority on this, I’d feel duty bound to switch sides and start worrying about carbon dioxide. It’s probably the problem, at the end of the day.)
The Sims… they have their own “language”?
Turns out that The Sims game characters speak in a nonlanguage so that the company didn’t have to do 200 internationalizations of the game. Turns out there is music in these languages, including covers by original artists. At that link you’ll find a link to the Pussycat Dolls singing “Doncha” in Simlish. It’s like… Sigur Ros gone trashy as hell.
Wanted: a tool to identify music.
That’s a legal torrent file to download 726 tracks, one per artist, from South By Southwest. Unfortunately it turns out to be really really hard to get through even a fraction of what’s there because there’s no genre information or other way to filter for taste.
What I’d like is a tool that does one of two things:
1> makes an album-cover like image which represents the sound on the track: something like a frequency spectrum but smarter about “semantic” differences. This could be really crude and still useful: female vocals, pink, male vocals, blue. Loud = bright, quiet = pale, lots of electronics = spiky. You know what I mean here… a quick visual ID of what’s on the album.
2> Something that listens to your music library, or some subset of it, then categorizes new tracks as “like Soundgarden” “like Bjork” “like They Might Be Giants” “like Mahler.”
How hard can it be?