April 2007
Masters of Propaganda
Tip of the hat to the barking mad Maoist International Movement who’s use of youtube is brilliant beyond all reason.
Only 45,000,000 served by Mao, mind you. But the videos… god, this guy is good.
Half way to a cure for cancer
60% of developed world cancer is from too little vitamin D?
Let this be true.
Ugh. Gitmo folks who’re cleared and still can’t leave
A case in point is Ahmed Belbacha, 37, an Algerian who worked as a hotel waiter in Britain but has been locked up at Guantanamo for five years. The Pentagon has alleged that Belbacha met al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden twice and received weapons training in Afghanistan. His attorneys dispute the charges and say he was rounded up with other innocents in Pakistan in early 2002.
On Feb. 22, without explanation, the Pentagon notified Belbacha’s lawyers in London that he had been approved to leave Guantanamo. Despite entreaties from the State Department, however, the British government has refused to accept Belbacha and five other immigrants who had lived in the country, because they lack British citizenship.
Bad Science Strikes Again
Reason on gender inequality in pay.
June O’Neill, an economist at Baruch College and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, has uncovered something that debunks the discrimination thesis. Take out the effects of marriage and child-rearing, and the difference between the genders suddenly vanishes. “For men and women who never marry and never have children, there is no earnings gap,” she said in an interview.
If this is true, there’s an entire class of legislation which makes no sense at all any more.
Climate changing on Mars
Mars has warmed about as much as the Earth has over the same period
Mars is being hit by rapid climate change and it is happening so fast that the red planet could lose its southern ice cap, writes Jonathan Leake.
Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.
Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.
The mechanism at work on Mars appears, however, to be different from that on Earth. One of the researchers, Lori Fenton, believes variations in radiation and temperature across the surface of the Red Planet are generating strong winds.
In a paper published in the journal Nature, she suggests that such winds can stir up giant dust storms, trapping heat and raising the planet’s temperature.
Fenton’s team unearthed heat maps of the Martian surface from Nasa’s Viking mission in the 1970s and compared them with maps gathered more than two decades later by Mars Global Surveyor. They found there had been widespread changes, with some areas becoming darker.
When a surface darkens it absorbs more heat, eventually radiating that heat back to warm the thin Martian atmosphere: lighter surfaces have the opposite effect. The temperature differences between the two are thought to be stirring up more winds, and dust, creating a cycle that is warming the planet.
Mass extinctions caused by cosmic rays?
National Geographic piece suggests that everything we know about mass extinctions may be wrong.
Remarkable turn around this would be if it pans out. Everything you think you know is also wrong.
In Search of Effortlessness
Beautiful writing about laziness
When I returned from lunch I saw another friend circling the safe, studying it intently. He had not been a party to the earlier fiasco.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m going to move the safe,” he stated matter-of-factly. “Do you want to help?”
“You’ve got to be kidding. I’ve already seen this movie.” I said with seasoned experience and proceeded to tell him about the seven guys and the tablecloth. I held up my bleeding thumbnail as Exhibit A.
“You and I can move this bugger,” he said, dismissing my expertise with a flick of his hand. So hideous was this safe and its presence so discordant to our dream studio that I forgot the morning’s debacle and accepted his invitation.
San Paolo bans advertising on billboards etc.
Huge story about developing world culture advancing over the developed world here. I prefer “rich” and “poor” as you know…
Biodiversity collapse - the big one
So, think this through with me.
Firstly, let’s assume that evolutionary history consists of nearly infinite numbers of generations.
“Gunfights,” in which inter-species and intra-species competition kills nearly everything alive, followed by massive repopulation, followed by more gunfights, average a lesser quantity of living gene replicas at any given moment in time, although any given gene might do better.
So perhaps, over the very long haul, you’d seen genetic strategies involving trying to stay way from gunfights and head towards maximum quantity of living gene-copies. Breed, and breed, and breed, and give ground rather than stand and fight. And slowly the world would fill up with stuff.
I think that’s what we’re eating in the oceans. An efficient, “maximum living matter” co-evolution of species.
Now, the question: if these systems collapse, then what? Well, the obvious answer is low productivity until co-evolution again restores the “full” ecosystem.
I do not believe that global warming is enough to do this.
Planet’s been warmer, planet’s been cooler, life goes on.
But hauling all of that biomass out of the sea and eating it?
Hm. I wonder, I really do, if stocks-and-flows models of biomass exchange aren’t actually where the rubber meets the road. Any living or just-dead matter is pretty much the same - something will eat it presently if it stops fighting back - but moving gigatons of biomass from one system to another, like cutting down forests and moving the timber, or slash and burn, or fishing…
I don’t know. Just a hunch, an intuition, that it’s much more important than global warming will turn out to be.
Classics of ancient british TV
Sting sings “Every Bomb You Drop.”