Good (and entertaining) advice on what to do if you’ve been threatened with one.
The Overview Effect
This is only a surprise to people who haven’t read Frank White’s book
But I’m always amused by people who think that there will be no demand, or insufficient demand, for space experiences.
Our (Near) Future Lifespan
I think it’s a mistake to call the fourth one “immortality.” A better phrase is “indefinite lifespan.” Unless our understanding of the universe is wrong, we’ll all die eventually, when it gets cold. And medical breakthroughs won’t save us from having an ACME anvil dropped on us.
Absent backups, that is. Which is philosophically unsatisfying, from the standpoint of identity.
But we need to start thinking about policy in terms of scenarios three and four, and ObamaCare is a disaster on that front (as is social security, lifetime tenure for academics and judges and popes, etc.). Plus, if people are going to continue to be born, and not die, we will eventually need other places to live than this planet.
The IPCC’s Quandary
On the eve of the official release of the latest report, Steve McIntyre has some thoughts.
This is indeed disturbing:
German ministries insist that it is important not to detract from the effectiveness of climate change warnings by discussing the past 15 years’ lack of global warming. Doing so, they say, would result in a loss of the support necessary for pursuing rigorous climate policies.
Yes, we can’t let empirical reality get in the way of our policy agenda.
[Update a while later]
Desperate times in climate alarmism:
Confronted with all this truly disastrous news on the eve of their upcoming global warming summit, IPCC politicians, bureaucrats and eco-activists are trying to figure out how to cover up the bad news. Germany wants all references to the absence of warming deleted from the IPCC report. Whereas 20 years of mild warming were enough to demand immediate drastic action to avoid a climate cataclysm, now the Germans say 17 years of no warming is “too short” and thus “misleading.”
Hungary doesn’t want the IPCC to give “deniers” more ammunition. Belgium wants the “world’s most authoritative climate body” to manipulate the data and graphs, by using a different starting year that cleverly creates a more noticeable upward temperature trend. The Obama Administration wants the IPCC to explain away the absence of warming, by saying the mysteriously missing atmospheric heat was somehow absorbed by the upper 1.2 miles of oceans waters, which have not actually warmed, according to ARGO project data, or perhaps somehow in the really deep ocean, where we have no data.
In other words, if the models and evidence disagree, the evidence must be wrong. The IPCC is infallible.
Need I remind? This is not science.
Joss Whedon
The definitive interview.
Ocean Heat
The relentless increase:
Lubos Motl has done the arithmetic in this post Ocean heat content: relentless but negligible. This is a good post, check it out. The punchline of his calculations: the heating in the layer 0-2000 m translates to 0.065 C +/- 20%. His calculations are essentially confirmed from this ARGO page where they confirm that since the 1960s, the warming of that layer was 0.06 °C.
So, can anyone figure out why 0.06C is a big deal for the climate? Or how all that heat that is apparently well mixed in the ocean could somehow get into the atmosphere and influence weather/temperatures/rainfall on the land? Or is sequestering heat in the ocean a fortuitous ‘solution’ to the global (surface) warming problem?
It’s “relentless” in the same (and harmless) sense that a glacial advance is.
Meet The New Generation Of Robots
They’re almost human.
I think it’s going to be more important that they act human than that they look it, until they figure out a way to bridge the uncanny valley.
The “California Comeback”?
What “California comeback”?
The IPCC
Some interesting questions.
I don’t think they’ll deign to answer any of them.
ObamaCare’s Weakest Link
It’s the IT, stupid.
As noted over there, this whole mess started with Roosevelt’s wage controls during the war. But did they fix that? No, they triple down on the socialist stupidity.