Rasmussen says that almost 70% of adults think that scientists have been falsifying data in climate change research. A bit of good news amidst the coming economic apocalypse.
Category Archives: Science And Society
Don’t Try This At Home, Kids
And now for something completely different — a man who is splitting atoms on his kitchen table. Bill Joy, call your office.
The Man Who Fights Death
I have more thoughts on Bob Ettinger’s deanimation over at Pajamas Media.
Who Are You Going To Believe?
The climate models, or the lying empirical evidence?
The new NASA Terra satellite data are consistent with long-term NOAA and NASA data indicating atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds are not increasing in the manner predicted by alarmist computer models. The Terra satellite data also support data collected by NASA’s ERBS satellite showing far more longwave radiation (and thus, heat) escaped into space between 1985 and 1999 than alarmist computer models had predicted. Together, the NASA ERBS and Terra satellite data show that for 25 years and counting, carbon dioxide emissions have directly and indirectly trapped far less heat than alarmist computer models have predicted.
But let’s not let a little pesky science get in the way of social justice.
[Update a while later]
Gee, whaddaya know? A “climate researcher” who implied that our SUVs were drowning polar bears is being investigated for “integrity issues.”
It’s just the ninety percent of them who make the rest look bad.
[Update late afternoon]
Weep not for the polar bears: James Delingpole piles on.
The Shuttle Is Retired
…and the planet is saved. I’ll leave it to commenters to find all the errors. My favorite is making a fuel stop at Uranus.
The Father Of Transhumanism
…has deanimated:
In 1947 Ettinger wrote a short story elucidating the concept of human cryopreservation as a pathway to more sophisticated future medical technology: in effect, a form of “one-way medical time travel.” The story, “The Penultimate Trump”, was published in the March, 1948 issue of Startling Stories and definitively establishes Ettinger’s priority as the first person to have promulgated the cryonics paradigm: principally, that contemporary medico-legal definitions of death are relative, not absolute, and are critically dependent upon the sophistication of available medical technology. Thus, a person apparently dead of a heart attack in a tribal village in the Amazon Rainforest will soon become unequivocally so, whereas the same person, with the same condition, in the emergency department of large, industrialized city’s hospital, might well be resuscitated and continue a long and healthy life. Ettinger’s genius lay in realizing that criteria for death will vary not just from place-to-place, but from time-to-time. Today’s corpse may well be tomorrow’s patient.
Ettinger waited for prominent scientists or physicians to come to the same conclusion he had, and to take a position of public advocacy. By 1960, Ettinger realized that no one else seemed to have grasped an idea which, to him, had seemed obvious. Ettinger was 42 years old and undoubtedly increasingly aware of his own mortality. In what may be characterized as one of the most important midlife crisis in history, Ettinger reflected on his life and achievements, and decided it was time to take action. He summarized the idea of cryonics in a few pages, with the emphasis on life insurance as a mechanism of affordable funding for the procedure, and sent this to approximately 200 people whom he selected from Who’s Who In America. The response was meager, and it was clear that a much longer exposition was needed. Ettinger observed that people, even the intellectually, financially and socially distinguished, would have to be educated that dying is (usually) a gradual and reversible process, and that freezing damage is so limited (even though lethal by present criteria) that its reversibility demands relatively little in future progress. Ettinger soon made an even more problematic discovery, principally that, “…a great many people have to be coaxed into admitting that life is better than death, healthy is better than sick, smart is better than stupid, and immortality might be worth the trouble!”
I’ve never understood the resistance, either.
Rest in peace, but not in perpetuity.
[Update early afternoon]
Adam Keiper has a link roundup over at The New Atlantis, with a promise of more to come.
[Another update a few minutes later]
This is the first time I became aware that Mike Darwin (long-time cryonics pioneer) has a blog. I’ll have to add it to the blogroll.
Time To End The War On Salt
Are you reading this, Nurse Bloomberg?
This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.
I absolutely agree that the government should not be telling anyone how much salt to eat, or how much to put in customers’ food, though I appreciate content labels.
As readers know, I’ve been engaged in my own personal war on salt for the past few months, and I have in fact reduced my blood pressure from ridiculously high to merely high levels in so doing. I did it primarily with the intent of BP reduction, though obviously I hoped that it would also decrease my heart attack risk. There are other reasons to reduce blood pressure than to mitigate coronary issues — it’s hard on other organs (such as liver and kidney function). I don’t have any other symptoms of problems caused by high blood pressure, but I’d like to prevent them from occurring. I do seem to have hit a plateau, though, in terms of how low salt reduction is going to get it, and while I’ll be doing other things, I may also not focus as much on the salt as I have been (because it really is a pain in the ass to have to prepare all your own food from scratch, and avoid all cheeses but fresh mozarella, and other things). The results that lower salt intake actually correlations with higher heart attack risk is disconcerting (this, as with cholesterol, makes me wonder if I treating a symptom rather than of a cause?) But I won’t go back to a diet of jerky, either. There is no doubt that I am salt sensitive, and as the article notes (and as is true in many things) every person is different.
Which is why the government shouldn’t be involved, other than perhaps to provide advice (something at which they’ve been notoriously awful for the past decades when it comes to nutrition, partly due to lobbying by the agriculture-industrial complex).
[Update a couple minutes later]
I’m definitely not going to cut back on the garlic and onions. And speaking of treating symptoms:
News reports of this negative trial failed to recognize that the cholesterol-lowering effects of garlic are not the same for all people and that any trial containing a large percentage of healthy men could miss an effect that might be found if the people studied were patients with diabetes or heart disease.
In addition, while there is so much focus on the connection between cholesterol and heart disease, the benefits of garlic in preventing heart disease are probably due to factors other than changes in cholesterol.
In particular, clinical experiments have shown that regular consumption of garlic decreased calcium deposits and the size of arterial plaque in coronary arteries, prevented unhealthy blood clotting and improved the circulation of the subjects who were studied.
I think people worry way too much about cholesterol, and that for many people, taking statins to reduce it might be engaging in a cure worse than the disease.
The Thermodynamic Theory Of Weight Loss
“This study shows that conventional wisdom — to eat everything in moderation, eat fewer calories and avoid fatty foods — isn’t the best approach,” Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author of the study, said in an interview. “What you eat makes quite a difference. Just counting calories won’t matter much unless you look at the kinds of calories you’re eating.”
Dr. Frank B. Hu, a nutrition expert at the Harvard School of Public Health and a co-author of the new analysis, said: “In the past, too much emphasis has been put on single factors in the diet. But looking for a magic bullet hasn’t solved the problem of obesity.”
Also untrue, Dr. Mozaffarian said, is the food industry’s claim that there’s no such thing as a bad food.
“There are good foods and bad foods, and the advice should be to eat the good foods more and the bad foods less,” he said. “The notion that it’s O.K. to eat everything in moderation is just an excuse to eat whatever you want.”
I didn’t intend to, and I certainly never counted a single calorie, but I’ve lost about fifteen pounds over the last few months by almost completely cutting out grains and root vegetables (going mainly paleolithic), in the interest of trying to reduce my blood pressure.
Modern nutritionists (and the FDA) have primitive, unscientific beliefs (like the idiotic war on fat and saturated fat “You are what you eat”). They’re like the doctors that still prescribe leeches for ailments. And unfortunately, too many in the medical profession think they know what they’re talking about.
Completely Useless
…signs.
[Update a few minutes later]
Someone had too much time on their hands: the physics of Superman.
I Hate When That Happens
The earth has swallowed a river in Costa Rica.
I’ll leave the potential metaphors to commenters.