A timeline. A quadrillion years seems like a long time.
Category Archives: Science And Society
Memories
Why they don’t begin until we’re three years old.
Time Travelers
A search of the Internet for them comes up empty.
Remember, though, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: If a time traveler encountered a smart phone.
The Miracles Of Climate Change
Apparently, it turns women into hookers.
Cancer Deaths
A new protein that could prevent 90% of them?
“We’ve found a way to dispatch an army of killer white blood cells that cause apoptosis — the cancer cell’s own death — obliterating them from the bloodstream. When surrounded by these guys, it becomes nearly impossible for the cancer cell to escape,” said King.
Faster, please.
The Latest California Idiocy
Condoms for cooks’ hands:
So this law is in fact encouraging the very problem it strives to prevent. God, I’m glad I’m not governed by California—what a bunch of knuckleheads when it comes to food! Why don’t you people actually try to know what the f**k you’re talking about before legislating? Jesus.
I am continually washing my hands in the kitchen when I cook. This is moronic.
Unprecedented Non-Warming
A new global temperature index:
What we see is that the halt in warming is without precedent in the recent warming period. As such, something *is* amiss with predictions of not only continued, but *accelerated* warming. The something that is amiss appears to be that:
- Sensitivity has been very significantly over estimated and
- Natural climate variability, whatever the cause, has been under estimated.
The former undermines the claim of drastic future warming, the latter undermines the claim that recent warming was uniquely attributable to anthropogenic forcing.
Let’s be absolutely clear: that represents a complete vindication of the skeptical position and a refutation of the alarmed position.
Anyone who disagrees is obviously a denier.
The Weather Channel
Is DirecTV going to drop them?
I’ve never watched it since I left Florida, when they had OK hurricane coverage (though the local channels generally did a good job when the things got near). But at least they did fire “decertifier” Heidi.
The Ultimate Turing Test
Can a machine have an @rgasm?
The Grauniad On The Mann Lawsuit
Mann, who currently directs Penn State University’s Earth System Science Center, is one of the authors of the so-called “hockey stick graph”, which Al Gore used in his film, An Inconvenient Truth, to illustrate the precipitous rise in global temperatures since the dawn of industrialization when humans started spewing the heat-trapping greenhouse gas CO2 into the atmosphere. For the “sin” of helping to create this “exhibit A” in the scientific case for climate change, the conservative semimonthly, the National Review, called Mann “the Jerry Sandusky of climate scientists”. Blogger Rand Simberg wrote on the Review’s online site:
Except that instead of molesting children, [Mann] has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science.
The Penn State researcher didn’t take this insult lying down. He sued the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which also published the offending blog; the case is currently pending.
For the record:
a) I wrote that at CEI’s Open Market blog, not at National Review (and no, I received no money from the Kochs, from Big Fossil Fuel, or even from CEI to do so, thanks for asking). The Jerry Sandusky phrase was later removed by CEI’s editors in response to Mann’s complaint (prior to his filing the lawsuit).
b) Before it was deleted, Mark Steyn quoted it at National Review‘s blog, The Corner.
c) The reference to Sandusky was not so much to compare Mann to Sandusky as to compare the Mann “investigation” by Penn State to the Sandusky “investigation” at Penn State (under the same Penn State administration), and it had nothing to do with the “sin” of creating the hockey stick, per se.
And the comments section over there is a supersaturated solution of ignorant moonbattery.
[Update on January 14th]
Based on what I’ve since learned, the phrase was in fact removed by CEI’s editors before they learned that Mann’s attorney had complained to National Review.