Category Archives: Science And Society
The “Science”
So we have an expert on birds guessing that white blobs on a photo are drowned polar bears.
That’s it.
That’s the science.
He called it a parsimonious explanation. I call it Rorschach.
I call it the deliberate raising of hysteria by lies, in the service of a leftist agenda. And the foremost liar, or deluded fool, is Al Gore.
[Update a few minutes later]
Another food fight breaks out in the climate “science” community.
[Update a while later]
Lying, cheating climate “scientists” caught lying and cheating again.
Oh, Wow
Steve Jobs last words, according to his sister.
What I found interesting was this:
A middle-class boy from Los Altos, he fell in love with a middle-class girl from New Jersey. It was important to both of them to raise Lisa, Reed, Erin and Eve as grounded, normal children. Their house didn’t intimidate with art or polish; in fact, for many of the first years I knew Steve and Lo together, dinner was served on the grass, and sometimes consisted of just one vegetable. Lots of that one vegetable. But one. Broccoli. In season. Simply prepared. With the just the right, recently snipped, herb.
That is not a healthy diet. Broccoli is good for you but not just broccoli. He probably could have lived a lot longer if he’d understood nutrition better.
Wine Tasting
Why we can’t tell good wine from bad:
In 2001, Frederic Brochet conducted two experiments at the University of Bordeaux.
In one experiment, he got 54 oenology (the study of wine tasting and wine making) undergraduates together and had them taste one glass of red wine and one glass of white wine. He had them describe each wine in as much detail as their expertise would allow. What he didn’t tell them was both were the same wine. He just dyed the white one red. In the other experiment, he asked the experts to rate two different bottles of red wine. One was very expensive, the other was cheap. Again, he tricked them. This time he had put the cheap wine in both bottles. So what were the results?
The tasters in the first experiment, the one with the dyed wine, described the sorts of berries and grapes and tannins they could detect in the red wine just as if it really was red. Every single one, all 54, could not tell it was white. In the second experiment, the one with the switched labels, the subjects went on and on about the cheap wine in the expensive bottle. They called it complex and rounded. They called the same wine in the cheap bottle weak and flat.
I’ve always suspected this. And it reminds me of this post from a couple years ago.
It’s A Bird, It’s A Plane
Well, actually it’s a vegetable. Super broccoli.
The IPCC
…exposed. I’m just shocked, shocked that the reports were written by Greenpeace, WWF and other watermelon activists. Not.
The Ideal B00B
Nice work, if you can get it:
Though it would be easy for cynics to assume otherwise, this was a serious study based on a series of scientific measurements and not on the opinions of Mallucci.
‘We used computer measuring tools to examine the dimensions and proportions of each pair of breasts, identifying four features common to all of them,’ he explains.
The features analysed were the dimensions of the upper and lower pole, medical terms that describe the areas above and below the nipple; plus the angle at which the nipple points and the slope of the upper pole.
‘The study revealed that in all cases the nipple ‘‘meridian’’ – the horizontal line drawn at the level of the nipple – lay at a point where, on average, the proportion of the breast above it represented 45 per cent of overall volume of the breast and below it 55 per cent.
‘In the majority of cases the upper pole was either straight or concave, and the nipple was pointing skywards at an average angle of 20 degrees. In all cases the breasts demonstrated a tight convex lower pole – a neat but voluminous curve.
The science is settled.
Accountability
I would love to see the House impeach Steven Chu. It would be interesting to see what the Senate would do, given how many vulnerable Democrats are up for reelection next year.
A Hypernova?
Eta Carinae could kill us all next year. I hate when that happens:
Mario Livio, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland warns that Eta Carinae could be “seen to explode at any time.” [BBC News]
Esteemed NASA scientist Stefan Immler at the Goddard Space Flight Center thinks Eta Carinae could very well explode in our lifetime, or even in the next few years.
Well, maybe Earth has a little more time, right? Well, maybe not.
Some astrophysicists at the European Space Agency have suggested it’s quite possible, based on observational analysis, that the killer star has already gone hypernova thousands of years ago and the speeding death rays could inundate Earth in as little as a year.
How exciting. Of course, that something is “possible” is not to say that it is likely. The problem with this kind of event is that getting off the planet is no protection, per se, though if we were spacefaring, we could at least have shelters ready, and put out pickets in the outer solar system to give us some warning, since there’s some evidence that gamma rays are subluminal.
Are Most Women Bisexual?
I think another factor is that while men tend to compete on power and money, rather than looks, women primarily compete on appearance, so they have to be more naturally attuned to what makes women attractive. But I think that a lot of men are bis3xual, too. Anyone who really believes that sexuality is a “choice” has to be, logically, and it would explain the behavior of a lot of sailors and prisoners. But the only way I’d do it with a guy would be if I were raped.