RIP. I hadn’t realized that he’d retired so long ago.
[Update a few minutes later]
Some personal memories from John Derbyshire.
Category Archives: Science And Society
Going Paleo
Here’s an article on a retro diet.
My problem with this isn’t the diet per se (though I do like me them carbs) as the need for exercise. I read somewhere recently that there were huge health benefits to walking five miles a day. I can believe it, but who has the time? The only way I can imagine doing that is if I raised my desk and worked from a treadmill instead of a chair.
The thing that I find most irritating about the criticism (as well as in the health-care debate) is the declaration of life expectancy as a useful parameter. I don’t know what the life expectancy of paleolithic people was, but I’ll bet that diet was not a big factor in determining it. It’s important to understand that average life expectancy isn’t the age at which most people die. If it really was thirty, it was likely due to a) high infant mortality and b) a very violent lifestyle, in which the men were likely to be killed either hunting or fighting other humans, at a fairly young age. I suspect that if you manage to become an “elder” (i.e., someone in your thirties) you’d live a long time.
From Verde To Merde
A report on the Spanish green energy debacle:
As predicted was inevitable, today the Spanish newspaper La Gaceta runs with a full-page article fessing up to the truth about Spain’s “green jobs” boondoggle, which happens to be the one naively cited by President Obama no less than eight times as his model for the United States. It is now out there as a bust, a costly disaster that has come undone in Spain to the point that even the Socialists admit it, with the media now in full pursuit.
Breaking the Spanish government’s admission here at Pajamas Media probably didn’t hurt their interest in finally reporting on the leaked admission. Obama’s obvious hope of rushing into place his “fundamental transformation” of America into something more like Europe’s social democracies — where even the most basic freedoms have been moved from individuals and families to the state — before the house of cards collapsed has suffered what we can only hope proves to be its fatal blow. At least on this front.
La Gaceta boldly exposes the failure of the Spanish renewable policy and how Obama has been following it. The headline screams: “Spain admits that the green economy as sold to Obama is a disaster.”
It has lots of company with other administration policies in that regard.
Hansen’s Promotion
Some clueless Canadian reporters think that James Hansen is the head of NASA. Probably wishful thinking on their part, but I find it a frightening thought.
Fact Checking The EPA
I was doing a little research on the mess, and wanted to get some data on the Gulf. According to the EPA, it has a volume of 642 trillion gallons. This seems off by three orders of magnitude to me (that is, I think that its 642 quadrillion gallons — 1015th, not 1012th — which is what a trillion would be).
My calculation is based on the stated area of 600,000 square miles (which seems reasonable to me), and average depth of 1600 meters (why do they have to mix their units?), which is about 5100 feet. Multiply the square miles by 5280 squared, and you get about 17 trillion square feet. So the volume has to be three orders of magnitude more than that, and it’s another order of magnitude (7.5 gallons per square foot) when you convert to gallons.
Am I off, or are they?
Yeah, I want these people to be in charge of regulating carbon emissions (including, no doubt, my exhalations).
[Update late afternoon]
Why do I care, you ask? Because people are saying that with the new estimate of the leak rate, this is the equivalent of “n” Exxon Valdezes per week, where n varies with the commentator. But the Gulf isn’t Prince William Sound. Based on the number of 11,000 square miles affected in Alaska, and an average depth of a thousand feet (generous, I think — the deepest point in sound is 2000, and most of it is a lot less, even when you get out around the Kenai Peninsula), I get a ratio of volumes of on the order of 300, so we’d need a lot of Exxon Valdezes to make it comparable to that disaster. I don’t know whether the warmer temps of the Gulf make things better, or worse, though.
The Global Green Meltdown
…gains momentum. Some thoughts on our justified loss of faith in technocrats, from Walter Russell Mead. One point I would add is that much of the green movement was and is driven by the watermelon socialists, who leaped on to it with the collapse of the Soviet Union and (temporary, unfortunately) corresponding collapse in the credibility of socialism. I’d like to think that the current mess, including the collapse of Eurosocialism, will be the final stake through its heart, but I’m afraid that we’ll have to wage this ideological battle over and over, because every generation or two, we forget what a disaster it is everywhere it’s tried, and the basic tenets are a siren’s song to human nature.
The Democrat War Against Science
Leaving aside the issue of whether the federal government should be involved in our diets and weight, the BMI is junk science.
Squaring The Decline Curve
Is real longevity treatment just around the corner?
People blessed with anti-ageing genes tend not to get seriously ill but die suddenly at the end of their lives, Prof Barzilai pointed out.
‘I’m seeing 100-year-olds who are not only 100 years old but in great shape,’ he said.
‘They’re driving and painting, and they say life is beautiful.
‘I have this bias that makes me believe we have the ability as a species to get to 100 if we prevent some of these age-related diseases.
‘The cost of treating 100-year-olds in their last two years of life is a third of what it costs to treat somebody aged 70 to 80. At the end of their life they die, basically, all of a sudden.
‘People who die between 70 and 80 are sick in the last few years of their life. Centenarians are dying healthy.’
Studies had revealed a strong association between reaching 100 years of age and very high blood levels of HDL, which appear to run in families, said Prof Barzilai.
Not only were HDL levels important, but also the size of the cholesterol particles. Centenarians with this HDL profile were powerfully protected against Alzheimer’s, one of the greatest causes of disability and death in old age. A similar effect was being sought by the drug companies targeting CETP.
Prof Barzilai described his “vision” as a once-daily pill which staved off the effects of old age and would probably be taken when a person reached their 40s or 50s.
Works for me. I hope, anyway.
Fountain Of Youth?
This is interesting. A seventeen-year-old girl who has the biological age of one year old. The question is, how does development relate to aging? What will happen to her in another forty or fifty years? It would be nice to not have to wait that long to discover the secret. And of course, it’s tough luck that she didn’t get stuck in a seventeen-year-old’s body.
Refined Carbohydrates
…worse for you than saturated fats?
I’ve thought this for years. The fataphobes, particularly the ones at the FDA, have a lot of illness and death to account for. The food pyramid is one of the big causes of the obesity epidemic, and it’s still awful, even with recent improvements. Of courses, we have a problem in that a healthy diet is an expensive one.