Category Archives: Science And Society

Political Commentary, Science And Society

My Brain Hurts

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Living in a city apparently dulls the mind:

…scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

Could this explain why they vote Democrat?

Humor, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society, Weird

Kermit Feels Their Pain

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It’s not easy being green:

The unexpected discovery of a nest of red-cheeked squirrels amidst the huge, partially constructed MegaPyre Solar Power plant has halted construction, casting doubt on the viability of what has been considered to be the environmentalist’s crown jewel of renewable power facilities.

The 20 gigawatt plant was expected to provide electricity to much of southern California, and was only 6 months away from completion when the nest of squirrels, which are on the endangered species list, was found. Due to federal regulations regarding endangered species, moving the nest to another location is not permitted.

The situation has confounded local environmentalists, who are now evenly divided on whether the solar power plant or the nest of squirrels is more important to their cause.

Hear that little sound? That’s the sound of the world’s tiniest violin.

[Yes, I know it’s a joke. The twenty gigawatts, if nothing else, is a dead giveaway.]

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, War Commentary

Man Bites Dog

8 Comments

Here are two stories that are kind remarkable, in terms of their locale. First, the Huffpo, of all places, says that Al Gore is a scam artist:

You are probably wondering whether President-elect Obama owes the world an apology for his actions regarding global warming. The answer is, not yet. There is one person, however, who does. You have probably guessed his name: Al Gore.

Mr. Gore has stated, regarding climate change, that “the science is in.” Well, he is absolutely right about that, except for one tiny thing. It is the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind.

Contemplate it for a moment, even go read it in whole, before considering the second, a protest of thousands of people supporting Israel…in Paris.

Unfortunately, it was still smaller than the pro-terrorist crowds.

General Science, Science And Society, Space

Free Fall

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As Clark notes, here is a very nicely written piece on parabolic flight and weightlessness. Rare is the reporter (even science reporters) who get the physics right on this, because (as he points out) they get confused by the phrase “zero gravity,” which doesn’t really exist anywhere in the universe. Only one quibble:

Each period of ‘weightlessness’ is limited to half a minute or so; otherwise we ‘zeronauts’ would continue freefalling right into the Nevada desert at 600mph. As it is, during half-a-minute’s power- dive we drop nearly 20,000ft – although inside the plane we are completely unaware of this.

This gives the impression that weightlessness only occurs when you “drop” (i.e., descend in altitude). But it actually happens on the way up as well. In both cases, you are “falling” (in the sense that there is no force acting on you other than gravity). First you fall up, then hit the top of the trajectory, then fall down, weightless all the while, and unable to discern your direction of motion. If this seems counterintuitive, it is. But consider an elliptical orbit. As you approach perigee you’re heading down (toward the earth), and once you reach it, you start heading back up (away from the earth) to apogee, but you’re in orbit, and free fall the entire orbit. A parabola in an aircraft is an orbit that, if continued, would intersect the earth’s surface (which is why it is wise to not continue it). And of course, to be more technical yet, it is only parabolic in an approximate sense (assuming flat earth). In reality, it is a tiny section of an ellipse, because the contents of the aircraft are (briefly) in orbit, within the atmosphere.

I should also note that the phrase “power dive” is also misleading. “Power dive” implies that you are diving with engines at full thrust to get down as fast as possible, but in fact, the engines are barely running above idle throughout (until the pullout). Their only function is to overcome wind resistance so that the aircraft can approximate a cannon ball falling in vacuum.

Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Death From The Heavens

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Was there a major meteoritic strike 13,000 years ago in North America?

That wasn’t very long ago (compared to, say, the sixty-five million years ago that the Yucatan was hit). Evidence continues to accumulate that we get hit a lot more than people have previously imagined. We really need to develop the capability to do something about it. We have technology in hand to do so, but apparently lack the will to deploy it. This by itself is reason enough to make the investment to become a real spacefaring civilization, but pork and maintaining existing jobs remain more important.

Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Smarter Now?

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John Tierney wonders if Dr. Holdren learned anything from his misguided bet with Julian Simon:

Dr. Simon’s victory was not (as some Lab readers suggested) a fluke based on exceptionally lucky timing, as you can see from this Wikipedia graph showing the inflation-adjusted prices for the five metals in the bet from 1950 to 2002. (Since 2002, metal prices rose sharply for several years but have since plummeted back to familiar levels.) Prices do sometimes shoot up for natural resources, but people react by finding new sources and substitutes, and prices come back down. If you look back over the past several centuries, as Dr. Simon demonstrated in his book, “The Ultimate Resource,” you’ll see that the trend was downward long before 1950, too.

What lessons Dr. Holdren learn from that bet? The only one I’m aware of is: Don’t test your theories by betting on them. After Dr. Simon collected his winnings in 1990, he offered to make another bet not just on natural resources but also on any measure of human welfare, like life expectancy or food per capita. Once again, Dr. Simon predicted that humans would adapt to new problems (like global warming) and end up better off in the future — by any measure at any future date that Dr. Holdren or Dr. Ehrlich cared to name. They refused his offer. They did, however, go on making more gloomy predictions and calculations about the problems of sustainability, as in this 1995 essay discussing how to avert future shortages of resources.

I find this particular appointment disquieting. As one of my commenters said earlier, I’d much prefer a “science advisor” who sees technology as a solution, rather than a problem. And, again, I have no idea what the implications of this pick are for space policy.