Doug Messier has an open letter to them.
I have a bad feeling about this. But I don’t think that the fate of the industry rides on either their success, or failure.
Strength Training
The Grey Lady discovers Mark Rippetoe.
It occurs to me that like diet (and climate change), the field of exercise is rife with junk science, because there’s a lot of money to be made on it.
Melanoma
I hadn’t realized that they’ve made great advances in treating it:
This seismic shift in melanoma care — largely brought about by enlisting the immune system in the fight — might eventually be used to treat other cancers, researchers said. Smoking-related lung cancers, among others, are now starting to respond to similar treatments, according to research to be presented at this week’s conference.
“We really are in a historical time right now,” said Dr. F. Stephen Hodi, director of the Melanoma Treatment Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. “Cancer treatment five years ago compared to five years from now — it’s going to be completely different.”
Faster, please.
I found this a little sad, though:
“Someone with metastatic melanoma, I used to tell them to ‘eat whatever you want.’ Now, I’m saying ‘you should watch that cholesterol,’ ’’ said Dr. Patrick Hwu, chairman of the Department of Melanoma Medical Oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
It’s amazing and frightening how ignorant the medical profession is about diet and cholesterol.
A Space Cherry Tree
Of course, as they note, this is interesting, but not really a scientific result, since there is no control. It could be something big, or a fluke.
The Climate Debate
Over at First Things, John Murdock has some thoughts (including a discussion of me, Mark and the Mann suit), but there is also a howler:
Big decisions, whether in the life of a person or a nation often boil down to trust. America has been hemming and hawing for a while now, trying to decide if the 97 percent or so of climate scientists who say we have a big manmade problem are looking out for our best interest or are self-serving quacks.
Sorry, but this number has been debunked multiple times. It is simply false that 97% of scientists say that we have a “big manmade problem.” You can only get to such a ridiculous number by watering down what the “consensus” is about. Most scientists (including me) believe that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Period. Once you get beyond that, to whether or not we are causing a significant change in the climate with emissions, let alone whether or not the results will be catastrophic, and need to be addressed with immediate public policy, the “consensus” falls completely apart. Anyone who believes in that nonsensus needs to go read this.
Ending Our Dependence On Moscow
Defense News has a hit and a miss. First, the hit:
…And after SpaceX unveils the manned version of its previously unmanned Dragon spacecraft this week, NASA should accelerate development of the project
Yes, though unlike me, they don’t actually propose how to do that.
Here’s the miss, and it’s a big one:
and revive the Space Launch System to put super heavy payloads into orbit.
What does “revive” the SLS mean? I thought it was ahead of schedule? That’s what its proponents keep telling me.
And what “super heavy payloads” are there that need to be put into orbit? What does this have to do with dependence on the Russians? This recommendation seems to be a complete non sequitur.
Snowden
Why is Russia harboring him? A disturbing and plausible theory:
Since Snowden took vast quantities of information, and nobody can be quite sure what information he took, Russia has gained a fabulous smokescreen for all of its actual intelligence operations in America. Russian possession of American secrets is no longer actionable evidence of Russian spies in America; the secrets, especially anything touching on surveillance and the NSA, might have come with Snowden. The logic of American counter-intelligence is broken for a generation. It is like issuing a new life to every Russian spy in America, and nine new lives to any spy in the NSA.
What a disaster.
Climate, And Time Scales
The science of climate change on decadal to century timescales most definitely is not settled, in spite of the IPCC’s highly confident proclamations. There are so many interesting and unsolved issues in climate dynamics. At this point, climate science seems relatively irrelevant for energy policies – the goals of carbon mitigation are in place, and whether anything meaningful can be achieved in the near term is doubtful. However, climate scientists are (in the words of Pointman) in a hurry towards some finishing line only they could see, and acted accordingly. I suspect that the IPCC becoming less and less relevant to the UNFCCC agenda.
I’m hoping that at some point soon, climate scientists will get fed up with trying to play politics with their science and get back to researching and debating these fundamentally interesting and unsolved issues in climate science, rather than attacking their colleagues for suggesting that there are other ways of thinking about climate change.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
Isolated In Space
Who is? The Russians, or NASA?
On Memorial Day
Roger Simon says “Blame me for everything.”
I think he’s being a little too hard on himself. As he says, he was young.
The first (and last) year I was eligible for the draft, I had a high number. If I’d gotten a notice, I’d have likely joined the Air Force, though my vision would have prevented me from being a pilot.