That well-known right winger, Alexander Cockburn, confesses his sins on the climate change religion.
“I Am An Intellectual Blasphemer”
That well-known right winger, Alexander Cockburn, confesses his sins on the climate change religion.
We Need Science In Medicine
One of the prevailing myths of modern life (I use the word here in the sense of something that everyone believes, not necessarily something that is false) is that cholesterol causes heart disease and stroke, and that reducing it will reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke. But the recent Vytorin issue should give us cause to question this conventional wisdom.
Whenever I’ve looked at the research, I’ve never been able to see any clear indication that taking cholesterol-reducing medication actually reduces risk, per se–all that the clinical studies that I’ve seen seem to indicate is that cholesterol reduction is taking place. But correlation is not causation. It could be that both high cholesterol and vascular disease are caused by some third factor that hasn’t been identified, and that in reducing cholesterol, whether by diet or medication, or both, we are treating a symptom rather than a cause.
My point is, that I don’t know the answer. But I don’t have a lot of confidence that the medical community does, either. And I remain wary of taking medications with unknown side effects and potential for interaction with other things I ingest, when the benefit is unclear. And I write this as someone who lost both parents to heart disease (my father’s first heart attack occurred when he was about forty five, and he died from a second one about a decade later). But they also had much different lifestyles than I did–they grew up with poor diets during the depression, they both smoked like chimneys, and they were both overweight. So I don’t necessarily believe that genetics is destiny, at least in this case.
Another Seventies Teevee Classic
I don’t know where Iowahawk finds these things. I barely remember Makaniak myself.
Half A Century Of American Spaceflight
I’ll have a piece up on this myself later in the week (the anniversary is actually Thursday), but John Noble Wilford has some thoughts on the past fifty years since Explorer I.
A Florida Voting Report
From Patricia:
I voted in the middle of the day, when lines were short at my polling location, in the assembly room of a neighborhood Catholic church. At the beginning of the sidewalk to the polling place, I was met by a woman who asked me if I wanted to participate in an exit poll. Being the suspicious person that I am, I declined, noting that she was sitting close to people with Obama and Clinton campaign signs. Not accepting my decline, she asked again, telling me in a serious tone that my participation would allow them to assure that the voting machines were working correctly. I laughed, and declined again and continued walking toward the polling place passing by the exit-poll table set up in the shade of the building, manned by three or four nicely dressed men. I was met just outside the door to the polling place by an official in a vest who asked to see my voter registration card, which I showed him. After looking at the card, he directed me to the table right inside the door.
Once inside, I could see that other tables were set up for other precincts voting at this location. I went to my precinct table right inside the door as directed and found about five people in the line in front of me. The table was set up with signs designating alphabetical groupings and women in chairs on the other side of the table to look up voter names in printouts of registered voters matching the alphabetical groupings. Apparently, all the people in front of me had last names in the same alphabetical grouping as mine. There were no people in front of the other alphabetical groupings. And they were all problem voters. None of them had voter registration cards, or knew what precinct they were from, but nevertheless ended up at my precinct table. One by one their names were looked up in the one copy of S-Z and not found. After a few irrelevant questions from the women behind the tables: Are you married? Did your husband vote here? Did you move? Are you sure you are registered? These generally provoked irritated responses from them. After wasting time thusly, they were then sent to another table where a man with a computer would help them.
I finally got to the front of the line, but since the S-Z printout was in use, I had to wait a bit longer for my name to be found in it. Finally, my name was found in the S-Z printout. I signed on the appropriate line in the printout and, after the woman behind the desk scrutinized my sloppy signature for a match with my registration card, she gave me my ballot and sent me to the voting booths. Immediately available for my use were at least ten booths. Since the process of signing in created such a delay, getting a ballot and the amount of time to vote was short, due to only a couple of items on the ballot, and no lines had formed to use them. The bottleneck was clearly the sign-in process, not the number of machines.
Voting took me only a few seconds on the new touch-screen voting machine. I returned my ballot and received my “I Voted” stamp. Pleased with myself for exercising my voting rights in this wonderful democracy, wadding up my stamp, I walked past the exit-poll table where several poor schmucks who had agreed to take the exit poll were filling out paperwork, surrounded by three or four men ready to answer questions, or ask them, I really don’t know.
Ah, democracy, how confusing for those who don’t know what precinct they live in, or bother to change their address on their voter registration, or read their mail when they get their card, or believe campaign workers who assure them that voting machines are working correctly.
Remember, this is from the heart of “hanging chad country.”
The Ground Shifts In Redmond
Photoshop is running in Linux. If they can work out the last incompatibility bugs in Open Office, we’ll start to reach a tipping point, given the unhappiness with Vista.
[Tuesday evening update]
More bad news for Microsoft. Firefox has reached 30% market penetration in Europe.
This Is Just…Wrong
Radar Breakthrough
This looks like a pretty slick technology:
Lockheed for the first time has been testing a digital beam array to locate and track live targets–in this case, commercial and military aircraft coming in and out of the Philadelphia area. “The hard part was how we combined all the data … to form the individual beams,” Scott Smith, program manager for the radar system at Lockheed, tells PM. Commercially available high-speed digital electronics and advanced signal processors have become advanced enough to allow this data processing to occur, and that in turn has enabled digital beamforming to become practical for use outside a lab.
It will be helpful for ATC, but it has obvious military applications:
Digital beamforming radars will likely find their first homes on ships that track missile threats to U.S. fleets. Those threats will come from ballistic launches hundreds of miles away or from high-speed missiles launched from submarines or warplanes. The Russian government has been busy selling sea-skimming, antiship missiles to China that are designed to overwhelm the U.S. fleet’s radars, so the ability to track multiple, fast-moving threats could become vital in the Taiwan Straits. But a digitized phased array radar can handle many incoming signals at once, and should be able to discern real threats from bits of metal or shaped decoy balloons.So somewhere a Chinese admiral is frowning at Lockheed’s news, and a Taiwanese general is smirking.
Expect the usual suspects, any minute, to claim that it is “destabilizing” (a phrase they use any time the US comes up with a better way to defend itself).
Space And Nanotechnology
Thoughts on space tourism, “shooting down” errant satellites, and gray goo, in a podcast with Instapundit.