That Tabs Be Cleared!

1. You Need a Leap of Faith

The Manhattan Contrarian casts a gimlet eye on the New York Times and their reporting on renewable energy using non-renewable wallets. The Times huzzahs the lower costs of renewables generation equipment, but the MC reminds us that installing additional capacity more cheaply actually means more expensive electricity. [see graph, below] Because the wind does not always blow and half the day is night, the best renewables capacity is only 40% available. This instability in renewables generation requires a traditional power back-up capacity at least as great. Speaking of the German Energiewende, he writes:

The total [capacity] for all "renewables" [in Germany] is 83.8 GW -- a figure higher than the peak demand of 83.3 GW.  [This sounds good, b]ut, then there's also the fossil fuel and "conventional" capacity of 108.4 GW.  That's essentially the same amount you would have if you had no wind or solar capacity at all.¹  To put it another way, despite having built what would seem to be enough wind and solar capacity to supply all the electricity needs of the country, they have not been able to get rid of any of their fossil fuel generation capacity.  They need all of it as back-up for when the wind and solar go dead. 

Electricity costs vs. Installed renewables capacity (by country)

Notes:
1. capacity needed. If peak demand is P, then installed capacity should be ≈1.2P to allow for maintenance downtime, emergencies, and the like. That would be somewhere around 100 GW, and Germany has 108.4 GW of conventional generating power.

2. Not an Instruction Manual

Thomas Aquinas "On Evil"

3. Slip-Sliding Away

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10524

"The Greenland ice sheet (GIS) is losing mass at an increasing rate due to surface melt and flow acceleration in outlet glaciers," say the scientists. As the glaciers recede, they reveal early medieval settlements and the stumps of substantial forests; so in one sense, the climate is returning to normal. However, if you have ever tried to brew your tea [or coffee] by blowing on the water with a hair drier, you might wonder if increased air temperature can really account for this. Perhaps the glaciers are being heated from below? Now we learn that, Lo!, just as Iceland has underground volcanic hot springs, so too does Greenland, and these happen to underlie the recessional glaciers. This nicely explains why the melting glaciers are concentrated in specific regions. 

4. Scotty, Lock on with the Tractor Beam!

And you thought is was sci-fi? Apparently not. When Bridget ban serves he guest, Ravn Olafsdottr, from a "gravity cart" that floats above the floor, she is no so far ahead of the curve as we might think.

5. For Some Values of "Identical"

Another odd datum on the notion of "race." A pair of identical twins -- that is, genetically identical, from the same egg -- were born in the UK to a mixed-race couple. One twin had white skin while the other twin had black skin.

They are not the first case of twins born with different skins, though the first that are genetically identical. Makes one wonder though how genetically meaningful racial identification is in an objective sense.

Twins, but not monozygotic.

6. Iracatanam Antapakirantamthe

TOF's Faithful Reader may recollect passages from On the Razor's Edge describing how the Capital of All the Worlds was reassembling and repairing itself.

Inner Child was constantly alert to alterations in his environment and the Brute was keen to all his senses, and between the two of them they brought the scarred man to a halt by the block upon which they had earlier sat.

The Brute remembered that the crack had made the block uncomfortable to sit on.  Donovan went to his knees and the Sleuth studied the stone closely.  He ran their fingers across it.
I can feel where it was.  Like a scar.  
“It’s been spackled,” said the Fudir.

He turned suddenly and looked down the empty avenue behind him.  The freshening evening wind stirred the grasses.
“Who?” scoffed Donovan.  “A stealthy stonemason who creeps through the ruins patching up the cracks?”
The wind drove pebbles and grit before it, stinging Donovan’s cheek.  They rolled across the surface of the foundation block like a miniature barchan.  A grain found the slight groove where the crack had been and nestled within it.
There’s your answer.  Windblown grit has simply filled in the crack.  He reached out to dislodge the grain – to free it, as he thought – and found that it was fused with the stone.  When he put pressure on it, he experienced a sudden wave of foreboding, as if the entire city would tumble itself upon him and bury him.
He pulled his hand away, stood, withdrew a pace from the wall.
Certain materials of the Commonwealth, called metamaterials, were said to be self-repairing.  Like the self-sealing hulls and pressure suits we have.
“But,” said Donovan, “self-repairing stone?”
It is not true stone, said the Pedant, but some sort of Commonwealth material.  
Donovan looked out over the ruins.  The Capital of All the Worlds has been rebuilding itself all these centuries, the Sleuth decided.  Listen to that sound, that unending rustle.
The young man in the chlamys thought it sounded like the rustle of leaves on the ground of autumn, and thought how lonely the stones must have been over the ages.  

And now we have concrete infused with fungi! A new self-healing fungi concrete, co-developed by researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York, could help repair cracks in aging concrete permanently, and help save America's crumbling infrastructure.

7. Two Brothers

Using 'next generation' DNA sequencing scientists have found that the famous 'Two Brothers' mummies of the Manchester Museum have different fathers so are, in fact, half-brothers. The Two Brothers are the Museum's oldest mummies and amongst the best-known human remains in its Egyptology collection. They are the mummies of two elite men -- Khnum-nakht and Nakht-ankh -- dating to around 1800 BC.

8. Colorful Dinosaurs

The feathers of this particular dinosaur were so well-preserved that scientists could determine their color from their molecular structure!

9. The Cambrian Explosion was a Tumor?

The sudden appearance and rapid proliferation of animal life known as the Cambrian Explosion, which has been conventionally ascribed to the increase in atmospheric oxygen caused by plants eating the CO2 with which the early atmosphere was composed (similar to present-day Mars and Venus). But the timing is off: high oxygen content is actually detrimental to stem cells and hence cell replacement.

But by studying the ability of tumor cells to imitate the properties of stem cells, a team at Lund Univ. in Sweden, has observed how tumor cells can high-jack specific mechanisms that evade the negative effects that high oxygen has on stem cells. As a consequence, the tumor cells are able to maintain stem cell properties, despite being surrounded by the high oxygen concentrations that are present in the body.

The result was a cancer-like explosive growth in multi-celled animals.

The Report from the Imperial Tailor

A morning newsitainment show with pretensions recently "interviewed" the Secretary of Energy over the President's decision to "withdraw" from the Paris Deal. Now, technically the US cannot withdraw because the agreement was never ratified with the advice and consent of the Senate, a requirement of that "scrap of paper" called the Constitution. (This document was once referred to as an "obstacle" to doing what was right by a constitutional law professor named Obama, who later won his way to higher office.) That's why it was called a "Deal" and not a "Treaty." The Constitution does not mention how Deals are to be handled, only how Treaties are to be handled. So, believing in Name-Magic, the handlers deemed that by calling it something else, it would become something else and the US could be committed to it by Executive Order alone. The other term for this sort of ruler is dictator, i.e., "he who dictates."

Now the pearl-clutching that commenced after the announcement of withdrawal was a wonder to behold. The NY Post ran the headline: Trump to World: Drop Dead, as if that would really, truly be the result of withdrawing from the agreement. But maybe not. Even if every jot and tittle of the agreement is carried out, even those things agreed to by China and Russia, the result might be a saving of 0.05°C by the year 2100. And that assumes that the models are correct. They haven't been yet; but who knows?

Anyway, on the TV show, the Sec Energy pointed out that the accord gives China, the world's biggest emitter of carbon (assuming CO2 to be a "pollutant") has promised to do exactly nothing while the US has pledged to reduce "greenhouse gas" emissions by 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025 -- only 8 years away.  China, whose emissions are already about double those of the US, agrees to no reductions whatsoever, and only to try to reach "peak" emissions by 2030. At this point, the interviewer interrupted to point out that China had pledged to reduce emissions by 60% after 2030. He said this with a straight face, too, as if he believed a) China would follow through on that pledge; b) his network would remember by then to hold them to it; or c) it would be technologically feasible to accomplish. Well, TV personalities are seldom taught to think quantitatively.

Thanks to fracking, the US has already reduced CO2 by 7% below the 2005 baseline, but this success (which actually exceeds the more preening Europeans) frightened the activists so much that they started an anti-fracking campaign. The EPA's Clean Power Plan was to shutter cheap coal power plants and cover the landscape with wind and solar farms.  A version of the strategy that has led Germany to residential electricity prices about triple the U.S. average. This sort of thing can result in the collapse of industries dependent on cheap power: Paper down 12 percent.  Cement down 23 percent.  Iron and steel down 38 per cent.  Coal down 86 percent.

No wonder they wanted China and India to be exempt.

Never fear. California announced they would on their own try to abide by the Paris accords. In fact, in September 2016 California's legislature passed, and Governor Brown signed, SB-32 requiring a reduction of "greenhouse" emissions in California to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030.  That's about 12 1/2 years from now.

Now, California has been pushing to replace fossil fuels (boo) with "renewables" (yay) for 27 years, since 1990, covering the hillsides with wind turbines and the valleys with solar collectors.  So how much of the 40% reduction have they accomplished so far?  California's emissions for the latest year given (2014) were actually marginally above the 1990 level:

Does anyone really think California will accomplish this miracle in the next twelve years that it hasn't touched in the last 27? What will be the next strategy? Threats? Will household electricity become, as it is fast becoming in Germany, a luxury?

And will China, after doubling its emissions between now and 2030 really even try, let alone succeed in doing even more in the sixty years following?

A Glance at the Holocene

Unless I should say the "Whole Scene." Reconstructed "proxy" temperatures shown in black and model output temperatures in green are compared to atmospheric CO2 in red and methane in blue during the recent interglacial phase. When CO2 began increasing some 7000 years ago, global temperatures did not actually change and when they did, about 2000 years later, the world grew cooler, not warmer. The model outputs grew warmer, however. Notice that in the Modern Warm period, temperatures did increase when a special magical kind of CO2 took over. Either that, or a random fluctuation. In any case, a 5000-year long slide back into an ice age seems to have been temporarily stayed and temperatures have returned to medieval levels, and perhaps almost to Roman levels, although not nearly to normal levels for the interglacial, which were closer to +0.9°C

Data sources noted for each series on chart.

The war on science continues some more: A tale of two headlines

"California Drought Is Made Worse by Global Warming, Scientists Say."  -- NYTimes Aug 2015

Global warming caused by human emissions has most likely intensified the drought in California by 15 to 20 percent, scientists said on Thursday, warning that future dry spells in the state are almost certain to be worse than this one as the world continues to heat up. . . .  The paper provides new scientific support for political leaders, including President Obama and Gov. Jerry Brown of California, who have cited human emissions and the resulting global warming as a factor in the drought.

"A Climate Change Warning for California's Dams."  -- NYTimes Feb 2017

Scientists have said for years that a warming atmosphere should lead to more intense and frequent storms in many regions. 

So the theory predicts that California will become drier and that it will become wetter. Is there nothing this theory cannot predict, at least after the fact?

Keeping Perspective

Hot Times in the Old Town

Speaking of forest fires:

The 1930s were the banner years for forest fires. In 1937, there was one forest fire every three minutes per the NY Times.

But in 1910, a few years after the Forest Service was formed and not on the above graph, "a devastating series of forest fires swept over Idaho, Montana, and Washington, culminating on August 20–21 in what is known as the "Big Blowup." Coming only five years after the U.S. Forest Service’s establishment, this seminal event made a deep and lasting impact on the agency. ... [T]he young agency was undermanned, underfunded, and underprepared for what was to come. ...  On August 20 hurricane-force winds swept through the region and fanned embers and low flames back to life all across the Northern Rockies. There was no stopping or containing the fire; one could only hope to avoid it. Trains raced to evacuate towns just ahead of the flames." 

Thus began the Forest Service's Smokey the Bear campaign to prevent forest fires. Unlike most federal programs, it seems to have been successful and involved among other things a program of "controlled burns" in Forest Service lands to clear out inflammable underbrush. About 30 years ago, TOF read an article about the end of the controlled burn program because it was non-environmental: Nature should be allowed to take its course, even if that meant occasional wildfires. Hey, it's Nature!

Lo and Behold! As the underbrush and deadwood once more accumulated, the number of burned acres began to increase slightly, starting roughly ten years ago. 

Flood and Mud

Fires were not the only thing going on.

ALL EASTERN AMERICA UNDER FLOOD WATERS

Terrible Duststorm Rages In West

PRESIDENT SIGNS 

APPEAL AS 

CAPITOL FLOODED.

100 CITIES AND 14 STATES AFFECTED.

NEW YORK. Thursday.

A quarter of the area of the United States was

under flood waters today. It is a disaster ranking

with the worst calamities from natural causes that

have occurred in the history of the nation. Property

damage is so great that it is almost incalculable. Loss

of life may exceed 1000 for already 160 fatalities are

known and 40 people are missing.

As Eastern American States became almost

covered with water, terrible dust-storms raged across

the central and western States, tearing the crops out

by the roots and laying waste thousands of square

miles of country. Where the dust struck snow

storms, it rained mud.

So reported the Perth (Western Australia) Daily News on Friday, March 20, 1936

An extraordinarily dramatic

touch was given to the Presi-

dent's appeal to the nation for

Red Cross fund for, even as he

signed the proclamation, thous-

ands of Works Progress Admin-

istration workers were strug-

gling desperately to erect bul-

warks against the waters of the

Potomac River which rapidly

are approaching within a few

squares of White House itself.

Just in case you've been getting a-skeered by weather coverage lately.

Hurricane Season Off to a Whimper

Fascinatingly, the weatherfolk watching the tropical Atlantic have been reduced to reporting on a "scary," nameless "disturbance" (Invest 99-L) that might grow up to be a tropical depression that could deepen into a tropical storm that might be intensify into a hurricane that could reach Cat. One. This is because there has been, contrary to theory, a decided dearth of actual hurricanes to speak of for the past 11 years; although since we started naming tropical storms it does not actually seem so when one reviews the named storms. There is now a move to name tropical depressions in order to keep the count up. For now, the headlines will have to read:

An amazing stretch of almost 11 years without a major hurricane
may or may not be coming to an end.

Hot Enough Yet?

Speaking of heat waves, in 1936 a heat wave caused 12,183 deaths in the US, the NY Times reported (July 7, 1936)
The Chicago Tribune reported a week later (July 14, 1936) that hundreds had died in Detroit from the heat wave and that Chicago itself was also baking.Meanwhile, over in Ohio, the Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune in Ohio (July 25, 1936) tells us:

CROP CRISIS WORSE,
HEAT RISING TO 119°

with a sub-head that

31 CITIES ARE OVER 100°

Ach, du Lieber! TOF hears you ask, How many days went over 105°F?

Hard to say, but here is the graph of the percentage of US HCN temperature stations that hit that level sometime during the year:

So the 1930s peaked pretty dang hot compared to today's less extreme climate. Of course, Alert Reader will note that there will always be a few weather stations hitting the 105 point, roughly 15% of them.

The 1930s also featured worries about global warming

Warming Arctic Climate Melting Glaciers Faster, Raising Ocean Level, Scientist Says 
“A mysterious warming of the climate is slowly manifesting itself in the Arctic, engendering a "serious international problem," Dr. Hans Ahlmann, noted Swedish geophysicist, said today.

– New York Times, May 30, 1937

A ship was reported to have made the Northwest Passage across open waters, but TOF has not located the report.

So, the world rallied and did nothing and before you could say Jack Robinson, the Times was reporting:

“After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder.”

– New York Times, Jan. 30, 1961

 And just to emphasize the everything old is new again theme, 1938 was also the year Hilaire Belloc wrote his warming that Islam, though then quiescent could easily revive and threaten once more the cities of the West. 

The common root to all this is short term memory.

"[M]en are always powerfully affected by the immediate past:
one might say that they are blinded by it." -- Hilaire Belloc

A lizard riding a horse

Faithful Reader may recollect from an Earlier Post how TOF mused upon the collective result of a cycle riding on the back of a trend.

Something is not right.

h/t Matt Briggs

Odd Coincidence

A weather map: the Polar Vortex

Wisconsin Glaciation

The edges of the Laurentide glacier are a pretty good fit to the path of the jet stream when deflected by a blocking high. 

In the old novel The Sixth Winter, this was ascribed by the scientists of the time, processed through John Gribbin, to a cooling atmosphere.

The Sixth Winter

Cool!

Recently and for amusement, TOF has been rereading a potboiling SF adventure from the 80s entitled The Sixth Winter by Douglas Orgill and John Gribbin. It was written during the Global Cooling scare and involved the sudden onset of a new ice age. TOF found interesting the following, supposedly an excerpt from a report:

FIVE:  In warm decades, such as those prior to 1950, this jet [stream] follows an almost perfect circle around the globe. At the same time, it pushes with it a succession of weather systems: rain, followed by a dry spell, more rain, and so on. But when the atmosphere cools, the jet stream becomes more erratic, swinging in zigzags, first north then south, and becoming very weak and susceptible to disturbances caused by sea temperature and by snow and ice on land and sea.

SIX: Recent severe weather conditions in North America and elsewhere are a result of this weaker, more erratic pattern of windflow. High pressure building over the southwestern United States seaboard, aided by ocean temperature conditions, zigzags the jest stream so that it is too weak to push the "blocking high" system away. A dominant flow from northwest to southeast is established across the whole of the United States east of the Rockies, encouraging the southward flow of the jet stream and cooling a great area of ocean south of Newfoundland. The severe United States winters of 1977 and 1978 marked the return of this pattern as a common feature after more than 100 years of relatively equable weather.

Anyone who has seen the hoo-hoo about the "polar vortex" on the weather reports during the recent cold spell immediately recognizes the pattern described by Gribbin, although it is today blamed on global warming, rather than global cooling -- or at least (tautologically) on "climate change." Elsewhere in The Sixth Winter, characters ascribe to the cooling climate of those days the more variable and extreme weather that is today ascribed to a warming climate.

Ah, sure, and it's the wonderful modern age we live in.  "Men are always powerfully affected by the immediate past," Belloc wrote. "One might say that they are blinded by it."  So in the 1970s they wrote of global cooling, ironically at about the time temperatures turned around and began to warm again. After another thirty years or so, interest in warming reached a pitch -- just in time for temperatures to flatten out and begin to drop again, as the had done after the peak in the 1940s.

Political Book Reviews

ON OF THOSE THINGS that TOF finds ever perplexing is the tendency of some politically committed readers to commit politics on books they read.  TOF knew such folks in the 60s.  They would wool over pop songs, examining their lyrics closely for heterodox opinions, whether of satanic influences or of less-than-leftward sentiments.  The story is that at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Pete Seeger almost took an axe to the cable when Dylan came on, not because of the electronic backup, but because Dylan was no longer doing political songs. 

Well, it's a New Age, Faithful Reader.  While browsing through customer reviews of On the Razor's Edge on Amazon.com TOF discovered the following nugget by Gregory N. Hullender:

Twinkle, Twinkle

It seems that the rate of supernova occurrence (black line) is pretty much a dead match for biodiversity -- the normalized marine invertebrate genera count (blue line).  The gray is the error band around the biodiversity count. 

When Sagan said we were made of star-stuff, he had only half the picture.  Apparently, the stars really do affect life on earth.  The Permian extinction falls right in:

Svensmark notes that the Late Permian saw the largest fall in the local supernova rate seen in the past 500 million years. This was when the Solar System had left the hyperactive Norma Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy behind it and entered the quiet space beyond.

Through a variety of mechanisms, too few supernovae resulted in warmer air, reduced circulation, poor nutrient mixing, ending with a shortage of oxygen in the atmosphere.  Nearly all life on earth went extinct.
But once upon a time an abundance of nearby supernovae chilled the earth so badly it kicked into Snowball Earth.   So, Goldilocks, human life arose in a period of "just right" insofar as supernovae are concerned. 

The Wonderful World of Statistics - Part II

Back in August 2012, we presented the Allegory of the Fluoropolymers and promised a Part II "soon."  Well, nine months seems long enough to give birth, so...

Have You Seen This Theory?

Hi!  My Name is Global Warming

Have You Seen Me? 

Rochester MN, 1 May 2013

This young theory has been missing for a decade, now,
and her parents are very worried

Anyone who thinks they have seen this theory should call 555-WARM immediately

The Odd Ends of Odds and Ends

Yes, it's that time again.  Clearing out bunch of ends and odds.

• The Little Ironies of Life
• Life Used to be So Much Simpler
• The Music of a Generation
• Hot Enough For Ya? 
• Return of the Quanta

For Peat's Sake

A number of years ago...  In fact, a great number of years ago...  I participated in the writing of a fun novel titled Fallen Angels.  The 'guffin of the book was that all the greenhouse gasses had been cleaned out of the atmosphere, shutting down global warming and thus triggering an ice age.  Nyuck, nyuck.

Now this is a common enough literary trope -- reversal of expectations -- but the matter was already becoming politicized and so reaction to the book was largely political, even though a closer inspection of the premise reveals that it accepts the fact that carbon dioxide does tend to warm the earth.  It simply supposes that Other Stuff is going on at the same time; viz., another ice age is starting and global warming is staving it off.  Remember, this was just at the tail end of the Global Cooling hoo-hah, a phase of history now falling into George Orwell's "memory hole."

The Wonderful World of Statistics - Part I

Yes, it's that time once again.  So sit yourself down, kick your feet up, and pop a couple of brewskies, and ready yourself for:

The Allegory of the Fluoropolymers

Once upon a time, when the world was younger and TOF still had to work for a living, TOF came to the Land of the Fluoropolymers somewhere in the wilds of central New Jersey.  Among the many sterling qualities of these fluoropolymers - indeed of all polymers and many other substances beside - is the viscosity of the material.  Viscosity may be thought of as the flow of that which is thick.  High viscosity is "thick" and low is "thin."  It is measured (usually) in centipoise (cps) although TOF has been in situations measured in poise and (once, memorably) in which it was measured in kilopoise.  (The latter involved not liquids dripped through a Zahn cup, but solid plastic pellets pushed through an orifice.  TOF will leave you with that thought.)  The science fiction masterpieces of Flynn have sometimes been called not "hard SF" but "high viscosity SF," much like the wit of TOF, which is also said to be thick. 

Make an Ash of Yourself

Ash Wednesday
Today is the most subversive day on the revolutionary calendar.  It is the day when we become fleetingly aware that maybe Nietzsche was not right and the will need not be triumphant.  Recall that ol' Crazy Fred told us in Will to Power

Through Christianity, the individual was made so important, so absolute, that he could no longer be sacrificed. ... All 'souls' became equal before God: but this is precisely the most dangerous of all possible evaluations.

Crazy Fred

Hence, the fierce determination of the Late Modern to deny the very existence of soul.  In Latin, this is anima, and is the same as "life."  So what follows from soul-denying is necessarily life-denying.  We also see the root of the Late Modern determination to subordinate the individual to the group, replacing individual human natural rights with state-granted group-entitlements.  And in that rejection of all souls being equal, we wound up with some lives being less equal than others, the lebensunwertes Leben, or "life unworthy of life," a pig which we sometimes tart up with the lipstick of "quality of life."  And those who fall too far down the "quality" scale may be denied life by their betters. 

Fred also wrote:

Interpreting the News

Hey, boys and girls, can you spot the logic in the following headline? 


"Report: Health Insurance Profits Rise Despite Health Care Reform"
--headline, NationalJournal.com, Jan. 5

Yes, that's right, sports fans.  Since the point of Health Care Reform™ is to require everyone to by health insurance, insurance companies will then be selling more policies, more cash will flow in, and their profits will rise.  Not "despite," but "because."

Note that another purpose was to require policy coverage be given to people with pre-existing conditions.  This vastly changes the actuarial risk to the insurance pool and in fact changes it from insurance to entitlement.  A greater actuarial risk means a higher premium to cover it, and this too means a rise in profits. 
+ + +

Gandersauce Alert

• "It is disturbing that President Bush has exhibited a grandiose vision of executive power that leaves little room for public debate, the concerns of the minority party or the supervisory powers of the courts. But it is just plain baffling to watch him take the same regal attitude toward a Congress in which his party holds solid majorities in both houses. Seizing the opportunity presented by the Congressional holiday break, Mr. Bush announced 17 recess appointments--a constitutional gimmick. . . . Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton made scores of recess appointments. But both of them faced a Congress controlled by the opposition party, while the Senate has been under Republican control for Mr. Bush's entire five years in office."--editorial, New York Times, Jan. 9, 2006
• "Nearly six months after it opened its doors, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finally has a director, after President Obama's recess appointment of Richard Cordray. . . . Mr. Obama also appointed three new and qualified members to the National Labor Relations Board. . . . Announcing the appointments, Mr. Obama also asserted a welcome new credo: 'When Congress refuses to act, and as a result, hurts our economy and puts our people at risk, then I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them.' Hear. Hear."--editorial, New York Times, Jan. 5, 2012

And this is just plain funny, from the WSJ Best of the Web

"A poorly chosen baby name can lead to a lifetime of neglect, reduced relationship opportunities, lower self-esteem, a higher likelihood of smoking and diminished education prospects, according to a new study of nearly 12,000 people," Canada's National Post reports:

The research, which appears in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science [sic], is thought to offer the firmest conclusions to date that "unfortunate" first names evoke negative reactions from strangers, which in turn influence life outcomes for the worse.

The story's headline adds even more ill effects: "Bad Baby Name Could Leave Your Child Sadder, Dumber: Study."

Hmm. We have a president named Barack Hussein, and as of a month ago the two leading contenders to challenge him were Willard Mitt and Newton Leroy. That ought to clear things up for anyone having difficulty fathoming the rise of Richard John Santorum.

Global Warming

is there anything it can't explain?

What Hath Global Warming Wrought?

Snow near my brother's house by Philadelphia

It is snowing here in the Lehigh Valley.  Forecasts are for 4-8 inches.  It is not yet Hallow E'en.

Now, the IPCC models were always in agreement that most of the warming would take place in Northern Hemisphere winter nights (which actually doesn't sound so bad), so the trend toward colder over these past ten years or so is whiffing a lot like Popper.  But never fear: weather is not climate!  (Except when it is: cf. Katrina, Irene, Texas drought, etc.)  And it ain't global warming no more; it's climate change!  So any time the climate seems to change, it is due to climate change.  And never mind the dizzy spell from circular reasoning.  I suppose the orbits of the planets can now be explained by location change, too. 

Odds and Ends

Only in Pennsylvania

In New York City, when someone wants to sell you a bridge, it's a fraud.  In Pennsylvania, they actually go out and get a bridge - and it's theft. 

Does This Bother Anyone?

Should it? 
a) Lead Author on definitive paper
b) is president of a consulting firm
c) That makes its money on the fruits of such papers.

Caesar omni suspicione maiores debent esse uxorem. 

Fossil Genes, OWS, Precognition, and Intrepid Pathfinders below the cut