Shule Show

Two day, and the gum was relatively deserted. Must be getting close enough to summer for the denials to mount up. Science podcasts today and aside from a rather extended discussion of dark energy on one of the NPR ‘casts, not particularly sticky. So unsticky in fact that I find myself at a loss to offer comments on anything.

Except a rather naive segment on a road show aimed at exposing high shule students to climate change. The come-on is that climate change isn’t taught in public shules. Thud. Flat.

Why isn’t it taught? Probably for the same reason that evolution isn’t and mysticism is. Political pressure. It isn’t on the tests because politicians don’t want it on them. It’s one more symptom of what is wrong with the shules and our country.

But the question I want answered is why was the presentation permitted? Are there still rebels out there?

education, science, climate, politics, tyranny

Fog and Folderol

Beautiful! I do love a good fog and this one was/is bonnie. At about 0400 this morning the visibility in Scant City was about 0.25 km, estimated from headlamp beam spread and street lamp halos. It was a nice middling fog. The water accumulating on the windscreen was minimal, almost so little as to make the wiper blades squeek.

Once inside the gym, the bag was mixed, just like outside. There was a strange courtesy among and from the educationalists but the podcast, an episode of CBC’s “Quirks and Quarks” was vapid. The most engaging bit was about a newly discovered rat with only incisors that eats worms. Sadly, no elaboration on what type of worms.

Along that azimuth, I chanced upon an article about work at Royal Holloway U and a couple of spear holder shules that indicates the Clovis society (culture? maybe) of Nawth America was not eradicated by a comet (meteorite?) fall. The principal digger proclaimed the absence of relevant impact crater or impact debris.

Ever since the Alvarezes, pater et fils, advanced the extinction of the dinosaurs (except their descendants) due to one (two?) meteorite (comet?) strikes, it has become fashionable to explain all sorts of population fluctuations by astronomical intervention. Quite frankly the whole thing requires a great deal of effort and it has never been all that engaging for me. My principal interest in the matter is to get a reliable estimate of the mean time between “extinction” strikes so an estimate may be made of the effort that needs to be expended to provide reasonable assurance of human continuance.

Not that any government or large organization is going to do anywhere near that amount of effort. Especially in Amerika. After all, just look at our inability to do anything about climate change. Like get past the terrorists who deny it.

But come to think of it, freezing is a better way to die than baking.

humans, behavior, weather, climate, government, stupidity

Hot Intelligence

Gad, I hate weekends. Especially sundaes when the christianist pseudo-shabat closes everything down and I am stuck in a vacuum of activity. It is at times like this that I empathize with the tin woodsman.

Speaking of which, I noted an intriguing article [Link] that argues that human intelligence is the result of coping with climate change. Not an implausible hypothesis but one that is less than obviously testable. Of course, we have spent much of the intervening 2-3 MY trying to negate that intelligence. Witness the climate change denialists today. Of course, there is a rather charming reverie of climate change denialists back then arguing that primates had no need for intelligence. Nice to know that the repulsians have been around so long.

For that matter, what positive contribution can the repulsians advance other than nominating Lincoln?

More particularly, this raises the question of how intelligence plays out in an overcrowded environment. That is, as climate change builds to the point where much of the environment, and thereby society and civilization, collapses, will intelligence do any good?

humans, intelligence, evolution, climate

Let Us Doom

It’s ice cream beverage day, aka pseudo-shabat for the christianists, and I once more find myself with a covey (?) of tabs that have need of resolution.

The first is a rather draconian and laconic piece [Link] out of the Detroit Free press on the end of the world in five days. I was rather taken by the High Noonishness of this statement,

“the long-awaited, much-hyped and entirely farcical Maya apocalypse is just that — and archaeologists can’t wait until it passes so they don’t have to explain anymore why it was never going to happen.”

It is nice to observe that there are still a few (apparently) good mediaists/journalists out there. I promise Mr. Vergano that I will keep him under observation until I can remove that parenthetical.

I also have to admit that this sort of contemporary mysticism takes me back to my high shule days. As a senior I was required to take a course in economics, frankly, not a very coherent nor useful one, falling neither into the practicality of personal budgeting, a subject I learned by derivation from managing mega-shekel projects for the Yankee army in my early days with them, nor into the perversion of theory, a subject I have repeatedly attempted but repeatedly failed because of the stercus for maths that economists do. That’s why I tend to place them second on my gibbet list after lawyers.

What made a difference in that class was the teacher, a peppery neandertal haired woman named after antiseptic mammals and the Kryptonian’s love (?) interest. She made us read a biographical collection entitled The Worldly Philosophers, a title whose humor and subtlety was wasted on our ignorance. But I clearly recall that in his dotage the French economist (?) Laplace predicted a planetary transformation where, among other things, “the seas would turn to lemonade.” Never mind that I did not recognize the name for its actual relevance to humanity and civilization; I would find out about Laplace and his wonderfully useful integral transform, which, along with that of Fourier, is one of the foundation enablers of modern technological civilization. This computer, and the cellular telephones, and anything else electrical would be likely impossible without these transforms. So we cannot fault Laplace too much for his nonsense of age, nor, I suspect blame him too much as an economist. But I do make the association whenever one of these gloom-and-doom mysticisms  escapes the eraser of rationality.

Thank you, Angular Momentum Speed-of-Light.

Next, while on the azimuth of world endings, I note an article [Link] on the gotcha of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, aka MegaHard’s Maginot Line against the depredations of Linux. The article, amusing enough, is written by a helot of MegaHard who describe its impending failure as ‘only three distributions of Linux have managed to demolish the wall.’ The system, billed as a replacement for the BIOS, is actually a means for MegaHard to assure (?) that everyone else’s OS is rejected at boot. This is Goebelized as a security measure, which I suppose it is in the sense of trying to provide a measure of security for MegaHard in the marketplace of competition with better OS freely available with only the usual price associated with freedom, an educated, competent, aware user.

In that regard I cannot soon count MegaHard out, for too much of their user base is mind shackled bogs who have been rendered incapable of thinking of, much less learning, another OS without Grand Mal seizures. AS for me, I am happy to leave those unhappy many to their servile fates since they cannot but degrade and degenerate the utility and functionality that is Linux. Do not envy MegaHard its numbers of serfs, rather revel in the ranks of the free and knowing.

Next, a paradox of Yankee governance. I came across this article [Link] of a study at U California that indicated that 0.81 of the sample population wanted a ‘do not’ list for junk mail akin to the ‘do not call’ list that is patently a sieve. What makes this a paradox is that the Yankee government postal service panders to junk mail. I don’t know the actual volume of junk mail, but I suspect it is greater than 0.75 by count and greater than 0.9 by physical volume. And the YG postal service lets these ‘spammers’ send out their stercus at a lower rate than any useful generator can access, except possibly newspapers, which are only 0.6, by surface area, themselves junk. So if 0.81 of a representative sample, hence indicative of the Amerikan public, don’t want the stuff, and it is causing much of the postal service’s insolvency, why continue with this perversion?

The best I can come up with is that it lets the postal service make hideously and egregiously exaggerated claims of efficiency based on this volume of unwanted merde. And probably the judicious use of baksheesh to politicians? At any rate I suspect this is one of those evils we know of but are prevented by our own protectors from eliminating, other than with the use of blue recycling bins?

And to close, I note an article [Link] in Lifehacker, that strange oleo of utility and blathering social stercus, about a study of weather caused discorporation. It produced this rather colorful map

that is useful in telling me there are places other than the old Confederacy where tornadoes are a primary threat ignored by authorities. That is not to say they don’t invest in sirens and public address systems that are conflicting, confusing, and incoherent, but they don’t invest in any effort to actually combat the threat by any means shy of sitting in a hole and osculating one’s derrière.

Enough. Selah. I gotta seed the dinosaur descendants and the tree fluffs.

catastrophe, computers, government, weather, climate, humans, stupidity

Grapefruit Gollys

It being sundae, it is also time for the hawg’in of the tabs. So without too much grrr brrr, commencement occurs.

I start with a rather confusing article from a university I have never heard of before but infer it is not an English (language) institution because the language of the article is patently a rather strained translation. So far as I can gather, the researchers performed a study of students learning on-line and found no gender differentiation. Since this likely comes from an ethnicity/culture/society that strongly differentiates on gender, this may be a shocking and outre report. I am still looking for a similar work dealing with age and intelligence and extrovert/introvert differentiation. I know that I am a POOR on-line student. Simply put, it is not my medium. And, IMHO, it is a medium poorly suited to nerdish subjects, despite all the popularity of massive on-line courses like those offered by (e.g.,) Courserea.

On a nostalgia trip, I ran across an article [Link] projecting detection of gravitational waves by 2016 with an 0.95 confidence. I ain’t convinced. Back when I was a new graduate student at the campus of the Boneyard I went to a departmental colloquium. The speaker was Joseph Webber who was THE gravity wave experimentalist of the day. He was ruthlessly grilled by the senior professors, especially John Bardeen, the grand exalted kudzu of physics on that campus. It was wonderful. So far as I could tell, the physics played in the match was first rate, and the game was a draw. I learned a lot in that hour, and not just about physics. But I also came to find out that finding gravity waves was a bit more difficult than we thought. So I am not going to wait avidly for their discovery. Wait patiently, yes; avidly, no.

Next, on a rather more pragmatic front, an article [Link] from the medical instrumentality of Canadia detailing that the density of prescription drugs bewhacked by grapefruit is even larger than supposed previously. One almost suspects this of being a government conspiracy to counter demands for the fruit with the Floridas shortly to be immersed by global warming. Evidently only in the boonies of the hinterland do fruit cups include grapefruit?

On which subject, an article [Link] detailing how the melting of the ice cover is “patchy”, as measured by orbital sensors. The statement:

“At current melt rates, the Greenland ice sheet would take about 13,000 years to melt completely, which would result in a global sea-level rise of more than 21 feet (6.5 meters).”

rather puts a kibosh to the immediate inundation of the Floridas (98 feet meal elevation.) So we can look forward to all sorts of seniors keeling over and discorporating from being fed grapefruit by uncaring restaurateurs.

On an equally pleasant note, there is a report [Link] that the incidence of type 2 diabetes is positively correlated with fructose consumption. Another nail in the accuracy coffin of the corn sugar mafia!

And crossing all the way into the silly bin, it was revealed this week that the Yankee government had plans to nuke Luna as a demonstration of resolve to the Soviets. [Link] This has evidently become an instant piece of Sagan-ana but I should hope the old boy would be embarrassed by the whole thing. A nuclear explosion on the surface of Luna would be about as spectacular as an infant’s flatulence. I do have to wonder whether this one was thought up by some congress critter or in one of the sub-basements of the five sided fool farm?

I rather suspect the former, right after he had fruit cup in the cafeteria.

education, gravity, climate, health, war

After Action Realization

The primary lesson that we have obtained from Storm Sandy is that Amerika needs to diversify its manufacturing, production, distribution, and management resources. IOW, smaller and more instead of fewer and bigger.

Will this happen? Almost assuredly not. It would cut into corporate profits too much and be too good for the citizenry.

climate, corporations, extinction

Bogs are Mucky

It is week out again – Saturn’s day – and once more time to tab hawg. The weather beavers have proclaimed that fall is (maybe) finally here, as much as we are going to get with climate change anyway, and so I actually shivered when I got up this morning, switched from summer to winter bathrobe – housecoat as FD SCP calls it, and yes, it is sort of a coat and you do only wear it in house, but I also almost always only wear it after I put hermaphroditic gunk on my moistened corpus. For the bogs out there, that soap, which has the necessary characteristic of being comprised of molecules that are polar at one end – so they can latch onto organic pollutants – “dirt”, which isn’t actually – on the skin – and ionic at the other so they can latch onto dihydrogen oxide (liquid phase.)

So while we’re on bogs and climate change, we probably should note a study [Link] done at Yale and George Mason Us on Amerikan attitudes on climate change. The article asserts that the fraction of Amerikans who “believe” climate change is “real” is increasing. It has some nice plots, obviously done by an savvy graduate student using a good graphing program, like this one:

The other are similar and deal with other variations on the basic question so I won’t bother to regurgitate them here since that’s not the point I want to knap.

Fustest of all, to quote all those who misquote Bedford Forrest (and if you don’t know who Bedford Forrest is, you’re likely a bog anyway,) the graph is misleading because it is shown as straight line continuous. This is the default in most graphing programs and is almost always nastily misleading. Especially to bogs who are led to think that all that change is linear. And irritating to geeks and nerds who know it isn’t but do recognize that graduate students are one class of modern slaves.

The second thing, and this is the nasty one, is that word “believe”. That nails down that we are talking about bogs since nerds, and most geeks, would not like to say they believe in climate change since that is horribly irrational (and insulting to any rational individual.) Rather they would say that the data and theory appear to be accurate absent any better data and theory. All models are wrong, all science is transitory and must be continually tested and validated. Beliefs are irrational things that have to be kept almost stationary to evade the testing criteria.

I ain’t even gonna touch the deity component of all this.

On the positive side, it seems [Link] that the guvmint of New Sowth Wales, which is in Australia, forbids the use of cellular telephones while the motor is running in motorcar. Wunderful! The price of even fondling a cellular in motorcar is about 300$. Given the attitudes of most of the Australian citizens I have known I am surprised that this does not involve roadside trial and summary execution by drawing and quartering, a punishment that motorcars effect much more efficiently than horses if considerably less entertainingly. We may only hope that the mode is for miscreants to resist and receive a stout truncheoning in response.

This would seem to prove that, unlike the Amerikan model, incarcerated criminals can be rehabilitated, not just encapsulated and reinforced, and actually have good sense. In this instance, better than that of all politicians in the Yankee republic or the English tyranny monarchy.  Although knowing human nature and the creep of rule bashing, I would tie a cellular telephone gobbler into the transmission of every motorcar, physically unhackable naturally, that subverts any cellular telephone inside the motorcar so long as the transmission is not in park state. That way we should not need truncheons. And it might be kinder to the bogs since so many of them are incapable of learning.

hmans, behavior, climate, belief, cellular telephones, driving, stupidity

Immune System

According to Scientific American [Link] the Yankee government’s NASA has proclaimed that last year’s heat wave and drought were directly caused by global climate change.

Wonder how many repulsians and denialists bit off their tongues?

Next step: the big die off.

humans, extinction, climate

To blog, perhaps to gripe?

I do not like summer! It is nasty discomfortable and reinforces the contemporary Southron predilection to stay indoors. It has always been horrible how we get wet, almost freezing weather in winter – now rarer than ever – and Southrons seem to think they need to bunker up and pretend they’re in Maine during a storm. Since the invention, development, and proliferation of air conditioning this siege mentality seems to have spread to summer.

If you hadn’t figured it out, today is officially the first day of summer. I am not sure who the official is but I am convinced they are a tool of the climate change denialists. Indeed with the rise in temperature the meanings of the seasons have changed and their duration needs to be adjusted to reflect reality and abandon the equality of time previous used?

On the subject of discomfort, I note [Link] that MegaHard seems to be committed – a hopefully prophetic turn of phrase – to rolling out its own “Unity” – they call it Metro and with the usual MegaHard arrogance are quite ignoring they plagiarized it from elsewhere – despite alienating their user base. So the question is how many will defer upgrading from whatever they are running, and how many will vote by transporting to another OS. These are unsure but we can be relatively sure that if the don’t want to use Metro they surely will not adopt Ubuntu with Unity. For one thing Winders users don’t, in the modality, have the neuronage to load another GUI and hence Canonical has placed themselves in the position of the little engine that failed.

The good news, of course, in Canonical pruning the base of Ubuntu severely is that it has expanded the base of the alternatives, especially Xubuntu and Kubuntu which it has been trying for some years to kill off. Instead, it’s de facto role as a middle provider between kernel and OS may actually be an improvement given its showing of abysmal stupidity with Unity. Meanwhile, I suspect more of those MegaHard users are going to migrate to Apple thus strengthening the position of the new fascism.

On a more pleasant azimuth, I note [Link] that the Australians have gotten into the act with cave craft. They have discovered art dating back 28 KYA.

I have to admit that this is rather more striking than the negative hand prints dating back almost 41 KYA that have been so noted of in recent days. I think I have heard no less than three podcast episodes this week that either mentioned or were occupied with. This is a sad event. The boffins are having to spend a lot of time doing repeated interviews that end up doing little other than alienating their listeners with the interviewers nonsense and inaccuracies.

I was listening to a podcast episode of the CBC’s “Quirks and Quarks” this morning and swearing under my breath as some biologist/paleontologist made a hash of a discussion of the optics of moth wings. This is why I consider outreach to be terminally flawed. We do greater evil and damage telling the bogs inaccuracies than not telling at all.

Still, I was taken with the beauty of the Australian site as well as the art. At least this comes a lot closer to being art than that kindergarten hand turkey thing.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2012/6/18/1340018530474/Australian-rock-art-008.jpg

The Novelty of Frustration

OK, week out is about over and it is time to prune tabs. FD SCP and I have been in a bit of a state of denial. We have to go over to Kennesaw for her annual sewing training there and we have been often enough that the novelty of everything except the horror and the frustration have about worn off.

Speaking of novelty, I ran across this article [Link] about folks at Delft and Eindhoven Us in the Nethelands looking for the ‘elusive’ Majorana fermion. I have to admit to some mixed reactions on this one. The ‘elusive’ label brought forth thoughts of rather inane royalist propaganda disguised as an adventure novel to say nothing of the rather questionable acting skills of Leslie Howard. But then the Howards, at least the English faction, have always been royalist and shady. The Majorana brought back memories of graduate shule and those moments of almost unendurable trivia made desperate when one needs to do something more fundamental than physics such as micturate or defecate or rush to another class or even anti-defecate or anti-micturate. And lastly, fermions, the most wonderful of particles, Nature’s introverts as it were and hence sharing a bond of temperament with most physicists. In fact, many physicists I know shape their lives on an emulation of the behavior of fermions.

What is special about these fermions is that they possess spin (or they wouldn’t be fermions,) but not charge. Thus in the somewhat specious taxonomy of opposites, they are their own anti-particles since an absence of charge can only be reversed into itself. I find myself taking mental exception with one of the article’s statements however,

The researchers have “produced quasiparticles that act like Majorana fermions: electrically-neutral particles that are their own antiparticles, such that if two collide, they annihilate.

Since their only internal observable, at least from the brief reportage, is their intrinsic angular momentum or spin, annihilation would seem to occur only if the two particles have equal and opposite spin. Since the research has only begun, at least according to the reportage, this question may not yet have been addressed. Of course, it seems likely that the particles must be created with equal numbers of opposite spin value, for energy composition if nothing else, and hence every other encounter is likely to be with an opposite. But if the like spun do not annihilate each other then perhaps these beasties may be concentrated by sequesterment? Absent that, it would be nice to know if the annihilation mechanism bridges spin sameness.

While we are on skepticism, I ran across an illuminated – in the Medieval sacred work sense – article [Link] on the statistics of opinion (?) of the population (sample, at least) on the subject of global climate change.

It seems that a reasonable fraction of the sample, which presumably is large enough to include a fairly representative fraction of bogs, is indeed concerned about global climate change. Except for those who consider themselves members of the repulsian political persuasion, which explains why the outlook is so whacked in Alibam. Here in Alibam, of course, even the democruds are repulsians in liberal’s clothing.

Next, I ran across this article, [Link] which argues that since MegaHard’s browser is slowly decomposing, FaceScroll needs its own browser to combat Gooey in their war to be the internet mental component in the same way that Apple controls the appliance mental component. As one who rejects the covert serfdom vehemently, I find the whole matter laughable in the sense of a poorly executed hanging – galgenhumor, as it were. The matter only matters, as it were, if one is concerned with controlling the gammas and deltas. From an economic sense this is worthwhile, of course, since these people pay large amounts of money for piles of poorly but cheaply produced crap.

The shiny Gooey browser is popular and has some good points although the much touted level of security are not one such. It is fast, and hence desirable for meaningless activity on the interned such as observing captioned photographs of uncooked felines. It is not however, very useful for actual work. There are plenty of faster browsers out there  but they suffer from a klutzy exterior lacking the economic resources of Gooey for cosmetic facading.

The intriguing, but unraised question is whether FaceScroll, given their penchant for changing facades for no apparent reason other than micturating clients, can actually pull off a browser even as unsuccessful of MegaHard’s?