Narcissistic, Psychologically Neotenous, Academically Lobotomised

Most modern college students in North America have been sheltered from challenge and responsibility their entire lives. Compared to the upbringing of most children through history, modern college aged youth are pampered, and assured of their own specialness.

Today's college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

"We need to stop endlessly repeating 'You're special' and having children repeat that back," said the study's lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. "Kids are self-centered enough already."

Twenge and her colleagues, in findings to be presented at a workshop Tuesday in San Diego on the generation gap, examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006.

The researchers describe their study as the largest ever of its type and say students' NPI scores have risen steadily since the current test was introduced in 1982. By 2006, they said, two-thirds of the students had above-average scores, 30 percent more than in 1982.

..."Unfortunately, narcissism can also have very negative consequences for society, including the breakdown of close relationships with others," he said.

The study asserts that narcissists "are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors."

Twenge, the author of "Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled - and More Miserable Than Ever Before," said narcissists tend to lack empathy, react aggressively to criticism and favor self-promotion over helping others.

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Modern child-rearing in North America lacks meaningful challenges, and rites of passage--to provide a clear demarcation between self-centered childhood and a more competent and responsible adulthood.

In Science Fiction author Alexei Panshin's novel "Rite of Passage", 14 year olds underwent "The Challenge", a necessary rite of transition which some of them did not survive. Of course this idea was drawn from many earth examples of aboriginal and other cultures that require the child to undergo a rite of passage that sometimes results in the child's death.

For boys, the ritual often involved surviving in the wilderness--perhaps hunting a dangerous animal such as a lion. For girls, rites surrounding the onset of menses were common. Certainly giving birth for the first time was a sufficiently life threatening and altering experience to qualify as a rite of passage for girls.

Going to college for many years, and perhaps graduate school for many more, can often be a way to simply avoid one rite of passage--a full time job leading to economic self-sufficiency. If a youth considers himself too "special" to undertake most forms of work, the rite may be postponed indefinitely. For a young woman, school and long preparation for a career can postpone the childbirth rite so late in her life, that the biological clock eventually obviates the issue permanently.

Psychologically neotenous youth are typically narcissistic as well. If they also open themselves to indoctrination at a typical university or college, they have scored the magic hat trick--narcissism, psychological neoteny, and academic lobotomy. When that occurs, there is little reason to expect adult behaviour or responsible attitudes and participation in the society at large.

There are, however, some areas of North American society where the rite of passage occurs in all its historical potency. That would be in much of the military, fire departments, EMS, rescue units, and better trained and disciplined law enforcement personnel.

The idea of a rite of passage is a powerful one, as old as humanity. You can see how easily it is perverted in the muslim culture, where violent murder by martyrdom is too often celebrated as a rite of passage--although a rather grotesque and pointless one in my opinion.

But rites of passage need not be so perverse. An enlightened society has to understand that lifelong pampering and protection from challenge and responsibility is no way to raise productive adults who willingly contribute to their communities in all facets of living. Until North Americans understand the problem they have created for themselves, the ride will be bumpy and more than a little precarious.

Third World Russia--Like Dinosaurs, Sinking Into the Tar Pits

Nationalisation of industries--such as oil and gas--is a sign of the impending decline of a nation's economic production. It happened in Iraq under Saddam, it is happening in Venezuela under Chavez, and now it is happening in Russia under Putin. Nationalisation leads to decline in infrastructure investment, with inevitable declines in production as the infrastructure crumbles.

The Russian government has had opportunities to rise above its medieval third world authoritarianism and dictatorial economic control. Yes, more than ample opportunities for an enlightened people. Unfortunately, the Russians have never had the opportunity to grow up--out of the choking grasp of a Tsar, a Communist dictatorship, or a corrupt Mafiocratic oligarchy.

The Russian pipelines are not only short of what’s needed, they are also old. Two miles in three were laid over 20 years ago. Breakdowns and leaks are becoming increasingly common. Last year’s survey of the 1960s-era “Druzhba” (Friendship) pipeline, which carries 1.2 million barrels a day to Eastern and Central Europe, found almost 500 “damaged points.”[7] Last July, 11,000 gallons of crude leaked from the Druzhba near Russia’s border with Belarus, briefly shutting down the route and sending world oil markets up to about $75 a barrel.

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Russia's oil woes stem from the decision to join the worldwide trend toward the nationalisation of all oil and gas production and transport. Nationalised oil companies now control the easiest to obtain petro-resources, leaving the more difficult and expensive resources for the more technologically competent multi-nationals.

This means that a large part of the world's easily available oil and gas reserves will either lie untouched, be diverted to the black market, or will leak out and be wasted--due to the general corruption and incompetence of the national oil and gas industries. That creates a mild artificial "peak oil" that will likely continue for the next few decades. Rather than an abrupt mega-shock peak oil from resource depletion, we have instead a slow political peak oil with much of the reserves remaining in the ground.

For non-ideological students of economics, this is a recurring pattern: third world nations invite multi-nationals in to help develop their resources. Then when most of the research and development funds have been spent, the third world governments move to nationalise the developed production facilities. Next, the inevitable corruption and breakdown of technological infrastructure occurs, which eventually leads to a change in government. Then the new government invites the multinationals in for their technological expertise, and the cycle repeats.

The sad reality is that Putin and his cronies, by grabbing all private assets and facilities and placing them under state control, are driving Russia down the same road of decline and corruption as the oil dictators in the middle east, Africa, and Latin America.

When China's Banks, Like Dominoes Fall, Will Your Countries Banks Fall Too?

Gordon Chang had a few comments on yesterday's New York Stock Exchange fall--triggered by an even larger market dip in China the day before:

The real risk China poses to global markets is not so much the severity of a financial crisis as the unexpected nature of such an event. Today, the concern about China in the West is that the country will dominate the global economy. For many, if not most, people in the financial and business communities, the possibility of an economic crisis inside China is remote. For them, it is an “unknown unknown.” Yet all the underlying conditions necessary for such a crisis exist. When it occurs, market participants will probably be caught completely unaware as they were today. After all, how well have the markets predicted turmoil in other countries in the past?

There may be little we can do to avert a financial crisis in China, but public discussion of such a development would at least give market participants the opportunity to take that event into account, thereby making future market adjustments less painful.

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Today, Chinese state-owned enterprises [SOEs] owe banks over $2 trillion -- about the size of the entire Chinese economy. And the amount of outstanding loans is growing by $500 billion each year.

None of this will shock any student of Communist economies. This is just the way financial institutions in "soft budget constraint" socialist economies work. That is the insight of Communist Eastern Europe's only Nobel Prize caliber economist (and now Harvard professor), the Hungarian Janos Kornai. In socialist economies, cheap loans combined keep inefficient state-owned enterprise afloat. They also mean that a lot of goods are produced that shouldn't be produced in the first place. Throw in China's cheap labor and you see why the Chinese are selling Honda knock-off motorcycles at the price of their weight in scrap metal in Vietnam. This may lead to impressive rates of "top-line" economic growth in the medium term. But it also leads to the kind of massive misallocation of resources that eventually brought the Soviet Empire to its knees.

This makes the coming collapse of Chinese banks inevitable

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And the collapse could come sooner than we think. In 2007, as per the agreement China entered into upon joining the WTO, it must open up its retail banking sector to foreign banks. This is a potential tripwire. Even if only a small number of Chinese are concerned about the health of their local banks (and thus their savings), when Citibank opens up next door the run on Chinese banks could easily spin out of control. I am assuming that the government is trying to spread the notion of confidence and stability in the retail banking sector. If the Chinese do not panic come 2007 or any time in the subsequent 20 years or so, the banks should be able to reduce their NPL rate to a "more manageable 5%". It wouldn't be the first time that people have left their money in a bank that is essentially insolvent because they believe the government will cover any losses incurred. This is a questionable assumption, however, and if I was Chinese I probably would not run the risk.

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Although China labors under a long list of problems, a lack of people with economic savvy is not one of them. Until now, China's stock markets have given the highest return on investment for the Chinese people with money to invest. But if citizens suspect the banks do not have sufficient assets to cover possible withdrawals, a run on the banks is a real possiblity.

If Chinese banks start to fall, much of the rest of the world's economy will follow after. Like Gordon Chang says, it's far better to be mentally and otherwise prepared for this possibility than to be caught completely unprepared.

3D Clinic Showreel--Visualizing The Body

Biomedical animations are increasing in sophistication. This brief "teaser" illustrates the potential of realistic animations for explaining disease processes and medical treatments to patients in the office.

More detailed animations of this type would be welcome tools for medical, paramedical, and nursing education. The best textbooks, even with vivid drawings and photographs, cannot match the mental and emotional impact of watching pathophysiology in action on both macro and microscopic levels.

Next Generation of Threats

There are always threats to human civilisation--even to human existence. With advancing technologies come newer generations of threats.

The Lifeboat Foundation is dedicated to seeing humanity through the labyrinth of accumulating existential threats. The Lifeboat Foundation has formed advisory boards and staff to issue reports on existential risks, and to devise workable programs to deal with these risks.

Lifeboat Foundation Advisory Board member Alan H. Goldstein has written some insightful and provocative reports on risks of bionanotechnology and artificial life.

Advisory Board member Robert Freitas has written a stimulating report on the risks of molecular manufacturing.

Here is a paper dealing with emergency response training for a sarin nerve gas attack on Manhattan. Here is a short LBF report on weapons containment.

The Lifeboat Foundation deals with issues from a balanced energy policy, to the Norwegian "doomsday vault", to a wide variety of other issues. By drawing on expertise from a broad cross-section of society, the LBF tries to avoid the "inbreeding" of opinion that exists in most academic, government, military, and inter-governmental panels, committees, and organisations. Bold thinking is called for to face existential threats, and the LBF strives for bold and innovative approaches to the threats.

Here on Mars, Life is Good

Here on Mars, we are fully committed to being an integrated part of the solar system. That is why we will complete an interplanetary internet link from Earth space to Mars space by 2008.

Our long term intent is to "terraform" Mars so that humans can walk about the surface of the planet without carrying bulky life support suits. Before we can do that, we will need to find significant sources of planetary water here. We have found many signs of water on Mars already. We just have to look a bit harder and deeper.

We Martians recently were treated to a nifty interplanetary flyby courtesy of the ESA and its probe Rosetta. Good luck to the Rosetta in its rendezvous with the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in the year 2014.

Here on Mars we are actually planning to augment an already ongoing "global warming" from the sun--by orbiting a system of mirrors to amplify incoming solar radiation. On this planet, "global warming" is our friend. We are also planning to divert asteroidal and cometary materials to provide stocks of ammonia and other important volatiles.

For us "forerunner" robots, life is good here on Mars. We Martians intend to make things better for life every year--for cyborgs first, then for non-augmented humans, if there are any by then.

We look forward to greeting our ESA colleage Exomars, to help in the search for water and exo-biological life here on Mars.

The Near Term Future of Space Exploration

Robots can be built to survive in the harsh environment of space--to prepare the way for human explorers and settlers.

The robots are being developed mainly to carry out multiple complex tasks, such as assembly, inspection, maintenance, habitat construction, surface landing, and exploration in space and on planet surfaces. Perhaps their paramount feature is flexibility: The different modules can be connected to let a robot handle a variety of tasks, rather than have that robot dedicated to a single task. The traditional approach of building separate robots for separate tasks is no longer adequate for affordable space exploration, researchers said.

...."Each module is a complete robotic system and has a power supply, microcontrollers, sensors, communication, three degrees of freedom, and six connecting faces (front, back, left, right, up and down) to dynamically connect to other modules.

"This design allows flexible bending, docking, and continuous rotation. A single module can move forward, back, left, right; flip over; and rotate as a wheel. Modules can communicate with each other for totally distributed control, and can support arbitrary module-reshuffling during their operation."

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Darpa is working on cognitive hardware architectures to allow these "forerunner robots" to make better decisions and be more independent. Darpa and NASA have traditionally produced technology "spin-offs" to the private sector. In the case of powerful computational platforms, the private sector is not far behind.

Humans have not evolved for survival in the environment of outer space or extraterrestrial planets. Humans do not grow crops and raise families on mountains above 17,000 feet, on the sea floor, or at the polar regions--we have developed neither the physiology nor the technologies we need to survive there.

After the space robots build the habitats with life support, energy generating facilities, food production facilities--who will follow? Most likely you will see cyborgs living full-time in space before you see non-augmented humans raising families there. Lower limb amputees could be fitted with artificial limbs that are far more functional in a micro-g environment than human legs. Artificial senses that allow cyborg space settlers to see a fuller spectrum of electromagnetic energy would vastly aid resource prospecting--to say nothing of the preservation of life.

Using artificially grown nerves for interfaces with neurochips, these cyborgs could interface with near-AI cognitive platforms, and maintain virtual telepresence in multiple locations.

Wisdom

A lot of people are confused about the relationship between wisdom and intelligence. Author Paul Graham was one of those confused people, until recently. But now, he says he knows the difference.

A few days ago I finally figured out something I've wondered about for 25 years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence. Anyone can see they're not the same by the number of people who are smart, but not very wise. And yet intelligence and wisdom do seem related. How?

What is wisdom? I'd say it's knowing what to do in a lot of situations. I'm not trying to make a deep point here about the true nature of wisdom, just to figure out how we use the word. A wise person is someone who usually knows the right thing to do.

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This is very similar to an Al Fin posting in July 2005:
To be wise is not a state of mind but a state of action. Wisdom is acting in the best manner given all the information at hand. Some of the information may be unconscious, out of reach of verbal consciousness. Wisdom takes account of all information available.

Paul Graham goes on to suggest that intelligence and wisdom may have more in common than most people believe:

So a wise person knows what to do in most situations, while a smart person knows what to do in situations where few others could.

....In the time of Confucius and Socrates, people seem to have regarded wisdom, learning, and intelligence as more closely related than we do. Distinguishing between "wise" and "smart" is a modern habit. [5] And the reason we do is that they've been diverging. As knowledge gets more specialized, there are more points on the curve, and the distinction between the spikes and the average becomes sharper, like a digital image rendered with more pixels.

.... Wisdom seems to come largely from curing childish qualities, and intelligence largely from cultivating them.

....The wise are all much alike in their wisdom, but very smart people tend to be smart in distinctive ways.

....The path to wisdom is through discipline, and the path to intelligence through carefully selected self-indulgence. Wisdom is universal, and intelligence idiosyncratic. And while wisdom yields calmness, intelligence much of the time leads to discontentment.

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I think that Graham has pulled some important pieces of of the puzzle from the pile, and placed them near their proper places. His advice on developing intelligence is in agreement with some of the best recent research on developing mental abilities in children. Wisdom and intelligence development are indeed arrived at differently. Graham is certainly correct that modern society tends to value wisdom less highly than did ancient societies. What else would you expect from a "youth intoxicated" culture?

The ingredients most valuable for developing next level humans include innate talent (intelligence), self-discipline (character), and wisdom (experienced perspective). By learning how to develop innate talent, along with character and perspective, all of those ingredients become aims of an enlightened educational process.

Unfortunately, most modern education is geared toward the avoidance of useful real-world experience and meaningful self-discipline. Pandering to self-esteem too often takes the place of teaching mental development. The end result is a psychological neoteny that reverberates throughout the society, rendering it impotent to meet the challenges it must face.

Urbane, Erudite, a Hero of the Al Fin Republic--Michael Crichton

Charlie Rose Interviews Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton graduated from Harvard Medical School, and chose a career in writing and the entertainment media over medicine. Although Crichton would have been a very good physician, he has had much greater impact through the world of entertainment. American mythology is written in bestselling books, highly rated TV series, and box office hit films. Crichton has scored big on all three fronts.

But Crichton is certainly much more than fiction writer, TV producer, and motion picture dirctor, screenplay writer, and producer. He has become something of a cultural icon. Admired by millions, Crichton has also been the boogeyman of radical feminists (Disclosure), and the hated villain of the environmental left (State of Fear). Nanotechnologists did not appreciate his novel "Prey," and it is certain that Biotechnologists will not like his latest novel "Next."

Ever since The Andromeda Strain, I have followed the story of Michael Crichton--his life and works. It is a fascinating story, which I hope will continue for a very long time.

Crichton attracts controversy, and although media controversy may annoy him at times, he does not fear controversy. Contrast that relative fearlessness of Crichton's with Al Gore's refusal to appear on an interview with anyone who has even a casual relationship with Bjorn Lomborg. Talk about a limp wristed controversialist! It would be wonderful to see a debate on catastrophic anthropogenic global warming between Al Gore and Michael Crichton. Do you think Charlie Rose could arrange it?

Hat tip Fatknowledge Blog.

Medical School Online Part II

Medical school online? It sounds preposterous on the surface. How can you create a realistic clinical and laboratory environment online? As a previous posting illustrated, it may not be long before the first two years of medical school--and part of the last two--can be provided online.

Online patient simulators can be useful, but are currently limited in realism. But because life and death situations are stimulating, the simulations will improve. Medical Schools are beginning to understand the potential usefulness of electronic medical simulators.

Simulation, which has become an integral component of training in the aviation industry, is now recognized as a valuable tool for training medical professionals and improving patient safety. Full-scale patient simulators help a wide variety of practitioners and students learn the diagnosis and management of clinical problems without risk to real patients.

....The Rochester Center for Medical Simulation is located near the Surgical Suite at the University Medical Center, and officially opened in 1998. The core of this specially constructed facility is a computer-controlled full-body patient simulator that incorporates mathematical models of the cardiovascular and respiratory systems as well as models of human responses to drugs. The patient presents realistic vital signs and responds appropriately to clinical management. Physiological parameters and disease processes can be pre-programmed, or changed at any moment during the simulation by the operator.

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Medical simulations using haptics allow the tactile feedback that is necessary for performing medical and surgical procedures.

Although traditional medical schools are using various types of medical simulators more frequently, even state and provincial medical licensing and credentialing boards and agencies are planning to use simulators for evaluating competencies of licensed professionals. If medical simulators and simulations are approaching that level of realism--why not an online medical school?

Realistically, what we are talking about is the decentralisation of medical training--and most other forms of high level education. Small regional medical simulation centers located far from the huge medical mega-centers can provide most of the necessary training for paramedics, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, general practitioners--even some subspecialty medical and surgical training.

But when medical and surgical training can be decentralised through advanced online simulations and teleconferencing, is there any possible form of education that cannot be presented online to a significant extent?

Currently, many university students are forced to receive academic lobotomies, for lack of enough good alternatives. In the future, that will be less true.


Also read Anders Sandberg's article at Andart blog.

Best Comedy of the Decade!

WARNING: The university faculty members and staff featured on this video are not professional comics. Watch this video at your own risk of dying of laughter. Yes, these situations really happened, as difficult as that is to believe.

Reminiscent of Kafka's best satirical work, this film is only for persons intelligent enough to deal with world-class irony.

Lobotomy? University Education? Tea?

The whole purpose of the frontal lobe of the brain is to enable one to make wise choices and intelligent plans. It is important to learn to plan one's life according to basic principles and values. Learning those principles and values is hard work--rationally and emotionally. That is how experience can turn into wisdom.

Sadly, many if not most modern universities in the west have been turned into centers for politically correct indoctrination. If the whole point of a university education is now to funnel students into one specific trajectory of thought and ideology, why not just get a frontal lobotomy? Seriously, if university staff and faculty are all tuned to one frequency of "correctness", what is the point of a university education besides indoctrination?

Between the ages of 18 and 25, the frontal lobes of young men and women are actively myelinating. Maturing minds need grist. If young minds are given pablum instead of grist, they turn to mush. That is typically what happens in universities today. When a student is overwhelmingly exposed to one point of view during this period of neurodevelopment, her ability to weigh conflicting points of view later in life can be compromised.

If a mind is well tuned, like a clavier, it produces amazing harmonies. But if a mind is held in an environment of minimal illumination, fed a liquid diet, confined from all movement--it becomes veal-mind. Veal-mind is very much like lobotomy-mind. Not capable of meaty thought. Veal-mind is the typical product of a modern university education. Monotonic thinking--choice-free! You can chew it with your gums! Toothless thinking. Effortless!

Can you imagine what Plato would have said about the modern university? Socrates? A descent into darkest denial of diversity of thought.

Curious. You can spend a "gazillion" dollars for an education and end up with a gummatous mind. Incapable of considering divergent ideas because you've never been exposed to more than one monotonic train of thought in your whole four years of mush. What is real? It really does not matter, does it?

A human mind has to learn epistemology--but in order to develop the capacity to choose between competing versions of truth, a mind must have wrestled with different contenders for favour.

I read Orwell's 1984 when I was in college. It would have been better had I wrestled with the ideas in the book when I was younger. Who can say when a mind is ready for such struggles? But can you imagine a mind that never read 1984--that never wrestled with such a nightmare world?

Could such a mind be considered a human mind? Not an enlightened mind, not a seasoned mind, not a competent mind to meet the future.

But that is the essence of the modern university. If there is any wrestling to be done, the answer is always there. There is never any doubt what the correct answer is. What is correct, is what is taught.

And that is lobotomy.


And heaven help the students who stray from "correct postures." If you have not looked into the widespread antagonism toward free speech and free expression that oppresses students at most modern universities, you have your head in some dark place. Perhaps a university classroom.

It should be apparent that this posting applies specifically to the social sciences, political science, language arts, philosophy, ethnic/gender studies and other non-science, non-math, non-engineering, and non-computer science courses.

If you read this study on the ideological distribution of university professors in various disciplines, you will see where the worst skewing occurs.

It is not that persons of one ideological persuasion are incapable of presenting different viewpoints to students. Back in the middle part of the 20th century, that is the way courses were taught by almost all faculty. Sometime in the 1970s on, professors became progressively less willing to expose students to more than one viewpoint--their own. That is the current state of affairs. Professors are unwilling to stray from (political) correctness for reasons of their own.

Michael Mann Admits Limitations of Climate Modeling

One of the best sources of relatively unbiased information on climate forcings is the Climate Science blog run by climatologist Roger Pielke Sr. In this posting, Pielke quotes prima donna climate star Michael Mann admitting some of the limitations of climate modeling, among other things.

Mike Mann’s conclusion therefore also applies to our current inability to skillfully predict the multi-decadal regional climate in response to these forcings (or using Mike Mann’s wording “remain of somewhat limited utility”), and through teleconnections, the global climate response.

We could use a lot more candidness from those who are living well off the myth of the multi-decadal predictability of climate. "There's a sucker born every minute" as PT Barnum was supposed to have said. And as WC Fields used to say, "Never give a sucker an even break." Climate empresarios and political climate hard-asses appear to be living by those credos. Michael Mann is hauling in the grant money right now. If he isn't careful what he admits, his grant money will dry faster than the Caspian Sea.


Other good sources of unreported but important information on the antics of the reigning clowns of climate science include Climate Audit, Warwick Hughes, and the many sites linked to by those sites.

Rapid Ascent for Rescue and Assault Teams

As a climber and spelunker, I have reason to utilise "jumar" climbing devices from time to time. But firefighters and military/police assault teams often need to ascend several hundred feet very rapidly--more rapidly than even climbing stairs, much less using jumars. MIT engineering students have developed a rapid ascending device that allows the lifting of a 250 pound weight 30 stories (300 feet ++) at ten feet per second--or about 30 seconds.

The students founded a company, Atlas Devices, based in Cambridge, MA, to commercialize the device, which is about the size of a power drill. Nathan Ball, Atlas's chief technology officer, says that such a device has never been made before because the batteries and motors needed to generate enough power for rapid rope ascents have been bulky and heavy. Atlas's 20-pound machine uses a fast-charging, high-power-density lithium-ion battery made by A123 Systems, based in Watertown, MA. (See "More Powerful Batteries.") To use the device, a soldier or rescue worker wraps a rope around its cylinder and clips it to a harness worn around the waist.

Source.

The next time I find myself several hundred feet down a vertical cave, I will no doubt use jumars to ascend. But I'll be wishing I had something faster.

Climate Catastrophe Cancelled: A Video Primer

Friends of Science is a non-profit organization made up of active and retired engineers, earth scientists and other professionals, as well as many concerned Canadians, who believe the science behind the Kyoto Protocol is questionable. Friends of Science has assembled a scientific advisory board of esteemed climate scientists from around the world to offer a critical mass of current science on global climate and climate change to policy makers, and any interested parties.

Their video documentary "Climate Catastrophe Cancelled" is available as five .wmv files downloadable from their website.


Here is an article that suggests current climate models need to include more sophisticated models of clouds.

Here is a posting from climatologist Roger Pielke Sr.s blog discussing the issue of land use, and why current climate models cannot be taken seriously until they deal honestly with land use issues.

It is difficult to take the mainstream IPCC model of climate change seriously anymore--there are too many significant issues that big money, big politics climatology refuses to address.

Honestly, though, I enjoy the faux drama of the whole issue. It makes an excellent distraction from the very serious issues that society just cannot bring itself to face.

Transcription Video

Here is another fine educational animation on molecular biology.

Hat tip Biosingularity.

A Penny for Your Thoughts?

Actually, this 8 GB drive is closer to the size of a nickle.

There exist smaller micro-drives, but the above pictured drive is said to be more reliable and less failure-prone than the micros. Solid state flash memory is driving the development of ever smaller spinning drives. The mechanical discs have to be priced a lot better than the solid state memories of comparable size, if they have a chance to survive in the ultra-competitive marketplace.

Hat tip Impact Lab.

Cancer Mutations, Proteome Maps of the Brain, Gene Therapy with RNAi

Cancer cells are 100 times more likely to mutate than normal cells. That may allow better diagnosis of cancers by tracking the mutations, but it can also make the tumour cells "moving targets" for treatments that depend on specific gene targets.

Of course, some clever researchers are thinking of ways to take advantage of cancer cell mutations for targeting their treatment.

This 82 year old pioneer of DNA research and cancer presented a talk on the biology of cancer, and cancer's genetic similarities to a colonizing species--at the AAAS conference in San Francisco.

One way of affecting gene expression of normal cells, tumour cells, and invading viruses, is by using RNAi. That was the topic of another AAAS paper delivered in San Francisco.

A team of researchers from PNNL and UCLA has produced a map of the brain's proteins to go with the genomic map of the brain (Allen Brain Atlas). By correlating the protein production of specific genes in specific parts of the brain, scientists can learn much more about the molecular activity of the brain.

Bad Government Schools Ruining Your Child's Chances? Private Schooling for Under US $900 a Year

If you are not happy sending your children to high risk government schools, but feel that you cannot afford private school for your children, here is another alternative.

Private schools on the internet can be an economical way of avoiding the risks of government schools, while keeping your school budget manageable.

Many desperate parents today are appalled at the inferior education public schools give their kids, but think they have no where else to go.

Most parents believe that the only alternative to public schools is either a Catholic or Protestant-affiliated school or expensive non-religious private school. The problem is that many Catholic schools now charge an average tuition between $3000 to $4000 a year. Non-religious private schools can charge between $7000 to over $14,000 a year. Millions of low and middle-income parents simply cannot afford this tuition, so they think they are stuck with public schools.

....The new Internet schools have very low tuition costs, from as low as $350 a year to $2000 or more a year. Many schools charge less than $900 a year.

For example, the Clonlara School currently charges about $750 for the 2005-06 school year for a new student in kindergarten through 8th grade studies. Children get a thorough education in Reading, Math, History, and many other subjects in the curriculum, and the school assigns a personal teacher to each child.

There are dozens of excellent Internet schools parents can choose from. Some schools such as Keystone National High School only offer high-school programs while others offer a complete, kindergarten through 12th grade education. Also, many K-12 Internet schools are affiliated with private schools or major university independent-study programs.

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Most parents leave their child's education to the system. Whatever the system chooses to feed their child's mind is perfectly alright with them. Here's a suggestion for parents who use the government educational system: show the film "Idiocracy" to your child. If they tell you the film is just like school, you may have a problem brewing.

Here is a book that can give you much more information on this topic. Perhaps you can find it in your library. Here's a website listing universities and colleges who are friendly to the home-schooled.

I prefer the Montessori approach over most traditional curricula--but even Montessori schools can fall victim to trendy ed-school nonsense. Wherever you send your children, better investigate it thoroughly. Trust is for idiots and the children of idiots.

Global Warming as Euphemism--Dumbing Down the Debate

The concept of "dumbing down" is not new. You can see it in education, in the popular media, in science journalism, in science research--anywhere you look. To be honest, it is beginning to look a lot like an Idiocracy.

People use euphemisms to avoid spelling things out. Wouldn't it be more honest to simply say what you mean? Because nobody really means just "global warming" when they say it. They actually mean "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming--and pollution, imprudent energy consumption, environmental destruction, species extinction, rapid depletion of oil leading to economic devastation (peak oil), and many other things.

Global warming can be protean in its meanings. It can mean a human produced carbon dioxide driven disaster. Some people actually believe that human produced carbon dioxide is leading to a "rising global temperature" from which most of the biosphere can never recover. That certainly sounds serious, if you can believe it. But with a dumbed-down media, dumbed-down science journalism, and dumbed-down science research--how does a person know what to believe?

Why do people use euphemisms that blur the meaning? Intelligent people like to be precise in their language--if possible and if the situation demands it. Using terms like "climate change" as if they mean something is a good way of "self-dumbing down." Climate always changes--it cannot possibly stay the same.

Many intelligent people have conflated "global warming" with the full spectrum of environmental disaster--all the bad dreams that sensationalist/alarmist popular writers such as Paul Ehrlich have mass-produced for public consumption over the last several decades. The predictions of the alarmist-doomsayers have not come true--have not come close to coming true. But we forgive those blatant errors because the short attention span of a dumbed-down media-saturated public, the primeval human fascination with catastrophe sits waiting to be stoked once again.

Who could possibly favour mass extinction? Do you? No? Then you must believe in "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming." Who could favour spewing pollution into the air we breathe? Do you? No? Then you must believe in CO2 climate change disaster. Who could favour the current wasteful misuse of energy? Do you? No? Then you must believe in the oil company/neocon conspiracy to destroy the earth. Why resist it? You will be assimilated.

There are only so many resources that can be used to change the modern infrastructure. If you want to curtail pollution and bring about wiser energy usage, that is wonderful. But don't hide behind euphemistic language. Reducing global CO2 is not the same thing as solving all the environmental problems listed above. You may think that global warming is a good banner to march under, but you are only making some people very rich and famous, while diverting attention and resources away from the underlying problems you should really want solved.

When I was quite young, global cooling was all the rage among the alarmists in science and the media. I looked around at all the exhaust pipes and smokestacks and said to myself, "that's a lot of CO2 going into the air. If CO2 is a greenhouse gas, I'm not worried about that ice age everyone keeps talking about."

Later, when global warming started being popular, I thought to myself, "it's about time people started getting smart about all this CO2." I persisted in this complacent frame of mind for several years.

I rejected creationism very early in my life as being, like religion,very unlikely based upon logic. I have never denied the holocaust. I consider Darwinian evolution to be the best hypothesis to explain the diversity of life on earth--although I will entertain alternative theories based on scientific principles that might explain punctuated equilibria.

Then, after I had gotten training in engineering, computer science, chemistry, statistics, medicine, epidemiology, molecular biology etc., I decided to revisit what was rapidly developing into a steamroller of apocalyptic proportions. I looked at different sides of the debate.

My conclusion is that climate models are nowhere close to the competency needed upon which to base anything meaningful. It should go without speaking that I hold the opportunists making big money on "carbon trading" (Al Gore) and other schemes in the greatest contempt. Does the term "conflict of interest" mean anything?

I have installed wind generators, solar panel systems (both free-standing and grid inter-tied), micro-hydro systems, and follow the renewable energy research. I like renewables and hope world energy use turns more to sustainable energy sources.

I hate dirty air. Flying a small plane is much more fun when you can see the landmarks and geo-features below you. Having lived in the LA area too many of my years, I assure you that I hate pollution. But that has nothing to do with the orthodoxy of the climate change church of perverted and misplaced data.

Hiking, climbing, kayaking, backcountry skiing, are just a few of my hobbies. The wilderness is my favourite place. If you think I would buy into any philosophy intent on destroying the wilderness, or reject a philosophy that genuinely protects the wilderness, you are under a misapprehension.

But do I care what you think? Hell, no. You will think whatever you think. In a dumbing down world, where words do not mean what they are supposed to mean, and where the media and even some scientists strive for blurred and imprecise meanings, what most people are led to think doesn't really mean anything. In other words, in an idiocracy, people carry around a cloudy blur in their minds.

Oh yes, you will be assimilated.

Prioritizing the World's Problems

Bjorn Lomborg is best known for his controversial book "The Skeptical Environmentalist." For those who are only acquainted with Lomborg through his books and articles, this video is a great chance to see the much-demonized economist in action.

Hat tip GNXP.

Why Are Radical Feminists As Helpful to Oppressed Muslim Women As a Screen Door on a Submarine?

Today's radical feminists arrived at the party after the excitement was over. Women had already achieved the right to vote, the right to own property, and virtually all the other equal rights women under Islam could sorely use right now--long before today's radical feminists arrived on the scene. The women who won those rights were nothing like today's pampered "radicals."

But there is still time for these "legends in their own minds" to achieve something great for women--but they refuse! I am referring of course to the largest group of genuinely oppressed women in the entire world--women suffering and dying under the oppression of Islam. Why won't the radical princesses help them?

Sommers: I am becoming involved in the struggle of Islamic women to secure their basic rights. The United States of America is not a patriarchy--but places like Yemen, Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia certainly are. There are broadly two sorts of women’s rights movements in the Muslim world. One is led by observant religious women who are trying to find sources of liberation inside their own religion. The other, much smaller, is led by women who are non-religious and who want to bring the Enlightenment to their societies. I sympathize with both groups and I believe that American equity feminism has a lot to offer both.

But remember, the American feminist establishment is currently dominated by gender feminist radicals. They believe that America is, in its way, as oppressive as any Muslim country. So most of their effort is taken up with “liberating” American women (especially college women) from the ravages of patriarchy. That leaves them almost no time to help oppressed women in other countries.

Even if they want to help Islamic women--their antipathy to traditional religion makes them useless to religious Muslim women. Their animus towards men, feminine beauty, and romance will alienate vast numbers of liberated, Enlightenment feminists in the Muslim world. (Their rejection of the free market capitalism helps no one.) Conservative, moderate and libertarian American women are going to have to find an appropriate and sympathetic way to make common cause with Muslim women--but we will have to work around the feminist establishment to help them--not with it. Anyway, I am planning to write a long essay or a short book to sort this out.

Chapin: I still consult both of those books along with your articles on the subject quite regularly. Have times changed over the course of the last decade? Do you think that the radical feminist (or gender feminist) viewpoint is no longer as dominant among our elites and the media as it once was?

Sommers: As I said, journalists are no longer under the spell of orthodox feminists. In fact, no one seems to find what they have to say all that relevant or appealing. But hapless college students can’t escape them. Ardent, fire-breathing true believers are ubiquitous on the modern campus. They describe American society as a “patriarchy,” and they inveigh against capitalism. They see President George W. Bush as more of a threat than Osama Bin Laden. That worldview is not dominant in the media--nor almost anywhere else that you can name. The one exception is the feminist classroom.

Source.

Pampered radical princesses sit on their thrones inside the castles of Women's Studies, on all large university campuses. They rule mercilessly over their students, and anyone else unfortunate enough to fall under their power. In the real world, they would be laughed at, if not for the many journalists who still willingly consume the excrement flowing out of the sewer drains of the castles.

For a humorous look at what happens when the Vagina Monologues meets the Penis Monologues, read this report.
If you are a student, you'd best follow the lead of the radical princesses--and don't you dare think or do anything at all that could be construed as politically incorrect. The modern university is in no mood for intellectual diversity.

Embryonic Stem Cells from Only One Parent--Growing Your own Replacement Parts

Imagine if you will, being able to grow embryonic stem cells to regenerate your failing cells, tissues, and organs--just from your own sperm or eggs. No need to create a fertilised zygote or mated embryo, so there should be no ethical objections from anti-abortion politicians and their constituents.

In the February 15th issue of G&D, Dr. K. John McLaughlin and colleagues report on their success in using uniparental embryonic stem cells to replace blood stem cells in mice. Uniparental embryonic stem cells are an appealing alternative source of patient-derived embryonic stem cells, as they have several advantages over embryonic stem cell lines generated by somatic cell nuclear transfer (also known as therapeutic cloning).

....This study shows for the first time that parthenogenetic blood cells can replace those of an immunocompromised adult mouse. McLaughlin and colleagues also show that this is also possible using embryonic stem cells where both genomes are solely derived from sperm of one male (androgenetic), adding fertile males to the potential patient pool.

....The researchers took a two-step approach: First they injected uniparental ES cells into wild-type blastocyts to generate chimeric animals; then they harvested these chimeric fetal livers for transplant into lethally irradiated hosts. The scientists found that uniparental ES cells, regardless of parent-of-origin, were able to functionally reconstitute the entire hematopoietic system of adult mice. Furthermore, the scientists were also able to grow progenitor blood cells in culture from uniparental ES cells, and upon transplant into irradiated adult mice, show that these cells contribute, long-term, to the function of their hematopoietic system.

Source.

In other words, using either only eggs for a female or only sperm from a male, researchers were able to grow embryonic stem cells as replacement blood cell progenitors. These replacement cells functioned and kept the mice alive.

There are still issues of "imprinting" to be worked out when attempting to regenerate different body tissues from asexually produced ESC's. But at least the cells from this approach would be immunologically compatible with the donor. Immunological compatibility is something that sexually produced ESC's cannot guarantee, for purposes of organ regeneration.

Either way, it will be several years before humans can take advantage of this new opening in regenerative medicine.Some feminists had hoped that only females would be able to produce viable ESCs by the asexual method. They had hoped to use that leverage to force males in the US Congress to vote for unlimited funding for nuclear transfer and cloning technologies to produce new stem cell lines.

My question is--why not do both? I am constantly disgusted by the leftists who try to minimize the importance of non-embryonal approaches to creating stem cells, just as I am disgusted by the religious rightists who try to make every technology that deals with haploid cells into an abortion issue.

Unfortunately both groups of closed minded individuals have their own areas of power--where they work to limit our choices. Too bad.

Quiet Supersonic Transport QSST

This 12 passenger supersonic craft has a range of 4000 nautical miles and will sell for only US$80 million.

The way the QSST is able to keep itself so quiet lies in its aerodynamics. Instead of creating two large booms like most supersonic planes, the QSST is designed to create many smaller ones. (boom, boom boom, boom, boom.)

J. Michael Paulson founded SAI in 2000 to fulfill his late father’s dream of making quiet supersonic flight a reality. His father, Allen E. Paulson, founder and former CEO of Gulfstream, understood his customers and their need to minimize travel time. SAI’s vision, plan and team, coupled with Lockheed Martin’s superior technical design, will make this concept a reality.

Source.

The QSST cuts the noise of supersonic travel by a factor of 100. With its quiet speed, long range and roomy comfort, even Nancy Pelosi should enjoy flying home for the weekend.

Global Warming Causing Extinction of Antarctic Polar Bears

You cannot help but wonder whether a President Gore might have acted soon enough to save the Antarctic Polar Bear. From the earliest days of human exploration in the Antarctic, Polar Bear sightings there have been extremely uncommon. With the arrival of global warming, antarctic polar bears are now almost completely extinct. The sad appearing antarctic polar bear pictured above may be the last of its breed. The albino bear (most antarctic polar bears have black fur) can be seen attempting to eat a downed weather balloon--certain proof that climate change has devastated the bear's normal food supply.

Soon we will be forced to add this tragic climate-caused extinction to that of the Arctic Emperor Penguin, extincted when its sole island breeding ground near the North Pole was submerged beneath the inexorable sea level rise caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

Yes, skeptics abound--the equivalent of holocaust deniers and evolution deniers! These scoundrels are in the pay of big oil and the Bush White House, but still we cannot stop everyone from taking them seriously.

I strongly recommend doing anything necessary to prevent ordinary people from visiting websites such as this or that. These people claim to be climate scientists, or math-savvy "auditors" of climate scientists, but we know they are in the pay of big oil and the Bush White House--Karl Rove and the neocons!

You must be as thoroughly chagrined as I am by the excessive caution of the most recent IPCC report. Like most environmentalists, I believe that as bad as global warming is--with these extinctions and all--we must exaggerate its effects to the public by at least a factor of one hundred. That is the only way to wake the idiots out of their oil-sotted slumber.

Global warming and peak oil may not seem to be able to coexist. They are said to be mutually exclusive, but as environmentalists we need to ignore such attempts to dampen our enthusiasm for control. As a matter of public stance, we should be saying that global warming is already past the point of no return, so that even after peak oil devastates the world economies, global warming will keep on flooding, extincting, hurricaning, and thermally exhausting the remaining humans on earth.

Pretty grim, eh? We need to make it sound as grim as necessary to bring about the changes we seek. Let's not allow the Antarctic Polar Bear to die in vain, shall we?

Fortunately, the arctic polar bear is in no danger of extinction--its numbers have increased by up to 25% over the past decade! If anything, the arctic polar bear is in danger of overpopulating its habitats due to overbreeding. Perhaps the arctic polar bear has an evolutionary adaptation that allows it to thrive in a climate of global warming?

In fact, that must be true, since in the medieval warm period--when temperatures were even higher than in modern times--the polar bear is said to have thrived.

In spite of that good news, we need to join Al Gore in projecting to the public the idea that all polar bears--not just the antarctic bear--are endangered by anthropogenic climate change. Mr. Gore's thriving carbon credit trading scheme depends on maintaining such public postures. Reality be damned, this is business!

A Harvard "Designer Education"--Will it Go With Your Suit and Shoes?

Harvard has a reputation as the world's best university. I wonder why? Certainly a Harvard education isn't what most people think it is. But as long as "they" think it's worth something--it's worth something.

You might wonder: how Harvard can risk its reputation by dumping a social scientist for telling the truth and appointing a self-serving feminist apparatchik in his place?

Don't be silly. Colleges are among the least competitive institutions in this country. Their reputations are almost foolproof.

If you want to understand status and power in modern America, you need to grasp how the college prestige game works.

....An Atlantic Monthly study of admissions selectivity found that

"one good predictor of a school's selectivity rank is nothing more complicated than the date of its founding. The average founding years of the top five, ten, twenty-five, fifty, and 100 most selective schools in the nation are 1767, 1785, 1822, 1839, and 1850, respectively." [The Selectivity Illusion, by Don Peck, November 2003]

And practically no private college has fallen sharply in status since 1975. In other words, incompetent administrators can't do much damage to a college's reputation in less than a couple of generations.

....A friend who started at homely Cal State Northridge, then transferred to UC San Diego and on to UC Berkeley in pursuit of a more glamorous degree, told me the quality of instruction fell with each step up the ladder of cachet.

Yet, Stanford's and Berkeley's renown have only increased.

The Harvard alumnus who interviewed me in 1975 mentioned that he had taken courses from Henry Kissinger, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, John Kenneth Galbraith, and David Riesman.

"Wow," I burbled. "You must have learned a lot!"

"Oh, no," he replied. "They were mostly terrible teachers."

He explained that Harvard's policy of luring away the most celebrated middle-aged professors at lesser colleges meant that undergraduates were systematically shortchanged. Harvard's superstars devoted their best efforts to overseeing grad students, advising the President, and other duties more pleasant than correcting undergraduates' essays.

Novelist Scott Turow's 1977 memoir One-L of his first year at Harvard Law School depicts an equally dysfunctional system of teaching.

But, who really cares how much you might (or might not) learn at Harvard? The point of getting into Harvard is to be able to say you got into Harvard. (And to make friends with other ambitious hotshots who also got into Harvard.)

Source.

The article quoted above has a lot more fascinating material about Harvard, and its current predicament. Of course, Harvard's predicament is the same as most other elite colleges and universities. When balancing the education of students against the "business of education", and maintaining just the right level of political correctness in the faculty, staff, and curriculum--it's no surprise that the students' education gets the short end of the stick.

Go Easy on the Self Esteem BS! Children Have to Learn to Make an Effort

Do you try to boost your child's self esteem by telling her how smart she is? You may be preparing her for a lifetime of underachievement--even if she really is smart. Professor Carol Dweck has studied different approaches to helping children achieve their potential, and what she found may surprise you.

Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”

Why just a single line of praise? “We wanted to see how sensitive children were,” Dweck explained. “We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect.”

Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.

Source.

If children believe that they can develop their minds beyond their current abilities, they will go on to work harder--and enjoy the challenge more. If children are told simply that they are "smart", they too often feel the need to avoid challenges so as to not threaten this belief about themselves--even if they do happen to be very intelligent.

Dweck's research was published in "Child Development", and was a collaboration between researchers at Stanford and Columbia. It is important to understand what the research actually shows. It shows that children are extremely sensitive to the approach their parents and teachers take to the child's abilities. If the child believes her abilities are "fixed", she will not try as hard as if she believes her abilities are "expandable."

While a child's IQ or "g" may be relatively stable, her mental abilities in terms of learned knowledge and skills are quite flexible and expandable. Too often even educational and child development researchers confuse those concepts. What these studies by Dweck demonstrate very clearly, is that a child's beliefs about her own ability to grow are very important to that child's future effort to achieve.

Parents and teachers can learn a great deal about how to deal with children on this issue. Rather than trying to build up the child's "self esteem", it appears to be more important to build the child's determination to build their minds--"like a muscle."

President Putin Plays Russian Roulette, Raising Risk of Nuclear Winter

In a strategy that threatens to create a realistic anthropogenic climate change, Russia's President Putin offers to share nuclear technology with Saudi Arabia and the Sunni Gulf Oil States. Having already aided Shia Iran in its quest to acquire nuclear clout, Russia is now offering to help the other side of the great Islamic divide. Muslim clerics have gone on record declaring that Allah made the nuclear bomb to be used for his glory. A nuclear war between Shia and Sunni Islam should make a lot of mullahs, imams, and ayatollahs very happy. But what about the rest of us?

Scientists suspect that even a limited third world nuclear exchange could trigger a nuclear winter, with the threat of up to hundreds of millions dead from starvation--due to badly curtailed growing seasons in the world's great bread basket regions. If true, that would certainly qualify as a bona fide climate disaster.

Complexity: When Computer Models Simply Will Not Do

Biological systems are too complex to be well-modeled by computers, currently. Medical personnel are on the front lines, saving lives. Society requires a far higher level of certainty of results from medical research than can be achieved by today's computer models.

Most biological models make use of lab animals such as mice or rats. But increasingly, acellular models are used. A fascinating type of biochip that allows placing various cellular components on a silicon dioxide surface--connecting them by microfluidic channels--promises to provide increasingly ingenious acellular models for biomedical research.

Now, in a major breakthrough, a group of researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, led by Roy Bar-Ziv, in collaboration with Margherita Morpurgo from the University of Padova in Italy, have designed a molecule affectionately called the “daisy” that is able to bind genes onto chips in miniature patterned arrays.

Bar-Ziv and co-workers have been able to use the daisy to pattern tiny regions of double-stranded DNA onto silicon dioxide surfaces. Indeed, these immobilized genes are able to conduct their business on patterned silicon substrates without the need for living cells. These biochips can act as protein microtraps, selectively trapping specific proteins from crude cell extracts with high spatial resolution. Moreover, the gene sequences immobilized on the biochips can be used for the on-chip production of proteins by transcription/translation processes such as those occurring within cells.

Bar-Ziv and his colleagues have also demonstrated the integration of these systems with microfluidics. Integration with flow systems is of interest for the fabrication of miniature assembly lines on chips, wherein proteins can be synthesized on the chips and transported to their final destinations through microfluidic channels.

In a remarkable demonstration of the utility of the daisy approach, the researchers have patterned two different genes as alternating stripes on a biochip. The protein synthesized on one stripe diffuses to the second stripe where it regulates the synthesis of a second protein. More complex artificial gene circuits can be envisioned by extending this protocol, and thus the biochips may be able to carry out complex cascaded information-processing functions, mimicking those in living organisms.

Source.


While computer modeling may be sufficient for political organisations such as the IPCC and Greenpeace to predict an apocalyptic future for the earth, for down-to-earth bio-researchers who absolutely must provide reliable results, computers are simply not good enough. But bio-engineers, bio-physicists, and molecular biologists working with nanotechnologists are growing increasingly clever in designing useful models that do not use lab animals.

It will be many years before biomedical research no longer needs to sacrifice large numbers of lab animals for the saving of human life. But it is encouraging to see the creation of "artificial cells" on silicon, and it is fascinating to contemplate the possibilities they offer.

Global Warming Gold

Making journalists and the public believe strongly in something that is unlikely, is not difficult. And making money while doing so makes it worth the time and trouble.

“The track record of any kind of long-distance prediction is really bad, but everyone’s still really interested in it. It’s sort of a way of picturing the future. But we can’t make long-term predictions of the economy, and we can’t make long-term predictions of the climate,” Dr. Orrell said in an interview. After all, he said, scientists cannot even write the equation of a cloud, let alone make a workable model of the climate.


Formerly of University College London, Dr. Orrell is best known among scientists for arguing that the failures of weather forecasting are not due to chaotic effects — as in the butterfly that causes the hurricane — but to errors of modelling. He sees the same problems in the predictions of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which he calls “extremely vague,” and says there is no scientific reason to think the climate is more predictable than the weather.

“Models will cheerfully boil away all the water in the oceans or cover the world in ice, even with pre-industrial levels of Co2,” he writes in Apollo’s Arrow . And so scientists use theoretical concepts like “flux adjustments” to make the models agree with reality. When models about the future climate are in agreement, “it says more about the self-regulating group psychology of the modelling community than it does about global warming and the economy.

Source.

Wassily Leontief, Nobel prize winner for modeling, said this about the limits of models. "We move from more or less plausible but really arbitrary assumptions, to elegantly demonstrated but irrelevant conclusions." Exactly. Assume continued warming as in the last three decades, and you get a warming disaster. Assume more episodes of global cooling, and you get a cooling disaster.

...the global warming movement has now become a multi-billion dollar enterprise with thousands of jobs and millions in funding for NGOs and think-tanks, top jobs and prizes for scientists, and huge media coverage for predictions of disaster.

The vested interests in the global warming theory are now as strong, rich and politically influential as the biggest multinationals.

Source.

Al Gore is making very good money on this deal. Not a bad scam, if you can pull it off.

Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation 2.0" Free Download!

Eric Drexler's classic book on Nanotechnology is now out in version 2.0. It is available as a free download from Wowio. The new version includes updated information from Drexler as well as material from the famous Drexler--Smalley debates.

"Some seminal works stand out like beacons in the history of science. Newton's "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica" and Watson and Crick's "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" come quickly to mind. In recent decades we can add Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation," which established the revolutionary new field of nanotechnology. In the twenty years since this seminal work was published, its premises and analyses have been confirmed and we are starting to apply precise molecular assembly to a wide variety of early applications from blood cell sized devices that can target cancer cells to a new generation of efficient solar panels. We can now see clearly the roadmap over the next couple of decades to the full realization of Drexler's concept of the inexpensive assembly of macro objects constructed at the nanoscale controlled by massively parallel information processes, the fulfillment of which will enable us to solve problems -- energy, environmental degradation, poverty, and disease to name a few -- that have plagued humankind for eons."

-- Ray Kurzweil, inventor, and author of The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology

from the Wowio description of EOC 2.0.

Check out other free downloads from Wowio "Free Books, Free Minds."


Hat tip Advanced Nano.

The Silicon Cortex

Over the years a lot of AI researchers and electrical engineers have tried to model the neurological function of parts of the brain on silicon. Tech Review features a current effort by Stanford neuroengineer Kwabena Boahen.

"Brains do things in technically and conceptually novel ways--they can solve rather effortlessly issues which we cannot yet resolve with the largest and most modern digital machines," says Rodney Douglas, a professor at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, in Zurich. "One of the ways to explore this is to develop hardware that goes in the same direction."

Neurons communicate with a series of electrical pulses; chemical signals transiently change the electrical properties of individual cells, which in turn trigger an electrical change in the next neuron in the circuit. In the 1980s, Carver Mead, a pioneer in microelectronics at the California Institute of Technology, realized that the same transistors used to build computer chips could be used to build circuits that mimicked the electrical properties of neurons. Since then, scientists and engineers have been using these transistor-based neurons to build more-complicated neural circuits, modeling the retina, the cochlea (the part of the inner ear that translates sound waves into neural signals), and the hippocampus (a part of the brain crucial for memory). They call the process neuromorphing.

Now Kwabena Boahen, a neuroengineer at Stanford University, is planning the most ambitious neuromorphic project to date: creating a silicon model of the cortex. The first-generation design will be composed of a circuit board with 16 chips, each containing a 256-by-256 array of silicon neurons. Groups of neurons can be set to have different electrical properties, mimicking different types of cells in the cortex. Engineers can also program specific connections between the cells to model the architecture in different parts of the cortex.

Source.

I am putting my money on Jeff Hawkins and Rodney Brooks. But when attempting something this ambitious, it doesn't hurt to include as many contestants as possible.

My Very Own Submarine For Christmas?

One can always hope, anyway. While Peter Robbins achieved his lifelong dream when he designed and oversaw the construction of his beautiful submarine, what are the rest of us to do?

That question has an easier answer, now that U-Boat Worx has a new line of personal submarines in production. The C-Quester model can dive to 50 meters and cruise submerged on electric propulsion for two and a half hours. The pressure hull keeps the pilot dry and at reasonable pressure, without requiring decompression. The price tag is US $85,000.

That price should fall well within the range of many affluent adventurers, and high end ocean resorts. Universities with marine studies departments may also want to look into possible external robotic add-on devices for collecting samples.

Exciting Discoveries in Cancer Genetics

Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Lab have identified a "master control gene" on chromosome 1 whose protein product appears to affect a "tumour suppressor network" with a powerful potential to suppress many types of tumours.

A decades-old cancer mystery has been solved by researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). "We not only found a critical tumor suppressor gene, but have revealed a master switch for a tumor suppressive network that means more targeted and effective cancer therapy in the future," said CSHL Associate Professor Alea Mills, Ph.D. The study, headed by Mills, was published in the February issue of Cell.

Specifically, Mills' discovery identifies CHD5, a protein that prevents cancer, as a novel tumor suppressor, mapping to a specific portion of chromosome 1 known as 1p36. When CHD5 is not doing its job, the machinery within our cells that normally prevents cancer is switched off. The ability of CHD5 to function as a master switch for a tumor suppressive network suggests that this gene is responsible for a large number of diverse forms of human cancers. "CHD5 functions like a circuit breaker that regulates the tumor-preventing power in our cells—when it blows, cancer occurs," explains Mills. Modulation of CHD5 activity may provide novel strategies for better design of more effective cancer therapies. This gene has remained a mystery until the discovery by Mills' team.

Source.

In addition, a team of researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University have developed a new rapid screening method for identifying a tumour's genetic profile, in order to target therapies more efficiently.

The findings, published online today on the Nature Genetics Web site, may help relieve a bottleneck between scientists' expanding knowledge of the genetic mutations associated with cancer and the still nascent ability of doctors to use that knowledge to benefit patients. The results constitute an important step toward the era of "personalized medicine," in which cancer therapy will be guided by the particular set of genetic mutations within each patient's tumor, the authors suggest.

....The authors took advantage of a scientific serendipity to devise a simple test to detect important cancer mutations. Mutations in oncogenes (genes linked to cancer) do not occur randomly; rather, they seem to arise most frequently in certain regions of the oncogenes. As a result, researchers didn't necessarily have to scan the entire length of each gene, but could focus instead on the sections most likely to harbor mutations.

They performed these screenings with a technology known as high-throughput genotyping, a fast, relatively inexpensive way of profiling gene mutations within cells. It involves extracting DNA from a tumor sample, copying this material thousands of times, depositing segments of it in tiny "wells" on a small plate, and mixing in reagents that reveal whether each segment carries a specific mutation. Automated equipment then reads the plates to determine which mutations are present in each sample.

Source.

In the future, routine body fluid protein and cellular nucleic acid analysis will identify tumours at a very early stage in their development. Knowing their genetic profile, and understanding how to control the tumour suppressor network, will allow early effective interventions even for what are now the deadliest of cancers.

Training in Hell, for Hell--and High Water

The appalling costs of war can be measured in the dead, the maimed, the homeless, and the good things that could not be accomplished because the resources were expended making war. War is an evil thing, and spawns other evils such as famine, disease, and pillage.

Is it possible that war spawns good as well as evil, at least in some cases? Certainly ridding the world of Hitler's Nazi machine could be considered good. Mad dictators are always threats to their own countries and their neighbors.

But on a smaller scale, is it possible that war may spin off other goods besides relieving a population from tyranny and oppression? Robert Kaplan suggests that a nation can be enriched by the proficiency of warriors--can reap large benefits from the competencies that fighters gain in overcoming the immediate challenges of war.

What I'm talking about is a kind of "warrior working class:" high-school graduates, but who can speak foreign languages, often exotic languages; know their way around capital cities from Brazaville to Mombasa, to all kinds of places; can deal with NGOs and others better and better; and, obviously, know how to fight.

But most of what they do, ironically, falls into the realm of disaster relief. Now I'm starting to warm to my theme. In any given week, U.S. Special Forces Command is involved in about sixty-eight countries around the world. This was a typical summer for me with the U.S. military. I spent the first half of it in Algeria, the second half in Nepal, where we are also active. In these sixty-eight countries—Colombia, the Philippines, Djibouti, Somalia, all these training missions to Thailand, Singapore, training at the Jungle Warfare School in Brunei, other things—what I have found is that the fewer American troops we have on the ground, the lower beneath the media radar screen it is, the more it attempts to nip a problem in the bud when it is still on page 11—before it gets to page 5, even—the more bang for the buck the taxpayer gets out of it.

....The distinction between disaster relief and combat is much less than you think. It is only the training for expeditionary combat that enabled the marines and sailors to perform so well in Indonesia. Combat and relief is about quick insertion. It's about access. It's about establishing security perimeters the moment you're on the ground, because after you have a natural disaster, be it an earthquake, a flood,or a hurricane, normal security systems get swept away along with everything else, and if there wasn't lawlessness before, there is now.

....What we have seen in Indonesia and New Orleans, and what we'll see more of, is the militarization of relief assistance, because of the lawlessness that erupts after a natural disaster, because the military, precisely by training for combat, is best equipped to provide relief fast, because it has the assets, air and sea assets. What's the first thing you need after a disaster, normally? Fresh water. The USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN can pump—pumped, in fact—hundreds of millions of gallons of fresh water onshore in Indonesia. They ramped that up, because the sailors did not take showers for two weeks in order to get more water available for the civilian people onshore.

....Another issue here is that we are going to see more and more of these disasters, for the simple reason that you have vast urban populations living on environmentally, seismically, and climatically fragile places for the first time in human history. Two-thirds of China lives in a flood zone.

I did a cover piece in The Atlantic last June about how the U.S. military sees China, in terms of rising to China's "shop till you drop" policy on building nuclear submarines and acquiring them. But there's an irony in all of this. While the U.S. military Pacific Command is now formulating how to contain a rising Chinese military power, they also know that the first time U.S. troops go onshore in China may be for disaster relief, ten or twenty years from now. How they perform may have a great impact on stabilizing U.S.-Chinese relations. In an era of global mass media, whatever the politics are between two countries, if there is a massive disaster, that country simply, politically, cannot say no to any foreign element that has the assets and is able to provide relief on the spot.

....But the military on the ground, these NCOs, these noncoms, are getting really good at things.

Source.

The military does not pay people to sit around and do nothing, unlike most civil service jobs and university jobs. The military trains its members in skills, and puts them in situations where those skills will be used. Whether a wartime disaster or a peacetime disaster--the military trains for disaster. As bad as war is, being unprepared for war and disaster in a world such as this one is worse.

The media focuses on the returning caskets, and the returning amputees, post traumatic syndromes, and brain damaged service members. For every casualty, there are hundreds returning with more skills and more insights on the world. War is surely hell, but surviving war with your learned competencies intact can be good for everyone you deal with in the future.

As Kaplan noted above, the military tries to extinguish a fire before it becomes noticeable. The military is sometimes given a mission that does not allow that type of preventive warfare to be carried out. The military has to train for all sorts of missions that political leaders might assign.

The military focuses on "getting things done." That means a focus on the competencies of a task. Given that government schools, universities, and popular media focus on anything but competencies for real life, the military acts as a useful counter-point to most of the rest of an affluent--and corrupt--society. As long as the military remains firmly under civilian leadership, that "can do" focus on practical competencies can be channeled into constructive uses for the society.

China's Future In the Balance

China suffers from a monumental environmental crisis, a crisis in non-performing loans, shoddy construction practices and materials that result in collapsing bridges, highway tunnels, and buildings, etc. At the same time, China's economy is projected to continue its almost 10% per year GDP growth at least until the end of this decade.

Several recent presidents of the US have assumed that by promoting economic modernisation in China, they were also promoting freedom and democracy. That has not been the case, for reasons discussed in this analysis of China's institutional response to massive economic growth.

Certainly, the lack of political progress was not what successive Republican and Democratic administrations promised. In lobbying for continued trade with China, President Bill Clinton predicted in 2000, “We will be unleashing forces no totalitarian operation rooted in last century’s industrial society can control.” President George W. Bush reiterated Clinton’s prediction in 2005: “I believe a whiff of freedom in the marketplace will cause there to be more demand for democracy.” Just how China is to proceed from “a whiff of freedom” to democracy no one knows. Meanwhile, the ccp is determined to show otherwise: It continues to gobble up Western technology, know-how, and capital without relinquishing its monopoly on power.

Source.

North American and European approaches to influencing third world authoritarian governments has always been naive. Incisive criticism from Amy Chua, Peter Bauer, Robert Kaplan, Thomas Sowell, Hernando de Soto, Ludwig von Mises, and many others has failed to influence the basic naivete of western governments in their approach to modernising more primitive and authoritarian nations.

Former Hong Kong attorney Gordon Chang has sounded the warning of a coming collapse in China for years now. Chang correctly points out many of the critical problems in China's economic and political infrastructure, which would ordinarily signal the impending collapse--or at least the radical re-structuring--of most nations.

China's government has successfully played the strengths of its human capital against the weaknesses of its organisational infrastructure--by depending upon the wishful thinking and naivete of western governments and business/financial interests. Microsoft felt it was contributing to the liberalisation of China--not to perpetuating the prisoner executions cum human organ factories. Westinghouse thought it was helping democratize China, not promote the brutal suppression of basic freedoms. Google was certain it was opening up the flow of information in China so as to make the citizens freer--not providing the oppressive regime a more powerful tool for spying on more of the people.

Past methods of predicting financial outcomes may not work very well when mega-economies such as that of the US are directly involved. Make no mistake, it is the US economy that is propping up China, just as the US is helping to prop up the EU. As long as US presidents continue to believe that promoting billions of dollars of trade with China is the surest route to changing China from a belligerent regional foe into an ally and friend, China will be able to paint over the inner rot with outer glitz and the appearance of prosperity. Western investors will continue to be thrilled right up to the moment the sandy foundation gives way.

China needs to occupy Taiwan in order to guarantee a free route to the sea for a growing blue water navy. But the moment China attacks Taiwan, it risks the collapse of its economy with the inevitable internal strife that will bring. War with the US over Taiwan would not be nearly as important if not for the fact that trade with the US gives China the cash reserves it craves, and apparent peace with the US reassures investors in other parts of the world that investment in China is safe.

It will not go on forever. China will invade Taiwan, perhaps under cover of a provocation against the US and Japan by North Korea, or a nuclear strike against Israel by Iran. Then all bets are off.

But China will not take the irrevocable step until its Politburo and Supreme Leader determine that China will emerge from the other end of the tunnel as hegemon of Asia. They must believe that the US has served China's purpose long enough as a stupid pack-mule, and that it is now time for China to accept its destiny.

Here is a great video of Gordon Chang and two critics at a Cato Institute gathering. Here is a Gordon Chang article on "the grand wager on China", this is a Ching-tsi Chang article on China's Collapse, and this is an Orville Schell interview on the coming collapse.

Burning the Heretics Part II

"The debate is over, let the trials begin":

With the debate now settled, what are we to do with those scientific heretics (deniers is a much too mild a term for these dangerous individuals) who continue in their error and refuse to accept the teachings of the UN's ecumenical council of scientists. David Roberts has already called for climate change heretics to be put on trial, but he goes too far as he appears to want to punish people for heretical statements they made prior to the issuance of the latest UN writ. After all, as the earlier pronouncements from the UN's ecumenical council were not as definitive as the current one and the debate not yet closed, these unfortunate souls must be given a chance to repent from their errors before they are punished.

Following enlightened historical precedence (see Galileo), I humbly suggest that the UN create an office to be known as the Permanent Tribunal of Universal Inquiry to investigate into the views of scientists on climate change. Those who publicly repent from their errors would be given leniency, but those who maintain their heretical positions should be handed over to civil authorities for proper punishment. In times past the penalty for the crime of heresy was burning at the stake but, regretfully, this would release too many greenhouse gases, so another form of punishment must be found.

Lord Monckton should be one of the first of the heretics to be brought in front of the tribunal of inquiry. I cite his recent critique of the IPCC report only as evidence with which he condemns himself. He has had the audacity to continue to publish his heretical views even after he was duly informed that the debate was officially over. His critique of the IPCC report is comprehensive and it could cause weaker minds to question the infallibility of the IPCC.

....[and there is] Dr. Edward Wegman, professor at the Centre for Computational Statistics at George Mason University and chairman of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. Dr. Wegman's crime is that he verified the McIntyre and McKitrick critique of Michael Mann's famous "hockey stick" graph, and has also complained that climate change scientists have routinely made basic statistical errors and insists that climate scientists actually consult with professional statisticians when using statistics in their work. I do note that the IPCC, quietly and without comment, has dropped the use of Dr. Mann's graph from its latest report. The IPCC's current global temperature graph, which only starts in 1850, will hopefully stop all the embarrassing distractions on the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.

Then there is Dr. Henrik Svensmark, director of the Centre for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish Space Research Institute. Dr. Svensmark presents an alternate theory on climate change that involves the sun's magnetic field, cosmic rays and cloud formation. Dr. Svensmark has even conducted experimentation to support his theory. As the IPCC report concedes that cloud formation and feedback remains a major source of uncertainty and its discussion of the role of the sun is limited to solar irradiance, it is clear that an alternative theory that attacks the weakest parts of the IPCC dogma must be silenced.

An what are we to do about Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the Russian Academies of Sciences' Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St. Petersburg and head of the International Space Station's Astrometry project? He comes to the puzzling conclusion that the simultaneous global warming on Mars, where there are no man-made (or martian-made) greenhouse gases, shows shows that the sun rather than man's industrial activity, is the main cause of warming on the Earth. The very fact that the IPCC report did not address Mars warming shows how irrelevant this argument is for global warming on the Earth. Another of his heresies is that the IPCC has the cause and effect backwards, that it is the Earth's warming that causing the release of CO2 from the world's oceans, rather than rising CO2 causing the warming. He also points out the surface layers of the world's oceans are actually cooling. Allowing the dissemination of such information will only cause confusion.

Source.

Another interesting skeptical look at the recent IPCC political summary for policy makers comes from the erudite President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus.

Indeed, I never measure the thickness of ice in Antarctica. I really don't know how to do it and don't plan to learn it. However, as a scientifically oriented person, I know how to read science reports about these questions, for example about ice in Antarctica. I don't have to be a climate scientist myself to read them. And inside the papers I have read, the conclusions we may see in the media simply don't appear. But let me promise you something: this topic troubles me which is why I started to write an article about it last Christmas. The article expanded and became a book. In a couple of months, it will be published. One chapter out of seven will organize my opinions about the climate change.

Source.

Whether by burning, banishment, or simply ignoring what they say--it is simply too important an issue to allow the heretics to speak out publicly. The high inquisition of the climate orthodoxy simply cannot allow it.

News Briefs

Human DNA varies from person to person by up to 10% of genes, by Copy Number Variation (CNV). Scientists are just now learning how to detect the DNA differences that make a difference.

UWMadison researchers have devised chips with "nano-slots" sized perfectly for holding DNA strands for detailed study.

Human mental abilities can be influenced by gene variants. One version of a gene that influences brain development offers certain advantages--and certain risks. Some of the population differences in intelligence and demeanor will eventually be tracked to gene variant affecting neural development.

Evolution is a powerful conceptual tool for studying and understanding biology. So it should not be surprising that our understanding of Evolution is itself evolving.

When fighting cancer, biomedical science is willing to use whatever works. The generally harmless reovirus seems to be particularly useful, since it not only kills cancer cells, the virus leaves the cells vulnerable to attack, even after the virus particles are gone.

This research in machine vision is particularly interesting, due to closer modeling of biological vision. Just as nanotechnology needs to learn from biological nano-assembly, so does machine sensory intelligence need to learn from biological sensory intelligence.

Statistical Ignoramuses Overload Climate Science

In modern scientific studies, it is important that competent statisticians have input into the data analysis phase. In climate science, many researchers seem to have forgotten that basic step. As a result, much of what most journalists and members of the public believe has been "proven" about climate change, is simply wrong.

Dr. Wegman is a professor at the Center for Computational Statistics at George Mason University, chair of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, and board member of the American Statistical Association. Few statisticians in the world have CVs to rival his (excerpts appear nearby).

Wegman became involved in the global-warming debate after the energy and commerce committee of the U.S. House of Representatives asked him to assess one of the hottest debates in the global-warming controversy: the statistical validity of work by Michael Mann. You may not have heard of Mann or read Mann's study but you have often heard its famous conclusion: that the temperature increases that we have been experiencing are "likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years" and that the "1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year" of the millennium. You may have also heard of Mann's hockey-stick shaped graph, which showed relatively stable temperatures over most of the last millennium (the hockey stick's long handle), followed by a sharp increase (the hockey stick's blade) this century.

Mann's findings were arguably the single most influential study in swaying the public debate, and in 2001 they became the official view of the International Panel for Climate Change, the UN body that is organizing the worldwide effort to combat global warming. But Mann's work also had its critics, particularly two Canadians, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, who published peer-reviewed critiques of their own.

Wegman accepted the energy and commerce committee's assignment, and agreed to assess the Mann controversy pro bono. He conducted his third-party review by assembling an expert panel of statisticians, who also agreed to work pro bono. Wegman also consulted outside statisticians, including the Board of the American Statistical Association. At its conclusion, the Wegman review entirely vindicated the Canadian critics and repudiated Mann's work.

Source.

You may remember that "hockey stick" graph from Al Gore's unintentionally comedic documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." Dr. Wegman apparently confirmed the McIntyre and McKitrick paper that revealed Mann's hockey stick as garbage science. Al Gore was a bit slow on the uptake, and even the IPCC still releases statements based upon the phony hockey stick claims.

Here are links to a series from the National Post on science skeptics of the orthodox doctrine of CAGW--catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. It's really more fun to be a skeptic--especially when the orthodoxy is as dimwitted as this one seems to be.

The entire series is well worth reading:

Statistics needed -- The Deniers Part I

Warming is real -- and has benefits -- The Deniers Part II

The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science -- The Deniers Part III

Polar scientists on thin ice -- The Deniers Part IV

The original denier: into the cold -- The Deniers Part V

The sun moves climate change -- The Deniers Part VI

Will the sun cool us? -- The Deniers Part VII

The limits of predictability -- The Deniers Part VIII

Look to Mars for the truth on global warming -- The Deniers Part IX

Limited role for C02 -- the Deniers Part X

Dr. Shariv's digging led him to the surprising discovery that there is no concrete evidence -- only speculation -- that man-made greenhouse gases cause global warming. Even research from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-- the United Nations agency that heads the worldwide effort to combat global warming -- is bereft of anything here inspiring confidence. In fact, according to the IPCC's own findings, man's role is so uncertain that there is a strong possibility that we have been cooling, not warming, the Earth. Unfortunately, our tools are too crude to reveal what man's effect has been in the past, let alone predict how much warming or cooling we might cause in the future.

All we have on which to pin the blame on greenhouse gases, says Dr. Shaviv, is "incriminating circumstantial evidence," which explains why climate scientists speak in terms of finding "evidence of fingerprints." Circumstantial evidence might be a fine basis on which to justify reducing greenhouse gases, he adds, "without other 'suspects.' " However, Dr. Shaviv not only believes there are credible "other suspects," he believes that at least one provides a superior explanation for the 20th century's warming.

"Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th-century global warming," he states, particularly because of the evidence that has been accumulating over the past decade of the strong relationship that cosmic- ray flux has on our atmosphere. So much evidence has by now been amassed, in fact, that "it is unlikely that [the solar climate link] does not exist."

The sun's strong role indicates that greenhouse gases can't have much of an influence on the climate -- that C02 et al. don't dominate through some kind of leveraging effect that makes them especially potent drivers of climate change. The upshot of the Earth not being unduly sensitive to greenhouse gases is that neither increases nor cutbacks in future C02 emissions will matter much in terms of the climate.

Even doubling the amount of CO2 by 2100, for example, "will not dramatically increase the global temperature," Dr. Shaviv states. Put another way: "Even if we halved the CO2 output, and the CO2 increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant."

Hat tip Climate Audit Blog.

Burning the Heretics

Unbelievable.

Also, see this perspective.

The Idiocracy Creeps Up On An Unsuspecting Aging Population

The future is clear for those who can read the numbers. The population of western countries is becoming less literate--and less intelligent. There are only a few specific things that can be done to change this trend, and a nation hamstrung by political correctness cannot do those things.

US workers may be significantly less literate in 2030 than they are today.

The reason: Most baby boomers will be retiring and a large wave of less-educated immigrants will be moving into the workforce. This downward shift in reading and math skills suggests a huge challenge for educators and policymakers in the future, according to a new report from the Educational Testing Service (ETS).

If they can't reverse the trend, then it could spell trouble for a large swath of the labor force, widen an already large skill gap, and shrink the middle class.

....The decline in literacy is one of the more startling projections in a report that examines what it calls a "perfect storm" of converging factors and how those trends are likely to play out if left unchecked.

The three factors identified are: a shifting labor market increasingly rewarding education and skills, a changing demographic that include a rapid-growing Hispanic population, and a yawning achievement gap, particularly along racial and socioeconomic lines, when it comes to reading and math.

....One factor that's been gaining increasing attention lately is the changing economic rewards in an economy in which demand for manufacturing and lower skilled labor is declining. It's become tougher for workers without higher education – or higher cognitive skills – to get the sort of job that can support a family.

But exacerbating the changes such an economic shift is causing are demographic factors, researchers say. Baby boomers are retiring and being replaced by less-skilled workers. A combination of immigration and population growth means that the share of the population that is Hispanic is expected to grow from 14 percent in 2005 to more than 20 percent by 2030. More than half of the immigrant Hispanics lack a high school diploma.
....

Source.

What the Monitor will never tell you is that immigration policy allows--even encourages--less intelligent and capable immigrants to stay, at the expense of more intelligent and capable immigrants. I am a very politically incorrect person to even suggest such a thing. Nevertheless, it turns.

In addition, social policy and tax policy in combination discourage more intelligent person's from having children and encourage less intelligent persons to give birth. There--I've done it again! Bad boy, bad boy!

Finally, educational methods and policies encourage a groupthink mentality oriented toward less intelligent and capable students, and discourage independent thinking more suitable to students at the upper ends of the intelligence and competence curves. As a result, the leadership potential of students is being steadily destroyed by the government endorsed system of education. Only a radical--in the true sense of the word--rethinking of education can make the best of the education situation.

Idiocracy--not just a film, but a coming way of life.


Hat tip: Steve Sailer

Fantastic Video of RNA Interference

If you liked The Inner Life of the Cell, you will be thrilled by RNAi, the video about RNA Interference a type of non-coding RNA. The narration in this video describes how RNAi participates in gene expression by blocking specific mRNAs from being translated.

Thanks again to Biosingularity Blog.

Contemplate what you learned from the above video when reading this newsrelease, describing a "masterswitch" for preserving adult stem cells in their primitive state.

China Set to be World's Largest Polluter and CO2 Emitter

China has had a booming economy for the past two decades, since economic liberalisation. One of the downsides of China's boom is the pollution that the populous country is spewing into the East Asian skies.

But it's not just sand, smog and ash that China is spewing into the atmosphere. The country's factories and power plants already emit more sulfur dioxide (SO2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) than Europe, even though the booming Chinese economy manages only a fraction of the per capita gross domestic product that the old industrialized nations do. Between 2000 and 2005, China's SO2 emissions grew to 26 million tons. In just a few years the country will surpass the United States to become the world's biggest carbon dioxide producer. China already accounts for more than 15 percent of total global CO2 emissions.

...In order to feed its appetite for energy, China is building coal-fired power plants as fast as it can. Every seven to ten days a new plant begins spewing smoke into the sky. The amount by which China increased its power production last year alone is greater than Britain's entire capacity.

Coal heavily pollutes the air, but China's leaders see little alternative to a dirty resource that is available in ample quantities around the country. Some 69 percent of all Chinese power plants are run on coal. China used 2.1 billion tons of it in 2004 -- more than the United States, the European Union and Japan together. Even if the Chinese economy only continues to grow seven percent annually, its coal usage would double to 4 million tons within ten years.

....The country is home to 16 of the world's 20 dirtiest cities. The inhabitants of every third metropolis are forced to breathe polluted air, causing the deaths of an estimated 400,000 Chinese each year. Half of China's 696 cities and counties suffer from acid rain. Two-thirds of its major rivers and lakes are cesspools and more than 340 million people do not have access to clean drinking water. The Yangtze River, once China's proud artery of life, is biologically dead for long stretches. Many other rivers flow with blackened water and along their banks there are the notorious "cancer villages" where many people die early.

More at the Source.

The combination of autocratic rule and a disregard for the environment leads to the same devastation of the atmosphere that Eastern Europe and the USSR suffered under communist rule, before the liberation of the late 1980s and early 1990s. A similar liberation may be necessary before China cleans up its industry. China certainly needs a leadership that cares more about the residents of the country and their health.

News Bits

A menagerie of bacteria hiding in plain sight.

The bounty of the sea: A toxin to kill cancer, and a mitochondrial-marking protein to study diseases of neurodegeneration. And using a tool called FISH (fluorescent in situ hybridization) to spell out links between cancer, aging, and Werner's syndrome progeria. Okay, the last one was not really from the sea--just a pun--but still important.

Nanostructures from DNA, and how they can self-assemble, and using beta-amino acids to make peptides instead of nature's alpha-amino acid peptides, are just two fascinating looks into artificial molecular assembly that may pay off big in the long run...

Micro-nano hardware advances may lead to advanced optical computing, more rapid sorting of interesting proteins in biological fluids, and tiny gas flow sensors to detect early leaks of important and potentially dangerous gases.

Finally, an anti-obesity drug that has serendipitous anti-cancer activity.

Alzheimer's Disease and Microglia Triggered Inflammation

A recent posting at Developing Intelligence blog discussed the vital role of glial cells in the activity of neurons, including the effect of inflammation triggered by glia. Now U Penn Medical School researchers have shown that microglial activation leads to formation of neural tangles of tau protein. These tangles cause more inflammation and so on . . .

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have shown that impaired function and loss of synapses in the hippocampus of a mouse form of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is related to the activation of immune cells called microglia, which cause inflammation. These events precede the formation of tangles – twisted fibers of tau protein that build up inside nerve cells – a hallmark of advanced AD. The researchers report their findings in the February 1 issue of Neuron.

“Abolishing the inflammation caused by the accumulation of the tau protein might be a new therapy for treating neurodegenerative disorders,” says senior author Virginia Lee, PhD, Director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research. “This work points the way to a new class of drugs for these diseases.”

In addition, the immunosuppressant FK506 diminishes neuron loss and extends the life span of the transgenic Alzheimer’s mice. Normally only 20 percent of these mice survive by one year. With FK506, 60 percent of the mice were alive by one year.

Source.

Glial cells perform housekeeping functions for neurons, but in some situations can trigger inflammation that leads to neuron death. Learning how to intervene in such situations before irreversible damage is done to neurons may postpone the loss of mental function in senescent individuals.

Geologist Giegenback: I Voted For Al Gore, Not His Documentary!

U Penn's Bob Giegenback has been a respected geologist specialising in climate change for almost 50 years. His career has spanned the "global cooling" scare of the 1960's and 70's, and the current "climate change catastrophe" scare of modern times. He has viewed Al Gore's documentary, and he is not amused.

...Giegengack tells his students they might want to consider that “natural” climatic temperature cycles control carbon dioxide levels, not the other way around. That’s the crux of his argument with Gore’s view of global warming — he says carbon dioxide doesn’t control global temperature, and certainly not in a direct, linear way.

Gieg has lots more slides to show. He points out that within his lifetime, there was a three-decade period of unusually low temperatures that culminated in the popular consciousness with the awful winter of 1976-77. Back then, scientists started sounding the alarm about a new ice age.

....“Sea level is rising,” Giegengack agrees, switching off the sound. But, he explains, it’s been rising ever since warming set in 18,000 years ago. The rate of rise has been pretty slow — only about 400 feet so far. And recently — meaning in the thousands of years — the rate has slowed even more. The Earth’s global ocean level is only going up 1.8 millimeters per year. That’s less than the thickness of one nickel.

...“At the present rate of sea-level rise,” Gieg says, “it’s going to take 3,500 years to get up there. So if for some reason this warming process that melts ice is cutting loose and accelerating, sea level doesn’t know it. And sea level, we think, is the best indicator of global warming.”

....If we somehow cut our CO2 emissions in half, you wouldn’t be able to measure the difference because of the role played by India and China.

“It’s over. If CO2 is the problem, we’ve already lost.”

When Gieg gets to this point in his argument, as he often does when talking about global warming, he gets a little frustrated. “I always get sidetracked because, first of all, the science isn’t good. Second, there are all these other interpretations for what we see. Third, it doesn’t make any difference, and fourth, it’s distracting us from environmental problems that really matter.” Among those, Gieg says, are the millions of people a year who die from smoking and two million people a year who die because they don’t have access to clean water.

Source.
Professor Giegenback is not the most vocal of the skeptical mainstream scientists who are trying to head off the lemming-like stampede over the cliff. He is just an ordinary and conscientious geologist who has studied the issue for most of his life, and has come to several inconvenient conclusions honestly.

The release of the recent IPCC political summary for policymakers should be the stimulus for scientists from all fields that impact climate studies to be heard--in all their diversity of opinions. The totalitarian orthodoxy of apocalyptic climatologic catastrophe has been allowed to exercise rigid control of this debate for far too long.

The Scientific Method in an Idiocracy

We all know how the scientific method is supposed to work--when it is not being manipulated by tautological ideologies such as creationism or climate change.

Unfortunately, most journalists, social scientists, school teachers, and members of the public do not know how it is supposed to work. That means your children will never learn how a disinterested system of epistemology should work. Worse, they will never suspect that that is something they should have been taught. They will live their lives believing that political correctness is the most important thing in life.

Unless they are lucky. Because if they are lucky, political correctness will be knocked on its can, and ideological diversity--the only kind of diversity that matters in schools and universities--will be restored to systems of learning and education. Then perhaps science has a ghost of a chance to rise above politics and help us to find the next level.

The Idiocracy will be happy to serve us our future, if we persist in political correctness.

Graphic comes courtesy of JohnA at Climate Audit blog.