Canada's Changing Ethnic Makeup

Canada CensusCanada is an important part of the Anglosphere. Rich in natural resources and human resources, Canada should have a strong 21st century to look forward to. But Canada's population is increasing slowly -- and mainly due to immigration. If not for immigration, Canada's population future would be as bleak as Japan's or Russia's.

Canada CensusCanada's visible minorities comprise less than 20% of the total population -- compared to the US where visible minorities comprise just over 40% of the total population.

Ethnic origin	%	Population	Largest reported ethnic identity
Canadian	32.22%	&0000000010066290.00000010,066,290	Quebec ( 66.2% )
English	21.03%	&0000000006570015.0000006,570,015	Newfoundland and Labrador ( 97.7% )
French	18.82%	&0000000004941210.0000004,941,210	New Brunswick ( 32.6% )
Scottish	15.11%	&0000000004719850.0000004,719,850	Nova Scotia ( 29.3% )
Irish	13.94%	&0000000004354155.0000004,354,155	Nova Scotia ( 19.9% )
German	10.18%	&0000000003179425.0000003,179,425	Saskatchewan ( 30.0% )
Italian	4.63%	&0000000001445335.0000001,445,335	Ontario ( 7.0% )
Chinese	4.31%	&0000000001346510.0000001,346,510	British Columbia ( 10.6% )
North American Indian	4.01%	&0000000001253615.0000001,253,615	Nunavut ( 83.6% )
Ukrainian	3.87%	&0000000001209085.0000001,209,085	Alberta ( 10.2% )
Dutch (Netherlands)	3.31%	&0000000001035965.0000001,035,965	British Columbia ( 5.3% )
Polish	3.15%	&0000000000984565.000000984,565
Indian	3.08%	&0000000000962665.000000962,665	British Columbia ( 6.4%)
Russian	1.60%	&0000000000500600.000000500,600	British Columbia ( 4.2%)
Welsh	1.41%	&0000000000440965.000000440,965
Filipino	1.40%	&0000000000436190.000000436,190
Norwegian	1.38%	&0000000000432515.000000432,515
Portuguese	1.32%	&0000000000410850.000000410,850
Métis	1.31%	&0000000000409065.000000409,065
Swedish	1.07%	&0000000000334765.000000334,765
Latin American	1.04%	&0000000000315510.000000315,510	British Columbia (3.2%)
Hungarian	1.01%	&0000000000315510.000000315,510	Ontario
Jewish	1.01%	&Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character ","Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character ","Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character ","Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character ","Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character ","Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character ","Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character ","Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character ","Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character ","Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character ","Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character ","Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character ","Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character ","Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character ","Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character ","Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character ",".Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character ","315,510	Template:Country data Bathurst St., Toronto

Wikipedia

Year	1996	1996%	2001	2001%	2006	2006%
South Asian	670,590	2.35%	917,070	3.09%	1,233,275	4.00%
Chinese	860,150	3.02%	1,029,395	3.47%	1,168,485	3.70%
Black	573,860	2.01%	662,215	2.23%	783,795	2.50%
Filipino	234,195	0.82%	308,575	1.04%	389,550	1.30%
Latin American	176,970	0.62%			304,245	1.00%
Arab					265,550	0.90%
Southeast Asian	172,765	0.61%			231,425	0.70%
West Asian					156,700	0.50%
Korean	64,835	0.23%			138,425	0.40%
Japanese	68,135	0.24%			60,415	0.20%
Multiple visible minorities	61,575	0.22%			104,215	0.30%
Visible minority, n.i.e.	69,745	0.24%			71,420	0.20%
Total visible minority population	3,197,480	11.21%	3,983,845	13.44%	5,068,095	16.20%
Non-Visible Minority Population	25,330,645	88.79%	25,655,185	86.56%	26,172,935	83.78%
Total Population	28,528,125	100.00%	29,639,030	100.00%	31,241,030	100.00%

Wikipedia

The makeup of Canadian visible minorities is distinctly different from that of the US. Most of Canadian visible minority populations come from Asia -- East and South Asia, primarily, with a growing number of Southeast Asians, including Filipinos. Blacks are only 2.5% of the population and Latinos are only 1% of the Canadian population. Canadian native americans make up almost 4% of the population.

The total fertility rate of Canada has declined to around 1.5, well under replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. As you can see below, Canada, Europe, and Japan have comparable low TFRs.

The conclusion: Canada needs immigrants to avoid a Japan-style population implosion. Canada is unlikely to feel as much of the negative effects of immigration as the US or Europe for at least 2 reasons:

1. Canada is starting with a base of greater than 80% non-minority population.
2. More of Canada's immigrants are coming from East Asia and South Asia, where crime rates are lower than in Mexico and Africa -- two large sources of immigrants to the US and Europe, respectively.
It is hoped that more Canadian immigrants will find a way to assimilate successfully into Canadian society than European immigrants typically have done.

If not for the cold winters in Canada, it would probably see much higher rates of immigration. Even so, Canada is a much stronger immigration draw than Russia, which has comparable winters.

Small Children as Demographic Crystal Balls

Source_via_GuyWhite
You can see much of the future demographics of a place by noting which people are bothering to have babies, and raise kids. Then, if you look at how many of these children are born into a fatherless poverty, you may perceive even more of the future.

Table 2
	Births to Teenage Mothers	Births to Unwed Mothers
White	10.9%	16.9%
Asian	5.7%	5%(chinese only)
Black	23.1%	66.7%
Hispanic	16.8%	36.7%

Source

Throughout history, only a few cultures have succeeded in the task of self-government for longer than a few decades. Most "nations" of the third world dissolve in violent overthrow, civil war, bloody insurrection, or all of the above. There are reasons why some demographic groups are more successful, historically, at governing themselves than are other demographic groups. It is unlikely in the extreme, that a successful culture could substitute another ethnic group for itself, and expect to achieve the same levels of success. Cultures and societies evolve over centuries. They cannot be successfully re-constructed in decades.

Most Common Ancestries in US
Europe, North America, and Oceania are engaged in a grand experiment, to determine whether the application of high enough dosages of political correctness can make such large-scale demographic substitution successful -- in this "more enlightened and progressive age."

Heh.

The Wiki Map above demonstrates that the US Southwest is dominated by those of Mexican ancestry (brown), the US Midwest and Northwest are dominated by those of German ancestry (blue), the US South and South Atlantic contains a high number of persons of African ancestry (light blue), purple is used for states with high levels of English ancestry, green represents high Irish ancestry, and red represents high levels of Scotch-Irish, Welsh, English, Scottish, and Irish.

Why Does Sarah Palin Drive Stupid People Crazy?

Evidently, there is something about Palin that drives her critics crazy. But if they can pause for breath, they might take a lesson from history as to the wisdom of mocking a political figure for a supposed lack of intelligence. The caricature of Eisenhower as Donald Duck did not stop him from twice defeating, in Electoral College landslides, the cerebral Adlai Stevenson, the darling of the intellectual crowd. The Georgetown set's view of Reagan as "an amiable dunce" did not keep voters from giving the Gipper landslide wins over Jimmy Carter, a nuclear engineer known for his propensity to micromanage, in 1980, and Walter Mondale in 1984. And Bush won re-election over John Kerry in 2004 despite being pilloried as Cheney's puppet. NationalJournal _

Although I virtually never think about Sarah Palin without being prompted, I cannot help but notice the high level of criticism that Palin continues to receive -- from all directions. Whenever I trouble myself to look deeply into the criticisms, there is one thing that stands out regardless of the ideological standpoint of the critic: lack of substance, sometimes referred to as stupidity. Palin's critics are virtually always missing the crux of their own arguments -- and getting it wrong. Some of these critics were born stupid and will always be stupid. But a lot of the brighter critics who go bonkers on Palin are clearly letting their emotions get in the way of their thinking. And others -- on both left and right -- who go insane at the mention of Sarah-cuda simply lack enough insight into their own reflexive bigotry to ever penetrate to the essence. Still others -- such as the matronly right-wing intellectuals who sputter and spit at the thought of the former Alaska governor, are simply jealous of the cold-weather huntress' ability to seemingly live a life full of challenges and pain -- and still focus on the simple pleasures of children, family, and a huge, beautiful outdoors.

Yep. Sarah drives them to the brink of stark, raving madness.

Sarah Palin irritates, agitates, angers and annoys some of the self-appointed finest minds of America to a point long past reason. She has been the target, since the night she walked on stage to speak at a Republican convention, of some of the most savage commentary that the great republic has seen since Richard Nixon.

The great difference, of course, is that Nixon earned some of his venom. He practised political hardball. He was a remorseless partisan with an appetite for political vengeance

And he received some he did not earn, by virtue of a personality -- secretive, bitter even in success, humourless, cold and anxious -- that made him, fairly or otherwise, a target for the cruellest and most unrelenting attacks. But in any event, he was the President. He had been in politics for a full generation. For those determined to hate him, there was a large field to till.

But Palin is not the president, nor has she been. She's been a presence in American national politics for only about two years. She is a cheerful human being, with a large family, an apparently easy-going and normal husband. She has a personality that would sell corn flakes -- if not grow them. What career she had in Alaska, she earned. She's at home indoors and out, radiates human warmth, seems to have some balance about herself, and has displayed over the last year or so a considerable fortitude under an avalanche of mockery and hatred. For the final stroke of this cameo I should note she is smart -- smarter than 90% of the people who make a point of how rock-stupid they know she is.

She, by rights, should be queen of the feminists. All that self-reliance, her takeover of Alaska politics, the rocket ride to a Vice-Presidential ticket, a public career she blends with her family life-- these seem gold-standard credentials for a real feminist. But official feminism derides herewith an unspeakable intensity. Her early critics were not beyond the inane claim that she was somehow not really a woman. _NationalPost

I am very unlikely to ever vote for Sarah Palin as a presidential candidate -- unless she is running against an incompetent clown such as Barack Obama. I am certain to never contribute funds to a Palin campaign. As I said, I do not think about Palin unless someone else brings her up in a particularly cloddish manner. Then, it is the critic that appears the moron, not Palin.

Understanding The Sarah Palin Effect in National Post

Palin is no Puppet in National Journal

US Lower 48 Shale Gas Maps

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/rpd/shale_gas.jpg
Above you see the US Energy Information Administration's map for shale gas plays in the 48 contiguous US States.

Below, you see T. Boone Pickens' map for shale plays. The circled areas are thought to be particularly rich.

Shale gas and coal bed gas discoveries have shaken international energy markets. It is likely that the shaking has just begun.

Cross-posted to Al Fin Energy

China's Buildings Chip, Crack, Collapse Too Soon

Compared to the less than 30-year average life expectancy of China’s buildings, the average life span of a building in Britain is capable of 132 years and in the United States it is 74 years.

...Alarm was raised several times in 2009 over the poor quality of the country's buildings.

In October of that year, a six-story apartment block collapsed in Central China's Wuhan, Hubei province. It was later found to have been held together by "steel supports as thin as iron wires", according to the subsequent investigation.

Earlier, in June 2009 a 13-floor building in the Lotus Riverside residential complex in Shanghai toppled, killing one worker. An investigation revealed the building's foundations had been undermined by a combination of soil piled 10 m high on one side of the structure and the digging of a 4.6-m underground car garage on the other.

One month later, a construction pit at the site of a planned building in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, collapsed and is believed to have caused massive cracks on nearby residential buildings. _ChinaDaily_via_ImpactLab

China is a massive consumer of the world's materials, energies, and resources, but is China putting the world's resources to good use? We know that China pollutes the world's skies, oceans, and land masses. But is it for a good cause?

"Every year, new buildings in China total up to 2 billion square meters and use up 40 percent of the world's cement and steel, but our buildings can only stand 25 to 30 years on average," Qiu Baoxing, vice-minister of housing and urban-rural development, said at a recent international forum on green and energy-efficient building.

This means the average life span of China's residential buildings is shorter than their intended life span of 50 years at the blueprint stage. As a result, property developers have been urged to extend the median life span of buildings.

Industry sources have added to the mix by stating that the per unit energy consumption of China's short- lived residential buildings is two or three times that of residential buildings in developed nations.

In China, construction waste comprises 30 to 40 percent of the total urban waste.
The construction of a 10,000-sq-m building will create 500 to 600 tons of waste, while the demolition of a 10,000-sq-m old building will create 7,000 to 12,000 tons of waste, according to industrial data.

Space from building demolition in China annually constitutes about 40 percent of the total construction area. _ChinaDaily

Eventually, one must ask the question: "What is the point of it all?" Why is China devouring so much of the world's resources to build a huge volume of construction, when it is all going to be torn down -- or will fall down on its own -- within 30 years? Particularly when most of this new space is unoccupied, and may well never be occupied before collapsing or being demo'd.

For all of those who insist that China is the place to invest one's assets, perhaps it is time to begin to pay attention to what is actually going on. It is not always clear who is cooking China's books, only that they use too much MSG, pork fat, and bubble gum.

Originally published at abu al-fin

US Incandescents Phased Out: GE's New LED Retrofit

Starting in 2012 and continuing through 2014, standard incandescent light bulbs are going away as a result of U.S. federal lighting efficiency standards:

100-watt bulbs can no longer be made in January 2012;
75-watt bulbs can no longer be made in January 2013; and
60- and 40-watt bulbs can no longer be made in January 2014. _GE_LED

As incandescent light bulbs are phased out by US federal regulations, GE is providing new alternative lighting of different types.

GE has consumers covered each step of the way with alternatives such halogen, CFL and LED bulbs that already meet the new efficiency standards. _GE_LED

Given the proven toxicity of the compact fluorescent bulb components, the new LED retrofit replacements are likely to take off quickly -- despite the price penalty.

GE's Energy Smart LED bulb, expected to go on sale this year or in early 2011, produces the same amount of light as a 40-watt incandescent bulb while only using 9 watts. It lasts 17 years--25 times longer than an equivalent incandescent bulb and three times as long as a standard CFL. The LED bulb won't be cheap, of course. It is expected to cost $40 to $50, which isn't that expensive when the device's lifespan is taken into account, but may still be too pricey for people used to paying a few bucks per bulb. _FastCompany

The lucrative lighting market is due for a revolution. As engineers learn to bring out the potential of LCDs, LEDs, and electroluminescent panels, our walls, ceilings, and windows will soon become much more interesting. Think in terms of mind altering virtual environments. Then let your imagination run wild.

Lunar Lava Tubes: Ready-Made Moon Habitats?

Phenom_via_ImpactLab
Thanks to the discovery of water on the moon, interest in exploration and colonisation of Luna has grown recently. NASA is planning robotic explorations of the moon to better assess Luna's water reserves. Google's $30 Million Lunar X Prize contest is still on, and is helping to bring international competition to the forefront.

Now, Indian scientists have discovered lunar lava tubes which may provide an opening for large underground human habitats on the moon.

Director of Indian Space Research Organisation's Space Applications Centre based in Ahmedabad, Dr Ranganath R Navalgund said the terrain mapping camera, an Indian instrument on the lunar mission, has found "new types of rocks" and hollow tunnels.

These tubes were formed after the flow of lava from volcanoes, he contended.

"Tubes which are hollow have been found below the surface of the Moon. Such things have also been identified from the Chandrayaan mission ... from terrain mapping camera ... which was our own instrument".... _Phenomenica

Humans will need to provide shielding from harmful space radiation, if they are to live outside Earth's magnetic and atmospheric shields for long periods of time. Underground habitats on Luna are the most logical answer to that problem. Structurally sound lava tubes may lead us into a deeper understanding of lunar composition, point the way to a safer living environment, and give us better access to some of the riches of the moon.

Deep Brain Stimulation Mechanisms in Depression

DBS involves continually delivering high-frequency pulses of weak current to a particular region via stimulators that are surgically inserted into the brain. Although invasive, it works so well for Parkinson's disease and other movement disorders that it is now mainstream, with tens of thousands of patients implanted.

In the last decade, researchers have tested DBS on a variety of other conditions. It has proved effective at reducing some symptoms of bipolar disorder and Tourette's syndrome (see table). It was recently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat obsessive compulsive disorder. _NS

The effect of deep brain stimulation (DBS) on a depressed brain is turning out to be more complex than at first thought. DBS is not merely affecting the part of the brain near the electrode. DBS appears to be affecting entire circuits of brain interaction -- performing a type of fine-tuning or calibration of the circuitry.

The researchers implanted the stimulators into the subgenual area, which is involved in emotion, in six severely depressed patients for whom all other treatments had failed, including several types of antidepressant drugs and electroconvulsive therapy. Four reported vast improvements (Neuron, vol 45, p 651).

The region was selected because brain imaging studies had shown it to be hyperactive in many people with depression. Most researchers thought that DBS worked by silencing activity in that area. This would explain why so many patients responded as soon as their stimulators were switched on: many said the operating room looked brighter than when they had gone in, for example, a sign of a changed outlook on life. It was as if "something painful had suddenly stopped", Mayberg said at a recent lecture on her work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

That wasn't the whole story, however. PET scans revealed that while DBS damped down activity in the subgenual area as expected, other regions appeared affected too, particularly parts of the nearby prefrontal cortex, which is involved in decision-making and evaluating emotions. "We got lucky," says Mayberg. "It worked, but probably not for the reason we thought."

...His [Thomas Schlaepfer] team used DBS on the nucleus accumbens, an area involved in assessing pleasurable stimuli that is known to behave abnormally in depression (Biological Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2009.09.013).

PET scans of seven of the patients revealed that the implant didn't seem to affect activity in the nucleus accumbens itself, but instead suppressed the subgenual area - also called Brodmann's area 25 - just as with Mayberg's team (see diagram). It also had reverberations in parts of the prefrontal cortex.

"There are clear connections between area 25 and the nucleus accumbens," Schlaepfer says. He suspects that the three areas are part of a brain network that his and Mayberg's teams both tapped into.

The experiments also raise the question of why DBS doesn't work in everyone. While all of Schlaepfer's patients felt their lives had improved a year after having the stimulator implanted - be it returning to work, taking up a hobby or making new friends - some fared much better than others.

...That's where Mayberg's most recent results, which she presented at the MIT lecture, come in. To see if there were any pre-existing differences in the brains of DBS responders and non-responders, which might predict who should go to the trouble of getting a DBS implant, Mayberg's team turned to functional MRI, which allows you to see which regions light up at the same time - indicating that they are "connected".

In depressed patients who went on to respond to DBS, a part of their prefrontal cortex tended to light up in conjunction with the subgenual area. This did not happen in non-responders. In these patients, the amygdala, which is involved in fear and other emotions, tended to be connected to the subgenual area - not the case in responders. _NS

One of the aims of psycho-neurologists at the Al Fin Institutes of Psycho-Neurology, is to place the diagnoses of mental disorders on a sound scientific foundation. The demonstration of physical changes in brain circuits as a result of successful treatment would go a long way toward making the treatment of mental disorders more respectable within medicine and society.

Caution: Glaciation In Progress

ImpactLab
The Arctic winter of 2009:2010 reached its chill fingers an "unprecedented" distance into spring -- to March 31. Never before in the reliable human record of Arctic sea ice extent, has the freeze season lasted until so late in the year.

Does this mean that we are on the brink of a new ice age? Not necessarily. Earth's climate consists of cycles within cycles within cycles. And the satellite human record of Arctic sea ice extent only goes back to 1979.

Meanwhile, orthodox catastrophic predictions of the demise of the Arctic are proving to be somewhat premature. Time to abandon carbon hysteria? Only if you are intelligent and honest. If you owe your livelihood to the alarmist orthodoxy of climate catastrophe, you may feel obligated to maintain the pretense a bit longer -- until retirement, or the kids get through college, or some other arbitrary guidepost allowing a reversion to honesty.

Bioenergy Poised to Become Largest Renewable

BiofuelsDigest
Comparing different sustainable energy sources, biomass and biofuels are clearly poised to come out on top. Hydroelectric is limited due to geography and climate -- as well as environmental concerns. Further investment into big wind installations is simply pouring resources down a sewer. Solar has potential, but it is limited by insolation to specific regions -- and badly needs cheap energy storage.

Visual aids help to get a better grasp of the different strengths, weaknesses, and potentials of different energy sources. Fuel alcohols production and biodiesel production are both growing exponentially. And while investment in new wind power is significant, the actual power output from all the investment in wind is not significant.

Biomass can be grown virtually anywhere on land and sea. Take the new method of seaweed cultivation, developed in Norway.

In Norway, Seaweed Energy Solutions has patented the first ever modern structure to enable mass seaweed cultivation on an industrial scale in the world¹s oceans. The structure, known as the Seaweed Carrier, makes a clean break with past seaweed cultivation methods that have all been based on ropes. The Seaweed Carrier is a sheet-like structure that basically copies a very large seaweed plant, moving freely back and forth through the sea from a single mooring on the ocean floor.

The Seaweed Carrier will allow seaweed cultivation to become a possibility in deeper and more exposed waters, opening the way for large scale production that is necessary to make seaweed a viable source of energy. According to SES, growing seaweed in farms covering an area of just less than 0.05 percent of Europe’s coastal regions would yield a yearly production of 75 million tons of seaweed. This biomass could be converted into an estimated 846 Mgy (3.2 billion litters) of ethanol, about 4.7 percent of the global ethanol production in 2008. _BiofuelsDigest

And one does not necessarily think of Poland as a bioenergy giant, yet giant French utility GDF Suez has chosen Poland as the site for a new 190 MW bioenergy plant.

Algae can grow in the desert, thriving on wastewater and brackish water. Various species of biomass and biofuels crops are adapted to cold, moderate, and very warm climates -- but using genetic tools, they can learn to thrive in virtually any climate.

Microbial fuels -- custom made to generate virtually any chemical or fuel -- are being adapted to mass production at any scale. Microbial production of fuels, chemicals, animal feed, materials, etc. will become more important to world commerce than petroleum.

First published at Al Fin Energy

Planet Earth Barely Notices Effect of Anthropogenic CO2

There was five times as much CO2 in the air during dinosaur years as now, and twenty times as much before that [AF: When most plants evolved].....oceans continuously absorb CO2 and tie it up as calcium carbonate and limestone. There is now too little CO2 in the atmosphere for good plant growth (385 parts per million). Humans are slightly correcting the problem. Greenhouse operators often add three times as much CO2 to the air to improve plant growth. _ClimateBasics

GlobalExtinction
A recent study reported in Nature Geoscience reminds us once again of how miniscule is the effect of human action on the planet. In fact, even huge earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have little impact on the planet's long-term fate.

Even the monstrous 8.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Chile in February, and which might have changed Earth's rotation and shortened days by a fraction, hardly had an impact on the planet in the long run. In fact, scientists have a hard time spotting the effect of even bigger quakes on something such as the Earth's rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

...Gross calculated that the Chilean quake shifted the Earth's figure axis by 3 inches (8 cm or 27 milliarcseconds), and shortened the length of an Earth day by 1.26 microseconds.

Few other catastrophic events besides quakes could even make the slightest impact on the Earth's rotation.

"People have looked at volcanoes, but they're just too localized," Gross said. "There's not enough mass-motion involved with a volcanic eruption."

...Glaciers that build up and retreat during ice age cycles can also affect Earth's shape. Earth has always resembled something of a pumpkin with a bulge around the equator, because of how the planet's rotation affects its mass.

Melting ice at the poles takes weight off those areas and allows the Earth to fill out more like a sphere, but ocean currents and the jet stream can redistribute mass either toward or away from the equator.

Don't discount the moon's gravitational tug on the Earth, either. That twice-daily tidal effect causes Earth's crust to flex by about 8 inches (20 cm) each day, and leads to much higher ocean tides.

...Current scientific instruments and sensors...have a hard time detecting earthquake effects on Earth's rotation, even without the normal background noise. More sensitive monitoring systems might someday allow scientists to watch a quake change the Earth's rotation in real-time — but Gross won't hold his breath.

"It's still such a small calculated signal that I'm afraid I have my doubts as to whether I can see it," Gross said. _LS

Only a catastrophic change in the status of Earth's sun, Sol, or an impact with a space body of significant size, could render Earth uninhabitable anytime within the next few billion years.

Aside from cyclic glaciation, Earth's climate has shown an amazing resilience and stability. And within the cyclic nature of Earth's natural climate change, Earth life has shown an incredible ability to adjust and adapt.

The ability of Earth's climate to maintain its relative stability -- and to resist so-called "tipping points" -- lies in its strong natural negative feedbacks. Until the rather corrupt and insular infant science of climatology learns to face the realities of natural negative climate feedbacks, anyone who takes orthodox climate catastrophe models seriously is doomed to be badly disillusioned.

South Africa's Malema Wants to Follow Mugabe's Way

Julius Malema -- up and coming star in South Africa's ANC -- recently met with Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. Malema says he now favours bringing Mugabe's policy of land seizure to South Africa.

And, most concerning to foreign investors, he has called for the nationalization of South Africa's mines.

South Africa's mining industry produced 11% of the world's gold, 80% of the world's platinum, and 40% of the world's palladium in 2007.

Malema is young in the world of South African politics, but at the age of 29, he is already being considered a vocal threat to the ethnic stability established through Nelson Mandela's Rainbow Nation movement. _BI

The mean population IQ of Zimbabwe is only 66, after decades of Mugabe rule. The mean population IQ of South Africa is 72, but if Malema has his way, South Africa will drop in the national IQ standings to rest alongside Zimbabwe near the bottom.

South Africa's economic and political prospects have been collapsing for well over a decade now. Once the world leader in pebble bed nuclear fission technology, the country is now dependent upon international handouts just to keep a miniscule pretense of its pebble-bed program functioning. Like most Sub-Saharan African nations, South Africa now finds it very difficult to supply basic electrical needs to its population. In a democratic nation with such a low average voter-IQ, and skyrocketing rates of crime and corruption, wise leadership is virtually impossible to find.

The wisest political observers have been predicting that South Africa would imitate Zimbabwe's radical decline. Nelson Mandela was an exceptional leader -- a better leader than South Africa will ever again produce. From now on, it is likely that this low-IQ democracy will accelerate the elimination of its market-dominant-minorities -- the ones who have been keeping the country afloat against all odds.

President Jimmy Carter was there at the beginning of the fall, midwifing Mugabe's rise to power in Zimbabwe. Can Obama do the same for Malema?

Sonic Disruptor Technology Comes to Earth

Unlike conventional lead bullets, sound bullets can travel through air, liquid and solids alike, carrying devastating energy along as they go. If weaponized, a sound bullet system could create waves to blast holes in submarines or reach into underground bunkers with devastating shock waves. _PopSci

ImageSource
Scientists at Cal Tech in Pasadena have developed amazingly effective new methods of focusing sonic energy. The new techniques are likely to play important future roles in medical therapies for treating tumours, in weapons technologies, and in advanced communications.

The new acoustic lens is made of a metamaterial and uses the Newton’s cradle principle, which is familiar to many people from a toy with identical metal balls suspended on strings, designed to demonstrate the conservation of energy. When the ball at one end is pulled out and released, the ball at the other end swings out at the same speed. The metamaterial comprises 21 parallel chains, each containing 21 stainless steel spheres, but instead of channeling motion, the balls channel sound waves, which are converted to a shock wave called a “solitary wave”. The energy leaving the lens does not bounce back through the chains because of the length of the chains, and instead is focused on a spot a few centimeters in front of it. _Physorg

Brian Wang has much more on this development, with supplementary links and materials.

You need Flash installed to watch this ideo

Stress waves traveling in a nonlinear acoustic lens and sound bullet formation in the adjacent fluid medium (numerical results). In the lens, the sphere colors are proportional to the contact-force amplitude. Waves emitted by the nonlinear acoustic lens reach the host medium (via an elastic interface), where they generate compact spherical pressure waves. The pressure waves coalesce in the host medium and form a sound bullet. The color bar on the right represents the scale of pressure intensity (Pa) in the host medium.

The system is still under development and has not yet been tested on living cells. It is likely to be some years before it is available for medical or other applications.
VidSource: Physorg

No Cropland? No Problem! Farming On Air

Aeroponic farming, which uses mist to grow plants without soil, is another new technique. Grown indoors with LED lighting, without pesticides, aeroponic produce requires less than 10% of the water consumed by conventional agriculture. And because aeroponic farms are located in urban areas, transportation costs and carbon emissions are vastly reduced. _GreenTechMedia

As the price of fuel rises, the cost of farming rises along with it. Energy-intensive farming practises will be strained if energy costs rise much further. Of course, if energy crops and biomass-to-fuels can be made more economical and efficient, it is likely that more cropland will be devoted to biofuels and bioenergy -- if fuels prices continue to rise.

Where will the food come from, in that case? The concept of aeroponic farming -- farming on air -- is beginning to receive more attention. Aerofarms can be located anywhere, even in the middle of a large city.

Albright said the reason hydroponics and aeroponics have increased in popularity is the whole idea of food safety. If greens are grown and sold locally, there is less of a risk of disease from various outside factors.

“With the ability to control the environment for the plants precisely you get optimized production which increases productivity,” Albright said. “You are doing it in a place that is free of animal manures and pesticides, so it is ready to eat right away, without being rinsed in chlorine three times.”

Bloomgarden said the goal of the company is to rework the way farmers grow food and to transform the agriculture business as a whole. “A high level, lofty goal would be to transform our current system into a more sustainable and efficient food system by enabling commercial scale vertical farming in urban centers,” she said.

Hardwood said his main focus is working on transforming rural, traditional farming into urban high-tech production. He said he expects a warm welcome from the Ithaca community when they move in. _IthacanOnline

There are even companies that are developing small aeroponic "pots" and modules that will be controlled by a person's home computer. Click & Grow aims to penetrate the urban, high tech professional lifestyle, by making the growing of indoor crops and flowers as easy as clicking a mouse button.

One daring entrepreneur is even trying to transform and rejuvenate Detroit -- the poster child of urban blight and decay -- using aeroponic farming.

"It won't be a conventional farm," he promises, but an exhibition of state-of-the-art agriculture using aeroponics -- the science of growing in the air -- and other advanced ways of growing year-round in an urban environment. He's going to start by growing a variety of lettuces, apples and probably trees for timber or Christmas. Trees, he has learned, as a crop also reclaim contaminated land. Hantz said the city is over-valuing land that has no value until someone can pay for it. He points out that the city is paying for vacant land that costs the city in taxes and maintenance. The crisis that spawned his idea to use vacant land for for-profit agriculture has yet to create real momentum. We're still stuck.

"That's the opposite of how it should be," he says, during an interview in his Southfield office._DetNews

Anyone could have told the man that dealing with the city of Detroit tends to be a no-win proposition. Unless you grease the right palms, of course. Organised crime together with labour unions and corrupt officials have made Detroit highly toxic to private enterprise.

But if aeroponic urban farming can work for Detroit, it can potentially work anywhere in the developed world or the third world.

New Desalination Membrane Self-Cleaning

A new method of fabricating nano-membranes for desalinating and purifying water, is described in the current issue of Journal of Materials Chemistry. The new membrane structure was devised by UCLA researchers, and incorporates nano-fibrous "brushes" which self-clean the membrane to prevent fouling. This self-cleaning should reduce the maintenance costs of reverse osmosis desalination and water purification appreciably.

The highly permeable, surface-structured membrane can easily be incorporated into today's commercial production system, the researchers say, and could help to significantly reduce desalination operating costs. Their findings appear in the current issue of the Journal of Materials Chemistry.

...The new membrane was synthesized through a three-step process. First, researchers synthesized a polyamide thin-film composite membrane using conventional interfacial polymerization. Next, they activated the polyamide surface with atmospheric pressure plasma to create active sites on the surface. Finally, these active sites were used to initiate a graft polymerization reaction with a monomer solution to create a polymer "brush layer" on the polyamide surface. This graft polymerization is carried out for a specific period of time at a specific temperature in order to control the brush layer thickness and topography.

...In this new membrane, the polymer chains of the tethered brush layer are in constant motion. The chains are chemically anchored to the surface and are thus more thermally stable, relative to physically coated polymer films. Water flow also adds to the brush layer's movement, making it extremely difficult for bacteria and other colloidal matter to anchor to the surface of the membrane. _PO

It is now a matter of finding economic ways to scale the process for fabricating large surface areas of material cheaply.

Investors Driving the Price of Oil

Investors continue to drive the market for oil, pushing prices above US$86 a barrel Monday -- and this despite the opinion of no less an expert than King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who has said a couple of times over the past two years that US$75 to US$80 a barrel would do just fine, thank you.

As long as investors' enthusiasm for oil lasts, we live in a surreal world in which the fundamentals of supply and demand seem to have lost their traction. _FP

Peak oil doomers want to believe that shrinking oil supplies are squeezing world oil prizes higher. All of this is supposed to be the lead up to a gigantic economic crash costing hundreds of millions of lives around the world. But the reality is more mundane.

Supply seems ample, as well. Oil inventories in the United States are at above-average levels, and the futures market is quite happy to guarantee you delivery of oil in 2014 for only about three dollars more than it would cost you to buy a barrel today.

But neither slow-growing demand nor the market's expectation of ample supply for years down the road has been capable of shaking investors' enthusiasm for oil as an asset class.

"This raises a key question," says Bassam Fattouh of Oxford University in a recent paper on oil pricing. "If market participants attach little weight to current market fundamentals and if future market fundamentals are highly uncertain, at which price or price range should the oil market clear?"

His answer is that oil prices have become "indeterminate" -- a professor's way of throwing up his hands and saying you can no longer predict what's going to happen next. Oil's price depends upon a guessing game among major market players in which everybody is trying to guess what prices other players are guessing. If that is correct, oil investors can expect some neck-wrenching swoops in the years ahead as bulls and bears take turns in the pilot's seat._FP

World oil production is approaching the July 2008 peak -- at a much lower price per barrel -- despite all claims that oil production peaked in 2005. And most of the recent increase has come from non-OPEC sources, against all predictions by peak oil gurus.

When prices of a commodity are driven up by big investor speculation, it is called a price bubble. The oil price bubble that culminated in the collapse of 2008 was accompanied by bubbles in prices of other commodities and real estate, along with multiple financial instruments. The current oil price bubble would like to get other economic entities onboard in order to appear more convincing.

But when will demand destruction begin to kick in? And how much demand destruction can the hugely endebted economies of Europe, Japan, the US, and other advanced nations take before they sink back into another full-blown recession?

Demand destruction occurs because of the price of energy, not because of any shortage of supply. If the supply is ample but prices have been driven up by large investors looking for a safe haven, the demand destruction is the same.

Meanwhile, every policy of the Obama - Pelosi regime appears directed toward reducing domestic US energy production. Hang on, it could be a wild ride.

Star-Shaped Seastead: Retire and Play Golf

It already has artificial islands, scuba-diving Cabinet ministers and a back-up plan to relocate its entire population if it is swamped by rising seas. Now the Maldives has another scheme to deal with its watery future: floating golf.
The island nation has signed a deal with a Dutch company to investigate building the world’s first permanent floating golf course, along with a convention centre and residential rooms, on a platform on the Indian Ocean. _ImpactLab

The floating hotel and golf course seen above is being designed by Dutch Docklands International for the Maldive Islands. It is meant to be a floating Maldives resort, convention center, and golf club in one. But there is no reason that such recreational resort seasteads could not be propagated to sheltered harbours, bays, and estuaries around the world.

Notice that the "Star Seastead" design could be adapted for the addition of arc-shaped breakwaters at the tips of the star -- similar to the "Gyre" seastead design. Also notice how the arms of the star are terraced, providing a type of tertiary breakwater effect themselves. Also take note of the artificial beach in the webs between the star arms. Such structures when customised could provide a secondary breakwater.

This floating golf club and resort may be the forerunner to a serious seastead design. The devil is in the details. And we know that it will take a real devil of a design to withstand the harsh punishment of the open seas and still provide a livable environment for working, playing, and raising families.

"Smart Grid" An Open Door to Hacker Mischief

With the best of intentions, US residential, commercial, and industrial users of electric power are being pushed into an extremely vulnerable situation. With the installation of a "smart meter", your home immediately becomes vulnerable to a malicious hacking attack. Not only could your power be shut off by hackers, but your power use records could be manipulated at will.

Hacking the smart grid is a snap!

Once hackers have access to smart meter codes and programming, they can "talk" to all meters of the same brand over the network. In one simulation, Davis proved that malware set to self-replicate could shut down power for 15,000 homes in 24 hours.

The threat is not just to your home, or to 15,000 homes. The threat is to the entire grid, via self-propagating computer worms that could initiate a cascading power failure over large areas of North America.

Researchers have previously warned that allowing network access to the home opens up a host of security issues. Last year, security firm IOActive found flaws in a smart-meter device that allowed its researchers to insert code into one device and have it spread to others--essentially, injecting a computer worm into a local power network.

"If you could get that meter to talk to its neighbors and those to talk to their neighbors, you could conceptually tell them to turn off and cause a fairly broad power outage," Shaw says. _TR

Chinese spy-hackers have been busy at work, devising ways of breaking into the US power grid's most vulnerable points. The new "smart grid" will only make it easier for them to access every weak area.

Normally, a nation's government would not be so eager to make its citizens and economy so vulnerable to an overseas threat such as Chinese power-hackers. In the case of the Obama-Pelosi reich, however, one can never be sure of the underlying motive. We would like to think the best of our leaders, but the track record of Obama-Pelosi suggests that the current regime is not necessarily looking out for the best interests of North Americans without close O-P connections.

Cross-posted at Al Fin Energy

IQ Largely Determined by Genes: The Evidence Builds

As brain imaging becomes more readily available and more reliable, the evidence supporting a strong gene :: IQ link continues to accumulate.

Some of the determinants of IQ in the brain include 1. The efficiency of the connections in the brain, 2. The quality of the myelin sheaths around axons in the brain, 3. The volume and location of gray matter tissue in the cerebral cortex, 4. The volume of sub-cortical gray matter, 5. The speediness of white matter tracts and more.

All of these variables are highly heritable. As a person ages, the influence of his genetic makeup on his IQ will increase.

The heritability of general cognitive ability increases significantly and linearly from 41% in childhood (9 years) to 55% in adolescence (12 years) and to 66% in young adulthood (17 years) in a sample of 11 000 pairs of twins from four countries, a larger sample than all previous studies combined. _MolecularPsychiatry

A lot of research that is intended to debunk the link between IQ and genes, is conducted prior to the most significant genetically programmed changes in the brain -- in adolescence. The connections between genes and IQ apparently do not fully kick in until early adulthood.

A rich environment can raise a young child's tested IQ during early childhood, but if the genes do not support an elevated cognition, the artificially high IQ scores will not be maintained into adulthood. Such faulty research designs tend to distort comparisons of mean IQ scores between different population groups.

Here at the Al Fin Institutes of Next Level Research, we expect any significant IQ differences between races, genders, and ethnicities to be eliminated by advanced neuroscience within the next few decades. But the currently fashionable denial of the link between genes and IQ is immensely destructive -- particularly to low IQ population groups. The only way to achieve the neuroscientific uplifting of all humans' intelligence, is by an honest pursuit of the realities involved. That uplifting is what is being postponed by the fanatical adherence to political correctness which is endemic to western politics, academia, media, and popular culture.

The modern-day dieoff leftism that dominates western cultures is a deadly and lethal meme that requires attention, before it accomplishes the human dieoff it fervently seeks.

A Climate Reckoning: Dusting Off the Guillotines

In Paris, indignant climatologists are dusting off the guillotine for geochemist Claude Allegre, author of the book L'imposture climatique (The Climate Fraud). In fear of losing their funding and their jobs, French climatologists are out to behead anyone who publicly criticises the quality of their work, or the validity of their claims.

In the UK, the House of Commons Committee of Science and Technology has recently given Phil Jones the green light to get back to "hiding the decline" of global temperatures. Some people are calling the parliamentary committee's actions a "whitewash", and others feel that some committee members may have been tricked into clearing the climate rascals of UEA's CRU of all wrongdoing.

Here at the Al Fin Syndicate, we only want to be sure that a proper record is kept of all of these goings-on. We know that high-ranking members of government and other large institutions almost always act in their own interest -- even at the expense of the interests of their constituencies.

Here is a good illustration: Despite all the public attention received by ClimateGate and associated IPCC follies, the keepers of the gate of climate publications are still obstructing the publication of papers that conflict with the dominant (and very profitable) theme of contemporary climate science.

The forces of the climate doom orthodoxy are very strong, and well entrenched inside the halls of government and powerful private lobbies and wealthy foundations that fund research. When the UAE CRU's ClimateGate misbehaviour came up before the parliamentary committee, most informed persons expected a coverup, or whitewash. As it happens, that is what we got.

So. We need to keep an account of those involved in misleading the public, and in misallocating public funds. There will be a reckoning, sooner or later. We do not want to punish the wrong persons, when the time comes.

UK Parliamentary Commons Committee of Science and Technology:
Member                                                 Constituency                              Party
Mr Phil Willis (Chair)                    Harrogate and Knaresborough     Lib Dem
Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods     City of Durham                             Labour
Mr Tim Boswell                           Daventry                                      Conservative
Mr Ian Cawsey                            Brigg and Goole                           Labour
Mrs Nadine Dorries                     Mid Bedfordshire                         Conservative
Dr Evan Harris                             Oxford  West  Abingdon              Lib Dem
Dr Brian Iddon                              Bolton South East                       Labour
Mr Gordon Marsden                    Blackpool South                          Labour
Dr Doug Naysmith                       Bristol North West                       Labour
Dr Bob Spink                              Castle Point                                  Independent
Ian Stewart                                  Eccles                                          Labour
Graham Stringer                          Manchester, Blackley                    Labour
Dr Desmond Turner                    Brighton, Kemptown                     Labour
Mr Rob Wilson                           Reading East                                 Conservative

It is important to emphasise that at this time the important thing is to keep a clear and accurate record of what persons in positions of responsibility are doing.  Then, when all is clear, to hold them to account for what they have done.  It is much too early to understand the economic devastation that is coming as a result of misguided and corrupt institutional policies.  The chain of causation will be much clearer in the future.

Memristor Update and Video

The discovery of the memristor derives from the search for a rigorous mathematical foundation for electronics by a young electronics engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, Leon O. Chua. Chua’s analysis suggested there was a fourth foundational circuit element missing from the standard trio of resistor, capacitor and inductor. He called it “memristor.” In 1971, he published a seminal paper on this missing basic circuit element.

...Jumping forward to 2010, the work of Dr. Wei Lu’s University of Michigan team now confirms that memristor circuits indeed behave like synapses. Lu’s team used a mixture of silicon and silver to join two metal electrodes, mimicking how synapses allow neurons to learn new firing patterns — not unlike a slime mold’s ability to anticipate events. The timing of electrical signals in two neurons anticipates how later messages can jump across the synapse between them. When a pair fires, the given synapse becomes more likely to pass later messages between the two. “Cells that fire together, wire together,” says Lu.

Just like a synapse, the memristor changes its resistance in varying levels. Dr. Lu found that memristors can simulate synapses because electrical synaptic connections between two neurons can seemingly strengthen or weaken depending on when the neurons fire. “The memristor mimics synaptic action,” Lu concludes. Dr. Nadine Gergel-Hackett at NIST acknowledges the Michigan team’s successful creation of a brain synapse analog. “This work is a large step towards the realization of biology-inspired computing,” she says. _hplus

This electronic approach to an artificial synapse may help in the quest to build a bottom-up artificial brain. The neo-cortex contains about 10 billion neurons, with each neuron making approximately 10,000 connections (or more). The synaptic approach to cognition is only one of several approaches that neuroscientists and cognitive scientists have taken. But it is a fairly good place to start.

Neurons are also connected to each other via "gap junctions" -- direct ion exchange pathways between neurons. Other cells are also involved intimately with neuronal function -- the glial cells. No one actually understands how the brain generates cognitive activity, or consciousness.

But if scientists can create realistic artificial brains that can be tested and monitored in exquisite detail at every stage of input, output, and anything in between, it is quite likely that we will learn something.

The Goal Is Competent Societies

Unconscious Incompetence
The individual neither understands nor knows how to do something, nor recognizes the deficit, nor has a desire to address it.
Conscious Incompetence
Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, without yet addressing it.
Conscious Competence
The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires a great deal of consciousness or concentration.
Unconscious Competence
The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it becomes "second nature" and can be performed easily (often without concentrating too deeply). He or she may or may not be able teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned. _Wiki4Stages

The beginnings of competence are instilled in early childhood. Good parents work hard to instill competence (and thus confidence) in the growing child.

As we foster a sense of competence in the home, we build confident, capable, and independent thinkers. Wyatt will begin to understand the dangers of stairs under my watchful eye. He will be able to make better decisions as he learns with me rather than having to wait and learn these skills in front of his peers or other strangers. It is definitely more work to teach your children to master skills at home but it will promote their self-esteem and make them more emotionally successful and physically capable as they venture out into the big world. _FosteringChild'sCompetence

But good parenting skills are a vanishing commodity in the hurry-up modern world. Most parents tend to let the television or the babysitter or the teacher or the child's peer group or popular culture do the child-raising. This is a mistake.

The early childhood is a rare and irreplaceable opportunity to instill the core competencies of living in the rapidly developing brain. Executive functioning skills, basic social skills, the rudiments of problem solving and self-teaching.

And something very important: The Rite of Passage. Not just one rite of passage -- or rite of competence -- but multiple rites of competent display are needed at different stages of development. Such rites should be hard-wired into any competent approach to child-raising.

In homes where "chores" are done -- such as when growing up on a family farm, a working ranch, or within a family business -- such rites and competencies are simply part of daily life, and passed from one generation to the next.

It is true that some types of competence are genetic and heritable. But it is also important that whatever seeds of competence exist, should be nurtured.

The alternative is societies where important competencies are dying out. As western nations age, their competent craftsmen and engineers and skilled technical teachers are retiring and dying out.

As manufacturing is outsourced to China and South / Southeast Asia, manufacturing skills are likewise lost with no prospects for return.

An aging population in Europe, parts of North America, and Oceania will grow more and more dependent upon technical products and technical skills which are no longer locally made or locally taught.

Competence slips away every year, more and more.

Find the pockets of competence that are stubbornly resistant to obliteration, and try to attach yourself to them. Contribute your own competence and learn from the competence of others.

Society at large is sinking in a quagmire of incompetence -- particularly at top levels of political, academic, and intellectual leadership. A thriving and prosperous civilisation encourages the cultivation and growth of independent competence at all ages and levels. A stagnant civilisation encourages a cradle-to-grave dependency, and a constriction of opportunities to excel, thrive, and profit on one's own merit and efforts.

A society that congeals into a monolithic institution is not a healthy or thriving society. What little sprouts of competence and independence that may show, are quickly stifled and discouraged. Most of the world is like that. America was once different.

Smoking, IQ, Russia's Demographic Decline

ImageSource
Researchers have recently determined that young smokers tend to have lower IQs than their non-smoking peers. In Russia, teen smoking is considered "an epidemic," even though the IQ of Russians is not much lower than that of western Europeans or white North Americans.

Russia has one of the world's highest smoking rates. The government says 44 million Russians smoke. That's a third of the population, including more than 60 percent of all males.

It's having a major effect on the country's health. Up to 400,000 Russians die each year from tobacco-related causes. But as health campaigns in the West encourage growing numbers of smokers to give up the habit, Russia is becoming increasingly important for international tobacco firms, and the number of Russia's newest smokers -- women and teenagers -- is skyrocketing.

...packs of Western cigarettes in Russia can cost as little as $0.50, compared to around $10 in some European countries.

"It's a lot easier for a child to buy a packet of cigarettes than a chocolate bar," she says.

Knorre says tobacco companies are now aggressively targeting women and teenagers. Around 15 percent of women smoke, twice more than in the early 1990s, and the number is steadily growing.

"You see mostly women's cigarettes behind store counters," she says. "They're thin, carry deceiving labels saying they're less harmful, and come in different flavors and bright packages." _Source

The billboard shown above is seen on Moscow streets. It reveals a lot about the perverse psychology of Russia under the thumb of Putin.

The infamous billboards appeared in Moscow in March. They depict a sleeping baby with a cigarette butt put down against her back. The slogan on the billboard says: “Smoking in child’s presence is a much bigger torture for him.” _MikeHitchen

Smoking -- particularly heavy smoking -- is a form of slow suicide. Ironically, it is also a form of Russian roulette. You never know whether your heart or your lungs will give out first. Whether cancer will settle in the mouth, throat, or lungs, before spreading to the brain and bones. Whether your blood vessels will close off, depriving organs and muscles of vital blood supply. You never really know.

It is not just a question of low IQ leading to smoking. It is also a question of will to live -- and what you have to live for. In Russia, there is little reason to sacrifice current pleasure or comfort for future gain. The future looks less and less likely to be a pleasant place, for those ethnic Russians who manage to survive. Why not smoke, drink, let things go?

Citizens of the US are allowing despotism to creep up on them incrementally. But Russians have never had freedom, never enjoyed an independent life, free from despotic governments. Americans are letting the wealths of freedom slip away after deciding that freedom is too much trouble to fight for. What does that suggest about national IQ?

Thinking in Space, Time, and Body

When shown movies of two snails crawling along parallel paths for different distances or amounts of time, children judged the amount of time a snail took to make its trip based on how far the snail went. That's a sign that the concept of time grows out of spatial knowledge, researchers propose. In this movie clip, young volunteers watched a blue snail crawl a longer distance over a shorter time span than a red snail. _ SN

To probe the relationship between space and time in the developing mind, Daniel Casasanto of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and colleagues at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Stanford University showed children movies of two snails racing along parallel paths for different distances or durations. The children judged either the spatial or temporal aspect of each race, reporting which animal went for a longer distance or a longer time.

When asked to judge distance, children had no trouble ignoring time. But when asked to judge time, they had difficulty ignoring the spatial dimension of the event. Snails that moved a longer distance were mistakenly judged to have traveled for a longer time. Children use physical distance to measure of the passage of time. _AlphaGalileo

The new investigation was conducted by a team of researchers based at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who were led by expert Daniel Casasanto. The group collaborated closely with colleagues based at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in Greece, and also the Stanford University, in the United States. During the experiments, children were asked to watch animated videos of races between snails, each of the animals located on its own track. The races went on over various distances and durations, and the children were then asked to tell researchers the distance each had traveled. _ Softpedia

This study was conducted with 99 children ages 4 to 10. According to the authors, children of all ages studied were unable to separate the time judgment from the distance traveled by the snail. The author's suggest that children possess deep conceptual links between time and space.

The study was conducted using Greek-speaking children. In the Greek language it is possible to discuss time without using spatial metaphors such as "long" or "short", which are used routinely in English when referring to time spans. (the word span itself is a spatial metaphor) By using Greek speakers, the scientists believe that they side-stepped issues of superficial language metaphorical conceptual conflation.

This Greek-German-American study brings up some interesting issues dealing with metaphorical underpinnings of thought and concepts. When different concepts are inextricably linked -- even beneath the level of spoken and written language -- we are still dealing with metaphors. But these metaphors are pre-verbal, vestigial residues of pre-verbal mental development.

If pre-adolescent children cannot conceptualise time without utlising spatial concepts, they are using pre-verbal metaphors of space to construct time concepts. This apparently occurs automatically and unconsciously.

It will take time to trace the issue to earlier stages of development, since at this time some level of language development appears necessary in order to assess the nature and direction of the child's conceptual linkage.

Such an obstruction will not impede the pursuit of such questions for long.

Obama Plan for Energy Starvation and Suicide

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has oil reserves in Abu Dhabi that will last another 150 years -- even without any new oil discovery! These proven reserves help to underpin another century of solid economic development for the country.

The US, likewise, has huge fossil fuels reserves that could be used to underpin centuries of economic and technological development. The problem seems to be that the US has a government that is committed to starving its industrial and commercial infrastructure of its lifeblood of energy. Witness President Obama's recent actions:

The entire west coast is now off limits.... That means California’s 10 billion barrels of oil and all the jobs, money and energy they would produce for that bankrupt state are now under embargo.

But the biggest threat to U.S. energy security is what the president did in Alaska, and by extension, to America. He cancelled five existing lease sales that were to be held in 2011 and 2012.

Two of the sales are in the Chukchi Sea, adjacent to where Russia is exploring for and producing oil and gas. According to Salazar’s own Department of Interior, the Chukchi Sea area could hold as much as 77 billion barrels of oil. This is over three times as much oil as the U.S. has in proven reserves, and by itself, is larger than Russia’s total proven oil reserves.

Obama’s new plan for drilling offshore in America is a lot like his old plan: Don’t do it. The fact that his image team went overboard to sell it as offshore drilling means he has seen the polls that show two-thirds of Americans support more offshore drilling._Source

There was no shortage of not-so-bright pundits who declared that Obama was now opening up oil drilling, based upon the White House announcements. But anyone who has been following the Obama - Pelosi - Boxer - Salazar program of planned energy starvation would have known better.

Try not to be a sucker for the Obama - Pelosi reich's PR team. It makes you look weak and wobbly.