Global Cooling Strikes Earth With a Vengeance?

SpotlessSun
An unusually cold and snowy December has struck across Europe, Wales, Ireland -- even Australia!!! This extreme cold goes against a brief, but multi-decadal trend of warming winters, and has many people asking whether there is an underlying (and unforeseen by climatologists) reason for the apparent switch in climate regimes?

Climate researcher David Archibald believes that there is something different about Solar Cycle 24 PDF. Archibald has come out publicly predicting that this solar cycle, and the one following, will be cycles of extremely low solar activity. Such an extended period of low solar activity may be similar to a historic cold spell that occurred between 1790 and 1830.

The Dalton Minimum was a period of low solar activity, named after the English meteorologist John Dalton, lasting from about 1790 to 1830.[1] Like the Maunder Minimum and Spörer Minimum, the Dalton Minimum coincided with a period of lower-than-average global temperatures. The Oberlach Station in Germany, for example, experienced a 2.0°C decline over 20 years.[2] The Year Without a Summer, in 1816, also occurred during the Dalton Minimum. _WUWT

It is best for humans to keep in mind that their lives are deeply affected by phenomena which are far larger than any human activity -- and go far beyond the ability of humans to influence.

Lipid Fermentation via Engineered Microbes for Bio-Jet Fuel

GCC
The US military's DARPA has awarded Logos technology with a $17.5 million phase 2 award to produce jet fuel from biomass, using microbial lipid fermentation.

This contract is to demonstrate an end-to-end Lipid Fermentation Process (LFP) at scale for the commercially viable production, from cellulosic biomass, of Hydrotreated Renewable Jet (HRJ) spec jet fuel—a near term surrogate for JP-8 that can be readily commercialized.

HRJ is produced from renewable oils (lipids) by methods common in petroleum refining. Fatty acids and triglycerides are hydrotreated to remove oxygen, and the resulting paraffinic hydrocarbons are processed to yield a mixture of straight-chain, branched-chain, and cyclic paraffinic hydrocarbons with collective properties that are similar to those of conventional jet fuel.

Oleaginous yeast can produce lipids from the sugars resulting from the pretreatment and hydrolysis of biomass; certain fungi can also produce lipids, either via solid-state fermentation of biomass or from the biomass hydrolyzate.

This primary program effort is to consist of optimized process development and engineering along with regionally specific economic modeling to produce fuel, demonstrate process energy efficiency and support commercialization.

...This phase of the BioJET program requires the delivery of larger quantities of jet fuel with a projected cost of production of JP-8 at commercial scale implementation (50Mgal/yr) at less than $3.00 per gallon. _GCC

Al Fin bio-synthesists believe that the greatest value of current advanced biofuels research is to put a rough ceiling on future prices of hydrocarbon fuels. Peak oil doomsayers claim that liquid fuels will have no price ceilings when "peak oil" truly hits the fan.

But that claim has already been falsified by the fact that shale gas cost per BTU is well less than half the cost of crude oil per BTU. As efficiencies of conversion from gas to liquids improve, we will see the "price ceiling" effect of shale gas begin to affect markets. Something similar will begin to happen in about ten years, as more efficient biomass to liquids processes begin to scale up.

Like everything associated with energy these days, oil futures markets are heavily politicised, and infiltrated by persons whose behaviour is -- shall we say -- somewhat less than ethical. The fluctuations of oil markets are highly profitable to those who know how to put their fingers on the scale in a reasonably surreptitious manner. But the conversion of alternative and unconventional fuels to liquid hydrocarbons: GTL, CTL, BTL, kerogensTL, BitumensTL, etc etc, provides a multiple bypass to the oil commodities markets. Such alternative routes to fuel makes the work of the energy mafias and faux environmentalists much harder -- unless they can use bribed politicians to stop the alternatives and unconventionals.

Cross-posted to Al Fin Energy

Enjoy a Long Day of Sin By Slowing Circadian Clock

The compound, dubbed 'longdaysin,' "massively slows down the body clock, it turns to 24 hour body clock into a 36 hour one," says Steve Kay, chair of biology at the University of California San Diego and an author on the paper published in this week's edition of the online journal PLoS Biology. _USAToday

Have you ever wished to have more hours in the day? With better modulators of the body's built-in biological clock for daily circadian rhythms, you can! Of course the annoying day-night sun cycle will attempt to disrupt your plans, but if you are serious you can simply move underground away from the sunshine and night sky. Why should you be confined by a 24 hour cycle that is only an evolutionary residue left over from man's early origins? We will be leaving this planet for distant horizons sooner or later. May as well get used to adjusting our body clocks to suit our needs, and stop being chained to a the same cycle that regulated the cave men.

Most organisms show daily rhythms in physiology, behavior, and metabolism, which may be advantageous because they anticipate environmental changes thus optimize energy metabolism. These rhythms are controlled by the circadian clock, which produces cyclic expression of thousands of output genes. More than a dozen components of the circadian clock are called clock genes, and the proteins they encode form a transcription factor network that generates rhythmic gene expression. In this study, we set out to control the function of the circadian clock and to identify new clock proteins by means of chemical tools. We tested the effects on the clock in human cells of around 120,000 uncharacterized compounds. Here we describe identification of a novel compound “longdaysin” that markedly slows the circadian clock both in cultured mammalian cells and in living zebrafish. _PLOS

Megacities for Better and for Worse

Frost & Sullivan forecasts that about 4.5 billion people globally will be living in cities by 2025—about 60% of the world’s total population. The growing urban population will lead to the rapid expansion of city borders into neighboring suburbs, resulting in the formation of Megacities. _GCC

GCC

When you hear about the coming urban age, it's really a story about rising Asia and the two countries that will define this new era of the megacity: China and India. Half of Asia will become urbanized, and nearly a billion people will shift from countryside to cityscape. Trillions of dollars will need to be spent on roads, trains, power plants, water systems, and social services. _FP

That is the projection, anyway. All very nice, clean, and orderly. But really now, what will it be like?

...the high density of people can generate problems, including health issues such as the rapid transmission of 'flu viruses and psychological problems caused by poverty and stress.

But whatever we think of them, megacities are not only here to stay: They're growing. New Delhi, for example, is projected to have 29.49 million inhabitants by 2025, according to Demographia -- up from 20.99 million in 2010. _CNN

Megacities are metropolitan areas containing more than 10 million people.

FP

For better or worse, urban-watchers are clear on one point: The quality of life for most people in the future will be determined by the quality of cities.

Those cities will be bigger than ever. A megacity has more than ten million inhabitants. In 1995 there were 14; in 2015 there will be 21. And the ranking will have shifted: Today the five largest cities are Tokyo, Mexico City, São Paulo, New York City, and Mumbai (Bombay), and in 2015 they will probably be Tokyo, Dhaka, Mumbai, São Paulo, and Delhi.

And yet, population numbers by themselves don't determine a city's prospects; after all, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Hamburg, Germany, have the same population. Nor is explosive growth necessarily the determining factor. "City problems," one authority points out, "mostly have to do with weak, ineffective, and usually unrepresentative city governments." _NatGeo

Wikipedia article on megacities

Megacities are a dynamic sprawl of human interaction. Some of them will work fairly well, and some of them will fall into the coming anarchy. Dense concentrations of low intelligence humans will not lead to the benefits of cities which Jane Jacobs wrote about. It will lead instead to the less savoury aspects of Sao Paulo, Nairobi, Lagos, and the Paris banlieus.

Cities are complex organisms which must be fed, cleaned, energised, and have their waste hauled away. In the routine and massive power failures of third world cities of today, we see the bare beginnings of the chaos, and a growing potential for devolutional suffering within many of tomorrow's megacities. Not only will both old and emerging diseases spread through these megacities like wildfire, but all other forms of misery -- and inability to recover from more unpredictable catastrophes -- will propagate through these monstrosities.

As the cities of Europe, North America, and parts of Oceania slowly become one with the third world, we will see the same aspects of decay and a brittle inability to recover from setbacks and natural disasters. The disorder ratchets downward, and the "no-go" zones grow larger.

There are limits, of course. But what are the limits? China has no intention of surrendering to the forces of decay -- nor has Japan. But if the compulsively "politically correct" west continues to surrender to and imitate the voracious, corrupt, and undisciplined third world, we will see only sparse archipelagos of order in the middle of a sea of chaos -- where once lived the prosperous and orderly western civilisation.

Amazing technologies are coming, which will allow for a freedom of movement and a shocking abundance of necessities and luxuries. Other technologies may force a temporary shutting down of the "commons", and of free movement in the open air. In the middle of an amazing blooming of new and promising technologies, we will also see numbing cruelty, suffering, and death.

Luck will partially determine who will emerge on the other side, empowered by the best of the new technologies. Planning ahead may also be of use.

News from the Biosingularity

SDThe drug lenalidomide -- related to thalidomide -- may prove to be one of the first in a long line of revolutionary anti-aging medications to slip through the back door of conventional medicine.

In this study, the team tested the drug in healthy seniors, each of whom were matched in race, gender and national origin to a healthy young adult participant. They found that extremely low levels of lenalidomide - 0.1 μM - optimally stimulated IL-2 production in the young people (21-40 years) roughly sevenfold, but stimulated IL-2 production in patients over age 65 by 120-fold, restoring them to youthful levels for up to five days. At that dosage, the drug also increased IFN-gamma up to six fold in the elderly patients, without suppressing IL-17 generation.

The researchers also found that lenalidomide had many other beneficial effects on the elderly participants' T cells, including better migration throughout the body, more efficient patrolling activity and longer survival after defending the body against an infection. _SD

Not for pregnant women, certainly, but not many women over the age of 65 are getting pregnant accidentally.

Another approach to prolonged youthfulness may come by way of "cord blood", blood from the umbilical cord which is obtained at birth. Apparently cells present in cord blood are capable of producing regenerative factors capable of rejuvenating the aging brain.

Laboratory culture (in vitro) studies examining the activity of human umbilical cord blood cells (HUCB) on experimental models of central nervous system aging, injury and disease, have shown that HUCBs provide a ‘trophic effect’ (nutritional effect) that enhances survival and maturation of hippocampal neurons harvested from both young and old laboratory animals.

“As we age, cognitive function tends to decline,” said Alison E. Willing, PhD, a professor in the University of South Florida’s (USF) Department of Neurosurgery and Brain repair and lead author for a study published in the current issue of Aging and Disease (www.aginganddisease.org) . “Changes in cognitive function are accompanied by changes in the hippocampus, an area of the brain where long term memory, as well as other functions, are located, an area of the brain among those first to suffer the effects of diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.” _SB

The type of rejuvenation of hippocampal cells demonstrated by the USF researchers suggests that it may be worth our while to keep a culture of HUCBs (or useful substitutes) safe and handy for the sake of our older selves.

Another useful approach to rejuvenating the brain besides pharmaceuticals or stem cell therapies may involve the electromagnetic stimulation of the brain.

Shooting steady pulses of electricity through slender electrodes into a brain area that controls complex behaviors has proven to be effective against several therapeutically stubborn neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. Now, a new study has found that this technique, called deep brain stimulation (DBS), targets the same class of neuronal cells that are known to respond to physical exercise and drugs such as Prozac.

The study, led by Associate Professor Grigori Enikolopov, Ph.D., of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), is the cover story in the January 1st issue of The Journal of Comparative Neurology, which is currently available online.

The targeted neuronal cells, which increase in number in response to DBS, are a type of precursor cell that ultimately matures into adult neurons in the brain’s hippocampus, the control center for spatial and long-term memory, emotion, behavior and other functions that go awry in diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, epilepsy and depression. DBS has been successful in treating some cases of Parkinson’s. And recently, it has also proven to work against other brain disorders such as epilepsy and severe depression. _SB

It is likely that routine maintenance for aging humans in the near future will include a wide range of therapies, including stem cells, EM therapies, rejuvenating drug therapies, and nanotech approaches.

Researchers at Salk and Princeton have discovered new ways in which the oncogene protein p53 is useful in the control of cancer. It seems that besides suppressing the early stages of cancer transformation, p53 also suppresses later stage local spread and distant metastasis.

A close collaboration between researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the Institute for Advanced Study found that the tumor suppressor p53, long thought of as the "Guardian of the Genome," may do more than thwart cancer-causing mutations. It may also prevent established cancer cells from sliding toward a more aggressive, stem-like state by serving as a "Guardian against Genome Reprogramming." _PO

This opens the door to the use of p53 enhancing therapies in persons whose cancers are already well established -- in the hope of slowing the progression of the disease to allow other therapies to eradicate it.

Another good source of news on the biosingularity front (as well as other science and technology news) is Nextbigfuture:

New artificial bone material to healing from bony injury

New advanced tools for genetic manipulation and engineering

Pluripotent stem cells from adult tissues finding wider use in research

Anyone who has studied Nanomedicine or followed SENS understands that the tools discussed above are just scratches in the surface of the coming biosingularity. But even such scratches may well mean the difference between life and death, vitality and atrophy, mental sharpness and senility, to some who are reading this.

Massive Dieoff of Algae 250 MYA: Poisonous Upheaval at PT Junction

Physorg
At the junction of the Permian and Triassic periods around 250 million years ago, the algae of the world appear to have been killed off by massive amounts of hydrogen sulfide. Massive volcanic activity triggered an enormous release of toxic gases as well as large quantities of CO2. The ocean's ecosystems were overturned, as only 1 in 10 ocean species survived. Massive quantities of dead algae, animals, and vegetation descended onto a dark and suddenly anaerobic seafloor, and were buried by large masses of ash and other sediment. In other words, a perfect environment for the formation of oil and other hydrocarbons. So, what happened to them?

The mass extinction at the end of the Permian period almost cleared the planet of life 250 million years ago. Only one in ten species in the ocean survived. Two-thirds of reptiles and amphibians disappeared. Even plants and insects suffered major losses. But in this near-perfect strike, the first "pin" to topple may have been algae, according to researchers studying molecular fossils from this time.

The Permian-Triassic, or P-T, extinction event happened long before dinosaurs had even appeared on the scene. Often called the Great Dying, it was the most dramatic pruning of the tree of life that we have on record. "It was not only the largest, but also the most enigmatic mass extinction of all time," says Roger Summons from MIT.

Unlike the dinosaur die-off, there's no credible evidence of an asteroid impact to blame for the P-T extinction. Instead, scientists have been forced to sort through a number of factors: The formation of the supercontinent Pangaea reduced shallow marine habitats; slower ocean circulation deprived the deep ocean of oxygen; and one of the largest volcanic eruptions in history caused a spike in carbon dioxide that would have greatly warmed the planet.
On top of all that, hydrogen sulfide – a lethal gas that smells of rotten eggs – may have poisoned the ocean and the atmosphere. Summons and his colleagues are leading proponents of this theory, having discovered molecular evidence for a substantial proliferation of bacteria that rely on hydrogen sulfide for their metabolism. _Physorg

More fascinating detail at the link above.

The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Photosynthetic organisms have been converting sunlight, CO2, and water into carbohydrates and lipids for about 3.5 billion years. And yet, most of the oil and gas that humans have accessed, originated roughly 200 million years or fewer ago.

Certainly CO2 levels were far higher in earlier periods of geologic history. Uncountable numbers of photosynthetic organisms lived and died to make and keep the planet's atmosphere oxygen rich and CO2 poor (currently 0.04% of atmosphere is CO2 vs over 20% O2).

It is highly likely that other less prominent dieoffs, accompanied by massive volcanism, occurred throughout the long geologic history of the planet. Each time CO2 concentrations shot up, Earth's photosynthetic arsenal massed itself to meet the challenge, and restore the oxygen heavy balance of the planet's gases.

Over and over again, massive volumes of plankton and vegetation were buried in deep anaerobic conditions, leading to unimaginable volumes of hydrocarbon generation. And almost all of that occurring in parts and depths of the Earth's crust which humans have not yet explored with any care.

Public Unions Pushing US States and Cities to Breaking Point

It is not surprising that New York, Illinois, and Ohio are the #1, #2, and #3 US states losing population. "Poodle states" such as these are kept on a tight leash by public unions. In New York, vital public services will be curtailed to satisfy the insatiable demands of the public unions. More from a governor on the front lines of the battle to save the US from the public unions:

The majority of union members today no longer work in construction, manufacturing or "strong back" jobs. They work for government, which, thanks to President Obama, has become the only booming "industry" left in our economy. Since January 2008 the private sector has lost nearly eight million jobs while local, state and federal governments added 590,000.

Federal employees receive an average of $123,049 annually in pay and benefits, twice the average of the private sector. And across the country, at every level of government, the pattern is the same: Unionized public employees are making more money, receiving more generous benefits, and enjoying greater job security than the working families forced to pay for it with ever-higher taxes, deficits and debt.

How did this happen? Very quietly. The rise of government unions has been like a silent coup, an inside job engineered by self-interested politicians and fueled by campaign contributions.

Public employee unions contribute mightily to the campaigns of [leftist] politicians ($91 million in the midterm elections alone) who vote to increase government pay and workers. As more government employees join the unions and pay dues, the union bosses pour ever more money and energy into [leftist] campaigns. The result is that certain states are now approaching default. Decades of overpromising and fiscal malpractice by state and local officials have created unfunded public employee benefit liabilities of more than $3 trillion. _WSJ

(Notice that Al Fin has replaced the word "liberal" by the more appropriate descriptor "leftist" in the quote above, using square brackets. Leftists destroy economies intentionally, while those who go by the misnomer "liberals" only do so out of incompetence.)

Even the left-leaning New York Times has expressed some concern over the kamikaze tactics of public unions and their legislative enablers in municipalities and state houses:

It is the long-term problems of a handful of states, including California, Illinois, New Jersey and New York, that financial analysts worry about most, fearing that their problems might precipitate a crisis that could hurt other states by driving up their borrowing costs.

But it is the short-term budget woes that nearly all states are facing that are preoccupying elected officials.

Illinois is not the only state behind on its bills. Many states, including New York, have delayed payments to vendors and local governments because they had too little cash on hand to make them. California paid vendors with i.o.u.’s last year. A handful of other states, worried about their cash flow, delayed paying tax refunds last spring. _NYT

More states are approaching the breaking point due to unfunded pension, wage, and benefit liabilities to public unions.

It’s hard to overstate the havoc that a meltdown in the state and municipal bond market would cause. Many private investors and retirees are heavily invested in securities long thought safe. Worse, many pension funds, including state pension funds, have large positions in the muni market. The meltdown could feed on itself as falling bond prices would undermine state pension fund reserves and raise the interest rate on new debt issues. The panic will intensify and spread, sucking new states into the maelstrom — as more and more European countries have been affected by a crisis once limited to Greece. _AmericanInterest

Those US taxpayers who can get out, are leaving the states that have become enslaved to public unions and are growing impoverished as a result. But the same phenomenon is occurring at the US federal level, along with quite a few other fiscal, regulatory, and tax misadventures. Leaving one's country is a bit more complicated than leaving one province or state for another. But becoming an expatriate may well be easier than removing the politicians, regulators, lawyers, and union crooks who together are dragging the structure down.

You may want to add your weight to the much-maligned Tea Party movement before you go to those lengths. Most people are more attached to their homeland than they realise.

Amy Chua's Tiger Mother Parenting Curriculum

Amy Chua is a Yale Law professor and celebrated author of World on Fire and Day of Empire. More recently, Amy has written Battle Hym of the Tiger Mother, a look at her attempt to raise her American children by traditional Chinese methods.

Chua was raised by Chinese parents in the US -- her father Leon Chua is a UC Berkeley professor of Electrical Engineering and originator of many important concepts in non-linear electronics. Leon was raised in Manila, a member of an elite Chinese Filipino family. He rebelled against the traditional Chinese family business and tradition, in order to come to America and make his own way.

Amy Chua is married to a Jewish Yale Law professor -- not a traditional Chinese choice -- but appears intent on raising her daughters in the traditional Chinese manner. Here is a description of Chua's book:

All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. What Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother reveals is that the Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that. Western parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions and providing a nurturing environment. The Chinese believe that the best way to protect your children is by preparing them for the future and arming them with skills, strong work habits, and inner confidence. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother chronicles Chua's iron-willed decision to raise her daughters, Sophia and Lulu, her way-the Chinese way-and the remarkable results her choice inspires.

Here are some things Amy Chua would never allow her daughters to do:

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• not be the #1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin

The truth is Lulu and Sophia would never have had time for a playdate. They were too busy practicing their instruments (two to three hours a day and double sessions on the weekend) and perfecting their Mandarin.

Of course no one is perfect, including Chua herself. Witness this scene:

"According to Sophia, here are three things I actually said to her at the piano as I supervised her practicing:

1. Oh my God, you're just getting worse and worse.

2. I'm going to count to three, then I want musicality.

3. If the next time's not PERFECT, I'm going to take all your stuffed animals and burn them!"

But Chua demands as much of herself as she does of her daughters. And in her sacrifices-the exacting attention spent studying her daughters' performances, the office hours lost shuttling the girls to lessons-the depth of her love for her children becomes clear. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is an eye-opening exploration of the differences in Eastern and Western parenting- and the lessons parents and children everywhere teach one another. _GoogleBooks

This brief description is likely to apply to many East Asian traditions of child-raising, not only the Phillipines Chinese branch as represented by the Chua family. As you can see, it is a highly disciplined approach, oriented toward extracting the maximum possible achievement out of the child, in the areas that are emphasised.

If you look at other alternative parenting methods or alternative educational curricula which achieve above-the-ordinary results, you will likely find a similar undercurrent of high expectation and a guiding away from popular methods of time-wasting and peer dysfunction that leads a lot of affluent children into a rudderless adolescence and adulthood.

Amy Chua directed her children toward music -- specifically piano and violin. Does anyone doubt that Chua's daughters are likely to be highly proficient in these instruments, and probably other areas of interest? World-class mastery is another matter, and for that the child herself would need to have the fire inside her. But proficiency is very likely in the context of the Chua household as described.

Who would deserve the credit for high achievement by the girls? Chua's disciplined approach? Chinese tradition? The genetic giftedness bestowed on daughters of a Chinese law professor mother and a Jewish law professor father? Inherited drive and executive function?

Wait and see how things turn out first. Parenthetically, I wonder how often it happens that high-achieving East Asians marry and have children with high-achieving Jewish partners? This natural experimental joining of the genes of the two highest IQ test-scoring demographic populations known should provide researchers in the field of human intelligence with some genetic fodder, as gene sequencing and bioinformatics becomes cheaper and more sophisticated. Certainly the gene alleles which combined to give Ashkenazi Jews an average IQ of 110-115 are not likely to be the same exact gene variants which combined to give East Asians average IQs of 105-110. What will the combination yield?

Certainly Amy Chua herself, in World on Fire -- which looked at market dominant minorities around the world -- studiously avoided any discussion of differences in IQ between population groups. And yet, when choosing a mate for herself, there is no question that she took that quality into consideration. Still, for a good Chinese girl to marry outside the Han group suggests a bit of rebelliousness, which is a good sign in an intelligent, accomplished adult.

Children crave guidance, which is all too often denied them by parents whose time demands may stretch them to the breaking point. Child-raising trends in general are not encouraging, but there are rare foci of rationality, which may provide something of a nucleus for re-building afterward.

More about Amy Chua's background from Day of Empire's preface:

We were required to speak Chinese at home—the punishment was one whack of the chopsticks for every English word accidentally ut­tered. We drilled math and piano every afternoon, and we were never allowed to sleep over at our friends' houses. Every evening when my father came home from work, I took off his shoes and brought him his slippers. Our report cards had to be perfect; while our friends were rewarded for Bs, for us getting an A-minus was unthinkable.

Coming World Worse than Peak Oil, Climate Doom Hysterias?

Photo: Sean Heavey
The economic collapse that seems to be falling across most of the western world will make peak oil moot, and reveal carbon hysterics as persons disassociated from reality who have nothing important to do. The US government and the governments of most of Europe have compounded disastrous trends in debt and demography by adding a lethal layer of dysfunctional immigration. There's a storm a comin'.

When the US most needed good economic leadership, Bush and Obama let the US down.

$1.7 trillion in US home value goes up in a puff of smoke in 2010 -- continuing through 2011

Monster US deficit in November 2010, US on track to have another $1 trillion dollar deficit year

US Companies and Banks running scared. Fears over uncertainty in Obama's America leading private decision makers to hold onto cash.

Tax revenues for US governments at all levels continue downward, just as public sector union pay, benefits, and retirement shoot sky high. Layoffs of essential personnel inevitable.

Public employees -- The New Aristocracy (Video)

The tracks leading to the likely economic troubles were laid from 1900 through 1980. They have been well greased ever since, by the real government -- the bureaucracy and regulatory massif. The legal-political-industrial-criminal complex will make sure the demolition job on the economy is carried out, with no backtracking by busybody Tea Party types.

Population Bomb: Earth is Bleeding Human Capital

"I've got colleagues running around Florida trying to find people to take their knowledge before they die," says Peter Waggitt, a uranium production consultant to the IAEA. "Most of the senior experts in uranium mining are pushing 50 and some of the best are over 70." _SwissInfo

It is not too surprising when third world countries such as South Africa dismally fail to meet their electric power demands. Even though South Africa is the wealthiest and most advanced nation in SubSaharan Africa, it must still struggle with an average population IQ of only 72. More and more high IQ market dominant minorities in business, technology, and the professions are being driven from South Africa by sky-rocketing crime rates and other forms of rapid descent into third worldism.

It may come as a surprise to find that some of the same problems of human capital shortages are beginning to crop up in the advanced world.

The average university technician is aged over 40 and almost a third are over 50 years old, according to their trade union, Amicus Unite. It also warns that the training schemes that drew that generation of technicians into the sector have largely withered.

A report for the Higher Education Funding Council for England by consultancy Evidence Ltd found a 22 per cent drop in the number of technicians in engineering between the 1996 and 2001 research assessment exercises, almost a 23 per cent decline in biological sciences technicians and 16 and 17 per cent decreases in technicians for physical sciences and pre-clinical technicians.

"People are not coming into the sector as there is no development for them, and we are losing people because of the demographic time bomb," said Matt Levi, manager of the Leadership Foundation's Heated project, which was set up to research the problem. _TimesHE

Such problems are appearing in technology sectors all over the developed world. Europeans, S. Koreans, Japanese, Russians, and residents of the Anglosphere are failing to have children to replace themselves. Of the few children they have, not enough are going into technical professions that will be badly needed in the near future. One of the technology sectors which needs to grow the fastest, is the nuclear power sector. And that -- along with the power and energy industry in general -- is where some of the worst losses of human capital are occurring.

French utility EDF says around 50 percent of employees in its nuclear branch will retire by 2015 and that its workers are on average 43-44 years old.

In the United States, the peak age of workers in the nuclear sector is 48-52 while Britain estimates that up to two-thirds of its top-tier nuclear managers will retire by 2025. Worldwide, the nuclear industry employs around 250,000 people. Many first-generation nuclear staff have just retired or will do so in the next few years, taking with them skills and knowledge of complex, costly projects -- just as the nuclear renaissance gets underway.

Sometimes referred to as a "silver tsunami", the departure of the first generation of nuclear workers is a big concern for the IAEA, which promotes civilian nuclear technology alongside its role as atomic watchdog. Many countries and private firms have new units planned or under construction, the agency said in a September report for a conference of its 151 member states. "(They) are facing shortages of experienced personnel and loss of knowledge as they look to replace retiring staff for their existing fleet while at the same time staffing new projects."

Finnish nuclear regulator Stuk says the lack of skilled workers is at least partly to blame for the delays at Olkiluoto. So many experienced nuclear manufacturers have left the business that project managers have been forced to look for subcontractors who then need nuclear training, the regulator said in a presentation in August. Building the next generation of power plants will be demanding, "because much of the earlier experience and resources have been lost from the nuclear industry." _SwissInfo

As European populations fall from Europe to North America to Oceania, few members of many replacement populations possess the native talent to be trained in highly technical occupations which are crucial for an advancing future. Mexican immigrants to the US have an average IQ no higher than 90, shifting the occupational bell curve significantly to the left -- with many technical and scientific professions out of reach for most of the newcomers. Immigrants to Europe from North Africa and the Middle East have average IQs of around 85, a full standard deviation below native European populations. Fewer than 5% of these will be qualified for highly technical areas of study. The manpower shortages will only get worse.

Leaders and policy makers in the US, the EU, and elsewhere need to learn that low-IQ immigrants will quickly become a drag on their economies, and provide very few in the way of qualified high tech professionals. Affirmative action can attempt to force these unqualified immigrants into the technical professions, but a lowering of standards will be the result. There lies the Idiocracy and collapse.

It is not for advanced nations to tell third world nations how large their populations can grow. But it is the job of advanced nations to take care of their own societies, and to make sure that they maintain the technological skills and standards which keep their citizens safe, warm, and healthy.

The only shortage humans are facing that is of any significance is the shortage of human ingenuity. If we allow human ingenuity to die out due to postmodern groupthink and political correctness, then certainly everything else that we need will come in short supply. It is up to those who are still awake to make sure that that does not happen.

Must We Kill All Tort Lawyers Before We Can Go Into Space?

ImageSource
Over at NextBigFuture, Brian Wang looks at the supply and demand economics of space colonisation. Brian points to a more extensive posting by Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams, "The Economics of Space Infrastructure." Brian and Paul are correctly looking at the economic costs and benefits of space infrastructure and space colonies. But the topic goes far beyond mere economics.

Science Fiction author Charles Stross downplays arguments in favour of space colonies as "quasi-religious." Physicist Stephen Hawking wishes for humans to colonise Mars and Luna, as a way to preserve the human race and Terrestrial life, should Earth be destroyed by comets, asteroids, geologic catatrophe or other forms of massive upheaval. Physicist Freeman Dyson has thought along similar lines since the mid-1960s. The idea of "not having all of one's eggs in a single basket" appeals to the long term thinker who wishes the human enterprise to be ultimately successful.

Humans appear to possess an "exploratory instinct," a natural urge to explore. From the very beginning, humans have been willing to risk what they have, in order to find something more. The urge for outer space is another manifestation of this instinct.

At times it may seem that we have lost this exploratory urge, but always it returns, reshaped by current events. Why is it that we strive to understand our place in the heavens and seek other intelligences out there? _Planetary

Exploration is risky. Explorers often die. In an outward-looking, exploratory society, the acceptance of risk is so commonplace as to become second nature. Such a society will spawn many explorers, and many pioneers who are willing to follow close behind the explorer to create a more settled life in the new, risk-filled territories.

Modern affluent societies become more risk-averse, more fixed on security over time. This security-fixation often approaches pathological levels, depending upon whether it becomes accepted and codified within legal, cultural, educational, and legislative institutions.

In modern western nations -- particularly the US -- risk aversion in the form of tort is often costing societies their birthright and their future.

Economists have long understood that America's tort system acts as a serious drag on our nation's economy. Although many excellent studies have been conducted, no single work has fully captured the true total costs, both static and dynamic, of excessive litigation.

The good news: We now have some reliable figures. The bad news: The costs are far higher than anyone imagined.

Based on our estimates, and applying the best available scholarly research, we believe America's tort system imposes a total cost on the U.S. economy of $865 billion per year. This constitutes an annual "tort tax" of $9,827 on a family of four.

...litigation doesn't just transfer wealth, it also changes behavior, and often in economically unproductive ways. Any true estimate of the costs of America's tort system must also include these dynamic costs of litigation -- the impact on research and development spending, the costs of defensive medicine and the related rise in health-care spending and reduced access to health care, and the loss of output from deaths due to excess liability. _WSJ

Most recent attention to tort reform in the US has focused upon medical tort. But the economic destruction of out-of-control US tort law is felt in every part of society, industry, and the economy. In a society ruled by tyranny of tort, all risk is punished pro-actively. In other words, most great ventures are never even attempted, due to the tight noose of tort -- and other effects of excess government -- around the necks of entire societies. As of 2006, costs of tort in the US had been growing at an average rate of almost 10% annually PDF.

In order to advance, humans must take risks. The elimination of risk from society is also the elimination of growth and advancement. Eliminating risk means inevitable stagnation and decline. It is the great human dieoff by backdoor means, albeit in slow motion form -- at first. Decline has a way of accelerating, however, once it passes a certain point.

Massive -- and still growing -- bureaucracies of government shut in most possibilities of escape from this inbuilt decline. When humans are cut off from expressing their natural instincts, they tend to rebel if they can. Eventually, they grow passive, fatalistic.

It appears as if western educational, news media, and entertainment systems are dedicated to the suppression of the exploratory urge in humans. This society-wide trap appears to be closing more tightly every year, with every pseudo-cause and crusade such as carbon hysteria, or resource scarcity doom.

How can we escape this suffocating atmosphere of security-fixation and excessive risk-aversion? There are few ways to escape other than to emigrate to a less regulated nation, or to build a seastead. Every so often a few people try to start a new country, where they can set their own rules so as to allow greater personal freedoms. Of course, new countries in space -- on the moon, Mars, in the asteroid belt, and beyond -- would represent a big step up from previous efforts.

But people will die in the attempt to establish a permanent human presence and economy in space. That is inevitable. People die in hazardous environments on Earth every day, and outer space is far more hazardous than almost anywhere on Earth. Whenever there is a chance of people dying, lawyers flock like flies on excrement.

We can see in the inability of advanced societies to develop a larger, safer, cleaner nuclear power industry, how tort lawyers combined with government regulators drive up costs to the point of abandonment of multi-billion dollar enterprises and loss of future plans and possibilities.

Established powers aim to remain established powers. That is what the vast inbred and corrupt system of government and law has become in the west. Free humans are hemmed in and restricted. Economies stagnate and the human spirit dies a little with every new encroachment by government and its army of allied extortionists.

People do emigrate to Costa Rica and other small countries where there may be less intrusive regulation and more freedom of activity in many ways. Other people "go Galt" and drop out, go off the grid as it were. Expect to see more of that unless something drastic occurs to reverse the creeping strangulation of the government-legal- quasi organised crime complex.

Can SpaceX and other private space companies provide an escape from the ongoing choking of human freedom in the developed world? Even if improvements in technology allowed the costs of space launch were to come down enough to make travel to the moon economical for middle class incomes, the inbred risk-aversion of modern societies places a limit on how far the movement could progress -- without massive changes in western government and legal systems.

Must we kill all tort lawyers and their fellows in crime, before the human instinct to explore and pioneer can find an outlet in space?

What the Predictions of Greens, Luddites, and Doomers are Worth

CagleCartoon via Historian
The climate of doom generated by greens, Luddites, and doomers of 2010 sounds remarkably similar to the climate of doom generated by the same groups in 1970. Here is some food for thought on the reliability of such predictions:

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” – George Wald, Harvard Biologist

...“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” – Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

...“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….” - Life Magazine, January 1970

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” – Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

...“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.” – Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” – Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” – Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” – Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
... _Historian_Predictions from 1970

More from Paul Ehrlich:

"The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines . . . hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) are going to starve to death." (Population Bomb 1968)
"Smog disasters" in 1973 might kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles. (1969)
"I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." (1969)
"Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity . . . in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion." (1976)
"By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth's population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people." (1969)
"By 1980 the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 because of pesticides, and by 1999 its population would drop to 22.6 million." (1969) _igreens

Even more revealing quotes from our green, dieoff.orgy, and lefty-Luddite friends:

"We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing -- in terms of
economic socialism and environmental policy." Timothy Wirth, former U.S.
Senator (D-Colorado)

...Global Sustainability requires: "the deliberate quest of poverty . . .
reduced resource consumption . . . and set levels of mortality control."
Professor Maurice King

..."Giving society cheap, abundant energy . . . would be the equivalent of
giving an idiot child a machine gun." Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University _Source

Here are more proclamations from your elitist betters:

“We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination… So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts… Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
- Prof. Stephen Schneider, Stanford Professor of Climatology, lead author of many IPCC reports

“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing.”
- Christopher Manes, Earth First!

“The extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions, if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on Earth - social and environmental.”
- Ingrid Newkirk, former President of PETA

“I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”
- John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal _Telegraph_quoted in Wiseup

You can find several more equally damning quotes here. Decades after they have been shown to be foolish frauds, these morons still do not know when to shut up (read the comments and weep). And the media does not hesitate to give them a "megaphone of doom" whenever they request one.

Universities, media rooms, and government bureaucracies are full of this type of idiot. If you send your children to university, chances are good that they will be taught crudely updated versions of the same message. The less intelligent of your children will take these ideas to heart, and never give them up. They will be good little lambs to the slaughter.

You, on the other hand, can see the duplicity, the lack of credibility, and have the opportunity to decide for yourself.

Is North America the New Energy Kingdom?

With rising production from shale fields, the U.S. surpassed Russia last year to become the world’s largest supplier of natural gas. Shale now accounts for 10 per cent of the country’s natural gas production – up from 2 per cent in 1990. Chesapeake’s production from its next Texas project, expected by the end of 2012, will by itself supply the energy equivalent of 500,000 barrels of oil a day. _Globe&Mail

We know that Canada is overflowing with hydrocarbons from shale oil to oil sands to coal to natural gas to methane hydrates.... But the US was supposed to be "all tapped out" ever since oil production peaked back around 1970. Is it possible that all of the peak oil and peak energy doomers who foretold the end of US oil & gas may have been a bit premature?

U.S. domestic production for the year will be 140,000 barrels a day higher than last year (which was 410,000 barrels a day higher than 2008). Although the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) says U.S. production will decline next year, who knows?

...As an article last month in The New York Times observed: “Just as it seemed that the world was running on fumes, giant oil fields were discovered off the coasts of Brazil and Africa, and Canadian oil sands projects expanded so fast, they now provide North America with more oil than Saudi Arabia. In addition, the United States has increased domestic oil production for the first time in a generation.” Further still: “Another wave of natural gas drilling has taken off in shale rock fields across the United States, and more shale gas drilling is just beginning in Europe and Asia.”

...For natural gas, the U.S. has the four largest fields in the world: the Haynesville field in Louisiana (with production up by 77 per cent in 2009); the Fayetteville field in Arkansas and the Marcellus field in Pennsylvania (both with production up by 50 per cent); and the Barnett field in Texas and Oklahoma (with production up by double-digit increases). The EIA reports that proven U.S. reserves of natural gas increased last year by 11 per cent to 284 trillion cubic feet – the highest level since 1971.

Beyond shale oil and shale gas, there’s the awesome energy promise of methane hydrates, frozen crystals of water and gas that lie beneath the northern permafrost and beneath oceans floors around the world in quantities that boggle the imagination.

“Assuming 1 per cent recovery,” the U.S. Geological Survey says, “these deposits [in U.S. territory] could meet the natural gas needs of the country (at current rates of consumption) for 100 years.” _Globe&Mail

Gas producers are scurrying to find ways to export gas to cold, hungry customers in Asia and Europe. LNG -- liquified natural gas -- is one approach which is being developed for the export market. GTL -- gas to liquids -- is another approach that is likely to be developed inside the US within the next 10 years. Both approaches will allow for easier entry into the lucrative export markets. The GTL approach will also -- if economical -- allow gas to be converted into liquid fuels at a profit. That should help reduce North American dependency on overseas oil, once developed.

Cross-posted to Al Fin Energy

SpaceX Falcoln 9 Success With Dragon Capsule Orbit & Recovery

Discovery
Elon Musk's SpaceX Falcoln 9 rocket has made its second successful launch to orbit -- but this time it carried the Dragon capsule through two full orbits before a sea landing and recovery. Today's demonstration brings SpaceX that much closer to carrying space cargo to orbit, and eventually carrying astronauts into space.

The mission marked the first time a private company had returned a spacecraft from orbit, a key milestone in the company's quest to shoulder some of the cargo runs to the space station after NASA retires the shuttles next year. SpaceX, which is owned and operated by Elon Musk, is expected to share the work with Orbital Sciences Corp., which plans to test-fly its Taurus 4 rocket and Cygnus capsule next year.

By then, SpaceX may be well on its way to actually docking at the space station. Today's successful mission should help the firm's case to combine the two remaining test flights under its NASA-backed development program and berth a Dragon capsule at the station during its next flight, targeted for Spring or Summer 2011. _Discovery

If we are lucky, SpaceX and other private launch companies will team up with Robert Bigelow's space hotel enterprise and other private space enterprise companies, in a rapid proliferation of profitable space enterprise.

NASA has almost outlived its usefulness to the future of humans in space. Once space commerce becomes a profitable and going concern, we will see how differently things could have gone had the US been governed by more market-oriented leaders throughout the 50's, 60's, and 70's. The entire state-centered mentality that set up shop in the FDR administrations of the 1930s and 1940s doomed the US to a stagnant top-heavy government of lead-bottomed bureaucrats, which has only gotten worse with time.

We will have to see if some of the newer technologies can open up some non-state or minimal-state opportunities for ambitious market-oriented persons of the near future.

Problem Solving with Sudden Creative Insight

ImageSource
Most of us have solved problems using trial and error, slogging our way through the possibilities until we hit on the right answer. Some of us have solved problems through a sudden flash of insight -- an epiphany or eureka! moment. Of the two methods of problem solving, most of us who have experienced both, would prefer the epiphany. Northwestern University researchers have looked at these two methods of problem solving in an attempt to better understand how to achieve the more preferred sudden insight.

In a just completed study, researchers at Northwestern University found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine.

“What we think is happening,” said Mark Beeman, a neuroscientist who conducted the study with Karuna Subramaniam, a graduate student, “is that the humor, this positive mood, is lowering the brain’s threshold for detecting weaker or more remote connections” to solve puzzles.


...For almost a century scientists have used puzzles to study what they call insight thinking, the leaps of understanding that seem to come out of the blue, without the incremental drudgery of analysis.

In one classic experiment, the German psychologist Karl Duncker presented people with a candle, a box of thumbtacks and the assignment of attaching the candle to a wall. About a quarter of the subjects in some studies thought to tack the box to the wall as a support — some immediately, and others after a few failed efforts to tack wax to drywall.

The creative leap may well be informed by subconscious cues. In another well-known experiment, psychologists challenged people to tie together two cords; the cords hung from the ceiling of a large room, too far apart to be grabbed at the same time.

A small percentage of people solved it without any help, by tying something like a pair of pliers to one cord and swinging it like a pendulum so that it could be caught while they held the other cord.

...creative problem-solving usually requires both analysis and sudden out-of-the-box insight.

“You really end up toggling between the two, but I think that they are truly different brain states,” said Adam Anderson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto.

At least, that is what brain-imaging studies are beginning to show. At first, such studies did little more than confirm that the process was happening as expected: brain areas that register reward spiked in activity when people came up with a solution, for instance..

Yet the “Aha!” moment of seeing a solution is only one step along a pathway. In a series of recent studies, Dr. Beeman at Northwestern and John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University, have imaged people’s brains as they prepare to tackle a puzzle but before they’ve seen it. Those whose brains show a particular signature of preparatory activity, one that is strongly correlated with positive moods, turn out to be more likely to solve the puzzles with sudden insight than with trial and error (the clues can be solved either way).

...The punch line is that a good joke can move the brain toward just this kind of state. In their humor study, Dr. Beeman and Dr. Subramaniam had college students solve word-association puzzles after watching a short video of a stand-up routine by Robin Williams. The students solved more of the puzzles over all, and significantly more by sudden insight, compared with when they’d seen a scary or boring video beforehand.

This diffuse brain state is not only an intellectual one, open to looser connections between words and concepts. In a study published last year, researchers at the University of Toronto found that the visual areas in people in positive moods picked up more background detail, even when they were instructed to block out distracting information during a computer task.

The findings fit with dozens of experiments linking positive moods to better creative problem-solving. “The implication is that positive mood engages this broad, diffuse attentional state that is both perceptual and visual,” said Dr. Anderson. “You’re not only thinking more broadly, you’re literally seeing more. The two systems are working in parallel.”

The idea that a distracted brain can be a more insightful one is still a work in progress. So, for that matter, is the notion that puzzle-solving helps the brain in any way to navigate the labyrinth of soured relationships, uncertain career options or hard choices that so often define the world outside. _NYT

This line of thought takes me back to the difference between hypnosis and meditation. With hypnosis, the attention is focused so narrowly that the mind becomes progressively unaware of anything except the object of focus. With meditation (mindfulness mediation), the attention becomes softened progressively, so that the mind seems to become aware of everything all at once -- but without anxiety. An ongoing fMRI study comparing hypnosis and mindfulness meditation may help to answer many of the questions which have been asked when comparing the two states of mind.

The Northwestern researchers above discovered that humour tended to soften the attention, and make the mind more prepared to receive a flash of sudden insight for solving a problem. Parallels between humour and meditation have been drawn many times -- specifically by the late philosopher and Zen enthusiast Alan Watts.

Using various metrics including psychological testing and brain imaging, researchers have found that mindfulness meditation tends to lend toward a more youthful and flexible brain -- including the preservation of cortical thickness in older individuals who practise mindfulness, comparable to brain thickness of much younger persons.

Mindfulness should be taught rather early in life, and should become a lifelong practise -- although either is rare, and both together are almost unheard of. Enhanced problem solving and preservation of cortical thickness into old age would both be welcome side benefits to the main effect of an ongoing enhancement of day to day awareness.

More bits and pieces:

The functional M.R.I. images reveal that when people are emotionally distressed — anxious, angry, depressed — the most active sites in the brain are circuitry converging on the amygdala, part of the brain's emotional centers, and the right prefrontal cortex, a brain region important for the hypervigilance typical of people under stress.

By contrast, when people are in positive moods — upbeat, enthusiastic and energized — those sites are quiet, with the heightened activity in the left prefrontal cortex. _Goleman

The difference between concentration/hypnosis and meditation is really more about expansive versus contractive awareness. Many hypnotic induction techniques encourage the subject to shrink their focus down to just one thing such as the hypnotist's voice or watching a small spot on a wall so that all other points of awareness are temporarily pushed out of awareness. In most hypnosis there is initially an increase in Beta brainwaves as the subject engages their thinking mind to start blocking out things. As they physically relax into the experience of concentration the Alpha waves begin to arise.

When you enter into hypnosis much of the racing mind gets pushed out of awareness leaving you with far less mental chatter than usual. Superficially, you might think that sounds just like meditation, and in a way it is, and in another way it isn't. In meditation we transcend racing thoughts whereas in rigid concentration or hypnosis we repress them. The result is less thinking, but the mechanisms work on opposite principles. _ProjectMeditation

Relaxation

When studied in psychology, relaxation refers to a focusing on the mind and a relaxing of the body's muscles. Research has shown that being too tense and/or living with too much stress has a significant negative impact on our lives. It can lead to physical illnesses such as high blood pressure, ulcers, fatigue, and headaches and many psychological issues, including inappropriate or misdirected emotions, confusion, difficulty concentrating, and burn-out. People utilize relaxation, in combination with stress management, to improve their quality of life, reduce the physical components of stress, and improve their psychological functioning.

There are different forms of relaxation, including breathing exercises, deep muscle relaxation, progressive muscle relaxation, imagery, meditation, and yoga. Although each of these has different components, the main goal in each is to relax the body's muscles and focus the mind. Since the body and the mind cannot be separated, most agree that both of these components must be present for any relaxation technique to work.


Hypnosis

Hypnosis is very similar to relaxation in that the same two components of physical and mental must be addressed together. Most professionals agree that hypnosis is a very deep state of relaxation where your mind is more focused and the connection between your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are more clear. _Psych101

This last comparison appears to contradict what I said above about hypnosis and meditation. But remember, there are many forms of meditation. Some of them are virtually indistinguishable from many forms of self-hypnosis.
You could also watch your favourite comic or comedy show, and achieve much of the benefit of meditation. Alternatively, you could just belly laugh. Interestingly, that also works.

Traditional "Passive Learning" Education is Hogwash

SD
Confining children in a classroom with no one but their peers for several hours a day, week after week, year after year, is thought to be the proper way to bestow an education on the child. Somehow, this passive absorption of knowledge from a "learned" teacher is supposed to prepare the child for the time when he will take on the cloak of adulthood and make his own way in the world.

Of course most of us suspect that it is garbage, and that it has always been garbage. But educational research is rather tied up with and obligated to the current system, and has been quite slow to present tangible objections to the way things are. Still, occasionally some light shines through:

New research confirms that having some authority over how one takes in new information significantly enhances one's ability to remember it. The study, in the journal Nature Neuroscience, also offers a first look at the network of brain structures that contribute to this phenomenon.

"Having active control over a learning situation is very powerful and we're beginning to understand why," said University of Illinois psychology and Beckman Institute professor Neal Cohen, who led the study with postdoctoral researcher Joel Voss. "Whole swaths of the brain not only turn on, but also get functionally connected when you're actively exploring the world."

The study focused on activity in several brain regions, including the hippocampus, located in the brain's medial temporal lobes, near the ears. Researchers have known for decades that the hippocampus is vital to memory, in part because those who lose hippocampal function as a result of illness or injury also lose their ability to fully form and retain new memories.

But the hippocampus doesn't act alone. Robust neural connections tie it to other important brain structures, and traffic on these data highways flows in both directions. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, which track blood flow in the brain, show that the hippocampus is functionally connected to several brain networks – distinct regions of the brain that work in tandem to accomplish critical tasks.

To better understand how these brain regions influence active versus passive learning, Voss designed an experiment that required participants to memorize an array of objects and their exact locations in a grid on a computer monitor. A gray screen with a window in it revealed only one object at a time. The "active" study subjects used a computer mouse to guide the window to view the objects.

"They could inspect whatever they wanted, however they wanted, in whatever order for however much time they wanted, and they were just told to memorize everything on the screen," Voss said. The "passive" learners viewed a replay of the window movements recorded in a previous trial by an active subject.

Then participants were asked to select the items they had seen and place them in their correct positions on the screen. After a trial, the active and passive subjects switched roles and repeated the task with a new array of objects.

The study found significant differences in brain activity in the active and passive learners. Those who had active control over the viewing window were significantly better than their peers at identifying the original objects and their locations, the researchers found. Further experiments, in which the passive subjects used a mouse that moved but did not control the viewing window, established that this effect was independent of the act of moving the mouse.

To identify the brain mechanisms that enhanced learning in the active subjects, the researchers repeated the trials, this time testing individuals who had amnesia – a disease characterized by impairment in learning new information – as a result of hippocampal damage. To the surprise of the researchers, these participants failed to benefit from actively controlling the viewing window.

"These data suggest that the hippocampus has a role not just in the formation of new memory but possibly also in the beneficial effects of volitional control on memory," the researchers wrote.

Brain imaging (by means of fMRI) of healthy young subjects engaged in the same active and passive learning tests revealed that hippocampal activity was highest in the active subjects' brains during these tests. Several other brain structures were also more engaged when the subject controlled the viewing window, and activity in these brain regions was more synchronized with that of the hippocampus than in the passive trials.

Activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the cerebellum and the hippocampus (see cartoon) was higher, and more highly coordinated, in participants who did well on spatial recall, the researchers found. Increased activity in the inferior parietal lobe, the parahippocampal cortex and the hippocampus (see cartoon) corresponded to better performance on item recognition.

"Lo and behold," Cohen said, "our friend the hippocampus makes a very conspicuous appearance in active learning."

The new findings challenge previous ideas about the role of the hippocampus in learning, Voss said. It is a surprise, he said, that other brain regions that are known to be involved in planning and strategizing, for instance, "can't do very much unless they can interact with the hippocampus."

Rather than being a passive player in learning, the hippocampus "is more like an integral part of an airplane guidance system," Voss said. "You have all this velocity information, you have a destination target and every millisecond it's taking in information about where you're headed, comparing it to where you need to go, and correcting and updating it." _Eurekalert_via_SD

I quoted more extensively than normal from the news release, in case readers might want as more detail than a snippet. The findings are important, although I fail to understand why the researchers should be surprised about any of these findings.

The key finding in regard to education is that active learners who take an active role in acquiring knowledge, seem to form stronger brain connections and achieve better recall. Sitting in a classroom or lecture hall, listening to a lecture, may be the worst possible form of teaching/learning imaginable.

But will the schools of education -- so deeply in thrall to the powers that be -- begin to rock the boat just a bit, try to change things? Not likely, at least not on a grand scale. The corrupt and failed school system is too attached to the powerful and moneyed interest in the educational - industrial - political complex.

If you haven't read John Taylor Gatto's free online book on American education, or explored the significant number of alternative curricula for homeschools, unschools, and private schools, you owe it to yourself to make up the deficit -- particularly if you have children needing to be educated, or even if you pay taxes to support the current system, or vote on school bonds etc.

The Female Brain's Reaction to Stress

Rutgers
Psychology professor Tracey Shores of Rutgers has discovered some interesting gender differences between the brains of male and female rats in their ability to learn immediately after being stressed.

The research, published Dec. 1 in the Journal of Neuroscience, has implications for the way stress-related disorders are treated in men and women.

Shors and her co-authors, graduate student Lisa Maeng and post-doctoral scholar Jaylyn Waddell, examined two brain regions important in learning and stress, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. The amygdala, a small almond-shaped structure located deep within the brain, senses stressful situations. The prefrontal cortex, in the front of the brain, is necessary for higher cognitive functions.

“These two structures are intimately connected to one another,” Shors said. “Therefore, we examined whether they communicate with one another to influence learning after stress.”

The researchers exposed male and female rats to stress, and then presented them with an associative learning task. During training, the rats learned to associate one event with another that occurred later in time. They played a tone and later stimulated the rats’ eyelids to elicit a blink. After the stimulus was taken away, most of the male rats responded to the tone by blinking on their own. Most of the females, however, did not blink in response to the tone, indicating that they had failed to learn that association. But the research also contained a neurological surprise for Shors, Maeng and Waddell.

When Shors and her colleagues disrupted the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala in some of the females, those females were able to learn the association.

“This wasn’t true for males," Shors said. "So, males and females are using different brain structures to learn after stress. In other words, females can learn after stress if the prefrontal cortex can’t ‘talk’ to the amygdala. From this, we conclude that males and females can use different brain circuits to learn after stressful life events.” _Rutgers

This study's findings are somewhat consistent with studies in humans from both USC in Los Angeles and researchers in Polish labs. Human males are more likely to analyse the dynamics of a stressful situation with the aim of taking definitive action to resolve the stressful stimulus. This male reaction requires the brain to assess a situation as clearly as possible, which may involve adapting known strategies to the situation or adopting entirely new strategies -- which requires learning.

Human females in the face of stress, tend to look for assistance from sympathetic onlookers, bystanders, or companions. This response requires reading facial expressions of others in the vicinity, as well as their capacity to render assistance. Such abilities are rather instinctive in the female brain, and require minimal learning or creative adaptation.

As to the female rats inability to learn (basic stimulus response conditioning) immediately after stress, the extent of applicability of the finding to human females would require further study. All that can be said with respect to the USC and Polish studies, is that the stereotyped human female response to stress does not typically require new learning, not that she would be unable to learn if necessary (either stimulus-response conditioning or more conventional conscious learning).

No one is proposing cutting frontal cortex pathways in human females for such studies, but brain researchers may soon have tools to allow temporary, selective disruption of targeted pathways. At this time, transcranial magnetic stimulation can disrupt particular cortical areas -- since the cortex is closest to the skull, and easiest to reach with extra-cranial magnetic fields. As scientists find better ways to focus such pulsed fields deeper into the white matter of the brain, more selective targeting should be achievable.

"Scam for the Ages" Makes Madoff Look Like Small Change

WUWT
Is it possible that you are the victim of a massive scam that makes the Bernie Madoff scam -- and all the other famous scams of history -- pale in comparison? It is not only possible -- it is true. In this incomprehensibly vast scam, there are many $billions to be made, and many $trillions to change hands over the next few decades. Clever chaps, these highly placed con-men.

A small number of humans shape and control the information flow that is accessible to most of the human race. Not coincidentally, this small number of persons is also tightly connected to even fewer persons who control most of the world's commercial, industrial, and governmental assets. If you do not take the trouble to step out of the mainstream of information flow, you are not likely to be aware of how your future prospects are being stolen from you without your consent.

Reducing man made carbon dioxide emissions is completely and utterly pointless if your goal is to change the future climate. On the other hand if you’re looking to make money from the trading of carbon allowances (carbon credits) than it makes a great deal of sense. If you’re looking to control the way the modern world makes energy then it makes perfect sense as well. If you’re trying to save the world from capitalists it makes it highly desirable to reduce “dirty” carbon emissions. If your mission is to extract money from developed nations and give it to those countries that have been robbed of their right to burn fossil fuels to grow their economies then it [may appear to be] the moral thing to do. If you are in the renewable energy business it makes perfect sense to support the reduction of carbon dioxide “pollution”. If you’re one of hundreds of environmental corporations whos mission is to save the planet at any cost, [and reduce the human population of Earth by at least 90%] then shutting down all sources of man made carbon dioxide is a war you must win. What cause could be nobler than to save the planet? _EnergyTribune

Bracketed comments in the quote above are editorial insertions by Al Fin

The frantic global rush to control human energy production -- and thus all human industry and commerce -- is based upon catastrophic climate models which project a "runaway greenhouse effect" from human CO2 emissions. But are the models believable? Are these pliable constructs of an infant science -- climatology -- trustworthy enough to base the entire human future upon their computations? There are reasons to strongly doubt the reliability of the models. From the paper: Anagnostopoulos, G. G., Koutsoyiannis, D., Christofides, A., Efstratiadis, A. & Mamassis, N. (2010) A comparison of local and aggregated climate model outputs with observed data. Hydrol. Sci. J. 55(7), 1094-1110 (via WUWT) we can see a few detailed comparisons between climate model outputs and actual observations.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global circulation models (GCM) are able to “reproduce features of the past climates and climate changes” (Randall et al., 2007, p. 601). Here we test whether this is indeed the case. We examine how well several model outputs fit measured temperature and rainfall in many stations around the globe. We also integrate measurements and model outputs over a large part of a continent, the contiguous USA (the USA excluding islands and Alaska), and examine the extent to which models can reproduce the past climate there. We will be referring to this as “comparison at a large scale”. _WUWT

When predicting the future it is best if your predictions range far beyond the lifetimes of anyone currently alive. That way, when you are proven wrong, no one then alive will particularly care one way or another -- certainly not you or your primary antagonists, who are long since dead. Climate modelers would like to have such luxury, but if they are to be taken at all seriously -- even by their fellows who are accepting generous and targeted research grants like themselves -- they must leave a way for the models to be tested, some tenuous connection between the models and real world observations. So far, the models appear to be highly biased and unreliable.

Is it possible that the models' outputs -- and the sensationalist headlines about climate change that face us on every front on every day of the year -- may be just a bit exaggerated?

The primary greenhouse gases listed in order of their contribution to the effect are: Water vapor, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane. There are others but their concentrations in the atmosphere are so small they don’t contribute much effect. Water vapor and clouds are about 93% of the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide about 5%, nitrous oxide about 0.95% and methane contributes about 0.36%. It’s the combined greenhouse warming from these gases that gives the earth its current average temperature.

Studies by Raval & Ramanathan (1989) estimated that the greenhouse effect of a cloudless atmosphere is 146 W/m2 (watts per square meter) for the average earth. They further pointed out that water vapor is accounting for most of this greenhouse effect, leaving about 8 W/m2 for the total amount of atmospheric CO2, i.e. some 5%. In addition the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate changes (IPCC) 4th assessment showed that 3% of the atmospheric CO2 comes from man made sources. Global gross primary production and respiration, land use changes plus CO2 from the oceans totals 213 gigatons of carbon exchanged each year between the earth/oceans and the atmosphere. The IPCC figure also shows man made carbon emissions to be about 7 gigatons bringing the total to 220 gigatons per year. So from this we can see that making energy from fossil fuels is adding about 3% of the carbon dioxide added to the air each year. From that the total human component of the greenhouse effect is therefore about 3% of the total carbon dioxide component of the greenhouse effect which is 5%. That gives us a value of 0.1% from man made carbon dioxide. If you think that’s a small number you’re right. _EnergyTribune

In reality, humans could reduce their CO2 contribution to virtually nothing, and the climate would not change its trajectory. But the human population would rapidly die off to a relatively low level -- which is precisely what legions of faux environmentalists would like to see occur. And a few well-placed individuals would reap many $billions (or more) of diverted resources, which would place them in a most elevated position with respect to the mere hundreds of millions of subsistence-level humans who might survive the energy starvation and dieoff.orgy.

US President Obama's staff is well-stocked with such faux environmentalist dieoff.orgiasts, and his presidential campaign was well-financed by individuals, corporations, and investment banks who are likely to do very well from carbon markets, trades, and regulations.

If you still believe in climate catastrophe from anthropogenic greenhouse gases, then you are not likely to change your point of view by looking at observations, data, or evidence which contradicts your point of view. You are one of the happy pawns to be sacrificed at will. But for the rest -- those who seek out information for yourselves, and do your own weighing of the evidence -- for you there is just a bit of fore-knowledge.

You can get involved in politics to attempt to slow the energy starvation reich's agenda a bit, or you can make personal preparations for what is coming, or both. Alternatively, you can try to get in on the big scam. Your move.

Extra Bonus: 120 Years of Media Coverage of Climate Catastrophe -- Hot and Cold. Climate is cyclic -- first hot, then cold, then hot again. Whichever direction the cycle is heading, it is always a catastrophe to the media and to credulous consumers of media crap.

The current Religious Orthodoxy of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming -- CAGW -- is easily converted to an orthodoxy of CAGC, if conditions warrent. The direction of climate temperature is irrelevant. It is the doom that counts.