Russian Driving

You know, I've occasionally suspected that our brothers at BSBFBs might be cherry-picking their Russian driver videos.

Not so, it turns out!

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I apologize that the thought ever crossed my mind, gentlemen.

Magic scissors

A tangled web indeed.  First a CDC politico tries to explain why $30 million in sequester cuts to a vaccination program would have killed the children while the President's magic powers could cut $60 million from the same program without hurting anyone.  My favorite part is at the end, addressing the White House's new program to "re-calibrate" its sequester message in the wake of a pile of Pinocchios awarded by those conservative troglodytes at the Washington Post:  The White House plans to "de-emphasize the veracity of its previous statements."

Speaking of…Science

I was walking with my wife in this morning's frigid sucker hole in the weather when I flashed on a solution to both of our age's major questions: where are the other intelligent life forms, and where is the universe's missing mass?

The answer is breathtakingly simple, and it solves both mysteries. 

The missing intelligences have been present all along, and they're still here.  They've just placed themselves inside Dyson shells.  We can't detect the intelligences because of the lack of emissions, other than gravity, escaping the shells.

The gravity part is key to the other solution.  The so-called missing mass currently is considered to be composed of "dark matter" that doesn't interact with the composition of our universe, except…gravitationally.  How convenient a set of characteristics.

The missing mass, clearly, is ordinary matter; it's just contained within all of those Dyson shells.  After all, there are a double potful of LGMs and BEMs, and they've all built these spheres.

Why would a species do such a thing rather than getting out and about, or at least shouting out their existence to the universe around them?  Speculating on the motives of an alien mindset—that really would be magical thinking.

I’m ready for my NSF and NASA grants, which I promise only to use for good.

Eric Hines

Comet alert

We may get a glimpse of a comet just after sunset for the next few days.  Comet Pan-STARRS came within about 100 million miles of Earth a few days ago and now is going to come within about 45 million miles of the Sun.  That will make it bright, but unfortunately it also means we'll only get a glimpse right after sunset.  It's worth a try tonight, though viewing may be better for the next couple of days after.  We're nearly at dark of the moon; that will not only help with viewing but possibly give us a dramatic contrast in a couple of days, when the new crescent moon will be just above the horizon near the comet right after sunset.

I got a pretty good look at a comet -- was it Hale-Bopp? -- in the mid-90s from the window of a commercial airliner.

Mad Middle Earth

The way to a man's heart . . .

. . . Is through his coffee cup.  Well, not literally a man, but a flying insect vis-à-vis flowers trying to decide what kind of nectar will keep 'em coming back for more.  It seems that citrus nectar has a lot of caffeine in it.  In controlled experiments,"three times as many bees remembered the connection between odor and reward if the reward contained caffeine."

The article says that citrus leaves have toxic levels of caffeine, presumably to ward off insects.  I must say that it doesn't deter leaf-cutter ants.  They go straight for our citrus trees, preferring them over almost every other leaf, and can strip and kill a tree in days.  They've been particularly bad this year.

H/t Rocket Science.

No problem with the California budget

Guest blogger Gregg Stevens at CoyoteBlog reminds most of us why we're not trying to make a living in California, and why Douglas really needs to get working on that exit strategy.  The operator of a camping site near Eureka in extreme Northern California, Stevens found one day that a large fir tree had fallen over into the river, leaving a hole six feet deep and ten feet wide.  Thus began a strange and wonderful journey through familiar bureaucratic mazes he fondly imagined he already had mastered, in pursuit of permission to move the fallen tree (now "salmon habitat") and fill the hole.

It turned out that the tree issue was readily resolved, but the hole was a problem on a Kafkaesque scale.  Stevens sent off a $2,500 application fee and prepared the usual richly illustrated and annotated research paper examining the impact of filling the hole, then waited.  And waited.  In the meantime, he shoveled some of the displaced gravel over some exposed utility lines and put up a temporary fence to prevent campers from falling into the hole.

Then one winter day, more than a year after I had filed the application, I received a certified letter from the Coastal Commission.  They had been surreptitiously monitoring the work we had done, or not done, at the site.  And we were looking at a fine of $30,000 and up to $15,000 per day for doing the work.  Or not doing the work.  The letter was a bit vague on that part.  But one thing was clear.  Whatever it was we had or hadn’t done was wrong and thoroughly illegal.  And we were to be punished severely for it.

But all's well that ends well. No one was driven into bankruptcy this time, the salmon continue their happy lives uninterrupted, and all the wonders of modern technology were brought to bear on a cavity-mitigation project that's not quite visible from space.

The man who killed 40,000 elephants

He loved elephants, but he did it to save the land.  Then he found it made desertification worse instead of better, and devoted the rest of his life to figuring out why.  These are his conclusions and proposed solutions.  He and his team have restored desertified grazing land on several continents by increasing grazing herds instead of decreasing them, with careful rotation and movement.  It sounds a lot like what Joel Salatin does with his moveable fences and frequently moved cattle herds.  It's also a good deal like the restoration of cool oases from hot desert that is described in Gaia's Garden, a favorite permaculture resource in the Texan99 household.

The before-and-after shots are like something out of a dream of Paradise.  These are results he's achieving on poor lands with poor people.

H/t Watts Up with That, who's more excited about this than I've ever seen him.

Taxing today to pay for yesterday

The "Antiplanner" reacts poorly to a San Francisco councilman's proposal to tax email to help the U.S. Postal Service out with its operating deficit.

H/t a comment to an article linked by Rhymes with Cars and Girls, from Free Northerner, about Matthew Yglesias's inability to understand how we might structure a rail system that didn't rely on taxpayer subsidies: "What kind of system could possibly cause people to invest resources in providing valued services to others in an efficient manner solely so they can profit from operating surpluses?"

Hoaxes

I'm obsessed with hoaxes lately, and our ability to admit what we don't know.  This is a wonderful art quiz.  Can you tell the masterpiece from the hoax?  I scored a 67%.  This is a similar quiz.  Again I scored a 67%.

Visual arts not your thing?  Try this prose quiz, and distinguish snippets of Faulkner from a bad machine translation of German.  I was more disappointed this time, because I scored only a 75% score, and I thought I could do better than that with an author I like very much.

iCure for cancer

The guy who writes "Rhymes with Cars and Girls" under the pen-name "The Crimson Reach" is a funny man.  Today he wonders whassup with Apple these days:

And of course as everyone knows it’s been like a year and a half (AT LEAST) since Apple has released a revolutionary new product every single year.  That’s a long time.  Is Apple dead?  The answer seems clear.  This is cold hard objective number reasons going on.  It’s not like there was just a Steve Jobs personality cult or something.

His blog banner reads:

Dabbler who knows a little about a lot, and a lot about very little. All lies within The Crimson Reach. 

This blog has been FULLY vetted AND fact-checked. (There were some issues.)

Natural law

From First Things, as I continue thinking about Grim's question about where Heidegger went wrong:

The truth is that we cannot talk intelligibly about natural law if we have not all first agreed upon what nature is and accepted in advance that there really is a necessary bond between what is and what should be.  Nor can that bond be understood in naturalistic terms.  Even if it were clearly demonstrable that for the majority of persons the happiest life is also the most wholesome, and that most of us find spiritual and corporeal contentment by observing a certain “natural” ethical mean—still, the daringly disenchanted moralist might ask: “What do we owe to nature?” 

To his mind, after all, the good may not be contentment or even justice, but the extension of the pathos of the will, as Nietzsche would put it: the poetic labor of the will to power, the overcoming of the limits of the merely human, the justification of the purely fortuitous phenomenon of the world through its transformation into a supreme aesthetic event.  What if he should choose to believe (and are not all values elective values for the secular moralist?) that the most exalted object of the will is the Übermensch, that natural prodigy or fortunate accident that now must become the end to which human culture consciously aspires? 

Denounce him, if you wish, for the perversity of his convictions.  Still, after all hypothetical imperatives have been adduced, and all appeals to the general good have been made, nothing would logically oblige him to alter his ideas.  Only the total spiritual conversion of his vision of reality could truly change his thinking. 

To put the matter very simply, belief in natural law is inseparable from the idea of nature as a realm shaped by final causes, oriented in their totality toward a single transcendent moral Good:  one whose dictates cannot simply be deduced from our experience of the natural order, but must be received as an apocalyptic interruption of our ordinary explanations that nevertheless, miraculously, makes the natural order intelligible to us as a reality that opens up to what is more than natural. 

There is no logically coherent way to translate that form of cosmic moral vision into the language of modern “practical reason” or of public policy debate in a secular society.  Our concept of nature, in any age, is entirely dependent upon supernatural (or at least metaphysical) convictions.  And, in an age that has been shaped by a mechanistic understanding of the physical world, a neo-Darwinian view of life, and a voluntarist understanding of the self, nature’s “laws” must appear to be anything but moral.

German philosophy

In "The Weimar Touch," A.J. Goldmann explores the German influence on American film culture when Jews and others fled Germany starting in 1933.  Ed Driscoll goes further, and posits a broad intellectual American takeover by the Weimar Republic:

[T]o respond to the query by Thomas Friedman last year in the New York Times, ‘Can Greeks Become Germans?’ 

Well, 50 years ago, we did, didn’t we?

He quotes Alan Bloom in "The Closing of the American Mind":

I have seen value relativism and its concomitants grow greater in the land than anyone imagined.  Who in 1920 would have believed that Max Weber’s technical sociological terminology would someday be the everyday language of the United States, the land of the Philistines, itself in the meantime become the most powerful nation in the world?  The self-understanding of hippies, yippies, yuppies, panthers, prelates and presidents has unconsciously been formed by German thought of a half-century earlier. . . .

Feedback

One of the weakest points in the anthropogenic global warming argument is the heavy reliance on positive feedback assumptions.  CO₂ is a weak greenhouse gas, and can be projected to cause rapid, catastrophic warming only if we assume that it will increase water vapor, which is turn is a much stronger greenhouse gas.  The problem is that there is little evidence that the positive feedback mechanism exists, and even some reason to suppose that the feedback may be negative.  New evidence from NASA's water vapor project highlights the uncertainty:

Climate models predict upper atmosphere moistening which triples the greenhouse effect from man-made carbon dioxide emissions.  The new satellite data from the NASA water vapor project shows declining upper atmosphere water vapor during the period 1988 to 2001. . . .  The cooling effect of the water vapor changes on OLR [outgoing longwave radiation] is 16 times greater than the warming effect of CO₂ during the 1990 to 2001 period.  Radiosonde data shows that upper atmosphere water vapor declines with warming. . . .  Both satellite data and radiosonde data confirm the absence of any tropical upper atmosphere temperature amplification, contrary to IPCC theory.  Four independent data sets demonstrate that the IPCC theory is wrong.  CO₂ does not cause significant global warming.

Unclear on the concept

From the Washington Post, an explanation of the forecasting embarrassment that was Snowquester:

Still, I blame the storm more than I blame the computer models.  The models are pretty good.  It’s Nature that messed this up.

H/t Watts Up with That, which adds the comment: "I hope he escapes from his alternate reality soon, people must be looking for him."

Swimming

Can you remember when you learned to swim?  I was too young, but I'm sure I wasn't an infant.  I've seen shows demonstrating that babies can learn.  I've never known anyone, thank God, who lost a child to drowning.  It was bad enough that a young school friend lost her dog that way during the family dinner, an experience that's always made me teach young dogs where the steps in the pool were, on those rare occasions when any of my dogs have encountered a pool.

More school bashing

Or is it more Big Apple bashing?  Both, of course, but in another sense not really.  Obviously, this CBS report that 80% of graduates from New York City high schools need remedial classes in the three Rs before they can start on credit courses in community college is an indictment of New York City public schools.  But there are two nuggets embedded in the story that inspire a bit of hope.  One is that the community college system hasn't caved in to what must be considerable pressure to dumb down the entry-level credit courses so that they include material that ought to have been taught in high school.  The other is that the community colleges apparently have a system for quickly teaching the kids what they missed in high school, so we know it can be done.  We just don't know why the high schools can't do it, at least for kids motivated enough to seek additional education after they've finished high school.

The One Horse Town of Nelson, Georgia

Well, not one horse exactly.

The town has one police officer who is on patrol eight hours a day, leaving residents largely to fend for themselves the rest of the time.

I know that area very well. The next "town" over is Ball Ground, which was very close to where I grew up. I guess Ball Ground has a police department too -- I know it does, because I've seen their car parked on the street. Their officers I haven't seen, not in all the years I've passed through there.

Sort of in between the two towns is Two Brothers Barbecue, which gives every sign of being more populous than either of these metropolises of an evening.

It's a lawless, lawless region.

The courage not to know

By "the courage not to know," I'm not referring to anything as obscure as Keats's "negative capability," just the willingness to admit that we have no basis for an opinion when we lack all information.  Take the nice, caring people in this video, who are trying to reach a responsible position on issues of public policy:



H/t House of Eratosthenes.  Or to take another example, Assistant Village Idiot posted a link to this description of Richard Feynman's experience on a California school board textbook committee.  The other committee members took such careful notes of what he said about most of the many books they were to have reviewed that he gradually understood they hadn't actually read most of them.  One set was supposed to contain three volumes, but he received only two.  Committee members kept asking him what his opinion was of the third book, and he kept answering that he hadn't read it and therefore had no opinion.  Many of the other members had rated it.  Then a representative of the publisher joined the meeting and explained that they hadn't been able to make the publishing deadline for the third book, so they'd included a set of blank pages between the usual covers, meaning to include the real book later.  The other reviewers were so determined to have an opinion that they came up with a rating on a book with blank pages.

Only one of the people interviewed in the video above was willing to come right out and say she had no idea what the absurd question meant.

Canterbury Tales

Victor Davis Hanson continues worrying about the future of California:

In medieval California, the elderly and retired sometimes head to the foothills, a poorer man’s coast, where there is less crime and less worry over what California has become.  I never quite fathomed fully why a classical Greece of city-states on the plains became an Ottoman Greece of villages perched on mountain slopes.  I knew, of course, in the abstract that Greeks fled Turks to escape the taxman, conversion to Islam, and the Janissaries, but I can now appreciate that maybe such a sense of impending dread is real in interior California, as valley towns become darker at night from lights that no longer work, and streets that are no longer safe and assumptions that are no longer familiar.  Even the most liberal retired professor seems to head for the hills once his thirty years at CSU are up.