Coyote Blog

I second Alex’s nomination – this is one of my favorite documentaries as well.  The book by the same name is very good as well and covers more of the math history.  I actually watched it just the other day in a home double feature with a A Beautiful Mind, mainly showing my kids the scenes shot at Princeton**  but it turned out to be a great essay on math and the human mind.

** I suppose I could have thrown in Transformers 2 as a Princeton triple feature but it seemed somehow out of place in terms of tone.  Also, seeing all the ASU girls walking around the Princeton campus was almost weirder than the hallucinations in A Beautiful Mind.

Why playing around with complex numbers is more than just wanking.

Natural seeps in the Gulf of Mexico release more oil each year than even the most recent oil spill.  Somehow, nature consumes this oil with only a few tar ball showing up on beaches.  Which is why this is not hugely surprising

The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be dissolving far more rapidly than anyone expected, a piece of good news that raises tricky new questions about how fast the government should scale back its response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The immense patches of surface oil that covered thousands of square miles of the gulf after the April 20 oil rig explosion are largely gone, though sightings of tar balls and emulsified oil continue here and there.

Reporters flying over the area Sunday spotted only a few patches of sheen and an occasional streak of thicker oil, and radar images taken since then suggest that these few remaining patches are quickly breaking down in the warm surface waters of the gulf.

Some scientists claim to be able to make room temperature ice (yes, I presume at 1 atm pressure).  Not sure what to make of it:

Earth’s climate is strongly influenced by the presence of particles of different shapes and origins — in the form of dust, ice and pollutants — that find their way into the lowest portion of the atmosphere, the troposphere. There, water adsorbed on the surface of these particles can freeze at higher temperatures than pure water droplets, triggering rain and snow.Researchers at Spain’s Centre d’Investigació en Nanociència i Nanotecnologia (CIN2) have studied the underlying mechanisms of water condensation in the troposphere and found a way to make artificial materials to control water condensation and trigger ice formation at room temperature. Described in the Journal of Chemical Physics, which is published by the American Institute of Physics, their work may lead to new additives for snowmaking, improved freezer systems, or new coatings that help grow ice for skating rinks.

The next step? The researchers’ goal now is to produce environmentally-friendly synthetic materials for efficiently inducing snow. “If water condenses in an ordered way, such as a hexagonal structure, on such surfaces at ambient conditions, the term ‘room temperature ice’ would be fully justified,” adds Verdaguer. “The solid phase, ice, would be produced by a surface effect rather than as a consequence of temperature. In the long term, we intend to prepare smart materials, ‘intelligent surfaces,’ that will react to water in a predefined way.”

I remember some work on how water boiling could be suppressed by polishing surfaces where bubbles form (watch a pot of water boiling, the bubbles appear on the pan surfaces).  I presume this may be a related effect.

One of the geekier conversations I used to get drawn into (up there along with arguing about favorite Serenity episodes, lamenting the demise of Omni magazine, and coming to blows over D&D rules interpretations) was over the relative merits of various sorting algorithms.  Flowing Data has some links to some interesting visualization approaches to sorting algorithms.  This one is for quicksort (colors start out random on the left and must be sorted into Roy G Biv order).

In college I did a project on solving traveling-salesman-type problems with an algorithm called simulated annealing.  Many approaches to the traveling salesman problem pick a random path and then randomly switch pairs of routings on the path, and then stick with the alternative that gives the best score (in this case the shortest path).   Rinse, repeat a zillion times.  The problem is this approach can get stuck in, or converge on, a local optima that are not as good as the single grand optimum for the problem.

In simulated annealing, the algorithm is allowed to sometimes jump to a worse (ie longer) path, which lets it jump out of local minima.  The amount of the backwards jump that is allowed is slowly reduced over time as the algorithm runs.  It is called simulated annealing because this is very similar to the annealing process in metals, where temperature is decreased slowly to, initially, allow the metal molecules to jump to higher energy states so that the whole can settle into a more homogeneous structure.

Anyway, we tried to show how the algorithm proceeded to a solution over time and the visualizations looked a little like this.

Matt Ridley discusses some of the themes from his new book the Rational Optimist.

I now see at firsthand how I avoided hearing any good news when I was young. Where are the pressure groups that have an interest in telling the good news? They do not exist. By contrast, the behemoths of bad news, such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF, spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year and doom is their best fund-raiser. Where is the news media’s interest in checking out how pessimists’ predictions panned out before? There is none. By my count, Lester Brown has now predicted a turning point in the rise of agricultural yields six times since 1974, and been wrong each time. Paul Ehrlich has been predicting mass starvation and mass cancer for 40 years. He still predicts that `the world is coming to a turning point’.

Ah, that phrase again. I call it turning-point-itis. It’s rarely far from the lips of the prophets of doom. They are convinced that they stand on the hinge of history, the inflexion point where the roller coaster starts to go downhill. But then I began looking back to see what pessimists said in the past and found the phrase, or an equivalent, being used by in every generation. The cause of their pessimism varied – it was often tinged with eugenics in the early twentieth century, for example – but the certainty that their own generation stood upon the fulcrum of the human story was the same.

I got back to 1830 and still the sentiment was being used. In fact, the poet and historian Thomas Macaulay was already sick of it then: `We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason.’ He continued: `On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us.’

Check out the article for more.  I am currently reading his book — good stuff so far.  He quotes both my college roommate Brink Lindsey as well as yours truly in the book.  How can you go wrong?

Larry Summers caught a lot of grief for a statement that has been oft-misreported:

“It does appear that on many, many different human attributes- height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability – there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means – which can be debated – there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population.”

Carpe Diem brings this chart, visit the link for more explanation.

Personally, I don’t have a lot of problems with the gender hypothesis, but I am skeptical of our ability to test intelligence.  I think most of us in the real world have enough experience to understand that the people we meet have a range of cognitive abilities, but I am not sure it is even possible to put a number on this, particularly since my experience is that there are many categories of intelligence and intelligence in one area is not intelligence in another.  Besides, I think most IQ tests are dominated by logic problems where one’s ability to solve them improves with practice and training — but this is counter to the idea we are somehow testing some property separate from education or training.

Update: As to the idea of different intelligences, I will offer myself as an example.  In my prime, I was pretty freaking good at advanced math, and later in life I got pretty good at deconstructing business problems that were pretty complex.  But I can’t spell my way out of a paper bag, and I have a horrendous proof-reading ability (as all my readers will know by now).  I can stare at text over and over and still miss obvious errors.  I have a fabulous memory for concepts and problem-solving approaches, and I can recite the entirety of Monty Python and the Holy Grail from memory, but have almost no ability to retain a name, date, or phone number.

I guess I could have predicted this, but I didn’t know until this weekend that a variety of conspiracy theories were circulating about the BP oil platform fire and spill, including the incredibly absurd notion that the platform was torpedoed by a North Korean submarine.

I am not a military analyst, though my sense is that a North Korean submarine would have difficulty even sailing reliably to the Gulf of Mexico.  But I do know petroleum operations.  And I can say that any petroleum facility is a playground for fire, and only unwavering, intelligent management can prevent disaster  (and even then sometimes shit happens).

It seems that, like the 9/11 truthers, the arguments are based on statements that sound plausible to laymen but in fact are meaningless.  An example:

Many have concluded that the platform sunk due to sabotage of some nature. No oil spills happened when Hurricane Katrina hit the area in 2005, they note.

While hurricanes are dangerous to oil rigs, they are something rigs are designed for.    This kind of blowout likely was due to forces at work down in the borehole, meaning that the problem was thousands of feet below the surface of the ocean, where one would not even know a hurricane was present.

This piece of evidence is funny

This conclusion has been spurred by alleged Kremlin reports that the Obama Administration has ordered a news blackout, preventing reporters from gaining access to the area or discovering information that would confirm or disprove the charges

LOL, the Obama Administration ordered a news blackout of gay protesters around the corner from the White House.

Via the South Bend Seven, comes this interesting post on images at Barbarian Blog.

The total number of pixels [on an HDTV screen]  is 1920 horizontally x 1080 vertically = 2,073,600 pixels. There are 256 possible intensities of red, green and blue for each pixel, so that’s 256³ = 16,777,216 possible colors. To figure out how many possible images there are, we need to raise the second number to the power of the first, so 16,777,216^2,073,600 = 1.5 * 10^1,4981,180 possible images. That’s a pretty big number – it’s almost a million and a half digits long. Printing it in 10 point Monaco would take over 2,700 pages of paper. Scientists estimate that there are 10⁸⁰ atoms in the observable universe – a tiny number in comparison.

However big it may be, the fact that the number is finite is a surprising thing to realize. It means that every possible image has a unique ID number. So instead of asking me, “did you see that picture of MIA performing pregnant at the Grammys”, you might ask, “did you see image number 1,394,239,…,572?” Obviously that is totally impractical and it would make you a huge nerd, but it’s interesting that you could.

I have written about it before, but here is Matt Parker:

I have just purchased a packet of Boots-brand 84 arnica homeopathic 30C Pills for £5.09, which Boots proudly claim is only 6.1p per pill. Their in-store advice tells me that arnica is good for treating “bruising and injuries”, which gives the impression that this is a very cost-effective health-care option.

Unlike most medication, it didn’t list the actual dose of the active ingredient that each pill contains, so I checked the British Homeopathic Association website. On their website it nonchalantly states that to make a homeopathic remedy, they start with the active ingredient and then proceed to dilute it to 1 per cent concentration. Then they dilute that new solution again, so there is now only 0.01 per cent of the original ingredients. For my 30C pills this diluting is repeated thirty times, which means that the arnica is one part in a million billion billion billion billion billion billion.

The arnica is diluted so much that there is only one molecule of it per 7 million billion billion billion billion pills.

It’s hard to comprehend numbers that large. If you were to buy that many pills from Boots, it would cost more than the gross domestic product of the UK. It’s more than the gross domestic product of the entire world. Since the dawn of civilisation. If every human being since the beginning of time had saved every last penny, denarius and sea-shell, we would still have not saved-up enough to purchase a single arnica molecule from Boots.

The amazing thing to me is that the folks lining up to be fleeced by this industry, and who will vociferously defend that they are not being fleeced, are the types of folks who are typically the first to throw up the barricades in the street when gas prices rise by 5 cents.

By the way, Arizona has a state board of homeopathic examiners to check … what, exactly?  To guarantee no active ingredient made its way into the product?

Here is a funny related video:

Apparently the LHC is back in business.  If the LHC had a sense of humor, they would announce that they are indeed going to try to create a man-made black hole and that the test is currently scheduled for December 21, 2012.

At first, I thought the headline was a joke on government programs.  It read something like “NASA Spitzer telescope discovers ring around Saturn.”  I mean, duh.

But it turns out they did find a big, really cool and nearly invisible ring around the larger Saturn system.  Via the Reference Frame

This artist’s conception shows a nearly invisible ring around Saturn — the largest of the giant planet’s many rings. It was discovered by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

The artist’s conception simulates an infrared view of the giant ring. Saturn appears as just a small dot from outside the band of ice and dust. The bulk of the ring material starts about six million kilometers (3.7 million miles) away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 million kilometers (7.4 million miles). The ring’s diameter is equivalent to roughly 300 Saturns lined up side to side.

I am constantly amazed at the totalitarianism of the global warming community and their absolute intolerance of dissent.  One suspects that a reason more people are skeptical of alarmist predictions is that they know enough about human behavior to distrust someone who claims to be correct but refuses to respond to or even allow questions or replication.

Anthony Watt has a good example from the world of polar bears:

Exile for non-believers (PDF, press release)

Mitchell Taylor is a world’s leading polar bear expert. He has studied a greater number of polar bear populations than anyone else. He has caught more polar bears than anyone else.

He was going to attend the 2009 meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG). The name sounds technical, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, in one of his papers, he wrote this somewhat self-evident, yet detailed, balanced, and carefully worded description of the polar bears’ situation:

“The concern that polar bears will decline if the climate continues to warm is valid. However, the assertion that polar bears will become extinct unless immediate measures are taken to curb greenhouse gas emissions is irrational because it is inconsistent with the long-term persistence of polar bears through previous periods of warming and cooling; and because the IPCC climate model predictions 50 and 100 years into the future do not suggest a future with insufficient sea ice to support polar bears as a viable species.”

What was the answer? He wasn’t allowed to participate. Here is Mr Andrew Derocher’s letter:

Hi Mitch,

The world is a political place and for polar bears, more so now than ever before. I have no problem with dissenting views as long as they are supportable by logic, scientific reasoning, and the literature.

I do believe, as do many PBSG members, that for the sake of polar bear conservation, views that run counter to human induced climate change are extremely unhelpful. In this vein, your positions and statements in the Manhattan Declaration, the Frontier Institute, and the Science and Public Policy Institute are inconsistent with positions taken by the PBSG.

I too was not surprised by the members not endorsing an invitation. Nothing I heard had to do with your science on harvesting or your research on polar bears – it was the positions you’ve taken on global warming that brought opposition.

Time will tell who is correct but the scientific literature is not on the side of those arguing against human induced climate change. I look forward to having someone else chair the PBSG.

Best regards,
Andy (Derocher)

If you are not familiar with Taylor’s positions that are alluded to, as I understand it they include:  1) The fact that most polar bear populations have been rising rather than falling over the last decades and 2) polar bears have survived interglacial periods in which we believe all sea ice disappeared.

Most of y’all know I have a parallel blog on climate over at Climate Skeptic.  I get accused of being “anti-science” all the time, I suppose for pursuing scientific evidence where it takes me rather than accepting the scientific “consensus” that I am told I should shut up and accept.

One response I often make to this accusation is the to compare the comment policy of leading skeptic and alarmist climate sites.  Which seem more “anti-science” to you?  Here is part of my blog’s comment policy:

I have never tried to moderate my comments (except for spam, which is why you might have  a comment with embedded links held for moderation — I am looking to filter people selling male enhancement products, not people who disagree with me.)  In fact, I relish buffoons who disagree with me when they make an ass of themselves – after all, as Napoleon said, never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake.  And besides, I think it makes a nice contrast with a number of leading climate alarmist sites that do not accept comments or are Stalinist in purging dissent from them.

Leading sites that are skeptical or at least are willing to ask questions of the climate orthodoxy like Watt’s Up with That or Climate Audit have similar policies – their comment threads are full of people with strongly opposing opinions to the site’s authors.

Now check out a comment policy from an alarmist site:

Climate “skepticism” is not a morally defensible position. The debate is over, and it’s been over for quite some time, especially on this blog.

We will delete comments which deny the absolutely overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, just as we would delete comments which questioned the reality of the Holocaust or the equal mental capacities and worth of human beings of different ethnic groups. Such “debates” are merely the morally indefensible trying to cover itself in the cloth of intellectual tolerance.

So, if you’re a climate skeptic, you may be well-intentioned and you’re certainly welcome to your opinion, but we’re not interested.

The leading alarmist site, Real Climate, founded and run by people the media portrays as leaders in climate science, such as James Hansen, routinely purge all dissent from posts and comments.  For example, Anthony Watt wrote this after Steve McIntyre found huge problems in a recent version of a hockey stick temperature recontruction:

Realclimate.org continues deleting the ongoing river of comments posted on their threads ( Note: Any of you who find that your posts to those sites are being rejected {as usual without any explanation} can keep a copy of the post, and post it at http://rcrejects.wordpress.com if you want

I find that amazing — someone is maintaining a blog populated with everything the “leading scientists” at Real Climate purge.  Check the stuff out there, this is not foul-mouthed mindless rants, but real scientific challenges that are being deleted.

One of the dirty secrets of climate science is that the so called “settled” science of global warming is often never challenged or replicated as we expect science should be.  When someone claims to have produced cold fusion, if they want their work to be accepted it is their obligation to publish their data and methodology for others to try to replicated.  In climate, this seldom happens.  Members of a small community all replicate and review each others’ results, and claim this to be sufficient for “consensus.”  When outsiders or mavericks attempt to test or replicate the results, they are stonewalled.

Here is my favorite quote to illustrate the whole mindset, and should make any reasonable person nervous who understands that Congress is on the verge of committing trillions of dollars of our money to certain courses of action based on the science.  It is from Phil Jones, who put together one of the first global temperature metrics at the Hadley Center, to Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist who had some questions about the data and was having trouble replicating some of Jones’ results.  Jones wrote, in response to Hughes request for data (data which underlies much of the early IPCC reports and so is the basis for a lot of public policy discussion):

“We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

UPDATE: Here is a great example of the way it should be done — Steve McIntyre posts Keith Briffa’s response in full, invites other responses:

In spite of suffering a serious illness (which I understand to be a kidney problem), Keith Briffa has taken the time to comment on the Yamal situation. The comment should be read by interested readers. If Briffa or any of his associates wishes to post a thread here without any editorial control on my part, they are welcome to do so.

I thought this was an interesting quick and dirty social study using Google. (via Knowledge Problem)

For any individual study you can validly say that you think the estimate is too low, or indeed, too high, and give reasons for that. For instance, you might say that your sample was mainly young people who tend to be healthier than the general public, or maybe that the diagnostic tools are known to miss some true cases.

But when we look at reporting as a whole, it almost always says the condition is likely to be much more common than the estimate.

For example, have a look at the results of this Google search:

“the true number may be higher” 20,300 hits

“the true number may be lower” 3 hits

I often tell folks that the key to understanding behavior is to understand incentives. The media as institutions have incentives to sensationalize and scare (it sells papers) and as individual reporters have incentives to magnify the importance of whatever story he or she is working on.

But what I found really interesting was how the Observer effect comes into play here.  Wikipedia has this brief definition of the observer effect:

In physics, the term observer effect refers to changes that the act of observation will make on the phenomenon being observed. This is often the result of instruments that, by necessity, alter the state of what they measure in some manner.

Click on the Google hit numbers above.  I get 42,700 and 5,360 respectively, the increase presumably due in part to this article and links to it.  Its impossible to report on patterns in Google searches without the very fact of such reporting affecting what is being measured.

Rick Trabino writes “How to Publish a Scientific Comment in 1 2 3 Easy Steps.”  Not only hilarious, but it will make one despair for the future of science and academia, until one remembers that this kind of stuff has probably been happening since Euclid so somehow we make progress anyway.

Via Steve McIntyre, who has had similar problems of his own.  Particularly the parts where authors of studies published in journals refuse to share their data for replication, despite rules in the journals in which they publish which typically require such availability.

Norman Borlaug, the founder and driving force behind the revolution in high-yield agriculture that Paul Ehrlich predicted was impossible, has died at the age of 98 95.  Like Radley Balko, I am struck by how uneventful his passing is likely to be in contrast to the homage paid to self-promoting seekers of power like Ted Kennedy who never accomplished a tiny fraction of what Borlaug achieved.  Reason has a good tribute here.  Some exceprts:

In the late 1960s, most experts were speaking of imminent global famines in which billions would perish. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” biologist Paul Ehrlich famously wrote in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Ehrlich also said, “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971.” He insisted that “India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.”

But Borlaug and his team were already engaged in the kind of crash program that Ehrlich declared wouldn’t work. Their dwarf wheat varieties resisted a wide spectrum of plant pests and diseases and produced two to three times more grain than the traditional varieties. In 1965, they had begun a massive campaign to ship the miracle wheat to Pakistan and India and teach local farmers how to cultivate it properly. By 1968, when Ehrlich’s book appeared, the U.S. Agency for International Development had already hailed Borlaug’s achievement as a “Green Revolution.”

In Pakistan, wheat yields rose from 4.6 million tons in 1965 to 8.4 million in 1970. In India, they rose from 12.3 million tons to 20 million. And the yields continue to increase. Last year, India harvested a record 73.5 million tons of wheat, up 11.5 percent from 1998. Since Ehrlich’s dire predictions in 1968, India’s population has more than doubled, its wheat production has more than tripled, and its economy has grown nine-fold. Soon after Borlaug’s success with wheat, his colleagues at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research developed high-yield rice varieties that quickly spread the Green Revolution through most of Asia.

The contrast to Paul Ehrlich is particularly stunning.  Most folks have heard of Ehrlich and his prophesies of doom.   But Ehrlich has been wrong in his prophesies more times than anyone can count.  Borlaug fed a billion people while Ehrlich was making money and fame selling books saying that the billion couldn’t be fed — but few have even heard of Borlaug.   Today, leftists in power in the US and most European nations continue to reject Borlaug’s approaches, and continue to revere Ehrlich (just this year, Obama chose a disciple of Ehrlich, John Holdren, as his Science czar).

Continuing proof that the world moves forward in spite of, rather than because of, governments.

Update: More here.

Update #2: Penn and Teller on Borlaug

Update:  230 MPG turns out to be, as I suspected, total BS.  Make sure to check out update at bottom

Apparently under new methodology, the Chevy Volt got an MPG rating of 230.

we’re told that the Volt has snagged a staggering 230 MPG rating in the city, but we should caution you that it’s not as cut and dry as GM would have you believe. The EPA has released “a new methodology for determining a draft fuel economy standard for extended-range EVs like the Volt,” and it’s that murky measurement system that has blessed Chevy’s wonder child with a triple digit MPG rating.

Forget for the fact that the whole terminology is meaningless, as the vehicle only burns liquid fuel for a portion of its energy needs, so “miles per gallon” is an odd concept.  But one could imagine that one could look at the miles per electrical charge, and then look at the equivalent gallons of gasoline-equivalent BTU’s it took to deliver that electricity, and create an equivalent MPG.  In fact, that’s the only approach that makes any sense to me.

If so, these numbers imply that it is 10x more efficient to burn hydrocarbons in a large utility plant boiler or gas turbine, convert the combustion energy to electricity, transmit that electricity hundreds of miles, charge up a set of car batteries, and then drive an electric traction motor from the batteries than it is to burn hydrocarbons directly in an internal combustion engine in the vehicle.

If this is really the case, then I have been selling electric cars short and we will all soon be buying them (I prefer the performance of an electric engine so this kind of fuel savings is just icing on the cake).  However, I have my doubts.  While certainly a large power station is much more efficient in using all the BTU’s in a fuel than is an internal combustion engine, when one considers losses in the electrical generation and line losses, I find it very very hard to believe the difference is 10x.

But I am sure there is no conflict of interest here, and that it is pure coincidence that GM is owned by the same people who created the new methodology and did the testing, and given that the new methodology was created by the same people who have been pushing electric cars as a policy alternative.

Update: The 230 MPG figure is even more BS than I thought.  Apparently, MPG while running on batteries is treated as infinite!  In other words, electricity is treated as “free” and not costing anthing in terms of fuel. Check out how the math is done

When gasoline is providing the power, the Volt might get as much as 50 mpg.

But that mpg figure would not take into account that the car has already gone 40 miles with no gas at all.

So let’s say the car is driven 50 miles in a day. For the first 40 miles, no gas is used and during the last 10 miles, 0.2 gallons are used. That’s the equivalent of 250 miles per gallon. But, if the driver continues on to 80 miles, total fuel economy would drop to about 100 mpg. And if the driver goes 300 miles, the fuel economy would be a just 62.5 mpg.

This is entirely consistent with the bizarre way electric cars have always been treated by environmentalists and politicians, as if the electricity is free and they have no  hydrocarbon use or CO2 production.  Which is weird, since we get harangued for our incandescent light bulbs destroying the world when we plug them in but plugging in a whole car does not?

That being said, if one really wanted to move away from hydrocarbon fuels, the smart approach is probably to go with electric cars and then attack electricity generation rather than transportation.  I will feel good plugging in my car because the juice will come from a big honking zero-emissions nuclear plant.

Maybe I have watched too many movies, but it just does not seem like this will end well:

In its recently released “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047″ report, the US Air Force details a drone that could fly over a target and then make the decision whether or not to launch an attack, all without human intervention. The Air Force says that increasingly, humans will monitor situations, rather than be deciders or participants, and that “advances in AI will enable systems to make combat decisions and act within legal and policy constraints without necessarily requiring human input.”

I will eschew some obvious Terminator clips and go a little old school

The original version of this scene actually did not make the theaters because it was too violent for the time.  If you want the full gore, here it is.  The clip begins with the theatrical release, and then it replays the whole thing with the deleted bits.

Sometimes one molecule of active ingredient diluted into the entire volume of the world’s oceans still isn’t enough of a pick-me-up on a Friday afternoon.  So I leave you with this, via John Stoessel:

Anyone want to bet that things like homeopathy will get included in the government’s “must cover” rules under the new health proposal?

I thought this Kenneth Chang column in the NY Times was pretty interesting.  Much like we can sometimes spot plagiarism by spotting where spelling errors have been reproduced, apparently errors in our DNA give clear pointers to our evolution from other species.

All my complaints about the NY Times not-withstanding, I think if the Times were to disappear, I would miss their science reporting the most.

From Greenlaunches.com (via Engadget) comes a technology that I have written about before to leech energy from cars to power buildings:

Now when you shop, your can be responsible to power the supermarket tills. As in with the weight of your vehicles that run over the road plates the counter tills can be given power. How? Well, at the Sainsbury’s store in Gloucester, kinetic plates which were embedded in the road are pushed down every time a vehicle passes over them. Due to this a pumping action is initiated through a series of hydraulic pipes that drive a generator. These plates can make up to 30kw of green energy in one hour which is enough to power the store’s checkouts.

The phrase “there is no such thing as a free lunch” applies quite well in physics.  If the system is extracting energy from the movement of the plates, then something has to be putting at least as much energy into moving the plates.  That source of energy is obviously the car, and it does not come free.  The car must expend extra energy to roll over the plates, and this energy has to be at least as great (and due to losses, greater) than the energy the building is extracting from the plates.  Either the car has to expend energy to roll up onto an elevated plate to push it down, or else if the plates begin flush, then it has to expend energy to pull itself out of the small depression where it has pushed down the plate.

Yes, the are small, almost unmeasurable amounts of energy for the car, but that does not change the fact that this system produces energy by stealing or leeching it from cars.  It reminds me of the scheme in the movie “Office Space” when they were going to steal money by rounding all transactions down to the nearest cent and taking the fractional penny for themselves.  In millions of transactions, you steal a lot but no one transaction really notices.

I have seen this idea so many times now portrayed totally uncritically that I am almost beginning to doubt my sanity.  Either a) the media and particular green advocates have no real understanding of science or b) I am missing something.  In the latter case, commenters are free to correct me.

By the way, if I am right, then this technology is a net loss on the things environmentalists seem to care about.  For example, car engines are small and much less efficient at converting combustion to usable energy than a large power station.  This fact, plus the energy losses in the system, guarantee that installation of this technology increases rather than decreases CO2 production.

Postscript: One of the commenters on my last post on this topic included a link to this glowing article about a “green family” that got rid of their refrigerator:

About a year ago, though, she decided to “go big” in her effort to be more environmentally responsible, she said. After mulling the idea over for several weeks, she and her husband, Scott Young, did something many would find unthinkable: they unplugged their refrigerator. For good.

How did they do it?  Here was one of their approaches:

Ms. Muston now uses a small freezer in the basement in tandem with a cooler upstairs; the cooler is kept cold by two-liter soda bottles full of frozen water, which are rotated to the freezer when they melt. (The fridge, meanwhile, sits empty in the kitchen.)

LOL.  We are going to save energy from not having a refrigerator by increasing the load on our freezer.  Good plan.  Here is how another woman achieved the same end:

Ms. Barnes decided to use a cooler, which she refilled daily during the summer with ice that she brought home from an ice machine at her office.

Now that’s going green!  Don’t using electricity at home to cool your groceries, steal it from work!

Update: The one place one might get net energy recovery is in a location where cars have to be breaking anyway, say at a stop sign or on a downhill ramp of a garage.  The plates would be extracting speed/energy from the car, but the car is already shedding this energy via heat from its brakes.  Of course, this is no longer true as we get more hybrids with dynamic breaking, since the cars themselves are recovering some of the braking energy.  Also, I have never seen mention in any glowing article about this technology that placement is critical to having the technology make any sense, so my guess is that they are not being very careful.

I often say that most government officials are not dumb or evil, they just have bad incentives that make them act that way, and they look dumb because they attempt to tackle problems that even a 250IQ can’t solve (e.g. planning the economy).

But I may have been wrong.  Evidence is mounting that people in Congress, at least, really are just plain dumb.  From an interview on NPR:

[Congressman Henry] Waxman: Well, there have been scientists brought together to see if they could figure out the science and make it clear whether this is a danger or not, whether it’s a danger that’s a great one or one that we can postpone for a while, and the overwhelming consensus of all the leading scientists that have looked at this issue is there is a warming of the planet, it’s manmade, caused by our burning of carbon fuels, and it’s happening faster than anybody ever thought it would happen.

We’re seeing the reality of a lot of the North Pole starting to evaporate, and we could get to a tipping point. Because if it evaporates to a certain point – they have lanes now where ships can go that couldn’t ever sail through before. And if it gets to a point where it evaporates too much, there’s a lot of tundra that’s being held down by that ice cap.

If that gets released we’ll have more carbon emissions and methane gas in our atmosphere than we have now. We see a lot of destruction happening because of global warming, climate change problems, so we’ve got enough warning signals and enough of a scientific consensus to take this seriously.

Oh my heavens, we are certainly in good hands.  Via Tom Nelson.

Postscript: For those who slept through high school science:

• North Pole ice melts, it does not evaporate (liquids evaporate).  Occasionally a solid will go straight from a solid to a gaseous state (e.g. with dry ice) – that is called sublimation.  Ice on Kilimanjaro, for example, sublimes rather than melts.
• There have been a number of years this century, including several times in the 1930′s, when the Northwest Passage opened up in the summer, so a recent opening was far from the “first time.”
• The ice cap does not hold down the tundra.  The concern, as I understand it, is that large stretches of Siberia are essentially permanently frozen peat bogs.   If the permafrost (which is under the tundra) melts, this allows the previously frozen organic matter to start to decompose, releasing methane which is a strong greenhouse gas.
• When Waxman refers to a tipping point, he means that a positive feedback cycle, much like nuclear fission, is created causing temperatures to accelerate rapidly.  As an aside, such runaway positive feedback processes are rare among long-term stable natural systems, as at some point, given 5 billion years of history, they should have already run away by now.  Why temperatures would reach a tipping point now when they did not in millennia past when both global temperature and CO2 levels were much higher remains unexplained by Mr. Waxman and other tipping point advocates.
• As of today, global sea ice extent is higher than the last 30 year average.  (this graph is updated regularly)

I was in the audience yesterday at Arizona State for something they called the Origins conference, which attracted a lot of top scientists to talk about issues related to the origins of life and the universe.  Towards the end there was a panel discussion that was less scientific, and more focused on “future of science” and “science and public policy” type issues.

What I observed in this discussion was amazing.  Folks who likely set very high standards of proof and rational thought in their own disciplines threw all such concerns out the window when talking on these public policy topics.  In fact, in the same sentence, I heard participants decry the rise of anti-scientific Luddites and then make wild, unsupported statements of their own that are laughably easy to disprove.

Here are some semi-random observations:

On Scientific Education: The panel went on and on about how schools are somehow failing to make science interesting and magical or whatever and are killing interest in science.  One woman who used to work with Carl Sagan said every kindergartner should be taken out to look at the stars and think about alien races.  While I am not one to defend schools too much, I do think that this gauzy view of education is a crock.  For some number of years, kids can be engaged with science and nature with gee-whiz demonstrations and participation events and spurring a general sense of wonder, and elementary school teachers who can do so should be treasured.

But at some point, discipline has to kick in.  To be good at physics, for example, requires a deep, deep knowledge of math.  It means hours and hours and hours of stultifying work learning to solve various forms of partial differential equations (just to choose one example near and dear to my heart).  Or, to choose another discipline, I just don’t think that memorizing isomers in organic chemistry is ever going to be magical.   I believe this happy feel-good approach to science is in fact part of the problem.  Kids may get to age 13 thinking black holes are cool, but they are utterly unprepared for the work it is going to take to go to the next level of understanding.   I think this is in some sense why so many hard science PHD’s are foreign — their culture and early education is preparing them better for the hard stuff that requires discipline to master.

On Obama: The panel members all agreed that the change in US administrations meant an enormous turnaround in the future of science in the US.    Really?  I understand the problems with the Bush administration, but does anyone really think that the quality and quantity of scientific endeavor in its full scope across the country is going to measurably change because Obama has several Nobel laureates among his advisers?   It’s like saying the Earth’s rotation is going to measurably change if we all jump up and down at the same time.   How can people who analyze complex systems for a living throw out everything they know about such analysis when then look at the government and the economy?

On Economics: I swear one of the panel participants got up last night and said that the US economy is tanking because we have failed to make investments in science, while other countries who have made such investments are doing well.  That one sentence, from someone who is nominally a scientist, has four unsupported, and I think unsupportable, statements in one sentence:  1.  That the US has somehow refrained from investing in science, against some unidentified benchmark (the past?  the Platonic ideal?); 2.  That current economic problems stem from this lack of investment, rather than, say from the housing bubble and poor banking decisions; 3.  That other countries have made more investments in science than the US; and 4.  That these countries are prospering while our economy is in the tank (who??).  And everyone nodded their head at this.  No one challenged this.

On the Politicization of Science: The panel lamented the politicization of science, which they say is a phenomenon that has arisen solely over the last 10 years.  Ignoring this perversion of history, I was amazed at their solution.  For example, one member lamented the pushback in teaching of evolution in certain public schools.  Her solution, however, was for scientists to get even more political, ie to fight fire with fire.  That seems to miss the point.  I would have thought a better solution was to merely eliminate the politicization.  For example, taking government out of the business of setting curricula, e.g. by allowing school choice, would eliminate the role of government in choosing sides in science teaching issues altogether.  Why escalate the problem when we can eliminate it?

On the Profit Motive: The hostility to the profit motive was astonishing.  One guy on the panel had the temerity to mention that maybe changes in scientific output were driven by changing expectations of making money from such investment.  We then had to endure a 5-minute interlude where each member jumped in to assure the world that neither they or anyone they knew or anyone with any real credibility were driven by anything but a pure and idealistic desire to understand the universe.

Update: I have been reminded rightly that this panel does not necesarily represent the mass of the Origins effort, and in fact this panel was much more skewed to media and public policy.  This post is solely in reaction to this one panel, and the rest of the conference was great, dedicated mostly to hard science, and a real learning experience for me.

Reason asked Norman Borlaug about the claim that organic farming is better for the environment and human health and well-being.  His answer:

That’s ridiculous. This shouldn’t even be a debate. Even if you could use all the organic material that you have–the animal manures, the human waste, the plant residues–and get them back on the soil, you couldn’t feed more than 4 billion people. In addition, if all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests.

At the present time, approximately 80 million tons of nitrogen nutrients are utilized each year. If you tried to produce this nitrogen organically, you would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the manure. How much wild land would you have to sacrifice just to produce the forage for these cows? There’s a lot of nonsense going on here.

If people want to believe that the organic food has better nutritive value, it’s up to them to make that foolish decision. But there’s absolutely no research that shows that organic foods provide better nutrition. As far as plants are concerned, they can’t tell whether that nitrate ion comes from artificial chemicals or from decomposed organic matter. If some consumers believe that it’s better from the point of view of their health to have organic food, God bless them. Let them buy it. Let them pay a bit more. It’s a free society. But don’t tell the world that we can feed the present population without chemical fertilizer. That’s when this misinformation becomes destructive…

I want to add a big “ditto” to this answer in reference to the whole food miles and locally grown food movement.  There is a lot of evidence that trying to get all of our food locally will actually increase energy use.  It will certainly harm the environment by increasing land use.

Why?  Because currently, economic incentives push farming of a particular food item towards the land that is best-suited and most productive for that item  (government subsidies, both direct, e.g. farm programs, and indirect, e.g. subsidized water for agriculture in arid areas like Arizona and SoCal, interfere with this, but that is a different subject).  The locally grown food movement seeks to shift crops from large productive farms located in the best soils and climates for that crop to smaller farms located in sub-optimal growing areas.  This HAS to increase agricultural land use, prices, and in many case, energy use.  More here.

I have argued for a while that the US appears to be regressing back to the 1970s.  George Bush is showing every sign of rivaling Richard Nixon for the award for most heavy-handed, misguided economic interventions by a President nominally espousing free market principals.  And there is no reason to think that Obama’s outsider appeal and leftish economics will clean things up any better than did Carter.

Another sign the 1970′s are back is Obama’s appointment of Paul Ehrlich buddy John Holdren as his Science Adviser.   The Reference Frame has more on his work and “credentials”, but suffice it to say there is very little there.

He is a strong practitioner of what I call post-modern science, where being fact-based and rigorous is far, far less important than coming to politically correct conclusions that are wrapped in just enough pseudoscience to wow science-illiterate media and most of the public.  His only highly cited works are Club-of-Rome type stuff with Ehrlich in the 1970s, and, not surprisingly, climate alarmist work today.   He is the type of scientist that is more comfortable (and better received) on an Oprah episode than in a detailed science debate.  He has a tendency to declare issues settled without having ever produced any evidence, and a history of eventually backing down from ludicrous positions he adopted without evidence in earlier phases of his life, only to then make the exact same mistake again in a slightly modified form.

The title comes from perhaps his most famous work, and is a great example of exactly what this guy is about.  I=PAT is supposedly an equation to measure man’s impact (generally interpreted to be negative impact) on the Earth.  The letters stand for Impact (or Influence) = Population x Affluence x Technology **

The fact that he has an “equation” makes it look like science.  But in fact, it is not an equation at all.  He never tries to put any numbers to it, and in fact one cannot put numbers to it.  It is merely a political point of view popular on the left – that growth and technology and wealth are all bad – made to look like there is some science behind it.   It gives the scientific impremateur to something that is no such thing, so limits-to-growth supporters could yell back at their critics that is was “settled science.”  Its a kind of voodoo, where activists could wave Holdren and Ehrlich at their critics, to try to keep the fact-Gods at bay.  Similar forces are at work in climate, though climate scientists have learned not to put their equations on paper (since then churlish outsiders can criticize it) but to bury them in a black box climate model.

In fact, even as a concept I=PAT fails.   Because at least two of the three terms have exactly the opposite relationship.  What do I mean?  Well, I guess I could be convinced that, all things being equal, rising human population has a net negative impact on the environment.   But affluence and technology should be in the denominator, not the numerator.  I won’t bother with an extensive proof, since Holdren never proves his equation, but I will offer up a couple of thought experiments:

• Imagine 6-7 billion people on the earth today but with the wealth and technology of the pre-Jethro Tull 17th century.  It would be a freaking disaster.  The catastrophe, to humanity and the environment, would be unimageable.   We are able to have the P we have today only because it is offset by A and T.  Or, in a point made in an earlier post, poverty is not “sustainable.”
• America is demonstrably less polluted and cleaner than in 1970, despite a higher population.  Many areas are cleaner than in 1920, and we have more untouched land and more forest coverage today than we did in 1920.  Why?  Technology and affluence.

If one really wanted to be scientific about it, and studied actual data, I think he would find that environmental impact follows a parabola with development.  Initial increases in population and industrialization lead to messy problems, which are then fixed with increasing wealth and technology.  There are many places in the world where halting growth would merely freeze the country at the top of this parabola.  China is a great example.  China’s environmental problems will get solved through increasing wealth.  Stopping it from growing would actually increase the negative impact on the environment.

Anyway, I just spent more time on the proposition than it deserves.  If Holdren ever steps down, I suppose there’s always Rosie O’Donnell to replace him.

** This is based on the popular interpretation of the equation.  In fact, in its original form, T was not technology but just a plug factor, something like impact per population-dollar.  At this level, the equation is certainly true, as mathematically it is hard to argue against the equation impact = population x dollars x impact per population-dollar!  So, at some level, the finding was not wrong but simply trivial.  However, in popular mythology, T was changed to technology, and the authors really did nothing to correct this interpretation, because essentially they agreed with it, even if they hadn’t proved it.  (more here)  This approach, of proving one thing that is trivial and then claiming the proof is of something broader and more robust is now typical of climate science.