Terence Tao has written 120+ papers, won a Fields medal, so you may guess what's one of his new major goals: yes, to become a blogger. ;-)
Via Sabine.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Al Gore's house in Nashville, Tennessee
... vs George Bush's house in Crawford, Texas
Gore's average monthly electric bill topped USD 1359. Add USD 1080 per month for natural gas. In total, it makes more than USD 30,000 per 2006 for his house at 312 Lynnwood Blvd. in the City of Belle Meade, adjacent to Nashville, TN. The house is in the middle of the map. Of course, the money from the previous sentences don't include air travel, especially not with his Gulfstream private jet.
Update, December 2007: Al Gore has hired dozens of workers and SUVs and managed to reduce his power consumption by 11%, from 20 times the average household to 18 times the average household. Congratulations. ;-)
Update, June 2008: Actually, the information from Al Gore above was wrong. Gore's electricity consumption increased by 10% rather than decreased after the renovations.
Gore's house in Nashville
It's not just a consequence of Gore being a visible man. George W. Bush's house in Crawford, Texas is a model of environmental rectitude.
Bush's Crawford ranch
That's a typical difference between the leftists and rightwingers. Leftists want others to reduce their lives and to pay. Leftists want themselves to benefit. And the rightwingers are those who actually create the values and live the right and modest lives, if I simplify a tiny little bit. ;-)
Is Al Gore willing to walk the walk, not just talk the talk? ;-) See news.google.com.
Video: Al Gore's opportunities and profits.
Another comparison of Bush's house and Gore's house
LOOK OVER THE DESCRIPTIONS OF THE FOLLOWING TWO HOUSES AND SEE IF YOU CAN TELL WHICH BELONGS TO AN ENVIRONMENTALIST.
HOUSE # 1:
A 20-room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house all heated by gas. In ONE MONTH ALONE this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an ENTIRE YEAR. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over USD 2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone (which last time we checked was a fossil fuel), this property consumes more than20 times the national average for an American home. This house is not in a northern or Midwestern "snow belt," either. It's in the South.
HOUSE # 2:
Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university, this house incorporates every "green" feature current home construction can provide. The house contains only 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on arid high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F) heats the house in winter and cools it in summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas, and it consumes 25% of the electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Flowers and shrubs native to the area blend the property into the surrounding rural landscape.
HOUSE # 1 (20 room energy guzzling mansion) is outside of Nashville, Tennessee. It is the abode of that renowned environmentalist (and filmmaker) Al Gore.
HOUSE # 2 (model eco-friendly house) is on a ranch near Crawford, Texas. Also known as "the Texas White House," it is the private residence of the President of the United States, George W. Bush.
So whose house is gentler on the environment? Yet another story you WON'T hear on CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC or read about in the New York Times or the Washington Post. Indeed, for Mr. Gore, it's truly "an inconvenient truth."
Additional favorite climate articles on The Reference Frame
See also: Al Gore's new $9 million villa in Santa Barbara, California (click)Gore mansion: 20x average household
Gore's average monthly electric bill topped USD 1359. Add USD 1080 per month for natural gas. In total, it makes more than USD 30,000 per 2006 for his house at 312 Lynnwood Blvd. in the City of Belle Meade, adjacent to Nashville, TN. The house is in the middle of the map. Of course, the money from the previous sentences don't include air travel, especially not with his Gulfstream private jet.
Update, December 2007: Al Gore has hired dozens of workers and SUVs and managed to reduce his power consumption by 11%, from 20 times the average household to 18 times the average household. Congratulations. ;-)
Update, June 2008: Actually, the information from Al Gore above was wrong. Gore's electricity consumption increased by 10% rather than decreased after the renovations.
Gore's house in Nashville
It's not just a consequence of Gore being a visible man. George W. Bush's house in Crawford, Texas is a model of environmental rectitude.
Bush's Crawford ranch
That's a typical difference between the leftists and rightwingers. Leftists want others to reduce their lives and to pay. Leftists want themselves to benefit. And the rightwingers are those who actually create the values and live the right and modest lives, if I simplify a tiny little bit. ;-)
Is Al Gore willing to walk the walk, not just talk the talk? ;-) See news.google.com.
Video: Al Gore's opportunities and profits.
Another comparison of Bush's house and Gore's house
LOOK OVER THE DESCRIPTIONS OF THE FOLLOWING TWO HOUSES AND SEE IF YOU CAN TELL WHICH BELONGS TO AN ENVIRONMENTALIST.
HOUSE # 1:
A 20-room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house all heated by gas. In ONE MONTH ALONE this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an ENTIRE YEAR. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over USD 2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone (which last time we checked was a fossil fuel), this property consumes more than
HOUSE # 2:
Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university, this house incorporates every "green" feature current home construction can provide. The house contains only 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on arid high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F) heats the house in winter and cools it in summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas, and it consumes 25% of the electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Flowers and shrubs native to the area blend the property into the surrounding rural landscape.
HOUSE # 1 (20 room energy guzzling mansion) is outside of Nashville, Tennessee. It is the abode of that renowned environmentalist (and filmmaker) Al Gore.
HOUSE # 2 (model eco-friendly house) is on a ranch near Crawford, Texas. Also known as "the Texas White House," it is the private residence of the President of the United States, George W. Bush.
So whose house is gentler on the environment? Yet another story you WON'T hear on CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC or read about in the New York Times or the Washington Post. Indeed, for Mr. Gore, it's truly "an inconvenient truth."
Additional favorite climate articles on The Reference Frame
Pre-Lobby Day postpourri
-- Don't worry; Dick's OK. Apparently he set a world record in the 100-meter dash, but nobody was injured in his escape.
-- The stock market had a meltdown today. It was the worst single-day retreat since 9/11, and it was due to a belief that Chinese economic growth will be limited by an inability to secure raw material (as well as the lemming-like fear that stocks are over-valued). Since my business is driven by stock-market contrarians, if this trend continues I'll have another good year.
-- Robert Eckels is being threatened by the king of all Republicans in Houston:
Pop some corn. This ought to be a hoot. More:
No, it's not, Alice. You're all as full of shit as a Christmas turkey; you'll fall in line behind whoever is the standard-bearer just like you did when Shelley Sekula-Gibbs ran for Tom DeLay's -- nevermind.
Is that popcorn ready yet?
Update: Houston Consigliere has more.
-- Jon Matthews goes to jail. Once one of the most rabid right-wing talkers in Houston, even his longtime sycophants locally have finally been forced to abandon him.
-- We are raising an entire generation of narcissists. What a shock.
-- Tomorrow I'm in the state capital for Planned Parenthood's Lobby Day. Here's our report from two years ago (the last time the Lege was in session). Update: Sam Jones has more on the "Prevention First!" legislation filed by Rep. Mark Strama and Sen. Kirk Watson.
-- The stock market had a meltdown today. It was the worst single-day retreat since 9/11, and it was due to a belief that Chinese economic growth will be limited by an inability to secure raw material (as well as the lemming-like fear that stocks are over-valued). Since my business is driven by stock-market contrarians, if this trend continues I'll have another good year.
-- Robert Eckels is being threatened by the king of all Republicans in Houston:
"This decision (selecting the next judge of Harris County) is extremely important to whether the base will get behind Eckels if he runs for higher office," said County GOP Chairman Jared Woodfill.
Pop some corn. This ought to be a hoot. More:
Alice Rekeweg, a precinct chair from Kingwood, said some GOP activists are so upset that Eckels appears to be backing Emmett as his successor that they would not support the county judge in a run for statewide office. "It's a possibility some people will hold a grudge," she said.
No, it's not, Alice. You're all as full of shit as a Christmas turkey; you'll fall in line behind whoever is the standard-bearer just like you did when Shelley Sekula-Gibbs ran for Tom DeLay's -- nevermind.
Is that popcorn ready yet?
Update: Houston Consigliere has more.
-- Jon Matthews goes to jail. Once one of the most rabid right-wing talkers in Houston, even his longtime sycophants locally have finally been forced to abandon him.
-- We are raising an entire generation of narcissists. What a shock.
-- Tomorrow I'm in the state capital for Planned Parenthood's Lobby Day. Here's our report from two years ago (the last time the Lege was in session). Update: Sam Jones has more on the "Prevention First!" legislation filed by Rep. Mark Strama and Sen. Kirk Watson.
Sweet spot supersymmetry
Ryuichiro Kitano of Stanford gave an enthusiastic talk about what he calls the first supersymmetric model worth considering although it is not necessarily guaranteed that all people attending the talk have displayed the same degree of enthusiasm. ;-) Some of the talk may be found in hep-ph/0611111.
If you want to break SUSY in some way or any way, it's not hard. You start with something like the O'Raifeartaigh model: I usually prefer longer words instead of short screams but let me admit that O'Raifeartaigh is an exception. In this model, you have a gauge-singlet chiral superfield S. The Kähler potential contains
Now, add bilinear terms in quarks into "K" and a Yukawa interaction of "S" with quarks into "W". You're in the process to communicate the breaking in the hidden "S" sector to the visible sector of the Standard Model - a process that will give additional masses to the superpartners of known particles needed to explain why SUSY hasn't been seen before 2007.
It is almost universally assumed that the supersymmetry breaking can be divided to these parts - the hidden SUSY breaking sector plus some form of its interaction with the visible sector: this interaction is the "mediation". Although the assumption could be wrong, the sweet model is no exception.
Ryuichiro classified the types of mediations according to the gravitino mass. As the mass increases, you go from direct mediation through gauge mediation and gravity mediation to anomaly mediation and finally to split supersymmetry.
His model is intended to be a viable hybrid of gauge mediation and gravity mediation. Alternatively, you may want to think about it as gauge mediation where some previously neglected effects of gravity are included. The gravitino mass is around 1 GeV here. The Higgs mass term in the superpotential - the mu-term - is governed by the same parameter as the SUSY breaking, he says. He presents the Higgs and/or "S" and/or the GUT Higgs breaking SU(5) as composites of two objects from a set {a quark and an antiquark or a "T"}. This compositeness should only work at low energies and the abrupt transition to higher energies where the Higgs is assumed to be weakly coupled wasn't quite clear to many physicists in the audience.
In some more precise realization of the hidden sector, he argued that SO(9) is the most natural gauge group for the SUSY-breaking sector. If you want to know, SO(9) x SU(5) from the GUT can't be embedded into a single E8 which, I believe, means that the grade from string theory to his model is B or worse. ;-)
At any rate, if you believe all the positive comments, you simultaneously solve all astrophysical bounds, mu-problem, doublet-triplet splitting problem, proton decay problem, FCNC problems, CP-violation problems, all remaining SUSY phenomenology problems except for some little hierarchy problem, and with some modest heuristic input ;-) apparently also the cosmological constant problem.
If you care about my impression, you are somewhere in the middle of some parameter space where all these problems are half-solved, half-unsolved. ;-) But maybe this is the right compromise that Nature likes, who knows.
If you want to break SUSY in some way or any way, it's not hard. You start with something like the O'Raifeartaigh model: I usually prefer longer words instead of short screams but let me admit that O'Raifeartaigh is an exception. In this model, you have a gauge-singlet chiral superfield S. The Kähler potential contains
- K = ... + Sdagger.S + (Sdagger.S)^2 / Lambda^2
- W = m^2 S + ...
Now, add bilinear terms in quarks into "K" and a Yukawa interaction of "S" with quarks into "W". You're in the process to communicate the breaking in the hidden "S" sector to the visible sector of the Standard Model - a process that will give additional masses to the superpartners of known particles needed to explain why SUSY hasn't been seen before 2007.
It is almost universally assumed that the supersymmetry breaking can be divided to these parts - the hidden SUSY breaking sector plus some form of its interaction with the visible sector: this interaction is the "mediation". Although the assumption could be wrong, the sweet model is no exception.
Ryuichiro classified the types of mediations according to the gravitino mass. As the mass increases, you go from direct mediation through gauge mediation and gravity mediation to anomaly mediation and finally to split supersymmetry.
His model is intended to be a viable hybrid of gauge mediation and gravity mediation. Alternatively, you may want to think about it as gauge mediation where some previously neglected effects of gravity are included. The gravitino mass is around 1 GeV here. The Higgs mass term in the superpotential - the mu-term - is governed by the same parameter as the SUSY breaking, he says. He presents the Higgs and/or "S" and/or the GUT Higgs breaking SU(5) as composites of two objects from a set {a quark and an antiquark or a "T"}. This compositeness should only work at low energies and the abrupt transition to higher energies where the Higgs is assumed to be weakly coupled wasn't quite clear to many physicists in the audience.
In some more precise realization of the hidden sector, he argued that SO(9) is the most natural gauge group for the SUSY-breaking sector. If you want to know, SO(9) x SU(5) from the GUT can't be embedded into a single E8 which, I believe, means that the grade from string theory to his model is B or worse. ;-)
At any rate, if you believe all the positive comments, you simultaneously solve all astrophysical bounds, mu-problem, doublet-triplet splitting problem, proton decay problem, FCNC problems, CP-violation problems, all remaining SUSY phenomenology problems except for some little hierarchy problem, and with some modest heuristic input ;-) apparently also the cosmological constant problem.
If you care about my impression, you are somewhere in the middle of some parameter space where all these problems are half-solved, half-unsolved. ;-) But maybe this is the right compromise that Nature likes, who knows.
Matrix theory in 9 dimensions
I recommend you a new paper by
about the Matrix theory description of vacua with nine (8+1) flat infinite directions and 16 supercharges. The matrix model is generically a gauge theory on a cylinder. The only case in which it's that simple is the vacuum where the gauge group is broken down to SO(16) x SO(16) by a Wilson line around a circle in N=1, d=10 SUGRA-SYM coupled system - something that you can get both from the SO(32) and E8 x E8 starting points.
Recall that in 10D, the only really simple vacua with a matrix model description were type IIA with 32 supercharges and heterotic string theory with the E8 x E8 gauge group broken to SO(16) x SO(16) by longitudinal Wilson lines with 16 supercharges.
The other points of the moduli space they try to cover involve matrix models (2+1-dimensional generalized gauge theories) where the gauge coupling diverges as you approach one of the boundaries of the cylinder; they confirm the Kabat-Rey construction using a different interpretation. They have also (for the first time) looked at the description of the compactifications of M-theory on the Klein bottle and the Möbius strip, too - which also includes the Dabholkar-Park type IIA background with two different kinds of orientifolds (a perturbative dual of the Klein bottle compactification of M-theory) and the CHL string (the perturbative heterotic limit of the Möbius strip compactification of M-theory, with the exceptional group at level two).
Normally, orientifold O8-planes may coincide with D8-branes. You can keep on removing the D8-branes from the O8-plane, until the number of D8-branes is zero. That's what you would think except that they argue that you can actually remove one more, so that the number of remaining D8-branes on the O8-plane equals minus one. ;-) This O8-plane "in debt" must be infinitely strongly coupled but it still preserves the same supersymmetries. This novel discussion emerges from their unified description of the unoriented compactifications.
about the Matrix theory description of vacua with nine (8+1) flat infinite directions and 16 supercharges. The matrix model is generically a gauge theory on a cylinder. The only case in which it's that simple is the vacuum where the gauge group is broken down to SO(16) x SO(16) by a Wilson line around a circle in N=1, d=10 SUGRA-SYM coupled system - something that you can get both from the SO(32) and E8 x E8 starting points.
Recall that in 10D, the only really simple vacua with a matrix model description were type IIA with 32 supercharges and heterotic string theory with the E8 x E8 gauge group broken to SO(16) x SO(16) by longitudinal Wilson lines with 16 supercharges.
The other points of the moduli space they try to cover involve matrix models (2+1-dimensional generalized gauge theories) where the gauge coupling diverges as you approach one of the boundaries of the cylinder; they confirm the Kabat-Rey construction using a different interpretation. They have also (for the first time) looked at the description of the compactifications of M-theory on the Klein bottle and the Möbius strip, too - which also includes the Dabholkar-Park type IIA background with two different kinds of orientifolds (a perturbative dual of the Klein bottle compactification of M-theory) and the CHL string (the perturbative heterotic limit of the Möbius strip compactification of M-theory, with the exceptional group at level two).
Normally, orientifold O8-planes may coincide with D8-branes. You can keep on removing the D8-branes from the O8-plane, until the number of D8-branes is zero. That's what you would think except that they argue that you can actually remove one more, so that the number of remaining D8-branes on the O8-plane equals minus one. ;-) This O8-plane "in debt" must be infinitely strongly coupled but it still preserves the same supersymmetries. This novel discussion emerges from their unified description of the unoriented compactifications.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Czech social democrats near bankruptcy
The Czech social democrats used to be a moderate workers' party. However, in the late 1940s, they merged with the communists: their party became a submissive component of the leading force of the totalitarian regime. The social democratic party was re-established after the Velvet Revolution - and Mr Miloš Zeman transformed it into the leading leftist political formation - but its legal continuity was questionable.
This question was rather important because the answer would decide about the assets of the old party - especially whether the social democrats regain the "Lidový dům" (People's House), a rather large complex of buildings in Prague. Social democrats didn't want to start from the scratch - as the Civic Democratic Party and many others had to. A prominent lawyer named Mr Zdeněk Altner defended the social democratic party and was able to win the case: "Lidový dům" became a property of the social democrats again in 2000 or so.
Altner has negotiated a pretty good contract with the social democrats: although his services were free if he would lose - an irresistable (and among good attorneys, unique) offer for Miloš Zeman et al. who were sure that they simply couldn't win - the party was ordered to pay him 93 million Czech crowns in fees in the case of success (1 USD is 21.50 CZK). However, left-wing parties typically only know how to steal money from others so they didn't try to speed up the payment too much. :-) But let me mention again: the contract was really good for Mr Altner! ;-)
With the prescribed sanctions and interests (0.3 percent per day), the social democratic party now owes more than 19 billion crowns, almost 1 billion U.S. dollars, to Altner! While this amount is insane, there exists no rational or legal way to question that this is the right figure. And he has just announced that he has no more patience with the out-of-court debates with the social democrats whom he no longer trusts and he's gonna work on their bankruptcy (in fact, he has already started in January).
Needless to say, Mr Jiří Paroubek, the chairman of the party, is trying to humiliate Mr Altner. Paroubek - a typical leftist leader - is convinced that the social democratic party has the right to steal one billion dollars from anyone whom the party officials declare to be unethical. It's pretty clear that they have simply believed for years that they would never pay Altner anything because a leftist party has the right to do anything with individuals. Paroubek now offers Altner 126 million crowns only - slightly less than 19 billion - and Altner answered that Paroubek couldn't possibly have been serious. ;-)
However, most of the leadership of the social democratic party finds it increasingly likely that Altner is gonna succeed simply because the contract seems to be pretty clear. Altner is already working on the police protection of other creditors - people who are currently hiding and who are afraid of a possible anger of the socialist thieves - which would allow him to publish their names and speed up the bankruptcy process of the social democratic party. Meanwhile, some of the social democratic leaders are already thinking about a new party. They would have to give up their exact name, logo, headquarters, funding assigned to parties for each lawmaker, and other details.
One billion dollars is a pretty good amount, isn't it? It would be great to prove that it's in fact the whole international left-wing movement that suffers from this debt, and to officially bring the global left-wing movement where it has morally been for a century or so - to bankruptcy. ;-) In fact, they are already working on this bigger project, too: Paroubek wants to unify his party with the Slovak SMER. I wish them to merge with as many leftist parties as possible. :-)
This question was rather important because the answer would decide about the assets of the old party - especially whether the social democrats regain the "Lidový dům" (People's House), a rather large complex of buildings in Prague. Social democrats didn't want to start from the scratch - as the Civic Democratic Party and many others had to. A prominent lawyer named Mr Zdeněk Altner defended the social democratic party and was able to win the case: "Lidový dům" became a property of the social democrats again in 2000 or so.
Altner has negotiated a pretty good contract with the social democrats: although his services were free if he would lose - an irresistable (and among good attorneys, unique) offer for Miloš Zeman et al. who were sure that they simply couldn't win - the party was ordered to pay him 93 million Czech crowns in fees in the case of success (1 USD is 21.50 CZK). However, left-wing parties typically only know how to steal money from others so they didn't try to speed up the payment too much. :-) But let me mention again: the contract was really good for Mr Altner! ;-)
With the prescribed sanctions and interests (0.3 percent per day), the social democratic party now owes more than 19 billion crowns, almost 1 billion U.S. dollars, to Altner! While this amount is insane, there exists no rational or legal way to question that this is the right figure. And he has just announced that he has no more patience with the out-of-court debates with the social democrats whom he no longer trusts and he's gonna work on their bankruptcy (in fact, he has already started in January).
Needless to say, Mr Jiří Paroubek, the chairman of the party, is trying to humiliate Mr Altner. Paroubek - a typical leftist leader - is convinced that the social democratic party has the right to steal one billion dollars from anyone whom the party officials declare to be unethical. It's pretty clear that they have simply believed for years that they would never pay Altner anything because a leftist party has the right to do anything with individuals. Paroubek now offers Altner 126 million crowns only - slightly less than 19 billion - and Altner answered that Paroubek couldn't possibly have been serious. ;-)
However, most of the leadership of the social democratic party finds it increasingly likely that Altner is gonna succeed simply because the contract seems to be pretty clear. Altner is already working on the police protection of other creditors - people who are currently hiding and who are afraid of a possible anger of the socialist thieves - which would allow him to publish their names and speed up the bankruptcy process of the social democratic party. Meanwhile, some of the social democratic leaders are already thinking about a new party. They would have to give up their exact name, logo, headquarters, funding assigned to parties for each lawmaker, and other details.
One billion dollars is a pretty good amount, isn't it? It would be great to prove that it's in fact the whole international left-wing movement that suffers from this debt, and to officially bring the global left-wing movement where it has morally been for a century or so - to bankruptcy. ;-) In fact, they are already working on this bigger project, too: Paroubek wants to unify his party with the Slovak SMER. I wish them to merge with as many leftist parties as possible. :-)
Transcending chronology
"Particle physics and string theory inspired Scott Putman's piece. The dancers vibrate energetically in a sort of patterned randomness."
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Oscar: An Inconvenient Truth
All influential and "hip" groups of people, including GaySocialites, Tennessee guerilla women, LGBT advocates, Radical Left dot NET, and Socialist Christian Hippie QC were praying. Ladies and Gentleman, it's here. Al Gore has won this ideologically neutral piece of gold.
More precisely, the award for the best "Documentary" went to Davis Guggenheim, the movie director of the Director of Earth (see their common photo taken by paparazzi from the New York Times).
There's no reason for condolences for the old winners because the ethical actors such as Bruce Willis have avoided this contest anyway. See Al Gore's Oscar acceptance speech (draft on his party's semi-official website). See also criticism by Patrick Michaels, a climate scientist, of the scientifically incorrect speculations about collapsing glaciers in Greenland included in the movie.
Because it wasn't directly Al Gore who was awarded, the Gore effect didn't influence Hollywood directly. Instead, 200 flights were canceled in Chicago and 68 flights at the Kennedy Airport in New York because of the Gore Oscar snowstorm. A talk by Nima today was also canceled because he is stuck in a snowstorm. ;-)
More precisely, the award for the best "Documentary" went to Davis Guggenheim, the movie director of the Director of Earth (see their common photo taken by paparazzi from the New York Times).
There's no reason for condolences for the old winners because the ethical actors such as Bruce Willis have avoided this contest anyway. See Al Gore's Oscar acceptance speech (draft on his party's semi-official website). See also criticism by Patrick Michaels, a climate scientist, of the scientifically incorrect speculations about collapsing glaciers in Greenland included in the movie.
Because it wasn't directly Al Gore who was awarded, the Gore effect didn't influence Hollywood directly. Instead, 200 flights were canceled in Chicago and 68 flights at the Kennedy Airport in New York because of the Gore Oscar snowstorm. A talk by Nima today was also canceled because he is stuck in a snowstorm. ;-)
European universal history book
Annette Schavan, the education minister of Germany - the country that will lead the EU until the end of June - has proposed something that seems to be a typical bureaucratic mission creep, using British politicians' terminology, and an example of the unrealistic imperial ambitions of certain people in the EU. She wants all children of the EU to learn from the same history textbook. Not even a German chancellor who reigned in the 1930 and 1940s was able to do something like that in his empire.
What she wants is a synchronization, forcible coordination, making equal. German readers know that the correct translation to German is Gleichschaltung.
It would be much easier - although not easy - to unify the education of mathematics or physics although it's not quite clear what such a unification would be good for. But Schavan is more ambitious so she chooses the subject that is clearly the most difficult one to be unified: history.
In my opinion, that's a sign that she has no sense of reality.
The European Union has 27 member countries and this number keeps on increasing. However, a normal history teacher spends about 1/2 of her time at school with their own national history. It is completely correct that they do so. Who should know the Irish history if the Irish don't? There are two things that Schavan can mean: it's only the universal history that she wants to unify; or it is all of history.
I have very good reasons to think that she wants the latter. After all, the European history overlaps with every national history so there would be a lot of redundancy if the students learned the European history including their nation after or before they learn the national history. Fine, so she means the latter.
What does it mean? She effectively wants to eliminate nations from the intellectual map of Europe. For example, she wants to reduce the time dedicated to the Czech history at Czech schools by a factor of 13.5 or so - and this ratio will be increasing. I have deliberately chosen an average EU country so that the calculation is easy.
How the hell are they gonna learn the history of the Czech Kingdom during Charles IV's reign or Hussites or National Revival or anything else if they have 13.5 times less time to learn? She clearly wants all young citizens of Europe to know 13.5 times less about their nations than their parents. It's just so mad that I would immediately become a huge opponent of the Czech membership in the EU if this were approved.
It's not just about eliminating national histories: the different interpretations of events are another major issue.
Although there are many historical events that are described in a similar fashion by many countries, it is certainly not all of them. An attempt to unify history textbooks - the "Histoire Geschichte" project - has already occurred but it only included France and Germany: about 13.5 times easier task than the full EU task. Of course, it didn't work at the end because the French morons wanted to be critical towards the U.S. and friendly towards the communists after the Second World War. This part of the textbook remained different in the two language mutations.
Other two "details" where the French and German historians disagreed were the Christian church ;-) and the French colonial history. See the Telegraph.
The French would try to insert pro-communist, anti-American propaganda to the textbooks of other countries. Armies could no longer be celebrated - or described in an intriguing style - as long as they fought against someone else in Europe which is what 90% of them did. There are roughly 26 issues that are similar to the French example and that I don't even know at this moment.
The British and the Poles oppose it. I hope that others will give a proper thrashing to this proposal, too.
What will have to be unified
In the textbook, we will probably learn that the U.S. entered the war by occupation of Normandy in 1944 but the Yankees were finally stopped by heroic allied French and German forces near Pilsen, my hometown. ;-)
This one was easy. There will be more subtle chapters.
It will be interesting to read the universal truth about the contributions of Czechoslovakia to the Munich Betrayal, the voluntary merger of Austria with the Third Reich (Anschluss), Germany being attacked by Poland or the Soviet Union, and the war reconstruction of London using the V2 bombs.
A chapter - one that the Slavic students would appreciate - could be dedicated to the Slavic expansion to the West against the dovish Germanic tribes. A politically correct team of historians will tell us nice stories about the friendly collaboration during the battles of Waterloo, Leipzig, Austerlitz (Slavkov), and Verdun. We will probably learn that John Huss has burned himself in 1415 and Joan of Arc was a heretic, after all.
The French and the English will finally reach harmony about the Hundred Years War. The Britons and Spaniards will finally agree whether the Undefeatable Army was undefeatable. The Germans and the Poles will agree about the triple split of Poland. The textbooks could finally recommend the Britons to return Gibraltar to Spain.
Czech and Polish historians will happily report about the Polish attack on the Czech lands and the subsequent happiness of the Czechs who saw the Poles being chased away by the Germans.
Marxists and Leninists had a hard time to create semi-unified history textbooks whose only goal was to make the working class look nice in the light of the historical events. I am very curious how the proposed textbook will present the history as an example of the European unity, especially if 95% of the history is about the European non-unity.
And that's the memo.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Chimp relatives: 4 million years ago
We share about 96 percent of the genes with the chimps. But when did the common ancestors exist? It used to be thought that the split occurred 5-7 million years ago. According to a new
this event is actually more recent: 4 million years ago. They studied the rate at which the DNA is changing, used a coalescent hidden Markov model for comparison, and assumed that organgutans split about 18 million years ago. The last divergence occurred more than 5 million years ago but they seem to imply that the split occurred more recently.
Well, this new result, if true, could make it 20% more understandable why some people think and behave the way they do. ;-)
Friday, February 23, 2007
Doubts about global warming
The Czech version was published in "Orientace" (Orientation), a section of the "Lidové noviny" (People's Newspapers), on February 24th, 2007.
The theory of man-made global warming hasn't been tested as carefully as the scientific method demands
A recently published report by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) considers global warming to be a fact caused by the emissions of greenhouse gases.
However, the situation is not as simple as many mainstream climatologists seem to think.
Our ancestors were unable to comprehend a wide spectrum of natural phenomena.
The fear from thunderstorms or solar eclipses may have helped the first primitive forms of religion and the first anthropomorphic gods to be born. However, during the several recent centuries, people learned how to look at the natural phenomena rationally. The scientific method allowed them to formulate hypotheses and, using a meticulous analysis of experiments, to decide which of them are valid and which of them are not. The insights obtained in this fashion are valuable per se; however, many of them are practically useful for our everyday lives, too.
Nevertheless, very recently, we are hearing increasingly often the paradigm that our paganic ancestors may have been right in one opinion, namely that the main originator of the climatic phenomena may have anthropomorphic features, after all, because it is no one else than Man himself. Moreover, many laymen as well as experts seem to believe that science has proven beyond reasonable doubt that the judgment day is unstoppably approaching. But is it really possible to deduce from the existing body of knowledge that the human activity will lead to a catastrophic global warming? We will first recall some scientific questions that are important for a proper analysis of climate changes. At the end of the essay, I will try to explain why it is exactly climatology that has so serious problems to preserve its objective character and why so many people are led to scientifically unjustifiable, gloomy visions of the future.
The science of climate
The climate and the weather incorporate a huge selection of rather complex phenomena that are being studied by diverse scientific disciplines. Most of the corresponding questions are only interested for researchers - ordinary people and politicians shouldn't be worried about them. On the other hand, Nature is not interested which of Her mysteries will be useful for the mankind. If we want to understand the phenomena in Nature properly, it is necessary to study many phenomena without any political or practical flavor, too. These phenomena may approximately be sorted according to the typical time scale they occupy.
The Universe was born 13.7 billion years ago and the Solar System was created roughly 4.6 billion years ago. In order to accurately describe the events in the Universe that took place billions of years ago, we need nuclear physics and other disciplines that clearly don't belong to climatology. Among the phenomena that take a somewhat shorter period of time than billions of years, the motion of the Solar System through the Milky Way and the continental drift may serve as two familiar examples. The Sun is oscillating around the main plane of our Galaxy and one period of this motion takes tens of millions of years. All these effects have a certain impact on the climate and the average temperatures: more or less periodic and more or less chaotic waves with various periodicities have to be combined if our goal is to have an idea e.g. about the dependence of the average temperature on time.
The climate is changing and it has always been changing, regardless of the time scale at which the climate is observed. The idea that the climate change is something that was born together with homo sapiens is naive. As we approach shorter time scales, we encounter the so-called Milankovitch cycles: the periodicity of oscillations of the eccentricity of Earth's orbit is close to 100,000 years while the precession of the Earth's axis takes about 20,000 years. These cycles and a few similar phenomena are almost certainly responsible for the glaciation cycles - the alternation of the ice ages and interglacials - even though some recent alternative theories are trying to find their explanation inside the Sun.
The circulation of water in the deep ocean takes about 2,000 years. The Sun itself hides ticking clocks, too: long-term solar variations last 100-400 years while the short-term solar cycles, controlling the number of sunspots, take 11 years in average. We have finally reached the seasons, the day-and-night cycles, and the weather - the winds, precipitation, clouds, high-pressure areas, and cyclones. The difference between the weather and the climate is primarily in the time scale: the climate usually refers to time intervals comparable to 30 years or longer but no sharp boundary between the weather and the climate exists.
Man himself began to influence the climate in many ways, even though we remain a "cherry on the pie" in many respects. Deforestation and the construction of roads and buildings have modified the Earth's albedo. People are emitting various chemical compounds, too. Aerosols and the dust are able to reflect the solar radiation and help to cool the planet while the greenhouse gases, especially water vapor but also carbon dioxide or methane, are able to absorb the infrared thermal radiation of the Earth that would otherwise escape the planet - which helps to warm up our planet. This effect has been known since the 1827 work by Joseph Fourier; however, it only became popular at the end of the 20th century.
However, there exist dozens of other natural as well as industrial effects that influence the climate and may be essential for its accurate description. For example, several teams, including a couple of well-funded groups of experimenters, are working on a theory that galactic cosmic rays, whose flux depends on time, influence the cloudiness on Earth and the temperature, too. Experiments are underway in Denmark (SKY experiment) and they are in preparation at CERN (CLOUD experiment). The cosmic rays may become more crucial for our future description of the climate than carbon dioxide.
How the "big conclusions" are created?
Is the contemporary science able to decide which of these effects are decisive and which of them are not? Has carbon dioxide really become the key player? And can we be certain that its expected increase in the atmosphere will lead to a substantial warming? A group of climatologists that can't be overlooked answers in the affirmative. But surely not all of them.
I am convinced that definitive conclusions cannot be drawn at this moment and the man-made global warming theory hasn't been tested as carefully as the scientific method demands. For example, the proposition that the 20th century warming was unprecedented was incorporated into the so-called "hockey stick graph", a key symbol of the IPCC report from 2001. According to this chart, the average temperature on Earth has been nearly constant for 900 years, before it began to skyrocket around 1900 (apparently due to human activities). However, it was shown, primarily due to relative outsiders, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, that the "hockey stick graph" was based on flawed statistical methods. Newer articles about the same question show that the 20th century changes do not qualitatively differ from the oscillations in the previous centuries - and the medieval period may have been warmer than the present era, just like the historical sources indicate, although we cannot be quite certain about it. In the newer IPCC report published in 2007, the original hockey stick graph has been silently erased (more precisely, hidden in a confusing juxtaposition of dozens of alternative, non-hockey-stick graphs) and everyone pretends that this symbol never existed.
We know that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is approximately 0.038% of the volume and we are helping to increase it by about 0.0002% annually. Is it possible to calculate how much this otherwise innocent gas warms up the atmosphere? The simplest calculation gives roughly 1 Fahrenheit degree per 20th century but this calculation neglects the effect of the gas and of the temperature changes on the cloud creation, their impact on the temperature, as well as all other complex but important phenomena. Can we believe the existing climate models that are oversimplifying the situation in so many respects? I am convinced that the right answer is No. These models include a huge amount of input parameters and unjustified assumptions and they only roughly agree with a few qualitative observations about the 20th century climate. No observed details seem to match the predictions of models correctly and accurately. And sometimes, the predictions are not even in the ballpark of reality.
No one is able to explain why the warming in the last 25 years only affected the Northern Hemisphere but not the Southern Hemisphere. No one knows why the world oceans were cooling down between 2003 and 2005, why Greenland is cooler now than it was in the 1930s, why the global mean temperature was decreasing between the 1940s and 1970s when the mankind was emitting almost as much carbon dioxide as today, why the observed temperatures are more "persistent" than the theoretical ones and why the warming is observed not only on the Earth but also on Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Enceladus, Triton, and Pluto. No one has a satisfactory explanation why many predictions of a significant warming that were made 10-20 years ago failed so miserably. No one can explain why the Alps were full of forests - and therefore warmer than today - in the era of the Roman Empire. Moreover, a low number of stomata on the fossils of 450 million years old leaves suggests that the carbon dioxide concentration used to be 8 times higher than it is today but no one can explain how the plants could live in such a "hell on Earth". And no one is able to forecast the weather for more than one week. These examples of our ignorance and potential disagreements between the theory and observations - and many others - are usually swept under the rug while other predictions that happen to agree are being celebrated uncritically. However, this asymmetry of reactions doesn't belong to real science.
How is it possible that such a high percentage of scientists claims that all the big questions about the climate have been answered and that the catastrophic global warming is a fact? It is because of a kind of division of labor - someone is creating the "big picture" while other people are assigned more detailed and less important work. It is not unusual that the "big picture" is often drawn by talented scientists with a profoundly conceptual reasoning.
Unfortunately, the "big picture" in climate science is being invented by the people with certain non-scientific, often political interests. They have introduced a multi-level filter to their discipline. Because of this filter, the newspaper articles have almost nothing to do with the scientific reality. Moreover, the climatological community is strongly affected by a groupthink that prevents it from an objective judgment of all new theories, especially theories proposed by researchers from outside their community. How does it work?
While there are many climate skeptics among retired climatologists, a young climate scientist has to offer a sensational result because these results are the primary factors deciding about the funding of the discipline: because climatology swallows billions of dollars a year - a small fraction of the money that is spent for the "fight against climate change" during the same period - we can't be surprised that the money plays an important role. The main sensational result is shared by the whole discipline (a dangerous global warming) but individual scientists are being pushed to invent their own spectacular results, too. Scientists whose research leads to a different explanation of the existing data or different predictions are routinely intimidated. They are often threatened and accused of co-operation with the "evil" oil corporations and they are not allowed to use the grant resources and advance in their careers.
If someone ends up with inconvenient results despite these pressures, his or her articles are not printed. Those articles that are printed are post-selected according to yet another ideological key. The summaries of reports are being written by the most politically active, and therefore the most biased members of the scientific teams: the IPCC is unfortunately no exception. The most dramatic filter is hiding in the media that have a roughly 5-fold probability to report a "story" about research that leads to a "catastrophic" prediction than a paper whose conclusions are "moderate" or "politically inconsequential".
Nowadays, the journalists also seem to be much more eager to write about a warm weather than a cool weather, even though it used to be the other way around 30 years ago. And whenever they talk about a cool weather, it is not linked to the global climate - even though articles about a warm weather or hurricanes mention the global climate in most cases. If we try to understand a system that is as complex as the climate, it is paramount for a scientist to avoid any bias, if he doesn't want to instantly end on a wrong track. In the real world of climatology, however, the degree of bias is enormous. If someone is free to choose convenient "cherries on the pie" from the huge number of assorted data about the atmosphere and the Earth's history that are available, he is able to "prove" almost anything.
So far I was only talking about our knowledge of the true reasons behind the observed climate changes and our ability to predict the climate in the future, without being able to predict the weather for one week. My conclusions were skeptical. However, if we focus on the question whether science is able to estimate the consequences of the hypothetical warming for the mankind, we would be led to an even more skeptical appraisal. Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg has tested how it feels when one is treated as a heretic. It was enough for him to publish a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist that collected some arguments that a potential mild warming could be beneficial for our civilization. The modern Danish Inquisition, more precisely the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty, began to work on Lomborg's excommunication from the scientific community as soon as some environmentalist activists raised their concerns and it took one year before Lomborg was rehabilitated. It's obvious that a serious discussion of climatologists and economists about these matters is only getting started and it only occurs at a few institutions where the political correctness is not the main criterion that determines what can be said and thought and what can't be said and thought.
Despite all these gloomy observations, I believe that we are not far from a new era when climatologists will be able and allowed to study a greater set of details - including those politically "inconsequential" or even "inconvenient" ones - using a more diverse set of methods and without intimidation. Maybe sometime in the future, their theories will be competing according to the same fair rules that we know from other disciplines, regardless of the fact that climatology has an impact on politics and many people "know" in advance how the right answers should look like. I am primarily talking about the people who want to use the climate as one of the tools to prove that the free markets lead mankind to the Hell - and these people can be found both among the activists but also among the professional scientists themselves - but I would like to emphasize that a direct influence of the "opposite" ideology on science would be equally undesirable. Let me wrap up with the wish of a more creative and more free future for the discipline of climatology.
About the author: Dr Luboš Motl is a physicist, currently (2007) at faculty of Harvard University
The theory of man-made global warming hasn't been tested as carefully as the scientific method demands
A recently published report by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) considers global warming to be a fact caused by the emissions of greenhouse gases.
However, the situation is not as simple as many mainstream climatologists seem to think.
Our ancestors were unable to comprehend a wide spectrum of natural phenomena.
The fear from thunderstorms or solar eclipses may have helped the first primitive forms of religion and the first anthropomorphic gods to be born. However, during the several recent centuries, people learned how to look at the natural phenomena rationally. The scientific method allowed them to formulate hypotheses and, using a meticulous analysis of experiments, to decide which of them are valid and which of them are not. The insights obtained in this fashion are valuable per se; however, many of them are practically useful for our everyday lives, too.
Nevertheless, very recently, we are hearing increasingly often the paradigm that our paganic ancestors may have been right in one opinion, namely that the main originator of the climatic phenomena may have anthropomorphic features, after all, because it is no one else than Man himself. Moreover, many laymen as well as experts seem to believe that science has proven beyond reasonable doubt that the judgment day is unstoppably approaching. But is it really possible to deduce from the existing body of knowledge that the human activity will lead to a catastrophic global warming? We will first recall some scientific questions that are important for a proper analysis of climate changes. At the end of the essay, I will try to explain why it is exactly climatology that has so serious problems to preserve its objective character and why so many people are led to scientifically unjustifiable, gloomy visions of the future.
The science of climate
The climate and the weather incorporate a huge selection of rather complex phenomena that are being studied by diverse scientific disciplines. Most of the corresponding questions are only interested for researchers - ordinary people and politicians shouldn't be worried about them. On the other hand, Nature is not interested which of Her mysteries will be useful for the mankind. If we want to understand the phenomena in Nature properly, it is necessary to study many phenomena without any political or practical flavor, too. These phenomena may approximately be sorted according to the typical time scale they occupy.
The Universe was born 13.7 billion years ago and the Solar System was created roughly 4.6 billion years ago. In order to accurately describe the events in the Universe that took place billions of years ago, we need nuclear physics and other disciplines that clearly don't belong to climatology. Among the phenomena that take a somewhat shorter period of time than billions of years, the motion of the Solar System through the Milky Way and the continental drift may serve as two familiar examples. The Sun is oscillating around the main plane of our Galaxy and one period of this motion takes tens of millions of years. All these effects have a certain impact on the climate and the average temperatures: more or less periodic and more or less chaotic waves with various periodicities have to be combined if our goal is to have an idea e.g. about the dependence of the average temperature on time.
The climate is changing and it has always been changing, regardless of the time scale at which the climate is observed. The idea that the climate change is something that was born together with homo sapiens is naive. As we approach shorter time scales, we encounter the so-called Milankovitch cycles: the periodicity of oscillations of the eccentricity of Earth's orbit is close to 100,000 years while the precession of the Earth's axis takes about 20,000 years. These cycles and a few similar phenomena are almost certainly responsible for the glaciation cycles - the alternation of the ice ages and interglacials - even though some recent alternative theories are trying to find their explanation inside the Sun.
The circulation of water in the deep ocean takes about 2,000 years. The Sun itself hides ticking clocks, too: long-term solar variations last 100-400 years while the short-term solar cycles, controlling the number of sunspots, take 11 years in average. We have finally reached the seasons, the day-and-night cycles, and the weather - the winds, precipitation, clouds, high-pressure areas, and cyclones. The difference between the weather and the climate is primarily in the time scale: the climate usually refers to time intervals comparable to 30 years or longer but no sharp boundary between the weather and the climate exists.
Man himself began to influence the climate in many ways, even though we remain a "cherry on the pie" in many respects. Deforestation and the construction of roads and buildings have modified the Earth's albedo. People are emitting various chemical compounds, too. Aerosols and the dust are able to reflect the solar radiation and help to cool the planet while the greenhouse gases, especially water vapor but also carbon dioxide or methane, are able to absorb the infrared thermal radiation of the Earth that would otherwise escape the planet - which helps to warm up our planet. This effect has been known since the 1827 work by Joseph Fourier; however, it only became popular at the end of the 20th century.
However, there exist dozens of other natural as well as industrial effects that influence the climate and may be essential for its accurate description. For example, several teams, including a couple of well-funded groups of experimenters, are working on a theory that galactic cosmic rays, whose flux depends on time, influence the cloudiness on Earth and the temperature, too. Experiments are underway in Denmark (SKY experiment) and they are in preparation at CERN (CLOUD experiment). The cosmic rays may become more crucial for our future description of the climate than carbon dioxide.
How the "big conclusions" are created?
Is the contemporary science able to decide which of these effects are decisive and which of them are not? Has carbon dioxide really become the key player? And can we be certain that its expected increase in the atmosphere will lead to a substantial warming? A group of climatologists that can't be overlooked answers in the affirmative. But surely not all of them.
I am convinced that definitive conclusions cannot be drawn at this moment and the man-made global warming theory hasn't been tested as carefully as the scientific method demands. For example, the proposition that the 20th century warming was unprecedented was incorporated into the so-called "hockey stick graph", a key symbol of the IPCC report from 2001. According to this chart, the average temperature on Earth has been nearly constant for 900 years, before it began to skyrocket around 1900 (apparently due to human activities). However, it was shown, primarily due to relative outsiders, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, that the "hockey stick graph" was based on flawed statistical methods. Newer articles about the same question show that the 20th century changes do not qualitatively differ from the oscillations in the previous centuries - and the medieval period may have been warmer than the present era, just like the historical sources indicate, although we cannot be quite certain about it. In the newer IPCC report published in 2007, the original hockey stick graph has been silently erased (more precisely, hidden in a confusing juxtaposition of dozens of alternative, non-hockey-stick graphs) and everyone pretends that this symbol never existed.
We know that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is approximately 0.038% of the volume and we are helping to increase it by about 0.0002% annually. Is it possible to calculate how much this otherwise innocent gas warms up the atmosphere? The simplest calculation gives roughly 1 Fahrenheit degree per 20th century but this calculation neglects the effect of the gas and of the temperature changes on the cloud creation, their impact on the temperature, as well as all other complex but important phenomena. Can we believe the existing climate models that are oversimplifying the situation in so many respects? I am convinced that the right answer is No. These models include a huge amount of input parameters and unjustified assumptions and they only roughly agree with a few qualitative observations about the 20th century climate. No observed details seem to match the predictions of models correctly and accurately. And sometimes, the predictions are not even in the ballpark of reality.
No one is able to explain why the warming in the last 25 years only affected the Northern Hemisphere but not the Southern Hemisphere. No one knows why the world oceans were cooling down between 2003 and 2005, why Greenland is cooler now than it was in the 1930s, why the global mean temperature was decreasing between the 1940s and 1970s when the mankind was emitting almost as much carbon dioxide as today, why the observed temperatures are more "persistent" than the theoretical ones and why the warming is observed not only on the Earth but also on Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Enceladus, Triton, and Pluto. No one has a satisfactory explanation why many predictions of a significant warming that were made 10-20 years ago failed so miserably. No one can explain why the Alps were full of forests - and therefore warmer than today - in the era of the Roman Empire. Moreover, a low number of stomata on the fossils of 450 million years old leaves suggests that the carbon dioxide concentration used to be 8 times higher than it is today but no one can explain how the plants could live in such a "hell on Earth". And no one is able to forecast the weather for more than one week. These examples of our ignorance and potential disagreements between the theory and observations - and many others - are usually swept under the rug while other predictions that happen to agree are being celebrated uncritically. However, this asymmetry of reactions doesn't belong to real science.
How is it possible that such a high percentage of scientists claims that all the big questions about the climate have been answered and that the catastrophic global warming is a fact? It is because of a kind of division of labor - someone is creating the "big picture" while other people are assigned more detailed and less important work. It is not unusual that the "big picture" is often drawn by talented scientists with a profoundly conceptual reasoning.
Unfortunately, the "big picture" in climate science is being invented by the people with certain non-scientific, often political interests. They have introduced a multi-level filter to their discipline. Because of this filter, the newspaper articles have almost nothing to do with the scientific reality. Moreover, the climatological community is strongly affected by a groupthink that prevents it from an objective judgment of all new theories, especially theories proposed by researchers from outside their community. How does it work?
While there are many climate skeptics among retired climatologists, a young climate scientist has to offer a sensational result because these results are the primary factors deciding about the funding of the discipline: because climatology swallows billions of dollars a year - a small fraction of the money that is spent for the "fight against climate change" during the same period - we can't be surprised that the money plays an important role. The main sensational result is shared by the whole discipline (a dangerous global warming) but individual scientists are being pushed to invent their own spectacular results, too. Scientists whose research leads to a different explanation of the existing data or different predictions are routinely intimidated. They are often threatened and accused of co-operation with the "evil" oil corporations and they are not allowed to use the grant resources and advance in their careers.
If someone ends up with inconvenient results despite these pressures, his or her articles are not printed. Those articles that are printed are post-selected according to yet another ideological key. The summaries of reports are being written by the most politically active, and therefore the most biased members of the scientific teams: the IPCC is unfortunately no exception. The most dramatic filter is hiding in the media that have a roughly 5-fold probability to report a "story" about research that leads to a "catastrophic" prediction than a paper whose conclusions are "moderate" or "politically inconsequential".
Nowadays, the journalists also seem to be much more eager to write about a warm weather than a cool weather, even though it used to be the other way around 30 years ago. And whenever they talk about a cool weather, it is not linked to the global climate - even though articles about a warm weather or hurricanes mention the global climate in most cases. If we try to understand a system that is as complex as the climate, it is paramount for a scientist to avoid any bias, if he doesn't want to instantly end on a wrong track. In the real world of climatology, however, the degree of bias is enormous. If someone is free to choose convenient "cherries on the pie" from the huge number of assorted data about the atmosphere and the Earth's history that are available, he is able to "prove" almost anything.
So far I was only talking about our knowledge of the true reasons behind the observed climate changes and our ability to predict the climate in the future, without being able to predict the weather for one week. My conclusions were skeptical. However, if we focus on the question whether science is able to estimate the consequences of the hypothetical warming for the mankind, we would be led to an even more skeptical appraisal. Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg has tested how it feels when one is treated as a heretic. It was enough for him to publish a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist that collected some arguments that a potential mild warming could be beneficial for our civilization. The modern Danish Inquisition, more precisely the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty, began to work on Lomborg's excommunication from the scientific community as soon as some environmentalist activists raised their concerns and it took one year before Lomborg was rehabilitated. It's obvious that a serious discussion of climatologists and economists about these matters is only getting started and it only occurs at a few institutions where the political correctness is not the main criterion that determines what can be said and thought and what can't be said and thought.
Despite all these gloomy observations, I believe that we are not far from a new era when climatologists will be able and allowed to study a greater set of details - including those politically "inconsequential" or even "inconvenient" ones - using a more diverse set of methods and without intimidation. Maybe sometime in the future, their theories will be competing according to the same fair rules that we know from other disciplines, regardless of the fact that climatology has an impact on politics and many people "know" in advance how the right answers should look like. I am primarily talking about the people who want to use the climate as one of the tools to prove that the free markets lead mankind to the Hell - and these people can be found both among the activists but also among the professional scientists themselves - but I would like to emphasize that a direct influence of the "opposite" ideology on science would be equally undesirable. Let me wrap up with the wish of a more creative and more free future for the discipline of climatology.
About the author: Dr Luboš Motl is a physicist, currently (2007) at faculty of Harvard University
What to do in Houston this weekend
-- See all of the Oscar-nominated films tomorrow on a $30 AMC pass. Babel is first at 11 a.m., and Little Miss Sunshine wraps up the marathon at 9:45 p.m. Since that's more than 12 hours of movie-viewing, the theater chain will throw in a large popcorn and soft drink, with free unlimited refills all day. Passes are available at amctheatres.com or the box office of any of the AMC multiplexes around Houston.
-- Go to the MoFA and see French masters Picasso and Degas, on loan to the only gallery outside of New York for a very limited time.
-- Support one of the bars and restaurants in the downtown entertainment district. They're having a rough go of it.
-- Take in the touring production of Twelve Angry Men, with John Boy Walton and Norm from Cheers, at the Hobby Center. The Houston Press even liked it.
Update (6 pm): To those of you have inquired about my father-in-law's surgery, it was successful. He's out of recovery and in ICU.
-- Go to the MoFA and see French masters Picasso and Degas, on loan to the only gallery outside of New York for a very limited time.
-- Support one of the bars and restaurants in the downtown entertainment district. They're having a rough go of it.
-- Take in the touring production of Twelve Angry Men, with John Boy Walton and Norm from Cheers, at the Hobby Center. The Houston Press even liked it.
Update (6 pm): To those of you have inquired about my father-in-law's surgery, it was successful. He's out of recovery and in ICU.
Conservapedia
Some readers have asked me what I think about Conservapedia, www.conservapedia.com (their server is currently overloaded, sorry, see mirror of the main page). Well, for quite some time, I wasn't sure whether the project - a self-described conservative, Christian, pro-American counterpart of Wikipedia - was serious or just a hoax.
Now I think that it is serious. The number of articles in it, including some relatively meaningful ones, is simply much higher than what I would expect from a hoax. On the other hand, the total volume of Conservapedia is much smaller than the volume of Wikipedia. I think that it is obvious that Conservapedia will remain a less extensive, less complete, and nominally more biased server than Wikipedia. It is not clear to me whether the authors realize that their project is almost guaranteed to remain a parody of Wikipedia.
Don't get me wrong. Wikipedia is biased in many different ways. For example, the number of left-wing editors is much larger than the number of right-wing editors, among other examples of asymmetry. But I don't think it is so biased that the bias would justify to build a new online encyclopedia from the scratch.
If there are examples in which Wikipedia promotes a biased point of view, an intelligent reader can usually tell. I haven't faced any serious problems whenever I was trying to extract some essential information from Wikipedia pages even if the pages were slightly biased. You can just ignore the spin and emotions. They're not what an intelligent reader looks for anyway. It's the nontrivial facts that matter. Every person with IQ above 100 can twist them if she needs it. Moreover, I think that the amount of spin is tolerable.
As far as entertainment is concerned, I would still prefer Uncyclopedia.org. For example, you may start with String theory or Al Gore.
Now I think that it is serious. The number of articles in it, including some relatively meaningful ones, is simply much higher than what I would expect from a hoax. On the other hand, the total volume of Conservapedia is much smaller than the volume of Wikipedia. I think that it is obvious that Conservapedia will remain a less extensive, less complete, and nominally more biased server than Wikipedia. It is not clear to me whether the authors realize that their project is almost guaranteed to remain a parody of Wikipedia.
Don't get me wrong. Wikipedia is biased in many different ways. For example, the number of left-wing editors is much larger than the number of right-wing editors, among other examples of asymmetry. But I don't think it is so biased that the bias would justify to build a new online encyclopedia from the scratch.
If there are examples in which Wikipedia promotes a biased point of view, an intelligent reader can usually tell. I haven't faced any serious problems whenever I was trying to extract some essential information from Wikipedia pages even if the pages were slightly biased. You can just ignore the spin and emotions. They're not what an intelligent reader looks for anyway. It's the nontrivial facts that matter. Every person with IQ above 100 can twist them if she needs it. Moreover, I think that the amount of spin is tolerable.
As far as entertainment is concerned, I would still prefer Uncyclopedia.org. For example, you may start with String theory or Al Gore.
The Kos cattle call: Clinton, Obama, Edwards
My own thoughts after hearing Obama last night is that there is a slight little something missing -- I don't know, call it 'gravitas', without the negative connotation the word has always had for the current White House occupant, who remains a lightweight to this day. The senator from Illinois is a very good speaker but not a powerful one; his "rock star" reputation precedes his actual onstage presence IMHO, but he has the competence and quiet confidence to be the man. In any case, Markos has the cogent insight:
Some of this I agree with wholeheartedly, some -- as with his dismissal of Kucinich -- is just typically arrogant Kos. I'm not as certain as he that Obama will be the nominee as I write today. Biden ought to be the first one to drop out, even ahead of Gravel. Vilsack will quit after his home state loss and endorse Hillary (surprise). Update (10 am): LOL --or maybe a bit sooner.
At this point I don't know what General Clark could be waiting for, either.
Update II (3 pm): Chris Cillizza's line is nearly identical. He places Dodd in fifth, and ranks the Repubs McCain, Guiliani/Romney tied for second, then Brownback and Huckabee.
Update III (4 pm): Kos explains his "ugh".
... (his) take on where these candidates sit in the race today. My long-term prognostication remains -- I think Obama will win this all by the time votes are counted. But what do I know?Last month's rankings: 1) Obama, 2) Edwards, 3) Clinton, 4) Richardson, 5) Clark, 6) Kerry, and then everyone else.
THE TOP TIER
1. Hillary Clinton
Her announcement rollout was masterful. She leads in the national polls which, while not indicative of much, is helpful for fundraising and media buzz purposes. She leads all early New Hampshire polls and several of the Iowa ones (though numbers are all over the place suggesting that no one knows how to poll these early states, this far out).
Iraq is already giving her fits, and will present a long-term problem for her campaign. But for now, most people are blissfully unaware of her Iraq record.
2. Barack Obama
He has parried off the early attacks skillfully and is getting a great deal of traction on Iraq. He's drawing thousands to his rallies, hinting at a Dean-like popular phenomenon in the makings. He's got huge support in the Facebook world, and is he's neck and neck with Edwards in the Daily Kos straw poll showing strong and growing netroots support.
Oh, and the money will be there. Lots of it.
3. John Edwards
Boy, that blogger stuff wasn't his campaign's finest hour. They betrayed a lack of preparation, foresight, and basic vetting. They were pushed into "bunker" mode by the rantings of Bill Donahue, giving little confidence they'd be able to withstand a serious attack from the VRWC. Then, the campaign leaked like a sieve -- were the bloggers fired or not? Then, the campaign did the right thing and held tight on the bloggers, but didn't tell them they shouldn't blog elsewhere. A couple of days later, the bloggers resign anyway, giving the right wingers a scalp.
The good thing is that this happened so early that it won't register as even a blip in a few months. And hopefully the campaign learned some good lessons out of this.
Otherwise, the Edwards campaign appears to have been overshadowed by the battle of titans between Hillary and Barack. It's not a bad thing for Edwards to see the two front runners beat the shit out of each other while he safely stays out of the fray.
THE SECOND TIER4. Bill Richardson
Put aside his hokey desire to have the candidates make a pledge to campaign only positively (those things never survive the heat of battle), Richardson is quietly building up support and raising money. In the dKos straw poll, he's the only candidate to gain every one of the last five polls. (Of course, when you start at 1 percent, that's easier to do...)
Of all the announced candidates, Richardson has the greatest potential to break into the top tier.
THE REST5. Tom Vilsack
Coming out in favor of social security price indexing was rather odd for a Democratic candidate.
But he's the former governor of Iowa, so that might count for something.
6. Joe Biden
His announcement week was a nightmare.
7. Chris Dodd
His remarks at the DNC and AFSCME cattle calls were generally well received.
8. Dennis Kucinich
Ugh.
9. Mike Gravel
I'm not sure what Gravel thinks he's bringing to the table that isn't being covered by other, viable candidates.
10. Wesley Clark
He's not even in the race, has no operation, and his public profile is fading as the rest of the field takes center stage. This is the last time I include him in either the straw poll or cattle call unless he announces. He's bleeding support in the Daily Kos straw poll as people lose interest and move to other candidates. Given that his big mistake in 2003 was waiting too long before entering the race, it's crazy to think that he's going to make the same mistake again (and the race is definitely accelerated this year). So I'm starting to assume he's not going to run.
Some of this I agree with wholeheartedly, some -- as with his dismissal of Kucinich -- is just typically arrogant Kos. I'm not as certain as he that Obama will be the nominee as I write today. Biden ought to be the first one to drop out, even ahead of Gravel. Vilsack will quit after his home state loss and endorse Hillary (surprise). Update (10 am): LOL --or maybe a bit sooner.
At this point I don't know what General Clark could be waiting for, either.
Update II (3 pm): Chris Cillizza's line is nearly identical. He places Dodd in fifth, and ranks the Repubs McCain, Guiliani/Romney tied for second, then Brownback and Huckabee.
Update III (4 pm): Kos explains his "ugh".
Remembering DJ
Dennis Johnson skywalking in 1979, with the Seattle SuperSonics.
He passed away yesterday outside a basketball court in Austin, stricken by an imponderable illness for an athlete who spent most of his life in top aerobic condition.
In 1987, against the Detroit Pistons in game 5 of the conference finals, "Bird stole the ball!" but it was DJ who took the feed and put in the layup that won the game and broke the Pistons' backs.
He won three rings, one with Seattle and two in Boston, and was the MVP of the Finals in '79. Larry Bird said he was the best he'd ever played with.
Considering Bird played with HoFers McHale, Parrish, and Walton, that's a pretty high compliment.
Following his playing days he became a coach, for a short time with the Clippers in Los Angeles but with the Austin Toros of the Developmental League when he suddenly collapsed following the team's practice. The Statesman has more on the life of Dennis Johnson.
Rest in peace, DJ.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Yes, it's a pretty crappy picture
And how close did you get to Barack Obama this evening?
John and Martha got just as close and with better cameras. When they post one of their pictures, I'll link ya. Until then ...
Update: Here's Martha's. Hal was there, too.
John and Martha got just as close and with better cameras. When they post one of their pictures, I'll link ya. Until then ...Update: Here's Martha's. Hal was there, too.
Alan Guth & seesaw
Alan Guth has a big-picture preprint
Show postings on this blog with the words seesaw & cosmological.
Technical comment: try to click the pink feed icon in the right sidebar, next to my photograph. Google Reader is a very efficient and nice way to browse through the postings (try next item and previous item!), especially for the readers who don't like the color scheme of this blog (and I live in the superposition of the opinions "the colors are just cool" and "the colors suck and plain white rules").
arguing that inflation is good but it can't be the whole story, and putting everything in the context of eternal inflation, landscape, etc.
Michael McGuigan has another paper on the
In the picture where the observed cosmological constant is the smaller among two eigenvalues of a special 2x2 matrix, McGuigan studies the physical consequences of the large eigenvalue of the same matrix. Not Even Woit is omitted from the list of references, so I hope and guess that this unpleasant critic of science won't be too unpleasant this time. ;-)Show postings on this blog with the words seesaw & cosmological.
Technical comment: try to click the pink feed icon in the right sidebar, next to my photograph. Google Reader is a very efficient and nice way to browse through the postings (try next item and previous item!), especially for the readers who don't like the color scheme of this blog (and I live in the superposition of the opinions "the colors are just cool" and "the colors suck and plain white rules").
Incandescent vs fluorescent light bulbs
See also: Klaus: hoard Edison's light bulbs before EU bans them on Sep 1st, 2009This topic was recently discussed by James Annan and Clifford Johnson, among others.
Two years ago, Fidel Castro switched his communist island from classical incandescent light bulbs to more efficient fluorescent light bulbs. The reason is simply that electrical blackouts are common on this island plagued by the criminals and the leader has the power to dictate similar things to the whole nation. Needless to say, Hugo Chavez, the most active communist rock star of the present world and a Stalin who returned from a fattening station, is planning something similar in Venezuela.
But would you expect that the government of a decent and wealthy country such as Australia would promote a similar policy as the losers above? It's kind of surprising but it's true. ;-)
Figure 1: Spectrum of "cool white" fluorescent light bulbs. It doesn't look like a natural black body curve, does it? Well, blacklight lamps are worse.
As a generic consumer, I find the classical light bulbs based on the black body radiation somewhat superior. They resemble the actual spectrum of the Sun more closely - the full interval of visible frequencies is represented. They don't blink 60 times a second. (These two problems are solved by the newest fluorescent models.) You don't have to be afraid that they're constantly emitting a lot of UV rays with unpredictable health consequences. In general, their environmental impact is more predictable.
Figure 2: Count the number of light bulbs in the clip "eSeMeS" by Lucie Bílá, a Czech singer.
Fluorescent light bulbs are more efficient energetically but they don't share the advantages of the incandescent light bulbs explained in the previous paragraph. The photographs taken under these light bulbs don't look great. Moreover, they use mercury. Most people discard them in uncontrollable ways and mercury is a poison that pollutes unpredictable places of the environment. The mercury from one fluorescent light bulb pollutes, according to some activist groups, 6000 gallons of water beyond levels safe for drinking. In 43 U.S. states, it is legal to dispose fluorescent bulbs as universal waste.
Update February 2008: The New York Times about the real and growing dangers of mercury in the fluorescent light bulbs - a call for a better system of recyclingThere are positive features and negative features of both of them. The incandescent light bulbs have not disappeared and there are very good reasons why they have not disappeared. All the aspects - energy consumption, friendliness of the color spectrum, difficulties with recycling etc. - have been considered by the market and the result is that both technologies have survived. The energy consumption is already accounted for - because people do pay for energy. The energy consumption is simply not a big problem which is why people use both types of light bulbs. In fact, the heat produced by the conventional light bulbs is not lost: especially during winter, it's often useful to add some extra source of heat to your living room.
It's unjustifiable if someone wants to double-count and pretend, for purely ideological reasons, that the energy consumption is more important than it is - while he bravely neglects other issues such as the difficulties with recycling.
As these blinded people promote hysteria against a perfectly innocent gas called carbon dioxide, people suddenly start to forget about some threats that are somewhat more real. Once again, one teaspoon of mercury can contaminate a 20 acre lake forever: the U.S. companies still emit roughly 30 tons of mercury a year. Be careful: I can't independently verify these numbers and I was told that this quantification of the toxicity of mercury is a myth.
The government may buy efficient fluorescent light bulbs for various public places in order to save energy and taxpayers' money. But I just find it scary to imagine that a government would get the right to effectively ban an innocent and popular technology from usage by general consumers for no good reason - unless you consider the megalomanic propaganda of global warming to be a reason and a magic tool that can defeat any rational argument.
For me, such brutal plans to cripple the freedom of civilized countries are just way too serious, and I would immediately join anyone who would start to fight against these shameful communist tendencies. ;-)
And that's the memo.
Carbon indulgences: below one euro
In April 2006, the price of carbon indulgences in the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS), the largest emission market in the world, was 30 euro per ton of CO2 emissions: see this graph. However, in May 2006, the price decreased a little bit, more precisely by a factor of pi - below 10 euro per ton of CO2.
In November 2006, when the price was still around 9 euro per ton, we predicted its fall to 2 euro per ton. This seemingly bold prediction was realized at the beginning of February 2007. However, the price continued to approach the actual market value, namely zero.
Yesterday, the EUA (European Union Allowances) price closed at €0.93 for 2007 Futures: click the chart on the left. The price correction by a factor of more than 30 in the right direction and in less than one year is a sign that the free market kind of works. It would be nice if the number of global warming journalists, climate change pseudoscientists, catastrophic charlatans, and their funding decreased by a factor of 30, too.
Update: Today, one ton closed at €0.85, a ten-percent decrease per day.
In November 2006, when the price was still around 9 euro per ton, we predicted its fall to 2 euro per ton. This seemingly bold prediction was realized at the beginning of February 2007. However, the price continued to approach the actual market value, namely zero.
Yesterday, the EUA (European Union Allowances) price closed at €0.93 for 2007 Futures: click the chart on the left. The price correction by a factor of more than 30 in the right direction and in less than one year is a sign that the free market kind of works. It would be nice if the number of global warming journalists, climate change pseudoscientists, catastrophic charlatans, and their funding decreased by a factor of 30, too.Update: Today, one ton closed at €0.85, a ten-percent decrease per day.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Hot women not allowed in optics?
In the 1950s, women were not allowed to enter the building of the physics department of Princeton University because the head of the department believed that they were a distraction. ;-)
Although the chairman's assumption was right, the rules of the game have changed. Women are not only allowed but they are welcome in the physics departments and they, in fact, control many of them. This includes attractive women, too. I know quite a few. While they can still be a distraction, it's the other people's problem, not theirs - if it is a problem at all. Their new right is to distract or not to distract, to become a scientist or not to become a scientist, to dress as men or as women, according to their choice.
But everything can change again in 2007.
After this cute ad promoting Edmund Optics appeared in Physics Today and other places, some powerful forces started to think about returning to the policies from the 1950s. It seems that the person on the picture is actually not a generic hired outsider but an expert so it is her fate and her rights that are being debated here. Again, I have no general reason to doubt that she is their employee because I know similar experts in other fields of physics and engineering.
However, a radically "progressive" blog started an incredible campaign against Edmund Optics: they send a lot of complaints and encourage their readers to send complaints, too. Although that blog claims that the young women should be welcome at all possible places of physical sciences and engineering, there is one place where they're simply not allowed: on photographs that represent these companies. And maybe they're not allowed to look like women even if they're at work: they're a distraction, after all. ;-)
Cosmic Variance argues that even if another commercial of Edmund Optics features a semi-naked young man, it will still not be enough. It turns out that the only acceptable people at the company's photographs are ugly old white males! Who could have thought? Well, the employee on the photograph may want to go into hiding mode because the "progressive" activists are going after her.
Does Cosmic Variance realize in what situation they bring the attractive expert from the photograph? The main reason why they're creating problems to her is that they believe that all women in science and engineering must be unattractive, frigid feminists. But that's not the case. According to all the laws, the U.S. constitution, as well as common sense, attractive, hot, mainstream, straight women are welcome, too!
JoAnne argues that the person on the photograph has crossed the line of "professional attire". I wonder whether she doesn't think that her criticism is a bit painful. Imagine your humble correspondent criticizing Arnold Schwarzenegger that by showing his muscles, he has crossed the line. I would feel painful, indeed! ;-)
Many great people have fought for the dignity of female scientists. For example, one of Richard Feynman's famous paintings was "Madame Curie Observing the Radiations from Radium". The message he intended to convey was, nobody thinks of Madame Curie as a woman, as feminine, with beautiful hair, bare breasts, and all that. They only think of the radium part. (Quoted from Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman.) And Sean Carroll suddenly wants to undo all this and make all female scientists feel like ugly, unattractive geeks again.
I hope that neither the blonde mechanic nor the company gets intimidated by these radicals. And don't forget: if you need optical components, think about Edmund Optics. Britney Spears should think twice whether she wants to stay in semiconductor physics. And Louise Riofrio should get ready that her fellow cosmologist will go after her, too. ;-)
When we're talking about commercials for optics, you may see how they sell eyeglasses in Germany. Disclaimer: you are only allowed to click if you're older than 21 years.
Bonus I (via Prof JM whom I added to the blogroll):
Girls of engineering 2007: a video promoting a calendar
Bonus II
Bikini calculus - MIT nuclear physicist Paige Hopewell (publications) and her friend explain calculus
Although the chairman's assumption was right, the rules of the game have changed. Women are not only allowed but they are welcome in the physics departments and they, in fact, control many of them. This includes attractive women, too. I know quite a few. While they can still be a distraction, it's the other people's problem, not theirs - if it is a problem at all. Their new right is to distract or not to distract, to become a scientist or not to become a scientist, to dress as men or as women, according to their choice.
But everything can change again in 2007.
After this cute ad promoting Edmund Optics appeared in Physics Today and other places, some powerful forces started to think about returning to the policies from the 1950s. It seems that the person on the picture is actually not a generic hired outsider but an expert so it is her fate and her rights that are being debated here. Again, I have no general reason to doubt that she is their employee because I know similar experts in other fields of physics and engineering.
However, a radically "progressive" blog started an incredible campaign against Edmund Optics: they send a lot of complaints and encourage their readers to send complaints, too. Although that blog claims that the young women should be welcome at all possible places of physical sciences and engineering, there is one place where they're simply not allowed: on photographs that represent these companies. And maybe they're not allowed to look like women even if they're at work: they're a distraction, after all. ;-)
Cosmic Variance argues that even if another commercial of Edmund Optics features a semi-naked young man, it will still not be enough. It turns out that the only acceptable people at the company's photographs are ugly old white males! Who could have thought? Well, the employee on the photograph may want to go into hiding mode because the "progressive" activists are going after her.
Does Cosmic Variance realize in what situation they bring the attractive expert from the photograph? The main reason why they're creating problems to her is that they believe that all women in science and engineering must be unattractive, frigid feminists. But that's not the case. According to all the laws, the U.S. constitution, as well as common sense, attractive, hot, mainstream, straight women are welcome, too!
JoAnne argues that the person on the photograph has crossed the line of "professional attire". I wonder whether she doesn't think that her criticism is a bit painful. Imagine your humble correspondent criticizing Arnold Schwarzenegger that by showing his muscles, he has crossed the line. I would feel painful, indeed! ;-)
Many great people have fought for the dignity of female scientists. For example, one of Richard Feynman's famous paintings was "Madame Curie Observing the Radiations from Radium". The message he intended to convey was, nobody thinks of Madame Curie as a woman, as feminine, with beautiful hair, bare breasts, and all that. They only think of the radium part. (Quoted from Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman.) And Sean Carroll suddenly wants to undo all this and make all female scientists feel like ugly, unattractive geeks again.
I hope that neither the blonde mechanic nor the company gets intimidated by these radicals. And don't forget: if you need optical components, think about Edmund Optics. Britney Spears should think twice whether she wants to stay in semiconductor physics. And Louise Riofrio should get ready that her fellow cosmologist will go after her, too. ;-)
When we're talking about commercials for optics, you may see how they sell eyeglasses in Germany. Disclaimer: you are only allowed to click if you're older than 21 years.
Bonus I (via Prof JM whom I added to the blogroll):
Girls of engineering 2007: a video promoting a calendar
Bonus II
Bikini calculus - MIT nuclear physicist Paige Hopewell (publications) and her friend explain calculus
Missile defense system against Iran, not Russia
There is a growing consensus that Poland will host the missiles and Jince in the Czech Republic will host the radar (see the XBR radar on the picture below). Jince in the Brdy hills is known for trilobites.
Some Russian officials immediately commented that Russia will redirect some of its weapons to the Czech radar, getting ready to attack it. The Reference Frame thinks that these comments are meant to show the Russian muscles and should be treated as ridiculous.
Moreover, Rice, Poles, and Czechs agree that the system is not built against Russia but primarily against a possible attack from Iran against the U.S.
Some Russian officials immediately commented that Russia will redirect some of its weapons to the Czech radar, getting ready to attack it. The Reference Frame thinks that these comments are meant to show the Russian muscles and should be treated as ridiculous.
Moreover, Rice, Poles, and Czechs agree that the system is not built against Russia but primarily against a possible attack from Iran against the U.S.
LHC magnet game: SWF
Click here to play. Via Sabine.
My additions
Catch enough quarks and electrons to create atoms:
Microboy from CERN
From an anonymous reader:
Don't press the red button
Pedagogical CERN flash:
Avantgout
A flash at CERN can also tell you:
How does Google work
And you may see the:
LHC detectors (right arrow!)
Climate models and disaster prophecies: new astrology
Cornelia Dean has an article in the New York Times. It is a review of the book "Useless Arithmetic" by Pilkey and Pilkey on the left. One of the main points is that the model sensitivity is a property of a model, not a property of reality. If this sensitivity is small and the results don't depend on small variations of the parameters, it doesn't mean that the model is accurate: the model may still be a very poor description of reality.
Daniel Sarewitz from Arizona State University says:
In a complex, imperfect world quantitative models feed the delusion that society can predict its way out of its environmental dilemmas. The corrosive result is that politics and science have become inextricably interwoven to the considerable detriment of both. This engaging, wise, and far-reaching book diagnoses the causes and costs of our quantitative hubris, and in so doing points the difficult way toward a more productive relationship among science, democracy, and the vexing challenges of environmental stewardship.
In Local Transport Today, 15-28 February 2007, Roger Pielke Sr is quoted:
Roger Pielke Sr. believes many scientists, policy-makers, journalists and other commentators place too much confidence in climate model results. "The overselling of regional and global models as robust projections rather than as sensitivity simulations, adds to the existing politicisation of climate science and provides justifiable criticism of the [IPCC] assessment reports," he says.
Richard Lindzen says climate models vastly overestimate temperature changes resulting from increases in CO2. All other things being equal, Lindzen says a doubling of CO2 should result in a global mean warming of just 1ºC. "Alarming predictions all require that water vapour and clouds act so as to greatly amplify the impact of CO2," he (and fellow critics) say in a recent critique of the Stern Review published in World Economics. "But it is freely acknowledged, including by the IPCC, that water vapour and especially clouds are poorly modelled, while the underlying physics for determining their behaviour is missing or even unknown."
Via Bob Ferguson and Benny Peiser.
Daniel Sarewitz from Arizona State University says:
In a complex, imperfect world quantitative models feed the delusion that society can predict its way out of its environmental dilemmas. The corrosive result is that politics and science have become inextricably interwoven to the considerable detriment of both. This engaging, wise, and far-reaching book diagnoses the causes and costs of our quantitative hubris, and in so doing points the difficult way toward a more productive relationship among science, democracy, and the vexing challenges of environmental stewardship.
In Local Transport Today, 15-28 February 2007, Roger Pielke Sr is quoted:
Roger Pielke Sr. believes many scientists, policy-makers, journalists and other commentators place too much confidence in climate model results. "The overselling of regional and global models as robust projections rather than as sensitivity simulations, adds to the existing politicisation of climate science and provides justifiable criticism of the [IPCC] assessment reports," he says.
Richard Lindzen says climate models vastly overestimate temperature changes resulting from increases in CO2. All other things being equal, Lindzen says a doubling of CO2 should result in a global mean warming of just 1ºC. "Alarming predictions all require that water vapour and clouds act so as to greatly amplify the impact of CO2," he (and fellow critics) say in a recent critique of the Stern Review published in World Economics. "But it is freely acknowledged, including by the IPCC, that water vapour and especially clouds are poorly modelled, while the underlying physics for determining their behaviour is missing or even unknown."
Via Bob Ferguson and Benny Peiser.
Ash Wednesday bloggerhea
My father-in-law will have spinal surgery this afternoon. Say a little (whatever you say in this case). Update -- 4:30 pm: Surgery rescheduled for Friday morning.
--These are the photos of ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff's injuries and rehabilitation. Not too graphic.
-- Texans can contact their state representatives through this link and call for a moratorium on the death penalty. I believe even those who support capital punishment would not be in favor of executing innocent men, as Texas has probably done at least three times (their names were Cameron Willingham, Ruben Cantu, and Carlos de Luna).
-- Like Joe Wilson and FBI translator Sybil Edmonds, Jesselyn Radack was targeted by the Bush administration as an enemy of the state. Her offense was that she advised the Justice Department about the ethical restraints that applied to their pursuit of "the bad guys". Bush (and conservatives) like to say they're fighting the "war on terror" there, so we don't have to fight it here. The reality, as Radack makes clear, is that they actually are conducting a war of terror against American citizens here.
-- Senator Tim Johnson has left the hospital and entered a rehabilitation facility, where he will continue his recovery from a brain hemorrhage. My mother Jean, who had her knee replaced last Thursday, has likewise made the same transition from hospital to rehab this week. Now with both a bionic knee and hip, she will soon be able to kick Lindsay Wagner's ass.
Let's go for a walk soon, Mom.
--These are the photos of ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff's injuries and rehabilitation. Not too graphic.
-- Texans can contact their state representatives through this link and call for a moratorium on the death penalty. I believe even those who support capital punishment would not be in favor of executing innocent men, as Texas has probably done at least three times (their names were Cameron Willingham, Ruben Cantu, and Carlos de Luna).
-- Like Joe Wilson and FBI translator Sybil Edmonds, Jesselyn Radack was targeted by the Bush administration as an enemy of the state. Her offense was that she advised the Justice Department about the ethical restraints that applied to their pursuit of "the bad guys". Bush (and conservatives) like to say they're fighting the "war on terror" there, so we don't have to fight it here. The reality, as Radack makes clear, is that they actually are conducting a war of terror against American citizens here.
-- Senator Tim Johnson has left the hospital and entered a rehabilitation facility, where he will continue his recovery from a brain hemorrhage. My mother Jean, who had her knee replaced last Thursday, has likewise made the same transition from hospital to rehab this week. Now with both a bionic knee and hip, she will soon be able to kick Lindsay Wagner's ass.
Let's go for a walk soon, Mom.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Fat Tuesday postpourri
Tony Soprano, King of Bacchus.
Since I'm an XM subscriber, I hope this is good news.
How dare they expect justice?
D.C. news: A Fort Worth girl makes good. Meanwhile, net neutrality continues to be high-profile. And a military amputee was purposely left off the invitation list to an event with the president because he might have been photographed by the media.
Even John McCain thinks Don Rumsfeld sucked. Of course, McCain is a confirmed flip-flopper, so who knows how long he'll believe this.
Another reason why I'm glad I never had children:
In 2005, when government scientists tested 60 soft, vinyl lunchboxes, they found that one in five contained amounts of lead that medical experts consider unsafe — and several had more than 10 times hazardous levels.But that's not what they told the public.
Instead, the Consumer Product Safety Commission released a statement that they found "no instances of hazardous levels." And they refused to release their actual test results, citing regulations that protect manufacturers from having their information released to the public.
That data was not made public until the Associated Press received a box of about 1,500 pages of lab reports, in-house e-mails and other records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed a year ago.
Which of these things is not like the other?
Fucking moron.
Noncommutative blog
See noncommutativegeometry.blogspot.com. Via David Goss. Sorry for my time limitations now.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Andrei Linde: eternal feast
This press release of Stanford University is certainly more serious than the "solution" to the twin paradox but it is still kind of amusing:
While Alan Guth has discovered that the Universe is the ultimate free lunch, Andrei Linde has improved this theory. He argues that the Universe is an eternal feast because all possible dishes are being served all the time. The menu offers 10^{1000} different tasty meals, previously known as the landscape.
Figure 1: The landscape, 2007 edition. For the sake of simplicity, (10^{999}-1) x 10 vacua were omitted.
It's somewhat entertaining that this evolution of the popular metaphors proposed by the two famous Gentlemen kind of mimicks the evolution of the actual discoveries within inflationary cosmology.
While Alan Guth has discovered that the Universe is the ultimate free lunch, Andrei Linde has improved this theory. He argues that the Universe is an eternal feast because all possible dishes are being served all the time. The menu offers 10^{1000} different tasty meals, previously known as the landscape.
Figure 1: The landscape, 2007 edition. For the sake of simplicity, (10^{999}-1) x 10 vacua were omitted.
It's somewhat entertaining that this evolution of the popular metaphors proposed by the two famous Gentlemen kind of mimicks the evolution of the actual discoveries within inflationary cosmology.
A role model for green parties
Although I normally dislike opportunists such as Martin Bursík who has indeed been a member of many centrist and other parties, his party is still much more attractive than the typical green parties in the West.
He was able to get them to the Parliament and to the government. He would never agree to join a government with the social democrats because such a coalition would have to be supported by the communists which he would find unacceptable. Instead, he chose a government with two conservative parties - libertarian ODS and the Christian Democrats - because "conservative" means "cool" and "progressive", at least in the Czech Republic.
The foreign minister - chosen by the Czech Green Party - supports the radar base in the Czech Republic and the meeting of the Czech Green Party took a neutral position and didn't even support the calls for a referendum about this question. The German Greens understand that Bursík's successful strategy was to avoid being a fringe party - and in the post-socialist world, fringe means left-wing.
Needless to say, there are also leftists in the Czech Green Party but they realize that without the centrist leadership, they would continue to be irrelevant water melons: green (environmentalist) on the surface and red (communist) inside.
Well, I happen to think that Bursík is not particularly green in any sense. He just realizes that there is a political demand for the green ideology but there are no good politicians in this field because more or less everyone who really believes these green things is a moron, so he benefits from this opportunity. ;-)
See playfuls.com.
Another news from the Czech politics: it seems very likely that BAE systems has paid huge amounts of money in bribes back in 2001 before Czechia decided to buy supersonic Gripens from that company...
He was able to get them to the Parliament and to the government. He would never agree to join a government with the social democrats because such a coalition would have to be supported by the communists which he would find unacceptable. Instead, he chose a government with two conservative parties - libertarian ODS and the Christian Democrats - because "conservative" means "cool" and "progressive", at least in the Czech Republic.
The foreign minister - chosen by the Czech Green Party - supports the radar base in the Czech Republic and the meeting of the Czech Green Party took a neutral position and didn't even support the calls for a referendum about this question. The German Greens understand that Bursík's successful strategy was to avoid being a fringe party - and in the post-socialist world, fringe means left-wing.
Needless to say, there are also leftists in the Czech Green Party but they realize that without the centrist leadership, they would continue to be irrelevant water melons: green (environmentalist) on the surface and red (communist) inside.
Well, I happen to think that Bursík is not particularly green in any sense. He just realizes that there is a political demand for the green ideology but there are no good politicians in this field because more or less everyone who really believes these green things is a moron, so he benefits from this opportunity. ;-)
See playfuls.com.
Another news from the Czech politics: it seems very likely that BAE systems has paid huge amounts of money in bribes back in 2001 before Czechia decided to buy supersonic Gripens from that company...
April 13th, 2036: asteroid
Two years ago, we informed about a possible collision with an asteroid that could occur on Friday, April 13th, 2029 - a rather superstitious day. However, the probability of that particular collision plummeted once more accurate observations became available.
The hottest asteroid on the market continued to be the same 2004 MN4 asteroid - also dubbed 99942 Apophis - until the last summer. It was again scheduled to tell us "Hi" on April 13th, but in 2036. Such a Sunday encounter would only take place if Apophis were able to hit a 400-meter-large "gravitational keyhole" in 2029 that would redirect it to attack us in 2036. According to the most recent data, that won't occur.
Some journalists - such as those behind the article you get if you click the picture - can't get the most recent reports. But let us talk about their - currently defunct - speculative collision anyway. The collision would be equivalent to 80,000 Hiroshima bombs which is not necessarily the end of everything - it is only 100 times more than the first H-bomb - but it could be rather unpleasant anyway. The probability of that collision was estimated to be 1:45,000.
According to the most recent data, NASA recommends you to ignore this particular asteroid - it is the first one on the "currently unobserved" list and its Torino scale is already 0 - and it shows 2007 CA19 to be the only one with Torino scale above 0, namely 1 (it has about 1.5 parts per million of probability and the speed during the March 14th, 2012 impact is rather high):
The hottest asteroid on the market continued to be the same 2004 MN4 asteroid - also dubbed 99942 Apophis - until the last summer. It was again scheduled to tell us "Hi" on April 13th, but in 2036. Such a Sunday encounter would only take place if Apophis were able to hit a 400-meter-large "gravitational keyhole" in 2029 that would redirect it to attack us in 2036. According to the most recent data, that won't occur.
Some journalists - such as those behind the article you get if you click the picture - can't get the most recent reports. But let us talk about their - currently defunct - speculative collision anyway. The collision would be equivalent to 80,000 Hiroshima bombs which is not necessarily the end of everything - it is only 100 times more than the first H-bomb - but it could be rather unpleasant anyway. The probability of that collision was estimated to be 1:45,000.
According to the most recent data, NASA recommends you to ignore this particular asteroid - it is the first one on the "currently unobserved" list and its Torino scale is already 0 - and it shows 2007 CA19 to be the only one with Torino scale above 0, namely 1 (it has about 1.5 parts per million of probability and the speed during the March 14th, 2012 impact is rather high):
Oh, sorry. The correct URL is here. ;-) Would it be a good investment to pay the estimated 300 million dollars for a mission that would almost guarantee that the asteroid becomes harmless, assuming that the probability were 1:45,000? Note that 300 million dollars is about 8 hours of the Kyoto protocol. I think that the answer is Yes, it is a good but not remarkably good investment. If you estimate the costs of the damaging collision to be the annual global GDP, around 50 trillion USD, the probability 1:45,000 makes the statistical expectation value of the damages to be 1 billion USD. That's why an investment of 300 million USD is still expected to be profitable in average although the margin is not breathtaking. ;-)
It is clear that if the damages would only be as large as 7 Katrinas, i.e. below 1 trillion USD, as some sources say, the calculation shows that the risk simply can't justify the investment.
Correct me if you think that the numbers I use are unrealistic. But I do think that the calculations whether a mission is a good idea or not should be done calmly in the way I sketched, without any additional bias. It may be useful and fun to learn the technology how to manipulate with asteroids but the value of this know-how is not infinite either. The proposed technology is "gravitational tractor" - the spaceship flies next to the asteroid and the gravity exerted by the spaceship on the asteroid is apparently enough, cumulatively, to deflect the asteroid.
You can see that the collisions that are not ultimately devastating and that only have 1:1 million or smaller probabilities shouldn't be paid for.
"Resolving" Einstein's twin paradox
Because the hype about the bizarre physicists sold as "critics of string theory" has already faded away, many journalists must find something else, comparably or even more dumb, to write about, something that would satisfy their instincts to misinform their readers.
The following "story" is a good example showing how breathtakingly limited many journalists and their bosses are. An employee of LSU has posted the following press release on the LSU website:
Every journalist who writes about the "twin paradox" should at least try to open the Wikipedia page about the twin paradox that explains quite clearly that there has never been any paradox. He should read at least one paragraph. Be sure that Wikipedia is reliable in more than 99% of similar cases, including this case in which the Wikipedia article is labeled as "needing attention of experts": in this sense, Wikipedia is a peer-reviewed source. There are hundreds of other sources that a casual journalist or Internet user may find to become sure that there has been no paradox to solve.
The following "story" is a good example showing how breathtakingly limited many journalists and their bosses are. An employee of LSU has posted the following press release on the LSU website:
- LSU professor resolves Einstein's twin paradox
- Preprint to be published in a prestigious journal
Let me just copy the first paragraph here:
- Subhash Kak, Delaune Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at LSU, recently resolved the twin paradox, known as one of the most enduring puzzles of modern-day physics.
The press release is full of nonsensical comments about his "quantum" explanation based on "distant stars". It is not hard to see that the correct first paragraph should have been
- Subhash Kak seems to be a canonical example of a new Einstein who can't understand special theory of relativity, not even at the high school level. Laymen often face problems when they try to digest how it is possible that a brother who's been moving quickly and returned from a long space trip will be younger: the age of the brothers will differ. But this conclusion is a fact that has been experimentally verified, and long before it was checked, it was presented as a well-established conclusion of the special theory of relativity in Einstein's paper of 1905. Einstein never considered any of these phenomena to be a paradox and other serious physicists didn't consider it a paradox either.
Every journalist who writes about the "twin paradox" should at least try to open the Wikipedia page about the twin paradox that explains quite clearly that there has never been any paradox. He should read at least one paragraph. Be sure that Wikipedia is reliable in more than 99% of similar cases, including this case in which the Wikipedia article is labeled as "needing attention of experts": in this sense, Wikipedia is a peer-reviewed source. There are hundreds of other sources that a casual journalist or Internet user may find to become sure that there has been no paradox to solve.
Twin paradox: in SR and GR
In special relativity, only the inertial observers are subjects to the same laws of physics. The guy who stays on Earth is approximately inertial, and he can correctly calculate that this brother will be younger because the wiggly time-like lines in Minkowski spacetimes are shorter than the straight lines. The laws for the other guy are more complicated.
The general theory of relativity allows us to use all reference frames, including the accelerated ones, but it is no longer true in general relativity that the "pace of time" is universal and only depends on the coordinate differences. Quite on the contrary, the "pace of time" in general relativity depends on the gravitational field - or the metric tensor, if you wish - and the two brothers simply see different gravitational fields which is compatible with the fact that their aging will be asymmetric.
Every smart 15-year old kid who is interested in physics should understand these things. There is no paradox, there has never been any paradox, there is no quantum mechanics needed to understand what happens because it has nothing to do with quantum mechanics, and it is unlikely that the Mach principle based on stars could be revived - and there is no reason for such a revival. We either use the special relativistic approximation or general relativity. In both cases, we arrive at the same conclusion unless we make errors.
Happiness in the media
Nevertheless, this LSU press release has been celebrated - see news.google.com - by
- Tech Blorge, Australia
- Kashmir Newz, India
- Daily News & Analysis, India
- iTWire, Australia
- CNN-IBN, India
- Hindustan Times, India
- Technocrat.Net, Massachusetts
- Innovations Report, Germany
- SpaceRef.Com
- YubaNet, California
- PhysOrg.COM, Virginia
- EurekAlert, DC
They tell you that Kak has solved something that no one else, not even Einstein, could solve. You wonder whether these people actually believe that such a mad proclamation is likely: it certainly looks so. They want to believe it. Especially some of them want to believe it.
For example, you may see that Indian sources are over-represented. That's evidence that the journalists who belong to the same groups as the people who claim a "discovery" are much more likely to believe that the announced "discovery" is meaningful. To make the story even more impressive, the CNN-IBN story in India is rated by the readers. The average rating from 75 users is 9.5 stars: the maximum is ten stars. Well, this shows that about 95% of their Indian readers are complete ignorants about high school physics.
I assure the people in India who know what the "twin paradox" is and what it's not - for example high-energy physicists ;-) - that if they're gonna ignore these trends instead of trying to patiently explain the people around how science works, India may simply return to the trees.
And that's the memo.
Young Earth
A bonus: in order to show how educated, self-consistent, and brilliant the Earth scientists are, let me congratulate to Marcus Ross. He was just awarded a PhD: see Vancouver Sun. Marcus Ross believes that the Earth is as young as 10,000 years and his PhD thesis is about marine reptiles that disappeared 65 million years ago.
What do I think about it? I have not read the thesis but I have no reason to doubt the comments by his advisors that it's a good thesis. If it's a good thesis and if he satisfied other rules, he should be given a PhD. But unlike others, I don't think that having a PhD means that other scientists must take the person seriously, and I will personally continue to consider the Young Earth creationists to be nutcases.
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