Pretty much self inflicted .
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Just Shariah Law & Sharia Finance - Nothing to see here, go back to your homes
HT CC via BCF Shariah complaint in Ohio
Islamic financing is based on the principle that charging interest on loans is forbidden.
Eugene Volokh highlights an incident in Mansfield, Ohio, where the Mansfield High School forced a local Tea Party group to change venues after the group invited an “anti-Islam” speaker. According to the school, the event was canceled not because of the speaker’s message but because the school — in consultation with the police — decided that it “could not guarantee public safety.”Is There a Double Standard in Tim Pawlenty's Disavowal of Sharia-Compliant Mortgages?
Adam Serwer writes today about a state mortgage program set up in Minnesota during Tim Pawlenty's tenure that structured loans to avoid interest payments barred under Islamic law. He speculates it could become a problem for the ambitious Pawlenty among conservatives who "believe Sharia-compliant finance is part of a 'stealth jihad' to subvert the Constitution."Canada woos Islamic finance
The Hockey Hall of Fame may seem like an unlikely venue for tonight's gathering of some of the global leaders in Islamic banking and insurance services.
But the location was chosen because it is ideal to introduce foreign investors to Canada, say the organizers of the event from Ittihad Capital Corporation, a Canadian company specializing in Islam-compliant financial services.
"We are a proudly Canadian firm," said Ittihad president Suhail Ahmad. "We want the foreign investors to walk away and understand that Toronto is a place where they want to do business."
No legal hurdles to Islamic financing: CMHC report
Canada's Muslim community has taken the first tentative steps to privately offering Shariah-compliant mortgage-like products, but the practice is still in its infancy.Islamic financing is based on the principle that charging interest on loans is forbidden.
Ever wonder what a dhimmi is?
Delaware Beware:The Government is coming for your cars, guns and your basketball pole.
What started this I don't know but this is pretty much 'big government bullying' of taxpayers and bare face lying by the police:
Thursday Multicultural Sharia Rebel Immigration Saudi Terrorism Clusterschtoock
But first a Bacon Haiku:
The Benefits of Multiculturalism in Canada: Montrealers show support for Syria's Bashar Assad
How can hiring an imam from the leading authority on Islamic sharia law be anything but great news for non-Muslims in Toldedo?
Libyan Rebel Commander Is From Fairfax, Virginia. No shit!
SWEDISH PARLIAMENT DEBATES IMMIGRATION POLICY AS IT INVESTIGATES ISLAMOPHOBIA…….
Saudi who got student visa to launch attacks on U.S. pleads not guilty. What a surprise!
“No, Mr. Bacon,
“I expect you to sizzle”
Bacon, James Bacon
The Benefits of Multiculturalism in Canada: Montrealers show support for Syria's Bashar Assad
How can hiring an imam from the leading authority on Islamic sharia law be anything but great news for non-Muslims in Toldedo?
Libyan Rebel Commander Is From Fairfax, Virginia. No shit!
SWEDISH PARLIAMENT DEBATES IMMIGRATION POLICY AS IT INVESTIGATES ISLAMOPHOBIA…….
Saudi who got student visa to launch attacks on U.S. pleads not guilty. What a surprise!
More Praise for The Climate Fix
The great achievement of The Climate Fix is to make the obvious obvious. No small feat in these confused times.
What to look for when buying sunglasses?
From the NYTimes:Unprotected exposure to sunlight can cause significant damage to the eyes
Sunlight can burn the surface of the eye, causing a temporary and painful condition known as photokeratitis. Over time, unprotected exposure can contribute to cataracts, as well as cancer of the eyelids and the skin around the eyes.
UV exposure also may increase the risk of macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in people over age 65.
What to look for when buying sunglasses?
Look for labels indicating at least “98 percent UV protection” or that it “blocks 98 percent of UVA and UVB rays.” If there is no label, or it says something vague like “UV absorbing” or “blocks most UV light,” don’t buy them.
For the best defense, look for sunglasses that “block all UV radiation up to 400 nanometers,” which is equivalent to blocking 100 percent of UV rays
Sunglasses should cover the sides of your eyes to prevent stray light from entering. Wraparound lenses are best. Look for close-fitting glasses with wide lenses. Avoid models with small lenses, such as "John Lennon-style" sunglasses.
UV protection is not related to how dark the lens is. Sunglasses tinted green, amber, red and gray may offer the same protection as dark lenses.
Polarized lenses block the horizontal light waves that create glare. But remember, polarization in itself will not block UV light.
You should be able to find a pair of drugstore sunglasses for $10 to $20 that provide all the protection you need.
References:
Let the Sunshine in, but Not the Harmful Rays. NYTimes, 2011.
Image source: OpenClipArt.org, public domain.
Herr Schellnhuber has a master plan
First, a technical intermezzo: check 5 new ways to view this blog: flipcard, mosaic, sidebar, snapshot, timeslide...
Pierre Goselin is discussing a remarkable interview with the top German climate ideologue in Spiegel:
But of course, it's nothing compared to the segment of the interview that focuses on carbon dioxide:
I don't claim that there are no people who disagree but I do find it important to emphasize that they're profoundly deluded individuals who should only be listened to by their psychiatrists.
This Schellnhuber's lookalike, soulmate, and countrymate was serving in the years 1941-1942. Because it turned out that he was trying to help the set of people who would live in the 1000-year empire in the future, rather than the living generations of the Czech lands, our democratically elected government in London (representing the living generations of the Czech lands, rather than hypothetical future generations of the Third Reich) fired this blonde beast in May 1942 - by fireguns. Goodbye, Mr Heydrich.
The notion of empathy across spacetime is a truly crackpot invention. One may have "empathy" - ability to feel in a similar way - with anyone because it is a purely subjective process. To "empathize" means to feel in a particular way.
However, to use these subjective feelings to decide about our present behavior is utterly irrational if our present behavior cannot influence the fate of the beings with whom we "empathize" or if those people whose feeling we "share" don't exist at all. And our present behavior cannot influence the lives of the people in the past - because of causality. Also, we can't empathize with people who will be born in the future because we don't know who they are and we can't have any information about their lives and needs at all - again because of the arrow of time.
In other words, we only know about the people who lived in the past and who live in the present; and we can only influence the people who live now or in the future. If you take the intersection of these two sets, you will get the people whose needs are known to us and whose life we can influence: it is just the people who live at the present.
Everything else is just irrational bullshit. There can't be any empathy across the spacetime. By the way, this notion of empathy across spacetime, or a democracy that holds in all of spacetime, is also sometimes being used by the proponents of the anthropic lack of principles. It is irrational for the very same reason. Causality and the arrow of time prevent one from organizing "democracy" etc. in between different moments.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that "The Earth belongs to the living", and he knew very well why this principle is important. Countries can't be controlled by people or zombies who have already died; and countries can't be controlled by people whose existence and interests are just speculations. The former category includes the people who have lived but who are dead today; the latter category includes people who will be born - or begin their independent lives - in the future.
Just to be sure, I don't claim that those people (of the future) won't exist. What I claim is that their opinions, problems, and interests are inevitably unknown today, and it is utterly unacceptable for power-thirsty maniacs of Schellnhuber's type to declare themselves the spokesmen of the people who will live in the future.
Such grandiose declarations what the future people will think - or have to think - have always turned out to be preposterous. The idea that German politicians of the 1940s should be working for the Germans who would live in the 1000-year empire is a major example. It took a few years and it became clear that the majority of Europe wouldn't ever be occupied by Germans, and even the Germans in the shrunk territories would have no wishes overlapping with the Nazi predictions.
So if Herr Schellnhuber or his Nazi predecessors can't be the spokesmen for the future generations, are there any? In fact, I am the spokesman ;-) but what I will say is going to be very modest and general.
And the people in the future will agree with me that we should eliminate Schellnhuber et al. away from any influence on the Earth to prevent the civilization from repeating similar things that Germany ignited in the 1930s and 1940s. Pretty much all people in the future agree with me, not with fanatical proponents of authoritarianism in the early 21st century (whose followers will have been nuked out in 2030 because it will have been necessary), and I won't allow the German Nazis who calls himself a physicist to misinterpret the basic fact.
And that's the memo.
Greening Antarctica
There have been lots of recent news that have something to do with life and carbon in Antarctica:
The last two links are about a recent paper unmasking a powerful feedback. If there were a significant warming - it's very likely that there won't be any - and this warming would make significant changes to the ice sheets, the decomposing ice sheet would also automatically be able to absorb much more CO2, which would eventually reduce its concentration and undo some of the warming that was blamed on CO2 in the first place.
The message is that the prediction for the long-term CO2-induced warming has to be significantly reduced. Of course, this insight is just an example of a "negative feedback" that ultimately prevail in all stable systems in Nature, and the Earth's atmosphere and the world ocean are surely examples of such systems.
Every time when someone is promoting positive feedbacks, it's pretty much guaranteed that they were cherry-picked and that he has neglected negative feedbacks that are ultimately more important.
Pierre Goselin is discussing a remarkable interview with the top German climate ideologue in Spiegel:We Are Looting the Past and Future to Feed the Present (English)Joachim Schellnhuber, a doomsday crackpot who calls himself a physicist (the inflation in using this term has been significant), starts with the assertion that nuclear power plants should be ready for infinitely strong earthquakes and economics and economy shouldn't play any role because they're "crazy logics".
But of course, it's nothing compared to the segment of the interview that focuses on carbon dioxide:
SPIEGEL: Are you worried that the government's new anti-nuclear course will lead to higher CO2 emissions because more coal will be burned once again?Well, in the Universe where I live, just the opposite development has occurred: after the recent years that have proved the economic irrationality of the biofuels; photovoltaic power plants; windmills, and a few others, every sane person in the world has, on the contrary, realized that the bulk of our energy in coming decades has to come from a combination of fossil and nuclear fuels - exactly from the set that the German man claims to have "no future".
Schellnhuber: Actually, I'm convinced that this is precisely what Chancellor Angela Merkel will not allow. Now everyone is starting to realize that society's entire fossil-nuclear operating system has no future and that massive investments have to be made in renewable sources of energy.
I don't claim that there are no people who disagree but I do find it important to emphasize that they're profoundly deluded individuals who should only be listened to by their psychiatrists.
SPIEGEL: Do you feel that the government's abrupt change of course in relation to its energy policy is adequate?Wow, what a modest choice of words. Those maniacs will soon "unveil a master plan" for a transformation of society. It may be a good idea for the German - or other - intelligence services to physically deal with Herr Schellnhuber and his thugs before it's too late. I assure you, Mr Schellnhuber, that if you will try to apply just a fraction of this insane megalomania on the territory of the Czech Republic, we will give you the same treatment as we offered to the Herr who was a de facto leader of the Czech lands until 1942.
Schellnhuber: No. It can only be the beginning of a deep-seated shift. The German Advisory Council on Global Change, [of which I am the Führer], will soon unveil a master plan for a transformation of society. Precisely because of Fukushima, we believe that a new basis of our coexistence is needed.
This Schellnhuber's lookalike, soulmate, and countrymate was serving in the years 1941-1942. Because it turned out that he was trying to help the set of people who would live in the 1000-year empire in the future, rather than the living generations of the Czech lands, our democratically elected government in London (representing the living generations of the Czech lands, rather than hypothetical future generations of the Third Reich) fired this blonde beast in May 1942 - by fireguns. Goodbye, Mr Heydrich.SPIEGEL: What does that mean?A transformation of society apparently wasn't enough for him. He also needs a new social contract, to replace the contracts with God and Jesus known to the Christians.
Schellnhuber: We need a social contract for the 21st century that seals the common desire to create a sustainable industrial metabolism. We must resolve, once and for all, to leave our descendants more than a legacy of nuclear hazards and climate change. This requires empathy across space and time. To promote this, the rights of future generations should be enshrined in the German constitution.
The notion of empathy across spacetime is a truly crackpot invention. One may have "empathy" - ability to feel in a similar way - with anyone because it is a purely subjective process. To "empathize" means to feel in a particular way.
However, to use these subjective feelings to decide about our present behavior is utterly irrational if our present behavior cannot influence the fate of the beings with whom we "empathize" or if those people whose feeling we "share" don't exist at all. And our present behavior cannot influence the lives of the people in the past - because of causality. Also, we can't empathize with people who will be born in the future because we don't know who they are and we can't have any information about their lives and needs at all - again because of the arrow of time.
In other words, we only know about the people who lived in the past and who live in the present; and we can only influence the people who live now or in the future. If you take the intersection of these two sets, you will get the people whose needs are known to us and whose life we can influence: it is just the people who live at the present.
Everything else is just irrational bullshit. There can't be any empathy across the spacetime. By the way, this notion of empathy across spacetime, or a democracy that holds in all of spacetime, is also sometimes being used by the proponents of the anthropic lack of principles. It is irrational for the very same reason. Causality and the arrow of time prevent one from organizing "democracy" etc. in between different moments.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that "The Earth belongs to the living", and he knew very well why this principle is important. Countries can't be controlled by people or zombies who have already died; and countries can't be controlled by people whose existence and interests are just speculations. The former category includes the people who have lived but who are dead today; the latter category includes people who will be born - or begin their independent lives - in the future.
Just to be sure, I don't claim that those people (of the future) won't exist. What I claim is that their opinions, problems, and interests are inevitably unknown today, and it is utterly unacceptable for power-thirsty maniacs of Schellnhuber's type to declare themselves the spokesmen of the people who will live in the future.
Such grandiose declarations what the future people will think - or have to think - have always turned out to be preposterous. The idea that German politicians of the 1940s should be working for the Germans who would live in the 1000-year empire is a major example. It took a few years and it became clear that the majority of Europe wouldn't ever be occupied by Germans, and even the Germans in the shrunk territories would have no wishes overlapping with the Nazi predictions.
So if Herr Schellnhuber or his Nazi predecessors can't be the spokesmen for the future generations, are there any? In fact, I am the spokesman ;-) but what I will say is going to be very modest and general.
And the people in the future will agree with me that we should eliminate Schellnhuber et al. away from any influence on the Earth to prevent the civilization from repeating similar things that Germany ignited in the 1930s and 1940s. Pretty much all people in the future agree with me, not with fanatical proponents of authoritarianism in the early 21st century (whose followers will have been nuked out in 2030 because it will have been necessary), and I won't allow the German Nazis who calls himself a physicist to misinterpret the basic fact.
And that's the memo.
Greening Antarctica
There have been lots of recent news that have something to do with life and carbon in Antarctica:
Antarctica going green due to climate change (The Telegraph)The first report is about a paper claiming that Antarctic hairgrass has spread over Antarctica since 1960: the only other "plant" living there is Antarctic pearlwort. Well, don't expect terribly welcoming conditions as the temperature remains dozens of degrees below the freezing point and it's unthinkable that any warming could do anything about it.
Antarctic ice breakup makes ocean absorb more CO2 (The Register)
Antarctic Icebergs Play a Previously Unknown Role in Global Carbon Cycle, Climate (NSF)
The last two links are about a recent paper unmasking a powerful feedback. If there were a significant warming - it's very likely that there won't be any - and this warming would make significant changes to the ice sheets, the decomposing ice sheet would also automatically be able to absorb much more CO2, which would eventually reduce its concentration and undo some of the warming that was blamed on CO2 in the first place.
The message is that the prediction for the long-term CO2-induced warming has to be significantly reduced. Of course, this insight is just an example of a "negative feedback" that ultimately prevail in all stable systems in Nature, and the Earth's atmosphere and the world ocean are surely examples of such systems.
Every time when someone is promoting positive feedbacks, it's pretty much guaranteed that they were cherry-picked and that he has neglected negative feedbacks that are ultimately more important.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Probably just Larry, Curly and Mohammed being 'victimized' by the airline passangers and crew
*
A Portland, Ore.-bound flight made a "level two emergency" stop in Chicago Tuesday night after passengers said three men, reportedly of Middle Eastern descent, were acting strangely, even fighting with flight crews.
Is 'driving sustainable innovations' just code for more big government? Sure it is!
Who knew they had a GREEN CZAR:
"unparalleled reach" ? I think these guys get pretty much open door treatment by Governments. So the development of influence and policy making is more like: Government, Business, School (that's business too), individual students, Homes, individual lives in terms of application to each segment of society. Is it trickle down or rammed down? You know very well which.
Catch the remark by William Weihl at starting at the 14 sec mark to get an idea how these 'czars' really think about you and me (their customers):
PS: If my blog gets disappeared you'll know that internet control central has deemed my in violation of some policy. I'm just saying.
It's been a busy three years for Rob Bernard as Microsoft's first chief environmental strategist. But being tasked with driving sustainable innovations at the world's biggest software firm – with unparalleled reach into homes, businesses, and governments – was never going involve much downtime.
"unparalleled reach" ? I think these guys get pretty much open door treatment by Governments. So the development of influence and policy making is more like: Government, Business, School (that's business too), individual students, Homes, individual lives in terms of application to each segment of society. Is it trickle down or rammed down? You know very well which.
Catch the remark by William Weihl at starting at the 14 sec mark to get an idea how these 'czars' really think about you and me (their customers):
PS: If my blog gets disappeared you'll know that internet control central has deemed my in violation of some policy. I'm just saying.
Who's driving the crazy train in Egypt, I mean Yemen, no I mean Libya this week?
 |
| Barry Hussein Obummer try a cup before you do something else to destroy America! |
 | ||||||
| Is the Soros-Obama Partnership going to give these 'rebels' weapons? |
WTF is Travel Demand Management? Hint - The government is coming for your car
A little something to help get the Government inside your car.
@ 54: "What does a travel demand management executive do?"
"(laff) My our goal is get fewer of our students staff and faculty to drive alone in thier cars everyday and to get more of them to try more more sustainable forms of transportation."
"... your trying to change the culture"
"we really are, we're trying to start witth the campus environment and gradually go into the city* and the region and change the way people think about transportation"
@2:19: "...regardless what they are currently doing we get them to sign a pledge** saying they're willing to try..."
* which is not University lands ** and now we have your names and can harass you at will
Related: Why do software companies have green czars?
@ 54: "What does a travel demand management executive do?"
"(laff) My our goal is get fewer of our students staff and faculty to drive alone in thier cars everyday and to get more of them to try more more sustainable forms of transportation."
"... your trying to change the culture"
"we really are, we're trying to start witth the campus environment and gradually go into the city* and the region and change the way people think about transportation"
@2:19: "...regardless what they are currently doing we get them to sign a pledge** saying they're willing to try..."
* which is not University lands ** and now we have your names and can harass you at will
Related: Why do software companies have green czars?
A library in Prague: 40 gigapixels
In May 2009, I declared a contest based on a 1.5 gigapixel photograph of the Obama inauguration. In December 2009, TRF mentioned the world's largest spherical panoramic photograph: its 18 gigapixels were collected on the Prague TV tower.
Click the 0.00012 gigapixel picture to zoom in and to obtain a 0.0013 gigapixel image.
The progress hasn't stopped. The world's largest indoor photograph has 40 gigapixels and you may guess the the city where it was taken: well, it's Prague once again. As the WSJ blogs and others figured out, it's a photograph of the Library of the Strahov Monastery (early 18th century) by Jeffrey Martin.
Here it is:
Click the 0.00012 gigapixel picture to zoom in and to obtain a 0.0013 gigapixel image.
The progress hasn't stopped. The world's largest indoor photograph has 40 gigapixels and you may guess the the city where it was taken: well, it's Prague once again. As the WSJ blogs and others figured out, it's a photograph of the Library of the Strahov Monastery (early 18th century) by Jeffrey Martin.
Here it is:
Strahov Library's 40 gigapixels (Flash needed)You may try the "tour". Let me try to avoid the misunderstanding once again: your digital camera probably has megapixels only and we're talking about gigapixels here which is not quite the same thing. ;-)
Wall Organization Ideas--Great for Classrooms and Homeschools!
Over at TheChuppies you'll find a fabulous blog entry, including tons of photos, which show you how to organize with cute wall hangings, decor, clips, containers, etc. A bunch of the ideas are perfect for classrooms, including homeschool. I'm using the list as I remodel our classroom space.
And at RaisingOlives you can find a tutorial for raingutter bookshelves.
I may keep adding to this list as I find more... ;)
And at RaisingOlives you can find a tutorial for raingutter bookshelves.
I may keep adding to this list as I find more... ;)
Well this is different: British Muslims for Israel
I don't, as yet, believe this is genuine pro-Israel support but I would believe that a fatwa will soon be issued against this guy.
Average time patients spend waiting to see a health-care provider is 22 minutes
The average time patients spend waiting to see a health-care provider is 22 minutes. Orthopedists have the longest waits, at 29 minutes; dermatologists the shortest, at 20.Patient satisfaction dropped significantly with each 5 minutes of waiting time. Even the term "waiting room" has a bad connotation. Many offices prefer "reception area" instead.
"I live my life in seven-minute intervals," says Laurie Green, a obstetrician-gynecologist in San Francisco who delivers 400 to 500 babies a year and says she needs to bring in $70 every 15 minutes just to meet her office overhead.
Measures the health-care industry is trying to minimize waiting time include:
- "Open-access" scheduling
- Minimize office visits
- Advance preparation
- Huddling up: "Mr. Jones is in a 15-minute slot, but we know he's a 45-minute guy"
- Teamwork
- Cutting "cycle time"
- Keep patients informed
- Survey patients
References:
Image source: OpenClipArt.org, public domain.
Global Temperature Trends
THIS POST FIRST APPEARED 9 DEC 2009. SEE THIS FOR MORE.
In an earlier post I made the case that one needs to know only two things about the science of climate change to begin asking whether accelerating decarbonization of the economy might be worth doing:
- Carbon dioxide has an influence on the climate system.
- This influence might well be negative for things many people care about.
And the answer is ... no!
My concern about the potential effects of human influences on the climate system are not a function of global average warming over a long-period of time or of predictions of continued warming into the future. A point that my father often makes, and I think that he is absolutely right, is that what maters are the effects of human influences on the climate system on human and ecological scales, not at the global scale. No one experiences global average temperature and it is very poorly correlated with things that we do care about in specific places at specific times.
Consider the following thought experiment. Divide the world up into 1,000 grid boxes of equal area. Now imagine that the temperature in each of 500 of those boxes goes up by 20 degrees while the temperature in the other 500 goes down by 20 degrees. The net global change is exactly zero (because I made it so). However, the impacts would be enormous. Let's further say that the changes prescribed in my thought experiment are the direct consequence of human activity. Would we want to address those changes? Or would we say, ho hum, it all averages out globally, so no problem? The answer is obvious and is not a function of what happens at some global average scale, but what happens at human and ecological scales.
In the real world, the effects of increasing carbon dioxide on human and ecological scales are well established, and they include a biogechemical effect on land ecosystems with subsequent effects on water and climate, as well as changes to the chemistry of the oceans. Is it possible that these effects are benign? Sure. Is it also possible that these effects have some negatives? Sure. These two factors alone would be sufficient for one to begin to ask questions about the worth of decarbonizing the global energy system. But greenhouse gas emissions also have a radiative effect that, in the real world, is thought to be a net warming, all else equal and over a global scale. However, if this effect were to be a net cooling, or even, no net effect at the global scale, it would not change my views about a need to consider decarbonizing the energy system one bit. There is an effect -- or effects to be more accurate -- and these effects could be negative.
Of course, not mentioned yet is that action to improve adaptation to climate doesn't depend at all on a human influence on the climate system, warming or cooling or whatever. Adaptation makes good sense regardless. So clearly my policy views on adaptation are largely insensitive to any issues related to global average temperature change.
The debate over climate change has many people on both sides of the issue wrapped up in discussing global average temperature trends. I understand this as it is an icon with great political symbolism. It has proved a convenient political battleground, but the reality is that it should matter little to the policy case for decarbonization. What matters is that there is a human effect on the climate system and it could be negative with respect to things people care about. That is enough to begin asking whether we want to think about accelerating decarbonization of the global economy.
To fully assess whether accelerated decarbonization makes sense would require us to ask, are there any other good reasons why accelerated decarbonization might make sense? And it turns out, there are many.
Shimon Peres visits LHC
Haaretz, an Israeli left-wing daily, informs about the visit of Israeli President Shimon Peres to CERN.
Shimon Peres is talking to Fabiola Gianotti, the ATLAS experiment's head, and is observed by CERN director general Rolf Heuer. Amusingly enough, the official caption by Haaretz (or CERN) says: "Shimon Peres talking with CERN Director general Rolf Heuer at the particle accelerator in Geneva Tuesday." Can you spot the difference? :-) Well, yes, I would agree that in this case, she was discriminated against (by the left-wing sexist pigs). By the way, I think that the reason why Gianotti was omitted is that she has no male suit. Despite their obsession with clothes, women haven't managed to invent a counterpart of the male suit that would make them look uniformly serious. Shouldn't Gianotti just borrow a suit from a man?
Now, of course, Israel is in the process of becoming a full-fledged CERN member. This process is totally natural. There are 50 Israeli scientists working at CERN, not to mention much higher numbers of physicists of Jewish descent.
However, there has been some hesitation on the Israeli side when it came to the country's contributions to the experiment. More importantly, there's some clear opposition from the side of the old members - and, I would say, many generic physicists from those nations.
The only explanations I can think of are related to this map of Europe in 2015:
This map has already become outdated a little bit: the Scandinavian country will no longer be called Sweden but the Polar Palestinian Authority (click). See also Goodbye Sweden. Thanks to Olda and Peter F. for the two videos.
Make no mistakes about it: there are lots of Israel haters among the particle physicists - and in many other "scholarly" groups in the West, too. The increasing influence of the Muslims in those countries is only making things worse. The differences in the opinions are significant: for example, I think that Israel should obviously become an EU member - and many key politicians in Europe agree - if the EU makes any broader sense. Some people don't like Israel even in a single scientific experiment.
Shimon Peres is talking to Fabiola Gianotti, the ATLAS experiment's head, and is observed by CERN director general Rolf Heuer. Amusingly enough, the official caption by Haaretz (or CERN) says: "Shimon Peres talking with CERN Director general Rolf Heuer at the particle accelerator in Geneva Tuesday." Can you spot the difference? :-) Well, yes, I would agree that in this case, she was discriminated against (by the left-wing sexist pigs). By the way, I think that the reason why Gianotti was omitted is that she has no male suit. Despite their obsession with clothes, women haven't managed to invent a counterpart of the male suit that would make them look uniformly serious. Shouldn't Gianotti just borrow a suit from a man?
Now, of course, Israel is in the process of becoming a full-fledged CERN member. This process is totally natural. There are 50 Israeli scientists working at CERN, not to mention much higher numbers of physicists of Jewish descent.
However, there has been some hesitation on the Israeli side when it came to the country's contributions to the experiment. More importantly, there's some clear opposition from the side of the old members - and, I would say, many generic physicists from those nations.
"People here may be smiling," said one member of the Israeli delegation. "But not everybody here is enthralled with Israel."The French and the Britons have expressed reservations and the French are even worried that Israel's CERN membership would have a "detrimental effect on the French high-tech industry." Wow: I kid you not! The mysterious mechanism by which the membership of the Jewish state in a particle physics center could have a "detrimental effect on another nation's high-tech industry" hasn't been explained; they're probably afraid of the influence of the Internet Protocols of the Elders of Zion. :-)
The only explanations I can think of are related to this map of Europe in 2015:
This map has already become outdated a little bit: the Scandinavian country will no longer be called Sweden but the Polar Palestinian Authority (click). See also Goodbye Sweden. Thanks to Olda and Peter F. for the two videos.
Make no mistakes about it: there are lots of Israel haters among the particle physicists - and in many other "scholarly" groups in the West, too. The increasing influence of the Muslims in those countries is only making things worse. The differences in the opinions are significant: for example, I think that Israel should obviously become an EU member - and many key politicians in Europe agree - if the EU makes any broader sense. Some people don't like Israel even in a single scientific experiment.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Thanks, IKEA Guy!...a Homeschool Remodel Adventure
7:15 Arrival. At the top of my list is a metal door cover I'd seen on the website. In the description it said it could work as a magnetic board. We make a pass through the maze that is IKEA and finally ask a salesperson for help.
7:25 In kitchens..."We're looking for the metal door covers that we saw on the website. Can you point us in the right direction?"
Saleswoman looks at me like I'm from planet homeschooler. "We don't carry anything like that."
"But I saw it on the website this afternoon."
"No, nothing like that here. It'd have to be brand-new for me to not know about it."
We keep looking, continuing through the maze. We find a salesman who scratches his head. "There are some smaller magnetic boards in organization, but nothing big like that." Since we're standing IN organization, we take another run through, give up, and head back upstairs.
Salesperson #3...or is it #4..."Nope."
Crazy homeschool lady..."But I saw it on the website this afternoon. It said it was IN STOCK for this location."
Salesperson #umpteenthousandandone..."Nope."
It's now 8:42ish. (Time flies when you're having fun.) We've trecked through IKEA 10 times, uphill both ways and in the snow. We find a computer "self search" machine. Enter "magnetic board." Zero results. Enter "magnetic." Get a list of hits that INCLUDE THE PHRASE "magnetic board." Mine isn't there.
8:50 Find a salesman near the stock/EXIT area. Tell him our long, sordid story. He looks on the "self search" machine. Unbelievably, HE GETS THE SAME RESULTS AS US. (Pound head into large metal--perhaps magnetic?--object!) Yet, there is hope. This man finds a computer with internet access. Attempts to get on. Learns that since he's only been an employee for two weeks that he NEEDS A PASSWORD. Waits for assistance to access internet. Waits. Waits some more. Another guy comes to help. He doesn't have a password either. We look at the first employee. He shrugs. "He was hired the same time I was."
8:58 With new help, salesman finally accesses IKEA website. I immediately direct him to the magnetic door panels. He enters the stock number into the "self search" machine. We all peer at the "location in store" box. What does it say?
"Consult sales personnel."
(Attempt to drive large metal--perhaps magnetic?--object into temple.)
9:00 Across the loudspeaker: "IKEA is now closing."
9:01 Salesman says he has no idea where to find the item...although he does note that the computer indicates that 31 of them are available at this location. (Note to IKEA...the reason you have 31 of this item is that NO ONE ON YOUR STAFF KNOWS WHERE THEY ARE!)
9:02 Salesman says his best guess is that the item is warehoused at another location and that you make the purchase here before picking it up there.
9:03 I ask how you're supposed to make a purchase, sight unseen.
9:04 Salesman tells us to try kitchens. (Note: Go back and read 7:25.)
9:06 We fly through the lower floor and return back upstairs to kitchens. On the way we desperately call out to a couple salespeople chatting..."Kitchens? Metal door panels?"
"That way!!!" they yell.
9:08 We find a miniature display version of the door panel. Reject it. (If we'd actually wanted it, I'm not at all sure that they could have found it!)
9:10 Head to checkout with a few purchases.
9:13 Walk out the door as they're turning off the lights.
Moral of the story? Please let me know.
Hopefully, I'll have a remodeled room to show you in a month or so. Maybe. If IKEA isn't involved.
AUGH!!!!!
P.S. But dh notes, "Yeah, but we had fun together!!!" True story. ;)
P.P.S. The thanks goes to the IKEA guy who finally got us on the website!!!! Otherwise, we might still be there.
The Jewish Community of Prague
I have just returned from the Jewish Community Prague where I gave a talk show, or participated in a discussion with the members. It was a pleasant experience. The audience had a genuine interest in physics or at least philosophy etc.And I was happily surprised that the community was de facto a living organism.
Although the kind host has mostly prepared me for a uniform community of 100-year-old holocaust survivors born in the era of Austria-Hungary (the monarchy), the audience included people from many generations. A young man wanted to deny my entry, but he quickly changed his mind when I explained to him who I was and what was going on.
There were attractive girls over there, too. ;-) And it was good to meet one perfectionist instructor from my Alma Mater.
Before the event, I was studying some Jewish culture and realia, which I have never been "officially" explained by anyone, including various forms of Judaism, their lunisolar calendar, holidays, and so on. I wasn't even shocked that the conference hall, which was a kosher dining hall at the same moment, couldn't offer milk with the coffee because it was a meat dining hall and, as you must know, milk and and meat can't be mixed in the same room!
If the blog were not visible to the public, I would probably quip that the rule must be a pain in the ass. ;-)
The topics we talked about covered string theory, its testability, cosmology, the LHC, Lawrence Summers and feminists, climate change, and a few others. A task for me was to choose the author of the best and most concise question - a winner of a bottle of wine - and I chose a woman who asked whether dark matter had been experimentally proved. That was a pretty good choice because, as it turned out, she didn't like my opinions about women in STEM fields too much so at least she has some liquid to qualm a potential anger if any. :-)
As I expected, it was impossible to avoid a faux pas in a mostly religious environment whose big defender I am - but with which I am unfamiliar in practice. There have probably been many mini-scandals related to what I was saying but I have learned about one of them; the rest of this blog entry is dedicated to this faux pas. When I am studying the historical background right now, what I did looks like a genuine offense but my guess is that when I will tell the story about the offense to other Czechs, they will think that it is a kind of joke.
Well, it's not.
What happened? I was also explaining that CO2 wasn't a pollutant analogous to SO2, SO3, N2O, tar, and so on (those are really bad guys). In fact, 20 years ago, everyone agreed. The most environmentally friendly plastic bags would boast that they decompose to H2O and CO2 only. What is the offense? Well, I used the same word for the plastic bags as pretty much every Czech would: they're "igelit bags" ["igelitové tašky"] because the word "igelit" is being used for any plastic foils, especially those made of PVC and similar soft compounds.
Ouch!
So it was explained to me by a participant that "igelit" was a wrong word. Just to be sure, "igelit" has been a commercial name only, and it referred to PVC (polyvinyl chloride), which produces pollutants when it burns, while the modern plastic bags are environmentally harmless - and they are mostly made out of polyethylene.
As you might guess, this technical inaccuracy of mine, while a clear departure from perfectionism, was not the source of the real trouble. So what was it?
It turns out that what is important is the owner of the commercial name that continues to be used across our nation. Well, it was a company called IG Farben - a huge German corporation founded in 1925; "ige" in "igelit" comes from "IG". That already sounds risky, doesn't it? Well, let me tell you the full story: IG Farben established a chemical plant to produce synthetic fuels and rubber out of fuel. Where? Well, in Auschwitz. To make things worse, IG Farben was employing 83,000 slaves, was the main commercial subject connected with the holocaust, and was the owner of the patent to produce Zyklon B.
Holy crap. Imagine that our nation innocently continues to use their commercial name, and not only for the original material, but for the whole class of materials that look similar!
IG Farben obviously had to be fully liquidated after the war. I guess that some of the U.S. leftists won't be impressed by the terrible things done by IG Farben, so let me add another point that will make them stunned as well: it's proved that IG Farben has collaborated with George Walker, i.e. the grandfather of George H. W. Bush (and great grandfather of George W. Bush). George Walker was given a unit of spies from IG Farben, the Hamburg-Amerika Line [sic], whose task was to spy in North America.
Again, I was totally unfamiliar with the very name of IG Farben - if I have ever heard the name, I instantly forgot it. That's a pity because after 1925, IG Farben included BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, Agfa, and two more "Chemische Fabriks"; add the confiscated Czech and Polish factories after the occupation and you get pretty much all chemical industry in Central Europe (and one half of the industrial backbone of the Third Reich). Of course, this story was just 1% of the event but it's just another example of the unexpected processes that may occur when different cultures interact.
Meanwhile, I doubt that the Czechs (and Slovaks) will stop using the word "igelit". But your humble correspondent may change his vocabulary a bit.
By the way, the Czechs must love German commercial names for plastics. We use the term "bakelite" ["bakelit" in Czech, a trademark of Bakelite AG], which should normally represent polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride only (an early plastic whose name I wrote via copy-and-paste), for most of the plastics that are not "igelite". For example, it's believed that Trabants were made out of "bakelite". It's not too inaccurate because these funny vehicles were made out of Duroplast which is a similar compound.
The words with the "plastic" root became somewhat more frequent in Czech but I guess that they're still less frequent than "igelit" or "umělá hmota" (a "synthetic or artificial material"), the most common Czech term to describe plastics in general. I vaguely remember that some of the teachers - even during communism - wanted the pupils to switch from all other general names to "plastics" but such a change is largely impossible in a society where only a small portion of the people (pupils of a particular age) are being re-educated in this way.
Kohlekraft? Ja Danke
Conventional wisdom holds that the election's dramatic results were a consequence of the Japanese nuclear crisis and Chancellor Angela Merkel's clumsy efforts in announcing a moratorium on the nuclear plant extension that she had previously championed. I find this line of argument convincing, as well as the role played by Stuttgart-21, the controversial train station. However, not all agree.
One point is clear, with political leadership of Baden-Württemberg the Greens have inherited a difficult, so might say impossible, set of conflicting political realities. They promise a focus on continued economic growth and jobs (image above) and an shutdown of the state's nuclear power reactors.
The state is 45 percent owner of Energie Baden-Württemberg, or EnBW, which generates about half of its electricity from nuclear power plants. In its election platform, the Green party promised to shut down one plant immediately and the other in 2012. Both have been shut down temporarily because of a moratorium declared by Mrs. Merkel after the disaster in Japan.Financial markets and analysts have more certainty about where that replacement power will come from:
It is unclear where the replacement power will come from, said Georg Zachmann, an energy specialist at Bruegel, a research organization in Brussels.
“In Baden-Württemberg there will be some very tough choices to be made,” Mr. Zachmann said. “The Greens now own assets that they do not want. It’s kind of a poison pill.”
"Getting rid of old nuclear plants means plants will run more coal and gas. That means around 70 million tonnes of extra carbon dioxide will be emitted and carbon is up on this prospect for now. The question is how much is this worth in terms of additional carbon price?" said Emmanuel Fages, analyst at Societe Generale/orbeo.The policies and politics of Baden-Württemberg bear watching.
European Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger, who before his position in Brussels was Prime Minister of the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, also supported the view that coal will act as a substitute to nuclear in Germany.
Managing fever of unknown origin in adults - BMJ review
Few clinical problems generate such a wide differential diagnosis as pyrexia (fever) of unknown origin. The initial definition proposed by Petersdorf and Beeson in 1961 was later revised. Essentially the term refers to a prolonged febrile illness without an obvious cause despite reasonable evaluation and diagnostic testing.Definition
Classic adult fever of unknown origin (FUO) is fever of 38.3°C (101°F) or greater for at least 3 weeks with no identified cause after 3 days of hospital evaluation or 3 outpatient visits
Causes of FUO
Common causes of FUO are infections, neoplasms, and connective tissue disorders.
Investigations almost always include imaging studies. Serological tests may be indicated
Treatment of FUO
Empirical antibiotics are warranted only for individuals who are clinically unstable or neutropenic. In stable patients empirical treatment is discouraged, although NSAIDs may be used after investigations are complete. Empirical corticosteroid therapy is discouraged.
References:
Empirical antibiotics are warranted only for individuals who are clinically unstable or neutropenic. In stable patients empirical treatment is discouraged, although NSAIDs may be used after investigations are complete. Empirical corticosteroid therapy is discouraged.
References:
Investigating and managing pyrexia of unknown origin in adults. BMJ 2010; 341:c5470 doi: 10.1136/bmj.c5470 (Published 15 October 2010).
Image source: Wikipedia, public domain.
Dream Big Little Pig by Kristi Yamaguchi
Stars: *****Sourcebooks Jabberwocky (2011)
Illustrations by Tim Bowers
Picture Book
4 and up
Summary: Poppy the Pig has big dreams - lots of them! But following her dreams isn't always easy, and whenever Poppy thinks it might be time to give up, her family reminds her to "Dream Big!"
Olympic figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi has created her very first picture book. I am normally reluctant to read picture books by celebrities as it feels to me like they just aren't happy being famous for TV, movies, music and/or sports and want to be great at everything.
The summary of the book is what drew me in and made me want to check it out and I'm glad I did. It can be very disheartening when you try something you like only to be told you are no good at it and should try something else. The book is all about realizing your dreams with practice and enjoyment of what you do, no matter what anyone else says or thinks.
The illustrations are absolutely adorable and the cover has sparkles, which according to my girls, is the best thing ever. We will be revisiting this book when my children express interest in a certain activity but then feel discouraged.
About the Author:
Kristi Yamaguchi is an Olympic gold medalist and world champion who knows about dreaming big. The motto "Always Dream" serves as Kristi's personal inspiration, as well as the name of her charitable foundation for children.
Links of Interest: Always Dream,
Other Reviews: Chronicle of an Infant Bibliophile, For Immediate Release Reviews - Kids,
Buy Dream Big Little Pig!
at amazon.com and support SMS Book Reviews*I received a copy of this book to review from the publisher. All opinions are honest and are not affected by how I acquired the book.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Finale
This might only make sense to those of you who have watched Californication over the past few years, or those of you who have read this blog, have been privy to a personal search for meaning, for intimacy, for love, for happiness, for fulfillment. Fantasy and reality are part of all of our lives. A character walks through a movie set and sees the moments of his life; or is it life itself that is one long movie, one that ends too soon, too sad, or maybe was too full of hope? Memories and visions that seem like a better life then we lived it.
The lost of love, the loss of a journey, the loss of one last chance.
A
The lost of love, the loss of a journey, the loss of one last chance.
A
Like it or Not
The heart of The Next American Economy is nine impressively thorough case studies of “clusters” of successful US businesses, mostly making innovative products such as new types of batteries and adhesives. A veteran reporter, Holstein expended a lot of shoe leather in his researches, from Massachusetts to California, and he does an excellent job of describing what he sees and letting his subjects speak for themselves.This is very well stated. The essential and unavoidable nature of government involvement in processes of innovation is a point that is often missed in policy debates. A better debate starts with the acknowledgement -- like it or not -- that government has an important role in innovation. The more interesting policy questions are what the role might be in particular contexts to help steer innovation in desirable directions.
The point that crops up with startling regularity in their stories is the importance of government, both national and local, in helping these businesses to grow. A North Carolina technology company called Protochips, for example, pays warm tribute to the efforts of state and federal government agencies in helping it to export, including “excellent” Japanese translation.
Often, the positive contribution of government comes from the Pentagon, sometimes through its lavish spending on contracts with high-tech companies, and sometimes through its own research. As he and several of the other writers point out, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency laid the foundations of what became the internet.
The lesson Holstein draws is that, “Whether we like it or not, the federal government is involved in the economy, and must be.” In other words, for good or ill the government has a huge influence over the economy and it would do better to use that influence effectively in pursuit of thought-out strategic goals.
Canada Votes: Michael Ignatieff to meet with Muslim Brotherhood front group ICNA in Mississauga
Unconfirmed reports have Liberal supporters gathering in Mississauga to hear the Liberal leader speak tonight:
Iggy meeting with Radical Islamists Muslim Brotherhood ICNA Tonight
Added: The Muslims Against Crusades website has issued a rather ominous threat relating to the forthcoming royal wedding on 29 April. What kind of ‘nightmare’ do they have in mind?
Read about it at Durotrigan!
Video HT goes to Creeping Sharia
Iggy meeting with Radical Islamists Muslim Brotherhood ICNA Tonight
Added: The Muslims Against Crusades website has issued a rather ominous threat relating to the forthcoming royal wedding on 29 April. What kind of ‘nightmare’ do they have in mind?
Read about it at Durotrigan!
Funny & Witty Political Ad: Christy Chrunch
This ad is by the British Columbia NDP (socialist/marxists) aimed at the Liberal Party (big government/ high tax socialists), as political "attack ads"* go this is one of the better ones:
* Canadian Media types are always quick to alert their hapless viewer of an "American Style Attack Ad" and that the subtext in all of these ads is one of meanness and anger (white meanness and white anger and that you should still be afraid of George Bush).
* Canadian Media types are always quick to alert their hapless viewer of an "American Style Attack Ad" and that the subtext in all of these ads is one of meanness and anger (white meanness and white anger and that you should still be afraid of George Bush).
"How to Conquer Your Fear of Doctors"
The term "content farm" describes a company that employs large numbers of often freelance writers to generate large amounts of textual and/or video content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by search engines. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue through attracting reader page views (source: Wikipedia).
This is what the content farms are producing nowadays:
How to Conquer Your Fear of Doctors (HowCast video). A mix of good and bad advice, don't take it seriously:
"How to Live to Be 100" (HowCast video). Some tips in the video may fall in the category "Do not try this at home":
2011 MIT feminist women's status report
The Daily Beast has pointed out that after a decade, an MIT committee has released a brand new report on the status of women at the technological institute:A Report on the Status of Women Faculty in the Schools of Science and Engineering at MIT, 2011The key person behind similar documents at the MIT is Nancy Hopkins, an MIT biologist and the main assassin of Lawrence Summers as the Harvard president. In January 2005, when Lawrence Summers began to explain how his twin daughters played with the daddy truck and the baby truck, she was going to commit the most important achievement of her life.
Nancy Hopkins left the room, called a friend in the Boston Globe, and threatened Harvard University, the American newspapers, and the global Academia that she would vomit if she stayed in the room as a polite participant of a conference whose very purpose was to discuss how women play with the trucks. She demanded Harvard and the U.S. media to start a hysterical witch hunt against all sane men in the system in general and Lawrence Summers in particular and they obeyed.
At that time, I decided to leave the U.S. Academia and President Summers was forced to resign after a year of continuing harassment by the feminists and various groups of their PC friends.
What does the new report say? Well, it celebrates the "progress" i.e. the increased amount of funding and advantages that goes to the women just because they are women. It is inevitable that the main message of the report has to be a positive one. It if were not, the text could also be understood as a criticism of the current MIT president, Susan Hockfield, who is also a female.
However, on pages 13 and 14, they also list "remaining and resulting problems". They quote a few women who are dissatisfied that they were not invited to a conference - and who are also complaining that feminism is not as rampant in some Western European countries as it is in the contemporary U.S. Academia.
More importantly, on page 14, they discuss "perceived preferential treatment of women". What's the problem? Their problem is that they notice that people notice that women are being given advantages because they are women. This fact can be decoded from the lower relative abundance of references to "brilliance" in recommendation letters for female candidates and in the persistent questions of new female faculty: "Was I hired because I am female?"
Well, if you ask me, I can't tell you a universal answer because there's no universal answer. And I can't give you a specific answer for your case because I don't know your name, your achievements, and your talents, and it's very likely that I haven't attended the meeting that was deciding about you. However, I can give you a statistical answer. Approximate yourself by an average MIT woman who has gotten a tenure in recent years. What are the odds that you got it because you are a woman?
This question is easy to be answered. Just look at the percentage of tenured MIT women in the mid 1990s, before the feminist bias became aggressive and substantial. At that time, the percentage of women among new tenured faculty was about 8.5%. It's 17% today. (In all these figures, I only mean the two schools of science and engineering by "MIT" - the institute has three more schools.)
It shouldn't be hard to do the maths. The logic and expectations of the fields - and the relative people's ability to excel in them - hasn't changed much in the two decades so about 8.5% of the tenured faculty would be women if almost no one tried to give women much advantage, just like it was the case in the early 1990s. However, the percentage has doubled.
Chances are therefore 50% that if you are a recently tenured female professor at the MIT, you were tenured because you are female. Try to talk to another MIT female tenured professor: it is more likely than not (75%) that at least one of you got tenured because of her sexual organs. This percentage makes it unreasonable to expect that the discussion between the two of you could have anything to do with the meritocracy. Fortunately, most of you don't care why you were hired.
Note that these effects of feminism are strong and "highly concentrated" if you focus on the female subgroup; they're not as large when you look at the whole MIT because the female professors are still a minority which reduces the impact of all effects that only influence the females.
It's kind of honest that the authors of the report chose the title "remaining and resulting problems" because this problem is clearly a "resulting problem" that is guaranteed to increase with the influence of the feminist ideology, not a "remaining one" that is expected to fade away. The more often the feminist ideology with all its crap about men's and women's being equal in all fields and about men's everlasting discrimination against women influences the hiring process, the greater numbers of inappropriate women will be hired, and the more more often their male and female colleagues will notice that it was the case.
It's that simple.
In the unlimited feminism scenario, the MIT will effectively be composed of the male and female portions. The male portion will resemble the MIT as we have known it; the female portion will be primarily composed of people who don't know much about technology and who use the MIT as a source of free money and a charity paying for daycare centers and kindergartens. Correspondingly, about 1/2 of the money from the donors will go to welfare for the women who marketed themselves as technological scholars.
Most likely, the reality will be somewhere in between the meritocratic MIT we have known decades ago and the MIT from the unlimited feminism scenario. You may think that it's not too bad if 50% of the resources are wasted. But the percentage is only 50% because we haven't discussed the affirmative action for ethnic groups and other groups. In the extreme scenario, about 80% of the resources may be spent just for the affirmative action. Of course, within the remaining 20%, most of the amount is being wasted for other things, too.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Book Review: Simplicity Parenting
I've just returned from a 5-day hiatus to the beach. The kids and I cleared out so that dh could finish (with help!) some big--and not-so-big, but messy!--household projects. While I try to ignore the smell of paint in the air, I'd like to share a bit about a book I read this week...all while living an extremely simple (cold, rainy) beach life.
The subtitle of Simplicity Parenting
immediate grabbed my attention: "Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids." I'm all for CALMER. HAPPIER. MORE SECURE. And, while I would have loved to have had the information with my first few stints in parenting (my kids range in age from 5 to almost 21!), this book is especially helpful for my youngest two children who have had more than their share of stress in their young lives. (The book really resonates with recommendations that Patty Cogen gives in her book, Parenting Your Internationally Adopted Child
.)
Because of our Mennonite heritage, we do live a relatively simple life; I was happily surprised to note how many of the suggestions are already part of our daily lives. So here are some of the things we do, some things we hope to implement, and some of the excerpts that wowed me. (The book contains much, much more!)
Some WOW moments:
*they studied kids with ADD, devising a simplification regime "with a particular emphasis on simplifying environment (including dietary changes), screen media and schedules." Result? "68 percent of the children whose parents and teachers adhered to the protocol went from clinically dysfunctional to clinically functional in four months." Wow.
*I love this..."Before you say something, ask yourself these three questions: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?"
Currently part of our lives:
*we don't do a lot of outside activities with our youngest kiddos, ages 5 & 8. Currently, they have no outside sports, clubs, music lessons, etc.
*when our kids are overwhelmed, we try to slow life down and pull them closer.
*we try to only keep toys around that we really use. I rotate toys from storage areas rather than having everything out and available at once.
*predictability--we have a pretty regular schedule. Occasionally it gets high-jacked by the older kids' busy lives, but generally it's smooth for the little guys.
*we eat nourishing, homecooked, seasonal meals together as a family. Very little processed stuff. Virtually no eating out. (Except for date nights, which the little guys don't go on!)
*my little boys have lots of "unscheduled free time" each day to "daydream and play." That's one of the best things about homeschooling.
Wish List:
*despite rotating toys, we still have too many around than we really don't need. And I won't even TOUCH the book issue. It's definitely time to purge the shelves of outgrown or little read books. (Hello. My name is ____. I am a bookaholic.)
*I desperately need to decrease the amount of clothing accessible to my youngest two. The number of choices they have is overwhelming, overstimulating, and a source of constant stress for me and them. My problem actually stems from my Mennonite heritage. Most of what we have has been gifted to us. So getting rid of it means that I might later have to spend money. (What if I NEED a red t-shirt one time this year? What if the white button-down gets a stain? I might need that second--or third, or fourth--shirt.) Or something may end up in the landfill because no one will take away stained, holey clothing even for free at a garage sale. (I know. I'm pathetic.)
*An entire chapter is dedicated to "filtering out the adult world." It's something I need to work on. While I avoid having the news on when my little guys are in the room, they definitely overhear news as well as adult or bigger-kid conversations about things that they could find stressful.
*I have a new resolve to keep the television off during daytime hours. At night, they go to bed before evening shows are turned on. While my little guys watch very little television, zero would be best.
I loved this book and highly recommend reading it. Whether you already "simplicity parent" or not. :)
The subtitle of Simplicity Parenting
immediate grabbed my attention: "Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids." I'm all for CALMER. HAPPIER. MORE SECURE. And, while I would have loved to have had the information with my first few stints in parenting (my kids range in age from 5 to almost 21!), this book is especially helpful for my youngest two children who have had more than their share of stress in their young lives. (The book really resonates with recommendations that Patty Cogen gives in her book, Parenting Your Internationally Adopted Child.)Because of our Mennonite heritage, we do live a relatively simple life; I was happily surprised to note how many of the suggestions are already part of our daily lives. So here are some of the things we do, some things we hope to implement, and some of the excerpts that wowed me. (The book contains much, much more!)
Some WOW moments:
*they studied kids with ADD, devising a simplification regime "with a particular emphasis on simplifying environment (including dietary changes), screen media and schedules." Result? "68 percent of the children whose parents and teachers adhered to the protocol went from clinically dysfunctional to clinically functional in four months." Wow.
*I love this..."Before you say something, ask yourself these three questions: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?"
Currently part of our lives:
*we don't do a lot of outside activities with our youngest kiddos, ages 5 & 8. Currently, they have no outside sports, clubs, music lessons, etc.
*when our kids are overwhelmed, we try to slow life down and pull them closer.
*we try to only keep toys around that we really use. I rotate toys from storage areas rather than having everything out and available at once.
*predictability--we have a pretty regular schedule. Occasionally it gets high-jacked by the older kids' busy lives, but generally it's smooth for the little guys.
*we eat nourishing, homecooked, seasonal meals together as a family. Very little processed stuff. Virtually no eating out. (Except for date nights, which the little guys don't go on!)
*my little boys have lots of "unscheduled free time" each day to "daydream and play." That's one of the best things about homeschooling.
Wish List:
*despite rotating toys, we still have too many around than we really don't need. And I won't even TOUCH the book issue. It's definitely time to purge the shelves of outgrown or little read books. (Hello. My name is ____. I am a bookaholic.)
*I desperately need to decrease the amount of clothing accessible to my youngest two. The number of choices they have is overwhelming, overstimulating, and a source of constant stress for me and them. My problem actually stems from my Mennonite heritage. Most of what we have has been gifted to us. So getting rid of it means that I might later have to spend money. (What if I NEED a red t-shirt one time this year? What if the white button-down gets a stain? I might need that second--or third, or fourth--shirt.) Or something may end up in the landfill because no one will take away stained, holey clothing even for free at a garage sale. (I know. I'm pathetic.)
*An entire chapter is dedicated to "filtering out the adult world." It's something I need to work on. While I avoid having the news on when my little guys are in the room, they definitely overhear news as well as adult or bigger-kid conversations about things that they could find stressful.
*I have a new resolve to keep the television off during daytime hours. At night, they go to bed before evening shows are turned on. While my little guys watch very little television, zero would be best.
I loved this book and highly recommend reading it. Whether you already "simplicity parent" or not. :)
Homeschool Teacher Workshops!
I'm offering two new classes for homeschool teachers in April. If you live in the Portland/Salem area and are interested in being added to the email list, please contact me (see email under "About Me" on right sidebar). I will update information here as it becomes available. (If you've already contacted me about this class, expect to receive information this week!)
Description:
Multiplication & Division
...with Visual Models, Manipulatives, Games and "Real" Books
TWO Workshops for Homeschool Teachers
...with Visual Models, Manipulatives, Games and "Real" Books
TWO Workshops for Homeschool Teachers
Description:
Interested in learning some fun new ways to teach math? Join other homeschool teachers as we explore visual models, play games, and use “real books” to inspire learning. Appropriate for adults who are interested in adding to (multiplying?) their math teaching toolboxes.
Not Good
What amazing karma, Japan returning the favor from World War II; radioactive Iodine 131, Cesium 137 and Xenon 133, across the Pacific and falling down on us with the rain.
What does it mean?
Not good.
They took it off of the front pages and the network news and in its place, the bombing of Libya:
Not good.
10K dead; 17K missing:
Not good.
Four nuclear reactors out of control:
Not good.
Melt down:
Not good.
Multiple meltdowns:
Not good.
Plutonium:
Not good.
What does it mean?
Not good.
They took it off of the front pages and the network news and in its place, the bombing of Libya:
Not good.
10K dead; 17K missing:
Not good.
Four nuclear reactors out of control:
Not good.
Melt down:
Not good.
Multiple meltdowns:
Not good.
Plutonium:
Not good.
Roger Bilham on Honshu Earthquake and Tsunami
The Honshu earthquake is one of 5 earthquakes in the world to have exceeded Mw=8.4 since 2004. Initial estimates of its magnitude (Mw=8.9) have now been superceded by its Mw=9.0 status. The recent 5 mega-quakes were preceded by a four decade gap that followed a cluster of megaquakes between 1950 and 1964. No significance to the gap has been established although there appears to have been a reduction in global energy release after the 1960 clusterOf the effects of the earthquake and tsunami on the Fushima nuclear power facility he writes:
The Fukushima Nuclear reactor successfully shut down in the Mw=9 earthquake. This must be considered a success, because shaking intensities were apparently close to Mercalli Intensity VII. Thirty minutes later a tsunami flooded the reactor buildings. In hindsight it appears impossible to believe that nuclear power stations were located on a shoreline without recognizing the engineering difficulties attending prolonged immersion by a large tsunami. In 1896 a 33 m high tsunami drowned the Sanriku coastline 200 km to the north of Fukushima. A 23 m wave surged on the same coast in 1933, and in 1993 a 30 m wave swept over Okushira Island. The Fukushima plant was protected by a 5.7 m tsunami barrier but the wave height here apparently exceeded 10 m, flooding the generators and electrical wiring in the basement and lower levels of the power plant. Nuclear power plants are simply not designed to be immersed in sea water.A 33 m tsunami? Wow.
In his travelogue, Roger reminds us that seismologists are not like the rest of us:
Thanks Roger for the report!I chose the 14th floor rather than the 3rd floor because being a seismologist, I wanted to really experience large aftershocks at first hand. Only the following day did I realize there was no 13th floor so I guess the 13th floor had been labeled 14. I slept through two M=5.5 events but awoke with delight to a Mw6.2 about 80 km away. Like thunder and lightning, if you count the time between the first jolt and the rolling surface waves you can gauge the distance quite well.
During the 2 am aftershock, the building heaved mightily and erratically at first, and then in the next ten seconds settled to a long swaying motion with gentle creaks of approval from the furniture. There was that uneasy feeling in the middle about whether it was going to get bigger. But no, it stopped eventually. Pretty lame sort of event in fact - no sirens, no screaming from nearby rooms. I found out later I was the sole occupant of the 13/14th floor.
Dan Gardner: Future Babble
Dan Gardner's latest book, Future Babble, was just released in the U.S.: click to buy via amazon.com.
It's a whole book about the self-described experts who predict the future and who are almost always wrong - and about the irrationalities and biases that allow these "experts" to maintain their self-confidence and influence despite their repeated mistakes.
The author divides the experts to "hedgehogs" and "foxes": the former always feel absolutely certain and they love to present their predictions in an unambiguous way; the latter partially realize the complexity of the questions but their predictions are found boring by the public. Consequently, the hedgehogs are always wrong while the foxes are just almost always wrong but the hedgehogs, because of their higher attractiveness, have a greater impact on the mankind. ;-)
The book offers quite some selection of particular nonsensical predictions about the future that were proved wrong - as well as particular people who have always been wrong, with a repeatability that reaches comic proportions, but people haven't yet managed to deduce the consequences. Gardner also tries to explain why the people keep on believing experts even though they must know that the predictions will be wrong.
In 1911, experts would predict that there would be no more wars in Europe. In 1967, experts predicted the USSR to be the fastest-growing economy of 2000. In 2008, when oil surged above USD 140, experts would say that the oil price would soon hit USD 200. Mr Alexander Ač of Czech Globe, who has been collecting and believing every single prediction of this kind, had a version of this prediction on steroids: he followed an expert Robert Hirsch to claim that the oil price would reach USD 500 per barrel in 2011-2013.
Face it, "experts" are as accurate as dart-throwing monkeys. The book may also offer some answer why some people such as Mr Alexander Ač keep on believing so self-evidently irrelevant random farts by so random "expert" crackpots such as Mr Hirsch.
Some biases are behind the repeated errors. For example, the "hindsight bias" leads most people to reinterpret the past according to the outcomes that only became known much later - to retroactively "create a story". Such a reinterpretation makes the people incorrectly believe that the events could have been predicted more reliably than they actually could.
Psychologist Steven Pinker of Harvard University has nicely and accurately :-) summarized how the book will change the humanity if people start to buy it and read it en masse:
See Introduction, an excerpt via the New York Times, a review in The Boston Globe (extended), interview with the author for U.S. News, and a review in NYT. The lady who wrote the latter review is unfair; Gardner is surely not an anti-intellectual who claims that predictions are always impossible. But, as he says in the interview, if it comes to really complicated events, e.g. those that depend on the weather if not the human psychology, the task to sensibly predict is just hopeless.
Radiation increased 10 million times?
Today, we saw another example of the mechanism that the more preposterous a statement is, the more quickly it is spreading. Pretty much all global media have "informed" us that the radiation near a Fukushima reactor was 10 million times higher than the normal. That would be a lot, indeed. Death within an hour or minutes.
Of course, TEPCO has revealed that the information was a "mistake". How did it happen? They confused the readings for cobalt and iodine. Well, that's a pretty bad mistake for a report that is guaranteed to be reprinted at thousands of places and read or watched by a billion of people.
But the error could have been found at other layers, too. No one has done so, however: this news is so "hot" that it doesn't really matter whether it's true, does it? My blog has gotten immediately bombed by anti-nuclear zealots who spread the wrong number, too.
By the way, if you care about the details, it's very likely that they just measured the concentration of iodine-134 and cobalt-56 whose half-lives are 50 minutes and 77 days, respectively. They may have interpreted the concentration of cobalt as that of iodine, but because the cobalt is decaying 2,000 times more slowly, the actual radioactivity caused by it is approximately 2,000 smaller - so 10 million gets shrunk to 5 thousand. ;-) That allows you months of life over there without cancer.
Obviously, the people who have actively propagated the bullshit about 10 million will prefer to say to 5 thousand and 10 million is essentially the same number and nothing changes - instead of admitting that they have qualitatively screwed their job and they just generally suck.
It's a whole book about the self-described experts who predict the future and who are almost always wrong - and about the irrationalities and biases that allow these "experts" to maintain their self-confidence and influence despite their repeated mistakes.
The author divides the experts to "hedgehogs" and "foxes": the former always feel absolutely certain and they love to present their predictions in an unambiguous way; the latter partially realize the complexity of the questions but their predictions are found boring by the public. Consequently, the hedgehogs are always wrong while the foxes are just almost always wrong but the hedgehogs, because of their higher attractiveness, have a greater impact on the mankind. ;-)
The book offers quite some selection of particular nonsensical predictions about the future that were proved wrong - as well as particular people who have always been wrong, with a repeatability that reaches comic proportions, but people haven't yet managed to deduce the consequences. Gardner also tries to explain why the people keep on believing experts even though they must know that the predictions will be wrong.
In 1911, experts would predict that there would be no more wars in Europe. In 1967, experts predicted the USSR to be the fastest-growing economy of 2000. In 2008, when oil surged above USD 140, experts would say that the oil price would soon hit USD 200. Mr Alexander Ač of Czech Globe, who has been collecting and believing every single prediction of this kind, had a version of this prediction on steroids: he followed an expert Robert Hirsch to claim that the oil price would reach USD 500 per barrel in 2011-2013.
Face it, "experts" are as accurate as dart-throwing monkeys. The book may also offer some answer why some people such as Mr Alexander Ač keep on believing so self-evidently irrelevant random farts by so random "expert" crackpots such as Mr Hirsch.
Some biases are behind the repeated errors. For example, the "hindsight bias" leads most people to reinterpret the past according to the outcomes that only became known much later - to retroactively "create a story". Such a reinterpretation makes the people incorrectly believe that the events could have been predicted more reliably than they actually could.
Psychologist Steven Pinker of Harvard University has nicely and accurately :-) summarized how the book will change the humanity if people start to buy it and read it en masse:
It’s rare for a book on public affairs to say something genuinely new, but Future Babble is genuinely arresting, and should be required reading for journalists, politicians, academics, and anyone who listens to them. Mark my words: if Future Babble is widely read, then within 3.7 years the number of overconfident predictions by self-anointed experts talking through their hats will decline by 46.2%, and the world will become no less than 32.1% wiser.There's no reason to doubt Pinker's figures. After all, he's the world's top expert in psychology.
See Introduction, an excerpt via the New York Times, a review in The Boston Globe (extended), interview with the author for U.S. News, and a review in NYT. The lady who wrote the latter review is unfair; Gardner is surely not an anti-intellectual who claims that predictions are always impossible. But, as he says in the interview, if it comes to really complicated events, e.g. those that depend on the weather if not the human psychology, the task to sensibly predict is just hopeless.
Radiation increased 10 million times?
Today, we saw another example of the mechanism that the more preposterous a statement is, the more quickly it is spreading. Pretty much all global media have "informed" us that the radiation near a Fukushima reactor was 10 million times higher than the normal. That would be a lot, indeed. Death within an hour or minutes.
Of course, TEPCO has revealed that the information was a "mistake". How did it happen? They confused the readings for cobalt and iodine. Well, that's a pretty bad mistake for a report that is guaranteed to be reprinted at thousands of places and read or watched by a billion of people.
But the error could have been found at other layers, too. No one has done so, however: this news is so "hot" that it doesn't really matter whether it's true, does it? My blog has gotten immediately bombed by anti-nuclear zealots who spread the wrong number, too.
By the way, if you care about the details, it's very likely that they just measured the concentration of iodine-134 and cobalt-56 whose half-lives are 50 minutes and 77 days, respectively. They may have interpreted the concentration of cobalt as that of iodine, but because the cobalt is decaying 2,000 times more slowly, the actual radioactivity caused by it is approximately 2,000 smaller - so 10 million gets shrunk to 5 thousand. ;-) That allows you months of life over there without cancer.
Obviously, the people who have actively propagated the bullshit about 10 million will prefer to say to 5 thousand and 10 million is essentially the same number and nothing changes - instead of admitting that they have qualitatively screwed their job and they just generally suck.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Hide the decline II: 1400-1550 covered up
Steve McIntyre managed to uncover a piece of scientific forgery that looks even more serious than the original "hide the decline" trick:
Click to zoom in.
Look at the brightly shining pink lines - because both of these segments have been erased in the final paper. Those guys have censored the "distracting" decline of the temperature obtained from the trees after 1960 (they have masked the so-called "divergence problem"): this is the original "hide the decline" scandal.
But as you can see, they have also hidden a 3 times longer period, 1402-1550, which was arguably even more inconvenient because the trees indicate a faster warming in the 15th century than in the 20th century. By this cosmetic surgery, they have eliminated pretty much 1/2 of their data - on both sides - because they didn't support the predetermined conclusion and only picked the 1/2 that could be used as a part of the hockey stick.
No justification has been given for the truncation - and in fact, the fact that the truncation has been done remained a secret in the paper.
I suspect that the whole alarmist paleoclimatological community has been well aware of this 15th century problem - data clearly disagreeing with any form of a hockey stick. My reason for this broader statement is that the censorship seems to influence the same period as the aptly named "censored" directory by Mann that was ultimately erased from MBH98.
MBH98 came before Briffa-Osborn 1999 so you may try to guess which mann is the most likely primordial originator of this fabrication.
It seems pretty likely that this or a very similar fraud affects pretty much every single climate reconstruction in the literature going back at least to 1400 by anyone who has failed to explicitly denounce Michael Mann as a pile of f*ces. Those people - if they deserve to be called in this way at all - have been lying and deceiving everyone for decades and they should be sent to Guantanamo Bay. ;-)
Well, Tim Ball has offered a better verdict: the mann should be moved from Penn State to the State Pen. A hilarious quote! Needless to say, the mann has sued Tim Ball. If Ball loses, I will try to find addresses of oil companies and urge them to pay Ball 10 times the money he will lose.
Now, let me add that I am far from certain that the Earth has seen a warming trend - or even a huge warming trend - in the 15th century. In fact, other climate reconstructions, including one from Craig Loehle who is no alarmist, indicate that the 15th century already saw a cooling before the little ice age. However, what I am certain about is that there have been sizable temperature variabilities in the pre-industrial era and the alarmist movement has been working hard to deprecate them.
Via Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts
Hide the Decline: Sciencemag #3The summary of the story is very simple. The Briffa-Osborn 1999 reconstruction of the climate depended on a variable called "yrmxd" in a computer code. You can set it to any year and the program will cover up the whole history of your proxies before the year "yrmxd". The variable was set to 1550 instead of the correct 1402 and the result looked like this:
Click to zoom in.
Look at the brightly shining pink lines - because both of these segments have been erased in the final paper. Those guys have censored the "distracting" decline of the temperature obtained from the trees after 1960 (they have masked the so-called "divergence problem"): this is the original "hide the decline" scandal.
But as you can see, they have also hidden a 3 times longer period, 1402-1550, which was arguably even more inconvenient because the trees indicate a faster warming in the 15th century than in the 20th century. By this cosmetic surgery, they have eliminated pretty much 1/2 of their data - on both sides - because they didn't support the predetermined conclusion and only picked the 1/2 that could be used as a part of the hockey stick.
No justification has been given for the truncation - and in fact, the fact that the truncation has been done remained a secret in the paper.
I suspect that the whole alarmist paleoclimatological community has been well aware of this 15th century problem - data clearly disagreeing with any form of a hockey stick. My reason for this broader statement is that the censorship seems to influence the same period as the aptly named "censored" directory by Mann that was ultimately erased from MBH98.
MBH98 came before Briffa-Osborn 1999 so you may try to guess which mann is the most likely primordial originator of this fabrication.
It seems pretty likely that this or a very similar fraud affects pretty much every single climate reconstruction in the literature going back at least to 1400 by anyone who has failed to explicitly denounce Michael Mann as a pile of f*ces. Those people - if they deserve to be called in this way at all - have been lying and deceiving everyone for decades and they should be sent to Guantanamo Bay. ;-)
Well, Tim Ball has offered a better verdict: the mann should be moved from Penn State to the State Pen. A hilarious quote! Needless to say, the mann has sued Tim Ball. If Ball loses, I will try to find addresses of oil companies and urge them to pay Ball 10 times the money he will lose.
Now, let me add that I am far from certain that the Earth has seen a warming trend - or even a huge warming trend - in the 15th century. In fact, other climate reconstructions, including one from Craig Loehle who is no alarmist, indicate that the 15th century already saw a cooling before the little ice age. However, what I am certain about is that there have been sizable temperature variabilities in the pre-industrial era and the alarmist movement has been working hard to deprecate them.
Via Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts
Buzz Aldrin dumped the LHC beam
If you continuously watch the LHC status, you must have noticed that on March 1st, 2011, a beam was dumped at some point. Why did it happen?
Well, it happened because they told the second man on the Moon, climate skeptic Buzz Aldrin, to press the red button, and he did so. ;-) Here a few words he said about the future of science:
Buzz Aldrin couldn't hide that particle physics wasn't his field but he's still such as skillful and charming speaker that what he had to say actually made some sense.
Via Symmetry Breaking
Well, it happened because they told the second man on the Moon, climate skeptic Buzz Aldrin, to press the red button, and he did so. ;-) Here a few words he said about the future of science:
Buzz Aldrin couldn't hide that particle physics wasn't his field but he's still such as skillful and charming speaker that what he had to say actually made some sense.
Via Symmetry Breaking
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