Biblical Soil Science

My work here in Everett has been postponed, so I'm sitting in the hotel waiting to hear from my temporary masters on what they need me to do for them, if anything, and idly surfing the 'net. And in so doing I came across Frank Moraes' essay on atheism and theology.

In it Frank concludes:

"One can’t be an atheist without knowing what it is to be a theist. And most atheists don’t seem to even know what God is supposed to be. What they seem to be against is ignorant people with childish beliefs. If that’s the case, we should call such people areligious. They don’t know or care enough to have an opinion about God, and thus don’t deserve to be called atheists."

Hmmm.

I guess I fit into one of these niches. I'm an atheist, or, at the very least, a "don'tgiveashit-ist". My feeling is that I have no fucking idea what is God, or gods, or what it or he or she or they do. Or whether they do anything. Or care, really.

(I should note that it seems to me that if what I see as human life, life on this planet, is really the province of a God, or gods, then those Powers are, at best, some pretty fucking capriciously feckless sonsofbitches and, at worst, some serious assholes).

If people did what those Higher Powers are accused, or credited, with doing in the physical world they'd get kicked from here to Armageddon.

Plagues? Floods? The Penn/Madonna Shanghai Surprise? WTF, deities? You got nothing better to do than eff with people bringin' that shit?

Moraes links to an earlier post of his that references S.J. Gould's idea of "non-overlapping magisteria"; the idea that science (or, at least, non-theological explanations for physical matters) can happily exist side-by-side with theological/philosophical/spiritual explanations of moral and ethical (and ontological) matters.

Moraes' problem is that, apparently, there are a group of atheists who are not content with the Gould idea but are directly attacking religious ideas of, well, pretty much everything. And that this attack is focused on the "worst" aspects of theology, the "Answers in Genesis" sorts of theology that insist that God created dinosaurs and humans and the one rode the other (or something; I never bother much with the AIG people). Moraes wants atheists to a) ignore the AIG dumbshit and b) learn genuine theology - at least, learn enough to understand it - if they want to debate it.

But as I commented on Frank's post, I think the biggest problem is this “worst theology” and how predominant it is over the “better”, and how destructive, and I think that's why the theists are attacking religion, not because they don't understand the higher thinking or care.

There was no Great Flood. We know that. "Know" as in know; the "flood" of Genesis and the Middle Eastern texts that preceded and fomented it were legends, stories, fictions. The textural references to it are stories made up by people who saw things they didn’t have the intellectual tools to understand.

There were no humans riding dinosaurs. "God" didn't give humans "dominion" over volcanoes and oceans and squirrels. That's "Answers in Genesis", the Bible (or Torah, or Quran) as soil survey manual. Iron Age superstition and ignorance dressed up in churchy clothes.

And you'd think there'd be no point attacking or debating that.

But, dammit, this sort of “Answers in Genesis” theologian are all over the fucking place, and their nonsense contributes mightily to the very real damage that religion does in the public square.

It's that sort of Vacation Bible School "theology" that permeates the GOP and helps them in their quest to free their patrons to resume dumping shit into Love Canal and crap into the sky and credulous nonsense (or canned "facts") into kid's brains.

It's that sort of simplistic "theology" that encourages We the People to make stupid choices based on what we've been told about God and Man and the world around us (and politics as God-bothering, another real problem).

THAT’s why the atheists go after them, I think.

Not because they’re a “worthy” opponent Moraes wants to engage...but because, as rubbishy as they are, the Answers-in-Gensis sort of “theology” is much more destructive than the theology of the "better" sort, the kind of theology of people of faith willing to start from the NOMA standpoint.

To put it in videogame terms, it’s all well and good to recommend going up against the boss in an epic struggle.

But it doesn’t help when the damn trashy little minions are running all over the place wrecking the joint.

(h/t to Gods Playing Poker for the comic...)

Stubbed Toe

See below; this is my reconstruction of the Santa Clarita landslide.

Typically large, slow-moving rotational slump- (meaning that the movement is rotational, with the top part moving down and in and the bottom (or toe) moving down and out) earthflows (meaning that the thing is moving slowly, like a big earth glacier) develop large toe-bulges at the bottom. Somewhere in my files I have a picture of an old mine access road that has been buckled up and rotated vertical by the toe pushing up and out at the bottom of a large earthflow; the thing stood straight up for about 8 or 10 feet. That'd have been a real sonofabitch to drive up with a stick shift.

I had a long discussion about this thing with my friend GeoChick, and I told her my problem was that all the articles had the scientific intelligence of a mophead. "Guh - landslide" was about the level of sophistication. Seriously; I couldn't tell either from the pictures or the text enough about the topography or the geology to even guess what was happening.

But long-time commentor Ael finally sent me a link to an article that showed not just the big honkin' road uplift but the surroundings, and it looks pretty clear to me that this thing is at or near the base of a slope that is failing, and it's pushing this road up because the road is at or near where the bottom of the slide plane "toes out" of the ground surface...

And this is a simple landslide. Given that, can you imagine how hard it is for most reporters to understand something as complex as climate change?

Kaiju Hentai!

Every so often something utterly innocuous just tickles the living shit out of me. For example:

Over at Lawyers, Guns & Money one of the bloggers (bspencer, to be specific) does something called a "Friday Creature Feature" where she profiles some sort of paleontological critter. Today's was the Permian reptile Dimetrodon - that's the dinosaur-y looking one with the big sail on his back, right?

OK, so I enjoy this little feature and I'm reading down the comments section and I come to this:

Denverite says:
April 18, 2014 at 12:59 pm

So I had no idea these “mammal-like reptiles” were around long before the reptilian dinosaurs.

Yeah, a lot of people don’t realize that dinosaurs and mammals really kind of evolved parallel with each other. A good way to think of it is that the dinosaurs were the reptiles that evolved into birds, and the mammals were the reptiles that evolved into rats.

And in the comment string to this comment are the following:

mike in dc says:
April 18, 2014 at 4:42 pm

B-B-But then, where did Godzilla come from, if not from the unnatural union of a stegosaur and a T.Rex?
Reply

sharculese says:
April 18, 2014 at 4:57 pm

Well, see, when an undersea lizard and a nuclear blast love each other very much…

And that's the point where I completely lost it and laughed so hard my Diet Coke came out my nose.

TC Darwin

I'm always sort of amazed when I run into people who "don't believe" in evolution as the method of the origin of species.

First, because most of these people are "conservative". And, second, because if they would just look around, they'd see a wonderful metaphor for evolution at work in one of their (typically) favorite things; weapons.

I thought about this again because of my son's current favorite on-line game "World of Tanks".

The magilla behind this MMO game is that there's this imaginary world full of World War 2 tanks. It includes every possible permutation and variation of the breed, including tanks that were no more than prototypes or never fired a shot in anger between 1939 and 1945. Oh, and it includes self-propelled artillery, for some odd reason.

But they're all there, and you "buy" a tank or tanks and then you get tossed into battles where you drive around, shoot other people, and get shot. There's no infantry, or mines, or civilians, or politics, or messy wounds or deaths - it's WW2 in a pasteurized bottle, but it's big fun for nine years old.

But here's the catch; you have to start out with a light tank; the VK-31 Leichttraktor for Germany, the Soviet MS-1, or the U.S. T1 "Cunningham".

But you get pitched into battles with much bigger tanks, everything from mid-war mediums to 1945 superheavies. The Boy spends a lot of time getting shot into Swiss cheese, at which time I remind him that there are two types of light tanks; ones that hang around after the Big Kids show up to play, and live ones.

Which brings me back to evolution.

Because typically we can't "see" things evolve. Natural selection requires environmental change to occur, and that usually occurs over millenia. A type of critter produces several genotypes, and then some change occurs - temperature, salinity, rainfall, vegetation - where one genotype is more successful than the others. But the replacement of one with another often takes lifetimes, typically many lifetimes, to complete.

But in the World of Tanks, the real world of tanks, we've seen a process that neatly duplicates what happens in the evolution of species through natural selection in a single long human lifespan.

The major nations typically went to war in the late Thirties or early Forties with a full suite of armored vehicles;

Light tanks, for scouting,

Medium tanks, for general combat, and mobile action, and

Heavy tanks, for static defense or breaking through an enemy's defense.

(The only exceptions I can think of were the Chinese, who flat-out couldn't afford anything more than a rag-tag and bobtail, and the Japanese, whose armored force was as crude and unsophisticated as the rest of Japanese tactical doctrine.

I should really do a post about them - Japanese armor truly sucked pipe, kind of shocking for a nation whose ambitions were so great...)

Where are they now?

I'll tell you where; they're here, but the tank has evolved.

The deadly natural selection of combat was unpleasant to the light tanks; they were too small and too slow to fight through an enemy's screen of medium tanks, mines, and hand-held antitank rockets (the bazooka and the Panzerfaust were the small mammals that ate the light tank eggs...) and reconnaissance duties increasingly became the province of the aircraft.

And the heavies were just that; too damn heavy. Too slow, too expensive, too few. I don't agree with the old Soviet saying about "quantity has a quality of it's own" but it was true that unless the terrain was ideal the combination of infantry, artillery, tac air, and medium tanks could winkle out a platoon or so of heavies with a little effort.

The light and heavy versions of the species a. tankus converged on the medium to produce the "main battle tank". This vehicle has roughly the speed of a WW2 medium tank (or better) with composite armor and the main cannon of roughly a WW2 heavy tank. The current U.S. M1A1 has a 120mm cannon; the German Panzerjäger Tiger Ausf. B mounted the 12.8 cm PaK 44 L/55. The armor of the Soviet T-80 is comparable to the late-WW2 IS models or the German superheavies.

Modern tanks are clearly an evolution of the WW2 types, an evolution that converged on the medium tank at the expense of the heavy and light types.

Ground reconnaissance duties have now been delegated to other vehicles; light wheeled scout cars such as the U.S. M1126 Stryker or the Russian BRDM/BTR-types, or the tracked carriers such as the U.S. M3 CFV.

Even on the theatre scale the U.S. Army concluded after WW2 that reconnaissance and screening are the province of specialized units (armored cavalry regiments, or ACRs) but armed them with standard main battle tanks and infantry/cavalry carriers. Since the Third Gulf War in 1991 most of these ACRs have been converted to use the Stryker light wheeled AFVs.

Only the British insist that the light tank still has a place on the battlefield.

Their Scimitar AFV is the last of the Great Power lights, and I have a sneaking suspicion that its persistence owes more to the reluctance of the British cavalry to accept that in armored war a modern cavalryman in a light tank is as dead as their horse cavalry forebears were when they met the original armored columns in 1939.

(Oh, and I should note here that the Poles weren't really that stupid; it's a military urban legend...)

For the rest of the world experience has concluded that using a small tank to scout is expensive and unproductive; it is too small to outfight an MBT and too slow to outrun one. Its light armor cannot withstand modern artillery or infantry antitank weaponry. A wheeled vehicle can do the job just as well, and it's loss can be afforded better. Sorry, scouts; it's just not worth training you up to be a tanker.

The natural selection of battle has not chosen the light tanker and his little tank.

So my poor little man and his light tank are trying to fight against not just larger and stronger tanks, but forces that mimic the incredible power of natural selection and species evolution.

No wonder it's such a hard fight.

But he has an excuse; he's nine years old. And we've talked about "evolution" and he's seen the simulacrum happening in the World of Tanks. I tell him; if the tanks were "intelligently designed" the M1 would have been invented in 1916.

Instead, the tank "evolved" as the world's tank designers responded to the natural selection of battle by altering the phenotype of the tank over the course of the 20th Century. The analogy isn't perfect, of course...but it makes the point; "species" can change, do change, as the result of natural selection, and end up resembling something very different from the starting point.

I wonder; what the flamin' hell is the excuse for the "conservatives" who don't "believe in evolution"..? Can't they SEE?

So, all together now:

(For those of you non-German speakers, that's the Panzerleid, the "Tank Song" of the German Army of WW2. Interestingly, for all that the modern Bundeswehr has discarded almost all the old Wehrmacht trappings, the Wiki entry says that the German tankers still sing this song.)

(And I want to tip my hat to commentor "gruff", whose cogent arguments regarding tanks and evolution caused me to revise this post)

One Hour Behind.

It says something, and probably something pretty scathing, about me and my life at present that I spent the entire day today completely unaware that I and my entire family were an hour behind the rest of the world.

Yep. Daylight savings time? Missed it completely. It wasn't until I was sitting with the Boy watching (Jesus wept, the things I do for my offstpring) "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" that I noticed that the time on the cable directory was an hour ahead of the clocks in the house.Mind you, the cellphone that I'd been carrying all day, and the computer that I had checked once or twice were "correct". I just never really noticed the difference.

Of course, it was a lazy Sunday, and we had no agenda, so, really, who cared? Mind you, if I hadn't caught it before tomorrow morning there would have been hell to pay. But it made me wonder about our obsession with time. All four of us lost an hour today, lost it from dawn to dusk, never once even knew we'd lost it. And it made no difference whatsoever. We went where we needed to go (Goodwill, the grocery store, the little wargame store to pick up the rule for "Axis & Allies", the latest in the series of games the Boy and I have been fooling with), did what we needed to do, got our meals and our work and our entertainment without ever needing that hour.

All in all this wasn't a bad weekend. We got some relaxation in, the Boy and his little army cleaned me out of my village defense with the help of some aggressive mistakes on my part and a 4-2 advantage in tank strength). We picked up a kabocha squash at Beaverton's wonderful Uwajimaya market, tho we were sad that they didn't have a live octopus in the tank.

(This is, obviously, NOT the Beaverton store, but old man Moriguchi's Seattle store in 1946; fun article about the clan and their business here.)

I finally got the downstairs shelves cleared up and took the expired paint, leaky tarps, broken tools and a hell of a lot of stuff that was simply dunsel to the dump. That includes the two discarded computer towers and monitors; something like $2,500 1990 dollars now worth approximately...nothing. Not that the computers themselves don't WORK, mind you. They simply lack the memory now available in the smallest laptop, lack memory space to the point where getting them to run the most mindless Windows crap would result in a shower of sparks and a puff of smoke, the perfect symbol of sudden technological death. To the dump with you, then.

Oh, and, not so delightfully, I discovered the clowder of small black ants that had taken up residence under the downstairs laptop. I hauled some clothes from the worktable and was dismayed by a sudden scurry of insects. Damn. I couldn't find any food scraps - I don't usually eat downstairs - and I think the damn beasts were drawn by the warmth of the running electronics. So I had to haul everything off the table and ant-spray the entire work area before vacuuming up the little bodies. Ugh, nasty. I have GOT to get a contractor in to replace the old basement windows. They are open to the entire wild woods and the transient insect traffic can get truly ridiculous.

The thing is, though, that the entire weekend centered around the kiddos. Not that everything we did was of , by, and for the kids. But they were there, they couldn't be disregarded. And when they were - if, for example, we wanted to do something that held no child-level entertainment value or even distraction-value - the whining began quickly, if not instantly. This could be dealt with, but then the result was a sullen silence, tolerable only if you had the temperament of an antihero of one of the more biting Jane Austin novels. It reminded me vividly of this post by Carrie over at Clueless in Carolina. She went to some website and made some do-it-yourself "demotivational" posters. Once of them included her family above the caption "Parenting: Because We Couldn't Figure Out What To Do With All That Money And Spare Time".

It ended up being posted (without her knowledge) to the site's homepage where it garnered a ton of nasty comments and about 700 "dislike" votes.

OK.

Here's my take on this; anyone who "hated" this, first, has no real life, and, second, either has no children or is one of those sorts of people who come from one of those goofy Christian sects where they teach you that kids are God's little miracles and how you're supposed to walk around all day in a sort of religious/oxycontin haze with a big, goofy smile on your puss.

Because parenting DOES suck up your time and money.

Because for every lovely moment there's a "Will you PICK UP the damn shoes like I asked you FOURTEEN times already?" moment.

It's hard, often grinding work, it never stops, and if you think your kids are grateful for it you're smoking crack.

Parenting is a good thing and a great thing, often a rewarding thing, but anyone who thinks its easy, or that as a parent you're supposed to be going through the day singing because its just a ceaseless parade of wonder and delight has been doing their parenting whilst licking lead paint off old kids toys.

So. How about some other random bloggage?

Speaking of overwhelmed technology, I am very uncommitted on the subject of nuclear power in general.There seem to me to be considerable risks, but also significant advantages, to a source of electrical power that doesn't rely on short-term, nonrenewable consumables but produces such such long-term, nondisposable wastes.The U.S. problems with it seem to stem as much from our approach to plant design - most of our plants are, I understand, literally one-offs; each designed more-or-less anew every time a new plant comes online - as it does with any sort of larger nuclear power issues. The French, for example, seem to do a decent job of running a large-scale nuclear grid. The Japanese, too, seemed to be a model argument for nuclear as an alternative power source, especially given that the Japanese have even fewer options that the U.S. does.

But the aftermath of Friday's earthquake two of the commercial nuclear plants in Fukushima Dai-ichi in Japan's Tōhoku region seem to be running considerable danger of dangerous core meltdown failure, which reminds me of the single biggest difference between nuclear and other forms of power: there's just no way to "turn off" a nuclear reactor.

My understanding of the way nuclear power works is that the process depends on hear generated by controlled nuclear fission. And that the main controls for this reaction are the so-called "control rods" which are designed to absorb the excess neutrons that propagate the chain-reaction and thus end it.

But the difference between this, say, and a coal or gas plant, or hydroelectric dam, is that there seems to be no way to actually "shut down" the nuclear core. Shut down the coal or gas, fully open the sluicegates, and the energy powering the conventional plants or the dam is gone. The turbines will stop spinning, the fires in the boilers go out, the dam pool drain, and the danger will end.

The nuclear core doesn't appear to follow this pattern. Even with the control rods fully inserted it seems to need to be actively cooled or it will overheat, and if it overheats it will melt. (Here are some discussions of the problems of cooling a shut-down reactor) It seems physically impossible to extract fuel cells from a reactor where the cooling system fails (or else you suspect that someone would have done it in one of the several major failures, including this one) and thus drop the reactive mass below criticality. So without continuous and effective cooling in the week after shutdown some sort of major disaster seems certain.

And, again, the difference between nuclear disasters and the "other" power plant disasters seems to be not so much in the scale as in the permanence of the former. A dam breaks and the resulting flood devastates the valley below. A gas plant explodes and the neighborhood around it burns.

But after the waters return home, and the fires are put out, the people around the destroyed gas or hydro plants can rebuild. A major nuclear core melt, a real "China Syndrome" containment breach, and the area around the plant is poisoned for years, possibly for generations. This, for example, is what was once a primary school in what was once the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl.Mind you, I also realize that there are massive long-term problems with fossil fuel power generation. So there doesn't seem to be a "good guy-bad guy" here. But it seems to me that the active-cooling issue is a problem that needs to be solved before nuclear power is more widely used here. There should be some way to passively flood the reactor vessel and cool the fuel for the week or so until the heat dissipates. Without power, without the need for generators or electricity, which the Sendai Earthquake has shown will not be there when needed.

There; that's nuclear engineering taken care of.

This from Karen Traviss' blog; a eulogy for the latest young man to die for...something...in southwest Asia. Say what you want about the decline of the British Empire; they still know how to mourn their war dead. I don't pretend to know young Liam Tasker. But after reading the Ministry of Defence press release, I at least have some dim sense of the young dog handler who will be sadly missed by his mates, his family, and in his home of Kirkcaldy. I know that if I was to be killed in some Third World shithole the least I'd want is something like this, a real forget-me-not, a chance for a stranger half a work away to read "I am the proudest girlfriend there could ever be and there will be an LT-sized hole in my life forever. Sleep well my darling, my soul mate, my best friend." and, however briefly, feel the emptiness in the heart and soul of a young woman from Scotland who will never see her man again. There's something extra there, something the U.S. Army doesn't seem to bother with, something that all the boilerplate "for God and country" eyewash just can't give you.

Speaking of King and Country, the Little Girl's latest "Iwant" is the Zhu Zhu Princess hamster toys, complete with castle and coach and little ballroom. Mind you, I have no idea where her LAST "zhu zhu pet" has got to, but the magic of pink plastic appears to be irresistible; she Must Have Them. Every time they appear on the television she swirls into rapture; "Iwantthat, Iwantthat, IREALLYwantthat!"

(My personal favorite is the Prince Hamster, who goes by the improbably monkier of "Prince Dashington". And even he is pinky-purple and soft with fake fur. Little girls...sigh.)

The whole set is being offered on EBay for something like $140, but I'm damned if I'm going to pay the price of a new stereo for a pink plastic hamster palace. Hopefully I can find some hamster-princess parts that will serve to entertain. This is a little girl who finds endless amusement in cutting up construction paper; I can't think that the hamsters are a must-have in the Big Picture. In the small, unfortunately, I fear that there must be pink hamsters in the 5th Birthday present pile or there will be Sadness.

I'm just tired of the damn politics. I just want to be domestic and small-minded tonight, because otherwise, at home and abroad, there seems to be no refuge from the sad and the stupid. I wish...aw, the hell with what I wish; it's not gonna happen. A hell of a lot of us are gonna ram our pecker into the meatgrinder just because we refuse to hear any alternative; we seem bound and determined to prove that we're just homicidal, hairless apes without a clue that the rest of the world is an hour ahead of us and all the chest-beating, stick-pounding and shit-flinging isn't going to make the time up, make us smarter, or richer, or happier.Just a pack of goddamn brain-damaged bonobos one hour behind.

Don't EVER correct me!

Good to know that piety makes you humble as well as wise.

(h/t to Pharyngula)

Those look like about a Moment Magnitude 8.5 to me...

Here's a teensy funny; a young woman in Indiana is conducting an experiment to see if her rather delightfuly displayed frontispiece (see Figure 1, below) can cause seismic activity in the normally rather tectonically bland regions of the central U.S. I admit to being rather unprofessionally seduced by her off-kilter geek girl charm and her clever idea, but then I'm a fool for the smart geeky gals. Hell, I went and married one.

Figure 1: Potentially Seismogenic Breasts
For, you see, a brief verbal monograph on plate tectonics (referred to in the media somewhat curiously as a "Friday sermon" - there may be some cultural reference I'm missing here) has been published, based on the work of a previously little-known Iranian seismologist, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi. Dr. Sedighi (I'm assuming the doctorate, since this level of seismological work is usually done at fairly advanced levels) who has been quoted as saying; "Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes..."

The investigator is shown in Figure 2, below:
Figure 2: Potentially Non-Seismogenic Iranian Cleric
"What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble?" says Dr. Sediqi, "There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam's moral codes."

Mind you, the Iranian cleric/scientist has not been able to explain the relative lack of seismicity centered around the French Riveria, Rio de Janiero and the Oregon Country Fair.

But I'm hopeful that the Journal of Geophysical Review can provide some insight into Dr. Sediqi's methodology and analysis that will explain this omission.

Now in case you think I'm getting all snarkily academic; please note that I'm generally all in favor of the notion that science is for everyone. IMO one of the most pernicious things we've done since the Enlightenment is make scientific knowledge the province of the specialist, the "egghead", the science geek. In return, most people know less about natural phenomenon like earthquakes and volcanoes than they do about electronic gadgets, sports statistics, and the marital status of Sandra Bullock. This, to my mind, is NOT a healthy way to run a technological civilization.

Now, unfortunately, my work safety dress requirements preclude my participation in this fascinating experiment. Add to that the well-known tectonic activity of the Pacific Northwest, even if I could help out it may be difficult to rule out pure randomness in the "scandalous attire = seismic catastrophe" connection.

But you bet that when I get home tonight Mojo and I are going to put on our grass skirts or our Speedos and do the Barbie Girl dance, you betcha. Swinging fleshy bits mean M9 subduction zone earthquake? Bring it on, baby!

Anything for science.

Update 4/27: Well, the U.S.G.S. has come down squarely on the side of boobs. They're seismologically friendly!

Not only did the global frequency of seismicity NOT increase yesterday, but the mean magnitude actually decreased. Perhaps flaunting female bounty actually has a sort of pleasingly calming effect on tectonic activity?

Works on me that way, so why not the Cascadia Subduction Zone?

Kudos to Jen for her ground breaking experimental work.

And a shake of the finger to certain Iranian clerics and their theological counterparts everywhere. What she wears is her business, giacomo. You want to keep your chastity uncorrupted? Try and grow up and act like a man; she's not your rubber love-doll and she's not dressing for your sexual uses. Her body, like yours, is and should be a wonder of nature - strong, swift and healthy. She is a sunrise, a flower, a hawk in flight; beautiful, an inspiration. Try and think past your goddamn penis for a moment, eh?

What IS it with religion and women's bodies that makes so many men so stupid?

Everybody talks about the weather...

Over at MilPub one of my colleagues mentioned the Copenhagen Conference on climate change and the recent fooforaw about the "censoring" of climate change skeptics by the mainstream climatologists.

Now, overall, I am perfectly confident that if human industrial emissions ARE having a significant impact on global climate (and I cannot imagine why they wouldn't - see below) that this conference will continue the great tradition of looking away from a difficult and painful choice until it rips our collective head off and vomits down the neck stump. There never has been a human society that anticipated their own impact on natural systems prior to those systems going to hell. Ask the Sumerians about soil salinization, the Anasazi about irrigated agriculture in a desert, or the Easter Islanders about giant heads. Oh, wait, you can't...But as for the "censoring" the skeptics...my background is in geology, not climatology, but here's my short take:

1. We are in an interglacial, and we know that over the past 1.8 million years the Earth has warmed and cooled considerably from where it is today. From the VOSTOK ice cores in the Antarctic we have O16/O18 ratios that give us a fair idea of global temperatures back into the end of the late Pleistocene. Stratigraphic, palynological and flora/fauna interpretation can give us a good guesstimate of global temps back at least as far as the Proterozoic (4 billion years ago). And we know from that that the Earth has been both much warmer and much colder than it is now.

2. But...the temperature data we have now looks suspicious; it spikes starting in the late 18th Century and that trend seems to be continuing. This trendline is rising at about the same rate as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which saw 6 degrees of rise in 20,000 years and had a fairly major impact on planetary life.The thing is that we think that the PETM was triggered by one or more natural causes, the most likely thought to be the release of deep-ocean methane deposits or "clathrates". Of the other natural or cosmogenic processes that have affected global temperatures, from cometary impacts to the development of grasses, we have seen none over the past 200 years.

3. We also know that...

4. Industrial gases, including CO2, do have a "greenhouse" effect, and we have poured a tremendous amount of them (relative to the global baseline) into the air since about 1800.

5. So it makes sense, in a purely empirical way, to be highly skeptical of the notion that "humans can't alter the global temperature stasis", which is the primary point of the skeptics. Even if the temp spike and the industrial emissions aren't 1:1, it makes no sense to think that there's no effect at all (which is the main skeptic point).

6. And the real problem is that we know from Venus that there's a tipping point where the greenhouse becomes irreversible. And we don't really know what that tipping point is here on Earth. Runaway greenhouse here is unlikely - we have too much free water - but the point is we don't know. We don't know what is happening, other than the global temperature is rising above the normal trend and we have no smoking gun - no volcanism, no bolides, no clathrates, nothing that we know or think has caused warming in the past - to account for it. We don't know.

7. So since we know so little to me it makes perfect sense to reduce the amount of industrial gas emitted into the atmosphere to the greatest extent possible. And many of the skeptics

- whose evidence consists mostly of nitpicking holes in the theory and some pretty wild assumptions (as in the cartoon above - are paid for by industries that have a short-term stake in preventing this. It's also worth noting, as the Toronto Sun editorial stated:

"A key factor in the controversy is that the data discussed in these e-mails was not suppressed. It was discussed in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment report, which concluded it is more than 90% likely that human emissions of greenhouse gases are responsible for climate change."

This whole business is another attempt to make doing nothing - or making a mistake - seem like doing the right thing. Haven't we been there before?

So my feeling is this: we're not going to reverse the industrial revolution and go back to living in yurts. No one who warns of climate change believes we will. What they are trying to do is talk to a largely uneducated, credulous and greedy public about the notion that we need to put off our pursuit of that Wii and that Hummer H4 to slow down the emissions cycle and reduce the chance that we will end up with a runaway greenhouse.

This is the scientific equivalent of taking your foot off the gas because the terrain ahead suggests there may be a hard left turn in front of you. The skeptics, many of them, are saying "Fuck you, you pussy, floor it!" for no reason other than they have found some irregularities in the climate data, the scientific equivalent of saying that you don't need brakes because the road has always been straight and always will be.

So in a perfect world the climatologists would lay out all the data, point to the trend and then point out the irregularities and discrepancies and admit "We don't know why this is, this seems anomalous, but the overall data seems to suggest this." But the Western publics know only this: anything that curtails their industrial "progress" makes them "poorer" in the short-term.

Therefore if someone can manage to take those irregularities and discrepancies and make them look like a fatal flaw (which is possible with any scientific data you don't really understand how to interpret) they will seize on it as an opportunity to do nothing.

So I don't think that what the climatologists did was smart in the long run; if there IS a serious climate problem, people in general are going to have to become smarter about it in order to solve it.

But in the long run we're all dead and these guys have been fighting the battle against the nay-sayers for thirty years. We all saw how the people who were skeptical about the good sense of invading a fucked-up post-Ottoman Third World dictatorship to let freedom reign were swiftboated and lied about and generally screwed over. They did, too.

So I can fully understand their instinct to shut these guys up before they managed to raise their Pecksniffian bullshit to full Cheney on them.

The editorial in the journal Nature sums the situation up pretty well:

"In the end, what the UEA e-mails really show is that scientists are human beings — and that unrelenting opposition to their work can goad them to the limits of tolerance, and tempt them to act in ways that undermine scientific values. Yet it is precisely in such circumstances that researchers should strive to act and communicate professionally, and make their data and methods available to others, lest they provide their worst critics with ammunition."

But no matter. The entire controversy is a tale told by a lot of idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The bottom line is that if this climate problem forces us to make a hard decision today, forces us to put down the TV remote and do something that makes us poorer and smaller in the short run...we'll kick it down the road. We like our problems minor, and our major problems invisible - until the moment they strike us dead. That way it's SO much less stressful.

Just ask anyone on Venus.

(cross-posted at MilPub)

Moonbell

Even for the ingenuous Japanese, this is...unusual.Welcome to "Moonbell" a website that lets you play music based on the lunar topography data collected by Japan's Kaguya orbiter.I find this both fascinating and disturbingly typical of the sort of thing that many Japanese find fascinating too: the artfully crafted, cunningly devised artifact that is useful for precisely...nothing.

But pretty. In a looney sort of way.

(h/t to Pink Tentacle)

Small Step to Nowhere..?

I'm not immune to popular enthusiasms, and with that I note the 40th anniversary for the "small step for a man" that capped NASA's manned space program in 1969.I was not a particularly bright kid at the age of 12, and I remember the summer of '69 more for my mother's frenzied ranting at the Chicago Cubs on their way to their traditional September swoon in the year of the Miracle Mets than for the lunar landing.

And, really, after forty years, you have to look back - at least, some of us look back - and wonder; what the fuck?

Riley over at Bats Left/Throws Right pretty much nails it. The space program was born, grew, and died like a mayfly, in 1969, It didn't die because somehow we jacked the money to bomb Vietnam or give food stamps to Negroes.

"It died because it's damned near at the edge of what we might accomplish provided we threw everything we've got into it (and if we haven't learned from doing that several times over that the main thing it accomplishes is bankruptcy, then we've been paying even less attention than we appear to be), and means fucking nothing whatsoever to anyone above the mental age of eleven..."

The reality is that Einstein's Wall makes interstellar travel impractical unless you're willing to construct monstrous argosies that will carry, in effect, little Earths, voyaging for countless generations through the empty voids between the stars. Even assuming the idea was practical - and the ill-fated "Biosphere" experiments suggest that we are, at best, generations away from a workable model, no nation could afford it. Mars and Venus, the closest planetary objects to us, cannot support life, and the remaining planets are even worse.

Nope. We're stuck on this planet save for in the imagination of sci-fi fans, books and movies. The "moon shots" were a one-off, a vastly expensive, mildly entertaining bit of government pork thrown at the military, useful for collecting some rather valuable geologic data but otherwise sterile. The fact that there are mental ten-year-olds presently in elective office that seem to think that sending a human being to Mars is a good idea says more about our electoral process than it does about the value of the idea.

So I guess I understand why the "celebration" of the anniversary of Apollo 11's landing was so muted.

Who celebrates the puberty of a eunuch?

Update 7/21 pm: I want to hammer this home - I'm not saying this stuff just to be curmudgeonly. The IDEAL of space exploration, of humanity finding a way to the stars, is a terrific one. Not only for the pure knowledge and adventure of it - being confined to a single planet is begging for extinction. But here's my deal; why are we celebrating our piddly little "dream" of flag-waving Yankee Doodle moon shots? Why not dream REALLY big? An "Ark in Space", the real chance to give the human race a shot at a future beyond the lifetime of our star?

National space progams like the Apollo missions, IMO, are the problem, not the solution. They divide the human race, forcing nation to compete against nation, militarizing the space programs and condemning us to farting around near the Earth's orbit for the next ten generations.

The real dream is up there. But the groundwork for the dream is here, on Earth, and it involves moving beyond the Apollo-type missions to real, global cooperation and exploration and, yes, commercialization, of space.The day we see the launch of the "Nostromo" from Kaiser's orbiting shipyard near Ceres, with a commercial crew and funding from Reynolds Metals, will be the true culmination of the dream of space exploration. At that point we will truly be reaching out into space, rather than simply using it as a void through which to swing a fist.

Why I'm Not an Engineer

Because this is how I felt in calculus.

Is there something you feel this way about?

What is it?

I dread the moment when a high-school-age Peeper or Missy comes to me with a textbook and asks: "Daddy, can you help me with this math problem..?" It's not that I can't do the math, it's just that I don't have a "feel" for the science and I tend to make foolish mistakes. I used to have a sharp BCS operator that I relied on to recheck my checks of firing data before I sent them on to the line of steel. I'm just not a natural math-type guy.

While we're talking about stuff we didn't do well in school, here's a couple of science test bolos who at least tried to go with imagination when actual knowledge failed them. Hey, it's worth a try, right?Okay. Not the answer I was looking for but shows a fine degree of common sense.Nature hates a vacuum. And a smartass.And there's always one out there that looks for a seamy underside to everything. Jathin is unlikely to make the grade as a marine engineer, but he looks to have promise as a Fox News anchor. Except he needs to find a way to tie the whole thing to Bill Clinton's penis. Keep on after it, Jathin. The Lure of the Clenis has GOT to be involved in that problem somewhere. Everything wrong with Man and Nature is connected in some way to the Clenis.