Friday Ephemera
Loving the neighbours. // Vilayanur Ramachandran on phantom limb pain. // Levitating lamp. Not a pretty thing. More. (h/t, Microscopics.) // Images, maps and films of Saturn and its moons. // The Giant Impact Hypothesis. How the Moon came to be, probably. // Soviets in space matchboxes. (h/t, Monoscope.) // Google Sky. // Flash Earth. // A layman’s critique of catastrophic man-made global warming theory. More. (h/t, The Thin Man.) // Impressive bridges. (h/t, Stephen Hicks.) // The Millau Viaduct. A personal favourite. // How to move an obelisk. // On the evils of lipstick and infidel fashions: “Our prayers become unfocused and our sleep is often disturbed.” // “In only a minority of institutions – approximately 25 per cent – was radical material found.” // Robert Spencer on “Islamophobia”. // The not-so-secret sins of faded revolutionaries. // “The true social parasites are those who demand collectivism for other people while being themselves relatively protected from its consequences.” // What is typography? // Via Coudal, making spiders from scissors. // Make your own Bumble Bee Transformer. // Chinese toy factory workers. // A range of Tokyo vending machines. // One particular vending machine, photographed repeatedly by Ryuuichi Ikeda. Every day, for two years. More. (h/t, 1+1=3.) // South Park: Imaginationland, part 3. Will Butters save the day? // Aroma advertising. (h/t, Metrolander.) // Aromatherapy pens. // Hitler’s flatulence. // Beef made easy. Loin, sirloin, shank and brisket. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s pork chops and gravy.
Ah yes, neighbours. Epicurus said, “Whatever you can provide yourself with to secure protection from men is a natural good”. And de gustibus non est disputandum and all that: I think the bridges are beautiful. Thanks, David.
I predict that men for whom women give sleepless nights are going to loose the battle in the long run, due to lack of sleep. I mean, get over it honey. If you’re doing it right, you sleep more soundly, not less (speaking as a male here of course – is that still allowed).
As to Prof. Moonbat’s “core argument, which he explains at greater length in his books, is that humans, being the products of natural selection, act only in their own interests”: well, yeah, the definition of life is selfish competition. The objective for the moral man is to not proceed past the boundary conditions of merit and selfish satisfaction into the destructive realms of greed, envy, jealousy, pride, avarice, and hubris. Sigh.
And never mind Hitler’s flatulence, what about – http://tinyurl.com/3dokxd – Marx’s carbuncles:
“In addition to reducing his ability to work, which contributed to his depressing poverty, hidradenitis greatly reduced his self-esteem,” said Shuster, who published his findings in the British Journal of Dermatology.
“This explains his self-loathing and alienation, a response reflected by the alienation Marx developed in his writing.”
While HS is linked to boil-like lumps, the painful condition also causes more widespread infection, swelling, skin thickening and scarring.
“The bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day”, Marx told Friedrich Engels in a letter from 1867.”
I leave you with this damning indictment of “big” bureaucracies: “Care Enough to Smoke?” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_LutWBunb4 – because as Abe Lincoln said, “I never trusted a man who never smoked or drank”.
On a perhaps interesting parallel matter of mechanism, I note that as I see it here, David, today’s Friday Ephemera was posted at 05:45. And I note that my comment at 08:57 blog time was posted here at my time of 02:57, indicating a 6 hour time zone difference.
Yet when I calibrated my DTFE History curve – http://tinyurl.com/2dm5cr – I based it on posting timestamps that indicated a 7 hour time difference between here and there. So that would mean that today’s 05:45 would be 06:45 by the old metric: still quite early but at least thankfully not frighteningly so.
What does that mean, you may well ask? Well, of course, simply that the disparate global time zone adjustment rules we can’t seem to stop tinkering with are wacky yet again – it’s that time of year. I wonder if we’ll resync in a week or so as the various standards return to traditionally intersecting zones, allowing our poor suffering technology to catch up once again with the foibles of our petulance for change in the name of “something must be done”, and “this is something”?
I think it would be better if everyone just used Greenwich Mean Time for everything and people locally normatively just slept at varying times, with seasonal adjustments per local custom, but apparently my fellow species does not agree with me on that.
I mean, who cares what time the whistle blows, it remains the case that the wheels must turn: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bj4xWuM86GE
Hi. I watched the Climate Skeptic video.
This topic fascinates me. I like to support the underdog, the unfashionable opinion, so I’m naturally drawn to people like the Climate Skeptic. But the truth is, I’m out of my depth with the science. I just don’t know who’s right on this one.
But even if man-made global warming is real, how do we respond to it? That’s where I disagree with the greens. Their only response is rationing, retreat, scaling down, doing less. They seem to consider rationing virtuous in itself, for seemingly religious reasons. Taking holidays on cheap flights is sinful, because you might enjoy yourself too much. It’s religious puritanism, not science.
Some scientists have proposed technical ways to lower the climate. I read a green say that we shouldn’t try any of these technical fixes. Why? Because they might actually work. And if they work, people won’t “make the sacrifices”. So the real point isn’t to control the climate, it’s to “make the sacrifices”. In Africa, making the sacrifices means staying poor, of course. As far as I can tell the greens actually like poverty. They want to keep the poor poor, and drag the rich down to the level of the poor. Again, this is a religious attitude to poverty…
Georges & Vitruvius,
Re the climate change critique, I don’t mean to imply any rigid position on the subject; but the film is eye-opening and worth watching in full. The highlighted lapses in methodology (and elementary reasoning) are extraordinary – and, it seems to me, inexcusable. Many of the examples given appear to be driven by ideology and funding opportunities, rather than an attempt to fathom what’s actually happening, and why.
Fortunately, if Operation Overlord is successful the world’s climate will be under my personal control.
No it won’t. Talk to the sun.
Operation Overlord is a tau-neutrino generator, so David will be ordering the sun about, not talking to it.
Here’s the http://abductionlamp.com/ it’s much nicer than the levitating lamp.
AC1,
Quite right. And my atomic magnets will also prove invaluable in mastering the Sun. I’ll be needing a chief of secret police, by the way, so bear that in mind. Just to make sure the “restless elements” know their place in the New Order Of Things.
Georges
Now you are getting it! “But the truth is, I’m out of my depth with the science.”
Even our most handsome and photogenic scientographers and knowledgologists are out of their depth with this one. Current levels of understanding of climate and how it works are so far below any level of certainty that we simply cannot trust them.
Remember in the mid 90s, when the Genome Project was going – how this was going to lead to a total understanding of genes – of the RECIPE of life itself. I remember claims that within 10 years, we would all be living to the age of 1,000 and that cancer and disease would be conquered.
What hogwash. This was like claiming that having drawn an AtoZ steet guide of London, you could extrapolate current planning regulations and economic activity and the colour of Londoners shoes – its just nonsense. Same deal with climate change – the bits of the climate we do understand are such tiny, isolated fragments that we cannot expect to answer the questions we are asking.
The fact that we have only recently seen a relation between solar activity, cosmic rays and cloud cover, should SCREAM at us “Your Models are INCOMPLETE – don’t trust them”
I have no idea whether AnthroGlobWarm is real or not. Anybody who argues with certainty that it is real OR that it it not real is pushing a political agenda not a scientific one.
Application For for Post Of Chief of Secret Police.
Qualifications: A mean disposition, experience with all the major causes of death, and the fact that Big Ron and Knuckles MacAllister work for me.
Say why you think you are suited to this position: Everybody else who applied has just mysteriously dissappeared.
The Thin Man,
A recursive simulation with both an imperfect dataset and imperfect model will suffer from an exponential error that will swamp any predictive signal after a small number of iterations.
Since it is IMPOSSIBLE to have a perfect dataset and model (the simulator would have to be the same size as the earth to accurately simulate it) then the longer term predictions (> 2 weeks) of climate models is 100% junk.
AC1
A point well taken. I seem to remember having a similar conversation with Thompson about 10 years ago when he first mooted creating a weather machine that would use tornados and hurricanes to blast his enemies.
I struggled for some time to get him to understand that “the butterfly effect” did not imply that a working prototype could be created using a small battery fan as the power source.
Although I like the idea of greens building a second Earth, just to show us what the effects of climate change would be.
Hopefully we could move them all onto it, and then arrange for a Space 1999 type “nuclear accident” and have this second earth zoom off into the outer reaches……
I see where I went wrong. I wasn’t thinking on a sufficiently grand scale. Thankfully, my plans for the human race have subsequently grown, both in scope and terrible boldness.
Thompson
I keep telling you, a 3 week old bottle of milk and a piece of moldy toast fished out from under the cooker is NOT a working germ warfare division.
Thanks David
I got my obelisk moved.
Saturday Morning Links
Blacks in the top chairs. Tiger. No longer Stan O’Neil, however? Merrill may have pooped in its pants.Everybody jokes about Moslem men preferring goats and camels, but they are being distracted by human females too. The China Connection continues to ge…