Senator Rand Paul Exposes Doctor Fauci

"I was stunned."

I was so happy to read this exciting (yawn) science news about some planet that is supposedly like earth because it reminds me of one of my favorite Jack Handey bits.

I was stunned. But then I was struck by a thought that was even more devastating. What if it wasn't an exact copy of us but instead we were an exact copy of it?  The possibilities were fantastic! What were we like, I wondered. Were we warlike? Did we look like humans?

So it was with great disappointment that I realized I had been aiming the telescope at a picture of Earth on the wall. I had been right after all: it was a duplicate of Earth. And yet it wasn't a planet. I sat back in my chair stunned.

Oh, man... too funny. Read it; you'll use this one, I promise: "What in the name of a supreme being exactly like God was going on here?"

Space Buns?

Always wondered what the proper name of that hairstyle was.

This will really make you think of what it's like to be a space princess in Manhattan. A female space princess, I mean.



I hope this makes male persons of color and non-color reconsider their horrible treatment of space females. I know Lando is a person of color, but so is Yoda. Darth Vader is not a person of color, but he is black and is... challenged. I think.

The CDC finally admits what we suspected

Hat tip Liberty News. Yes, we have suspected that Ebola is easier to contract than, for example, the AIDS virus.

Ebola is a lot easier to catch than health officials have admitted — and can be contracted by contact with a doorknob contaminated by a sneeze from an infected person an hour or more before, experts told The Post Tuesday.

“If you are sniffling and sneezing, you produce microorganisms that can get on stuff in a room. If people touch them, they could be” infected, said Dr. Meryl Nass, of the Institute for Public Accuracy in Washington, DC.

Nass pointed to a poster the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quietly released on its Web site saying the deadly virus can be spread through “droplets.”

“Droplet spread happens when germs traveling inside droplets that are coughed or sneezed from a sick person enter the eyes, nose or mouth of another person,” the poster states.

No, we shouldn't panic, but we like information when information reflects the Truth. Knowledge is power, and should lead to preparedness.

They deserve it

These guys deserve the prize for figuring out how to made blue light come out of a semiconductor. Excerpt:

When Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura produced bright blue light beams from their semi-conductors in the early 1990s, they triggered a funda-mental transformation of lighting technology. Red and green diodes had been around for a long time but without blue light, white lamps could not be created. Despite considerable efforts, both in the scientific community and in industry, the blue LED had remained a challenge for three decades.

They succeeded where everyone else had failed. Akasaki worked together with Amano at the University of Nagoya, while Nakamura was employed at Nichia Chemicals, a small company in Tokushima. Their inventions were revolutionary. Incandescent light bulbs lit the 20th century; the 21st century will be lit by LED lamps.

Bonus points for relegating the twisty-bulb to the ash heap of history.

Cancer Survival Odds: Government Health Care Sucks

The Net Right Nation blog reports on "Cancer Survival Rates With Government-Run Care". Excerpt:

Prostate Cancer Awareness Month has just ended, so it is timely to bring to mind the innovation and capability of the American doctors and researchers who have made America’s prostate cancer survival rates the highest in the world. Americans’ five-year survival rate is 91.0%. It beats out the Canadian survival rate of 85.1%, trounces Europe’s 57.1%, and obliterates England’s 50.9%. As Democrats in Congress seek to make America’s health care more like the government-run bureaucracies in these other countries, I cannot help but fear that our survival rates will decline.

Here's a chart from the article.

"Coercive Technique" used in Jesse Tree Reading

Our Jesse Tree reading for today was I Kings 3:3-28. That's where Solomon asks God for wisdom, then figures out who the real hooker mom is by threatening to chop the baby in half. I remembered joking to myself, "Wow, there's an advanced interrogation method if I ever saw one." I guess it's a good thing we have DNA testing now.

I also remembered to leave out the word "harlot" when I read the story to my kids. I didn't feel like being interrogated by an agressive five-year-old on what that word means.

Sense Amid the Fear-mongering

Every since I heard Bjørn Lomborg interviewed on the radio for his new book, Cool It, I've wanted to check it out. From the Amazon.com review by author Michael Crichton:

Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming will further enhance Lomborg’s reputation for global analysis and thoughtful response. For anyone who wants an overview of the global warming debate from an objective source, this brief text is a perfect place to start. Lomborg is only interested in real problems, and he has no patience with media fear-mongering; he begins by dispatching the myth of the endangered polar bears, showing that this Disneyesque cartoon has no relevance to the real world where polar bear populations are in fact increasing. Lomborg considers the issue in detail, citing sources from Al Gore to the World Wildlife Fund, then demonstrating that polar bear populations have actually increased five fold since the 1960s.

Lomborg then works his way through the concerns we hear so much about: higher temperatures, heat deaths, species extinctions, the cost of cutting carbon, the technology to do it. Lomborg believes firmly in climate change--despite his critics, he's no denier--but his fact-based approach, grounded in economic analyses, leads him again and again to a different view. He reviews published estimates of the cost of climate change, and the cost of addressing it, and concludes that "we actually end up paying more for a partial solution than the cost of the entire problem. That is a bad deal."

In some of the most disturbing chapters, Lomborg recounts what leading climate figures have said about anyone who questions the orthodoxy, thus demonstrating the illiberal, antidemocratic tone of the current debate. Lomborg himself takes the larger view, explaining in detail why the tone of hysteria is inappropriate to addressing the problems we face.

In the interview, which was on Prager's show, he showed himself to be sensible and uninterested in the standard utopianist screeds about who's to blame. Basically he 1) firmly believes that global climate change presents a problem, 2) believes that it is to a great extent caused by human activity and 3) looking at reality, concludes current proposals to address it are wrongheaded. So he separates the facts from the fear-mongering. He gets attacked, of course, for not partaking of the envirofreak koolaid. But he's on Time's influential 100 list, and his detractors are probably out smoking homegrown and griping. This made me laugh:

Lomborg was not the first to say these things, but he hit a nerve. Environmentalists reacted to him in the way that corporate public relations departments had learned not to react to them: by fanning the flames with intemperate attacks. He was vilified in Scientific American magazine. He was found guilty of "scientific dishonesty" by a national committee of Danish scientists (the verdict was later overturned by the academy). With each attack, sales of his book boomed. And try as they might, the critics could not paint this mild-mannered, bicycle-riding, leftish vegetarian as a corporate apologist.

So he's smart, healthy, and these dweebs helped him get rich -- good for him. I'll bet he rides a really nice bike.

As an example of his practical, big-picture view from his radio interview, he agreed that global warming will be a boon to the Anopheles Mosquito, ergo more cases of malaria for those in prone areas. But he points out that in regards to human victims of the disease, poverty will still be a much greater indicator for fatalities than temperature and climate. So resources committed to forcing nations to comply with greenhouse gas emissions standards would be better spent in providing nets and medicines to those potential victims.

But this argument probably only appeals to me because I'm a human who is more interested in helping other, especially poorer, humans than in sticking it to richer humans. If any non-humans, sub-humans, space aliens, human-animal hybrids, envirodorks or anopheles mosquitoes would like to comment, please do so.

"Scribblers" and Scientific Chastity

Oswald Sobrino posts on a book by Sir Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery. The book was first published in 1934 and most recently reissued in 2002. Mr. Sobrino provides some excerpts from this edition to "help us keep scientific claims in perspective, especially when those claims are pushed forward by non-scientists." His insightful conclusion:

Popper offers a chastened view of scientific claims that most scientists, I think, share; but that few non-scientists are aware of due to the fact that we are so dazzled, as outsiders, by so much scientific achievement in the modern era. In contrast, we have unrestrained scribblers, usually non-scientists, who do not show the restraint of scientists. Well, we live in a society that is, in many ways, out of control -- temperance or chastity are just not the marks of American culture today. To be chaste is not just a sexual virtue. To be chaste is a virtue of humble restraint needed throughout the culture. The lack of temperance courses through our culture from the highly personal aspects of life to the highly public claims of pseudo-scientists. Maybe, there is a testable link.

What would be an example of this kind of link? Could one be a link between people who are into "free love" and, like, totally freaked out by man-made global warming? Maybe... I don't know if it's testable; I'm a non-scientist. But I'm not sure if it really needs to be tested either.

Platonic Paulihedra

You can't make anything up anymore. Like for instance, I was just in the men's room polishing my head with a damp paper towel when I imagined an internet quiz called "Which regular polyhedron are you?" This caused me to chuckle about how clever and original my ideas are.

Precautionary googling revealed that of course, such a thing already exists, duh.

I guess the "cat's out the bag" as they say in my old nabe. I'm a D&D-style geek. But the odds of my readers not picking that up by now are approximately the same as successfully navigating an asteroid field, i.e., 3,720 to 1. That's equivalent to rolling a 7 on a dodecahedron 310 times in a row.

So what do you think? Is the quiz accurate? I'm especially anxious to read Tom's assessment of this quiz.

"You are the rare, the overlooked, yet incredibly useful dodecahedron: the d12. You are a creative, romantic soul. You often act without thinking, but make up for your lack of plans with plenty of heart. You easily solve problems that stump others, but your answers tend to put you into even deeper trouble. You write long, detailed backgrounds for all your characters, and are most likely to dress up as one or get involved in cos-play. You can be silly at times and are easily distracted by your own day dreams, but are at the end of the day you're someone who can be depended on."

Doesn't mention that I can be duplicated by an old 6-sided die and a coin toss, heads add six. So much for "incredible usefulness."

Who's going to teach the Saudis to surf?

This ought to make Sponge Bob the next Donald Trump.

A former broadcaster has reportedly discovered that salt water will burn when exposed to certain radio frequencies, raising the possibility that sea water could someday be used for fuel.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported over the weekend that cancer researcher John Kanzius - who once owned a radio/TV combo in Erie, PA - discovered while experimenting with a frequency generator that the hydrogen in salt water can burn with a 3,000-degree flame when exposed to radio frequencies.

Penn State University chemist Rustum Roy told the Post-Gazette that he was able to re-create Kanzius' results in university laboratories. Roy called the discovery "the most remarkable in water science in 100 years."

Kanzius once co-owned what is now WQHZ-FM in Erie (formerly WJET-FM).
He and partner Myron Jones also owned WJET-TV in that market. Jones was CEO and Kanzius was President of the licensee of both stations, The Jet Broadcasting Co.

If sea water can be used as fuel then I suppose rising sea levels due to global warming will be a good thing. Makes sense. But I'm more excited about the possibility of thumbing our noses at the Arabs while we fly down the highway blasting Jan & Dean tunes on our sea powered Hummers and other "land yachts".