Here and There

Huffington Post reports.

A cool demonstration of a very realistic android, and an academic type talking about humans’ reaction to it version a more mechanical looking robot. There’s talk of mirror neurons in here, so I’m excited.

Thx: Sullivan

Thx: Alexis at Wired.com

From Wired.com.

In a nutshell, it’s important, and candidates aren’t exactly being forthcoming about their beliefs.

Yes, I’m unabashedly brand loyal, but it’s because of items like this that I love the Google.

Exactly what Google’s founders did, announced today.

Super-ultra-uber-cool stuff about a primitive form of communication, from The New York Times.

* How are SPF levels determined? From listening to the Slate Explainer podcast, which I do from time to time: So what they do is get a little study group together, made up entirely of people who burn easily. There’s a scale for skin type, a spectrum ranging from blondes and redheads all the way to dark brown skin. The ones they use for the tests are on the light end, naturally. They simulate UV rays on a small patch of subjects’ skin, and see how long it takes to burn. Then they repeat the experiment with the product being tested and record the time it takes to burn. After a simple bit of math, they derive the SPF.

* The origin of the word “galaxy.” From a photo caption in the latest New Yorker. It comes from the Greek word for “milk,” or “galakt,” according to wikipedia.

* Not learned as much as reminded: “Your Love” (”I Don’t Want to Lose Your Love Tonight”) was written and performed by a band called The Outfield (who, amazingly, are still together). Heard the song at a bar the night before, and couldn’t for the life of me remember who it was.

I respectfully disagree with a new study that reportedly shows that first-born children tend to be smarter than their younger siblings.

I’m sure it’s the kind of thing that was determined, say, in ancient Greece …

But as I was attempting to get back to sleep around 5 a.m., I wondered for the first time really, Just how fast is the earth moving in its annual trips around the sun?

I set myself to the task of determining this on my own. Here’s my estimate:

Based upon three sources (1, 2, 3), I came up with an average for the length of the earth’s orbit of 580,705,545 miles. I then calculated the amount of hours per year (a simple 365 x 24 will do for an estimate, thank you), and got 8,760 hours. I divided the length by the number of hours and got 66,290.587 mph. I decided to take it a couple steps deeper: next was speed per minute (1,104.431 miles) followed by miles per second (18.414052 miles).

So there you have it. Since I started writing this post, the planet we’re all on has hurled about 5,522 miles through space. Thank you, sun, for keeping us in your orbit.

Nothing really shocking or new in the latest UN panel of scientists’ report on climate change, but still, I’m depressed.

Maybe.

Scientists have discovered a single gene responsible for the greatest size variance found in any species of mammal. Behold, the dog … small and ferocious. Large and timid. And everything in between.

I have this problem. I work at a newspaper that, handicaps and all, does a pretty job with its limited local coverage, draws state, nation, and world stories almost exclusively from the wire, has a solid sports reputation, ditto business, but, when it comes to its two pages of editorials, well, let’s just say those pages also have a solid reputation.

It happens to be a socially conservative, libertarian reputation, and a deserved one.

More than a few editorials have come across the copy desk that repulsed me to the point of wanting to quit the job in protest. But I suck it up, remember that I need that paycheck to pay rent, and pass the page off to someone who can stomach it.

But the other day, we ran this, about a British program countering Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and going on about why the notion that global warming is caused or accelerated by human activity, and that we must thus take action to counter the effects, is hogwash.

I could let you read this completely unscientific, cherry-picked nonsense for yourself, but that would be like cheating. So here are my main issues:

1. The author, S. Fred Singer, says, “… the Antarctic is cooling while models predict warming.” Okay, I’m no scientist, but NASA has shown (and explained) why Antarctica “warmed around the perimeter from 1982 to 2004, where huge icebergs calved and some ice shelves disintegrated, it cooled closer to the pole.” One possible explanation is that “the warmer temperatures in the surrounding ocean have produced more precipitation in the continent’s interior, and this increased snowfall has cooled the high-altitude region around the pole.” Other explanations are more complex. Read what NASA has to say.

2. Singer says, “Observations in ice cores show that temperature increases have preceded — not resulted from — increases in CO2, by hundreds of years, suggesting that the warming of the oceans is an important source of the rise in atmospheric CO2.” While that may be true, it has never been within a species’ control to limit the amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. With humans, obviously, it is. And please don’t dispute the fact that CO2 levels are rising, or that because water vapor is simply more abundant in terms of greenhouse gases, it’s more relevant. NOAA states that greenhouse gases, such as CO2 and other trace gases from human activity, are increasing. And the U.S. government’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center clearly states that “both hemispheres were warming at a rate of 0.5°C/100 yrs.”

3. From such very flimsy bases, Singer then posits that warming is part of a natural trend dating back millions of years. That’s analogous to saying, “Never mind the stock market crash and the evaporation of all your money. Historically, the market trends upward.” It also brushes over the causes of the warming.

4. The point of the op-ed is counter the idea that we have to do something about the warming now. That we must alter our planetary behavior to reduce the damage we’re doing to the atmosphere and the planet and all life on it. If you proceed from the basis that we’re not causing the warming, your conclusion is given. No need to limit or control CO2 releases; no need for “uneconomic” alternative energy sources (aha! the motivations reveal themselves).

One thing I may never understand is the economic argument. If demand shifts to renewable energy, isn’t there money to made there? I mean, can’t the five white guys who own everything now simply sell their stakes in fossil fuels and reinvest in wind, tidal, solar, ethanol, and hydrogen sources (and the like)?

One other thought: It’s a misnomer to say that the warming happening now isn’t natural. Humans are part of nature, too, right? The point is that the evidence is simply overwhelming now that humans are causing the chain reaction causing climate change, and anyone calling themselves a scientist should look at their own paycheck and question the rigorousness of their evaluations.

Related links:
Pew Center on Global Climate Change
Australia’s Uranium Information Centre
NASA’s list of climate change resources
More from NOAA
U.S. Climate Change Science Program
RealClimate
Science magazine
The Environmental Protection Agency