It's the Dust, stupid!

As I've reported here before, Mars is getting warmer. But now an MSM paper has discovered it! Woo!

Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.

Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.

The mechanism at work on Mars appears, however, to be different from that on Earth. One of the researchers, Lori Fenton, believes variations in radiation and temperature across the surface of the Red Planet are generating strong winds.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, she suggests that such winds can stir up giant dust storms, trapping heat and raising the planet’s temperature.

Yeah, dust. Right. Or it could be that the sun is having a 1000 year sunspot maximum and there's more sunlight shining on Mars, which is making for more wind and more dust as well as heating things up.

Naw, it must be my truck doing it.

The truth is like a flounder.

Yes it is.  You kick it under the table and ignore it long enough, it'll start to STINK.

Case in point:  University!

In their forthcoming book Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis, Prof. Côté and his co-author, Anton Allahar, sound the alarm about the demise of higher education, where many students are more interested in the piece of paper they get at the end of their programs than in the intellectual journey along the way, where professors are cowed into watering down courses and bumping up grades, and where universities are run like corporations hawking mass-produced degrees which are increasingly in demand but increasingly meaningless.

The consequences, the authors argue, are a disengaged student body, disillusioned faculty and a glut of bachelor-degree-holding graduates with unrealistically lofty aspirations in for a shock when they land in a job market fuelled by "credentialism" and plagued by under-employment.

Credentialism!  This is what you get when people are assumed to be incompetent morons unless proven otherwise.  Doesn't matter a damn if you can DO the job, you have to have the right paperwork. 

Kids are preparing for the workplace the best way they can.  They sleep through the indoctrination, browbeat the gatekeepers into punching the damn ticket and get the hell out ASAP.  That they don't know anything and can't do anything is irrelevant so long as they got the ticket!  If they schmooze well they can parlay their incompetence into a pretty decent sinecure in one of the many layers of public or corporate bureaucracy modern life is infested with.  Kids learn early that the system rewards popularity, not ability.

Problem is this credential madness leads to poor performance in corporations and government.   Guys have the ticket, they look good in the suit and they can bafflegab with the best of 'em, but they can't do the friggin' job.  Leading to countries like China eating our lunch.

That'd be the bad smell from kicking truth under the table too much.

The Smelly Phantom

Blasting the myths

Dear Ms. Marsden,

I was surprised to read your article "Blasting the Myths" in the Sun today.  Equating nukes with handguns is the kind of rhetorical trick I usually expect from a Liberal.

Do you know why Palestinian terrorists use suicide bombs?  The Palestinians discovered 20 years ago that when their death squads tried to stage a massacre in some school or store or theater, they'd get killed  before they could empty a magazine.  Whoever was in the crowd would immediately return fire, long before the IDF showed up with heavy weapons.  Mr. Terrorist would whip an AK out, and some old grandma would blast him.

Bystanders.  Killing terrorists.  With handguns!  In Israeli cities.

But it can't happen here because people like you, Rachel Marsden, hold your fellow Canadians in contempt.  You trust the increasingly corrupt and incompetent Federal government apparatus more than the average Joe.  That's not Conservatism.  That's the same mentality that drives our high tax rates, runaway regulations, the cult of PC victim hood and absurdities like Kyoto.  People are too stupid, venal, wasteful and bigoted to be allowed freedom. They must be controlled by the gentle but firm hand of their betters. 

That's gun control Ms. Marsden.  You want that for our country, you need to join your intellectual brothers and sisters in the Liberal party.

You also need to learn a little about guns before you start raving on about pistols.  The Virginia Tech killer had to shoot his victims multiple times to kill them because he used a handgun.  Had he been using a common deer rifle or shotgun, one round each would have sufficed.  Rifles are considerably more destructive than pistols.  We do not want the nut cases switching to rifles.

If you want to opine on these issues and not appear uninformed and indeed silly, do some homework eh?

The Phantom
http://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.com/

New clot finder prototype tested in India.

On a day in which we are being inundated with bad news from Virginia Tech, I thought I'd look at something good instead.  Just to be contrary.

So here it is, a portable device that they claim can image CVAs.

The device, called an "infrascanner", can spot blood clots on the surface of the brain known as haematomas, which can lead to death or disability if left untreated.

It is being tested in India, but if successful it could have benefits for patients anywhere.

<snipola>

The infrascanner uses harmless "near-infra-red" light - like that in a TV remote control.

The light beam penetrates the skull up to three centimetres.

A blood clot absorbs near-infra-red light differently to normal brain tissue and the signal is bounced back to the scanner.

The tech then views the results on a computer or even a PDA.  There's a picture of the whole lash up in the article.  Looks like a really sweet piece of kit, particularly for ambulances, emergency rooms and old folks homes.

The nice part is it'll be cheap enough to become wide spread in use, just like the portable defibrillator.  This will hopefully allow lots of clots to get diagnosed early enough for those miracle clot-buster drugs to have a shot at fixing up the patient.

So there you go, some good news on a bad day.

The Clot Bustin' Contrary Phantom

Fun with Photons

I confess.  I'm a tool guy.  If there's a tool I don't have, I want one.  If there's a tool I do have, I'm dying for a chance to use it.  Welders, chisels, makes no difference I love them all.

When I hear about a new tool to do something completely nuts, I love that too.  NIST just posted a few kewl things on Eureka Alert.  This one's a beauty.

In a significant improvement on previous designs, physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have devised a system that delivers such pairs with great efficiency over a wide range of energy, and with very little noise from extraneous photons.

While it doesn't reveal new properties of quantum entanglement itself, it does provide lots of entangled photons, cheap.  Awesome.

How about quantum dot lasers?

Quantum dots are nanoscale regions in a crystal structure that can trap electrons and “holes,” the charge carriers that transport current in a semiconductor. When a trapped electron-hole pair recombines, light of a specific frequency is emitted. Quantum-dot lasers have attracted attention as possible embedded communications devices not only for their small size, but because they switch on with far less power then even the solid-state lasers used in DVD players.

In recent experiments*, the NIST-Stanford-Northwestern team made “microdisk” lasers by layering indium arsenide on top of gallium arsenide. The mismatch between the different-sized atomic lattices forms indium arsenide islands, about 25 nanometers across, that act as quantum dots. The physicists then etched out disks, 1.8 micrometers across and containing about 130 quantum dots, sitting atop gallium arsenide pillars.

Intel processors right now are made on a 65 nanometer lithographic process.  They will be going to 45 nanometers pretty soon.  That's high production commercial kit.  25 nanometer feature size isn't too long away.  Kewl!

The Photonic Phantom

Sunspots at 1000 year high.

Notwithstanding Algore, Dr. Fruitfly Suzuki and the Global Warming Host, there seems to be an under-reported issue in the present climate.  Sunspots!

Dr Solanki is presenting a paper on the reconstruction of past solar activity at Cool Stars, Stellar Systems And The Sun, a conference in Hamburg, Germany.

He says that the reconstruction shows the Maunder Minimum and the other minima that are known in the past thousand years.

But the most striking feature, he says, is that looking at the past 1,150 years the Sun has never been as active as it has been during the past 60 years.

Over the past few hundred years, there has been a steady increase in the numbers of sunspots, a trend that has accelerated in the past century, just at the time when the Earth has been getting warmer.

The data suggests that changing solar activity is influencing in some way the global climate causing the world to get warmer.

Over the past 20 years, however, the number of sunspots has remained roughly constant, yet the average temperature of the Earth has continued to increase.

This is put down to a human-produced greenhouse effect caused by the combustion of fossil fuels.

This latest analysis shows that the Sun has had a considerable indirect influence on the global climate in the past, causing the Earth to warm or chill, and that mankind is amplifying the Sun's latest attempt to warm the Earth.

They had to stick that line in there about human greenhouse effect, but conveniently ignore the measurements of Mars' warming over the last few years.  As I've mentioned here before, that by itself is more than enough to account for the 1/2 degree C increase over the last 20 years we've seen.  The .5C is the only measurement the global warming propagandists have.  Everything else is computer models.

Rage on Algore, I'm going to keep driving my truck.

The Phantom

Vimy Ridge 90th memorial

To commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, I thought I'd post this link to Google Maps, give you all a view of Vimy from the air.  In the center is the wooded park, which has some trenches etc. restored.  If you zoom in you can see lots of evidence of the craters and trenches of 90 years ago.

Here's a link to a good overview of the battle in the Globe and Mail.

The Phantom

Daylight saving change saves no fuel.

This is why we need less government.

As it turns out, the US Department of Energy (and almost everyone else except members of Congress) was correct when they predicted that there would be little energy savings. This echoed concerns voiced after a similar experiment was attempted in Australia. Critics pointed out a basic fact: the gains in the morning will be offset by the losses at night, and vice-versa, at both ends of the switch. That appears to be exactly what happened.

Reuters spoke with Jason Cuevas, spokesman for Southern Co. power, who said it plainly: "We haven't seen any measurable impact." New Jersey's Public Service Enterprise Group said the same thing: "no impact" on their business.

So while the US government pats itself on the back for at least looking busy, know that the main goal—energy conservation—has not been met. We can still argue over other supposed benefits, like the supposed reduction in crime (which returns in November?) and the fact that many people seem to simply like the change. As far as the purpose of the move is concerned, that appears to be a total flop.

What's really scary here is this is just the Kyoto Accord on a smaller scale.  You want to see what will happen if carbon credits are fully implemented, just take the costs incurred by this little piece of waste motion and add six or seven zeros.  Total impact on The Environment (caps to indicate an actual entity, like The Church) will be zero, but by George those socialists will look like they Really
Care (TM).

People in government Being Seen Doing Something, on my dime.  Tax cut now please!  Twenty percent per year for ten years will be a good start.

The Phantom

new stroke treatment technique

Ah, finally some GOOD news for a change.   Clever lads and lassies at MIT have come up with a robotic assist for stroke patients.

The wearable, portable, lightweight robotic brace slides onto the arm. By sensing the patient's electrical muscle activity through electromyography (EMG)--which detects muscle cells' electrical activity when they contract--and sending that data to a motor, it allows stroke patients to control their affected limbs.

When used under the supervision of an occupational or physical therapist, the device can be used to help patients progress from basic motor training, such as lifting boxes or reaching for a light switch, to more complex tasks such as carrying a laundry basket or flipping a light on and off while holding an object with the unaffected limb.

According to the study researchers--Dr. Joel Stein, Kathryn Krebs and Richard Hughes of Harvard Medical School and Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and MIT graduates Kailas Narendran and John McBean--even people who have experienced a stroke years ago may be able to use the device to regain mobility.

In my experience, and more importantly according to previous studies of NDT assisted movement techniques, this should work really, really well.  The problem with NDT and all the other manual therapies for stroke is not that they don't work.  The problem is expense.  You need a highly trained therapist doing the treatment, whose time is worth about $100 bucks an hour.  This device can continue the treatment when the therapist is not there, at a huge cost reduction to the patient.

Friggin awesome.  I want one!

The Phantom

No, you are NOT paranoid enough.

My last two missives relate to sneaky things you can do with computers that amount to tech toys for boys.  Here's what the Big Kids have been doing.

Quite a few people have by now read about AOL’s new Skyhook “Near Me” buddy plugin. That’s the plug-in for the service which lets you know if any of your buddies are geographically near to you, and puts them in a “Near Me” buddies group.

But what far fewer people realize is exactly how it works. How does it know when you are geographically near one of your buddies?

The answer may surprise - and concern - you.

The underlying technology is provided by Skyhook Wireless. According to news sources, Skyhook has spent the past several years “driving a fleet of 200 trucks up and down the streets of 2,500 cities and towns across the United States and Canada,” mapping every single wireless router. Not just commercial hotspot routers. They openly admit that their trucks “scan for the pulse given off at least once a second by every home wireless router or commercial hotspot, recording the unique identifying code for that piece of Wi-Fi equipment.”

Then, that code - of your home wireless router “is correlated with the exact physical location where it was captured using GPS in the trucks, which cruise the streets at 15 to 50 miles (24 to 80 kilometers) per hour as they collect this information.”

Yes my friends, these guys have done something that even the East German Stazi couldn't dream up.  They made a map of every wi-fi router in North America.  Yes, including yours.  But not including mine.  Being the nasty suspicious type that I am, I don't use one.  I don't like the idea of a router that broadcasts to the great outdoors.  Looks like I was right to be a little concerned.

This isn't even the government, its just a small private company.  I can't imagine what the real Big Brother guys are doing.

The Phantom

Fighting Little Brother on the cheap.

We saw in the previous post that Big Brother's annoying sibling is getting pretty capable.  But all is not lost, kids!  Uncle Phantom found some keen-o neat-o Linux stuff you can run on that cheapo wireless router collecting dust in the back of your closet.

Check out the OpenWRT project. OpenWRT is a Linux distribution for embedded devices, and it brings a lot of exciting possibilities to your humble wireless router. Although still in its release candidate stage (currently at RC6), OpenWRT is very usable and feature-rich right out of the box. Be warned, you could void your manufacturer warranty by installing OpenWRT on your wireless routers.

So what can you do with an embedded Linux device running on limited RAM and very small storage? As it turns out, quite a lot actually. You can install asterisk, and have your personal, customizable PBX (private branch exchange). If you already have a SIP phone or some kind of VoIP phone interface (such as the Cisco ATA 186 adapter), you can have your very own VoIP system at home, all running out of your low power-consumption embedded hardware.

Put your router/firewall on steroids by installing packages like nmap (network security scanner), snort (intrusion detection), and tcpdump (packet sniffer). Together with iptables (which comes with the Linux kernel), you can turn your OpenWRT box into a powerful security tool. Install openvpn, and you have a very affordable VPN device. And if it strikes your fancy, you can install quagga and turn your dusty little Linksys into an OSPF and BGP-capable router.

Want to provide your own wireless hotspot? No problem. Install chillispot, and you are ready to go. You can even install FreeRADIUS on the OpenWRT for the authentication back-end, and WPA (wifi protected access) for the added security.

You can turn it into an all purpose office server by installing DHCP, cups (print server), lighthttpd (web server), NTP (time server) and OpenSSH or dropbear (secure remote administration). If your router has a USB port, you can also turn it into a file server by hooking it up with a USB hard drive and installing NFS.

And don’t forget that this is a wireless router. It has a wireless card, so take advantage of it! Install kismet on it, and you have a wireless sniffer. This can prove to be invaluable if you ever need to analyze the airwaves at a remote location, but don’t want to leave your expensive laptop on-site. Drop in place a $50 OpenWRT box loaded with kismet instead.

You can use this stuff to secure your home network like Fort Knox.  It won't keep Big Brother out (because he will kick in your front door at 3AM if he REALLY wants something), but it will certainly make Little Brother's life difficult.

The Phantom

How secure is your Bluetooth gizmo?

How secure is your Bluetooth enabled whatchamacallit?  Good question eh?  That Bluetooth phone has lots of stuff in it, so does your PDA, laptop, all kindsa stuff.

The answer, unfortunately, is not very.  Nope, not at all really.

The above links are to an article that describes how some kids built a Bluetooth "sniper rifle" style sniffer that can detect, and fiddle with, Bluetooth devices at a mile or more away.  The guts of it is a large antenna (which one could make pretty quick out of a wok) and a Gumstix computer the size of a pack of, you guessed it, gum.  Stir in some solder and a bit of time and shazam! you've got a big ear on the world.  Did I mention these are kids?

We've been aware for quite a while now that Big Brother is listening and watching ever closer.  There's nothing the government can't crack or find out about on line, given time.  If its on a computer, its theirs.  Big Brother sees all.

This thing here is different.  This is what I'm going to call Little Brother.  Big Brother's annoying younger sibling.  Little Brother is getting pretty sneaky these days, so just take care what you put on your wireless devices.

The Phantom

Idiotic blast from the past.

While on the subject of idiocy we need to protect ourselves from, Wendy Cukier is once again climbing up on the bodies of slain innocents to shriek lies.  Same lies as always, same strident shriek.  Military weapons are DIFFERENT than mere semi-automatic hunting rifles, hunting rifles are ok except not always, blah blah blah.  But there she is, peddling the same old crap in the Ottawa Citizen.

This article is even less logical than most.  Here's my favorite nonsequiter. Hunting rifles are safe for people to own, buuuut....

There is no doubt that many unrestricted semi-automatic hunting rifles are more powerful than [dealdly military death] guns that are restricted. For example the .338-calibre rifle used to kill Laval police constable Valerie Gignac was called "an elephant gun" by the police chief, because of its firepower. Many of the so-called "duck guns" the Harper government wishes to deregulate are extremely powerful semi-automatics.

That would be, at most, a bolt action .338 rifle such as this Ruger.  The police chief is an idiot, because the .338 is most certainly NOT an elephant gun.  An elephant would shrug off a round of .338 more than long enough to kill your ass.  The .338 is an elk and moose gun.  You want an elephant gun you need to go up to .416 Rigby or a .375 H&H magnum., Wendy's just using the chief's convenient sound-bite to further the lie about the gun and its extreme power being the problem.  She also ignores the fact that a standard issue police vest can be penetrated by pretty much any rifle caliber over .223, and a plaster wall won't slow down anything bigger than a .22 rimfire.

The real problem in this case was the Justice Ministry.  It has an unpleasant habit of leaving violent offenders out on the street until they kill a cop.  Just killing the average schlub isn't considered important enough I guess.

Anyway, to complete the absurdity in the next paragraph Wendy says:

My group, the Coalition for Gun Control would not prohibit semi-automatic rifles designed for hunting or semi-automatic handguns designed for target shooting.

That is probably the biggest fib in this whole piece.  Wendy and her minions live for one thing, and that is to ban the private ownership of firearms in Canada.  I'm quite sure they'd disarm the cops if they could.  Those extremely powerful semi-automatic duck gun owners are Wendy's true target.  Men are scum, men with guns are dangerous scum.  That's Wendy's universe, and she would like to make it yours.  So would the Liberal Party of Canada, as evidenced by all the government money they've slid Wendy over the past 13 years.

In other news, guns don't seem to be the only deadly weapons out there.  I'd make the old joke about a knife registry, but they have one of those in England now and I'm sure some useful idiot is polishing up a letter to the editor on the subject.  Plus I can't be bothered, Wendy has made me tired.

At least 2 dead in Hamilton multiple-stabbing

Updated Sat. Feb. 17 2007 8:35 AM ET

CTV.ca News Staff

Police in Hamilton, Ont. have confirmed two deaths after an overnight multiple stabbing incident at a night club.
The dead men were 18 and 19 years old, CTV News has learned.
Several others were rushed to hospital with undisclosed injuries.
The violence is alleged to have occurred at the Dizzy Weasel hip hop bar.
An employee of a nearby restaurant told CTV he saw one body on the ground covered by a tarp.
Police are investigating the deaths.
More to come...

Seems the boys were quite determined about the whole affair.  It is really quite hard to stab a guy so that he dies right on the spot.  Two guys in the same fight?  That's serious business.

In the long past days when I was a roadie, the difference between Toronto and Hamilton bars was in the fights.  In Hamilton they threw punches and chairs, in Toronto they would use bottles and knives. 25 years of "progressive" justice have left their mark, the knobs in Hamilton have upgraded.  Nice job, justice guys.

Protecting oneself from idiots.

First of all, my thanks to Mr. Al for introducing to me this absolutely excellent speech by Michael Crichton.  He ripped out the best quote on the MSM I've seen in ages.  Upon discovering that the "disaster" of Chernobyl was in fact 99.5% hogwash (!), he went looking to see what else might be.

Now, Chernobyl started me on a new path. As I researched these old fears, to find out what had been said in the past, I made several important discoveries.  The first is that there is nothing more sobering than a 30 year old newspaper. You can’t figure out what the headlines mean. You don’t know who the people are. Theodore Green, John Sparkman, George Reedy, Jack Watson, Kenneth Duberstein. You thumb through page after page of vanished concerns—issues that apparently were vitally important at the time, and now don’t matter at all. It’s amazing how many pressing concerns are literally of the moment. They won’t matter in six months, and certainly not in six years. And if they won’t matter then, are they really worth our attention now?

Well, yes and no.  No, they aren't worth our attention because they are not True, capital "T".  That is, they do not reflect actual reality.  Unfortunately yes, they demand attention because these fake issues and the wall to wall discussion of them in the media mobilize human effort and money just as much or even more than actual real problems.

Case in point A), Canada.  Here we have a whole country that's been living in a friggin' fantasy since the 1970's.  The fantasy even has a name, coined by Mark Steyn:  Trudeaupia.  Here's a book review of the cost this Trudeaupian fantasy has had for us poor residents of Canada.  Peter Worthington:

What makes history professor Jack Granatstein's new book, Whose War Is It?, riveting, is that it's as timely as tomorrow and underlines where Canada has gone wrong, where it needs correcting, and dares challenge conventional dogma.

For those who think Canada is doing everything right, and needs no correcting, consider that our influence on the world stage has steadily diminished since World War II, that we've developed something of a reputation for self-satisfaction, of not pulling our weight on global issues, and -- until Afghanistan -- we were freeloaders in collective defence.

It goes on in the same vein, but for the purpose of my point it illustrates the way 20 million Canadians have been taken for a sleigh ride by idiots who can't tell Truth from fiction.  I managed to see the snow job for what it is after I had lived in the USA for a few years, but I get met with blank stares a lot here when I talk about it.

Case in point B), global warming.  This particular crock is starting to boil over, to the point where we have MSM guys out there seriously suggesting violence be visited on its critics.  And its a CROCK.  It is no less a total crock than fundamentalist Islam, and heading in the same direction.  People are really going to get killed over this crap if we aren't careful.

Case in point C), gun control.  An idea whose time has come and gone already.  High profile politicians have moved on, dedicated gun controllers still riding the train are treated like has-been entertainers.  Nobody cares when Tony Orlando releases a new album, nor do they care when Sarah Brady makes another speech.  But this was the issue that pushed George W. over the top and sank Algore.  Total bullshit, but changed American history.

Case in point D), the North American electrical grid.  It's old, it's crunchy, it's on the ragged edge of catastrophic failure every goddamn day.  What do we hear about this Real, True, actual problem that could leave millions without heat in the winter, pretty much any day?  We hear NOTHING.  Not one thing.  A fire this week in a Toronto capacitor bank caused a major voltage drop across Ontario and New York, re-booted servers all over the place.  Hear about it?  Nuh uh.


Taken together, I'd say we have a serious idiot problem.  As Crighton says,

But most troubling of all, according to the UN report in 2005, is that "the largest public health problem created by the accident" is the "damaging psychological impact [due] to a lack of accurate information…[manifesting] as negative self-assessments of health, belief in a shortened life expectancy, lack of initiative, and dependency on assistance from the state."

 

In other words, the greatest damage to the people of Chernobyl was caused by bad information. These people weren’t blighted by radiation so much as by terrifying but false information.  We ought to ponder, for a minute, exactly what that implies. We demand strict controls on radiation because it is such a health hazard.  But Chernobyl suggests that false information can be a health hazard as damaging as radiation. I am not saying radiation is not a threat. I am not saying Chernobyl was not a genuinely serious event.

 

But thousands of Ukrainians who didn’t die were made invalids out of fear. They were told to be afraid. They were told they were going to die when they weren’t. They were told their children would be deformed when they weren’t. They were told they couldn’t have children when they could. They were authoritatively promised a future of cancer, deformities, pain and decay. It’s no wonder they responded as they did.

 

In fact, we need to recognize that this kind of human response is well-documented. Authoritatively telling people they are going to die can in itself be fatal.

We live in an increasingly powerful society.  There is getting to be very little outside the grasp of the Western nations should we collectively decide we want something.  Wanna go to the moon?  No problem.  Mars?  No problem.  Jupiter?  We'll work on it. 

Currently much of that power is being wasted with these tail-chasing exercises, to the point where it is actually becoming dangerous to us as individuals.  Something like this global warming fuss could seriously damage The West and leave us easy meat for the likes of the Chicoms or some other bunch of friendly totalitarians.

We need to defend ourselves, and in this instance guns are useless.  What's needed is a method for sorting out these useful idiot campaigns and distinguishing them from Reality, Capital "R", then defeating them in the arena of free speech.  I think the Blogosphere is a start on something like that, but far from a whole solution.  Witness who's US House Speaker today if you doubt me.

Suggestions are welcome.

The Phantom

Lying 2007.01-A, the coverage of one's butt.

Our friend Heidi Cullen got a bit more mail (1650+ when I looked) on her last blog entry than she bargained for I guess, because today she has this "clarification". 

Its a classic of the liars method of covering one's butt.  Lie more.

First, you establish you are smarter than your audience.

I am a scientist. And I'm a skeptic.

Then you restate your original lie as being the absolute truth.

AND after more than a century of research -- based on healthy skepticism -- scientists have learned something very important about our planet. It's warming up -- glaciers are melting, sea level is rising and the weather is changing. The primary explanation for this warming is the carbon dioxide released from -- among other things -- the burning of fossil fuels.

Then you categorically deny that you said what you said.

I've read all your comments saying I want to silence meteorologists who are skeptical of the science of global warming. That is not true. The point of my post was never to stifle discussion. It was to raise it to a level that doesn't confuse science and politics. Freedom of scientific expression is essential.

Nothing to see here, you are imagining things, moveon.org please.

Which method worked just fine back in the day, but doesn't cut the mustard in the Internet Era.  'Cause I can go back and read what she said again:

If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval.

Which means:   "Freedom of scientific expression is essential... as long as you are expressing what I want."

Now, in case you were wondering what kind of genius hires a buffoon like Heidi Cullen and PAYS her to lie like that, this research has been done for us by Melanie Morgan.

The move away from scientific forecasting of the weather to sensationalized leftist political advocacy is in part due to the influence of Wonya Lucas, executive vice president and general manager of The Weather Channel Networks.

Lucas admitted in a recent interview with Media Village that the reprogramming of The Weather Channel was influenced by her tenure at CNN when that network shifted from presenting straight news to personality-driven programming.

Lucas decided that what was good for CNN was good for The Weather Channel, and the objectivity and respectability of the network has now been thrown out the window. It doesn't matter that CNN's turn to the left has caused their ratings to plummet; The Weather Channel's embraced its model.

Media Village reported that the move by The Weather Channel "is intended to establish a broader perspective on the weather category and, says Lucas, to move the brand from functional to emotional."

Yes friends, Wonya Lucas ex of CNN hired Heidi to sex up the weather and make some noise.  Next question, given that CNN's ratings are in the dumper, who's the fool that hired Wonya Lucas? 

I predict its some guy that votes Democrat and thinks Algore is a great statesman.  A useful idiot, in other words.

The Phantom

How to tell when people are lying. Version 2007.01

People lying in the media seems to be just a fact of life these days. 

Y'all are familiar with the lying on gun control over the years.  The  more evidence there is that they are lying the more strident and extreme their speech becomes.  This culminates with the automatic demonization of anyone who dares disagree with them, right before they slink off stage.  The most frenetic efforts to SILENCE! the opposition are right before the wheels come off.  Nobody has heard from Sarah Brady lately, right?

Well, seems that the Global Warmers are heading that way.  I've been extremely skeptical since I discovered gun control was a red herring, and I noticed global warming was being pushed by all the same people.  My skepticism was entirely by association, because unlike gun control I haven't read the "science".  But lately we've been seeing guys like Bjorn Lomborg pilloried by politically affiliated groups for daring to produce evidence contrary to the human caused warming theory.  Plus, I've noticed that only the "Reactionary Right" leaning members of the Blogosphere have bothered reporting that the Martian ice caps are melting.  Odd.

Today we have this gem.  Quoth Marc Morano (202-224-5762 marc_morano@epw.senate.gov )

"The Weather Channel’s (TWC) Heidi Cullen, who hosts the weekly global warming program "The Climate Code," is advocating that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) revoke their "Seal of Approval" for any television weatherman who expresses skepticism that human activity is creating a climate catastrophe.

 

"If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval. Clearly, the AMS doesn't agree that global warming can be blamed on cyclical weather patterns," Cullen wrote in her December 21 weblog on the Weather Channel Website."

Translation, shut those @$($&#(%!!'s up!!! They're goring our sacred cow!

Mr. Morano goes on to mention several other people speaking in the same vein, including one genius who wants Nuremburg trials for global warming skeptics.

In addition, Cullen’s December 17, 2006 episode of "The Climate Code" TV show, featured a columnist who openly called for Nuremberg-style Trials for climate skeptics. Cullen featured Grist Magazine’s Dave Roberts as an eco-expert opining on energy issues, with no mention of his public call to institute what amounts to the death penalty for scientists who express skepticism about global warming. See: http://epw.senate.gov/fact.cfm?party=rep&id=264568

 

Cullen’s call for suppressing scientific dissent comes at a time when many skeptical scientists affiliated with Universities have essentially been silenced over fears of loss of tenure and the withdrawal of research grant money. The United Nations Inner Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) process has also steadily pushed scientists away who hold inconvenient skeptical views and reject the alarmist conclusions presented in the IPCC’s summary for policymakers. See: http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressRoom.PressReleases&ContentRecord_id=21CC88EC-CCA6-4A61-8C2E-78FA8DE4850D

 

Any time I see the screws of the education industry getting turned on somebody, I think it is worth looking at what they are saying.  The harder the screws get turned, the more worthy their pronouncements tend to be.  When you can lose your tenure for calling bullshit on somebody else's data, that's a very big deal.

In a free country, for a public figure to suggest that a certain group have their right to free speech removed is cause for alarm.  In a free country, cabals which manipulate scientific institutions and the grant process to further their own ends are cause for alarm.  At the moment there are quite a few issues where this is happening, all of them directed toward curtailing my personal freedom of choice, of movement, and of speech.

Thankfully these particular True Believer weenies seem to be right at the edge of disaster.  Probably there's a body of contrary evidence percolating its way through the bowels of the climatology biz, just getting ready to poop on their parade.  They want to get some nice coercive laws jammed through this new Democrat House before it all hits the fan.

Given my interest in turning back the tide of government control and coercion, and God forbid injecting a little more freedom into my life, I'd very much like to see them fail.

Black box data admissible in court, kids!

That little black box under your car seat remembers a lot of stuff if you get in a crash, boys and girls.  Such as the previous 5 to 15 seconds of driver input including everything from pitch, yaw and roll to the air conditioner setting.

All of which is admissible in Canadian courts.  Oh, and lots of American ones too, like Kalifornia (People's Republic of).  So when the nice officer asks you what happened, SHUT UP.  That way at least they can't claim you lied later.

The people that brought you the current OBD2 version black box (Kalifornia, that is) have more in store.  In particular they have big plans for the unholy marriage of a cell phone and a GPS unit with a boosted version of the black box.   Basically  added sensors and a LOT of memory, it  will record data for weeks or months instead of seconds. You can get a ton of data on a 2 gig flash card.

This thing will know where your car is, how fast its going, what the speed limit is on that street, how many people are in the car, when the last time you changed your oil was, and maybe even if its you that's driving based on your weight in the driver's seat and/or your thumb print on the door lock.  Best of all, it will be able to call the cops on you if you are speeding, running a red or [gasp!] SMOKING.  The cops, upon receiving this call from your car, will be able to issue you a ticket electronically, inform you of said ticket VERBALLY through your in-car phone (and tell you to slow the hell down too!), or possibly disable your engine and lock the brakes for good measure should the mood strike them to do so. 

Should the all-important emission controls indicate the car is running dirty, the on-board computer could unilaterally decide to cripple the car, tell you where the nearest Official Repair Station is and refuse to go in any other direction than toward said repair station.  Given the cheapness of video cameras these days they could probably stick a few of those in there too and run 24 hour surveillance on you in your own car.  At your expense to boot.

Why bother with all this?  Because people too stupid to be trusted with guns are also far, far too stupid to be trusted with cars.

That'd be you and me, my friends.

Let me assure you, this is going to happen.    Large players are bringing a lot of money to bear on the issue to drive it through the legislatures and the courts.  The insurance industry alone has sufficient interest in this to lobby all levels of government intensely.

What to do?  Two things.  First, vote for people who don't like this kind of thing.  You are going to have to ask each one individually, Republicans and Conservatives have just as bad a record on this issue as the Lefties, more's the pity.

Second, drive a car that doesn't have a black box.  That means an antique with a carburetor or a fuel injection unit you built yourself.  Like this one. 

There's always a way to do it.  Sometimes its just a pain in the butt is all.

The Phantom

Major breakthrough in human genome announced.

Today a major advance in human genetics is published.  They have finally figured out something that has been puzzling all of us for a long time, why are people so different if 99.9% of their DNA is identical?  Because it isn't identical after all!  Shazam!

What have scientists discovered today?

They have found that each of us is more different genetically than we previously believed. Instead of being 99.9 per cent identical, it may turn out to be more like 99 per cent identical - enough of a difference to explain many variations in human traits. Instead of having just two copies of every gene - one from each parent - we have some genes that are multiplied several times. Furthermore these "multiple copy numbers" differ from one person to another, which could explain human physical and even mental variation.

Why does this matter?

One practical benefit is that it could lead to a new understanding of some of the most difficult, incurable diseases. Although it adds an extra layer of complexity to our understanding of the human genome, the discovery could lead eventually to new insights and medical treatments of conditions ranging from childhood disorders to senile dementia. Scientists are predicting for instance that the knowledge could lead to new diagnostic tests for such diseases as cancer.

How was this discovery made?

Scientists have developed sophisticated methods of analysing large segments of DNA over recent years. "In some ways the methods we have used are 'molecular microscopes', which have transformed the techniques used since the foundation of clinical genetics where researchers used microscopes to look for visible deletions and rearrangements in chromosomes," explained Nigel Carter of the Sanger Institute in Cambridge.

What genes are copied many times and why?

There are just under 30,000 genes in the human genome, which consists of about 3 billion "letters" of the DNA code. The scientists found that more than 10 per cent of these genes appear to be multiplied in the 270 people who took part in the study. They do not know why some genes are copied and some are not. One gene, called CCL3L1, which is copied many times in people of African descent, appears to confer resistance to HIV. Another gene involved in making a blood protein is copied many times in people from south-east Asia and seems to help against malaria. Other research has shown that variation in the number of copies of some genes is involved in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

Are there any other practical applications?

The scientists looked at people from three broad racial groups - African, Asian and European. Although there was an underlying similarity in terms of how common it was for genes to be copied, there were enough racial differences to assign every person bar one to their correct ethnic origin. This might help forensic scientists wishing to know more about the race of a suspect.

Who made the discovery and where can we read more about it?

Scientists from 13 research centres were involved, including Britain's Sanger Institute in Cambridge, which also took a lead role in deciphering the human genome. The research is published in Nature, Nature Genetics and Genome Research.

I predict a lot more of this kind of discovery.  The genome cannot possibly be as simple as we think.  I mean, there's bacteria with more raw DNA than what we have, why aren't they more complicated?  Therefore coding must be much more complex than a simple one dimensional "tape" of DNA.

For one thing, we have more brain cells than DNA base pairs.  What decides where all those cells go?  Since they seem to end up in the right place almost every time, something must be doing that job eh?  So that mechanism must be coded fore somehow.

Then there's protein folding to consider.  If protein A folds one way it does one thing, if it folds another way it does something completely different.  Same chain of components, different fold.  There's a lot of data required to "remember" all those folds, and its in the DNA somehow.

Therefore I think we can expect lots more emergent properties to be discovered over the next few years, which will probably change not only biology but computer science as well.  This is very exiting stuff!

The Phantom

Euros make amazing discovery: freedom works!

Yes friends, those clever lads in Europe have made an amazing discovery.  Seems that when left alone by government, people behave rationally, carefully and even courteously!

A project implemented by the European Union is currently seeing seven cities and regions clear-cutting their forest of traffic signs. Ejby, in Denmark, is participating in the experiment, as are Ipswich in England and the Belgian town of Ostende.

The utopia has already become a reality in Makkinga, in the Dutch province of Western Frisia. A sign by the entrance to the small town (population 1,000) reads "Verkeersbordvrij" -- "free of traffic signs." Cars bumble unhurriedly over precision-trimmed granite cobblestones. Stop signs and direction signs are nowhere to be seen. There are neither parking meters nor stopping restrictions. There aren't even any lines painted on the streets.

But oddly, there is no carnage in the streets.  How can this be?!  Don't the sheeple all go crazy when there's nobody telling them what to do?  Seems not.

Sounds oddly familiar too.  Don't I remember something like this with... guns?  Citizens are issued concealed carry permits, and nothing happens.  No OK Coral, no St. Valentine's Day Massacre, no Apocalypse Now.

Gee, could there be a connection?

The Sarcastic Phantom

Democrat victory in foreign policy!

Seems like the Chicoms have closed the technology gap in the oceans.  Their formerly creaky diesel subs have begun sneaking up on US aircraft carriers and surfacing in Japanese waters by surprise. 

Looks like all the wonderful peace/love/cooperation being preached by the Democrats is finally bearing fruit:  the US is no longer the only super power in the world.  Isn't that great?

The Phantom, de-cloaking off the port bow...