New job, new bedroom layout, and a new computer means a new blog with more free time to post things. I look forward to seeing you there.
Sunday, June 07, 2009
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
The Day Today: Tuesday 19th May 2009
Reading through this excellent editorial by Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, I was struck by these paragraphs:
The United States has had four big tax cuts over the past century. In 1921, President Coolidge cut the top rate from 63 per cent to 25 per cent. Five years later the top earners (people on incomes over $100,000) were paying 86.3 per cent more than they had before. The economic boost fuelled the Roaring Twenties.
In 1964 President Kennedy cut the top rate from 91 per cent to 70 per cent. Two years later the top 5 per cent of earners were paying 7.7 per cent more in taxes, while the bottom half were paying 9.2 per cent less.
When President Reagan cut the top rate from 70 per cent to just 28 per cent between 1981 and 1988, the share of revenues paid by the top 1 per cent of taxpayers rocketed from 17.6 per cent to 27.5 per cent. He cut capital gains tax as well, from 28 per cent to 20 per cent - and again, revenues leapt by half, from $12.5 billion to $18.7 billion in only two years. The cuts launched the longest period of wealth creation the world has known. And under George Bush's cuts too the wealthy ended up paying more, not less.
So taxes have had to be cut from astronomical highs, well over 60 percent four times in the past century?! Trying to keep government down really is like pushing water uphill with a rake sometimes, when Jefferson talked of "eternal vigilance" he wasn't kidding.
Boffins have discovered that oxygen created by bacteria 2.5 billion years ago caused Earth's first ice age.
Geologists may have uncovered the answer to an age-old question - an ice-age-old question, that is. It appears that Earth's earliest ice ages may have been due to the rise of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere, which consumed atmospheric greenhouse gases and chilled the earth.
Two and a half billion years ago, before the Earth's atmosphere contained appreciable oxygen, photosynthetic bacteria gave off oxygen that first likely oxygenated the surface of the ocean, and only later the atmosphere. The first formed oxygen reacted with iron in the oceans, creating iron oxides that settled to the ocean floor in sediments called banded iron-formations - layered deposits of red-brown rock that accumulated in ocean basins around the worldwide. Later, once the iron was used up, oxygen escaped from the oceans and started filling up the atmosphere.
Once oxygen made it into the atmosphere, Kaufman's team suggests that it reacted with methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, to form carbon dioxide, which is 62 times less effective at warming the surface of the planet. "With less warming potential, surface temperatures may have plummeted, resulting in globe-encompassing glaciers and sea ice" said Kaufman.
That's why we need to keep on pumping out that carbon. Bacteria are doing their darnedest to pump out oxygen and cool the planet down so we freeze to death, our survival depends on neutralising their pernicious photosynthesis.
The United States has had four big tax cuts over the past century. In 1921, President Coolidge cut the top rate from 63 per cent to 25 per cent. Five years later the top earners (people on incomes over $100,000) were paying 86.3 per cent more than they had before. The economic boost fuelled the Roaring Twenties.
In 1964 President Kennedy cut the top rate from 91 per cent to 70 per cent. Two years later the top 5 per cent of earners were paying 7.7 per cent more in taxes, while the bottom half were paying 9.2 per cent less.
When President Reagan cut the top rate from 70 per cent to just 28 per cent between 1981 and 1988, the share of revenues paid by the top 1 per cent of taxpayers rocketed from 17.6 per cent to 27.5 per cent. He cut capital gains tax as well, from 28 per cent to 20 per cent - and again, revenues leapt by half, from $12.5 billion to $18.7 billion in only two years. The cuts launched the longest period of wealth creation the world has known. And under George Bush's cuts too the wealthy ended up paying more, not less.
So taxes have had to be cut from astronomical highs, well over 60 percent four times in the past century?! Trying to keep government down really is like pushing water uphill with a rake sometimes, when Jefferson talked of "eternal vigilance" he wasn't kidding.
Boffins have discovered that oxygen created by bacteria 2.5 billion years ago caused Earth's first ice age.
Geologists may have uncovered the answer to an age-old question - an ice-age-old question, that is. It appears that Earth's earliest ice ages may have been due to the rise of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere, which consumed atmospheric greenhouse gases and chilled the earth.
Two and a half billion years ago, before the Earth's atmosphere contained appreciable oxygen, photosynthetic bacteria gave off oxygen that first likely oxygenated the surface of the ocean, and only later the atmosphere. The first formed oxygen reacted with iron in the oceans, creating iron oxides that settled to the ocean floor in sediments called banded iron-formations - layered deposits of red-brown rock that accumulated in ocean basins around the worldwide. Later, once the iron was used up, oxygen escaped from the oceans and started filling up the atmosphere.
Once oxygen made it into the atmosphere, Kaufman's team suggests that it reacted with methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, to form carbon dioxide, which is 62 times less effective at warming the surface of the planet. "With less warming potential, surface temperatures may have plummeted, resulting in globe-encompassing glaciers and sea ice" said Kaufman.
That's why we need to keep on pumping out that carbon. Bacteria are doing their darnedest to pump out oxygen and cool the planet down so we freeze to death, our survival depends on neutralising their pernicious photosynthesis.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Μη μου τους κύκλους τάραττε!
As might be obvious to followers of this Blog your correspondent is a great fan of science. Those that give him the most solace are the biological sciences, thanks to a steady diet of Attenborough (which we shall leave to one side today), and astronomy. Since there was no Attenborough of space readily available in New Zealand (Carl Sagan, Patrick Moore) this love had to be self-guided with special mention going first to this book and the fantastic illustrations within (the web does not do it justice).
And second to my telescope in my possession since youth. Hartmann’s drawings added with the imagination of a young boy makes for powerful stuff, and to see the Galileans (Jupiter’s four main moons) or Saturn’s rings for yourself is also breathtaking. Here's Jupiter and her (his?) four main moons called the "Galileans" through your average backyard telescope. Again this picture might not look like much on the screen but observed through your own telescope pointed at a speck of light, and with a little reflection on just what it is you are looking at, the distances and sizes involved, that is what gets you
Man cannot live by science alone, he needs a bit of the humanities. For my humanities I very much like the Classical world of ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt. Give me a time machine and I would ignore everything past Constantine. The testosterone in me would love to sit on a hill and watch an old-fashioned set-piece battle with swords and shields, horses for tanks, and arrows for bullets. Just as interesting would be to watch people living with a completely different worldview, without the yoke of monotheism we have been saddled with for the last few thousand years. Without knowing the full extent of the earth, and where the undiscovered peoples and lands are not a few tribes in New Guinea but whole continents and civilizations. As much as I love all that we have discovered since the Enlightenment, going back to a time when everything was undiscovered has a certain appeal
Astronomy and the Classical world connect. Without television there was not much else to do but study the skies and/or compose Homeric epics. The word "Planet" comes from the Greek "to wander" for example, due to some stars not remaining in a fixed position and seeming to wander around. The most obvious connection though is that the Planet's names are those of ancient gods:
Mercury - The Roman messenger God
Venus - The Roman Goddess of love
Mars - The Roman God of war
Jupiter - King of the Roman Gods
Saturn - The Roman God of agriculture and harvest
Uranus - The Greek God of the Sky
Neptune - The Roman God of the Sea
The Romans feature quite heavily (the only planet named after a Greek God was discovered in 1781) so one might presume they were a great scientific empire? Alas, apart from engineering, no. They did bugger all.
The Babylonians were giants of astronomy, as were the Egyptians. The Greeks also with their expert mathematical prowess did a great deal of astronomical theorising. Philosophy is impossible to study without some coverage of what a Greek said. We still use Pythagoras' Theorem and Euclidian Geometry. Erastosthenes worked out the circumference of the Earth with great precision. One could go on at great length with almost countless examples of Greek thinking but you get the idea. In almost every field of study the first few pages of the stage 101 textbook has an obligatory reference to an ancient Greek who made the first tentative steps.
It seems a little unfair that the unscientific Romans get all the glory in a field where they had no input whatsoever, but all is not lost. Thanks to one of the fathers of modern astronomy, Johannes Kepler, the Greeks have taken back a portion of what is by rights more theirs than the Romans.
Kepler worked out three laws of planetary motion, after the Ptolemaic theory whereby the planets moved in perfect circles was discredited.
Kepler's Third law states that "The square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.". Meaning that planets further out from the Sun travel slower than those closer to the Sun, and this law gives that fact a bit of precision. To give the Wikipedian example "For example, suppose planet A is four times as far from the sun as planet B. Then planet A must traverse four times the distance of Planet B each orbit, and moreover it turns out that planet A travels at half the speed of planet B. In total it takes 4×2=8 times as long for planet A to travel an orbit, in agreement with the law (8^2=4^3)." But we needn't delve further into this.
Kepler's Second Law - "A line joining a planet and the sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time." - is explained by this handy picture and again, we needn't go further.
It is Kepler's First Law that interests us. "The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at a focus."
Of course, we have given names to the points where an object is nearest and farthest from the body is is orbiting. We'll start with the Earth. Anyone who fishes or who spends much time out on the water would be aware of when the Moon is at its closest or farthest - Apogee and Perigee respectively - because of how the tides change. In those two words though, we can see a Trojan Horse for Greece to reclaim a foothold in what is rightfully hers.
Apogee and Perigee both have Greek prefixes "Apo" and "Peri". It would be weird even for a mongrel language like English to have one part of a word from one language and another part from another language and so after "Apo" and "Peri" we have a derivative of "Gaia" - the Greek Godess of the Earth to give us the "-gee" ending. If we were to use the Latin we might have "Apiterra" and "Periterra", not really a starter at all. But Greece is in! and this principle is used for those two points for any orbit.
Everything orbits the Sun with a Perihelion and Aphelion, Helios being the name the Greeks gave the Sun.
Mercury is a straight God-swap with the "-hermion" ending coming from Hermes, the Greek Mercury for Perihermion and Aphermion. As is Mars with "-areion", Saturn "-krone", Neptune "-poseidion" and the planet formerly known as Pluto, "-hadion". Uranus is Greek to begin with so unsurprisingly has Periuranion and Apouranion.
Venus, if you guessed something akin to"aphrodition" you are mistaken. Were Venus to have a moon it would orbit with Pericytherion and Apocytherion after Cytheria, one of the places which claims Venus' birth. The Moon has no satellite, but for the times during the Apollo Project when it did "-cynthion" from Cynthia, a sometime name for Artemis who was herself a sometime moon goddess.
Some justice at last then for the long suffering Greeks. Even better news is that astronomical naming conventions are incredibly broad and now throughout the Solar System mountains, valleys, and craters are named after mythological creatures, people, and places from around the world, not just the BCE Mediterranean, but those conventions are a story for another day.
The mosaic at the top of this post is of one of the greatest scientists in antiquity, Archimedes, just before his murder by the barbarian Roman hordes for continuing with his scientific work instead of meeting a Roman general.
The Day Today - May 2nd 2009
I, for one, welcome our new Robotic overlords. We have also invented a machine that shits.
I know this isn't Livejournal, but "How Science Fiction Found Religion Once overtly political, the genre increasingly employs Christian allegory."
Five minutes of fun. Star Formation...The Game.
Charles de Gaulle, made it clear that he wanted his Frenchmen to lead the liberation of Paris...Allied High Command agreed, but only on one condition: De Gaulle's division must not contain any black soldiers.
Depressing that this sort of bullshit happened within living memory (and of course, even at all). Of note is the death of American historian John Hope Franklin who suffered much the same prejudice throughout his lifetime:
The day he was told by a white woman whom he was helping, at 12, across the road, that he should take his “filthy hands” off her. And the warm evening when he went to buy ice cream in Macon, Mississippi—a tall 19-year-old student from Fisk University, scholarly in his glasses—only to find as he left the store that a semi-circle of white farmers had formed to block his exit, silently implying that he should not try to break through their line.
Still though, who'd be disabled? This poor guy in a wheelchair just gets talked "through" sort of and ignored at the same time. God only knows the thought processes of the security guard. [HT Uncertain Principles, who has a good story of his own of his son being ignored]
I was waiting patiently in the airport, quietly watching people go by. My luggage was stacked up next to me and I felt that I looked like quite the world traveler. Suddenly this illusion was shattered when a security type guy came with a luggage cart and began loading my luggage. I sputtered a protest,
'Hey, that's my luggage.'
He looked at me, annoyed and said,
"Luggage can't be left unattended."
"I AM attending it," I said incredulous.
"You don't understand, SOME BODY needs to be in possession of the luggage," he said and I didn't get his implication, not yet, I was still too startled.
"I am in possession of this luggage, it is MINE," my voice is rising.He looks at me with exaggerated patience,
"SOME BODY (long pause) needs to be attending the luggage."I got it then, I wasn't SOME BODY,
"Are you suggesting that I can't supervise my own luggage because I'm in a wheelchair?""You need to settle down, sir."
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Dicks
You human females don’t know how lucky you are. They have, in Israel, discovered a spider whose mating ritual is:
1) A hug and a dance.
So far, so good…but this species is not known as Harpactea sadistica for nothing.
2) The male bites the female so she becomes passive.
3) Ignoring the female’s genitalia, the male stabs the female’s belly with one of his two needle-sharp penises located on his head...
...and injects semen directly into her body cavity numerous times for a quarter of an hour.
Watch the whole thing here, the scientific term for this brutality leaves as obscurity as the scientific name of the spider – “Traumatic Insemination”
Something else that has two dicks at its head, the National Party. I listened to parliament on my pocket radio at work this afternoon (the 29th) and couldn't help noticing if not a contradiction then certainly an absurdity. Take a look at the following exchange from Hansard. Bill English
2. CHRIS TREMAIN (National—Napier) to the Minister of Finance: What would be the impact on public services if no measures to restrain public debt were taken?
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance) : The latest projections show that if the Government continued with the rate of spending growth that occurred under the Labour Government, gross debt would rise to 73 percent of GDP, which would lift finance costs to $15 billion per annum. That amount would be enough to fund all of New Zealand’s superannuation entitlements, almost enough to fund every district health board, and sufficient to fund tertiary education several times over. That is why the Government is determined to change the direction of spending that built up under the Labour Government, in order to prevent debt from accumulating rapidly to levels that are unsustainable.
Chris Tremain: Why is public debt projected to rise?
Hon BILL ENGLISH: The primary reason that public debt, in the preliminary Budget forecast, was projected to rise to 73 percent of GDP was the undisciplined and reckless increases in spending under the previous Government.
I see, so the spending that Labour has budgeted for is “reckless”, and coming from the Deputy Prime Minister one would presume that is the government’s view. What does John Key think? Here is his response to a question from Roger Douglas asking why the government does not cut its reckless spending.
Hon Sir Roger Douglas: Could the Prime Minister please explain to the House how it is possible, in today’s economic circumstances, to spend more this year than Labour did last year, especially when households are having to spend less?
Hon JOHN KEY: That is because we are putting more money into things that we think are very important. I think if members were to look around the—
Hon Member: Like what?
Hon JOHN KEY: Well, $750 million into health, and hundreds of millions of dollars more in other areas. The reason for that is that we are taking the approach that most westernised countries are taking, which is that this is a time when Governments should use their balance sheet, but we are not going to diet on debt forever.
OK, so the spending that Labour has budgeted for (and that National is continuing with and even increasing according to John Key’s answer) is “very important”.
Very Important and reckless? Why don't you just cut funding for the reckless bits?...I'm not even going to try to understand.
Come on you two, you sit next to each other!
Can’t you find one line and stick with it?
1) A hug and a dance.
So far, so good…but this species is not known as Harpactea sadistica for nothing.
2) The male bites the female so she becomes passive.
3) Ignoring the female’s genitalia, the male stabs the female’s belly with one of his two needle-sharp penises located on his head...
...and injects semen directly into her body cavity numerous times for a quarter of an hour.
Watch the whole thing here, the scientific term for this brutality leaves as obscurity as the scientific name of the spider – “Traumatic Insemination”
[HT: Not Exactly Rocket Science]
Something else that has two dicks at its head, the National Party. I listened to parliament on my pocket radio at work this afternoon (the 29th) and couldn't help noticing if not a contradiction then certainly an absurdity. Take a look at the following exchange from Hansard. Bill English
2. CHRIS TREMAIN (National—Napier) to the Minister of Finance: What would be the impact on public services if no measures to restrain public debt were taken?
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance) : The latest projections show that if the Government continued with the rate of spending growth that occurred under the Labour Government, gross debt would rise to 73 percent of GDP, which would lift finance costs to $15 billion per annum. That amount would be enough to fund all of New Zealand’s superannuation entitlements, almost enough to fund every district health board, and sufficient to fund tertiary education several times over. That is why the Government is determined to change the direction of spending that built up under the Labour Government, in order to prevent debt from accumulating rapidly to levels that are unsustainable.
Chris Tremain: Why is public debt projected to rise?
Hon BILL ENGLISH: The primary reason that public debt, in the preliminary Budget forecast, was projected to rise to 73 percent of GDP was the undisciplined and reckless increases in spending under the previous Government.
I see, so the spending that Labour has budgeted for is “reckless”, and coming from the Deputy Prime Minister one would presume that is the government’s view. What does John Key think? Here is his response to a question from Roger Douglas asking why the government does not cut its reckless spending.
Hon Sir Roger Douglas: Could the Prime Minister please explain to the House how it is possible, in today’s economic circumstances, to spend more this year than Labour did last year, especially when households are having to spend less?
Hon JOHN KEY: That is because we are putting more money into things that we think are very important. I think if members were to look around the—
Hon Member: Like what?
Hon JOHN KEY: Well, $750 million into health, and hundreds of millions of dollars more in other areas. The reason for that is that we are taking the approach that most westernised countries are taking, which is that this is a time when Governments should use their balance sheet, but we are not going to diet on debt forever.
OK, so the spending that Labour has budgeted for (and that National is continuing with and even increasing according to John Key’s answer) is “very important”.
Very Important and reckless? Why don't you just cut funding for the reckless bits?...I'm not even going to try to understand.
Come on you two, you sit next to each other!
Can’t you find one line and stick with it?
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Anzac Day 2009
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
Siegfried Sassoon
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
George Orwell
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Let's Build a Teacher!
The industrious Japanese have built a teaching robot, which is all very interesting, but have a read at this paragraph:
Unlike more mechanical-looking robots like Honda Motor Co.'s Asimo, the robot teacher, called Saya, can express six basic emotions — surprise, fear, disgust, anger, happiness, sadness — because its rubber skin is being pulled from the back with motors and wiring around the eyes and the mouth.
Does that strike anyone as odd? Out of the six emotions programmed into Saya the robot we have one positive one, happiness, and five negative ones - fear disgust anger and sadness, and maybe surprise.
What does that say about teaching?
"I'm just off to work to build a robot teacher"
"Don't forget the 'fear' module"
Friday, February 27, 2009
Science vs. Science
Science good news! Genetically engineered livestock are being used to grow drugs, now with the approval of the FDA. GTC Biotherapeutics is using the goats to grow a drug to prevent fatal blood clots.
In more science good news, or just good news in general, a 22 year jail sentence has been handed down to a woman who destroyed a crop of potatoes with moth-resistant properties - which, as Ron Bailey points out, sure could be useful in places where moths eat a lot of potatoes. Then again if you are a Greenie people starving to death is a good thing - you don't leave much of a carbon footprint when you are dead.
So, everything's looking good on the science front. Next stop, curing cancer - how's that going?
I see, scientists appear to have made a green gingerbread man out of cancer cells...I thought the trick with cancer was trying to kill it.
Here's every swear word ever said on the Sopranos - it goes for 27 minutes.
the sopranos, uncensored. from victor solomon on Vimeo.
In more science good news, or just good news in general, a 22 year jail sentence has been handed down to a woman who destroyed a crop of potatoes with moth-resistant properties - which, as Ron Bailey points out, sure could be useful in places where moths eat a lot of potatoes. Then again if you are a Greenie people starving to death is a good thing - you don't leave much of a carbon footprint when you are dead.
So, everything's looking good on the science front. Next stop, curing cancer - how's that going?
I see, scientists appear to have made a green gingerbread man out of cancer cells...I thought the trick with cancer was trying to kill it.
Here's every swear word ever said on the Sopranos - it goes for 27 minutes.
the sopranos, uncensored. from victor solomon on Vimeo.
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