Know the limits.  Know your stats.  Separate media hype from science fact.  For example, how many people died of the Ebola virus in the Congo in one year versus the Congo civil war.  Well the ratio is a staggering 255 to 2.9 million!  So how afraid should you be of the Ebola virus?  Very large and very small numbers are discussed.  Better have your bit conversion calculator on hand.

Other science facts.

Here's another one from The Scientist.  This is actually me covering an old Love Button song.  The Scientist will be out soon - cover art is now done, and I'm basically just waiting on a test pressing, and then there will be a few days before CDBaby gets it in the system to sell.  I expect to release it within a couple of weeks, though!

Recycling is not the religion I practice. That's my answer to the recycling Nazis when the topic arises. Here's a post that gives you eight more answers to recycling myths.

(i changed the headline which cited 10 myths)

Britain dealing with worst flooding since 1947

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is blaming the flooding on climate change caused by carbon-fuel emissions and on the country's outdated infrastructure.

"Like every advanced industrialized country, we are coming to terms with some of the issues surrounding climate change," Brown said Monday.

I ask again, how do you explain the 1947 flooding? I also ask, why 1947? Was there worse flooding in the early 20th century? It would certainly appear so by the date chosen.

(cross posted at The London Fog)

Global Warming News So Stupid It's Funny

French-bashing made easy

Wow!

(also at The London Fog)

This is kind of neat -- the game of Checkers has been solved; mathematically, if you play correctly, you cannot loose. I.e. you're basically now playing tic-tac-toe with a bigger board. Jonathan Schaeffer, the lead author, is now working on Poker, aka "never need to apply for a grant again".

everyone agrees that the world is coming to an end except me.

Of course God could still be designing but that's not in the bible.

Link

Planet Gore:

I must protest as unfair the headline writer's recasting of the sentiments as "global warming, 'just hysteria'?". In truth, global warming is much, much more. It is a ready excuse for whatever afflicts or impedes you, an opportunity for the media to outdo past lows, a wonderful vehicle comfortably seating every exiled adherent of last century's failed "inevitability", and a very lucrative pony for rent-seeking business to ride to riches for making nothing. And it made a bunch of government weathermen briefly into rock stars no longer needing to beg for their annual appropriation of (taxpayer) debt-financed lucre, but whose area of interest actually now picks our pockets for the same amount we send, I submit, far more soberly, to the National Cancer Institute every year.

"There are many ways not to find an alien broadcast."

(via Instapundit)

The Faithful Heritic:

[Reid] Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for current headlines. “What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps?”

We recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and agricultural water-management structures had been discovered emerging from the ice, seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of years. Bryson interrupts excitedly.

“A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never went,” he says. “There used to be less ice than now. It’s just getting back to normal.”

The Globe and Mail this weekend reported on what may be a major breakthrough in stupidity cancer prevention:

But research into vitamin D is suggesting both a plausible answer to this medical puzzle and a heretical notion: that cancers and other disorders in rich countries aren't caused mainly by pollutants but by a vitamin deficiency known to be less acute or even non-existent in poor nations.

Those trying to brand contaminants as the key factor behind cancer in the West are "looking for a bogeyman that doesn't exist," argues Reinhold Vieth, professor at the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto and one of the world's top vitamin D experts. Instead, he says, the critical factor "is more likely a lack of vitamin D."

[...] A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn't take it, a drop so large — twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking — it almost looks like a typographical error.

There you go: quit smoking, take an aspirin every day and make sure either by supplements or by sunlight exposure make sure you get sufficient Vitamin D and you're likely to live longer and healthier. The beautiful thing is that the latter two items are pretty easy to do. What has the establishment been focusing on in the meantime? Statistically meaningless improvements to our life, such as banning home use of pesticides and reducing your exposure to second-hand smoke, all more about hairshirt-morality than health or science.

And on the subject of the establishment:

In light of emerging research on the benefits of vitamin D, the Canadian Cancer Society said Monday that Canadians could consider brief, unprotected exposure to the sun, increased dietary intake of the vitamin and the use of supplements.

Keep in mind that, if the Vitamin D science holds up, various cancer societies 30-SPF sunblock no-sun-is-too-much-sun recommendations puts them in the same place as doctors who developed and prescribed thalidomide in the late 50's/early 60's.

An interview with Derya Unutmaz, on the process of how life extension could be achieved. Unutmaz writes one of my favorite blogs, Biosingularity.

We might be alive a lot longer than we think after we die:

Consider someone who has just died of a heart attack. His organs are intact, he hasn't lost blood. All that's happened is his heart has stopped beating—the definition of "clinical death"—and his brain has shut down to conserve oxygen. But what has actually died?

As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller "How We Die," the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn't be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn't receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can't be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "After one hour," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.

But if the cells are still alive, why can't doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed. It was that "astounding" discovery, Becker says, that led him to his post as the director of Penn's Center for Resuscitation Science, a newly created research institute operating on one of medicine's newest frontiers: treating the dead.

[...] mitochondria control the process known as apoptosis, the programmed death of abnormal cells that is the body's primary defense against cancer. "It looks to us," says Becker, "as if the cellular surveillance mechanism cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and a cell being reperfused with oxygen. Something throws the switch that makes the cell die."

[...] When someone collapses on the street of cardiac arrest, if he's lucky he will receive immediate CPR, maintaining circulation until he can be revived in the hospital. But the rest will have gone 10 or 15 minutes or more without a heartbeat by the time they reach the emergency department. And then what happens? "We give them oxygen," Becker says. "We jolt the heart with the paddles, we pump in epinephrine to force it to beat, so it's taking up more oxygen." Blood-starved heart muscle is suddenly flooded with oxygen, precisely the situation that leads to cell death. Instead, Becker says, we should aim to reduce oxygen uptake, slow metabolism and adjust the blood chemistry for gradual and safe reperfusion.

There may be chemical angles opened for exploration here too, i.e. to temporarily suppress apoptosis.

CBC reports:

British doctors say they have made the world's first surgical attempt to treat a human sight disorder using gene therapy.

The patient, Robert Johnson, 23, has an inherited disorder called Leber's congenital amaurosis. The disorder, linked to a mutation in a gene called RPE65, is thought to lead to degeneration in the retina — the layer of cells at the back of the eye that detects light.

[...] The doctors — Prof. Robin Ali of the Institute of Ophthalmology at University College London and his colleagues at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London — said they injected non-defective copies of the RPE65 gene under the retina in one of Johnson's eyes.

A harmless virus was used to deliver the gene into the cells.

[...] However, it will be months before the team knows whether the approach worked for Johnson.

If I remember correctly from earlier gene therapy tests, the real trick is whether the genes don't get spliced into the wrong spot and cause nasty cancer. Maybe they've worked around this, which would be great news as there's many nasty diseases that may be treatable by gene therapy.

Another crank, this one with the dubious distinction of being the United States lead hurricane forecaster, says that computer modeling is a flawed way to view climate change...apparently, it's the ocean that is affecting the climate, not mankind:

THE United States' leading hurricane forecaster says global ocean currents, not human-produced carbon dioxide, are responsible for global warming.

William Gray, a Colorado State University researcher, also said the Earth may begin to cool on its own in five to 10 years.

.....

Earlier this month, he dubbed former US vice-president and 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore "a gross alarmist" for making the Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which helped focus media attention on global warming.

Yesterday, Dr Gray said that politics and research into global warming had created "almost an industry" that had frightened the public and overwhelmed dissenting voices.

He said research arguing that humans were causing global warming was "mush" based on unreliable computer models that could not possibly take into account the hundreds of factors that influenced the weather.

He said little-understood ocean currents were behind a decades-long warming cycle, and disputed assertions that greenhouse gases could raise global temperatures as much as some scientists predicted.

What does he know? All the real scientists are unanimous in the belief that research money will flow more readily from man-made climate change.

Selenian Boondocks has an interesting post on whether it's reasonable (or not) to assume that current suborbital private spacecraft efforts will scale up to orbital. Conventional wisdom says no (25-81 times the energy would be needed); Jonathan Goff says yes, because all the hard work is at the bottom of the atmosphere and that only 1.5-4x is needed (via Simberg).

From the "if you don't believe something, you'll believe anything files", the "Gore Challenge" (via Greenie Watch):

As a believer:

• that human-caused global warming is a moral, ethical, and spiritual issue affecting our survival;
• that home energy use is a key component of overall energy use;
• that reducing my fossil fuel-based home energy usage will lead to lower greenhouse gas emissions; and
• that leaders on moral issues should lead by example;
• I pledge to consume no more energy for use in my residence than the average American household by one year from today

Note by selecting the "household" as the target, the energy profligate lifestyles -- first class seating, private planes, entourage, limos, SUVs, powertoys, cottages, etc. -- of the privileged are exempt from examination; whereas almost 100% of Joe Everyman's life is up for grabs.