I don’t know where this Leonard Cohen performance of ‘Who by Fire’ with Sonny Rollins playing saxophone came from, but holy cow! That’s got to be one of the best jazz solos ever – that bit at the end, as one of the commenters say, will recalibrate your DNA.
(hat tip: ongoing)
I am going to resolve not to exhale. That should keep several thousand pounds of carbon out of the atmosphere. On a less sarcastic note, two of the most interesting things I’ve read on the subject are Freman Dyson’s Global Warming Heresies. As a scientist I have tremendous respect for him, and it’s an interesting and different point of view. Equally interesting is the response from Alun Anderson the editor of New Scientist. Both are worth reading so I won’t bother to summarize here.
The aspect of this debate on Global Warming that I find the most tedious is the focus on whether humans are the cause or not. I mean it’s an interesting question, but it’s sure as hell not the question. Even worse, I am not sure what possible evidence could demonstrate this with any degree of certainty. The questions that matter are
There seems to be general agreement, at least among the non-faith-based community, about number one. There seem to be many dire movie plot predictions about the second from lots of people with some sort of axe to gride. As for the third, there seem to be two mainstream positions, both of which are bullshit:
Personally, I think there are tons of really good reasons to diversify our energy sources that have nothing to do with catastrophe-mongering. We have far too many eggs in the fossil-fuels basket, and far too much of our fossil fuels are in the hands of crazy people. Our society and our position in the world would benefit greatly by diverse and decentralized means of energy production and less need for consumption. So while I agree with the cause of consuming fewer non-renewable resources, I am annoyed at the demagoguery in the motives of the climate people.
And what is really stupid about the whole discussion is that it takes attention away from the pressing questions about what to do about the things that will happen. There are all kinds of things that might happen and some of them would be pretty catastrophic if they did, but I can’t predict the future, and I’d rather eliminate them as decision-making factors – since they also might not happen, they cancel themselves out as variables in the decision making equation.
Unless something radical happens to reverse what is well underway, lots of arctic ice will melt. That will totally destroy the livelihoods of hundereds of thousands of people up north. So are we going to let them die, are we going to proactively give them the tools they need to find another livelihood, or are we going to do nothing until it’s too late and then pay billions of dollars to move their cities farther inland and let them live on welfare for the rest of their lives?
As lots of this ice melts, a lot of cold water is going to come into play that will be prime fishing waters. It will contain some of the world’s best oil reserves. Unless something else radical happens, world oil production will continue to steadily decline, so these waters, north of Alaska, Russia, Norway, etc. will become super valuable. What does this mean for foreign policy, and should we be starting to work out some of these almost inevitable issues via diplomacy now?
On a lighter note: step by step instructions to make your own bacon – Yum!
Here’s a video:
Long time no post…but I have some interesting tabs building up on the browsers so I figured I’d post them.
Looks like Rove is Retiring – maybe the Democrats can hire him
If you look in the book collections and libraries of the super-successful, you’re not going to find any of those business books written by and for the MBA crowd.
Google is turning off their video purchasing service. As a result, videos that users paid for will suddenly cease to be viewable. A new generation of people will learn never to purchase encumbered content, but it’s a shame that Google, with effectively unlimited space and bandwidth, is leaving customers naive enough to trust them out in the cold.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon Univerity (my alma mater!) announced a way to convincingly fill in arbitrary-shaped holes in pictures by scanning a database of images and looking for one that will fit.
Within weeks of the iPhone’s release, Chinese clones are coming out. It is amazing the manpower and infrastructure that goes into cloning everything from cars to consumer electronics. Perhaps it doesn’t have the iPhone’s build quality, but it has two replacable batteries, six speakers, and two SIM card slots. Nuts.
The bananas that you buy in the store are seedless, which means that they are sterile and have no way of reproducing. They are reproduced artifically and every banana tree is an exact genetic copy of the other. Great for consistency, bad for disease resistance.
This is one of the most useful-sounding services I’ve seen in a loong time. Bringo lets you choose a company, they call and navigate through the phone tree to get you a human, and then they call you when they do. How cool is that?
I can’t help but feel a little strange in my stomach when I see old 50’s advertisements like this one
New Scientist has an interesting list of Global Warming Myths that makes for long, but good reading. There seems to be a lot of polarization in this discussion, where there appears to be two sides: the people who say the world will end if we don’t stop driving our cars NOW! and the people who say that this whole climate change is a hoax and the worst thing that will happen is that our winters will be a little milder. As always, the truth is somewhere in-between, but nobody really knows where.
Personally I don’t think anyone really knows to what degree humans affect the climate, but investing in green technologies makes sense either way. Fossil fuel energy costs are going to continue to rise, so a money spent now on alternatives either for large-scale research, or for geothermal heating and cooling for your house, will probably pay off in the future.
I’d like to see the government use the carrot, not just the stick, to encourage alternative fuels. I’d love to see some X-prize type bounties to private industry to develop new power sources.
I want to love the idea of Universal Health Care. Anyone who has needed more than a routine physical from their doctor in the past few years can see that our system of medicine is, if not broken, straining under its own weight, and the need for insurance companies and healthcare providers to constantly game each other to get what they need. (Nash Equilibrium, anyone?)
Most Western European countries provide excellent health care for the majority of their people, most of the time, and if we care about our people and their health, why would we not want the same for Americans? Marginal Revolution makes an interesting point regarding the differences between government in Europe and America:
Because European government works better, Europeans demand more of it and get more of it. American liberals look at Europe and see (sometimes) better results per dollar spent. They then conclude that America should be more like Europe, whereas in reality America would end up spending more to get more bad American government.
More homogeneous populations and less geographical area makes social policy a lot easier to develop.
My wife and I always joked about the sleep gene. She falls asleep easily and can sleep for a long time, and loves to sleep. I don’t. Falling asleep always takes effort, but I can survive of 5 hours of sleep per night (although I prefer 6-7). We occasionally lament that the baby seems to have inherited my sleep gene. She sleeps less than most babies and seems to be harder to put to sleep.
It turns out that science somewhat supports the notion of a sleep gene
A new study out of England has shown that depending on the type of gene (the name of the gene is Period3) you have, either “long” or “short” can influence a variety of other behaviors as well. Having the long gene makes you perform poorly in certain tests of reaction time when sleep deprived, but people with this gene were quick to get to sleep when given the chance. Apparently people with two copies of the short gene were much better at staying focused even when sleep deprived but took much longer to fall asleep.
I also have to mention that the blog itself, Survival of the Sickest, is always interesting reading.