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If you have even the slightest interest in nature or biology, you will love The Encyclopedia of Life. It is an attempt to put all the world’s taxonomy data in one easily searched location. Presumably they will one day attach the full genome of each critter as well! Oh how I wish I had this available when I was a kid. I knew just about everything that walked, crawled, slithered, swam or flew in Western Pennsylvania and was working away at the rest of the world when I was 14 or so! August 30th, 2009 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The world of genetically modified plants took an interesting commercial turn, according to this story by Bloomberg that caught my eye. August 28th, 2009 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
You have to hand it to him for sheer, brass neck: George Monbiot, uber-Green, is trying to claim that those calling attention to what he claims is Man’s disastrous impact on climate are being censored, while those nasty, capitalist running dogs, climate change “deniers”, are bully boys:
As evidence, Mr Monbiot says:
Well, such outrageous events are entirely possible, but Mr Monbiot, in trying to claim that the Green movement is some sort of vulnerable, weak grouping ranged against the forces of evil big business, is surely testing the reader’s patience and intelligence. The thesis of Man-Made global warming is widely promoted and repeated in the MSM. To argue against it, even to argue that such warming must be mitigated rather than reversed, can often land the arguer in hot water professionally. Consider, for example, the treatment of skeptical enviromentalist, Bjorn Lomborg. Note the use of the word “denier”. Anyone who goes against the standard party line on Man-made global warming can expect to be dubbed by the Monbiots of this world as a “denier”. Consider how even the word, “skeptic”, which once may have implied a sort of admirable refusal to take certain big claims on trust without the most rigorous testing, is now almost a term of abuse in the mouths of some, if not all, climate change alarmists. So in truth, while Mr Monbiot may have some merit in his argument, for him to claim that the green movement is operating against forces of censorship is laughable. As far as I can see, the force is very much with the alarmist case, albeit perhaps less potent than a few years ago. There is only so much panic that flesh and blood can stand. I am an agnostic on the climate change issue, and not being a scientist, do not presume to know what the position actually is with regard to whether such warming is man-made, or not. However, my political and economic views lead me to favour approaches that work to enhance prosperity and freedom, and my suspicions about some of the alarmists is drawn very much from the fact that their agenda seems to be incorrigibly statist. Sometimes you have to go with your gut instincts. August 3rd, 2009 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
He is far from perfect, being happy to run a railway business that takes state funds, but my goodness, one has to admire the entrepreneurial brio of Richard Branson. If true, this story suggests that his commercial space venture could be soon involved in taking up satellites. There is a distinct buzz around such ventures at the moment, which might have something to do with lessons people are hopefully learning about the flawed, if magnificent Moon landings of 40 years ago. For some extended reading, this long article by Rand Simberg is a good guide to some of the issues involved in spacefaring. In particular, I liked the way he addresses the issue of getting fuel into space and making it possible to set up the equivalent of a gas station network. Here is also a good book on how spacefaring get back on track. August 2nd, 2009 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Okay, since we are in Lunar mode today, here’s another quotation: “No event in contemporary culture was as thrilling, here on earth, as three moments of the mission’s climax: the moment when, superimposed over the image of a garishly colored imitation-model standing motionless on the television screen, there flashed the words: “Lunar module has landed” – the moment when the faint, gray shape of the actual model came shivering from the moon to the screen – and the moment when the shining white blob which was Neil Armstrong took his immortal first step. At this last, I felt one instant of unhappy fear, wondering what he would say, because he had it in his power to destroy the meaning and the glory of that moment, as the astronauts of Apollo 8 had done in their time. He did not. He made no reference to God; he did not undercut the rationality of his achievement by paying tribute to the forces of the opposite; he spoke of man”. (page 186). Ayn Rand, The Voice of Reason. For all that I broadly share the sentiment expressed here, I don’t think that any of the astronauts, even if they were religious, would have thought of their faith as somehow undercutting the sheer, grandeur of rational thought that got them up there in the first place. For them, I think, belief in a Supreme Being might even have been strengthened by wondering about how the universe came about in the first place, although cosmology comes in many forms. But still, Rand was right to make the point: in a culture that sometimes denigrates science and reason, the Moon landings were a potent reminder of just how far Man has travelled through the use of both. July 20th, 2009 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
University of Essex Professor Vic Callaghan has a paper addressing issues of privacy and intelligent environments. In his review of a video on the subject he notes:
Although I do not think the UN is going to have the effect he would wish, the worries he expresses are ones we all need consider. The era of ubiquitous sensing has already begun. PS: Watch the referenced Christine Peterson video for a good summary of the right way to approach this problem (and not just because she’s a very old friend of mine!) July 18th, 2009 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
In just over one month’s time, some of us space geeks will be hoisting a glass or several to mark this 40th anniversary. I was only a three-year old toddler when Messrs Armstrong and Aldrin climbed out of the craft and onto that dusty, sun-blasted place called the Moon. 40 years. Popular Mechanics has a good look at what it all meant. I think a good place to mark the occasion would be down at Greenwich, London, near to the Royal Observatory. June 12th, 2009 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
Via such blogs as this one (see the list of recent postings on other blogs), and this one (the previous list being how I got to that blog), I today encountered a video of someone called Ian Plimer plugging his latest book, which is called Heaven and Earth. Watch it here. And here (via this posting) is a piece about an Aussie politician who seems to be following Plimer’s lead. I am no scientist, and politically I am heavily in favour of the free market capitalism that the Green Movement wants to shut down or at least castrate. So I would say all this. But I can honestly say that I find Plimer more convincing than those persons who talk about climate change as if the urgent need now is to stop all climate change (impossible) of as if those who doubt their prophecies of apocalypse (such as me) believe that climate is not now changing. The climate always changes. Plimer is eloquent, and relatively brief. Even pro-AGW greenies would find this, I think, a quite useful short compendium of all the arguments against their views, in fact they already are using it this way. That’s if they are interested in answering arguments, as some are. The clearest insight that I personally got from this video performance was Plimer’s claim that the AGW (as in anthropogenic global warming) people are all atmospheric scientists (insofar as they are scientists at all), who are plugging their apocalypse without looking at any other kinds of scientific evidence, or much in the way of historical evidence either. He also says that this particular evidence is itself very threadbare, but that is a distinct argument that I have long known about. I was also interested that Professor Donald Blainey [Correction: Geoffrey Blainey], an Australian historian whom I have long admired, is in his turn an admirer of Plimer’s book. Big plus, for me. Plimer is optimistic that the current economic woes, woes that really are now being experienced by our entire species if not our entire planet, together with the little bit of cooling that has recently been happening, will concentrate people’s minds on what a load of humbug the AGW scare is. No doubt pessimists commenting here will say that the damage has already been done, and will take decades to undo. I’ll pass on that argument. I now guess that the next argument for AGW here in Britain is going to be that since the BNP also says AGW is humbug, it must be true. June 10th, 2009 | 151 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a certain kind of libertarian-stroke-free-marketeer intellectual whom I hold in particular esteem. I’m talking about the specialist consensus breaker. I gave a talk to the Oxford Libertarian Society last year in which I mentioned two of my favourite intellectuals of this sort. I talked about James Tooley, who says: education for the poor doesn’t have to state funded and it’s better if it’s not. And I talked about Peter Bauer, who said: government to government foreign aid does more harm than good. I could also have mentioned another such consensus breaker: Terence Kealey. Happily, my failure to inform the Oxford Libertarian Society of Terence Kealey’s existence and stature did not do any lasting damage, because by some means or another they still managed to hear about him. Better yet, they invited him to talk to them about the consensus he has been busy breaking, the consensus that says that science is a public good which has to be government funded. Kealey says: not so. As with education for the poor, it’s better for science if the government doesn’t fund it. And even better yet, the Oxford Libertarians filmed Kealey’s talk. The talk was given on May 22nd, and the video of it was posted on the Oxford Libertarian Society blog on the 23rd, so sorry for only just noticing it and mentioning it here. But this is not one of those arguments where a couple of weeks will make any difference. I’ve only watched about a third of it so far, but am confident about recommending all of it. The talk I gave to the OLS is here. See also this recent Kealey book and this earlier one, both of which I have read all of and much enjoyed. June 3rd, 2009 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the days when UFOs were big news, someone – as usual I have forgotten where I read this, but it might have been in something by Arthur C. Clarke – once put forward a very good reason not to believe that the US military were concealing alien visitations: “If there really were UFOs,” said a military man, “all us captains would be majors.” And so they would. The proven existence of alien spaceships buzzing around in our atmosphere would prompt a vast expansion of the armed services. No doubt the governments of the world would also pour resources into the sciences. Administrators, too, would need more power and money in order to deal with the dramatic changes to our accustomed mode of life that might be necessary. The alien threat, scary though it would be, would be so good for so many people in receipt of a government salary that I am quite surprised that no one of any significance propagated it. In fact, according to believers in UFOs, the military-industrial complex went to great efforts to pooh-pooh the whole idea. Given the benefits it would have brought them, maybe I should revise my cynical views about bureaucrats. That was then. This is now. These days the threat of global warming rather than flying saucers is good news for many people getting a government salary. Some people will read this as meaning that I take climate change to be a group delusion, as UFOs were. Not so. I believe it is happening a little less strongly than I did in 2006 but I do not know. Back then I said, “The consensus convinces because there is no good reason to suppose that so many eminent scientists are lying or deceiving themselves when they say climate change is happening. But if you give me cause to believe that departure from the consensus gets a person ostracised, then there is a good reason.” I still think this, but I have become equally aware of another incentive for scientists to believe that global warming is happening. Via Tim Blair and Benny Peiser comes a beautiful example of how the words “climate change” have come to be seen as the key to the government strongbox. In the Guardian, Tariq Tahir asks:
The red things you see everywhere are tongues hanging out.
and
and
The fact that people believe something because they have incentives to do so does not make their beliefs untrue. But it is a reason for caution. May 20th, 2009 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have been somewhat quiet of late as I am on the road again, going from job to job to keep cash flowing sufficiently to keep me alive until my aerospace startup can keep me busy and paid full time. In the last 30 days I have worked jobs in Manhattan and north of DC; at the moment I have one day of business in Pittsburgh and am staying with the other half of “Browning and Amon” (or vice-versa), a duet from my younger days as a fixture in the Pittsburgh music scene. Mark Browning, besides being a fellow singer-songwriter and guitarist who shared many years and several bands with me, is also a Pittsburgh zoo-keeper and has used his knowledge of birds and his fertile imagination to invent a product for a market most of us would never have imagined existed: housing for Barn Owls.  An Owl ponders the possibilities of Mark and dinner. Photo: Courtesy of Mark Browning Sound strange? You might think so and you would be wrong. Barn Owls, beside being large, gorgeous and fascinating predators also happen to be exceedingly effective controllers of small mammals. Since I long ago shared a flat with Mark and assorted birds and vipers, I realized immediately how useful it might be having some living about your farm field. What I did not realize was just how big the potential market is. To be truthful I still do not know how gargantuan it may be, but it is simply huge. There is hardly a farm in the Anglosphere world (and perhaps later elsewhere) that would not profit from the free service provided by these birds. His boxes are selling like hotcakes in the California wine country. Sales are accelerating rapidly. Barn Owls love his nesting boxes and growers are packing them into their fields as closely as the Barn Owls will go along with. I would say there is every chance Mark will make his million from warm blooded flying predators long before I make mine off rapidly flying objects of the manmade kind.  Mark with his box and the Pittsburgh skyline behind him. Photo: Courtesy of Mark Browning You may wonder what is so special about these things. I cannot give out details I have been told over a few beers (well, not just a few. A lot actually) until his patent is through, but it comes down to a design which lasts and is naturally cooling. It gives barn owls a cool nesting place even if there is direct sunlight. If one happens to be flying around in the neighborhood it will make a beeline for one of these boxes because large enough hollow trees are rare and their old wooden barn homes are rapidly disappearing.  A proud homeowner surveys his cool new pad. Photo: Courtesy of Mark Bornwing I would not be at all surprised to turn on Autumn Watch in a year or two and see Bill and Kate talking with Mark about the increase in owl population these boxes have brought about. I am sure our own Editor Perry deHavilland will also appreciate this advance in Barn Owl housing…  Perry with his familiar, Cadaemus, during his Hogwarts days. If you are interested you can find out more from The Barn Owl Box Company web site. May 16th, 2009 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
A US stealth aircraft, photographed while breaking the sound barrier. I don’t know why, given that Man has achieved the feat of breaking Mach 1 for more than half a century since the great Chuck Yeager officially did it first, but stuff like this still gives me a buzz. May 13th, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
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