NOVATOWNHALL

Bjorn Lomborg is the author of the book ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist‘, this is an seminal work and I recommend it to everyone.  Lomborg is meticulous and backs up each claim carefully both with tables and graphs as well as multiple citations to a host of sources. His work has survived multiple reviews from decided hostile sources.  The book provides over a 100 pages of both web links as well as book references in its bibliography.  Many of these links are to the U.N. documents of the source studies regarding Global Warming Studies, Poverty, Energy etc.  Regardless of what you think of Lomborg’s conclusions, his book can at least provide you with sources from which to from your opinion.

The following presentation was made by Lomborg at a TED conference.  TED stands for Technology-Entertainment-Design, it has hosted both Lomborg and Gore and each has made his point at the conference.  Among the scores of other speakers are Steve Jobs, Burt Rutan, and Stephan Hawking, some of the entertainers invited are Yo Yo Ma and Bono.  The conferences are annual, and the talks cover everything from education to the state of African economies to the technology behind the Wii system.

Interestingly, Lomborg has asked Gore to debate Global Warming, Gore has declined, which is both a shame, for the public would benefit from such a debate, and cowardly on Gore’s part.

The left is using this issue as an anvil on which to hammer away our freedoms.  This is an issue about government control over our lives, not human survival.  Is global warming a problem?  Possibly.  There are anecdotal stories to support both sides of this argument.  Overall global temperatures are falling this year. Still, currently the evidence does point to a warming trend.

The weather varies from year to year (big surprise!), only 20 years ago the threat of Global Cooling was the bogey man. Is Global warming  caused by man?  Possibly.  However with other planets in the solar system warming up one can then wonder what is the effect of the Sun on our weather.

According to the U.N. report the sea level will rise but the change is inches (0.17 m/4.3 in), not feet as claimed by Gore. Is global warming our biggest problem? No, we have bigger fish to fry.

Hat Tip to Suburbanite for reminding me.

As I watch Andrew Zimmern explore donkey restaurants in Beijing (and these are not restaurants for donkeys), I am feeling more fearless by the minute. So this story from IHT was very welcome:

1. Killer hot dogs…
2. Your car’s planet-destroying A/C….
3. Forbidden fruits from afar….
4. Carcinogenic cellphones….
5. Evil plastic bags….
6. Toxic plastic bottles….
7. Deadly sharks….
8. The Arctic’s missing ice….
9. The universe’s missing mass….
10. Unmarked wormholes….

Personally, the missing mass of the universe is the one that had been keeping me up at night. If there is a chink in the armor of it all, a blot in the tableau if you will, a weak leg on the stool of life, there would be much to worry and feel guilty about. Say if some portion of a distant galaxy had begun to crumble, if some matter had gotten swallowed up: Well, we’d certainly know we could blame George W. Bush and, only to a slightly lesser extent, this blog. It’s good to have that one off the conscience.

For quite some time now, we have been told that man made global warming (MMGW) is settled science, supported by a consensus of scientists from various disciplines. Many are also beginning to question the validity of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conclusions.

Recent news :

The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming “incontrovertible.”

Read More at APS

WASHINGTON (7-15-08) - Mathematical proof that there is no “climate crisis” appears today in a major, peer-reviewed paper in Physics and Society, a learned journal of the 10,000-strong American Physical Society, SPPI reports.

Christopher Monckton, who once advised Margaret Thatcher, demonstrates via 30 equations that computer models used by the UN’s climate panel (IPCC) were pre-programmed with overstated values for the three variables whose product is “climate sensitivity” (temperature increase in response to greenhouse-gas increase), resulting in a 500-2000% overstatement of CO2’s effect on temperature in the IPCC’s latest climate assessment report, published in 2007.

Read More at SPPI

My prediction, at some time in the not too distant future, we will hear an announcement from the MMGW crowd that we are no longer threatened, due to the decrease in the number of SUVs on the road caused by the recent record gas prices.

While the title of this post may appear a blatant play for Google traffic, longtime readers of this blog will know I would never stoop to such cynical tactics.

A “Dr. Kring” is reportedly recommending NASA study the practicalities of sex in space:

He believes that Nasa could learn from the operation of bases at the South Pole, where researchers who are separated from their families for months at a time take “expedition spouses” as sexual partners for the duration.

He said: “You have an exclusive relationship with them for six to nine months but when the expedition is over, so is the relationship and you return to your normal lives and families.”

He added: “The polar environment has similar characteristics of isolation and confinement to space. Most of the evidence suggests that the addition of women there has had a positive effect on these traditionally all male crews.”

I’ll say.

It is personally comforting to me to know that scientists going into polar regions for a few months nowadays get concubines for the trip, and also that everyone goes home to their normal lives and families afterwards, and also that my geek friends from college who were mired down in organic chem while I was drinking Southern Comfort and arguing philosophy eventually made out quite all right. Better living through science, indeed. When I dropped calculus my senior year of high school, I had no idea the fork in the road I was then choosing and the fabulous life of hedonism I was leaving behind.

Clearly, the question of sex on Mars is an interesting one … sex on the Moon slightly less so. The Moon trip would likely only be six or nine months: You tell your wife, Hey I’ll be away nine months and Dr. Lovelace will be my expeditionary spouse, and your wife probably responds with something like, “Like hell” and you don’t get to go.

But Mars -well that’s pretty exotic, a few years project at least and a cherry subtitle on the curriculum vitae. You say: Honey, we are preparing the way for the next stage of humankind, the point of departure for civilization, the very evolution of our species, so me and Dr. Lovelace will be testing all the ramifications of gestation in a zero-gravity environment. I trust you and the kids will be fine until I get back and we start up the Wednesday night bridge games again.

I’m sure 99 out of 100 wives will say: Well, you were a physics major, I knew what I was getting into when I said “I do.”

We have some scientists around here: What say you, guys? Is Dr. Kring spilling the beans?

Well the time has come.  The interviews are over, the permits submitted and the tapes edited.  The only thing left to do is watch this thing from beginning to almost end (sorry but you won’t see the impact-still classified).  Have your daytimers marked for Sunday, July 20th at 2000 hrs or 8pm civilian time.  This is a Discovery presentation but shown on the MILITARY CHANNEL.  I believe the Discovery people will do a great job in holding our interests.  Good watching.

UPDATE:  Here is a complete listing of all showings.

(7/20) 8 and 11 pm  (7/21) 3 am  (7/23) 9 pm  (7/24) 12 and 4 am, 5 pm  (7/26) 12 and 5 pm  (7/30)  2 pm

Really interesting read … as long as you don’t mind a rare expletive. David Berlinski is a rather interesting character. For those that want to say religion is the only reason for arguing intelligent design, he must be their worst nightmare. Irreligious would be a good description — though capable of quoting from at least four of the major world religions, he seems to not care for any of them himself. The Devil’s Delousion, Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions has some of the best jokes on science I’ve seen. It points out the religiously (i.e., unproven and unprovable) held views of much of modern scientists.

Berlinski is an agnostic … a “secular Jew” … for whom religion did not take hold. But he certainly knows that atheists are just as dogmatic in their doctrine about the lack of a god as any religous lead is about the existence of God.  While sometimes the book is rather dense (what would you expect from someone that has his phD in philosophy and was a post-doctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology) it is mostly very approachable, and spectacularly funny.

This is something I would not recommend to anyone that would be truly offended by 3 or 4 off color words in a book, but it is something that I find absolutely compelling in argumentation that flies in the face of modern physics and biology. It is rare indeed to find someone that both understands the mathematics and science and is willing to challenge the “party line”. It is especially refreshing to see this from someone that is saying all this from an agnostic position and so proving intelligent design is not just a religious position.

I first met John Berlau at Dulles Airport in January, 2007 - I think I got his interest with my swastika armband … or it could have been my Townhall.com ball cap - and he told me about his then-new book, Eco-Freaks.

[Note to the world: If you want Joe to comment on your book, you need to allow some serious lead time.]

I was preoccupied with other extra-curricular stuff, along with a very consuming day job, so it has taken this long for me to begin to post on the topic of environmental alarmism, about which Eco-Freaks should be required reading. The footnotes alone are worth the cost of the book. If not for the issue which crowded our consciousness here in Loudoun County the past couple years, this is the one I would have been most passionately involved in all along.

Eco-Freaks is an essential primer on the most damning moral and intellectual failure of the modern age. “Science” has been so throughly corrupted by the grant process that political correctness has trumped objective research and analysis. Tracing back to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, an anti-human ideology has become normalized and institutionalized in popular culture, resulting in an outrageously negative - and wholly unnecessary - impact on mankind.

The topic is going to span over numerous posts at NVTH of which this is only the preamble.

Read the rest of this entry »

Oh, I can’t take it anymore.  Another wonderful breakthrough that, if you believe hook, line and sinker will solidify what you have always known about being homosexual….well, almost anyway.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2877509

I particularly like this observation:

“This is significant, she says, and fits with data showing that women are three times as likely as men to suffer from mood disorders or depression. Gay men have higher rates of depression too, she says, but it’s difficult to know whether this is down to biology, homophobia or simply feelings of being “different”.

Being different?  They are no different then straight women, right?  Are they trying to say straight women are different?  Then what pray-tell?  Straight men?  Good observation don’t you think.

How about this one:

“They found that the patterns of connectivity in gay men matched those of straight women, and vice versa (see image, above right). In straight women and gay men, the connections were mainly into regions of the brain that manifest fear as intense anxiety.”

If straight men and homosexual women are alike, and straight women and homosexual men are alike then how about a simple understanding and solution.  I know many couples were the man is dominating and the woman is meek and submissive.  I know couples where the man is a “girly boy” (sissy when I didn’t know better and didn’t have PC about me) and the woman was more of a man then I could ever obtain.  Then there was rough/gruff men/women couples and meek/mild men women couples.  The important thing here is men/women couples.  Just because a male thinks/feels more feminine, why would he be attracted to another MAN instead of the opposite sex?

The study proves nothing.  So we might be born with more of the opposite sex’s feelings.  Big deal.  Doesn’t give us attraction for the SAME sex!  Another lame liberal cop-out for justifing sin.

Yes, I am back, ready to kick more booty and take even yet more names.

Here’s what happened: Late Wednesday night, an automatic “Windows Update” of XP Professional kicked in while I was not looking, and rebooted my Toshiba A210 laptop. My computer automatically rebooted, and after that, the wireless adapter would not work.

I rebooted our wireless router, rebooted the computer, and still got zero connectivity. Up until this point, the Toshiba had been flawless since I bought it late last year.

Losing the wireless adapter would have been a huge problem because it is the only convenient way I can get online at home, and being forced to blog solely via my ethernet connection at work would have certainly reduced my participation here to little-old-lady levels, to say the least. I rarely begin to blog before 11:00 pm.

But the solution was a simple one, which I hold out as one which all of us poor stooges locked into Microsoft operating systems should be intimately aware of.

The trick is to bring your computer back to the previous “working” configuration.

On the Toshiba, this means right at startup (when you are presented with the option of pressing F2 for BIOS configuration) press F8, and choose “last known good configuration.” This will reverse the nefarious Windows update and bring your computer back to a working state. I had to move my “NETGEAR” home network back the top of the stack of “available wireless networks” and was back in business.

I suggest the next step is to find out how to turn off automatic Windows updates, and will post that whenever I figure it out. Whatever Microsoft purportedly assayed to accomplish with their forced update, I am going to bravely declare I will live without. Which I would love to be able to say about their whole company someday. But for now the lesson is, beware the automatic Windows update.

I have absolutely no comment on this report, for the usual “full disclosure” rationale. Except to say, in terms of emotional maturity, it seems to be working.

In keeping with our tradition here at NVTH of staying at least two years behind any given technological curve, I can hereby announce I am marching boldly into 2006 by incorporating Twitter into this Web site. What this means is, I can now send messages from my cell phone to the Twitter Web site, and theoretically they will be forwarded here to the “Twitter Updates” script at the very bottom of the righthand column.

I had to put it at the bottom so in case Twitter is down, as seems to be the case right now, the rest of the blog will still load in your browser.

Anyway, the point of Twitter is to be able to constantly broadcast the answer to the question “What are you doing?” I’m not totally clear on the appeal of that concept, because I can’t imagine anyone caring a whit what I happen to be doing at any particular time, and I know I sure as hell don’t care what any of you are doing at any particular time, but there it is.

One possible use I do see is being able to flash updates on things that people might happen to care about, like “I just saw a boatload of Chinese soldiers disembarking under the Woodrow Wilson Bridge” or possibly results from tomorrow’s RPV Convention.

Unfortunately, none of it will be too easy because I literally do have to use a cell phone - don’t have a Blackberry so the fastest I can create messages is by plodding through the telephone keypad.

So if Twitter is working, and I have anything of value to share, you might find some information of interest at the bottom of the right column of this blog, so please check back periodically.

UPDATE: Here is a video about Twitter.

My daughter (bless her veagan heart) made me aware of something of late and I find it noteworthy.  Although when growing up she really didn’t have a say in what was shoved down her throat for meals, now being a mother of 2 has changed how she sees things done for her own .  Makes you wonder where it will all end.  I am talking about genetic engineering of food stuff.

“Why should you be concerned about GMOs and labeling of GE foods:

It’s a simple conflict of interest.  Pesticide companies like Monsanto have developed Bt (bacillus thuringiensis) spliced corn, that is resistant to it’s own Round Up herbicide product.  This starts a vicious cycle where farmers must use both products to grow anything.

Biodiversity is a big deal.  There are 20,000 varieties of corn in Mexico alone.  If heavily introduced in Mexico, GE seed stands to decimate the assortment through cross pollination/contamination.  In 1970 the US experienced a corn crisis.  Southern corn leaf blight destroyed 15%-50% of the total US corn harvest, resulting in the loss of over $1 billion.  The US turned to Mexico’s seed biodiversty and cultivated several varieties of corn that were resistant to Southern corn blight, thus saving billions of dollars in losses the next year.

Bt corn is engineered to punch holes in the intestines of the insects that eat it and kill them.  What effect does Bt have on human organs and immune systems?  What effect does it have on our livestock that eat it and also become our food?  What effect does it have on beneficial insects?  It’s a good question.  It’s also a question that cannot be answered without GE labeling.  There is no way to link or trace illnesses back to GE foods if they are not labeled, thus the effects have never been studied.

 A small California biotech company, Epicyte, in 2001 announced the development of genetically engineered corn which contained a spermicide which made the semen of men who ate it sterile. At the time Epicyte had a joint venture agreement to spread its technology with DuPont and Syngenta, two of the sponsors of the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault. Epicyte was since acquired by a North Carolina biotech company. Astonishing to learn was that Epicyte had developed its spermicidal GMO corn with research funds from the US Department of Agriculture, the same USDA which, despite worldwide opposition, continued to finance the development of Terminator technology, now held by Monsanto. 

According to the USDA in 2007, adoption of biotech corn reached 73% while GE soy is at a staggering 91%.  This means most soy on the market is genetically engineered.  This is very frightening indeed.  Soy is the first alternative infant formula for babies with milk sensitivities and allergies.  What effects will this GE soy have on infants exclusively fed this formula?  We just don’t know and there should be proper labeling.  We DO know what it does to rats, however:

 Over half of the rats born to mothers who ate GM-soy (55-56%) were dead in three weeks, as opposed to a 9% mortality rate in rats whose mothers ate normal soy.What is happening here is that genetic seed is being manufactured.  The seed can pollunate with other seed but by the same token NULLIFYS (sterilize if you will) that seed so that it cannot be anything but GE used for future crops.  In essence, terminator seed wipes out the competition.  All that is left for each years crops are genetically manufactured seed from Monsanto.  We are talking about cornering the WORLD market literally.  It takes decades to manipulate nature into producing changes that are good for us and it takes science a short time in the lab to ruin it forever.  This isn’t comforting.

http://www.thecampaign.org/index.php

http://www.thecampaign.org/states/virginia.php

I would say that this is definately worth consideration.  Make your voice heard.  Do some research.  Watch what you eat and never, never eat grain from a crop circle! (Just thought I’d throw that in).

From past experience I have the impression our readership is not by and large a “techie” audience, unless the technology happens to go bang - in which case I think we have the top experts in the world this side of Janes.

But maybe the occasional Web or marketing person will drop by, so I am going to share a great blog I discovered in the course of researching my day-job Web overhaul project (which remains highly diffuse at this point). It’s honestly one of the best blogs I’ve ever read in any subject field, and I have read a whole lot of them.

Jeremiah Owyang is clearly the rare individual who has found an occupation which matches his personal enthusiasms, so that his online diary bears the depth and quantity of content of someone who pours 100% of himself into the subject matter. This is a pure blessing for anyone interested in learning about the information-intensive, jargon-rich, and opaque - for those who have fallen a bit behind on tech innovations - field that Owyang specializes in: Web strategy. Every minute spent on his blog is worth that minute of your life. His posts on User Experience could serve as a certificate program.

For instance, this post and comment thread on Content Management Systems arrived at a perfect time - when I am engaged precisely in researching CMS and social media solutions for our company. If you are behind the times on Internet trends, terms like Twitter and Technographics are greek to you, if you are responsible for making a strategic Web decision, and you want to get caught up, read this guy’s blog.

Sorry for the bleg but I am desperate:

My (day job) company is considering a Web software purchase which is a content management system that runs on Microsoft Server, and I need to get some information on Web site hosting companies. There are many Web sites that tout themselves as “Web hosting review” sites but a tiny bit of digging reveals the vast majority are simply advertising outlets that reprint each company’s promotional literature.

There is a special place in Hell for the guy who started that trend, believe you me.

The very few sites that actually do seem to be trying to provide reviews or compilations of customer ratings are either really outdated or - judging by other “reviews” for software and such that I happen to know about - don’t seem to have much going on between the ears, so I am not taking their word for anything.

The basic specs for the potential host would be dedicated (co-located) server, very powerful machine to pull the gargantuan pile of ore which is Microsoft software, and MS SQL Server. Backups and such, obviously. If anyone knows of any place on the Web or elsewhere where there are actual reviews or test center results for any hosting companies, that info would be greatly appreciated.

I am only going to give you this heads-up one time.  For those of us with ADD, ADHD and Altzeimers-too bad.  Staple a post-it to your forehead and look in the mirror often!  What?  Can’t read backwards either?  I have no other suggestions for you.

It seems that decisions made elsewhere and from middle-managment are about to give us a complete scenerio of how to kill a satellite; from beginning to end.  The interviews are still being made as I type this.  The program should include those people that made the decision, those people that implemented the decision, and those people that revamped everything to make it workable.  If we get really lucky (and I believe we will), there will be nose camera footage of the missle to target up to the last few seconds before impact.  Some things just have to remain classified as it should be.  Oh, stop crying and whinning.  If you want to see what missle impacts look like, google footage for the first Gulf War.

All this should come about around mid-June timeframe.  It is developed and brought to you by the Discovery Channel BUT will air on the Military Channel.  Get those VCR’s (or TiVO’s) ready.  Ought to be a good time!