The Last Ephor

any load screen from id Software.

Will Wilkinson / The Fly Bottle � Blog Archive � Ranting Cant : "Climate eschatology really is the ultimate in big lie crisis politics. The far-left has failed so comprehensively to make the case for its vision of society and economy that the only thing left to do is to brazenly and repeatedly assert that the world will literally collapse unless we implement this otherwise indefensible vision." h/t: Insty They are the secular answer to the fire and brimstone preacher. They are the guys with the sandwich boards that declare "REPENT! THE END IS NEAR!" They have somethings in common with those preachers: Only by ceding to their authority will we be saved. They alone know what God's/Gaia's will and how to save us. They string their followers along sometimes for year with the Sword of Damocles dangling over them. "Any minute now! God/Gaia will bring the pain! Just you watch! Seriously, like, one more year." They are typically either charlatan...

The images of the 140 blind and sighted athletes from 37 countries revealed that Paralympic athletes blind from birth struck the same triumphant stance as sighted Olympic athletes. Since the blind athletes could not have learned the victory dance by watching others, the scientists concluded that the behavior was innate.

Lord Nelson may hold the key to understanding climate change It seems Jack Tar was big on recording data. Anything that would help with navigation would be a great advantage for the British Navy. Weather is, of course, very important. A preliminary study of 6,000 logbooks has produced results that raise questions about climate change theories. One paper, published by Dr Dennis Wheeler, a Sunderland University geographer, in the journal The Holocene, details a surge in the frequency of summer storms over Britain in the 1680s and 1690s. Many scientists believe storms are a consequence of global warming, but these were the coldest decades of the so-called Little Ice Age that hit Europe from about 1600 to 1850. Heresy! Global warming is irrefutable! Any deviation from orthodoxy and you will be ostracized. Wheeler and his colleagues have since won European Union funding to extend this research to 1750. This shows that during the 1730s, Europe underwent a period of rapid warming simila...

So, you all remember my whining about the dishwasher , right? Well after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, the new one has finally been installed. Yesterday. The bill arrived...a week ago. The salesman had assured me that it would take three days to deliver, a week at the most. Rube that I am, I believed him. It took 9 days. Sorry, nine business days. Weekends apparently don't count. I called and suggested they put the billing people in charge of product delivery and vice versa. He didn't see the humor. Lastly, The VeryBigDishwasher company and I have come to an agreement on the previous item that gave up the ghost. Part of the agreement was that I not blog about the terms of, or discussion with, said company. The matter was resolved to our mutual satisfaction. I can say that a few key words known well to CSR's were effective. Some of those words may be: blog sausage Digg automobile Technorati dog EECB laundry Consumerist energy link sidewalk email Steve Jo...

Two installments on what may become a regular feature: First up, dutiful lefty David Mamet on why he is no longer a "brain-dead liberal. " Read the whole thing. I think his critique of "brain-dead liberalism" is a fair one. He doesn't believe all liberals are brain-dead. Rather, that he was not thinking about it. There were certain things he accepted as hardened facts that did not withstand the scrutiny of close examination or comparison with real life. Second, physicist and environmentalist Miklós Zágoni believes he was wrong about global warmening . Like any good scientist (or intellectually honest person) changed his mind to fit the facts and not the other way around. The key graf: NASA refused to release the results. Miskolczi believes their motivation is simple. "Money", he tells DailyTech. Research that contradicts the view of an impending crisis jeopardizes funding, not only for his own atmosphere-monitoring project, but all climate-c...

Read the sunspots the hold the answer. At least that's what the article contends. Could it be that the scaremongers of the 70's were right when they were scaremongering about a new ice age. Frankly, I've always believed that global cooling was more dangerous than global warming. Global warming gives us more arable land. Global cooling does not. The great irony of global cooling would be that in extremis, population centers would move to many of what are now third world nations.

Climate Books Cooked? asks American Digest. The one example cited is certainly a damning case even if it's only one example. I've always failed to understand why the weather babe always tells me what the wather was at the airport. If there's one place that's going to give a skewed temperature reading, it's the airport. Consider also, the temperature difference between large cities and the more suburban or even rural areas. If you take the mean temperature for a region based on temperature readings in the city, you're going to get significantly different results than you wold if you took them on a farm 20 miles outside the city. Additionally, as Dennis Miller noted "Excuse me if I don't trust temperature readings from 150 years ago."

I've been skeptical of wind power in the past. Largely my concerns rest with scalability and consistency of supply. There are ways of mitigating the latter somewhat but the former is a barrier created by physics not will. This idea , however, might have some merit. If that's going to be used to power lights along the highway and possibly suppliment some service stations it would be a start. Even if this only does a small amount, that's a good thing. It won't drive the price of oil down but we need to move to renewable energy wherever possible.

Global Warming Swindle . Read the whole thing as they say. The destruction of the Grand Monolith of Scientists Who Believe In Man Made Global Warming continues apace. I'll continue to point them out over and over until we get to some sort of rational place where we're debating this not polemically shouting each other down (buckle up, it's going to be a long ride. -Ed). We should be good stewards of the Earth and should absolutely make every effort to "go green". There are, however, trade-offs and we have to be reasonable about them. Technology is the only way we're going to get greener. To think that we're going to get their by conservation is lunacy. Likewise this is not going to be pain-free. There will be things that we may have to curb or even do without to get to where we need to be.

Be More Than You Can Be so sayeth DARPA . The article is incredible. It outlines how they are using basic physiologic principles to makes soldiers endure heat extremes much easier. This is going to be a very very big breakthrough. Reducing muscle fatigue and inuring soldiers against weather will have a profound effect on capability and even morale. Read the whole thing. It's fascinating.

Navy develops 8-Megajoule railgun, Nukem bows down The mere mention of the word brings back visions of the original first-person-shooters to grace our now-antiquated machines, and now the US Navy is getting real personal with a realized version of the pixelated railgun we all love and adore. Presumably ripped straight from the (admittedly lacking) storyline of Quake, an 8-Megajoule railgun has been officially created, fired, and deemed worthy of flanking our naval ships, which should strike fear in the hearts of anyone wishing us harm. The gun was showcased this week at the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Dahlgren, Virginia, and utilizes massive quantities of electricity rather than gunpowder to propel "nonexplosive projectiles at incredible speeds." The weapon is powerful enough to equal the damage inflicted by a Tomahawk cruise missile, and the device's project director compared the impact to hitting a solid object "going 380 miles-per-hour in a Ford Taurus." ...

Donald Sensing makes the claim in a post called Science and religion? No, science is a religion So said Michael Polanyi, a Fellow of the Royal Society and former professor of physical chemistry at the University of Manchester in an article entitled, “Scientific Conventions and the Free Society,” linked to by The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The article is based on a previous work of 1949. Polanyi writes, " Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in, is essentially incomplete and a false pretension. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs which are not scientific statements, and this is untrue. To show the falsity of this pretension, it should suffice to recall that originality is the mainspring of scientific discovery. Originality in science is the gift of a lonely belief in a line of experiments or of speculations, which at the time no one else had considered to be profita...