Nice write-up of the “Pioneer anomaly” over at the Planetary Society. I’d sort of forgotten about them - used to be a member about 10 years ago.
January 31, 2008
January 30, 2008
Can we please pull these people out of the meat-grinder now? Almost seems like protracted wars ain’t all they’re cracked up to be.
God I love Laurie Anderson. Ever since I heard her albums as a young lad. That was my introduction to William S. Burroughs: he does vocals on a track from those early days and I was all, “Who the hell is this guy?”
So anyway the link is to Anderson’s wikipedia entry, and from it I gather she and Burroughs collaborated on a few things. New to me too is the fact that she is NASA’s only artist-in-residence. Also that she can properly be called an inventor, owing to her invention of the tape-bow violin, since digitized, and the “talking stick,” which can access and replicate any sound. Geez, makes her sound a little like a superhero.
Dig up a fossil and push back the origin of horseshoe crabs by 100 million years.
Geez, a hundred million years ain’t chump change. What else is 100 million years older than previously thought?
January 29, 2008
Craig Minowa of Cloud Cult, musical architect of the Gonzo Science CD, rock star and environmental scientist at the Organic Consumers Association. Another cool interview with Craig here. Sample tracks of Gonzo CD here. To buy: here, at our newly revamped CDbaby page.
That’s funny, I thought there weren’t supposed to be any physical effects from microwaving your brain.
Researcher Professor Bengt Arnetz said: “The study strongly suggests that mobile phone use is associated with specific changes in the areas of the brain responsible for activating and coordinating the stress system.”
Another theory is that radiation may disrupt production of the hormone melatonin, which controls the body’s internal rhythms. ….
Alasdair Philips is director of Powerwatch, which researches the effects of electromagnetic fields on health.
He said: “The evidence is getting stronger that we should treat these things in a precautionary way.
“This research suggests that if you need to make a phone call in the evening it is much better to use a land line, and don’t have your mobile by your bedside table.”
January 28, 2008
England seems to have a bad case of Colony Collapse Disorder.
From this side of the pond, anecdotally, the organic beekeepers are not suffering as much. Updates as events warrant.
January 27, 2008
See Groovy Pics Here.
Ours was the pyramid.
January 26, 2008
A man trades in movies with the “dirty parts” illegally cut out, for sale/rent to religious prudes. Meanwhile, he pays for sex with 14-year-old-girls, discovered by one of the girls’ mothers. Click on peculiarly “values voter” hypocrisy.
January 25, 2008
David Attenborough climbs into a termite mound. The queen was clearly James Cameron’s inspiration for Aliens.
CANBERRA, Australia - An Australian teenage girl has become the world’s first known transplant patient to change blood groups and take on the immune system of her organ donor, doctors said on Friday, calling her a “one-in-six-billion miracle.”
What else is possible?
Syphilis originated in the Americas.
It had been speculated for a long time.
January 24, 2008
January 22, 2008
After analyzing hundreds of fluoride studies, researchers found that fluoride:
- Alters endocrine function, especially in the thyroid
- Causes dental fluorosis in young children
- May lower IQ
- May increase the risk of bone fractures
PS- Jim here. Allen and I wrote an article about fluoridation about 7 years ago that said all this stuff. Every claim in that article referenced papers in respected scientific journals. How did we beat Scientific American to this conclusion by 7 years? After all, we are merely commentators and critics, lowly independent bloggers. How again did we scoop Scientific American, the official mouthpiece of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, by 7 years?
Well for all you philosophy of science geeks, it’s because our method compares paradigms using all the criteria of adequacy (simplicity, fruitfulness, scope, testability, etc) except conservatism. (As detailed in our book, conservatism is inherently corrupted by the appeal to tradition, and must be jettisoned from the criteria of adequacy.) Once you remove the handicap imposed by conservatism, the dominant paradigm doesn’t always fare so well against alternative paradigms. The paradigm that resolves the most anomalies, wins.
Sibel Edmonds 2002 60 Minutes Episode, pt 1 of 4.
And here’s our previous Sibel Edmonds post, plus the latest revelations.
And yet more. Bush: legalize the selling of nuclear secrets to Turkey, which neocons have already been doing illegally for 10 years.
Sibel Edmonds pt 4, from 2002 60 Minutes episode.
Here’s those latest revelations again. Turns out high-ranking US government officials were warning their Turkish and Pakistani nuclear underworld contacts not to do business with Brewster-Jennings, because Brewster-Jennings was really a CIA front keeping tabs on the nuclear underworld. The Brewster-Jennings front had to be shut down two years later when high-ranking members of the Bush administration fanned out into the media and outed Valerie Plame. Brewster-Jennings was outed at the same time - it only worked as a CIA “front” if no one knew Plame, who was associated with it, was CIA. It suggests (to me) that Plame’s outing may have been in fact a deliberate attempt, from out the back door of the administration, to shut down Brewster-Jennings, which enabled the nuclear underworld at a profit.
January 21, 2008
So I blogged it. Not technically a ‘revised timeline’ but Dude’s take on Texas history is priceless.
In fact, the unabridged story is breathtaking in its callous disregard for the economic well being of this nation and its people. Exchange traded products did not emerge to hedge this risk because, behind the scenes, Citigroup, along with 12 other big banks and securities firms were funding a private company to gobble up all the necessary components to keep this burgeoning cash cow to themselves in the opaque, unregulated, over-the-counter (OTC) market, despite the fact that they knew it was dysfunctional.
From our dear friends at Counterpunch.
Turns out the profit motive gets in the way of a). preventative medicine and b.) delivering the best care. If only this could have been predicted.
January 20, 2008
Our opinion: Sheldrake wins.
Sheldrake:
The previous week I had sent Richard copies of some of my papers, published in peer-reviewed journals, so that he could look at the data.
Richard seemed uneasy and said, “I don’t want to discuss evidence”. “Why not?” I asked. “There isn’t time. It’s too complicated. And that’s not what this programme is about.” The camera stopped.
The Director, Russell Barnes, confirmed that he too was not interested in evidence. The film he was making was another Dawkins polemic.
I said to Russell, “If you’re treating telepathy as an irrational belief, surely evidence about whether it exists or not is essential for the discussion. If telepathy occurs, it’s not irrational to believe in it. I thought that’s what we were going to talk about. I made it clear from the outset that I wasn’t interested in taking part in another low grade debunking exercise.”
Richard said, “It’s not a low grade debunking exercise; it’s a high grade debunking exercise.”
In that case, I replied, there had been a serious misunderstanding, because I had been led to believe that this was to be a balanced scientific discussion about evidence. Russell Barnes asked to see the emails I had received from his assistant. He read them with obvious dismay, and said the assurances she had given me were wrong. The team packed up and left.
Richard Dawkins has long proclaimed his conviction that “The paranormal is bunk. Those who try to sell it to us are fakes and charlatans”. Enemies of Reason was intended to popularize this belief. But does his crusade really promote “the public understanding of science,” of which he is the professor at Oxford? Should science be a vehicle of prejudice, a kind of fundamentalist belief-system? Or should it be a method of enquiry into the unknown?
Sheldrake has one telepathy paper linked to on his website that Dawkins might accept as legitimate: this one about people psychically knowing who is about to send them an email, published in the Journal of Motor and Perceptual Skills. My impression is that it’s a real journal, although they have published weird edgy stuff before like much of Michael Persinger’s work on the piezoelectric/plate tectonics theory of the paranormal, which we have always found exciting, since it purports to show that some so-called paranormal events may be the results of misunderstood natural environmental forces. Sheldrake’s work kind of aims at the same place, although from a different direction…
On the other hand, Sheldrake also has published many papers with the likes of the Journal of Psychical Research, which although peer-reviewed, Dawkins’ skepticism will never accept as legitimate.
The skeptical take on the psychic email experiment: email senders are not really chosen randomly, and the “psychic” email recievers are just learning the non-random pattern of who will be “randomly” sending them the next email. Sheldrake has probably refuted this view somewhere - and Dawkins will never accept it.
One thing Sheldrake was able to show, and this was even published in one of the skeptic magazines, was that parapsychological research was more likely to use double-blind experiments than it had been given credit for, and that much “normal” scientific research failed to use double-blind controls. More Sheldrake peer-reviewed material about that here and here and here. Sheldrake is basically saying that even though it sounds wacky, you can’t just dismiss this stuff out of hand. Dawkins: Yes you can.
