11-11-2009 = 15
2-15-2010 = 11
On 11-15-09, Kurt Nimmo covered Borghezio’s comments on PrisonPlanet.
You can see 317 to Borghezio’s right for most of the video, and 371 behind him in the final shot, for another 11-11 (or 1111 [15, as I mentioned elsewhere, in binary]).
It’s all true, yo!
Have fun and cuídate.
With our solar mirrors we controlled the polar caps. The glaciations and mass extinctions that had marked the Pleistocene were over; the next ice age, long overdue, would never come. With our space-based lasers and nukes, we could shield the earth from asteroid impacts. We could bring back lost species from the DNA in museum exhibits. Soon, any century now, we would control the Milankovitch cycle. We were secure.
Ken MacLeod, The Cassini Division
On Paar (not The Tonight Show host, but the optimist prophet of icy doom),
The Zagreb based scientist says it will still be possible for man to survive in the ice age, but the spending on energy will be enormous.
“Food production also might be a problem. It would need to be produced in greenhouses with a lot of energy spent to heat it”, commented the professor, who remains optimistic despite his predictions.
He said: “The nuclear energy we know today will not last longer than 100 years as we simply do not have enough uranium in the world to match the needs in an ice age. But I’m still optimistic. There is the process of nuclear fusion happening on the Sun. The fuel for that process is hydrogen and such a power plant is already worked on in France as a consortium involving firms from Marseille and the European Union, the US, Russia, China, Japan and South Korea. The head of the project is a Japanese expert, and former Japanese ambassador in Croatia”, Vladimir Paar revealed.
He said the building of the new technology power plant will take at least another 10 years.
“In 40 years we’ll know how it functions. That would be a solution that could last for thousands of years. We have a lot of hydrogen and the method is an ecological one”, the professor concluded.
“Croat scientist warns ice age could start in five years” Croatian Times 2-10-10
Never really got into Frost, but I can’t knock his toss-up approach to elemental eschatology (as it’s still pretty mysterious, I’ll file this cruciform doohickey under “ice”, for now). Also, Greenpeace UK director John Sauven says Rajendra Pachauri is lowering the IPCC’s street cred and should resign, Pachauri says he’s no quitter and wishes death by asbestos on his critics, Nature editor Philip Campbell resigns from the Climategate investigation (“over interview defeding researchers“, according the editorially doubleplusrigorous Telegraph), and Evo Morales throws his own dang climate summit.
See yinz in flames, flooded, frozen, or just chillin’, as the case may be.
Have fun and cuídate.
Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future ; practise these acts. As to diseases, make a habit of two things–to help, or at least to do no harm.
Hippocrates, Epidemics I, Part XI, W.H.S. Jones trans.
“There’s no conspiracy.”
Jonathan Wilde in Ken MacLeod’s conspiracy-filled Fall Revolution series
Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th – malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists themselves, away from the guilty.
George W. Bush to UN General Assembly, 11-10-01
This can of worms has really made the rounds since Marc Estrin opened it (I caught it over at Cryptogon). Basically, for the thoroughly modern malady of conspiracy theoryitis, OIRA’s Sunstein and co-author Vermeule prescribe… wait for it… conspiracy!
I have to admit, the dudes occasionally raise some interesting points. For instance, I can recall (wonder how many of my fellow conspiracy geeks can say the same?) the transformative fury I felt upon learning of the Santa conspiracy. I didn’t know to call it that at the time, but learning I’d been systematically lied to by my parents, and that such deception was no big deal to them, nor to any of the other adults with whom I raised the issue, led me to question for the first time the religion in which I’d been raised – a path leading to the jovial cynicism I’ve enjoyed (with but the infrequent hiccup of outrage/indignation) for the past decade. Thanks, Mom & Dad!
Not all false conspiracy theories are harmful; consider the false conspiracy theory, held by many of the younger members of our society, that a secret group of elves, working in a remote location under the leadership of the mysterious “Santa Claus,” make and distribute presents on Christmas Eve. This theory is false, but is itself instilled through a widespread conspiracy of the powerful – parents – who conceal their role in the whole affair. (Consider too the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.) It is an open question whether most conspiracy theories are equally benign; we will suggest that some are not benign at all.
Sunstein & Vermeule, “Conspiracy Theories” 1-15-08, pg. 5
Cass and Adrian want you to know that they know that, like, not all conspiracy theories are wrong or harmful, just the wrong or harmful ones, going so far as to selectively quote Robert Anton Wilson on Holocaust denial leading to solipsism (pg. 7; I’m sure Wilson would’ve been honored) and going on about informational cascades and group polarization before dropping their delightful policy recommendations.
Here we suggest two concrete ideas for government officials attempting to fashion a response to such theories. First, responding to more rather than fewer conspiracy theories has a kind of synergy benefit: it reduces the legitimating effect of responding to any one of them, because it dilutes the contrast with unrebutted theories. Second, we suggest a distinctive tactic for breaking up the hard core of extremists who supply conspiracy theories: cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, whereby government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of those who subscribe to such theories. They do so by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups, thereby introducing beneficial cognitive diversity.
Sunstein & Vermeule, “Conspiracy Theories” 1-15-08, pg. 15
Not neurodiverstiy, yo, cognitive diversity. And stylized facts!
If you believe what you read on the internet, the Senate voted to confirm Sunstein’s nomination to the post of OIRA Administrator on 9-10-09; and, as of this writing, “CC: C and C” has been downloaded from SSRN’s site 9,119 times.
Have fun and cuídate.
Four hundred years ago today, Galileo discovered the fourth of the Galilean moons (which he wanted to call Medicea Sidera after his patron), Callisto.
So, I’m watching Moon Rising, which is pretty entertaining,
and at 0:40 the word “Bloomfield” jumps out at me.
October 6, 1997 – Commander Jim Wetherbee and pilot Mike Bloomfield brought Atlantis down to a picture-perfect landing at 5:55 p.m. EDT on runway 15 at Kennedy Space Center. The deorbit burn occurred at about 4:48 p.m. EDT. This landing of Atlantis marked the 40th landing at KSC in the history of Space Shuttle flight. It was the seventh landing of the Shuttle at KSC this year.
“STS-86 Atlantis, 87th shuttle mission” The Ultimate Space Place
5:55 on runway 15, yo!
Another Bloomfield, Maurice, is mentioned briefly in David White’s super-rad Sinister Yogis, which I’m currently reading. And who could forget “A World Effectively Controlled by the United Nations” author Lincoln P. Bloomfield?
The delightful slice of Pittsburgh I inhabit was apparently named “for the wildflowers that once populated its terrain” and not for New Jersey Governor and jagov Joseph Bloomfield, who led his state’s militia against local tax activists during the Whiskey Rebellion.
Have fun and cuídate.
9^2 years ago today, both Burroughs’ Tarzan and Philip Francis Nowlan’s Buck Rogers made their newspaper comic strip debuts. In making the jump from prose to strip, the site of Rogers’ 492-year (15-year) cryptobiotic snooze shifted from Wyoming Valley, PA to “the lower levels of an abandoned mine near Pittsburgh, in which the atmosphere had a peculiar, pungent tang, and the crumbling rock glowed strangely.”
There’s a tiny store called Copacetic Comics in Squirrel Hill. It’s on Asbury Place, just around the corner and across the street from the Northumberland police station, and it’s easy to overlook. No big sign. The name is on a flier in the front window.
Then, wow, once you’re inside, it’s a cube about 15 feet by 15 feet by 15 feet.
“Things You Can Learn in a Comic-Book Store” by Rick Sebak, Pittsburgh Magazine May 2009
In other old, but, to me, new, news:
Dyson’s son, George, a technology historian, says his father’s views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone — out of his beautiful mind.
But in the considered opinion of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, Dyson’s friend and fellow English expatriate, this is far from the case. “His mind is still so open and flexible,” Sacks says. Which makes Dyson something far more formidable than just the latest peevish right-wing climate-change denier. Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists — William Press, former deputy director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and now a professor of computer science at the University of Texas, calls him “infinitely smart.” Dyson — a mathematics prodigy who came to this country at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory — not only did path-breaking science of his own; he also witnessed the development of modern physics, thinking alongside most of the luminous figures of the age, including Einstein, Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Witten, the “high priest of string theory” whose office at the institute is just across the hall from Dyson’s. Yet instead of hewing to that fundamental field, Dyson chose to pursue broader and more unusual pursuits than most physicists — and has lived a more original life.
“The Civil Heretic” by Nicholas Dawidoff, NYT 3-25-09
As a scientist I do not have much faith in predictions. Science is organized unpredictability. The best scientists like to arrange things in an experiment to be as unpredictable as possible, and then they do the experiment to see what will happen. You might say that if something is predictable then it is not science. When I make predictions, I am not speaking as a scientist. I am speaking as a story-teller, and my predictions are science-fiction rather than science. The predictions of science-fiction writers are notoriously inaccurate. Their purpose is to imagine what might happen rather than to describe what will happen. I will be telling stories that challenge the prevailing dogmas of today. The prevailing dogmas may be right, but they still need to be challenged. I am proud to be a heretic. The world always needs heretics to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies. Since I am heretic, I am accustomed to being in the minority. If I could persuade everyone to agree with me, I would not be a heretic.
We are lucky that we can be heretics today without any danger of being burned at the stake. But unfortunately I am an old heretic. Old heretics do not cut much ice. When you hear an old heretic talking, you can always say, “Too bad he has lost his marbles”, and pass on. What the world needs is young heretics. I am hoping that one or two of the people who read this piece may fill that role.
“Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society” by Freeman Dyson, Edge 8-8-07
Long before Climategate, the author, for what it’s worth, of some of the most entertaining pop-sci books I’ve read (From Eros to Gaia, Infinite in All Directions and The Sun, the Genome and the Internet) was calling foul on the climate modelers.
Here’s another Freeman’s take on climate change
and here’s yet another’s.
Have fun and cuídate.