General
illconsidered | July 25, 2016"In order to save the dying heliocentric theory from the conclusive geocentric experiments performed by Michelson, Morley, Gale, Sagnac, Kantor and others, establishment master-mind Albert Einstein created his Special Theory of Relativity which in one philosophical swoop banished the absolute aether/firmament from scientific study and replaced it with a form of relativism which allowed for heliocentricism and geocentricism to hold equal merit. If there is no universal aetheric medium within which all things exist, then philosophically one can postulate complete relativism with regard to the…
illconsidered | January 20, 2016I will allow comments through by default for repeat commenters again, first time commenters will still need an initial approval.
I will however now be a more active moderator and delete things that are useless or unnecessarily personal from now on, except on this thread.
This is unavoidably subjective but I will try to err on the side of permissiveness. The goal will be controlling the tone more so than the content. Readers should keep in mind the fact I am in an Australian time zone, so doomed comments may be visible for many hours. I expect this blog will remain pretty quiet for the time…
illconsidered | November 13, 2014Humankind has touched the surface of the solar system's most alien of objects.
Image taken from NAVCAM top 10 at 10 km – 10.
There are no words...
illconsidered | July 15, 2014Aside from the climate blogosphere, Paul Krugman's "Conscience of a Liberal" is my most regular blog visit. He does not usually have a lot to say on climate change (which is mildly disappointing) and I have seen only very shallow and casual dismissals of the, to me compelling, notion that perpetual growth as a requirement for economic prosperity is problematic (which is very disappointing). It is however, usually very interesting and I have learned a lot about economics, something very apropos given the ongoing global crisis. I do enjoy the political snark as well, as long as it is reality…
illconsidered | July 13, 2014Only In It For The Gold: Neither Optimist nor Pessimist, Just Activist.
"We must stop treating the natural world as something to exploit, and start realizing that it is our home. If we do that, we can thrive."
illconsidered | July 11, 2014Just a quick note to regulars and those who like to visit the weekly GW News Roundup about its absence. Unlike past delays, this is not just me having more on my plate than usual. For the first time in very close to 7 years I have not received het's compilation of links, nor is it at his own site. Nor have I received the next chapter of "The Bottleneck Years".
I'm a little worried, and I got no response to an email inquiry. I certainly have appreciated his heroic weekly efforts and really hope there is nothing serious amiss.
illconsidered | June 27, 2014Consensus, Criticism, Communication | Planet3.0.
This is a well written and comprehensive discussion of the "97% consensus" message, have a look!
illconsidered | May 5, 2014In the video below Gavin Schmidt gives a "TED Talk" on climate models, taking us from an overview of their construction to the resulting emergent processes and their skill at reproducing much more than a global average temperature trend.
Gavin is an excellent communicator and a true hero in humanity's fight against itself over the impending and tragic disruption of our global ecosystem services. Well worth the 12 or so minutes to watch!
illconsidered | February 11, 2014Via un-climate-related readings, I came across this gem (from the victim article of the link):
My job is to assess not the rightness of each argument but to deal in the real world of campaign politics in which perception often (if not always) trumps reality. I deal in the world as voters believe it is, not as I (or anyone else) thinks it should be. And, I'm far from the only one.
This is from the mouth of one of the Washington Post's political mouthpieces, Chris Cillizza. Readers here will be more than familiar with the fundamental problems with this attitude. I just wanted to note that the…
illconsidered | July 14, 2013Things have been quiet here, even more than the usual slow pace...
I am back now from a trip to Europe where I left the family with the kids maternal grandparents and I won't see them for nine weeks in all. This was a bad plan, but it was the plan. I have been home for a couple of weeks already, but I managed to lose my laptop traveling. Yes, that is a big pain in the behind and it has made many previously simple and efficient things more difficult. Mind you, it could have been much worse as the external hard drive I always keep in my laptop bag was not in my laptop bag and this is where…
illconsidered | April 22, 2013(these are of course NA dates)
Event Title: Do the Math ... If you Love this Planet// Earth Night Gathering
Venue: Country Park {Mobile Home} Community Clubhouse
Location: Clearwater, FL
Start Time: Sunday, April 21, 7:00 PM
You can RSVP here: http://act.350.org/event/do_the_math_movie_attend/4678/signup/?t=2&akid=3034.683317.zTETWN
Event Title: "Do the Math" sustainability tour movie at Eckerd College.
Venue: Eckerd College Campus at Fox Hall
Location: St Petersburg, FL, FL
Start Time: Sunday, April 21, 7:00 PM
You can RSVP here: http://act.350.org/event/do_the_math_movie_attend/…
illconsidered | April 15, 2013Via Planet3.0 I see there is a declaration of the need, and competitive advantage it would bring, for action on climate change signed by a not insignificant number of major (non-fossil fuel) corporations. As Michael Tobis points out, it is, rather strangely, presented as an image only.
So my contribution is running it through an OCR tool, formatting and presenting it below:
Tackling climate change is one of America's greatest economic opportunities of the 21st century
(and it's simply the right thing to do)
What made America great was taking a stand. Doing the things that are hard. And…
sciencepunk | April 11, 2013In the age of life-casting offered by Google Glass, you'll need to pick your friends wisely.
As the first of Google's goggles are dispatched, we're starting to see serious conversations arise about the implications of always-on feeds beaming every moment onto the cloud. I've seen a few articles expressing alarm at the idea we'll be under constant surveillance by the people around us, and the necessary etiquette frameworks that will need to be hashed out as this kind of device becomes more commonplace. Seattle's 5 Point Cafe became the first to ban the goggles, although this was more a savvy…
sciencepunk | March 31, 2013There's been quite a lot of coverage in the press about Google's street-mapping of the tsunami-damaged Fukushima district in Japan, still derelict two years since the disaster.
I think this is interesting for a couple of reasons, The first is the use of Google's Street View as a journalism. The mayor of Namie invited the cameras in an effort to stop the world forgetting about the catastrophe. As far as I know, this is the first time street view has been used to document an area with this kind of subtext. In the future, might we demand more from news teams than carefully composed photographs…
sciencepunk | March 25, 2013 Source: Oak Ridge Associated Universities
Moscow police officers have detained a schoolteacher after 14 kg of radioactive material was discovered in his garage.
The police cited the man as saying that he had used the substances to “irradiate” a friend who wanted to become immortal.
He reportedly said the friend had even traveled to the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster “to expose himself to radiation and become immortal.”
The radioactive material was apparently collected by the teacher from known burial sites and other "special places".
Moscow Police Seize 14 Kg of Radioactive…
sciencepunk | March 24, 2013A couple of surprising images from the medical literature - two patients with chopsticks buried deep in their skulls. The first belongs to a 38-year-old woman who was dancing at a wedding while eating with chopsticks. Someone accidentally pushed into her from behind, causing the woman to fall forward onto one of the chopsticks. The wooden skewer went straight through the back of her mouth, into the skull and snapped against the back of it, coming so close to the carotid artery that a separate image shows the major vessel pushed to one side(!). Despite some length of it still jutting out of…
sciencepunk | March 20, 2013Last month I visited Amsterdam to take part in Sonic Acts, an art festival with a keen love of the scientific. Amid music woven out of the electromagnetic ether and artists painting geomagnetic storms, I took part in a panel convened by Arc editor Simon Ings to discuss the ‘futures of science and science fiction’.
Not being a scientist or a science fiction author, I opted to look at how one influenced the other. The theme of the festival was the dark universe - all that lies unknown and obscured. During the age of empires, Dutch cartographers were regarded as the best in the world, their…
sciencepunk | March 20, 2013Written over a year ago, but only just coming to my attention, is Google engineer Jean-Baptiste Quéru's wonderful essay describing how no single person alive understands entirely what's going on in the machines we use daily.
You just pressed a key on your keyboard.
Simple, isn't it?
What just actually happened?
Well, when you know about bit about how input peripherals work, it's not quite that simple. You've just put into play a power regulator, a debouncer, an input multiplexer, a USB device stack, a USB hub stack, all of that implemented in a single chip. That chip is built around thinly…
sciencepunk | March 19, 2013From the annals of dystopian architecture: the New York Times reports on a trend in US communities to build nominal parks to drive out sex offenders. The parks are often too small to be of any use to local children - instead, they exist to force out nearby paroled sex offenders, who are required to live no less than 2,000 feet from any school or public park. As the article points out, this practice actually makes neighbourhoods more dangerous, as it drives rapists and paedophiles out of secure accommodation and into the street, where authorities have a harder time tracking them.…
sciencepunk | March 13, 2013 You had your chance.
A while back I chanced across a post by Carla Sinclair at BoingBoing, recounting a recent TED talk that proposed reviving extinct species:
Stewart Brand began his TED talk today with the statement, “Biotechnology is about to liberate conservation.” Before I had a chance to process what that meant, he went on to list a number of birds and mammals that have become extinct in the last few centuries, including the passenger pigeon, which was killed off by hunters in the 1930s. For a moment my mood plunged, as it always does with conversations of human-caused animal…