It might make sense if he had won an Oscar

by Dave_B_

Strip Gore of His Oscar | The Atlantic Wire
[Via The Atlantic Wire]

Defying the stereotype that Hollywood luminaries are tree-huggers and bleeding-heart liberals, conservative Academy members Roger Simon and Lionel Chetwynd are trying to rewrite history. Incensed that Al Gore won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth in wake of “climategate,” they’re urging the Academy to strip him of his award.

[More]

Al Gore did not win an Oscar for Inconvenient Truth in 2007. We was the subject of the movie. David Guggenheim won the Oscar. If you check out IMDB, Gore has never even been nominated for such an award. He did win a Primetime Emmy but not for anything climate related.

The Atlantic Wire is a little off. What the men are really calling for is something much worse, in my opinion. They want some sort of public auto-de-fe where the producers, director, writers and subject of the movie are called into a hearing, with cameras, and required to explain why they lied by the inquisitors.

No need for an investigation. No need for a hearing. Just bring them in and ask why they lied. Nice. I wonder if they will have to poke them with the Soft Cushions?

Now, why in the world should Gore, be brought into this? What is it that he is supposed to have done that would especially require the Hollywood Inquisition to take notice? I don’t know but he is someone that they are extremely aware of.

Perhaps their interest is because he is a much greater boogyman than David Guggenheim. SImply look at the comments at this LA Times article to get an understanding. I just had to say ‘Wow!’

I guess their ratings would be ever so much higher if Gore is there than if they question some director no one really cares about.

Luckily for us

Vaccination, antivirals and social distancing may blunt impact of H1N1 influenza:
[Via EurekAlert! - Infectious and Emerging Diseases]

(Canadian Medical Association Journal) The relatively low number of new cases created by a single case of H1N1 influenza indicates that mitigation strategies such as vaccination, social distancing and the use of antiviral drugs may help to lessen the final impact of the virus, suggests an epidemiological modeling study reported in CMAJ.

[More]

The really interesting number for me from this paper is the reproduction number. It is a measure of how many other people get the disease from a single person with the infection. It has to be greater than 1 for any disease to spread. For measles, the number is 12-18.

For H1N1, it appears to be 1.3. This is just about as low as one can find in any spreading disease. With a number this low, efforts such as vaccination and social distancing can work well. Estimates of the reproductive number for the flu pandemic in 1919 are closer to 4.

We would be in much greater peril if H1N1 was nearly as contagious as the 1919 pandemic. We might not be as lucky next time.

Technorati Tags: Health

Helpful amino acids

Scripps Research team develops cheap, easy ‘kitchen chemistry’ to perform formerly complex synthesis:
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

A team at The Scripps Research Institute has made major strides in solving a problem that has been plaguing chemists for many years: how best to break carbon-hydrogen bonds and then to create new bonds to join molecules together. This problem is of great interest to the pharmaceutical industry, which currently relies on a method to accomplish this feat that is relatively inefficient and sometimes difficult to perform.

[More]

According to the release, they use very simple and cheap compounds, some based on amino acids, to help guide these reactions. I imagine that this will appear in some organic chemistry classes. I do love science articles that provide interesting insights:

To our delight, during this investigation, we also discovered that certain Boc-protected amino acid ligands could dramatically improve the yield in this olefination reaction (see supporting online material), with the optimal ligand choice highly dependent on the combination of substrate and coupling partner.

As well as displaying emotions. The word delight so seldom appears in scientific literature yet it is almost always part of the emotional feelings of researchers.

Technorati Tags: Science

What he said

by jwebb202

UK Met Office to publish climate records – CNN.com
[Via CNN]

The UK’s weather service, the Met Office is to publish station temperature records that make up the global land surface temperature record.

[More]

While this is news people may have heard before, I really liked how the British Prime Minister puts it:

With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn’t be distracted by the behind the times anti-science, flat earth climate skeptics. We know the science. We know what we must do. We must act and close the five billion ton gap. That will seal the deal.

I may have to agree with him.

Videos about climate change

[Crossposted at Path to Sustainable]

by chrispearson72

To What Degree: What Science is Tellifont-size: medium; color: #999999;”>NSF News]

What is science telling us about climate change? Leading climate change experts discuss one of the most complex scientific puzzles ever to confront humankind.

More at /news/special_reports/degree/water.jsp?WT.mc_id=USNSF_51

This is an NSF News item.

[More]

The link has some really good videos. When someone asks a basic quesiton oabout climate change, snd them here. There are some really engaging researchers in the videos.

Richard Alley from Penn State gives a great intro to “How do we know the earth is warming?” along with several others. There is also a nice discussion of the water cycle. All done with very nicely.