E pur si muove!

by shizhao

UK Guardian: “US Senate’s top climate sceptic accused of waging ‘McCarthyite witch-hunt’”
[Via ClimateScienceWatch]

The Guardian covered the story of Senator Inhofe’s new prosecutorial approach to climate science. “A spokesman for Inhofe rejected the charges of a witch-hunt,” the British national daily newspaper reported. “But he said a criminal investigation was warranted and that it should not necessarily be limited to the 17 ‘key players’.”

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I guess his list of criminal scientists fits somewhere with McCarthy’s list of Communist spies in the State Department. This is the sort of junk we can look forward to if Inhofe ever gets to be the Majority leader of a Senate panel. The goal is to prevent any scientist who is working in this area from getting any work done.

Responding to frivolous FOIs or to government subpoenas or worrying about the vicious, out right violent hate mail each of them now gets, threatening to kill them or their children. One prominent purveyor of this attitude said,”I seriously believe we should kick them while they’re down. They deserve to be publicly flogged.”

These are not reasonable people we are talking with about. They are not rational. They want to see scientists in tumbrils on the way to the guillotine. (Check out the tags from this from the blog, which is hosted by a major newspaper.) Burning people alive or sticking hot pokers into people leads to over 250 positive responses in the comments.

Just as the Italian establishment used the Inquisition to prevent the scientific discoveries of Galileo from being spread – because they were dangerous to the power structure – we are seeing similar sorts of inquisitions being started by parts of the establishment that are most threatened by the effects of climate change on policy. And they are perfectly happy to create an auto-de-fe to accomplish this.

Too bad that the response of scientific facts to political pressure is still pretty much what Galileo said.

[Listening to: Talking Bird from the album "Narrow Stairs (Bonus Video Version)" by Death Cab for Cutie]

Burning methane from manure but polluting the air

by madiko83

A stink in Central California over converting cow manure to electricity – latimes.com
[Via Los Angeles Times ]

Reporting from Stanislaus County, Calif. – Central California is home to nearly 1.6 million dairy cows and their manure — up to 192 million pounds per day. It’s a mountain of waste and a potential environmental hazard.

But for dairyman John Fiscalini, the dung on his farm is renewable gold: He’s converting it into electricity.

At his farm outside Modesto, a torrent of water washes across the barn’s concrete floor several times a day, flushing tons of manure away from his herd of fuzzy-faced Holsteins and into nearby tanks. There, bacteria consume the waste and release methane, which is then burned in a generator capable of producing enough power to run Fiscalini’s 530-acre farm, his cheese factory and 200 additional homes.

Fiscalini’s resourcefulness should be drawing accolades, considering that state mandates are requiring California industries to boost renewable energy use and slash greenhouse gas emissions sharply over the next 10 years.

But efforts to convert cow pies into power have sparked controversy. State air quality control regulators say these “dairy digester” systems can generate pollution themselves and, unless the devices are overhauled, are refusing to issue permits for them.

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I mentioned yesterday some of the possible things that could be done with all the manure being generated. Well, here is a nice article that looked at farmers that were trying to do the good thing, reduce methane production. But they ran afoul of Clean Air provisions because they were producing too much nitrogen oxides, a big component of smog.

Just demonstrates how solving our problems will not simply be an easy fix. Fixing global warming does no good if we have air we can not breath. It’ll take a few more rounds of the innovation cycle to get all these things under control.

[Listening to: Locked & Loaded from the album "Locked & Loaded" by The Penetrators]

Almost everything you wanted to know about the greenhouse effect

Greenhouse effect revisited…
[Via Climate Change]

Every once in a while it is worth reviewing the basic physics behind the greenhouse effect and global warming. Sometimes all the debate about global warming in the media loses focus of the fact that the world really is governed by the laws of physics. Unfortunately, many internet explanations get dumbed down to the point of having an atmosphere that serves as a single “slab” between the ground and space, and has a bunch of colorful arrows coming out of it and bouncing off it, etc. This is a useless explanation, and gives no justice to understanding what is happening. Two encounters in the outside world recently prompted me to do another post just to have a reference handy, and I’m using this to replace an older post which I entitled “just a few more molecules.” There’s also been an interesting episode with Dr. Andy Lacis from NASA GISS over at Dot Earth which I’d like to elaborate on.

We begin with the Planck function, which describes the radiation emitted from a blackbody at a specified wavelength and temperature:

This has physical dimensions of intensity (power per unit area per unit solid angle) per unit wavelength, often in W m^-2 µm^-1 steradian^-1 (a steradian is essentially the 3-D analog of what angles are in two-space; there are 4π steradians in a sphere). h and k are constants, λ is the wavelength, and T is the temperature. An important note is that dB/dT > 0 for all wavelengths, which suggests that increasing the temperature increases the emission at each wavelength.

For review, the electromagnetic spectrum is presented below

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You will have to be pretty hardcore, with a real preference for Greek symbols in the math, to make it through this but if you stick through it, you will get a background explaining why greenhouse gases are so important for determining the temperature of the Earth. Without them, we would be a frozen snowball.

The more GHCs there are in in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet. That is mathematically certain.

[Listening to: 1812 Overdrive (An Adaptation of Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture") from the album "Wolfgang's Big Night Out" by The Brian Setzer Orchestra]

Windows Phone 7 continues MS poor design

by nathanborror

Edward Tufte’s Initial Thoughts on the Windows Phone 7 Series Interface Design
[Via Daring Fireball]

Edward Tufte:

The panorama sequence appears to be an interface for an interface, a distancing from the core activities of users, who just want to get on with what they want to do. My view is to let the user’s eyes do more on a screen-image rich with opportunities rather than having to move through a sequence of thin decorative screens in order to find the desired action.

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Tufte is always fascinating to listen to. Here he dissects some of the problems with Microsoft’s new mobile OS. One of his big points with small devices like this is the need to get a lot of information on a small screen, which is sometimes not very easy. Thus, the developers at MS end up making ‘stacks’ of screens that people have to drill down into.

What he likes about the iPhone is that it often uses the higher resolution to present large amounts of information and flattens the experience, so you feel like you are sliding across a single surface rather than drilling down. He states it thusly:

The design ideas here include high-resolution touch-screens; minimizing computer admin debris; spatial distribution of information rather than temporal stacking; complete integration of text, images, and live video; a flat non-hierarchical interface; and replacing spacious icons with tight words. The metaphor for the interface is the information. Thus the iPhone got it mostly right.

That is what the music companies said

from Baen Books Free Library

Publishers justify $13-$15 e-book prices for Apple iPad
[Via AppleInsider]

After the introduction of the iPad gave publishers leverage to raise e-book prices on the Amazon Kindle, a new report states that consumers have “unrealistic expectations” about how low e-book prices should be.

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Part of the problem here is that the book publishers are comparing costs of one business model they know really well with another that they do not know as well. No one really knows how well eBooks will do. It is a novel market and one, for the moment. is much smaller than the current market.

So they approach the new medium as though it was just a new form of their old one. Its just a book on a computer so they pricing must be something like what they describe.

But there are things that can be done with the new medium that are impossible in the old one, opening up new methods of revenue impossible before. One big problem with current books is the need for warehouse space to hold them and the need to deal with returns. How would no longer having to deal with these things change all the numbers?

One commenter discusses the ability to ‘rent’ a book. Impossible with the old approach but possibly a whole new revenue stream now.

What about things like specialty book clubs? My family buys a lot of books from the Science Fiction or Mystery Book Club. What happens if there is an eBook club giving us access to cheaper versions of the eBooks? How do the economics change?

In addition, what about their back catalog? The numbers here are for best sellers but a properly utilized eBook back catalog would bring them in money, from the long tail, that they are not getting now. They would have no warehouse costs, or printing costs and the overhead has presumably already been paid for. It would be like free money. Even more so than movie studios have found for their back catalogs on DVD.

Look, Baen Books provides electronic versions of some books for FREE! Chosen with input from the authors. They believe that getting people hooked on some authors or their series will generate interest in others.

The reason they do this is because of one thing not mentioned in the article. The only reason publishers have something to publish is because there are writers. The whole argument above is about what is most advantageous for the publisher. But, in the long run, the publishers that survive will be those that provide the best outlet for the authors. No author, no publisher.

What I expect will happen is that small, genre publishers, like Baen, will innovate ways to get more money to the authors with less cost to the audience. Some might go to all eBook with perhaps some print on demand for those who want hardcopies at a higher price. Their sales will increase while authors make more money. This will bring more authors to the publisher, generating more cash.

These smaler, innovative publishers will drive the entire industry to change in order to survive.

So, do no look to the publishers of best sellers to make a difference here. Look to the smaller publishers to lead the way.

Apple sues HTC for alleged infringement of 20 iPhone patents

by Selma90

Apple sues HTC for alleged infringement of 20 iPhone patents
[Via AppleInsider]

Apple on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against rival handset maker HTC over the alleged infringement of 20 patents related to the iPhone’s user interface, underlying architecture and hardware.

[More]

What is fascinating to me is the suit is not only in a US District Court but also in the International Trade Court. The latter holds the ability to prevent importation of the device. I wonder where it is easier to prevail on patent issues – the District Court or the ITC.

I would expect that the result of any of these suits is some sort of cross licensing agreement. That is what will probably happen with the Nokia-Apple suits. It does not seem to me that they have HTC dead to rights with patent infringement since they claim 20 are being infringed. Why not 50? This sounds more like throwing a lot out there and hoping one sticks. If there was obvious infringement on a couple, why not just concentrate on those? This seems more like a way for the headline to say “HTV violated 20 patents” when, in fact, the vast majority are not very close.

But, for HTC, the consequences of losing are just too great. Remember RIM’s lost patent suit? There was real concern they would have to shut down. NTP won the case and was asking for an injunction to stop RIM from providing any Blackberry service. RIM had to pay over $612 million to get the right to sell their product.

Playing this sort of roulette can be tricky, unless one has the patent infringement dead cold, which in the high tech world can sometimes be hard to prove. And suits can backfire on the group doing the suing.

But sometimes it is more clearcut.

Back in the 90s, Apple sued Microsoft because some of Apple’s code for Quicktime was directed added to Microsoft’s code for Video for Windows. It was a direct rip off by a contractor who admitted the piracy. The judge’s agreed and made Microsfot remove the code. In 1997, there was the much heralded shaking of hands by Microsoft and Apple, where Microsoft agreed to provide Office for the Mac, bought $150 million in stock and agreed to make other payments, apparently to get rid of various lawsuits. The other payments may have been substantial, with rumored amounts in the hundreds of millions.

In this case, Microsoft had something Apple needed and a nice out-of-court settlement was apparently reached.

One aspect mentioned in one of the articles is the process of Discovery. Here, Apple could get access to some of HTCs IP in order to discover just how they infringed. This might be something that HTC does not really want. In fact, I expect this is the reason so many want to settle. Just to stop Discovery. Who knows what Apple would find that HTC would regret?

I expect some sort of settlement will happen here. The alternative is usually too ricky.