It’s coming!

by nDevilTV

iPad Available in US on April 3
[Via Apple Hot News]

Apple today announced that its magical and revolutionary iPad will be available in the US on Saturday, April 3, for Wi-Fi models and in late April for Wi-Fi + 3G models. In addition, all models of iPad will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April. Beginning a week from today, March 12, US customers can pre-order both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G models from Apple’s online store or reserve a Wi-Fi model to pick up on Saturday, April 3, at an Apple retail store.

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Great news. Now I just have to figure out if I want the 3G version or not. I’ve been looking at old ATT bills for my iPhone to see how much data I use a month. I’m hoping that I can start out with the $15 plan. So far, I maxed out my iPhone at 100 MB in a month, so I should be well under the 250 MB limit of the $15 plan.

I wish they offered a $15 plan for the iPhone.

[Listening to: Banana boat from the album "The Very Best of Stan Freberg" by Stan Freberg]

Creationism repeating debunked statements while getting almost everything else wrong

by Tadias Magazine

Buchanan Blathers Ignorantly About Evolution
[Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars]

Pat Buchanan has a column at the Worldnutdaily reciting the familiar litany of idiotic anti-evolution arguments. He’s reached for two of the oldest and silliest of them, Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man. And he starts by proving his ignorance:

With publication of “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, the hunt was on for the “missing link.” Fame and fortune awaited the scientist who found the link proving Darwin right: that man evolved from a monkey.

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Why do creationists keep getting basic stuff wrong? Both apes and humans evolved from an ape-like common ancestor. even calling that ancestor an ape is technically wrong but understandable

But it was not even close to a monkey. And Piltdown man? Nebraska man? Neither of these were discoveries of the century (hyperbole – another rhetorical trick). And it was scientist that provided the final explanation of these two things., not creationists or even denialists.

But that is pretty typical for a creationist. Continuing to use old arguments in an attempt to sway an audience with misinformation, not actually educate them in any fashion.

Of course, that is always the goal of a denialist, of which creationists are one of the oldest forms ween today. Misinform. Quote mine. Misattribute what is said. Repeat debunked information. Mislead. Use rhetorical tricks and logical fallacies. Rinse and repeat. Again and again with little real regard for trying to find scientific explanations for the world around us.

And creationists are finding common ground with other purveyor of denialism.

Because it is not long before the comments in the post, one dealing with creationists, is invaded by those discussing climate change and conspiracies about President Obama. There really is a convergence in denialists at the moment.

Made me smile!

by xlibber

Institute of Irony
[Via Deltoid]

Institute of Physics refuses to say who wrote submission calling for more openness.

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When you hear denialists bring up the IOP and how it somehow supports their views of climate science, simply check out the current fiasco:

The institute statement says its submission was approved by its science board, a formal committee of experts that oversees its policy work. The Guardian has been unable to find a member of the board that supports the submission. Two of the scientists listed as members said they had declined to comment on a draft submission prepared by the institute, because they were not climate experts and had not read the UEA emails. Others would not comment or did not respond to enquiries. An institute spokesperson said the submission was “strongly supported” by three members of the board. “All members were invited to comment. Only a few did, all concerned approved [the submission] unanimously.”

They talked to the chairman of the science board who said he had little to do with the submission of the statement. It appears that only 3 members of the board really approved this with the others not appearing to really care.

It appears likely that the IOP statement was put together with input from an energy industry consultant and IOP official, who views global warming as a religion. He appears to be on the energy subcommittee of the science board but the IOP will not say who else is.

As Evan Harris, a member of the science and technology select committee, said:: member of the science and technology select committee, said: “Members of the Institute of Physics … may be concerned that the IOP is not as transparent as those it wishes to criticise.”

So, apparently 3 anonymous members of a science board took it upon themselves to represent the full authority of the IOP and present an opinion on a highly politicized affair, Then they are surprised by the criticism by the their members and the public. Really smart.

It is so much easier to sling mud when you can keep your name hidden. I don’t expect them to remain hidden for very long.

Weights and standards via Facebook

by HeavyWeightGeek

Hella…yes!
[Via Cosmic Variance]

A physics student here at UC Davis, Austin Sendek, has launched a campaign to add another designator to the list of numeric SI prefixes such as kilo-, mega-, etc. to cover 10²⁷: hella. For example, 1 hellagram would be 10²⁷ grams, or 1000 yottagrams.

The term “hella” is one I first heard my sister-in-law utter in the context “that ski run was hella fun!”, which I immediately took as a shorthand for “a hell of a lot of”. I’ve since learned that it originated, reportedly, in San Francisco to mean just that, or “very” in general, as in “that tee shirt is hella awesome” – it’s not an uncommon utterance to hear here in northern California.

And, 10²⁷ is hella big, to be sure. A hellasecond is ten billion times the age of the universe, and the mass of the earth is about 6 hellagrams.

It seems that hella is poised to go viral…there are nearly 24,000 fans of the facebook petition, and it even made the local news last night in Sacramento.

Who decides such things? The International Bureau of Weights and Measures, that’s who. They added yotta in 1991. Sign the petition to them at the facebook site!

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This is the modern way to create a groundswell – make it a Facebook page. It certainly seems like a great way to use social media to accumulate enough ‘mass’ to get something like this approved.

Much more interesting than the old way. The next General Conference of Weighs and Measures, where any resolution would be dealt with, is in 2011.

It’s not the science. It’s the politics

by fdecomite

Daniel Sarewitz: Time to get climate politics right
[Via CEJournal]

A month or so ago, reporting on global warming seemed focused on the details of Climategate, the IPCC’s Himalayan glacier imbroglio, and wild winter weather. Now, reporting has shifted to a focus on the backlash against science and how scientists are struggling to cope with it.

As John M. Broder put it in his front-page article in yesterday’s New York Times:

. . . the volume of criticism and the depth of doubt have only grown, and many scientists now realize they are facing a crisis of public confidence and have to fight back. Tentatively and grudgingly, they are beginning to engage their critics, admit mistakes, open up their data and reshape the way they conduct their work.

One unstated assumption here is that if climate scientists can improve how they interact with the public, not only will some trust be restored but more forceful policy action will follow. But there’s another view, expressed cogently by Daniel Sarewitz, co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University, in this column published online yesterday in the journal Nature. I think every journalist who covers climate change should read it.

Here’s Sarewitz’s nutgraf:

The problem? Science has been called on to do something beyond its purview: not just improve people’s understanding of the world, but compel people to act in a particular way. For nearly twenty years, researchers, policy-makers and activists have claimed that climate science requires a global policy agenda of top-down, United-Nations-sponsored international agreements; targets and timetables for emissions reductions; and the creation of carbon markets. But this agenda was guaranteed to be politically divisive because it entails short-term political and economic costs in return for benefits that are long term and highly uncertain.

That last part crystallizes the issue: People are being asked to pay costs right now to prevent problems that most of them don’t yet experience — and at a time when people are confronting very real economic problems.

The crucial point here is that no amount of reform of the IPCC, or rooting out of bad science — or of scientists behaving badly — will begin to correct the flaws in the dominant approach to climate policy. Rehabilitation of climate policy is a matter not of getting the science right, but of getting the politics right.

Just what is the problem with the politics?

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Scientists can try and do a better job communicating but it will have very little effect because the politics are so screwed up. A lot of this needs to be reframed and put into terms that more properly reflect what can be done, instead of being driven by extremists.

There is this nice quote from Sarewitz:

There is no magic formula, but a few general principles seem apparent. A successful climate policy regime will match short-term costs with the real potential of short-term gains. These gains can come from reducing vulnerabilities to climate impacts, and increasing security and wealth generation from energy-technology innovation. Both paths call on the government to do things that most people see as appropriate: to provide public goods and promote innovation. Both paths also allow climate change to be understood not as impending doom that requires deep sacrifice to ensure survival, but as an opportunity to continually improve society.

I wrote earlier today about the horrible employment picture. Many of those jobs will never come back. Those industries are dead or overseas. Our best hope is to create new jobs as fast as possible, not just as fast as the skittish free market wants to.

That is why green jobs are important and why continuing support for them is critical. That is why it is a good thing that Gore is using his position to help drive green energy investments. Sure, they hope to make money but they should also get people employed.

How about being responsible for our own energy needs instead of having to import our energy from a politically unstable part of the world – one that would probably be much less unstable if we were not sending them so much money every day. We import over 11 million barrels of petroleum products a day. At current prices, we are nearing a billion dollars a day for energy from outside the US.

So, why do so many people want us to remain dependent on foreign energy, want us to remain stuck in old models that have failed to sustain employment of Americans? Solving these two problems by using green energy approaches would also have the added benefit of reducing carbon emissions.

People can change their behavior really fast – look at DADT in the military. Better framing would get more people on board with this and then the political barriers would begin to drop.

“It must be a bigger conspiracy than we thought!”

by wili_hybrid

‘Case stronger’ on climate change
[Via BBC News | Science/Nature]

A review from the UK Met Office says it is becoming clearer that human activities are causing climate change.

It says the evidence is stronger now than when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change carried out its last assessment in 2007.

The analysis, published in the Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change Journal, has assessed 110 research papers on the subject.

It says the Earth is changing rapidly, probably because of greenhouse gases.

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I hate it when articles do not provide links to the actual paper. Here it is – Detection and attribution of climate change: a regional perspective. You’ll have to pay to read the whole thing but here is the abstract:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change fourth assessment report, published in 2007 came to a more confident assessment of the causes of global temperature change than previous reports and concluded that it is likely that there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years averaged over each continent except Antarctica. Since then, warming over Antarctica has also been attributed to human influence, and further evidence has accumulated attributing a much wider range of climate changes to human activities. Such changes are broadly consistent with theoretical understanding, and climate model simulations, of how the planet is expected to respond. This paper reviews this evidence from a regional perspective to reflect a growing interest in understanding the regional effects of climate change, which can differ markedly across the globe. We set out the methodological basis for detection and attribution and discuss the spatial scales on which it is possible to make robust attribution statements. We review the evidence showing significant human-induced changes in regional temperatures, and for the effects of external forcings on changes in the hydrological cycle, the cryosphere, circulation changes, oceanic changes, and changes in extremes. We then discuss future challenges for the science of attribution. To better assess the pace of change, and to understand more about the regional changes to which societies need to adapt, we will need to refine our understanding of the effects of external forcing and internal variability.

Remember – The evidence supporting AGW has gotten stronger since the last IPCC report.

And here is some more detail from the Met Office itself:

Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office, said: “Recent advances in observational data and the way it is analysed give us a better insight into the climate system than ever before. This has allowed us to identify changes in our climate and disentangle natural variability from the results.

“The science reveals a consistent picture of global change that clearly bears the fingerprint of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. This shows the evidence of climate change has gone beyond temperature increases — it is now visible across our climate system and all regions of the planet. Our climate is changing now and it’s very likely human activity is to blame.”

There is also some evidence that changes in rainfall patterns could be happening faster than expected. More work is needed to understand why and whether this implies future changes in rainfall could be greater than models predict.

Already some of the denialists are shouting ‘traitors’, as well as continuing to write about things that have been well debunked. Since the report provides Dr. Stott’s email address, I hope he is not going to get hate mail because of this report. That seems to be the response these days to researchers publishing their work.

  

Employment numbers not for the easily depressed

Employment-Population Ratio, Part Time Workers, Unemployed over 26 Weeks
[Via Calculated Risk]

Here are a few more graphs based on the employment report …

Employment-Population Ratio

The Employment-Population ratio ticked up slightly to 58.5% in February, after plunging since the start of the recession. This is about the same level as in 1983.

Click on graph for larger image in new window.

This graph shows the employment-population ratio; this is the ratio of employed Americans to the adult population.

Note: the graph doesn’t start at zero to better show the change.

The general upward trend from the early ’60s was mostly due to women entering the workforce.

The Labor Force Participation Rate increased slightly to 64.8% (the percentage of the working age population in the labor force). This is at the level of the early 80s.

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We had a higher percentage of the US population employed in 1978 than we do now. Over 30 years of growth wiped out in about 3. It took us 20 years to reach our peak last time. employment for the next generation may well be slow unless we start really concentrating on doing some big things and making some hard choices.

And this graph from Calculated Risk is even more depressing. It looks at the percentage of job losses (relative to the peak employment levels) since the start of each recession:

Not only is this the deepest recession since WW2,, notice the shape of the curves. It is taking longer and longer to get back to the employment levels at the start of the recessions. 1981 took about 27 months to completely recover. 1990 took 31 months. 2007 took 47 months (almost 4 years!!).

I wonder why the recovery times are taking so much longer now? That is not a nice thing to see. I think the younger generation just now entering the job market are in for quite a few bad years.

Even if we do not do something to harm the recovery, it looks like it may take a very long time to get the job market back to what it was. Seems to me that something needs to be done to speed up the job recovery.

Even busy work for a couple of years might help a lot of people hold on until things get better and the job market picks up enough to take them. Otherwise we may doom a large number of people to unemployment for perhaps another 2 or more years.

Some of the most exciting news I have heard in a while

Artificial photosynthesis could power your house, even if it’s not green (video)
[Via Engadget]

It’s a sad state of affairs: your lawn is better at converting the sun into energy than that $23k solar array your neighbors just threw on their roof. Sun Catalytix wants to show that grass what’s what with a new process for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen — artificial photosynthesis. In a presentation at the ARPA-E conference (the Advanced Research Projects Agency — basically DARPA minus the military bent) Sun Catalytix founder Dan Nocera indicates that the process his company is developing could, with a photovoltaic array, four hours of sunlight, and a bottle of water, generate 30 kilowatt-hours of electricity. That’s enough to power an average home for a day — though hardcore gamers will probably need a bit more. The hope is that this will ultimately lead to cheap power for self-sufficient homes in the not-too distant future, but we’re still left wondering when that future’s going to come.

[Thanks, Jaden]

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I wrote about Daniel Nocera’s work last year. He gave a very good presentation of the novel chemistry he and his lab had created. I described how this system would work:

It is easy to calculate that a 30 square meter PV system on a house would easily be able to drive the catalyst to split 5.5 liters of water a day.

The average home uses 20 kWh a day. The 5.5 liters of water would allow this amount to be stored as hydrogen and oxygen gas. But the key here is that this can be stored AT the home. There is enough sunlight captured in this system to use it during the daytime but also to store a full day’s worth of energy, to be used by the individual for whatever needs they have. There is no requirement to be connected to any electric grid.

He has come up with a rally cheap way to catalyze the electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen. During the day, half of the energy from the solar panels goes to the house and half goes to the electrolysis, essentially storing the energy in the two gases.

At night, the two gases can be combined in a fuel cell, to give back the water plus some energy for powering the house at night. All this could be done without having to have any connection to a power grid.

On sunny days more hydrogen could be stored, in order to deal with cloudy days. And, in the Northwest, we have really long summer days, usually free of clouds, So we could possibly store a lot of energy for use during the darker winter months. Although even with shorter, rainier days in winter, we supposedly get about 70% of sunlight that LA gets.

Excess hydrogen could be used to power a car. Excess energy could be sold back to the grid. A very nice closed loop to convert solar power into energy, store it and reuse it all at one location.

The effect on overall need to burn fossil fuel would be tremendous. It does not require new distribution systems and uses water. Interestingly, the water does not have to be particularly pure. They have used salt water and even urine to accomplish this.

Thus the water used may not have to be taken from potable sources. Perhaps it could even be used from septic systems as the water heads out to the drainage field.

I wonder if someday we will be using water treatment facilities to create and store power, as well as treat water.

As Nocera suggests, this system can also be used in areas far from the grid, especially in developing countries. These sorts of technologies can perhaps leapfrog these places into developed countries economic prowess without having to degrade the environment to get there.

Apple owns solid state devices

Apple iPad success could increase solid state drive prices
[Via AppleInsider]

Apple already consumes nearly one-third of total global NAND flash memory, and with its share expected to grow even more with the launch of the iPad, hard drive makers believe it could delay the transition to solid state drives in traditional PCs.

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Pretty amazing that Apple uses such a large amount of the global flash memory.I hope their suppliers can keep them going because the iPad is going to be using a lot. It is very likely that Apple will sell as many iPads in one year as they do traditional desktops.