Off Topic

Some of you may know that last year I staged a play at the annual British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, which brought back Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin – who were both born on 12th February 1809 — to reflect on what has taken place since their time. Denyse O’Leary kindly mentioned the play here. It takes the form of a talk show, with all the show biz that entails. At the end Lincoln and Darwin were asked whether they wished to stay in the present or return to the 19th century. One stays and the other goes – but which does which?   The play’s running time is 80 minutes and it covers a host of issues common Read More ›

Last October, there were some unaccustomed hisses on the Madrid catwalk—directed against gaunt girls. Size 0 scored 0. One in three models, at less than size 8, was ordered offstage by the audience.

Spain isn’t the hottest fashion walk in Europe, but some star-studded runways are grudgingly following its bold move. Maybe the starvation trend has peaked—about time, say many disgusted fashionistas.

In recent years, according to the UK’s Sarah Watkinson, who manages attractive models of normal proportions, “some designers especially like to use incredibly thin girls to wear their clothes because they like the shock aspect. These days more and more very skinny, size-zero models are being used.”

The real shock is that underneath the duds, zeros may hover wispily close to death’s door. One model fell through it last year. Read More ›

Easy enough to do when like true things that are real problems are happening.

Nevertheless, we have a definite climate trend emerging – more and more climate scientists are admitting anthropogenic global warming is a bunch of crap. Read about some of them:

Lorne Gunter: Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof

More goodies below the fold. Read More ›

Yeah, me too. Amazing how fast a red herring gets pushed off the front page when there’s a real problem to talk about. But just to keep you updated a little I offer these: Boise gets earliest snow on record Valley shivers as winter weather makes a premature appearance and related to the global cooling we are now experiencing is this: Spotless Sun: Blankest Year Of The Space Age ScienceDaily (Oct. 7, 2008) — Astronomers who count sunspots have announced that 2008 is now the “blankest year” of the Space Age. As of Sept. 27, 2008, the sun had been blank, i.e., had no visible sunspots, on 200 days of the year. To find a year with more blank suns, Read More ›

I posted this a week or so ago but Universal and Warner shut it down for copyright infringement of the background music. It’s about the sub-prime mortgage meltdown and those involved. View the original with the great sound track by clicking here.

Source: Google Trends

Recently, commentator Dinesh D’Souza came up with an aid package for a most unlikely – though doubtless deserving – recipient. He considered it a scandal that George Obama, half-brother to the American Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama, lives in Third World poverty in a shack in Kenya:

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The YouTube of the this video was shut down by Unversal and Warner music groups. You can still see it at Liveleak.com. Click here to see it. Make it viral. Link to email to everyone you know, post everywhere you go: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f67_1222761495

Don’t blame ya. It’s easy to forget things that aren’t happening. Not much to report but here goes: Solar Activity Lowest in 100 Years. Sunspots still MIA. NAS reports 50 million year cooling trend.

A tough choice for teh environmentalist whackos if I ever saw one. Wind Turbines Give Bats the “Bends,” Study Finds Brian Handwerk for National Geographic News August 25, 2008 Wind turbines can kill bats without touching them by causing a bends-like condition due to rapidly dropping air pressure, new research suggests. Scientists aren’t sure why, but bats are attracted to the turbines, which often stand 300 feet (90 meters) high and sport 200-foot (60-meter) blades. The mammals’ curiosity can result in lethal blows by the rotors, which spin at a rate of about 160 miles (260 kilometers) per hour. But scientist Erin Baerwald and colleagues report that only about half of the bat corpses they found near Alberta, Canada, turbine Read More ›

A friend of mine told me about this interesting link: www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse Regardless of whether you agree with the economic philosophy presented here, it suggests a useful approach to presenting ID.

Buffalo hit an all time record low high of 64 degrees for this day breaking the previous record of 66 degrees set in 1882. Global warming is MIA in this neck of the woods. I’m just sayin’.

Contrary to last year’s hysteric proclamations that arctic sea ice would completely vanish this summer it has instead increased to an extent not seen since 2004.
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This is off topic. Specifically botany and mycology. I thought some readers might find it of interest. I’m vacationing for the summer up north, it’s been wet and warm, perfect for mushrooms so this morning my daughter and I went walking through some woods and fields looking for mushrooms. I really wanted to get a sack of table mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus; button mushroom; portobello) to cook up. All I found in that regard was one lonely old portobello long past its prime. We found lots of boletes, amanitas, lbm’s (little brown mushrooms), death caps, and one odd thing that was sort of mushroom shaped, lumpy, light violet, but no gills I could discern. Disappointingly, no puffballs. We did find something Read More ›

I’ve been saying for a long time that the computer climate model predictions don’t match up to actual observations. The global warming hysterics have been in denial trying to find faults with the observations instead of admitting the plain truth that the models are flawed. Here’s an article by an Australian climate researcher that tells it like it is. Quite refreshing.

No smoking hot spot
David Evans | July 18, 2008
The Australian

I DEVOTED six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.

FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I’ve been following the global warming debate closely for years.

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

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