Physicists who want to protect traditional Christmas realize that the only way to keep from changing Christmas is not to observe it.
(via xkcd)
That is all.
A recent comment on Planet3.0 gave me an excuse to post a link to Isaac Asimov’s excellent essay on the Relativity of wrong, and I realized that I had never posted it here.
So here it is for the record:
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I might sound old when I start rambling about the way things used to be, but Anil Dash’s post about how the web used to be before the rise of walled gardens like Facebook is definitely must read:
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I am tired of the fact that the vast majority of the opinionated reporting on the situation in Gaza portrays it as a simple good vs evil fight, with the roles of good and evil cast predictably by the writers political affiliation.
Reality is not usually that simple and the situation in Israel and Gaza definitely is not. The history between the Palestinians and the Israelis is long and complicated. The current political realities of the situation are also complicated and the correct course of action is often not known. Which means the simplistic viewpoint of good vs evil is not only inaccurate, but also unhelpful.
What does it say about us if we are incapable of discussing such a complicated issue with the nuance that such complexity makes inevitable?
By now the news of Neil Armstrong’s death is a few days old, but while we all mourn the passing of a great man, we should take the opportunity to remember that only 66 years after the Wright brothers’ first historic flight we put a man on the moon. What have we done in the 43 years since?
The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space–each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.
-XKCD
We are capable of so much, but lately we seem to have lost our way. Let the passing of a great man (as well as the recent triumph of Curiosity on Mars and the 35th anniversary of Voyager 1 and 2) remind us of our potential. This would be a fitting legacy for the first man to ever step onto another world.
A lot has happened in the past few weeks on Mars.
First of all we have much more high resolution videos of the entry decent and landing:
And amazing self portraits:
And brilliant panoramas:
Then came the system checks. First a little wiggling of the wheels:
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The recent Australasian heatwave has been so unprecedented that the Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology has had to add a new colour (purple) to represent the hottest region:
But the Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology new colour is not unprecedented.
[more]… or nothing to see here. Move along folks.
All of this cosmic nonsense was pre-debunked by Richard Alley in his great AGU talk from 2009 titled: The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth’s Climate History (starting at about 42 minutes):
So despite what you might have read at some less-than-reputable publications, the recent leaked IPCC drafts don’t change any game.
[more]We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.
-Jean-Claude Juncker
Talking about financial reforms, but the exact same situation applies to climate/sustainability.
[more]TEDx has recently been used as a platform for pseudoscience, and in response they have published an open letter full of good advice on how non experts can spot pseudoscience.
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This talk, by Ray Pierrehumbert, is an excellent response to Naomi Oreskes’ observation that: “climate scientists are so busy talking about stuff they don’t understand that they never get around to taking credit for what they got right.
[more]Perhaps you have heard that delegates from around the world have gathered in Doha to discuss what to do about the climate problem. Perhaps you hope that something worthwhile will come out of the negotiations.
[more]Katharine Hayhoe on Twitter (or rather the service TwitLonger since 140 characters is obviously not enough) explaining climate change’s influence on Sandy, and the difficulties in communicating the nuances involved to the press:
[more]As a scientist in a field where consensus is constantly challenged, I’m a bit sensitive about being pitted against a colleague.
The website hint.fm/wind/ (which understandably is currently very slow) has an incredibly interesting visualization of the wind patterns over the entire continental United States. An instantly recognizable feature tonight is Sandy.
[more]John Nielsen-Gammon thinks that perhaps it is better that climate change isn’t being given much attention in the 2012 election
[more]Maybe it’s a good thing that the major political parties are not engaged in a pitched battle over climate change. Maybe this presents us with an opportunity to remove the political baggage from the scientific evidence. We can start thinking rationally about the problems we face and start considering those tough questions that really matter. Then maybe, in two or four years’ time, we can leave behind the partisan extremist positions and start building the groundwork for common agreement rather than mutual distrust.