Author: matthew

For several years, global warming activists have been at odds with arch-conservatives, insisting that the world was getting warmer due to human industry, while arch-conservatives (recently acknowledging the indisputable warming trend) insisted it was just part of a natural cycle.

For both sides, the following find is a doozy.

Oceans rise at record rate as industrial age gathers momentum.

To sum up: The past 150 years have seen rising levels of the ocean due to methane and carbon dioxide which were unheard of for at least 100,000 years… and more like 650,000. If this is part of a “natural warming trend”, then it’s a killer one. Human civilization has only been around for about 11,000 years, and we only really got ahold of the tools of the industrial revolution 150 years ago.

I’ve just changed my opinion from “undecided” on global warming (as to whether humans are the cause, or if it’s part of a normal fluctuation) to “there’s no doubt humans are responsible for drastically rising ocean levels”. Sure, some people are going to say I’m guilty of pride because I think humans can affect an earth so vast.

I guess I’m proud, then. Or something. But still slightly ashamed, as I unabashedly use the Internet, in my fuel-heated home, guzzling electricity generated by a coal-burning power plant.

What’s the long-term solution to curbing our carbon dioxide and methane emissions? Carbon dioxide levels today are 27% higher than at any time in the last half-million years on this planet. We’re not in danger of choking ourselves in our own emissions (like in the farcical Spaceballs of some years back), but we’re in very real danger of flooding many of our coastal cities within our grandchildren’s lifetime.

Hurricanes and tornados, fueled by the additional trapped heat, will continue to grow in both frequency and intensity. Droughts will intensify, as will deluges. The Arctic permafrost is melting, and Antarctica’s sea ice shelves will mostly disappear within the next 50 years.

On the bright side, (I guess), it looks like many Arctic properties will open up. Greenland will be fertile and temperate again for the first time in a thousand years. Those ancient Viking settlements, once iced-over and barren, may become tourist attractions in a verdant farming community.

This time-span, though, is a blink of an eye in geological timelines. The carbon dioxide and methane levels won’t self-correct for thousands of years, as they get absorbed back into the earth and ocean through various means.

Unfortunately, the damage is done. Even if we dramatically reduce our emissions, we’ll continue to produce emissions thousands of times higher than any natural process has created in the last 100,000 years. We’ve already dramatically increased the greenhouse gas levels.

Knowing that there’s very little we can do on the emissions-forming side of the issue, what is to be done?

I’m thinking it’s a good time to look into northern Canadian real-estate.

So what did you guys do for turkey day?

I worked. Ahh, the life of a laborer 🙂 I was at work from 9PM Wednesday night through about 7 AM Thursday morning, handling UNIX support issues for workers in India. It was an unusually busy night! I’ve noticed this tendency for people I support there — and here in the US, we’re not guiltless — to submit support issues, claim they are “critical”, and then when it isn’t handled within, say, thirty minutes, use my support team as the scapegoat for their multi-week project not getting handled on time.

It’s terribly frustrating to *know* this is done routinely, handle the support calls, close the ticket, and have the user repeatedly re-open the ticket claiming to not understand the solution I provided. Until one day I saw the pattern behnind the madness, and then it makes perfect sense: the goal of the ticket isn’t to get the problem resolved, it’s to get a plausible excuse for their otherwise inexcusable delay. Or, at least, so I tell myself.

Strangely, the few times I’ve wanted to test my theory, the turnover is so high in our remote office that the worker who attempted to use us as a scapegoat is no longer there a few weeks later. Justice, I suppose.

Anyway, after working, I went home and slept for about 3 hours before leaving for our family get-together at my brother Jay‘s house. Lots of turkey, lots of pie, lots of fun and a sad goodbye. All the good stuff. It was really nice to have a family get-together where all we were doing was just hanging out, all day long. Usually, we get together for dinner at around 4:30, and by 7:30 we’re packing up to leave. This time, we had enough time to play Dance Dance Revolution for a while, watch three episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (now I’m on Season 4, episode 3… yeah, I’m slow, but woot!), play board games (I didn’t get into those today), geek-out by whipping out matching laptops on the couch, and stuff ourselves silly to boot.

It was a good Thanksgiving. Now where’s my diet book?

Around this time of year I often find myself thinking about the musical “The Sound of Music”. Besides the fact that Julie Andrews was both incredibly hot and could sing like an angel (thus inspiring my childhood crush on her), several of the songs are compelling and stick around in my brain after hearing them.

Heh, and it seems like they always played “The Sound Of Music” on local TV stations around November/December. I’m really not sure why, but maybe they wanted to balance the usual violent fare with a token “family” movie around the Holidays or something.

Anyway, the one that is stuck in my head today? “My Favorite Things”. I’m sure you know the tune; if I’m wrong, go watch The Sound of Music right away!. My brain, in my sleep, began re-arranging lyrics into a song called “Least Favorite Things”. Here’s a sample stanza or two:

Children with puke-breath and loaded, plugged toilets, Having to work when I’d rather avoid it, Gastrointestinal distress and “bling!”, These are some of my least-favorite things.

Cheap plastic parts breaking in an appliance, Creationists pretending that it’s science, Naught in my inbox but advertising, These are some of my least-favorite things.

When my job bites, When my locks freeze, When I have to curse, I then remember some least-favorite things, And think that it could be worse.

Come on, guys, pitch in a verse! I know you can…

Yet another useless test: the Yankee Test. Claims to be able to identify where you’re from based on relation to the Mason-Dixon line, which traditionally separates the Northern United States (the Yankees) from the Southern United States (.

My result?

58% (Dixie). Right on the Mason-Dixon Line

Some terms I had never heard of until I was an adult, like “frontage road” which I’ve only ever referred to since I’ve been out West. Considering that the Mason-Dixon line historically divided Pennsylvania from Maryland, and I’m from Maryland, I’d say it’s pretty accurate!

Maryland has traditionally been quite ambiguous regarding whether it’s a Southern or a Northern state. Culturally, it is Southern. Sympathetically, it’s Northern. In order to ensure that Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, would not be the Union capital surrounded by Confederate states, during the Civil War (a.k.a. “The War of Northern Aggression”) a brigade was sent from Boston to keep the peace and ensure that Maryland was Union… despite it actually being south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Nevertheless, several Confederate regiments were formed within the state, notably from Baltimore, and they fought on behalf of the Confederacy.

Isn’t it funny how, in this age of the Internet and television, we still preserve some unique geographically-based linguistic patterns?

In the raft of recent legislation passed, politicans voted into and out of power, and various and sundry other things that are the necessary result of living in a democracy, one thing slipped the notice of most people:

The state of Texas outlawed marriage. Not gay marriage: marriage, or anything identical to or like it.

What’s funnier to me is this page, in defense of the marriage amendment, which gets it wrong again! Now remember, these are the guys who supported the proposition, and were attempting to defuse the last-minute campaign opposing the amendment because it would ban all marriages in Texas. I fully expect them to fix the language on this HTML page soon, though:

A phantom group launched a campaign Monday to trick Texans into voting against the state’s marriage protection amendment by falsely claiming that such a vote would actually protect marriage.

Now, the trick hinges on how you interpret the word “vote”. The way I read it is that the “vote” is the vote for the amendment. The amendment is, itself, a “vote”. After reading it a couple of times, I realize that the “vote” could also be, as intended, the “voting against the state’s marriage protection amendment”.

This group gets big stars for sending crappily-mixed messages.

The group opposed to the state’s marriage protection amendment opposes it on the grounds that it would actually protect marriage? Huh? I realize that it’s just one word. They intended to say “would actually prevent marriage”, or that they meant the vote to be the vote against the amendment, but this is just too funny. The same group that wrote the Constitutional Amendment, and screwed it up, also wrote this page defending it, and screwed it up again.

And to think, my wife and I just this morning were discussing a potential move to Austin if my job requires it. Hmm. Maybe not. I’d really not like to suddenly become an illegitimate father.

The actual language of the constitutional amendment is even funnier. Those crazy Texans!

SECTION 1. Article I, Texas Constitution, is amended by adding Section 32 to read as follows:

Sec. 32. (a) Marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman. (b) This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.

Of course, the legal status most identical to or similar to marriage is marriage itself…

Reminds me of that old joke: “If marriages are outlawed, then only outlaws would have in-laws”… But now it’s true!

(Note: OK, I totally get the other side to this. Activists in favor of the proposition are saying that the language clearly doesn’t ban marriage itself. And yet, looked at in isolation, it sure looks like that to me. Mathematically speaking, “1 == 1”, or “1 equals 1”, or “1 is identical to 1” are equivalent statements…)

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: Matrimony isn’t a word, it’s a sentence.

(The randomly-selected signature, too, is just too funny today!)

So I finally sat down the other day and did an inventory of my email. I set up every filter, every folder, every sub-folder to file away messages into neat categories. I came to a startling realization:

I really don’t get a whole lot of email.

I mean, I get over a hundred messages a day. But once I’ve filtered out the spam, the mailing lists, the advertising (much of it opt-in, I’m ashamed to say, and I’m not going to opt out because I like reading ads about cool audio hardware and stuff), and whatnot…

I’m down to about 1-5 emails a day.

That’s kind of pathetic, really. I read dozens of emails a day (skipping about a hundred or so), and only a couple are actually addressed to me. I did a similar thing with my work mail, and found that I only ever received personally-addressed mail when I sent some for one reason or another.

How much of your mail is really yours?

OK, Coffee Break’s Over, everybody back on your heads again! (See Joke 19, warning: foul word.)

I’ve been following the Dover, PA lawsuit by parents against school-board-mandated instruction in “Intelligent Design” closely. This is, in my opinion, a crucial case for preserving public school science classrooms from future domination by individual religions, and for preserving the rights of parents to educate their children in religious matters without governmental interference. For others who may not have been following the case with similar rapt interest, here are some relevant links:

• Chief school board proponents of ID caught perjuring themselves
• More details of ID proponent lying under oath. OK, you obviously can’t throw out an entire case due to some moron lying in court. But it looks really, really bad when you corner the defendant into admitting that he passed money under the table — and lied about it under oath — in a clumsy attempt to disguise his involvement.
• The plaintiff’s closing arguments. (PDF format, Adobe Reader required) This closing argument, IMHO, is very readable, reasonably brief, and summarizes in very clear form why Intelligent Design is a religiously-motivated, unscientific rehashing of Creationism, which violates the Establishment clause of the Constitution and should not be taught in public school science classes.
• This New York Times article (free registration required) documents how the Thomas More Law Center shopped around for five years looking for a school district willing to promote Intelligent Design in science classroooms in order to inspire a lawsuit like this one.

Here are my thoughts and speculations:

1. It looks like many ID supporters are bitterly disappointed by the self-appointed champions of classroom ID in PA. Between the defendants’ inability to tell the truth, well-documented Creationist motivations, and hand-in-the-cookie-jar efforts to launder money in support of their religious aims in public school, I have to agree: evolution supporters would be hard-pressed to find more inept public officials supporting Intelligent Design.
2. Elections were yesterday, and several of the positions of the ID supporters are up for grabs. Returns aren’t due for some time, but I strongly suspect the Dover voters will express their disappointment with the existing Board in a very direct fashion. I know I would.
3. While most supporters of science will score this as a victory, I’m certain Creationism in public schools will come up in court again. Probably sooner than the 30 years it took for this to come back from the previous Supreme Court decision.
4. I think this decision works more to preserve their parental rights than public-school instruction in ID. I think of it in terms of some other principle — say, the “Intelligent Thunder Theory”, with Asgard and Thor supporters advocating it be taught in science classrooms to explain the weather. Without special pleading, it just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
5. I’m certain more rednecks will get their 15 seconds of fame on the TV decrying how American government and “activist judges” are perverting the government into a god-hating secular state in opposition to popular will. Never mind that religion thrives in America mostly because of church/state separation.

Early this summer, major news outlets crowed about some preliminary research revealing that men are, on average, cleverer than women. This research made a big splash with headlines around the world.

In an unusual move, the journal “Nature” published a critique which not only rebutted the conclusions and data used by the British team in the original study, but thoroughly trashed it.

The Observer noted how unusual it was for a published article in a scientific journal to so thoroughly and angrily debunk the claims made in a competing journal:

Science journals rarely attack studies at the same time as they are being published by a rival. Neither do they often use strong or intemperate terms. A delayed and measured approach is the norm in scientific circles.

The article further noted that, like Andrew Wakefield’s controversial MMR vaccine/autism link debacle of some years ago, the researchers involved seemed more interested in garnering publicity than in peer review:

They did not release their paper to fellow academics immediately. Instead, they gave it out to journalists two months before it was scheduled to be published in the British Journal of Psychology this month.

I’m skeptical. Any time a study comes out — like the previous study by the same researchers which indicated white people were generally smarter than black — which seems to reinforce existing prejudices, I’m doubly skeptical. The truly groundbreaking stuff seems to be the things which blows away common misconceptions, not the stuff which looks like it’s trying to reinforce racial or sexual stereotypes.

I came across a useful guideline on the entire process of meta-analysis by Vivienne Parry:

“[C]heck the statistics first. If you are quoted a risk increase, check what the risk was before. A 100% increase of a very small risk is still a very small risk. Find out what the absolute risk rather than the relative risk is – in other words, what the real numbers of women dying, or getting cancer or whatever, are. “Again, you may find that this huge risk turns out to be one extra woman per 100,000. Nasty, but not as bad as you thought. If no one can give you real numbers, then feel free to ignore it. It is also useful to find out who is behind the information. Do they have something to sell or an agenda to push? If they do, be doubly suspicious.”

Congratulations to Sammy G on his wedding to… erm, what shell we call her? Let’s call her Shammy, after the awards given out this weekend 🙂

Christy and I left our kids at home under the care of Marsha, Christy’s mom. And we set off for Minneapolis on Friday afternoon. Long about 1:00 AM, we finally rolled into our hotel room and crashed.

I’ll leave it to Christy to tell the sordid tale of trying to find a clean hotel room. I’m about to hit the sack, so I’ll have to either update this blog or add more later. Regardless, Mazeltov! We had a fabulous time, and hope you have a fabulous lifetime together.

— Matt B.

Today, as I drove into work, I found myself listening to “Coast to Coast AM“, a radio program which seems to be entirely devoted to pseudoscience, superstition, and conspiracy theories.

However, this evening they were discussing the topic of the world’s oil supply. With the recent release of a book called “Black Gold Strangleold”, the authors were on the program to discuss the oil situation. While some of their points held water, one of their assumptions stood out to me as anti-science superstition that I felt it was important to debunk.

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Myth 1: Oil Reserves

The Myths:

1. The world’s oil supplies are dwindling rapidly as fossil fuels are depleted, and we should prepare for an economic disaster within the next 20-40 years,
2. the contrary myth: the world’s oil supplies are generated via abiotic processes; the “oil shortage” is an invention of oil companies to keep prices artifically high.

THE REALITY: Whether oil is abiotic or organic in origin, the fact remains that it is produced in large quantities only on geologic scales of time: millions of years. Both myths are wrong: we neither seem to be facing an imminent oil shortage within our lifetimes, nor do we have a virtually limitless supply of petroleum available within human-scale timeframes. We have a very large, but limited supply, of oil available to drill out. This oil will become increasingly expensive to access as existing wells refill more and more slowly as the overall pressure drops. What conclusions you draw from that are up to you in regards to conservation and other topics, but it’s a foregone conclusion that demand will continue to grow, while access to easily-pumped oil will continue to diminish. Simple economics dictates that the price will continue to rise. However, pumping technology seems to be working in our favor to keep the costs of drilling increasingly-difficult wells within reason, so it may be that the overall amount of oil drilled continues to rise for many decades.

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Myth 2: Global Warming

The Myths:

1. Human emissions have caused greenhouse gasses to increase, resulting in global temperature increases. These temperature increases cause stronger hurricanes and rising ocean levels, resulting in massive natural disasters.
2. The Contrary Myth: Human emission have nothing to do with the rising temperatures; they are merely part of a regular cycle of rising and falling average temperature.

THE REALITY: Both human emissions and natural cycles are at play here. The question is really: how much does each account for? This isn’t something we’ll have enough hard data on to answer within the next decade, but it’s a pretty good guess we’ll have an answer within two. In geologic time, that’s a tiny sliver. Attempting to gauge long-range weather patterns by the short time frame of human experience and ability to measure the weather is not very useful. More useful are the tree-ring analyses currently underway to determine historic weather patterns from ancient trees and gauge the extent of the warming. So far, the results are still indeterminate. That we are experiencing a global warming trend is indisputable fact at this point: the poles are melting, and billions of acre-feet of water are being dumped into the oceans from the antarctic ice shelves. The ocean level is rising, hurricane ferocity is increasing, and other residual effects from a rising ocean are being felt. That reducing human emissions will also reduce the greenhouse effect is also indisputable… the question is just whether or not that reduction will be statistical noise in the overall warming trend.

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— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: Sick Building Migration: The tendency of younger workers to leave or avoid jobs in unhealthy office environments or workplaces affected by the Sick Building Syndrome. — Douglas Coupland, “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture”