Thursday, May 10, 2007

Low Gravity

Very interesting.

If it seems Canadians weigh less than their American neighbours, they do – but not for the reasons you might think. A large swath of Canada actually boasts lower gravity than its surroundings.

Researchers have puzzled for years over whether this was due to the crust there rebounding slowly after the end of the last ice age or a deeper issue involving convection in the Earth’s mantle – or some combination of the two.

Now, ultra-precise measurements taken over four years by a pair of satellites known as GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) reveal that each effect is equally responsible for Canada’s low gravity. The work could shed light on how continents form and evolve over time.

I’ll refrain from making jokes about Canadians being lightweights.

Friday, May 04, 2007

Psuedo-science vs Real Science

This article does a great job breaking down what the signs of junk science are. And what do you know, many of them apply to the man-made global warming theory. Those who question or insult the skeptics are not being very skeptical themselves. Junk science preys on the human desire to believe in something. So it often tells people what they want to hear. After the environmentalist movement started this drumbeat of “humans are killing the planet”, it was easy to convince a lot of people to believe in man made global warming, even though the science really shows the earth is going through natural climate change brought on my a solar cycle.

But there’s no money in something being natural. If you guilt people, you can separate them from their wallets. That’s what junk science often attempts to do. Sell people some bogus invention. And this is why we need to look at the whole global warming thing with skepticism. 

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Real Progress Doesn’t Come from “Progressives”

I was a young teen with the first Earth Day happened in 1971. I remember it well. Who can argue with the idea that we need to make the earth a cleaner, greener place? Thr problem is, the environmentalist movement became hijacked by anti-capitalist, crypto-Marxists. In order to deter capitalism, you have to hurt industry, so theyve become anti-technology which actually works at cross purposes to making the world a greener place.

As John Stossel explains, the aims of Earth Day are not based in reality.

John Semmens of Arizona’s Laissez Faire Institute points out that Earth Day misses an important point. In the April issue of The Freeman magazine, Semmens says the environmental movement overlooks how hospitable the earth has become—thanks to technology. “The environmental alarmists have it backwards. If anything imperils the earth it is ignorant obstruction of science and progress. ... That technology provides the best option for serving human wants and conserving the environment should be evident in the progress made in environmental improvement in the United States. Virtually every measure shows that pollution is headed downward and that nature is making a comeback.” (Carbon dioxide excepted, if it is really a pollutant.)

Semmens describes his visit to historic Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, an area “lush with trees and greenery.” It wasn’t always that way. In 1775, the land was cleared so it could be farmed. Today, technology makes farmers so efficient that only a fraction of the land is needed to produce much more food. As a result, “Massachusetts farmland has been allowed to revert back to forest.”

Human ingenuity and technology not only raised living standards, but also restored environmental amenities. How about a day to celebrate that?

Yet, Semmens writes, the environmental movement is skeptical about technology and is attracted to three dubious principles: sustainable development, the precautionary principle, and stakeholder participation.

Earth day is being used as a tool to empower more Marxist type measures to limit and curtail technological development and capitalism. Read the article and you’ll see what those terms mean and why they are bogus.

We live at the most prosperous time in human history. And these people would try to turn back the clock to some 19th century pre-industrial world. A world that was incredibly harsh and life expectancy was much lower.

The resources of the earth, as far as we’re concerned, are far from finite at this point. More importantly, technology provides us with the means to do things cleaner and more efficiently as technology improves. We are a long way from the 1940s, 50s and 60s technology. As a computer person, I can tell you how far computers have come since the 80s. We’re making constant progress. What these people want is regression. They are not progressive at all.

We need took forward, not back. As Bjorn Lomborg once said, “We didn’t leave the stone age from lack of stones.” The real progress in society will come largely from science. And those who would stand in the way, are not real friends of the earth. As we improve our technology it will have less and less impact on nature and will do more to make the world a better place for every living thing. 

Thursday, April 19, 2007

In Case You Were Wondering

String Theory explained, in a nutshell. or how they think the universe works. 

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Cool Science Experiments

How to see sound waves, or make water spheres float in the air, or anti-gravity floating objects. Very cool stuff.

Friday, March 16, 2007

Teenaged Mad Scientist

A teenager has created nuclear fusion in his house. Huzzah.

For two years, Olson researched what he would need and scrounged for parts from eBay and the hardware store. Flanges and piping? Check. High-voltage X-ray transformer? Check. Pumps, deuterium source, neutron bubble dosimeter? Check, check, check. “I have cross-country and track, so during those seasons I don’t have much time to work on it,” says Olson, a high school senior in Michigan. “It’s more of a weekend project.” Last November the machine finally delivered the hallmark of success: bubbles in the dosimeter. The bubbles indicate the presence of neutrons, a by-product of fusion—an energy-releasing process in which two hydrogen nuclei crash together and form a helium nucleus. Fusion is commonplace in stars, where hydrogen nuclei fuse in superhot plasma, but temperatures that high are hard to achieve on Earth. Still, the prospect of creating all this energy while forming only nonradioactive helium and easily controlled neutrons has made harnessing fusion one of the most sought-after and heavily funded goals in sustainable energy.

Olson’s apparatus won’t work for generating commercial power because it takes more energy to run than it produces. But he has succeeded in creating a “star in a jar,” a tiny flash of hot plasma. “The temperature of the plasma is around 200 million degrees,” Olson says modestly, “several times hotter than the core of the sun.”

Too bad it can’t be used for power generation, but iof a teenager can create a fusion reaction, it’s only a matter of time before they create one that can power a city. 

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

10 Rules of Physics Hollywood Ignores

A good list of things that happen in movies, that would never happen in reality. 

Monday, January 15, 2007

Science Marches On

The Chinese claim to have created a fusion reactor.

The Russians created the “Real Frankensteins”.

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

20 Ways the Earth Could End

Discover Magazine gives us this cheerful list of ways we could all die. I hadn’t heard this one before.

Collapse of the vacuum In the book Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut popularized the idea of “ice-nine,” a form of water that is far more stable than the ordinary kind, so it is solid at room temperature. Unleash a bit of it, and suddenly all water on Earth transforms to ice-nine and freezes solid. Ice-nine was a satirical invention, but an abrupt, disastrous phase transition is a possibility. Very early in the history of the universe, according to a leading cosmological model, empty space was full of energy. This state of affairs, called a false vacuum, was highly precarious. A new, more stable kind of vacuum appeared and, like ice-nine, it quickly took over. This transition unleashed a tremendous amount of energy and caused a brief runaway expansion of the cosmos. It is possible that another, even more stable kind of vacuum exists, however. As the universe expands and cools, tiny bubbles of this new kind of vacuum might appear and spread at nearly the speed of light. The laws of physics would change in their wake, and a blast of energy would dash everything to bits. “It makes for a beautiful story, but it’s not very likely,” says Piet Hut of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey.

Sunday, December 24, 2006

10 Creepiest Fossil Finds of 2006

This “demon duck of doom” that can stalk tigers is just one of many weird critters discovered this year by paleontologists.

It’s interesting to think of the creatures that once populated this planet. We keep finding some amazing fossils.