Saturday, December 22, 2007

Another Favorite Anime Theme

Mospeada. Also known here as part of the Robotech series. 

Friday, December 21, 2007

Christophe Huet: Surreal Photo Artist

Amazing stuff. You have to see it. 

Yikes

A present for your cat this Christmas? Or not. 

Time Traveller?

World’s Smallest Hotels

But not the cheapest, it seems. The last one is the one I am the most interested in. Citizen M may be the future of budget hotels. 

Scientists Smack Down Gore

It was bound to happen. More and more scientists are coming out against AGW*.

More than 400 scientists challenge claims by former Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations about the threat of man-made global warming, a new Senate minority report says.

The scientists — many of whom are current or former members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Gore for publicizing a climate crisis — cast doubt on the “scientific consensus” that man-made global warming imperils the planet.

“I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting — a six-meter sea level rise, 15 times the IPCC number — entirely without merit,” said Dutch atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes, one of the researchers quoted in the report by Republican staff of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

“I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached,” Mr. Tennekes said in the report.

And what does Mr. Gore’s people say in response? Why, the typical and meaningless retort commonly used by AGW believers.

After a quick review of the report, Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider said 25 or 30 of the scientists may have received funding from Exxon Mobil Corp.

Exxon Mobil spokesman Gantt H. Walton dismissed the accusation, saying the company is concerned about climate-change issues and does not pay scientists to bash global-warming theories.

It’s nice to hear from the oil company themselves, but let’s examine Gore’s argument. 30 scientists out of 400 have been paid by an oil company? And that negates the other 370 how?

And really, the “they got paid by oil companies” argument is laughable to begin with. Why would a politician’s argument have more weight than a private scientist’s on a subject that the scientist is a specialist in? How are scientists paid by governments to reach a certain conclusion (as are AGW proponents) more credible that scientists who may or may not get paid by energy companies? Politicians and political organizations like the UN have agendas too. They tend to be corrupt and mendacious to the core. So how is anything they say credible?

The fact is that science is not about opinion. It’s not about hype or hysteria. It’s certainly not about belief. It’s about provable and demonstrable results. They have yet to prove anything with AGW. They can’t prove it. They can only point to something like weather patterns and claim it’s the result of something, when they often do so by ignoring the factors that aren’t man made, because that would deflate their message. Factors like the sun. Like water vapor. Two of the most important factors in climate change. Neither are man made.

So if the most important factors in climate change aren’t man made, you can’t really blame mankind. Especially if you ignore these factors and try to say it’s something like CO2 which is so insignificant in the scope of things, it’s laughable.

Gore is a attention seeking politician. His movie is full of hyperbole, hysteria and outright fictions. Whether or not he won some awards doesn’t mask the fact that his credibility on this subject is zero to anyone who bothers to ignore the hype and research the facts.

* AGW: Anthropogenic Global Warming

Hellboy II Trailer

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Wishful Thinking

The makers of this site think the world would be better without us. Or so that’s the inference we get.

A world without people would be kind of boring, frankly. And nature is a lot more violent than humans. Why do you think we do what we do?

Agriculture and farming is so we don’t starve. Nature likes droughts and disasters.

Architecture protects us from the elements. As do clothes.

Roads help us move goods between places so people have what they need.

Weapons protect us from predators and help us bag game.

Medical science is designed to protect us from all the nasty ways nature tries to kill us.

Civilization is mankind’s way of banding against nature. What green lovers fail to understand is without these things, many of them would not be alive. Their ancestors would have been killed before they had their grandparents or parents.

Why some may think a house is a blight on nature, this video shows that nature always wins in the end. We’re just here temporarily. 

X-Mas Story DuJour

Sort of. A man finds out his long lost birth mother works at the same store he does.

For years, Steve Flaig, a delivery-truck driver at a Lowe’s store here, had searched for his birth mother.

He found her working the cash register at the front of the store.

For several months, he and Christine Tallady had known each other casually as co-workers. Last Friday, they met for the first time as mother and son.

“I have a complete family now, all my kids,” said Tallady, who has two younger children. “It’s a perfect time of year. It’s the best Christmas present ever.”

For Flaig, it was the reunion he had dreamed of for much of his 22 years. He had always known he was adopted, and his parents, Pat and Lois Flaig, who raised him since his birth, supported his decision to search for his birth mother.

Chingrish Signs

Some of these are pretty funny. Almost as funny as Americans who get tattos of Chinese characters that mean “Supermarket” or “Fool” thinking they mean something else.