NASA offers you life in prison: on Mars

NASA's Ames Research Center is working on its "Hundred-Year Starship" project that will sell you a one-way ticket to Mars:

Pop Sci, Google News, Google

This job is clearly not appropriate for losers. It's kind of dramatic: NASA needs to save some money. The return trip is more expensive, roughly by a factor of five or so, and NASA wants to save the money by sending settlers who have the balls to do the unthinkable.

Nima Arkani-Hamed: The Messenger Lectures

In 1964, Richard Feynman returned to Cornell University for a while and gave his Messenger Lectures that are available to you thanks to Bill Gates.

Now it's 2010 and the five Messenger Lectures were delivered by the world's leading particle phenomenologist, Nima Arkani-Hamed (IAS Princeton).

Here is the first one, from October 4th, 2010.


Press play to play.

Al Gore's car idling during his talk

The Swedes are wealthy and they like their environment to be really clean. That's why the local legislation prohibits any car engine running on empty for more than 60 seconds.

But you know, the folks in Gothenburg invited a speaker who doesn't give a damn about the environment or the laws, for that matter. That's why Al Gore left his car idling during his whole talk - for 3,600 seconds or so.

And he has the arrogance to talk about pollution. This hypocritical jerk should clearly be arrested at least for 60 years. But it seems that the laws no longer apply to him. He seems to be innocent because he also replaced the public transportation by a Swedish government jet he flew - which was actually illegal as well.

LHC: ATLAS, CMS approach 50/pb of integrated luminosity

The major detectors CMS and ATLAS at the LHC are approaching 50 inverse picobarns of data each: the threshold could be surpassed today.

By now, each of them has recorded more than 3 trillion events. That's five time more than what we had at the beginning of this month! Indeed, the older version of the article, attached below, celebrated 10 inverse picobarns.

Fifty inverse picobarns is already a high enough integrated luminosity for many relatively sensible models of new physics (mostly SUSY) to show their fingerprint in the data. My estimated probability that 50/pb is enough to see "something new" is 30% but I haven't heard of any hints that this has indeed happened yet.

Particles and signals moving backward in time

Mephisto has raised the issue of the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory in particular and the influences that travel backward in time in general.

I remember having been excited about many similar topics when I was a teenager. Feynman and Wheeler were surely excited, too. But as physics was making its historical progress towards quantum field theory and beyond, most of the original reasons for excitement turned out to be misguided.

In some sense, each (independently thinking) physicist is following the footsteps of the history. So let's return to the early 20th century, or to the moment when I was 15 years old or so. Remember: these two moments are not identical - they're just analogous. ;-)

Divergences in classical physics

Sarkozy and Merkel may be humiliated over Lisbon revision

Nicolas Sarkozy decided to press a button.



No, I don't mean this button. What I mean is that before an upcoming EU summit, he agreed with Angela Merkel that the Lisbon treaty should be updated in order to strengthen the fiscal responsibility in the EU.

Why EROEI is not important

In his efforts to save the world, John Baez has promoted the notion of EROEI, or "energy return on energy invested":

Baez's blog

EROEI is the ratio of usable energy that you get out of an energy source divided by the energy you had to insert. The idea is that this ratio should be high. If it is smaller than 1 (or 1:1), the source is supposed to be unusable.

Who caused the 2008 financial crisis

Paul Krugman, New York Times, August 2nd, 2002

Multitasking in landscape decays

Adam R. Brown and Alex Dahlen of Princeton University released two preprints today:

Bubbles of Nothing and the Fastest Decay in the Landscape

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Giant Leaps and Monkey Branes in Multi-Dimensional Flux Landscapes

You could say that the first preprint is non-stringy while the second preprint is stringy. But of them argue that the decays of the flux vacua in the stringy landscape proceed differently than many people expect.



Also, both of them argue that the reduction of the flux by many units is preferred as long as there exist many kinds of fluxes. The first preprint moreover uses a six-dimensional field-theoretical model and argues that in the limit in which all the types of fluxes get eliminated simultaneously, the radion (scalar field that measures the size) ceases to be stabilized against the collapse and the process reduces to the bubble of nothing.

IPCC, dogma, heretics, and Judith Curry

Science journalist Michael Lemonick published an article in Scientific American yesterday:

Climate Heretic: Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues

What a title. Roger Pielke Sr thinks that the article is very informative but it is not too hard to imagine how Judith Curry who is being discussed in this way has to feel.

Curry replied to Lemonick's article on her blog:

Heresy and the creation of monsters

She explains that her description as a heretic to be excommunicated from the IPCC says more about the IPCC than about herself. Well, indeed, dictionaries show that heresy is a change of beliefs that conflicts with a religious or similar dogma. So first of all, there must be a dogma - and then you can have heretics.

Mam Barbara Boxer worked so hard to get the title

The U.S. military has called civilians "Sirs" and "Madams" for centuries. And indeed, in 2009, the male senators were called "Sirs" and everything was fine.

But Mam Barbara Boxer decided that she had worked so hard to become the "Senator" that the military personnel had to change the tradition:

Call Me Senator from RightChange on Vimeo.

The driver of Ms Boxer's work has been her title and she is overworked. Now, Ms Carly Fiorina - the ex-boss of Hewlett Packard - has a chance to allow Mam Barbara Boxer to relax once again.

Don't mess with the path integral

Tonight, the TV Prima Cool (Czechia) is going to air The Codpiece Topology, the episode 2x02 of The Big Bang Theory (in Czech dubbing).

It was the first episode I have ever watched (but later, I retroactively watched all the episodes, including the first season, usually several times) and because of this scene in which Sheldon graciously overlooks the fact that Leonard's new and temporary girlfriend is an arrogant, sub-par scientist who actually believes that loop quantum gravity better unites quantum mechanics with general relativity than does string theory, people started to talk about Sheldon Cooper's character being based on your humble correspondent.

Richard Feynman and the birth of quantum gravity

Our theory of nearly everything (TONE) describes the forces in terms of an effective quantum field theory in which a few dozens of matter particle species interact through four fundamental forces - electromagnetism, the weak force, the strong force, and gravity.

Feynman and the four forces

Richard Feynman received his Nobel prize for the path integrals and especially their application to Quantum Electrodynamics; no doubt, he's been one of the most important physicists who have built our understanding of electromagnetism at the quantum level.

Václav Havel: Leaving: pretty good

I just watched the Czech version of "Leaving" by Czech playwright Václav Havel who happened to be employed as the president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic.



Four minutes from an English version

It's a play about a chancellor, Mr Wilhelm Rieger, who is just leaving his office. He is soon to be replaced by Mr Vlastimil Klein.

Wikipedia: William Connolley was just replaced by Tony Sidaway and Stephan Schulz

William Connolley, the climate propagandist-in-chief at Wikipedia, has been officially denied the right to edit articles related to the climate for half a year.

I was somewhat skeptical about the results of this gesture but I still tried what it meant. The first action I took was to restore the section about the ClimateGate and the tree reconstructions at the page about Keith Briffa because it's clearly the most important section of that page that actually justifies why Keith Briffa deserves his own Wikipedia entry.

The section was quickly erased by a user called Stephan Schulz. He threatened me with some sanctions if I edited the article again and so did another jerk called Tony Sidaway (a notorious transvestite and scientologist) - on my talk page. This nasty scum never hesitates to spread lies about distinguished scientists - e.g. the NIPCC members - and blackmail everyone who is inconvenient for them.

Climate Change Prognosticator: a new omniscient climate model

WHN covers the Climate Change Prognosticator, featuring a tour of the Brick Moon Meteorological Laboratory.

Bob Carter: two links

Here are just two interesting links related to Bob Carter and his new book.

One of them is his article about policymaking; the other is a review of his book by the Czech president:

Adaptation is key (by Bob Carter; South China Morning Post)

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Thanks heaven for Bob Carter (by Václav Klaus; the Spectator U.K.)

BBC Horizon: What happened before the big bang?

If you have 55 minutes, here is a new program about cosmology that the BBC aired a week ago or so:



The playlist has 6 parts

Well, yes: I hate it. It has nothing to do with the scientific discipline that I could recognize. This program is about a chaotic mixture of largely unsubstantiated ideas about quantum cosmology - but not only about quantum cosmology.

The program doesn't make any distinction between cosmological insights and hypotheses that only depend on classical physics and those that depend on quantum gravity; it doesn't distinguish weird quasi-religious speculations from theories backed by the scientific evidence (and the number of insights that belong to the latter category and that are shown in the program is very limited, indeed).

EMA: Hollywood hypocrites are saving the Earth

The Hollywood self-described "elite" are distributing the Ecoterrorist Media Awards (EMA) to each other. If your stomach is really strong, here is 18 minutes of some juicy stuff for you.



Please be careful when watching this video. If it makes you throw up, I apologize in advance. If you don't see any video, go to the individual page of this entry.

Needless to say, the abbreviation EMA was chosen to partially steal the fame of the Emmy: these green nuts are parasiting on the Emmy's achievements. They're parasiting on many other things, too.

Privatization of Czech railways

Just eight years ago, the Czech telephone industry would belong to one state-owned company that would be later known as Czech Telecom. However, the monopoly ended in 2002 and an intense competition took over.



As a result, the Czech consumers were able to get high-quality, cheap services. We could become the #1 nation in text messaging ;-), one of the fastest nations when it comes to the ADSL bandwidth, and there are many results of this kind.

Years ago, there would be people who would say that the free market didn't belong to the communication industry. They were spectacularly wrong - so wrong that no one even bothers to mention that such people have ever existed.

Why there are no classicalons by Dvali et al.

Jester at Résonaances discussed a recent paper,

UV-completion by classicalization,

by Gia Dvali, Gian F. Giudice, Cesar Gomez, and Alex Kehagias. They want to claim that one can construct a Higgsless Standard Model and solve the unitarity problem with the W_L-W_L scattering - or any UV problem in any field theory, for that matter - by a simple idea inspired by black holes.

Well, the new objects postulated by their scenario are not too simple - and they can be viewed as a nearly infinitely complicated generalization of the Higgs sector - but let us call the idea simple, anyway.

Czech president: Inaugural Annual GWPF Lecture

This blog entry is just a collection of links related to Václav Klaus's talk in the U.K. where he was invited by Nigel Lawson's and Benny Peiser's foundation.



See:

The Climate Change Doctrine is Part of Environmentalism, Not of Science (full transcript)

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President Václav Klaus at the GWPF Inaugural Annual Lecture: quasi-live blogging (Omniclimate, Maurizio)

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Klaus: Billions wasted for new technologies (The Times)

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Klaus denounces global warming dogma (Prague Daily Monitor)

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Climate change is no threat (Reuters)

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President Vaclav Klaus: Climate Control or Freedom? (John A. at WUWT)

Nothing is below the "don't stop reading" sign.

Christian Science Monitor: Hal Lewis is the new Martin Luther

This entry is most composed of one link.



The Christian Science Monitor, a pretty famous journal whose name suggests that one of the things it could do well is to monitor the analogies between Christianity and science, has published a deep and optimistic text:

Climate change 'fraud' letter: a Martin Luther moment in science history (click).

Well, it was written by Anthony Watts and we know his wise opinions. However, we haven't known them from the pages of the CS Monitor yet. Watts quotes portions of Lewis' letter to the APS chairman, compares this event with the nailing of Martin Luther's 95 Theses to the Wittenburg church door, and hopes that Lewis' letter will lead to a similar reformation of the scientific community.

The global slowing of winds: the cause

A paper in Nature claims that the wind speeds dropped by 5%-15% since 1979,

Northern Hemisphere atmospheric stilling partly attributed to an increase in surface roughness (abstract).

The authors, Robert Vautard, Julien Cattiaux, Pascal Yiou, Jean-Noël Thépaut & Philippe Ciais, have investigated winds in 5 most important countries in the world - namely in the U.S., China, the Czech Republic, Australia, and the Netherlands. ;-)

And the speeds went down by 10% in 30 years, with a lot of messy disclaimers.

HadCRUT3: September 2010 not in top ten

Was September 2010 the warmest September on the modern instrumental record? As Steve Milloy's table quickly reveals, it depends whom you ask: different teams offer strikingly divergent answers to this simple question.

While our skeptical soulmates, John Christy and Roy Spencer, at UAH AMSU answer "Yes, September 2010 was our warmest September", and their satellite colleagues at RSS AMSU say the same thing, the crusaders responsible for the global surface records say something entirely different.

Korean IPCC diary of Dr Radim Tolasz

The 32nd session of the IPCC took place in Busan, South Korea, between October 11th and October 14th. While almost everyone previously agreed that Mr Pachauri is dragging the IPCC to the bottom of the sea, there hasn't been a single nation that would officially propose his resignation. Not even the gathering of NSDAP exhibited this stunning degree of groupthink.

The text below are reports from the viewpoint of Dr Radim Tolasz, one of the Czech participants. There were three of them: Dr Radim Tolasz, Dr Ladislav Metelka, and Mr Jaroslav Olša. While Dr Metelka is a climate crusader - diluted to the limited proportions of our "Czech pond" - who often denies that he is a climate crusader, Mr Jaroslav Olša is our ambassador to South Korea while Dr Radim Tolasz is a nice guy who may be described as a coward and opportunist. I will kindly ask him to check that my description of him is accurate. ;-)

Benoît Mandelbrot, the King of Fractals: 1924-2010

Benoît Mandelbrot was born in Poland on November 20, 1924, into a highly educated Jewish-Lithuanian family. They moved to France in 1936. He studied, was fixing tools, and tended horses there but acquired the dual French-U.S. citizenship after some years.

Mandelbrot died of pancreatic cancer in a hospice on Thursday, October 14th, 2010. It was in a town where I have lived for 6 years - Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Some climate insanity for the weekend

While most people with at least traces of rational thinking or common sense have largely seen through the nonsense of "climate disruption", the AGW crusaders reacted in a simple way: they began to write bigger insanities than ever before, hoping that the low-to-nonexistent quality of their arguments can be compensated by their "intensity".

A couple of fresh examples:



Global warming flattens skyscrapers

New Scientist has figured out some new science: "Earth is starting to crumble under the strain of climate change." (This is a quote.)

Cities such as Seattle are going to be completely flattened soon. How does the Earth achieve this modest goal? It's simple. Climate change is, first of all, detonating the volcanoes above such cities, Kate Ravilious professionally explains. Once the volcanoes explode because of the 0.013 °C warming per year or so, they destroy all the skylines, too. No kidding. ;-)

Database: will INSPIRE replace SPIRES?

The SPIRES database of physics papers has been serving the particle physics community - and a few related fields - for many years. How would you upgrade it?



Well, there shouldn't be too many spires over there. One spire is enough. But the new server should also be "in". That's enough. So the new server expected to supersede SPIRES is called

Andrew Revkin shocked that science is evolving

Andrew Revkin wrote about his exchanges with Hal Lewis:

A physicist’s climate complaints (Dot Earth)

The first observation that Revkin finds utterly shocking is that 20 years ago, Hal Lewis didn't quite understand that and why the opinions that the changing climate justifies expensive interventions was unsupported by science. I knew very little about the changing climate 20 years ago, too.

However, for Andrew Revkin, the fact that someone can learn something new in 20 years is a shocking news. I will discuss this point later.

Harvard: our elixir of youth for stem cells was bogus

Breaking news August 2012: Ms Shane Mayack was finally found guilty of misconduct today: Boston.com, Nature News

There have been various examples of (alleged) scientific misconduct - e.g. "Copygate" affecting Mr Wegman. I find this one interesting.

In January 2010, the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) announced a nice discovery: the aging of the stem cells could be reversed by signals from insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1):

Blood tells old cells to act young: HSCI scientists uncover clues toward treating age-related conditions via the blood

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Systemic signals regulate ageing and rejuvenation of blood stem cell niches (full paper, PDF, Nature).

Well, it turns out that the discovery was almost certainly bogus:

3 Harvard Researchers Retract a Claim on the Aging of Stem Cells (NY Times)

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Stem cell papers under suspicion (Nature News)

BBC told to be impartial on AGW

Benny Peiser of The GWPF sent us some interesting articles today:

► BBC new guidelines try to make their reporting of AGW impartial (The Telegraph): well, we will see how the same people - many of whom are unhinged green fanatics - may suddenly become impartial

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► Is the BBC eco-tourism coming to an end? (The Guardian blogs): Chilean miners defeated reports from climate talks

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► U.K. Government report kills some green semi-government offices (Click Green)

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► Physicist mocks global warming scam (The Australian): responses to Hal Lewis' letter

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► Pachauri keeps on dragging the IPCC to the bottom of the sea (glub glub, Reuters): a Brezhnev asked to start the perestroika of the panel

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► Guardian blogger Robbins vs The Register (The Register): he said she said on the role of the Sun

APS thinks that Tawanda may teach physics to Hal Lewis

A few days ago, Harold Lewis wrote a very thoughtful resignation letter to the current chairman of the American Physical Society, Curtis Callan.

In the letter, he has recalled some better times when the American Physical Society actually allowed and encouraged the physicists to use their expertise, creativity, honesty, and intelligence to discuss important matters related to science.

The current APS is very different. Most people in its leadership are corrupt and they deliberately try to suppress any debate about questions that would be financially or "socially" harmful to these individuals - and global warming has become a key topic of this kind.

Yesterday, the APS has answered to Dr Hal Lewis in a way that I consider breathtakingly arrogant and dishonest.

First of all, the answer to the important letter by a serious scientist was apparently composed by a secretary, a bureaucrat called Tawanda Johnson. Or is it a coincidence that she is signed under the reply and that the quality of the text suggests that indeed, no scientist was involved?

John Ellis dreams about the non-existence of the Higgs

A funny two-minute NSF video shows John Ellis, the 2nd most cited high-energy physicist (and, by the way, the father of the term "Theory of Everything", Nature 1986), who thinks it would be healthy for physics if the experiments showed that the Higgs boson were just like the luminiferous aether and the physicists have been idiots for 40 years once again:



Does he really believe this scenario?

CMS SUSY group working hard

As director of research and computing at CERN, Bertolucci, confirmed to Alpinekat, supersymmetry rocks. We're stil looking forward to the 2nd blog on planet Earth aside from TRF that will take notice. ;-)

At the time when the LHC detectors have collected over 10/pb of data each (actually 16.7/pb by today), Maria Spiropulu - whom you may know from The Elegant Universe on PBS - gave a very useful talk (PDF) about SUSY searches of the CMS collaboration in Split: it doesn't mean that it was a talk about split SUSY! :-)

Windows Phone 7 and Škoda 120

This blog entry contains no important information.

Microsoft is releasing Windows Phone 7. As they show in The Season of the Witch, it's time for a phone that saves us from our phones. I agree with that even though the ad doesn't clarify how Windows Phone 7 is supposed to achieve this goal. But it's fair because the ad says nothing else about the system, either. ;-)



Let me point out that I am not a witch or anything you've heard. I am you! ;-) But I haven't metamorphosed into you because I am a witch! :-)

Rubrene: cheap efficient solar panels from Rutgers

Don't tell it to anyone but carbon will be the element that will find the greatest number of applications in the future rather than a villain.

Rubrene is a nice bound state of 2+4+2 benzene rings. It contains nothing else than 42 carbon atoms (8 x 6 = 48 from the rings minus 6 from 3 shared sides) and 28 hydrogen atoms (48 - 4 x 3 - 2 x 4, subtracting 12 for shared sides and 8 for four internal propagators). Rubrene is a red powder - see the picture below - that is added as a dopant to yellow-shining OLED components.

Advantages

The chemical content is very prosaic but the arrangement looks cool. As a consequence, this rubrene is a great new material to potentially create "plastic" solar panels. It's organic and carbon is cheaper than silicon because you don't have to deconstruct anyone's microprocessors or artificial breasts to get the stuff.

Josef Váňa wins his 7th Velká Pardubická Steeple Chase

In the morning, Josef Váňa who will celebrate his 58th birthday in two weeks said that 7 was a nicer number than 6 so he would prefer to win the race for the 7th time. This mathematical argument sounded sensible.

A few hours ago, he won the Great Pardubice Steeple Chase for the 7th time, indeed.



If you want to optimize your chances of winning the most prestigious Czech horse race, statistics strongly suggests that you should be approximately 58 years old, 166 cm tall, 62 kg of weight (the horse has to carry some extra baggage to avoid any advantage from your lower weight!), and you should have already experienced a clinical death as well (Váňa's heart has repeatedly stopped in June 1994 after a complicated collision with another horse in Baden-Baden). :-)

"No Pressure" by The 10:10 campaign: all skeptical kids and adults will be detonated on 10/10

Originally posted on 10/01/10, 10:10 am. But I think it should be reposted on 10/10/10, 10:10:10 because the video below became the ultimate symbol of this moment.

Update: the video was labeled "private" on Friday, a minute before 3 p.m., Prague Summer Time, when it had 10,000-20,000 views, 45 positive and 250 negative votes. I managed to download a copy 20 seconds before it disappeared - and then Boom. ;-)

Please contact me if you need a copy. Meanwhile, another YouTube copy uploaded by a skeptic has been embedded below (there exist about 15 skeptics' copies and they want you to perversely vote "thumbs up" to make the video more visible - it's up to you).

On Monday, the total number of views has surpassed half a million and hundreds of blog reactions.

You used to believe that you had the right not to believe that it was beneficial to reduce the CO2 emissions. Times are changing.

The 10:10 movement is going to abruptly reduce the CO2 emissions by 10 percent in nine days, on 10/10/10 at 10:10:10 am. How will they do it?

Warning: the following video is brutal: if you don't like gore (and Gore), the movie is not for you



James Lee killed himself too early: he would have surely been delighted by this film. The film was produced by Richard Curtis, a top film director (e.g. many episodes of Mr Bean). He was a hired gun but the people who hired him were for real.

Yes, they will simply kill all people who are openly skeptical: the "No Pressure" video proposes a "final solution" of the problem with the AGW skeptics. No pressure. Just a little bit of pressure that is needed to press a red button and all skeptics in the world will explode in bloodbath. It was their choice - and the alarmist killers will continue smiling. It's excellent, isn't it?

Prague Astronomical Clock: 600th birthday

The Prague Orloj celebrates its 600th birthday these days.



It was completed by clockmaker Nicholas of Kadaň (the town is translated as Capenhagen into Lumo English but only Czech speakers will understand this pun haha - although some clever non-speakers may figure out what's the Czech word for Copenhagen, too) in 1410. Because of the anniversary, the tourists may look into the interior of the gadget now.

Why Harold Lewis left the APS after 67 years

After 67 years of membership, Harold Lewis of UC Santa Barbara is leaving the American Physical Society:

Resignation letter (GWPF, click)

The APS - currently led by Curtis Callan who seems to have abandoned most ethical principles as resolutely as any other generic bureaucrat who wants to preserve his feeding trough - has become a corrupt organization whose main goal is to protect the financial interests of the members, especially the members who love to get to the top.

Daily Kos: campaign to spam the Internet with links to junk and spam blogs

Showing the utter disrespect for democracy and objectivity of the Internet, as well as the lack of any substance and values in their political plans, the well-known American hard-core extreme leftist hateful website called Daily Kos has initiated a new campaign attempting to distort the results of the upcoming elections in the U.S. by spamming all websites on the Internet with links to spam blogs attacking conservative politicians.

A special SEO team is advising tens of thousands of activists in this organization to post links in places and ways that "optimize" the impact on Google's indices.

Is this publicly organized Google bombing actually legal in the U.S.? Can you sue them? Cannot Google just identify the Daily Kos spammers who try to compromise the quality of Google's database and to remove their "contributions" from the indexed Internet? Does Google actually want to remove this type of spam?

At any rate, Daily Kos subscribers have received the following e-mail (see also this page):



[Your name],

Every time you post a hyperlink anywhere on the Internet - including on message boards and social networking sites - it impacts search engines like Google. Also, one of the most common actions undecided voters take online is to use search engines like Google to find information about candidates. As such, shouldn't we learn how to post hyperlinks in a way that helps lead to our preferred political outcomes?

Mickey Man: AGW science depends on manipulation by politicians

The author is going to be a self-described scientist for two more months

An equivalent article written by my colleague with a similar name has appeared in The Washington Post today

You may think that science is independent of politics. Therefore, I or my colleagues shouldn't tell you whom you should vote for. But my scientific discipline is different. It has grown into a great business. The funding has grown from $200 million fifteen years ago to $2-3 billion today: the increase can be attributed solely to the great idea of mine and others that our planet is in danger. And this business depends on a particular breed of politicians who must stay in power.

Chances are that your friends or even your relatives depend on this funding, too. Everything has worked for years but now we have a problem, Houston. We need your vote. Please feel no pressure. It's your choice. But be sure to avoid the tickets with the names below or else...

Arrow of time, part 101010

The past and the future play a fundamentally asymmetric role in logic. After more than 100 years, some people are still not getting it.



A backward guy is living his ordinary everyantiday backward life. Things get dramatic when he starts to antidrink and antieat. Some people still don't believe me but the events above don't naturally occur in the real world.

They imagine that to exchange the past and the future is as easy as to rotate a picture by 180°. But it's not.

Does increased solar activity lead to cooling?

Gavin Schmidt, BBC, and many others discuss an interesting paper about the Sun's role in our climate published in Nature,

An influence of solar spectral variations on radiative forcing of climate (abstract)

and written by Joanna D. Haigh, Ann R. Winning, Ralf Toumi, and Jerald W. Harder (UK, US). The authors focus on an important subtlety - the spectral dependence of the solar variations.

Nobel peace prize: Chinese dissident

The 2010 Nobel peace prize was awarded to

Liu Xiaobo (CN),

a top Chinese dissident and human rights advocate who is currently employed as a prisoner. China's economy is so powerful these days that even prisoners may earn millions of bucks during the first year of their 11-year tenure. Last year, the Nobel prize to Barack Obama offended the sensible part of the Western public.

This year, the award will offend the Chinese communist officials - and some of their incredible Western soulmates, too. ;-)

Some of these incredible people among the journalists in Oslo have already shown their values! Meanwhile, an Indian journalist complained that the committee didn't pick an Indian yogi who fights against climate change by his exercises in the world's largest democracy. :-)) Didn't they already give the prize to one nutcase and crook defined by the very same criteria in 2007?

Well, I surely think that the transition from an American liberal kitsch to a Chinese fight for essential values is an improvement.

Kiwigate: NZ government abandons datasets that showed warming

Kiwi cuts

The raw temperature data from New Zealand were showing no temperature change in the 20th century. However, some "official" climatologists have "homogenized" the data in such a way that a significant warming by 1 °C suddenly appeared as a result.



The unadjusted temperature chart

The muddy circumstances that led to this outcome and the impossibility to verify these procedures - all the documents were eaten by a dog or a kiwi - are known as the Kiwigate scandal. In Suite101.com, John O'Sullivan reports on some newest developments:

Legal Defeat for Global Warming in Kiwigate Scandal

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See also: GWPF, IceCap.US, NZ Climate Conversations

Nobel prize in literature: top non-leftist Latin American writer

The 2010 Nobel prize in literature was given to

Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru, Wikipedia),

perhaps the globally most influential Latin American writer, "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat". He has written many essays, novels (comedies, historical novels, murder mysteries, political thrillers), and more.

Environmentalist Hungary poisons Danube

After the collapse of communism, there existed significant differences between the post-socialist countries' attitudes to the environment, the environmental ideology, and many other things.

Czechoslovakia would switch socialism to capitalism but there were clearly many business-as-usual projects that simply had to continue. That included the expansion of nuclear power plants - which have been attacked by anti-nuclear Austria - and the completion of Gabčíkovo Waterworks that were originally meant to be a common Slovak-Hungarian project, Gabčíkovo-Nagymarosz Waterworks.



The red mud that will be discussed later

However, there was an apparent consensus in Hungary that the end of communism meant that there would never be any new big projects. "Big projects" and "big buildings" were equated with communism. The attitude of Slovaks and Czechs couldn't have been more different. "Big projects" have nothing to do with capitalism or socialism: the two systems just realize them in different ways. So while Slovakia continued to build the dam - to prevent the big floods and other things - Hungary unilaterally breached the 1977 Czechoslovak-Hungarian Budapest Treaty.

How the eye wires up

Nature has some fun articles about the measurements that are unmasking the neural circuitry of the retina:

Field, G. et al. Nature 467, 673-677 (2010)

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Adam Mann: How the eye wires up (Nature)

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Mapping color vision in HD (NSF)

The NSF article also features an amusing comment that the tiny, multi-electrode retinal readout system was inspired by the particle detectors used to search for the Higgs boson: that's how I found this article in the first place. ;-)

Signals from hundreds of cells are evaluated simultaneously.



Click to zoom in (by a lot). Credit: Zina Redetsky, NSF

Why climate change deniers should be blown to bits

Sony, Kyocera, and others have terminated their relationships with the 10:10 campaign - and they may represent just the beginning of the recarbonization of the private sector and the return of sensible reasoning to the business world.



However, you may be sure that there still exist people on the fringes of the commercial sector who are faithful to the values of radical alarmism. You are welcome to open a website, Green Chip Stocks dot com, that writes about "a new way of life" and "a new generation of wealth".

R.T. Jones has contributed an article called

Why Climate Change Deniers Should Be Blown To Bits!

He says that the "No Pressure" ad is kind of funny. And it is "bullshit" for someone to say that he is offended. As far as he can say, his opinions show that he has a sense of humor. Well, his text primarily proves that he respects no moral values.

Chemistry Nobel prize: palladium in organic synthesis

The main element that "makes" life is carbon.

Given the intense environmentalist propaganda, you could think that exotic silvery metals such as palladium (Z=46) have no business to participate in organic chemistry. They're just toxic pollutants, aren't they? ;-)



Well, the 2010 chemistry Nobel prize went to

Richard Heck (US),
Ei-ichi Negishi (US, JP),
Akira Suzuki (JP)

for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis. Palladium is helpful to put the pieces of various organic molecules together.

Let me ignore that Negishi's birthplace - Changchun - belongs to China now.

The likelihood that 2010 will surpass 1998

It's time for some climate change facts. This text is just an update of two articles written three months ago and one month ago into which I will add one additional month of data and refresh all the numbers.

The nearly final temperature readings of UAH AMSU for September 2010 are out and the global temperature anomaly was 0.60 °C, higher than 0.51 °C a month earlier.



So September 2010 was 0.15 °C warmer (thanks, Ivan!) than September 1998 and it is just a slightly-above-average month of 2010 so far. Also, the average anomaly of the first nine months (Part1) of 2010, 0.55 °C, is cooler than Part1 of 1998, 0.59 °C, by 0.04 °C. Of course, if this temperature difference continued for the last three months (Part2) of 2010, 2010 would be cooler than 1998.

Solar panels return to the White House

This is a Nobel prize week so let us look at one story from the everyday life of Nobel prize winners.

Peace Nobel prize winner Barack Obama decided to show his appreciation for the newest 21st century technologies. So he will decorate the White House with the same gadgets that his fellow peace Nobel prize winner Jimmy Carter installed in 1979: solar panels.

See The Telegraph and others

Jimmy Carter is checking that his solar panels are heating the Sun and returning the energy we have borrowed from our star so that the life of our Solar System is sustainable. Meanwhile, his subordinated colleagues are impressed by Carter's knowledge of science: Carter looks like a professional physician. ;-)

Later, Ronald Reagan has removed the panels. While Reagan's peace Nobel prize was given to Mikhail Gorbachev, he had another virtue relatively to Jimmy Carter, one that also has "some" value for the U.S. presidents: unlike Carter, he was actually a great president.

Physics Nobel Prize: Geim, Novoselov

The 2010 physics Nobel prize has been awarded to

Andre Geim (UK),
Konstantin Novoselov (UK)

for their groundbreaking 2004 experimental discovery of graphene, the one-atom-thick planar hexagonal sheet of carbon atoms - or a two-dimensional material, if you wish. The distance between the adjacent carbon atoms (i.e. the side of the hexagon) is 0.142 nm.

If you think that Geim looks very young, then notice that Novoselov was his graduate student when they did the key work. ;-)

BBC interviews Nobel prize winner Lindzen about being a denier

It's a Nobel prize week, so I will deliberately insert the inventor's name to many postings.

The BBC has interviewed "Nobel winner Richard Lindzen on being a climate change denier, and why office plants rock" (it's their description!):

Our Planet (audio)

At the very beginning, Lindzen corrects the host that he is no "skeptic": a "denier" (or "realist") is actually more accurate. Lindzen's impressive list of publications is mentioned, among many other things. It's the kind of a BBC program that would be unthinkable just a year ago.

Something has obviously changed about the forces that determine what is thinkable and what is unthinkable at BBC - and elsewhere. Don't get me wrong: the previously unthinkable program was still hosted by the same kind of an unthinking host who would present the thinkable programs for the unthinking audiences years ago, too. ;-)

Hat tip: Willie Soon