9 December 2009

A most intriguing website is at oddee.com, well worth a regular glance. Today’s group includes the 10 weirdest awards in the world, which include the Stella and Darwin awards, always amusing. Two of the others cited are the Golden Raspberry for the worst motion picture and the Ig-Nobel Prize for the worst prize awarded.

Worst Picture Dis-Honorees to date have included such Big Budget B.O. Bombs as Catwoman, The Love Guru and Howard The Duck, as well as such Certified Camp Classics as Mommie Dearest, Showgirls, Battlefield Earth and I Know Who Killed Me. (Link)

Some recent winners are:
In Medicine: Brian Witcombe from Gloucester, for his research on “Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects” and his results include “sore throats”;
In Linguistics: Juan Manuel Toro, Josp B Tobalon and Nuria Sebastian-Galles of the University of Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards;
In Peace: Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, for its research on a gay bomb which could cause enemy soldiers to become irresistible to one another and lose the will to fight. The Laboratory spent $7.5 million in the U.S. for this research. (Link)

Missing, for reasons I don’t understand, were Gore’s Oscan for his “Battlefield Earth” (revisited) and his award for “peace” shared with a scientific panel.

2005: Sheikh Feiz Mohammad, Islamic cleric: “A victim of rape every minute somewhere in the world. Why? No one to blame but herself. She displayed her beauty to the entire world…strapless, backless, sleeveless, nothing but satanic skirts, slit skirts, translucent blouses, miniskirts, tight jeans…to tease men and appeal to their carnal nature.”

Sexist comments are made only by males, of course. One of my favorites is the woman who printed on her tee-shirt, across her breasts, an up-arrow with the words “my face is this direction”.

For those of us who have had occasion to know a woman well enough (or drunk enough) to tell the truth, we’ve become aware that women do, indeed, check out the bulge in a man’s trousers. Naturally, being women, they are much more cunning and sly about doing this then men are.

But you have to wonder the reaction you’d get if you printed across your shorts an up-arrow and the same words about where your face is located, don’t you? And why do women print all of those things across their chests if they don’t expect the more literate men of this world to be interested in reading them? Now staring at a plain and undecorated titillacious tee-shirt might well be sexist, I suppose, but I’m often so deep in thought that I don’t really see what I appear to be looking at, so I know that happens.

I’ve told this story before (naturally) but when I was a university student I had a chemistry professor who was without doubt a genius in the field of chemistry. I mean this sincerely, the man left us in complete awe. But he was also on another planet where everything else was concerned. One night my buddies and I, including my wife, were in our car waiting in line to get to the window of one of Salt Lake City’s earliest drive-ins, and our car happened to be straddling the sidewalk. Out my window I beheld Dr Cagle walking down the sidewalk in our direction, talking to himself and drawing in the air on some blackboard only he could see.

He walked straight into the side of my door, without even breaking stride. He bounced off, staggered back a step, and appeared to see me for the first time. I had no idea what to say or do and I think I said something idiotic like “hello, Dr Cagle” but since I think there were 300 or so of us in his chemistry class he knew more about organic carbon bonds than human ones and my identity was not included among them. He pivoted like one of those toys they have today, that bounce off of things they encounter and head in another direction, which is exactly what he did, still talking to himself and writing equations only he could see. Or understand.

Well, even so I can appreciate the Sheik’s attitude. Down here in Costa Rica virtually all of the women always wear bras. Most seem to be quite thick...no nipple definition to be seen. However, they might be bright green and worn beneath a white blouse. And they might also be of the push-‘em-up variety that make 44-D almost tiny. And the v-neck of the blouse or tee-shirt might well be, well, more like

(the central letter down here is pronounced as if it were ‘B’ making an even better bilingual pun)

...but good form says you aren’t supposed to notice anything unusual about her unusually good form. We don’t have parking meters to worry about but we do have telephone posts so I find the safest thing to do is stop walking for a few moments.

And it’s nice for me that most of them know I don’t speak very good Spanish so when I start babbling they think I’m merely trying to say something they can’t understand because my Spanish is poor.

The evidence that our planet, since the Industrial Revolution, has been on a broad warming trend outside the normal variation patterns — with periodic micro-cooling phases — has been documented by a variety of independent research centers.

As this paper just reported: “Despite recent fluctuations in global temperature year to year, which fueled claims of global cooling, a sustained global warming trend shows no signs of ending, according to new analysis by the World Meteorological Organization made public on Tuesday. The decade of the 2000s is very likely the warmest decade in the modern record.”

This is not complicated. We know that our planet is enveloped in a blanket of greenhouse gases that keep the Earth at a comfortable temperature. As we pump more carbon-dioxide and other greenhouse gases into that blanket from cars, buildings, agriculture, forests and industry, more heat gets trapped.

What we don’t know, because the climate system is so complex, is what other factors might over time compensate for that man-driven warming, or how rapidly temperatures might rise, melt more ice and raise sea levels. It’s all a game of odds. We’ve never been here before. We just know two things: one, the CO2 we put into the atmosphere stays there for many years, so it is “irreversible” in real-time (barring some feat of geo-engineering); and two, that CO2 buildup has the potential to unleash “catastrophic” warming.

Except virtually none of what he has said is actually factually known to be true and/or is misleading. For instance, what does it mean to be “the warmest decade in the modern record”?

What, exactly, is “the modern record” and how long has it lasted. See, the glaciers which filled the Ohio Valley and the holes which are presently the Great Lakes started melting at least 12,000 years ago. Trying to panic me over events of the last 120 years is a bridge too short...even the last 1200 years.

Temperatures today are not only not warmer than they have ever been, they might not even match 1934. The simple fact that this debate even exists should teach you something about record levels.

No nononono, the mad scientist screams, I can prove that 2005 was 0.0000001 warmer than 1934. Warming is a fact.

Human production of CO2 is a bit more than 0.0000001 greater than it was in 1934, but presumably it’s still the cause and about to unleash catastrophic warming, as well.

Tom Friedman, desperate, invokes the Cheney 1% solution he hated when Cheney proposed it:

Not unreasonable logic...depending on the price of the premium. When there is a 1% probability but the premium is based as if the probability was 100% then the insurance company is screwing you out of your eyeballs.

We’re reasonably certain that the mass extinction which included the dinosaurs was caused by at least one large meteorite hitting the earth. This ought to count as catastrophic, and since it’s happened at least once before then it isn’t unreasonable.

Let’s think about one simple thing which has eluded Tom Friedman’s huge intellect thus far. Geologic history teaches us that there have been several mass extinctions during the earth’s existence.