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| Semi
Prozac |
2/26/08 |
A few years ago, I saw a movie starring Christina Ricci called
“Prozac Nation.” It was a good movie, with a searing performance by Ricci, about
a young woman’s struggle with depression.
But it left me dissatisfied. The ending seemed pat. The girl starts taking
prozac, and wow! She’s all better. The sun is shining, birds are frolicking,
puppies are in the trees chirping.
Or so memory informed me. I rented the movie today and watched the ending again.
It wasn’t pat; they just simply wrapped it up abruptly. The Ricci character, as
narrator, explained that it was a long hard road from depression, and what the
prozac did was give her “breathing room.” The inference was that prozac was, at
the beginning, the only thing that stood between her and suicide, and in the
climatic scene, she smashes a glass in the bathroom at her psychiatrist’s office
and stands at the sink, poised to slit her wrists, and just can’t do it. From
there to fade-to-credits is about ninety seconds, which doesn’t leave much time
to detail what probably really was a long and arduous recovery from depression.
Thus the feeling of a pat ending.
If the movie didn’t actually disintegrate into an ad for prozac, it made clear
the writer’s opinion that prozac saved her life. I have no doubt that she
utterly believes that it did.
But there was a significant study reported in today’s London Guardian, bannered:
“Prozac, used by 40m people, does not work say scientists.” Eli Lilly claims
it’s used by 54 million people, and of course has made the company a lot of
money over the years. |
| Cold
Truths |
12/12/07 |
George Monbiot, the reporter for the
Guardian, has a modest proposal to curb global warming. Take all the fossil
fuels, and leave them in the ground.
Hmm. Well, if we started that tomorrow (Tuesday) the world economies would
collapse, probably by 4pm Wednesday, and by Friday civilization would have
collapsed in most of the northern hemisphere. Starvation would begin by
Sunday, and on Monday people in the the American south would be killing prey
with their bare teeth while their children, naked, chased chickens around
the yard. In other words, the South would be the one part of the world left
unaffected.
Monbiot wasn’t seriously proposing the world try to quit fossil fuels cold
turkey. He was raising the point that the nations that stand to lose the
most from global warming (including, whether they admit it or not, China and
the US) are working the hardest to increase the extraction rate of those
same fossil fuels that are causing the problem in the first place.
The problem, Monbiot argues, is that while people are trying to address
fossil fuel consumption in terms of limiting demand – nuclear power, hybrid
cars, fluorescent lights – the real solutions will come only from limiting
supply.
This comes the day after an article appeared in the Sacramento Bee, written
by the brilliant environmental reporter Tom Knudson, detailing the
environmental catastrophe that is developing in north central Alberta, deep
in the heart of Canada, in the area of the Athabaska oil sands. There,
Knudson writes, arsenic, mercury and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are
endangering the health of the residents and destroying the environment for
hundreds of miles around. Alberta is cursed with an Alliance government,
which consist of wannabees who believe in Ayn Rand and the Invisible Hand
and dream of becoming American-like plutocrats and being rich and stupid,
instead of just plain stupid. So they stand carefully upwind, flutter their
hands, and assure everyone that the free market has everyone’s best
interests at heart. And nobody mentions that sand oil causes up to three
times as much CO2, barrel for barrel, because of the extra energy and
chemistry needed to turn what is basically asphalt into some sort of
serviceable oil. |
|
Burning Down the House |
7/21/06 |
There’s two documentaries out there right now about global warming. One of
them is attracting immense attention, galvanizing people, creating an American
hero, and scaring the piss out of the far right.
The other one is more low key. It gives a detailed analysis of what is causing
global warming, what the effects of global warming are likely to be, how bad it
might get, and what can be done about it.
In the long run, it might be the more important of the two documentaries.
Tom Brokaw, retired news anchor, decided to do something that he had limited
opportunity to do in the last 15 years or so that he worked for NBC: he got to
make an honest, non-flashy, and informative documentary. Think about it: when
was the last time you saw something like that on network TV? Been a while,
hasn’t it?
Naturally, Brokaw’s documentary isn’t on network television. It’s on the
Discovery Channel, a station that itself has become far too fond of monster
trucks and idiotic “Did Jesus live?” pseudo-documentaries with lots of blurred
and jittery camera shots to denote that something interesting is going on when
in fact it is not. |
| Kosher
Medicine |
7/18/06 |
Imagine that you are
running a restaurant. It’s a fairly classy joint, nothing snobby, but you
can go in and get a nice steak and the edges of your customers’ credit cards
won’t be smoking when they leave.
Business is good, but a number of customers have asked about a “surf and
turf” plate. You look into it, decide the menu can take a small expansion,
and you add a steak and lobster plate.
It’s a hit, and you’re making a decent margin on it. But then one evening,
one of your customers comes to you, irate, and tells you that one waitress
has told him that she won’t serve the steak and lobster plate for religious
reasons.
You confront the waitress, who explains that the bible says that lobsters
are an insect, and are an abomination to eat (the bible actually does say
that of all shellfish) and that she thus cannot serve it to others because
it is wrong. She points out that when she entered your employ, the
restaurant did not serve lobster.
You could mention the shrimp salad, but that’s only served on Fridays, and
she had requested Friday from an hour before sundown until Saturday an hour
after sundown off, and so you just simply never scheduled her for those two
days. |
| Bird Flu |
5/11/06 |
I don’t mean to
panic anyone about Bird Flu, but have you seen or read Steven King’s “The
Stand”? You know, the one where a mutated flu virus gets loose from a
military compound and kills 99.98 of all the people in the world, which
inexplicably calls Satan’s imp to Las Vegas so he can get nuclear bombs?
ABC will probably re-run “The Stand” the week the news breaks that H5N1 has
finally developed human-to-human contagion. Should give them great ratings.
I watched “First Contact: Bird Flu in America” Tuesday night, and it managed
to be just as dreadful as I feared, and better than I hoped. It was
sensationalist, and is going to raise public anxiety about bird flu. At the
same time, they got their facts straight for the most part, and pointed out
that the real danger from a pandemic of that sort isn’t the number killed by
the disease, but the number killed by panic and social chaos. |
| Free
Market Health |
5/3/06 |
For decades,
Republicans, libertarians and other right wingers have been warning us
against the perils of what they call “socialized medicine.” “It will be a
vast, expensive, ineffective bureaucracy,” they intone, “heartless,
soulless, crushing children and old people, forcing triage, and denying
millions even the basics in an effort not to bankrupt the nation.”
Americans, on cue, went wide-eyed with fright, and swore that health care
would, now and forever, be a free market enterprise.
The decades went by, and nations that had single-payer or national health
not only failed to go bankrupt, but in most such countries, most of the
citizenry seemed to be quite satisfied with the level and quality of health
care they got. And if their taxes were higher, they never had to shop for
doctors, or worry about whether the insurance company would cover a visit to
the ER, or how to afford medications.
More recently, Americans noticed that they were spending an awful lot on
health care. (As of 2005, the average per capita spent on health care is
$5,200 a year). In return, they were getting a rather poor return. Fifteen
percent of Americans had no health coverage at all, and nearly half the
remainder had poor to barely adequate coverage. More and more, people were
being killed by the rapidly escalating price of medications (next time
you’re in the pharmacy, remember the money you are spending goes, in large
part, to those fancy ads on TV that you so enjoy). And of course, everyone
had to deal with endless paper work, and a maze of conflicting and often
contradictory plans, providers, HMOs, hospital bureaucracies, and another
maze of tax rebates and employer involvement. People were horrified to
discover that insurance companies were dictating to employers who they could
hire, based on health-risk estimates. |
|
Marvin and Mars |
3/18/06 |
Regular readers know that a theme I write
on fairly often is that of global warming. Next to nuclear holocaust or an
asteroid strike, I consider it the most serious threat humanity faces, and
unlike nuclear war, it is inevitable, and unlike an asteroid strike, we know
that it’s going to happen. Some of us will live to see the worst effects of
it.
I also like to talk about Mars. Like anyone raised on a diet of Ray
Bradbury, Robert Heinlein and Edgar Rice Burroughs, I’m fascinated by our
closest neighbor, and this shows up from time to time in my pieces.
It’s not often I get to talk about both at the same time. In fact, this is
the first, and probably only time. So I’m going to make the most of it.
Last week, I wrote another piece about global warming, and mentioned toward
the end about how tenaciously right wingers clung to the ideology that
global warming is nothing but a plot by America-hating, tree-hugging Luddite
liberals who hate capitalism. They do so long after insurance companies and
extraction industries have stopped trying to pretend global warming isn’t
real, and some have even stopped pretending human activity has nothing to do
with it.
So in the next couple of days, I heard from a couple of right wingers, both
of whom wanted to use Mars as an example in order to set me straight on this
whole liberal fantasy about global warming.
|
|
Propagandizing Nature |
3/13/06 |
The news from the high latitudes continues
to be unrelievedly grim. Today, the Observer (the Sunday edition of the
Guardian) reported on a new study which showed carbon dioxide levels rising
at between 2.5 parts per million and 3 parts per million per year at a
station in northern Norway. That is yet another substantial increase in the
rate of increase, and worldwide, levels are at about 380 parts per million.
Over the previous 800,000 years, it has never exceeded 280 parts per
million.
According to the article, 500 parts per million is considered a (somewhat
arbitrary) “tipping point,” at which time climate change becomes
irreversible. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean we have 40 years to mull over
our options.
The article states, “Scientists and campaigners are desperate for
politicians to reach agreements that will prevent the 500 ppm 'tipping
point' being breached in the next half-century. These new data suggest they
may have a far shorter period of time in which to act.” Unfortunately, we
may not even have that slim hope. |
| A Cold
Shoulder |
2/21/06 |
The Science Fiction community – in America, at least – has always had a
strong representation from people who are either libertarians or free marketeers,
or (for those incapable of seeing the built-in conflict between market demands
and individual rights) both. The worst cases are Randroids, who are utterly
convinced that government is the root of all evil, and that churches and
corporations wouldn’t DREAM of taking over the power vacuum if government were
to be somehow eliminated from human affairs. Aside from being rather poorly
thought out, it also has a rather vile premise, that human greed can be counted
upon to solve all social problems.
Like in Rwanda, perhaps.
It’s an ideology, an odd one that celebrates the individuality of humans while
vociferously opposing any other viewpoints, labeling such as “socialist” and
“authoritarian.” As if churches or corporations wouldn’t share such traits.
Holding this particular ideology doesn’t mean someone can’t write great science
fiction. Robert Heinlein incorporated it in a lot of his novels, and usually did
so in a way that didn’t interfere with the magic of the story one bit. I often
most enjoyed the stories where I was most likely to disagree with the political
philosophy that informed the story. |
| Chaos vs
Order |
7/4/05 |
Last night, I watched a DVD movie called
"π" (for those staring
in frustration at a tiny black rectangle in quotes, that’s supposed to
be the symbol for "pi"). It wasn’t a very good movie. Aside
from the density of the subject matter (advanced math) it featured a poor
soundtrack that made it nearly impossible to tell what the characters were
saying. Then, too, there’s a suspicion that the math the premise of the
movie rested upon wasn’t just abstruse, but was actually incoherent.
In the movie, a brilliant mathematician with no
visible source of income has outfitted his apartment with several tons of
1970s computer equipment, and is searching for a way to predict the stock
market. Or something. Like all good mathematicians, he suffers from
migraines, fainting spells, epileptic seizures, and paranoid
schizophrenia. It’s a wonder these guys can count to eleven without
having to pull off a sock, let alone solve the mysteries of the universe. |
| "We're
Number One!" - Mental as Anyting |
6/12/05 |
The most striking thing about the National Comorbidity Survey Replication isn’t
that it reports that 46% of Americans have experienced mental illness at some
point in their lives, or that 26% have experienced mental illness in the past
year. It isn’t that those afflicted often suffer from “comorbidity” – getting
two or more forms of mental illness concurrently. It isn’t even that America has
far higher rates of mental illness than any other developed country.
The most striking thing about the survey is that it does NOT count schizophrenia
or other severe affective disorders that usually require institutionalizing. Nor
does it include organic deficits stemming from stroke, trauma, or oxygen
deprivation. According to the Harvard report on Science Daily, “The survey
examined four classes of disorders: anxiety disorders (such as panic and
post-traumatic stress disorders), mood disorders (such as depression and
bi-polar disorders), impulse-control disorder (such as conduct and
attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder), and substance abuse disorders (such
as alcohol and drug abuse).” Chances are good that a significant number of
respondents were able to conceal mental problems from the researchers, and
another sizeable group that had suffered such problems in the past would state,
often sincerely, that they had never been so afflicted, either out of simple
denial or for fear of being stigmatized. Given that these disorders most
frequently have transitory episodes in children and adolescents, it’s entirely
possible that a lot of people have either forgotten the incidents, or dismissed
them as being part of the emotional Sturm und Drang of adolescence. Finally, the
survey didn’t include two segments of the American population where mental
illness is concentrated the most: in the prisons, and among the homeless. So the
number of 46% is, if anything, very low. Chances are a substantial majority of
Americans have experienced mental illness. |
| Chimera |
3/25/05 |
With all the noise in the media about
Terri Schiavo, and steroids in baseball, most people didn’t notice a
little article in the paper about how scientists at Stanford University
had implanted DNA into mice, resulting in brains in those mice that were
1% human.
The idea of blending species – creating what are
called chimeras – isn’t a new one. Indeed, the word
"chimera" comes from an imaginary critter in ancient Greek myth
that was part lion, part snake, and part goat. Creating chimeras was one
of the highest goals of alchemy, when they weren’t trying to transmute
base metals into gold. And of course, the idea has been a staple in
science fiction going back to Frankenstein.
So it’s not a new idea. |
| When
Trilobites Have a Bad Day |
3/14/05 |
The Guardian had a piece on the curious
periodicity of extinction level events in earth’s history, stating that
they occurred every 62 million years (British years, that is), and that we
were overdue for the next one. I posted the story to my newsreaders under
the helpful Sunday morning greeting, "Good morning. We’re all going
to die. Have a nice day," and moved on to the next topic.
But something about the story nagged at me. It
wasn’t that the mass die-offs occurred every 62 million years, or that
the last one was 69 million years ago. It was that the number seemed too
big. Or too small. I vaguely remembered that there had been the die off
that killed the dinosaurs, making life much more convenient for us
mammals, but the previous really big one was 250 million years ago, not
130 million. One hundred and twenty million years might not seem so long
when you are preparing for a tax audit, but it seems a rather big bump on
a frequency of 62 million years.
On the other hand, the ice ages caused die-offs,
surely, and the last one of those was only 12,000 years ago. An eye-blink.
Even in British years. |
| Kristof's
Nightmare |
3/12/05 |
Nicholas Kristof, the NY Times columnist,
wrote an essay this week called "I Have a Nightmare" in which he
discussed how the environmental movement in America has done severe damage
to itself by being alarmist and inflexible. He bases his column on a
tract, "The
Death of Environmentalism"by Michael Shellenberger and Ted
Nordhaus, that has been around the internet for the past year. Kristof is
mostly correct in what he writes; public perception that environmentalists
are mostly reactionary nay-sayers is often justified by people in the
movement who constantly preach that this thing or that thing is going to
doom us all, and if we don’t address this (often minor) problem
immediately, humanity is going to hell in a handbasket. The essay itself
discusses the political failure of environmentalism, and discusses what
other approaches need to be taken. It’s a must-read for anyone concerned
about the health of humanity and our future. |
| Krakatoa |
3/7/05 |
A friend of mine in Oregon emailed me. “Did you hear that they’re sending a rapid response team to investigate a volcanic eruption off Vancouver Island?” he asked.
I knew there volcanic activity going on out near the Juan de Fuca fault line, in an area known as “the spreading zone”. This was mildly worrisome, since the Juan de Fuca fault line is a triggering area for the entire Cascadian subduction zone, which has an unpleasant habit of cutting loose every 400 to 600 years and producing gigantic earthquakes and tsunamis. The last one was 305 years and two months ago. People took notice of that one and wrote it down.
|
| Fleas |
12/28/04 |
I was looking at a heart-rending picture
from Sri Lanka of a mother crying over the bodies of four of her children,
and a passer-by, glancing at the picture, said, "Aren’t you glad we
live in the mountains?"
Well, it’s true that being 3,600 feet up and 100
miles inland means that tsunamis are not our number one concern. Any
tsunami big enough to hit us means an end of the world event just
occurred, such as an asteroid the size of Manhattan landing in the
Pacific. Sloppy phrasing; scientists prefer "extinction level
event" instead of "end of the world event," since the
planet would still be around. Extinction level events are comparatively
common, and there have been several dozen that we know about, starting
with the impact that created the moon. |
| Gods
and Suns |
12/5/04 |
Why do I think creationism is something
that only an abject moron would believe?
The answer lies in the stars.
According to the first version of creation in the
Bible, God created the stars (the lights in the vault of heaven) on the
fourth day, two days after he created earth.
And he supposedly created earth 6,000 years ago. |
| The
Little Egg Harbor Incident |
12/04/04 |
Back about a month ago, there was an
incident in New Jersey where a National Guard F-16 jet on a training
mission had one of its guns accidentally fire, squirting off 27 rounds in
slightly under half a second. Some of the bullets perforated the roof of
an elementary school, some four miles away.
Fortunately, this happened at night, and so there
were no injuries, the bullets were of a non-explosive variety, and the
damage was comparatively minor, being limited to holes in the roof, a few
ceiling tiles destroyed, and the demise of one child’s desk that just
happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nobody was hurt,
unless you count the fact that the whole thing probably gave the school’s
night custodian a good case of the jitters. Getting shot at by invisible
jets definitely isn’t a part of the job description.
|
| H5N1 |
10/12/04 |
The other day there was an article in the
papers about a team of researchers playing around with H1N1, the influenza
virus that swept the globe in 1918, killing forty million people and
temporarily incapacitating over a billion in the space of 40 weeks. The
military was interested in something that could quickly and effectively
incapacitate up to half the population while only killing one or two
percent. If you happen to be of a military-sociopathic frame of mind, it’s
a humane and effective way of getting your own way in world affairs.
I always think of "The Stand" when I read
news stories like that. "The Stand" was a Stephen King novel,
later a miniseries, about the military losing control of a "shifting
antigen" flu virus. The element that made this stuff nasty was that
the virus changed every few days, faster than the body could produce new
antibodies, while maintaining 99.9% lethality, and once it broke lose of
military confinement, stock prices plummeted. The handful of survivors
from around the world got to fight Satan for control of Las Vegas, and the
viewer is left to ponder such imponderables as why the virus didn’t kill
off Molly Ringwald’s annoying character when it had the chance, or why
the hell they just didn’t LET Satan have Vegas if he wanted it all that
bad. Ever been there in the summer? |
| Pyongyang
Bang |
9/12/04 |
Something went "bang" in North
Korea the other day.
Well, that’s not too unusual. A few months ago,
hundreds, perhaps thousands were killed in an explosion when two trains
loaded with things that go bang collided in a place called Ryongchon.
North Korea is a paranoid and secretive place with lots of weapons and a
penchant for running with scissors. Bang happens.
As most people know, North Korea secretly worked on a
nuclear weapons program over the past twenty years, lying vociferously to
the world that they were doing nothing of the sort. Given the general
state of their economy, and their disdain for the educational systems of
all other countries, nearly all of which are superior to NK’s, this
might not have mattered, were it not for the fact that Pakistan started
making and selling "Build-ur-own-nukes" kits to any and all
interested buyers.
North Korea was an interested buyer, and by dint of
starving a few extra hundred thousand of their citizens, were able to buy
their very own nuclear program. |
| The Heat is
On |
2/23/04 |
Imagine if a report appeared in some
magazine that warned flat out that global warming would destroy us.
Suppose the report said that major change would come as early as 2007,
when storms and rising waters would mean abandoning The Hague and
Sacramento, and that by 2020, just sixteen years from now, Britain would
have a Siberian climate, and that millions would die from famine and war
as humans fought over rapidly-dwindling food supplies, and the threat of
nuclear war would increase sharply as the planet’s ability to feed our
six billion people collapsed.
If you were a right winger, you would dismiss such a
report as being the paranoid fantasy of some dope-smoking, left-wing,
anti-American and anti-capitalism outfit. Sierra Club, maybe, or
Greenpeace. Or even Earth First!, which really likes to go for extreme
rhetoric and extreme scenarios.
There is such a report, and it is, naturally, being
ignored by nearly all the corporate media in America. It was first
published about two weeks ago. But it isn’t some fringe group with an
axe to grind that’s behind the report. The dope-smoking anti-American
outfit that generated the report was the Pentagon, and the left-wing
anti-capitalist magazine that printed it was Fortune magazine. |
| Evolution
in Action |
2/10/04 |
Nova aired a program February 3rd
called "Dogs and More Dogs". Since I own three of the critters
(two Samoyeds and a Cockeyed Spanule) plus a wolf mix, I decided to watch.
It was the usual good standards I expect from Nova, and as is usually the
case, I finished watching the show with more knowledge that I had going
in. There are some who might observe that I am damning Nova with faint
praise, but I checked with all of my dogs, and they think I’m a splendid
person. Especially when I reach for the leads. Or the dog bowls.
The program dwelled on how the dog developed (whether
it was deliberate breeding by humans over the past 14,000 years, or
whether the canid carrion eaters attracted to human refuse about the time
the first villages were formed became more familiar with humans and thus
better fed) and why there is so much diversity among dogs. And why they
differ so much from their canid cousins: wolves, foxes, and hyenas. |
| Mars:
Because the natives won't form a Resistance |
1/15/04 |
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m fascinated by
space in general and Mars in particular. As a kid, I used to get up at two
am and watch the six hour countdowns that usually got aborted because a
cloud showed up on the horizon, or they noticed that Fred forgot to fuel
the rocket, or some damn thing. Even back then, forty odd years ago, there
was the mysterious and futuristic "computer problem" too. I’ll
spend hours poring over the January 2004 National Geographic, which has
great coverage (and even greater photos) of Mars.
So it would stand to reason that when an American
President stood up and made a clarion call to return to the Moon by 2015
and form permanent colonies, and send humans to Mars by the year
20whenever, I would find that pretty exciting.
And certainly, I want the human race to move onward
and outward. Our destiny lies there, and not on this one little planet. If
we have a purpose, if we have a salvation, space is it. There is no human
endeavor that matters more to the future of the race. I believed that when
I watched flickering, grainy images on our 12" black and white in
1961, and I believe it today. |
| Prions |
12/30/03 |
You would think Republicans would love
prions. Anything that can take a voter and turn him into a drooling,
twitching idiot, paranoid and fretful, incapable of doing simple math or
making moral judgments on his own, would be just what the GOP wants to see
turn up at the polling places.
But it turns out that prions are bad for business, so
Republicans don’t like them. America can count itself lucky on that
score. |
| Productivity
vs. Efficiency |
9/27/03 |
The White House Office of Management and
Budget just released a report that concludes, according to the Washington
Post, that "that the health and social benefits of enforcing tough
new clean-air regulations during the past decade were five to seven times
greater in economic terms than were the costs of complying with the
rules."
The report – and let me reiterate, this is from the
OMB, which is part of George’s White House – states that between 1991
and 2001, industry spent some $23 to $26 billion on regulatory compliance.
There are quite a few corporations that made at least that much in net
profit alone over that ten year period. Bill Gates ALONE could have
covered the costs, and kept half his fortune. This week’s report
replaced a previous report that was found to have been factually
deficient, or, in technical terms, "A great steaming load of GOP
bullshit." |
| Political
Conservatism |
8/16/03 |
Well, we always knew there was something
wrong with them.
A study, funded jointly by the National Science
Foundation (NSF), and National Institute of Mental Health at the National
Institute of Health (NIH) examined a mindset that the authors were polite
enough to refer to as political conservatism. That was something of a
euphemism. What they were really studying were the right wing whacks who
took over the GOP and threaten to turn America into a third-rate fourth
Reich. The paper, titled "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social
Cognition" has raised a predictable storm among right wingers, most
of whom are yowling and spitting in rage and frustration and throwing
their feces, furious that anyone would imply they were emotionally
unstable. |
| A
Warning Shot |
8/12/03 |
It hit 100.2 degrees in London, England
yesterday. Here in the US, that wouldn’t be major news, since every
state in the Union, including Alaska, has experienced triple digit
readings. But England is a cold and damp place. I lived in London for
three years, and it never got above 85 in all that time. The average
daytime high in August is a hair under 70F (21C). This time, they set an
all-time record, and their records go back to 1659.
Forecasters say the heat wave might continue through
the end of September. Temperatures at or above 100 have been popping up
all across northern Europe, including 105 in Germany. Adding to the
general consternation is that this comes after three months of the
European equivalent of a drought.
In Iraq today, it hit 130 degrees, which is warm even
for them. Thanks to the efficiency of the free market, troops over there
were able to withstand the heat thanks to promises that they would have
fans and air conditioning by no later than October.
Since 1980, the amount of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere has increased
by 9.3%. |
| A Forest
That Puts Out Fires |
7/23/03 |
I glanced at the thermometer on my front
porch as I got home from work and winced. Ninety-four isn’t a record for
us – it hit 99 last year – but it’s plenty damned hot. Out back,
where there’s a wading pool for the dogs and plenty of shade, it was
only 90. (Last year, when it hit 120 in nearby Redding, one woman called
in to her local radio station to report that it was 118 at her place.
"But," she chirped cheerfully, "with the wind chill factor,
it’s only 115!")
A sharp edge divided the sky, deep blue above, leaden
grey to the north east. Thunderstorms would be raking through the high
spruce and red fir forests in the rain shadow of Shasta tonight. A
brownish tinge to the clouds suggested there were already fires burning.
Not for the first time, or the hundredth, I felt
gratitude that the Forest Service and private landowners had jointly built
a firebreak around the town last summer. No place in the western forests
is 100% safe from fire, but our odds are much better than they were a year
ago should a big fire come roaring through. And one will, eventually. That’s
certain. It’s one thing to have a fire-resistant roof and clear the
brush around the house, but when you have a 150 foot wall of flame 75
yards from your home, it often isn’t enough. |
| The Atkins Diet |
05/21/03 |
Back some 50 years ago, there was a story
arc in Al Capp’s brilliant "L’il Abner" comic strip about
how the village of Dogpatch was besieged by a ravening horde of "fatocerouses"
– large, vicious beasts that looked like a cross between rhinoceroses
and hippopotamuses, that ate everything in their path. The Dogpatchers
stopped the beasts by laying out plates of "mockaroni," a
wondrous pasta-like substance that had an interesting effect: the more you
ate, the skinnier you got. In the case of the fatocerouses, by the seventh
helping, most were so skinny that they simply floated away in the breeze,
and Dogpatch was saved.
A theatrical agent, burdened with a former sex siren
client with an eating disorder ("Anita Eatburg") saw this, and
recognized the commercial potential. He bought up mockaroni for five
dollars from the Dogpatchers, who were gleeful at such a huge windfall and
happy to serve their nation in its hour of need against the fatocerouses,
and the agent started selling it as a diet food, under the slogan,
"Eat like a swine – stay slim as a snake." |
| Thermal
Depolymerization Process |
4/26/03 |
I remember one morning picking up my copy of the LA Times, and
after giving the headlines a scan, noted an inconspicuous six column-inch single wide story
below the center fold. "New Fusion Process Claimed" it said. I scanned
on, reading the sports and comics, and then, after I got a couple of cups of
coffee in me, returned to the front page.
The Fusion piece caught my eye again. I frowned at it, expecting to read that
scientists in Europe had achieved fusion for several microseconds at a
temperature of several million degrees, producing a few BTUs of energy while
using enough power to keep Manhattan lit for a few nights.
What the story related, of course, was so-called "cold fusion," and
by the time I flipped the paper open (continued on page 28, but you’ll wind up
on page 33 because the copy editor screwed up), I realized that I was reading
about something quite extraordinary, something that, if true, could
revolutionize the world. I particularly liked the fact that the apparatus was so
small and simple that it might conceivably be a power source for individual
homes, and even automobiles.
It was pretty exciting stuff.
|
| The Dream
Machines |
4/15/03 |
Most people don’t know this – I didn’t
– but there are cars available that use existing engines and burn
gasoline, and run so clean that the emissions are actually cleaner than
the freeway air they take in!
The cars, which use existing technology, are simply
put together a bit more thoroughly, and have a few modest improvements on
items that cars already have, such as catalytic converters, vapor traps,
and computerized fuel control.
How much do these modest changes, which add between
$200 and $400 to the base sticker price of a car, reduce emissions?
At least ninety percent. Often more. Never less. |
| Tainted
Research |
1/22/03 |
Robert Lee Hotz, writing for the Los
Angeles Times, reported that "one-quarter of the biomedical
researchers at universities had commercial ties serious enough to raise
the questions of financial conflicts, the analysts found."
Well, duh.
At least, that was my initial response. Then I
remembered that I was exposed to the notion of tainted research some 11
years ago, back before the corruption had become widespread in trials for
drugs for human use.
Hotz wrote a good piece, and the country would be
better off if people paid attention to it. But experience is that people
will glide right past it, unaware of what it could mean to them at any
point in the future. |
|
Send in the Clones |
1/5/03 |
It’s not often you get to see Type Five
howling cat fights in the scientific, political, and religious communities
at the same time, but a sect calling themselves the Raelians managed just
that last week with their announcement that they had just just had
sucessfully birthed the first cloned human being. Working with a company
they own called Cloneaid, the sect claims to have several other cloned
human births pending, including two taken from the cells of children
killed in accidents.
Brigitte Boisselier, a bishop of the sect, says that
the scientific proof of the cloning would be produced sometime in the next
eight or nine days, which is more than a little bit strange. Normally, a
scientist who manages such a spectacular breakthrough has all the
documentation and data compiled, because he’s going to want to submit it
to peer review and verification as fast as he can once word gets out. |
|
Standardized
Tests Flunking |
12/29/02 |
I doubt many teachers were surprised. A
major study performed by researchers at Arizona State University found
that not only did standardized testing fail to improve academic
performance in the twenty eight states where it takes place, but it may
have actually worsened it, and led to higher dropout rates.
The tests have been a cause celebré among right
wingers, advocates of funding for private schools, politicians, and
Putsch. Putsch, of course, wants to tie school funding to the tests. If a
school finishes below the acceptable levels two years running, funding is
cut off. That’ll show those kids a thing or two about not passing tests,
right? |
| Solstice 2002 |
12/20/02 |
Well, nuts.
Each year, I write an essay that revolves around the
winter solstice, and I usually work it around the cliché, "it’s
always darkest before the dawn." I decided I wasn’t going to do
that this year because...well, it was starting to feel stale to me, and if
I was getting tired of it, than by now my readers must be slinging nooses
over the highest limbs of their Christmas trees with the vain hope that
Saint Nick would appear and help them hang themselves before they had to
read the same thing AGAIN.
But boy, if there was ever a year where that message
were germane, this is it.
OK. "It’s always darkest before the
dawn." Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope. OK? |
| To Live and Die in
America |
11/20/02 |
It was the sort of news you really don’t
like to get any time. The wife of a business associate, aged 44, just
diagnosed with lung cancer. Diffused through both lungs, involvement of
the aorta and pericardial sac. Lousy prognosis, of course. It’s a shame;
she is a funny and intelligent woman, fun to be around.
She’s Peruvian, and she and her American husband
will have to consider options if she fails to respond to treatment. Peru
doesn’t have the high quality of medical care that America has, but
then, he is self-employed and uninsured. Like forty-five million other
working poor in America, she isn’t going to see much of that high
quality medical care here.
|
| You Gotta Have Heart... |
10/11/02 |
There are instances where people have the intelligence and ability to do a
job, but are, most cataclysmically, the wrong people for the job. They are, for
one reason or another, emotionally unprepared.
They give psych tests for police applicants, and one of the disqualifying
personality types is the fundamentalist. It makes sense. You don’t want to
come around a corner to find a cop, red-faced, lips laced with spittle,
screaming, "You have SINNED! Against GOD!" while waving his gun wildly
at a terrified motorist who is sobbing that she didn’t SEE that it was a red,
no-parking zone. Fundamentalists tend to take their perceived duties a little
TOO seriously, and aren’t real good on perceiving graduations between right
and wrong.
|
| Legacy Lost |
8/28/02 |
A few weeks back, I got together with an acquaintance for fish
and chips. While chatting about this and that and the other, he
asked a question popular among the majority of the local population who
weren’t born here: what brought you to Mt. Shasta?
The Answer nearly always has something to do
with the Mountain. It can be religious, spiritual, aesthetic, or
just a desire to be away from the noise and congestion of the city.
In my case, it was coming around a bend on old US 99 some 40 odd years
ago, and seeing the Mountain for the first time, still 40 miles south
of us, and already the most imposing landscape feature I had ever seen.
My dad drove the car and hid a grin as my eyes got huge. I had absolutely
no idea such a mountain could exist. I had been grousing because
we had been in California for a half an hour and I still hadn’t seen a
single palm tree. It made the Canadian Rockies - at that point,
my only first-hand experience with mountains – look like nothing.
It was then that I fell in love with this place. I still experience
that sense of awe I felt as a child, on another August day, so many years
ago.
So I asked the Question back, and got a really
interesting answer. "There was a short story I read about the
Mountain once, by Robert Heinlein. I can’t remember the title, and
that’s frustrating, because I would love to read it again. But that
story is what brought me up here." |
| Evolution |
7/24/02 |
It's doesn't matter how many brains you have, or how
strong your teeth and claws are. You can be king of the jungle, and step
on ants without noticing, but eventually, you will be gone.
And the ants will carry on.
Before we learned how to handle tools and fire and
developed communal defense and thus became a force to be reckoned with
on the savannah, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of species who
had a turn as "top of the food chain".
They all have one thing in common that makes them
different from us. They all went extinct.
|
|
Boolyah |
6/10/02 |
The Putsch administration,
like a cat trying to cover up a mistake on the kitchen floor, tried burying
a climate report on global warming (required of it by a 1992 treaty) on
the web, deep in the electronic bowels of the EPA.
How deep?
Here's the url: www.epa
.gov/globalwarming/publications /car/
Rumor has it that as you
exit that page, you will see the skeletal remains of people who were running
Mosaic on their 486s and foolishly forgot to bring food and water with
them to visit that far into the EPA. In 1992, the net was not for sissies. |
|
|
5/5/02
|
The nursery rhyme, "London
bridge is falling down," like most nursery rhymes, has a basis in
reality, and was originally a political gibe against the powers that be.
The bridge in 1665, was a main thoroughfare over the Thames, and heavily
built up with a wild array of structures, woodbeam and siding and thatch,
all very flammable. When the Great Fire of London struck, the bridge caught
fire, and the structures all burned. Miraculously, the bridge itself survived,
but nobody was in any great hurry to shore up the rickety and charred
structure, and it soon became apparent to one and all that at some point,
most likely when traffic was at it's heaviest, the whole thing would plunge
into the noisome waters below, drowning dozens, if not hundreds.
|
|
|
4/7/02
|
I came across a fascinating
website that promotes a book, "The ‘God’ Part of the Brain: A Scientific
Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God" by Matthew Alper. http://www.godpart.com/index.html
The premise was well enough written that I plan to purchase the book and
read the rest of Alper’s thesis about human spirituality.
|
|
|
3/3/02
|
One of my earliest memories
comes from when I was five, going on six. My dad took me out into a chill
November night, and we scanned the southern skies looking for the new
"artificial moon" that the Russians called "sputnik."
When it appeared, right on schedule as my dad noted with an approving
nod, I was a little disappointed. It was just a little white dot, like
all the other stars, except that it was moving. What I expected to see
was a tiny version of the moon, dangling down from a big boom that extended
back to the north pole, which rotated once every ninety minutes, twirling
the little moon on its trip around the earth.
|
|
|
2/17/02
|
When a private company,
John Sperling's Apollo Group, financed a venture by another group, Genetic
Savings and Clone, it was interested in making a profit from the cloning
of pets. It bankrolled a Texas A&M lab into producing "cc."
the first cloned cat. To this end, it sank $3.7 million into the project.
The response was both predictable
and sad.
Paul Elias of Associated
Press wrote, "Tundra died three years ago, but Susann Rivera never
gave up hope that one day she would play with her furry friend again.
Hear heart soared Friday after she learned that Texas A&M University
researched had successfully cloned a calico kitten...
|
|
|
10/1/01
|
Fundamentalism isn’t a
religion. It’s a personality disorder. It gets associated with religion
a lot, because religion, with its claim to be able to provide final answers
to life’s greatest mysteries, appeals to a mind-set that is fearful of
uncertainty, antagonistic toward a world where trains don’t run on time
and other people might do things that the fundamentalist is afraid to
try personally.
|
|
|
8/21/01
|
Is everyone else as tired
as I am of having arrogant jerks flail away with the cross and the flag
to disguise the fact that they don’t have a leg to stand on?
I was watching the farmers
in the Klamath parade before the cameras, waving their flags and their
bibles and whining copiously about how everybody prefers the damn sucker
fish over loyal, god-fearin’ Emerkins like them.
Well, at least the fish
doesn’t whine. There’s that to be said for it.
|
|
|
8/11/01
|
Last night, I dreamed that
I was listening to a CD. Mercifully, it being a dream, I couldn’t actually
hear the CD. I just dreamed I was listening to it. The CD was called "Popping
Some Caps", and it was described as "Lite ‘N Easy Rap Medleys"
as performed by William Shatner and Michael Jackson.
Obviously, some nightmares
can convey horror that annihilates reason. This dream, clearly, was one
of them.
|
|
|
8/9/01 |
They weren’t going to yank
Putsch’s strings just yet. Word was that he wasn’t going to announce "his"
decision on stem cell research until sometime after a trip to Wisconsin,
in late August.
But then the media noticed
that he had been taking a lot of vacation time for a guy who hadn’t even
been on the job six months, and someone sat down and figured that by the
time he got back at the end of the month, a full 42% of his "Presidency"
to that date would have been spent on vacation.
|
|
|
8/6/01 |
The cool thing about science
is that when the shamans make predictions, they tend to come about. I’m
not talking about eclipses, which are a fairly simple matter of orbital
mechanics. I’m not talking about the rate of decay of a radioactive substance,
which is just a matter of figuring out a constant, and remembering that
it pertains to a particular element. That’s ordinary, humdrum stuff that
comes easily to us midgets as we stand upon the shoulders of giants.
|
|
|
1/31/01
|
Today’s Sacramento Bee ran a story under the byline of Mike Toner of the
Cox News Service, reporting that NASA had conducted an experiment that apparently
provides an answer to one of the most vexing problems in creation theory, namely,
how could water- soluble amino acids get together and interact to form the first
living cells in a water environment?
The only answer that worked was that the osmotic membrane that surrounds
every living cell on earth would have had to develop first, an answer that didn’t
seem to make much sense. Why would such membranes form first, and for that matter,
HOW? The organic compounds in the amino acids would have to combine to form
the membrane, and nobody had ever been able to demonstrate that amino acids
ever did such a thing.
But as scientists get a clearer picture of conditions in space, they try
to duplicate on a small scale on earth what we see going on up there, and study
the results, and see how it fits in with everything ELSE they see going on up
there.
When they saw that organic chemistry going on in deep space, they decided
to duplicate it here, and see what it did. So they took a bunch of organic chemicals
– water, methanol, ammonia, and carbon monoxide, the junk that makes up the
"ice" in comets and exists all over the universe – at Ames Research
in Mountain View, California, and combined them at a deep-space temperature
of two degrees kelvin, minus 271 Celsius, or -441 Fahrenheit. They also bombarded
them with ultraviolet rays and X-rays. |
|
|
1/4/00
|
I
swore I wasn't going to write "a millennium piece", especially since I'm
one of those sour and humorless types who believes that the millennium
is some time off - 1/1/01, to be more precise.
But, like chickens transfixed
by a chalk line in the dust, people zoomed in on all those zeroes, and
felt the same excitement they felt when the odometer on dad's car hit
100,000 miles. The media was paying close attention, partly to see if
Y2K would raise its ugly head and destroy civilization, as the wild-eyed
fanatics were claiming. (It will come as no surprise that the same fanatics
are now claiming that the busted crisis was staged by {Clinton, the Chinese,
the Canadians, Saddam, Liberals} to secretly invade the US while every
one was distracted. Must have worked, too. Nobody except the fanatics
notices that we've been invaded.).
|
|
|
12/15/99
|
There were a couple of articles
in the press in the past few weeks that made for an interesting juxtaposition.
The first one came a few weeks back, when the government announced that
gun-related murders were down to 13,000 or so, and gun-related injuries
were in the area of 85,000. The NRA (The world's only lobbying group for
murderers) said they were pleased that gun murders had dropped (from a
peak of some 17,500) and said that this showed that not only could Americans
be trusted with guns, but that the vast number of guns doubtlessly had
something to do with the low, low numbers. I infuriated gun afficionados
by mentioning this on Usenet, under the admittedly provoking headline
"Gun casualties 100,000: NRA cheers wildly, says it shows we need more
guns".
|
|
| |
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