The Denier's Club

Denying something in the face of overwhelming evidence is something congress is really good at, particularly when it comes to global warming as seen by the map above. Click on it to go to the interactive version to see how many ostriches exist in the halls of congress. Also check out the monies received by the deniers in charge. Most interesting to say the least.

Climate change is happening, humans are the cause, and a shocking number of congressional Republicans — over 56 percent — deny or question the science. CAP Action conducted a fresh analysis of public statements from current Representatives and Senators from the 114th Congress on climate change. 

It gets better.

All told, 170 elected representatives in the 114th Congress have taken over $63.8 million from the fossil fuel industry that’s driving the carbon emissions which cause climate change. They deny what over 97 percent of scientists say is happening — current human activity creates the greenhouse gas emissions that trap heat within the atmosphere and cause climate change. And their constituents are paying the price, with Americans across the nation suffering 500 climate-related national disaster declarations since 2011.

The pix below shows how one senator can get rather intense when it comes to CC.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).    Talk Radio News Service

Sanders’ amendment went nowhere. But Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), the chair of the committee, used the opportunity to take a shot at climate science. “I do believe that our climate is changing,” she said. “I don’t agree that all the changes are necessarily due solely to human activity.” Murkowski didn’t elaborate on her current thinking about the causes of global warming, but in the past she’s advanced a bizarre theory involving a volcano in Iceland.

Any questions?

There are lies, damned lies and statistics

There are lies, damned lies and statistics - Benjamin Disraeli

In a wonderful Nautilus article titled Five Way to Lie with Charts , one learns how to deceive using charts as the weapon of choice.

A chart’s purpose is usually to help you properly interpret data. But sometimes, it does just the opposite. In the right (or wrong) hands, bar graphs and pie charts can become powerful agents of deception, tricking you into inferring trends that don’t exist, mistaking less for more, and missing alarming facts. The best measure of a chart’s honesty is the amount of time it takes to interpret it, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology perceptual scientist Ruth Rosenholtz: “A bad chart requires more cognitive processes and more reasoning about what you’ve seen.”

To whit: Swindling Shapes

A classic way to lie with a chart is to introduce irrelevant information. In the chart on the right, the only relevant property is cone height. But, while the cone volume is irrelevant, it is also very difficult to ignore, encouraging us to assign a greater value to the larger part of the cone.

In both charts, administrative costs take almost a third of each dollar. While this matches reasonably with the left chart, the right chart seems to shrink administrative costs to something much less than a third. “Anytime you ask anyone to judge just height and ignore the other measurements,” says Rosenholtz, “it’s going to take extra cognitive load to disregard these other cues.”

So whenever a politician or corporate rep comes up with a set of "facts" supporting some agenda using charts to illustrate why this notion should be supported, analyze said charts with a grain of salt before saying yea or nea on said agenda. :)

Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

Interstellar

Worth seeing without a doubt.

My God, It's full of stars

The Andromeda Galaxy , destined to merge with ours in about 4 billion years, is approximately 1.5 times the size of the Milky Way with a star count of about a trillion+ . In looking at NASA's ultra high def picture of same, realize that the myriad of tiny white points revealed in the image is but a tiny percentage of what Andromeda really has in the way of star power, something to consider when realizing it, and us, are just two out of a possible 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe we see all around us. Makes one think doesn't it? Think about the universes we cannot see.

Seen below is an artist's amazing conception of the observable universe
with our tiny SS in the center. :)

"And so it goes" - K Vonnegut

My God, It's full of stars - 2001

Where Eagles Dare

From the Eiffel Tower to the ground, unreal video for sure. :)

I am not a scientist

How many times have we heard the phrase, I am not a scientist before the bloviator in question states his or her uninformed opinion about some aspect of reality, like climate change or evolution or god knows what else whenever the catchall phrase of I am not a scientist rears it's ugly head, intended to deflect criticism while sounding rather limited regarding the topic being discussed. As a public service to all of those who are not scientists, here's a succinct explanation of what science is all about, the topic covered .... climate change.

In the case of climate change, we are not dumb at all. We know that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, we know that its concentration in the atmosphere has increased by about 40 percent since the industrial revolution, and we know the mechanism by which it warms the planet.

WHY don't scientists pick the standard that is appropriate to the case at hand, instead of adhering to an absolutist one? The answer can be found in a surprising place: the history of science in relation to religion. The 95 percent confidence limit reflects a long tradition in the history of science that valorizes skepticism as an antidote to religious faith.

Even as scientists consciously rejected religion as a basis of natural knowledge, they held on to certain cultural presumptions about what kind of person had access to reliable knowledge. One of these presumptions involved the value of ascetic practices. Nowadays scientists do not live monastic lives, but they do practice a form of self-denial, denying themselves the right to believe anything that has not passed very high intellectual hurdles.

Moreover, while vigorously denying its relation to religion, modern science retains symbolic vestiges of prophetic tradition, so many scientists bend over backward to avoid these associations. A vast majority of scientists do not speak in public at all, and those who do typically speak in highly guarded, qualified terms. They often refuse to use the language of danger even when danger is precisely what they are talking about.

Years ago, climate scientists offered an increase of 2 degrees Celsius (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) as the “safe” limit or ceiling for the long-term warming of the planet. We are now seeing dangerous effects worldwide, even as we approach a rise of only 1 degree Celsius. The evidence is mounting that scientists have underpredicted the threat. Perhaps this is another reason — along with our polarized politics and the effect of fossil-fuel lobbying — we have underreacted to the reality, now unfolding before our eyes, of dangerous climate change.

Any questions?

Superstar :)

CG rocks, especially when it comes to sciecne. Nasa's simulation of the Superstar Eta Carinae is truly awesome. Enjoy. :)

Nous Sommes Charlie Hebdo

It's time to talk about the absurdity of fanaticism and how it relates to religion, the existence of which has "coerced" "righeous" individuals to kill people in Holland, France, Afghanistan, Sweden, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and Saudi Arabia, among significant others, for harmless satiric images of, in this case,  Mohammed. 

In light of all this senseless violence, the question no one seems to ask these thugs who commit these horrible crimes in the name of whatever is, What physical or economic impact have these cartoons had on your existence? 

As a matter of fact, similar questions should be asked regarding other practiced intolerances like gay marriage, women's right to choose or all things relating to racism or differences in faith because prejudice of any type has negatively impacted society, to varying degrees, since the beginning of time. I post Author's innocent yet profound toons to encourage people to question because all creative acts start with a question, never an answer, something altogether different from the kind of insane devotion that compelled fanatics to kill 12 innocent people for no reason save that of religious beliefs. Yours truly wanted to put in another of Author's cartoons but won't, for now, because he's right, this is not a time of laughter but of reflection as We All Are Charlie Hebdo.

Click here to see responses from artists all over the world. Thanks Sifter, I needed that.

The Deep Zone

Life finds a way, in this case, in the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot in the ocean.
What's really astounding is how large the life forms are. One cannot make this up.

Whack-A-Mole

Web censorship is such a drag. Information, like tech, wants to be free, something governments like China's (and ours to a far lesser extent) try, with varying levels of success, to muzzle as the flow of data coursing through the net is rapidly changing how the world conducts business whether governments, of any stripe, like it or not. Seen above is the network topology used by China's government to curtail the influx of data coming in from "nefarious" sites like Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and Blogger, among significant others, because of the inherent fear the government has about the power of unfettered access to information that could possibly compromise the absolute control the communist party has over the Chinese nation.

It’s widely known that the Chinese government has long exerted tight control over Internet access on the mainland, deploying an extensive apparatus to regulate what its citizens can read and publish on the web. The Chinese authorities employed more than 2 million people in 2013 to monitor web activity on blogs and social media sites like the wildly popular social media site Weibo, and blocks access to topics it deems sensitive, like the Free Tibet movement, for instance, and democratic activism.

But ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Chinese authorities are cracking down even further on news outlets and search engines, blocking access to websites including Google and the Wall Street Journal. Wednesday marks 25 years since the Chinese army killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of students and protestors in Beijing, and the tightening of media control that followed. It’s part of the Chinese government’s concerted effort to limit information about the incipient pro-democratic movement that ended in bloodshed.

When looking at all of this, one gets the notion of Whack-A-Mole, the nonsensical game where one whacks one mole after another, never achieving true success given that additional moles randomly pop up at rates impossible to be completely neutralized in the allotted time required for one to ever win , thus forever defying the whacker of final victory, something akin to the issue of Gmail and the millions of Chinese who use it to communicate in and out of country.

Though there is no solid evidence that China blocked Gmail, or indications of why it might have, the fact is that China faces a dilemma in dealing with Western information giants. The free flow of information and the potential for quick popular mobilization through social networks are anathema to the authoritarian state, and China has gone to great lengths to control what comes in.

But as a rapidly developing economic powerhouse, China also needs the instant communications, quick research and management tools of the technology giants. Gmail is especially popular with Chinese doing business with Western companies, and many publicly complained about the interruption. The technology companies, for their part, salivate at the vast and rich Chinese market but bridle at the control and censorship China demands as the price for participating.

Whack-A-Mole participant in action, 

courtesy UrbanAnomie, Calgary's Least Trusted New Source. :)