Sunday Music Blogging

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

The inner being of the world often appears clouded
and hidden, and people's minds are full of doubts
and irritation, but Chromodoris magnifica cheers up their days,
and doubt's dark questions stay distant.

(Photo by Richard Seaman.)

Friday Hope Blogging

The California Coastal Commission has wisely rejected a plan to build a six-lane toll road through San Onofre State Beach:

The decision was a major setback for the Transportation Corridor Agencies, which has spent years and tens of millions of dollars preparing to construct the 16-mile tollway as an alternative to Interstate 5.

"This project looks like something from the 1950s," said Commissioner Sara Wan of Malibu, who voted against the tollway. "Putting a massive project in an environmentally sensitive area, it is inconceivable."

The South Carolina House has declined to define nuclear energy as renewable:

The S.C. House defeated a plan today to define nuclear power as a “renewable” form of energy after conservationists complained that it could set back efforts to develop solar, wind and other alternative energy sources....

Many lawmakers favor nuclear power as a way to limit pollution that adds to global warming. But by a 114-0 vote, the House agreed it wasn’t worth including nuclear in the definition of renewable energy.

Employees at the Interior Department have been leaking some very interesting e-mails:

The Interior Department is scrambling to stanch the flow of internal e-mails from its own scientists that undermine the legality of its aggressive offshore oil and gas lease sales in federal Arctic waters, according to correspondence released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The e-mails belie Bush administration claims that environmental risks were adequately considered prior to offering tracts in the Chukchi, Beaufort and Bering Seas for drilling.

A couple who'd been strongarmed into a high-cost loan has won an important court case:

In what is likely to be a precedent-setting decision in New York, state Supreme Court Justice Joseph J. Maltese agreed with the Shearons, recently telling the bank that it could not foreclose on the couple's New Springville townhouse and that it may have to pay them damages for their troubles and void the $355,000 mortgage on their Westport Lane home.

In his 11-page decision, Maltese rips the original lenders and brokers for making the high-cost loan to the Shearons without checking to see if the couple could repay the mortgage -- a violation of the 2002 predatory lending provisions of New York State banking law. It's the first time in the state that a judge has invoked those predatory lending provisions against a lender, and it could signal a shifting tide in how foreclosures are handled, experts note.

POGO reports on Alaska's new Checkbook Online site:

This week, the state of Alaska launched a website that tracks every state expenditure of over one thousand dollars, as reported on today's NPR Morning Edition. This makes Alaska the tenth state government to provide such a service to its taxpayers.

A South Dakota Senate committee has affirmed that pharmacists who refuse to dispense birth control shouldn't be protected by state law:

The bill's main sponsor, Sen. Ed Olson, R-Mitchell, said he believes pharmacists should dispense birth control pills and other contraceptive prescriptions. Women need to make birth control decisions without interference by government, and access to birth control can help reduce abortions, he said.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has upheld Concord, NH's ban on digital billboards:

The court also agreed that Concord has a right to protect its visual environment, saying that the town's aesthetic goals would be much harder to achieve without a ban on EMCs.

A federal court has slapped down the Arizona Cattle Growers' bid to weaken protection for the Mexican spotted owl:

The Arizona Cattle Growers alleged among other things that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s critical habitat designation unlawfully included areas not occupied by the species, failed to rely on the best available science, and failed to account for the economic impact of the designation. The court rejected all the Cattle Growers’ arguments.

“This was a complete victory for the Mexican spotted owl,” said attorney Matt Kenna of the Western Environmental Law Center, which represented the Center for Biological Diversity in the case. “All arguments of the Arizona Cattle Growers were rejected, and the critical habitat designation was upheld.”

In related news, the timber industry has failed yet again to end ESA protection for the marbled murrelet:

The timber industry began its courtroom campaign against the murrelet more than seven years ago. Big timber was given a huge assist in 2004 when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was ordered by Julie MacDonald, a political appointee in the Bush Department of the Interior who recently resigned amidst scandal over her bullying of agency scientists and political interference with biological decisions, to report that murrelets did not deserve protection in the lower 48 states. This finding reversed government scientists who had concluded that the birds continued to need protection. Although currently under investigation by the inspector general and Government Accounting Office, this last-minute flip-flop formed the basis of the timber industry’s lawsuit. Had the timber industry’s lawsuit been successful, much of the murrelet’s old-growth forest habitat would have been open for logging.

An "activist judge" has ruled that BushCo can't simply override her previous ruling on Navy sonar tests:

In her 36-page ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Florence-Marie Cooper in Los Angeles rejected arguments made by the White House's Council on Environmental Quality. The panel had said the military's need to conduct sonar exercises constituted an emergency that warranted an exemption from the National Environmental Policy Act.

Cooper concluded “there is no emergency” and therefore no legal basis for the White House to approve “emergency alternative arrangements....”

“The court has affirmed that we do not live under an imperial presidency,” Joel Reynolds, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said yesterday.

Further affirmation comes from the federal appeals court that ruled against BushCo's cap and trade system for mercury emissions.

In other legal news, a judge has struck down Banning, CA's approval of a new housing project:

Judge Cahraman of the Riverside Superior Court invalidated the City of Banning’s approval of an environmental impact report for the sprawling Black Bench project, which would place over 1,400 new houses on undeveloped grasslands and chaparral at the base of the San Bernardino Mountains remote from Banning’s core. The environmental impact report was struck down on nine separate grounds, including the failure to provide substantial evidence that there is an adequate water supply for the project, the improper rejection of project alternatives, and the improper deferral of the designation of an access road to the project site.

WorldChanging has an interesting post on porous streets in the Northwest. In Tijuana, meanwhile, activists are trying to install porous pavements in slum areas, in order to reduce run-off that affects people on both sides of the border.

The plan, at least its initial stages, is to cover dirt roads with concrete blocks designed to hold water and allow it to seep into the earth. Residents, mainly women, are making the 70,000 "permeable pavers" needed for just the first half mile of road....

"The intent is to create an example," says Oscar Romo, an environmentalist and professor at the University of California at San Diego who's leading the effort. "I don't have the resources or the will to start paving the [entire] city. What I'd like to do is convince authorities on both sides of the border that this is an environmentally friendly way to pave the roads."

An enormous new species of elephant shrew has been discovered in Africa:

Not really a Shrew at all, the species is more closely related to sea cows and elephants, this represents the 16th species of elephant-shrews found to date. Also known as "sengis" to avoid confusion, this species lives only in two high-altitude forest blocks in the mountains of south-central Tanzania.

Kenya's population of wild elephants in increasing:

In Tsavo, Africa's second-largest game reserve, 11,700 elephants were recorded during a five-day aerial census, according to the Kenya Wildlife Service, representing growth of more than 4 percent on the previous count three years ago.

Nigeria is putting duties on imports of scrapped computers:

Currently, importers can ship in old computers duty free. They are then gutted for spare parts and the unwanted bits are thrown away.

"(Old computers) will be banned completely later, but it has to be a gradual process to avoid our country turning into a dumping ground for scrap," Odey told reporters after a cabinet meeting that approved the idea of tariffs.

A program to revitalize depleted African soil has been launched in Kenya:

The initiative will place a particular focus on women, who are the majority of small-scale farmers in Africa and other parts of the world. Other agencies have pointed out that assisting women farmers goes a long way to tackling social inequalities and a looming global food shortage crisis.

The US Patent Office has revoked four patents on the AIDS drug Tenofovir, which could increase its availability in the developing world:

The public interest group Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT), which challenged the patents in the US, submitted evidence that TDF was already a known substance at the time of Gilead’s application for the patents, and therefore a patent should not have been granted. The evidence used in the patent office’s ruling may have an impact on whether the drug will be granted patents in other countries, such as India and Brazil.

NASA satellite data are providing insight into how environmental factors affect disease and health:

“With our combined data, we’ll be able to pinpoint any statistical relationships between these diseases and where these people live, how hot their climate is and so forth,” Quattrochi said. “We’re analyzing the data now. With the wide geographic coverage, this study’s findings could help health officials with environmental exposure and health recommendations.”

The Sietch Blog explains how cars can be recycled into musical instruments:

Ah a world in which people tear apart cars to make other things...such a world may be here sooner than you think. With the high cost of oil, and the high chance of a shift to simple electric cars, it is unlikely that driving around an old gas guzzler will be legal or affordable. Instead its orchestras for everyone!

Treehugger discusses the trend towards dematerialized education. And Pruned surveys an unusual urban garden in Queens.

This is fascinating:

[A] new study based on molecular evidence suggests that avian ancestors were flapping their wings some 40 million years earlier than thought.

As is the news that terahertz radiation may help to detect artwork hidden beneath paint or plaster:

Current methods of imaging underdrawings can't detect certain art materials such as graphite or sanguine, a red chalk that some of the masters are believed to have used.

The team of researchers, which includes scientists at the Louvre Museum, Picometrix, LLC and U-M, used terahertz imaging to detect colored paints and a graphite drawing of a butterfly through 4 mm of plaster. They believe their technique is capable of seeing even deeper.

The photo at the top is from Silent Nests, which compiles Vicki Topaz's photographs of French pigeon houses dating from the 14th to the 18th century. The aerial suburbs at BLDGBLOG provide a nice counterpoint.

I'd be remiss if I didn't draw your attention to Thursday Fossil Blogging at WhirledView, the exhibit of Photobooth pictures at Luminous Lint, and Parenthetically's feature on The Festival of Broken Needles. Those who seek a more harrowing form of nostalgia may proceed directly to Scholastic Book Club Covers of the 60s and 70s (via Coudal).

There's a bumper crop of glorious historic photos at Trésors Photographiques La Société de Géographie. If you'd prefer to stay closer to home, try Danny Wilcox Frazier's photographs of Iowa, or The Newton Owen Postcard Collection. I also recommend the astonishing geomancy almanac at BibliOdyssey.


Also: Astrophotography of the Southern Night Sky. And Herbert Pfostl's Paper Graveyard (via wood s lot).


The Invisible Garden offers a grand tour of moldy bread. See also Small Things Considered, whence comes this incredible photo:


Last, a little treatise on the fine art of vacuuming cows, circa 1920:

Sticking to the Obvious

Jack Cashill has discovered and christened a new threat to our Democratic Republic: The Literary/Science Complex.

Some mischievous soul at William Jewell College, a smart Baptist institution outside Kansas City, invited me to participate Tuesday in a three-person panel called "Science, Politics and Policy."

I say "mischievous" because that person had to suspect the trouble I could cause for the star of the panel, Chris Mooney, an elfin journalist in his late 20s who had scored big in the literary/science complex with his 2005 book, "The Republican War on Science."

To hear him tell it, Cashill mopped the floor with Mooney, while proving that it's actually the Left that has launched a war on science. Here's some of his evidence:

Mooney...surprised me by insisting that embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning were two different things altogether.

I'm not sure why this would surprise Cashill, given that Mooney makes the distinction in the book Cashill claims to have read, and in the sole line that Cashill quotes from it. What's even more confusing is that Cashill himself goes on to make a similar distinction, even as he claims it doesn't exist:

As I explained to Mooney and the audience, there would have been little fuss had scientists stuck to in vitro discards. Instead, they ventured into the process of creating life to destroy it – therapeutic cloning. This is what embryonic stem cell research is all about and why it is so controversial.

From here, Cashill proceeds to a truly astonishing argument against global warming:

I suggested that the Vikings did not name the island "Greenland" as part of some real estate scam. I then talked about the settlements there, the vineyards that stretched into Northern England, the town names, the historical artifacts, the memoirs and the various core samples that suggest these warming events were not local.

"But then it got cold again," the biologist said as though this information somehow undercut my own. This tag-team madness continued when Mooney challenged my evidence that it had gotten cold at all. [??!!]

Sticking to the obvious, I referred the pair to the 16th-century winter landscapes of Dutch painter Peter Breugel and the 19th-century novel (and Disney special) about Dutch lad Hans Brinker and his silver skates.

Unless I'm dreaming, which is possible given that I'm doped up on Flexeril, Cashill is trying to debunk AGW by offering some paintings and a children's story as evidence that it gets cold during winter.

Which goes to show that "sticking to the obvious" is an excellent way of making a fool of yourself. (Or of other people, if you're a propagandist like Cashill.)

Fashionable Nonsense

"It's not easy being me," Walter E. Williams says. He goes on to describe (but not to demonstrate) his exquisite sensitivity to language, which doesn't permit him to indulge in the tawdry pleasure of personification.

How many times have you heard a weatherman say that the sun will try to come out later in the day? Sometimes their prediction turns out to be false and I wonder whether they would explain it by saying the sun didn't try hard enough. But it's not just weathermen who use teleological explanations, ascribing purposeful behavior to inanimate objects. I'm currently listening to CD lectures on particle physics and I'm told that strange quarks want to decay. I'm wondering how the professor knows what a strange quark wants; has he interviewed one?

Bwa ha ha, as the saying is.

Williams also gets upset when people call zeros Os:

In the past, I have asked operators whether I'd reach my party by pressing the telephone's "o" key instead of the zero key. Operators have always told me that to reach my party, I'd have to press the zero key, whereupon I'd ask them, why did they say "o"; were they deliberately trying to sabotage my communication efforts?

And a stern lesson it was to them, I'm sure.

Having wasted most of his space on this sort of grueling pedantry, Williams has only a moment left to get to the point:

I wonder whether it's just me, or is anyone else bothered by silly talk? It might be that I'm getting old and out of touch, or it might be that I'm suffering from having received my education before it became fashionable for white people to like black people and nonsense was unacceptable.

This last sentence is fascinating, both grammatically and philosophically. As far as I can tell, the gist of Williams' column is that black people would be better off if white people stopped pretending to like them, because they would then be forced to use reflexive pronouns properly and to sneer at "nonsense" (e.g., personification, prosopoiea, synecdoche, and any other rhetorical figure that strays too far from the cold hard Gradgrindian facts).

In other words, whatever feeble analytical power Williams can bring to bear on these trivialities ennobles the educational system that prevailed in those dear dead days when it wasn't "fashionable for white people to like black people," and "nonsense was unacceptable" (except, of course, for the racist nonsense that made it fashionable for white people not to like black people).

If that's not what Williams is arguing here, I can't begin to imagine what he's actually trying to say.

(Illustration: "The Problem We All Live With" by Norman Rockwell, 1964.)

My Appointed Rounds

Photos from The Claude C. Matlack Collection.

Snapshots by Jean Thomas, The Traipsin' Woman.

Photos of Africville by Bob Brooks.

Near the Cross: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta.


Botanical and cartographical drawings by Alida Withoos.

A "social history of collecting," entitled Collect: Obsessive, Passionate, Visionary.

Ice, Fire, and Northern Myths.


An exhibition of works by Salvatore C. DiMarco and Gilbert J. Tucker of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin.

Nova Scotia Bird Watercolors by S. Edgar Marsh.

(The illustration at top is from The Panorama Effect.)

Fanatical Simplicity

A number of conservative scholars fell in love at first sight with the term "Islamofascism," and have since been trying to invent a respectable pedigree for it, like some lovesick heiress from a P.G. Wodehouse novel.

At a site called Family Security Matters, where the threat of Islamic bloodlust seems to trump such everyday family-destroyers as car accidents and cancer, Andrew Bostom gives Cliff May a passing grade for his latest attempt to connect Islam and National Socialism:

May’s inchoate effort should be applauded for its attempted illustration of any possible ideological nexus between Hitler’s Nazism and Islam.

The emphasis is in the original, which makes this an unusually honest summation of the business at hand. May's stab at linking Hitler and Islam - which actually strikes Bostom as daring, perhaps because he's been living on the moon for the last few years - may've been inadequate, but at least he understands that they ought to be linked, one way or another.

Having softened up his colleague with this faint praise, Bostom prepares to school his punk ass on the finer points of the Historical Method. He begins with an appeal to authority: Carl Jung once compared Hitler to Mohammed!

That really isn't very impressive, especially to those of us who've occasionally "dared" to doubt Jung's other opinions. But Bostom has lots of other quotes up his sleeve. Here's one from Albert Speer:

Hitler usually concluded this historical speculation by remarking, “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”

Bostom has inadvertently stumbled on a fairly profound characteristic of fascism: its parasitic opportunism. But he doesn't notice it, because he's too excited by the proximity, in this anecdote, of Hitler and Islam.

Bostom goes on to say that Hitler didn't want to alienate the Arabs, because he saw them as potential allies in his war on the Jews. Of course, Hitler formed an actual alliance with Japan, but what this reveals about the essential nature of Shinto or Buddhism is apparently of no interest.

The next witnesses for the prosecution are Jacob Burckhardt, who once called Mohammed "a radical simplifier," and Waldemar Gurian, who once called Hitler "a fanatical simplifier." See how the phrases are almost the same? And how it's impossible to imagine any other political or religious figures, living or dead, being described in this way?

He also mentions Ibn Warraq's discussion of Islam in light of Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism. And like Warraq, he willfully ignores one of the most pertinent distinctions Eco makes:

In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life.

Emphasis added.

All of Bostom's scholarly posturing, and all of the silly anecdotal cherrypicking on which it relies, is supposed to provide retroactive support for the conclusion that Islam, when viewed for the sake of political convenience or personal animus as monolithic, is authoritarian (or dictatorial, or totalitarian, or despotic), and is therefore fascistic. These analogical sleights of hand are pretty much the same ones that provide the aeriform foundation for The House that Jonah Built, and they stand up to about as much critical scrutiny.

What we never learn from these earnest people is why it's so important, in practical terms, to discern "any possible ideological nexus between Hitler’s Nazism and Islam," instead of recognizing the various strains of violent Islamic radicalism as distinct, unique movements with their own goals and tactics and ideological substrate. Supposedly, it pays to know one's enemies. But "fanatical simplifiers" like Bostom prefer to force their current antagonists into the mold of a past they seem to understand no better than the present.

That said, Bostom promises that he will soon be presenting shocking new evidence that Nazis and Arabs both dislike Jews. So I suppose I'd better withhold my judgment for now.

(Illustration by Francesca Berrini.)

The Week in Denialism

Ken Green has discovered shocking new proof that climate modeling is inaccurate:

Gore claims that “Recent evidence shows the climate crisis is significantly worse and unfolding more rapidly than those on the pessimistic side of the IPCC projections had warned us...”

Isn’t this, in effect, an admission that scientists with computer models can’t predict the future?

Touché, I guess.

If you've been dying to know what Pat Boone thinks about climate change, your wait is over:

Some months ago, while driving back home from an engagement, I became fascinated with George Noory's late-night radio interview with a solar physicist, one of a number of very dedicated scientists who actually watch and analyze the sun itself, and its ongoing powerful effects on planet earth....

[W]hile the main topic of discussion on Noory's program that night was the remarkable list of prophecies recorded by ancient Aztecs from centuries ago -- gleaned somehow from their study and even worship of the sun -- the guest scientist brought up the concern solar physicists share about "new, unexplained activity and disturbances" on the surface of that giant fireball in space!

As far as I can tell, Boone is talking about John Jay Harper, a clinical hynotherapist who has written a book called 2012: Fact or Myth? At the risk of shocking you, a search of Noory's site doesn't turn up any guests who qualify as solar physicists. Perhaps a careful survey of Aztec calendar stones can explain this anomaly.

One of the things that impressed Boone about this so-called physicist was his habit of speaking "assertively," as thus:

"Men's actions can and do affect his local environment, but neither man nor machine is powerful enough to seriously disturb our global ecology or our weather patterns."

Evidently, there's some physical mechanism that prevents myriad, ongoing local effects from having global ones. Maybe Noory's guest can win this year's Nobel prize in physics by telling us what it is.

Boone's column is worth noting mainly because it allows us to contrast his genial idiocy with the black-hearted dishonesty of the Wall Street Journal:

No one disputes that higher temperatures in the bear's Arctic habitat have disrupted the sea ice that bears use to catch food and breed. The problem is that polar bear populations have been rising over the last four decades, and may now be at an historic high. This is the result of conservation management, including international agreements on trophy hunting and federal safeguards like the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Why is this a "problem"? Because as usual, the gimlet-eyed scourges of "junk science" find it inconceivable that polar bears could simultaneously be rebounding from overhunting, and be threatened by loss of habitat.

This editorial also introduces us to the pejorative term "warmists," which apparently refers to people who agree with the WSJ "that higher temperatures in the bear's Arctic habitat have disrupted the sea ice that bears use to catch food and breed."

The term probably doesn't apply to U.S. trade rep Susan Schwab, who complains that climate change is being used as a pretext for protectionism:

"We have been dismayed at a variety of suggestions where we have seen the climate and the environment being used as an excuse to close markets," Schwab said.....

If we lived in some science-fiction world where it was possible for human activities to have an effect on the climate and environment, I suppose there could be another explanation. But as we don't....

(Illustration from The World Turned Upside Down, or No News, and Strange News, circa 1820.)

Sunday Music Blogging

I'm going to be pretty busy over the next few weeks, at least, and it's unlikely that I'll be able to do much blogging. Which is probably just as well, given how scatterbrained the last batch of posts has been.

I may manage some reposts, film clips, links to other (better) sites, and the like. Anyone who wants to take over Friday Hope Blogging, or post some nudibranch pics, is more than welcome!

Best wishes to you all, meanwhile. And thanks.

XOXOXOXO,

P

Saturday Dancing Pig Blogging

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

I study the lives on a leaf: the little
Sleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions,
Beetles in caves, newts, stone-deaf fishes,
Lice tethered to long limp subterranean weeds,
Squirmers in bogs,
And Thuridilla picta
Wriggling through wounds
Like elvers in ponds,
Their wan mouths kissing the warm sutures,
Cleaning and caressing,
Creeping and healing.

(Photo by jlyle.)

Friday Hope Blogging

The Navy has abandoned plans to build a landing field near a wildlife refuge that "hosts more than 100,000 snow geese and tundra swans, and other waterfowl each winter":

“This is a tremendous victory for the local community and the wildlife refuge that would be devastated by the operation of a landing field at the proposed site. We salute the Navy’s ultimate recognition that this was not the place for an OLF,” said Derb Carter, director of the Carolinas office of the Southern Environmental Law Center which represented the environmental interests in the case.

In related news, a judge has ruled that the DoD's proposed airstrip in Okinawa violates the National Historic Preservation Act:

The lawsuit sought to compel the U.S. Department of Defense to comply with the National Historic Preservation Act by conducting a complete public assessment of the impacts of the proposed project on the dugong — a relative of the manatee sometimes known as “sea cows” — so that actions could be taken to avoid or mitigate any adverse affects. The National Historic Preservation Act requires agencies of the U.S. government to consider the impacts on cultural and historic resources in other nations when undertaking activities outside the United States.

Saudi Arabia claims it will allow women to drive:

Saudi Arabia is to lift its ban on women drivers in an attempt to stem a rising suffragette-style movement in the deeply conservative state. Government officials have confirmed the landmark decision and plan to issue a decree by the end of the year.

In partnership with several other corporations, IBM is creating an Eco-Patents Commons:

The Eco-Patent Commons will start with the donation into the public domain of 31 patents that cover everything from a manufacturing process that reduces volatile compounds to a natural coagulant used to purify industrial waste water.

On Monday, a Web site that hosts the patents is scheduled to launch. The patent commons will be administered by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, a Geneva-based organization devoted to promoting sustainability in business.

There's talk of using rain to generate electricity:

Jean-Jacques Chaillout and colleagues at the atomic energy commission (cea) in Grenoble, France, have shown that piezoelectric materials, which generate voltage in response to mechanical force, can be made to produce useful amounts of electrical power when hit by falling rain. “we thought of raindrops because they are one of the still-unexploited energy sources in nature,” Chaillout says.

Orion has a long article on anti-coal activism:

Can the environmental movement muster the necessary clout to overcome the combined forces of Big Oil and Big Coal? To Big Green advocates like Hawkins and Thompson, it’s a fantasy to think that America won’t continue using coal and oil. To grassroots activists like LaPlaca, Overland, and Muller, the fantasy lies in the opposite assumption: believing that the world can survive without a radical shift away from fossil fuels. “Big Green has the resources,” said Muller, “but the grassroots is where it’s happening in terms of leadership, in terms of work, and in terms of results. To anybody who’s following this, I’d say don’t bet too much money on coal right now.”

Just for the record, more than 50 proposed coal plants were canceled or delayed in 2007.

AIDG Blog explains its Rocket Box stove:

The Rocket Box uses 50-60% less firewood than traditional cookstoves and fires. This provides a huge costs savings for families that buy fuel wood. For instance, women we interviewed at San Alfonso, a cooperative in Guatemala, reported spending 28-56% of their monthly income on wood.

This stove design shows similar fuel efficiency to masonry stoves, but is up to 50% cheaper. Being portable, it is particularly useful in communities where residents are living in temporary housing and/or want more flexibility in where the stove is placed in their home. Like most good ‘improved’ stoves, it comes equipped with a chimney that vents smoke out of the home and thus cuts exposure to the ‘killer in the kitchen’.

Behold the economy-annihilating horror of renewable energy standards:

SCHOTT solar is opening a brand new solar energy technology production facility in the Mesa del Sol region of Albuquerque, NM....SCHOTT was attracted to New Mexico thanks in part to the State’s commitment to the consumption of renewable energy....The long-term economic impact of the site is expected to exceed $1 billion for the state of New Mexico.

Other frightening steps towards neotroglodytism: Whole Foods has vowed to stop using plastic bags by April, and Ontario is ending its ban on clotheslines.

Cuba has banned the hunting of marine turtles:

The decision was applauded by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) as a lifeline to all turtle species hatching on beaches throughout the Caribbean, but above all the critically endangered hawksbill turtle.

The ban took effect this weekend, said the Cuban Fisheries Ministry's director of regulations, Elisa Garcia. She said it would remain in effect "until it is scientifically proven that the species is recovering."

Revere has some modest good news about avian flu:

For some time the absence of mild or inapparent infections has been worrying. It means that the current case fatality ratio of over 60% is the real CFR, not one based on just the most serious cases coming to the attention of the surveillance system. Now scientists gathered in Bangkok at one of the many gatherings of those studying the disease have heard some new data involving 674 people in two Cambodian villages exposed to influenza H5N1 ("bird flu") by infected poultry in their households. Seven children were found to have been infected using a test of their blood for antibodies. Seven is 1% of these exposed people, so it is still consistent with low transmissibility to humans. But scant data from previous investigations of health care workers or villagers in infected areas had not turned up evidence of mild infection, so this is good news. Not all H5N1 cases are serious or fatal disease.

Also, the universal influenza vaccine has reportedly been tested successfully in humans:

The British-American biotech company Acambis reports the successful conclusion of Phase I trials of the universal flu vaccine in humans. The universal influenza vaccine has been pioneered by researchers from VIB and Ghent University. This vaccine is intended to provide protection against all ‘A’ strains of the virus that causes human influenza, including pandemic strains. Therefore, this vaccine will not need to be renewed annually.

This is fascinating:

A study of how female lark buntings choose their mates, published this week in Science, adds a surprising new twist to the evolutionary theory of sexual selection. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, discovered that female lark buntings show strong preferences for certain traits in the males, but those preferences change from year to year.

And this is funny.

I was impressed this week by Kevin Cooley's eerie photos of Southern California (via Coudal). And by Matt Callow's pinhole photographs.


But that's nothing compared to Kolmanskop, a ghost town buried in sand:


You'll also want to visit Doodles, Drafts and Designs: Industrial Drawings from the Smithsonian (via Things).


Plep alerted me to an exhibition of Victorian Sheet Music at BibliOdyssey, which I'd somehow overlooked.


Last things last: Preliminary Flickr sets from the Library of Congress. Nu-real: a timeline of fantastic photomontage and its possible influences, 1857 - 2007. And a haunting survey of Japan's scarecrow mannequins.


(Photo at top via Good.)

The Politics of Possibility

As the price of oil skyrockets, and we discuss past and future "surgical strikes" on Syria and Iran, the U.S. Energy Secretary asks our Middle Eastern friends whether they've ever considered the advantages of nuclear power:

Gulf Arab oil exporters and countries around the world should look into nuclear power as an alternative to hydrocarbons, U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman said on Monday.

"Nuclear power should be an alternative for Gulf countries and other countries around the world," Bodman said in the United Arab Emirates during a visit.

Meanwhile, in the American Southeast, the ongoing drought may force nuclear plants to shut down:

Nuclear reactors across the Southeast could be forced to throttle back or temporarily shut down later this year because drought is drying up the rivers and lakes that supply power plants with the awesome amounts of cooling water they need to operate.

Utility officials say such shutdowns probably wouldn't result in blackouts. But they could lead to shockingly higher electric bills for millions of Southerners, because the region's utilities may be forced to buy expensive replacement power from other energy companies.

And in the American Southwest, people are falling in love all over again with oil shale, the perennial fuel of the paleo-future. Estimates of how much water it'd take to develop this low-grade oil range from ghastly to staggering; one thing it's fairly safe to say is that a (subsidized, artificial) oil shale boom would result in a massive influx of thirsty new residents, much as the tar sands boom did in Alberta.

With these stories in mind, it's interesting to learn that farmers in California are thinking it might be more profitable to sell their (subsidized) water to cities, instead of using it to grow crops:

In a state where water has become an increasingly scarce commodity, a growing number of farmers are betting they can make more money selling their water supplies to thirsty cities and farms to the south than by growing crops....

"It just makes dollars and sense right now," said Bruce Rolen, a third-generation farmer in Northern California's lush Sacramento Valley. "There's more economic advantage to fallowing than raising a crop."

All of which can only mean one thing: it's time to transcend the politics of limits, and embrace the politics of possibility.

(Photo: Ship stranded in Aral Sea.)

A Lack of Judgment

In one of those sweeping gestures for which he's justly famous, William Saletan has formally approved the proposition that "the ideal amount of teen sex is zero."

We're still waiting to learn how much and what kind of teen masturbation is ideal, if any. Perhaps Saletan can prepare some diagrams for us with his free hand.

Putting aside the question of whether it's seemly for a grown man to spend so much time fretting officiously over the sex lives of other people's children, I think the belief that teenagers are "good" to the extent that they're nonsexual says a lot more about us than it does about who they are, or should be. The modern concept of childhood exists more for the benefit of adults than children; innocence is the shadow cast on them by our own guilt.

In too many American families, adolescence recapitulates Eve's temptation by the Serpent: will these little angels remain pure, or will they corrupt themselves by learning things they shouldn't know and thus, in a certain uncomfortable sense, becoming our equals? (Girls, of course, can also be accused of failing to manage a valuable resource properly...by preferring use value to exchange value, as it were.)

It's no wonder that as unease about sex increases, the ultimate symbol of "childhood innocence" becomes the fetus, or even the stem cell. According to this school of thought, children shouldn't be seen or heard; they should be imagined.

Real children, meanwhile, get punished for turning out to be human after all...despite all our good-natured attempts to treat their sexuality as something that can vaccinated against like measles, or cured like strep throat. They suffer when they try to live up to our fantasies, and they suffer when they fall short of them.

That's OK, though, because the underlying fear is not so much that children will suffer excessively because of sex, but that they won't (which, among other problematic things, would prove the Knights of Purity wrong on a fairly fundamental point).

Like the people who piously invoke the ideal of "colorblindness" in order to ignore everyday proof of racial inequality, Saletan hopes to lead us to Heaven by settling down comfortably in Hell:

It's absurd to have to say this, but judgment isn't a bad word. You can moralize without losing your soul.

It hadn't occurred to me that judgment is what's been missing from the national discussion about teen sex, but Saletan surely wouldn't say it if it weren't true. Evidently, things will change for the better only if we don't.

Who Needs Facts?

Tom Sears, a "professor of accounting" in upstate New York who has unaccountably been given a column in the Oneonta Daily Star, knows something you don't:

[W]hat you are doing now has in no way a significant impact on global warming. Man is not to blame for global warming.

How does Sears know this? Well, first off, because S. Fred Singer told him so:

A great book to read is "Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years" by S. Fred Singer. In it, he points out that the science in Gore's movie is shoddy at best, and then proceeds to back up his claims.

As Joseph Romm notes, one of the many problems with Singer's "every 1,500 years" theory is that as far as we know, there wasn't a comparable global warming trend 1,500 years ago.

Regardless, this is Sears' cue to launch into that classic denialist mantra, everyone's stupid but me:

The global warming advocates and their sophisticated models can't explain the Medieval Warm Period from 900-1300 and then the Little Ice Age from 1500-1800, to say nothing of the countless number of cooling and warming cycles before these two examples.

Right. Because anthropogenic global warming is predicated on, and can only occur in, a world that has never warmed or cooled naturally. If you accept anthropogenic warming, you must reject natural warming, and vice versa.

Just for the record, here's the NOAA's take on the Medieval Warm Period:

In the early days of paleoclimatology, the sparsely distributed paleoenvironmental records were interpreted to indicate that there was a "Medieval Warm Period" where temperatures were warmer than today....The idea of a global or hemispheric "Medieval Warm Period" that was warmer than today however, has turned out to be incorrect.

But again, even if the NOAA were mistaken on this point, it wouldn't follow that the current (and far more rapid) warming trend must be natural.

Next, Sears puts the final nails in AGW's coffin by noting that it's depressing, and that it's a common topic of conversation among people he doesn't like:

Everything has been blamed on global warming -- wildfires, Darfur(!) and dying polar bears. Barbara Boxer said global warming was to blame for a poor 14-year-old boy who died from "an infection caused after swimming in Lake Havasu" (warmer water, you see). Who needs facts?

Sears' argument here is fascinating, in that he accepts that the climate is getting warmer, but is outraged by the idea that a warming climate could lead to more wildfires, or fewer polar bears, or regional instability, or warmer water that hosts a wider range of pathogens. Once you've conceded that the world is warming, it seems as though you'd have to accept these outcomes as at least possible. But apparently, Sears has been immunized against climatological reality by the sole concession he was willing to make to it.

Which makes his parting advice all the more poignant:

So listen, people. Use common sense.

(Illustration from "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments," Justin Kruger and David Dunning, Cornell University, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 77, no 6, p 1121-1134 (1999). Via Denialism Blog.)

Stupid Smart Machines

In consumer technology, as in biology, mutations tend to be useless or maladaptive. The Taser isn't improved by being combined with an mp3 player, unless you believe that two capabilities are automatically better than one, no matter how incompatible they may be. I think it's fair to suggest that turning a dangerous weapon into yet another lifestyle accessory - one that distracts you from your surroundings, no less - makes users and innocent bystanders less safe.

Now, there's talk among Serious People of marketing a cellphone that doubles as a radiation detector:

"The likely targets of a potential terrorist attack would be big cities with concentrated populations, and a system like this would make it very difficult for someone to go undetected with a radiological dirty bomb in such an area," said Longman, who also is Purdue alumnus. "The more people are walking around with cell phones and PDAs, the easier it would be to detect and catch the perpetrator. We are asking the public to push for this."

Let's imagine for a moment that I'm an actual terrorist, rather than a member of that Islamopacifascist fifth column, the American Left. Let's suppose further that I have access to radioactive material, and that I don't want it to go undetected. What's to stop me from putting it in magnetic containers on the undercarriage of UPS trucks, or crosstown buses? Or taping it under subway or taxicab or bicycle seats? Or floating it down rivers and canals? Or mailing it?

It seems to me that anyone who took these steps could cost one or more cities a great deal of money, and citizens a huge amount of trouble and worry, while undermining whatever remained of public faith in our "protectors." This is a perfect example of how easily anti-terrorist technology can become a readymade weapon, or a force multiplier, making us more vulnerable to disruption and despair as well as to violence. Schemes like this one are the technocratic equivalent of an autoimmune disorder.

If these modern-day Tom Swifts have considered this argument, they're keeping quiet about it:

The system could be trained to ignore known radiation sources, such as hospitals, and radiation from certain common items, such as bananas, which contain a radioactive isotope of potassium.

"The radiological dirty bomb or a suitcase nuclear weapon is going to give off higher levels of radiation than those background sources," Fischbach said. "The system would be sensitive enough to detect these tiny levels of radiation, but it would be smart enough to discern which sources posed potential threats and which are harmless."

Which would be great, in theory, if human beings of average intelligence weren't more than smart enough to outwit it, and to turn it against us.

In other news, our infrastructure is crumbling. Which is why it's disheartening to learn that research into this miracle cellphone "has been funded by the Indiana Department of Transportation through the Joint Transportation Research Program and School of Civil Engineering at Purdue."

God Rode In the Windstorm

Someone named Tamar Yonah notes that a tornado struck Jerusalem, Arkansas while Bush was en route to the Middle East:

It seems like this is just too uncanny that these are all 'coincidences'. On January 8, 2008 the day that President Bush left the USA for Israel in order to lay the framework for the establishment of a Palestinian State and the division of Jerusalem for its capital , a freak 'January' tornado swept through a city in Bush's own country. The place hit was 'Jerusalem', Arkansas. Coincidence?

One church was totally destroyed in the tornado’s path. The name of it was “Mt. Zion” Community Church. Coincidence?

Cynics might wonder how a tornado could travel across Arkansas without knocking down a church. Others might argue that it's not unusual for a town, or a church, in the Bible Belt to bear the name of a site in the Holy Land.

But consider this: My own research reveals that exactly nine years ago, on January 21, 1999, Yassir Arafat went to Cairo to meet with Hosni Mubarak "on the current status of the Palestinian peace track in light of the Israeli government freezing of its implementation of the Wye River accord." On that very day, a tornado touched down in Egypt, Arkansas!

And on January 4, 1946, an F-4 tornado struck Palestine, Texas...just as the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, under the direction of "Texas Joe" Hutcheson, was assembling in Washington DC "to examine political, economic and social conditions in Palestine as they bear upon the problem of Jewish immigration and settlement therein and the well-being of the peoples now living therein."

QED, as the saying is.

Sunday Music Blogging

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Now we feel Hypselodoris bullocki to be inexhaustible
like an ancient wine
and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
and time has charged her with eternity.

And to think that she wouldn't exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.

(Photo by Richard Smith, whose other work is equally breathtaking.)

Friday Hope Blogging

Uzbekistan has abolished the death penalty:

The trend towards total abolition of the death penalty has continued with Uzbekistan becoming the latest country to put an end to executions.

From 1 January 2008, it becomes the 135th country in the world to abolish the death penalty in law or practice.

The Jordanian parliament is attempting to address domestic violence:

The draft law, which still needs to be approved by the Senate before taking effect, imposes stiff penalties on violators, ranging from hefty fines to imprisonment of up to six months.

The bill also gives the authorities the power to detain perpetrators of domestic violence for 24 hours "in order to protect the victim" and the court has the right to bar perpetrators from approaching "safe houses" where victims are sheltered in order to guarantee their safety.

Meanwhile, in the Land of the Free, an attempt by fundamentalist groups to overturn the Student Civil Rights Act, which protects LGBT teens from discrimination, has failed:

Geoff Kors, executive director of Equality California, said...."Despite their vicious attack, Californians stood with us and said 'no' to turning back the clock on civil rights and protecting all youth from discrimination in our schools."

Pam Spaulding reports that "NJ Congressman Rush Holt has introduced a bill to help voting districts that want to either go with paper ballots or auditable machines for the 2008 election to fund the switchover in time."

The bill, dubbed the Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act of 2008, seeks to fix what many critics fear is a potential problem with paperless electronic voting machines — a lack of voter-verified paper records.

Thanks largely to pressure from ten veterans' groups, the VA will get $3.7 billion in emergency funding:

Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, said the emergency funds were needed because the veterans budget proposed by the president would have underfunded the Veterans Affairs Department at a time when there was a need to expand mental health care, improve treatment for traumatic brain injuries and reverse a claims backlog.

"This could not be allowed to happen," said Akaka, who wrote to the president urging him to release the extra money. "I am relieved that he has seen fit to do so."

Billboards are getting increasingly unpopular. Oklahoma City and Wyoming, MI are considering restricting them dramatically, and in Arizona, astronomers are doing their best to fight light pollution from digital billboards.

"The state is magical in terms of its clear night skies but we're concerned this kind of outdoor lighting will make it harder for the state's observatories to do their work," said Richard Green, director of the Large Binocular Telescope observatory in Tucson.

Last year, California gave taxpayers the chance to donate automatically to a sea otter preservation fund, by checking a box on their state income tax form; this program has raised $255,000, so far:

“Last year, Californians showed just how committed they are to the conservation of sea otters,” said Jim Curland marine program associate for Defenders of Wildlife. “The tax check-off gives people a great way to play a direct role in the recovery efforts for sea otters.”

The Sietch Blog reports on a bicycle that doubles as a water pump, purifier, and storage tank:

A peristaltic pump attached to the pedal crank draws water from a large tank, through a carbon filter, to a smaller clean tank. The clean tank is removable and closed for contamination-free home storage and use. A clutch engages and disengages the drive belt from the pedal crank, enabling the rider to filter the water while traveling or while stationary.

Sierra Leone has halted timber exports:

Sierra Leone's government has banned the exportation of timber after "indiscriminate destruction" by Chinese and other foreign businessmen, a senior official said on Monday.

David Roberts notes that Xcel Energy will spend $100 million to build a smart-grid city:

A smart grid would allow Xcel to charge higher rates during peak usage hours and lower rates during off-peak hours. Consumers could lower their monthly bills by performing power-consuming tasks, such as running the dishwasher, during off-peak hours.

"That's a pretty good way to take care of capacity issues," said Jon Caldara, president of Golden-based think tank Independence Institute. "I'm not a big fan of Xcel, but on this one, I think they're taking a step in the right direction."

Xcel plans to install in-home control devices in the smart-grid city to automate home energy use. The city would be outfitted with infrastructure to support renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. The city would also feature plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles that charge and discharge to the grid.

In related news, Google is investing $10 million in a solar-thermal company:

To serve the renewable electricity needs of utility-scale energy providers, eSolar has developed a market disrupting solar thermal power plant technology. Generation can be scaled from 25 MW to over 500 MW at energy prices competitive with traditional fossil fuels.

It often happens that air conditioners are used on very sunny days, so it makes sense to have them run off the grid on solar power. A Spanish company seems to have invented a small air conditioner that does just that:

From an operation point of view it is very simple: you put hot water in, you get cold water out, which you can run to a conventional fancoil. The hot water in can come from any source, but evacuated tube collectors, which used to be very expensive, are pretty affordable now.

Illinois farmers are taking a stand against a nightmare plan to build a pipeline from Albertan oil sand fields to Texas:

Several farmers are standing in Enbridge's way, however, refusing to let the company build the pipeline through their land. At a public meeting, Bob Kelly, 81, called Enbridge "highway robbers." He said there is no way he will allow the company to tear up farmland that has been in his family for 125 years. "It's not for sale at any price," he said.

Not all farmers agree, of course:

"It should be seen as progress to bring some crude oil down here to central Illinois," said John Gramm, 76, of Gridley. "It's good for business and labor, and it makes us less dependent on foreign oil."

The GOP needs to run this man for president, if you ask me.

Onwards and upwards. First off, ten minutes or so of ambient audio from Antigua, via AIDG Blog.

Next, condom envelopes from the 1930s and 1940s, via Coudal.


And some close-up views of sweets, sweet wrappers and candy.


From there, we'll proceed in an orderly fashion to James A. Scott Collection, which comprises before and after photographs of San Francisco, and the Willard E. Worden Glass Plate Negative Collection (both via Plep).


BibliOdyssey has a typically dazzling post on The Fugitive Beauties of Hexandria. National Geographic investigates The Emptied Prairie and finds "a sense of things ebbing" (recommended soundtrack: Extreme close up recording of a stem cell harvesting machine).

You'll find a couple of entertaining Laulupidu videos at WhirledView. (Also, check out the letter CKR sent to the presidential candidates on the bloggers' nuclear strategy consensus statement. Not sure what will come of this, but it strikes me as a shrewd and potentially very powerful use of the blogosphere as a sort of decentralized thinktank.)

Last, "Danse Macabre," a short film from 1922.



(Photo at top: "Dissin's Guest House, Washington, D.C. 1942" by Esther Bubley, via wood s lot).