Universities -- above all -- are supposed to be repositories of knowledge, creators of truth, oases of freedom an dintellectualism, in a world that too often barely values these traits at all -- and this kind of conduct is absolutely indefensible:

On campuses nationwide, professors and administrators have passionately debated whether their universities should accept money for research from tobacco companies. But not at Virginia Commonwealth University, a public institution in Richmond, Va.

That is largely because hardly any faculty members or students there know that there is something to debate — a contract with extremely restrictive terms that the university signed in 2006 to do research for Philip Morris USA, the nation’s largest tobacco company and a unit of Altria Group.

I just can't understand how people like this look at themselves in the mirror in the morning.

More on My Theorem

More on Appell's Theorem:

A Global Comeback for Coal

By MARTIN FACKLER

Soaring commodity prices have been an unanticipated boon to coal producing regions that had written coal mining off as a relic of the Industrial Revolution.

New York Times, May 21, 2008

The Pitiful state of US science education

What can you say?

25% of high-school teachers indicated that they devoted at least one or two classroom hours to creationism or intelligent design.... Of the 25% of teachers who devoted time to creationism or intelligent design, nearly half agreed or strongly agreed that they teach creationism as a “valid scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species.

We are largely a nation of imbeciles, taught partly by imbeciles who wouldn't recognize the scientific method if it stabbed them dead in the dark, and unfortunately led by imbeciles who think we should respect these other imbeciles and are too terrified to say otherwise because it might cost them a couple of votes. It is in no small part responsible for the direction our country is headed -- a wave rushing towards a lack of reason, intelligent and informed thought, and respect for the wonders and prizes that science has brought them over the last 400 years.

We are (most probably) screwed.

More on Burying Trees

There's another paper out on the prospect of growing and burying trees in order to combat global warming. The authors, Scholz and Hasse, calculate that the world would have to grow and bury about a billion hectares a year to counteract the 32 GtC/yr we're putting in the atmosphere. That's about 4 million square miles (which more or less agrees with this calculation from an earlier paper by Zeng on the same subject), which is about the size of the entire United States (including AK and HI), or, as the authors put it, "roughly to the surface of the virgin forest cut down in the last century." Every year.

Still seems kinda crazy.

Via Science Daily.

Our Transistors

Each year, the semiconductor industry makes about 100 million transistors for every man, woman, and child on Earth. By 2010, the number should be up to 1 billion.

-- Excerpt from Seven Wonders for a Cooler Planet – The Microchip

Portland's New Mayor

Sam Adams:

Asked if it was odd that he can be mayor - but not married - in Oregon, Adams said it was "surreal."

"With the position of mayor comes life and death authority and responsibility in running a police force, emergency preparedness system and fire departments," he said. "But gay folks still can't be trusted to be married."

Few Hurricanes with Global Warming

Just to show that the science of global warming and hurricanes is not settled yet, a new paper came out in Nature Geoscience yesterday, predicting fewer but more intense storms in the Atlantic ocean as the globe warms.

A simulation of Atlantic hurricane activity for the final decades of the century projected an 18 percent decrease in hurricanes and a 27 percent decrease in tropical storms, researchers at the U.S. government's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in New Jersey found.

"It does not support the notion that increasing greenhouse gases are causing a large increase in Atlantic hurricane or tropical storm frequency," said Thomas Knutson, one of the study's authors.

Clearly more study is needed. Give the scientists time to do their jobs before you plan out your propaganda.

Primer on Climate Change

This looks like a very good primer on the current understanding of climate change, published by the National Academies:

http://dels.nas.edu/basc/climate-change/

Barack Obama in Portland

Barack Obama is speaking not 500 yards from my apartment in a few hours, and I had hoped to go see him. They're expecting 50,000 people, his largest crowd ever. But I read that the line to get in, which I can see from my window, is already about 8 blocks long, and I'm just not so sure about that.

Fortunately it's a gorgeous day, 75°F and blue skies.

John Haught

John Haught in Excerpt of God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens:

"Dawkins’s uncompromising literalism is nowhere more obvious than in his astonishing insistence throughout The God Delusion that the notion of God should be treated as a scientific hypothesis, subject to the same verificational procedures as any other “scientific” hypothesis."

I simply cannot see -- or imagine -- why the notion of "God" should not be treated as a scientific hypothesis.

What is "astonishing" about this? Please, someone -- anyone -- please tell me.

Electrons should be treated this way, no? Neptune, too. Extra-dimensions, supersymmetry, the properties of an ideal gas.

Why does this one "thing" -- "God" -- get to escape such proof, merely because you can't provide it? If you can't provide the proof, then you can't scrape by by imaging this thing as part of all those things that a person can't ascertain. What a royal copout.

I just can't see how a person can make this kind of intellectual argument and still look at themselves in the mirror in the morning. It's absurd.

Quote

"There is no way to peace.
Peace is the way."

-- AJ Muste

Life on the Rim

Malcolm Reynolds: "The wheel never stops turning, Badger."
Badger: "That only matters to the people on the rim."

Firefly, Season 1, Episode 1

Mt. St. Helens

The Oregonian has some interesting time-lapse video of Mt. St. Helens rebuilding itself. It's going much faster than I ever would have guessed.

Edwards Endorses Obama

John Edwards was my favorite Democrat and I would have voted for him in the general election. But I'm not very impressed with his endorsement today of Obama. Could he have waited any longer? It seems pretty obvious he has stood around with his finger in the wind, waiting to see who was going to come out on top, so he could take advantage and perhaps garner the VP spot. Only then did he endorse.

And today in his endorsement speech he talked about "bold leadership." I don't think so.

I have lost some respect for him.

11th Warmest April

NASA GISS is out with their measurement of April '08 global land+ocean temperatures: +0.41°C above the long-term average. It has something for everyone: on the one hand, it's the coldest April in seven years. On the other hand, it's the 11th warmest April in GISS's recorded history (1990-2008).

How you see it depends on where you sit.

Polar Bears are now Endangered Species

Wonders never cease:

The Interior Department has decided to protect the polar bear as a threatened species because of the decline in Arctic sea ice from global warming, officials said Wednesday....

This is the first time that the Endangered Species Act has been used to protect a species threatened by the impacts of global warming. There has been concern within the business community that such action could have far-reaching impact and could be used to regulate carbon dioxide.

After all the corporate giveaways from this administration, especially from the EPA, I never thought I would see something like this.

Acceleration due to Gravity

I was looking through an old notebook last night, and came across this calculation, which is true to 3 percent:

g = 32 ft/sec^2 = 1 lightyear/year/year