Gasification: Coal and Biomass to Liquid Fuels

Plasma Gasification - Funny home videos are a click away
Gasification of coal and biomass to liquid fuels is one emphatic answer to the peak oil hysteria that afflicts so many otherwise intelligent humans. This video presents the gasification process in easy to understand terms.

Coal gasification is a cleaner way of using coal, and allows for carbon sequestration -- or preferably diverting of CO2 to algae bioreactors or controlled atmosphere greenhouses.

Biomass gasification allows for a sustained renewable form of solar energy that can provide either liquid fuels, high value chemicals, or clean baseload electricity.

A Nation of Sluts? Brazil Goes Globo

Girls learn to be women -- and women learn to be sluts -- from the media. Romance novels, films, and especially soap operas and "soap Oprahs". Brazil's population of women is being taken over by the popular soap "Globo."

How much impact do the soaps have on real life? As recounted in papers from the Inter-American Development Bank, researchers tracked Globo’s expansion across the country and compared this to data on fertility and divorce.*

The results are most striking for the total fertility rate, which dropped from 6.3 children per woman in 1960 to 2.3 in 2000, despite contraception being officially discouraged for some of that time. This was because women moved to cities and opted to have fewer babies. The papers argue that the small, happy families portrayed on television contributed to this trend. Controlling for other factors, the arrival of Globo was associated with a decline of 0.6 percentage points in the probability of a woman giving birth in a given year. That is equivalent to the drop in the birth rate associated with a woman having two extra years of schooling

The effect on divorce was smaller, but noticeable. The researchers found that between 1975, when divorce was first mooted, and 1984 about one in five of the main characters in Globo soaps were divorced or separated, a higher percentage than in the real Brazil. These break-ups were not just a result of machismo: from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s about 30% of female lead characters in novelas were unfaithful to their partners. The researchers find that the arrival of Globo in an area was associated with a rise of 0.1-0.2 percentage points in the share of women aged 15-49 who were divorced or separated. The authors reckon that watching “empowered” women having fun in Rio made other women (a few of them anyway) more independent. _ImpactLab

One person's "empowered woman" may be another person's slut -- it depends upon a person's perspective.

I wonder if ancient Rome had soap operas, right up until the end? Would you like to know, "who were Rome's soap Oprahs?" Women take their cues from the herd, as they interpret it. The soap Oprahs of the world exert a huge impact on female behaviour, and on society at large. You may be a slave to a loosely knit web of puppet masters and puppet mistresses, pulling the strings on female behaviour everywhere except perhaps within the Muslim world. And how much longer can that bastion of male dominance hold out?

Cross-posted at Al Fin, You Sexy Thing!

Is Competence Dying Out In the Obama Age?

Within the next five years, an estimated 45 percent of engineers in U.S. electrical utilities will be eligible for retirement or will leave for other reasons, according to a 2008 survey by the Center for Energy Workforce Development. That percentage translates into some 7,000 power engineers that will be needed in the electric utility industry alone. But the problem doesn't stop there. According to the report, two to three times as many electric power engineers may be needed to fulfill the needs of the entire economy. PW

The shortage of qualified engineers for the power industry, the oil industry, the nuclear industry, the construction industry, and many other industries, threatens to stifle plans for a vibrant, sustainable future. Without the manpower to turn ideas into working industries, jobs, and economies, you may as well start mixing the final kool-aid.

This looming shortage of competence is the end result of a designed dumbing down of schools -- from K-12 through the university. The substitution in the curricula of political indoctrination in the place of competence-building procedural and declarative knowledge has created at least one lost generation so far. Under Obama, the process toward brain-wasting will only accelerate.

But competent generations eventually retire, and die off. If all you are left with is psychological neotenates, academic lobotomates, and incompetent Obama zombies, your future will be dismal. But that is precisely the direction the western world is headed.

Even if universities and colleges were teeming with engineering students, the educational institutions may not be well equipped to handle the demand. The Collaborative estimated that within the next five years, 40 percent of full-time senior engineering faculty will be eligible for retirement and that 27 percent may actually do so. A number of historically strong power engineering programs have ended or are close to doing so. _PW

The rapidly depleting supply of competent engineers is just the beginning of the problem. As young minds are being rapidly destroyed by a dysfunctional educational system and popular culture, their dimming consciousness is incapable of selecting career paths for the future.

The recent debacle on Wall Street involving faulty computer models and suicidal risk instrument derivatives suggests that the mind rot extends all the way to the Ivy League cream of the crop. And under Obama, millionaire investment bankers are being bailed out by custodians, auto mechanics, garbage collectors, and taxi cab drivers -- via forced taxation of hard-earned income. Corruption on top of incompetence! Is this the future of hope and change? It seems so.

Clueless Clown, Hapless Harlequin, Zombie King

A combination of wishful thinking and abject stupidity has landed the US (and the world) in a toxic pit of hazard. It is bad enough having an inexperienced, incompetent, and ideologically blindered clown of a president in control. Unfortunately, the US Congress is led by a group of corrupt and unscrupulous quasi-criminals the likes of which has not been seen in well over a century of government corruption in the US. To top it off, everyone that Obama appoints to the executive and to the courts appears to share in these global Obama-style inadequacies and failure to lead responsibly. This will be a very rough 4 years. Even a radical rearrangement of the House of Representatives in 2010 will not be enough to reverse the destruction of Obama's first 6 months, let alone the next two years. Decades will be required to recover from this episode of failure by American voters and media.

Abandoning a Nuclear Deterrent Out of Wishful Thinking

Obama's War On Business

Obama's Recovery Plan Can Only Fail

Obama Prefers the UN to the US

Entering an Obama Dark Age

China's Support for Jihad in Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan



H/T Reverse Spins

Are Lawyers Getting Stupider?

I would not have thought it possible for lawyers to get more stupid, but according to a study from the Centre for Market and Public Organisation (CMPO) at Bristol University, the IQs of lawyers are dropping toward the population average. Thinking about the attorneys currently running the US government, however, it becomes easier to believe the decline. In fact, are they absolutely sure that average attorney IQ has not dropped below population average IQ?

The CMPO study.... found that, although the comparative wealth of lawyers’ parents had increased between the two study groups – born in 1958 and 1970 – their scores in IQ tests had moved closer to the average.

BPP College principle Carl Lygo argues that a relative fall in ability might not be such a bad thing. “This doesn’t surprise me,” he says. “Opportunities are ­widening – there are all kinds of people out there who need all kinds of different lawyers.”

He points to the growing number of people embarking on a law career, adding: “The law doesn’t need to be the ­preserve of the elite.”.....

.....Researchers tracked some 18,000 people from birth to age 34, recording vital data along the way. The 1970 group is the latest study (apart from one carried out in 2000, which is of little use when analysing today’s lawyers). The results of the 1970 survey were only released a couple of years ago and it was not until this year that the data was broken down by ability and income for each profession. The ­participants of the 1970 survey are now well established in law firms and ­chambers, making this the best data available, given that large-scale ­economic studies are thin on the ground. _The Lawyer_via TaxProfBlog_via_NewsAlert

If a pilot is incompetent, the plane may well crash. If the surgeon is incompetent, the patient may die or have the wrong leg amputated. But if a lawyer is incompetent, he fits right in with most of the other lawyers and judges, so there is generally no penalty.

Even if an attorney graduated from Harvard or Yale, due to affirmative action, grade inflation, and widespread cheating, there is little reason to expect him to be competent. Look at Obama. Case closed.

A Liberal Gets Uneasy About Obama's Leftism

Stuart Taylor is a respected liberal legal scholar and author who has supported Obama out of a belief that Obama was "one of us." By "one of us", Taylor meant that he thought that Obama was really a "good liberal", and not a wild-eyed leftist like those right wingers were claiming. But even a "baby leftist" can start to wake up. Being taken for a chump is not easy to admit, but Taylor may be beginning to comprehend how easily he has been led down the path.

I have taken certain liberties with the excerpted text below, from Taylor's timid "mea culpa." Text inside the square brackets is editorial comment from Al Fin. _Al Fin

Having praised President Obama's job performance in two recent columns, it is with regret that I now worry that he may be [crafting] what looks more and more like a depression and may engineer so much spending, debt, and government control of the economy as to leave most Americans permanently less prosperous and less free.

Other Obama-admiring centrists have expressed similar concerns. Like them, I would like to be proved wrong. After all, if this president fails, who will revive our economy? And when? And what kind of America will our children inherit?

....But with the nation already plunging deep into [gratuitous] debt to [drown] the crippled financial system and stimulate the economy, Obama's proposals for many hundreds of billions in additional spending on universal health care, universal postsecondary education, a massive overhaul of the energy economy, and other liberal programs seem grandiose and unaffordable.

With little in the way of offsetting savings likely to materialize, the Obama agenda would probably generate trillion-dollar deficits with no end in sight, or send middle-class taxes soaring to record levels, or both.

All this from a man who told the nation last week that he doesn't "believe in bigger government" and who promised tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans.

The president's suggestions that all the necessary tax increases can be squeezed out of the richest 2 percent are [devious and ] deceptive and [designed] to stir class resentment. And his apparent cave-ins to [leftist revolutionary] interest groups [will] change the country for the worse.

Such concerns [will] help explain why the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 17 percent from the morning of Inauguration Day (8,280) to its close on March 4 (6,876). The markets have also been deeply shaken by Obama's alarming failure to come up with a clear plan for fixing the crippled financial system -- which has loomed since his election four months ago as by far his most urgent challenge -- or for working with foreign leaders to arrest the meltdown of the world economy.

Stuart Taylor

Papercrete Dome Project

Here is an interesting tutorial on how to build a papercrete dome by a couple who are building a life in rural New Mexico.

Their first papercrete dome was a simple project to house their PV battery bank. With only minor modification, it should be possible to use the same technique to build any small shelter from a child's playhouse to a simple guest house. Reinforced papercrete domes are both strong and weather resistant, if the proper finishing layers are applied. Insulation properties are good, and could be modified to the particular location. Thermal mass characteristics can likewise be adapted to location, with simple modifications. Creative possibilities in design are immense with these building techniques.

H/T to MAKE and Wired

Jet Engine / Gas Turbine No Birds, Please!!!

These precisely machined engines do not take kindly to a meal of flying birds. The result of such a meal is not pretty, and makes for a very hair-raising trip back to Earth. Just ask Sully.

Searching for a Secular Morality

Each of us has grown up in a world in which moral judgments already exist. These judgments are passed every day by everyone on the conduct of everyone else. Each of us not only finds himself approving or disapproving how other people act, but approving or disapproving certain actions, and even certain rules or principles of action, wholly apart from his feelings about those who perform or follow them. So deep does this go that most of us even apply these judgments to our own conduct, and approve or disapprove of our own conduct in so far as we judge it to have conformed to the principles or standards by which we judge others. When we have failed, in our own judgment, to live up to the moral code which we habitually apply to others, we feel "guilty"; our "conscience" bothers us.
Henry Hazlitt, The Foundations of Morality

Across the western nations, religion has lost its hold over the people. Tragically, there is no other system of ethical guidance that has achieved any level of authority even closely approaching the prior authority of religion. In terms of ethics, most westerners appear to be "running blind." Many Al Fin readers have watched this developing ethical vacuum growing, with its concomitant rise in crime and societal and sub-societal dysfunction. In a multi-traditional, multi-religious, multi-ethnic society such as most western nations are becoming, a common moral and ethical system is absolutely vital to prevent the type of violence and societal schisms which are a constant threat to any society's present and future well-being.

Muslim societies solve this problem by declaring the supremacy of Islam, and forcing all other religions and belief systems into an uncomfortably subservient position. Communist societies solve the problem by establishing the communist state as a de facto religion and arbiter of morality, with all other belief systems considered irrelevant and obsolete -- if not treasonous.

Societies which pride themselves on their tolerance can not easily utilise either of those strategies. As a result, when the original basis of law and morality of a society begins to lose authority at the same time as the society grows much more strongly multi-traditional, the scene is set for violent clashes and schisms within the society.

The need for a widely accepted cross-traditional basis for ethical and moral behaviour is self-evident, but the devising of such a cross-traditional ethical system is hampered by all of the factions which are firmly attached to their own system of ethics. Most of these "strongly attached" factions are not willing to accept the need for any other system of ethics than their own. Hence, religious and ideological wars throughout history.

Where would one start, when attempting to devise a secular, or cross-traditional, system of ethics? Well, to begin with, one would not publicly begin such an effort in Iran or Saudi Arabia -- not if one valued his head. Even in Holland, Theo van Gogh discovered that publishing ideas that point out shortcomings in other ethical systems comes with a cost. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie, various Muhammed cartoonists, and others across Europe have learned the same lesson and lived to tell the story.

For those who are interested in this project, I would like to make one suggestion: The Foundations of Morality by Henry Hazlitt (long PDF). Before you click on the link, you should know that the PDF is a 24 MB book-length treatment, so you may want to right click and use the "Save Link As" option. That will download the document to your computer or removable drive, leaving your browser to function normally without bogging down.

I have found Hazlitt's approach to be quite valuable. As a disclaimer I will say that I am also comfortable with Hazlitt's viewpoints of market economics and libertarian politics as well. That comfort allows me greater play in the mental wrestling that goes on reading the book, than a person antagonistic to Hazlitt's strong individualist stance would have. Such a person would likely not survive the first few chapters. Which only highlights the problem of devising a cross-traditional, cross-ideological system of ethics.

In the end, such a system can only be agreed upon out of a pragmatic desire for a society that intermeshes cleanly, despite the many different traditions, religions, ethnic groupings, and nationalities of origin. Without the will to create such a cleanly meshing society of inevitable sub-societies, all is lost.

If the disparate components of a multi-traditional society are unwilling to admit a common secular morality into the areas where the different traditions interact, clearly the word "society" no longer means what most people think it means. If such is the case, an increase in crime, violence, and ill will between sub-societies of multi-traditional nations is inevitable -- perhaps leading to the type of dissolution that occurred in the former Yugoslavia, for large sections of several western nations. Or perhaps leading to something very much worse.

We are caught in the lurch, and many of us fail to recognise the problem. What are the odds that a common and workable system of ethics will find its way back into the lives of most people living in western countries? Slim to none. But the concept is worth working on, for the sake of emerging groups of more far thinking individuals. Next Level Humans.

Is the UK Education Debacle to be the Future of Education in the United States?

The UK is fading as an important world power. Its human capital is being squandered, its very foundation of potential accomplishment allowed to crumble from neglect. The government pushes adolescents to attend university, but then stands by and watches as more and more choose nonsense courses that leave them without income potential are useful knowledge. Is this what Barak Obama wishes to emulate, to make the US "more like Europe and the rest of the world?"

In Reform's report, it said the drift was leading to a skills shortage in the UK, forcing many firms to rely on foreign labour...."Removing individual involvement and decisions from the process has the danger of undermining the values of successful education - personal discipline, curiosity, independence of thought and hard work," said the report.

"It has helped to create a something for nothing culture. One result is the growth of spoon-fed generation that wants to receive education passively and without effort. This generation prefers the X-Factor to A grades."

...Just 6.2 per cent of British university degrees are in engineering, manufacturing and construction, compared to more than nine per cent in North American and 15 per cent in continental Europe, said the study. _Telegraph

If you provide an environment for adolescents to hang out, drinking and using drugs, with free hooking up privileges, taking nonsense classes and generally wasting themselves into oblivion, most young people will take you up on the offer. Particularly if nothing in their past has instilled into them any deeper sense of values or self-motivation.

For the past few decades, at least, the adults of society have been distracted from the function of mind-formation of youth. Consequently, the youths have raised themselves into perpetual adolescence, of a most incompetent and self-destructive nature. Are you surprised at the outcome?

It appears that rather than lifting up the third world, the first world is heading downward itself.

H/T An Englishman's Castle

Counter-Intuitive Graphics

This graphic demonstrates an inverse relationship between CO2 concentration and temperature. Watts Up With That?
This graphic demonstrates the growth of US government spending in the human resources sector while spending on national defense and everything else stagnates or even declines slightly. Under a President Obama defense spending would drop significantly while increases in human resources and new spending would likely be ten times the cuts in defense.

The "Catch 22" of human resource spending is that it is tied to cost of living, and can only go up. As the elderly population grows older, as the highly skilled craftsmen of industry grow old and retire and are not replaced, as high IQ populations die off and are replaced by lower IQ immigrants who can never take their place--paying for the exponential increases in government spending coming down the pipe will be impossible.

Can Obama Keep His Promise to Black Males?

There is a sense of optimism among many US blacks regarding the so-far successful candidacy of Barak Obama. This ecstatic burst of utopianism extends well beyond the US black community into Europe--even to Islamic terror organisations--but it is US blacks whose hopes are elevated to the most rapturous levels.

If Obama could do anything to help black males in the US, perhaps it would be worth it to elect him president just for that. What are the challenges?

In examining graduation rates, the report finds a national graduation rate for black males (47 percent) that is 28 percentage points lower than the graduation rate for white males (75 percent). In ten states, the difference in graduation rates for black males and white males is 30 percentage points or more...In addition to low graduation rates, black males also have "consistently low educational attainment levels, are more chronically unemployed and underemployed, are less healthy and have access to fewer health care resources, die much younger, and are many times more likely to be sent to jail for periods significantly longer than males of other racial/ethnic groups," according to the report. _Source_via_JoanneJacobs

As a group, black males are the chronic statistical laggards of US society. Can Barak Obama do anything at all to help them? The problem is vast and begins at a very early age.

In the country as a whole, the number of Black students in Special Education classes is disproportionately high and the number in Gifted/Talented programs is disproportionately low. The number of Black students, particularly Black male students, who receive out-of-school suspensions and are expelled is also disproportionately high. _Source_via_JoanneJacobs

A quick look at the chart above shows that as bad as young black males are doing in school, their sisters--born of the same parents, raised in the same homes, and eating the same foods--are actually doing fairly well.

Why are black girls doing reasonably well by comparison? Black girls, in contrast to the boys, get pretty good grades, go to college at decent rates and graduate from college at very good rates, earning degrees as twice the rate of men. _Source_via_JoanneJacobs

Black males are staggeringly over-represented in the prison population--44% of prisoners, and only 5% or so of the population (black males of prison age). The overall IQ average for American blacks is 85. That is 1 standard deviation below the overall mean of roughly 100. It very possible that the black male average IQ is even less than the overall US black average IQ, looking at comparative life success.

We know that executive function (EF) is more important than IQ for life success, although EF lacks a comparably accepted metric to IQ, so it is more difficult to compare EF statistics. EF can be improved by training (Posner, Rothbart), which should be done not much later than age 6. Even so, EF--like IQ--is highly heritable, so that there are limits to what training can do. Still, better trained than not.

Finally, if Barak Obama becomes US President next January, will the IQ's and EF's of black males magically and instantly normalise? Will we see abrupt drops in criminal and delinquent behaviour from black males? Will black males suddenly begin succeeding in school--from kindergarten through college? Will the exaggerated strut of young black males suddenly have a full complement of efficacy and competence backing it up?

Probably not. Not immediately, and not for a very long time. Then what will become of all of the magical expectations floating around the messianic candidacy of Barak Obama?

Obama has no substantive achievements, no particular experience or accomplishments to prepare him for the challenges he would face as chief executive of the world's only superpower. But never mind all that. Born of a white mother, raised largely by a white family, and only absorbing the victimist culture of black America secondhand--what has prepared Obama to pull black males out of the incredibly deep hole they are in?

Reinventing the Wheel: Airless Tire

The military is trying to develop a tire for HumVees and other vehicles running on pneumatic tires, that cannot be punctured or shot out from under the vehicle. The "airless tire" is a project being worked on by the US DOD with the help of Resilient Technologies and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

“You see reports all the time of troops who were injured by an IED or their convoys got stranded because their tires were shot out,” says Mike Veihl, general manager of Resilient. “There’s all sorts of armor on the vehicle, but if you’re running in the theater and get your tire shot out, what have you got? You’ve got a bunch of armor in the middle of a field.”

...The Wisconsin design breakthrough, first developed by Resilient’s in-house design and development team, takes a page from nature. “The goal was to reduce the variation in the stiffness of the tire, to make it transmit loads uniformly and become more homogenous,” Osswald says. “And the best design, as nature gives it to us, is really the honeycomb.”

...The patent pending Resilient design relies on a precise pattern of six-sided cells that are arranged, like a honeycomb, in a way that best mimics the “ride feel” of pneumatic tires. The honeycomb geometry also does a great job of reducing noise levels and reducing heat generated during usage - two common problems with past applications. “We definitely brainstormed,” says Foltz. “We wanted to create more of a matrix of cells within the tire, and it seemed kind of natural to go with the honeycomb’s hexagon shape. We tried some other shapes, such as diamond shapes, and they didn’t perform as well.” _Source

Honeycomb designs make sense for load distribution, but I suspect there is a better design waiting to be tried. A pneumatic tire distributes the load almost uniformly in continuously alternating tension-compression in the tire, distributed by the compressed air inside the tire.

This is the type of relatively simple engineering problem that computer models should be capable of handling. In terms of vehicle maneuverability, we may find that the pneumatic tire is not the best type of tire.

Interestingly, some of the same problems that need to be solved to design the best airless tire also need to be solved in the design of the modular seastead. The outer "rim" of the seasted needs to absorb the energy of the surrounding seas, protecting the sensitive living and working areas within.

Interesting work.

New Jet Engine Incrementally Better

The new Pratt and Whitney geared turbofan is an excellent innovation in gas turbines for jet aircraft. By allowing the compressor to spin at a slower speed than the drive turbine fans, the overall engine system can burn 12 to 15 % less fuel per amount of thrust. In a time of high fuel prices, that level of improvement in efficiency matters.

Current jet engines have fans that suck air into the combustion chamber, where it is compressed, mixed with fuel, and ignited. Then it's blown through a turbine, generating thrust. It works, but it's inefficient because the fan is connected to the engine and turns at the same speed as the turbine. Fans work best at low speed, while turbines work best at high speed.

Pratt & Whitney solved that problem with a gearbox that lets the fan and turbine spin independently. The fan is larger and it spins at one-third the speed of the turbine, creating a quieter, more powerful engine the company says requires less fuel, emits less C02 and costs 30 percent less to maintain. Pratt & Whitney has been torture-testing the engines, and its engineers have simulated more than 40,000 takeoffs and landings. __Wired

A nice incremental improvement, and quite timely. More on the new engine:

...the Geared Turbofan will have operating costs 10% lower than current engines and maintenance costs that are 30% less. According to Pratt & Whitney, that translates into $600,000 $1.5 million in annual cost savings for a 120- to 180-passenger aircraft. __Source

For the airlines that survive the current fuel price peak, this should help.

Top Dystopian Novels List

In general, I separate dystopian novels from science fiction, mentally. There is a lot of overlap, naturally. Still, books on this list are generally not also on the SF list.

1. 1984
2. Fahrenheit 451
3. Brave New World
4. Lord of the Flies
5. Handmaid's Tale
6. Animal Farm
7. We
8. This Perfect Day
9. Anthem
10. Atlas Shrugged
11. Camp Concentration
12. Planet of the Apes
13. The Sheep Look Up
14. Stand on Zanzibar
15. Logan's Run
16. 334
17. A Clockwork Orange
18. Mockingbird (Tevis)
19. The Diamond Age
20. The Castle
21. The Dispossessed
22. Alongside Night
23. The Last Starship from Earth

More to follow as I think of them.

Here is the Wiki Category: Dystopian Novels, which contains quite a few more.

When George Bush II was elected US President, there were a lot of predictions that the US would descend into a dystopian world very much like 1984, Handmaid's Tale, or Fahrenheit 451. The reason so many people made these predictions, is that they never truly learned the lessons of the dystopian authors. Nor had they ever truly studied the real world dystopias honestly--Castro's Cuba, Mao's China, Stalin's USSR, Sandinista Nicaragua, Chavez' developing dystopia in Venezuela, etc. Their predictions were ideologically based, rather than based on any realistic conceptual or evidence-based foundation.

In reality, it is the candidate that is supported most enthusiastically by the news media, entertainment media, and academicians that is most likely to cross into dystopian territory. In the 2008 US election, that likely candidate is not difficult to identify.

Musical Genes Located In Finland

Collaborating researchers from Finland and the USA have discovered genes for musical aptitude in Finnish families.

Molecular and statistical genetic studies in 15 Finnish families have shown that there is a substantial genetic component in musical aptitude. Musical aptitude was determined using three tests: a test for auditory structuring ability (Karma Music test), and the Seashore pitch and time discrimination subtests. The study represents the first systematic molecular genetic study that aims in the identification of candidate genes associated with musical aptitude.

The identified regions contain genes affecting cell extension and migration during neural development. Interestingly, an overlapping region previously associated with genetic locus for dyslexia was found raising a question about common evolutionary background of music and language faculties. The results show that musical aptitude is likely to be regulated by several predisposing genes/variants __SciDaily

It sounds as if the genes involved in musical aptitude are also involved in other functions as well. Brain functions involved in the sorting of syntax, rhythm, amplitude, scale, ratio and proportion, and many other facilities involved in skilled musical ability and interpretation will necessarily be utilised by other brain ensembles.

Still, little by little scientists studying gene expression are connecting the dots between genetic codes and real world skill. That is a cause for at least a small celebration.

Jackie Chan's Early Fighting Days

This is one of the best fight scenes I have seen. Chan's opponent in the scene was a 6 time world kickboxing champion and is quite good.

H/T Impact Lab

Top Science Fiction Lists

Science fiction remains one of my favourite genres of fiction, to read. It also remains my favourite genre for writing. Here is an ongoing list of my favourites in SF over the years. I will add more as they come to mind.

1. Dune
2. Childhood's End
3. Ender's Shadow
4. Foundation (1-3)
5. Neuromancer
6. Ringworld
7. Fahrenheit 451
8. Hyperion Cantos
9. A Canticle for Leibowitz
10. The Demolished Man
11. Starship Troopers
12. The Space Merchants
13. Blood Music
14. Flowers for Algernon
15. Camp Concentration
16. The Genocides
17. Shockwave Rider
18. The High Crusade
19. Tuf Voyaging
20. A Fire Upon the Deep
21. Replay
22. Jumper
23. Cryptonomicon
24. Player of Games
25. Glory Season
26. A Deepness in the Sky
27. To Your Shattered Bodies Go
28. The Forever War
29. Midshipman's Hope
30. Cities in Flight
31. Rites of Passage
32. No Blade of Grass
33. The Martian Chronicles
34. Engine Summer
35. The Genesis Machine
36. Earth Abides
37. Citizen of the Galaxy
38. The Peace War
39. Gateway
40. Slan
41. Eon
42. Solaris
43. Rendezvous with Rama
44. The Humanoids
45. Pavane
46. Old Man's War
47. The Stainless Steel Rat
48. Puppet Masters
49. Doomsday Book
50. A Boy and His Dog
51. Davy
52. Alas Babylon
53. City
54. Void Captain's Tale

Here are some top SF lists from various sources:

Peter Sykes top 100 SF

Phobos top 100 SF

Top Ranked SF by James Wallace Harris

Top 100 SF by vote of 3316 internet respondents

Top 100 SF by David Pringle

Top 1000 SF and Fantasy by vote

James Wallace Harris classics of SF novels, short stories, anthologies etc

Warm Tropical Air Flows South From Melting Icecaps

Just as Nobel Prize winner Al Gore and the IPCC predicted, warm tropical air is rushing south from melting icecaps, threatening to envelop the entire northern hemisphere. Saskatoon has been particularly affected by the heat, but Winnipeg is also suffering from the unseasonable heat wave.

To paraphrase the right Reverend Wright, "god-damn those deniers." When the warming cataclysm is right in front of their eyes, they try to ruin it for the rest of us--who were foresightful enough to get in on the carbon trade enterprise on the ground floor.

And They Want Al Gore to Be President?

Al Gore has done another stupid thing. He is accepting a $100K speaker's fee to speak to a group of techies under the strict condition that no news media is present, and no video or audio recordings or photographs will be allowed!

Gore has demanded--as a condition of giving the keynote speech--that press be barred from the room. As Kim Zetter wrote for Wired.com: "Video recordings, broadcasts and photography are also prohibited."

Gore might have gotten away with it a decade ago. And, to be sure, he has the right to negotiate that requirement with RSA. But nowadays, when tech-savvy audience members, who each coughed up some $3,670 for registration, are outfitted with digital cameras and recording devices (including on mobile phones), any speaker who insists on this requirement is foolish or naive.

You decide which category Gore falls into.

This isn't the first time that Gore has insisted on a $100,000-or-so speaking contract that prohibited press from attending. He did it at a speech at Augustana College (billed as "free and open to the public"). He did it at a speech last year to the American Institute of Architects convention, which the San Antonio Express-News crashed and wrote up anyway.

...Does anyone really think Gore's Don't-Record-Me Ban will work at a conference of 17,000+ gadget-outfitted security geeks? Thought so. So here's my offer: A free News.com (or CNET, depending on what we have in stock) baseball cap or fleece--your choice--to the first person who e-mails me a link to the video of the astonishingly publicity-shy ex-veep at RSA next month.___Cnet

This does not reduce my opinion of Al Gore in the slightest. Nothing could do that, given that Gore negative-pegged my opinion-o-meter years ago, and it has not recovered since.

The astonishing thing is that top-ranked US Democratic Party political analysts and pundits are public wishing for Al Gore to come to the Democratic Party Convention this summer and rescue the DP from itself! As if Gore is capable of rescuing his pet poodle from a neighbor's cat, much less rescuing an entire political party.

The dumbing down of US schools is bearing fruit within the Democratic Party voting population. Already in possession of two hopeless candidates, the DP is trying to resurrect yet a third! Yep. Pegged it at the negative extreme. I paid good money for that meter, too.

Global Warming Basics

Intelligent people understand that they can trust neither politicians, nor the media. What some of them have not yet learned, is that they cannot blindly trust anyone, regardless of credentials.

Consider the "science" behind the global warming high orthodoxy and crusade. One can pose the issue in such complex terms that even most meteorologists, geologists, and climatologists cannot completely follow the argument. Or, more constructively, one can illustrate the problem in a simple manner--reduce it to the basics--for fact-checking.

...global warming requires a more-or-less monotonic increase in the accumulation of heat (in Joules) within the climate system. The use of a global average surface temperature, regardless if it is increasing or decreasing is an inadequate and inaccurate metric of global warming as the heat is not only a function of temperature but also mass over which the heat change occurs! This is why the ocean is the dominate reservoir of heat content change.

With respect to the change in upper ocean heat content, as reported on a Climate Science weblog on February 15 2008, the paper

Willis, J. K., D. P. Chambers and R. Steven Nerem, 2008: Assessing the Globally Averaged Sea Level Budget on Seasonal and Interannual Time Scales. Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans (in press),

reports on no upper (700m) ocean warming since 2004.

Thus while we cannot state that the recent widely distributed cold waves or overall cooling of the troposphere are evidence of the end of global warming over decadal and longer time scales, we can state that global warming has not occurred in the last 4 years. This is a major issue for both climate science and for policymakers, as only those who blindly (or deliberately) ignore the scientific evidence can still accept the 2007 IPCC conclusions as settled science.___ClimateScience

A scientific theory must contain falsifiable hypotheses. The key to understanding and testing current orthodox theories of anthropogenic global warming, is to identify its falsifiable hypotheses and to attempt to falsify them.

The current climate orthodoxy is based upon a set of assumptions--incorporated into its models--that should eventually be pared down cleanly and honestly enough to a form which can be falsified. We are not at that point as of yet. Currently, the orthodoxy has taken care to obscure and complicate its theories so as to present a front to the world which is indistinguishable from an unfalsifiable belief system, a religion.

But if catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) orthodoxy is to be taught in university science departments, rather than in cloistered seminaries and monasteries, curious students, post-grads, and junior professors will attempt to formulate the issues in terms of science--falsifiable hypotheses. As these un-initiated supplicants produce a body of work based upon pre-orthodox mindsets, it should be possible to tease out a set of hypotheses which are falsifiable.

Time. More data. Cleaner theories.

The Lethal Meme: Going to University for Indoctrination into Dead-End Thinking

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.___RichardDawkins

A lethal meme, analogous to a lethal gene, is a meme that leads to a certain level of lethality for the society or culture that is parasitised by the lethal meme. Meme-complexes are even more sophisticated than simple memes, and lethal meme-complexes produce more wide-ranging lethal effects to entire cultures and civilisations. Multiculturalism is one such meme-complex.

The idea that all cultures are equal in merit and deserving respect, an idea devoid of any historical perspective, could be seriously proposed and adopted only in western liberal democracies. And logically such an idea meant only one thing, the diminution of the West and its achievements in comparison to other cultures.

Multiculturalism institutionalized as a policy, run by self-perpetuating bureaucracies and sustained by entrepreneurs of a growing multicultural industry, became an easy ride for its proponents and clients.

Immigrants were not required to embrace the West's culture and complex history; and the West did not have to strain itself in instructing immigrants on the need or importance of embracing it, warts and all.

Multiculturalism worked so long as the illusion of cultural harmony could be maintained.

But once the sham of equality got exposed by the heat of Islamist violence -- once it became undeniable that a culture in which a woman, for instance, can assert her individual freedom without fear is not at par with a culture where a woman's worth is less than that of a man -- multiculturalism as an idea was dead.

Historians will note a period of confusion followed the death of multiculturalism before the West asserted its ideals of freedom and democracy, and moved on. ___TorontoSun

The West is confronted by more enemies than multiculturalism within, and Islamism without. The West is also confronted with China, Russia, and an unholy alliance of corrupt thugocracies that span the globe.

One thing is certain. As long as the killing meme-complex of multiculturalism is taught as dogma in the universities and lower schools of the West, the death of the West will continue to hang in the balance.

Men and women who love the hard-fought ideals of the West such as

• freedom of economy, thought, assembly, and religion
• limited, representative government
• individual rights of self-determination and self-defense
• separation of ideology and state
• the freedom to conceive and work toward a marvelous future
• and many more ideals of widespread non-violence, self-determination and well-being

will need to make themselves heard, leaving no doubt as to their intention and ability to defeat all enemies of these ideals. The West cannot be weak and passive to these threats from within and without. Never surrender these ideals.

Meme-Gene Coevolution PDF and streaming
Dawkins on Memes
The Meme Meme

Dan Fogelberg 1951-2007

His life was always about music. He left a fine legacy of work behind. He did what he loved.

Mozart's Requiem

Transition to the Future

Welcome to the future, where city streets are war zones between drug gangs and sectarian militias. A world whose cities are like Beirut of the 1980s, where the sounds of firefights, car bombs, and bloody martyrdom greet one's ears more commonly than sounds of birds singing or children playing.Financially and morally depleted by the Obama administration of the early 2000s, the United States had lost all ability to keep trade routes safe, or to ride herd on trans-national criminal organisations and religious terrorist groups. At street level, it has become a free-for-all, worldwide.

The world's elites create cities in the sky, in an attempt to escape the cheapness of human life on the streets below. By paying "protection fees" to street-level gangs and militias, the sky-cities' street level foundations and access are protected, for the most part. The last sky city to be brought down by the gangs was in Singapore of 2059. The subsequent reprisals to the streets of Singapore by the triad owners of the felled Sky City, have left most of the island freehold uninhabitable to this day.The rise of China as world hegemon in the early 2020s paved the way for entrenchment of large-scale corruption across Europe, North America, and Oceania -- regions formerly supportive of property rights and rule of law. Then as China itself fragmented into warring factions in the late 2020s, the entire world became a place without law. The teeming masses of the third world discovered that the developed world lacked the will to defend its borders. Soon there was no distinction between third world and first world.

Crime lords and militia leaders have no use for space launches, so every year another irreplaceable satellite falls flaming back to Earth. During the 2030s, nuclear arsenals finally fell into the hands of the gangs, and a few short nuclear wars quickly thinned the ranks of would-be nuclear terrorists and warriors. Several warheads turned out to be duds, and a few thousand self-styled nuclear submariners took residence in Davy Jones' locker. They lacked the competence to safely pilot the aging sea monsters -- particularly the Russian death traps.

As the skies of the world once again grow dingy with coal and wood smoke, all pretense of protecting the water and air of the planet are abandoned. Any species that cannot fend for themselves will suffer the fate of the dodo. Rain forests are slashed and burned, and huge pit mines gouge the surface of every continent and large island. This is the rapidly poisoning world that the many leftist environmental movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries made possible, through their quasi-terrorist tactics against the world of law -- a world that was quickly shrinking under their noses. It took only an Obama presidency and the lack of any credible opposition for the "Greens" to finish off human economic freedoms and any chance for a clean prosperity that might carry men to the stars.

And so the wealthy few -- many of them crime lords themselves -- huddle in the uncertain safety of the sky cities. Listening to the bombs and gunfire far below. Forgetting how close the world had come to climbing out of the primitivity of lower human nature -- but now mired in the stinking, choking future of perpetual sectarian and criminal warfare.

Originally published in Al Fin

H/T Inhabitat and Time