Smells Like A TEA Party...

"I know for a fact that many of the leading figures in the field read the blogs, but so do high-school science students. The scary thing is that frequently you can’t tell which is which.”

Peter Woit
Columbia mathematician


"...In recent years, as science reporters and interested amateurs have turned to the arXiv – and as some physics personalities have started blogs – the audience for physics has both expanded and fragmented. “I know for a fact that many of the leading figures in the field read the blogs, but so do high-school science students,” Woit, the Columbia mathematician and string-theory critic, said. “The scary thing is that frequently you can’t tell which is which.” The leading blogs have readerships that, while including some loud dissenters, tend to align with the perspectives of their authors – Distler, of the University of Texas, has a blog that attracts many string theorists and enthusiasts, while Woit’s blog draws more skeptics. It works somewhat in the way the blogosphere operates in politics. Andreas Albrecht, a physics professor at the University of California at Davis, said that the blogs had opened physics to a new sort of populism, one that the academic establishment had to figure out how to manage. “It just pushes thoses buttons,” Albrecht said. “There’s some really good stuff, but a lot of really sloppy stuff.” What you have, in other words, is the erosion of the referee and the rise of a scientific underclass..."

Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Surfing The Universe
The New Yorker
July 12, 2008


"In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything at any hour of the day or night."

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Jolting Uncle Milton With The Shock Doctrine

"...The central thesis of the book is that capitalism and democracy, free markets and free people, do not, as we’ve been told, go hand in hand. On the contrary, capitalism—at least fundamentalist capitalism, of the type promoted by the late economist Milton Friedman and his “Chicago School” acolytes—is so unpopular, and so obviously harmful to everyone except the richest of the rich, that its establishment requires, at best, trickery and, at worst, terror and torture. Friedman believed that markets perform best when freed from government interference, so he advocated getting rid of tariffs, subsidies, minimum-wage laws, public housing, Social Security, financial regulation, and licensing requirements, including those for doctors—indeed, virtually every measure devised to protect people from the market’s harsh logic. Klein argues that the only circumstance in which a population would accept Friedman-style reforms is when it is in a state of shock, following a crisis of some sort—a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, a war. A person in shock regresses to a childlike state in which he longs for a parental figure to take control; similarly, a population in a state of shock will hand exceptional powers to its leaders, permitting them to destroy the regulatory functions of government..."

Lariss MacFarquhar

Read more @ The New Yorker

What If FOX News Is Wrong? #1

Those eco-freaks who have been proven wrong about global warming say a sign of global warming in an increase in the release of methane gas. Of course, some of the greatest scientific experts of today -- like Shaun Hannity of FOX News -- have debunked these global warming charlatans of the great fraud they are foisting on the innocents of this Earth.

Wouldn't it be funny if FOX News turned out to be wrong and the Earth experience rapid warming that costs citizens untold trillions of dollars to combat the impacts and it quickly became obvious that billions spend in the first two decades of the second millennium could have significantly slowed the warming?

"The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world's oceans. Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap."

Natalia Shakhova
University of Alaska
International Arctic Research Center




A section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas, according to the findings of an international research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov.

The research results, published in the March 5 edition of the journal Science, show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.

Read more @ Science Daily