Fabulous news!
The Isotopes have hired an organist for the upcoming baseball season.
shadows on the cave wall
Who knew I had the thug gangsta of all majors.
Technology and Intentions
Ed Felten tells the interesting story of a nameless computer scientist who’s developed something useful, but… Well, I’ll let Ed pick up the story:
He isn’t sure he wants the public to find out about his research. He says this, even though his work would probably be of interest to many people, and could be useful to far more. The problem, he told me, is that if too many people find out what he has done and realize its value, some of them may start using it for illegal purposes. He doesn’t want that kind of trouble.
Adding to the Planet
Any more, it seems as if I don’t have people’s feeds on my planet, I forget to read them. (I thought Matthew Bohnsack had dropped from the face of the earth. Turns out he just jiggered the blog, and his feed had a new address.)
Today, I added MJH.
(Note to Telsa, requesting please an RSS feed?)
Shipping the Cheap Shit Back
Pika’s recent observations of cheap shit from China being shipped by the trainload to the heartland may or may not be related to something I noticed more than a decade ago along the same rail line.
I was making relatively frequent visits to Clovis, New Mexico. We’d stay in the Holiday Inn, which was right across from the tracks, and we would see train after train loaded with stuff going west. Only west. I figured all the shit would eventually end up out in California, and they’d run out of stuff in the east and have to start shipping it back.
Clearly, given Pika’s observation, the whole thing was more international than I realized. That’s probably why it took so much longer than I expected. I wonder what sort of value has been added. Or did it just sit around in containers on the dock at Tianjin for ten years?
My Childhood
Old school chum Kenna Ogg recently tracked me down, having found this:
That’s me on the right and Mike on the left, though Kenna and I are both at a bit of a loss as to Mike’s last name. It’s from David Mackintosh’s and Gigi Bailin’s birthday party during our freshman year in high school. You can see my unerring fashion sense has deep roots.
Testing
Testing, testing. 1 2 3.
Can you hear me in the back?
Thanks. Look it’s great to be here. We’ve got a terrific show planned for you this evening. Blarg is here, so stick around. We’ll be right back.
Warming and La Niña
There’s an interesting new paper in tomorrow’s Science by Rickaby and Halloran that supports the idea that warm conditions during the Pliocene were linked to a cool equatorial Pacific – a La Niña-like state:
Our Pliocene paleothermometer supports the idea of a dynamic “ocean thermostat” in which heating of the tropical Pacific leads to a cooling of the east equatorial Pacific and a La Ni?a?like state, analogous to observations of a transient increasing east-west sea surface temperature gradient in the 20th-century tropical Pacific.
This is relevant because of the connection between La Niña drought in the southwestern U.S.
This is an idea I first ran across last year in a paper by Mike Mann and some other folks. It also fits quite nicely with a paper last year by Ed Cook and some other dendrochronologists linking warmer temperatures during the Medieval with widespread drought in what is now the western United States.
I don’t know a lot about this, but apparently there have been folks who have argued in the past that a warming greenhouse climate could tilt toward El Niño-like conditions. This is the latest line of evidence to contradict that assertion.
Stuff We Don’t Understand
MJH passes along New Scientist’s 13 Things that Do Not Make Sense. My favorite:
8 The Pioneer anomaly
THIS is a tale of two spacecraft. Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972; Pioneer 11 a year later. By now both craft should be drifting off into deep space with no one watching. However, their trajectories have proved far too fascinating to ignore.
That’s because something has been pulling – or pushing – on them, causing them to speed up. The resulting acceleration is tiny, less than a nanometre per second per second. That’s equivalent to just one ten-billionth of the gravity at Earth’s surface, but it is enough to have shifted Pioneer 10 some 400,000 kilometres off track. NASA lost touch with Pioneer 11 in 1995, but up to that point it was experiencing exactly the same deviation as its sister probe. So what is causing it?
Nobody knows. Some possible explanations have already been ruled out, including software errors, the solar wind or a fuel leak. If the cause is some gravitational effect, it is not one we know anything about. In fact, physicists are so completely at a loss that some have resorted to linking this mystery with other inexplicable phenomena.
Bruce Bassett of the University of Portsmouth, UK, has suggested that the Pioneer conundrum might have something to do with variations in alpha, the fine structure constant (see “Not so constant constants”, page 37). Others have talked about it as arising from dark matter – but since we don’t know what dark matter is, that doesn’t help much either. “This is all so maddeningly intriguing,” says Michael Martin Nieto of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “We only have proposals, none of which has been demonstrated.”
Fight the Man
What kind of police state is this that we’re living in, when my daughter can’t buy spray paint for her science fair project and can’t go hear all-girl Japanese punk bands?