Back from the far Side

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Back in the realm of the living. Notes from my multi-faceted absence:

William Connolley has a good rundown on the Moberg et al. paper with the latest version of the hockey stick. Is it me, though, or is anyone else out there frustrated by the fact that most of the mental energy associated with the discussion of this fascinating paper involves its place in the climate wars rather than its abilty to shed light on climate? All of the most interesting science must be framed in terms of its place in the debate, rather than its place in our understanding of climate.

Sick, and lacking any good computer games to occupy my mind (my old Sim City 2000 just couldn’t hack it), I turned to PyGTK and DV’s libxml python bindings, and whacked together a little app to better keep track of a whole bunch of my writing.

When I don’t exercise, I start to feel sickly. When I’m as sick as I was over the last week, I can’t exercise. You see the problem. This morning I hauled the bike out of the garage, set it up on the trainer, and rode for half an hour, staring at the heart monitor the entire time. My lungs did not appreciate it, but the rest of my body seemed to be rejoicing under the load. I imagine these complex metabolic pathways that have been built over the years of training getting all stopped up like debris clogging a rain gutter. This morning I broke through the debris.

Laid Out

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Laid out by the flu, made all the worse by the fact that I was on a work trip when it hit, leaving me not much choice but to sit off by myself, refuse to shake anyone’s hand, and suck it up until I could get home.

Breast Cancer and Artificial Light

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Via BoingBoing, a fascinating hypothesis: could breast cancer be caused by artificial light?

The University of Connecticut cancer epidemiologist says there still is no scientific consensus about why the incidence of the disease is so much higher in the developed world.

The literature on breast cancer is littered with discredited theories about environmental and lifestyle factors that may contribute to the onset of the disease.

“We knew more about the cause of breast cancer 20 years ago than we do today,” Stevens said. “What we do know is that it must have something to do with industrialized society.”

Only a few theories have withstood scientific scrutiny, and no single factor explains a great percentage of breast cancer cases.

But that hasn’t stopped people from looking for new explanations.

Now, Stevens and a few other researchers are focusing on a little-known suspect – electric light.

Their theory that artificial light can cause breast cancer is simple. Prolonged periods of exposure to artificial light disrupt the body’s circadian rhythms – the inner biological clocks honed over thousands of years of evolution to regulate behaviors such as sleep and wakefulness. The disruption affects levels of hormones such as melatonin and the workings of cellular machinery, which can trigger the onset of cancer, Stevens theorizes.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

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A few months ago, blogging about drought in Ethiopia, I mentioned my definition of drought: “less precipitation than you’ve come to depend on.”

This evening I realized where I’d gotten the idea.

In the August 2002 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Kelly Redmond wrote a commentary on “The Depiction of Drought.” In it, he wrote:

Most concepts of drought involve a water balance. This implies that both supply and demand must be considered, as well as the question of whether there is enough (and, enough for what?). Thus, through time I have come to favor a simple definition; that is, insufficient water to meet needs.

I’d not read the paper before. But I’ve talked with Kelly about this stuff at great length. So the idea must have come from him.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

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One of my favorite scientists, Carl Caves, was recently elected a fellow of the American Physical Society. It was a good excuse to give the general public a little introduction to what he’s thinking about:

That strangeness, though difficult to grasp intuitively, turns out to have useful consequences, Caves said in an interview.

By embracing the strangeness rather than fighting it, Caves and others in the vanguard have laid out a theoretical framework for computers vastly more powerful than anything conceivable today.