Jorge and the Diamond Cam

Posted by on

Fox, ever pushing the envelope of baseball broadcast technology (they’re the ones who put microphones in the bases) has installed a tiny spy cam in the dirt in front of home plate, looking up at the batter. Yankee catcher Jorge Posada, imagining a bunt or throw to the plate hitting the little hole in the ground going awry, kicked dirt on it. A grounds crew member cleaning out the dirt left an even bigger hole, which Posada again covered with dirt, stomping on it this time for good measure, rendering the camera broken for good:

Fox and the commissioner’s office weren’t happy, and Yankees general manager Brian Cashman spoke with Posada. The All-Star catcher said the network did a very good job of hiding the camera in Game 2.

Yankees manager Joe Torre had a simple explanation for Posada’s actions.

“Jorge is a passionate guy,” Torre said. “He just likes to be able to play baseball without people interfering, I guess. He just felt that that was a problem. … We talked to him about it and as far as I know, it’s not an issue.”

Fox plans to keep using Diamond Cam during the series.

“We think the angle provides a very compelling shot that we weren’t able to bring to the 15 million people who were watching the game,” Fox spokesman Lou D’Ermilio said.

With all due respect to Lou D’Ermilio and the fine folks at Fox, every time they showed the Diamond Cam, I had no idea where the camera was or what I was looking at. As we say in my business, it “didn’t read well.” I’m with Jorge on this one.

Cut Greenhouse Emissions, Save Money

Posted by on

It is taken as a given in the climate debate that reducing greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to reduce climate impacts will come at significant economic costs. This seems to me like a reasonable assertion.

There is an argument, however, that efficiencies could reduce greenhouse emissions and save money. That’s the case laid out in what looks like an entirely anecdotal report (but with a lot of anecdotes) by The Climate Group. They list a long series of examples of institutions, both corporate and government, that have enjoyed substantial savings by making their operations more efficient, reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the process.

Some of their examples:

Savings by Governments:

Berlin reduced emissions 15% from 1990 to 2000 through energy efficiency, use of combined heat and power and solar energy programs, with a municipal budget relief of ?2 million per year.

The UK Action Energy Program stimulated savings of ?650 million a year between 1989 and 2001 while reducing emissions.

Germany?s promotion of renewable energy and improved efficiency has led to the creation of more than 450,000 new jobs, undermining the oft-repeated claims that a strong climate policy is bad for business.

Savings by Companies:

Five companies have achieved reductions of 60% or more (DuPont, Alcan, British Telecom (BT), IBM, and NorskeCanada), with combined savings of over US $5.5 billion resulting from improved energy efficiency, fuel switching, and reduced waste.

DuPont has saved over $2 billion through increased energy efficiency, and has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 69% on 1990 levels.

British Telecom ? BT ? has reduced its emissions by over 80% below 1991 levels and has recently committed to cutting another 325,000 tonnes of its indirect CO2 emissions by making the largest ever single purchase of green energy.

I have a hard enough time getting my hands around the uncertainties in the climate science without trying to tackle the clearly far large uncertainties in the economic analysis of the climate issue. That’s why, while you see me blathering on endlessly about the science here, you dont see me talking about Kyoto and societal response measures. So I’m not entirely sure what to make of this. It’s clearly an activist group doing the analysis, so the data should be viewed with caution, but it is at least an interesting point in the debate.

When Ideas and Anti-Ideas Collide

Posted by on

New on the local blogging scene: Atasta:

Last night, on our kitchen table, was a copy of The Virtue of Selfishness, a book of essays on Ayn Rand’s philosoply, Objectivism. Also on the table was a book about Buddhism. I don’t remember the title or author of that one, we have many. I picked each book up, one in either hand, and held them at arm’s lenght. I moved them slowly towards each other, wondering if they would destroy each other in a burst of energy when they touched. They didn’t. Now they are stacked on top of each other on the table.

Carbon Dioxide Cycles and News Cycles

Posted by on

There’s been a flurry of reporting out of Great Britain in the last few days about the detection of a rapid rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. David Appell has covered this at length, with a number of posts linking to stories on this, including The Guardian and others, all somewhat breathless about the revelation.

David also links to GRIST, which uses the stories to argue that the U.S. press, in ignoring this, is a bunch of slackers with respect to climate change. The problem here, as several people pointed out in comments to GRIST, is that the story’s an old one. The AP moved a story back in March when this was first reported, which was apparently carried by the New York Times and a lot of other publications.

The puzzle here is why an eight-month-old story has been resurrected. My assumption is that this all came about because of David King’s major climate address Tuesday.

Nukes in the Campaign

Posted by on

My old buddy Ian Hoffman has done the best piece I’ve seen so far on the nuclear nonproliferation issue in the context of the fall campaign. It’s interesting to see nukes rise in importance in the national debate (though Hoffman points out the occasions when it’s happened before), but Ian makes clear these are very hard problems:

But there’s no guarantee that Abraham’s deadline or Kerry’s is achievable. Nuclear security in Russia lies in the hands of large, slow and secretive bureaucracies. More money won’t necessarily result in faster progress.

Ultimately, Russians, not American presidents, control the pace.

“The major problem isn’t 13 years or four years. We’re not going to do it at all,” said Hecker at Los Alamos, pioneer of the original U.S.-Russian scientific contacts that evolved into the nonproliferation programs. “Only the Russians can secure their nuclear materials, and we’re at a point now where money is no longer a limiting factor.”

“Russia is a place that still produces plutonium, and it’s a place that doesn’t like to tell you what it’s got or what it’s doing,” Sokolski said. “It’s not something that can be solved in a short period of time by force feeding of money and priorities.”

‘Cross Racing, New Mexico Style

Posted by on

The culture of cyclocross racing seems to value mud, frankly beyond all reason:


Cyclocross racers carry bikes through mud

This is a difficult fetish to support here in the high deserts of New Mexico, where the terrain ordinarily looks more like this:


One must admire Rich Plunkett, organizer of Sunday’s Psunshine Psychocross (that’s rich in the second picture in the red and white KHS uni) for his diligence in finding mud. (I don’t race this stuff. But it was fun to go out and watch.)

Great Line

Posted by on

J. Robert Oppenheimer, describing Augustus Klock, his high school science teacher: “He loved the bumpy contingent nature of the way in which you actually find out about something.”

From Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma, by Jeremy Bernstein.

Climate Modeling as Hypothesis Testing

Posted by on

Climate models don’t prove anything. They are merely a set of hypothesis-testing tools for understanding how the intrinsically complex system that is our climate works. As such, they must be tested against the available data. Gerald Meehl and colleagues at NCAR have conducted another such test (published in the October Journal of Climate).

It’s frequently argued that the models are the best we’ve got in understanding what might happen in the 21st century as we increase the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, because the “experiment” we can physically conduct will take a hundred years, with some risks related to the outcome. But in fact, we’re reaching the point where greenhouse gases and the other climatological drivers have varied enough over the last 100 years that we can begin to conduct the experiment through a sort of hindcasting. That’s what Meehl et al. have done in their latest Journal of Climate paper.

They plugged in five climate forcers into the model, two natural (solar variability and the cooling effect of stuff spewed out by volcanoes) and three man-made (greenhouse gases, ozone and sulfate aerosols). They ran simulations with various combinations to see what might reasonably explain the actual variance we see in 20th century climate records. The result:

The late-twentieth-century warming can only be reproduced in the model with anthropogenic forcing (mainly GHGs), while the early twentieth-century warming is mainly caused by natural forcing in the model (mainly solar). However, the signature of globally averaged temperature at any time in the twentieth century is a direct consequence of the sum of the forcings.

In other words, using the models, the greenhouse warming hypothesis is the best fit with the data. Again, this isn’t proving anything, but it’s nevertheless important for two reasons. First, it provides added confidence in dealing with the “attribution problem” – to what extent can the climate change we have seen thus far be attributed to anthropogenic effects?

And it provides increased confidence that the models might have something useful to say about what might happen in the future.

ES Cells and the Heart

Posted by on

I’ll leave it to Chris Mooney to sort out the political implications of this, but there’s an interesting paper in Friday’s Science (sub. req.) by Fraidenraich et al. on the use of embryonic stem cells to treat cardiac defects.

A review also in Science (more $ req.) by Kenneth R. Chien of UC San Diego, calls it “an exciting new study … (that) expands the potential therapeutic repertoire of ES cells.”:

These investigators provide direct evidence that ES cells can rescue otherwise lethal cardiac defects in mouse embryos.

I’ve not followed the embryonic stem cell debates closely (am I the only one who’s uncomfortable with the way this issue has been transformed from science into tribal politics?), so I may be munging the science here. But as I understand from reading Chien’s review, the importance here is not that the transplanted embryonic stem cells differentiate into cardiac cells. Instead, the embryonic stem cells secrete stuff that gets the regular cells to do what they’re supposed to.

Here’s how Rick Weiss explained it in yesterday’s Washington Post:

The new work offers the most definitive evidence yet that the versatile cells, derived from embryos, can help repair organs two ways: by filling in damaged areas — the primary focus of stem cell research to date — and also by secreting potent chemicals that can make tissues rejuvenate themselves.