I received a piece of spam today from Carson Marks. At first I thought, “Wow, a veteran of the Manhattan Project, one of the designers of the first atomic bomb, is trying to sell me prescription medicine on line.” Then I realized the eminent theoretical physicist is J. Carson Mark, not Marks. Plus, the eminent theoretical physicist is dead, so how could he be hawking on-line drugs?
Into the cuckoo’s nest
David over at Quark Soup yesterday linked to a fascinating excerpt from Lauren Slater’s new book Opening Skinner’s Box. Slater is the woman who wrote Prozac Diary. She’s a psychologist who has suffered mental illness herself. She’s also a terrific writer, her stuff so raw that at times it’s uncomfortable to read. In the piece excerpted in the Guardian, she talks about a famous 1972 experiment in which eight sane people feign mental illness to get themselves admitted to psychiatric hospitals. Slater repeats the experiment. It’s riveting to see how the system handles her trickery today.
Fortune on Climate Change
Fortune magazine (no bastion of liberal thinking, mind you) weighs in on the question of abrupt climate change with a tidy little explanation of the potential for the thermohaline circulation to abruptly change:
Scientists still don’t know whether a climate disaster is on the way. But taken together, these changes appear strikingly similar to ones that preceded abrupt climate shifts in the past. Many researchers now believe the salient question about such change is not “Could it happen?” but “When?”
It’s important to note the language here. We’re really tallking about “global climate change”, not “warming”. Big and important difference.
Weird Googlejuice
I found the answer this morning to one of life’s great mysteries.
In my Inkstain logs, I see a steady traffic to an old blog entry about Lowell George and Frank Zappa, and I’ve never understood why. I only found one person linking to it, an entry from back in December on a rarely updated blog. Could that be it?
But I had underestimated my own Googlejuice. This is my own doing. Enter don’t bogart that joint into Google, and my old blog entry ranks number one. I own “don’t Bogart that joint”. Nine or ten times a day, it seems as though someone somewhere on the planet is typing “don’t Bogart that joint” into Google and reading my blog. Truly remarkable.
“I Ripped My Pants”
A package arrived recently from my sister.
It included a copy of “I Ripped My Pants”. While at the beach, Spongebob sees weightlifters looking buff and tries to show off, with hilarious results. I don’t want to give away the ending, but let’s just say the title offers something of a clue.
It includes “An Ocean of Tattoos” (“Kids: Ask an Adult to Help You.” – always good advice).
The Corrales Hill
I knew I was in trouble when we hit the bottom of the hill out of Corrales.
It was hellaciously windy day, so we’d dropped down into the valley for some protection. But there reaches a point where you run out of valley. We were about 90 minutes into the ride, and I’d been hanging on for dear life most of the way, trying to hold onto someone’s back wheel. Once I lost it and got out into the wind, it was hell to get back on, and the guys I was riding with are pretty fast.
They’d always stop and wait, mind you, but you don’t want that – distinctly not macho.
Continue reading ‘The Corrales Hill’ »
Ununtrium, Ununpentium
Science writers like to make hay when scientists see something that’s, ya know, never been seen before by humans and stuff. But this (NYT, reg. req.) is about as genuinely “never been seen before” as it gets: two new elements, 115 and 113 (nominally “Ununtrium and Ununpentium” for now) created in a lab in Russia. 113 is especially what the physicists would describe as “long-lived”, and by that they mean a second. Blip. We’ll not be building furniture out of that one. But they do seem to exist on what Kenton J. Moody, one of the scientists involved in the experiment described as “the shoals of the island of stability,” an area where physicists theorize that stuff will live a bit longer.
Super Bowl Sunday
Plannning a long ride tomorrow with Jaime and some of his tri friends, and it just occurred to me that the subject of missing the Super Bowl never even came up. (Sorry, jrb, I’ll be rooting for the New England Whatevers on your behalf while we’re out doin’ the thing.)
Flooding St. Petersburg
Today’s Global Climate Update comes from the icy city of St. Petersburg (you may remember it fondly as Leningrad), where folks are apparently worrying now that they might be swimming in the cold waters of the Gulf of Finland:
St. Petersburg may have the same fate as the fairy-tale city of Kitezh that was completely covered with water.
St. Petersburg as many other coastal European cities may be faced with the threat of complete or partial inundation in the next 20-30 years, oceanologist and geologists Alexander Gorodnitsky, who was born in the city and lived there for 40 years, said in an interview with Itar-Tass.
The global warming may begin melting ice in the Arctic, and it will considerably raise the ocean level.
This of course runs counter to the conventional geopolitical opinion that the Russians are not all that enthusiastic about curbing their greenhouse gas emissions, because they rather think they would benefit if things got a bit warmer. Does anyone know if that conventional wisdom is true?
Dan Gillmor on Comment Spam
Dan Gillmor says he’s considering turning off comments on his blog because of comment spam. Further evidence of the damage a small group of the amoral can do to the commons.