Category Archives: Science

Fad science and self-made a monkeyof-ism

Posted on July 27, 2013 by | 12 comments

Hi readers. Thanks for coming by.

Some of you thought I was joking with my recent post about climate change and the current yakyakyakyak by the excitement industry concerning ‘manmade global warming’.

Some of you probably also didn’t notice the comment by Trapper Gale remembering a time four-or-so decades ago when the previous generation of the same institutional experts ran in increasingly small circles setting their hair on fire predicting a coming ice age.

AmericaLaurentideIceSheet.jpg

http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/01_1.shtml

http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/images/AmericaLaurentideIceSheet.jpg

“The last of the ice ages in human experience (often referred to as the Ice Age) reached its maximum roughly 20,000 years ago, and then gave way to warming. Sea level rose in two major steps, one centered near 14,000 years and the other near 11,500 years. However, between these two periods of rapid melting there was a pause in melting and sea level rise, known as the “Younger Dryas” period. During the Younger Dryas the climate system went back into almost fully glacial conditions, after having offered balmy conditions for more than 1000 years. The reasons for these large swings in climate change are not yet well understood. “

Which is an understatement.

Academians have a vested interest in manmade climate change today. They get their names in the journals and newspapers through the power of positive speaking. If they can stir up enough fear by presenting what they don’t know as ‘not yet well understood’ they generate government grants, jobs, power and prestige within their fields. Further study of what they don’t yet well understand, it’s assumed, will provide better understanding in the direction of their assertions.

Somehow the fact their disciplinary ancestors also didn’t yet well understand similarly the precise opposite interpretation of the data. Mined it for all it was worth at the time in study, grants, power and prestige. Opened new frontiers for their progeny when the time came, by reversing what a few decades later remained not yet fully understood.

I’m not suggesting there’s no manmade climate change. Maybe there is. And I’m not suggesting that if there is, it won’t speed the natural progress of planetary warming.

What I am saying is that anytime scientific observers examine data with an expected, hoped-for outcome, [especially when power, money, career advancement and prestige are factors] they have a way of observing selectively.

Same as human beings are prone to do in all other walks of life.

What I’m also saying is that three, maybe four decades from now there’s a reasonable possibility they’ll have mined this crisis dry and be setting their hair on fire with a new crisis to be mined for power, prestige, money and career advancement. Humanity induced plate tectonics, maybe. Earth’s decaying orbit because of atmospheric drag created by airliners.

Maybe they’ll be right. Hell, there’s even a remote chance they’re right about of what they’re saying today. Some piece of it-or-other.

The damned problem is you can’t trust them. They watch the same television you do. They know which way the wind’s blowing and muddling along trying to sail downwind getting the most out of it while it’s hot. Joining the gold rush with the knowledge when this one plays out there’s another lode in Alaska or Nevada they can move to.

Same as the rest of us.

Old Jules

12 Comments

Posted in 1970's, 2013, America, Current Issues, Education, Government, Grants, Human Behavior, Nature, Outdoors, Science, Survival

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The underlying fundamental truths

Posted on July 27, 2013 by | 7 comments

Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

If you’re like me, you are probably asking yourself why Johnson grass, crabgrass, beggars lice, goatheads, thistles and, say, salt cedar, thrive through the most difficult of times while all the stuff you deliberately planted requires care, nurturing by various means, irrigating.  You’re probably wondering why skunks can overwinter with rabies, throwing off the virus to all their kinfolk, while almost everything else dies within days of manifesting symptoms. 

Yeah, you’re probably wondering also why the skunks in Homeland Security run you about as you’d figure,  and the entrepreneurs in the private US penal systems are wallowing around in profits without ever getting their lives dirtied by contact with inmates.  Wondering why faceless ghosts in places such as the NSA would, not only wish to know the intimate details of your life, but actually be able execute a plan to do it.

You’re probably wondering why classy, wonderful aircraft with glide ratios and whirling propellers are rotting in hangars and on airstrip tiedowns while unnatural aluminum monsters incapable of manned flight zoom around carrying people places they didn’t need to go.  Why the only damned propellers anyone cares around are horizontal wings beating the air to death and crawling over the carcass.

Well friends and neighbors, if I had more time I’d explain it to you.  Because it’s one, or part of one of the fundamental truths of the Universe.

Unfortunately, this has gotten a bit long and there’s no point in me doing it right now.  It’s a proven fact that people don’t read long blog posts and that they click somewhere else the moment anything gets fundamental, or truthful.  Or if there are no pictures of naked dancing girls, celebrities, politicians, or tsunamis.

And hells bells, part of one of the basic truths of the Universe is that I can’t upload a damned thing.  So you’ll have to figure it out for yourselves.

Old Jules

7 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Animals, Current Issues, Education, Flying, Government, Nature, Police, Politics, Science, Spirituality, Transportation

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Climate Change – A matter of perspective

Posted on July 26, 2013 by | 15 comments

Morning to you, readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Now that the planet’s finally recovering from that last ice age, all the glaciers and permafrost finally melting, maybe things can get back to normal, the way things used to be in the good old days.  All that ice covering things up has been one hell of an inconvenience.

We’re lucky to live now instead of a while back when the Great Lakes were covered by half-mile of ice.  But things are getting better, just as they’ve been getting better all along as the ice receded.  Imagine how tough it would have been for all those automotive manufacturers to turn out cars if Detroit had been under half-mile of ice.  And those super-highways?  Heck, how do you build an Interstate on top of melting ice?  Same with all sorts of other things we spent the past few centuries doing.

Sure, things are going to change when things get back to normal.  And nobody can guess what those changes are going to be, how a normal climate’s going to manifest itself.  Nobody who lived during normal times was writing anything much down about the situation at the time. 

But the good news is that the planet goes a longish while between ice ages usually.  So once things are back to normal folks living then will have all kinds of time to get used to it.  Besides, they’ll be busy as hell working to pay off the debts the people living today are promising they’ll pay.  Maybe they’ll find some new ways of doing it in places where the ground’s covered with ice.

Running around screaming and setting our hair on fire isn’t going to keep this planet from doing what it’s going to do.  Those glaciers are going to keep receding.  No stopping it.

And there aren’t any laws, any human behaviors anyone’s going to change to keep it from doing it.  Any more than humans before this ice age came along could have done anything to keep it from happening.

Might as well relax and enjoy it.  The forward thinkers will find ways to make money from it, get rich off it one way or another.  The stainless steel agers will find ways to exploit whatever’s been hidden under all that ice.

Cultures, religions and civilizations will rise and fall, same as they always have.  Everyone will think it’s perfectly normal.

Nothing to get excited about.

Old Jules

15 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Education, Emergency Preparedness, Government, Human Behavior, Science, Survival

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At least nobody calls us the Great Satan

Posted on July 25, 2013 by | 16 comments

Hi readers.

We followers and practitioners of the older, more traditional, more mature and simpler stone and copper age religions are frequently scorned and ridiculed by followers of the younger bronze and iron age religions.  But I’ve never known it to go further than that.  Who ever heard of anyone getting burned at the stake for praying the sun up, or praying the moon up?

Fact is, once the later religions got going well they were too busy killing one another off to bother with anything as simple and harmless as sun worship.  They had important matters of nuance, doctrine, hair-trigger ‘kill-them-all-and-let-God-sort-them-out’ heresies.

Iron age Christians frequently refer to Catholics, for instance, as ‘the Great Satan’.  Iron age Muslims, similarly often refer to Christians as the Great Satan.  Nobody’s ever been called the Great Satan for praying up the sun in the morning and down at night.

Bronze age Hebrews, meanwhile, were slaughtered and dispersed from the Middle East by bronze age Romans following a hybridized bronze age religion.  After which the bronze age Hebrews were accused of killing Christ and treated as criminals and worse throughout Europe and Russia for 2000 years.

Nobody ever accused anyone who prays the sun up in the morning and down at night of killing Jesus.  Nobody ever ran sun worshipers out of any country I can think of.

Fact is, though, someone should do something about the damned moon worshipers.  Those people really piss me off.

Old Jules

16 Comments

Posted in 2013, Human Behavior, Nature, Science

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The conspiracy theory of mechanical advantage

Posted on July 25, 2013 by | 7 comments

Hi readers. 

I’m here to breathlessly tell you Paul Revere-like about a matter you might need to be aware of if you’re ever the target of God’s punishment.  Physicists, Rosicrucians, Illuminati, unreconstructed NAZIs, Zion Elders and other conspirators will try to convince you mechanical advantage is mere physics.  They lie.  It’s done to lure you into a false sense of uncertainty.

Mechanical advantage isn’t about moment, arm, fulcrums and all that other crap they try to fill your head with when you’re vulnerably youthful and open to big headedness.  Mechanical advantage is about heavy breathing, taking a lot of breaks and not giving yourself a damned coronary.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you you can’t rock a 5000 pound RV sitting on the ground with the wheels blocked and the emergency brake on, rock that mama with a long-enough cheater on a lug-bar.  You can practically roll the SOB over the blocks.

But also don’t be gullible enough to believe you can’t eventually break the lug nuts crack  CRACK CRACK.  Eventually far enough so’s you can turn them with a T Bar.  No matter what those people with their fancy impact tools thought when they put those tires on.

It ain’t about mechanical advantage, though.  It’s about taking a lot of breathers, not getting into any heart-stopping hurries.  It’s also about getting them loose enough so’s when that 5000 pounds is poised atop a 2-ton hydraulic jack with a 1-inch diameter knurled coin atop it, you don’t tip it over when you loosen the nuts the rest of the way.

Which is the next step in this conspiracy theory.  During that step I recommend the mantra, “Ahtay Malkuth Vegeverah Vegedula Layohhlum!”  [Four-two breathing if you can manage it]

Being punished by God can be a growth experience if a person holds his mouth right and he’s careful which God he’s going to allow to do the punishing. 

Old Jules

7 Comments

Posted in 2013, Education, Science, Social Security, Spirituality

The Smallpox People Project

Posted on July 18, 2013 by | 4 comments

The Whale and Dolphin People Project got me talking it over with the topcat around here.

http://thewhaleanddolphinpeopleproject.org/

Me:  So, Hydrox, what’s your thinking on this thing of trying to save dolphins and whales by making people of them?

Hydrox:  Does it concern you at all that if dolphins and whales began behaving like humans there wouldn’t be room in the oceans for any other species?

Me:  Hell Hydrox.  You know better than that.  They’d starve.

Hydrox:  Think about it a minute now.  Try the perspective of a domestic cat.  Back earlier than I can recall you cut my chorizos off so’s I wouldn’t be a part of what human beings think of as a cat-over population-problem.  Same with the rest of that litter.  When you protected all those chickens, both back in Y2K, and later here, killing coons, coyotes, skunks, you got an over-population problem.  Meanwhile you humans, during my own feline lifetime, have possibly doubled your population.  Does that tell you anything?

Me:  I think I see where you’re going with this.  What you aren’t taking into account is that we value human life.  We don’t believe in going around cutting the nuts off human beings and clipping the whatchallits of our females.  We rely on disease, war, hunger and other natural causes to keep our population down.

Hydrox:  Does it occur to you that the natural forces aren’t doing the job?  That the reason dolphins and whales need to be made into people so you can’t kill them legally might be going backward into the problem instead of approaching it head-on?  For instance, if you really want to save those whales protecting them from humans by calling them humans would be a lot less likely to actually save them than calling Bubonic, Ebola, Cholera and whatever other disease you can invent ‘people’ and protecting them.  Get rid of all those damned shots and pills and the whales will do fine just being whales. 

Me:  You’re saying …. hmm.  You’re saying make diseases PEOPLE?

Hydrox:  Actually I’m not.  If you change the wording around a bit you’ll see what I’m saying about what’s a disease.  Heck, if you could just find a disease that would kill off heart surgeons and fast food workers you could take care of a huge part of the problems of dolphins and whales through starvation and heart failures.  Whale and dolphin people my ass!  Tell those folks they’re human, convince them of it, and they’ll be beaching themselves into extinction!  Maybe that’s already what’s causing them to beach themselves to death.  Someone told them they’re people and they believed it. 

Me:  Seems to me we’ve got a failure here somewhere, to communicate.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Animals, Education, Government, Human Behavior, Science

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Chinese Sardines

Posted on June 23, 2013 by | 15 comments

Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

I doubt I’ve ever mentioned it, but I’ve always been a sardine lover.  Quit buying them when the price went high back there sometime and partly justified quitting because it drove the cats nuts when I opened a can.  Had to sneak around or I’d end up having to share.

So recently I was in the Dollar Tree store and noticed they had a lot of cans of sardines stacked on the shelves at a buck per can.  Big cans of a sort I haven’t seen in a number of decades, takes a can opener to get in there.

As you know, I a suspicious person, so I carefully got out my pocket magnifier and examined the label.   Well!  I’ll be damned!  Chinese!  Chin-freaking-ese sardines!

Well, heck.  What can sardine packing plants do wrong with sardines, thinks I.  You pack them in brine, or oil, or mustard sauce, or tomato sauce, put a lid and label on, and nobody’s going to know they aren’t Scandahoovian sardines.

Bought 20 cans of them, by golly, a lot just packed in brine because I thought I might use a few coaxing Tabby out of being anti-social.

Well, friends and neighbors, it’s entirely possible to screw up sardines.  I’m not sure how they did it, but they just don’t taste right.  And while the cats love the ones packed in oil or brine, they ain’t touching the ones packed in mustard nor those in tomato sauce.

I’m going to have to gut it out and eat those anyway.

How in the world can an ethnic group invent gunpowder and be the first to invent carbon steel, and not be able to can sardines worth eating?

[Hmmm.  To be fair, it’s generally believed the steel thing was an accident.  Slave either fell, or was thrown into a vat of molten iron and someone noted the quality of the product improved.  So a lot of slaves made their way into a lot of vats of molten iron before it was discovered there were other ways of getting the job done.]

But even so, sardines can’t be that tough.  The Scandahoovians don’t even have slaves, haven’t had them since, since, since, sometime back there before canning was invented.

Old Jules

Afterthought:  When you think about it, Chinese steel’s nothing to brag about these days, either.  Maybe they ought to be tossing all those sardines into vats of molten iron instead of canning them.

15 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Current Issues, Science

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Disambiguating Phobos

Posted on June 19, 2013 by | 6 comments

phobos

If you’re like me you’re probably getting fairly impatient with all this shilly-shallying around that’s been happening with finding out what’s going on with the Mars moon, Phobos.  That thing has been out there making people who know everything feel less good about themselves than they want to almost since it was first discovered.  Forcing them to use terms such as, ‘poorly understood’, ‘not completely understood’, ‘not yet fully understood’, when they write things about the way it behaves.

Problem is the thing refuses to behave itself the way the people who know how objects in orbit ought to behave.  As I recall it’s the fastest moving object in the Solar System, and I mean FAST.  And it isn’t anywhere near as dense as it ought to be.  Just for beginners.

If there’s an ‘artifact’ anywhere in the Solar System, Phobos probably stands a better chance of being it than anything else anyone knows about does.

NASA Eyes ‘Hedgehog’ Invasion of Mars Moon Phobosby Elizabeth Howell, SPACE.com ContributorDate: 19 January 2013 Time: 10:35 AM ET

http://www.space.com/19342-space-hedgehogs-mars-moon-phobos.html

A daring, “Angry Birds”-like NASA mission could bombard a Martian moon with robotic “hedgehog” probes in the next few decades, scientists say.

The space hedgehogs are actually small, spiky, spherical rovers that form part of a novel mission idea called Phobos Surveyor. The rovers would take advantage of the low gravity on the Mars moon Phobos, its sister moon Deimos, or asteroids in the solar system. Engineers have designed the devices to work in concert with a nearby mother ship.  

The hedgehogs would work well in the low gravity of the 16-mile-wide (27 kilometers) Phobos, a force 1,000 times weaker than the gravity on Mars itself, where NASA’s Curiosity and Opportunity rovers currently explore, said researcher Marco Pavone of Stanford University. Gravity on Mars is about one-third that of the Earth.

Okay, fine.  But the fact is, I’d like to see some questions answered about this thing before I get dead, or much more senile than I am already.  I want to know whether that thing is hollow.  And going about it in slow steps, using things that haven’t even been invented yet is going to take a long time. 

We spent all that money during the 1950s and 1960s inventing hydrogen bombs we never got any use out of.  Maybe it’s time to put them to some useful work.  We probably have the technology today to get a hydrogen bomb delivered right there dead center of Phobos within the next couple of years.

Time someone, hopefully the Chinese or the Japanese, launched a hydrogen bomb at phobos to see what happens when it hits.  And whether it shoots back.  Time for some serious disambiguation.

Just saying.

Jules

Edit:  The thing’s obviously not able to defend itself anyway and the chances of it shooting back are almost certainly not all that likely.  Whatever made all those dents in it, the impacts are bound to have generated a lot of heat inside and rattled the eye teeth of the might-have-been computers and defunct Buffalo Bills aiming rockets and pushing buttons of weapons systems.  Knocking a nice hole right in the middle a person could focus a telescope on for a looksee would improve things enough to make it worth the risk and the cost.    Easily enough to make it worth the miniscule risk of it raining down nukes on the Japanese or Chinese launch sites.

6 Comments

Posted in 2013, Adventure, Astronomy, Education, Government, Grants, Human Behavior, Los Alamos, Nature, Science, Senior Citizens

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Finally it begins to make sense

Posted on June 11, 2013 by | 19 comments

first man in space

I read somewhere recently the efforts to teach sign language to great apes since the 1970s gave a lot of them vocabularies large enough to allow IQ tests. The lowest a mountain gorilla ever scored was 97. Smarter than a lot of people. And I read somewhere else there’s only a 1% difference between the DNA of a chimp and that of a human being.

All of which suggests to me there might be sub-species of human beings, not quite human but not different enough to identify as an entirely different species. Politicians, genetic engineers, Wall Street bankers, CEOs of multi-national corporations, along with Hitler, Stalin et al might finally be explained that way.

I’d never considered the possibility aristocrats might be merely close relations to human beings without actually crossing the great divide to become human.  That maybe they’re just a smidgen of lifetimes behind on the reincarnation trail, sniffing along trying to catch up, but getting distracted by the fire hydrants others among them peed on as they struggled to gain humanhood.

19 Comments

Posted in 2013, Animals, Communication, Human Behavior, Politics, Science

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Solar Shower – Overdesigned under-utilized

Posted on June 9, 2013 by | 4 comments

Shower

This was briefly my smartassed solar shower.  Lasted through one, count’em: 1 each of those 8 gallon water jugs.  Getting 60 pounds of water up there in a way so’s it will stay decided me the showering I got wasn’t worth the hernia I almost got.

So next time in town I went to Walmart and bought a 2 gallon insecticide sprayer.

4 Comments

Posted in 2013, Adventure, Nature, Redneck Repairs, RedneckRepairs, Science, Senior Citizens, Survival, Texas

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