How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
Below the fold is a twelve-minute video that explains (and demonstrates) two aspects of Milankovitch cycles, those two being tilt (aka obliquity) and precession. There is also orbital eccentricity, maybe covered in another video. Between the three, Milankovitch worked out mathematically the Earth’s rotating progression between ice ages and interglacial periods like our current one.
Continue reading “Milankovitch cycles, just for the fun of it”
Thoreau is Full of Shit
By: DS Klausler
Nah, he’s cool, mostly, I just liked that title. We’ll get to him later.
“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
Only relatively recently have I used this e-mail account for my private communication. Historically, I used the corporate account that I was linked with via employment. Because of that and being reduced-in-staff [because of my age] (I had no means to sue a billion-dollar company), I cannot locate my trip report from a family vacation over a dozen years ago. Strange, but I also cannot locate either my complete digital electronic images or photographs from the same trip. By memory alone, I think that the trip included Niagara Falls, Mount Marcy (NY highpoint), Mount Mansfield (VT) and Jerimoth Hill (RI) – which was a boulder on a trail (really). Missing is the highpoint of Maine – Mount Katahdin (5,269’).
My memory also says that #1 Son and I turned back high on Katahdin due to high winds and near zero visibility in the fog and rain. I recall being very concerned that he would have dangerous difficulty on the even more slippery exposed rock and sparse re-bar hand holds. I thought, back then, that he was a little kid. It was only after we had returned home that I dug a little deeper into maps, trails, images and trip reports that we had halted just a quarter-mile mile from the summit. In good visibility, we would have been able to see the summit. More on this later.
Wifey and I reviewed, and I found just seventeen images – NONE of the hike up. It turns out that #1 Son was almost FIFTEEN – but he was a very slight kid – very much like his father in his youth. Photos show his height just to my shoulder; so maybe five-one. Anyway, my thoughts remain clear about one thing: it would have been too dangerous for him on the worsening wet and very steep descent.
I did not know that when Ab asked me to be on his podcast last night that he wanted to talk about, of all things, 9/11. I really wasn’t prepared, and in fact, have not written much about that day over the years because others have it covered. It is so big, so much research has been done, and more yet to be done.
One guy who has done yeoman’s work on that day is Simon Shack. The podcast below is over two hours, pretty daunting, I know. If anything, listen to the first hour, which is Simon. It is really interesting.
Jerry Seinfeld has enjoyed enormous success in his life. I have tried to think of other men named “Jerry” who have had similar fortune, and after Lewis and Lee Lewis, come up short. Help me out. Nicknames don’t work on serious people so well, even as friends knew him as Gerry Ford, and not Gerald. He was “Johnny ” Carson, not John.
I like Seinfeld, and do not envy him one dollar of his well-deserved popularity. Comics have a reputation of being angry. He is not angry at us. He is just annoyed. There’s a difference.
I wish him continued success, and also say this knowing he will never make another movie. He knows better, and learns sometimes the hard way. He works hard at his craft, even today trying out his material in comedy clubs to see what works and what does not. He never phones it in, never expects that people will laugh merely because he is Seinfeld. Each joke is finely crafted, each word in place, not to be substituted for another.
I am going to include some tables and graphs in this presentation, easily understood ones. I asked myself yesterday morning about the number of deaths (only in the US, not worldwide) during the Sars-COV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic. There was a time when pandemics were defined by “excess deaths,” but oddly that definition was replaced before Covid with the following:
[An] outbreak of infectious disease that occurs over a wide geographical area and that is of high prevalence, generally affecting a significant proportion of the world’s population, usually over the course of several months.
Deaths are no longer a factor in pandemics. I think that is odd. We generally define past pandemics by excess deaths.
Mike Stone was a guest on Ab’s Fakeologist site, and did an hour+ interview, quite well done. I only have a few qualms, purely personal preference. I felt he was too deferential to Poormina Wagh, even after he learned that her degrees were fake, her research nonexistent, and no evidence of any FBI raid anytime. I also felt he dealt with Drs. Kaufman, Cowen, Bailey(s) and Lanka with too much reverence. Ask yourself, why did these five people come to prominence exclusively of all others? I do not know the answer to that question, and only suggest to be slow to trust anyone who self-appoints as a leader. Kaufman’s appearance on the scene, especially, had the look and feel, to me, of a rollout.
What I have learned from both Poornima and the Mike Stone interview:
Continue reading “Poornima once more and hopefully, finally”
Al Gore was used to front for a book and movie, both released in May of 2006, called “An Inconvenient Truth” (which, trust me, he did not write). A man whose weakest subjects at Harvard were science and math does not turn around and become a science nerd. Here’s Wikipedia on his Harvard stint:
Gore was an avid reader who fell in love with scientific and mathematical theories,[21] but he did not do well in science classes and avoided taking math.[20]
In other words, for the Inconvenient Truth book and movie, he was a hire. The “theories” he fell in love with had more to do with public relations than science. He obviously loves the camera. He even showed some comedic chops on 30 Rock:
This post, as I envision it, will be a ramble about a number of topics not even related, but hopefully that generate interest and comments over the weekend. But first, I want to highlight a comment from yesterday, as I recall, on the Carl Sagan post:
Yeah, agreed on Sagan, and his successor in scientific fraud, Neal DeGrasse Tyson. I did not want this post to be a forum on Sagan, as he did say some useful things, as in “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
As long as I am leading with my chin, I will lead with that, but the reason I want to highlight the comment is that in the history of this little blog, it is number 50,000. I did at one time eliminate a large number of posts as part of a general cleanup, and when a post is discarded all comments underneath it go too, but officially, that it #50K.
This link is to Fakeologist and a video that is very brief, a minute or so of Carl Sagan interviewed by Charlie Rose not too long before his death in 1996. In the clip, Sagan is warning us of scientific tyranny, what happens when the public has no basis in science.
Of course, that is fait accompli now. Covid was the worst expression of such tyranny, a complete hoax with a fake virus and a testing process guaranteed to imitate a spreading disease.
It is a well-advertised fact that putting CO2 (usually referred to as “carbon” ***) into the atmosphere causes global warming. My problems with this idea are that 1) the planet is barely, almost imperceptibly warming, and 2) CO2’s role in this mild warming is very tiny. The demonization of carbon dioxide is another agenda, having nothing to do with warming, and everything to do with command and control, population reduction, and perpetuation of poverty, especially in Africa. Climate Change is in large part a racist agenda.
So, I say CO2 is not a cause of warming. Where are my facts? There are quite a few “greenhouse gases,” the primary ones being water vapor, CO2, and methane. The latter two, CO2 and methane, pale in significance to water vapor, which is the cause of 95% of the so-called greenhouse effect. That is more than twenty six times that of CO2, and over 237 times that of methane. So that if we truly wanted to stop or slow down the greenhouse effect, we would be sequestering water, not CO2.
Piece of Mindful 