Category: Science

Are cosmic rays causing global warming?

Potholer54 on the latest GOP dunderheaded attack on science.

 

I know the blogs will tell you that that a correlation between cosmic rays and temperature has been shown, and once you believe this it may be hard to convince you of the science. However let’s have a go….

There are two supposed correlations:

Svensmark and Friis Kristensen wrote a paper on a correlation between sunspots and temperature during the 20th century, which they attributed to the varying intensity of cosmic rays with solar activity. However, this turned out to be the result of a mathematical error. Cosmic rays have been measured over the last 50 years and they vary with the 11-year solar cycle. There has been no increase at all, whereas average global temperatures have been increasing.

via Are cosmic rays causing global warming? – YouTube.

Effects of wars and epidemics on historical atmospheric CO2 content: Dr. Julia Pongratz

Dr. Julia Pongratz, postdoctoral research scientist at the Carnegie Institution Dept. of Global Ecology, discussing

 

J. Pongratz, K. Caldeira, C.H. Reick, and M. Claussen (2011) , Coupled climate-carbon simulations indicate minor global effects of wars and epidemics on atmospheric CO2 between AD 800 and 1850. The Holocene,

via Effects of wars and epidemics on historical atmospheric CO2 content: Dr. Julia Pongratz – YouTube.

 

When your machines talk together, What will they say about you?

As the rest of the century unfolds you will see machines and artificial Artificial Intelligence units talking among themselves more and more until that chatter becomes a persistent tapestry in the background of our lives that we only rarely hear or notice. When the machine chatter becomes nearly ubiquitous, what will our machines be saying about us?

We can speculate on some of the near horizon M2M apps, but what Machine to Machine chatter will be like mid century and beyond is really impossible to predict. There’s already a lot of M2M out there but now it usually takes human request through push of button, click of app, or other trigger to initiate the conversation.

In the future it will most likely happen seamlessly and automatically. Sensors will detect our presence, temperature, vital signs, position, and everything else measurable. Timers will know when to trigger events, and meters will measure our personal context for events that unfold around us almost completely without our direction. Context will be things like: Are you standing, sitting, laying, moving, or still? What time is it? When did you last eat? What thing did you last do, choose, look at, move toward? What did you last say and what motions did your hand make?

As making machines smart and then smarter becomes a matter of pennies, and as having them talk together wirelessly and automatically also becomes cheap, most companies will open their devices and they will tart them up with artificial artificial intelligence (AAI.*) This will escalate and accelerate for the rest of century until most devices are talking incessantly to most other devices, sensors, and network devices like Chatty Cathy dolls on a loop. Initially companies will do this to leapfrog the competition but later it will be absolutely necessary if they want to stay in business.

Let’s start with a few simplex assumptions and build upon them to get to an example that’s simple, easy, and really doable tomorrow. Machines do not have artificial intelligence yet,  so what starts the conservation between them? It will likely take artificial artificial intelligence (AAI,*) or programs with contextual triggers, thresholds, or control zones that are also able to search and query databases both at home and online.

What will the conversation be about? That will be dependent on the devices talking, the context, and the amount of artificial artificial intelligence (AAI*) built in. Context might consist of time of day, location, position, weather, and data about you — like when you last ate, whether you are standing, sitting, or laying down, who else is present, what songs you like, which artists you like, who your family and friends are, what they like, etc. etc. etc.

So here’s an easy example, all the parts exist but none talk together yet. You drive up to your house – your garage is opened by you pressing a button, and you manually switch off the radio. In a fully developed M2M environment things could be different. Your car could signal ahead that you were coming once it recognized that you were near your house with it’s GPS. The Garage door opener could periodically query the camera out front and your car’s until it got short distance confirmed recognition of both your car and your face. It could then open the door, and turn on the speakers in the garage. As you exit the car after pulling into the garage the speakers in the garage play the song, station, or stream that you were listening to in the car. The Garage door opener signals the TV in your living room to turn on and tune in the news channel you usually watch this time of day, and etc. etc. etc. Everything in this example could be kludged together today with existing tech, but since M2M is definitely our future it really does behoove us to create some open standards around it.

Perhaps the FCC should investigate M2M only spectrum, and Universities should look at standards for security and protection (E.G. if our machines are going to know everything about us then they damned well better be secured with biometrics and much more.)

 

* Artificial Artificial intelligence is when masses of data regarding human or individual preferences or masses of actual crowd sourced human input is sifted to get to best choice or a range of best choices – it’s crowd sourcing, history sourcing, or both to find a few best choices: examples are Google and other search engines with their history of other people’s preferences when searching your search term. Others are the “you might also like” recommendation engines at Netflix and Itunes where they use the history of your preferences and look for like, and another is Mechanical Turk at Amazon.com where they put the question to hordes of people on the net to get best answer. This is a term I first heard from Jonathan Zittrain in a Berkman center lecture and I am stealing the term because it’s so appropriate. Bottom line it looks like the machine is thinking and possibly prescient, but it’s really neither — it’s all done through brute force or lots of human responses sifted through context.

A Letter from Christopher Hitchens to American Atheists

Christopher Hitchens is ill, and cannot make an address he was scheduled for instead he sent this letter.

Dear fellow-unbelievers,

Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death. Nobody ever wins this argument, though there are some solid points to be made while the discussion goes on. I have found, as the enemy becomes more familiar, that all the special pleading for salvation, redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before. I hope to help defend and pass on the lessons of this for many years to come, but for now I have found my trust better placed in two things: the skill and principle of advanced medical science, and the comradeship of innumerable friends and family, all of them immune to the false consolations of religion. It is these forces among others which will speed the day when humanity emancipates itself from the mind-forged manacles of servility and superstitition. It is our innate solidarity, and not some despotism of the sky, which is the source of our morality and our sense of decency.

That essential sense of decency is outraged every day. Our theocratic enemy is in plain view. Protean in form, it extends from the overt menace of nuclear-armed mullahs to the insidious campaigns to have stultifying pseudo-science taught in American schools. But in the past few years, there have been heartening signs of a genuine and spontaneous resistance to this sinister nonsense: a resistance which repudiates the right of bullies and tyrants to make the absurd claim that they have god on their side. To have had a small part in this resistance has been the greatest honor of my lifetime: the pattern and original of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry. The cheap name for this lethal delusion is religion, and we must learn new ways of combating it in the public sphere, just as we have learned to free ourselves of it in private.

Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.

As the heirs of a secular revolution, American atheists have a special responsibility to defend and uphold the Constitution that patrols the boundary between Church and State. This, too, is an honor and a privilege. Believe me when I say that I am present with you, even if not corporeally (and only metaphorically in spirit…) Resolve to build up Mr Jefferson’s wall of separation. And don’t keep the faith.

Sincerely

Christopher Hitchens

I place this here on my blog so I might have easy access to it for few better words were ever writ to those who don’t believe.

Medical Devices coming to an IPOD or PC near you soon?

While in the hospital for my quint bypass last July one of the noteworthy things was how reliant the hospital is on moment by moment accurate measures of your vital signs to keep you healthy. The actual sensors they use are cheap and in some cases even disposable (pulse-ox leads, litmus tabs for blood sugar meters, etc.) The bulk of the monitoring is done by software periodically recording from a very simple sensor set.

It’s inevitable that home sensors and programs will be widely available in this decade, and in another decade every “Home PC” and possibly even wireless device will come with a med suite of apps, that can measure your vitals and upload it to your doctor’s office. Remote appointments might become more common, with health coaches and nurses calling to ask you to “plug in” so they can get your vitals.

Maybe the pulse ox lead will plug into a USB port along with a a blood pressure cuff and thermometer, all are relatively cheap, simple and easy to manufacture. Think that’s a stretch? Here’s the first entrant and with lots of baby boomers retiring the numbers of people monitoring their own vitals will increase significantly. So who is going to make the first “Home Med” kit for the PC, XBox etc? Will Doctor offices soon be handing out USB port pulse-ox/BP cuffs and prescribing an application download?

Back in March 2009 at the iPhone OS 3.0 debut event, Apple’s Scott Forstall pointed out medical devices specifically as one of the more interesting class of peripherals that could leverage the new custom app interface capabilities. And while it’s certainly an interesting concept — keeping tabs on your general health from the comfort of your own home — we haven’t really seen it catch on (only a couple of products come to mind). That isn’t stopping iHealth; the company’s blood pressure dock, available today from its online store (we’re told it should be filtering through Apple’s own channels later this month) ties in with a specialized iPhone / iPod touch / iPad app to monitor and track blood pressure from the comfort of your home, where theoretically there shouldn’t be a stranger in a white coat making you extra nervous.

Read the rest at Engadget

Dawkins Deservedly Pummels the Pope

Reality belies the Pope’s claim, indeed it seems that religious moral cowards are more likely to become Nazis than atheists, after all the current Pope did.

In this video Richard Dawkins rightly takes the Pope to task for borrowing a page from the Ben Stein’s book and going Godwinian against atheists. This is a Discovery Institute tactic — pretend that all atheists are potential Nazis when really European Catholics, like those in Vlaams Belang, are much more likely candidates for the Nazi party. What I really do not get is how a moral coward like Ratzinger who marched wearing a “Gott mit uns” belt buckle while in the Wehrmacht can make such a bogus claim. Reality belies the Pope’s claim, indeed it seems that religious moral cowards are more likely to become Nazis than atheists, after all the current Pope did.

The Fairies of the Gaps: Observation Alone is Not Science

Concordance has produced another great Skeptic video that explains the difference between observation and imagining cause vs. observation, hypothesis and test. This is the scientific method, and why PSI, Intelligent Design, and Fairy ring fallacies fail to move our real knowledge forward. Until we test – it’s just an anomaly that we don’t understand.