Is there a "New Normal"?

A blog on the Discover Magazine has a good post on the question of how climate change and weather events are now framed and how they will likely be framed in the future. The point Kevin Trenberth is quoted as making makes sense. Climate change, by definition, will affect all weather events. The question is just how.

A potential northern sky show

NASA informs us that a CME has been produced by a long duration solar flare that will hit the Earth. It's going to be a benign one highly unlikely to do any damage but if you're far enough north the aurora will probably be a nice show.

Great-grand^10000 Dad!

Wired, as well as many other media outlets, have picked up on this story about an attempt to reconstruct what the last common ancestor of all current mammals might have looked like. I suppose there's a family resemblance to some people.

Only tangentially geeky, I know.

I just watched an episode of a show on PBS called Shakespeare Uncovered. It's interesting premise is to have someone who has actually been involved in the subject play of that episode such as an actor or director be your guide to an exploration of the history of the play and its continuing appeal to audiences. What makes this tangentially geeky? One of the episodes tonight was on Hamlet with David Tennant, the 10th Doctor, as your guide. Tennant starred as Hamlet in a BBC production with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2009 with Patrick Stewart as Claudius and Hamlet's father's ghost. See? It's related after all.

When there are no good options left...

The MIT Technology Review features a story about a potentially cheap and easy plan to stop global warming. Or at least that's the headline. It's about the suggestion that's been around for a while that sulfur injected into the upper atmosphere could form sulfate particles that would reflect enough energy back into space to make up for the GHGs that are being pumped into it by other processes. The article focuses on David Keith, a physicist who thinks that we need to at least seriously research whether or not it's doable and if there are unintended consequences that would make it an untenable solution.

Keith wants some limited field tests to move past the computer models that have already been run. Some think that field trials are the slippery slope that would lead to such a system being fully deployed. Supporters of Keith's position acknowledge that extreme caution needs to be taken and that even if deployment was actually decided on at some point in the future it's not an all or nothing proposition. It could be implemented on a limited basis and consequences watched for. Still there are those that object, of course. But those who oppose any research and experimentation seem to be assuming that those proposing it think it's a good idea. As this article makes clear, they don't. They do, however, see that it is far too likely that when it comes to heading off the consequences of our carelessness with the environment we are far too likely to need a solution of last resort.

Some books on Amazon and the smell test

So, you see this widget on the left hand side of the page? I'm trying to build what is called an Amazon aStore. You take and create your own take on an online bookstore using Amazon's inventory and order fulfillment. I thought this would be a way to create my own take on a "small" online bookstore with a fannish view of things. One thing I'm doing is providing links and (in the near future) some information on classic science fiction and providing categories for their books currently in print. In the process of doing this I've found some rather interesting things.

Be careful what you buy. I'm not providing names or links because I just don't want to provide even negative publicity for these "publishers". The other night while adding the available books by Robert Silverberg I stumbled across one that made me think "Is this legit?". Scrolling down a bit I saw a post by Silverberg blasting these folks for publishing something that he had let slip into the public domain since he considered it superseded by another book. Tonight I stumbled across a questionable publication of a Theodore Sturgeon book. From what I've been able to tell, it's more than a little likely that while some of this kind of publishing is actually in the public domain, I for one am not interested in supporting someone who is overcharging for someone else's work when I can be pretty sure that the writer's estate isn't seeing a penny.

The Quasi-Official Robert Silverberg Web Site

We do learn more and more. It's called science.

In the realm of very vaguely related news stories, 8 days before we are due for a cosmic close shave so close that it could whack an orbiting satellite or two, we read that there is even more evidence that the massive impact that produced the Chicxulub crater was in fact if not the sole cause almost certainly a contributor to the massive extinction event whose most famous victims were the dinosaurs. Gotta love it. This is the way science works when dealing with questions about real world events that can't be answered in repeatable laboratory experiments though some don't seem to appreciate it. Scientists have to not only ask not only the questions concerning the event they are researching but what kind of traces are there to help them find those answers. This is what climatologists do in order to try and find the answers concerning climate change. In spite of what some whose fashion sense should include tinfoil hats claim, they are not involved in a massive hoax or conspiracy. They ask questions and go where the evidence takes them. As they should.

Hello world!

When I installed WordPress it created an initial post called "Hello world!" that I imagine most people would just delete and create their own introductory post for their brand new blog. But given that "Hello world!" seems to be the first little computer program that you learn in almost every programming language I just thought I'd leave the title while putting some actual text in here instead of the boilerplate that the WordPress folks created.

Yes, this blog will have geeky stuff about science fiction, computers, fantasy and pretty much all of the stuff that one would expect with that title. But I doubt I'll be able to stay away from politics, economics, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Kansas City Royals and anything else that happens to catch my attention.

The Book Sale

I am selling a number of my books and this is just the first part of what I'm doing. Some information about the first batch for sale is below.

Title	Author	Condition	Signed	Edition	Price
All the Lies That Are My Life	Harlan Ellison	Fine/Like New	NO	First Edition, Second Printing	$50.00
Armageddon Rag, The	George R.R. Martin	Fine	YES	First	$300.00
Assignment in Eternity	Robert Heinlein	Near Fine	YES	First	$400.00
Deathbird Stories	Harlan Ellison	Near Fine	YES	First	$125.00
Eros Ascending	Mike Resnick	Fine/Like New	YES	First	$50.00
Eros at Zenith	Mike Resnick	Fine/Like New	YES	First	$50.00
Essential Ellison, The	Harlan Ellison	Fine	YES	First	$150.00
Green Hills of Earth, The	Robert Heinlein	Near Fine	NO	First	$300.00
Leiber Chronicles, The	Fritz Leiber	Near Fine	NO	First	$40.00
Mefisto in Onyx	Harlan Ellison	Fine/Like New	YES	Hardback in slipcase	$300.00
Methuselah's Children	Robert Heinlein	Very Good -Ex Libris label on inside front cover	NO	First	$100.00
No Doors, No Windows	Harlan Ellison	Fine/Like New	YES	First	$60.00
Pornucopia	Piers Anthony	Fine	NO	First	$100.00
Robots of Dawn, The	Isaac Asimov	Fine/Like New	YES	First	$275.00
Rocketship Galileo	Robert Heinlein	Very Good	NO	First	pending
Ship of Shadows	Fritz Leiber	Fine	YES	First	$65.00
Stranger in a Strange Land	Robert Heinlein	Near Fine	YES	First Edition, Fifth Impression	$750.00
Tramp Royale	Robert Heinlein	Very Good	NO	Uncorrected Proof	$20.00
Unpleasant Profession of Jonathon Hoag, The	Robert Heinlein	Good - DJ has some wear and tear on spine	YES	First	$425.00
Vault of the Ages	Poul Anderson	Very Good -some wear on DJ edges	NO	First	$75.00
Watching	Harlan Ellison	Fine/Like New	NO	First	$30.00

Cogitamus: The Liberal Canon

This is a great post by Sir Charles at Cogitamus. Cogitamus: The Liberal Canon

Is Charles Murray trying to prove his ignorance?

Charles Murray: Why Capitalism Has an Image Problem - WSJ.com

Not only does this column not reflect well on the WSJ op-ed pages, which of course bothers them not in the least, but it should make one wonder if Murray is in some kind of contest to show how little he understands of modern America and what its people think. First, he constantly refers to capitalism as some kind of monolithic system, which it is not, and praises it as an unmixed blessing. Wherever people critique it, it's because they don't understand it. No mention of shadow economies of unregulated derivative systems that dwarf many country's budgets. The crash caused by many bad practices in the financial sector apparently doesn't exist in his mind. There is not one mention of the corruption represented by Enron, Dennis Kozlowski, Bernie Ebbers or Bernie Madoff, among others. What blame he does recognize as "legitimate" lies with the government. Oh, and of course he never mentions the fact that modern businesses work as hard as they can to eliminate every job possible. There is no such thing as offshoring jobs to cheap labor markets. And no, I freely admit that I don't buy into the arguments that offshoring is another unmixed blessing of capitalism, which is not uncommon among economists, especially those of the right wing.

No, A Former Publisher Doesn't Know More About the Internet Than Techies

Vint Cerf is a well known name in computer geek circles for very good reasons. If anyone knows the events that led to the internet as we know it, he does. Yet a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal decided to revise history a bit in a column for the WSJ that once again shows why those pages have so little to do with facts, even when compared to other op-ed sections. In it he tries to claim that the role of the government was limited to a modest contribution backed by ARPA. He admits that Vint Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocols but claims that "the Ethernet", developed at Xerox PARC, was in fact the invention that first connected different computer networks and served as the basis for the internet. He bases his claims, which contradict everything I ever read about the history of the internet, on a book by Michael Hiltzik, who was at Xerox PARC back then and a quote from a former top official of ARPA that he doesn't understand.

He made a very foolish mistake, though, by getting his "facts" flagrantly wrong while some of the people involved are still alive. And they're not very happy with Mr. Crovitz for hosing history. Vint Cerf refutes Crovitz's column in an interview with CNet. Michael Hiltzik corrects Mr Crovitz in a column in the L.A. times. In fact, Cerf points out that not only was ARPA involved in the development of the Internet but so were the NSF, NASA, DOE and other government agencies as well. Hiltzik points out how Crovitz misinterpreted the quote from his friend, Robert Taylor.

I think that Crovitz, like far too many who drift too deeply into an ideology, interpreted things he found to support what he wants to believe and ignored the larger body of evidence that contradicted him. Think of him and others trying to revise the history of technology to minimize government involvement for ideological reasons as the David Bartons of tech history.

The Oil Drum | Ruthless Extrapolation

This site is about energy and our future, as per the subtitle. I really enjoyed this article and the physics discussion the comments thread turned into.

The Oil Drum | Ruthless Extrapolation