Not All Memes Mean Something

I've been seeing a variety of tech pundits and article comments claiming Microsoft is dying for a while now. I've never bought into it and the latest news on Microsoft's earnings wouldn't seem to support it either.

An End to Patent Trolls?

We can only hope that the headline of this Ars Technica article is right. Real patents are necessary for innovation. Overly broad patents are not. Patents held for the sake of hitting people up for licensing fees by people who couldn't build a real produce or write a line of code to save their lives aren't. Those patents hurt real innovators and our economy.

Kansas City Chiefs' Tamba Hali leaves extra thousand dollar tip at restaurant - FanSided - Sports News, Entertainment, Lifestyle & Technology - 240+ Sites

Very impressive.

Kansas City Chiefs' Tamba Hali leaves extra thousand dollar tip at restaurant - FanSided - Sports News, Entertainment, Lifestyle & Technology - 240+ Sites

A Debt Ceiling Petition

After the near disasters in 2011 and earlier this month I've come to believe that the only way to avoid this kind of idiocy is to take away the political toy that is the debt ceiling. No political party should be able to threaten the economy of the nation for an instant whether it's to extort concessions from their opponents or to "make a point". We don't have to default to create potential economic problems and it should just not come up. I was surprised to find on the We the People site at whitehouse.gov that no one had yet thought of this but they hadn't so I created a petition on the site that reads as follows:

WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO: work with Congress to eliminate the debt ceiling Since the budgetary processes that have been in place since 1974 serve the same purposes as those originally envisioned by the legislators who wrote the 2nd Liberty Bond law in 1917 and also those of the members of Congress who modified it in 1939 to cover all general debt of the United States government the law should be eliminated or superseded by new legislation that would provide long term stability to purchasers of debt of the United States government. The law currently seems suitable only as a political Sword of Damocles that both political parties have used with varying degrees of responsibility. Since that level of responsibility has noticeably decreased in recent history no political party should have this "weapon" available any longer so it should be removed.

If you're interested in signing it the link is here. Cross posted at The Moderate Voice

(Not So) Solid Ice

While the U.S. government shutdown and debt ceiling crisis are taking up virtually all the media attention other things are happening and should be pointed out. Despite contextually questionable claims by climate change deniers that Arctic ice increased by 29% (Initial figures published on the NSIDC on their web site were incorrect. Rose initially claimed a 60% increase.) from last year that are technically true but leave out that it still leaves the extent of ice up north well short of historical averages, news from the poles isn't all that encouraging if you really pay attention. It is true that compared to last years minimum Arctic ice extent this year's wasn't as bad. But the NSIDC points out:

Overall, 10.03 million square kilometers (3.87 million square miles) of ice were lost between the 2013 maximum and minimum extents. This was the seventh summer that more than 10 million square kilometers of ice extent were lost; all but one of the seven (the summer of 1990) have occurred since 2007. ... September average sea ice extent for 2013 was the sixth lowest in the satellite record. The 2012 September extent was 32% lower than this year’s extent, while the 1981 to 2010 average was 22% higher than this year’s extent. Through 2013, the September linear rate of decline is 13.7% per decade relative to the 1981 to 2010 average.

NSIDC also discusses another meaningful metric when they report on ice. Thickness.

The pattern of ice thickness for the summer of 2013 is similar to what has been seen in recent years. According to data from the European Space Agency CryoSat-2 radar altimeter, the spring melt season started with an Arctic ice cover thinner than in any recent year. This corroborates thickness information inferred from a calculation of ice age that showed first-year ice, which is thinner and more vulnerable to melt, over a significant part of the Arctic Ocean as the melt season started (see our earlier post).

Then we move to the part that is really beloved by the "skeptics". The Antarctic. It had another record extent in sea ice this year. The details from the NSIDC are:

Antarctic sea ice extent reached 19.47 million square kilometers (7.52 million square miles) on September 22, a record high maximum extent relative to the satellite record, and slightly above the previous record high set last year. This year’s maximum extent was 3.6% higher than the 1981 to 2010 average Antarctic maximum, representing an ice edge that is 35 kilometers (approximately 22 miles) further north on average. Overall, Antarctic September sea ice extent is increasing at 1.1% per decade relative to the 1981 to 2010 average. This increase is likely due to a combination of factors, including winds and ocean circulation. A recent paper by our colleague Jinlun Zhang at the University of Washington concludes that changes in winds are resulting in both more compaction within the ice pack and more ridging, causing a thickening of the pack and making it more resistant to summer melt.

On the other hand there's a new discovery that makes me wonder how well this will hold up. That sea ice in western Antarctica has gouges in it. Gouges that come up into the ice from the bottom and are as tall and wide as the Eiffel Tower. New research hints that these gouges are related to water flow from melting ice. What that might mean to further increases in ice extent is something we'll have to wait and see, though it doesn't bode well for it, I'd think. Cross posted to The Moderate Voice

Promising Steps in Applications for Graphene

With all of the usual caveats applied, some new discoveries in using graphene membranes hold some promise if they can be scaled up. New configurations of graphene appear to be usable for tunable separation of gases, including carbon dioxide, and water treatment.

Let's Just Strangle the Consumers

Wow. And I thought I didn't like the Republican list of demands to raise the debt ceiling before. Now I find out that another little goodie they wanted was to kill net neutrality. Is there any pro-consumer policy they don't hate?

Trolls of the Patent Variety

One of the greatest threats to many tech startups are the trolls. Not the comments trolls but the patent trolls. Vermont Public Radio reports on a bipartisan effort to do something about them and hopefully make it possible for people who actually work in technology to develop new services and technologies. Cross posted at The Moderate Voice

Miniaturization Comes to Particle Accelerators?

After reading this article on Red Orbit my first thought was that if it pans out the implications for fusion power could get very interesting.

An accurate assessment of Arctic Ice

Back on September 7 the Daily Mail published what is quite possibly the most dishonest recent article on the climate that I've seen. It would attempt to persuade people that this year's decrease in the amount of Arctic ice is in fact a growth of 60% from last year that represents an amazing recovery. In reality the extent of last year's ice still represented the sixth lowest level in the history of satellite measurements of Arctic ice. Another British news outlet, The Guardian, gives a much more accurate assessment, including pointing out the errors of the Daily Mail.

Yes, there is still such a thing as libel.

There is a lot of vitriol spewed in the debate over global warming/climate change. One of the biggest targets of that vitriol is Michael Mann, co-author of what is generally called the MBH paper, which produced the famous "hockey stick" graph. Mann sued the online versions of The Chronicle of Higher Education and the National Review for libel and defamation. Openmarket.org, the blog of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, started the ball rolling with a post that was quoted approvingly by the National Review, including this gem.

In the post quoted on National Review, writer Rand Simberg calls Mann, “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science.”

Not satisfied with quoting that jab at Mann, Steyn added his own accusation, stating that:

Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate-change “hockey-stick” graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus.

The offending sections have since been removed from the OpenMarket.org web site, presumably to avoid the fate of NR and the Chronicle, but the originals are still at the other publications. Peter Wood at the Chronicle used the accusations that had been made against Mann to also parallel the Sandusky scandal when it comes to a culture of corruption at Penn State. Both publications have strived mightily to kill Mann's case against them, citing the First Amendment, claiming that it was just their opinion and not a claim of fact as defenses but last week a court decision validated the lawsuit, allowing it to continue since in the judge's opinion the case is likely to succeed on the merits.

See, if you claim that a scientist whose livelihood depends on the perception that his research is honest in fact is falsifying data or in some other way misrepresenting facts or the results of his research based on those facts, either explicitly or implicitly, you have damaged that person. If you continue to make these claims even after multiple investigations have shown the claims of fraud to be false your case that it's just an honest disagreement or a matter of opinion tends to fall apart. There have been multiple reviews of Mann's work and investigations into the so-called "Climategate" scandal and every one of them found that there was in fact no fraud, no intent to deceive or any of the other accusations repeated constantly against Mann and his associates. Yet the drumbeat of accusations and false claims has gone on. If in the end the courts rule against these publications maybe a lesson will be learned. But I tend to doubt it.

Cross posted at The Moderate Voice

A Great View from Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo

This is a great shot from SpaceShipTwo. It would be so cool to actually be able to be on a flight, wouldn't it?

Q: What Likes Global Warming? - A: Pests.

redOrbit passes along news of a study from Nature Climate Change about a study that indicates that as global warming continues to increase the spread of pests that aren't very good for food crops. As far as what data supports their conclusion, the article gives us a pretty good example, IMO.

The researchers based their findings on 50 years of data that included global temperatures and the range of crop pests, which includes fungi, bacteria, viruses, insects, nematodes, viroids and oomycetes. They said the diversity of crop pests continues to expand and new strains are constantly evolving.