Category: Culture

Climate change is not a right vs left issue.

A revealing article in The Atlantic by Professor Adler.

Yesterday, I published a Post called Denialists standing up for insanity.  Then within hours of writing that, up popped in my email ‘in-box’ the latest ‘What’s New’ from the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media.  One article that jumped off the page at me was this one,

How A Conservative Sees, Wants to Address, Climate Change

June 6, 2012

Law professor Jonathan Adler, no flaming liberal, accepts much of the science and outlines conservative property rights principles for addressing climate change challenges.

What is surprising about these quotations?

  • “… there is reason to believe many of the effects [of climate change] will be quite negative.
  • “Excesses” of climate campaigners and “bad behavior” by some scientists “do not, and should not, discredit the underlying science.”
  • Despite some “substantial uncertainty … this is not sufficient justification for ignoring global warming or pretending that climate change is not a serious problem.”
  • “… effects will be most severe in those nations that are both least able to adapt and least responsible for” the greenhouse problem.
  • “Even non-catastrophic warming should be a serious concern.”

What’s actually surprising about these points is not so much the messages, but the messenger.

Then a couple of paragraphs later, the Yale Forum article links to The Atlantic piece as in, “Adler expresses his views on the seriousness of climate change in “A Conservative’s Approach to Combating Climate Change.”

Let me just give you a taste of that Atlantic piece.

It opens thus,

A Conservative’s Approach to Combating Climate Change

Guest post by Jonathan H. Adler, a professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law and regular contributor to the Volokh Conspiracy

No environmental issue is more polarizing than global climate change.  Many on the left fear increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases threaten an environmental apocalypse while many on the right believe anthropogenic global warming is much ado about nothing and, at worst, a hoax.  Both sides pretend as if the climate policy debate is, first and foremost, about science, rather than policy. This is not so. There is substantial uncertainty about the scope, scale, and consequences of anthropogenic warming, and will be for some time, but this is not sufficient justification for ignoring global warming or pretending that climate change is not a serious problem.

The fifth and sixth paragraphs present a powerful ‘constitutional’ perspective,

Accepting, for the sake of argument, that the skeptics’ assessment of the science is correct, global warming will produce effects that should be of concern.  Among other things, even a modest increase in global temperature can be expected to produce some degree of sea-level rise, with consequent negative effects on low-lying regions.  Michaels and Balling, for instance, have posited a “best guess” that sea levels will rise 5 to 11 inches over the next century.  Such an increase in sea levels is likely manageable in wealthy, developed nations, such as the United States.  Poorer nations in the developing world, however, will not be so able to adapt to such changes.  This is of particular concern because these effects will be most severe in those nations that are both least able to adapt and least responsible for contributing to the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

It is a well established principle in the Anglo-American legal tradition that one does not have the right to use one’s own property in a manner that causes harm to one’s neighbor.  There are common law cases gong back 400 years establishing this principle and international law has long embraced a similar norm.  As I argued at length in this paper, if we accept this principle, even non-catastrophic warming should be a serious concern, as even non-catastrophic warming will produce the sorts of consequences that have long been recognized as property rights violations, such as the flooding of the land of others.

Professor Adler closes the article, as follows,

Fourth and finally, it is important to recognize that some degree of warming is already hard-wired into the system.  This means that some degree of adaptation will be necessary.  Yet as above, recognizing the reality of global warming need not justify increased federal control over the private economy.  There are many market-oriented steps that can, and should, be taken to increase the country’s ability to adapt to climate change including, as I’ve argued here and here, increased reliance upon water markets, particularly in the western United States where the effects of climate change on water supplies are likely to be most severe.

I recognize that a relatively brief post like this is unlikely to convince many people who have set positions on climate change.  I can already anticipate a comment thread filled with charges and counter-charges over the science.  But I hope this post has helped illustrate that the embrace of limited government principles need not entail the denial of environmental claims and that a concern for environmental protection need not lead to an ever increasing mound of prescriptive regulation.  And for those who wish to explore these arguments in further detail, there’s lots more in the links I’ve provided throughout this post.

The links provided by Professor Adler, as he refers to above, are well-worth pursuing, so for that reason alone, I do recommend reading the whole Atlantic piece in full.

Denialists standing up for insanity!

Bill McKibben spells it out that climate-change deniers are on the ropes — But So Is the Planet !

Once again, I am deeply indebted to Tom Englehardt of Tom Dispatch fame for his permission allowing me reproduce a recent post.

But before so doing, let me natter on for a few words about why I am motivated to write a daily post for Learning from Dogs.  As I say on the Welcome page, “Mankind is close to the edge of extinction, literally and spiritually. Dogs know better, much better! Time again for man to learn from dogs!”

To expand on that, I write about the purpose of this Blog, “... if society doesn’t eschew the games, half-truths and selfish attitudes of the last, say, 30 years or more, then civilisation, as we know it, could be under threat.”  Which is why the quotation on that page is so powerful:

There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth, the persistent

refusal to analyse the causes of happenings.” Dorothy Thompson.

Stay with me for just a little longer.  Here’s an article that was published on the BBC’s News website on Tuesday (I’ve taken just a small extract and slightly re-arranged the order),

Virginia’s dying marshes and climate change denial

By Daniel Nasaw

BBC News Magazine, York River, Virginia

Trees die as rising salt water soaks their roots, Watts says

Dying wetland trees along Virginia’s coastline are evidence that rising sea levels threaten nature and humans, scientists say – and show the limits of political action amid climate change scepticism.

Dead trees loom over the marsh like the bones of a whale beached long ago.

In the salt marshes along the banks of the York River in the US state of Virginia, pine and cedar trees and bushes of holly and wax myrtle occupy small islands, known as hummocks.

But as the salty estuary waters have risen in recent years, they have drowned the trees on the hummocks’ lower edges. If – when – the sea level rises further, it will inundate and drown the remaining trees and shrubs, and eventually sink the entire marsh.

That threatens the entire surrounding ecosystem, because fish, oysters and crabs depend on the marsh grass for food.

“These are just the early warning signs of what’s coming,” says avian ecologist Bryan Watts, stepping carefully among the fallen pines.

And a little later in the article comes this,

“Here in Virginia there is very little political will to address the mitigation side of things – reducing our carbon footprint, reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” says Carl Hershner, who studies coastal resources management at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

So you can see what I can see and what a majority of the US population can see – denying the truth of dangers to our biosphere is nothing more than insane!

OK, now that’s off my chest, on to the Tom Dispatch essay from Bill McKibben introduced, as always by Tom.

oooOOOooo

Tomgram: Bill McKibben, Climate-Change Deniers Have Done Their Job Well

Posted by Bill McKibben

Here’s the thing about climate-change deniers: these days before they sit down to write their blog posts, they have to turn on the AC.  After all, it might as well be July in New York (where I’m writing this), August in Chicago (where a century-old heat record was broken in late May), and hell at the Indy 500.  Infernos have been raging from New Mexico and Colorado, where the fire season started early, to the shores of Lake Superior, where dry conditions and high temperatures led to Michigan’s third largest wildfire in its history.  After a March heat wave for the record books, we now have summer in late spring, the second-named tropical storm of the season earlier than ever recorded, and significant drought conditions, especially in the South and Southwest.  In the meantime, carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) continue to head for the atmosphere inrecord quantities.  And in case anyone living in a big city doesn’t know it, heat can kill.

It’s true that no single event can be pinned on climate change with absolute certainty.  But anyone who doesn’t think we’re in a fierce new world of weather extremes — and as TomDispatch regular Bill McKibben has suggested, on an increasingly less hospitable planet that he calls Eaarth — is likely to learn the realities firsthand soon enough.  Not so long ago, if you really wanted to notice the effects of climate change around you, you had to be an Inuit, an Aleut, or some other native of the far north where rising temperatures and melting ice were visibly changing the landscape and wrecking ways of life — or maybe an inhabitant of Kiribati.  Now, it seems, we are all Inuit or Pacific islanders.  And the latest polling numbers indicate that Americans are finally beginning to notice in their own lives, and in numbers that may matter.

With that in mind, we really do need a new term for the people who insist that climate change is a figment of some left-wing conspiracy or a cabal of miscreant scientists.  “Denial” (or the more active “deniers”) seems an increasingly pallid designation in our new world.  Consider, for instance, that in low-lying North Carolina, a leading candidate for disaster from globally rising sea levels, coastal governments and Republicans in the state legislature are taking action: they are passing resolutions against policies meant to mitigate the damage from rising waters and insisting that official state sea-level calculations be made only on the basis of “historic trends,” with no global warming input.  That should really stop the waters!

In the meantime, this spring greenhouse-gas monitoring sites in the Arctic have recorded a startling first: 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  It’s an ominous line to cross (and so quickly).  As in the name of McKibben’s remarkable organization, 350.org, it’s well above the safety line for what this planet and many of the species on it, including us, can take in the long term, and heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere are still on the rise.  All of this is going to get ever harder to “deny,” no matter what resolutions are passed or how measurements are restricted.  In the meantime, the climate-change deniers, McKibben reports, are finally starting to have troubles of their own. Tom

The Planet Wreckers
Climate-Change Deniers Are On the Ropes — But So Is the Planet
By Bill McKibben

It’s been a tough few weeks for the forces of climate-change denial.

First came the giant billboard with Unabomber Ted Kacynzki’s face plastered across it: “I Still Believe in Global Warming. Do You?” Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, the nerve-center of climate-change denial, it was supposed to draw attention to the fact that “the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.” Instead it drew attention to the fact that these guys had over-reached, and with predictable consequences.

A hard-hitting campaign from a new group called Forecast the Facts persuaded many of the corporations backing Heartland to withdraw $825,000 in funding; an entire wing of the Institute, devoted to helping the insurance industry, calved off to form its own nonprofit. Normally friendly politicians like Wisconsin Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner announced that they would boycott the group’s annual conference unless the billboard campaign was ended.

Which it was, before the billboards with Charles Manson and Osama bin Laden could be unveiled, but not before the damage was done: Sensenbrenner spoke at last month’s conclave, but attendance was way down at the annual gathering, and Heartland leaders announced that there were no plans for another of the yearly fests. Heartland’s head, Joe Bast, complained that his side had been subjected to the most “uncivil name-calling and disparagement you can possibly imagine from climate alarmists,” which was both a little rich — after all, he was the guy with the mass-murderer billboards — but also a little pathetic.  A whimper had replaced the characteristically confident snarl of the American right.

That pugnaciousness may return: Mr. Bast said last week that he was finding new corporate sponsors, that he was building a new small-donor base that was “Greenpeace-proof,” and that in any event the billboard had been a fine idea anyway because it had “generated more than $5 million in earned media so far.” (That’s a bit like saying that for a successful White House bid John Edwards should have had more mistresses and babies because look at all the publicity!) Whatever the final outcome, it’s worth noting that, in a larger sense, Bast is correct: this tiny collection of deniers has actually been incredibly effective over the past years.

The best of them — and that would be Marc Morano, proprietor of the website Climate Depot, and Anthony Watts, of the website Watts Up With That — have fought with remarkable tenacity to stall and delay the inevitable recognition that we’re in serious trouble. They’ve never had much to work with.  Only one even remotely serious scientist remains in the denialist camp.  That’s MIT’s Richard Lindzen, who has been arguing for years that while global warming is real it won’t be as severe as almost all his colleagues believe. But as a long article in the New York Times detailed last month, the credibility of that sole dissenter is basically shot.  Even the peer reviewers he approved for his last paper told the National Academy of Sciences that it didn’t merit publication. (It ended up in a “little-known Korean journal.”)

Deprived of actual publishing scientists to work with, they’ve relied on a small troupe of vaudeville performers, featuring them endlessly on their websites. Lord Christopher Monckton, for instance, an English peer (who has been officially warned by the House of Lords to stop saying he’s a member) began his speech at Heartland’s annual conference by boasting that he had “no scientific qualification” to challenge the science of climate change.

He’s proved the truth of that claim many times, beginning in his pre-climate-change career when he explained to readers of the American Spectator that “there is only one way to stop AIDS. That is to screen the entire population regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the disease for life.” His personal contribution to the genre of climate-change mass-murderer analogies has been to explain that a group of young climate-change activists who tried to take over a stage where he was speaking were “Hitler Youth.”

Or consider Lubos Motl, a Czech theoretical physicist who has never published on climate change but nonetheless keeps up a steady stream of web assaults on scientists he calls “fringe kibitzers who want to become universal dictators” who should “be thinking how to undo your inexcusable behavior so that you will spend as little time in prison as possible.” On the crazed killer front, Motl said that, while he supported many of Norwegian gunman Anders Breivik’s ideas, it was hard to justify gunning down all those children — still, it did demonstrate that “right-wing people… may even be more efficient while killing — and the probable reason is that Breivik may have a higher IQ than your garden variety left-wing or Islamic terrorist.”

If your urge is to laugh at this kind of clown show, the joke’s on you — because it’s worked. I mean, James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who has emerged victorious in every Senate fight on climate change, cites Motl regularly; Monckton has testified four times before the U.S. Congress.

Morano, one of the most skilled political operatives of the age — he “broke the story” that became the Swiftboat attack on John Kerry — plays rough: he regularly publishes the email addresses of those he pillories, for instance, so his readers can pile on the abuse. But he plays smart, too. He’s a favorite of Fox News and of Rush Limbaugh, and he and his colleagues have used those platforms to make it anathema for any Republican politician to publicly express a belief in the reality of climate change.

Take Newt Gingrich, for instance.  Only four years ago he was willing to sit on a love seat with Nancy Pelosi and film a commercial for a campaign headed by Al Gore.  In it he explained that he agreed with the California Congresswoman and then-Speaker of the House that the time had come for action on climate. This fall, hounded by Morano, he was forced to recant again and again.  His dalliance with the truth about carbon dioxide hurt him more among the Republican faithful than any other single “failing.”  Even Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts actually took some action on global warming, has now been reduced to claiming that scientists may tell us “in fifty years” if we have anything to fear.

In other words, a small cadre of fervent climate-change deniers took control of the Republican party on the issue.  This, in turn, has meant control of Congress, and since the president can’t sign a treaty by himself, it’s effectively meant stifling any significant international progress on global warming.  Put another way, the variousright wing billionaires and energy companies who have bankrolled this stuff have gotten their money’s worth many times over.

One reason the denialists’ campaign has been so successful, of course, is that they’ve also managed to intimidate the other side. There aren’t many senators who rise with the passion or frequency of James Inhofe but to warn of the dangers of ignoring what’s really happening on our embattled planet.

It’s a striking barometer of intimidation that Barack Obama, who has a clear enough understanding of climate change and its dangers, has barely mentioned the subject for four years.  He did show a little leg to his liberal base in Rolling Stoneearlier this spring by hinting that climate change could become a campaign issue.  Last week, however, he passed on his best chance to make good on that promise when he gave a long speech on energy at an Iowa wind turbine factory without even mentioning global warming. Because the GOP has been so unreasonable, the President clearly feels he can take the environmental vote by staying silent, which means the odds that he’ll do anything dramatic in the next four years grow steadily smaller.

On the brighter side, not everyone has been intimidated.  In fact, a spirited counter-movement has arisen in recent years.  The very same weekend that Heartland tried to put the Unabomber’s face on global warming, 350.org conducted thousands of rallies around the globe to show who climate change really affects. In a year of mobilization, we also managed to block — at least temporarily — the Keystone pipeline that would have brought the dirtiest of dirty energy, tar-sands oil, from the Canadian province of Alberta to the Gulf Coast.  In the meantime, our Canadian allies are fighting hard to block a similar pipeline that would bring those tar sands to the Pacific for export.

Similarly, in just the last few weeks, hundreds of thousands have signed on to demand an end to fossil-fuel subsidies. And new polling data already show more Americans worried about our changing climate, because they’ve noticed the freakish weather of the last few years and drawn the obvious conclusion.

But damn, it’s a hard fight, up against a ton of money and a ton of inertia. Eventually, climate denial will “lose,” because physics and chemistry are not intimidated even by Lord Monckton. But timing is everything — if he and his ilk, a crew of certified planet wreckers, delay action past the point where it can do much good, they’ll be able to claim one of the epic victories in political history — one that will last for geological epochs.

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook.

Copyright 2012 Bill McKibben

The truth about exercise!

A powerful new look at exercise from a recent BBC Horizon programme.

The first 15 seconds of the BBC Horizon Programme – The Truth About Exercise – sum it up in a nutshell.

Exercise!  I know I should but I don’t particularly enjoy it, I begrudge the time and I never seem to make much progress!

So say many of us!

I’m 68 next birthday and while I try and watch my weight and eat a healthy diet I know my overall fitness is far from what it should be.  A neighbour lent me a bicycle the other day because I had this notion that riding into town, just over a mile away, would make a great healthy difference.  In my younger days, I would ride dozens of miles on a bike and think nothing of it.  But when I jumped on the bike and set off up the road, in less than 300 yards I had come to a halt stumped by the very first incline!  So much for my fitness!

Thus when we watched this BBC Horizon programme, I could hardly believe what was being proposed.  That surprising new research suggests many of us could benefit from just three minutes of high intensity exercise a week.  Yes, I did write three minutes a week!

Here’s how the video is introduced,

Like many, Michael Mosley want to get fitter and healthier but can’t face hours on the treadmill or trips to the gym. Help may be at hand.

He uncovers the surprising new research which suggests many of us could benefit from just three minutes of high intensity exercise a week.

He discovers the hidden power of simple activities like walking and fidgeting, and finds out why some of us don’t respond to exercise at all

Using himself as a guinea pig, Michael uncovers the surprising new research about exercise, that has the power to make us all live longer and healthier lives.

The video is 58 minutes long and I thoroughly recommend that you find a comfortable seat and remain undisturbed while you watch every minute of this mind-blowing programme.

P.S. Jean and I were down in Phoenix last week and a local fitness store had a sale of exercise bikes.  I purchased what looked like a well-built bike, listed at $249, for $159.  Now a week later, I can confirm that 20 seconds of ‘flat out’ pedalling really does have one heaving for breath.  So watch the video!!

P.P.S.  Doesn’t need to be said but if any reader is motivated by the video to buy a bike and adopt the exercise regime they should take into account their own health and, if in any doubt, see a doctor first.

That Diamond Jubilee

A further reflection on what has clearly been a wonderful occasion.

Last Sunday, I published a piece about The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.  Today, I wanted to add a couple of perspectives to this glorious and historic event.

The grand perspective

As seen by someone watching the 1,000 boats on the River Thames to mark The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

Then in stark contrast …

The local perspective

… as seen by the camera’s eye in the little village of Littlehempston, South Devon with many of the population of some 200 persons in front of Littlehempston Church.

Picture by Neil Kelly, standing to the right of John, see footnote.

Footnote: Not only is Littlehempston just a few miles from the village of Harberton where I used to live, before my new life with Jean here in Arizona, but both my sister and brother-in-law are in this photo; my sister, Corinne, is the first woman in from the right in the front row, and my brother-in-law, John, is standing just behind her (wearing the white hat).

Update:

Neil sent me a further picture below of the village beacon alight for the Jubilee.

Littlehempston’s Jubilee Beacon

 

Transit of Venus

This is a copy of a Post published on the 31st May to ensure that all who are interested get the details.

That Post was called, The noblest astronomy affords, all that follows is a copy of that Post.

Don’t miss the transit of Venus across the Sun.

Continue reading “Transit of Venus” →

Congratulations, Ma’am.

A small tribute from two of Her Majesty’s subjects!

Best wishes for many years ahead as our Queen!

Jean and I managed to watch the hour-long tribute by Prince Charles to his mother’s wonderful Diamond Jubilee week-end.

Here’s a small extract of that programme that appeared on ITN News.

Then thanks to Martin Lack’s latest Post, I discovered that You Tube have the full programme as well.  Here it is – do watch it if you can, it is a lovely, personal and intimate reflection by Prince Charles.

At the end of the programme, both Jean and I felt very nostalgic about the long reign of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.  However much we appreciate the life that we have here in Payson, Arizona, these two old Londoners still feel proud to be British.

There’s a great website here full of all the details of this very special time for Britain.

Finally, the extreme dry conditions of our forest mean that lighting a Jubilee Beacon here at home is out of the question.  The following is our alternative:

Beltane Fire Ritual, Edinburgh, Scotland

It’s what Jean and I do most Sunday evenings anyway!

Talking physics with your dog!

Not as silly as one might think!

Back on the 25th April I ran a Post called Dogs and the Mathematics of Calculus that had been prompted by a lovely email from Richard Hake who is Emeritus Professor of Physics at Indiana University.  (Now here’s a question for yours truly; what does it mean for a Professor to be an Emeritus Professor? Answers as comments please.)

It was very well received.  Then just a few days ago Professor Hake, who admits to being a dedicated lurker of this blogsite, sent me another email with a number of fascinating links.  So here goes with one of those links.

Talking to Your Dog About Physics

A conversation with Chad Orzel

So, why do you talk to your dog about physics?

Lots of reasons, but the main one is that I’m a physics professor. Talking about physics is what I do. Sooner or later I talk to everybody about physics.

I bet that’s a big hit at parties.

You might be surprised. I mean, sure, I get a lot of people making faces and saying how much they hated physics when they took it in college. But some of those same people turn right around and start asking interested questions about the subject.

OK, but why the dog?

Talking to the dog about physics is worthwhile because it can help me see how to explain physics to my human students. Humans all come at the subject with the same set of preconceptions about how the world works, and what “should” happen, and it can be very hard to shake those off. That’s a big barrier to understanding something like quantum physics.

Dogs look at the world in a very different way. To a dog, the world is a neverending source of wonder and amazement. You can walk your dog past the same rock every morning, and every morning, she’ll sniff that rock like she’s never sniffed it before. Dogs are surprised by things we take for granted, and they take in stride things that would leave us completely baffled.

Can you give an example?

Well, take the dog’s bowl, for example. Every now and then, we put scraps from dinner in the bowl when she’s not looking, and she’s become convinced that her bowl is magic– that tasty food just appears in it out of nowhere. She’ll wander over a couple of times a day, and look just to see if anything good has turned up, even when we haven’t been anywhere near the bowl in hours.

This puts her in a better position to understand quantum electrodynamics than many humans.

It does?

Sure. One of the most surprising features of QED, in Feynman’s formulation, is the idea of “virtual particles.” You have an electron that’s moving along, minding its own business, and every now and then, particle-antiparticle pairs just pop into existence for a very short time. They don’t stick around very long, but they have a real and measurable influence on the way electrons interact with each other, and with other particles.

You’re making this up, right?

No, not at all. One set of these interactions is described by a number called the “g-factor” of the electron, and this has been measured to something like fifteen decimal places, and the experimental measurement agrees perfectly with the theoretical prediction. If there weren’t electrons and positrons popping out of nowhere, there’s no way you could get that sort of agreement.

So, what’s this have to do with the dog?

Well, like I said, the dog is perfectly comfortable with the idea of stuff popping into existence out of nowhere. If a great big steak were to suddenly appear on your dining room table, you’d probably be a little perturbed. The dog, on the other hand, would feel it was nothing more than her due.

So she’s perfectly ok with the idea of virtual particles, unlike most humans, who tend to say things like “You’re making this up, right?” She was already convinced that there were bunnies made of cheese popping in and out of the backyard, and just regards QED as a solid theoretical justification for her beliefs.

And this helps humans, how, exactly?

Physics has a reputation as a difficult and unapproachable subject, especially in fields like quantum mechanics, where the predictions of the theory confound our human preconceptions. If you can put aside a few of your usual notions of how the world works, and think about how things look to a dog, some aspects of physics that seem absolutely impossible to accept become a lot more approachable.

Why does this matter, though? Isn’t this all stuff that you need a billion-dollar particle accelerator to see?

Actually, no. It’s a common misconception, but most of the really cool aspects of quantum mechanics that we talk about in the book are experiments that are done on a table-top scale. One of them, the “quantum eraser,” you can even do yourself with a laser pointer and a couple of pairs of polarized sunglasses.

OK, but what is it good for, in a practical sense?

Lots of things. It’s not an exaggeration to say that modern life as we know it would be impossible without an understanding of quantum phyiscs. You need to understand quantum ideas to build the lasers we use in modern telecommunications, and the transistors that are the basis of all modern electronics. The computer I’m typing this on wouldn’t exist without quantum physics.

And there are a whole host of future technologies that are based on quantum ideas. There are exotic applications like quantum computers that can do calculations that would be impossible with any normal computer, and quantum cryptography systems that allow us to make unbreakable codes. But even relatively mundane “green” technologies like more efficient light bulbs, batteries, and solar panels rely on quantum ideas to work.

Quantum physics is everywhere, and drives a huge amount of modern science and technology.

So that’s why people should teach quantum physics to their dogs?

Exactly. Also, it’s just about the coolest thing ever.

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is published by Scribner can be ordered from Amazon.com, IndieBound,Barnes and Noble, and Powell’s.

How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is published by Basic Books and can be ordered from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s.

 

Talking or sleeping about physics?

OK, two thoughts to close this off.  The first is to remind you of an early sentence that Chad Orzel wrote, “Talking to the dog about physics is worthwhile because it can help me see how to explain physics to my human students.” and to add that in my next life, I wouldn’t mind coming back as one of Chads dogs!

The second thought is that Chad’s talks with his dogs are pretty relaxed affairs, as the picture above bears out!

Thank you, Professor Hake!

 

The noblest astronomy affords

Don’t miss the transit of Venus across the Sun.

The full quotation is “This sight…is by far the noblest astronomy affords…” and was reputed to have been made by Sir Edmond Halley of Halley’s Comet fame, see here.  But today’s Post is about Venus.

Venus — Sister to Earth

From the NOAA Science on a Sphere website, we can read this about Venus,

Venus has been referred to as the sister or even twin to Earth by many because of its similar chemical composition, density and size. That, however, is where the similarities end. Venus is not only the hottest planet in the solar system, but also the brightest. Both of these characteristics are the result of the atmosphere that surrounds the planet, which is mainly composed of carbon dioxide and some sulfuric acid. This composition allows for the greenhouse effect to be astronomical causing the planet to have a constant temperature of 864°F. The planet is the brightest because the clouds, composed of sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid, are highly reflective. The pressure of the atmosphere that surrounds Venus is 90 times that of the atmosphere around Earth, crushing any probes that land on Venus in a matter of hours.

Depending on where you live on Planet Earth you will see the transit on the 5th June, the 6th June or not at all!

Courtesy of Fred Espenak (NASA GSFC), who provides additional transit of Venus data from NASA.

(That additional data referred to above may be found here.)

That transit diagram plus mounds of other interesting stuff is on the Transit of Venus website and on that website this page has the details allowing you to work out what day and time the transit occurs depending on where you are.

To close let me be a little cheeky and reproduce, in full, what appeared on the Science Daily website on the 1st May.

Venus to Appear in Once-In-A-Lifetime Event

ScienceDaily (May 1, 2012) — On 5 and 6 June this year, millions of people around the world will be able to see Venus pass across the face of the Sun in what will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

It will take Venus about six hours to complete its transit, appearing as a small black dot on the Sun’s surface, in an event that will not happen again until 2117.

In this month’s Physics World, Jay M Pasachoff, an astronomer at Williams College, Massachusetts, explores the science behind Venus’s transit and gives an account of its fascinating history.

Transits of Venus occur only on the very rare occasions when Venus and Earth are in a line with the Sun. At other times Venus passes below or above the Sun because the two orbits are at a slight angle to each other. Transits occur in pairs separated by eight years, with the gap between pairs of transits alternating between 105.5 and 121.5 years — the last transit was in 2004.

Building on the original theories of Nicolaus Copernicus from 1543, scientists were able to predict and record the transits of both Mercury and Venus in the centuries that followed.

Johannes Kepler successfully predicted that both planets would transit the Sun in 1631, part of which was verified with Mercury’s transit of that year. But the first transit of Venus to actually be viewed was in 1639 — an event that had been predicted by the English astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks. He observed the transit in the village of Much Hoole in Lancashire — the only other person to see it being his correspondent, William Crabtree, in Manchester.

Later, in 1716, Edmond Halley proposed using a transit of Venus to predict the precise distance between Earth and the Sun, known as the astronomical unit. As a result, hundreds of expeditions were sent all over the world to observe the 1761 and 1769 transits. A young James Cook took the Endeavour to the island of Tahiti, where he successfully observed the transit at a site that is still called Point Venus.

Pasachoff expects the transit to confirm his team’s theory about the phenomenon called “the black-drop effect” — a strange, dark band linking Venus’s silhouette with the sky outside the Sun that appears for about a minute starting just as Venus first enters the solar disk.

Pasachoff and his colleagues will concentrate on observing Venus’s atmosphere as it appears when Venus is only half onto the solar disk. He also believes that observations of the transit will help astronomers who are looking for extrasolar planets orbiting stars other than the Sun.

“Doing so verifies that the techniques for studying events on and around other stars hold true in our own backyard.. In other words, by looking up close at transits in our solar system, we may be able to see subtle effects that can help exoplanet hunters explain what they are seeing when they view distant suns,” Pasachoff writes.

Not content with viewing this year’s transit from Earth, scientists in France will be using the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the effect of Venus’s transit very slightly darkening the Moon. Pasachoff and colleagues even hope to use Hubble to watch Venus passing in front of the Sun as seen from Jupiter — an event that will take place on 20 September this year — and will be using NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which is orbiting Saturn, to see a transit of Venus from Saturn on 21 December.

“We are fortunate in that we are truly living in a golden period of planetary transits and it is one of which I hope astronomers can take full advantage,” he writes.

Editors note: Looking directly at the sun can cause severe and permanent eye damage. Do not look directly at Venus’ transit of the sun.

For more information see Wikipedia article.

Footnote:

I’m going to republish this in full on Monday, 4th June at the usual Learning from Dogs release time of 0700 UTC so to increase the odds of all my readers who would like to see the Transit having the information in good time!

Civilisations do fail!

Any lessons for today from the Valley of the Pyramids at Tucume in Peru?

The view of Huaca Larga (Photo: Heinz Plege/PromPerú)

Let’s set the scene,

It’s amazing to think that anyone lived here, that this valley was once green. Now it is sun-blasted, scorching hot, and the only life is the circling vultures and the rainbow-colored iguanas, like something out of a desert hallucination, skittering across the rocks.

The reminders of past life rise up around me, however, eroded to look more like drip castles than the pyramids they once were. I am in Túcume, the once-grand capital of the Sican culture, Peru’s mythical Valley of the Pyramids.

I am not far from Chiclayo, and even closer to the city of Lambayeque, where the Royal Tombs of Sipán Museum serves as one of the major tourist attractions on the north coast. Here at Túcume however, there are few visitors.

It is not hard to get to the site. Combis leave regularly from Chiclayo and Lambayeque, dropping passengers in the modern village of Túcume, from which an quick mototaxi ride leads to the ruins. By car or taxi, it is about a 30 minute ride from Chiclayo.

There are two main trails marked out across the desert plain in Túcume. One leads to Cerro Purgatorio, a craggy hill overlooking the 26 pyramids that comprise the site. The trail winds across the scorched valley, between several of the pyramids, before arriving at a staircase leading to different scenic overlooks on the face of Purgatorio.

WikiPedia, too, has a short reference.

Then there’s a long and revealing article on the InkaNatura Travel Site, which I recommend you go to.

So what happened at Túcume to cause the civilisation to fail?  Maybe this 10-minute film gives the answers, but just a note to say that there are some potentially upsetting scenes for the younger or more sensitive among us.

So anyone sufficiently brave to say that history won’t repeat itself.

Wonder which would be the ‘cursed cities’?

Inequality, a rich man speaks!

A personal reflection offered by Nick Hanauer.

Mr. Nick Hanauer

I hadn’t come across Mr. Hanauer before but thanks to some Facebook comments by Patrice Ayme found this YouTube video that is well-worth watching.  That’s an understatement!

The fundamental message that is contained in this short video seems critical, well to me it does, to society (that’s all of us, by the way) understanding why so many things seem to be going so very wrong for so many people.  But let me stop there before it becomes another of my rants!

Who is Nick Hanauer?  Here is a small extract from Nick Hanauer’s website,

Nicolas J Hanauer is a partner with Second Avenue Partners, a Seattle venture capital partnership specializing in early state startups and emerging technology. He has had a hand in such companies as Amazon.com and aQuantive among others.

Hanauer’s career began with a position as executive VP of Sales and Marketing at Pacific Coast Feather Company, a family owned manufacturer of basic bedding. In his time in that role, he helped grow Pacific Coast from several million dollars to more than $300 million in sales. Hanauer subsequently served as the company’s Co-Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer and remains Chief Executive Officer.

In 1988, Hanauer co-founded Museum Quality Framing Company, a company that has emerged the largest of its kind on the west coast with 60 locations. Hanauer was also one of the first investors in Amazon.com in 1995, where he served as a Board Advisor until January of 2000.

In 1996, he founded and served as CEO of internet media company Avenue A Media (later re-named aQuantive, Inc.) and became Chairman of the Board upon the first public offering in 2000. aQuantive was purchased by Microsoft in August of 2007 for 6.4 billion dollars; the largest acquisition in Microsoft history.

Now the video; less than 6 minutes long – do watch it!

As  a one-time entrepreneur back in the 80’s I can vouch for much of what Mr. Hanauer proclaims in his video.  The essence of successful marketing for any business, large and small, is understanding your market. Seeing the customer’s world through the customer’s eyes would be another way of putting that.

In plain language that means carefully and closely understanding what your customers, both actual and prospective, require, objectively and subjectively, and providing it to them profitably.  As the middle-classes (don’t like the term but it will have to do) are often the largest market opportunity, then it does follow that a healthy and vibrant middle-class is going to be best overall for the health and vibrancy of a country.  Indeed, in this very inter-connected world, that really equates to the health and vibrancy of our planet.

Which so easily leads on to a core truth. This one.  If all the Governments democratically elected on this planet truly acknowledged the democratic foundation, as Lincoln so ably put it, “government of the people, by the people, for the people” then those governments would be united in the one most important task facing the people – creating a sustainable way for us to live on the only planet we have!

Apologies, it did turn into a rant!

You may also want to read this TED and inequality: The real story.