Now, scientists have cast doubt on yet another fundamental feature of the universe, its shape, in a new paper from Nature Astronomy that warns of a “cosmological crisis.”
Pretty sure that’s sciencespeak for “SEND MONEY”.
Have You Hugged An Environmentalist Lately?
Unforeseen impacts caused by wolves in Idaho.
Y2Kyoto: 11,000 “Scientists” Say We’re All Gonna Die! Oh My!
It’s a real who’s who.
Update: It’s no Mickey Mouse organization. Oh, wait…
The Sound Of Settled Science
The remains of an ancient ape found in a Bavarian clay pit suggest that humans’ ancestors began standing upright millions of years earlier than previously thought, scientists said Wednesday.
An international team of researchers says the fossilized partial skeleton of a male ape that lived almost 12 million years ago in the humid forests of what is now southern Germany bears a striking resemblance to modern human bones. In a paper published by the journal Nature, they concluded that the previously unknown species — named Danuvius guggenmosi — could walk on two legs but also climb like an ape.
The findings “raise fundamental questions about our previous understanding of the evolution of the great apes and humans,” said Madelaine Boehme, of the University of Tübingen, Germany, who led the research.
The Sound Of Settled Science
His students called it a gift, describing his ability to “rivet a group of two to three hundred students with dynamic lectures that are full of feeling and poetry.” One student recalled how Rosenhan opened one of his lectures while sitting on a student’s lap — as a way to test the class’ reaction to abnormal behavior.
His research work was also groundbreaking. In 1973, Rosenhan published the paper “On Being Sane in Insane Places” in the prestigious journal Science, and it was a sensation. The study, in which eight healthy volunteers went undercover as “pseudopatients” in 12 psychiatric hospitals across the country, discovered harrowing conditions that led to national outrage. His findings helped expedite the widespread closure of psychiatric institutions across the country, changing mental-health care in the US forever.
It’s Probably Nothing
It’s Probably Nothing
ALIENS. A new type of virus that defies evolution has shocked scientists who have no idea how it is infecting its hosts.
The Sound Of Settled Science
We’re getting something wrong about the universe.
It might be something small: a measurement issue that makes certain stars looks closer or farther away than they are, something astrophysicists could fix with a few tweaks to how they measure distances across space. It might be something big: an error — or series of errors — in cosmology, or our understanding of the universe’s origin and evolution. If that’s the case, our entire history of space and time may be messed up. But whatever the issue is, it’s making key observations of the universe disagree with each other: Measured one way, the universe appears to be expanding at a certain rate; measured another way, the universe appears to be expanding at a different rate. And, as a new paper shows, those discrepancies have gotten larger in recent years, even as the measurements have gotten more precise.
Y2Kyoto: Academic Enforcement
There shall be no dissent;
A world-renowned expert in animal bone identification has lost her position at the University of Victoria (UVic), she believes for telling school kids politically incorrect facts about polar bears.
Zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford is routinely hired by biologists and archeologists in Canada and abroad to identify the remains of mammals, birds and fish. She has helped catalog museum collections, and assisted police with forensic analyses. But UVic students will no longer benefit from her expertise, and her ability to apply for research grants has come to a screeching halt. In May, the Anthropology Department withdrew her Adjunct Professor status, depriving her of a university affiliation.
Crockford describes her expulsion as “an academic hanging without a trial, conducted behind closed doors.” After being renewed unanimously in 2016 for a three-year term, her adjunct status was not renewed the next time around.
Crockford is the author of a popular blog, polarbearscience.com, as well as five books about these animals. Polar Bear Facts and Myths has been translated into four languages. She says that, contrary to the claims of environmental activists, polar bears are currently thriving and are at no risk of extinction from climate change.
What’s The Opposite Of Diversity?
While I was finishing my Ph. D., my supervisor constantly whined about how he needed someone else to pay for his research.
Bull tweet, I told him. Being a professor, he was well-educated and, supposedly creative and clever. (As it turned out, he was neither, but that’s another story.) What was stopping him from making do with less and making do with what he had on hand. His lab was filled with idle, though older, equipment. What was stopping him from using some of it? I had to when I worked in industry–it’s called a budget and I had to keep within it, as once the money was spent, that was it.
I paid for my research myself. I bought my computer and the money for the software I used came out of my pocket. I figured that if I could do that, he could, too.
But, no, that wouldn’t do for him and his well-paid, tenured ego. He had a privileged opinion of himself and told me that the general public was obligated to fund what he was doing. And using older equipment would simply not do. His results would have more credibility if he used the latest, shiniest new toys for what he was working on. (“Voltages will be more voltager! Temperatures will be more Kelvinized or Celsiuser!”)
That’s one reason universities have become money-harvesting machines. Assuming that one manages to jump through all of the white-heterosexual-men-need-not-apply hoops, one still might not get hired as a professor if one isn’t bringing in outside loot.
And, no, just because one gets a grant, it doesn’t necessarily mean that one gets to spent any of it, let alone on what. The last head of the department where I did my Ph. D. insisted that any money coming in had to go into a common pool. I wasn’t privy as to how that cash was distributed, but I’m sure that there as a song and dance associated with that.
Universities hate creativity, initiative, and independence. I’m sure one reason I never got a faculty position was that I was going to pay for my research myself. All I needed was a computer and paper and I could buy those using my own money. The department would have had no say in how I spent it.
I don’t feel sorry for academe or academics any more. There’s a word for what that system is nowadays and that word is freeloaders.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Records Found in Dusty Basement Undermine Decades of Dietary Advice. (From 2017).
The Rocks Don’t Lie
Noah’s Flood and the Development of Geology – David Montgomery at the Radcliffe Institute. It’s a little bit stupid at times, but overall not bad.
Honey, I Finished The Internet
BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Scientists try but fail to make a KNIFE from their own frozen faeces…
h/t James
The Sound Of Settled Science
Abstract:
The reliability of general circulation climate model (GCM) global air
temperature projections is evaluated for the first time, by way of
propagation of model calibration error. An extensive series of
demonstrations show that GCM air temperature projections are just linear
extrapolations of fractional greenhouse gas (GHG) forcing. Linear
projections are subject to linear propagation of error. A directly relevant
GCM calibration metric is the annual average ±12.1% error in global annual
average cloud fraction produced within CMIP5 climate models. This error is
strongly pair-wise correlated across models, implying a source in deficient
theory. The resulting long-wave cloud forcing (LWCF) error introduces an
annual average ±4 Wm–2 uncertainty into the simulated tropospheric thermal
energy flux. This annual ±4 Wm–2 simulation uncertainty is ±114 × larger
than the annual average ∼0.035 Wm–2 change in tropospheric thermal energy
flux produced by increasing GHG forcing since 1979. Tropospheric thermal
energy flux is the determinant of global air temperature. Uncertainty in
simulated tropospheric thermal energy flux imposes uncertainty on projected
air temperature. Propagation of LWCF thermal energy flux error through the
historically relevant 1988 projections of GISS Model II scenarios A, B, and
C, the IPCC SRES scenarios CCC, B1, A1B, and A2, and the RCP scenarios of
the 2013 IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, uncovers a ±15 C uncertainty in air
temperature at the end of a centennial-scale projection. Analogously large
but previously unrecognized uncertainties must therefore exist in all the
past and present air temperature projections and hindcasts of even advanced
climate models. The unavoidable conclusion is that an anthropogenic air
temperature signal cannot have been, nor presently can be, evidenced in
climate observables.
Full article is at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2019.00223/full
(h/t to Dean)
The Sound Of Settled Science
“Spay and neuter”, they said. It’s good for their health, they said.
More troubling, despite the unambiguous statements made by proponents of the salutary effects of spay-neuter on dogs, a series of long-term research programs has begun to show that the effects are far more subtle — and sometimes outright damaging. Benjamin Hart, a researcher and veterinarian at the University of California, Davis, has led the biggest effort to date to see exactly what the repercussions of desexing might be, in the long term, using the database from his university’s veterinary hospital. By removing dogs’ reproductive organs, gonadectomies also remove their main source of hormones — estrogen, testosterone and progesterone — each of which has a role not just in reproduction, but systemically through the body.
The first publication by Dr. Hart and his team, in 2013, reported that desexing golden retrievers, especially before six months of age, increased their risk of serious joint diseases, four to five times over the risk intact dogs face. They have since found higher rate of joint diseases among desexed Labrador retrievers, German shepherds, Doberman pinschers, Bernese mountain dogs and St. Bernards. Risks of cancer increase multifold in spayed goldens, neutered boxers and all Bernese. Desexed dogs of all types suffer higher rates of obesity. One of the most touted claims of spay-neuter — that it increases an animal’s life span — may be tempered by the finding that with an increased life span comes an increase rate of life-taking cancers.
[…]
Similarly, the oft-cited behavioral improvements of desexed dogs are questionable. Dr. Hart has reported that only one in four male dogs neutered for reasons of “aggression” shows less of the behavior after the surgery; the same holds for rates of mounting and excessive urine-marking. In females, there is even some evidence of an increase in aggressive behaviors if they are spayed before the age of 1.
The argument against routine spay-neuter is framed in animal rights blather, which is crocodile delicious. The same activist veterinarians who’ve enacted bans on “elective” animal husbandry procedures (like cat declawing and tail docking) apparently did so without considering that these surgeries keeping their clinic lights on are also “elective”.
Mathematical Challenges to Darwin
Interesting discussion.
Jordan Peterson Pushes Back on “Deep Fake”
The recent release of NotJordanPeterson.com should be of concern to everyone. This website illustrates that AI technology has now evolved to the point that we will not be able to determine whether audio recordings (and somewhat already, videos) are real or fake. This means that any public or private person can be “made” to appear to be saying anything. Just imagine, for example, the ability that political opponents will have to destroy each other. Former spouses, going through a vicious divorce, can suddenly come up with audio recording of the other saying the most horrendous of things. Didn’t get the promotion you were hoping for at work? No problem, just create an audio recording of your manager acting in an appalling manner and you can get whatever you want at that company.
The evolution of technology can’t be stopped though. So what’s to be done? Professor Jordan Peterson has some thoughts:
It’s hard to imagine a technology with more power to disrupt. I’m already in the position (as many of you soon will be as well) where anyone can produce a believable audio and perhaps video of me saying absolutely anything they want me to say. How can that possibly be fought? More to the point: how are we going to trust anything electronically mediated in the very near future (say, during the next presidential election)? We’re already concerned, rightly or wrongly, with “fake news” — and that’s only news that has been slanted, arguably, by the bias of the reporter or editor or news organization. What do we do when “fake news” is just as real as “real news”? What do we do when anyone can imitate anyone else, for any reason that suits them?
The Sound Of Settled Science
Ross McKitrick made the same argument over a decade ago: Why Should We Trust A Statistic That Might Not Even Exist?
“Discussions on global warming often refer to ‘global temperature.’ Yet the concept is thermodynamically as well as mathematically an impossibility,” says Science Daily, paraphrasing Bjarne Andresen, a professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, one of three authors of a paper questioning the “validity of a ‘global temperature.’”
“The temperature obtained by collecting measurements of air temperatures at a large number of measuring stations around the globe, weighing them according to the area they represent, and then calculating the yearly average according to the usual method of adding all values and dividing by the number of points.”
But a “temperature can be defined only for a homogeneous system,” says Andresen. The climate is not regulated by a single temperature. Instead, “differences of temperatures drive the processes and create the storms, sea currents, thunder, etc. which make up the climate”.
The Sound Of Settled Science
… has found winters in northern China have been warming since 4,000BC – regardless of human activity – but the mainland scientists behind the research warn there is no room for complacency or inaction on climate change, with the prospect of a sudden global cooling also posing a danger.
The study found that winds from Arctic Siberia have been growing weaker, the conifer tree line has been retreating north, and there has been a steady rise in biodiversity in a general warming trend that continues today. It appears to have little to do with the increase in greenhouse gases which began with the industrial revolution, according to the researchers.
Lead scientist Dr Wu Jing, from the Key Laboratory of Cenozoic Geology and Environment at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the study had found no evidence of human influence on northern China’s warming winters.