Lorne Gunter, one of our best columnists, poops on the Liberals’ (and many others’, including academics and pundits who should know better) parade:

Libs believe the world waits for Canada’s Egypt stance
A daydream, courtesy of Liberal Foreign Affairs critic Bob Rae [a pretty smart fellow these days, good on Afstan, but still drinking some of that Kool-Aid]…
In a fireworks’ burst of elation, pro-democracy protestors erupt with joy. Canada has spoken. The crisis is averted. Ruefully, but non-violently, pro-Mubarak forces drop their shoulders and slink out of Tahrir square. What is there left for them to do? Canada has had its say. That settles everything. There is now no hope of preserving the regime. They know Canada’s intervention has settled the matter definitively.
Peace and democracy break out and everyone lives happily ever after.
Of course, all of the above is a mocking hallucination…
For 40 years, the Liberals have deluded themselves into believing that the world looks to Canada as its moral beacon because of the Liberals’ enlightened international policies. It was never so, but the Grits cling to this daydream even now…

Or as I put it elsewhere recently with reference to Jumpin’ Jack Layton and Afstan:

…
As for “our experience in resolving conflicts”, can anyone name any serious international conflict in, say, the last twenty years that Canada has played a major role in sorting out? To my mind yet another example of many Canadians’ thoughtless, in fact ignorant, ego(t)ism. Blowing a horn that only we hear; check the index of non-Canadian books on international issues.

The shale tale:

If the ecofascists are against it…
…surely it’s a good thing…

New research shows that kids infected by adenovirus 36 (AD36), which causes the common cold and slight stomach upset, are more likely to be heavier – much heavier — than children who hadn’t been infected with the bug.

And why not? There aren’t enough Big Macs on the planet to account for the increasing waistlines of children, but that hasn’t stopped them, either.

This oil sands debate should be a hoot:

Hot stuff: Ezra Levant vs. Elizabeth May, Ottawa, Nov. 13
…

Earlier from Kate on Mr Levant:

Ethical Oil

(After a coin toss.)
h/t Tech1

Americans, at least seen via their media, are a lot more generous in spirit than Canadians. NBC Nightly News–their Olympic Network–this evening (Eastern Time) had on two Canadian members of their crew to speak about what the Vancouver winter games signify for them. As Canadians.
Can anyone imagine a Canadian network, covering an Olympics in the US, doing something similar? That is if a Canadian network would actually acknowledge employing Americans. Our pathetic chattering class. God bless America.
Just watched (1945 roughly ET) on NBC about five minutes of the best boost-Canada propaganda I’ve ever seen. Including being in WW II well before the US and fighting strong in Afstan. Just so’s you know. Will try to find the video, let us know if you do.
NBC’s Winter Olympics website is here.

“The details of the files tell a story that FOIA2009.zip was compiled internally and most likely released by an internal source.”

Some time starting in mid November 2009, ten million teletypes all
started their deet-ditta-dot chatter reeling off the following
headline: “Hackers broke into the University of East
Anglia’s Climate Research Unit….”

I hate that. It annoys me because just like everything else about
climate-gate it’s been ‘value-added’; simplified and distilled. The
contents of FOIA2009.zip demand more attention to this detail and as
someone once heard Professor Jones mutter darkly, “The devil is in the
details…so average it out monthly using TMax!”

Update: I’ve updated the original page with new information. Many thanks to all in the comments and who emailed regarding the filenames. Cheers.

As has been pointed out to me, the filenames are Unix epoch
timestamps. (Like, duh, Lance.) This invalidates certain parts
of my analysis, but doesn’t in any way invalidate my
conclusions.

The point of the original information was to provide more
circumstantial evidence pointing to the location of the email
archives. The fact that the emails are named with epoch
timestamps that relate to the creation date of the emails
actually enhances this point.

You definitely do not want multiple machines naming files
based on a Unix timestamp. It has to be a single machine because
the opportunity for overwriting a file is simply too great.

Cheers,
lance

As for our major media and the Climatic Research Unit affaire:

…the mindless insularity of the true believer…

Mark

Universal health care that works:

Swiss Health Care Thrives Without Public Option

…along with lower costs and the freedom to choose doctors come bigger bills for individual patients. On average, out-of-pocket payments come to $1,350 annually…

…Then there are the hefty prices of the insurance policies themselves, which can top 14,000 Swiss francs a year for a family of four in Zurich, or about $13,600…

Per capita income in Switzerland is some US$41,000, so for that family the yearly insurance total of $13,600 is not that great a burden–remember only a very small portion of their taxes is going to health care (I’m ignoring other payments).

While in Canada that family of four represents some C$22,000 in health care costs–70% of that is public. Per capital public expenditure here is some $3,700 ($120 billion divided by 33 million). So taxes of $15,000 are needed for that family. Bingo! Roughly the same total for the four people (ignoring private expenses in Canada) but through insurance for the Swiss–and they have a much better system.

Now this methodology is hardly precise. But clearly Canadians pay a whole of taxes to get a system that is getting ever closer to the breaking point. Yet we are at the same time prevented from buying insurance for privately-provided “essential” services (you’re allowed to do that in Britain, which really helps). Why the insistence on doing something poorly through government when, as the Swiss show, it can be done very well privately?

The thing is Canadians won’t expand their consciousness beyond fixating on the evils of the dastardly American system. Look east, people. Earlier:

Health care debate: Inconvenient facts

Conservatives kiss health care reform good-bye

Update: Canadians might also look at the, gasp!, French and Dutch systems. Rip off those flippin’ blinkers (I imagine the Québécois do know something about France, which might just explain some of their greater willingness to accept private provision of services than most of the RoC, B.C excepted).

The Scientist; (free registration required)

Two researchers conducting animal studies on immunosuppression lied about experimental methodologies and falsified data in 16 papers and several grants produced over the past 8 years, according to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI).
The scientists, Judith Thomas and Juan Contreras, formerly at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), falsely reported that they performed double kidney removals on several rhesus macaques in experiments designed to test the effectiveness of two immune suppressing drugs — Immunotoxin FN18-CRM9 and 15-deoxyspergualin (15-DSG) — in preventing rejection of the a single transplanted kidney.
The experimental protocol was to remove one intrinsic kidney, replacing it with a transplant and starting the monkeys on immunosuppresants, and then remove the other intrinsic kidney a month later, according to Richard Marchase, UAB’s vice president of research. “What occurred in a good number of these animals was that [Contreras and Thomas] never performed the second surgery,” Marchase told The Scientist. In a statement emailed to The Scientist Marchase called the misconduct “a very serious offense.”
Thomas’s and Contreras’s research was funded with more than $23 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health. UAB officials learned that Contreras and Thomas had left one native kidney intact in at least 32 animals — which allowed those animals to live and inflated the apparent effectiveness of the drugs — on January 27, 2006, when Thomas reported that she found an experimental monkey with one of its native kidneys intact and blamed Contreras for the mistake.

Had they only had the good sense to channel their energies into climate research, all of this unfortunate “research integrity” wiffle piffle might have been avoided…

Times Online;

Craig Venter, the controversial American scientist who helped decode the human genome, has announced the discovery of ancient bacteria that can turn coal into methane, suggesting they may help to solve the world’s energy crisis.
The bugs, discovered a mile underground by one of Venter’s microbial prospecting teams, are said to have unique enzymes that can break down coal. Venter said he was already working with BP on how to exploit the find.
Venter even suggested the discovery could open up the world’s coalfields to an entirely new form of mining, where coal is infected with the bacteria, allowing methane to be harvested “without even digging up the coal”.
Venter, speaking at the recent La Jolla research and innovation summit, in La Jolla, California, told an audience of researchers and technology investors how he had harvested 20m new genes by analysing the DNA of micro-organisms collected underwater or deep underground.
He said: “We have found a huge number of microbes a mile or so deep in the earth. In fact, there is more diversity under the surface of the earth than in the ocean. It is absolutely stunning.

h/t Ed S.

Herald Sun;

AUSTRALIAN scientists have developed a new method for transmitting data with light that may lead to super-fast quantum computers and teleportation technology.
The research team from the Australian National University developed a new approach to generating quantum entanglement in beams of light using only two parts.
Quantum entanglement is a process in which two objects are linked together in such a way that any changes to the properties of one can be measured from the other regardless of the distance between them.
This process of linking particles has existed for a few years but team leader Dr Jiri Janousek says this new method allows it to be achieved in a much simpler way.
“Usually, when you want to generate entanglement you need a lot of sources of light and a lot of receivers but we found a way to use only one source and one receiver to generate and measure entanglement,” Dr Janousek said.

h/t Rhaines

The big pictures, from the International Space Station. (More here).

More very cool photos here.

Busted – scroll down for the continuing updates….

Today’s good news story comes to us from beyond the Arctic circle. Our friends from the Catlin Expedition haven’t fallen through the ice yet;

When the three (Pen Hadow, Ann Daniels and Martin Hartley) leave messages on the TVM – a machine that records the messages they phone into London HQ – their voices often sound slurred and they occasionally muddle their words.

Sounds like heatstroke.
Update Catlin data hanky-panky? From the comments –

Anthony Watts checks the “live from the ice” data here (thanks for the heads up in the comments).

Something else bothers me: trailing zero deletion. Notice this data sequence:
Martin Core Temp
37.29
37.25
37.24
37.25
37.23
37.21
37.2
37.21
37.22
37.2
37.21
37.2
37.19
37.2
37.21
37.2
37.19
37.2
37.19
37.18
37.19
Notice how the zero is dropped from 37.2? Most data loggers don’t behave that way when logging data, but anyone familiar with a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet knows of this behavior.
More – this appears to be the root data. I’ve loaded the http://dev.indigopapa.tv/clients/arctic/statsXML.php file and it appears to indeed be hard coded.

UPDATE2: “It gets even stranger. Why would anyone strap a “hand warmer” to a device designed to measure temperature?”
Heh. The Catlin site is edited to read – “Please note, we are disabling the biotelemetry data section of the website for several days. The units themselves are still functioning perfectly, but we need to address an issue with the above display. We hope to have resolved this problem in a matter of days.”
Then, edited again – (exerpt) “The first thing to note is that the data above is a representation of what the team have gone through on a particular day; it is not a live feed. As a project team, we explored the option of live transmissions, and this is certainly possible, using a combination of Bluetooth and Iridium technology. However, such a set-up is particularly power hungry, and given the power limitations imposed on the team (they have to carry all power supplies with them in their sledges), we opted instead to prioritise our power supply elsewhere. As such, biotelemetry data is still captured every five seconds, but it is not transmitted back to the UK in real time.”
And that’s not all that isn’t working.. read the whole thing, including the comments.

Or, how to send a man to the moon using nothing more than a plastic bag and an Electrolux.
h/t Shaken

h/t Kathryn C.
Environment Canada

In memory of Michael Crichton.
Update: Not even in his grave, and already turning!

Via Anthony Watts, who explains – “This is unusual. A live media teleconference on the sun.”

NASA To Discuss Conditions On And Surrounding The Sun
WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a media teleconference Tuesday, Sept. 23, at 12:30 p.m. EDT, to discuss data from the joint NASA and European Space Agency Ulysses mission that reveals the sun’s solar wind is at a 50-year low. The sun’s current state could result in changing conditions in the solar system.

Bookmark this Nasa page for the briefing on the 23rd.

“we now have 3 functioning laboratories on Mars”
Update – the first photos are starting to come in.