The secret is out

I wonder if Edgar Mitchell’s helmet had a leak in it on that moon walk:

I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we’ve been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real,” Dr Mitchell said.

“It’s been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly it’s leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it.

He also says the aliens really do look like ET, with a small frame and large head and eyes. So that’s who those people are that we only see during Three Rivers Festival week.

Cancer, er, cancel my calls

No study has yet shown a link between cell phone use and brain cancer, but the head of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Center is warning his faculty and staff to limit their phone use because of the possible risk:

In the memo he sent to about 3,000 faculty and staff Wednesday, he says children should use cell phones only for emergencies because their brains are still developing.

Adults should keep the phone away from the head and use the speakerphone or a wireless headset, he says. He even warns against using cell phones in public places like a bus because it exposes others to the phone’s electromagnetic fields.

OK, let’s start having some laws to ban cell phones in public places like restaurants and bars and, yes, all workplaces. If there’s a chance we can be exposed to that deadly secondhand electromagnetism, why take the chance?

The scary part is that this guy is basing his warning on “unpublished evidence” the rest of us haven’t been able to see. He said it “takes too long to get evidence from science,” so people should take action now: “Really at the heart of my concern is that we shouldn’t wait for a definitive study to come out, but err on the side of being safe rather than sorry later,” Herberman said. Boy, no potential for abuse in that attitude, huh?

Snooze it or lose it

You probably haven’t been losing any sleep wondering about this, but in the digital age, a snooze alarm could be any length of time. It’s nine minutes because of the limitations of tehcnology when the alarm was invented:

Alarm clocks in 1956 had standardized gears. The snooze gear needed to mesh with the teeth of the other gears. Due to the configuration of the gears, a 10-minute snooze cycle was out of the question, so the engineers had to choose between nine minutes or 10-plus minutes.

And we live in America, chock-full of that whole Protestant work ethic, so the engineers went with nine minutes. Don’t dare be late for work or you’ll end up a miserable failure.

The nine-minute interval carried into the digital age. Some early digital clock designer probably took a look at an old mechanical clock and decided nine minutes was the standard.

Love my snooze alarm. On work days, I set the alarm for just over an hour before I have to get up — that’s seven snooze alarms. But that means you have to wake up eight times in one morning, say the morning-loving ntwits who like to bound out of bend and tackle the day with zest. But I get to go to sleep seven times in the same morning — that’s the point.

Cooling on warming

At least the administration is ending on a high note:

The Bush administration on Friday rejected regulating greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, saying it would damage the U.S. economy and cause too many job losses.

In a 588-page federal notice, the Environmental Protection Agency made no finding on whether global warming poses a threat to people’s health, reversing an earlier conclusion at the insistence of the White House and officially kicking any decision on a solution to the next president and Congress.

It’s hard to get too excited, since “the next president and Congress” will be sure to shove the “solution” down our throats. Both Obama and McCain are  onboard the global-warming train, and Congress will be chocked full of Democrats. Disaster has been postponed, not averted.

Hot and clean

Another cause of global warming is . . . wait for it . . . clean air!

GOODBYE air pollution and smoky chimneys, hello brighter days. That’s been the trend in Europe for the past three decades - but unfortunately cleaning up the skies has allowed more of the sun’s rays to pierce the atmosphere, contributing to at least half the warming that has occurred.

Quick, somebody get in touch with the Natural Resources Defense Council and tell them to drop their planet-threatening lawsuit against BP’s planned refnery expansion in Whiting:

The group’s lawsuit focuses primarily on three new flares — the large torch structures used to relieve pressure in the refinery – planned as part of the refinery’s $3.8 billion expansion.

The NRDC has alleged BP’s air permit does not properly account for any increased pollution from the flares, and has criticized the Indiana Department of Environmental Management for being too lax in BP’s permitting.

Well, clean air or a cool planet, which do you want? Come, on, make up your mind.

A little help, ladies

Today’s “Well, duh” headline: Sex is good for men:

THERE’S new advice for older men who want to preserve their sexual function: have sex, and have it often, researchers say.

In a study that followed nearly 1000 older Finnish men for five years, researchers found that those who were regularly having sex at the start of the study were at lower risk of developing erectile dysfunction (ED) by the study’s end.

Just as we’ve always known: Use it or lose it.

Out there

Happy 60th anniversary to the flying saucer:

1947: Pilot Kenneth Arnold sights a series of unidentified flying objects near Washington’s Mt. Rainier. It’s the first widely reported UFO sighting in the United States, and, thanks to Arnold’s description of what he saw, leads the press to coin the term flying saucer.

[. . .]

Whether Arnold actually saw something or not, the resulting publicity touched off a worldwide spate of UFO sightings. Barely two weeks after Arnold’s flight, the Roswell story broke, and UFO hysteria was on.

Was it the power of suggestion that led to all these sightings, or was 1947 a peak travel year for little green men? You decide.

I vote for the latter. I’m sure they wanted to keep visiting, but events conspired to prevent it. First, their planet was devastated by global warming, then fuel costs became so high that they had to choose between food and medicine or visiting Earth. Finally, a Democrat was elected supreme president of the planet, and conditions improved so dramatically that no one could imagine the point of leaving the planet ever again.

Just a cigar

(SPOILER alert)

I haven’t seen “The Happening” yet, so I want to be careful not to seem to be praising it (with Shyamalan, it can go either way). But I’ve been a little annoyed at some of the criticism of the movie, especially from my part of the political spectrum. It’s lousy science, kind of “The Day After Tomorrow” on steroids, the critics say, putting environmental concerns above human beings. One even said something like “it’s the most morally reprehensible movie ever made.” (Whew!) Reason’s Hit&Run has the right answer to all this hot air, in a post headed “It’s About Zombies, Dummy, Not Global Warming”:

The talking head scene at the end of the movie, in which an environmental expert explains the event as nature’s way of defending itself and warns that the event was only a “prelude” to a more catastrophic attack, reinforces the critical sentiment that The Happening is a really, really, bad environmental movie.

But there are some aspects of the plot that suggest the environmental aspects are only a means for scaring us for the sake of scaring us, and not a strategy for raising environmental awareness.

I submit as evidence one of the movie’s more explicit ironies: The few characters in the movie who are modeled after green freaks die horrible deaths. The greenhouse owner, who is the first character to suggest that it’s not terrorists releasing the toxin, but plants, shoots himself, as does his equally earth-friendly wife. And the old lady who lives off the grid, grows her own crops, and doesn’t own a car, ends up being bat-shit insane, killing herself by repeatedly headbutting the side of her earth-friendly house.

If a movie claims to be science fiction, I expect it to be at least partly an extrapolation from what is known to what is possible. But I don’t expect solid science from fantasy/horror/monster/disaster movies. I’m gonna pan “Night of the Living dead” because there’s no such thing as re-animating corpses? “King Kong” is bad because there are really no giant apes? I just want to be scared and/or entertained. The people who made “The Day After Tomorrow,” I suspect, did have pretensions of saying something “serious,” and the science was lousy. But in the end, it was just a disaster movie, and it can be judged on that basis — it was a lousy disaster movie. It may in fact have been the most poorly constructed disaster movie I’ve ever seen. All the exciting stuff — the “That blowed up real good” scenes– came in the first 45 minutes. The rest was just a long, boring slog through ice and snow.

Show me the way to go home

For someone with absolutely no sense of direction — if you’re ever lost, just ask me which way to go, then do the opposite — this seems like a pretty silly concern:

For most people — the cab driver, the tourist, the business traveler — the ubiquitous GPS has become a lifeline, giving directions to the nearest bathroom, a pizza joint or the shortest route to the office.

But, just like with spell-checker before it, some experts believe that the guiding device gives less than what it takes away. The price we pay for the convenience, they say, could be our sense of direction.

You can’t lose what you never had. Some machines may have made us dumber — the mentioned spell-checker, the hand-held calculator — but GPS? Don’t think so.

Snooze alarm

Boy, there’s some smart researchers at this sleep-disorder center:

THURSDAY, June 12 (HealthDay News) — Teens whose high schools have a delayed start time sleep longer and report less daytime sleepiness, say researchers at Norwalk Hospital’s Sleep Disorders Center in Connecticut.

The study included 259 high school students who reported sleeping about 7.03 hours per school night, with a mean bed time of 10:52 p.m. and a mean wake-up time of 6:12 a.m. when school started at 7:35 a.m.

After the school start time was switched to 8:15 a.m., the students’ total sleep time on school nights increased 33 minutes, mainly due to a later rise time.

So, let’s see. If things start later, those who have to go those things will sleep longer. Who knew? I’d better alert my boss at the newspaper; I’m sure he’ll want to take immediate and approriate action.

Keep it to yourself

If you’ve suspected that sending in the “grief counselors” after every school tragedy might be doing more harm than good, you might have been right:

Talk it out. That’s the first advice most victims are given in the wake of trauma. Conventional wisdom would suggest that burying one’s emotions after a violent incident — such as a school shooting or terrorist bombing — will only lead to deeper anxiety later on. Yet, while mental health practitioners widely subscribe to this truism, it has rarely been tested outside a laboratory setting — past studies have found a lack of convincing evidence to support the use of psychological debriefing to mitigate trauma — and some experts think the theory doesn’t hold up in every situation.

I’ve never been demonstrative, and I’ve been told all my life that I needed to “let things out” or “talk them through,” that I was doing myself harm by keeping everything all bottled up inside. Now I have my response: Nyah, nyah, nyah.

Barfly

So, this butterfly goes into a bar in Brazil, and the next day, it Indiana has floods:

Translated into mass culture, the butterfly effect has become a metaphor for the existence of seemingly insignificant moments that alter history and shape destinies. Typically unrecognized at first, they create threads of cause and effect that appear obvious in retrospect, changing the course of a human life or rippling through the global economy.

In the 2004 movie “The Butterfly Effect” - we watched it so you don’t have to - Ashton Kutcher travels back in time, altering his troubled childhood in order to influence the present, though with dismal results. In 1990’s “Havana,” Robert Redford, a math-wise gambler, tells Lena Olin, “A butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. They can even calculate the odds.”

Such borrowings of Lorenz’s idea might seem authoritative to unsuspecting viewers, but they share one major problem: They get his insight precisely backwards. The larger meaning of the butterfly effect is not that we can readily track such connections, but that we can’t. To claim a butterfly’s wings can cause a storm, after all, is to raise the question: How can we definitively say what caused any storm, if it could be something as slight as a butterfly? Lorenz’s work gives us a fresh way to think about cause and effect, but does not offer easy answers.

Chaos theory is about, you know, chaos, not certainty in cause and effect. You may now return to your global-warming bible. Hope you didn’t lose your place.

The alien vote

But what is the legal status of these aliens? They weren’t invited, so they must be ordered to return home:

A man who has shown a video of what he claims is an alien visitor to earth to bolster his case for greater public scrutiny of UFOs is to take his campaign to the Democratic Party convention in August, where Barack Obama will formally win the presidential nomination.
Jeff Peckman revealed a video of what he believes is an extra-terrestrial, at a press conference in Denver, Colorado.

Mr Peckman, a website entrepreneur, is campaigning in support of a ballot initiative that would let the people of Denver vote in November on a plan to establish a city-wide extra-terrestrial affairs commission.

Under his proposal, which he says would cost $75,000 (£38,000) a year, the new body would ensure that government offices, police and firefighters are trained to deal with extra-terrestrial visitors. It would also release details of UFO sightings which it judged to be credible.

It’d be cool if the aliens actually showed up at the convention. Under Democratic rules, I’m pretty sure they’d have to be seated and have at least half their delegates counted.

A harsh mistress

Now we are thinking about a return to the moon, unless, of course, President Obama or President McCain thinks we ought to use that money for universal pre-K or to end global warming. So perhaps you’re thinking about getting up there yourself and homesteading your 40 acres. Well, think again:

A lunar settlement, probably located at one of the lunar poles where scientists believe ice exists in permanently shadowed craters, would be a center of science and commerce. Lunar geologists and astronomers would work cheek to jowl with helium 3 miners and lunar tour guides. There would even be a government of some kind, with lawyers and bureaucrats, to sort out disputes and to pass and supervise laws and regulations.

However, if the lunar settlement is to be more than just an Antarctica style science base, some provision would have to be made about private property rights. And there is the rub.

The Outer Space Treaty, which currently governs national activities in space, is silent about private property rights. The treaty does, however, forbid nations from making sovereign claims on territory on other worlds. National sovereignty is the traditional mechanism for guaranteeing private property.

I know I go overboard sometimes on my libertarian, don’t-give-an-inch property rights rants, so I’m happy to report that here is a hypothetical problem I won’t lose a lot of sleep over. If we’re smart enough to overcome all our earthbound problems now preventing moon colonization, we will have also figured out the property rights issue. An interesting point is highlighted, however, one often slighted by libertarians. While it is true that overreaching government is responsible for the weakening of property rights, without government there can be no property rights at all except the rule of “he who has the most power has the most property.”

Don’t touch!

This is big news?

Regular wiping of student desks and use of hand sanitizers during the school day can significantly reduce student illness and absenteeism, a new study shows.

While we keep worrying about people sneezing on us or even breathing in our direction, it’s become established by medical researchers that many of the gastrointestinal illnesses that lay us low are transmitted by touch. I’m not likely to become obsessed with this, but I am becoming more aware or the problem. The Kroger I do most of my shopping at has a disinfection-wipe dispenser by the entrance so we can clean the parts of the cart that we touch. I only noticed it a couple of month ago, and already I freak out if it’s empty.

(The “don’t touch me!” hierarcy, by the way: The rest of the world, me, Felix Unger, Monk, Howard Hughes.)

Students’ little helpers

Athletes aren’t the only ones who take performance-enhancing drugs. A growing number of college students (as well as their professors, apparently) are taking drugs such as Adderall and Ritalin, which are typically used to treat Attention Deficit Disorder, as “study drugs” to stimulate their memory, concentration and focus. Alarms are being sounded over this “drug abuse” crisis, but Reason magazine wonders what the big deal is:

Still, there is widespread alarm about the possible health problems arising from unsupervised dosing. “Put the pills in the wrong hands and the results can be dangerous,” NBC News warned. Henry Chung, Director of the New York University Student Health Center has warned that, “Students may have some kind of manic reaction or a seizure that could occur from taking these medications.” For high doses, Chung is correct. But today’s performance-enhancing undergraduates exhibit more responsibility than Chung realizes. One NYU senior I spoke to says it’s mainly a case of “every now and again for finals. I don’t know anyone who abuses Adderall or Ritalin.” Moreover, “because they’re prescription you can find out so much about them so you know how you can take it safely.”

There is also the claim that student dopers—like testosterone-injecting athletes—are cheating because college is a competitive environment in which participants are obliged to play fair. Of course, this argument ignores the fact that most of the abilities being enhanced by such drugs are already unequally distributed (due to a mixture of biological and socioeconomic factors). Why is doping to achieve “normal” functionality a permissible act for ADD sufferers, but wrong for those seeking better grades or greater knowledge?

But those athletic skills are also unequally distributed. That’s why stereoids are taken — to make up for what biology didn’t provide. The question to ask is: Why is artificial enhancement wrong in a competitive athletic environment but not wrong in a competitive academic environment? Why aren’t they both right or both wrong?

Down and dirty

I appreciate the interest of animal-rights activists in saving the lives of poor, oppressed frogs, so I can understand their advocacy of computer software that lets students do virtual dissections. But this is going a little far:

Marilyn Grindley, a member of the Ohio County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said dissecting animals “desensitizes kids. It tells them that we do not have any respect for any animal.” She wants to end the practice.

If the teacher took the kids out to shoot cats and dogs, that would be desensitizing, but dissecting frogs? I confess to being one of the kids who was grossed out by the frog-dissection requirement. I would have welcomed the ability to do the whole thing by computer simulation. And that’s probably OK for most kids.

But what about the ones who are going to pursue careers in science and medicine? For them, I think the teacher gets it right who says nothing can duplicate the smell, feel and texture of cutting into a real frog.  “It’s not the same as the real thing,” Perillo said. “To actually cut through the tissue, see how the skin layers feel, the textures, the way the organs look inside the body, I think that can’t be duplicated. “Its like trying to become a gardener without touching the dirt.”

Put it this way: You want a first-time surgeon (they all have to have the first one sometime) operating on you who until then had only experienced dissecting a virtual cadaver?

Hot air

I don’t think any weather prediction more than a few days out should be taken seriously. So this is no great shock:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Tropical Storm Risk Consortium in London and, most recently, the Coastal Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at North Carolina State University in Raleigh are now among teams attempting to handicap the storm season weeks or months ahead.

After high-profile, back-to-back busts by Gray and others, critics have questioned whether these long-range outlooks do more harm than good. But the very question presupposes that Gray, et al., have been promising more than they can deliver.

They can pretty accurately predict an above- or below-average season, even predict the likelihood a major storm will hit SOMEWHERE along the U.S. coast. Beyond that, they’re not promising anything.

But the hurricane-predicting hype has taken such root that there’s probably no getting rid of it. At least the Associated Press correctly faults weather reporters for blindly adding to the hype by not holding the forecasters accountable for all the wrong calls they make.

The good bomb

Finally, what the world has needed — a nice, friendly, cuddly, green bomb:

New explosives could be more powerful and safer to handle than TNT and other conventional explosives and would also be more environmentally friendly.

TNT, RDX and other explosives commonly used in military and industrial applications often generate toxic gases upon detonation that pollute the environment. Moreover, the explosives themselves are toxic and can find their way into the environment due to incomplete detonation and as unexploded ordnance. They are also extremely dangerous to handle, as they are highly sensitive to physical shock, such as hard impacts and electric sparks.

 

To make safer, more environmentally friendly explosives, scientists in Germany turned to a recently explored class of materials called tetrazoles. These derive most of their explosive energy from nitrogen instead of carbon as TNT and others do.

Kill the people but don’t harm the planet. The very thought must be making some people ecstatic.

Urine trouble now

Man, talk about an inconvenient breakdown:

WASHINGTON - The international space station’s lone toilet is broken, leaving the crew with almost nowhere to go. So NASA may order an in-orbit plumbing service call when space shuttle Discovery visits next week.

Until then, the three-man crew will have to make do with a jury-rigged system when they need to urinate.

When I was a yoot (see “My Counsin Vinnie”), I didn’t worry about having something fill-up-able (milk carton, pop bottle, freeezer bag), handy, even for long trips with potential bathroom emergencies. That’s what the side of the road was for. But these days, that would get you an indecent exposure arrest and an honored place on the sex offender registry. So, space-station crew, don’t just go outside, in case you end up doing your business while facing the Earth.

Soft landing

How cool is it that not only did we succeed in a soft landing on Mars, but there was a camera in orbit to get an actual photo the landing?

On Monday, NASA released a black-and-white image captured during Phoenix’s descent by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which had a bird’s-eye view of the lander hanging from its parachute. It’s the first time a spacecraft had taken an image of another craft during landing.

Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory said the camera aboard Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken many unique pictures of Mars, but “this one’s really unique.”

I know I’ve mentioned it before, but space exploration is an area I don’t mind the government spending on (with the usual waste and fraud exceptions, of course).

Bearing down

Now you know. Every time you turn on a light, you’re helping kill the polar bears. It’s your fault:

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne listed polar bears as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act yesterday, saying the loss of Arctic sea ice in a warming climate could drive them to the brink of extinction in less than four decades.

Too bad the ringed and bearded seals didn’t have their own Coke commercial.

Still hooked up

The trend of connecting to people rather than places continues:

For nearly three in 10 households, don’t even bother trying to call them on a landline phone. They either only have a cell phone or seldom if ever take calls on their traditional phone.

The federal figures, released Wednesday, showed that reliance on cells is continuing to rise at the expense of wired telephones. In the second half of last year, 16 percent of households only had cell phones, while 13 percent also had landlines but got all or nearly all their calls on their cells.

The number of wireless-only households grew by 2 percent since the first half of last year. Underscoring the rapid growth, in early 2004 just 5 percent had only cell phones.

I’m almost there. I have cable Internet, so I don’t need the “real” phone for that. Every month at bill time, it galls me to pay two phone bills, and I vow to get rid of the land line. But I keep backing down, because there’s just something frightening about going completely wireless, like my home might be incomplete, you know? I suspect a lot of old fogies feel that way.

Extraterrestrial brothers

This is fascinating:

Believing that the universe may contain alien life does not contradict a faith in God, the Vatican’s chief astronomer said in an interview published Tuesday.

The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, was quoted as saying the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

“How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?” Funes said. “Just as we consider earthly creatures as ‘a brother,’ and ’sister,’ why should we not talk about an ‘extraterrestrial brother’? It would still be part of creation.”

In the interview by the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Funes said that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures. Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like “putting limits” on God’s creative freedom, he said.

Do I get to see evidence of alien life, or must I take it on faith? Just kidding. I’d think finding alien life would add  to faith in God, or “a” god, anyway. Why would an omnipotent God create the universe in all its vastness and just do this one tiny experiment?

Brave new world

I’ve never been able to work up much outrage over human cloning, so this sure doesn’t bother me much:

News that scientists have for the first time genetically altered a human embryo is drawing fire from some watchdog groups that say it’s a step toward creating “designer babies.”

But an author of the study says the work was focused on stem cells. He notes that the researchers used an abnormal embryo that could never have developed into a baby anyway.

“None of us wants to make designer babies,” said Dr. Zev Rosenwaks, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

“None of us want to make designer babies.” Well, why in the world not? I can have my car custom designed. I don’t have to take any old TV set off the Best Buy floor. I can even have a stupid hamburger done “my way.” But I have to settle for any baby that comes along?

The fear usually raised is that people will choose blonde, blue-eyed male babies, finishing what Hitler tried to start. But the most likely outcome of designing babies is that genetic weaknesses will be found and eliminated. People will live longer, healthier lives. What’s the problem?