Science, Technology & Health: December 2009 Archives
Here Gerald Warner with the funniest take yet on the Copenhagen climate summit.
This “single most important piece of paper in the world” comes, presumably, from an authoritative and totally neutral source? Yes, of course. It’s from the – er – UN Framework Committee on Climate Change that is – er – running the Danegeld Summit. Some people might be small-minded enough to suggest this paper has as much authority as a “leaked” document from Number 10 revealing that life would be hell under the Tories.
He's right in asserting that 2009 will be seen by future historians as the year that the hysterical climate change con game began crashing down. There's still a lot of inertia to overcome, but the game is up.
In our (justified) haste to deploy drone systems to combat zones, it appears that some important features were left out: terrorists intercept video streams from military drones:
Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes' systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter. ...
In the summer 2009 incident, the military found "days and days and hours and hours of proof" that the feeds were being intercepted and shared with multiple extremist groups, the person said. "It is part of their kit now."
These video streams should obviously be encrypted, but doing so would have slowed deployment, probably not because it's hard to encrypt the data as it is generated but because the soldiers on the ground would have needed specialized decryption units to take advantage of the video.
A senior defense official said that James Clapper, the Pentagon's intelligence chief, assessed the Iraq intercepts at the direction of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and concluded they represented a shortcoming to the security of the drone network."There did appear to be a vulnerability," the defense official said. "There's been no harm done to troops or missions compromised as a result of it, but there's an issue that we can take care of and we're doing so."
It's absurd to assert that no harm was caused by this security lapse -- the terrorists wouldn't have been routinely monitoring these video feeds if there were no benefit. Despite the need to deploy these systems quickly, this security hole should have been patched years ago.
(HT: DS.)
Last August I told you that Barack Obama's health care reform is dead, and it still is. Senators and Nelson Lieberman have stated that they will not vote for a "public option" of any kind. I suspect that many Democrats are secretly pleased, despite outrage among the base.
The progressives are, of course . . . well, livid is probably too weak a word. At this point it's hard to see them getting to sixty votes on anything. Frankly, I'm not sure that a majority of legislators want them to get to sixty votes on anything. Every time health care makes the news, its poll numbers drop further, and at 54-38 against, it's already dangerously close to "Republican landslide if you pass it" territory. Outside of coastal enclaves, Democrats cannot win the next round of elections with no one but their base. And independents, already against the plan, especially hate partisanship. This makes it especially unhealthy to pass a bill they don't like on a straight party line vote.
Health care reform is still dead, as it has been for many months. It will not happen. It has been, however, an exciting way to waste Congress' time and has prevented the Democrats from passing many potentially harmful bills that they could have mustered the votes for.
Scientists are working on a gene therapy that will stimulate super-human muscle growth with no apparent side effects.
As published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, researchers at the National Children’s Hospital (NCH) and Ohio State University have proven that blocking myostatin in monkeys will lead to skeletal muscle growth with few or no discernible negative side effects. Myostatin is the protein that helps mammals regulate muscle building, acting as a signal for muscles to stop consuming resources and stop growing. Blocking myostatin leads to enhanced muscle strength and continuous muscle growth. ...My concerns about myostatin have largely focused on potential organ damage, possible unknown dangerous effects on smooth muscle tissue, and ligament/tendon stresses. The NCH work addresses these concerns rather well. Macaques were observed for 15 months after receiving a gene therapy that promoted follistatin (and blocked myostatin) in their quadriceps. There was no observed damage to internal organs, the treatment only seemed to affect skeletal muscle, the reproductive cycles and cells functioned normally, and there was no reported damaged to tendons or ligaments (though this last issue wasn’t expressly pursued by the research).
Check out that awesome cow!
Aside from helping people with muscular dystrophy -- which is awesome -- adding muscle would also let the rest of us eat whatever we want and still stay in shape. Sounds too good to be true....
(HT: NW.)
Paul Hsieh has written a Letter-to-the-Editor of the WSJ about the disputed settleness of climate change.
If a respected MIT scientist like Mr. Lindzen argues that "the science isn't settled," and other scientists disagree, then doesn't the very dispute itself prove that the science isn't settled?Paul Hsieh
Sedalia, Colo.
The point is: dispute about how "settled" the science is implies that it isn't very "settled" at all... unless you're able to convince people that the dispute is being promoted by sources who have no place in the debate. That's what prominent climatologists were attempted to do, until their dishonest methods and manipulations were recently revealed thanks to the Climategate hacker.
(It's the fourth letter here, though the page's format is quite confusing. If you look at the underlying HTML you'll notice that Dr. Hsieh's letter is the only one that wasn't given an invisible anchor tag, making it impossible to link to the letter directly. Strange.)
October 6th, 2009, President Obama stages an event at the White House to promote his health care plan.
A California physician, Dr. Alice Chen, was one of dozens of doctors invited to the White House on Monday to hear President Obama urge them to "fan out across the country" and work for health care reform."Nobody has more credibility with the American people on this issue than you do," Obama said. "And so if you're willing to speak out strongly on behalf of the things you care about and what you see each and every day as you're serving your patients all across the country, I'm confident we are going to get health reform passed this year."
Fast-forward to December 3rd and we see yet another state association of doctors rejecting Obama's health care plan.
The state's largest doctors group is opposing healthcare legislation being debated in the U.S. Senate this week, saying it would increase local healthcare costs and restrict access to care for elderly and low-income patients.The California Medical Assn. represents more than 35,000 physicians, making it the second-largest state medical group in the country after Texas.
Its executive committee met last week to discuss the Senate legislation proposed last month by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), also known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Association leaders plan to announce their opposition later this week before a vote is taken in the Senate, spokesman Andrew LaMar told The Times.
They join a handful of other state medical associations that have opposed the bill in recent weeks, including those in Florida, Georgia and Texas.
Hey, no one has more credibility than these guys right? Maybe the President and Congress ought to listen to them.
(HT: NG.)
Intel has unveiled a prototype 48-core processor.
Intel announced that company researchers demonstrated an experimental, 48-core processor--dubbed the "single-chip cloud computer"--that will supposedly pave the way for future generations of processors. According to the company, the "concept chip" is aimed at scaling on-chip performance, communication, and power consumption. The new prototype also offers 10 to 20 times the processing engines found in today's Intel Core processors.Despite its many cores, Intel says that the futuristic prototype chip will consume the same amount of energy as two standard household light bulbs thanks to newly invented power management techniques.
Very cool, but unfortunately it's extremely difficult to write software that can effectively use so many processors. Some tasks can be parallelized very effectively, but many cannot, and those that can't won't see any advantage from processors with so many cores.
Moore's Law is still holding, but only at the aggregate level. Single processors aren't doubling in speed every 18 months anymore, but instead we are figuring out how to cram more cores onto the same chip. This results in an increase in processing power per chip, but multi-core processors are much more limited in what they can do than would be a single-core processor with the same total power.
(HT: LM.)
