Dogs and evolution; BEST climates; Roast Koala; and other matters

Mail 699 Sunday, November 06, 2011

· Dogs and humans

· Marines vs. Rome

. Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) kerfluffle

· Eating Koala?

· On ABE Books, Hephaestus, and other such matters

Coevolution, humans and dogs

In a previous View I outlined my old cocktail party theory that humans got smart because we made a deal with dogs: “You keep your sense of smell, we’ll get smart using the part of the brain we use up on smell, you watch out for our kids, and we’ll watch out for yours.” The result was that tribes that kept dogs had more of their kids grow up. This generated a good bit of mail.

Cocktail party theory on dogs

I understand that there is some evidence of human habitation on America prior to the opening of the Siberian land-bridge 25,000 years ago. They are believed to have come along the front of the Atlantic Ice Sheet from what is now France, where the ice sheet then reached. The problem being that they clearly did not rise to the top of the food chain and wipe out all the big predators as the Siberian incomers did. Why could the one do this but not the other?

One possibility that occurred would be that the "French" couldn’t bring dogs with them (at least in sufficient numbers to establish sustainable breeding) and that humans on their own are much less effective hunters than humans + dogs.

Neil Craig

I am sure my Siberian Husky would agree with you…

From Cave to Kennel: The Evolution of Man and Dog – WSJ.com,

Jerry

I’m sure you got this already, but here it is:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203554104577001843790269560.html

For my money, we and dogs co-evolved, or at least European and Asian people co-evolved with dogs. Isn’t it interesting how, about the time our ancestors began associating with dogs, they began beating out the Neanderthals and the Denisovans?

Ed

I keep seeing more and more evidence that my cocktail party theory is true: we really are smart because we had dogs to do the smelling, leaving more brain cells to get smart with. Anyway it all fits…

Imitation as Flattery?

Dr. Pournelle —

I saw this and, naturally, thought of you:

Rome, Sweet Rome: Could a Single Marine Unit Destroy the Roman Empire?

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/digital/fact-vs-fiction/rome-sweet-rome-could-a-single-marine-unit-destroy-the-roman-empire?click=pm_latest

Anybody who has read your Janissaries series (and a good, fun read it is) would likely know what could be done.

Pieter

He seems to have a movie deal out of it. Congratulations. I think it’s pretty complicated – you’re only going to win a few battles and you’re out of ammo and helicopter fuel…

THE BEST (Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures) controvery has generated a lot of mail. It starts with Muller’s paper:

Transparent, for a change – Massive study concludes: ‘Global warming is real’ Jerry

This looks like actual science, in part because it was funded by people hostile to the current climate change orthodoxy:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/21/berkeley_earth_surface_temperature_study/

A hunk from the middle: “Muller gathered together a group of 10 prominent scientists – among them recent Nobel Prize winner Saul Perlmutter http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/04/nobel_prize_physics_2011/ – to create BEST. Funding was provided by such disparate sources as Bill Gates ($100,000) and the Koch foundation ($150,000) http://www.novim.org/resources/novim-news/88-novim-news , the latter accurately described by the foundation managing the funding as an organization "whose animosity towards action on climate change made the Berkeley project look yet more suspicious to some climate-change activists."

“The BEST team, however, had a stated goal of neither proving nor disproving global temperature increases. As expressed http://berkeleyearth.org/Resources/Berkeley_Earth_Summary_20_Oct by project cofounder Elizabeth Muller, Richard’s daughter, the goal was to conduct an analysis so data-rich and objective that it would "cool the debate over global warming by addressing many of the valid claims of the skeptics in a clear and rigorous way."

“The "valid claims" didn’t survive.

“For one, skeptics have charged that previous studies were done with selective data sets, but BEST lead scientist Robert Rhode points out that his team’s analysis "is the first study to address the issue of data selection bias, by using nearly all of the available data, which includes about five times as many station locations as were reviewed by prior groups."

“The data set was large, indeed: temperature data was gathered from 39,028 sites, collected by 10 different sources, resulting in 1.6 billion data points.

“Another objection that has been raised is that temperature observations over the decades have been influenced by sensors being encroached upon by human development – the "urban heat island" (UHI http://www.skepticalscience.com/urban-heat-island-effect.htm ) effect. The BEST analysis, however, found this effect to be negligible http://berkeleyearth.org/Resources/Berkeley_Earth_UHI at best.” <snip>

More: “Project cofounder Richard Muller is a fervent believer in data sharing and peer review – and an equally fervent critic of how journals such as Science and Nature stifle broad-ranging peer analysis, debate, and collaboration.

“When contacted by The Reg, Muller responded in an email that he believes scientific papers should be widely circulated in "preprint" form before their publication. "It has been traditional throughout most of my career to distribute preprints around the world," he writes. "In fact, most universities and laboratories had ‘preprint libraries’ where you could frequently find colleagues."

“This preprint system, he told us, is being stifled by major journals. "This traditional peer-review system worked much better than the current Science/Nature system, which in my mind restricts the peer review to 2 or 3 anonymous people who often give a cursory look at the paper."

“While this more tightly controlled review method may enhance the prestige of major journals, Muller told us, it does nothing for the advancement of science.

"I think this abandonment of the traditional peer review system is responsible, in part, for the fact that so many bad papers are being published," he writes. "These papers have not be vetted by the true peers, the large scientific world." And more.

I’ll be digesting this myself. I thought I’d send it along as something to ponder. If the Global Warming hypothesis is correct, it will not be because the AGW religion was correct in its liturgy. In fact, proving that the Earth is warming up is just the beginning of the inquiry, as you have pointed out many times. Now we come to whether this 1 degree rise has been driven by human activity. It is another point where the AGW religious doctrine must prove itself. Perhaps we should call it the Church of Arrhenius.

We’ve seen a bunch of these secular religions rise up in the past 60 years or so. As God-based religion fades, the pagans are replacing it with their cargo cults and their pounding of drums to make the sun rise every day.

Ed

As far as I can tell, BEST has shown that land surface temperatures have actually risen for the past couple of centuries, and while some of the data are not as good quality as we would like because the temperature collection points have gone from orchards to inside concrete islands, the temperature rises are real. I don’t know of anyone who still disputes this. BEST has helped define just how we calculate average temperatures at least for land surface numbers, and that is a good thing.

I said when BEST came out:

No one I know thinks the Earth has not been warming since about 1800, and everyone I know thinks it warmed a good bit up to the year 2000, and somewhat from 2000 to present. The way to bet it is about 1 degree F a century, possibly as much as 1 degree C.

The controversy, I would have thought, is HOW MUCH, and of that how much, how much is due to CO2?

Adding CO2 to the atmosphere has some positive as well as negative results.

Again the question is how much, what should we pay to avoid the negative results, and what’s the best way to do that?

Me, I’m for nuclear power to finance space based solar and interplanetary commerce, but then I always have been.

"And the earth is clean like a springtime dream No factory smokes appear For we’ve left the land to the gardener’s hand And they all are circling here…

But then I’ve been saying that a long time

==

BEST is not so Good

Jerry,

If you have a fan on, shut it off before the smelly stuff hits it.

"But today The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a leading member of Prof Muller’s team has accused him of trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.

Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis.

Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers."

The article is here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2055191/Scientists-said-climate-change-sceptics-proved-wrong-accused-hiding-truth-colleague.html

It’s also covered on Watts Up With That, along with further analysis, here:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/29/uh-oh-it-was-the-best-of-times-it-was-the-worst-of-times/

Note that the BEST data is available on the BEST web site, but for some reason their results (either numerically or graphically) haven’t been on the BEST web site. Others plotted the BEST data and found the last decade flat (as other sources have found). According to The Mail:

"But a report to be published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation includes a graph of world average temperatures over the past ten years, drawn from the BEST project’s data and revealed on its website."

Muller has apparently given interviews where he says that there is no evidence of Global Warming having slowed down, saying "no leveling off" according to The Mail.

I recommend a look at both articles. The Watts Up With That article also shows a graph for Los Angeles temperatures and you might find that hits home even a bit more.

Regards,

George

My impression is that global temperatures have been fairly stable for the past decade, but the general trend of 1 degree/century has been consistent from 1800. Think of a slow and steady rise with some cyclic events superimposed. But we’ve postulated that before.

 

Scientist who said climate change sceptics had been proved wrong accused of hiding truth by colleague

Read more: http://wwwdailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2055191/Scientists-said-climate-change-sceptics-proved-wrong-accused-hiding-truth-colleague.html#ixzz1cbHbNb7i <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2055191/Scientists-said-climate-change-sceptics-proved-wrong-accused-hiding-truth-colleague..html>

Scientist whose climate change research on polar bears was cited by Al Gore will face lie detector test over ‘integrity issues’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2055123/Climate-change-scientist-Jeffrey-Gleason-cited-Al-Gore-face-lie-detector-test.html#ixzz1cbI0KyFz <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2055123/Climate-change-scientist-Jeffrey-Gleason-cited-Al-Gore-face-lie-detector-test.html>

Tracy Walters

I have no suspicion that the report isn’t accurate; the question is what does it mean, and that isn’t likely to be solved by lie detectors.

BEST climate heresy 

Dr. Pournelle,

I wonder if part of the controversy over BEST is that it shows no recent rise in temperature in more than the last decade. To accept this would also mean accepting that there is no direct correlation between CO2 and global temperature.

Steve Chu

Well, certainly none over a 20 year period; but then we had the same happen in the Great Cooling Scare of the 70’s and that has not changed the Believer theory.

The coming Ice age

You posted:

“I admit that back in the 70’s I believed that the Ice might be coming back, because after all we are in the middle of an Ice Age. What startled me was the work of a Belgian scientist whose name I have forgotten – Daniella something – who found from the study of lake sediments that England and the Channel areas went from deciduous trees to under many feet of ice in under one hundred years, and possibly even quicker, back at the onset of the current Ice Age (in which we are enjoying a temporary respite).”

She wasn’t the only one. I remember an article in an old Scientific American coming to the same conclusions, only it was based on sediment layers from Connecticut ponds. As I remember, the plant pollen and such changed from ordinary New England forest to arctic tundra in the space of less than 20 years.

David Starr

From desiduous trees to under permanent ice in under 100 years: that’s not a model, that’s history. And it’s pretty scary.

Global temperatures dropping

Jerry,

Global temperatures are dropping again consistent with back-to-back La Nina events:

www.drroyspencer.com

Global (September Average – October Average) lower tropospheric temperature anomaly: -0.175 Celsius.

The AMSR-E satellite that was tracking sea-surface temperature and Arctic ice extent failed in early October, but the last data

http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent_L.png

shows that Arctic sea ice extent, which prior to September was trending to the second lowest in the 8-year record, had reverted towards the mean consistent with the onset of dropping atmospheric temperatures.

Jim

I understand that ice sheets are growing in the southern hemisphere. I am also given to understand that soot fallout from the increased burning of coal in China and India can cause the northern hemisphere ice to melt off. I haven’t enough evidence to comment further on that.

NCDC data shows… summers are cooler, winters are getting colder

Re: NCDC data shows that the contiguous USA has not warmed in the past decade, summers are cooler, winters are getting colder

Jerry,

Surprise!

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/05/ncdc-data-shows-that-the-contiguous-usa-has-not-warmed-in-the-past-decade-summers-are-cooler-winters-are-getting-colder/

Regards,

George

But does not the AGW theory predict monotonic temperature rises, and thus require an explanation for even temporary cooling decades?

Koala Bears

Here is a link to the Koala Bear story with a picture. There seems to be some doubt as to whether the offered animal was in fact a Koala Bear.

http://philly.barstoolsports.com/around-barstool/stewed-koala-bear-served-at-chinese-restaurant-would-you-eat-it/

DJ Drummond

I doubt that’s a koala. It looks a lot more like a big woodchuck. And why give a koala a carrot? I always doubted the story to begin with.

Letter from Italy

Ciao Jerry

Have you heard of the E-Cat ? It may be too good to be true, but still, worth a look. Wired says:

"Rossi, an Italian inventor, with support from his scientific consultant, physicist and emeritus professor Sergio Focardi (University of Bologna) claims to have come up with the Holy Grail of power generation, an "Energy Catalyser" or E-Cat, which produces limitless energy. He has already carried out laboratory demonstrations in front of scientists and the Italian media, and in October he plans to unveil a one-megawatt power plant in the US. If it works, the E-Cat is the biggest thing since atomic power, bringing an inexhaustible supply of cheap energy. It looks much too good to be true and many dismiss it as an obvious scam, but Rossi has powerful support from some surprising quarters."

NyTeknik (http://www.nyteknik.se) has an extensive analysis of the October 6 test.

Ciao !

Roberto

I would love for this to be true, but I would not bet much money on that.

Foxconn going into the robot business

Hello Jerry,

I knew this was a big story when I first brought it to your attention in August. Now it’s even bigger and more meaningful!

Foxconn – the company that assembles Apple products in China – is going to mass produce their own robots from a new research facility and factory in Taiwan and has plans to deploy 1 million robots within 3-5 years in their factories in China. This will double the world’s industrial robot population! An amazing feat and a blow to German and Japanese robot manufacturers who had hoped to get a share of the business.

As of this moment, nobody else except The Robot Report http://www.TheRobotReport.com has picked up on this story.

Here are the two sources:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jmmlqDVBEClVdpCoGcZe-2q–ybw?docId=CNG.c985efcfab53ba89f922bddeac7ead11.2c1

http://focustaiwan.tw/ShowNews/WebNews_Detail.aspx?Type=aECO&ID=201110290024

I hope this information stimulates a story idea about robotics – perhaps one where I can help.

Cordially,

Frank Tobe

I need to think on this one. Thanks.

Investigating Chinampa Farming <http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/ioa/backdirt/Fallwinter00/farming.html>

Re your daughter’s writings on fertile crescent cities being formed on swamps:

This appeard to be how the Aztec empire was built. A small tribe forced to live in the middle of a lake became enormously productive & begat a great nation.

"

How the Aztec Empire fed the burgeoning population of its capital, Tenochtitlan, has long intrigued researchers. Most of Tenochtitlan’s estimated 150,000 to 200,000 inhabitants at the time of Spanish contact were not food producers. The system, known as chinampas, of draining swamps and building up fields in the shallow Basin of Mexico lakebeds, was a remarkable form of intensive agriculture that Jeffrey Parsons of the University of Michigan suggests provided one-half to two-thirds of the food consumed in Tenochtitlan.

At the time of Spanish contact, shallow lakes covered approximately 1000 km2 of the Basin of Mexico. Archaeological surveys show that large expanses of the lakes were converted into chinampas."

Neil Craig

Jenny has created considerable scientific interest in her theories of marshlands and the origins of civilization. Needless to say I am proud of her.

"The Soda Pop Board of America"

Though most of the old ads in the pages linked to on Thursday are real, the one from "The Soda Pop Board of America" is a recent fabrication:

http://rjwhite.tumblr.com/post/472668874/fact-checking

Too bad. It’s the best one. 🙂

. png

Pity…

Switchblade

As someone commented at the Strategypage site, it is basically a guided light mortar round. A good squad support weapon. Can also be helicopter launched from 2.75 inch rocket tubes. And, I imagine, dropped out of tubes in fixed wing aircraft, like a sonabouy.

Switchblade Manpack UAV demo http://deepbluehorizon.blogspot.com/2011/05/switchblade-manpack-uav-demo.html

 

Tinkerbell’s Law

The economy is subject to Tinkerbell’s Law: It’s only alive as long as everyone believes it’s alive. Sooner or later, no one is going to buy T-bills, not Chinese, not oil sheikhs, and certainly not any Swiss bank or anyone with an account in one. Republicans have run up the debt just as consistently as Democrats have. The Tea Party will go into the darkness that consumes all American third parties, another sound and fury, signifying nothing. Remember George Wallace’s American Party? I do. I remember how he said he was going to take the attache cases from all those Washington people and thrown them in the Potomac. I haven’t heard any reports of attache case jams blocking the flow of the Potomac.

Jerry,

Subj: Mixed metaphors

Outtakes from Firefly and Serenity – set to the classic Trek filk, "Banned from Argo"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN1WSkFXmzU

Wheedon fans should not miss this. Thanks.

On ABE BOOKs, Hephaestus, and other such matters:

Hephaestus Books: Content Scrappers, not pirates

I’ve taken a look at the Hephaestus Books "titles," and they seem to be content scrapped from Wikipedia rather than actual omnibus editions:

http://www.lawrenceperson.com/?p=6829

So they are indeed dishonest scumbags, but they’re primarily ripping of readers through deceptive advertising, not writers through piracy…

—

Lawrence Person

Avast!

Not sure if this is the actual novels or wiki-articles about the novels. For $13 stealing if no permission or royalties for novels. Overcharging and fraud if the wiki-articles.

"Hephaestus Books represents a new publishing paradigm, allowing disparate content sources to be curated into cohesive, relevant, and informative books. To date, this content has been curated from Wikipedia articles and images under Creative Commons licensing, although as Hephaestus Books continues to increase in scope and dimension, more licensed and public domain content is being added. We believe books such as this represent a new and exciting lexicon in the sharing of human knowledge. This particular book is a collaboration focused on Novels by Jerry Pournelle."

Dowlan Smith

Thanks. I didn’t look closely enough.

Hephaestus Books

Jerry

I found a book about People Who Went to LaSalle Univ. (nee College) in Philadelphia, myself being one of those in the title. Apparently someone has learned they can copy Wikipedia pages and put them together into a book. It reminds me of some comments Mark Twain made to Rudyard Kipling when the latter had come to Elmira to interview him. He told of a man who had gathered a bunch of essays on a topic, excerpted what Mark Twain had said in interviews about it and printed it as "Mark Twain on (Topic)." "He’s dead now," Twain said to Kipling, adding reflectively, "I didn’t kill him."

MikeF

Thanks for that story.

Hephaestus ABE Books Flap

Are you sure you aren’t losing sales from this? If these show up in a

search ahead of your legitimate offerings, it’s going to be harder to

find and buy your work.

Mike Johns

They don’t show up in my lists, at least not so far, until several pages in. But I will watch for it. Thanks.

Abe books/pirated books

Abebooks as far as I know is little more than an agent for used book stores. Stores sell their books through Abe, Abe handles billing, and the store ships to the customer.

As to fakes on Amazon, they seem to come in waves. Amazon takes them down regularly, but they reappear under a different "company" name a few weeks later. With the ease of eBook publishing, people can create these fakes very quickly now, the cat is out of the bag so to speak.

Good luck battling them!

J.T. Wenting

My conclusion is that I over reacted to this. Hephaestus puts out not very useful collections of comments which are easily mistaken for pirated collections of books. ABE Books sells them sometimes. I don’t think any of this actually costs me money, but I do think my readers ought to be aware that this is a questionable at best operation. Thanks to all my readers who looked into this for me.

Population Control Global Warming BS

What did we hammer on? Climate change is about killing people. Now the NY Times — a mouthpiece — blurts it out:

<.>

What’s the impact of overpopulation? One is that youth bulges in rapidly growing countries like Afghanistan and Yemen makes them more prone to conflict and terrorism. Booming populations also contribute to global poverty and make it impossible to protect virgin forests or fend off climate change. Some studies have suggested that a simple way to reduce carbon emissions in the year 2100 is to curb population growth today.

</>

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/opinion/kristof-the-birth-control-solution.html?_r=1

So, carbon emissions — that buzzword again. Carbon tax is a life tax and now we are getting to the point — just like the Koran does. If you read it, it starts out with four types of people: believers, non-believers, harm doers, and evil doers. As you progress evil doers and harmdoers become one group. Then believers one group and everyone else is in the bad group and it goes on about horrible and humiliating punishments and so forth. The climate change dogma turns in that direction, now we get to the eugenics and the population reduction and the life tax.

Let’s have less people so we can save the forest and eradicate poverty? Let’s cure the headache by cutting off the head? This Malthusian approach is unnecessary. And, population control does not start at home — it starts in the third world. Bill Gates knows this, which is why his eugenics operations happen over there.

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

An interesting view. Wrecking the global economy will certainly reduce the population. We have had two generations who never knew the ghastly kind of famine that once stalked many lands; technology, food storage and transportation, (See A Step Farther Out http://www.amazon.com/A-Step-Farther-Out-ebook/dp/B004XTKFWW ) have made famine rare in our times, although I remember famines from headlines when I was a child. I doubt Bill Gates has the intents you impute to him. Melinda would be horrified at the thought. The Gates Foundation has made some important discoveries in education research.

Famine may become very real again as the economy falters.