| Monday
September 13, 2010
Following kindly reformatted by Charles Adams
=============
The Space Studies
Institute urges the Congress to defeat H.R. 5781 We believe there is a
great benefit to our Nation in the opening of the space frontier. Space
is about more than science or exploration.
Frontiers are about
creating prosperity and realizing potential. The contribution of American
space efforts to our national economy and to human welfare has barely begun.
We face many challenges: ensuring a permanent supply of clean, low-cost
energy, strategic metals and, providing robust protection against asteroid
impact. Affordable space transportation is necessary to enable all of these
benefits.
The present House bill
will delay the time when space can make a greater contribution to our
national welfare. The most useful thing this Congress can do to lower the
cost of launch is to create a market for space transportation services. The
Kelly Act of 1925, which contracted for private air mail delivery, is a
successful example. A consequence of the Kelly Act was the development of
the DC-3. As students of history note, the commercial DC-3 ( re-designated
the C-47) was an important element in winning WWII. American industry --
rather than Russian -- will soon be able to supply commercial transportation
to the ISS and to commercial space stations. NASA purchase of commercial
crew services would accelerate the maturation of this industry. There is
another important role for government to play in space development. That is
financial support of pre-competitive research and development. That is the
role the NACA played until 1958. The NACA performed critical pre-competitive
research on topics necessary to build aircraft. NACA reports are models of
clarity. These reports are still used today in the development of the U.S.
commercial space industry. By contrast, little of economic utility has come
from the past few years of NASA R&D.
Development of the
unnecessary and wasteful Ares vehicle crowded out useful and necessary
research. We support the administration's request to reinstate funds needed
to pursue precompetitive research. There are several areas that are critical
to America's regaining leadership in space development. The topics of
interest require the development of human capital. Congress must give the
long-term support needed to develop human capital in the form of engineers
and scientists with technical expertise that we have lost.
The magnitude of benefits
from space development could be a significant annual addition to our economy
within a few decades if the Congress chooses to foster a commercial
industry. The benefits include satellite solar power. Clean renewable energy
from space could be a $500 billion annual export market in a few decades.
Asteroidal resources could supply a resurgent American manufacturing
industry with the resources to dominate world markets and ensure prosperity
at home.
It is difficult to predict
the future. Yet, we already have sufficient knowledge of the resources in
space to predict a bright future for space development if transport costs
are driven low enough to open the space frontier.
For good reasons,
government developed transportation has been costly and uncompetitive. A
classic case is Samuel Langley's government funded attempt to invent the
airplane. Langley spent one hundred times as much money as the Wright
brothers did. They succeeded, and he failed. Another example is the British
government-funded effort to build passenger dirigibles between the world
wars. The government-funded R101 crashed on its maiden voyage, but the
commercially developed Vickers R100 dirigible flew successfully. NASA's
failures at every new launcher program in the past two decades are more
recent examples.
The competition
represented by the government's developing its own unique launch vehicles
hinders the emergence of a competitive and improving space transportation
sector in the United States. The current House bill perpetuates that
mistake.
This Congress can choose
to be on the right side of history--or on the wrong side. You can elect to
help your country build wealth and prosperity, or you can choose to waste
money and talent building an unaffordable rocket to nowhere. History may
record your choice in stark terms, but your constituents will thank you now,
and in the near future, if you make the wise choice.
Prof. Freeman Dyson,
President
Prof. John S. Lewis, V.P.,
Research
Dr. Lee Valentine, Exec.
V.P.
==========
Subject: The Appeasement Mosque
Looks like it's going up.
Maybe we should also put up a big statue of Hideki
Tojo on top of the Pearl Harbor memorial.
Those who refuse to learn from the past are forced to
repeat it.
Those who refuse to learn from the present are forcing
the rest of us to learn Arabic.
Matthew Joseph Harrington
e pur si muove
It isn't up yet. Of course neither is anything
else. We built the Empire State Building in 2 years after the stock market
collapse in 1929; we don't seem to be able to move that fast now, ten
years after the World Trade Building was destroyed in an act of war. We
must have had better technology in 1930.
===========
Letter from England:
Trainwreck
I've never seen a train wreck
before. I'm watching the UK Government handle its budget cutbacks--I suppose
they're necessary, but it's like watching the Union Army in 1861. The
Business Secretary announced earlier this week that they would be halving
research funding and limiting it to world-leading applied science. <http://tinyurl.com/379pq7y>
<http://tinyurl.com/28s856l>
<http://tinyurl.com/336s2pb>
<http://tinyurl.com/2f2hmc8>
<http://tinyurl.com/34ljppd>
<http://tinyurl.com/35n2ygs>
<http://tinyurl.com/34neq8x>
(Currently, the UK spends about one third as much as America does per
capita, this would reduce the figure to about 1/5th or 1/6th.) Since I've
almost never seen applied science in world-leading journals, I assume this
means they're really thinking about almost 100% cutbacks. That will shut the
UK doctoral programmes down quickly and trigger an exodus of researchers <http://tinyurl.com/29v75k4>.
It will be interesting to see how long a first world economy can last
without funding research. Canada has relevant experience <http://tinyurl.com/2w5l5tg>.
There's an interesting chart
comparing higher education expenditure in the 9 September Times Higher
Education. <http://tinyurl.com/2ud4ah2>.
The UK figure shown is prior to the 35% cutbacks. Also the Australian and UK
figures are for a 3-year baccalaureate (instead of 4 years in the other
nations).
Apparently there will be a
university fee increase <http://tinyurl.com/3685det>.
Unlike America, college students in the UK are legally adults, so the new
fees will not be funded by families. I actually agree with the fee increase,
but I believe it must be coupled with bursaries for the talented poor, or it
will have negative effects on the economy.
Tax revolt in the UK <http://tinyurl.com/2urdqsg>
<http://tinyurl.com/2utodln>
Royal Mail to go private <http://tinyurl.com/337lvdx>
Hawking's new faith: <http://tinyurl.com/3aee7jb>
<http://tinyurl.com/34rs6km>
* * *
I've been working with a lexico-statistician
on the authorship of the Johannine corpus. We're using common function word
usage statistics since other studies have found them fairly reliable as an
indicator of authorship. Initial results are interesting.
There seems to be no evidence
for more than four major authors, each of whom is associated with a distinct
cluster of writings. These are Revelation, the epistles, and two clusters
imbedded in the Gospel of John. Revelation is a complete outlier for many
words, including the most common, kai (or 'and'), so this confirms the
general opinion that it has a separate author. The three epistles cluster
together to the exclusion of the remainder of the corpus, which is a mild
surprise. The Gospel of John contains two major distinct clusters: the
Farewell Discourses and a narrative source--the Signs Gospel--that Robert
Fortna previously reconstructed using other criteria. The remainder of the
Gospel falls between the two major clusters, suggesting that it is a
mixture. Fortna had suggested the Signs Gospel was originally composed by
combining a life narrative with a passion narrative, but there is no
evidence of different authors.
The Signs Gospel reads like a
much more primitive and very Jewish Mark with concerns appropriate to the
decades prior to the Jewish Revolt. The theology is messianic and treats the
crucifixion as an embarrassment to be explained away by Jewish prophecies.
There are between seven and nine signs used to prove Jesus is the messiah,
with the resurrection the greatest sign.
--
Harry Erwin, PhD
"If you can't be a good example,
then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." (Catherine Aird)
I will comment on Biblical
authorship another time.
================
From another conference. We were discussing the
Iron Law of Bureaucracy, and the subject of the Roman Church came up'
certainly the longest lived bureaucracy in history. Having survived 1500
years or so, is there much to be learned from it. Most of the comments were
dismissive or derogatory, but Mike Flynn said:
A bit of rambling regarding clerical bureaucracy.
The question does not regard various stereotypes held
of the Church but whether
Pournelle's Iron Law applies. The history of the church shows both:
there are always people dedicated to the mission: feed the hungry, shelter
the homeless, care for the sick, and so forth. But there are always those
who are in it for their own benefit, and others who sincerely convince
themselves that what benefits them is good for the organization. IOW, some
are saving souls and some are burnishing the organization. The weeds grow up
along with the wheat. When the Iron Law becomes too rusty, a reformer
appears: e.g., the Clunaic reformers, Robert d'Abrissel, Francis d'Assisi,
and so on.
There is also the Church's rather decentralized
nature. First, there are various orders that run their own affairs: the
Jesuits, Dominicans, Carmelites, etc. In my area there is a Franciscan
friary a short distance away. An African order, the Apostles of Jesus,
supply the priests for a local diocesan parish. One may find monasteries,
convents, carmels, and sundry other self-governing bodies. There are abbots,
abbesses, generals, and so forth. Second, there are parallel hierarchies.
One of the local churches here is Arabic and practices the Maronite rite. It
falls under the Maronite Eparchy of Brooklyn. The Maronite bishops elect a
patriarch, confirmed by Rome. Another local church is Ukrainian and
practices the Byzantine rite. It falls under the Ukrainian Catholic
Archeparchy of Philadelphia. The others are all Latin rite under the bishop
of Allentown.
Thirdly, each bishop, though appointed by the Pope
(where States have not interfered), runs his own diocese. Dogma is subject
to Rome, but discipline is local - unless it breaks down. There is always
the "appeal to Rome" as a sort of supreme court. An archbishop has a higher
dignity, usually because his city is more important, but he's not the "boss"
of the provincial bishops. The province is run by a "conference" of all the
bishops in it. (At one time, the whole church was run that way: Rome,
Alexandria, and Antioch conferred. Then Constantinople, because that's where
the emperor hung out. When pastoral letters were not enough, they called an
ecumenical council, and all the bishops got together for a Worldcon.)
At the parish level, the pastor is not the
"supervisor" of the congregants; and money is not collected because they
think they'll go to hell if they don't put in. The money is collected
because the church building costs money to maintain, and because of various
programs undertaken. Some of it goes to the diocese because there are
programs the diocese can run that would be uneconomical for each parish to
run. These programs are described when asking for donations. The
parishioners are not threatened with hellfire. Locally, there are clothing
drives, food banks, parish "visitators of the sick," parish community
events, eucharistic ministers, lectors, and so forth, all carried out by
volunteers.
Another possible factor is that to become a priest at
all requires several years of study and indoctrination. (That term is meant
precisely: mastering the doctrines.) What corporation or agency spends
*years* teaching its entry-level managers in the mission of the
organization. This may retard the Iron Law and accelerate the Rubber Band.
That is, no matter how badly off the beam they get, there is an established
standard against which they can be judged.
A last point is a certain kind of recognition. The
third bishop of Philadelphia was deeply spiritual and worked hard at
ministering to his diocese, which at the time included all of Pennsylvania,
Delaware, and much of New Jersey. But he was not a very good administrator
or book keeper. So he was given a co-adjutor who was, and who succeeded him
on his death. Bishop Woods organized and managed many building projects, set
up managerial systems, and all the rest. But it was his predecessor, John
Neumann who was canonized saint. This sort of thing also serves as a
touchstone or reference standard.
Any list of popes and bishops and eparchs and the like
could contain Iron Law examples. The order founded by St. Francis found
itself enmeshed after his death in a struggle between the "Spirituals" who
wanted to live the simple life of poverty and the "Conventuals" who wanted
to set up rules and regulations. I can't say the Conventuals were wrong: a
governance structure that works for one charismatic dude and his immediate
followers will not work when the number of followers far exceeds a personal
following and are scattered among scores or hundreds of friaries across
Europe. But I can't say the "Spirituals" were wrong, either, in seeing the
ominous shadow of the Iron Law in the writing of many chapters and rules.
The Church, as usual, had it both ways and there are today the "OFM" and the
"OFM conv."
Can any of this apply to bureaucracies outside these
special circumstances?
Mike Flynn
============
Subject: For those of us that like it hot
http://www.firefoods.co.uk/infinity_chilli_sauce.htm
Tracy Walters, CISSP
================
The following is the last in
an exchange of letters that began in about the same tone. It purports to
instruct me on how we know the temperature of the Earth for a year to a
tenth of a degree. You will recall that I asked a couple of space
scientists how they would go about getting the temperature of the Earth
for a year and expressing it in a single number accurate to a tenth of a
degree.
I was asked who these people were:
I was curious about this statement you made: "I have
also had conversations with space scientists on just how you might go
about getting a single number accurate to a tenth of a degree that
represents the annual temperature of the Earth. Unsurprisingly they were
nonplussed." What space scientists with what expertise did you talk to
here?
Thanks, Mark
I named Yoji Kondo, a rather senior NASA
scientist who was in charge of the IUV satellite among other projects, and
is pretty well known in space weather research; and the chief scientist of
space command.
That resulted in this:
Hello, "Space command"? I think you meant Johnson
Space Center from the old Apollo and Skylab missions. Is Yoji Kondo an
active climate researcher with published peer reviewed studies in the
relevant fields? Usually you look at the relevant literature which is
available at UCLA, attend lectures by scientists with proper expertise and
who are doing current research and in general spend time educating yourself
so you can ask good questions. The Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Part
of NASA) has all the original data, freely available and some of the
foremost climate researchers in the world among thousands of active
researchers. There is no noteworthy disagreement among actual experts about
AGW. If you are serious about understanding climate research you can start
here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
<http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/>
Have you also read the relevant sections of the IPCC reports? To get started
look here:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/contents.html
And within this section you can find this:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-3-1.html
Partial quote follows: "There is no single thermometer
measuring the global temperature. Instead, individual thermometer
measurements taken every day at several thousand stations over the land
areas of the world are combined with thousands more measurements of sea
surface temperature taken from ships moving over the oceans to produce an
estimate of global average temperature every month. To obtain consistent
changes over time, the main analysis is actually of anomalies (departures
from the climatological mean at each site) as these are more robust to
changes in data availability. It is now possible to use these measurements
from 1850 to the present, although coverage is much less than global in the
second half of the 19th century, is much better after 1957 when measurements
began in Antarctica, and best after about 1980, when satellite measurements
began. Expressed as a global average, surface temperatures have increased by
about 0.74°C over the past hundred years (between 1906 and 2005; see Figure
1). However, the warming has been neither steady nor the same in different
seasons or in different locations. There was not much overall change from
1850 to about 1915, aside from ups and downs associated with natural
variability but which may have also partly arisen from poor sampling. An
increase (0.35°C) occurred in the global average temperature from the 1910s
to the 1940s, followed by a slight cooling (0.1°C), and then a rapid warming
(0.55°C) up to the end of 2006 (Figure 1). The warmest years of the series
are 1998 and 2005 (which are statistically indistinguishable), and 11 of the
12 warmest years have occurred in the last 12 years (1995 to 2006). Warming,
particularly since the 1970s, has generally been greater over land than over
the oceans. Seasonally, warming has been slightly greater in the winter
hemisphere. Additional warming occurs in cities and urban areas (often
referred to as the urban heat island effect), but is confined in spatial
extent, and its effects are allowed for both by excluding as many of the
affected sites as possible from the global temperature data and by
increasing the error range (the light grey band in the figure).
A few areas have cooled since 1901, most notably the
northern North Atlantic near southern Greenland. Warming during this time
has been strongest over the continental interiors of Asia and northern North
America. However, as these are areas with large year-to-year variability,
the most evident warming signal has occurred in parts of the middle and
lower latitudes, particularly the tropical oceans. In the lower left panel
of Figure 1, which shows temperature trends since 1979, the pattern in the
Pacific Ocean features warming and cooling regions related to El Niño.
Analysis of long-term changes in daily temperature
extremes has recently become possible for many regions of the world (parts
of North America and southern South America, Europe, northern and eastern
Asia, southern Africa and Australasia). Especially since the 1950s, these
records show a decrease in the number of very cold days and nights and an
increase in the number of extremely hot days and warm nights (see FAQ 3.3
<http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-3-3.html> ). The
length of the frost-free season has increased in most mid- and high-latitude
regions of both hemispheres. In the Northern Hemisphere, this is mostly
manifest as an earlier start to spring.
In addition to the surface data described above,
measurements of temperature above the surface have been made with weather
balloons, with reasonable coverage over land since 1958, and from satellite
data since 1979. All data are adjusted for changes in instruments and
observing practices where necessary. Microwave satellite data have been used
to create a ‘satellite temperature record’ for thick layers of the
atmosphere including the troposphere (from the surface up to about 10 km)
and the lower stratosphere (about 10 to 30 km). Despite several new analyses
with improved cross-calibration of the 13 instruments on different
satellites used since 1979 and compensation for changes in observing time
and satellite altitude, some uncertainties remain in trends.
For global observations since the late 1950s, the most
recent versions of all available data sets show that the troposphere has
warmed at a slightly greater rate than the surface, while the stratosphere
has cooled markedly since 1979. This is in accord with physical expectations
and most model results, which demonstrate the role of increasing greenhouse
gases in tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling; ozone depletion
also contributes substantially to stratospheric cooling.
Consistent with observed increases in surface
temperature, there have been decreases in the length of river and lake ice
seasons. Further, there has been an almost worldwide reduction in glacial
mass and extent in the 20th century; melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet has
recently become apparent; snow cover has decreased in many Northern
Hemisphere regions; sea ice thickness and extent have decreased in the
Arctic in all seasons, most dramatically in spring and summer; the oceans
are warming; and sea level is rising due to thermal expansion of the oceans
and melting of land ice"
Digesting and understanding information such as this
will, of course, take months of effort on your part if you do it correctly
and your questions after getting over the hump of initial effort should
properly be addressed to the actual researchers. I am sure there are good
ones near you at UCLA.
All the best in efforts to become educated on this
grave and growing problem,
Mark Schaffer
I presume this was meant to be informative,
although I still do not understand why one should take seriously a tenth
of a degree when there are thousands of numbers being averaged in, and
some of them are known to be flawed; but this is the answer I was given.
Yoji Kondo is a senior NASA scientst at Goddard,
and was in charge of the IUV satellite among other projects. He is
recently retired. Space Command is a USAF operational command. It should
be clear that the statement by a member of that command that he wouldn't
know how to get a comprehensive measure of the temperature of the earth
for a year accurate to a tenth of a degree was a private opinion, in
no way an official statement, and not necessarily the opinion of Space
Command, the United States Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the
Government of the United States. To the best of my knowledge Space Command
has not been tasked with measuring the temperature of the Earth accurate
to 0.1 degree.
I fear that I didn't learn much I had not already
been told, but perhaps others will profit from this. I am still
unconvinced that any of these techniques including the satellite
atmospheric measurements are consistently accurate to 0.1 degree over a
period of a year (for example, orbits drift, the latitude at which one is
looking changes a bit, and I believe that temperature can be sensitive to
latitude). I believe that ground temperature measurements are subject to
error. I believe that sea temperatures are subject to error. I have had to
monitor temperatures in an altitude/temperature chamber as well as both
skin and core temperatures of test subjects under thermal stress, and I
have some knowledge of the difficulty of obtaining such measures to
fractions of a degree accuracy in a laboratory where I had entire control
of the environment and direct access to the measuring -- and recording --
equipment. I know that measures vary even in the lab, and I am convinced
there is more than a 0.1 degree standard error of measurement in many of
those listed as contributing to the climate temperature. Of course one can
believe that if we take enough such measures and average them we will have
a number we can trust enough to believe that 0.1 degree changes in
temperature are significant. Perhaps so, but for how long have we had such
measurements?
From all the data I have seen, we are dealing
with a temperature rise of about 0.4 degrees from 1880 to 1940, and
another 0.4 to 0.8 degrees from 1940 to present, less from 1940 to 2000
(0.4 tp 0.6). We are told to be alarmed. It is my understanding that there
was about 1 degree temperature rise from 1780 to 1880, although I do not
think we know the temperature in either 1780 or 1880 to a tenth of a
degree.
In any event, I suppose I ought to be thankful
for the lesson, which appears to be that we must leave such matters to the
specialists, and can safely ignore critics like Freeman Dyson and Fred
Singer.
As to whether I have read the relevant secti0ns
of the IPCC reports, I presume most of the world has read them.
==
Re: Under "Taking the Earth's Temperature
Yes, careful science is amazing to watch. Beats the
complete lack of research the denialists indulge in. It is also amazing that
you have read the relevant literature in one day including references to
thousands of peer reviewed research. Or was that just uninformed sarcasm on
your part?
Mark Schaffer
==
"We have concluded that the Greenland and West
Antarctica ice caps are melting at approximately half the speed originally
predicted."
<http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/20100908/tts-climate-warming-science-ice-c1b2fc3.html>
-- Roland Dobbins
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