Rhinocrisy

Idle back-of-the-envelope calculations to save the world are a favorite pastime of mine, the product of, believe it or not, long road-trips with my family, where my dad would work us through calculations such as the circumference of the world at our latitude and the like. Here’s a fun one:

In the latest New Scientist, a reader inquires about painting roofs white to increase albedo and thus prevent global warming. Someone responds to inform us that about 3% of the world is covered by buildings. A third says that we would do better to instead cover the world with photovoltaic cells.

Well, let’s see how well we can do with this. Let’s restrict ourselves to the U.S., so we can get plenty of data. Let’s assume the U.S. has a proportionate number of buildings according to its population; probably more, but it’s always better to be conservative. This is 5% of 3% of 510,065,284.702, which is the surface area of the Earth in km². For some reason I happen to know off the top of my head that the average incident sunlight in the U.S. is 200 W/m² (I don’t know how this stuff happens to me). Which means, if we do some multiplication, that American rooftops are drawing, on average, 1.53e14 W. Let’s say a photovoltaic cell has an efficiency of 16%; this allows us to produce 2.44e13 W, or in a year, 7.7e17 kWH. To put this figure in perspective, the U.S. consumes something like 3.6e12 kWH of electricity annually. In other words, even if we only did this with 0.1% of buildings, or if the process is a thousandfold less efficient, we would still be producing two hundred times as much power as we consume annually. Sounds like a good idea!

I don’t understand how people can write editorials for widely-read newspapers and produce nothing but bloviation. Check out this editorial in the London Times, which raises the bugaboo of “liberal intelligentsia” complaining about the Christian undertones of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”, but neglects to give even a SINGLE concrete example of such a complaint. Then again, people seem to have no problem hosting cable network “news” shows consisting entirely of bloviation. Amazingly, all these people work for Rupert Murdoch. Interestingly, I recently discovered that in 1980, shortly before he bought the Times, Murdoch acquired a majority share in a large hot-air concern. Apparently this has been fueling the success of his media empire ever since.

As you may have heard, there is a war on Christmas this year. Not a shooting war, so don’t expect to run downstairs on Christmas morn and find Santa’s bullet-riddled corpse lying under your tree where your presents ought to be.^* Just a war of words. As usual, I go to Michelle Malkin for the goods. The salient bits:

A guy named John Gibson from Fox News has a book out called “The War on Christmas”. Apropos! Check out the Amazon page - the book has an average of 2.5 stars, the result of an EXACTLY EQUAL NUMBER of 1-star and 5-star reviews. Holy shit.

Also, conservatives are apparently up in arms about the USPS refusing to sell religiously-themed stamps this year. Self-correcting blogosphere says: um, no.

Finally, Bill O’Reilly, who started this whole business last year, has re-entered the trenches. He fired off a few shots at the Daily Show, which prompted Jon Stewart to respond with a pledge to destroy Christmas: “I will not rest until every year families gather to spend December 25th together, at Osama’s Homo-bortion Pot & Commie Jizz-porium.” Awesome.

On a more serious note, I’m intimately familiar with the whole idea of ‘majority as downtrodden, persecuted group, beset by evil secularists’, coming from a Hindu nationalist family. This is a powerful rhetorical device, allowing you to cloak yourself in the righteous anger of the wronged and trample the minority in the name of justice. It’s considered trite to offer such comparisons, but all of this smells strongly like the fascistic movement I grew up with.

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^* If you do, however, be sure and ransack the body. I hear that guy has tons of sweet magical items - Bag of Infinite Capacity, Levitation Belt, 5d8 Reindeer Whip (+2 dex!).

Eric Muller had a link to this BBC World Service piece about the Turner Prize, an art prize recently awarded to Simon Starling for his performance/piece “shedboatshed”, where he took a shed, turned it into a boat, paddled it down the river to Basel, and turned it back into a shed. The BBC commentator Mark Whitaker interviews two art-world airheads about this bizarre business (starts at around 6:25 in above link). He’s quite funny and seems to be peeved for the same reasons I am (I’ll explain later). Here’s a bit of a transcript, though you really should listen to the whole thing:

MARK: Eric Troncy at, uh, museum in Dijon - is it art? a shed?
ERIC: Why not?
MARK: Is the French view of sheds the same as the British art establishment?
ERIC: Well you know, I think the question is not about, it’s not about ‘I could do it’, it’s, it’s, because in fact you did not… do it, and this guy did, and it’s the difference between you and him.
MARK: Well, the difference is that he’s got the gall to do it, then.
ERIC: Well, he decided to do so, and you did not decide to do so, uh, to try to make things, uh, simple.
MARK: (almost laughing) Because I don’t think it’s art! I mean, if I was to bring my underpants in next year, and submit them for the Turner Prize, would I have a chance of winning?
ERIC: Why not? But I am sure you will not do that, and that’s the difference between you and an artist.

This has been one of my buttons for many years; I’ve often lamented the slow decay of the word ‘art’. And I think this exchange captures it perfectly. If, indeed, the art world wishes to espouse the philosophy that anything can be art, or that, in the extreme, everything that human beings do, anywhere, any time, is art, then they should immolate themselves. They should give up the idea of an ‘artist’, wreck their museums, and distribute the Turner Prize equally amongst all people, from the housewife cooking deviled eggs to the homeless man sleeping in his own filth. The whole point of Duchamp painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa was to mock the idea of art as something special and figurative, to be brazen and tear down boundaries between art and the rest of life. It’s foolish in the extreme for M. Troncy, above, not to recognize the hypocrisy of insisting that what Starling does is art, while Mr. Whitaker is not an artist, merely because he lacks the pretension to declare himself one.

This bleg post is a non sequitur. It comprises two utterly unrelated snippets of information. The attempt to draw a connection between them is a futile journey. Save yourself the trouble. Have another beer.

Rumsfeld’s growing stake in Tamiflu

Defense Secretary, ex-chairman of flu treatment rights holder, sees portfolio value growing.
October 31, 2005: 10:55 AM EST
By Nelson D. Schwartz, Fortune senior writer

NEW YORK (Fortune) - The prospect of a bird flu outbreak may be panicking people around the globe, but it’s proving to be very good news for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other politically connected investors in Gilead Sciences, the California biotech company that owns the rights to Tamiflu, the influenza remedy that’s now the most-sought after drug in the world.

Rumsfeld served as Gilead (Research)’s chairman from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration in 2001, and he still holds a Gilead stake valued at between $5 million and $25 million, according to federal financial disclosures filed by Rumsfeld.

That has nothing to do with this.

Report: Tamiflu is ‘useless’ for avian flu

LONDON, Dec. 3 (UPI) — A Vietnamese doctor with experience in treating avian flu says Tamiflu, the drug being stockpiled for treatment of avian flue is useless against the virus.

Dr. Nguyen Tuong Van of the Centre for Tropical Diseases in Hanoi has treated 41 victims of H5N1, following World Health Organization guidelines and administering Tamiflu to her patients. She told the Sunday Times of London the medicine had no effect.

“We place no importance on using this drug on our patients,” she said. “Tamiflu is really only meant for treating ordinary type A flu. It was not designed to combat H5N1.”

For years I’ve been hearing the bullshit hypothesis that there are more colds in winter because people tend to spend more time indoors in the winter and thus are more likely to transmit infections. This makes very little sense, especially in cities. I’ve also been hearing there is “no evidence that exposure to cold weather makes you more likely to get a cold”. This is more likely a failure of the crappy case-control studies performed to measure the effect. I’m much happier with the “cold weather causes immunosuppression” hypothesis, which I’m gratified to read is favored by some “rhinologists”^*. From Eccles, R., “An explanation for the seasonality of acute upper respiratory tract viral infections.” Acta oto-laryngologica, Mar. 2002:

Despite a great increase in our understanding of the molecular biology of the viruses associated with acute upper respiratory tract viral infections (URTIs) there is a remarkable lack of knowledge and ideas about why URTI should exhibit a seasonal incidence. Most publications in this area either acknowledge a complete lack of any explanation for the seasonality of URTI or put forward an explanation relating to an increased “crowding” of susceptible persons in winter. This review will discuss some of the ideas concerning the seasonality of URTI and put forward a new hypothesis for discussion, namely that seasonal exposure to cold air causes an increase in the incidence of URTI due to cooling of the nasal airway. The hypothesis is supported by literature reports demonstrating that inhalation of cold air causes cooling of the nasal epithelium, and that this reduction in nasal temperature is sufficient to inhibit respiratory defences against infection such as mucociliary clearance and the phagocytic activity of leukocytes. A case is also made to suggest that warming of the nasal airway during fever and nasal congestion may help to resolve a current URTI.

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^* Unfortunately, they do not actually study rhinos, and the journal “Rhinology” is not full of papers on rhino anatomy and dietary habits.

I was browsing through the White House’s recently-released “Strategy for Victory in Iraq“, a document refreshing in its clarity. A few years back I saw a copy of the White House’s “Strategy for Victory in Chess”, which read:

We intend to win by:

• Gaining control of the center of the board.
• Maintaining an advantage in number of opponent’s pieces taken.
• Capturing the king.

But even in moist pablum like this, there’s some good grist. Occasionally even our paranoid national security apparatus screws up and lets a secret of Teutonic proportions slip out. Check out THIS gem!

The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity.

That’s right! Al-Qaeda is not JUST composed of evil Mohammedans, it’s composed of evil, non-human Mohammedans! It’s clear that once again this administration is privy to information that they don’t deign to share with the rest of us.

Fortunately, clever detective work can compensate. Although we don’t know exactly what sort of villainous non-humans al-Qaeda may be, we know they must fall in one of the following categories^*:

• Aliens from another planet/dimension
• Mole people
• Demons
• Robots

Each one of these has valid evidence to show for it. For example, we know that al-Qaeda is adept at hiding out in tunnels, which they used to escape the U.S. Marines in Tora Bora, Afghanistan. This, combined with their pinched features and propensity towards long whiskers lends credence to the idea that al-Qaeda is, in fact, an organization of mole peoples.

Classically, mole peoples have not waged war against the human race except to redress some grievance, usually involving a disturbance of their subterranean realm. In Superman vs. the Mole Men, an especially deep oil well was responsible. However, since we haven’t heard any complaints about underground nuclear testing, twenty-gigaton drills or a tunnel through the earth’s crust in any of the speeches made by al-Qaeda leadership, we ought to look at other theories.

Aliens from another planet has a lot going for it. There have been numerous instances of attempted alien takeovers in the past, usually thwarted by a plucky gang of Americans, sometimes with the aid of a Macintosh. Aliens are also fond of trying to disguise themselves as normal earthlings and make use of mind-control.

A typical feature of alien invasions is the use of advanced technology. Aliens have many devices that we have not invented yet, like hyperdrive, heat rays and flying saucers. They may also make use of bio-warfare. In the documentary “Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers” by Haim Saban (which I viewed as part of my research), the alien queen Rita Repulsa sends giant monsters down to destroy the city of Angel Grove (I couldn’t find this on my map - can anyone help?). Fortunately in this case they were defeated by the superior technology and kung-fu of a plucky, ethnically-balanced gang of Americans. I have ordered a copy of one of their lycra suits in case I need to take part in an alien-monster resistance movement in the future.

It does not appear that al-Qaeda has made use of any advanced technology, preferring to use explosions and box-cutters. It’s possible that they are only the vanguard of an alien force, sent to test our weaknesses before the arrival of a much larger space armada. We should leave open this possibility. I am honing my space-fighter skills in anticipation of such an eventuality by playing “Galaga” instead of working, according to the recommendations of the documentary “The Last Starfighter”.

Although I have suggested “robot” as a possibility above, I do not believe this is correct. I have listened to audio from Osama bin Laden’s speeches, and unlike a robot, he does NOT speak in a monotone. Also, as far as I can tell, he does not have glowing red eyes or a radio antenna protruding from his head, although these may have been digitally edited from the video and/or hidden by his head-dress.

This leaves the most likely possibility, demons. This agrees with other details that the White House has let slip, e.g., the fact that George Bush was charged with this mission by God, or the direct admission by General William Boykin that the war on terrorism was a battle against Satan. Also, in the documentary “South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut”, we see that there was in the past an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Satan. I believe this is the unspecified evidence that Dick Cheney referred to when he assured us that Saddam and al-Qaeda were working in cahoots. Hopefully our government will be more forthright about this in the future.

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^* I am aware that this list ignores the possibility of intersections between these categories, for example alien mole people or demon robots from another dimension. However, due to limited resources I was unable to consider these intersections in my research.

From Undernews, an article from the Independent:

Hilarie Cash, who heads Internet/Computer Addiction Services in Redmond, near Seattle, has identified a specific chemical rush - a dopamine high - which can be generated by even something as simple as receiving an email. She told The New York Times that she has seen instances of anxiety and depression in her patients.

YES! I was right, it’s dopamine. OK, bedtime!

By the way, everyone here knows about The Darkness, right?

The people have spoken! I look forward to this year’s Christmas Riot.

New poll courtesy of Hedgehog. It being December, it has an appropriate contemplative, year-in-review feel to it.