Science Friday - Explaining Man's Influence on Extreme Weather Patterns

Over at Early Warning there is a longish post on the possible affects climate change is having on the northern jet stream. The post is a summary of a longer science paper that is behind a firewall. I won't try to recreate everything here as EW does a terrific job in explaining the underlying science and the papers observations. In summary, climate change appears to be affecting the speed of the jet stream winds and the frequency of the wind's wave pattern shape. These affects are contributing to prolonged extreme weather. While they rightly point out that the paper's conclusions are not definitive they certainly match up with our observations of the weather over the past couple years.

As they say, go read the whole thing. The language isn't too dry and it has plenty of visuals to help the reader understand the concepts being explained.

Happy Discoveryday, Neptune

Man, does time ever fly when you're having fun. Can you believe it's been one whole year since we discovered Neptune? Me either. It seems like it was just last month that Englishman John Adams and Frenchman Urbain Le Verrier were coming forth with their calculations

Neptune's discovery marked a turning point in astronomy. Its existence was revealed, not through a serendipitous observation by an astronomer but by the careful work of mathematicians. They calculated that perturbations in the orbit of Uranus, then thought to be the sun's most distant planet, could only be explained by the existence of another, even remoter world whose gravity was affecting Uranus's path.

and William Lassell started scanning the skies.

Tasty Treats

Looks good.  A table of tasty pastries.  Well, maybe not.

Also found in the May 2011 National Geographic.

Today's Stat

From the May 2011 National Geographic.  Human beings are expected to number 7 billion - that's 7,000,000,000 - in the near future.  As a comparison the magazine offers estimates of the populations of various domesticated food animals.

• Chickens:  52 billion
• Ducks:  2.6 billion
• Pigs:  1.3 billion
• Rabbits:  1.1 billion
• Turkeys:  633 million
• Sheep:  518 million
• Goats:  398 millioni
• Cows:  293 million
• Water Buffalo:  24 million
• Camels:  1.7 million

Question:  Who eats camels?

Pale Blue Dot

A friend of mine pointed me to this.  It's been so many years since I last saw it.  It's worth viewing and listening again and again.

Train Wreck

L.A. columnist sparks up in the name of science and public safety.  The results were predictable.

Call in the Paratroopers

Fifty plus years after the invasion began, the US of A is ready to strike back.  After all this time the enemy is entrenched and there are up to 12,000 of them in every square mile.  We're sending in the paratroopers!

No, not Easy Company, although their used to those kind of odds.

We're sending in the mice and arming them with acetaminophen!

Elections Have Consequences

U.S. Farmers are preparing for new limits on use of antibiotics.

Dispensing antibiotics to healthy animals is routine on the large, concentrated farms that now dominate American agriculture. But the practice is increasingly condemned by medical experts who say it contributes to a growing scourge of modern medicine: the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including dangerous E. coli strains that account for millions of bladder infections each year, as well as resistant types of salmonella and other microbes.

Now, after decades of debate, the Food and Drug Administration appears poised to issue its strongest guidelines on animal antibiotics yet, intended to reduce what it calls a clear risk to human health. They would end farm uses of the drugs simply to promote faster animal growth and call for tighter oversight by veterinarians.

Which party is in charge of the White House and Congress right now? Oh, that's right, I recall now.

Of course, the major farmers, including the National Pork Producers Council, are pushing back against the new rules and proposed legislation that would implement even stricter limits. They claim there is not sufficient evidence that the antibiotics injected into the animals cause or contribute to human health problems. The American Medical Association and the Infectious Diseases Society of America are pushing for the tougher legislation.

I don't have the competing studies in hand to compare them. If I did, I'm certainly not qualified to do the comparison. I am reminded though that tobacco industry for years claimed smoking didn't harm people, that the evidence it caused cancer was insufficient and flawed. They had an economic interest in selling cigarettes. The National Pork Producers have a similar economic interest in producing the most pork possible and the lowest costs possible.

I feel confident saying if the GOP was in charge of the White House and the FDA these rules would not be moving forward. If the GOP gains control of the House and/or the Senate in November then we can look forward to government shut downs and as many investigations as they can muster against Obama and his administration. This kind of work good will come to an end. Just what the GOP wants.

via

Save the Tigers!

And the Gnus!

I've recently subscribed to the Discover Blogs RSS feed. Today there a couple posts on conservation.

In reverse order of their posting, the second was about Tanzania's plan to build a road across the Serengeti. This is deemed a really bad idea. The highway would stop the largest migration of land mammals in the world. It's predicted that would reduce the wildebeest population from millions to a few hundred thousand. The wildebeests are essential for the maintenance of the grasslands. There is an alternate route for the road that would not affect the migration. Let's hope that is the decision that is made.



The first was for saving tiger habitat. The plan is stating that basically, as a last ditch effort, we have to concentrate on just saving the small amount of territory left to the big cats. There are only about 3,000 tigers left in the wild with maybe less than 1,000 breeding females. The population has fallen 40% in the past decade. This plan is rightly described as their last chance.

Random Babeball

“Restore the spitter?” asked Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese. “When did they stop throwing it?”

• My Cardinals lead the NL Central most of the year but have been on a terrible slide. I think they've lost 15 of their last 16. They have lost 3 series in a row to sub-500 teams. Before this stretch I thought we might be competing for the wild card. Now, I don't even know if I believe that. I think this says it all
  

  The Cardinals have five players currently on their roster who have at least 350 plate appearances this year and an OPS below 700. That's the most of any National League team and tied with the A's for the most in baseball. Aside from the Cards, in the National League, only the Padres even have more than two such players.

  
  
  
• I've had a general observation this year that sportswriters and sportscasters are putting on a push for instant replay in baseball. I understand the frustration when a perfect game was lost to a blown call. All the same I just don't believe it should be part of baseball. In fact, I don't want it in any sport. Sports are human endeavors judged by human beings. You want computer like accuracy, start being a fan of video games.
  
  
• Sweet Lou has retired from baseball. He has a been a staple of baseball my entire life. He lead the mediocre Reds to a World Series in 1990. He lead the talent ridden Mariners to a 116 win season in 2001. Sweet Lou was a very good manager and was very good for hitters. Still, I have to agree with Joe Posnanski, Lou's not really Cooperstown material:
  

  He’s like 100 games over .500 in his career — and that 2001 Mariners team was 70 of those games. He won that awesome World Series in Cincinnati — fabulous there — and he managed Seattle to that cool 116 win season and playoff heartbreak, he managed Chicago to a couple of playoff heartbreaks … and that’s really about it. The Yankee years weren’t much, the Tampa Bay years were pretty disastrous, he leaves the Cubs a mess and before the season’s even out. I’m not saying he’s a bad manager — he’s good — but he doesn’t seem to me to be THAT good.

  
  
  
• NPR's Frank Deford rightly praises Ichiro Suzuki.
  

  If he isn't injured, he will easily reach 200 hits again this season. Only Pete Rose did that 10 times, and it took him 17 years. Ichiro will be 10 for 10.
  
  He has 2,200 hits in our major leagues. He made 1,400 hits in the Japanese majors. In case you want to suggest that he feasted on weak pitching over there, well, Ichiro actually averages more hits per game here than he did in Japan.

  
  

The White Sox claimed slugger Manny Ramirez off waivers this week. Tribune reporter David Haugh is on a crusade to berate him before he plays a game. Here and

here. The second column starts, "How ironic that a day after celebrating one of the purest right-handed power hitters in baseball history the White Sox welcomed one of the dirtiest." My emphasis.

And that's the heart of it, isn't it. Manny used steroids which ruined baseball forevah! No one ever, ever cheated prior to steroids. No one ever used illegal drugs before steroids.

Hell, steroids doesn't even count as cheating if it is defined as getting an unfair advantage. I'm just damn tired of the whole steroid Puritanism of the sports press. Steroids did little to nothing to change the game. In fact, over all power statistics, when normalized for changes in the baseball, show power has been steadily decreasing since 1962!

So, if we want to see what player power results look like, we need to "splice out" the spurious jumps from ball juicing, so that we are dealing with the actual trends in player power rather than external effects from changes in the ball.
. . .
If we look at those intra-era average movements, something has to jump forcefully out at anyone: from 1962 on, true power has been declining. (Here, "true power" means simply power exclusive of the artificial boosts from those isolated, big-jump changes in the baseball itself.)

Modern Chemistry

So after a week of battling Montezuma's Costa Rican nephew I broke down and went to see a doctor last week. She wanted to do lab tests to determine the exact type of bacteria has populated my intestines but I put a nix on that since it would have come out of my pocket and she was prescribing the same kind of meds any way.

Those meds, to be exact, are 1,000mg of ciprofloxacin and 1,000mg of metronidazole. This is some heavy duty shit. Cipro is commonly used to treat urinary and lower respiratory infections, typhoid fever, and anthrax in addition to treating diarrhea. Nidazole is used to treat lung abscess, diabetic foot ulcer, meningitis and brain abscess, bone and joint infections. Also there is absolutely no drinking of alcohol while taking the nidazole. I tried violating that rule for one beer at the Cubs game on Friday and was sick to my stomach for hours. Nidazole is also thought to be a carcinogen. Nice stuff, huh?

So far, the worst side effect for me has been the nidazole giving everything a metallic flavor. I'm pretty sure my mouth is made of copper right now. On the other hand I don't get painfully sick 3 hours after I eat any more.

A couple years ago the Calc Teacher was on this stuff for 3 weeks. After stopping treatment she had to go on pills that basically kick started her digestive system because she wasn't digesting food. I won't be on it for nearly that long so hopefully that won't be a problem for me.

Random Animal News

1. Researchers have found 4 new species of octopi in Antartica including the fabulously named sub-zero venoms.
   
2. For the second year in a row a large number of great white sharks are appearing off of Cape Code. It is believed they are being attracted by the return of fur seals. The seals disappeared years ago when they were nearly hunted to extinction.
   
3. And in what might be one of the best headlines in a while, "Monkeys hate flying squirrels, report monkey-annoyance experts". How exactly does one qualify as a monkey-annoyance expert? Is that a graduate degree or something I can pick up at the local community college?
   

Subsidizing Bad Eating Habits

The U.S. government spends a lot of money subsidizing the farming of corn and grains. These crops are used, among other things, to feed livestock and to produce high fructose corn syrup.

This chart (via) shows the inflation adjusted cost of various food stuffs has changed over the past 30 years.


Notice how cheap carbonated beverages have become. Now think about how much the average American's waist line has expanded over time.

Notice how cheap meat has become and think about the on going cholesterol and heart problems in the U.S.

Notice how expensive fresh fruits and vegetables are.

I don't know that this will change any time soon if ever. The Senate is dominated by small population states that grow lots of corn and raise lots of livestock. People are used to cheap soda and meats and if the costs start going up they'll start complaining. If Coke and Pepsi see their sales drop because of cost and attribute that to the increased costs of supplies more money will flow in to the campaign coffers of the appropriate office holders.

High Tech Solutions

Deepwater Horizon well on fire


Sealing the well head.

The first chance to choke off the flow for good should come in about a week. Engineers plan to shoot heavy mud into the crippled blowout preventer on top of the well, then permanently entomb the leak in concrete. If that doesn't work, crews also can shoot golf balls and knotted rope into the nooks and crannies of the device to plug it, Wells said.

FSM knows that I've put more than my share of golf balls in to the water. Still, this solution doesn't fill me with a load of confidence.

Meanwhile, underwater oil plumes are quickly approaching an ocean current that, if reached, will pull the oil to the Florida Keys and on to the Atlantic Ocean.

Fail-Safe

In the stories and hearings about the on going oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico we here about the fail-safe mechanisms that were supposed to stop the flow of oil. Via a Balloon-Juice commenter I relearned the definition of fail safe today and I think it's important enough to point out again. A fail-safe device does not mean a device that will not fail. It means that if/when the device does fail it does so in a safe manner.

Two examples. A fail-safe door lock. If the lock fails the door will not swing open.

Better, the air brakes on semi-trucks. Contra what you see in the movies, if the air lines are severed the truck does not careen out of the control. Quite the opposite. The air pressure is used to prevent the brakes from engaging. If the compressor or hoses fail the brakes are applied, stopping the truck.

Cameras In Space

A computer and photography geek in England is taking some pretty cool pictures.



He's been at it for a couple of years and apparently it has been working its way around the internet. His story has made the MSM now.

[Robert Harrison] buys weather balloons from a supplier in the United States; pictures from balloon-borne cameras long pre-date the space program. He uses an off-the-shelf GPS locator, which gets signals from U.S. satellites, so he can track the balloon on Google maps. He bought a Canon pocket digital camera (a model discontinued in 2008) and attached a circuit board so that it would take pictures every five minutes.

Good Ridance!

Per The Wiki, the last record naturally occurring instance of small pox was recorded 32 years ago today.

I see this via Bad Astronomy who does a nice job of smacking down the anti-vaccination people.

Man Bites Dog

Or, more accurately, mantis bites bird.

Found this is my most recent Nat Geo. I had not clue a mantis could do this.

Today's Stat

400+
exoplanets have now been discovered. Exoplanets are planets outside of our own solar system. New techniques and pushing existing technology to the edge of its capabilities are discovering more and more small planets. Scientists have discovered 28 planets that are 20 Earth masses or less.

This Day in Space History

40 years ago, man first walked on the moon.

33 years ago, the Viking I landed on Mars.

Today, astronauts are fixing a clogged toilet.