Cuz We Said So

David Subjected to Doritos X-13D Flavor Experiment

I was waiting to get a tire fixed this week when I dropped into a nearby convenience store, and encountered bags of the mystery Doritos flavor you see to the right.  This branding, which makes it sound like Frito-Lay does new product development somewhere in Area 51, is clearly nothing more than a cleverly manipulative marketing scheme.  I immediately bought a bag, since I'm happy to fall victim to any scheme that involves tasty snacks.  They were good. 

Spoiler: I was back at the tire store, two or three chips into the bag and not yet able to place the flavor, when the guy behind the counter called over and said, "Hey, what do you think?  A couple of guys here have tried them, and swear they taste just like a Burger King cheeseburger." 

Yes, that's exactly what they taste like.

Where Are They?

In reply to my assertion that "sane" Muslims are as eager, or more eager, to be free of Islamofascism as I am, Rip wonders:

Not to be a pessimist, but where's your proof?  With over a billion Muslims on the planet, if, say, only half are sane, that's 500 million Muslims who are "more eager" than the rest of society to rid the world of radical Islam.  Where are all of them?

Well, perhaps my answer is one of definition—I'm defining "sane" to mean "eager to be free of Islamofascism."  And I think there are clearly many Muslims, including most here in the United States and majorities in Germany, India and Great Britain, who do: who are concerned about the rise of Islamic extremism, who say violence against civilians in the defense of Islam is never justified, and so on.  We also see them among the villagers who put their lives and those of their families at risk to help Petty Officer Marcus Luttrell evade the Taliban, among ordinary Iraqis who provide intelligence against the local terrorists, and in the work of Irshad Manji, who puts her life in considerable danger by speaking out for the salvation of her faith.  Fear is a big problem.  Any voice of questioning or defiance loud enough for you and I to hear it here, half way around the world, is more than loud enough to get you killed in Iraq or Lebanon.  There is a gulf between being open to the idea of liberty and having the power, the courage, and the will to stand up and fight for it.

Check out the 2006 Pew Global Attitudes Project report for the data I'm referencing, if you haven't already seen it.  There is both good news and bad there.  There are clearly places in the world where my brand of sanity is extremely rare, unfortunately.  The numbers out of Egypt are particularly grim, in this regard.

iPhone First Impression

John Gruber of Daring Fireball has a nice summary up, in which he covers a lot of ground.  Overall take so far: "the iPhone is 95 percent amazing, 5 percent maddening."

Bless The Early Adopters

Eager customers finally get iPhones (AP):

AP - Brandon Saunders, 16, had been saving his allowance and birthday money for months to get one of Apple Inc.'s coveted iPhones. He waited in line with his 70-year-old grandmother for about eight hours Friday in front of a San Antonio AT&T store and left sunburned but grinning, shopping bag in hand. "It's worth it," he said. "It's like Christmas in June."

It truly is.  And in the spirit of the season, I'd like to take this moment to thank the folks who ran out today and bought an iPhone, helping finance Apple's development of the inevitable second-generation iPhone—the one I will wait to buy.

Not that iPhone 1.0 isn't fairly compelling.  I sat through the video tours on Apple.com, last night, and unsurprisingly, given Apple's marketing genius, was seized by gadget desire.  But for me, the deal killer on the initial release is memory capacity.  I listen to a lot of podcasts, and a lot of music, and 8 MB is just not enough room for portability happiness.  For $600 bucks,  I expect my entire library on board.  Factor in the footprint of the TV shows or movies required to make that beautiful screen shine, and here is me, waiting for flash memory to further encheapen.  Show me a 32 GB iPhone sometime down the road, and we can talk about it.

But I'll still be plenty jealous if my boss managed to snap one of these up, as planned.

Climate Change: It Just Gets Better

I'm practically tripping over interesting news these days on climate change.  The latest: statements from IPCC's Kevin Trenberth calling into question the computer modeling used extensively by IPCC, Al Gore, and others to justify the current doomsday scenarios:

Since the last report it is also often stated that the science is settled or done and now is the time for action.

In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers “what if” projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios.  But they do not consider many things like the recovery of the ozone layer, for instance, or observed trends in forcing agents. There is no estimate, even probabilistically, as to the likelihood of any emissions scenario and no best guess.

In the words of the Courier-Mail's Bob Carter,

There is no predictive value in the current generation of computer GCMs and therefore the alarmist IPCC statements about human-caused global warming are unjustified.

Indeed.

I'd Call This A Positive Transformers Review...

Dave3 at Geeks of Doom says it’s “not a mere blockbuster, it’s a two and a half hour atomic bomb… strapped to a roller-coaster… filled with snakes… on fire!”

HIV Removed from DNA

From Scientific American:

Scientists have constructed a custom enzyme that reverses the process by which the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) inserts its genetic material into host DNA, suggesting that treatment with similar enzymes could potentially rid infected cells of the virus. In tests on cultured human tissue, the mutated enzyme, Tre recombinase, snipped HIV DNA out of chromosomes.

A very cool technology, but I can't help but wonder what else it removed?

Global Warming as Religion

In the spirit of Rip's recent sea level posts (here and here), some thoughts on global warming as religion from John Brignell at Numbers Watch: 

...The Royal Society, as a major part of the flowering of the tradition, was founded on the basis of scepticism. Its motto “On the word of no one” was a stout affirmation. Now suddenly, following their successful coup, the Greens have changed this motto of centuries to one that manages to be both banal and sinister – “Respect the facts.” When people start talking about “the facts” it is time to start looking for the fictions. Real science does not talk about facts; it talks about observations, which might turn out to be inaccurate or even irrelevant.

The global warmers like to use the name of science, but they do not like its methods. They promote slogans such a “The science is settled” when real scientists know that science is never settled.

...The world might (or might not) have warmed by a fraction of a degree. This might (or might not) be all (or in part) due to the activities of mankind. It all depends on the quality of observations and the validity of various hypotheses. Science is at ease with this situation. It accepts various theories, such as gravitation or evolution, as the least bad available and of the most practical use, but it does not believe.

The great difference between science and religion, notes the author, is that religion demands belief, while science requires disbelief.  The full article is somewhat lengthy, and draws parallels between common elements of theology and the AGW movement, which Brignell calls "a new eco-theology."

Again, to be clear, none of this indicates global warming isn't happening, or isn't man-made.  The only thing that indicates that, one way or the other, is evidence.  It is itself a problem, however, that our understanding of the subject is seen through the lens of politics and reasoning that is, very simply, counter-scientific

More on Sea Level Change

In my research on global sea-level change, I stumbled across a scientific publication produced in 2001 by the IPCC, which is one of the leading scientific groups now promoting global warming theories.  In the publication, I found this fascinating graph (click to expand).

Take a good look.  Something should just LEAP off the page at you.

Let the IPCC scientists who produced this data give you a hint:

These fluctuations demonstrate the occurrence of sea level oscillations during a glacial-interglacial cycle that exceed 100m in magnitude at average rates of up to 10 mm/year and more during periods of decay of the ice sheets and sometimes reaching rates as high as 40 mm/year (Bard et al., 1996) for periods of very rapid ice sheet decay.

Did you get that?

My friends, if the sea level changes up to 100m (at a rate of 40mm/year) without human intervention why do we need to get worked up about the human impacts of global warming which have been liberally estimated at perhaps an additional 1mm/year (or, 0 mm/year if you believe these 50 respected experts).

This also means that the Earth is more than capable of offsetting any theoretical human-caused sea-level changes by a factor of 5-20x.  Which means that when the Earth decides to go on a cooling binge, we're going to be absolutely incapable of producing enough carbon emissions to keep the seas from shrinking dangerously.

In short, we humans should be prepared for massive sea level changes based on the geological evidence, and should try to remember that, even though we are the most powerful species on the planet, Gaia is still far more powerful than all the humans who have ever lived, combined.

Are Sea Levels Really Rising?

It's so amazing.  I sometimes give in and assume, "well, I guess that global warming and sea-level rise are really happening."

Then I take a read of stuff like this interview with one of the world's most respected sea-level experts, and I shake my head, and realize that "unbiased" information is, actually, impossible to find.  Or, rather, if you find it, how could you know.

In the interview, Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner states (among other things)

From 1992 to 2002, [the graph of the sea level] was a straight line, variability along a straight line, but absolutely no trend whatsoever. We could see those spikes: a very rapid rise, but then in half a year, they fall back again. But absolutely no trend, and to have a sea-level rise, you need a trend.

Then, in 2003, the same data set, which in their [IPCC's] publications, in their website, was a straight line—suddenly it changed, and showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 mm per year, the same as from the tide gauge. And that didn't look so nice. It looked as though they had recorded something; but they hadn't recorded anything. It was the original one which they had suddenly twisted up, because they entered a “correction factor,” which they took from the tide gauge. So it was not a measured thing, but a figure introduced from outside. I accused them of this at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow —I said you have introduced factors from outside; it's not a measurement. It looks like it is measured from the satellite, but you don't say what really happened. And they answered, that we had to do it, because otherwise we would not have gotten any trend!

According to the interview, even though the satellite and other worldwide data showed no sea-level rise, the data were adjusted based on the tide gauge readings of ONE SITE on the planet (Hong Kong) which, it is believed, is subsiding (sinking) in order to "fit" the data into the required trend.  And then those "adjusted" data were presented as hard evidence of the sea-level change.