OK, politics is stupid, so there's no intellectual content to posts that mention political behaviors, so this is more of an anthropological perspective on the bizarre habits inside the beltway. What A Carbon Tax Proposal Looks Like: A bipartisan group of legislators has introduced in the U.S. Congress a proposal for a revenue neutral carbon tax. The economic downturn calls for action to stimulate the economy, such as reducing the amount of taxes taken out of each paycheck. Our ongoing dependence on foreign oil from hostile nations also calls for action to reduce that dependence and move to fuels of the future. Even if you disagree with the science of climate change, everyone agrees that less carbon in the atmosphere would not hurt us. The preposterous idea that it is possible to impose a new tax and not increase government revenues, especially when the debt and deficit are high and rising steeply, isn't worth much comment. Won't happen. The...

The attitudes, insights and discoveries that interest me come from thinkers and investigators that have a broad time sense. They see things not just as they are in this moment, but also as they were before and might become in future. This smeared time sense also allows them to think in terms of probabilities and variation, and so gives them a more realistic and useful stance that allows deeper engagement with reality. Conversely, there are many who seem frightened, timid, longing for an end to change, variation and uncertainty. They bore me, and their work is inferior. Forests species change. In the recent study, the researchers found that changes in climate were less important than changes in vegetation. Despite a transition from a cool, dry climate to a warm, dry climate about 10,500 years ago, the researchers found a sharp decline in the frequency of fires. Their sediment cores from that time period revealed a vegetation change from flammable...

is confirmed. Female mammals follow their noses to the right mates. many mammal species are sexually active at night. So mammals may be less inclined than birds to base preferences on visual cues. Instead, females of many mammalian species may be more likely to choose males using olfactory cues. Research has shown that female mammals commonly investigate scent marks left by males. Females also show a preference to mate with males who scent mark more frequently. Just what can a female learn about a male through his scent? Plenty, say Clutton-Brock and McAuliffe. Recent studies have shown that mammalian females use scent to pick out genetically dissimilar males. Parents with dissimilar genes in a certain part of the genome tend to produce healthier offspring. So male mammals advertise their genotype via scent, and females pick up the signal and preferentially mate with dissimilar males. This ability to sniff out a good genetic match has been found in mice and...

Sometimes the press releases seem to have a rough theme when read one after another. Extra lizards University of Adelaide research has discovered that there are many more species of Australian lizards than previously thought . . . "Many of these species are externally very similar, leading to previous severe underestimation of true species diversity. . ." Wild Prawn Pr0n A Queensland University of Technology researcher has filmed hours of prawn "sex tapes" to find out why prawns bred in captivity did not go on to breed well. . . "When prawns are caught from the wild and put into tanks, they have no problem breeding," she said. "It is a different story for the prawns reared in captivity. "It was suspected that prawns bred in captivity weren't interested in sex but very little was known about why this was the case, so I undertook the study to try to find out." . . . "I found it was...

The skies cleared for a moment today after a couple of days of cold rain and occasional small hail. The mountain tops are gleaming white with snow and the pastures are frosted. Tonight the pipes may freeze as what little heat we have radiates into space. In the noon day sun the soaked old wooden fences are steaming as they exhale water they absorbed yesterday. The old iron wood stove greedily consumes my dwindling pile of squaw wood that accumulated over the summer. It falls from the trees whenever the wind blows hard - self-pruning is the old joke - and I haul it up to the pile near the bunkhouse. Then, in winter, I burn it in the stove. Days like today renew the old affection for radiant heat. It's a comfort to mind and body in a time when there are few others. It's enough....

I intend to compose proper posts when I have time, but I'll just drop some links and sketch some arcs for now. Jeremy points to More than you’ve ever wanted to know about bison, which says in part that: When the first humans began arriving in North America, these vast swaths of land were forested. No one is certain about what really happened. (There are many untestable but entertaining theories, of course, such as this Cheyenne legend describing the origin of the buffalo. On the other hand, the bisons themselves may be the ones to tell the true story... their teeth recorded millennia of changes in climate, through the different grasses they chewed.) In any case, the climate warmed; the trees disappeared, with the exception of riparian corridors; the Mammuthus primigenius and the Bison antiquus went extinct; Bison bison arrived; humans arrived, hunted, built tools, and used fire. Perhaps not: Another example of false narrative driven by urban myth...

In small doses there can sometimes be something of value to psychist cant. . . . people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at www.YourMorals.org.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment. As a registered alien from another space time dimension I can say that...

It's fall seeding time so I've not been attentive here. Too bad, since there is lots going on and I could blather at length if I had time to craft posts, a slow and painful thing for me since I am a horny handed son of toil rather than a soft handed keyboard adept with a large and fluid vocabulary. This subject deserves attention when there is time. . . . while higher fuel prices will reshape trade patterns and probably boat designs, neither global trade patterns nor transportation costs will return to those of the 1960s or 1970s. This is due to huge improvements in logistics that have radically dropped the labour cost for shipping goods long distances, and this has also decreased fuel costs. The rapid expansion of skills in logistics is a hidden environmental efficiency of the modern world economy - in that it allows things to be moved around for less cost than earlier in...

Continuing the theme of increasing biomass production discussed briefly in a recent post which claimed: Producing more biomass is the primary need in a world with a growing population. You can work your way around to understanding this in a crab-wise fashion by thinking of it as energy efficiency: making better use of the sunlight that falls on the planet. It's the ultimate solar power hack. Oliver notes that increased CO2 concentrations have had a measurable effect on production. everyone studying carbon dioxide levels agrees that there are "biological sinks" -- places where more carbon-dioxide means more biomass, either because of the direct carbon-dioxide-fertilisation effect (it is, after all, plant food) or because the climatic effects are to the benefit of plants. Growth in sinks = growth in biomass. And a billion tonnes of carbon or so flowing into sinks every year will add up, over time. No denying that. Oliver cites posts that seem to have am anti-IPCC...

Food and agriculture have been getting closer scrutiny is recent weeks. There's nothing like food riots to get media attention. One theme that has emerged is that the policies and attitudes of corpulent western societies are devastating to those less well off. I've linked and discussed a few commentaries as they were published, and now there are commentaries about the commentaries, each highlighting some aspect. The focus seems to be sharpening and the bad finger is pointing at paleo-environmentalists, green posers, food fetishists and the like. John Tierney: Greens and Hunger This issue is timely today not just because of the current food shortages but because greens are calling for vast sums of money to be spent off future climate change. And just as money was diverted from agricultural research for environmental projects in the 1980s, there’s a danger that immediate problems in poor countries will be shortchanged by pursuing the long-term agenda of wealthy Westerners, as Bjorn Lomborg...

Continuing the trail from Lost At Sea: The North Pacific Gyre Oscillation. Since 1945, fishermen in the California current of the Pacific Ocean have been tracking temperature, salinity and nutrients, among other things, in the ocean to help them predict changes in fish populations like sardines and anchovies that are important for the industry. Studying this data, along with satellite images, Di Lorenzo discovered a pattern of current that he named the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation. Recent satellite data suggest that this current is undergoing intensification as the temperature of the Earth has risen over the past few decades. "Although the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation is part of a natural cycle of the climate system, we find evidence suggesting that its amplitude may increase as global warming progresses," said Di Lorenzo. If this is true, this newly found climate pattern may help scientists predict how the ecosystem of the Pacific Ocean is likely to change if the world continues...

We really are. THE oceans of the world are covered in mysterious "stripes", scientists have discovered. Oceanographers have uncovered a regular pattern of currents imprinted on every sea on the planet. It is the first time the strange phenomenon has been spotted after researchers collected data from a global network of 3,000 free-floating buoys that measure the temperature and salinity of the oceans and are tracked by satellites. . . The scientists found the 93 mile-wide bands covered almost every ocean basin. They recorded the striations flowing in opposite directions at about 0.022 mph, says the study published in Geophysical Research Letters. This is slower than most known currents – which is possibly why they have remained hidden until now. The researchers also found the striations extend below the surface to a few hundred metres and the eastward bands are slightly hotter than westward ones. This could turn out to play a role in the circulation of nutrients. Ya...

Self medicating to achieve preferred brain activity levels. In the normal situation of sitting in their home cage, subordinate monkeys displayed less activity than did the dominant monkeys in areas of the brain involved in stress and anxiety (the amygdala and hippocampus) and also in areas of the brain involved with emotional and social processing (anterior cingulate cortex). Gould and Nader say these findings suggest monkeys that have to cope with constant, ongoing social stressors may have developed a lower level of brain activity even at rest. In the abnormal situation of being placed in an unfamiliar cage surrounded by unfamiliar and aggressively behaving monkeys, however, the subordinate monkeys showed pronounced decreased brain activity in areas of the brain involved with stress, anxiety, reward, and emotion, whereas the dominant monkeys showed increases in reward-related areas after the same situation. In a separate part of the study, researchers looked at the effect of the stressful situation on the likelihood that...

In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of . . . bugs. By pinpointing DEET's molecular target in insects, researchers at Rockefeller University have shown that DEET acts like a 'chemical cloak', masking human odors that blood-feeding insects find attractive. This research makes it possible to improve the repellent properties of DEET and also make it a safer chemical. "For all these years, there were a lot of theories but no consensus on how DEET worked," says Leslie Vosshall, head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior. "Does it smell bad to mosquitoes or does it blind them to odors" It was a great unsolved problem." Mosquitoes are strongly attracted to odors in human breath and sweat, including carbon dioxide, lactic acid and an alcohol-based compound called 1-octen-3-ol. Different receptors within their olfactory system detect these odors, among others, and lead them to their prey. . . Although DEET is widely used, concerns about its...

There may be a pattern . . . somewhere. Encyclopedia of Life In essence, EOL will be a microscope in reverse, or “macroscope,” helping users to discern large-scale patterns. By aggregating for analysis information on Earth’s estimated 1.8 million known species, scientists say the EOL could, for example, help map vectors of human disease, reveal mysteries behind longevity, suggest substitute plant pollinators for a swelling list of places where honeybees no longer provide that service, and foster strategies to slow the spread of invasive species. Most importantly, the EOL will be a foundational resource for helping to conserve the species already known and to identify millions of additional species that haven’t yet been described or named. At its core is the knowledge about the world’s species that has been discovered by scientists over the last 250 years. By putting this information all together in one place, EOL hopes to accelerate our understanding of the world’s remaining biodiversity. . ....

Shiny things that caught my eye. Tleilaxu eyes Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights. "Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside," said Babak Parviz, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering. "This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it's extremely promising." . . . There are many possible uses for virtual displays. Drivers or pilots could see a vehicle's speed projected onto the windshield. Video-game companies could use the contact lenses to completely immerse players in a virtual world without restricting their range of motion. And for communications, people on the go could surf the Internet on a midair virtual display screen that only they would be able to see. . . Building the lenses was a...

Consider these evolved neoteny crumbs. Are we there yet? Cultural evolution diversifies the physical environments where humans live, creating a multitude of places where useful mutations can thrive. And greatly increased population density means ever more bodies where mutations may be selected for usefulness. The result, says Greg Cochran, one of the authors, is that human biological evolution has accelerated, to perhaps 100 times as fast as in prehistory. . . Accelerated biological evolution in humans doesn’t mean that we’re turning into aliens, but there is evidence that hundreds of human genes are under selection pressure, having to do with such things as diet, vitamin metabolism, the functioning of the central nervous system, disease resistance, hair, skin and eye color, the shape of the skeleton and behavioral traits better suited to living in large groups. “We’re tamer,” Cochran said. I asked him why we’re not developing floppy ears like the silver foxes bred for tameness. Floppy member syndrome does...

As long as we are obsessing about armageddon, just what is the best way to defend against impacts from space debris? The best method, called “mirror bees,” entails sending a group of small satellites equipped with mirrors 30 to 100 feet wide into space to “swarm” around an asteroid and trail it, Vasile explains. The mirrors would be tilted to reflect sunlight onto the asteroid, vaporizing one spot and releasing a stream of gases that would slowly move it off course. Vasile says this method is especially appealing because it could be scaled easily: 25 to 5,000 satellites could be used, depending on the size of the rock. . . a half-mile-wide asteroid or larger, of which there are more than 700 that come close to Earth’s orbit, could have an impact equal to 60 billion tons of TNT. While it is not likely to happen, you still want to be prepared. “You don’t panic, you don’t have to...

In Next Screen I speculated: I wonder if we might not be nearing another inflection point where there is a general awakening and resultant collapse of totalitarian forces. . . We can already see that the Kyoto block has failed to cut emissions . . . I think that we have the information needed to refute the Kyoto bloc but it may still be some time before that information penetrates public consciousness. Perhaps these crumbs mark a trail of sorts. Values, the refuge of scoundrels. the debate over next steps is as much about values as data. The consequences of various decisions over greenhouse gases are framed by science. But choices made by countries, communities and individuals are being shaped by a mix of history, geographic circumstance, money and – especially – values. . . It’s not just banner-waving environmentalists and banjo-plucking folkies who see values as a key to the climate question. Last week, Jerry Taylor, who writes...

Against anti-science. Seldom has public perception been more out of line with the facts. The public in Britain and Europe seems unaware of the astonishing success of GM crops in the rest of the world. No new agricultural technology in recent times has spread faster and more widely. Only a decade after their commercial introduction, GM crops are now cultivated in 22 countries on over 100m hectares (an area more than four times the size of Britain) by over 10m farmers, of whom 9m are resource-poor farmers in developing countries. . . The alleged risk to health from GM crops is still the main reason for public disquiet—something nurtured by statements by environmental NGOs, who in 2002 even persuaded the Zambian government to reject food aid from the US at a time of famine because some of it was derived from GM crops. This allegation of harm has been so soundly and frequently refuted that when it is repeated,...