I heard the jury’s still out on science.

The following chart shows a direct correlation between CO² levels in the atmosphere, and the changing talking-point stance of climate-change deniers.


Assuming a correlation will continue to hold, and then plotting against predicted CO² levels over the next century, the following talking-points can be predicted:


Then, using sophisticated anti-global-warming skeptic social-climate modeling techniques, it is possible to generate various simulations of likely right-wing op-sci "news" items. A few of the results follow.


Simulation year 2018: Not over-hyped enough.

Over recent years, conservative response to global warming has been nothing short of appropriate. Rather than reacting in an alarmist fashion before major problems appeared, the political-right soundly waited for the problems to occur before becoming alarmist. Economists now say that this calm restraint and delayed action had a corresponding delay on the economic downturn, and that the current depression could have come earlier if not for their quick-thinking delays.

As global warming evolved from an imaginary conspiracy of left-wing nuts, to an actual problem with real economic consequences, public opinion followed precisely. But for those who have lost more than just homes, families, or their coastal cities -- those who have lost fortunes on the stock market -- there is the real problem that someone could have, and should have, done more to prevent the crash in the markets. Given that global-warming problems were inconsequential only a few years ago (affecting only bears and poor nations and continents that don't even have any people, etc), it was impossible for anyone to predict any of the economic problems we've seen. Yet, it was always possible to fear them, and this fear was sadly lacking. So while the response to global-warming has had dead-on accurate timing, the prediction of market effect has been left far behind, say Wall Street analysts. And while the threat of global-warming has been over-hyped until recently when the crisis caught up to the hype, analysts say that climate scientists could have done a lot more to over-hype the threats to a more appropriate level of over-hype.

In particular, Al Gore is being blamed for the shortfall in over-hype felt among former skeptics. His dire warnings of last decade failed miserably to sway the opinions of die-hard climate change detractors. If he had only spent more time over-hyping global warming to an appropriate degree, and less time making useless powerpoint presentations, we would have been much better prepared to weather the recent violent storms in the markets. "The scientists did nothing to force us to accept that what they told us was true," writes one angry reader. "It's their fault that all this happened."

Simulation year 2044: It's not so bad

Loss of coastal real-estate, deaths caused by inadequate food distribution, wars waged over anti-migration policy -- these problems have spelt disaster for the Dow. However, analysts say there is still plenty of room for the markets to improve. Says J. Random Analyst, "You can still survive in this world, and this financial climate, if you pick the right place to live and the right portfolio." While the economies of many countries have collapsed like giant sheets of arctic ice, the world's economic engine is still healthy enough to keep turning for the foreseeable future. And though most of us have seen our stocks burnt to a crisp that matches our skin, many are finding ways to turn a profit from the global crisis.

"Many view Earth's dwindling population as a loss of potential customer base, but we don't," says the CEO of ItsMines Corp, maker of anti-migrant PPP (personal property protection) devices, one of the new economy's most prosperous sectors. "You just have to keep up with the changing needs of humanity and carve out niche markets. In meetings we ask ourselves, 'Okay, my home is under water, my crops have all burned, and I will be shot if I try to head north... What is it that I would really want to buy?'"

Simulation year 2080: It's part of a natural cycle

Since the dawn of mankind, our species has periodically engaged in large-scale undertakings aimed at destroying a significant portion of itself and its belongings. Many scientists now accept this as a naturally occurring phenomenon, and accept mankind's current catastrophic destruction of our planet's land and biosphere as part of that natural cycle. While many left-wing nuts still claim we should have done something to stop it, more and more scientists are coming to the conclusion that it was a good thing that we didn't. It would be unnatural, they say, to interfere with mankind's natural tendency to destroy nature.

Average folk like you and I tend to agree. "I make a good living in this freakish nightmare world we live in," says one person we spoke to. "My paycheck depends on it. And the liberals want to change it all just to take that away from me! Why?"

Still, the liberal agenda continues to push the myth that things will continue to get worse. This is a preposterous idea, which is plain to see by anyone with an IQ over 80 who asks the question, "How can things possibly get worse?"

Oh no, I've said too much

Recent versions of the Wikipedia entry on Buddhism began with the intro, "Buddhism, as traditionally conceived, is a path of liberation attained through insight into the ultimate nature of reality." This was enough to hook me, to tell me that this is a spiritual philosophy worth investigating further.

It struck me that different religions are based more on values than on beliefs. Beliefs are things we tend to form around those values. Buddhism is instantly appealing to me because it values understanding reality. It seems it would encourage questioning our beliefs in order to figure them out. This likely makes it popular among people seeking new faiths, especially if they are at odds with their former belief system due to questioning it. Some religions neither encourage nor deal well with questioning. Christianity for example values faith over figuring out reality. This isn't to say that one religion has a more accurate description of reality than another, but that a religion can for example be less concerned with accuracy in describing reality than another, and perhaps more concerned with things like trusting in reality, whatever it may be.

Religions can give us guidance and they can be a way of dealing with unknowns in our reality. Various religions appeal to various individuals depending on our individual values. If we feel a need to figure things out and have things make sense, we may be drawn to religions that focus on the nature of reality. If we value trusting in the unknown without needing to figure it out, we may be drawn to religions that focus on faith and deities that will take care of us. If we have a strong need for security, we may accept dogma over personal choice, and be drawn to religions with strict beliefs.

And so, if you find yourself debating religions with others, keep in mind that you're not just debating which specific beliefs are the "correct" ones, you are making judgments of others' values. Determining which beliefs are "correct" tends not to even matter -- if a person's beliefs line up well with their values, then those beliefs are likely correct for them.

If, however, one's beliefs are not working well for them, they might be considered incorrect in that case. Many religions tend to value loyalty, which discourages people from choosing a better-fitting option. Most tend to have human leaders, whose values become indoctrinated. But we each have varying values. These individual values combined with loyalty to a named religion lead to different flavors of religion that can seem strange to outsiders. If you value questioning your faith, you should do so, but if others do not value it, it may be best to just respect their choice. If you feel inclined to question your own faith, ask yourself these two questions: First, do my religious beliefs coincide with my personal beliefs? If not, then your religion may, for you, be a source of confusion and gloom, instead of understanding and hope. Second, do the values of my religion coincide with my personal values? If not, your religion may be like a prison, discouraging thoughts or behaviors that you might find more fulfilling.

It is unfortunate in my most humble of opinings, that religions tend to be evaluated more on beliefs than on values. Ironically, though I said I wanted to investigate Buddhism further, I didn't read much past the opening line, satisfied with the value and not wanting to hear about specific beliefs. Fittingly enough, that line was removed in recent edits to the Wikipedia page, due to it being a "point of view". So it looks like I might have to create my own religion, starting with the values and building on my own beliefs.

I wonder... is starting a religion still a good way to make a lot of money?

Stay tuned (but don't hold your breath) for Part II: On the Nature of God

fitter, healthier and more productive

Today's boycott: Industrial farmed meats

A friend related a story of once being sick with some kind of nasty bug, for which he took strong medicine. He would wake up in a panic thinking "I'm dying!" It was explained to him that living things share a lot of chemical signatures (hormones or enzymes or something), and that humans and tiny parasites both release similar chemicals when dying. If you kill a ton of bugs inside yourself, you get the chemical signal of all those bugs saying "I'm dying", in your blood, and you think it's your body that's saying it.

You wouldn't want to put this "I'm dying" chemical into your body. That's partly why it's important that animals raised for food aren't slaughtered in a stressful way. How they die matters. But what about how they live?

High-density hog factories are disgusting. There are plenty of surprising and disturbing documentaries that show the terrible conditions in which factory pigs live. People are willing to effectively torture animals if it means greater profit. Pigs are confined in dirty metal pens, squished in together till there's no room to move. The "stench of liquid manure" affects communities for miles around, and makes people sick outside of the farms -- imagine what it does to those living their entire lives inside.

One reason not to eat pork is simply that it's aesthetically and morally gross to eat something that has been raised in such filth and appalling conditions. There are other reasons: I've been told that pork is the closest meat to human flesh, and it doesn't digest easily, it just sits in your intestines rotting as much as being digested. Then there are parasites, etc.

Imagine though that when you eat meat, you are putting into your system the chemical signatures that an animal built up as it lived and grew. You are taking its chemical memories, and making them your own. So if you eat a ton of industrial hog factory meat, could your body be absorbing a feeling of being stressed out all the time, of being confined and crowded, frantic and agitated, living in filth? Could you be absorbing a little constant unhappiness, a desperate need to escape? Whether or not this actually happens, simply thinking about it might make you want to cut back on meat consumption.

Non-factory farms, where animals live and die decently, shouldn't have this problem. If you eat only ethically raised meats, it means lower-density production, which means that we can't all eat huge amounts of meat without requiring an impossibly large environmental footprint. But this isn't a problem; eating less meat is a solution.

Oink!

If we had some bacon we could have some bacon and eggs if we had some eggs

Evolution is all about the chicken and the egg. If you get the paradox, you probably get evolution. If you don't believe in evolution, I'll bet you're also puzzled by the paradox.

So which came first, the chicken or the egg? The paradox kind of disappears if you accept that a chicken and chicken-egg go hand-in-hand... they are so interdependent that it neither makes sense nor is relevant to consider one existing without the other. So it's not sensible to consider one coming first, without the other. They both evolved together. *

To be puzzled by the C & E paradox, all you have to do is imagine one or the other existing completely on its own. Imagine just a chicken... how was it born? Imagine an egg with no chickens... what hatched it? It is exactly these types of black-and-white narrow perspectives that leave evolution non-believers perplexed by all that evolution explains. Usually the standard solution is, "Something must have created it"; thus the need for a creator. But understand that they evolved together, in long sequences of many steps, none of which was such a leap as to be inconceivable to happen randomly, and the puzzle disappears. There is no step where a chicken appears without something very chicken-egg-like, and no step where an egg comes from something not very chicken-like.

Understanding evolution by looking at its current state and then working backwards, we're certain to come across many different chicken-and-egg paradoxes. If we assume that a particular species or trait "should" have evolved, then we are puzzled by all the unlikely events that brought it about. If we think that species are pre-designed, then we tend to think that only an intelligent entity could have created it. But evolution doesn't work to fit any pre-existing design. The design evolves along with the species. The design is never more than one mutation away from what currently exists. Which came first, the human or its design? They evolved together.

A typical chicken-and-egg-type conundrum involves taking 2 things that are dependent on each other, assuming one of them once existed without the other, then trying to figure out how the other came to be. Sometimes one of the dependencies isn't properly considered, either assumed to be a constant, or not considered a product of evolution, or not even noticed as a key element in the problem.

For example, one might ask, how did the human form "randomly" evolve into something so beautiful and aesthetically pleasing? Even our hands are works of art. If evolution favors functionally "fittest" traits, how did it also just happen to create such beauty? If your only answer is "Something must have planned it that way", or even "It must be a pretty big coincidence", then it may seem like evidence against evolution. But realize that our perception of beauty is also evolved. Our brains have developed to find the human form beautiful. You may equally validly ask, why did brains develop to find our form so attractive? Which came first, the human form or human perception of beauty? Chicken or egg? Of course, they developed together, hand-in-hand. If we had instead evolved to look like Darmok, then an evolved perception of beauty would have found his form as perfect as we consider the human form.


Questions involving the results of evolution must be asked within the context of what has evolved, to truly be answerable. Why do the conditions of Earth just happen to be so well suited to life as we know it? (Or the egg to that chicken: Why did we just randomly evolve into something that thrives here?) If the conditions on Earth were different (but still conducive to life), then life would have evolved differently, into something well-suited to those different conditions and vice versa. We can't answer any "How did evolution arrive at this unlikely point?" questions without realizing that what makes that unlikely point important is itself a product of the same evolution. Otherwise, it is simply a random point, as likely or unlikely as any other.

The Earth happens to be so well-suited to life as we know it, because life as we know it evolved within the conditions on Earth.

Evolution makes sense if you consider what may have existed before, and imagine how what existed later could have come about. If you focus on why certain things happened, it's not as clear. Asking "why" suggests there are predetermined reasons for evolutionary events, and having reasons leads to assumptions about some form of conscious thought involved in the process.

Because we tend not to naturally understand evolution, we create a need for and a strong belief in a supernatural creator. But once we've done this, even if we try to consider evolution from different perspectives, the assumption of the existence of a creator leads to further assumptions (such as predetermined reasons for events or existences) that make evolution confusing. Understanding evolution intuitively can remove one's intellectual need for a creator, but understanding evolution is much more intuitive when one fully suspends belief in a creator. This is another chicken-and-egg problem. Which comes first, understanding evolution without accepting it, or accepting it and then trying to understand it? Of course, they must come about together. The simple solution is to not try to require one side completely without the other.

Science: it's supercool!

-- Unknown

* To be technical, and to avoid trying to make an interesting paradox disappear by saying "I couldn't be bothered to think about it", I submit that the egg came first. For one thing, other animals reproduced using eggs long before chickens existed. It is highly unlikely that chickens ever reproduced in any other way, and later evolved to use eggs (there is probably proof of this). Birds evolved through various species of kinda-chickens, all using eggs in reproduction, before finally evolving after a very long time, into chickens. But which egg was "officially" the first chicken egg? I assume (without bothering to look it up) that species-to-new-species evolution can occur through many different mutations over many generations, and that there isn't always a perfect dividing line that says "this is a chicken, and it's parents are not-chickens". I assume that species changes blur across several or many generations, and it may not even be valid to isolate a single individual and say "this is the first chicken". This would be a clear case where the chicken and egg paradox is neither solvable nor relevant.

But if it so happened that a single distinct mutation separated a chicken from its not-chicken parents, that at some point in prehistory there was some kinda-chicken that wasn't technically-chicken, but which then evolved into a full-blown-chicken, then the technically-chicken egg probably came first anyway, because it is most likely that meaningful mutations resulting in the technically-chicken occurred during the genetic recombination of parental DNA, and less likely (I assume) that it occurred within the first or first few cell divisions of the kinda-chicken's life (either way, within an egg), and much much less likely that a grown kinda-chicken mutated in some key way that turned it into a full-blown-chicken. For certain, as this article is all about, it is extremely unlikely that a non-egg-laying non-chicken suddenly evolved the ability to lay eggs in one mutation or generation, all at once taking on that and every other characteristic needed to distinguish non-chicken from technically-chicken.

That kind of argument goes against the point of this article. Evolutionary changes occur on the level of random molecular changes, a tiny change in a single cell's DNA that expands to a larger change after a ton of cell divisions, some tiny defect that can be used as a new advantage, or at least results in a still-viable living creature. The "What came before that?" is nothing more miraculous or unexplainable than "The same kind of creature, less that one mutation." Big changes occur over generations and generations.

Question: What's cooler than being cool?

On a recent trip around the world and back, on foot I passed through the Rambo tunnels of Hope, British Columbia. There I met some fellow travelers also from Edmonton, who were making the same trek that I was. Here is a piece of worldly advice I picked up while conversing with these wandering strangers in that foreign land.

• To endure a cold winter comfortably, spend at least a half an hour outside every day.

The reasoning is that this will allow you to acclimate to low temperatures, the way we did as kids when we walked to school every day, back when winters never seemed that bad. Apparently, the face is an important meteorological sensor for our bodies, and keeping ourselves inside too much prevents us from getting used to the oncoming cold of winter.

If you find an excuse to be out while the weather goes from okay to bad, it should be tolerable when it goes to worse. I will try to test the idea this coming fall.

For your health!

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Bonus-beats advice!

• Soak raw nuts overnight before eating them.

Raw nuts have enzyme inhibitors on them that allow the nut to stay fairly inert through dry periods, and only "come alive" to start growing in the presence of water. These inhibitors make nuts hard to digest. Soak yer nuts overnight for like 12 hours or whatever, to get rid of the inhibitors. Beware though that what keeps the nuts inert, keeps them from spoiling, so the nuts won't last as long once they've been soaked. It's a good thing!

[Top notch post but could you add a witty and original "nuts" joke before we send this off to print? Thx. Maybe get Vince in for ideas. --Ed. PS. don't forget to remove this note, this time]

Also ran

GM's new slogan is "May the best car win. TM"

Um. Okay, but, like... didn't that, like, already happen?

American car companies recently fell hard on their asses and it seemed for awhile that they were desperate to clean up their act, to finally look to what foreign car companies were doing right, and to try to catch up. Their ads reflected this. Then they got all bailed out, and as far as I can tell from their commercials, they immediately returned to selling us crap that we don't really want: Bulkier trucks and SUVs; body detailing that looks like bad cheap stereos (about which I also feel curmudgeony... "Back in my day, a stereo looked like a stereo, not a carnival ride!"); and generally, fantasy over function. It seems that building a car that has what I want (high gas mileage, quality construction, doesn't die after a few years for no good reason, made out of duroplast and runs on solar power, etc) is only worth doing when you're against the ropes (that's a boxing reference, y'all). Any other time is business as usual: Making crappy cars, trying to sell them with deceitful advertising, and getting bailed out when you can't compete with companies who make decent cars.

Here are some future slogan ideas for GM:

• "Okay best car, 2 out of 3, wins!"
• "Do over? May the best car win, starting..... now!"
• "3 out of 5?"

Is it bigger than a bread box?

When I read about the giant rings recently discovered around Saturn, I wanted some frame of reference to help understand how big they are. So I started calculating some ratios between various measurements...

Scale: If you could walk around the earth

Suppose you made a map of the earth to the size of a city. The equatorial circumference of the Earth is 40,075 km. The length of Manhattan, or an average city like Edmonton, is about 21 km. This is a long walk for an average person, but most should be able to do it in a day.

If you laid a large map of the globe across such a city, the map scale would be 21:40075, or 1 to 1908.333 (repeating, of course). You can multiply this ratio by any map distance to find the equivalent distance on earth, or divide to do the reverse. For example, a big 1 m step taken in your city map would cover 1908 m on Earth, which is about half the length of Central Park (on your map, the park would be about the size of a tub). The distance from London to Paris is 343 km, which would be 180 m on your map. That's about the depth of the Met Museum of Art in real life.

Note: This ratio is actually only valid along the equator on the map, because the projection from sphere to plane will deform the map, but let's just pretend that the map was made in such a way that any of the distances we measure here share the same ratio.

By the way, the ratio also means that if you laid 1908 average cities side by side, they would circle the entire globe.

A map of Earth the size of a city.
Scale: 1 : 1908.3

Measurement	Actual size	Size on map	About as big as...
Width of a house	10 m	5.2 mm	a pea
Height of CN Tower in Toronto	553.3 m	0.29 m	the height of a garden gnome
Height of Mount Everest	8848 m	4.637 m	the height of a house. Imagine a city the size of Manhattan with nothing taller than 1-story buildings. That's how relatively "flat" the Earth is.
Average city length	21 km	11 m	a house
Length of the equator	40075 km	21 km	a city, of course!
Diameter of the moon	3475 km	1.820 m	half the length of central park
Average distance to the moon	384,403 km	201 km	Long Island
Diameter of the sun	1,391,000 km	728.9 km	New York to Chicago; highway driving for 7 hours
1 AU (Distance to sun)	149,598,000 km	78391 km	6 Earths side by side
Distance to Proxima Centauri (nearest star to sun, 4.3 light-years)	4.07×1013 km	21,317,173,156 km	142.5 AU... within the heliosheath of the solar system; 5x the distance from sun to Uranus

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Scale: The solar system in a ball park...

Suppose we have a park that is 60 m (just under 200 ft) from home plate to the outfield fence, and we want to build a scale model of the solar system with the sun at home plate and Neptune orbiting around where the fence is.

Home plate is 0.4318 m across, the pitching rubber is 18.44 m away, 1st base is 27.43 m away, and the outfield grass line is 47.40 m straight ahead.

Neptune orbits at about 30 AU, or 4.48794×10¹² m.
Scale: 60 : 4.48794×10¹² = 1 : 74799 million

Measurement	Actual size	Size in ballpark model	About as big as...
Diameter of the sun	1,391,000 km	18.60 mm	a nickel
Diameter of Mercury	4,879.4 km	0.0652 mm	the width of a thin hair. All of the inner planets are like hairs of varying thickness.
Distance to Mercury	59,839,200 km	0.8 m	a big step
Venus	12103.6 km	0.1618 mm
To Venus	104,718,600 km	1.4 m	a short person laying down
Earth	12756.2 km	0.1705 mm
To Earth	149,598,000 km	2 m	width of a car. If you tape a nickel to a window and stand 2 m away from it, the coin should just eclipse the sun. Try this with the moon to be safe, if you're curious. The moon looks slightly (103%) bigger than the sun, on average.
Diameter of the moon	3475 km	0.0465 mm
Average distance to the moon	384,403 km	5.14 mm	a pea
Mars	6794 km	0.0908 mm
To Mars	224,397,000 km	3 m
Distance to the Asteroid belt	418,874,400 km	5.6 m	a limousine
Jupiter	142,984 km	1.9116 mm
To Jupiter	777,909,600 km	10.4 m
Saturn	120,536 km	1.6115 mm	width of a grain of rice
To Saturn	1,421,181,000 km	19 m	just past the pitching rubber
Diameter of Saturn's main rings	273,560 km	3.66 mm	the width of 3 pennies
Saturn's new ring	13,000,000 km	173.8 mm	a cantaloupe. As seen from Earth (2 m from home plate), this should look twice as big as the moon or sun.
Uranus	51,118 km	0.6834 mm	Uranus is huge.
To Uranus	2,932,120,800 km	39.2 m	halfway between 2nd base and the outfield grass line
Neptune	49,528 km	0.6621 mm
To Neptune	4,487,940,000 km	60 m	the park, to the outfield fence
Solar system bow shock	34,407,540,000 km	460 m	a few long city blocks
Distance to Proxima Centauri (nearest star to sun, 4.3 light-years)	4.07×1013 km	543 km	Toronto to Montreal. If it took us a year to get from the sun to Neptune's orbit, it would take 9064 years to get to the nearest star.
Diameter of Proxima Centauri	201,695 km	2.70 mm	a spitball
Size of the galaxy	9.50×1017 km	12,700,705 km	Size of Saturn's newly discovered rings. 33 times the average distance to the moon and a twelfth of the distance to the sun.

In a model where the planets' orbits fit in a ball park, the galaxy fits in Saturn's "new" rings. The next time you make a model this big, have someone in another city 543 km away hold up a spitball, to represent the nearest star.

---

Scale: If the distance to the nearest star was the length of a house...

Length of house: 14 m
Distance to Proxima Centauri: 4.3 light-years = 4.07×10¹³ km
Scale: 1 : 2905733 billion

Measurement	Actual size	Size in house model	About as big as...
Diameter of the sun	1,391,000 km	0.000479 mm	a bacteria cell. Though not visible to the naked eye, if it was very bright and seen from across a dark house, it would be a visible, single point of light, just like a star in the sky
Distance from sun to Earth	149,598,000 km	0.0515 mm	width of a thin hair
To Neptune	4,487,940,000 km	1.54 mm	width of a grain of rice
To bow shock	34,407,540,000 km	11.8 mm	a marble
Distance to Proxima Centauri (4.3 light-years)	4.07×1013 km	14 m	length of house
Size of the galaxy	9.50×1017 km	327 km	Distance from Edmonton to Calgary
Distance to nearest galaxy	2.37×1017 km	81.4 km
Distance to Andromeda Galaxy (whose size is comparable to the Milky Way Galaxy)	1.89×1019 km	6512 km	Radius of Earth
Size of the visible universe	4.40×1023 km	151,395,348 km	Distance to the sun

References: google, wikipedia