This Is Your Brain On Drugs

Charlie Rose discusses with brain scientists the nature of addiction. There are a few commercials at the beginning.

Update: The NIDA woman just repeats the DEA line - drugs hijack the brain. She never explains why only 10% of those who try heroin ever become addicted. She also makes no mention of the fact that about 70% of female heroin users were sexually molested as children. Something she must know.

H/T Drug Policy Forum of Texas

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Quantum Locking

astc.org

Clearing the Smoke: The Science of Cannabis

I must say it is interesting to hear the critics in this video. It is as if they are unfamiliar with the concept: medicinal plants. The idea seems to be that only single compounds that come from a factory can be medicine. But what about Marinol?

Huge Diamond Find

The largest known diamond anywhere has just been found.

Cambridge, MA -- When choosing a Valentine's Day gift for a wife or girlfriend, you can't go wrong with diamonds. If you really want to impress your favorite lady this Valentine's Day, get her the galaxy's largest diamond. But you'd better carry a deep wallet, because this 10 billion trillion trillion carat monster has a cost that's literally astronomical!

"You would need a jeweler's loupe the size of the Sun to grade this diamond!" says astronomer Travis Metcalfe (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), who leads a team of researchers that discovered the giant gem. "Bill Gates and Donald Trump together couldn't begin to afford it."

When asked to estimate the value of the cosmic jewel, Ronald Winston, CEO of Harry Winston Inc., indicated that such a large diamond probably would depress the value of the market, stating, "Who knows? It may be a self-deflating prophecy because there is so much of it." He added, "It is definitely too big to wear!"

The newly discovered cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallized carbon 50light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles.) It is2,500 miles across and weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds, which translates to approximately 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a one followed by 34 zeros.

"It's the mother of all diamonds!" says Metcalfe. "Some people refer to it as 'Lucy' in a tribute to the Beatles song 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.'"

The diamond star completely outclasses the largest diamond on Earth, the 530-carat Star of Africa which resides in the Crown Jewels of England. The Star of Africa was cut from the largest diamond ever found on Earth, a 3,100-carat gem.

Well it is a ways away. And before it can be collected we will have to wait for the diamond core to cool down. That could take a while. In the mean time a little closer to home, I expect that once we start exploring the asteroid belt we will find a lot of diamonds and gold. Mining the asteroid belt? I wish I wasn't too old for that sort of thing.

Integrity Failure Cascade

Jeff Id is looking into integrity failures in Climate Science. Which reminded me of a job I once did.

Integrity failure cascades are not unfamiliar to me. As a contractor I see a LOT of that.

At one company that shall remain nameless I encountered the following.

1. A poorly designed circuit board that did not follow design rules for its logic components. Lines at least double the maximum length.
2. I pointed this out. Showed the people (managers, engineers) the references.
3. The company men pointed out that the prototypes were working fine and I was just being an “old lady” about the matter. Besides it would cost $100K (because of the burn rate) and one month to do a new spin. Customers wouldn’t like the delay.
4. Ten pre-production prototypes were built and they worked perfectly – boy were they laughing at my unwarranted concern. The rest of my work was excellent so they just wrote off my concern as “engineering perfectionism”.
5. Production started – 90% production failure rate. That is when I left. They wanted me to stay on to work production to get the pass rate up. I declined.
6. Of those that passed production tests 99% failed in the field
7. They lost $3 million on that one and it cost them a lot of customer good will.

LMAO

You can only violate the rules so long until it comes back to bite you.

I think the lack of integrity in climate “science” will follow a similar path. The wheels are already starting to come off. Only big wobbles for now. But it won’t be long before the wobbles turn into collapse.

I will then have another opportunity to LMAO. I’m looking forward to it.

Climate Models - Not Even Wrong

Watts Up With That has the news the sceptic community has been waiting for. The CERN experiments done by Svensmark et. al. [Update: actually they were done by Kirkby but they validate the Svensmark hypothesis] show that clouds are significantly affected by cosmic rays.

...it appears that a non-visible light irradiance effect on Earth’s cloud seeds has been confirmed. The way it is posited to work is that the effect of cosmic rays (modulated by the sun’s magnetic variations which either allow more or deflect more cosmic rays) creates cloud condensation nuclei in the Earth’s atmosphere. With more condensation nuclei, more clouds form and vice-versa. Clouds have significant effects on TSI at the surface.

Even the IPCC has admitted this in their latest (2007) report:

“Cloud feedbacks are the primary source of inter-model differences in equilibrium climate sensitivity, with low cloud being the largest contributor”.

If a significant effect has been left out of the models that means in the general sense that they are not even wrong. All the sensitivities used to come up with the current results will have to be adjusted to account for the new cloud factor. Effects once attributed to something else will have to be attributed to clouds. And estimates of future solar activity will have to be added to climate models. And we are not doing such a good job of predicting solar activity. The current decline in solar magnetism was unpredicted. So what does that tell us about the future of the climate? That it is very hard to predict.

CERN Experiment Confirms Cosmic Rays Influence Climate Change.

by Nigel Calder

Long-anticipated results of the CLOUD experiment at CERN in Geneva appear in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Nature (25 August). The Director General of CERN stirred controversy last month, by saying that the CLOUD team’s report should be politically correct about climate change (see my 17 July post below). The implication was that they should on no account endorse the Danish heresy – Henrik Svensmark’s hypothesis that most of the global warming of the 20th Century can be explained by the reduction in cosmic rays due to livelier solar activity, resulting in less low cloud cover and warmer surface temperatures.

There are a a LOT of careers and vast sums of money involved in the "CO2 is going to kill us all eventually" idea. They will not go quietly. In the history of science they never have.

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." - Max Planck

Cross Posted at Classical Values

The World Of Experimental Physics

Suggested in a private message by EricF of Talk Polywell. I was amused when he talked about the lab guys (about 50 seconds in) and said what they were doing was hard to understand and after all he was only a theory guy. There is more video (about 10 minutes) if you want to go a little deeper.

They Have Climate All Rapped Up

H/T Insane Clown Posse @ Bunyipitude and Insane Clown Posse II @ Bunyipitude

The Problem With Physics

A very nice essay on the fundamental problems in physics. Like the fact that it doesn't all fit together. We have islands of knowledge with vast chasms between them. On these islands we can solve the most intricate problems. Between the islands we know practically nothing.

Physics is the most fundamental of the natural sciences; it explains Nature at its deepest level; the edifice it strives to construct is all-encompassing, free of internal contradictions, conceptually compelling and—above all—beautiful. The range of phenomena physics has explained is more than impressive; it underlies the whole of modern civilization. Nevertheless, as a physicist travels along his (in this case) career, the hairline cracks in the edifice become more apparent, as does the dirt swept under the rug, the fudges and the wholesale swindles, with the disconcerting result that the totality occasionally appears more like Bruegel’s Tower of Babel as dreamt by a modern slumlord, a ramshackle structure of compartmentalized models soldered together into a skewed heap of explanations as the whole jury-rigged monstrosity tumbles skyward.

Of course many grand issues remain unresolved at the frontiers of physics: What is the origin of inertia? Are there extra dimensions? Can a Theory of Everything exist? But even at the undergraduate level, far back from the front lines, deep holes exist; yet the subject is presented as one of completeness while the holes—let us say abysses—are planked over in order to camouflage the danger. It seems to me that such an approach is both intellectually dishonest and fails to stimulate the habits of inquiry and skepticism that science is meant to engender.

In the first week or two of any freshman physics course, students are exposed to the force of friction. They learn that friction impedes the motion of objects and that it is caused by the microscope interaction of the two surfaces sliding past one another. It all seems quite plausible, even obvious, yet regardless of any high falutin’ modeling, with molecular mountain ranges resisting each other’s passage or running-shoe soles binding to tracks, friction produces heat and hence an increase in entropy. It thus distinguishes past from future. The increase in entropy—the second law of thermodynamics—is the only law of Nature that makes this fundamental distinction. Newton’s laws, those of electrodynamics, relativity … all are reversible: None care whether the universal clock runs forward or backward. If Newton’s laws are at the bottom of everything, then one should be able to derive the second law of thermodynamics from Newtonian mechanics, but this has never been satisfactorily accomplished and the incompatibility of the irreversible second law with the other fundamental theories remains perhaps the greatest paradox in all physics. It is blatantly dropped into the first days of a freshman course and the textbook authors bat not an eyelash.

Well it is not quite as bad as all that. We have a perfectly good explanation. Statistics. But statistics is not deterministic. It only tells you the most likely answer and the range of answers possible (in a "reasonable" amount of time).

And of course there is the measurement problem. We only know things to be "true" to the level we can measure them. Because with greater precision new things often show up. And there may be things we will never know because they are so far down in the noise. Not to mention quantum uncertainty. Which brings up a whole host of question in and of itself.

Read the whole thing.

Catching The Wave

Sounds pretty amazing to me. According to Carnot the efficiency of an ideal engine is 1 - Tc/Th. Where Tc is the exhaust temperature and Th is the burning temperature (this is somewhat simplified). The temperatures are absolute (i.e. Kelvin scale in the metric system). The Wave Engine according to some designs operates at a peak temperature of 1070°K with an exhaust at 300°K (room temperature roughly). So what is the ideal efficiency for such an engine? 1 - (300/1070) multiplied by 100 to get percent. And the answer is almost 72%. So a practical realization giving 60% efficiency is not unreasonable. That is about 83% of ideal. Not bad. In fact very good.

Some geeks (not as geeky as me) have a few words to say.

Mueller envisions his wave disc motor powering a generator, making it an ultra-light ultra-efficient hybrid electric vehicle. That’s a lot of ultras, but Mueller says he has the numbers to back it up. The wave disc apparently uses 60% of its fuel for propulsion, compared to 15% of fuel used for propulsion in conventional engines. And because the wave disc powered cars would be much lighter — perhaps 20% lighter — the fuel efficiency is even greater.

This all might seem very pie-in-the-sky, and that’s quite understandable. However, Mueller’s team has received $2.5 million in federal dollars from the Advanced Research Projects Administration – Energy (ARPA-E), which will be put towards creating a 25kw engine perhaps as early as next year. According to Mueller, that’s enough power to run an SUV.

I’m hoping Mueller’s checked his math on this, because I am very excited to have a car running on something as efficient as it is elegant.

Well I checked the math and it doesn't look out of the question. Some folks from Warsaw, Poland and Zurich, Switzerland [pdf] have checked the math with computerized flow simulations and think it looks pretty good. The concept goes back to at least 1906. So it is not a new idea. What is new is this particular realization. And of course we have computers for simulation and automated milling machines to make prototypes and small production volumes. Things not available in 1906.

Of course the engine is just the beginning. Once that is proved you have to design the whole hybrid drive train. And then you have to wrap an automobile around it. I don't expect to see them on the market as a production vehicle for about ten years. Unless some really big money (or the Japanese) get behind it.

Some more places to visit to get a handle on the technology:

Daily Tech

Green Cars

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Fetish

Irrational traditionalism (we have always done it this way) can be a fetish. An excuse for lack of study and thought. We used to laugh at South Sea Islanders for their Taboos when I was a kid. The idea was so popular they named a perfume after it. And yet we have in politics a very powerful Traditional Values crowd. Let me say that I have nothing intrinsically against those values. But they all ought to be evaluated in terms of current conditions. Is slavery profitable? Only if it doesn't have to compete with machines. Altered conditions change the morality of traditional practices. For better or worse the birth control pill and modern contraception in general plus antibiotics and other STD treatments has changed the effective morality in male/female sexual relations. And let us not leave out warm summer nights and automobiles.

Altered knowledge can also change how we treat others. We are not sure if "gayness" is genetic, eipigenetic, a cultural affectation or a combination of those and other factors. What ever the cause we no longer condemn to death homosexuals. It just doesn't seem right to kill people because of who they have consensual sex with. Prison might be OK though. Kinder and gentler. And burning witches has gone out of favor. Both popular religious practices at various times and places. And you know death for witches is sill in the most popular traditional values book of all time. Who is rewriting these laws without notice?

So the test of any religious/traditional practice should be a rational basis test. And in America I would add a Liberty test. You know Leviticus 25:10:

"Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof" a traditional value that has stood the test of time.

We place no reliance on virgin or pigeon, our method is science our aim is religion. Obviously a not so traditional value that might serve us better than fetishising tradition.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Hate Is The Object

In my post Hating The Andromeda Galaxy I looked at the necessity of hate in politics. I discuss some of the repercussions of that in Strange Connection.

Today I came across a site discussing those very issues from a biological perspective. The Market for Sanctimony.

Two unspoken questions that religions and quasi-religions, in practice, have to answer are "Whom do I have permission to use as a scapegoat?" and "What lies may I tell myself in order to feel morally superior to my competitors?" In Jerry Falwell's church, you have permission to use homosexuals as scapegoats. At a Green Party meeting, you have permission to use capitalists as scapegoats.

Yep. Which is one of the reasons I suggested the human race unite in hating the Andromeda Galaxy. We could then be united in hatred.

When it becomes too embarrassing for people to engage in a particular kind of moral fraud, they will usually substitute a different kind of moral fraud rather than give up their feelings of moral superiority. Thus, to a first approximation, we have a principle of "Conservation of Irrationality:"

(1) much of the irrational behavior associated with religion is related to people having a craving for ego justification,

(2) changing a person's theological beliefs has little effect on his tendency to crave ego justification, and

(3) politics is the continuation of religion by other means.

Irrationality is Conserved? All the more need for a War On
Andromeda.

Andromeda (1869) Edward Poynter

Well that last bit was just an excuse for a picture of a naked lady. Art don'cha know? Besides. I'm partial to red heads. And blonds. And brunettes. And given the right circumstances even green hair. Uh. Where was I?

...it's impossible to diagnose a problem correctly if the actual cause is not a member of the approved boogieman list, and one is committed to only blaming members of the approved list (having "ideological blinders" or what Eric Raymond called "historical baggage").

Question: "Why do you keep hitting that nail when what you have to do is tighten the screw?" Answer: "I hate nails. I'd rather be hitting nails than screwing." Yep there are folks out there like that. Almost all of them in fact.

The next bit doubles down on that question and answer in spades. (Can you double down in Hearts?)

Part of the reason for the "slippery slope" phenomenon is that Progressivism is a positional good. The point of Progressivism is to distinguish oneself as being smarter than and morally superior to the average voter. One consequence of this is that Progressives have no fixed goal for the optimal size and scope of government. There is no such thing as "enough." Whatever the average voter has become acclimated to has to be "not enough" so that the Progressives can be smarter than average.

The solution for out-of-control government is not constitutional change, but psychological change. To paraphrase what Andrei Codrescue said of the USSR, what we need are not economic advisors (or constitutional lawyers), what we need are psychiatrists.

Progressives want mommy to make it nice (especially for them) and Conservatives want to find the designated miscreants and punish them. Libertarians just want to be left alone. Forgetting Trotsky: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." Which is to say that in more than a few cases it is better to get them before they get you.

Different flavors of moral fraud may be equally irrational, but they are not equally harmful. By analogy, smallpox and cowpox are both diseases, but smallpox is very often fatal, whereas cowpox almost never is. Furthermore, cowpox provides immunity from smallpox, just as, to a lesser extent, I claimed above that different flavors of moral fraud (ie. various flavors associated with Christianity and Socialism) tend to compete with one another (conservation of irrationality). Mencius Moldbug describes "Revelationist" Christianity as a "counterparasite" for "Universalism" (the modern Left).

I'd rather live without parasites (dogma). But that is just me. Evidently most people can't live without them.

There is an answer:

We know enough about the sociology of religion to identify a number of key properties that a good religion should have. A successful religion will inevitably have scapegoats; ideally these scapegoats should be beyond human capacity to harm, and should also be unlikely to inflict harm on humans as a result of being vilified. Gods or god substitutes (demigods) are also pretty much unavoidable, for reasons that are outside the scope of this essay. (See Paul Bloom regarding people's cognitive biases, but also Laurence Iannaccone on the advantages to practitioners of the supernatural of having gods on whom to blame their failures. Supposedly irreligious people often project semi-divine qualities onto the State.) A low religious Herfindahl index is good for society, so it is desirable if a religion forms schisms easily or can be given features that limit its market penetration to a few percent. It is desirable for a new religion to have a cosmology that is compatible with its target audience (we need naturalistic demigods, not supernatural ones, to attract scientifically literate converts). A spectacular eschatology (ie. fire and brimstone) is also nice to have to add color and purpose. Any scientific claims that an attractive religion makes should be at least as plausible as global warming catastrophism.

Well Christianity comes pretty close so what is wrong with it?

Q. ...why don't you embrace Christianity?

A. Do you mean "embrace" in terms of me joining a Christian church, or "embrace" in terms of applauding the spread of Christianity? I am relieved to hear reports of evangelical Christianity spreading in China and Latin America. Also, as a living religion, Christianity continues to evolve, so I think it's possible that some new versions of it will make a major comeback in the first world. But as it stands, Western intellectuals have had plenty of exposure to it, and they have turned their noses up at it. And it is the rich, powerful West, where I live, that I most care about. So I do embrace Christianity in the sense of wishing there were more "skeptical enlightenment" Christians in the West, and fewer "radical enlightenment" types, but I'm not holding my breath. Also, I don't really trust Christianity in any of its many versions not to revert to its romantic roots, which historically is where much of the impetus of the American "progressive" movement came from (Jonah Goldberg documents this in Liberal Fascism, for example pp. 215-220). In other words, the Christian "cowpox" doesn't provide reliable enough immunity to the Socialist "smallpox."

Well I'm not promising Utopia. Which is where most religion goes wrong. I'm promoting war on the Andromeda Galaxy.

I have only excerpted from the exposition. The essay is both amusing and confronts a real problem at the interface between human nature and governance. Go read the whole thing. And if you have to hate: the Andromeda Galaxy is just out there waiting for your attention.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

A Year For Chemicals

The American Chemical Society has announced an International Year of Chemistry. This is a good thing as #1 daughter is studying to be a chemical engineer.

If you have a potential chemistry student in your family you might want to give him/her a head start with a Chemistry Setfrom Amazon.

How Dogs Got Domesticated

A friend of mine saw this on the tube and found it interesting. Which got me looking around for more.

Here is the wiki for Dmitry Konstantinovich Belyaev.

Fox Farm Experiment [pdf]

Adrenaline to Melanin

Melanin Metabolism

The full video: NOVA: Dogs and More Dogs

That should get you started.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Sharing The Data

The video is a survey from the advent of man to the invention of the computer mouse and what it all means. Highly entertaining and well worth your time.

And just today Instapundit linked to an article exactly illustrates the concepts discussed in the video: Progress on Alzheimer’s.

And should you wish to delve further Matt Ridley has written a book:

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

H/T to Bishop Hill for the video.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Skip The Numbahs

Consequently he who wishes to attain to human perfection, must therefore first study Logic, next the various branches of Mathematics in their proper order, then Physics, and lastly Metaphysics. - Maimonides

It seems the trend these days is to skip all the hard stuff like logic, math, and physics (including chemistry) and go straight for the metaphysics. It leaves out all that tiresome stuff subject to experiment and proof and goes straight for the ineffable. Which no one can possibly eff. Very convenient.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Perverted Science

The Inertia Question

I have started a new blog called The Inertia Question. So what is it all about? That tired feeling you have in the morning before your sixth cup of coffee? No.

I explain what it is all about in my first post which I reprint here in its entirety:

============

This blog is dedicated to getting research done and reporting the results on the questions posed in Chapter 28 of Book 2 of The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

The title of that Chapter is Electromagnetic Mass. And what do you know? There is a wiki page called Electromagnetic Mass.

Those questions are over 100 years old. They are still open. I'd like to close them as best as we can. If the theories of some physicists are correct it should be possible to develop a reaction force without expending mass (rockets). That would make high speed space travel very economical. If enough force could be generated we might even be able to lift off from earth without rockets. Now wouldn't that be nice?

And suppose several different experiments are tried and results are obtained and the results are null? We will have learned something very important and may thus have to revise our conception of the universe or at least fine tune it.

I am soliciting Researchers, Research Proposals, Papers, Funding reports, Funding sources, Parts Donations, "Industry" Gossip (No ad homs - save those for the comments. I have certain minimal standards to uphold, although particularly vile comments will be deleted if I find them. My judgment on the matter is final. So if you post a really nasty comment that you particularly enjoy. Save a copy.), Schematics (use the Tiny CAD software if you want to share the data), etc.

Besides my research goals what are my monetary goals? My guess is that each experiment would cost on the order of $300,000 per year for parts, labor, lab space, etc. I think about 5 experiments with different designs would answer the general question. Then we have an engineering review if the outcome is positive and come up with a road map for further development.

I'd like to further say that I want to see any patents obtained from this research to be available for a reasonable licensing fee. Radio really took off when RCA was formed as a patent combine. Remember the first rule of business: Don't Scare Off The Customers.

And one final thing - if you know of any useful pdfs please leave a url in the comments or send me an e-mail. I want to add resources like that to the sidebar.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Mass Displacement And Acceleration

In the interests of science I like to run videos of science experiments from time to time. This one explores buoyancy, displacement, acceleration, energy transfer and probably a few other engineering if not scientific principles. Pay close attention. In fact to master all the concepts you probably ought to watch it several times.

You can find more like this at Hawtness which is NSFW. You might want to search for Hawtness Mad Beer Skills for another good one.

And for the ladies among us. Did you know that engineer/airplane designer Howard Hughes designed that female torture instrument known as the under wire bra? The details come from a site called Bikini Science. Which reminds me. I need to go back and carefully re-study the July 4th Bikini Edition for engineering details. You never know what you might learn.

I ♥ Engineering.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

The Quantum Mechanic

If you are interested in quantum physics as I am I think you will find this paper very interesting: Modern Physics is Rotting [pdf]. You can also follow the discussion and read some words by the author at Talk Polywell.

You can also read more sections of Prof. Johan F. Prins's forthcoming book at Cathodixx.

Here are the opening paragraphs of the pdf linked above. He then goes on in this piece to give a simplified explanation of his theory with simple math.

Physics is considered to be the purest of all natural sciences. Scientists practising physics are supposedly those “special” people who search for knowledge with an “open mind”. New ideas and concepts are supposedly welcomed and objectively considered and tested. Since my own training is in physics and materials science, I also believed that this behaviour must reign supreme in science. I have applied these rules diligently while building my own career.

It thus came as a traumatic shock to discover when already approaching retirement that the real bigots in the world are to be found within the physics community, and more specifically amongst our modern-day theoretical physicists who have lost the plot many years ago when Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) convinced them during the 1920’s that it is impossible to “visualise” what happens on the atomic scale.

His complete book is due out later this year and I will do a post on it when it is available.

Cross Posted at Classical Values