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This Amazing World

I've neglected science corner of late, but I can't sleep and as an aide-memoire for myself--and a treat for regular readers--I thought that I might list a few stories that have caught my eye.

1. The path of the solar system through the cosmos is taking us through an interstellar cloud

2. The Large Hadron Collider is on and, look-no armageddon well, yet.

3. Light has been tied in a knot, so to speak....

4. Another conference on extraterrestrial life and physics, following last year's at the Vatican, is being held in London and respectable physicists are wondering if the aliens, in the form of extremophile bacteria, aren't already here in a 'shadow biosphere'.

5. Bubbles in the seas may be cooling the earth.

Here's Eric Idle. I wonder what sort of an eighties Doctor Who he would have made....

Comments

DBC Reed said…
One thing I find fairly amazing is if you Google: Sahel getting greener or whatever you get stories of greening over big areas, even stories of the Sahara getting greener.The only argument is betweeen those who say its been going on for decades and those who say its years .There are also those who say it goes in cycles.No sign of the global warmers.
8:00 pm
Martin Meenagh said…
Yes I noticed that, though sometimes coase theory people claim this is because governments gave people property rights over trees and boundary greenery and thus a reason to push back the desert. The global warmers are going to go back to dissolve, fairly soon, into the dissonant elements of scientific hustle, puritanism, anti-materialism and odd volkisch stuff from whence they came.

I really like science. That's one of the reasons I really resent the global warming rubbish. Once again;

what is the temperature of the earth and what value is there in suggesting a range?
What should that range be?
How should it be measured?
What causes it?
How reliable are the models on which the assertions are based and for how long back do they go?
What explains climate variation in the past?

Not one clear and sensible and verifiable answer from the warmers. not one. Just lots of narcissitic rubbish, parasitism, personal destruction and bullying.

But, well, science will win through that just as decent scientists will avoid the anti-god squad like the plague too, in my experience.

What do you think it was about the international middle classes in the west, in almost every sphere, that made them so conformist and frightened? I've been reading a review of a book on Arthur Koestler in the NYRB and, though I'm no fan, the sex and drink and life of the mind seem impossible these days amongst the 'professional' and frightened wannabe governors of the eath...
9:03 pm
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