Froth Slosh B'Gosh

SCIENCE!

The headline is sensationalists, but this piece in the Boston Globe explains how money spent on science, including so called "useless" pursuits, benefits society and the economy by many magnitudes. 

I Swear....

If I hear one more person say "So much for that 'global warming?'" I will scream.  Here's a pretty good, readable explanation for why its so damn cold in the east (and so damn warm in the west).

...the Arctic is warming much faster than elsewhere. That Arctic/mid-latitude temperature difference, consequently, is getting smaller. And the smaller differential in temperatures is causing the west-to-east winds in the jet to weaken.

Strong jets tend to blow straight west to east; weaker jets tend to wander more in a drunken north/south path, increasing the likelihood of wavy patterns like the one we’ve seen almost non-stop since last winter.

When the jet stream’s waves grow larger, they tend to move eastward more slowly, which means the weather they generate also moves more slowly, creating more persistent weather patterns.

If you want a denser scientific explanation, just google "quasi resonant Rossby waves."

METEOR!!

Luckily, no one killed, but a bunch of people hurt when a large meteor broke up over Russia today.  Pix and video at the link.

This Man Is An Elected Official

Care to guess which party he belongs to?  Via Hullabaloo.

Poop Provides Power Possibilities!

Now this is pretty interesting!

a Penn State University research team views wastewater as an important energy resource, a raw material. By combining and refining energy technology, the research team has developed a two-pronged method of using wastewater to produce a more abundant output of electricity than either method could do individually.

The Penn State study, "Energy Capture from Thermolytic Solutions in Microbial Reverse-Electrodialysis Cells," written by Roland Cusick, Bruce E. Logan and Y. Kim, was published Thursday in Science.

The microbial fuel cell uses microbes to consume plant or human waste to produce electrons that the fuel cell converts into electrical current. But that system, Mr. Cusick said, is inefficient.

Adding a system that uses reverse electrodialysis, the research team pumped solutions of salt water and fresh water across specialized membranes that only allow positive and negative ions through, while also separating them. The separation of salt water and fresh water by the membrane generates an electrical voltage that directly increases fuel-cell power. As the ions migrate from the salt water to the fresh water, their movement also increases electrical current generated by the microbes.

Using common waste to provide power is rather resourceful. The technology appears to be too expensive to be practical at the moment, but give it time. Now,if there was only a way to produce electricity via bloviation, we'd really be on to something!

Snakes Swallow Swamp Stuff, So Say Scientists

A pretty good example of how an introduced species can wreak havoc on an ecosystem. 

New Plant Hardiness Map

The USDA revised their plant hardiness map, the color coded map used by gardeners (like me) to judge what plants will grow in a particular location.  My home in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, was situated along the line separating the warmer Zone 6 from the cooler Zone 5 on the old maps.  On the new maps, all of Allegheny County is in Zone 6a, with the river valleys listed as a slightly warmer Zone 6b. 

Zone 6 now includes almost all of Butler and Armstrong counties, counties that were previously Zone 5 areas.  Across the national maps, the warmer zones are creeping northward.  If you click on the link above, you can access the interactive map and check out the new zones for your state, or if you enter your zip code, the USDA will show which zone you happen to be in.

This of course is further evidence that climate change is a hoax and that Al Gore is fat, also too!11!!

Whack-A-Mole

Here we go again, this time in Indiana.

An Indiana Senate committee on Wednesday endorsed teaching creationism in public schools, despite pleas from scientists and religious leaders to keep religion out of science classrooms.

Senate Bill 89 allows school corporations to authorize "the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life" and specifically mentions "creation science" as one such theory.

Geocentrism is also a theory.  Its also wrong.  Just because you have a theory, doesn't mean it should be taught in a science class, especially if its clearly wrong and has no evidence to back its conclusions.  I'd also recommend that the elected officials in Indiana take a look at Kitzmiller v. Dover.   The only concrete thing this legislation will do if it becomes law is waste a bunch of taxpayer dollars defending the inevitable lawsuits resulting in the declaration that the law is unconstitutional.

More Creationist Woo

This time from Missouri.

I could go off on my own rant about this, but The Angry Astronomer does a far, far better job than I could.

I Can't Believe Its Not Stradivarius!

Science meets art.

Despite a widespread belief in the old violins' superiority and the millions of dollars it now costs to buy a Stradivarius, the fiddles made by the old masters do not, in fact, sound better than high-quality modern instruments...

Despite a general belief among violinists that Stradivari and Guarneri violins are tonally superior, the participants in Ms. Fritz's test could not reliably distinguish such instruments from modern violins. Only eight of the 21 subjects chose an old violin as the one they'd like to take home. In the old-to-new comparison, a Stradivarius came in last, and a new violin was the most preferred.

Sometimes we expect a certain thing to be better because we've been repeatedly told that something is better.  However, with proper controls, we find that are assumptions may be wrong.  Predictably, there are naysayers:

A less-respectful view of Ms. Fritz's study is offered by violinist Earl Carlyss, a longtime Juilliard String Quartet member. "It's a totally inappropriate way of finding out the quality of these instruments," he said. The auditions, he noted, took place in a hotel room, but violinists always need to assess how an instrument will project in a concert hall.

Mr. Carlyss likened the test to trying to compare a Ford and a Ferrari in a Walmart parking lot. "The modern instruments are very easy to play and sound good to your ear, but what made the old instruments great was their power in a hall," he said.

Fair enough, so why not repeat the test is a concert hall?  I suspect the results will be the same, but then an objection that the wrong concert hall was used will arise.