Shots Across the Bow

To date, 263 people have died from the swine flu since the first death two and a half months ago. In that same time period, over 40,000 people in the US have been diagnosed with the disease through doctor or hospital visits, 4800 had to be hospitalized, and it is estimated that over a million people have contracted swine flu, but only felt mild cold symptoms. So if you are exposed to the swine flu virus, you are looking at about a 0.48% chance of being hospitalized, and a 0.026% chance of dying from it.

Looking at it from the other side, you have a 96% chance of never even knowing you had the disease.

No more words.

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

A break from politics for a breakthrough in physics.

Equipment connected to a house-sized sphere can focus 192 laser beams on a small point, generating temperatures and pressures that exist at cores of stars or giant planets.

NIF will be able to create conditions and conduct experiments never before possible on Earth, according to the laboratory.

A fusion reaction triggered by the super laser hitting hydrogen atoms will produce more energy than was required to prompt "ignition," according to NIF director Edward Moses.

"This is the long-sought goal of 'energy gain' that has been the goal of fusion researchers for more than half a century," Moses said.

Theoretical physics is cool, but this is pretty awesome. NOw then, who wants some popcorn?

First, a few facts from theCenter for Infectious Disease Research And Policy, along with some simple explanations.

This new strain of swine-origin influenza A H1N1 is substantially different from human influenza A H1N1 viruses; therefore, a large proportion of the population might be susceptible to infection and the seasonal influenza vaccine H1N1 strain likely will not provide protection

Calling this the H1N1 virus, as the Obama administration has decreed, is inaccurate, because this virus is not the same as the human H1N1 virus. It also muddies the waters since some will believe that the flu shot they got last year might offer some protection. According to CIDRAP and the CDC, it won't.

Infected persons are assumed to be shedding virus from the day prior to illness onset until resolution of symptoms. Persons with swine-origin influenza A H1N1 virus infection should be considered potentially contagious for up to 7 days following illness onset.

This means that you could be feeling perfectly fine, but be contagious. That makes containment nearly impossible to achieve. We can expect to see cases of this flu spreading for quite awhile yet.

Available data suggest that airborne transmission does not play a major role in the spread of influenza viruses

A mask will only help you if you are close enough, within 3 feet, for an infected person to sneeze or cough on you. And in that case, direct transfer of the virus may still take place. ON the other hands, masks work very well for the already infected person, containing the virus from sneezes etc. So runningdowm to Home Depot for a face mask isn't going to help you, but if it makes you feel better, go for it.

An outbreak of swine-origin influenza was recognized in early 1976 among military personnel at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Thirteen clinical cases occurred with one death; the cause of the outbreak remains unknown, and no exposure to pigs was identified (see References: Gaydos 2006). Retrospective serologic testing subsequently demonstrated that up to 230 soldiers had been infected with the novel virus, which was an H1N1 strain. The outbreak did not spread beyond Fort Dix.

Morbidity and mortality rates are difficult to determine since many cases of the flu go unreported as the symptoms are very mild. Speaking very roughly, morbidity describes the percentage of the population that has the disease while mortality describes the percentage of the affected population that will die from the disease. Without knowing the manning levels at Fort Dix, it's hard to determine morbidity, but out of 230 soldiers known to have been exposed to swine flu, only 13 cases were serious enough to need medical treatment, and only 1 died. That gives us a mortality rate of 0.4%. That sounds comfortingly small; the problem is that the garden variety of flu we battle every year has a mortality rate of somewhere around 0.1% or so, and it still takes out over 50,000 people annually. If the two types of flu are transmitted similarly, as the CDC believes, then we can expect as many as 200,000 deaths in the US from a widespread outbreak of the swine flu, jumping from the eighth to the third leading cause of death, just behind cancer and ahead of stroke.

This brings up the question, How come the mortality numbers from Mexico are so much higher? The answer is simple. They haven't done the testing to discover the hundreds or thousands of people who were exposed but didn't get sick enough to go to the hospital. Consider that if we used the 13 soldiers from Ft. Dix who got sick enough to go to the doctor in our mortality calculation, we'd show a rate of about 7.7%, which is very close to what we are seeing in Mexico right now.


So, let's put this all together. If the current patterns hold true, then the worst case scenario is that 200,000 people die from this flu that wouldn't have died otherwise. Given that 2.5 million people die each year (rough approximation using data from 2005), we're looking at an increase in the US death rate from 0.83% to 0.90%. 3 times as many people will die fron heart disease. 2.5 times as many will die from cancer. Accidents will claim almost half as many. Going another step, 200,000 is the worst case right now; it's very likely that the outbreak will not be as widespread as the standard seasonal flu. Our behavior patterns are different during the warmer months, and our immune systems are under less stress, accounting for the seasonal variations in flu infection rates. I'm guessing that we won't see anywhere near 200,000 deaths from the swine flu in the US. I doubt we'll even reach the seasonal flu number of 50,000. Yes, we need to take action to minimize these numbers, but the panic and hysteria we are seeing from governmental agencies is ridiculous. The swine flu simply isn't that dangerous.

If something changes, if we start seeing infection rates far above what we expect for the seasonal flu, or for some reason the mortality rate spikes, then there will be cause for alarm, but right now, talk of closing borders and shutting down travel and wearing masks in public is fear driven over-reaction.

I've been posting about global warming for about 6 years or so, using scientific facts and logical analysis to show just how ridiculous Anthropogenic Global Warming actually is.

You first clue should be that Al Gore, a guy who managed to flunk out of divinity school, is the chief proponent of AGW. Al believes that AGW is such a big deal that his mansion in Nashville uses more electricity than most neighborhoods.

Anyway, one of the best visual aids used by the snake oil salesman was the hockey stick graph, which shows global temperatures spiking in the late 20th century. Now we get news that the hockey stick was a hoax.

Scientists massaging data to reach a politically favorable conclusion in order to keep the grant money coming? Say it ain't so!

Isn't it fascinating how completely corrupting government funding is? By the way, the government will now be funding fetal tissue research and abortion.

Sleep well.

We live in a digital world.

Literally.

I'm not just talking about digital watches, mp3 players, CD's, DVDs, Blu-Ray, and the internet; I'm talking about all the way down at the most fundamental level of reality, we live in a digital universe. That idea has some very interesting implications for us in a number of ways, but before we explore those ideas, let's make sure we all know what we're talking about first.

What does "digital" mean? Merriam Webster says:

1: of or relating to the fingers or toes (digital dexterity)
2: done with a finger (a digital rectal examination) (Eeeww.)
3: of, relating to, or using calculation by numerical methods or by discrete units
4: of, relating to, or being data in the form of especially binary digits (digital images) (a digital readout) ; especially : of, relating to, or employing digital communications signals (a digital broadcast) compare analog 2
5: providing a readout in numerical digits (a digital voltmeter)
6: relating to an audio recording method in which sound waves are represented digitally (as on magnetic tape) so that in the recording wow and flutter are eliminated and background noise is reduced
7: electronic (digital devices) ; also : characterized by electronic and especially computerized technology

We're going to go with definition 4 for right now because it comes closest to the physics definition. To help our understanding, let's follow the reference it gives and look up the second definition of "analog."

2 a: of, relating to, or being a mechanism in which data is represented by continuously variable physical quantities

So, what does that mean to you and me? Well, let's look at this picture.

Here we have two numbered lines. The bottom one is a digital line going from 1 to 10. Each digit stands alone, and there is nothing in between them. In a digital world, there is no 1.5, only 1 or 2. The top line is analog. You have an infinite number of points between 1 and 2, and between 2 and 3 and so on. Instead of only having ten choices of positions, you have an infinite number of choices. The analog number line is much more powerful than the digital because of its infinite variability.

Let's look at another example, a sine wave. Here again, you see a smoothly varying line with an infinite number of possible points all along the signal. Compare that to the digitized sine wave seen in the next picture.

The gray boxes are a digital representation of the smoothly curving sine wave, and you can see that the discrete nature of the digital representation creates a very jagged wave form. It simply cannot carry the same amount of information that an analog signal can.


For example, we've all heard YouTube videos where it sounds like the microphone is under a raging surf. That roaring echoing noise is the result of digitizing the original audio. Each of those jagged steps in the digital sine wave introduce distortion.

So how does a CD sound so good, if digital introduces so much distortion? Well, let's take a look back at our digital sine wave. The accuracy of our sine wave is directly related to the size of the blocks we use to build it. Bigger blocks, as shown in this drawing will result in a less accurate reproduction of the sine wave. On the other hand, if we make our blocks smaller, we get a much better reproduction of the original wave, as seen in the earlier example. So, when a CD is made, the blocks used to build the sine wave are very small, resulting in a sound that is nearly indistinguishable from the original.


And that begs the question, if we have to work so hard to get our digital signal to equal the original analog in quality, why bother? Stick with the analog. As it turns out, there are some significant advantages to digitizing information like music. Editing and noise reduction become much easier and more effective, and controlling playback quality becomes a snap. The fidelity of the playback is always identical to the recording, a feat no analog system can match.

It turns out that as we look into things, our world is made up of analog systems. Sound is analog. Electromagnetic radiation is analog. Light is analog (sort of, sometimes, but we'll get to that another time.) And that makes sense because as you look around, the world is a continuous place. There are no real gaps between here and there, or between 1:00 and 2:00, or between freezing and boiling temperatures. Everything follows a continuously varying path.

But I started out by saying we live in a digital universe, and that doesn't make sense with what I just said, does it? The truth of the matter is that just as a CD is a digital representation of an analog signal, i.e. music, sounding to our ears nearly identical to the analog original but missing tons of information, our universe may be a digital representation of some far greater reality, looking real to our limited senses but missing tons of information.

What makes me say this? Actually, I'm not the one saying it. Max Planck, Neils Bohr, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and others said it first, they just said it in mathematics, not English. Let's start with quantum mechanics and then we'll dig into the really tricky stuff. (How's that for a scary sentence?)

Keeping things very simple, a mathematician named Max Planck noticed that he could predict the energy of a photon by an equation that related its frequency to a constant. This constant had no real physical reason to exist, except that it made the equations work. The fact that it did so told physicists that energy was not transmitted smoothly and in an infinitely variable way, but was broken up into discrete bundles or packets that they called quanta.

Does that sound familiar to anyone?

Boiled down to its simplest form, quantum mechanics says that energy is not an analog system, but a digital one. Now that doesn't surprise most of us because we have heard this before in high school or college, particularly when we're talking about light particles, AKA photons. But it did surprise the crap out of the physicists who had no idea why energy should be quantized. All they knew was that it worked when they used it, so they set out to figure out why it worked.

Along the way, a guy named Werner Heisenberg made another interesting discovery. He found out that when you get down to things that are smaller than the constant Plank discovered, you could no longer know their position and momentum. Going further, he discovered that it had nothing to do with an inability to measure such small quantities, or an inability to measure one without affecting the other, but that it was a property inherent in sub atomic particles. If their position was known, their momentum was mathematically undefined.

This was called the uncertainty principle, and the fact that it centered round Planck's Constant was no coincidence.

A few years earlier, Einstein had released his theories of relativity, and he realized that there were some fundamental incompatibilities between his theories of the super big and fast and quantum mechanics descriptions of the super small. He was unable to reconcile those incompatibilities, partly because he spent so much time trying to refute quantum mechanics because the implications were so strange. A couple of decades later, some bright boys came up with a startling idea that shows promise in reconciling the quantum world with the relativistic world.

In a way, their idea is derived from the quantum, Again, very simply, the theorized that the reason that energy wwas quantized, and why the Heisenberg uncertainty existed, and that they were all tied to Plank's Constant was that Plank's Constant was actually the smallest anything could be, or put another way, not only is energy quantized, but space is as well. We're used to thinking of moving through space in a smooth, continuous manner, but at the subatomic level, string theory says that, just like our earliest example of ten numbers with no line, we are actually moving from place to place without traveling through the distance between.

OK, that went too far too fast. Let's take it a bit slower. If space is quantized, as string theory suggests, and if we put 0 and Plank's Constant (h) on a number line, it would look like the bottom line in our first drawing. There would be no line between them. And there would be no line between 1h and 2(h). We're back in familiar territory now, aren't we? Because if string theory is correct, then our universe, at its most fundamental level, is not analog at all, but digital.

So, besides being a neat thing to think about, what does this all mean for you and me? Maybe nothing. Maybe a digital universe really is the ultimate answer. But I can't help thinking about all the information we lose when we take an analog signal and digitize it. I can't help but wonder what we're missing in our digital universe that might be present in the analog original, if it exists. I can't help but think that maybe, just maybe, I have some small understanding of Genesis 1:6-7.

Gen 1:6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
Gen 1:7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which [were] under the firmament from the waters which [were] above the firmament: and it was so.

Was God creating a digital copy of the real universe, and preparing it for us? Is the firmament, which God called heaven, the analog original?

I don't know, and science will never answer that particular question.

But it is intriguing.

A seed pod gets stuck in the coat of a dog. The dog and its pack travel for miles over months until he sheds his winter coat and the seed pod falls off. The pod falls on fertile soil, sprouts, and a plant grows in a new environment. The plant thrives because this new area has no natural predators that feed on it. It displaces native species and soon dominates the landscape in that area.

We call this process natural selection and it is an integral part of evolution.

But replace the dog with a man, and we call it "interfering with Mother Nature's delicate balance.

Piffle.

Right now, well meaning idiots are poisoning streams in the Smokies to kill off the rainbow trout so they can replace it with "native" brook trout. Once the poison has killed off the rainbows, they place baskets of fish into the stream to make sure all the poison is gone. If the fish die, they wait a while longer, and do it again.

This is called environmentalism.

When the stream is safe for fish again, they'll release the brook trout.

So why are environmentalists against evolution?

Too bad he wasn't serious.

Over at Knox Views, R. Neal links (Here's the url in case Mr. Neal is still trying to hide his ravings from careful critique: http://www.knoxviews.com/node/7772) to a post showing atmospheric data that indicates that the tropical troposphere isn't heating up the way the best AGW models predict. Following that post back to its source leads you to Steve McIntyre's blog Climate Audit, and the post Tropical Troposphere.

Now before I get too deep into this thing, let's make something very clear. The issue at hand is NOT whether we are in the midst of an increase in global temperature due to man; the issue in this post is simply, "Is the troposphere reacting as the models predict?" You have to remember that all of the fuss about global warming comes from the predictions of computer models, models whose accuracy has been spotty at best.

The simplest way to put it is this: The models, based on thermodynamics predict that tropospheric temperatures will rise sooner and faster than surface temperatures. The models go on to say that the earliest indicators and the greatest movement will occur in the tropics.

So far, they aren't.

This doesn't mean that AGW isn't happening, although it does raise several important questions. What it does mean is that the predictive models we are using to forecast the extent and the severity of climate change incorrectly model the actual physical processes occurring.

In short, they're wrong.

Yet it is these very models that Al Gore preaches on every time he gets out of his Gulfstream.

Instead of reading the article, picking up the background knowledge required to understand it, and reading through the extensive discussion in the comments, Mr. Neal, would rather dismiss the problems generated by real world data out of hand, primarily because it doesn't fit within his orthodoxy.

Put simply, in deference to Mr. Neal, he'd rather stick his fingers in his ears and say "La la la la la," rather than hear the facts.

Here are the facts.

Thermodynamics is the study of how heat (thermo) moves (dynamics). Obviously, an understanding of thermodynamics is essential to understanding the greenhouse effect, and how CO2 emissions affects it. I learned basic thermodynamics while learning how to run a nuclear reactor. While the system is different, the laws governing the transfer of heat are the same.

OK, say you want to make a pot of tea. The first thing you have to do is boil water. You want to raise the temperature of the water from room temperature, around 70F to the boiling point of water, at 212F. In order to do that, you turn on the stove. Now, if the burner only heats up to 70F, will your water boil?

Obviously not. In order to transfer heat from one body to another, the body losing heat must be at a higher temperature than the body gaining the heat.

This is crucial to understanding how heat is transferred. It always must go down to a lower temperature body. In order to raise water to 212F, the stove burner is going to have to get hotter than 212F. It will also have to heat up the pan holding the water to greater than 212F.

The second thing to understand is that the rate of heat transfer is directly proportional to the difference in temperature between the two bodies. The greater the temperature difference, the faster the heat will transfer.

The final thing to understand is exactly how heat is transferred. There are three methods;

1. Conduction. The two bodies are in physical contact.


2. Convection. The two bodies are separated, but are surrounded by a gas or liquid.


3. Radiation. The two bodies are separated, but heat is transferred directly by photons.

Now let's take a look at the greenhouse effect. Now, let's look at our thermodynamic system. The Sun radiates heat to the Earth in a steady, constant stream. (For the purposes of this discussion, will ignore the various solar cycles.) This heat passes through the atmosphere unhindered, and reaches the surface and warms it. Heat is sent back up through the troposphere but things have changed. Where before the outer layer of the Earth's atmosphere was transparent to heat radiation, this is no longer the case. By giving up energy to the surface, the photons carrying the energy are now blocked by stratospheric CO2 and CO. These gases act almost like a one way blanket around our atmosphere. They allow energy in, but not back out again.

Remember what we talked about before? The rate of heat transfer is dependent on a difference in temperature. Since the temperature of the troposphere has gone up while the surface temperature has remained constant, the difference between the two has dropped, resulting in slower removal of heat from the surface. But the Sun is still pumping out the same amount of energy, so what happens to surface temperature? Well, if you're putting more energy in than you're taking out, the only thing that can happen is that surface temperature will go up. And as surface temperature goes up, the differential between the surface and the troposphere goes up, and the rate of heat transfer goes up until we reach a new equilibrium.

That's the greenhouse effect folks, and it makes life possible here on earth.

Now then, let's look at AGW, man made global warming. According to the theory, humans have dumped massive quantities of CO2 into our atmosphere, which has caused a pronounced increase in the ability of our atmosphere to trap heat. This mean that the troposphere is now trapping more heat, causing a rise in surface temperatures until we reach a new, higher equilibrium.

And now you see why tropospheric temperatures are so critical to AGW modeling. If the troposphere is not heating up, and by the data in this post it isn't, then the proposed mechanism for AGW is in big trouble. Not only that, but the models forecasting gloom and despair are also completely off.

What Steve McIntyre's data shows is that tropical tropospheric temperatures are not increasing significantly. In fact, they're down compared to reference temperatures.

Does this mean AGW is not happening? No, but it raises questions both about the mechanics of our climate, and about the predictive value of the models. Asking those questions is the first step to learning the truth about our effect on this planet.

Rarely do you find a movie so courteous as to write a review into the title, but Ben Stein's crockumentary Expelled does just that. Attacking the education establishment and modern science based on their refusal to accept Intelligent Design is like attacking the Metropolitan Opera Company for refusing to sing "I Think I Love You."

Intelligent Design is not science. Period. I say this as a committed Christian who firmly believes that God created the earth, the heavens and all the things in them.

I've dealt with Intelligent Design many times over the course of this blog,so there's no point in recovering that ground in depth. Follow the links if you're interested. The short version is that ID rests on a couple of logical flaws:

• Problems with the Neo Darwinian evolutionary model do not automatically confirm ID.
  
• Complexity does not require design,since natural forces produce complex systems all the time.

By basing his attack on science and education on their rejection of non-science, Stein has hamstrung himself before he ever started.

As I wrote the last post, it occurred to me that there are probably a lot of people out there who don't understand what all of the fuss about HD is about, and what all the numbers mean, and I figured that since we're a bit over a year away from the end of television as we knew it, a quick primer couldn't hurt.

First, the quick version. HD produces a sharper, clearer picture with more details, and it does so using a digital signal, so you'll need a new ATSC tuner if you want to keep your old TV. Or you can buy a new TV with an ATSC tuner, and you're all set.

OK, for you non-tech types, that's really all you need to know.

For the rest of us, let's take a look at the old TV so we can understand how the new TV works.

The stronger the beam, the brighter the phosphor glows. The beam starts at the top of the screen and paints a picture all the way across the screen, but just at the very top of the screen. When it reaches the side, it flashes back to the other side, only it drops down a bit and draws another line across the screen. This continues until the beam draws the last line across the bottom of the screen, then it flashes back up to the top of the screen, ready to begin this whole process again.

The sequence above describes the drawing of one single frame of video, and it takes place almost 30 times a second in an old tube type TV. Think of it like an Etch-a-Sketch with three controls instead of two. In addition to left/right and up/down, you also have a knob that controls how hard the scraper touches the screen. The scraper starts in the upper left corner of the screen, and as you wind it across the screen, you vary the pressure with the third knob to create one line of your picture. When you reach the end of the screen, you use the third knob to lift the scraper off of the screen, and then return it to the beginning position. Next, you use the up/down to move the scraper down one line length, and repeat the whole process until you get to the bottom of the screen.

This is how your old, tube type TV's worked. Greatly simplifying things, an electron gun squirts electrons to the screen which is covered with a phosphor, a chemical that glows when it is hit by electrons. Two magnets are used like the buttons of the Etch a Sketch, to push the beam from side to side and up and down. The TV signal is our third knob, and it varies the strength of the electron beam, which affects how brightly the phosphor glows.

When TV first started, a bunch of people, the National Television System Committee, got together and decided we needed a broadcast standard, and they decided a few things. First, they decided that the number of lines across the screen should be 525. They also decided on a frame rate, the number of times a complete image is formed on the screen, should by 30 frames per second, that the aspect ratio, width vs height, should be 4:3, and that the signal should be interlaced, meaning that every other line is skipped on one pass, then the skipped lines are picked up on the second pass. To understand all this, let's pull out our Etch a Sketch again.

The first part of the NTSC standard is that the aspect ratio is 4:3. All that means is that a screen 4 inches wide must be 3 inches tall. If it's 8 inches wide, it has to be 6 inches tall, and so on. In short, an NTSC screen should always be 3/4 as tall as it is wide. So if our Etch a Sketch screen is 12 inches wide, it must be 9 inches tall. Next, we know that our screen is divided into 525 horizontal lines from top to bottom. And finally, we know that our scanning sequence is not a straight top to bottom like we used in our first example. Instead, we'll scan the first, third, fifth, etc lines until we get to the bottom, then we'll scan the second, fourth, sixth etc lines. What this means is we have to scan the screen top to bottom twice for one full frame, which means that our scan rate must be 60 times per minute, or Hz, for a frame rate of 30 frames per minute.

So that's how things started off. We've changed a few things since then. We added color, replaced the electron gun and screen with LCDs or plasmas, but the NTSC standard remained pretty much the same.

Until HD came along.

The new standard for HDTV is called the ATSC standard, for the Advanced Television Systems Committee. Unlike the NTSC which set a single standard, the ATSC left the door open for multiple standards and resolutions, and that's where some of the confusion has crept in. SO lets clear it up a bit.

Let's start with the aspect ratio. The ATSC specifies an aspect ratio of 16:9, instead of the old 4:3. This means that our Etch a Sketch has to be 9 inches tall for every 16 inches in width. Going back to our earlier example, a 12 inch wide Etch a Sketch would now be just a shade under 7 inches tall, instead of 9. Also, the number of horizontal lines changed. the ATSC standard accepts either 720 or 1080 lines of horizontal resolution. And finally, the ATSC accepts either interlaced scanning, like the NTSC, or progressive scanning, where every line is scanned in sequence, rather than the odds then evens in two passes.

OK, so let's put all of this together and see where we stand.

The first thing you should look for is an ATSC tuner. That will give you the ability to pick up your local HD digital TV stations without paying a dime to the cable company. For Knoxville folks, I live about 20 miles from Sharp's Ridge in Kodak, and I can pick up all of the Knoxville stations with an amplified indoor antenna. Reception gets a little spotty at times, so I'll probably invest in an outdoor antenna eventually.

The next thing to look for is 720 vs 1080. Personally, I go for the 1080. There is a visible difference in the resolution, especially when you get up to the larger screen sizes. As for progressive vs interlaced, it's really getting harder to find an interlaced set anymore. Progressive scan isn't much more expensive and it results in a much nicer picture.

We haven't really talked about size much yet. Don't worry; we're about to.

Obviously it depends on where you're going to use the set, and what you're going to use it for, but in general, go big. There's talk of a new, 1440 line standards coming down the pike in the next year or so, but cable, satellite and over the air stations are struggling just trying to pump out a 1080i signal now. They won't switch up to a higher resolution for quite some time, so the only thing the higher resolution will work for is DVD players and the like. Your 1080p will be a good value for years to come.

So go big. I've got a 60" 1080p in my room, and it's just like being at the movies, without the annoying kids, and the sticky floors.

The one other thing you should look for is plenty of connection in the back. The HD standard connection is called an HDMI cable. It carries the video and the audio, and are the best way to connect an HD source, like a cable box, PS-3 or XBox 360, or Blu-ray DVD player, to your TV set. They are also freakishly expensive. If you don't want to pony up for the HDMI cable, you can use component cables. These break up the video signal into three parts and usually come with stereo audio cables as well. For your TV, look for 2 HDMI connections and 2 component connections.

And that's it. If you read this far, I hope you have a better understanding of what all the numbers and symbols mean. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments. If I don't know the answer, I'll make something up!

Instapundit links to a KnoxViews post about Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs.

In the comments to the post, Justin links to treehugger who gives the following scenario:

A CFL containing 5 mg of mercury breaks in your child’s bedroom that has a volume of about 25 m3 (which corresponds to a medium sized bedroom). The entire 5 mg of mercury vaporizes immediately (an unlikely occurrence), resulting in an airborne mercury concentration in this room of 0.2 mg/m3. This concentration will decrease with time, as air in the room leaves and is replaced by air from outside or from a different room. As a result, concentrations of mercury in the room will likely approach zero after about an hour or so.

Under these relatively conservative assumptions, this level and duration of mercury exposure is not likely to be dangerous, as it is lower than the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standard of 0.05 mg/m3 of metallic mercury vapor averaged over eight hours.

Professor Helen Suh MacIntosh has made a couple of key errors in her analysis,surprising for a professor of envronmental health. By the way, my credentials include 2 years on a mercury cleanup team in the Navy, another 8 years as a trained Hazardous Waste Operations and Response worker and 4 years as an OSHA 29CFR1910.120 40 hour HAZWOPER instructor.

I've done this stuff for a living.

The OSHA PEL for mercury vapor is 0.1mg/m3, not 0.05mg/m3. The latter is the NIOSH REL and it applies to skin contact only. You can look these values up at http://www.osha.gov, or check out the NIOSH pocket guide online, resources any professor of environmental health should be intimately familiar with.

Now then, take an average room at 10'x10'x8', which comes out to 21.6m3. Assume the 5 mg of mercury all vaporizes, giving an initial concentration of 0.23mg/m3. This is roughly twice the OSHA PEL for Hg, and working in this area would require respiratory protection.

Her second error is to assume that the contaminate in the room would be replaced with a single air change, a completely unwarranted assumption. Standard environmental calculations assume that mixing occurs during the air exchange and the rule of thumb in the field is that one complete air exchange only reduces the contaminate by 50%. Again, I'm surprised that a Professor of Environmental Health would make that mistake. In the real world, starting with .23mg/m3 of Hg vapor, after one air exchange, we would expect to see 0.12mg/m3 Hg vapor. After the next exchange, we would expect to see 0.06mg/m3 and so on. Basically, a person in this room would be breathing air in excess of the OSHA PEL for about 1.5 hours.

The professor's scenario is flawed in another way, assuming that all of the Hg will vaporize immediately. She may have made this assumption honestly thinking that it would lead to the worst case scenario, but it doesn't. Let's take a more realistic case, one where only half the metallic Hg goes airborne each hour. The first hour, 2.5 mg would go airborne. The next hour, 1.25 mg go airborne, the third hour, 0.6 mg go airborne, and so on. In this more likely scenario, and using the 50% dilution rate per air change, Hg exposure will exceed the OSHA PEL for almost 3 hours, or twice as long as her test case.

Finally, while the OSHA PEL is an 8 hour TWA (Time weighted average) that doesn't mean you can exceed the limit for a short period of time. As an analogy, you can't drive 100mph in a 55mph zone and use the excuse that you were only going to be out for 15 minutes. Doses above the PEL result in a higher concentration of Hg in the body, leading to more damage, regardless of the duration of the exposure. There hasn't been enough study on the effects of short term exposures to determine non occupational exposure limits, which is why environmental scientists routinely defer to OSHA PELs or NIOSH/ACGIH RELs in assessing exposure for members of the public.

So, what's the bottom line? CFLs result in energy savings, but do require special handling for disposal, and do represent a slightly increased health risk, particularly to young children and pregnant mothers. The magnitude of that increase is very small, much smaller than risks we take for granted every day, like driving to the supermarket for example, but it does exist.

Given what I know about the risk,and that I hate replacing lightbulbs, I'm converting over to CFLs in my house. But to suggest that there is no increased risk is dishonest.

God created the world in 6 days and rested on the 7th.

Now some folks find that a bit hard to swallow, so they say instead that this is the truth

Nothing existed. Zip, Nil, Nada. No time, no space, no thing at all.

Except.

According to quantum theory, we can't be sure that nothing was there because uncertainty is too big when you get down into the sub atomic world. It's not that we can't measure precisely at that range, it's that there's no such thing as measuring precisely at that range. (There's a difference between accurate and precise. Accurate means you've measured correctly. Precise means you can duplicate the measurement. The distinction is crucial in the quantum world.) Without getting too technical, at the sub atomic level, the universe itself is uncertain about where and how much stuff there is. We can measure it accurately 100 different times and come up with 100 different answers, and each one is accurate, but the precision of the measurement is limited by the quantum nature of the universe. Now you have to understand that we are not limited by our ability to measure; we are limited by the construction of the universe.

So, since we can't know what the actual state of nothing is, whether it's actually nothing, or maybe a little something, or a little less than nothing, (yes, less than nothing is an actual possibility in the quantum world) then all we can say is that statistically, there was nothing, or on average, there was nothing. Now this gets kinda funky, because remember, it's not our measurements that are in error, it's an uncertainty inherent in the structure of the universe. This means that it's not a measurement of nothing that is varying, it's actually nothingness that is varying.

A provocative concept.

I see a question from the back?

Variance is a measure of change over time. If there was nothing, no matter, no space, and no time, then how could nothingness vary?

Ah, very good, very perceptive question!

In order for us to have variance in a system, we have to have time. But in 0 dimensional space, you can't have time. Just ask Mr. Einstein. So we have to invent a different kind of time. Physicists call this new kind of time imaginary time and according to them, it runs at a right angle to our conventional time, so we don't notice it.

So, getting on with our story, nothing was fluctuating through imaginary time, when suddenly, due to a mathematical anomaly in the statistical variations of nothing, the value of nothing explodes into something, and we get a universe filled with matter, energy, space and, oh yeah, real time. Like most imaginary playmates, imaginary time disappeared, having been replaced by real time.

Let's sum up: According to our best and brightest scientists, in the beginning, there was nothing, but that nothing might have been something, or less than nothing, and it varied between those three states in imaginary time, until something happened, and nothing became something, at which point, we had our universe in real time.

And they say scientists lack faith...

The researchers with the most funding have won the war, science be damned. I give up.

Global Warming is real and it's all human induced.

The sun plays no role, nor does anything other than human activity.

In fact, our carbon emissions are so out of control that we're causing the surface of Mars to heat up as well, placing both planets in jeopardy.

However, only emissions from the United States cause global warming. The incredibly dirty industrial plants of the developing nations do not contribute to global warming, nor does the clear cutting of their forests reduce their carbon sink. Needless to say, the US and its increasingly large forest area does not act as a carbon sink.

In fact, global warming really is a US plot to reduce the rest of the world to starvation level poverty so we can continue to drive our SUVs and eat at McDonalds..

Fine. I believe.

And as soon as all those global warming true believers scrap their gulfstream jets and stop chartering flights across the globe to discuss how excessive consumption of hydrocarbon fuels by guys like me driving pick-up trucks is ruining the planet for everybody, then I'll change my way of life. But as long as these hypocritical twits continue to preach conservation while driving Escalades and traveling by private charter jets, then I'll continue to drive my Dodge and enjoy the benefits of global warming.

The News Sentinel has an AP story in today's paper about a successful study using stem cell therapy to treat Muscular Dystrophy in dogs.

Stem-cell injections worked remarkably well at easing symptoms of muscular dystrophy in a group of golden retrievers, a result that experts call a significant step toward treating people.

Sharon Hesterlee, vice president of translational research at the Muscular Dystrophy Association, called the result one of the most exciting she's seen in her eight years with the organization. Her group helped pay for the work.

She stressed that it's not yet clear whether such a treatment would work in people but said she had "cautious optimism" about it.

Weren't we told in campaign commercials that President Bush and the heartless Republicans had outlawed stem cell research?

The study used stem cells taken from the affected dogs or other dogs, rather than from embryos. For human use, the idea of using such "adult" stem cells from humans would avoid the controversial method of destroying human embryos to obtain stem cells.
(snip)
The scientists worked with golden retrievers that suffer a crippling form of dystrophy very much like the human one. Researchers studied the effect of repeated injections into the bloodstream of a kind of stem cell extracted from blood-vessel walls.

Weren't we told that adult stem cells weren't as flexible as embryonic stem cells, and couldn't be used to generate different tissues? Here, we've got blood vessel wall cells being used to cultivate nerve tissues.

Cossu said he hopes to start a small experiment in children in the next year or two.

Weren't we told that embryonic stem cells were the best hope for treatments for muscular dystrophy, Parkinsons, multiple sclerosis and other diseases? And that adult stem cells just weren't promising enough?

I guess we were told wrong.

The Earth was created in 6 days and is about 10,000 years old.

The Earth formed over millions of years and is about 4.5 billion years old.

One is an article of faith, the other a matter of science, right?

One is true, the other patently false, right?

Well, maybe not. What if I told you that there is a way to use science to show that both statements could be accurate simultaneously? Note carefully that I said could be true, not are true. I can't say for sure if the following series of conjectures is true or not. What I can say is that the second statement does not automatically render the first one false.

It all depends on using the proper framework.

For starters, you have to understand that by design, science does not answer any questions about religion and the existence of God. The idea of supernatural forces/beings/actions is automatically excluded from consideration in the scientific framework. This makes scientists very happy, as they can make and test their mechanistic theories about how the world works without worrying about divinity mucking things up.

But there's a consequence to operating in this framework that many scientists have a tendency to forget. Since they start out by choosing postulates that exclude the idea of God, none of their results can be construed to say anything about God, whether positive or negative.

Yes, you in the back, you have a question?

"But if the equations work without a God, then that means there's no need for a God, so doesn't that prove He doesn't exist?"

A good question, and one I'm glad you asked because it perfectly illustrates the fallacy of trying to disprove the existence o God using science. The short answer is "No, it doesn't." To more fully demonstrate, let's construct a proof. Your argument goes like this:

I can describe this process without resorting to God.
Therefore God does not exist.

It is very clear that the conclusion is not supported by the proposition. In order for the conclusion to be true, you would have to include a first postulate, making the proof look like this:

If God exists, He must be crucial to every process description.
I can describe this process without God.
Therefore God does not exist.

While the proof is logically sound, there is no basis for the first postulate, which makes the proof invalid.

Now, getting back to the subject at hand, the first postulate of science can be stated like this:

All processes in nature can be described without recourse to supernatural actors/forces.

Note that this statement says nothing about whether or not those forces actually exist or not. And because it doesn't, no proof constructed from that first postulate can have anything to say about the existence of those forces.

So, since science by definition cannot say anything about God, then why would I call this essay "The Mathematics of Divinity?"

Because math is not science; math is a descriptive language. It uses abstract symbols manipulated in a rigid, logical fashion, in an attempt to describe the real world. The results are haphazard at best.

Ahh, you in the back again. Math major, I take it?

"Come on, professor! You expect us to believe that math is haphazard? Math is perfectly designed, always logical, always repeatable, and makes perfect sense! How can you call that haphazard?"

Ok, allow me to demonstrate. Come up to the front of the class. On my desk, you'll find 5 pencils. Take 7 of them and bring them here to the podium.

"I can't! If there are only 5, then how can I bring you 7?"

What, you can't bring me -2 pencils?

As I said, haphazard. Following the rigid logical rules of mathematics can easily result in answers that have no real world counterpart. The point I'm trying to make here is that math is only useful when it provides an accurate description of the real world and its processes. It has no intrinsic value of its own.

So, what does all of this have to do with reconciling the biblical age of the earth with the scientific age?

Everything.

We'll talk about age as a dimension in Part 2.