Iceland and Teddy

Hi everyone,

The World's Greatest Geophysicist (hereafter shortened to WGG) and I continue to have an amazing time in Iceland. As I write this I am in a hotel in Hofn, somewhere in the Southeast of the country.

Amazing scenery - I will be updating and posting my Flickr sets later but in the mean time. Here is the view from just outside my hotel room a few minutes ago. These are two "tongues" of the glacier Vatnajökull.

















To give you an idea of the scale - those two intrusions onto the plain below are approximately 4 km apart, there are two others within view of my hotel room but my camera can't capture them all with a wide angle lens! This is the largest glacier in Iceland and you can't even see the main body of it!

As to what else we have seen, again, I will be updating Flickr but here goes a nice picture of the WGG and a waterfall - pretty typical which tells you how remarkable this place is.
















Alas the world continues even when we are on vacation. I note with interest and condolences the passing of the Lion of the Senate for our US cousins. I think he will be missed by many of his fellow citizens and, unfortunately, condemned by many others. Consider this, his brother was President, his other brother was Attorney General, then Senator, then Presidential Candidate. Both were assassinated. Neither had their name on as much legislation as he did. There is not one piece of social legislation for the past 40 years which does not have his name on it somewhere.

Joe Biden, as is appropriate, says it best.

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Not to say this was an unimpeachable record....

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32564662/

And he was the man who ran for President without really knowing why and may have helped ensure that Jimmy Carter was a one term president.

Finally, let's turn it over to Chris Mathews - I can't match the man...

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Thanks, Teddy. Our American cousins and the rest of the world will never find your like again. Rest in peace.

Paul

Vacation, guilt, frustration and weight gain!

Hi Everyone,

No matter the seriousness of this blog's title, I am on vacation in Iceland with my girlfriend Barbara. We are having a great time and today visited the famous Blue Lagoon. It has been just super so far and tomorrow we continue our tour with a visit to Thingvillr. I will post a few more notes from here as I go forward and will throw in the occasional picture. Such as the two which follow:



































My guilt comes from the same place as the frustration and weight gain. I was originally going to run the Reykjavik Marathon this weekend but having to commute to and from Lagos since the spring has hurt my ability to train and as such, after 4 1/2 marathons this year, I am afraid my season is over. Just can't train there. Unfortunately, that means that I am frustrated and have gained weight. I am scheduled to return to Nigeria twice more and then the 2010 season will begin - stay tuned. In the mean time I have to get some sort of training thing going and am working on a plan as we speak. Stay tuned.

I posted an entire photoset from the Blue Lagoon to Flickr - here is the link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/12290600@N06/sets/72157622103493384/

Blog at you soon!

Paul

Common Sense.

Hi everyone,

I like common sense. Generally I am pretty good with it but being male, as many women I know will like to point out, I may have a gender based disposition toward not having as much of it as all would like. Now, of course, common sense can be misleading. There are things which appear to defy common sense - just look at something like quantum mechanics - nothing common sensical happening there. Hell just look at stats and probability - it might seem to be common sense that if you have a room with 50 people in it that the odds of having two people with the same birthday are pretty low but in fact they are nearly 100%! Common sense? Well, it don't help you here. In fact the probability curve is shown in the following article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

Another example of common sense. Eating garlic. A geophysicist of some renown and I were having dinner tonight and some mixed olives were on the table. Amongst the olives were some lovely cloves of marinaded raw garlic. Now I like raw garlic but given that the aforementioned geophysicist and I will be sleeping close to each other for the next little while, it occurred to me to ask if it would be ok if I sampled said garlic. The answer, alas and predictably was "no", but common sense was executed with me asking first. Hence my next few days are likely going to be nicer than they would be otherwise.

Other common sense from this evening. Ketchup. New, well, last couple of years, ketchup bottles are now plastic, squeezable, and have eliminated the whole issue with the inefficient delivery of squashed tomato waste matter. Hey, leverage gravity! Common sense!

So where am I going with this, Science. Science works. To paraphrase Carl Sagan - if someone comes down with cholera you can do a couple of things. Wait for them to get better - some will, some won't. You can pray for them - same results as just waiting, measurably (and, yes, such trials have been done). Or, you could give them 500 mg of tetracycline every 4 hours for 10 days. Guess which will work? Want to predict the position of Jupiter in the night sky 10 years from now (or 100, or 1000)? You can ask someone to consult some crystals? You can ask a psychic? You can ask an Astronomer - he or she will give you an accurate answer. They others might too, but I bet they would consult astronomical tables to do so? Science works.

Pray for rain in a drought? Won't do much.

Use pure water to cure cancer? Won't do much.

Stick needles in yourself and rotate them around because Chairman Mao couldn't afford health care for his country and invoked "ancient knowledge"? Well, back when the ancient knowledge was acquired people lived to be 30 so the knowledge is very suspect.

All this brings me to "Organic Farming" - please listen to the following podcast, do a bit of reading and get away from this putrid marketing ploy. There is no difference between the nutritional value of "Organic Produce" and regular produce. Use some common sense!

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4166

Have a great day and enjoy those "non-organic" apples!

Paul

How do you spell "Hypocrisy"?

Hi Bloggerets,

I am surprised you asked the question - back when I grew up we knew how to spell. Well, not me, exactly, but other people who don't have to rely on Spell Check when they actually remember. In any case, the answer to the question of how to spell "Hypocrisy" is:

S A R A H P A L I N

Now, I admit to being smug on this subject but here is why. I live in a country that:

• Has a single payer health care system
• Guarantees the rights of all citizens to access basic care
• Does not charge for care
• Has guidelines about the quality of care

Further, in my life the following things are true:

1. I picked my own doctor
2. I have picked my own specialists
3. I have never waited any length of time for an appointment or a referral
4. My life expectancy is better than that of my "American Cousins"
5. The infant mortality rate in my country is better than that of my "American Cousins"

Finally, I don't have a major political figure in my country who is a Doctor and doesn't believe in the basic, most fundamental theory of biology - Evolution. Further no member of my Parliament would choose to diagnose a brain dead woman that he had never met for political purposes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo_case. Thank the universe that Bill Frist is an American phenomenon and not an apparition from Canada. Our Doctors try to "do no harm"...

Which brings me to Sarah, someone who could be best described by Tom Waits as a " piece of used jet trash ". Let's be plain spoken, this is a nasty bit of work who's only redeeming quality is that she is stupid.

Here is Sarah on Obama's Death Panel: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32340009/ns/politics-white_house/ - notice the words "Downright Evil".

Here is Sarah on the dialog about health care shortly thereafter, calling for "Civil Discussion": http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32362219/ns/politics-more_politics/

Hmmm... Sounds like somebody is smokin' somethin'. Or just stupid - same effect.

Here is the reality, this is what the legislation in question says:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32364264/ns/politics-more_politics/

Wow. You know, if Terry Schaivo had the opportunity to have a Doctor to work with her to discuss end of life options, as I have had with mine, free of charge, perhaps she wouldn't have ruined the career of Bill Frist by forcing him to mis-diagnose her over video.

Look - Americans - get with the program. You are retarded when it comes to health care and the fact that you have Sarah Palin as a leading political figure indicates that your retardation may be fatal. Work hard to get over this...

Paul

A space science blog posting from Abuja, Nigeria

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to post a new blog which will hopefully not contain anything that my readers consider inflamatory or otherwise annoying. Well, actually, I just want to write a space science blog and your emotional state is your own business...

Interesting article on the Kepler Mission. To refresh you all, and this is exciting stuff, Kepler is up in space pointing at one particular section of the sky which is continuously images. It is looking at the brightness of all the stars in that section of the sky. Now, if a small planet orbiting goes in front of the star, from our point of view, Kepler should see a very small decrease in the amount of light coming from the star and when the planet goes behind the star, Kepler should see a smaller decrease in light as the planet's reflected light is now not visable. Clear as mud, well, it does indeed work. We have identified a planet around another star which does exhibit the orbital orientation necessary for this to work and we used this as a test case for Kepler. Voila! Things behaive as expected - which is why we all love science, isn't it. Unless of course you don't believe in the scientific method, of course - which I know all the bloggerets out there do! Right!

So, here is the article from MSNBC, which has a great science section (more on that later): http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32319679/ns/technology_and_science-space/

So, what else to tell you about... Hmmm... Well, how about some NASA news? I have a bit of a long winded story to get us to an article here but there is no point in apologising for it, we have to follow it though from start to finish.

I own a very cool piece of technology, a Sony PRS-700, PRS stands for Personal Reading System. This is basically an eBook which holds some vast number of tomes, more if you stick in extra memory (which I have) and I brought it with me, as I always do, here to Africa preloaded with a bunch of reading - keeps me out of the bars, mostly. Anyway, two great books I brought with me this time: Censoring Science by Mark Bowen (http://www.mark-bowen.com/book_cs.html) and Unscientific America by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum (http://www.unscientificamerica.com/), the nice folks who brought our American Cousins ScienceDebate2008 during the US Election last year. Anyway a feature of both of these books is that they talk about the marginalization of science, and in fact its outright censorship, during the dark ages (AKA Bush Years - 2000 to 2008 AD). Interestingly Michael Griffin, the head of NASA in the later part of the Bush Administration came across as a bit of an ideolog and coward in both of these books, certainly moreso in the first but alluded to, I think, in the second as well.

Griffin, as you may remember, was the architect of the Constellation Program and a contributor to the only decent thing Bush did, his Vision for Space Exploration. Well, after reading the books, I begin to understand why the Obama administration so wanted rid of the guy - his clear brilliance aside. He was a critical player in censoring information with respect to climate change as well eviserating the planetary research budget for NASA - he even (according to Bowen) was clandestinely responsible for the reshaping of NASA's mission statement (http://www.physorg.com/news72971590.html). Well, perhaps we are well rid of him but I must say, his approach to manned spaceflight is one that I agree with. Saying all of that, and we are finally getting to the end of this tortured tale here, NASA is reviewing that with the Augustine Commission which is to present its findings at the end of this month. As a taste, here is an article on their short list options:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32307312/ns/technology_and_science-space/

I personally like the "Dash out of LEO", "Lunar Global" and "Mars Direct" scenarios but would prefer "Lunar Global" and would least like "DooLEO". We shall see...

One of the other things that both books, particularly Unscientific America discuss is the inability of the population to understand and relate to science and, further, to fail to see the benefits therein. This is partly due to the free market nature of news broadcasting and which caters to individual interests which are more "News you can use" or celebrity stuff (don't get me started about Michael Jackson - I am upset enough about the skinny on Michael Griffin) and are eliminate thier science departments. The MSNBC Science Page is a refreshing oasis of knowlege in a Demon Haunted World (apologies to the late great Carl Sagan).

Well, got to go, space cadets, catch you when I get to the Northern Hemisphere, or maybe sooner.

Paul

Happy day - we have some Shatner for y'all!

Hi everyone,

If I can have the juxtaposition of ridiculing Sarah Palin and William Shatner doing anything, well, it makes my month.

Here thanks to Conan O'Brian, we have "Master Thespian" William Shatner, AKA Captain James T. Kirk (whom James T. Mackin may or may not be named after ;-) ), T. J. Hooker, and wonderfully Denny Crane, reading the Tweets (or in this case Twits) of Sarah Palin, AKA (with apologies to J. K. Rowling) "The Governor who ran away"

Over to you, Captain!

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Was it good for you, too?

Paul

Happy day - we have some Shatner for y'all!

Hi everyone,

If I can have the juxtaposition of ridiculing Sarah Palin and William Shatner doing anything, well, it makes my month.

Here thanks to Conan O'Brian, we have "Master Thespian" William Shatner, AKA Captain James T. Kirk (whom James T. Mackin may or may not be named after ;-) ), T. J. Hooker, and wonderfully Denny Crane, reading the Tweets (or in this case Twits) of Sarah Palin, AKA (with apologies to J. K. Rowling) "The Governor who ran away"

Over to you, Captain!

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Was it good for you, too?

Paul