Unfortunately, they neglect a critical fact:

I’ll leave the conclusions to the reader, but it should be noted that at some point these two lines cross (and may already have done so).

To avoid a collision between the two, we are left with this graph:

Nota bene: The first graph can be interpreted in various ways. The most common way, which I am addressing here, is to conflate the economy with resource consumption. This connection isn’t inherent.

Well, it’s spring. We found Skunk Cabbage blooming at Metea this afternoon. Skunk Cabbage is always the first flower in this area. Harbinger of Spring should be up in a week or so, followed by everything else. Here are some snapshots of flowers found in the floodplain of a little seasonal stream that feeds into Cedar Creek.

With the TV and newspapers constantly referencing medal counts, I thought it would be interesting to come up with a good measure of how well each country performed. The problem with medal counts is that it gives an advantage to large countries that enter a number of athletes. I am much more impressed when a small or poor country enters a couple athletes who perform better than expected than I am by professional athletes from larger countries. One way create a combined score would be to give 3 points for gold, 2 for silver, 1 for bronze, then add the points up by country and divide by the number of athletes from that country. A better way would be something like:

Where:
n == number of athletes in an event
a_p == the finishing rank of an athlete (1 = gold)
a == the number of athletes a nation entered in an event
s == all events
c_a == the number of events a nation entered

This will give an average score for each country, compensating for some countries entering more athletes. While watching a couple events, I started scraping the results from the Vancouver 2010 website. This took a longer than expected, so I never got around to doing the calculations. Since I haven’t seen the results posted as nice clean CSV files anywhere, I’ll post them for others to use. I ran out of time before including the results for curling and hockey.

Now, if only the Olympics would go back to being amateurs only…

Files:

• 2010 Winter Olympics results spreadsheets (does not include hockey and curling)

The fact is, however, that the historical conflict between science and Christianity is historical only in the sense that it is the creation of historians.

This is an important point that needs to be understood by more people. Far from being the historical Christian view, Young Earth Creationism did not gain wide popularity until after the 1961 publication of Whitcomb and Morris’ book The Genesis Flood. The spread of the ideas in Whitcomb and Morris’ book contributed to the wide acceptance of a distorted view of the early debates over natural selection. This view has become so prevalent that even many christians do not realize that the Young Earth Creationism and a war between religion and science is not the historical Christian perspective, but a recent development. Livingstone’s book is a welcome contribution to correcting this myth.

Now, to find a good book on Galileo…

BibTeX citation:

@book{Livingstone:1987,
	Author = {David N. Livingstone},
	Publisher = {William B. Eerdmans and Scottish Academic Press},
	Title = {Darwin's Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter Between
	             Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought},
	Year = {1987}
}

BibTeX ref:

@book{lindeburg1998,
	Edition = {8},
	Editor = {Michael R Lindeburg},
	Publisher = {Professional Publications},
	Title = {Engineer-In-Training Reference Manual},
	Year = {1998}
}

Since there are already so many loopholes, this ruling may not make much of a practical difference. But, still, it is a dangerous continuation of `corporate personhood’ toward corporate sovereignty.

Suggested reading:

• Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute)
• Supreme Court Rips Up Campaign Finance Laws (NPR)
• What Is the First Amendment For? by Stanley Fish (NYTimes)
• Paul Szep
• Slowpoke

The story is based on press release from the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion advocacy group, originally a division of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. I have no reason to doubt the published numbers, but the press release makes the mistake of over-interpreting the data to agree with predetermined conclusions. The annual change in the numbers from 2005 to 2006 isn’t large enough to draw a conclusion, yet the press release attributes the change to policies they oppose. This is what Darrell Huff would call playing up numbers, and the wording could be considered cherry-picking. This is exactly the same kind of mistake I see every slightly cool day during the summer when someone (often in the news) claims that it disproves anthropogenic global warming. While it is possible that the Guttmacher Institute’s conclusion is correct, the evidence is not yet strong enough to make a conclusion. The Guttmacher Institute’s press release presents an explanation for 1995 through 2006, leaving out an explanation of the data from 1986 to 1995. This is a problem because there is a larger unexplained peak in 1988 and the decline begins in 1989, not 1995. At the present time, without presenting stronger evidence, an equally plausible explanation is that the 2005 to 2006 change merely represents the expected annual fluctuations around a steady state, and that the slow in the decline is simply due to approaching the steady state. To make their conclusions will require a longer trend, and to explain the prior changes, not just assume the change is due to policies they oppose. It is important to remember to actually look at data and to know that the world is more complex than advocacy groups pretend.

Update 2010-02-02: A new study published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine provides evidence that the Guttmacher Institute’s attribution of the changes in the abortion rate is likely incorrect. Unlike the Guttmacher Institute’s conclusion, this is published in a peer-reviewed journal. (Found through a story in the Washington Post.)

Since they are in the business of selling gasoline-powered automobiles, the manufacturers understandably are reluctant to come out and publicly announce the obvious solution to air-poisoning by the gasoline engine: Get rid of the gasoline engine.

On the other hand, every member of the industry is actively engaged in trying to do just that.

–W.E. Butterworth, Wheels and Pistons

While editing down the number of books I own, I found Wheels and Pistons: The Story of the Automobile, a history written for middle schoolers that my grandmother gave me years ago. It is a 1971 book championing the car and car companies, and how the number of cars on the road and miles driven demonstrates the USA is better than the Soviet Union. The chapter on the future is interesting. It mostly talks about turbine and steam engines, but also mentions electric and hybrid gas-electric cars, showing a couple Ford and GM experimental cars.

From the pictures, you can see that GM was treating electric and hybrid technology as a play technology, for use in toy cars. The examples of turbine engines in the book are installed in production cars. This fits well with my understanding of the history of the automobile, where GM has kept up enough research on modern technology to not fall too far behind, but does so in a way that they never have to actually sell a car that could cut into gasoline car production. The book also shows a similar Ford of England Comuta electric car.

It is worth to noting that Wheels and Pistons was published two years before the first oil embargo, and that GM still does not sell an electric or viable hybrid car. (I’m not counting the EV1 beause they were destroyed at the end of their leases, or their current hybrid options because of sub-par performance.)

This is a good time to put in another recommendation to read Edwin Black’s Internal Combustion, an excellent history of the car.

Sources:

@book{butterworth1971,
	Author = {W. E. Butterworth},
	Publisher = {Four Winds Press},
	Title = {Wheels and Pistons: The Story of the Automobile},
	Year = {1971}
}

@book{black2006,
	Address = {New York},
	Author = {Edwin Black},
	Publisher = {St. Martin's Press},
	Title = {Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments
	 Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives},
	Year = {2006}
}

Static friction is greater than kinetic friction.^*

In other words, if you aren’t sliding, it is easy to stay not sliding. Once you start sliding, it is hard to stop.

So stop stomping on the pedals when you drive. You’ll just make your wheels spin or lock and slide. When you spin your wheels, you are just turning the snow into an ice slick, making it harder for you and everyone after you to start or stop. So please go easy on the pedal mashing.

Suggested reading:

• Friction on Eric Weisstein’s World of Physics
• Car Talk’s Official Click and Clack Winter Driving Rules

^*Except for some cases you probably won’t encounter.

This is certainly nicer than the standard three phase light, but I’m not convinced that it is practically better than a four phase light. I prefer the simplicity and reliability of a four phase signal to the extra complication and unneeded detail of the Stanković signal. Still, it is good to see someone else promoting the idea of better traffic signals. I’m not sure how many American drivers are alert and courteous enough to take advantage of better signals, but there are probably enough that we could still see some improvement in traffic flow, saving gas.

Source:
A Better Understanding of Stoplights through A Stoplight for the Progress Bar Generation