CapitalistImperialistPig

It's been a warmish Spring on the Arctic Ocean, and melting is well underway, with the Bering and Okhotsk Seas already almost completely ice free.  There is one big cold spot though - Northeastern Canada.  There was a huge snowfall there this Winter, and even as snow is rapidly vanishing in Alaska, Western Canada, Siberia, and even on the Arctic Ocean itself, snow and cold persist there. Is this likely to have a significant effect on the melt season?  Beats me, but Hudson bay melt is a bit slow, but it always melts completely.  Some of the thickest ice likes to pile up in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, so that might be affected. Final melt out is depends on unpredictable weather, but if I had to guess, I would predict a top three melt out for this year.

US Constitution, Amendment II:  A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. The gun rights people have largely or completely ignored the first two parts of the Second Amendment.  Clearly, the nation is failing by not adequately regulating the Militia.  I have a few modest proposals: 1)All gun purchasers would immediately be inducted to the National Militia, assigned a identification, required to undergo basic training, and assigned to a unit. 2)All members of the Militia would be be required to undergo monthly and annual training, and be subject to call up when required for service in our wars or other national service. 3)Dismissal from the Militia for disloyalty, threatening behavior or other indiscipline would require forfeiture of all arms.

In astrophysics, star clusters are birthing centers for stars, fed by the collapse of giant molecular clouds.  In genomics, star clusters are a bit different, but have a similar impact on births.  The diversity of the Y-chromosome DNA (inherited solely from the male line) is vastly less than that of the mitochondrial DNA (inherited only from the female line).  In historical times, star clusters are associated with some famous warlords, for example Genghis Khan, who seems to have passed his Y on to several million living men.  His star cluster is the pattern of Y-DNA seen in present day populations. Such star clusters are the signature of profoundly hierarchical societies, where a small number of men dominate the right to reproduce.  Older and larger star clusters are known, which predate history so we can't know exactly whom the fathers were.  We do know, though, that most of them lived about 5000 years ago. From ancient DNA combined with archaeology, ...

Gerard Alexander, a professor of political science at University of Virginia, published an article in today's NYT entitled:  Liberals, You’re Not as Smart as You Think You Are.   I can easily believe that, especially when I get caught in the self-referential loop of thinking that I'm not as smart as I think I am.  I am a liberal, at least compared to today's conservatives, of course, but rather than wrestle with the implied endless loop, let me just consider other liberals.  I know a lot of them, and many are not as smart as they think they are.  Actually, quite a few aren't very smart at all. It's not exactly a logical corollary, but should I conclude that conservatives are not as stupid as I they they are?  Or that some of them are smart?  Well, that hasn't been my experience, but the laws of probability would seem to disagree.  I'm talking about the die-hard Trumpophiles here, not the so-called conservatives in the never Trump camp. Prof. A...

A black female grad student at Yale fell asleep in her residence hall's common room.  Another, white, female, student confronted her and called the cops, claiming that the first grad student didn't belong there.  After the police arrived, the black woman established her right to be there, the white woman was admonished, and people went on their way, but the offended student was properly outraged and the press picked up the story.  It happened that the same white student had previously called the cops on another black Yale student in the same building. Naturally the woman who made the two unjustified calls is going to be subjected to some brutal internet shaming, and, if she has any sense, has cancelled or blocked all her social media accounts.  Despite her bad behavior, I have some sympathy for this woman, who seems to be, at the least, a bit of a case of failure to launch.  She apparently has two undergraduate engineering degrees and a J.D. and is a member o...

OK, I'm not really going to talk about the economics of climate policy but about people who talk about the economics of climate policy - mostly William Connolley, AKA, The Stoat. Dr. C is fond of complaining about the weak grasp global warming alarmists (like me) have of economics.   I, on the other hand, tend to think that his economics is sometimes crackpot tinged, and I notice that when backed into a corner he tends to disavow relevant expertise.  His latest is entitled "Why Liberal Media Need Conservative Columnists."   He cites an example, but but from what I can tell, his example doesn't seem very typical of conservative columnists I have seen, who mostly are either denialists or are utterly untypical of the current American right. What are the supposed gems these conservative columnists might unearth?  Number one seems to be the discount rate - the idea of evaluating the costs of current policies in terms of the present value of money and its hypothesized va...

Not quite 70 years ago Astronomer  Jan Oort looked at the trajectories of long period comets and deduced that they came from between 10,000 and 100,000 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun (An AU is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun.  1 AU is about 150 million km, and 100,000 AU is a bit more than 1/3 the distance to the nearest star).  Moreover, he pointed out the fact that such comets could only survive a few passes through the inner Solar System without either being swallowed by the Sun or being expelled completely from the Solar System implied that there must be a vast cloud of about a trillion of them out there.  Orbital velocities at that distance are so small (a couple of meters/sec) that a passing star or galactic tides can send a few of them into the inner Solar System or out into interstellar space. So where did they come from and how did they get there?  It's clear, pointed out Oort, that they weren't manufactured in situ.  The Sol...