A web site about physics and other things
vttoth — February 27th, 2010
Apparently, the earthquake in Chile was the 5th largest on record in the whole world since 1990. I guess I know three out of the other four: Chile in 1960, Alaska in 1964, and Indonesia in 2004. Ah, there’s the fourth (thanks, Wikipedia): Kamchatka in 1952.
Chile is supposedly well prepared. But how can you be well prepared when the earthquake destroys basic infrastructure?
Categories: History, Physics | No Comments
vttoth — February 27th, 2010
According to a Web site found by New Scientist’s Feedback page, turnips are not very interesting, and have in fact been that way for at least fourteen years.
Categories: Internet | No Comments
vttoth — February 22nd, 2010
It was a rare night-time landing, but Endeavour is safely back home. The sight of an open flame from that venting on top, only visible at night, is positively weird: combined with the sound effects, it’s as if it was an overheated steam locomotive, not a space plane huffing and puffing on that runway.
Four more Shuttle flights to go, one of them by Endeavour. After that, for the first time since the 1960s, the United States will have no manned space flight capability. Hopefully not for long.
Categories: Space | No Comments
vttoth — February 18th, 2010
Imagine… a person leaves behind a politically charged manifesto, and then flies an airplane into a crowded office building with the intent of killing himself along with many other people. A terrorist?
Not according to the United States government, who promptly assured us that the incident that occurred today in Austin, Texas, is not terrorism-related.
So what exactly defines terrorism? Does the perpetrator have to be, in addition to a politically motivated suicidal murderer, also brown-skinned and of the Muslim persuasion?
Categories: Aviation, Politics | No Comments
vttoth — February 18th, 2010
What a remarkably boring weather forecast:
I wonder if I am allowed to extrapolate from this trend and conclude that the temperature will remain -1 degrees Centigrade, like, forever.
Categories: Weather and Climate | No Comments
vttoth — February 17th, 2010
While it may not feel like it if you live in the US or Western Europe, this has been a very warm January, the fourth warmest on record:
It was certainly warmer than usual (and a lot dryer than usual!) up here in Ottawa. Not that I am complaining.
Some proponents of anthropogenic global warming will point at this result as proof that global warming is “scientific fact”. The plot tells a more nuanced story. In the short term (last 8 years or so) there’s no warming trend at all, if anything there has been slight cooling. Prior to that, there was a roughly 30-year warming period. One other warming period that is very similar in nature occurred in the early half of the 20th century. In between, there was some cooling, just not enough to offset the earlier gains, hence the more recent warming period started with an already higher temperature, and we see an overall warming trend across the 130-year span of this plot.
But is that really a long term trend? Or is it just another periodicity that we simply cannot discern because the data set it too short in duration? This is the question that those “proxy” temperature estimates from tree rings, ice cores and whatnot are supposed to answer. How reliable are those? How representative? That is a key question, which may determine, for instance, if the infamous medieval warm period was comparable to the current warming or not.
Categories: Weather and Climate | No Comments
vttoth — February 17th, 2010
I’ve been reading about a 60-year old show trial, the so-called Standard case (link in Hungarian), held in Communist Hungary, and decided to search for contemporary English-language articles. In the process, I came across something delightful: A 1953 issue of the Ottawa Evening Citizen. Its front-page headline: An incredible “Red offer” to free an imprisoned British businessman in exchange for a female Communist terrorist awaiting the gallows in Malaya.
The British businessman was eventually released a year later. I have no idea what happened to the Malayan woman. As to the other accused in the Standard case, several were executed, others received heavy prison terms… after the 1956 revolution, they were all released, but not rehabilitated until 1990, when Hungary’s Supreme Court declared the convictions null and void, as “no crime was committed”.
Meanwhile, I learned for instance, that in 1953 Ottawa, the daily newspaper listed two television stations: one in Montreal, one in Syracuse, N.Y., both of them broadcasting only in the afternoon and evening hours.
Categories: History, Local Ottawa | No Comments
vttoth — February 16th, 2010
According to a Radio Free Europe journalist, even today, many of Afghanistan’s small intellectual elite still speak Russian, a legacy of one of the few good things brought to Afghanistan by the Soviet invasion, the education of many Afghans in Soviet institutes of higher learning. What will our legacy be in Afghanistan 20 years into the future, I wonder?
Categories: History, Politics | No Comments
vttoth — February 15th, 2010
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a nifty Web site called panopticlick: it shows you just how unique your browser is. Even browser configurations that I thought were surely non-unique (such as a vanilla Internet Explorer setup on a Windows XP virtual machine or the off-the-shelf Mozilla Firefox that is installed on my Linux server but almost never used) turned out to have unique signatures, for which plugins, most notably Flash, are largely to blame. And you thought the [insert name of favorite most-hated intelligence agency here] needed cookies or some other tricks to track your every move!
Categories: Computers, Internet | No Comments
vttoth — February 15th, 2010
Someone just called my attention to this BBC interview with Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA), which has been at the center of the Climategate e-mails.
It has been suggested that Jones admitted that there has been no global warming since 1995, or that he made an amazing retreat. So I was curious as to what he actually said. Here are a few tidbits, hopefully not taken out of context:
Q. Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?
A. [...T]he warming rates for all 4 periods [NB: Jones counted 1975-1998 and 1975-2009 as two separate periods] are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.
Q. Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?
A. Yes, but only just. [... The] trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level.
Q. Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?
A. No. [...] The trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant.
Q. There is a debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global or not.
A. There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.
Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm that today, then current warmth would be unprecedented.
Q. If you agree that there were similar periods of warming since 1850 to the current period, and that the MWP is under debate, what factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made?
A. The fact that we can’t explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing [...].
Q. When scientists say “the debate on climate change is over”, what exactly do they mean [...] ?
A. [...] I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this.
Meanwhile, another error in the IPCC report has been uncovered, this one about the size of the Dutch countryside that is under sea level (26%, not 55%). An inconsequential error by itself, but apparently, it was enough for Robert Watson, former IPCC chief, to call for an investigation of this apparent bias, namely that all the errors uncovered so far exaggerate the presumed magnitude and effect of the warming.
So who can we believe? I don’t want to join the climate skeptics (at the very least, not without getting a hefty retainer from an oil company first!) but obviously, the choir hasn’t been completely honest with us either. What does the raw data say? Well, according to the UK Met Office, there has been warming in the last 160 years:
However, if I accept the short-term trend as just that, short-term, what we’re left with is a long-term warming of about 1 degree over 160 years… which is about 0.06 degrees per decade, about half the decadal figure during the last (1975-2002) warming period, a period that is by no means unique, according to Jones.
So… what am I to think?
Categories: Weather and Climate | No Comments
