Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Iran releases American hostages; Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy innaugurated as President.
Obviously, there are people who sincerely view themselves as Muslims who have committed horrible acts in the name of Islam. We Muslims can make the case that their actions are not based on any part of the faith but on their own political agenda. But they are Muslims, no denying that.
However, and this will probably shock many, so you might want to take a breath: Overwhelmingly, those who have committed terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe aren’t Muslims. Let’s give that a moment to sink in.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
Breakfast Tune: Alison Brown Quartet – Mambo Banjo
Today in History
Soviets proclaim end to Leningrad siege; Robert F. Scott reaches South Pole; Boston Strangler sentenced; Rudyard Kipling dies.
Lowell P. Weicker is about the last Republican I respected and voted for. While Wikipedia labels him a “radical centrist” he’s a flat out Liberal Republican of the Northeast Nelson Rockefeller type that used to be common but now seems as extinct as the Passenger Pigeon.
Readers of a certain age will remember him best from the Senate Watergate Hearings way back when the Neoliberal consensus didn’t rule D.C. and rape and pillage our country for Oligarchs and Billionaires while setting up a Stasi State to repress democracy and dissent.
But the story of Lowell is instructive in how such a situation developed.
Weicker was the First Selectman (Mayor equivalent) of the Town of Greenwich and was absolutely as beholden as you might think to the Hedge Funds and WWE of Connecticut’s Gold Coast.
He replaced Thomas Dodd who was censured in 1967 for pocketing campaign funds and was by almost all accounts a vain and vapid fool who let himself get beat by Prescott Bush and then re-elected to the other seat. Yes, he isChris Dodd’s father Luke.
Lowell won in a 3 way with Tom as an independent and Joe Duffey as the endorsed Democrat. What eventually got him booted from the Senate was only partly his participation in Watergate (Nixon endorsed him) but mostly the fact that Republican Conservatives viewed him (correctly) as a Liberal (Americans for Democratic Action rated Weicker 20 percentage points more liberal than his fellow Connecticut senator, “Democratic” Chris Dodd) and were unhappy that he wanted to make the State Party more inclusive. He was defeated in 1988 when conservatives including William and James Buckley and the Bushes defected en masse to Joe LIEberman who is much more a conservative Republican than a Democrat and is the single slimiest most unctuous politician it’s ever been my displeasure to meet.
In 1990 Weicker ran for Governor as an Independent in another 3 way against John Rowland (who eventually spent a year and a day in Danbury, as we in Connecticut like to say even though he served his time in Loretto PA where John Kiriakou is currently the only CIA Officer imprisoned in the CIA Torture Scandal and for whistleblowing not for actually torturing people or authorising torture) and Bruce Morrison.
Now nationally the narrative is that Lowell paid the price for implementing a State Income Tax which lowered our incredibly regressive Sales Tax but also eliminated a Commuter Tax, a State Capital Gains Tax, and substantially reduced an Unearned Income Tax (told you he was close to his Hedge Fund backers). It was no doubt incredibly unpopular with some, but as a native Nutmegger let me tell you that’s not what people were talking about on Election Day.
Both the Attorney General, Richard Blumenthal, and the Legislature’s Transportation Committee — exercising its rarely used powers to issue subpoenas and compel testimony under oath — have begun investigations into the charges and counter-charges between the Governor and his former protege.
If the investigations bear out Mr. Goldberg’s charges that the administration circumvented its own established procedures in awarding the contract, legislators say, the implications would shake Connecticut’s government and could lead to an overhaul of the contract laws and a legal challenge by the losing company, at the very least.
Mr. Goldberg and a contract committee in his department both recommended a Connecticut company for the seven-and-a-half-year emissions testing contract. Besides being a local business, the Connecticut company, Environmental Systems Products Inc. of East Granby, was also the low bidder. Mr. Weicker overruled Mr. Goldberg and chose a vendor from Arizona, Envirotest Systems Corporation, which had already being doing emissions testing for Connecticut and which the Governor said had greater financial stability than the home-grown competitor.
Lowell chose not to run again leaving the field open to Rowland about whom the major surprise was that he was so cheap to bribe, but the moral of the story is-
Which (finally) brings us to the point- our State Composer, Charles Ives.
Ives was an insurance salesman born in Danbury, an actuary who invented creative ways to structure life insurance for estate planning and wrote a book, Life Insurance with Relation to Inheritance Tax, that made him world famous in Poland and Hartford.
You’re not Polish or from Hartford? That’s OK, he was mostly thoroughly ignored throughout his lifetime except by his industry peers who found his musical avocation both amusing and confusing because it was cutting edge avant garde.
His Dad was a Band Leader, much like John Philip Sousa whom we discussed last week. When Charles was a child he’d frequently march behind the band but near enough the next one hear the tunes from each. Carried over in his compsitional style, his signature was having different parts of his orchestra play completely diferent melodies, harmonies, and time signatures which sometimes synced but frequently didn’t and resolve it all at the end of the piece. His works are ferociously difficult to play and challenging to listen to.
Ives frequently chose patriotic themes and popular marches, tunes, and hymns as his source material, seeking like most late Romantics to evoke a mood or a memory rather than simply displaying technique thought his compositions are technically demanding and utilize “polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatoric elements, and quarter tones.”
Now this made him world famous in Poland (only a different one) and his compositions highly regarded by academics and fellow composers, but most musicians would look at them and say- “what the heck is this rubbish?”. Independently wealthy he funded the works of others and when awarded a Pulitzer in 1946 for his 3rd Symphony (The Camp Meeting) he gave it all away saying- “prizes are for boys, and I’m all grown up.”
There is a great Man living in this Country – a composer. He has solved the problem how to preserve one’s self-esteem and to learn. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives.
Speaking of Leonard Bernstein, in 1951 he gave Charles Ives’ Symphony #2 its debut with the New York Philharmonic. Here’s a performance of that which, while complete, is visually uninteresting.
Ives heard it on his cook’s radio (he was a FIRE guy, independently wealthy, I told you).
Later Bernstein performed it again with the Bavarian Radio Symphony and gave a little chat about Ives-
That full performance, in three parts, which is visually interesting if you like that sort of thing, is available below along with the Obligatories, News, and Blogs.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Operation Desert Storm begins; Space Shuttle Columbia takes off for last time; Prohibition takes effect.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Supervillains
It’s quite impressive that the prisoners in Gitmo are the masterminds behind everything bad that happens in the world. Maybe it isn’t a prison camp at all, but an Evil Lair Of Evil, a base of operations for all terrorism everywhere. If so, we probably should close it, no?
Last week, we shared a heart-wrenching tale: After barely escaping recent bush fires, koalas were so badly burnt that they needed special treatment to heal their paws — including hand-sewn cotton mittens to cover their dressings.
But because of the (unsurprising) viral nature of our post and others like it, the International Fund for Animal Welfare now has plenty of mittens. So now they ask volunteers to turn their attention to other animals displaced and injured by the fires.
Kangaroos, possums and wallabies have also been rescued, the IFAW writes on its blog, and many of the survivors are orphaned baby animals. The joeys need to be kept warm and safe in pouch-like environments (which, like diapers, need to be changed several times a day), so sewers wishing to lend a needle can use this pattern to help out.
With a looming showdown over net neutrality bumping up against his internet-heavy State of the Union address, President Barack Obama continued his weeklong dance with telecommunications giants on Wednesday in Iowa, unveiling plans to challenge state laws that limit the expansion of high-speed broadband access.
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“In too many places across America, some big companies are doing everything they can to keep out competitors,” Obama said. “Today I am saying we are going to change that. Enough is enough.”
After privacy advocates pushed back on cybersecurity measures announced by Obama ahead of Tuesday’s speech before Congress, open internet advocates are already pleased with the president’s plan to write a letter to the Federal Communications Commission, asking the agency to look at how it can undo restrictions on municipal internet service.
Large telecommunications companies have aggressively lobbied to rein in the growth of these smaller providers. In 19 states, these efforts have proved successful, with laws in place to block, or slow the growth of, municipal internet service providers.
Holmes Wilson, co-director of the nonprofit digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, told the Guardian that Obama’s broadband rollout is a “a wonderful and obvious step”.
“These prohibitions on municipal broadband were passed lightning-fast through state legislatures with tons of AT&T and cable company money behind them and they are blatantly anti-public,” Wilson said. “If the town wants to get together and try to do better than the local internet provider, why on earth would you want to stop that?”
The answer probably comes down to keeping zebras cool and fending off disease-causing insects that are more common in hotter climates, researchers reported Tuesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
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This “stripe riddle” has puzzled scientists, including Darwin, for over a century. There are five main hypotheses for why zebras have the stripes: to repel insects, to provide camouflage through some optical illusion, to confuse predators, to reduce body temperature, or to help the animals recognize each other.
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One is the “cooling eddy” theory. When air hits a zebra, the currents are stronger and faster over the black parts (since black absorbs more heat than white) and slower over the white. At the juncture of these two opposing airflows, little eddies of air may swirl and serve to cool a zebra’s skin.
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The other idea holds that more stripes may be a barrier against disease, since disease-carrying biting flies, like horseflies, tend to like it hot. Experiments in the field have shown that biting flies don’t like landing on striped surfaces.
“Preliminary examination indicates that the animal may have been butchered by humans,” said Fisher. Bones show what look like tool marks, in places.
The bones are between 10,000 and 14,000 years old. Fisher said once they’ve been donated to the museum the exact age will likely be narrowed to within 200 or 300 years.
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Mastodons, the distant relatives of elephants, lived 10,000 to 14,000 years ago. The animals weighed up to five tons.
There have been about 330 Mastodon bone sites confirmed by experts throughout the state. Most bones have been discovered in the southern half of the lower peninsula. Two sites have been confirmed in the last year.
The first verbal communications, which likely happened 2.5 million years ago, were likely about tool-making.
The study proposes that our human ancestors in the African savannah may have developed a primitive form of language so they could teach each other how to make stone age tools, a crucial skill for survival at the time.
The researchers came up with this conclusion after conducting experiments on teaching the art of Oldowan stone knapping. Starting 2.5 million years ago and for about 700,000 years, the Oldowan stone tools were used to butcher animals. Oldowan stone knapping involved creating butchering flakes by hammering hard rock against basal, flint and other certain types of glassy and volcanic rocks.
By experimenting with five different ways of teaching Oldowan stone knapping skills to over 180 volunteers, Morgan and colleagues found that using spoken communication rather than imitation, gestures or non-verbal presentation, obtains the highest volume and best quality of flakes with least wastage and in the least amount of time.
The murky origins of human speech have long baffled researchers. One of the main sources of confusion stemmed from the curiosity of monkey speech. Monkeys are capable of producing any number of human-like sounds, so called “precursors” to human speech. They can chortle with a speech-like rhythm. They can smack their lips together. And they can produce harmonic tones that almost sound like words. So, the thinking went, monkeys must represent an evolutionary stepping stone on the path to human speech.
But then there was the problem of the great ape. The great ape, which includes gorillas and orangutans and has closer evolutionary ties to humans, could not make like the monkey. As far as researchers knew, it couldn’t make any sounds that sounded like human speech. Its sounds seemed to be emotion-based or involuntary: the “grumphs, gorkums and grumbles,” as told in a new study. That left an unexplained gap of some 25 million years between the monkey speech-rhythms and humans.
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They were perhaps missing an orange, 50-year old orangutan named Tilda. Tilda is a very special ape, for she can do something that has never before been witnessed in a great ape. She can make noises that sound just like talking. The animal, housed at Cologne Zoo in Germany, can click her tongue and smack her lips to make the letters “t,” “p” and “k.” She can also murmur vowel sounds like some sort of invented language out of a science-fiction movie.
A problem with the heat exchanger could cause ammonia to leak into the water loop and then into the American segment of the space station.
The space station consists of two essentially independent segments, one built by Russia, the other by the United States and other nations.
The astronauts put on gas masks, moved into the Russian segment and closed the hatch.
After sifting through the measurements, the managers at mission control let the astronauts return. But then air pressure in the American segment also started to rise. “If you’re leaking ammonia into the water loop and it eventually finds its way to the cabin, you would expect the cabin pressure to go up,” said Michael T. Suffredini, the manager of the space station, in an interview on NASA Television.
The crew evacuated to the Russian segment a second time.
Nonessential systems were turned off to avoid the possibility of overheating but were later gradually restarted.
“Everything is looking pretty normal right now,” James Kelly, an astronaut at mission control, told Barry Wilmore, the station commander, in an update after 8 a.m. Eastern. “It’s a little more positive than we thought before.”
The State Board of Education voted 6-to-2 to withdraw its altered version of the Next Generation Science Standards, which were developed by 26 states, including West Virginia. The changes had been quietly made by a member of the West Virginia board before it adopted the standards in December.
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The board voted to revert to the original standards, which emphasize the scientific consensus on human activity as a cause of climate change, and will adopt those standards after a 30-day comment period, said Gayle Manchin, the board president and wife of United States Senator Joe Manchin III.
“We listened, we learned and, well, I think, grew in our knowledge and understanding,” Ms. Manchin said in an interview. “We all knew at the end of the day more than what we did at the beginning – and that’s what I’d hope for for our students.”
White House officials on Wednesday announced plans to impose new regulations on the oil and gas industry’s emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. The administration’s goal is to cut methane emissions from oil and gas production by up to 45 percent by 2025 from the levels recorded in 2012.
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Environmental advocates have long urged the Obama administration to target methane emissions, and the rules would be the first to do so. Most of the planet-warming greenhouse gas pollution in the United States comes from carbon dioxide, which is produced by burning coal, oil and natural gas. Methane, which leaks from oil and gas wells, accounts for just 9 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas pollution – but it is over 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, so even small amounts of it can have a big impact on global warming.
“This is the biggest opportunity to curb climate change pollution that they haven’t already seized,” said David Doniger, director of the climate and clean air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group.
The oil and gas industry has pushed back against methane regulations, insisting that new rules could stymie a booming industry and that voluntary industrywide standards are sufficient to prevent methane leaks.
The US government has basically declared war over the Sony hacking, offering full-throated support for the beleaguered embarrassed company. Why this one — rather than the countless hacks of corporate networks (including those where credit card data and personal information were compromised) — remains a mystery.
The end result has been a call for more government intrusion and a reanimation of CISPA’s lumbering corpse. “Share with us,” says the government. “Gird yourself for the cyber Pearl Harbor,” say its supporters. “Let us handle it,” say those whose desire for expanded government power exceeds their crippling myopia.
Yeah, let’s do that. Let’s allow the government to set the rules on cybersecurity. Let’s give agencies like the DHS — which can’t even be bothered to secure its own assets — more leeway to investigate and react to cyberthreats.
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This is the agency tasked with securing federal assets and ensuring the safety of not only government employees, but Americans in general. And it can’t do it. In fact, it can’t even begin to do it.
Despite being specifically directed by 2002’s Federal Information Security Management Act (FIMSA) to periodically assess risks, report on them and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, the agency has managed to blunder into 2015 with no specific plan to tackle cyberthreats to the federal buildings under its protection.
And, while the President and those pushing the revived CISPA seem rather keen on “sharing info,” it’s a one-way street, apparently. The DHS can’t even be bothered to share with other government agencies.
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So, why is the DHS so bad at this? It would seem to be two things: the DHS is too big to move at the speed the threat mandates and it’s always someone else’s job. Because it has failed to take charge of the situation (despite a federal mandate and a 2013 presidential policy directive [p. 8-9]), no one seems to know what to do, how to do it or even who should do it.
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This is the government that wants the nation’s companies to “partner up” against cyberthreats and cyberterrorism: the same government that can’t even ensure its own infrastructure is protected. And no one cares because compromising control systems doesn’t make for very sexy copy or hawkish soundbites about being “tough on cybercrime.
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The government doesn’t have the skills necessary to ply its wares in the cybersecurity business. If it can’t lock down its own assets — despite seemingly limitless funding and manpower — it has nothing to offer the private sector but intrusiveness and harmful regulation.
Now, if you’re a fan of bad news, you’re going to love the worse news. The fight over who should head up the government’s War on All Things Cyber doesn’t put the DHS at the front of the list — but it’s not because the agency clearly can’t handle the job. It’s because agencies that are even more intrusive than the DHS want a piece of the action, namely the FBI and the NSA. If either of these two end up in that position, expect to find domestic surveillance rules relaxed. The latter agency defines cybersecurity as “peeking in at everyone,” which is at odds with those on the receiving end (US companies) who believe being secure means removing backdoors or otherwise locking everyone out, not just the “bad guys.” That isn’t going to sit well with the FBI and NSA — one of which believes no one should be able to “lock out” law enforcement and one that intercepts hardware and inserts backdoors when not deploying malware for the same purpose. So, the DHS may be the lesser of three evils, if only because its incompetence exceeds its reach.
The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Hubert Humphrey dies; Japan apologizes for WWII Korean sex slaves; L. Douglas Wilder becomes America’s first elected black governor; J’accuse published.
But as Daniel Wickham points out (as amplified by the journalist Glenn Greenwald), many of the 40 leaders attending the rally in Paris don’t have the best record of defending the principle of free speech so viciously attacked earlier this week:
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
You see, a good writer can write about anything and make it mostly painless and accessible to the non-expert reader. You need some style and a fair vocabulary, but no special expertise in the subject. In fact expertise is kind of a handicap because what you are chronicling is a joint voyage of discovery with your partner, the reader, and if you know a lot more about things than they do and suppose some common connection you mostly limit your audience.
Which is why I’m proud of my ignorance.
I can read music, but not sight read it (i.e. hear the tune from the notation, I have to listen to it first and then I can say- Aha! I know what this means). I can make fart noises into tubes and, provided there are not too many buttons and I don’t have to push them very fast, produce sounds that are arguably recognizable as tunes.
By the time I was in 6th grade I had already advanced to the important position of first seat, third Trumpet where my duties were primarily to ensure that in those parts of pieces where we were actually supposed to be playing I and the rest of my section held our instruments in a fashion that could easily be mistaken by people with bad distance vision as contributing to the group effort without actually audibly detracting from it.
In my Junior High years it was gently suggested I take up the euphonium because, as hopeless as Leonard Falcone pronounced me, I was better at that than Trumpet and in due course I rose to section lead and finally switched to French Horn as a Senior since we were one short in the Mellophone line (Weird French Horn trivia- I no longer remember what exactly that 4th key does and playing French Horn can mess with your heart rhythm, seriously, French Horn players are about 4x more likely than average people to die of heart attacks).
Oh, and we marched. Field shows in the fall and parades in the spring. Our great and bitter rivals for state supremacy were the hated and despised East Slime. Screw the Runball (our Coach didn’t believe in the Pass very much so our offense was run left, run right, run up the middle, and punt) team, those people were in the stands to see us.
This experience (13 years of it) warped me profoundly to the point where I enjoy and am impressed by groups like the Mummers and DCI Bands, and one of my favorite pranks is to take a police whistle and induce a roll off so the band plays in front of my house.
So, fun games you can play with a marching band. Here’s how you do it with the “Commandant’s Own”. Remember, these folks are trained combat infantrymen for whom this is only a hobby.
Did you catch that last tune? It was Stars and Stripes Forever, the National March of the United States composed by the “March King”, John Philip Sousa who was director of the band from 1880 to 1892. He wrote over 136 marches, most of them entirely forgettable except you hear them all the time, and some Operettas that sound like marches.
In his day he was about the most famous native composer from the U.S. among a European audience that regarded our Art Music as crude and simplistic, even compared to the Russians. He wrote novels including The Transit of Venus (which was also a march) that is entirely less erotic than the title might suggest. “It was about a group of misogynists called the Alimony Club who, as a way of temporarily escaping the society of women, embark on a sea voyage to observe the transit of Venus. The captain’s niece, however, had stowed away on board and soon won over the men.” His other best known works are The Fifth String and Pipetown Sandy.
(A) young violinist made a deal with the Devil for a magic violin with five strings. The strings can excite the emotions of Pity, Hope, Love and Joy – the fifth string was of Death and can be played only once before causing the player’s own death. He was unable to win the love of the woman he desired. At a final concert, he played upon the death string.
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Pipetown Sandy… included a satirical poem titled “The Feast of the Monkeys”. The poem described “a lavish party attended by variety of animals, however, overshadowed by the King of Beasts, the lion…who allows the muttering guests the privilege of watching him eat the entire feast”. At the end of his gluttony, the lion explained, “Come all rejoice, You’ve seen your monarch dine.”
He was famous and avid trap shooter who helped found the Amateur Trapshooting Association– “Let me say that just about the sweetest music to me is when I call, ‘pull,’ the old gun barks, and the referee in perfect key announces, ‘dead’.”
He (as you might imagine) invented the Sousaphone as a Tuba replacement and you need a very special kind of cheek vibrating fart noise to make it work at all. The fact that the fiberglass ones sound exactly the same as the much heavier brass ones really says all you need to say about the instrument
What makes a March a March?
Well, first of all is the strict enforcement of the 1 and 3 accents in a bar of common time. Then you play it twice as fast (cut time) and loud.
I am a member of a community Marching Band that mostly does Fireman’s Parades, but I haven’t played or practiced in years. My activist brother, the Music Major, is a pretty regular attender and he keeps trying to tempt me into a comeback-
“All you have to do is play fast and loud”, he says.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Former U.S. President Richard Nixon is born, Howard Hughes identifies fake biography, Unmanned probe lands on moon, the Phantom of the Opera becomes the longest running Broadway show.
When we talk about Entropy and its increase, it pays to keep in mind that we are talking about a a theoretically ‘closed’ system.
Like, oh say, The Universe. All that was or ever will be.
Locally it is not only entirely possible that new inputs (opening the system) will result in the spontaneous rise of complexity, it may even be likely!
Darwin didn’t exclude God, of course, though many creationists seem incapable of grasping this point. But he didn’t require God, either, and that was enough to drive some people mad.
Darwin also didn’t have anything to say about how life got started in the first place – which still leaves a mighty big role for God to play, for those who are so inclined. But that could be about to change, and things could get a whole lot worse for creationists because of Jeremy England, a young MIT professor who’s proposed a theory, based in thermodynamics, showing that the emergence of life was not accidental, but necessary. “[U]nder certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life,” he was quoted as saying in an article in Quanta magazine early in 2014, that’s since been republished by Scientific American and, more recently, by Business Insider. In essence, he’s saying, life itself evolved out of simpler non-living systems.
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If England’s theory works out, it will obviously be an epochal scientific advance. But on a lighter note, it will also be a fitting rebuke to pseudo-scientific creationists, who have long mistakenly claimed that thermodynamics disproves evolution (here, for example), the exact opposite of what England’s work is designed to show – that thermodynamics drives evolution, starting even before life itself first appears, with a physics-based logic that applies equally to living and non-living matter.
Most important in this regard is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that in any closed process, there is an increase in the total entropy (roughly speaking, a measure of disorder). The increase in disorder is the opposite of increasing order due to evolution, the creationists reason, ergo – a contradiction! Overlooking the crucial word “closed,” of course.
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Evolution is no more a violation of the Second Law than life itself is. A more extensive, lighthearted, non-technical treatment of the creationist’s misunderstanding and what’s really going on can be found here.
The driving flow of energy – whether from the sun or some other source – can give rise to what are known as dissipative structures, which are self-organized by the process of dissipating the energy that flows through them. Russian-born Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work developing the concept. All living things are dissipative structures, as are many non-living things as well – cyclones, hurricanes and tornados, for example.
The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
Not long after two mild earthquakes jolted the normally steady terrain outside Youngstown, Ohio, last March, geologists quickly decided that hydraulic fracturing operations at new oil-and-gas wells in the area had set off the tremors.
Now a detailed study has concluded that the earthquakes were not isolated events, but merely the largest of scores of quakes that rattled the area around the wells for more than a week.
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The number and intensity of fracking-related quakes have risen as the practice has boomed. In Oklahoma, for example, quakes have increased sharply in recent years, including the state’s largest ever, a magnitude 5.7 tremor, in 2011. Both state and federal experts have said fracking is contributing to the increase there, not only because of the fracking itself, but also because of the proliferation of related wells into which fracking waste is injected. Those injection wells receive much more waste, and are filled under high pressure more often, than oil or gas wells, and the sheer volume of pressurized liquids has been shown to widen cracks in faults, raising the chances of slippage and earthquakes.
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In Poland Township, an analysis of seismological data found 77 well-related earthquakes from March 4 to March 12, the four largest of them on March 10. All occurred about 1.9 miles underground, along a horizontal fault that at times ran less than a half-mile under wells where fracking was underway.
The regulations, the heart of President Obama’s climate change agenda, are based on the Clean Air Act and require states to cut planet-warming carbon dioxide from power plants. Each state may create its own plan for how to do so, but the requirements have the potential for shutting hundreds of coal-fired power plants.
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“We certainly hope that every state feels like it’s in their best interest to create a plan,” Ms. McCabe said. “But we have an obligation under the Clean Air Act, should there be states that don’t submit plans, to be sure we’re ready.”
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Ms. McCabe said she expected the E.P.A. to release final versions of the climate change regulations by midsummer, when it would also issue the proposed model rule for states.
Astronomers announced on Tuesday that they had found eight new planets orbiting their stars at distances compatible with liquid water, bringing the total number of potentially habitable planets in the just-right “Goldilocks” zone to a dozen or two, depending on how the habitable zone of a star is defined.
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So far, Kepler has discovered 4,175 potential planets, and 1,004 of them have been confirmed as real, according to Michele Johnson, a spokeswoman for NASA’s Ames Research Center, which operates Kepler.
Most of them, however, including those announced Tuesday, are hundreds of light-years away, too far for detailed study. We will probably never know any more about these particular planets than we do now.
“We can count as many as we like,” said Sara Seager, a planet theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the new work, “but until we can observe the atmospheres and assess their greenhouse gas power, we don’t really know what the surface temperatures are like.”
Calling Aldo Rebelo a climate-change skeptic would be putting it mildly. In his days as a fiery legislator in the Communist Party of Brazil, he [railed against ] those who say human activity is warming the globe and called the international environmental movement “nothing less, in its geopolitical essence, than the bridgehead of imperialism.”
Though many Brazilians have grown used to such pronouncements from Mr. Rebelo, 58, his appointment this month as minister of science by President Dilma Rousseff is causing alarm among climate scientists and environmentalists here, a country that has been seeking to assert leadership in global climate talks.
“At first I thought this was some sort of mistake, that he was playing musical chairs and landed in the wrong chair,” said Márcio Santilli, a founder of Instituto Socioambiental, one of Brazil’s leading environmental groups. “Unfortunately, there he is, overseeing Brazilian science at a very delicate juncture when Brazil’s carbon emissions are on the rise again.”
The White House on Tuesday made it clear that President Obama would veto a bill authorizing construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, setting up an immediate clash with Republicans just as they assume control of Congress.
“The president threatening to veto the first bipartisan infrastructure bill of the new Congress must come as a shock to the American people who spoke loudly in November in favor of bipartisan accomplishments,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the new majority leader, said on Tuesday.
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A State Department analysis of the project, released last January, concluded that it would not significantly increase the rate of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions, noting that producers would extract oil sands petroleum and move it to market with or without construction of the pipeline. The review estimated that Keystone would support 42,000 temporary jobs over its two-year construction period – about 3,900 of them in construction, the rest in indirect support jobs, such as food service. It estimated that it would create 35 permanent jobs.
Pancake lovers, take heart. In the coming weeks, maple farmers throughout Quebec, Vermont and elsewhere in the syrup belt will dust off their metal spiles for another harvest season, and some scientists are predicting that the sugary sap will flow even more freely than usual.
That’s because this year, the region is likely to have what is known in botany as a mast year – a time every few years when perennial trees like sugar maples synchronize their seed cycles, and flower as one. Low-seed years usually lead to mass blooms, and may bode particularly well for the maple syrup industry.
In a paper published recently in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, ecologists at Tufts University near Boston suggest that syrup and seed production are linked. Because 2014 was a low seed year for maples, the scientists reason, maple trees invested spare energy into producing more carbohydrates. This year, the trees will use those carbs to flower – and fill sugar makers’ pails with rich, sweet sap.
The agency has asked a team of scientists in Philadelphia to look more closely at the active ingredient in Miralax and similar generic products, called polyethylene glycol 3350, or PEG 3350. While outlining the scope of the research, the agency also disclosed that its scientists had discovered trace amounts of two potential toxins in batches of Miralax tested six years ago.
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Buried in the agency’s brief to researchers, issued last year, was some disquieting news. The F.D.A. said that it had tested eight batches of Miralax and found tiny amounts of ethylene glycol (EG) and diethylene glycol (DEG), ingredients in antifreeze, in all of them. The agency said the toxins were impurities resulting from the manufacturing process.
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As it turns out, extremely small amounts of DEG and EG are permitted in finished drug products, and the F.D.A. considers the laxatives “safe to use in accordance with approved labeling” – that is, only by adults for not longer than seven days.
This is going to be the year of the smartwatch. Thanks to several incredible boundary-smashing technological vaults, Apple will soon release a product that looks like a wristwatch but is really So Much More Than That. The Apple Watch will display your Facebook updates. It will tell you who is calling your phone. It will let you show photos to people, even if each photo is the size of a postage stamp and the only way to let anyone actually see it is to awkwardly hold your arm out in a berserk mockery of a CIA stress position while they grab it and squint.
The Apple Watch apparently solves a problem. The problem? Sometimes people have to take their telephones out of their pockets. Why would you want to do that, when all the information in the world could be permanently located at the bottom of your arm, on a tiny screen that you have to navigate by twisting a crown so hopelessly minuscule that it makes you look like a drunk bear in boxing gloves trying to pick a needle off the deck of a listing ship?
If the rise of the smartwatch has taught me anything, it is that I am perfectly happy with my dumbwatch. The one I can strap to my wrist and look at sometimes if I am not in the immediate vicinity of a clock. My watch can do one thing really well. The Apple Watch, meanwhile, will let you do a million things that you can already do elsewhere, but in a slightly more difficult way. Unless it’s run out of battery, that is, which it probably has because it’s an Apple product.
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Technology is still brilliant, and completely necessary. If I didn’t have a map of the entire world inside my phone all the time, there’s a fairly reasonable chance that I would still be fruitlessly wandering around continental Europe, starved and frothing because I couldn’t find my way back to the hotel that I had checked into somewhere in the middle of 2012. If I couldn’t look up recipes from my phone, I guarantee that I would be dead from excessive oven-chip consumption by now. Try to part me from my phone, and I would probably have quite an ugly tantrum in front of you.
But when you get to the point, as I did recently, where you are buying lightbulbs that can only be switched on and off from your phone, it is time for an intervention. Things like that – and smartwatches, and everything else – sound cool, but they just end up making things more complicated than they need to be. You can do without them. Your smartphone isn’t your entire life.
Over the next year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will determine whether the iconic black-and-orange butterflies deserve the federal protections that come with being listed an endangered or threatened species.
By some estimates, the monarch butterfly population has declined by 90 percent over the past two decades, from about 1 billion butterflies in the mid-1990s to just 35 million individuals last winter.
That loss is “so staggering that in human-population terms it would be like losing every living person in the United States except those in Florida and Ohio,” Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement.
