Multiple Sorties

Energy Fact of the Week: Debunking the Rosenfeld Curve

2011-11-02T23:58:00.000-05:00

Energy Fact of the Week: Debunking the Rosenfeld Curve

A Fine Essay by a Reagan Biographer that Whets Your Appetite for the Rest of His Work

2009-08-28T07:20:00.003-05:00

The second and final volume of The Age Of Reagan has been published. The essay is worth a nice slow reading.

Have You Ever Wondered How Netflix Was Able to Be So Efficient?

2009-08-21T23:05:00.001-05:00

Then have a look at this.

A British M.D. Compares the British National Health Service to British Veterinary Care

2009-08-16T22:42:00.004-05:00

See Man vs. Mutt.

A Nice Animation Making the Case Against Obamacare

2009-08-13T21:19:00.001-05:00

HT to Francis Beckwith.

Steven Crowder on Canadian Health Care

2009-08-09T21:57:00.002-05:00

Steven Crowder of Pajamas TV (PJTV) goes undercover to report on Canadian Health Care here.

The Democrats Change Strategy on ObamaCare

2009-08-07T07:17:00.004-05:00

The new strategy is spelled out in a memo from the leadership of the House Democrats to their members that is summarized here. It's intended to be a game-changer.

A main point: stigmatize the insurance companies. In the new order they will be at best public utilities, a means for standing up a system of government health care.

How Not to Do Science

2009-08-06T22:35:00.006-05:00

"Even if WMO (World Meteorological Organizaiton) agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it." (emphasis mine).

- Dr. Phil Jones, Climate Research Unit Director, University of East Anglia

This is *science* ! How dare you question my results!

Exurban League.

Exurban League

2009-08-06T21:59:00.004-05:00

Exurban League has a rollicking way with its commentary. See here, here, here, and here.

Who Knew? Arlo Guthrie's a Republican!

2009-08-05T22:36:00.002-05:00

See here.

And go here to see and hear Alice's Restaurant again.

Myths About Obamacare

2009-08-04T23:11:00.005-05:00

Myths:

Health care costs are soaring.
The Canadian drug story
Socialized medicine works in some places.
Socialized medicine is better because the countries that have it have a lower ratio of expenditure on medical care to gross domestic product (GDP).
We can have health care without rationing.

These are refuted with common sense here, followed by an explanation for why they are believed.

Here a link to a PDF.

French Bread Van that Will Do 180 mph

2009-08-04T22:56:00.003-05:00

It helps to have seen an unmodified Citroen 2CV ("deux cheveux"). They seem to be made out of tin.

See a modified one.

A Jazz Choir Does a Storm to Introduce "Africa"

2009-08-04T20:20:00.008-05:00

A capella, no less. Give this one a try for a remarkable experience and an introduction to Perpetuum Jazzile. It begins very softly so be patient. Hat tip to Judy Schmidt.

Janeanne Garofalo is Going to Make it Easier to Give Up Watching "24"

2009-08-02T15:03:00.002-05:00

The repugnant Garofalo is making it easier to say good by to the Fox Network's 24. Sorry, Jack.

Don't Recycle, Reuse

2009-07-31T22:54:00.003-05:00

Lawn care division

Science Shows that Unborn Babies Learn

2009-07-16T23:11:00.001-05:00

The National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) had no comment.

Click through to the original article to read about a 2003 study that showed that unborn babies prefer the voices of their mothers to other voices, a preference that continues after birth.

The Consequences of Cutting Carbon Footprints by 80 %

2009-07-15T22:58:00.000-05:00

More than most people have considered.

Can Canadian nurses speak their minds?

2009-07-14T22:44:00.000-05:00

Follow the link above.

NPR asks Juan Williams not to say he works for NPR when on Fox News

2009-02-14T15:40:00.000-06:00

This is outrageous. NPR, due to listener pressure, has asked Juan Williams not to identify himself as working for NPR when he appears on Fox News.

NPR is funded by the federal government. NPR doesn't belong to the liberals who are its primary audience, and certainly not to the totalitarian "liberals" who have pulled this off.

This seems a pretty clear violation of the First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and press. Let's see if we hear a peep from our self-anointed guardians of civil liberties, the ACLU.

Ht: Keith Burgess-Jackson

Patrick McGoohan, R.I.P.

2009-01-15T07:37:00.000-06:00

Patrick McGoohan, creator of The Prisoner passed away this week. The Prisoner inspired such other TV shows as Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and even The Simpsons (see here). A reimagined The Prisoner is in the works.

McGoohan is also to be remembered for Secret Agent, a very good TV spy series done on a low budget.

Fr. West's Catholic Blog: Homily for Gaudete Sunday (Third Sunday of Advent Year B)

2008-12-14T22:53:00.000-06:00

Fr. West's Catholic Blog: Homily for Gaudete Sunday (Third Sunday of Advent Year B)

Some Bipartisan Campaign Humor

2008-11-10T22:52:00.000-06:00

Cindy McCain Claims She's Just Like Any Other Female Human

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

"The Unit" A Little Behind the Times

2008-11-10T08:31:00.000-06:00

The Unit is a TV show about the members of a special forces unit and their families. It is produced by David and Lynn Mamet. It frequently seems ahead of the headlines, or at least the editorial page (e.g., it has plots where the Saudi government is villainous) but as it happens last night's show was somewhat behind the times. The plot turns on the Unit ignoring the limits set by the local regular Army commander and intruding into Syria, who says this would be a violation of international law. Perhaps so but apparently our special forces have been doing this for a few years to take the fight to al Qaeda.

Veteran's Day 2008.

Votive Early, Votive Often

2008-10-20T00:09:00.001-05:00

h/t Mark Steyn at the Corner. Seen in San Francisco.

SNL parody of Second Presidential Debate

2008-10-11T09:01:00.001-05:00

Not to be missed

2008-10-04T00:02:00.000-05:00

"Jet Man" Yves Rossy Crosses English Channel Like a Human Rocket

via Scientific Blogging - The world's best scientists. The internet's smartest readers by Kimberly Crandell on 9/26/08

Wile E. Coyote has nothing on this guy.

Yves Rossy, aka Jet Man, zoomed into the record books this morning, flying across the English Channel strapped to a single jet-powered wing, with only a helmet and flight suit for protection.

To Infinity And Beyond!

The 22-mile (35-kilometer) France-to-England journey took 13 minutes. Bad weather had twice postponed the event this week. But this morning—with clear blue skies and a nice tailwind—turned out to be an ideal flight day for the Swiss airline pilot.

Baseball Debate Solved - The Head-First Slide Is Quicker

Do you agree?

via Scientific Blogging - The world's best scientists. The internet's smartest readers by News Account on 9/25/08

Nothing says fun to physicists and mathematicians like baseball - it's the perfect sport for the numbers-oriented crowd, and because it's the only game where the defense has the ball, it's ideally suited for the rebel mentality.

With baseball playoffs heating up and the World Series right around the corner, it's guaranteed that fans will see daring slides, both feet-first and head-first, and even slides on bang-bang plays at first. But the eternal question has always been, who gets there faster, the head-first slider or the feet-first?

The heads first player, says David A. Peters, Ph.D., the McDonnell Douglas Professor of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, and big-time baseball fan. He says it's a matter of the player's center of gravity.

Clear Air Turbulence Technique Could Make Flights Smoother

via Scientific Blogging - The world's best scientists. The internet's smartest readers by News Account on 9/30/08

Clear air turbulence (CAT) is energy associated with gravity waves — phenomena in the atmosphere that look like ocean waves but which can occur in clear air. They can be created by air flow over mountains, frontal boundaries or other causes.

The type of gravity wave that John Knox, an assistant professor in the department of geography at the University of Georgia, and his colleagues identified as a possible source of airplane flight bumpiness comes from a different source; these waves are spontaneously generated and associated with jet streams at high altitudes, near cruising levels for airplanes.

Their new method outlined in the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences could help pilots chart new courses around these patches of rough but clear air that can turn an otherwise unremarkable flight into a nightmare.

French Muslims send their children to Catholic schools

2008-09-30T23:09:00.000-05:00

Hugh Hewitt interviews Sarah Palin

2008-09-30T23:06:00.000-05:00

Transcript and MP3. ht KLo at The Corner

For those of you who missed the first presidential debate

2008-09-27T22:38:00.000-05:00

... and would still like to catch it, go here for the full debate plus an annoted transcript, including fact-checking by the Washington Post.

We can count five-inch, nocturnal rats from space

2008-09-21T05:39:00.000-05:00

See here. You'd think we could do a better job of spotting illegal aliens crossing the border.

Religious, or superstitious and anti-scientific. Take your pick.

2008-09-21T04:07:00.000-05:00

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway points out the strong relation between disdain for religion, and openness to irrationality, superstition, and anti-scientific thought. Bill Maher, for instance, whose movie attacking religion opens early next month ("religion must die for man to live"), thinks aspirin is lethal, disbelieves in the germ theory of disease, and doubts that the Salk vaccine eradicated polio.

"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study [performed by the Gallup Organization and] released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians. ...

This study confirms another done in 1980. And with, regard to superstition, a close association with church seems to be far better than another favorite modern panacea:

Surprisingly, while increased church attendance and membership in a conservative denomination has a powerful negative effect on paranormal beliefs, higher education doesn't [emphasis added]. Two years ago two professors published another study in Skeptical Inquirer showing that, while less than one-quarter of college freshmen surveyed expressed a general belief in such superstitions as ghosts, psychic healing, haunted houses, demonic possession, clairvoyance and witches, the figure jumped to 31% of college seniors and 34% of graduate students.

So college seems to either increase superstition among its students, or to filter out those who won't put up with superstition and irrationality.

Nato plan for rapid-reaction force to counter Russian agression

2008-09-20T00:36:00.001-05:00

And none too soon. The Ukrainian government has split over the Georgian war.

Sharia Law Arrives in Britain

2008-09-19T22:46:00.000-05:00

It was introduced stealthily by the British Establishment, and not just for civil cases (though sharia favors men in property division after divorce) but for wife abuse too; see here.

A video that shows Charlie Gibson's presumption

2008-09-19T20:48:00.000-05:00

This video skewers Charlie Gibson quite effectively, and reminds us of the near complete historical and theological illiteracy of our media elites. (About five minutes long.)

Hat tip: Steven Hayward

Anti-Semitism at Ms. magazine

2008-01-11T23:24:00.001-06:00

Ms. magazine turned down an advertisement by the American Jewish Congress on the success of women in Israeli politics. It is interesting to speculate on whom Ms. is appeasing.

Men now regret encouraging and acquiescing in abortions

2008-01-07T21:42:00.000-06:00

As reported in the Los Angeles Times. As referred by The Corner.

Chess as a way to teach character, especially to girls

2008-01-07T00:10:00.000-06:00

Jim Pemberton discusses how fathers can use chess to cultivate the character of their daughters.

Massive Die-offs of Mammals Linked to Variations in Earth's Orbit

2006-10-14T16:52:00.000-05:00

Apparently paleontologists have puzzled for some time over why all the mammals die off every 2,500,000 years or so. With a finer temporal analysis of mammalian remains, Jan van Dam of Utrecht University linked the mass extinctions to long-term cycles in the Earth's climate caused by perturbations in the Earth's orbit and the tilt of its axis of rotation. Here is a discussion of his findings.

The theory that orbital variations cause climate fluctuations dates back to the 19th century Scottish scientist James Croll, who taught himself physics and astronomy. At one time he took a job as a museum janitor to have access to better books for developing his ideas. By the end of the 19th century his theory had fallen into disfavor but it was taken up again in the 1920s by the Serbian civil engineer and geophysicist Milutin Milankovitch. By the 1970s the study of sediments in the deep seas brought a wide acceptance of the Croll/Milankovitch theory.

Christopher Hitchens Overreaches on Leo Strauss

2005-05-05T22:34:00.000-05:00

According to Christopher Hitchens, Leo Strauss, the late Jewish scholar of political philosophy, was a conservative who like Ayn Rand was an unbeliever or nonbeliever. While Rand was quite explicit about her atheism, Strauss explicitly criticized the grounds of modern atheism.

Consider these excerpts from a lecture he gave in the early fifties.

Now I have to say a few words about the present-day argument. The present-day argument in favor of philosophy , we can say, is practically non-existent because of the disintegration of philosophy. ... I shall not waste words on the most popular argument which is taken from the needs of present-day civilization, the present-day crisis, which would simply amout to this: that we need today, in order to compete with communism, revelation as a myth. Now this argument is either stupid or blasphemous. I think this whole argument has been disposed of in advance a long time ago by Dostoievsky in The Possessed. ...

Now there is today, I believe, still a very common view, common to nineteenth and twentieth century freethinkers, that modern science and historical criticism have refuted revelation. Now I would say that they have not even refuted the most fundamentalistic orthodoxy. ... The Bible speaks of creation; creation is a miracle, the miracle. All the evidence supplied by geology, paleontology, etc., is valid against the Bible only on the premise that no miracle intervened. The freethinking argument is really based on poor thinking. It begs the question. ...

If one can say colloquially, the philosophers have never refuted revelation and the theologians have never refuted philosophy, that would sound plausible, considering the enormous difficulty of the problem from any point of view. And to that extent we may be said to have said something trivial; but to show that it is not quite trivial, I submit to you this consideration in conclusion. And here when I use the term philosphy, I use it in the common and vague sense of the term where it includes any rational orientation in the world, including science and what have you, common sense. If this is so, philosophy must admit the possibility of revelation. Now that means that philosophy itself is possibly not the right way of life. It is not necessarily the right way of life, not evidently the right way of life, because this possibility of revelation exists. But what then does the choice of philosophy mean under these conditions? In this case, the choice of philosophy is based on faith. In other words, the quest for evident knowledge rests itself on an unevident premise. And it seems to me that this difficulty underlies all present-day philosophizing.

The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy.

Sandy Berger Gets Mild Tongue Lashing

2005-04-02T18:47:00.000-06:00

John Ham and others have observed that as part of Sandy Berger's negotiated plea for pleading guilty to stealing and destroying classified documents from the National Archive he would lose his security clearance for three years. Less widely noted is that he may get it back even sooner:

it also allows him to have his clearance reviewed and restored within that time if the government were to ask him to serve on a panel or in another position with access to sensitive material, associates said.

Peg Kaplan has a nice movie poster on the forthcoming docudrama.

Multiple Sorties

Energy Fact of the Week: Debunking the Rosenfeld Curve

A Fine Essay by a Reagan Biographer that Whets Your Appetite for the Rest of His Work

Have You Ever Wondered How Netflix Was Able to Be So Efficient?

A British M.D. Compares the British National Health Service to British Veterinary Care

A Nice Animation Making the Case Against Obamacare

Steven Crowder on Canadian Health Care

The Democrats Change Strategy on ObamaCare

How Not to Do Science

Exurban League

Who Knew? Arlo Guthrie's a Republican!

Myths About Obamacare

French Bread Van that Will Do 180 mph

A Jazz Choir Does a Storm to Introduce "Africa"

Janeanne Garofalo is Going to Make it Easier to Give Up Watching "24"

Don't Recycle, Reuse

Science Shows that Unborn Babies Learn

The Consequences of Cutting Carbon Footprints by 80 %

Can Canadian nurses speak their minds?

NPR asks Juan Williams not to say he works for NPR when on Fox News

Patrick McGoohan, R.I.P.

Fr. West's Catholic Blog: Homily for Gaudete Sunday (Third Sunday of Advent Year B)

Some Bipartisan Campaign Humor

"The Unit" A Little Behind the Times

Votive Early, Votive Often

SNL parody of Second Presidential Debate

"Jet Man" Yves Rossy Crosses English Channel Like a Human Rocket

Baseball Debate Solved - The Head-First Slide Is QuickerDo you agree?

Clear Air Turbulence Technique Could Make Flights Smoother

French Muslims send their children to Catholic schools

Hugh Hewitt interviews Sarah Palin

For those of you who missed the first presidential debate

We can count five-inch, nocturnal rats from space

Religious, or superstitious and anti-scientific. Take your pick.

Nato plan for rapid-reaction force to counter Russian agression

Sharia Law Arrives in Britain

A video that shows Charlie Gibson's presumption

Anti-Semitism at Ms. magazine

Men now regret encouraging and acquiescing in abortions

Chess as a way to teach character, especially to girls

Massive Die-offs of Mammals Linked to Variations in Earth's Orbit

Christopher Hitchens Overreaches on Leo Strauss

Sandy Berger Gets Mild Tongue Lashing

Baseball Debate Solved - The Head-First Slide Is Quicker

Do you agree?