400m asteroid (2013 TV135) could collide with Earth on 26th August 2032

October 18, 2013

Not quite another doomsday prediction but the Russian Vice Premier Dmitry Rogozin was moved to tweet about the threat to blow up the Earth.

Ria Novosti: 

Ukrainian astronomers have discovered a large asteroid that could hit Earth in 2032, though the impact risk is minimal, according to current estimates.

The 410-meter-wide (1,350-foot) minor planet, which has been named 2013 TV135, was first discovered last weekend by the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory in southern Ukraine, according to the International Astronomer Union’s Minor Planet Center.

As of Thursday, the discovery had been confirmed by five more astronomy groups, including in Italy, Spain, the UK and Russia’s Siberian republic of Buryatia, the center said on its website.

The asteroid has been classified as potentially hazardous, a formal tag given to celestial bodies whose orbits bring them closer than 7.5 million km from Earth’s orbit. The minimal distance between the orbits of 2013 TV135 and Earth is currently put at 1.7 million km.

However, it also has a 1 in 63,000 chance of colliding with Earth on August 26, 2032, according to available estimates.

“Here’s a super-task for our space industry,” Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who has lobbied for Russia to develop asteroid defense systems, said of the asteroid on Twitter on Thursday.

The 2013 TV135 has been given a 1 out of 10 rating on the Torino Scale, which estimates asteroid impact hazards. Only one other asteroid currently has the same rating, with collision risks for all others being “effectively zero,” according to NASA’s Near Earth Object Program.

The 2013 TV135 colliding with Earth would create an explosion estimated to be equivalent to 2,500 megatons of TNT – 50 times greater than the biggest nuclear bomb ever detonated.

Asteroids due to pass close to Earth in the next 200 years are shown in this graphic:

Asteroids That Buzz Planet Earth

Asteroids which will come closest to the Earth in the next 200 years

 

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Scientific American sends Bora on “leave”

October 18, 2013

One thing is clear after this last weeks’ convulsions at Scientific American. Breaking the silence can have an effect in the face of wrongdoing but it requires a society prepared to listen.  In the face of wrongdoing, silence is not always golden, silence is acquiesence, silence condones. But breaking the silence does not always end well for whistle-blowers  and breaking the silence requires taking some risk. Edward Snowden can testify to that.

The fall-out at Scientific American continues and Bora Zivkovic has been sent on gardening leave. But the behaviour of Scientific American editor-in-chief Mariette DiChristina for her initial knee-jerk censorship and then her attempts to explain away her initial untruth has yet to be fully addressed. The Editor’s Note accompanying the reinstatement of the censored blog post does not carry much credibility and – in my opinion – seeks to establish a blatant untruth as real. There is no apology to the blogger for the censorship, no expression of regret.

Editor’s note (10/14/13): This post was originally published on Friday, October 11, 2013, at 16:58, and taken down within the hour. As fully detailed here, we could not quickly verify the facts of the blog post and consequently for legal reasons we had to remove it. Email to the editor referenced in this post to elicit his comments has gone unanswered. Biology Online would not disclose his identity or give out additional contact information and other efforts to identify him to solicit a response have been unsuccessful. Biology Online has confirmed the exchange. This post is therefore being republished as of October 14th at 4:46pm.

Whether Zivkovic was sent on leave or asked to go on leave is moot.

NASW:

Bora Zivkovic, who has admitted to sexual harassment and resigned from the board of ScienceOnline, has now taken a break from his duties as blog editor at Scientific American, according to Philip Yam, Scientific American’s news editor.

In an email this morning, Yam confirmed the news that was making its way around Twitter–that Zivkovic was taking a break from his duties at his request. Alice Henchley, a spokesperson for Scientific American, said in an email, “Bora Zivkovic is on personal leave at the moment.”

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Posted in Behaviour, Media, US | 1 Comment »

Germany also has its “idiot” projects

October 17, 2013

Every country has its share of bizarre, wasteful and idiotic projects – usually paid for by the taxpayer. Most are just bungling though some are because certain politicians wish to favour a particular constituency or a particular contractor.

Bureaucrats in Germany are usually – from my limited experience – exceptionally rational. But Germany too has its share of “idiot” projects.  The “Black Book” is compiled by the German Taxpayer’s Alliance.

Some examples from The Local:

€435,000 was spent on building two bridges for field mice in In Bieberbach in the state of Baden-Württemberg. If the mice don’t use the bridge no-one can photo DPA

€435,000 was spent on building two bridges for field mice in Bieberbach. If the mice don’t use the bridge no-one can. photo DPA via The Local

  1. Two bridges for field mice in Biberach, Baden-Württemberg so that the animals can safely cross the road. The bridges alone cost around €435,000 and surveillance costs amounted to €35,000. They have not been built for human use.
  2. A memorial to the early years of Germany’s Autobahn built in a roadside lay-by in North Rhine-Westphalia. The remains of a concrete road bridge sat at the roadside of the A2 motorway but these had to be cleared for safety reasons. Rather than simply removing them, however, authorities built a memorial bridge from the remains one-and-a-half kilometres away in the lay-by. The bridge to nowhere cost €310,000 when removal would have cost €108,000. 
  3. Planners managed to spend €400,000 on a bicycle path which simply ended after 300 metres in the middle of nowhere.
  4. The German government also paid for a metal concert in China by the lesser-known German band “Drone”. Unfortunately “after the first few beats of the intro, it was clear that the Chinese were not into metal.”
  5. Costs of the Elbe Philharmonic Hall in Hamburg have risen from €77 million to €800 million.
  6. Berlin’s new airport, meanwhile, is costing €162,000 a month just to keep clean, while its opening is continuously delayed.
  7. An operating theatre in Düsseldorf’s university hospital cost €200 million but three years on it has still not been used due to inadequate fire safety precautions. A further €2 million has been spent on paying cleaning, heating and other bills for the as-yet unused ‘Operative Medicine II’ clinic.
  8.  Authorities in the town of Meschede in North Rhine-Westphalia when they left the heating on in their empty offices for eight years. Nobody turned the radiators off when the offices were emptied in November 2000, racking up a bill of €42,000 for the taxpayer. 

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Chinese woman said to be 127 years old was born in 1886

October 17, 2013

It has been calculated that there is a high probability that somebody already born will live to see 200 years. That is just a probability of course but if in 2213 it turns out to be true it is likely to be a woman.

There are 54,000 Chinese who are over 100 years old and about 80% of them are women. And the oldest one is Alimihan Seyiti, an Uygur who is 127 years old and was born on June 25, 1886. She is said to have 56 descendants. The claim is still being verified and there are many so called “experts” who doubt the claim.

A Chinese government news portal has claimed that a woman in China's remote far west is 127 years old, making her the oldest person ever to have lived – but experts raised questions over the supposed record.

Alimihan Seyiti sitting in her home in Shule county of Kashgar, northwest China’s Xinjiang region Photo: AFP/Getty Images

Alimihan Seyiti from Kashgar, near the border with Kyrgyzstan, was born on June 25, 1886, said ts.cn, a government website in Xinjiang – when Grover Cleveland was president of the United States and William Gladstone the British prime minister. …. 

At the time of Seyiti’s supposed birth much of Xinjiang was ruled by Yakub Beg, a Tajik warlord, while Russia held other parts of the region.

Xinhua reports

About four-fifths of the more than 54,000 living Chinese centenarians are women, and a 127-year-old woman from northwest China is the oldest of them all, according to figures released on Wednesday.

The Geriatric Society of China (GSC) claimed the oldest person in China is Alimihan Seyiti, a Uygur who was born on June 25, 1886. She lives in Shule County in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

If verified, Seyiti could be the oldest person in the world, beating by five years the Guinness World Record of 122 set by Jeanne Calment from France. Seyiti was honored by the GSC in June as the oldest person in China after the death of Luo Meizhen in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, who was born in 1885.

Xinjiang, Hunan, Yunnan, Shandong, Guangxi and Sichuan are home to China’s 10 oldest supercentenarians (those who have attained the age of at least 110), and their average age is 119.2 years.

According to GSC figures, rural centenarians outnumber their urban counterparts. Among the 54,166 Chinese centenarians, about three-quarters, or more than 74 percent, are from the countryside.

The GSC also published a list of the 10 oldest couples in China, who are now living in the provinces of Hainan, Henan, Liaoning, Fujian and Shanghai Municipality.

According to the GSC, the oldest living couple are Ping Muhu and his wife Zhang Xinniu from Yuzhou City in central China’s Henan Province, whose combined age stands at 213 years. The average combined age of the 10 oldest couples in China is 207.7 years.

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Bora! Bora! Bora! Could this be SciAm’s Pearl Harbour?

October 17, 2013

This is a sorry tale. And Scientific American and their Blogs Editor, Bora Zivkovic are covered in the proverbial effluent. Scientific American’s editor-in-chief Mariette DiChristina has not covered herself with very much glory. Biology Online has tarnished what little reputation it had.

It all started as an unpleasant little incident when DN Lee, a scientist and a blogger at Scientific American, was called a “whore” by an “editor” at biology-online because she declined (very politely) to contribute free material for that site. She took exception to being called such names and blogged about it at her SciAm blog. The idiot who had referred to her in such terms was dismissed.

Then Scientific American made a fool of itself.  It removed her blog post. (All the rest follows only as a consequence of that one action).

Scientist and science communicator @DNLee5 declined an offer to blog for free from biology-online.org and got called a ‘whore’.  @DNLee5 posted a thoughtful response on herScientific American‘s blog ’The Urban Scientist‘.  A short time later, her response vanished…

Scientific American editor-in-chief Mariette DiChristina also made herself out to be very economical with the truth. First she explained that the post was inappropriate and then – when the noise mounted –  said it had been removed for legal reasons. After the fire storm the post was reinstated.

But that was not all. Monica Byrne recounted her story. This Happened by Monica Byrne. The apparently well respected (in some circles) Bora Zivkovic, Blogs Editor for Scientific American, was a regular wolf in sheep’s clothing. His reputation in the blogosphere as being very helpful to women bloggers now seems to have been built on a hidden agenda. (Zivkovic is known as being hypocritical in other circles).

Priya Shetty was astonished at the silence on the blogosphere and was scathing in her article. Silence she argued was condoning the behaviour (as it was).

Bora apologised  – but not before the critical comments had escalated to a level which made it impossible to stay silent. This was when DN Lee’s post was reinstated by Scientific American.  And then further details emerged that this was not just some isolated incident but appeared to be a pattern in Bora’s behaviour.

(UPDATE!  And yet another “But he didn’t just make a mistake, apologize, atone and change his behavior. He harassed, and kept harassing”)

Andrew Maynard performed some ethical calisthenics and suggested that Bora had done so much good that he didn’t deserve to be named and shamed. He deserved “compassion”! He only managed to come out as an apologist for Bora — but his ethical standards came up rather short (in my opinion). The use of positions of power (actual or implied) for sexual harassment cannot be excused – I think – in any circumstances. Greg Laden is another blogger who tries to appear objective but comes out as an apologist for his friend Bora. (I recall that he tried in a very similar style to excuse the disgraced Marc Hauser – also apparently a friend). So I think Greg Laden’s excuses for the wrongdoings of establishment figures are to be discounted.

But the bottom line is that it took much too long for SciAm to show any kind of support – if it could even be called support – for DN Lee. The grudging reinstatement of her post hardly redresses the balance. The many friends of Bora are either silent or are drafting carefully worded apologia in his support. SciAm is now contorting itself to ensure that Bora’s position at SciAm is not jeopardised. I don’t see how SciAm can avoid a public rebuke for Bora.

Shades of Pearl Harbour! Bora! Bora! Bora! will be etched in SciAm’s psyche for some time to come.

(For those who can’t remember the movie Tora! Tora! Tora!  is the Japanese code-word used to indicate that complete surprise had been achieved at Pearl Harbour)

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Posted in Academic misconduct, Behaviour, Media | 2 Comments »

Clouds – Just water and a bit of dirt

October 17, 2013

Check these “60 insane cloud formations” at the Matador Network:

Lenticular cloud, Mt. Fuji, Japan

Lenticular cloud, Mt. Fuji, Japan

and this one leaving this world

Lenticular UFO in Patagonia image A Lamy

Lenticular UFO in Patagonia image A Lamy

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Posted in Art, Clouds | 1 Comment »

The IPCC 95% trick: Increase the uncertainty to increase the certainty

October 17, 2013

Increasing the uncertainty in a statement to make the statement more certain to be applicable is an old trick of rhetoric. Every politician knows how to use that in a speech. It is a schoolboy’s natural defense when being hauled up for some wrongdoing. It is especially useful when caught in a lie. It is the technique beloved of defense lawyers in TV dramas. Salesmen are experts at this. It is standard practice in scientific publications when experimental data does not fit the original hypothesis.

Modify the original statement (the lie) to be less certain in the lie, so as to be more certain that the statement could be true. Widen the original hypothesis to encompass the actual data. Increase the spread of the deviating model results to be able to include the real data within the error envelope.

  • “I didn’t say he did it. I said somebody like him could have done it”
  • “Did you start the fight?” >>> “He hit me back first”.
  • “The data do not match your hypothesis” >>> “The data are not inconsistent with the improved hypothesis”
  • “Your market share has reduced” >>> “On the contrary, our market share of those we sell to has increased!” (Note -this is an old one used by salesmen to con “green” managers with reports of a 100% market share!!)

And it is a trick that is not foreign to the IPCC  – “we have a 95% certainty that the less reliable (= improved) models are correct”. Or in the case of the Cook consensus “97% of everybody believes that climate does change”.

A more rigorous treatment of the IPCC trick is carried out by Climate Audit and Roy Spencer among others but this is my simplified explanation for schoolboys and Modern Environ-mentalists.

The IPCC Trick

The IPCC Trick

The real comparison between climate models and global temperatures is below:

Climate Models and Reality

Climate Models and Reality

With the error in climate models increased to infinity, the IPCC could even reach 100% certainty. As it is the IPCC is 95% certain that it is warming – or not!

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Posted in Academic misconduct, Alarmism, Climate, Mathematics | 1 Comment »

Colour photographs from the Russia of 1909

October 16, 2013

This is from Kuriositas. A magnificent collection of colour photographs from a Russia of a century ago.

The Century Old Color Photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky

In 1909 a remarkable project was initiated by Russian photographer Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky. His mission was to record – in full and vibrant color – the vast and diverse Russian Empire. Here, with his story, is a selection of his amazing century old full color pictures. …

The colors are quite remarkable – a technique which Prokudin-Gorsky developed himself. However, his travels through the Russian Empire were never a fait accompli. They were the culmination of a long and arduous struggle. Thanks to the tenacity of the photographer we now have a record of times a century ago, so clear and vivid that one feels it is almost possible to jump in to the picture …….. Prokudin-Gorsky came from a long line of Russian nobles who mostly enjoyed careers in the Russian army. Prokudin-Gorsky had a more cerebral bent and he studied chemistry in Saint Petersburg at the Institute of Technology in the city. He also studied painting and music at the Imperial Academy of Arts. Chemistry and the Arts may not immediately spring to mind as a happy marriage of subjects to many, but Prokudin-Gorsky’s interest in both would come together eventually. In 1889, at the age of twenty six he travelled to Berlin to study Photochemistry at the Technical University of the German capitol. There he met and studied under Adolf Miethe who was experimenting with three color photography. ……. 

The process used involved a camera that would take a set of three photographs. These pictures would be monochrome but each picture would be taken using a filter of a different color. When all three monochrome pictures were projected (using light which had to be specifically colored) then the original color scene could be reconstructed. However, this took some time to take ….. 

Here are just a couple of a quite remarkable collection which spans the mighty and the miserable:

Prokudin-Gorsky 40 Emir of Bukhara

Prokudin-Gorsky 40 Emir of Bukhara

Prokudin-Gorsky 25 Hard labour at the Bakalskiy Mine

Prokudin-Gorsky 25 Hard labour at the Bakalskiy Mine

Prokudin-Gorsky is credited with the first ever colour photograph in Russia – a portrait of Leo Tolstoy – in 1908.

Prokudin-Gorsky L.N.Tolstoy 1908 Wikimedia

Prokudin-Gorsky L.N.Tolstoy 1908 Wikimedia

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Posted in Art, History, Russia | 1 Comment »

Removing visual pollution

October 16, 2013

The wind turbines seem to have been replaced by sheep!

Four wind turbines in the Yorkshire Dales are the first in Britain to be torn down

The 150ft high turbines of Chelker Reservoir, near Ilkley, will not be replaced after the council refused permission for two even bigger machines. According to campaigners, the turbines have not worked in years. In an unprecedented move, the utility company sent in contractors at the end of last month to dismantle the rusting structures.

Chelker Reservoir, Addingham, Yorkshire - Chelker Reservoir wind turbines are dismantled

Chelker Reservoir, Addingham, Yorkshire – Daily Mail

 

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Nightmare continues: Panel falls off Air India Dreamliner in flight

October 15, 2013

A new problem every few days for Boeing with their Dreamliner but their share price does not seem to be much affected:

The Hindu: 

An Air India Boeing 787 Dreamliner. File photo

An Air India Boeing 787 Dreamliner. File photo

A large panel in the belly of a Bangalore-bound Dreamliner of Air India fell off mid-air, putting about 150 passengers on board at a grave risk, but the aircraft landed safely.

The DGCA is probing the incident which occurred on Saturday when an 8X4 feet panel in the fuselage fell off while the plane was on its way to Bangalore from Delhi, leaving a gaping hole in the cargo hold, official sources said.

There were 148 persons, including the crew, on board flight AI-803 which landed safely at the Bangalore airport, the sources said, adding that the hole was noticed by the ground staff when they came to inspect the aircraft for its return journey.

A spare panel was flown to Bangalore and fitted on the Boeing 787, which was later declared fit to fly. But the return flight was delayed by over nine hours, they said.

Confirming the incident, airline officials said a panel had fallen off but was replaced and the aircraft was cleared for flights.

“Yes, there was a gaping hole. During the normal transit inspection, it was observed. Engineers immediately rectified it,” an AI official said requesting anonymity.

“It was not an emergency. There was no safety problem,” he added.

Besides long-haul international operations, Air India operates the Dreamliners on domestic routes like from Delhi to Chennai, Bangalore and Kolkata.

 

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