Paul (or Pablo) the octopus gets it right again. So far a 100% record for Paul in this World Cup.
A good performance by both teams and especially Germany without 3 key players. Germany are going to be a force to be reckoned with for the next 2 World Cups.
I have to travel to Spain on Sunday and should arrive in time for the final. I am looking forward to watching the match in a suitable bar.
For the last 1000 years eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull on Iceland have always triggered subsequent Katla eruptions. After the ash clouds in the spring caused by the eruptions under Eyjafjallajökul glacier, the region under Katla is rumbling.
There have been 14 earthquakes under the Mýrdalsjökull glacier in the last 48 hours. reported by the Iceland Meteorological Office.
Katla Volcano usually erupts every century, says Iceland’s President Olafur Grimsson. and the last eruption was in 1918. “The time for Katla to erupt is coming close.”
“I don’t say if, but I say when Katla will erupt,” Grimsson says. “We have been waiting for that eruption for several years.”
“It can create, for a long period, extraordinary damage to modern advanced society.”
Significant ash clouds from a Katla eruption could compound the global cooling which has already started. Perhaps we shall soon have another year without a summer!!
Anthony Watts has a post revisiting the late Michael Crichton‘s 2003 lecture at Caltech which I had not seen before.
A lucid and eloquent exposition which I reproduce below. Reading it now in 2010 it is still fresh, applicable and apposite. It should be required reading for any young scientist of the dangers of religion or politics masquerading as science.
My topic today sounds humorous but unfortunately I am serious. I am going to argue that extraterrestrials lie behind global warming. Or to speak more precisely, I will argue that a belief in extraterrestrials has paved the way, in a progression of steps, to a belief in global warming.
Charting this progression of belief will be my task today.
Let me say at once that I have no desire to discourage anyone from believing in either extraterrestrials or global warming. That would be quite impossible to do. Rather, I want to discuss the history of several widely-publicized beliefs and to point to what I consider an emerging crisis in the whole enterprise of science-namely the increasingly uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy.
I have a special interest in this because of my own upbringing. I was born in the midst of World War II, and passed my formative years at the height of the Cold War. In school drills, I dutifully crawled under my desk in preparation for a nuclear attack.
It was a time of widespread fear and uncertainty, but even as a child I believed that science represented the best and greatest hope for mankind. Even to a child, the contrast was clear between the world of politics-a world of hate and danger, of irrational beliefs and fears, of mass manipulation and disgraceful blots on human history. In contrast, science held different values-international in scope, forging friendships and working relationships across national boundaries and political systems, encouraging a dispassionate habit of thought, and ultimately leading to fresh knowledge and technology that would benefit all mankind. The world might not be avery good place, but science would make it better. And it did. In my lifetime, science has largely fulfilled its promise. Science has been the great intellectual adventure of our age, and a great hope for our troubled and restless world.
But I did not expect science merely to extend lifespan, feed the hungry, cure disease, and shrink the world with jets and cell phones. I also expected science to banish the evils of human thought—prejudice and superstition, irrational beliefs and false fears. I expected science to be, in Carl Sagan’s memorable phrase, “a candle in a demon haunted world.” And here, I am not so pleased with the impact of science. Rather than serving as a cleansing force, science has in some instances been seduced by the more ancient lures of politics and publicity. Some of the demons that haunt our world in recent years are invented by scientists. The world has not benefited from permitting these demons to escape free.
But let’s look at how it came to pass.
Though Paul, who was born in the UK predicts that Germany will win tonight’s third place match, he has also predicted a win for Spain in tomorrows final.
In Germany there are now various suggestions of how Paul should be sliced, squashed, marinaded, fried, broiled, grilled or baked.
All of Paul’s predictions have been true in this World Cup. In Spain there are moves to rechristen him Pablo and provide him with Spanish citizenship. Spain’s defensive midfielder Sergio Busquets said Friday that the Spaniards are in love with the octopus and and out of gratitude they want to re-christen it Pablo.
“We guess it is a Spanish octopus. We are in love with it and want to name it Pablo,” said Busquets.
Paul’s predictions require the choice of mussels but whether he will take to paella is not known. Paul’s religious and political affiliations are also not known.
But I think Paul is quite safe. His keeper’s at Sea Life Oberhausen are seeing a marked increase in the number of visitors to the aquarium and it it can be expected that Paul’s psychic abilities will be tested in new fields when the World Cup is over.
It’s summer even here in Sweden and the silly stories are coming thick and fast:
I returned just in time to watch the match. My forecast (hope) about Germany was wrong and Spain is in the World Cup final for the first time ever.
Good Luck to them but I pick Holland for the final – 3rd time lucky perhaps?
Ramos was a disgrace. A great pity that he does not just rely on his indisputable skill and feels it necessary to play dirty.
Germany had their chances but Spain just edged it. The burden of beating the prediction by Paul the Octopus was just too much for Schweinsteiger and his manschaft. Özil was impressive again- but he needs a little more stamina to last the entire 90 minutes.
Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University and a laureate professor at the University of Melbourne. His books include “Practical Ethics, One World,” and, most recently, “The Life You Can Save.”
His recent syndicated article is well worth reading.
MELBOURNE — Shortly before half-time in the World Cup elimination match between England and Germany on Sunday, English midfielder Frank Lampard had a shot at goal that struck the crossbar and bounced down onto the ground, clearly over the goal line. German goalkeeper Manuel Neuer grabbed the ball and put it back into play. Neither the referee nor the linesman — both of whom were still coming down the field, and poorly positioned to judge — signaled a goal, and play continued.
After the match, Neuer gave this account of his actions: “I tried not to react to the referee and just concentrate on what was happening. I realized it was over the line and I think the way I carried on so quickly fooled the referee into thinking it was not over.”
To put it bluntly, Neuer cheated and then boasted about it.
By any normal ethical standards, what Neuer did was wrong. But does the fact that Neuer was playing soccer mean that the only ethical rule is: “Win at all costs”?
According to the Assembly, the handling of the pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), EU health agencies and national governments led to a “waste of large sums of public money, and unjustified scares and fears about the health risks faced by the European public”. The report finds that there was “overwhelming evidence that the seriousness of the pandemic was vastly overrated by WHO”, resulting in a distortion of public health priorities.
The WHO has been “highly defensive”, the adopted text underlines, and unwilling to accept that a change in the definition of a pandemic was made, or to revise its prognosis of the Swine Flu outbreak. The WHO and European health institutions were not willing to publish the names and declarations of interest of the members of the WHO Emergency Committee and relevant European advisory bodies directly involved in recommendations concerning the pandemic.
The obvious beneficiaries are the pharmaceutical manufacturers of vaccines and Tamiflu and their supporters.
But is anybody at the WHO accountable to anybody?
The wonders of what now passes as SCIENCE (no doubt peer-reviewed).
Science Daily reports on major insights resulting from a study by “Empa – a Research Institute of the ETH Domain” on behalf of the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN).
This ground-breaking study shows that Automobile air conditioning systems do not run “free of charge.” The article reminds us that Car air conditioning systems require energy to compress the cooling agent, and the greater the degree of cooling required the more energy (i.e. fuel) they use.
This is good strong stuff. I need more coffee.
The article continues. The study, the results of which have just been published in the scientific journal “Environmental Science and Technology,” shows that the fuel consumption of the test vehicles with air conditioning systems in operation increases with rising ambient air temperature and humidity, reaching a value of some 18 per cent on a typical Swiss summer day with an air temperature of 27 degrees and relative humidity of 60 per cent.
Wow!
This highly significant peer-reviewed, CO2 related (what else) paper is referenced as:
Martin F. Weilenmann, Robert Alvarez, Mario Keller. Fuel Consumption and CO2/Pollutant Emissions of Mobile Air Conditioning at Fleet Level – New Data and Model Comparison. Environmental Science & Technology, 2010: 100608141025002 DOI:
What is not reported is how much this nonsense cost. But since it has CO2 in the title it must be worth every penny.
After yesterdays glaring blunders by the referees, linesmen and 4th referees, first when England were denied a goal which every TV viewer around the world could see had crossed the goal-line and second when Argentina were awarded a goal when every TV viewer could see that Tevez was off-side, it is now going to be difficult for FIFA to resist bringing in the use of technology to assist referees’ decisions. It occurred to me that even though the final results seemed justified by the rest of the play, we cannot know what the impact of the correct decisions would have been. If England had been awarded their goal they would have started the second half level and in a different frame of mind. If Argentina’s goal had been disallowed and Mexico had scored first the players’ attitudes and the play could have changed in a fundamental way.
FIFA’s attitude to the use of technology borders on faith in a bygone age which no longer exists.
Like the proverbial ostriches – they do not wish to know what they do not know.
Thinking about what might have been, I was reminded of Donald Rumsfeld’s press conference at NATO HQ, Brussels on June 6th, 2002., when as U.S. Secretary of Defence he said:
“The message is that there are no “knowns.” There are thing we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that’s basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns”.
There is actually a compelling music to the words but this quotation is often mocked especially by opponents of the US invasion of Iraq. I have quoted it disparagingly myself in discussions and presentations about the dangers of forecasting.
But of course what he said is rather profound. Read the rest of this entry »
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