These posts were imported from my LiveJournal. I may or may not go through them and categorize them later.
Well, this is a day late (because the internet was absolutely not working last night), but that's okay. Happy birthday, dear sister. I hope you had a lovely day. And now you're old! Heh heh heh. Here's your birthday present:
This is a touching discovery of a pair of 3000-4000 year old skeletons eternally locked in a tender embrace. Ann writes well of it, so I'll pass you along to her.
In a grim and powerful assessment of the future of the planet, the leading international network of climate scientists has concluded for the first time that global warming is “unequivocal†and that human activity is the main driver, “very likely†causing most of the rise in temperatures since 1950.
In its last report, in 2001, the panel, consisting of hundreds of scientists and reviewers, said the confidence level for its projections was “likely,†or 66 to 90 percent. That level has now been raised to “very likely,†better than 90 percent. Both reports are online at www.ipcc.ch.
….
The Bush administration, which until recently avoided directly accepting that humans were warming the planet in potentially harmful ways, embraced the findings, which had been approved by representatives from the United States and 112 other countries on Thursday night.
….
At the same time, Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman rejected the idea of unilateral limits on emissions. "We are a small contributor to the overall, when you look at the rest of the world, so it’s really got to be a global solution," he said.
The United States, with about 5 percent of the world’s population, contributes about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, more than any other country.
What astonishes me is how bloody long it took for them to accept that. Scientists have been getting surer and surer, and among most reputable scientists there has been a consensus for a few years now. But the attitude of the Bush administration has been "We have some scientists who doubt these theories, so we're not even going to consider them." It was easier to plug their ears and loudly hum than to actually pursue a legitimate investigation into the veracity of such theories.
Now that we're past that particular hurdle, now that it has become so overwhelmingly obvious that even they cannot ignore it, I wonder what they are going to do about it.
The following day, Charles Stross (a brilliant fellow by all accounts) posts an article noting that "The American Enterprise Institute, a think tank largely funded by Exxon-Mobil is offering to pay climatologists $10,000 for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)." This will, of course, mortally wound those scientists' reputations. Stross notes that $10,000 isn't quite enough to forever put you out of a reputable job.
I'm a little confused about the tendency for nations to abhor unilateral restraints. It seems to me that they are an excellent way to gain the moral high ground (that America has entirely lost by now) and to actually push for true change. "See, we're doing it, now you should too." I understand that in this sort of game theory dilemma it is the ideal (purely profit-motivated) situation for everyone to limit their emissions except you, but it doesn't accomplish the goal: The goal isn't to "win" in some technical economic sense, but to keep intact the valuable resource we have in the natural world. It seems to me that the best way to do that is to simply start changing, and expect the rest of the world to follow in our footsteps. The reason the Kyoto Protocol largely failed is that the United States wouldn't accept such limits. The result? The world was set back a good ten or twenty years in that particular branch of environmental protection. Are such economic imbalances simply not feasible? Would it put our already shaky economy on even less stable grounds? I don't know. But I bet we could afford it if we really cared. Let's hope that the other 112 nations that approved the study will be willing to be reasonable about emissions and that change can be effected quickly. I wonder how likely that is….
If you make one, it is likely that someone else has made the same mistake, in a more important setting. Take, for example, a common search and replace in an html page. If you have a bunch of <div> tags, and you want to replace them with more semantically correct <p> tags, you might do a search and replace for "p" to replace "div". This would be a mistake if, say, your page was about a certain section of a hospital or about the earnings of your site or about a mathematical formula, resulting in these sorts of quotes:
Unfortunately, too many people misspell Persian and purge; pest, pine, pining, and ping are all fairly common words; Pisor is a name; other words, like divulged, aren't common enough that the possibility missed them. But there are plenty of possiblities, just in the <div> != <p> error. You would expect that republicans are spiders, but it's more obscure than that. I really wonder what a persity is.
Can you find any more?
A few nights ago I had a dream. It was the most internally-consistent and plot-driven dream I have ever had, as far as I can remember. An excerpt:
A few friends and I were standing in a dark forest. Above us, silhouetted against a twilit cliff face was a large puma. It turned towards us and began to walk down the slope in our direction. We were, needless to say, a wee bit frightened. Then, about halfway to us, it veered off into a small hollow and laid down, pulling up the covers around itself and going to sleep. We took this at face value and continued talking until it asked us if we could please be a little quieter:, because it was trying to sleep.
It was a rather mystical dream, filled with more familiar faces than most of mine are. I appreciated that.
I'm a occasional Facebooker. I accept many friend requests, but I can't remember when I last made one myself. Some of my closest friends also have this strategy. So, today, I added Cami and Becky and Aaron, along with a few others. I thought it was a shame that I have a bunch of Facebook "friends" who I don't know or care to know as much as many of my actual friends. Don't expect this to mean I will use Facebook more: I won't. Henceforth, I will go back to my usual ways.
I feel like an addicted man who has been denied his pleasure for a month, finally getting back on it. I'm back in Spokane with my computer.
Chinese facing shortage of wives
China will have 30 million more men than women by 2020 making it hard for them to find wives, a report says.
Mexico leader in tortilla pledge
Mexico's President Calderon vows to tackle the soaring price of tortillas, the flat corn bread which is a diet staple.
Also, Making Light posted a list of all hamster-headlines in the BBC in the past few years.
Some of my favorites: Apparently deceased hamster revives, gnaws hole in coffin, tunnels out of grave, and finds its way home; Bus company apologizes for charging hamster 10p for ride, issues lifetime bus pass; Oldest hamster food cache found. (Miocene, 17 million years old.); Man jailed for 60 days after drop-kicking ex-girlfriend’s hamster.
So, you may remember Aaron Brown's post about torsion of the testis. I assumed that it was a morbid way to kill someone, but I was wrong. Most people have some structure that keeps their testicles from moving around too much. Overexcited genitals can get themselves into trouble without such structures. Apparently I'm some mutant freak: through some genetic aberration, I got gypped. Here's how it went.
On Saturday I was feeling great. I was enjoying the weekend at the coast, and I was ready to go back to Spokane to get some stuff done before school started. Sunday morning, I started feeling some pain in my lower abdomen, but I shrugged it off. It was something that happened a few times a year, and I figured it was a normal sort of pain that everyone got. When it didn't fade like usual after an hour or so, I began to worry a little. But it wasn't until a few hours later that it hit its peak, with me doubled over in pain. We decided to go to the hospital. I got a nice long ultrasound (before the painkillers kicked in), after which the doctor came in to give me the news.
"You have a twisted testicle." My first reaction, naturally, was to laugh. It wasn't a terribly funny joke, but it was certainly unexpected. After a moment of reflection, though, I realized that he wasn't joking. He continued, "Your left testicle has no blood flow. We're going to rush you to Portland for surgery." Wow.
So they gave me a nice big pain reliever, and I got back to Portland an hour or so before my parents, which was unexpected. We apparently hit 93 miles an hour (which isn't technically legal, even for an ambulance), but when we got to the hospital it took about fifteen minutes to figure out where to send me. Talk about a weird contrast.
They eventually sent me directly to the operating room, where they had me slide off of the stretcher onto the table, after which I remember absolutely nothing. I know they gave me a combination anesthetic/amnesiac, which knocks out short term memory along with you. While I'm completely out of it, they right my nether regions, throw in a few more stitches to keep them there, and sew me back up. Next thing I know, I'm in the recovery room, and they send me to my hospital bed.
Now, I've been amused throughout the entire process, but at this point I finally get to talk to other people. I call Becky and tell her that I won't be flying in the next day, I call Josh to tell him I won't be on his flight. I call Nathan and tell him (and Eric and Aaron) to come visit me, and finally call Sarah and tell her all about it.
"Hey, Sarah, guess where I am!"
"Uhhh, your house?"
"Nope."
"Nathan's house?"
"No, but Nathan's coming to visit me."
"Okay, I give up."
"I'm in the hospital!"
"What?!"
That was fun. Anyway, Nathan and friends visited me and we laughed about the whole situation for a while. He climbed into my hospital bed at one point when I vacated it and tried calling his mom to tell her he was in the hospital, but nobody answered. After they left, I managed to get a decent amount of sleep between when the nurses came in to check on me. I got a bit more pain medicine that morning at 6:00, but I haven't had any more since.
So, at the end of it all, I didn't lose anything important, I got a quick ride back to Portland, and I enjoyed the strange embrace of anesthesia once again. Although I certainly wouldn't choose to go through such an experience, I think I made the best of it.
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.
And the smell of rot fills the country.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.