Bloomington has SF/English weather right now, light overcast, occasional spritz of rain, grey over green, a combination I've always loved. And maybe the winter really got to me, but right now it seems *really* green around here, as in I'll look down a street and see the trees in leaf and be surprised at how the view is blocked. Many of the blocks here are criss-crossed with alleys, vs. blocks in Chicago that just had a long block going down them, or ones in San Francisco with no alleys and trash pickup is out front. (Out front here too, despite the alleys.) Today I was diverting myself down alleys, and discovering the central spaces, standing on gravel under clouds and trees, the cars somewhat distant and muffled by houses and leaves, birds chirping in the trees above me. Chicago wouldn't have that feeling, I think, partly from there being fewer trees in that location, and largely because of the feeling of being in a crossroads, and looking out in four directions, vs. being trapped in the middle of a long alley. I think *that's* related to Jane Jacobs's observations about short vs. long city blocks, and how much more pedestrian (and business) friendly the former were. Also related to my brief couple of weeks working at Knowledge Adventure, in some office block around LA, in the middle of an inhumanly long block, of course sans any green or softening features. My friends Glenn&Sarah lived in blocks half a mile long, but at least all those 3/4 acre lots softened the view, plus G&S were close to one end.

( Review )

since apparently the commercial ones are nerfed.

From montyy0

A 'small' local war -- 50 Hiroshimas -- could damage the ozone layer in mid-latitudes -- where you and I and other rich people live -- for years.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080408/ap_on_sc/nuclear_ozone_3

Nepal moves to get rid of its monarchy.

Cuba expanding private farms. Reinventing the wheel, again and again. I have an apropos quote, by me, from my childhood:

Wisdom is learning from your mistakes. Real wisdom is learning from other people's mistakes.</a>

Porn makes men take bigger financial risks.

Host of soil bacteria found which can live on antibiotics. Cattle get fed antibiotics. Cattle poop. Soil bacteria get exposed to poop. *evolution* Profit! Or not, from out point of view.

China allows access to English wikipedia (Tibet and Tianenmen still restricted) but not Chinese wikipedia.

Questions for pompe and anyone else who can answer:
if we used space mirrors so that the nightside of the Earth got the same sunlight as the dayside, would we totally roast? How quickly/badly?

What if we get the same total sunlight as now, but split and redirect it, so that the tropics at noon get less than half what they do now, but the entire planet gets that same level, 24/7? I imagine net thermodynamics wouldn't change much, weather would be massively changed, but I'm most interested in plant productivity -- is it more productive to have a constant moderate level of light everywhere, rather than some times and places with intense light and others with none, or vice versa?

Christina Hoff Sommers warns against it.

I wonder how Congress would react to a suggest that Title IX and quotas be applied to itself...

So, I've heard that the energy extractable from wind goes up as the cube of windspeed. This is easy to follow: the kinetic energy of a mass of air goes up as v^2, and if the wind is v times faster, v times as much mass goes by, for a combined v^3.

Only today did it occur to me that this applies to wind blowing down on you, or your house: double the speed from 10 to 20 mph, octuple the energy involved. Suddenly, hurricane winds of 75 mph and tornado winds of 300 mph snap into perspective.

Perhaps more directly relevant to not being blown over is force, or delta-momentum. A mass of air moving v times faster has v times as much momentum, and again v times as much air mass can go by, so the force exerted on a stationary object goes as v^2. High everyday winds might be 30 mph; a tornado is not 10x as forceful, but 100x. Whee.

I suspect that in a fit of Galilean relativity, all this applies to propelling yourself through a stationary fluid, as well, but I'm not certain of that.

Tangentially, we live in a new era: avalanches on Mars visible almost live.

LOLParrot

Huckabee endorses wifely submission. Fred Thompson calls him a liberal. All the GOPers endorse more tax cuts, because the federal government is running such a surplus right now... McCain says US was founded as a Christian nation.

Majikthiese notes the various male Presidents who have cried in public, without the grief that Hillary Clinton is getting over her voice wavering.

Greta Christina on the harm of woo-woo thinking. Links in passing to the total failure of a whole slew of phone pet psychics to detect that the pet in question did not exist.

(from pompe) More on how US doesn't regard foreigners as having any rights.

Dead heart stripped of cells, remaining matrix repopulated with stem cells. Woo!

New Yorker article on the decline of reading, and on the cognitive changes in literate as opposed to oral or audiovisual brains and minds.

Thank you, pompe! I get to re-use my 'hubris' tag (in a good way): biggest building plans, from an architect who's already built similar buildings. Article also links to a much bigger proposal for Japan, which is probably vaporware. This hyperbolic pyramid design is a new one to me, for arcologies, and my first reaction is "wow, that's really space inefficient", compared to a cube or dome, but I assume there are other benefits. Be nice to know what they are.

From James we get GOP candidates as Buffy villains.

From fallenrose, Michael Pollan (Omnivore's Dilemma, Botany of Desire) has a new book out (In Defense of Food). Don't eat too much, eat plants, don't eat things your grandma wouldn't recognize as food... I'd note that some of the animal engineering he mentions is arguably counteracting previous abuses; eggs aren't getting "fish oils", they're getting a flaxseed component which might be closer to natural eggs than the pure corn diet.

I wonder how this interacts with the John Hawks paper on rapid human evolution, which seems to support my intuition that various human populations could well have adapted to their specific agricultural diets. Perhaps we should think about not just traditional foods but food traditional for our individual genomes, where determinable. A related thought was that if there's any genetic component to correlations between 'race' and IQ, perhaps it's not from "X are dumb" but "X aren't adapted to Middle Eastern-derived agriculture, and IQ is nutrition sensitive", with certain middle-class populations suffering from the fact that while they can afford all the food they think they want, their genomes actually want foods not sold in their hemisphere.

Creationists take on plate tectonics and linguistics.

I currently have no plans for Thanksgiving.

( Mess o' links on AIDS, terror, physics,and atheism )

John Wilkins and P.Z. Myers -- the former is an "unflinching sociobiologist" and the latter calls himself lapsed with positive views. Both, to my surprise, distinguish it from evolutionary psychology -- not in the sense I've seen before of evo psych getting more cautious than sociobiology and concentrating the science, but in an opposite sense of amplifying the flaws of sociobiology, being too eagerly adaptationist, and too committed to mental modularity, as in principle 4 of Tooby and Cosmides's primer. The latter might be a fair cop... but I also wonder if this is an atheist/agnostic like debate, where the real sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists are all doing the same good science, but flustered and squabbling over labels.

A paragraph from Wilkins:

Now I want to note at the outset that there are several kinds of thing that get called sociobiology, according to one's attitude to biological accounts of social behaviour, and the age in which the writers under consideration worked. Few disciplines are as history-ridden as evolutionary biology, and few within that as social biology. I mark out three types of social biology: the standard Evil Demon of eugenics and "social Darwinism" (which is neither social, nor Darwinian, nor ever an actual historical movement, but that's for another day). We may dismiss this as being of no positive value apart from an object lesson in how not to apply science to society. The second is the movement of the 1970s to treat humans as social animals and discuss the ways in which evolution has shaped us. This is the sense of the term in Wilson and Wilson, and which I will discuss below. The third is that same evolutionary psychology. A few short words about that before we begin.

Daylight Saving Time takes weeks to adjust to.

The sun should be highest at noon, damn it.

Some research I did (Excel spreadsheet)
http://mindstalk.net/okcupidgaystats.xls

Method: searching for straight, gay, and bi men and women on the OkCupid personals site. The system acts weirdly if I try to query the whole database, so I searched in varying radii of various cities, e.g. 1000 miles of San Francisco, or 10 miles of Dallas, or 500 miles of Frankfurt, Germany. All ages and relationship statuses. Results vary somewhat, but a rough pattern is
gay guys: 5-7%
bi guys: 2-5%
gay girls: 3-6%
bi girls: 12-19%

Certain places break these ranges: San Francisco, NYC, Northampton ("lesbian capital of the US"), for example. 500 miles of Frankfurt raises the gay and bi girl maxima, among large-radius searches.

Pace Kinsey's "10%", it is true that everywhere has >10% of people self-registered as willing to consider same-sex relationships. Actual homosexuals are less than that, outside of concentrated areas, and apart from Frankfurt gay males outnumber gay females, while bi females outnumber both, and bi males have the same scarcity as gay females. The highest rate of gay males is 11%, in SF; the lowest rate of bi females is 12%, around Dallas. Highest rate of bi males is in Northampton, while NYC is rather low.

(Edit: I late added data for Tokyo, New Delhi, Lima, and Pretoria; the latter three have much lower rates of bi females, 6-8% -- though still twice the rate of gay females.)

Almond monoculture and bee collapse. As friends put it:

"Interesting and well-written article in today's Chron about the massive California almond harvest, the role that bees play in it, and what impact it may have on colony collapse disorder."

"Until I started reading the article I thought you had that last clause backwards."

Temperatures here have plunged from 80s to 50s overnight. Hello, autumn? I repeat my call for climate controlled cities; the environment is too important to be left to nature.

Pretending I'm akashiver (entertainment news): Warner's president of production says no more female leads.

Suburban blight

Zombies for Jesus. I don't know how this interacts with "God is a fairy".

Odd Republican sex death. Yes, this is the one with two wetsuits.

I just had this thought: space colonies not being obviously profitable, some people have fantasized about billionaire space fans building them for the hell of it. Others have imagined space hotels slowly expanding. Reading Richard Conniff's Natural History of the Rich I wondered if space mansions might not be a takeoff point. After all, the real question is not "what can colonies do for Earth" or "for humanity" but "for the people living in them."

Well, I guess "for Earth" is relevant for investment purposes. But "for the people" works for buying purposes, and people do buy weird shit.

ADDED: Mules occasionally foal despite normally being sterile due to odd chromosome number. I was alerted to this by a Usenet thread on books by Alan Dean Foster and Robert Heinlein where colonies on other planets lack amenities such as maps, as might be taken by a satellite, or even by a handheld camera from orbit. Time Enough For Love has mules, okay, rifles, okay, and no maps, not okay.