Foundation

I never cared about that plotline anyway. It was always a distraction from saving the world and reuniting the party.

Of course between Miko being nuts and the king jerking everyone around, I never really got attached to the Paladin people anyway.

I’m getting a sense that the Democrats are becoming nervous: Months after I posted a couple of anti-Obama videos, only now am I getting a series of semi-literate critical comments on YouTube on my account and my videos.

I tend to delete these things, but in they come. It makes me smile.

BBC reports that research into the building collapses on 9/11 has illuminated properties of steel at high temperatures. Fusion power researchers hope that research into the effects of magnetism on very hot steel will lead to the creation of new materials that can take the heat, which would allow the construction of better nuclear fusion chambers.

Here I’ve been writing off the Dodgers. But they go into a series with Arizona down a game and a half and proceed to win all three games by a combined score of 19-5.

I’m stunned. I just hope it can last.

Via Slashdot comes the report that The Sun has broken a 95 year old record. Quoting the Daily Tech:

The sun has reached a milestone not seen for nearly 100 years: an entire month has passed without a single visible sunspot being noted.

The event is significant as many climatologists now believe solar magnetic activity – which determines the number of sunspots — is an influencing factor for climate on earth.

Read the whole thing to get a bonus story of the scientists who predicted this, but were prevented from publishing their theory’s predictions by the peer review process, but to me the important story here is the sunspot cycle.

Scientists have been watching the Sun and recording sunspots for about 400 years. For the first 30 years of measurements, the Sun was as active as it normally is, but abruptly, activity died way down. For the whole second half of the 17th century there were hardly any sunspots recorded, a period known as the Maunder minimum. Eventually activity did pick back up, getting back to what appears to be a ‘normal’ pattern by about 1725.

The Sun’s magnetism appears to run on cycles within cycles within cycles. Every 10 years or so there is a very short period cycle, with spots going high and low, high and low. Right now we are at the trough of one of those, with the Sun having zeroed out in fact. However the highs and lows aren’t the same. Sometimes they go higher, as they have for the period of about 1940-1990. Sometimes they go lower, too, as they did during the Dalton Minimum of about 1790-1820. And apparently, as we saw during the Maunder Minimum, sometimes the sun almost shuts down its magnetic activity completely.

Is the Sun’s magnetism about to shut down again, threatening us with the kinds of cold winters that battered the Pilgrims? Is it coincidental that as recorded temperatures have gone up, solar activity has also risen? Possibly. Only time will tell if the theories regarding Solar radiation and cloud formation will bear fruit.

But until we know, we must keep watching, and avoid doing anything rash. If a new mini ice age approached, it may yet turn out that dumping carbon dioxide into the air and getting a greenhouse effect may be the only thing that can prevent widespread famine.

I’ve seen so many exchanges on the Internet lately that go like this:

Smart person: You know, research shows that the older the mother gets, the more likely the children are to have Down’s Syndrome.

Lefty: So what? More Down’s Syndrome babies are born to young mothers.

I guess leftists are too busy learning at racist studies programs from Marxist professors to take classes in basic math and science, or else they’d not make a statement that so blatantly shows a lack of understanding of basic probability.

Hint to the lurker trolls: Thomas Bayes has the droids you are looking for. You see, Bayes did some work with respect to conditional probabilities, showing the way those probabilities change given the addition of new data.

I’ll spare the mathematical details, but consider this hypothetical. There are two coins: One has a head and a tail, and one has two heads (it’s used to cheat). Your ‘buddy’ grabs a coin and is going to flip it. What’s the probability that he picked each coin? 50% each. Easy.

But what happens when he starts flipping the coin? If after the first flip it’s tails, then obviously it’s not the two-headed coin. The probabilities are 100% (normal) and 0% (two-headed). That’s easy. After one heads toss, the probabilities are about 33% (normal) and 67% (two-headed). After two heads tosses, they become 25% and 75%. These can be calculated, as I just did, by counting outcomes and doing division.

However what Thomas Bayes did was to do the math for more complicated cases. Using the principle of Bayes’ rule one could take the probability of Trig Palin being the child of Bristol Palin or Sarah Palin, plug in the the fact that Trig Palin has Down’s, and get an increased probability that Sarah truly is the mother. No, it doesn’t matter that more Down’s children are born to young mothers. What matters is the probabilities are changed. Given what we know about Trig Palin, basic probability states that Sarah Palin is more likely to be his mother than if we didn’t know anything about him.

So you can go about your business. Move along. Or not, because the more you push this, Obama fans, the more you ‘prove’ to the PUMAs that Obama hates strong women, so much that he’ll use any insinuations he can about hysterics, PMS, or anything else in order to be top.

Some ‘green’ plastic-free living advice published on the BBC’s website today:

Ask yourself, what did they do 50 years ago before plastic was around. The answer is usually there.

So it’s actually the green left who not only desire a return to the days gone by, but they expressly want to roll back the innovations of convenience that made modern feminism possible. Interesting.

I have to think that, were the right to have our own George Soros, we could pour millions of dollars into a project to hammer at the seams of the left wing alliance of grievance groups. If we could pit the feminists against the racists (each group separately) against the environmentalists against the labor unions, the Democrats could never have a safe and sane primary again at any level above dogcatcher.

How well did the McCain campaign fake the whole world? Here’s how well: the DNC’s page The Next Cheney which aggregated talking points against our likely VP nominees didn’t even mention Governor Palin as of this morning.

The Next Cheney is of course the page that was already known for suggesting Eric Cantor is shady because he’s Jewish.

Many of us have feared for years that John McCain would never grow to have a proper relationship with the press if he were to become our party leader. I think this whole situation is a harsh test of that theory. He played them perfectly. Nobody expected the Alaskan inquisition. Not even the Democrat opposition researchers.

No, I’m not going to link.

It’d been a while since I popped in on the Internet’s leading Nazi community, and read what they were all hyped up about. I used to check in every couple of weeks to see how the Ron Paul push was going. They do still have a bunch of Ronulans, but some have moved on to the Constitution Party candidate.

In any case, I visited last night to see what their reaction was to the alleged assassination attempt on Barack Obama. No surprise: They think the whole thing is a Jewish conspiracy, and the would-be assassins were set up or paid off. Of course, they think when it rains, it’s a “ZOG” weather control device attempting to make “White people” unable to see the truth.

But I kept reading, and stumbled onto a huge thread: their main discussion of the war in Georgia. It’s funny: they can’t decide which Jewish conspiracy is at work here. Some say that the former Communist KGB Vladimir Putin is a puppet of Israel, because Communism is Jewish say they, and the war is designed to pit “White” Russians against “White” Georgians in order to weaken “White people” everywhere.

Some say that it’s the other way around: That Vladimir Putin is a “good White leader” (think Führer when they say leader), and that it’s the Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili who is the Zionist stooge, trying to pit “White” against “White.” Yet others have declared Georgians to be ‘mud people’ and are spouting otherwise the Russian party line: the Georgians are the aggressors, South Ossetia belongs to Russia, and “Georgia should be wiped out.”

Then all these factions started to fight. Some claimed Georgians have Greek ancestry, some claimed they’re closer to Iranian than European. That then started two whole separate fights: one over whether Iranians are “Aryan”, and another over the apparently new site policy that Armenians aren’t “White.”

Poor, poor “White nationalists.” If only the Joooooooos hadn’t made Ron Paul say pro-Communist things, maybe he’d have won the nomination, unified “his people,” and led America into its Third Empire Republic (counting the Articles of Confederation as #1, and the Constitution as #2).

Some may have heard of a plan to drive Hydrogen-fueled cars across the country, in a demonstration of technical maturity and practicality. It’s a great idea if you can do it, but it turns out to have been a lie. Says Gizmodo:

…if you’re going to heavily promote your cross-country trek as the “first ever” for hydrogen-powered vehicles, at least make sure large, 1,000-mile stretches of it did not involve having the vehicles carried along on flatbed trucks. This was the case today as the “Hydrogen Road Tour ’08” wrapped up in Los Angeles after its 60-strong vehicle fleet entered the Los Angeles Coliseum. From Rolla, Missouri, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, the caravan was carried on the back of carbon-belching flat bed tractor trailer trucks. Doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of an alternative fuel road trip right then and there?

If the right tried something like this, trying to change public opinion and policy through fraud, the left would be screaming Reichstag. But will the green left suffer political consequences for their attempt at deception? Never.