The Oyster’s Garter

I’ve often mentioned my love for apocalyptic fiction. Now I can get my fix from reality. The Center for Strategic and International Studies released a new report entitled “The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change.” It envisions three scenarios: “expected,” “severe”, and “catastrophic.” I haven’t read the whole report yet, so here’s Real Climate’s summary with my comments:
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Eric and I watched Battlestar Galactica: Razor just before Christmas. I was incredibly disappointed. Many spoilers ahead.

The arc with the Pegasus and Admiral Cain was one of my favorite parts of Season 2. I saw Admiral Cain as Adama’s dark shadow - she had had similar challenges and tests, but failed and paid for it with her humanity. It also got deeper into a perennial theme of BSG - what is a person? In the first season, President Roslin does not hesitate to toss a Cylon out of an airlock. Does this mean that Admiral Cain is within her rights to torture another Cylon?

I was hoping that Razor would be a kind of Shakespearean tale of Admiral Cain’s fall. Hell, her name is Cain in a show fraught with Biblical symbolism. Sadly, Razor totally failed. Instead of telling the tale of Cain’s fall since the Cylon attack it gave her a cheesy and pat childhood trauma backstory. Instead of getting into the question of whether a robot can be a person, Razor turned Admiral Cain’s torture of Number 6 into a brutal lover’s revenge. And instead of telling an alternate story of the Cylon attacks, Razor does a paint-by-number retelling of what is narrated in Season 2 and wastes time on an unnecessary flashback from the “present” (which takes place from the end of Season 2).

Anyway, I found very little redeeming about Razor, though I did enjoy spending time in the BSG universe (especially with Starbuck before they ruined her character with crappy soap opera romance). What did you fellow geeks out there think? And do you think Season 4 is going to be any good?

Unlike many scientists, I embrace doom & gloom. It probably has something to do with being a Jewish New Hampshirite - the combination of “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God” and “Jews in the Hands of an Angry Pogram” doesn’t make for the cheeriness. Maybe I’ll start a weekly Doom feature. In the meantime, have some more tasty doom!

• Estimates of sea level rise may be too low. A new study in Nature found that if global temperature rose 2 degrees C, sea level would rise 4-6 meters (12-18 feet). Eeep! That’s a up to a 1.5 meter (5 foot) rise per century! New York isn’t looking so healthy with just a 0.7 (2 foot) rise. Not my bagels! My precious bagels!
• Pacific salmon are swimming around Argentina and invading the southern Atlantic, probably aided by massive salmon farming operations in Chile. Since salmon are hungry mofos, they could starve out Magellanic penguins in Patagonia. This is somewhat ironic due to Atlantic salmon causing trouble in the North Pacific. Maybe they’ll make it home as the ice melts and the Northwest Passage grows.
• In preparation for the inevitable apocalypse (which may or may not be related to zombies), crop seeds from all around the world are being stored in Svalbard, off Norway. The Svalbard global seed vault is set to open in February 2008.
• And finally, is humanity doomed? A paper in Nature considers the probability of overpopulation, giant asteroids, and the extinction of the sun.

Er, Happy New Year!

This tiger homicide story has made national news and all, but the details are still amazing. I’ve had a bit of a tiger obsession since I covered a small part  of the story of the man who raised a tiger in Harlem in 2003. The short version of the tale is that on Christmas day, a tiger leapt the wall of its enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo to attack Carlos Sousa Jr., 17, and his two buddies, Kulbir and Paul Dhaliwal, 23 and 19 respectively. Here’s a run down of the facts culled from multiple news sources:

* The tiger, Tatiana, is 4-year-old, 350-pound Siberian tiger with a nasty reputation.

• Tatiana leapt out of the cage to attack one brother Kulbir. Sousa yelled at the tiger to distract it, and ended up getting mauled himself.

• The two brothers abandoned Sousa and fled to the cafe. To quote the Associated Press, “After killing the teenager, the tiger followed a trail of blood left by Kulbir Dhaliwal about 300 yards to the cafe, where it mauled both men, police said. “

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There really has never been a good way to recycle old electronics. They can’t be thrown into the trash, because electronics are built out of all kinds of compounds and heavy metals that seep into the ground and eventually into the ground water. The virtuous among us who bring electronics to recyclers actually aren’t doing any good either, since recyclers often extract the valuable metals - copper wiring, gold from the microchips – and then chuck the rest into the landfill.

So what to do? Sell it to Second Rotation, apparently. This company is trying to make a living buying your old electronics, refurbishing them and reselling them. They apparently can resell 90% of the gear they get. The rest they recycle. Are they giving it to the sleazy recyclers or good ones? I’ve got a call in to them to try and find out the deal. Still, if they can resell 90% of my old electronics, that’s at least two of the three gadgets we have in a drawer at home.

[Via Ars Technica]

I absolutely must highlight this post on the Other 95%. It has it all - sea squirts, orgies, biofoam, and a take-home conservation message! Knowing that sea squirts are even more kinky than I imagined (and I have a good imagination) is making my scientific forays into squirt-dom so much more awesome.

For pretty pictures of sexy squirts, check out I’m a chordata, urochordata’s Sea Squirt Sundays.

I was so hoping I’d never have to run again. Unfortunately, although playing Nintendo Wii games does burn 50% more calories than playing regular console games, it doesn’t even approach the calories burnt by normal exercise. It’s not so much that I’m surprised by this result as I have the sense of a million teenage voices hoping to get a Wii suddenly silenced.

Dawn at Joshua Tree 5

As part of our “dammit we will love the southwest since we are stuck here” plan, Eric and I visited Joshua Tree National Park over the weekend. Having grown up hiking where copious amounts of water runs right over the ground, I’m pretty skeptical of the desert. (If skeptical = terrified.) But Joshua Tree was an incredibly gorgeous and alien landscape. The Joshua trees, which are really overgrown yuccas, form twisted and alien shapes, while the momzogranite cliffs loom above.

Since we don’t know anything about the desert, we went on a few short nature walks to read the interpretive signs. I *heart* interpretive signage - it told us how to identify the two major types of yucca besides the Joshua Tree, the difference between a pinyon and a juniper, and six of the major desert adaptation used by local animals.

But the most interesting thing on the signs had to do with local climate. Apparently Joshua Tree was wetter before the 1940s, making cattle ranching possible. Then the climate shifted, springs dried up, and ranching became impossible. Does anyone know anything about this? The shift seems too early to have to do with fossil fuels - is there a decadal-scale natural variation in the United States southwest? I have not been able to find any information so far.

Ice at midday in Wonderland of Rock

Sadly, like so many neat things, Joshua trees don’t look like they’re going to make it into the next century. Chris Clarke at Creek Running North has covered this pretty thoroughly, between invasive grasses that increase the severity of fires and climate change & poor dispersal (yet another reason to grieve for the giant ground sloth). So if you’re in the southwest, go to Joshua Tree NOW.

I’d like to say that I’m not always this filled with gloom, but actually I am. Have a photo of an inappropriately shaped rock formation to cheer you up!

Miriam and I love the idea of a science debate for the presidential candidates. Seriously, let’s make our potential future leaders show us what they understand about how science works, let’s see what studies they cite as important. Science underpins pretty much our entire modern world. Let’s make this happen.

Never trust a magazine cover. Not that I did anyway, but check out this portfolio from a professional retoucher. All these photos are after he worked his digital Botox - scroll over to see the “before.” After a while, the retouched photos started to look really cheesy and I wondered if this guy was just a two-bit hack. Nope - his work appears in major magazines and ads. I found this especially telling in light of Hillary Clinton’s “OMG HOW CAN A 60 YEAR OLD WOMAN CORRUPT OUR EYEBALLZ!!!” photo.

For more scary plastic people revealed, here’s a Dove ad showing a model from before-coffee morning mode to billboard.

Via Diary of a Freak Magnet