Buy Rubber Boats! The Earth is Melting!

Typhoon Ondoy was an eye-opener for the Philippines a few years ago. People still talk about it. Secretary Teodoro lost the rubber boats and Manila washed out to sea on a river of plastic bags. Preparations are better these days, the rubber boats have been found and some communities are banning plastic bags, but too many people are still being killed during typhoons. Poor people, mostly. Steps are being taken to relocate some of the most vulnerable squatters. Oddly, it seems that some don't really want to go.

Yesterday I was reading about how la Nina conditions are posing problems for the Visayas where I live. Reducing rainfall and drying up the rice fields. I can certify that we have had about a week of nice weather. Nice from the standpoint of no rain so it is possible to go out and play badminton or go for a walk or other outdoorsy things. Our mountain range is small. Get three or more weeks of "nice" weather and our water goes dry.

It is a tad unsettling.

Two more unsettling scientific articles popped up on my news roll the other day. Same day. The headlines were a little different but they said, effectively:

• "Antarctic Ice Melts at Record Levels"

• "Arctic Ice at Record Lows"

So the earth is losing her polar ice both north and south. The culprits are the normal characters, warm winds and higher water temperatures and holes in the ozone layer.

You know, of course, there is a tipping point. Once the sensitive equilibrium of the earth's heating and cooling gets tipped too far toward warming, there is no way to get it back. Chaos is sure to follow, massive destruction and shocks to the eco-system, violent changes in weather patterns, starvation and anger, riots and war.

Revelations, perhaps in our time.

I've never quite understood the way the skeptics of global warming play their cards. They seem not to understand risk, and how to protect against it.  Or it is in their SHORT TERM advantage to profit and to hell with the kids. They have no conscience.

• What do you lose if you are right about global warming, it is not an aberration but a natural earth warming cycle, but take steps to prevent it?

• What do you lose if you are wrong about global warming, and it is an aberration? But you do nothing to stop it?

More and more studies are pointing to the reality of global warming. The Philippines is in a precarious position. It is at the divide of earth's northern and southern weather systems. The inter-tropical conversion zone bounces across the Philippines like a floppy elastic band that has lost its discipline. This typhoon season it is pushing all the storms north to blast Luzon, or move past and blast Okinawa. The Visayas are dry. If it bounces back south, then Luzon is a desert and we soak.

This is another reason why the nation's population growth, 50% higher than it ought to be, is dangerous. This is why there should be a sense of urgency to balancing out the nation's population growth and its ability to employ, feed, shelter, educate and care for that population.

It takes time to slow a huge boat, and we may not have much time left.

With climate volatility comes a greater risk to food and water supplies. I'm sorry. This is not an opinion. It is a statistical certainty. Volatility means unpredictable. And potentially extreme weather. And potentially destructive consequences. It does not mean stable and certain and predictable and benign.

The Philippines needs to get control of its resources. It needs to stop drifting down the risky slope of fate like an oarless, rudderless rubber raft ripping out-of-control down the Cagayan de Oro River, at the mercy of the rocks and currents and illegally cut logs.

Like, get a rudder, baby! Grab a paddle and work it.

Fire up the engines of competency to manage the affairs of the Philippines as if LIVES DEPENDED ON IT.

Enough of this talking and posturing as if God actually listens to prayers. I was upset that the first words out of Chief Justice Sereno's mouth was that the Constitution asks us to plead to God.

Give me a break, your honor. This humanization of God is a little much for me, as if the Constitution will soon DEMAND we plead to the Big Your Honor in the Sky or get thrown in jail.

God doesn't answer prayers like Santa Clause in a sled. He set the scene a bazillion years ago, gave us free will, and said "take your best shot." That's all.

You can't pray and make the ice stop melting.

You CAN stop birthing the nation into oblivion and eating the fields bare like locusts with brains filled with some kind of gray green glop.

How about applying some intelligence for a change, in stead of faith? How about exercising some WILL for a change, instead of just lollygagging along as if someone else will do it? As if God will do it.

Like, enough of that faith-bound mentality, that needy "God please help us" beggar mentality. I don't care if you are Chief Justice or a fisherman or a legislator. Get up and go to work.

God takes care of those who take care of themselves responsibly.

Elitism, Mars and JoeAm's House

If you were fighting the rain last week, perhaps you missed the video from the U.S. about "Seven Minutes of Terror", the Curiosity expedition to Mars. "Curiosity" is a nuclear powered robotic rover that will help earthbound creatures decide if there is a different place that can sustain human life. Gadzooks, but NASA marketed this expedition well, selling it like a real-life suspense story. I'll link to two absorbing videos at the end of this article.

This is not a technology article, however. So if you detest science, just wade a little more and I'll get to the point.

The seven minutes of terror is the time between when the rover's pod hit the Martian atmosphere to the time it touched down on Mars. One of the videos focuses on the reactions of the Jet Propulsion Lab's blue-shirted technicians as they monitored the fruits of their work during the tense seven minutes. A guy is reading readouts into the microphone, most incomprehensible on the tape. Speed. Distance to surface. Checkpoints.

Curiosity below parachute; photo from orbiter

• Entering atmosphere.
• Popping parachute.
• Popping capsule base so instruments can read positioning.
• Dropping the crane and rover from the pod.
• Maneuvering sideways away from the parachute and toward the landing zone.
• Firing retro-rockets to stabilize the flying crane and slow its fall.
• Lowering the rover on a tether while continuing to drop.
• Touchdown and cutting the tether; wild cheering, hugging and backslapping.
• Crane rocketing off to a safe distance, splashing into the sandy dirt.
• First thumbnail photo and more cheering, hugging and backslapping.

Seven minutes of faith in a machine; faith in Man's accomplishments.

We will post appropriate photos in the gallery of the Church of Man. If you do not yet belong to our Church, please read the formation announcement in the pertinent article here.

The Mars landing was almost as dramatic as the first manned moon landing.

No, folks, it was not done in Hollywood.

Curiosity

Unfortunately, it is reported that China is angry and has summoned the US Ambassador to report for a lecture. Evidently China has claimed Mars because of the historical precedent that it is called "the Red Planet." They don't like the U.S. dropping one-ton off-road vehicles onto their dirt.

Well, that will play out as will nine-dash crayon drawings done by a Chinese seventh grader that authorizes Chinese warships to cruise off the coast of Luzon.

I think that whole nation is smoking dope.

The cost of the Mars venture is $2.6 billion.

At an exchange rate of 41.83 pesos per dollar that is:

• P 108,758,000,000 or 108.8 billion pesos.

That would feed a lot of Filipinos, eh? Build a lot of classrooms.

It would feed a lot of homeless Americans, too; give them a good meal, a bed and a shower. It would bail out a lot of underwater homeowners or college graduates sucking on loan payments.  Or help fund Social Security.

But the U.S. chose to invest the money in Mars.

Good idea or bad? THAT is the point of this article, or the essential question at least.

I happen to think it is good, and here are the reasons why:

• The U.S. needs to stay ahead of China in the space race because space is a military place. You lose that edge and you risk everything. China is not yet a peaceful and constructive player in the World community.

• The money gets paid largely to American companies and workers, so it is not much different than a road infrastructure project aimed at righting the economy; it is just a very long road taking some eight months to traverse. It is a lightly traveled road, but so is that freeway between Clark and Subic.

• The technology advances will eventually find their way into civilian uses, like smaller cameras and computers and useful health care equipment. Or 100 pound parachutes that can withstand 65,000 tons of snap. What the hell was THAT sucker made of?

• We can have a colony on another planet when our earth implodes in about 200 years. Survival of our dysfunctional, stupid, destructive species. I'll go out on a limb and say that is a good thing.

• It is great television. Better than movies and fake stuff.

A parallel dilemma.

Our neighbors and friends are always asking for money. They are poor. But we (our family) choose to invest  our money, instead, in ourselves (a car, a large house), savings for our son's college and savings for my wife (I'm older and will bite the dust while she is relatively young; she has no career or professional training).

It is the fundamental question on which all political theory rests. Take care of the poorest or take care of a few select people.

Well Marx and Engels and Adam Smith had a few things to say about this. They beat it to a pulp, socialism and capitalism. And history has played out and capitalism won. Presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Barak Obama in the U.S. are beating each other about the ears regarding the single issue: invest in the people, or invest in the wealth-builders?

Socialism or capitalism?

At the core of the highly successful capitalistic American economic beast is the human drive called "motivation". Often it looks like aspiration or ambition. Sometimes it morphs to greed. But it is the fundamental drive to produce and excel. This is the beast that Ayn Rand spent several thick novels addressing. The societal advantage of egoism and productive might.

When individual effort and achievement is siphoned off to take care of non-achievers, over-all achievement slows and productivity goes stagnant. And poverty and malaise grow.

That’s why the grand ideal of communism is deader than Aunt Maude's dog that was run over by the morning milk truck.

My neighbors will never grasp the concept, but I think the Philippines is best served by a pyramid of capabilities where a pinnacle of productive might is sharpened and raised for the ultimate benefit of the base. I think when my son is 45 and sitting in the legislature or running his law practice or business, trained in American disciplines, the neighbors will be much better off for it. When he has lived a standard of living that is high and aspires to make it higher, the neighbors will benefit.

Beneath the highly productive pinnacle we will see emerge a happy-go-spending middle class.

Elitist? Hmmmm.

Uncaring? Hmmmmmm.

I'll coin the term "economic elitism" for consideration for the Humpty Dumpty New World Dictionary. It means an investment in a small set of wealth-builders whose success flows down to the broad population. Other economists refer to it as the "trickle down" theory, but that to me suggests it is just money moving down a pipe. No, no.

It is the BUILDING of the pipe.

It is investing in the productive enterprise that MAKES the money. It is not just taxing and passing around money like the church panhandlers do at offering time.

"Economic elitism" favors the few. It says that in a class of 400 high school graduates, 20 will contribute in a material way to making this a better, richer Philippines. Find them. Train them the way China does its athletes. Obsessively.  Make sure they thrive and stay in the Philippines.

Do a good job taking care of the other graduates. But do a sterling job of finding and polishing the jewels.

That is the point of this article. Filipinos are smart but not many are trained in productivity. Most are corrupted by values of subservience, the trade of favors, and ego over humility as it hampers discovery. So train them to think differently. Don't spare the funds. Develop a set of unaffiliated, super-smart thinkers and producers. Tell them to make the nation tops in Asia. Fast track them into positions of authority. They'll know what to do.

That would be the kind of elitist program the Philippines could use. In 100 years, there might even be a Filipino on Mars.

And so, to understand what quality elitism is, I refer you here to two videos that may possibly have redefined American willingness to invest in the elitism  . . . and the paybacks . . .of space travel:

• NASA's  "7 Minutes of Terror" Video which lasts 5 minutes

• Jet Propulsion Laboratory Control Room during the 7 minutes of terror and through the first images. Stick with it, the lesson is at the end.

An Intellectual Appetizer . . .

It's a Nano Nano World

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), have developed a new solar cell for residential and office windows that can generate electricity while still allowing people to see outside. The polymer cells generate electricity from infrared light, not visible light. So they are 70% transparent, which mean they are much like the tinted windows you pay extra for.

The leader of the project, a guy with the snazzy name of Dr. Yang Yang, says the solar cells can be produced at low cost. His team pulled researchers from multiple disciplines: the California NanoSystems Institute, the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and UCLA’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. The energy capture and conduction are manufactured by "solution processing", which I think means melting and stirring exotic metals and plastics.

Here are more people involved, which is really the main point of this snippet: Paul S.Weiss, Fred Kavli, Rui Zhu, Chun-Chao Chen, Letian Dou, Choong-Heui Chung, Tze-Bin Song, Steve Hawks, Gang Li, and Yue Bing Zheng. It's no longer Whitie's world.

Link to Article

Here's the Full Report, and It Is the Last We Will Hear of These Dead Filipinos, Because They Are Poor

Fifteen people on their way to a wake for a dead clan member were killed when their speeding truck lost its brakes on a downhill road, smashed into a cement barrier and flipped over in the central Philippines, officials said Sunday.

Eight other people, including the driver, were injured Saturday night when the truck rolled over twice and landed in a shallow creek in Caibiran town in Biliran province.

Caibiran Mayor Eulalio Maderazo said many of the victims, including children, were hurled off the truck or crushed underneath it. Relatives traveling separately on two motorcycles saw the truck roll over and called police.

"The impact was so strong some of the passengers were thrown off the truck," Maderazo said by telephone, adding that provincial officials would provide coffins and financial help to the impoverished families of the victims.

He said most of the passengers were members of a dead woman's clan and were traveling to attend her wake in Caibiran in mountainous Biliran, about 500 kilometers (310 miles) southeast of Manila.

Many accidents in the Philippines are blamed on poorly maintained vehicles and roads, ill-trained drivers and weak law enforcement.

____________

Note: This happened last week near where I live.  I compare this short news blurb to the international uproar about the tragedy of the Movie House shoot-out in the U.S. and I wonder, where is the outrage in the Philippines?  Joe

Of Birds and Dogs

How do homing pigeons find their way from point A to point B, hundreds of miles away?  How does a dog, dropped in the middle of nowhere, come straggling up to the house two days later, dirty and exhausted and happy to be home?

Two ingenious scientists, Le-Qing Wu (damn!) and J. David Dickman at Baylor College of Medicine, discovered exactly how the birds find their way about. This research identified that birds have magnetic receptors in their beaks, and other animals have them as well, in other parts of the body. They pick up magnetic forces from the surrounding environment.

The researchers took pigeons, put them in a dark room with adjustable magnetic fields, and locked their heads in place to neutralize any possible inner-ear adjustments to changing position. The two smart men identified 53 neurons in the birds’ brain stems that had greatly enhanced activity based on changes in magnetic power and direction. They concluded that the birds would take to the air and fly in a direction and distance that that would put them in their magnetic comfort zone.

I wonder why doesn't Ford just sell a pigeon with each new car instead of a GPS device.

Link to Article

The Case of the Swimming Rat Heart

Scientists have figure out how to make a creature, a jelly fish, from silicone and rat-heart cells. It isn't technically alive, but it swims. Creepy.

The goals is to develop a bioengineered system that could, for instance, work as a heart pacemaker that requires no batteries. They'd use the natural contraction and expansion of muscle tissues. Kevin Kit Parker, bioengineer at Harvard University co-authored the study said: "What we're trying to do is become really good at building tissue . . ."

One problem with the manufactured jelly-fish muscle right now is that it can't go out and eat. So that is the next step, getting it to absorb its own nutrients. It also requires stimulation from electricity in the water, and the researchers will work to get it to self-stimulate. (I'd just suggest they put in a teenager-sex hormone, send it to the bathroom, lock the door and see what happens.) Finally, the thing can't turn, so they have to engineer a maneuvering mechanism into the creature, an internal decision-making packet, the researchers call it.

John Dabiri is co-author of the study and a bioengineer at Caltech University. Seems to me he and Parker are big kids having a very useful and fun time playing with slime.

Link to Article

The Philosophy of the Gun

Philosopher professor Evan Selinger of Rochester Institute of Technology in the U.S. puts a different spin on the old maxim of the National Rifle Association (NRA) that is always used to justify widespread gun ownership. The NRA claims that: "Guns don't kill people. People kill people."

So don't blame the gun, and change gun laws. Blame the person who uses the gun irresponsibly, and jail him.

Professor Selinger says this argument ignores the affect a gun has on the person holding it.  He cites French philosopher Bruno Latour who says:

• "You are different with a gun in your hand; the gun is different with you holding it. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you.

Selinger adds:

• To someone with a gun, the world readily takes on a distinct shape. It not only offers people, animals, and things to interact with, but also potential targets. Furthermore, gun possession makes it easy to be bold, even hotheaded. Physically weak, emotionally passive, and psychologically introverted people will all be inclined to experience shifts in demeanor.

The impact is akin to what we feel when we are in a museum, more world-wise. Or when we are on a university campus, more intelligent and intellectual.

Inanimate structures enter into who we are, and can change what we think, feel and do.

The gun and the person are not separate.

Link to Article

A Philippine Colony on the Moon?

This is today's science report.

While the Philippines is trying to figure out how to get electricity to Mindanao, the rest of the world is moving on . . .

The Kepler spacecraft launched by the U.S. several years ago, is out there finding planets that might be habitable. It watches 150,000 suns, scanning for shadows the planets make as they pass in front of a particular sun. Once the satellite has spotted a planet, it runs spectrographic analyses to determine the composition and size of the orb, and its distance from its sun. By studying the size of the sun and composition of the planet, astronomers can identify those which are temperate enough to support life as we know it. They figure there are a bazillion habitable planets in the Milky Way.

Kepler was in the news this week because it identified two planets in extraordinarily close proximity to each other, one of iron, the other of gas. The close proximity and differences in composition astounded the international science community. It is understood that Manila residents merely yawned. Nothing in it for them.

Researchers at MIT in the States have concluded that snowfall on Mars is not comprised of large flakes, as we find on earth, but minute fog-like particles that drift in the valleys of the planet. Data comes from America's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter circling the red planet like the alien spacecraft that it is, to those little orange Martians hiding in caves amongst the rocks. The photo on the left is an illustration by Steven Hobbs of Stocktrek Images. Illustrators in the Philippines are mainly working on comic books and fake covers to pirated CD's.

In Great Britain, researchers at Sheffield University have compiled a definitive treatise on the origins, construction and symbolism of the Stonehenge Monuments. Construction of the huge stone monuments (there are eight separate memorials in the area) began about 8,000 b.c. and ended in 5,000 b.c. Yes, folks, 3,000 years in the building. Chipping the huge stones from quarries in Wales, pushing and pulling them to Stonehenge along rutted muddy roads, and cranking the big heavy bastards into place. To them it was like space travel is to us. We'll never see what happens in the end, but we know it is important to keep shooting off the rockets.

Stonehenge is way before the pyramids, you understand. And Jesus was not even a gleam in his almighty Father's eye.

 

Given the layout and location of the rocks, which have specific and meaningful alignments to the sun, moon and stars, people of the British Isles at the time figured this to be the center of the world. They appear to have built the monuments to celebrate the unity of many regional peoples into one peaceful humankind. Meanwhile, on the Philippines ,in 2012, the nation cannot figure out what language to speak.

Microsoft announced its foray into building computers, the hardware. It's slick new machines are light, powerful, and the perfect integration of machine and software. Microsoft evidently became upset that PC manufacturers were not doing enough to keep up with Apple. Their machines were clunky Chevrolets when Microsoft wanted Porsches. Next up, Microsoft smart cell phones.

Meanwhile, in the Philippines, the nation was busy herding millions of karabao along the farm to market roads between the rice fields and the mud ponds where the animals cool off in the evening.

It was also announced this past week that there is water on the Moon. Scientists have identified trace amounts at the cold south pole of our rocky neighbor. The discovery is of immense significance because water can be broken down into its components, oxygen and hydrogen. That, folks, means air. And that means it is possible to colonize the moon.

Meanwhile, in the Philippines, the island nation is single-handedly doing the utmost to combat global warming by burning anything and everything from wood to plastic to acidic batteries, thereby stuffing its air full of carcinogens to kill people off and stop overpopulation, whilst simultaneously blocking the sun's rays from warming things up overly much. That, folks is science at the cutting edge.

As for my headline, A Philippine Colony on the Moon. That is a big joke. haha

Yours, dripping with unsightly sarcasm this grumpy Sunday morning,

Joseph August America