Due in part to the economic times and the fact that I’m a bit under-employed, I am once again experimenting with advertisements.   These ads will be only shown on the side or top or bottom of content and are placed in a manner designed to make them less obtrusive.

Since previous ads were basically generated by the ad broker and thus could be worse than useless, I’m trying a new approach.   The ads now shown will be primarily for interesting products and services which have been selected because I think that they’re worthwhile and readers may actually like them.   Note that I am not actually selling these products, but I do get some payment for the advertising of them.

Hopefully this will prove to be unobtrusive and will actually introduce s0me worthwhile products and services to check out and maybe even be useful and worth visiting.

In any case, the content of this site is still entirely independent and not in any way influenced by the ads that are shown.

This is not exactly a recent news story, but as it didn’t get much attention in the media, I only recently found out about the death of Professor Rustum Roy.    Dr. Roy died on August 24 at the age of 86.

Rustum Roy was a professor of material sciences who had earned his PhD in ceramics in 1948.   He was legitimately an educated and accomplished scientist in this area and nobody can take this away from him.   However, beginning in the 1960’s, Roy also became heavily involved in alternative sciences, especially alternative medicine.   In recent years, Rustum Roy had been a mainstay of homeopathy and other generally rejected areas of medicine.

Although trained in materials sciences, he had no background to speak of in medicine.  Despite this, most of his recent activities focused in this area.   He also had been active in promoting religious-based science.  He founded the organization “Whole Person Healing” which promotes homeopathy and other alternative medicine.

He had also lent his name to other areas of questionable science such as claims of “water fuel” and “water burning.”

One of the things that always bothered me a great deal about Roy’s arguments were that they were generally an appeal to authority.   Roy argued often about “water memory” and the idea that water molecules could have structure that would somehow transfer information to human cells and thus effect health.  Offering no empirical evidence, he generally resorted to simply pointing out that he was a professor and had a PhD in materials sciences.   Of course, this is a complete straw-man, especially considering that his area of formal training wasn’t related to biology or medicine.

Rustum Roy had been discussed on this site on several occasions.

I should finally say that despite the fact that I believe Rustum Roy did a lot more harm than good in the later part of his life and that his views on things like homeopathy were far out in left field, I certainly never wished the man death.  It has always been my impression of Rustum Roy that he was not so much a scamster as genuinely self-deluded into his own unsupported beliefs.   That said, we do have one less prominent homeopath in the world.

While living t0 86 is definitely a full life, it’s hardly an exceptionally old age, considering that there are close to one hundred thousand persons of 100 years of age or older in the United States.   Thus, it would seem that the claims that homeopathy can be used to cure nearly all ailments and thereby achieve exceptional longevity are, once again, proven wrong.

Uranium is not exactly a “rare” mineral, by any standard.   The concentration of uranium in the earth’s crust is 2.7 PPM, significantly more than tin, silver, cadmium and bismuth.  In some areas it has much higher concentrations and enormous deposits of high grade ore have remain relatively untapped.

Compared to chemical fuels like hydrocarbons, the energy density of uranium, even in a standard light water reactor is orders of magnitude greater.  Yet even this represents only a maximum of a few percent of the potential energy that can be produced from the uranium.   Reprocessing can more than triple the energy extracted, and advanced fuel cycles and fast spectrum reactors can increase the energy extracted to near 100%.

If that’s not abundant enough, thorium is more than three times as abundant as uranium and thorium-cycles like the molten salt reactor can extract virtually all the energy available from thorium.   Indeed between stockpiles of thorium compounds and spent uranium fuel, there is already enough energy to last humanity many decades, even if no additional mining took place.

So to those of us familiar with uranium and nuclear energy, it’s absolutely no surprise to hear that current uranium reserves are not in any danger of running out, despite what some have claimed in an attempt to derail support for nuclear energy.   Yet a study from MIT, which has reaffirmed this, has been making a lot of news recently.

Via USA Today:

MIT finds plentiful uranium for nuclear power plants
Plenty of uranium exists for nuclear power plants for decades, but more research is needed to develop a better way to dispose of the spent fuel, says a new report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This finding is signficiant, the researchers say, because the idea of a limited uranium supply has long prompted efforts to develop very costly reactors that breed plutonium.

The report supports President Obama’s loan guarantees, controversial among environmental groups, to help build the first new nuclear power plants in three decades. It suggests nuclear power has significant potential to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, arguing current U.S. nuclear plants generate 70% of all zero-carbon electricity.

The only “problem” this presents – if you can even call it that, is toward the promotion of closed fuel cycles and reprocessing. The cost low cost of uranium makes the once through fuel cycle just quite economical. For reprocessing and advanced closed fuel cycles to be widely deployed their cost will have to be reduced to the point of offering a clear economic advantage even a world with such plentiful uranium.

You may have heard by now that a man entered the Maryland offices of Discovery Communications, the parent company of The Discovery Channel, Investigation Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet and several other television channels.   The man carried firearms and had explosives strapped to his body, which he threatened to detonate.   The standoff ended when police sharp-shooters managed to shoot and kill the suspect.

The man, James E. Lee, had been protesting the programing of the Discovery Channel and its other networks, including programs which documented children and families.   These include reality tv shows like “Kate Plus 8” and “19 Kids and Counting.” You can read more in this LA Times Article.

What is especially disturbing about this incident is the motivation of Mr. Lee, which he made very clear on his website savetheplanetprotest.com Lee had previously protested at the building and elsewhere and had been arrested for disorderly conduct related to his protest activities.

There’s a good liklihood that the website will be taken down in the near future, so I am copying the entirety of the site, which consists of one page of text.   The page is titled “My Demands”

(more…)

Tomorrow night, the 29th of August, the show “Bad Universe” will premier on the Discovery Channel at 10 o’clock eastern time.  If you don’t live in the eastern US, check your local listings.   The show looks pretty cool, and it stars my friend Phil Plait, (AKA The Bad Astronomer) who is a very active member of the skeptic community and has been debunking bad science for years.   It’s really huge that Phil would get a show like this on a major television network, and it’s definitely a great way for him to help spread skepticism and good science.

One nitpick: Phil can’t actually shoot rays of energy out of his eyes. If he could, I’m pretty sure I would have been zapped by now.

Alaska has more aircraft per capita than any other state in the US and most places in the world.   Small aircraft are a vital means of travel in the massive and largely unpopulated state, and it’s also one of the most dangerous places to fly.  While the relative risk is still fairly low, many lives have been lost in plane crashes in Alaska.

It seems that yet another one has been lost – that of former Senator Ted Stevens.   Stevens plane crashed on a remote mountainside killing Stevens.  The plane also carried NASA’s former chief administrator, Sean O’Keefe and his son.   O’Keefe and his son survived the crash and, at last report, both had sustained injuries that were thought to be non-life threatening.  Luckily for them, it seems rescuers got to the sight of the crash fairly quickly.

Via the Associated Press:

JUNEAU, Alaska — A float plane carrying former Sen. Ted Stevens and ex-NASA chief Sean O’Keefe crashed into a remote mountainside in Alaska, killing the longtime senator and four others, authorities said Tuesday. O’Keefe and his teenage son survived the crash with broken bones and other injuries, said former NASA spokesman Glenn Mahone. The O’Keefes spent Monday night on the mountain with several volunteers who discovered the wreckage and tended to the injured until rescuers arrived Tuesday morning.

Plane crash + NASA big shot + former senator =  conspiracy theories in 5…4…3…2…

Oh I just love seeing a post like this on a site like “Age Of Autism”, an anti-vaccine, anti-science site that promotes every wacky idea on how to treat autism and what causes it.

Health Fascism in Australia.

The sinister Skeptics group, agents of what used to be CSICOP now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) organised from the US and linked to the major corporate lobby groups, American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) and American Council Against Health Fraud (ACAHF), which is in turn linked to the Australian CAHF) are making ground in Australia. Supported by authoritarian ideological influences in government and Big Pharma, the Skeptics are running constant attacks on homeopathy, natural cancer treatments, those who question vaccination and those who support any form of alternative medicine.

With the present world fiscal crisis, all those linked to Big Pharma and Science are fighting a bitter battle to preserve drug company competitiveness. But where fascist influences in government and health with most force come together is in attacking anyone who speaks out about freedom of choice and expression in relation to vaccination.

Over the last year the international corporate lobby Skeptics, have been behind a campaign against the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN). In 2009, one of their trolls, a lay person with no standing in medicine or government complained about the web site of the AVN to the office of the State Government funded Health Care Complaints commission (HCCC) an organisation that accepts complaints against groups found be giving out false information about health.

The remit of the HCCC, did not actually cover parent groups which discussed the pros and cons of vaccination, so the State government slightly changed the remit to satisfy the Skeptics. The government then proceeded with a year long investigation into Meryl Dorey the woman who established and runs the AVN and the AVN itself.

Dorey was asked to answer their first 30 odd page report against her and the organisation, within a few weeks. She did this with a magnificent document that argued every point with brilliance. The complaint investigation actually argued against almost every sentence that had appeared on the AVN web site. If the AVN had said that vaccines contained toxic elements, such as mecury and aluminuim the HCCC argued with pseudo science that this was not true, giving pages of bogus evidence to support the vaccine manufacturers.

Oh how very sinister!
(more…)

Back from The Amazing Meeting 8, which was indeed Amazing, I’ve found a pile of work to get to even as I get over the modest jetlag that traveling across three time zones will cause.   Luckilly, I don’t have to describe the event all by myself because others have.   Better still, my friends at the Greater Edmonton Skeptics Society (GESS) have put together a roundup of links from other blogs and news sites describing the amazing events of the Amazing Meeting!

Check it out here

From NASA’s confused, convoluted and underfunded Constellation program to the de-funding of it in favor of a non-existant plan, there has been little good news from the American space program.   There is one exception, however.   SpaceX has been making great progress in the design and testing of the Falcon 1 and 9 rockets.   The Falcon 9 is especially exciting.  It’s the first space launch vehicle to be developed 100% privately, the first completely new liquid-fueled rocket in decades and the first American rocket capable of completing a mission with an engine failure since the last Saturn-IB lifted off in 1975.

The Falcon-9 is designed to be human rated and is complete with the Dragon capsule, designed to carry cargo and eventually humans to Low Earth Orbit.   The rocket also can be configured as the Falcon-9 Heavy, which consists of three core boosters and is capable of lifting 28 metric tons to LEO, putting it ahead of the mighty Russian Proton rocket, the current most popular heavy lift ELV, and exceeding the capacity of all current ELV’s with the exception of the ultra-heavy configuration of the Atlas-V.

SpaceX also hopes to make the Falcon-9 considerably cheaper than other rockets.   The vehicle is intended to be partially reusable, with stages being retrieved after parachuting back to earth.  If the design meets projections, it may set a new standard for the economics of heavy lift vehicles and possibly help reestablish the United States as a major player in the commercial satellite launch business.

Today the first Falcon-9 lifted off and sent its payload, a test version of the Dragon capsule into low earth orbit!

First time trials of rockets are certainly not assured successes and SpaceX has spent some time testing the design on static test stands and dry runs for launch.    This flight is the culmination of years of development and an enormous step in making the Falcon-9 a cargo and human-carrying rocket we can rely on.

Some may have noticed some annoying popups or fake computer security messages over the past couple of days.   It turns out that a worm had exploited some weaknesses in Wordpress and attacked self-hosted blogs on my hosting service.    I thought I had it fixed yesterday but apparently did not.   Since then I’ve replaced all the major system files with new versions or backups and I’m not pretty sure that the site is back to normal.

However, the nasty thing about the little script that infected the site is that if any files remain infected it will spread to the remaining good files by replicating itself to the PHP headers.   Thus, if I missed any it may come back.  Please let me know if it does or if any other strange behavior occurs.