Modern Phrenology

In today's news, phrenology makes a big comeback among "serious" researchers.

According to palaeontologists, the dimensions of the region between the mouth and the eyebrows are crucial in determining how attractive a man's face appears to the opposite sex.

Research carried out at the Natural History Museum found that, at puberty, the height of the upper face - the area between the lip and the brow - develops differently in men and women. Men have evolved short faces between the brow and upper lip, which makes their jaws appear larger, their cheeks more flared, and their eyebrows more pronounced.

Unlike other facial features, however, the difference "in upper facial height" cannot be explained in terms of men being bigger than women. Researchers believe men have evolved the features because they appear more masculine.

Dr Eleanor Weston, a palaeontologist from the museum, examined 68 male and 53 female skulls from the University of Witwaterstrand in South Africa.

Oh, by all means, please read the rest of this one. The top ten list of their findings of "masculine men" would probably correlate 100% with "most media exposure". But, we don't want to rain on the "serious" scientist's parade. We found a handy guide that should help them decipher all the rest of the things they can find in the shape of the human skull.

Save The Planet: Kill An Orangutan

Talk about a timely article. I just posted about the way that the "cure" for global warming being pushed by true believers was actually worse than the "disease". Lo and behold, the Telegraph has also started to question the "solution". They noticed the orangutan genocide being committed in the name of "fixing" global warming. The orangutans in Borneo are being eradicated so biodiesel can be produced.

As jungles are rapidly replaced by palm oil plantations, the great apes starve and are hunted, mutilated, burnt and snared by workers protecting their crops.

At a rehabilitation centre run by the charity Borneo Orang-utan Survival, there are more than 600, mostly orphaned babies. Lone Nielsen, the centre's director, estimates that for each of the 227 animals they rescued last year, five more were killed in central Borneo alone.

"There are broken bones, cracked skulls, burns, internal injuries," said Miss Nielsen. "The plantation workers beat them because they want to catch them and the only way you can catch an orang-utan is to knock it unconscious."

Each orphan must be raised to the age of eight by a human "mother" who teaches it to be afraid of rubber snakes and other hazards before it can be released on to an island.

The "children" engage in amusingly human antics - one of them walking with a stick like an old man. In Indonesian "orang-utan" means "forest people" and after humans they are the most intelligent primate.

The true believers have no qualms whatsoever about this. They are saving the planet. Who cares if anything is left when they've finished? Don't worry, though, soon Borneo will be orangutan-free so the biodiesel magnates can flourish. And Canada will be a moonscape (albeit one that stinks of sulfur) to produce Prius batteries. But the planet will have been saved. It has never been easier to rape the planet.

UPDATE: I Really should have included this gem in the blockquote.

A common tactic, campaigners say, is for plantation firms to first burn the forest then buy up the degraded land for a pittance.

There you have it all in a nutshell. Destroy a rainforest and barbecue the orangutans to put "environmentally-friendly" fuel in the gas tank of your Prius while patting yourself on the back for being so eco-conscious. Rape Save the planet.

Reality Television Meets Reality

The Daily Mail has an interesting little article on an inventor who appeared on a British reality television show where "experts" decide on the merits of the invention. This man appeared and his idea was positively savaged by the panel of judges. They were pretty well merciless with the poor inventor.

Who has since sold thousands and thousands and thousands of his invention.

Less than a year ago he stood chastened as the Dragons' Den judges gave him a typically fiery dressing down.

Now inventor Rob Law is having the last laugh after a product rejected as 'worthless' on the BBC television programme for budding entrepreneurs has proved a huge commercial hit.

Mr Law, 29, from Bath, spent 11 years - and £17,000 of his own money - refining his design for a wheelie suitcase which doubles up as a child's ride-on toy.

The plastic Trunki case is designed to allow youngsters aged three to six to take their own bag on holiday - and to sit on it when they are tired.

But when Mr Law appeared on Dragons' Den last September, he was given short shrift by the famously stern panel of investors.

Businessman Theo Paphitis, chair-man of the Ryman chain of stationers, ridiculed the product after managing to pull off one of the straps. His colleague Deborah Meadon, head of a holiday firm, declared bluntly that there was no market for the case.

And the notoriously brusque tele-communications tycoon Peter Jones declared: "I meet people like you all the time - you think you have something. I tell you, you don't."

He added: "Within seven days I could do a better job than that. Your company is currently worthless."

The panel declined Mr Law's offer to give up 10 per cent of his fledgling company in return for a £100,000 investment - an offer which valued the firm at £1 million.

However, it now appears that the experts missed a valuable trick.

Yeah, by a little bit. Law has now sold some 85,000 of his inventions and they are hotter than heck at some very, very large British stores. Oh, and Law's company is worth quite a lot more than the money he was turned down for by the "experts". And Laws owns the entire company - 100%.

As a parent who has herded tired and grumpy young children through some pretty horrible airports, I can tell you that this idea is sheer genius. Giving kids the ability to help with their own luggage - great. Giving them a place to sit when they are exhausted - brilliant.

Who Is Really Anti-Science?

Via Hot Air, there have been further developments in the erroneous NASA global warming temperatures. Steve McIntyre forced a correction in the GISS data when he found incongruous numbers in the data. Reto Ruedy and James Hansen were forced to admit that the data had a significant skew starting in in the year 2000. This severely impacted the so-called warmest years ever in the US. Now the true believers are dismissing the bad data as irrelevant. The best, most thorough collection of data on the planet is shown to be incorrect - and nobody is honest enough to admit that there may be a real problem here?

Yep. That's exactly what the true believers are maintaining.

In its consideration of possible urbanization and/or microsite effects, IPCC has taken the position that urban effects are negligible, relying on a very few studies (Jones et al 1990, Peterson et al 2003, Parker 2005, 2006), each of which has been discussed at length at this site. In my opinion, none of these studies can be relied on for concluding that urbanization impacts have been avoided in the ROW sites contributing to the overall history.

One more story to conclude. Non-compliant surface stations were reported in the formal academic literature by Pielke and Davey (2005) who described a number of non-compliant sites in eastern Colorado. In NOAA’s official response to this criticism, Vose et al (2005) said in effect -

it doesn’t matter. It’s only eastern Colorado. You haven’t proved that there are problems anywhere else in the United States.

In most businesses, the identification of glaring problems, even in a restricted region like eastern Colorado, would prompt an immediate evaluation to ensure that problems did not actually exist. However, that does not appear to have taken place and matters rested until Anthony Watts and the volunteers at surfacestations.org launched a concerted effort to evaluate stations in other parts of the country and determined that the problems were not only just as bad as eastern Colorado, but in some cases were much worse.

Now in response to problems with both station quality and adjustment software, Schmidt and Hansen say in effect, as NOAA did before them -

it doesn’t matter. It’s only the United States. You haven’t proved that there are problems anywhere else in the world.

McIntyre has graphs, facts and figures to back up his findings. Reto Ruedy and James Hansen, NASA and GISS refuse to publish their data or the algorithms they use to massage the data with to arrive at their spectacular, lurid findings. McIntyre is freely publishing his methodology and data - a basic cornerstone of science. Reudy and Hansen are deliberately hiding the way they arrive at their conclusions - which bears no real resemblance to science but sure looks a lot like what witch doctors do. (Incidentally, any truth-seeking lawyer who really wants to make a name for themselves would have a ball filing a Freedom of Information Act request on NASA, GISS, Reto Ruedy and James Hansen. Just a thought.)

Warren Meyer at Coyote Blog is all over this and has more to add about the real denialists here - hint, it ain't the global warming skeptics.

The general response at RealClimate.org has been:  Nothing to see here, move along.

Among other incorrect stories going around are that the mistake was due to a Y2K bug or that this had something to do with photographing weather stations. Again, simply false.

I really, really don't think it matters exactly how the bug was found, except to the extent that RealClimate.org would like to rewrite history and convince everyone this was just a normal adjustment made by the GISS themselves rather than a mistake found by an outsider.  However, just for the record, the GISS, at least for now until they clean up history a bit, admits the bug was spotted by Steven McIntyre.  Whatever the bug turned out to be, McIntyre initially spotted it as a discontinuity that seemed to exist in GISS data around the year 2000.  He therefore hypothesized it was a Y2K bug, but he didn't know for sure because Hansen and the GISS keep all their code as a state secret.  And McIntyre himself says he became aware of the discontinuity during a series of posts that started from a picture of a weather station at Anthony Watts blog.  I know because I was part of the discussion, talking to these folks online in real time.  Here is McIntyre explaining it himself.

In sum, the post on RealClimate says:

Sum total of this change? A couple of hundredths of degrees in the US rankings and no change in anything that could be considered climatically important (specifically long term trends).

A bit of background - surface temperature readings have read higher than satellite readings of the troposphere, when the science of greenhouse gases says the opposite should be true.  Global warming hawks like Hansen and the GISS have pounded on the satellite numbers, investigating them 8 ways to Sunday, and have on a number of occasions trumpeted upward corrections to satellite numbers that are far smaller than these downward corrections to surface numbers. 

My opinion on all of this should be pretty well known. I recognize that there has been a warming trend. What I do not believe is that the extent of man's involvement in that has been at all settled. I also believe that many of the "cures" for global warming are badly thought out at best and criminally fraudulent at worst. Basing public policy on voodoo science is a really, really bad idea.

If you don't believe the "cure" is worse than the disease in this case, you are wearing blinders. Planting trees: fraudulent. Biofuels: kills orangutans in huge numbers and displaces and devastates native people. Not to mention outright murder of humans and the skyrocketing food prices that will start to bite everyone on the planet soon. Oh, and all you holier-than-thou Prius drivers? The battery in your car uses nickel from this mine in Ontario, Canada. You can see the environmental devastation from that facility from outer space. Still going to pat yourself on the back and vandalize a Hummer?

Who is really anti-science? Who are really the denialists here. Who are the real Luddites?

Smugglers

Reuters, accurate as usual, reports that a Saudi man was apprehended trying to smuggle cobras and crocodiles out of Egypt and into Saudi Arabia.

The discovery of the reptiles in the passenger's bags triggered a brief panic among security personnel at the Cairo International Airport, witnesses said.

The 22-year-old passenger, identified only as Anas, said he needed the reptiles, which also included chameleons, for scientific research at his university in Saudi Arabia.

Longtime readers will, of course, recognize the factual error in the report. The reptile legions of the Animal Uprising™ were actually trying to smuggle the man into Saudi Arabia.

Anti-Wrinkle Pizza Raises A Fuss

A new "anti-wrinkle" pizza developed by an Italian nutritionist is drawing the ire of the True Neapolitan Pizza Association. They do not think the new formula meets the traditions of the pizza - as defined by the True Neapolitan Pizza Association at any rate. But the Pope is on board.

The "primula" pizza is made up of three times the amount of fibre found in a classic pizza and boasts that it contains more magnesium and iron, thanks to its ingredients, including wholemeal flour, La Stampa newspaper reported Monday.

At least eight vegetables or sauces in the pizza allegedly create the anti-oxidant effects against ageing: tomatoes, rocket, garlic, courgettes, basil, mushrooms, carrots and spinach.

The formula was devised by Eugenio Luigi Iorio, a nutritionist and biochemist at the University of Naples, in collaboration with Cosimo Mogavero, owner of a restaurant called La Fabbrica dei Sapori (The Taste Factory) restaurant.

Pope Benedict XVI apparently loves the "anti-age" pizza, according to the newspaper. He ate one of the pies during a party for the Vatican guards catered by Mogavero.

But the new invention has its detractors, including the True Neapolitan Pizza Association, which says the wholemeal flour in particular prevents the characteristic crust from forming.

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard wanted to test the effectiveness of the new pizza. So we dispatched one of our crack operatives to try one. He informs us that the new pizza is painful, particularly around the eyes. But the swelling and blisters reduce the appearance of wrinkles.

One of these days we'll be able to afford good operatives.

Could I Have My Leg Back Please?

Some fishemen caught a shark and figured they'd have a bit of fun. So they stuck a wooden leg in the shark's mouth and took some pictures. That's when the trouble started.

Fishermen were on the Georges Bank, near the U.S. border, on Sunday morning when they caught a shark. They thought it would be funny to stick a fake leg in the shark's mouth and take pictures.

Problem was, fishermen on a nearby vessel took it seriously, and called the Canadian Coast Guard. Then the coast guard called the Mounties. That's when the prank really got out of hand.

"It's kind of an expensive hoax," Const. Joe Taplin, an RCMP spokesman, said Sunday.

"You've got the RCMP on this side (of the border) getting ready and calling in extra personnel to take possession of this, as well as U.S. authorities were aware that it was possibly a human leg," he said.

Actually, it would be the fault of the people who reported it without bothering to ask the jokers what they were doing. Just one question: what in heck were they doing with a spare wooden leg?

Vanity, Vanity

“We are so vain that we even care for the opinion of those we don't care for.” Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

The Telegraph reports on a new phenomenon. The increasing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace have led to an enormous jump in the request for photographic airbrushing services.

The vanity of users of social networking and dating websites has led to a big increase in the demand for photo airbrushing services.

Image-conscious web users have created a 550 per cent increase in requests for airbrushing services, according to the photo specialists Snappy Snaps.

The company said the majority of requests related to profile images for sites such as Facebook, MySpace and My Single Friend.

Technology means images can be improved. Those striving to achieve a flawless look can have crooked teeth straightened. Dark shadows can be removed, wrinkles erased and bodies slimmed.

For example, with a tiny bit of work, a photo of Austrian novelist Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach can look just like Keira Knightley in the nude - well, not quite nude (link should be safe for most work environments, it is a Chanel ad. If you have a strict environment, wait and open it at home). Now some folks might doubt that, but another news item today proves the point. An Australian farmer thought he had found the love of his life on the internet. Only the lovely bride from Mali turned out to be several men wielding machetes.

Des Gregor, 56, traveled to the West African nation last month to meet his supposed bride, whom he had met on the Internet, and collect a dowry of gold bars worth $85,000.

But when he arrived, the wheat and sheep farmer was abducted by a gang of armed bandits who bound him, beat him with a machete and stole his cash and credit cards.

Gregor, who returned to his home state of South Australia with a police escort late Sunday, said the men told him they would hack his limbs off with a machete unless he paid them a $85,000 ransom.

The scam was stopped when Australian and Malian police, alerted by Gregor's family in Australia, tricked the kidnappers into taking Gregor to the Canadian Embassy to collect the ransom money.

Australian Federal Police said in a statement that Gregor's case was an "extreme example" of what can happen to people who succumb to Internet scams, and warned Australians to protect themselves.

That's what we'd call an extreme makeover. On the internet nobody knows if you're a dog. Or a gang with machetes.

The Fraudulent Carbon Offset Market

Another positively greewaldian title for the post, but the news warrants it. One of the prime most holy indulgences carbon offsets pushed by the true believers from the First Church of the Presumptuous Assumption is the planting of trees to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Tree planting is touted with religious fervor by the disciples of Pope Goreus I and, in fact, are pimped by Gorezilla himself.

But tree planting doesn't really help at all. It works a little only if sufficient water and nutrients are available. But it is very, very unreliable - unless even more damage is done to the environment.

These differences are key since the weather isn't always cooperative with human needs—if a drought takes hold, trees won't be able to do much in the way of carbon storage.

"If water availability decreases at the same time that carbon dioxide increases, then we might not have a net gain in carbon sequestration," Oren said.

Fertilizing forests to spur more carbon dioxide uptake is impractical, Oren added, because of the ramifications to the local environment and water supply.

"In order to actually have an effect on the atmospheric concentration of CO₂, the results suggest a future need to fertilize vast areas," Oren said. "And the impact on water quality of fertilizing large areas will be intolerable to society. Water is already a scarce resource."

The results of the study, presented yesterday at a national meeting of the Ecological Society of America, also noted that only a few parts of a tree will store carbon for long periods of time.

"Carbon that's in foliage is going to last a lot shorter time than carbon in the wood, because leaves decay quickly," said Duke graduate student and project member Heather McCarthy. "So elevated CO₂ could significantly increase the production of foliage, but this would lead to only a very small increase in ecosystem carbon storage."

I've said it before: it has never been easier to rape the planet or fleece its inhabitants. Just say your doing whatever in order to offset global warming and you have a license to destroy the earth - or rip people off.

The Most Unpopular Man In Congress

Robert Novak has an interesting look into the inner workings of the increasingly noisome swamp that is the House of Representatives. In highlighting just one battle over pork-barrel spending, Novak exposes just how bad it has gotten in the House since the Democrats took power. Note that he is not claiming the Republicans are one bit better, mind you. He simply points of how one Congressman, Republican Jeff Flake, has become an object of bipartisan hatred because he tries to stop the pork.

WASHINGTON — With the midnight hour approaching Saturday Aug. 4 near the end of a marathon session, Democratic and Republican leaders alike wanted to pass the Defense appropriations bill quickly and start their summer recess. But Republican Rep. Jeff Flake's stubborn adherence to principle forced an hour-long delay that revealed unpleasant realities about Congress.

Flake insisted on debating the most egregious of the bill's 1,300 earmarks placed in the Defense money bill by individual House members that authorize spending in their districts. Defending every such earmark was the chairman of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee: Democratic Rep. John Murtha, unsmiling and unresponsive to questions posed on the House floor by Flake.

Murtha is called "King Corruption" by Republican reformers, but what happened after midnight Aug. 5 is not a party matter. Democrats and Republicans, as always, locked arms supporting every earmark. It makes no difference that at least seven House members are under investigation by the Justice Department. A bipartisan majority insists on sending taxpayers money to companies in their districts without competitive bidding or public review.

Claims of newly established transparency were undermined by the Saturday late night follies. Flake, who ran a Phoenix, Ariz., think tank (the Goldwater Institute) before coming to Congress in 2001, is immensely unpopular on both sides of the aisle for forcing votes on his colleagues' pork. He burnished that reputation by prolonging the marathon Saturday session and challenging selected earmarks.

John Murtha managed to escape indictment in the ABSCAM sting because he was essentially holding out for more money and didn't take the bribe on the spot. Even CREW, not exactly an unbiased group, calls Murtha the most corrupt man in Congress. Yet he is presiding over the process of doling out the fresh gobbets of pork. Nope, no conflict there. When you're running a crooked shop, you want a crook at the helm for the big votes. The Democrats promised reform. What they have delivered involves John Murtha - that alone shows how badly they failed to fix anything.  

There are a lot of people, regardless of political orientation, who are against pork - regardless of which party is in charge. Flake deserves our respect for at least trying to stir up the swamp a little bit.

Rove Resigning

An obligatory post on the hot topic of the day, Karl Rove, one of the favorite chew toys of the left, is resigning his position at the White House.

Mr. Rove, who has held a senior post in the White House since President Bush took office in January 2001, told Mr. Gigot he first floated the idea of leaving a year ago. But he delayed his departure as, first, Democrats took Congress, and then as the White House tackled debates on immigration and Iraq, he said. He said he decided to leave after White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten told senior aides that if they stayed past Labor Day they would be obliged to remain through the end of the president's term in January 2009.

"I just think it's time," Mr. Rove said in the interview. "There's always something that can keep you here, and as much as I'd like to be here, I've got to do this for the sake of my family." Mr. Rove and his wife have a home in Ingram, Texas, and a son who attends college in nearby San Antonio.

In the interview, Mr. Rove said he expects Democrats to give the 2008 presidential nomination to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom he described as "a tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate." He also said Republicans have "a very good chance" to hold onto the White House in next year's elections.

There are a host of people commenting on this, obviously. See Memeorandum. The only thing I am going to add to all of that is this: who are the left going to blame now? They are really going to miss Rove, whether they realize it or not. He helped keep them focused, even if it was on conspiracy theories.