Ipsa scientia potestas est

This is one of those moments in nature, caught on film that is hard to believe unless you see it. Check this out.

Prayer leaked.  Here’s what he wrote on the bit of paper:

Lord - Protect my family and me, Forgive me my sins, and help me guard against pride and despair. Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just. And make me an instrument of your will.

In case anyone cares.

Sometimes in OSX, you get a situation where the thumbnail image for a particular image in the icon/coverflow view doesn’t get generated properly.  There is a tool you can use right on the command-line to add a finder icon to an image file.  sips(1), along with the “-i” flag, or the “–addIcon” getoptlong flag, works like a dream.

herecy:~ dmess0r$ sips -i LemonParty.jpg 
/Users/dmess0r/LemonParty.jpg
  /Users/dmess0r/LemonParty.jpg
herecy:~ dmess0r$

And if you have a ton of images to take care of, you can use sips(1) in bulk.

$ sips -i *.jpg

If your file list is so long that sips complains, you can use the for loop method

$ for image in * ; do sips -i ${image} ; done

Works pretty well for me.

Something that has been pissing me off lately is using non-homogenous data sources to produce misleading information regarding CO2 in the atmosphere.  There is a basic correlation in which practically all scientists believe, that elevated CO2 levels in the atmosphere are related very closely to elevated temperatures.  Whether or not there is a causal effect is up to debate.

Regardless, the Department of Energy for the US government runs the Oak Ridge lab out of Roane County in Tennessee.  This lab happens to host a particular center called the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, or CDIAC.  From the CDIAC page:

The Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) is the primary climate-change data and information analysis center of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). CDIAC is located at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and includes the World Data Center for Atmospheric Trace Gases.

CDIAC’s data holdings include records of the concentrations of carbon dioxide and other radiatively active gases in the atmosphere; the role of the terrestrial biosphere and the oceans in the biogeochemical cycles of greenhouse gases; emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere; long-term climate trends; the effects of elevated carbon dioxide on vegetation; and the vulnerability of coastal areas to rising sea level.

One of the particularly interesting graphs which the CDIAC holds is a graph of the 1999 Vostok Antarctica ice-core samples data.  One particular graph, showing the Age of Entrapped Air, and the levels of CO2 in parts per million.

This image is pulled right from the CDIAC, so I am not fudging data here.  As you can see there is a *very* clear trend here.  If you subscribe to the correlation between global elevated CO2 and global elevated temperatures, it isn’t too much of a stretch to relate this graph to global temperatures.

This next bit is what pisses me off.  One simply cannot take the values extrapolated from analyzing ice-cores, and directly compare those values to the values taken with real-time sampling.  While the graphed data pulled from the ice is incredibly useful for trending purposes, comparing it directly to values polled real-time is akin to comparing apples to oranges.

We know we’re on the tail end of an ice-age and the level of CO2 emissions in the post-industrial era is also growing at an impressive rate.  Let’s see how humans participate in mother natures dance. 

Apparently in the late 70s and early 80s, a scare was racing across America, GLOBAL COOLING.
A snippit from wikipedia:

In the 1970s, there was increasing awareness that estimates of global temperatures showed cooling since 1945. Of those scientific papers considering climate trends over the next century, slightly under 10% inclined towards future cooling, while most papers predicted future warming. The general public had little awareness of carbon dioxide’s effects on climate, although Paul R. Ehrlich mentions climate change from the greenhouse gases in 1968. By the time the idea of global cooling reached the public press in the mid-1970s, the temperature trend had stopped going down, and there was concern in the climatological community about carbon dioxide’s effects. It was known that both natural and man-made effects caused variations in global climate.

Take a look at this cover of a very well respected magazine, “Time.”  Clearly this was a serious issue, enough of one to make the cover.

Somehow in the last 28 years, the focus has shifted.  Now we’re so concerned about warming of the planet that corporations are spending billions of dollars in claims to “put an end to global warming”.  Really what are these corporations trying to do?  I believe they’re trying to get on the band-wagon and recieve consumer backing.  Get people to buy your products simply by going along with the crowd, claiming that the sky is falling.

Is the sky falling?  ~30 years ago it was falling.  Looks like its falling again.