Science – Page 12 – Chicago Boyz

Outdoor Adventures

December 20, 2015December 20, 2015 by Michael Hiteshew

Jamal Green makes multi-day hikes across Utah and other interesting places, and then produces videos showing interesting moments along the way.

(Image source.)

His website Across Utah! is a good starting point for videos, maps, and recommendations for gear.

During several of his hikes, Jamal crosses a spectacular feature called the Water Pocket fold, the edge of a monoclinal fold that eroded away across the crest leaving the edges as upturned rocks pointing into the sky. If you’re interested in a professional geological look, visit Written In Stone and travel along with Dr. Jack Share in a regional overflight, Flight Plan: Part II Geology of the Circle Cliffs Uplift and the Waterpocket Fold at Capitol Reef National Park.

Reclaiming the Lost Future

March 20, 2016November 27, 2015 by Michael Hiteshew

A couple of Trifecta videos ask a really pertinent question, What happened to our once and promising future?

What are black college students rioting about ?

November 16, 2015 by Michael Kennedy

Power line has a post today that seems to me to be right on the topic of what these students want, which is freedom from accountability. They are afraid they are overmatched against white colleagues. They can’t hack it and want a pass. It is called “Mismatch.”

The biggest change since Grutter, though, has nothing to do with Court membership. It is the mounting empirical evidence that race preferences are doing more harm than good?—even for their supposed beneficiaries. If this evidence is correct, we now have fewer African-American physicians, scientists, and engineers than we would have had using race-neutral admissions policies. We have fewer college professors and lawyers, too. Put more bluntly, affirmative action has backfired.

Why is this ? We know that the normal distribution of IQ is a standard deviation lower for blacks than whites.

This is the over all curve with the distribution around an average of 100, by definition.

The curve for blacks has a peak at IQ about 80. White peak at 100 to 104. Asians peak at around 106. What this means is that the average IQ is lower for blacks but this does not mean that all blacks are less intelligent than whites. At an IQ of 110 there is a large difference but the number of blacks who will do well in certain academic fields like Medicine is still significant. It would seem important to identify those blacks who will do well in fields requiring higher than average intelligence but the present system of affirmative action ignores this truth.

What is Climate Change doing to Science ?

October 18, 2015 by Michael Kennedy

The discussion on Global Warming, has shifted to “Climate Change” as the warming has slowed or stopped, depending on your politics. Now there are a few rather timid questions being asked about this highly charged topic.

“Doubt has been eliminated,” said Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway and UN Special Representative on Climate Change, in a speech in 2007: “It is irresponsible, reckless and deeply immoral to question the seriousness of the situation. The time for diagnosis is over. Now it is time to act.” John Kerry says we have no time for a meeting of the flat-earth society. Barack Obama says that 97 per cent of scientists agree that climate change is “real, man-made and dangerous”.

This is the consensus of politicians. Scientists ? Read the resumes of the people pontificating on Climate Change. How many are real scientists ?

A Member of Parliament with a Physics degree, was ridiculed by the BBC for questioning Climate Change.

Peter Lilley, a long standing member of the energy and climate select committee, has made a formal complaint to director general Lord Hall after discovering that mandarins had issued an apology following claims he made that the effects of climate change were being exaggerated.

Appearing on BBC Radio 4’s ‘What’s the Point of The Met Office’, Mr Lilley stated that, while he “accepted the thesis that more CO2 in the atmosphere will marginally warm up the earth”, he questioned the assertion that global warming would be as dramatic as is being portrayed in some scientific circles.

Mr Lilley, who graduated with a degree in natural sciences at Cambridge University, said: “I’m a ‘lukewarmist’, one who thinks that there won’t be much warming as a result of it, and that’s the scientifically proven bit of the theory. Anything going on the alarmist scale is pure speculation.”

Sounds mild to me.

Mr Lilley was horrified to discover that the BBC later placed “health warnings” on the programme’s website, and issued an apology for “giving voice to climate sceptics” and failing to “make clear that they are a minority, out of step with the scientific consensus.”

The apology was written to listeners who had complained, including academic Dr Andrew Smedley, of Manchester University, and then re-stated on the BBC Rado 4’s programme Feedback.

That sounds like “Trigger Warnings” in American university life. This sort of thing has gotten more common the past 20 years. Why ?

Secretaries of State march on for two hundred years – but we still count it in feet

August 24, 2015August 23, 2015 by Ginny

I’ve been reading Daniel Walker Howe’s The Political Culture of the American Whigs(1979). It slowly gave me a better understanding, since I started in a complete fog. Like his Making the American Self, here Howe chooses representative figures to give narrative, character & understanding. Just because the book is forty doesn’t mean insights don’t remain. Howe enlivens the Whigs and reminds us our parties still have more than a bit of the Whig & the Jacksonian. But, surprisingly, an anecdote used to illuminate John Quincy Adams reminds us of a spring candidacy.