Global Warming Doesn't Matter! Presidential War Crimes, Ghosts Fall Sorta Flat, PEng Chuckle
I am a pretty independent minded guy (okay, okay, so I joined the Democratic party to be able to vote in the Presidential Primary last year, but I'm still of independent spirit, for all my cheering of the Obama Administration thus far). Yet, I find myself agreeing with the basic premise if not the arguments of the original blogger involved. You see it really doesn't matter very much whether humans are involved in causing global warming or not. It doesn't really matter all that much that we might have just seen the peak in global warming in 2007, because statistically there are claims that the earth cooled over the course of last year (2008), wiping out nearly a whole century worth of gradually warming temperatures. Four highly reputable scientific reporting sources all show significant single year decline in temperature. Those organizations include Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa, CA (RSS), NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Institute, University of Alabama at Huntsville, and the UK´s Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature anomaly (HadCRUT). All four have charts on a single page.
Now, of course, there undoubtedly some people who will say, it's a "blip" and not statistically significant, and those folks could be right, although, separately, the complaint that Antarctica´s ice is melting is also proving to be only partially true since the other side of the continent's ice seems to be thickening recently. Personally I am more inclined to subscribed to the theory that the warming trend we were seeing is more a result of high activity levels of solar flares ("sunspots"), and that this recent decline in temperature is the result of a sudden decline of these solar activities. But my point here is that as stated originally, "it doesn't matter."
Okay, it matters in terms of will there be massive flooding, or worse yet, are we going into a 4 century long "Little Ice Age", but in the short term, the transition to renewable fuels and greater conservation of resources is a GOOD THING, regardless of how or why people are motivated to make these changes. In pure economic terms, it is, as I urged the transition team before they took over the White House, a chance to put the economy on a new industrial footing, one not based on petroleum, weapons and wars, but on green energy, growing our fuel instead of digging it up, and generally taking better care of ourselves and our planet. It was this kind of shift (in the opposite direction, towards war) that allowed us to break out of the Great Depression of the 1930's. Then, as now, the Depression had spread to a global disaster, and it was only by the "re-tooling" of society to "prepare for war" that overcame the fears of deficit spending, and gave the government, industry and the people a common goal to strive to achieve.
The opinion that President Obama had become "cheerleader-in-chief" was also apparently the opinion of most of the panel present on This Week with George Stephanopolous today. In assessing the President's first 100 days in office, a rather arbitrary time period that members of the discussion said harkened back to the first 100 days of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Depression Era tyro year, and the press' proclivity to try to control its own news cycle by creating such deadlines, the conclusions were generally that President Obama had accomplished a great deal. George Will grumbled that all the "accomplishments" were really negative mis-steps, but he seemed especially belligerent over the Administration's waffling on whether or not to prosecute lawyers who had provided the legal opinions that certain tough interrogation techniques were not torture.
Mr. Will argued that it was counterproductive to prosecute members of the Office of Government Counsel for providing legitimate legal opinions on questions of law. Indeed to do so would, in effect, tie the hands of all future members of that office because the only thing which could make the offering of those legal "opinions" into illegal or criminal acts was if the intent of the writer was determined to be a malicious attempt to thwart "JUSTICE" in the first place. Just as in the legal judgment which holds that an act is not criminal if the person lacked the mental capacity to form the intent to commit a bad act.
It concerns me considerably that what was done, with the full approval and encouragement of the most senior members of the government were clearly violations of human rights under the provisions of the Geneva Convention. It also concerns me that we may prosecute, after the fact, those acts which persons unqualified to judge were told were perfectly legal. I supposed that former President George W. Bush may take some small comfort from the fact that he is unlikely ever to be prosecuted, because he 'lacked the mental capacity to form the intent'.
I don't like to write comments about entertainment that are strongly negative, but I think this one deserved a "dishonorable mention" from this week's television. This week's episode of Ghost Whisperer (titled "Stage Fright") was one of the worst directed, poorly acted in the entire history of the show. Cast members mainly to blame for the cardboard acting and stilted dialogue were Jamie Kennedy and Camryn Manheim, although stilted dialogue leaves one with at least a hint of blame on the writer, in this case Mark B. Perry whose writing and producing credits go all the way back to Picket Fences and frankly the PLOT was actually rather sensitive and even a little touching, not your typical angry-ghost-wants-revenge pot-boiler. This plot had some thought in it, and I liked the interweaving of the characters' lives. Eric Laneuville must take the blame for the weak, in some cases, perhaps, non-existent directing. That is a surprise, because Eric has been around as an actor since the days of "old time" television like Room 222 and The Partridge Family, and has been directing television episodes since his days (acting) on St. Elsewhere (and even in the St. Elsewhere days I don't remember him putting on a badly directed episode). He, normally, always does good work, so I wonder what happened.
Meanwhile Kellie Martin was looking good, and Amelia Heinle (formerly known as Amelia Luckinbill or Amelia Weatherly, and once voted the most beautiful woman in Soap Operas) looked lovely, as did Lesli Kay (another Soap Opera star, playing a Soap Opera star character)(Amelia played a drama professor).
On a brighter note to end, I wrote a "help wanted ad" looking for engineers for some upcoming work. Of course, we are looking for money too, but there's no point in having money sitting in the bank waiting to staff up a project that is ready to go, so we're looking for people with this ad:
Senior Engineer - Algae Fuel Development
Job Description
Partially-reformed WORKAHOLIC wanted to join team of same. If you are the kind of person who can't leave work until the (neglected) floor is properly swept (by you, since you're the last one working), and you have the calm but relentless get-it-done attitude of a Zen Buddhist monk in her/his garden, then we might have a place for you.
We dream of finding the perfect combination of biochemical engineer, mechanical engineer, process design engineer, who is also enough of a civil engineer to cope with the fact that she/he will be dealing with waste water, sanitation, manure, and biofuels with regulations thick enough in every jurisdiction to choke a hippopotamus AFTER a tonsillectomy. And we did mean "every" jurisdiction because we have developed some innovations that will make bio-derived fuels a worldwide reality very rapidly, without using any existing food crop, no deforestation, it could even be done with no land used. If all that sounds too good to be true, you probably haven't enough knowledge of algae to fill these shoes. If you do, please read on.
We love jatropha curcas too, and we expect to be gasifying sewer sludge along with orchard and municipal landscape trimmings. We would love YOU to have connections to existing refineries or other sources of carbon dioxide because we'll be "eating" it in unprecedented amounts every day. But we don't know how to evaluate a turnbuckle's holding capacity, or how to reinforce the walls of our hydroponics units to withstand the stress we'll be putting on them. Can you figure out the cost of spraying on a hectare of truck bed liner, and whether or not it is a good idea for hydroponic cultivation environments?
If you can decode what we have been talking about here, and you are looking for a small company with few levels of bureaucracy (like 2) where there's a chance to change the world and for rapid advancement to the top levels, then you might want to talk to us and send us your "resume" (we'd love it if this found you without a resume because you weren't really looking to move, you just couldn't stand not to know more about what we are doing and if it is for you --- so write us an email !)
Requirements:
PEng status preferred but not required. Biochemists who are not engineers but who are algae experts are welcome to apply.
University degree required, advanced degree preferred. (But if you are sure you can impress us enough that we won't care about a degree, apply anyway.)
Salary: upper 5 figures to lower 6 figures for the right candidate. Stock options possible. (We hope President Obama will eliminate the need for company health plan, and we'll be helping him see that it happens, too.)
American or Canadian citizenship preferred, but right to work in USA required.
North American residence required so we don't get arrested for sending you an encrypted business confidential message.
Contact: president (at) winfotech.com
Well, I hope you found that "help wanted" ad mildly entertaining. Certainly not your run-of-the-mill ad to be sure. Indeed we've had a couple of phone calls in addition to the email responses, and one of those was from a gentleman (who I plan to call soon so I won't name until I've spoken to him) who was NOT interested in the job, he just wanted to talk to the guy who wrote such a creative ad. He said he couldn't imagine any engineer would have written such a literary employment solicitation. I'm sure there are some engineers out there who could, but I'd also bet he's right that they are few and far between. In any case, just the fact that he called was very flattering, and I thank him.
Love and warm wishes,
Sincerely,
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
http://daochienergy.com