Thursday, October 18, 2012

Thursday Links

  • Are we losing interest in the Eurozone crisis?
  • Visualizing the US drought from satellite gravity measurements.
  • How and why some folks are opposing the Keystone XL pipeline.
  • A123 Systems battery maker for the Chevy Volt Fisker Karma has filed for bankruptcy.  The assets and operations will be acquired by Johnson Controls.
  • I thought this article about life in Damascus was very interesting (if sad).  This is what it's like to live through a social breakdown.
  • Extraordinary: "And the findings were sobering: Every single hour of television watched after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 minutes."
  • Jim Hamilton does the energy fact check on the presidential debate.  Personally, I found it dispiriting that energy issues could take such a high profile while being discussed in a way that almost completely ignored the real factors in the situation.

8 comments:

Seth said...

Satellite gravity measurements to detect groundwater? Amazing. I wonder how large a deflection in GRACE orbits is generated by a difference of a few centimeters of groundwater?

"Every single hour of television watched after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 minutes."

Classic over-interpretation of statistics. Especially the emphatic word "single" -- every SINGLE hour of tv. There's some big cloud of data points, somebody does a linear regression and reports a coefficient. Then along comes a journalist to construe this as a direct linear relationship.

Here's the 'linear' relationship I worry about: every SINGLE time a journalist tells this simple minded linear causation 'story' in a news article, 10 more people decide "science is such BS" and tune it out.

Michael R said...

"This is what it's like to live through a social breakdown."

Not to be snarky, but I would submit that this is more like what it is to live through a social breakdown:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age_collapse

The fact that it's exactly the same neighborhood simply reinforces the point.

Stuart Staniford said...

Michael: I readily grant that was worse.

Mike Rosack said...

LG Chem makes the batteries for the Volt, not A123. A123 was in the running, but lost the bid.

Stuart Staniford said...

Mike - my bad - I wrote that from memory and forgot to double-check. Corrected above.

A Quaker in a Strange Land said...

If one couples sedentary behavior with remaining indoors and as a result becoming Vitamin D deficient the outcome is a heck of an indictment of the Industrial lifestyle of working in an office and sitting front of a computer.

A Quaker in a Strange Land said...

I like our use of "dispiriting" to describe the presidential grasp, or presentation, of energy.

I am going to use that description early and often.

Stuart Staniford said...

Greg: "indictment of the Industrial lifestyle...": no kidding.