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.
at

8 comments:

  1. SethOctober 18, 2012 at 11:07 AM

    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.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Michael ROctober 18, 2012 at 1:24 PM

    "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.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Stuart StanifordOctober 18, 2012 at 1:39 PM

    Michael: I readily grant that was worse.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Mike RosackOctober 18, 2012 at 1:44 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  5. Stuart StanifordOctober 18, 2012 at 5:03 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  6. A Quaker in a Strange LandOctober 19, 2012 at 8:17 AM

    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.

    ReplyDelete
  7. A Quaker in a Strange LandOctober 19, 2012 at 8:19 AM

    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.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Stuart StanifordOctober 19, 2012 at 9:57 AM

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

    ReplyDelete