Sean Hastings

The Last Generation

(excerpt from GWYD section 8.1):

If you believe that any of the technologies we have talked about are possible (and there certainly are some good reasons to think so), then it would seem that we can look forward to a very interesting future. It may be that we are destined to be a race of immortal beings with powers that we would previously have described as godlike, or maybe we will just create the machine creatures that will replace us, or even something in between as our technology becomes more and more a part of us. Alternatively, we may still be heading for some sort of end of the world scenario, in which we, and all of our works, will come to some cataclysmic end.

Every technology we have talked about holds immense promise for bringing us all a much better life, however, every technology also seems to have some end of the world scenario associated with it. This could be because any power can be used for good or ill, or it could just be the way we tend to think.

There have been many ‘end of the world’ scenarios before, and we have survived them all without even breathing very hard. Here is just a small sampling:

• A couple thousand years ago, there were people predicting that all civilization was doomed by the military practice of the time of salting the Earth of a defeated nation, so that no crops could be grown there again. The theory was that eventually all farm lands would be salted, through ongoing warfare, and then everyone would starve.
• The year 1000 AD brought the first millennium crisis, with people believing that Christ was sure to return and Armageddon would follow.
• In 1798, Thomas Malthus predicted overpopulation and mass starvation was just a decade away, and it has continued to be thought to be “just a decade away” by many others, ever since.
• In the 1970’s with global temperatures having fallen steadily for 40 years, some concerned environmental scientists predicted the start of a new ice age, and told people that global cooling (yes cooling), caused by our modern industrial practices, was going to freeze us all – unless we shut down all the factories.
• In the 1980’s we were going to be annihilated at any moment by a nuclear war between super powers, perhaps started by computer error or a computer hacker.
• There was another millennium scare in 2000, and this time, there was the millennium bug with computer date stamps not registering properly past Y2K – it was certain to threaten modern civilization with a massive global computer shutdown.

However we have not survived the entire list of imagined world ending disasters – not by a long shot. Just for fun, here are a few additional possible scenarios: (This is the short list. Many more available at www.exitmundi.nl):

• cosmic ray burst
• super volcanism
• drastic climate change
• another big bang
• deadly new mutant animal species
• super virus or bacteria
• black hole

Now here is an interesting thing about all the scenarios we just listed: they could all be natural occurring phenomena. At any time, we could all be killed by a completely natural disaster according to the plot line of any of these scenarios. However, most people do not seem worried about the world suddenly coming to an end through natural forces.

Now take a look at the list again, but this time put the words “New technology causes…” in front of each of them. Do the scenarios now seem more likely? To a lot of people, the prospect that science could cause some of these things seems far more likely, and/or worrisome, than the idea that they might occur without a human cause.

Now take a look at the list again, but this time, put the words “New technology saves us from…” in front of each. Does that make you feel better? Most people don’t seem to think about the fact that we create science to shelter us, and to serve our needs, and that this should make a scenario where science saves us, more likely than one in where science accidentally destroys us.

The point we are trying to make is that there is no particular logical reason to believe that such a disaster will occur soon, let alone that we will somehow cause it with our science. However, the idea that this might be the case seems to be in a lot of people’s heads. Most people seem to believe that the idea of science causing such a disaster is more likely than it occurring naturally. The only explanation we can find for this bias is that certain idea-organisms have reasons to want us to resist technological change.

These idea-organisms will continue to promote disaster scenarios to slow our technological progress. More such scenarios are always in the works. Some people point to prophecies that foretell our immediate doom, saying that the Mayan calendar predicts a “new cycle” in 2012 and that our technology will destroy us then. Some predict that the “real” millennium computer bug will happen in 2038 when the UNIX date time format runs out of space. Global warming has us burned, flooded, or frozen (pick the one that scares you most) sometime in your lifetime. And there is the nanotech earth eating goo scenario.

This all seems very scary doesn’t it? But you can probably always find a prophecy to say whatever you are scared of, if you just look hard enough. For example:

If you believe in prophecy and are afraid of nanotechnology, have you ever considered this registered trademark of The Sherwin-Williams Company? Perhaps they should never be allowed to use nanotechnology in their paint factories…

If we were to allow this to happen, after being so clearly warned by this obviously prophetic logo, wouldn’t our faces be red?

(We know, the joke isn’t as funny in black and white, but color printing costs being what they are, what are you gonna do?)

It is always more interesting to say that the world is about to end than it is to say that the world will continue on and be just fine. It will always grab more attention. It will always produce more newspaper headlines and teasers spots for later news programs. (“There are three common household products that are probably in your home right now, and could suddenly cause the end of the world! Tune in at 11 O’clock to find out what they are.”) Such fears are exactly the kind of thing that Collective Identities use to gain control. The message they send is that you will be safer if control of such dangerous matters is left to some Higher Power.

But why should we believe that the Collective can protect us from ourselves? We know that a free market works to give us the things we want, and that the Collective almost always does a worse job. When it comes to deciding what technologies will be pursued, the free market has a record of producing things that benefit individuals, while large collective entities, in competition with each other, have given us things like atomic weapons and genetically engineered diseases. There is no reason to believe that central control will not do more harm than good.

It may be true that as individuals get more powerful, a single very upset person might one day have the power to destroy everyone and everything. However, a Collective is more likely to create the technology that would make that possible, and keeping someone from using it, once it is created, will be a real trick. Also consider that the only people who ever seem to be willing to commit such acts of murder/suicide are those infected with the urgent cause of some Collective Identity.

If we allow collective Higher Powers to decide what technology is developed and what is suppressed, it is more likely to create harmful dangerous technology, and suppress good uses for advanced technology, such as giving us all longer healthier lives. This could actually make the difference between you living to see some incredible future world, or dying of old age just decades before things really get interesting.

If we can control the future in any way, reducing collectivism’s drag on scientific progress is probably our best bet. As a person living in the early part of the 21st Century, you may well be part of a truly unique generation of human beings on the planet Earth. But which unique generation are you a part of?

You might be part of the last generation that has to die, or the first generation of immortals.

Whether you let the development of new technology be influenced by individual hopes and dreams, or controlled by some collective mindset, could well make the difference of whether or not you get to witness the future of mankind.

We can’t tell you if the future will be hell on Earth, or heaven, or something more mundane in between. All we can say is that we think it would be a real bummer for you to die of old age just before it becomes clear what is actually going to become of humanity. And it would be especially annoying if the only reason you were not saved was because some group of people, hosting idea-organisms based on writings that are thousands of years old, denied your right to life by slowing the progress of medical technology.

Do your best to stick around. You don’t want to miss the punch line, do you?

Sean Hastings

I acknowledge that global disaster is possible, but I don't have a species wide global hedging strategy, nor would I ...

30 December 09 at 20:19 | see more

The Usual Suspects

I thought it would be fun to post this cartoon from God Wants You Dead.

When I was working on the book, I tried to get several different artists I know to draw this one for me, but none of them would touch it. Apparently they feared for their lives, so I ended up having to do this one myself.

So far, there have been no fatwās calling for my death, but please appreciate how I am putting my neck on the line for your entertainment here, and at least pretend to laugh…

I Moved My Blog

Vera Verba Blog got hacked by spammers and, for various reasons that I won’t go into, I don’t want to fix the problem. So, instead, I shut it down and am moving all my old posts here. I am also moving various posts from other places on the net to try to consolidate them to one archive. So, this will be my location for publishing my random rantings for the foreseeable future.

The Case For AGW And Why I Am Skeptical

The best real argument for anthropogenic global warming appears to me (and I don’t think I am constructing a straw man here, but feel free to correct me if I am – or if I am missing anything) to be:

1. There is a historical correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperature. This correlation is probably mostly feedback from temperature change (more CO2 comes out of solution as oceans warm and more goes in as it cools), but…

2. We know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, so even if we don’t know exactly how much an increase in CO2 will drive temperatures, it is also a forcing factor according to some curve. Now, this curve is certainly not linear and we don’t really know where we are on it, and the majority of correlation being ocean feedback makes it really complicated, but…

3. We have put together computer models that account for everything we know about, and the only way we can get them to fit historical data is to apply certain CO2 forcing formulas. If these formulas are accurate, then the current rise in CO2 that we are seeing will continue to produce greater heat, and eventually this will reach a level of doing more harm than good. And…

4. The only formulas we can figure out that work are based on effects from human generated CO2, so if human beings could just reduce their CO2 output, we might not have to worry about future, potentially harmful temperatures.

* * *

Now, here are the scientific problems I have with this story (the economic issues would require another post):

A. Having a formula that turns CO2 into higher temperatures and successfully maps past temperatures, in no way guarantees that it correctly projects future temperatures.

I know enough math (or could look it up – because it has admittedly been many years) to generate a formula to produce a curve to give a good fit to almost any data set and then have it do whatever I choose after that fit. So, even if I allow for no agenda on the part of the climate modelers, I have to think about their reasons for choosing one formula over another (in this case, a curve that continues linearly, or takes off exponentially, rather than the curve that rises slower and slower logarithmically). Their choice in this regard is based on some hypothesis about how CO2 produces greater temperature, but this hypothesis (there are actually more than one, because different modelers get very different future projections) does not seem to be experimentally testable.

B. There is still a lot of room for doubt that the climate modelers have accounted for every other forcing effect besides CO2 that might have produced recent historical temperature records.

Solar forcing is a strong candidate for being such an unaccounted factor. There are strong historical fits with temperature (even stronger than CO2 correlation on longer time scales) and absolutely no reason to believe that the correlation is feedback rather than forcing – while the mechanism by which earth temperatures can drive atmospheric CO2 is obvious, the mechanism by which earth temperatures could drive sun spots is unimaginable (at least not by me and I have a pretty good imagination).

[Here is a link to a video talking about the most recent science I can find on solar forcing: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1181073/]

C. There is a lot of room for doubting that the modelers have properly accounted for every possible negative feedback effect that might completely mitigate the problem.

It is intuitive that there are such negative feedback mechanisms, or we would probably see many more historical swings from ice-house to hot-house planet and back again. There are only a few in hundreds of millions of years, with our current ice age state exhibiting many many smaller swings that have never broken through the ice age temperature ceiling that we are currently closely approaching. Something happens at that temperature that keep us in an ice age cycle. I am not sure what that is, and I don’t think anyone else is either. But the fact that we have been in an ice age for millions of years, with none of the interglacial periods (like now) breaking a certain temperature level, indicates some downward temperature effect probably kicks in at this level.

This would probably be both some feedback on the shorter time scale of interglacial peaks and a separate downward temperature pressure from whatever slowly sent us into the ice age, as shown by the long term declines of both high and low maximums in the graph below. The later might be the continental drift of Antarctica into a polar position to hold extra ice and act as a reflector.

My favorite candidate for the former shorter-term feedback (unaccounted for in climate models) is cloud cover. Greater heat produces more clouds. More clouds reflect more light. More light reflected causes cooling. Negative feedback.

But that is just a guess – it could be anything or nothing. The IPCC reports I have read basically say [paraphrasing] “We don’t know if there will be more or less clouds or if this would reflect more incoming light or absorb more outgoing heat.” There is a lot of room for uncertainty here.

D. The temperature records upon which the climate models are based, and therefore the degree that CO2 has been implicated in global warming (as the default candidate), may not be correct.

There is an ongoing disagreement between satellite and surface based measurements. The surface based measurements seem to show more recent warming. The argument in favor of the surface based temperature record has been that the satellites do not monitor the poles, and that most of the warming is happening there. But there is no known mechanism (at least not any that I have been able to find an explanation for) by which CO2 increase would mostly heat the poles .

Another issue is that it has recently come to light that there have been some odd choices made in compiling data for the temperature record upon which the models were based. For example, only one site out of dozens was chosen to represent the entire Antarctic continent, and that chosen site showed the greatest warming signal of all stations – an 8x greater warming signal than the raw data from all those stations. This sort of thing could explain the greater polar warming and the land versus satellite data discrepancy.

[Here is a link to an article about temperature data selection in Antarctica:

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/ghcn-antarctic-warming-eight-times-actual/]

And if the land based temperature record is bad, then the models built to fit it are all bad.

So, when the modelers say things like, “Only human action can explain the temperature record” they may be absolutely correct – its just may be a different kind of human action than what they are considering…

E. And last – but perhaps most importantly – the projections made in the IPCC 2001 models have not proven accurate.

There may be better models now, and they may still predict immanent warming that may reach dangerous levels, but the projections that have been around long enough to be tested at all, have failed that test. With no increase of the hypothetical problem over 10 years, either the hypothesis is wrong, or it is less of an immediate threat than was predicted.

I find it hard to be convinced that there is an urgent need for immediate political action to stop a problem that moves so slowly as to not show itself for a decade.

View all 3 comments

Neil

A) "Having a formula that turns CO2 into higher temperatures and successfully maps past temperatures, in no way guarantees ...

31 December 09 at 17:43 | see more

Sean Hastings

Neil, sorry, I may have munged your reply a little bit in answering it. I have seen other blogs where ...

31 December 09 at 17:49 | see more

When Do You Stop Believing?

Recently, I have been thinking about the things that give people faith in science. As a mental exercise I have created some scenarios concerning scientific claims that shed light on when I will or will not believe alarming claims by scientists. In each case, if the given scenario represented reality, I am sure that some group of people would believe it was all a conspiracy theory or institutional group think, and ignore the scientists. Likewise, I know that some people would continue to believe with religious like conviction, despite all the contrary indicators.

Personally, I start out as a believer and join the “denier” camp about half way down the list.

So, when do you stop believing?

Scenario 1:

• A. It is claimed that a large asteroids is on a collision course with the earth.
• B. The location of the asteroid is published and astronomers all over the world (professional and amateur) are able to spot it with their telescopes.
• C. Anyone can use well tested mathematical formulas to compute its path and confirm the impending collision. These same formulas have been confirmed by observation to correctly plot the path of other asteroids time and again.
• D. Various studies are published predicting Estimates of the damage that will be done based on land strike and sea strike scenarios. Natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires, floods, and drought are considered possible or likely consequences, depending on where the asteroid hits.
• E. There is a movement with a costly plan to build a rocket that might be able to divert the asteroid to prevent the collision.
• F. The call goes out for your money, vote, and/or personal effort to help the cause.

Scenario 2 (as above, but):

• A. It is a cloud of smaller meteors that will cause multiple smaller strikes.
• E. The plan of action is some sort of magnetic space net. It is widely questioned whether it will actually help, or if it is already too late.

Scenario 3 (as above but):

• B. The location of the threat (the raw data) is kept confidential by a small group studying the threat.
• C. They assure us that there will be a collision based on well tested formulas, but we can’t do the calculations ourselves.

Scenario 4 (as above but):

• A. It is a cloud of space dust, rather than an asteroid.
• C. Rather than well tested formulas, brand new, untested, computer models (code not released to the public) are used to predict the development of the threat based on new scientific theory (space dust is attracted by our planets magnetic field or some such). But we are assured that these scientist know what they are talking about, and anyone who doesn’t believe is a “denier”.
• D. The potential damage predicted is not anything as obvious as physical collisions – but instead the effects of the dust on our atmosphere are projected as being harmful in various ways. It is even possible that there will be some positive effects, but these are downplayed.

Scenario 5 (as above but):

• E. Studies suggest that the threat is increased by human action. (The use of electricity is said to be causing our magnetic field to be more attractive to the theoretically harmful space dust that only the trained scientists can see) There is a movement with a costly plan to reduce human industry – replace electricity with older power technology – fund development of theoretical new power technology.
• F. You are asked to accept new central political control over a huge section of human industry/production.

Scenario 6 (as above but):

• A. The threat is not anything extraterrestrial but based on global measurements of with regular natural variance that may be as large as that being pointed to as evidence of a threat.

Scenario 7 (as above but):

• C. A whole decade passes with no increase in the threat.
• E. Believers continue to claim that their is no time to waste and that the “scientific debate is over”.

Scenario 8 (as above but):

• G. Leaked emails, data, and computer code show that the “scientists” who would not share the data or code willingly, appear to have an agenda in promoting the threat and suppressing any scientific study that disputes their alarming claims.

Seasteading Conference Speaking Gig

This was my first time giving any sort of presentation in front of a crowd – at least since grade school. So, I was facing a fear of mine here.

I have been on national radio and TV a few times, but that is really just talking to two or at most three people;  one asking questions, one doing sound, and one holding a camera. There is something viscerally different about having an audience large enough that they could lynch you…

Anyway, I discovered the secret reciepe for public speaking – two shots of tequilla and a pear cider.

Judge for yourself how I did:

Sean Hastings – The Seasteading Institute Conference 2009 from The Seasteading Institute on Vimeo.

Sean Hastings

I noticed that my eyes were sometimes closed - also my hands moved around too much. Whomever cut this together ...

28 December 09 at 02:26 | see more

devon

I thought you did a fine job, actually. I've been taking classes in speech/rhetoric, and you didn't do any of ...

29 December 09 at 22:08 | see more

Better Dead Than B

(Group A Forever ! ! ! )

As a right thinking member of Group A, I know that all of our societies ills are the fault of Group B. Of the hundreds (maybe thousands) of things we disagree on, it is clear to me that Group A holds the correct position on each and every one. It is purely a coincidence that there are an almost exactly equal number of people who support the ideas of Group B – holding the exact opposite position on these issues. The only explanation for this large group getting every single issue exactly wrong is that half of all people are smart and half stupid.

Now, occasionally someone in group B will say something that I am forced to agree with, and occasionally it may seem like one of THEM is actually also a smart person. The explanation for this is that it is a trick. If you are smart enough to see deeper to the subtext, they are saying true stuff, not because they think that important truths need to be said, but because it is a way to make Group A look bad. Or, if one of them is smart, they are also evil and just say what they do for personal gain, not because they believe it. So instead of looking for common ground in what appears to be a shared truth, or stopping to consider why another person sees the world differently than I do, the smart thing to do is defend OUR position by shouting them down.

To give any one of THEM credit for either good intent or valid insight would add support to the positions they hold that I do not agree with, so instead I must claim that they are only saying true things for false reasons. Then I must bring up all the bad stuff I blame on their group and try to shift the argument to the issues that I feel most comfortable arguing that make me more sure that everything my group believes is the truth – even though all the issues are not logically connected and I have just put them in the same mental bucket labeled “things Group A believes” so that I can just think about the ones I am really sure about and conclude from those ideas, that all of the others that I don’t have time to think about, because they are more complicated, must also be true.

Now I know that some people actually claim to have a set of beliefs that holds some things that Group A believes and some things that Group B believes. While these people might be well meaning in some cases (like situations where they agree with me on a particular issue) my below the surface analysis reveals to me that they are really just deluded tools of Group B.

It is important to me that there only are two possible sides, and that all the various positions held on various issues by my side must be right and the other side must always be wrong. If this is not the case, then the whole group identity falls apart. If people can be right about some things and wrong about others, then there would really be millions of possibles “sides” and it is no longer US against THEM with a large, easily understandable enemy and many many good friends, but rather, it might turn out that it is just me alone, and a lot of other people who are all individuals – not easily viewed as 100% friends or 100% enemy – 100% right or 100% wrong.

It might even turn out that on some issues there are no 100% right answers that work for everybody – that sometimes I don’t know best – that sometimes nobody knows best, and that the best thing to do is actually let people act according to their own hearts, rather than trying to set a single rule for everyone to follow. It might even turn out that this is true for almost every issue that divides us into groups…

And that would be very scary and confusing.

Gay Marriage Should NOT Be Legalized

(Nor Should the Heterosexual Variety)

The government should not legally recognize any marriage. There is simply no need for it and it just causes trouble. Any required legal status for any sort of partnership can be conferred through applicable contract law, and need never use a word as charged with religious connotations as “marriage.” Leave the word “marriage” to the churches.

In our society, people who attend one church seem to be able to get along pretty well with the blasphemous heathens next door who have different religious beliefs. They are quite happy in the knowledge that their beliefs and rituals are the correct ones, and that everyone else is going to hell. As long as the government doesn’t decide to start legislating about who is or is not saved, and what constitutes a proper ritual, or whom should be allowed to participate, everyone seems quite happy. But there would certainly be an uproar if the government decided to declare that women had the right to be priests and men could become nuns – even if their was no mention of specific religious denominations, nor any requirement for any specific church to follow the government guidelines.

This is exactly what is happening when we allow the government to make ANY laws about “marriage”. It is offending people on a religious level.

If we let each church define marriage themselves, everyone will happily believe that the church next door does not perform “real marriages” like the ones done by the right thinking people over here. They may be sad for those poor lost souls, but not really too upset about it. They certainly won’t bother any of the rest of us about it.

I happen to be married to someone of similar age, racial type, religious beliefs, and of the opposite sex – a union that is fully recognized by pretty much everyone everywhere as a “legitimate marriage” – yet I’d still very much rather that the government had no business in recognizing or not recognizing the nature of my relationship with my wife. We should (all of us) be able to freely define our own relationships, not have government approved relationship templates legally imposed upon us.

Having the government legally sanction any definition of “marriage” is a violation of separation of Church and State and/or an absolutely unnecessary governmental approval of just one of the many possible relationships within which free people should be able to choose to associate. Once you grant that the government has any business defining marriage at all, it should not surprise you that their will be significant non-productive argument about that definition and that it might not end up defined the way you would want it defined.

Stop trying to get marriage legally redefined and start trying to get it legally undefined.

If you happen to be a heterosexual person who wants to protest the different treatment of gays, the proper way to show your solidarity is to NOT get married (or if you are married – get divorced) and just enter into a domestic partnership, the same way your gay friends are required to. Then fight to get the applicable legislation on domestic partnerships changed to be just as good or better than current marriage laws and to get all laws involving the word “marriage” removed from the law books.

Then no one will ever again have to argue about what is or is not a “real marriage” unless they happen to be into arguing their religion with non-believers.

Mulligan Night

This year, one of my favorite cultural traditions, “Mulligan Night”, falls on the same night as the more well known holiday of “Halloween”. It is also a Saturday night, so it likely that a lot of people will unknowingly be attending Mulligan Night parties. Thus I feel obligated to explain the rules of Mulligan Night so that no one will be caught unawares.

Mulligan Night (also sometimes called “do-over” or “fall-back” night, or hour) refers to the fact that, in jurisdictions practicing the custom of daylight savings time, on a particular Autumn evening, the clock is officially turned back one hour. This causes an hour of time to be erased and redone. This strange custom is based on a primitive societal belief that the laws of man are powerful enough to alter the normal flow of time. Daylight Savings Time is, therefor, on par with attempts to legislate the value of Pi, in demonstrating the hubris of legislation.

Like all over-reaching laws, this one creates unintended side effects. Fortunately, in this case, these side effects can be a lot of fun. Because society believes that this hour disappears, all lingering social consequences must also disappear. Anything embarrassing that may happen during this “lost hour” is officially erased.

To see why this is true, consider the legal concept of “alibi.”

If a bank robbery occurs at 1:30 AM on Nov 1st, and I can prove conclusively that at 1:30 AM on Nov 1st, I was 50 miles away, having a drink at a bar with a dozen unimpeachable witnesses, I am off the hook. I couldn’t possibly have done it. If the prosecution tries to insist that 1:30 AM actually happened twice that night, this is just going to confuse the jury and is unlikely to lead to conviction. Of course, any lingering physical evidence can still be an issue. If the stolen money is found under my bed, or the prosecutor can produce recorded images of me with my ear pressed against a vault door as I rotate the tumblers, then I am still likely to get convicted, despite my clever alibi.

All of the above leads us to the rules of a Mulligan Night Party:

• 0.) A Mulligan Night party can only happen once a year. (Although God is Dead Day has similar aspects) Mulligan night usually happens wherever Daylight Savings Time is practiced, on whatever night it ends and the clocks are officially turned back. However, like all holidays, it is somewhat permissible to move the night of celebration by a few days to accommodate other scheduling issues. Furthermore, ex-patriots are permitted to celebrate Mulligan Night, even if they happen to be in a country that does not believe political officials posses magical powers allowing them to control the flow of time.

• 1.) Mulligan night should be officially announced. People will react differently when they know that they are not socially responsible for their actions. So in order to maximize fun, everyone at the party should be made aware when the lost hour is starting. Five minutes before (usually 12:55 am) the host of the party should announce that the “lost hour” is about to commence and ask everyone to remember where they are standing and what they are doing. This is also a good opportunity to explain Mulligan Night to the woefully uninformed.
• 2.) No cameras or other recording devices. Since documentation of the events can ruin the illusion that “it never happened”, technology for producing such documentation is discouraged during the “lost hour”.
• 3.) No social repercussions. Since the laws of society have deemed that the “lost hour” never happen, there shall be no social repercussions. This is the fun part of Mulligan Night. It is an opportunity to do anything that you would really like to do, but would normally feel inhibited from doing during for fear of lingering social stigma. We spend most of our lives projecting a fictitious consistency of behavior that conforms to some social norm – during the “lost hour” you are free from that – you can do whatever you really want to do.
• 4.) Beware of lasting effects. If someone gets pregnant or seriously injured, it is quite likely that someone else will still be held responsible the next morning. This may also apply to any psychological trauma deep enough that it goes beyond the level of mere social embarrassment. So try to retain some level of good judgment.
• 5.) Mulligan night should be officially ended. At the end of the “lost hour”, the host of the party should ask everyone to return to exactly where they were and what they were doing when it started. The clock is then rolled back and things proceed as if nothing had happened. (Optionally, the host can then declare that “lost hour” rules still apply for the rest of the night – that the record will be again wiped clean in the morning.)

And that’s it. Have fun!

What happened to global warming?

From the BBC website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm

“Last month, Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.Professor Latif is based at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany and is one of the world’s top climate modellers.

But he makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself.”

In fact, the most recent temperature records, rather than matching IPCC predictions, are right on track for a simple combination of two natural trends.

• 1.) A gradual warming trend as we return to the temperatures of the medieval warm period (hotter than now) from the temperatures of the little ice age. (For a look at how the IPCC scientists have massaged the data to try to get the inconvenient medieval warm period to disappear, read this -> http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/McKitrick-hockeystick.pdf )
• 2.) The multi-decade cycle described in the top article that represents the interaction of sun output cycles with ocean current cycles – and conforms exactly with the multidecade shift between sensationalist claims that we are going to burn up and sensationalist claims that we are going to freeze, should temperatures continue in one direction linearly or worse (like the 2001 IPCC predictions all showed).

Note that according to this simple hypothesis (which so far fits observable data better than 2001 IPCC predictions) we are unlikely to be as hot as 1998 again until the mid 2040s.