Note: I’m playing fast and loose with history here. The details aren’t important. It’s the perceptions that I’m speaking to.

In college I had a professor who was talking to the class about the Napoleonic wars. He set the stage for us by telling us how Europe was transitioning into a modern society and they knew it. For the first time in history people were looking at their present and realizing that it was different than the past.

You know how sometimes someone will ask you how your day was and you say, “Same old. Same old.” That’s how life was before around the 1700s, give or take a few hundred years. Point is that most men and women did what their mothers and fathers had done and that’s pretty much how life had been for generations enumerable.

The point here is that Europeans in the 1800s had a sence that they were permanently different than their ancestors and that maybe they wouldn’t even have any more wars. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Then of course everything went to pot when Napoleon started marching around the continent. Not only were they disappointed that they were back at war but this was really bad. They had cannons and muskets and things that made a real mess out of some really nice estates. Not to mention the raping and pillaging that the soldiers did along the way which is pretty much what soldiers had always done.

So just when they thought they were finally pulling themselves out of the mud they fell into a shit hole.

That’s the essence of what my professor was communicating to us.

I raised my hand and said, “But you know, we did get Beethoven’s 9th Symphony out of it.” That pretty much got me a “globber” from everyone in the class including the professor.

My point was that, while it may have been really crappy for those stuck in the mess it’s really pretty far removed from us now. Plus we’ve seen things like the Holocaust and such that makes the Napoleonic wars look like a garden party.

But it was the tragedy of those times that inspired Beethoven’s 9th. That symphony will endure. When the Alps are worn down into gentle rolling hills the air will still occasionally vibrate to the tune of Beethoven’s 9th.

So were the Napoleonic wars bad? Is it appropriate to label something historical in that way? Certainly as we distance ourselves from it we are more inclined to focus on the greatness that they produced instead of the horror they suffered.

So what of today? How will people of the future view the events of today and near future? I think of this often when I think of what might be in store for humanity if global warming turns into a worse case scenario.

Perhaps in the generations to follow they will think of us today, the agents of global warming, as the unknowing saviors of the human race. It could be our actions that in the immediate future will be universally considered “bad” that leads to the next evolution of humanity into a true global society. And so our distant children will be thankful that we blundered yet gave birth to something they cherish.

Then again, maybe we’re all doomed. At any rate. I often think of Shakespeare’s quote in Hamlet who said, “There is nothing neither good nor bad. But thinking makes it so.”

My wife and I were talking about sensory organs and what they might be like on animals on other planets. And of course I carried it way to far for my wife to stay interested so I’ll write about it here.

Lets start with the obvious senses that we have. I’m not so much interested in the sensory organs that we have but more what physical attributes can be sensed.

Electromagnetic/vision : sensing the energy contained in photons. This is different than feeling, say the heat from a fireplace. In that case the photons heat the surface of the skin and that in turn is picked up by specialized nerves.

Vibratory : This is our sense of detecting the pressure waves in the air - hearing. Other animals, for instance dolphins, detect pressure waves in water. And snakes detect vibrations in the ground. Though I’m not sure that sense is different than our ability to detect vibrations in a solid only more refined.

Perhaps the difference is in how the vibrations are registered. Our hearing is registered by tiny bones oscillating. Our feeling of vibrations is picking up changes in acceleration.

Molecular analysis : ( not a very good name but the first that comes to mind. ) This is smelling and tasting. Molecules are binding with other molecules in our sensory organs and based on the number of specific bindings produce a sensory input.

Somatosensory : the combination of nerve endings that detect pressure, temperature, heat, etc.

That covers our basic five. What others are there?

Magnetic : Humans probably don’t sense this but migratory birds do.

Electric : I’m not sure if there are any organisms on earth that detect electric currents. Eels produce an electric current so perhaps they have some sort of way of communicating with other eels in this fashion.

It isn’t hard to imagine that there could be environments somewhere in the universe where the ability to sense electric fields might come in handy.

Gravitational : Okay, you could say that we all sense gravity. But that’s probably under the the sense of touch for us. What about organisms that might sense changes in gravitational fields? This might come in handy for an organism in a system with lots of moons. The environment might change due to alignments of the moons/planet so that under certain conditions the organism might need to migrate to another location for food or safety.

Radioactive decay : If an organism had the ability to detect the Weak force it would show up as high energy photons. Imagine an environment where there are areas with lots of radioactive decay and other areas where there is very little. There might be an organism that could detect these photons so that it could avoid the highly radioactive areas.

Note: I’m not sure if this should be considered different than the electromagnetic/vision sense. My first impression is that it should because while it is ultimately sensing photons they are produced by very different means and mean very different things to the organism.

Strong force : This is a real long shot. The strong force isn’t directly detectable outside of the nucleus of an atom. The only environment I could image where an organism might be able to detect the strong force is if there is some form of life on a neutron star.

Any such life would be non biologic since no molecule can exist on a neutron star. But there might be some combination of particles that can exist on/in a neutron star that could maintain a pattern. It’s a real stretch but as is said, “life finds a way.” In this instance we may never know because it may be beyond any technology to ever detect that level of detail on a neutron star. Perhaps someday computer simulations might shed some light on this far out possibility.

Radio : This again is the electromagnetic sense but perhaps like detecting radioactive decay this one deserves it’s own category. I’m thinking about the hypothesized giant gas bags dreamed up in Arthur Clarke’s novels. I would suppose these GGBs can sense radio waves from lightning because they might be attracted to them for energy/nutrients or repelled from them because of the obvious danger. Perhaps more likely they would be attracted to the wake of a lightning storm where there might be specific nutrients that they desire.

Can you think of any other forms of physical perception?

Let me say up front that there is ample reason to be a global warming skeptic. Especially if one is skeptical about the anthropogenic affects. There is no doubt that earth has undergone huge climate variations in the past. From a “Snowball Earth” to a mostly tropical climate through the Jurassic.

With that said, “What the frak are skeptics thinking?”

Really?

Dogma once held that the Earth was the center of the Universe. Then a guy comes along and says, “You know, I have this model of the solar system that works pretty darn good with the Sun at the center of the solar system.” (*Note: that’s not completely accurate.)

Dogma responds, rather vehemently, that dogma is correct because it’s dogma.

Some might call that a circular argument. But a dogmatist would respond to that by saying, “You’re being inconsistent because you think that it’s okay for planets to go in circles but not arguments.” This is the sort of statement that really stupid people fall for.

Another guy had a fairly simple idea that would explain the wild diversity of nature based entirely on who gets laid. He loosened a shit storm that is still raging despite an overwhelming body of evidence. I mean if evidence had mass then the theory of evolution would collapse into a black hole. Going along with that analogy, skeptics must have some exotic method of reasoning that is not effected by data.

What else? Space travel is not possible; heavier than air machines won’t fly; heart surgery can’t be done not to mention brain surgery; Everest can’t be climbed; continents don’t move; God does not play dice with the Universe . . . I could go on, and on.

Skeptics have such a horrible batting average that if skepticism could be measured it would count as scientific evidence for a theory. I can see the headlines now, “Engineers build space ship capable of faster than light travel powered by skepticism that it can’t be done.”

One might say that skeptics keep people from being overly gullible. But how many gullible people fall for the argument of the skeptic only to eventually end up feeling gullible?

After much thought I have come up with a theory to explain skepticism. Most people don’t want to believe things. And they certainly don’t want to understand things. They want to Know things - with a capital “K”. How do you know something? You listen to an authority figure talk. They tell you what you there is to know.

Where do authority figures get their knowledge from? Simple, they figure out what it is that they need to get people to know so that they can get what they want.

So if you don’t believe in my theory then I’m going to argue that that is evidence to support my theory.

Ha! Take that you skeptic.

*The Copernican model was not as accurate at predicting planetary movements as the ruling Polyatomic model because Copernicus used circles instead of ellipsis. Once Kepler fixed the Copernican model it worked much better than the Ptolemaic.

Global warming is about to hit high gear is a wonderful interview with Bill McKibben from the Citizen-Times.com from Ashville, NC. McKibben has written numerous books about nature and global warming.

RealClimate.com (RC) reports that the island of Svalbard, an Arctic island in the Northern North Atlantic, has recorded a 5 sigma event. That means that an event with a probability of one in a million.

You can get the details from the source at RC.

As it was pointed out at RC this does not prove global warming is happening much less anthropogenic GW. It is however worth noting that there have been a run on highly improbable weather patterns in the past few years. RC mentioned the heatwave in Europe as one and of course the 2006 hurricane season certainly deviated from the norm, whatever that is.

This reminds me of a quote I read somewhere, “Million to one odds happen 6 times a day in New York City.” The question is, “How many abnormal weather events should we expect as the norm and how many have been happening?”

This music video has lots of closeup views of the sun and isn’t a bad song to boot. Note: the sun doesn’t show up until about 40 seconds into the video.

Here’s some good advice about taking care of your pets in the event of bad weather.

Here’s a funny article about Global Warming. It’s sort of a David Letterman’s Top 10 reasons to look forward to Global Warming.

On a serious note: I think the author is correct in that whatever Global Warming has in store for us there isn’t anything we will do about it. Unless something cataclysmic happens we’re going to go on pumping CO2 into the atmosphere for decades to come. So, sit back and enjoy the show. Oh, and don’t think about invensting in real estate that isn’t at least 20 feet above the current sea level.

Robert J. Samuelson’s op-ed Global Warming’s Real Inconvenient Truth is a very honest look at the Global Warming situation. I believe he’s right in that we can jump and yell all we want but in the end CO2 levels will rise for the foreseeable future. It’s inevitable. Only a catastrophic event such as half of the Greenland’s glaciers sliding into the ocean over night is going to provoke us to really make a difference.Our best hope is in technology. Because weather you like it or not people don’t change but technology does.

Cold, Hard Facts : An op-ed by a climatologist who’s data has been distorted by Global Warming skeptics.

Global warming skeptics have used this man’s study as evidence that the globe is, in fact, not warming. I’m not sure which makes me feel better: that they were just too stupid to understand what was really being said. Or, that they did understand but took things out of context to purposely mislead people. Neither one is very comforting.