Weekly Links

Ethanol production is eating our lunch.

China is blocking Flickr.

Decorative pencils.

World's cheapest car.

Nitrogen pollution is causing trees to soak up more CO2 from the atmosphere.

The feathered dino explained.

Rome reborn.

Talking jewelry.

23 ways to improve your work life.

Over a thousand parents named their daughters "Unique" during this decade. I guess they aren't.

The seven engineering wonders of the world.

Scramjet hits Mach 10.

Is Google scarier than the FBI?

Venezuela launches the sale of "Bolivarian" linux-based computers for the masses.

How motherboards are made.

The full panoramic view from Everest.

A new particle was discovered at Fermilab, one representing all three families of quarks for the first time.

The SEC just ended an important safeguard in the stock markets. Will this be another example of being condemned to repeat history?

In nature, bacteria emit proteins to sweep up nanoparticles into innocuous clumps.

Totalitarian communist and Gaiaist propaganda compared.

Thousands of pearls found.

Deja vu explained.

Too much sex in the Bible?

The Jefferson Memorial is sinking.

It's now legal for women to be topless in New York.

Space colonization may be hopeless. (hat tip: Luther McLeod)

Why the Soviet Union collapsed.

What people are doing online and which demographic groups participate.

How to give yourself a good life.

Chinese slaves freed.

Calculations with two qubits were successfully performed for the first time.

Floating sand.

Microinjection of materials into a single cell at the nano-level.

Memorable Dining in London

h/t Tim Blair:

Chicken, cashew nut and coriander looked like a hippo’s inflamed tonsil; the smell of it was like vinegar in the eyes. With noodles, you chose an ingredient (meat, fish, chicken), a noodle (rice, wheat, egg) and a “topping” (spicy, healthy, Thai, teriyaki) and then flipped a coin for either wokked or soup. The Blonde had salmon, Japanese noodles and Hong Kong topping as soup. What arrived was a daunting bowl of stuff that was the colour of beetroot water, though disturbingly nothing solid in it was red, and it tasted as though there was nothing in it at all. A spicy chicken soup was a large bowl of thin, hot, smelly water. My wokked pork fillet with egg noodles was a foul, grey, greasy, overcooked confection that you might expect to find in a fire station or a sixth-form common room. I have never met a Pot Noodle I wouldn’t have preferred.

Heh, sounds like the reviewer met his match and the food won. It makes me want to visit the restaurant out of simple morbid curiosity. Read the whole thing 'cause it begins with an equally caustic attack on the green armies of perdition that goes like so:

But let me tell you, you Peruvian-hatted puritan apostles of grassy nihilism, the single hottest problem facing the planet is not global warming, but the viciously smug fundamentalist prohibitionists of the green movement. Those wholemealy-mouthed ecologists, who devoutly wish to reduce everyone else’s existence to a self-righteous nose-drip probity that never moves more than four miles from the communal yurt, never eats anything that hasn’t been grown in the communal dung and never thinks anything that isn’t collectively miserabilist, are going to destroy life as we know it faster than an equator of traffic jams, a continent of unlagged lofts and a squadron of circling jumbos.

If there is a wrong side of bed, this guy has found it.

A New Beginning?

We are witnessing the continuing development of a narrative designed to bring the world together, namely the rhetoric of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Putting aside, for the moment, an assessment of the merits of the War on Terror (WoT), including Iraq, it is clear that the US has encountered acrimony from various parts of the globe for the prosecution of the war. Even inside the US, we are experiencing bitter conflicts around the WoT, immigration, healthcare, etc. In many respects the level of anger, conflict, and other tensions have reached a fever pitch over the last several years. The “world” (via the prism of the major commercial media outlets) hates the US. And while we have always encountered the accusations of the “ugly American”, this seems different. And yet Americans desire to be liked. In general this is a friendly country to which immigrants become acculturated more smoothly than anywhere else on earth. I think that many Americans could tolerate being disliked for a while, but after less than expected evidence around the WMD question, the images of Abu Ghraib, accusations about Gitmo, the sheer difficulty of pacifying an ancient country rife with religious and tribal tensions, etc., well we want to be liked again.

At the same time, for all of the sniping, name-calling, “cheese-eating”, perfidy, etc., many other countries, deep down inside, want the US to take care of this problem (i.e., Islamofascism) and be the bad guys, so they don’t have to. Surely France, Germany, Great Britain et al. are worried about immigration and lack of acculturation of people who use the liberties available to promote a retrograde view of humanity and actively seek to gradually transform those countries. Many of our Euro buddies understand in a deep level, which they fear giving voice to, that appeasement only buys relief for today but trouble for tomorrow. Blaming the US while looking the other way in their own lands is like throwing some red meat to a lion; if you don’t have a lot more of it, where will his next meal come from?

Global warming gives a variety of people the way to “make nice” with each other. We can join hands and save the planet. Even scientists decide the issue by “consensus” rather than by thorough, accurate, appropriately cautious data collection, including challenges to the data collection and interpretation as is expected from any discipline that presumes to take the falsification principle seriously. By agreeing it’s the “big” problem, we are to put aside our differences. “Skeptics” are to be treated with derision. The question is said to be “settled” (there we can all agree about that). The remaining questions involve what to “do” about it. And most of the solutions appear to be either quasi-socialism or outright socialism, again to make level, to obliterate differences. There are to be no differences, no competition. We are to all agree.

AGW offers modern people and modern societies a secular sacrament. It is a New Penance: Forgive me, Gaia, for I have sinned. It’s been 5 yrs. since my last recycling. Instead of saying the rosary or davening, we can chant “sustainability” and become pure again. And now virtually everyone is getting in to the act. Even ChimpyMcBushitler is on board, although new religions may seek new sacrificial lambs. We will be told that it is the evil market system, which creates this problem. And that will lead to being told it is the individual’s pursuit of self-interest that lay at the heart of the warming- even life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness may come to be seen as culprits, if they haven’t already been. Top-down enforced social cooperation will save us from ourselves. A new god would be born, until…. Well, that wouldn’t really be paradise, and even the true believers would find that out at some point. But they could wreak a lot of hell in the meantime.