Bookworm Room

Tweet Bear with me here, because I’m about to prove how simplistic and primitive my mind is.  I need you all to help enlighten me. Some high school students I know got an assignment to set up and complete an experiment.  Some of the experiments they came up with include looking at plant growth under [...]

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Tweet Approximately every ten years, Marin County floods.  Thinking back, the last big flood year in our neighborhood was around 2002 or 2003.  I remember taking the kids down from the hill on which we live to the marshy flat-lands nearby.  We waded through water that came up past our knees.  This high water was [...]

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Tweet (iPad wiped all my hyperlinks, so if you’re interested in the security programs I mention, you’ll have to search then yourself.) A friend’s email got hacked. This led to a discussion with a very knowledgeable person about the risks she now faces. Upon realizing she was hacked, she immediately changed her email password and [...]

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Tweet “Find a need and fill it.”  That’s great advice in a capitalist society and it’s how many people have gotten rich while improving other’s lives. Al Gore has a different twist on that adage:  Use false data to create an artificial need, and then fill that need using pork: The man who was within [...]

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Tweet Food prices in America are going up and up.  We’re not starving, thank goodness, but we are seeing more and more of our money go to groceries.  Many see a direct connection with ethanol (i.e., using food to power cars) and rising food prices.  Thus, despite the challenging drought, the administration is pursuing ethanol-based [...]

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Tweet The scientists were wrong, so they blame it on climate change.  Maybe they’re right this time that their wrongness is because of climate change.  Or maybe the scientists simply don’t know as much as they think they do, whether because of poor data, poor predictions, or the fact that Mother Nature always has surprises [...]

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Tweet The news tells me that the US is suffering the biggest drought since 1956.  Does that mean that anthropogenic global warming was as bad in 1956 as it is today?  And if the Dust Bowl drought of the 1920s was even worse (and the news article doesn’t mention it), does that mean AGW was [...]

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Tweet A couple of weeks ago, I asked you all to link to a General Knowledge Quiz that DK publishing hosts.   I disclosed at the time that this was not a purely altruistic act, even though I thought the quizzes were fun and I think the world of DK books.  In exchange for promoting [...]

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Tweet Years ago, the Bookworm Room took a leadership position in challenging man-made global warming dogma and I would comfortably assert that we have been winning the arguments. However, the battle is far from over. Today’s Chicago Tribune posted a column published by two credentialed climate scientists from the U. of Illinois, attributing this winter’s [...]

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Tweet I’ve been skeptical of climate change because (a) I think Al Gore’s an idiot; (b) the climate changers see everything in terms of climate change, which is nonsensical; (c) the Climate Gate emails indicated fraud and information suppression to advance the climate change narrative, suggesting that the actual facts do not advance that narrative; [...]

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Tweet The Science Channel’s Alien Encounters is a two-part pseudo-documentary that interweaves footage of real scientists and novelists talking about possible alien encounters, with faux footage of the world dealing with an actual alien encounter.  Alien Encounters has gotten decent press from the usual suspects. I disagree.  As a science show, it’s not impressive.  The [...]

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Tweet Today at lunch, Don Quixote and I ended up talking about predestination and free will.  Along the way we touched upon whether prayers are necessary (if God is omniscient, doesn’t he already know what we want?) and funerals (definitely for the living, although one doesn’t want to disrespect the dead).  We also talked about [...]

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Tweet There’s nothing like a Progressive who’s not worrying about reelection.  If you thought Barney Frank’s moobs were repellent, wait until you get a look inside Lynn Woolsey’s brain.  The 10-term House Democrat from Marin County is retiring this year, so she finally feels that she can speak freely.  It’s not pretty. For example, we [...]

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Tweet Bummer! It’s two days before Christmas and there will be no white Christmas in Chicagoland, this year and the temperature will be above freezing. There’s not much snow north of here all the way to the Canadian border, either. Global warmening? I called a good friend in Cali’s San Joaquin valley, today: turns out [...]

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Tweet “Facts are stubborn things.”  — John Adams. “Ideologues are even more stubborn than facts.”  — Bookworm A few nights ago, Mr. Bookworm watched the movie Shattered Glass with the children.  It’s a fairly good retelling of the way in which Stephen Glass, a young feature writer at The New Republic, wrote a series of [...]

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Tweet On the heels of Bookworm’s excellent, hard-hitting essay on narcissism comes a nice coda on man-made global warming that is emblematic of Bookworm’s theme. Because of major discoveries involving the interaction of atmospheric aerosols and cosmic radiation, “climate models will have to be revised,” stated a communication from CERN that promises to completely overhaul [...]

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Tweet We have an odd family friend. Fundamentally, she is a nice person and sports a very unconventional view of the world that occasionally emotes great insights into the human condition. She has a major flaw, however, one that she admits as a character flaw: she is an unabashed hater. Despite her husband, kids and [...]

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Tweet I know that we have been round and round on climate issues in our always edifying Bookworm Room discussions, so here is an interesting lecture that I found at our friends at Flopping Aces. The lecturer, Prof. Courtillot, professor of geophysics at the University of Paris, does an excellent job summarizing both historical data [...]

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Tweet Mr. Bookworm, New York Times reader, was telling the children that there was a total catastrophe in Japan, with the Japanese and the world exposed to the possibility of massive radiation poisoning.  I calmed the children’s fears by telling them that the paper could be right, but it could be wrong.  First, newspapers sell [...]

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Tweet Are we entering the next ice age? One of the foundations of scientific inquiry is skepticism. Contrary to what some believe, science is not about consensus but about leaving all doors of inquiry open to all possibilities. It takes only one point of evidence to disprove an entire theory. Progress in science has occurred [...]

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Tweet Unless you’ve been on a camping trip in a remote wilderness for the past few days, you’ve heard about the video that a British climate change advocacy group prepared.  The short video takes you through a variety of settings (classrooms, workplaces, sports fields), in which people are encouraged to diminish their carbon footprint and, [...]

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Tweet I have to say that this video actually made me giggle, because having all of Al Gore’s doom-and-gloom compressed to less than 2 minutes, and then playing Pomp & Circumstance in the background, is more like a cartoon than anything else. Then again I didn’t have to listen to the whole blather, and I [...]

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Tweet I truly intended to fisk algore’s op-ed at the New York Times, in which he explains why global warming is still so important that the world should continue its task of turning him into the first green-based billionaire.  I was foiled, however, by the fact that I couldn’t step giggling as I read his [...]

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Tweet I’ve been reading Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem, by Simon Singh.  Normally, I’d shy away from a book like this — after all, it’s about math! — but it was required reading for my book club, and it’s proven to be delightful.  To the extent there is [...]

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Tweet This is one of Steyn’s best, and that’s saying a lot.  Here are my two favorite parts from his column on Copenhagen: [T]he Prince of Wales is simultaneously heir to the thrones of Britain, Australian, Tuvalu, and a bunch of other countries. His Royal Highness was also in Copenhagen last week, telling delegates that [...]

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