| Author | Message | ||
     Aesquire |
I had to search the site to find that article. For those too lazy to look it up, there may be serious health problems and a rise in birth defects in a valley in Hawaii where they spray tons of poison on corn to test if the poison will kill it. Lots of poison. Poison banned in the U.S. for use on food, because, well, it's poison. ( don't worry, the corn is all exported, according to the article ) Makes sense to me. Probably true. | ||
| Aesquire |
by the way..... the title of that article is deliberately misleading. I suspect this "paper" has a long history of misleading headlines, looking at the titles of search results for "gmo". It seems that that paper has a pretty biased editorial policy, at least in the "science" they claim to report.... Still, I am certainly willing to believe that living next to an experimental plot heavily doused with chemicals, far in excess of any actual farm, may be hazardous. I am of the opinion that people who lived next to badly run chemical plants may have issues too. ( based on the former largest company in the area and the mess they left behind ) Note that not a darn thing in the article shows that gmo crops have a darn thing to do with the local problems. But the Headline does. ( No one local eats the gmo corn, so it cannot be a cause.... but liars lie in many ways. ) Thank you Tod, for both that article and the implicit, but possibly unintended, warning that "The Guardian" may not be a good source for any news. | ||
| Sifo |
I have to agree with Aesquire as to the headlines The Guardian has on GMO foods. Very one sided. Their search engine sucks too. I don't have much time to search it out, so I guess I won't be reading it without a useful link. I have been to Hawaii enough times to forget how many times I've been there. There's only two states that I've spent more time in. Let me provide some observations. First, I've never seen a corn field in Hawaii. At best they are rare. Also water wells are rare. They simply don't work there. Many communities are pretty much dependent on valley streams for water. If they are testing poisons on crops in a valley where people have to drink the runoff that has never even percolated through the soil, yes, you may likely see problems. This isn't a normal situation for most of our farmland however. Most communities in HI are also along the coastline, so would almost certainly be downstream of agriculture. Apply that information any way that it fit with the story that isn't linked to. | ||
| Aesquire |
I'm going to blame The Guardian for the link not working. ( fair or not ) I'll try. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/23/haw aii-birth-defects-pesticides-gmo I have no idea if foods bred today are healthy or not. We've been modifying our food crops and critters since LONG before we knew what DNA was, much less how to fiddle with it. Is it possible that the natural pesticides that some crops produce are bad for us? Or that the GMO crops that are given the genes to produce them in a plant that previously did not, may be producing a slightly more dangerous chemical than the original? BTFOM. just because it's a "cause" doesn't mean it's bogus. There are a lot of nut ball conspiracy theories and eco nut causes that have zero relationship with reality. OTOH There are real ecological problems we have to use our technology to clean up and avoid. Even the extreme eco-freak groups, the ones that want very few ( them, of course, the elite ) humans on the planet, and it's return to Nature's Way, have some good points. ( Being a Tom Clancy Villain isn't one of them ) There are a LOT of people on the planet, most of them live in low technology conditions, and having them progress in historical lockstep with our technological advancement, is a disaster, potentially. We need to figure out a way to jump the rest of the planet into a cleaner high technology economy ( which we are still working towards ) without them making the messes we have. ( by WE I mean Humans, to date ) Look at China. I keep hearing "a coal power plant a week" on the radio, and used to joke "If you believe in Global Warming you can't let 3 billion Chinese drive suv's." That's really a metaphor for the whole "be the same as Europe in power consumption and resource depletion." ( much less US! ) On the Gripping Hand. You have to figure out which crisis mongering has real basis, and which is bogus for power & wealth. | ||
| Sifo |
Aesquire, thanks for the link. Works fine. I've got to say that the article was very unfocused. To the point of being confusing at times. It seems to be more of a hit piece on big corporations. What a piece about birth defects, supposedly from GMO crops gets into tax subsidies, I haven't got a clue. Both the reporter and the editor need a lesson in focusing on the story at hand. Perhaps big corp. bashing was the story at hand though. It does sound like the GMO crops in question are not even being sold in any real quantities. The don't really make any link between GMOs and the birth defects at all. The statement about Hawaii having the best water quality available is pretty much BS. I've spent enough time on Maui to know that some areas have real water issues. It's very local, with many people using private cistern systems. Those range from excellent to very questionable. Many areas have small dams on streams that are often less than ideal. Especially if you are down hill from agriculture, but even the wild bores create a real problem for water quality. The pesticide issue in that one town sounds like a problem. But later in the article, they talked about the problem being spread over multiple islands. I'm not sure what to think. Trade winds blow from the NE about 9 moths of the year though and they did say that the town was on the SW side of the island. That appears to put the town just down wind of where the 17X normal pesticide usage goes on. Is that 17X 3 seasons, or just a simple 17X? I found that confusing. It seems to have little to do with typical farming in the corn belt. They claim large corn crops on Maui. I've spent close to 2 years of my life on that island and have never seen corn. I haven't been there for about 11 years though. It's possible this is a new thing. I've been all over that island though. Corn just isn't something that the locals eat a lot of. SPAM OTOH... | ||
| Sifo |
It was also noteworthy that 40% of our corn goes to producing ethanol. That's 40% of our corn that we don't even have to produce. Burning food for fuel is the height of insanity. 36% is going to cattle feed. I would bet that the bulk of what is produced in HI goes to cattle feed. If they are even allowed to use experimental GMO corn for that. Tod, what was the point of posting that article anyway? Did you read it? What did you take away from it? | ||
| Aesquire |
Quite a few places are growing Corn where they didn't before. It's the current cash crop, instead of cotton. ( not edible crops that make good money ) I agree with the insanity. I was all for using ethanol to stretch and even replace the oil based gasoline, but it was sold as turning garbage into booze, and inedible crops that could be grown on otherwise unproductive land. ( don't recall now what miracle weed that was, since no one talks about it any more ) The corn being grown for fuel in the U.S. isn't sweet corn ( the kind we eat on the cob etc. ) it's dent corn ( made into corn meal for tortillas, corn chips, and used to make plastic & fructose ) aka yellow corn or field corn. It has displaced a LOT of food crops. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maize#United_States_ usage_breakdown http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/04/20/ its-final-corn-ethanol-is-of-no-use/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_ethanol#Economi c_impact_of_corn_ethanol The use of ethanol for fuel has had a damaging impact on food markets, especially in poorer countries. In the United States, ethanol is mostly made from yellow corn, and as the market boomed for alternative fuel, yellow corn went up in price. Many farmers saw the potential to make more money, and switched from white corn to yellow corn. White corn is the main ingredient of tortillas in Mexico, and as the supply dropped, the price doubled, making the base of most Mexican foods unaffordable. The number given by the wiki for how much fuel you get from how much you use to make it is 1.3. That number may be .9 or lower in the real world, meaning it takes more energy to produce the alcohol than you get out. Honestly, even the best studies admit the number is inside the error bars. They just don't know. It's certainly not a major success, and the side effects include starvation, revolution, and terrorism. See also "the arab spring" ( revolution, genocide, and terrorism ) and mass illegal immigration from/through Mexico, all driven by higher food prices driven by food to fuel programs. | ||
| 86129squids |
Bicycles. We have a government that was built on them, doing calculations with the abacus, and the populations riding them, with all the efficiencies of such travel, through Mao's revolution and the one child society, which failed... wanting more. And their "stock market" just took a dump on the Earth. Oh F***CKIING S%HiiiT. I respect the Chinese people, but... $hit blowing up, hopefully, will remain a metaphor, despite their warehouses... (Please pardon, it's been a long day, looking after me, my own, my love, my dogs, and my stuff.) Dang. "Efficiencies. They're not just apartments anymore." Maybe I should trademark that...  Growing old and happy is gonna be sketchy, but still my last goal. (Message edited by 86129squids on August 25, 2015) | ||
| Hootowl |
"don't recall now what miracle weed that was, since no one talks about it any more" Switchgrass | ||
| Hootowl |
Corn to fuel is another environmentalist created catastrophe. Unintentional, of course. Maybe. (Wouldn't it be great to get rid of a bunch of those future carbon polluters? Starvation worked for Mao, and Stalin, after all.) In similar news, the two million or so tires the environmentalists dumped into the ocean around Florida, ostensibly to create artificial reefs, are now being brought back up, at considerable expense to the tax payer. Seems coral won't grow on them. Or under them, as storms blow them up onto existing reefs. Perhaps they should just leave the rest of us alone and go back to their communes. | ||
| Sifo |
I've had some pretty good discussions with a scientist who is working in the ethanol business. His take was that, while it was within the error bars for a break even, it looked likely that it was a net loss. Even as a break even, you are simply spinning your wheels, spending money. Insanity. Then add in the impact on food production. Double not good plus insanity! I've been running my chain saws hours per day for about a week now. My brother has been getting 100% gas at a station up here for his small engines. After finishing my E10 gas, is switched over to the 100% gas. They start better and maintain idle better on the 100% gas. I've got a saw that I left at home simply because the fuel line fell apart inside the fuel tank. I really wish they would give up this ethanol BS! The one plus to ethanol that I've learned about is what can be done with E85. I was reading on a Miata board about someone who has converted his Miata to run on E85 and getting noticeably better performance from it. It was an expensive conversion though, replacing many components in the fuel system, including the injectors to provide more fuel. You also need to add a sensor to the fuel system that will sense the actual ratio of ethanol to gas, and provide the proper fuel mapping to make it all happen. It seems to me that there are easier ways to make power. | ||
| Sifo |
BTW, I do remember that when I was last on Maui Dole was looking at moving pineapple production to Mexico. It's very possible that corn is being grown in some of those fields now, but Dole isn't one of the chemical companies that the article was complaining about.  | ||
| Strokizator |
It doesn't make much sense to grow pineapples on land that's worth $50/sq.ft. "Growing" timeshares is more profitable. Here's hoping they decide to plant coffee trees instead. | ||
| Aesquire |
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/the-scien ce-is-settled/ Worth a critical read. | ||
| Aesquire |
http://spectator.org/articles/40194/real-way-save- planet I got a "D" in Psych 102 because I called Freud a "coke head with mommy issues", and the teacher was a hard core Freudian. About that time I decided shrinks were all crazy. I have mellowed in that belief since. Talking your problems out with someone trained to ask leading questions can be quite helpful. I do note that NO ONE who ever took Freud style Therapy ever got "cured". I consider that a clear sign of a scam. YMMV. | ||
| Aesquire |
http://accordingtohoyt.com/2015/05/30/solar-space- and-terrestrial-weather-some-reflections-by-stepha nie-osborn/ | ||
| Reepicheep |
That's a good article! | ||
| Aesquire |
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/settled-s cience-and-the-munchhausen-trilemma/ Thank you. It's an interesting time in Science. On on hand, you have pretty intense politicalization of Science, with AGW at the front. But there are other fields where there are dogmas and political/emotional reaction way out of proportion to the cause. Cold Fusion, for example. There may or may not be something there in the non-existent field of low temperature Fusion, but the politics is such that you will probably lose any credibility if you even say you want to investigate it.... have your reputation crushed, lose any grants of scholarships, etc. I have no opinion on if Pons and Fleischmann were on to something. There seemed to be an art to making the electrodes, and some labs reported nothing, and others said something..... and so it lays. Keep in mind the Wiki article is biased. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion Not to be confused with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusio n which is a whole different thing. I've even heard of a guy getting kicked out of school for publishing a study of how radioactive coal clinker piles can be, in a state University in a Coal State. ( the Senator was not pleased, the story goes ) On the Other Hand, we have some possible fundamental advances in astrophysics and other fields. M-theory and Quantum Chromodynamics seems to be able to cover a lot of string theory gaps, and, of course, the EM drive, even if it does not work, is pointing a finger at the nature of the structure of the Universe, and some older observations are getting a new look. Plus medicine is getting close to a couple of major breakthroughs as we see genetics plays a major role in cancer and the effectiveness of drugs. Interesting time to be alive. We are also getting close to genetic engineering hitting the "script-kiddie" stage that computer viruses are at now. ( where bored teens can download a virus, mess with it, and turn it lose on the internet... Imagine that with the Flu. ) | ||
| Aesquire |
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/feb/07/sci enctific-research-peer-review-reproducing-data http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0828/An-emer ging-challenge-to-science-s-credibility I admit to some bias in my attitudes towards the "social sciences". Most, IMHO, are just this side of voodoo in their actual "science". Grand ideas, core philosophies, and targeted interpretation make for lots and lots of papers of observations with tenuous connection to reality. Often these studies have political implications, or political purposes, and thus are disconnected from reality because otherwise you just don't get paid. Kings have often wanted to hear only what they want to hear. ( they usually have major disasters happen to them after they adopt this wishful thinking ) Some "social sciences", I will say are working hard to be accurate predictors of human behavior, and are being used in the Stock Market, Advertising, and marketing departments worldwide, but we are nowhere near an all understanding "psycho-history" science of human prediction. ( see "Foundation Trilogy" by Asimov. ) Even physics, which you would think is rock solid science, either something does x or y, has a problem in that it can take large efforts to get subtle data. When the next advance in science will take more power than the planet produced a few years ago, ( or more than it will a decade hence ) to run a particle accelerator, and astronomical observations depend on light that does not penetrate our atmosphere, so your telescope must be in orbit.... or beyond Neptune, make it quite expensive to explore some fields more. Try explaining to a Congressional Committee that you want to launch a dozen high powered lasers and huge mirror arrays into solar orbit ( meaning Big, expensive, rockets ) to test a theory on Dark Matter drift, and admit it most probably won't produce a better bomb, or phone, in the near future but might make a big difference in some future technology that doesn't have a name yet. Good luck. | ||
| Aesquire |
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-c hange/climate-change-2015-will-be-the-hottest-year -on-record-by-a-mile-experts-say-10477138.html | ||
| Aesquire |
They're late. I predicted this last year. But just for the record. They WILL declare 2016 the hottest year on record. Bet you a dollar. Btw. Did anyone else think this was, in actual fact, a fairly hot summer? Locally, it's been pretty steady heat since the start of July, and not much transition, which, locally, means weeks of rain and cool before summer kicks in. Of course, we had 5 hours above freezing the entire month of February. Total, not in a row. Only one day it was 24 below F did I have trouble starting the TDI, and generally had no issues with snow. I mean it snowed, I had the driveway plowed twice, and got stuck twice, ( but rocked it out, gently on the trans and hard on the gas.... ) in the driveway... but that's a really low snow year here. It's really tough to guess the overall temperature of the planet. It's hard to measure the temperature of your living room to less than One full degree F. So when they told me 2014 was the hottest year on record... ( we need a Word for that. HYOR? ) by .0012345 degrees F. ( more or less ) I figure it's bogus. That's TWO orders of magnitude more accurate than the thermometer reading accuracy. But .10 degrees is within an order of magnitude, and sure sounds possible. If They hadn't been lying every year since 1998 and formally adopted AGW as a religion, I'd buy it this year.... | ||
| Aesquire |
That disbelief is one of my Major problems with Climate Cultists. The Boy who cried Wolf. On the one hand, If James Hansen ( former NASA Administrator ) told me a planet killer comet was coming, I'd not believe him until I checked with Sky Watch. Or a foreign observatory. He's used up all his chances to impress me with candor. Same with Al Gore, and most all politicians in general. How many times does someone have to lie to you before you just assume he's lying? OTOH they actually tried and imprisoned some scientists in Italy that failed to warn of an earthquake. Worst lawyer on the planet? Or Sign of The End Times? | ||
| Sifo |
So I got an opportunity to talk to someone about the agriculture business that I wasn't sure I would ever get to talk to again. Thanks to the Mayo Clinic, it looks like I will get many more years of talking to this wealth of knowledge. His name is Chuck, and he is the Facility Manager at Michigan Agricultural Commodities and a member of the Midwest Shippers Association. He also runs his own family farm that has been going for generations now. He knows a couple of things about agriculture. He works with all sorts of farmers, including organic farmers. He has no ax to grind and is very open with his knowledge. He also happens to be my brother's brother-in-law. Also a great guy that will go way out of his way to help you out. So I asked him about commercial farming practices vs. organic practices. One of the first things he launched into was how the organic industry doesn't want the public to know what organic farming really means. He zeroed right in on what I had asked Tod, about pest mitigation. You may remember Tod didn't want to give an answer when I asked, and when pressed made it sound incredibly complex with the available options depending on the pest involved. Well according to Chuck, one of the go to pesticides used by organic farmers is arsenic. It's organic, so it's safe and healthy for you, right? Still feel good about organics? He also got into some other issues like mechanical weeding. He used the example of sugar beats. Organic farming methods will plant with one pass of the equipment. Then there will be a number of more passes with the equipment during the growing season to mechanically strip out the weeds. Conventional farming methods would be to plant and spread an herbicide to control weeds, all in one pass with the equipment. This means that the conventional farmer uses far less diesel fuel than the organic farmer, as well as producing far less CO2 as a result. Well after about 20 minutes of him going on about the pros and cons of both methods, as well as how it's viewed in various countries around the world I had to stop him and ask a specific question. I told him of this discussion and that Tod had made the claim that organic practices can get yields that equal the yields of conventional farming. He rocked back on the seat of the quad he was sitting on and gave a good belly laugh. In short - not in your dreams. He did discuss GMOs quite a bit also. I didn't know that we currently don't produce GMO wheat. They are currently waiting for approval for GMO wheat. It turns out that over the thousands of years of selective breeding of wheat, there just wasn't that much to be gained with GMO versions, so it hasn't been a high priority. He did offer his personal opinion on GMOs, that while he has no problem with consuming them at all, he would recommend that you might make an effort to avoid them with infants less than 6 months old. Sorry, I didn't ask why. I should have. Overall a great discussion with Chuck on this that lasted the better part of an hour. He loves passing on knowledge. This was all at his families annual pig roast. One of his kids provided the guest of honor who's name was "Ham Bone". Ham Bone was delicious! | ||
| Hootowl |
Pretty sure there's only like 5 GMO crops in the US. | ||
| Hootowl |
6. I didn't know about papayas. There are a few others, but they're not for human consumption. | ||
| Sifo |
I think my story needs some pictures too. Here's the scene of the pig roast, our little lake.  Here's a small plot of sugar beats that my brother put in this year. Organic of course! The deer like organic veggies. Deer are organic too!  And finally, one of the larger trees that blew down on the trail down to our lake. The tree that I have cut up is about a 15 inch trunk. The one that is still across the trail is pretty massive. We have a number of them about this size that blew down. I still counted 11 trees on this trail that we never got cleaned up while I was there. Glad it's not the only trail to get us to the pig roast!  Had a discussion with a forester about the forest situation. Hoping to recover some value from the blow downs, but maple prices are low at the moment. We'll have to see where we are at after he does a full inventory. | ||
| Aesquire |
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/415263/heres- one-way-reach-scientific-consensus-david-french | ||
| Aesquire |
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-tim othy-hunt-witch-hunt/ This perhaps belongs in a people are freaking crazy thread. It's funny. I'm a Libber. Women should, IM not so HO have the same rights as men, get paid the same for doing the same work ( which they DO NOT in the Obama White House and as Hillary Minions ) and I even support women in the military, ( I'd better, or all my Lady Veteran friends would kick my butt in the List... not that they don't do that anyway, some of them ) and figure if you are a "non-combatant" truck driver in Afghanistan and they shoot at you you should get combat pay... and maybe be allowed to shoot back. ( yes, I have more than one friend that happened to ) Yet I don't bow to the concept that I should not be Male, because the radical femlibs want a "genderless world" at the same time they insist you should be able to chose your gender, and make others respect your choice. Somehow this gets some of them in a tizzy ( male and female, physically, only they know what they do behind closed doors, I sure don't care ) especially when I hold the door for a Lady, only to find out she is offended by my stereotypically heteronormative actions. I've evolved a "what-ever" attitude about such things, and that seems to infuriate them more. Too freaking bad. Btw, I think "Professor Heteronormative" would be an Awesome name for the villain in a Steampunk Novel. | ||
| Aesquire |
http://www.wired.com/2015/08/dark-matter-may-compl ex-physicists-thought/ From Jerry Pournelle And the maps are still maps; of the territory we infer much, but we observe little, and what we observe we strain to make fit our maps; to the extent we now with a straight face say that 80% of the universe cannot be observed, but our maps are good. Note that when asked about the data, we are told about the high level abstraction maps; a very common confusion. The data say no such thing: indeed, there is no data about dark matter. It is all an abstraction derived from an abstraction, which is true of much scientific theory; but his answer is not about the data. He said nothing about the data. It's weird. 80 percent of the Universe is something we have zero, zip, no experience with. No samples, no tests, I can't sell you any, you can't give me a jar full. But it makes the math come out right, sorta, ok, better, if we have invisible stuff that weighs a lot, everywhere, but more some places than others..... Of course if we called them angels instead of WIMPS someone might accuse us of trying to count the WIMPS dancing on the head of a pin and assume we are seminarians arguing about religion.... Either we have invisible stuff, and most of the universe is made out of it, or we have a problem with our theories about gravity. Occom's Razor would cut that a bit different than Establishment science does, but it's not an infallible tool. | ||
| Aesquire |
http://thesmartset.com/lets-abolish-social-science / Not sure I agree, but interesting. How about efficient solar power? A ways off from commercial use, but I do like the fact that hardware actually works. ( selling it is another matter. Ask the folk working at Solyndra. If you can find any. ) http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/08/the-solar-s unflower-harnessing-the-power-of-5000-suns/ Just because I thought it was nifty. http://arstechnica.com/cars/2015/08/flir-shows-us- a-hot-new-infrared-look-for-formula-1/ |
