Understatement (Again)

A front page story on the Sydney Morning Herald's website this morning tells of a 93 year old woman found dead on her couch. Apparently, she'd been dead for months, while others continued to live there.

Police, who had been called to the house by a neighbour to do a welfare check, also found a dead dog in another room.

Dallas police spokeswoman Janice Crowther said months have passed since anyone apparently last saw the elderly woman. Electricity was still on at the home and the lawn and exterior were well-kept, but police described the interior as "messy".

"Messy"? So leaving dead people and animals lying around the house is "messy"?

That's an interesting redefinition, and makes me feel a whole lot better about my study.

Another Nail or Two

I watched a few grinding minutes of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" the other day, not by choice, but because Dr J wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

It didn't surprise me that this film was made by a politician... you know the joke... how do you tell if a politician is lying? His lips are moving. So it was for An Inconvenient Truth. In one staggering scene, Gore stands before a world audience and shows a Powerpoint slide proclaiming that not a single scientist now doubts "humans-did-it" global warming. Seriously? Not one? People, he won a fecken Nobel Prize for this bullshit.

I have said before... beware anyone who uses lies, deception and untruth to try to control your life, and I don't care how worthy the cause. When truth is sacrificed, the end does not justify the means because you just never know which truth is next.

Which leads me to a few more nails in the coffin of this global warming myth...

The first is HERE. It's a story about Sunspots, and how they effect Global Climate. Apparently, according to the story, the more sunspots, the less cloud and rain. And at the moment, there are no sunspots, which explains the really shitty weather we've been having here in Sydney.

Astronaut and geophysicist Phil Chapman was the first Australian to become an astronaut with NASA. His observations show that the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C. This, he says, correlates to a drop in sunspot activity to zero.

According to Chapman, "this is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930."

He goes on to say that "if the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over". He even suggested that if sunspots don't fire up soon, we might be headed for another Ice Age.

And here's more...

I was trawling about the web the other day and came across a paper written in 1999, that looked at rises in sub sea floor temperature off the US coast. The researchers were trying to extrapolate that the increase in temperature deep in the mud of the sea floor was a result of an increase in water temperature at the sea floor, and, like all scientists who care about their research grants these days, they were trying to pin those increases on global warming. What they actually found was an increase in mud temperature of between 6 and 10 degrees over the last 150 years, far beyond anything that could be explained by increases in sea temperature. They also found that the geothermal gradient, which is the increase in temperature as you drill down into the earth, had not changed. (If the temperature increase was coming from the water, the gradient would have decreased.)

Sadly, they didn't reach the conclusion that maybe the Earth might be heating up from the inside, but if they had stopped to think about it for a bit, that makes perfect sense because many geologists believe the molten core of the earth is sustained by a low level nuclear reaction caused by radioactive material under pressure.

Temperatures go up. They go down. Sea levels rise and fall. Ice Ages come and go. It happens. Get over it. Forces way more powerful than mankind are at work here, forces so great it's near impossible for us mere mortals to comprehend.

Sunspots, fluctuations in the brightness of the Sun, and geothermal activity are the core drivers of climate on Earth.

Yet Governments around the world are committed to spending trillions "fighting climate change", as though bureaucrats might be able to regulate the climate to stay the same. Here, we even have a "Climate Change Fund" splashing money around on "measures to protect us from inevitable warming", all overseen by the "Minister for Climate Change".

One day, soon I hope, we'll look back on this arrogant buffonnery for the silliness it is because much as we might like to think otherwise, whatever humans do to our climate is insignificant by comparison to those forces of nature.

An April To Forget

Whew! Can anything else go wrong? I suspect not!

And before I go on, let me include a spoiler right here in case you're unduly concerned for my wellbeing. Everything's fine. Ok? Just fine.

So let me tell you why everything needs to be bloody fine, because this April has been one I'd rather forget.

First, I rolled over on my ankle. Sprained it and got to limp around for a few days eliciting some small degree of sympathy from those who crossed my path. As sprains go, it was pretty bad, but nothing compared to the time I did the same ankle on a cobblestoned street in Istanbul.

The ankle took about four days to shrink to tennis ball size, and as long as I didn't try running or skate boarding, I was fine.

And then, a week later, I rolled on it again. Crack. Down I went, leaving a near perfect face print in the mud. That snapping sound was so loud that a dozen or so people in the dog park came running over, certain I'd broken something. I was sure I'd broken something too, and it took all musterable strength to load Zac back into the car and drive the few blocks to home.

I cried. Really. I know it's not a manly thing to do, but the pain was pretty fierce, though I do suspect the tears were, in part, out of frustration for having done something that stupid again.

Dr J and I talked about rushing off to hospital but with the state of the public health system in Sydney, we decided that sitting in Emergency for 12 to 14 hours just for the privilege of being seen by an overworked, tired first year intern probably wasn't a productive use of time. It's just lucky I had a hidden stash of Panadeine Forte to get me through the night.

The next day, the ankle was grapefruit sized, but I could walk on it so I figured it probably wasn't broken after all. It still warranted a trip to the local GP though and that's where the real problems started.

It had been two years since I'd seen my doctor. She'd actually wondered if I'd perhaps died or moved away. Whatever. All that meant was that while my ankle was rather large and warranted immediate X-Rays, she was more concerned about my off the cuff "short of breath with chest pains" answer to her otherwise innocent "how have you been feeling?" question.

We'll get back to those chest pains later. In the mean time, the X-Rays were fine, but she was concerned I'd snapped a tendon so she ordered an MRI and casually declared that my snow boarding and mountain climbing careers were over. I'm picking up the MRI results on Monday, and I'll let you know. It's probably academic. "If you were an elite athlete, then we might consider surgery. You're not, so we won't." Thanks doc, for reminding me once again of my athletic inadequacy.

As it turned out, the MRI and the appointment with the cardiologist were on the same day. I've been seeing the heart guy for 20+ years to keep an eye on a dicky aortic valve, and the last time I saw him, he basically said "Go away. I don't want to see you for another 5 years." If that hadn't been good news, I suppose I might have taken it a little personally.

That he remembered me was nice, and that he remembered that I was seeing him two years too soon was nice too, I think. He was unamused that my heart appeared to have deteriorated, which didn't make my day. He ordered an echo cardiogram, basically an ultrasound of the heart valve, where the main thing they look for is the speed at which the blood is squirted out of the left ventrical. This, I'm told, is important because in a stunning design flaw, if the blood comes out of the heart too fast, it misses the little inlet arteries that actually take it into the heart muscle, which makes the heart want to beat harder, which means the jet of blood is moving faster, which means even less of it gets into the heart. Eventually, the hearts just throws itself over on its side and says "screw this, I'm outa here", and you die.

Which is not to say I died, or even came close to dying, mainly because the ultrasound showed the jet at about half the speed it would have needed to be for me to be dead (though, come to think of it, if I was dead, then presumeably, there would be no speed at all).

The raw number was 38. Don't worry about what 38 means. Just know that in the last fifteen years, it's deteriorated by just 8. In normal people, it would have deteriorated by about 30 in the same timeframe. Hooyah! Score 1 for Chester.

That didn't deter the cardiologist though. "Chest pains and shortness of breath. Damn. I was sure the valve would explain that... I think we'd better do an angiogram next week."

Oh. Ok then. Next week it is.

So it's Thursday. I'm scheduled for a day in hospital next week with a potentially clapped out heart, and I get a phone call from my bro'.

"Mate, I just got a cryptic call from Dad's travel agent. He's been taken off the cruise ship and rushed to hospital in China with internal bleeding. I don't even know where in China."

There's nothing like a crisis to focus someone with ADD. I guess the imperative speeds up one part of the brain so it matches the speed of the other part, and we ADD people become super efficient. It took ten minutes to track Dad down to a little hospital in Tianjin, and another ten to get enough of the story from his travel insurance company to know that he was being looked after. Unfortunately, dear Mother hadn't signed the release forms before they left, so the good people at the insurance company couldn't actually talk to me about what was wrong with Dad, they could just tell me where he was.

Think it can't get much worse? You're wrong.

On Sunday night, I felt a familiar twinge behind my right ear. I won't go into the graphic details... suffice to say that every six months, I get swelling inside my ear and it's excruciatingly painful. I knew that within 36 hours, I would be in agony, and doped to the gills on the aforementioned Panadeine Forte, unable to sleep and barely able to function at all.

Thirty six hours would make it Tuesday... the very day I'm scheduled for the angiogram.

So there I was, off my face on very nice drugs, and about to have a test that's supposed to tell me how my heart's going, and whether I'm going to need heart surgery. I still can't walk properly, Dad's bleeding to death in a foreign hospital where no-one speaks English, and my ear is agonising. Really agonising. Think of how it would feel to have someone drive a really big flat blade screwdriver into your ear drum and twist. That's not it. It's worse than that.

This was not fun people. I didn't want to tell the family about the angiogram because no-one needed the additional worry, and I was reasonably sure it would be fine. Unfortunately, this meant bro' kept calling to co-ordinate Dad's evacuation from Beijing (he moved to a shiny new hospital there on that same day). Seriously, if I'd been able to take the phone into the operating room, it wouldn't have stopped ringing.

So here's the wash up...

Dad's problem ws a bleeding ulcer... bad, but not nearly as serious as first thought. He and Mum are due home today thanks to the very fine work of his insurance company.

The ankle's only a bit swollen now. I'll pick up the MRI results on Monday, and I suspect there's not much I can do about it other than being more careful. I have cancelled the Extreme Adventure Sports Vacation scheduled for August, and have promised to go somewhere a little quieter.

The ear has a way of fixing itself that I won't describe in case you're eating.

And the heart? Perfect. To use the cardiologist's own words... "surprised as I am to have to say it, especially given your self confessed poor diet of deep fried take-away, and your flagrant disregard of your cholesterol levels, your heart is more like the heart of a 30 year old than a fifty year old."

So that's been my April.

I do suspect things will improve... the sun came out for the first time in 17 days and the superstitious remnant left in my more evolved brain thinks this might be a sign.

Neanderthal Speak

There was a curious piece this week on one of the many on-line news sites I waste time with.

Apparently, according to the story, research anthropologists at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton reconstructed a Neanderthal voice box to find out what they would have sounded like.

Ok. Um. So they got a research grant to listen to Neanderthals. Hmmm.

Here's the really curious bit... apparently, they discovered that the shape of a Neanderthal larynx meant that they would have had trouble with "e"s, so "beat" would have sounded more like "bit".

So... um... they think a Neanderthal sounds a bit like a Kiwi? Yeah. I can see that.
The article also describes Neanderthals as "a dead-end offshoot of the human line". So... um... someone sounding like a New Zealander is a dead end offshoot. Yeah. I can see that too.

Perhaps they could have saved all that research money and just had a holiday in Willingtin.

Freedom Of Thought

There's a new movie opening this week across the USA that stirs up some very important soup.

Ben Stein's "Expelled" is a doco about the politics of science, and the lack of freedom of academic thought. Specifically, Ben's got himself in a lather over the Darwinism v Intelligent Design debate, a real with-us-or-agin-us stoush where "mainstream science" accepts one view as fact and villifies anyone who promotes or even contemplates the other.

If you haven't been following it, Darwinism states that life evolved by trial and error. Who or what we are is the product of a series of accidents, starting from the very moment life appeared on earth. Intelligent Design proponents believe there's a greater hand in there somewhere. They don't dispute evolution per se, they simply say "maybe the evolution is the result of some intervention somewhere".

Intelligent Designists point to the one question Darwinists can't answer, which is "how was life created?"

Now I don't want to get bogged down here in any creationism v evolution debate. Intelligent Designists don't believe the world was created in 6 days, after which God went off for a beer. All they say is "maybe there was a Hand of God in the evolution of life somewhere".

I don't mind that view. I really have no opinion one way or another, and if they're right, they certainly answer a few hitherto unanswerable questions without challenging a core, scientifically provable fact, which is that life has built within it, a magnificent self replicating, self programming structure called DNA with which it can change (or be changed?) to suit whatever is happening to it.

What does concern me is that, once again, one view, in this case Darwinism, is accepted as unimpeachable truth such that anyone holding an opposing or questioning view is labelled a heretic and figutatively burned at the stake. Don't take this the wrong way. Darwin was a brilliant thinker, and he's on my hero list because he observed and spoke out against the mainstream.

However, what the mainstream Darwinists are now doing to their Intelligent Design colleagues would make Darwin spin in his proverbial grave.

There is a saying in science... "first they ridicule you, then they revile you... and then they adopt your ideas as though they are their own."

Science has no room for dogma. Webster defines this as "A doctrinal notion asserted without regard to evidence or truth; an arbitrary dictum". Yet isn't this what we now see in mainstream academia?

Ask yourself... is "Humans-Did-It Climate Change" provable science or politically motivated dogma?

Is "High Cholesterol Is Bad For You" the mantra of a vested interest, or is it also just more dogma?

None of this is new, of course. Medicine use to think washing hands before surgery was quackery. Physicists used to think matter was made up of solid stuff. And Astronomers used to think the Sun revolved around the Earth

I don't care what the issue is. No Thought Police State is acceptable under any circumstance. Scientists must be free to follow the evidence, and not the money, fashion or vested interest.

To watch the trailer, click HERE to go to the Expelled website.

Signture Stuff

Is your signature unique? No... I', not talking about that particular quirk of personality that you've somehow set to define you (mine's cartoon socks... doesn't matter how important the business meeting, just look at my socks).

I'm talking about your actual signature. The one on the back of your credit cards. The one on your loan documents, driver's licence and passport. I'll bet you though it was yours. I'll bet you thought no-one else could have exactly your signature.

My signature's pretty flamboyant. It's got long sweeping strokes, stylised letters and curvy bits that make it look more like a logo than a way to pay for something. It truly is unique... or at least I thought so... until yesterday.

We were at the Sydney Bridal Expo and a customer handed me his credit card. I turned it over and... knock me down with a feather... it was MY signature on the back of his card. Seriously.

I did a real double take. For a second or two, my brain actually tried to remember how I eneded up with my credit card between my fingers. "What slight of hand is this?" I thought.

I looked at the customer and said something like "Mate, you really have to see something". Out came my card and we held the two side by side. The signatures were identical. Different names. Even a different letter starting the first name. But absolutely identical signatures.

Now I'm depressed.