There is a hierarchy of models in the sense they offer insight into the thing modeled. The order of importance is: causal, deterministic, probabilistic, statistical. Most models use mixtures of these elements. 

All models have this form: a set of premises, which include any number of facts, truths, supposeds, data, and such forth, and a proposition of interest, which is the thing being modeled conditional on those premises.

A classic—or perhaps better, as you’ll agree, classical—causal model “Socrates is mortal” given “All men are mortal and Socrates is a man.” The model predicts Socrates will die because of the nature of all men. It is man’s nature to die, and Socrates (and you, dear reader) are among the race of men. We knowall men are mortal from the necessarily limited sample of observations of past men, and from the induction of these dead men to the entire race.

A potential lifesaver lies unrecognized in the human body: Scientists at the University of Tübingen and the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) have discovered that Staphylococcus lugdunensis which colonizes in the human nose produces a previously unknown antibiotic.  As tests on mice have shown, the substance which has been named Lugdunin is able to combat multiresistant pathogens, where many classic antibiotics have become ineffective. The research results will be published on 27 July in the scientific journal Nature.

This article is part of an occasional series exploring the possibility (or rather the necessity) of a sociological analysis of climate catastrophism. Others can be found at

https://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/category/sociology-of-climate-change/

It argues 1) that the key criterion for identifying the social class which has propelled climate catastrophism to centre stage (the green blob; the chattering classes, Guardianistas, the “right on” generation – define them how you will) is university education and 2) an explanation is required of how such a weak (woolly, vague, unconvincing) idea as environmentalism (“we live on a fragile planet”; “we need to recycle/conserve/cycle to work to prevent the sixth great extinction” etc.) has conquered the world. Both ideas I have lifted from the work of Emmanuel Todd, a French historian and demographer I have often referred to in different posts. I’ve added an appendix describing Todd’s work, which is of great interest outside the narrow bounds of an analysis of climate catastrophism.

Einstein is attributed to have stated:  “Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized.”  I often quote Feynman [pictured] because I consider him to be a giant of physics on whose shoulders I can stand to see further.  And it seems that a reader might consider that I idolize him.  So this article is to begin to correct such a consideration, if it exists. 

Feynman began The Feynman Lectures On Physics with an Introduction 1-1.  But the actual lecture on physics began “1-2 Matter is made of atoms.”  And I have often quoted the paragraph which followed.  Now, I quote it again plus the next four paragraphs.

“If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?  I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.  In that one sentence, you will see, is enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.

America, Japan and China are racing to be the first nation to make nuclearenergy completely renewable. The hurdle is making it economic to extract uranium from seawater, because the amount of uranium in seawater is truly inexhaustible.

And it seems America is in the lead. New technological breakthroughs fromDOE’s Pacific Northwest (PNNL) and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national laboratorieshave made removing uranium from seawater within economic reach and the only question is – when will the source of uranium for our nuclear power plantschange from mined ore to seawater extraction?

Nuclear fuel made with uranium extracted from seawater makes nuclear power completely renewable. It’s not just that the 4 billion tons of uranium in seawater now would fuel a thousand 1,000-MW nuclear power plants for a 100,000 years. It’s that uranium extracted from seawater is replenished continuously, so nuclear becomes as endless as solar, hydro and wind.

I’ll repeat with what I concluded in Part 1, but more succinctly: for an authoritative storyteller to mesmerize an audience, the story must never contain an element where the audience blurts out, “wait a minute, what you just said can’t be right,” otherwise whatever point there was to the story disappears at the exact same moment when the storyteller’s credibility implodes.  Now, see how Harvard History of Science professor Naomi Oreskes’ inadvertently elicits that exact response from her audience, via her tale of the events which led her to explore the notion that skeptic climate scientists operate in a manner parallel to what ‘expert shills’ did for the tobacco industry.

In this extract from his new book When Google Met Wikileaks, WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange describes the special relationship between Google, Hillary Clinton and the State Department — and what that means for the future of the internet: 

New Nasa study of the Antarctic from space has thrown the case for climate change into disarray after finding that more NEW new ice has formed at the Antarctic than has been lost to its thinning glaciers.

Researchers from Boston University’s (BU) Center for Space Physics report today in Nature that Jupiter’s Great Red Spot may provide the mysterious source of energy required to heat the planet’s upper atmosphere to the unusually high values observed. 

In previous postings, we investigated the likelihood of a serious climate-related concern expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that CO₂-induced global warming will lead to a future increase in the number of heat related deaths worldwide (see, for example, On The Bright Side: Declining Deaths Due to Hot and Cold Temperatures in Hong Kong and Response to Heat Stress in the United States: Are More Dying or Are More Adapting?).  In short, we found there is an absence of empirical data to support the IPCC’s claim.

The latest study to investigate this topic comes from Arbuthnott et al. (2016), who introduce their work by noting that “interest in understanding temperature related health effects is growing.” And as their contribution to the subject, they set out to examine “variations in temperature related mortality risks over the 20th and 21st centuries [in order to] determine whether population adaptation to heat and/or cold has occurred.”

The journal Science had an interesting take on a recent statement by the American Statistical Association (ASA):Imagine the American Physical Society convening a panel of experts to issue a missive to the scientific community on the difference between weight and mass. And imagine that the impetus for such a message was a recognition that engineers and builders had been confusing these concepts for decades, making bridges, buildings, and other components of our physical infrastructure much weaker than previously suspected.

Science is referring to the “ASA statement on statistical significance and p-values.” The ASA claims misunderstandings about the meaning of the P value undermine the credibility of many scientific claims. It further implies that these misunderstandings could explain why so many scientific findings described in journals can’t be replicated by other researchers.

Respected American professor of Statistics publishes important new book which calls for a complete and fundamental change in the philosophy and practice of probability and statistics.  Author, Willam M Briggs is Adjunct Professor of Statistics at Cornell with MS in Atmospheric Physics, and Bachelors in Meteorology. In this easy-to-read volume Briggs unmasks the over-certainty that pervades so much government and corporate science.

NASA’s just released data shows that Earth is cooling the fastest it has since at least 1880. Over the past four months, global temperatures have dropped more than half a degree C. The second fastest drop occurred 100 years ago in 1916.

Solar wind forms the energy source for aurora explosions. How does the Earth’s magnetosphere take in the energy of the solar wind? An international team led by Hiroshi Hasegawa and Naritoshi Kitamura (ISAS/JAXA) analyzed data taken by the US-Japan collaborative mission GEOTAIL and NASA’s MMS satellites and revealed that the interaction between the magnetic fields of Earth and the Sun, or more precisely the phenomenon known as magnetic reconnection, can feed the aurora explosions. 

The region of outer space near Earth, also called geospace, is not a peaceful region. For example, solar wind, a fast flow of charged particles driven by the Sun’s magnetic field that blows against the Earth, is harmful for lives on the Earth. Fortunately, our planet has a shield. The Earth’s magnetosphere provides an invisible protection from the solar wind.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is trying to use the prestigious National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to cover-up the agency’s illegal science experiments on humans. 

Four years ago I broke the story in this paper that the EPA was conducting illegal toxicity experiments on human beings. In short, the EPA intentionally exposed hundreds of humans in a gas chamber to exceedingly high levels of air pollutants like diesel exhaust, soot and smog in hopes of causing serious health effects that the agency could point to as justification for its costly and stringent outdoor air quality standards. Study subjects included the elderly (up to age 80), asthmatics, diabetics and people with heart disease — the very people EPA claims are most susceptible to air pollution. EPA failed to tell these study subjects it believed the experiments could cause death.

Soviet-born scientist, Nikolai Shkolnik, has invented the world’s most powerful and efficient combustion engine, and patented it in the US.

In 1975 Russian physicist Nikolai Shkolnik left the Soviet Union for the U.S. after graduating from the Kiev Polytechnic Institute. For 10 years he worked as a consultant for struggling innovation companies. Throughout these years, he was constantly preoccupied with one question – why are modern car engines so inefficient?

Shkolnik developed his own high-efficiency hybrid cycle (HEHC) engine, which became a key step towards his dream. He was helped by his son Alexander, who eventually graduated from MIT and had become an expert in system optimization.

Nikolai Shkolnik is convinced that, among other things, the education he received in the USSR helped his ambition to create a revolutionary engine.

“There are big differences between American engineers and those trained in Russia,” said Shkolnik. “American engineers are incredibly effective in what they do, and it usually takes two or three Russian engineers to replace one American. However, Russians have a broader view of things, which has to do with their education; at least in my time it did. They are capable of achieving goals with a minimum of resources.”

Blast from the past

The father and son inventors were inspired by the idea of a rotary engine, whose principles were first proposed in the mid-20th century by German inventor, Felix Wankel.

Ordinary piston engines have many rotating and moving parts, which reduces their efficiency. The Wankel engine, however, has an oblong chamber with a triangular rotor inside it, whose movements create different sections in the chamber where fuel is injected, compressed, burnt and released.

Despite their higher efficiency, rotary engines failed to win wide recognition because they were not very reliable and not environmentally-friendly.

Rotary engines reincarnated

The Shkolniks founded the LiquidPiston company and created their own version of a rotary engine where the rotor has the shape of a nut that revolves in a triangular chamber, thus resolving the shortcomings of the Wankel engine. In addition, the Shkolniks’ engine creates a so-called isochoric combustion that is fuel burning with the volume remaining constant, thus improving efficiency.

The inventors created five models of an absolutely new engine, one after another, the latest of which was first tested in June when it was installed on a sports cart. The tests lived up to all expectations.

Compact and powerful

The Shkolniks’ miniature engine weighs under two kilos, has a capacity of just three horsepower, and has an efficiency factor of 20 percent. By way comparison, a typical piston engine of the same displacement of 23 cubic centimeters has an efficiency factor of just 12 percent, while a piston engine of the same weight would generate just one horsepower.

Source: Press photo

The efficiency factor of such engines improves dramatically with the increase in their volume. For example, the Shkolniks’ next engine will be a 40-horsepower diesel motor. Its efficiency will be 45 percent, which is higher than the best diesel engines in modern trucks. At the same time, it will weigh just 13 kg, while equivalent piston engines currently weigh about 200 kg.

In the future, the Shkolniks’ compact and powerful engines are planned to be used in light drones, hand power saws and electric generators.

DARPA money

To date, the Shkolniks’ startup has received $18 million in venture investment, including $1 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

U.S. aviation mostly uses JP-8 fuel, and the military wants all military hardware to run on it, which incidentally, can be used by diesel engines. These engines, however, are rather bulky, which is why DARPA is taking a close look at the Shkolniks’ designs.

Read more at russia-insider.com