The Earth and Our Atmosphere

I started some hand-written notes back in January to understand and explain, in simple terms, how very thin our atmosphere is. During my recent flight from London to Chicago, I noticed that highest that the plane got was 40,000 feet, and the outside temperature at that altitude hovered around negative 50 degrees on either scale. If we were not in a sealed tube, we wouldn't be able to really breathe, and we'd freeze to death. At one point, during the flight, while standing near the lavatories, with my blanket around my shoulders, I chatted with a couple of people waiting with me, and when they remarked on how cold the plane was, I told them that with the temperature outside being so low, I was surprised that they could keep us as warm as it was.

My notes included measurements of the earth's radius from a few sources, and identified things like the radius to sea level at the poles vs the equator, and found a rough average of about 3,900 miles. I had written that this translated to about 20,900,000 feet, but I rounded it down to 20 million, so I could do the math by hand more easily. 40 thousand over 20 million is 1/500.

So, in the spirit of the accurate depictions of how far our planet is from the sun, and from other planets, I want to give you the same kind of visual for our atmosphere, in relation to the size of our planet. 'A' below represents the air between my plane (which includes all of the clouds and weather), and 'G' represents the same amount of ground below sea level until the center of the earth - not even the other side of the planet. You should also note that I rounded the radius of the earth down to get my numbers, so a more accurate depiction would include more 'G's.

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And thank you for scrolling through all of that. I left some of the number markers in there to help you, in case you wanted to count. I hope that you can get the point, because I'm not going to say anything more about it, just that I'm not $#%@ing kidding, not about this.

Cause for Concern

Irene grew to a size of the Southeastern United States. An official at the Department of Atmospheric Research at Colorado State University described, "If you were to just put it on a map of the United States, it could go from South Florida to Pennsylvania, and from North Carolina to eastern Oklahoma." (Mitch Weiss and Samantha Gross, "Huge storm churns up East Coast", Associated Press via San Francisco Chronicle, August 28, 2011)

This is a big storm, and it is dumping inches of rain on the east coast. Oddly enough, the ground there cannot handle the 5 or 6 inches of rain because it is saturated. As it happens, there has been unusually high rainfall this year.

The National Hurricane Center at NOAA is putting our tax dollars to good use by monitoring these storms so we can prepare. We will need that this year as there is another named storm right on Irene's heels. The yellow spot is an area of atmospheric activity that has below a 30% chance of becoming a hurricane (actual, 10%). The orange spot has a 30-50% chance (actual, 40%).

I don't want to forget about the scientific method in all this, which helped us examine the skys appropriately both directly and indirectly by helping to create the ability to even get images of our planet like this. Remember to thank science that the death toll is in the single and double digits, instead of quadruple and quintuple. Of course, one could argue that science caused all of this in the first place, but at least we can use it to protect ourselves too.

Consistency

One of the member's of SANE has amateur expertise regarding the medical sciences due to his having spent roughly half his life (IIRC) in hospitals and researching this stuff. He's only 20. He said that his identification with atheism comes more out of his focus on dismantling bogus medical practices. So yes, he does not "believe in god", but that seems to be a by-product of this skepticism.

My identification is similarly different from the common definition of atheism. Unlike this member, my identification involves the myth of the afterlife, which is another vestige of religion. But that is the subject for a longer post.

PZ Meyers, who spoke at UC Berkeley on Friday, posted a poll on a homeopathy site and the Pharyngulites swarmed it. Those that posted the poll and were even in it reacted just like the other poll that was Pharyngulated earlier this week.

E-mail written by [Bananaman]

Dictated to E*** Z****

I got this feelin' - R** C****** is near. Yes, November 19, 2009, on college campuses near you, the R** C****** Posse of Idiots will come knocking to tell you how great God is, how baaaad Hitler is, and how somehow, he was Darwins' gay lover? I read some of the piece - well, I skimmed part of it when we looked at at SANE - I would read it, but I've already had one brain injury, and they say that the next one will be worse.

Alternet had a post about R**'s celebrities, Kirk Cameron and Ben Stein, passing out this 50 page fairy-tale piece. I didn't read the article, but I saw some comments, including this one.

The real story here is the big cash behind making stuff up. We live in a world where all the scientists believe in man-made climate change but half the population doesn't. In general, if the science doesn't suit a big company we get a science-washing campaign. This goes back to the 1920s when doctors endorsed cigarettes to make women slim. Then Exxon/Mobil bought a climate change campaign, the nuclear industry bought a radiation is good for you campaign, coal became clean coal (use it like soap!). This evolution serves Jesus deal is just one more schtick.

50,000 copies, for free, and lots of money put into the product. Of course the public will buy it!

-Source

I find the highest moral offense of Martin Luther to be valuing faith over works, but how else to sell a lie?

We Do Not Exist Just to Breed

Something is said to be alive if it is an item that grows on its own and creates identical items that grow on their own. So it happens that the life patterns of humans would include a period of growth, then procreation. A major difference between humans and other species of life is that we don't just stop at making copies of ourselves. We create and build, we discover and invent, we fix and improve, sometimes never stopping to have more than one or two children.

But many people have it in their heads that our purpose is to breed, they may be forbidden by others from preventing pregnancy, and many are unable to resist sexual contact. In the past, the human population stayed stable because we were unable to keep a large segment of babies from dying shortly after birth. The population was further held down due to disease, war, and in Europe, witch burnings killed a significant portion of the young adult population. These days, science gives us the technology to limit the number of people we create and to take good care of the ones that we do create.

But now and then, the past comes back to haunt us. Will we make the right assessment of the problem and fix it? Will we discourage religious dogma and encourage contraception? I hope we do.

Never Studied

A friend on Facebook posted a cool photo of a storm in Iowa. The people that saw the clouds in this storm think that there should be a new cloud classification based on these clouds. But not everyone agrees and the article mentioned that meteorologists would classify these clouds as an existing type of cumulous clouds. It sounded like an interesting debate until I got here:

But Pretor-Pinney, who never studied meteorology, believes the clouds merit their own cumulus sub-classification.

This person is not an amateur meteorologist, one who might have read a bunch of books but never got a formal degree, no, Pretor-Pinney "never studied meteorology".

Miracle, by Anatole France

A few pages of text, pages 175-181, to disprove any mythology.

What is the definition of a miracle ^ We are
told : a breach of the laws of nature. But we do
not know the laws of nature ; how, then, are we to
know whether a particular fact is a breach of these
laws or no ?

So Glad This Exists

I can't claim to understand this very well, but it is hilarious.

Lincoln vs. Darwin?!?!

At the gym, there are a lot of old magazines, including an old Newsweek. I've seen this a lot, and every time I see it, I ponder the ridiculousness of the question. I've never read the article and I don't really care to*. Maybe it has a critique on how they both helped and hindered racism in America, or maybe it is more mass-media tripe.

Obviously, there is no reason to pit historical figures against one another in a "battle" for relevance or influence. They're dead. Furthermore, to even compare a man that discovered the process of evolution to a politician is evidence how devalued the theory of evolution is in society. Even as evolution allows advances in the fields of medicine and agriculture, saving the lives of many and improving the lives of everyone, we argue that a lawyer that found himself President at pinnacle moment in our nation's history can hold a candle to it's discoverer.

This is not to say that Lincoln was not influential or important in our history. No, it is only to say that evolution is a powerful and so far, correct set of ideas that lay the foundation of many of the things we take for granted in the modern world. Darwin first published those ideas and, for that, will always be more relevant.

*OK, whatever, they have the same birthday, blah blah blah

Once Again, Nothing New

Oops!

Well, I'm getting more visitors, it seems, and hopefully more than just my parents. But to keep everyone coming back, and maybe, someday *gasp* leaving a comment, I must post. Post. Post. Post.

I have tons of drafts saved up, some that will never be public, some about race, some about TV, at least one very important MST3k post, one about life in California, and a few other random things. I wrote one after my trip to SFMOMA. I'd love to publish it, but its kind of crappy. It is supposed to be about how I have an eye for beauty, and then how being surrounded by beauty reminded me of someone I find rather special. I came up with what seemed like great lines, encompassing one of my newer theories. This theory is actually inspired by a line in an Ani DeFranco song about how men are like delicate flowers. A couple of readers should recognize that one.

I guess its more like a hypothesis? I am becoming cognizant about how I misuse the word theory. I want to help retain its scientific importance. The atheists sent out the peanut butter and bananas creationist videos the other day. My brain cells are hurting so much, even from about 20 seconds of the peanut butter one. Peanut butter jars can not create life from non-life, but some scientists in not America are on the verge of creating life from non-life. Science has some very good approximations about how life was created on earth and are testing them on a daily basis. Assuming some entity did it inhibits creativity, intelligence, and yes, an improved standard of living. Just because a creationist doesn't understand science doesn't mean that no one else can either.

Hmm, I promised not to make this blog bitchy, does this count?

A Basic Science Primer

As an educated person, I should know all of the scientific data presented in this series of videos. The only critique is that we might not be using the best tone when we explain this stuff. I do not know what kind of tone we need to use, but we should be experimenting with different tones and strategies.

Why do people laugh at creationists?

The only people so stupid as to not understand the answer are the creationists themselves.

Their claims are just plain stupid. They wouldn't be able to make these claims if they knew anything about science or the scientific facts. Scientific speech is not the same as free speech.