Taking a break from posts dealing with both white and black bigoted idiots… Get ready for the Cryptogram Challenge: Cell Counting! Decipher the hidden message and enter it into the sweepstakes for a chance to win a spectrometer or a cell counter (I need one of both for the home lab I’m building! So if you win, I’ll buy it from you.).

Clue 1: The number of cells in the overall image is unimportant.
We will provide another clue on July 19 if the contest remains unsolved.
Good Luck!

Decipher the hidden message and enter it at http://www.genengnews.com/cellcountingchallenge/TheClues.aspx.

Now the back-story. Since late summer of 2008, I’ve known of a medium-sized garden snake (Thamnophis sirtalis ) to live under the brush and mulch next to my HVAC on the side of my home. This guy has successfully hunted toads, worms, and if lucky a rodent or two around the perimeter of my house for two summers. He hibernated without any problems during three winters and I was always happy to see him emerge in mid-Spring – always longer than he had been the previous autumn. My kids grew to call him by the name, “Steve-o the Snake-o” and we’ve all enjoyed discussions around Steve-o sightings and how he helps our ecosystem.

A couple of weeks ago, my neighbor rang the doorbell and told me in a panic that she’d seen a “gigantic snake” on our shared side yard and could I come “help her”. Walking around the corner of my house I instantly recognized Steve-o out hunting toads and worms. This gave me a rare opportunity to discuss how this snake was an important part of nature and that I’d purposefully protected Steve-o for quite a long time. After a couple minutes of apprehension, I saw that she had carefully considered what I said and now agreed with me (without too much protestation). Steve-o went safely about his business.

Flash-forward to today. I was driving to a lunch meeting and saw one of my neighbors beating something on his front yard with a large piece of lumber. I’d pretty much already figured out what was going on when I stopped the car and got out to see what it was. Yes, Steve-o had been mortally wounded with a smashed skull and eviscerated mid-section. When I walked onto the scene he was still alive and suffering quite badly. With clinched teeth I “educated” this stupid fucking (read: average) human about the necessity of bio-diversity. Given his facial expression and the way he was taking steps backwards, he was puzzled as to the meaning of my polysyllabic diatribe and worried about my potential for aggression. I ended my lecture by restating that this was a non-poisonous snake that had every right to live and that he (my neighbor) needed to finish him off as this snake was suffering. I turned and got back into my car and drove away.

Let us stop and think about how we have come to make assumptions around wildlife. Could society be reinforcing norms that are ill-informed and outdated? Does anyone stop to even casually wonder about the niche a certain creature serves in the greater schema of living things? The only reason this fucker (my neighbor) isn’t crawling around looking for his front teeth or having to speak to the police because I called them on him is because he lives only two doors down and I have to consider the future security of my family.

However, I do plan on mentally and emotionally torturing this gigantic douche bag asshole from here on out.

An ad on that has been showing up on this site…..

How about I help everyone out – EAT LESS or Exercise more!  Our body does not break the rules of physics. 

Energy In = Energy out.  If you don’t decrease the Energy in then, you must increase Energy out or you will not lose weight.

There was a Junior Officer on my last boat that was a perfect example of this.  He would eat whatever he wanted and balloon up to 250lbs.  At 6′4″ he’s allowed to be approximately 217lbs.   So a couple months before the Physical Readiness Test, he would eat a candy bar and a vitamin pill for breakfast/lunch and regular dinner and would lose the weight. Note – he did not exercise more, just ate less.  But it takes effort and dedication to do this – but we are a nation of fat people who are always looking for the easy way.

Also myself as an example…I was constantly hovering up around 210-215 – I’m allowed 211lbs in the Navy.  So I didn’t want to work out more, so I made the difficult decision to switch to…..DIET COLA. Tastes like crap and not as good as the “Real Thing”, but sacrifices had to be made.  Now I hover around 205…no change in anything else.  Still eat the same stuff and didn’t exercise anymore.

I’ve reduced my choices to two.

Any suggestions?

b) The word “they” as a third-person singular gender-free pronoun. Why? No really, why?

c) The emotionally-charged social convention against the word “niggardly”? (it means being stingy about spending). Scenario: Caravaggio was immediately and aggressively reprimanded by his spouse for stating to the Barista that he didn’t want to come off as being “niggardly” but the price of their triple expresso was simply scandalous. Additionally, from the fast-twitch facial expression of the Barista I interpreted that she must have thought I’d just cursed at her. Result: I’ve now learned to eliminate a perfectly acceptable word from my lexicon. We should all weep at the slow death of the Queen’s English.

Over the last two centuries the growth of the population has increased at a fantastic pace. The development and utility of industrial, food, and medical technologies requiring massive energy consumption in support of this growth has continued with unrelenting fervor. Even with experiences such as the “Dust Bowl” in the Midwest, we only thought of the impact as localized without any real consideration in systemic consequences. Just as the Native Americans had no concept for “Sailing Galley” and what this would eventually portend for their civilization when Christopher Columbus came into view of the New World, Modern Folk have no construct for affects caused by the interconnectedness of our Earth System – even as soot and chemical-laden smog rolls across the entire Pacific Ocean from China to the Northwestern US.

As is our inquisitive nature, there are numerous camps of thought within the argument regarding Climate Change. For purposes of fairness, I list these “thought tribes” based on degree of scientific consensus (up to now) – I’ve also detailed categorical cohorts to illustrate the diversity of concepts being argued. It is my (personal) position that this is also why the unfolding theories make for one hell of a confusing situation.

1) Climate Change is happening
a. Climate Change (getting warmer) is happening and is man-made
b. Climate Change (getting warmer) is happening but it is not man-made
c. Climate Change (getting colder) is happening but it is not man-made
d. Climate Change (getting warmer) is happening and it is bad
e. Climate Change (getting warmer) is happening and it is good
f. Climate Change (getting colder) is happening and it is bad

2) Climate Change is not happening
a. Climate Change is not happening

In Part Two of this Post Series, I plan on further defining each of the two primary categories as well as dive into presenting the facts offered by the subset groups. My aim is to provide clarity while painting an unbiased baseline of the Climate Change debate for your consideration.

Excerpt from Scienceblogs.com…
“I wasn’t surprised to learn this, as I had already noticed the omission a couple of months ago, when I updated the slides for my talk on public communication of science– the figure showing survey data in the current talk doesn’t include those questions, while the original version has them in there. I noticed it, and thought it was a little odd, but it had no effect on the point I was making with that slide. In fact, the graph works better, for my purposes, without the evolution question in there.”

Dear reader, I (Car) believe this is indicative of one of the most frustrating problems in public communication of science today. While evolution is undeniably a critical topic in science education, there is a lot more to science than evolution, and this item alone dominates the discussion to a distracting degree. As an example, take the case of two additional true-false questions: “Lasers work by focusing sound waves” and “Electrons are smaller than atoms.” With these questions,the US population surveyed gets those right about half the time — the same as guessing. China and Japan remain in the 30% range. Here is why these two questions are critical in illustrating the problems with science education than questions about evolution: they’re not controversial.

From the original post’s author, “There is no large, well-funded and politically connected organization out there pushing the notion that lasers are based on sound. There is no Church of the Large Lepton telling its members that salvation depends on a bogus model of particle physics. Failure to teach the correct answers to these questions is purely a failure of education, not a political or religious issue. Those questions don’t draw the same amount of attention as the evolution question, though, precisely because they don’t connect to any hot button political issue. They’re not fodder for great fundraising letters or angry blog posts, because there’s no convenient and readily identifiable villain. The educational problem they point to is a systemic problem, something that will require hard work over an extended period of time to fix, and it’s not glamorous or controversial.”

And thusly, this is the HIGH GRAVITATIONAL SMACKDOWN on the state of science education, particularly on the Internet. If someone in Wyoming attempts to take evolution out of textbooks, one can simply mobilize an army of people to denounce them as… a “fruit”. BUT if several generations of kids continually “learn” from horribly bad instruction in the fundamental ideas related to modern chemistry and physics, this crime passes without much notice or excitation. Not knowing math is arguably more harmful in the long-term than not knowing evolution — quoting the blog post: “the current recession is, in many ways, the result of societal innumeracy”. And there’s much more to science than just evolution. YES and NO.

This is where I depart from the author’s premise. By not establishing a basis in understanding the logic standing behind the theory of Evolution, we shoulder the responsibility for not arming young minds with the rudimentary concepts required for critical thinking. This, by its very nature, envelopes the full spectrum of the hard (and soft) sciences. I, for one, believe we allow this horribly myopic topic of Evolution continue to dominate science education. However, let us engage this topic from the argument points being levied from both sides and enable our youth to t-h-i-n-k. The evolution question should serve as a construct for learning how to intelligently depose a theory which is core to becoming a scientist or simply a well-informed citizen living in the modern world.

Let me begin.

Ahem.

People are scared. Intelligent, educated people are truly rattled. Is it becasue the pendulum has swung in the direction of socialism? It can be unsettling (True dat, change = scary). Why this spells complete sudden disaster for the US… I do not know. Just relax. Breathe. Think. Read. Why the paranoia?

1) Global Climate Change – To be brief, how can over two decades of independent work of an army of arborists, climatologists, biologists, oceanographers, astro-biologists, meteorologists, paleontologists and botanists all somehow collude and conspire to arrange false findings proving drastic climate change due to carbon dioxide as a front for killing capitalism? Have any of you dear readers ever been to a symposium? Getting agreement amongst two Scientists in the same field is rare… getting thousands across dozens of disciplines from dozens of different countries to agree and sign a declaration regarding climate change should be considered impossible — but it happened. Put in very blunt terms…. If you don’t think global climate change is real, you are killing your children’s children. You are a selfish, ignorant punk (which I believe makes you a normal human being – congrats!).

2) H1N1 — Beware of the pharmaceutical companies attempting to make everyone a zombie! Seriously? Let us presume these companies are truly in existence to make a profit (do you agree?). Why then in hell would they want to 1) kill off their market or 2) cause reluctance to use their products in the future? Think. Think like a capitalist. You fail if you kill the people you depend on to buy your product. Again, similar to #1 above, if you are a parent of an un-immunized kid that socializes with other kids – you should be charged with neglect. That is not love… that is ignorance (or at the very least an extremely limited understanding of statistics) preventing you from the flu shot.

3) New World Order — When bored I peruse the infamous “Infowars” site. Did you know that the leaders of the NWO will kill off 80% of the world’s population? That is a freaking terrible fact (according to the site). But wait… why didn’t anyone question where the hell the percentage came from? Now shifting gears a bit… let me focus on the “respectable” author (Paul Craig Roberts) who just bowed-out of writing for “Infowars”. In his last post, he wove a sad tale about calls from the Bush Whitehouse being made to his boss so that he was fired for writing “the truth” about the Gulf War. Yes. So? Would it be shocking to know that calls like this are made daily to news organizations around the world? Let us pretend for a moment that Paul knew “the truth” and this “truth” was just as bad as he said it is. Why can’t Conspiracy Theorists bring themselves to theorize the following… If Paul actually “knew the truth” he would be killed. End of scary story. Why just fire him so he could continue to write? Grab him in a parking lot. Throw him in a van. Inject him between the toes with nothing but a large syringe full of air and allow him to stroke-out. Then drop him off on a park bench as if he sat there innocently contemplating life when cruel fate played an unfair hand. Nope. Mr. Roberts will be celebrating Easter with his family on Sunday while continuing to scream the sky is falling. Hint: the reason he was fired repeatedly and found himself with no other outlet than “Infowars” is because he continued to see “ghosts”. Boo!

4) Financial Meltdown – this one makes me angry. No. Just no! It was NOT a conspiracy. If you believe there was some type of concerted, guided effort behind the meltdown means you’ve never experienced institutional trading and have no knowledge of Wall Street – at all. Allow me a metaphorical explanation. You are a professional athlete. Your competition starts to use steroids. Their game improves dramatically. If you don’t beat your competition you will be fired (as a trader you’ve no other marketable skills – this job is it). So you start using steroids. Now the game is faster, riskier, and the score quadruples – everyone is a sports star… until bodies start to disintegrate from overuse. Simply replace steroids with exotic, unregulated trading instruments and…. meltdown.

5) Throwing this one in for good measure. Aliens. Infowars.com even has advertisers who sell Roswell alien pictures, videos, and such. What?!?! Look … why do you think the silver or metallic material was proof of an alien spaceship crash at Roswell? Really quick… you believe it was an alien craft because it was silver. Hollywood has used silver saucer shaped alien craft for decades. Your construct for “spaceship” is shaped through popular culture – which is not proof of aliens. Ever heard of the Drake Equation? Google it. Ever heard of Carl Sagan? Dr. Sagan offered some very salient points on his thoughts on intelligent beings from other worlds. He said that humans would be too stupid to comprehend that they were looking at an alien. Similar to how ants identify gigantic humans walking by — they don’t notice them. The ant has no concept for “human”. If a race of space beings was advanced enough to fly light years across the universe we’d have no concept for them. And why the hell would their craft be metallic or silver? Humans make metallic space rockets. Aliens think that is stupid – theirs are made from H6%4Es2 which is obviously superior (and comes in the color pink).

Again, this post is in direct response to a number of interactions I’ve had with friends and family. The interesting thing is that the people who espouse the topics I’ve discredited (at least tried to) above are very smart, well read people. From a social science perspective, that tells me that we’ve hit an inflection point in our culture when the “smart caste” have started to see boogie men at every street corner. It tells me we are in a very quick phase of change and people are understandably nervous. It is my hope this change is for the betterment of the human race and not the same old destructive stuff.

Peace to you and to yours.

It is at this point on a rainy Saturday morning that I sit pondering the value of beginning a series of posts that will be written to purposefully entice or welcome intellectual, yet highly spirited debate. The posts within Blinkinblogs are vast and reflect a very smart demographic array of authors and commentary participants from a range of backgrounds. Additionally, there exists evidence of retracing as it applies to some very key hot topics. These topics are Global Climate Change, 9/11, H1N1, New World Order, Congress, and an assortment of other items that stand as recurring primary threads that has led to some observed friction and stress (inclusive of yours truly).

The goal here is to educate everyone as to opposing viewpoints in a civilized manner. And by this effort, we can widen the viewership of our beloved weblog. The only ground rules being proposed are 1) become truly involved in the discussion (debate, argument, etc.) while 2) remaining respectful and courteous. Your viewpoint will help broaden the understanding of those who don’t necessarily share your beliefs. It is my aim to learn something from all views shared in Blinkinblogs as I hope it becomes your aim as well.

My planned first post will be focused at outlining the reason for the financial meltdown of 2008. This shall delve into aspects of systemic failure in a deregulated free market system while presenting facts as to why this was caused by collusion – but collusion through ignorance and not a defined conspiracy (as it is being currently depicted by the Tea Party and others).

Oh, would someone kindly suggest a category, title, or name for the thought-tribe who find the title of “Conspiracy Theorists” demeaning (I want to remain respectful here)? Would “Neo-patriots” suffice (I seriously like this one)? Please help me out here?!?.

I hope that Blinkinblog readers will “take me to task” on my offered viewpoints.

Good Lord. I had to re-read this piece several times. Interesting. Shocking. And, OK, somewhat humorous. I agree with the premise here, but where the hell was the mind of the author when he was writing this?

Freud once offered, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”… but I don’t believe this metaphorical adage can be appropriately applied to this particular researcher. However, he probably does require therapy.

Overview:
Increased population makes things worse. There are various ways to influence population growth: tax incentives and government policies. More people mean more congestion and demands upon arable land.

Discussion of energy, solar power, desalinization. Aesthetics and standard of living. Ecology, wilderness. Carrying capacity versus cultural carrying capacity and quality of life tradeoff.

Garrett closes with: “If I’ve upset you… fine!”

[Technorati: HXR5U9GYP3SA]