12 Week Weigh-in

Life is full of learning, naps, pack playtime and puppy classes for Sparta.

A Scientific discussion on Climate Change

The bride and I have a new inside joke.  Someone makes an authoritative claim and one whispers the question to the other, "science or not science?" We've both heard too many people try to dress their biases or fears in the authority of science.  It is a bigger problem today than those who project their fears or biases onto the divine. 

We homo sapiens often want to believe we are on the side of settled truth, whether we choose a narrow

reading of revelation or science for our confidence is almost academic, the same psychological compensation against ambiguity is at work.  Both instances claim to know more than the text or the experimentation actually contains.  Both lead to a destructive fundamentalism.

Yet it is possible, if infrequent, to have an adult conversation about what we do and do not yet know about climate change (or theology for that matter).  This podcast is 64 minutes of just that.  Both parties are humble and respectful.  Both parties find themselves embarrassed, at times, by the claims made by members of their own tribe.  Both speak soberly about what does or does not concern them about the problems we face.  I do not think either will change too many minds on the issue.  I do believe both are models on how we should discuss the issue going forward.  Both take seriously my concern, the tyranny of "settled truth."

Sunday Check in

Two walks this last week for a total of twenty miles bringing the birthday to date totals to:

Road                  147
Woods                17
Snowshoe           15
-----------------------
                          179 miles

What the Dog Know

A fun read but the subtitle is more than misleading.  

The book is a memoir of a middle-aged woman and her cadaver dog.  What general information about working dogs that is presented concerns itself with law enforcement and search and rescue work.  Livestock, terriers, whippets, frosts, retrievers, and gun dogs receive little mention and then are only mentioned in passing.

Cat Warren did a wonderful job telling her story in a charming and engaging manner.  It is a shame that her publisher could not be as honest in presentation as she is in her storytelling.  When a publisher does a good job, you forget they stand between you and the author.  Simon & Schuster stepped all over my toes and botched their matchmaker's art.

First Friend

Overheard:

"When the Man walked up he said, 'What is Wild Dog doing here?" And the Woman said, "His name is not wild Dog anymore, but the First Friend, because he will be our friend for always and always and always."

-Rudyard Kipling

There is more than one way

To care for baby chicks.

The bride and I bring very different attitudes to how much time and effort to put into caring for baby chickens.  I have to confess, however, that if you're gonna put forth the effort , this is a pretty damn efficient way to keep them contained.  Old welded wire fence holding up fabric snow fence enclosing heat lamp, chicks, food and water.

Basset Hound Clown Car

I always thought of them as clowns.

12 miles

Twelve miles after the overnight shift.  It seemed like a good idea when I set out.

No Make-up Selfie

My kind of Playground

Kick out the kids; I want to play.




The Atlantic gets it about right.  Confidence is caught not taught.  If you choose to be a nervous wreck, your child is more likely to become one.  If you ask me, it is a bigger detriment to our children than second hand smoke from Dad's unfiltered Camels.

Get your kids outdoors and know when to not pay attention.

Scars are sexy.  Skinned knees heal.  Joy is in the doing it yourself.  Confidence is for a lifetime.

The Overprotected Kid

 A trio of boys tramps along the length of a wooden fence, back and forth, shouting like carnival barkers. “The Land! It opens in half an hour.” Down a path and across a grassy square, 5-year-old Dylan can hear them through the window of his nana’s front room. He tries to figure out what half an hour is and whether he can wait that long. When the heavy gate finally swings open, Dylan, the boys, and about a dozen other children race directly to their favorite spots, although it’s hard to see how they navigate so expertly amid the chaos. “Is this a junkyard?” asks my 5-year-old son, Gideon, who has come with me to visit. “Not exactly,” I tell him, although it’s inspired by one. The Land is a playground that takes up nearly an acre at the far end of a quiet housing development in North Wales. It’s only two years old but has no marks of newness and could just as well have been here for decades. The ground is muddy in spots and, at one end, slopes down steeply to a creek where a big, faded plastic boat that most people would have thrown away is wedged into the bank. The center of the playground is dominated by a high pile of tires that is growing ever smaller as a redheaded girl and her friend roll them down the hill and into the creek. “Why are you rolling tires into the water?” my son asks. “Because we are,” the girl replies. 

Life begins when you can appreciate a walk

Whether it be indoors, outdoors, fast or slow:

Saturated Fat and "Settled Science"

They always claim to be on the side of "settled" truth.

Beware anyone who feels the need, in the name of science, to use shame in an attempt to shut down those who disagree.  As more and more studies call into question the link, thirty years after it was considered settled science, between saturated fat and heart disease, what other bits of received scientific wisdom might be up for question.

Of course I am alluding to the catastrophic warmists who fill the void left vacant by the death of that old time Puritan fundamentalism.  They, like Jonathon Edwards, believe that humanity hangs like a spider suspended by a thread in the hand of an angry god.  Once upon a time you might be sentenced to wear a scarlet letter or drowned as a witch for disrespecting the received wisdom of God's prophet.  Today too many direct questions and you are labeled a "denier."

This is not to say that eating bacon double cheese burgers everyday is good for your health or that burning dinosaur bones is without ecological consequence.  It only goes to demonstrate that complex systems, like the human body and global climate, are truly complex and attempts to simplify them lead to false conclusions.

It also demonstrates that those advocates who are the most strident, the most ready to overstate their case, should not be trusted with the power to govern our lives, or even to set the terms of public debate.  It matters little if the fundamentalism they espouse is Calvinist, Nurtitionist, Warmist; or any other human ideological classification, it all comes from the same place in the human heart.  Where there is the absence of humility there lies the seed that we must be dictated to, for our own good of course.

Culture, Policy, and Events

Unpersuadable

The two things I find most distasteful in a human being are actually closely related: self-righteousness and hypocrisy. Consequently, whatever the subject of debate is, I find plenty to be uneasy about. Conviction can be a beautiful thing, so long as it does not serve as an excuse to treated one's fellow homo sapiens as so many polluted lepers.

Will Storr investigates the tension between conviction and critical thinking farther than I ever will in his new book The Unpersuadables and runs into the problem that he A) knows he must be wrong about something but B) believes his opinions are right about everything. My answer would be humility, or, at least, the discipline of being polite to everyone. There is a detailed review over at Salon.com.

Such rumination undermines Storr’s faith in his convictions, rooted as they once were in the rather quaint confidence that human beings make up their minds rationally. Instead, exploring recent developments in neuroscience, he learns that we believe first — engaging mental models formed early in life and rarely amenable to change — and come up with the reasons for it afterward. By the now-familiar process of confirmation bias, we ignore what doesn’t support our most favored notions, and shine a brilliant spotlight on the ones that do. Our minds operate unconsciously to a flabbergasting degree, while our consciousness is forced to tag along after, cooking up convincing rationales. “We do not get to choose our most passionately held views, as if we are selecting melons in a supermarket,” is Storr’s provocative conclusion.

The Abusive Self-Appointed Nannies

Among my uncritically held beliefs is that when your absence of humility blinds people, you should be held accountable. Not with jail time, public flogging or judicial maiming but public outing and shaming; and those who have faith-based opposition, including illegal activity, has slowed the development of Golden Rice should be ashamed.

By 2002, Golden Rice was technically ready to go. Animal testing had found no health risks. Syngenta, which had figured out how to insert the Vitamin A-producing gene from carrots into rice, had handed all financial interests over to a non-profit organization, so there would be no resistance to the life-saving technology from GMO opponents who resist genetic modification because big biotech companies profit from it. Except for the regulatory approval process, Golden Rice was ready to start saving millions of lives and preventing tens of millions of cases of blindness in people around the world who suffer from Vitamin A deficiency.
It’s still not in use anywhere, however, because of the opposition to GM technology. Now two agricultural economists, one from the Technical University of Munich, the other from the University of California, Berkeley, have quantified the price of that opposition, in human health, and the numbers are truly frightening.

Everything has Trade-Offs

From War is Boring:

In 1969, the Soviet navy shocked the U.S. and NATO militaries with a new and incredibly capable submarine—one that could swim faster and dive deeper than anything else under the sea.But the seven high-tech-class submarines—able to reach 45 knots and 2,400 feet—were actually inferior where it really mattered. Their speed and depth-resistance came at the cost of noisy internal machinery that made them easy to detect … and destroy.

Libya Continues to Fall Apart

And we continue to try to manage it without risking anything to resolve it.

American Navy Seals have seized a North Korea-flagged tanker which had been loaded with crude oil at a rebel-held port in eastern Libya, the Pentagon said on Monday.

The operation to take control of the Morning Glory came a week after Libya failed to prevent the tanker from leaving the rebel-controlled eastern port of Es Sider loaded with an estimated $20m cargo, in a crisis that has brought the country to the brink of civil war.

"The Morning Glory is carrying a cargo of oil owned by the Libyan government's National Oil Company," said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. "The ship and its cargo were illicitly obtained from the Libyan port of Es Sider."

There were no casualties in the operation, which took place in international waters off the coast of Cyprus. The operation to take control of the Morning Glory came a week after Libya failed to prevent the tanker from leaving the rebel-controlled eastern port of Es Sider loaded with an estimated $20m cargo, in a crisis that has brought the country to the brink of civil war.

Live better and live longer: correlation or causation?

Why should I care? Enjoy more muscle in the everyday and enjoy more everydays before that day when you do not.

New UCLA research suggests that the more muscle mass older Americans have, the less likely they are to die prematurely. The findings add to the growing evidence that overall body composition — and not the widely used body mass index, or BMI — is a better predictor of all-cause mortality.
The study, published in the American Journal of Medicine, is the culmination of previous UCLA research led by Dr. Preethi Srikanthan, an assistant clinical professor in the endocrinology division at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, that found that building muscle mass is important in decreasing metabolic risk.

"As there is no gold-standard measure of body composition, several studies have addressed this question using different measurement techniques and have obtained different results," Srikanthan said. "So many studies on the mortality impact of obesity focus on BMI. Our study indicates that clinicians need to be focusing on ways to improve body composition, rather than on BMI alone, when counseling older adults on preventative health behaviors."

Sunday Check In

It has been 113 days since my 40th birthday and the day that I began to make my occasional walks into a purposeful endeavor.  The totals for my fortieth year are:

Road            127
Woods           17
Snowshoe      15
-------------------
Total            159

We've had a bit of a warm up so the roads are clear of ice but the snow remains too deep to head out into the woods without snowshoes.  To be honest, I am ready to be done with those military surplus snowshoes for the year.  Consequently, I pounded out a few miles on the road, including our single longest walk to date: 13 miles.  Saw some turkeys, stag deer whose shed antlers I hope to find in two weeks when, hopefully, snow melt will reveal them, and neighbors.  I also figured out how to make it so I could see the screen on my new cell phone when outdoors.

The changing temperature and desire for a little bit of gear on my walk had me trying out a fanny pack I had planned to use only on walks in the woods.  If you wear a large enough shirt, no one can see that you are wearing it.

Love this part

Today's homeschool lesson:

Geography, demographics, and recent developments of the Ukraine crisis and open question time.

O: Dad, what is same sex marriage?

A: Dad, what is the tea party?