Jeff's Lunchbreak

As has become my tradition to celebrate Christmas on this blog, and as I've said nearly verbatim for a few years now, every year around this time I post Tim Minchin's song, White Wine in the Sun. As described on Minchin's site, "This is a captivating song and a beautiful and intelligent exploration of why Christmas can still be meaningful even without religious beliefs. There's just the right amount of sentiment and some very gentle humour illustrating Tim's feelings about Christmas and the importance of family and home. It is a heart-warming song and may make you a little bright eyed."

Tim Minchin has his own tradition - donating all the proceeds from the sale of the song from around Christmas time to the National Autistic Society, a tradition that he's keeping again this year, including all sales from November through January. So if you don't already own your own copy of the song, go buy it and help support a good cause.

Even though the lyrics are mostly easy enough to understand, here they are if you want to read them: White Wine in the Sun Lyrics.

And now finally, here it is (but don't let the fact that you can listen to it from YouTube stop you from buying your own copy).

Posted by Jeff on A, Dec 19 | Permalink | Comments (42) | TrackBacks (0)

113 years ago today, the Wright brothers became the first humans to truly fulfill the dream of flight. You can read what I wrote about the significance of this from my Wright Brother's Day, 2007 entry. On a related note, you could read my entry, Flying, from a few years ago, where I marvel at just how cool it really is to be able to fly.

(Yes, this entry is recycled. I only have my iPhone today, so I'm not up for typing a long original entry. But I still couldn't let the day go unmentioned.)

Posted by Jeff on A, Dec 17 | Permalink | Comments (41) | TrackBacks (0)

This is my semi-regular feature to post links to articles about Donald Trump along with excerpts from those articles. Trump has the potential to cause so much damage to our country and the world that it's every citizen's responsibility to keep pressure on him and our other elected officials to try to minimize the damage. To be honest, even this is only a sampling of the negative actions Trump has undertaken in the past couple weeks. I fear it's going to be a very bad four years. To read previous entries in this series and other Trump related posts, check out my Trump archives.

Anyway, here are this week's links:

Scientific American blogs - Trump's Presidency Will Be a Disaster for Public Education

"Trump is already showing which direction he's taking the country's public education. If you care about kids being taught science, you'd best gird yourself for a war, because we're going to have to fight to preserve our children's right to a strong STEM education. / To begin with, Trump's Vice President, to whom he plans to delegate most of the actual presidential work, is an evolution-denying Christian extremist who wants creationism taught in public schools. He's also brought all his political power to bear on overturning the will of Indiana voters while he pushes for expansions of school vouchers and charter schools." ... "So Trump went with his second choice: a conservative Christian billionaire who also loves charter schools and vouchers for private (including religious) schools. She pours money and support into anti-evolution Christian schools and organizations like Grove City College and the Willow Creek Association. Betsy DeVos has been a disaster for education in Michigan. Now, she's being given the chance to push that failure of an agenda nationwide."

Scientific American blogs - An Open Letter from Scientists to President-Elect Trump on Climate Change
(I did already post about this.)

"Climate change threatens America's economy, national security, and public health and safety. Some communities are already experiencing its impacts, with low-income and minority groups disproportionately affected. / At this crucial juncture in human history, countries look to the United States to pick up the mantle of leadership: to take steps to strengthen, not weaken, this nation's efforts to tackle this crisis. With the eyes of the world upon us, and amidst uncertainty and concern about how your administration will address this issue, we ask that you begin by taking the following steps upon taking office..."

Washington Post - Trump's unpredictable style unnerves corporate America

" 'When a chief exec is making individual calls to individual companies, he's in some sense acting like a central planner,' Mankiw said. 'We have a lot of history under communism that suggests it doesn't work well in practice, and that's the direction you're heading in as the president starts to weigh in on individual business decisions.' "

Nature - Trump's pick for environment agency chief sued government over climate rules

"President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Oklahoma attorney-general Scott Pruitt to lead the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). / Pruitt, who must be confirmed by the US Senate, is an ardent opponent of federal regulations to curb climate change and has questioned the science underlying global warming. He is one of dozens of state officials who have mounted a legal challenge to President Barack Obama's limits on greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants -- regulations that Trump has promised to repeal."

Quora - Thomas Friedman - Did [his] opinion of President Elect Trump change after meeting him in person?

"what I learned at the meeting was a lot about the people he's surrounded himself with. Because no one thought he was going to win for fifteen months, he could only attract extremists and goofballs. Now that he's won you realize he's been talking to Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and the Mike Flynns of the world. It's the Star Wars bar of extremists and nut cases." ... "I'm encouraging everyone to engage him. You cannot underestimate how much he's been living in a bubble talking to the Rudy Giulianis of the world."

Vox - Trump is trying to use Taiwan as a bargaining chip with China. Bad idea.: China's government won't risk looking like it's giving in to a bully.

" 'That's particularly important to Chinese nationalists, who have great sway over the political dynamics of the country. And that means China is unlikely to back down on Taiwan. "China would be willing to suspend all negotiation rather than let him move the status quo on the issue,' she says. / If that's true, Trump's apparent willingness to roll the dice on abandoning decades of tradition out of a belief that his negotiating skills could give the US a leg up over China could in fact leave Washington with a weaker hand that it had before. Trump may not want to admit it, but the US can't just get it wants simply by pretending the rules of the game don't exist."

Vox - The real reason Trump's denial that Russia hacked Democrats' emails is so worrying

"The bigger picture here is that Trump's actions over the past few days have sent an unmistakably clear signal across the government, and among those who will soon staff it. People who agree with the consensus conclusion of those 17 agencies will likely now feel distinctly unwelcome in the new administration, and fear political pressure to deny evidence and realities that are inconvenient to Trump. That helps ensure that people who have no compunctions about lying to advance Trump's agenda, will fill top posts. And intelligence agencies will feel pressure to cook their findings." "But in another sense, it's extremely troubling. Potential Russian interference in US elections is a very serious matter. And again, the consensus conclusion of 17 intelligence agencies is that the Russian government or entities closely tied to it are behind the hackings. Yet Trump's team is making it loud and clear that their conclusions will not be accepted, because they aren't what the president-elect wants to hear."

Vox - Trump's team is asking for the names of Energy Department employees who worked on climate issues

"What's unusual here, though, is the request for a list of any career agency employees or contractors who even worked on the issue. Indeed, it's unclear why this would even be necessary. 'It reads more like a subpoena than a request for information,' says Michael Halpern, deputy director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concern Scientists. 'I've never seen transition teams asking for list of civil service employees.' "

Bad Astronomy - Trump Advisor Turns the Anti-Science Up to 11

"You might want to read that last sentence again. Yes, Scaramucci said the Earth is only 5,500 years old. / I'm not surprised by this, to be honest. A lot of the people Trump has enveloped himself in are creationists as well as climate change deniers; VP Mike Pence is one, Rick Perry appointed creationists to the Texas State School Board over and again, and Ben Carson said evolution is Satanic and the Big Bang is a fairy tale." ... "Instead, Trump nominates a passel of fossil-fuel driven climate change deniers to his cabinet, including ExxonMobile CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State and former Texas Governor Rick Perry (who has deep ties to the fossil fuel industry) for the Department of Energy. / Actions speak louder than words here."

Posted by Jeff on A, Dec 16 | Permalink | Comments (40) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm not trying to turn this into a quarterly feature, but it seems like I keep forgetting to run one of these top 10 lists at the end of the month and only remember every 3 months or so. Well, it happened again, but I still went through the server logs for the past 3 months to see what pages on this site were the most popular.

Most of the pages that made the list had made it before. However, there were two newcomers. First was Tank Game - QBasic Source Code. I'm happy to see it make the list, but a little surprised. It's a very simple QBasic program I wrote back in high school. I was proud of it when I did it - an attempt at an 'action' game with both people using the same keyboard. But it's not a particularly good program, particularly for people to use as an example. I wrote it before I learned good programming practices, and there are way too many labels and GOTO statements (even 1 GOTO statement is 1 too many). The other newcomer is Birds Are Dinosaurs. It's a few years old, so I'm surprised to see it gain popularity now, but happy to see it doing so.

I have been doing pretty good at my renewed efforts of maintaining my post per week goal. I haven't quite kept up with my goal of updating the Friday Bible Blogging series every week again, but I have been trying. I've made one new post in the series, and I've ready the next 10 chapters of Isaiah. The problem, as I've said several times now, is that I also try to read the footnotes in the New Oxford Annotated Bible before writing the entries, and I usually devote weekend mornings to doing that reading, but I've been busy with projects, trips, and get togethers the past several weeks (including replacing a hot water heater). But I will sincerely try to start updating that series on a weekly basis, again.

Overall traffic was fairly consistent for those three months, reversing a trend I noted several months ago of declining traffic. I read an entry on Daylight Atheism a little while ago that several sites have been seeing decreased traffic due to changes in Facebook's algorithms regarding external links. So, maybe that was part of the problem in addition to me not generating as much new content. Hopefully, traffic will at least hold or even grow now that I'm back to writing regularly again.

Anyway, here're the lists for the past three months.

Top 10 for September 2016

1. Response to Rabbi Steven Pruzansky - Why Romney Didn't Get Enough Votes to Win
2. Origin of Arabic Numerals - Was It Really for Counting Angles?
3. Response to an Editorial by Ken Huber
4. A Skeptical Look at MBT Shoes
5. Autogyro History & Theory
6. Running AutoCAD R14 in XP Pro 64
7. Response to E-mail - 1400 years of In-breeding
8. Tank Game - QBasic Source Code
9. Blog - VW XL1 + E-mail Debunking - China's New "Little Car"
10. Response to Global Warming Denialist E-mail - Volcanoes and Global Cooling

Top 10 for October 2016

1. Origin of Arabic Numerals - Was It Really for Counting Angles?
2. Response to an Editorial by Ken Huber
3. A Skeptical Look at MBT Shoes
4. Autogyro History & Theory
5. Response to Global Warming Denialist E-mail - Volcanoes and Global Cooling
6. Response to E-mail - 1400 years of In-breeding
7. Retroactive Soapbox Entry- Fed Up with U.S. Public, Part II
8. Tank Game - QBasic Source Code
9. A Skeptical Look at Bio-Identical Hormone Replacement Therapy
10. Review of Ray Comfort's New Movie - Evolution vs. God, Part I

Top 10 for November 2016

1. Origin of Arabic Numerals - Was It Really for Counting Angles?
2. A Skeptical Look at MBT Shoes
3. Response to Global Warming Denialist E-mail - Volcanoes and Global Cooling
4. Autogyro History & Theory
5. Tank Game - QBasic Source Code
6. Retroactive Soapbox Entry- Fed Up with U.S. Public, Part II
7. Response to E-mail - 1400 years of In-breeding
8. A Skeptical Look at Bio-Identical Hormone Replacement Therapy
9. Response to E-mail - Are America's Hunters the World's Largest Army?
10. Birds Are Dinosaurs

Posted by Jeff on A, Dec 12 | Permalink | Comments (38) | TrackBacks (0)

Scientific American has just published An Open Letter from Scientists to President-Elect Trump on Climate Change. So far, it's been signed by more than 800 earth scientists and energy experts, all of whom either have or are pursuing PhDs, and all of whom are American or work in the U.S. Along with the letter, there's a public petition that you can go sign:

For reference, here's the opening of the letter.

To President-elect Trump

We, the undersigned, urge you to take immediate and sustained action against human-caused climate change. We write as concerned individuals, united in recognizing that the science is unequivocal and America must respond.

Climate change threatens America's economy, national security, and public health and safety1-4. Some communities are already experiencing its impacts, with low-income and minority groups disproportionately affected.

At this crucial juncture in human history, countries look to the United States to pick up the mantle of leadership: to take steps to strengthen, not weaken, this nation's efforts to tackle this crisis. With the eyes of the world upon us, and amidst uncertainty and concern about how your administration will address this issue, we ask that you begin by taking the following steps upon taking office...

It goes on to list six concrete steps with further explanation than what I'm quoting here:

1. Make America a clean energy leader.
2. Reduce carbon pollution and America's dependence on fossil fuels.
3. Enhance America's climate preparedness and resilience.
4. Publicly acknowledge that climate change is a real, human-caused, and urgent threat.
5. Protect scientific integrity in policymaking.
6. Uphold America's commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement.

If you care about the planet's future and the future for our children, go sign the petition.

Image Source: Scientific American

Posted by Jeff on A, Dec 6 | Permalink | Comments (41) | TrackBacks (0)

Two weeks ago when I wrote my first Friday Trump Roundup, I said I wasn't sure if I was going to make it a regular feature or not. Well, I think I'm going to make it a semi-regular feature - not necessarily every Friday, but at least once a month. I didn't posted anything last Friday because of Thanksgiving, and I'd much rather enjoy my time off with my family than post stuff about Trump on this blog. But I still feel the same way I did when I wrote that entry two weeks ago - I don't want to become obsessed with Trump and spend all my free time writing about him, but he has the potential to cause so much damage to our country and the world that it's every citizen's responsibility to keep pressure on him to try to minimize the damage. So, I'll compromise by posting links and excerpts from stuff other people have written, to help draw attention to Trump's actions. Granted, right now it's still a lot of speculation given that he hasn't been sworn in, yet, but his cabinet picks and other actions since winning the election haven't done much to ease my worries of the damage he could cause. To read previous entries in this series and other Trump related posts, check out my Trump archives.

And, since I anticipate posting quite a bit about Trump in the coming 4 years, I've created a sub-category to Politics, Trump, where you can go to read all my Trump related posts. I've already added everything I've already written about him from before the election to now.

Anyway, on to this week's links:

Nature - Trump's pick for US health secretary has pushed to cut science spending

"He [Tom Price] has taken few public positions on science, but has consistently pushed to cut overall federal spending. Last year, he voted against a bill that would overhaul FDA regulations and provide US$8.75 billion in mandatory funding to the NIH over five years." "Price has also pushed to repeal the Public Health and Prevention Fund (PHPF), a roughly $1 billion to $2 billion fund provided yearly to the CDC to support public-health programmes." "And Price has also consistently opposed embryonic stem cell research, saying in 2009 that Obama's executive order to permit such research would 'force taxpayers to subsidize research that will destroy human embryos'." "He has also supported numerous efforts to defund the reproductive non-profit healthcare group Planned Parenthood..."

Nature - Tracking the Trump transition, agency by agency
"Nature's list of the key issues and appointments facing US government science agencies." A lot of concerns over Trump's potential direction with the NIH, FDA, CDC, EPA, DOE, USGS, NASA, and the NSF.

Bad Astronomy - Trump's Plan to Eliminate NASA Climate Research Is Ill-Informed and Dangerous

"In an interview with the Guardian, Bob Walker, a senior Trump adviser, said that Trump will eliminate NASA's Earth science research. This is the mission directorate of NASA that, among other important issues, studies climate change. / In other words, Trump and his team want to stop NASA from studying climate change."

Bad Astronomy - Follow-Up: More on Trump's Catastrophic Plan to Gut NASA's Earth Science

"We need to arm ourselves against the barrage of weaponized denial we'll be facing for the next four years. Trump himself, and his proxies as well, have no trouble at all just bare-faced lying to the American public. We must stand ready to fight against this. Whether it's the racism, the xenophobia, the misogyny, or the attacks on science, it is no exaggeration to say that our culture, our country, and even our very existence depend on us."

Friendly Atheist - Anti-Vaxxers Are Thrilled to Finally Have an Ally in the White House

"One of the many ways in which President-elect Donald Trump has already shown signs of being a disaster for the science community is how he talks about vaccines. Not only did his foundation once give $10,000 to Jenny McCarthy's anti-vaccination organization, he has consistently perpetuated the lie that vaccines lead to autism, a conspiracy that has never been confirmed with evidence and which has been firmly discredited by experts."

Vox - It turns out we should have taken Trump literally as well as seriously: He's really doing what he said.
"Life is inherently unpredictable. And Trump is more unpredictable than your average politician. But the best information about how he will govern is still the literal text of his formal proposals. It's true that this is a bad way to understand what his supporters like about him, but it's the best way to understand what he will do."

Vox - 11 things we learned from Donald Trump's meeting with the New York Times
"Because Trump can be so inconsistent, of course, it's not a great idea to assume that this -- or anything he told the Times -- is set in stone. But ultimately, the Times meeting was less useful for what Trump thought he was saying than as another display of some of his most deep-seated character traits: a total disinterest in self-reflection, an ideological flexibility that can be indistinguishable from (or a cover for) ignorance, a morality defined by success. Trump's willing to "move on" from some of the things he did to win the election, but those appear to be too deeply ingrained to cast off."

Vox - The Carrier deal shows a big problem with Trump's approach to the presidency
"But a series of Carrier-like deals doesn't add up to a viable economic agenda. For one thing, these deals are way too small. There are 150 million workers in the United States, and the US economy needs to create about 200,000 jobs a month just to keep up with population growth. Trump would have to negotiate dozens of Carrier-sized deals every week to have a serious impact on job growth -- and so far he's announced only two deals in three weeks." "What Trump needs is a policy -- a consistent set of rules for how the government will treat companies employing US workers. Maybe that means manufacturing tax breaks or higher tariffs or interest rate cuts or stronger "buy American" provisions for US procurement. Or maybe none of these are good ideas and Trump should accept that there's no good way to prevent some jobs from going overseas. But only by focusing on an overall strategy, rather than obsessing over the decisions of particular companies, can you make intelligent decisions about an economy as large as the United States."

Politico - WSJ editorial board comes out against Trump's Carrier deal ( I'm only linking to Politico because the actual WSJ editorial is behind a paywall))
"The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, a reliable bastion of free-market conservatism, isn't cheering the Carrier deal that Donald Trump is touting as his first major political victory since becoming president-elect. / In an editorial published Thursday evening, the Journal argued that Trump's method to convince the manufacturer to keep some 1,000 jobs in Indiana instead of moving them to Mexico -- what it described as an "arm-twisting" -- in the long run will lead to a loss of jobs."

Vox - Trump's call to ban flag-burning isn't about patriotism. It's about silencing dissent.
"His statement can easily be interpreted as yet another inflammatory and distracting Trump tweet -- there have been many, after all. But Trump's calls for punishing flag-burners hinges on more substantial themes behind his political rise: an intolerance for dissenting voices and critique, and a willingness to turn a blind eye to certain inalienable rights afforded by the US Constitution."

Washington Post - Trump turning away intelligence briefers since election win
"President-elect Donald Trump has received two classified intelligence briefings since his surprise election victory earlier this month, a frequency that is notably lower -- at least so far -- than that of his predecessors, current and former U.S. officials said." "But others have interpreted Trump's limited engagement with his briefing team as an additional sign of indifference from a president-elect who has no meaningful experience on national security issues and was dismissive of U.S. intelligence agencies' capabilities and findings during the campaign."

Posted by Jeff on A, Dec 2 | Permalink | Comments (42) | TrackBacks (0)