Friday, July 23, 2010
We expect to find macabre relics of saints in centuries-old cathedrals, but
some of Galileo's parts, chopped off his remains a century after his death,
now reside in a new Galileo Museum in Florence. The relics will no doubt
draw an audience that would not normally be interested in Galileo's sort of
truth. The Galileo Museum made the front page of the New York Times this
morning in an article by Rachel Donadio. Galileo was devout, but in the
16th century, who was not? In his early years Galileo's family had its own
pew in the cathedral in Pisa. To occupy his mind on Sunday mornings, young
Galileo timed the slow swings of the bronze chandelier that hung from the
cathedral Dome, set in motion by the movement of air. Using his pulse as a
clock, he found the period to be almost independent of the amplitude.
Countless students have since been called on to explain his observation in
their first physics exam. Galileo's observations would someday shake the
foundations off the Church
A huge antenna complex, 25 miles north of Rome, is operated by Vatican
Radio. The residents of nearby Cesano have claimed for years that
radiation from the antennas increases the number of leukemia and lymphoma
cases in children. The Vatican denies it. Science is on the side of the
Vatican this time. According to a story in IEEE Spectrum the first
epidemiological study of the Vatican radio waves by the local health
authority in Rome found eight cases instead of the expected 3.7. Ken
Foster at the University of Pennsylvania, who has been studying the effects
of EMF for decades, describes epidemiology in a small area dealing with a
rare disease as "mission impossible." Moreover, he points out that this
tiny study was only done for the purpose of litigation. The advocates pick
and choose the data to get any result they want.
It's not like harvesting corn once a year; algae gives you a new crop every
day. The first step is to find the ideal oil-producing strain. Natural
selection doesn't have much to do with making oil, so a lot of work is
going into genetic modification. This is not a hard sell in the US, where
genetically modified corn has been used for 15 years, and almost all
tomatoes are GM. In Europe. however, where a 2001 directive gave EU-wide
approval for farmers to cultivate GM crops deemed safe, but frequent claims
of new evidence of danger has prevented a single GM food crop from being
approved. For algae grown in open ponds, it would be impossible to prevent
GM strains from escaping.
Global warming, vanishing fisheries, vast ocean garbage patches, peak oil,
perpetual warfare, all tell us the same thing. There are just too many of
us. Cap-and-trade is not going to solve our problem.
|
