Year: 2016

Harvard researchers discover that Obamacare isn’t working

9:50 am

Finding out what’s in it: A Harvard research study has found that the program in Obamacare designed to improve hospital care has had no effect, and essentially is not working.

Or, to put it another way, in exchange for increasing regulations and cost, we have gotten nothing in return.

Gee, I seem to remember a lot of unwashed, uneducated rubes from the backwaters of flyover country saying loudly that these programs in Obamacare would not work, back in 2010. Too bad these brilliant Harvard experts considered themselves too smart to pay any attention.

6 comments

Computer simulation models Sun’s magnetic field during grand minimum

9:11 am

The uncertainty of science: A computer simulation, run for six months on a supercomputer, suggests that during grand minimums in the Sun’s solar cycle, when there are no sunspots for decades, its magnetic field remains strong but descends into the star’s interior.

I think this statement by the leader of the science team is most informative:

‘The Sun as such is impossible to replicate on present-day computers – or those of the near future – due to its strong turbulence. And indeed we are not claiming that this modelling would really be the Sun. Instead, it is a 3D construction of various solar phenomena by means of which the star that runs our space climate can be better understood,’ Käpylä explains.

6 comments

More problems at Khrunichev

9:00 am

Construction of the second Angara rocket, built by the Russian organization Khrunichev, is behind schedule by at least three months.

[T]he reason for the lag is the delay with the supply of components, as well as the production setup in Omsk, the long period of checks and the lack of certain equipment for testing. In Moscow, the units will pass additional testing and the carrier rocket will be assembled, after which the launch vehicle will be transported to the Plesetsk cosmodrome (Arkhangelsk region) for the pre-launch preparation.

It is interesting to note the circuitous route the rocket’s parts must travel before launch. Kind of reminds me of the way Congress distributed SLS, and how ESA distributed Ariane 5, in order to spread the wealth and put pork in as many places as possible, regardless of how it increased production cost.

Meanwhile, the delay suggests again that Khrunichev’s quality control problems, seen repeatedly with launch failures of its Proton rocket, have not been solved with the new Angara rocket.

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Iran completes another ballistic missile test

3:45 pm

Does this make you feel safer? Iran has successfully completed another ballistic missile test with a rocket capable of reaching Israel and most of the Middle East.

And does the Obama administration response below ease your mind?

The rogue nation conducted the test in defiance of a United Nations resolution that calls on Iran to cease work on its ballistic missile program. “Iran has to abide by U.N. resolutions with regard to ballistic missiles tests, and if they have violated or not been consistent with those resolutions, that clearly would be a concern for us,” Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said.

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New analysis says it ain’t aliens at strange star

2:17 pm

The uncertainty of science: A new analysis of old star data has concluded that KIC 8462852, also known Tabby’s Star and subject to random fluctuations that no scientist can explain, has not dimmed by 20% in the past century.

This reduces the chances that the fluctuations are caused by the slow accumulating construction of a Dyson sphere by an alien civilization, as some have proposed, but it still does nothing to explain the star’s random changes in brightness.

6 comments

Judge rules White House showed “bad faith” in global-warming case

12:51 pm

A federal court has ruled that the Obama White House was stonewalling in its refusal to turn over global warming documents requested under the Freedom of Information law

In this most recent case, the Competitive Enterprise Institute was trying to force the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to release documents backing up Director John C. Holdren’s finding that global warming was making winters colder — a claim disputed by climate scientists. Mr. Holdren’s staffers first claimed they couldn’t find many documents, then tried to hide their release, saying they were all internal or were similar to what was already public.

But each of those claims turned out not to be true. “At some point, the government’s inconsistent representations about the scope and completeness of its searches must give way to the truth-seeking function of the adversarial process, including the tools available through discovery. This case has crossed that threshold,” the judge wrote.

The judge also ruled that they will now proceed with “discovery”, in which the courts will force the administration to release documents, under penalty of contempt.

The article also notes that this is the third time the courts have been forced to go this route with the Obama administration. For some reason, they seem to be stonewalling a lot of Freedom of Information requests. And that doesn’t even include the stonewalling the IRS did in the Lois Lerner IRS scandal.

8 comments

Facebook routinely suppressed conservative news

11:19 am

Even as Facebook claimed that its trending website, listing the stories that are supposedly the most popular, curators of that website have now admitted that they routinely suppressed conservative stories, just because they were conservative.

Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.

Facebook can do what it wants, but it is important to note the dishonesty here. They claimed their trending site objectively listed stories according to their popularity on Facebook, but when conservative news became popular, Facebook managers then stepped in make sure no one knew that. In other words, the organization lied to its members.

Note also that this is only further evidence that the last thing anyone should do is rely on one source for their information. Get it from multiple sources, with multiple perspectives, so that you increase the chances that you will get it all.

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Sunspot activity crashes

10:19 am

The monthly NOAA update of the solar cycle was released yesterday, showing the Sun’s sunspot activity in April. It is annotated and posted below.

April 2016 Solar Cycle graph

The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The red curve is their revised May 2009 prediction.

After four months of steady decline matched exactly with the low prediction from 2007 (the lower green line curve), in April sunspot activity plummeted to the lowest level seen since January 2011.

This decline shouldn’t surprise anyone. The now ending solar maximum has been the weakest in a century and, as noted here, it is now more than a year since the last X-class solar flare, the most powerful kind, with this solar maximum seeing only 45 X-class events, compared to 126 during the previous solar maximum.

As I have noted repeatedly, the big question now is what will happen during the next solar cycle. Will we get another weak solar cycle or will the sun’s sunspot activity recover? Or will sunspots vanish and will the sun enter a grand minimum, with no sunspots for decades? At the moment no one knows, though some solar scientists favor the latter.

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Saturn’s moon Epimetheus

9:14 am

Epimetheus

Cool image time! The picture on the right was taken by Cassini on December 6, 2015, and shows the asteroid-like misshapen moon, too small (only 70 miles across) for gravity to force it into a sphere. Behind it, filling the frame, is gigantic Saturn.

If you look close, you can see one crater that appears elongated, as if the impact was only a glancing blow.

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