December 2009 Archives

Self-destruction in the pursuit of some political or religious agenda is nothing new nowadays--so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised if scientists do it

MUCH OF the fallout surrounding Climategate - the controversy over the hacking and revealing of emails from the UK's University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that show how data has been tweaked and concerted efforts made to marginalize, if not silence, those who disagree with CRU's doomsday hypotheses - seems to indicate that now nobody can trust scientists.

And maybe that's what the CRU wanted all along....

Those who are skeptical of climate change and its accompanying apocalyptic scenarios are called "climate skeptics," but what should we call those who believe we are doomed, and that only by wrecking the machinery of industry can we salve, and perhaps save, our souls?
No, no, not that word. This is a respectable blogsite after all. How about "climate changers"?

Yeah, I like that: it also sounds like they want the climate to change.

Which is perhaps why they should be called nihilists as well. They want change - nothing wrong with that - but seemingly at the cost of everything else.

And as such, would they be willing to risk their own credibility if it would wreck the credibility of others, especially those whose work is completely counter to your own? A nihilist might.

Someone with a really bleak world view might expect, even encourage a gang of Russian hackers to crack into CRU's email accounts and dump the load for the world to see: the petty backstabbing, the skewed data and tweaked numbers.

This could be the end for the CRU, but this research group seems to be skating through this with a slap on the wrist: ideologies have trumped everything, and those who want to believe the CRU's point of view still do so, feeling its actions are justified.

So while it is a bummer that they're getting away with it, there is a feeling of schadenfreude that the CRU's voice cannot be listened to the same way ever again.

But then, after this, can any scientist or researcher be trusted without some absurdly transparent process?

It's like they feel guilty about living in an industrialized capitalist society. Am I wrong?

I'll admit that I haven't had entree into this segment of society much - being a journalist for a chemical trade magazine means I'm the enemy, remember?


The end is coming - to a theater near you

Ever since I was a kid in the early-1970s, I've been hearing fear-mongering about climate change or global warming, so my speculations about "what will happen" trend towards scenarios like the disaster movies I grew up with - and the more recent ones like 2009's 2012, where solar flares are actually the culprit for doomsday,
and 2004's The Day After Tomorrow, which was specifically about climate change, although the film follows the hypothesis that the Northern Hemisphere will be plunged into a new ice age rather than a primordial swamp stage.

Fun stuff, if you like the fantasy of seeing expensive CGI used to destroy the world.
But that's Hollywood: fantasy.

Sure, the massive amounts of carbon industrialized-mankind has pumped into the atmosphere will make a change somewhere: I think it is moronic not to think that something will happen.

But since you and I do not live in trillion-year geologic time, we can only speculate about what will happen.

Samurai swords prove the ancients were aware of alchemy and metallurgy, but also process control

SAMURAI SWORDSMEN and their sword-makers were considered the military-industrial complex of their day.
With highly developed metal-making skills dating back to 900AD, by the 1700s, the Japanese were the global champs at creating swords.

Exceptional samurai swords, or katana, can today sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In 2007, NOVA, the weekly science show on the US-educational TV network PBS, broadcast Secrets of the Samurai Sword, a fact-filled documentary following the making of a sword, with a overall historical perspective.
The film is available on DVD, and worth a look.

The steel for the sword is made from iron sand, collected from rivers, and charcoal.

The carbon from the charcoal gives the iron greater strength. Later, carbon concentration is determined by the smith as he pounds the metal, seeing how it bends, then folding the white-hot metal onto itself, and starting again.
The blade is essentially folded onto itself thousands of times, strengthening it that much more.

But the ordeal is not over: one of every three blades is lost in the quenching process.

SHINTO PROCESS CONTROL
At the smelting furnace, where bellows drive the heat up to 2,500º F (1370º C), there is a Shinto shrine devoted to the unnamed diety who protects the furnace and the workmen.

Interviewed in the film, Michael Notis, materials scientist at Lehigh University, says the workers' elaborate prayers go beyond safety, and are also about quality control.

"The ancient Japanese swordsmiths used religious ritual as their process control to make sure that each and every time that they manufactured this same object, it was done exactly the same way," says Notis.
"They didn't have science to do it, they had religious ritual."

"If you think that what you are doing has religious significance, you pay extra attention to it," notes Kenneth Kraft, professor of religion and medieval Japan, also from Lehigh, elsewhere in the documentary.

"They say that the sword is the soul of the samurai.... [and] an object as powerful and as beautifully made and as reverently made as a sword could have some sacredness to it."

It can take 15 people six months to make one sword.

Stephen Turnbull, historian and samurai sword expert from the University of Leeds, was also interviewed for the film:
"The great swordsmiths of Japan were far more than just blacksmiths. They weren't just people who bashed metal into a sword shape, they were more like alchemists.
"They were steeped in the mysterious traditions of the metal: how it was melted, how it was molded, how it was beaten. They may not have understood the chemical composition of it, but from years of practice, years of apprenticeship, and years of tradition, passed on from master to pupil, they were able to transform this mystery into something that was very, very real: the samurai sword."

By the way,
No matter how you slice it, the most important Japanese phrase any gaijin could ever hope to learn is this: "Sumimasen, nihongo wakarimasen:" I'm very sorry, but I do not speak the Japanese language.

A macabre, violent and grisly tale is unfolding in Peru - and vanity and greed may be the ultimate culprits

IT SOUNDS like something out of an old Hammer or American-International Pictures horror movie, but unfortunately it is not.

Misinformed maniacs in Huanuco, Peru, have been allegedly slaughtering innocents to extract their fat -
so that it could be used for cosmetics.

According to UK daily newspaper The Guardian, about four months ago police received a tip about black marketers trading human fat, who "exported the amber liquid to Europe as anti-wrinkle cream."

Journalists were shown two bottles of fat, allegedly worth $60,000 (€40,000)/gallon, as well as "a photograph of a rotting head believed to be of a male victim," reports US paper Los Angeles Times.

According to the UK's BBC, the gang sought out travelers on remote roads and lured them with job offers, before slaying them, and then hanging their bodies over low flames to extract the fat.

Col. Jorge Mejia, chief of Peru's anti-kidnapping police, told US-based Seattle Times that a suspect claims his was not the only gang involved.

Meanwhile, Streetgangs-dot-com, adds:
"Police hope the arrests will help solve the mysterious disappearances of a large number of people, including children, from villages in the central Peruvian provinces of Huanuco and Pasco."

BLOOD SACRIFICES

A rural province located between the jungle and mountains, Huanuco's ties to its ancient past are strong.
Not only is the area dotted with old Inca pyramids, but the alleged ringleader of the killers nicknamed his gang the Pishtacos after the legendary "ruthless assassins of indigenous Quechua legend who ambushed solitary victims and drained their fat as an offering to gods to make the land fertile," says The Guardian.

Famous Peruvian novelist (and unsuccessful 1990 Peruvian presidential candidate) Mario Vargas Llosa writes about the Pishtacos in his 1996 book Death in the Andes.

He describes them as, The Washington Post says, "half-gringo ghouls who are said to live in caves, lurk along the highways, and suck the fat out of anyone foolish enough to travel the Andean roads at night."

Pishtacos, Vargas Llosa writes, "needed human fat to make church bells sing more sweetly and tractors run more smoothly... They not only slit their victims' throats but butchered them like cattle, or sheep, or hogs, and ate them. Bled them drop by drop and got drunk on the blood."

Our savage new times revive the memories of savage old times - and it is all for naught.
While human fat has some cosmetic applications, it is doubtful that a greater international black market exists for it.

According to the BBC: "Medical authorities have expressed skepticism about a black market for human fat, partly because of the wide availability of fat for use in surgical procedures."

In Peru, we are well beyond the realm of using liposuctioned fat for soap (as fantasized in the film Fight Club), or as fuel - like the now-disbarred Beverly Hills doctor who was allegedly using it to fuel his SUV.

And as morally reprehensible as using liposuctioned fat as soap or fuel may be, at least it is not murder.