Is Velikovsky Still Dead ?

WUWT censor and occasional Person of Interest to the Norfolk Constabulary Tallbloke seems anxious to upstage Jim Hansen on the bleeding edge of bad planetary analogy.

Why settle for an alien atmosphere, cosmic rays, or an Iron Sun when you can re-arrange the solar system to suit your taste --

 Was the planet Mercury once a moon of Venus?

Posted: April 4, 2013 by tallbloke in Astronomy, Astrophysics, Geomagnetism, Gravity,methodology, Photography, Solar physics, solar system dynamics, Tides
Tags: mercury, moon formation, solar system, Tom Van Flandern, venus

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"This is an essay written some years ago by the late Tom Van Flandern  which was included in his book ‘Dark Matter, Missing Planets & New Comets’. Tom, who worked for many years at the U.S. Naval Observatory, was an out of the box thinker who covered a wide range of astronomical topics, many of them well outside the mainstream. His methodology was a bit similar to my old dad’s approach to cryptic crosswords. “The clue doesn’t give you the answer, but it helps confirm you got the right answer once you’ve got it”. Leif Svalgaard says he was a crank, which in my view means he’s well worth a read. I think this article, tied in with his other solar system formation concepts, deserves to be republished for the assessment and re-appraisal of the talkshop cogniscenti ..."

                                                                         [emphasis added]

THE SPECTATOR CLIMATE SPECTATOR

MEANWHILE, BACK AT UKIP HQ:

THE JEWEL OF DENIAL

During a study of the hydrology of the Nile 

a British Engineer discovered that the annual runoff appeared to have a memory. The Hurst Exponent (H) named in his honor is calculated using Equation 1, in which R, S and n are the rescaled range, standard deviation and observation number.
Equation 1. H = Log[R(n)/S(n)] / Log (n)

The rescaled range is the amplitude of the integral trace of deviations from the mean of a serial data vector. Hurst had anticipated an exponent near 0.5, which is termed Brown Noise and can be simulated from a series of random numbers. Values above 0.5 indicate increasing auto-correlation in the data with 1.0 termed Black Noise indicating extreme correlation with the past or strong “memory”.'

Watts' endless search for badly sited nilometers and tanna leaves to revive his pygmy bearers recalls the warning of the Scroll of Toth:

[ BRAIN DEATH COMES ON SWIFT WINGS TO HIM WHO DEFILES PEER REVIEW ]

Witness this 2004 Nature article:

                     The Memory of Water 

The life and work of Jacques Benveniste taught us valuable lessons about how to deal with fringe science, says Philip Ball.

Jacques Benveniste, who gave the world the 'memory of water', ... will certainly be remembered for the phrase his work inspired, which has become the title of a play and a rock song, as well as a figure of everyday speech.
But his controversial career also highlighted the tricky issue of how to deal with research on the fringes of science, a question with which Nature itself became intimately entangled. 

In France, Benveniste was a celebrity, and it is not hard to see why. He was a charismatic showman who knew how to wield a rhetorical foil. His talk of witch-hunts, scientific priesthoods, heresies and 'Galileo-style prosecutions' played well with those inclined to regard science as an arrogant, modern-day Inquisition.
He conjured up images of a conservative orthodoxy, whose acolytes were scandalized by a ground-breaking discovery that demolished their dogmatic certainties. He was, he suggested, a Newton challenging a petty-minded, mechanistic cartesianism.
Back in 1988, however, Benveniste was very much part of the establishment...

That was when he sent his notorious paper to Nature¹. In it, he reported that white blood cells called basophils, which control the body's reaction to allergens, can be activated to produce an immune response by solutions of antibodies that have been diluted so far that they contain none of these biomolecules at all.

Incredible resultIt was as though the water molecules somehow retained a memory of the antibodies that they had previously been in contact with,.... But no one, including Benveniste, gave much attention to the critical question of how such a 'memory' effect could be produced.

The paper itself offered only the suggestion, at face value almost meaningless, that "Water could act as a 'template' for the [antibody] molecule, for example by an infinite hydrogen-bonded network, or electric and magnetic fields." The idea that water molecules, connected by hydrogen bonds that last for only about a picosecond (10-¹² seconds) before breaking and reforming, could somehow cluster into long-lived mimics of the antibody seemed absurd. 

Other teams were subsequently unable to repeat the effect, and the independent results that the reviewers had asked for were never published. Further experiments carried out by Benveniste's team, in double-blind conditions overseen by [Nature Editor Sir John] Maddox, magician and pseudo-science debunker James Randi and fraud investigator Walter Stewart, failed to verify the original results.... The talk that I saw [Benveniste] and his co-workers deliver last June was a blinding blizzard of histograms 

Keeping Up With The Orwells

Having declared scientists 'persona non grata' 

Big Brother Watts has anounced another climate blogging first:

 AUTOMATED CENSORSHIP:

Calling blacklisting whitelisting may seem Orwellian to oldthinkers, but
James 'It's not my job to sit down and read peer reviewed papers' Delingpole
finds the bellyfeel of regurgited Newscorp newspeak doubleplus good--

  "Then, of course, there is the great Anthony Watts – founder of the most widely read and important sceptical website of the lot... I owe Wattsy an enormous amount...

Ultimately, it seems to me, that the war we're fighting concerns the battle between openness, honesty, truth, liberty and freedom of expression on the one hand, and corrupt, dishonest, bullying authoritarianism on the other. What's particularly valuable about Watts Up With That? is ... Anyone is welcome to contribute to the debate," Daily Telegraph  11 April 2013

Really? Watts  has serially embraced dozens of crank climate theories, from underwater volcanoes to the Iron Sun, only to drop and bury them at the first sign of scientific laughter.  

Hours after Delingpole celebrated WUWT as an open forum, whitelister Roy Spencer noted the unauthorized appearance of :" a comment that is actually from John O’Sullivan, who Anthony has banned."  
 But whom Dellingpole  has hailed for authoring one of a" superb crop of books on AGW- Slaying The Sky Dragon", an anti-thermodynamics tract once celebrated, but later dropped by, you guessed it :

AIRPORT FORECAST: MANN UPGRADED, WATTS GROUNDED

Postmodern Coal Deposits and the Semiotic Carbon Cycle

Australia owes its inexhaustible soft coal deposits to the fossilization of an organic material called cellulose, whose largest postmodern source is the Murdoch newspapers readers bury in landfills as fast as Rupert prints them.  

There it turns into layers of anthropocene coal shallow as the science writing in The Wall Street Journal. Cheap to mine, this highly inflammatory material amply pays for advertorials praising the environmental benefits of mining, as more money can be made  excavating coal in Australia than the greatest living digger can possibly spend on journalism. 

Once read and buried, the already fossilized editorial content of Newscorp papers hastens their transformation into minable coal that can be exported to China in exchange for printing presses as the great biogeochemical cycle of carbon continues.

As an environmentally responsible publisher, Newscorp recycles op-eds whenever possible, and to assure their legibility uses only fresh newsprint and printer’s ink. While the deforestation of Canada to mine tar sand provides Newscorp with an ample supply of journalistic pulp, making ink is harder than manufacturing news, as it entails mixing tar oil with carbon black obtained by frakking & cracking natural gas. 

So tell your Congressman to help the Keystone XL pipeline save the environment by cutting the energy cost of delivering ink from Alberta's beaver infested wilderness to the Murdoch organ nearest you!

The Funeral Games

The ancients thought Olympian tragedies  merited funeral games in  honor of the fallen

Last week Harvard revived this Classical custom with an outdoor boxing fundraiser for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing :

READERS ARE INVITED TO CONTRIBUTE AS WELL !

The Ancestral Wisdom Of Anthony Watts

NOT CONVERGING ON ZERO

Peer reviewed & published estimates of climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling  have done many things in the three centures since Arrhenius published the first.
Converging on a single value is, alas, not among them.

CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON

There is much snarling over the temperature record, because thermometer and radiometer data is subject to instrumental variation and persnickity interpretation. But ever since the first notch was carved on a leg of Canute's throne, tide gauges have presented fewer opportunities for disputation-  it's hard to argue with a yardstick bolted to a sea wall.

The Atlantic coast of the US is well endowed with the things, and its tides have been duly recorded since the days of Ben Franklin if not before. Put the last century of data together and the sea level record hereabouts duly compensated for post-glacial isostasy, as published in

looks like this:

Hat tip to Eli Rabbet for NCCL ref-

Readers are invited to choose which item of sports equipment this uncontroversial curve most resembles:

    A:  A curling stone

 B:  A baseball bat

     C:  A tennis racquet

D:  A polo mallet

  E:  A hockey stick

GEE, DOC, I WAS ONLY DOING 100 WHEN I HIT THE COYOTE

County Highway Patrol public information officer Brian Pennings told CBS LA that an officer on routine patrol on Interstate 8 last Sunday observed what appeared to be a giant rabbit driving a sidecar equipped antique motorcycle down the highway near San Diego.

The officer stopped the vehicle after noticing the bunny was not wearing a helmet, and appeared at risk of visual impairment from the windage on his ears. The driver told the officer he was headed to a charity event, and was given a verbal warning but not issued a citation.

It's a good thing the bad bunny wasn't driving down the 38th parallel. 

The Rabbit Wars 

        Wouldn't you be hopping mad if your daddy ate the Easter Bunny?

Like Kim Jong-un,
Karl Szmolinsky of  Eberswalde Germany faces a chilly Easter. His pride and joy,  Robert der Grosse, the largest rabbit in recorded Prussian history has been declared legally dead.  The 23 pound uberbunny went missing in North Korea seven years ago, after being sent to Pyongyang along with 11 others "with the aim of setting up a breeding program to alleviate famine,"

It was not to be. Instead of founding an Eastern Easter Bunny dynasty, Robert der Grosse had the ill fortune to arrive on the eve of Kim Jong Il's birthday banquet, and ended up as the Dear Leader's lunch.

"North Korea won't be getting any more rabbits from me, they don't even need to bother asking " Szmolinsky told Der Spiegel,  which says  he was due to travel to North Korea to set up the breeding farm, when a DPRK official called to thank the Meisterkaninchenzüchter for providing the Star of Juche's super-sized entre'.

While the Berlin embassy of the diminutive Hermit Kingdom Hasenpfepper fiend later issued a denial of the Guiding Sun Ray and  Invincible and Ever Triumphant  General's  alleged  lepicide, Robert der Grosse has not been seen since.

By all accounts Kim Jong-un prefers braised bear cub paws to rabbits on steroids, but to add insult to past injury, Herr Smolinsky's  German Giant Grey  has been upstaged by a young bunny from Britain,  Sir King Darius, who already stands 4' 4" and weighs a thumping 50 pounds

That translates into fifteen kilograms of meat, and absent Pyongyang's orgy of lagomorphagy, the 12 Prussian bunnies dispatched in 2007 might have produced upwards of 60 bunnies per year per year, multiplying into a Malthusian integral of rabbit mass larger than I dare calculate.

The only problem with this sort of green revolution is that the omnivorous creatures  scarf down everything from grain to carrots and cabbages-- it takes a ton of vegetarian fodder to raise up a Guinness record holder, and as Szmolinsky notes of his 50 surviving charges: " You can't hang on to them... They cost a lot to feed."

Nevertheless, giant rabbbits remain easier to keep than horses, making it hard to see the merit of  high-biotech proposals to re-people the world  with Neanderthals , or revive the wooly mammouth. Why bother when  some descendant of young Darius or  Robert der Grosse will eventually fall into the hands of the  dreaded Acme Corporation.

Once Acme identifies, sequences, and de-Buggs the bunny growth hormone, it can launch a new generation of  quality synthetic biology products designed to give Wyle E. Coyote a run for his money, and strike fear into the heart of Elmer Fudd, whose shotgun won't be much use if the Easter Glyptodont comes calling.

NOW IN ITS TENTH SEASON

SUFFERING FOOLS GLADLY

Watts has posted this notice on WUWT

 Note the highly apposite date:

On April 1, Fred Singer will talk on “Global Warming” to the Science Group luncheon at the Cosmos Club in Washington. For additional information and reservations please contact Ken Haapala by March 28 at Ken@SEPP.org.
#########################################
Urgent: Reviewers Needed for Climate Change Reconsidered-2

The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) is seeking credentialed individuals who are willing to serve as reviewers of the forthcoming NIPCC report Climate Change Reconsidered-2.

Reviewers will be needed between April and August 2013 for various chapters and sub-chapters of the report. A list of topics addressed in the report, and for which reviews will be needed, can be found under the links and sub-links listed on the NIPCC Web site’s Topical Archive page. To volunteer as a reviewer, or for more information, please send an email toNIPCC_contact@nipccreport.org.
Thank you, your help in this matter is greatly appreciated.
#########################################

ELIMINATE !

The Australian reports that The Institute of Public Affairs has recommended a new and cost effective way to reinforce the Murdoch-Rhinehart Climate Consensus. 

The Institute proposes the next Liberal govenment deal with radiative forcing by abolishing climate change and energy efficiency research altogether.

Smoke gets in your eyes

THE COLOSSUS OF BUSH

                             Who needs the Biennale ? 

If you're sailing to Byzantium this summer, skip Venice and drop in on Albania's Côte Concrèt to view the astonishing retrospective of works by Heads Of State awaiting you in the postmodern pearl of the Adriatic, Fushë-Krujë, contemporary art capital of Nato's 28th nation!

The show features the nocturnes and cat paintings of Xhorxh Bush 43, who already stands immortalized in bronze nearby upon a plinth previously occupied by Enver Hoxa, Fearless Leader of the Peoples Republic of Sqip, and King Zog of blessed memory before him.

Albania hopes to suck tourists ashore like an Illyrian Charybdis by turning its phalanx of coastal pillboxes into a pantheon of bronze colossi honoring those unsung Skanderbegs of the culture wars, America's Former Vice-Presidential Chiefs Of Staff, from Spiro Agnew's mentor Artur Smër, to Cheney's loyal lieutenant Skotor Libbë, and the head of Dan Quayle's brain trust, Vlym Xristol.

With Post-Palladian architectural treasures rivaling Skagway and Aruba, no National Review, Weekly Standard or Front Page seminar cruise should resist the siren call of this New Atlantis, only an hour's drive from the ancestral home of John Belushi and Mother Teresa International Airport, whence Bush '43's whirlwind Balkans tour dropped in on Fushë-Krujë in 2007. 

While my friend Taki avers the bronze  colossus celebrates Bush ridding the Abanians of Kosovo, or Kosovo of the Albanians, it may be the Fushë-Krujënes apologetic ex voto for having stolen GWB's watch off the Presidential wrist as he worked the welcoming crowd.

TWO EYED JACKS

FORMER HABERDASHER VISCOUNT MONCKTON MAKING SARTORIAL  COMMON CAUSE WITH  COLONIAL COAL BARON DON BLANKENSHIP 

AS THEY SEEM TO SHARE A SHIRTMAKER,  PERHAPS THEY SHOULD  SHARE A WANTED POSTER AS WELL - BLANKENSHIP HAS A LOT OF DEAD MINERS TO EXPLAIN

Usshering In The Fiscal Apocalypse

Six thousand sixteen years after the Earth's creation, (4004 BC-2013 AD) underfunded palaeoclimatologists can avoid sequester shortfalls and Congressional ire by adopting:

                The Seitz System of Condensed Concordia,

A compact & cost-effective geological column that accommodates the Differently Facted by condensing deep time into the Biblically Correct 6,000-year format authorized by the father of geochronology, the good and great Archbishop Ussher.

25 Oct. 4004 B.C.: Encounter with Nemesis knocks Lucifer out of Oort Cloud.

1 Nov. 4004 B.C.: Finding the Earth still largely molten, Eve knits  Adam a pair of asbestos waders.

3714 B.C.: The first biotechnologist, Cain, invents cyanobacteria.

3554 B.C.: Komatiitic lava inundates earliest crust; Noah's Ark incinerated.

3264 B.C.: Methuselah begins to notice passage of geological time.

3124 B.C.: Archaean stratiform sulfide deposits form, making Bronze Age possible.

2844 B.C.: Tired of reading graphic granite, Imhotep invents hieroglyphs.

2584 B.C.: Earliest sedimentation; discovery of slate leads to stone tablets.

2444 B.C.: Breathable atmosphere develops; first sermon preached.

2384 B.C.: Descendants of Tubal Cain inaugurate banded Iron Age. Sphinx starts to fossilize.

2024 B.C.: Nimrod the Hunter erects the Geosyncline of Babel.

1914 B.C.: Advent of diapirism; Lot's wife turned into first salt dome.

1794 B.C.: Children of Ham split from Israelites, insisting that the Burgess Shale fauna are kosher; chowder invented.

1704 B.C.: Charshumash the Hittite bitten by first vertebrate; lawyers emerge from slime.

1624 B.C.: Samson attempts perovskite synthesis; laboratory of the Philistines implodes.

1444 B.C.: War of the Chaldean Succession; Pangea broken up in accordance with the Treaty Of Uruk.

1334 B.C.: Shang Empire abandons efforts to invent compass when China drifts over South magnetic pole.

1264 B.C.: Moses invents hydrofracturing; opening of Red Sea rift drowns Egyptian Army.

1194 B.C.: Odysseus runs aground on Gondwandan Riviera; Circe founds Club Teth.

1104 B.C.: Ezekiel see de pterodactyl 'way up in de middle ob de air.

1024 B.C.: Goliath stepped on by irate Barosaurus, David takes credit.

794 B.C.: Jonah swallowed by Carcharas megalodon.

564 B.C.: Pythagoras publishes Air-Earth- Fire-Water phase diagram.

454 B.C.: Marble deposits form in Greece; Parthenon erected.

338 B.C.: Aristotle concludes that quartz is just another polymorph of ice, like

diamond or pearls; this is known as the Wisdom of the Ancients.

48 B.C.: All of Gaul is divided into three parts by the collision of Corsica with the European plate.

The Year Zero: Nothing much happened, there being none.

A.D. 31: Miracle of the Loaves and Ichthyosaurs.

A.D. 70: Paul, formerly Saul the Tarsier, suffers identity crisis on the road to

Damascus and writes Epistle to the Cephalopods.

A.D. 344:  Hordes of Huns perish when Romans breach Gibraltar escarpment, flooding the Mediterranean Desert.

A.D. 494: Snakes evolve and are driven out of Ireland.

A.D. 974: Lief the Unlucky lost with all hands after amorous Kronosaurus spots his dragon ship.

A.D. 1066: William the Conqueror invades England by walking through northern France.
A.D. 1215 Magna Carta eaten by Velociraptor.

A.D. 1324: Gunpowder and plate armor introduced; dinosaurs hunted to extinction.

A.D. 1384: Dante Alighieri publishes 1st description of core-mantle boundary.

A.D. 1444: Flowering plants appear; War of the Roses commences.

A.D. 1484: Leonardo da Vinci designs Archaeopteryx.

A.D. 1492: Mesoamerica emerges, thwarting Columbus's discovery of Japan.

A.D. 1522: Asteroid impact shatters Aztec Empire. Hernan Cortes mops up.

A.D. 1588: Spanish Armada frustrated by continuing absence of English Channel.

A.D. 1636: Earliest primates appear; Harvard founded.

A.D. 1664: An English primate becomes Primate of Ireland; Archbishop Ussher

successfully deduces last four out of ten digits of the age of the Earth.

A.D. 1688: Hapsburg Iceboat Armada invades England via London-Bruges

canal; Inquisition burns Isaac Newton at the stake on suspicion of alchemy.

A.D. 1754: Gibbons evolve and write master-pieces like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

A.D. 1776: Washington's Mastodon Cavalry routs Hessians at Battle of Hudson Canyon.

A.D. 1835:  After attack by a giant ratite in the Galapagos, Darwin, returns home a convinced Neptunist.

A.D. 1846: A milestone in ape evolution is passed: birth of a son to Bishop and Lady Wilburforce.

A.D. 1867: Cosmos superstar Alexander Von Humboldt wins the Napoleon lll Peace Prize by sabotaging the Baltimore Gun Club's lunar cannon.

A.D. 1894: As glaciation peaks, Cecil Rhodes proposes Capetown-to Cairo bobsled run.

A.D. 1914: Younger Dryas sea-level rise unleashes U-boats into the Atlantic, Holy Roman Empire wins World War One.

A.D. 1948: Harry Truman proposes using ice to contain Stalin; Cold War begins, ending Younger Dryas

A.D. 1954: Glaciers retreat from Fulda Gap; de Gaulle invades Russia.

A.D. 1957: Civil Rights Movement challenges Jim Cro-Magnon laws.

A.D. 1961: Rachel Carson links DDT to Glyptodonts' decline.

A.D. 1969: Last sighting of saber-toothed tiger in Central Park; Elizabeth Taylor divorces Proconsul.

A.D. 1971: Andy Warhol paints Campbell Soup cans on walls of Lascaux caverns.

A.D. 1983: Australopithecus wins the America's Cup.

A.D. 1988: Homo habilis  nominated as Pat Robertson's running mate.

A.D. 1990: Last Neanderthals perish in siege of Kremlin.

A.D. 1991: Saddam Hussein discovers fire; Anthropocene tar sands form in Kuwait.

A.D. 1997: Citing black smoker emissions, the EPA bans continental drift. 

A.D. 2013  Leveraged buy out of North Pole by Club Med leads to cancelation of Christmas

N.B.: As all dates except the first are +/- 2.3 billion years,readers are cautioned not to use this chronology for purposes of exegesis or the calibration of carbon-14 dating.