Tuesday, August 30, 2016

                     DEAD  MATHEMATICIANS  CAN  JUMP

          NEIL  DEGRASSE  TYSON  HAD BETTER PUT   COSMOS, THE MUSICAL  ON  HOLD --


ALEXANDER  H , HE   WAS   A  GREAT   MAN   FROM  NEVIS
IT  WAS A  SHAME   AARON  BURR   MADE HIM  LEAVE   US
BUT   MATHEMATICS   GOT   EVEN ,  FIFTY   YEARS   LATER
WHEN THE  HAMILTONS  POPPED THIS BADASS CREATOR


Monday, August 29, 2016

                          OH NO, MISTER  FOUCAULT!
                   NOT   ANOTHER   PoMo  ONTOLOGY

Years after  Postmodern Geology   and Petrology for Poets extended the genre of  Sokalist Realism, along  comes  another  PoMo journal,  Society and Space , that "seeks to push the boundaries of theoretical debate and maintains a commitment to considering the political and social  justice  imperatives  of  research and theory", presenting the musings of  soi-disant 'Geontologist' Elizabeth Povinelli, & a teaching aid whose coming philosophers of language have long dreaded-- 
                          The  Geontological  Column:                                                

EP: ... I coined the term “geontology” to indicate a disruption of a previous formation of power ...

Geontology asks, How do we understand the current formation of power when the figures that emerge from its mechanisms are something like the animist, desert, and the terrorist rather than the masturbating child, the hysterical woman, the perverse adult and the Malthusian couple?

KY: If we consider the Anthropocene as a monstrous geography (a kind of suicidal exhausting of earth materials), what kind of political reconsideration of geographical obligations might make an otherwise that is not-Anthropocene? ...

EP: I reserve the idea of the monster for that which decisively disrupts the current organization of the actual—...

Thus truth is not a proposition that has more or less referential coherence but an event that has more or less disruptive power... 

Foucault, Deleuze, Braidotti, and others have noted that these threshold events are experienced at the time as monstrosities, as incomprehensible, as mad. The more event-full and more true it is, the more monstrous the event appears."


Monday, August 22, 2016

 IS  TINY THE TURBINE  RELATED TO  ZIPPY THE PINHEAD ?

Although Bishop Hill has gone missing, his understudy has aimed a book at a demographic of a certain mental age warning  post-Brexit teletubbies of the evils of wind power. The following edition is very slightly  shorter than the original:
PERCY THE  PINWHEEL

The sun seldom smiled on Grimbledon Glulch and the people were always gloomy.
It was a dour place to live until something happened that made the people very barmy.

This is the tale of Percy the Pinwheel who always wore a propeller beanie, and lived on a pretty little Grimbledon farm high above the gulch Mr Barley rented from the rich landowner, Lord Law Law.

Despite the drone of his propeller beanie, no-one could get out of earshot of Percy. The promising lad sat on the roof of his cowshed atop Northern Rock for many years with a bull horn whose subsidized computer feed from the GWPF Trust London office was hushed up by the big downstairs PR firms  at Grimbledon House in W1.

Hardly anyone knew the Counter-Spin  B-team were there except when they brayed around Lord Law Law’s breakfast table upstairs, for they were mostly his inlaws.

His lordship farmed them out in the winter to give batteries of speeches to warm up his colonial coal mining pals, or write leaders for the papers that provided dry fodder for his highland cows in the cold dark months. Percy could just about do that, but nawt else, and spent summers sunbathing at G 20 and Heartland conferences in Doha and Vegas, and watching the wildlife all around him.

Lord Law Law's son, Alaric the Editor, was Percy’s friend, and would often go and wak and  talk and hunt and shoot with Percy. Alaric didn’t have many friends, but Percy was always there to listen when he had problems at his magazine, like getting fired.

One day a wind developer called Mr McWeasel went to see Lord Law Law.
He said he was cutting back on PR, because Lord Law Law’s friends already had  more income from wind turbines on their land than leasing the shooting, and Brexit was a done deal, he could lay off more of the daft buggers he’s been paying to raise hob about renewable energy, since the Dark Greens were dying off anyway, and everyone south of Sutherland could see there was more brass in frakked gas than bigger wind turbines.

The only place on earth still funding such falderal said Mr McWeasel was Australia, where mad cow coalies would even pay to propagandize five year old children.

Mr McWeasel said if he could have permission, he’d get Percy sent to Aldershot to train as a tank driver in Lord Law Law’s  next Persian Oil  war, so he could come home and drive one of the big wayright machines that ripped up all the ground and cut down all the trees in Grimbledon Gulch Forest and poured big lorry loads of concrete all over the land  for frakking pads.

Then when the wild animals ran away and the river turned a dirty brown colour and the birds stopped singing, and the sun stopped shining and dark clouds spread across the sky, it would be time for the Boxing Day shoot, for global warming could only improve the weather on the Northumberland Riviera.

Mr Mc Weasel said Mr. Barley would be invited, for he was the hottest shot in the shire, as he  trained all year by blowing the blades off Trasher, the tiny turbine atop his cowshed, as he’d read in The Spectator that he had a duty to stop the evil bat-bashing machine from whacking the wings off of  snipe flying by.  

Percy agreed that saving the snipe was a very green thing to do, and said that as soon as he was commissioned in the hats, he would write to The Daily Telegraph proposing Mr Barley for a gong in the New Year’s honors list. Lord Law Law wrote him a very small cheque and told  him to push off. The end.





Wednesday, August 17, 2016

                      NO  HORSEMEN  OF  THE APOCALYPSE
  WERE  KILLED OR  INJURED  IN PRODUCING THIS  STUDY

Research at the  Potsdam  Institute for  Climate Impact Research on Coevolutionary Pathways in the Earth System, funded by Humboldt University  Integrative  Research  Institute  on  Transformations  of Human–Environment Systems, the Stordalen Foundation, the Earth League EarthDoc Programme, the German Federal Ministries for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety, Education & GFR Research Project GLUES Grant 01LN1306A  has  found  a  positive correlation  between  Pestilence,  Famine, War  and Death : 

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

FEMTORISK  MARKETS  RISE  ON MICROAGGRESSION  FEARS   

In a fifteen order of magnitude burst of semantic aggression,  authors from UCLA, The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, The Russian Academy of Science and Kissinger Associates extend a misunderstanding about communications theory to new frontiers in homeopathic diplomacy & existential threat inflation:

        Dealing With Femtorisks In International Relations 

A  RUNAWAY  FEMTORISK: UNREGULATED CHEESE ROLLING  IN POST-BREXIT BRITAIN
ABSTRACT   The contemporary global community is increasingly interdependent and confronted with systemic risks posed by the actions and interactions of actors existing beneath the level of formal institutions... We call these challenges “femtorisks,” ... for example the 2008 financial crisis; the Arab Spring of 2011–2012; the Ukrainian crisis of 2014; the rapidly changing Arctic; Hezbollah’s increasing embeddedness in regional and global politics; and global health risks arising from zoonoses—reveal significant limitations to understanding of 21st century international systems... 

We introduce the term “femtorisks” to refer to threats that confront international decision makers as a result of the actions and interactions of actors that exist beneath the level of formal institutions... using the prefix that denotes a factor of 10−15, to highlight the apparent insignificance of the individual actor... analogous to the deployment of the terms “femtocell” vs. “picocell” in the world of cellular communications... “femto-” here does not mean literally something 15 orders-of-magnitude smaller than the macro scale, but just something many orders-of-magnitude smaller.


Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

ONLY ANAMATRONIC BEARS CAN PREVENT CLIMATE WARS







A REVENANT OF AN EARLIER PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN
BIG DATA SENSORS AND ORGANIC ADVOCACY: 

The Case of Leonardo DiCaprio and Climate Change

The strategies that experts have used to share information about social causes have historically been top-down, meaning the most influential messages are believed to come from planned events and campaigns. However, more people are independently engaging with social causes today than ever before, in part because online platforms allow them to instantaneously seek, create, and share information. In some cases this “organic advocacy” may rival or even eclipse top-down strategies. Big data analytics make it possible to rapidly detect public engagement with social causes by analyzing the same platforms from which organic advocacy spreads. To demonstrate this claim we evaluated how Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2016 Oscar acceptance speech citing climate change motivated global English language news (Bloomberg Terminal news archives), social media (Twitter postings) and information seeking (Google searches) about climate change. Despite an insignificant increase in traditional news coverage (54%; 95%CI: -144 to 247), tweets including the terms “climate change” or “global warming” reached record highs, increasing 636% (95%CI: 573–699) 
with more than 250,000 tweets the day DiCaprio spoke. In practical terms the “DiCaprio effect” surpassed the daily average effect of the 2015 Conference of the Parties (COP) and the Earth Day effect by a factor of 3.2 and 5.3, respectively. At the same time, Google searches for “climate change” or “global warming” increased 261% (95%CI, 186–335) and 210% (95%CI 149–272) the day DiCaprio spoke and remained higher for 4 more days, representing 104,190 and 216,490 searches. This increase was 3.8 and 4.3 times larger than the increases observed during COP’s daily average or on Earth Day. Searches were closely linked to content from Dicaprio’s speech (e.g., “hottest year”), as unmentioned content did not have search increases (e.g., “electric car”). Because these data are freely available in real time our analytical strategy provides substantial lead time for experts to detect and participate in organic advocacy while an issue is salient. Our study demonstrates new opportunities to detect and aid agents of change and advances our understanding of communication in the 21st century media landscape.


Tuesday, August 2, 2016

      SWORD OF TRUTHINESS DRAWN FROM STONE OF FOLLY

GLASTONBURY  FESTIVAL  NEWS
Wise Men of Paraguay and Spitzbergen swear fealty to once & future Viscount wielding weapon of  mass instruction unseen since 1995
University College, London ...has forfeited the right to be taken seriously as a seat of learning. 
Now, who are the members of this “rather fringe group” that might have caused the “UCL community” to go into the corner, turn its back to the room, suck its thumb and blub?
They include not only Professor Baghdad Planetarium fundraiser Alsabti but also Professor Nils-Axel Mörner, who has published more refereed papers on sea-level rise than Professor Butterworth has had hot dinners; Professor polar bear counter Ole Humlum of the University of Oslo, who publishes a widely-circulated monthly data update on global temperatures and related matters blog; Professor Jan-Erik Solheim of Norway; members of the Swedish Polar Institute, of the Asociacion Rural de Paraguay; of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, of the U.S. Geological Survey; of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration; a former moonwalker & hisvalet, the former president of the Italian National Research Council; an octagenarian mafioso, the Professor of Paleobotany at the Sapienza University, Rome; a world-leading physicist from  post-doc at the François Rabelais University in Tours; an analytical expert  a  technician from the Laboratoire Analyse at the University of Paris; the brother of the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition in the House of Commons; Corbyn's loonier younger brother , dozens   a handful of doctors of science and a totally bogus D.Phil.; and a sprinkling of IPCC expert reviewers, hangers on, including your humble servant.
If this is a “rather fringe group”, then the academic mainstream must – as many of us have long suspected – have been reduced to a thin, dreich, terrified, narrow, narrow-minded, insignificant trickle, confined deep within the gloomy and inspissate [sic] canyon of its own no doubt profitable but increasingly discredited prejudice.


Lord Monckton's  paper: “Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model” has been downloaded more often than any other paper in the 60-year archive of the Science Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences – by a factor of 12.


More than 3 million people have viewed Lord Monckton's  2009 speech in the US giving details of the world “government” proposed by the UN in the draft Treaty of Copenhagen. The speech went platinum on YouTube in a week – the fastest-ever for a political speech. In West Virginia on Labor Day, 2009, more than 100,000 attended a miners’ rally which he addressed live on a mountain-top. Tea Party rallies at which he spoke in Washington DC and in North Houston attracted 40,000 and 15,000 respectively. His article on climate science in the Sunday Telegraph on 5 November 2006 attracted 127,000 hits in two hours, crashing the paper’s website. His speeches at the St. Andrews and Oxford Unions were followed by student votes defeating climate alarmism for the first time in Scotland and England respectively.
Wordpress ranked his summary of the draft Durban climate agreement in December 2011 as having received more hits than any other among its 500,000 blog postings on all subjects worldwide that day. A video of his talk to the Mannkal Foundation in Australia in July 2011 became the most-watched video in Australia in February 2012. A video of his talk predicting the toppling of Australia’s then prime minister by climate-extremists a year before it happened became Australia’s most-watched video in September 2015. He has given talks on the climate in more than 30 countries. He holds the Meese-Noble Award for Freedom and the Intelligence Medal of the Army of Colombia for his climate research.