Athletes by country at 2012 olympics

Frustrated, I couldn't find a convenient list on the Internet of how many athletes per country at the 2012 Olympics, so I compiled this list from the wiki page:

2012 Summer Olympics

Craig Thomson's Statement to Parliament

New koala law to curb land owner's rights

Now the Labor federal government has a new raft of in-your-face laws to control and restrict what you do with your land.

Despite the species as a whole flourishing -- their numbers actually require "managing" i.e. culling, in South Australia southern Australia (see article below) -- the government is about to park itself in your back yard and tell you what you can and can't develop in the name of "saving" the koala.

Infant male circumcision is genital mutilation

This post is of a very different topic than the ones I usually post on.  If this isn't a topic to your taste or you are too young to read it please do not continue.

A few web articles have come to light in recent days describing human male infant circumcision as male genital mutilation.  They are correct and I must say I can attest to many of the negative repercussions described as I am a victim of this procedure as well.  Taking a perfectly good and necessary organ of the body and removing it for some kind of societal trend is shocking.

Kevin Rudd's sleight of tongue

I've heard Kevin Rudd say this many times in interviews. He calls the IPCC the International Panel on Climate Change instead of what it really is: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

Janelle Saffin contradicts herself

Just had to laugh at this answer from Labor MP for Page, Janelle Saffin to the media at Canberra airport today:

Question: If Julia Gillard won [the leadership challenge] would you worry about losing the next election?

Did Gleick make the faked Heartland Document?

Environmental activist Peter Gleick enticed a staffer at Heartland Institute -- a libertarian think tank and sceptical science funder based in Chicago -- to email him some internal Heartland documents.  You can get them from DeSmog blog here including the allegedly faked one here:

2012 Climate Strategy (3).pdf

Gleick has thus far admitted to being the receiver of the emails which show some fairly run-of-the-mill financial workings of Heartland.  But Gleick has stopped short of admitting to being the author of the one document that stands out from the pack.

Bloody Iraq Campaign Comes to an End

A tragic and ultimately unproductive nine years of war in Iraq comes to a close. Originally the justification for the war was to stop the development and use of WMDs and for purported links of Iraq to Al Qaeda.

It turned out there were no WMDs and no links to Al Qaeda. Then the justification was shifted to regime change and rebuilding a new Iraq after years of oppression from Saddam Hussein. 

Response to An open letter to Donna Laframboise

This is a rebuttal to:  

An open letter to Donna Laframboise (or, You have got to be F*!$*%@&! kidding me) 

by Brooke LaFlamme, 

November 3, 2011, 

posted on the Molecular Love blog. 

The fallacy of the greenhouse effect 2

Part 1 Part 2 (Index)

In part 2 I rebut some of the claims to an atmospheric greenhouse effect using the concepts introduced in the first part.

Given the Earth's distance from the Sun and the Sun's electromagnetic radiation (EMR) Earth should by conventional calculations be about -18C temperature on average. However Earth's surface temperature is 15C on average -- a difference of 33C. Many have resorted to the notion of a greenhouse effect to explain this difference.

To the various greenhouse claims I have heard:

Refreshing A Current Affair stories

Tonight I was watching A Current Affair Queensland edition and there were two environment-related stories.  The first was on the fad of banning plastic bags sweeping Australia. 

Tasmania has now joined three other states in banning them.  But, refreshingly and unexpectedly, the article sensibly argued that the so-called green polypropylene bags that replace the usual polyethylene ones take a lot longer to biodegrade.  Plus, they are prone to getting bacteria with multiple use, which the article didn't mention.

The real reason for NBN: censorship

Stephen Conroy: clubbing democracy and freedom to death

The fallacy of the greenhouse effect

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 (Index)

An object can warm through the absorption of electromagnetic radiation (EMR). However, an object passively warmed can't warm the object providing the warmth. Were this to be so energy could be multiplied for no extra input merely by having objects mutually radiate EMR. But there is no such temperature multiplication because the amount mutually exchanged cancels. It does not add as is required by greenhouse theory.

The reason that an object can be heated by EMR on earth by the sun is because the sun is warmer than the earth.  The idea of the greenhouse effect is that the cooler, upper layers of air are able to warm a warmer ground by backradiation. But this can not happen.

Greenhouse theory would even require that the backradiation from the earth to the sun warms the sun by a small (if practically imperceptible) amount. This is impossible too because a cooler object can not warm a warmer one unless work is done.  But greenhouse gas, not having an energy source, can not provide this work nor can the earth provide work to the sun.

Greenland is not melting

A 20km-wide iceberg broke off a Greenland ice shelf recently.  It has been used by the media as a powerful emblem in their coverage of global warming.  But there's a huge irony here.  Because, if anything, a larger iceberg is indicative of more snowfall and greater ice mass rather than warming temperature -- more snow and ice making for a faster flow and huger ice blocks.  Warmer temperatures would cause the opposite to this, with the ice receding, and hence less ice for breaking off into big chunks.