US involvement in Iraq to end, US troops home by holidays

The misguided action in Iraq, at least the official involvement of the US military in it, is coming to a close according to a statement issued by President Obama from the White House press room.  The President said in part:

As a candidate for President I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end … after taking office I announced a new strategy [to remove US troops] . Today I can report after nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over.” … “The troops will be home by the holidays.”

Hey Anthony: Watts up with this?

Results from the Berkeley Earth project data fits existing NASA and NOAA temperature records like a glove

If Anthony Watts is an objective skeptic he has a very interesting weekend ahead. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Watts is a former weather-caster turned blogger and global warming skeptic who writes at What’s Up With That. Sources tell me he may have tipped his hand over a hot-off-the-press independent climate study which confirmed the same rising temperature trend found by NASA and other climate scientists over the last century. The story begins with Watts fluffing the scientific cred of that study’s authors and editors back in March:

I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. I’m taking this bold step because the method has promise. So let’s not pay attention to the little yippers who want to tear it down before they even see the results. I haven’t seen the global result, nobody has, not even the home team, but the method isn’t the madness that we’ve seen from NOAA, NCDC, GISS, and CRU …

NASA madness! But the Anthony Watts who chimed in on the same project yesterday, after those results were partly released, sounds very different: [Read more…]

Conservatives grudgingly recognizing US policy success in Libya

They’re getting dragged kicking and screaming, and some haven’t quite been able to fess up and admit this worked, at least in terms of getting rid of the world’s worst (previously living) terrorist:

McCain’s statement made no mention of President Obama or his administration’s role in supporting the rebels.However, Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who accompanied McCain to Libya last month, released a statement crediting the administration.

Some of you may be too young to remember, but for years Gaddaffi was the number one terrorist in the world, or so we were told incessantly before 9-11 anyway.

Good riddance Mr Gaddafi?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It’s not clear exactly what may have happened, but there are increasingly reliable sounding reports that Muammar Gaddafi has gone into that sweet goodnight:

AFP news agency quoted another NTC official, Mohamed Leith, as saying that Col Gaddafi had been captured in Sirte and was “seriously wounded” but still breathing. A soldier who says he captured Muammar Gaddafi told the BBC the colonel had shouted: “Don’t shoot!” But NTC official Abdel Majid Mlegta told Reuters news agency that the former leader had been shot in the head and killed as he tried to flee.

Hashtags seemed to be #Gadhafi and of course #Libya and #BreakingNews. Al Arabiya English has tweeted they’re being allowed to photograph the body and will have more soon.

It’s raining comets at Eta Corvi!

Bring the rain! The Spitzer Space Telescope has found evidence that a nearby star system only 60 light-years away may be undergoing a period of bombardment similar to what happened during and before the Hadean Eon in our solar system about five-billion years ago:

The infrared telescope spotted a band of dust around Eta Corvi that strongly matches the chemical makeup of an obliterated giant comet, said Carey Lisse, senior research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., and lead author of the new study. The Eta Corvi system is approximately 1 billion years old, which would place it in the right time period for such a comet storm, the researchers said.

Bacterial super computers

More evidence the Singularity is nigh! Mere bacteria being given super human processing Rain Man-esque power:

Scientists have taken another step towards biological computing, with the creation of logic gates from gut bacteria and DNA.While something similar’s been done before, the team says its logic gates behave more like the standard electronic version.

All microprocessors do is add. That’s it. Your entire computer works on the back of what is basically an electronic abacus. Which is why questions about sentience and all that are so fascinating when applied to digital computers. So I wouldn’t worry too much about computerized bacterial colonies taking over the world just yet. I would instead keep worrying about the oxygen-burning bacterial collectives already here, specifically, the bipedal metazoan ones with giant bulbs of nerve tissue at the top.

Ancestral magnitudes

Before there were blogs, there was use.net. One of the most fun message boards there was called Talk Origins, a meeting of the minds between the reality-based community and a gaggle of trolls and drive-by creationists. One of the best essays posted there was by a member named Aron-Ra, and a few years later I adapted it to the emerging new medium of the blogosphere. I’ve reposted an a newly edited, more streamlined version below. — DS

My grandfather wasn’t no monkey!”, “You think we came from slime?!”, and “man, if you want to believe your great^100 grandpa was a rock, be my guest…but it’s STUPID!” One thing we can agree on is, yes, thinking that evolutionary biology stipulates that your ancestor from 100 generations ago was a monkey is indeed stupid. For a lot of reasons, not the least of which is just to get to “monkeys,” let alone “slime,” we’ll need a lot more zeros in there …  [Read more…]