Why Global Warming Denial is so common in America

I think I've figured out why there's such a storm of people denying global warming and related phenomenon in the United States. Here's a map of the air temperature anomaly (difference in temperature from expected):

We're not FEELING it here. The anomalies are making all US territory colder, as cold air from Canada and the north pole are pushed into our area. Today it is very cold around my area, particularly, with weather I'd normally associate with states thousands of miles north.
Combine this with our conservative branches believing that economic activity is inherently good, and government intervention inherently bad, and you have people who experience massive cognitive dissonance at the very concept. It contradicts everything they know, so they reject it.
But all "Canadians for global warming" jokes aside, temperature affects more than just temperature. Farming, culture, and engineering are all affected. Adaptation could prove...expensive.

Mr. Wu's Amazing Robots

Just outside of Beijing, a touring journalist, Paul Merton, has discovered a man named Mr. Wu, who makes a multitude of robots with no educational training. Yes, the original sources spell his name "Woo," but I'm pretty sure that it's this one, transliterated "Wu."
Mr. Wu's robots are of varying utility. Many are just little walking toys of entertaining novelty. And all are named after him, and a number describing the order of their invention. I think his most interesting is Wu-25, a rickshaw bot that announces something in Chinese as it hauls you about. (The video does not translate that, unfortunately.) I'd totally buy that. Most impressively, all of Mr. Wu's robots are made of things that other people threw away.
When uneducated people accomplish things like this, it leaves me in awe, since I've met very educated people who could do no such thing. I also am left wondering how much more such people would accomplish if granted an education.
Also, if I had money, I would totally hire Mr. Wu. His current job as a farmer is a total waste of his talents.

Geothermal Desalinization

I suddenly have the idea of using the earth's internal heat to purify water.

You will need:
* Supply of lava from fissure or volcano
* Heatproof ceramic pipe
* Seawater
* Steam Condensing Unit

Pump the seawater into the volcano, producing steam. Capture the steam. Let it cool in various radiators. Pump the now fresh and warm water to the consumers.

The salt in the water probably melts with the lava. Then what?

A Punishment Too Far In Georgia

In Georgia, a mother was angry with her son for getting bad grades. This much is not news. That much happens all around the world. So to punish him, she made him beat his pet hamster to death with a hammer. She was arrested for this, charged with one count cruelty to animals, one count cruelty to children, and one count battery. (The battery charge doesn't seem to fit the pattern, since it's the crime of touching a stranger without their permission. Did she grab the sheriff's arm while being arrested or something?)
I have to agree with the charges, and think she should lose her child to protective services because of what lessons she's teaching. At best she's teaching her son that Mommy is a crazy person who cannot react rationally to disappointments. At worst, she's teaching him that vandalism, assault, or even murder, are normal acceptable responses to interpersonal problems. You may think I'm exaggerating in the last one, but children think very anthropomorphically. Even their toys are people to them. These are not lessons I want a child to learn. Especially if he decides that if Fluffy has to die for his sins, then maybe it's okay if I, or the guy down the street, or Mommy dies for his sins too.
Now, had this mother instead sold the hamster to a pet store, and used the money on a tutor, (or even kept it for her own uses), it would have the intended lesson that screwing up has consequences, that the hamster is now gone forever because the boy didn't put the effort into keeping it. And life would have gone on with me (and the national media) completely ignorant of the situation. The hamster may experience some momentary sadness at the change of situation, but it would at least still be alive.
What blows my mind entirely are people defending the mother in this situation, which only makes sense of you hate animals beyond all reason, or think that vandalism is a great response to interpersonal problems. Either way, I think I'll be avoiding Georgia for a while. It's full of crazy people.

Transportation Slime Mold

A Japanese scientist has discovered that slime molds, grown in a 2d medium like agar, inevitably finds the fastest route to food.
Used carefully, this is invaluable to planners of subway systems, freeways, and other shortest-route problems. (Which, on traditional computer systems, is NP-Complete, the kind of puzzle that may only be solvable by brute force attempting every possible solution, which takes somewhere around forever for more complicated examples.)
I'm left wondering what else can be solved by biology, which collectively has been working on these puzzles for millions of times longer than any of us has have.

Transcendental Number Theory

I have a new theory. It may be true or false, I'm not sure how to proceed in proving it.
My theory is that all numbers in the physical world are actually transcendental, and that we humans mostly use integers and rational numbers because we're rounding it to terms we understand.
A quick primer, which you can skip if you're a mathematician. Numbers come in various kinds. Natural numbers are the first we humans learned to deal with like 1, 2, 3, and so on as if you were counting apples. Integers are those and also 0 and negative numbers like -3. Rational numbers are all those that can be represented as a fraction of integers, including integers themselves. 6/1, for instance, for 6. This was all discovered by the times of the ancient Greeks. Their next discovery was irrational numbers, which cannot be expressed as a fraction of integers. The square root of 2 being the first example. If represented with our decimal system, the pattern after the decimal point would both go on forever and never repeat at any point.
Transcendental numbers are irrational, and also not any sort of square root. The most commonly referred to ones are pi and Euler's number, which are useful for circular constructs and natural growth modeling respectively. There are uncountably many transcendental numbers, but most have no easy way to reference. Mathematicians can now begin reading again.
In Engineering, there is a concept of precision. All measurements are slightly wrong. This error can be reduced by measuring more carefully, but all measurements are to within some plus-or-minus of the true value. Most serious projects reduce this error to ludicrously small values. Not zero, however, as that would take infinitely long.
Evidence against this theory includes Max Planck's discovery of graininess in the universe, where measurements below a certain threshold are no longer meaningful. This implies rational numbers.

Google and China

I'm sure you've heard it elsewhere first. The Chinese government hacked Google's email servers to dig up dirt on human-rights activists. So Google has retaliated by no longer censoring their searches, and announcing that if this requires them to leave China, well, then so be it. (A quick note that Google is the host of this blog.)
I can still remember when Google was first introducing itself to China. Many pundits were furious that they were making any concessions at all. Google's business department answered this by claiming that they were doing this all for the best, and to trust them on it.
I'm surprised by the Chinese response. While the government is predictably furious, the common people seem delighted by Google's move. Chinese citizens are shown laying flowers on Google's signboard. Maybe it's just sympathy for the hundreds of employees who will likely to lose their jobs, or maybe it's a deliberate siding with Google's position. Real news from China has been difficult to determine.
In any case, it looks bad for the Chinese government. The whole "censor stuff you don't like" thing looks stupider every day, the image of them abroad is mostly that of thieving and insufferable-ness, that working in China will mean having your technology stolen and endless regulation.
The thrust of the Chinese argument is that they're turning their backs on billions of dollars. Such is true in literal terms. China has 1.3 billion people, who have between them $8.8 trillion USD to throw around. But Google is arguing that it's not a fair market. Things were set up to give local competitors, like Baidu, every conceivable advantage, and Google every conceivable disadvantage. Google managed to get maybe 20% of the local market, and it was made very clear that it wouldn't get higher than that.
And yes, the Chinese Renmenbi has a value, but so does reputation, security, trust, and a thousand other intangibles that the Chinese government poked at. This event is not over. I predict much screaming by both sides in the near future.