Year: 2014

I meant to offer you this Scientific American blog post when it first appeared:

God Controls the Climate, So You Can Relax

By Scott Huler | April 24, 2014 |  81

I know, he’s just a Tea Party candidate with almost no chance of election, but Greg Brannon, primary candidate for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Kay Hagen, said in a debate the other night that God controls the climate.

And here all this time you’ve thought it was physics.

Welcome back to North Carolina (Motto: “We have mines of crazy so rich we’ll NEVER run out!”). The state has made most of its science news this spring with its staggering inaction on the Duke Energy coal ash spill. You remember:  the largest energy company in the country spilled 39,000 tons of toxic ash into the Dan River from coal ash pits it had for years resisted cleaning up. Then it waited two months to do much about it. Then state government, naturally, sided with Duke in appealing a judge’s ruling that Duke should, you know, clean up its mess. The fact that the state of North Carolina thinks that the nation’s largest electric utility should not exercise the degree of responsibility we require from a kindergartener has, of course, nothing to do with the fact that NC governor Pat McCrory worked for Duke Energy for 28 years or that Duke has donated $1.1 million to McCrory and the organizations that support him. I mean come on.

By the way — few doubt that this catastrophic spill of toxic pollutants was anything but accidental. Just the same, sometimes Duke Energy dumps coal ash on purpose, like when it did so about 30 miles southwest of Raleigh — a couple weeks after the spill. If you were wondering.

But we’re not even going to talk about that! Because North Carolina! Is! Way! Crazier! Than that!

You probably know that Democratic Senator Kay Hagen, who believes in liberal fantasies like anthropogenic climate change, has already been targeted by GOP attacks to the tune of $7 million. And you may have even known that of the eight candidates in a big hurry to face her, the four likeliest had a debate this week. I’ll cut to the chase. When asked whether climate change was real, all four candidates said no — and Brannon added that God controls the climate.

[Here Mr. Huler inserts the 17-second clip from the debate, so you can see for yourself.]

So no need to worry about pollution or sea-level rise or temperature or any of that. It’s in God’s hands.

That’s all I’ve got to say here today. Okay one more thing: One of the candidates is a pastor — and it’s not even Brannon. He is a physician. Another is a nurse. (Special free advice: do not go to these medical practitioners! They are not safe! They believe God controls things, and trust me — you want science, not God, to be checking your blood work!)

Personal from North Carolina: Help me, Obi-wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.

About the Author: A writer who commonly explores science, culture, and the relationship between the two. Follow on Twitter @huler.

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

I celebrate all 7 nights of the July 4th weekend.  What can I say?  I love America.

Last Friday I offered a two-minute video history of the world (and a few words on slime-based intelligent life forms on other planets).

Did you miss it?  And how about the column I ran here 16 years ago with my own brief history of the universe, lifted from a book I had out at the time?  Did you miss that one, too?  What am I going to do about you?

You have to keep up.  And — as one who can’t himself keep up — I will be first to admit it’s not easy.

You saw that Syria’s just finished handing over the last of its 1,300 tons of chemical weapons?  The Syria situation remains a nightmare.  But this piece, at least, is done.

“President Obama’s critics excoriated the deal,” reports the New York Times, “but they have been proved wrong.  The chemical weapons are now out of the hands of a brutal dictator — and all without firing a shot.”  Imagine if we had taken the same approach with Iraq.

You saw that as outraged as the Senate has been about President Obama’s recess appointments — which they sought to thwart by pretending to be in session when they weren’t — it turns out he has made just 32 of them, compared with 171 by his predecessor.  If the Republicans were outraged by those 171, they didn’t show it.

You saw that the Supreme Court has sided with the anti-abortion folks?  Rachel Maddow sums it up, “From inside their own protective buffer zone, the Supreme Court issued its majority ruling striking down the one outside abortion clinics.”  What?  You didn’t know the Justices protect themselves with a huge buffer zone — free speech be damned?  Watch the clip.  It’s long, but that’s because she takes the time to make a compelling case.

And there’s so much else going on to keep up with!  The World Cup!  ISIS advancing on Baghdad.  Amazon’s new phone!  The Ebola outbreak!  John Oliver’s new show!  Immigration!  The minimum wage!  Marriage equality!  Honduran gangs!  Ukraine!  Egypt!  It’s dizzying!

Cut to:

Silence.

The vast, infinite, ever expanding universe.  Our teensy, tiny blue space ship endlessly circling one of hundreds of billions of stars in one of hundreds of billions of galaxies.

Tom Stolze:  “Try these:  A two-minute flight through the universe 2 billion light years away.  An only slightly longer evolution of the universe.  And if you have another four minutes, an MIT supercomputer recreating the evolution of the cosmos.”

Of course you have another four minutes: there’s a long weekend coming up.  Is there anything better than the Fourth of July?  It would be so easy to get this great, idealistic country moving again.  All those of us who “believe in” science and logic and stuff have to do (it’s not logical to think that cutting taxes on the wealthy will reduce our deficit and revitalize our infrastructure) is take just a little time to register and vote.

Have a great weekend.

So the President has finally had enough with the Republicans in Congress — who in no way represent the will of the people on so many issues.

Issues like immigration and infrastructure and the minimum wage and universal background checks that could be signed into law today if only they would allow them to come up for a vote.

Here it is: 15 minutes in the Rose Garden.  Watch.

(And here is Rachel Maddow’s take on it and the Congress that has — as a matter of fact, not opinion — done less than any other in history.)

(And here were his remarks at Monday’s sixth annual White House LGBT Pride celebration.  Because, by the way, Congress should pass the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, too.  Most Americans are surprised to learn that in more than half the states you can be fired from your job not simply because you’re black or Italian or a woman or Jewish — that’s all illegal — but because you’re gay.)

But if you’re as pressed for time as I expect you are, just watch the first minute or two of the 15 minutes in the Rose Garden.

Where were you October 28, 1970?  I don’t know where I was, either, but if you click here, you can be in London’s Royal Albert Hall listening to a 26-year-old Joni Mitchell and a 22-year-old James Taylor for 74 wonderful minutes.

One of my favorites forever has been “The Circle Game” (at the 40-minute mark). But hearing her lead-in to why she wrote it (for Neil Young) — and then reading the lyrics — makes it all new and even better.

And now I’m reading more lyrics on her amazing website.  Can’t believe it took me nearly 50 years to finally “get” some of this stuff.  So good.

Thanks, Paul.  (And Joni and James.)

Enjoy.

In the “How Exciting Is It To Be Alive Now That It’s All Coming Together Faster and Faster?  (So, Can We Please Not Screw It Up?)” department — like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle near the end of the game, when it’s more and more obvious what fits with what (but your evil big sibling lurks, threatening to upend the whole thing just before you finish; because if we know anything about humans it is that even the best of us harbor a demonic impulse or two) — take eight minutes to see the smart-phone-based medicine of tomorrow.

The growth in health care costs may indeed continue to bend downward even as quality and convenience improve.

(All this as Republicans cut funding for the National Institutes of Health, because . . . well, why fund life-saving scientific research?  How could that lead to a better life or a stronger economy?  Please, for the love of God if you worship Him or the love of reason if you don’t, get everyone you know to register and vote this November, even though they usually don’t bother.  Wresting the Tea Party wrench from the gears of our gridlocked government is so worth the effort.)

But first, to get you in the mood, take two minutes to watch the history of the world. It certainly drives home my point that, after 5 billion years, we have just a decade or two to get onto a trajectory that will lead to unparalleled well-being — or hurtle off the rails.

(One hypothesis in the link below is that we might not be the first intelligent civilization to self-destruct.)

After thousands of generations of suffering and struggling to get this far — and in the footsteps of DaVinci, Galileo, and Einstein . . . Jefferson, Franklin, and Lincoln . . . Gandhi, Mandela, and King — are we really going to look to Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber for leadership to get us across the finish line?

That’s the immediate, urgent question, with profound ramifications for our children and their children and theirs and theirs and theirs.

And now . . .

YIKES!

The universe just keeps getting bigger.*  Every time you turn around, there’s another even more astounding way of expressing it — and how infinitesimally small and insignificant we are by comparison.

This post (thanks, Pete Roehrig) says there are between 100 billion and 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone (Wait a minute! how can science, as advanced as it is — and with stars as big as they are — not know whether it’s 100 billion or 400 billion?) . . .

. . . and “roughly an equal number of galaxies in the observable universe” (how can you be off by two or three hundred billion galaxies?) . . .

. . . “which means that for every grain of sand on Earth, there are 10,000 stars out there.”

And — based on assumptions it calls conservative — 100 Earth-like planets for every grain of sand in the world.

And 100,000 planets with intelligent life in our one galaxy alone.

My God: think of all the new languages we’d have to learn — all with words for “hot” and “cold” and “big” and “small,” but some with dozens of different words for variants of slime.

So — asks the article — where are they?  Why haven’t we heard from them?

That, we learn, is “The Fermi Paradox.”

And the possible explanations include this one (paraphrasing very loosely):  No one’s out there because every time a civilization gets as close as we now are to “solving it all” — nearly free energy, nearly free communications, the ability to colonize other worlds — it hurtles off the rails.

Not to put this all on Sarah Palin, but you get my drift.

If you have time, read the whole post.

Meanwhile, how astounding that until a geological instant ago there were no posts — no printed words.  That when my grandparents were born there were no radios, TVs, or computers.  And that now millions of books and articles, if you have a smart phone, are in your pocket.  With pictures.  In color.

We are at the climax of 50,000 years’ effort.  Will we live happily ever after or render our spaceship uninhabitable?  Some think our best chance for success will come from lowering taxes on the wealthy, banning contraception, and allowing the free market to take care of the rest.

Others disagree.  I hope they vote November 4.

*Literally — and at an accelerating rate.  But that’s not what I mean.

SHOULD YOU RETAIN A FINANCIAL ADVISOR?

It turns out that the 28-page Vanguard Research paper I summarized yesterday is available on line, for those interested in the details and underlying assumptions.  (Thanks Ron Sheldon.)  Does it make sense to pay a financial advisor $20,000 a year (1% of your $2 million, say)?  For most people, I’d suggest spending $11.46 or $9.99 instead.  But there will always be exceptions.  (And before they sign on with an advisor, they might first note the blinking asterisk down to the right of this post — Ask Less — and consider the 10 Reasons he gives for why you shouldn’t retain him, either.)

BEARS

You were impressed by that bear Monday?  Who wouldn’t be?  But check out this bear — and his friends the lion and the tiger.  There’s even a nice moral to their story.

BULLS

Former Congressman Allen West of “The Guardian Fund” is soliciting my support — $5 or more — to help impeach the President . . . so that he “may finally answer for the things he has done to destroy this country.”  

I decided  not to give because I actually like that the stock market has doubled on the President’s watch, reaching all-time highs.  To me, this suggests that capitalists think this country is not being destroyed but, rather, remains a good bet.  (And that sooner or later, the Republicans will let us put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure.)  And I like the fact that the $1.5 trillion deficit President Bush handed President Obama has been cut by two-thirds so that the Debt is no longer growing faster than the economy as a whole.  And I like the fact that everyone now has access to affordable health care — or will, once Republican governors stop rejecting the Medicaid expansion money that’s theirs for the taking.  And that health care costs have risen slower than at any time in decades and that our energy situation is so much improved and that we have three times as many women on the Supreme Court and no longer discriminate nearly so flagrantly against our LGBT friends, neighbors, coworkers, and relatives.  I don’t even mind the fact that we’re not engaged in disastrous wars.

You know whom I’d like to impeach?  The Republican leadership that will allow practically nothing to come up for a vote, lest it pass and we move forward.

Impeachment is not in the cards, but are you signed up to vote?

This 28-page March, 2014, paper — from Vanguard, no less, famous for advocating low fees — argues that they are.

Sort of.

“Putting A Value On Your Value” — which Vanguard makes available to the financial advisors through whom it sells a lot of Vanguard fund shares — concludes:

For some investors, the value of working with an advisor is peace of mind.  Although this value does not lend itself to objective quantification, it is very real nonetheless.  For others, we found that working with an advisor can add “about 3%” in net returns when following the Vanguard Advisor’s framework for wealth management, particularly for taxable investors.  This 3% increase in potential net returns should not be viewed as an annual value-add, it is likely to be intermittent, as some of the most significant opportunities to add value you occur during periods of market duress or euphoria when clients are tempted to abandon their well thought out investment plan.

So the advisor may add 3% in some years . . . but she or he likely charges you 1% or so every year, and that cuts into your return.

The 3% — 300 basis points — is figured to come from 7 things:

1. Asset Allocation.  No specific value is assigned to this one, but Vanguard is right in saying it can be valuable.  If you are a person of some wealth who would otherwise fail to allocate his assets intelligently among the various alternatives — stocks, bonds, real estate, and so on — an advisor can help.  A sensible blend of asset classes can lower risk without lowering return; or enhance return without raising risk.

2. Cost Effective Implementation — 45 basis points.  If you need an advisor to tell you to use low-cost index funds (like Vanguard’s, for example), Vanguard figures that advisor may save you 45 basis points for having done so.  I think it’s way more: the typical actively managed fund, between its fees and the extra drag inherent in its active buying and selling of stocks — plus its tax inefficiency — can easily set you back 200 or 300 or 400 basis points — 2% or 3% or 4% — a year.  But maybe you don’t need to pay someone to tell you that.

3. Rebalancing — 35 basis points.  If you want to be allocated 60/40 between stocks and bonds (say), your portfolio will go out of whack if and as stocks rise relative to bonds.  An advisor can help you do that math and remind you to rebalance your holdings from time to time.

4. “Behavioral coaching” — 150 basis points.  Basically, this is getting clients not to panic and sell at the bottom (or join the stampede and buy at the top).

5. Asset Location – from 0 to 75 basis points.  This has to do with deciding which assets should be in a taxable account and which in a tax-deferred account.  If you only have one or the other, there’s nothing to decide.  But if you have both, and are an idiot, you certainly would need someone to teach you, each year, to put your taxable bonds in tax-deferred accounts, and the assets on which you hope to have very-long-term capital gains in your taxable account.

6. Withdrawal Order – up to 70 basis points.  Again, if you have both taxable and tax-deferred accounts, an advisor can explain that withdrawing money from the retirement account can entail large taxes, so suggest that you fund your spending needs from taxable accounts instead.

7. Total Return Versus Income Investing – no points assigned, but potentially valuable to a retiree trying to decide how to fund his or her spending needs.  Should he put more money in high yielding stocks and bonds to produce more current income?  Or should he or she keep the balance unchanged, but sell a few shares of stock to make up the income shortfall that results from today’s low interest rates?

It’s an interesting paper, neither overselling nor underselling its case, and providing interesting “backup” to explain its findings and assumptions.  I haven’t done it full justice here.  If you’re interested, you can read the whole thing.

The goal of my book is to take the place of a financial advisor for those with insufficient assets to afford one . . . (the advisor who gave me the Vanguard booklet has a $1 million minimum) . . . as well as for those who don’t want or need one.

And to help those who do want to work with an advisor chose one — and work with her — with more confidence.

A BEAR

Have you seen this one?  (Thanks, Mel.)

Well, if you taught your pet to roll over, shake hands or play dead, don’’t go spraining your shoulder patting yourself on the back.  Look what this guy did.

A POEM

So much depends upon

by Tom Chandler

the blonde woman who drops a potato
in the supermarket parking lot where it rolls
beneath the 89 Dodge Ram with rust patches
near the left rear fender from contact with
too much road salt during the winter of 91
which was actually one of the mildest on record
though the driver tends to remember it
as the season he was fired from his job
at the aluminum window factory where
he had worked for nearly sixteen years
without promotion as he shifts into reverse
and backs over the potato which squishes
as softly as a dream’s last breath and leaves
slick asphalt for the lot boy to slip on
as he pushes a train of shopping carts
and sprains his lumbar vertebrae just
days before he is scheduled to leave
for basic training to become the cool
killing machine he’s always craved
but will now have to settle for someday
making assistant produce manager
and marrying a girl he almost loves just
as the blonde woman finds herself
one potato short with dinner guests
ringing the doorbell.

“So much depends upon” by Tom Chandler from Toy Firing Squad. © Wind Publications, 2008.

A HOME

A sharp 78-year-old passes this along:

During a visit to my doctor, I asked him, “How do you determine whether or not an older person should be put in an old age home?”

“Well,” he said, “we fill up a bathtub, then we offer a teaspoon, a teacup and a bucket to the person and ask them to empty the bathtub.”

“Oh, I understand,” I said. “A normal person would use the bucket because it is bigger than the spoon or the teacup.”

“No” he said. “A normal person would pull the plug. Do you want a bed near the window?”

Bah-DUM-bum.