atomic_fungus (atomic_fungus) wrote,

#2402: Those pesky Laws of Thermodyamics don't apply to global warming!

The headline should read "Colder winters possible due to global warming--study" because that is exactly the point the article tries to make. They don't say it that way because then it would be bloody obvious how fuckin' stupid the idea is.

The study it cites says that warming melts sea ice, which "...causes some regional warming of lower air levels and may lead to anomalies in atmospheric airstreams, triggering an overall cooling of the northern continents."

Because, y'know, that pesky detail that entropy tends to a maximum just gets in the way of the global warming agenda.

See, if you have two masses of air--one hot, one cold--and there's nothing separating them, heat will transfer from the hot mass to the cool mass. This is as inevitable as water seeking its own level. You can't raise the temperature of the hot mass and have the temperature of the cold mass go down; that's physically impossible.

Okay, let me emphasize that: it's physically impossible. It's not a matter of opinion or "concensus" but physically impossible.

* * *

Leonidas over at Eternity Road is talking about boycotting commercial air travel until and unless the TSA is reined in.

I'm with him.

My main reason for linking his post, though, is the cartoon which accompanies it. It's 100% true. Actually, the whole damn post is 100% true. (Possibly 200%.)

* * *

Advice Goddess debunks the notion that McDonald's hamburgers aren't food.
Somebody did this test that had all the fast-food haters coming out of the woodwork to say "Seeee! McDonald's is pure eeee-vil!" And then other somebodies repeated it and found (and concluded) the same thing.

The test entails leaving out a McDonald's hamburger for days, months or years, and showing children that it remains pretty much the same -- it does not rot.
Then she goes on to link someone with some sense who discusses the matter:
...[T]he burger doesn't rot because it's small size and relatively large surface area help it to lose moisture very fast.

Actually, jerky is made by dehydrating the meat at a relatively low temperature (100-odd degrees does fine as long as the air is dry).

...but hamburger does not readily rot, even uncooked. How do I know this?

When I lived in Cedar Rapids, one evening I decided to defrost a hunk of ground beef in order to cook something. My microwave did a yeoman's job of defrosting meat but I usually had to strip off a layer of defrosted meat to keep it from cooking while the inner (still frozen) part defrosted. No biggie.

Except this particular evening, I completely forgot about the meat left in the microwave. I cooked my meal and ate it and went on to do whatever it was I was doing that night.

A week passed; and I began noticing this odd odor in the kitchen. It wasn't coming from the garbage can; it wasn't the cat box. The sink was clean. There was nothing in the fridge which had gone bad. Try as I might, I couldn't locate the source of the smell. I even looked for dead mice, but there were no mice in that apartment.

A day or so after the big search, I realized that I had not looked in the microwave...and there--in the middle of the microwave--was about a pound of ground beef, seriously rancid.

You'd expect rotten meat to stink, wouldn't you? This stuff was whiffy but not rotten; it had mostly just dried out. It hadn't had a chance to rot much before the moisture evaporated from it. Which is good, because that meant I didn't have to replace the microwave; I just swabbed it out with glass cleaner and it was fine.

I think that one of the things most of the anti-fast-food people ("food nazis") hate about McDonald's et al is that they provide cheap, nourishing food. Okay, it's not the best food for you, not according to modern dietary science. You're supposed to eat five tons of sticks and twigs per day, and only one tiny serving of meat, and for God's sake don't eat any trans fats!

When I was a kid, the "food pyramid" was built around protein; meat and dairy were a big part of the diet. Vegetables were also essential, as were grains, but it wasn't lopsided like it is now, where you're only supposed to have about eight to twelve ounces of meat per day and the rest should be sticks and twigs and berries.

McDonald's and the rest of them continue to thrive because they serve food Americans like, not because of some kind of heinous underhanded alien corporate conspiracy. That drives the food nazis absolutely bonkers: the way they see it, Americans are too stupid to choose to eat the right foods! So the food nazis want to ban fast food, or make it prohibitively expensive.

That's why San Francisco has prohibited McDonald's from selling Happy Meals. It's not really about nutrition so much as it is about being able to tell people what they may and may not feed themselves and their kids. (Also because San Francisco is populated with lunatics.)

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, there are billions of people who wish they could buy a Happy Meal for about an hour's worth of unskilled labor at local prices. One Happy Meal. Per day. Because it would represent doubling their daily caloric intake and a serious upgrade to their nutrition.

That's not an argument for banning Happy Meals here; that's an argument for exporting capitalism all over the world.

* * *

I've been doing a lot of sleeping over the past couple of days. The antibiotics are working; I am feeling considerably less shitty than I have been. My head is still crammed full of gunk but the Sudafed and the Claritin are helping to keep that under control.

I couldn't remember if I'd taken Sudafed yesterday morning, so I ended up putting off taking a dose until 11 PM--big mistake, because when I woke up last night it was with a sinus headache that I still had at 5 AM this morning.

Sudafed raises your blood pressure; I have to be careful about that. Nothing else works for me, though; so for the duration of this sinus infection I'm taking it. I just didn't want to risk a double dose of that stuff.

I did that once; I never want to do it again. I was loopy as a bowl of breakfast cereal for three hours after accidentally double-dosing on Sudafed. Man, that sucked.

...some people would say, "Oh, man, that was a rockin' buzz!" but I dislike being intoxicated, especially because that means I can't see straight and I'm dizzy and have trouble concentrating. I don't need to be more stupid.

* * *

Argh. Why do people insist on using kanji for OST track titles?

I've just finished with a torrent of the Haruhi music--all of it, apparently, including character singles and a bunch of other useless crap--and the actual OST music are the only tracks with the names in kanji. The very tracks I want. Stupid people.

* * *

So WoW did another patch, and my user interface is now being displayed in tiny-vision. The minimap, the action bars, everything is about 70% of its former size. There's no way to change it, either.

Anyway, the new patch also disables the procedural water on my system, which I thought looked great. It worked fine, yet now suddenly my video card doesn't support it? WTF.

Guess I'll have to go in search of a new video driver that won't force WoW to drop to a software cursor, yet which will allow me to run WoW in nifty-vision. Argh.

UPDATE: The Haruhi music, however, is complete. The OST includes all the music used in the series, including the short bits from the cultural festival and the music from the game Day of Sagittarius III.

UPDATE II:...but not the TV-length OP and ED themes. Weird.

  • #7750: I did it again!


  • #7749: No, it didn't happen


  • #7748: Decidedly warm outside, old boy


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