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COULTON’s “thing a week” and the “Jonathan Coulton Project” are available as podcasts. Subscribe.

For a good time, play both videos at the same time.

Recently a good friend commented in her del.icio.us feed and made the following bold statement regarding an article about breastfeeding:

Man, you can’t trust ANY study you read nowadays! Eggs are bad, eggs are good, wine is bad, wine is good. I just don’t know anymore.

I think it’s important for the public to know the truth about these shocking claims. We’ve got science to back us up here; everybody who follows the field and knows anything about anything agrees: Wine is good.

This comes on good authority from any number of people. There is more supporting evidence for this than there is for any other proposition in the history of man. Using rigorously sound mathematical, logical and entomological methods, I will prove it to you.

First, it is delicious. What else needs be said? Each different variety is more yummy than the next¹. If you disagree, you are wrong. It’s as simple as that. You can demonstrate this to yourself using the scientific method. Hypothesis: wine is yummy. Your test: drink a bottle of wine. After the test, you will find the hypothesis verified. If you did not enjoy the wine, your testing methods were incorrect. Try again.

Next, there are many different kinds of wine. As the point most open to debate, this is often called out by wrongheaded wine detractors. There are, they say, very few varieties of wine, sometimes boiling it down to just “red” and “white.” I’m here to tell you that there is also pink and deeper shades of burgundy that the simple moniker “red” fail to properly capture.

Third, it is medically beneficial. Any ailment can be made to seem unimportant with the proper application of wine. As perception is reality, this is proof positive. Above and beyond this logical slam dunk there is more supporting anecdotal evidence — which is the best kind of evidence — than any one proposition needs. I’ve heard at least five stories in which doctors recommended a glass of wine with dinner, and probably seven where a sommelier did the same. That’s twelve members of highly respected fields. You can’t argue with that.

Fourth: Etc.

There are people out there who will disagree. Some of these people have been awarded degrees from the nation’s finest medical schools. I am sorry to say that they are all wrong, no matter what their reasoning. Unless they can soundly refute points one through four above — and they can’t — their opinion carries no water. I hope that after all of this mercilessly insightful logic you agree with me, because wine is in fact good. You can take that to the bank.

1. Order depending on taste, of course.

I’ve been thinking about this one for a while, and I believe that Stephanie and I came up with the answer the other night. I’ll rot13 our results to avoid spoiling it for everybody. I encourage you all to ponder this in your spare time. Draw your own conclusions, and don’t believe the hype.

Q: Who killed Al Gore’s inconvienent electric truth about Guantanamo?

A: Evpxl Obool

While not the most terse way to make this particular point, I think it’s pretty effective.

From information aesthetics

Note that this infographic is (hopefully) dated by now, as “US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called for an urgent ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, conditional on both sides addressing the root cause of the conflict.”

In a report to congress, the National Academy of Sciences had the gall to contradict well-established science fiction and suggest that the earth is hotter than it should be and it’s that way because of human activity.

The Earth is the hottest it has been in at least 400 years, probably even longer. The National Academy of Sciences, reaching that conclusion in a broad review of scientific work requested by Congress, reported Thursday that the “recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia.”

A panel of top climate scientists told lawmakers that the Earth is running a fever and that “human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming.” Their 155-page report said average global surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rose about 1 degree during the 20th century.

Obviously this is some sort of conspiracy on the part of those data-loving academics to keep corporate-sponsored research down. It’s a gross limitation of our freedom of expression and I don’t understand why we as Americans stand for it. And what about that name: National Academy of Sciences. Why, it might as well be “The People’s Academy of Sciences” for its clearly anti-corporate stances. Damn those scientists and their method! Damn their data! Damn them all!

The best argument against electric cars that I hear is that they take too long charge relative to the distance they can take you. A team at MIT is working on capacitor-based batteries that would charge in seconds and would need to be replaced much more rarely than chemical batteries.

They turned to the capacitor, which was invented nearly 300 years ago. Schindall explains, “We made the connection that perhaps we could take an old product, a capacitor, and use a new technology, nanotechnology, to make that old product in a new way.”

Rechargable and disposable batteries use a chemical reaction to produce energy. “That’s an effective way to store a large amount of energy,” he says, “but the problem is that after many charges and discharges … the battery loses capacity to the point where the user has to discard it.”

Schindall Battery Researcher But capacitors contain energy as an electric field of charged particles created by two metal electrodes. Capacitors charge faster and last longer than normal batteries. The problem is that storage capacity is proportional to the surface area of the battery’s electrodes, so even today’s most powerful capacitors hold 25 times less energy than similarly sized standard chemical batteries.

The researchers solved this by covering the electrodes with millions of tiny filaments called nanotubes. Each nanotube is 30,000 times thinner than a human hair. Similar to how a thick, fuzzy bath towel soaks up more water than a thin, flat bed sheet, the nanotube filaments on increase the surface area of the electrodes and allow the capacitor to store more energy. Schindall says this combines the strength of today’s batteries with the longevity and speed of capacitors.

I’d put off reading about el Presidente’s signing statements because, honestly, I’d rather just wait until the coronation to find out that he’s abolished congress and the supreme court and declared himself emperor for life. Anyway, this joyful little nugget appeared as part of the Boston Globe’s piece on W’s executive signing orders.

Dec. 30: When requested, scientific information ”prepared by government researchers and scientists shall be transmitted [to Congress] uncensored and without delay.”

Bush’s signing statement: The president can tell researchers to withhold any information from Congress if he decides its disclosure could impair foreign relations, national security, or the workings of the executive branch.

This from the guy who supports the teaching of the horriffically harmful pseudoscience intelligent design and takes the word of a science fiction author over that of the science research community. Why do people still stand behind this guy? Seriously. How can one say that they care abour or even vaguely understand the importance of science to this nation or the world as a whole and not denounce this raving lunatic?

A study recently accepted to the Journal of Geophysical Research suggests that deliberate CFC reductions are responsible for partial recovery of the ozone layer. However, in certain circumstances, the recovery is more than can be explained by CFC reductions alone.

What they found is both good news and a puzzle.

The good news: In the upper stratosphere (above roughly 18 km), ozone recovery can be explained almost entirely by CFC reductions. “Up there, the Montreal Protocol seems to be working,” says co-author Mike Newchurch of the Global Hydrology and Climate Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

The puzzle: In the lower stratosphere (between 10 and 18 km) ozone has recovered even better than changes in CFCs alone would predict. Something else must be affecting the trend at these lower altitudes.

It will be interesting to find out what caused the additional recovery. Either way, congratulations to the Montreal Protocol for mitigating what could have turned to an ugly situation.