Archive for June 22nd, 2008
The GHG Spot: North Pole May Be Ice Free for First Time This Summer
Arctic warming has become so dramatic that the North Pole may melt this summer...>Put oil firm chiefs on trial, says leading climate change scientist
James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.
Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech to the US Congress – in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming – to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the “perfect storm” of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.
Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.
In an interview with the Guardian he said: “When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that’s a crime.”
I think he is right, but the legal nicety is that there is porbably no law on the books that they can be charged with. And then of course there is the whole buisness of jurisdiction. In the US no other courts are recognised as legitimate, since the US does not sign treaties that would allow its officials to be put on trial. Because, of course, for most of the Bush administration, the Vice President and President have been denying right along with the buddies from the oil patch.
And while the tobacco cmpanies have had to pay large sums to both smokers and state governments, so far as I am aware no tobacco company executuve has ever served any hard time for their crimes against humanity. (I would really like to be proved wrong about that.)
Rubik’s Cube Inspired Puzzles Demonstrate Math’s “Simple Groups” [Scientific American Magazine]
Editor's Note: The online puzzles mentioned in the July magazine can be found here.
Millions of people have been perplexed at one time or another by Rubik’s Cube, a fascinating puzzle that took the world by storm in the 1980s. If you somehow missed the puzzle--or the 1980s--the cube is a plastic gizmo that appears to be made up of 27 small cubes, or “cubies,” stacked into a larger cube, three cubies to an edge. Each of the six square faces of the larger cube is colored in one of six eye-catching colors--typically blue, green, orange, red, yellow or white. We said the cube appears to be a stack of cubies, but appearances here are deceptive. An ingenious mechanism, invented in 1974 by a Hungarian teacher named Erno Rubik (and, independently, in 1976 by a Japanese engineer named Terutoshi Ishige), enables any of the six square faces of the large cube to be twisted about the center of that face. Twist the faces in some random sequence five or six times, and you have a cube so scrambled that only an expert--a cubemeister--can restore order. The object of the puzzle is to put an arbitrarily scrambled cube back into its original state, one solid color per face, thereby “solving” the cube.
[More]How to Solve the Rubik’s Cube [Features]
This story is a supplement to the feature "Rubik's Cube Inspired Puzzles Demonstrate Math's "Simple Groups"" which was printed in the July 2008 issue of Scientific American.
Solving the authors’ new puzzles builds on techniques developed for the study of mathematical entities called groups. One essential technique from group theory is specifying a simple, unambiguous system for writing down the elements of the group and how they combine.
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