There is no such thing as a free lunch, part 549

Recently, on Zach Weinersmith's SMBC:

The embedded comment in the original comic (you'll have to click the link above to see for yourself) is, "The front part of my gas powered car is also emission free."

It's not quite as bleak as Mr. Weinersmith portrays it. Yet, if you consult the Wikipedia entry for Lithium-Ion battery, you will find (as of 2/23/22, internal links and footnotes removed):

Extraction of lithium, nickel, and cobalt, manufacture of solvents, and mining byproducts present significant environmental and health hazards. Lithium extraction can be fatal to aquatic life due to water pollution. It is known to cause surface water contamination, drinking water contamination, respiratory problems, ecosystem degradation and landscape damage. It also leads to unsustainable water consumption in arid regions (1.9 million liters per ton of lithium). Massive byproduct generation of lithium extraction also presents unsolved problems, such as large amounts of magnesium and lime waste.

Lithium mining takes place in North and South America, Asia, South Africa, Australia, and China.

Cobalt for Li-ion batteries is largely mined in the Congo....

The linked Wikipedia article also notes, "Cobalt sourced from the Democratic Republic of the Congo is often mined by workers using hand tools with few safety precautions, resulting in frequent injuries and deaths. Pollution from these mines has exposed people to toxic chemicals that health officials believe to cause birth defects and breathing difficulties. Human rights activists have alleged, and investigative journalism reported confirmation, that child labor is used in these mines" (internal links and footnotes omitted).

I'm not suggesting that you ditch your Tesla, if you have one, or don sackcloth and ashes for the sin of driving a Prius.

EVs provide still another illustration, if one were really still needed, that there is nothing perfect in this very imperfect human world. The issue is whether EVs are better, on balance, for the world generally, and for the environment in particular, than gasoline-guzzling vehicles. I suspect that the scales tip, at least slightly, in favor of EVs, particularly when one considers the horrors that pertrodollars (or petroeuros) have unleashed on the world.

Kids in the Congo may balance the scales differently, I understand.

Which is why the search for 'clean' energy no more ends with EVs than it did with swapping coal for wood.

A lesson in relativity involving relatives

According to my calendar, it has been only one month since Christmas Eve.

This seems impossible to me, and perhaps it may seem so to you, now that I've called it to your attention.

So much has happened since.

To set the scene, Middle Son and his wife Margaret were very responsible and grown-up and decided that, since their youngest (he's just more than nine months old now) had been exposed to COVID-19 at Daycare at the beginning of that week, they should stay at home on Christmas Eve, lest any of them or their three children turn out to be contagious.

I pouted. But the often-dormant grown-up part of me eventually surfaced, understood, and (reluctantly) accepted their decision.

So only four of our five children could be with us for Christmas Eve.

It all worked out, as these things do. But in the rush of events leading to our Christmas Eve gathering, Younger Daughter and Olaf asked Olaf's parents to watch their four kids on December 23. Olaf's parents are not vaccinated against COVID-19, and deliberately, and defiantly, so. But they were in apparently good health on that occasion.

They were less healthy on Christmas Day, when Younger Daughter and Olaf brought the kids by for more presents, but they didn't mention it.

If you are tempted to contrast the behavior of Olaf's parents unfavorably with that of Middle Son and Margaret on this divisive issue of guarding against infecting others, I will not try to stop you. Anyway, Olaf's parents got progressively sicker after Christmas, to the point where, after first floating the notion that they must have picked something up from the grandkids, they actually sought testing. (They have both recovered, as far as I know, and neither required hospitalization -- thank you milder omicron variant -- but they were pretty sick for a solid week or so.)

Middle Son and Margaret's exposure turned out not to result in any Covid at their house, and they were thinking of rejoining the world in time for New Year's Eve, but the positive diagnoses of Olaf's parents scotched that idea pretty quick. Depending on your attitude, I suppose, Middle Son was either being Eeyore or merely philosophical when he predicted that, once his kids went back to school and Daycare they'd catch the Covid for real. Meanwhile, Olaf and Younger Daughter and all their kids came down with the disease. (Oddly enough, the two grandkids under five, who can't be vaccinated, had it worst. The rest, who are as vaccinated and/or boostered as their ages will permit, exhibited mild symptoms only.)

Anyway, Middle Son's pessimistic prediction proved accurate. We eventually delivered all the Christmas presents for his family still at our house along with chicken soup and crackers and Cuban sandwiches (so they wouldn't have to cook) and other things that were meant to provide aid and comfort whilst they recuperated. (Middle Son had not yet been boostered; he seemed to have the most serious case, even more substantial than his kids, none of whom are old enough to be vaccinated.) Long Suffering Spouse and I wore masks when we dropped these off on their front porch and ran like flushed pheasants.

Oldest Son and Abby went to Notre Dame's bowl game debacle in Arizona. We babysat Rodent, their now elderly dog. On the flight back from Arizona to Chicago, they were seated in front of a man who kept hacking and wheezing. Though they're both fully vaxxed and boostered, when Oldest Son came down with a sore throat, a few days later, Abby insisted he take a Covid test. He turned up positive, too.

Why did you bother getting tested when you had such negligible symptoms? I asked him via text when he reported the diagnosis. Well, he replied, Abby is paranoid about these things. She insisted. (Fully vaxxed and boostered, they both recovered quickly.)

So much has gone on -- and that's just the family Covid report card. Surely, two months must have elapsed since Christmas, or even three....

But, no, the calendar insists it has been only a month as of today.

Physicists will tell you that time slooooows down, relative to a stationary observer, as a traveler approaches the speed of light. Our hypothetical space traveler would potentially age far less on a near lightspeed trip to Proxima Centauri than would her friends and family on Earth. Eons might pass outside in the seconds it might take someone trapped in the event horizon of a black hole to be pulled into his constituent atoms. Time, they teach us, is relative.

As if we didn't already know that instinctively! Duck into a tavern sometime on your way home from work for a quick one. Hours may pass for your anxious and then angry spouse waiting at home, while only a few happy minutes seem to pass by inside the gin mill. The minutes stretch out to infinity and beyond when you're waiting for someone to return a phone call. Meanwhile, time compresses to a whoosh when you have to leave by a certain time and you just have one more thing you want to finish. For a grownup, the weeks before Christmas rush by in a mad blur. For a little kid, the weeks before Christmas are an agonizingly slow torture. Every minute is an hour, every hour is a day.

And in the crush of events following another Pandemic holiday, as happened to me this morning, one can be jolted by the realization that the months that have zoomed by since Christmas have really only taken 30 days....

Masked confusion

In his most recent Sunday strip, Stephan Pastis engaged in sorta-kinda wishful thinking. Yes, Lucy pulled the ball away, as always, but, right now, in the U.S. at least, nobody is seriously saying that the COVID-19 pandemic is over.

New reported infections have reached record levels, hospitalizations are soaring, ICU beds are scarce -- it's gotten very old. It's like Groundhog's Day every day... except the calendar advances and we're all Bill Murray. I remember when we used to chuckle acidly when we asked whether the "two weeks to flatten the curve" were up yet. It may have still been amusing two months in. We're coming up on two years now of these miserable two weeks.

Until recently, anyway, the Curmudgeon family has fared remarkably well during this time. During the initial phase of the lockdown, Long Suffering Spouse (who, as you will recall, is a teacher) learned the intricacies of Google Classroom and a bunch of other related stuff. However, as the Spanish teacher, she was not required to conduct regular classes during the Spring of 2020 (the focus then was on keeping the kids going on math, English, and history). While Long Suffering Spouse did all sorts of school-related work during that time, she did have more time on her hands than she was used to.

Then, one gloomy Saturday in April -- on or about April 4 is my best guess but, of course, all the days were really the same when most everyone took the lockdown seriously -- we saw a story on the news about masks.

I know it must be hard to recollect, now, nearly two years later, but there was a time when the public health authorities were not all persuaded about the utility of masks. In fact, some authorities -- recognized authorities I'm talking here, not YouTube or TikTok crazies -- were concerned that constantly wearing masks might endanger the health of the persons wearing the masks! And, besides, they argued then, there was no certainty that wearing a mask would ward off a COVID-19 infection.

Of course, at that time -- and remember, please, I'm talking about nearly two years ago now -- there was some serious dispute as to whether Covid could be contracted from the air. It turns out -- I remember looking this up, and I had a lot of time, at that time, to look things up -- that medicine generally has (had? by now hopefully had?) a knee-jerk prejudice against believing in airborne viruses. So... droplets? Sure. Contaminated bananas at the grocery? Wipe everything down before putting anything away. It doesn't matter if I don't have all the details right here; I'm confident I have the gist of it.

Health care professionals should wear masks -- that was the original position -- but the rest of us either did not need them or, even if we did, should not wear them because PPP, like toilet paper, was a scarce commodity. It was our patriotic duty not to wear masks. Save them for the doctors and nurses and EMTs!

And that's why, that gloomy April Saturday nearly two years ago, it came as a bit of a surprise when the TV news advised the CDC had decided that mask-wearing might not be such a bad idea for everyone after all. However, since PPP was still scarce as hen's teeth, we the people should go online and find patterns for cloth masks. Thus advised, Long Suffering Spouse immediately got up and got out the sewing machine. And started making masks. Lots of masks. For us. For the kids. For the grandkids.

Her early models had long ties, kind of like the surgical masks on old TV doctor shows. Mask down, I was Ben Casey (I'd leave the bottom string tied up around my neck). Mask up, I was fixin' to rob the 3:10 stage from Dodge City. (Throw down that chest with the railroad payroll money!)

But Long Suffering Spouse soon graduated to models with elastic ear loops. And we ran out of old sheets pretty quick, too. That meant trips -- careful, cautious trips -- to Michael's or JoAnn Fabrics for cloth for masks. In the many, many months since, Long Suffering Spouse has created all sorts of seasonal masks. She needed 'em -- her school was open throughout the 2020-2021 school year and she wore a new mask each day -- and she would fill special orders from the kids and grandkids too (you want unicorns? mermaids? no problem).

I had my one brief shining moment concerning masks during one of these fabric scrounging trips some months back. I saw a bolt of gray fabric with a black and white Dunder Mifflin Paper Company logo. "Grab some of this," I suggested, "the kids will love masks made from this pattern." My wife had no idea what I was talking about -- but she got the fabric and made the masks and the kids did like them. I think one of the kids, or at least an in-law, actually wore The Office mask on a brief trip to his or her actual office. Remember just a couple of months ago... when people were talking about reopening offices?

Anyway, I think it safe enough to say that Long Suffering Spouse has a serious investment in cloth masks. A personal investment.

But the news changed again, just within the past few days. The omicron variant is so contagious that cloth masks alone will no longer suffice. Even if decorated with mermaids, unicorns, or the logo of a fictional paper company. Cloth masks would have to be worn, if at all, with the blue surgical masks. Better yet, according to the latest thinking, we should all start wearing the KN95 masks or their equivalents (the equivalents have similar names but are manufactured in different places) that were in such short supply at the outset of these interminable two weeks.

And then the news advised that all of Chicago's 50 aldermen had been provided with KN95 masks to give away to constituents.

Apparently the supplies of KN95 masks have been replenished. (But... have you noticed? Toilet paper seems to be getting scarce again. On our last two trips to the grocery, before and after Christmas, the shelves that weren't empty in the toilet paper aisle were filled with no-name, off-brand substitutes....)

Anyway, my course was clear. And, if I hadn't figured it out all by myself, Long Suffering Spouse made sure I understood: I was to get myself to the alderman's office posthaste and grab me as many of those masks as I could get. And maybe I could ask, while I was at it, if some of these special masks might be made available to the teachers at my wife's school.

It's good to have a purpose. I've spent most of this global Pandemic as an empty vessel into which stimulus checks might be poured. The checks didn't make up for the costs of groceries I consumed... but it was some contribution anyway.

Anyway, I sent an email to the alderman's office inquiring about the availability of the masks, and while I was at it I asked about masks for the teachers as well. I got a prompt response, too: The alderman had made arrangements to take care of the school.

You could read the email in such a way as to think that maybe I had something to do with that. Long Suffering Spouse thought so, when I forwarded it to her. Her principal may have thought so, too, when Long Suffering Spouse forwarded it to her.

But the truth of the matter is entirely different. The alderman and one of the other teacher's husbands are buddies and the masks came through him.

Ah well.

But I did pick up our household allotment of 10 KN95 masks and Long Suffering Spouse is wearing one of them now. Or maybe one of the ones dropped off at the school. These masks all look alike. No mermaids or unicorns or anything.

I guess we need them. The Covid is all around us. Again. And, unlike past surges, or peaks, the disease has this time hit close to home: Since November, four of my five kids, three of their spouses, and seven of my grandkids have come down with the bug. Only four of my grandkids are old enough to receive vaccinations, but everyone who could has had at least two shots. Most of us (including me) are fully vaxxed and boostered. Thankfully, the virus has made no one in our immediate family seriously ill. My wife attributes this to the vaccinations and the masks. She's probably right. But I don't care as much as I suppose I should: I just want this to be over.

A creature from your worst nightmares: A millipede as big as a car

You're looking at a picture of a Giant African Millipede, this one from the Happy Hollow Park & Zoo in San Jose, California. (Do you know the way to San Jose?) (Sorry... couldn't help myself.)

Anyway, if you look at the stats thoughtfully provided by the zoo at the link in the preceding paragraph, you'll see that this creepy critter is typically eight to 12 inches long... and can get up to 15 inches long. If your stomach is strong enough, you can click around the Intertubes and find pictures of these slimy devils crawling on peoples' hands... and sometimes their faces.

Yet this guy is a midget. A piker. A Lilliputian.

At least by comparison to the nine-foot long fossil millipede found recently in England. The link is to a USA Today story, by Jordan Mendoza, reprinted on Yahoo! News.

Although I'd prefer to believe that Mendoza is just joshing with us, I am obliged to report that the story is also on CNN, Live Science, and NPR.

England was closer to the Equator 326 million years ago and this behemoth, called Arthropleura, flourished in the warm, tropical conditions that then prevailed.

Arthropleura now displaces Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, a giant sea scorpion, as the largest invertebrate currently known to science.

(Of course, who knows what tomorrow may bring?)

I don't want anyone to think that I knew all this off the top of my head. I didn't. In fact, until I saw the linked Yahoo! News article, if asked, I probably would have said that the largest invertebrate known to scinece was a centipede that Long Suffering Spouse once saw on the living room ceiling one cool autumn morning. If the fur on that creature could have been preserved, it might have made her a fashionable-looking jacket. Or at least a stole.

Not that she would have worn it.... Long Suffering Spouse has a particular aversion to centipedes (or anything else that trespasses on the premises but belongs in the Great Outdoors).

How Warren Buffett proved that time travel will not exist for the foreseeable future

Mr. Buffett

Even those who don't follow sports will recall that Warren Buffett teamed with Quicken Loans to offer a billion dollars (that's billion with a "b") to anyone who could accurately predict the outcome of each and every game in this year's NCAA tournament.

Oh, sure, most people have office pools -- the winners in these may have two or three of the Final Four pegged accurately -- but Mr. Buffet's contest required entrants to correctly forecast the outcome of every game -- predict every single upset -- and identify all the winners. Mathematicians calculated odds of anywhere from 1 in a billion to something like 9.2 quintillion to 1 against -- and you had better believe all those smarty-pants mathematicians heaved a sigh of relief when the last perfect bracket was eliminated just days after the tournament began (Mercer's upset of Duke wiped out most entries).

But what does this have to do with time travel?

Think about it. Here's this immensely rich guy who made arrangements to have a billion dollars available (no, he wasn't really going to write a personal check -- you don't get to be the Oracle of Omaha by doing stupid stuff). Actually, Buffett was going to use one of his insurance companies to insure the billion and he probably had Quicken Loans, his co-sponsor, pay the premium, estimated by some at $15 million. You can probably guarantee Buffett made a profit on this deal. That's how you get to be an Oracle. Or Wizard. I hear tell he's been called both.

Anyway, Buffett's announcement makes huge news -- the Intertubes are ablaze with the billion dollar bet -- it's a PR stunt that will long be remembered... you know, well into the future?

And yet, not one of my great-great-great grandkids showed up with a cheat sheet for me to use as an entry.

In fact, nobody's did. Because if somebody's great-great-great grandson or daughter showed up with the perfect bracket, Buffett and his fellow investors would, at this point, be getting just a wee bit concerned about having to make good on the bet.

And you can imagine our little time traveler passing out investment advice after the billion is paid out, too, feathering his or her nest for a very comfortable future.

Now, this doesn't prove that time travel is impossible any more than travel into outer space proves there's no Heaven. Warren Buffett, for all his wealth and fame now, will presumably be largely forgotten in time -- it may take centuries before he is unfamiliar to historians specializing in 21st Century America, but it probably will will happen. Therefore, what this proves is that time travel will not be invented while this March Madness bet is still remembered. Time travel might be invented after Warren Buffett has faded from the footnotes of history so that no one knows what a golden opportunity the inventors of the time machine missed by not looking up their old ancestors.

Alternatively, I suppose, it could indicate that, in the future, our descendants won't care so much about money.

But that seems about as likely as correctly predicting the outcome of each and every NCAA tournament game.

"Coregasm" study, um, stimulates discussion in the Curmudgeon home

One of the things I don't generally talk about here at Second Effort is *whispering* s-e-x.

Yes, I'm old-fashioned: I still believe there are some things that should remain... private.

But the news intrudes.

I saw a female anchorperson on one of the local stations blush her way through a report about "coregasms." Apparently, some women find a real happy place doing exercise routines -- not pole-dancing, or anything involving batteries. Women in ordinary sweats, thinking about nothing more romantic than what to fix for dinner or who has a dentist's appointment on Saturday have found, in the course of a vigorous workout, that -- all of a sudden -- oh my!

The link in this sentence, to a March 20, 2012 story on the ABC News website, by Susan Donaldson James, explains that researchers at Indiana University have scientifically established that, for many women, exercise can result in, um, satisfaction.

(If my high school science classes had covered these kinds of topics I sure as shootin' would never have gone to law school!)

Long Suffering Spouse wasn't in the room when I first heard the story, and I didn't say anything about it then. But, then, yesterday, on my way home from an afternoon appointment, I heard a radio interview with Dr. Debby Herbenick, one of the authors of the IU study.

I mentioned it to Long Suffering Spouse last night after dinner.

"You're crazy," she said.

"No, wait," I said. I went online and quickly found several articles, sniggering and non-sniggering, about the topic generally and about the IU study in particular. I read excerpts to my spouse.

She listened in silence for awhile. Eventually she said, "I thought you don't like doing exercise."

"Well, no," I admitted. "But I, er, um, thought you might find this interesting."

"I'll just bet you did."

The large law firm and the ant hill compared

You're looking at an ant colony here, the queen ant being tended by her faithful, anonymous, fungible worker ants.

A partner in a large law firm is much like a queen ant. Or, depending on the annual bonuses, a queen termite.

It's not a pretty sight -- but it's efficient as all get out.

The queen in the termite mound -- or ant colony -- or beehive -- has only one function: Lay eggs. But, then, there's usually only one queen in a termite mound, etc.

There can be lots of partners in a law firm. Partners in large law firms have only two functions: Bill time or generate business. The really big partners generate business; the lesser partners bill time. Either way, they must be surrounded by faithful, anonymous and largely fungible minions whose sole purpose in life is to maximize the productivity of their assigned partner.

The partner in a large law firm never has to clear a paper jam from a printer or copier. In a really large firm, the partners may not know where the copiers are located. A large firm partner never spends an afternoon filing. S/he has people who write checks, look up cases, locate witnesses -- whatever the partner needs to keep productive, and whenever the partner needs it.

Another key difference between the ant hill and the large law firm is that, in a law firm, some of the workers may someday become partners themselves. Not the clerical help, of course, but the associates, with their fancy Ivy League degrees. They may start out legal life as props, something that the business-generating queen, er, partner, can brag on to prospective clients ("we just hired the editor of the Yale Law Journal; we turned the editor of the Harvard Law Review down flat"). However, with sheer determination, tireless struggle, the occasional sacrifice of principle (sure, we can justify ignoring those oil rig safety standards), incessant brown-nosing and false bonhomie, at least a few of the associates can some day rise to the top of the anthill.

On the other hand, in the anthill, the young and fresh worker ants tend the queen and the next generation of workers. Then, when they're older, they join foraging parties. When the survivors of these adventures get too old for that, they become the nest's guardians, rushing out to absorb the attack of any invading predator. It is difficult for a worker ant to die of old age. Of course, ulcers and heart attacks claim a lot of law firm support personnel as well; others may be fired for failing to adequately serve or protect their partner.

The National Geographic website mentions that there is a third class of honeybee, the drone. "Several hundred drones live in each hive during the spring and summer, but they are expelled for the winter months when the hive goes into a lean survival mode." This is similar to the way that associates and non-equity partners -- and the least productive partners -- are expelled from law firms whenever economic conditions warrant.

Social insects, like honeybees, are considered more 'advanced' than their solitary cousins. There are bees, wasps, and even ants who do not live in colonies, but who try and do everything themselves. In other words, solo practitioners. Like me.

I remember when Blackberries first burst on the techno-scene. All the big firm partners had them -- increased efficiency, you know -- and each email received from the device proudly bore the legend, "Sent From My Blackberry."

Of course, if the message was spelled correctly and punctuated, chances are the message was typed by a worker ant.

The big firms were behind the efiling movement that has swept the federal courts -- and is gathering momentum in the state courts as well. And why not? The partners in the big firms did nothing different from what they'd done before. They waved their hands (billing 4.5 hours for the task) and minions crafted a brief. That the brief was filed differently than heretofore would not have registered on the big firm partner -- he or she had never filed anything before either.

The problem is, I can change an ink cartridge -- even in the postage meter -- and solve paper jams deep within the copier. Given enough time (we know, now, it takes a month) I can figure out why my office Internet died. I know where all the courthouses are and how to file papers in each. But, sadly, these hard-won skills are not valued.

Gosh, I wish I had minions.

What I wished I could have said: Science and religion can be complimentary

Regular readers will recall that I'm a church-going Catholic. That doesn't make me a good Catholic, much less a good person, but it does make me different from many who are out here in the Internet, standing on our digital soapboxes, shouting at passersby.

Regular readers will also recall that I am a big fan of the comics. I read a lot of the comics that appear (or used to appear) in the Chicago newspapers on line (they're often rendered in color, even on weekdays, and bigger than they are in print) and a lot of webcomics besides. A lot of times the webcomics are crude, vulgar, tasteless and offensive, but I enjoy some, like Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, xkcd, Tree Lobsters!, or Scenes from a Multiverse (to name just a handful), often enough to keep me coming back. No one hits a home run every time. Good grief, Charlie Brown never hit one in 60 years.

Fair warning: Each of these above-listed comics can be just as crude and tasteless as webcomics generally. Don't blame me if you follow a link and are offended. But my point today is that, a lot of times, these comics can also be downright anti-religious. These webcomics have a geek following (engineers, mathematicians, scientists). It is apparently the fashion among these folks in particular to be actually hostile to religion, organized or otherwise.

Younger Daughter's boyfriend, Olaf, comes to mind in this regard. Olaf fits the demographic profile: He's a math major. And to hear Younger Daughter tell the story, his folks are hard-core Creationists. They reject evolution. Their universe was created in six days, just as Genesis says. Like a lot of kids, Olaf has reacted to his parents' views by forming equal and opposite views of his own.

Olaf is cautious in expressing his views around Long Suffering Spouse and me, but he made a passing reference recently to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He must have thought only Younger Daughter would catch his drift; he was surprised when I did. I'm not a Pastafarian, I assured him, but I try and pay attention.

Last Sunday afternoon, Younger Daughter and Olaf were out shopping -- but none of us had yet been to Mass. She promised to be home in time for the 6:00pm 'last chance' Mass that our parish offers.

But you know how these things go... time passed, they were having an enjoyable afternoon, and Younger Daughter called to ask if she could skip Mass just this once and go out to dinner with Olaf and his parents.

Long Suffering Spouse was still painting Sunday. This project had been ongoing for a month already but the finish was in sight. I was assisting (for a change). So neither of us answered Younger Daughter when she called her mother's cell phone. Youngest Son did. And, in the time-honored tradition of little brothers everywhere, he translated my "ask your mother what she thinks" into "no way, you better meet us at Mass or else you're toast."

After I actually did confer with Long Suffering Spouse, we agreed that Youngest Daughter could stay out -- but we instructed her brother to tell her. Who knows what he actually said? Thus it came to pass that Younger Daughter did show up at church. With Olaf.

Youngest Son spotted them first. They were standing way in the back, although there were plenty of available pews. They stayed there, too.

After Mass, Long Suffering Spouse was prepared to just wave in their general direction and walk past, but I said I must greet our guest. I heard later from Younger Daughter that Olaf was a little concerned about the big sappy grin on my face when I said hello. "I hope your father doesn't think that I'm converting," he told her.

Actually, I didn't think that. I was happy, though, that Olaf was willing to accommodate his girlfriend -- and us -- in something that we think important.

And there is something else I wish I could explain to him, and to all the anti-religious webcomic artists, too: Religion and science are not mortal enemies; rather, they should compliment each other. Both are concerned with searching for the truth. Science is concerned with what can be known; religion is concerned with what is not known (what can't be known). As time goes on, the domain of science increases as we know more and more of the universe around us -- and yet the domain of religion remains infinite.

Remember back in high school math, when you had to plot an asymptotic curve? The line of the curve comes ever closer to, but never intersects, the axis of the graph. Science is like this: It pushes religion ever closer to the border of irrelevance, but it will, presumably, never quite push religion over the edge.

There will always be Questions that science can not answer satisfactorily. Why are we here? What is our purpose? Does our consciousness expire with our bodies, or does it go on? Where? How? The answers to these questions are not likely to be found in a lab. And it is just as willfully ignorant for devotees of science to assert that these Questions are unimportant because they can not be answered as it is for Creationists to deny the evidence of the fossil record because it is incomplete.

I like this explanation by a Chicago Catholic priest, Fr. Robert Barron:

The basic principle is this: All truth comes from God. God is One. And, therefore, there can't be a contradiction, finally, between the truth discoverable through Reason and the truth discoverable through Faith, properly articulated. And so the unity of God -- the unity of Creation -- gives rise to this ultimate compatibility between Faith and Science.

The trick is not to get too dogmatic about either religion... or science.

Acting on instinct -- not always the best way to act

Talk about survival strategies: The primitive mammals (tiny, shrew-like quadrupeds), furtively crawling out of their burrows at dusk, watching out for dinosaurs -- big ones that might step on them and, more important, little ones looking to eat them -- would quickly dive for cover at the first whiff of trouble. Dinosaurs rumbling through? Dive into the burrow. Forest fire? Dive into the burrow. With luck, the fire would pass by without using up all the oxygen in the hidey-hole and the frightened little animal could live to cringe and cower another day.

The survival strategy really paid off when the Chicxulub asteroid hit: The cowardly little mammals took cover and enough survived to take over the world. The proud dinosaurs roared back at the heavens and went extinct. Some larger mammals had evolved by the end of the Cretaceous; a few were large enough to eat dinosaurs. They fared no better than their dinners. The K-T boundary shows us one place where the meek really did inherit the earth.

Not surprisingly, the 'duck and cover' instinct survives in all of us descendants of those timid little creatures today -- though, unhappily, it doesn't always serve us as well.

I well remember deposing a State Fire Marshal -- a grizzled veteran of four decades fighting and investigating fires -- who broke down in tears describing two children who'd died in a house fire -- a fire they might easily have escaped -- but who hid instead under a bed and were suffocated. Kids have an instinct, he explained. In a house fire, kids will naturally crawl into closets or under the bed. It is often fatal.

House fires notwithstanding, most of our modern stresses are mental, not physical. But have you ever noticed? When things go bad at work, when we start fighting with our spouses, when we can't pay the bills, when we're facing unhappy medical news, we clam up. We don't return phone calls; we don't do much of anything. We turn inward -- diving into a mental hidey-hole. I submit that this is the same hide-in-the-burrow instinct that guided our little shrew-like ancestors, but it's not all that helpful now.

As sentient creatures we can identify instinctive behaviors. We can understand that our impulses are instinctive, not rational. But it's still hard to overcome them. I'm trying.

Bumblebee population crashing?

Scientists are buzzing about a dramatic decline in American bumblebee populations.

National Geographic (from which the accompanying image was taken) and AOL both have posted stories this week about a recent study reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which claims that several species of American bumblebee have declined by 90%. A killer fungus is suspected as one possible culprit for the die-off, as is lack of genetic diversity (read: inbreeding).

Believe it or not, global warming is not identified as a reason for the decline because some bumblebee species are flourishing even as their cousins are buzzing toward extinction. Humans may still be to blame, however, because the killer fungus is even worse in Europe -- and European bees were imported to California in the early 1990s, right before the population plunge began.

Somebody may have brought in some sick bees.

When I first heard about the population crash my first thought was that perhaps bumblebees had finally been revealed as imaginary creatures. Once we realized that bumblebees don't actually exist, sensible people should no longer see them in their gardens. Why would I think bumblebees to be imaginary? Well, I remembered reading many years ago that science had 'proven' that bumblebees could not fly.

Turns out, though, that the story about bumblebees inability to fly was just another example of faulty science reporting.

Probe Finds Large Amount of Water on Moon

ABC News is reporting that the probe that NASA recently crashed into the Moon splashed up a lot more water than expected -- enough that humans might be able to set up a base inside the crater with hot and cold running water -- all locally produced.

Can we go back now?

Bad news for Curmudgeon: World won't end in 2012 after all

Oh, sure, some of you were probably relieved to learn that the Mayan calendar may have been translated incorrectly and world might not end in late 2012 after all.

But -- for me -- this was terrible news and yet another reason why I should never, ever plan.

See, I had it all figured out. At the rate I'm going, my credit cards will all max out in December 2012. If it turns out there really is a January 2013, it's going to be a real drag for me....

Please note: They call the site Fake Science

If you're reading this in, say, Texas, you might not get that right away.


These very amusing cartoons, and a lot more in this same entertaining vein, are taken from a site called Fake Science (motto: "Fake Science is for when the facts are too confusing"). (Thanks to Popehat for the introduction.)

Males obsolete? It's apparently natural...

'Natural,' that is, as in 'occurring in nature.'

And occurring, to be specific, in a species of fungus farming ants, Mycocepurus smithii that is widely distributed from Mexico south through all of South America. (The link is to Wikipedia, the legitimacy of which, according to some fearful high school teachers, is always suspect due to the past -- and possible future -- interference of Stephen Colbert, but I read about these asexual ants -- in print -- in the November issue of the Smithsonian Magazine.)

Speaking as a male, I can only hope that this trend, if it is a trend and not an evolutionary aberration, will remain confined to the kingdom of insects.

But the news put me in mind of a cartoon I'd seen on the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal some months ago:

Talk about finding a silver lining in a dark cloud... I just don't think it would work out, though, as the cartoonist fantasizes, er, imagines.

Global Climate Change: Don't just act -- THINK!

Today is Blog Action Day 2009 and I registered for the event this time because this year's topic is near and dear to my heart... Global Climate Change.

Note we don't call it "global warming" any more because, whatever may the case in some localities, and particularly at the poles, the Earth isn't warming uniformly. Today marks the 18th day in a row of below average temperatures in Chicago -- following one of the coolest summers on record.

Now, don't get excited: I'm not one of those skeptics come to scoff. Climate change has been happening on Earth for billions of years. Climate change will continue on Earth for billions of years more, regardless of the fate of our own species, until Sol swells to a red giant and Earth is either swallowed whole or the last remnants of our atmosphere are scattered to the cosmos and only a floating cinder remains.

At least at one point, according to some scientists, Earth was frozen almost solid (the "Snowball Earth" hypothesis). At other points, scientists believe, Earth has apparently had tropical climates at its poles. Now that's climate change.

But how like humans, having finally figured out that Earth's climate is not static, to forget about the rhythms of Nature and believe instead that they -- we! -- are the cause of Earth's changing. Industry is to be blamed! Carbon dioxide!

Yet, livestock were grazed in Greenland -- never as verdant a land as the Vikings' sales brochures suggested, but far more hospitable then than of late. Then the ice returned... and the European colony died out. Climate change.

The Sahara Desert was -- not long ago on a planetary time scale -- a lush green paradise, with exotic animals. Australia, now entering a dry cycle, was also once far more lush. Climate change. Nobody believed the Aborigines when the Aborigines said so -- but their cultural memory, going back tens of thousands of years, is being confirmed with each new scientific discovery. Climate change again.

And in none of these incidents were humans to blame.

The Mayas of Mexico and Central America may have lost their empire due to climate change. Or to political upheaval caused by climate change, which is much the same thing. The Cahokia Mound Builders, here in the American Midwest, were masters of water and wood and nature... until they were wiped out. Was it climate change there too? Or ecological disaster directly attributable to human construction? Was it some combination of factors? The American Southwest may be entering an entirely predictable dry cycle. Climate change, surely -- but has it been prompted or retarded by our building up of Las Vegas and Phoenix, or by our draining of the Colorado? Or is all of our activity irrelevant to Nature's pattern?

In my lifetime, the science of meteorology has grown by leaps and bounds. Satellites getting a truly global picture of weather patterns have enabled scientists to see dust clouds crossing from the Americas to Africa... and give us a better than even chance of knowing whether it will rain at this weekend's picnic.

But the science is young, and the predictive models are incomplete. If we can't tell, on Thursday, whether it will be sunny by kickoff on Sunday, how can we accept, as gospel, dire predictions that all coastal cities will be inundated in 50 years' time? Ocean levels have risen and fallen before -- climate change -- and they will rise and fall again. But when? Why?

All the greenhouse gases produced in mankind's industrial present can be dwarfed in an instant by the release of carbon dioxide buried in Siberia... or released in the next (and largely unpredictable) volcanic eruption.

Does all this sound too much like resignation? That I advocate sitting idly by and drowning, if that be our fate?

No. That's not what I think.

I think that the climatologists and meteorologists should join hands with paleontologists and archeologists and anthropologists and historians and start to figure things out together... using all the evidence... and not just that unique to their disciplines. We must keep studying... and learning... and evaluating the evidence with open minds.

Let's seriously explore alternatives to fossil fuels -- but not because this will Save The World. Eliminating the need for gasoline may not -- when all the evidence is in -- have any measurable effect on climate change. It is, however, the right thing to do from the standpoint of responsible stewardship of the planet -- and it will enhance western security by taking the Petrodollars from the Wahhabis' pockets, thereby stifling the growth of Islamic extremism.

In the meantime, don't talk to me about carbon credits. Recycle your paper. Recycle aluminum. Use CFL's instead of incandescent bulbs. If you live in a water-poor area, redouble your conservation efforts. Stop using so many plastic bottles. These small actions, multiplied over a multitude, will make a positive difference. Just maybe not to climate change.

And that's OK.

Religion vs. science? Not necessarily....

Ah, well, readership is down here at Second Effort, but not yet eliminated entirely. So herewith a piece on science, religion AND politics... something to aggravate just about everyone....

The Los Angeles Times ran a piece by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum on August 11 about Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, and other New Atheists who "want to change [America's] science community in a lasting way. They'd have scientists and defenders of reason be far more confrontational and blunt: No more coddling the faithful, no tolerating nonscientific beliefs. Scientific institutions, in their view, ought to stop putting out politic PR about science and religion being compatible."

They're not?

Granted, Biblical literalists deny evolution and, according to the Times article, "About 46% of Americans in polls agree with this stunning statement: 'God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.'"

But that's not to say that religion and science must be adverse. Fr. Bob Barron, a Chicago-area priest, provides, in one of his Word on Fire commentaries, a pretty effective refutation of the New Atheists' insistence that science and religion are incompatible. It comes in a YouTube review of the recent movie Angels and Demons.



Skip past the first three minutes of this eight minute video -- a plot summary -- and the next minute and a half or so, as he points out the Catholic priests and brothers who are still revered, even by ardent secularists, as scientific pioneers -- and you'll get to the nub of his argument:

The sciences emerged and flourished in the context of the great Christian universities of the West. And this is not accidental. When you have a theological system, like Catholicism, that emphasizes the non-divinity of the world and the intelligibility of the world you have the preconditions for science.

Why? Because if the world is divine, if it is being worshiped as sacred, you're not going to experiment on it, but Christians who hold to creation know the world is not God and therefore can become the object of scientific investigation and experimentation.

Second, if [the world] is created, it is endowed with intelligibility. It's been thought or spoken into being. And therefore scientists can go out confidently to meet the world. They expect to find an intelligible world.

If something is made, it can be understood. Belief in a specific Maker may not be required for understanding -- but neither is such a belief incompatible with understanding (c. 6:15):

The basic principle is this: All truth comes from God. God is One. And, therefore, there can't be a contradiction, finally, between the truth discoverable through Reason and the truth discoverable through Faith, properly articulated. And so the unity of God -- the unity of Creation -- gives rise to this ultimate compatibility between Faith and Science.

Of course, this doesn't satisfy the Creationists or other fundamentalists, Christian and otherwise. I would say to them, however, that dinosaur bones are not put in the ground to test or undermine your faith; they provide an opportunity for your faith to grow beyond what our remote ancestors in the Middle East were capable of understanding.

That does not have to lead us down the path of relativism... but that's a discussion for another day.