Lunar eclipse photo

Here's a photo I just took of tonight's lunar eclipse. The eclipse is still occurring as I write this.

2010 is one of the warmest years on record so far

The first eleven months of 2010 are leading it to be one of the warmest years on record:

This year is on track to enter the almanac as one of the three warmest years on record globally, along with 1998 and 2005, according to a preliminary analysis by the World Meteorological Organization.

Not only that, but 2010 stands a decent chance of capturing the record, depending on temperature data from November and December, according to Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of the WMO. Global average temperatures for the first 10 months of the year are running slightly ahead of those for the same period in '98 and '05...

Preliminary temperature data for November are comparable to temperatures seen in November 2005, indicating they have remained near record levels as the year winds down.

Even if 2010 fails to capture the top spot, the first decade of the 21st century already has gone into the books as the warmest since 1850, when the instrument record began. ...

Some climate scientists caution that any one year's worth of events is driven more by natural variability than by long-term warming triggered by the released of carbon dioxide from burning fossils fuel. But when 2010's extreme events are seen in that broader context, they appear to fit long-term patterns the climate models have generally projected for a climate system responding to increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.

A range of studies have documented an increase in extreme heat events, a decrease in extreme cold events, and an increase in rainfall and snowfall intensity globally during the past 50 years...

The public debate about climate change is so intertwined with politics that I try to avoid politically-motivated arguments on the subject. I've never watched Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, because he's an environmental activist, not a climate scientist. I prefer to get my information from reputable scientific sources such as the National Academy of Science. Instead of An Inconvenient Truth, I watched the Teaching Company DVD series Earth's Changing Climate by Prof. Richard Wolfson of Middlebury College, available at your local library. These sources concur with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but are not as alarmist as environmental activists.

Republicans attack the IPCC as biased, but the IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. As Science Magazine, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, once stated:

IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. ... Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect.

Here's a graph of global temperatures from 1850-2008:

Knowing that anthropological climate change exists and doing something productive about it are two different issues. Harvard economist Greg Mankiw has a simple solution. Raise carbon taxes, and then reduce other taxes so that the overall tax burden on the American economy doesn't change.

Is our universe inside a wormhole, which is part of a black hole, which is inside another universe?

Whoa:

Could our universe be located within the interior of a wormhole which itself is part of a black hole that lies within a much larger universe?

Such a scenario in which the universe is born from inside a wormhole (also called an Einstein-Rosen Bridge) is suggested in a paper from Indiana University theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski in Physics Letters B. The final version of the paper was available online March 29 and will be published in the print edition April 12.

Poplawski takes advantage of the Euclidean-based coordinate system called isotropic coordinates to describe the gravitational field of a black hole and to model the radial geodesic motion of a massive particle into a black hole.

In studying the radial motion through the event horizon (a black hole's boundary) of two different types of black holes -- Schwarzschild and Einstein-Rosen, both of which are mathematically legitimate solutions of general relativity -- Poplawski admits that only experiment or observation can reveal the motion of a particle falling into an actual black hole. But he also notes that since observers can only see the outside of the black hole, the interior cannot be observed unless an observer enters or resides within.

"This condition would be satisfied if our universe were the interior of a black hole existing in a bigger universe," he said. "Because Einstein's general theory of relativity does not choose a time orientation, if a black hole can form from the gravitational collapse of matter through an event horizon in the future then the reverse process is also possible. Such a process would describe an exploding white hole: matter emerging from an event horizon in the past, like the expanding universe."

A white hole is connected to a black hole by an Einstein-Rosen bridge (wormhole) and is hypothetically the time reversal of a black hole. Poplawski's paper suggests that all astrophysical black holes, not just Schwarzschild and Einstein-Rosen black holes, may have Einstein-Rosen bridges, each with a new universe inside that formed simultaneously with the black hole.

"From that it follows that our universe could have itself formed from inside a black hole existing inside another universe," he said.

By continuing to study the gravitational collapse of a sphere of dust in isotropic coordinates, and by applying the current research to other types of black holes, views where the universe is born from the interior of an Einstein-Rosen black hole could avoid problems seen by scientists with the Big Bang theory and the black hole information loss problem which claims all information about matter is lost as it goes over the event horizon (in turn defying the laws of quantum physics).

This model in isotropic coordinates of the universe as a black hole could explain the origin of cosmic inflation, Poplawski theorizes.

Poplawski is a research associate in the IU Department of Physics. He holds an M.S. and a Ph.D. in physics from Indiana University and a M.S. in astronomy from the University of Warsaw, Poland.

Here's the abstract:

We consider the radial geodesic motion of a massive particle into a black hole in isotropic coordinates, which represents the exterior region of an Einstein–Rosen bridge (wormhole). The particle enters the interior region, which is regular and physically equivalent to the asymptotically flat exterior of a white hole, and the particle's proper time extends to infinity. Since the radial motion into a wormhole after passing the event horizon is physically different from the motion into a Schwarzschild black hole, Einstein–Rosen and Schwarzschild black holes are different, physical realizations of general relativity. Yet for distant observers, both solutions are indistinguishable. We show that timelike geodesics in the field of a wormhole are complete because the expansion scalar in the Raychaudhuri equation has a discontinuity at the horizon, and because the Einstein–Rosen bridge is represented by the Kruskal diagram with Rindler's elliptic identification of the two antipodal future event horizons. These results suggest that observed astrophysical black holes may be Einstein–Rosen bridges, each with a new universe inside that formed simultaneously with the black hole. Accordingly, our own Universe may be the interior of a black hole existing inside another universe.

Who needs hallucinogenic drugs when we've got cosmology?

Hat tip: Mark Thoma

Project Implicit is complete garbage

After reading a CNN article titled "You may be more racist than you think, study says," I followed a link in the article to Project Implicit on Harvard University's website, where you can supposedly take tests to discover your hidden biases regarding things like race, religion, age, weight, etc.

So far, I have taken three of Project Implicit's tests, and I am not impressed. First, I took the Black-White racial preference test, which said I have a strong automatic preference for White people. This apparently put me in Ku Klux Klan territory, as it was the most racist option possible.

Second, I took Project Implicit's Obama-McCain test, which actually tested two things: racial preference and politician preference. Regarding racial preference, it said I have no automatic preference for either Black people or White people, which was in complete disagreement with the racial preference test I had just taken a little while earlier. Regarding Obama vs. McCain, it said I have a slight preference for Obama. Although I did vote for Obama, I actually like both men but favored McCain most of the year. My switch from supporting McCain to supporting Obama was due to my dislike of Sarah Palin, not McCain, himself.

Finally, I took Project Implicit's "Presidents" test, which supposedly compares how one likes George W. Bush compared to other recent U.S. Presidents. For some background, I have despised George W. Bush as long as I have known about him. I contributed to McCain's 2000 campaign, in an attempt to prevent Bush from winning the Republican nomination. I voted for Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. Even after the September 11 attacks, when Bush's approval rating soared to around 90%, I was in the other 10%. I think he is one of the worst presidents in U.S. history. So what did Project Implicit's test say? (You know where this is going, don't you?) It said I have a strong automatic preference for George W. Bush, which is complete garbage.

I don't know what research Project Implicit's tests are based on, but from my experience the tests are no more accurate than random chance. The New York Times has also noted that "there isn’t even that much consistency in the same person’s scores if the test is taken again." Yikes! This is science? Wikipedia lists some of the criticisms of their testing methodology here. In fact, if you search for the term "Implicit Association Test," which is the testing methodology Project Implicit uses, you keep coming back to the same very small group of researchers. This suggests that their methodology has not passed the peer review necessary to verify that it is reliable. I get the uneasy feeling that Project Implicit's tests are as bogus as polygraphs. You've gotta love social science research.