Conservatively Speaking

Rachmanism (RAK-muh-niz-uhm) noun: The exploitation and intimidation of tenants by landlords. After Peter Rachman (1919-1962), a landlord in London who became notorious for unethical practices including driving out tenants to maximize revenue from his rental properties.

Whether the haters are left handed or right hand thread wingnuts does not matters - all are dangerously wrong. - as the murder yesterday at the holocaust museum shows. Consider the following:

• Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in 2007 declared that skeptics of global warming hysteria are guilty of “treason.”
• NASA’s James Hansen said climate skeptics should be put on trial for “high crimes against humanity.”
• And Kennedy recently called coal companies “criminal enterprises” and said their CEO’s should be jailed “for all of eternity.”

Now a global warming alarmist has taken the vitriol to new heights, calling for the execution of global warming deniers.

The alarmist, identified only as “The Insolent Braggart,” posted an entry on Talking Points Memo, an often-cited Web site. TPM removed the entry from the site, but not before it came to the attention of Marc Morano of Climate Depot.

He reproduced the entry on his Web site: Use caution here because we do not know whether this person lives in a rubber room; on an isolated mountain top or at the bottom of a deep mine.

“At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers? … “So when the right-wing [expletive deleted] have caused it to be too late to fix the problem, and we start seeing the devastating consequences and we start seeing end of the world type events - how will we punish those responsible? It will be too late. So shouldn’t we start punishing them now?”

The Washington Examiner cited the TPM poster in an editorial headlined, “Is American politics becoming a hate sport?”

The editorial likened the poster to Scott Roeder, who is charged with killing abortion doctor George “Killer” Tiller, and John Brown, the abolitionist who led a murderous raid before the Civil War. Laast week al Qaeda called on disaffected American militants to join its jihad as it warned of a bioweapon attacks on America. Even on this website there is occasional hatespeak - thankfully rare and usually discredited - but any is too much.

“Are Brown, Roeder, and the TPM  poster simply lone fanatics,” the Examiner asked,  ”isolated illustrations of what happens when political concerns become warped beyond reason and combine with unstable personality characteristics to produce gruesome results?

On Tuesday, NBC’s news special “Inside the Obama White House” was watched by 9 million people. Historians say it was the most revealing look behind the scenes at the White House since Bill Clinton set up a secret Web cam–Letterman

 Had I not been such a dumbbell I’d have completed my studies in theoretical mathematics rather than jumping to engineering “where the money was” and been part of such breathtaking discoveries. Alas we do not get do-overs. So, I perch here on the sidelines of science a dullard to marvel

Ohio State University doesn’t just have a great football team, and not everyone there are knuckle draggers either researchers there have found a relatively simple way to measure distances to objects three times farther away in outer space than previously possible, by extending a common measurement technique. They discovered that a rare type of giant star, often overlooked by astronomers, could make an excellent signpost for distances up to 300 million light-years - and beyond.

Along the way, they also learned something new about how these stars evolve.

Cepheid variables - giant stars that pulse in brightness - have long been used as reference points for measuring distances in the nearby universe, said Jonathan Bird, doctoral student in astronomy at Ohio State. Classical cepheids are bright, but beyond 100 million light-years from Earth, their signal gets lost among other bright stars.

In a press briefing at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Pasadena, CA, Bird revealed that a rare and even brighter class of cepheid - one that pulses very slowly - can potentially be used as a beacon to measure distances three times farther than their classical counterparts.

This project is the latest in principal investigator Krzysztof Stanek’s effort to gauge the size and age of the universe with greater precision.

There are several methods for calculating the distance to stars, and astronomers often have to combine methods to indirectly measure a distance. The usual analogy is a ladder, with each new method a higher rung above another. At each new rung of the cosmic distance ladder, the errors add up, reducing the precision of the overall measurement. So any single method that can skip the rungs of the ladder is a prized tool for probing the universe.

Stanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio State, applied a direct measurement technique in 2006, when he used the light emerging from a binary star system in the galaxy M33 to measure the distance to that galaxy for the first time. M33 is 3 million light-years from Earth.

This new technique using so-called “ultra long period cepheids” (ULP cepheids) is different. It’s an indirect method, but this initial study suggests that the method would work for galaxies that are much farther away than M33.

“We found ultra long period cepheids to be a potentially powerful distance indicator. We believe they could provide the first direct stellar distance measurements to galaxies in the range of 50-100 megaparsecs (150 million - 326 million light-years) and well beyond that,” Stanek said.

Because researchers generally don’t take note of ultra long period cepheids, there are few of them in the astronomical record. For this study, Stanek, Bird, and Ohio State doctoral student Jose Prieto uncovered 18 ULP cepheids from the literature.

Each was located in a nearby galaxy, such as the Small Magellanic Cloud. The distances to these nearby galaxies are well known, so the astronomers used that knowledge to calibrate the distance to the ULP cepheids.

They found that they could use ULP cepheids to determine distance with a 10-20 percent error - a rate typical of other methods that make up the cosmic distance ladder.

“We hope to reduce that error as more people take note of ULP cepheids in their stellar surveys,” Bird said. “What we’ve shown so far is that the method works in principle, and the results are encouraging.”

Bird explained why astronomers have ignored ULP cepheids in the past.

Short period cepheids, those that brighten and dim every few days, make good distance markers in space because their period is directly related to their brightness - and astronomers can use that brightness information to calculate the distance. Polaris, the North Star, is a well known and classical cepheid.

But astronomers have always thought that ULP cepheids, which brighten and dim over the course of a few months or longer, don’t obey this relation. They are larger and brighter than the typical cepheid. In fact, they are larger and brighter than most stars; in this study, for example, the 18 ULP cepheids ranged in size from 12-20 times the mass of our Sun.

The brightness makes them good distance markers, Stanek said. Typical cepheids are harder to spot in distant galaxies, as their light blends in with other stars. ULP cepheids are bright enough to stand out.

Astronomers have also long suspected that ULP cepheids don’t evolve the same way as other cepheids. In this study, however, the Ohio State team found the first evidence of a ULP cepheid evolving as a more classical cepheid does.

A classical cepheid will grow hotter and cooler many times over its lifetime. In-between, the outer layers of the star become unstable, which causes the changes in brightness. ULP cepheids are thought to go through this period of instability only once, and going in only one direction - from hotter to cooler.

But as the astronomers pieced together data from different parts of the literature for this study, they discovered that one of the ULP cepheids - a star in the Small Magellanic Cloud dubbed HV829 - is clearly moving in the opposite direction.

Forty years ago, HV829 pulsed every 87.6 days. Now it pulses every 84. 4 days. Two other measurements found in the literature confirm that the period has been shrinking steadily in the decades in between, which indicates that the star itself is shrinking, and getting hotter.

The astronomers concluded that ULP cepheids may help astronomers not only measure the universe, but also learn more about how very massive stars evolve.

Some of these results were reported in the Astrophysical Journal in April 2009. Since that paper was written, the Ohio State astronomers have started using the Large Binocular Telescope in Tucson, Arizona, to look for more ULP cepheids. Stanek says that they’ve found a few good candidates in the galaxy M81, but those results have yet to be confirmed.

Charles Boycott (1832-1897), a British land agent in Ireland, whose mistreatment of tenants resulted in his getting ostracized, i.e. he was boycotted - hence the popular usage.

A generation ago, the unapologetic liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) cited GM as proof that free market competition couldn’t work because no auto company could take on General Motors and win - how things have changed.

 Now only 42% of those who currently own a General Motors car are even somewhat likely to buy a GM product for their next car. That figure includes just 30% who are Very Likely to do so.

 The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 43% of current GM owners are not likely to buy another GM car, while 16% are not sure.

Democrats who own GM cars are somewhat more likely than others to buy their next car from GM.

This data is the latest evidence of how steep a hill GM must climb as it hopes to increase sales and return to profitability. Only six percent (6%) of non-GM owners are now Very Likely to buy from GM.

Overall, among all adults, 16% say they are Very Likely to buy their next car from GM. That figure is slightly below the auto giant’s current share of the domestic auto market.

Another 10% of all adults are somewhat likely to buy from GM while 60% are not likely to do so.

 Younger adults, those under 40, are less likely than their elders to consider a GM product for their next car. Younger buyers in general tend to favor import names for cars and other products.

The government bailout and takeover of General Motors remains very unpopular among the public. Just 26% of Americans believe the bailout was a good idea, and nearly as many support a boycott of GM products.

 Fifty-one percent (51%) of Americans nationwide say they are now more likely to buy a Ford since that company did not take any bailout funding. Only 12% are less likely to buy from Ford.

 There is an interesting political twist to the attitudes about buying GM. Currently, among those who hold populist or Mainstream political views, 46% own a GM car. But just 15% of those in the Mainstream are Very Likely to buy their next car from GM.

Among those with Political Class views, 22% currently own a GM car, but 24% of the Political Class say it’s Likely that a GM product will be their next car. This may be a case of the Political Class expressing its support for the bailouts.

 General Motors currently makes Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC. Its Opel, Pontiac, Saturn, Saab and Hummer have or are being sold or will be discontinued.

 General Motors was once the world’s largest corporation, and its share of the U.S. auto market at one point exceeded 50%.

 In dealing with the current economic crisis, most Americans now worry that the government will do too much rather than too little. Americans overwhelmingly believe that Big Government and Big Business are on the same team working against the interests of consumers and investors.

 This poll tracks with now a majority of people who worry about and oppose Obama’s economic stimular plan - specifically worrying about borrowing too much - for his social experiments.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory - John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)