this election's hot-button topic

Paul Hellyer, former Canadian Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister under Pierre Trudeau wants you to start thinking seriously about aliens. The following comments come from a speech given at the University of Toronto last month:

"UFOs, are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head. ...I'm so concerned about what the consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war, that I just think I had to say something ...The secrecy involved in all matters pertaining to the Roswell incident was unparalled. The classification was, from the outset, above top secret, so the vast majority of U.S. officials and politicians, let alone a mere allied minister of defence, were never in-the-loop.

The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning. The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide. ...The time has come to lift the veil of secrecy, and let the truth emerge, so there can be a real and informed debate, about one of the most important problems facing our planet today."

There's more to the story, of course, but I'm still not sure exactly why Mr Hellyer seems so convinced of the existence of aliens. Maybe the US gave him access to those top-secret Roswell files after he was Minister of Defence.

Anyway, a few organizations are now lobbying the government to hold hearings into the matter. Will this stuff overshadow the Gomery inquiry, climate change, native rights, health care, education, and potholes in the hearts and minds of voters? Only time will tell.

Read the full article here. (Glibness aside, we here at SFB are still very much opposed to the weaponization of space.)

yes, it is our fault

A couple weeks ago I was speaking to a friend of mine, and the topic of global warming came up. I was astonished to hear that while all evidence points to rapidly increasing global temperatures and sea levels, she believed that this was likely due to natural processes, not humanity. It was rather frightening to hear, because this friend is in Environmental Engineering and plans on becoming a lawyer - in all likelihood, she will be one of the people creating legislation to control greenhouse emissions 20 years down the road.

I decided that perhaps I was misinformed, and resolved to do some research as soon as I had a chance. Well, before I even had the chance, research landed on my lap care of Slashdot: According to a European study of a 3km-long antarctic ice core sample that dates back 650,000 years, "carbon dioxide levels today are 27% higher than they have been in the last 650,000 years and levels of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas, are 130% higher".

Another recent study from Rutgers University in New Jersey has found that sea levels have been rising steadily at about 1mm/year since the last ice age. Except for the past 150 years, when humans started burning fossil fuels - since then, the rate has doubled to 2mm/year.

This article provides a decent summary of both studies. They all say basically the same thing: It's real, not fake; it's getting worse, not better; it's our fault, not natural.

I'm not a fan of doomsday scenarios, and there sure are a lot of tree-hugging wackos out there presenting a lot of bad science. But it bugs me when certain people consider peer-reviewed scientific papers extremist, and filter news to keep the public uninformed. The message: Wake Up.

parkour

I'm mostly posting this right now so that I might spare some of you from having to see that picture of the world's ugliest dog that Jared put up just below this post.

Parkour is about treating the landscape around you as a bunch of physical obstacles. Described by founder Sébastien Foucan as a "philosophy", "way of life", and "state of mind", it tends to look more like a bunch of guys just jumping around like crazy. But they make cool videos! Here's one starring Parkour hotshot David Belle. His site seems to be down right now, but at one point it also had links to some more good videos to watch.

Via this particularly bizarre episode of Achewood, to be fair.

montreal (ten points, plus fifty for using all seven letters)

(Oh wait, proper nouns aren't allowed.) Finally, something to really put Montreal on the map: local boy Adam Logan has won the 2005 World Scrabble Championships in London, England. The thirty-year-old cruised to the finish with the words "qanat" (52 points) and "twistier" (140 points).

Congratulations, Adam! We here at SFB will be rooting for you at the 2006 Winter Olympics!

full disclosure

Small Flightless Bird is now using Google Analytics to keep track of how many people visit the site and where they come from and such. There has been some discussion about whether this should be worrying and how to make sure you're not tracked, which you may feel compelled to read.

two things to watch

1. Via the irrepressible Boing Boing, why not head over and watch this flash animation of a person being sketched? It is much more interesting than it sounds. If I knew anything about it I would tell you, but that would require me being able to read Russian.

2. Via the irascible Internets, you can go see this distracting video called Shingo. Once again, I don't know nothing about it except that it was great.

canuckian election

Hey Canadians! Did you know we might have to go vote in a federal election on December 20th? Yes, I agree, that would suck.

The good ol' CBC has the rundown of the events leading up to this current situation right over here. As it stands, if Paul Martin doesn't call an election soon, the opposition parties might bring down his government sometime this week. Jack Layton finally joined forces with the Bloc and the Conversatives when Paul Martin's health care offer was deemed not strong enough to stop the privatization of health care services.

The upshot: either (a) an election before Christmas, which is unlikely; (b) an election in February, right after the release of the second report into the sponsorship scandal, with official campaigning starting a week into the new year; or (c) Martin's initial promise of an election two months after the second report.

bush vs revisionism

Now Bush is all angry at people who claim he said things about "weapons of mass destruction", or something, before the Iraq war began. According to him, these opponents of his are trying to "rewrite history".

I was thinking of taking a bunch of time to find all kinds of quotes where Bush says one thing and then contradicts it years or minutes later, but I think we've all seen enough of that. Instead, I will comment on the headline of the article I just linked to: "Bush slams Iraq war 'revisionism'". It's fairly common to use the word "slam" like that in a headline, but come on: did Bush really just "slam" revisionism? Did he pick up revisionism, turn it upside-down, and hurl it to the mat?

We report, you decide. Leave us a comment.

Update: David Corn successfully picks apart the speech so that I don't have to: Bush Rewrites History To Criticize His Antiwar Critics

this fusion ain't cold

The Open Source Energy Network has an interesting article about focus fusion - a new type of fusion reactor in development that sounds very promising.

For the past 25 years, fusion research has focused almost exclusively on the tokamak reactor - a giant donut that holds 200-million-degree deuterium-tritium plasma suspended in a magnetic field and uses it to produce heat and drive a turbine. This process uses the same heat-engine based approach to power generation as coal - it just replaces a coal furnace with a fusion plant. The deuterium-tritium reaction also produces high-energy neutrons, which leave the plant radioactive. Not to mention that the fuel, tritium, is the same stuff used in H-bombs.

The focus fusion reactor uses a very different approach. The details are on the website, and they explain it much more fully than I can here. But the gist of it is that they fuse Boron-11 and a hydrogen atom using a device called a plasma focus, leaving 3 helium atoms and no radioactive by-products. Rather than letting these atoms collide with a tank of water to produce steam, they are directed in a beam to a sort of reverse particle accelerator that converts the fusion energy directly to electricity. If you've taken any thermodynamics, you know that heat engines are inefficient by nature. Bypassing the steam-turbine cycle not only reduces cost, it makes for a much more efficient process.

Perhaps the best thing about the idea is that power plants based on the plasma focus would be small and cheap - $500,000 and the size of a two-car garage. These small plants could be built in a much more distributed way than current power stations, helping to avoid things like the blackout of two years ago. It would also enable developing countries to generate significant amounts of power relatively cheaply. The project is still in the R&D phase and has yet to produce a break-even prototype. But their proof-of-concept is quite impressive. Take a look.

causal friday

This is a comic called Savage Chickens; it consists of chicken doodles on post-it notes. You should go read it sometimes.

death to idioms

This was on Livejournal Images (caution: link sometimes contains grainy pictures of nude livejournallers), and comes from lj user withoutcanseco. Image reprinted without permission.

the gomery report

I'd completely forgotten about the Gomery inquiry, but apparently the report was released today. The result? Frankly, about as exciting as most of Canadian politics. But here are the key points, as I see them:

• Jean Chrétien himself didn't really do anything bad, except hire a crooked dude as his chief of staff, a guy named Jean Pelletier.
• Paul Martin didn't do anything bad at all.
• Pelletier operated the Sponsorship Program with Alfonso Gagliano, who was minister of public works at the time. (Gagliano has since been fired.)
  
• A former bureaucrat named Chuck Guité was the one who actually awarded the contracts, and he favoured friends and Liberal-friendly ad firms.
• Jacques Corriveau, a friend of Chrétien's who owned a graphic design company, orchestrated "an elaborate kickback scheme by which he enriched himself personally and provided funds and benefits to the [Quebec wing of the Liberal Party of Canada]."

So, there you go. The system sucked, a bunch of Liberals were corrupt, an unknown amount of money went to the Liberals that was supposed to help fight seperatism. Now the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois are clamoring for an election, and Jack Layton says he needs a few days to think it over.

There will be an election, either in a couple weeks' time or else next spring. I doubt the Gomery report will prove explosive enough to reinvigorate the anti-Liberal sentiment that affected the last election, especially since Paul Martin has been exonerated from any blame. And Stephen Harper seems pretty unpopular, even among Conservative voters. That leaves the NDP and the Bloc: the former might gain some seats thanks to Layton's energetic exploitation of the minority government situation, and the Bloc will probably gain some seats now that the report is out.

Anyway, the CBC has excellent coverage of the Gomery inquiry and report; and a bunch of blogs will probably start commenting on it soon - try this Blogger search.