DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

[A]an obscure section of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act requires that all schools receiving federal funds (virtually all public schools) provide the phone numbers and addresses of high school students to military recruiters.

The Executive Summary of the No Child Left Behind Act mentions recruiting teachers, but not infantry.

According to Environmental Defense,

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) has introduced an unprecedented rollback to our nation’s clean air laws. The misnamed “Clear Skies” bill is a smokescreen that covers up a better, more immediate way to healthier air — the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR). CAIR would reduce pollution from power plants, and only requires final approval from the EPA to go into effect.

Grist Magazine sums up the so-called Clear Skies bill: Bush has new hope that his industry-backed initiative will be voted into law. Just as an intellectual exercise, can you think of any industry that would honestly want more government-backed pollution controls?

Carbon dioxide is at the heart of the issue. Senator Inhofe and your local fossil-fuel-burning electrical utility don’t want any restrictions on CO₂ emissions. According to the NYTimes, Inhofe says global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

I thought the search for WMDs was the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. Regardless, we can deconstruct Inhofe’s statement: either he’s saying the earth is not getting warmer, or he’s saying there’s no harm in it.

There’s no arguing the first point. Even the EPA — which one time stood for Environmental Protection Agency, but now that some of their real environmentalists have resigned in disgust due to the Bush Administration’s rollbacks of hard-earned pollution caps could as accurately be called the Environmental Paving Agency — admits the earth is getting hotter:

Average global temperature has increased by almost 1°F over the past century; scientists expect the average global temperature to increase an additional 2 to 6°F over the next one hundred years.

(If you’re thinking 2° doesn’t sound like much, remember that “at the peak of the last ice age (18,000 years ago), the temperature was only 7°F colder than it is today.”)

The second possible explanation for Inhofe’s disregard for rising temperatures is that he believes no catastrophe is possible. This is, as far as I can tell, his contention. Unfortunately his understanding of the science is lousy. I’m not qualified to refute him, but here’s a group of climate scientists who are, and do. Their point-by-point rebuttal of Inhofe’s recent Senate speech is enlightening.

To make your opinion known, send a letter to your congressperson via the E.D. campaign page: “Clear Skies” Smokescreen

Eye of Science: Life in a Microcosmic World

That Apple’s market share has dropped to a small fraction of Wintel’s is old news. But there’s a new explanation.

Paul Murphy of LinuxInsider points out that Apple’s unit sales have been increasing over the years. That seems like a conflict: if Apple is selling more machines than before, why isn’t the Mac gaining market share? Is the rest of the world buying that many more Wintel boxes?

Yes, but not for the reason you might expect: this is not about rapid adoption of Wintel by new computer users. Murphy argues, instead, that all those additional Wintel unit sales are upgrades.

Apple’s declining relative market share measured in dollars has been due more to the expense of Wintel product churn than to a fall-off of interest among Mac users. Over the longer term, Apple’s unit sales have consistently increased; what caused the decline in Apple’s annual share of market dollars has been growth in revenue to the PC sellers.

It’s Wintel’s rapid upgrade cycle that’s been getting progressively more and more out of line with norms for industrial or retail electronics products, and therefore not falling interest in the Mac, that’s behind the numbers. Think about this for a minute: If PCs remained usable as long as Macs do, industrywide total revenues (aka customer costs) would be nearly two-thirds lower.

Murphy’s editorial segues into the tale of a Wintel bigot, who in spite of repeated and obvious failures of his chosen OS continues to denigrate alternatives. It’s just another proof that the human organism is hardwired for fraud — to quote George Lakoff, “people think in terms of frames and metaphors … when the facts don’t fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored.”