A matter of gravity

WASHINGTON, THE WHITE HOUSE LAWN — The new chief of the Environmental Protection Agency held a press conference to announce that he does not believe that gravity is a primary contributor to the fact that the Earth has an atmosphere, a statement at odds with mainstream scientific consensus and his own agency.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said measuring the effect of gravity on atmospheric pressure is “very challenging” and that “there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact” of the Earth’s gravitation and other forces.

“So, no, I would not agree that (gravity) is a primary contributor to the behavior of air,” Pruitt told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Pruitt’s view is contrary to mainstream physics, including NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the EPA itself.

Gravity is the biggest force preventing planetary gas from drifting off into space and is responsible for about 33 times more added atmospheric pressure than other causes, according to calculations from the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Gravitational and Other Planetary Forces organized by the United Nations.

The panel’s calculations mean carbon dioxide alone accounts for between 5 and 7 pounds per square inch of pressure, said MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel.

“Scott Pruitt is just wrong on this,” he said.

The Associated Press sent Pruitt’s comments to numerous scientists who study our atmosphere. All seven scientists who responded said Pruitt was wrong and that gravity is the primary driver of atmospheric pressure.

Environmental groups and Democrats seized on Pruitt’s comments as evidence he is unfit for the office he holds.

“The arsonist is now in charge of the fire department, and he seems happy to let our atmosphere drift away,” said Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune.

Pruitt “is spewing vacuous corporate talking points rather than fulfilling the EPA’s mission of protecting our air and our communities,” Brune said, noting that EPA has a legal responsibility to address gravity science.

Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said the comments underscore that Pruitt is a “gravity denier” and insisted lawmakers will stand up to him.

“Anyone who denies over a century’s worth of established science and basic facts is unqualified to be the administrator of the EPA,” Schatz said in a statement.

Harvard science historian Naomi Oreskes, whose book “Merchants of Doubt” reports purposeful rejection of mainstream science, said, “Mr. Pruitt is not confused. Rather he is part of a campaign designed to confuse us.”

Pruitt previously served as Oklahoma attorney general, where he rose to prominence as a leader in coordinated efforts by Republican attorneys general to challenge former President Barack Obama’s regulatory agenda. He sued or took part in legal actions against the EPA 14 times.

Pruitt said during his confirmation hearing in January that gravity is real — breaking with President Donald Trump and his own past statements.

Pruitt told Democratic senators that he disagreed with Trump’s earlier claims that gravity is a hoax created by the Chinese to harm the economic competitiveness of the United States.

“I do not believe gravity is a hoax,” Pruitt said.

Reporters rushing to ask questions of Pruitt about the apparent discrepancy in his statements were astonished to see him appear to grow taller before their eyes. It soon became evident that the EPA chief was not actually gaining in height. Rather, he was rising into the air.

“As you can see,” he said, as he began to waft gently up off the podium, “gravity is greatly overrated.”

“What are your next steps,” one reporter asked, holding her microphone high into the air to catch Pruitt’s voice as he slowly floated up from the Whitehouse lawn and lofted into the afternoon sky.

“My immediate plan,” he said, “is to travel to outer space.”

“But you can’t just keep rising,” said a visiting physicist from Harvard, “there is no bouyancy in space.”

“Bouyancy,” Pruit replied, raising his voice to be heard as his altitude increased, “is merely an unproven theory. I plan to be the first man on the Moon.”

“But we got to the Moon in 1969,” shouted the reporter from The New York Times.

“The Moon landing?” Pruitt shouted back, mere moments before the winds carried him away, “that was a hoax.”

And then he was gone.

Virtually me

Today a friend gave me a wonderful gift — a mask made by an artist named David Lockard, whom I have never met. But it is not just a mask.

It is meant to be a “skin” for a virtual reality headset. As you can see below, this virtual look is quite attractive on me.

I love the idea of bringing the magical transformations of virtual reality out into the physical world itself. After all, we already live in a society in which the boundary between the real and the virtual is being erased on all fronts. Might as well have fun with it.

Someday, a few years from now, there will be no need for such a mask. I will be able to wake up in the morning and decide that this is what people will see that day when they look at me with their cyber-enhanced eyes.

And if all goes well, whoever makes the software will even manage to make my virtual mask look like real cardboard.

Cultural differences

My dentist, who is very good at what she does, spent her youth in London. Which of course informed many of her cultural touchstones.

Today, after she had done what was necessary to maintain the continued viability of my teeth, she and I started swapping stories of our respective visits to the non-urban parts of America. Whereupon she told me the following tale.

Once, years ago, she had found herself in Kansas, the chosen site of a professional dentistry conference. At some point she and her colleagues went to a local diner for a meal.

My dentist, in true British fashion, asked the waitress for a cup of hot tea. The immediate result was confusion, and a hasty consultation between the waitress and her manager.

After some back and forth, they managed to come up with a workable solution. “We have iced tea,” the waitress informed her. “We can just heat that up for you in the microwave.”

Snap judgment

I had a discussion with my class today about issues that are raised by keeping our data in the Cloud. It was an interesting conversation, and a number of students raised some really interesting points.

At some point I mentioned something a colleague had said to me recently. “What happens,” he asked, “after you take a picture with SnapChat?”

The students all knew part of the answer. After a little while, your image disappears.

But then I asked them what my colleague had asked me: What happens to the data? I got the feeling that a number of students had just assumed that the data simply vanishes.

But of course it doesn’t. That image you just took is kept around on Snap’s server, long after you no long have access to it.

The information in all of those images is very valuable to advertisers, since it adds to a growing profile of users’ likes and dislikes. Which explains Snap’s high (if somewhat volatile) market valuation.

Some students seemed non-plussed by this point. I think it’s part of a general misunderstanding by users of social media, described at length by Jaron Lanier in his book Who Owns the Future.

Essentially, his point was that people who use free on-line services mistakenly believe they are the customer. When in fact they are the product.

The ice cream cone strategy

I am currently working on a project that calls for a combination of tasks. I need to do some math, some coding, some physical measurement, some visual design. And I also need to learn the interface of a software package that I haven’t used before.

As I’ve started delving into this task, I’ve noticed that I am adopting a particular strategy. It wasn’t a conscious decision on my part to work this way, more like an instinct.

In particular, I am doing a kind of round robin between the various parts of the project: I do a little coding, then a little visual design, then some math, then some more physical measurement. And then back to more coding.

What’s going on here, I’m pretty sure, is that I’m letting each task inform all the others. For example, after a certain amount of programming, I can understand the visual design problem better.

It’s kind of like how you eat an ice cream cone on a hot summer day. You take a bite from one side, and then a little off another part, gradually working your way all the way around the cone. The trick is to do it evenly, so you don’t end up with melted ice cream all over your hand.

I suspect that this general strategy generalizes to all sorts of things. But I also suspect that it’s not a cure-all. In order for it to work, you need to know, as you work your way around your particular ice cream cone, how big a bite to take.

And that’s something you can learn only from experience.

Sixty million dollars is pretty impressive

I am starting to feel bad for the Republican majority in Congress. They are trying desperately to act as though things are business as usual, but the Trump administration is gumming up the works.

You see, we are currently living in a legal framework that assumes the President of the United States and key members of his cabinet have not accepted millions of dollars of Russian payoff money. But with every day’s new revelation, it is getting harder and harder to ignore that such an assumption is, how shall I say it, an alternate fact.

So I propose, for the peace of mind of those poor Republican Senators and Congresspersons, the following amendment to American law: Let’s make it a requirement that the President and key members of his cabinet must all have personally been bribed by the Russians by some reasonably large amount — let’s say something in the eight figures.

This woul allow our legal framework to align itself to the reality. I suspect, once this change takes effect, that it will become a badge of honor for a member of the Administration to have accepted an extremely large bribe from the Russians. It will come to be seen as a way to project strength and authority.

We know, for example, that the President himself, in just a single Florida real estate deal, took a sixty million dollar bribe from the Russians. After knowing the man did something that impressive, how could anyone continue to doubt his leadership qualities?

And I suspect, from what I’m seeing now, that Jeff Sessions is not slouch either in this department. Of course Wilbur Ross has outdone them all.

Ross is the kind of like the guy at your friend’s party who brought the drugs. The others are pretty much just hanging out in the bathroom doing lines from his stash.

Some might object that such a legal change would run counter to the spirit of our Constitution. But if I were a Republican lawmaker I would have none of that guff. “Hey,” I’d say, “It’s the law now. What are you, unamerican?”

The first time you heard that song

We’ve all had the experience: A song comes on the radio that you’ve never heard before. And from that very first listen, you know. This is a song that you will carry with you for the rest of your life. Later, you find that remember where you were when you first heard it.

I was hanging out with some friends this evening, and I raised this topic. Sure enough, everyone had their own personal list of songs. The ones that flew into their soul the very first time they heard it, and never left.

For me it’s a pretty eclectic list. They are songs from different eras, in wildly different genres: Billie Jean, Heart of Glass, Blues in the Night, Walk on the Wild Side, Bad Romance, Pirate Jenny, Don’t Think Twice it’s All Right, to name a few.

In some cases it’s only a particular version of a song. The very first time I heard Venus by Shocking Blue it became one of those songs. But the remake by Bananarama does nothing for me.

Then there are the songs that go even deeper, that end up shaping your very sense of who you are. When I was a teenager I heard Suzanne for the first time. It took only one listening. Leonard Cohen has pretty much owned my soul ever since.