At least if you're a Gun Controller in Massachusetts. My costume this year is dressing up as Dick Heller. 
Platinum hit. #3 on the Rock charts. Grammy award. The final challenge on Rock Band III. An episode of Futurama. Not exactly how the world usually reacts to a Country song.The devil went down to Georgia, he was looking for a soul to steal.
He was in a bind 'cos he was way behind: he was willin' to make a deal.
When he came across this young man sawin' on a fiddle and playin' it hot.
And the devil jumped upon a hickory stump and said: "Boy let me tell you what:
"I bet you didn't know it, but I'm a fiddle player too.
"And if you'd care to take a dare, I'll make a bet with you.
"Now you play a pretty good fiddle, boy, but give the devil his due:
"I bet a fiddle of gold against your soul, 'cos I think I'm better than you."
The boy said: "My name's Johnny and it might be a sin,
"But I'll take your bet, your gonna regret, 'cos I'm the best that's ever been."
Johnny you rosin up your bow and play your fiddle hard.
'Cos hells broke loose in Georgia and the devil deals it hard.
And if you win you get this shiny fiddle made of gold.
But if you lose, the devil gets your soul.
The devil opened up his case and he said: "I'll start this show."
And fire flew from his fingertips as he resined up his bow.
And he pulled the bow across his strings and it made an evil hiss.
Then a band of demons joined in and it sounded something like this.
When the devil finished, Johnny said: "Well you're pretty good ol' son.
"But if you'll sit down in that chair, right there, and let me show you how its done."
Fire on the mount, run boys, run.
The devil's in the house of the risin' sun.
Chicken in the bread pin, pickin' out dough.
"Granny, does your dog bite?"
"No, child, no."
The devil bowed his head because he knew that he'd been beat.
He laid that golden fiddle on the ground at Johnny's feet.
Johnny said: "Devil just come on back if you ever want to try again.
"I told you once, you son of a bitch, I'm the best that's ever been."
And he played fire on the mount, run boys, run.
The devil's in the house of the risin' sun.
Chicken in the bread pin pickin' out dough.
"Granny, does your dog bite?"
"No, child, no."
Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley,... and this:talking aboutcriticizing the father who punched out the guy he caught molesting his 4-year-old son in a supermarket men's room (and, who was subsequently arrested for his morally just actions)."All I'm saying is that...we really try and discourage people from self-help."
Memo to Attorney General Coakley: pick one, and only one. You can either have citizens engaging in self-help, or you can have dead murder victims.The security guard who fatally shot a patient who was attacking a doctor in a Massachusetts General Hospital psychiatric clinic said today he had done what anyone would have done and he was happy that the doctor was recovering.
"I just did what anyone would have done, ma'am, that's all," Paul Langone said in answer to a group of reporters' questions as he walked to a car outside the family's home in Reading.
...Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said Thursday that, based on a preliminary investigation, Langone may have saved the life of Dr. Desrosiers and others and the shooting appeared legally justified.
Desrosiers was pinned to the floor and being stabbed by Carciero at about 2 p.m. Tuesday in the hospital's bipolar clinic on the fifth floor of a building at 50 Staniford St. As clinic colleagues fled, another doctor tried to pull the 250-pound Carciero off her, but fell back when the patient slashed at him, authorities said.
Langone, an off-duty security officer carrying a concealed handgun, may have been her only chance, authorities said. He entered the room, ordered Carciero to stop, and when he didn't, fired multiple shots, hitting Carciero twice.
This one is pretty good. It looks like it's from Facebook, and tells you that you need to change your password. Of course, it steals your password, and tries to install malware that steals your bank account information.
Good overview at The Register. If you're remotely interested in the tech world, you should check them out every day. Good coverage of the most important goings on, with a generous helping of snark.The Koala - due for its official release today - brings faster boot times, a revamped software installer, better disk encryption, online services, and quite a bit more to the popular Linux desktop.
We took the release candidate for a spin and are happy to report that while work remains, Ubuntu 9.10 has plenty of improvements and that it's well worth upgrading your current system.
Then I told her to stare at the last set of tracks again and imagine where the beetle might next step. There was a very small dirt patch about two feet in front of where the insect’s tracks ended and that is where she spotted its next set of tracks.Lucky girl, even if it was a dung beetle.“There,” she cried out, “I see his tracks!”
I felt very proud of her, she had learned to imagine in her mind’s eye which direction the beetle might have taken and then followed her instincts and found the next set of tracks. It was a moment very reminiscent of the wizard Merlin’s tutelage of a young King Arthur (whom he called “Wart”) in the art of becoming the animal which he happened to be interested in, and seeing the world through that animal’s eyes.
"...a study by the Pew Research Center showed that 40 percent of Fox News stories on Obama in the last six weeks of the campaign were negative. Similarly, 40 percent of Fox News' stories on Obama's Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, were negative.Knock me over with a feather, but thanks, John.
On CNN, by contrast, there was a 22-point disparity in the percentage of negative stories on Obama (39 percent) and McCain (61 percent). The disparity was even greater at MSNBC, according to Pew, where just 14 percent of Obama stories were negative, compared to a whopping 73 percent of McCain stories -- a spread of 59 points. "
He ... issued a clear message to President Obama that he must attend the meeting in Copenhagen in person in order for an effective deal to be reached. US leadership, he said, was “desperately needed” to secure a deal.Fail.
He said that he was deeply concerned that popular opinion had so far failed to grasp the scale of the changes needed to address climate change, or of the importance of the UN meeting in Copenhagen from December 7 to December 18. “I am not sure that people fully understand what we are talking about or the kind of changes that will be necessary,” he added.Fail.
Well, now.People will need to turn vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to a leading authority on global warming.
... Lord Stern ... said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”
...
Lord Stern, who said that he was not a strict vegetarian himself, was speaking on the eve of an all-parliamentary debate on climate change.
This isn't such a bad idea, actually. I have to say, though, that "thoughtful" struggled with "snark" for a while.Facebook has announced a new service for the friends and family of dead people.
Monday morning, after some public pressure from Canada's privacy czar, Mark Zuckerberg and company told the world they're now "memorializing" the Facebook profiles of those who graduate to that big social network in the sky.
"When someone leaves us, they don't leave our memories or our social network," Facebook man Max Kelly wrote on the official Facebook blog. "To reflect that reality, we created the idea of 'memorialized' profiles as a place where people can save and share their memories of those who've passed."
So I downloaded it. And ran it in Wine. And... well, it turns out Wine emulates Windows well enough to get infected by a Windows virus.So, do Linux fanboys (like me) need to worry about viruses? Not so much:
...
It even went and added itself into the taskbar (which Wine nicely integrated with my Gnome notifications), and added reminders from time to time (read: every 2 minutes) that you're using the unregistered version.
To stop it completely, I had to kill Wine. If it managed to infect the Wine registry well enough that it's run automatically, I will have to go into the Wine registry to remove it manually. Or I could run a couple of simple commands:There's a step by step with tons of screenshots. RTWT if that's your bag, baby. One of the more interesting security experiments I've seen in quite some time.sudo aptitude purge wine;
sudo aptitude install wine;That's it!
Plus, remember that Firefox tried to stop me 3 times before I even saw the file. In the case of a Linux-targeted virus, it would probably do just the same. If I downloaded it, I would then have to go run it manually (unless it's a .sh, in which case I may be able to just run it). To do the same amount of harm, it would then ask me for the administrator password, not just a repetitive "Allow/Deny" box that I just instinctively click Allow on. It would then proceed to do its evilnesses, but with one difference: I can still kill it just as easily.
Looks like it's not just Joe Sixpack who doesn't believe that things are getting warmer - scientists are even starting to catch on. Unlike Joe Sixpack, a scientist might know where to get the data, and how to look at it. And might find something really interesting in it:Lately we’ve been told that California and the west in general had set a 115 year record for high temperatures. All Time Heat! I called “BS”.
No way was this year even a regularly warm year. My tomatoes were not setting fruit (they can not set fruit below a 50F night temperature unless you use special varieties. I had 2 of the special varieties that were setting some fruit, but far less than in prior years. Further, my Runner Beans were setting seeds. Normally in mid summer they have lots of wonderful red flowers that attract lots of hummingbirds, but they can not set seed over about 93-95 F and in July and August I expect only decoration. I got beans… So I called a big load of BS but could not point to any reason why. That has changed.
What conditions am I seeing in the GHCN data set? The Thermometer Langoliers have eaten 9/10 of the thermometers in the USA; including all the cold ones in California.You want to show record warm temperatures? Airbrush the weather stations that don't run warm.
When I investigated, I found California has all of 4 thermometers (assuming I read the LAT and LONG correctly and recognized the place names; someone check me on this.)In the flurry of weather station closings, it seems that we've lost 90% of our sensors. This is very likely part of the "Peace Dividend", as military bases consolidated and Civil Defense just went away in the Clinton years.San Francisco
Santa Maria
Los Angeles
San Diego42572494000 SAN FRANCISCO 37.62 -122.38 5 102U 6253FLxxCO15A 1COASTAL EDGES C3 66
42572394000 SANTA MARIA/P 34.90 -120.45 73 120U 62HIxxCO15A 2WARM CROPS C3 23
42572295000 LOS ANGELES CALIFORNIA 33.72 -118.27 -999 55U14531FLxxCO 1x-9WATER C3 32
42572290000 SAN DIEGO/LIN 32.73 -117.17 9 39U 2498FLxxCO 1A 1WATER C3 105IIRC, Santa Maria is a nice little coastal town in Southern California. Everyone knows L.A. and San Diego from Beach Blanket Babylon, The Beach Boys, and Surfer Girl fame. That just leaves San Francisco to stand in for all the rest of Northern California.
SF is a nice beach town, with cool summers, but in winter the ocean keeps it from getting very cold at all. So all the frozen inland, all the Chico frost, Redding hail, Weed snow and all the Sierra Nevada under whatever frozen snow, well they all are represented by a nice 50F to 60F day in San Francisco. Forget Yosemite, Mount Shasta, Truckee / Tahoe, Mono Lake, Trinity and the Cascades, even the cold evenings of the Mojave Desert. It’s all just downtown LA…
So forget the difficulty in comparing the global temperature from today with that of 1200 A.D. You can't compare global temperature today with that from 1975.Would You Believe a Little Over 2 Thermometers Per State?
And no, that is not a “Maxwell Smart” imitation.
My “by years” tool told me there were 136 active thermometer records in the U.S.A. in 2008. For the whole thing. Including Alaska and Hawaii. But in fairness, Hawaii got three thermometers, all at airports [Emphasis in original - ed.]
There just aren't enough customers who are willing to pay for their product what it costs to produce it.Pay what it costs? I wouldn't pay what it's worth, which for the Globe is a negative $242.86. Not only would they fill up my trash, but I'd have to spend as much time getting disabused of the false narratives - or learning about important stories that they refuse to publish - as I spent reading their rags.
They have a screen shot from Dell's site, which describes the "Microsoft Operating System" as "Ubuntu Linux 8.04". Heh.Dell is currently flogging a cheap-as-chips netbook that apparently comes loaded with that well-known Microsoft operating system, Ubuntu 8.04.
Anyone dropping in on the computer maker's UK product website will be able to buy an Intel-based Inspiron Mini 10 laptop for £199 a pop.
And, according to the blurb on the site, one ickle mobile computer in its current range is being shipped with Microsoft's, er, Linux-flavoured OS.
Geocities is closing today. Its advent in 1995 was a sign of the rising 'Internet for everyone' era, when connection speeds were 1,000x or 2,000x slower than is common today. You may love it or hate it, but millions of people had their first contact with a Web presence right here. I know that Geocities is something that most Slashdotters will see as a n00b thing — the Internet was fine before Geocities — but nevertheless I think that some credit is due. Heck, there's even a modified xkcd homepage to mark the occasion.The XKCD simply is outstanding, constructed from 100% Made Of Win and topped with Awesomesauce. Here's a taste:
Click through for the real thing: blinking stars on the background, "under construction" GIF pictures, datk text on dark background, and (my very favorite) a hit counter that reads "0000000036".
Part of the USHCN data is created by a computer program called “filnet” which estimates missing values. According to the NOAA, filnet works by using a weighted average of values from neighboring stations. In this example, data was created for a no longer existing station from surrounding stations, which in this case as the same evaluation noted were all subject to microclimate and urban bias, no longer adjusted for. Note the rise in temperatures after this before the best sited truly rural station in Maine was closed."Urban bias" is the technical term for when a weather station reads artificially high temperatures because the station is situated in an urban location where there are lots of buildings and parking lots to absorb the heat from the sun. Filnet took temperature readings from other weather stations - stations in urban locations where reading are higher because of the surrounding asphalt heat collectors - and used it for the most rural station in the state.
How can we trust NOAA/NASA/Hadley assessment of global changes given these and the other data integrity issues? Given that Hadley has destroyed old original data because they were running out of room in their data cabinet, can we ever hope to reconstruct the real truth?Given that there are only 30 or 40 stations that have been providing temperature readings from the Civil War up to today, given that "adjustments" are made to the temperature data via an arcane and opaque process and may represent most or all of the warming in the 20th Century, given that scientists refuse to release their data (or the raw - unadjusted - data has been destroyed), given how some of the data sets rely on tree rings from a single tree, how can we trust the data?
Blogger Bob at the TSA Blog has some compatriots, Lynn posts about how they've been finding people bringing hand grenades through the security checkpoints. Seems they've found twenty one grenades since July (!).The lesson to be learned here is that even if it’s a gift (gag or otherwise), souvenir or inert, putting a grenade in your carry-on or checked bag is a no-no. I would also suggest not packing the new novelty grenade MP3 player in your carry-on or checked bags. Not only will you be delayed and possibly miss your flight, but you could also end up spending some quality time with law enforcement officers."Quality time"? Boy, howdy.
Many have been misidentified as a match or possible match for the Selectee Watch List and the only thing they could do is work with the Redress Office to correct the problem.He also stopped by here and left a comment in my post. Like I said, it looks like he's doing a proper job, following trackbacks and links.
But who is that I see? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, It’s Secure Flight! Airlines are beginning to ask for name, date of birth, and gender as it appears on the government ID you plan to use when traveling. This is a part of the Secure Flight program. The program will be in full effect for domestic airlines by the first quarter of 2010 and the rest of the airlines will be on board by the end of 2010. It will reduce mismatched names by 99.9%.
Even as major climate change legislation moves through Congress, fewer voters believe global warming is a very serious problem -- or even think there is solid evidence of it -- a new Pew Research survey finds. ...Smart people, that American public. What never fails to astonish me is the belief by Statists that they can - by sheer force of marketing "shock and awe" - make the unwashed masses believe anything. Seemingly, the Statists' self-regard knows no bounds here, even though a cursory examination of the history of marketing would disabuse them of some silly ideas.
According to the poll, 35% of respondents said global warming was a serious problem, down from 44% in April 2008. Even starker is the increase in voters' skepticism: Only 57% said they believe there is solid evidence that earth's average temperature has increased over the past few decades, compared with 71% who said that last year -- a 14-point drop. Also, just 36% said increases in global temperatures are the result of human activity, which was down from 47% last year.
Along political lines, global warming was the lowest-rated priority for both independents and Republicans, and was 16th among Democrats out of 20 issues.
US President Barack Obama should do more to push for a US climate deal, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Nobel Peace Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said Thursday.
"I personally feel he ought to be doing a lot more," Pachauri told reporters after a debate on climate change in Stockholm, adding the president "really has to assert himself to see that the US passes legislation" prior to the Copenhagen summit.
...
"He (Obama) has to get the Senate to legislate the Kerry-Barbara Boxer bill," Pachauri insisted during the debate, adding he felt the president had not "put his weight behind it."
Since we at Borepatch pride ourselves on being a full-service blog, let me help Dr. Pachauri out here and explain the Obama Administration to him. While you and your fellows at the IPCC have been very helpful to President Obama and his party, you've taken them about as far as you can go. As a stick to beat the Republicans, it's just not working like it used to. Since Chicago politics is all about "what can you do for me today" - as opposed to "what have you done for me yesterday" - your stroke with the POTUS is, sadly, on the wane. You'll have to do a much, much better job showing him why he should risk his entire administration when even his own party doesn't put this issue in the top 75% of Really Important Things To Do.You know, the way to move me from thinking “your side is muddle headed” to thinking “your side is profoundly anti-human, and perhaps should be exterminated” is to tell me that we can’t live with dogs, and joke that we should eat them.At least they only want to starve children to save Mother Gaia. Most of them. For now.
"The sad part about happy endings is there's nothing to write about."Sometimes it's hard to be a woman* Just for grins, the KLF with the First Lady of Country Music:
Giving all your love to just one man
You'll have bad times
And he'll have good times
Doin things that you don't understand
But if you love him
You'll forgive him
Even though he's hard to understand
And if you love him
Oh, be proud of him
Cause after all he's just a man
Stand by your man
Give him two arms to cling to
And something warm to come to
when nights are cold and lonely
Stand by your man
And show the world you love him
Keep giving all the love you can
Stand by your man
Stand by your man
And show the world you love him
Keep giving all the love you can
Stand by your man
The Bay Area where he lives is experiencing light rail disease. This is the phenomenon where middle class voters along heavy white collar commuting routes push for horrendously expensive light rail lines. The capital costs of these systems drain transit budgets into the distant future, forcing service cuts, particularly in bus systems that serve the poor. The result is that the city ends up with bigger transit bills, but less actual transit, and progressives like Scott scratch their head and try to figure out what went wrong. It must be because non-users of Transit aren’t paying enough!Translation: But ... but ... I like Light Rail! How could it possibly not work out?
Cheryl Cressey, 48, told how she pleaded to have her son admitted to hospital. She said: “I kept going back and asking for somebody to look at him, but nobody would come. They rolled their eyes at me, they tutted at me, they turned their backs on me.”A ten year old boy, dead from Meningitis. Sent home from the hospital with pain killers. What does avictim of socialized medicine look like? This:
Here at least, we'd sue them to destitution. The only word for this is evil. State-sponsored evil.Sandra Burt, 56, who works at A&T Food store in Clackmannanshire, was warned she could be fined for her singing by the Performing Right Society (PRS).Even the PRS figured out that this was a little over the top, and apologized. A real apology, not one of those "we're sorry if someone was offended" pseudo-apologies:
...The village store where Mrs Burt works was contacted by the PRS earlier this year to warn them that a licence was needed to play a radio within earshot of customers.
When the shop owner decided to get rid of the radio as a result, Mrs Burt said she began singing as she worked.
Flowers and a proper apology. Well done, lads.In response to the furore created by their initial hardline, the PRS contacted Mrs Burt to apologise.
In a note attached to a large bouquet of flowers they said: "We're very sorry we made a big mistake.
"We hear you have a lovely singing voice and we wish you good luck."
There do seem to be different interpretations - as you'd expect for a neologism:A contributor to a mailing list for Japanese-English translation that I read reports that the verb obamu is gaining currency on the Kyoto University campus. He writes, “It means something along the lines of, ‘to ignore anything which appears to make you likely to fail or (be) wrong, and blindly surge ahead (preferably chanting, “yes we can, yes we can”)’.” He adds that he heard a friend jokingly try to cheer someone up by saying, “obandoke, omae.” (オバんどけ、お前.)
If I had to translate that on the fly, it would come out something like, “Lighten up and think positive, guy!”
I found it as an entry dated 22 September in a collection of slang and modern usage put together by the Japanese Teachers’ Network in Kitakyushu. Here’s what they write:So to those who find themselves newly added to the unemployment rolls, or to one-time allies in Eastern Europe facing alone a newly resurgent Russian Bear, let me just say "Hey, why are you so down in the dumps? Obandoke, omae!"obamu: (v.) To ignore inexpedient and inconvenient facts or realities, think “Yes we can, Yes we can,” and proceed with optimism using those facts as an inspiration (literally, as fuel). It is used to elicit success in a personal endeavor. One explanation holds that it is the opposite of kobamu. (拒む, which means to refuse, reject, or oppose).
They give the following example:
ほら、何落ち込んでいるんだよ。オバめよ、オバめ。
Or, “Hey, why are you so down in the dumps? Cheer up, cheer up!”
Better hurry if you want to get your name in. But the competition is fierce, from (ahem) professionals:Denver's Westword newspaper has unsurprisingly received more than 120 applications for the post of marijuana reviewer, many of whom are offering to do the job for nothing.
The site is seeking a permanent critic for its "Mile Highs and Lows" column, AP reports, who'll become "the first professional newspaper critic of medical marijuana in the country".
The paper is now sorting the weed from the chaff by asking wannabe pro dopeheads to outline "What Marijuana Means to Me". One hopeful, a former heroin addict, explains: "it has never let me down. never made me want to rob a bank. never put me in a situation where i felt compelled to prostitute myself".And this explains why M.J. hasn't been legalized yet:
27-year-old man from Sudbury [Massachusetts] has been arrested on charges he planned terrorism attacks inside and outside the United States, including a plot to use automatic weapons to open fire at shoppers and emergency responders in shopping mall attacks, federal prosecutors said today.This cannot possibly be correctly reported. After all, there is a huge billboard near Fenway Park that says terrorists can get guns at Gun Shows. Clearly this is another example of the Media failing to properly fact check a story.
...
The plot included plans to fire at emergency responders, but was abandoned because the men could not obtain the weapons, authorities said.
Red - Record High temperature (highest reading of the day is highest ever recorded) (277 stations)Pretty much everywhere north and east of the Red river saw record cold. The mountain states and Texas saw record heat. Overall, record low beat record high by around four to one.
Yellow - Record High Minimum temperature (lowest reading of the day is highest ever recorded) (527 stations)
Blue - Record Low Max temperature (highest reading of the day is lowest ever recorded) (2958 stations)
Purple - Record Low temperature (lowest reading of the day is lowest ever recorded) (330 stations)
White - Record snowfall (most of these seem to be records due to early date of snowfall, rather than deep accumulations) (143 stations)
Green - Record Rainfall (734 stations)
SMSUnless Global Warming leads to a greater spread between high and low temperatures, this seems highly counter-intuitive. Or there's no clear warming signal. Should be pretty easy to see if the spread is increasing.
Todd Brown is the proud dad of an adorable little girl. A little girl that he found out, is on the TSA's list of potential terrorists.They efficiently shifted the cost of false positives to you.Bingo.
If we really thought these folks were actually terrorists, we'd investigate them. A reasonable investigation involves a lot of effort - wire taps (first, get a warrant), stakeouts, careful collection of a case by Law Enforcement, prosecution. Probably a million dollars between police, lawyers, courts, etc - probably a lot more, if there's a trial. For each of the 700 [people in our thought experiment]. We're looking at a billion dollars, and this assumes a ridiculously low false positive rate.Actually, they haven't turned the system off. Rather, they've shifted the cost of the investigation to Mr. Brown and people like him.
There are on the order of a hundred thousand people in TSA's no-fly or watch databases. Not 700. If you investigated them all, you're talking a hundred billion bucks. So they turn the system off.
And that's actually the right answer. The data's lousy, joining lousy data with more lousy data makes the results lousier, and it's too expensive to make it work. How lousy is the data? Sky Marshals are on the No-Fly list. No, really. 5 year olds, too.
Surfacescapes Demo Walkthrough from Visual Story TAs on Vimeo.
An anthropologist has described modern man as “the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet”, with even Arnold Schwarzenegger at his muscular peak no match for a Neanderthal woman in the arm-wrestling stakes.Well, then. And there's a lot more where that came from:
But don't despair, you can break the family curse:The prologue of McAllister's book warns blokes just how much of a humiliation they're in for, opening with: "If you're reading this then you - or the male you have bought it for - are the worst man in history. No ifs, no buts - the worst man, period.”
Chaps are then reminded that a Roman soldier was able to march one-and-a-half marathons in a single day, Rwandan Tutsi men could jump higher then the current world record of 2.45 metres, and Huichol Indian dads in Mexico tied strings to their 'nads so that their other half could give a quick tug during labour enabling them to share the childbirth experience.
Those parents wishing to restore the male of the species to his former glory have a few options available: start your son firing arrows from galloping horses at the age of two, the better to emulate deadly accurate 12th century Mongol bowmen; train your offspring to throw an aboriginal hardwood spear 110 metres plus (as did the original Down Under locals, putting the current javelin world of 98.48 metres into perspective); or reserve him a seat on an Athenian oar-driven vessel, whose crew could easily out-row modern oarsmen.Riiiiight. Or you could teach your son to do this:
And this seems somehow relevant, as a helpful reminder to anthropologist Peter McAllister:I was trained as a physicist and was granted a PhD for my postgraduate work in upper atmosphere physics. In the early 1980s I joined the CSIRO’s Division of Oceanography and worked in surface gravity waves (ocean waves) for a time. Much of the theoretical side of oceanography entails fluid dynamics which, because of its heavy mathematical load, is regarded as a sub-discipline of applied mathematics rather than of physics. Because of this, in my view, many practitioners of oceanography and climatology have a cavalier disregard for experimental testing and an unjustified faith in the validity of large-scale computer models.Sheesh. What would an Atmospheric Physicist who worked on Oceanography know about how the atmosphere and oceans effect the climate? Must be some sort of denier, or something. Reid continues:Later in my career I was involved in running and refining numerical fluid dynamical models, so I gained some insight into how this modelling is done and how rigorously such models need to be tested. Naval architects and aerodynamical engineers do such testing in wave tanks and wind tunnels.
Meteorologists regularly test model “skill”. Climatologists don’t seem to have a concept of testing, and prefer to use the term “verification” instead—that is, they do not seek to invalidate their models; they only seek supporting evidence.
It's too hard to model the fluid dynamics of one river mouth, but the climate of the entire world? Don't worry, they have it covered.Back in the early 1990s when I was still working for the CSIRO and the early versions of the AGW theory started to gain currency, I was rather bemused by the passions which were aroused in my colleagues and the gullibility with which predictions of future climate disaster were accepted. Surely the jury is still out, I thought. I remained agnostic about the theory. More recently, after reading the literature and looking in detail at the output of one well-known climate model (HadCM3) I have changed my stand. I now believe it is nonsense for the following reasons.
[snip]
Second there are the climate models themselves. In discussions with colleagues, arguments always seem to come down to “But the models show …” Those who use this argument seldom have modelling experience themselves and share the lay public’s naive faith in the value of large computer models.
I have been a fluid dynamical modeller and I know how flaky numerical models can be for even a relatively small chunk of fluid like the Derwent Estuary. The models are highly unstable and need to be carefully cosseted in order to perform at all realistically. One reason for their inherent instability is that the mesh size of the model grid (typically hundreds of metres to hundreds of kilometres) is always much larger than the scale at which friction and molecular diffusion operate (millimetres or less). These are the forces which act to damp down oscillations by converting free energy to heat. In order to get around this difficulty, in order to keep a model stable, it is common practice to set certain parameters such as eddy viscosity unrealistically high to compensate for the absence of molecular friction. This is reasonable if we are using the model to gain insight into underlying processes, but it means that fluid dynamic models are not much good at predicting the future. There is no exact correspondence between model and reality, and the two soon part company.
A scientific theory is not tested merely by looking for confirmations but by conscientiously trying to “break” the theory, by trying to disprove it. The AGW theory is encapsulated in the IPCC assessment reports. The models discussed in these reports have not been tested in this way. These reports include sections on “Verification and Validation” but none on testing. “Verification” means that only data which support the theory are examined and data which do not support it are ignored. Indeed the authors of this section in the IPCC Third Assessment Report specifically dismiss the need for rigorous testing when they state: “our evaluation process is not as clear cut as a simple search for ‘falsification’” (Section 8.2.2 on page 474). Effectively what they are saying is: proper scientific testing is too hard and we are not going to bother doing it.Testing is hard, and often thankless. And really, really important. A company that doesn't test its products goes out of business, because customers won't put up with lousy output.
A House-passed bill that targets climate change through a cap-and-trade system of pollution credits would slow the nation's economic growth slightly over the next few decades and would create "significant" job losses from fossil fuel industries as the country shifts to renewable energy, the head of the Congressional Budget Office told a Senate energy panel Wednesday.Some folks don't like them saying this:
Daniel J. Weiss, a senior fellow at the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, pointed to a University of Massachusetts at Amherst study that concluded that the House bill would add jobs to the overall U.S. economy.I'll keep this simple, so I don't confuse the Democrats and their allies in the media (redundancy alert): you really only have two choices. You can not enforce carbon limits, in which case you will not have any added cost. Or you can have enforcement, with its associated cost. Pick one.
To all the bien pensant Usual Suspects who got their bowels in an uproar over Sarah Palin's comment about "Death Panels", I'm waiting for an explanation on how that won't happen here. Since the Obamacare plan is based on (a) ten years of taxes to fund seven years of benefits and (b) a 21% cut in Medicare costs, the shortfall is going to have to be made up somewhere. I mean, you can't eat yourself thin, nice though that might be. (hat tip: TJIC)AN 80-year-old grandmother who doctors identified as terminally ill and left to starve to death has recovered after her outraged daughter intervened.
Hazel Fenton, from East Sussex, is alive nine months after medics ruled she had only days to live, withdrew her antibiotics and denied her artificial feeding. The former school matron had been placed on a controversial care plan intended to ease the last days of dying patients.
Doctors say Fenton is an example of patients who have been condemned to death on the Liverpool care pathway plan. They argue that while it is suitable for patients who do have only days to live, it is being used more widely in the NHS, denying treatment to elderly patients who are not dying.
Hey, fight the power, man! Up the system! Please explain to the environmentalists that, however much it is to be wished, you simply can't eat yourself thin.LINDEN -- Rowdy union workers today upstaged a campaign kick-off by New Jersey environmental groups opposing a unique, coal-fueled electric plant proposed for the City of Linden that will capture its own carbon dioxide output and pipe it under the Atlantic Ocean.
"We need jobs," chanted two dozen union workers who support the "PurGen" project, as leaders of the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club, the New Jersey Environmental Federation, the New Jersey Environmental Lobby, Environment New Jersey and the Edison Wetlands Association held a press conference near Linden’s city hall to lambaste the $5 billion plant as a "dangerous experiment."
As for the complex ways of living, I love them not, however much I practice them. In as many places as possible, I will get my feet down to the earth.Welcome to the Borepatch blogroll!
If, as some warmist suggest, the world temperature has risen by upwards of 2 degrees C in the past 100 years; then no (new) low temperature records should be possible.
I guess we can put that claim to bed.
It would be interesting to see how the distribution of low and high temperature records occurs. Is there a pattern between rural and urban?
Cheers,
Steve