Even when it's cold in Atlanta, it's not cold like in Massachusetts. Of course, we'd take the dogs out for a walk anyway, but here in Atlanta other people take their dogs for a walk, too. Admittedly, most are - like us - transplants from the frozen north. But you meet them, at the Dog Park.
In Massachusetts, there was no Dog Park. Rather than control by the County, each town ran its own show. In general, I like that, but it meant we had to find our own place to take the four footed beasts for their Daily Constitutional. Here, the County has put up a couple of fenced Dog Parks, where the dogs can run together, and the people can talk together.
He was married for 44 years. They moved here from Connecticut, into a big house. Then she died, unexpectedly. He was cheerful, but somehow the conversation kept coming back to her, and how his dogs just didn't keep the Big New House from echoing.
But life goes on, and remembers.
Gerard van der Leun, riffing off a post from The Anchoress, posts a song by Lorena McKennitt. We like her quite a bit, but this made me stop and think about the unexpected. About him, trying to rebuild a life which after 44 years was suddenly upended.
I stayed there to forget.
There on my lover, face to face, I lay.
All ended, and I let
My cares all fall away
Forgotten in the lilies on that day.
It's hard being fully human; experiencing - and understanding - the full range of this life we find ourselves leading. Many have gone before us, who give us clues, if we're wise enough to see. Most only see when they stand on that hallowed ground.
William Herschel was a polymath in an age of polymaths. A self-taught astronomer - who made his own telescopes, including the monster 40 foot one shown here - he is best known for his discovery of the planet Uranus in 1781. He is (fortunately) not known for the name he gave it: Georgium Sidus (George's Star) after King George III. We can thank the French, who would have none of that sort of shameless sucking up (to a British Sovereign), and so we're left with Uranus, the source of amusement to Middle School boys ever since.
One name of his that did stick was asteroid.
Herschel is less known as a composer, which is where in fact he got his start. One of many German immigrants to England in the period, he is overshadowed by fellow transplant Handel. Rather a pity.
One very curious product of this polymath mind was an observation he made in 1801. He spent a considerable time studying the Sun, and specifically sunspots. He found a very close correlation between the number of sunspots and the price of wheat. He observed that Solar Cycles with low numbers of sun spots were correlated with high wheat prices, and vice versa.
And while this sounds implausible, it seems to hold up to repeated scrutiny:
Since I first looked at the matter there's been a lot of research and it appears the correlation may not be as spurious as I thought. The wheat price series is one of the longest we have, it extends back to 1250, I've got a paper chart that starts in 1300 (although some of the prices are dubious).
The CBOT has a wheat chart that starts in 1477. [Dead link updated. - Borepatch]
Google Scholar has 285 ref's to Herschel and wheat prices. Gregory Yom Din of the Israel Cosmic Ray Center, Tel Aviv University and Israel Space Agency, seems particularly interested, here, here, here, ...
We have excellent records of both sunspot activity and wheat prices back to at least the middle of the eighteenth century. We have less thorough records extending nearly 150 years beyond that:
If you look in the middle of the graph (around 1800), you'll see a 40 year period of low sunspot activity called the "Dalton Minimum". Significant cooling occurred during this period - up to 2°C in 20 years at Oberlach, Germany - and it included 1816 (known as "the year without a summer") and 1817 when New York Harbor froze solid enough for horse traffic. The price of food quadrupled.
It seems plausible that the Sun would effect the temperature of the Earth, but much recent research has failed to establish a link between solar luminosity and global temperature.More interesting is a proposal from Henrik Svensmark, that it's the variation in the strength of the Sun's magnetic field, not the luminosity, that counts. A weaker magnetic field allows more Cosmic Rays to reach the Earth. The Cosmic Rays ionize the lower atmosphere, seeding increased cloud cover. Higher levels of low level clouds reflect more light back to space, resulting in a cooler planet.
Nigel Calder has an excellent overview of the Svensmark hypothesis, as well as the controversy surrounding it. As you'd expect, the controversy contains much of what we've come to expect from Climate Science: Science-by-Press-Release from the warming enthusiasts, difficulty in getting responses published in peer-reviewed journals, and arguments over the proper use of statistics.
Quite frankly, this goes beyond my depth, and beyond the depth of what I can expect to understand while doing this as a hobby. And so I'll drop back from the science to the history:
We have very good records of sunspot activity, records that go back much further than good global coverage of historical temperature.
We have very good records of grain prices, records that go back much further than good global coverage of historical temperature.
There is a striking correlation between these two.
And it's not just these records. Just look out your window. The Sun went spotless last week, and this has been only the latest example of reduced Solar magnetic activity that we've had for a number of years. The last three years in particular have been very quiet, and this is the third very cold and snowy winter we've seen in a row.
Yes, I know, correlation does not imply causation. However, this is a microcosm of all that is wrong with Climate Science today. Strong evidence against AGW "can't be right", and weak evidence in support "must be right".
People cared about the price of food. Money could be made or lost (not to mention millions whose lives were at stake). The data here is very good indeed. The data hasn't been manipulated "homogenized" and "gridded". It's easy to count sunspots - so easy that we've been doing it for nearly 400 years. There's even decent proxy data extending back millennia that lets us track Solar Flux. The correlation appears to hold over very, very long periods.
Direct observations of sunspot numbers are available for the past
four centuries1,2, but longer time series are required, for example,
for the identification of a possible solar influence on climate and
for testing models of the solar dynamo. Here we report a
reconstruction of the sunspot number covering the past 11,400
years, based on dendrochronologically dated radiocarbon concentrations.
And the correlation is laying on my lawn right now, for the first time since 1882. Excuse me while I go light a fire in the fireplace. Maybe a little CO2 will melt all this controversy away.
Hang around the debate between proponents and opponents of Anthropogenic Global Warming for a while, and you'll hear this question tossed out to the opponents by the proponents. OK, smartypants. If it's not Carbon Dioxide, just what it it?
Thus the rate of temperature rise during the last 200 years is about +1°C/200 years, + 0.5°C/100 years, which is about 5/6 of the rate of increase (+0.6°C/100 years) during the last century. Therefore, it may be inferred that the CO2 contribution was about +0.1°C during the last century. There was no obvious break in the rate of temperature rise during the last 150~200 years, so it is likely that the recovery from the LIA is continuing to the present. Sea level rise is approximately linear (1.7mm/year or less) from about 1850, to the present. The retreat of many glaciers in the world began from about 1800-1850, not after 1946, when CO2 began to increase rapidly. When discussing the present warming, we should not ignore the LIA and its recovery.
The only complication is that the multi-decadal oscillation, of the amplitude ~0.2°C and a period of about 60 years, is superposed on the linear change. It peaked in about 1940 and 2000. After 1940, the temperature change was negative until 1975, so a similar negative trend may continue until about 2030. This may explain the present halting of the temperature rise. The inferred temperature increase by 2100 is about + 0.5°C±0.2°C, depending on the phase of the multi-decadal oscillation.
If climate chage is your bag, baby, RTWT.
Tagged with "junk science" because I don't have a tag for "non-junk science".
It's also surprisingly cheap, assuming you already have an Xbox 360. Kinect is, of course, Microsoft's new hands-free adapter for the Xbox console. The kids simply love it, and since I can't get any time on it to try it myself, I'll post about it instead.
I'll present my observations in layers - like Ogres or parfaits. It'll take a couple of layers to get to why this is so seriously cool, not not just an "Xbox Wii".
Layer 1. The Microsoft Wii.
The Kinect comes with Kinect Sports, just like the Wii comes with Wii Sports. It has a selection of games - bowling, boxing, golf, and the like - that you play sort of as mini-games. The selection seems bigger in Kinect Sports, with Track and Field, knock-down-the-blocks, and other stuff that I'm sure would be just dandy if I could get any time on it to play. Here's a demo of ping pong (warning: anoying advert at the beginning).
But other than the you-don't-need-a-wiimote, it's more or less just like the Wii.
Layer 2. The video capture makes it way more than a Wii.
You don't need a remote, because the Kinect has a camera that watches you, analyzes your movements, and translates that into actions for your on-screen avatar. This is a lot cooler in practice than it sounds, and is best shown, not described. This video is from the Dance Central game which sounded completely stupid to me, but which the kids simply love. Think Dance Dance Revolution, but with no pad to step on, and with arm gestures.
Remember, it's figuring this out by watching you with its camera. It even plays back a quick series of frame grabs of you at the end of the dance, which is often laugh out loud funny. As I said, my first impression was that this game would be 100% stupid. I was wrong - way wrong.
Layer 3. The secret sauce of video analysis is very cool indeed
Microsoft has a really innovative technology here, and has made a very shrewed move by opening up the API, which people are already taking and running with. This means that you'll have a lot more stuff in 6 or 12 months, so there will be a continuous wave of cool washing over the market. Smart.
And just how much can you get with the API? Lots. Here's how it works, which is a combination of annoyingly basic (wavelength vs. frequency, duh) and very cool indeed (Infrared depth resolution).
Layer 4. It's personal.
When the Kinect breaks down your image to its component parts, it can recognize you, and tell you apart from other people who use the same system. It can even log you in to Xbox Live when you step in front of it. This seamless personalization is an example of the sort of thing that the depth and breadth of the API will allow. I expect much more of this sort of thing, but it is simply insanely cool.
Layer 5. HAL, open the pod bay door.
There's quite a good voice command capability. The kids had this set up by the time I went to look at it, so I'm not sure what this video is getting at when it talks about setup. But you can not only use voice commands for games, but for watching movies (say, Netflix via Xbox Live).
Still, I'm not sure that I'll hook the Xbox up to Camp Borepatch's main gate:
Borepatch:HAL Xbox, open the main gate.
Xbox: I'm afraid I can't do that, Borepatch.
This strikes me as the Media Center of the future. With cameras and microphones in different rooms communicating over WiFi, with access to your MP3 library and playlists, with a decent text-to-voice to read you recipes for roast leg of lamb, you have something very, very compelling.
I have to hand it to Microsoft for coming out with something that starts with a "Wii-alike", but takes it to a whole new level.
A Flash Mob singing the "Hallelujah" Chorus accompanied by the largest pipe organ in the world, Philadelphia's Wanamaker Organ with its almost 30,000 pipes.
Although I have to confess to a greater fondness for "Worthy Is The Lamb", which would be awesome accompanied by the Wanamaker Organ.
This is a special song for us, having just moved back south after eight years in New England. Alabama needs no introduction to most readers. Said to be the most successful commercial Country band of the 1980s with their fusion of Country and Southern Rock, they had 30 #1 songs and sold over 70 Million records.
Long time readers will recall that I was a big Southern Rock fan, and so it's no surprise that I listened to my share of Alabama. But you also know that I have a bit of a sentimental streak. While this might normally be a bit too sentimental even for me, on this first Christmas back in Dixie, it hits just the right note.
Christmas In Dixie (Songwriters: Jeff Cook, Teddy Gentry, Mark Herndon, Randy Owen)
By now in New York City.
There's snow on the ground.
And out in California.
The sunshines' falling down.
And maybe down in Memphis, Graceland's all in lights.
And in Atlanta, Georgia, there's peace on earth tonight.
Christmas in Dixie, its snowing in the pines.
Merry Christmas from Dixie to everyone tonight.
Its windy in Chicago.
The kids are out of school.
There's magic in Motown.
The city's on the move.
In Jackson, Mississippi to Charlotte, Caroline.
And all across the Nation, its a peaceful Christmas time.
Christmas in Dixie, its snowing in the pines.
Merry Christmas from Dixie, to everyone tonight.
And from Fort Payne, Alabama..Merry Christmas tonight.
If this isn't the most beautiful piece of music ever written, I don't know what is.
Astonishingly, I never would have heard this, except I went to a concert with them a few months ago. Married these 56 years, Dad is Tristan to Mom's Isolde, and an inspiration on how to live a life that means something.
If I can just make one (hesitant) correction to Herr Wagner, this isn't the liebestod - the Love's Death. It didn't, and won't die. We're still listening to it.
