宁静

宁静.
Just wanted to wish you serenity.

Having fun with industrial strength pressure cooking

This guy really loves to experiment with cooking, while trying to follow the scientific method :-)

Rolf-Dieter Heuer about before the Big Bang

The European: Do you think it is conceivable that we will eventually learn something about before the Big Bang?
Heuer: I doubt it.

Interesting. He says in the interview basically that humans will push the knowledge further and further, that answering questions will open doors to new questions – but whats's before the Big Bang is beyond our possibilities. And I think I can understand the reasoning, but it is still a bit absolutistic… (via)

A song I just heard, which I think I just fits right in:

There you go
Swimming deeper into mystery
Here I remain
Only seeing where you used to be
Stared at the ceiling
'Til my ears filled up with tears
Never got to know you
Suddenly you're out of here

Gone from mystery into mystery
Gone from daylight into night
Another step deeper into darkness
Closer to the light

Walked outside
Summer moon was nearly down
Mist on the fields
Holy stillness all around
Death's no stranger
No stranger than the life I've seen
Still I cry
Still I begged to get you back again

Bruce Cockburn – Closer to the light

John Hawks on consensus building

I feel so fortunate to have been engaged in this problem, because it says so much about the process of science. Science is always a process where progress requires an opinionated minority to recruit support among peers who are not specialists in the same area. Such a minority may forge consensus through consistent and repeated demonstration of facts. More likely -- as in the case of modern human origins, where new evidence was often equivocal -- a motivated minority will apply a broader range of rhetorical strategies. Over the years, I saw people pull out every trick in the book to persuade the uncommitted to their point of view.

"It turns out fish are essential to the health of a reef."

Scientists say the world's reefs are being harmed by a complex combination of factors; including pollution, agricultural runoff, coastal development, and overfishing. It turns out fish are essential to the health of a reef. Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other leading institutions are also very concerned about climate change because they believe rising ocean temperatures are triggering a process called "bleaching" in which the coral weakens, turns white and often dies.

Captain Obvious to the rescue!

There is a very important message from this news report. The risks to coral reefs are dominated by local interference by humans on its ecosystem function. Such effects include local pollution (e.g. runoff from rivers and shorelines and from shipping; overfishing including the major predator species such as sharks).

What seems to be a minor, or even an inconsequential effect, is any warming of the ocean (i.e. global warming) despite the reference by NOAA in the CBS show to bleaching (they also showed a calving glacier :-)).

Despite this short reference to global warming in the CBS report, the report is quite an important addition to the broadening out of environmental issues beyond the mypopic focus on global warming. The contrast between reef health near Veracruz, Mexico and the Cuba Preserve should convincingly show objective readers that coral bleaching from global warming is clearly not the largest threat to the health of tropical coral reefs.

Will Huntingt …

… tells it like it is:

What a nice inquiry indeed

Although the UK Parliamentary Committee directly asked Muir Russell to examine this incident, Muir Russell refused to do so, and, worse, made a false finding that Jones had not sought to delete emails subject to a prior FOI request. Muir Russell did not satisfactorily explain his false finding when recalled by the UK Parliamentary finding, but admitted that he had not asked Jones about the incident because that would have been asking Jones if he had committed a crime.

Funniest Nigeria Spam Ever

Urgent Information Regarding your Funds
WORLDBANK WASHINGTON DC

WIRE TRANSFER DEPARTMENT
WORLD BANK GROUP WASHINGTON DC.
PAYMENT CENTER
Funds Remittance Department
World Bank

Attn: Beneficiaries/ Scam Victims
After a joint meeting of the Executive Council (FEC), the Senate Committee on Debts/Scam reconciliation and the Presidential Payment and Implementation Panel on Contract/ inheritance fund, which was addressed and headed by President Obama. It became imperative to contact you on the subject matter. This meeting was initiated as part of the recent scams that has been coming from Nigeria
During the meeting, so many negative reports were tabled on behalf of numerous Victims and foreign personnels on how unfairly they have been treated and extorted by some corrupt Nigerian government officials who were vested with the authority to pay them their entitlements. The most annoying and irritating aspect of it all is that they could not effect payment to these beneficiaries after subjecting them to so much stress and trauma. So the WORLD BANK WASHINGTON DC OFFICE has been instructed to carry out the payment to you.
So for you to receive your fund which is worth $17.5M United States Dollars all you need to do is to choose an option amongst the below options on how you will prefer to get your funds.
…

Kindly choose the method you will like to receive your funds with and get back to the paying officer Mr Jerry Rothchild so that he can proceed on this matter rothchildjerry121@hotmail.com or call him on XXX
Best regards
Allen Schmidt

Atmosphere warming at lower end of computer model projections

The end of November 2011 completes 33 years of satellite-based global temperature data, according to John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. Globally averaged, Earth’s atmosphere has warmed about 0.45 Celsius (about 0.82° F) during the almost one-third of a century that sensors aboard NOAA and NASA satellites have measured the temperature of oxygen molecules in the air.

This is at the lower end of computer model projections of how much the atmosphere should have warmed due to the effects of extra greenhouse gases since the first Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) went into service in Earth orbit in late November 1978, according to satellite data processed and archived at UAHuntsville’s ESSC.

“While 0.45 degrees C of warming is noticeable in climate terms, it isn’t obvious that it represents an impending disaster,” said Christy. “The climate models produce some aspects of the weather reasonably well, but they have yet to demonstrate an ability to confidently predict climate change in upper air temperatures.”

Climate consensuses that will be overturned

Just a quick and dirty list. The supporting evidence are left as an exercise for the reader.

1. Human emissions of CO2 are the sole driver of the recent global warming. 
2. Clouds have a strong positive feedback.
3. The recent global warming is unprecedented.
4. The sea level is rising catastrophically!
5. The sea level rise is accelerating!
6. OMG! More and more hurricanes!
7. The northpole is melting!
8. The antarctic is melting!
9. The [insert your favorite species] is dying!
10. The [insert your favorite species] is negatively affected!
11. We are all going to die!
12. Climate change is the biggest threat to nature!
13. Climate change is the biggest threat to humanity!

An comment to the above

1. The maximum contribution to global warming is 50% (probably lower).
2. No, the total feedback from clouds is negative.
3. No it isn't.
4. You call 3.4 mm per year (at maximum) catastrophic?
5. No it isn't.
6. No increase in hurricanes.
7. Yeah?
8. No it isn't.
9. Humans are probably causing it, but not by global warming. 
10. Humans are probably causing it, but not by global warming. 
11. One day.
12. Not by far.
13. Poverty? Hunger? HIV? War? Religions? Capitalism? Imperialism? Modern food?

Dietary consensuses that will be overturned

Just a quick and dirty list. The supporting evidence are left as an exercise for the reader.

1. Dietary cholesterol causes (heart-)disease
2. A high blood cholesterol level causes (heart-)disease
3. Dietary saturated fatty acids cause (heart-)disease
4. All dietary fatty acids cause (heart-)disease
5. Omega-6 fatty acids are essential and therefor healthy [notice the contradiction to the previous point]
6. (Red) meat is unhealthy
7. Grains are healthy

An comment to the above

1. This theory is no longer supported by the scientific community but still lingers on in the public and is repeated by the media.
2. A high blood cholesterol level is one marker (and not even a good one), not a cause
3. Studies either show that partially hydrogenated fatty acids (e.g. vegetable margarine) or sugar have to be added to a diet to cause disease. There are different saturated fatty acids, to show its "unhealthyness" in the lab only one saturated fatty acid is predominantly given – giving a composition of saturated fatty acids found in animals does not cause disease (by itself).
4. Omega-3 and Omega-6 are essential fatty acids. Too little of them is unhealthy. Too much of them is unhealthy. A wrong ratio between them and/or other nutrients is unhealthy. The banal commonplace hat all fatty acids are unhealthy is bullshit. Your vegetable oil will kill you.
5. The Omega-6 fatty acids become unhealthy when the ratio to Omega-3 gets high (higher than 2 to 1)
6. Processed meat is unhealthy. Grain-fed beef is unhealthy. Grass-fed beef is healthy.
7. Studies show that wheat is unhealthy. Studies show that whole grain is healthier than wheat, same as studies would show that heroin is healthier than meth.

Work in progress.

What is society? The cheeseburger example

Further reflection revealed that it’s quite impractical—nearly impossible—to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in spring and fall. Large mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year, and would inherently involve omitting some core cheeseburger ingredients. It would be wildly expensive—requiring a trio of cows—and demand many acres of land. There’s just no sense in it.

A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors—in all likelihood, a couple of dozen—and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh. The cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago as, indeed, it did not.

That is Socialism!

Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the municipal charter, protection of personal liberty or regulation of the state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: "Socialism!" Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.

This was not merely a figure of speech, fashion, or party tactics. The bourgeoisie had a true insight into the fact that all the weapons it had forged against feudalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education it had produced rebelled against its own civilization, that all the gods it had created had fallen away from it. It understood that all the so-called bourgeois liberties and organs of progress attacked and menaced its class rule at its social foundation and its political summit simultaneously, and had therefore become "socialistic."
– Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

(via)

"I assumed no media outlet would pick up on it. I was wrong."

In 2008 Alice Dogruyol representing The Spa PR Company wrote to me requesting I plug a new genital cosmetic procedure – the g-shot. It involved injecting collagen into the vaginal wall. And was being spearheaded in the UK by a Professor Phanuel Dartey of Harley Street.

I immediately noticed there seemed to be no robust peer reviewed clinical evidence for the safety and effectiveness of the g-shot procedure. I felt the press release I was sent was so poor and the ‘treatment’ described seemed so bizarre that it was best ignored. I assumed no media outlet would pick up on it.

I was wrong.

Several newspapers including the Sun, Mirror, Telegraph and Mail clearly had been sent the same press release as me. The only difference was they joyfully publicized the g-shot and promoted Prof Dartey’s Harley Street practice. And in the case of the Sun and the Mirror the pieces were written by their Health and Science correspondents. Who really should have known better. Since then many women’s magazines and websites have also described the procedure as a sex life enhancer, promoting both the g-shot and Laser Vaginal Surgery (which Dartey also offered).
…
This media distancing could be coincidence, or it may be more deliberate. In the Mail’s case it can be seen as deliberate in the way Dartey is talked about. When his g-shot procedures are being lauded he’s a Professor from Harley Street. When his striking off is detailed his qualifications from the Soviet Union and Ghanaian heritage are at the fore. As @PeteDeveson astutely commented on twitter: “on the way up it’s “Hollywood” and “Harley Street”. On the way down it’s “Ghana” and “Soviet””. This xenophobic coverage neatly airbrushes any involvement of the newspaper in promoting Dartey’s practice – and subsequent harm done to his patients.

(via)

Kierkegaard on how to fool oneself

There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.
― Søren Kierkegaard

Severinghaus asks questions …

… and Mann obfuscates. Must read.

DSK framed?

At 1:31 — one hour after [chambermaid Nafissatou] Diallo had first told a supervisor that she had been assaulted by the client in the presidential suite — [Hotel Security Chief] Adrian Branch placed a 911 call to the police. Less than two minutes later, the footage from the two surveillance cameras shows [Hotel Chief Engineer Brian] Yearwood and an unidentified man walking from the security office to an adjacent area. This is the same unidentified man who had accompanied Diallo to the security office at 12:52 PM. There, the two men high-five each other, clap their hands, and do what looks like an extraordinary dance of celebration that lasts for three minutes.

Not that I care much if DSK is innocent or not – nobody in a position with power is innocent – but this shows just how politics is a game for power in our so called "democracies".

"if the data doesn’t exist, the question can’t be answered"

#4133 Johnathan Overpeck – IPCC review.
   … what Mike Mann continually fails to understand, and no amount of references will solve, is that there is practically no reliable tropical data for most of the time period, and without knowing the tropical sensitivity, we have no way of knowing how cold (or warm)the globe actually got.

… Unsatisfying, perhaps, since people will want to know whether 1200 AD was warmer than today, but if the data doesn’t exist, the question can’t yet be answered.

Tiim Osborne #4007
   Also we have applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data after 1960, so they look closer to observed temperatures than the tree-ring data actually were

Tim Osborne #2347
   Also, we set all post-1960 values to missing in the MXD data set (due to decline), and the method will infill these, estimating them from the real temperatures – another way of “correcting” for the decline, though may be not defensible!

"Looks like the error bars need error bars…"

Hide the decline – the core:

Indeed, they did not simply “hide the decline”, their “hide the decline” was worse than we thought. Mann et al did not merely delete data after 1960, they deleted data from 1940 on, You can see the last point of the Briffa reconstruction (located at ~1940) peeking from behind the spaghetti in the graphic below:

Had Mann et al used the actual values, the decline would have been as shown in the accompanying graphic:

Looks like the error bars need error bars…

The problem with tree-rings

Tim Clark said
November 27, 2011 at 6:52 pm

As a physiologist, I could post a million references to studies like this one, on spruce trees in Canada:

“Response function analysis indicated that (a) climate accounts for a high amount of variance in tree-ring widths; (b) tree-ring growth has significant positive correlation with mean monthly air temperature of previous October and November, and with total monthly precipitation of current January and June, while has significant negative correlation with mean monthly air temperature of May to July
…

The best correlated analyses show a greater response to precipitation at all temperatures, and only show a significant response to temperature when water becomes limiting. For those with impaired reading comprehension let me rephrase; water availabilty limits growth, temperature, not so much.

But look closer at the first study. Jeff’s selected e-mails indicate (correct me if I’m wrong) that the tree proxies were calibrated to summer temperatures. Why not with the positive correlations in the fall and early winter temps???

John Skookum said
November 28, 2011 at 3:17 pm

These comments, especially those of Mr. Hmmm, bring to mind an old scam used by professional touts who sell their predictions of horse races to gullible gamblers. They will commonly mail (or nowadays, email) unsolicited free predictions to a very large number of gamblers (their “marks”) over multiple weeks, to allow them to place their own bets and thus “prove” to themselves that the tout has some can’t-miss inside dope on the ponies and jockeys.

What they don’t tell their victims is that each individual subset of predictions is different for each mark, tailored so that their entire set of predictions will encompass most plausible results. Each week, 25% or so of the marks will win, while the rest lose their money. The next week, 25% of last week’s winning 25% will win big again, and so on.

After three or four iterations of this, there will be a tiny fraction of their marks who will be gratefully astonished at how accurate their tout’s predictions are, and for another few weeks they will happily re-invest their winnings in paying a very high price for the tout’s predictions on upcoming races. (The alarmists and their rapacious government cronies have that part particularly well understood).

So what if nine hand-picked pine trees in Yamal show an amazing correlation with temperature, and neatly dispose of the Medieval Warming Period, and predict catastrophe if we don’t change our wicked carbon-spewing ways? The onus is on the alarmists to show me a much larger set of dendrochronology results from the same locality and elsewhere, and give a plausible explanation for how they are to be included in or excluded from analysis. Otherwise, the default assumption must always be that they are cherry picking their results from statistical noise and local conditions. And by God do these emails ever confirm it!

A study that could show that you know fuck-all? Forget Popper and don't do that study!

Without trying to prejudice this work, but also because of what I almost think I know to be the case, the results of this study will show that we can probably say a fair bit about <100 year extra-tropical NH temperature variability (at least as far as we believe the proxy estimates), but honestly know fuck-all about what the >100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know with certainty that we know fuck-all).

Now that is quite a bombshell of an email. It is more serious than the ‘hide the decline’ situation because it gets to the heart of all of the paleo-hockeystick plots.  If you consider that they are saying any change in temps greater than 100 years in length are a complete unknown, how is it that we “know” that recent years are the warmest in history?  The very clear answer is – we don’t.

A possible study that might show that climate science might know fuck-all? And they know it before hand?  So they don't do it! There you have Popper's Principle Of Falsifiability! To qualify to be a scientific inquiry, to have a scientific theory (and not something pseudo-scientific), one postulates something that can be falsified, and then tests it (or better has it tested by independent parties). To know of such a test and avoid it, now that is truly unscientific.

"The reconstructions clearly show a ‘hockey-stick’ trend."

Therefore, I thought I’d play around with some randomly generated time-series and see if I could ‘reconstruct’ northern hemisphere temperatures.

I first generated 1000 random time-series in Excel – I did not try and approximate the persistence structure in tree-ring data. The autocorrelation therefore of the time-series was close to zero, although it did vary between each time-series.

Playing around therefore with the AR persistent structure of these time-series would make a difference. However, as these series are generally random white noise processes, I thought this would be a conservative test of any potential bias.
…
The reconstructions clearly show a ‘hockey-stick’ trend. I guess this is precisely the phenomenon that Macintyre has been going on about.

The problems with the "consensus science" in the field of climate change

Two clear videos on the topic of Climate Change, and the problems with the "consensus science" behind it.


The first one by Prof. Dr. Vincent Courtillot (via)

And the second by Michael Chrichton (Part 1 is MIA use this and this, here are Part 2 and Part 3):

The planed destruction of a scientific journal and a scientific career

Now the most interesting point of note here is that the article in question refutes the infamous hockey stick chart developed by Mann, in which the Medieval Warm Period disappears. What we have here is Mann, and other members of the team trying to get the editors of a journal to discredit the entire journal, simply for publishing a paper which refutes his own [Mann's] work! Note in this that the stakes are being raised again. Mann seeks to have the entire journal tarnished as a result of the publication of the offending papers. Note also his offer to re-review the manuscripts, which is disingenuous, to say the least (bearing in mind he is calling it crap). The aim appears to be to find out who did the review (which becomes quite and obsession, see earlier Pittock email). Finally, see how the consensus (highlighted) apparently trumps peer review! So the pressure is building against the journal…..

And you should read all the quotes:

Yes, read it again. There can be no doubt that they are trying to get Chris de Freitas sacked from the University of Auckland. Re-read it if you have any doubts. When the team object to a person, they really, really object. And if that means seeking to destroy a reputation and career, so be it. If you look at Pittock’s email with the options for action, you can see the final option was to address critiques with science. Instead, the proposed course of action is to gang up on an individual, and trash their career and reputation.

[Update] And one more:

Now even if the paper was bad, you can see the extremeness of the team response to it. I can tell readers from my own experience in publication that even papers with ‘less’ global warming message are forcefully resisted by some. I have also been privy to other paper’s reviews which suffer the forceful gatekeeping as is implied above. If the authors truly did make an honest attempt at publishing as DeFreitas wrote, and it truly was accepted by four reviewers, even if it had a mistake, can you imagine the difficulty they will now have in promotions or acceptance of future work in their field? I wonder if the huge climate funds will still find their way to them or if their proposals will fall on deaf ears?

Confirmation bias at its worst - Climategate 2.0 edition

Phil Jones worries about "impact", not about scientific soundness, when choosing what goes into his publications:

I’m in discussion with AGU and Ellen about co-ordination as this should increase the impact of both pieces. 

And well, he (and Mike Mann) get called out for it by Bradley.

You just shouldn’t grab anything that’s in print and just use it ‘cos it’s there—that just perpetuates rubbish.

Alas, it has no lasting effect on Phil Jones.

And this by Tom Wigley is revealing:

It seems that there was a misunderstanding about what I suggested re Yang. To be more specific, I suggest adding the following to the end of the Figure 2 caption:

“….. Note that individual series are weighted according to their quality in forming a composite hemispheric-scale time series.”

The word ‘quality’ here has been chosen carefully — as something that is deliberately a bit ambiguous.

The point here is to have something that we can fall back on if anyone criticizes *any* specific input series (*not* just Yang).

These emails are amazing:

I too have expressed my concern to Phil (and Ray) over the logic that you leave all series you want in but just weight them according to some (sometimes low) correlation (in this case based on decadal values). I also believe some of the series that make up the Chinese record are dubious or obscure, but the same is true of other records Mann and Jones have used (e.g. how do you handle a series in New Zealand that has a -0.25 correlation?) .

IT IS A DIFFICULT CALL — WHETHER TO DUMP SERIES THAT HAVE NO SIGNIFICANT LINK TO TEMPERATURE AND WHICH ARE, AS WELL, DUBIOUS ON A PRIORI GROUNDS; OR TO USE A WEIGHTING SCHEME. IF ONE DID THIS BY SIMPLE MULTIPLE REGRESSION, THEN THINGS WOULD BE WEIGHTED AUTOMATICALLY. HOWEVER, STATISTICALLY ONE SHOULD STILL DUMP THE LOW CORRELATION ONES. I HAVE RESERVATIONS ABOUT WHAT MIKE AND PHIL HAVE DONE — BUT THIS IS SOMETHING WE SHOULD TALK ABOUT FACE TO FACE SOME DAY.

And suggesting to let the Mann-O-Matic fix it "AUTOMATICALLY" – nice. How would that help when:

There are problems (and limitations ) with ALL series used.

Does Capital add "value"

At face value, these trends would be consistent with large productivity gains in finance. Pre-crisis, that is what the bald numbers implied. Measured total factor productivity growth in the financial sector exceeded that in the rest of the economy (Figure 1). Financial innovation was said to have allowed the banking system to better manage risk and allocate capital. These efficiency gains in turn allowed the factors of banking production (labour and capital) to reap the benefits through high returns (wages and dividends).

But crisis experience has challenged this narrative. High pre-crisis returns in the financial sector proved temporary. … In what sense is increased risk-taking by banks a value-added service for the economy at large? In short, it is not.

(via)

Avoid doorways

New research suggests the mere act of walking through a doorway helps people forget, which could explain many millions of confusing moments that happen each day around the world. A study published recently in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology found that participants who walked through doorways in a virtual reality environment were significantly more likely to forget memories formed in another room, compared with those who traveled the same distance but crossed no thresholds.

Notre Dame University researcher Gabriel Radvansky says doorways serve as a type of “event boundary” that the brain uses to separate and store memories. When you enter a new room, your brain updates its understanding of what’s going on in the new environment, which takes some mental effort. This parsing of memory, albeit subtle, leaves the information encoded in the other room (i.e. “Now I’m going to my room to fetch some knickers”) less available in your new location.

Recognizing this tendency could help you avoid future lapses. Or you could take Radvansky’s advice, as (jokingly—I think) told to Postmedia News: ”Doorways are bad. Avoid them at all costs.”

Justus, this one is for you.

The Militarization of Our Police

Repost of a classic, due to recent events:

The Militarization of Our Police

Here’s another thing that boggles my mind: You get busted for drugs in this country, and it turns out you can make yourself ineligible to receive food stamps.

But you can be a serial fraud offender like Citigroup, which has repeatedly been dragged into court for the same offenses and has repeatedly ignored court injunctions to abstain from fraud, and this does not make you ineligible to receive $45 billion in bailouts and other forms of federal assistance.

This is the reason why all of these settlements allowing banks to walk away without "admissions of wrongdoing" are particularly insidious. A normal person, once he gets a felony conviction, immediately begins to lose his rights as a citizen.

But white-collar criminals of the type we’ve seen in recent years on Wall Street – both the individuals and the corporate "citizens" – do not suffer these ramifications. They commit crimes without real consequence, allowing them to retain access to the full smorgasbord of subsidies and financial welfare programs that, let’s face it, are the source of most of their profits.

(via)

The gene "for" X

“Scientists discover gene for autism” (or ovarian cancer, or depression, cocaine addiction, obesity, happiness, height, schizophrenia… and whatever you’re having yourself). These are typical newspaper headlines (all from the last year) and all use the popular shorthand of “a gene for” something. In my view, this phrase is both lazy and deeply misleading and has caused widespread confusion about what genes are and do and about their influences on human traits and disease.

The doorstep of fascism

Fascism in power is the open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialistic elements of finance capitalism.
Georgi Dimitrov, for the Communist Third International

So, when I read things like the following, I get a very bad feeling:

Already there are rumors floating about that parts of the german industry are determined to give massive financial support for such a thing as a "NNP" [Neo-National Party].

(Gerüchtehalber gibt es bereits konkrete Zusagen aus der deutschen Industrie für massive Finanzunterstützung für so etwas wie eine NNP.)

They aren't in power, and they aren't committed to a open, terroristic dictatorship – yet.

Principiis obsta – Resist the beginnings!

Kill 'Em All

As it turns out, it isn’t only the President’s drone-cheering supporters who have no idea who is being killed by the program they support; neither does the CIA itself. A Wall Street Journal article yesterday described internal dissension in the administration to Obama’s broad standards for when drone strikes are permitted, and noted that the “bulk” of the drone attacks — the bulk of them – “target groups of men believed to be militants associated with terrorist groups, but whose identities aren’t always known.” As Spencer Ackerman put it: “The CIA is now killing people without knowing who they are, on suspicion of association with terrorist groups.”

(via)

The central issue is “sensitivity”

The central issue is “sensitivity”: the amount of warming that you can expect from a doubling of carbon dioxide levels. On this, there is something close to consensus – at first. It is 1.2 degrees centigrade. Here’s* how the IPCC put it in its latest report.

“In the idealised situation that the climate response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 consisted of a uniform temperature change only, with no feedbacks operating…the global warming from GCMs would be around 1.2°C.” Paragraph 8.6.2.3.

Now the paragraph goes on to argue that large, net positive feedbacks, mostly from water vapour, are likely to amplify this. But whereas there is good consensus about the 1.2 C, there is absolutely no consensus about the net positive feedback, as the IPCC also admits. Water vapour forms clouds and whether clouds in practice amplify or dampen any greenhouse warming remains in doubt.

So to say there is a consensus about some global warming is true; to say there is a consensus about dangerous global warming is false.

A short anthology of changing climate

Watts Up With That? A short anthology of changing climate – Guest post by Tony Brown

Oakland police used methods prohibited in war zones

Before gas goes into a crowd shield bearers have to be making no progress moving a crowd or crowd must be assaulting the line. Not with sticks and stones but a no bullshit assault. 3 warnings must be given to the crowd in a manner they can hear that force is about to be used. Shield bearers take a knee and CS gas is released in grenade form first to fog out your lines because you have gas masks. You then kick the canisters along in front of your lines. Projectile gas is not used except for longer ranged engagement or trying to steer the crowd ( by steering a crowd I mean firing gas to block a street off ). You also have shotguns with beanbags and various less than lethal rounds for your launchers. These are the rules for a WARZONE!!

How did a cop who is supposed to have training on his weapon system accidentally SHOOT someone in the head with a 40mm gas canister? Simple. He was aiming at him.

I'll be the first to admit a 40mm round is tricky to aim if you are inexperienced but anyone can tell the difference between aiming at head level and going for range.

The person that pulled that trigger has no business being a cop. He sent that round out with the intention of doing some serious damage to the protestors. I don't care what the protestors were doing. I never broke my rules of engagement in Iraq or Afghanistan. So I can't imagine what a protester in the states did to deserve a headshot with a 40mm. He's damn lucky to be alive and that cop knows he was using lethal force against a protester he is supposed to be protecting.

"High Class Thugs for Big Business"

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class thug for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Mayor General Smedley Darlington Butler (via)

Proving the Utility of Assertions in Software Development

Sven, this is for you:

The team observed a definite negative correlation: more assertions and code verifications means fewer bugs. Looking behind the straight statistical evidence, they also found a contextual variable: experience. Software engineers who were able to make productive use of assertions in their code base tended to be well-trained and experienced, a factor that contributed to the end results. These factors built an empirical body of knowledge that proved the utility of assertions. 

At one company I worked, assertions were discouraged by the head of software development, he considered them "bad style" – he now works for Adobe… And yeah, working for him sucked, big time. BTW, I was interviewing for Adobe when he went there (unbeknown to me) AND AM I A GLAD THEY DIDN'T HIRE ME.

Come think to think of it, assertions are the poor men's Test Driven Development, kind of inline tests.

"Wet streets cause rain"

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
― Michael Crichton

(via)

The Great European Debt Plan Hoax

To this end we invite Greece, private investors and all parties concerned to develop a voluntary bond exchange with a nominal discount of 50% on notional Greek debt held by private investors. (via)

Haha. For half of the "nominal" value (as in "issuing price"), I would "voluntary" give away my car. And most of the things I own. Can I interest you in some VHS cassettes? Only half the nominal value! It's a bargain!

The Space Shuttle was designed as a carrier for a First-Strike-Weapon

At the end of the 1960's and the beginning of the 1970's the United States began new research in the use of spacecraft for the destruction of military targets in and from space. In the late 1960's development began at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory of a space-based nuclear weapon-pumped laser. This was originally envisioned as a fearsome weapon, consisting of several dozen independently aimed lasing rods arranged around the bomb. When the bomb exploded, a large percentage of its force would be conducted down the lasing rods toward the targets at which they pointed (in the microsecond before the rods themselves vaporised).

At the same time the Air Force and NASA were studying reusable space shuttles. A single shuttle payload bay of such weapons had the potential of destroying the entire Soviet ICBM force - not just in launch phase but in a first strike, frying them right through the silo covers. One of the most heavily classified projects of the time, it still came to the attention of Soviet intelligence.

During this same period NASA was struggling to justify a post-Apollo space program. The Nixon administration decided that the USAF shuttle project would be dropped, and their requirements incorporated into the NASA design. One of these requirements was a mission involving a launch into polar orbit from Vandenberg Air Force base, release of unspecified payloads into orbit, and return to Vandenberg after a single orbit of the Earth. This requirement forced NASA to drop their preferred straight-wing design for a heavier double-delta wing that had the necessary cross range.

Start from Vandenberg. Fly over the (north-)pole. Release a weapon (and detonate it over the Soviet Union). Return to Vandenberg. Rinse and repeat if necessary.

But in my view, this "First Strike" capability of the Space Shuttle was more a selling point than reality, just like the supposed ease and frequency of the Space Shuttle launches. But to the Soviet leadership, it seemed like a real threat.

The Soviet leadership saw their worst fears confirmed. This was a modern version of the first-strike multiple-warhead UR-500 and N1 super heavy rockets which they had developed but then abandoned in the early 1960's. 

The reaction to the Space Shuttle was the Buran shuttle, which was supposedly very expensive.

It seems that two things broke the back of the Soviet Union: The Afghan War and the Buran project. Both were a reaction to the US – how ironic.

Quotes from a bygone era

You must remember that our Soviet land is impoverished after many years of trial and suffering and has no Socialist France or Socialist England as neighbours to keep us with their highly developed technology and highly developed industry. Bear that in mind! We must remember that at present all their highly developed technology and industry belong to the capitalists who are fighting us.
Lenin, 1921

The lesson of that victory [over fascism in WWII] was that Soviet citizens must still heed Lenin's warning of 1921.
Andrei Grechko after World War II

Oh, the times are long gone. Capitalism has crushed the Soviet Union. As Andrei Grechko wisely said (probably after the Prague 1968): "Liberalization and democratization are in essence counter-revolution."

The real moon hoax

Studying declassified Corona spy satellite photographs, Vick is able to show that there was substantial unexplained activity at the Baikonur cosmodrome during December 1968. Although no photographs exist during the 8-12 December launch window, images made during a pass on 15 December show a Soyuz spacecraft - booster combination mounted on its pad and the Proton pad gantry in position, although no booster is mounted. A week later, the Soyuz booster is being removed from its pad, but now a Proton - L1 combination is on the Proton pad. This seems to clearly indicate that attempts were being made, right up to and beyond the day Apollo 8 was launched, to beat the Americans to the moon. The authors theorise that an attempt at a manned launch to the moon using the two-launch podsadka scenario was attempted, but that some serious spacecraft problem must have resulted in the Proton launch being scrubbed.

So all these years the Ruskies said "No, no, comrade, we never planed to go to the moon, I swear on Lenin's tomb!", and they were almost there to go to the moon BEFORE the Yankees.

Interestingly, they had not one manned moon flight program, no, they had TWO manned moon flight programs. One was run by Korolev (and then after his death by Mishin) using Soyuz-spacecraft and N1 rockets, the other was run by Chelomei using a Soyuz variant and Proton rockets. Both ran into problems with, both with their spacecraft, both with their rockets. The Soyuz capsules were too heavy for a N1 single-shot-mission (and anyway delayed), the N1-rocket was not reliable, Soyuz-1 failed killing its Kosmonaut, the Proton looked promising (and is one of the backbones of Russia's space industry today) but ran into reliability problems. So Korolev's team aimed for a "bastard" version, using Proton and Soyuz/R7s for a two-launch mission with prior docking in LEO. Well, it didn't work – the rest, you know.

Don't believe in models

Models are a fine tool – just don't mistake them for the reality. Whether economy, climate or medical science, some (many?) scientist have models of the world, which might be helpful to understand a an smaller or larger aspect of the real world. Yet in an act of what seems to me to be confirmation bias, the mistake "their" model of the world for realty itself – and then it becomes religious. Catastrophic positive feedback in climate! The homo economicus with his self-interest will lead the invisible hand of the markets. My model of your illness proves leaves only one conclusion.

No. Your model is not the reality, and chances are it is actually far away from it – just some spurious correlation.

"The poster child of excessive lawsuits"

The case was noted by some as an example of frivolous litigation; ABC News called the case "the poster child of excessive lawsuits,"

Yeah, right.

I had never before seen the injuries suffered by the woman who sued McDonald’s for its hot coffee. Now I have.


Excerpt from 2011 documentary "Hot Coffee" von anonymouscoward382

On John McCarthy

But McCarthy's legacy also has a little-noted dark side which also influenced my career, but in a much less positive way. McCarthy was not only one of the pioneers of the study of AI, but also an avid proponent of a particular school of thought about how human intelligence works. McCarthy believed that human intelligence could be modeled as a formal logic. That hypothesis turns out to be (almost certainly) wrong, and the evidence that it is wrong was overwhelming even in McCarthy's heyday. And yet McCarthy steadfastly refused to abandon this hypothesis. Well into his nominal retirement, and quite possibly to his dying day, he was still working on trying to formulate formal logics to model human thought processes.

The way human mental processes actually work, it turns out, is (again, almost certainly) according to statistical processes, not formal logics. The reason I keep hedging with "almost certainly" is that the jury is still out. We have not yet cracked the AI puzzle, but vastly more progress has been made in recent years using statistical approaches that has ever been made using logic. Very few (if indeed any) logic-based systems have ever been successfully deployed on non-toy problems. Statistics-based applications are being deployed on a regular basis nowadays, with Siri being the most recent example.

It took decades to make this switch, arguably due in no small measure to McCarthy's influence. One of the many consequences of this delay was the infamous AI-winter, which lead more or less directly to the commercial demise of Lisp. That the same person was responsible both for the invention of such a powerful idea and for its demise has to be one of the greatest ironies in human intellectual history.

Unbelievably Cute

Penguins in sweaters. I kid you not.

"The tree ring data is not temperature (say that out loud). This is why it is called a proxy."

The data in a time series analysis is the data. This tautology is there to make you think. The data is the data! The data is not some model of it. The real, actual data is the real, actual data. There is no secret, hidden “underlying process” that you can tease out with some statistical method, and which will show you the “genuine data”. We already know the data and there it is. We do not smooth it to tell us what it “really is” because we already know what it “really is.”
…
The tree ring data is not temperature (say that out loud). This is why it is called a proxy. It is a perfect proxy? Was that last question a rhetorical one? Was that one, too? Because it is a proxy, the uncertainty of its ability to predict temperature must be taken into account in the final results. Did Mann do this? And just what is a rhetorical question?
…
What you can not, or should not, do is to first model/smooth the proxy data to produce fictional data and then try to model the fictional data and temperature. This trick will always—simply always—make you too certain of yourself and will lead you astray. Notice how the read fictional data looks a hell of a lot more structured than the real data and you’ll get the idea.

Read it all!

Things I didn't knew about american history: Yippies

The House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman of the Yippies in 1967, and again in the aftermath of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The Yippies used media attention to make a mockery of the proceedings: Rubin came to one session dressed as an American Revolutionary War soldier, and passed out copies of the United States Declaration of Independence to people in attendance. Then Rubin "blew giant gum bubbles while his co-witnesses taunted the committee with Nazi salutes." Rubin also attended HUAC dressed as Santa Claus and a Viet Cong soldier. On another occasion, police stopped Hoffman at the building entrance and arrested him for wearing an American flag. Hoffman quipped for the press, "I regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country," paraphrasing the last words of revolutionary patriot Nathan Hale; meanwhile Rubin, who was wearing a matching Viet Cong flag, shouted that the police were Communists for not arresting him also.

Hilarious. :-)

The Media…

The country of Greece has been more or less shut down by a general strike as the country's economy teeters on a precipice that could plunge the Eurozone, and potentially the whole world, into a major economic depression. But you'd never know if from reading American news sources. The NYT front page, which includes a story about how Mitt Romney cared for his lawn (and no, I'm not kidding), makes no mention of it. I can find no mention of it on any other American news outlet. (CNN doesn't even mention it under World News!) The only coverage I can find at all is on Reuters and Al Jazeera. Reuters reports that there are 400 dock workers demonstrating outside the port, but I can neither see nor hear any sign of them.

Intensely Insane

A major naval exercise off the coast of Scotland has been ordered to stop using GPS jamming technology after complaints it is endangering the lives of fishermen and is disrupting mobile phones.

The Nato exercise, dubbed ‘Joint Warrior’, involves the military forces from 14 countries and is taking place off the west coast of Scotland. As part of the operation, Global Positioning System (GPS) services were jammed in a radius of 20 miles around the various warships.
(via)

Let me get this straight: The NATO does jam THEIR OWN navigation system? What good is a military navigation system one can only use in times of peace? Just how intensely insane is that? Unless of course it is all about the profit the MIC can make from all that shiny hardware…

"It would all be hilariously funny if these people weren’t destroying the world."

Options Group’s Karp said he met last month over tea at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York with a trader who made $500,000 last year at one of the six largest U.S. banks.  The trader, a 27-year-old Ivy League graduate, complained that he has worked harder this year and will be paid less. The headhunter told him to stay put and collect his bonus.  “This is very demoralizing to people,” Karp said. “Especially young guys who have gone to college and wanted to come onto the Street, having dreams of becoming millionaires.”

"Civil disobedience will not be tolerated"

"Civil disobedience will not be tolerated," Thomas Menino, mayor of Boston, told a local news station on Tuesday.

So you want non-civil disobedience? Bankers walk away with Trillions(!) of Dollars ransom, while peaceful protestors on sidewalks get pepper sprayed. People who peacefully cross a bridge get arrested. No justice, no peace.

Simpletons who run the world

"We didn't know enough and we still don't know enough. Most of us — me included — had a very superficial understanding of the situation and history, and we had a frighteningly simplistic view of recent history, the last 50 years."

Retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal about the Afghan War. (via)

The Afghan War isn't about Bin Laden. It isn't about terrorism. It isn't about Al Qaeda. It isn't about the Taliban. It isn't about women's rights. It isn't about human rights. It isn't about "freedom". It isn't about "them" hating "us". It isn't about the "free world". It isn't about democracy.

It is about the MIC making enough profit for the capital. But while the buck keeps rolling, it is all honky dory to let simpletons handle all the Gear&GIs, and bomb the world, I guess.

Boys and girls, remember the next time you hear some people who think they know everything explain why some country supposedly needs a good bombing: It's a "simplistic view" – everything you hear is bullshit.

Oh, the irony

Michael Moore speaks at Occupy Wall Street. The video is on YouTube, the adverts are from Google – and the advert is paided by an Bank…

Loop gain of the climate system – Or why high positive feedback is impossible

Since the loop gain in the climate object cannot exceed 0.1 (at maximum) without rendering the climate so prone to instability that runaway feedbacks that have not occurred in the past would be very likely to have occurred, the maximum feedback sum before mutual amplification cannot exceed 0.32: yet the IPCC’s implicit central estimate of the feedback sum is 2.81.

From the engineering standpoint – which is where I come from – this is my biggest irk with the "loudest predictions" of the climate sciences: That there are so strong positive feedbacks, that not only do we get a rise of 4 °C (or more) per doubling of the CO2 level, no, we also risk a "runaway climate".

I say this such high sensitivity is bullshit.

If climate would be this sensitive, the oceans would have boiled away long ago.

To understand it a bit better, one needs to know that there are three "concepts" (sorry, don't know a better english word) with relation to CO2 and temperature:

• Sensitivity
• Forcings
• Feedbacks

Sensitivity is the total sum of effects that CO2 has on the temperature. A doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere is usually taken as the input (let's say from 0.03% to 0.06%), and various models predict the total temperature change ("sensitivity"). The IPCC report, which is supposed to represent the available peer-reviewed literature, says that the climate sensitivity ranges from somewhere between 2 °C to 4.5 °C, with certainly no less than 1.5 °C.

How do they come to this high sensitivity? The direct effect of CO2 on temperature (by filtering out radiation that would have otherwise escaped into space – the so called "greenhouse effect") is called forcing and it is around 1 °C – and this number is consent between the vociferous mainstream ("alarmists") and the skeptics ("deniers"). I don't know of anybody that disputes the size of the CO2 forcing being around 1 °C (give or take a bit), and I surely do not "deny" it.

So where does all the heat come from? The other half of the CO2 equation is the feedback. Feedback are all secondary effects that react to a temperature change: Cloud coverage, glacier coverage, and so on. These changes itself lead to a temperature change as well, because they change how much heat is radiated back into space. The vociferous mainstream says that for every degree of change (no matter the source, whether CO2 or vegetation or continental drift or tilt of the earth axis) there will be up to another 3.5 degrees of change in the same direction – a strong positive feedback.

And that's where anybody should say: No way. No way is it possible to have a stable climate with this kind of feedback. Well, at least some of the climate skeptics say it, that there is a negative feedback.

By the way, the biggest contributor to feedback are clouds – but that is a topic for another day…

The NYPD likes to pepper-spray little girls

Steal Billions? Get more from the government! Protest peacefully against it? Get maced and arrested. (via)

Read more here.

Beautiful Streetart

Tegels from johan rijpma on Vimeo.

Via Zefrank.

Genuine Chums

In subsequent discussions Halifax ignored Eden's reservations and indicated clearly to Hitler that German designs on Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia and Poland were not regarded as illegitimate by the British, but that only peaceful processes of change would be acceptable. Writing to Baldwin on the subject of the conversation between Karl Burckhardt (the League of Nations' Commissioner of Danzig) and Hitler, Halifax said: "Nationalism and Racialism is a powerful force but I can't feel that it's either unnatural or immoral!. I cannot myself doubt that these fellows are genuine haters of Communism, etc.! And I daresay if we were in their position we might feel the same!"

Over 30 Million in East Europe people were murdered by these "genuine haters of Communism" – and Halifax aided and abetted it.