Watts on how climate science should be done

Watts on how climate science should be done:

I would argue not for removal of bad stations, but rather for the replacement of bad stations with well-sited stations, with simultaneous overlapping data collection so that biases can be both measured directly and permanently eliminated.

Of course, that's not what's actually being done…

Science in Capitalism

Adequate resources to support the scientific enterprise would not only reduce incentives for misconduct but improve the lives of all scientists and allow them to spend more of their time searching for answers to research questions instead of funds.

How not to do Science – Non-climate Science Edition

I really do not want to know. Part of the point of having two independent experiments is that they cross-check each other - independently. We do that most effectively when we are blind to the other experiment's data, right up to the last minute. In fact we even try to blind ourselves to our own data up to a point. As much as possible of the analysis should be optimised and decided in advance, before even looking at the data. This prevents even the possibility of subconscious bias entering the studies. If you are biased, the truth will probably still out in the end, but in the meantime your statistical estimations of confidence and significance will all be wrong.

Justus, I think you would have liked this

A couple of years ago I became involved in a grand plan to make sounds out of LHC data. We called this project LHCsound. Recently we have revisited the idea with the aim of listening to real data produced in the proton-proton collisions happening right now, and I found myself back in my favourite place - talking to (okay, emailing) musicians with ideas for making this happen.

It's been seven years now.

Richard Seymour on proletarian hegemony

Richard Seymour on proletarian hegemony:

Peter Thomas, in his Marxism talk about Gramsci and the 99%, made a defence of the concept of proletarian hegemony against certain misconceptions that might put people off it. Pointing out that the working class is numerically and proportionately larger than ever, he suggested that the 99% was potentially the name for hegemony as a principle of unity, rather than as simply a form of domination: what we all have in common, despite our immense differences in identity, social category, occupational culture and habitus, etc., is that we are all exploited. This is what working class hegemony means in practice today. Not, generally speaking, the unity of a national popular bloc of classes under working class leadership: this becomes less the case as capitalist mode of production has entrenched itself, and thus simplified the class system in one sense. Rather, it means the dominance of the working class as the axis of our common exploitation and thus as the strategically privileged basis for organisation. The arrival of the Asturian miners in Puerta del Sol, site of the Indignado rebellion, could be the the sign and sanction of this hegemony in motion. The question, then, is whether Spain's heteroclite social and industrial struggles can be stitched together under the banner of the 99%.