azgolfer
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16 years ago
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on: The Real Struggle Behind Climate Change - A War on Expertise - David Brin
Yeah, right. As every day their are more revelations of corruption and incompetence in 'Climate Science'. There is really no such thing. Anyone who says they can build a computer model of the climate is either stupid, ignorant or corrupt. The CRU code is laughably ugly and sloppy, yet they would have us believe that they have made an incredible breakthrough in Computer Science - they can build an accurate model of the climate !
azgolfer
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16 years ago
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on: One Step Back For Mankind
I still say robots are far better than humans for space exploration. There was even a proposal for repairing the Hubble with them. It would have been better if they had designed it with this type of repair/upgrade mission in mind. But it is always easier for them to justify an incremental cost, along with the romantic notion of humans in space.
azgolfer
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16 years ago
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on: One Step Back For Mankind
This could have been done for way less than 175 billion (the estimated cost of the shuttle program).
azgolfer
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16 years ago
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on: One Step Back For Mankind
The Shuttle program has alwasy been a boondoggle. There has been not one significant piece of science that has come out of it. Robots are far better at space exploration than humans.
azgolfer
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16 years ago
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on: Warning - cell phones and WIFI - not so safe
Microwave radiation is too low energy to cause DNA mutation, so it can't be a direct cause of cancer. Besides, wouldn't we see ear cancer more than brain cancer ?
azgolfer
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16 years ago
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on: The Problem with Meritocracy
The book 'The Big Test' explains the rise of intelligence testing and the origin of the word 'meritocracy'. Prior to intelligence testing, college admittance was very influenced by whether your father had gone to that college. The hierarchy was determined by the status of your school and the senior society you were a member of. The senior George Bush he uses as an example - a Yale man and member of Skull and Bones. He mentions another remarkable fact - until around 1910 or so, 90% of corporate CEOs were Episcopalian. A very interesting book.
azgolfer
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16 years ago
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on: Lawrence Lessig: How to Get Our Democracy Back
Yes, and the Fannie/Frdedie mortgage meltdown IMO was the result of government 'reverse' redlining.
azgolfer
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16 years ago
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on: Lawrence Lessig: How to Get Our Democracy Back
Yes and the brilliance of the founders was creating a very limited federal government. The aristocratic senate and the house 'of the people' had to agree. The bill would get vetoed by default. One senator could stop any bill by filibustering. The bill of rights prevented state governments from gettting out of control...
azgolfer
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16 years ago
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on: How Apple hides the iPad’s dirty little secret with an optical illusion
I've always thought wide screen was strange. Didn't it originally come from projecting from two movie cameras side by side ? It's terrible for closeups in movies. It seems to me the human eye 'viewport' is somewhere around 4:3
azgolfer
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16 years ago
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on: What the Study of Chess Experts Teaches Us About Building a Remarkable Life
In music, one huge factor is copying people. Stevie Ray Vaughan not only knew every Albert King lick, he knew them well enough to use them in new ways. To be a good musician, you need vocabulary and facility. Learning to play other peoples licks will help you with both. Playing in front of an audience or with other musicians will give you good feedback and make you focus on the end result. Listening a lot will also help. John Scofield listened to a Miles Davis record he owned until the needle wore through the vinyl. He could play (and sing) every note on the record. Great interview with Bill Evans on learning to play
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEHWaGuurUk&feature=PlayL...
azgolfer
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16 years ago
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on: Looks like I’m going on FoxNews today because it’s cold outside
azgolfer
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16 years ago
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on: Decoding Climate Change with Perl, gnuplot and Google Earth
Here is the most recent sign that that data is 'cooked'.
On Tuesday, the Moscow based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data...
Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for unknown reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations, according to the IEA.
http://global-warming.accuweather.com/2009/12/was_russian_cl...
azgolfer
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16 years ago
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on: Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out (2005, Neal Stephenson)
azgolfer
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16 years ago
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on: Freakonomics: The Quiet Danger of Non-Inflation-Adjusted Stock Returns
'De-listed' stocks are another factor - the worst performing stocks are removed from the exchange, giving a higher average. Inflation itself is a very tricky thing - technology is very deflationary but this is ignored by the market basket.
azgolfer
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16 years ago
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on: The Unbearable Complexity of Climate
From a recent paper by two German Physicists
(a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 degrees Celsius is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.
azgolfer
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16 years ago
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on: Decoding Climate Change with Perl, gnuplot and Google Earth
So blizzards have nothing to do with cold temperatures ? The week of December 15th - 815 new snowfall records, 304 new cold records, and 403 lowest maximum temperature records. Seems like they go together to me.
azgolfer
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16 years ago
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on: Decoding Climate Change with Perl, gnuplot and Google Earth
There were 877 new snowfall records set this week. That would be rather unlikely if we are experiencing catastrophic warming. Also there is this (from Watts Up With That)
"Keep in mind, everyone sorta has to admit that CO2 by itself doesn’t do much. Even at current concentrations, it’s a teensy weensy bit of the atmosphere (.00038) that soaks up only a teensy weensy bit of the sun’s long-wave radiation at a particular high altitude in the tropics (the tropics account for about 80% of the Earth’s energy budget). Moreover, we have long since passed CO2 concentrations which are more than sufficient to flag down 99% of that wavelength."
azgolfer
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16 years ago
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on: Trust Science
"I have to cop out on that."
This is the kind of intellectual laziness that almost let the nonsense of AGW succeed. Fortunately there are people like Watt (check out surfacestations.org) and McKintyre (Climate Audit) who have the skills and put in the time and effort to reveal the horrible corruption in 'Climatology'. The emails and code have now made it obvious, but their release might never had happened without the FOI requests. Here is the latest for those who haven't seen it - One man has been controlling all the Wikipedia climate articles to support the AGW view
http://www.nationalpost.com/m/blog.html?b=fullcomment&e=...
azgolfer
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16 years ago
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on: Programming languages worth checking out
azgolfer
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16 years ago
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on: Climate change global editorial
No, the flawed data sets and 'tricks' were reused for many papers. There was a tight circle of scientist who published most of the global warming nonsense.
