- 18:40 thinks 12 year old Glennfiddich is truly the nectar of the gods... #
Not seen anything like this on the Beeb. Just lots of handwringing from 'ethical man' and cheerleading for Copenhagen...
- 13:07 had a proper arse-puckering 2 wheel slide this morning... #
This is a handy video guide to the main players in reducing the credibility of 'Climate Science' to somewhere behind 'Comical Ali' during the Iraq War.
I've decided they should have given those 6 figure research grants to me, not these bozos. I mean sure, I know bugger all about the climate, but I can make shit up at least as well as these guys. As a bonus, if I did my own software and data storage/management, it wouldn't have been the amateurish unreproducible clusterfuck that these 'gurus' managed...
Of course it still would have been as bent as a nine bob note, otherwise the research grants would have stopped, but at least it would have been transparently and reproducibly dishonest, instead of obscurely and incomprehensibly dishonest...
I found this handy youtube guide to some of the gems picked out of the hacked CRU emails and some of the comments from the source code of the dodgy climate models.
I've certainly written code comments I wouldn't want to see on the internet in the past. But really, talk about incriminating evidence...!
However, the deniers have long claimed that Man-made Global Warming is itself a giant conspiracy promoted by people with an axe to grind. This would seem less plausible at first sight.
However, some helpful hacker has purloined the last couple of decade's worth of private email from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/19/b
We learn that the place has soaked up approaching £15 million worth of government funding, presumably much of it dependant on the looming threat of global warming that needs studying. If the people running the UEA CRU were to announce tomorrow that they had cocked up their numbers and that global warming wasn't happening after all, then presumably they'd have to go and get proper jobs. Or scrabble for scraps of funding like other people in obscure branches of science. I see an incentive at least as large as the one that might corrupt 'deniers...'
But the really damning thing is what the email record reveals about the behaviour of the 'climate scientists'. One quote, from Professor Phil Jones in an email in 2004:
"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep
them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !
Cheers
Phil"
They have form for everything from ostracising people who don't agree with their conclusions, to massaging presentation of data to further their agenda, to simply excluding data that contradicts their assumptions, rather than highlighting the discrepancy and trying to understand it. There's a side order of suppressing research they disagree with, through orchestrating campaigns to get editors of scientific journals they regard as being 'off message' replaced, and even openly conspiring with others around the world to delete emails on particular subjects to frustrate FOI requests from 'evil deniers'. The one they have been most keen to deny seems to be a request for the raw measurement data that a lot of these warming assumptions are based on. The global collective effort /not/ to publish this data seems to bely the assertion by those involved that the data shows nothing significant that isn't already in the public domain and that there is no reason to publish it. It all smacks of "Don't look behind the curtain". Rather as in encryption, where security by obscurity is no security at all, science where both the raw data and collection methodology, and the analysis, are not entirely open and subject to honest and challenging review, is no science at all. In fact it's no more scientific than the book of Revelations.
So, there we have it. Two groups of collectively unattractive people with unfortunate friends, who make a good living out of pushing competing ideas, either of which might turn out to be right (or half right), and neither of which is at all credible because science has whored itself out to competing political and economic interests.
Lovely.
Hopefully if the particle physicists manage not to replace our solar system with a Black Hole in the next couple of weeks courtesy of the LHC, they'll get back to getting nuclear fusion up and running, thus rendering the entire argument moot...
However, {Warning - definitely NSFW}, take a close look at the screen on the telly :-).
- Mood:
amused
- 17:51 RT @f1scoop: Where have Toyota been hiding Kobayashi? A revelation! #f1 What, as a driver or as a weaver? #
Somebody I once vaguely knew was a developer for a small but rather avant guard and cutting edge Silicon Valley company called Danger. They invented and developed a quite groundbreaking widget for its day called the 'Danger Hiptop', which was a sort of I-phone come super-Blackberry come cloud computing platform long before either of those things had really been invented. Time passed and T-Mobile started flogging the Hiptop as the Sidekick, and its fame and market share grew. By now my acquaintance had risen to be a proud and excited project manager, but in
Mawdor
Redmond the evil eye of Sauron
Ballmer had turned towards little Danger, and presently the evil empire pounced and gobbled them up. No real idea what happened next, I lost touch with said acquaintance, but clearly her and her co-workers niaive optimism about a glorious Microsoft backed future building things that weren't powered by WinCE was a tad
misplaced.In due course I'm told that Microsoft summarily fired all the developers and project managers working on the hiptop products, and now, by completely fucking up an infrastructure upgrade beyond all recognition (by apparently failing to take a backup first, or perhaps ever), they have just admitted that they have managed to irretrievably wipe all of their customers centrally held data. As in 'Whoops, butter fingers!'.
So, not only is the current Danger Hiptop/Sidekick a platform without a future or even anybody to do software maintenance, it seems it's also a product without a present either, because its' past has just been erased by Microsoft...
Although I suspect that very few people now the proud owners of an extremely expensive dumb mobile handset come paperweight will want anything to do with the evil empire when they look for something to replace their Sidekick. If they have any sense, anyway. Advantage Android & Iphone, then...
Presumably they also let the Danger ops people who knew how to upgrade stuff without breaking it go during their recent slash and burn exercise...
- Mood:
shocked
And now a deeply surreal interlude...
Testing+The+EgoN+Von+Zibcamera
- Mood: impressed
Up until today, I was still holding out a vague hope of flying out to Portugal for this year's Faro Rally, this coming weekend. Had I ridden down to Faro on my own bike, I'd have needed to be on the Tuesday Portsmouth-Bilbao ferry, but I could in theory fly out as late as Friday, and I have a gracious invitation to stop with Louis again.
Sadly, and in a stunning demonstration of shite timing, I finally found a builder who wasn't taking the piss, and he was miraculously able to dive straight in and get the work done this week. And he's tied up on other work next week. Except he was off today with a stomach bug and in order to get the job finished it looks like he'll (and I'll, since he's on his own and I am working with him) be working this weekend.
Bugger.
There's no way around it, either.
Oh well, I console myself with the knowledge that:
1. Getting the house fixed and sold is part of the essential precursor to getting out of this place and over to Spain/Portugal indefinitely.
2. The line up of bands this year didn't look that good anyway.
3. So far the summer over here has actually been unexpectedly good!
Hopefully next year I'll be a local...
- Mood:
frustrated
- Mood: amused
That is all...
- 20:20 is reading tinyurl.com/mzbfv9 -- "Basiji Hunting" seems a dangerous sport! #iranelection #gr88 #
--
4:16 PM ET -- "Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to get killed." A blog post in Persian, translated by the NIAC.
"I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe they will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to get killed. I'm listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow! There are a few great movie scenes that I also have to see. I should drop by the library, too. It's worth to read the poems of Forough and Shamloo again. All family pictures have to be reviewed, too. I have to call my friends as well to say goodbye. All I have are two bookshelves which I told my family who should receive them. I'm two units away from getting my bachelors degree but who cares about that. My mind is very chaotic. I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so they know we were not just emotional and under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mongols but did not surrender to despotism. This note is dedicated to tomorrow's children..."
--
Whiny self-obsessed students around the world take note. It seems not impossible that in Tehran tomorrow a million or perhaps two million people of all ages and social classes are going to knowingly and steadfastly march in peaceful and serene silence, straight into a hail of Republican Guard and Basiji machine gun bullets. And that many are already coming to terms with the very real risk of not seeing the sun rise on Sunday.
Humbling and emotive stuff.
- Mood:
contemplative
- 19:41 is still sniggering at this... petehisameme.wordpress.com Tweet in haste (and total stupidity), repent at leisure... #
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