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Posted on: Most Climate Change alarmists cut from same cloth ...
at 11/25/2009 4:22pm

Listen to Ed Begley Jr. for 5 minutes and you realize that the lights are on, but nobody's home.

Posted on: Most Climate Change alarmists cut from same cloth ...
at 11/25/2009 10:55am

Begley's an idiot. His statements that only climatologists should have a say in this ignores the fact that an isolated ... more(+)

Begley's an idiot. His statements that only climatologists should have a say in this ignores the fact that an isolated insular group can get lost in the woods and ignore principles other branches of science have already tripped over. A good argument for a multi-disciplinary approach. The part where he says actors shouldn't be judged by anyone but actors is just silly on its face since it totally ignores the audience.

From my Forces of Nature post quoting the CBS article;

ScienceMag.org published an article noting that deleting e-mail messages to hide them from a FOI request is a crime in the United Kingdom. George Monbiot, a U.K. activist and journalist who previously called for dramatic action to deal with global warming, wrote: "It's no use pretending that this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging."
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Posted on: More remakes....
at 11/25/2009 5:23am

Fantastic Voyage (201?)

Metropolis (201?)

The Thing (201?)

The Crow (2011)

The Shadow (2012)

They Live ... more(+)

Fantastic Voyage (201?)

Metropolis (201?)

The Thing (201?)

The Crow (2011)

The Shadow (2012)

They Live (2011)

When Worlds Collide (201?)

Romancing the Stone (2011)

The Illustrated Man (2010)

The Howling (201?)

Judge Dredd (2012)

Kull (201?) close(-)

Posted on: Anthropogenic GW now exposed as a myth? Hackers le...
at 11/25/2009 5:02am

One thing that's unsettling is that many of the assigned WMo codes for Canadian stations do not return any hits with a ... more(+)

CBS News has a report, and part of it is a tome by one of the CRU programmers. Sounds like the data, and their software, is a ball of confusion.

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In addition to e-mail messages, the roughly 3,600 leaked documents posted on sites including Wikileaks.org and EastAngliaEmails.com include computer code and a description of how an unfortunate programmer named "Harry" -- possibly the CRU's Ian "Harry" Harris -- was tasked with resuscitating and updating a key temperature database that proved to be problematic. Some excerpts from what appear to be his notes, emphasis added:

I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation - apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless. It also means that we cannot say exactly how the gridded data is arrived at from a statistical perspective - since we're using an off-the-shelf product that isn't documented sufficiently to say that. Why this wasn't coded up in Fortran I don't know - time pressures perhaps? Was too much effort expended on homogenisation, that there wasn't enough time to write a gridding procedure? Of course, it's too late for me to fix it too. Meh.

I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that's the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight... So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!

One thing that's unsettling is that many of the assigned WMo codes for Canadian stations do not return any hits with a web search. Usually the country's met office, or at least the Weather Underground, show up – but for these stations, nothing at all. Makes me wonder if these are long-discontinued, or were even invented somewhere other than Canada!

Knowing how long it takes to debug this suite - the experiment endeth here. The option (like all the anomdtb options) is totally undocumented so we'll never know what we lost. 22. Right, time to stop pussyfooting around the niceties of Tim's labyrinthine software suites - let's have a go at producing CRU TS 3.0! since failing to do that will be the definitive failure of the entire project.

Ulp! I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can't get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections - to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more. So what the hell can I do about all these duplicate stations?...

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One programmer highlighted the error of relying on computer code that, if it generates an error message, continues as if nothing untoward ever occurred. Another debugged the code by pointing out why the output of a calculation that should always generate a positive number was incorrectly generating a negative one. A third concluded: "I feel for this guy. He's obviously spent years trying to get data from undocumented and completely messy sources."

Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU's Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION." Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!"

It's not clear how the files were leaked. One theory says that a malicious hacker slipped into East Anglia's network and snatched thousands of documents. Another says that the files had already been assembled in response to a Freedom of Information request and, immediately after it was denied, a whistleblower decided to disclose them. (Lending credence to that theory is the fact that no personal e-mail messages unrelated to climate change appear to have been leaked.)
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ScienceMag.org published an article noting that deleting e-mail messages to hide them from a FOI request is a crime in the United Kingdom. George Monbiot, a U.K. activist and journalist who previously called for dramatic action to deal with global warming, wrote: "It's no use pretending that this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging."
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Posted on: The USS Enterprise: Just how practical?
at 11/25/2009 4:19am

As to rotating decks for artificial gravity: you would need a constant sideways thrust from the stationary part ... more(+)

As to rotating decks for artificial gravity: you would need two counter-rotating decks to nullify torque effects or a constant sideways thrust from the stationary part (engineering section?), otherwise it'll just spin around like a helicopter with a defective tail rotor. close(-)

Commented on: SpaceX Picks Launch Date for New Rocket's Debut
at 2009-11-03 03:56:41

Those engines run at only 890 psi chamber pressure (other engines run at 2-4x that pressure) and are surrounded by ... more(+)

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