I am a Dragon. I emerge from my Egg. Posted to an internal newsgroup:
Customer: Hi there, I sent you two sample units last week so you could investigate our problem. Can you give us an update on your progress?
CSR: We accelerated your units up to 99.9% of the speed of the light and smashed them into each other, by looking at the bits that fly off we can understand the inner workings of your system.
Customer: And what did you find?
CSR: We are speculating that your system does not work because of something we are calling a "Bugeon"
Customer did you detect any Bugeons?
CSR: No, we believe we need to accelerate a fresh pair of boards up to 99.99% of the speed of light before smashing them into each other to detect the Bugeons.
Customer: Isn't that what you did last time?
CSR: No, its completely different. The extra 0.09% makes all the difference.
Customer: But it's only a tiny fraction faster?
CSR: The extra effort required as we approach 100% increases exponentially
Customer: So next week we should discover the Bugeon?
CSR: We believe so, although their is a slight risk of a gate to hell opening and half of Europe vanishing into it.....
Maybe this is a good place to point people at JA's doomed attempts to explain probability theory to climate folk. Good luck to him.
Comments
That was cruel.
Posted by: Steve Bloom | September 11, 2008 2:52 PM
What was cruel?
The internal circular or JA's doomed attempts? :-)
[I was wondering that -W]
Posted by: P. Lewis | September 11, 2008 4:06 PM
Or you could wonder whether it was cruel to LHC, cruel to JA for being doomed or cruel to CPDN.
The least likely possibility would seem to be cruel to himself on the grounds that it is likely to be pointed out that last time a CPDN paper was commented on he was dissapointed it didn't address what he wanted. Now there is another paper which is perhaps beginning to turn its attention in the direction he wanted, all he can do is grumble by pointing out 'doomed attempts'. :-)
Posted by: crandles | September 11, 2008 4:38 PM
Continuing the
[Its not more tripe about global cooling, is it? And you're sugesting the prog is a reliable source? -W]
in a fun post.
I though the following (probably not an exact quote) was particularly bad.
"And then an ugly fact spoilt the global cooling idea, the summer of 1976 [lots of pictures of British heatwave] ... and it wasn't just here .... "
One unusual season killing a global hypothesis doesn't sound very likely and then if you look at giss to see if it was warm globally, I only find two cooler years in 1940 to 1975 which includes the 1940 to 1970 cooling period!
uuggggg!!!
Posted by: crandles | September 11, 2008 5:44 PM