Misc

Posted by William M. Connolley on March 20, 2013
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The Daily Fail has been lying to the public again says says KK but he sneaks in a dig at the Grauniad on GMOs as he passes, for balance. QS notes that Myles Allen has a column in the Graun about the same (not the GMOs, obviously, you wouldn’t get that past the Graun) which seems bizarrely forgiving of David “I made it up” Rose. JA is caustic as ever.

In misc news, I’ve made my first foray into advice on how to row, and been climbing again. And running (pix).

Cyprus is a disaster area featuring enormous political stupidity for such a small country. That the finance minister flew off to Russia tells you a lot.

Retraction watch has a fun one about how “Unfortunately, due to the system of publishing fast, often and in high-impact factor journals, scientists are under greater pressure to produce quantity, at the expense of research quality” got pulled because a supervisor didn’t like it. Tut.

Meanwhile, “climategate3.0″ remains totally invisible in the real world (and the google trends graph has now had time to catch up, and its still nothing). As of the date of writing, WUWT is still valiantly keeping it as a top sticky post, but no-one cares.

Update: and don’t miss the dramafest in the comments of Anthropological data point. Whodathunkit? The interview is worth reading too.

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Comments

  1. #1 guthrie
    2013/03/20

    If you want political stupidity for a small country, try reading “Ship of Fools” by Fintan O’Toole, about Ireland and its broken, corrupt political system which basically meant that a boom was encouraged and all opportunities for making good use of it (e.g. funding national broadband, instead of having a service so poor that a friend of mine cancelled their home internet service 3 years ago) were squandered.
    After reading it, I’m surprised they weren’t hanging politicians and certain other people from lampposts.

  2. #2 Rattus Norvegicus
    2013/03/21

    Not only does no one care, no one is finding any mails which can be misconstrued.

    [I noticed that. Or perhaps, I failed to notice the reverse of that. So now we know why the full archive was delayed so long: it was too dull to publish -W]

  3. #3 Hank Roberts
    2013/03/21

    David Rose apparently doesn’t need to _find_ anything.

  4. #4 Matthew McIrvin
    2013/03/21

    Say, I recently saw something that slightly mystified me. In a recent Facebook argument about climate change, somebody who seemed to be an AGW-contrarian type made some kind of wisecrack, in an aside to another AGW-contrarian type, that went like “don’t mention the entropy; I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it.”

    The Fawlty Towers “don’t mention the war” reference is obvious, but aside from that, is there some kind of supposed knockout argument involving “the entropy” going around in the denialist community now? I can’t even make heads or tails of the things they say any more.

    [The only thing that brings to mind is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garth_Paltridge Paltridge is a "skeptic" and pushes entropy as a way of understanding the atmosphere -W]

  5. #5 Matthew McIrvin
    2013/03/21

    Hmm, interesting. What it reminded me of was the stuff Jeremy Rifkin was saying back in the 1970s, but of course Rifkin is if anything the opposite of a climate “skeptic”.

  6. #6 Hank Roberts
    2013/03/21

    I went looking for ‘entropy’ and found this:

    “(Almost surely is probability jargon for ‘with probability 100%’, which is not the same as ‘always’.)”

  7. #7 Martin Gisser
    2013/03/22

    @#6 Hank, John Baez’ Azimuth Project is a good find. He has a wiki writeup on entropy in climate here

  8. #8 andrew adams
    2013/03/22

    Nice run!

    What’s your PB for a HM?

    [That one; 1:36. I was very pleased with it. Just possibly 1:30 is within the bounds of possibility in time; 1:35 certainly should be -W]