William M. Connolley
stoat
Posts by this author
February 8, 2010
About the furthest you can row on the Cam (unless you go over Baits Bite to Bottisham) is Baits Bite lock to Jesus Lock; and that seems to have become our regular monday evening practice. Warmup, spin, down to Jesus Lock, steady state to Baits Bite, then a piece back. It is about 5 km I think;…
February 8, 2010
A couple of people have asked me this - I think it came up in Ask Stoat (I haven't forgotten, you know, just busy). Anyway, it seems like a great post - bound to be flamebait and get my comment count soaring!
You won't be too shocked to learn that I think it should be reformed, not dissolved. But…
February 5, 2010
Anatomy of IPCC's Mistake on Himalayan Glaciers and Year 2035" is well worth a read. Especially interesting is their taking-apart of the revisions of 10.6.2 - in brief, these mistakes were spotted before tape-out but those revising that section couldn't be bothered to make any changes (and/or didn'…
February 5, 2010
Asian ones that is, not red ones. And not all of them of course, only Minister for environment & forests Jairam Ramesh so far. The Torygraph says:
"There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC…
February 4, 2010
Well, he is this one. But not this one. In the news, he is Former IPCC Leader Says Climategate Scientists "Manipulated data." and the "head of the International Technical Review Panel for IPCC's first report".
The latter is what interests me. What is it? I am just about old enough to remember IPCC…
February 3, 2010
A small excerpt from the true horror at The C Programming Language Brian W Kernighan & Dennis M Ritchie & HP Lovecraft:
Exercise 4-13. Write a function reverse(s) which reverses the string s by turning the mind inside out, converting madness into reality and opening the door to allow the…
February 3, 2010
A rush of controversial comments has pushed the burn rate up, and we're over the 10k barrier. You can all stop now :-).
And I'm pleased to say that I have a worthy winner, with no need for me to fudge it (not that I would have done so, oh no indeed): Hank Roberts, with "Your willingness to identify…
February 2, 2010
Klimazwiebel is on my reader list, but I don't usually bother with the comments. It looks a bit like the septics are disappointed with him. And he with them: And, damn it, give your names, when making strong statements. When you have an opinion, then you should have also a name. Still, there are…
February 1, 2010
Obvious enough you would have though, but some still fall for it. UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article is the latest excitement.
Breathlessly, they reveal:
It can be revealed that the IPCC report made use of 16 non-peer reviewed WWF reports. One claim,…
January 31, 2010
Says the Grauniad. Not the "Hurrah", I added that. The Grauniad doesn't come out for it being good or bad news. But I think it is. Emissions trading is a waste of time and an enormous waste of money, promoted mostly by those who hope to get rich on it.
Carbon Tax Now.
My previous post refers.
January 28, 2010
Three posts in one day. And all of such high quality. You lucky people.
Pascal has a go at explaining the std.nutters. Some of it is the usual correct stuff, but some of it is wrong: What you need, over and above all that, is constant social interaction with other practising scientists. Oral…
January 28, 2010
At some point I need to decide if I'll re-start the by-now-traditional sea ice bet for the summer. Before we start arguing over the details, remember that there is a lot of inter-annual variablity so we need to disagree *a lot* to have a meaningful bet. But at least one person has said in the…
January 28, 2010
This was an ask stoat question, and probably a fairly easy one, so I'll have a go.
First of all, what is it? AF (ie, Airbo(u)rne Fraction, is the proportion of human emitted CO2 that stays in the atmosphere, the rest being sunk in land or ocean. Now it is important not to confuse the "proportion…
January 26, 2010
Going through the photo backlog. From Jenny's village.
Leaves on the patio in D's sandpit.
Winter river. Christ Church meadow.
Rose. Bridge of Sighs.
Bridge, Cheddington.
January 25, 2010
Reader enragedparrot asks the rather sensible question, which appears to have been somewhat neglected in the vast war of words of 2035, 2350, and quite what is the source for what: if 2035 is badly wrong, what is the right date?
The answer, of course, is that I don't know. But I may be able to tell…
January 24, 2010
Sometimes I have to admit I'm completely outclassed, and people who can find this kind of stuff win hands down.
January 24, 2010
From http://www.philcooke.com/book_publishing via mt's shared posts:
Here's the reality of the book industry: in 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies.…
January 23, 2010
In which I yet again abuse science blogs to discuss matters of little import to general readers. But it's my blog, so there.
The rowing was the Head to Head, which involves rowing the 2 km form the Railway bridge to the Motorway bridge, spinning, and then rowing back. You get a rest of ~20 mins…
January 22, 2010
Isn't this beautiful:
Story behind it from withouthotair.blogspot.com/2010/01/wind-farm-wakes.
January 21, 2010
This is my first contribution for "Ask Stoat", and I'm doing it because it is low hanging fruit :-). I was going to do the even lower-hanging "airbourne fraction" but that will come. This is for Brian.
So, the issue is in the news because of the 2350 / 2035 kerfuffle, and links to Brian's other…
January 19, 2010
This is one of my favourite proverbs. I quite often find myself turning it over in my own mind as some particularly dense person fails yet again to see the bleedin' obvious.
And yet I discover that it doesn't appear to be a "standard" proverb, at least as revealed by 5 mins of not-very-exhaustive…
January 19, 2010
Off in Wootsup land someone called Gudfry is having trouble with the portrayal of Monckton on wikipedia, saying:
I see Connelly and his "tag-team" are at it again. This time it's about the many disputed entries about Lord Monckton, the prominent anti-AGW campaigner.
Many contributors have argued…
January 13, 2010
Ha ha, there you go, yet another provocative headline that won't really deliver.
From the comments elsewhere (thanks F):
At the rate newspapers keep pushing the boundaries of what nonsense
they will publish, then Einstein's theories will be up for grabs in a
few years. And there is worse than the…
January 11, 2010
The malign Nature effect, again refers.
In the hotly contested competition to see who are the biggest tossers in the british newspaper industry there has been an early entry this year by the Daily Mail: The mini ice age starts here based mainly on the fact that, oh, it has snowed a bit. And not…
January 11, 2010
So I was coming upstairs after talking to the digits about the things you talk to digits about, when a little beep came from my mobile receiving a text message and I just knew it was going to be the outing coming On. 4pm on a cold dark monday with only 4 people signed up: I thought there was a fair…
January 8, 2010
Cold, isn't it? And quite dark too (is that the [[Equation of time]]?).
But I'm rather enjoying this snow - it is clear and crisp, so far. I've only fallen off once.
[Update: Looks cold but lovely from above [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/8447023.stm
]. Mind you, it is warm elsewhere]…
January 4, 2010
"Part I" is very presumptuous. I might never write part II. Ah well, I press onwards in hope.
I'm going to take my text from Climategate: the corruption of Wikipedia and see what we can learn about wiki's workings from the way people misunderstand it. I should warn you that blog is mostly recycled…
January 3, 2010
Many years ago, back when Stoat was a humble blogspot blog, I had an "Ask Stoat" feature, shamelessly ripped off from RP Jr's "Ask Prometheus". Anyway, it is back, and here it is. Ask away. I'll transfer anything I think there is any prospect of me doing from the comments into some kind of order…
January 1, 2010
Paul puts up his best posts of 2009 and that seems like a good idea. He did 8, so I think I should try for 9. I'll write it tomorrow; you've got till then to do it for me :-)
No-one did my work for me. And I decided to do a rough pick month-by-month instead.
* Jan Hegel does maths
* Feb "Will" I be…
December 30, 2009
Apparently, exploding underpants are to be banned on planes from now on. Security experts say that they never expected anyone to try this, but now that someone has they will look there too. They are considering banning exploding vests as well, but won't bother until someone actually tries it.
[…