More misc

When we all wake up by the Onion.

Spam: I wrote a website for a friend who does English/German translation. This is my attempt to push it up the google rankings and maybe even get her some business: http://baumgarten-translations.com/.

ScruffyDan on the incoherent septic response to Siddall et al.

Daniel: stronger than 3/4 of a sausage.

DSC_3959-lents-crop

We were going to the Head of the Trent tomorrow (well, today now, cos I delayed this post) but the forecast is looking awful: Div 2 and the novices are already cancelled (for some mad reason we were entered as IM2). Since that means I don't have to get up at 5 am tomorrow its not all bad news :-). This afternoon I wandered down the river to watch the Lents, or at least the first two divisions with the most amusingly dubious rowing.

DSC_3955-nb-by-tree-close In between races it is quiet and peaceful.

Continuing: as it turned out, the Trent *wasn't* cancelled but we did wimp out of our sunday morning outing and do a few ergs instead. Our thin excuse was that we couldn't see the edge of the river: wading out with waders rather than boots it was possible to poke a pole in to mark it, but no-one was keen. Perhaps a slight lack of determination there.

Sorry, this seems to have morphed into a diary entry. Ah well.

Image0004 On the way back home: if you know this bit, it is the little triangle of land behind the UL near the ?real tennis? courts on the footpath towards Coton; normally a humble little stream but today a roaring torrent, or not quite, because the rain abated. Appalling picture quality due to my phone's camera; still it was nice to have. And due to the power of - aha - Bluetooth, I xferred the photos to M's laptop, with only a certain degree of cursing (eventually realising that the laptop wasn't going to offer a removable-disk type option and I'd have to xfer each from the phone view's "send").

Late addendum: you must watch the EDSAC film. As well as being 'istorical it is wonderful fun. Committees! People with mustaches! Punched tape! What more can you want.

And another:

ergs-2010-03-01

Thisis me being narcissistic, of course. Of the two ergs, the second was on a machine with a functioning display :-) and it seems I do better when pushed by a time. Next stop, 30m with a monitor.

Yet more more misc. Isn't that just... awesome?

More like this

Warning: this post is of limited general interest, unless you (like all right-thinking people) are interested in rowing. More photos than you could ever wish to see are here. We got a new eight today (well actually it turned up during the week, as Amy already noted; but this was the first outing…
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…
...we'll be watching you. Bluetooth, that is. At least according to the rather over-hyped Bluetooth is watching: secret study gives Bath a flavour of Big Brother. I don't have a lot of sympathy. If you go around shouting out "Hello my name is Eric Fertang" then you shouldn't complain if people…
I had such fun watching the last three divisions today that I'm going to bore you with yet more rowing. First, here is Corpus M1 (hello Rob!) catching Christs M2 (note cox's hand half raised in the process of acknowledging the bump) to cement their place in division 2 and their hopes of blades…

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You didn't mention what you had for lunch and still you call this a diary entry?!

[I didnt really have lunch on Sunday, sorry :-) -W]

By Steve Bloom (not verified) on 28 Feb 2010 #permalink

MISC.

I just posed this question to gavin at RC recent thread "climate change commitments" (moderated out?) and was wondering if you have any reponse in due time:

1.I donât understand their figure. The IPCC AR4 scenario A1B(21) calls for warming between approx. 2-5 deg C by 2100. This is a âmiddle of the roadâ scenario which would look outrageous on their figure. It also is beginning to look outrageous to systemic eyes.
I want an answer to this, please: In order for the AR4 scenario I mention to come true, the decadal increase in temp observed from 2000-2010 would need to jump 100% to 700% per decade to reach the modeled change. Is this outrageous to a physicist at this point????????

[Oh, I think the answer is that you shouldn't be using a 10 year average -W]

By thomas hine (not verified) on 03 Mar 2010 #permalink

Sorry, it looks like I didn't realize their figure was the "constant" CO2 model ensembles in the RC post.

OK - how about 20 years? I don't think this is just rehashing the old weather vs. climate stuff. It hits at statisctics, probability, systems, etc. You must admit that, for each step nowhere, or slightly back, catch-up will need to be more dramatic (and even more dramatic as time passes in stasis)? Doomsday type drama? Is that what we're in for?

[Well, to hit +2 oC over the century you need 0.2 oC per decade, which seems entirely plausible given the past. Hitting +5 would be tricky -W]

By thomas hine (not verified) on 03 Mar 2010 #permalink

ah, but then you are only looking at a 10 year (or "short" 1980-200)average trend of your choosing, albeit one which has the (or one of the) forcing(s) we are agreeing on for the future. The running mean over the last 120 years is less than 0.07 deg C per decade, and the last decade is beneath that I believe. All of this is elementary and I'm sure somewhere has been dealt with, so I will conclude here. But in my mind, it leaves a "naked" precautionary principle and not much more.

[Jones said 0.12. Why use 120 years? -W]

By thomas hine (not verified) on 03 Mar 2010 #permalink

Well, I'm glad "septic" wasn't a typo. Whatever the spelling (N.B. the k in your last), the word is meaningless without knowing what a so called skeptic is skeptical of. As an omphaloskeptic, it's easy to see there is, in climate, no singular skeptic position. There are as many reasons for skepticism as there are skeptics.

[In the GW wars, "skeptic" is a label for a side. It doesn't mean actually-skeptical-in-the-traditional sense. Wiki used to have an article but it got deleted :-( -W]

Help your friends website... It will only take about 4 minutes. First, make it proper html. Second, give it a title (sorry, I don't know the correct way to format to get the less than and greater than to show up). Finally, put the "GERMAN-ENGLISH and ENGLISH-GERMAN TRANSLATIONS" inside an h1 tag. Search engines in general think that things in an h1 tag are meant to be important.

This is definitely "Misc."

http://courses.washington.edu/bangblue/Sagan-Faint_Young_Sun_Paradox-Sc…
(as a poor OCR version from Google, or from Jstor by scaling their paywall)

Earth and Mars: Evolution of Atmospheres and Surface Temperatures -- Carl Sagan; George Mullen
Science, New Series, Vol. 177, No. 4043. (Jul. 7, 1972), pp. 52-56

"Major variations in the CO2 abundance
will have only minor greenhouse effects
because the strongest bands are nearly
saturated. A change in the present CO2
abundance by a factor of 2 will produce
directly a 2' variation in surface tem-
perature(18)."

Cited to:
18. S. Manabe, in Global Effects of Environmental Pollution, S.F. Singer, Ed. (Springer-Verlag, New York, 19701, p. 25.
___________

S.F. Singer?

[Singer wasn't so wacky when younger -W]