Uncategorized
tlambert | January 6, 2011Hey, remember how Don Easterbrook deliberately falsified a baseline to make it look like past temperatures were warmer than current ones? Well, he's at it again. He has taken a graph of temperature proxies for Greenland and used the value for 1855 as the "present". Gareth Renowden comments
1855 â Easterbrookâs âpresentâ â was not warmer than 1934, 1998 or 2010 in Greenland, let alone around the world. His claim that 9,100 out of the last 10,500 years were warmer than recent peak years is â to put it bluntly â pure bullshit, based on a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of…
tlambert | January 5, 2011The detailed examination of the Wakefiled fraud is by Brian Deer: How the case against the MMR vaccine was fixed. The British Medical Journal editorial summarises:
Who perpetrated this fraud? There is no doubt that it was Wakefield. Is it possible that he was wrong, but not dishonest: that he was so incompetent that he was unable to fairly describe the project, or to report even one of the 12 children's cases accurately? No. A great deal of thought and effort must have gone into drafting the paper to achieve the results he wanted: the discrepancies all led in one direction; misreporting was…
gregladen | January 4, 2011For purely demographic reasons, more Californians read this blog than people from any other US state (with New York a close second). So I know that it will matter at least a little bit if I endorse my friend, Miles Kurland for member of the California Democratic Party Central Committee.
This is from Miles' facebook page:
If you wish that the Democratic party could be more principled, more progressive, more effective than we commonly find it to be, you have a rare opportunity to participate in an election that will help determine the direction of the Democratic party in California.
Every…
gregladen | January 4, 2011Enjoy this recent post on "How does one prove astrology?"
...The meat of Curtis' comment appears to be a way to test astrology, or at least one aspect of it. My problem with the suggestion is the same that I've had with the concept of astrology as a whole -- it depends on a foundation that is simply not there.
Have you ever been to Zzyzx Road, in the Mojave Desert? Carr2d2 has an excellent post on early 20th century woo and politics: Adventures of the Mind.
2010 space odyssey never did happen. But it's not too late to engage in the conversation. You just have to know how to talk like…
gregladen | January 3, 2011The Podcast from last Sunday's show is now on line. Go here and find "download now" and click that.
stoat | January 3, 2011This is about the paper of the same name by A Dai, available from http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers/Dai-drought_WIRES2010.pdf.
To keep things in one place, here is the abstract:
This article reviews recent literature on drought of the last millennium, followed by an update on global aridity changes from 1950 to 2008. Projected future aridity is presented based on recent studies and our analysis of model simulations. Dry periods lasting for years to decades have occurred many times during the last millennium over, for example, North America, West Africa, and East Asia. These droughts…
gregladen | January 2, 2011Should the Skepchicks start reproducing as soon, and as quickly, as possible? I say yes. What do you think?
Thank you Diandra for making the link between the current Republican effort to "democratize" science and Arnie Proxmire and his Golden Fleece award. You are absolutely correct.
gregladen | January 2, 2011My first bird of 2011 was a crow, so I'll move right along to my second bird which was a hawk, presumably a red tail. That does not count birds I could hear but not see. Register your first bird here at 104Birds.
Is there a sustainable aquaculture? Maybe. It might involve Vietnamese catfish.
Check out these excellent photographs of Angry Birds. Not the video game, the actual birds. Angry.
Holy crap jesus christ on a stick, look at this:
Whoa. That was a sperm whale poking around at an oil rig. HT Kevin
Panda's Thumb asks, Are they fossils of Ediacaran metazoa?
gregladen | January 2, 2011Hacktivists have struck a blow against the regime in Zimbabwe by attacking a number of government websites. The cyber-assault appears to have been in support of newspapers who published secret cables in the ongoing WikiLeaks saga, to the annoyance of the-powers-that-be in the country.
Grace Mugabe, wife of Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe, was recently reported to be suing a newspaper for $15 million after it published a WikiLeaks cable that claimed she has benefited from illegal diamond trading.
As news spread amongst the loosely-knit group of Anonymous hackers who support WikiLeaks,…
gregladen | January 2, 2011Except when it does not work.
A glitch on Apple's iPhone has stopped its built-in alarm clock going off, leaving many people oversleeping on the first two days of the New Year.
Angry bloggers and tweeters complained that they had been late for work, and were risking missing planes and trains.
Bloggers late for work? LOL.
Apple is not revealing why this happened but claims they will have it fixed by January 3rd. So, tonight, if you use your iPhone as your alarm clock, just go to sleep knowing you'll be awakened in the morning exactly as you wish. Because, you know, it's an Apple product,…
gregladen | January 1, 2011Atheists Talk, #98, January 2, 2011
As 2010 rolls out, we all hope the future is bright for 2011. Along with hope, there's always hype. Bringing us a reality check from their areas of expertise are these savvy thinkers:
Greg Laden, bio anthropologist and bogger for Scienceblogs.com, will give his top ten list of science stories for 2010, with commentary on the new field of paleogenomics
Maggie Koerth-Baker, science journalist and writer for BoingBoing.net, will talk about the Future of Energy in the US
Steve Borsch, media trend expert at Connecting the Dots, has insights for a year of…
gregladen | January 1, 2011This year, I will:
Totally empty my email inbox every day.
Read one classic novel published before 1950 each week.
Learn the names of the capitols, mottos, bird and mineral of all of the fifty states.
Learn to play five new musical instruments.
Lean to speak five new languages
In the spring, plant a large garden and live off the produce through the subsequent winter.
Learn how to frame pictures from scratch.
Reduce my personal carbon footprint to zero.
Clean the fridge once a week.
Go to the gym every fifteen minutes.
Change my own oil.
Learn fifty new emacs key combinations.
Not eat any…
gregladen | December 31, 2010... is temporarily suspended due to technical difficulties. I am experiencing the equivalent of a denial of service attack from our friends in Turkey.
Commenting has been turned back on, but seems to be broken at least on recent posts. Sorry for the inconvenience. Should the situation persist in the morning, I'll be here, waiting for SB.com to go back to normal.
Happy New Year!
gregladen | December 31, 2010Thanks, Gwen for the tip on this must see, soon to be viral video (or is it something that's been around for years and I didn't notice?)
stoat | December 31, 2010 A post a month, chosen not quite at random, and I couldn't always restrict myself to one post. Somehow, I feel that not a great deal happened scientifically during the year. But I still enjoy writing this stuff, and people still read it, so on I go.
* Himalayan glaciers to disappear by... when? an obligatory reference to the CRU nonsense, but its a spin-off, so that's OK.
* Death at UAH (and Wolf Hall)
* Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi - its not all chance folks (and Hobbes again, and 400 ppm CO2)
* Currygate, part 3: the key papers exposed - no round-up of the year could be complete without at…
gregladen | December 31, 2010The latest epic viral fail, designed for maximum wow factor but that hardly qualifies as an a-ha moment, is the Lake Superior University list of words to be banned in 2011. I heard the back story from my BFF, well, it's not very interesting.
Some would say that Lake Superior U should man up and admit that language is flexible, and that it is pointless to refudiate neologisms such as "Mamma Grizzlies" if the American People want to live life to the fullest, linguistically, as it were. I'm just sayin'
If you think this blog post is interesting, please facebook it. If you want to know the…
gregladen | December 30, 2010The last Kodachrome processing machine, at Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas, shut down and will be sold for scrap. This is a bummer, because I think I still have some film laying around that I've not gotten 'round to getting developed. They figured out why Skype crashed earlier this month, and it has to do with a bug in a Windows version of Skype that users should have updated but didn't. But don't blame the users. They were using Windows, and there is no automatic updating process for software on Windows, like there is in, ahem, Linux. People who use unsecured operating systems such as…
gregladen | December 30, 2010Atoms are the smallest things stuff can be and still be an element. So, why should the periodic table be so huge? Like, covering almost an entire piece of paper?