I didn’t know YouTube was that old

Woke to this

An early end to an ill-advised experiment

Over the years I’ve heard several stories of people taking a picture of themselves each day for a year. I thought of this in December and figured, I ought to try it. Well, I made it through January, but I’m going to stop because it’s not working.

I foolishly decided that I would take a picture of myself each morning before I left for work. Unfortunately, in just about all the photos I have a dazed, eyes half-closed, “I don’t want to do this” look. Which is understandable since in most of the photos I’ve only been up for about ten minutes. Of the 31 photos, this is the best one:

and that’s because it was taken on the 10th, a Sunday, probably sometime in the afternoon after I’d been awake for a few hours. If I try to do this again, I’ll probably wait to take the photos until I get home from work.

Political Flip-Flop

I’m not excited about the State of the Union because I know how the system works. The President will propose something, and Congress will fuck it up. I was just going to post a link to a State of the Union story I wrote three years ago (Politically Cynical) but I ended up thinking about another of my stories, (Vote With Your Fists. The story is about a guy who celebrates “Punch-Your-Politician Day” by punching his Senator although he “had wanted to punch the President, but [he] couldn’t afford to stand in line all day.” I was just wondering how many people thought this was deeply offensive and that I was un-American when I wrote this in the Bush-years who now find it amusing and want to line up in the Obama-years.

Noah was an ass

Genesis 9:18-27

18And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan.

19These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.

20And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:

21And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.

22And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.

23And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness.

24And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.

25And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

26And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

27God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

Wait? What? Ham accidentally sees his father Noah naked, so Noah curses Ham’s son Canaan. Does anyone see any sense to that?

Google’s opinion of Rush Limbaugh

Fairly accurate I’d say.

Free pass for the nutjobs?

So you know what I’m talking about.

Okay. I had a few tweets about this, but then I stopped. Because the time wasted talking about how big of assholes these guys are, is that much less time spent talking about the people who really need help. (There are tons of places that are helping, but for basic help, there’s always the American Red Cross.)

But today I couldn’t stop thinking about how these two schmucks will probably get a free pass. Yes, they’ve been blasted for what they’ve said, but they’ll be back tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. Nothing will change. Decent people will think them idiots, but unfortunately too many will continue thinking them as dispensers of truth. Now, I’m not saying they should be kicked off the air, they have the right to announce to the world how big of idiots they are, but there should be some consequence.

The reason I fear they will get a free pass, is there is a bigger story. Their statements will get lost among everything else that is going on. And in a few weeks or months, if anyone brings up these statements, there are people who will shout them down as being “liberal, socialist, fascist, secularist, elitist who hate Christianity and conservatives.”

A bad sign?

I’m currently in a personnel shuffle at work. I won’t try to explain it, I’m not sure if the people “in the know” know what the hell is going on, but it is a process that will take one to three months (best estimate.) So, in the first step of the process, on Thursday I took my box of stuff to a different lab. That’s not my final destination, so I’m pretty much leaving everything in the box. Which is good, because my new desk is basically a filing cabinet for the department I’m in now.

Today I had a few minutes to kill, so I was looking through the drawers seeing if there was anything interesting. There were folders labeled with things like, “International Shipping,” “Training Logs,” and “Equipment Checklists.” Then there was a folder marked “Goals and Achievements.” Curious, I opened it to find it empty.

What a week

In the past week I’ve watched three rocket launches.

On the 14th, I watched a Delta II loft the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base.

On the 18th, I saw the Helios 2B fly on an Ariane 5 from Kourou.

And moments ago I watched as a Soyuz rocket sent Expedition 22 from Baikonur to the ISS.

Interesting Global Warming Quotes

As with all polls, the answers you get depend on the questions you ask. We found that almost all climate scientists believe that the world has been warming: 97% agree that “global average temperatures have increased” during the past century. But not everyone attributes that rise to human activity. A slight majority (52%) believe this warming was human-induced, 30% see it as the result of natural temperature fluctuations and the rest are unsure.

When it comes to current conditions, however, the consensus in favor of human warming reemerges: 84% believe “human-induced greenhouse warming” is now occurring, compared with only 5% who reject this conclusion. And 74% say the “currently available scientific evidence substantiates” its occurrence, while only 9% disagree. So global warming doubters are a genuinely small minority among American climate scientists; it is difficult to believe that any transgressions against scientific procedures or the scientific ethos uncovered by Climategate are going to change that.

http://www.climatologynews.com/story.asp?ID=544555&Title=What%20Scientists%20Really%20Think%20About%20Global%20Warming

In a recent survey of more than 3,000 Earth scientists, 82% agreed that human activity is a “significant contributing factor” in changing global temperatures. Specialists were in greater agreement: 75 of the 77 climate scientists who actively publish in the field about 97% agreed with the statement.

http://www.examiner.com/x-20010-NY-Economy-and-Politics-Examiner~y2009m12d19-3000-Scientists-in-US-and-Europe-agree-that-global-warming-is-caused-by-CO2

The American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling.

The drafting of such reports and statements involves many opportunities for comment, criticism, and revision, and it is not likely that they would diverge greatly from the opinions of the societies’ members. Nevertheless, they might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions. That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords “climate change.”
The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

Admittedly, authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural. However, none of these papers argued that point.
This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies. Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686

This brief report addresses the two primary questions of the survey, which contained up to nine questions (the full study is given by Kendall Zimmerman [2008]):

1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?

2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

With 3146 individuals completing the survey, the participant response rate for the survey was 30.7%. This is a typical response rate for Web-based surveys [Cook et al., 2000; Kaplowitz et al., 2004]. Of our survey participants, 90% were from U.S. institutions and 6% were from Canadian institutions; the remaining 4% were from institutions in 21 other nations. More than 90% of participants had Ph.D.s, and 7% had master’s degrees. With survey participants asked to select a single category, the most common areas of expertise reported were geochemistry (15.5%), geophysics (12%), and oceanography (10.5%). General geology, hydrology/hydrogeology, and paleontology each accounted for 5–7% of the total respondents. Approximately 5% of the respondents were climate scientists, and 8.5% of the respondents indicated that more than 50% of their peer-reviewed publications in the past 5 years have been on the subject of climate change. While respondents’ names are kept private, the authors noted that the survey included participants with well-documented dissenting opinions on global warming theory.

Results show that overall, 90% of participants answered “risen” to question 1 and 82% answered yes to question 2. In general, as the level of active research and specialization in climate science increases, so does agreement with the two primary questions (Figure 1). In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change (79 individuals in total). Of these specialists, 96.2% (76 of 79) answered “risen” to question 1 and 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to question 2….

http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf