An Interesting Correlation...

One of my favorite AGW skeptics is Warren Meyer, proprietor of CoyoteBlog.  He's put together a presentation on AGW skepticism that includes the chart below.  It shows that life expectancy in any given country is quite closely correlated with that country's CO2 emissions (which are themselves a good proxy for fossil fuel consumption).  The more fossil fuels a country uses, the longer its citizens can expect to live.

He's not arguing that fossil fuel consumption directly causes longer lives, but rather that something(s) else is causing both the increase.  He doesn't say what, but I'd offer up prosperity and accumulated wealth as those causes.

Categorical Thinking...and the Climate Debate...

Via reader and friend Doug W., an article by Craig Loehle exploring a notion that's new to me, though when I google the term I get a few bazillion hits.  My engineer's brain translates that notion into “binary thinking” vs. “analog thinking”.  Some might say “black and white thinking” vs. “more nuanced thinking”.  What's new in this article is connecting categorical thinking to the way the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) debate is polarized.  A key bit:

Categorical thinking is common in life. It is a critical mental shortcut that brings order to the chaos of sensory input—I do not claim it to be a defect. If someone lies to us once, they are now in the category of liar. This may work for judging likely human behavior but one hurricane is not a trend. If a person is in the clergy, we classify them as good. If they exhibit some defect such as shoplifting, we throw them down to the pits. They are either a saint or not a saint. We don’t say that a politician in the other party is misguided or has different goals from us, we call them evil (and they call each other evil). If some small thing goes wrong on a date or at a wedding, the event is “ruined”. In religion you are either “saved” or not, there is evidently no in-between category of semi-saved or saved part of the time or improved.

This categorical thinking permeates the climate change debate. A premise in categorical thinking about the environment that goes back before the current debate is that natural is good and artificial is bad, where artificial means anything affected by humans. In the case of nature this means that wilderness is good and trees planted in rows are bad (though birds don’t necessarily mind the rows). The categorical mindset means that any touch by humans ruins the wilderness, so humans in the US are being progressively excluded from wilderness (roads closed, no snowmobiles, horses banned, etc.) from the wilderness that they are supposed to value so highly. In the climate debate, it goes like this: “There is no doubt that humans have caused warming over the past 50 years. Therefore we must act now.” The question is posed as whether the climate has change, a categorical question. And of course it has changed and of course humans have had some effect even if tiny. The fact that there is some influence of humans is taken to mean that all the bad things one can imagine will consequently follow. In real life no one imagines that if their stock portfolio is yielding 0.1% annually that they are making money and therefore they are going to become rich and therefore they are already rich, but this is how the climate debate plays out, perhaps because climate is not something anyone has direct experience of so it is an abstraction, a “thing” not a process or continuum.

Mr. Loehle's argument resonates with me, mostly in the way it helps explain the arguments of those credulous of AGW.  It's a good read, and not very long...

Mathematics and Programming...

Is knowledge of mathematics necessary – or even useful – for a programmer?  That's a long-standing debate, with bazillions of threads on usenet groups and blogs.  Evan Miller has some interesting ramblings on the topic.

Speaking strictly for myself, there have been only a few occasions when I needed any mathematics more advanced than simple algebra to do the programming work that I've done.  However...some of the most interesting and fun things I've done did involve some more advanced math.  The ones that come right to mind include: network traffic analysis and management (probability, statistics, sampling theory), teletype FSK modems (Fourier transforms and information theory), bond valuation (Monte Carlo statistical modeling), classic optic design, software servos (control optimization), astronomical and geographic calculations (can you spell spherical trigonometry?), algorithmic trading (big data analysis, pattern matching), and cryptography (really big numbers, modulo math, and trap functions).  For all of these programming jobs, I really could not have done the job without having learned some new mathematics.  Because I had only a high school education, all of these areas of math were new to me when I first encountered the need.  And for whatever reason, in each case I thought the need to learn these was a lot of fun.  Still, the programming that I've done that required this math forms only a small fraction of the total body of programming work I've done. 

I don't know where that puts me in this debate :-)

The Last Debate...

My favorite part: “last”.  I don't want to watch any more such nonsense.  It may (or may not) have political significance, but it certainly didn't have much in the way of substance.

The consensus of opinion seems to boil down to these points:

Obama didn't walk away a clear winner.
Obama didn't walk away a clear loser.
Romney didn't walk away a clear winner.
Romney didn't walk away a clear loser.

I'll call that a draw.  Here are some other thoughts:

Krauthammer
Ace
Clark Judge

Just two more weeks and we can stop worrying about who will win.  Then we can start worrying about who did win :-)

About That Debate...

You may have heard that we had a “Presidential debate” last night.  I watched the first third of it, then turned it off in disgust.  About the only things I learned were (a) the two candidates could verbally spar with each other, and (b) Candy Crowly wears her progressive bias like a piece of jewelry.

Sheesh.

I see in the blogs that writers on both sides are cheering the “jabs” that their candidate made, and booing the “lies” that the other candidate made.  I see endless debates about points of infinitesimal importance.  I see utterly nothing of any real substance, and no new positions or plans by either candidate.

There was a moment, early in the debate, that crystallized my disappointment for me.  It started with this question (directed at Obama) from one of the selected questioners:

Your energy secretary, Steven Chu, has now been on record three times stating it's not policy of his department to help lower gas prices. Do you agree with Secretary Chu that this is not the job of the Energy Department?

I'm sure that the Romney supporters, upon hearing this question, immediately thought it was a great question, and waited eagerly to hear Obama's answer.  And they heard exactly what any political observer would tell them to expect: Obama danced around all over the place, talking about green energy, efficient cars, and what not.  But he never came close to answering that question.  Of course he didn't, as that would require him to do something politically suicidal: admit that it was, in fact, his intended policy to raise energy prices – and that Steven Chu was doing exactly what Obama wanted him to do.

Romney replied exactly as you'd anticipate, by highlighting what Obama has done to make prices high, and what he'd do to lower them.  Nothing new.

My own reaction to that question was a bit different: I thought it was an obvious and even stupid question.  How uninformed does one have to be to not already know the answer to that question?  This isn't exactly new news.  Way back in 2008, Obama campaigned on a promise to raise energy prices (including, explicitly, gasoline).  He didn't hide it so much back then; he said it quite openly.  He gave that some context as well: higher prices would force Americans to use less energy.  In Obama's Progressive-world, it's an article of faith that the government should do this.  When he nominated Stephen Chu, Obama bragged about Chu's support for exactly those policies.  Then when Chu actually executed those policies, and talked about them publicly, he got no rebuke.  He wasn't told to retract his statements.  He wasn't fired.

It's obvious what the answer to that question is.  At least, it's obvious to anyone who's been paying even the very slightest amount of attention to the world over the past four years.

So what does it mean that the Gallup organization selected that question to be asked?  

Fundamentally I think it means that Gallup (and the presidential debates commission) knows they're never really going to get a debate on real issues of substance.  The electorate/audience is far too ignorant for that to ever happen.  And those real issues of substance aren't going to be what decides the outcome of this election.  Instead, it will be uninformed voters, generally with poor thinking skills, making uninformed choices, mainly on an intuitive and emotional basis.  Some people will vote for a candidate because they like the sound of his voice, or his confidence, or his business background, or his lack of business background, etc.

So...  I shut off the debate, drank a big glass of wine, went to bed and tried to think of other things.  Thinking about the election was just too damned depressing...

Today's Iowa Electronic Markets: Obama's up.  Oh, boy...

WTF Happened Last Night???

Well, that was just about the strangest political “debate” I've ever seen.  I was expecting entertainment, but I got something else instead.  I don't think either Ryan or Biden was the clear winner on either substance or debate style.  But I do think there was a winner: everybody who watched the debate – because we learned a lot about both men.

We learned that Ryan was out of his depth, and is somewhat uncomfortable, with foreign policy issues – but despite this, he was able to hold his own with the much more experienced Biden.

We learned that Martha Raddatz was an excellent moderator, despite the right's trashing of her before the debate, and accusing her of pandering to Biden after the debate.  She did no such thing – she was professional and even-handed throughout, and did a very effective job of asking questions that provoked potentially interesting answers.  The candidates didn't live up to the expectations she set, but that's their fault, not hers.  Kudos to Ms. Raddatz.

We learned that Biden was an uncouth, impolite, bullying jerk; full of bluster and blarney, and fond of yelling from the bar stool.

We learned (or rather, had reinforced) Ryan's strength on economic issues.

We learned how lucky we are that Obama hasn't been killed or incapacitated – because the idea of Joe Biden as president is positively terrifying (I would thing that's true even for loyal Democrats).

We learned that Ryan looks and behaves like a level-headed, grounded adult.  At least from behavioral cues, it's at least not frightening to imagine him as president.

We learned (or rather, had reinforced) how effective Biden's down-home, folksy mannerisms are.  Unfortunately for him, this was more than counter-balanced by his downright bizarre behaviors and constant rude interruptions of Ryan.

We learned that women find Ryan strong, comforting, and easy on the eye (despite his party affiliation), and that they find Biden kind of creepy and definitely not comforting (despite his party affiliation).

The winner?  Us, hands-down.  The loser, politically?  Probably the Obama/Biden ticket, because they didn't get the sort of boost from this debate that they so badly needed after the first Obama/Romney debate.

Here are some thoughts from others:

Nick Gillespie, Reason: The Smirk Store Is Out of Smirks...
Michael Barone, Washington Examiner: Biden Didn't Put a Dent in Romney...
Neoneocon: Biden Was Like the Drunken Blowhard...
Peter Suderman, Reason: Very Specific Malarkey...

Less than an hour after the debate finished, the Republican National Committee had a new ad up, making extensive use of Uncle Joe's bizarre debate behavior.  On nearly a daily basis something like this happens with a speed that leaves me gobsmacked.  An hour?!?  Before I could really even collect my thoughts, they had a polished and effective ad up on the Internet.  Just amazing...

Greatest Sentence Ever?

Bill Whittle has a candidate, and he makes his case.  It involves intellectuals running amok, Obama team mocking, skewering of warmists, and Whittle wit on full display.  Via reader Doug S.:

Which Talking Head is More Credible - A or B?

This “debate” on (of all places!) Anderson Cooper's show is a nice comparison between two experts: Peter Schiff, accomplished business man on one side, and Cornell West, a leading light of progressive economics.  You be the judge: