Monday, February 15, 2016
Stuffed, I am...
Stuffed, I am... We just finished our early lunch, feasting on Debbie's latest delight: a chicken casserole featuring (lots of) poblano pepper, corn tortillas, mozzarella cheese, cilantro, sour cream, butter, and mushrooms. Poblano peppers, if you don't know them, are a real culinary delight. They're often called “pasilla” peppers in U.S. stores, but they're really poblanos. If you like green (“Bell”) peppers but don't like the spiciness of jalapenos and the like, that the poblano pepper might be your new best recipe friend. It's got way more flavor than a green pepper, but none of the spiciness of a jalapeno...
This is Debbie's second pass at this recipe, and this one was way better for some reason. We know from the first go-round that this dish freezes very nicely, so we've now got some more “instant meals” for our freezer. Man, this was good! At left below is the casserole moments after emerging triumphant from the oven; at right is my pig bowl (and somehow I ate the entire thing!)...
This is Debbie's second pass at this recipe, and this one was way better for some reason. We know from the first go-round that this dish freezes very nicely, so we've now got some more “instant meals” for our freezer. Man, this was good! At left below is the casserole moments after emerging triumphant from the oven; at right is my pig bowl (and somehow I ate the entire thing!)...
Oh, look what Curiosity found now!
I'll speculate a bit. My guess is that those are solidified drops of molten rock, splashed out from some (relatively nearby) impact crater where a meteor struck the Martian surface. The fact that the little sand “craters” haven't filled in suggests that this happened fairly recently...
Really?
Really? Michael Brooks is a physicist (Ph.D. in quantum physics from the University of Sussex in England), and a noted science writer. He's also written a novel (which I didn't know about until I read his Wikipedia page this morning). The New Scientist is currently running an article by him, which includes this:
The entire edifice of science is built upon the notion of seeking the truth about nature, whether it comports with our preconceived ideas or not. Honesty in the process is utterly essential, and rooting out dishonesty is one of the hallmarks of science (though sometimes it takes a lot longer than one would hope!). If Brooks' ideas here were to become the norm, it's easy to see that what we think of today as science would degenerate into something like ... what climatology and social sciences are today. It's appalling that Brooks (apparently) believes otherwise. I can only hope that he was drunk when he wrote this...
How can this be so, when honesty is supposedly such an essential attribute? Because it gets the job done. Raymond De Vries at the University of Michigan and colleagues have argued that data manipulation based on intuition of what a result should look like is “normal misbehaviour”. They see such common misbehaviours as having “a useful and irreplaceable role” in science. Why? Because of “the ambiguities and everyday demands of scientific research”.In brief, he's arguing that it's just fine for scientists to cook and cherry-pick their data (which is, in large part, where any “evidence” for AGW comes from). A scientist is arguing that honesty in science isn't essential.
In other words, data isn’t often as clean as you would like. According to Frederick Grinnell, an ethicist at the University of Texas, intuition is “an important, and perhaps in the end a researcher’s best, guide to distinguishing between data and noise”. Sometimes you just know that data point was an anomaly to be ignored.
Should we do something to make science more virtuous? Probably not.
The entire edifice of science is built upon the notion of seeking the truth about nature, whether it comports with our preconceived ideas or not. Honesty in the process is utterly essential, and rooting out dishonesty is one of the hallmarks of science (though sometimes it takes a lot longer than one would hope!). If Brooks' ideas here were to become the norm, it's easy to see that what we think of today as science would degenerate into something like ... what climatology and social sciences are today. It's appalling that Brooks (apparently) believes otherwise. I can only hope that he was drunk when he wrote this...
Sunday, February 14, 2016
Two minutes of kitten...
Paradise ponders...
Paradise ponders... Our downstairs heater (we have a separate one for the second floor) is giving us trouble. It keeps shutting down, with its indicator light showing a code 31. We're not alone in this; the number of hits on a search are staggering. The house got down to 60°F overnight; a little uncomfortable but certainly not an emergency. I tried all the obvious things from the troubleshooting tips I found online, but got nowhere. Tomorrow we'll have our heating guy out here, and he's great – one way or the other, we'll get it fixed.
We civilized people sure do like our creature comforts :)
Take a gander at the photo of Mo'i, at right. Can you guess what our weather is like?
Our forecast says 1 to 3 inches of that white stuff today, but with above-freezing temperatures. We'll see what that really turns out to be. Meanwhile, at left is the current radar picture (as of 7:35 am).
Yesterday Debbie made us a wonderful midday meal: her signature baked Ora King salmon in dilled mayonnaise, accompanied by roast vegetables (Brussels sprouts, parsnips, and carrots). You can see the veggies at left in the “before” photo, and the completed dinner on the right. Sorry y'all weren't here to share with us!
Yesterday evening, just before it got dark, I caught the scene at right. From our perspective on the valley floor, the sun had set, behind the Wellsville Mountains. But the peaks of the Wasatch Mountains to our east were still in sunshine, albeit disappearing fast. I managed to catch this about 90 seconds before the last light on the peaks was gone...
We civilized people sure do like our creature comforts :)
Yesterday Debbie made us a wonderful midday meal: her signature baked Ora King salmon in dilled mayonnaise, accompanied by roast vegetables (Brussels sprouts, parsnips, and carrots). You can see the veggies at left in the “before” photo, and the completed dinner on the right. Sorry y'all weren't here to share with us!
Saturday, February 13, 2016
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says...
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says ... that Obamacare costs will rise by 60% over the next decade. In other words, the Obamacare skeptics were right all along when they predicted that Obamacare would increase the cost of healthcare, not decrease it as Obama and his mincing minions promised. No surprise to anyone who's been paying even the least bit of attention to the debate – and especially not a surprise to anyone paying their own insurance costs!
Friday, February 12, 2016
Do you like persimmons?
Do you like persimmons? If you do, try Trader Joe's unsweetened, unsulfured dried California persimmons. They are hands-down the best I've ever had. They actually taste like persimmons!
Music video in weightlessness...
Why do people go to emergency rooms?
Why do people go to emergency rooms? Man, there were a lot of surprises in here for me, starting with #1...
Sawed off in Paradise...
Sawed off in Paradise... For about three hours this morning, we were cut off from the Internet (“sawed off” in IT lingo). Quite a bit of my morning routine revolves around the Internet (mainly email, Twitter, and news), so this was quite ... unsettling ... for me :)
The views outside our windows were quite beautiful this morning. At right is the view to the north, toward our friend and neighbor Tim D. I particularly liked the way the mountains looked, filtered through the haze. Not ten minutes after I took this photo, that fog bank you can see in the background came down and engulfed us. Now we're living in a sea of gray, with visibility down to under 100'.
Now I'm going to go catch up on things, as we have the Internet back. Yay!
Now I'm going to go catch up on things, as we have the Internet back. Yay!
Thursday, February 11, 2016
A rimey morning in Paradise...
A rimey morning in Paradise... It's cold this morning, but it's also foggy. That combination means that rime is forming on any surface that's below freezing. Since it was well below freezing (air temperature) last night, that means just about everything is covered with rime, some so thickly that it looks almost like it snowed. Some photos from around our yard:
Like all the photos I've taken in the past few months, these were taken with an unmodified iPhone 6s Plus using the built-in camera app. As usual, the only processing I've done is color-correction (for white balance) – for some reason, my iPhone wants to make outdoor shots have a bluish cast...
Like all the photos I've taken in the past few months, these were taken with an unmodified iPhone 6s Plus using the built-in camera app. As usual, the only processing I've done is color-correction (for white balance) – for some reason, my iPhone wants to make outdoor shots have a bluish cast...
Paradise Porcupine ponders...
Paradise Porcupine ponders... That's Porcupine Reservoir, which we took a short drive up to last night. We'd heard from a fellow wildlife gawker that the road up to the reservoir had been plowed, and that there were elk to be seen up there. Well, we got to the reservoir, but no further than the north edge of the dam – and that road had not been plowed. Furthermore, we saw just one cow elk on the entire trip.
On the other hand, we saw quite a few deer, and a bald eagle soaring overhead. And lots of beautiful winter scenery:
On the other hand, we saw quite a few deer, and a bald eagle soaring overhead. And lots of beautiful winter scenery:
They're counting on you being stupid...
They're counting on you being stupid... The American political parties, I mean. There's a form of corruption that is, so far as I'm aware, uniquely American. The two major organized political parties in the U.S. (the Democrats and the Republicans, if you've just emerged from under a rock) both have a vested interest in not letting you (the American voter) select the candidates that you want in the Presidential primaries. They have two main methods of taking this power away from you:
The “Party Purse” is easy enough to understand. The two parties collect a lot of money through campaign contributions. This money gets spent in various ways. Some of it promotes the party in a way that is not specific to any candidate. Most of it is eventually spent in support of a single candidate, though the means may be slightly subtle. For instance, if the Republican party were to spend money on ads promoting one particular point of view on, say, immigration – that will be seen as supporting some candidates and not others.
The superdelegate system, on the other hand, is something the parties (especially the Democratic Party) would rather you didn't know about. Certainly they don't go around bragging about it, and the media says remarkably little about it. However, consider this: in the primary election just held in New Hampshire, Sanders took 60% of the vote, and Hillary less than 40%. So Sanders should have 50% more delegates than Hillary, right? Wrong. Hillary has the same number as Sanders, because of superdelegates – party insiders – choosing her, despite the votes of New Hampshire party members. The theory is, you see, that the superdelegates know better than the voters. That's American democracy in action, folks.
What's the answer for the corruptions of the American two-party system? Every once in a great while, a new political party emerges – when the voters have had enough, and want better. That last happened with the emergence of the Republican party in the 1850s, and their first big success with the election of Abraham Lincoln. It's been too long now – 160 years! – and the corruptions of incumbent power have long been a problem. It's long past time for us to have another ballot box revolution, though I don't see one anywhere in the predictable future.
Maybe we need the equivalent of term limits for political parties :)
- The power of the “Party Purse”.
- Superdelegates.
The “Party Purse” is easy enough to understand. The two parties collect a lot of money through campaign contributions. This money gets spent in various ways. Some of it promotes the party in a way that is not specific to any candidate. Most of it is eventually spent in support of a single candidate, though the means may be slightly subtle. For instance, if the Republican party were to spend money on ads promoting one particular point of view on, say, immigration – that will be seen as supporting some candidates and not others.
The superdelegate system, on the other hand, is something the parties (especially the Democratic Party) would rather you didn't know about. Certainly they don't go around bragging about it, and the media says remarkably little about it. However, consider this: in the primary election just held in New Hampshire, Sanders took 60% of the vote, and Hillary less than 40%. So Sanders should have 50% more delegates than Hillary, right? Wrong. Hillary has the same number as Sanders, because of superdelegates – party insiders – choosing her, despite the votes of New Hampshire party members. The theory is, you see, that the superdelegates know better than the voters. That's American democracy in action, folks.
What's the answer for the corruptions of the American two-party system? Every once in a great while, a new political party emerges – when the voters have had enough, and want better. That last happened with the emergence of the Republican party in the 1850s, and their first big success with the election of Abraham Lincoln. It's been too long now – 160 years! – and the corruptions of incumbent power have long been a problem. It's long past time for us to have another ballot box revolution, though I don't see one anywhere in the predictable future.
Maybe we need the equivalent of term limits for political parties :)
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