AGW Unvraveling...

ClimateGate seems to have begun the long-overdue process of critically examining the science and the corruption within the AGW community.  The latest revelation is the outright falsehood of IPCC claims about the damage global warming is doing in the Amazon Basin.  As James Delingpole says:

Here’s the latest development, courtesy of Dr Richard North – and it’s a cracker. It seems that, not content with having lied to us about shrinking glaciers, increasing hurricanes, and rising sea levels, the IPCC’s latest assessment report also told us a complete load of porkies about the danger posed by climate change to the Amazon rainforest.

Read the whole thing.

Best Economics Music Video Evah!

I'm fairly certain I have no other posts with both “Music” and “Economics” tags...

Benford's Law...

Have you ever noticed that a disproportionate amount of numbers start with the digit one?  For instance, if you were to go through a newspaper and tally up the numbers that appear there, you'd find that about 30% of them start with a one.  Why is it 30%? This odd phenomenon continues with the other digits – about 16% of numbers start with a two, and smaller and smaller proportions until you get to nine.  What's going on here?

The first person to study this was a fellow named Frank Benford, and the proportions above are said to follow “Benford's Law”.  If you follow the news carefully, you may recognize Benford's Law, as it was used last year to prove that the election results from Iran were faked – the returns should have followed Benford's law, but they did not.

If you'd like to understand more about both what Benford's Law actually is (it's a bit more complex than the simple version I gave above), and especially why it is, here's an easy-to-understand explanation.

Debbie's Home!

Much happiness in our household. 

She played a trick on the dogs – as we pulled into our driveway, she opened her window and ducked down out of sight.  I let the dogs out to run in the yard, and then she called them.  Oh, we had some very happy dogs – whimpering, leaping and twirling for sheer joy, and nearly knocking her down with their enthusiastic greetings...

“We Regret It.”

Via a liberal friend who does not want to be named:

Wow.

Folk Wisdom, from the Mouth of a Babe...

Via my mom, who must have tapped into a productive lode here recently:

A Congressman was seated next to a little girl on the airplane when he turned to her and said, 'Let's talk. I've heard that flights go quicker if you strike up a conversation with your fellow passenger.'

The little girl, who had just opened her book, closed it slowly and said to the total stranger, 'What would you like to talk about?'

'Oh, I don't know,' said the congressman. 'How about global warming or universal health care', and he smiles smugly.

OK, ' she said. 'Those could be interesting topics. But let me ask you a question first. A horse, a cow, and a deer all eat the same stuff - grass. Yet a deer excretes little pellets, while a cow turns out a flat patty, and a horse produces clumps of dried grass. Why do you suppose that is?'

The legislator, visibly surprised by the little girl's intelligence, thinks about it and says, 'Hmmm, I have no idea.'

To which the little girl replies, 'Do you really feel qualified to discuss global warming or universal health care when you don't know shit?

Har!

Miracle on the Hudson (Simulation)...

Via my mom, this excellent simulation of Flight 1549 and its emergency landing in the Hudson River (by Captain Sullenberger):


These simulators are getting very realistic...

The Garbage Mystery...

Like most couples, my wife and I have divided up the chores.  In the boringly conventional mode, one of my chores every Thursday morning is to haul our week's trash about 400 feet down our driveway to the nearest public road.  There the garbage truck and its crew will pick them up, empty them, and leave the empties there for me to haul back up to the house in the afternoon.

We've lived here for over ten years now, so I've performed this little ritual over 500 times.  You could say that I'm an expert on certain aspects of our garbage – in particular, how much of it we produce.  There's really little variation; we consistently produce between two and three 50 gallon trash cans full every week.

But for the past three weeks, my wife has been in Indiana with her mom.  That means I've had two trash cycles with her gone.  In those two weekly cycles, I've produced less than a half of one trash can.  I skipped taking it down last week; there wasn't enough to make it worthwhile. 

Now it makes sense to me that two of us would produce more trash than one of us, but I'd expect the difference to be about 2:1 – and instead it's more like 5:1.  This leads inexorably to the mystery: what on earth is my wife throwing out in such large quantities each week?  I don't really feel like inventorying all the garbage to find out.  I'm hoping one of my readers out there has already done this, and knows the answer.

Anyone?

Weirdness...

Via reader Tom B.:

HOW  SMART IS YOUR RIGHT FOOT?

You  have to try this please, it takes 2 seconds.  It is from an  orthopedic  surgeon.
This  will confuse your mind and you  will keep trying over and over again to see if you can outsmart your foot, but, you  can't.  It  is pre-programmed in your brain!

1.  While sitting at your desk in front of your computer,  lift your  right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles.

2. Now, while doing this, draw the number  '6' in the air with  your right hand. Your foot will change direction.

And there's nothing you can do about  it!  Before  the day  is done, you are going to try it again, if you've not already done so.

The first few times I tried this, it worked as advertised.  I found that if I moved very slowly and deliberately I could keep my foot going in a clockwise circle – but it took great concentration.  Even after many tries, if I move quickly I cannot do it.

Definitely weird.

How Good are You?

How good are you at “eyeballing” straight lines, angles, and lengths?  Take this test to see how you measure up...

Storm Summary...

First, the rain: 6.34 inches (161 mm) of lovely, lovely rain.  The graph at right tells the story (click to enlarge).  Most of this came down in liquid form, but some was solid (hail).

The barometric pressure changes were kinda dramatic (graph at left, click to enlarge), too.

The forecast has a 60% chance of rain on Tuesday.  Wow!

Dogs Found!

Our neighbor just called to say that two local dogs have wandered into her yard.  One looks a bit like an all-white St. Bernard, the other like a black-and-white cattle dog.  Both are friendly; one looks like it may have broken loose from a leash (perhaps thunder-frightened?).  If these sound like your dogs, please drop me a line (email address is in the sidebar at right), or comment on this post.  Either way, I'll put you in touch with my neighbor.

These two doggies just want to go home...

Update: The two doggies have been reunited with their owners.   The way it happened is a great story of neighborhood. 

My neighbor who found the dogs got the phone number for Paula C. from me.  Paula lives just down the road from us, and operates a kennel and dog training facility.  She's also a long-time resident of Lawson Valley, and knows just about everybody here (and most especially she knows their dogs).  Unfortunately, Paula didn't know these two doggies.  Paula called everyone she knew, but none of them knew of these two dogs either.  This was shaping up to be a story with a sad ending...

Fast forward a few hours.  Paula was at her gate, shoveling the rainstorm's mud out from underneath her gate, so she could open it and leave.  While she was working, a car drove slowly by, and the driver hollered to ask her whether she'd seen a couple of lost dogs - a big white one, and a small black-and-white one.  Paula sent them up the hill to see my neighbor, who still had the dogs – and the dogs were reunited with their worried owners.

Turns out the owners live about a mile away.  They weren't home when the dogs got loose, but the thunderstorm happened during that period, so I'm thinking my guess was a good one...

I love happy endings like that!

Slide Rule Humor...

Via a fellow slide rule collector who wishes to remain unnamed:

TEACHER ARRESTED IN NEW YORK

A public school teacher was arrested today at John F. Kennedy International Airport as he attempted to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a compass, a slide-rule, and a calculator.

At a morning press conference, the Attorney General said he believes the man is a member of the notorious 'Al-Gebra' movement. He did not identify the man, who has been charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.

'Al-Gebra is a problem for us', the Attorney General said. 'They derive solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in search of absolute values. They use secret code names like 'X' and 'Y' and refer to themselves as 'unknowns', but we have determined that they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country.'

As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, 'There are 3 sides to every triangle'.

When asked to comment on the arrest, President Obama said, 'If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, he would have given us more fingers and toes..'

White House aides told reporters they could not recall a more intelligent or profound statement by the President.

It is believed that the Nobel Prize for Physics will follow.

2010...

Via my mom:

Weather Update...

So far our four-day storm total is 5.24 inches (133 mm).  As you can see on the chart at right (click to enlarge), we received over an inch (25mm) yesterday and last night, and the rain continues as I write this. 

I was awakened several times last night by rain and hail pounding on my bedroom window – we had gusty winds to 15 MPH (about 20 kph) from the southwest, and several thunderstorm cells passed right overhead.  Two of them had powerful lightning strokes, causing very loud thunder (one of our dogs, Lea, is terrified of lightning, and spent hours quaking, pressed hard up against me on the bed).  As if that wasn't enough, my weather radio was alarming every 15 minutes or so, to tell me of a new threat the NOAA wanted to warn me about.  All in all, it wasn't a good night for sleeping...

But no damage was done, so far as I could tell with my flashlight.  And we've got a lovely start to the rainy season, with nearly 11 inches already on the ground.

The wildflowers in the Anza-Borrego ought to be spectacular this year.

Yesterday evening, driving home from work, I saw the streams in Lawson Valley in full flood.  Last night's rains should drive them even higher, perhaps to the highest levels I've yet seen in my ten years out here.  I've heard stories from long-time residents about much higher floods washing out bridges; hopefully that is not happening to us!

A Democratic Insider's View into the Sausage Factory...

My favorite tidbit:

I believe President Clinton provided some crucial insight when he said, "people would rather be with someone who is strong and wrong than weak and right." It's not that people are uninterested in who's right or wrong, it's that people will only follow leaders who seem to actually believe in what they are doing. Democrats have missed this essential fact.

Go read the whole thing, it's fascinating...

Space Cannon...

Now this is just plain cool.  I particularly like the clever way they came up with to make the thing aimable.  Every other proposal for similar technologies (such as magnetic rail guns) required enormous fixed infrastructure that would permit launching payloads only into a very small range of orbits...

Air America is Put Out of Its Misery...

Several years ago, Al Gore famously helped found “Air America”.  Its objective was to bring quality liberal talk radio to the airwaves to compete with the then (and now) fabulously successful hordes of conservative, libertarian, and independent talk radio shows.  The idea was twofold: to help get the liberal (or “progressive”) message out, and to make a profit.

Air America failed dismally on both counts, from the very beginning.  Though they aired a fair number of liberal talk shows, their audiences were always small – and they've been shrinking for the past few years, even during the Obama campaign when you might have thought interest would be particularly high.  Not so much.

Yesterday the death knell rang; Air America filed for bankruptcy and ceased all on-air operations.  They are dead.

At the same time, talk radio is by far the most profitable and fastest-growing segment of radio in the U.S.  Nearly every day, it seems, a radio station switches from the traditional “disk jockey” format to talk radio, for the simple reason that the audiences on talk radio dwarf those on music stations – and therefore so do the ad revenues (which of course is how radio stations make money).

It fascinates me that despite an earnest, well-funded attempt, liberal talk radio was an abject failure.  One is tempted to say that the failure must mean there aren't many liberals, but clearly that's not the case.  Other possibilities I can think of:

• There aren't enough engaged liberals; those interested enough in politics to listen to talk radio.
  
  
• There aren't enough thinking liberals; they'd rather be told what to do than to think it out on their own.
  
  
• The liberals are all smugly listening to NPR, and can't be bothered to listen elsewhere.

Anybody got any better ideas?

Homeopathic “Medicine”...

You can find homeopathic medicines in any American drugstore, sitting on the shelf right next to real medicines.  Many of the homeopathic medicines use packaging and messaging that looks identical to that used on real medicines – a deliberate, and largely successful attempt to trick you into believing that the homeopathic medicines are real medicines.  Others make claims for their benefits (or efficacy, to use the conventional term) that sound exaggerated, as they are – but many consumers believe that the claims must be true, else the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) wouldn't allow them to say it.  The FDA, after all, closely regulates all drugs.

Therein lies the rub.  Homeopathic medicines are not drugs under U.S. law.  When the FDA was formed, homeopathic medicines were specifically excluded (along with a few other things, but those are stories for another day).  This was a political accomodation made to get the legislation passed, and the decision has never been revisited.

Homeopathic “medicines” can make whatever claim they want to about their efficacy.  The FDA does not check them, nor does anyone else.  The only restriction or regulation on homeopathic medicines is that they can't be dangerous – but there's not much chance of that, as they have virtually no active ingredients.

While the truth about homeopathic medicines is widely known, and information about them is readily available, there are still millions of people who swear by their usefulness, believe in their efficacy, and spend billions of dollars ever year on them.  That completely blows my mind.  Spending money on homeopathic medicine is like burning money, but without the entertainment value.

The British Homeopathic Society describes how homeopathic medicines are made.  If you have even the slightest regard for science, this should be enough to convince you of their fraud.  There's more stuff, equally ludicrous, elsewhere on their site.  Here Matt Parker, writing on the London Times, relates his introduction to homeopathic medicine.  And here's a nice little skit pointing out the absurdities of homeopathic medical “practice”:

Puzzler...

For the past few weeks, the number of readers daily hitting this site has been slowly and steadily growing.  This is after about 18 months of nearly constant readership, except for brief spikes when my blog gets linked from somewhere else (thank you!) or when there's a hot topic (such as ClimateGate) in the blogosphere.  I have no idea why the hits are increasing, as (so far as I can tell) I'm not doing anything different than I've always done.

But in any case: welcome, new readers.  Drop me a line if you've got something you'd like to say, and of course feel free to comment on the posts.  As you can see, my interests range all over the place, though there's allegedly a focus on things Jamulian around here...