It’s Friday night. Open forum starts….
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Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
It’s Friday night. Open forum starts….
Wait for it…
Wait for it…
…
Now!
{ 15 comments }
Professor Bob Carter talks on "Climate Change" and testing hypothesis with the scientific method.
He shoots AGW and CO2 hypotheses so full of holes it should leave no doubt in anyones mind that the earth is not in any abnormal temperature changes. It’s in 4 parts of about 9-10 minutes each and worth listening to.
Fun site of the day:
http://www.arguewitheveryone.com/
Its pretty damned futile to make a point there b/c everybody just argues, you know? Biggest arglebargle evah.
Something for the WH401K nerds out there:
http://tinyurl.com/54zju4
If you’re in West Michigan this weekend and you’re into tiny trees, check out the 10th annual Michigan All-State Bonsai Show at Frederick Meijer Gardens. My sister’s the show chair, so I thought I’d give a shameless plug.
If the weather’s nice, be sure to check out the gardens and the sculpture park. Besides Da Vinci’s Horse, we have a number of impressive works. My favorites include:
* Deborah Butterfield’s Cabin Creek, a driftwood horse skeleton.
* A cast of Rodin’s Eve.
* Andy Goldsworthy’s Grand Rapids Arch. Mr Goldsworthy specializes in art from natural objects, assembled more than shaped. His arches are incredible. He finds a number of natural stones and stacks them into an arch, using nothing but gravity and friction to hold them together. The first of his arches I saw was impressive at 3 feet tall. Well, the Grand Rapids Arch is 34 feet long and 18 feet wide. Gravity. Friction. 110 tons of stone.
* Jacques Lipchitz’s Hagar, which I find impossible to describe but fascinating to look at.
* Igor Mitoraj’s Light of the Moon, a facial study, or part of one.
Dvorak on social networking…
I’m of the opinion that there is no such thing as a real community online. It’s a "pretend" community that we like to feel we’re a part of, but it’s composed of users who could jump ship at any moment, and often do.
Yep.
Dvorak on social networking…
I’m of the opinion that there is no such thing as a real community online. It’s a "pretend" community that we like to feel we’re a part of, but it’s composed of users who could jump ship at any moment, and often do.
Yep
BTW Akismet was being bad and had several comments that weren’t spam…
So here’s one of my maple trees, taken April 22nd of last year, compared to the same tree on May 1st this year. I think we’re just a little behind. We did have a little bit of sun this week though…
Jan
JLBussey’s last blog post..Japanese Maple “Autumn Moon”
Martin,Â
OMG, I’m a bonsai fan. Thanks for the link!Â
I worked on bonsai for about 7 years. But I gave it up when I bought a real forest.  I thought it would be a similar challenge, just on a bigger scale.  But it’s completely different. Maybe a 20% overlap.Â
There’s a lot to be said for attempting to distill the essence of a tree down to a desk top form. It’s not something you can do over a few weekends in the summer.
Props to your sister!
"It should leave no doubt in anyones mind that the earth is not in any abnormal temperature changes."
Gonna watch this and also, has anyone ever watched the weather channel or the local weather? Notice how they have a record high and a record low for today? Even notice that summer season days have had crazy recorded lows and winter days have had extremely high temperatures recorded? We’ve only really studied weather what 100 years? The farmers have been watching it longer perhaps but still, unless we have the weather documented back say 10,000 years ago there is no way we can show this is a deviation from a normal weather pattern or that the Earth and all it’s forces ever has a "normal" weather pattern.
Thanks Sandi,
It is, indeed, the complete lack of empiricism that has long disgusted me about the AWG movement. I talk about the very things, that Dr. Carter discusses, to anyone that will listen.
I just wish that the professor’s production value was as good as "An Inconvenient Truth".
I am sending the link to a friend of mine who is a PhD student in Hydrology. His grad thesis / project is eliminating much industrial CO2 by way of burying it beneath natural substrate, like bedrock.
It is a, sort of ethical concern for him, since he is not all that convinced, that industrial CO2 is a real threat. He also has told me that their actuarial model predicts a doubling of EVERYONE’S utility bill if they are successful in convincing-the powers that be-that their project should be actualized.
For what is worth, the majority of my contemporaries (Physics and Geology) understand that the scientific method does not apply to AGW. So, they are….dubious.
However, even at our Science-only University, the AGW movement is very active.
Amendment to the previous post.
The AGW movement at my school is somewhat active and mostly ignored. As in the of the rolling of eyes.
I never read John Dvorak anymore. His whole schtick is to say things that he knows will annoy people. How is the fact that people freely move from online community to online community any different from the modern job and housing marketplace? Yeesh.
Lots tree posts this week. I was quite interested in bonsai trees at one time and had a couple started. But I found out that I don’t have near the patience needed for projects that take years to show results.
Jan, nice comparison of the tree leafing from last year to this. When I was just a young girl my father told me that by the 1st of May all trees with rare exception would be in full leaf. It has stuck with me through the years and I always take note nearing the end of April. Lots of years it looks like they aren’t going to make it, but they seem to spring forth in the last few days. This year is the first I have ever see his prediction wrong.
Speaking of trees, scientists are creating worldwide database of tree DNA.
More on adjustment of climate figures. The tale of two thermometers.
Dean
I think what you see as annoying with Dvorak is his acting as a historian at a magazine full of technophiles. While the magazine gets caught up in the latest/greatest/coolest gadget, he provides some needed perspective.
I like technology; heck I’m surrounded by it. But I don’t consider myself a "gadget guy", nor do I search for the Next Big Thing. Most of the software I use is a few years old; some is relatively ancient – but it does what I need it to do.
As for the social network sites, I’m simply not impressed by what I’ve seen. I read your twitters, but note that you have to update it manually, and often it goes for 12, 14, 20 hours without you doing so. Meanwhile you’ll post several items which are far more interesting. Yet blogging is "old" and social networking sites like Twitter are "new". (BTW I notice that your twitter currently is 1 day old yet you have posted several articles, each of which I’ve read in the interim).
I’ve signed up for most of the major sites, but I notice that most of the people I know on them have comments that read "email me for a faster response," in their profiles. Heck I visit myspace and facebook so rarely that I always forget my passwords to them. Email and The Razor are still the best way to contact me (oh, and if you really want to talk to me, there’s this old-school gadget called a "telephone" which is by far the best way to contact me besides showing up at my door.) Honestly the social networking sites just seem to be a real pain in the butt to me – lots of time spent setting them up, and for what? No one will read them – at least mine (I’m the wrong age and wrong gender for that).
Again, I think Dvorak is just injecting some perspective on the issue.
I first began reading Dvorak on and off in either the late ’80s or early ’90s–call it something like 15 or 20 years. His view has always been to be a naysaying curmudgeon. It’s his schtick. For a while there he was writing a column for a major PC magazine and a major Mac magazine, and he was caught out by people who noted that he basically did nothing but dog Microsoft and PCs in general in his PC columns, and piss all over Macs and Apple in his Mac columns, and people noticed that he often said completely contradictory and inconsistent things, i.e. if he believed what he said in his Mac column he couldn’t possibly believe what he’d just said in his PC column, or vice versa. He basically acknowledged this to be true, and was unrepentant about it.
I pretty much stopped taking him seriously because it became obvious that he’d basically just made a career out of being irritating for the sake of being irritating.
[shrug] If you like him you like him. I just find him tiresome. ;-)
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