Another bowling ball suggestion:
I suggest adding a garden sprinkler system for further hilarity.
(Obviously taking due care to protect loudspeaker, light and webcam in
the process)
No doubt the loudspeaker, light and webcam will have to be of the all-weather variety, so this shouldn’t be a problem.
A reader suggests that continuing to replace the bowling balls as they are stolen would be wrong: “Noooo “they” will win then. John, there’s principle at stake here!”
This reader’s alternative suggestion:
1. Point webcam and light at ‘crimescene’
2. Place loudspeaker near ‘crimescene’.
3. Rig loud speaker and light to trigger when bowling ball is lifted from post.
4. Post hilarious pictures of thief having the living-be-jesuses scared out of him on your Blog site.
5. We laugh ourselves hoarse and you hopefully keep your bowling balls in future.
6. Thief is scarred for life and develops a Pavlovian fear-response whenever he thinks of stealing something in future. He gives up his now impossible life of crime and goes to college were he excels in medicine. He later develops a cure for cancer and in his Nobel prize acceptance speech credits YOU with changing his life.
I think we’re on to something here. Rube Goldberg in the service of humanity.
Another promising suggestion to deal with the neighborhood epidemic of bowling ball theft:
Paint your name on the ball (possibly on the back
so it isn’t visible), and a request to return it if lost.
Gavin Schmidt on RealClimate gives his take on Michael Crichton’s new anti-global warming novel. Schmidt’s discussion reads like a fundamental primer on the subject. My favorite bit:
The characters visit Punta Arenas (at the tip of South America), where (very pleasingly to my host institution) they have the GISTEMP station record posted on the wall which shows a long-term cooling trend (although slight warming since the 1970?s). “There?s your global warming” one of the good guys declares. I have to disagree. Global warming is defined by the global mean surface temperature. It does not imply that the whole globe is warming uniformly (which of course it isn?t). (But that doesn?t stop one character later on (p381) declaring that “..it?s effect is presumably the same everywhere in the world. That?s why it?s called global warming”). Had the characters visited the nearby station of Santa Barbara Aeropuerto, the poster on the wall would have shown a positive trend. Would that have been proof of global warming? No. Only by amalgamating all of the records we have (after correcting for known problems, such as discussed below) can we have an idea what the regional, hemispheric or global means are doing. That is what is meant by global warming.
David Appell has been trying to get to the bottom of the discrepancy between Naomi Oreskes’ claim in her Science paper that she had reviewed 928 papers in the ISI database with the keyword “climate change” and Benny Peiser’s claim that there are more than 11,000 such papers in ISI’s “Web of Science.”
Appell is making progress.
Readers offered several suggestions for dealing with our bowling ball problem:
On the “scientization,” as Daniel Sarewitz calls it, of a political/policy debate:
Since 1988, Sandia has spent some $10 million of taxpayer money on study after study of its Mixed Waste Landfill, an unlined dump on the southern side of Kirtland Air Force Base. For more than three decades, it was filled with all manner of hazardous and radioactive waste.
Each step of the way, Sandia officials have said the evidence was sufficient to support their argument that the landfill does not pose a risk and that the waste can safely be left where it is.
Each step of the way, activists have disagreed, saying the landfill could contaminate the aquifer and needs to be excavated.
And each step of the way, additional studies have failed to settle the issue, and instead become new subjects of contention.
More on Latenberg’s Washington Post letter from Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt.
Frank Lautenberg, in a letter in today’s Washington Post, takes Post writer Juliet Eilperin to task for the “he said-she said” treatment of the Stott et al. paper on European heat and climate change.
For a critical look at Stott’s work, Eilperin turned to noted climate expert Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Wrote Lautenberg:
The last half of the article is squandered on the views of Myron Ebell, an economist — not a climate scientist — whose “studies” at the American Enterprise Institute are funded by Exxon Mobil. The article fails to mention this shameless conflict of interest.
(Hat tip to Scott.)
The response from climate change contrarians to last week’s Science paper by Naomi Oreskes on climate change science has been instruction.
Oreskes, you may recall, reviewed all 928 papers in the ISI database with keyword “climate change,” looking for ones that disagreed with the general consensus on anthropogenic climate change. She found nary a one.
There has been a great deal of sputtering from the climate change skeptics, but nothing substantive in the way of a refutation. As Chris Mooney points out, “If Oreskes is wrong, refuting her should be a piece of cake. Simple: Do your own ISI search, and find an article that explicitly disagrees with the consensus position as Oreskes describes it.”
No one seems to have done that.
CNSNews has some lengthy quotations from a number of skeptics, including the cranky and beloved Benny Peiser. Peiser, on his email list (sorry, not on line) claims to have done his own ISI search and the terms “climate change” and found lots more than 928 papers, suggesting that Oreskes somehow unfairly limited the scope of the seach. I don’t have access to ISI, so I can’t check out who’s right. But either way, he has not come up with the paper Mooney is asking for, the one that contests the consensus.