Dunno. Just a thought.
Emacs v. Vi
A genuine emacs vs. vi flame war erupted today on the New Mexico Linux Users Group mailing list. That’s such a standing joke that I never could have imagined it actually happening.
So far no references to Hitler.
Bugzilla
I haven’t been fixing many GNOME bugs lately, but when jrb files a bug, I feel honor bound to jump to it. (Well, if it’s something I can fix in five minutes, anyway. If it’d taken any longer I would have just shifted responsibility by cc’ing someone else on the big and absolving myself of any guilt.)
Stradivari and the Maunder Minimum
Rummaging through Henri Grissino-Mayer?s dendrochronology web site this evening I ran across the remarkable story of Antonio Stradivari and the Maunder Minimum.
Continue reading ‘Stradivari and the Maunder Minimum’ »
Road Cuts
There’s a great line in one of John McPhee’s geology books about what it’s like riding in a car with a geologist distracted by road cuts. The idea is that road cuts lay bare the rocks, the geologist is always looking at the side of the road rather than paying attention to driving, etc.
Opportunity seems to have landed in a road cut.
That Silly Grin
Pretty much every cyclist I passed today on my ride along the riverside trail had the same silly grin on their face, a cross between “Jeez this is fun” and “You’re as much of a fucking idiot as I am.” Something about the shared adventure….
The weather was snarky, spitting a mix of snow and rain that got progressively thicker the longer I was out. The weather had what the meteorolgists call “energy”, showers popping up here and there all morning all over the valley, spitting in my face at least half the time, until the trail was wet and my tires were hissing, sending up rooster tails. Usually I stay in on a day like today, but I’ve been cooped up with a stiff neck for, like, a week or more, and I’m finally feeling good, and I’ve spent all this money on high-tech clothes, damnit, I’m gonna ride!
Note to self: try the plastic bags around the socks trick next time. My feet about fell off, they got so cold after the water got through my shoes. But the rest of the high-tech clothing performed admirably. Must give bike a bath, though.
More RSS Help
With further assistance from Hallski, my RSS feed now should have a “read more” liink for those really long posts.
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Big Lies
I see on Footnotes that a new free software package, LiarLiar, has been released that claims to use “Voiice Stress Analysis” to detect lying. The blurb is carefully written to suggest that it’s something short of a lie detector – “Stress can be one indicator of whether or not a person is being truthful in the statements and communcations that he or she is making.” But the screenshots and the app’s name are clear – this is a lie detector. And it’s pretty clear that lie detectors in general just plain don’t work. It’s pseudoscience.
In particular, according to a review by the National Academy, there’s no good evidence that voice stress analysis works to detect deception. As with polygraphs, that means that the problem of false positives (people wrongully accused) and false negatives (people getting away with lying) will swamp any actual usefulness the tool can offer. To the extent that people actually believe what the software is telling them (and why else would you use it?) this clearly could do more harm than good.
Dork in Tights
There was a joke I read somewhere about the dorky appearance of a cyclist in tights varying with the square of the distance from the bike. Yeah, that seems about right. And the baseball bat doesn’t help.
Britain in the Freezer
I missed this paper (Nature, subscription required) when it came out last month. It’s pretty interesting. Ruth Curry, from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and her colleagues measured changes in salt and fresh water in the Atlantic:
The oceans are a global reservoir and redistribution agent for several important constituents of the Earth’s climate system, among them heat, fresh water and carbon dioxide. Whereas these constituents are actively exchanged with the atmosphere, salt is a component that is approximately conserved in the ocean. The distribution of salinity in the ocean is widely measured, and can therefore be used to diagnose rates of surface freshwater fluxes, freshwater transport and local ocean mixing – important components of climate dynamics. Here we present a comparison of salinities on a long transect (50 S to 60 N) through the western basins of the Atlantic Ocean between the 1950s and the 1990s. We find systematic freshening at both poleward ends contrasted with large increases of salinity pervading the upper water column at low latitudes. Our results extend a growing body of evidence indicating that shifts in the oceanic distribution of fresh and saline waters are occurring worldwide in ways that suggest links to global warming and possible changes in the hydrologic cycle of the Earth.
That’s a bit dense, but there’s a “holy shit” buried in there for those of you in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. Y’all are being warmed by a big-ass current flowing up the Atlantic, bringing warm water from the tropics. The “Wally Broecker hypothesis” is that global climate change caused by greenhouse gases could cause the conveyor belt to shut down. Bingo. European ice.
Geoffrey Lean, in The Independent, gives an altogether too breathless take on Curry’s work:
Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age within our lifetime by global warming, new research suggests.
“Likely” seems all too strong a word, if my understanding of the science is correct, but “strong possibility”, especially given Curry’s apparent empirical support for Broecker’s hypothesis, doesn’t seem far from the mark.