Sound Science

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More stuff I wrote elsewhere:

Houck’s disquisition does beg an important question, which is what policymakers should do in the face of genuine uncertainty. Greenhouse-induced climate change is a case in point. While there seems little scientific doubt that we’re changing our climate, the details of how that climate change will play out are hugely uncertain, as are the effects on the climate system of various greenhouse-gas mitigation strategies.

So what’s a policymaker to do? It’s a legitimately hard problem.

Bugzilla

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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.)

Road Cuts

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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

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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.

Big Lies

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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.