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Value-addition by subtraction
"Reminiscent of Briffa and his magic Yamal tree, GHCN used one temperature sensor location to represent an entire continent. Let that sink in. One thermometer in one location is what GHCN has used to report the temperature history of the entire continent of Antarctica. Now I'm going to ask you to go out on a limb, and guess whether this station was on the high or low-end of temperature change."
New Device Desirable, Old Device Undesirable
The Onion skewers the obsession with technological toys. Very amusing (and yet somehow disturbingly too accurate).
GHCN – The Global Analysis
Wow. Apparently a blogger's been doing his own analysis of the global thermometer-based temperature dataset... and has discovered that in recent years, they've been using more thermometers in warmer places, and fewer thermometers in colder places. And, shockingly, their data then shows warmer temperatures! An excellent, in-depth investigation.
I’m gobsmacked. So is Sen. McCain. Heck, so is Sen. Durbin.
This is ridiculous. If a Democratic senator doesn't know what's in the health care bill, how can anyone know? "Durbin explained that during a Democratic caucus, Reid and the small group of senators involved in crafting the bill turned to their fellow Democrats and “basically stood and said, ‘We are sorry, we can’t tell you in detail what was involved.’”"
Palin Talks About Captain Kirk in His Underwear
It's William Shatner. And Sarah Palin. On the Tonight Show. Quoting each other's books, beatnik coffee shop style. Why WOULDN'T you watch this?
Dems squabbling over raising the debt limit
"The citizens of the US constitute a bipartisan panel every two years; it’s called Congress. Those elected officials exist to make decisions on spending and taxation. Over the last few decades, they’ve made a lot of really, really bad decisions, and we’re seeing the entirely predictable results of them in ballooning deficits and spending that rivals World War II in terms of the burden on GDP. These decisions to spend money in a manner that makes drunken sailors look like Ebenezer Scrooge has put this nation into a debt crisis of historical proportions, and into a position that leaves us at the mercy of foreign potentates in a way that would enrage and embarrass our founders."
The rich (bureaucrats) keep getting richer
"When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000. Got that? Seventeen hundred employees at DoT make $170,000 per year. Eighteen months ago, there was one."
My friend Leon's Open letter to ABC
Apparently ABC chopped several scenes out of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" so they could show more commercials. Pathetic.
Did Christianity Cause the Crash?
A well-written article looking at the "prosperity gospel" and its spread, especially among lower-income groups. Frankly, it's incredibly disturbing to read about what's being preached by these pastors.
China’s Family Planning Goes Awry
Excellent look at how the the "One Child Policy" has lead to the dangerous combination of an aging population and male/female imbalance.
Does Obama have it in for Britain?
One of the stupidest things Obama has done so far has been to ignore and disrespect our alliance with Britain.
Veteran flagpole controversy ends precisely as expected.
"With the homeowners’ association caving. They apparently finally woke up to the fact that when asked to choose between a Medal of Honor winner and, well, a homeowners’ association, the American people won’t really choose to be sympathetic to the Medal of Honor winner. That would be like choosing whether you prefer to have a slice of apple pie, or to have your hometown destroyed via saturation bombing: it’s technically correct that there’s a choice there, too. It’s just that it’s a no-brainer. Literally." And while you're at it, go read the description of the actions that won him the Medal of Honor.
The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero
Excellent analysis of the data from Australian weather stations, showing how the raw data was adjusted in a way that is very suspicious: "What on earth justifies that adjustment? How can they do that? We have five different records covering Darwin from 1941 on. They all agree almost exactly. Why adjust them at all? They’ve just added a huge artificial totally imaginary trend to the last half of the raw data! Now it looks like the IPCC diagram in Figure 1, all right … but a six degree per century trend? And in the shape of a regular stepped pyramid climbing to heaven? What’s up with that? ... The blatantly bogus GHCN adjustment for this one station does NOT mean that the earth is not warming. It also does NOT mean that the three records (CRU, GISS, and GHCN) are generally wrong either. This may be an isolated incident, we don’t know. But every time the data gets revised and homogenized, the trends keep increasing. Now GISS does their own adjustments. However, as they keep telling us, they get the same answer as GHCN gets … which makes their numbers suspicious as well."
Code Humor Challenge
An older post, but still very amusing. A couple of samples: "One of my previous employers had, for historical reasons, the requirement that all class names be prefixed with "Mc" (McUser, McCheckbox, etc.). I created the class McNugget, complete with methods like McNugget.dip(McNugget.BBQ_SAUCE). Unfortunately, I was unable to incorporate this into the telecommunications billing software the company was writing. It did, however, stay in the version control system long after I left the company. ... I worked on some software for a travel agency once with classes like Booking and Hotel and Resort. I did my best to find an algorithmic requirement to get the last object from a list of resorts, but I never could incorporate a getLastResort() or isLastResort() method. "
Some Historical Perspective
A fascinating sequence of graphs that show the temperature in the same Greenland location, but with the scale zoomed out farther each graph to show more time. The "hockey stick" looks scary at first... until you see it in comparison to 10,000 years ago. Another reason to doubt the "sky is falling" cries we hear every day.
Alternate Names for the Fiesta Bowl
Frank J seems to have some issues with the BCS bowl system: "So non-BCS teams Boise State and TCU fought so hard this season to be able to prove themselves by playing against a top-ranked BCS team on a national stage, both ending their regular seasons undefeated, and now they get to play… each other… just like last year in their consolation-prize bowl."
EPA: Greenhouse gases are harmful
One way or another, the left is determined to regulate everything they can... and this is just groundwork for them to push more government control, either through Cap & Trade, or EPA regulations.
Understanding Climategate's Hidden Decline
An EXCELLENT, in-depth analysis of how the CRU has played tricks with various temperature datasets in an effort to show how bad global warming is.
There are no rights to grant
Dead on: "The real boneheaded, but typical liberal thinking Frank displays is that the Constitution grants rights. It does not. In America, the state apparatus grants no rights at all to the people because the government has no rights to grant. All rights reside in the people to begin with. The American founders understood that human rights are simply a fact of human existence; human beings are "endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights," as the Declaration of Independence puts it." Read it all.
Washington Post quietly reveals Obama's incompetence in developing Afghan plan
Pathetic. Indecision is worse than a bad decision.
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