LOL Steve Milloy

Steve “JunkScience” Milloy, who in addition to his Faux News paycheck, receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from the tobacco industry to assure Faux viewers that second-hand smoke is a myth and cancer links to cigarettes are overblown, has issued an Ultimate Global Warming Challenge. $125,000 will be awarded to the first person to disprove the hypotheses that human greenhouse emissions are not significantly warming the Earth’s surface while cooling the stratosphere and disprove that the benefits of global warming will equal or outweigh the costs of fighting it by the year 2100, “when all global social, economic and environmental effects are considered.”

I’m sure this challenge has nothing to do with the hundreds of thousands of dollars Exxon/Mobil “donates” to Milloy’s non-profit think tanks, but let’s play anyway. This should be pretty easy to win, all we have to do is reference the 928 Peer-Reviewed Articles published in Scientific Journals showing that Global Warming is happening and we are causing it, and then top it off with the 2007 IPCC Report on Climate Change. That cool $125k is as good as ours. Right?

Not so fast, please see the fine print. Specifically #5 in the rules:

5. All entries must represent the original work of an entrant that has been produced specifically for the UGWC.

Hmmm… Okay. So we can’t go to the thousands upon thousands of scientists, Nobel laureates, private citizens and their mountains of evidence supporting Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory. We have to come up with something completely spontaneous and novel. Telling people they can’t stand upon the shoulders of giants isn’t good science, but let’s play. Everyday there’s a new story in the news about some new unanticipated effect of global warming, so we can make do. Right?

Hold on. Please see Rule #2:

2. Entrants acknowledge that the concepts and terms mentioned and referred to in the UGWC hypotheses are inherently and necessarily vague, and involve subjective judgment. JunkScience.com reserves the exclusive right to determine the meaning and application of such concepts and terms in order to facilitate the purpose of the contest.

So we’re dealing with very subjective criteria and a judging body (Steve Milloy), who will ultimately define that criteria supposedly at some later date, since he won’t set specifics now. Milloy is very busy accepting checks from Big Tobacco, Big Oil, and Faux News, so we can’t expect him to figure out those pesky details of his own unpublished hypotheses right away. That’s okay, because we all know Milloy is an honest and trustworthy soul who has no other agenda than defending us against those greedy environmentalists.

In fact, those treehugging econazis have so little evidence for their Global Warming hysteria that, as the JunkScience Website blares:

“The prize has gone unclaimed for 80 days!”

Knowing how much those Scientists love their money (It’s the only reason they go into the lucrative field of Academia.), the fact that not one has claimed the prize in three months proves the unsupportable character of their stance. Right?

Well… Not quite. See Rule #10:

10. The results of the UGWC will be announced on February 1, 2009.

So nobody’s won the prize in 80 days, but the prize won’t be awarded (if awarded at all, see Rule #4) for a whole ‘nother year. So by 02/01/2009, the JunkScience web page will be bragging:

“The prize has gone unclaimed for 540 days!”

Okay, so maybe Milloy isn’t the most trustworthy of people. Maybe he’s a bit of a snake oil salesman. That’s okay, because we’re going to take him on anyway! The contest website says:

“entries – we’ll post ‘em when we get ‘em!”

No entries? Well that’s about to change!

It took me awhile to figure out how to submit my entry. You see, Milloy’s site isn’t Section 508 Compliant, meaning it’s unnavigable to people with disabilities, lousy internet connections, and content filters (I fall into this last category when I’m at work).

So reviewing the submission instructions, we must first read the rules (check), then go the JunkScience gift shop and… um… buy something? Then we e-mail Milloy our entry in MSWord or PDF format and show him our receipt for our purchase.

To assure us all of this is 100 percent legitimate, Milloy will send us a free t-shirt making fun of us for believing in Anthropogenic Global Warming! Yay!!!

IN SUMMARY:

To have a chance to win Steve Milloy’s contest, you must disprove his twin, extremely nebulous hypotheses that people aren’t causing global warming and that global warming is a good thing. The money is coming out of Milloy’s pocket, he’s is the judge of all entries, and he doesn’t have to choose a winner.

You must reject the scientific virtue of building on your peers’ research for your submission, your submission may be manipulated and used for whatever propaganda Milloy sees fit, and you may not sue him.

When you enter the contest, you will be given a t-shirt letting everyone around you know what a dumbass you are, which raises the catch-22 of this contest: You’d have to be a puke-drooling nimrod stupider than a cup of dirt to enter the contest in the first place. In other words, stupider than Steve Milloy (and that’s lowwwwww), who will continue bragging about how there are still no winners for a contest that will not even be announcing winners until February 2009.

The Ultimate Global Warming Challenge is ultimately a great big steaming pile of horse-patootey, and Steve Milloy isn’t so much a corporate “tool,” but more of a “Useful Idiot.” I wonder what that makes his audience?

Anyways, because of our concern for the intellectual climate in addition to the ecological climate, we truth-seeking empirically-minded scientific-method-adhering folks will continue to publish in peer-review journals, work with the legitimate media, and lobby the government in open forums, places where irrelevant dink-brains like Mr. Junkman are nowhere to be found.

My cell phone has been waking me up an hour early all week because it thinks that Daylight Savings Time (DST) began last weekend. I can’t change the time because it’s managed by Cingular, so it’s the fault of their systems. Several local banks in Elizabeth City are broadcasting the incorrect time as well.

This is because the American Government adjusted the beginning and end dates for DST for 2007. Microsoft and Sun have both experienced a plethora of software glitches thanks to the adjusted dates, as have a multitude of other softwares across the world. Many programmers suffering from the change have whined about it (also see comments on this thread), but it happened anyways.

I have to agree with Daniel Read, when he says the programming problems are purely the fault of the programmers, and not a problem with DST changing. It took us a few minutes to adjust DST in the software we work on for the Coast Guard, without so much as a blip in our functionality.

We do have an ongoing issue with flights that occur at the change-over moment at the beginning of DST. This is because the hour from two to three in the morning doesn’t exist, which fouls up our flight time calculations, but this is the fault of the way our Ingres Database calculates times and out of our control. So we live with it.

As for all those software developers who were hurt by the change in Daylight Savings Time, and are trying to scapegoat it off on American politicians, I’m sorry that you are crappy programmers, but thank you for posting your rants. It lets the rest of us know who was too stupid to program an adjustable DST into their softwares! Ha! Ha! Thpppt!!! You suck! Fart on you!!!*

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*Note: This does not apply to programmers who are suffering problems, but blame themselves. Don’t worry about it. Stuff happens. You can’t program the whole freaking world into your software. One day you will. Not today. Get your patches out and best of luck!

Note Note: Happy Halloween! Is it possible that DST has been extended into November because of pressure from the Candy Lobby?

Three Domain Tree of Life

Yet another reason to feel small and insignificant, check out the Three Domain Tree of Life.

The White House may have eviscerated the CDC’s report on the health effects of Global Warming, but, we can read the portions of Redacted Testimony of CDC Director Julie L. Gerberding.

Ada Byron wrote the world’s first computer program for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, which would have calculated a series of Bernoulli Numbers. 100 years later, six young women programmed ENIAC, the first all-electronic programmable computer.

The bright side of peak oil (PDF)? Higher gas prices may combat obesity.

Plantoid Concept Robot

Interesting piece on a Plant Intelligence Lab that looks at the ways plants solve the problems of existing to produce solutions in robotics and telecommunications. The article never mentions it, but looking to nature for solutions in this manner is known as bionics.

I don’t know if this means I’m creative, or if I’m just lousy at math. See how you do on this test.

File this one under Guerilla Gardening, check out Moss Graffiti. Viva La Revolucion!!!

Being an optimist, but not an extreme optimist, is good for economic health.

Another reason to dread Hubble’s eventual demise, the telescope has recently photographed two galaxies dancing with one another:

heic0717

Food Science with Dr. Kiki Sanford

No wonder my mom says I’m cool.

Doctor Kirsten (“Kiki”) H. Sanford, Ph.D hosts this week in science radio show and podcast, authors The Bird’s Brain blog, co-created the Unicorn Museum website brilliantly parodying the Creation Museum, and stars in the totally ass-kicking anything-goes culinary ninja videoblog Food Science, where she blowtorches creme brulie, makes ice cream with liquid nitrogen, and uses infrared thermometers in a totally geektacular and scientiferifically entertaining way.

Oh yeah, and she’s also on twitter, which indicates a level of transhumanist wired-into-the-mainframe level of cybergeekdom that borders on the next step in human evolution. Okay, maybe twitter isn’t that far out there, but it does tip toe into dangerous post-human territory.

All this and a cirriculum vitae of dizzying awesomeness. It makes me look at my BA in English and get degree envy… degree inadequacy… I’m trying to work a Freudian/Academia metaphore/gag in here, but it’s–oh nevermind.

Dr. Kiki is a true honest-to-goodness exponent of science for the Information Age. Someone who deserves mad-props for really getting it, understanding how to use the wikinetionaries’ social networking and multimedia to communicate and promote science. Dr. Kiki harnesses the awesome power of the webbernets for good, unlike Steve Milloy, who uses it for evil, and Ira Flatow, who doesn’t use it at all.

Obviously, when the singularity comes to harvest all the brainiacs into nerd-rapture, Dr. Sanford will have front-row seating.