In the tradition of Matt Groening’s Life in Hell…

Abstraction Guy

“We really need a Factory Pattern for that Factory Pattern.”
Pros: Produces really really really loosely-coupled systems.
Cons: Output will never escape the layers of code.

Buzzword Bumbler

“This enterprise needs to move to a service-oriented paradigm in the cloudplex to encapsulate polydactylism!”
Pros: Impresses the heck out of people who don’t know better.
Cons: Someone will eventually call bullshit.
Note: For fun try putting two in the same room to watch them throw nonsense at one another.

Bleeding Edge

“Why don’t we just replace the company phonelist spreadsheet with a FOAF browser plugged into an object database?”
Pros: Thinks outside the box.
Cons: Must regularly be beaten back into the box.

“It is easy to lie with statistics; it is easier to lie without them.” – Frederick Mosteller

Global Cooling Trend Close-Up of Last Decade

Yesterday I posted this image of what climatologists are claiming is evidence of warming in the last decade, and explained how it actually shows a cooling trend; however, it has come to my attention that the methodology I used, while completely legitimate in a completely fallacious sense, did violate the scientific principle of Occam’s Razor, which states that the simplest explanation is the most likely.

The problem with this graph is that there are way too many dots on it, making it too complex. A much simpler graph, with fewer dots, would clear things up and show how the world has actually cooled in the last decade.

Global Cooling Trend Simplified Close-Up of Last Decade Simplified

See? Isn’t that cleaner? Easier to understand? Occam’s Razor baby. That’s right. This is what those Global Warming cooks don’t want you to see. How about we apply this principle to the whole last century of temperature data?

Global Cooling Trend over the Last Century

Warming Versus Cooling

Where’s your warming now Al Gore? Huh? As we can see from this graph, most of this century has been on a cooling trend. Take all those shaded parts that I’ve so helpfully shaded and all the non-shaded parts that I’ve so helpfully not shaded and put them on a statistical bar graph thing like you see in power point, and look what you get. You get this pic over here to the right, with the red cooling bar being much much bigger, like three times much much bigger than the warming bar.

How can anyone look at this concrete visual data and not see Global Warming’s a crock?

Here’s more on Dr. Marohasy’s global cooling assertions.

A recent article that appeared in The Australian, Climate facts to warm to, has the transcript of an important interview with Dr. Jennifer Marohasy a biologist, free market advocate, and Global Warming skeptic.

When asked “Is the Earth still warming?” Dr. Marohasy replied:

No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.

Surprising right? Why haven’t all those Global Warming Climatologists been talking about this? Especially, as Dr. Marohasy points out, they don’t deny it:

The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognizes that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued…

We can clearly see this plateau here:

In case you can’t see it, here’s a zoom in of the last ten years to the right. You can see the obvious cooling trend. Notice the way the red median line looks like it sorta wants to curve just a little bit there? If you use your imagination, you can clearly visualize this red line actually pointing in the opposite direction.

Go ahead. Just imagine that. Imagine this picture upside down. That’s what Dr. Marohasy is talking about. Why are Climatologists at the IPCC ignoring this important fact being imagined in the brains of climate skeptics? Why? Why is the IPCC and MSM refusing to cover this important visualization research?

And what about the NASA Aqua satellite, which has been collecting data since 2002 on Earth’s atmospheric temperatures, water cycles, and sea-ice levels? Dr. Marohasy brings up the satellite’s research several times, but NASA only publishes the data that supports their preconceived notions of global warming, like melting Arctic Ice and global temperatures. There’s a lot of data supporting this cooling trend that Dr. Marohasy has so much faith-based evidence for, and the fact that NASA doesn’t have it on their website, just further proves how real it is. NASA is trying our faith.

And what about the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri’s blatant acknowledgement about the recent temperature stall? Here’s some damning highlights from the article:

Last year was among the six warmest years since records began in the 1850s and the British Met Office said last week that 2008 will be the coolest year since 2000, partly because of a La Nina event that cuts water temperatures in the Pacific.

“We are in a minor La Nina period which shows a little cooling in the Pacific Ocean,” Delju told Reuters. “The decade from 1998 to 2007 is the warmest on record and the whole trend is still continuing.”

The record year for world temperatures was 1998, ahead of 2005, according to WMO data. Among recent signs of the effects of warming, Arctic sea ice shrank last year to a record low. (emphasis mine)

“2008 will be the coolest year since 2000,” got that? Let me italicize, underline, and follow it with some exclamation marks just in case you missed it: “2008 will be the coolest year since 2000!!!”

God Bless the FreeRepublic for notifying their fanatically conservative base of this important development, who then flooded the blogosphere with this news the MSM was so blatantly ignoring, even getting the story on the front page of Digg by fanatically clicking on that “Digg It” button over and over and over again. Thanks to their activism, all those thoughtless sheep who believe the empirical evidence of Global Warming might get a clue.

I also appreciated the way these same activists got an offensive political cartoon posted to Digg under “General Sciences:”

Science is way too liberal in the way it doesn’t push conservative talking points. This cartoon will go a long way towards demonstrating what conservatives can contribute to collegiate scientific discourse.

Also featured on the radio show hosting Dr. Marohasy, was someone arguing that low fat diets cause diabetes and heart disease. I always knew all those servings of fruit and vegetables was just a liberal ploy to effeminate American men.

I had a good chuckle while working on a Database Procedure today, when I spotted the following entry in the Revision History notes:

Sadly, after his chemical castration, Turing committed suicide by eating a cyanide-laced apple.

Yet again my religious faith in Anthropogenic Global Warming has been shaken to its core by the power of Conservative Science. Witness the headline appearing on the Drudge Report last week:

“Sun’s ‘disturbingly quiet’ cycle prompts fear of global COOLING…”

The article in question points out that there is nothing to show CO₂ variations have any effect on climate:

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada’s Carleton University, says that “CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.”

I simply cannot dispute this statement. In fact, the following graph based on the New Antarctic Ice Core Data starkly illustrates this complete and utter lack of correlation:

As anyone can plainly see, the line representing the Atmosphere’s CO₂ is bright red, while the line representing the Earth’s Temperature is a vivid blue. The difference is plain as black and white… or red and blue, obvious to anyone. Well… obvious to anyone who isn’t colorblind or otherwise blind, like maybe ideologically blind like all those silly tree-hugging hippies who can’t even read a graph they’re so busy hugging trees and stuff. I bet they even wanna marry a tree, they love them so much (That’s why they support gay marriage, it’s a gateway to vegisexuality).

All of this irrational focus on demonizing CO₂ has blinded the world to the real threat, sun spots:

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.

Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.

Unlike the imaginary correlation between CO₂ levels and the global mean temperature, there is a real-life actual honest-Abe indisputable correlation between sun-spot proclivities and temperature:

Sure the sunspot line is gold and temperature red, but notice how cool those two lines look. The sunspot and temperature lines have squiggly lines over them that make them dynamic, exciting, attention-grabbing. These are two lines that have a lot in common with each other, and bear no resemblance to that drab blue CO₂ line. Hmph. Nobody but silly, uneducated liberals could find meaning in a boringly gradated line like that.

And if that doesn’t convince you then check out these peer-reviewed journal articles (or just their summaries) on sunspots and temperature correlations here, here, and here. Makes all those tree-sex-having people seem pretty silly huh? I mean, even sillier than the vegetable sex makes them seem.

PS – Exxon, can I get my check now?

Sam Shepard, Apollo 14

dorancha has correctly pointed out, without implying that I personally was a communist, that the Smurfs are pretty much commies living in a Marxist Utopia. Some bloggers have accused me of socialism in my Tragedy of the Commons Explained with Smurfs article.

You know who the real commies are in the blogowebs? My critics, who give their content away for free!!! (Gasp! Scandal Alert!)

That’s right. I get paid to blog. Okay? If I was a socialist, I would be blogging for free, like all those faux free-market bloggers.

You think they really believe in the free market? Then why aren’t they getting paid to write about it? Because they’re closet Marxists, snuggling up with the Communist Manifesto before bed every night! Reading their blogs is like having cybersex with someone claiming to be a BBW asian girl who’s actually a hairy trucker wearing panty-hose!!!

So remember. Every time you use a Commie-based, Web 2.0 resource like Wikipedia, a blog that isn’t ideonexus, or the webbernets in general, you are taking money away from honest, hard-working American capitalists, like myself. That’s what I think everyone needs to know and understand here.

I am a 100% All-American Heterosexual Capitalist Blogger.

Has been posted at the Science Creative Quarterly.

Our Earth is filled with finite resources that we, as the Human Race, exploit for personal gain. Oil, Fish Stocks, Forests, Clean Air, and water are just a few of the resources that nobody “owns,” but everybody needs in order to survive. However, in our current system, nobody who is taking away these natural resources from the whole of us has to pay back into the natural system. Thus, there is a great incentive to consume all of the available resources before somebody else gets to them, Garrett Hardin called this nuance the “Tragedy of the Commons.”

Let’s take Smurfs as a natural resource. There are 100 smurfs living in smurf village and they do not reproduce. Every Saturday in the 1980s, entertainment producers broadcast a show documenting the life and times of Smurf Village, and made money from the advertising revenue brought in from millions of viewers watching the show. The cartoon’s producers use the smurfs in the manufacture of intellectual goods.

The intellectual use of the smurfs does nothing to detract from their smurfiness. Just as Thomas Jefferson said, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine.” Similarly, you can draw a smurf without taking anything away from anyone else’s use for the smurf.

Also every Saturday, Gargamel, the smurf’s antagonist, tries to catch the Smurfs so he can convert them into gold. Gargamel wants to use the smurfs in the manufacture of material goods.

The material use of the smurf requires killing the smurf to convert it into gold [1]. Once a smurf is killed, it’s no longer available for other uses. So every time Gargamel consumes a smurf, he hurts the profitability of the Cartoon’s Producers. If Gargamel consumes all of the smurfs, the Cartoonists will be out of business.

According to Market Logic, no one owns the smurfs. Just as no one owns the oil underground, the fish in the sea, or the rainforests. No one owns these things, that is, until they pick them up to sell to other people. According to Market Logic that is.

Market Logic also tells us that Incorporated Businesses have human rights and that an Invisible Hand will make everything work out the best for everybody in the end. So maybe Market Logic isn’t all that logical after all.

In reality, the fact that Smurfs don’t belong to anybody means they belong to everybody. Everyone has the right to enjoy the Smurfs, just like everyone has the right to enjoy nature.

As an individual, Gargamel has a right to pursue wealth; however, that right ends where it unfairly begins to trample on the rights of others to pursue wealth. Gargamel doesn’t have the right to run the Cartoon’s Producers out of business and ruin everybody else’s fun just so he can get rich and refurnish his castle and play sugar-daddy to the town harlots, but Market Logic says he can do exactly that!

So the Market Game isn’t very fair. Lucky for us, Market Law, unlike Natural Law, is a human social construct, which means we have the ability to change the rules of the game so that Gargamel does have to compensate everyone for taking our Smurfs.

So what is the market value for a smurf?

Gold is valued at about $800 an ounce presently. If we make the generous assumption that a single smurf can be converted into a pound of gold, then that’s $12,800 a smurf! No wonder Gargamel wants the Smurfs so badly. It only costs him the time it takes to grab and process a Smurf to make a cool $12.8 grand! Cha-ching!

Gargamel’s profit means there are only 99 Smurfs left in the world for the rest of us to enjoy. We still have to figure in the smurfs’ profitability to the cartoon’s producers:

Let’s say the show earns the producers $1 Million dollars a week in advertising revenues. That means, dividing the entertainment effort across 100 smurfs, each smurf is worth $10,000 a week to the cartoon’s producers.

So Gargamel’s $12.8k one-time profit will cost the Smurf Cartoon $120k over the next year, as the production must now work one percent harder to find enough Smurf antics to fill a show’s content, and the remaining 99 smurfs are all now worth $10,101 each to the producers [2].

And that’s just a small percentage of a Smurf’s actual value. How do you define the monetary value of the wealth of knowledge an Evolutionary Theorist, Biologist, or Anthropologist will surely gain from studying the Smurfs? How do you set a price on instilling a sense of wonder in a child with smurfs?

So the very existence of the smurfs has a definable market value and an intangible value. The failure of the market is that Gargamel doesn’t have to compensate the rest of us for our Smurfs. He can just take our smurfs for his own selfish ends.

So in order to prevent Gargamel from smashing all the Smurfs into gold, or Coal Plants from giving them neurological disorders by dumping mercury all over them, or farms from polluting their water with run off fertilizer we need to establish a market system that approximates the value of smurfs. We need Smurf Credits, which are like Carbon Credits, only cuter.

Market Logic needs to play by the rules of Real logic, which tells us that potable water, clean air, biodiversity, coal, oil, and countless other natural resources are things those of us living on spaceship Earth all require to survive. They are our birthright.

The Smurfs belong to everyone. They’re our smurfs. The Gargamels aren’t playing fair. They’re ripping us off, and we have to stand up for ourselves.

Everybody owns one of 6.5 billion shares of planet Earth. We need to exercise our rights and responsibilities as stockholders.

Or as the smurfs would say, “We need to smurfercise our smurfs and smurfibilities as stocksmurfers.”

Footnotes

1. How Gargamel intends to convert Smurfs into gold, an element, is unknown to us. We might assume he owns an Atomic Supercollider, which he intends to put the hapless Smurf in, constructed under his castle. It’s like Japanese Whalers claiming to gain scientific knowledge about living Blue Whales by killing them. Greed doesn’t have to make sense.

2. Because of the individual nature of smurfs, their values may vary widely. Jokey, Hefty, and Papa Smurf might be worth substantially more than, say, Brainy Smurf, who nobody likes but me.

Blogging has introduced me lots of wonderfully intelligent, thoughtful people with whom I both agree and disagree. Blogging has also opened me up to the apparent ravings of lunatics as well. Behold, a sample of what ended up in my inbox last month:

First the quakes from global warming, then my “unusually” correct quake predictions providing warning, and then the words of those guilty of these crimes against nature and humanity. I predict unimpeachable earthquakes from global warming because those extremist Republicans and Christian substitute “slide whistles” for “thermometers” and they set about plagiarizing each other for votes, money, organ harvesting, and mass murders. Overlapping with the week of 12/30/07 – 1/5/08, only the predicted choke point of Central America has moved far north to the US/Canada/Pacific region with potential for a major volcanic eruption. (These 3 choke points also correspond to the lobes of tectonics on Mars.) Proving global warming denial is just not an extremist river in Egypt, I present the Prophet Moses and a “red” Nile leaching hidden evil from the Pharaoh to modern Evil Inhofe, Cardinal Pell, and Dr. Dobson exporting evil to Greece

This is maybe 1/10^th of the full e-mail, and it doesn’t get anymore coherent anywhere else. I found fourteen more e-mails just like this in my spam folder a month later, all from Robert J Rhodes, aka. “The Ozonator.”

OzOnatORRRRRRR!!!

My first suspicion was that this was spam-mail language, randomly generated content designed to get around a spam filter; however, not only is this odd-john filling my spam folder with this bizarre, stream-of-consciousness stuff, but he’s blasting it in comments sections all over the web, like here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Strangest of all, there doesn’t seem to be any purpose to it. Everyone in the comments threads ignores it, and all the e-mails after the first automatically went to my spam-folder. “The Ozonator” is putting a fantastic amount of time and energy into composing nonsense and putting it online.

But then I suppose the same could be said of me. : )

OzOnatORRRRRRR!!!

One day I decided I was going to become an American Football fan. I went to a sportswear shop in the mall and picked out a Raiders cap. The Raiders were going to be my team. That afternoon, I arrived at my dishwashing job at the college cafeteria, proudly sporting my new interest.

“Oh hey!” Tim, a coworker who was bussed in from the local mental institution pointed at my forehead. “You like the Raiders!”

“Yep,” I nodded proudly. “That’s why I wear the hat.”

Tim was ecstatic, “You guys have Rocket Ishmael! He passed for suchandsuch many field downs… and kicked X many touch goals… and ran for Y many first yards… and intercepted N many tackles!” Tim was rattling off copious amounts of sports facts at me in a barrage of information overload.

“Wow. I did not know that. Really?” I struggled to process this sudden deluge of data, “That’s cool. Uh-huh. Interesting. You don’t say.”

Tim stopped suddenly, frowning curiously at me, “You don’t really know anything about football, do you?”

“Ummm…” I thought for a moment. “Those Raiders have really cool helmets, huh?”

“I’ll give you a dollar for your hat.”

Sold, and thus my American Football interest was quickly extinguished.

It blows my mind to sit in a bar and listen to the obscure mountains of data sports fans can so casually toss about to one another. These are people who know all major players for numerous teams going back 30 years or more and can expound on statistical analyses of those players’ capabilities that leave my head spinning.

Two football fans arguing over who was the better quarterback, John Amway or Flash Gordon, sound suspiciously like two nerds arguing which was cooler, Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. Football fans geek out just like anybody else, it’s just their brand of geekery is more socially acceptable.

Why is that? Why do some athletes make more than 50 times the annual salary of the United States President? Why the urge to watch people run, jump, throw, and grapple in teams/tribes with “totemic” names like Bears, Eagles, Colts, Panthers, and the like? In his essay, Monday-Night Hunters, Carl Sagan argues that it’s simply in our genes as hunter-gatherers, and it’s easy to understand why a species such as ours, which only began gave up the hunt a few thousand years ago for an agrarian lifestyle would still have brains wired to this vicarious thrill.

But the operative word here is vicarious. This sound and fury signifying nothing constitutes an incredible expenditure of time and resources. Imagine if Sports fans devoted their energies to Science the way they devote themselves to their NFL Team:

Lou: I’m tellin’ yah Benny, Feynman was a better Physicist than Oppenheimer.

Benny: You kiddin’ me Lou? Your thinkin’ that clown was a better Physicist than Robert “father of the atomic bomb” Oppenheimer? Now I know your loosing it.

Lou: That Commie Oppenheimer couldn’t hold a candle to Feynman–

Benny: ‘scuse me, but dat’s an ad hominem logical fallacy their Lou.

Lou: Feynman made major contribution to Quantum electrodynamics, the physics of superfluidity, and his Feynman diagrams were fundamental to String T’eory!

Benny: Ah bumpkiss to yah String T’eory. You just wait till that new super-collider comes online and blows apart all that String T’eory nonsense.

I’m telling you, if we can find some way to get the world’s legion sports fans to refocus their incredible powers of concentration and data-crunching cognitive prowess, we could solve world hunger, cure cancer, and be driving hybrids to the #@$%ing Moon in less than 10 years.

Still, I plan to watch the Superbowl Sunday Night for my Vicarious-Hunter-Fix.

Go Raiders!