The unravelling begins

That didn't take long.

Steve McIntyre has realised there's a serious issue overlooked in Anthony Watts' "paper", and is scolding himself for doing a rushed look at the statistics as a favour for Watts (who was, quite openly, only motivated out of spite for Muller getting PR for his own conclusions.)

Eli Rabett has a post about the work too, with contributions from others, and the future ain't looking so bright for Mr Watts.

I liked Rabett's general take on this:

The take home, of course, beyond confirmation bias, is the same one that Eli discovered a long time ago when Tony, Monckton, Steve and the rest of the crew were all agog at the stamp collection of early CO2 measurements assembled by Ernst Beck

What amateurs lack as a group is perspective, an understanding of how everything fits together and a sense of proportion. Graduate training is designed to pass lore from advisors to students. You learn much about things that didn't work and therefore were never published [hey Prof. I have a great idea!...Well actually son, we did that back in 06 and wasted two years on it], whose papers to trust, and which to be suspicious of [Hey Prof. here's a great new paper!... Son, don't trust that clown.] In short the kind of local knowledge that allows one to cut through the published literature thicket.

But this lack makes amateurs prone to get caught in the traps that entangled the professionals' grandfathers, and it can be difficult to disabuse them of their discoveries. Especially problematical are those who want science to validate preconceived political notions, and those willing to believe they are Einstein and the professionals are fools. Put these two types together and you get a witches brew of ignorance and attitude.

Unfortunately climate science is as sugar to flies for those types. 

We shall see how this unfolds.

Will it affect climate fake skeptics if Watts comes out with egg on his face?  Nope.  All that matters for them is the first press release claiming victory.

Children: do not trust that candy bar you found in the boarding gate waiting area

Man Accused of Smuggling Meth Disguised as Candy Bars - ktla.com

LOS ANGELES -- A Long Beach man is charged with attempting to smuggle more than four pounds of methamphetamine out of the U.S. in packages designed to resemble a well-known brand of candy bar....

Harris was was searched after baggage inspectors became suspicious of what appeared to be a large box of candy bars inside his checked luggage.

Upon closer inspection, CBP officers discovered the 45 individually wrapped, full-sized “candy bars” which contained a white substance that was subsequently determined to be methamphetamine.

According to the criminal complaint, each bar “was coated in a chocolate-like substance to make the contents of the package appear to be a real candy bar.”

Good to know

BBC News - Apollo Moon flags still standing, images show

Not that I care .....

....but this just sounds greedy, doesn't it?:

Peter Jackson's The Hobbit to be extended to three films | Film | guardian.co.uk

Maybe it will cause people to cast a cynical eye towards Jackson himself, who seems a nice enough fellow, but I can't see how he rates as a director.

Fake meat news

Beyond Meat: Fake chicken that tastes so real it will freak you out. - Slate Magazine

The only thing is, you can't get this fake chicken yet.

As it happens, on the weekend, I make spaghetti bolognese using Quorn (which gets a mention in the article) in its "minced meat" version.   The result was not bad, and certainly it looks exactly like the "real" dish.  The Quorn itself is, however, soft on the tooth and feels less "weighty"  than meet, as well as not really having much flavour of itself.   But, following a Quorn recipe using quite a bit of vegetables (small diced carrot, celery and mushroom) the result was still pretty pleasing.

In looking at the packet, I think I saw that the Quorn was about 11grams of protein per 100 grams.  That doesn't sound much, but then again I had to go find out how much protein you get in a piece of steak.   Looking at this site, it appears to be 20 gram per 100 grams, which is a bit less than I would have guessed.   I see that chicken breast is actually a bit higher in protein than steak.  I wouldn't have guessed that either.

Quorn sure isn't cheap ($6 for the 300 gram bag at Coles), but as a substitute just when it feels like you've been eating too much meat lately, it's not bad.

For future reference

I haven't read this paper yet, but the topic looks interesting:

Is the individuality interpretation of quantum theory wrong ?

Watts over the top

I have this strong suspicion that this is not going to end well for the chronically immature Anthony Watts.  (I mean, who else would speculate that his critics just aren't patriotic enough, or that a passing reference to his mother - dead as it turned out - was beyond the pale.)

His latest spat in his traumatic falling out with Richard Muller, whose temperature record re-appraisal  project Watts said he would trust, until, of course, it basically reaffirmed the existing temperature records, has been on display over the weekend.

Muller got a piece in the NYT on Sunday, confirming that his latest analysis still says the temperature record is OK; when the rumours about this column were floating around late last week, Watts went all "drama queen" by announcing a controversial something of international significance would be announced on Sunday.

The announcement turned out to be that he and a bunch of AGW skeptic mates had an un-reviewed paper that showed the US temperature record did suffer from siting problems after all.    Yay Anthony!  All those fans who spent their holidays taking photos of weather stations for you instead of doing something actually enjoyable with their family will feel vindicated after all.

But wait - even taking it at its best - doesn't it still show US warming at the pretty much the same rate as the satellite record shows globally?  

Not only that, David Appel writes that the satellite record for the US alone is in fact quite a bit higher than what Watts now thinks the surface temperature record indicates, yet weren't skeptics always putting their faith in the satellite record as being the one which was likely to be more reliable?  And John Christy (who works on the satellite record) is a co-author of this new (unreviewed) Watts work.   Explain yourself, Sir.*  AGW skepticism has always been a hydra-headed opportunistic thing against which science has been playing a 10 year game of Wack-a-Mole,  but it seems it's getting particularly schizophrenic (in the colloquial sense) lately.

Here's the Appel quote:

 First of all, it's exactly the kind of paper that most needs peer review: based on a lot of judgements and classifications and nitty gritty details that only siting wonks can evaluate. (So does a paper like BEST's -- but their conclusion is nothing surprising.)

And it just doesn't compete with the narrative -- record US heat, the US drought, BEST -- that is quickly sweeping by. It smells a little desperate. If it withstands peer review, then it's worth a good look. Until then it looks like PR, which is, of course, exactly how it's being delivered.

(Can I just say that delivering science as PR, or PR as science, is off-putting and worrisome, whether it comes from private groups or professional journals like Nature.)

Then there are the inconvenient facts that

(1) USA48 is 1.6% of the Earth's surface area, and

(2) the trend of the USA48 lower troposphere, as measured by satellites as calculated by UAH, is 0.23 ± 0.08 °C from 1979 to present (95% confidence limit, no correction for autocorrelation). Satellite measurements almost completely avoid the urban heat island problem.

Stoat is similarly unimpressed, and his take on the self aggrandising Muller is worth reading too.

The other fascinating thing about this is that it appears that Steve McIntyre, another co-author of the new paper, appears to have had no idea that Watts was putting out a press release about the unreviewed paper.  I wonder if he has a problem with that.

Update:     I like Ben's take on this:

 Anthony’s been hiding behind a fence, nursing his snowball-with-a-stone-in-it waiting for Muller to walk past. Hell hath no fury like a betrayed denialist.

Update 2:  I see that in the paper itself, it's claimed that the satellite temperatures can be expected to be higher than the surface temperature, and that's why the Watts claimed trend is right.  Yet, I have read at least one comment around the place that this only applied to the tropics.  So let's wait and see what comes of this.

Making it "relevant"

Gary Younge had a column in The Guardian last week noting the rise of specifically "gay-friendly" high schools in the US.  Such schooling is not exactly welcomed by conservatives, but some gay advocates think it's a bad idea too, for basically letting normal schools off the hook for not dealing with bullying more effectively. 

I hadn't heard things had gone quite this far before:

  "Kids are definitely coming out earlier, and middle school is definitely the worst time for bullying, whether you're straight or gay," says Savin-Williams. There are several summer camps around the country, that cater to transgender children as young as eight.

But the paragraph I found most ready for parody was this:

....Chad Weiden, who led efforts to set up a gay-friendly school in Chicago, says that part of the skill in teaching is making sometimes abstract issues accessible to students. "It's all about making it relevant to kids. If you're doing probability in math, you could illustrate it by looking at GLBT suicides or stop-and-frisk or unemployment. A good curriculum would also deal with issues of sexual orientation when covering things like evolution, biodiversity, anthropology, history and literature. That should be true of any school, not just one that considers itself gay-friendly."

Gosh.  What a cheery class Chad must run.

South for Cameron

The New York Times notes that James Cameron has bought a large farm in New Zealand and plans on living there for half of every year.  

I hope he likes sauvignon blanc.

The locals are not all convinced this is a good thing:

Some of Mr. Cameron’s new neighbors seem to have an open mind. But most worry about his ability to inhabit this paradise without becoming the kind of disrupter he pilloried in “Avatar.” Will the millions he plunked down for the property increase everyone’s taxes? What about continued access to Lake Pounui for the eel researchers at Victoria University of Wellington? Mr. Cameron has already closed a little hall on his land that had been used for wedding receptions, thus severing the public from what locals now refer to as “his lake.” 

There is also the question of what Mr. Cameron farms. To obtain governmental approval to buy the land, he had to agree to keep at least part of it as a working farm. But the current operation — built mostly around cows — poses a problem for Mr. Cameron, who said his wife, Suzy Amis, had pushed him and their children toward a plant-based diet. “So we’re looking for something more crop based,” Mr. Cameron explained. “I don’t want to be a hypocrite.”

Yes, the famously shouty and aggressive on set Mr Cameron appears to be a vegetarian.  Huh.

Samsung un-sung

I guess I've been vaguely aware of how well Samsung has been doing, but I didn't really it was to this extent:

Samsung, the world's largest technology company by revenue, reported another record-high quarterly profit as customers flocked to Galaxy smartphones, helping it outdo rivals at a challenging time for the global tech industry.

Samsung Electronics Co. said Friday its net profit swelled to 5.2 trillion won ($4.5 billion) in the April-June quarter, a 48 percent jump from a year earlier.

The earnings were lower than a median forecast of 5.6 trillion won in a poll of seven analysts by Yonhap Infomax. But Samsung shares jumped 5.2 percent to close at one-month high in Seoul as investors expect its earnings to continue growing strongly.

Samsung, the world's largest maker of mobile phones, televisions and memory chips, benefited from runaway demand for its Android-powered smartphones as rivals including Apple Inc. were yet to release new models.

Clearly, this is a company doing something right, yet we don't seem to hear much about how it built its success.  Not like Apple, with its hero worship of Jobs.

Not just me

I watched Source Code on DVD tonight.  This one, in the ongoing series "movies-from-the-last-decade-which-I-am-catching-up-with-now-that-the-kids-are-older", is only from last year in fact, but it was surprisingly terrific.  Well, OK,maybe not terrific; but good, solid, entertaining science fiction with vague plausibility and some emotional depth and pleasing direction.

It's the second film by Duncan Jones, and I haven't even seen Moon yet, even though it received very high praise.

I only had a vague recollection of Source Code coming out last year, yet I see now it did get very good reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.  So, it's not just me who found it to be high quality.

I do wish there was an attempt to explain what happened to guy whose body Jake kept turning up in, though.  

So, this is 21st century life....

When I was 10, and reading about and watching the Apollo program with much enthusiasm, I imagined headlines around now to be something like this:

Lunar Tourist Discovers Alien Artefact

Instead, what do I get this morning?:

Gay Dad and Obese Mum in Battle Over Kids

I want to do this...

At Space Center, a Launch Pad Tour - NYTimes.com

 For the first time in the 50-year history of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, visitors can now venture almost a quarter-mile inside the security fence and have a close look at Launch Pad 39-A, the starting point for most of the space shuttle flights and all six Apollo missions that landed on the moon.

“Visitors will travel the same route as astronauts to the launch pad,” said Bill Moore, the chief operating officer of Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, in a statement.

The “KSC Up-Close: Launch Pad Tour” will include visits to structures that supported and protected the space shuttle, water tanks that fed a noise suppression system, and the flame trench that deflected fire and smoke from the engines.

Let's not politicise this now...

I can't stand the way gun loving Republicans bemoan how it is "political grandstanding" that is happening "too soon" after a shooting tragedy when people question gun laws and suggest practical changes to help reduce mass shooting.  As noted at Huffington Post:

It's a trick. When people tell you that you shouldn't politicize a tragedy like the shooting in Aurora, Colorado they are unwittingly helping to spread NRA propaganda. After a tragedy like that, it is the most logical thing in the world to ask what went wrong and how we can fix it. When you ask that question, the obvious answer is our gun laws. It's awfully hard to stab 70 people and kill 12 of them in a short period of time like that. It's very easy to murder those same people if you have an AR-15 assault rifle, a shotgun and two glocks.

This is the obvious conclusion that the NRA desperately wants you to avoid. So, they do a brilliant trick where they tell you that you are not allowed to talk about the problem in the immediate aftermath of the violence and death their guns caused -- that would be politicizing the tragedy.

 He calls it "a trick", but I think people can increasingly see that it is a very, very transparent one.

The military gay wedding that wasn't

As First Things notes, the recent "military wedding" of a US Air Force guy with another guy attracted a lot of news attention; only thing is, it was a civil union, and isn't the definition of "wedding" the start of a marriage?

I read about the "same sex wedding" (its headline) in a long article at Slate.   Sure, within the body of the article they note it was a civil union ceremony, but it takes a while to get to the point.

What's more interesting about the Slate article is the detail of the background of these guys.  Both come from conservative religious backgrounds; both have been married (to women, one of them twice) and have 2 children.   They fell in love via meeting at church, while was of them was still married; the discovery of the relationship (I don't think it is clear whether it was physical at that stage) sounds like it was pretty traumatic for his wife.   

But, of course, the general tenor of the article is that everything is fine and wonderful now because two guy have finally found their love match.

This type of treatment of this type of story shows the sort of bias that the media treats sexuality with these days; although to be honest, many people go along with it.

Of course, what I mean is that if this were a heterosexual story, would the media see much there to celebrate?   People falling out of love with their wives, particularly while they have children, and falling in love with someone else is rightly seen as kind of sad, no matter how happy the new couple are.   And given statistics of divorce and remarriage, most cool headed people know that no matter how brightly the new relationship seems to be burning at the start, there is a very good chance it will not last.  

But finding a dude who you really like and gets you going in bed is supposed to change this equation entirely?   Yes indeed.  The national media will give you lots and lots and lots of attention, because imitation marriage by same sex couples are just meant to be so heartwarming. 

Update:  having a look at the slide show of the "wedding" at the Slate site, I have a modest request:  can gay couples do us marriage conservatives* a favour and stop appropriating heterosexual marriage imagery (down to slow dances on the reception floor, what looks like jokes about a garter on a leg, etc) for their wedding/commitment ceremonies/whatever?      

Do it in the nude maybe; or put the ring on the tubular organ that wasn't available for the purpose at the last wedding; I really don't care.   But do something original for God's sake to show that what you've come up with is an original idea that is new to the entire human race.

* by which I mean:  those who think a cultural and religious phenomena that everyone understood and accepted was heterosexual and about reproductive potential for the last 10,000 years shouldn't be changed on the whim of modern sexual identity politics of the last 20 years.  

A handy headline

Gorillas filmed performing amazing feat of intellectual ability

Please feel free to use this to make your own jokes of the "So, I see the [insert political party/profession/other class of person] conference is getting some publicity this year" variety.

Smith on the Murdoch game

Rupert Murdoch's tolerance of climate change skepticism in his media outlets, when he claims to be convinced it is a legitimate thing to be concerned about, has long been a puzzle. 

I think Dick Smith gets it right:

In his letter, Mr Smith, who is a vocal supporter of the need to act on climate change, said it was in News's commercial interests to oppose the idea that people were responsible for the rise in global temperatures.

''And I'm on to you. When friends ask me why your organisation runs such opposing views on climate change - from Fox News's claims that it's all bunkum to The Australian newspaper occasionally claiming it's accepted science - I am able to say: 'It's simple'.

''It's all about making more money. They have worked out they will get more advertising and make more money on Fox News if climate change is debunked using sensationalism while they are likely to get greater circulation and more advertising dollars if The Australian shows a different view, so staff are directed accordingly.''

Really, the only alternative explanation is that Murdoch has stopped believing its true, but thinks there is some value in not "coming out" with his change of heart.

Update:   I should say that Dick may be getting it wrong when he says "staff are directed accordingly", as Bruce Guthrie has suggested that Murdoch operates in a more subtle way.   It may just be that he makes it known that he feels "all sides of the debate should be covered", but as he never objects to Fox News one sided take on the matter, they understand that to have his approval.

US and guns, revisited

Well, I didn't know that.  It appears that there is good evidence that gun ownership (well, at least in the sense of the number of households with guns) in the US has actually been declining in line with the reduction in the homicide and violent crime rate since the early 1990's.

In the comments thread that follows that post, some people point out that gun sales are such that this ownership survey must be wrong.  Others then give the potential explanation:

A growing number of homes have NO guns, while an increasingly smaller number have more and more and more.

Given the paranoid stylings of many on the Tea Party side of the nutty Right in the US at the moment, I suspect this is probably right.

Theology talk

While stumbling around the net recently, I found the blog of an Australian Catholic theology lecturer Ben Myers called Faith and Theology.  It seems to be active, moderate, and pretty good.  His links have led me to some interesting sites as well, including a group blog by a bunch of American theological academics called Catholic Moral Theology.

I don't know why I haven't really searched for moderate theology blogs before, but there you go.

Guns and movies

There has some interesting commentary at the New Yorker about the cinema shooting in Colorado last Friday.   Anthony Lane made the point that movies don't make people kill; but at the same time, does suggest that if ever there was a movie franchise that suffered from fanboy zeal that was kinda disturbing, it was this one:

 The fuss surrounding this movie did, and does, have something fevered and intemperate about it, something out of proportion to its nature; it is, after all, just a motion picture. Rottentomatoes.com suspended its user comments, this week, ahead of the film’s release, because the pitch of resentment, directed at critics who had dared to find the movie less than wonderful, had tipped into fury; Marshall Fine, of Hollywood and Fine, was told by readers that he should “die in a fire” or be beaten into a coma with a rubber hose. Such aggression was issuing, it should be noted, from those who, by definition, could not yet have seen the film.

David Denby then has a piece that is much less sanguine about how violence in movies is now received, and as I have never been a fan of overly violent films,  I find his commentary pretty insightful.   This, I think, is the crucial part:

There was a second element in the old critical defense of violence: audiences know that it isn’t real. Well, some audiences. I’ve sat next to people—often, but not exclusively, elderly people—who squirm with discomfort when vicious or cruel things happen onscreen. They react as if the violence were happening to an actual person—or, at least, their sense of identification is strong enough to make them miserable. But this discomfort has become a minority response. Most audiences, especially young ones, accept violence as illusion, artifice, spectacle—they relish it as play. We are all pop-culture ironists: we know that we’re being entertained by people making pictures and that none of it is real; we enjoy it and forget it the next day. In particular, horror movies with their ghoulish excesses are attended in a carnival spirit. Teen-age girls especially love horror—year after year, they keep it going as box-office phenomenon. The grosser the outrages, the greater the fun. Surviving the movie becomes a kind of rite of passage. They laugh it off and go again.

This willing dissociation of response from violent spectacle has a downside, as many people have said: we become inured to actual violence when it excites us on; we forget that that there’s pain and death, we become connoisseurs of spectacle. This kind of connoisseurship showed up in the response to 9/11, which many people, with obvious relish as well as awe, said resembled a movie, a remark that left anyone with half a brain feeling queasy, if not furious.

He's quite right about the "pop-culture ironists" bit, I think:  it's really the only way to understand how a movie franchise like "Saw" (which I understand to be entirely based on sadistic and gruesomely detailed horror scenarios) can make money.   I accept that the young-ish audience for that series, for example, is not a bunch of wannabe sadistic torturers.   But what I don't understand is this:  why does anyone want to be sufficiently distanced from a movie experience such that realistically detailed gruesome violence washes off them?    This is why I have never been a fan of cinema violence, and can count the number of R rated movies I have seen on one hand: I do not usually have a ready sense of detachment from what's on the screen.   If the movie is not affecting me, it has in a sense failed.    And it bothers me that movie studios, and critics to a large extent, play up to this ironic detachment by making over-the-top films with only rare critical complaint that de-sensitisation to realistic violence is perhaps not really all that good an idea for society.

Denby then goes on to really rip into The Dark Knight.     I had forgotten, but I presume he was one of the critics who first earned virtual death threats from Nolan fanboys for failing to follow the near universal praise for the film.  While I don't have any real grounds for suspecting that I would be bothered by its violence per se, I guess I am always a bit bothered by movies that make bad characters "cool".   (Pulp Fiction is the stand out example where I had a big, big problem with a movie for that reason.)

I don't know if Denby's criticism of the movie is valid or not:  I haven't seen the current Batman series  because, as I have made clear before, I have trouble engaging with the superhero genre at the best of times.   And given that my impression from reviews is that Nolan rarely leavens the bleak atmosphere with any humour or lightness: well, that just gives me all the more reason to suspect I won't like them.  Sorry fanboys, but men (or women) dressing in costumes to fight crime is basically a silly concept;  if you aren't going to have some light hearted fun with it, it's not likely to win me over.

In fact, going back to Anthony Lane, his review of The Dark Knight Rises wittily describes this over-seriousness as follows:

 Be honest. How badly would you not want Bruce—or Batman—to show up at one of your parties? He has no small talk (and Bale, as an actor, has charisma but no charm), although ask him about fear, anger, and other large abstract nouns, especially as they relate to him, and he’ll keep you in the corner all night. He doesn’t eat or drink, besides toying with a flute of champagne. Basic human tasks are beyond his reach; direct Batman to the bathroom, and it would take him twenty minutes of hydraulic shunting simply to unzip. On the rare occasions when Bruce, fresh from his helicopter or his Lamborghini, enters a reception with a girl or two on his arm, he looks deeply uncomfortable, and Nolan, as if sharing that unease, tends to hurry him through the moment. The point—and, after three installments, it seems a fatal one—is that the two halves of our hero form not a beguiling contrast but a dreary, perfect match. Both as Wayne and as super-Wayne he seems indifferent, as the films themselves are, to the activities of little people, and to the claims of the everyday, preferring to semi-purse his lips, as if preparing to whistle for an errant dog, and stare pensively into the distance. Caped or uncaped, the guy is a bore. He should have kids; that would pull him out of himself. Or else he should hang out with Iron Man and get wasted. He should have fun.

Finally, Adam Gopnik writes with outrage about how Americans will likely take no major action regarding any aspect of gun control as a result of the numerous and repeated massacres of this kind:

Only in America. Every country has, along with its core civilities and traditions, some kind of inner madness, a belief so irrational that even death and destruction cannot alter it. In Europe not long ago it was the belief that “honor” of the nation was so important that any insult to it had to be avenged by millions of lives. In America, it has been, for so long now, the belief that guns designed to kill people indifferently and in great numbers can be widely available and not have it end with people being killed, indifferently and in great numbers. The argument has gotten dully repetitive: How does one argue with someone convinced that the routine massacre of our children is the price we must pay for our freedom to have guns, or rather to have guns that make us feel free? You can only shake your head and maybe cry a little. “Gun Crazy” is the title of one the best films about the American romance with violence. And gun-crazy we remain.

By far the most appalling response to incidents like this is argument from the gun crazy that maybe this wouldn't have happened if the cinema didn't have a "no guns" policy for the audience.  That's right, there are a large number of gun loving Americans who would prefer not to think about, say, the wisdom of letting just anyone buy oversized magazines that let scores of bullets be shot off before reloading (as did this madman,)  but instead propose that if there were a dozen armed amateurs firing towards gunflashes in a darkened crowded cinema filled with smoke, well, maybe that would have been a good outcome.   

Just appalling.