Category Archives: Mathematics

Business, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Government Data On The “Hiatus”

Judith Curry has some questions:

To what extent did internal discussions occur about the more questionable choices made in adjusting the ocean temperature data?

Was any concern raised about the discrepancies of the new ocean temperature data set and NOAA’s other ocean temperature data set (OISST) that shows no warming since 2003?

Were any Obama administration officials communicating with NOAA about these statements prior to issuing press releases?

Was the release of the land and ocean temperature data sets, which were documented in papers previously published, delayed to follow Karl’s June press release?

Earlier this year, Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., initiated an investigation into possible industry funding of scientists (including myself) who had recently provided Congressional testimony for the Republicans.

While potentially undisclosed industrial funding of research is a legitimate concern, climate science research funding from government is many orders of magnitude larger than industrial funding of such work.

Yup. [Note: She probably didn’t write the headline]

[Update a while later]
More over at her site:

I’ve heard enough behind the scenes (including discussions with NOAA employees) that I am siding with Rep. Smith on this one.

The politicization of climate science has gotten extreme. I don’t know where to start in trying to ameliorate this situation, but Congressional oversight and investigation into what is going on in government labs does not seem inappropriate under these circumstances.

It’s a sad state of affairs that climate science has come to this.

It is indeed.

Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The Climate-Change Religion

10 Comments

French mathematicians are not impressed:

There is not a single fact, figure or observation that leads us to conclude that the world’s climate is in any way ‘disturbed’. It is variable, as it has always been, but rather less so now than during certain periods or geological eras. Modern methods are far from being able to accurately measure the planet’s global temperature even today, so measurements made 50 or 100 years ago are even less reliable.

Concentrations of CO2 vary, as they always have done; the figures that are being released are biased and dishonest. Rising sea levels are a normal phenomenon linked to upthrust buoyancy; they are nothing to do with so-called global warming. As for extreme weather events – they are no more frequent now than they have been in the past. We ourselves have processed the raw data on hurricanes.

We are being told that ‘a temperature increase of more than 2ºC by comparison with the beginning of the industrial age would have dramatic consequences, and absolutely has to be prevented’. When they hear this, people worry: hasn’t there already been an increase of 1.9ºC? Actually, no: the figures for the period 1995-2015 show an upward trend of about 1ºC every hundred years! Of course, these figures, which contradict public policies, are never brought to public attention.

Of course not.

[Via Steve Milloy]

Mathematics, Technology and Society

Narrow-View Cameras

7 Comments

I have a project in mind for which I have some unique requirements. I’d like a low-res, narrow-field webcam, robust enough for all-weather outdoor use. I can’t find anything that meets the requirement in a search, but wonder if anyone has ideas for how to hack one? For instance, if it’s got like a five megapixel sensor, could I easily just look at the center of it, without having to process the whole image? I’ll probably be hitching it to a Raspberry Pi 2.

[Update a while later]

OK, it looks like a standard webcam hooked up to a Raspberry Pi 2, with this software, should give me sufficient power to do what I want.

Humor, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Mark Steyn

4 Comments

Apparently, David Appell is as hilariously illogical as ever. And yes, Big Climate does seem to be a tad misogynistic. But hey, they can be forgiven, they’re just tying to save the planet.

[Update a while later]

The problem with Senator Whitehouse’s RICO suit. He has no evidence.

Yes, it seems to be mostly a wild conspiracy theory. And projection.

Related: Katherine Hayhoe has gotten an infinite amount more money from Exxon than I have.

Administrative, Mathematics, Technology and Society, Weird

Linux Problem

13 Comments

Can anyone figure out why /home is mounting read-only at boot?

Here’s my fstab:

# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Sat Apr 18 17:14:21 2015
#
# Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under ‘/dev/disk’
# See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info
#
/dev/mapper/fedora_new–host–5-root / ext4 defaults 1 1
UUID=058cc312-d471-41b9-a346-6ecf7dd2484b /boot ext4 defaults 1 2
#/dev/mapper/fedora_new–host–5-home /home ext4 defaults 1 2
/dev/mapper/fedora_new–host-home /home ext4 defaults 1 2
/dev/mapper/fedora_new–host–5-swap swap swap defaults 0 0

Note that /dev/mapper/fedora_new–host–5-root is an SSD (as is boot), and /dev/mapper/fedora_new–host-home is a physical hard drive.

And here’s /proc/mounts:

sysfs /sys sysfs rw,seclabel,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0
proc /proc proc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0
devtmpfs /dev devtmpfs rw,seclabel,nosuid,size=7787916k,nr_inodes=1946979,mode=755 0 0
securityfs /sys/kernel/security securityfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs rw,seclabel,nosuid,nodev 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,seclabel,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000 0 0
tmpfs /run tmpfs rw,seclabel,nosuid,nodev,mode=755 0 0
tmpfs /sys/fs/cgroup tmpfs ro,seclabel,nosuid,nodev,noexec,mode=755 0 0
cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd cgroup rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,xattr,release_agent=/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-cgroups-agent,name=systemd 0 0
pstore /sys/fs/pstore pstore rw,seclabel,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0
cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio cgroup rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,blkio 0 0
cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/net_cls,net_prio cgroup rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,net_cls,net_prio 0 0
cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb cgroup rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,hugetlb 0 0
cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/memory cgroup rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,memory 0 0
cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event cgroup rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,perf_event 0 0
cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu,cpuacct cgroup rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,cpu,cpuacct 0 0
cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset cgroup rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,cpuset 0 0
cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer cgroup rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,freezer 0 0
cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/devices cgroup rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,devices 0 0
configfs /sys/kernel/config configfs rw,relatime 0 0
/dev/mapper/fedora_new–host–5-root / ext4 rw,seclabel,relatime,data=ordered 0 0
selinuxfs /sys/fs/selinux selinuxfs rw,relatime 0 0
systemd-1 /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc autofs rw,relatime,fd=24,pgrp=1,timeout=300,minproto=5,maxproto=5,direct 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs rw,seclabel 0 0
debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs rw,seclabel,relatime 0 0
hugetlbfs /dev/hugepages hugetlbfs rw,seclabel,relatime 0 0
mqueue /dev/mqueue mqueue rw,seclabel,relatime 0 0
nfsd /proc/fs/nfsd nfsd rw,relatime 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /boot ext4 rw,seclabel,relatime,data=ordered 0 0
/dev/mapper/fedora_new–host-home /home ext4 ro,seclabel,relatime,data=ordered 0 0
sunrpc /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs rpc_pipefs rw,relatime 0 0
tmpfs /run/user/42 tmpfs rw,seclabel,nosuid,nodev,relatime,size=1559960k,mode=700,uid=42,gid=42 0 0
tmpfs /run/user/1000 tmpfs rw,seclabel,nosuid,nodev,relatime,size=1559960k,mode=700,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0
gvfsd-fuse /run/user/1000/gvfs fuse.gvfsd-fuse rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=1000,group_id=1000 0 0
fusectl /sys/fs/fuse/connections fusectl rw,relatime 0 0
binfmt_misc /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw,relatime 0 0

[Update a while later]

OK, clearly the disk is getting corrupted. I put in a file check option in the fstab, and it (temporarily) mounted it read-write at boot, but after working a while it became remounted read-only.

Any suggestions?

[Update a while later]

I had a spare 2T drive that I hooked up, and made it /home at boot (it was an old original, and the new drive was actually backup of it, so it had a lot of the data on it already). It’s working fine so far, except that when I copied my Gnome user configuration data over and rebooted, it decided that I wanted to have a Spanish desktop. I’ve changed the system settings to en_US, and even ‘localectl status’ give me:
System Locale: LANG=en_US
VC Keymap: us
X11 Layout: us

I can’t figure out where in the configuration files it’s getting the idea that I want to compute en Espanol, but while I can stumble along in it, it’s quite annoying.

[Wednesday-morning update]

OK, I determined that the language is changed in Gnome in “Settings,” but in the Spanish interface, that gets translated into “Configuracion,” so I was looking in the wrong place. So, now all is well, as far as I can tell. And as of this morning both the old and the new drive remain read/write. So still not sure what the problem was, but it seems to be a lot better now.

[Update a while later]

Wow. That drive had been causing problems I hadn’t even realized. My system had been running like molasses, with lots of runaway processes (like in Chrome). That’s completely disappeared. It’s like greased lightning now, even with several instances and many dozens of tabs open in Firefox.