There is deeply ingrained in American culture — particularly nowadays on the Left — the stereotype of the scientist as pure in intent and action, caring only for the Truth, let the chips fall where they may. The scientist works readily with other scientists (except when s/he is working alone, late into the night, thinking deep thoughts), accepts — nay, encourages — challenges to her/his theories and findings, welcomes new information and hypotheses, and is always willing to change his/her mind based on better data, models, and/or reasoning.
It is, to quote the late Douglas Adams, a load of dingos’ kidneys. A very large, steaming, rotting load of dingos’ kidneys.
Particularly when it comes to a politicized field like climate “science.”
Some discomfiting thoughts on their implications for foreign policy and hapless presidents.
Speaking of cascade effects, there seems to be a preference cascade developing on the lack of both hap and feck with this president. It’s apparently becoming socially acceptable, even at the New York Times, to point out what a disaster he is.
I’m not surprised. They don’t know WTF they’re doing. As I’ve said before, climate modeling is an interesting exercise, but it’s insane to base policy on it.
A new technique for communication. The good thing is that you probably don’t even have to be good at math. Just the attempt to solve the problem would create the desired response. Being in this state is one of my nightmares. Hard to know if it would be preferable to death, but this technique may allow us to find out for some individuals.
Here’s an article at the WaPo about it. This isn’t correct, though:
It is always desirable to launch to the east to capitalize on the direction of the Earth’s spin. The Earth travels about 1,000 mph west to east at the equator; you need to reach a speed of 17,000 mph to get to low-Earth orbit, so there’s no point in penalizing yourself 1,000 mph by heading in the wrong direction.
No, not “always.” Only for low-inclination orbits. For very high inclination, or retrograde, it’s actually preferable to launch from a high latitude (ideally, for a retrograde orbit, you’d like to launch from a pole, to eliminate any earth rotation, because it’s rotating in the wrong direction).
This sort of thing is why we don’t want economic illiterates in charge of the economy. Hey, morons. Don’t you think that if McDonalds could just raise their prices (and hence revenues) by 17% (actually 26%), they’d have already done that?
Let’s say McDonald’s decided to double all its salaries, so that the entry-level wage became $16 an hour instead of $8 an hour. Why would McDonald’s continue to employ their $8 an hour workers when instead they could hire “better” workers who are worth more? (And those of you who think that the skills, linguistic abilities, experience, intelligence, etc. of fast-food workers makes no difference in service don’t eat in McDonald’s much.)
Again, this is why you don’t want people making policy who don’t understand how business works. And this administration (and sadly, Congress, of both parties, but much more so among the Democrats) is full of such people.
They have to start adjusting their prognostications now, or risk looking more and more like fools when reality continues to get more and more out of line with the models.