Taking Jeff Masters to statistics school. While Jeff is a meteorologist, I really am starting to think that many of the “scientists” doing climate research are second raters. If not third.
Category Archives: Science And Society
Hope This Doesn’t Happen In Tonight’s Game
What happens when a ball is pitched at 0.9c?
Verlander’s good, but I don’t think he’s got that kind of arm.
[Update at the bottom of the first inning]
Wow. Between Verlander and (non)Fielder, the Tigers just screwed the American League team. They’re down 5-0 in the first, and the National League hasn’t even batted.
I’m guessing that Verlander’s problem was that he’s not used to pitching just two innings, and was off his early game.
Being Smart
The dangers of it:
It is troubling that smarter people are often worse off, because they cannot recognise the biases and blunders, due to a deep, complex layer of justification they’ve narrated to themselves. It’s troubling because we expect smart people to be the ones devoid of biases more than others. However, expectation as usual takes a backseat to evidence. Perhaps all we should expect of intelligence, however you conceive it, is a way of thinking, not the content of thought. This means, even if the belief is quite absurd, the methods to get to it can be smart (sophisticated theology is like this to me). But that’s just one way and assuming one kind of definition of intelligence, which is notoriously difficult to study, let alone quantify.
However, this confirms something more practical to me. As Lehrer says, we’re good at picking out the flaws in others. If this is true, this confirms my earlier view that we shouldn’t want a world in which agreement is everywhere. We must welcome criticism and argument, since, no matter how smart we are (indeed, as this indicates, especially considering how smart we might be), we could be wrong. We are, fundamentally, flawed and fallible.
Yes, it’s quite mistaken to think that people who believe in God are stupid, but many devout atheists seem to do so.
This Is What Pseudoscience Looks Like
My thoughts on the latest attempts of the warm mongers to hijack the weather to advance their political agenda, over at PJMedia.
[Update a few minutes later]
June 2012 temperatures are not that remarkable.
[Update a while later]
Well, this is disappointing. Joel Achenbach has fallen prey to the myth.
Rainbows
…have seams. An interesting look at how different cultures deal with naming colors.
Obama’s Green Energy Projects
Are any of them solvent? And what kind of idiot would think that a physicist would be a good judge of business plans?
Less than four months now until our opportunity to get these clowns out of our lives.
Brooklyn Hipsters
What’s All The Fuss About?
Here’s a pretty good story on the Higgs discovery. I have to say, I’m not sure to five sigma that I exist, so the result seems pretty solid.
James Lovelock
Its Not Just The “Science” Guy
More of the usual suspects and warm mongers are saying “I told you so” about the heat wave.
Because we’ve never had heat waves before.