First They Came For The Male Athletes

“…and I said nothing, because women deserve to play sports, too. Then they came for the frat boys, and I not only said nothing, I cheered it on, because frat boys are the scum of the earth. Then they came after men in general, and I said nothing, because they need to understand the fear women have of rape, and to fear engaging in sex.

Then, oh, wait. Holy s**t, they’re coming after me!”

Climate-Change Communications

moving beyond certainty:

The strategy of hyping certainty and a scientific consensus and dismissing decadal variability is a bad move for communicating a very complex, wicked problem such as climate change. Apart from the ‘meaningful’ issue, its an issue of trust – hyping certainty and a premature consensus does not help the issue of public trust in the science.

This new paper is especially interesting in context of the Karl et al paper, that ‘disappears’ the hiatus. I suspect that the main take home message for the public (those paying attention, anyways) is that the data is really really uncertain and there is plenty of opportunity for scientists to ‘cherry pick’ methods to get desired results.

Apart from the issue of how IPCC leaders communicate the science to the public, this paper also has important implications for journalists. The paper has a vindication of sorts for David Rose, who asked hard hitting questions about the pause at the Stockholm press conference.

It’s a good, and necessary first step.

OK, Different Computer Question

I’ve got her machine set up as Windows native, installed on SSD. Her old Windows drive, with her old files, is hooked up to it. She can see it fine from Windows. But while she was using Linux, she’d been writing to an LVM drive, which was originally a backup, but now has some changes on it from the old drive.

I’m running Fedora as a virtual machine, and it seems to be running fine (so far). I’ve attached the old Windows drive to the physical machine, and it shows up in Nautilus and other file managers. But when I try to access it, I get a message that it’s an NTFS drive with problems, and I can only mount it read-only. It suggests I repair.

So, is this caused by the fact that its already mounted and in use by Windows? Seems a little strange, since the virtual machine probably wouldn’t know that. Windows doesn’t have a problem with it. Bigger question: Can/should I try to repair it as an unmounted drive from the virtual machine using e2fsck? That is, does e2fsck repair NTFS drives? And what is the risk if I don’t attempt to back it up first?

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!