It came from the 1950s, when life was ideal, Reagan was a cowboy hero, and scientists were emotionless paragons in white lab coats. Conservatives today take the 1950s as their conception of how the world should work, and they get upset whenever anyone deviates from this model.

Yes, I'm being snarky, but I think it's a pretty accurate observation.

I'd settle for 500 years of accurate, precise (with an error no greater than 0.05C) temperature measurements from at least 5000 sites scattered reasonably uniformly over the globe.

Considering that CO2 levels will continue to rise for 1000 years afterwards -- we really will have missed a chance to build a sustainable economy. By analogy, you won't save the building from fire, because you want to measure exactly how hot the flame is, to within 0.5C, to prove that the house is really in danger.

In assessing certainty, one cannot simply pull number like 500, 5000 and 0.05C out of thin air. There is a confidence interval that goes with the measurement. Do you know what that confidence interval is? Didn't think so.

On the other hand, climate scientists *do* know what their confidence interval is. It is all in the ipcc reports. Ever read one? Didn't think so.

No, tree rings won't do. Nor will ice cores. Because we have less than 100 years of temperature measurements to calibrate them with.

I'd trust statistical techniques to assess the error range of proxies, over rules of thumb.

Oh, and I'd like to be able to see the raw data, the massaged data, and the formulae used to do the massaging. Note that the CRU people can't or won't provide the raw data - either of which is a big warning sign in my book.

The CRU people provide almost all of the data, except for date they cannot provide because it is not theirs to provide. That is hardly a conspiracy. In fact, they are simply obeying the law. The vast majority of the data is here. You can also find tonnes of raw data and source code here

I say all of this with no expectation of having convinced you of anything. Try to find a "top 10" skeptic arguments. No such resource exists, because wild charges of conspiracy is the best evidence that skeptics have. If you fail to find a top 10, that actually contains sound arguments -- would that be sufficient to cast doubt on your AGW opinion, or will the burden of proof just shift further away?

I wonder if this is the criteria for the withholding. Could the Army have entered into a NDA with private industry? What I picture is a situation where the Army lays out the budget for the project and a company agrees to write the code (A.I. behavior comes to mind) in return for whatever the Army can pay plus an agreement to not disclose the code. It has been years since I played AA so this theory make not make sense in some aspects.

Part of the problem is that every government has a hand in it, and that since people don't like to pay taxes, many of the governments involved fund the research by reselling the data to private forecast entities. If they open source it (which I fully agree that they should) that revenue stream dries up, a number of businesses are threatened, and your taxes go up. In any case, AIUI the Climate Research Unit was under contractual obligation to the various contributory agencies (in MANY countries) NOT to reveal the information, so all the FOI requests amounted to nothing more than harassment.

In the end, robust code is more expensive than quick hacks. The purloined code has quick hack flavor, no doubt, and in a few places shows somebody who is stuck in a Fortran mentality where a proper scripting language would have been far superior. Whether it was suitable for purpose for said code to be a quick hack is not something I see being discussed anywhere.

Let's stipulate for argument that it was not at an appropriate level of rigor for the task and consider what it means. What it doesn't mean is dishonesty.

I know lots of scientific programmers who find the idea of having to learn Perl or Python terrifying. Pity, but really these are untrained programmers though trained scientists. Anyway, acquiring trained programmers and training them in science or acquiring trained scientists and training them in programming costs a lot of money, and despite what you may have heard, money is very tight in climate science. That said, riskinbg doing things wrong because it's cheaper doesn't make a lot of sense. In other words, I agree with the sentiments expressed here for the most part but readers should understand that most of them cannot be achieved on a shoestring.

The loss of credibility in science described in the leader is realistic and not without foundation. Science has problems which need to be addressed. An accusatory and adversarial stance, though, will simply throw the baby out with the bathwater. And the CO2 continues to pile up, with consequences that we can anticipate may be very serious.

Anyway I find it odd that the parent article refers to "our" government. Presumably parent author is British?

Michael Tobis,
Ph.D. Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences 1996 at U Wisconsin-Madison

Well, science by definition can't finance itself. So what do you propose, corporations? bean counters would not allow any basic science, only applied and only in situations where ROI is clear enough.

People are down on it not because of objective badness, but because of badness tied to a well-loved series.

Most sane people that aren't teenaged girls didn't expect much from Twilight, and it wasn't an established movie series.

Star Wars, however, was an established canon that was well-loved, and the holiday special was awful. It was a disappointment.

That's all it is really.

in a basement illuminated by the glow of a CRT screen

What WoW player uses some junk old CRT to play?

It's difficult to say, but it certainly sounds like you are being taken advantage of. It may well not be sexism per se, but the fact that you are willing to bend to their will and do all the non-job-related tasks people are asking you to do might have something to do with the increasing amount of stupid tasks people are asking you to do.

That said, I rather suspect that if you raise concerns of sexism, that crap will back way off. Mostly due to no one wanting to get sued.

Seriously though, I dislike patent squatting.

These folks delay technology advancement and don't actually produce anything themselves.

I hope microsoft wins this. Of course, they will, because there's no one on earth they can't buy if they try hard enough.

And that's why a request for a waiver isn't just a formality, dispensed with in a few minutes. The FCC needs to determine that there isn't a risk to the public or to other established users of the frequencies in the specific case requested by the requestor. Lots of waiver requests are for experimental uses (the Amateur Radio community does so from time to time), but those typically designate small groups of stations and locations. As this is a portable commercial product, I suspect it was a lot harder to decide on.

I have put just a bit more thought into this problem and come up with some even more dismaying (to me) personal (of course) opinions which I will now share (making them public, ho ho.) The most sensible way to solve this problem is with technology, in the RSS feed. Craigslist should have a bit more metadata about location; the user could optionally use a google map widget (or similar... but you don't want to run your own mapserver if you can avoid it) to select a geolocation, with as much resolution as they like. Contact info would be outlawed in the description field, and the contact info fields would be the only data not presented via RSS, driving the page views that Craigslist obviously craves. Preventing programmatic insertion of Craigslist listings continues to be the best anti-spam mechanism, although it can never be fully effective. Besides, they do have a flagging system, which is obviously at least partially effective.

Anyway, the part of all this that makes me sad is that trying to keep the crap in your neighborhood is not just a denial of reality, but also an attempt to prevent trickle-down! What the world needs is more homogeneity of wealth, and trying to keep people trapped in their own neighborhood by dissuading broad search only promotes ghettoization. I don't want the shit in some 1950s double-wide in Clear Lake that should have been taken to the dump a long time ago, I want the stuff from Marin that someone is selling because they've bought some new high-concept crap, and it's well worth it for me to travel to get it. Further, it introduces more quality items to my depressed neighborhood, encouraging the replacement of outdated garbage. (I don't think everything newer is better; I got both my current vehicles via Craigslist ads, and both are over 20 years old. But there's a lot of old shit in this town that keeps showing up at yard sales instead of being decently destroyed.)

It's easy to say "just don't spend the money" when you haven't played the game. I've been a casual player of the game since April, and I must say, this is the definition of bait-and-switch. The business model of cheapening everything, but forcing players to buy them, is a horrible one to go buy. Given it's accessibility and cartoony environment, this game attracts many younger kids who find paying for items online a huge hurdle. Also, to suggest that they weren't making money before is simply wrong. I had mentioned this in another response here on /., but I'll say it again. In the actual forum post, Ben Cousins has clearly stated that it's not an issue with money but rather with a sustainable business model. Also not mentioned here was a previous interview where he had stated that only 5% of players would need purchase clothing items for them to turn a profit. As a player, I can tell you they clearly were not in the negative. Most likely, some corporate heads at EA called DICE and said "Hey, we're losing money from our other shitty games, so you need to pick up the slack". To do what they did is not illegal, but it sure as hell is professionally unethical. It's a great game, but doesn't have enough to offer to keep it's fan base. Trust me, the fans aren't going to just swallow this one.

I have a pair of older mechanical typewriters. I don't use them to write (which I do professionally, albeit technically). I could see using them for pre-printed forms not available in PDF, but they're there mostly because I like the idea of having them more than they are useful (free/cheap garage sale fare). I might bring one with when I move; but I haven't ever even changed the ribbon in either of them.

I write mostly on the computer, but have written stories and drafts on paper even recently. Hell, if it's a line or two or an idea, I'll SMS it (with an old crappy cell phone, not iPhone/Blackberry/etc.) to my e-mail address. It's just a matter of what is available at the time. Words are words, regardless of how they are put in the particular order you put them in.

Also, if it's a long doc, I'll print it out and edit it by hand by scribbling on the page, then make the changes in the electronic file.

That being said, I like reading from paper, not an LCD screen, but I have been eyeing an e-book reader for a while now; too bad they all seem to have pesky DRM. It's just a matter of which one is the least evil.

>That said, I'd buy one of Burroughs's typewriters.

I would agree. And his stash of magazines he used for his cut-ups, too. :-)

Personally, I like

and then

Meanwhile,

How exactly did a youthful da Vinci figure out what an ova and sperm look like? If Leonardo da Vinci (as a child) could sketch sperm and ova over 100 years before a crude microscope was invented and almost 200 years before Hooke and Leeuwenhoek, then that alone would be an astonishingly significant discovery. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that Leonardo would build a microscope, discover cell biology, and not bother to write something up about it as an adult. He was, after all, interested in pretty much everything. The more reasonable conclusion is that Edith Sherwood is willing to interpret images very "liberally" (meaning here, without much evidence), without making even simple checks for logical consistency. This is a single example, but the carelessness calls the rest into question. (As you have already indicated)