Author Archives: Bob Evans

Interesting Research paper

So here a link to a report that I found interesting.

The basic upshot is that this scientist, Wolfgang Knorr, did a study to see what has happen to the atmospheric fraction of carbon dioxide over the last 150 years. The assumption is that increasing fractions of carbon dioxide will drive a ‘greenhouse effect.’

In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.

I found that very interesting.


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A Pointless Exercise

So over at Instapundit Glenn Renyolds has posted a picture from the White House Flickr page and asks readers to ‘Analyze the body language. From the White House Flickr page.‘

Here’s the photo:
Glenn Reynolds later followed up with an update to his post…

UPDATE: No, I don’t think Obama’s facial expression is just a fluke of when the shutter went off. His eyes aren’t closed, as some with poor displays seem to think. Here’s a detail from the frame:

And this enlargement of the photo.

The first thing that struck me about this is that this exercise is one of pure futility and pointlessness. Without the context of the situation you cannot analyze the body language. All you can do is project your on preconceptions into the picture. We don’t know what Biden is saying to Obama and knowing that bit of information is critical to having any understanding of the image.

Biden has a reputation for being a blabber-mouth and never knowing when to stop. Could be all Obama is reacting to is a never ending monolog. Biden could be flubbing or telling a rather dreadful joke. Biden could be suggesting white people and black people are equals. The two men could be discussing basketball. It could be anything going on in that picture.

The next thing I notice was how in very typical style, Glenn Reynolds didn’t post his own analysis of the picture. A very sly movie to keep his own name out of harm’s way. Anyone who wants to consider themselves in league with Instapundit can assume that their analysis matches up with Glenn’s, however Glenn has total deniability from any unseemly analysis because he never posted his own stand. (I do believe that he does indeed have a stand and that it is a calculated decision on his point not to post it.)

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New Year’s Resolution

So here, quite publicly, is my New Year’s Resolutions for 2010.

I have not been putting in the hours of writing that I should have been, so the resolution is to reform my habit of writing every day, Monday through Thursday.

To achieve this, I am not allowing myself to play any game on my Xbox 360, Xbox, or PS3 on Monday through Thursday, unless I have written 1000 words that day.

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Our Puritanism is going to get people killed.

Over Christmas we had another attempted terror attack against America. By now I assume  that everyone reading this blog knows that a young man smuggled explosives aboard an International flight — the bomb making materials were apparently in his underwear — and after determining that the aircraft was in American airspace, attempted to detonate it.

Only by a combination of luck and in competence did the device not explode, but merely burned. Even that could have been very bad had passengers not acted quickly and subduing the terrorist and putting out the fire.

It stupid that this man was able to smuggle the bomb-making material aboard. We have the technology to catch this crap. It’s back scatter x-rays.

These devices can image right through clothing down to the skin. The likelihood of getting contraband through such a system is much lower than with our current wand and pat down system. (Nothing is assured – a dopey scanner operator can still miss things, but this is so much better than what we have now.)  We have not instituted these scanners because it is able to image people in the nude, right through their clothing.

Horrors, someone might see my wang.

Bloddy hell people, I’d rather have TSA people seeing an endless parade of naughty bits than not be able to see bombs. Hmmmm, nude or dead, I know which I’ll want to be.

The only reason to hold back this technology is that we are so scared of skin we’d literally rather die than have someone see some.

To quote Plan 9 from Outer Space…

“Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”

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Things that bothered me in the movie Avatar

The story for Avatar was serviceable, but predictable. James Cameron is not a terribly talented writer and not a subtle one at all. What follows in this post are the elements that bothered me in the film and the vast majority of them bothered me during my viewing of the movie.

It’s behind a cut so if it does becomes spoilerific  you have no one to blame but yourself.

Continue reading →

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Denialist – the sly ad hominem

One thing I hate in debate is the scoundrel’s technique of the ad hominem. I have no troubles with people who disagree with me. Hell, most of my friends disagree with me on a number of issues. That is fine and dandy, but insults to the person making an argument is simply a tool of bullies.

In the current debates on climate change and if mankind is a major contributing factor in any clime change the charge of denier gets thrown at people who express doubt about man-made global warming.  This is really nothing more than a sly ad hominem attack. The most cultural known use of the term denier in political debates is of course for those who would deny that the Holocaust occurred during WWII. By referring to doubters of AGW (Anthropomorphic Global Warming) as deniers, supporters of AGW are trying to achieve to things.

The first is subliminally place doubters in the same emotional space to most people as deniers of the Holocaust. The second thing they are trying to do is establish AGW as a fact as firmly rooted in reality as the Holocaust itself.

The Holocaust is a fact. It is not a theory, it is not a hoax, it was the systematic murder of Jews, gays, Gypsies, and others by the NAZIs.

AGW is a hypothesis, it is not a fact. It’s not even a theory. In science a theory is a hypothesis that has withstood rigorous testing over an extended period of time. The Atomic Theory of matter is a theory, the Germ Theory of Disease is a theory, General Relativity is a theory. All of these started their scientific lives as a hypothesis and became theory as they proved themselves to be the best current description of how the world works.

The world is warming. I think there is enough evidence to support that statement. After all the Hudson River used to freeze solid enough that you could drag cannons across it and they used to hold winter fairs on the frozen Thames in England. Clearly we don’t get that cold anymore. That does not mean that AGW is true.

Mind you I am not saying that AGW is not true in the post. It might be the best hypothesis for describing the current climate and the apparent changes we are seeing, but it is not the only one. The Earth has been much cooler in the past and it has been much warmer in the past without any help from mankind at all. There are good and reasonable people – scientists and lay-people alike – who have serious questions about AGW. These people might be right, they might be wrong.

What is wrong is to call these people deniers as though they were apologist for Hitler, or flat earthers pretending we never went to the moon. Calling them names is nothing but an attack on the person. (I will grant you that not all people who questions AGW do so from a serious doubt of the science. There are many venal and frankly manipulative people who takes their positions purely out of the politics of the situation, but that applies to both sides.)

Show me facts. Show me testable experiments and simulations.

Do not call me a denier simply because I think the GCR hypothesis might explain thing as well as the AGW hypothesis.

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