We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The United Kingdom Transhumanist Association has organised a small shindig at Conway Hall, the Mecca for freethinkers, to present and discuss issues that become less radical every year. This takes place next Saturday, April 24th.
The UK chapter of Humanity+, an organisation dedicated to promoting understanding, interest and participation in fields of emerging innovation that can radically benefit the human condition, announced today that registrations are on track for record attendance at the Humanity+ UK2010 conference taking place in Conway Hall, Holborn, London, on April 24th.
Always worth making the case that emerging innovation requires the precondition of liberty.
I note that there may be some absences if Iceland continues its revenge.
Incoming email from fellow Samizdatista Michael, just received:
This morning, I forgot to pack the charger for my laptop before heading for the airport. Therefore, once the battery had run down, I was faced with the real possibility of being without a computer for a week.
The horror, the horror.
Obviously, this could not stand, so I needed a charger. I had to do this is Rzeszow in Poland, or perhaps in Lviv in the Ukraine tomorrow. (Lviv is a bigger city, but Ukraine is a more backward country). After trying a few local stores, and a branch of Media Markt (the German equivalent of Curry’s), I eventually found a universal laptop charger. I found it in a branch of an obscure, East European chain named “Tesco”. The price was very reasonable, too.
“Markt”? Is that proper spelling, or just email spelling?
I have no idea whatsoever why so many people in places like London find the spread of Tesco – really a wonderful company – to be such a bad thing.
Well, here are some ideas. They are snobs who only want good stuff to be available to richer people such as themselves? They are anti-capitalist scum who hate humans and want humans to die out, but only after they have died first? They oppose international free trade in food (or in anything) and blame Tesco for it? They used to run inefficient food shops that sold stale and overpriced food, until Tesco drove them out of business?
I’m sure commenters can suggest further motivations for Tescophobia.
An unfolding saga in the game of cricket in recent years has been the question of whether technology should be used to aid umpires in the case of close or potentially controversial decisions. Like many things in life, the question of whether to do this has turned out to be more complex than it may at first have appeared to be. There have been situations in which the on field umpire has asked for a replay, and the replay has been unclear but has none the less been used to overrule an on field umpire who probably saw more. There have been situations in which the players have appealed to a video replay that didn’t show anything, when they likely knew themselves what had happened and the situation would previously have been resolved with a gentlemanly code of conduct. There have been situations when the television company did not manage to produce the appropriate replay in time, and the umpire then made a decision that was revealed to be incorrect five minutes later. Many decisions depend on whether the batsman hit the ball, and a mixture of sound and picture is used to make these decisions, and determining which items of the bat, ball, ground, clothing, safety equipment etc came in contact with each other is often no clearer using the technology than not.
Fans of other sports are no doubt nodding at this point, as similar issues have come up in most sports that have attempted similar things. Cricket has one further issue, not unique to it but relatively central to it, which is the question of how technology should be used in the interpretation of the leg before wicket rule (LBW).
One of the principal ways of getting a batsman out is for the bowler to bowl at the batsman, for the batsman to miss the ball, and for the ball to then strike the wooden stumps behind him. It would be possible for a batsman to avoid getting out this way by his simply standing in front of the stumps at all times. In order to avoid this, the rules of cricket allow for a batsman to be out if he is standing directly in front of the stumps, the ball hits his leg, and the ball would have gone on to hit the stumps. (The rule is actually more complex than this, but the complexities are not relevant to the point I am making). The umpire stands in a good position from which to judge whether the ball will hit the stumps, and traditionally the umpire’s judgment has been used to decide whether the ball would have hit the stumps.
Umpires inevitably make mistakes, and there have been many accusations of umpire bias over the years. For a long time people have been watching replays in slow motion on television in order to second guess umpires, but these have never been conclusive. Occasionally an umpire will make an obviously wrong decision, but most of the time there is as much of an element of doubt watching at home as there is for the umpire. Or perhaps more: the umpire is in a better viewing position than the TV cameras.
In recent years, however, things have changed. The “Hawk-eye” system was initially used by television companies, and there was then pressure for it to be used in assisting umpires as well. Basically, this system looks at a number of video replays, and from them constructs a three dimensional model of the ball, the pitch, the bat, etc. From the this model, the path of the ball is extrapolated going forward. Television viewers see a computer graphic image of the ball hitting (or not) a computer graphic image of the stumps, and are told whether the ball would have hit the stumps and whether the batsman was or was not out.
Every since this system has been in place as part of television coverage, there has been pressure for it to be used in umpiring decisions. When people have asked me about this, I have stated my position with unexpected vehemence, particularly given that I am generally in favour of using video replays as part of the adjudication process. For I am, at present, unequivocally opposed to the use of Hawk-Eye and similar decisions in umpiring decisions.
My reason for this is as follows. → Continue reading: Of cricket and climate
That James Lovelock is a strange case, as discussed by Natalie here on Monday. After hearing him on the Today programme the other day, I had to interrupt my bath and rush off to make notes, yelling to my wife as I went that he’s an old charlatan. The immediate provocation was the claim that’s bothered me in the past and had me quarrelling with fellow members of a science journalists’ mailing-list – the claim that global warming could cut the world’s population to a billion. I don’t know where he got this from, but it’s fixed in his head now – he keeps saying it. He talks of the scientific sin against the Holy Ghost being to fudge the data, but there’s another mortal sin too – lending the weight of your authority to pronouncements made in a field in which you’re not actually expert. Calculating the demographic effects of such a geophysical change, if it’s possible at all, would be the province of a team of – what? – geoscientists, economists, geographers, sociologists (sociologists – right, yeah, duh, like they’re really going to be any use – as the young people say). It’s not something that can just be dreamed up in the noggin of an old greybeard who did some useful geophysics decades ago and then got deified for the barmy green non-hypothesis of Gaia.
When I read the notes of his Guardian interview published by Leo Hickman on the paper’s environment blog, I found the charlatanism mixed with all sort of stuff that sounds superficially congenial to libertarians. But it’s clear that he’s got no clear ideological compass to make sense of it all. He seems to think that climate science is in a mess because all these terrible oiks were churned out by state-funded education instead of the right sort of chap, like himself, that we had in the good old days. And the journalists are to blame too, presumably for demanding sensationalist answers from those naturally bashful creatures, the climatologists.
Whereas the journalists, when they do their job right, are part of the solution – part of the scrutiny that all specialists need.
Lord Stern would have us believe that ‘arrogance’ undid the recent attempted power grab known as the Copenhagen Conference.
Strangely the public unravelling of the entire political and cultural narrative of global warming does not so much as get a mention in passing, as if ‘Climategate’ can be wished out of existence and with a Triumph of the Will, time itself can be rolled back to pre-hack days.
Repeat after me, you greenie morons … cold kills, cold kills, cold kills … greenies kill. You granny killers should be up for manslaughter.
– The indefatigable Richard North spells out just how much worse cold weather is than hot weather.
Personally, I’d like to see some Congressmen forced to testify before a panel of car dealers, about the budget deficit’s Sudden Acceleration Problem.
– Instapundit reflects on the travails of Toyota.
My Climategate pieces here have been of two sorts. There have been the big set-piece pieces where I at least try to say vaguely original things about it all, which given my life experiences tends to mean what sort of argument this is, how it is going and how it seems likely to go on going. And, there have been little bits like this one which basically just say: be sure not to miss this.
So anyway, be sure not to miss this, which is a report, from one of Bishop Hill’s readers, of a tactical discussion by a bunch of climate alarmist journalists, thinking aloud about how to handle the situation now that the general public has started smelling rats all over the place, rats which they helped to bury, but which those mad bloggers have been digging up. How to bury all the rats now?
Typical quote:
I used to think sceptics were bad and mad but now the bad people (lobbyists for fossil fuel industries) had gone, leaving only the mad. We published a string of articles in late Jan, early Feb showing that people had misinterpreted the emails as casting doubt on CC.
We as in the Guardian. And that worked really well, didn’t it?
Oh well, at least they are finally getting that we sceptics say what we say because we actually believe it, rather than merely because we have been paid to say it. That’s something. Next thing you know, they may even be admitting that some of their fellow climate alarmists are only still climate alarmists because someone is paying them, and that many more who would like to be sceptical are staying mum for similarly economic reasons.
Don’t miss the comments, which say everything that the good Bishop himself didn’t feel the need to say.
LATER: Bishop Hill now has a Tip Jar. The Bishop has a wife and three children, and I am guessing that even a quite small amount of cash that has been earned directly from his blogging efforts would make him an even more potent force in the Climategate debate. If the commenter who says Big Oil might be about to switch sides in this argument, again, is right, then how about a little oil money in the Bishop’s collecting plate?
The problem is that 71.3% of what passes as peer reviewed climate science is simply junk science, as false as the percentage cited in this sentence. The lack of trust is not a problem of perception or communication. It is a problem of lack of substance. Results are routinely exaggerated. “Scientific papers” are larded with “may” and “might” and “could possibly”. Advocacy is a common thread in climate science papers. Codes are routinely concealed, data is not archived. A concerted effort is made to marginalize and censor opposing views.
And most disturbing, for years you and the other climate scientists have not said a word about this disgraceful situation. When Michael Mann had to be hauled in front of a congressional committee to force him to follow the simplest of scientific requirements, transparency, you guys were all wailing about how this was a huge insult to him.
An insult to Mann? Get real. Mann is an insult and an embarrassment to climate science, and you, Judith, didn’t say one word in public about that. Not that I’m singling you out. No one else stood up for climate science either. It turned my stomach to see the craven cowering of mainstream climate scientists at that time, bloviating about how it was such a terrible thing to do to poor Mikey. Now Mann has been “exonerated” by one of the most bogus whitewashes in academic history, and where is your outrage, Judith? Where are the climate scientists trying to clean up your messes?
The solution to that is not, as you suggest, to give scientists a wider voice, or educate them in how to present their garbage to a wider audience.
The solution is for you to stop trying to pass off garbage as science. The solution is for you establishment climate scientists to police your own back yard. When Climategate broke, there was widespread outrage … well, widespread everywhere except in the climate science establishment. Other than a few lone voices, the silence there was deafening. Now there is another whitewash investigation, and the silence only deepens.
And you wonder why we don’t trust you? Here’s a clue. Because a whole bunch of you are guilty of egregious and repeated scientific malfeasance, and the rest of you are complicit in the crime by your silence. Your response is to stick your fingers in your ears and cover your eyes.
– Willis Eschenbach is unimpressed by Dr Judith Curry‘s ideas about reestablishing trust in climate science. Lots more Climategate commentary and links from North.
Patrick Crozier has an interesting list of things that might disappear if AGW alarmism, now very much on the defensive, loses support from policymakers.
Here are a few suggestions from me about products that might wane or go into defensive mode:
Carbon-trading hedge funds and other financial firms trying to make money out of cap-and-trade rules.
All those various “Green” mutual funds and even the occasional hedge fund. They sometimes smell like a scam, and the latest revelations of AGW alarmist skulduggery do not help.
Sellers of loft insulation where there is not a genuine economic demand for it.
Pressure to change building codes in the light of AGW alarmism might abate somewhat. New homes, I have noticed, often have tiny windows so they resemble houses in a children’s story book. We might go back to having bigger, more light-enhancing windows.
Alas, I don’t expect the alarmism theme to diminish in Hollywood movies or BBC documentaries. Mind you, as I said in a comment on one of Brian Micklethwait’s posts the other day, you know the prevailing climate of opinion (excuse the pun) has changed depending on the kind of villain chosen for a Bond movie. When they cast a deep Green scientist as a baddie, and put the villain’s lair in a bunker in deepest East Anglia, we’ll have won.
Suggestions welcome.
Political bloggers of the Guido Fawkes/Iain Dale variety have found themselves, I suspect, and as I suspect that the traffic numbers may now be proving, being ever so slightly sidelined during the last month or two. Who cares about the petty pilferings of MPs when there is a world of lies and plunderings out there, under the general rubric of “Climategate”? It’s not that the blog-as-gossip mongers been ignoring this story, more that they have faced a problem of how to respond to it. Should they hurl themselves into the science of it all? Probably better to leave that to specialists. Should they switch from contemplating the merely local government of Britain, to contemplating the government of the world, no less? Probably not.
One way for these bloggers to turn Climategate into their kind of story is to follow the money, especially if it is flowing through Westminster. Iain Dale, a political blogger very much inside the Westminster Bubble, yesterday featured an expensively produced climate change propaganda guidance leaflet entitled the rules of the game. Characteristic quote:
Those who deny climate change science are irritating but not important. The argument is not about if we should deal with climate change, but how we should deal with climate change.
Which just goes to show how much difference Climategate had made and continues to make. Without Climategate, the wider public was just left having to trust the scientists and acquiesce to this kind of stuff. Now “those who deny climate change science” are a whole lot more than irritating, important even, and the question very much is about if we should deal with climate change by any means other than simply adapting to it, as and when it really does occur.
Besides which, the second part of the quoted claim is also false. The argument being put by these climate propagandists is that we all should “deal with climate change” in the particular manner that they demand. Us saying that we have different opinions about how to adapt to climate change is also to be ignored, just as is the claim from any of us that “climate change”, i.e. climate change of the man-made and catastrophic variety, may not even be happening.
The whole thing is disgusting, of course, and kudos to Iain Dale for featuring it. But the point I want to make here and now is that this disgustingness is only now clear. For as long as “climate science” was widely trusted, or at least not widely contested, this leaflet was just a leaflet, not a story. Publishing it before Climategate would merely have resulted in counter-comments from those who agree with it to the effect that they agree with it.
I recall being told by some pessimistic commenters on this early Climategate posting of mine here (done during the time before that word had even been decided upon as the name for all this), and reading elsewhere, that this story would, contrary to what I was already then enthusiastically asserting, soon go away. It would, that is to say, be made to go away. This Iain Dale posting is just one small example of very how untrue that notion is proving to be.
One of my little pleasures in life is finding interesting pictures to put on my personal blog which are vertically very thin, and which thus assist in the pursuit of blogging brevity. As here for instance, yesterday, when I displayed a wafer thin slice of a picture of the rings of Saturn.
And I was all set to put this picture up at my personal blog too, until I found myself asking technological questions of the sort that Samizdata’s commenters are the very people to answer.
That picture, severely cropped by me, I found here. It is the new unmanned Israeli bomber, the Heron TP. The Israelis have apparently just put a flock of them into service.
Two thoughts.
One, this is surely vivid evidence of the wisdom, from the purely defence point of view (never mind the wider economic arguments), of the Israelis contriving, with encouraging tax policies, their own version of Silicon Valley, said to be second only in the world to Silicon Valley itself. And who knows how long the original will last, given the current insanity of Californian fiscal policy. The surrounding enemies of Israel can only dream of being able to contrive such birds. But is this a purely Israeli achievement, or did Americans have a big input? And do Israelis now have quite a big input into American aircraft of a similar sort?
Two, I find it interesting that although there is no pilot on board, there is still a bulge at the front and on top, just as if there was. Why is that? It surely can’t just be that they are used to such bulges at the front of airplanes, so they stuck with it. Could it? I’m guessing it’s the logical spot to put lots of guidance kit, telling the bird where it is and where to fly next and how to aim its weapons. It’s the best place to put, that is to say, the various “pilots”. Or, is their some aerodynamic reason? Comments on that appreciated.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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