6:04 PM Nov 30, 2009

by Rob Ritchie

More on Climategate

I admire expertise, and scientific expertise especially; like any intelligent citizen I am willing to defer to it. But that puts a great obligation on science. The people whose instinct is to respect and admire science should be the ones most disturbed by these revelations. The scientists have let them down, and made the anti-science crowd look wise. That is outrageous.

This is absolutely correct.

11:18 AM Nov 30, 2009by Rob Ritchie

No One Peer-Reviews Scientific Software

Just about everyone in business has had the experience of having to puzzle out a spreadsheet created by someone else who left the company unexpectedly. Although we seldom think of them this way, in reality each individual spreadsheet is a custom piece of computer software written in language of the spreadsheet program. (Technically, all spreadsheets are scripts.) Everybody else knows that you can’t trust the output of a spreadsheet just because the person who made it tells you, “It’s done in Excel.” To trust the output, you either have to compare it against known good data or you have to look at the individual spreadsheet itself to find any places it might go wrong. People create very complex spreadsheets and then leave and some poor schmuck gets stuck trying to figure out what the %$#@! the creator of the spreadsheet was trying to do.

Custom-written scientific programs are much, much larger and much, much more complex than any spreadsheet. It would take a huge amount of time for a peer reviewer to go through the code line by line to see if the software had any faults. Normally, peer reviewers work for only a token payment and they work in isolation. They don’t have the time or resources to actually check out a complex piece of software. Further, there is no guarantee that a peer reviewer in a particular field is competent to judge software. That is like assuming that a biologist who understands everything about the Humboldt squid can also rebuild any automotive transmission.

Any Way the Wind Blows....

7:56 PM Nov 24, 2009by Rob Ritchie

10:07 AM Nov 24, 2009

by Rob Ritchie

Wow, all those doubts about the legitimacy of the Global Warming science have been settled: it's a hoax!

The Fix is In

The picture that emerges is simple. In any discussion of global warming, either in the scientific literature or in the mainstream media, the outcome is always predetermined. Just as the temperature graphs produced by the CRU are always tricked out to show an upward-sloping "hockey stick," every discussion of global warming has to show that it is occurring and that humans are responsible. And any data or any scientific paper that tends to disprove that conclusion is smeared as "unscientific" precisely because it threatens the established dogma.

Climategate

9:02 AM Nov 21, 2009by Rob Ritchie

I figured it'd be years before this was finally revealed.

The final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming' [P]erhaps the most damaging revelations ... are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

Read the whole thing. Keep an open mind.

Update: More here.

5:34 PM Nov 10, 2009

by Rob Ritchie

It Wasn’t a “Tragedy”

If a bus had hit a patch of ice and skidded off a highway, resulting in the death of 13 people and injuries to dozens more, that would have been a “tragedy” as the term was once commonly understood.

But when a member of the enemy, even after revealing unmistakably his sympathies with those forces with which our nation is now at war, is allowed to infiltrate the Army and then use his position of trust as a means to murder unarmed soldiers, that is most emphatically not a tragedy.

That is malevolence on the part of the murderer and incompetence on the part of those who allowed it to occur.

2:05 PM Nov 9, 2009

by Rob Ritchie

Adam Baldwin ("Jayne") beats up on Liberal sock puppets here.

9:13 AM Nov 8, 2009

by Rob Ritchie

At least he didn't go to war against his own nation....

3:30 PM Nov 1, 2009

by Rob Ritchie

Heh...

Halloween 2009

12:56 PM Nov 1, 2009by Rob Ritchie

We had our annual Halloween party last night, and it was a blast. I've posted some pictures here.

Didn't get one of me and Mrs. Agnostic, though. When one surfaces, I'll post it.

Update: Here's a picture of our scary crew.