Climategate 1 is self summarized by the famous line:
Mike’s Nature trick … to hide the decline.
Climategate 2 is self summarized by the theme: ‘
help the cause
Archive for the ‘science’ Category
Climategate 1 and 2
Saturday, December 3rd, 2011Next climategate installment.
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011The cause of the decline
Sunday, October 16th, 2011Lately there as been a lot of concern about the increasingly visible decline of the west, notably Peter Thiel on “The End of the Future”: (more…)
Science stagnating in the west
Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011How many new drugs, Dr. Lajos Pusztai asks, were approved for breast cancer treatment in the past decade? His answer: seven. None was much different from drugs already on the market.
Anthropogenic CO2
Friday, July 22nd, 2011A replication of part of Clive Best’s analysis.
The theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming assumes a number of points without evidence, assumptions that might well be true, but which they have made no attempt to test.
One is that warming would be a bad thing, another is that the world is very sensitive to quite small CO2 greenhouse effect, supposedly because the CO2 greenhouse effect will be enormously amplified by the H2O green house effect.
And another is that human burning of coal and oil can have a significant effect on atmospheric CO2. (more…)
Yes, inferior races have smaller cranial capacities on average
Sunday, June 12th, 2011So what is a politically correct intellectual allowed to say?
Lately, people who are quite politically correct and academically respectable, are acknowledging that Gould and Lewontin were wrong and making $#!% up, and no heresy charges ensue. Indeed, they have been pissing on Lewontin since 2003. Now if Lewontin is wrong, then the races are genetically different in important ways, if Gould is wrong, then Darwin is right that races are the origin of species, and Morton was right that negroes and native Americans have smaller cranial capacities than whites. (more…)
Censorship
Thursday, May 26th, 2011Like a frog boiled, we have now reached Stalinist levels of censorship. They won’t send you to the gulag, but in the later days of Stalinism they seldom did that. Rather, your career depended on compliance
I was listening to Chris Rock’s hilarious rant “We hate black people too!” and my son became alarmed, lest some one sneak up on my house and listen near the windows.
(more…)
Consensus
Friday, April 22nd, 2011When Galileo explained the scientific method, he condemned consensus:
The testimony of many has little more value than that of few, since the number of people who reason well in complicated matters is much smaller than that of those who reason badly. If reasoning were like hauling I should agree that several reasoners would be worth more than one, just as several horses can haul more sacks of grain than one can. But reasoning is like racing and not like hauling, and a single Barbary steed can outrun a hundred dray horses
Peer review is consensus. Consensus is religion, not science. Peer review works as depicted in this excellent cartoon: Click on the snippet of the cartoon to see the full cartoon.
Peer Review in action
Observe the priestly robes worn by the scientists
Radiation levels normal and falling at Fukushima nuke reactor
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011NPR, usually the first to panic about evil nuclear energy, is reporting some very undramatic numbers from the Fukushima reactor
Radiation inside the plant is arguably dangerous, but radiation at the plants main gate is 0.647 milliserverts per hour. By comparison, when you take a flight, you get about 0.04 milliserverts per hour from cosmic rays, so standing at the main gate is fifteen times worse than flying. So someone who flies to Japan from New York, and then wanders up to the main gate to take a look, and hangs out at the main gate for half an hour or so, is likely to get more radiation from his flight than from the nuclear power plant.
Of course if your house is in front of the main gate, 0.647 milliserverts an hour is still a problem if it remains that high year after year – but if your house was in front of the gate, it is no longer in front of the main gate, because the tsunami washed it away, in which case radiation levels are a long way down on your list of troubles, and in any case, radiation levels will not remain that high for long.
Reactor disaster
Sunday, March 20th, 2011The television is full of panic stricken horror about the supposedly horrible horrible horrible horrible nuclear disaster in Japan.
This disaster looks like being worse than three mile island, but not nearly as bad as Chernobyl.
How many died as a result of Chernobyl?
Sixty people died. Pretty similar compared to coal mining disasters, of which there are many each year, killing in total world wide thousands of people every year, usually without making much news.
People have been trying to get alarming cancer statistics from the vicinity of Chernobyl, and have come up empty.
If Chernobyl has elevated cancer rates in its vicinity, as is frequently alleged, somehow no one has been able to produce persuasive epidemiological evidence for it, the only epidemiological evidence being a high risk of thyroid cancers among children that were under four at the time of the incident or conceived but not yet born – leading to the deaths of nine children from thyroid cancer! Nine! Nine! Nine! That is the worst anyone has been able to come up with for a great horrible horribly disastrous Chernobyl cancer epidemic disaster.
Nine!