Eric Rasmusen's Weblog

New Blog Address

2010-01-04T13:38:00.004-05:00

January 6, 2010: I've had to change the address again. The new address, which I've also modified below, is:

http://rasmusen.dreamhosters.com/b

I'm going to try switching back to Wordpress. I can't get trackbacks to work from Blogger, and they're important. Also, Wordpress has some improvements since I switched away a year ago, and I covet features I've seen at the Volokh Conspiracy. I've transferred all of my Blogger posts and comments to the new address, which is at:

http://rasmusen.dreamhosters.com/b

I have closed comments on this copy of the blog. Any new comments, even on old posts, should be at the new blog.

Multiple Millions to Secy.of State Clinton by Saudi Arabia, Norway, Kuwait, Qatar, Taiwan,Oman, Jamaica, Mrs. Rich

2010-01-02T09:52:00.004-05:00

From NR:

In recent years, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia gave between $10 million and $25 million to the foundation run by the husband of our current Secretary of State.

"Friends of Saudi Arabia" donated at least another million, perhaps another $5 million. So in short, since 1997, the Saudi Kingdom and its affiliated organizations have provided the Clinton Foundation at least $11 million, and perhaps as much as $35 million.

But I'm sure our Secretary of State held a hard line against them. Remember, it was the last President who was a pawn of the Saudis, or at least the left insisted that was so.

Other foreign governments contributing to the husband of the nation's chief diplomat: The government of Norway, Kuwait, Qatar, Taiwan's Economic and Cultural Office, Ministry for the Environment & Territory, Italy and the Sultanate of Oman.

Jamaica is listed as a donation between $50,000 and $100,000, with the specification, "100% pass through for commodity procurement."

For foreign countries to be able to put money into an account controlled by the household of our top diplomat is an egregious conflict of interest, and I cannot believe that the Obama administration shrugged its shoulders at this. The Foundation should have been put into a blind trust; there's just too much potential for foreign governments to try to buy friendship (or access!) under this arrangement.

Also donating $250,000 to $500,000? Denise Rich, wife of infamous Bill Clinton pardon subject Marc Rich.

UPDATE: Freddie Mac donated between $50,001 and $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Insert your own punchline here: The Clinton Foundation received between $10,001 and $25,000 from the 'I Won't Cheat' Foundation.

This one surprises me: between $10,001 and $25,000 from "Newsmax Media, Inc." That Newsmax?

The Standard for Assistant Profs at the IU Dept. of English

2010-01-01T12:24:00.010-05:00

I've moved my blog. This post has been moved to: http://rasmusen.dreamhosters.com/b/?p=694, which is where updates might go. I have closed comments on this copy of the blog. Any new comments, even on old posts such as this one, should be at the new blog.

Web Version of Books

2010-01-01T12:13:00.001-05:00

Here's an email I just sent Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations:

I don't see a web version on the website. There should be one. Your publisher may be worried about losing book sales. What you can do is this:

1. Put a serial number in each book.
2. The buyer sends in his serial number an email address.
3. He then gets a password.
4. A new password is emailed to that serial number every year (or month, or whatever), replacing the old one.

That would be good enough security to avoid most cannibalization, I think, and would greatly increase the value of the book.

Publishers *should* know about simple things like this, but I bet they don't, and think security requires something more burdensome for all concerned.

Golf Courses

2010-01-01T10:33:00.002-05:00

From "From Bauhaus to Golf Course: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of the Art of Golf Course Architecture," by Steve Sailer, published in a shorter version in The American Conservative, April 11, 2005 Assuming an average of a quarter square mile apiece, America's 15,000 golf courses cover almost as much land as Delaware and Rhode Island combined.... Research since the early 80s shows that humans tend to have two favorite landscapes. One is wherever they lived during their adolescence, but the nearly universal favorite among children before they imprint upon their local look is grassy parkland, and that fondness survives into adulthood.... In one amusing study, 1001 people from 15 different countries were surveyed about what they'd like to see in a painting. Then the sponsors of the research, conceptual art pranksters Komar and Melamid, painted each country's "Most Wanted Painting." Even though the researchers hadn't mentioned what type of picture it should be, the consensus in 13 of the 15 cultures favored landscapes and 11 of the 15 looked surprisingly like golf courses. All over the world, people want to see grassland, a lake, and some trees, but not a solid forest.... This frenzy of art worship among a minority of golfers has gone almost wholly unrecognized in the establishment art world, which otherwise has been so quick to discern artistry in such unlikely forms as graffiti and toilet brushes. Top museums do not stage retrospectives on the Trent Jones family or stock golf course photo books in their gift shops....

Golf course architecture is one of the world's most expansive but least recognized art forms. Yet this curiously obscure profession can help shed light on mainstream art, sociology, and even human nature itself, since the golf designer, more than any other artist, tries to reproduce the primeval human vision of an earthly paradise. Yet even this most unfashionable of arts was swept in the middle of the last century by the same Bauhaus-derived tastes that made post-WWII modernist buildings so tedious. Only recently has golf course architecture begun to revive the styles and values of its golden age in the 1920s. Hidden in plain sight, golf courses are among the few works of art readily visible from airliners. (A golf architecture aficionado can often identify a course's designer from 35,000 feet.) Assuming an average of a quarter square mile apiece, America's 15,000 golf courses cover almost as much land as Delaware and Rhode Island combined. Golf architecture philosophy isn't terribly elaborate compared to the thickets of theory that entangle most museum arts, but one thing all golf designers assert is that their courses look "natural." Growing up in arid Southern California, however, where the indigenous landscape is impenetrable hillsides of gray-brown sagebrush, I never quite understood what was so natural about fairways of verdant, closely-mown grass, but I loved them all the same. Research since the early 80s shows that humans tend to have two favorite landscapes. One is wherever they lived during their adolescence, but the nearly universal favorite among children before they imprint upon their local look is grassy parkland, and that fondness survives into adulthood. Richard Conniff wrote in Discover: "In separate surveys, Ulrich, Orians, and others have found that people respond strongly to landscapes with open, grassy vegetation, scattered stands of branchy trees, water, changes in elevation, winding trails, and brightly lit clearings..." In one amusing study, 1001 people from 15 different countries were surveyed about what they'd like to see in a painting. Then the sponsors of the research, conceptual art pranksters Komar and Melamid, painted each country's "Most Wanted Painting." Even though the researchers hadn't mentioned what type of picture it should be, the consensus in 13 of the 15 cultures favored landscapes and 11 of the 15 looked surprisingly like golf courses. All over the world, people want to see grassland, a lake, and some trees, but not a solid forest. And they always want to see it slightly from above. The project was intended to satirize popular taste, but it ended up revealing much about about human desires. Above is Komar and Melamid's rendition of America's Most Wanted Painting and here's a par 3 from the Coeur d'Alene golf course in Idaho that is similar in outline but aesthetically superior in execution. The current theory for why golf courses are so attractive to millions (mostly men), perhaps first put forward in John Strawn's book Driving the Green: The Making of a Golf Course, is that they look like happy hunting grounds—a Disney-version of the primordial East African grasslands. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, author of the landmark 1975 book Sociobiology, once told me, "I believe that the reason that people find well-landscaped golf courses 'beautiful' is that they look like savannas, down to the scattered trees, copses, and lakes, and most especially if they have vistas of the sea." Tasty hoofed animals would graze on the savanna's grass, while the nearby woods could provide shade and cover for hunters. Our ancestors would study the direction of the wind and the slopes of the land in order to approach their prey from the best angles. Any resemblance to a rolling golf fairway running between trees is not coincidental. In 1975, geographer Jay Appleton advanced the similar theory that what people like is a combination of a sense of "refuge," such as the ability to hide in the woods, and of "prospect" across open country. Both theories make the prediction that human beings, especially males, will spend enormous amounts of money to fashion golf courses. Generally, men (the hunters) tend to prefer sweeping vistas, while women (the gatherers) prefer enclosed verdant refuges. Perhaps it's no accident that a longtime favorite book among little girls is called "The Secret Garden." Similarly, women make up a sizable majority of gardeners while men often obsess over lawn care. To create these pleasure grounds, top golf architects typically spend over $10 million per course, and because designers oversee the creation of multiple layouts simultaneously, a "signature" architect like Tom Fazio will end his career with his name on a few billion dollars worth of golf courses. Famous works of "environmental art," such as Robert Smithson's monumental earthwork "Spiral Jetty" in the Great Salt Lake, are dwarfed by golf courses in extent and thought required. Among fine artists, only Christo works on a comparable scale, and his projects, such as his recent “Gates” in Central Park, are more repetitious. Nonetheless, Christo's “Gates,” which re-emphasized the original landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead's lovely serpentine pathways, and his 1976 "Running Fence" snaking through the undulating grasslands of Marin County, offer some of the same visual pleasures of following alluring trails as golf architects provide. The great majority of golfers long thought of courses mostly in terms of length or difficulty rather than of artistry. Even though the taste of golfers has improved in recent decades, many still judge a course more by the manicuring of its grass than by its design. Moreover, in the U.S., relatively few women are interested in golf before menopause, although the game is fairly fashionable among young women in East Asia and Scandinavia. In recent decades, however, the golf world has come down with a severe case of connoisseurship, publishing hundreds of coffee-table books and calendars, making cult figures of long-forgotten early 20th Century architects like A.W. Tillinghast and Charles Blair MacDonald and brand names out of living designers like Pete Dye and Tom Doak. Many today truly love good golf design, but until very recently, too few hated poor design enough to name names. Golfers tended to feel that any golf course is nice, so it would be churlish to gripe. It was not until the early Nineties that writing about architecture began to mature when Doak, a young architect, circulated a photocopied samizdat manuscript called the Confidential Guide to Golf Courses that lambasted sacred cows. Today, the gathering ground for architecture aficionados is the web discussion board www.GolfClubAtlas.com, where it's common to find, say, 70 messages denouncing the vulgarity of Fazio's redesign of the 7th fairway's bunker on George C. Thomas's classic 1927 Riviera course, where Los Angeles' Nissan Open is played. This frenzy of art worship among a minority of golfers has gone almost wholly unrecognized in the establishment art world, which otherwise has been so quick to discern artistry in such unlikely forms as graffiti and toilet brushes. Top museums do not stage retrospectives on the Trent Jones family or stock golf course photo books in their gift shops. The art community would benefit from exposure to golf architecture simply because the best courses, such as Alister MacKenzie's Cypress Point on the Monterey Peninsula, are things of astonishing beauty, comparable in craftsmanship, complexity, and deceptiveness to the finest efforts of 18^th-century English landscape artists such as Capability Brown, creator of the majestic grounds for Blenheim Palace. The first problem limiting the acceptance of golf design as art is that to nongolfers a course can seem as meaningless as a Concerto for Dog Whistle. That a golf course allows people to interact with interesting landscapes without killing wild animals makes sense in the abstract, but not until you've driven a ball over a gaping canyon and onto the smooth safety of the green will the golf course obsession make much sense. The distinction Edmund Burke made in 1757 between the "sublime" and the "beautiful" applies to golf courses. The beautiful is some pleasing place conducive to human habitat -- meadows, valleys, slow moving streams, grassland intermingled with copses of trees, the whole English country estate shtick. The sublime is nature so magnificent that it induces the feeling of terror because it could kill you, such as by you falling off a mountain or into a gorge. Beautiful landscapes are most suited for building golf courses, since a golf course needs at least 100 acres of land level enough for a golf ball to come to rest upon. But golfers get a thrill out of the mock sublime, where you are in danger of losing not your life, but your mis-hit golf ball into a water hazard or ravine. One reason that Pebble Beach on the Monterey Peninsula is so legendary is because it combines sublime sea cliffs with beautiful (and thus functional for golf) rolling plains...

Conventional artists are urban, golf architects suburban. The art community delights in the venerable game of Shock the Bourgeoisie, while golf courses are too bourgeois to be hip, too elegant to be camp....

The thrifty Scots made golf courses out of sandy, crumpled land of little value for farming. Lacking rich enough soil to grow trees, they are more open to the wind, which adds to the complexity of the game, but they don't furnish the natural pleasure of providing both forest and grassland together that the standard inland American course does...

Examples of truly horrendous design, fortunately, appear to be rarer in golf architecture than in building architecture, and are generally bulldozed into something more pleasing to the eye within a few years. Still, I can't resist a picture of Desmond Muirhead's legendary "Clashing Rocks" par-3 from his 1987 Stone Harbor course in New Jersey. Muirhead, who, while partnered in the early 1970s with Nicklaus, was largely responsible for the routing of the superb Muirfield Village course, became increasingly enamored with artistic self-expression in the 1980s. He explained:

"This hole has been published in hundreds of magazines worldwide, in art and architecture as well as golf. It was based on Jason and the Argonauts. The symbol came from my subconscious where it had probably been hanging around for a great many years. According to Jungian psychology, it is a mandala, a Sanskrit word meaning perfect circle which is the most common archetype drawn in psycho-analysis. The central form is female and the jagged forms are male."

Indeed.

Stone Harbor's members, however, found Muirhead's theoretical rhetoric less intimidating than the sand shots over water he'd inconsiderately created for them, and they had the hole rebuilt into something a little more traditional.

Straussianism

2009-12-31T12:29:00.003-05:00

Some scattered thoughts.

Strauss is like Keynes or Nietzsche. He wrote unclearly, but was very stimulating, so people have fun interpreting him. Like Nietzsche, if not, perhaps, Keynes, he had an Attitude, not a System.
Strauss was like economist Frank Knight at Chicago, someone whose teaching was hugely influential but whose writing was less important--- perhaps even mediocre.
What have been the good Straussian writings? "Persecution and the Art of Writing" by Strauss himself. The Strauss and Cropsey political philosophy survey. Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, and his translation of The Republic with its essay by far the best things. The wonderfully derogatory review of Rawls---was it by Cropsey, or by Bloom? Bloom and Jaffa on Shakespeare. Paul Rahe's books. Jaffa on Lincoln is supposed to be very good, tho I haven't read it. Rhoads on regulation is first-rate-- up there with Bloom--- though I don't know that it's particularly Straussian. I don't recall anything else right now that should be on the list, though I've read other things by Strauss, Pangle, Fukuyama, and Mansfield that didn't impress me so much.

The 'Fire Napolitano' Debate [Andy McCarthy]

2009-12-31T09:49:00.002-05:00

A post so good from Andy McCarthy that I reproduce it in full:

A couple of months back, Sean Hannity invited me on his nightly panel on a special show that was dedicated to ten of the more problematic figures in the administration — Van Jones, Kevin Jennings, Carol Browner, John Holdren, and some others. (Napolitano was not egregious enough to be included.) Sean pressed me on whether this one or that one should be fired, and I just shrugged my shoulders. The suggestion (not by Sean, but in a lot of the public debate) had been that these people had not been properly vetted. My reaction was that they had been extensively vetted — the "czars," like Jones, were made czars rather than cabinet nominations precisely because they were the people President Obama wanted but he knew they'd never get through a confirmation hearing. Sure, you could fire those ten, but the same guy who picked them would be picking their replacements.
I never thought we should have created a Department of Homeland Security. People's memories are short. The original idea behind DHS was to solve "the Wall" problem — the impediments to intelligence-sharing that were making the FBI, our domestic intelligence service, ineffective. But while DHS was being debated and built, the FBI and the intelligence community furiously called on their allies on Capitol Hill and protected their turf. By the time DHS formally came into being, they made sure it had no intelligence mission — in fact, it had no real clear mission at all except to be the unwieldy home of a huge agglomeration of federal agencies. Basically, we moved the deck chairs around on the Titanic but did nothing to improve homeland security.
Napolitano is an apt representation of Obama-style detachment from national security: She doesn't know where the 9/11 hijackers came from; she doesn't know illegal immigration is a criminal offense; she won't utter the word "terror" (it's a "man-caused disaster," just like, say, a forest fire); she thinks the real terrorists are "right-wing extremists" aided and abetted by our soldiers returning home from their missions; when a jihadist at Fort Hood massacres more people than were killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, she won't call it terrorism and worries mostly about racist blow-back against innocent Muslims; she doesn't see any indications of a larger terrorist conspiracy even after a captured — er, arrested — terrorist tells agents he was groomed for the airplane operation by al Qaeda in Yemen; she thinks the "system worked" on Christmas when every element of it failed; and even her walk-back on the "system worked" comment — i.e., that it worked after the fact because all the planes then in the air were notified to take extra precautions "within 90 minutes" of the attack — is pathetic. You may recall that on 9/11, the first plane hit the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. and the second at 9:16 a.m.; the Pentagon was struck at 9:37 a.m., and, thanks to the heroic passengers of Flight 93, the last plane went down a little after 10 a.m. — about 20 minutes from its target in Washington. A lot can happen in 90 minutes.
When DHS came into being, a good friend of mine put it perfectly: "We already have a Department of Homeland Security and its address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue." It is there, not at DHS, that the problem resides. The President has in place exactly the team he wants. To clamor for Napolitano's firing when she is just carrying out the boss's program is to shift the blame from where it belongs.

The Nigerian Terrorist

2009-12-30T15:22:00.000-05:00

From Maureen Dowd:

If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?

2009-12-30T11:16:00.002-05:00

John Derbyshire is very good in his 2001 Crusading They Went The deeds and misdeeds of our spiritual kin.

...the Crusaders were our spiritual kin.... Time and again, when you read the histories of this period, you are struck by sentences like these, which I have taken more or less at random from Sir Steven Runciman's History of the Crusades: "[Queen Melisande's] action was regarded as perfectly constitutional and was endorsed by the council." "Trial by peers was an essential feature of Frankish custom." "The King ranked with his tenant-in-chief as primus inter pares, their president but not their master." ...
No sooner had Godfrey of Bouillon been elected supreme ruler of Jerusalem ... than his first thought was to give the new state a constitution. This was duly done, and the Assize of Jerusalem — "a precious monument of feudal jurisprudence," ...What were their notions, their obsessions? Faith, of course, and honor, and then: vassalage, homage, fealty, allegiance, duties and obligations, genealogies and inheritances, councils and "parlements," rights and liberties....
...the virtues of men like Saladin rose as lone pillars from a level plain. They were not, as the occasional virtues of the Crusaders were, the peaks of a mountain range. The Saracens had, in a sense, no society, no polity. Says the Marquis to the Templar in another great Crusader novel, Sir Walter Scott's The Talisman: "I will confess to you I have caught some attachment to the Eastern form of government: A pure and simple monarchy should consist but of king and subjects. Such is the simple and primitive structure — a shepherd and his flock. All this internal chain of feudal dependence is artificial and sophisticated." Well, artificial and sophisticated it may have been, but in its interstices grew liberty, law, and the modern conscience.

“I think of all Harvard men as sissies”

2009-12-30T10:51:00.001-05:00

The Yale Daily News via Pajamas Media:

The [Freshman Class Council] has decided to change the design of its shirts after the original design, which was submitted by students and voted on by the freshman class, sparked outcry from members within the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. …
The original design, which won out over five other entries, displayed an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote in the front — “I think of all Harvard men as sissies” — in bold white letters. The back of the long-sleeved, navy blue T-shirt said “WE AGREE” in capital letters, with “The Game 2009” scrawled in script underneath it.

I won't be contributing to Yale for a while, and I don't think I'd want to send my children there. Alas!

"Man, Do I Hate Holiday Travel"

2009-12-30T10:24:00.000-05:00

Via Instapundit, this Iowahawk story is funny:

Time was, a suicide mission to explode an international jumbo jet was an event full of glamor and excitement; but now it seems to be a endless series of delays, hassles, pushy jerks and third-degree testicular chemical burns.

The Low State of English Departments

2009-12-30T10:05:00.003-05:00

What I find most appalling here is not that the top 20 English departments don't have specialists in Jewish-American literature, a subject of tiny importance, but that they do have specialists in other ethnic literatures. No doubt Asian-American literature, like golf literature or science literature, is a worthy subject of study for someone or other, but to have a specialist in every department is crazy.

And of course it's bad that he uses U.S. News & World Report as his criterion for excellence, even if he tries to backtrack with caveats.

Joshua Lambert, an assistant professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University, kicked off the discussion with an analysis of the top 20 English departments (as judged by U.S. News & World Report, a source that he acknowledged was flawed, but that he used to get a group of programs at highly regarded universities). He found that at these departments, every one has at least two and typically more specialists in African-American literature. All but two have at least one scholar focused on Asian-American literature. All but five have a Latino literature expert. All but 9 have an expert in Native American literature on the faculty.
Only two of the institutions have a tenure-track faculty member whose area of expertise is American Jewish literature, he said. (The University of Michigan, where Lambert earned his doctorate, is so ahead of the pack, with seven, that someone later referred to it with admiration as a shtetl.)

Regressions and Global Warming

2009-12-29T12:11:00.005-05:00

The webpost http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/how-long/ has a nice step-by-step exposition of how to estimate whether there is a warming trend in temperature data 1975-2008, first using OLS, then using an AR-1 process, then an ARMA. The trend is significant. But the post is responding to the observation that the trend has flattened out since 2000. It doesn’t really respond to that.

To see why, note the graph above. It has artificial temperatures that rise from 1975 to 2000 and then flatten out. If you do an OLS regression, though, YEAR comes in significant with a t-statistic of 25.33 and an R2 of .95. I just did it with Excel, because I haven’t installed StarOffice or STATA on my new computer here, but I’m sure that doing a serial correlation correction wouldn’t alter the result much. Yet eyeballing it, we can see that though it is clear that temperatures have risen since 1975, it is also clear that they’ve flattened out since 2000. A linear regression just doesn’t summarize the data correctly.

Let’s do a couple more examples for fun and to drive home the point. In the second figure, the temperature levels out in 1982 but year is still highly significant, with a t-stat of 4.89, though the R2 drops to .42 (what’s the R2 with the real data? –very small, I’d expect).

Okay, now look at the third figure, in which the trend actually reverses. The t-stat is actually bigger—4.98--- and the R2 is .43.

So don’t go and use a linear model when eyeballing the data tells you it isn’t appropriate. When you have a simple regression in which only one variable explains another, use your eyes first, and software second. Do remember, though, that checking for statistical significance--- and autocorrelation and all those other things--- are useful too, so long as you start off right. Here, the question is not just “Have temperatures been rising with time over the past 30 years?” but, separately, “Have temperatures been rising with time over the past 10 years?”

The way to start addressing that with regression, by the way, is to do a regression of temperature on four variables: Constant, Year, a dummy equaling 1 if the year is after 1999 and 0 otherwise, and an interaction of that dummy with Year.

If a lot of people are interested, I could apply the serial correlation corrections to the artificial data or do this 4-variable regression on the real data, but maybe somebody else can take over now. My Excel spreadsheet is at http://rasmusen.org/t/2009/warming.xlsx, this document at http://rasmusen.org/t/2009/warming.pdf, I’m Eric Rasmusen at erasmuse@indiana.edu, and this is December 29, 2009, and I've put a pdf of this post at http://rasmusen.org/t/2009/warming.pdf.

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-24T16:06:00.006-05:00

Merry Christmas to all! (though sad, too--- our card is here)

Spending on Global Warming Research

2009-12-24T15:27:00.003-05:00

Mark Kleiman writes

Bjorn Lomborg turns out not to be a global-warming denialist. He wants to spend $100 billion a year on what he calls “green energy research and development.”... I’m waiting to hear all the Republicans and libertarians who love to cite Lomborg as a guru when he’s attacking Ky0to and its progeny endorse his proposal, and the new taxes required to pay for it. But I’m not going to hold my breath.

I'm a definite skeptic, and I certainly would not reject Lomborg's proposal without mulling it over. I think a lot of skeptics would support it, in fact--- even those who would put the probability that carbon dioxide is causing temperature growth at only 20%. It's a matter of cost and benefit. Here are some reasons:

1. $100 billion per year is small compared to the cost of the carbon-reduction proposals that have been made.

2. Whether the research is making progress or nor would be much easier to see than whether a carbon-reduction proposal is working.

3. Some of that money, I hope, would be used for seeing whether global warming is actually occurring. I know this would benefit the climatologists who have been such frauds, but if the money were spent on honest research, that would be very useful.

4. Research has a good hope of finding a way to solve the problem. Carbon-reduction proposals just slow down the growth of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (well, almost all of the proposals-- that Canadian editorial's ruthless "one-child" policy would work). Roughly, instead of the temperature rising X much by 2100, the typical leftwing proposal has it rising X much by 2120.

5. Research spending can be done unilaterally and succeed. Germany, for example, could decide to go-it-alone and spend the $100 billion, find the solution, and give it away.

Rose Friedman

2009-12-23T10:33:00.002-05:00

Somehow I hadn't realized that Rose Friedman died this fall. John Taylor has a good one-page note on her and "TV Ears". She sounds like such a fun person to know.

Latest Links on Global Warming

2009-12-22T12:16:00.000-05:00

I've decided to use this page for lots of global warming posts. I'll cut and paste it to the top of my blog every once in a while, so I can have easy access to it. The bottom items in it will be the older ones.

"A Petition I Am Thinking of Circulating." My draft ClimateGate petition for economists to sign, which has lots of ClimateGate email excerpts on the two topics of fiddling with journals and hiding data.
This 2005 post at ClimateAudit thoroughly discusses the open-data policies of the US funding agencies that the East Anglia people ignored (and the US D. of Energy condoned). It has the story of the famous Philip Jones email quote, when refusing to disclose his data: "We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it."
Dec. 18 in NatureNews, two prominent climatologists not at East Anglia, Von Storch and Allen, show their total unconcern with the unethical practices displayed in the Climategate Emails: "We welcome debate about the ethics of science prompted by the language of some of these e-mails, which, rightly or not, have created concerns about the scientific process."
This 2009 post has the story of the Kamel Siberia paper that Jones boasted of having gotten rejected. "In the case of another paper (Aufhammer et al )[the economists], obstruction has delayed publication of the paper by six years but the authors are still endeavouring to get the paper into print. This was not the case with the Kamél paper; Kamél himself had abandoned the field."
This pdf article by James Hansen is a good survey of lots of global warming issues from his warmist point of view. It shows what a fraud he is, too. Two things I note are (1) when he discusses the year-2000 mistake, he fails to point out that it was a skeptic who found it in spite of Hansen's total lack of cooperation, and (2) when he discusses the failure of temperature to rise over the past decade he says that temperature did rise, because the 11-year moving average rose. (This last is blatantly deceitful, because if temperatures are rising and then flatten, it will take 11 years before the 11-year moving average stops rising! Note, too, that 1998 was by his own admission a year that was unusually warm for reasons unrelated to CO2.) The best place to prove a man's lack of integrity is from his own writing.
December 20, 2009 A Climatology Conspiracy? By David H. Douglass and John R. Christy. On the conspiracy to slow down an article's appearance in print till the warmists could write a response (and the editor's acquiescence and apparent guarantee of acceptance).
Climatedebatedaily is a very good site that in two columns links to Warmist and Skeptic webposts, and even links to "Ripostes" and "Replies" to each webpost. It is especially useful for the Warmist column, I think--- better than RealClimate.
Wikipedia’s climate doctor: How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles December 19, 2009, Lawrence Solomon
There;s a good post by a statistician showing step by step how to do your own Hockey Stick, at
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/12/fables-of-the-reconstruction.html
I'd like to try this out myself, but I haven't yet. He even limits himself to free spreadsheet statistical software (Star OpenOffice--Excel doesn't have the tools). Any statistician could have found out what was wrong with the Hockey Stick paper, one of the most important in the field, if he'd been allowed to see the data and techniques.
EUReferendum reports on the truly remarkable number of conflicts of interest thatDr Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, has. It's about as bad as if he were a director of Exxon. The number of directorships and consultantcies he has must make him a very rich man. Pegasus Capital, Siderian Ventures, The Sustainable Future Fund Iceland, International Risk Governance Council, Asian Development Bank, GloriOil Limited,Chicago Climate Exchange, Inc. , Oil Trade Associates Singapore, Climate Change Advisory Board of Deutsche Bank. Some of these are "advisory board" positions, so maybe they aren't paid much, but it makes one wonder.
A good post on public opinion: "You can feel that most crucial of propaganda processes happening with Climategate: the reversing of the burden of proof."
Hamweather record weather events mapped over the US for last week.
RealClimate, the main Warmer blog, has been surprisingly quiet about ClimateGate. Below are their most recent updates on it. These are useful because they present the Warmer case, which essentially is "I'm a very good guy and so is Phil Jones and it's a shame people are saying bad things about him " without mentioning anything specific. There's not a sign of contrition. Don't take my word for it--- read these.
Further update: Nature’s editorial.

Further, further update: Ben Santer’s mail (click on quoted text), the Mike Hulme op-ed, and Kevin Trenberth.
"Pielke Sr. responds to NCDC’s “Talking Points” about surfacestations.org". Arguments that the US raw temperature record is of dubious value for looking at long-term trends. Very feeble response from the weather station people, it seems.
"The Climate Research Dispute over Publishing Soon and Baliunas". Response of the journal editor to complaints about his publishing a Skeptic article.
It's interesting how comments are so often better informed and wiser than the writer. This Megan McCardle post is about death threats to climatologists after ClimateGate. The comments note that the only evidence that such threats were really made comes from the same scientists who have been discredited in the scandal itself.
Fables of the Reconstruction (Or, How to Make Your Own Hockey Stick). This goes through it, supplying the temperature and proxy data and telling you how to download and use OpenOffice to do principal components analysis. I'll do this myself when I have time. I emailed the author asking why principal components was a better technique than just regression here.
From Mark Steyn:

The documents were leaked on the Internet, the CRU confirmed their authenticity, they've announced that they've thrown out all their raw data, the head guy has stepped down . . . But that's no reason not to "continue to look into the issue" for another, oh, three, four, seven months before running a story. I like this fellow's sign-off:

Slice your average environment correspondent through the middle and you're going to find a left-leaning liberal arts graduate who is utterly out of his/her depth. Their world view is being swept from underneath them and they are being shown — in ways that they do not really and have never had to understand — that the guys they thought were the goodies are in fact "at it" and that those they have spent a decade disparaging as deniers were in fact spot on.
I would find that hard to report too.
Like eight year olds that just found out there's no Santa. Kind of earth shattering and traumatic. Lied to by those you most trusted.
The Harry Read Me file is worth having a link to. Here are some excerpts. One of them: “So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the nuclear option — to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations … In other words what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad …”
In my regulation class this week, a Taiwanese student jokingly suggested that the way to solve global warming would be to kill any children born to a family that already had one child. Then this Op-Ed appeared in one of the top Canadian newspapers: "The real inconvenient truth: The whole world needs to adopt China's one-child policy"
Megan McCardle very gently brings up the Darwin data fraud and politely asks if there's some reason it's not as bad as it looks. She hopes the warmist blog RealClimate will say something about it. I've been checking that site regularly, and they seem to have adopted the strategy of saying very little about ClimateGate and related scandals, probably because they can't give good answers and they don't want to even give their readers access to any details that might upset their views.
Look at the comments on this Boston Globe blog in which Harvard Prof. McCarthy tries to dismiss ClimateGate. The amount of scorn heaped on the Globe is amazing.
Bellamy: Twenty-Eight Years on TV, Then Blackballed for Challenging AGW
Global Warming US Cities Getting Warmer: This is a You-Tube video a geneticist made with his son showing how only the urban temperatures in the US are going up, not rural stations. "A comparison of GISS data for the last 111 years show US cities getting warmer but rural sites are not increasing in temperature at all. Urban Heat Islands may be the only areas warming." The emperor really does have no clothes. I've wondered about that myself, but I thought people in the field had surely looked at something so simple.
Climate Scientist to Revkin: "we can no longer trust you" to carry water for us. Another incredible email leak. A well-known U. of Illinois scientist condemns a NY Times liberal writer for making light of global warming and threatens to cut off his sources. These people have no shame, and no sense of humor either.
It is worth keeping in mind that maybe people who say they don't believe in absolute truth and who believe that the most important things for scientists to do is to help people, not to advance science, actually mean what they say, in which case they believe that a scientist has a duty to lie about his results if he thinks that will advance social justice. And if they believe that, they'll do it.
Nature has an editorial belitting the importance of ClimateGate and making misstatemetns such as that Antarctic sea ice is diminishing. Read it, and think less of that journal.
A good Levitt-Dubner comment on why anything happening with glaciers is unrelated to global warming (for example-- where glaciers are melting, temperatures aren't rising!)

Affirmative Action and Incompetent Doctors

2009-12-22T09:53:00.002-05:00

Affirmative action kills. I just came across the New York Times obituary for Patrick Chavis, one of the five medical students whose race gave them admission over Bakke in the famous case.

In 1996, Senator Edward M. Kennedy called him a "perfect example" of how affirmative action worked. "... The University of California at Davis has no records of what the four blacks admitted with Dr. Chavis are doing, a spokeswoman, Julia Ann Easley, said. By 1996, Dr. Chavis was using liposuction to help women lose weight after giving birth. He was accused of mistreating eight liposuction patients, one of whom died. In 1998, the Medical Board of California revoked his license for "gross negligence, incompetence and repeated negligent acts."
His professional difficulties began in 1993, at Long Beach Memorial Hospital, when he was accused of mishandling a delivery, and the hospital began monitoring him.
He sued, charging racism. In a jury trial, he won $1.1 million in damages, but a judge overturned the verdict. By 1997, he said he had delivered 10,000 children and performed thousands of abortions. About that time, he added liposuction to his practice. His personal and professional life then took a further downturn. In 1997, The Associated Press found in court records that he had been sued 21 times for malpractice and had settled some suits with no admission of guilt.
He declared bankruptcy and went through the second of two divorces. In 1997, his license was suspended, for not paying child support, but he continued to practice. The medical board used that as one of more than 90 counts in revoking his license the next year...

Updating Blog Posts

2009-12-21T11:48:00.003-05:00

Here's features I would like for my blog:

A way for commenters to be emailed future comments on a thread. Volokh Conspiracy has that.
A way to make sure that a particular post is "sticky" and stays as the first or the second or the n'th post appearing. VC has something like that too.
A way for any post that I update to move from whatever date location it is in to the top of the list, with a note as to its original and new date.

Aspirin as First Aid for Heart Attacks

2009-12-20T10:03:00.003-05:00

I was talking with Pastor Bayly the other day and asked him why he had a pillbox on his keychain. He told me that if you have a heart attack, you should immediately chew up two aspirin. I googled and found that that's true (though it seems one aspirin is probably enough). It makes sense-- aspirin reduces clotting, which is why it bothers some people's stomachs. I saw one comment which pointed out that you should also tell the 911 operator that you took the aspirin, so the ambulance people don't give you more (via a suppository if you are unconscious, say) and you get too much.

Note, too, that if you have aspirin on hand you can help out the improvident heart attacked who neglected to bring theirs. One more reason, till you get round to buying your keychain pillbox, to attend Pastor Bayly's sermons.

The Just Price

2009-12-19T15:56:00.000-05:00

Suppose I am the only person who can sell a widget to John Doe. It costs me $10 to sell it to him, including the cost of my time and a standard profit rate. He would pay up to $30 for it, if he had to. What price am I justified in charging, if I can make a take-it-or-leave-it offer?

Note that I am leaving John Doe better off than if he never met me even if I charge him $29.

Applying Time Series Econometrics to Temperature and Carbon Dioxide

2009-12-17T18:53:00.002-05:00

For an economist, what I suggest below is obvious, but I wonder if anybody has done it.

Does the world temperature rise over time? Check the statistical significance of a time trend.
Next, check for serial correlation, and re-check for whether there is a time trend.
Now regress temperature on carbon dioxide levels. Is there a significant relationship?
Now add a time trend for 1950-2009. Does it explain temperature better than carbon dioxide?
Now start applying some time series econometrics. I don't know that stuff really. But what we'd want to do is to detrend the variables and include lagged values.

Eyeballing the data, it's hard for me to believe there's a significant relationship. The temperature is highly variable from year to year, and the amount of average increase 1970-2000 is tiny compared to year-to-year variation. Once we allow even for first-order autocorrelation, finding an effect would be tough.

As I said, to an economist this is the obvious way to proceed. But has anybody done it? Now that we are finding out how poorly constructed the temperature series are, we'd better ask about all kinds of things.

The Direct and Indirect Implications of the ClimateGate Emails

2009-12-17T11:16:00.003-05:00

I was just reading a post and comments by a reputable statistics blogger who seems blind to the implications of ClimateGate. My sense is that he hasn't really looked into it much--- he doesn't seem to realize that the Medieval Warm Period's existence has important implications, for example. My comment:

It is true that only a few climatologists are implicated in the appalling emails about concealing data and pressuring journals. But just as CO2 is the just the direct driver for warming and the real action comes from indirect effects, we need to look at a second layer: the response of other climatologists.

In my field, economics, if it were revealed that top people in the field had sent emails like this, they would be repudiated by the rest of us. I have had my PhD for 25 years and I've never heard of anything like this. There's sloppy work and contrived results, but we don't need to use FOIA to get people's data.

But in climatology, where's the condemnation? The response seems to be, "Oh, this kind of things is just how scientists talk in private," and "Well, other scientists have reached much the same results, so this isn't really misleading," or "How dare someone leak private emails!". I don't trust *anyone* in a field that responds like that. If they say this is humdrum behavior, we can assume they do it themselves, or are so intimidated that they don't dare publish papers contrary to what the East Anglia people like to see.

Attitudes towards Murderers

2009-12-16T15:11:00.003-05:00

From the December 7 HT (I need to update this to add the newspaper comments, which is what's really the point):

Blade Reed, 14, sentenced to 30 years in home invasion, attack"
Physical and sexual abuse as a toddler followed by emotional trauma, foster care placements and then adoption into a dysfunctional family marked Blade Reed’s first 14 years.
The teen will now spend the next 14 behind bars for his part in a brutal attack against elderly neighbors last year that left 84-year- old Richard “Dude” Voland dead and his wife of almost six decades shot and stabbed. A judge sentenced him today to 30 years in jail, of which he will serve half; he gets credit for nine months spent in jail since his arrest. ...

The Reed brothers rode their bicycles a mile or so to the Volands’ Helmsburg home in the early morning hours of Nov. 15, 2008, intending to steal beer. The two took along a .25 caliber handgun stolen from another neighbor. They knocked on the door and asked to use the phone. When Bennie Reed pointed his gun at Dude Voland and said “no one needs to get hurt,” the 50-year National Rifle Association member drew his own weapon. Reed tried to knock it from the man’s hand, and a bullet fired from the gun hit him in the arm. The teen then fired back, and a bullet from the stolen gun struck the man in the head.
Bennie Reed then shot Mary Voland in the stomach with her husband’s handgun after she came out of the bedroom and provided medical care to her husband and also to Reed.
As the boys were leaving the house, without beer and wearing bloody clothes, Bennie Reed told his brother to cut the woman’s throat since she had witnessed her husband’s shooting. The then-13-year-old admitted he sawed back and forth on the woman’s neck with a kitchen knife.
This afternoon, he pleaded guilty to aggravated battery and robbery resulting in serious injury. ...
During a previous hearing back in November, Brown Circuit Judge Judith Stewart determined that despite an agreement between the prosecutor and defense attorney that Blade Reed should spend the time until his 18th birthday not in prison but at the Indiana School for Boys with other offenders his age, the law does not allow that placement. So Reed will be incarcerated with other youthful violent offenders in a special housing unit at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Carlisle.
Brown County Prosecutor Jim Oliver said justice was served. “This plea was justice. He committed an adult crime and he has received adult consequences,” Oliver said in a written statement. “Blade Reed pled guilty to what he agreed with his brother to do that night, which was to commit an armed robbery. He received the maximum disposition for his attack on Mrs. Voland.”
Cited among aggravating circumstances at the sentencing hearing was the recognition that the boys played on Richard Voland’s kindness to gain entry to his home that night. Oliver listed three mitigating circumstances: the boy’s age, that he didn’t intend for anyone to get hurt and his accepting responsibility for his actions....

This is the front line of the Culture Wars. We have Tim Bayly and we have Dawn Johnsen, to name two of our citizens with national (if specialized) reputations. Massachusetts and Idaho are safe territory for each side, but not Bloomington.

A joke:

Two social workers were walking through a rough part of the town in the evening. They heard moans and muted cries for help from a back lane. Upon investigation, they found a semi-conscious man in a pool of blood."Help me-I've been mugged and viciously beaten" he pleaded. The two social workers turned and walked away. One remarked to her colleague:"You know the person that did this really needs help".

Latest Links on Global Warming

2009-12-16T10:47:00.003-05:00

"A Petition I Am Thinking of Circulating." My draft ClimateGate petition for economists to sign, which has lots of ClimateGate email excerpts on the two topics of fiddling with journals and hiding data.
Climatedebatedaily is a very good site that in two columns links to Warmist and Skeptic webposts, and even links to "Ripostes" and "Replies" to each webpost. It is especially useful for the Warmist column, I think--- better than RealClimate.
Wikipedia’s climate doctor: How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles December 19, 2009, Lawrence Solomon
There;s a good post by a statistician showing step by step how to do your own Hockey Stick, at
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/12/fables-of-the-reconstruction.html
I'd like to try this out myself, but I haven't yet. He even limits himself to free spreadsheet statistical software (Star OpenOffice--Excel doesn't have the tools). Any statistician could have found out what was wrong with the Hockey Stick paper, one of the most important in the field, if he'd been allowed to see the data and techniques.
EUReferendum reports on the truly remarkable number of conflicts of interest thatDr Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, has. It's about as bad as if he were a director of Exxon. The number of directorships and consultantcies he has must make him a very rich man. Pegasus Capital, Siderian Ventures, The Sustainable Future Fund Iceland, International Risk Governance Council, Asian Development Bank, GloriOil Limited,Chicago Climate Exchange, Inc. , Oil Trade Associates Singapore, Climate Change Advisory Board of Deutsche Bank. Some of these are "advisory board" positions, so maybe they aren't paid much, but it makes one wonder.
A good post on public opinion: "You can feel that most crucial of propaganda processes happening with Climategate: the reversing of the burden of proof."
Hamweather record weather events mapped over the US for last week.
RealClimate, the main Warmer blog, has been surprisingly quiet about ClimateGate. Below are their most recent updates on it. These are useful because they present the Warmer case, which essentially is "I'm a very good guy and so is Phil Jones and it's a shame people are saying bad things about him " without mentioning anything specific. There's not a sign of contrition. Don't take my word for it--- read these.
Further update: Nature’s editorial.

Further, further update: Ben Santer’s mail (click on quoted text), the Mike Hulme op-ed, and Kevin Trenberth.
"Pielke Sr. responds to NCDC’s “Talking Points” about surfacestations.org". Arguments that the US raw temperature record is of dubious value for looking at long-term trends. Very feeble response from the weather station people, it seems.
"The Climate Research Dispute over Publishing Soon and Baliunas". Response of the journal editor to complaints about his publishing a Skeptic article.
It's interesting how comments are so often better informed and wiser than the writer. This Megan McCardle post is about death threats to climatologists after ClimateGate. The comments note that the only evidence that such threats were really made comes from the same scientists who have been discredited in the scandal itself.
Fables of the Reconstruction (Or, How to Make Your Own Hockey Stick). This goes through it, supplying the temperature and proxy data and telling you how to download and use OpenOffice to do principal components analysis. I'll do this myself when I have time. I emailed the author asking why principal components was a better technique than just regression here.
From Mark Steyn:

The documents were leaked on the Internet, the CRU confirmed their authenticity, they've announced that they've thrown out all their raw data, the head guy has stepped down . . . But that's no reason not to "continue to look into the issue" for another, oh, three, four, seven months before running a story. I like this fellow's sign-off:

Slice your average environment correspondent through the middle and you're going to find a left-leaning liberal arts graduate who is utterly out of his/her depth. Their world view is being swept from underneath them and they are being shown — in ways that they do not really and have never had to understand — that the guys they thought were the goodies are in fact "at it" and that those they have spent a decade disparaging as deniers were in fact spot on.
I would find that hard to report too.
Like eight year olds that just found out there's no Santa. Kind of earth shattering and traumatic. Lied to by those you most trusted.
The Harry Read Me file is worth having a link to. Here are some excerpts. One of them: “So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the nuclear option — to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations … In other words what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad …”
In my regulation class this week, a Taiwanese student jokingly suggested that the way to solve global warming would be to kill any children born to a family that already had one child. Then this Op-Ed appeared in one of the top Canadian newspapers: "The real inconvenient truth: The whole world needs to adopt China's one-child policy"
Megan McCardle very gently brings up the Darwin data fraud and politely asks if there's some reason it's not as bad as it looks. She hopes the warmist blog RealClimate will say something about it. I've been checking that site regularly, and they seem to have adopted the strategy of saying very little about ClimateGate and related scandals, probably because they can't give good answers and they don't want to even give their readers access to any details that might upset their views.
Look at the comments on this Boston Globe blog in which Harvard Prof. McCarthy tries to dismiss ClimateGate. The amount of scorn heaped on the Globe is amazing.
Bellamy: Twenty-Eight Years on TV, Then Blackballed for Challenging AGW
Global Warming US Cities Getting Warmer: This is a You-Tube video a geneticist made with his son showing how only the urban temperatures in the US are going up, not rural stations. "A comparison of GISS data for the last 111 years show US cities getting warmer but rural sites are not increasing in temperature at all. Urban Heat Islands may be the only areas warming." The emperor really does have no clothes. I've wondered about that myself, but I thought people in the field had surely looked at something so simple.
Climate Scientist to Revkin: "we can no longer trust you" to carry water for us. Another incredible email leak. A well-known U. of Illinois scientist condemns a NY Times liberal writer for making light of global warming and threatens to cut off his sources. These people have no shame, and no sense of humor either.
It is worth keeping in mind that maybe people who say they don't believe in absolute truth and who believe that the most important things for scientists to do is to help people, not to advance science, actually mean what they say, in which case they believe that a scientist has a duty to lie about his results if he thinks that will advance social justice. And if they believe that, they'll do it.
Nature has an editorial belitting the importance of ClimateGate and making misstatemetns such as that Antarctic sea ice is diminishing. Read it, and think less of that journal.
A good Levitt-Dubner comment on why anything happening with glaciers is unrelated to global warming (for example-- where glaciers are melting, temperatures aren't rising!)

Numerology, Global Warming, Moral Relativists, Truth Relativists, and Leo Strauss

2009-12-14T10:22:00.003-05:00

From Bryan Caplan:

If you think Rothbard was harsh on Hayek in Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, here's what he has to say about Leo Strauss's Thoughts on Machiavelli:
First, something should be said about the manner, the texture, the methodology of this book, which is really so absurd as to be almost incredible. It is based on the assumption, explicitly made at some points, that Machiavelli was a true Devil-figure, i.e., that he was evil, and that within this framework, he was all-wise, all-seeing, omniscient, etc... Taking his two books The Prince and The Discourses together, the result is that whenever Machiavelli contradicts himself in any way or omits something of note or puts in a particularly weak (to Strauss) argument or makes an error, Strauss immediately and persistently assumes that this simply couldn't be and that there must be some deep, twisted, hidden meaning to all this.
Rothbard then savages the famed Straussian method of interpretation:...
First, Strauss's flight into numerology. On page 48, he remarks on what is to him the strange and wondrous fact that Machiavelli's Discourses have 142 chapters, the same number of chapters of Livy's History. To me, this is not at all surprising, since the Discourses are proclaimed to be a commentary on Livy's History. But this is enough for Strauss. This "strange fact" he says, "makes one wonder whether the number of chapters in The Prince is not also significant."... On and on we go, until finally, on page 52, Strauss makes his crazy numerology explicit: "This is not the place to give further examples of Machiavelli's use of the number 26, or more precisely, of 13 and multiples of 13..." And off we go further expecting at any moment to be introduced solemnly to the Mysteries of the Great Pyramid and the manacle of Dr. Fu Manchu.

A commentor says

I'll try and briefly say something about Strauss's manner of interpretation. Strauss was informed by two traditions of interpretation--the Greek and the Talmudic. If he sometimes went overboard in his detective work (and I won't deny he did), it is well to remember that he viewed himself as restoring to our historical and philosophical memory a "forgotten kind of writing" that had been forgotten because modern assumptions (or presumptions) had themselves been taken overboard.

My comment there is

Applying numerology to Machiavelli sounds wrong,but that he writes in units of 13 is an interesting point. What is his motive? Maybe just clarity (i.e., 13 is the optimal number of sections for any book), but that's interesting too, and a sign that he was very careful about his writing.

I like the earlier commentor's point about Strauss noting that there is an older way of writing that we have forgotten. After all, a lot of people *did* believe in numerology. Thus, with medieval Christian and Jewish writers, we ought to pay attention to their chapter numbers, something I otherwise would ignore. If a scholar says something is important in document A (the mystical signfiicance of numbers, the importance of stretching the truth to persuade the public about global warming, the subjective nature of all knowledge), we should use that in thinking about what he writes in document B.

Yawneroos and Obammyboppers

2009-12-13T19:59:00.004-05:00

Mark Steyn uses the good word Yawneroo here.

Nonetheless, Rich Lowry does "President" van Rompuy a grave injustice. The boringness is, as the computer chappies say, not a bug but a feature. Like everything in Europe, the "presidency" was a backroom stitch-up, and neither the French nor the Germans wanted a charismatic glamorpuss in the gig, stealing their respective thunders. A Belgian nonentity was just what they were looking for. Being a nondescript yawneroo was the minimum entry qualification....
The squealing Obammyboppers of the media seem to have gotten more muted since those inaugural specials hit the newsstands back in late January....
The usual trick is to position their man as the uniquely insightful leader, pitching his tent between two extremes no sane person has ever believed:
"There are those who say there is no evil in the world. There are others who argue that pink fluffy bunnies are the spawn of Satan and conspiring to overthrow civilization. Let me be clear: I believe people of goodwill on all sides can find common ground between the absurdly implausible caricatures I attribute to them on a daily basis. We must begin by finding the courage to acknowledge the hard truth that I am living testimony to the power of nuance to triumph over hard truth and come to the end of the sentence on a note of sonorous, polysyllabic if somewhat hollow uplift. Pause for applause."

The news this week that the well-connected Democrat pollster, Mark Penn, received $6 million of "stimulus" money to "preserve" three jobs in his public relations firm to work on a promotional campaign for the switch from analog to digital TV is a perfect snapshot of Big Government. In the great sucking maw of the federal treasury, $6 million isn't even a rounding error. But it comes from real people – from you and anybody you know who still makes the mistake of working for a living; and, if it had been left in your pockets, you'd have spent it in the real world, at a local business or in expanding your own, and maybe some way down the road it would have created some genuine jobs. Instead, it got funneled to a Democrat pitchman to preserve three nonjobs on a phony quasi-governmental PR campaign. Big Government does that every minute of the day.

Death Threats

2009-12-13T10:06:00.007-05:00

I saw a Guardian article saying that climatologists had been receiving death threats after ClimateGate and that the FBI and British police are investigating. Megan McCardle's post on this has a lot of good comments. The problem is that when people who have been exposed as cheats who refused to reveal the evidence they claimed to have for their strong scientific assertions say they are being sent death threats but refuse to reveal the evidence they claim to have for being threatened, we ought to be a little skeptical. McCardle comments said:

[1] "I doubt the FBI comments on pending investigations." 

And you'd be right. The don't comment on actual investigations that are under way. That's the point. There is no FBI investigation under way concerning email threats to US climate scientists because there haven't been any.

If you doubt it, I suggest you call the telephone number listed here:

(202) 278-3519

If you are credentialed journalist, the Public Affairs spokesman for the Washington Field Office of the FBI will gladly confirm for you that this Guardian story is a hoax.

Takes five minutes to do this simple legwork.

[2] Yep! If they really wanted people to see these things they could just post emails, with ALL the header info on the web. Everyone, including authorities, would know who sent them. Amazing how that never seems to happen. Instead, it's "trust us".

I googled and found an example of some earlier threats to Skeptics instead of Warmists. From Scientists threatened for 'climate denial' The Telegraph, 11 Mar 2007:

Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five deaths threats by email since raising concerns about the degree to which man was affecting climate change.
One of the emails warned that, if he continued to speak out, he would not live to see further global warming.

Compare with the 2009 situation. "Climate scientists receive death threats," Eleanor Hall interview, Australia, December 9, 2009:

ELEANOR HALL:Now to those death threats against climate scientists at the centre of the East Anglia University email affair. The death threats are now being investigated by the FBI in the US and the British police.
Dr Tom Wigley is a former director of the Climatic Research Unit at the East Anglia University and has had several of his emails used by climate change sceptics to suggest that he and his fellow climate scientists have been distorting data and cooking the books to fabricate evidence of global warming....
TOM WIGLEY: Well there've been a number of abusive and threatening emails that have been sent to a number of the protagonists here, and I'm not going to mention the names of the individuals but it does include me, and those things are very worrying.
I've been asked not to say anything about the details of these threats but I can at least say that the FBI in the USA and the police in England are taking these things seriously and are investigating the sources of the threatening emails as well as they can....
ELEANOR HALL: I understand that you can't go into detail about who you think might be behind this but can you tell me a little bit more about your reaction? I mean do you now feel frightened for your life?
TOM WIGLEY: You know, I'm in a rather fortunate position that I spend half my time in Australia and half my time in the United States. I mean one of the emails to me said: "we know where you live". Well I'm not really sure whether they do know where I live.
In that sense I'm not particularly worried but the other emails that some people have received have been rather more pointed and detailed and, as I said, I mean I wish I could tell you more but I just can't say any more at the moment so...

From my reading of the ClimateGate emails, I doubt that Dr. Wigley would send himself fake death threats, but other people might, and it's interesting that the journalists just take his word for it, without even seeing copies of the threats. Note, too, the mention of police reaction. Do the police care about Skeptics being threatened too?

ClimateGate-- Best Links, with Description

2009-12-13T09:54:00.005-05:00

"A Petition I Am Thinking of Circulating." My draft ClimateGate petition for economists to sign, which has lots of ClimateGate email excerpts on the two topics of fiddling with journals and hiding data.
EUReferendum reports on the truly remarkable number of conflicts of interest thatDr Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, has. It's about as bad as if he were a director of Exxon. The number of directorships and consultantcies he has must make him a very rich man. Pegasus Capital, Siderian Ventures, The Sustainable Future Fund Iceland, International Risk Governance Council, Asian Development Bank, GloriOil Limited,Chicago Climate Exchange, Inc. , Oil Trade Associates Singapore, Climate Change Advisory Board of Deutsche Bank. Some of these are "advisory board" positions, so maybe they aren't paid much, but it makes one wonder.
A good post on public opinion: "You can feel that most crucial of propaganda processes happening with Climategate: the reversing of the burden of proof."
Hamweather record weather events mapped over the US for last week.
RealClimate, the main Warmer blog, has been surprisingly quiet about ClimateGate. Below are their most recent updates on it. These are useful because they present the Warmer case, which essentially is "I'm a very good guy and so is Phil Jones and it's a shame people are saying bad things about him " without mentioning anything specific. There's not a sign of contrition. Don't take my word for it--- read these.
Further update: Nature’s editorial.

Further, further update: Ben Santer’s mail (click on quoted text), the Mike Hulme op-ed, and Kevin Trenberth.
"Pielke Sr. responds to NCDC’s “Talking Points” about surfacestations.org". Arguments that the US raw temperature record is of dubious value for looking at long-term trends. Very feeble response from the weather station people, it seems.
"The Climate Research Dispute over Publishing Soon and Baliunas". Response of the journal editor to complaints about his publishing a Skeptic article.
It's interesting how comments are so often better informed and wiser than the writer. This Megan McCardle post is about death threats to climatologists after ClimateGate. The comments note that the only evidence that such threats were really made comes from the same scientists who have been discredited in the scandal itself.
Fables of the Reconstruction (Or, How to Make Your Own Hockey Stick). This goes through it, supplying the temperature and proxy data and telling you how to download and use OpenOffice to do principal components analysis. I'll do this myself when I have time. I emailed the author asking why principal components was a better technique than just regression here.
From Mark Steyn:

The documents were leaked on the Internet, the CRU confirmed their authenticity, they've announced that they've thrown out all their raw data, the head guy has stepped down . . . But that's no reason not to "continue to look into the issue" for another, oh, three, four, seven months before running a story. I like this fellow's sign-off:

Slice your average environment correspondent through the middle and you're going to find a left-leaning liberal arts graduate who is utterly out of his/her depth. Their world view is being swept from underneath them and they are being shown — in ways that they do not really and have never had to understand — that the guys they thought were the goodies are in fact "at it" and that those they have spent a decade disparaging as deniers were in fact spot on.
I would find that hard to report too.
Like eight year olds that just found out there's no Santa. Kind of earth shattering and traumatic. Lied to by those you most trusted.
The Harry Read Me file is worth having a link to. Here are some excerpts. One of them: “So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the nuclear option — to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations … In other words what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad …”
In my regulation class this week, a Taiwanese student jokingly suggested that the way to solve global warming would be to kill any children born to a family that already had one child. Then this Op-Ed appeared in one of the top Canadian newspapers: "The real inconvenient truth: The whole world needs to adopt China's one-child policy"
Megan McCardle very gently brings up the Darwin data fraud and politely asks if there's some reason it's not as bad as it looks. She hopes the warmist blog RealClimate will say something about it. I've been checking that site regularly, and they seem to have adopted the strategy of saying very little about ClimateGate and related scandals, probably because they can't give good answers and they don't want to even give their readers access to any details that might upset their views.
Look at the comments on this Boston Globe blog in which Harvard Prof. McCarthy tries to dismiss ClimateGate. The amount of scorn heaped on the Globe is amazing.
Bellamy: Twenty-Eight Years on TV, Then Blackballed for Challenging AGW
Global Warming US Cities Getting Warmer: This is a You-Tube video a geneticist made with his son showing how only the urban temperatures in the US are going up, not rural stations. "A comparison of GISS data for the last 111 years show US cities getting warmer but rural sites are not increasing in temperature at all. Urban Heat Islands may be the only areas warming." The emperor really does have no clothes. I've wondered about that myself, but I thought people in the field had surely looked at something so simple.
Climate Scientist to Revkin: "we can no longer trust you" to carry water for us. Another incredible email leak. A well-known U. of Illinois scientist condemns a NY Times liberal writer for making light of global warming and threatens to cut off his sources. These people have no shame, and no sense of humor either.
It is worth keeping in mind that maybe people who say they don't believe in absolute truth and who believe that the most important things for scientists to do is to help people, not to advance science, actually mean what they say, in which case they believe that a scientist has a duty to lie about his results if he thinks that will advance social justice. And if they believe that, they'll do it.
Nature has an editorial belitting the importance of ClimateGate and making misstatemetns such as that Antarctic sea ice is diminishing. Read it, and think less of that journal.
A good Levitt-Dubner comment on why anything happening with glaciers is unrelated to global warming (for example-- where glaciers are melting, temperatures aren't rising!)

A Petition I Am Thinking of Circulating

2009-12-12T23:35:00.019-05:00

I'm not sure how to get this going, but I'd like to have lots of economists sign a petition on ClimateGate. We scholars are in danger of losing a lot of our moral capital because of our tolerance of bad behavior, and I think we'd end up with the public thinking we're much less scholarly than we really are--- at least we in economics, and, I hope, every field but climatology.

I'm not going to the American Economic Association meeting in Atlanta in January, but maybe I'll find somebody who is who is willing to sit in a hotel lobby with a petition for people to sign. Volunteers, and comments on the draft below, are welcome, especially comments from anyone who is a strong believer in both global warming and good scholarly practices.

In the November 2009 "ClimateGate" emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia certain climatologists casually discuss suppressing other people's research and thwarting efforts to obtain the data and computer code used in published articles. This has hurt the reputation not only of those scholars but of climatology, science, and peer-reviewed scholarship generally. Unless scholars speak out, there is a danger that the public will believe bad behavior is routine in every field of research. The danger is all the greater because even some scholars not implicated have defended the emails as routine behavior or as unimportant.

We, the undersigned Ph.D. economists, wish to inform the public that we condemn those practices. Any economist writing the ClimateGate emails that we quote below would immediately lose the respect of his colleagues, regardless of their political views. We are making no statement about climate change science or policy when we say this. Few if any of we who sign have expertise in the science of global warming. Economists do have much to say about the costs and benefits of various climate policies, and our debates can be found elsewhere. What matters here is that in economics, requests for one's data and computer code are considered compliments to the importance of one's work and are routinely satisfied, whether the other scholar is trying to extend the results or refute them.

Authors are expected to make replication convenient even on controversial topics. John Lott's work on gun control and John Donohue and Steven Levitt's on abortion provide good examples of authors providing data to people they knew were seeking to find flaws in their work. The American Economic Review requires data to be made conveniently available unless special circumstances require confidentiality. The policy at http://www.aeaweb.org/aer/data.php, says:

"All data used in analysis must be clearly and precisely documented.
All data used in analysis must be made available to any researcher for purposes of replication. See Data Availability Policy.
Any requests for an exemption from the data availability policy must be made in the cover letter when the paper is first submitted. "

We are making a statement about economics, not climatology. We do not know whether the ClimateGate practices are common in that field or not, or even whether some extenuating circumstances exist. Rather, we wish to say that we find the specific emails listed on the attached page appalling and shameful.

Signatures in alphabetical order (with affiliations for identification only)

Jane Doe (Ministry of Governmental Affairs, Wherisitstan)
John Doe (Big Research Institute)
John Smith (Random University)

[put signatures in two or three columns]

[NEWPAGE]

The ClimateGate emails, available in searchable form at http://www.climate-gate.org, include the following statements. Boldfacing is added to aid the reader in skimming them.

[January 20, 2005] Proving bad behavior here is very difficult. If you think that Saiers [the editor of Geophysical Research Letters] is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU [American Geophysical Union] channels to get him ousted. Even this would be difficult.

[January 21, 2005] Yeah, basically this is just a heads up to people that something might be up here. What a shame that would be. It's one thing to lose "Climate Research". We can't afford to lose GRL [Geophysical Research Letters]. I think it would be useful if people begin to record their experiences w/ both Saiers [the GRL biogeosciences editor] and potentially Mackwell (I don't know him--he would seem to be complicit w/ what is going on here).

If there is a clear body of evidence that something is amiss, it could be taken through the proper channels. I don't that the entire AGU [American Geophysical Union] hierarchy has yet been compromised!

[November 15, 2005] I suspect that this is the first in a line of attacks (I'm sure Tom C is next in line) that will ultimately get "published" one way or another. The GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership there, [Prof. Saiers was removed from handling sumbissions responding to the MM paper, and one response he'd rejected was unrejected] but these guys always have "Climate Research" and "Energy and Environment", and will go there if necessary.

FOOTNOTE--LINK TO ANOTHER FILE:

Prof. Saiers says
"This paper caused a bit of a stir and because I oversaw the peer review of this paper, I assume that Wigley inferred (incorrectly) that I was a climate-change skeptic. I stepped down as GRL editor at the end of my three-year term, long after the excitement over the McIntyre and McKitrick paper had passed. My departure had nothing to do with attempts by Wigley or anyone else to have me sacked." His vitae says: "2004 - 2006 Hydrology/Biogeosciences Editor, Geophysical Research Letters".
Saiers indeed remained as Hydrology/Biogeosciences Editor but:
"It was announced that the editor in chief of Geophysical Research Letters, Jay Famiglietti, had taken over the file for the McIntyre paper and its responses. This was justified he claimed, because of the high number of responses - four - that the McIntyre paper had received. That two of those responses had been rejected and were no longer in play was not mentioned. The reason for the change quickly became apparent though when, at the end of September, the rejected response from David Ritson turned out not only to have been re-submitted but had also been accepted for publication. This was another clear breach of the journal's rules, which required that an article's author should be able to comment on responses before they were accepted. Famiglietti however refused to make any on-the-record comments about why he behaved as he did."

END OF FOOTNOTE
This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the "peer-reviewed literature". Obviously, they found a solution to that--take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering "Climate Research" as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board...

I think the skeptics will use this paper to their own ends and it will set paleo back a number of years if it goes unchallenged. I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor. A CRU person is on the editorial board, but papers get dealt with by the editor assigned by Hans von Storch.

Tim Osborn has just come across this. Best to ignore probably, so don't let it spoil your day. I've not looked at it yet. It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I've had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice!

I have learned one thing. This is that the reviewer who said they were too busy was Ray. I have been saying this to loads of papers recently (something Tom(w) can vouch for). It is clear from the differences between CR and the ERE piece that the other 4 reviewers did not say much, so a negative review was likely to be partly ignored, and the article would still have come out. I say this as this might come out if things get nasty. De Freitas will not say to Hans von Storch or to Clare Goodess who the 4 reviewers were. I believe his paleoclimatologist is likely to be Anthony Fowler, who does dendro at Auckland.

Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC [the RealClimate.org website] any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through, and we’ll be very careful to answer any questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other hand, you might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d like us to include.

Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who'll say we must adhere to it!

I’ve attached a cleaned-up and commented version of the matlab code that I wrote for doing the Mann and Jones (2003) composites. I did this knowing that Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future, so best to clean up the code and provide to some of my close colleagues in case they want to test it, etc. Please feel free to use this code for your own internal purposes, but don’t pass it along where it may get into the hands of the wrong people.

I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!

Options appear to be:
1. Send them the data.
2. Send them a subset removing station data from some of the countries who made us pay in the normals papers of Hulme et al. (1990s) and also any number that David can remember. This should also omit some other countries like (Australia, NZ, Canada, Antarctica). Also could extract some of the sources that Anders added in (31-38 source codes in J&M 2003). Also should remove many of the early stations that we coded up in the 1980s.
3. Send them the raw data as is, by reconstructing it from GHCN. How could this be done? Replace all stations where the WMO ID agrees with what is in GHCN. This would be the raw data, but it would annoy them.

The next puzzle is why Wei-Chyung didn't make the hard copy information available. Either it does not exist, or he thought it was too much trouble to access and copy. My guess is that it does not exist -- if it did then why was it not in the DOE report? In support of this, it seems that there are other papers from 1991 and 1997 that show that the data do not exist. What are these papers? Do they really show this?

Now my views. (1) I have always thought W-C W was a rather sloppy scientist. I therefore would not be surprised if he screwed up here. But ITEM X is in both the W-C W and Jones et al. papers -- so where does it come from first? Were you taking W-C W on trust?

(2) It also seems to me that the University at Albany has screwed up. To accept a complaint from Keenan and not refer directly to the complaint and the complainant in its report really is asking for trouble.

(3) At the very start it seems this could have been easily dispatched. ITEM X really should have been ...

"Where possible, stations were chosen on the basis of station histories and/or local knowledge: selected stations have relatively few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location, or observation times"

... -----

I realise that Keenan is just a trouble maker and out to waste time, so I apologize for continuing to waste your time on this, Phil. However, I *am* concerned because all this happened under my watch as Director of CRU and, although this is unlikely, the buck eventually should stop with me.

PS to Gavin - been following (sporadically) the CA stuff about the GISS data and release of the code etc by Jim. May take some of the pressure of you soon, by releasing a list of the stations we use - just a list, no code and no data. Have agreed to under the FOIA here in the UK.

The Climate Research Dispute over Publishing Soon and Baliunas

2009-12-12T13:16:00.004-05:00

From the very good, searchable, ClimateGate document site www.climategate.com comes some emails I haven't seen discussed anywhere. The bottom email is from an editor criticized for publishing Soon and Baliunas by the CRU crowd; the top email is CRU man Dr. Jones's reaction.

Dear All,
Keith and I have discussed the email below. I don't want to start a discussion of
it and I
don't want you sending it around to anyone else, but it serves as a warning as to where
the debate might go should the EOS piece come out.
I think it might help Tom (W) if you are still going to write a direct response to
CR. Some of
de Freitas' views are interesting/novel/off the wall to say the least. I am glad that
he doesn't
consider himself a paleoclimatologist - the statement about the LIA having the lowest
temperatures since the LGM. The paleo people he's talked to didn't seem to mention the
YD,
8.2K or the 4.2/3K events - only the Holocene Optimum. There are also some snipes at
CRU and our funding, but we're ignoring these here. Also Mike comes in for some stick,
so stay
cool Mike - you're a married man now !
So let's keep this amongst ourselves .
I have learned one thing. This is that the reviewer who said they were too busy was
Ray.
I have been saying this to loads of papers recently (something Tom(w) can vouch for).
It is
clear from the differences between CR and the ERE piece that the other 4 reviewers did
not say much, so a negative review was likely to be partly ignored, and the article
would still
have come out. I say this as this might come out if things get nasty.
De Freitas will not say to Hans von Storch or to Clare Goodess who the 4 reviewers
were. I
believe his paleoclimatologist is likely to be Anthony Fowler, who does dendro at
Auckland.
Cheers
Phil

X-Sender: f037@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.1
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 09:29:22 +0100
To: c.goodess@uea,phil Jones
From: Mike Hulme
Subject: Fwd: Re: Climate Research
Clare, Phil,
Since Clare and CRU are named in it, you may be interested in Chris de Freitas' reply to
the publisher re. my letter to Otto Kinne. I am not responding to this, but await a
reply from Kinne himself.
Mike

From: "Chris de Freitas"
To: Inter-Research Science Publisher
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 13:45:56 +1200
Subject: Re: Climate Research
Reply-to: c.defreitas@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
CC: m.hulme@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Priority: normal
X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c)
Otto (and copied to Mike Hulme)
I have spent a considerable amount of my time on this matter and had
my integrity attacked in the process. I want to emphasize that the
people leading this attack are hardly impartial observers. Mike
himself refers to "politics" and political incitement involved. Both
Hulme and Goodess are from the Climate Research Unit of UEA that is
not particularly well known for impartial views on the climate change
debate. The CRU has a large stake in climate change research funding
as I understand it pays the salaries of most of its staff. I
understand too the journalist David Appell was leaked information to
fuel a public attack. I do not know the source
Mike Hulme refers to the number of papers I have processed for CR
that "have been authored by scientists who are well known for their
opposition to the notion that humans are significantly altering
global climate." How many can he say he has processed? I suspect the
answer is nil. Does this mean he is biased towards scientists "who
are well known for their support for the notion that humans are
significantly altering global climate?
Mike Hulme quite clearly has an axe or two to grind, and, it seems, a
political agenda. But attacks on me of this sort challenge my
professional integrity, not only as a CR editor, but also as an
academic and scientist. Mike Hulme should know that I have never
accepted any research money for climate change research, none from
any "side" or lobby or interest group or government or industry. So I
have no pipers to pay.
This matter has gone too far. The critics show a lack of moral
imagination. And the Cramer affair is dragged up over an over again.
People quickly forget that Cramer (like Hulme and Goodess now) was
attacking Larry Kalkstein and me for approving manuscripts, in
Hulme's words, "authored by scientists who are well known for their
opposition to the notion that humans are significantly altering
global climate."
I would like to remind those who continually drag up the Cramer
affair that Cramer himself was not unequivocal in his condemnation of
Balling et al's manuscript (the one Cramer refereed and now says I
should have not had published - and what started all this off). In
fact, he did not even recommend that it be rejected. He stated in his
review: "My review of the manuscript is mainly with the conclusions
of the work. For technical assessment, I do not myself have
sufficient experience with time series analysis of the kind presented
by the authors." He goes on to recommend: "revise and resubmit for
additional review". This is exactly what I did; but I did not send it
back to him after resubmission for the very reason that he himself
confessed to ignorance about the analytical method used.
Am I to trundle all this out over and over again because of criticism
from a lobbyist scientists who are, paraphrasing Hulme, "well known
for their support for the notion that humans are significantly
altering global climate".
The criticisms of Soon and Baliunas (2003) CR article raised by Mike
Hume in his 16 June 2003 email to you was not raised by the any of
the four referees I used (but is curiously similar to points raided
by David Appell!). Keep in mind that referees used were selected in
consultation with a paleoclimatologist. Five referees were selected
based on the guidance I received. All are reputable
paleoclimatologists, respected for their expertise in reconstruction
of past climates. None (none at all) were from what Hans and Clare
have referred to as "the other side" or what Hulme refers to as
people well known for their opposition to the notion that humans are
significantly altering global climate." One of the five referees
turned down the request to review explaining he was busy and would
not have the time. The remaining four referees sent their detailed
comments to me. None suggested the manuscript should be rejected. S&B
were asked to respond to referees comments and make extensive
alterations accordingly. This was done.
I am no paleoclimatolgist, far from it, but have collected opinions
from other paleoclimatologists on the S&B paper. I summarise them
here. What I take from the S&B paper is an attempt to assess climate
data lost from sight in the Mann proxies. For example, the raising on
lowering of glacier equilibrium lines was the origin of the Little
Ice Age as a concept and still seems to be a highly important proxy,
even if a little difficult to precisely quantify.
Using a much larger number of "proxy" indicators than Mann did, S&B
inquired whether there was a globally detectable 50-year period of
unusual cold in the LIA and a similarly warm era in the MWP. Further,
they asked if these indicators, in general, would indicate that any
similar period in the 20th century was warmer than any other era.
S&B did not purport to do independent interpretation of climate time
series, either through 50-year filters or otherwise. They merely
adopt the conclusions of the cited authors and make a scorecard. It
seems pretty evident to me that temperatures in the LIA were the
lowest since the LGM. There are lots of peer-reviewed paleo-articles
which assert the existence of LIA.
Frankly, I have difficulty understanding this particular quibble.
Some sort of averaging is necessary to establish the 'slower' trends,
and that sort of averaging is used by every single study - they
average to bring out the item of their interest. A million year
average would do little to enlighten, as would detailed daily
readings. The period must be chosen to eliminate as much of the
'noise' as possible without degrading the longer-term signals
significantly.
As I read the S&B paper, it was a relatively arbitrary choice - and
why shouldn't it be? It was only chosen to suppress spurious signals
and expose the slower drift that is inherent in nature. Anyone that
has seen curves of the last 2 million years must recognize that an
averaging of some sort has taken place. It is not often, however,
that the quibble is about the choice of numbers of years, or the
exact methodology - those are chosen simply to expose 'supposedly'
useful data which is otherwise hidden from view.
Let me ask Mike this question. Can he give an example of any dataset
where the S&B characterization of the source author is incorrect? (I
am not vouching for them , merely asking.)
S&B say that they rely on the original characterizations, not that
they are making their own; I don't see a problem a priori on relying
on characterizations of others or, in the present circumstances, of
presenting a literature review. While S&B is a literature review, so
is this section of IPCC TAR, except that the S&B review is more
thorough.
The Mann et al multi-proxy reconstruction of past temperatures has
many problems and these have been well documented by S&B and others.
My reading of the IPCC TAR leads me to the conclusion that Mann et al
has been used as the basis for a number of assertions: 1. Over the
past millennium (at least for the NH) the temperature has not varied
significantly (except for the European/North Atlantic sector) and
hence the climate system has little internal variability. This
statement is supported by an analysis of model behaviour, which also
shows little internal variability in climate models. 2. Recent global
warming, as inferred from instrument records, is large and unusual in
the context of the Mann et al temperature reconstruction from multi-
proxies. 3. Because of the previous limited variability and the
recent warming that cannot be explained by known natural forcing
(volcanic activity and solar insolation changes) human activity is
the likely cause of the recent global change.
In this context, IPCC mounts a powerful case. But the case rests on
two main foundations; the past climate has shown little variability
and the climate models reflect the internal variability of the
climate system. If either or both are shown to be weak or fallacious
then the IPCC case is weakened or fails.
S&B have examined the premise that the globally integrated
temperature has hardly varied over the past millennium prior to the
instrumental record. I agree it is not rocket science that they have
performed. They have looked at the evidence provided by researchers
to see if the trend of the temperature record of the European/North
Atlantic sector (which is not disputed by IPCC) is reflected in
individual records from other parts of the globe (Their three
questions). How objective is their assessment? From a purely
statistical viewpoint the work can be criticised. But if you took a
purely statistical approach you probably would not have sufficient
data to reach an unambiguous conclusion, or you could try statistical
fiddles to combine the data and end up with erroneous results under
the guise of statistical significance. S&B have looked at the data
and reached the conclusion that probably the temperature record from
other parts of the globe follows the same pattern as that of the
European/North Atlantic sector. Of the individual proxy records that
I have seen I would agree that this is the case. I certainly have not
found significant regions of the NH that were cold during the
medieval period and warm during the Little Ice Age period that are
necessary offsets of the European/North Atlantic sector necessary to
reach a hemispherically flat pattern as derived by Mann et al.
S&B have put forward sufficient evidence to challenge the Mann et al
analysis outcome and seriously weaken the IPCC assertions based on
Mann et al. Paleo reconstruction of temperatures and the global
pattern over the past millennium and longer remains a fertile field
for research. It suggests that the climate system is such that a
major temporal variation as is universally recognised for the
European/North Atlantic region would be reflected globally and S&B
have given support to this view.
It is my belief that the S&B work is a sincere endeavour to find out
whether MWP and LIA were worldwide phenomena. The historical evidence
beyond tree ring widths is convincing in my opinion. The concept of
"Little Ice Age" is certainly used practically by all Holocene paleo-
climatologists, who work on oblivious to Mann's "disproof" of its
existence.
Paleoclimatologists tell me that, for debating purposes, they are
more inclined to draw attention to the Holocene Optimum (about 6000
BP) as an undisputed example of climate about 1-2 deg C warmer than
at present, and to ponder the entry and exit from the Younger Dryas
as an example of abrupt climate change, than to get too excited about
the Medieval Warm Period, which seems a very attenuated version.
However, the Little Ice Age seems valid enough as a paleoclimatic
concept. North American geologists repeatedly assert that the 19th
century was the coldest century in North America since the LGM. To
that extent, showing temperature increase since then is not unlike a
mutual fund salesmen showing expected rate of return from a market
bottom - not precisely false, but rather in the realm of sleight-of-
hand.
Regards
Chris

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

--
Thomas J. Crowley
Nicholas Professor of Earth Systems Science
Dept. of Earth and Ocean Sciences
Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences
Box 90227
103 Old Chem Building Duke University
Durham, NC 27708
tcrowley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
919-681-8228
919-684-5833 fax

Christmas, Saturnalia, and Sol Invictus

2009-12-11T15:00:00.004-05:00

I've found another instance where consensus scholarship is heavily flawed. I'd always heard that Christmas Day was on December 25 because nobody knows exactly when Jesus was born and that is the date of pagan Roman festival that Christians wanted to supplant. Nope.

The big problem is that Saturnalia was December 17-23, the winter solstice is December 21, there was no traditional Roman holiday on December 25, and the evidence that Emperor Aurelian's new quadrennial festival of Sol Invictus, first celebrated in 274, was on December 25 is weak, dating from 80 years later. From Wikipedia:

There is no record of celebrating Sol on December 25th prior to CE 354/362. Hijmans lists the known festivals of Sol as August 8 and/or 9, August 28, and December 11. There are no sources that indicate on which day Aurelian inaugurated his temple and held the first games for Sol, but we do know that these games were held every four years from CE 274 onwards. This means that they were presumably held in CE 354, a year for which perchance a Roman calendar, the Chronography of 354 (or calendar of Filocalus), has survived. This calendar lists a festival for Sol and Luna on August 28th, Ludi Solis (games for Sol) for October 19th-22nd, and a Natalis Invicti (birthday of the invincible one) on December 25th.

Thus, Christmas is not like Reformation Day, an October 31 celebration chosen to substitute for Halloween, or like Hannukah. If it were, it would have been chosen to be December 17 or December 21. I have often read that December 25 was chosen because it is clear by then that days are getting longer, after the shortest day on December 21. How idiotic. That argument could be used for any day between December 22 and June 21. It certainly is not the case that the ancients didn't know that December 21 was the shortest day and had to wait a few days to make sure. Even the people at Stonehenge knew about the winter solstice. I suppose Aurelian chose December 25, if he did choose that date, so as to avoid conflicting with Saturnalia. It's also possible he did choose December 25, and picked it *because it was a Christian holiday*. He was no friend of Christians, and heavily promoted sun worship. See this:

A. Mellinus writes, "Aurelian was a stern, cruel, and bloodthirsty Emperor by nature, and although at first he had a good opinion of the Christians, he nevertheless afterwards became averse to, and estranged from them: and having, undoubtedly, by some talebearers, been instigated against the Christians, he allowed himself to be seduced so far, as to raise the ninth general persecution of the Roman monarchy against them, which persecution .he, however, did not carry out. For at the very moment in which the decrees written against the Christians, were laid before him by his secretary, that he might sign them, and when he was about to take the pen in hand, the hand of God suddenly touched him, smiting his hand with lameness, and thus preventing him in his purpose, so that he could not sign them." First book, fol. 87, col. 3; from hopisc. Victor. Eus., lib. 7. Post. Literal, Aug. de Civit. Dei., lib. 18, cap. 52. Oral.. lib. 7, cap. 16. Theodoret. Hilt., lib. 4, cap. 17.

To be sure, as is well described in "How December 25 Became Christmas" by Andrew McGowan we have no good evidence on how December 25 was established as Christmas Day (or January 6 for the Greeks). He shows that it is much more plausible that December 25 and January 6 were chosen because they are 9 months after March 25 or April 6, the dates (for the two groups) of the Crucifixion. How people came to think that Jesus had to be conceived on the day he died remains unclear. But this seems to be what happened.

What Obama Could Have Said in Oslo

2009-12-11T07:46:00.000-05:00

James Taranto at the WSJ

In fairness to Obama, under the circumstances it would have been very hard for him to display true humility. He could have turned down the prize, but that would have seemed arrogant too. But if he was going to compare himself to other Nobel Peace laureates, it might have been better had he taken the opposite approach: When I heard about this prize, I didn't think I deserved it. I mean, what have I done? But then I looked at the list of past recipients. Yasser Arafat? A peace prize for a terrorist? What's the deal with that, guys? Al Gore? For what, making a movie with charts? And Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter! He endorsed me, and even I can't stand that sanctimonious little twit!

Climate--Various

2009-12-10T22:58:00.007-05:00

"A Petition I Am Thinking of Circulating." My draft ClimateGate petition for economists to sign, which has lots of ClimateGate email excerpts on the two topics of fiddling with journals and hiding data.
"Pielke Sr. responds to NCDC’s “Talking Points” about surfacestations.org". Arguments that the US raw temperature record is of dubious value for looking at long-term trends. Very feeble response from the weather station people, it seems.
It's interesting how comments are so often better informed and wiser than the writer. This Megan McCardle post is about death threats to climatologists after ClimateGate. The comments note that the only evidence that such threats were really made comes from the same scientists who have been discredited in the scandal itself.
Fables of the Reconstruction (Or, How to Make Your Own Hockey Stick). This goes through it, supplying the temperature and proxy data and telling you how to download and use OpenOffice to do principal components analysis. I'll do this myself when I have time.
From Mark Steyn:

The documents were leaked on the Internet, the CRU confirmed their authenticity, they've announced that they've thrown out all their raw data, the head guy has stepped down . . . But that's no reason not to "continue to look into the issue" for another, oh, three, four, seven months before running a story. I like this fellow's sign-off:

Slice your average environment correspondent through the middle and you're going to find a left-leaning liberal arts graduate who is utterly out of his/her depth. Their world view is being swept from underneath them and they are being shown — in ways that they do not really and have never had to understand — that the guys they thought were the goodies are in fact "at it" and that those they have spent a decade disparaging as deniers were in fact spot on.
I would find that hard to report too.
Like eight year olds that just found out there's no Santa. Kind of earth shattering and traumatic. Lied to by those you most trusted.
The Harry Read Me file is worth having a link to. Here are some excerpts. One of them: “So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the nuclear option — to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations … In other words what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad …”
In my regulation class this week, a Taiwanese student jokingly suggested that the way to solve global warming would be to kill any children born to a family that already had one child. Then this Op-Ed appeared in one of the top Canadian newspapers: "The real inconvenient truth: The whole world needs to adopt China's one-child policy"
Megan McCardle very gently brings up the Darwin data fraud and politely asks if there's some reason it's not as bad as it looks. She hopes the warmist blog RealClimate will say something about it. I've been checking that site regularly, and they seem to have adopted the strategy of saying very little about ClimateGate and related scandals, probably because they can't give good answers and they don't want to even give their readers access to any details that might upset their views.
Look at the comments on this Boston Globe blog in which Harvard Prof. McCarthy tries to dismiss ClimateGate. The amount of scorn heaped on the Globe is amazing.
Bellamy: Twenty-Eight Years on TV, Then Blackballed for Challenging AGW
Global Warming US Cities Getting Warmer: This is a You-Tube video a geneticist made with his son showing how only the urban temperatures in the US are going up, not rural stations. "A comparison of GISS data for the last 111 years show US cities getting warmer but rural sites are not increasing in temperature at all. Urban Heat Islands may be the only areas warming." The emperor really does have no clothes. I've wondered about that myself, but I thought people in the field had surely looked at something so simple.
Climate Scientist to Revkin: "we can no longer trust you" to carry water for us. Another incredible email leak. A well-known U. of Illinois scientist condemns a NY Times liberal writer for making light of global warming and threatens to cut off his sources. These people have no shame, and no sense of humor either.
It is worth keeping in mind that maybe people who say they don't believe in absolute truth and who believe that the most important things for scientists to do is to help people, not to advance science, actually mean what they say, in which case they believe that a scientist has a duty to lie about his results if he thinks that will advance social justice. And if they believe that, they'll do it.
Nature has an editorial belitting the importance of ClimateGate and making misstatemetns such as that Antarctic sea ice is diminishing. Read it, and think less of that journal.
A good Levitt-Dubner comment on why anything happening with glaciers is unrelated to global warming (for example-- where glaciers are melting, temperatures aren't rising!)

"Baby You Can Drive My Car": Copenhagen Full Limos and . Empty Buses

2009-12-10T08:35:00.003-05:00

Dealing with Reporters on a Regular Basis

2009-12-10T08:22:00.003-05:00

Via Sailer, "The Michael Jordan/Tiger Woods Model: Why It Will Never Work With The Media," . The title has it wrong, but the article is good. The strategy is to intimidate reporters and cut off access to any reporter who ever prints anything critical. The drawback is that if the athlete's stock ever falls (e.g. Tiger Wood's), even the hitherto friendly reporters hate him and have repressed stories to tell. The tradeoff can be worth it, though.

The Precautionary Principle

2009-12-09T14:16:00.003-05:00

Sensibly applied, the idea behind the Precautionary Principle could be useful for global warming. The idea is that we should worry a lot about catastrophic low-probability events. The standard warmist scenario is not at all catastrophic. Adjusting to even a rise of 10 degrees Farenheit over 100 years is just not that bad. It’s the difference between Philadelphia and San Diego, and people do find the heat bearable when they move to San Diego. (Or use Boston and Atlanta if you like. But one thing I wonder about is how much of global warming will just be to make winters milder. The Highs in the Tropics are not higher than in the Midwest--- they just last longer.)

But there is a possible catastrophe. It would be because of runaway effects caused by, for example, methane being released from Siberian swamps.

Correct use of the precautionary principle would say that we should forget about little things like cap-and-trade and instead (a) study possible catastrophes very hard,and (b) work on geoengineering, since mere cutbacks don’t address the problem (we could well be heading to catastrophe just with our present warming, and maybe it’s too late to go back unless we can get rid of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere).

Thus, the precautionary principle really has the opposite implication of its standard use, which is to call for expensive CO2 cuts that won’t help with the small-probability, really-bad outcomes.

In fact, we could go a step further. Suppose we are limited to spending at most one trillion dollars dealing with climate change. Suppose, too, we think that(a) there is a 99% chance that if we do nothing, the temperature will rise and cause 3 trillion dollars in harm to the global economy , (b) there is a 0% chance that the temperature won't rise, and (c) there is a 1% chance that the temperature will rise dramatically, killing off 90% of the world's population. The standard global warming line is that we should spend the trillion dollars on substituting other inputs for energy, to reduce CO2 output and prevent the loss of the 3 trillion dollars. The precautionary principle says that we shouldn't waste the trillion dollars on that--- we should spend it on geoengineering research and technology to deal with the 1% probability of disaster, instead.

You may be tempted to reply that both the CO2 reduction and the geoengineering projects should be undertaken. Well, suppose we have 5 trillion dollars to spend. Why shouldn't we spend all 5 trillion on dealing with the 1% probability of disaster? The more we spend, the higher probability we avoid the disaster, so why divert any of the funds to non-disaster scenarios?

Snowballs, Not Lines

2009-12-09T09:08:00.000-05:00

A good thought of Prof. Ribstein: (my boldface, as usual)

The best legal scholars, like the best lawyers, are those who bring a variety of tools together in responding to a legal problem. They are creative, insightful, and broad, making connections among different fields and with their other work. Their careers end up looking like snowballs rather than lines. They can use these skills to teach both lawyers and policymakers how to solve new problems.

Robert E. Sullivan's Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power

2009-12-07T11:44:00.002-05:00

It sounds as if Harvard University Press has severely embarassed itself by publishing Robert E. Sullivan's Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power. See the WSJ review. It argues, quite convincingly that Prof. Sullivan of Notre Dame has no understanding whatsoever of Victorian times, seeing, for example, gushy language in letters to Macaulay's sisters as evidence of incestuous desire rather than commonplace Victorian sentimentality. It sounds as if there must be a good story in how Harvard came to publish it.

How to EXTRACT & SAVE PICTURE From an Microsoft Word (MS Word) Document

2009-12-06T09:40:00.003-05:00

All the top googled webpages on this topic do it wrong or require special software, so this is important advice. The hard part is to save the undegraded, full-quality, image file that is entangled in the MS-Word document. I finally found that WebCoolTips does aone of its three methods right, so here it is.

MS Word, typically stupid, provides no obvious way to do this. One's first thought for a workaround is to Save As the file as an HTML file with embedded images. MS Word does that, and even saves every single one of the images in both a big and a small size. That's just a devious Microsoft trick. The big-sized image is still much worse than the original-- 4 to 10 times as small, by my two trials. You need to do something different. (The HTML approach, by the way is what you get from the official Microsoft support site---idiots! They'd make more profit if they spent a little more and hired talented staff.)

Here is what to do.

Launch Microsoft Office Picture Manager (It was provided with my version of MS Office, in a subfolder named something like "Accessories")
Open your MS Word Document.
Right click and copy your image.
Go to Picture Manager
Browse to the folder of your choice, and do Edit-paste to save the clipboard content as an image.
Go to that folder to get your image.

ClimateGate--Various

2009-12-05T14:03:00.009-05:00

ClimateGate Jokes

2009-12-05T07:30:00.003-05:00

Q. What's the proof that global warming is man-made?

A. The East Anglia emails--- a man made up the temperatures.

Q. How many trees does it take to make a hockey stick?

A. Twelve.

Q. How many trees does it take to make a hockey stick?

A. None-- just two lines of computer code.

Replication in ClimateGate

2009-12-04T10:41:00.004-05:00

Irritatingly often I see comments on Climategate blog posts saying that economics and climatology aren't real sciences. I don't mind Econ not being classified as a science; rather, it is the scoffing tone that I don't like. Econ is not a science; it's better than science. But I won't argue that here.

Rather, the main issues in ClimateGate are not special to science. Peer review and intimidation of editors and other scholars is not. Close linkages with supposedly unbiased blogs and newspapers is not. Violating freedom-of-information laws is not. Sloppy scholarship is not. And, finally, the refusal to allow replication is not.

By that I don't mean to say that all these sins are common in every field. Far from it! But they are possible in every field.

Consider replication. The issue in ClimateGate is the temperature data series. The scientists started with raw data from hundreds of weather stations covering 150 years, and their end product is a monthly average temperature for every sector of the globe (and a global average too). They did not measure the temperatures themselves-- they used data thousands of other people collected over 150 years, 95% of which is publicly available, much of it on the web. Their task was to process the data. They had to choose which weather stations are reliable and average different weather stations within a sector, for example. If one station only existed from 1850 to 1917 and the next one in the vicinity lasted from 1935 to 2009, they had to figure out what to do. They had to worry about the Urban Heat Island effect--- what happens when a city full of hot air and concrete grows around a weather station that started out in an empty field. So there was a lot of processing.

What East Anglia would not reveal is which weather stations it used for what years, and how exactly they made the adjustments to get their sector averages. Thus, nobody can replicate their work. Indeed, they can't do it themselves--- they have admitted that they destroyed much of their input data, and the ClimateGate leak tells us that even if they had it, their computer code is too poorly written for anybody to understand, even themselves. Now, back to the general case. This is not a failure of the scientific method, especially. It could happen in any field with sufficiently low standards for publication, if any other such field existed. Analogies:

A mathematician claims to have squared the circle. He gives us the axioms and the proposition, but keeps the proof secret. "I need to use some of the techniques for future research," he says.
An economist claims to show that sales of Twinkies are a good predictor of recessions. He shows us a graph, and the results of many regressions that have high R2 and significant coefficients, but he keeps the Twinkies sales data secret. "The company that gave it to me did so on condition that I not reveal their sales to competitors," he explains.
An English professor claims that contrary to what Mencken claims in his famous essay, the American South has produced more good literature than any similarly sized region in the world. He says there are 127 great novels from the South, but he doesn't say what they are or why they are great, or what other regions have produced. "This is the consensus of the people in my field, though I won't say exactly who because that is too personal, and the people in my field are very smart and have studied books a lot more than amateurs," he says.

Timid Scholars

2009-12-03T11:06:00.002-05:00

Judith Curry in the National Journal tells how she is finding out that academics are cowardly:

Curry: Somebody who was named in those e-mails e-mailed me and was rather upset about my lack of support and my speaking about this. Out in the blogosphere, a lot of people picked up my message and seem to like it. But in terms of the people that I would see at conferences, they have not spoken out publicly and I've received only a few e-mails. I'm getting e-mails from people with Ph.D.s in chemistry or physics saying, "Thank you for what you're doing, can you come give a talk at my professional society meeting?" So I'm getting favorable feedback from serious people in other branches of science who are interested in the climate issue and see too much politics in the science.
My issue is that everybody [in the climate science branch] wants to fly below the radar screen on this because it is a hot potato. Most of the scientists out there are busy in the retreat-to-the-Ivory-Tower mode, and they don't pay much attention to the public discussion on this topic.... People don't want to be distracted from their research by a lot of noise, and they don't want to be put in a position where their personal or scientific integrity will be attacked.
Nobody [in the climate-science sector] wants to talk about this. When I put my essay out on climateaudit.org, I thought I would be one of 500 people out there making statements, but oops, I'm out there by myself.
Scientists want to avoid publicly criticizing other individual scientists, [and] I have my own position about who did something wrong here, but I want to give them the chance to defend themselves and let the investigation proceed.

Rabbinical Judaism vs. Karaites, Sola Scriptura

2009-12-03T09:28:00.005-05:00

Here is my modification of a story I got from economist David Friedman's blog. (The Torah is the Bible; the Mishna and Talmud are commentaries.)

A young scholar came to the Rabbi and he said "Rabbi, I have been studying the Torah, and it is a trial and a tribulation to me. It goes into great elaboration over the heave offering, and the first tithe, and the heave offering of the first tithe, and the second tithe, and the poor man's tithe, and gleanings, and the corners of the field, and I know not what else, and I cannot follow the tenth part of it all. What am I to do?"
And the rabbi said to him, "Do you know anyone who has a copy of the Mishnah that you might study?"
And the young scholar answered, "my uncle has a scroll of the order "seeds," and no doubt would permit me to study it."
"Then go," said the rabbi, "and for the next month study the Mishnah, and then return to me."
A month later, the young scholar appeared before the rabbi, still more distraught and unhappy.
"Rabbi," he said, "The Mishnah is a terrible confusion. It gives one rule from one sage and another from another, and a third from a third sage, and it tells me that the school of Hillel said this and the school of Shammai said that, and I cannot tell for all it says what the law is or how I am to act. I am weary and confused and know less of the law than I did before I began to study it. Rabbi, what am I to do?"
"Do you" the Rabbi asked "know anyone who possesses scrolls of the Talmud, and would let you read in them?"
"My wife's brother, Rabbi, possesses scrolls of one of the orders of the Talmud, and no doubt would permit me to study it."
"Then go, and for the next month study Talmud, and when that time is done return to me."
"Oh Rabbi, the Talmud is a terrible confusion and mess and tangle, and I can make nothing of it. For not only does it give one answer from one sage and a different from another, but those commenting on the answers offer two explanations for the first, for neither of which any rhyme or reason is presented, and three for the second, and make the two sages to agree on one rule, or agree on the other rule, but never tell me what the law is, and if there is any in the whole community who knows less of the law than I do after reading for a month in the Talmud I cannot guess who it could be. Rabbi, what am I to do?"
"Have you still the scroll of the Torah?"
"Indeed I do, Rabbi."
"Take it down and read it, that you may learn the law."
A week later the Rabbi met the young scholar, and he said to him "How go your studies."
"Wonderfully well, Rabbi. I have been studying the Torah, and nothing could be clearer. For each case it gives one rule, not two or three, and it spends no words at all on explaining away the disagreements of the sages, but merely tells what the law is in plain words."

Simple Ideas and Complicated Models

2009-12-02T15:41:00.000-05:00

My comment on a VC post.

Thank you for linking to the Hakes article. It rings true.

The problem it concerns is not exactly poor writing, though. Rather, it is the problem of the brilliant but simple new idea. If you explain it simply, people say, “That’s obvious”, even if they would never have thought of it in a million years. Thus, you have to math it up, or disguise it in a convoluted hypothetical, or quote in foreign languages to get it published.

When I visited Chicago back in 1989 I was amazed at what George Stigler and Gary Becker could do in seminars. They’d ask a simple one-sentence question (“Have you thought about X?”) and entirely demolish (or expand) somebody’s paper. Unfortunately, many of us refuse to recognize that kind of Feynmannian brilliance, which, indeed, is distinct from IQ.

I was just thinking of this topic today because I have what might be a novel idea on why deposit insurance is useful. It’s so simple that I could write the paper in words, with no equations. But I wonder whether a top journal in economics would publish it then, even if the editor believed that the idea was worthy of a Nobel Prize.

What’s the solution? One is to wrap up the idea in unnecessary math modelling. Another, which is often used, is to have two parts to the paper. The first part is to explain the idea in words or with a numerical example. Everybody reads that part, and referees decide whether to accept the paper based on it. The second part is the general model, all mathed up. Referees require that part, but they don’t really read it.

I should add that I am a conventional modern economist, constantly building math models and believing that they are utterly necessary for most economic research. But not every idea needs a math model.

Climate Dementors

2009-12-02T10:35:00.001-05:00

Marc Hendrickxs has a good post on The Climate Dementors but he doesn't get it quite right:

The Huckabee Pardons and Methodism

2009-12-02T09:52:00.003-05:00

Joe Carter has an excellent article on the Huckabee pardons at First Things. He reviewed them as a researcher for the Huckabee campaign. His article is sympathetic, but it casts serious doubt on Huckabee's judgement.

After reviewing hundreds of cases and interviewing numerous people involved in the process, I concluded to my own satisfaction that the governor’s actions and judgment were generally defensible. Yet there remained about a half-dozen situations in which even after reviewing all of the information I was unpersuaded that justice had been served. Although I was sympathetic with some of the justifications offered for making the decisions, I found them inadequate for a number of reasons....

For instance, the politically prudent tactic would have been to simply refuse to grant any leniency—ever. Other governors with their sights set on higher offices had learned that doing nothing—even to correct obvious instances of injustice—was unlikely to cause any long-term political damage. Keeping an innocent man in prison is less harmful to an ambitious politician than freeing someone who may commit other crimes.

Huckabee would certainly discover this political reality the hard way. Initially, I chalked it up solely to extraordinary political courage. Later, I tempered this view when I realized that this courage was mixed with a large dose of cluelessness. The governor seemed genuinely surprised that he was held responsible for the criminal acts committed by those whose sentences he had commuted as governor. It was as if he believed that simply having noble intentions and a willingness to make tough decisions would provide political cover. The notion that he should be accountable for future crimes committed by these men seemed as foreign to him as the idea that he should refuse all leniency. ...

Judging from the records, the governor also seemed to put a lot of weight on conversion stories—a common trait among evangelicals, who believe the gospel is sufficient for restoration and redemption of character.

Carter quotes someone else as saying

What Huckabee misjudged is his ability to judge the character of a convicted murderer and rapists, a lapse out of a character for a pastor who believes in the sinful nature of an — or a lapse in character for a pastor who believes in redemption.

Here's my comment

Very astute. We evangelicals are suckers for redemption stories. It is good that we believe in miracles. The problem is that the dominant belief in America is no longer the Puritan Total Depravity but the Methodist Moral Perfectibility, even though (or perhaps *because*) the pastors don’t teach theology to their flocks. Thus, we have the idea that church people don’t sin— at least not most church people— reinforced by nobody wanting to admit that they sin. Just one step further, and we have the idea that somebody who has converted will stop sinning.

And of course we’re rather gullible too, easily satisfied with words. We trust someone who says he’s changed and become a slave of Jesus even if he’s living with his girlfriend, shirking on child-support payments to his ex-wife, and selling pornography at the gas station where he works. It isn’t considered polite to question whether someone else’s faith is true.

Periods and Commas: Inside Quotation Marks or Outside?

2009-11-29T09:51:00.005-05:00

(1) At VC, commentor John Blake said,

.... a direct quote requires enclosed quotation marks: “No more of this,” he said. Said he, “No more of this.” In the second instance, a period after the last quotation mark would be redundant. Citations or indirect quotes do NOT enclose quotation marks: Chronicles admonish, “From the fury of the Norsemen, good Lord deliver us”.

Those are good examples for the problem. Pure logic, the defense commonly used for the British rule, requires that redundant comma:

Said he, “No more of this.”.

The Norsemen quote looks funny. The period at the end is too far from the final word, because the high-up quotation marks separate it off. Also, the reader expects some punctuation at the end of a sentence, and there isn't any at the end of the quoted sentence. If it ends there, adding a period would be fine as part of the quotation. If it doesn't, then really there should be three dots, like this:

Chronicles admonish, “From the fury of the Norsemen, good Lord deliver us...”.

or this:

Chronicles admonish, “From the fury of the Norsemen, good Lord deliver us....”

I don't like the look of either sentence. What should I do? (2) The tradeoff is not really Form versus Function. The aesthetic problem here is not completely subjective, and is not distinct from clarity. The period is objectively far from the last word, under the British rule. And if something looks odd in a paragraph, it distracts the reader, reducing clarity. Commentor Henry Schaffer said:

Several people have pointed out that the American rule alters the quoted material. A long time ago I wrote a short computer manual, and put gave an example — essentially _quodlibet_’s one — I wrote the equivalent of:

Enter the command “cp foo/bar”.

The editor changed this for the distributed version to read:

Enter the command “cp foo/bar.”

This version of the instruction didn’t work, but the defense was that it was grammatically correct and mine was not.

Another commentor says:

As to following sentence ending periods with two spaces, that is an excellent rule, even with non-fixed width fonts because it distinguishes sentence ending periods from abbreviation marks. Also, fixed width fonts are the best for any and all computer work, and even for e-mail.

Another commentor gives these examples:

Jones assured me, “You have nothing to worry about.”
Hale said, “Give me liberty or give me death!”
Still, Obama assures us, “We will be better off after this reform bill passes”!
What makes you think that your only choice is, “Give me liberty or give me death”?
He spoke of “blue skies,” “black nights,” and “green grass.”
He spoke over and over of “blue skies,” “black nights,” and “green grass”; I got bored and left.

Another gives

“Kicking the ball through the uprights is called a ‘field goal’, and is worth three points.”

hjjkhk

Godless Presidential Thanksgiving Proclamations

2009-11-28T16:26:00.003-05:00

Here's a comment I posted at the Baylyblog, on the subject of Obama's godless Thanksgiving Proclamation: I'm glad Threegirldad checked previous proclamations. He's right that Ford 1975 and Carter 1978 omit God. Carter 1977 and 1979 carefully talk about other people giving thanks to God without doing so directly in the Proclamation (like Obama 2009, which does quote George Washington thanking God). Carter 1980 does thank God ("As we pause on Thanksgiving to offer thanks to God...") Maybe losing the election earlier that month chastened our born-again President. He's wrong on Nixon 1969, though: "Yet Lincoln knew that the act of thanksgiving should not be limited to time of peace and serenity. He knew that it is precisely at those times of hardship when men most need to recognize that the Source of all good constantly bestows His blessings on mankind." Ford 1975 has quite a modern ring: "On the eve of our 200th year, Thanksgiving Day should be a day of special reflection upon the qualities of heart, mind and character of the men and women who founded and built our great Nation. Let us join in giving thanks for our cultural pluralism. Let us celebrate our diversity and the great strengths that have come from sharing our traditions, our ideas, our resources, our hopes and our dreams." Ford 1974 is more traditional: "It is a time when the differences of a diverse people are forgotten and all Americans join in giving thanks to God for the blessings we share - the blessings of freedom, opportunity and abundance that make America so unique." Ford 1976 is actually the most God-laden Proclamation I've seen. Maybe almost losing the primaries to Reagan and then losing the election to Carter improved his focus (and got him to fire some liberal speechwriters):

"Traditionally, Americans have set aside a special day to express their gratitude to the Almighty for the blessings of liberty, peace and plenty that have been bestowed upon a grateful Nation. The early settlers of this land possessed an unconquerable spirit and a reliance on Divine Providence that remains a part of the American character. That reliance, coupled with a belief in ourselves and a love of individual freedom, has brought this nation through two centuries of progress and kept us strong. As we cross the threshold into our third century as a sovereign and independent Nation, it is especially appropriate that we reaffirm our trust in Him and express our gratitude for the unity, freedom and renewed sense of national pride we enjoy today. NOW, THEREFORE, I, GERALD R. FORD, President of the United States of America, in accord with Section 6103 of Title 5 of the United States Code, do hereby proclaim Thursday, November 25, 1976, as a day of national thanksgiving. I call upon all Americans to join on that day with their friends and families in homes and places of worship throughout the land to offer thanks for the blessings we enjoy. Let each of us resolve this Thanksgiving Day to make the coming year one in which our every deed will reflect our constant gratitude to God. Let us set a standard of honor, justice, and charity against which all the years of our third century may be measured. Let us make this Thanksgiving a truly special one.

Should Victims Be Able to Sue Corrupt Judges

2009-11-28T09:44:00.001-05:00

From VC:

Now comes news that the judges are immune from suit arising from any and all of their “judicial acts” in connection with the sentencing of these juveniles. [Stories are here and here; the opinion in the case conferring absolute immunity on the defendant judges (Middle District of PA, Judge Caputo) is here). Judge Caputo’s opinion conferring the immunity is thoughtful and well-reasoned...

My comment:

Very interesting problem, and you're right that it's not an easy one. We definitely want the judge to have criminal liability, I think (some people might want to limit it to impeachment) and we want the corrupt cases to be subject to review, so the only question is whether the victim--- the losing side--- should be able to sue the judge or the government for money damages besides.

What is the case with corrupt policemen? (Section 1983?) Can they be sued personally?

We also have a second-best situation. As the Court says, we'd have a huge amount of meritless litigation harassing judges. I say that is "second-best" because it is the fault of bad policy created by the judiciary itself, which for the past 50 years has encouraged nuisance suits generally. If judges would use their powers to punish lawyers who bring meritless suits, the problem would dwindle. Maybe making judges personally vulnerable to legal harassment and wacko juries would change the judiciary's mind about whether trial lawyers should be given every freedom to sue corporations.

ClimateGate, New Zealand Fakery

2009-11-27T10:16:00.007-05:00

I'm really enjoying this. It's the best things since Dan Rather's faking of the George Bush letter. I'll use this post to list some of the best articles.

Uh, oh – raw data in New Zealand tells a different story than the “official” one. and the pitiful government response in Combining Temperature Data from Multiple Sites in Wellington

Willis Eschenbach’s FOI Request, an excellent and exhaustive analysis of the FOIA stonewalling and why the "confidential data" excuse is bogus.

The USHCN Version 2 Serial Monthly Dataset National Oceanic and Atmospheric AdministrationNational Climatic Data Center (how they adjust the data-- and how they don't adjust for heat island effects) and UNITED STATES HISTORICAL CLIMATOLOGY NETWORK MONTHLY TEMPERATURE AND PRECIPITATION DATA. with its graph of how the adjustments *increase* the temperature about .25 degrees farenheit from 1960 to 1990.

The Climate Audit denier blog has had lots of good stuff.
Iowahawk Geographic: The Secret Life of Climate Researchers "The Alpha Grantwriter in our hive has been very successful indeed. He has earned three publications, a keynote address, and attracts the attention of a suitor from the symbiotic grant-giving predator genus Lucra Ecologica Hysterica. The suitor's grant bags are bulging with carbon credits and tax revenues harvested using the hive's last graphs, and the pair once again engage in their annual cross-pollination ritual"
REGIONAL TEMPERATURE CHANGE Vincent R. Gray. "The high Russia/Soviet figures indicate a common trend of large temperature rises in remote rural sites in severe climates. Other examples are Canada minus W Yukon (+0.96°C), North Pacific (+0.90°C) Spitzbergen (+4.06°C) and South Georgia (+1.91°C). The main reason would surely be the pressure to improve living conditions in these remote sites, involving better heating in the buildings, provision of roads, and the tendency for vegetation around the sites to be encouraged. The narrowing of the diurnal temperature range for many of these sites (Easterling et al. 1997) is further evidence for this tendency. "

A French scientist’s temperature data show results different from the official climate science.

"Courtillot and his colleagues were forced to turn to other sources of temperature measurements. They found 44 European weather stations that had long series of daily minimum temperatures that covered most of the 20th century, with few or no gaps. They removed annual seasonal trends for each series with a three-year running average of daily minimum temperatures. Finally they averaged all the European series for each day of the 20th century."

Thanksgiving

2009-11-25T22:27:00.004-05:00

Thanksgiving. This webpage is for things useful in celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday. For printing out to read at the table, see first-thanksgiving.pdf , more-proclamations.pdf, 2006.proclamation.pdf, and We- gather-together.pdf song lyrics. See also the page on original Thanksgiving foods via James Lindgren.

When a person is thankful, he is of course has to thanking someone---"to thank" is a transitive verb, requiring an object. Thanksgiving is a time to thank God, as the government proclamations traditionally say. These proclamations make nonsense of the claim that the American Constitution forbids a place for Christianity in public affairs, though it is noteworthy that Thomas Jefferson, unlike his two predecessors, refrained from issuing any Thanksgiving Proclamations. The 2006 Presidential Thanksgiving Proclamation is here.

Below are excerpts from some Thanksgiving proclamations from across American history. Pilgrim Hall Museum has a complete list.

The Council has thought meet to appoint and set apart the 29th day of this instant June, as a day of Solemn Thanksgiving and praise to God for such his Goodness and Favour, many Particulars of which mercy might be Instanced, but we doubt not those who are sensible of God's Afflictions, have been as diligent to espy him returning to us; and that the Lord may behold us as a People offering Praise and thereby glorifying Him; the Council doth commend it to the Respective Ministers, Elders and people of this Jurisdiction; Solemnly and seriously to keep the same Beseeching that being perswaded by the mercies of God we may all, even this whole people offer up our bodies and soulds as a living and acceptable Service unto God by Jesus Christ. (1676, Connecticut)

Before going on to other proclamations, let's look at some history. Karen Knelte writes

Most of us have been taught since childhood that Thanksgiving originated in 1621 when the Pilgrim survivors of the first winter, the following autumn had their first good harvest and celebrated for 3 days with their Indian friends who had taught them much about how to survive in this new land. This event did happen and is described by Edward Winslow, in a letter dated December 11, 1621. However, the later Thanksgivings are not commemorations of this event, as we will see. Here is an excerpt from the letter:

Our corn did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown, they came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom; our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a more special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.
Edward Winslow, December 11, 1621, in: [Mourt’s Relation] A Relation or Journall of the beginning and proceeding of the English Plantation settled at Plimoth in New England, by certaine English Adventurers both Merchants and others. London, Printed for John Bellamie, 1622. p.60-61.

Back to proclamations:

"Forasmuch as it is the indispensable Duty of all Men to adore the superintending providence of Almighty God; to acknowledge with Gratitude their Obligation to him for benefits received, and to implore such further Blessings as they stand in Need of: ...(1777, Continental Congress)
WHEREAS it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favour; and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requefted me "to recommend to the people of the United States a DAY OF PUBLICK THANSGIVING and PRAYER, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to eftablifh a form of government for their safety and happiness:... (1789, Washington)
Deeply penetrated with this sentiment, I, George Washington, President of the United States, do recommend to all religious societies and denominations, and to all persons whomsoever, within the United States to set apart and observe Thursday, the 19th day of February next as a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, and on that day to meet together and render their sincere and hearty thanks to the Great Ruler of Nations for the manifold and signal mercies which distinguish our lot as a nation,... (1795, Washington)
As the safety and prosperity of nations ultimately and essentially depend on the protection and the blessing of Almighty God, and the national acknowledgment of this truth is not only an indispensable duty which the people owe to Him, but a duty whose natural influence is favorable to the promotion of that morality and piety without which social happiness can not exist nor the blessings of a free government be enjoyed; and as this duty, at all times incumbent, is so especially in seasons of difficulty or of danger, when existing or threatening calamities, the just judgments of God against prevalent iniquity, are a loud call to repentance and reformation;... (1798, Adams)
As no truth is more clearly taught in the Volume of Inspiration , nor any more fully demonstrated by the experience of all ages, than that a deep sense and a due acknowledgment of the governing providence of a Supreme Being and of the accountableness of men to Him as the searcher of hearts and righteous distributer of rewards and punishments are conducive equally to the happiness and rectitude of individuals and to the well-being of communities;.. (1799, Adams)
I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the imposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purpose, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity, and union. (Lincoln, 1863)
Let us now, this Thanksgiving Day, reawaken ourselves and our neighbors and our communities to the genius of our founders in daring to build the world's first constitutional democracy on the foundation of trust and thanks to God. Out of our right and proper rejoicing on Thanksgiving Day, let us give our own thanks to God and reaffirm our love of family, neighbor, and community. (1996, Clinton)
Each year on Thanksgiving, we gather with family and friends to thank God for the many blessings He has given us, and we ask God to continue to guide and watch over our country. (2003, Bush)

1676, Connecticut

1777, Continental Congress

1789, Washington. Also, here is description of the debate in 1789 over whether to issue a Thanksgiving Proclamation.

Some other noteworthy proclamations:

A Pilgrim Hall Museum page has the proclamations from Clinton in 1999 to Obama in 2009. Notice how Clinton's 1999 proclamation refers to God twice, Bush 2008 three times, but Obama 2009 not at all (except in the quote from George Washington). Very possibly that is a first in American history, and a significant one. Obama does use the phrase "in the year of our Lord two thousand nine", but that's probably boilerplate whose religiosity was overlooked.

From: Plimoth-on-Web Plimoth Plantation's Web Site (as of 2003 a dead link)

In 1777, the Continental Congress declared the first national American Thanksgiving following the providential victory at Saratoga. The 1777 Thanksgiving proclamation reveals its New England Puritan roots. The day was still officially a religious observance in recognition of God's Providence, and, as on the Sabbath, both work and amusements were forbidden. It does not resemble our idea of a Thanksgiving, with its emphasis on family dinners and popular recreation. Yet beneath these stern sentiments, the old Puritan fervor had declined to the extent that Thanksgiving was beginning to be less of a religious and more of a secular celebration. The focus was shifting from the religious service to the family gathering. Communities still dutifully went to church each Thanksgiving Day but the social and culinary attractions were increasing in importance....
National Thanksgivings were proclaimed annually by Congress from 1777 to 1783 which, except for 1782, were all celebrated in December. After a five year hiatus, the practice was revived by President Washington in 1789 and 1795. John Adams declared Thanksgivings in 1798 and 1799, while James Madison declared the holiday twice in 1815; none of these were celebrated in the autumn. After 1815, there were no further national Thanksgivings until the Civil War. ... The New England states continued to declare annual Thanksgivings (usually in November, although not always on the same day), and eventually most of the other states also had independent observations of the holiday. ...At mid-century even the southern states were celebrating their own Thanksgivings.
By the 1840s when the Puritan holy day had largely given way to the Yankee holiday, Thanksgiving was usually depicted in a family setting with dinner as the central event. The archetypal tradition of harvest celebration had weathered Puritan disapproval and quietly reasserted its influence. Newspapers and magazines helped popularize the holiday in its new guise as a secular autumn celebration featuring feasting, family reunions and charity to the poor. ...
It is interesting that the same person who was a leading figure in the domesticity movement, Sarah Josepha Hale, also labored for decades to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday. A New England author and editor of the influential Godey's Ladies Book, Hale lobbied for a return to the morality and simplicity of days gone by. Each November from 1846 until 1863 Mrs. Hale printed an editorial urging the federal government to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday. She was finally gratified when Abraham Lincoln declared the first of our modern series of annual Thanksgiving holidays for the last Thursday in November, 1863. Lincoln had previously declared national Thanksgivings for April, 1862, and again for August 6, 1863, after the northern victory at Gettysburg. ...
Lincoln went on to declare a similar Thanksgiving observance in 1864, establishing a precedent that was followed by Andrew Johnson in 1865 and by every subsequent president. ...In 1939 Franklin D. Roosevelt departed from tradition by declaring November 23, the next to the last Thursday that year, as Thanksgiving. Considerable controversy (mostly following political lines) arose around this outrage to custom, so that some Americans celebrated Thanksgiving on the 23rd and others on the 30th (including Plymouth, MA). In 1940, the country was once again divided over "Franksgiving" as the Thanksgiving declared for November 21st was called. Thanksgiving was declared for the earlier Thursday again in 1941, but Roosevelt admitted that the earlier date (which had not proven useful to the commercial interests) was a mistake. On November 26, 1941, he signed a bill that established the fourth Thursday in November as the national Thanksgiving holiday, which it has been ever since.

And here is Psalm 100 ( KJV)

"Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all ye lands. Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing. Know ye that the LORD he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name. For the LORD is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations."

I found a page of Thanksgiving song lyrics, including this one:

We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing;
He chastens and hastens his will to make known;
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing,
Sing praises to his name: He forgets not his own.

Beside us to guide us, our God with us joining,
Ordaining, maintaining his kingdom divine;
So from the beginning the fight we were winning;
Thou, Lord, wast at our side, All glory be thine!

We all do extol thee, thou leader triumphant,
And pray that thou still our defender wilt be.
Let thy congregation escape tribulation;
Thy name be ever praised! O Lord, make us free! Amen

For some well-researched facts on Thanksgiving (but undue hostility to the Colonial side in King Philip's War), see Karen Knelte's "History of the Modern American Thanksgiving", August 9, 2001.

Principal Components Analysis

2009-11-24T14:55:00.001-05:00

From Wikipedia, Principal Components Analysis:

PCA is theoretically the optimal linear scheme, in terms of least mean square error, for compressing a set of high dimensional vectors into a set of lower dimensional vectors and then reconstructing the original set. It is a non-parametric analysis and the answer is unique and independent of any hypothesis about data probability distribution.

Spelling Out Numbers vs. Writing Them Using Digits

2009-11-23T11:31:00.001-05:00

Professor Eugene Volokh has a good idea:

Spelling Out Numbers vs. Writing Them Using Digits

Eugene Volokh • November 22, 2009 4:48 pm

Any thoughts on what the rule should be here? My sense is that numbers written using digits are much easier to quickly absorb, so I tend to write them that way whenever they refer to something that people might want to use in calculations or comparisons. I’d say, for instance, that “These books tend to sell for 20% below their list price of $8 to $10,” rather than “These books tend to sell for twenty percent below their list price of eight to ten dollars.” But when counting people or things in contexts where the count likely doesn’t need to be grasped as a number suitable for calculation or comparison, I spell out the number, for instance in “There are eight reasons why this law is a bad idea.”

Two Degree Below Winter Ale

2009-11-23T10:01:00.001-05:00

This is a pretty good beer, and I like the bottle shape a lot.

The Climate Change Email Leak

2009-11-23T08:05:00.004-05:00

From an op-ed at the London Times:

Moreover, the scientific basis for global warming projections is now under scrutiny as never before. The principal source of these projections is produced by a small group of scientists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), affiliated to the University of East Anglia.

Last week an apparent hacker obtained access to their computers and published in the blogosphere part of their internal e-mail traffic. ...

Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals.
There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. But what is clear is that the integrity of the scientific evidence on which not merely the British Government, but other countries, too, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claim to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions, has been called into question.

From the New York Times, which as I recall published the top-secret Pentagon Papers:

The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.

Below is a comment I posted on Marginal Revolution:

My reaction is like that of physicist David Wright: it is appalling that the scientists in the emails are concealing data and trying to suppress their rivals' research. I haven't heard of that in economics. (I am not surprised at this in climate science, but I would be in almost any other area of science.) Indeed, there are a number of episodes in which mistakes have been found in famous economics papers because of close scrutiny of data voluntarily supplied by the writers to scholars they know will search for every flaw. Examples are the Feldstein social security programming error, Lott's work on gun control, and Levitt and Donohue on abortion and crime.

Of course, all work has some mistakes, and a sophist could use trivial mistakes to try to discredit a paper, but in the profession trivial mistakes are expected and do not discredit, and we are all aware that big mistakes are very possible too, even from top researchers. Moreover, the custom of revealing one's data and methods is a deterrent to deliberate fraud. I haven't heard of deliberate fraud in econ published papers, but if climate science does not have the custom of making data and methods publicly available, we should predict that fraud will occur.

The Singular "They"

2009-11-21T19:04:00.002-05:00

I just posted something like the following at VC as a comment on a post on grammar.

Prof. Volokh, I’d value your opinion on what is a much harder question than whether “Everyone thought they were right” is valid, which is the singular “they” as applied to organizations. Here’s an excerpt from a student paper: “The US Navy took the lead in this research. They saw an opportunity...” This is common in educated speech, but it is against the rules of style. It is contrary to parallelism, but in accord with the good realization that organizations are not real persons. What should we do?

Teaching Sheriffs the Bible

2009-11-21T08:02:00.002-05:00

From the Baylyblog comes a story about demonstrators at the Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Bloomington:

For the past year or so Ginger and I have been reading Scripture in an orderly fashion down at Planned Parenthood. Due to various constraints we end up reading Scripture mostly to the escorts and the pro-abortion sheriff who are there every week.
We always read Romans 1 & John 3, alternately. In addition, Ginger had the idea to start reading a different chapter each week so as to finish whole books. Our goal, of course, is to ensure that these people hear God's Special Revelation each week but we hardly dared hope that our goal of forcing them to know Scripture would really work.
I wasn't there today but as Ginger was reading Romans 1, she had to cough and during her pause the sheriff, Todd, finished her sentence with mockery, "and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error." Then he realized what he did and looked annoyed with himself. Ginger smiled and thanked him for "hiding Scripture in his heart."

Here's Romans 1:

1 Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God, 2 (Which he had promised afore by his prophets in the holy scriptures,) 3 Concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh; 4 And declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead: 5 By whom we have received grace and apostleship, for obedience to the faith among all nations, for his name: 6 Among whom are ye also the called of Jesus Christ: 7 To all that be in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.
8 First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, that your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world. 9 For God is my witness, whom I serve with F3 my spirit in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I make mention of you always in my prayers; 10 Making request, if by any means now at length I might have a prosperous journey by the will of God to come unto you. 11 For I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift, to the end ye may be established; 12 That is, that I may be comforted together with you by the mutual faith both of you and me. 13 Now I would not have you ignorant, brethren, that oftentimes I purposed to come unto you, (but was let hitherto,) that I might have some fruit among you also, even as among other Gentiles. 14 I am debtor both to the Greeks, and to the Barbarians; both to the wise, and to the unwise. 15 So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you that are at Rome also.
16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. 17 For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith. 18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;
19 Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. 20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: 21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, 23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. 24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: 25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. 26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: 27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. 28 And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; 29 Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, 30 Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, 31 Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: 32 Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

Obama's Double Backwards Flip on Health Care

2009-11-20T15:58:00.001-05:00

Romesh Ponnuru sums it up succinctly:

In the primaries, Obama distinguished himself from Clinton on health care by opposing an individual mandate. In the general election, he distinguished himself from McCain by opposing taxes on health benefits. So now he is trying to pass bills with both an individual mandate and taxes on health benefits — and his supporters are saying that Congress should go along because he won the election.

Medicare Fraud

2009-11-20T15:29:00.000-05:00

I found a Washington Examiner article that says the government's estimate of medicare fraud is an astounding 12% of payouts. If true, that pretty much kills the administrative costs argument (unless private insurance companies have a 12% rate too). See http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/First_-stop-Medicare-and-Medicaid-fraud-8559066-70554417.html

A Good Sentence

2009-11-20T08:47:00.000-05:00

A good sentence from Jonah Goldberg:

Indeed, some of us will always be sympathetic to Mrs. Palin if for nothing else than her enemies. The bile she extracts from her critics is almost like a dye marker, illuminating deep pockets of asininity that heretofore were either unnoticed or underappreciated.

Major Hasan's Treasonous Powerpoints

2009-11-18T09:10:00.002-05:00

The Washington Post has posted Major Hasan's powerpoint presentation on why Moslems should not fight Moslems, why the US army cannot reasonably expect loyalty from Moslem soldiers and so should let them resign, and how Islam requres Moslem states with non-Moslems as second-class citizens. It's amazing.

Leibniz versus Newton on God's Intervention in Nature (and Leibniz on Locke too)

2009-11-17T17:02:00.003-05:00

Professor O'Connor pointed me to two interesting passages from the famous correspondence of Leibniz with Samuel Clarke, a philosopher and follower of Newton. See http://www.archive.org/stream/philosophicalwri029664mbp/philosophicalwri029664mbp_djvu.txt, number 192-193.

IT appears that even natural religion is growing very much weaker. Many hold that souls are corporeal ; others hold that God Himself is corporeal. Mr. Locke and his followers are at any rate doubtful whether souls are not material and naturally perishable....
Mr. Newton and his followers have also an extremely odd opinion of the work of God. According to them God has to wind up His watch from time to time. Otherwise it would cease to go. He lacked sufficient fore- sight to make it a perpetual motion. This machine of God's is even, on their view, so imperfect that He is obliged from time to time to come to its assistance especially out of the ordinary course, and clean it, and even to mend it, as a clock- maker might his handiwork; and the less skilful the workman is, the more often is he obliged to rehandle and correct his work. According to my view, the same force and vigour goes on existing in the world always, and simply passes from one matter to another, according to the laws of nature and to the beautiful pre-established order. And I hold that, when God performs miracles, it is not to uphold the needs of nature, but for those of grace. To think otherwise would be to have a very low opinion of the wisdom and power of God.

The web source says:

Clarke thinks that the passage to which Leibniz is referring is the following, from Newton's Optics: ' Whilst the comets move in orbs very eccentrical, with all variety of directions towards every part of the heavens; 'tis not possible it should have been caused by blind fate, that the planets all move with one similar direction in concentrick orbs; excepting only some very small irregularities, which may have arisen from the mutual actions of the planets and comets upon one another; and which 'tis probably will in length of time increase more and more, till the present system of nature shall want to be anew put in order by its Author.' (The translation from Newton's Latin is Clarke's.)

Major Hasan and the Media Parody

2009-11-11T09:04:00.000-05:00

Via Instapundit comes this good Major Hasan and the Media parody.

Government Harming People

2009-11-10T07:36:00.001-05:00

Via Jay Nordlinger, from Frederick Douglass's "What Shall Be Done with the Slaves If Emancipated?"

Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone.

Major Hasan and Nuttiness

2009-11-09T13:17:00.001-05:00

First-rate Mark Steyn from The Corner:

For the purposes of argument, let's accept the media's insistence that Major Hasan is a lone crazy.

So who's nuttier?

The guy who gives a lecture to other military doctors in which he says non-Muslims should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats?

Or the guys who say "Hey, let's have this fellow counsel our traumatized veterans and then promote him to major and put him on a Homeland Security panel?

Or the Army Chief of Staff who thinks the priority should be to celebrate diversity, even unto death?

Or the Secretary of Homeland Security who warns that the principal threat we face now is an outbreak of Islamophobia?

Or the president who says we cannot "fully know" why Major Hasan did what he did, so why trouble ourselves any further?

Or the columnist who, when a man hands out copies of the Koran before gunning down his victims while yelling "Allahu akbar," says you're racist if you bring up his religion?

Or his media colleagues who put Americans in the same position as East Germans twenty years ago of having to get hold of a foreign newspaper to find out what's going on?

General Casey has a point: An army that lets you check either the "home team" or "enemy" box according to taste is certainly diverse. But the logic in the remarks of Secretary Napolitano and others is that the real problem is that most Americans are knuckledragging bigots just waiting to go bananas. As Melanie Phillips wrote in her book Londonistan:

Minority-rights doctrine has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a 'victim' group, while those at the receiving end of their behaviour are blamed simply because they belong to the 'oppressive' majority.

To the injury of November 5, we add the insults of American officialdom and their poodle media. In a nutshell:

The real enemy — in the sense of the most important enemy — isn’t a bunch of flea-bitten jihadis sitting in a cave somewhere. It’s Western civilization’s craziness. We are setting our hair on fire and putting it out with a hammer.

Loyalty Oaths

2009-11-09T09:36:00.003-05:00

There's an easy fix to detecting traitors of the Major Hasan type: a better loyalty oath. Something specific, like this:

"I swear to defend the United States by fighting against its enemies even when they are Moslem, and in particular I swear to oppose Al Qaeda and the Taliban until my superiors release me from that obligation. If my duty ever conflicts with my religious principles, I will inform my superiors immediately."

Of course, Major Hasan wanted to quit the military, so he perhaps wouldn't mind a dishonorable discharge for disloyalty,but at least it would have removed him from an opportunity to hurt us.

Oaths are not much use for protection against liars, but principled people such as religious and political extremists are often unwilling to betray their gods.

Barney Frank: Drugs, Prostitution, Money

2009-11-08T10:04:00.002-05:00

Isn't it bizarre that one of the most powerful Congressmen, from a rich Boston district, is Barney Frank, who has been staying in the same houses as intimate homosexual friends used for growing drugs and for prostitution? When we add that he is perhaps more to blame than any other single person for the 2008 banking crisis (via his pressure to have Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac encourage subprime loans), his political survival is just weird. Do liberal intellectuals really not care about any of this?

Citing Web References

2009-11-07T09:57:00.009-05:00

Here's a webpage in a common citation style:

Thumma, Scott, and Warren Bird. Changes in American Megachurches: Tracing Eight Years of Growth and Innovation in the Nation's Largest-Attendance Congregations. Hartford Institute for Religion Research. 2008. Web. 1 Oct. 2009.

The word “Web” and the pointed brackets are unnecessary, whereas it would be useful to give the meaning of the date, thus:

Thumma, Scott, and Warren Bird. Changes in American Megachurches: Tracing Eight Years of Growth and Innovation in the Nation's Largest-Attendance Congregations. Hartford Institute for Religion Research. 2008. Http://hirr.hartsem.edu/megachurch/megastoday2008_summaryreport.html. Viewed 1 Oct. 2009.

Wikipedia has a neat link for every article in the "toolbox" in the left column that tells you how to cite the article in a large number of citation styles. See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Cite&page=Keynesian_economics&id=324592637. All of the citation styles are defective, failing to follow the principle of omitting useless keystrokes and of including all relevant information (a shocking number omit the date that the article is written!).

I would also drop the "Viewed" information entirely. It is true that webpages change or disappear, but I don't think knowing that the author viewed it on a particular day is very useful, particularly since the reader will usually know the year he viewed it from the year he wrote the text. And the location information should logically, be in one place, with the year information separate. Thus, what's better is:

Thumma, Scott, and Warren Bird. Changes in American Megachurches: Tracing Eight Years of Growth and Innovation in the Nation's Largest-Attendance Congregations. Hartford Institute for Religion Research. Http://hirr.hartsem.edu/megachurch/megastoday2008_summaryreport.html (2008).

I thought about making Wikipedia an exception since it changes so often, but I looked and saw that Wikipedia always has a date of last change, which should be cited as the publication date. That date is at the bottom of an article, like this:

This page was last modified on 8 November 2009 at 05:09.

Blair and Cameron's Fear of Hitchens

2009-11-07T09:19:00.002-05:00

A funny story from Peter Hitchens on November 5, 2009 (my boldface):

Mr Cameron is in many ways the 'heir to Blair' that he said he would be, and I was amused to find that he is also copying his exemplar in his treatment of me at press conferences. Even though he acknowledged me with a three-star Etonian manly glance and nod, and even though there was no huge hurry nor contest to ask questions, he paid me the immense compliment of not taking a question from me. Mr Blair used to do the same, even if mine was the only hand up in the whole vast room. My fellow journalists, amused by the performance, often used to let this happen deliberately. As a result, reporters from immensely obscure foreign media outlets learned that they could question the Labour leader if they put their hands up at the same time as me. The Beekeeper's Gazette could have got a question if they had turned up. When, after many weeks, Mr Blair eventually relented (which led to a scene, in which I was told to sit down and stop being 'bad') I had almost forgotten what I had wanted to ask. I had begun to tell people that I didn't want to ask a question at all, that holding my hand up for long periods was a Tantric Yoga technique for suppressing nausea.

Intelligence by State

2009-10-31T22:10:00.002-04:00

A map of estimated white IQ's by state is at http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/estimated-white-iq-by-state-us. Black IQ's by state are at: http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/estimated-black-iq-by-state.

Shaggy Manes and Puffballs from Latimer Woods

2009-10-26T21:16:00.002-04:00

The whole family went on an ideal walk in Latimer Woods this afternoon. We found lots of pear-shaped puffballs at the edible, white, stage, and several black shaggy manes that we took home and cooked in butter. The flavor was not ideal---it was actually sweet. Perhaps it would have been better to cook them in milk and butter as a soup or for on toast. The puffballs were okay, but I have not found a good way to cook them.

I did find a good 2008 blog article, "Wild Mushrooms of Mid-fall – Wine Caps, Shaggy Manes and More."

Medicare Administrative Costs and Fraud

2009-10-26T03:58:00.003-04:00

An Philip Klein American Spectator article is relevant to thinking about health care policy.

Coburn based his figures on an estimate from health care fraud expert Malcolm Sparrow of Harvard University, who has said -- at the low end -- 10 percent of the roughly $1 trillion in spending on government health care programs may be lost to fraud.
"By taking the fraud and abuse problem seriously this administration might be able to save 10 percent or even 20 percent from Medicare and Medicaid budgets," Sparrow said in May testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. But to accomplish this, Sparrow explained, the government would have to boost anti-fraud spending to as high as 2 percent of the cost of the programs from the roughly 0.1 percent now dedicated to the task.

See also "Medicare’s Hidden Administrative Costs: A Comparison of Medicare and the Private Sector" (Based in Part on a Technical Paper by Mark Litow of Milliman, Inc.) Merrill Matthews, January 10, 2006. I read the intro, which makes a lot of sense. It notes that Medicare costs exclude management, research, the cost of collecting government funds (much less the distortionary costs of taxation), and the administrative costs to employers of collecting premiums from employees. Also, costs of buildings and much fraud pursuit is not included in the usual administrative costs of Medicare. And Medicare does not have to pay the 1-2% state taxes on premiums that private insurance companies must pay. Medicare's costs are also lower because Medicare does not scrutinize claims as private companies do--- the report claims that Medicare does not try to pursue fraud unless it is massive, which is plausible.

Valedictions: Yours Truly

2009-10-25T22:19:00.003-04:00

Wikipedia's article Valedictions is good. It talks about differences between England and America, and about French, German, and Hebrew valedictions. I don't like "Yours sincerely", because though I suppose I am always sincere, it seems inappropriate for describing the contents of a typical letter. "Yours truly" is always apt, nicely conventional, and sufficiently uncool. Cheers, Best Wishes, and Best Regards have their places too.

What Does "Cool" Mean?

2009-10-25T21:37:00.000-04:00

"John Scalzi Answers the Burning Question - Can SciFI Movies Be Cool?", via Instapundit, is a good short literary essay.

For example, there's "cool," as in "the studied indifference to cultural judgment regarding what you like," which means that you like what you like and you don't care if other people like it. Science fiction fails this definition utterly, because science fiction fans are monumentally uncool -- not because they are geeks and nerds, or at least, not directly because of that, but because generally speaking they really really really want you to love what they love, too, and that sort of insensible urge to share is the opposite of cool. Mind you, scifi fans understand other people don't love what they love, but rather than not caring, they feel a little sorry for those people. Which is a different dynamic altogether.

He then notes that 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Matrix were cool movies.

Mushroom Photography

2009-10-22T21:03:00.000-04:00

"Top Ten Mistakes in Mushroom Photography" is an interesting long webpage. It has lots of photos, with the species identified, illustrating various mistakes. The photo tips are useful even if it is not mushrooms you are photographing.

The Word "Autochthonal"

2009-10-20T22:39:00.000-04:00

autochthonal: originating where it is found; "the autochthonal fauna of Australia includes the kangaroo"; "autochthonous rocks and people and folktales"; "endemic folkways"; "the Ainu are indigenous to the northernmost islands of Japan" (wordnetweb.princeton.edu)

Flower Dutch Auction Clocks

2009-10-14T19:04:00.007-04:00

A Clock

The Room

I found these pictures of a Dutch auction at http://www.flower-wholesale.com/hannsvba/klok.html, which tells how you can go and visit such an auction in Aalsmeer. The best YouTube video of it I found is here.

A Bolete Turning Blue

2009-10-12T22:20:00.002-04:00

I found a good, short, You-Tube video of a broken bolete turning blue. Browsing the web, it looks to me as if boletes are pretty safe. None are deadly poisonous. Some cause severe stomach-ache, but it looks as if you're safe if you avoid bad-tasting, blue-staining, or orange or red boletes.

The Meadow Mushroom, Agaricus Campestris

2009-10-08T21:03:00.005-04:00

Lillie and Faith and Benjamin and I went jogging (Ben on his bicycle) and brought home a white lawn mushroom with red-black gills. It seems to be an Agaricus Campestris, prettily named, a Meadow Mushroom. It had a brown spore print, free gills, and soaked up water readily. We looked at the spores under the microscope, and they did look like the spores above, though I don't remember seeing the green interiors under our smaller 900x magnification. That photo is from an amateur's good webpage at http://www.mushroom-collecting.com/mushroomhorse.html.

We had a coprinus for breakfast this morning--- two actually, probably shaggy manes, though I didn't check. Amelia and Mom collected them from near the church. They didn't liquefy overnight.

IV as a Solution to Omitted Variables

2009-10-03T09:32:00.004-04:00

We think of instrumental variables as a solution to Y causing X, but it also can help when there is an omitted variable. In that case, X ends up being correlated with the error term, because the omitted variable X2 is correlated with both Y and X. So what we can do is find a Z which is correlated with X but not with X2 or Y. We can do a first-stage regression of X on Z, and then use the fitted value Xhat in our main regression, Y on Xhat.

Verbs in Writing

2009-10-01T16:06:00.002-04:00

Via Marginal Revolution, here are some rules for good writing from Michael Nielsen.

Use the strongest appropriate verb: Identify the verb in every sentence, and ask if you can improve it, perhaps eliminating adjectives and adverbs in the process. This is simple and mechanical, but often yields great improvements with little effort.
Beware of nominalization: A common way we weaken verbs is by turning them into nouns, and then combining them with weaker verbs. This bad habit is called nominalization. Contrast the wishy-washy “I conducted an investigation of rules for rewriting” with the more direct “I investigated rules for rewriting”. In the first sentence I have nominalized the strong verb “investigated” so that it becomes the noun “investigation”, and then combined it with the weaker verb “conducted”.

Game Theory Notes on Subgame Perfectness and the Centipede Game

2009-09-30T15:26:00.001-04:00

I've just written up notes for my game theory class on a paradox of sequential rationality and on the Centipede Game.

Most-Used Bible Verses

2009-09-27T15:41:00.000-04:00

TopVerses.com has a list of Bible verses that they somehow calculate are most-used. It's interesting to see what's on it, and a good list of important verses. They don't give actual counts, though, so it's just ordinal.

Ranges and Codomains

2009-09-27T01:17:00.004-04:00

I just learned a useful math term: CODOMAIN. Consider the function f(x) = 3 +5x as defined over the intervals of x in [0, 10] and f(x) in [0, \infinity). The DOMAIN is [0,10]. The RANGE is [3, 50]. The CODOMAIN is [0, \infinity). This mapping is one-to-one, but not onto, so the range and codomain are not identical.

Phelps on Capitalism and Innovation

2009-09-25T22:47:00.003-04:00

Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps has an interesting essay, "Economic Justice and the Spirit of Innovation," in the October 2009 First Things.

The issue of morality in economics is neither the fairness of income distribution nor the stability of financial systems. It is how human institutions can be shaped to correspond to human nature—to man’s nature as an innovator.... Prosperity and the development of the human spirit are linked in the dynamism of the economy. The dynamism of the American economy over the past two hundred years was strong, and that helps to explain why prosperity was high both in the sense of high employment and the sense of a high degree of personal satisfaction compared to that in other countries.... That is the positive moral content of economics—to realize an anthropology that starts with innovative human nature: homo innovaticus, not homo economicus. Existing economics has a negative moral content in that it treats economic factors as though they were pieces on a game board rather than human beings who learn, discover, and innovate. Politicians play the same game, channeling resources from one activity or social group to another without considering the effect on the creativity and judgment exercised within the economy and thus the deep rewards the economy imparts or fails to impart.... Even now, in the midst of an economic downturn, there are signs of vitality that weren’t present in the 1950s. There is exuberance, however irrational, in the banking system, and some originality here and there in hedge funds and private equity, and still some inventiveness in Silicon Valley. Although they may have caused more problems than they were worth, the exotic, new financial instruments showed that America is still the world’s leader in invention. They reflect America’s capacity to create. Unfortunately, the markets were unsophisticated and set mistaken asset prices.

Constructing a Risky Density Function

2009-09-25T14:06:00.004-04:00

My colleague Haizhen Lin found a neat trick from someone in the math department. Suppose you have a density f(x) and you want to construct a pointwise less risky function, as in my paper cited below. You can use this: f(a, x) = (1/a) f( .5 - .5/a +x/a) If a=1, f(a,x) = f(x). If a is small, f(a,x) tends to get big because of the 1/a portion, and it gets very big for x=0, but for x far from 0, the f becomes small because the argument becomes very big, distant from 0. "When Does Extra Risk Strictly Increase the Value of Options?" The Review of Financial Studies, 20(5): 1647-1667 (September 2007). It is well known that risk increases the value of options. This paper makes that precise in a new way. The conventional theorem says that the value of an option does not fall if the underlying option becomes riskier in the conventional sense of the mean-preserving spread. This paper uses two new definitions of ``riskier'' to show that the value of an option strictly increases (a) if the underlying asset becomes ``pointwise riskier,'' and (b) only if the underlying asset becomes ``extremum riskier.'' Paper in tex or pdf ( http://www.rasmusen.org/published/Rasmusen07-RFS-options.pdf).

Leo Strauss Audio File of Him Teaching Meno

2009-09-24T22:52:00.004-04:00

The University of Chicago has posted an audio file of Leo Strauss lecturing on Meno as the first session of his political philosophy class. I should listen through it sometime. Will I? There are so many wonderful opportunities that we let slide by. We professors ought to be sitting in on each others' classes, for example, but that is rare.

Occupations over the Decades

2009-09-23T10:38:00.003-04:00

DD refers me to a good site like the baby name site I once blogged but showing over decades the most common occupations: http://flare.prefuse.org/apps/job_voyager . This site also tells you how to set up your own graphics of this kind.

A New Word: Jobligation

2009-09-20T15:44:00.001-04:00

Jobligation: an obligation arising from your job--- something you must attend because of work. From Mr. Lileks.

Dynamic Pricing for Hockey Tickets

2009-09-16T17:34:00.000-04:00

Via Marginal Revolution, a news story tells of daily-changing prices for hockey games:

Similar to airline pricing, the best prices are often found early. Dynamic pricing will provide fans with great prices starting from the initial on-sale on Sept. 12. The upper level single-game ticket prices can go up or down based on a variety of factors, including league standings, opposing team, star players, day of the week, and real time supply and demand. Dynamic pricing for upper level tickets will continue all season. Fans will be able to check out the current prices at any time at DallasStars.com.

Cromwell's Rule

2009-09-15T08:29:00.002-04:00

AJ refers me to Wikipedia's article on Cromwell's Rule:

Cromwell's rule, named by statistician Dennis Lindley, states that one should avoid using prior probabilities of 0 or 1, except when applied to statements that are logically true or false. (For instance, Lindley would allow us to say that \Pr(2+2 = 4) = 1.)
The reference is to Oliver Cromwell, who famously wrote to the synod of the Church of Scotland on August 5, 1650 saying

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.
As Lindley puts it, if a coherent Bayesian attaches a prior probability of zero to the hypothesis that the Moon is made of green cheese, then even whole armies of astronauts coming back bearing green cheese cannot convince him.

This seems reasonable. But is there a psychological problem if we are sure of nothing in the world? We might be haunted by having to always to do a substantive Bayes's Rule calculation. Maybe not, though. The substance of Lindley's idea is the story of the astronauts bringing green cheese-- we will throw away our heuristic solid belief if that happens.

The Blue-Eyed Islander Puzzle

2009-09-05T14:20:00.001-04:00

Here is a well-known puzzle that I will probably be teaching next week. An island starts with 2 blue-eyed people and 48 green-eyed, but the people do not know these numbers. If a person ever decides his eyes are blue, he must leave the island at dawn the next day. There are no mirrors and people may not talk about eye color, but they see each others' faces.

What will happen? -- nobody leaves.

Now an outsider comes to the island and says, "At least one of you has blue eyes".

The next dawn, nobody leaves, but on the second dawn, both blue-eyed people leave.

The reason: Both blue-eyed people realize there are either 1 or 2 blue-eyed people. When nobody leaves on the first dawn, each realizes that there must be 2-- and he is one of them.

Sharing the Gospel

2009-08-21T22:27:00.002-04:00

My wife made a good point to me tonight. Some people think that the way to show people that Christianity is good is to behave well, so they are impressed with Christians. There is something to that, but it goes off on a tangent. Christianity is good because it is true. Even as something we wish to be true, it is not so much that it will make me a better person as that it gives me hope even though I remain a bad person. Even if I don't succeed in becoming pure--- and nobody does, really--- God forgives me, as a father forgives a naughty child.

One reason this is important is that Christians really cannot succeed in preaching the Gospel by showing off what good people they are. The World is not impressed by Christian virtue; only by worldly virtue. Often those things coincide--- bravery is both a pagan and a Christian virtue--- but not always. In fact, the World usually thinks that the more Christian you are, the more you are a duped fanatic. Just think of the extreme Moslems--- we are not so much impressed by their bravery as appalled by their willingness to kill people. They do not convert by their example. At best, they make people take a look to see what makes them so brave.

Moreover, thinking that to convert people to Christianity means you must be exemplary in all ways makes us ashamed to admit our Christianity. I do not want people to see how deficient I am and decide that Christians are weak and thoughtless people. It is better if I forget about impressing them with my strength, and concentrate on letting God use me as he wills to convey information or whatever else I may do for Him.

Proof from Intuition and Failed Attempts to Prove Formally

2009-08-17T11:04:00.001-04:00

An insight from Trent Dougherty at Prosblogion:

In fact, I think that sometimes repeated failure is evidence for the insight when it is repeated failure by multiple people. Think of the history of failure to prove Fermat's last theorem. Personally, I never doubted the theorem for a second and I doubt I am alone in believing that the repeated failure to provide a proof did not provide much if any evidence that it was false. Or consider what a history to prove Goldbach's conjecture would look like (I haven't looked to see if there is an actual history of attempts to do so). The very fact that so many people have the insight that it is true is what is guiding all these (sadly failed) attempts, and the (partial) independence of the testimony can be surprisingly strong evidence when modeled probabilistically. And it helps when there is considerable conceptual similarity among the attempts, for the insights are often of the form "considerations pertaining to X support Y" (and we just can't get the bridge in formal logic yet).

Good Stewardship of Natural Resources

2009-08-15T10:49:00.001-04:00

Steve Sailer is right about parks. The Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath.

To get people back to the National Parks, they don't need cheaper admissions (which max out at $23 per vehicle, which is cheap). They need more luxury. For example, in the roadless high country of Yosemite National Park, above Tuolumne Meadows at around 10,000 feet in altitude, there has long been a circuit of about five High Sierra Camps, with tent cabins and dining halls, each a day's walk (6 to 8 miles) apart. So, you can take a five night hiking trip without carrying your own food and fuel, you can sleep in a bed, and have a hot shower (at three camps): it's $136 per person per night for food and lodging. This circuit is very popular with aging nature lovers who don't want to put up anymore with the rigors of sheer wilderness backpacking at high altitude. So you have to apply in a lottery each year in the autumn for the next summer. My aunt and uncle applied every year for about a decade, but never got chosen, and finally gave up when they got too old for high altitude hiking. That's just sad. Considering how popular this amenity is, you might think the National Park Service would have expanded it, adding more High Sierra Camps in Yosemite, and setting up similar circuits in Kings Canyon and Sequoia to the south. In truth, the more remarkable thing is that the NPS hasn't dismantled the High Sierra Camps.

International Law Explicitly Permits Jewish Settlements on the West Bank

2009-08-14T12:06:00.004-04:00

From Peter Hitchens, August 13, 2009:

...international law, though I am happy to discuss this with any reasonable person, all the way back to the Sanremo Accords and the original League of Nations Mandate, which designated the area now known as the West Bank for "close Jewish settlement", and has not been superseded, so far as I know, by any multilateral treaty or plan put fairly to all sides. The West Bank remained so designated after the entire area east of the Jordan to the Iraqi borders (originally part of the proposed "National Home for the Jews") was arbitrarily sliced off the Palestine Mandate to provide a consolation prize for Emir Abdullah.

I'd never heard this, so I checked. And in fact, international law does authorize Jewish settlements on the West Bank. From: League of Nations: The Mandate for Palestine, July 24, 1922:

Article 6.

The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency. referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews, on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.

Hitchens also has a good summary of the extreme views that the Arab countries hold and have always held of Israel, and how the Arabs do not consider the 1967 borders to have any legal validity whatsoever.

I would add that I am always amused by the enthusiasm which Israel's enemies now show for the pre-1967 border of Israel. Their alleged enthusiasm for it now is a fake. Their real objective, as enshrined for decades in the policy documents and propaganda of the Arab world, (though in some cases tardily, reluctantly and insincerely shelved for Western consumption) is the end of the Jewish state altogether. Every Arab political figure in the area has on his wall a map of the region, a map from which Israel has entirely vanished. Hizbollah works for the extirpation of Israel, from just beyond its northern border. Hamas (a movement whose treatment of fellow Arabs who oppose it is extremely repressive and violent) continues to make no secret of this aim. Racialist filth and Judophobic slurry are taught to children in the Arab states and broadcast on Arab TV stations. And until they abandon this aim, and this muck, there can be no compromise. How can you compromise with people who teach tiny children to hate you, and whose aim is your utter destruction? Every concession would merely be a further step towards death, not a step towards peace.
I am old enough to recall that these enthusiasts were not so enthusiastic about the pre-1967 border before 1967, when it was the border of Israel. No Arab state accepted it as legitimate, let alone lawful. So why are they so keen on it now? I guarantee that if the 1967 border were to be restored tomorrow, the Arab campaign against Israel (backed elsewhere by our strange Israel-haters, who can only find one country on the map of the world to disapprove of) would continue unabated. At that stage, before 1967, the official policy of the Arab world was to 'drive the Jews into the sea'. The 1967 border itself, a militarily indefensible and impractical frontier, was the cease-fire line at the end of the 1948 War, not an internationally agreed frontier between peaceful sovereign states. For most of its existence it was repeatedly violated.
The 1948 war was itself caused by the Arab world's rejection of the 1947 partition plan, which allocated Israel a much smaller territory even than the land enclosed in the supposedly sacred 1967 border. That rejection itself followed the similar rejection of the partition proposed by the 1937 Peel Commission, which was even less generous to the Jews than the UN would be ten years later.

Cowardice at Yale University Press

2009-08-14T11:45:00.001-04:00

From VC:

Yale University Press has decided not to include controversial Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad in a book about the cartoons and the resulting controversy. Other depictions of Muhammad slated for inclusion in the book, The Cartoons that Shook the World, have also been pulled. The NYT reports:

The book’s author, Jytte Klausen, a Danish-born professor of politics at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., reluctantly accepted Yale University Press’s decision not to publish the cartoons.

John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said by telephone that the decision was difficult, but the recommendation to withdraw the images, including the historical ones of Muhammad, was “overwhelming and unanimous.” The cartoons are freely available on the Internet and can be accurately described in words, Mr. Donatich said, so reprinting them could be interpreted easily as gratuitous.

He noted that he had been involved in publishing other controversial books . . . and “I’ve never blinked.” But, he said, “when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question.”

The American Teenager

2009-08-07T10:23:00.001-04:00

Ben Stein in TAS says of director John Hughes (Ferris Bueller's Day Off; Planes, Trains, and Automobiles; Home Alone):

The insight that will make him immortal... was that the modern American white middle class teen combines a Saudi Arabia-sized reservoir of self-obsession and self-pity with a startling gift for exultation and enjoyment of life. No one had ever thought to note that along with James Dean's sulky self-obsession might also come a shriek of happiness at just being alive.

Eric Rasmusen's Weblog

New Blog Address

Multiple Millions to Secy.of State Clinton by Saudi Arabia, Norway, Kuwait, Qatar, Taiwan,Oman, Jamaica, Mrs. Rich

The Standard for Assistant Profs at the IU Dept. of English

Web Version of Books

Golf Courses

Straussianism

The 'Fire Napolitano' Debate [Andy McCarthy]

The Nigerian Terrorist

“I think of all Harvard men as sissies”

"Man, Do I Hate Holiday Travel"

The Low State of English Departments

Regressions and Global Warming

Merry Christmas!

Spending on Global Warming Research

Rose Friedman

Latest Links on Global Warming

Affirmative Action and Incompetent Doctors

Updating Blog Posts

Aspirin as First Aid for Heart Attacks

The Just Price

Applying Time Series Econometrics to Temperature and Carbon Dioxide

The Direct and Indirect Implications of the ClimateGate Emails

Attitudes towards Murderers

Latest Links on Global Warming

Numerology, Global Warming, Moral Relativists, Truth Relativists, and Leo Strauss

Yawneroos and Obammyboppers

Death Threats

ClimateGate-- Best Links, with Description

A Petition I Am Thinking of Circulating

The Climate Research Dispute over Publishing Soon and Baliunas

Christmas, Saturnalia, and Sol Invictus

What Obama Could Have Said in Oslo

Climate--Various

"Baby You Can Drive My Car": Copenhagen Full Limos and . Empty Buses

Dealing with Reporters on a Regular Basis

The Precautionary Principle

Snowballs, Not Lines

Robert E. Sullivan's Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power

How to EXTRACT & SAVE PICTURE From an Microsoft Word (MS Word) Document

ClimateGate--Various

ClimateGate Jokes

Replication in ClimateGate

Timid Scholars

Rabbinical Judaism vs. Karaites, Sola Scriptura

Simple Ideas and Complicated Models

Climate Dementors

The Huckabee Pardons and Methodism

Periods and Commas: Inside Quotation Marks or Outside?

Godless Presidential Thanksgiving Proclamations

Should Victims Be Able to Sue Corrupt Judges

ClimateGate, New Zealand Fakery

Uh, oh – raw data in New Zealand tells a different story than the “official” one. and the pitiful government response in Combining Temperature Data from Multiple Sites in Wellington

Thanksgiving

Principal Components Analysis

Spelling Out Numbers vs. Writing Them Using Digits

Spelling Out Numbers vs. Writing Them Using Digits

Two Degree Below Winter Ale

The Climate Change Email Leak

The Singular "They"

Teaching Sheriffs the Bible

Obama's Double Backwards Flip on Health Care

Medicare Fraud

A Good Sentence

Major Hasan's Treasonous Powerpoints

Leibniz versus Newton on God's Intervention in Nature (and Leibniz on Locke too)

Major Hasan and the Media Parody

Government Harming People

Major Hasan and Nuttiness

Loyalty Oaths

Barney Frank: Drugs, Prostitution, Money

Citing Web References

Blair and Cameron's Fear of Hitchens

Intelligence by State

Shaggy Manes and Puffballs from Latimer Woods

Medicare Administrative Costs and Fraud

Valedictions: Yours Truly

What Does "Cool" Mean?

Mushroom Photography

The Word "Autochthonal"