Reruns

Superman Returns is on FX on Sunday AM. Here’s why you should watch.

If Only Jim Had Spoken to Hayao

I don’t want to write down any spoilers for Avatar, but I left wishing that James Cameron had spoken to Hayao Miyazaki about creating conflict without making someone an out-and-out bad guy. I thought of Princess Mononoke, with a theme similar to Avatar’s, and wanted antagonists like San and Princess Eboshi: people who valued different (but positive) things and came to battle over them. I was taken out of the narrative by the clumsy motivations as much as I was in Spielberg’s A.I. when Monica abandons David in the woods. Who would actually do that?

And I’m curious about animal evolution on Pandora – how did the Na’vi get to be the only large creatures with only 4 limbs?

But I suspect I will see the movie in a theatre again, and several times on DVD.

A little later: Cameron could also have spoken to Guillermo Del Toro of Hellboy fame. In Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Prince Nuada, the antagonist, has a very good motivation for being unhappy with humanity: from his point of view we have reneged on our agreement to stick to the cities and have been encroaching on the forests for too long. You can easily sympathize with his anger, even if you aren’t in favor of humanity being destroyed. I don’t know if the story is part of Hellboy’s comics canon or not – if so, the credit for the greater subtlety would go to Mike Mignola.

I must like movies with Forest Spirits.

What The Duke Said

I’m not a big fan of High Noon. I think John Wayne’s comment nails it for me. (from an interview with Roger Ebert)

“What a piece of you-know-what that was,” he told me. “I think it was popular because of the music. Think about it this way. Here’s a town full of people who have ridden in covered wagons all the way across the plains, fightin’ off Indians and drought and wild animals in order to settle down and make themselves a homestead. And then when three no-good bad guys walk into town and the marshal asks for a little help, everybody in town gets shy. If I’d been the marshal, I would have been so goddamned disgusted with those chicken-livered yellow sons of bitches that I would have just taken my wife and saddled up and rode out of there.”

Especially if my wife was Grace Kelly.

I came across this while reading Roger’s comments on Rio Bravo, a movie I watched again recently (and watch whenever it’s broadcast). I have to say that The Searchers is my favorite John Wayne movie, and one of my overall favorites.

Datanauts, Man Your Analyses!

Or why I love the internet. Iowahawk has a very good walk-through of regression analysis as applied to climate data – with a detailed how-to for using real NOAA data and creating/replicating some of the temperature graphs in various research papers. He makes the point that the famous “hockey stick” global warming graph is the result of a plausible choice for proxy variables (tree ring data, ice cores, etc). And also makes the point that other reasonable choices for proxy variables (bristlecone pine tree ring data, for example) yield very different graphs for global temperatures. One of the surprising things is that the proxy variable/principal component choices by the CRU team makes the Medieval Warming Period vanish, but that including bristlecone pine tree ring data as a principal component yields temperature graphs that keep the MWP.

I haven’t done the downloading and analysis myself yet, but I intend to. I will share anything interesting that I find.

Later: I can confirm that Iowahawk’s how-to does work and yields the graph described. This is fun, but not science – since I don’t know enough to think critically about what are wise or unwise choices for principal components.

We’re Too Busy Telling You The Sky is Burning To Check Actual Data Integrity

In early November of this year, NASA/GISS released a statement that this October had been the warmest October on record. From Jerry Pournelle’s website, a link to an article in the UK Telegraph describing how this claim was based on bad data from Russia. The GISS (Goddard Institute of Space Studies) excused this by saying “that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with.”

This article predates the leaked CRU emails by a couple of days (in fact, the actual hack was discovered by the CRU a day after this article was posted).

There is a call from members of the American Physical Society to have their 2007 statement calling for reductions of CO2 reviewed by a scientist who is not in charge of a research center that would be expected to receive more funding if it endorsed the AGW/CO2 hypothesis.

“It is Socolow whose entire research funding stream, well over a million dollars a year, depends on continued alarm over global warming,” says William Happer, a fellow Princeton University professor and head of the Happer physics lab who has raised the question of a conflict of interest. The reason: the ostensibly neutral person charged with evaluating a statement endorsing man-made global warming is a leading proponent of precisely that theory whose funding is tied to that theory.”

I don’t have any reason to doubt the validity of the Dr. Socolow’s research – but he shouldn’t be the one in charge of reviewing it since a continued affirmation of the APS’ 2007 statement could easily send more research money his way. Someone without that conflict of interest should be the reviewer.

We Are An Especially Tricky People

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. – Uncle Ralph

I am large. I contain multitudes. – Uncle Walt

Much madness is divinest sense to the discerning eye. – Aunt Emily

There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency–and a virtue; and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency–and a vice. – Uncle Mark

It is impossible to say just what I mean! – Uncle T.S.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. – Uncle Orson

Why I like Joe Lieberman

A good interview in the online WSJ with Joe Lieberman – covering both healthcare and Afghanistan. My favorite quote on the public option for the healthcare bill, “If we create this, it’s going to run deficits. Not for evil reasons. Congress just likes to say ‘yes’ when people ask for additional services to be covered.”

Only Watch This If You Are Comfortable With Your Nerdhood

The Bohr-Einstein debates on the underpinnings of QM – as enacted by dog puppets. Paul Ehrenfest is a hedgehog and Dirac (my favorite mathematical physicist) is an elephant. Silly and well done. I give it 4 stars.

“It would be the end of physics if Einstein were right.”

You might as well say…

why do we have to have evil?

This is the best answer I know. As unsatisfying as it may be.

Climate Update

Scientific American has a response to the leaked CRU emails and whatever doubt they may cast upon AGW. I have to confess that I stopped reading SciAm in the early ’00’s when they changed to a new editor who seemed to sensationalize science to the point where the magazine felt like Omni without the space-alien lesbian stories. Then they did what, to my mind, was an unfair assault on Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist. But read it and form your own thoughts.

The RealClimate website has a page of links to climate data, for those who want to see the raw (or processed) stuff.

And here’s a link to the website Skeptical Science, who sets out to debunk some of the standard AGW-skeptics’ arguments.