Those hacked emails…

It has been all over the blogs recently. Just like Kurrild-Klitgaard, I don’t know much about this stuff. You can read the mails here (do note that there are a lot of mails). Some interesting remarks by Pa Annoyed here:

Incidentally, the revelations seem to indicate that with the exception of Mann (who seems a bit of a barm-pot), the unwillingness to publish isn’t intended as fraud or a cover-up, but because they don’t want to provide the material for sceptics to “abuse” as they see it. They see the little tricks and manipulations they do as normal scientific practice necessary to get a genuine signal out of difficult data, but know that the sceptics won’t present it that way. Perhaps the way that butchers don’t want sausage-eaters to see the inside of real slaughterhouses. Ordinary people will misunderstand, and enemies will use it as ammunition. They have a hard enough time already with sceptics, why give them free help?

They genuinely believe they’re doing the right thing, and that their methods are justified, but know that the reality could be used against them. In science, the easiest person to fool is yourself. These people are fooling themselves, and are throwing away large parts of the scientific method that were developed to stop us doing precisely that. They know the rules, but they don’t understand the ‘why’ of them. And so they hide what they’re doing with clear consciences.

My current guess actually is that it wasn’t hackers. I think that as part of the FOIA process, while they were still arguing over whether they had to comply, they had some people go through the email archive pulling out the relevant data just in case they did have to give it up. I suspect that the people who did that may have collected up anything that they thought looked juicy. And when the appeal results came down that they didn’t, on spurious grounds, somebody decided to take the law into their own hands.

Unfortunately, if that is so, there are probably only a very few suspects to question. But I expect it also means that the emails are 100% genuine.

…

For an example of the “tricks and manipulations” PA is talking about, see this post or go directly to the source by following this link for more. More on the matter at hand here and here – the first link is a selection of some of the ‘juicy’ mails from my top link, the second is an interesting ‘case study’ analyzing a particular bit of email correspondance in some detail. Carsten Valgreen also provides good comments (in Danish) here.

Nerdtests

Jeg forsøgte at embedde et billede af mine resultater fra Nerdtest 2.0 ude i min sidebar, men det lykkedes ikke, så jeg lod det være ved et link til resultaterne nederst i sidebar’en (nede ved ’sider’). Har set at et par læsere allerede har set nærmere. Tænkte jeg også lige så godt kunne bringe resultaterne her, nu hvor jeg ikke kunne få sidebar-funktionen til at gøre, som jeg ville:

Slightly Dorky Nerd King

Har twitteret (tweetet?) resultater fra testen en gang tidligere, dengang var jeg Kinda Dorky Nerd King, men der var vist ikke stor forskel på de enkelte scores. Testen er lidt over-the-top på enkelte områder og flere “relevante” områder, jeg kunne komme i tanke om, er slet ikke behandlet, men den er meget sjov. Bring meget gerne Jeres egne resultater fra testen i kommentarsektionen herunder.

Retten til at brokke sig…

Jarl bringer det gode gamle hvis du ikke stemmer, har du ikke ret til at brokke dig “argument” på banen (igen).

Scott Adams take:

Det er da dem, der stemmer, ikke dem, der ikke stemmer, der om nogen har mistet retten til at brokke sig! Grunden til at jeg ikke stemmer, er at jeg ikke har nogen at stemme på. Hvis ikke det forhold, at ingen liberale politikere stiller op ved valget, er noget at brokke sig over, hvad er så? Og hvis du selv har været med til at vælge forbryderne politikerne, der foretager sig de tossede ting, politikere nu engang gør, hvorfor mener du så også, at du har mere ret til at brokke dig over det, de foretager sig, end folk som ikke har, fordi politikernes politik var uspiselig for dem, har? Det giver jo ingen mening.

Give me a fucking break! At sige at jeg ikke må brokke mig, fordi jeg ikke stemmer, minder i mine øjne en del om et argument om, at voldtægtsofre der har gjort modstand ikke må beklage sig efterfølgende over, at episoden var traumatisk for dem, fordi det havde været meget mindre smertefuldt for dem, hvis de bare havde holdt kæft og spredt benene.

How the internet has changed everything, example # 67785

Or is it: I live in the future!

Incidentally, I also thought about calling the post Stupid commentators looking like complete morons, chess edition… but decided against it.

Today, you have former World Champions commenting live on games taking place in Moscow while they are in Hungary (or Texas). You have former contestants to the chess crown debating the motives and ideas behind the moves being played with other grandmasters and strong players, while they are sitting in their homes in ie. Amsterdam. You can see the moves being played mere seconds after they have been played, and you can analyze them using computers stronger than any human alive as the moves are being played.

This was the best you could hope for 14 years ago:

The commentary makes me want to kill myself. Or them. Yeah, them, definitely them.

Market penetration rates, cannabis edition

A little bit of data:

Via Mark Perry. Do note that this is a bad measure of overall consumption today (if a guy smoked pot sometime in the sixties or seventies, he’s still included in this statistic).

Sesquipedalian loquaciousness

I’ve just been rewatching a few episodes of Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. If you don’t understand the headline, here’s the link.

I’ll probably mention the series again at a later point in time, even if I’m pretty sure I’ve done it here on this blog at least once before. If I was only allowed to recommend one tv-show out of all the shows out there, this one would be somewhere on the absolute top of that list. Some wonderful quotes from the series:

Sir Humphrey: To put is simply, Prime Minister, certain informal discussions took place involving a full and frank exchange of views, out of which there rose a series of proposals, which on examination proved to indicate certain promising lines of inquiry, which when pursued lead to the realization that the alternative courses of action might in fact, in certain circumstances, be susceptible of discreet modification, leading to a reappraisal of the original areas of difference, and pointing a way to encouraging possibilities of compromise, and cooperation, which, if bilaterally implemented with appropriate give and take on both sides, might, if the climate were right, have a reasonable possibility at the end of the day of leading, rightly or wrongly, to a mutually satisfactory resolution.
Jim Hacker (after a long pause): What the hell are you talking about?
Sir Humphrey: We did a deal.

Sir Humphrey’s speech above (from the episode Power to the People) took 46 seconds from start to finish. Here are two other memorable Humphrey-quotes from the series (the first one is from the episode Man Overboard, the second is from the episode The Ministerial Broadcast):

Sir Humphrey: It is characteristic of all committee discussions and decisions that every member has a vivid recollection of them, and that every member’s recollection of them differs violently from every other member’s recollection, consequently we accept the convention that the official decisions are those and only those which have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials; from which it emerges with an elegant inevitability that any decision which has been officially reached would have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials, and any decision which is not recorded in the minutes has not been officially reached, even if one or more members believe they can recollect it; so in this particular case, if the decision had been officially reached, it would have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials, and it isn’t so it wasn’t.

…

Sir Humphrey: You see, Party figures can be very unreliable, Prime Minister.
Jim Hacker: Evidently.
Sir Humphrey: May I suggest a compromise?
Jim Hacker: What?
Sir Humphrey: Well, it’s clear that the Committee has agreed that your new policy is really an excellent plan; but in view of the doubts being expressed, may I propose that I recall that after careful consideration, the considered view of the Committee was that, while they considered that the proposal met with broad approval in principle, that some of the principles were sufficiently fundamental in principle, and some of the considerations so complex and finely balanced in practice that in principle it was proposed that the sensible and prudent practice would be to submit the proposal for more detailed consideration, laying stress on the essential continuity of the new proposal with existing principles, the principal of the principal arguments which the proposal proposes and propounds for their approval … In principle.
Jim Hacker: What?
Sir Humphrey: Don’t refer to your Grand Design in your television broadcast on Friday.

California fact of the day

Now the government has started looting people’s safety deposit boxes:

San Francisco resident Carla Ruff’s safe-deposit box was drilled, seized, and turned over to the state of California, marked “owner unknown.”

“I was appalled,” Ruff said. “I felt violated.”

Unknown? Carla’s name was right on documents in the box at the Noe Valley Bank of America location. So was her address — a house about six blocks from the bank. Carla had a checking account at the bank, too — still does — and receives regular statements. Plus, she has receipts showing she’s the kind of person who paid her box rental fee. And yet, she says nobody ever notified her.

[...]

Ruff discovered the loss when she went to her box to retrieve important paperwork she needed because her husband was dying. Those papers had been shredded.

And that’s not all. Her great-grandmother’s precious natural pearls and other jewelry had been auctioned off. They were sold for just $1,800, even though they were appraised for $82,500.

[...]

The bank has reached a settlement with Ruff and continues to update its unclaimed property procedures as laws change. . . .

California law used to say property was unclaimed if the rightful owner had had no contact with the business for 15 years. But during various state budget crises, the waiting period was reduced to seven years, and then five, and then three. Legislators even tried for one year. Why? Because the state wanted to use that free money.

…

This quote seems apt:

If the government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away everything you have.

Gerald Ford (a quote often misattributed Thomas Jefferson).

Quote of the day

I had almost the exact same experience in April of 1989. I drove across from the crossing near Hannover, and was struck by the nastiness of the border procedures (even though I’d expected them). Then I was deeply disturbed by my first sight of the Wall, even though I knew its history well. I got to it near midnight, which didn’t help, but still, I was struck by how furious and disgusted I was at the sight of the thing – and the accompanying searchlights, razor wire, guard towers, and so on. How anyone could look at it and not immediately think “horrible high security prison camp”, I couldn’t say.

And I crossed on foot through Checkpoint Charlie the next day, was similarly robbed of 30 West-marks, and couldn’t spend them, either. I had a foul bratwurst for lunch, and thought that on that evidence alone there must be something seriously off when the Germans were unable to produce a decent sausage. I saw the goose-stepping guards at the Unknown Soldier tomb (in the company of some appalled Brits who swore under their breath), and at the Friedrichstrasse U-bahn platform (an island inside an island) I watched in shock as the booted, armed, long-coated guard went strolling along the catwalk above us, watching the crowd. “I’ve seen this movie”, I kept thinking.

I ended up buying a book in the Volksbuchhandlung as a souvenir, after similar being yelled at by the cashier woman for trying to shop without a hand basket, the way the sign said I had to. I dropped a copy of “Amnesty International: A Biography of Lies” into it, and the handle fell off.

And at the end of the day, the guard back at the checkpoint informed me that I could not leave with any DDR currency. “Was soll Ich denn tun?” I asked him, and he replied flatly in thickly accented English: “Enchoy a ress-taurant”. I walked out a couple of blocks away and gave my currency to the first East German couple pushing a baby carriage I saw.

I, too, thought that I’d definitely seen evil right in front of me. I’ve never had reason to think differently.

…

Derek Lowe’s comment to this post. Read the original post as well.

I’m too young to remember the fall of the Wall, I was 4 years old at that point in time, and it didn’t stick even if in retrospect I’d have liked it to (and even if I do remember personal events that took place before that, which I do), however I did spend a little time, not much; a couple of days at most, in Berlin sometime at the beginning of the 90′es. I don’t remember the exact year, but it was almost certainly less than 5 years after the Wall had fallen. My family went to Poland that year – in car – and on the way I saw both the remains of the Berlin Wall and Auschwitz. I have never been to Berlin since then, but what I took with me from that trip could probably be boiled down to the thought that Berlin was just an ugly, battered big city – probably due to the fact that we spent most (/all?) our time in the Eastern parts of the city. A lot of the inefficiencies and quirks of ‘the old system’ was still in place in Eastern Europe at that time: For instance, it took us more than four hours to cross the (German-)Polish border, and my dad twice had to bribe (‘pay a fine to…’) policemen from the traffic police with cash in order to avoid ’spending the night in jail’ – the last time it happened was very close to the (…again German-Polish-) border on our way home, and my dad had a pretty good idea how those policemen made most of their income. He was furious; they demanded a lot of money. One other thing I remember from that trip is the fact that the roads in Eastern Europe at that time were in a horrible shape: one road in particular stood out because it was made of concrete, not asfalt. Every 100 yards or so there would be this ‘thunk’ sound, as the tires passed from one ‘chunk’ of road to the next. The road was probably first established during Hitler’s major infrastructure projects, and it didn’t look like much had happened since the war. And anyway, how and why would you even try to make a trip in a car like this one ‘convenient’ – most people driving that kind of car would probably be (almost) happy if it didn’t break down altogether while they were driving…

The situation has changed a lot since then. Now’s as good a time as any to remember that, and be grateful for that. Even if you’ve never lived on the wrong side of the barbed wire.

Promoting the unknown

As always, if you want to listen to the pieces, do give them a short while to buffer first, so that they don’t ‘cough’ while playing. You do not want music like this to ‘cough’.

A few samples from Liapunov’s etudes:

Annie Fischer playing Brahms:

Danskere og IT – nogle tal

1) 86 pct. af danske familier har computer i deres hjem.

2) 83 pct. -ll- har internet – 76 pct. har bredbånd. 98 pct. af alle par med børn har adgang til pc i hjemmet.

3) 3/4 af alle danskere anvender internet dagligt eller næsten dagligt. Fire ud af fem bruger internet mindst en
gang om ugen.

4) To ud af tre danskere handler på nettet.

5) 9 pct. af befolkningen (ca. 360.000 personer i alderen 16-74 år) har aldrig brugt en pc. 72 pct. af dem er mellem 60 og 74 år.

6) Næsten hver anden kvinde (49 %) har aldrig brugt et regneark til udregninger, og 28 % har aldrig flyttet/kopieret en mappe eller fil.

7) 33 procent af de danskere, der bruger internettet, læser blogs, mens andelen af danskere, der blogger, er 18 procent. De tilsvarende tal for sidste år var 22 og 9 procent.

8 ) I 2009 var andelen af danskerne, der inden for de sidste tre måneder havde benyttet nettet til at søge ‘helbredsmæssig information’, 46 procent.

9) 39 pct. af internetbrugerne (ca. 1,4 millioner danskere) spiller eller downloader spil, musik, film, tv-serier eller billeder fra nettet.

10) Hver anden internetbruger er tilknyttet en social netværkstjeneste. 95 procent af de danskere, der er tilknyttet en netværkstjeneste, er tilknyttet Facebook.

11) 95 % af alle danskere har en mobiltelefon. 87 pct. af alle over 60 år har en mobiltelefon.

…

Fra denne nye dst-publikation om Befolkningens brug af internet – 2009

Quotes of the day

An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out.

…

The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that’s out always looks the best.

…

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.

…

everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.

…

Will Rogers

Quote of the day

Everything the Fed has been doing over the past fifteen months makes sense if you think of their goal as transferring wealth from taxpayers to banks. If you try to explain it as an attempt to implement an expansionary monetary policy, you won’t even get past my high school students.

Arnold Kling. There’s really no good reason to be calling it ‘expansionary monetary policy’, ‘quantitative easing’ or some such econterm. ‘Looting’ is a lot shorter, and most people get what that means.

Nej, er det sandt? – Ryd forsiden!

En politiker der har løjet for sine vælgere. Tænk engang!

Har man hørt mage? Hvad skal det dog ikke ende med…

Et rigtigt godt argument for at blive hjemme…

Ikke at der ikke er nok i forvejen, jeg kan komme i tanke om et par hundrede tusinde andre lige nu og her. Uanset hvilke øvrige argumenter, der så måtte være for at glemme al den statistik, jeg har haft på studiet og beslutte sig for at bevæge sig ned til valglokalerne for at få en varm følelse i maven, så ændrer det ikke på at sandsynligheden for at min stemme vil være udslagsgivende er = 0 ved dette valg. Ok, ~ 0, men så tilpas tæt på 0 til at forskellen er irrelevant:

Fire år efter, århusianerne sagde farvel til Louise Gade, den første folkevalgte ikke-socialdemokratiske borgmester i Smilets By, har Socialdemokraterne sikret sig et solidt greb om magten i Århus. Således viser en meningsmåling, foretaget af Rambøll for JP Århus, [min tilføjelse: "at partiet..." - 180 bør virkelig få sig en korrektur-læser] står til 14 af 31 mandater i byrådet og hele 42 procent af stemmerne. Det skriver jp.dk.

Meningsmålingen giver Socialdemokraterne mulighed for en flertalskonstellation sammen med såvel SF, der står til fem mandater, samt de radikales to mandater.

Med mindre der virkeligt sker ting og sager i løbet af de næste par uger, så bliver jeg hjemme.

Policy lags

Each recession, however minor, sends a shudder through politically sensitive legislators and administrators with their ever present fear that perhaps it is the harbinger of another 1929-33. They hasten to enact federal spending programs of one kind or another. Many of the programs do not in fact come into effect until after the recession has passed. Hence, insofar as they do affect total expenditures, on which I shall have more to say later, they tend to exacerbate the succeeding expansion rather than to mitigate the recession.

…

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, side 76. Men sådan er det jo ikke i virkeligheden, vel? Den slags indvendinger er jo mest bare teoretiske, de har ikke rigtigt noget på sig. Vel?

Fra dagens udgave af Jyllandsposten:

De vækstpakker, der skulle hjælpe murere, tømrere og elektrikere i Århus gennem finanskrisen, samler tilsyneladende støv.

På et møde i går blev håndværksfagene orienteret om, hvordan det går med at få brugt pengene i Vækstpakke I og II, der tilsammen indeholder 1,75 mia. kr.

»De fleste magistratsafdelinger havde slet ikke noget, mens Børn og Unge og Sociale Forhold havde skrevet lidt sammen i et notat,« fortæller Michael Ancher, formand for Dansk Byggeri Østjylland.

Mindre projekter

I notatet står, at Børn og Unge hovedsageligt holder sig til mindre projekter, mens social-magistraten har fremrykket projekter til 9,3 mio. Det svarer til, at der reelt er kommet gang i 0,5 pct. af milliardpuljen.

»Alle snakker, men der sker ikke noget,« siger Michael Ancher, som bakkes op af Aarhus Haandværkerforening og Tekniq, installatørernes forening.

»Det ender jo med, at projekterne først begynder at blive realiseret i løbet af 2010 og 2011.

Space colonization

Via MR, I found this blog. It looks very interesting. The post Tyler linked to, about the habitability of Earth, was fun to read, especially as I’ve often been thinking the same thing (far most of Earth is really, really deadly to humans, and in a historical context, most of the time this planet would just with almost 100 percent certainty have killed you dead, good and hard, no questions asked). But this post, about space colonization, is even better. Stross states in the beginning of the post that those of a sensitive (or optimistic) disposition might want to stop reading right now – I say: Read it, no matter what you think right now. I have for a long time, for many of the same reasons as the ones Stross outlines in his post, been a member of the: ‘human space-travel to exoplanets outside of the solar system…’, and especially ‘the succesful establishment of a human settlement on an exoplanet’…, ‘is just never gonna happen/work/succeed’-camp.

Go west?

How will an updated version of this image look like in 20 years?

“What Darwin said” – evolution in a nutshell

7 links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. Read them all. HT: Razib Khan. If you don’t already know about his blog, follow this link and start reading; the scienceblog-gnxp is definitely on my current top five of all blogs I read.

You can of course, rather than following these links, also just read Darwin himself here (I have given you this link before some time ago, but in case someone missed it: Here you can find a Danish translation of On the Origin of Species…).

For the record, I value the opinions of people denying evolution’s views about the biological sciences about as highly as I value the medical opinions of people still subscribing to the miasma theory of disease. The parallel is not completely randomly chosen: On the Origin… came out in 1859, only 5 years after Filippo Pacini as the first man ever isolated a bacterium, the Vibrio cholerae bacillus which causes cholera, thus invalidating the miasma theory of disease. One of the main reasons why there aren’t many people who are convinced that the latter theory is correct anymore, is that that particular theory never made it into the churches.

“Joke? What do you mean?”

Link.

En sympatierklæring

Hvorfor ikke?

Jp vil utvivlsomt selv dække de væsentligste punkter i sagen online, så læs med der hvis du vil vide mere.