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The Tempest (Joel Achenbach, Washington Post, May 28)

Gray’s crusade against global warming “hysteria” began in the early 1990s, when he saw enormous sums of federal research money going toward computer modeling rather than his kind of science, the old-fashioned stuff based on direct observation.

It’s stuff like this that makes me pay less attention to someone who has important things to say. Gray is the guy from Colorado or Utah or somewhere who forecasts the number and severity of hurricanes every year with canny accuracy. I say that because it’s hard to find studies that describe how accurate his forecasts are. I don’t doubt they’re out there, but they’re hard to find.

I did find some raw data from ‘83-’96 at faqs.org, so I took a calculator out and went to town. Because I’m bored, that’s why! Anyway, over that timeframe, Gray does come out ahead of frank guessing. His prediction of seasonal “named storms” is on the same side of the 40-year mean as the actual observed number 83% of the time. His “hurricane” prediction numbers are on the same side of the mean 69% of the time, while his “intense hurricane” prediction comes in at 71% for his June numbers, and 100% for his August numbers.

Since I had to do that myself, it beats me whether those numbers are any good when compared to other meteorologists’ numbers. Judging from the hype, I suppose they are, but it’s very hard to verify that. What I’m saying is that, since I believe him to be a bonehead when it comes to the evidence coming in about global warming, I’d be more comfortable considering him an over-hyped bonehead about what he’s famous for. I can’t do that comfortably because apparently no one who knows more about numbers than I do–just about anybody–has analyzed his predictions in comparison to both chance and other forecasters.

A TV reporter asks Gray a key question: “What if you’re wrong?”

“We can’t do anything about it if I’m wrong. China and India are going to burn fossil fuels.”

In other words, he thinks it’s too fucking scary to think about, and if he thought about it he couldn’t do anything about it anyway. And he doesn’t want anyone else to think about it either. So shut up.

Bonehead.

MiamiHerald.com | 05/30/2006 | Segway sets course for stock market

Norrod said he was brought in as CEO last year for just that purpose by Segway’s principal investors, Credit Suisse Group and the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, best known for its early investment in Google.

”They thought it was the right time to bring me in to really lead this company through this crucial period and to a liquidity event,” said Norrod…

Segway doesn’t matter, of course; I do want to point out this guy Norrod’s marvelous use of the English language, though. “Liquidity event.” He’s a special, special person.

What if you could rip an mp3 from your Pandora station for free? Would you enjoy that, or would you fear that the end of Pandora is in sight?

Doesn’t matter what you think. If it can be done, it will be done, and this can be done. This thread explains how to do it.

Their program can be used to prettify the process, but you can also just go to C:\Documents and Settings\HP_Owner\Local Settings\Temp\plugtmp (or wherever your ‘plugtmp’ file resides) and see a whole bunch of files called ‘access,’ access-1,’ etc. These are mp3 files. Give them .mp3 suffixes, and you just turned the songs you were listening to in Pandora into luscious, luscious mp3 files. It only works in Firefox (the temp file in IE is named something else, I guess), and only as long as you have Pandora running. Save the songs outside of the plugtmp file, because that disappears when you stop running Pandora.

Of course, when you’re finished listening to those songs in your own media player on your own time, be sure to delete them, as keeping them indefinitely on your hard drive would be wrong.

Welcome to 8-track Heaven!

MY TAPE JAMMED IN THE PLAYER — NOW PART OF THE TAPE
IS CRINKLED LIKE AN ACCORDION. CAN I FIX IT?OK, here is the definitive fix for crinkled tape:

Do NOT cut or throw away any tape!
Get your iron and set it on low to medium heat
and hold the tape between your hands with about 6 inches of crinkled tape
between them. Slowly drag the crinkled tape across the edge of the iron.

NOTE: keep even tension on the tape being heated, NOT so much as to
stretch the tape, and not so little as to let it stick to the iron. Move
the tape slowly back and forth across the edge of the iron and the
crinkles should disappear.

This procedure takes PRACTICE, and you will have to experiment with
the heat of your iron, the iron must not be too hot or the tape will be
damaged. Start low, and work the heat up until its right. If the heat
is too low, no damage will be done. Too hot, and you’ll know it pretty
quickly.

There’s nothing that will transport me back in time more quickly than thinking about 8 track tapes. They are very era-centric; they were everywhere, then they weren’t.

CNN.com – Study finds no marijuana-lung cancer link – May 24, 2006

They had expected to find that a history of heavy marijuana use, like cigarette smoking, would increase the risk of cancer.

Instead, the study, which compared the lifestyles of 611 Los Angeles County lung cancer patients and 601 patients with head and neck cancers with those of 1,040 people without cancer, found no elevated cancer risk for even the heaviest pot smokers.

Laws are funny, aren’t they? It’s not all roses, though, apparently:

The results should not be taken as a blank check to smoke pot, which has been associated with problems including cognitive impairment and chronic bronchitis, said Dr. John Hansen-Flaschen, chief of pulmonary and critical care at the University of Pennsylvania Health System in Philadelphia. He was not involved in the study.

Dr John Hansen-Flaschen’s school, the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, holds an annual seminar entitled “The Art and Science of Obtaining Federal Funding.” Just thought I’d throw that out there.

In my continuing mission to seek out more perfect tools to ensure privacy, I found a website that makes something they call the enkoder. It obfuscates email addresses embedded in webpages by cloaking them with a thick, gooey film of Javascript. That way, robot harvesters don’t recognize them as email addresses and pass them right by.

It doesn’t work in comments or posts, just the actual html of the page. Still, cool.

It beats me why I do this, this cloaking stuff. The internet is, by definition, about the most public place there is, and I go out of my way to hook myself into it via this site. It shouldn’t matter to me at all that anyone could find out my identity. I mean, I’m not Bruce Wayne. I’m not!

But it does matter to me. There are a lot of bad people out there who’d like nothing better than to get their hands on me Lucky Charms. I would very much mind gangsters slouching around, rifling through my stuff. It’s my stuff. And the amount of junkmail I’m avoiding by being a paranoid curmudgeon is probably enormous.

I assume I’ll eventually just erase all the files on the site and replace the index page with an encrypted gif of a night-time picture of the inside of a cave.

CNN.com – Nagin wins nail-biting New Orleans election

Good for Ray. Not being from nawlins, I don’t know what’s what. But I like him and his chocolate city.

from Whiskey Bar: Rump States

I like how Shrinking Jesusland is nevertheless contiguous. Like it’s a discrete tumor that’s responding to treatment.

The Jam help you relive that night in ‘83 when you were young and stupid and so was everybody else.

Moved primarily by the “Katrina Disaster”, and the hurricanes that followed in her wake, it became clear to Slim that the field effects of his existing Harmonizers cannot handle the intensity of the dynamics that feed into these severe weather patterns.

How would Slim respond? With the Storm Chaser. If only, if only we’d had one of these last year.

Preliminary field tests indicate that the ‘Storm Chaser’ modifies the intensity of these anomalous ‘Super Storms’ and in some cases, stops them dead in their tracks.

It’s been tested! And it’s on sale, too! $2400. How can I afford not to get one?

A follow up to this post; it happened again, and this time I have an actual screen capture of the weirdness.

Weird, huh? It’s probably poltergeists.