Fun with math

by Mykl Roventine
Vincent Gray has a theory:
[Via Deltoid]

Leading climate scientist has a new theory

Environmentalism is just the latest attempt to find a substitute for the theory of evolution and it is paradoxical that it can be so widespread when next year (2009) is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his major work “The Origin of Species as the Result of Natural Selection”.

Except that it’s the Global Warming Skeptics who tend to be Creationists. And he got the title of Darwin’s book wrong.

Gareth Renowden has more.

See, the entire scam of global climate change is due to the nefarious acts of a new religion, environmentalism. Those darn environmentalists are somehow corrupting thousands of scientists, forcing them to publish data demonstrating climate change, while also hounding the courageous few who have not been tainted by this new religion.

Because Gray then writes “All of the basic beliefs of Environmentalism are in direct conflict with contemporary understanding of the principles of Darwinism.” What a wonderful closing of the loop! If you are an environmentalist you operate in direct opposition to the principles of evolution! So both Creationism and environmentalists are against Darwin and evolution.

How in the world can natural selection survive the onslaught?*

Following science deniers is almost. always good for a laugh. Click and find out how to become a leading climate scientist (put out a press release). Learn what happens to data as you use degrees when radians is called for (you get wrong results but that does not stop you). Then read how to completely garble other people’s data to come out with non-sensical results. See how to start a Climate Research coalition which has no climate scientists, other than the well-known ones created by press release.

You can check out sites like realclimate.org to read real climate scientists who know how to do math. I got a chuckle out of the degrees/radians problem. Understanding a software program usually helps if you want to work in research.
_________

* At base, the concern for the environment is exactly the same as the concern for global climate change and has everything to do with the survival of a species, ours. They directly affect how humans will survive on this planet. Life will go on. It has survived tremendous extinction events before. The Cretaceous-Teriary event, that killed off the dinosaurs, did much more than that. Every vertebrate land animal greater than about 50 pounds disappeared, even birds and mammals. Yet here we are a few million years down the line.

But a similar event today means that most animals larger than a medium-sized dog (that would be us) would not survive.

The worry about the environment is a purely selfish one. If much of the life that we depend on, even in ways we barely understand, dies off, so will humans. For instance, one third of our diet comes from insect fertilized plants. Honeybees are responsible for 80% of that. So if the honeybee goes (which it has been doing), what happens to our crops? While we can worry about the effect on bears and other animals without honeybees, my concern is us.

Only by learning to understand the environment, climate and the natural world around us can we hope to overcome evolutionary constraints on our species. We have done it before (witness agriculture which moved us away from small groups of 50 or so, as seen with other apes, to megacities of millions). This time it looks like the constraints are ones we have also created. Let’s hope we are smart enough

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

It begins again

Home Depot for the Holidays:
[Via New Urban Legends]

Another “War on Christmas”? E-mail claims the Home Depot web site includes no mention of that holiday.

And once again this is False.

Technorati Tags: General

RockBand and my Mac

How to Use Your Rock Band Drums with GarageBand [Weekend Project]:
[Via Lifehacker]

The Mac|Life weblog demonstrates how to hook up your Rock Band drum set to your Mac for a low-latency electronic drum kit. If you do a lot of music-making on your Mac with GarageBand, one of the two setups covered in the post should take your composition chops to new heights. On the other hand, if you’re a Windows user, you may remember our previous post on turning your Rock Band drums into a real synth kit with a free Windows app (which, incidentally, looks like it’s come a long way since we covered it last).

Rock Out in GarageBand with the Rock Band Drum Controller [Mac|Life via TUAW]

Hey, my son left his Rock Band set here when he left for college. I have a Mac and I have GarageBand. I may just check this out. It looks pretty easy and it looks like the guitar controller can be used also.

Technorati Tags: Entertainment, General

Open government

by lsgcp
For Granicus, transparent democracy is just business as usual:
[Via Jon Udell]

This week’s Interviews with Innovators explores the Granicus solution for civic webcasting with CEO Tom Spengler. If you’re lucky enough to live in a city that is a Granicus client you’re already familiar with how it works. If not, take a look at the Newport Beach, CA site. It’s a beautiful thing. You can see the video and minutes in a synchronized view, jump to the agenda items you care about, and view associated staff reports in context.

For citizens the benefit is clear. If you have access to these proceedings on cable TV – even random access with a DVR – it’s still a challenge to pinpoint a segment you care about. What’s more, there’s no way to form a URL that refers to that segment so you can share it, and so that online discussion about the segment can aggregate around that URL. Granicus gets it right. Agenda items define the natural set of RESTful resources for these meetings, and this system enables people to cite, bookmark, and link to those resources.

Behind the scenes the system enables the town clerk to annotate a copy of the minutes with timecodes, so that the data required for segmentation and synchronization is captured in realtime and available immediately upon conclusion of the meeting. That’s exactly the kind of pragmatic approach that will help make transparent democracy as ordinary and routine as it ought to be.

Making it easier to track what elected officials are doing will be a hallmark of Web 2.0. Not only can you jump to relevant places in the video stream or search archives but there are also RSS feeds so you can be notified of a new video as soon as it is up.

Ten years ago, David Brin wrote The Transparent Society, where he discusses the conundrum of privacy in an increasingly open and transparent world. One important point he made was that our safest route to maintaining our freedoms was the ability to watch our political leaders as well as they could watch us. The best way to make sure politicians are honest is to watch everything they are doing.

This is a nice first approach. Although we are still light years behind having access to the same technology as our leaders, collectively we are much smarter. People want accountability and these tools provide ways that were simply inaccessible just a few years ago.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Social media

Seven rules

by ThunderChild tm
[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]
Seven rules for the KM-lords in their farm of cubes:
[Via Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

David Snowden has expanded his three rules to seven principles. Now I have to wonder if there are nine rules somewhere. And if there is One Rule to Bind them All. Rendering Knowledge (rules excerpted)

• Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted. [original]
• We only know what we know when we need to know it. [original]
• In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge.
• Everything is fragmented.
• Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.
• The way we know things is not the way we report we know things.
• We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down. [original]

The four new elements sound familiar from David’s other writing. Taking time to think about these principles and the additional context David gives them, they begin to sound like common sense. Of course people learn from failures. Of course we build things from fragments of other things. But then why do we forget this common sense when building approaches to knowledge management? Maybe not so common?

Yes, these are common sense but so often not observed. Many organizations do not tolerate failure, making their lack of innovation obvious.

When I was in Junior High School, we played a game called bulls and cows. One person tried to guess a 4 digit number the other person had written down. If the guess has a number in the right position, it counts as a bull. If the guess has the right number in the wrong spot, it is a cow. So the correct answer results in 4 bulls.

Now there are about 4500 possible numbers (assume no repeated numbers and you can’t have a zero in the first position) so having some sort of system helps. Like start with ‘1234′. But the absolute best answer is ‘no bulls- no cows.’ Complete failure to guess the number.

This results in the removal of 40% of the possibilities in a single guess. No other choice is as helpful in narrowing down the possibilities. Failing actually gets you to the answer sooner than an initial success of 1 cow.

This game taught me that failure can be much more helpful than a slight success. We see that so much today. Failing does not usually cost too much and can get the group to success much more rapidly by reducing the degrees of freedom one has to work with. It is generally corporate culture that hampers this path.

Those organizations that can tolerate failure will learn faster and innovate at a much more rapid pace. Not necessarily because they are smarter. They are just informed by their failures, narrowing down the possibilities that eventually result in success.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0