Finally, a reason to go to Mars

by cosmobc

Massive coverup! Remote viewing experts find industrial complex on Mars
[Via SciGuy]

I love — LOVE! — nonsense like this. Something called the “Farsight Institute” claims there is an active industrial complex on Mars. That’s right, a real life factory. As evidence the institute offers the following, clearly conclusive, photo: NASA Mars…

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Now this is something that would be so cool if true. Possibly humans on Mars. Maybe scientologists. Men and women. Domes, factories, shortage of spare parts, they wear uniforms and may be human.

Too bad facts get in the way. But maybe we need to send people to Mars just to be sure?

Some useful facts

Hyper-obstruction
[Via Balloon Juice]

I’ve stayed away from the topic of judicial confirmation because I didn’t know if Republicans were truly being obstructionist about this from a historical perspective. Well, they are:

It is part of a trend, but the jump from Bush to Obama is quite striking, given that Democrats have a large majority under Obama, whereas Republicans had no majority during the first year of Bush:

Similarly, the Alliance for Justice found that in Obama’s first year in office, the Senate confirmed a mere 23 percent of his judicial nominees. By contrast, presidents Carter and Reagan had 91 percent of their nominees confirmed in their first year. That number dropped to 65 percent for George H.W. Bush, 57 percent for Bill Clinton, and 44 percent for George W. Bush.

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Perhaps one reason the Federal government has not been performing some of its duties resides in the fact that almost half as many of Obama’s appointees have been confirmed than as any other recent President.

Even George W. Bush, who had a Democratic Senate his two years, had twice the level of judicial confirmations than Obama has been allowed.

This is taking Advice and Consent way too far. I expect it to only get worse since there is no penalty apparently for doing this.

Web traffic statistics and Cargo Cult Worlds

WattsUpWithThat hypes itself with most discredited web metric (hits!) and keeps smearing scientists while demanding others “dial back the rhetoric” – The NYT’s Virginia Heffernan now “regrets” being duped by Watts
[Via Climate Progress]

As long as Anthony Watts keeps a website “hits” counter on his sidebar and keeps bragging that his hits are evidence of his blog’s popularity, that will provide the most irrefutable evidence of his innumeracy and his willful statistical deception.

One thing is very safe to say about any quantitative analysis you see from Anthony Watts: It is, with high-probability, pure BS. See, for instance, Wattergate: Tamino debunks “just plain wrong” Anthony Watts.

Worse, Watts has, perhaps more than any other leading anti-science blogger, viciously smeared climate scientists and others. Yet in a post touting the most meaningless statistic on the web — his 50 millionth hit — he has the nerve to write, “I’m really growing tired of the vociferous and voluminous name calling and people bashing, on both sides. It’s palpable.” What’s palpable is his hypocrisy.

On Memorial Day, for instance, Watts directly questioned the patriotism of both Tamino and Rabett (see “Peak readership for anti-science blogs?“) leading Tamino to write, “This just might be the most loathsome thing Watts has yet done with his blog.”

Watts also keeps reposting the disinformation of The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, even though TVMOB is the leading purveyor of outright hate speech among the disinformers (see Lord Monckton repeats and expands on his charge that those who embrace climate science are “Hitler youth” and fascists). Since he reposted TVMOB a number of times last month alone, one can only assume he fully supports TVMOB’s methods. Indeed, after Prof. John Abraham eviscerated TVMOB in a must-see video, Watts reposted a shameless effort by TVMOB to “censor” Abraham, as Skeptical Science noted. Deltoid put it this way: “Monckton, supported by Anthony Watts, is trying to suppress Abraham’s presentation. Over at Watts Up with That? Monckton defames Abraham and asks for help in suppressing Abraham’s speech.”

But this is standard operating procedure for Watts.

Last year he demanded YouTube take down a Peter Sinclair video debunking him. Then he defended his effort to censor Sinclair’s video, by saying he was “doing him a favor” — no, seriously, you can’t make this stuff up, unless you’re a professional disinformer, like Watts.   Fortunately, Anthony Watts knows even less about copyright laws than he does about climate science, if that’s possible, and YouTube quickly put the video backup.

But Watts tries to fool people with charts and pretty pictures and phony why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along talk. And as we’ll see he duped New York Times online media critic Virginia Heffernan into recommending WUWT in the NYT magazine today “For science that’s accessible but credible, steer clear of polarizing hatefests.” At least Heffernan walked back this recommendation on line before the article was even published (see here).

But first, back to the absurd 50 millionth hit claim, which by itself is prima facie evidence that Watts doesn’t know the first thing about analysis. In his July 29th post, “A cool 50 million“:

WUWT reached a new milestone with 50 million unique hits on the WordPress hit counter (in the right sidebar) early this morning….

No other climate related blog has a 50 million hit number. Some, like Joe Romm try to claim the numbers don’t matter, or try to claim that some other number matters more. But (and it’s a big one) he doesn’t show his own number counter. At least RC does.

Memo to Anthony Watts: Not “some,” but everyone who knows anything about web statistics knows hits are a meaningless and deceptive measure of site popularity. Oh, and ClimateProgress had more than 50 million hits this year alone (see below)!

[Sound of Watts feverishly using Google to find one credible Web analytics expert who thinks Hits are anything more than what an anagram of the word 'hits' would suggest!]

No serious blogger quotes their “hits” as a measure of traffic, let alone any who pride themselves on their knowledge of statistics. Indeed, since Watts obviously reads this blog, he knows that back in March, in a post titled, “Hits charade: WattsUpWithThat hypes itself with dubious webstats, while lowballing other blogs,” I quoted a typical explanation of just what Hits are, “Hits, Page Views, Visitors and Visits Demystified,” which concludes “It is evident it does not make a lot of sense to count Hits.” So, of course, it is the perfect metric for the top anti-science website in the country. It’s interesting that not one of his commenters have bothered to tell him this!

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WattsUpWithThat has a history of using misleading information to drive its narrative, so I would guess quoting nonsensical statistics would be par for the course. The Climate Progrss article provides several nice links to misleading posts discussing misrepresenting the facts.

And Joe also makes a statement that embodies the thoughts of many of us who base out views on facts, not untruths:

It is simply amazing that a man who puts so little faith in actual, verified, reproducible temperature statistics puts his entire professional credibility on dubious and/or utterly un-reproducible web stats that he keeps on his sidebar.

That is the hallmark of Cargo Cult approaches to the world around us. They do not believe verifiable objective data but hold on tight to all sorts of woo. Read Respectful Insolence to see some really great examples of woo thinking with respect to medicine. Climate Progress sped a similar amount of time dealing with the woo of climate change.

Woo thinking is critical in the construction of many Cargo Cult Worlds. There are many tricks and illusions to try and hide the truth, to manipulate objective facts regarding the world around us, in order to create and sustain narratives that only slightly resemble reality. Like magicians, the purpose is to distract us from what is really going on.

Places such as WattsUpWithThat are experts at these approaches, seeming to appear as normal disseminators of fact while they actually spread a fair amount of misinformation. The masters of these techniques appear in many places, making untruths appear as reasonable as verifiable facts.

But all they really want to create a simulacrum of reality

The wooden airplanes they help build will not actually be able to carry them aloft. In the long run, truth and Nature win.

Misinformation by the media

by Richard0

Masters: “2010 is now tied with 2007 as the year with the most national extreme heat records–fifteen” – As nation, Russia, and world swelter under record heat, NY Times’ Tom Zeller publishes dreadful he-said/she-said, quote-mining piece
[Via Climate Progress]

We now know that “After the hottest decade on record, it’s the hottest year on record, seemingly the hottest week of all time in satellite record and we may be at record low Arctic sea ice volume.” In this country, we saw new daily high temperature records beat new cold records by nearly 5 to 1 in June.

Uber-meteorologist Jeff Masters reports today:

The year 2010 is now tied with 2007 as the year with the most national extreme heat records–fifteen.

So, naturally, the NY Times is out with what would, for any other paper, be one of its worst climate stories ever, but which is just run-of-the-mill dreadful for the former paper of record (see here)?

The Tom Zeller’s piece, “Is It Hot in Here? Must Be Global Warming,” buries the one crucial scientific fact that eviscerates its entire narrative:

There is a not-insignificant caveat: Those pointing to hot weather as evidence of global warming are, in the broadest sense, more likely to be right. Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado demonstrated last year that record high temperatures have occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade.

That’s in keeping with most models of global warming, which predict not a steady climb in temperature, but higher average readings over time — and more record-breaking peaks than valleys.

Okay, so climate scientists predicted the weather would get hotter as we poured more heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. And now that national and global all-time records are being set, that would seem to be supporting evidence for the theory.

Those of us who explain this are “in the broadest sense, more likely to be right.” But no need to let the facts get in the way of a good story. So the actual thrust of Zeller’s piece is the exact opposite. It opens:

In any debate over climate change, conventional wisdom holds that there is no reflex more absurd than invoking the local weather.

the climate has been well established for decades now — the real reason people like me are “more likely to be right.”

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This article will give you much more information than Tom Zeller’s, information that can be verified and checked. Good, informative article provides you the most important information first, not in the middle. That is where an article that wants to mislead puts the important information. Zeller exercises a very old, deceptive practice: create a false dichotomy, pretending that two sides have equal weight. Because if he wrote that only one side is likely to be right in the first paragraph he would not have the narrative he want to present.

Thus are Cargo Cult Worlds sustained.

It is called burying the lede The point that only one side is likely to be right changes the entire focus of his article. It is found in paragraph 14!

How does Zeller start the article? With a story about a Senator building igloos and various “He said. No he said” just so stories. Fun story, bad journalism.

Sustaining misinformation is not a problem for journalists like Zeller. As Brad said in the comments to his post entitled Why Oh Why Can’t We Have a Better Press Corps? Tom Zeller of the New York Times Should Go Do a Job He Could Do Well Edition:

As I have said many times: the root problem is that the idea that his stories should inform rather than misinform readers about the world is simply not on Tom Zellers checklist of things that it should accomplish–or on the checklist of his editors.

Which is why the sooner that he leaves journalism the better, and we hope to see him replaced by people who think their job is to tell people the truth–so that they can truthfully sum up: and thats the way it is.

People who think their job is to tell the truth. That would certainly make creating Cargo Cult Worlds much more difficult. I wonder why the major media does not work towards greater truthfulness?

Because you can be certain that if they do replace journalists such as Zeller, it will not be with reporters who think their job is to tell the truth. The papers simply do not appear to believe that highlighting truthfulness should be allowed to get in the way of a good story, that working to present facts in a truthful light is part of their business.

Perhaps the lack of such work by the media is a reason for their continuing failures?

Rummaging through Flickr

It is so incredible to be alive during a time when you can run across such interesting information, information that would have simply been unattainable just a few years ago.

While preparing the previous post, I happened to run across this, which shows a drawing of an onramp to the Alaskan Way Viaduct:

by Seattle Municipal Archives

Wow, my old office building is on the left and my office is on the third floor, actually the last window shown on the left. This photo led to this one, which is a real picture from 1959:

by Seattle Municipal Archives

My office building is on the left. If you follow the street back, in the distance you see a wall. The top of the wall is First Street. It represents the regrade that took place after the Great Fire in Seattle in 1889. The fire destroyed the central part of the town. In rebuilding the city decided to raise the street level by several stories, providing better protection from Puget Sound, making it easier for the toilets to flush by gravity and also providing the beginnings of the wonderful Seattle Underground.

But there is still a large discontinuity at Seneca Street and a large staircase still exists for people to move up to the grade at First.

The wall also helps demarcate the position of land fill that can liquify during an earthquake – everything from the wall forward.

To see what the same perspective looks like today, we can thank  Rob Ketcherside who posted this photo:

by Rob Ketcherside

The meat store is gone. The building is mostly offices now. The old building on the right is a parking lot and most everything else are condos.

Flickr can sure provide a nice history lesson.

An example of how Seattle slowly struggles with its own complex problems

by Chas Redmond

Views: Is viaduct fix politically impossible?
[Via All Today's News - Sightline Daily]

If Seattle isn’t serious about replacing the quake-damaged Alaskan Way viaduct, how serious should the rest of Washington be about it?

Next year will bring the 10th anniversary of the Nisqually earthquake and the 10th anniversary of the engineering report that the viaduct had to be rebuilt or replaced – lest it collapse in the next big shake.

Despite nearly a decade of facing what some would consider a dire threat, Seattleites seem poised for yet another Big Dither.

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Our strong collaborative instincts here in the Pacific NW also make it hard to rapid arrive at a solution. Maybe that is good but sometimes you may have to move fast.

The Alaskan Way Viaduct is built similarly to the Cypress Street Viaduct that collapsed in Oakland during the Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989. During the NIiqually Earthquake in 2001, the Viaduct was damaged and the need for it to be replaced was recognized.

As I was in a building in downtown seattle at the time of the quake, I have some personal views on this. The Alaskan Way Viaduct is built on fill, which can liquify during a strong enough quake, bringing down a thoroughfare that carries about 110,000 vehicles a day. There is a degrading sea wall that helps stabile everything.

Here is a simulation of what would happen if the Nisqualy quake had lasted 60 seconds instead of 40, had been 20 miles away instead of 30 or was a magnitude 7.0 quake instead of a 6.8:

This simulation is actually at the corner where I used to work. The building is right next to the Viaduct, just out of sight on the right. When the earthquake hit, I was in my office on the third floor on the south side. I looked down the hallway looking East and could see the floor ripple. Fortunately, the building had been retrofitted – retrofitting that was required – against quakes and stood.

Luckily for us, the quake did not last long enough to structurally damage the building. But the Viaduct needs to be fixed before another big quake.

But Seattle has been working on finding new options since 2001 and seems to have finally settled on a tunnel for the traffic rather than rebuilding the entire viaduct above ground. The state is on board and money will be available.

However, in the typical fashion seen when herding cats, a few people have decided to try and stop this process by using citizen initiatives to force a change.

So we shall see what happens.

Gilliam and Arcade Fire on YouTube

David Bowie and Arcade Fire

Gilliam on Fire
[Via The Criterion Current]

He’s quested for the Holy Grail, dived headfirst into Hunter S. Thompson’s sixties excess, turned La jetée into a Hollywood action epic (a good one!), and created what is probably cinema’s greatest Orwellian dystopia—what could Terry Gilliam do that would surprise us? How about a concert webcast? Gilliam will direct a live stream of the Arcade Fire’s August 5 performance at Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden that will be available on YouTube. This is the first in a planned series of streamed shows called Unstaged and backed by American Express, Vevo, and YouTube. Check back here at 10 p.m. the night of the show to see whether the director plays it straight or has some of his characteristic tricks up his sleeve.

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Thursday. August 5.10 PM Eastern/ 7 Pacific. Terry Gilliam – have every one of his movies. Arcade Fire – most of their songs. It will be very interesting to see a live stream directed by Terry of Arcade Fire. I’ll be there.

Or rather, I’ll be here watching there.

When a walled garden is good

Developers bemoan rampant and costly Android app piracy; iPhone developers unaffected
[Via MacDailyNews]

“Google recently announced new measures to help developers fight piracy of Android applications,” Jay Yarow reports for The Business Insider.

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One developer said that US piracy of his game was 43% and in Asia it was 97%. It is a lot easier to steal from the Android App Store than from the iTunes one. Developers will recognize this and may find it to be a better use for their time.

As one of the commenters – Deus Ex Technica – suggests, the iTune App store does a better job providing products and services for its three main stakeholders : consumers, developers and shareholders.