TubaGirl

I think *HE* wants to play Jackie... Silly TubaGirl!!! You know it's John Travolta who wants that gig :4biggrin: Yeah, but sometimes it takes an extra *fierce* gay to pay tribute to Jackie the right way.

I think *HE* wants to play Jackie...

Avatar summed up in 5 panels:

IRL Na'vi

Just rub it in why don't you?

Jessica can use email? I never would've guessed. Good for her.

13 year old email would be archived on a backup tape and stored somewhere. A hacker wouldn't be able to get to it because someone has to physically put it into the tape drive. Someone on the inside wanted those emails to get out..... (edited because I can't spell)

The longer she stays, the more she's gonna get.

Climate-gate gets worse Here is part of an editorial at the Washington Times: The story has gotten worse since the global-cooling cover-up was exposed through a treasure trove of leaked e-mails a week ago. The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia has been incredibly influential in the global-warming debate. The CRU claims the world's largest temperature data set, and its research and mathematical models form the basis of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 2007 report. Professor Phil Jones, head of the CRU and contributing author to the United Nation's IPCC report chapter titled "Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes," says he "accidentally" deleted some raw temperature data used to construct the aggregate temperature data CRU distributed. If you believe that, you're probably watching too many Al Gore videos. Mr. Jones is the same professor who warned that global-warming skeptics "have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone." Other revelations hit at the very core of the global-warming debate. The leaked e-mails indicate that the people at the CRU can't even figure out how their aggregate data was put together. CRU activists claimed that they took individual temperature readings at individual stations and averaged the information out to produce temperature readings over larger areas. One of the leaked documents states that their aggregation procedure "renders the station counts totally meaningless." The benefit: "So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!" Academics around the world who have spent years working on papers using this data must be in full panic mode. By the admission of the global-warming theocracy's own self-appointed experts, the data they have been using is simply "garbage." . . . The entire piece is worth reading here. A previous piece in the Washington Times on this topic is here. Even the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has this post up. Computer World adds this note to the discussion: As someone with a background both in IT and in science (I participated in particle physics experiments as a physics PhD student), I would also add the following lesson to the folks writing scientific code: Don't make stuff up. The released document HARRY_READ_ME.txt contains examples in which the coder, supremely frustrated with the poor quality of his data, simply creates some. Even if the underlying science is sound, "created" data taints the integrity of the entire process. Don't do it, no matter how tempting.

Climategate, Sen. Inhofe, Stuart Varney and Ed Begley Jr.

November 24, 2009 11:40 AM Congress May Probe Leaked Global Warming E-Mails Posted by Declan McCullagh A few days after leaked e-mail messages appeared on the Internet, the U.S. Congress may probe whether prominent scientists who are advocates of global warming theories misrepresented the truth about climate change. Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, said on Monday the leaked correspondence suggested researchers "cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not," according to a transcript of a radio interview posted on his Web site. Aides for Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, are also looking into the disclosure. The leaked documents (see our previous coverage) come from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in eastern England. In global warming circles, the CRU wields outsize influence: it claims the world's largest temperature data set, and its work and mathematical models were incorporated into the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report. That report, in turn, is what the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged it "relies on most heavily" when concluding that carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and should be regulated. Last week's leaked e-mails range from innocuous to embarrassing and, critics believe, scandalous. They show that some of the field's most prominent scientists were so wedded to theories of man-made global warming that they ridiculed dissenters who asked for copies of their data ("have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots"), cheered the deaths of skeptical journalists, and plotted how to keep researchers who reached different conclusions from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. One e-mail message, apparently from CRU director Phil Jones, references the U.K.'s Freedom of Information Act when asking another researcher to delete correspondence that might be disclosed in response to public records law: "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise." Another, also apparently from Jones: global warming skeptics "have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone." (Jones was a contributing author to the chapter of the U.N.'s IPCC report titled "Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes.") In addition to e-mail messages, the roughly 3,600 leaked documents posted on sites including Wikileaks.org and EastAngliaEmails.com include computer code and a description of how an unfortunate programmer named "Harry" -- possibly the CRU's Ian "Harry" Harris -- was tasked with resuscitating and updating a key temperature database that proved to be problematic. Some excerpts from what appear to be his notes, emphasis added: I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation - apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless. It also means that we cannot say exactly how the gridded data is arrived at from a statistical perspective - since we're using an off-the-shelf product that isn't documented sufficiently to say that. Why this wasn't coded up in Fortran I don't know - time pressures perhaps? Was too much effort expended on homogenisation, that there wasn't enough time to write a gridding procedure? Of course, it's too late for me to fix it too. Meh. I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that's the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight... So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage! One thing that's unsettling is that many of the assigned WMo codes for Canadian stations do not return any hits with a web search. Usually the country's met office, or at least the Weather Underground, show up – but for these stations, nothing at all. Makes me wonder if these are long-discontinued, or were even invented somewhere other than Canada! Knowing how long it takes to debug this suite - the experiment endeth here. The option (like all the anomdtb options) is totally undocumented so we'll never know what we lost. 22. Right, time to stop pussyfooting around the niceties of Tim's labyrinthine software suites - let's have a go at producing CRU TS 3.0! since failing to do that will be the definitive failure of the entire project. Ulp! I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can't get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections - to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more. So what the hell can I do about all these duplicate stations?... As the leaked messages, and especially the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, found their way around technical circles, two things happened: first, programmers unaffiliated with East Anglia started taking a close look at the quality of the CRU's code, and second, they began to feel sympathetic for anyone who had to spend three years (including working weekends) trying to make sense of code that appeared to be undocumented and buggy, while representing the core of CRU's climate model. One programmer highlighted the error of relying on computer code that, if it generates an error message, continues as if nothing untoward ever occurred. Another debugged the code by pointing out why the output of a calculation that should always generate a positive number was incorrectly generating a negative one. A third concluded: "I feel for this guy. He's obviously spent years trying to get data from undocumented and completely messy sources." Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU's Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION." Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!" It's not clear how the files were leaked. One theory says that a malicious hacker slipped into East Anglia's network and snatched thousands of documents. Another says that the files had already been assembled in response to a Freedom of Information request and, immediately after it was denied, a whistleblower decided to disclose them. (Lending credence to that theory is the fact that no personal e-mail messages unrelated to climate change appear to have been leaked.) For its part, the University of East Anglia has posted a statement calling the disclosure "mischievous" and saying it is aiding the police in an investigation. The statement also quotes Jones, CRU's director, explaining his November 1999 e-mail, which said: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." Jones said that the word trick was used "colloquially as in a clever thing to do" and that it "is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward." Also unclear is the ultimate impact of the leak, which came before next month's Copenhagen summit and Democratic plans for cap and trade legislation. On one hand, over at RealClimate.org, Gavin Schmidt, a modeler for the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been downplaying the leak. Schmidt wrote: "There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research ... no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no 'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords." On the other, groups like the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, the target of repeated derision in the leaked e-mails, have said: "We have argued for many years that much of the scientific case for global warming alarmism was weak and some of it was phony. It now looks like a lot of it may be phony." ScienceMag.org published an article noting that deleting e-mail messages to hide them from a FOI request is a crime in the United Kingdom. George Monbiot, a U.K. activist and journalist who previously called for dramatic action to deal with global warming, wrote: "It's no use pretending that this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging." Complicating matters for congressional Republicans who'd like to hold hearings is that East Anglia, of course, is a U.K. university. The GOP may intend to press the Obama administration for details on how the EPA came to rely on the CRU's predictions, and whether the recent disclosure will change the agency's position. Another approach lies in e-mail messages discussing grants from the U.S. Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to East Anglia; one says: "We need to show some left to cover the costs of the trip Roger didn't make and also the fees/equipment/computer money we haven't spent otherwise NOAA will be suspicious." The irony of this situation is that most of us expect science to be conducted in the open, without unpublished secret data, hidden agendas, and computer programs of dubious reliability. East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit might have avoided this snafu by publicly disclosing as much as possible at every step of the way. Declan McCullagh is a correspondent for CBSNews.com. He can be reached at declan@cbsnews.com and can be followed on Twitter as declanm. You can bookmark Declan's Taking Liberties site here, or subscribe to the RSS feed. (there's a lot of links in the article)

A co-worker brought some "mate de coca" to work last week. "Mate de coca" is tea made form leaves of the coca plant. The coca plant is where cocaine comes from. According to wikipedia it isn't addictive and you won't turn into a coke fiend. Has anyone ever tried it? And more importantly, will it help me lose the 10 poounds I gained during the winter?

It came from Peru. Maybe they sent it by pack mule from the Andes or something.

Climate bills give Obama unprecedented emergency power This is pretty scary. Both the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade energy approved earlier this year and the version just okayed by Sen. Barbara Boxer’s Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s Democrats (Republicans boycotted the vote) contains an obscure but nasty bureaucratic provision that requires President Obama to act like Venezuelan strong man Hugo Chavez. Here’s how: The bills require a federal declaration of a “climate emergency” if world greenhouse gas levels reach 450 parts per million. Guess what? The Pacific Northwest National Lab says it is a virtual certainty that level will be reached within a few months. The bill then requires the president to “direct all Federal agencies to use existing statutory authority to take appropriate actions...to address shortfalls" in achieving needed greenhouse gas reductions. When Vitter asked EPA Administrator what would be done in such a situation, she refused to say. So it must be asked: Would the president be empowered to do things like nationalize whole sectors of industry, ban coal use, restrict private automobile use, or anything else the “emergency” requires? . . . .

I had 2 cups today. I liked it. It was like green tea. I didn't get a rush or anything but I didn't seem to be that hungry at lunch. Probably just a coincidence.

cool - I'm excited to hear how it goes! It *FINALLY* came today. I'll try it tomorrow.

I talked with him today and he said that if you want to play the stock market, these books will help: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market by Nicolas Darvas Apparently you *MUST* read the first if you do any trading whatsoever. He said it has "everything" in it. And the second book is good for "beginners".

He said that he's pretty sure that when a company declares bankruptcy, and the company restructures, they usually issue new stock. So the old stock becomes worthless. I'd hold on to them just in case.

tubagirl, you're awesome. I have a feeling the news won't be good, though. I suck. I haven't heard back yet. Prolly tomorrow.

I have a friend that's a trader at the Board Of Trade. I'll ask him.

What happened to global warming? By Paul Hudson Climate correspondent, BBC News This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998. But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise. So what on Earth is going on? Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming. They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this? During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly. Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth's warmth comes from the Sun. But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences. The scientists' main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature. And the results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, disagrees. He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures. He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month. If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject. Ocean cycles What is really interesting at the moment is what is happening to our oceans. They are the Earth's great heat stores. According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated. The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO). For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too. But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down. These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years. So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles. Professor Easterbrook says: "The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling." So what does it all mean? Climate change sceptics argue that this is evidence that they have been right all along. They say there are so many other natural causes for warming and cooling, that even if man is warming the planet, it is a small part compared with nature. But those scientists who are equally passionate about man's influence on global warming argue that their science is solid. The UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, responsible for future climate predictions, says it incorporates solar variation and ocean cycles into its climate models, and that they are nothing new. In fact, the centre says they are just two of the whole host of known factors that influence global temperatures - all of which are accounted for by its models. In addition, say Met Office scientists, temperatures have never increased in a straight line, and there will always be periods of slower warming, or even temporary cooling. What is crucial, they say, is the long-term trend in global temperatures. And that, according to the Met office data, is clearly up. To confuse the issue even further, last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years. Professor Latif is based at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany and is one of the world's top climate modellers. But he makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself. So what can we expect in the next few years? Both sides have very different forecasts. The Met Office says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly. It predicts that from 2010 to 2015 at least half the years will be hotter than the current hottest year on record (1998). Sceptics disagree. They insist it is unlikely that temperatures will reach the dizzy heights of 1998 until 2030 at the earliest. It is possible, they say, that because of ocean and solar cycles a period of global cooling is more likely. One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up.

I remember reading an article about him, in People I think, and it was like every member of his family was either murdered, raped, or the victim of a violent crime.

VCO2-EOR and Carbon Geological Sequestration by Michael Economides and Xina Xie 07/07/2009 The climate bill passed by Congress on June 26, 2009, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454), has a lot of curious and wishful provisions but none can match the requirement that U.S. reduces its carbon emissions in 2020 by 17% below 2005 levels and by 2050 by 83%. Let’s ignore the rather remote 2050 and look at the situation in the more foreseeable 2020. The bill does not really say how these reductions are to be accomplished. One is the cap and trade, which in spite of its benign title is not really intended to reduce CO2. People and companies can continue business as usual as long as they pay some others who do not emit. Think of this as some sort of indulgence papers, the medieval way of gaining heaven by simply paying and allowed to be a sinner. This will do nothing to remedy global warming. Because the likelihood of moving away from fossil fuels towards others that do not emit CO2 in such short period of time is negligible, the only way that the mandated CO2 reductions can be accomplished is through sequestration (storage.) The solution, proposed by many, is geological sequestration. One suggestion is to use CO2 for enhanced oil recovery (EOR). It is important to put this idea in perspective in view of the recent legislation but also because of claims and efforts by certain universities and national laboratories to present the obviously overwhelming economic and industrial burden as an opportunity. As of June 2009, the U.S. use of CO2 for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) was 3 billion standard cubic feet per day, equivalent to 63.5 million tons per year, of which 83% is from natural underground CO2 reservoirs. Only about 10.8 million tons come from industrial (anthropogenic) processes. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the U.S. emitted 6.55 billion tons of CO2 by fossil energy utilization in 2005 (the world figure was 30.53 billion tons in 2005). EIA also projected that the U.S. CO2 emission from fossil energy will be 7.65 billion tons in 2020. If Bill H.R. 2454 is to be complied we have calculated that a total of 13.353 billion tons of CO2 from 2010 to 2020 must be stored, assuming that CO2 will be stored starting from 2010, as shown in the following table. [go to the link to see the table] Take any arbitrary year, e.g. 2015 and therefore 1.222 billion tons must be stored somehow. The current EOR use of 63.5 million tons is about 5 percent of the 2015 mandated amount and most likely it will become smaller. By 2020, unless CO2 EOR projects pick up at an unprecedented pace, they will amount to less than 3 percent of the EOR to be stored. In fact, with total (not annual) US oil reserves currently estimated by EIA at 21.5 billion barrels, if a huge part of 10% of this could be enhanced via carbon dioxide injection, the amount would represent on the order of 2 billion barrels, or about 250 million tons of CO2, about 20% of the mandated target for annual 2015 (not total) CO2 reduction. This is the best possible scenario of CO2 use that would fit both the mandated sequestration and application as an opportunity for EOR. For true sequestration, injecting into a closed system, the problem is orders of magnitude more cumbersome. Our calculations suggest that sequestering the CO2 emitted from just one 500 MW coal power plant for a 30 year period would require a reservoir whose pore volume is larger than Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay field, the US largest. This will be a subject of future publications. The irony is that much of the national debate and even discussions among some technical professionals have centered around the logistics and costs of capture, transmission and injection, ignoring the obvious: the physical impossibility to store the volumes of the mandated CO2 reduction. EOR applications cannot be the solution for any significant part of the total volume of CO2 that needs to be managed. More than 95% of the mandated volume to be sequestered simply cannot be done. So, the only way this bill can have any effect is by the witchcraft, feel-good of cap and trade. The question is why Congress would enact legislation whose presumed provisions of reducing emissions that ostensibly cause global warming simply cannot be physically met at any cost. Studies such as the ones described here are elementary and can be done by young undergraduate engineering students. Economides is a professor at the University of Houston and Xie is a research professor at the University of Wyoming