View 715 Saturday, March 03, 2012

When I was a lad, women and girls did not openly discuss their sex life, and those who attended Catholic institutions were expected to at least pretend that they believed chastity was a virtue. There was then, as there is now, opposition from within the Catholic church from those who believe the Catholic doctrine on contraception to be an error, but it was not often a matter of public discussion.

Sandra Fluke, a thirty year old women’s rights advocate and third year law student at Jesuit run Georgetown University, has a different view. She insisted on testifying at a House of Representatives hearing on the Obamacare mandate requiring all businesses to provide employee health care, and mandating what should be covered in that government mandated health care package: she wanted to talk about the mandate to provide free contraception prescriptions for everyone covered by these mandated health insurance packages. Georgetown, like all Catholic institutions, does not provide abortion as part of its health insurance package, and she wanted to speak for the Georgetown women who would now be desolated because they don’t now get free contraception. When the Congressional committee that was hearing the matter failed to call her to testify she complained bitterly, and was invited by minority Member Nancy Pelosi to be interviewed and state her case.

Before Pelosi’s intervention but after Chairman Darrell Issa (Rep,. CA) declined to invite her to testify, she gave interviews.

Fluke came to Georgetown University interested in contraceptive coverage: She researched the Jesuit college’s health plans for students before enrolling, and found that birth control was not included. “I decided I was absolutely not willing to compromise the quality of my education in exchange for my health care,” says Fluke, who has spent the past three years lobbying the administration to change its policy on the issue. The issue got the university president’s office last spring, where Georgetown declined to change its policy.

Fluke says she would have used the hearing to talk about the students at Georgetown that don’t have birth control covered, and what that’s meant for them. “I wanted to be able to share their stories,” she says. “My testimony would have been about women who have been affected by their policy, who have medical needs and have suffered dire consequences.. . .The committee did not get to hear real stories I had to share, about actual women who have been dramatically affected by this policy.” [Original source Washington Post, reprinted here.]

This caused a publicity flareup. Rush Limbaugh got involved, and pretty soon the news was about Sandra Fluke and not about the issue of publicly paid for contraception.

Fluke is essentially saying that it is her right to have free contraception, and it is the government’s responsibility to pay for it, and the Obama administration is saying that is correct, and this is something that must be covered by health insurance for everyone.

This seems odd. If getting pregnant is a danger to be avoided, humanity has known since at least the Bronze Age that there is a simple way to avoid pregnancy: virginity, or, since that word may have alternate definitions, more technically, females may avoid becoming pregnant by not having sexual intercourse with males. This is a well known sure fire method that has always worked.

Moreover, being a student at Georgetown, Sandra should have been made aware of the standard Catholic advice to young women: avoid the occasion of sin. This has been the standard Catholic lesson from about third grade on to maturity for centuries. If you don’t want to get pregnant, be careful about where you go and who you go there with. I’m sure there are still some among the Georgetown faculty who remember it.

But, Sandra would insist, that’s the kind of old fashioned gup that I am protesting. Keep your rosary off of my ovary. Or something like that. I recall protestors chanting that some years ago, I think in reaction to laws that made it difficult to obtain contraceptive pills and devices. In my day at least it was a lot easier if a bit embarrassing for young men to obtain condoms than for girls to obtain whatever contraceptive medicines and devices they trusted once they had decided to forgo virginity. But over time those restrictions and even social conventions were cast away, and while there may be some legal obstacles to young women obtaining birth control pills without the consent of their parents, the obstacles can be overcome with relative ease. Certainly by the time a young woman reaches law school she will know, or can easily find out, how to obtain contraceptives. There will be no legal barriers.

But what if she can’t afford them?

Common sense would say that the simplest solution to that problem is technical virginity.

Sandra Fluke’s solution is to demand that taxpayers pay for her contraceptive pills and devices. She can’t afford to have sex because of the risk of pregnancy, and it is up to us to provide her with the wherewithal for contraception. She hasn’t spoken about protection from STD’s but I think it safe to assume she believes we ought to pay for her insurance for treatment of those when they fail. Of course there are contraception means that are also somewhat effective against STD’s, and they are considerably cheaper than the ones Sandra Fluke demands; but apparently the choice of what we pay for is not up to us. Sandra Fluke has a right to indulge in sex when and however she wants, and to the means of contraception that she wants, and it is up to the taxpayers to pay for it.

The real question here is simple: how do you acquire the obligation to pay for Sandra Fluke’s birth control devices and pills? But in the great flap over her virtue that question seems to have been lost.

We need to go back to it. Even if insuring Sandra Fluke’s health is an obligation that the rest of us must assume, when did contraception pills become health insurance? What illness are we preventing? Must we then insure her against being eaten by sharks when she insists on swimming in shark infested waters? Can her life insurance include provisions that she will not be covered if she goes hiking on the Iranian border? Must we pay for any activity that might result in death, dismemberment, pregnancy, etc.?

Leave alone the freedom of religion issue of requiring a Jesuit college to provide contraception. Where did the government get the right to require that we the people pay for anyone’s contraception? How did we acquire that obligation and can we not find some way to be shut of it?

View 715 Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Memory Engineering

Memory Engineering

Jerry,

This is, I think, quite important – a theory of how memory works that includes techniques for modifying and/or erasing specific memories, using currently available neurochemicals, with considerable evidence that it works. There are interesting implications.

Apparently long-term memory involves destructive reads – recalling a long-term memory automatically rewrites it, modified to some extent to reflect your current mental state. (Anyone who’s looked into witness unreliability over time says, "ah-hah!")

There are therapeutic implications: Recalling a traumatic memory while in a positive mental state (however induced) can reshape the memory and reduce the trauma.

There are terrifying implications: Recalling a memory while dosed with a blocker for an essential memory (re)formation neurochemical erases that memory.

They’ve tested it on rats, so far. It requires direct injection of the blocker chemical into the brain, so far. It works quite well to erase specific rat memories, so far.

We live in interesting times. (Uh, what were we talking about?)

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_forgettingpill/all/1

Henry

A very long time ago during the height of the child molestation witch hunts I did considerable research into the then state of the art on inducing and implanting memories, including interviews with the psychologist involved in implanting a false memory of a child having been encountered by the judge in a case then on trial – the child had never met the judge except in the courtroom nor had she ever been at the place at which the incident supposedly took place.

The incident story was deliberately kept non-traumatic since there were considerable ethical issues at stake, and of course it only proved suggestibility, not that the charge in the case (against her father; it was a divorce case) was untrue or implanted. On the other hand, at the time the general consensus of the child psychologists were that children didn’t really have false memories and weren’t all that subject to suggestion.

That of course is untrue. Any parent can induce false memories in their own children. “Remember that time when you were lost and the nice policeman gave you a lollipop?” Said to a 12 year old about in incident that supposedly took place at age 5, the first response will be “No, I don’t remember that,” but gentle reminding will often make the incident real enough that the child will remember details, such as whether the policemen was in uniform or not, or “It wasn’t a real policeman, he was a mall cop!” or some such. Again there are ethical concerns here, but it is very possible for authority figures to induce children and even grownups to “recover” childhood memories of incidents that never happened, and there is at least one record of an adult recovering a memory of being molested by a person dead at the time of the supposed incident.

Psychology consultants in divorces cases have often ‘recovered’ childhood memories of molestations or questionable events that almost certainly never happened.

I would not be at all surprised to discover that chemical and physical stimulations can be included in a program of memory engineering, since I know that it’s quite possible to change memories or implant false memories without drugs. Memory engineering is one of the dirty little secrets known to some trial lawyers and many police interrogators. It is a major reason for changing police procedures in lineups and other identification processes of eye witnesses.

We have known since Aristotle that perception consists of inputs from the real world as modified by our internal perception processes, and that memories can be false. Unfortunately that is often the best we have for law enforcement: after all, some memories can be quite true.

See also “Mad in America”

http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti-authoritarians-are-diagnosed-as-mentally-ill/

In my career as a psychologist, I have talked with hundreds of people previously diagnosed by other professionals with oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, anxiety disorder and other psychiatric illnesses, and I am struck by (1) how many of those diagnosed are essentially anti-authoritarians, and (2) how those professionals who have diagnosed them are not.

Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously. Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and care about those people who are respecting their authority. And when anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and resist that authority—sometimes aggressively and sometimes passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not.

Some activists lament how few anti-authoritarians there appear to be in the United States. One reason could be that many natural anti-authoritarians are now psychopathologized and medicated before they achieve political consciousness of society’s most oppressive authorities.

Of course the Soviet Union used to put those who rejected the self evident scientific proof of Marxism in madhouses. When I was a young geeky nerd there were no “ADHD” diagnoses, Mania as a diagnosis had a fairly precise symptomatic definition and in any event there were not many “mental health professionals” around, and there were no drugs to be administered by nurses. Drugging children was a big deal, and it never happened to me. I learned discipline and self control, and particularly how to at least pretend to respect authorities such as the teacher who clearly knew less about scientific subjects than I had learned from the Encyclopedia. I probably would have escaped drugging because my mother was a rugged individualist and my father was a member of the Odd Fellows Society, but one can never be sure.

I understand that there are cases in which Ritalin is useful for some children in some circumstances. I refuse to believe that it is appropriate for any great percentage of the adolescent population without considerably more evidence than I have ever encountered.

When I was in graduate school in psychology I was considered acceptable as an experimentalist and theorist, but since I questioned much of the evidence for the effectiveness of most of the techniques used in clinical psychology – I found Freud’s theories no more based on real world evidence than those of L Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, and considerably less useful in understanding the world than General Semantics – but then I wasn’t intending to start a psychology practice. That led me to a number of disagreements with the clinical teachers. Then Paul Horst taught us to doubt the mathematical competence of most experimental psychologists as well, narrowing my niche in academic psychology. Fortunately I was recommended to Boeing and hired to work in Human Factors so I never had to choose an academic career. I find Dr. Levine’s essay refreshing.

It’s lunch time, and I have to work on Black Ship Island after lunch, but I do have some other stuff for later. I am still in recovery from the bronchial distress, and it still tires me more than it should.

View 715 Thursday, March 01, 2012

The climate discussion continues.

Climate Debate

I jumped from Instapundit to your link on Lindzen’s piece on the climate debate including the reply of. Couple of items. I noted both in Lindzen’s piece and the consensus physicist’s response to you the reliance on the misnomer "greenhouse gas." As a former academic science editor, I use the presence of that popular term to tell me whether I’m dealing with academics or amateurs. It was demonstrated in the 1890s that greenhouses do not work by trapping radiant heat; they work by retarding convective and conductive currents. A number of articles along the way have pleaded to avoid use of the term. I think the most impactful was by Stephen (Richard?) Lee back when I was first an editor (’73 range). I usually note that academics with a grounding in physics avoid the term. I was surprised to see Lindzen employ it without qualification given that his piece was well argued and his credentials would argue he should know better. That point is for what it’s worth.

This next point is more to the point. Back in the ’74/’75 time frame, I wanted to sign up a book treatment of an argument by a pair of paleo-climatologists who claimed we were soon to be leaving the best sixty-year stretch of weather since the last ice age and would slowly return to Normal Holocene Weather (in caps to emphasize)–ie, more variability, ie, summers both cooler and hotter, winters both warmer and colder, ie, just what we have been seeing for thirty years now. This 1920-1980 stretch even stands out if you study a good long-term temperature chart, especially one with summer highs and winter lows as opposed to just avg annual temp. It seems to me the first duty of any new theory is to explain why it holds better explanatory value than preceding theories do. I have yet to see that attempted with climate change theory in any of its forms. Indeed, the facts that we do have a detailed, multi-source paleo-climate record that shows higher highs and lower lows and the fact that much of the weather of the 20th century was both ideal and anomalous goes without mention. In science publishing back in my day, this kind of omission would not have been allowed.

Charlie Tips

I suspect that Lindzen, like me, has simply succumbed to popular usage and says ‘greenhouse gas’ because nearly everyone understands the concept now. When this debate began, decades ago, Petr Beckmann in Access to Energy did much the same thing: when he first began discussion of the concept of a greenhouse gas he used to add “of course any farmer would say ‘ain’t the way my greenhouse works’, but he used the term. For those who haven’t bothered to chase this down, a real world greenhouse works largely by controlling convective cooling and protecting the plants from wind; there is a “greenhouse effect”, and of course the heat in the greenhouse is caused by warmth from the sun – ie light is absorbed and converted to heat – but that takes place on the ground outside the greenhouse as well. Outside, the heated air rises and is replaced by air at ambient temperature; in the greenhouse that doesn’t happen. For the same reason an automobile with all the windows closed gets very hot inside. That Lindzen uses the term is hardly an indictment of his understanding. He knows how real greenhouses work and what ‘the greenhouse effect’ is; as did Petr Beckmann.

I used to be part of the campaign to retire the ‘greenhouse’ term, but I gave that up as an act of futility.

Your main point is exactly correct. Before AGW and Global Warming and Climate Change became part of a multi-trillion dollar debate, we did have a spate of warnings: that the Earth might be about to return to a more ‘normal’ climate, with more weather extremes. I don’t recall there was a large suggestion that this was due to human activities – indeed the nature of the prediction pretty well precluded that. We had enjoyed the best climate since – ever, and now things were going back to normal. I haven’t really seen anything that analyzes that hypothesis in any detail. It seems overdue.

You asked the wrong questions.

Mr. Pournelle,

I read your article on the unanswered questions regarding global warming that you’ve had for 40 years.

I’d like to sugest that you asked the wrong question(s).

You said:

"… what we knew was well known: that in historical times the Earth has been both warmer and colder than it is now. It was warmer in Viking times until about 1300 after which the Earth began to cool. Since 1800 the Earth’s temperature has risen about a degree a century."

In response, I must ask "How is it known?"

The historical temperatures that you refer to have all been developed via proxy data rather than direct observation. Is this proxy data reliable? That is, does it reflect reality "on the ground" as it were? if it were to be compared to actual thermometer measurements, how close would the proxy come to direct measurement? I ask this (these) question(s) given that:

a. There is no direct (thermometer) measurement of temperature available prior to 1940**(see below); b. Proxy data since 1940 is either unavailable, or does not match thermometer measurements; and, c. It has become evident that various proxies do not agree with one another as to the temperature.

If proxy measures do not agree with each other, how can they agree with (confirm) reality? Is there one single proxy that matches thermometer measurement exactly? Which is it?

If it were stipulated that proxy measures accurately reflect real (directly measured) temperatures, why directly measure the temperature at all? Is the IPCC’s (and others’) use of alleged direct temperature measurements intended solely to obfuscate the actual reality as shown by proxies? Or, is there another reason to rely upon direct temperature measurements rather than proxy data?

**Most skeptics have various reasons to doubt the Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis; but, almost unfailingly accept as incontrovertible fact — as you have done — that the Earth has warmed. This, especially with regard to the period since 1860.

If this is incontrovertible fact, I don’t suppose you’d mind proving it. Perhaps by e-mailing me the RAW data upon which the measurements from 1860 to 1940 are based.

I could save you the effort by simply telling you that such data does not exist; but, I don’t expect that you would take my word for it — nor should you.

By RAW data, I mean the actual thermometer measurements, when they were taken, where they were taken, by whom, with what type of thermometer, how precise they were, whether direct comparison between measures is warranted, etc.

Perhaps more important is how the RAW data is compiled. That is, are there thermometer measurements from enough places across the globe to warrant calling the aggregate of the readings a "GLOBAL" average? For example, if one has temperature measures from, say, one-fifth of the Earth’s surface, how does one then calculate the average of the whole? Are the measures randomly distributed? Can the readings from one place be used to assume the temperature in another place?

If you seek out the RAW data, you may find that the questions that you (and others) have asked are equivalent to asking the reasons why the Sun revolves around the Earth.

No matter how many times it is pointed out that the Sun DOES NOT revolve around the Earth, the focus remains on WHY the Sun revolves around the Earth.

e.g.:

I, "The Sun does NOT revolve around the Earth."

You, "Yes, but WHY does the Sun revolve around the Earth."

I, "It doesn’t."

You, "You’re muddling the issue. The question I’m concerned with is WHY the Sun revolves around the Earth."

and on,

and on,

…..

and …..

David Fuhs

Your point about thermometers and the methods of determining temperature echo some I have posed to the Climate Change theorists. I keep getting assurance that we have so many measures that we can have confidence in their averages, once we have cast out the extreme measures, and massaged the data. I never get into such arguments.

My data on whether it is warmer now than it was in 1800 comes from my 6^th grade history book: in 1776, Colonel Alexander Hamilton brought the cannon captured at Ticonderoga by Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, and famously transported by Colonel Henry Knox down to Boston, across the frozen Hudson River to General George Washington at Haarlem Heights. Washington survived because of those cannon and was able to escape and counterattack the British (Hessian, actually) forces on Christmas Day after crossing the almost frozen Delaware.

We have almanac records of first freeze and the date of ice breakups, and of growing seasons, for the period between 1775 and 1800, and it is very clear that the Earth was colder at that time. How much colder I don’t know, but I do know that the Thames froze solid enough that markets could be set up on the ice as late as the 1830’s. We know the dates of the last freeze of the Hudson. We have records from across the country, we have records from Europe, and it is just plain clear that it was colder in 1800 than it was in 1900. To know how much colder we would need actual measurements, and there are not so many of them; but we darned well know that it was colder then, not just in the US but across Europe, and Asia, and in Latin America.

Regarding the Viking Warm period, we don’t have records for the Southern Hemisphere, but we do know growing seasons in Europe – monastery records are quite good and give precise planting and harvest days – and in China, where the bureaucracy recorded such matter. We know that Nova Scotia was called Vinland because there were grape vines there. We know that Scotland produced wine. There were diary farms in Greenland, and the Inuit have legends of a time when they lived quite different lives from their present lot. It is just plain reasonable to conclude that it was warmer in 800. We even know when after 1300 things began to change. It got cold. Growing seasons were shorter. Crops failed and land yields fell. This across the entire Northern Hemisphere. The shorter growing seasons continued after the discovery of the New World. The cold continued until after 1800.

In general I reject the notion of an annual global temperature: I doubt it has much meaning, as I have said repeatedly. But even assuming that it does, a study of the actual data, even massaged and smoothed, does not match the predictions of the models.

We are asked to act as if the Earth is in danger unless we spend trillions on remedies to Climate Change. None of the models that predict the dire future we face unless we act now can take the initial conditions of 1900 and show the temperature pattern from 1900 to 2010. If it can’t reconstruct the past, why should we accept its predictions?

The proper conclusion is that we don’t know, but Lindzen is correct: we need to study it more but we need not panic, and we certainly should not bet $Trillions that we understand climate.

I am slowly recovering. My head works several hours a day now. I have been spending my time largely on getting The Legend of Black Ship Island ready to be posted as an eBook. I should be done tomorrow. And I will try to do a large mail  bag tonight.

Had dinner with Niven, and we will restart work on our next book Monday or Tuesday. I will finish my work on Black Ship Island tomorrow and over the weekend.

View 715 Tuesday, February 28, 2012

I will be spending the day on Legend of Black Ship Island. I have been saving some mail for longer and better treatment, but this seems a reasonable time to bring them up. Alas, my contributions will be brief, but the matters are important.

I proposed this http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02148/RSL-HouseOfCommons_2148505a.pdf as a rational argument for a skeptical position on AGW in another conference, and asked for comments. A physicist who often strongly supports the consensus position replied:

Let me propose some terminology, to make it a little easier to discuss the argument. The people opposing the anthropogenic theory of global warming can be divided into three distinct categories:

*skeptics

*policy critics

*deniers

"Skeptics" are asking legitimate questions about the science.

"Policy critics" criticize the policies proposed in response to global warming, for economic or political reasons.

"Deniers" deny anthropogenic global warming, period, end of discussion.

I’ve notice that, although deniers always claim that they are in fact "skeptics," deniers and skpetics are in fact complete opposites. The key feature of deniers is that they are not even slightly skeptical of any arguments against global warming: they are completely credulous of any argument, no matter how trivially it can be shown to be baseless, that opposes global warming.

Reading through this particular presentation of Lindzen, he starts out by saying that the greenhouse effect is real, and anthropogenic gasses contribute to it exactly as much as non-anthropogenic gasses; he just disputes what the radiative response function is. So I’ll put him in the category of "skeptics" rather than deniers.

In fact, he pretty much dismisses the deniers:

"Unfortunately, denial of the facts on the left [that the greenhouse effect is real], has made the public presentation of the science by those promoting alarm much easier. They merely have to defend the trivially true points on the left; declare that it is only a matter of well- known physics; and relegate the real basis for alarm to a peripheral footnote – even as they slyly acknowledge that this basis is subject to great uncertainty."

So, let’s ignore his loaded vocabulary here (words like "those promoting alarm" and "real basis for alarm" and "sly.") Here’s what he just said:

1. The greenhouse effect is real. It’s well-known physics.

2. By denying this, the deniers are not merely muddying the waters, they are discrediting actual skepticism by turning their case into one that is disdained by real scientists because they are defending propositions that are "trivially" not true).

3. The real scientists (the ones he calls "alarmists"), on the other hand, acknowledge uncertainty.

OK, once we’ve deleted his slanted vocabulary, I’ll agree with these statements.

At no point does he use the words "hoax," "fraud," or "scam," or support people who use those terms. Good for him. Maybe he could call up the rest of the deniers and tell them "hey, just because you disagree with the scientists, that doesn’t mean that they are frauds."

With that said, the presentation shown is one-sided; he presents a case for a value on the low side of the IPCC estimate, and makes no attempt to show any part of the arguments for higher values of the radiative forcing response function. Not unusual, if you see this as a presentation of one side of a debate, but one should never draw conclusions in a debate before hearing the other side.

I then said “And this is the response ?” which brought this reply:

I’m not sure if I understand the question. This is *my* response; I wouldn’t say it is "the" response.

Lindzen’s arguments, of course, has been pretty well addressed; it’s not hard to find good technical analyses if you look for them. I find it a little disconcerting that his conclusions have remained the same but the analysis he uses to support the conclusions keep changing; this (to me, at least) looks uncomfortably like the signature of an analysis crafted to support a pre-existing conclusion, rather than a conclusion that results from a careful analysis.

On the other hand, he does use actual science in his arguments, he agrees on the basic physics (that the greenhouse effect actually does exist, and human-generated greenhouse gasses are part of it) and only disagrees on the magnitude of the response function. And, most notably, he doesn’t accuse scientists who come to different conclusions of "hoax", or "swindle", or "fraud."

So even if he cherry-picks data rather egregiously, I’m good with him.

A good article about Lindzen in _Seed_ a couple of years back, if you’re interested:

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_contrarian

My problem is that I still have no answer to questions I asked forty years ago regarding the global warming controversy.

I said then that what we knew was well known: that in historical times the Earth has been both warmer and colder than it is now. It was warmer in Viking times until about 1300 after which the Earth began to cool. Since 1800 the Earth’s temperature has risen about a degree a century. About 1900 Arrhenius did some back of the envelope predictions of what would happen if CO2 levels doubled. Since 1900 the Earth’s temperature seems to have risen at about the rate that it had previously been rising: that is, there is warming, but there has been warming from 1800 when the Hudson and Thames froze solid enough to walk across, and the rate of warming doesn’t seem to have greatly increased so far as we can measure given the accuracy of the data. Some of the warming may well be due to CO2 but there doesn’t seem to be cause for alarm. We do need to continue to study this and develop better measurement tools.

A Bayesian analysis would conclude that it is better to invest in ways to reduce uncertainty than to spend resources on the predictions of the models; there is just too much uncertainty.

I also concluded long ago that cooling was still a possible threat: that the return of the glaciers requires energy to transport the water vapor to the cold areas where it can fall as snow, and this can have a runaway effect. That needs to be watched.

Regarding science and cherry picking: I would have thought that the experimentum crucis was the essence of science, and that’s certainly cherry picking. As I said long ago in my essay on the Voodoo Sciences, novelist need plausibility, lawyers need evidence, but scientists need data and hypotheses that explain all the data: one contrary result (cherry picking) is important. Look at the controversy over whether or not they have found faster than light neutrinos. No one supposes that if we are certain of FTL particles this will not force a revolutionary change in our standard models in physics. It won’t be dismissed as cherry picking.

As to Lindzen not having changed his conclusions over the years, I think I could easily say the same thing about many of the AGW believers. What I find alarming is that Lindzen asks questions about the models and their predictions, and concludes that there is not enough evidence to justify panic: that the best evidence is that the increasing CO2 is not a justification for alarm, and particularly not enough quality evidence to justify spending $Trillions on revising the entire industrial economy. What I get is a sociological discussion about the quality of the debate, and a discussion of Lindzen. I would not think that is a rational scientific discussion.

My conclusion is that Lindzen has the better of it: he has challenged the models and the data, and I do not believe he has been answered.

Relevant to the subject of cherry picking in science

Dark Matter, Vacuum Energy, and Aristotle’s Aether

Aristotle’s aether was not Lorenz luminiferous aether and so was no disproven by M&M. Here is an interesting comparison of the properties of Dark Matter, Vacuum Energy, and Aristotle’s Aether:

http://hylemorphist.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/zero-point-energygroundvacuum-state-vs-real-being-vs-logical-being-vs-nothing/

or in this article

http://www.thomist.org/jourl/2004/July/2004%20July%20A%20Dec.htm

MikeF

Philosophy as I understood it when I was young seems relevant to today’s fundamental questions, but it does not seem often to be discussed by today’s philosophers. I am grateful for my education in philosophy of science from Gustav Bergmann at the University of Iowa when I was an undergraduate, and to the Christian Brothers for my high school introduction to Aristotle. And to Mike Flynn for continuing to remind us that we do not want to lose sight of the relevance of some of the old questions.

A-10

Regarding the A-10, I’m reminded of the Stuka. At the outset of WW II, it was the best close-support aircraft on either side. It was regularly in the news. By the end of the war it had disappeared from the news, just as it had disappeared from the sky. It couldn’t survive in skies with high-performance fighters. It had neither speed, armor, nor armament to outfight the P-51 or the P-38.

I think the same would be true of the A-10 in a war against a "peer" power like Russia or China. It wouldn’t survive against their front-line fighters.

Having said that, the A-10 has been extremely successful in wars against non-peer powers. One of the most effective aircraft used in Vietnam was the A-1 Skyraider, originally developed during WW II as a carrier aircraft. It would not have survived in a sky full of MiG-19s, but it didn’t have to. There weren’t any over South Vietnam. the A-10 is now doing the job the A-1 formerly did.

We may have to fight a "peer" power some day, although I hope not. We are very likely to have to fight non-peer powers in the future, just as we have for the past fifty years. Getting rid of the A-10 because it can’t outfight Chinese J-10 would be foolish. They should be kept around for when they’re suitable, not eliminated from the inventory.

Joseph P. Martino

But no one ever supposed that the A-10 would operate without air superiority, as no one ever supposed that the A-10 would be useful in performing the air superiority mission. I was on the Boeing TFX design team, and we went through that analysis: the kind of airplane that wins dogfights is not the airplane you need for close support of the ground army, or for that matter for local battle area interdiction missions. As it happens the P-47 was useful for both, but its major value was for interdiction. Trainbusting recce/strike missions by the P-47 were a major factor in the conquest of Europe, although the P-47 was designed as an escort fighter. The P-51 with the Rolls Royce supercharged engine proved better at that mission.

The Army neither wants nor can perform the air superiority mission in a peer power war. That’s the job of the Air Force, and USAF is pretty good at it: the spectaculars of dogfighting, and the more decisive but more prosaic mission of taking out the hornet’s nests. You don’t really get rid of hornets by swatting one hornet at a time, but you sure do need a capability for escorting the guy with the Flit through a swarm of hornets. Air superiority takes a combined arms approach just as winning ground forces are those with combined arms capabilities. Give the A-10 to the Army, and give the local interdiction mission to the Army, and leave air superiority to the Air Force.

History has shown that combined arms armies have generally been victorious. That would seem to apply to the air superiority campaign as well. The Warthog is important in ground campaigns, and might well perform the equivalent of the heavy cavalry charge at just the right time in battle – provided that there is air superiority so that the A-10 can perform its mission. 

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/320137

How to delete your Google Browsing History before new policy

With just a week to go before Google changes to its new privacy policy that allows it to gather, store and use personal information, users have a last chance to delete their Google Browsing History, along with any damning information therein.

Tech News Daily reports that once Google’s new unified privacy policy takes effect all data already collected about you, including search queries, sites visited, age, gender and location will be gathered and assigned to your online identity represented by your Gmail and YouTube accounts. After the policy takes effect you are not allowed to opt out without abandoning Google altogether. But now before the policy takes effect, you have the option of deleting your Google Web History by modifying your settings so that Google is unable to associate data collected about you with your Gmail or YouTube accounts.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/320137#ixzz1nissqAwZ