A bit of a problem.

This blog uses Haloscan commenting, which is, as far as I'm concerned, the best commenting system on the market. It doesn't support all the irritating crap that makes online bulletin boards so utterly tedious and conversations on them impossible to follow, such as putting a user's favourite quote and a big graphic they've come up with under every single comment. It doesn't force people to create accounts and log in. It simply allows people to comment, and arranges the comments in the form of a conversation. Simple and perfect, and it just works.

Or it did, anyway. Turns out Haloscan has been bought by something called JS-Kit. And, rather than support the new user base they've acquired with anything remotely resembling customer service, JS-Kit are trying to extort us into switching to their software:

Once presented with the upgrade message, Haloscan users will have 2 weeks to make a decision. You will have the following two options.

1. Upgrade to Echo for $9.95/year – all your comment data will be transitioned over automatically


2. Export your Haloscan comment data and turn off their service

Users need to respond within the two week period to ensure uninterrupted service.

Translation: "You've got two weeks to pay us or we'll destroy all the comments on your blog." That's two weeks over Christnas, I might add, when some people have one or two other things to be doing than trying to sort out their blog's commenting system.

And what's the new software like? Well, it insists on posting comments in reverse chronological order, because "we have found that this is the best way to present real-time data." As the commenter RT responds, "and I have found that newer comments at the bottom is the best way to carry on a conversation." I've tried posting a comment on JS-Kit's site, and I had to type the whole thing out twice because their crappy software deleted everything I'd typed when I logged in. Ah, yes, logging in: I had to do that, annoyingly. Yet, even after I'd logged in, my comment still got posted under the name "Guest". I can see why JS-Kit are resorting to extortion to try and get people to use Echo: it's a shit bit of software. Every upgrade is a downgrade.

Anyway, comments will be switched off on this blog shortly, and won't be back till I've sorted this mess out. Sorry about that. Blame the morons at JS-Kit.

Rebellion and conformity.

So, let me see if I've got this straight.

You're annoyed about "manufactured" pop music. You're sick of Simon Cowell. You don't want the Christmas Number One, yet again, to be the debut single of the X-Factor's winner. You want to make a stand against the domination of our popular culture by cynical corporate interests.

So you put your weight behind a campaign to get everyone to buy Sony record B instead of Sony record A. Yeah, stick it to the man.

I'm half-convinced that the whole campaign was Cowell's idea, in which case he'll be due a big bonus from his bosses at Sony. If it wasn't, maybe he can persuade them it was.

Denialism and scepticism.

The question being asked here by Ben Goldacre and lots of his commenters is: why do AGW sceptics believe what they do? Well, I'm an AGW sceptic, so I can at least tell them why in my own case.

First, the non-reasons. Am I in the pocket of Big Oil? I wish. I hear they pay well.

Is it because I'm against the massive societal changes "necessary" to fight AGW? Well, no, because I don't think they're necessary. It is well established by lots of evidence (most notably the brilliant experiment done on Europe from 1945 to 1990, where they tried one political system on half the continent and its antithesis on the other) that Socialism screws the environment and that wealthy people in wealthy societies tend to spend their spare cash on the luxury good of natural-environment-preservation, while poor people are too busy trying to survive to be bothered with saving the trees. My position is that, if AGW were a threat, then the solution would be more wealth-generation, probably via Capitalism. Since I'm all for wealth-generation, I'm not sceptical of AGW in order to avoid its political solution.

Is it because I want to burn lots of oil for some reason? Again, no. I hate driving and I think we should cut down on fossil-fuel consumption because it puts all sorts of nasty crap in the atmosphere which is bad for our lungs and bad for trees. I also support the development of alternative fuel sources on the simple grounds of being pro-progress. I want my solar hydrogen fusion jetpack, like they promised us when we were kids.

However, as a computer programmer, I agree with Feynman's philosophical position that you shouldn't use computer models as a source of new information and I also take the practical position that even the world's best software is buggy. I've not seen any evidence that climatologists' software is orders of magnitude less buggy than, say, Excel. Two weeks ago, I saw evidence that it's buggy as hell.

I object to the fact that the models used do not contain known climate-influencing factors — specifically, existing models cannot contain information about new discoveries. For instance, no model used before 2006 could have contained anything about this discovery — and that includes being developed by a climatologist who has seen the science and refuted it. Of course, it is entirely possible to make accurate predictions based on purely numerical models, but I don't believe that this is one of those cases, for reasons that I won't go into here & now because it'd take hours.

I object to the constant use of the word "denialist", designed as it is to imply a parallel with AIDS denialists and Holocaust denialists. We never refer to Einstein as a "quantum mechanics denialist", even though he didn't accept the theory and the theory has been proven right to as great an extent as science ever is. You're not going to persuade me of your case by insulting me, but you are going to make me wonder why you're conducting a propaganda campaign against anyone who expresses any doubts whatsoever about your views.

The leaked emails were a shock to me — not because of the sniping and back-stabbing, but because I had never realised previously that FOI requests were even necessary to get at the data. This is scientific method 101 here: release your data. Goldacre does good business going through the problems with pharmaceutical studies by analysing their raw data. But at least he can get at it to analyse it in the first place. Regardless of the shenanigans to avoid acceding to the FOI requests, the very fact that they were needed in the first place is disturbing. And the insane quote from Phil Jones, "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it" — what the hell? Again, that's the scientific method. As Goldacre has pointed out repeatedly, scientists like it when their results get pulled to pieces, because that's what leads to stronger and stronger science. But not climatologists, apparently.

I object to the way that the science has been inseparably attached to authoritarian politics. Herman Van Rompuy said the other day that "2009 is also the first year of global governance," giving Copenhagen as an example of this. That's an unelected president of an unelected body asserting that he is going to exercise more power over me via policies that I will never be allowed to vote on. And I'm told that the only reason to object to this is because I hate the planet and want all our grandchildren to die. As far as I can see, the climatologists who say that AGW is happening and is a threat are backing the same political solutions and are keenly joining in the political fight. Well, if they want to conflate the science with the politics, they lose the right to complain when people criticise them from one point of view and not the other. They brought that on themselves. And, when they make it clear that they have political as well as scientific motives, I am entitled to question which one would be ascendant if they were to pull in different directions. It's not as if it's unusual for scientists to corrupt their science in the cause of politics.

The concensus thing. My objection to the constant use of the word "concensus" is not that the concensus itself is meaningless; obviously, it's relevant. My objection is the way that the concensus's existence is routinely presented as a scientific argument in its own right. It amounts to "You shouldn't be sceptical because none of us are, and that proves it." Yeah, go science.

I object to the apparent unfalsifiability of the argument. Every perceivedly unusual weather event is presented as evidence of AGW. As someone mentioned in the Bad Science comments, this may be more due to activists than scientists, but where are the climatologists attacking and disowning such claims just as they attack us sceptics? Conspicuously silent.

And yes, I object to the models' failure to predict the recent total lack of warming. AGW's proponents point out the difference between predicting a system's behaviour in micro and in macro, and the point is well taken. But the trouble is that there's no long history of correct predictions here. What the AGW crowd are telling us is not "Ignore our failure to predict the recent climate because we've predicted it successfully so often in the past" but rather "Ignore our failure to predict the recent climate because we will predict it successfully in the future." Hmm.

And I object to what looks suspiciously like Catastrophism, which used to be regarded as inherently unscientific by its very nature.

I am well aware that there are sceptics who are ignorant and motivated by such ridiculous things as a love of cars. But I'm not one of them, and, in my experience, most of us regard those nutters somewhat askance when they turn up.

Now, please, stop slandering me.


Update:

By the way, if anyone from Big Oil is reading this, whilst I did write it for free, I would like you to inform your overlords that I am more than happy to write much the same thing repeatedly in return for untraceable cash, barrels of oil, hot compliant women, etc. If I'm going to get accused of working for you anyway, may as well get the up side to go with it.

On insufficient cynicism.

As some of you may know, my motto is "The only problem with being cynical is being right."

Well, in light of recent developments, I'd like to say that I wrote this three-and-a-half years ago:

As you almost certainly know, lots of scientists these days — especially climatologists — draw conclusions about the real world from computer models. I have therefore compiled this handy list. It's a list of the questions you need to ask any scientist who has used a computer model to reach a conclusion — and I'm not just picking on the climate-change crowd here; they may be the most prominent in the news, but there are lots of other guilty parties out there in all sorts of scientific fields. If a scientist doesn't give confident and reasonable answers to these questions, take their conclusions with a handful of salt.

I set out some of the basic problems of programming and debugging as part of a team, in terms designed to make it clear to laymen that computer models may not always be all that reliable. But I admit that I always assumed that the models used by scientists were basically quite well built yet prone to the same inherent problems as every other bit of programming. It simply never occurred to me that prominent climatologists might be unable to replicate their own models' results or would be building models based on data that they had lost. I was just writing about the long-known problem of the blurring of lines between using computer models to examine and test data and using them to generate information. It didn't occur to me that our lords & masters might be considering destroying the global economy on the say-so of a bunch of "scientists" who'd lost sight of the scientific method.

Had I been more cynical, I'd've been more right. That'll learn me.

The best charity ever.

Anyone who's heard a thing or two about Hernando de Soto might recognise some of his ideas in Kiva:

Kiva's mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.

Kiva is the world's first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend to unique entrepreneurs around the globe.

The people you see on Kiva's site are real individuals. When you browse entrepreneurs' profiles on Kiva, choose someone to lend to, and then make a loan, you are helping a real person make great strides towards economic independence and improve life for themselves, their family, and their community. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates and track repayments. Then, when you get your loan money back, you can relend to someone else.

What Kiva are doing is making it easy for people in the Developing World to borrow money off us rich bastards in the Developed World, while also making it easy for those of us who aren't actually rich at all to lend small, affordable amounts of money and still do some good. Nothing about this encourages dependency. Nothing about it skews the incentives of poor nations' governments. And we the donors can afford to give far more this way, because we can actually get back nearly all of what we put in.

You can probably do more good lending money via Kiva than you can giving it to other charities. Let's just hope the idea catches on.

Form over content.

Been saying this for years. This is the root of the problem with political correctness:

If you say, "Chairman Mao? Wasn't he the wacko who offed 70 million Chinks?", you'll be hounded from public life for saying the word "Chinks". But, if you commend the murderer of those 70 million as a role model in almost any schoolroom in the country from kindergarten to the Ivy League, it's so entirely routine that only a crazy like Glenn Beck would be boorish enough to point it out.

 

I think I like John Mayer now.

Don't really know a damn thing about him, but you've got to love his answer to this:

What do you think about health care? Would you take the public option?

Have you ever heard me play guitar? I'm really fucking good. You know what I'm bad at? Answering questions about public health care.

 

Out of practice.

Should have blogged about this sooner, but I was too busy trying to catch up on all the damn sleep it lost me. I was caught up in this crap:

A SECURITY alert in Newry has caused serious traffic disruption.
Army technical officers worked throughout Wednesday examining a vehicle parked near the city's courthouse.

The alert was raised late on Tuesday evening.

Yeah, the alert was raised late on Tuesday evening and my work was within the cordoned-off zone, so we had to leave as soon as the police realised we were in the building. Not sure why, as they weren't evacuating any of the residential buildings in the area. No public transport at that time of night — a bit after midnight — and our cars were parked inside the cordon too, so we weren't allowed near them. Needless to say, the police do nothing to help you when you're caught up in a situation like that. Break a few shop windows and they'll put you in a nice warm cell for the night and provide you with food, but have the temerity to be a law-abiding citizen and you can go and fuck yourself as far as they're concerned.

Luckily, one of my colleagues was actually staying in Newry and so we didn't have to spend the entire night aimlessly wandering the freezing-cold streets and were able to sleep fitfully on sofas in a freezing-cold living room instead. I occasionally called the police to find out if the cordon had been lifted. They seemed to find these calls annoying, and, after a couple of them, told me that it would definitely be staying till nine at the earliest.

Which was odd. Bomb threats were a regular occurrence everywhere in Northern Ireland a few years ago, and they generally took a couple of hours for the security forces to clear. Yet this one was taking a bare minimum of, what, eleven hours? What the Hell?

And it ended up taking even longer. I eventually had to give up and get the bus and train home, conveniently leaving my car in bloody Newry. The cordon was still up well into Wednesday afternoon. And it wasn't even a real bomb.

The news reports aren't making this clear at all, but, talking to the police at the time and seeing what was going on, what appears to have happened is that the bomb squad didn't even come to look at the bomb until their normal working day started around nine. Not worth getting them out of bed for.

I certainly hope that that's what happened, as at least that would merely imply severe managerial stupidity. The alternative is that British Army bomb disposal experts take nearly twenty hours to make safe a fake bomb containing no explosives. I hope our guys in Iraq are managing to move a bit faster than that.

Anyway, it certainly sent a clear message to the terrorists: You can cripple a major town for an entire day with a car and a phonecall.

So we can probably expect this to become a regular thing. Great.

The bloody BBC, again.

There's that annoying habit news organisations have got into of putting quotes in headlines. It's basically lying, but if you put the lie in quotes you get to blame it on somebody else.

But the BBC have come up with a new advance on that. Here's the headline:

Anger at US mixed marriage 'ban'

A "ban", eh? Blimey. That sounds pretty bad.

Except that there then follows a report in which the word "ban" does not appear. Not once. The only place it appears is in that headline. Which rather implies that, for all that the word's in quotes, it's not a quote. Surely, if it were, the BBC would be providing the quote. I mean, this is basic journalism: when you publish a quote, you attribute it. Otherwise, you could just be writing any old crap, right?

Oh, hang on: they are. The reason the word "ban" doesn't appear anywhere in the report is that what it's describing is not in any way a ban. It's a personal decision by one person and a complaint about his decision from someone else.

A white US justice of the peace has been criticised for refusing to issue marriage licences to mixed-race couples.

Keith Bardwell, of Tangipahoa Parish in Louisiana, denied racism but said mixed-race children were not readily accepted by their parents' communities.

A couple he refused to marry are considering filing a complaint about him to the US Justice Department.

Oh deary me. A justice of the peace is refusing to marry this couple. That's awful. What on Earth will they do?

Ms Humphrey, who is white, said that when she phoned Mr Bardwell on 6 October to discuss getting a marriage licence signed his wife told her about his stance.

Mrs Bardwell recommended that the couple see another justice of the peace, who did agree to marry them.

Oh.

That little detail's down in paragraph 12, by the way, where the BBC can be pretty bloody sure it'll be missed.

I can't even see why the BBC are reporting this story, to be honest. I mean, there's a lot of racism in the world, most of it far worse than this. The entire story boils down to "Man expresses fairly racist sentiment, couple experience slight inconvenience arranging marriage." Would the BBC bother with this story if it came out of Poland or France or Italy? I doubt it. But, ah, America... it gives them the perfect opportunity to continue their decades-long propaganda war by blatantly lying in a headline.

I absolutely guarantee that I will meet people over the next few years who will tell me earnestly that interracial marriage is actually illegal in some parts of the US.

What the hell happened to the Left?

I know this question's been asked a lot, but, really. I used to be able to disagree with them about economic policy while agreeing on many of their pet causes, such as, for instance, the right of women not to be beaten to a pulp by their husbands. How old hat is that? Turns out, in the latest rules of Victimhood Poker, mentally ill trumps female. Like, really, really trumps it. Trumps it so hard it's not going to bloody try that again, the jumped-up bitch. Seriously:

The couple had been married 15 years when [David] Dawson, the former captain of the Canadian Triathlon Team, viciously attacked his wife, seemingly out of the blue.

According to the victim, she was punched in the face several times and struck in the face with a barbell.

At one point, she lost consciousness after Dawson began choking her and, when she came to, found that her hands had been tied behind her back.

Despite repeated pleadings to stop the assault, Judith Dawson said her husband continued the violence, first putting a pillow over her face, then picking her up and carrying her to the kitchen where he once again tried to choke her to a point where, she told the court, she feared for her life.

"I begged and begged him to stop hurting me," Judith Dawson wrote in a victim-impact statement submitted prior to sentencing.

The assault ended when the victim managed to free her hands and escape to a neighbour's house.

Lovely guy, you might be thinking. However, it turns out he's even lovelier than that, because he's a victim too.

The court learned that David Dawson was suffering from mental illness at the time of the attack, diagnosed by one doctor as agitated depression and narcissistic personality disorder and by another as a "mixed personality disorder characterized by an excessive preoccupation with detail."

Poor wee lamb.

Since the assault, Dawson has taken responsibility for the assault, expressing "profound remorse, which seems sincere," according to a psychiatrist who interviewed him earlier this year.

"He appears to be committed to maintaining his current recovery," the psychiatrist further noted.

In pronouncing sentence in the matter, Judge De Walle said Dawson's continued success would be better served by imposing a lengthy order of supervision, rather than jail time.

You'd hope a judge might know what a sentence is for. Apparently not. Judge De Walle thinks that we send violent criminals to jail in order to help them, and that we therefore shouldn't do it if it looks like it might not help them. Judge De Walle knows less about criminal justice than every five-year-old in the world.

I particularly like this detail:

However, Dawson was found fit to stand trial.

In other words, whether he was fit to stand trial was up for discussion in the first place. In other words, he tried to use this convenient mental illness to avoid the prosecution entirely — and in this he failed. The psychiatrists who looked at him may have decided that, yes, he was a bit mentally ill, but they also decided that, no, not to the extent of not being responsible for his actions he wasn't. He was officially deemed to be criminally responsible.

And the judge has still let him off with a slap on the wrist.

I know what some of you may be thinking. Why am I using this to criticise the Left? Who's to say Judge De Walle is a lefty? And the answer is that a mysogynist old socially conservative judge might let a guy off lightly for beating his wife because of some misguided belief that what happens inside a marriage is never the state's business no matter what, but only a lefty would let him off because jail is "counterproductive" to the poor convict's progress at overcoming his difficulties. Those old sexist judges, who used to make some truly appalling decisions (and, really, are there any of them left? Is that still happening?), at least noticed the victim. Sure, they reckoned the beating wasn't that bad and she should put up with it, but they acknowledged her existence. To the modern "progressive" mind, she's just getting in the way at the trial. A criminal trial serves no purpose other than to rehabilitate the offender. None. The idea that a sentence might be a form of punishment is anathema to these bastards.

These days, if you or a friend of yours is violently attacked by a mysogynist bastard, you might be better avoiding the police and just going straight to Jamie Foxx:

"If it had been my daughter who was barely a teenager — my daughter is 15 — Roman Polanski would be missing... period. It wouldn't even get to the court case."

Damn straight.