The Meatriarchy If God didn't want me to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?
Friday, October 22, 2004
Heresy
Has established science become this era's equivalent to the old Roman church where new ideas that challenge sacred cows are dismissed as heresy?
Well take a look at this article from Technology Review and decide for yourselves.
Some highlights:
In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the “hockey stick,” the famous plot (shown below), published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago--just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.
But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.
But it wasn’t so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.
Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called “Monte Carlo” analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!
McIntyre and McKitrick sent their detailed analysis to Nature magazine for publication, and it was extensively refereed. But their paper was finally rejected. In frustration, McIntyre and McKitrick put the entire record of their submission and the referee reports on a Web page for all to see
Some people may complain that McIntyre and McKitrick did not publish their results in a refereed journal. That is true--but not for lack of trying. Moreover, the paper was refereed--and even better, the referee reports are there for us to read. McIntyre and McKitrick’s only failure was in not convincing Nature that the paper was important enough to publish.
Not important enough to publish or too dangerous an idea? Ponder that as you are freezing through another cold winter. Oh and remember how cool this summer was (here in Ontario anyway).
Damian and Colby Cosh both have posts about voting for Don Cherry but seem to have forgotten that the meme originated here and both received emails about it several months ago when I started this campaign. Ahem. Dudes. Karma?
The best post of all goes to The Monger who accurately sums up why it is possible that Don could win this thing.
Banting and Bell split the "great Canadians who did something... um... you know, scientific or something" vote. I suspect that about 10% of Canadians think Banting and Bell worked together to discover the Canadarm. Their votes will split.
Terry Fox and Wayne Gretzky have to share the "Hero/Cancer" vote. You think this isn't a category? Ha. Nobody will vote for Gretzky because he's the greatest hockey player most of us have ever seen. They'll vote for him because of the intangibles: he's "made us all proud to be Canadian". He's "such a nice man". Remember, these are CBC viewers we're talking about. It's all about the love. And Fox and Gretzky make these people feel the same way about themselves: "Aren't they nice? They're Canadian! I'm Canadian! Hey, I must be nice too!" Vote split.
Sir John A. and Lester Pearson will split the "Canadian Politicians who had the gumption to stand up to Ronald Reagan" vote: i.e. your typical federal Liberal putznik in "vote-rich Ontario". (As an aside, have you noticed that whereas Americans get to have the war over the "battleground states", Canadians have to settle for our more resource-extracty "vote-rich Ontario"?). There's another hefty segment of the CBC electorate split right up the middle.
And now the 3-way. Tommy Douglas, Pierre Trudeau, and David Suzuki. Sounds like the set-up to a bad joke about beet soup: so a socialist, a marxist, and a communist walk into a bar... Anyway, here's how this breaks down: this is the hardcore lefty-hippy CBC demographic, which is the largest single proportion of the CBC population (and therefore why it's so critical it's split into three, not just two). Douglas gets the "things were better when I was a girl" socialists and the "it's all about health care" union tubthumpers: the Raging Grannies, the shop-steward-who-takes-down-names-of-people-at-the-picket-line-who-are-insufficiently-surly, etc. Suzuki gets the Really Angry EnviroWhackJobs, the desperate flat earthers, and the Rainbow Coalition Vegans. In B.C. this is not an insignificant group. And Trudeau--ah, Trudeau. This is obviously who the CBC wants to win. But having lost the Douglas and Suzuki supporters, Trudeau will have to rely on the Retro 60s Boomer Grayhairs, the "I Love Castro" fanclub, and the kind of people who put "You Can't Hug Your Children With Nuclear Arms" on the backs of their Volkswagens and Volvos. I peg this group at more than 25% of the voters. But complacency, coupled with vote splitting, may push its numbers down.
Leaving us with Don Cherry. He stands alone. No votes to share with David Suzuki or Lester Pearson or Alexander Graham Bell--and a lot of ticked off taxpayers, footing the bill for this CBC tomfoolery, who might just have a chance to push him over the top.
Oh and Kathy has (via comments here and over at the Shotgun) been unwavering in her support.
As for the rest of you on the blogroll. Get off yer asses and do a post on this. The possibility that Don might win has already been front page news in the Toronto Star and has been fodder for radio talk shows. This thing is taking hold.
"A vote for John Kerry is a vote for Michael Moore, the ACLU, Ted Kennedy, trial lawyers, George Soros, the leftist academics who morally confuse generations of young Americans, and for Dan Rather, CBS News, and nearly the entire news complex that daily presents a proctologist's view of America. A vote for John Kerry is a vote for Jesse Jackson, whom Kerry has named a top adviser; and for Al Sharpton, with whom Kerry campaigns; for Sean Penn and his Hollywood world; and for the passionately pro-Kerry ....MTV, the greatest destroyer of young people's minds and souls in American history. And a vote for John Kerry is a vote for the countries that have abandoned us and against the countries that are helping us."
You know, I generally agree with what Prager says. But saying MTV is the greatest destroyer of young people's minds and souls is absolute bunk. While it's true that MTV (and it's Canadian clone Much Music) have a hopelessly naive view of politics and their attempts to get their viewers invovled is laughable I don't see them having a huge effect on the election (Bush is polling very strongly in the MTV demographic).
And calling them a "destroyer of young people's minds and souls" sounds like the ravings of a 1950's preacher against Elvis or Bill Haley.
People like Prager have to realize that there is a new generation of right wingers who grew up on MTV (like Stone and Parker - creators of South Park) and are smart enough to separate the good stuff from the idiocy. That's what makes shows like South Park and movies like Team America World Police so damn good.
All Prager does with comments like that is give ammunition to the bubbleheads at MTV. Its ok to be critical Dennis but don't lob softballs at them.
What’s the deal with that new movie “ I Heart Huckabees”? When I see the trailers for it on TV the title is shown as “I ‘heartsign’ Huckabees” you know like those bumper stickers people have with things like “I ‘heartsign” Dobermans”. I have always read the heart symbol as the short form for “love” so the bumper sticker would read “I love Dobermans” not “ I heart Dobermans” so why is everyone calling the movie “I heart Huckabees” and not “ I love Huckabees?”
Anyway I don’t intend to see the movie anyway.
So I was watching TV last night and noticed that CBC was showing it’s results for their “Greatest Canadian” thing. Actually I thought it was the final show but apparently this is a list of the top 50 that we voted for. From that list the top ten are now eligible for the next round of voting.
The top 10 are as follows:
Frederick Banting Alexander Graham Bell Don Cherry Tommy Douglas Terry Fox Wayne Gretzky Sir John A. Macdonald Lester B. Pearson David Suzuki Pierre Elliott Trudeau
Big surprise! Don Cherry made the list. Maybe my small campaign some months back had an effect?
As for the rest of the list….
Sorry everyone but Alexander Graham Bell is not a Canadian despite all the propaganda we were fed in school.
We have a couple of humanitarian types in Banting and Terry Fox. The requisite athlete in Wayne Gretsky and I guess we couldn’t get away with not having John A Macdonald on the list.
But I think it says a lot about us that at least three on the list are hard core left wingers: Tommy Douglas (who is practically a Communist for Christsakes!)
Eco Warrior and business hater David Suzuki.
Castro lover and the original dismantler of the Canadian military Pierre Trudeau.
Each nominee has an “advocate” who will host a program outlining why they feel that their nominee should be selected.
Speaking on behalf of Tommy Douglas will be veejay George Stroumboulopoulos. Georgie gave us a taste of his pitch last night when he said that Douglas’ values are now Canadian values and ol Tommy gave us a roadmap to where we are today.
George and the CBC would be surprised I guess to know that there are plenty of people who don’t share Tommy Douglas’ “values”. And as for where we are today I guess a 500 billion dollar deficit is a legacy of people like Trudeau trying to implement the utopian vision of people like Douglas.
If there is a silver lining here it is that Douglas, Trudeau and Suzuki will split the socialist vote.
Don Cherry is the only thing close to a right wing candidate so he should garner most of the non-politically correct crowd.
At this point I am resurrecting my campaign to spit in the CBC’s eye by voting Don Cherry (the man they desperately want to fire) as the Greatest Canadian. Let’s do it.
Funny I was thinking about that band just two days ago and remembering how overrated they were. My sincere condolences to the family of Doug Bennett and his fans.
Remember the old Wayne and Schuster show? Remember that episode they did spoofing the behaviour of those in parliament. At the time Canada had just allowed parliament to be televised.
Wayne and Schuster did this song:
Question time, question time, everybody loves question time There ain't no reason and there ain't no rhyme to do de doo do doo Question time....
So lets make that the theme of the weekly blogrolling additions shall we?
Blogrolling time Blogrolling time everybody loves blogrolling time There ain't no reason and there ain't no rhyme to do be doo doo do Blogrollin' time!
Sometimes I surf around through the blogs via the TLB ecosystem. There are some good blogs there. Bob Hayes was surfing around and for some reason or other found mine and linked to me. Bob's worthwhile blog is called Let's Try Freedom and now appears on my blogroll.
Conservative Life is more than just a blog. It has a forums section and a blogwatch section and all manner of good things to keep you busy. And you gotta love someone who is willing to listen to CBC Radio yikes! That's sheer torture.
So, that's it for this week. If you've added me to your blogroll and I haven't reciprocated please drop me a line.
