Month: November 2020

I am so looking forward to being able to work on the Nine again. Corwin’s gonna shank someone. Random goes stress-bald. Vialle and Julian feud over the table settings. Fiona gets a boyfriend. All this and more when I’m done with my homework!

At least one of those is a lie, and at least one isn’t.

DU keeps serving what they call ‘chicken carnitas’ or ‘turkey carnitas.’

I don’t want to offend so I don’t say anything, but sometimes if it’s a Spanish-speaker serving when I order ‘chicken carnitas’, they look at me sideways.

Look, you work here! Don’t give me that. It’s your sign!

They spice it up really well, so I’m happy.

I saw a story about Masatoshi Koshiba today. I’d heard about him but never really looked into his life. Interesting guy. Helped discover the neutrino, which will be a big deal in 100 yrs.

The thing I like about this guy is that apparantly someone told him he couldn’t hack physics so he dropped a German Literature major and became a physicist. Big thumbs up. I did something similar many years ago.

Weather is the day to day state of meteorological conditions. Climate is the statistics thereof.

Say you want to know how much you weigh. You might weigh yourself on a bathroom scale. You’ll get a number. That’s like the weather.

But if you do this, you’ll notice your weight changes throughout the day. If you want to get an idea of what’s going on, you should weigh yourself regularly in the same situation. An often passed around bit of advice is weigh yourself in the morning before a shower (if you’re a morning showerer, etc.). That way your hair isn’t wet, you’re consistently dehydrated, and the weight will be comparable. The long term trends in these weights are similar to climate.

But if you weigh yourself sixty times in the hour after eating Thanksgiving Dinner, you’re not getting better numbers than the sixty weights over sixty days that preceded Thanksgiving. You are, at best, getting good data for that moment, but not data well comparable to two months. If you weigh yourself every minute every day for another sixty days, those data sets can be compared well. One must do some manipulation to compensate for the morning weighing being probably a daily low-weight average, whereas the weigh-every-minute data points will average higher.

In climate studies, the doing of this, comparing a weigh-every-minute data set to the weigh-once-a-morning-before-shower data set, gave rise to the corrections incorporated into the hockey-stick graph. But comparisons between weigh-every-minute data sets and weigh-every-second data sets do not. This is because one’s weight does vary over the course of a day, it doesn’t vary much over the course of a second.

What’s really happening is that now we’re in a take-a-billion-measurements-a-second climate data set, and we’re comparing it to last decade’s take-a-million-measurements-a-second data set. It’s a different set of correction issues.

I remember once talking climate studies with some climate-change skeptics, and they brought up the solar cycle. The solar cycle is a real thing. It’s absolutely there. Its got a 11 year period, and it falls right out of the data. It does exist.

But if you look across decades, plural, you’ve got repeated solar cycles. And those are like multiple days in our earlier body-weight analogy. Yes, gaining body weight across the day isn’t an indicator of gaining body weight due to health decisions. But gaining body weight across many days, and the morning weighings trending consistently up, is.

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On a very different but closely related thought, suppose we measure something. We compare that measurement to some criteria.

If we measure humankind’s contribution to the wildfires, and we measure above two units, our first criteria indicates humankind is contributing to causing wildires. If we measure ten units, our criteria indicates humankind is the sole cause of wildfires.

We measure four units.

That would indicate humankind is doing something, and depending on accuracy, precision, yadda yadda, that might be a comfortable margin to be sure we aren’t getting measuring error. We can safely conclude that humankind is contributing to wildfire incidence.

But we didn’t measure above ten, and commensurate with those same limitations of accuracy, precision, and the yaddas, we cannot claim this study supports the notion that humankind is the sole cause of wildfires.

We measured four. Not one, not eleven, not something else. We got what we got.

Competition is good for everyone but you. If other people are competing against each other, that’s great! If they’re competing against you, that’s bad.

In the short term.

Some day I will be able to wash my dishes without looking like I need a refresher class on potty training.

But today is not that day.

Boeing received clearance for the Max to fly again.

This is what worries me:

“This airplane is the most scrutinized airplane in aviation history,” Dickson told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday. “The design changes that are being put in place completely eliminate the possibility of an accident occurring that is similar to the two accidents.” [bolding mine, from here]

That rhymes with an unsinkable Titanic.

The advantage to the gold standard isn’t that control of the money supply lies with miners. It’s that there is a limit on the Federal Reserve’s power over the money supply.

The problems with the gold standard are all various renumerations of two points: A) that power will lie with miners and B) the Fed won’t have it.

I’m not terribly impressed with the Fed. They’re far more culpable in the GFC than they admit. Autocratic regimes across the globe often fail to respond to tragedies, deny responsibility after causing problems, and that’s it. Neither is answerable to voters. Neither wants to admit a problem, because if they admit a problem and don’t fix it, they lose face. And that’s what leads to catastrophic outcomes in single-party municipalities, collapsing states (nation- and United), and cults. The Fed is an unanswerable technocracy effectively immune to the court system. I suppose Powell can’t be considered an autocrat, but oligarch seems to fit the bill.

I would like to see some kind of check and balance on the Fed, and CBs as a whole, and I don’t think the current system of governors and directors who can only be fired for cause is sufficient. Which leads back to the gold standard.

The basic issue about being honestly wrong is that without some form of competition, being wrong doesn’t carry a sting. It’s an issue with fraud, and that very often it is impossible to prove someone acted with malice instead of incorrectness. If you have a vote or vote surrogate, like choosing to root for another team or taking your money elsewhere, someone who is consistently wrong can’t win. But I don’t think we should legally punish people for being wrong, or at least not without other factors. One of the advantages to democracy is if you don’t like someone, Alice, you can vote for the other one, Bob. But you don’t elect Fed governors, and the process by which they’re picked is so obscure as to insulate them from public consequences of their actions. They’re all rich to begin with.

Between 2004 and 2006, a little over two years, the Fed took the interest rate from about 1% to 5.25%, a relative increase of about 425%. They did that in just over two years, and the typical turn around for property loans is at least three. Often it’s five. That’s like a sports car break-checking a semi. Yeah, the semi shouldn’t follow so closely the semi can’t stop in time, but the sports car driver is culpable too.

I’m not for the gold standard, but I understand.

Miroveha left kudos on Sauron Explains It All. Thank you very much. I do like each and every one of those.