Batman versus Zod

Via Sean

Hmm a quiz to see who said what: Bush or Batman?

Personally I'd rather have Batman as president, even campy Adam West Batman, than General Zod

People of the World indeed.

What's wrong with Science as a Religion?

Salon comes up with a question that reeks of failure.

Anyone that thinks Science can work as a Religion or Religion can work as Science does not understand religion and/or science.

The core to science is verification through experimentation. Nothing, nothing is taken as sacred and unquestionable. That's the whole point. Everything is fair game, but to overturn an existing idea you need to prove it wrong. Science's purpose is to give a flexible framework to observe, model, predict and attempt to understand the natural world.

The core to religion is faith in something that cannot be proven. Religions have principals that are not determined via experiment.

The fallacy of attempting to equate the two should be readily apparent.

People who try to use science as a religion: Radical Environmentalists, and people that try to use religion as a science: Creationists, are cut from the same cloth. They both want use the authority of science to lend a veneer of validity to their agendas.

Rand Simberg has more thoughts.

So how good are those climate models?

Model vs. Reality
Always always bet on reality.

The blunt truth is that every, every model is wrong.
The important and difficult thing is determining how wrong the results are and then what conclusions can reasonably be made given the accuracy of the results.

The assumptions have to be factored in. Which effects were simplified, which ones were ignored totally. What is the range of values where certain assumptions are more valid? How good is the data being input into the model?

So, let’s review the bidding. The IPCC and the models on which it premises its version of reality are wrong on rainfall. They are wrong on GHG concentrations and behavior. Models are wrong on Antarctica, on Andean snowpack, on Bangladesh, on ocean temperatures, and wrong on the Northwest Passage. Roy Spencer’s research appears to have affirmed that models are demonstrably and fatally wrong on the threshold question of climate sensitivity.

Huh... that's not confidence inspiring.

Well what are they going to do with data of that reliability?

Other than that, why, those models are perfectly wonderful tools on which to premise trillion-dollar economic decisions!

That's not good. Not good at all.

Computer models make very nice graphs and can create reams of data. Their parameters can be varied to make lots of studies and comparisons...

but if the model itself is deficient, then all you have is very pretty garbage.

It's like he thinks he's already President...

From Glen
GAFFE-O-MATIC

Democrat Barack Obama, the first black candidate with a shot at winning the White House, says John McCain and his Republican allies will try to scare them by saying Obama "doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills."

Er, all those other presidents? Isn't there just one President on the dollar bill?

And have you noticed that it's always Obama who's actually injecting race into the campaign, under the guise of warning about what those Evil Republicans will do? And is it

really

likely that John McCain would be out there saying "don't vote for Obama, he's black?

Follow the link to see a bunch of other gaffes in that statement. It's an amazing collection of ignorance, arrogance, racism, and fear-mongering.

Also consider this part of the quote. "I know that I don't look like the other Americans who've previously spoken in this great city[Berlin]."

There's another gaffe in that statement too. Broadly, racially, speaking I would think the current and previous Sec State would count. Or is Obama limiting himself to just other presidents again?

Glen Reynolds: When the press is in the tank for you, you get sloppy.

And Glen ends with a preduction: Just wait. It'll get worse between now and November.

I wish he were wrong, but I'm sure he's right.

More on the Dollar Bill Statement by Peter Kirsanow

Amy Holmes nails the Obama spokesperson's transparent attempt to clean up the Dollar Bill quote. So we're to believe the statement had nothing to do with race, rather it referred to Obama not having spent decades in Washington? I suppose that last week when Obama — in terms similar to the Dollar Bill quote— told the crowd in Berlin, "I know that I don't look like the Americans who've previously spoken in this great city," he was referring to the fact that JFK wasn't as tall.
Not content with mere insinuations of racism, the Obama campaign publically signals their belief that we're galactically stupid.

Yes, because George Washington spent decades in Washington DC....

Using Science against those that pervert it.

More on the deviousness of using Maths and Logic on Environmental issues.

James Hansen asserted that there is a 99% chance of four conditions being met.
Now the probability of each of the four conditions being true has to be greater than 99%
(For example the probability of Heads on a coin is 50% but the probability of Four Heads is greater than 50% In fact it's 0.50^4).

So look at this

It’s also important to distinguish the varying degrees of climate-change scepticism that exist. For example, someone might be sceptical about one or more of these commonly accepted statements:
1. Global warming is really happening.
2. Global warming is caused by man-made greenhouse gases (GHGs).
3. Global warming will be harmful.
4. GHG emissions must be reduced in order to combat global warming.

And if there really is an urgent need to reduce GHG emissions, all four of these statements must be true.
Predictably, James Hansen has no doubt: ‘I can assert that these conclusions have a certainty exceeding 99 per cent.

Follow the link to see what the actual numbers are.

You know... if a guy lies about basic, basic probability... why are we supposed to trust intricate and complex computer modeling?

Science can't always give us definite answers to our questions, even when the issues involved are very important to us. But it often can tell us how certain we should allow ourselves to be. And the certainty expressed by far too many environmentalists goes well beyond what the science will support.

That right there is the rub for me about a lot of the eco-people trying to use science to prove a certainty in things that we don't know


The standard deviation is not the same as the distribution of a set.

Unfortunately, journalists of both sexes tend to not be math geniuses. Few of them anywhere on the continent noticed that Ms. Hyde's data actually come a lot closer to supporting Mr. Summers' hypothesis than they do to refuting it.
...
And that's exactly what Ms. Hyde's team found: The test data for boys were spread out more in every state, and in every single grade, by between 11% and 21%. That may not sound like a big difference. But such differences can create tremendous disparities in the relative proportion of men and women meeting a certain criterion.

Which is to say, the Science study has produced a recognizable echo of what Mr. Summers pointed out, to such indignation, in 2005. It is hard to tell if intelligence follows a normally distributed statistical pattern at the very high end of cognitive achievement. But if so, that means male-female ratios will naturally grow even more dramatic as the cutoff is placed even higher — as is inevitably the case in elite quantitative professions.

If someone writing a story makes a basic goof on something simple about statistics, math, history, or logic...

Then what about the rest of their work? Where did their conclusions come from? A mind that may be over their head? Or are they being spoon-fed by someone else?

This is why being a skeptical reader/viewer is so important. It's more work, but isn't the truth preferable to what might be false?

A couple questions to and from the Media about Obama.

The latest new drug: Hopium


Pop quiz for the press corps. Which of the following phrases is not attributable to Sen. Obama?



Simple assignment for the press corps: ask the senator to name three specific traditions to which America will return upon his election and why his election will prompt their return. No teleprompters allowed.

New York Times: Why didn't Obama leave his aides behind and visit those wounded troops alone

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