PrimusZ Mod Released...

After quite some time we are in the process of releasing this vaping "mod" into production.

More updates will appear here as time goes by...

This started back in July with this "proof of concept..."

Prototype #1 (late August 2013)

The willfully scientifically illiterate...

Over at Ars Technica there is yet another silly post titled "On Moderation in Climate Discussion."

Ars writes a lot of stuff from Ubuntu Unix to particle physics - most of which is reasonable stuff.

However, they also have a "contributor" named John Timmer who writes on "climate science."

Today I see the post linked above which basically says "this is a politically charged topic about which people rant" so we are tightening our "moderation."

Tightening our moderation of reader comments, hmmm...

I suppose little wonder when you see statements about climate change like this (from the link above): "...scientists all recognize the reality of climate change and take it seriously."

See, its all dogma and clearly if you don't agree there is something wrong with you, dear reader.

So shut up, stop posting, and let us get on with our weekly dogma report (or drum banging for "global warming").

I have written about this contributor before and his commentary and content.

Here is a recent post by him: "Solar variability has a small effect on climate change."

And what do we find here?

Well, climate science apparently has a number of "scientific" models that represent the earth's climate, many in fact (43 as Ars claims in this related article which we will get to in a minute).  Each produces disparate results as they relate to predicting climate.

(NOTE: Unlike physics which has, for example, "the standard model," which, while certainly not perfect represents, at least to me, a much more reasonable model of what a scientific model is all about.)

In any case the "Variability" article goes on to discuss how some people are making, at least to the author, unsubstantiated (or unsubstantiatable) claims "[the sun's output] .. hasn't seemed to have changed enough [over time] to have left a mark on the recent climate record."

As an "answer" to these unsubstantiated claims we are presented with the following example of "climate science" (from the "Variability" article speaking about some climate study):

"..they compared a climate model's output with reconstructions of the Northern Hemisphere's temperatures for the last 1,200 years (Northern Hemisphere data is much more complete than Southern)."

So we have at least 43 different climate models, and we picked one - apparently at random though no mention of the reasoning behind the selection is provided.

We compared this random model to some incomplete data that we happened to have and then adjusted the level of "influence" of solar activity (here it is described in what passes for detail):

"Within the climate model, they set both large and small values for the influence of solar activity on the climate.

And the large values simply don't work very well. With a high value for solar influence, nearly three hundred of the 1,000 years of the comparison failed to line up—the model output failed to match the historical record. In contrast, with a low value of solar influence, the number of mismatched years was cut by more than half."

So, the summary here seems to be that with one model solar "setting" the error rate when comparing to "reconstructed" data is 30% and with another (presumably the one the author thinks is important) its 15%.

Of course, its totally unclear what this means given that only 1/43rd of the climate models where tested against "reconstructions" of other, admittedly incomplete, data.

Timmer's conclusion (underline mine): "...the study is another point against the idea that the Sun's variability has had a significant influence on the historic climate."

So what's interesting here is that the above reasoning, at least in the article's authors mind, this study has some sort of scientific value - a data "point" in what sense I wonder...

Let's compare this to, for example, the detection of a new particle in physics (see this on the Higgs Boson in Wikipedia): "To conclude that a new particle has been found, particle physicists require that the statistical analysis of two independent particle detectors each indicate that there is lesser than a one-in-a-million chance that the observed decay signatures are due to just background random Standard Model events—i.e., that the observed number of events is more than 5 standard deviations (sigma) different from that expected if there was no new particle."

Certainly in many other endeavors, both scientific and engineering, a supposed "choice" between a 15% and 30% error rate where not all the facts/data are known is a meaningless comparison.  Meaningless because you admit up front that you are simply "picking" data from your problem space.

The other article I linked "Nailing down climate uncertainty hints at greater future warming" is equally short on science.  Here the discussion, much as I described above for solar influence, revolves around the effect of "clouds" on climate models.

The conclusion here: "Still, in this case, the models worked exactly how they were supposed to, in that they identified a key process that could then be studied empirically. And, with a major source of uncertainty identified, it increases the chances that we can find the remaining sources and study those in more detail as well."

So, basically, the model is full of uncertainty.

But I thought that "climate science" was decided???

So if I were to post a summary of my conclusion here, that "climate science" is a giant fraud the moderator of the forum at Ars Technica would give me a much needed warning: "...throwing out phrases like "the whole thing is a giant fraud" is a quick way to get a moderator's warning."

So I guess the point of Timmer's articles are to promote dogma - and only the pro "climate science" dogma - all others be damned.

Makes you wonder about "the willfully scientific illiterate..." - doesn't it...?

 

Sister Wives, Gay Divorce and a Chimp's Day in Court

From the Wired article linked below

 A little over two years ago I wrote "Sister Wives and 'The Next Step'..." about how polygamists were busy building on the gateway Lawrence v. Texas (sodomy laws - linked in the article above) built for the establishment of gay marriage.

The implication was, and is, that if gay marriage is recognized then polygamists will claim that their marital practices should be accepted as well.

Of course supports of gay marriage appear, for some odd reason, opposed to polygamy (and all the other poly's like andry).  See, for example, "After Gay Marriage, Why Not Polygamy" and "A Simple Point on Polygamy".

(Not that, in my opinion, the road to gay marriage was well thought out either.  For example, apparently it never occurred to anyone that getting a divorce might be involve a legal issue.  There are, in fact, no laws (or few) that support it so to get a "gay divorce" according to the article is a non-trivial matter.)

Turns out I was wrong about predicting the success of the Sister Wives.

The gay and poly blocks have apparently been caught off guard by yet another group seeking "rights."

Chimps (as in Chimpanzee).

That's right, chimps.

So while all the bickering and fighting and filing of lawsuits has been going on so that each special group can have its needs made into "rights" the chimps have been busy working on rights of their own.

And not only "rights" - but "human rights."

They are, after all, besides being cute, intelligent and thoughtful.

In any case the chimps are set for their day in court already as described in "A Chimp’s Day in Court: Inside the Historic Demand for Nonhuman Rights."

Just as in the precursors of Lawrence v. Texas chimps are wisely starting out small.  In this case for "bodily liberty," i.e., the freedom of being caged.

Of course, we can all see where this goes next.

I think the Sister Wives should be worried - the chimps may scoop their first place finish.

After all chimpanzee mating habits are certainly not gay or straight but instead fall more along the "poly" line of thinking from what I can tell at a distance.

I mean, gee, once freed of their cages there will be little to prevent them from practicing their on unique brand of "poly" openly around the country side for all to see.

Clearly its a race to the bottom.

Why not grant fish rights as well.

Deep ocean dwellers will, after all, deserve "bodily liberty."

While everyone seems quite certain that there is no "slippery slope" its sure is hard to describe this chimp-based turn of events as anything but.

Good thing for the deep ocean dwellers though.

(Hang in there guys, "rights" on on their way...)

Epigenetics, Smoking and Addiction

Epigenetics is the process by which some trait of a parent is transmitted to an offspring through non-genetic and non-social means (Wikipedia: "...anything other than DNA sequence that influences the development of an organism.")

Over at National Geographic we see this article: "Mice Inherit Specific Memories, Because of Genetics?" by Virginia Huges. (You can find the original article here but you'd have to pay $32 to read it even though its quite likely your tax dollars paid for its research, content and writing.)

Epigenetics has been somewhat "out of fashion" for a number of years but this paper brings it back to the fore.  Basically the idea is that mice taught that a certain smell is bad somehow seem to pass this on to subsequent generations through a reproductive process, i.e., with all the possibility of social and environmental transmission removed, that transcends DNA, i.e., the DNA itself is not directly altered, yet the offspring still avoid the bad smell.

The article is straight forward and an easy read.

The same topic is also covered here at ArsTechnica.

Of course, modern science never stops to think about the implications of this.

What about a positive reward rather than a negative one (in the paper above mice are given a specific smell and a corresponding shock - the fear of the specific smell is what's passed on to the subsequent generation)?

Could there be, perhaps, a propensity to smoke, for example, based on a similar process?

By the same line of reasoning, again, as an example, your parents might smoke and indirectly pass a preference for smoking on to you, their offspring, through a similar process.

One might argue that there was a epigenetic reason for being a smoker (or drinker, and so on).

So your parents biology is somehow responsible for the reason you are now a social outcast.

Someone whom is picked on, bullied, and ridiculed for smoking.

Yet what if the very reason you smoke is biological - just like hair color, skin color, and all the other myriad of things that people are bullied for...?

Everyone agrees that its "bad" to bully someone of, for example, another race than your own.

But what about bully for epigenetic traits?

The mice, for example, bullying their cousins for fearing a certain smell.  (In this case you'd demonstrate the effect of the Nature article on one "branch" of the family but not another, e.g., one cousin is so trained but not another.

Now mouse cousin A can ridicule mouse cousin B for a seemingly unexplainable fear of a smell.

Now imagine how this might translate into children...

Well, actually, we don't have to.

We can see that those who smoke, despite decades of put down, ridicule, and "re-education" continue to smoke.

And, at least to my mind, smoking tends to run in families (and yes, maybe its all social), but the point of this post is that we don't know.

The mere possibility of epigenetics having a roll in the outcome of our children really says that there may, in fact, be biological reasons that people smoke other than addiction.

Of course, this could apply to many other things as well, drug use, drinking, abusive behavior, fearful behavior, the list is endless.

The point is simple: science understands very little about why things occur, yet, just like Facebook, is happy to assist in the bullying and ridicule of what may in fact be something over which an individual has no control.

Bullying - The New Definition

So I go over to http://www.stopbullying.gov/what-is-bullying/definition/ to see what bullying involves:

• An Imbalance of Power: Kids who bully use their power—such as physical strength, access to embarrassing information, or popularity—to control or harm others. Power imbalances can change over time and in different situations, even if they involve the same people.
  
  
• Repetition: Bullying behaviors happen more than once or have the potential to happen more than once.

Now let's just eliminate "Kids" from the first bullet point because there is certainly no limitation as to age where bullying is concerned.

Now let's take a look at this article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.  It says in part:

"The region's biggest health care system announced Wednesday that its new no-smoking policy would take effect July 1, 2014. UPMC will continue to hire smokers but it will not allow them to smoke during their shifts or their breaks."

It goes on:

"... The policy also forbids snuff, smokeless tobacco -- and even electric cigarettes, which deliver nicotine via water vapor and are used by many as a smoking cessation tool."

Hmm, bans electronic "cigarettes" as well - specifically for those wanting to quit smoking.

(Note: Electronic cigarettes do not use, for the most part, water vapor.  In fact, they use things like Propylene Glycol (PG) - just like the inhaler technology UPMC and its doctors has its patients use for things like breathing problems.  So this is really interesting.  I can breath PG if UPMC tells me its okay but not if I decide to, for example, quit smoking by using it because my doctor tells me too.

Electronic cigarettes are far more closely tied to the UPMC breathing treatments than cigarettes.

Doctors do, in fact, tell people to use electronic cigarettes instead of smoking.

But since they make you look like a smoker you're going to get a whack on the head from the bully...)

Isn't that in fact promoting smoking, i.e., banning a means to quit.

This ban includes "time that is paid, and unpaid breaks, including lunch that is taken on or off campus. ..."

So, lets see here.  I can no longer do what I want on my break off the job.  Even on an "unpaid break" from work - hmm - unpaid break?  I imagine only slaves to have those - but who knows...

Clearly, by the www.stopbullying.gov description, this is BULLYING. (Note: The Propylene Glycol part is particularly sad because its just like the bully telling you its okay to carry his books for him but not your own, i.e., he knocks them out of your hands.  I can prescribe PG for you to breath but God-forbid you inhale it on your own or even if your doctor tells you to in order to stop smoking...,)

Why?

Well, suppose I engage in risky sexual behavior.

Obviously I can become infected and transmit a disease to a patient.

But the policy does not affect all risky behavior on the part of employees - only smokers and smoking. I guess no one minds if the Hep C or AIDS guy cuts himself during a surgery or while patching up your wound.

But having Hep C or AIDS is socially cool so there's apparently no need to deal with that.

So they are singling out smokers to control them.

After all, smoking is not socially cool.

Sounds to me like it fits the definition of bullying to me.

(Remember the 12 and 14 year old girls who were arrested for bullying?  All they did is make Facebook posts about the victim.  Not like, for example, threatening their livelihood as does UPMC.)

Especially after the last sentence in the article: "Violations will be reported to a UPMC supervisor, [who] will then attempt to resolve the problem, and progressive corrective action will be used."

Corrective action - wonder what that means?

So if some UPMC employee off's themself due to the stress of not smoking during the day its not UPMC's fault, right?  No one will arrest them or their parents (as in the case of the 12 and 14 year old girls).

Why not?

Because smoking is not socially cool...

So let's take a look at what "social bullying" is about according to the government (again from the "stop bullying" site): 

Social bullying, sometimes referred to as relational bullying, involves hurting someone’s reputation or relationships. Social bullying includes:

• Leaving someone out on purpose
• Telling other children not to be friends with someone
• Spreading rumors about someone
• Embarrassing someone in public

Hmm...  "Leaving someone out on purpose." - Like someone who "smokes?"

An electronic cigarette need not even contain nicotine but should your coworker see you using one no doubt you will be subjected to "corrective action" as described above.

Certainly, if I were a smoker, this would be embarrassing to me - to be singled out for a specific behavior.

I suppose this means that if you are addicted to, say, Oxy Contin, its okay - we'll hire you - but not if you smoke.

This is social bullying to an extreme.

Certainly there are many things someone might do that are "dangerous" and affect their jobs - like take drugs, or be mentally ill, or have a bad attitude, or whatever.

But only the "smokers" are to be singled out.

No one will follow you around to see if you are shooting up on your break.

None of this should be surprising when you consider that UPMC makes quite a bit of money treating - you guessed it - smokers!

Prescribing Medicaid and Medicare treatments to patients and billing the government.

Imagine the effect on these big companies and industries if people suddenly stopped smoking.
 

Ars Technia and Ruiu's Questionable Results

I am fascinated by this article at ArsTechnica.

It describes a computer security researcher named Drago Ruiu studying what he calls "BadBIOS."  BadBIOS is supposedly some kind of virus that lives in a computer's BIOS (the BIOS is a low level memory where basic instructions on startup, accessing the disk, display, etc. are stored).

BadBIOS supposedly allows computers with no internet or wired or wireless connection to become infected by, supposedly again, mysterious means, e.g., audio data transfer, and so on.

A subsequent Ars article here describes how others are unable to duplicate Ruiu's results.

What interesting is not this information per se but rather how this reflects on today's notion of "science" and credibility.

Unlike, for example, "climate science" a laptop is a closed system.  A device without access to the internet that is supposedly exhibiting problems with self infection of computer viruses.

No one so far can "duplicate" Ruiu's results.

But Ars can still write articles about these results even though there are basically nonsense.

If we (or they) can't reliably decode what a laptop is doing how can we decode, for example, the climate?

The laptop is a closed environment that sits on your lap.  The climate represents a planet-wide phenomena.

What the fascination is here is that no one at Ars questions the ineptitude of Ruiu.  Computers are based on boolean logic and deterministic electronics.  Yet Ruiu is unable to demonstrate actual results.

This is a common phenomena when debugging large, complex software systems.  Its easy to fool yourself (as I wrote about here in "Through the Keyhole") about what's going wrong.  Perhaps Ruiu (and the editors at Ars) should read my posts regarding this phenomena before publishing articles.

Yet Ars still writes about this nonsense - and climate science as well.  If we can't understand a laptop how can we understand climate?

I wrote here about how 1 in 20 scientific studies are basically bogus - I think that the modern notion of science is flawed and guys like Ruiu are really just lost.

Yet Ars represents a world where we can talk about intermediate results of scientific efforts as if they are news.

The "Madoff" Point...

There comes a point in every Ponzi scheme (and other government and business fraud) where a decision must be made:

- Do "we" come clean, confess and repay.

- Or are the consequences to "us" so grave that we must continue on with the fraud regardless.

(Edit: Note, for those with a modern "education" or advanced college degree a Ponzi scheme is, according to Wikipedia "... a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money or the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from profit earned by the individual or organization running the operation.")

I call this, in honor of Bernard Madoff, the Madoff Point.

Now I am not an economist nor would it matter if I was.  But I have seen the rise and fall of many businesses and governments in my time.

The Madoff Point is the point in the fraud where a conscious decision is made to move forward with wrong doing.  Of course, in most criminal cases this was the idea from the start.

With government and business, though, usually not.

In each and every case, particularly from the perspective of hind site, you can almost always identify the point where things "went south" and should have been stopped and also where "management" continued on regardless.

Businesses where the mail room guy would mumble "this is insane;" yet those above him continued on with some fallacy that the business was viable run up until the brick wall.

Last night we saw this with Dianne Reidy, the US House stenographer whose outburst was recorded as follows:  “He will not be mocked. He will not be mocked The greatest deception here is this is not one nation under God. It never was. It never was. Had it been, it would not have been — the Constitution would not have been written by Freemasons. They go against God. You cannot serve two masters. You cannot serve two masters. Praise be to God, lord Jesus Christ.”

Interesting, eh?

There is little doubt in my mind that today you need look no further than the "cloak room" for Satan.

When you reach the Madoff Point its always the true believers at the bottom who crack first.

So today the good old US Government crosses the Madoff Point.

The point were the consequences of stopping the fraud and Ponzi operations exceed the cost of coming clean.

Imagine borrowing 4-6 billion a day while your pals a the Federal Reserve print another two or three.

Personally I have seen with the government shut down how smoothly traffic flows at rush hour - I wonder why?  With all those who consume our countries resources sidelined those that are left merely go about their business in an efficient and effective manner.

It would probably be beneficial to shut down the government for the traffic benefits alone.

Our government is addicted to debt as I have written here before.

And now, with the crossing of the Madoff Point, there is little hope the "right thing" will ever happen...

If you run a casino the government requires you to say:  "This ad brought to you by Little Joe's Casino.  Got a gambling problem, call 1-800-GAMBLING."

So what should the federal government do, call 1-800-BAD-DEBT?

Our should the people be calling this number?

Oh wait, someone at the government is answering...

Just ask Dianne Reidy.