eveninghawk’s links

i get excited by pretty renewable materials and manpowered gear. of late there has been some information floating around about bike frames made with an interesting assortment of renewables:

beautiful wood frames (Cell is my fav)
Biomega’s biolove (though for the life of me I can’t find it on biomega’s site)
sandwich bikes the idea is you buy one, they export one to folks in need
Brano Meres homemade bamboo bike frame too hot!
Calfee Design’s bamboo bike pricey, but pretty. nothing like a bike that has to be wiped down with furniture polish.

Yup, you heard me.  Sexy electric cars.  An interesting environmental alternative sports car for folks who have an awful lot of money.

Electric cars can go really fast, and probably help you pick up chicks. If you live in CA and have lots of money and like sports cars, I hope you think about getting one.

So… I found out about this through a blog apparently promoting more controversy on the climate change issue, and I must say that it frustrated me in a profound way, and my rapid run through statistics this summer is not fast or in depth enough to really make me feel comfortable evaluating the conclusions.

This is where you all come in. I am becoming more versatile in statistics, but I was wondering if anyone could look at this with more knowledge of the statistical language going on here than I have. I’ll quote the findings and give you a link to the whole 4 page summary (though i would much rather find something more than the executive summary… I want to see the math that they’re complaining about).

“Findings
In general, we found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling. We also comment that they were attempting to draw attention to the discrepancies in MBH98 and MBH99, and not to do paleoclimatic temperature reconstruction. Normally, one would try to select a calibration dataset that is representative of the entire dataset. The 1902-1995 data is not fully appropriate for calibration and leads to a misuse in principal component analysis. However, the reasons for setting 1902-1995 as the calibration point presented in the narrative of MBH98 sounds reasonable, and the error may be easily overlooked by someone not trained in statistical methodology. We note that there is no evidence that Dr. Mann or any of the other authors in paleoclimatology studies have had significant interactions with mainstream statisticians.

In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface. This committee does not believe that web logs are an appropriate forum for the scientific debate on this issue.

It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility. Overall, our committee believes that Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.”

This was taken from the Committee on Energy and Commerce’s website (where you can find the PDF of the summary of Wegmen’s findings).

It’s under the “Assessing Global Warming” section, and this is the press release for the hearing from this week.

This got no news coverage, and being something very in-committee, I find the whole thing very worrisome because while public opinion may be waking up, or paying more attention, policy is on its way to getting gutted.

Today, while reading my normal run of comics, I ran across Rob and Elliot.  While flipping through the archives, a total jem came up, showing what Waldo has been up to since all his book-chronicled exploits.

Just think of various images we all have about evil. Now think that at one point, even evil was a cute little baby. That’s what endears me to the “Satan’s Little Helper” shirt.

I rented Unleashed, and managed to set aside some time to watch it this week. Someone recommended it to me a year ago, and I’ve been a little slow on the uptake in terms of watching.

The movie related to a lot of things I’ve been thinking about in terms of being smart and sensitive, and about learning in general. I will warn you that the movie is violent, and if you’re not up for violence in your flicks, then you shouldn’t watch it.

However, if you’re willing to allow that, then it’s a great film. It took me a while to realize that many of the folks involved also made The Professional, a long-standing favorite film of mine, so it’s no wonder that I liked this one so much.

It’s interesting to think of what kinds of controls we put on ourselves in order to interact well with the rest of the world, and also to think if other folks have some kinds of controls on us. I’d like to think the answer is “none” for the latter, but I’m not so sure.

In terms of fighting style - which is something we come to treasure in any Jet Li movie, right? - the choreography is interesting, as they tried to conjure up what a person would fight like if they acted more like a dog than a human being. I was really impressed that Jet Li chose to do a film like this, and it’s gritty and fascinating, and in the end I think his character transforms from being a man degraded to becoming a man empowered and sensitive. That made me really happy because one of the things that has consistently disappointed me with other Hollywood martial arts flicks is that I feel like the main character is dehumanized. Here we pointedly start of with a dehumanized character who takes back his humanity.

any graduate student learns the skills of finding free food.  Heck, this is a skill most undergrads also manage to hone.

Of course, this is a skill we don’t think of much outside of the poor student sector, but one worth considering, because an awful lot of perfectly good food gets thrown away, either from fast food joints, bakeries, restaurants, and supermarkets.  Think about how much food there is out there, if not for the social taboo of finding it in dumpsters. Better than think about it, watch the Current TV piece about it.

Two links of interest today. First off, Josh pointed me to this fantastic size comparison of various planets and stars. Some of the image resolution is prettier than on other pictures, but the concept is great. The thought of sitting some size comparison planets on my desk is a lot of fun.

The second is an issue where museum preservation of biological species meets art. An ineffectively preserved shark is shrinking, so the artist wants to replace it with one more properly preserved. Not a bad idea. The question then becomes whether or not this modification changes the value of the art. Heck, does the rotting of the current shark in the container change the value of the art? Big questions.