WoodDragon
-
Content count
942 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
21
Posts posted by WoodDragon
-
-
-
Guys, I suffixed my language with an apology to the board in general at the time that I posted. I actually removed it completely first time that I typed it (most here know that I very rarely swear), but I replaced it because Dolos' statement was so rank a misrepresentation of what I had and had not said, and I believe that it warranted a strong response. I still do. Dolos knows full well that there was an apology for all but him, and yet he is now playing the concern troll card as well... nice.
And notice how he didn't actually address the original problem, which was that he lied about what I had said?
Anyway, for those who want to have access to Dessler's destruction of Spencer and Braswell, the paper is here, and he has a
. -
Yeah, I've taken the Sunday night run from Central to Cardiff a few times. The thing to watch out for is that you don't sleep through your stop!
It seems like another life now though - I have no nostalgia for it.
How are you adjusting to being home?
-
My car was checked by sniffer dogs too, which was interesting because I had two Newfoundlands in the back!
You won't get plants through, and given that kaffirs and elders are easily found down here, I wouldn't bother. I can't comment on caapi, as I've never seen it, but I reckon that you'd be better off setting yours free and seeing if you can sort out some new stuff when you get down here. From what I know about caapi you'd need to be properly set up before you think about starting on it, otherwise you'll just be wasting your time. The nights are still getting down to 5 or so, and there are only a few days above 12-15 atm, so there's a while to go yet before unprotected plants could make it.
FYI, mail is being more and more scrutinised too, and it won't be long before any plant material is easily detected. If you really want to bring anything down here, your best bet is to do it legit, or not do it at all.
-
On the matter of Spencer's claim, it essentially boils down to him saying that clouds cause the temperature changes of the atmosphere. Anyone who is familiar with the physical properties of water vapour know that it operates as a feedback, and not as a direct primary forcing as Spencer is claiming.
For those who don't have the background to follow this argument, a crude metaphor would be to say that Spencer is claiming that babies cause sex, rather than sex causing babies.
I really don't know how Spencer and Braswell thought that their claim would stand scrutiny. Either they think that professional scientists are so stupid that they can't spot an error that a first year physics student would recognise, or they knew that they'd be sprung but they just wanted to score a publicity win.
And they certainly did the latter - Dolos is evidence of the fact that a denialist claim can be shown to be garbage, but the head will continue to chatter even after it's been sliced from its body by real science.
It's a propaganda war, and garbage pseudoscience side is winning it - all so that fossil fuel interests can continue to rake in a billions dollars profit per day, and self-indulgent Westerners can avoid having to clean up their wasteful lifestyles, and fundie Christians can avoid confronting the fact that a white-beared old dude on a cloud didn't actually give them the planet to do with as they choose.
-
You claim a paper was refuted months before it was even published in a peer reviewed journal.Huh?!
Goodness gracious me Dolos, I do believe that you have profoundly misperceived the reality of the meaning of my comments! Perhaps you should carefully re-parse the relevant passage, and reassess your initial misplaced interpretation of my words.
I said that the paper was "...completely blown out of the water, months ago...". I made no mention of it being refuted before it was published, for the simple reason that this did not happen - except in your history-revising mind. The scientific community did not respond to Spencer and Braswell until after it was published - which was months ago. However, the subsequent scientific response was rapid in the scientific blogosphere, and today marks the first peer-reviewed rebuttal, in Geophysical Research Letters.
I offer well-meant advice that stands most folk in good stead - consider establishing a higher coefficient of friction for your objective universe parameter.
The normal way a rebuttal is handled is to allow the writers of the paper in question a chance to answer before opposition publishes. Add this to the fact that skeptic papers can take years to be published (if ever) and this does not pass the smell test. But we shall see.The reason that "this does not pass the smell test" is that you have your head up your arse.
You see, I know this because I've published in the scientific literature. Some papers go through in a few months. Some take a year or more, even if they are uncontroversial. It all depends of the resources of the journal, and on the number of manuscript submissions, and on the availability of reviewers.
"Skeptic papers" rarely get published because they are almost universally crap. On cursory professional scrutiny this one of Spencer's was no different - it was only because he recommended, to the editor of Remote Sensing, three of his denialist mates as reviewers that it scuttled through the review process without being caught out for what it was. When Wagner realised that the editorial process had allowed this to happen, he resigned because he was responsible for this egregious break-down of review.
If the so-called sceptics actually had something they would be published in the best journals. Journals love overturning paradigms, so they'd all be up for publishing something that had meat. But nothing "sceptical" ever does. It's why denialists publish in low-reputation journals, or in pay-to-print journals**. And even then, when they do publish in the dirty back-alleys of print, they are soundly rebutted anyway.
And yet they, and the lay people who are suckered by them, just don't get the message...
And as of about 6 hours ago, Andrew Dessler's paper has been formally released, and it ain't pretty for Spencer and Braswell. There's a plain-language summary at Skeptical Science
[*Apologies to the rest of the board for my bad language, but really, Dolos is just a skanky troll who willing to lie through his teeth to push his garbage. I'm not copping his re-writing of history.
**Remote Sensing is not necessarily a bad journal, but it is a new one and its subject focus is not in climatology, so they have little expertise in assessing climatological manuscripts. Spencer knew this, and that's probably why he tried it on with that journal. As I said above, when Wolfgang Wagner, the Editor-in-Chief, realised that he had been conned, he resigned as a matter of course. He can't retract it because that's not how publishing works: once the paper's out it would take evidence of academic malpractice for the editor to retract without author involvement - the more usual response is a rebuttal, as Dessler has provided.]
-
Ah, Dolos, up to your usual tricks, I see.
You seem to have a pathological inability to check your sources before you post. Spencer and Braswell have been completely blown out of the water, months ago, and the climate change denialists are squealing like stuck pigs because their one remaining hope of an unchallenged paper has evaporated under the merciless refutation of professional scrutiny.
Real Climate has ripped Spencer another one over this junk paper.
Spencer's paper has been so thoroughly shown to be rubbish even before Andrew Dessler's peer reviewed rebuttal which comes out tomorrow, that Wolfgang Wagner, the Editor-in-Chief who let Spencer's paper past scrutiny and published it without cottoning on the the fact that is was garbage, resigned in contrition when he realised what he'd done. And Spencer, and his denialist cronies like Bolt, Anthony Watts, Roger Pielke Sr, and Jonova for starters, are absolutely foaming because they have nowhere to go.
To help those rabid, disappointed climate change deniers, many people are explaining why the whole Spencer paper and its lack of import are nothing but smoke and mirrors:
Unfortunately it seems that you can take a scientifically untrained, non-educated, inexperienced denialist horse to the water of knowledge, but you can't make it drink.
Spencer's paper is dead, Dolos - it's just the denialist lobby pulling on strings to make you think that it's still going. It's passed on! This paper is no more! It has ceased to be credible! It's expired and gone to meet its shredder! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If the denialist blogosphere hadn't nailed it to the perch it'd be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are now history! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-PAPER!!
[Edit: spelling]
-
Do it Bacon. Work if you can, slum it if you have to, but do it.
You won't regret it.
-
It's funny that you should start this thread BM. I was thinking only last night about kicking off an almost identical one on AE.
Keep your eyes peeled - I'll get around to it soon...
-
though i'm yet to look up what a molly bol is...Oops, sorry, I have a nasty jargon habit.
Molly bol/molly bolly (and various spelling permutations thereof) = molecular biologist/molecular biology.
Note that I am not disparaging the discipline as a whole - it's actually a very respectable discipline. The problem is that many molly bols are very specifically and restrictedly trained in and focussed on their own discipline, and are weak in other areas of biology - and often in (paradoxically) evolution and in ecology.
Witness, for example, attempts to develop classic-style vaccines for sperm, or for DFTD - both are cases where an effective vaccine would rapidly select for resistance, potentially rendering the original problem worse than it previously was.
The issue is that molly bols have a nifty new hammer, and many of them see all biological problems as a nail. Trouble is, most biological problems are screws, or bolts, or rivets, or staples, or pins, or...
[Admission - in my medical research days I worked on molly bol projects... I got better.]
-
I have to agree with BM and Ob...
As an ecologist I have long tried to explain to my molly-bol colleagues that they are missing the forest for the trees. It is (or at least, it should be) simple to understand that targetted organisms will efficiently evolve against the artifical pressure of GM, especially as they are, by definition, weedy species with generalist, disturbance-loving natures.
In other words, the reason that they're weeds in the first place is that they are well-adapted to coping with - and adjucting to - novel environmental challenges. Short of moving to as-yet undeveloped generations of GE, Nature will almost inevitably find ways to circumvent human manipulations, rendering those technologies ever more ineffective, and at ever greater collateral cost.
As BM points out and as I have said myself to people in the past, there may come a time when we can actually keep ahead of evolution. The trouble then is that without evolution pruning our manipulations, we risk creating artificial biological function/interaction "bubbles" that will at some point drift so far from balance with what remains of an equilibrated natural ecosystem that when we eventually lose control (and we inevitably will, as in Jurrasic Park, but in a far more sophisticated manner), things will turn around to slap us hard in the face.
Aside from pest control, GE to "improve" nutrition, or to respond to problems in the environment (such as creating salt-resistant crops), are also approaches that miss the basic issues - plant appropriate crops in the first place, and don't fuck the environment in the first place.
I fully support the use of in vitro-based GE, because the issues of containment are completely different. However, releasing GMOs into the environment is a matter that needs orders of magnitude more ecological and evolutionary understanding than molly-bols, corporations, and governments have, or that they have demonstrated.
The way it's used now, the non-contained use of GE is largely a process of painting over rust, using a corrosive paint.
[Edit: spelling]
-
3
-
-
For best results, a drill press with a vice on the stage helps.
-
ever tried putting a hole in a glass bottle?Not in a glass bottle, but I've done it in sheet glass.
A little well of putty, some water or light oil, carborundum grit, and a copper pipe in a drill, and Bob's your uncle. It takes a little skill to get the carborundum to embed in the end of the pipe, and cutting shallow grooves in the business end of the copper helps, but once you've worked it out cutting a hole is easy. Just keep things cool, and don't apply too much pressure.
The handy thing is that afterward you'd have a pipe that fits the hole...
-
I don't use, but really, what's the point of this?
After all,
....................+
....................+
....................=
-
Jack and the Bean-stalk...
-
Dolos.
Sorry, no your right I didn't...I thought this place would be a bit deeper than just herbs and spices. I'm pretty well across my herbs and spices at the moment thanks. And thanks for your warm warm welcome. Maybe you should set up an introductory page highlighting what is ok to post about and what is not. You should scratch off anything to do with global warmingWas I best to ask first off "hey man, where the fuck can ya get me some salvia" or "these shrooms are just awesome, I want a spore print"
I thought the change in the science was very interesting indeed considering it was not long back "settled". OK...back over to AE....their not as rude as fuck over there....well not yet anyway....
If you found my post offensive, it's because your trite regurgitation of "it's the sun", "it's cosmic rays" (not necessarily the same thing, btw) is so easily confirmed as rot that even suggesting them it is offensive in itself.
Why would you post about climate change on an ethnobotany site if you're not primarily here for the EB? Why would you post a canard that is one of the more silly of the list of Denialist memes? Why would you do so without checking first to see what's been previously said about this here and in more specialist fora? Why would you do so using language that comes straight out of 'The Internet Guide for Trolls and Spammers'?
Seriously?
The bottom line is that your post was easily blown out of the water before it even left the slip. If you're too stupid and/or lazy to work this out before you post, then you shouldn't be surprised if someone offends you by stepping in and clipping your wings. Anyone with an average IQ and an understanding of how to type the right key words into G00gle could have figured this out before making an ass out of themselves by suggesting that there had suddenly been a "change in the science".
Don't worry though - I'm sure that Tony Abbott loves you. As will Piers Ackerman, Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones, and all of the other anti-science ideologues who would rather condemn their decendants to a very unfavourable living environment, than to do their share to take the simple steps that would fix the issue now.
TI.
I think that Qualia was being ironic...
[Edit: spelling]
-
I don't think the science is so settled any more. This is very interesting and is real science, not just data input to create models...maybe a carbon tax is not needed after all...
I'm so confused...This I thought had been ruled out and mocked...
CERN Experiment Confirms Cosmic Rays Influence Cloud Seeds
Read about it here
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/24/no fucking way I'm linking to this shit
Might as well talk about Dolos's first post on the Corroboree.
It reads like a form letter, and one composed by a shill who is paid by an agency to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Seriously, I've had email spam that reads better than this.
I'd put money on the fact that Dolos didn't sign up here to talk about how to grow herbs and spices...
-
Dolos.
I'm very suspicious about the fact that you started this thread as your very first post on the Corroboree, but that's a discussion for another time.
The short answer is that it's not the sun, and it's not cosmic rays.
Seriously, if you're too stupid and/or too lazy to do some basic fact-checking before you start promulgating shit, you should just not bother.
The only people whom you are impressing are those who'd buy a bridge from you.
{Edit: fixed link]
-
I've been a sudoku addict for about 5 years. They're great to take to the dunny. But remember, it's cheating to write anything but the answer in the empty squares...
I started on the evil ones at that site about a month ago. Cool.
For a variation, try samurai sudoku.
-
Flashgot.
Which reminds me, when I updated Firefox I lost the FG icon in the lower right corner. Anyone know how to retreive it? Or do I have to reinstall?
-
Bacon.
There are a few things that we don't see eye to eye on, but in this matter I know exactly where you're coming from.
I spent the better part of my 20s and 30s being the rock-solid support for about half a dozen girls over that time. I didn't deliberately go out to find ones that needed supporting - it was just the way the cards fell.
The thing is, there's a difference between being someone's support in a partnership, and being a social worker. That's a lesson that I took too long in learning! You're not this girl's social worker, so don't give her the chance to treat you like you are. You've already done your part, and it's not been enough for her, so move on.
It'll hurt like you're bleeding your guts out. But you'll recover. Guaranteed, even when it doesn't feel like it. Just make the start, like others are saying - go out, kiss a few girls, and learn to wrestle the pain. Be nice to your ex, but be steadfast in looking after yourself. You're no good to anyone - her, yourself, or other prospectives - if you are crushed by someone else's lack of respect for your previous relationship.
Negotiations to 'open' a relationship that was previously exxclusive very rarely succeed. She's simply taking advantage of you now, and a genuinely loving partner wouldn't do that.
So look after yourself. Maybe she'll wake up, and shape up. Probably she won't. But don't be someone else's doormat. Give-and-take only works when there's fair give and fair take, and this girl is not being fair.
Anyway, that's my take...
-
4
-
-
Wait. The UK has tested nuclear bombs in Australia?!
5 @ Montebello Islands, Western Australia.
2 @ Emu Field, Woomera Rocket Range, South Australia.
? @ Maralinga, South Australia:
Seven atomic tests are conducted... between 1956 and 1958. So-called 'minor trials' continue until the early sixties.[Source]
-
-
Bright indirect light at first, but they should probably be able to handle anything but direct mid-day light almost straight away, especially if it's not summer.
Just keep an eye on them. If they start to etiolate give them more light immediately. If they start to curl or otherwise look like they're burning off, shade them from the most intense light.
Now that they're germinating you can certainly decrease the humidity. I'd do it in stages though over a day or so, so that you don't risk shocking them. Just put increasing numbers of holes in your plastic, until it's like a collander and not holding much humidity in. Doing it slowly will also give some of the remainding seeds just a little more time to take up moisture and germinate.
It's important not to over-water them now, or wet the leaves directly. Keep the day warmth up to them, and don't worry about the cooler nights, as that probably mimics the desert nights anyway.
Tripsis, I might yet arrange for another batch of seeds, depending on how many I get up. If so, I'll let you know when I do so. If you're patient though you can just wait until our seedlings are bigger, as frankincence is supposedly ridiculously easy to strike from cuttings.
The Great Global Cooling/Warming Thread
in Chill Space
Posted · Edited by WoodDragon
For those who may be following the story, here is more well-presented deconstruction of Spencer and Braswell, with a bit of Lindzen and Choi dismantling as well:
Barry Bickmore.
And Bickmore again.
Scholars and Rogues (includes a nice comparison of one of the S&B graphs with Skeptical Science's clarification).
Scott Mandia.
More from Skeptical Science.
[Edit: added links]