Demons

Statistics

Rudolph versus Sarah Palin

Road hunting

Grouse camp sauna musings

my first xtranormal cartoon. enjoy.

Open sights and aging eyes

I made a discovery this week when the muzzleloading deer season started--I'm blind as a bat when it comes to seeing my musket sights. What I really learned was that I can see the front sight when I put my reading glasses on (my eyes went to hell in the last six months). Voila! I can see the front sight.

Which led me to spend the last day or two researching Rx shooting glasses, aperture suction-cup thingies, etc etc. I should have stayed in skirmishing when I was young and able-bodied; now I am decrepit and can't see straight.

I suspect my eye issues are partly explain why I shot the carbine (with a peep) better than my two-bander this past season.

I like what my teammate Jon Faucher said--I wish I could have last season back knowing what I know now. But at least I've got a game plan for my musket for this next season.

Jim

ps. here's a cool link: http://www.starreloaders.com/edhall/nwongmain/eyeguide.html . Check out the links to his other topics.

Sarah Palin versus Aaron Sorkin versus Gary Francione

Aaron Sorkin has let loose with this expletive-laden diatribe against Palin: "In Her Defense, I'm Sure the Moose had it Coming."

Now, the most fun yet: Rutgers law professor Gary Francione--he of the ultimate pro-animal rights position--writes to Sorkin saying "I Hate to Say It, but Sarah Palin is Right: A Response to Aaron Sorkin."

I haven't had this much fun since I was reading for my A-exam.

Of course the hunting blogs are all over this the last few days--Sarah Palin taking five or six shots (and missing) at a caribou on her Alaska show. Apparently the scope got bumped earlier in the 'hunt.' Hard to believe this made it to the final edits and onto television.

Fascinating reading on Judy Curry's climate blog . . . going over the list of "denizens," I am struck by the varied backgrounds and the level of interest people bring to the topic. Not to mention the various biographical accounts of how folks came to the topic. Very, very thoughtful people.

just about says it all:

James Hansen at Princeton

Luboš Motl has a great post featuring a running commentary about a talk Hansen gave at the Institute for Advanced Studies on November 19. I trust he won't mind me posting some of it here:

From the very beginning, Hansen made lots of bold statements about the "planetary emergency" and horrible things waiting in the pipeline unless we reduce the CO2 concentration from 390 ppm to 350 ppm (a randomly chosen nonsensical number that is lower than 390 ppm) but he hasn't provided the listeners with something that they are used to from pretty much all the talks at their institute, namely evidence or a story that makes at least some sense.

Instead, the IAS researchers could repeatedly see photographs of Hansen's grandchildren who have admittedly inherited certain ugly and visibly non-cute features from their granddad. At some moment, you can watch a picture of Sophie for minutes. Hansen argues that it's partly right to call him the "grandfather of global warming" because he is a grandfather.

Additional ugly pictures of children are shown and given silly captions. Two little bastards, Sophie and Connor, are claimed to evaluate the radiative forcings. ;-) A traditional way to abuse the children - something that is even more widespread in Islam than it is in AGW.

Hansen claims that the Earth is "out of balance", without explaining whether it should be usual for a planet to be at balance, how much imbalanced it normally is, and what is the error bar of his current estimate. Clearly, the talk is optimized for people who never ask any sensible questions. Not sure whether the IAS folks were the right audience, however.

New pictures of grandkids follow. Somewhat prettier than before. Sophie is writing one of her first letters to President Obama now. She asked Barack: "Why don't you listen to my grandfather?" Meanwhile, the grandfather considers this argument "very clever", using his standards. Hansen told us that even the greenest countries such as Norway suck: imagine, they fund tar sands instead of using perpetual-motion machines to get the energy they need.

Remotely related: James Hansimian, a chimp, didn't beat NOAA in his hurricane predictions this year. Via NCPPR.

On another picture, Connor joins Hansen and Sophia and they celebrate the very good letter mentioned above. Congratulations. Hansen must be really proud. :-)

Hansen's mood rapidly deteriorates at 18:05; he has to return to the science. Superficial tautological statements are made about the sources of information - history, present, models. Global temperatures going back 65 million years ago were shown: there were no ice sheets prior to 40 million years before Christ.

Preposterous statements that all these changes were caused by CO2 are soon fixed: he admits that the orbital motion is the main cause. But he returns to the preposterous statement quickly. He doesn't feel any urge to even try to produce some evidence that CO2 mattered. Whenever it's clear that something is not caused by CO2, he mentions that CO2 has to be a powerful feedback - against, with no evidence. It's just some "mandatory baggage" that has to be added everywhere to skew the truth and that cannot be questioned.

Hansen promotes his crackpot pet theory of the sliding ice that will simply walk to the ocean - a hypothetical process that definitely doesn't decide about the fate of the ice sheets. Listeners had to go through a long and standard litany about melting glaciers, wildfires, coral reefs, ocean acidification, and others. At this point, his talk really picks comic proportions. He shows the list of all these hypothetical "catastrophes" - [here a miracle occurs] - and "derives" that each of them implies that the "right" CO2 concentration should be between 300 and 350 ppm to "preserve creation". Holy cow.

Could you please be more specific about the step 2 in the calculation, Mr Hansen?

Again, we simply cannot burn the available fossil fuels, he says. We can't burn the coal, we can't burn the unconventional fossil fuels. Well, be sure that we almost certainly will. Again, we learn that even Norway, the greenest country, is controlled by Big Oil. Well, it has to be so because the whole modern civilization depends on energy, Mr Hansen.

Hansen actually realizes that the cheapest fuels will be burned if they're the cheapest source. Of course, it's just like Newton's law of gravity, so the "right" solution he proposes is to distort the market in so gigantic ways so that they're no longer cheap. He wants a fee to be paid for mining or important fossil fuels. In fact, he also wants the fee to keep on increasing until the economies are happily devastated. The money should be given to the U.S. citizens to adapt to the fact that they must live without energy. In his viewpoint, it's better than cap-and-trade.

Two previously undisclosed grandchildren have totally distracted Mr Hansen while he was explaining that "China is going to suffer most from climate change" - what a piece of crap, by the way. We're promised that aside from the four grandchildren, we will also see Hansen's wife. I don't think that he has fulfilled the promise.

The grandson Jake is a gentle giant. He's among the top 1% biggest kids of his age, we learn. You need to be a top IAS researcher to understand this talk. If we allow Jake to grow under business-as-usual, he will be 2 meters tall. That's unacceptable so Jake must be made starving and hungry - that's how I understood Hansen's bizarre mixture of the two topics.

Jefferson's "Earth belongs to the living" is totally misinterpreted - really inverted to its negation. Jefferson clearly meant that you can't allow dead and future people to vote about the decisions about the present. Only the present generations can decide. Jefferson surely did not mean that the rights of hypothetical people in the future should be taken into account now. He mainly wanted to say that the debts calculated by the previous - currently dead - generations shouldn't determine the lives of the present generation (a point I only partially share, but that's clearly unrelated to our relationship with the future generations).

Governments shouldn't be allowed to decide about their levels of carbon regulation. Courts should tell them that they are obliged to destroy the economies completely, Hansen argues. Thanks, the talk is over. Thank God.

Maldacena's question

The question-and-answers period began. Juan Maldacena, the author of what most top people in high-energy physics consider the greatest breakthrough of theoretical physics in the last 15 years (the 1997 AdS/CFT correspondence), among a hundred of other papers, asks whether geoengineering is a suitable alternative solution to the extra taxes and duties that Hansen has promoted.

Now, we agreed with my contact at IAS that Hansen probably doesn't know who Maldacena even is. This is a crazy world given the fact that Hansen, a random average activist employed in an inferior discipline of physical sciences, is now known to Maldacena.

Hansen answers that we are "already doing geoengineering" by emitting CO2. Well, it is not quite a Maldacena-level-sophisticated geoengineering, I guess. ;-) Carbon sequesteration is the only acceptable geoengineering for Hansen. He admits that aerosols etc. could cool the planet but it would not solve the ocean acidification problem or the main problem he truly cares about, namely how to cripple the world economy.

Instead of talking about the topic of the question - geoengineering - Hansen returns to his mentally ill delusions about collapsing ice sheets and other tragedies that have nothing to do with the question. He is really incapable to focus on science.

He eventually returns to the question and says that "covering one pollutant by another is not a sensible thing to do". That's it. However, he immediately stops thinking about any technicalities and returns to his clichés that energy has to be expensive so that people don't "waste" it.

Pretty funny stuff.