i don't have an issue with the language used. the distribution is the curve, or everything under the curve. it's a semantic point that a statistician would be splitting hairs over in "correcting" you on and most actually probably wouldn't bother with at all. a major hurricane hitting the united states would be a rare event, and whether you want to describe that using a "poisson distribution" or the "curve described by the poisson distribution" is just an issue in language, although i would perhaps suggest that you're misapplying the central limit theorem in a situation with not enough data points to do so, if that's what you're getting at by referencing normality. a misapplication of the clt like this could actually be used to argue for stasis. it doesn't change the point you're making.
and, yes - charting an increase in hurricanes since 2005 is kind of like charting a decrease in temperatures since 1998. or jet stream variability since 1725.
but, the important thing you pointed out was that global warming is not the only factor. and, if you want to push this on this platform, that's the most important point you can make: the universe is complicated, and this increase in carbon on this planet is just one of the things that's happening in it.
Thursday, January 11, 2018
as another aside, the fact that climate scientists use averages at all is kind of...it's not mathematically sound.
averages are good when there's a fixed variable of some sort. you can take an individual's average over a fixed task (exam scores, track times, etc), or you can take a fixed task like exam scores and then average it out over various individuals (joe, sally, etc). what you're really doing with an average is repeating trials over and over, and trying to get a guess on a "test statistic" that exists in some platonic reality - the idea is that the average exists in some cloud somewhere, and if you repeat the trial often enough then you'll reveal it. i'm actually not a platonist at all, but you'd be surprised by the things you hear from grown men with math degrees, behind closed doors.
what the hell are you even trying to do by averaging out temperatures over the entire earth, in the first place? there's no test statistic to arrive at. you're not finding some ideal concept of earthly temperature readings. once you get a sequence of ratios in place, you can find the test statistic for the average of that sequence, but what does that mean if the "average temperature of the earth" is a wonky concept in the first place? it's not devoid of meaning at all, but it's more of a contrived ratio to determine policy (like the cpi, or the unemployment rate) than it is any kind of reflection of anything meaningful. it only make any sense in the context of itself.
my understanding of things suggests that that could very well be a typical january, mid-century.
average temperature: 16.3 degrees. of course, this is a crappy data set, i'm just making a point. but, that's completely fucking worthless as any descriptive measure - it's only useful in comparison to the next data point.
now, suppose that the readings for these cities in 1975 was as follows:
that's reasonable for 1975, huh? i'm not looking it up, i'm making a point; i should have looked this one up. and bullshitted the other. whatever. the average temperature of this data set is also 16.3 degrees
therefore, there was no climate change over these years? eh...
i should be offering a mathematical solution right now, but i'm not entirely convinced that the idea of modelling the earth in this way makes sense at all.
you hear this push-back: weather is not the same as climate, weather is not the same as climate. i end up doing it myself sometimes. it's an easy way to explain away the fluctuations.
i'm not really convinced that you can talk about a planet's climate at all. i mean, the ratio has a purpose, but it doesn't actually physically mean anything. there is no "earth's climate", there is a collection of overlapping systems, and really several different climates that develop where these systems intersect.
and, right now, it looks like the north and south are moving in opposite directions, as a consequence of opposite causes.
i'm not at all interested in a red team / blue team approach to climate change; i won't support a political movement that i think is being dishonest in order to generate a narrative, i will call you out and tear you down with as much vehement scorn as the next liar.
in science, truth is not an abstraction, it's fact. scientists cannot tolerate this sort of post-modern, pragmatic bullshit. and, it won't work; there is no actual end point to this approach besides greed.
sorry.
there's two approaches to this: honestly convince enough people to make it a political issue and then push hard for it (it's the second part that failed under obama), or get lucky in stumbling upon a despot that understands the urgency of the situation and doesn't fucking care what the masses think, anyways.
so, why do we have winter, anyways?
no, if you don't know look it up. if you think you know, prove yourself right. do this. this isn't phd-level stuff; you should have learned about it in grade school. maybe you did, and just forgot.
but, it's because the amount of sunlight hitting the earth fluctuates, causing changes in the upper atmosphere that allow cold air to move from the polar regions into the habitable regions. this 'polar vortex' is called winter.
so, realizing that, what would you predict is the result of the sun hitting historical lows in output? more winter, right? and, the correlation is there, if you go to look for it - as it was from antiquity until 1980, when it split due to increased carbon concentrations.
you won't find a scientist that contradicts the obvious. this isn't specialist knowledge, it's grade school science. what you'll find instead is a lot of talking around the basic point, because it's been so obfuscated by deniers. what you're doing to these scientists when you bring up the sun in a non-academic context is triggering them into bad memories that they've had of dumb arguments with scientific illiterates trying to pass themselves off as educated. you're forcing them to relive traumatic experiences, and not getting good answers out of them, because of it. they're more focused on not letting bad ideas perpetuate (and there are a lot of them...) than actually getting the right ideas out. so, when you actually bring up good points about the sun's effect on the climate, it gets ignored because they just don't want to talk about it. and, that's a failure that the talking heads need to address, because the sun is actually going through a phase right now where it's output is low enough that it will (regionally) offset the effects of global warming, at least for a while. if legitimate climate scientists don't take steps to address the point clearly and honestly, climate change is going to be seen as a theory that fails to make accurate predictions, and we're going to lose the argument - only to get roasted when or if the sun turns itself up. science cannot operate at a propaganda level if it wants to win public support. it has to be honest, and it has to win people over due to it's honest attempts to understand things as they actually are.
here's the thing: this is not as dire as people are likely to intuitively think. it's a modelling issue. it doesn't require a rethink to solve, it requires a tweak. the reality is that we don't understand the sun all that well, so we mostly model it as constant. we even have a term called the solar constant. but, the sun's output is not constant, and nobody is going to argue that it is.
what legitimate climate scientists need to do is put more effort into modelling the sun and then work those fluctuations into the models. remember: small changes in solar output can make big differences in the upper atmosphere. think of the way the sun hits the earth as a lightning strike on a lake - it ripples. and, that's where the "amplification" actually happens. in this case, what we're talking about is a decrease in total energy entering the system - and we understand how this works fairly well, with the oscillations taking repetitive shapes that are predictable functions of the solar output.
unlike the deniers, i would not expect that a better modelling of the sun would create a substantially different understanding of climate change. it's theoretically plausible, i suppose - only way to find out is to do it - but we understand the greenhouse effect, too, and the solar output would probably have to decrease by a larger proportion than is being contemplated in order to offset the effect. the point is that we don't have this model. because we don't understand the sun. the deniers, however, insist that the models can be improved - and that is tautological. they should be met halfway on this point, to prove them wrong, and to better understand the thing, as a whole. what better models - and this is a complexity issue, not a computing issue - would really help us with is in understanding the weather quite a bit better.
i don't really have any corrections to make on the article. but, the scientific claim here, and mike lockwood, who is cited here in an equally poor but oppositely poor context than he is in the right-wing media, has volunteered to be spokesperson for it, is not that the decrease in solar activity will offset global warming but that it will lead to the kind of regional variations that were seen in seventeenth century england. the article is really an elaborate strawman fallacy, rushing to debunk a claim that no scientist has ever made.
it's all very nice and everything to point out that a regional decrease in northern temperatures is likely to be offset by an accompanying increase in southern ones. why do we have winter, again? but, tell it to the guy that's playing hockey on the thames in april, as india suffers through 55 degree heat.
it balances out, so there's nothing to worry about, right? eh....
deathtokoalas
this research was trendy in the mainstream media a few years ago, but it's actually been thoroughly debunked. and, this insistence that all weather is created by the same factors is actually conspiratorial thinking; what's presented here isn't a counter to denial type thinking, but it's parallel and analogue on the left.
carbon concentrations are not the cause of all weather.
and, the polar vortex is quite well understood as a function of sunlight.
deathtokoalas
the very quick response is this: we don't need to cite carbon concentrations to explain the cold we're seeing. we already have a standard, widely understood model. it's the same model that we use to understand seasons. so, this is a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. and, it happens to be that it isn't consistent with the laws of thermodynamics.
i think maybe the conceptual problem people are having is that they conceive of the earth like the ancient greeks did: as though it's in a glass ball, free from the influence of outside forces. the universe is newtonian - predictable - and only gets chaotic when humans alter the natural equilibrium. in fact, the reality is that we're a jagged lump of molten rock, not spherical but only even roughly elliptical, and we're hurdling towards nowhere through an orbit full of bumps. we go through ice ages when we hit very rough patches - that is the theory of ice ages, converted into an analogy about bad roads. and, it's the basic theory of weather, too.
the reason we needed a theory of global warming in the first place was that the movement of temperatures decoupled from the sun. if the weather we were experiencing was caused mostly or solely by the sun, it should have been getting colder, not warmer. yet, it was getting warmer. contradiction. so, the weather could not have been caused solely by the sun....
as it stands, the recent exaggerated expansion of the polar vortex - which most people call winter - is happening in perfect correlation with the sun, which is entering a minimum during one of it's weakest cycles on record. if our science of seasons and ice ages is correct, our recent observations of the sun are predictive; the actual predictive science here is that this should, in fact, make things colder - regionally. and temporarily. and, this is exactly what is happening. there's no reason for what she's doing.
what jennifer francis is doing is really something along the lines of throwing an apple into the air, and trying to explain why it falls using magnetism. it's a nice story, jenn. but we already understand gravity pretty well - or, at least, we do observationally.
mike lockwood. look him up. he did the studies.
jessman9000
Deleting peoples comments only destroyed your own narrative.
deathtokoalas
i'm not interested in acting as a medium for the dissemination of false information, or outright stupidity; your comment is not correct. what deleting stupid comments does is sharpen the narrative, by eliminating the irrelevant, the superfluous and/or the incorrect. it removes misleading or useless information from the discourse.
i don't want to get into a huxley v. orwell debate, but that's where i'm going with this. when we're bombarded with false information, it's much harder to find the actual truth.
that said, i wish i still had the ability to remove stupid comments, but google has removed this under apparent pressure from right-wing extremists.
pk
FYI: BBC Horizon 2005 Global Dimming
deathtokoalas
it is consistent with what i'm saying to suggest that coal particulates - and other pollutants - should be a measurable aspect of climate modelling. but, this isn't the same kind of long term problem, because the particles don't build up in the same way. it's more of a localized short term thing. but, if i was more interested in southern china than i am in the great lakes, i'd be arguing the point for a short term effect, absolutely.
grindupBaker
Earth surface is smooth, not a jagged lump. You referred to yourself and one or more unspecified persons as "a jagged lump". This seems quite likely but we are not sufficiently familiar with you to have high certainty of your similarity to a jagged lump.
deathtokoalas
apparently, this person is from saskatchewan, because they've clearly never seen a mountain before.
grindupBaker
you say "the reason we needed a theory of global warming in the first place was that the movement of temperatures decoupled from the sun". Correct but also note that the hypothesis of "global warming" was derived by Fourier more than a century before the experiment with coal had been conducted for long enough and measurements had been sufficient for long enough to confirm the hypothesis and make it a theory.
deathtokoalas
google is very bad at notifications. but, fwiw, i believe that what fourier demonstrated was merely the mechanism of the greenhouse effect, rather than any specific warming trends.
charles
Just another Russian troll calling him/herself Jessica. Yawn!
well, i'm not a russian troll. but, you sure sound like a democratic party stooge.
my arguments do not challenge the climate consensus; francis' theory is not in it, and never will be.
charles
"democratic party stooge" LOL, Jess. I'm not from the US and A, not even from that continent.
deathtokoalas
i have no reason to believe you when you say that, stooge.
charles
I couldn't care less, Jessica. Nice name BTW. You transgender?
deathtokoalas
see, this is when the democratic party stooge reflexively retreats to identity politics to attempt to prove their faux liberalism.
charles
At least we know now what you're after
deathtokoalas
you'll have to fill me in on the conspiracy, stooge.
=====
wonderpope
This professor couldn't have explained the physics of how AGW affects the jet streams, and by that causes the local weather anomalies we are experiencing, any easier and clearer. She's not talking about carbon tax or one world government. She's basically saying "we're fucked" even if we would restore the carbon cycle to pre-industrial, because the surplus of CO2 we've been putting into the cycle in the past, let's say, 100 years will continue affecting the climate for 100 years more. And yet I read some cringe worthy comments on here, that show that some people have not listened to this video and aren't even attempting to dispute the data presented, but want to present the expert as a shill for some government entity. Don't get me wrong, skepticism is a good thing. But there's a reason why experts in a field understand things better than the average person...it's because they've spent all their life studying it.
We're driving this car called "human civilization" towards a wall at 200 mph...and instead of facing the problem and finding a way to reduce the speed, people seem to just try to turn their seats in the opposite direction to not see the wall coming towards them at a rapid speed.
deathtokoalas
in fact, this particular scientist's research is not accepted by mainstream academics.
you should look that up, rather than rely on youtube videos for information.
wonderpope
Please tell me exactly how mainstream contradict her claims. What, in your opinion, does mainstream science claim? what is the counter claim I need to look for? I can´t just google "debunking Jennifer A. Francis" and hope to find easily what you claim.
deathtokoalas
you have to realize, wonderpope, that most ideas that are not well accepted do not generate a large amount of literature debunking them. they're just ignored and forgotten. with francis' theory, because it was picked up by the msm without vetting it, what you're going to find is a lot of debunking of various validity from what are mostly very poor sources. actual scientists working in the field have largely just ignored it. i mean, these people don't have time for it.
as a consequence, it's easier to direct you to the actual mainstream theory.
you can easily find articles discussing lockwood's work on mainstream sites, like the bbc. he's actually received scientific awards for his work, along with promotions and the kind of titles that scientists covet, like a place in the royal society. this is the existing consensus: while climate is complicated, weather (and the jet stream is weather.) is caused almost entirely by fluctuations in the amount of sunlight hitting the earth. and, he's rather convincingly demonstrated the point that the existing slow down in solar activity will cause the kind of fluctuations we're seeing in the jet stream - thereby producing a predictive theory of more cold winters in the northern hemisphere, around the jet stream, during the existing minimum.
as mentioned, the most obvious problem with francis' theory is that it has heat and cold moving in directions that are not consistent with the theory of thermodynamics.
---
i googled a bit more. i'm kind of bed-ridden by choice, right now.
jennifer francis has, herself, done her opponents the courtesy of compiling a list of studies that contradict her own research (i do not know how many of them addressed her research directly, but probably very few did.), and then attempts to hand wave it away by claiming bad methodology - which is what scientists do when they can't admit they're wrong.
I watched a video called "Jet Streams, more Jet Streams, and even more Jet Streams: AGU Science" In that clip he talks about a paper by Mann. When I heard that my BS detector turned up its sensitivity because Mann is the infamous author of the fake hockey stick graph.
To be honest what he says is mostly beyond me even though I understand standing wave theory and resonance quite well. God help those that are completely ignorant of such theory. He appears to be talking about how modeling of the jet stream works. But the models don't actually emulate reality well and have demonstrated zero predictive capability.
No one argues that the jet streams play an important part in weather events and more study as to how they operate is welcomed.
But the jet stream performs much more like a meandering river than a simple wave function. It is a chaotic structure, not a pure sine wave function. Its path change is caused by minor and chaotic deviations to its flow path restrictions, its width, and its inertia all interacting simultaneously.
So its apparent "frequency" and "amplitude" can never be more than a very rough approximation. Applying "quasi resonant effects". resonance, amplitude, Q, and R etc. apply only to sine functions. So I conclude wave theory models that use such simulations will never be able to adequately explain or predict chaotic jet stream behavior.
He goes on to claim that aerosols contribute "hugely" to radiative forcing. If you look at IPCC reports you will see that a) the supposed effects due to aerosols have large error bars and b) as the reports become more refined their effects are being reduced. This fact has introduced a conundrum for alarmists because large aerosol effects have been used to tune models (to provide cooling to force them to agree with observed data) that contain high climate sensitivity values (predict more warming than happened). i.e. they appear to be incorrectly tuned to cancel predicted warming. Even at that, the models all quickly diverge from observed climate, predicting warming that does not occur. That would indicate that their sensitivity values are too high. Yet the IPCC averages 102 knowingly incorrect models and runs with a 3C sensitivity value!
He then goes on to talk about the paleo record reconstruction of the jet stream from ice cores. At best this is a poor proxy of snowfall location that eludes to a possible jet stream waveform. But the observation concludes that warmer periods had larger stream amplitude so he runs with it. To his credit, he admits "it's very difficult to determine what configuration jet streams had based on (these records)".
The rest of the video sites other possible inferences and he points out that we need more research. I agree.
deathtokoalas
you might want to check your understanding of waves, dan.
there is a basic theory in algebra that says that all continuous functions, no matter how complicated, can be decomposed into a series of sine waves, called a fourier series. and, the fourier transform (not the same as the series) has widespread applications across the sciences. there is also a fourier theory, but that is pure math stuff. the question isn't really whether the math is reasonable, it's whether the theory is predictive, and the answer is that it only works when you cherry pick the data. this shouldn't actually be particularly surprising, though, because it's quite physically counter-intuitive.
the empirical question is really whether these waves remain in tact or not, that is the physics being challenged, and the evidence appears to be that they don't. the model then collapses as a result of bad physics, not bad math.
further, we don't try to understand the jet stream in terms of ocean currents, anyways. we try and understand the jet stream in terms of factors in the upper atmosphere. i mean, this is the theory: that the energy from the oceans is elevating itself into the atmosphere, and then wreaking havoc - which is a difficult idea on it's face and requires this clumsy mechanism to take seriously.
the biggest factor in the upper atmosphere, and especially around the earth's tilt, is the way the sun hits it. and, there is actually good science that makes predictive theories about jet streams based on solar fluctuations.
======
deathtokoalas
somebody ought to tell paul that if he wants to focus on climate change, he should hire a science journalist. i can't blame greg for this. and i don't claim anything malicious. it's just that it's wrong.
sertaki
Are you saying that a climate journalist would bring more credible facts to the table than an actual climate scientist who has worked on important studies herself?
deathtokoalas
what i'm saying is that a broader science journalist should have pointed out that this particular scientist is actually not well regarded in her field, and that her ideas are really distorting the narrative. not in those terms, exactly, perhaps, but through a probing analysis. see, aaron is a actually a good example, in the sense that he challenges people, albeit not when it comes to science, because he's not a science journalist, even when he plays devil's advocate. an interview with a very controversial researcher like jennifer francis should be presented as what it is, and should ultimately be about challenging the mechanism she's providing. this is rather presented as a science lesson, but what it's "teaching" is something that is at best extremely obscure - and probably just flat out wrong.
what you're doing is appealing to authority. and, she might be an authority on her own research. but, she's not a good authority on the broader topic.
you could throw a dart in a climate conference and find somebody who both accepts the climate consensus and is willing to challenge this theory on air.
and, it's kind of pernicious. because the reason this theory is getting more attention than it deserve is that it was run by the corporate left media. the guardian. the atlantic. now, the so-called independent media is running with it, because it appeared in the mainstream press, not because of it's actual value. that's not how this ought to work.
grindupBaker
I made an effort and spent some time with searches like "controversial research jennifer francis" and I've come up with nothing after reading NAS & all sorts of sites. So give a couple of links, just so we can confirm that you aren't just a coal/oil shill-fuckwit wasting our time. Just a couple of relevant links.
deathtokoalas
the reason i'm being obscure is that the arguments are technical.
i didn't get my $68 credit on this bill, but i got the 8% rebate. it comes up to $43.78, so if i did have my rebate, i'd actually have the balance applied towards the next bill. even if you remove the set-up fee, i'm still paying $13.78 for $1.84 worth of electricity. that's 23.41 kwh used, fwiw - 72% off peak, 14% mid peak and 14% on peak..
yes, very low electrical usage - but it's also only from the 1st to the 12th. i was in and out on these days, but i also left a lot of lights on. i can maybe use this to calculate a base rate for lights, the fridge, battery charges & cooking, which would be about $5/month. but, i don't even think i had even turned a computer on. i had the laptop on during the week to listen to music, actually. i was expecting december to be of minimal value; this is not of much use at all, other than to double check rates when i get an actual bill.
the delivery charge is the flat rate i was talking about, which is actually lower than i thought. on a normal month, it would be a fixed charge of $18.78 + $0.0237/kwh when you add up the charges.
if i'm able to guess that my base electrical usage is (23.41/12)*30 = 58.525 ~ 60 kwh, my delivery charge is going to be around $20.20 for base usage. if i double that in actual usage, i'm looking at less than $25, anyways. and, if i repeat the usage statistics, that works out to:
let's say i'm equally likely to us electricity at any given time. then, my off rate usage should be 50% while my mid rate and off peak usage should each be 25% . then, at 120 kwh, the electrical component would be $10.71, rather than $9.43. but, i think i can probably to a bit better than that, in terms off minimizing use in peak periods.
flipping it around, (68/1.13)-18.78 = $41.40. so, i need to solve for
my accounting suggested to me that a more likely range for me, on an average month, is around 150 kwh. and, i haven't calculated for the hst rebate.
in short, i don't expect to pay electricity, here. it should balance out under the rebate. after a few months, i should have enough of a balance to plug in the heftier gear without paying for it, too. but, i'll need to call to make sure, tomorrow.
christmas ended for me this morning, so i'm going to lose the rest of the day to things i need to do, like laundry and budgeting. i'll be back at inri070 probably tomorrow.
Sunday, January 7, 2018
if you read the classical literature, it is full of harsh criticism against 'trousers'. in much of the classical world, the nefarious act of trouser-wearing was a deeply frowned upon sign of utter barbarism. a civilized person would not be caught dead in trousers.
we're all barbarians, now - the barbarians won, in the end. so, that may seem curious to us. but, it's an absolutely accurate depiction of classical views against trouser-wearing. it was entirely taboo.
but, the greeks had a lot of trouble expanding into russia, didn't they? you try living on the russian steppes, or even the german forests, in january, in that dinky little robe of yours, socrates. without a pair of trousers, a man will freeze his balls off in these climates. it was just an adaptation to the weather, these horrific trousers. but, yet, the greeks laid the wide russian rivers to waste as outside of civilization, holding to a no-pantsed principle over making the obvious adjustment to explore these rich lands. it was almost like the act of pulling the trousers on was one of defeat to barbarian forces - that to conquer this land, one must become a barbarian, by putting on those trousers, and it can therefore never be won to civilization. the greeks stayed to the milder coasts, in their robes.
this clothing thing - it's irrational, but it's well-attested, isn't it?
canadians, especially, really shouldn't feel all that upset about the muslim headdress thing, they just have to understand it properly as an adaptation of the weather. canadians are certainly used to wearing obtuse articles of clothing to deal with extreme weather, it's just of a different kind here, it's extreme cold. we wear ski masks and scarves to protect from the cold, just as arab peoples wear scarves to protect from the flying sand, at speeds that make it seem like gravel. we have snow storms and dress appropriately for them; they have sandstorms, and do so accordingly as well.
despite concerns to the contrary, this is something that the descendants of recent migrants should adapt to. perhaps there are other, ideological concerns, that are more pressing. but, the question of weather-focused attire in second or third generation immigrants is something that should conform to majority trends. we don't have sandstorms, here. people will adjust.
i know that there are other myths attached to these articles of clothing, but they're just that - myths. it's easy to uphold a myth around wearing scarves outside when that scarf protects you from the elements. when it no longer does so, that myth breaks down from one generation to the next. give it time, and you'll see.
the difference is really just that they don't realize, yet, that it's safe to take their scarves off in the summer. i vote for making them feel safe enough to do so, not in making an example out of them and isolating them in hopes that it coerces different behaviour.
even the iranian mullahs just lifted their restrictions on female clothing.
Saturday, January 6, 2018
are countries like the united states and canada simply too big to administrate properly? i previously suggested that america's stagnation is causally linked to the rate at which it expanded westward, that it tried to absorb too much wilderness too fast and was ultimately overcome by it. but, what would a more successful rate have been?
well, the geographic middle of the country is still largely closed to civilization. in order for america to have walked down a path that could have avoided collapse, it would probably still have unorganized territories, right now.
if quebec succeeds in annexing new france, that is going to split the united states down the middle, but it might be better off that way.
canada expanded quickly as well, but it created much larger administrative divisions, which allows for more truly regional control. i don't know if the size of the provinces was explicitly constructed as a reaction to madisonian democracy the way that the division of powers was in canada, but it's the same kind of difference: madison's evil plan all along was to create small administrative divisions to prevent regional co-operation, in order to prevent the spread of political ideas that would help the working classes. what america ought to be doing is reorganizing itself in regional divisions that allow for more co-operation between neighbouring states. the country is too big for federal administration, but the administrative divisions are too small for effective oversight, as well. so, this might be best accomplished at this stage by a new level of government that splits the country into 5 or 6 divisions, and three rough categories: urban, rural and mixed. allowing the eastern seaboard to regain some concept of local sovereignty, and setting up the infrastructure to allow for something similar on the west coast, might help america recapture that sense of progress that it lost in the 50s, even as it strands the geographic middle of the country. but, future expansion out of the megalopolises will simply need to occur at a sustainable rate.
would an independent quebec have designs on new france? well, it's not so crazy to think that this society could produce a napoleon.
if it's going to claim quebec on some claim of ethnic identity to the land, why not claim new france? detroit. st louis. new orleans. these are all of french heritage, are they not?
one wonders how much separatist sentiment already exists in new france. nobody talks openly about it in detroit. but, i have reason to think it's there, if you could just scratch the surface. they all know, deep down, that they would join the movement to unite quebec with new france.
but, it is the region that i think the united states needs to be most concerned about actual revolt in. they just might be more interested in joining canada than joining quebec.
still. i would advise all american intelligence agencies to be on the look out for quebcois intelligence agents, trying to sow separatist fervour in new france. it's an inevitability.
you're welcome for the tip.
you know, canada is pretty geologically stable in most places.
i suppose the difficulties in maintaining permanent settlements in canada were always related to the climate; at most historical levels of human development, the cold here would have required migration. the romans couldn't have built cities here. if the germans lived here, they would have fled to mexico. even the norse could only really live on the coast. if the remnants of roman civilization had found america two hundred years sooner, it wouldn't have been able to colonize it. that is the answer as to why the indigenous people did not build cities here: the terrain is uninhabitable for a quarter of the year.
it's really only with the development of technology that inhabited cities in this region of the globe is a real possibility. but, now that this technology is real, i think these cities have a potentially very long life span, given that they're built in such a geologically stable area. large proportions of america's most populated regions are about to be swallowed by the sea, one way or another. but, canada is built on solid rock - the shield - and protected by glacial lakes.
it's funny how what's left of america may end up being basically new france. vive le quebec libre!
Friday, January 5, 2018
i was talking about how there was some uncertainty around whether the hot air in the atlantic may have something to say about the polar vortex.
that storm on the east coast right now is that hot air in the atlantic getting pulverized by the polar vortex, which is clearly demonstrating itself as the more powerful force. but, this is actually the kind of storm that people around the jet stream, wherever it is in thirty years, are going to have to get more used to during winter, as increasingly concentrated pools of warmth near the equator smash more frequently into these polar air masses.
the latitudes of these storms may push north, or may not. the polar sea may not end up so navigable in the winter, after all. it depends on the sun. right now, the cold is holding it's own at fairly temperate latitudes. but, the onslaught has just begun.
Thursday, January 4, 2018
i was just using my compass to pull a piece of lint out of my lighter (it's the worst when that happens...), when i started to realize that the ancient greeks probably used compasses for pretty much everything. if you can imagine this bearded greek old man, using this giant compass as a claw in his daily tasks - holding pita bread sandwiches, swapping away flies, getting that itch in that hard to reach spot. it's almost like that edward scissor-hands, isn't it?
i'm now fully convinced that all greeks lived like this, with compass as primary general utensil.
what we understand in the universe is largely restricted to concepts of motion. unfortunately, a fairly good understanding of motion may have led us to a false conclusion that we understand the universe well because we understand it's motions well.
most objects in the universe still perplex us at the most basic levels - we don't really know what they do, and if we do know then we don't know why, and if we don't know then we propose mathematical theories about them.
take the sun. we can measure how the sun moves fairly well. and, we know it shines. but, we don't really have any predictive theory to explain how the fluctuations in the sun's strength vary. this is a total mystery.
we may in the end find out that the laws of motion are actually not particularly useful in understanding the universe at all.
Wednesday, January 3, 2018
so, are we just tiny microscopic life forms in the greater context of a much wider biological entity, possibly with some kind of consciousness?
i'm just struck by the synchronicity of the dimming of the sun with the warming of the atmosphere, almost as though one is acting to balance the other out - and while some may want to interpret this as a sign of a higher power, i think a more naturalistic explanation lies in something mechanistic, like the parts of a living organism. maybe the stars that form this organism even arrange into a constellation of a duck, if you could see it from the outside, which we will never be able to, because we are on the inside of it. well, maybe we could catch a reflection, somehow. or be lucky enough to catch a glimpse into some curvature in space. but, we can't see ourselves in the night sky.
now, you could run a computer simulation to determine the empirical question of whether our mathematical understanding of the universe projects a duck into other parts of the galaxy, if we have anything approximating enough data. you could potentially model it on a computer screen, but you'd have to go to virtual reality to really see the duck that we may or may not project. and, there would always be uncertainty levels.
no, to truly determine the empirical question of whether or not the galaxo-spacial biological entity we exist as a component of appears as a duck to other parts of the galaxy will require travelling there to see for ourselves. that's settled.
but, then, what if the constellations that we see are also galaxo-spacial biological entities? see, as i've mentioned a few times, i'm kind of open to the idea of religion as a ufo cult - and astrology was at one point a religion. contemporary westerners of a liberal scientific mindset tend to scoff at astrology as a lot of contrived nonsense, and they're not technically wrong, but their scorn obscures the fact that these ideas come from a lost religion that acted as a syncretic bridge between mathematics, astronomy and mysticism - that this is actually derived from legitimate ancient science. that doesn't mean that there's any value to the zodiac - this is not my argument, don't misunderstand me. but, it does suggest that there are maybe ritualized relics embedded in the zodiac that remember the relatively advanced science of the babylonian era, which was a high point for astronomy in the ancient world, this period of learning itself spurred by even more ancient stories, such as those told in egypt.
they kept very careful records, apparently. they were tracking things, looking for patterns. but, people don't realize how long this period of early civilization really was, before the languages started to change in the middle east, with the persians and then the greeks. if you're standing in babylon in the year 500 bce, you have 4000 years of astronomical records to draw on. the egyptians had even more than that. our science is based on a few hundred years of observation. so, they had more observations than we do, and more data to infer from. one has to think that inferences were made. if we could retrieve this data somehow, we might be able to predict the next several solar cycles better, if we could see a longer term pattern.
some of these patterns may be hidden in the zodiac, but you'd have to be careful, because it's also full of traps. first, if it finds a pattern, it's inevitably going to project it too perfectly, and project a cycle far less chaotic than reality. second, the mathematical writing that they used was cumbersome, and it produced a lot of error due to crude approximation arising from difficulties using that system. so, their calendar was actually wrong. and, it's been out of sync for centuries. it would require a lot of calculation to resync this, and then it wouldn't even be clear what you're comparing. it seems absurd to consult a source for predictive value when it can't even get the date right, right?
still, there could be useful information in there, if it's calibrated right. we'll never know until we pass through it and look back and reconstruct it. why were they so interested in the stars in the first place, though? and what's with all these stories of people coming up and down from the sky?
if there are living galaxo-spacial biological entities in the universe, then perhaps the movement of bodies in the sky has more to do with how the ancients imagined it than we currently think.
"have you seen my cat?"
that's twice, this week. and, here's the hard truth for windsorites: your cat ran away to join the colony, and you'll have to deal with it. the feral cats here have a really strong invisible network of scent signals that will lure your cat away immediately, if you let sight of it for even one second, outside. i wouldn't even be surprised to hear about cats darting out when doors are left open a crack, after waiting all day to follow the smell, as it walked by outside.
i've been arguing that the city needs a serious straight out feline cull. i know what they say about how trap, neuter & return is a preferable option, but that presumes a certain level of manageability. we may, unfortunately, be at the point where we require an all out slaughter of feral cats, because their existing numbers are already too much of a problem for a t-n-r to cut down on.
but, the colony will in some way affect your cat, even if it's isolated enough from the aromas that it only gets the odd sniff of it. the ones that it drags out, zombie like, will be converted to the cause of the colony upon arrival. and, this is simply hormonal - no amount of pleading will change your cat's minds. once assimilated, they are gone - never to return to snuggling, or to the far more subversive kneading, at that. their minds are washed of their existence as slaves to humans, however absurd that formulation is when related to cats, and given a new life of meaning to protect, defend and expand the colony. do not waste your time - they are gone.
as it's purely chemical, and we're both basically the same kind of mammal, of course this is possible in humans, if you can find the right magic password, the right chemical bonds. you can get an idea of how we're sometimes driven purely by hormones when you look at the fight or flight response; we literally don't think in these situations, we just succumb to this hormone that forces us to react. this is a ways from actual chemical mind control. and, the instincts available to program are likely to be biological responses that might not be useful and might even be dangerous - lust, for example. but, i think the chemistry likely exists to turn a human's brain right off in order to accomplish a biological urge, and it would probably be experienced by the conscious host as a blackout in memory. one could no doubt find detailed examples that fit this description.
if you lose your cat around here, though? it's gone. to the colony.
i think i'm done my distraction with the usb key, now. i didn't salvage anything off of it, but i convinced myself that what was on it was routine. i was just paranoid about forgetting something. if i did, there's no evidence it existed.
i still don't know what happened with that; i stopped writing to the key immediately after the weirdness happened, so the files should have been easily accessible. but, they only came up on a deep scan, and they came with some directory corruption, as though they'd been decaying on the drive a while. it's all very strange.
what i remember doing is deleting two files in the root directory, leaving a folder called bd-2 in tact. that's a little blurry as to the exactness of the directory structure, which is what it causing me all of this pause. but, the whole drive wiped. my initial thought was that i accidentally deleted the folder and it should be a quick undelete. but it seems more like that the thing collapsed under itself; it just vanished. do file directories randomly collapse like that, or is it further sign of intrusion?
dude. remember the prime directive. you can't be fucking with my files like this. i actually have no delusions as to the nature of "network privacy", but zapping my usb key crosses boundaries. if somebody did zap me, please don't do it again.
Tuesday, January 2, 2018
i accidentally deleted files off of my usb key, and i'm kind of dumbfounded as to why they're not showing up in the file system. i haven't touched the drive. it's just full of random dates, almost more like it got flooded with data. but i'm waiting for one more scan to make sure it's not just hiding with a weird name.
i guess maybe the file table could have gone out? is that something that happens? i don't think there was much on there, i'm just going to have this nagging feeling like i forgot something.
something else i read while the internet was down was the gibson classic, neuromancer. i'd read half of it a dozen times and made sure i actually finished it this time. i think it's overrated as a work, even if it was enjoyable enough as basic fiction. but, something i think he got wrong was the idea with the implants. the female protagonist had mechanical implants inserted into her eyes. i think the way this is going to actually work is that people are going to get injections full of hormones designed to rearrange their dna: that we're going to actually reprogram ourselves to use the hardware we have better, not get new hardware attached to ourselves. i think the potentials of this are quite staggering, but it's going to require a difficult period of human experimentation, where people get programmed in disturbing ways, sometimes accidentally and sometimes on purpose.
one medical application i can think of, as a transgendered person, would be actual genetic therapy for transition. you could just reprogram your cells to produce estrogen instead of testosterone. i think diabetics could put this to use, as could anyone else with a problem in hormone regulation - including people with high levels of bad cholesterol.
but, the key futuristic element was in finding ways to use technology to enhance our abilities. and, i think the novel made an error in imagination that was kind of ubiquitous at the time.
did you know that humans have the dna to understand magnetism, and therefore electricity, as a sixth sense?
i was just thinking about epi-genetics when i was going for a walk outside, and it is cold right now here, as i saw a series of cats cross my path - one very black, and the other very white.
i started to wonder if cats had the genetic ability to change their fur colour. i've never seen a cat actually do this. but, the white cat seemed strangely adapted to the snow, while the black cat seemed equally adapted for the night. i suppose the traditional explanation is that cats are born with variations in fur colour, and that the ones best suited to the environment survive. but, i'm not sure the laboratory conditions provide that as a clear explanation, as this population of cats is only semi-feral, and the snow here is actually unusual.
well, maybe the darwinian explanation isn't so lacking if you explore it carefully - you just have to accept a lot of coincidences, but then you need to have good luck to get the right mutations in the first place, right? let's explore other possibilities, without pursuing the need to debunk anything.
so, what if house cats can actually change their fur colour? the ability to change fur colour, often in winter, is a common adaptation of species descended from the common ancestor of the carnivore clade, and some species with older common ancestors, like rabbits, seem to have these genes, as well. they appear to be very old mammal genes. cats probably have them, cleverly inactivated around humans.
i started to wonder if humans may have even selected specimens of house cats that didn't utilize this adaptation, as it would be alarming to watch the cat transform - perhaps into an evil spirit. and, perhaps that evil spirit was somewhat real - perhaps the change in fur colour came with hormonal changes that made the animal more aggressive. perhaps. perhaps.
but, then, if something like that happened, your cat may have a special power that it isn't using, so as not to alarm you. we identify cats by their colours. they need to project a static representation of themselves to remain identifiable. they don't want to be changing their fur colours.
a semi-feral cat lost outside in a snow storm has a very different set of priorities, and one has to wonder whether the stress is enough to flip the switch.
it led me to thinking about humans, and this sixth sense that we have. we have this sixth sense because our ancestors had it - not our recent ones this geologic epoch, but our distant ancestors, before life moved out of the oceans. our ancestors could intuitively measure magnetic fields - think about that. and, why don't we have this ability any more? because it's an ocean adaptation. the utility of sensing magnetic fields through a liquid medium didn't transfer over to a gaseous one, the sense fell into disuse and, in the end, the more successful individuals were probably coincidentally born deficient of it. if you can imagine an existence so dark that eyes are so useless that the blind outcompete those that can see....
but, that truth might be eroding. our atmosphere is now full of magnetic fields, of our creation. how many humans have been born with this sense, and studied as mystical, or perhaps laughed at as delusional? it should happen from time to time as an error, or a mutation, whatever word you want to use. these people should actually exist. but, then, how many of us could flip it on, if we only knew which collection of hormones to concoct?
i don't know what we would realistically be able to do in reading a cell phone signal or transmitting wireless data. it may very well end up as a terrible way to interpret reality, full of indecipherable amounts of noise at strengths that produce pain. but, perhaps we can order the data quite well, and abstract it relatively easily. this is really an experimental question.
it's a different way to think about evolution, this realization that we have the history of billions of years of adaptations existing in our genetic codes, potentially ready to utilize under the magic chemical password. and it's a bit humbling to realize the power and the complexity of the genome.
Monday, January 1, 2018
where'd the week go?
i had to go through every single release to integrate the blu-ray component. maybe there's a bulk edit option; maybe i just demonstrated the wisdom in using it. but, i also wanted to take the opportunity to check for typos and just generally reorder the liner notes, and this has turned into a more time consuming project than anticipated.
in fact, i'm feeling like i'm going to need to do a second run, but i'm going to fill in the details after the blu-ray disc, to inri074 and a bit beyond it, before i go through the sources, separately this time, just looking for problems in a more self-contained way. it's a second pass. i think it will be a bit quicker.
i'm almost done. and i could even get a volume of the guitar project up before i crash, we'll see.
the electricity thing seems to have worked itself out; i got approved on christmas. thanks. and, i had to call in to get the isp to pro-rate, to start - they say they'll do it for next month, and then let's go from there.
it's otherwise been a typical christmas week: full of distractions but ultimately productive, in some sense.
