Looking in at Judith Curry's thread on Mann vs. Steyn, they point out an interesting statement in Steve McIntyre's testimony:

ipcc told mcintyre that he would never peer review another study if he asked for data.

Don't think I'd heard that before. If that threat had teeth it implies that the IPCC had effective control over all the journals' review processes. Seems unlikely. I don't doubt the threat was made, but it was chest thumping (and by some person, not the IPCC).

Grizzle for the day: at what point does China's economy graduate from "developing" to "advanced"? This, in an e-mail auto-replay:

Sorry for not being able to reply to you at the moment. We are celebrating Spring Festival in China from Feb.6 to Feb.17,we will be back to work on Feb.18. ...

That's a First World level of service right there. Looks like I'll have to get used to my "temporary" workaround for the computer problem.

tomo,
Seems worth trying that Terry Gilliam evening. Over-enthusiastic fans might spoil it, and he's getting on a bit too, but a glimpse of his creative and perceptive mind would make it worthwhile. A refresher on Brazil would be good too.

Mike Rowe is fun to listen to, and he seems to strike a good balance of values. That's in the eye of the beholder I suppose, and it sounds like YouTube beholds him differently.

Yeah, a de-icer that can't handle heat. What will they think of next? (They seem to be cornering the market for planes that shouldn't fly)

As for selling EVs, if the grid continues getting shakier, they might need to kill the real horses as well the metaphorical ones.

Nobel Peace Prize is an enigma. Perhaps a new mission: the "Give Us Peace" Prize. You get the award, then no microphone for (say) 5 years. That would have made Obama's prize a win for us all. And Gore's. I'd even support one for Michael Mann (he so seems to want one).

Mailman,
Yes, we may have seen the COVID mania for what it was, but being right about it won't win us friends. The multitude of COVID mistakes will be memory-holed, but not the dissidents. Our sins will be remembered.

 

Still catching up with the John Anderson conversations. His interview with Melanie Phillips was a good one. I can't say it cheered me up, but she was on-target. Not bad for a former Guardian journalist. (I see Wikipedia's entry about her is pretty much entirely negative; might be a badge of honour)

Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini got a Nobel

so why not Hamas?

Here’s some interesting insight in to Floridas covid enquiry;

https://twitchy.com/justmindy/2024/02/02/florida-covid-releases-report-n2392504

Some of the things are just astonishing…but astonishing exactly BECAUSE we’ve known about them since day 1, like kids being practically immune to the Chinese death pox and masks don’t do f88k alll…in fact masks may have contributed to a number of pointless deaths because people thought they were safe.

I suspect the conclusions reached will be very, VEEEEEEERY different to the conclusions reached by the UK inquiry where politicians and scientists seem more intent on covering their arses and being less than transparent with everything they did.

Mailman

tomo,
Incompetent pilots can only kill one planeload of people (well, two on a good day), where ATC people are trained to juggle tasks, so might manage to do in a few more planeloads. Small price to pay for diversity.

Bit busy the last couple of days, and some incipient computer trouble has limited my "online experience". Had to give up on the Mann v. Steyn coverage (for the moment) because, if your system dies, Spotify doesn't appear to have any quick way of getting back to your last point (let alone double-speed option or whatever). I suppose Spotify's popular for some reason other than user interface.

The three dystopias most-quoted in forums I frequent are 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451. They have all made direct hits on the world we're in, but a fair few misses too. I think Brazil, with it's insouciant bureaucracy, is a closer fit.

It would be very interesting to have ongoing figures on COVID vaccination status and age at time of death, but it might be wiser *not* to collect them (let alone publish them), because the savages within might become restless, and living in Brazil, grim as it is, is far better than waking up in Lord of the Flies.

Still "Forbidden" for afd.de I see. Will there be an alternative for the alternative? (I see you've retried today — hazard posting our comments at the same time of day)

Adam's story was grim listening and, as he pointed out a couple of times, being a physiotherapist, he was more knowledgeable than most on bodily processes. How many people meekly acquiesced, went away and died?

Ties in with the Official Visitors thing I mentioned a couple of days ago. Dad saw a lady who was raving in an isolation room, but he also saw the signs of liver failure. Her "mental" illness was a result of a serious infection and she needed antibiotics not antipsychotics.

The BBC policy isn't much of a surprise. The biggest scandal of it for some of the insiders might be that whoever wrote it used "derisory" where "derisive" would have been more appropriate. Tut, tut. As you say, it would be fun to see the interview guidelines for attitude on climate (keywords: 97%, deniers, conspiracy theorists, exonerated, e-mails were hacked, etc.).

A recent EconTalk didn't strike me as particularly interesting — that sometimes great consequences hinge on trivial actions; how can we know which actions matter a priori — but it did mention a paper that sounded interesting.

The paper itself is a bit over-academic in its wording, but the results are amusing.

The plan was to perform one social science experiment, then send the raw results to 73 separate research teams to analyse and draw conclusions. The end result was that about half the analyses said "inconclusive", about a quarter said "conclusive *yes*" and the remaining quarter said "conclusive *no*". Beautiful!

The study is ironically "meta", in that it tries to analyse the analyses, identifying various key decisions in creating the statisical model(s) for the results and putting those decisions into their own statistical model. Variations in those key decisions didn't go anywhere near explaining the variations in conclusions. One of the more lucid sentences in the paper pretty much summed it up:

Our conclusion is that we have tapped into a hidden universe of idiosyncratic researcher variability.

As usual it comes back to Rutherford and if you need statistics to see your results, you should have designed a better experiment.

And yes, this was from "social science", but which fields are immune from this idiosyncratic researcher syndrome? Maths, for sure, I would think, and fair chunks of physics. At the other end of the scale would be medicine, pharma, climate.