Credit Where Credit Is Due

A few days ago, I whined about the "rate-limiting" that prevented me from importing my old blog posts into the new Blogger-powered blog. The basic problem was that I needed to import well over 1,000 old posts, and Blogger was limiting me to just 50 posts a day. I wrote to Google, hoping for some kind of solution.

Well, today the folks at Blogger came through -- they changed the limit for my blog from 50 posts/day to 500 posts/day. At this rate, I'll have them all imported within just a few days. It's a perfectly good solution, and one that I'm quite happy with. If you look in the "Archives" section at right, you'll see that I've now got about half my old posts imported -- just a couple more batches and I'll have them all!

Considering that Blogger is a free service, this is outstanding customer service -- not instantaneous, but plenty fast enough; polite and cheerful; and best of all -- effective!

I am impressed, Googloids. And thank you!

Pecans in the Cemetary

Tip o'the hat to Marsha Y.:

On the outskirts of a small town, there was a big, old Pecan tree just inside the cemetery fence. One day, two boys filled up a bucketful of nuts and sat down by the tree, out of sight, and began dividing the nuts. "One for you, one for me. One for you, one for me," said one boy. Several dropped and rolled down toward the fence.

Another boy came riding along the road on his bicycle. As he passed, he thought he heard voices from inside the cemetery. He slowed down to investigate. Sure enough, heard, "One for you, one for me. One for you, one for me."

He just knew what it was. He jumped back on his bike and rode off. Just around the bend, he met an old man with a cane, hobbling along. "Come here quick," said the boy, "you won't believe what I heard! Satan and the Lord are down at the cemetery dividing up the souls." The man said, "Beat it kid, can't you see it's hard for me to walk?" When the boy insisted though, the man hobbled slowly to the cemetery.

Standing by the fence they heard, "One for you, one for me, one for you, one for me..." The old man whispered, "Boy, you've been tellin' me the truth. Let's see if we can see the Lord." Shaking with fear, they peered through the fence, yet were still unable to see anything. The old man and the boy gripped the wrought iron bars of the fence tighter and tighter as they tried to get a glimpse of the Lord. At last they heard, "One for you, one for me. That's all. Now let's go get those nuts by the fence and we'll be done."

They say the old man with a cane made it back to town a full 5 minutes ahead of the kid on the bike...

Raw Temperatures

In my poking about trying to get a grip on the debate about global warming, I've tried several times to get raw temperature data. Until this morning, I've always failed -- all I've been able to find is the "adjusted" data, and the adjustment methods are opaque. I'm suspicious when I see something this; it makes me think there's something there the authors don't want me to see.

So I was delighted this morning to uncover this graph of raw temperature data -- and of California, no less! You can click on it to get a full-sized, readable view. I found it at this web site, along with this description of how the data was gathered:

Today I visited my friend Jim Goodridge, former California State Climatologist and the man with a garage full of data going back to before the Gold Rush.

He’s been quietly toiling away in his retirement on his computer for the last 15 years or so making all sort of data comparisons. He gave me two CD ROMS full of data that I’m just now wading through. One plot which he shared with me today is a 104 year plot map of California showing station trends after painstakingly hand entering data into an Excel spreadsheet and plotting slopes of the data to produce trend dots.

He used every good continuous piece of data he could get his hands on, no adjusted data like the climate miodelers use, only raw from Cooperative Observing Stations, CDF stations, Weather Service Offices’s and Municipal stations.

Nothing but the data, ma'am. Just good, clean, raw data. And it is fascinating to examine.

If you're unfamiliar with this particular method of plotting data, here's the key point: the biggest red dots represent the largest temperature increases, and the biggest blue dots represent the largest temperature decreases (both over the 104 years of data). As the author points out, there's a definite pattern there -- the red dots are clustered around major population centers (Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, etc.) and the blue dots are, well, nearly everywhere else.

One of the frequently heard claims of the global warming skeptics is that the data used by the global warming proponents is biased by the "urban island" effect -- a well-known phenomena wherein cities are warmer than their surroundings. The reasons for this are many, but they boil down to the predominance of man-made materials in a city (concrete, asphalt, etc.) over the plants (trees, grass, crops) found around them -- and where the city is, before the city was built.

It sure looks like this raw data supports that that claim. If you were to subtract the populated areas from this chart, the trend would be toward a mild cooling! This single compilation of data, however compelling, is a long way from scientifically credible proof -- but it certainly doesn't decrease my skepticism about the global warming "phenomenon"...

Scary, Scary Lady

In the text of a speech Hilary Clinton gave on Tuesday, I discovered that she said:

It's time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few and for the few, time to reject the idea of an "on your own" society and to replace it with shared responsibility for shared prosperity. I prefer a "we're all in it together" society.

Usually her socialist proclivities are hidden behind screwphemisms and other clever language. This statement lays it out in the open, though. Shared prosperity simply means forced wealth redistribution -- or, more personally (since I'm in the top 25% of wage earners), it means take money away from me, forcibly, and give it to someone else.

Socialism.

A "fact sheet" on Hilary's site is chock-a-block full of the non-facts, lies, distortions, and clever common to the liberal dialog these days. It's best viewed as propaganda (spin, if you prefer the more, er, polite term), and not as a serious piece. But it is useful for understanding how the leading Democratic candidate is posturing. And it's downright scary to someone (like me) who believes in the America our founding father's created. Hilary and her ilk would like to turn our country into something more closely resembling a European country.

If I was attracted by that, I'd move to Europe. Sure wish Hilary would!

Cognitive Bias

I'm currently reading a fascinating book (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb). One of the topics discussed in the book (though not its main focus) is the way we humans habitually misinterpret (and therefore misunderstand) the world around us. I did some poking around the web to learn more about these cognitive biases, and ran across this Wikipedia page that lists 20 or so common kinds of cognitive bias, and points to pages explaining them. I was actually looking for information on "confirmation bias", and found this example on another Wikipedia page:

Among the first to investigate this phenomenon was Peter Cathcart Wason (1960), whose subjects were presented with three numbers (a triple):

2 4 6

and told that triple conforms to a particular rule. They were then asked to discover the rule by generating their own triples and use the feedback they received from the experimenter. Every time the subject generated a triple, the experimenter would indicate whether the triple conformed to the rule (right) or not (wrong). The subjects were told that once they were sure of the correctness of their hypothesized rule, they should announce the rule.

While the actual rule was simply “any ascending sequence”, the subjects seemed to have a great deal of difficulty in inducing it, often announcing rules that were far more complex than the correct rule. More interestingly, the subjects seemed to only test “positive” examples, triples that subjects believed would conform to their rule and thus confirm their hypothesis. What the subjects did not do was attempt to falsify their hypotheses by testing triples that they believed would not conform to their rule. Wason referred to this phenomenon as the confirmation bias, whereby subjects systematically seek evidence to confirm rather than to deny their hypotheses.

It's fascinating to read about all these cognitive biases, and understanding them can (I hope!) lead to a better ability to avoid them in one's own thinking. Taleb's book provides abundant reasons for investors to avoid these biases, but it's easy to see how avoiding them would improve just about any decision making. Taleb makes an interesting point regarding these biases: that most likely they evolved because they helped humans when we were in more primitive situations -- but today, in our modern, more civilized context, they often get in the way rather than help us...

Spam King: Nailed!

This is very welcome news: Robert Soloway (aka "The Spam King") has been captured and arrested in Seattle. He's been indicted on charges of identity theft, money laundering, and mail, wire, and e-mail fraud. From the story on Yahoo! News:

Between November of 2003 and May of 2007 Soloway "spammed" tens of millions of e-mail messages to promote websites at which his company, Newport Internet Marketing, sold products and services, according to prosecutors.

Soloway routinely moved his website to different Internet addresses to dodge detection and began registering them through Chinese Internet service providers in 2006 in an apparent ploy to mask his involvement.

Spam messages sent by Soloway used misleading "header" information to dupe people into opening them, according to Sullivan.

Soloway is accused of using "botnets," networks of computers, to disguise where e-mail originated and of forging return addresses of real people or businesses that wound up blamed for unwanted mailings.

If convicted as charged, Soloway will face a maximum sentence of more than 65 years in prison and a fine of 250,000 dollars.

Prosecutors want to seize approximately 773,000 dollars they say Soloway made from his spamming-related activities.

More than 65 years. Well, if it's enough more, it might just make up for all the garbage this evil man has spewed. I can only hope that his cell mates despise spam even more than I do...

30 Years

On June 30, 2005 there was a horrific crash that killed five people and injured five more. Two of the dead were children; one was a pregnant woman. The car was full of illegal aliens being smuggled into the U.S., but nobody was chasing the car -- the driver, probably nervous and frightened, passed on a blind corner and crashed head-on into a large pickup.

The driver of that car was Fidel Wilfredo Gonzales, who is 20 years old now -- and has just been sentenced to 30 years in prison on multiple counts of gross vehicular manslaughter and assault with a deadly weapon.

Gonzales is directly responsible for the horrors of that day. His actions, taken of his own free will, caused those deaths, injuries, and much consequent misery. He deserves that sentence, and arguably more.

But while he bears responsibility for his own actions, I believe our immigration policies bear responsibility, too -- not for his actions, but for creating the incentives for those actions. Gonzales was essentially in this game for the money, and the money was only there because these aliens could only immigrate here illegally. I don't know whether the aliens Gonzales was carrying wanted to come here to become Americans, or simply to take advantage of jobs or handouts available here for them. In either case, I believe our current policies are loony.

People who want to come here to become good Americans -- we should welcome them, plain and simple.

People who want to come here to take advantage of our generosity -- we should remove their incentive for doing so. Not by the utterly hopeless notion of "closing the border", but instead by being tough on employers who illegally hire them, and by stopping the government handouts and policies (such as free hospital care) that attract them.

Instead, we have our hopelessly ill-designed system of unachievable goals, conflicting incentives, and guaranteed human misery. The miserable story of Gonzales and his passengers is but one tiny piece, destined to be repeated over and over until and unless we chuck our current system out the window. Let's chuck it!