Today’s excuses for not posting

CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF CLIMATE CHANGE PREDICTIONS FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

The Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, F?sicas y Naturales of Spain and the Fundaci?n Ram?n Areces are sponsoring that conference in Madrid on 2-3 April. The symposium will begin with the IPCC assessment and then move to “Critical assessment taking into consideration past (Pleistocene to historical) climate change and the nature of chemical forcing, as well as the characteristics of physical and numerical models used, their potentials, limitations and uncertainties.”

I’ve been asked to speak on the “Robustness and uncertainties of climate change predictions.” I have a deadline of this Saturday to hand in my abstract, and a couple of weeks to hand in a paper and presentation. I’m trying to walk a line between showing too much statistics and too little. By that I mean math. I keep going back and forth on this, trying to decide the best way to present. I haven’t decided, but, hey, I have three days left, right? Whatever I come up with will eventually be posted here. In a day or two–after my abstract is finished–I’ll post the conference program.

Reporters at the New York Times

A copy of Monday’s Times was given to me. I don’t subscribe, by the way, since I have learned from that august publication that because I am a veteran of the U.S. Armed Forces, I might explode at any moment and start murdering anybody in sight. I’m not disagreeing with this, of course; I just don’t want to be reminded of it.

Anyway, a lead story in the Business section, written by somebody called Noam Cohen, started thusly, “Of the many landmarks along a journalist’s career, two are among those that stand out: winning an award and making the government back down” (emphasis mine).

And people wonder where journalist’s cynicism comes from?

Stuff White People Like

This site, written by someone called Clander, has been making the rounds and is hilarious. Some examples. “#75 Threatening to Move to Canada” (a friend of mine did this after Bush “stole” his first election), “#65 Co-Ed Sports” (one of my favorites), and “#62 Knowing what?s best for poor people“.

That post tells us

White people spend a lot of time of worrying about poor people….They feel guilty and sad that poor people shop at Wal*Mart instead of Whole Foods, that they vote Republican instead of Democratic, that they go to Community College/get a job instead of studying art at a University…It is a poorly guarded secret that, deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things…But it is ESSENTIAL that you reassert that poor people do not make decisions based on free will. That news could crush white people and their hope for the future.

The accompanying picture is priceless. What’s even better are the reader’s comments, particularly those, presumably white, people who take exception to Clander’s observations.