Nerds Make Science Fun!

Yes, I know that makes no sense whatsoever.

I went online and looked into Climategate (not really, it was just something that popped up on Youtube). It turns out that of about 13 years of emails, there are exactly two passages that the media honed in on:

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series to the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

and

“We can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

So either these are the most noticeable frauds, or these are the only frauds and this entire story is a giant load of bovine feces. As it turns out, both “evidences” can easily be explained as the aforementioned bovine feces.

For the first one, it turns out that the “Nature trick” doesn’t refer to fraud, but to a technique, as in “Substitution is a great trick for solving systems of equations.”
Also, the decline mentioned is actually the apparent decline in temperatures shown by tree rings. The issue that the quote is from is whether or not tree rings should be used as a guide for constructing temperature models from before the industrial evolution, as they are known to vary with temperature but are also unreliable.
The only potential problem here is the word “hide,” which might indicate fudging, but regardless of what it reflects, it will have no effect on the veracity of global warming itself.

The second quote is only talking about the past one or two years, and it is common knowledge among scientists that the Earth has cooled slightly over the past few years due to the influence of an eleven-year cycle, at the nadir of which the Earth’s temperature drops from the factors responsible for El Nino/La Nina. In fact, the given quote actually appears in multiple emails, from different climatologists, who disagree with this claim, made by another climatologist, Tremberth.
In fact, Tremberth wasn’t expressing this privately; he even wrote a paper - and was kind enough to provide a link to it - expressing these same doubts. Additionally, this is his personal opinion, not that of the scientific community.

And let’s face it, this entire story violates common sense. Remember the 9/11 “conspiracy”? The fact was then that for the President, Congress, the military, the firefighters, the state of New York, the police, the construction crew, the salvages, the bloggers, the political hopefuls and all the families to be coerced or convinced into such a conspiracy would be completely ludicrous.

Likewise, which of these three scenarios seems the least likely?
The right-wing news stations are perpetuating a story without fact-checking, as they have been known to do?
The hackers faked a few thousand emails?
The entire scientific community, in unison, faked millions of data points across twenty years, keeping them consistent with each other and cross-referencing them so that they tell a story completely contrary to reality?

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

For an internet blogger, or a layman to spread this story without looking too far into it is understandable thanks to the daily grind, but for a news station? Especially Fox News, one of the largest in America? I wouldn’t say it’s preposterous, but at the very least, it demonstrates horrible reporting, inconsistency, reckless disregard, and pure incompetence. At worst, it is lying, propoganda, and fraud.

Dangit Fox.

-T

If you’ve been on the internet anytime within the past 5 years or so, you probably know that Japan has a reputation for cranking out weird stuff, like human tetris or various pranks involving rockets, massage chairs, and a ski resort (I’ll let you mull that over for a while).

It turns out that they’re not the only ones capable of creating weird. Yes, I just used an adjective as a noun. That is how well it describes what I am about to present.

So there’s this show called “Banzai,” which you may have seen in DVD game format (I did) at a local Half-Price Books or Wal-Mart or anywhere else that sells DVD games. It looks immensely Japanese, complete with people in kimonos speaking broken English, shouting “BANZAI” every ten seconds, and plentiful use of sushi, chopsticks, and an octopus.

Did I mention it’s actually British?

Turns out that Britain tried to imitate a Japanese game show, and did it too well. Their events are just as off-the-wall as the stuff Japan comes up with, including escalator racing, wheelchair chicken, squirrel fishing, and russian roulette involving umbrellas. Yes, you read all of those correctly. Here’s their Youtube channel, for those with a flair for the random.

Oh, and one thing they were noted for on Wikipedia?

Apparently, they tried to film the late Queen’s funeral procession for their show… while targeting it with a speed gun. These are some seriously random, random people.

Alright, more advertising for a random site.

This time, it’s BioInteractive, which is run by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which I’m sure is mentioned somewhere else on this site, even if only in one of the random sidebar links.

It’s not all interactive, since there’s pages full of videos and animations about a variety of topics, but there is a ridiculous amount of online activities, not to mention some offline activities to be printed out and followed, plus a store, with DVDs that some of these activities are supplementary material for.

I haven’t been able to look at all of it due to a browser crash the second it ran into shockwave, but I expect to have some fun with the interactive fruit fly lab.

-T