AP reports on the post-Katrina real estate boom, echoing Sam's thoughts about hurricane relief by selling off underwater real estate (similar issues to viaticals, really)...
and Overlawered covers the first Katrina lawsuits against the oil companies, similar to my prediction (not identical, as the lawyers haven't thrown in the anthropogenic climate change - hurricane intensity angle... yet).
In this alt.food.wine thread I found an interesting discussion about what exactly various parts of a pencil taste like, after someone described a wine as "Graphite and smoke on the finish." I certainly chewed up many pencils while I was school, but not for the flavor. This is an easy experiment though, so I immediately found a pencil and a sharpener. The lead don't taste like nothin' to me, either dull or sharpened. (I have to admit it did feel a bit cool on my tongue, no doubt due to its temperature being lower than my tongue's.) The shavings, now, they smelled like pencil shavings.
You gotta love the French attitude to peak oil. Here's the full quote, from the head of economic studies at the IEA, based in Paris:
"Le pétrole, c'est comme une petite amie, vous savez depuis le début de votre relation qu'elle vous quittera un jour. Pour qu'elle ne vous brise pas le coeur, mieux vaut la quitter avant qu'elle ne vous quitte." (Le Monde)
Both Creek Running North and Pharyngula are observing Lurker Day, wherein all readers, regular or random, friends, family or strangers, are invited to come out, comment, and say hi, if just this once. My guest status makes logs hard to get at, so I've started to wonder if anyone is reading at all, or if I'm just talking to myself here. Indeed, the only reader I know of is my wife, who claims she reads the blog regularly, but sometimes I suspect, hm, well, there's no polite way to put this, but sometimes I think she might be faking it. So, despite the very real risk that no one at all will respond, and the sad truth of my meaningless existence will be made even more evident than it already was, I figured I would open up comments and see what happens...
Update Exactly zero comments: another sad, desperate plea for attention falls on the deaf ears of an uncaring universe. Of course, as my wife pointed out with an "I'm not laughing with you, I'm laughing at you" chuckle, this could have something to do with the fact that comments here are simply broken. *sigh*
Update 2 - 11/12/2005 (Sam) For the record, the comments aren't broken, they are disabled.
The deeply weird AmericanConscience.org begins with this Fred Hoyle quote:
It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing high intelligence this is not correct. We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only. (Of Men and Galaxies 1964)
I'm not so worried about energy. Even if we exhaust all useful fossil resources on this planet, and even if fossil fuels are an absolute necessity for developing an industrial civilization like ours, at maximum a few hundred million years of sunlight shining on the plants and oceans should suffice to regenerate them. So yeah, some patience is required, but that gives evolution time to develop new interesting creatures to burn the fuels. And there's plenty of time: our sun should last for a few billion more years. And I'm not even certain that fossil fuels are strictly required. Could you run a society similar to ours strictly on wood and vegetable oil? It might be smaller, skinnier, and (to our taste) poorer, but I don't see why it's impossible.
I'm even less convinced by the exhaustion of metal ores, though I have to admit I know less about this area. Metals have concentrated in particular rocks via long geological processes. Our species has simply altered and accelerated those element movements, they have not (with the exception of fission fuels, oops there goes another energy source) permanently destroyed those atoms. In fact, the fossil remains of the rusting hulks of the bridges and buildings that our species may leave behind could be a very useful source of highly refined iron, much better than the stuff we had to work with. Nor will the ancient geological processes which led to the ores we had stop once we're gone, though like the buildup of fossil fuels, it could take while.
No, the planet will be okay, and advanced civilization on this planet seems as likely to recur as it was to occur in the first place. The only reason to care is a selfish, shorterm desire to protect this civilization, our species, our families. In the long run, the rest of the universe can take care of itself.
At Pharyngula, one of the more bombastic of the moonbat blogs I frequent[1], hysterical atheist[2] blogger PZ Meyers spent some effort ripping into some other guy, apparently of the evangelical American Christian persuasion, named Joe Carter. Standard stuff, really. If I were to tell you that the only socially accepted demographic bias in liberal circles is against adherents of any popular American religion, you wouldn't find much here to contradict me, but again that's nothing unusual.
What's interesting is that both Joe and PZ, along with lots of others, wade in through the comments, and despite the quantities of muck flying in all directions some interesting shiny rocks emerge. Only a lunatic would read the whole thing, but to give a flavor of the discussion, I've included part of one comment from near the end, selected solely because I get quoted, and (in honor of Monday) rendered in Pharyngula's convenient "Talk like a pirate" mode:
Raven \u2014 09/16 at 04:39 AM This little dog-leg in logic really confused me fer a moment:CGlace: If an argument is formally invalid then th' conclusion can ne'er be true, to be sure.
TFox: This would seem t' imply that all I need t' do t' disprove somethin' is come up with a formally invalid argument fer it. Is this what ye meant t' say, or have I misunderstood?
CGlace: Nay, I am sayin' that th' conclusion can ne'er follow from an invallid argument. I am not sayin' that given another set o' propositions th' conclusion still isn't true.
TFox's point seems obviously true and well-taken, and it seems that CGlace is just makin' up a universe in which conclusions can simultaneously be true and untrue.
Then I figured out how CGlace's universe works--it is totally disconnected from th' physical world, and a bucket o' chum. Maybe it is th' realm o' Platonic idealism discussed on other threads; I am not enough o' a specialist in philosophy t' say, we'll keel-haul ye! But if ye assume that conclusions are nothin' but symbols, it doesn't matter what truth value ye attach t' them: X can be true one minute, and false th' next, pace CGlace, and it doesn't matter--conclusions are nothin' more than arbitrary values ye attach t' variables.
If, on th' other hand, ye assume that conclusions are connected t' real-world objects in some way, then th' physical constraints o' th' real world prohibit somethin' bein' simultaneously "true" and "false" (at least at any level o' granularity greater than th' quantum one).
Makes me feel like I'm back in college.
[1] Yes, I'm aware that even more bombastic stuff is out there. No need to send me links to DailyKuss or whatever it's called.
[2] Don't try to tell me you don't know the type.
Looking for word lists, I found this spelling test. Now, as readers of this blog know (if there are any I haven't driven away yet), I may be a dreadful writer, but I do take some pride in orthography. I may not know how to string words together, but generally I know how to spell them. So I was dismayed to to get six wrong out of 50. That's 88%, a B grade. And that's on a multiple choice test, two choices on fairly ordinary words! Very chagrinning (sp?). See how you do...
UPDATE After reviewing my errors, I took it again. Six wrong again, but a different six! Stupider and stupider...
Last Tuesday evening, as the news reports of flooding rolled in and it started to become clear to me what the human scope of the tragedy would be, I thought of the one person I knew in New Orleans.
She's an acquaintance I met exactly once some years ago, going out to dinner with a coworker who knew her from an online group. She's a survivor, an incredibly cheerful and bushy-tailed person who had long outlived every prognosis she'd been given for her lymphoma. Of course, her cheefulness may have had to do with having just been transfused the morning of the day I saw her. She was, however, pretty close to the margins of health and society in perhaps the poorest state of the union. Her treatment had exhausted her resources and whatever insurance she may have started out with. Transferred into the indigent health system, she racked up debts to the State of Lousiana for an amount larger than most people earn in a lifetime. Contrary to the beliefs of most Canadians, there is coverage of last resort in the US, but they are sure not happy about keeping you alive. One problem was the very length of her survival: some of the programs paying for her care capped the total amounts at levels based on prognosis -- live too long, and the money runs out, you've overstayed your welcome, go find somebody else to pay. Another is that the programs you end up in are more concerned with cost control than excellence of care. Kidney failure required her to have dialysis once a week -- skip it, and you start dying pretty quick. Some bright administrator had determined that "once a week" meant the same as "no more than four times per month". Those with an excellent command of arithmetic may notice that four times per month times twelve months equals forty-eight, somewhat less than the fifty-two weeks which actually occur in a year. (Perhaps said administrator went to a Louisiana public school, which tend to rank even lower than post-Proposition 13 public schools in California, as far as academic excellence goes.) So every time there came a five-week month she and her caregivers were left with an awful scramble, trying to find a facility to adminster treatment. (Hm, "finding". If she were black, these days we'd say "looting". And it's not so different: I doubt the places that served her in those fifth-weeks ever received a dime for it.) Sometimes she'd have to give up, and go without.
Money was tough. The state demanded the vast majority of whatever she could earn, to pay back the medical debts, see, although at her rate, she would have to live for centuries to catch up. The cabfare to come meet us consumed most of a month's disposable income, so we bought dinner and the cab home. (Why didn't she declare bankruptcy? I don't know -- perhaps she already had, perhaps she couldn't afford the filings, perhaps the State, in its infinite wisdom, chose to disallow cancellation of debts to itself. Or perhaps it simply wouldn't have helped.) It was also quite difficult for her to work, given transportation difficulties, the amount of medical care she required, and her health's effects on her ability to produce. She was perky the day I saw her, but anemia, induced in almost all chemo recipients, can be an incredible drain on your ability to function, much less accomplish anything. Erythropoeitin helps some, but is fantastically expensive. She had an office job for awhile, but she lost it, due to frequent absences. Later she had a job at a pizza place, but got mugged on the way to work one evening. She arrived, but late, and so beat up looking that she was fired on the spot. She lived the life of Job, as my coworker says.
So I thought of her Tuesday night, as I looked at the pictures of water flowing over levees, and read of the difficulties evacuating the sick and the poor, and thought that it was exactly people in her kind of situation who might not make it. And then I realized that, in fact, she was unlikely to have survived until now anyway. She was too sick, her existence too marginal. And I felt sad.
Wednesday, my coworker told me she was okay. (O ye of little faith!) A friend drove her out to someplace higher and drier. The lymphoma is in remission, dialysis is twice a week now, but she's okay. And you know, despite my tenuous connection to her, I felt truly grateful. Being an atheist, I don't know who to thank (though the person driving the car comes to mind). A Christian might say that God spreads his love on the faithful and faithless alike. It doesn't matter why, I will take it, and be thankful.
An AP poll has 80% saying don't rebuild New Orleans below sea level. This sounds like a rough consensus, but it doesn't include everyone, obviously. Here's one alternative voice:
Joyce Jones, a retiree from Modesto, Calif., said: "If the levees were built stronger, they should put it back the way it is. We're a nation of lots of smarts. Those Corps of Engineers can do just about anything."
I find the language here interesting. I absolutely agree that the nation has lots of smarts, and, given those smarts and sufficient time, money, and effort, great feats of engineering are possible. However this statement contains an implicit limitation on what we are allowed to use those smarts for: can we apply the smarts only to the engineering, or are we also allowed to be smart about what goals we choose to engineer?
The other obvious question, not posed by AP, is "which sea level?" Do we pick a value from the 19th century, the 20th, or what reasonable expectations are for the 21st? And who gets to define "reasonable expectations"? This one could get very sticky and political, but get it wrong, and the same problem could repeat far sooner than necessary.
Next up, there is a stream of submissions to Nature: a comment by M&M, call it MM04a, a reply (call it MBH04), and a revised comment by M&M (call it MM04b). If MBH revised their reply, I haven't seen it. In the end, the exchange was rejected. Some of the referee reports are reproduced at McIntyre's website: the ones selected to be presented seem mixed but cautiously positive, the final referee reports and the rejection letter are not published. So what do these papers say?
MM04a accepts that MM03 deleted certain data series, and then argues that they are of poor quality, and ought not to have been included in the first place. I have two issues with this train of thought: first off, any evaluation of the quality of raw data which occurs after you've already assessed its impact on your hypothesis risks introducing your own bias into the analysis, which is about the biggest no-no in science. I also have a difficult time accepting McIntyre and McKitrick as authorities on data quality issues in tree rings; these kinds of considerations are better taken up by the people who took the data in the first place. The usual pattern, if you believe that existing data are low quality, is to take better data yourself, and then show that your data is a better explanation of nature.
My second problem with this is a pure data analysis issue. If the data is poor proxy for climate, as MM04a argues, then this will turn up in the calibration. Noise will be a poor fit to the 20th century instrumental records, do a poor job reconstructing 19th century temperatures, and will have little impact on the backpredicted earlier temperatures. In other words, the poor quality of the data will be established by the data analysis itself, and contrariwise, its excellence will also be so established.
MM04a introduces for the first time a complaint with the analysis procedure, in particular the preprocessing before taking principal components on the North American treeline database. This seems to be the main argument that gets carried forward these days, so it's worth spending some time on.
Principal component analysis (PCA) is a way of trying to automatically extract some patterns from a dataset. The dataset is a set of vectors in a high dimensional space, but you won't go far wrong by just imagining them as a cloud of points. PCA selects a particular rotation of the cloud: that's it, that's all it does. The idea is to try and get the "most important" directions, for some value of "most important", lined up along particular axes. PCA defines importance as "explaining the variance", which is to say distance from the origin. Now, clearly there are a number of choices to make here. Do we center the cloud first? Are all directions of the cloud in the same units, and have similar values, or do we want to scale them first? How should we scale them? Our answers to these questions will determine which particular rotation of the data we produce.
Now, the purpose of applying PCA to the North American treering data is that there are many highly correlated series, so there aren't really 70-odd independent datapoints here. The idea is to extract the dominant features, correlate 'em to the 20th century data, and forget the rest. Now we need to make choices about what we see as "dominant features". MBH98 says, hey, we're correlating to 20th century temperatures here, let's normalize around the 20th century, do our PCA on the 20th century, then correlate and drop components once they stop contributing.Given this context, that sounds pretty reasonable.
Wait a minute, says MM04. You're effectively choosing which patterns to emphasize. And look: the hockey-stick shape appears in PC1, the first principal component. And watch, if I apply the same algorithm to random data, I can also see hockey sticks. Therefore, the entire hockey-stick picture is bunk.
The problem with this point of view is that the shapes of the various PC's have no significance, except insofar as they correlate to 20th century temperatures. What do I care about patterns in North American tree rings? Nothing: I'd never even heard of them before starting reading this stuff. The whole point is to use them as temperature proxies, so as to learn about past climate. Some rotations will bring out the pattern of correlation earlier than others, but the data remains the same, and the correlation will come out, sooner or later. In a sense, MM are correct that the procedure is biased to produce hockey sticks, but the first principal component is not the final purpose of the procedure. The true bias is provided by the fit to 20th century temperatures, which show unambiguous warming.
Myself, I probably wouldn't have done it this way. Since I don't care about the data patterns per se, only correlations with an output variable, I'd use some technique designed for that purpose. Partial least squares is one, with a few variants available. But if it matters, you're doing something wrong.
The response, MBH04, says there's nothing wrong with the data. The complaint about PCs they address, in addition to bloviating, by simply redoing the entire calculation using the entire database (as opposed to the first few PC). The result stays the same, but the cross-validation statistics are slightly worse: exactly what you'd expect if the leading PCs after their procedure captures the leading behavior of climate during the calibration period. It should be clear, from the proceeding discussion, that this is pretty determinative. There is no rotation, and no selection of PC's at all. If you want to avoid the conclusions of MBH98, you have to get new data, or remove the old data.
MM04b, the updated comment, mostly repeats the same points as MM04a, and does not seem to address the direct criticisms of MBH04. Two things are new. One is an off-hand comment that another data series, Gaspe cedars, is also fairly high leverage. This may be damning with faint praise, but it's the first time I've seen that M&M undertake independent examination and analysis of the data itself, as opposed to merely attempting to repeat the existing analysis. The other is the first appearance of a cross-validation calculation. The numbers concur with MBH04's conclusion: dropping the data results in worse cross-validation. Unfortunately, MM04b get the conclusion inverted (better validation means better data, not the reverse) but it's encouraging to see that they are attempting validation in the first place. Nevertheless, I'm not surprised the exchange was rejected. It's things like this which I pay the editors of Nature to keep me from wasting my time on.
Perhaps the biggest observation about MM04 is what is missing. Unlike MM03, MM04a and MM04b do not claim to produce an alternative reconstructed temperature with a 15th century warmer than the present, they just attack the MBH reconstruction.
Stay tuned for my analysis of the GRL 05 paper, McIntyre and McKitrick's first ever contribution to the peer-reviewed scientific literature, and one of sufficient importance to merit a front page article on the Wall Street Journal and attention from Senator Barton's committee on transportation.
Danielle and I have given our bit to Katrina relief, but I keep thinking that there's more that could be done.
For example, right now there are a lot of people who own underwater real estate and would like to have some or all of the value of it to buy food, clothing, etc. And there are quite a few banks who lent money on 80% of the value of land which is now underwater and buildings which are now demolished. And there are probably a fair number of people with a lot of capital who wouldn't mind picking up some New Orleans real estate cheap -- in the understanding that if New Orleans is not rebuilt, their investment is a dead loss (Or perhaps an attractive yacht berth?)
Obviously insurance is the first great complication. In fact, insurers already committed to the region represent the first wave of gamblers/speculators to invest in the New Orleans flood, before it was even flooded. As far as I know, conventional home insurance will cover replacement costs for the structure, but not remediation of the land. Flood insurance may in part cover those costs. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to hold on to your waterlogged title deed until all the numbers are in, and then decide whether to take the money or walk away from the property.
But nevertheless, there may be people who are willing to sell out, chuck it all, and go live in Colorado or somewhere equally altitudinous -- and transfer the risk to someone more willing to handle it. Sadly, if this was going on in the open, I expect it would be called profiteering and shut down. So it will happen in semi-secret, and the homeowners will get a worse deal -- both because of less competition and because the speculators must manage the additional risk of being thrown in jail.
I'm not saying that I want to go around buying underwater property from flooded-out homeowners. In fact, I would have serious moral qualms about doing it. But the government should not take it upon itself to shield all of the people from New Orleans from "profiteers" just because some of them may be distraught.