Creekside Chatter

Files from the UK Climatic Research Unit were hacked. They show that data was massaged, numbers were fudged, diagrams were biased, there was destruction of data after freedom of information requests, and there was refusal to submit taxpayer-funded data for independent examination.

Data was manipulated to show that the Medieval Warming didn’t occur, and that we are not in a period of cooling. Furthermore, the warming of the 20th century was artificially inflated.

This behavior is that of criminals and all the data from the UK Hadley Centre and the US GISS must now be rejected. These crooks perpetrated these crimes at the expense of the British and U.S. taxpayers.

The same crooks control the IPCC and the fraudulent data in IPCC reports. The same crooks meet in Copenhagen next week and want 0.7% of the Western world’s GDP to pass through an unelected UN government, and then on to sticky fingers in the developing world.

So far, most of the Climategate attention has been on the emails in the data dump of  November 19 (see here, here, and here), but the emails are only about 5 percent of the total. What does examining the other 95 percent tell us?

Here’s the short answer: it tells us that something went very wrong in the data management at the Climatic Research Unit.

Thanksgiving Day is right around the corner in the United States!  What do you think about most of all on Thanksgiving?  Friends, family, memories, some wonderful food and gratitude?  When we gather around our big tables laden with the fruits of the harvest, our hearts are filled with the gratitude of today, tomorrow & of days gone by.  But, we don’t need to be sitting around a Thanksgiving table to feel greatful toward someone or something do we?  Gratitude is so much a part of our lives ... so much so that we each sometimes need to take a little time to say thank you to those to whom we are grateful.  I love this quotation from Cynthia Ozick ... “We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.”

Several of these designs are interesting because there's plenty of room for journaling - the rest of the story.

Besides distribution, the other problem with comics now is the cost. You used to easily be able to sample new comics because they were so cheap. Now, if you can find them, they cost so much it’s hard for the average person to give a new book a try. That makes it extremely hard for new books to make it. And the industry needs to ideas. It can’t rely purely on old characters to keep going.

Enter the digital age. When music downloading became popular, fans started scanning comic book pages and uploading whole comics series online to torrent sites. In Japan, they started making comics (aka manga) available for download on your cell phone. And many comics started to run exclusively on the Internet. Marvel even started making their books available on the web by subscription to the service.

Print is dying, not just for newspapers and magazines. The cost of printing and paper, the problems with accounting for sales and waste in the newsstand business is what made it unviable for comics. Newspapers, magazines and books have been feeling the pinch for years. But the digital age is showing them a new path to future growth.

Wet spells in the Sahara may have opened the door for early human migration. According to new evidence, water-dependent trees and shrubs grew there between 120,000 and 45,000 years ago. This suggests that changes in the weather helped early humans cross the desert on their way out of Africa.

The Sahara would have been a formidable barrier during the Stone Age, making it hard to understand how humans made it to Europe from eastern Africa, where the earliest remains of our hominin ancestors are found.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

Lordy, lordy, lordy. They have no shame. It appears that Microsoft has just patented sudo, a personalized version of it.

Here it is, patent number7617530. Thanks, USPTO, for giving Microsoft, which is already a monopoly, a monopoly on something that's been in use since 1980 and wasn't invented by Microsoft. Here's Wikipedia's description of sudo, which you can meaningfully compare to Microsoft's description of its "invention".

This is why what the US Supreme Court does about software patents means so much. Hopefully they will address the topic in their decision on Bilski. Sudo is an integral part of the functioning of GNU/Linux systems, and you use it in Mac OSX also. Maybe the Supreme Court doesn't know that, and maybe the USPTO didn't realize it. But do you believe Microsoft knows it?

Perhaps Microsoft would like everyone in the world to pay them a toll at least, even if they don't want to use Microsoft's software? Like SCO, but with more muscle behind the request? Or maybe it might be used as a barrier to competition? What do you personally believe Microsoft wants patents on things like sudo for? To make sure innovative new companies can compete on an even playing field with Microsoft?

LightSail-1, as it is dubbed, will not make it to Neverland. At best the device will sail a few hours and gain a few miles in altitude. But those hours will mark a milestone for a dream that is almost as old as the rocket age itself, and as romantic: to navigate the cosmos on winds of starlight the way sailors for thousands of years have navigated the ocean on the winds of the Earth.

In AMERICAN PATRIOT by Robert Coram, Medal of Honor recipient Colonel Bud Day is quoted as saying “It is not a widely known fact, but military people are weepers. They weep when they watch a parade and the flag goes by. They weep when they hear the National Anthem. They weep at tales of valor and sacrifice.” When I read that, a sense of relief washed over me. If maybe the most valiant man I ever met can weep then I guess it’s okay for me to admit shedding a tear.

He has me nailed!

They must have read my latest post!