Random Thoughts

[chris_gerrib]

So, I was going to talk about Sheri Tepper's The Gates To Women's Country, but stuff came up. So, have some random thoughts.

Random Thought #1

So, what irritates me about posts like this one at Simberg's Flying Circus is the sheer ignorance of basic facts exhibited therein. For example, the post talks about DDT being banned for anti-malaria use (it's not) and (in comments) how not using DDT against bed bugs led to their resurgence. Well, bed bugs are immune to DDT, and have been for decades.

Regarding the article's headline (global warming "hoax"), somebody forgot to tell Arctic sea ice. It will be below average again, and the last five summers are the five minimum ice extent summers on record.

Random Thought #2

Those of us who support Microsoft-centric networks at work have all kinds of weird issues to deal with. For us at work, Windows 7 had had a tendency to not allow users to print. It appears that Windows likes to change registry keys, thus making calls to .dll files that don't exist. This post explains that in great detail. Of course, from this seven-page screed on a Microsoft site, one would think that Microsoft would actually, you know, fix the problem!

Comments

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Rand seems to have moved smoothly into "phase 2" of Climate Deniers, which is a) I'm not a denier, b) sure the climate is changing anyway because of sunspots... er... cosmic rays... er... it was the little ice age... er... UNICORNS!

And so on. It's beyond parody now.

[jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com]

Simberg irritates me too, enough so that I don't read him anymore. However, five years of stats on the Arctic ice says nothing about global warming, global cooling, or anything else. The whole business of Arctic climate is hugely complex and still pretty obscure in its workings. The sea ice there has been thin or simply gone many times in the past, as far back as 1817. We're hampered by lack of good data until very recently. There's a good writeup here which pulls a lot of things together:

http://www.john-daly.com/polar/arctic.htm

The main conclusion I draw is that there are no conclusions to be drawn, at least from Arctic ice stats since the 1950s, which is as old as good data goes.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

There is huge variability in climate and a great deal of noise in the data, not just in the Arctic. Having said that, completely ignoring the data is not a good idea.