Friday, December 25, 2009

All I Want for Christmas

Is what I received. I opened a huge box to see something that's been on my Deeply Wanted but Top Secret list for many years- a violin. It is a rented student violin, but if all goes well we'll upgrade. I always wanted to play a stringed instrument, mostly because I had ancestors and relatives on both sides of the family who were/are musically talented. If you come from the Nashville area, it comes with the territory. Before the days of radio, from mansions with grand pianos or organs to shacks with home-made banjos, everybody had a family member who played some musical instrument. Singing was a common way to spend an evening or make the workload lighter. Music was in our blood, from the Scotch-Irish ballads to bluegrass to Negro spirituals and hymns. I have wanted this for a long, long time. I'm figuring out the notes for the octaves the instrument covers now. What fun!

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Staying Alive

They're still out there! We're still getting tomatoes, too, from the shelves indoors. Life is good.
Still amazed by the lack of response to the whole "Climate-gate" thing in official circles. It is as if the political ball is already rolling too hard to stop for the mere TRUTH- the researchers fudged the data to get and keep funding, and will continue to do so. A co-worker convinced of global warming responded to my comment that the globe has been cooling in the past 10 years, and it is hard to convince people of global warming when they are freezing in this manner:
"The uneducated will believe what they see. You have to be educated to see the truth of global warming." Yup. Cold is really hot, you can warm your home without a fire and drive your car on magic electricity, and there really is no absolute truth after all (umm, how could we have bank accounts, court cases, speeding tickets, or any science requiring measurements or calculation without absolute truth? Just wondering...). Hope I never get THAT educated.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Winter Gardening


I planted several cool-weather vegetables out back in mid-September. I wanted to get them out in August, but weather and time did not coincide to let that happen. Las week we had 2 nights in the low 20s. The chard looks gone. The tomatoes and limas are long gone.



But I have been pleasantly surprised by the lettuces and broccoli. I saw the frost on their leaves. I saw them looking frozen solid. And look! They live! No protection! I may or may not get any more than the 127 pounds I harvested this year, but it is interesting to watch and experiment.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

"Climategate", Cash, and Scientific Integrity

It has been an interesting week in the scientific community, reading about the hacked emails from CRU, to say the least. As a Christian and a graduate student, I am interested in how the affected parties respond, and if any scientific revision will take place. The answer to the latter, at least so far, seems to be "no". I've seen interesting posts from programmers indicating that the code in the hacked documents is not good, and was designed to generate the results it did.
I've seen stories in top journals defending the investigators, for doing things that would get me hanged (or at least kicked out) as a grad student. Subverting peer review is a huge one. Sure there are some people in every field who produce suspect work sometimes, but you subject their papers to appropriate public scrutiny; you do not block their publication. Avoiding releasing raw data is another. If I told my boss I had lost YEARS of raw data in a move and tried to shrug it off, I would be toast. If I refused to show him my notebooks, or altered them before he could view them, again a very hot seat (or a cold kick out the door) would be mine. People paid with taxpayer money are employees of the taxpayer. Their data should be (and by law is) public property. Yet these guys, and the ones in the US, have avoided FOIA requests for years.
The "adjustment" of the raw data is another issue. According to surfacestations.org, most of the North American temperature stations do not meet standards in terms of siting. A lot of pavement has been laid down in the last 50 years, some of it close to these stations. My own backyard did not get hit by frost this year until November 30; the heat island effect of cities is very real. Let's face it- people would naturally put a station where they could get to it easily for maintenance, and way out in the boonies an hour from any road is not an accessible place. Next to a parking lot-much better. And if the parking lot gets paved and the numbers shoot up after 1970, so much better for you!
What about the satellite data from NASA and NOAA? Reading through layers of the atmosphere, in which the temperature rises and falls for each layer until you reach bottom, and even there the read temperature would depend on the surface over which it is read, and the time of day, etc.? It would be a lot like trying to read the back page of a newspaper section through the upper ones, if the pages were transparent, but not the ink. Tricky, and controversial. That the satellite data agrees with "adjusted" ground data does not make either one right. Precise but inaccurate leaves the hunter very hungry, even if all the arrows fall in the same place.
Modern science is funded by the acquisition of government grants from committees of scientists evaluating and rating the grants, then administrators doing their thing. For decades (at least in the biological sciences, according to multiple scientists I have met in various places), grants have had to include certain key words (cyclic AMP, siRNA, high-throughput screening, tumorigenesis, etc.) to get funding. If you d0 not have the "right" keywords, it has become increasingly difficult over the past several years to get grants, unless you are at the top of the field and are GENERATING the key words. In which case you shape the future of the field for years to come. If you are right or if you are wrong, everyone else will be too.
The scientists implicated at East Anglia were some of the top ones in their field. They and a few others at NASA and NOAA and in a center in Japan were generating the key words. It will be interesting to see how these investigations unfold (or not) and what they mean for climate science.