Michael Flynn's Blog, page 10

Spare a Moment to Remember

before the last living memories are gone and the revisionists take over.Today at breakfast, Pere mentioned that it was the 69th anniversary of the flag raising on Iwo Jima.  When TOF was a kid, we asked him where he was in the famous photograph.  I was in front, he said. I called out, "Put the flag here!" and then kept going while they snapped the picture.  We were young and naive and believed him. But he also told us that he had been killed in the battle, and we believed that, too, and burst into tears at the tragedy. Later, we figured it out.  Hey... Wait a minute...Read more »

At Twenty-Three

This article:  David Wise’s alternative lifestyle leads to Olympic gold, contains a remarkable paragraph; to wit:

At only twenty-three years old, he has a wife, [Alexandra], who was waiting patiently in the crowd, and together they have a two-year-old daughter waiting for them to return to their home in Reno, Nevada. At such a young age, Wise has the lifestyle of an adult. He wears a Baby Bjorn baby carrier around the house. He also attends church regularly and says he could see himself becoming a pastor a little later down the road. Not exactly the picture you had in mind while watching him nail two double corks wearing baggy pants.

TOF will pause here to allow Faithful Reader to ponder this and determine what is wrong.
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TOF in Italian

A popular TOF post is now available in Italian.  The faithfulness of the translation and the nature of the site on which it appears is so far unknown.

Gallimaufry

Mr. Snow prevented TOF from going to Boskone this year, pretty much at the last minute.  If it hadn't snowed last night...  But alas and alack (both of them) the Laurentide Ice Sheet is even now accumulating in TOF's front yard.  Then, of course, the storm proceeded up I-95, much as the pillar of fire preceded the Hebrews out of Egypt, though in a more frigid and slippery manner.  Disinclined to follow in the wake of the storm all the way up (or down) to Boston, TOF and the Incomparable Marge elected to remain among the fleshpots of Castle Flynn.

TOF had planned to present America's Next Top Model at Boskone.  Now he must content himself with translating it into a blog post.  A portion went up already as Part I.  Part II is in the works.
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Odd Coincidence

A weather map: the Polar Vortex








Wisconsin Glaciation

The edges of the Laurentide glacier are a pretty good fit to the path of the jet stream when deflected by a blocking high.

America's Next Top Model -- Part I

Let's talk about models.


 No, no, no. Not that kind.  The interesting and exciting kind. Mathematical and statistical models!

TOF can hear your pulses quickening all the way up here in his Fortress of Solitude.  Tell us more, TOF! (he hears you cry).

But you knew that the moretelling was going to happen, didn't you.
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Headlines of the Week

Our first headline is from the (Manchester) Guardian:Thousands of chickens escape after lorry overturns in ChinaA "lorry" is evidently a truck of some sort, although the term does not seem Chinese.  This story is accompanied by video.  If you carefully watch the video, you will notice this at 0:08: That's right.  The chickens are crossing the road. Why do they do that? (TOF hears you ask) A question that has bedeviled many a sage. The best answer -- it may have been Plato -- is that it is for some fowl reason.

A second headline, from the Miami Herald:
Gassy German cows blamed for barn explosion
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/01/28/3897682/gassy-german-cows-blamed-for-barn.html#storylink=cpythankfully without a video.  But the notion that concentrated cow farts blew roof off a barn is not something you see every day.

The Sixth Winter

Cool!

Recently and for amusement, TOF has been rereading a potboiling SF adventure from the 80s entitled The Sixth Winter by Douglas Orgill and John Gribbin. It was written during the Global Cooling scare and involved the sudden onset of a new ice age. TOF found interesting the following, supposedly an excerpt from a report:

FIVE:  In warm decades, such as those prior to 1950, this jet [stream] follows an almost perfect circle around the globe. At the same time, it pushes with it a succession of weather systems: rain, followed by a dry spell, more rain, and so on. But when the atmosphere cools, the jet stream becomes more erratic, swinging in zigzags, first north then south, and becoming very weak and susceptible to disturbances caused by sea temperature and by snow and ice on land and sea.

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Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas

Today is the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas. Do something logical in his honor.

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Sometimes They Don't Need No Steenking Masks

The Washington post recently took a poll, described in the last paragraph of the article as:

The Post-ABC poll was conducted Jan. 20-23 among a random national sample of 1,003 adults, including interviews on land lines and with cellphone-only respondents. The overall margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

There is not enough information -- by far -- to evaluate the adequacy of this procedure. (What sampling frame did they use to access the adults? Land-lines tend to access whole households; cellphone-only will pick up a lot of teens. Was this a two-stage cluster sample? The only thing we know for certain is that the sampling error was probably larger than 3.5%-points. Why? Because the results of any poll are usually less certain than we think. As near as TOF can figure that is a sampling error based on a simple (unstratified) random sample, a very difficult thing to obtain.

But the scariest result of the poll is not
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