Michael Flynn's Blog, page 8

We Can Only Hope The Prom Theme Was Meant Ironically

E pluribus unum

Yesterday was the Feast of Pentecost, sometimes called 'the birthday of the Church.' In the Acts reading is a role call of the places from which the Jews and converts to Judaism had come, and the more geographically savvy among us recognize that the list runs from east to west. There are two odd points: the Cretans and Arabs are mentioned separately, and Greece is not mentioned at all. But what in those days had Athens to do with Jerusalem?
E Pluribus Unum

On the High Frontier

A story of mine that appeared in Analog (Apr 92) is on the STORY PREVIEW page, at the TOF Spot. It will stay up for a couple weeks.

"On the High Frontier" was an early effort, a cowboy yarn set in space -- long before Firefly came along, we might mention. It's pretty much a Tall Tale and has nearly every gol-danged cliche you can shake a stick at. I added one to this version that was not in the original.
On the High Frontier

Sterling Silver

There has been much hoo-hah in the media recently, where discussion of NSA "wire"-tapping, the performance of the government-run VA medical care, or of an economy for the past seven years endemically sluggish has been eclipsed by a two-minute hate declared regarding Emmanuel Goldstein Donald Sterling. Sterling, for those of you thankfully beyond range of the twitterverse, is the current stand-in for those perennial goldsteins, the Koch Brothers.

The exquisite sin of this two-time NAACP Lifetime Achievment Awardee has been that, having espied his mistress publicly accompanied by men other than himself, suffered the umbrage of all married men apparently being dissed by their mistresses and vented infelicitously regarding her behavior. In the course of this, he naturally mentioned those in whose company she had been seen and marked their most salient characteristic. Now, this venting was in a private conversation, but someone (presumably not the NSA) recorded it and distributed it to various publicity organs, in consequence of which the mistress' Q-score was increased from zero to a wee but positive number.
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More Odds and Ends

Today, TOF presents for your delight a Quote of the Day, a Science! Marches On!, and a Statistical Puzzle for you to solve, among the usual sundry miscellany.

Catching Up

I have been remiss about reposting entries from the TOF Spot here at the Aulde Blogge. Herewith the last several.

Save Lives, Stop Funding Science!Bro KevinOdds and EndsTOF at LargeAmerica's Next Top Model -- Part V

Snarf!

Somebody Paid Money for This

A Devoted TOFling yclept Guy Stewart writes:

"While reading io9 (which I enjoy a lot), I came across this article: “Are Religious Beliefs Going To Screw Up First Contact?”

Based on: “...[clinical neuropsychologist Gabriel G. de la Torre]…sent a questionnaire to 116 American, Italian, and Spanish university students.”

Reached this conclusion: “…he found that many of the students — and by virtue the rest of society — lack awareness on many astronomical aspects. He also learned that the majority of people assess these subjects according to their religious beliefs.”

As a statistician, what do you make of the significance of the conclusion of this survey?

To which TOF responds: "Not Much."
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m_francis @ 2014-05-04T00:15:00

Odds and Ends

America's Next Top Model -- Part IV

Ruminations

This is a continuation of ruminations on the use and understanding of models that began with Part I and continued (as you might suspect) through Part II and Part III to reach this Part IV. One can only wonder at what might come next.

In partes priores, we learned that as science proceeded from matters of organized simplicity (a few elements connected one to another) to disorganized complexity (many elements acting randomly) to organized complexity (many elements organized into patterns), the scientific approach progressed from mathematics (e.g., Boyle's Law) to statistics (e.g., thermodynamics) to models (e.g., general climate models). As it did our understanding of the phenomena decreased. It is easy to understand:

less easy to understand:
and nearly impossible to understand complex nondeterministic models having millions of degrees of freedom.  For example, says Judy Curry:

if a model is producing shortwave surface radiation fluxes that are substantially biased relative to observations, it is impossible to determine whether the error arises from the radiative transfer model, incoming solar radiation at the top of the atmosphere, concentrations of the gases that absorb shortwave radiation, physical and chemical properties of the aerosols in the model, morphological and microphysical properties of the clouds, convective parametrization that influences the distribution of water vapor and clouds, and/or characterization of surface reflectivity.
-- Judy Curry, "Climate Science and the Uncertainty Monster"

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