JAWS

Taken at the National Geographic Museum in Washington DC. It’s a female great white shark – the mouth is open.

OBAMA'S CHARISMA

I think Obama’s “charisma” was based on voter narcissism — people excited not just about electing a black President, but about themselves, voting for a black President.

CASH FOR CLOTURE

Harry Reid bribed his way to cloture on the Senate healthcare bill.

Well, in Mary Landrieu’s case at least, it’s not bribery; it’s logrolling ... a time-honored Congressional tradition.

WELL SAID

The New York Times tells Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds to ”STFU.” Commenter datechguy (8:39 pm) responds “There was a time about 7 or 8 years ago when Instapundit had a quote at the top that called him the “New York Times of bloggers” ... if the New York Times wanted to regain it’s former status as an actual respected and believed source of news it should strive to become the ‘Instapundit of Newspapers’.”

More.

CLIMATEGATE

Lord Monckton calls it criminal. If the climate-controllers succeed, it should be genocide.

AL GORE WAS RIGHT

Global warming is anthropogenic – the data was rigged:

We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2—it was created by man-made adjustments of the temperature. It’s a disgrace.

Is there a Nobel Prize for lying?

TEACHING IDEOLOGY

All cultural biases aren’t created equal:

Katherine Kersten wonders when ... universities began demanding ideological purity as a prerequisite to attaining a degree. The University of Minnesota will apparently demand that its education graduates, the future teachers of Minnesota, confess to their own bigotry if they believe in the American dream of equal opportunity as a means to cleanse the Minnesota education system of cultural biases.

What happened to reading, writing, and arithmetic?

[Update] FIRE has taken notice.

GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT

A first look at the climate model computer codes:

As the leaked messages, and especially the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, found their way around technical circles, two things happened: first, programmers unaffiliated with East Anglia started taking a close look at the quality of the CRU’s code, and second, they began to feel sympathetic for anyone who had to spend three years (including working weekends) trying to make sense of code that appeared to be undocumented and buggy, while representing the core of CRU’s climate model.

One programmer highlighted the error of relying on computer code that, if it generates an error message, continues as if nothing untoward ever occurred. Another debugged the code by pointing out why the output of a calculation that should always generate a positive number was incorrectly generating a negative one. A third concluded: “I feel for this guy. He’s obviously spent years trying to get data from undocumented and completely messy sources.”

Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU’s Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” and “APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION.” Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: “Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend – so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!”

It’s not clear how the files were leaked. One theory says that a malicious hacker slipped into East Anglia’s network and snatched thousands of documents. Another says that the files had already been assembled in response to a Freedom of Information request and, immediately after it was denied, a whistleblower decided to disclose them. (Lending credence to that theory is the fact that no personal e-mail messages unrelated to climate change appear to have been leaked.)

Maybe the codes are not as sophisticated as we have been led to believe.