Many years ago, my college roommate had a job in the Physics department as a tape monkey. The department had a Large Grant to process data from Fermilab. Each run filled a 9-track tape, and the analysis required roughly 11 hours of uninterrupted runtime on their Vaxen. The average uptime on the server was a hair over 11 hours, and with very little slack in their schedule, someone had to be available any time day or night to make sure their delivery date didn’t slip.

My friend was a biochemistry major, and appreciated the importance of delivering high-quality analysis of experimental data, so he was a bit concerned by the fact that the programs used to perform that analysis were in a constant state of flux, a mess of Fortran hacked on by an ever-changing team of grad students. Not wanting to waste precious time, he got into the habit of running it on a small test dataset each day, to make sure it still worked before kicking off an 11-hour run.

The test output was frequently different, in ways that it shouldn’t have been. Ways that very well could have made all of their analysis completely useless to Fermilab. Ways that no one planned, expected, or kept track of. When he raised his concerns, well, their exact words are lost to time, but I remember them sounding an awful lot like, “just load the tapes, kid”.

I think of those words whenever I hear about a computer model that proves something significant that’s tied to the modeler’s funding. And I think that’s all that I need to say about the rapidly-unfolding saga of ClimateGate.

Something about this story just seems a bit, shall we say, “over-hyped”:

In the space of 11 days this year, seven people were murdered in Salinas. Each killing, like the record 25 homicides the previous year, spilled from the gang warfare that this summer pushed the homicide rate in the city of 140,000 to three times that of Los Angeles. Residents retreated indoors at night, and Mayor Dennis Donohue affirmed his decision to seek help from an unlikely source: the U.S. military.

...

"Obviously, there are restrictions," said Salinas Deputy Police Chief Kelly McMillin. "Not only the constitutional part of it, but just the idea we are going to have choppers fast-roping onto Alisal Street."

As far as I can tell, it boils down to: “not many jobs right now for young male unskilled workers who don’t speak much English, so joining a gang seems like a good idea; at least, until you get used as cannon fodder in a fight against another gang”.

And, of course, when the total number of homicides is so low, it’s easy for one or two serious incidents to dramatically alter the rate, creating a dramatic “worse than LA” comparison.

Not to imply that there are no problems. It’s quite clear from the statistical data that, taken as a whole, the Salinas SMSA has crime rates comparable to much larger cities; it’s just highly concentrated geographically. The warzone they paint in the article is nothing like the kid-friendly neighborhood where I handed out big handfuls of candy on Halloween night to roving bands of (often unescorted) little monsters.

[Update: a quick bit of math to show the rate swing: in 2006, the homicide rate was only 82% of the national average (4.7 versus 5.7), while in 2008 it was three times higher (17.4 versus 5.8). Since these are numbers per 100,000, and the current population is 148,350, that’s a difference of 11 homicides. The rate was also significantly lower than the national average from 1987 to 1991, which happens to be a period with low unemployment and lots of construction.]

Sloppiest. Blow job. Ever.

Fight global warming with wolves!

"We urge Senators Udall and McCain to take immediate action to restore wolves to Rocky Mountain National Park, as part of their climate change initiative"

...making her the latest spectacular victim of the bad debt crisis and nationwide recession

After 18 paragraphs that demonstrate that photographer Annie Liebovitz spends money (her own and other peoples’) like water, including the $24 million she hocked her work for less than a year ago, this is how the writer spins her: a victim of recession and “the bad debt crisis”. No hint that she actually lost money due to investments collapsing under the weight of someone else’s bad debt, mind you, just a firm deflection of responsibility.

The interesting question is what, precisely, she hocked, her work or her copyrights. Given that the lender (possibly slimed here as “a high-end pawn broker”) specializes in high-dollar art, probably the latter, which would pretty much cut her off from any future revenue. And with Goldman Sachs also asking for a piece of the pie, she’ll likely lose her home and equipment as well, leaving her dependent on new clients. Not fun.

This is just… sad.

Not so much because there’s a cartoonist who’d draw it, as because I’m seeing it linked approvingly by people who have access to wet matches, with which they can obviously no longer be trusted.

So, in a story about a well-placed State Department official on trial for spending the last 30 years spying for Cuba, what sort of direct quote do they lead off with?

"We were all appalled by the Bush years"

Because, y’know, that puts everything in perspective. If proven guilty, what we have here is someone who turned traitor because he started hating America during the Carter administration, but somehow, it’s still all about Bush. Fits the established narrative better, y’see.

Jon Wellinghoff, Chairman, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, “Earth Day” 2009:

I think baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism. Baseload capacity really used to only mean in an economic dispatch, which you dispatch first, what would be the cheapest thing to do. Well, ultimately wind's going to be the cheapest thing to do, so you'll dispatch that first. People talk about, 'Oh, we need baseload.' It's like people saying we need more computing power, we need mainframes. We don't need mainframes, we have distributed computing.

(via The National Review)