Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Andy Gates' LiveJournal:

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Thursday, November 26th, 2009
2:07 pm	Zerg Rush The game is memetic warfare. The opponent has built a spawning pool (a PR industry) and is producing many zerglings (ideas with no real merit: one-hit monsters) in great quantity. The player has developed their tech tree (science) and has used it to build strong troops (verified, rational ideas). Given enough time, the strong troopers will win (tobacco/cancer, CFCs/ozone, etc etc). Is the zerg-rush model useful in suggesting tactics to use to speed up their victory? (7 Comments |Comment on this)
12:23 am	Worst Case Scenario The Copenhagen Diagnosis is an update to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report to cover research published since 2006. The blue squiggly line is satellite observations. The grey cone is the range of IPCC predictions - in this case for sea level rise. The observations closely track the worst case scenario. Oh. Shit. The IPCC's worst cases are pretty damn 'worst'. They're things like a Greenland melt this century, so there's something for the kids to look forward to. The false-flap around 'climategate'? It's trying to distract people from this. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
8:54 pm	The Price of Carbon Rowson just had this cartoon in the Guardian. Harsh, bad taste, but on the money (enhanced European windstorms are on the climate-change track - the insurance industry were discussing this at Copenhagen last year - and these intense rain events are what they do). Then someone pointed out that Rowson's cartoon is a riff on this classic Philip Zec cartoon of WW2. When you know that, it gets a whole lot more angry and a whole lot more bitter. And the faceless copper stops being a news story and becomes Everyman. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
10:42 am	Kneesy does it ( I aten't lame! ) (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 16th, 2009
12:06 am	Shooting stars! It's Leonids week so book some clear skys for Tuesday night. To quote New Scientist, "Earth will cut across the first such stream around 0900 GMT on 17 November, an event that is expected to produce dozens of meteors an hour. But the spectacle will reach its peak between 2100 and 2200 GMT, as Earth passes through two debris trails left by Tempel-Tuttle in 1466 and 1533." I think it's utterly great how we can say that these lights in the sky came from that snowball when it visited back in the Age of Princesses. That's awesome. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 9th, 2009
9:08 am	Druid Challenge - Muddy Funsters Well, I made 20 miles before all the wheels fell off my wagon. ( Wot happened ) This one is not 'unfinished business' ( What went wrong? ) Photos are here!  Current Mood: sore (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, November 6th, 2009
1:37 pm	Ask the Flist: Enterprise-scale printing? We've got 5000 Windows desktops and a Windows 2003 Enterprise two-node print cluster.  The print cluster carries 850 printers in 60 models from 10 manufacturors. It's creaking.  It's creaking particularly because HP (our main supplier) drivers share components and are crappy desktop-grade filth.  Every so often a change to one printer's spec will cascade through the whole model line or worse, the whole brand.  Joy is unfolding, from the heavens, like a lotus blossom of migraine flashes. Do you do enterprise-scale printing?  How the hell do you keep this ball of string tight?  (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
8:01 pm	The Economics of Climate Change Here's an interesting article: American economists were polled on climate change, and came back strongly.  I'd have expected more of a disconnect between the real world and the baffling handwaving of economics, but maybe I'm just not wise in economic theory. (Comment on this)
2:05 pm	The Wave - Climate Protest 5th Dec http://www.co-operative.coop/ethicsinaction/takeaction/thewave/about-The-Wave/ The Wave, on Saturday 5 December, will be a carnival style procession through the streets of London to call for international action on climate change. It is being organised by the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, which has been organising peaceful climate change marches since 2006 to keep the pressure on government for definite action on climate change. details of the day * Meeting from 12pm, Grovesner Square, central London * Starts at approximately 1pm * The route will flow from Grosvenor Square, via Piccadilly and Whitehall, to finally encircle the Houses of Parliament on both sides of the Thames. * A stunning finale will take place at 3pm as The Wave encircles the Houses of Parliament   And there's a local coach going up! Greenies and activists, you have a few days to convince me that this will be more worthwhile and less soul-crushing than the Iraq protest.  I can't face that level of cynical ignoring again.  I'd rather just go do something direct. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 30th, 2009
7:32 pm	School me on carb-loading Next Sunday is the marathon run.  I hear that one carb-loads for such things, and that carb-loading isn't just a big bowl of pasta the night before.  Edumacate me! (psst: www.justgiving.com/andygates) (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
11:00 pm	Bang! And The Beaufort Multiyear Ice Is Gone! David Barber, Manitoba Uni's big frosty boffin, went out looking for multiyear ice, and instead just found rotten, half-metre thick one-year stuff that an ice-capable ship can apparently crank through at thirteen knots.  This is navigable.  Forget the Northwest Passage, just ice-belt your boat and go for it, chew out a frasilicious sea-lane and make your millions. 1: Investment niche!  It's the coming growth area for shipping.  It'll take a while for ice-happy oil rigs to get ROI but shipping's faster. Go go gadget exploitation machine.  Ah well, it'll be good for Iceland. 2: This is another pile of scary to add to the pile of scary.  The exact pattern of melt each year is determined by weather - wind, for example, can pile ice up against land (slowing melt) or push it through straits into the open ocean (accelerating it).  In a melty year, though, the single-year ice goes away almost entirely.  In a non-warming Arctic some single-year ice persists and is built up; in the warming Arctic (3x global average, as both observed and modeled) it seems to have reached a critical tipping point.  This observation correlates well with Pen Haddow's hike'o'hell.  Massive Arctic summer melt now looks a lot like a dice-roll for weather each summer. 3: That single-year stuff is crap for polar bears.  I has a sad. I wonder what Northern Hemisphere weather is going to do with all that extra dark absorbing surface and all that extra humidity?  Place bets now! (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
8:08 pm	At least in Heaven I can ... surf? Work/Life win: "Boss, can I have a half-day leave? The surf is epic and I won't get there before dark unless I leave at lunchtime." Got to Croyde and the sets are marching slowly in, wide-spaced and stately.  The big stuff is overhead; the little stuff is keeping the half-term kids in a happy foamy place.  The wind's light and offshore, it's warm, there's broken low cloud: it's a perfect Autumn day. There's a tradition chez munky of getting a good first ride then fighting for ages; in this case after a Zenly foamy run, my bad feet cramped up super-fast and I left the kids and the handful of gnarly dudes to play: the gnarlies were way out, where the waves were maxing out around eight feet, getting up, getting down and getting utterly obliterated. While I was in, the sun came down and did that low metallic Highway to Heaven thing; the clouds were fringed with silver, the spray blowing off the tops of these huge waves curling and gleaming in the light.  I half expected Michael Landon to paddle past, or Harry Secombe in the lifeguard's ute.  As it was, of course, it made me think of Nick.  If there is a good place to go after you die, well, I hope his was a bit like that.  (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 25th, 2009
7:41 am	Science Museum Climate Poll http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/proveit.aspx "I've seen the evidence. And I want the government to prove they're serious about climate change by negotiating a strong, effective, fair deal at Copenhagen." ...and if you haven't seen the evidence and aren't convinced, the Science Museum has a ton of good stuff to enlighten. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 24th, 2009
8:29 am	A moment of clarity Politics and religion start from a priori assumptions and go from there to their conclusions, methods and so on.  Science starts with observations; this, I think, is why political and religious types often fail to grok science: they're starting on arbitrary foundations and they know that it's really all opinion.  Thus, when they hit a scientific consensus that is unpalatable - such as climate change and the responsibilities and requirements that come from it - they have great difficulty in parsing what to do.  An ecclesiastical-religion viewpoint would find accommodation; a political one would just shout it down or use rhetoric to get around it.  It's only the fundamental, dogmatic, wild-eyes-and-beard religions that are as implacable. And thus, this accusation of "global warming religion" -- it's nothing of the sort, but the accuser can't think of anything in their plastic worldview that's as immobile.  They've likely never come across something as immovable that is also unpalatable (gravity, after all, never offended anyone).  The only mental model that's available is religion.  Science always wins, because science is based on facts.  No amount of wishful thinking would make Lysenko's comradely wheat grow.  No amount of snark will stop CO2 absorbing heat. it makes me wonder if the cognitive dissonance and plain dumb fury that the denialsphere are feeling is similar to what geocentrists felt when Copernicus presented, and Kepler and Galileo later confirmed, that the Earth goes around the Sun. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
9:50 pm	Superfreakonomics and credibility The blogosphere is alight with critiques of Superfreakonomics, whose climate-change chapter appears to have been written in crayon by a drunken marmoset watching Fox News. Question is: Knowing how incompetent that chapter is, how can I trust any of the rest of the Freako oeuvre?  (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
2:41 pm	The stupid, it burns The Beeb's Have Your Say is flypaper for green-ink nutters.  The ones supporting the vile, racist puke-akke that is the BNP (download the current membership list here) do come across as even thicker than the regular biomass.  Take this gem: "what is so wrong with the BNP membership policy? We have ethnic organisations with policies that exclude others so why is it so wrong for the BNP? Take the Black Police Association. Is that not gender specific?" Where to start?  Oh, where to start?  The poster can't tell the difference between race and gender (and he means 'sex') - clearly they're all just rolled up into a bunch of fuzzy hippy feel-good bullshit in their frightened little rat-hole of a mind.  And 'ethnic organisations' kinda skips that the others are not political parties, who are required by law to allow everyone they aspire to govern to join.  I'm reaching the conclusion that the far right has two disctinct groups: stupid, angry, scared people (thugs and grannies); and clever, manipulative people who run the show, and who might believe anything at all but can at least put on a show. All this brouhaha is contingent on the recession: fear and uncertainty are amplified by financial stress, just as they're numbed by comfort, so the next year - between when the numbers start turning up and when we feel it on the street - will be a pinchy, nasty place in politics.  (2 Comments |Comment on this)
9:17 am	Rejection! Noes!  I didn't win the Cthulhu Haiku contest!  Writers on the flist, I grok your pain.   ;) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 18th, 2009
8:12 pm	State of the Doomion Both NOAA and NASA rate September's global temperatures as the second-hottest on record, narrowly missing the 2005 peak (by well under a tenth of a degree).  Meanwhile, a first look at the data from Pen Hadow's arctic ice survey - the Catlin Ice Survey - show that ice is thinner than expected, bringing the ice-free Summer Arctic forward from around 2050-ish to around 2030-ish.  You'll get to see it. Thin ice means ice that has formed this year.  It's relatively flimsy and breaks up in heavy weather, and broken ice melts faster.  Hadow's team got the data by walking across the ice with an auger, drilling holes, and measuring how far down the water was.  Pretty hands-on stuff.  This was married up to the satellite data, allowing better calibration of ice-sensing kit (mostly radar, IIRC).  The spiffy radar sled they were supposed to be using broke down at the start, which is why they had to go oldschool. I think even the dimmest bastard out there can grasp the technique here:  Drill a hole, plunge a stick into it, and say "holy fucking shit".  Repeat a couple thousand times.  (Polar data is available for all, at the Polar Data Catalog) (Comment on this)
Thursday, October 15th, 2009
10:21 pm	Lenny? Omid? Tag, boys, you're it. The race relations people have told the BNP to stop using weasel terms like "the Anglo-Saxon folk community" and the "Celtic / Norse folk community" in their membership rules.  Phrases like those are academically bogus and more importantly, are white-supremacist dog-whistle code for WHITE PEOPLE.  Oddly enough, saying only white people can join breaches all sorts of race law.  They're going to have an EGM.  They'll have to comply or they will go illegal, as I understand it.  This means either: 1: They'll comply, grumble, and then wheel out their token Member Of Albedo.  If this happens, I'd love to see some big funny important respected but not white zomg celebs join up and just turn the party into a laughing stock before hijacking it and closing it down.   2: They'll go all martyr-whiney, schism, and the real hatebags will go underground, and we'll get the Real BNP.  Which will, at least, prove that they are the dirtbags we've been saying they are. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
12:52 am	This made my day This really has made my day: @MarsPhoenix -- 1st day of Martian spring (north hemi) is Oct 26. The team will wait til January (& longer sunlight hours) before attempting contact. It's probable that Phoenix is a dead stick.  It outlived its planned end-of-mission date in August 2008, giving a last 'peep' on November 2nd.  The dim light of the Martian polar winter was too weak to charge its batteries, so after reboots and brownouts, Phoenix shut down. It's been frozen in drifts of CO2 ice since then.  In fact, Phoenix's lidar spotted falling snow in high cloud (this is water ice; the CO2 comes when it gets colder!) before it went down.  It is likely that the winter has killed the old bird (Phoenix was not designed to survive the winter, and extreme cold is ever so bad for electronics), but it has a 'Lazarus mode' : if there's power, it'll try to boot and say hello.  If the boot fails or the communications fail, it shuts down and tops up its batteries for a while before having another go; if Phoenix is capable of life, then eventually it should start up fully. That would be awesome on a scale like unto the Incredible Rovers That Just Will Not Die.  And I just want to hear it tweet again.  :) Current Mood: impressed (Comment on this)