Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

I stumbled across an article in Forbes via GeekPress today called " Eight Ways Goofing Off Can Make You More Productive ". Now this sounds like the kinda management theory I could buy into. The author, Susan Adams, refers to James A. Levine of the Mayo Clinic saying: '... you work in concentrated 15-minute periods, divided up by breaks. “The thought process is not designed to be continuous,” he tells the  Times . He points out that efficient, productive work is much more valuable than long hours of wasted or partially productive time. ..' That is pretty much my take on my own productivity during a work day, with the exception of those rare longer periods of white hot intensity, when you are "in the zone" working on a creation that is attempting to pull together diverse threads of thought and that can't be let go off lest the whole thing collapses losing shape and coherence. Read the whole thing . It's not long. And there are only 8 items in th

If the judicial system of a major Western European nation can convict and imprison seismological scientists for not accurately predicting the severity and timing of an unpredictable earthquake ( this really happened this week in Italy ), is it any wonder that climate scientists have felt the need to constantly predict imminent climate catastrophe as a means of self preservation against the inevitable happening of natural catastrophes, which are certain to occur at some unpredictable time in the future. But it does somewhat undermine our confidence in the impartiality of the scientific reporting process if they have such a substantial and real incentive to overestimate catastrophe.

 Justice trumps Freedom. Freedom trumps Truth. Truth trumps Justice. I am prompted to revisit the above hubristically concocted heuristic from the early days of this blog, by an interesting paper I stumbled across recently by John P. Anderson of the Mississippi College of Law, Trading Truth for Legitimacy in the Liberal State: Defending John Rawl's Pragmatism . Anderson states: "Philosophers have challenged the idea of justice without truth as incoherent; and social critics have attacked it as naive. This paper defends Rawl's pragmatism against such critics and argues that the future of liberal constitutionalism may depend on its success". That's a pretty high burden to place on the success of a defence of pragmatism. If it's any assistance I am prepared to suggest that my heuristic might, if someone could only explain it half competently, partially lend support to Anderson's case. The case and the heuristic share many potential and actual threats

" The fight for freedom begins with free speech " Aung San Suu Kyi, The Observer, Sunday 11 March 2012 Aung San Suu Kyi was not saying this specifically in response to the report published 11 days earlier by the Honourable Ray Finkelstein QC on 28 February 2012 of his "Independent Inquiry into the Media and Media Regulation", but she could have been. Mr Finkelstein says in his report to the Australian Federal Labor government, who commissioned it, the following: 11.44 To rectify existing and emerging weaknesses in the current regulatory structures it is recommended that there be established an independent statutory body which may be called the "News Media Council", to oversee the enforcement of standards of the news media. ... 11.55 The News Media Council requires clearly defined functions. It is not recommended that one of them be the promotion of free speech. There are other ample bodies and persons in the community who do that more than adequ

Dr David Evans, formerly a full time consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office and a PhD from Stanford, has written a brief Skeptics Case which was been republished recently on WUWT . It is a succinct and well argued case essentially making many very similiar, if not identical, points to those made by Professor Richard Lindzen in his presentation to Westminster about the exaggeration of CO 2 forcings in the CAGW climate models. Here's Dr Evan's take: ... This is an unusual political issue, because there is a right and a wrong answer and everyone will know which it is eventually. People are going ahead and emitting CO2 anyway, so we are doing the experiment: either the world heats up by several degrees by 2050, or it doesn’t. Notice that the skeptics agree with the government climate scientists about the direct effect of CO2; they just disagree just about the feedbacks. The climate debate is all about the feedbacks; everything else is merely a sideshow. Yet hardly

What's Up With That has directed me to a  tutorial in physics and science contained in a comment by Professor Robert Brown of the Duke University Physics department on a post on WUWT about Climate Science and Special Relativity . I enjoyed Professor Brown's post as much for its excellent exegesis on the nature of scientific certainty in physics ,as for its application of scientific principle to the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. This is Professor Brown's take: You compare the predictions of their “catastrophic” theory five, ten, twenty years back to the actual data . If there is good agreement, it is at least possible that they are correct. The greater the deviation between observed reality and their predictions, the more likely it is that their result is at least incorrect if not actual bullshit. That’s all. Accurately predicting the future isn’t proof that they are right, but failing to predict it is pretty strong evidence that they are wrong.

Professor Richard S. Lindzen of the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gave a seminar to the House of Commons Committee Rooms in Westminster, London on 22 February 2012. Here is the link to the PDF of the slides he used at that seminar. There are many interesting quotes from these slides. This is one which took my fancy: “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.” Of the many new things I learnt from this, one is a better understanding of the importance of the scale of the attributed amplification effect of "forcings" from alleged positive feedbacks on the amount of temper

There'd be a huge scramble of egg, vegetable and waste matter on the faces of, and obstructing the vision of, the vast worldwide army of over-sensitive and deeply concerned prognosticators in politics, academia, journalism, workplaces and kitchens, who have been scolding us all about our carbon emissions for nearly 2 decades. And, make no mistake, this is now a completely legitimate question. Anyone genuinely interested in and curious about climate change must start asking themselves this in the light of the confirmation from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Institute and the British Met Office that there has been no no material change in the Earth's surface temperature in the last 15 years . CO 2 emissions have continued to rise unabated over that same 15 years but the planet has stubbornly refused to heat up. It looks mightily like there must be an explanation other than increases in atmospheric CO 2 for the global warming in the 20 year odd pe

It is now clear that Tony Hodges, Prime Minister Gillard's now former Media Adviser, rang  UnionsACT secretary Kim Sattler on Thursday 26 January. Ms Sattler is quoted in the Daily Telegraph as saying : "I spoke to Tony Hodges on the phone. He mentioned that Tony Abbott had made a statement about the embassy, that it shouldn't exist at all, ... I do now accept that wasn't what was Tony Abbott said." The same day ("Australia Day") Ms Sattler  according to the Herald Sun  posted this statement on her Facebook page: "Tony Abbott just announced the Tent Embassy should be closed down and a huge crowd from the Embassy went to greet him and he had to be rushed away with a police escort!" On Saturday 28 The Prime Minister  is quoted in the Sunday Telegraph as saying : "At no point did Mr Hodges say to Ms Sattler that Mr Abbott had suggested that the tent embassy be torn down or removed in any way," Ms Sattler says Mr Hodges told her

It is heartening to potentially see emerging to legitimacy in contemporary polemics the notion that employment, with all its attendant rights and long term benefits for the employed, may not be an optimal relationship for the encouragement and fostering of success and prosperity in small business. This article, " The Growth Agenda - the Self Employment Option " by Dr Madsen Pirie of the Adam Smith Institute advocates for "all small and medium enterprises to treat their workers as self-employed people under contract". He argues that "employers could take on extra people on a self employed basis without imposing any additional burden on themselves". This argument strikes me intuitively as quite compelling. Inevitably any discussion of possible changes to the existing structures for workers' rights can provoke unnecessarily over emotional responses from the entrenched conservatism of trade unions and their enablers in protecting prevailing guild privi