States

I've made another pilgrimage down to the States and or course it was a total blast. It is so good to see old friends again and renew old acquaintances and use lots of tp :) its was tons of fun just hanging out and playing games and doing some other stuff that I will refrain from telling you just inc ase any cops read this blog :P I haven't even left yet and I already feel like coming back. Oh and did I mention the Beamer my good friends Re and Greg gave me for free? Awesome times! Here are some pictures:

This is my new beamer behind those studly young men

Cheers!...

Rudolf isn't so lonely anymore

What kind of holiday would it be without breaking something?

A few of us crazy ppl

Lots of fun I tell you.

Hi

Just wanted to let you know that I am alive. Christmas is such a busy time of year especially when your car breaks down and you are working 11 hours a day and you have a christmas party of some sort to go to about every other day and you have to pack up all your stuff so that you can be cleared out of your room by the end of the week and you are flying down to the states for a few days on a pretty much last minute idea and you have to figure out all the paperwork involved in taking a car back from said flight down to the States. Yes indeed. Not much time to post, but after the holidays are over, I will have much to post on. I need to get pictures from people too, but right now I need to go to bed. 4:30 up tomorrow. Yippee.

Is God a Killjoy?

I'm reading a book called the Ten(der) Commandments by Ron Mehl and it has really made me stop and think so I though I would share some of the gleanings I've gotten from it so far with you.

So often when people think of God and the bible they see someone who is a killjoy. They read the Ten Commandments and the hear rattling chains and clanking prison doors. They see these Commands as the harsh, legalistic, confining commandments of a god who finds some kind of sadistic joy in watching people suffer as they try to keep his laws. Is this really the case? Are the Ten Commandments a binding burden on us that God has put there just because he can?

Have you ever stopped and taken a moment to read through Exodus 19 in its lead up to the giving of the Ten Commands in Exodus 20? 'The Lord called to Moses out of the mountain, saying, "Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on Eagles' wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel."' (Ex 19:3-6)Did you hear that? In his introduction to the Ten Commandments God talks about bearing his people up on eagles wings. The Lord was reminding them of how much he had done and how he had saved them from oppression and slavery. How can a God who loves his children so much that he will use an analogy like that of a mother eagle teaching her young to fly and making sure they don't get hurt, give unloving commands? No! God's commandments are expressions of his love and care and concern for his people. They aren't just some arbitrary laws that he has given to makes us unhappy, they are the loving words of a loving God. "I bore you up on eagles wings!"

love can come in many different shapes. It might come as a quick hug from a friend when you need it the most, it might come as a word of encouragement or a box of chocolates, or a love letter, or a blood soaked cross on Calvary's hill, or it might even show up written in stone. I might come as Ten Commandments. God has written us a love letter (the bible) and it is full of stories about him and those that follow him, it is full of wisdom and poetry, it is full of fantastic and glorious stories about what he is like, and it is full of advice. Loving advice. Fatherly advice. Perfect advice. Ten Commandment advice. Who wouldn't want to listen to commands like this?

Dilbert

Have you ever had this happen to you?



I love Dilbert!

Global Warming Part I: The Science?

This has been rattling around in my head for some time now, but as I was writing this up I found I had far too much to say for one post and so I've broken this down into a multi-part series. Part I is about the science behind the whole Global Warming fad.

Global warming has become the hot topic of the day. It seems hardly a day goes by that we don't hear something about it in the news and politicians are going on and on about it and what we should do about it. Usually this takes the form of regulating carbon emissions and many countries and states have already put in place restrictions on these emissions. A lot of people are very worried about global warming and what it will do to us all, so much so that a group of politicians got together and decided to enact something call the Kyoto Protocol which requires assenting nations to greatly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. But what exactly is all the hype about? Should we really be getting all worked up about global warming and be spending trillions of dollars in an attempt to curb it? I think not. Let me explain why.

First of all it's poor science. Well actually to be more precise, it is not science at all. You see, science involves using the scientific method to arrive at a conclusion. This means it needs two key things: observable and measurable evidence, and repeatability. Thus for example something like the law of gravity is scientific. We can observe what happens when we drop something and we can measure the acceleration change and we can do this over and over and over again making us extremely certain that this law holds true.

Global warming on the other hand does not involve repeatability of any kind since it is merely conjecture about the the future. Also, It only involves evidence insofar as it extrapolates far beyond what is mathematically and scientifically acceptable, and it ignores true evidence in that most of the parameters in models have to be guessed at or estimated since we cannot now everything about our climate. It is far to complicated for even the most powerful computers to come even close to calculating the effect of every parameter, without even considering the fact that we are far from know what exactly all these effects are. Let me briefly illustrate this fact. There is something that is known as the butterfly effect I know that link is quite technical but the point of what I'm trying to show you is that potentially every flutter of a butterfly's wings can have a huge effect on the weather and thus unless our models account for every flutter of every butterfly's wing, ever bird that flies, every man and animal and plant and fish that moves on this earth, unless it accounts for every fluctuation in the sun's energy output, unless it accounts for all the forest fires and volcanoes, unless it accounts for so many parameters that we can never know, it will not be truly accurate. The question is how accurate do we have to be to have a reasonable model? How much stuff can we ignore and how much do we need to include? We don't know. We are missing the repeatability factor and so much of what is done is just educated guesswork. The parameters used and the weight they are given in the models is guesswork. The model designers use the parameters they think matter the most and then assign them the values they think they will have.

Now of course we don't need to know any of these things to be able to say that global warming will happen. If, for example, we were to look at global temperatures and say that for the last 500 year the temperature has always gone up be 0.01 degrees per year we would be able to say with a large degree of certainty that it will continue to do so. However to look at the approximately 30 years of data that we have indicating a global warming trend and extrapolate that into the next 100+ years is HORRIBLE science. I would receive an instant F if I tried to do anything of that sort on a lab or assignment. With only 30 years of data you cannot extrapolate more than 5 years into the future and still have any degree of certainty. For example if we were to look at the 30 year warming trend that occurred from ~1915-1945 we would predict that average world temps would be about 1 degree F higher than they are right now. We can't use the data that we have to extrapolate into the future until we have much more of it.

Therefore, we see that since the whole global warming theory relies on simplified parameter inputs (and therefore is highly susceptible to the preconceptions and assumptions of the person creating the model and entering the parameters) and also has no repeatability and cannot be verified or tested it is not true science.

Coming next: The consensus?

Get Firefox

Yesterday when I was looking at my blog at work I was forced to use Internet Explorer to view it and I noticed something about it. IE pretty much sucks of course, but I didn't realize just how badly it was displaying my blog, so if you are using IE and you see a messed up looking 097 across the top of it and you have to scroll down past all the posts to be able to see the links and stuff on my sidebar, I apologize. I apologize on behalf microsoft and the developers of IE, but I also apologize on my own behalf for not pointing you toward the solution seeing that about 60% of my pageviews come from people using IE. The solution you see is really quite easy. I could recode my whole page and fight with it until it works in IE, but I'm kind of lazy so I'll tell you how to fix it: Just GET FIREFOX. I have a link on my sidebar if you scroll down(WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY down if you're using IE :-P) Just click on that and you'll be able to download firefox for free.

I've been using Firefox to browse the web for about a year now and I've never looked back. Its a much better browser than Ineternet Explorer in pretty much every way so you should really get it. You'll be amazed at how much better my blog looks, and the rest of your surfing experience with be improved too :) Its worth the download.

It's Raining

So I'm at work right now and it is pouring rain so I'm not to busy, but the sad thing is I have to go out in said rain (and blustery cold wind feeling like -4) and try to write stuff down and give it to the truck drivers. Needless to say I am cold right now. I just got in and I feel wetter than a fish in the ocean and colder than a polar bear on an iceberg. It took me about 10 minutes just to type this up because my fingers are so cold they are refusing to move. Hope your day at work is going well too :)

Dave Westy

PostScript: As the last truck drove off the site the sun came out. How......nice.