CRU Email Hack, Isocracy Network.. Inc?, RPG campaigns

[tcpip]

The CRU email hack seems to be much ado about nothing except that scientists can be snarky in emails. There has been some ironically predictable display of global warming skeptics being unskeptical of emails cobbled together over several years, and a parameterisation in some IDL code which is attempting to make tree-ring data fit instrumental observation. There is this thing called the divergence problem in dendroclimatology and to make dendroclimatic modelling programs more accurate some 'fudging' is required to fit instrumental records. The CRU of East Anglia University have some additional pertinent comments.

The latest Isocracy Newsletter is now available. It includes a review of Dominique Moisi's "The Geopolitics of Emotion", a campaign against a proposed escalation of 40,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan costing $100 billion USD, a secret copyright treaty and user disconnection in the UK and US, and the development of Isocracy across different social networking sites. I am pleased with how this small group of politically-interested people is developing. Perhaps early next year it can be formalised as an incorporated association in Melbourne, and start it's own public campaign; I was thinking of raising the spectre of free public transport which has received some previous support

A number of my longstanding roleplaying campaigns are coming to an end. My eighteen month Powers & Perils game has reached a point where all needs to be written up is the denouement. My HeroQuest Glorantha game, which has been going for almost three years is in the last couple of months by my estimation, as is my sixteen month RuneQuest Prax game. The short stint I had for Rolemaster Cyradon playtesting is also complete. Hopefully all this will give me some extra time to do some more RPG writing (yes, rather than playing - swings and roundabouts).

Comments

[loic.livejournal.com]

*sigh*

why am I not shocked that ESR is a global warming denier...

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

People choose what they want to believe. We all do it to an extent, and I guess ESR saw wanted to see smoking gun (oh dear, pun not intended), and therefore believed a bit of code to be such a gun. A person of a more conservative disposition would look more carefully and dispassionately.

[mr-figgy.livejournal.com]

You are welcome, my friend, to look at either of my manuscripts if you so choose. One claims it's 55000 words, the other nearing 90200--but in the latter's case, more like 83000 if you subtract a lot of fluff and "deleted scenes" added for the purpose of assisting a word war, some of which is interesting in itself or belongs elsewhere.

You're also welcome not to look at the first at all but just the second, which is organized in neat chapters and something resembling chronological sense, whereas at least one reader has said the first manuscript confused them in its jumping-aboutness.

I had such feelings about this "e-mails scandal", which fell out of the news really fast here, but wasn't sure enough to make a statement. Good to know my feelings are properly calibrated some of the time!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Not a problem; send them through to the email address listed on my userinfo page and I'll give them a look... In the meantime, feel free to mull over your thoughts on the CRU emails.

[mr-figgy.livejournal.com]

The e-mails and the way that blog post framed them seemed inconclusive from the beginning, though I took a wait-and-see approach. I don't think I'll be so needlessly quiet in the future.

First of all, I knew I was looking at a series of e-mails out of their original context. I'm not as well versed in dataspeak as I could be, so I could not conclude anything damning from the messages by themselves.

Second, the frame oh-so-helpfully provided by the blogger and other "smoking gunners" to help laymen like me understand, was as transparent as cellophane. I did not feel I could trust that interpretation of the messages as it seemed somebody was doing exactly what they accused the scientists of doing--shoehorning information into a context friendly to what they believe.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

The wait-and-see approach I think is actually the right one. Over the past week or so the AGW denial crowd have worked themselves into a feeding frenzy only to discover that there really isn't that much there at all. A lot of wasted energy on their part.

Given how few climate scientists adhere to the unorthodox view, perhaps this is not surprising. After all, it was a fairly simple matter for those who actually understood what was going on to point out what people were getting worked up about was actually quite explicable.

[mr-figgy.livejournal.com]

BTW, let me know if the forward arrived okay. I bungled the address the first time but upon closer inspection got it right.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, no problem whatsoever.

[laura-seabrook.livejournal.com]

Um, I misread a section above as "My eighteen month Powers & Penis game has...". Can't even begin to imagine what that game would be...

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Oh goodness. Eighteen months? Now that would be Power indeed!

[strang-er.livejournal.com]

Now i'm picturing Peter Garrett jerking about singing : "Whoa-oh, the power of the penis.."

I guess it is mightier than the sword.

(Gods, now i'm having even sillier He-Man images..)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

"Sometimes you've got to take the hardest line"

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

I am so glad Moisi's work was mentioned there!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Hey, thanks for writing it up. I did say that I was going to get reviews, but I certainly did expect one the geopolitics of cultural psychology to be the first one.

I have a few good links on a psychoanalytic study of war which I must find and slip into the comments field..

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

There is this thing called the divergence problem in dendroclimatology and to make dendroclimatic modelling programs more accurate some 'fudging' is required to fit instrumental records.

Regarding the divergence problem, why is dendroclimactic data used at all, if it has been demonstrably unreliable for the last 50 of the roughly 150 years that sufficient instrument readings are available to gauge its reliability?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

(Somehow I overlooked this)

I guess because the dendroclimatic data provides (a) an additional data point to read the past and (b) the 'instrument' sometimes has records dating back several hundred years.