Explaining Away Climategate - 1

Climategate was triggered by the release of thousands of emails and computer programs from the UK Climactic Research Unit (CRU) late in 2009. See Jon Stewart's hilarious and surprisingly fact-filled take and this attempt at Explaining Away Climategate.

This is the first of a series of new Topic postings that detail the viewpoints of the major groups involved in the controversy:

Originality or lack thereof

[from Joel] David Hume was of the opinion that nothing is totally original. All our creative ideas are either rework of the ideas of others or the result of new information from our senses. This is another way of saying that one does not have a divine Muse that sends ideas from out of the blue. Here's an interesting example.

I'm preparing a talk for our philosophy club that extracts notions from pop music (mostly oldies) that contain the kernal of an idea expounded upon by classical philosophers and/or are worth some small-group discussion at our meeting. Since most pop music is about moon-June-spoon romantic love, it's taken me some time (a few weeks) to gather together enough material for a session lasting an hour and one half. I was going to post the list of tunes on this blog today for your input and suddenly realized that Ira had done something of this sort with Gilbert and Sullivan about a year ago. What I thought was a novel idea on my part turns out to be just an extension of Ira's idea. So, although I will post the tunes I'm going to use as the basis of a philosophical discussion, my main point turns out to be that David Hume was right about originality.

Sunspots Coming 'Round the Mountain When They Come?

The best experts at NASA have been predicting the imminent ramp-up of Sunspot cycle #24 since 2006. Well, here it is almost 2010, over three years later, and there has been a bit of an upsurge in Sunspot activity. At long last, it appears a Sunspot ramp-up may be coming 'round the mountain* pretty soon - but they won't be drivin' six white horses when they come!

The base figure above is from NASA/NOAA and shows their latest prediction (May 2009) which is the lowest and latest of the four red hoops. You can see that the actual Sunspot observations (black jig-jags with blue smoothing) do not quite match up with NASA's latest prediction. They also fall far short of the previous predictions which I have annotated into the figure as the three higher red hoops. [Click on image for larger version.]

Just some thoughts about life.

[from John] Ira’s latest posting regarding statistics brings to mind my current gripe – frustration? – with the information age. Can anyone be reasonably certain that the information they possess, the information they rely on when they go to the polls is valid and current? I don’t think so. I would like to use an analogy; my grandfather lived in a small town in Minnesota that had a single weekly newspaper. When voting for those seeking national office he only had the information that paper provided. He flew by the seat of his pants – his intuition. My father, living in the same town, at a later time, had a daily paper, a daily (weekly?) Minneapolis paper and primitive radio for information so he still flew by the seat of his pants because his sources were limited. Today I fly by the seat of my pants because I am inundated with information I cannot trust.
I have come to the conclusion that the best way to handle information in the information age is to form an original hypothesis upon which to measure new information discarding some yet be willing to modify the hypothesis if new information seems valid. Keep an open mind but don’t be fooled by charlatans.
The following are my current positions on some items of national issues.

LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND STATISTICS (Part 6)

STATISTICS OF HEALTH CARE SPENDING
Health Care reform has been a hot topic where statistics have been used to: Abuse anecdotal math to falsify the truth and truthify falsehood.

(This is the sixth of the series on misuse of statistics. For the earlier postings, click: 1-Going to St. Ives, 2-Playing Percentages, 3-Correlation and Causation, 4-Fun with the Normal Curve, 5-Global Warming.)

In a December 2009 posting, I pointed out that the map of per capita Medicare spending by county in the US looked a lot like the political division between the "Blue Counties" (Democrats, L-Minds) and the "Red Counties" (Republicans, C-Minds).

Since counties are so numerous and therefore confusing, I used Congressional Budget Office 2004 statistics of per capita Medicare spending on a statewide basis to show that the top five Highest Spending States tended to be Blue States and the top five Lowest Spending States tended to be Red States.

(My stated purpose -agenda if you like- was to indicate that Liberals consume an outsized share of the common pot of health care resources, as compared to Conservatives who take a smaller piece of the pie per capita.)

The Blind Side - Surprise Hit Movie

My favorite line in this movie is when Sean Tuohy (Tim McGraw) asks his wife Leigh Anne (Sandra Bullock):

"Who would've thought we'd have a black son before we met a Democrat?"

Do Liberals Consume More Health Care than Conservatives?

The stereotypical Conservative (C-Mind) is well-off financially, attends religious services regularly, and tends to vote Republican, while the stereotype Liberal (L-Mind) is less well-off, less likely to attend religious services, and tends to vote Democratic. Of course there are many well-known exceptions, but I think reasonable people would accept these generalizations on average. One would think that C-Minds, having more disposable income, would tend to spend more on medical care than their poorer L-Mind colleagues. If one thinks that, one would be surprised by the following maps. [Click maps for larger versions.]