For 3 years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube. Now the tables are turned. It's time for us to take matters into our own hands.
We know who you are, we know where you live and we could come after you in ways too horrible to tell. ...
Mashable is now reporting on a staggering increase of Monty Python DVDs sold on Amazon soon after the Python crew made some of their their more popular material free on Youtube. And by staggering, I mean 23,000% worth. Mashable notes that Monty Python’s DVDs climbed to the #2 spot on Amazon’s Movie’s and TV Bestseller List, and you don’t have to be a genius to follow that the sales were probably influenced by the Amazon links found on all of their Youtube clips.
As proven by the fiery exchange below, the debate over climate change couldn’t be further from settled
Last week, Lawrence Solomon’s column described a study in Nature purporting to show that Antarctica was warming — an important finding for those who argue that urgent government action is required to counter man-made climate change. Solomon’s column cited several prominent scientists who cast doubt on the validity of the study. In response, Michael Mann, one of the authors of the Antarctica study, wrote a commentary that was published by Google News. Mann’s response, and Solomon’s reaction to Mann, appear below. Please note that Mann’s piece appears exactly as it was published by Google News.
Conclusion about the new study on Antarctica: The verdict is not yet in, although since the time of writing last week, the prospects for Mann et al. have gone from bad to worse. An embarrassing data error has come to light with the study, charges of unethical behaviour involving Mann’s supporters now appear all over the blogosphere, Mann’s Web site, RealClimate.org, has acknowledged behaviour that many scientists consider unethical, and terms such as “slander” and “abuse” are flying around, along with demands for an apology.
The global warming debate is heating up, even if Earth is not.
Various scientists immediately spotted the flaw in Steig’s methodology of combining satellite evidence since 1979 with temperature readings from surface weather stations. The flaw they identified was that, since Antarctica has so few weather stations, the computer Steig used was programmed to guess what data they would have produced had such stations existed. In other words, the findings that caused such excitement were based on data that had been made up.
Even one of the IPCC’s lead authors sniffed a problem:
‘This looks like a pretty good analysis, but I have to say I remain somewhat skeptical,’ Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research said in an e-mail. ‘It is hard to make data where none exist.’
As Mark Twain might have put it, there are three kinds of lies -- lies, damned lies and global warming science.
A singularity in the mathematical formulation of a physical theory means that a variable which represents a physical quantity becomes infinite within a finite time. This is, actually, not that rare a phenomenon in non-linear theories. For example, in General Relativity, Einstein's field equations when applied to the gravitational collapse of a very massive star develop infinities in density and curvature at the centre of the system. Another famous example of a non-linear theory is fluid dynamics as described by the Navier-Stokes equations - and this is also a habitat of nice singularities.
But I was fascinated most by what I've learned since then about singularities in fluid dynamics - singularities that actually occur in the kitchen, every time a drop of water falls off the tap.
