The off topic off topic thread

[Freegrass]

Did anyone here see the movie The Wicker Man yet? It's a 1973 movie that's completely insane, but so relevant today... It's my new favorite movie of all time now... WATCH IT!

These are my fleeting thoughts, that I posted on my Facebook today...
They're not about Elon Musk, or vaccine and Ukraine war conspiracy theories, so I'm sure they won't get posted by Neven...
HEMP IS CANNABIS NEVEN!!!!!


Why am I in so much pain? Maybe it's because I'm an asshole? Because I hate people? 🤔

But I love all the other animals on this planet that don't destroy it...

We are just one species on this planet, and we're destroying the thing that created us... Nature...

God is love... So why do religious extremists hate so much?

Christianity, Islam, Judaism... They all hate so much...
Killing in the name of God...
The Spanish inquisition...
It never ends...

For thousands of years, religious nutcases have been hating and killing in the name of God...
And they call me delusional?
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I'm crazy, because I don't conform to the norm...
I use "drugs"...

I was raised in a bar from the age of 6 (it was actually called a "clubhouse", in a gymnastics club. But it was still a bar where my father got completely wasted in every weekend)

But I'm a drug user... Because I smoke weed...
The lesser kind of "drug" that's actually helping people in old folks homes in Israel use less pharmaceutical drugs...

But hey... Who cares about science these days?
Everything is rhetoric, and what you "believe" in...

But God is love...
Where has all the love gone?
Why are we destroying the garden of Eden?

People are idiots...
And I hate people...
So you can all go fuck yourself!
You have no idea how bad climate change is...
You just keep believing those extremely rich criminals that keep telling you on TV and social media that everything is gonna be alright...

NO, IT'S NOT ALRIGHT!!!!!!!!
Humanity is doomed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!...

But hey… I'm an idiot...
What do I know?
What does Greta and so many others know?
What we know doesn't fit in with your comfortable cozy life...
So we must be idiots...

Alcohol isn't a drug, right?

KEEP DREAMING IDIOTS!!!!

Facts are a bitch...


Part two, in response to a reaction to that post...


Good people go insane, because they can't handle this unjust world...

Bad people on the other hand are thriving, because they feed on the lies and the pain and destruction of love and truth...

Trump is all that is wrong with this world, and he will probably become president again...

It's a sad sad world we live in today... And good people suffer...

Ignorance is bliss... Why do we care? The end is nigh... And the Buddha taught us that everything is impermanent... Accept the things you can not change... So be a slave to the evil that ruins this world...

Sorry... But I can't do that... I'm an activist...

Get up, stand up, stand up for your right!

But evil is winning...
It's so much easier to be ignorant to the truth...


So happy I stopped watching the ice melt...
Watching ice melt must be the most insane thing you can do with your life...
We all know where this will end...

[Alexander555]

So this is a rossby wave on it's way to the surface ?

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/rossby-wave.html#:~:text=Rossby%20waves%2C%20also%20known%20as,naturally%20occur%20in%20rotating%20fluids.

[kassy]

No that is the total temperature profile. It is probably in there somewhere but it is not the same.

As usually with oceanography and atmospheric science it is more compicated:

Rossby wave development in the central Pacific in the initiation stage of ENSO and the subsequent reflection of Kelvin waves at the western boundary seems to be an important mechanism for further development of ENSO. The development of Kelvin waves forced by the surface wind in the far-western Pacific cannot be ruled out as a possible mechanism for the growth of ENSO. While Kelvin waves in the far-western Pacific serve as an intiation mechanism of ENSO, they also cause the termination of existing ENSO condition in the central and eastern Pacific, thereby leading to a biennial oscillation over the tropical Pacific. The Kelvin waves from the western Pacific erode the thermocline structure in the central Pacific preventing further devlopment of ENSO and ultimately terminating it. It should be emphasized that this wave mechanism is clear and active only in the biennial mode.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00703-002-0547-9

[Alexander555]

That pool of warm water , it moves to the surface ? It's not that the sun or winds are warming the water.

[Alexander555]

I assume the arrows represend the direction of the wind, or the sea current . To get that hot water down, that's probably downwelling/ upwelling. Is there also a colder as normal pool of water before a La Niña ?

[Alexander555]

This has a nice visualization in it, of the cold pool replacing the warm pool.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/ElNino#:~:text=This%20allows%20great%20masses%20of,of%20South%20and%20Central%20America.

[Alexander555]

Some about the upwelling/downwelling.

https://rwu.pressbooks.pub/webboceanography/chapter/9-5-currents-upwelling-and-downwelling/

[Renerpho]

Here's some self-promotion... Together with a historian from Australia, I have recently published an article (in English) about a German emigrant to Australia who fought in the Eureka Rebellion of 1854. That article is now available online, here.

D. Bamberger, A. Young: Edward Thonen. A forgotten Eureka rebel. WikiTree Germany Connector's Challenge. Zeitgeschichtliche Sammlung, Zentrum für Stadtgeschichte und Industriekultur Wuppertal. 2023.

It has nothing to do with sea ice or climatology, but if you like history and a nice crime story(!), you may enjoy this. There is a brief version on Wikipedia, based on our work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Thonen
And it has been almost a year in the making, so I am just glad to have it finished!

[kassy]

He was not a very good criminal. Fun hobby digging up bits of lives from the past.
Ina part about the robbery the pound signs are used but sometimes quotes use a version which looks like an l. Some typography convention at that time?

[Renerpho]

He was not a very good criminal. Fun hobby digging up bits of lives from the past.

Yes, on both parts. We'd have never heard about his story if his escape had been successful, so I'm glad it wasn't.

In a part about the robbery the pound signs are used but sometimes quotes use a version which looks like an l. Some typography convention at that time?

450l. was just another way to write £450. Today we would write 450 lb if the £ symbol isn't available, where lb is short for "libra pondo", the Roman name of the unit. The modern symbol £ is just an L with a line through it, which stands for "libra".

A quantity of money could be written like 1l 2s 6d, which is "1 pound 2 schillings and 6 pence". This would later be written £1-2-6, which is how it was done until 1971.

[Renerpho]

See my signature? Before I came here I was confused about this subject. Having listened to your lecture I am still confused. But on a higher level. That quote is widely attributed to Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), but there is no proof that he actually said that, which is why websites like Wikiquote don't include it.

Quoteinvestigator.com ran an article about it in 2010, but that article leaves me unsatisfied. They only say that it was given by BrainyQuote, and that they had found "no compelling evidence that Fermi said these sentences". I expected more from Quoteinvestigator, but what can you do? Right, try to locate the source yourself.

What did I find? Firstly, BrainyQuote have probably taken it from Alan Lindsay Mackay's "A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations", which was published in 1991.[1] Of course the inclusion of the quote in that book is no proof that the attribution is correct.
Attributions to Fermi can be found from as early as the 1960s.[2][3] The saying was famous enough to make it into popular science articles by 1957,[4] and into political speeches by 1962.[5] It is first quoted in something close to its modern form in a 1953 nuclear physics textbook by Emilio Segrè.[6] Fermi was Segrè's doctoral advisor, and one of his closest friends.

[sidd]

One of my favorite aphorisms was a similar construction about mathematica (fill in language of the day) allowing you to make more sophisticated errors than MACSYMA ...

sidd

[kassy]

It might very well be a joke he used in teaching. To actually say that to a known scientist would be quite savage.

I don´t think we have an actual source for Einstein talking about bees either.

[Renerpho]

I don´t think we have an actual source for Einstein talking about bees either.

If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left.

We don't have a source that Einstein ever said this. And even if we did, Einstein wouldn't be the original source.
We have an "if I remember well, it was Einstein who said" source from 1941, but the quote was widely used already before Einstein became famous. Charles Darwin wrote something close to it in the 3rd edition of "On the Origin of Species" (1861), and that's probably where the quote originated.
In this case quoteinvestigator.com have done a thorough job.

[Renerpho]

RIP Saleemul Huq (1952-2023)

[Alexander55]

Maybe a stupid question. But is there a relation between warmer oceans and air pressure in winter ? If 90 % of all extra heat goes into oceans. And land can not hold heat very long, like in winter. That means that the winter situation between land and oceans will only get bigger. The pic shows high pressure over the sea , and low pressure over land. It makes me think about these cold bursts over Texas.

[Renerpho]

Together with a historian from Australia, I have recently published an article (in English) about a German emigrant to Australia who fought in the Eureka Rebellion of 1854. That article is now available online, here.

I spoke about that story on an Australian podcast this week (part 2 will come out on Wednesday):
https://omny.fm/shows/in-black-and-white-1/the-diamond-thief-who-became-a-eureka-hero-part-1

[SeanAU]

that thing they invented, the internet ....

Where do we start? The modern website—not dissimilar to the clade of YouTube Video—is bedrocked solely on the pillars of: ‘monetization’. That means every conceivable ergonomic, UI, and user experience manifestation is completely at the behest of keeping eyes glued, fingers clicking, souls sacrificing at the inhuman altar of ‘Metrics’.

This translates into padding every square-inch of textual real-estate with as much empty fluff and flummery as possible, so as to keep those digital bean-counters whirring along. In real terms, it means the first 70-85% of every article you find is blighted like a limpet-wracked whaler hull with verbal noise: empty blather, unneeded setup and ‘contextualizations’, unasked for historical background and explanatory longueur which seems to drag on forever and ever, and can be confidently skipped. Finding a ‘How-To’ tutorial these days is an exercise in futility; one must negotiate a gamut of dead-ends and verbal off-ramps to reach the pith.

Oh, but if it weren’t for the irritation of it all!

Before the era of Google Adsense turned the Web into a hypermarket of sleezy commercialization and transactionalism, many websites retained a sense of dignity—not to speak of originality—in their point-to-point directness. Now, everything is a see-through contrivance geared wholly towards keeping you somnambulantly ‘plugged in’ to the almighty Adsense Matrix.

It all seemed to go down hill around the mid-2000’s, when the first inkling of the ‘Big Tech’ sprawl began to eat its way through the astro-turfed soil of the digital world like acid rain, greedily gobbling up all that was pure and genuine as they coalesced into the monopolistic godheads they now so unabashedly represent.

Then, as the Obama Era unleashed a rogue-wave of cultural disintegration, birthing the modern Woke Era, with its attendant digital sequestrations and industrial-scale deplatforming, the ‘Web’ turned another critical corner in its descent toward moribundity. The now-dominant Big Tech Hall Monitors became riot-police and gatekeeper in one, smoting down the sunless pate of any poor schmo who dared lean an elbow on the hallowed sill of the ever-shrinking Overton Window. 

https://darkfutura.substack.com/p/dead-internet 

[SeanAU]

Together with a historian from Australia, I have recently published an article (in English) about a German emigrant to Australia who fought in the Eureka Rebellion of 1854. That article is now available online, here.

I spoke about that story on an Australian podcast this week (part 2 will come out on Wednesday):
https://omny.fm/shows/in-black-and-white-1/the-diamond-thief-who-became-a-eureka-hero-part-1

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Leichhardt

discovered the massive queensland coal fields fwiw ..... and mapped an area where my ancestors settled. the guy was amazing. in a british colony, doubly so.

[johnm33]

thats some good shit you are smoking  johnm33

https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/ocean-hotter-ever-heres-why

To be brief. In my model of geology the oceans, both on Earth and the various moons, are home grown not that I hold black smokers wholly responsible, nor white smokers for that matter.

[gerontocrat]

Some might be interested in this....

After 12 years Micheal Mann has finallly won his court case.

Will the defendants appeal against the verdict / the amount of damages?
If yes, how many more years in court?

"Justice delayed is justice denied"

https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-defamation-michael-mann-penn-state-61289ee2d8d2143768d28995c83899ef

Jury awards climate scientist Michael Mann $1 million in defamation lawsuit

WASHINGTON (AP) — A jury on Thursday awarded $1 million to climate scientist Michael Mann who sued a pair of conservative writers 12 years ago after they compared his depictions of global warming to a convicted child molester.

Mann, a professor of climate science at the University of Pennsylvania, rose to fame for a graph first published in 1998 in the journal Nature that was dubbed the “hockey stick” for its dramatic illustration of a warming planet.

The work brought Mann wide exposure but also many skeptics, including the two writers Mann took to court for comments that he said affected his career and reputation in the U.S. and internationally.

“It feels great,” Mann said Thursday after the six-person jury delivered its verdict. ”It’s a good day for us, it’s a good day for science.”

In 2012, a libertarian think tank named the Competitive Enterprise Institute published a blog post by Rand Simberg, then a fellow at the organization, that compared investigations into Mann’s work to the case of Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Penn State University who was convicted of sexually assaulting multiple children. At the time, Mann also worked at Penn State.

Mann’s research was investigated after his and other scientists’ emails were leaked in 2009 in an incident that brought further scrutiny of the “hockey stick” graph, with skeptics claiming Mann manipulated data. Investigations by Penn State and others found no misuse of data by Mann, but his work continued to draw attacks, particularly from conservatives.

“Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data,” Simberg wrote. Another writer, Mark Steyn, later referenced Simberg’s article in his own piece in National Review, calling Mann’s research “fraudulent.”

The jury in Superior Court of the District of Columbia found that Simberg and Steyn made false statements, awarding Mann $1 in compensatory damages from each writer. It awarded punitive damages of $1,000 from Simberg and $1 million from Steyn, after finding that the pair made their statements with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm.”

During the trial, Steyn represented himself, but said through his manager Melissa Howes that he would be appealing the $1 million award in punitive damages, saying it would have to face “due process scrutiny.”

Mann argued that he had lost grant funding as a result of the blog posts — an assertion for which both defendants said Mann did not provide sufficient evidence. The writers countered during the trial that Mann instead became one of the world’s most well-known climate scientists in the years after their comments.

“We always said that Mann never suffered any actual injury from the statement at issue,” Steyn said on Thursday through his manager. “And today, after twelve years, the jury awarded him one dollar in compensatory damages.”

Simberg’s attorney Mark DeLaquil said his client was “disappointed in the verdict” and would appeal the jury’s decision.

Both writers argued that they were merely stating opinions.

Lyrissa Lidsky, a constitutional law professor at the University of Florida, said it was clear the jurors found that Steyn and Simberg had “recklessly disregarded the falsity of their statements.” She added that the discrepancy between what the jury awarded in compensatory and punitive damages could result in the judge reducing the punitive damages.

Many scientists have followed Mann’s case for years as misinformation about climate change has grown on some social media platforms.

“I hope people think twice before they lie and defame scientists,” said Kate Cell of Union of Concerned Scientists. Her work as senior climate campaign manager includes tracking misinformation related to climate change.

“We are so far outside the bounds of a civil conversation about facts that I hope this verdict can help us find our way back,” Cell said.

Alfred Irving, the judge presiding over the case, reminded the jury on Wednesday before they deliberated that their job was not to decide “whether there’s global warming.”

[morganism]

That Time America Outlawed Pinball

It may be hard to believe, but not too long ago major American cities banned pinball out of fear of the arcade game’s effect on crime, juvenile delinquency and morality.

On March 6, 1948, a New York City patrolman in plain clothes entered a cigar store on 106th Street in East Harlem and dropped a penny into a machine called “The Marvel Pop Up.” He pulled back the game’s plunger and launched a small steel ball into play. The silver orb danced around the tabletop board as the undercover policeman tried to keep it in play. His first five shots ended in frustration, but his sixth try proved lucky as the metallic pellet landed in a hole that won him a free play.

Having finally made his shot, the patrolman placed the cigar store’s owner into handcuffs and arrested him for “unlawful possession of a gambling machine.” The arrest was just the latest in a crackdown on one of the perceived scourges of American society in the 1940s—pinball.

https://www.history.com/news/that-time-america-outlawed-pinball

( i still love pinball, and recommend everyone going to Vegas to check out the Pinball Museum near the Crown and Anchor pub, down on Flamingo past UNLV)

[ivica]

i like birds <