Party Crashers

The news is loaded with stories about the White House party crashers. I'm listening to Glenn Beck pontificate that White House security is so tight that no one could just crash the party, it must have been an inside job.
Sorry Glenn, no security is that tight. Show up at the right time, dressed right, looking like you belong, have some paperwork, doesn't have to be the right paperwork, anything will do. You will probably get in.
Back during the Cold War we used to keep nuclear armed aircraft on alert. We took this seriously, and had pretty decent security on the flight line. Everyone had badges, we had a fence, armed guards on the gate, the whole nine yards. But, every time we had a security inspection some thing would get written up.
There was this colonel on the inspection team who had a trick security badge. It looked OK except instead of his picture on the badge, there was a picture of his dog. That bastard always managed to fake out some gullible security guard with the fake badge. The colonel looked like a colonel, was dressed right, and his paperwork was almost in order. That was enough to get him thru the gate and get us a writeup for a security violation.
I think you crash a White House party the same way. You look right, you dress right, and your paperwork is almost in order.

Climategate head will "stand aside" pending a review

Doctor Philip Jones, head of the hacked into East Anglia University Climate Research Unit announced he will "stand aside" while the hack is investigated. His is the first head to roll. Temperature data and computer programs released by the hacker[s], or inside whistleblower, show deliberate faking of the published historical temperature graphs. Official press release is here.

Bacon is good, but this goes a little too far.

This is as good as those legendary effective herbal remedies.

Easy come, Easy go.

Saturday we got ten inches of snow, just what we needed to get Cannon to open. Prior to Saturday's snow, Cannon was completely green, it has been too warm to make snow. The ten inches of natural snow covered all the trails and put the mountain into fine shape to open on the traditional opening day, this coming weekend.
Too bad. Today the temp is up over 40F and it's raining. It hasn't rained it all out yet, but a helova lot of that wonderful snow is gonzo. Less it cools down and snows again, Cannon probably won't open this weekend for lack of snow.

Tree rings warm the world

The global warmists look in many places to find the temperatures in times gone by. The thermometer wasn't invented until 1654, and the Farenheit temperature scale wasn't defined until 1724. In consequence we only have thermometer data going back a few hundred years. For temperatures before the thermometer it is necessary to look at other indications, types of pollen in sediments, various kinds of isotope analysis, date of grape harvest, accounts of the freezing of lakes and rivers, accounts of the extent of alpine glaciers.
To my surprise, the global warmists now look at tree rings as an indication of temperature. Trees lay down thicker layers of new wood in good years and thinner layers in bad years. The patterns of thick and thin rings are distinctive and have been used for dating for more than 50 years. It's possible to match up the ring patterns of living trees with the patterns in trees long dead and in this fashion extend the tree ring dating back many thousands of years. Timber from ancient Indian pueblos was dated in the 1930's. Timbers from a sunken Viking vessel were both dated and located by tree rings. The ring patterns indicated the vessel was built of Irish oak.
The global warmists looked at tree ring data (there is quite a bit of it) and decided that ring width was controlled by the temperature, wide rings in warm years, thin rings in cold years.
There is a problem with this approach. Moisture, rain fall, is much more important to trees than temperature. Nice moist years, even cool moist years, are good years from a tree's point of view. In short, the width of tree rings has little or nothing to due with the temperature and everything to do with the amount of rainfall.
The global warmists noticed that their tree ring data didn't show a warming trend in modern times. So, they merely dropped the tree ring data for the last 50 years from their graphs.
The hacked Climate Research Unit files show us the use of questionable tree ring data, and even more reprehensible, the editing of the already questionable tree ring data to make the hockey stick graphs look more alarming.
In short, don't use tree ring data to indicate ancient temperature, 'cause the width of tree rings doesn't vary with temperature.

Running barefoot, no antivirus

I finally decided to pitch the anti virus program. I have used a bunch of them over the years, Norton, Mccaffee, Eztrust, Fprot and AVG. I have scanned the disk for years without finding a virus. The scans take hours, the downloading of fresh virus definitions slows the internet. The newer antiviruses (antivirii?) have moved beyond scanning the harddrive and now stay active all the time, soaking up CPU time, diskspace and RAM, inspecting web links, slowing the computer, and never catching anything. So I'm now running barefoot, no anti virus installed.
You have to be a little bit careful. I run a router on my cable modem. The router has a pretty solid firewall to keep the internet from infecting the computer thru the various holes in Windows XP security. I never click on email attachments. I don't file share. I don't use thumb drives. I have auto-run turned off. I don't use Internet Exploder. I'm a home user, I don't plug into a company network. I run Windows Update and install the patches regularly.
We will see how long this lasts.

Another Thanksgiving successfully executed.

My sister in law did the honors. We had myself, two children, one son-in-law, my mother, a three week old granddaughter, and a second cousin. The menu was the traditional, it always tastes good. Weather was decent. Today's weather is not so decent (rain with snow promised) and dark.