The Illusion of Relevance
I’m not a big fan of the human intellect. In fact I think one of the most obvious points in science – too rarely addressed – is how inadequately evolution has prepared us for the challenges of modern technological times. A simple example is the fact many of us eat too much, and die early from diseases that we’d rarely get if we maintained a healthy lifestyle of modest calorie intake and modest exercise.
Every year *billions* of life years are lost simply due to minor deviations from our evolutionary designed healthy lifestyle recipe. This is not to suggest that recipe of modest calorie intake + modest exercise is a health panacea, but those two factors dwarf most others in the developed world. Poor countries, on the other hand, suffer more from *too few” calories and vices like smoking, war, and poor health standards. In fact it is in this arena where humanity could have a stunning impact on raising the standard of living for about a billion people with a modest investments in health, water, and infrastructure.
Yet a combination of dictatorial regimes, inept bureaucracies, human ignorance among the victims, and widespread indifference from the affluent countries condemns an extraordinary number of people to a lifetime of relatively poor health and poverty.
What does this have to do with the illusion of relevance? I think one aspect of our intellectual inadequacy is that we often assign importance to the wrong things. Why is the death of Michael Jackson so much more interesting to so many than the deaths of some 125,000 children that have happened since Jackson’s untimely demise? Every week sees hundreds of thousands die – often painfully and miserably – from diseases like malaria, rotoviruses, and malnutrition that are all easily preventable at relatively low cost. This is NOT to suggest the people dying do not have responsibilities here – they do and I think a key component of bringing higher global health standards is to treat parents in the third world more harshly when they ignore the needs of their children in favor of their own bad habits and bad decisions. Political correctness prevents using some marketing tactics that might prove effective in combating the pervasive ignorance that often accompanies vaccination programs, schooling for girls, and other standard western rights that are currently beyond the grasp of so many in the developing world.
The tragic circumstances of the third world are not generally our *fault* as suggested by the naive who fail to see that it is the *lack of US participation*, not the presence of it, that has condemned so many poor economies to failure.
Still, solving these problems remains a large part of our *responsibility* as global citizens. Partly due to the moral imperatives that are a product of the worldview most of us share but I think more importantly simply because we *can* solve these problems if we can extract ourselves from the foolish concerns that plague so many otherwise intelligent people.
More importantly, solving these problems requires us to dispense with the illusion of relevance about so many topics that have so little meaning to the collective humanity. Britney Spears news vs Clean water for a billion people news.
You decide.
ClimateProgress.org bans most reasoned dissent?
As a long time blogger I’m going to start calling out other blogs for an outrageous practice that is becoming very common and very frustrating to any clear thinker: banning comments simply because they don’t line up with a particular blog’s point of view and biases. Blog authors have a lot of control and it’s increasingly abused in the name of groupthink. At the WordPress conference I was alarmed to hear a prominent blogger say something along the lines of “it’s my house and I can kick out whoever I want to”. Blogs already suffer from inhibiting good two way communication and it pains me to see bloggers make the problem worse by wasting their time censoring comments. I comment far less now than I used to at blogs like RealClimate.org because I know that even a calm and reasoned comment may be deleted by the heavy handed and irrational moderation practiced there. This form of censorship distorts the conversation, often misleading the gullible into thinking there is concensus where there is none.
There are many obvious gray areas in terms of censorship but I’m seeing an increasing number of blogs cross the lines of reasoned discourse in the interest of lining up support for their positions. Interestingly this is becoming something of standard operating procedure in much of the climate alarmism blog community, where ClimateProgress stands out conspicuously as an alarmist voice for the poorly informed who want to stay that way.
My hypothesis is that this irrationality and censorship stems from several new factors: Ego-driven science of the last few decades, unreasonable attacks on scientists that were common in the Bush “anti science” administration, overspecialization in the sciences that creates narrow bands of expertise that have little relevance to larger context issues like Climate Change, grade inflation (there are a remarkable number of scientists who now write and discuss things as irrationally as a TV pundit – acting more as advocates than purveyors of information.
A spectacular example of this is Joe Romm’s ClimateProgress.org , a targeted and uninformed collection of misleading posts about Climate Science. Most are simply attack dog pieces on reasoned voices who do no share Romm’s irrationally alarmist views about Climate change. Although I’m a fan of Tom Friedman his implied endorsement of this blog forces me to reconsider Friedman’s coherency.
Now, we are living in the blogosphere so ranting irrationally has a lot of entertainment value, but Romm’s has the audacity to simply ban or moderate those who don’t agree with him.
I feel a combination of anger and pity for people who choose to limit the conversation to strengthen their own (usually weak) positions, but when this is done in the name of “science” it *REALLY* pisses me off, and I’ll be bringing this up regularly as the intersection of advocacy and science continues to metasticize in the blogOsphere.
OK, I admit the comment below, posted over at ClimateProgress.org is kind of snarky but he should at the very least post it in the interest of dialog since he’s attacking *both* Pielke’s, who any reasonable person would agree are well qualified climate scientists who suffer enormous abuse at the hands of their intellectual inferiors for simply pointing out the obvious about climate alarmism.
Ad Hominem BS as usual – do you EVER address any reasoned scientific critiques here? Both Pielke’s represent voices of reason in the rising sea of alarmism that represents the greatest exaggeration of risk in the history of humans on earth.
The main point for those of us who accept global warming and accept the anthropogenic nature of that warming but don’t preach catastrophe is that 1) related natural factors are very significant and poorly understood and affecting things as is obvious from the last few years of cooling 2) the models suck to the extent they don’t predict things well and are generally presented as unfalsifiable 3) the changes are gradual and small, presenting us with engineering issues, not existential ones.
These three points are *totally obvious to informed people* yet they don’t line up the groupthinkers.
PS – shame on you for deleting this comment!
Or this one at RealClimate. I used to participate there often but noticed that if I addressed people who attacked me in the same snarky vein I’d sometimes be moderated. This form of targeted censorship has no place in the blogs where free spirited discussion should rule the day.
Commenter Chris wrote: <i>In the interest of civility, I think we should await Pielke’s response before heaping abuse on him</i>
My reply: (I predict this will be deleted by the RealClimate censors): Sure, but you obviously don’t belong here at RealClimate, where no reasoned objection goes unchallenged by blustering nonsense. Only here does “less change” become “more change”. The whole problem for clear thinkers is that the models are predicting things that are not happening. Predicted warming is not materializing as expected, and the *very recent* data suggests even more strongly that the idea we are poised on the brink of (Hansen’s term here) “Climate Catastrophe” is simply nonsense. I don’t even think you guys are *sincere* anymore. Egos and alarmism now trump the data on virtually every public front, though ironically the non-politically polluted studies remain of good quality.
Domain Renewal Group – BOGUS MARKETING ALERT!
The “Domain Renewal Group” with an address listed in Buffalo appears to be like other shady firms preying on unsuspecting domain name holders. They have sent me a “Domain Name Expiration Notice” with a “Reply Requested by July 27″ for 1) A domain they have nothing to do with and 2) a domain name that does not expire until November.
This common tactic preys on the fact that people either routinely pay bills or don’t understand the system well enough to know that most renewals are handled online anyway. These letters make it appear as if you need to work with them to renew when in fact they will *move* your domain from current registrar and will generally charge much more per year for the fees.
In the case of the Domain Renewal Group they charge a whopping $30 per year so I’d be looking at an increase in my domain fees of some 400%
General rule for domain name holders: Use great caution with any renewal notices, but also MAKE SURE your names will be automatically renewed with your current registrar if you forget, change email, or miss the notices which are generally NOT sent via real mail. In typical internet irony the real paper mail domain notices are generally scams where the half-assed email renewal note may be legitimate.
Many registrars including the one I use (Godaddy) make it too easy to lose domain names if you don’t pay for them by expiration, often whisking them away into auction after only a few weeks. For this reason “auto renewal” is generally a very good idea.
Note: If you work for DOMAIN RENEWAL GROUP feel free to contact me – I’ll print your response to this.
Hardbat Classic – Nice Video Summary with Biba Golic
Here’s a very quick summary of the Hardbat Classic Table Tennis Tournament that just ended in Las Vegas.
Anna Kournikova Fight at Hardbat Classic Las Vegas. Venetian Lavo Nightclub
So, the greastest prize in US Table Tennis history of $100,000 is awarded to bar player Jack Baker of Mobile Alabama and the only big Hardbat news is the fight at Lavo Nightclub between a drunk woman and Anna Kournikova. Kournikova was a featured celebrity at the tournament though she does not appear to be much of a Table Tennis player. I never even saw her hit a ball.
Here Anna Kournikova is pictured watching while Biba Golic (a spectacular player, originally from Serbia) plays with Judah Friedlander.
Adding to the misfortune is that my wife and were right near the action at the Venetian when we chose not to go to the Lavo party after we’d had a lot to eat at the (very excellent) Palazzo Sportsbook party by Budweiser. Both were held on the second day of the tournament.
We might even have been able to say “hey, were were there during Anna Kournikova’s lowlife highball ping pong fracas.
Celebrity watcher Perez Hilton reports below on the fight at the Hardbat Classic in Las Vegas between Anna Kournikova and another woman at the Lavo Nightclub afterparty.
Could the offender have been angry because Anna Anna didn’t play any Table Tennis during the tournament? Not even with her beauty and style rival the charming Biba Golic, a top Table Tennis player who unfortunately did not compete in the All Star division of the tournament, but who will be featured in the ESPN coverage coming in September.
Perez Hilton:
Former tennis pro Anna Kournikova ended up with cuts on her neck after getting into a Sin City shoving match on Saturday night.
At the HardBat Classic party inside Lavo Nightclub, another woman at the club threw a drink on her and all hell broke loose!
According to an onlooker, the Enrique Iglesias‘ girlfriend/possible wife and her assistant were sitting at a VIP table when the other woman bumped them. They shoved each other but were separated.
Then, the mystery woman returned later for more trouble!
“The woman came back over and threw a drink on Anna and her assistant,” said the source. “The woman was definitely drunk.”
Anna wanted to have the women kicked out, but it escalated quickly to where the pair were pushing and shoving each other!
Meow!
The woman grabbed Kournikova by the neck and pushed her into a wall right before security broke them apart!!!
Anna did not need treatment but was extremely shaken up.
Violence is never the answer!
Killerspin Hardbat used for the Hardbat Classic
A controversial new paddle made by Killerspin for the Hardbat Classic in Las Vegas made it very hard for many experienced players to compete effectively with each other or with the lower ranked players who often had a huge point advantage as well as the equipment handicap from making everybody use either the paddle shown here or an even cheaper “junk paddle” version.
Although I approve of the handicapping process I think they need some modifications to make a paddle that favors defender play , produces long, quality rallies rather than the short rallies this blade tended to create. I only saw a handful of ”great points” where we would have seen hundreds with regular sponge rubber. I’d favor a modification that would introduce a USTTA approved hardbat and/or a sponge slow version. Another approach might be to move to the “big ball” format which is much slower but does not destroy the fun of watching high quality loopers arc the ball back and forth many times.
Inexperienced and non- players want high quality play and this blade does not give us much of that, even when it is weilded by some of the finest players in the country as happened at the Hardbat Classic.
Table tennis will probably *never* be a good TV sport but it’s the world’s greatest participation sport and I think the focus needs to be on bringing people into the game rather than changing it to fit TV better.
Bud Light Hardbat Classic at The Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas – is this good or bad for the game?
We’re back from a fun three days in Las Vegas and I’m thinking about whether the approach taken by Budweiser (the big tournament sponsor) and Killerspin (equipment maker and I think the sponsor of the “All Star” competition) is going to be good or bad for the wonderful game of Table Tennis.
My short take is yes, this is great for the game because it raises awareness and gets people playing more in bars and basements and therefore will bring more people into the serious side of the sport. However I would recommend better social media next year, tied initially to the bar tournaments and then to the big Las Vegas spectacular. There was very little media buzz offline or online about this tournament despite hundreds of free trips to Las Vegas, celebrities, big money, pretty athletes, and a two hour ESPN special coming in September! Everybody loves this game in different ways and somehow this part was lost in the PR campaign leading up to and including the tournament.
In real Table Tennis the play is at a much higher level than we saw even among the best players at the Hardbat Classic because everybody was required to use one of two special ”hard bat” paddles made just for this tournament.
$100,000 Winner Jack Baker, originally from London and now from Mobile Alabama, had won a local bar tournament. He was an excellent player but would have been crushed by Trevor Runyan but for the point spread. Runyan is a US Hardbat Champion who barely made it out of the All Star tournament to face Jack in the semifinals where he lost due to the point spread. I think the spread was 17 but don’t know yet (I missed the final day’s matches).
Despite a lot of grumbling by the best players who faced the huge handicappings, I think the idea of spotting points is good because it forces everybody to play their very best. Not so with these paddles, which basically forced many of us who know the game well to play far below our normal levels. I had trouble even keeping the ball on the table – I think because I’d mostly practiced with the hardbat against a robot which did not give me a sense of what type of shot would be coming to me from these paddles. Every player I saw from beginner to international class was struggling to get performance out of this blade, so if I had to make one recommendation for next year it would be to find better equipment that would showcase skills. Old style hardbats, used in the heydey of the game as a spectator sport, shoud be reviewed by Bud and Killerspin.
The lower end paddle was much like the junkiest type of pips out paddles you’d buy for a few dollars at Wal- Mart, where the higher end paddle was a notch up in blade and rubber quality though still seemed light and hard to control. Head was normal sized where a better hardbat head might have been larger. The pips rubber allowed a very modest level of spin but control was so weak that the rallies with these paddles tended to be very, very short.
This problem was significant as the whole idea is to get people excited about watching long rallies and I do not think this type of equipment is best for that. Better would be to find a blade/rubber combination that slowed the speed and spin down but allowed longer rallies with more work and motion on the part of the players. This is what might turn Table Tennis into a more popular spectator sport in the USA.
Another popularity strategy I’d love to see would be regular bar tournaments with money or prizes. I think Bud’s done a lot of good in that direction with the Hardbat Classic, though it was disappointing for me that the distributor held a small tournament locally but did not pony up the money to send the winner to Las Vegas . Especially because the winner was … me.
Although I heard something about “4000 local tournaments” that number made no sense because there did not appear to even be a total of 1000 players at the tournament – more like about 300-400 would be my guess and that includes the “basement” players that had no rating, players like me who were rated by the US Table Tennis Assn, and the 8 all stars, mostly from Killerspin’s great team of amazing players.
The Table Tennis “All Stars” who were invited by Killerspin and Bud played against each other and this was the most exciting, high quality play even though they were handicapped with the low grade rackets. Table Tennis Superstar and Olympic Silver Medalist Ilya Lupulesku http://server2.usatt.org/magazine/08mar-apr/lupulesku%20.pdf was there but was having a lot of trouble with the hardbat and the fact that his ranking meant he had to give many points to his opponent. He did not even make it out of his first round robin with other All Stars. I understand that David Zhuang, another amazing player who has won the US national championships lost *every match* in his first round robin in the “pros” division – I assume because he had to give up to 17 points to the other players.
My initial reaction was that the handicap system was failing to be fair with points, but the idea was to make it very hard on the best players and in this they succeeded - few “great” players made it out of the initial round. My round robin opponent Ashu Jain, a brilliant player with the HBC hardbat, managed to win a a lot but was finally defeated due to the large point handicaps.
…. more soon with pictures ….
ABC Search Affiliate Browser Hijack using abcjmp.com advertising
Update: The malware seems to be hitting affiliates other than the ABCSearch, making a bit stronger their claim of innocence in matters relating to browser hijacking.
Still, it would seem to me that these problems would disappear if every affiliate relationship was defined by a *real, verified person* and then ad companies were required to identify (to authorities AND to the hijack victim) the recipient of any advertising revenue generated by the hijack. This would put the pressure on the hijackers, not the victims.
NOTE: It’s not yet clear to me the indirect role that ABCSEARCH plays in this frustrating equation of a browser hijacking redirecting to ABC advertisers. It would seem they could police this activity better (as I think Google does with their adsense program).
I’m now struggling to remove a browser hijack routine where a spam affiiliate of ABCSEARCH is forwarding me to unwanted websites. I’m furious with ABCSEARCH for failing to provide me with *any* helpful information, most importantly the identification of the affiliate who is the recipient of this fake search traffic. ABC benefits from unwanted advertising and to some extent from this illegal activity and therefore is reluctant to lift the veil of secrecy that helps protect purveyors of unwanted advertising. That is outrageous of them.
(I’m on a Vaio Desktop running Windows XP)
I found the info (below)indicating many others have had similar problems with the ABC advertising network. Obviously they don’t directly support spammers but they *indirectly* support them by making it difficult to track down the offenders, some of whom are actually selling programs online that use a combination of infecting the computers with a browser hijack and ABC search ads.
When I figure out how to remove this ABCJMP ABCSEARCH spamming malware routine I’ll post it here. In the meantime please let me know if you have the same problem.
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What is abcjmp.com Abcjmp.com is owned and operated by ABCSearch.com, the world’s largest privately held pay per click advertising network. Advertisers come to ABCSearch to distribute their ads across our broad network of search partners and content sites. Abcjmp.com is used as our network referral ID to identify and qualify traffic sent by our traffic partners. Why am I seeing abcjmp.com on my computer? Because ABCSearch is comprised up of a network of thousands of traffic partners, one of these partners may have included you into their distribution network. If you have received any advertisements that contain the url abcjmp.com, it is important to understand that ABCSearch.com and the advertiser are not directly responsible for the advertisement you received through our partner distribution that contains the advertisement with abcjmp.com in the domain name. For Help Thank you, |
The Illusion of Free Will
Gotta love the internet. I was trying to find the Wegman Report, a very interesting critique of how global warming advocacy too often masquerades as science, and stumbled into a recent discusson of Free Will with an expert in Neuroscience and philosphy featured in the New York Times:
… the philosopher agreed with Dr. Haggard that free will has biological roots. In fact, that is something all the men seemed to agree on: that free will is not a spiritual or magical experience endowed supernaturally within us, but rather, that the conscious decision-making ability is a result of organic brain activity.
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