Don't Go Being Politically Insane You Climate Change Skeptics

[DougK]

2 hours ago, Ivanhoe said:

Here's the best "coffee-table" explanation of repeatability vs reproducibility;

https://www.labmate-online.com/news/news-and-views/5/breaking-news/what-is-the-difference-between-repeatability-and-reproducibility/30638

 

Oh, Man... I still have nightmares of computing Coefficients of Variation in lab results. Not a lot of calculators just spit out CV's when I was doing this. Think "standard deviations" with extra steps. LOTS of data entry.
In clinical chemistry assays, CV's of 3% was a highly desireable target, rarely achieved.

 

Edited November 17, 2025 by DougK

[Ivanhoe]

In the late 1990s, a colleague requested some wind tunnel data from an experiment 10 years prior. They shipped him a shoebox full of 3.5" floppy disks. 

Yeah, research is glamorous. 

 

[DougK]

14 minutes ago, Ivanhoe said:

In the late 1990s, a colleague requested some wind tunnel data from an experiment 10 years prior. They shipped him a shoebox full of 3.5" floppy disks. 

Yeah, research is glamorous. 

 

In "shorthand" for assay reproducibility this is usually referred informally as "within run" and "between run". The latter often involves multiple operators but in a clinical lab, that is the norm.

[Stuart Galbraith]

There is a guy on youtube that restores old computers, and he was contacted by a university somewhere that had a resource of old coal samples that had plants fossils in them. Being high tech when they compiled the index, in the 1970's they used a state of the art computer system. About 5 years ago when they decided to make use of the resource, they suddenly discovered the state of the art system the index was on was completely obsolete, and they had no means to access it. I forget how they solved the problem in the end, I think he hooked up a disk drive that would play the original disks, and ran the data through a converter to a format they could read.

Its an emerging problem in archaeology too. Much of the data, such as geophysics, is in formats which are probably unreadable 20/30 years from now. Hard copies seem to be the way forward.

[sunday]

More shenanigans with temperature data collection in the UK

 

[Soren Ras]

2 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

There is a guy on youtube that restores old computers, and he was contacted by a university somewhere that had a resource of old coal samples that had plants fossils in them. Being high tech when they compiled the index, in the 1970's they used a state of the art computer system. About 5 years ago when they decided to make use of the resource, they suddenly discovered the state of the art system the index was on was completely obsolete, and they had no means to access it. I forget how they solved the problem in the end, I think he hooked up a disk drive that would play the original disks, and ran the data through a converter to a format they could read.

Its an emerging problem in archaeology too. Much of the data, such as geophysics, is in formats which are probably unreadable 20/30 years from now. Hard copies seem to be the way forward.

It has been a widespread problem for a while and it is only getting worse. Depending on which sector a company is working in (pharma, pensions, energy, national security etc) you often run into requirements to keep records for 30+ years, and for example, if you acquire another company you inherit the data retention requirements for the data possessed by that entity, and that may be stored in formats you cannot read since you never had or used the systems using those formats in the first place. And whoever created and maintained the original hardware and software used may have gone out of business a long time ago. 

Turns out that paper is actually a pretty damn good storage medium. Magnetic disks, tapes, not so much.

[Ivanhoe]

Back in the late 90s, the sysadmin guru that supported my gang got a request from the higher ups to copy a Fortran program from punch cards onto the Convex mini-supercomputer. 

Somebody pulled up a publication from the 1970s showing predictions from the Fortran program, and it was one of those "comes around every 15 years" topics*. 

It turned out, one division had a dusty old card reader up in the attic. It was brought into a server room, hooked up to a modern-ish computer, and the deck was read and stored on a disk file. 

* I saw this happen several times over the decades. When I went thru grad school, they didn't even teach hypersonic flow. There was a class in the catalog, but nobody would teach it as there was zero demand for it. 

[rmgill]

You can get all Sorts of transfers done. If you have smart imaginative staff. And you procurement folks need to be flexible. 
 

 

[Ivanhoe]

This was in a .gov environment, which means it would have cost about $10 per card to contract the work out. 

These days, you can use an OCR type program to turn a photo of each card into text. Tedious, but do-able. 

[Stuart Galbraith]

1 hour ago, Soren Ras said:

It has been a widespread problem for a while and it is only getting worse. Depending on which sector a company is working in (pharma, pensions, energy, national security etc) you often run into requirements to keep records for 30+ years, and for example, if you acquire another company you inherit the data retention requirements for the data possessed by that entity, and that may be stored in formats you cannot read since you never had or used the systems using those formats in the first place. And whoever created and maintained the original hardware and software used may have gone out of business a long time ago. 

Turns out that paper is actually a pretty damn good storage medium. Magnetic disks, tapes, not so much.

Its not the first time obsolete technology has caused a problem.   Britain used to have a tally system in taxation. Its long and complicated and I wont bore you with the details which I dont fully comprehend anyway, suffice to say both parties got a piece of wood with the taxation paid written on it, so both could keep it for their records. You can find the long explanation here. It worked well, but seemingly was rather problematic on the space it occupied.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick

By the 1820s the damn things have piled up in the basement of Parliament, and they eventually decided that the system should be done away with. 8 years later they started on the long process to incinerate the 'tally's, some of which which dated back 6 centuries. Unfortunately, so dry were they, they set fire to the Chimney and took the rest of Parliament with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Parliament

I guess you could call it the original millenium bug.

[Ivanhoe]

When I was getting my business degree, during the MIS class my study group did a paper on IT project tragedies. They main feature was the California DMV case. It was a 10 year, zillion dollar program involving several contractors. 

Problem was that during the ten year span, computing went from traditional mainframes, timesharing, and COBOL to Unix-based minicomputers etc. And the tenure of programmers in Silicon Valley was far shorter than the project lifespan. Towards the end of the project, the mainframe hardware that everything was designed for, was no longer in production. The source code extant would not compile and run on available platforms. The cost of rewriting was so high, it was simply shitcanned. 

[Ivanhoe]

https://legalinsurrection.com/2025/11/norway-pauses-use-of-fart-reducing-cattle-feed-in-wake-of-danish-cow-tastrophe/
 

Quote

 

Denmark’s farmers have recently been reporting that their cows are collapsing and suffering illness after eating feed containing a methane-reducing additive called Bovaer.

Use of this feed is now legally required for many farms in Denmark as part of its national climate policy. Some farmers claim their cattle experienced severe symptoms after eating the additive-infused feed, including collapse, lethargy, reduced feed intake, fever, diarrhea, miscarriages, and significant drops in milk production.

Based on these complaints, another Scandinavian country poised to implement the same policy is halting the move.

In Norway, the government had mandated the use of Bovaer as an additive in all dairy cows starting in 2027 as part of its climate action plan. However, the Norwegian state-subsidised milk cooperative, Tine – which has a monopoly on the nation’s dairy industry – has now put the use of Bovaer on hold until they have carried out an investigation.

 

I wonder how much methane that rotting cow carcasses release.

[Ivanhoe]

https://www.rebelnews.com/we_caught_them_un_climate_elites_dumped_their_conference_garbage_on_a_poor_brazilian_neighborhood
 

Quote

 

While global VIPs preach climate virtue inside the UN summit in Belém, the city and the United Nations are using the impoverished community of Vila da Barca as their real-life dumping ground.

Former VP Al Gore was just at the United Nations’ climate conference droning on about how ordinary people are supposedly “using the sky as an open sewer,” but, as the facts now show, that phone call was coming from inside the house.

We discovered something that Gore, the climate delegates, and their media cheerleaders don’t want you to see: they’re using a poor neighbourhood here in Belem, Brazil as their own open sewer and garbage dump.

 

Is anyone surprised?

 

[rmgill]

The amount of trash all over the lefty districts all over America and how clean the conservative ones are tells you everything. 
 

Go to any area where rainbow flags fly and environmental religiosity is fervent and you will find trash, filth and feculent odors abounding.  

[Ivanhoe]

Try not to laugh, people, this is serious!

 

[Ivanhoe]

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/europes-energy-transition-destroyed-its-economy

Quote

Meanwhile, the unpredictability of solar and wind is hurting everything everywhere. The costs of construction and operation are obscured by carbon taxes and government subsidies, and power finds its way to the grid on cloudy or windless days anyways, so what’s the issue? Those powerless days where panels and mills are sitting idle require power to be purchased, at a premium, from nearby countries. When this occurs for weeks at a time, prices can skyrocket for everyone.

The road to hell is paved with virtue signaling. 

[Tim Sielbeck]

 

[Tim Sielbeck]

 

[sunday]

3 hours ago, Tim Sielbeck said:

 

A Death Cult, more precisely.

The fact that it has enabled bureaucrats to tax the air we breathe is a plus.

Edited January 15 by sunday

[Tim Sielbeck]

 

[NickM]

That's nothing! On my cellphone, which gets nothing but MSN nonsense, now, 'the acidification' of the oceans is going to cause shark teeth to dissolve. 

 

https://www.tbsnews.net/science/study-warns-ocean-chemistry-changes-could-weaken-sharks-teeth-1336006