This is why computers were invented

Let's get Steve to England

I contributed to Steve McIntyre's trip to England to participate in the Guardian's Pearce Inqury. He would be pleased if you did same.

iOS4 intall took about 90 Minutes...

I don't know why it took so long and I don't know if this normal or not. The install process took about 90 minutes or so. Maybe my sync wire is going bad and the whole time was spent on data communication errors or something. I don't know. Read a book while watching it go, so it was not a complete waste of time.

But boy is this a good upgrade for the iPhone:

• Camera now has an electronic zoom. In the spirit of "the best camera is the one you have with you", this is a great feature which makes the camera more useful.
• Folders for grouping start up icons. Good for usability
• Mail has some upgrades which allows you to read all mail in all accounts from one view. I need to monitor a number of accounts and this is useful. At first glance, though, it's not clear how to tell which account the mail actually resides in. This would be needed to help me understand who I am when I reply.

iOS 4 ... trying to Install it. Seems a slow process.

My iTunes invited me to download and and install the new operating system to my iPhone, iOS 4. I said "yes, do it" and the computer and the iPhone are working on it as I write this.

It was a pretty big download taking about 10 minutes on the wireless connection to the house's broadband.

Now iTunes reports it's backup the iPhone. It appears to be much slower than a normal backup of the iPhone. In about 20 minutes of backup, it's progressed to what the progress bar suggests is about 5% or so. I suspect it might take all night. I'm glad it's the end of the day and I can just let the two gadgets work on it overnight.

Weather Great. Reading about Climate Change

The weather has been great this weekend and outside of a bike ride and a walk along the sea front I've enjoyed the time reading a couple of books which I recommend to anyone interested in the debate about climate change and energy for our planet:

"The Great Global Warming Blunder", by Roy Spencer

"Climatism", by Steve Goreham

Both books are superbly written. For where I feel I am informed and understand the current issues and state of play both books are in line with my thinking. This gives them great credibility as they explain so much that is still new or still not understood. They talk of both the science and politics of the issues.

Recommended.

Finally, Some Reasonable Comments about PowerPoint

I was meaning to write something here about all the articles about PowerPoint--the most prominent being the recent New York Times article about what the Army leadership was saying.

See this article in Slate about how to really communicate. From the masters.

I have an important presentation to make in Kazakhstan soon ... food for thought here.

It's Complicated

An outstanding article in today's New York Times on complexity. They sum up:

Of course, nobody at Goldman Sachs or any other large financial institution meant to wreck the economy. The United States military didn’t invade Iraq or Afghanistan thinking that one day its efforts would be mounted on a bewildering PowerPoint slide. The engineers who designed the BP oil platform that exploded and sank and produced one of the largest oil spills in history built it with multiple back-up systems.

But complexity has a way of defeating good intentions. As we clean up these messes, there is no point in hoping for a new age of simplicity. The best we can do is hope the solutions are just complicated enough to work.

NASA Movie on Hubble

What a great video from NASA about the History of Hubble--fantistic summary of a fantastics and earth-changing machine.

Nice Photos on CNN Web Site about Scotland

Some beautiful pictures of a beautify country.

We Probably Need to Get Used to this Volcano

From today's Telegraph newspaper, word is that this personal and economic disruption could last some time:

The significance is that andesite has a markedly higher gas content than basalt. This may mean that even after all the ice in the crater has melted, the exploding volcano will continue to throw ash into the air rather than simply produce lava flows.

Blame and the Volcano Dust

It is refreshing, that so far, despite the world-wide personal and economic disruption, I'm reading and hearing nothing about calls for blaming anyone for this issue. Blame has not entered the conversation. Nor should it ever.

Plans Change due to Volcano

I happened to be in London for a terrific 2-day conference. The first day exceeded my expectations and I was looking forward to the second. I woke up early this morning to hear the news reports about the volcano in Iceland which erupted over night and its ash cloud caused all airports in Scotland to be shutdown, with the rest of the country expected to shutdown very soon. Within minutes after hearing of that, I received a text message from my airline advising that my flight tonight was cancelled.

I pondered that and decided that this situation would lead to transportation chaos throughout the country. I decided to skip the second day of the conference and head to take the first train home. I end up getting on a train which departed London at 9:00 a.m. and it's fully loaded.

The rest of the day will be difficult for those stuck away from home and having expected to travel. I can't help thinking that this could last a while.

Not in My Backyard

By accident I came across notice of a plan to install a single wind turbine "in my back yard".

The link to the Edinburgh City Planning Department for this application is here. I can't tell from documents here (yet) who is behind this other than it appears to be by the owners of and on the site of the "secret" nuclear bunker which was situated on Corstorphine Hill. The view from my back yard would be as shown below.

I am going to look into this. Not in my back yard.

P.S. On 13 April have written a letter to the Edinburgh City Planning Department stating our objections on the grounds of blight, noise and visual pollution, safety risks, destroying rare urban natural beauty, lack of adequate planning notification, and "debatable and probably wrong" assertions in the applicants planning documents.

Recordings of "Handling Uncertainty in Science"

Recordings of the March 22-23, 2010 Royal Society (UK) meeting on "Handling Uncertainty in Science" are now available for listening and downloading. See http://royalsociety.org/2010-Handling-uncertainty-in-science/.

Ross McKitrick writes on failing to get a paper published that required the "revered" peer-review process.

"This is the story of how I spent 2 years trying to publish a paper that refutes an important claim in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The claim in question is not just wrong, but based on fabricated evidence. Showing that the claim is fabricated is easy: it suffices merely to quote the section of the report, since no supporting evidence is given. But unsupported guesses may turn out to be true. Showing the IPCC claim is also false took some mundane statistical work, but the results were clear. Once the numbers were crunched and the paper was written up, I began sending it to science journals. That is when the runaround began. Having published several against-the-flow papers in climatology journals I did not expect a smooth ride, but the process eventually became surreal."

Heard about this on Bishop Hill's blog.