Creekside Chatter

Looking for a great holiday desktop, or just some inspiration to create your own? Check out these freebies at DesignerDigitals.

Along with a hoard of emails, some source code for the computer climate models was also hacked and released to the public — and the source code is an unusable mess. It doesn’t take expertise in climatology to look at source code and determine that the code is garbage. There are many more geeks with software expertise than with climate expertise, and the geek community will go through every line of code and likely conclude that the computer models are so flawed that any conclusions drawn on them are without merit.

Despite the liberal tendencies of many geeks, I believe that the source code evidence will be insurmountable for most. Some will continue to cling to AGW because of a devotion to left-wing politics, but the majority ofgeeks will abandon their belief, and that abandonment by geeks will truly spell the end for AGW.

Still little mention of Climategate in the big media.

No matter what our climate czar may insist, climate science and Copenhagen are now under a giant cloud. In fact, as Hume implies, the situation is far more serious than that, because what has been revealed is what strange bedfellows science and politics are in this era. The relationship between politicians and scientists today is not entirely unlike the relationship between scientists and the clergy during the days of Galileo. And the politicians of today know about as much about the science as the bishops of Galileo’s time did, although our politicians are perfectly willing to exploit the science of which they are ignorant and the scientists too often perfectly willing to be complicit in their own exploitation

But in an era when we no longer think the world is flat, it’s time to have open, transparent science. It’s an absolute necessity if we are to have any confidence at all in the results – and in how we are spending the gigantic sums our leaders seem to demand of us.

Historic City News received a great holiday idea from John Reardon of St. Augustine.

When doing your Christmas cards this year, take one and send it to this address:

A Recovering American Soldier
c/o Walter Reed Army Medical Center
6900 Georgia Ave NW;
Washington, D.C. 20307

If all Historic City News readers would follow through on John’s idea, think how many cards these wonderful, special people would get.

Forget cranberry sauce, Plymouth Rock, and pilgrims. Think olives, garbanzo beans, and Spanish soldiers and sailors. The first Thanksgiving in our country took place in September 1565, when famed Spanish mariner Pedro Menéndez de Avilés along with 800 Spanish settlers celebrated a Mass of Thanksgiving to commemorate the successful sea voyage and founding of the town of St. Augustine, which would go on to be the first and longest-lasting port within the present-day United States. As is often the norm, our country's history books and school rooms tend to forget our Spanish colonial roots, and we have ended up celebrating as our national holiday the Thanksgiving of the pilgrims which occurred some 56 years after St. Augustine's first Thanksgiving.

Files from the UK Climatic Research Unit were hacked. They show that data was massaged, numbers were fudged, diagrams were biased, there was destruction of data after freedom of information requests, and there was refusal to submit taxpayer-funded data for independent examination.

Data was manipulated to show that the Medieval Warming didn’t occur, and that we are not in a period of cooling. Furthermore, the warming of the 20th century was artificially inflated.

This behavior is that of criminals and all the data from the UK Hadley Centre and the US GISS must now be rejected. These crooks perpetrated these crimes at the expense of the British and U.S. taxpayers.

The same crooks control the IPCC and the fraudulent data in IPCC reports. The same crooks meet in Copenhagen next week and want 0.7% of the Western world’s GDP to pass through an unelected UN government, and then on to sticky fingers in the developing world.

So far, most of the Climategate attention has been on the emails in the data dump of  November 19 (see here, here, and here), but the emails are only about 5 percent of the total. What does examining the other 95 percent tell us?

Here’s the short answer: it tells us that something went very wrong in the data management at the Climatic Research Unit.

Thanksgiving Day is right around the corner in the United States!  What do you think about most of all on Thanksgiving?  Friends, family, memories, some wonderful food and gratitude?  When we gather around our big tables laden with the fruits of the harvest, our hearts are filled with the gratitude of today, tomorrow & of days gone by.  But, we don’t need to be sitting around a Thanksgiving table to feel greatful toward someone or something do we?  Gratitude is so much a part of our lives ... so much so that we each sometimes need to take a little time to say thank you to those to whom we are grateful.  I love this quotation from Cynthia Ozick ... “We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.”

Several of these designs are interesting because there's plenty of room for journaling - the rest of the story.

Besides distribution, the other problem with comics now is the cost. You used to easily be able to sample new comics because they were so cheap. Now, if you can find them, they cost so much it’s hard for the average person to give a new book a try. That makes it extremely hard for new books to make it. And the industry needs to ideas. It can’t rely purely on old characters to keep going.

Enter the digital age. When music downloading became popular, fans started scanning comic book pages and uploading whole comics series online to torrent sites. In Japan, they started making comics (aka manga) available for download on your cell phone. And many comics started to run exclusively on the Internet. Marvel even started making their books available on the web by subscription to the service.

Print is dying, not just for newspapers and magazines. The cost of printing and paper, the problems with accounting for sales and waste in the newsstand business is what made it unviable for comics. Newspapers, magazines and books have been feeling the pinch for years. But the digital age is showing them a new path to future growth.