Humor

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You Didn’t Build That

Way too funny! Read the rest at iowahawk’s blog, You Didn’t Build That.

Readings from the Book of Barack

1 In the beginning Govt created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the economy was formless and void, darkness was over the surface of the ATMs, and the Spirit of Govt was hovering over the land.

3 And Govt said, “Let there be spending,” and there was spending. 4 Govt saw that the spending was good, and that it separated the light from the darkness. 5 Govt called the spending Investments, and this he did in the first day.

6 Then Govt said, “Let there be roads and bridges across the waters, and let dams divide the waters from the waters.” 7 Thus Govt made the infrastructure and the patronage jobs for eternity under the firmament from the Potomac which was above the firmament; and it was so. 8 And Govt called the firmament Washington. This Govt did on the second day.

9 Then Govt said, “Let the regulations and the guidlines under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the Bureaus appear”; and it was so. 10 And Govt called the Bureaus demigovts, and the gathering together of them He called AFSCME. And Govt saw that it was good.

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A Parody of Obama’s Remarks on Business

I could not help myself but wonder whether President Obama felt as strongly about the contributions government makes to business failures as it does to business successes. Since there are more businesss failures than business successes in this country, President Obama could have made a stronger correlation implies causation argument that education and infrastructure leads to business failures. Here is my version of his speech. You can see the original here.

If you are a failure, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life but that teacher did not help you. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed a few to thrive and others like you to fail. Somebody invested in roads and bridges but that did not help you. If you’ve got a failed business ”” you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

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I don’t know whether to laugh or cry

Every time I go through the grocery store and see all of those overweight people buzzing around in motorized carts I am struck with this strange thought, “Would our nation be healthier if we had a good old fashioned food famine?” Maybe we should ban motorized cart usage for overweight people and force every one to walk. Gluttony used to be one of the seven sins. Nowadays gluttony is our national past time and we pay the price in many different ways.

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Great Ideas about Health Care Reform

My boss and I came to same realization on Friday. We would be more in favor of the individual mandate if the Federal government required everyone to buy one of our products, too. We are hurting just like the hospitals. Hospitals have un-insured patients and we have dead beat customers. Why can’t we get a piece of this mandate pie?

Here is a great idea that will help balance the budget. Instead of paying tax refunds in cash, they should give out GM or Chrysler rebates. This is definite step up from California’s IOU idea.

Don’t fret that the health care bill is doomed to failure but take pride that “politics as usual” has brought us in full circle to our fore fathers predicament, “Does too much federal power corrupt absolutely?”

Being a state official responsible for finding the funding for an expanded Medicaid system is just part of the job description, vassal for Washington.

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Things that make me go hmm… No statistically significant warming since 1995

I am beginning to think that this global warming crisis is a sinister plot by statistics professors to get more students to  take statistics courses. 😉 Despite my misgivings about the true motives of global warming I will take the opportunity to give a big thanks to LuboÅ¡ for encouraging me to refresh my knowledge of regression analysis. In his post, The Reference Frame: No statistically significant warming since 1995, he shows a simple example of regression analysis of temperature anomalies. Since I am Mathematica challenged I opted to use a method a high school student would probably be familiar with, I used Excel. Without much effort I was able to quickly plot add a trend line to the Excel chart with the following equation on the chart, y = 0.0095x + 0.12 with a R2 = 0.0889. LuboÅ¡ was kind enough to provide me with a link to the AP Tutorial on Statistics so that I would be reminded on the prerequisites for regression analysis. The Coefficient of Determination or otherwise known as R2 is a key output of regression analysis. To paraphrase the AP Tutorial for this case, the variance of the temperature anomalies are 8.9% predictable from the time variable. Ugh! So whether you look at the confidence interval, Standard Error, or R2, it is reasonable to conclude that the temperature data is really ugly and to agree with LuboÅ¡ that the underlying trend in 1995-2009 was "somewhat more likely than not"  a warming trend rather than a cooling trend.

For kicks I decided to follow up on a comment Bret made on this same article posted on the Watts Up With That? blog concerning using monthly data. I found some suitable monthly temperature data at http://www7.ncdc.noaa.gov/CDO/CDODivisionalSelect.jsp, imported it into Excel, and plotted it. Here is the result.

NOAAMonthlyTemperatureData

Some people may complain that this chart is a nonsensical plot since the seasonal variations overwhelms the temperature trend. On the other hand it highlights how small the slope of the trend line is compared to the seasonal variations. Regardless of which estimate of the temperature increase you choose, it is still a very small number compared to the seasonal temperature variations. Another complaint might be that I should have used temperature anomalies rather than the actual temperature data. This begs the question whether you can have a warming trend that shows up in the anomalies that doesn’t show up in actual temperature data. Oh-oh! I think I should move on to less contentious subjects.

Since I was on a roll I decided to go one step further and analyze the temperature data like it was weather. Oops! I put climate change and weather in the same sentence. Every time I see or hear a weather forecast they discuss the high and low temperatures for the day. I do not remember ever hearing a weather forecast that included the average temperature for the day. In some cases a weather forecast will include an average high or  low for the day. Hence I created a plot of the maximum and minimum monthly temperature for each year. This appealed to both my pragmatic view and my engineering background. If we can imagine that our climate is a control system, a control engineer would primarily be interested in setting control limits on the maximum and the minimum values. Surely we should get a better regression analysis using the annual maximum and minimum values.

NOAAMonthlyMaxMinTemperatureData 

Once again despite selecting a subset of the monthly temperature data that  should have had a better chance of a statistically relevant temperature trend, the regression statistics continue to make it difficult about drawing conclusions about warming or cooling trends. The R2 value for the maximum temperature and minimum temperature trends are better than the raw monthly trend but they are still very low. Once again the underlying trend is "somewhat more likely than not"  a warming trend rather than a cooling trend. The R2 value has improved but with it  so low, we are still saying very little.

Here are some more thoughts to ponder.

  1. The range in the system from high to low temperature, 44 degrees, is very large compared to the warming trend(~ 1 degree/century). My inner engineer is having trouble understanding why a climate system that can handle a 44 degree swing in temperatures is having problems with a warming trend of about a degree per century.
  2. Are the problems we are seeing with the R2 value in our regressions analysis a natural result of the errors(noise) in the system of measuring temperatures? As an example if our temperature measurements are limited to an accuracy of plus or minus one degree, are we not fundamentally limited by the measurement errors in the system. What can we say about warming trends of one degree per century if our measurement errors are likely to be as large as the trend?
  3. How low does a R2 value or confidence limits in trends need to go before we decide to pack it in and say we do not know what is happening?

Finally for a humorous look at the scientific process courtesy of xkcd.com we have the Science Montage.
The rat's perturbed; it must sense nanobots! Code grey! We have a Helvetica scenario!

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The Best Jokes about Obama and the 2016 Olympic games selection

The best jokes about the IOC selection of Rio for the 2016 Olympic games over Chicago, Tokyo, and Madrid came from Rush Limbaugh. Frankly I think the IOC made the right decision. Brazil is a rising economic star and will likely be a great representative for South America. Rio is definitely a more exciting travel destination than Chicago or Tokyo.

"Who knew the Olympic Committee was a bunch of racists?" Limbaugh joked at the start of his program, saying he was waiting on official confirmation from former president Jimmy Carter, before turning to the gravity of the nation’s embarrassment. 

"When you stop to think about it, folks, doesn’t it make sense?" Limbaugh asked.  "Our president, Barack Hussein Obama, has been running around the world for nine months telling everybody how much our country sucks…. Why would anybody award the Olympics to such a crappy place?"

Limbaugh: Obama "Failed" in Copenhagen, Unmasking Weakness and Ego – The Note