Climategate underscores the importance of projects like Clear Climate Code. They’re software engineers who are rewriting a key model (GISTEMP, which models Global Historical Climate Network data from the Goddard at NASA) so that the model is clear and understandable and verifiable. I tried to write a multiprocessing extension for a school project, but couldn’t verify the results due to equipment problems.

Science models & data are massaged all the time. A dirty fact, but common across many disciplines. The bottom line is, if the models in question have predicative power, anthropogenic climate change is real. If not, then climate change may still be real, but we must wait for better data and/or better models. Academic models of complex, schocastic systems are always ugly code in my experience. That doesn’t negate their validity.

That being said, scientists writing models aren’t often software engineers, and the data collection and collation is incredibly complex and messy with many possibilities for errors. Code and data should always open-sourced for verification, and keeping such things to yourself is inexcusable and a violation of how science should be done.

However, I highly doubt there’s a climate conspiracy cabal hiding a secret data db. All the data I’ve seen is open and freely available (and really messy!). Seeing those emails as suspicious appears as confirmation bias to me, no matter how much of a persecution complex the individuals in question appear to harbor.

What I am saying is this: Transformers 2 sounds like a really truly awful movie, and there are some eye-wateringly valiant attempts to summon righteous anger, or at least a belly laugh, from being forced to watch it for the critic’s livelihood.

I’ve collected the most successful of such attempts. Enjoy, and remember, I love you as much as Michael Bay sucked when he made Titanic, and that’s a lot.

Those who think “Transformers” is a great or even a good film are, may I tactfully suggest, not sufficiently evolved. I hope they climb a personal ladder into the realm of better films, until their standards improve. They don’t need to spend a lifetime with the water only up to their toes.

—Roger Ebert, “I’m a Proud Brainiac”

So the Decepticons made a slutty robot to attend his college and enrolled her in classes and put her in on-campus housing just in case Sam ended up being important at some point in the future?
Apparently. It was an elaborate plan, but it sure paid off.
I am already incredibly sick of this movie, and I’m just typing questions about it. Sam resurrects Optimus, Optimus kills the Fallen, end of story, right?
Pretty close. Sam dies, though.
Really?
Yeah, for a little while. But then the Transformers in heaven send him back because he still has work to do.
Fuck you.
I’m serious.
Fuck you. There’s no way.
It’s true. The 6-7 Primes are there in the clouds like Mufasa’s head in The Lion King, and tell Sam he’s awesome and he needs to live again so he can bring Optimus back to life.
I may be ill.

—Rob Bricken, “Rob’s Transformer’s 2 F.A.Q.’s”

Director Michael Bay has yet to direct a movie that can be described as anything but deeply and arrogantly dumb. It’s mildly terrifying, in fact, that the first Transformers is likely the most clever movie he’s ever made.

—John Scalzi, “Relax! Transformers Is Not the End of Cinema as We Know It”

Transformers is like twenty summer movies, with unrelated storylines, smushed together into one crazy whole. You try in vain to understand how the pieces fit, you stare into the cracks between the narrative strands, until the cracks become chasms and the chasms become an abyss into which you stare until it looks deep into your own soul, and then you go insane.

—Charlie Jane Anders, “Michael Bay Finally Made An Art Movie”

The Randall Roberts has been supplying a steady stream of contributions to an emerging academic discipline of Wu-Tang Clan critical literary analysis. Currently midway through a song-by-song translation and annotation of Ghostface Killah ‘s The Fishscale.

Their amateur food critic, Malcom Gay, mixes unholy foodstuffs and Philosophy 101 lesson plans like a Fear Factor hosted by Will Durant.

In moving to St. Louis, we’ve somehow marched backwards in time in regard to Cable TV technology. Whereas Comcast , for all that I hated it , did in fact offer an HD DVR that I could rent for $10/mo, the otherwise enlightened Charter offers no DVR at all. This has caused great wailing and gnashing of teeth in the Weichbrodt house. As is my custom, I’ve examined the issue and offer the following analysis.

Fundamentally, there are three models for distributing media content out right now.

1. Old Media: Get your shows through a provider. Cable, Satellite, Over-the-air. This is the traditional model.
2. New Media: Purchase your shows through an internet distributor. iTunes, Amazon, Real, etc. Tech companies trying to bridge the gap between where consumers are and where pop content is currently published.
3. Free Media: Share your shows via the internet. RSS, Bittorrent. Pay for bandwidth, share what you will.

Unfortunately, the content is different across the three models. Watching the Champions League match between Barcelona and Chelsea live can only be done using Old Media, while watching House can be done with all three, and watching Rocketboom can only be done with New Media & Free Media.

These models are leaky–there is overlap between what iTunes and what RSS cover, for example. Just rough models, then.

The second background item is timeshifting. The ability to watch a show despite when/where it was first released. Tivo is a popular way to do this to content from Old Media. RSS may be timeshifted due to its very definition. The trick is, some ways of timeshifting lag. Tivo doesn’t lag–as soon as the show starts, Tivo lets you timeshift. Bittorrent has a (comparitely) huge lag: a show must be broadcast, captured, encoded, and fully shared before viewing may begin.

I’ve built a spreadsheet of my options. Comment back with what you think I should do.

The world is a broken place. Words like his are important to hear and follow in these uncertain, modern times. The consumption of bourbon has become integral in thinking, discussing, and responding to current world events, whether you do so alone or with the companionship of others.

Last night was another miserable experience with scotch, and caused me to long for the bracing, wholesome embrace of a few fingers of Kentucky’s finest. Percy converted me to bourbon with this essay, and damn if I cannot testify that it all isn’t true.

It appears that the University of North Carolina holds the original manuscript, which would be a treat to examine. I’m keeping a copy of the entire essay in the extended entry so that it doesn’t slip away from me again.

This is not written by a connoisseur of Bourbon. Ninety-nine percent of
Bourbon drinkers know more about Bourbon than I do. It is about the
aesthetic of Bourbon drinking in general and in particular of knocking it
back neat.

I can hardly tell one Bourbon from another, unless the other is very bad.
Some bad Boubons are even more memorable than good ones. For example, I
can recall being broke with some friends in Tennessee and deciding to have
a party and being able to afford only two-fifths of a $1.75 Bourbon called
Two Natural, whose label showed dice coming up 5 and 2. Its taste was
memorable. The psychological effect was also notable. After knocking back
two or three shots over a period of half an hour, the three male drinkers
looked at each other and said in a single voice: ‘Where are the women?’
I have not been able to locate this remarkable Bourbon since.

Not only should connoisseurs of Bourbon not read this article, neither
should persons preoccupied with the perils of alcoholism, cirrhosis,
esophageal hemorrhage, cancer of the palate, and so forth–all real dangers.
I, too, deplore these afflications. But, as between these evils and the
aesthetic of Bourbon drinking, that is, the use of Bourbon to warm the
heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold
phlegm of Wednesday afternoons, I choose the aesthetic. What, after all,
is the use of not having cancer, cirrhosis, and such, if a man comes home
from work every day at five-thirty to the exurbs of Montclair or Memphis
and there is the grass growing and the little family looking not quite at
him but just past the side of his head, and there’s Cronkite on the tube
and the smell of pot roast in the living room, and inside the house and
outside in the pretty exurb has settled the noxious particles and the
sadn ess of the old dying Western world, and him thinking: ‘Jesus, is this
it? Listening to Cronkite and the grass growing?’

If I should appear to be suggesting that such a man proceed as quickly as
possible to anesthetize his cerebral cortex by ingesting ethyl alcohol,
the point is being missed. Or part of the point. The joy of Bourbon
drinking is not the pharmacological effect of C(2)H(5)OH on the cortex but
rather the instant of the whiskey being knocked back and the little
explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasopharynx and
the hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime–aesthetic considerations to
which the effect of the alcohol is, if not dispensable, at least secondary.

By contrast, Scotch: for me (not, I presume, for a Scot), drinking Scotch
is like looking at a picture of Noel Coward. The whiskey assaults the
nasopharynx with all the excitement of paregoric. Scotch drinkers (not
all, of course) I think of as upward-mobile Americans, Houston and New
Orleans businessmen who graduate from Bourbon about the same time they shed
seersuckers for Lilly slacks. Of course, by now these same folk may have
gone back to Bourbon and seersucker for the same reason, because too many
Houston oilmen drink Scotch.

Nothing, therefore, will be said about the fine points of sour mash,
straights, blends, bonded, except a general preference for the lower proofs.
It is a matter of the arithmetic of aesthetics. If one derives the same
pleasure from knocking back 80-proof Bourbon as 100-proof, the formula is
both as simple as 2 + 2 = 4 and as incredible as non-Euclidean geometry.
Consider. One knocks back five one-ounce shots of 80-proof Early Times or
four shots of 100-proof Old Fitzgerald. The alcohol ingestion is the same:

5 X 40% = 2
4 X 50% = 2

Yet, in the case of the Early Times, one has obtained an extra quantum of
joy without cost to liver, brain, or gastric mucosa. A bonus, pure and
simple, an aesthetic gain as incredible as two parallel lines meeting at
infinity.

An apology to the reader is in order, nevertheless, for it has just occurred
to me that this is the most unedifying and even maleficent piece I ever
wrote–if it should encourage potential alcoholics to start knocking back
Bourbon neat. It is also the unfairest. Because I am, happily and
unhappily, endowed with a bad GI tract, diverticulosis, neurotic colon,
and a mild recurring nausea, which make it less likely for me to become an
alcoholic than my healthier fellow Americans. I can hear the reader now:
Who is he kidding? If this joker has to knock back five shots of Bourbon
every afternoon just to stand the twentieth century, he’s already an
alcoholic. Very well. I submit to this or any semantic. All I am saying
is that if I drink much more than this I will get sick as a dog for two
days and the very sight and smell of whiskey will bring on the heaves.

Readers beware, therefore, save only those who have stronger wills or as
bad a gut as I.

The pleasure of knocking back Bourbon lies in the plain of the aesthetic
but at an opposite pole from connoisseurship. My preference for the
former is or is not deplorable depending on one’s value system —
that is to say, how one balances out the Epicurean virtues of
cultivating one’s sensory end organs with the greatest discrimination and
at least cost to one’s health, against the virtue of evocation of time and
memory and of the recovery of self and the past from the fogged-in
disoriented Western world. In Kierkegaardian terms, the use of Bourbon to
such an end is a kind of aestheticized religious mode of existence, whereas
connoisseurship, the discriminating but single-minded stimulation of sensory
end organs, is the aesthetic of damnation.

Two exemplars of the two aesthetics come to mind.

Imagine Clifton Webb, scarf at throat, sitting at Cap d’Antibes on a perfect
day, the little wavelets of the Mediterranean sparkling in the sunlight,
and he is savoring a 1959 Mouton Rothschild.

Then imagine William Faulkner, having finished ‘Absalom, Absalom!’,
drained, written out, pissed-off, feeling himself over the edge and out of
it,
nowhere, but he goes somewhere, his favorite hunting place in the Delta
wilderness of the Big Sunflower River and, still feeling bad with his
hunting cronies and maybe even a little phony, which he was, what with him
trying to pretend he was one of them, a farmer, hunkered down in the cold
and rain after the hunt, after honorably passing up the does and seeing no
bucks, shivering and snot-nosed, takes out a flat pint of any Bourbon at
all and flatfoots about a third of it. He shivers again but not from the
cold.

Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.

1926: As a child watching my father in Birmingham, in the exurbs, living
next to a number-6 fairway of the New Country Club, him disdaining both
the bathtub gin and white lightening of the time, aging his own Bourbon in
a charcoal keg, on his hands and knees in the basement sucking on the
siphon, a matter of gravity requiring cheek pressed against the concrete
floor, the siphon getting going, the decanter ready, the first hot spurt
into his mouth not spat out.

1933: My uncle’s sun parlour in the Mississippi Delta and toddies on a
Sunday afternoon, the prolonged and meditative tinkle of silver spoon
against crystal to dissolve the sugar; talk, tinkle, talk; the talk mostly
political: “Roosevelt is doing a good job; no, the son of a bitch is
betraying his class.”

1934: Drinking at a Delta dance, the boys in bi-swing jackets and tab
collars, tough-talking and profane and also scared of the girls and
therefore safe in the men’s room. Somebody passes around bootleg Bourbon
in a Coke bottle. It’s awful. Tears start from eyes, faces turn red.
‘Hot damn, that’s good!’

1935: Drinking at a football game in college. UNC versus Duke. One has a
blind date. One is lucky. She is beautiful. Her clothes are the color of
the fall leaves and her face turns up like a flower. But what to SAY to
her, let alone what to do, and whether she is ‘nice’ or ‘hot’ — a
distinction made in those days. But what to SAY? Take a drink, by now
from a proper concave hip flask (a long way from the Delta Coke bottle)
with a hinged top. Will she have a drink? No. But that’s all right. The
taste of the Bourbon (Cream of Kentucky) and the smell of her fuse with
the brilliant Carolina fall and the sounds of the crowd and the hit of the
linesmen in a single synesthesia.

1941: Drinking mint juleps, famed Southern Bourbon drink, though in the
Deep South not really drunk much. In fact, they are drunk so seldom that
when, say, on Derby Day somebody gives a julep party, people drink them
like cocktails, forgetting that a good julep holds at least five ounces of
Bourbon. Men fall face-down unconscious, women wander in the woods
disconsolate and amnesiac, full of thoughts of Kahil Gibran and the
limberlost.

Would you believe the first mind julep I had I was sitting not on a columned
porth but in the Boo Snooker bar of the New Yorker Hotel with a Bellevue
nurse in 1941? The nurse, a nice upstate girl, head floor nurse, brisk,
swift, good-looking; Bellevue nurses, the best in the world and this one
the best of Bellevue, at least the best-looking. The julep, an atrocity,
a heavy syrupy Bourbon and water in a small glass clotted with ice. But
good!

How could two women be more different than the beautiful languid Carolina
girl and this swift handsome girl from Utica, best Dutch stock? One thing
was sure. Each has to be courted, loved, drunk with, with Bourbon. I
should have stuck with the Bourbon. We changed to gin fizzes because the
bartender said he came from New Orleans and could make good ones. He could
and did.

They were delicious. What I didn’t know was that they were made with raw
egg albumen and I was allergic to it. What a lovely fine strapping smart
girl!

And thinking of being invited into her apartment where she lived alone and
of her offering to cook a little supper and of the many kisses and the
sweet love that already existed between us and was bound to grow apace,
when on the Brooklyn Bridge itself my upper lip began to swell and little
sparks of light flew past the corner of my eye like St. Elmo’s fire. In
the space of thirty seconds my lip stuck out a full three-quarter inch,
like a shelf, like Mortimer Snerd. Not only was kissing out of the question
but my eyes swelled shut. I made it across the bridge, pulled over to the
curb, and fainted. Whereupon this noble nurse drove me back to Bellevue,
game me a shot, and put me to bed.

Anybody who monkeys around with gin and egg white deserves what he gets.
I should have stuck with Bourbon and have from that day to this.

POSTSCRIPT: Reader, just in case you don’t want to knock it back straight
and would rather monkey around with perfectly good Bourbon, here’s my
favorite recipe, “Cud’n Walker’s Uncle Will’s Favorite Mint Julep Receipt.”

You need excellent Bourbon whiskey; rye or Scotch will not do. Put half
an inch of sugar in the bottom of the glass and merely dampen it with water.
Next, very quickly–and here is the trick in the procedure — crush your
ice, actually powder it, preferably with a wooden mallet, so quickly that
it remains dry, and, slipping two sprigs of fresh mint against the inside
of the glass, cram the ice in right to the brim, packing it with your hand.
Finally, fill the glass, which apparently has no room left for anything
else, with Bourbon, the older the better, and grate a bit of nutmeg on the
top. The glass will frost immediately. Then settle back in your chair
for half an hour of cumulative bliss.

–Walker Pearcy, “Bourbon”, from Signposts in a Strange Land, 1975

For a prime example of the nerdy excellence that is Enplaned, try this riveting tail of how Sky West went double-or-nothing on a losing bet and walked away as the largest regional airline in the US. Or how ’bout a veritable composite/steel cage fight between the new Airbus A350 and the new Boeing 787M heavies, replete with an unplanned deviation into the fabled “second-mover advantage”.

Basically I want three things from all the pipes and waves coming into and emanating from my house. First, I want internet access at a reasonable-for-2005 speed. Second, I want to watch red-blooded American sports: football and basketball, at the college and professional levels. Third, I want to watch my blue-blood European sport: soccer, at the league and international levels. That’s it.

In exchange for those services, I am prepared to pay, quite handsomely I think, the sum of $65 dollars. Near as I can figure, you could probably offer me a 256kbs internet connection, ESPN, and Fox Soccer, and meet the floor of my criteria for aforementioned cash. You could offer more (say Cox Sports channel, or NBA Season Ticket channels), or better (HDTV, faster ‘net connection), and I could probably be convinced to pay a bit more, or just earn a good name.

Simple, right? A small bit of IP pipe, two TV channels, good service, and you’ve got me hooked for the rest of my foreseeable life. And hey, I’m flexible. You want to offer me Wi-Fi instead of landline broadband? I’m game. You want to deliver those two channels over copper instead of cable? Cool with me.

Sadly, this is not how the world works.

Instead of accepting the transaction terms outlined above, you, Mr. Cable Monopoly, are currently trying to offer me everything except what I want. So I am forced to enumerate what I do not want.

I don’t care about The Disney Channel, or most other channels. I’ve had 300-channel cable, and all I got out of it was a profound depression. At those moments where I had time and inclination to sit down with the remote and the all-scrolling program guide, I would flip through the next 1.5 hours of programming for all of those 300 channels, bright-eyed with expectation and excitement at exploring the offerings of the largest, most well-funded entertainment industry the sum total of the entire Earth’s efforts has produced, and inevitably conclude, “meh, there’s nothing good on TV.”

This is after flipping through screenful upon screenful of TVGuide listings, for fifteen minutes.

I don’t care about landline phone service. I have a perfectly good cell phone that comes with many, many minutes that I pay dearly for. There is no reason for me to accommodate another ten digit number in my life.

I don’t care about most TV shows. The ones I watch, I can download anyways, and watch it (as Ryan pointed out) when I want, without commercial interruption.

Basically, I’m saying this: I know what I like, I find out what I like through means other than the TV, and I don’t care that you, Mr. Cable Monopoly, offer me these 300-odd other channels that carry exactly nothing that I wish to watch.

My last point is that my demands could easily be met. I am basically asking for TV-on-demand, or at least a la carte cable, which is a death toll for many obtuse media business models and agreements. I am also asking to decouple TV from internet from phone, but still to offer all three. These are not new ideas. They are also eminently possible using technology that is at least five years old. But near as I can figure, these companies do not actually care about giving me what I want. I’m not even a selfish, crying baby to them. I’m just nameless, noiseless krill that gets sucked up and digested in their bloated primitive corporate entity.

So, in summary, I know what I want, neither Comcast nor Bellsouth nor Verizon give it to me, and in fact instead of giving me what I would like they instead give me exactly what I do no want, and this is all when they are fully capable of delivering what I want.

Bellsouth, and Comcast.

I’ve tried over-the-air TV with Bellsouth for the internet connection. That sucked because the ‘net connection was slow (torrent files averaged about 40kps), and the TV reception was horrible. We made Casselberry stand in the middle of the room with one arm at a 45-degree angle one Saturday afternoon so that we could see the OU players in color. Plus, I had to pay for a landline phone in order to get the DSL. I didn’t use the landline phone. Not once. I didn’t even have a phone to plug into the jack. $25 a month, just for the phone that I never used. The DSL? $45 for a 256kps connection.

Bellsouth, you suck.

Comcast had a special so I switched to them. I got the Digital Plus package and the broadband cable. The net connection is speedy. The channels are nice. But when the trial period was up, I couldn’t figure why I should pay $130 a month for 300+ channels that I didn’t really have time to watch. Entourage Season 2 was over, and Lost was on network TV. So I downgraded to Limited Ghetto cable, and kept the cable modem. We’re still talking $60 a month. So I figure hey, why not add HDTV and Fox Sports World. That just adds another $12, and I get my football and soccer. So I call. The Comcast “Customer Care Representatives” lady pretty much thought I was an idiot, and had never heard of Fox Sports World. Nor could she be bothered to look it up to see if it was available, or explain why I couldn’t order it, or care that I was asking for a package that Comcast offers on its web site. But I’m a savvy consumer, and would not give up. So I look up some more packages, and find Cable Latino. That way I can get ESPN and Fox Sports Espanol. And brush up on my romance language. Comcast gets ringed again, and a different “Customer Care Representatives” lady accepts my order.

The wife just called. The cable guy came by, and couldn’t hook up the Fox Sports World Espanol channel because we don’t have the right plan. This despite three different, ahem, “Customer Care Representatives” assuring me that, “no, no problem, you can order that Cable Latino package with your current plan. Yeah, you can also get the HDTV channels too with the plan. Yep.”

No soccer, no football, and no HDTV for me. Not even in Spanish. Argh. Of course, I could pay $120 a month, upgrade to “Preferred Basic”, and grab the Cable Latino plan. But that’s $120 a month for two channels and a ‘net connection. Sorry kids, I’m still middle class. That’s 1/4th of my monthly rent.

Comcast, you suck. And I have two more blog entries that explain why.

Man, these blog entries are therapeutic. I’m still disappointed, though.