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.

The service cuts implemented by Metro yesterday illustrate how harmful the actions of MDOT & the Missouri government have been to the health and vitality of public transportation in St. Louis.

Really, the fact that our neighboring state of Illinois funds public transportation at something like 10x Missouri’s level shows just how laughably short-sighted this state’s transportation policy has been. This shows a skewed vision of what St. Louis should become as a city, a trust in the continuation of a cheap-oil-based economy, and I dare say a immoral failure to serve the poor and helpless. For me, the service cuts are an inconvenience to my bike-and-train commute. For others in your community, they are the severing of their freedom of movement.

As the provider of vital infrastructure that serves the state, I request that you do all that is in your power to redirect funding and regulation in a manner that encourages and enables the success of public transportation, even at the cost of a reduction in meeting car-based needs.

Your Constituent,
Noel Weichbrodt

This is not it.

Additionally, I have also concluded that Scientology is a new Gnosticism, based on similarities between their cosmologies. In reading the gospel of Judas, the full picture of what L. Ron Hubbard was striving to capture all those years quickly appeared.

To: CountyClerk@mail.hamiltontn.gov
CC: webmaster@mail.hamiltontn.gov
From: noel at weichbrodt dot org
Subject: Express Tag Renewal Center Online Accessibility

Clerk Knowles (and Webmaster),

I was shocked to find, upon attempting to access your online Express Tag Renewal Center (http://www.countyclerkanytime.com/onlinesvcs.htm), that you do not support standards-based web browsers (https://secure.hamiltontn.gov/cclerk/tags/browser.asp) like Firefox (http://www.getfirefox.com). I and many of my friends and family (all your constituents) only use web browsers that adhere to the formal standards of the web (http://webstandards.org/about/) and that offer full protection from various internet exploits and dangers (http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/faq.html#mozvsie). To not offer your services to us because of our choice is both a slight and a self-condemnation.

Upon examination of your county web site, it seems that it currently stands in violation of Section 508 (http://www.section508.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Content&ID=3), which mandates compliance with both web standards and disabled accessibility standards (http://webstandards.org/learn/faq/#p312). Though Section 508 is a Federal law, and thus does not directly apply to the County, as a government agency compliance with Section 508 demonstrates your concern for standards and accessibility, especially for your constituents who are disabled (http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/ada/websites2.htm), also (http://www.alistapart.com/stories/politics/). Further, demanding the use of closed-source web browsers ignores the quantifiable superiority of other options (http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html).

There are a number of Chattanooga-based small businesses who are competent in the area of standards-based and accessibility-compliant web design (http://www.aiga50.org/cha/). I suggest that if your IT team does not agree with the industry standards and best practices in this area you avail yourself of their reasonably-priced services.

Please note that I will shortly discuss this issue, along with this letter, on my community blog (http://barelylegalsubstance.chattablogs.com). If you wish for further information regarding what I have mentioned above, or to discuss these matters, please contact me directly.

Thank you for your consideration.

Noel Weichbrodt

Background:
A city employee who wishes to remain anonymous recently wrote this on a Linux-related mailing list:

this sucks… the reason they wanted to know what sort of user-agent info is being sent from Safari is so that they could *allow* that browser to access the County Clerk tag & title website… [I] asked why the hell can’t I use Firefox anymore? Their reason:
Firefox is open source. A hacker could modifiy the code and post a hacked version of Firefox on the net. People download the hacked version of Firefox and it sends passwords and other sensitive information back to the hacker.
…the guy who made the policy to block Firefox [on the Express Tag Renewal Center] is one of the programming team managers here. the programmer said he wanted to block firefox, not because of security issues, but because he didn’t want to code his website to work with all possible browsers.

In light of what the city employee posted, my letter attempts to take the County’s elected officials to task. If you care about this sort of stuff, take a couple minutes and write to the addresses I noted above with your concerns.

This, while other counties are cutting costs and increasing performance by switching to free/open source software.

Update: Added links to the quoted URLs

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”.

Turns out there are two issues. First, Knuth was using an old-and-busted, non-standard DTD that wasn’t even available on the web anymore (which means any new web browser would not be able to guarentee support). One point from Mr. Knuth. Second, the validator folks removed the DTD without notification, when they knew that the DTD would work most of the time and was pretty close to other, standard DTDs. One point from Web Standards.

What did I learn? Standards are not possible at the beginning of something new, but they need to happen, and when they come, make the compliance process as friendly, verbose, and easy as possible.

Kudos to Dare Obsanjo for spotting and blogging this thread.

Proposed class or classes of copyrighted work(s) to be exempted:
Motion Pictures, Software, Audio Recordings, and Digital Text.
Brief summary of the argument(s) in support of the exemption proposed above:
These classes of works (Motion Pictures, Software, Audio Recordings, and Digital Text) have traditionally been granted copyrights for the purpose of encouraging the public dissemination of the works for the benefit and use of the public by providing a property incentive to the originator for a short period of time. The DMCA ignores this traditional cause of granting a copyright, and moreover establishes crippling restrictions on the aforementioned “benefit and use of the public”. As such, the DMCA’s use should be restricted to the text of the DMCA itself, with the consequence being that any private party which attempts to discern the workings of the DCMA with the intent to apply it in any broader fashion outside of the text of the Act itself would be committing a punishable, criminal action under the DMCA.

Just an idea
I am awaiting a response from the LoC.
Found via Slashdot.

Thank you!

The following information was submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office at 17:35 on 11/3/05. Please print this page for your records.

[I have read the notice of inquiry and acknowledge that my attached submission will be posted on the Copyright Office website.]: Acknowledged

[Name]: Noel Weichbrodt

[Title]: Application Developer

[Organization]:

[Street Address]: The Volunteer Building

[Address Line 2]:

[City]: Chattanooga

[State]: TN

[ZIP]: 37402

[Phone]: 4237858262

[Fax]:

[Submitter's email]: nweichbrodt millermartin com

[Proposed class or classes of copyrighted work(s) to be exempted]: Motion Pictures, Software, Audio Recordings, and Digital Text.

[Brief summary of the argument(s) in support of the exemption proposed above]: These classes of works (Motion Pictures, Software, Audio Recordings, and Digital Text) have traditionally been granted copyrights for the purpose of encouraging the public dissemination of the works for the benefit and use of the public by providing a property incentive to the originator for a short period of time. The DMCA ignores this traditional cause of granting a copyright, and moreover establishes crippling restrictions on the aforementioned “benefit and use of the public”. As such, the DMCA’s use should be restricted to the text of the DMCA itself, with the consequence being that any private party which attempts to discern the workings of the DCMA with the intent to apply it in any broader fashion outside of the text of the Act itself would be committing a punishable, criminal action under the DMCA.

[Attached file]: ExceptionProposal.doc

Maybe you can buy a subscription to Martha magazine with the bribe money. That’s the great thing about this country: even scumbags are able to buy a magazine with quick & easy instructions on how to make seasonally-matched window curtains for a 6×9 cell.

I sincerely hope, William, that you repent publicly, quickly, and truly. I also sincerely hope that you, and all you represent, will never represent our town again. Have a nice, long stay in jail.

For the record, this is cool because it brings AJAX voodoo into the nice, friendly, standardized Visual Studio IDE and the nice, clean, modern, OO .NET languages and the nifty, mostly-standards-based .NET technologies.

Part of it has been the tension at work over our immenent Worsite/Outlook conversion. I think I’ve been subconsciously escaping and distressing with the silly posts about the NBA, Airwolf, and Zombies. And then I took a vacation.

I’ve been fairly blasé regarding most news of the last month. Google Earth caught my eye, and was good for a hour of fun with the wife and the “volcano” layer on Maui, but everyone else will probably talk about that. iTunes 4.9 with built-in podcast support is cool too, but being that the only podcast I listen too is Matty’s, this is neither affective nor notable.

So, what’s in the future? When I finish that neural net project, I’ll start learning Ruby. And when Apple introduces a new laptop, I’ll buy that, upgrade to Tiger, etc. What has caught my eye for the future is writing AJAX-enabled apps for our intranet using ASP.NET 2 with Atlas and AJAX.NET. I’ve come to realize that we will never be on the cutting edge of research, the new-new thing, but we can be on the cutting edge of adopting the best tools for the new-new thing. In other words, some people make new things up, others make tools for those new things, and others use those tools to make the same old thing, except better.

There are some personal projects I’m working on, but nothing ready for a first-look unveiling. My bookmarks for neural networks and books should point out where I’m going, though.

At work, not much is bloggable currently. Middle of a political and technical storm for an email/matter-centric km rollout. My boss has been doing stellar write ups and examinations of it, and we’re now poised to thrust the spear deep into the heart of bad workflow. Interesting, but not in my usual geek way.

…the insider who finked on Nixon was a simple, straight guy just doing something a little bit extraordinary.

The aphorism “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”, and the lessons learned from reading Ordinary Men, give a significance to what Mr. Felt did, and what I would hope to do if given to me.

It seems entirely possible that Mr. Felt’s motivations were (and remain) base, but the long-silent example still remains.

Basically, I’m seeing the end of private details like DNA, address, fingerprint, SSN, sexual orientation, phone number, shaken or stirred, etc. Anybody who wants those private details can find, buy, hack, or steal them. If it hasn’t happened yet, it will.

So, how do you know who I am? Well, here’s my public PGP signature. Run it against the public security server, or a server you trust, and the proof is in the output. The SSN is explicitly, by law prevented from being a unique identification number by either the government or private industry. More observed in breach than in practice.

With that said, I’m terribly tempted to toss my full name, address, phone, SSN, and whatever DNA sequencing I can scrabble together onto this blog just to force some changes in the consumer info industry. I’d rather get my identity stolen and get some fame out of it than to settle for a mention in the local police blotter. Oh dear, I shudder to think of dealing with the Chattanooga Police Department with that…

Microsoft, catholic in another sense, has many, many employee blogs. Why? Transparency.

Another great not-so-direct technique: write a blog. Blogs provide transparency into your company and its product development process and show that there are real people behind that corporate logo.

Their point is taken, but the example given is that n log n applies to the union of two networks of equal size n. It seems in that case that lots of new connections may be formed, more so than if each network grew on its own. I can agree to n log n in that case, but a large union seems to create more opportunities, but only in cases where there are chances at intercommunication.

In their Thoreau example, Maine may not have anything to say to Texas. But a large union of two networks makes this example brittle. It’s as if Maine was suddenly moved next door to Texas. Then Maine has a lot more interest in what’s going on in Texas, and vice-versa. Not only that, they find out that there’s more in common between this Red state and Blue state than they thought. And then they form the MTFTA (Main-Texas Free Trade Agreement), and suddenly there’s even more connections, more so than if Maine had never left the cold Northeast.

Of course, a network of earthworms, no matter how large (well, within reason here…), will probably not have much to say to Texas, regardless. Merge those two networks, and not much happens. So I believe, on average, that networks do grow n log n, but there seems to be edge cases where growth is greater. Early internet, blogs, usenet, etc. Not just merging two networks, but moving networks closer to each other.

That’s hand-wavy discourse. To tighten things up a bit, I will say that networks grow faster if they share similar properties and the exposed/addressable surface area is increasing. Which explains my previously-stated cases of usenet, bbs, blogs, etc. New technology increased surface area of network that users/computers could address. Boom, n^2 growth for the network.

Sounds like arguments for open-ness and transparency too, then, huh?

An honorable, savvy fellow, he was interviewing at several organizations to run regional micro-economic development programs. Great resume, great business mind, &c. The organization that he is now working for began their interview with the question, “Why is Peter Brinkerhoff a sexy beast?” He was flabbergasted, and muffed a response along the lines of how they came about to ask that.

A few months ago, a satirical newsletter from his alma matter had run a chop piece on him that fancifully imagined him, the student government treasurer, as a new-money playboy about campus. That newsletter later went online as a blog, and uploaded its archives. Since blogs tend to receive high Google rankings, this article appeared on the first page of results. A simple Google search for “Peter Brinkerhoff” returns a result entitled “The Drone: November 2003 Archives” with the body of “… Peter Brinkerhoff Is A Sexy Beast. … For now, Peter Brinkerhoff remains notoriously
single, but don’t be surprised to hear engagement rumors start flying. …” as the third hit on the first page.

The interviewer had passed his name around the organization’s office, and one of the department heads had executed the above search, grabbed the link, and passed it around the office. Fortunately the interviewers in question caught the humor and were having a laugh at my friend’s expense, but Peter (not the film actor, nor the business consultant, nor the sailor) was deeply concerned.

A couple of days later at a party he asks me, “What can I do? They can’t publish that! How do I get my name back?” Well, yes they can, and there’s not much you can do to alter a Google results page. However, there is a way to regain your name, and that is by blogging yourself (or receiving a favorable blog post). Become a valuable contributor in the conversation about your name, and you control the conversation. That shouldn’t be too hard if your name doesn’t have a *sucks.com domain running around. Thus, this post is my contribution to the conversation about Peter Brinkerhoff, affectionately known around his office as Sexy Beast, or SB. Whaddya think, Pete? Want to start a blog?