More arty stuff

For the last two days, the Pyrmont Bridge has been partly taken over by corporate types promoting "fun". I'm not sure what it was all about - I was travelling too quickly to have a good look, and I was on the lookout for council rangers who have been telling cyclists to slow down when crossing the bridge.

Here's a sample of the activities - painting.

And more painting. This is good fun - we do it at home after a few bottles of wine, and the results have generally been good.

Hulla-hoops.

Drumming. I didn't see anyone having a go on the various sets of drums. Thankfully, no one told any smelly hippies about the free drums. I can't stand those hipster hippies that sit around on the footpath, banging on drums and thinking that they are the coolest people on the planet. I just want to set them on fire. Preferably with napalm.

Friday photos

In order to amuse myself on the ride in, I took a variety of snaps of this bloke.

I like this angle. I got this photo by holding the camera up at arm's length and pointing in his general direction. Seemed to work.

Compare and contrast our "lycra clad loon" above (probably a merchant banker or lawyer) with the fellow below. Casual clothes. Relaxed bike. Not terribly interested in getting anywhere in a big hurry.

And then we have another variety of cyclist - semi-casual attire plus the full commuter rig of saddle bags. All three of these blokes so far looked to be in their 40s.

Track standing. I wish I could still do this. Haven't been able to do it since I was 17.

Another speedy bloke who looked about 40. My problem was keeping up with him and trying to take a photo at the same time!

Here we see him earlier at a more relaxed pace, as he tries to thread his way at low speed through wayward pedestrians on the Pyrmont Bridge. Note the "ride shop" logo on his bum - I hope he is getting paid for carrying advertising for someone else. Good calf muscle development. Must get someone to take a photo of me one day at full tilt.

Arty stuff

I spotted a few out of the ordinary road signs today. They look like proper RTA-type signs, until you look more closely....

And here's another one on the other side of the roundabout.

The Council has been putting up banners for Christmas. From the pictures on them, you wouldn't actually know they have anything to do with Christmas. Here is a pair with a parrot on them.

As far as religion goes, I am definitely C of E - "Christmas and Easter". Plus weddings and funerals. But even I get annoyed when I see bloody councils refusing to acknowledge that Christmas is all about the birth of Christ. It might be a holiday for most people these days, but that was the original purpose.

They wouldn't put up banners celebrating the Olympics without plastering photos of athletes and the Olympic rings all over them. Christmas banners could at least have a Christmas theme. Fucking post-modernist secular twats.

What sort of book would you take to an Obama speech?

Try this one for size.

Fiddling the numbers the CRU way

I thought I would have some fun this week by fiddling with a set of statistics to show how graphs can be manipulated to say anything you want. I spent a few minutes considering what sort of data set to use, and I settled on the ages of our Federal MPs - you can look up their dates of birth at the Australian Parliament House website.

The first graph shows the number of MPs born in each year. They range from 1935 to 1981. I then fitted a lovely, smoothed curve to it, which resembles a bell curve.

However, no matter how I fiddled with the data, I couldn't produce a hockey stick. So I reached into my bag of CRU "tricks" and simply deleted all MPs born after 1967. Even though that removed the "tail" of low results, a 3 order polynomial curve of best fit refused to produce a hockey stick.

So I changed to a 4 order polynomial - and look! The signs of a hockey stick start to appear!

So I cranked it right up to a 6 order polynomial and - wooowor! - the hockey stick just takes off!

I then discovered that Excel 2007 has this nifty "prediction" button when producing graphs like this, so I asked it to add a prediction for 10 years into the future.

Taking this to a Tim Flannery type extreme, I asked it to predict out to 100 years. According to my scientific survey, in 2109, there will be 800,000 Federal MP's who were born in 2067. The weight of those MPs alone will cause Canberra to sink, and the entire city to be drowned under Lake Burley Griffin. Oops, I mean water levels will rise, leading to the catastrophic destruction of Canberra. We could stop that happening by opening the weir downstream and letting some water out, but in typical fashion, Labor and the Greens would insist on taxing something in order to stop this - like neck ties.

Now it was quite unfair of me to exclude all those MPs born in 1968 or later, but let's assume that we didn't have their exact DOBs, and we had to estimate their ages by proxy. Here is the list of excluded members, and their actual DOBs.

Scott John Morrison 1968

Jason Peter Wood 1968

Sen Hon Penny Wong 1968

Sophie Mirabella 1968

Hon Tanya Plibersek 1969

Damien Francis Hale 1969

Kirsten Fiona Livermore 1969

Hon Anthony Stephen Burke 1969

Sen Cory Bernardi 1969

Stuart Rowland Robert 1970

Sen Scott Ludlam 1970

Michael Andrew Johnson 1970

Sen Michaelia Clare Cash 1970

Yvette Maree D'Ath 1970

Mark Christopher Butler 1970

Hon Peter Craig Dutton 1970

Sen Mathias Hubert Paul Cormann 1970

Julie Maree Collins 1971

Sen Mark Victor Arbib 1971

Sen Louise Clare Pratt 1972

Nicholas David Champion 1972

Jodie Louise Campbell 1972

Michael Fayat Keenan 1972

Jason Dean Clare 1972

Hon Christopher Eyles Bowen 1973

Sen Scott Michael Ryan 1973

Sen Simon John Birmingham 1974

Steven Michele Ciobo 1974

David John Bradbury 1976

Darren Leicester Cheeseman 1976

Alexander George Hawke 1977

Hon Katherine (Kate) Margaret Ellis 1977

Amanda Louise Rishworth 1978

Sen Sarah Coral Hanson-Young 1981

Now let's revisit the APH website and try to guess their ages from their photos (in a scientific manner).

Here's Senator Scott Ryan. Looks like a very serious bloke. Bit chubby round the jowls. Must be 45 at least (actual age - 36)

Senator Pwong. Always looks haggard when I see her in the paper. She dresses like a state school teacher. Again, must be 49 at least (actual age 41).

A youthful looking Senator Birmingham. I'd say he's about 42. Erp. He's 35.

And we finish with Senator Arbib. With a dome like that, I'd guess he's 48. Nope, he's 38.

So I went back to my spreadsheet and entered my "estimated" values for the ages of those born in 1968 or after - and look at this - suddenly even a flat trend line is taking off. Because my estimates were completely crap, it boosted the numbers of those apparently born in the 1960s. However, I will defend to the death my "scientific" method for estimating their ages, and if you try and FOI my data, I'll just delete it. And you have no right to my data, even though the taxpayer paid to generate it, because it's mine. Mine, mine, mine. So there.

There is another way to estimate the ages of our MPs, and that is by using the infill method beloved of climate forgers. If you have temperature records from one weather station, but the one next door is on the blink, then you fit the records of the working station to those of the dud one and "complete" your data set that way.

So let's imagine that we didn't have Pwong's age. We could infill it by taking the age of the Senator that she sits next to and then "adjusting" it using some sort of fudge factor. As I couldn't find a photo of Pwong sitting in the Senate, I have substituted one of her with Australia's favourite window licker.

We know the wax muncher was born in 1958. His data of birth is probably the only thing he hasn't lied about, so I will begrudgingly accept it. If we use the method used by the GISS to infill missing data, I'd have to say that Pwong was born in 1960, and use that record in my graph.

Oops. She was of course born in 1968, but what's 8 years between friends?

And thus is data twisted, manipulated and plain made up in order to serve a cause.

Cheers!

More crap from the SMH

The SMH is really scraping the bottom of the barrel this week in terms of coming up with climate change scare stories.

Here is one from Adele Horin:

We're worrying about shift in weather

------

SURPRISINGLY high numbers of people in NSW have been concerned that climate change would personally affect them or their families, according to a health survey.

The results show more than 60 per cent of people strongly or very strongly believed climate change was a worsening problem, and 54 per cent were very or extremely concerned that they or their families would be affected by it.

Beverley Raphael, the professor of population mental health and disasters at the University of Western Sydney, who authored the study, said the extent of concern about the personal implications of climate change was surprising.

----

Just one problem - the research was carried out in 2007 and only recently released. It's so recent, I am unable to find it on the Uni of Western Sydney website.

The data is two years old - who is to say how attitudes have shifted since then? What is the point of writing this up in the paper, except to continually scare us about the climate change bogeyman. This is about as relevant as publishing research from 2007 telling us what voters think of John Howard.

Even worse for Adele Horin and her stupid article, here is how the UN rates global health risk factors.

If taxi drivers weren't vaguely useful, we'd have to kill most of them

I know it's hard to get a sense of perspective in incidents like this because the field of view of my video camera is so narrow. But let me just say that when this taxi went past, my heart leapt into my mouth. If it had one extra coat of paint on the doors, it would have rubbed up against my legs.

What many drivers like this forget is that there is a good chance that I can catch them for a quick chat. This taxi pulled up less than 1km down the road to let his fare out. They don't seem to think that their stupid actions might catch up with them a minute or two later.

Thursday photos

Rowers in the early morning light. Nice flat water. It was so choppy last week, the coaches in their speedboats were bouncing out of the water as they chased the crews.

Always check the wind direction and strength. The flags at the top of the Harbour Bridge are a good guide. When they are standing straight out (as they were tonight), that's a sign of a tough ride home.

Today's hipster. Flatbar bike with some sort of internally geared rear hub. Groovy Crumpler sachel. Hipster shorts, and the giveaway - many hipster tats. Two on the left forearm and one on each calf.

A sure sign of a hipster.

Two rather different cyclists. The guy on the right has a flash road bike and some nice kit that would have set him back multiples of thousands. His legs are bare of hair. But incongruously, he has the rattiest back pack I have seen outside my home on his back. Why buy expensive kit and then lug around a back pack that looks like it has seen 3 tours of duty in Iraq?

The bloke on the left is the hipster. Hairy legs, but cool clothing. He was quite fit and fast too.

Two different approaches, and they both left me for dead.

Too much time on my hands

I thought I'd make a short time lapse video. When I was reviewing the video at high speed, I was amused at the interplay between the cyclist in front of me and the cars we were passing. And other wanky arty crap that makes no sense.

Has Australia been getting hotter?

Well, um, err, perhaps not.

Read the article - it explains how data on the Australian temperature record was cherry picked to remove weather stations that showed no rise in temperature, and only to retain those that showed some increase - like urban stations (which are subject to the urban heat island effect).

I love this kicker at the bottom:

The situation for Jones 1986 Sth Hem compilation – is that Sydney and Melbourne aside, there is not one station, long or short term, between Brisbane and Mt. Gambier. This area includes all of NSW and Victoria and contains the greatest concentration of long term recording stations in Australia. Must be one of the great and complete exclusions in the history of science.

Compare and contrast - SMH vs Google on climategate

Two searches, run a minute apart. Climategate is over a week old, yet a search on the SMH returns exactly zero results.

Google returns over 17 million.

I could rant on all night about bias, but I just can't be bothered. What kind of fools do they take us for?

By the way, the SMH wants you to vote on whether you believe in climate change or not. Vote early, vote often.

Surprising result from a survey on ETS support in the inner west

Our local rag ran a survey recently asking what people thought of living in the inner-west. You have to remember that this area is about as Green as it gets outside of Nimbin. The Mayor of Leichhardt is a Green. The seat of Balmain may fall to the Greens at the next state election. The new Mayor of Burwood drives an Echo of all things (boasting about his green credentials) - and he is a rich wog businessman who would be more at home in a Maserati or Ferrari.

Buried at the bottom of on of a series of stories on the survey was this gem:

Eight in 10 respondents believe in global warming

One in four respondents would support an emissions trading scheme.

One in four support the ETS! This in a seat with a large Labor majority where Green tendencies run deep! And all they can muster up is 25% support!

That, if anything, must show that Turnbull was fucking mad to support the ETS. If support is running at 25% in the Green belt, it must be around 2.5% in the mortgage belt.

Oh, and the local paper loves pushing global warming as a cause. I notice that they wrote up every other statistic from the survey except this one. Must have been too embarassing.

Wednesday photos

Two modes of transport, two conflicting ideas about maximising visibility. Normally, I ride around looking like the car on the right. Did you notice the bike on the left at all? The guy dressed in black riding through a tunnel of shadows?

A man and his kids, out for a spin around the Bay. Awww, that's so cute.

Double scull, out for a spin on the Bay.

My old rowing coach would have a fit at this - "Keep your eyes in the boat!"

Climategate, the ETS and something or other

I have given up and decided to use the term "climategate", even though I can't stand the idea of adding "-gate" to scandals of any sort.

Since the CRU has come a cropper, may I offer this old bit of wisdom:

• You can fool all of the people some of the time
• You can fool some of the people all of the time
• But you can't fool all of the people all of the time

The ETS, or CRPS, or whatever the crap it is, will probably go the same way. Now that the Telegraph is reminding people how much it will cost them, it's rapidly becoming as attractive as waxing your nasal hairs.

Tuesday photos

A funny thing happened last week. For the first time in ages, I rode well all week, and was then still able to function normally all weekend. By the time Saturday comes around, I usually can't walk, let alone ride. However, I had a very active weekend, and the legs didn't complain one bit. I think I have finally reached a level of fitness where I can ride all week and it hardly shows. Thank goodness for that - it's only taken 6 months to get there.

Now to some photos that were taken yesterday and today. I have of course completely forgotten why I took some of them. I will do my best to interpret what I was thinking at the time.

A non-lycra commuter. Work shirt, work shoes, black socks - all he's done is exchange trousers for a pair of shorts. This type of rider is taking over from us lycra types on the daily commute - which is a good sign. Cycling is becoming "normal", especially for short trips. The more bikes on the road, the more drivers become aware of them, and the safer it gets for all of us.

I know why I took this photo - the kid's seat on the back. I'm pretty sure I'd never install one of these, but I see a fair number of these around. I don't know if the parents drop their kids off at daycare and then head into work, or whether they cart the kids around on weekends to the shops and so on.

Murky Monday morning. This morning was worse - I was reduced to wearing my winter undershirt as the temperature was 16 degrees when I left for work. I found that I hadn't washed the undershirt since the dust storm, so it stank of impregnated dust. When I got into the shower at the office, my chest had gone bright red from a combination of sweat and dust from the shirt!

Another relaxed commuter - red Crocs and all. Check out the basket at the back.

An "all black". This is a view I try hard to not present to traffic coming up from behind - one that is black from head to toe. I like to be as bright and lairy as possible so that drivers have no excuse for not seeing you.

A very funky cyclist - some sort of silk, Chinese dress by the looks of things and work shoes. The bike was built for comfort rather than speed, and she headed up towards Balmain once off the bridge. Perfect way to get to work if you have a 3-5km commute.

The other end of the cycling spectrum - very serious lycra bloke on a fixie. The only thing he has in common with the woman above is shaved legs.

Another hockey stick - Flannery's air miles

What's this? A graph of Tim Flannery's frequent flier miles?

I was thinking about inventing a graph this morning to poke fun at Flannery and his predilection for overseas junkets, but then I found this at Watts Up With That?