Graphs that make a good point

Have a look - it will only take a minute.

Thursday photos

Look! Another photo of a woman on a bike! That must be two this year! On a more serious note, I think women have to be careful about the type of bike frame that they select and the sort of skirt they choose to wear whilst riding a bike. I followed this lady up the hill, and she was adjusting her skirt every few seconds. That's not the way to cycle in comfort.

A P&O liner at berth. On the far right is a frigate that has been decommissioned and it's being stripped in preparation for being sunk as a dive wreck. It's been parked there for a few months now. It would be much easier to just tow it to the site and use it as a bombing target.

Work is progressing on the Pyrmont bike route. A perfectly serviceable asphalt road has been torn up so that a fresh concrete path can be laid instead. I continue to shake my head at this silliness. There is an urgent need to fix a horrible black spot just around the corner, but instead we are seeing work done that will add little value to the average commuter's journey.

Mea culpa

I just sent this email to Andrew Bolt & Anthony Watt:

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Gents

My apologies for leading you up the garden path, but my little excursion into the murky depths of climate measurement has been an interesting and enlightening one.

For starters, it showed how a sceptical mind works. I postulated a theory and a fellow sceptic (Ubique) torpedoed it below the water line within a few hours. This is how an open and inquiring mind works. My fellow sceptic did not care whether we were "on the same side" - I was wrong, and the truth was more important than any political position that we might hold. That is important.

The second thing is that my theory was tested because I published all my data in an easily accesible format. Others were able to immediately check my work (and attempt to replicate it if necessary). I could have only published the graph and not the photos, and we would have been none the wiser. It demonstrates the importance of being open with your source data and reasoning.

The third is the importance of relying on first hand observation in the field, rather than relying on second hand data and a "computer model".

The fourth is the emotional rollercoaster ride this small episode generated. It was fun to be published on two well regarded sites, but that lasted about 5 minutes until the ego bursting comment arrived that knocked my analysis over. It's a humiliating experience, but a necessary one. You get it wrong, you cop the consequences and try to do better next time. Imagine how hard it must be for the likes of Briffa, Mann and Jones - their egos and professional reputations have been pumped up by years of media flattery and exposure to heads of state etc etc. It's not fun having to admit you got it wrong in a small thing - imagine how hard it would be for them to climb down now. The loss of face would be unbearable - I doubt most people would be able to hack it emotionally. It's no wonder they have circled the wagons and are in full denial mode - in their position, I would be doing that too. They can't turn back - they have too much invested in this. Some say "follow the money". To that I would now add, "consider the ego".

In that spirit, I have decided to crush Ubique. I am going to write to every reputable blog and insist that the editors refuse to publish his comments in future. If they don't comply, I am going to campaign to have them removed from running their own blogs. I will also undermine Ubique by stating at all times that his comments are not "peer reviewed", and will attempt to have his credentials as a comment provider revoked. I am also going to take down my photos of the lighthouse, and refuse to release them for at least a decade. If he asks any other blogger to provide the photos, I will tell those bloggers to refuse to provide them, and to delete any email correspondence pertaining to those photos. If anyone asks for them, I'll just delete them. Oh, and by the way, Ubique is in the pay of Big Oil.

Cheers, and keep up the good work. You can publish this is you want to.

Let's see if this comment gets published by the ABC:

I have applied the "Tiger Woods Index" to Clive Hamilton

Clive has a ratio of 84,300 google hits to 320 news stories - 263:1. "Climategate" has a ratio of 9693:1. Although Climategate is only two weeks old, the general public are nearly 37 times more interested in reading about Climategate than Clive Hamilton.

Addendum

If we assume Clive Hamilton is 50 years old, that makes him 1300 times older than Climategate. Given that Climategate is still an infant, we could then say that the public are actually 48,000 times more interested in reading about Climategate when you take the time they have been around into account. Which strikes me as about right.

Australian weather records - how much can we trust them?

After reading a few articles on weather stations in the US and Australia over the last year or so, I decided to do a random check on one station in WA to see what the records looked like.

I chose Cape Naturaliste, as I have visited it several times, and the lighthouse has been there for around a century. I guessed that the weather station would be at the lighthouse - and I was right.

One glance at the annual mean maximum temp from around 1900 to today would convince most people that we are all about to fry.

However, I decided to have a look for photos of the site to check out the location of the weather station.

And I found these:

The weather station is located between the two buildings on the far right - and it is about a foot from an asphalt road. Note that the asphalt is a dark black colour - the colour of fresh tar.

Here's a side on view.

If memory serves me correctly, when I visited this place back in the 1980s, this was a gravel road - not tarmac.

If the weather station has not been relocated since 1901, what impact would moving from a gravel road to tarmac have on temperature readings? Undoubtedly, it would skew them upwards. The key question is when the tarmac was laid - or relaid - and what impact this has had on the temperature record.

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Bugger - memory must be worse than I thought. I've been to both lighthouses - as a school excursion in the early 1980s and then a few in the late 1980s when I was working at Yallingup. Can't believe I fouled the two up. All I can say is "thanks Google images for showing photos of Leeuwin when I asked for Naturaliste". I trusted Google more than my memory.

However, I am sure about the gravel road bit. When I first started regularly visiting the Dunsborough-Yallingup area in around 1982, it was not the heavily trafficked tourist and wine themed area that it is today. Most of the roads in all directions were gravel. They were only paved in the 1990s when tourist numbers reached a point where the gravel had to go.

As an aside, I remember family trips between Bunbury and Perth in the 1970s that involved driving along unpaved stretches of gravel on the main road between WA's capital and the next largest city (or town as it was back then). I remember it because we skidded on one section and nearly ended up in a ditch. It's now dual carriageway most of the way, but a lot has changed in 30 years as the area has grown.

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Another update - this is how science should work. Check the facts, show your working, allow debate about your assumptions and results. If you are wrong, it's back to the drawing board.

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Last update - Mea culpa.

Stupid twat

Nothing annoys me more than a cyclist acting like a stupid twat. Check out this hipster in the yellow brackets - he's about to execute a remarkably stupid manouvere by riding down the wrong side of the street and then taking to the footpath - all in order to gain a few seconds on someone like me.

Here he goes - he's gone hard right and he's about to go down the road the wrong way, oblivious to traffic coming up the hill. No wonder motorists get shitty.

He's hard to see against the dark background, but trust me, he's in that yellow box.

And here comes a taxi the other way - and the driver jumped in shock when he saw the cyclist heading his way.

The driver of this car turning right was not expecting a cyclist to be riding on the wrong side of the road, so they turned without glancing to their right (who would?) and almost collected the bloody idiot as he careened down the road.

Here's our least favourite twat on the footpath on the wrong side of the road.

Twat then jumps off the footpath and tries to edge in front of me as we approach the Anzac Bridge on-ramp.

I slowed down for the Stop sign and the errant pedestrian, but our twat just bored through without regard for the pedestrian or cars that might be coming up the hill from the left.

Of course as soon as we got onto the on-ramp, he changed down into a low gear and pedalled like a girl. I was 30 metres in front of him by the time we made it onto the bridge proper. By the time I made the crest, twat was miles behind.

It just goes to show that fitness, strength and stamina will burn off most twats any day of the week. It would not surprise me to see twat under a bus one day. Sympathy - zero.

Tuesday photos

I start with an arty photo of three bikes that I had to give way to as I emerged from a side street. The original video still was so awful, you could hardly pick out the first two cyclists in it, so I fiddled with a number of treatments before settling on a "pencil sketch" effect. I have found that if the video camera is seeing too much sky, it washes out the rest of the view. It can't handle too much light very well. I need to tilt it down to view more road. Asphalt - that's what we want to see.

The council has been putting Rangers on the Pyrmont Bridge most mornings to catch speeding cyclists. How a Ranger on foot is supposed to catch a mad speeding cyclist is something that escapes me. If I don't want to stop and get a ticket, I can just put my foot down and be off at 40km/h before the Ranger has time to say "boo". I haven't seen them writing any tickets, but the hell-for-leather crowd that tear through the slow moving, addle-brained pedestrians like sharks through puffer fish appear to have calmed down and learned to take it easy.

At first glance, you might think this is a woman. Long hair, petite etc etc. But when I got behind this cyclist, I had second thoughts. Although they were petite, they were very muscley, and the facial features that I could see looked rather masculine. I thought it might have been an Asian bloke that was quite feminine.

Then I got to the lights and spotted the bra strap. Gotta be a woman. I think.

The bloke on the right is being all Captain Sensible by sticking a bright, fluro jacket in the back pocket of his back pack - that was nice and visible from several hundred yards away.

Has the tide gone out on global warming?

Some months ago, Ashfield Council spent a fistful of ratepayer's money on putting up "tide markers" and accompanying signs around a section of the Bay Run. As far as I am aware, I am the only person who has ever stopped and read the signs. I pass them twice a day every working day, and I have never, ever seen anyone stop and even glance at them. The tide markers are supposed to show what a record high tide will look like in 2050, and us grockles are then supposed to be so shocked, we go home and tear out the air conditioner and scrap the clothes dryer.

As if.

What cracks me up is that most of these markers have been put up on what looks like reclaimed land to me. Reclaimed land, because it is not well compacted, tends to sink or subside over time. If these low lying flat bits of waterfront flood in 40 years time, it is going to be partly due to the land sinking rather than the tide rising. Although the other factor in rising water levels might be all the shopping trolleys that the westie bogans upstream keep dumping in the waterways.

I just thought it would be fun to show the tide markers when the tide is right out.

Instead of spending trillions on crippling our economies, if we are worried about these bits flooding, we can simply do what our forefathers did: turn up with a few hundred truckloads of dirt and build up the reclaimed flat bits a few feet. That will be a lot cheaper than forking over fistfuls of cash to the government every year for the rest of our lives.

On to things cycling. I really must remember to record a bit of video when I take some of these photos, and describe why on earth I took the photo in the first place. I don't know why I took this, but the juxtaposition of the cyclist against the hand-hewn rock (hacked out by convicts 200 years ago) is pretty groovy.

I am vaguely intrigued by thee multi-speed hubs. Personally, they remind me too much of the 3 speed chopper with sissy bars that I had as a kid to ever want one now.

Check out the definition on that calf though. Riding a hundred miles a week will do horrible things like that to your major muscle groups.

Bullying boss Glenda Stone - did she work with Kevin Rudd

An export from Queensland to the UK, where she has turned out to be the boss from hell.

A gregarious blonde, she was born in Australia and worked as a teacher before embarking on a government career in Queensland Education Department, the Cabinet Office, and HM Treasury.

Wonder if she worked with Krudd in any of those jobs, and picked up a few man-management tips?

Idiot pedestrian

I hate - really hate - pedestrians who cross the road with their back to the traffic. Especially when there is a pedestrian crossing 20 feet away. Are they trying to get run over? No wonder the road toll is up this year - stupid pedestrians are being knocked down like nine pins.

Why do people with small cars park so badly?

I have never understood why so many people who drive small cars are completely unable to park them competently. Each and every working day, I ride in bike lanes that take me past kilometres of cars parked on the side of the road. Without fail, every day involves at least one dodging action where I have to pull out and go wide to get around a small car that is parked a metre from the kerb.

Here we have an example of one such idiot. When I ride, if I am following another cyclist, I never sit right on their tail and have them block my forward view. I weave from side to side in order to get an idea of what is in front - that's fine so long as there are only a few of you (or two of you) and you are in single file. That sort of action would get you thrown out of a peleton!

Apart from weaving from side to side to look around the bloke in front of me, I look for tell tale signs from the rider that something ahead of us is amiss. Cycling etiquete dictates that the lead cyclist should call out a warning to those behind, but that only seems to happen on organised weekend rides. It rarely happens between commuters. The warning sign for me was when he turned his head to look over his right shoulder to see if someone was coming up behind him - that told me he was about to pull out, which is what happened a few seconds later.

If anyone wants to start doing Parisian-style car-B-Qs in Sydney, they would do well to start with all the ineptly parked small cars that have their bums intruding into bike lanes.

Whoops, I was wrong. The SMH has indeed run a story on climategate. They dragged out an academic to tear into the idea that the emails poke a hole in the AGW theory.

What sort of climate scientist did they get to write the story?

Stephan Lewandowsky is Australian professorial fellow in the school of psychology at the University of Western Australia

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!