| Snowing Flowers! Another Hoax? | 11 comments |
 10 Dec 2009 @ 14:51, by Max SandorLooking at the pool this morning, I got a surprise: it looked like frozen and snowed over. We're in Brazil, mind you, and it's only a few days to the SUMMER solstice on December 21st. So, how's that possible? Mainstream media over here is bigtime twisting words around and pushes all the buttons they can think of. Yesterday it was 'weather isn't climate, stupid!', today is 'the heavy rains in South America are a consequence of Climate Change'. Good thing they changed their language in time: in the 70's it was 'Global Freezing', in the 90's theay started 'Global Warming' and now it's 'Climate Change'. Every 20 years a different thing. And Climate Change is the perfect synthesis of Global Freezing and Warming, isn't it? How ingenious!! Al Gore and the IPCC should hand over their fraudulous Nobel Prizes to whoever came up with this cool SPIN. Wow... these are adult people who come up with this, but then, they must be getting very well paid for it... or lose their job if they express their own opinions as demonstrated by the ClimateGate e-mails. Emails in which the death of sceptic Daly was celebrated like a victory. Just for this infamous act, they should lose their jobs, or even face a court judgement. People like this are destroying the people's confidence (belief?) today's into Science at large. On the other hand, this may not be so bad after all. In any case, 40 years ago in my first classes in Statistics at the University, the 'science' of Statistics was not quite a 'science' yet, it was a hybrid, rejected by the Faculty of Mathematics as well as Physics, a fatherless and motherless enterprise which was heavily joked and sneered upon. One of the first things we learned was how to create any wanted trend out of a sufficiently random sample of data just by selecting the right time frame, even without data suppression. Many years later, at the University of Los Angeles (UCLA), the rumor of a mathematical treatise was going around: a work that supposedly provided the mathematical proof that any statistics can be twisted to yield any wanted result. Later, this urban legend (?) claimed the treatise had been rejected as a dissertation thesis and the book banned. That was in the 80's and the tide was changing from Global Freezing to Global Warming. These stories and more came in from the department of Mathematics via my friend Tony Matweecha until his premature death. He was a great person, a former student of the main Assistant of Einstein who translated his lectures at Princeton, a circumstance that provided us with a plethora of Einstein stories, some fascinating and some sad ones. If I should ever waste my time by writing a book on the truth about Statistics, I would dedicate the book to him. But, then, maybe that would be quite an empty book, some may say: where is the truth in Statistics? Be it as it may, today's early pool surprise turned out to be quite simple: a large tree at the pool side shed a lot of his billions of small flowers: it was literally snowing flowers until this afternoon. Well, I will clean the pool now, hoping it won't start snowing flowers again soon. |