Amazing what you can do with tree rings

A new Nature article reports a cooling trend for the last 2,000 years suggested by tree ring data.  The cooling trend is statistically correlated with orbital mechanics but uncorrelated with CO2 levels.   Commenters at Watts Up With That quickly pointed out that the sample was regional (Finland) and that tree-ring data articles published to date have been notoriously unreliable.  As one put it:

The divergence problem is a mathematical artifact of calibration.  Formally known as “selection on the dependent variable”, it is a statistical flaw in the methodology that creates bias in the results.  This bias leads to divergence at the calibration boundaries, and misleading results over the proxy period. 

In other words, it isn’t the trees that are at fault.  It is the knuckleheads looking at the tree cores that have improperly applied amplifier technology to statistics, thinking they were inventing a better way to look at noisy data.  What they invented instead was a way to amplify noise, while making it look like signal.  They fooled not only themselves, but most of the world as well.

"Divergence," in the climatology context, refers to the discrepancy between thermometer data and tree-ring temperature inferences in periods when we have access to both.  Thermometer and tree-ring data agreed reasonably well during the last 150 years until about 20 years ago, when they began to diverge sharply.  AGW skeptics infer from this that the thermometer readings are being jiggered, a charge that involves controversies over climate scientists' doctoring of data, refusal to reveal basic data, cherry-picking of temperature sensor sites, and location of too many sites near urban heat islands.  AGW believers infer from the same divergence that tree-ring data are less accurate than thermometer data, and therefore that past warming periods deduced from ancient tree-ring records may have been overestimated.  Part of the excitement over the new Nature article (in both AGW camps, skeptic and believer) is that it does not suffer from the divergence problem; its tree-ring data match up well with thermometer data in the recent period.

A draft? Really?

I've discussed this sort of crap previously. As I noted here, Do your duty. 

While We're Doing Music

Try this one, from Benny Goodman.   

This particular recording is from his set at Carnegie Hall, and it's been digitally cleaned up.  I have the CD set ostensibly from one of the original sets of recording tapes that Goodman had squirreled away in his attic, found later, and released.  The CD set is deliberately not cleaned up, which the quasi-purist in me appreciates, but I like the cleaned up version of Sing, Sing, Sing, also. 

What really attracts me to this piece though, other than my liking for Big Bands and swing music, is the free-flowing extempore performance.  The basic piece is a three-minute dance song, but near the end of the Carnegie performance, the band was well fired up and into their music.  Krupa, probably with Goodman's prior permission, blew the piece into a jam session, and the main musicians each got a long-ish solo, with Krupa's drums both underlying the sets and bridging them, tying them all together.  And there's a bit of byplay as Goodman seems to get into a loop in his second set, and Krupa's drums jump in to prod him.  The piece then moves to an absolutely cold piano solo by Jess Stacy.

Enjoy.

Eric Hines

Dawsonville Pool Room Update

The Dawsonville Pool Room is still closed, even though the state has lifted the liens filed against it.  Apparently the IRS became interested in the question of filing liens of their own once they heard about the state action, and so is currently investigating whether or not to do so.  The owner wants to meet with them to arrange a payment plan, so that he can re-open the place, but they won't even meet with him until they finish their internal paperwork process.

The community is stepping up, however.

A unique beauty pageant, scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. on July 14 at the Georgia Racing Hall of Fame, is the first planned event to "Help Save the Pool Room."

The next day on July 15 a concert will be held at Veterans Memorial Park featuring local musician Dell Conner. Other local, family-friendly bands will also appear on stage from 3 to 10 p.m.

The following weekend, on July 21, a car and bike show will be held at the Georgia Racing Hall of Fame beginning at 4 p.m.

Accounts have also been set up at United Community Bank and First Citizens Bank of Georgia to "Save the Pool Room."

It's amazing how much charity is pouring out from the community just to try to fix the deranged behavior of its government.  We could be using this charity for other things if the government wasn't making problems for us to fix.

For that matter, if the government really wants some money, why not just let them reopen the place and earn it?

Man "ist was er isst"

Or to update Feuerbach to the 21st century, you are what you spend, at least when it comes to evaluating your creditworthiness.  The FTC claims that credit card companies are jacking up rates on consumers who use credit cards for marriage counseling or massage parlors.  (But I understand that credit card companies no longer are accepting charges from medical marijuana clinics, which, bummer.)  So far, squinty-eyed meanies at the card issuing banks are relying only on rough impressions based on which merchants you frequent, but a movement is afoot to get a finer-grained picture by analyzing the SKU codes for the individual products you purchase.

I have only a rudimentary sense of privacy in most areas of my life.  I honestly don't care who knows what I buy, and can only be amused by attempts to understand me on that basis.  If anything I suffer from a sense of being unknown, inaccessible.  I'm exactly the kind of customer a merchant should try to charm by offering a product whose choice was intelligently informed by real information about my preferences; I would be far from offended.

I admit to a little curiosity about whether my spending patterns portray me as a potential deadbeat, but I figure that, with a 35-year credit history of actually paying my bills, any other information the card issuer gets is gravy.  They must think I'm the Holy Grail of customers.  When they cut off my credit, we'll know the entire financial industry has melted down.

Bitter clingers or clueless Pollyanas?

Who's happy?  According to Arthur C. Brooks, the jackpot goes to "married, religious, politically conservative people (with kids)" (self-reporting as happy at a rate of 52%) vs. "single, secular, liberal people without kids" (14%).  Does this mean, Brooks asks, that conservatives are "simply inattentive to the misery of others," so that "conservatives are ignorant, and ignorance is bliss"?  Brooks suggests a thought experiment in which data showed that liberals were happier, and conservatives questioned whether the explanation was that ignorant liberals "are unperturbed by the social welfare state’s monstrous threat to economic liberty."  In any case, that's not what the data show.

The conclusion that conservatives are happier is one I've read before, but what was new here was data showing that extremists are happier than moderates.  The happiness scale runs from sunny extreme conservatives (48% happy) to sort-of happy extreme liberals (35%) to glum moderates (26%).  I guess that means people like certainty and are happier landing on a secure belief that many things deserve to be preserved in their traditional form.

H/t Maggie's Farm.

The love-hate relationship with Mom 'n' Pop

Why, Bookworm asks, do leftists love Mom 'n' Pop in retail stores, but hate them in medicine?  WalMart is evil incarnate, but national health care is the bee's knees.  I think the answer lies in whether the entity is the enemy.  If so, the bigger the scarier; if not, the smaller the less effective.  The enemy is institutions driven by the profit motive, naturally.  It is a leftist dream that medicine can function without any profit motive -- as long as they're not the ones expected to work for free, or even for below union wages.

Bookworm's commenters discuss whether and how they use WalMart, and what kind of competitors can stay in business.  Our nearest small town sports a WalMart.  It's where we go for a variety of basic supplies, when we have to, as long as we don't mind getting stuck with a bottom-of-the-line product that can't be expected to hold up long.  We patronize the smaller local stores when we don't mind paying higher prices for better quality or for help from knowledgeable salesmen.  Local stores that don't stock better quality or provide knowledgeable salesmen don't stay in business, but I don't blame WalMart for that.

One commenter notes that on-line shopping has taken on the role that Sear's mail-order catalogs once did:  bringing a variety of goods to rural people at affordable prices.  Mail-order certainly is our primary alternative to WalMart here.

Hank Williams, Sr., Part Two

Because of his centrality to the form, we need to spend a little more time with Hank Williams, Sr.

Although he was the exemplar for the hard country songs, he also sang songs rooted in the gospel music that was one of the two main streams of traditional country music.



This music has always been eschatological in the South.  The world will melt away in the fires, so soon to come, that will rain down from Heaven.



And we all know who is the rider of the pale horse:



Hear him cite book, chapter and verse in this song.  It's from 1949.  It makes some sense, at the hour of the start of the long Cold War.



So we must understand this tension to be at the root of the music he is building.  It is built around a sincere faith, but also it is rooted in an honest admission of sin.  He does not claim to be better than he is.  He does not think that his sins prove his strength.  This honest speech is the root of the power of his song.

The Right to Choose... for You

I read James Taranto's attack on Dr. Shari Motro's recommendation that we establish procedures to force men to pay women for pregnancies resulting from sex with said women.  Taranto raises some good points about the function of incentives, and it's a fairly thoughtful reply.

I'd like to raise a less thoughtful response to this particular suggestion:

One of the potential ramifications is that men might be called upon to help support their pregnant lovers before birth, even if the pregnancy is ultimately terminated or ends in miscarriage. They might be asked to chip in for medical bills, birthing classes and maternity clothes, to help to cover the loss of income that often comes with pregnancy, or to contribute to the cost of an abortion.

Emphasis added.

I'm willing to accept that a man who gets a woman pregnant ought to take responsibility for providing for her needs during pregnancy.  That all makes sense to me, although Taranto's objections regarding incentives do seem like relevant concerns.

But there can be no accommodation on the question of forcing a man to pay for the abortion of his own child.  It's hard enough that we require a man to endure the killing of a child he may want, if the woman carrying the child decides that she prefers it dead.  There can be no moral argument for forcing him to pay for the poisoning of his own flesh and blood.

Continuing Education: Hank Williams, Sr.

There is no figure in late-20th century country music that towers nearly as high as Hank Williams.  That doesn't mean he had a happy life.  He was an alcoholic, refused service in WWII because he was injured in a rodeo, a man whose band dissolved around him because they were all drafted, and whose replacements refused to work with him because he was so often drunk; and a man dead at the age of thirty from a combination of an ice storm, alcohol, and morphine.

When he sings about being "a rolling stone" on the lost highway?  That's 1948.  Bob Dylan did that line in 1965.

It's almost impossible to overstate the importance of Hank Williams to country music.  You can attribute to him most of the focus on drinking and lost love, and lives wrecked by these same things.  Even today, you'll hear the old joke:  "What happens if you play a country record backwards?  You get your job back, your wife back, and your dog back."  He's why that joke means anything.

Here is a famous duel inspired by the idea of love at the honky tonk, and who was at fault for the end of such love:

Even Patsy Cline sang about the longing for adultery:



-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Draw a line there.  Everything that follows is from a later period, and is just to show how important the earlier things were to them.

One of the most popular singers of the 1970s made this tribute, which sums it up.  The sexual revolution brought the dissolution of alcoholic honky-tonkers to middle class life:  and Hank Williams was their poet, the one who managed to put how it all felt into words.

Or take David Allen Coe's word for it.  An important part of his claim in this song is that he can sing "every song that Hank Williams ever wrote."  And he can:  but we'll get to him, and the Outlaws, in due time.  For now, the point is that Hank Williams is the touchstone.



Well, let's do one more Outlaw song to make the point.  This is genuflection to the thing that was gone by the time they were singing:  but they meant every word of it.

Oh, give it a rest

Some suggestions from "Pour Me Coffee" for responses to trolls.

It is solely your responsibility to find the hilarity.  No humor explanations. 

Please tell me more about how I might use my time and talent to perfectly match your unique sensibilities! 

I appreciate your candor, but it is none of my business what you think of me. 

I confess to the exaggeration you identified.  This technique is sometimes used in humor.

H/t Rocket Science.

Wildlife overpasses

These are cool.

"That ^$&*%(*& particle"

I loved Rocket Science's intro to a roundup of coverage on this week's blockbuster scientific development:

A particle not unlike the Higgs boson was discovered to rapturous applause.  No really, a room full of people applauded like it was a sports game.  It was brilliant.  One guy said “I was overwhelmed by the data analysis” and started choking up a bit.  We were two seconds away from someone chucking their panties at the boson and then fainting.

Having read some serious nonsense about this discovery lately, I was happy to find a list of links of respectable attempts to explain the business to those of us who lack any kind of a clue about particle physics, in addition to some second-generation links from associated comments.  I can't honestly say any of these were tremendously helpful to me (the subject remains over my head), except that they seemed less silly than what the newspapers were running.

An Atlantic piece featuring a mini-lecture received at a July 4th picnic.

How the Higgs field is like water that fills up some particles and is expelled by others.

A short video lecture from The Guardian, a publication that's producing better-than-average written articles as well.

I like this animation of a brief explanation of what the experiments are trying to measure and how.

W100

xkcd: The Agincourt Gambit

So, my question for the amusement of the readers:  how would you distinguish this from the Crécy gambit or the Poitiers gambit?  What would the field look like in each variation?

Also, is it correct that the French are white in this variation?  The English archers moved first at Agincourt.

Weirdness of Physics

I got a battery-operated mower for this season: I needed a new mower, wanted to try out the technology, and given the hour at which I mow on a Texas Sunday—before it gets too hot—I wanted something quieter than a traditional gasoline-powered machine.  However, unlike modern gasoline-powered mowers, this one is human propelled.

The mower's design facilitates dismounting the battery for recharging between mowings; for me, this amounts to a walk of some 30 feet from my wife's garden shed where I store the mower to the garage, where I recharge the battery.

That's a long introduction to get to the weird physics matter.  I've noticed, now, some 3+ months into the mowing season, that the battery is quite light when it's fully charged and I'm carrying it out to the mower.  However, after it's given up all those electrons to the mowing operation, the battery has gotten quite heavy for the carry back to be recharged.

Hmm….

Eric Hines

Mayberry

 Mark Steyn takes on the subject I'm so addicted to:  the problem of balance between anonymous markets and warm families as a model for human communities.  I've often argued that what works brilliantly under our own roofs is a disaster on a large scale:

In their book The Size of Nations, Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore argue that, if America were as centrally governed as France, it would have broken up long ago.  But hey, that’s no reason not to try it!  In a land where everything else is supersized, why not government?  Obituaries for the late Andy Griffith generally glossed over his career finale as a pitchman for Obamacare.  But he was a canny choice to sell the unsellable, for is not “health” “care” “reform” the communitarian virtues of beloved small-town Mayberry writ large?  The problem is you can’t write Mayberry large.  And, if you attempt it, it leads not to Mayberry but to Stockton, Calif., and to a corrupt, dysfunctional swamp.  A large Sweden is a contradiction in terms.  It cannot be done, and the more determinedly you try to do it, the more you will preside over a ruined wasteland.  The road to hell isn’t paved at all, and the street lamps went out long ago.

My own neighborhood is much closer to Mayberry than to a Wall Street populated by Gordon Gekkos.   We dispense almost entirely with formal enforcement mechanisms and operate, if not on the basis of pure charity, at least on an extremely loose barter system that's more like the old social convention of alternating entertainments than like a ledger.  But it's a small neighborhood, and the close-knit aspect is earned, to some extent, by each getting to know the others and demonstrating a willingness to act right. We don't try to incorporate even the local town into the system, let alone the nearest city.  But shouldn't we be trying to expand the brotherhood of man rather than build walls around our own private Camelot?  I believe that, so the question for me is what's most likely to succeed in that ambition.  Experience tells me that giving strangers respect as autonomous beings, but extending charity to them if necessary, is more likely to bring people together evenetually over a wider and wider area than encouraging each to treat the group as his private teat.  I don't know why dependency on strangers corrodes most people, but I'm convinced it does.

H/t Maggie's Farm.

Continuing Education: Western Swing

Let's take the Hank Williams song from the last post on the subject as a baseline for the unity of country and Western music. The song dates to 1950, and it stands at something like the end of a trend in which the two genres had grown together in popular culture. Now let's look at how that baseline point was formed. The driving force was Hollywood, whose appetite for cowboy movies through the 1930s and 1940s included a developing taste for Western music. We had singing cowboys, who started off by singing traditional Western folk songs. The Sons of the Pioneers and Roy Rogers (originally together, later separate) were probably the most famous of these, from 1933. Here's a traditional Western tune.

 

 As cowboy movies continued to be popular through the 1930s and 1940s, the musical genre began to take on aspects of another genre very popular in the '40s: swing music. Here's the same group kicking up their heels a bit in a film from 1944.

 

Another band that was at the forefront of Western Swing music was Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.  I believe it's correct to ascribe the introduction of the steel guitar to them.  That first happened in 1935, when the band had already included a saxophone and other instruments more commonly found in jazz and swing music.



Now here's Bing Crosby making the point about the change that had overcome the Old West even in its music.



So this is the music that Hank Williams' alter-ego was performing.  It was a genre that had national attention and acclaim for a couple of decades.  It remained popular through the 1950s, when Westerns were still very popular in Hollywood, and even more popular on television.

Hollywood Westerns from the '50s, though, began to move away from Western Swing and back toward traditional Western music out of a desire to use the Western movie as a vehicle to present more serious films.  In Rio Grande, for example, the cavalry regimental singers return to traditional roots music in order to achieve authenticity. It is therefore ironic that the authentic Irish rebel song they picked for the Irish soldiers to sing, "The Bold Fenian Men," actually wasn't composed until the 20th century.

UPDATE:  Turns out we have a highly educated and well-connected fan of Western Swing in the Hall.  I petitioned Gringo for some favorites, and here's what he picked (see discussion).

Ida Red shows Bob and the Texas Playboys playing an old folk tune- or should we say fiddle tune.




Trouble in Mind shows what Bob Wills can do with a blues song. Al Striklin, my third hand connection to the Texas Playboys, is on the piano.




Home in San Antone is a movie clip with some good, swinging instrument solos. 



Take Me Back to Tulsa has a rare appearance of brother Luke Wills on the vocals. Tommy Duncan did most of the vocals.This is one of Bob’s best known tunes.

Two Interesting Articles...

...on subjects we occasionally discuss.

A female Marine with combat experience argues against the admission of female Marines into the Infantry officer program.  In doing so, she makes a number of points Cassandra has often made, but one that I think may be new to the discussion.  The author's own experience with medical attrition as a combat engineer includes a harrowing list of symptoms including infertility:  and that is from a successful tour, without injury from enemy action.

This said, we need only to review the statistics from our entry-level schools to realize that there is a significant difference in the physical longevity between male and female Marines. At OCS the attrition rate for female candidates in 2011 was historically low at 40 percent, while the male candidates attrite at a much lower rate of 16 percent. Of candidates who were dropped from training because they were injured or not physically qualified, females were breaking at a much higher rate than males, 14 percent versus 4 percent. The same trends were seen at TBS in 2011; the attrition rate for females was 13 percent versus 5 percent for males, and 5 percent of females were found not physically qualified compared with 1 percent of males. Further, both of these training venues have physical fitness standards that are easier for females; at IOC there is one standard regardless of gender. The attrition rate for males attending IOC in 2011 was 17 percent. Should female Marines ultimately attend IOC, we can expect significantly higher attrition rates and long-term injuries for women....

Opening combat arms MOSs, particularly the infantry, such observers argue, allows women to gain the necessary exposure of leading Marines in combat, which will then arguably increase the chances for female Marines serving in strategic leadership assignments.... Even if a female can meet the short-term physical, mental, and moral leadership requirements of an infantry officer, by the time that she is eligible to serve in a strategic leadership position, at the 20-year mark or beyond, there is a miniscule probability that she’ll be physically capable of serving at all. Again, it becomes a question of longevity.

When we were talking about Ranger school, some of us noted that the odds were that there would be a loss to the force of excellent officers by putting them in such a physically demanding situation.  However, the issue of longevity is new:  even the ones who do survive the training may not be able to survive twenty years of active service to attain admission to the general officer ranks.  If we are doing a cost/benefit analysis in terms of the good of the force, then, the costs are even higher than I had thought; and the expected benefit begins to vanish entirely.

The second article is over at National Review, a writer named David French does something that I know Elise and Cassandra both wish we did more often:  he attacks the problem set that conservatives often attack as arising from "feminism," but without attributing it to (or even mentioning) feminism or feminist groups.  Rather, he attributes the problem set to "the sexual revolution."

This strikes me as kind of a good point.  What's really objectionable is the destruction of the family, the prevalence of abortion, the translation of 'pursuit of happiness' to mean 'chasing after desires by adults, regardless of the cost to their families and children.'  It seems natural to look to the foremost defenders of unfettered abortion when you go to complain about abortion; but it may be that the underlying issue he identifies is the real source of the problem.

No, No, Joe:

As a service to Dad29, who doesn't know much about country music, a song. This one is by Hank Williams, Sr., when he was singing under a stage name ("Luke the Drifter"). You'll probably like it, both for the anti-Communist lyrics and the Western swing sound.  Note the steel guitar.  This was originally a Hawaiian instrument, but Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys introduced it into Western music in the 1930s.  It was a very popular sound in both country and Western music through to the 1960s.