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Premio Nobel de la paz

Al Gore, inventor de internet y del cambio climático ha recibido el premio Nobel de la paz junto al IPCC "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change", es decir por publicitar su propia invención.

De este modo se convierte en el primer premio Nobel de la paz otorgado a un inventor, algo que se venía echando en falta. Parece que a mucha gente no le ha sentado bien... ¡Si Benjamin Franklin levantara la cabeza!

Desde algunas esquinas polvorientas del IPCC también se han tomado con sorna la noticia.

P.D.: Añadir todos los asteriscos y peros que se quieran :-)

Global warming

Up until now I was refraining from writing on global warming, and I won't do so, but I found a slashdot comment, related to a finding that NASA's data on global warming had an error that was silently corrected that pretty much synthesises my thoughts on the matter:

There is no questioning of global warming. It's now a fact. The sun revolves around the earth. To suggest otherwise means you're an idiot.
Let's ignore that CO2 is not the largest part of our atmosphere, and something else (say methane) may be responsible. Let's ignore the fact we're coming off an ice age. Let's the history of "science facts" that the media has trumpeted in the last 40 years or so (remember when we would all die in a massive world-wide starvation as foretold in "The Population Bomb"?, the new ice age they said would come in the by the 80s? The mass extinction caused by DDT?) Let's ignore the fact that Mars is getting hotter too and that it seems to be the Sun's fault. How about that acid rain that would become a blight on the planet making it impossible to go outside while it was raining in the US? And where are those empty south american countries that lost so many trees the planet can't produce enough oxygen to supply all the people in the world.
Is the globe getting warmer? Seems like it. Is it the fault of humans? I wonder. Is it the fault of CO2? I wonder. I don't care if you want to reduce pollution and emissions and such. When I moved to my current location 9 years ago or so, the sky was clear. We now have plenty of smog. Asthma is going up in the US. There are plenty of reasons to do these kind of things. But no one talks about that any more. If we want to cut car exhaust, it's to stop the planet from warming, not so the air isn't brown. If we want to reduce power plant emissions it is to reduce the warming of the globe, not because the plant has been putting a fine layer of soot on everything downwind.
Global warming is the latest media boogeyman. I'm just sick of hearing about it. I'm sick of how it's the US's fault. China pollutes more than us now. Go bug them. Go help them stop burning so many coal blocks for heat. Go help them make cleaner cars affordable. Go help India. Go help Europe (which is getting close to our levels). Fight the BIG sources (that will only grow bigger). When a dam is leaking, you plug the BIG leak that will soon be letting out 20,000 gallons a minute, not 5 little holes that let a few gallons through per day.
I'm sick of this global warming stuff, and how I've basically never seen it questioned in the mass media (except by other people who question it and immediately get called morons for questioning).
Global warming, as it is discussed in the US, seems more like a religion than anything else to me at this point.
Can you give me a good reason why the number from a government scientist who's report was used to "prove" global warming and then later complained he was censored for his actions being disproved shouldn't be reported just as big as the original story?
Remember kids. Call the president a child molester, that's page one. Print the retraction (if at all), that's page 37b in tiny type 6 months later between an ad for Hardee's and Mission Impossible 12.

Amén.

Platero y tú

Voy a acabar borracho.


¡Pero qué buenos que son!

Parece que esto se está convirtiendo en un videolog, prometo algo más de texto para la próxima :-)

¡Mira mamá, mi primer video en youtube!

Como algunos se quejaban de que este blog no tenía colorines (hasta las fotos que pongo son en blanco y negro), he estado currándomelo últimamente para conseguir hacer un video con colorines.



Demasiado verde, lo sé, pero ando esperanzado últimamente :-)

Antártida

Por Sebastião Salgado

SOLEDAD Sin población indígena y, sin embargo, patrimonio de la Humanidad entera, el Sur blanco atrapa todavía hoy, como en el pasado, a muchos exploradores, a aquéllos que han hecho de la Antártida su vida.

SUPERVIVENCIA Lucha de titanes por la supervivencia, por lo que es de uno. Los elefantes marinos, que pueden alcanzar las cuatro toneladas de peso, se enfrentan de manera continua y encarnizada.

Plotting

Making publication-quality plots is one of the ugly parts in the life of a scientist wannabe. In my field there are two main plotting packages in use (besides IDL which i don't have): SuperMongo and PGPLOT.

Both are quite old. I guess the best of them must be SuperMongo, since its lemma is "You can't beat SM.". Joking aside I can't give an unbiased opinion, since all the times that I have tried to use SM, I have hit a wall of uneasiness. The syntax is too different from everything else that I know.

That leaves us with... erm well, PGPLOT and PLplot. Since my main computing environment has come to be Octave running on Ubuntu, I thought that it would be good to give PLplot a drive, after all it has pre-compiled packages and it's supposed to work fine from within Octave. Another advantage is that it's built to be very similar to PGPLOT, which I had used in the past. After fighting with it for some hours I can say that it is not ready for prime-time. Some of the problems I found while using it:

• The gnome server won't work. That leaves us with the xwin server which is incapable of redrawing itself (a PITA if you are working from a full-screen terminal).


• Issuing plend() to close the active plotting window will make Octave segfault if actually there's no such window. Hey, I made a mistake! But no need to punish me so hard.


• The output is... well not-as-good-as-I-would-like. If you print directly to a Postscript device, some Hersey symbols (like the Sun's symbol $\odot$ in LaTeX) won't be drawn. If you plot to the xwin server and then save the output with save_fig, the result is ugly. All the letters and symbols are squashed and o's (supposed to be a round and in fact round on screen) appear as ellipses on the Postscript.

Those were the most important so, repeat after me: "You can't beat PGPLOT (unless you are SuperMongo, of course)". The final result, I'm using PGPLOT from inside Octave with the help of the matwrap tool. No need to make specific programs and compile them to plot your data. Works like a charm, it's much more solid than PGPLOT and the output has that fancy professional look that only SM and PGPLOT can attain.

Now I'm a believer, I won't doubt again about how to make my plots.