pleasant weather

I must say, I am enjoying the recent weather. Highs have only been in the mid-80s, and on Monday it didn't even break 80. Humidity has been low, also; right now its only 64%. As it turns out, the normal average for August here is around the mid-80s, but what usually makes August extremely unpleasant in DC/MD is the high humidity. With the lower humidity we've been able to sleep with the windows up and able to take a break from running the AC a lot.

The tomatoes are going well, I'm averaging about three cherry tomatoes harvested a day. I got 3 plum-sized tomatoes off the vine yesterday as well, plus one red pepper, and the regular-sized tomatoes have turned a light orange; going to wait until they're red to harvest them, though. We have a number of cucumbers on the vine, I'm just letting them bulk up for now. Unfortunately I think the plants are starting to wind down for the season, so we may not get much more out of them than the current harvest. I cut back my comfrey plant over the weekend, since it had been getting overgrown and I'm hoping to get in some new growth that I can display at the county fair in September.

A tale of "science" gone bad...

via Watts Up With That, a long and involved post titled "Caspar and the Jesus Paper" about how personal politics trumped science in promoting one of the key graphs (the 'hockey stick') used to support the "global warming" hypothesis.

If things are as presented in the post, then its a scandal. For a scientist to refuse to release (a) the data to allow replication of results and (b) a standard measure such as an R-squared which allows others to measure how good a predictor the model is, is simply unacceptable and against the rules that we all play by. This seems to be a case that the researchers felt the issue was too important to permit evidence which would weaken their case to be published.

It reminds me of something I heard in grad school, when one of my classmates in research class said "if I was researching and found something that I felt supported a wrong (i.e. conservative) position, I'd refuse to submit it (suppress it) because of the damage it might do." I was horrified that a scientist would take that stance, am horrified by it when I encounter it still, but am very aware that it happens. Having seen 'how the sausage is made,' I know that science a lot of the time isn't the pure, unbiased process resulting in Truth that many of its idealists assume it to be. It should be, but it isn't; its being done by people, with real flaws and weaknesses, and that's the whole point of requiring replication of results, so that individual's biases are minimized over time.