Posts by Sam Vilain
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Apparently it has a sexual context also attached to it.
I’m not sure. The results I found looked like they were just missing the appropriate punctuation.
As in, “(subject) (verb) (posessive) twat cock (verb)…”
Clearly there should be a hyphen before the last verb there. I’m not sure it’s an actual porn term, at least, not like say “Teabagging”
Given that ‘twatcock’ is going to walk it, perhaps we should just stick it out of the way over in the corner and focus on the fight for second place
+1
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Especially relating to the Christchurch earthquake, I think “shit volcano” does it for me :)
(ahem, I can't actually find a link to the actual term, but you know, it relates to the liquefaction combined with the burst sewers and stuff... maybe you had to be there.)
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And if Assange believes in the rule of law, he needs to go to Sweden with his lawyer and sort this shit out. Refusing on the basis that it would be (in the words of his lawyer) “a media circus” simply does not not wash.
Russell, the article you post to states his claim that he stayed in Stockholm for a month and offered the prosecution extensive opportunities for such a discussion, and later via the relevant embassies, and that the charges were without substance and have been withdrawn by the chief prosecutor. Assuming his lawyer's claims are true then I think "smear tactic" is spot on.
I'm actually very thankful that the recipient newspapers are reporting on the real story, such as the developing Iran crisis covered well by the New York Times. That US diplomats were asked to get fingerprints/DNA and credit card numbers of foreign officials. These articles written by the journalists who know the history of the region and who have had full access to these cables for 2 months are where the real insight is to be found.
That they are also leaking information showing diplomats reporting petty information through top secret channels ... such things should be off the record, and here they are putting it on the record. If this leak seems to be petty gossip, well that can only be the diplomats' faults.
The Guardian is calling it a global diplomatic crisis, and I think they're right. But there is an upside to it - it gives the world a much more current view of the games which are currently being played. The power struggles between nations that us ordinary civilians are not expected to be a part of, because they are far too important. A whole lot of cards have been laid straight on the table, and surely informed decisions by leaders in light of this information are going to be better than uninformed decisions.
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Here's Sam, Luke and co playing at the Merry Kriskmass(?) EP release Gig at Slowboat in Wellington:
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Wittering. Sounds like a real word in the context you used it. But it isn't. I checked.
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Andy, they were in no way "debunked". Read the RealClimate article. And modern temperature reconstructions do not solely rely on "a few tree rings" - if you looked at the other RC article I linked it goes into this, too. One step ahead of you (and Steve Curtis) this time I'm afraid.
The e-mails might seem controversial. On the face of it, scientists "conspiring" to reject a flurry of papers which they know are faulty, by going outside of the peer review process (or "redefining" it, perhaps), is a violation of the regular journal cycle of publish, critique, etc. The cranks in this case were basically gaming the journals into getting something published. Instead of going through this cycle, the East Anglia Scientists were trying to shortcut it by getting the papers pulled - saving themselves the work of rebutting work they know is faulty.
Just look at what happened with von Storch - a paper gets into a journal, makes a critical mistake which the reviewers don't notice - gets rebutted - yet even now, you are guilty of not understanding that the von Storch paper has been discredited.
As you can see, the public and especially the cranks do not understand the peer review process. Letting faulty papers into journals in this political climate will wrongly damage the achievement of consensus. That's the lesson from the CRU hack e-mails.
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On the hockey stick... from a highly relevant Real Climate post
One prominent example was a comment in Science showing that a challenge by Von Storch et al. (2004) to the “hockey stick” climate reconstruction of Mann et al. (1998) “was based on incorrect implementation of the reconstruction procedure”. We discussed the implications on Realclimate after the comment appeared. Another recent example was a comment by Schmith et al. on a Science paper on sea level rise by Stefan, noting that he failed to account for the effect of smoothing on the autocorrelation in the data he used. In his response, Stefan acknowledged this mistake but showed that it does not affect his main conclusions.
This appears to be the source of the original "debunked hockey stick" myth.
There have since then been other failed attacks on temperature reconstructions, Steve McIntyre's attempt to blame it all on 12 trees in Siberia, for instance.
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BenWilson: what about a smack as a part of bad parental correction? A smack as a part of complete parental sadism?
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I think there's a clear mandate for a Government Press Release detailing why a smack as a part of good parental correction has not yet resulted in a criminal prosecution in New Zealand. Clearly the voting populace have said something: that they don't understand the anti-thrashing bill (S59 repeal ;))
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"I hope to take a paper to Cabinet in the near future, after Labour failed to implement any changes," Power said.
Didn't take Power long to extract political capital from this story huh.