Category Archives: Mathematics

Android Phones

Hundreds of millions of them are vulnerable to having their cameras and mikes hacked.

I’ll have to check the Motorola site to see if they have a patch for my G6. This kind of thing is why I avoid the use of my cell unless I’m traveling.

[Update a couple minutes later]

OK, it seems that one way to prevent this is to not grant an app permission to access device storage. I rarely do that, so I’m probably OK.

[Update a few minutes later]

Sorry, link fixed.

Climate Models Versus Observations

A 2019 update.

TL;DR: They continue to run hot.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Climate utopias and engineering reality.

[Update a few minutes later]

How to trigger a global recession overnight? Ban fracking.

[Late-morning update]

Judith Curry reflects on “Climategate,” a decade later. Hard to believe it’s really been that long.

The Rolling Blackouts In CA

No, they’re not a climate-change story. It’s about rampant insanity and corruption of rent-seeking “green”-energy firms.

And this seems like cheating: Texas lures California businesses with promises of electricity.

What did socialists use to light their homes before candles? Electricity.

[Late-morning update]

California is approaching Puerto Rico territory.

Speaking of which…

[Thursday-morning update]

California is “winning” its way into the Stone Age.

And is the state becoming pre-modern?

Apparently. Pat Brown has to be rolling in his grave at what his idiot son has wrought.

[Bumped]

Model Land

Judith Curry, on a new paper concerning how to escape from it:

Naïvely, we might hope that by making incremental improvements to the “realism” of a model (more accurate representations, greater details of processes, finer spatial or temporal resolution, etc.) we would also see incremental improvement in the outputs. Regarding the realism of short-term trajectories, this may well be true. It is not expected to be true in terms of probability forecasts. The nonlinear compound effects of any given small tweak to the model structure are so great that calibration becomes a very computationally-intensive task and the marginal performance benefits of additional subroutines or processes may be zero or even negative. In plainer terms, adding detail to the model can make it less accurate, less useful. [Emphasis added]

Computer models can be useful in some circumstances, but they are not science.

All the Doomsdays

Zero out of the last thirty predicted have actually come to pass. Someone should show this to Greta Doom.