The problem with ferreting out bullshit in scientific papers even in areas that I’m pretty familiar with is that even not-that-difficult publication take a long time to read, even longer to fully understand, and to do the calculations all over again is nearly impossible (for me).

How does the average person even stand a chance? They don’t. They really don’t.

This paper for instance is 45 pages long.

The paper’s premise is that 100% of the decline in the US labor share of income is due to intellectual property. This doesn’t even pass the sniff test, but I’m willing to give the paper a fair shot at convincing me. (So far it has not.)

However, even to make sense of one not-that-hard paper without any complex math, it has taken me about two hours. And I think I know where and why the authors went wrong. But it’d take me another 10-15 hours of work to prove it, which I’m not planning on doing because I don’t have that kind of time.

My point is that 90% of science could be utter BS (even though I don’t think it is) and no one would ever know. Or at least not many people.

Damn, we humans need an upgrade. This software just isn’t cutting it. It is buggy, slow, prone to failure at the worst possible times and can’t easily be improved.

Models don’t predict the future. They can’t nor are they built to do this. They just give a likely range of occurrences given certain parameters and assumptions.

However that doesn’t make them worthless. Quite the opposite.

I understand why climate scientists especially portrayed their models as more definitive-seeming than they actually were or could ever be: to battle against climate change deniers.

But the real risk that we know from models of climate change is not that climate change will magically abate; no, we absolutely know it is occurring. The risk is that we’ll get the most extreme of the possibilities outlined in models. This is what we should be mitigating against, and exactly why people in the real world buy insurance.

Think of it like this. Most car accidents don’t even produce injuries and are relatively benign. Yet some kill entire families. Because the vast majority of car accidents are just fender-benders, ignoring the financial costs, does this cause you to drive at 120mph everywhere, ignore all traffic laws, and generally just pretend invincibility? (Don’t answer this, Florida drivers — you’re different.)

Of course not.

Climate change is happening. It’s here. The danger isn’t that the models aren’t completely accurate. The danger is that the worst seen in the models is a possible outcome at all.

By the way, Fat Acceptance nutters, the reason many doctors discuss your weight with you when you visit is that almost all of them have done rotations where they have seen very graphic and very disturbing results of gas gangrene, amputations due to peripheral arterial disease, and diabetes-related blindness and other complications — all of which are strongly linked to and directly caused by obesity.

Doctors know very well the bad things that are statistically likely to occur to you when you are fat. They are trying to help you, not hurt you.

It’s not oppression. It’s common sense. Losing your feet at 45 when it’s completely preventable ain’t no way to go through life. Your doctors are trying to forestall that outcome.

The Fat Acceptance movement is a blight on sense and on humanity. They won’t even help themselves, nor let others help them. They’re like some weird combination of the MRAs and the anti-vaxxers.

The new RAID 5 array I built at home does 300MB/s (yep, that’s megabytes) reads and 270MB/s writes — not bad for some stuff I threw together from parts we already had.

Now we have 12TB of storage goodness that’s faster than our network can pull from it or push to it.