March 5, 2012

"Unknown animals are appearing all over the place you know, global warming and all that."

Wrote Chip Ahoy in the comments to last night's post "Fox news," about our sighting of a fox running across the frozen Lake Mendota. Chip added, "Still, whatever it is, clearly between wolves, coyotes, bobcats, and humans, it is bobcats that pose the greatest hazard to survival in the wild." He linked to this:



Now, Chip Ahoy is an amazingly great commenter. We are blessed with his exalted presence. But there was another commenter who impressed me greatly yesterday. It was Mr. Forward, who invented — as far as I can tell — a whole new commenting game. He wrote:
One year ago today at the Wisconsin protests, Fox News utters a bizarre sentence played over the years, "We can not afford to indulge this madness, everything Mark Twain wanted to eat when he arrived home at Meadhouse."

Apologize, atheists, accusing others of taking pills at the Snowhill Cafe. It's completely bizarre, a symbolic victory, one year ago today.
Do you get it? He's pasted together bits from my blog posts of the last few days into a fanciful vignette. I'd love to see more of these, I thought, and then I did. For there was Chip Ahoy, in the very next comment — 3 hours later, in the middle of the night — and he's all:

Oh Mr. Forward I'm afraid you have that misread. It's like hieroglyphics, they're read the way they face, in this case they go bottom to top. Strange, I know.

So something like,

The Snowhill cranes ate breaded flounder strips called fingers at the cafe and then delivered pills to Maureen Dawd's recreational porpoise. The atheists are timid in their charges that religion wears contaminated contact lenses but that is surpassed by Glenn retweeting Wright's column about Breitbart dancing with glow sticks at a Rave. A blogger drank mead at the alehouse and casted about and married a broad. Mark Twain traveled around America and ate France and Italy. It was widely known he indulged his madness and engaged in a same sex marriage with a Cardinal and they argue about what words mean and Cardinal said Twain just wanted a sex slave. And Twain said,"I'll always have Erica who is very erotica. So he threw in his keys and left with the frizzy-hair Schultz and said, "Hey, check out my stone foxy lady. Where can I lay this pipe?" And Schultz was all, "Yeah, I wonduh about duh rotunda."
Scampering fox, and — whoa! — the Bobcat!

ADDED: I'm just seeing that Mr. Forward read from the top to the bottom, in order, from one "year ago today" post to the previous day's "year ago today" post, and then Chip did the same thing from bottom to top.

44 comments:

Chip Ahoy said...

My brother was driving and he goes, "You're not listening," and I go, "I am too." He goes,"So repeat what I just said." So I repeated what he said making sure to hit his key words but mangle the whole thing to a hopelessly absurd outcome and my brother goes, "Good."

Valentine Smith said...

He lifted the lyrics from Dylan.

yashu said...

Ha! Valentine, I was just about to say, Chip Ahoy's paragraph would make for a great Dylan song.

Robert Cook said...

In other words, they're doing Burroughs' cut-up routine.

chickelit said...

"Amazingly great" far exceeds "Marvelous" and "Wonderful."

CWJ said...

The commenters here are truly the other half of what I like about this blog.

Old RPM Daddy said...

"Ha! Valentine, I was just about to say, Chip Ahoy's paragraph would make for a great Dylan song."

Or Lou Reed, but you'd have to give the characters suitably Dickensian names.

edutcher said...

That Mr Forward could do it for so long impressed me.

deborah said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMWLjgPTR_c

Uncle Pinky said...

Getting a Pynchon and Joyce read off of Ol' Chip.

If you were to take a vacation, he'd make a fun guest blogger.

WV: arspoly utextnt.

Bruce Hayden said...

Or, maybe it is global cooling, or global climate change.

Or, maybe some of these animals are moving back into their traditional range, since they are no longer freely hunted there. In Colorado, that is clearly the case for mountain lions and black bears, and likely the case for fox and bobcats. I don't think that coyotes ever left. Oh, and people moving into the traditional range of these animals - something that we see a lot of in Colorado.

Love said...

I see the usual climate change deniers are out in full force once again.

If you idiots spent more time reading and researching what is happening, and less time trying to disprove actual science, you'd be much better off.

Then again; when have any of the regulars here ever cared about facts versus what they want to believe.

Hazy Dave said...

More like Dylan's liner notes than his lyrics, in my opinion, but those aren't shipped with the mp3's nowadays, anyway.

"Actual science," huh?

Bruce Hayden said...

If you idiots spent more time reading and researching what is happening, and less time trying to disprove actual science, you'd be much better off.

And the AGW skeptics think that you are just as silly as you think they are. (Note - I said AGW skeptics, not GW skeptics).

Robert said...

Some people have far, far too much free time on their hands.

Chip S. said...

She's got tenure, Robert.

rhhardin said...

Betraying is letting loose.
The tame caged fox is betrayed
To the hounds...

Vicki Hearne

David said...

PETA gonna getcha Chip.

rhhardin said...

I see the usual climate change deniers are out in full force once again.

If you idiots spent more time reading and researching what is happening, and less time trying to disprove actual science, you'd be much better off.

Then again; when have any of the regulars here ever cared about facts versus what they want to believe.


I love actual science!

Please explain:

1. How can you distinguish a cycle from a trend with data that's short compared to the cycle? The mathematics say that the eigenvalues of the discriminating matrix blow up, so that no measurement whatsoever is good enough.

2. How do you solve the Navier Stokes equations in three dimensions? Flows in three dimensions tend to shorter and shorter scales, and so no resolution whatsoever is good enough in a model. Yet you need short scale flows because they operate as a sort of ersatz visconsity on larger scale flows.

What does settled science say about these?

My impression, as a settled scientist, is that settled science says the AGW claims are bunk.

David said...

Chip S. said...
She's got tenure, Robert.


I don't think Robert was referring to Althouse. That other Chip person it seemed to me.

David said...

I love it when you talk dirty, Hardin.

Chip Ahoy said...

The thing is Ann's fox is too small even the largest version so I used different foxes. I'm terrible with animal movement and human movement for that matter and the foxes I put together look more like a bunny when they're run in sequence, and finally something neither like a bunny nor a fox so to compensate for my lack of skill I made up the thing about unknown animals appearing although there have been a few isolated cases, in each case the animals were ugly and not fluffy at all. <-- possible run on.

garage mahal said...

What does settled science say about these?

My impression, as a settled scientist, is that settled science says the AGW claims are bunk.


As a settled scientist, you must know the answer. Why are you asking?

rhhardin said...

As a settled scientist, you must know the answer. Why are you asking?

I do know the answer: that owing to (1) there are no confirming observations, and owing to (2) there are no physical predictions.

As a settled social scientist, I'd add, in that additional role, that there's lots of money to be made from AGW, and that might have a lot to do with its presence.

It was a serious question, to the AGW scold, though. There's some actual science to respond to and disagree with. Give it a try.

Unknown said...

Chip Ahoy saith:
I'm terrible with animal movement and human movement for that matter

Well, he can't help you with foxes. But for horses and humans, Muybridge is your friend.

traditionalguy said...

The more one reads about String Theory, the more reasonable it sounds that the world did not come into being because a giant turtle god burped , but rather a spider god spun a web.

Whatever it was, it probably happened in Egypt.

Science after all is said and done is still the expression of what we do not yet know about creation.

rhhardin said...

Science after all is said and done is still the expression of what we do not yet know about creation.

Mathematics preexisted the universe and will outlast it.

Lautreamont, maybe it's online...

here

I prefer Lykiard's translation.

Chip Ahoy said...

I wrote a big huge long thing that went on and on and on a brilliant essay really on and on and on and on in rebuttal about having too much time but then I trashed it all because it occurred to me th

Bart Hall (Kansas, USA) said...

Where can I buy the Field Guide to Flattened, Frozen Fauna??

garage mahal said...

@rh
No disrespect intended. I have no idea if you're right or wrong about your opinion that the existing models are bunk. My problem with climate skeptics are; why are you skeptics? Why aren't your models the best available models accepted by the vast majority of your peers? Less skepticism, and more results!

Affectionately,

garage mahal

Kirby Olson said...

Animals are overpopulating the earth.

Polar bears are multiplying at a huge rate.

rhhardin said...

Why aren't your models the best available models accepted by the vast majority of your peers?

Some people choose what's called a management career path, others stay in physics.

The management career path people don't care much about the physics of a model. They can solve all sorts of problems.

The physics people stay with physics equations and have very few things they can solve.

That's why the career interest comes in strongly, as to which kind of thing you do.

The physics people say that, well I don't follow everything you're doing, but I know about this step and this step, and they're wrong.

It seems to a physics person like that invalidates the whole thing. To the management career person it's a detail of little consequence.

The best physics model makes no prediction at all for a thousand reasons corresponding to a thousand difficulties. Sorry, we don't know how to do it and are not going to be able to do it.

So the philosopical situation is that it's not a competing model matter. It's a no model at all matter.

You're left claiming that after eons of huge cycles the earth has suddenly developed an instability that never came up before and it's about to explode, on no evidence; against the more obvious claim that if the earth had such an instability we wouldn't be here at all, and here we are, so it's stable.

Anonymous said...

That is awesome, Chip!
At work, the animation wasn't working. I anticipated a bobcat, but not THAT type of Bobcat.

Crimso said...

"less time trying to disprove actual science"

So we shouldn't even try to falsify hypotheses? You can argue about who has the best philosophy of science, but I would bet Popper would have vomited upon hearing the above quote.

There was once a time when it was pretty clear that electrons were particles. Guess we should have just left it at that, eh?

garage mahal said...

The best physics model makes no prediction at all for a thousand reasons corresponding to a thousand difficulties.

So if Obama summoned you to Roswell with a team of 12 other scientists to solve a climate change solution, you'd just throw up your hands and say it wasn't possible? C'mon! If it weren't possible, you wouldn't have given it the thought you already have. Almost anything is possible.

Go big rhhardin, that's what I'm saying. Your shit deserves to be published along with all these other people. But you have to come up with the compelling model to be looked at.

garage mahal said...

By "your shit", I meant your knowledge. Your "chops".

Phil 314 said...

By "your shit", I meant your knowledge. Your "chops".

And it don't stink!

Phil 314 said...

Tangential, but related.

rhhardin said...

Go big rhhardin, that's what I'm saying. Your shit deserves to be published along with all these other people. But you have to come up with the compelling model to be looked at.

That exemplifies the career path guy.

virgil xenophon said...

@rhhardin/

Agree with you on the science, but what *I* want to know is just how in the H did you even find the "thanatologist" on the innertubes? Or do you somehow know her personally or by professional reputation? Talk about an obscure blog!--with so few links that I would think it's almost impossible to even "stumbleupon" it.

rhhardin said...

It's in Lautreamont's Maldoror, just google for some of the text and various sites offering it come up.

As I said I prefer the Lykiard translation though.

Paco Wové said...

"But you have to come up with the compelling model to be looked at."

In case it isn't clear to you, GM, you have revealed in these last few comments that you really don't know how science works.

Rusty said...

Mathematics preexisted the universe and will outlast it.

Lautreamont, maybe it's online...



But then again maybe mathematics is just our feeble way of attempting to describe what is actually going on. Much of which we cannot see.
If we were not here would mathematics still exist?

Rusty said...

You're left claiming that after eons of huge cycles the earth has suddenly developed an instability that never came up before and it's about to explode, on no evidence; against the more obvious claim that if the earth had such an instability we wouldn't be here at all, and here we are, so it's stable.

Or



As the number of data points approaches infinite, the chance of finding any useful data approaches zero.
Statistically speaking.