November 15, 2012

Face it: Faces matter.

There's a controversy with 2 sides, and 2 human faces present the 2 sides. Here are the faces:



After you've thought about how the look of a face might influence your thinking, click here to see what the controversy is.

80 comments:

Juan Pablo said...

Global warming link?

Unknown said...

Who is more believable based on how their faces look?
Judging from my own face the one with lines and creases is the one that is disillusioned.

m stone said...

He looks like the Republican and she's the Democrat.

I'm Full of Soup said...

Come on - these two are only mere scientists. It is way more important to hear what Al Gore believes!

Moose said...

Whew - I thought this was another General infidelity post...

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

I think I know what you're getting at with the faces, Professor, but I'd still choose to have sex with the one on the right, if I had to choose.

But hey, that's just me.

ricpic said...

No surprise to me that the schmuck giving the camera his best soulful look is the global warming advocate,

Humperdink said...

Did anyone ever tell him he looked like Al Gore?

Writ Small said...

It's almost as if the people choosing the which photos to represent each side aren't neutral.

It's a good thing the science is based on something not subject to the whims of human bias: computer models.

tim in vermont said...

Judith complained about that picture and in later articles on the subject, they used a happier one.

You can almost see Phil repeating to himself "I do believe in fairies, I do, I do!"

Where Judith is casting a cold eye on the evidence.

Scott said...

So the man on the left is a prof at the UK university known for the email scandal that exposed the politics behind their bogus climate data.

The woman on the right is a Georgia Tech climate science expert who called the methodologies of analyzing climate data "deeply flawed".

The man on the left looks like a goofball.

The woman on the right looks pissed.

Anonymous said...

surprising that con artists often smile?

it's disarming...

Tim said...

As the temperature data flatten against all predictions of the global warming models, the "fact" of global warming becomes risible, yet its evangelical community presses harder and harder.

And, given the immense amount of federal funding, I think we'll increasing see a conflict with the Establishment Clause.

That, or Barry stopped the oceans from rising waaaaay back in 1997, and he was much too modest to let us know.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

BTW, many years ago I was watching the MacNeil/Lehrer show and there was one of those talking-heads debates about abortion.

The abortion advocate looked like Frau Blucher and the anti-abortion advocate looked like Snow White.

It was actually kind of funny.

Guess you had to be there.

Patrick said...

Had they used This Picture, they wouldn't be able to scare the warmists with the big scary scientist who says things they don't want to believe.

They just want folks to listen to the nice, pleasant fellow who tells you that NYC will be underwater next year unless you stop driving your SUV. Of course, he'll tell you this after flying in on Al Gore's private jet.

Weird.

Patrick said...

That, or Barry stopped the oceans from rising waaaaay back in 1997, and he was much too modest to let us know.

He didn't want to tell us that he also invented the time machine.

Irene said...

Before clicking the link to the article, I thought the woman on the right was wearing a prison jumpsuit. I thought I might reach a story about spousal homicide.

Peter said...

Well, the "scientists" at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel have weighed the evidence, and- it's Time to Do Something!

(And how do they know? Because an advocacy group tells them so! (Yale Project on Climate Change Communication )

http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/time-to-do-something-about-the-weather-vo7kk2q-179199861.html

Ignorance is Bliss said...

The most surprising claim from the linked article is that Georgia Tech is a prestigious university.

McTriumph said...

Of course he is smiling he got all the hoax subsidies, he's rich, the UN loves him, and the cash is still coming in. She on the other hand is an evil anti-science scientist.

test said...

Jesus Christ, now she's nutbaiting.

Paul Kirchner said...

B-b-but President Obama at his press conference yesterday said this: "What we do know is the temperature around the globe is increasing faster than was predicted even 10 years ago. We do know that the Arctic ice cap is melting faster than was predicted even five years ago."

Would our president lie?

Paul Kirchner said...

B-b-but President Obama at his press conference yesterday said this: "What we do know is the temperature around the globe is increasing faster than was predicted even 10 years ago. We do know that the Arctic ice cap is melting faster than was predicted even five years ago."

Would our president lie?

Shouting Thomas said...

The most surprising claim from the linked article is that Georgia Tech is a prestigious university.

I'd bet that GT is a great college, particularly in engineering and the sciences.

So is my alma mater, the University of Illinois.

Class snobbery really doesn't matter much in engineering and the sciences.

LoafingOaf said...

Who chose to use that photo? They had some much nicer looking photos to choose from. Look how different she looked here, when the left first started worrying about what she was saying: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/11/16/174844/judith-curry-zombies/

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Here are three not-so trivial questions you probably won’t find in your next pub quiz. First, how much warmer has the world become since a) 1880 and b) the beginning of 1997? And what has this got to do with your ever-increasing energy bill?

You may find the answers to the first two surprising. Since 1880, when reliable temperature records began to be kept across most of the globe, the world has warmed by about 0.75 degrees Celsius.


From the start of 1997 until August 2012, however, figures released last week show the answer is zero: the trend, derived from the aggregate data collected from more than 3,000 worldwide measuring points, has been flat."


If true, that doesn't bode well for the tax rapists on the left.

I'm all for solar and wind, but they have to be viable within the confines of a free market. Enough with the green corporate welfare that ends up costing tax payers and adding to the debt.

Sydney said...

It's almost as if the people choosing the which photos to represent each side aren't neutral.

Exactly. Newspapers and news sites do this all the time. The person they are against gets the ugly picture. The person they are for gets the pretty one.

William said...

The guy on the left looks benign and thoughtful. The world has treated him well and he wants to reciprocate the favor. The woman on the right looks like she's got some undigested grudges lodged in her colon.....Sometimes the greatest editorial judgement is shown in the choice of photos. However, the article is somewhat favorable to the woman. If that's her official photo, she should change it......I can see why the guy on the left looks so pleased with life. Rich friends probably offer to fly him to global warming conferences in their private planes, and socialites want to party with him. The resentful woman probably gets cream pies thrown at her face when she addresses conventions.

Anonymous said...

Ignorance is Bliss said...
The most surprising claim from the linked article is that Georgia Tech is a prestigious university.


They do well in some niches. OR for example. Applied Math correlates to computer modeling. I have no idea about the physics or climate dept :)

Ignorance is Bliss said...

Exactly. Newspapers and news sites do this all the time. The person they are against gets the ugly picture. The person they are for gets the pretty one.

The DMV does the same thing, however, they're against everyone.

Saint Croix said...

Guy on the left is your nice uncle or a really creepy pedophile.

Lady on the right wants to burn the witches.

Methadras said...

Neither. You can tell they are both leftards from a mile away.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Funny how leftists don't give a shit about rising energy prices. Esp. when those rising energy prices hurt the poor.
Funny how Matt Damon's Hollywood anti-fracking agitprop film was funded by Middle Eastern mean who really hate the idea of an energy independent North America.

Here's another little tidbit: China and India are polluting our air and water at an alarming rate. The particulates in the air from China spread to the US. These same toxic particulates can lead to global cooling.
erp.

Funny too how this is not being reported in the MSM. Instead, we need a carbon tax! Another job killing tax from the elite.

Meanwhile, the dems drool over the kind of corrupt power China holds over the masses.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

Note:

I wasn't making any claims about the quality of either the education or the research at Georgia Tech. Just the prestige. If you asked people to list prestigious universities, it would not make many people's lists.

Wince said...

This will come as a disappointment to Obama.

He knows his tax hikes on "the rich" won't pay for the government he envisions.

That's why he's pushing so hard to raise tax rates on the more affluent, not merely their share of taxes.

It's the bloody shirt he can waive in order to justify the broad-based "carbon taxes" he'll seek to impose on everyone to pay for the government he wants, cloaked in environmentalism.

To paraphrase Willy Sutton, because that's where the money is.

MTN said...

Head tilt gave it away

MTN said...

Head tilt gave it away

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I thought it was a divorce.

The guy had money and the wife wanted it.

The money and the power to re-make the world in her image... the only image she is ever going to know... her own.

KCFleming said...

Id and superego.

KCFleming said...

Curly and Moe.

john said...

If they had an ugly baby, which one would sue for divorce?

Is that the question?

madAsHell said...

Catastrophists!!

I am a catastrophist. I worship the binary of Gaia, and Global Warming.

Tank said...

Global Warming/Climate Change - it's a religion. The facts don't matter. Consensus.

Emil Blatz said...

Looks like she just smelled a fart in church. But I like Georgia Tech, so I'll go with her side of the argument.

edutcher said...

I looked at the headline (does this mean Barry can be impeached?) and didn't care about what the people looked like.

Saint Croix said...

Guy on the left is your nice uncle or a really creepy pedophile.

Lady on the right wants to burn the witches.


Or is one.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Marriage, divorce... Id

What do we want... Ego

What do we want to do with it... Super-ego

Robert Cook said...

"The most surprising claim from the linked article is that Georgia Tech is a prestigious university."

By my understanding, it's long been considered one of the top engineering schools in the nation, and difficult to get into.

Two high school friends of mine went there back in the 70s and I stayed in their dorm on several visits up to Atlanta to see The Who (twice, at the Omni) and the Ramones, (on their first national tour in Fall '76).

Bob_R said...

Some day Georgia Tech can hope to measure up to East Anglia.

MountainMan said...

"I wasn't making any claims about the quality of either the education or the research at Georgia Tech. Just the prestige. If you asked people to list prestigious universities, it would not make many people's lists."

Really? Among the engineering community it ranks quite high. It is also very highly regarded by major employers of engineering talent, both in the US and around the world. In the US News ranking it is #7 in public universities and #5 in engineering. Many of its engineering programs are ranked quite high, including aerospace (2), biomedical (2), civil (3), electrical (5), environmental (2), industrial (1), and mechanical (3). Many of these are not only highly-regarded in terms of academics and research but quite large in number of engineers produced each year. It also has global scope, with large numbers of foreign students and international campuses in Europe and Asia.

Geoff Matthews said...

Georgia Tech is highly ranked in engineering. They have this cited on their website:

http://www.profpractice.gatech.edu/gt_wsj_top25.php?nid=62645

Apparently, their engineering grads are the best to recruit.

Big Mike said...

Competent mathematicians knew that the models were deeply flawed from the moment they were published. Many, to their shame, got on board the global warming bandwagon anyway. Some because they wanted to believe that the results were true even if the models were bogus. Others because they lacked the personal strength of character to stand against their faculty colleagues from liberal arts and the soft sciences who were positively slavering at the mouth.

But reality does catch up with one, doesn't it?

Oh, and I didn't much care for either face. The guy on the left looked smug. The woman on the right looked angry and upset. Given my choice I'd rather deal with an upset woman than a smug university professor, but neither is a picnic.

McTriumph said...

Patrick linked a normal picture of the lady professor, I'd hit it. I bet she was really cute at 18 and smart. Smart is sexy.

tim in vermont said...

"you asked people to list prestigious universities, it would not make many people's lists."

I think that says more about you than it does about Ga Tech.

Oso Negro said...

Yes, there is no global warming. Suck it green weenies!

sparrow said...

I agree with her but prefer his picture, probably the smile. Shows the subjectivity inherent in photos. Univ. of east Anglia is notorious by the way, I believe he's part of the group that had their emails colluding with Michael "hide the decline" Mann outed.

Pastafarian said...

Ignorance is Bliss: "The most surprising claim from the linked article is that Georgia Tech is a prestigious university."

I hate to pile on, as everyone has already explained to you that anyone who knows anything about prestigious universities in engineering considers Georgia Tech to be one of the best; but that was really blissfully ignorant.

If you ever consider hiring someone from GT, bear in mind that there is no gentleman's B there -- their GPAs will be about a full point lower than the GPA of a similarly competent student from, say, UW-Madison.

Rusty said...

I thought the pictures of icebergs were a nice touch.
Probably couldn't find any bloated corpses of dead polar bears.

kimsch said...

From the linked article:

At last week’s Conservative Party Conference, the new Energy Minister, John Hayes, promised that ‘the high-flown theories of bourgeois Left-wing academics will not override the interests of ordinary people who need fuel for heat, light and transport – energy policies, you might say, for the many, not the few’ – a pledge that has triggered fury from green activists, who fear reductions in the huge subsidies given to wind-turbine firms.

The bolded is the money quote. The greens really aren't interested in the environment, it's the money. Environmentalism is lucrative.



Anonymous said...

What are all the secular utopians going to believe if it isn't clear we're headed for global disaster?

Sometimes you have to let people be right because they can't be anything else.

Sam L. said...

Choice of photographs counts, too. We can be lied to in soooooooooo many ways.

mccullough said...

He looks warm and she looks frigid. They make a nice couple.

Anonymous said...

There are better photos of Dr. Curry.

In any event, her website, Climate Etc., is probably the best single blog for two-sided discussion of climate change issues. It tends to a preponderance of skeptic voices, but that's mostly because orthodox climate blogs censor, harrass and ban skeptics from participation.

Dr. Curry is labeled a "heretic" but her position is actually mainstream. She accepts the broad outlines of the orthodox climate change position, i.e. that greenhouse gases are warming the planet and changing the climate, but she is skeptical that climate science can answer accurately how much and how quickly and what other factors may be at play.

Her blog, rather mysteriously, has been shut down as of this morning.

http://judithcurry.com/

Anonymous said...

Given that we are considering physical appearances here, another anomaly of the 2012 election is that the taller, more handsome man lost.

Dante said...

I've visited Judith Curry's website many times. It reminds me of this place: examining the issues, thinking around the problem without grabbing on to positions. Turning over a thought, or a phrase, to understand what it means.

It's a serious blog. Or, it was. I went over there to see what was going on just now, and I got this:

curryja.wordpress.com is no longer available.

This blog has been archived or suspended for a violation of our Terms of Service.
For more information and to contact us please read this support document.


Don't know what it means, but I'm not surprised. The Global Warmists have taken to trying to shut down voices, limit access to data, etc.

Amartel said...

Ha. I thought this was going to be a sociology post about gender expectations, that a passive look on a man and an aggressive look on a woman were equally offputting, or offputting in different degrees depending on your sex and/or political affiliation or some crap.

But instead it's global warming photojournalism!
Woman (denier)=bad. Grrrrrrl! Man (warming propagandist)=good.

Isn't East Anglia U the place where leaked emails revealed institutionalized cheating on the data or presentation of the data? Smile!

Jim in St Louis said...

Yes- It sure got me. The photo of the smiling benevolent scientist seems so much more reasonable.

Funny how easy we are to manipulate sometimes.

Charlie Martin said...

Gee, I wonder how it happens that they found a glowering picture of Judith Curry and a smiling picture of Jones?

Scott said...

@Dante: I just checked. Judith Curry's blog seems to be up and working.

Synova said...

The "melting" icebergs are beautiful. Ice is sort of amazing.

I was wondering how they figured to find icebergs that weren't melting. Did they have a geologist along to point out the melting from the non-melting icebergs? To say... that one there melted in the past but is not presently melting, this other one is melting today. Isn't melting what icebergs do?

Take a picture of Minnesota in the summer and caption it... "Usually frigid Minnesota."

In any case, as manipulative as the pictures are, the many pictures of "melting" ice are just as blatant.

Toad Trend said...

"And with the country committed by Act of Parliament to reducing CO2 by 80 per cent by 2050, a project that will cost hundreds of billions, the news that the world has got no warmer for the past 16 years comes as something of a shock."

'Mugged by reality' comes to mind.

When you base your actions on fairy tales, the realizations and results aren't pretty.

Strelnikov said...

Is the controversy over which is the more masculine? Cause I'd like to weigh in.

Toad Trend said...

"In any case, as manipulative as the pictures are, the many pictures of "melting" ice are just as blatant."

An absurd yet illustrative point; imagine a world where no icebergs ever melted. None of them.

Yeah I'm having trouble with that one, too.

raf said...

I was repulsed by both pictures: the man looks (smarmily) devious, the woman looks angry, and it might turn out that she is angry with me.

"Prestige" has next to nothing to do with quality. Bryn Mawr is prestigious, Engineering schools, by definition, are merely utilitarian. The relationship between Prestige and Education is often inverse. This makes sense. If you can sell Prestige, that's all you need and you can charge premium prices. If you have not Prestige to sell, you have to sell something of value, and then you can only charge so much.

Taking Professor Jones at his word -- fifteen years is too short a time to form useful opinions -- the period 1980 - 1996 is too short to conclude that warming is occurring. Unless, of course, that is different, somehow.

Clyde said...

Unsurprisingly, he looks like he would have a warmer personality.

She looks like the harsh, inconvenient truth.

Steve Koch said...

creeley23 said...
"There are better photos of Dr. Curry."

Most recent google images of her look pretty stern. Just a few years ago her pictures made her look much younger, more attractive, less stern, and happier.

"Dr. Curry is labeled a "heretic" but her position is actually mainstream. She accepts the broad outlines of the orthodox climate change position, i.e. that greenhouse gases are warming the planet and changing the climate, but she is skeptical that climate science can answer accurately how much and how quickly and what other factors may be at play."

Most skeptics agree with Curry, CO2 does have a warming effect. There is general agreement that every doubling of CO2 raises the earth's temp by about one degree C. The earth's CO2 level is about 390 ppm and going up 2 ppm/year. This means it will take about 2 centuries for CO2 to double, thus raising the temp of the earth by one degree C!

What is not at all clearly understood are what the feedbacks will be to the CO2 caused warming. There are still huge unknowns in climate science. For example, the IPCC claims that clouds have a warming effect on the climate while there are many papers that show that clouds have a cooling effect on climate. Having lived in a hot climate for decades, it does seem obvious to me that clouds cool things down. There is strong agreement that climate science does not yet understand the effect that clouds have on the climate or even all the factors in the formation of clouds.

What is clear is that climate science has been grossly politicized by the left and that lefty hacktivist climate "scientists" such as Mann should not be trusted.


Robert Cook said...

"I've visited Judith Curry's website many times. It reminds me of this place: examining the issues, thinking around the problem without grabbing on to positions."

Heavens to Murgatroid!

Carl said...

On the left, the quintessential beta male, licking the boots of powerful females. Probably secretly wearing a buttplug in this photo.

On the right, a female with overly clean boots, thoroughly sick of the sniveling.

Ignorance is Bliss said...


Okay, I was wrong. It's about the 26th most prestigious university in the US, better than I expected.

Known Unknown said...

One of these people looks extremely gullible.

Known Unknown said...

Ever since I left, Carnegie Mellon has plummeted to #37 on that list.