Cleaning Out the Basement...

I've had this box of old toys and other miscellaneous stuff from my childhood which I've been pressured to go through to eliminate the "clutter" in the corner. Here is what I found:

Knight Rider Stomper 4x4

A Few Atari Catalogs from 1982

The Instruction Booklet from Yars Revenge

Chuck Norris as VP?

Can you see it?



Chuck Norris as VP?



Now that Mike Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses on the republican side, many are wondering, IF Huckabee wins the GOP nomination, would Chuck Norris become the VP running mate? (Maybe not many...well, in fact just me and a few people at work...)



Regardless, I say go for it, Mike!



I'm not endorsing Mike Huckabee in any way, I'm just posing a HUGE WHAT-IF...



I guarantee you this, If Chuck Norris became VP, several things would happen overnight:



* Every US citizen would be required to learn the roundhouse kick

* Flannel would become popular

* Beards would become the norm again

* Instead of the State of the Union Address in January, all of the networks would play Mission in Action and Delta Force back to back.


* Lastly, at the UN, instead of an ambassator, we would put a huge life-size cutout of Chuck Norris in the chair normally occupied by the ambassator. The cutout would look like this:

What Happened to Tom Bosley?

I ask this not to make fun of his age or his appearance but seriously, what happened to him?

The last time I saw him a few years ago, he was doing infomercials for some company. But evidentally, he must have aged 20 years since then because he's not looking so good. We here at Evening With Sabs hope all is right with Mr. Bosley.

Compare him to Rutger Hauer and Tom seems healthy.

Happy New Year!

(Pictured is Times Square with confetti falling)

Its hard to believe that 2007 is basically over.

For me, it was filled with many welcome changes. The first and most rewarding was the birth of my daughter, the second was a better work schedule for the family which, aside from the lack of sleep--who doesn't--has been been a godsend. I truely hope that 2008 will be blessed with just as much warmth and fulfillment.

What about 2008. Is this really a special year?

2008 is divisible by 2, 2, 2 and 251.

2008 is a leap year which means that Christmas is on a Thursday which means a four day weekend.

Most high school seniors were born in 1990. Crap. That's scary.

2008 is season 7 of American Idol. Great. More wannabee crooners who quit their jobs at the local greasy spoon.

The 4th Indiana Jones Movie titled and Indian Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Finally, maybe a female president.

Here are a few new search engines that are up and coming in 2008:

http://www.kartoo.com/
http://www.quintura.com/
http://www.goshme.com/login.jsp;jsessionid=B43C41AED84C67E50A5C4D95AD3CA7F9
http://www.zuula.com/
http://www.gigablast.com/

Santa is Here!

Merry Christmas!

Holiday Wishlist from 1982

We all have a wishlist for the holidays. Maybe an I-POD or some wi-fi device or maybe a plasma tv or clothes or something of that ilk.


Maybe the catalog from your favorite store just doesn't list what you want. If that's the case, then you might want to try this.


A friend of mine found this person's flickr site which shows pages from the 1982 Sears Catalog...





ALL 600+ OF THEM!


Check out the price of this piece of cutting edge technology above.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/wishbook/sets/72157594229749541/




I don't know what's worse. The fact that someone actually spent the time scanning in 600 pages of a 25 year old Sears catalog or that I found it fascinating enough click through it to pick my favorites.

Evening With Sabs Two Year Anniversary Post

On Saturday, all of us at Evening With Sabs celebrated our second anniversary on World Wide Web.

Never did I expect this website to garner such a following. My ultimate goal is to make some money with the site. As of this writing, our gross income from is endeavor a paltry ZERO.

Wait. I think we got some free potato salad last summer. That counts....sort of.

At last check in our two years of existence, we referenced Barry Bonds, the late Victor French, Ernest Borgnine and John Stamos. Yet, our audit shows no mention of Wilfred Brimley. You can bet your brand-spanking new diabetes testing supply kit that this will soon change in year three.

Happy Birthday!

The Politics of Politics

"Air-fouling, oil-drilling, earth-raping conservative fossil fools."

Or...

"...apocalyptic global-warming-denying homophobes"

Or better yet...

"Hippie, granola, wacko, non-patriotic, anti-Jesus freaks"

Heard some of these classic blasts? I found these on various websites illustrating how our stereotypes, whether factual or not, have interwoven their way into the political arena. And frankly, its now starting to piss me off.

I know this kind of talk has been around since America was founded more than 200 years ago. All you have to do is read about the political divisions that existed in the late 1700s right after the Revolutionary War. The two main political parties back then--the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans----surely "slung some mud" to prove their point(s). However, in this
passage from Thomas Jefferson, the "smack" isn't quiet what we are used to.

"...to the states as a bulwark against that consolidation, the fear of which produced the whole of
the opposition to the constitution at its birth."

(I sight this passage not for its political message but for the use of the word "bulwark". Wow,
what a word! Any candidate that uses this in a speech gets my vote.)

Back to the task at hand.

In this day-in-age, with more information at our disposal than ever before, its hard not to steer
clear of political stereotypes. Conservatives stereotype liberals as radicals who are anti-establishment, anti-christian, anti--US, anti-war on terror non-conformists who want big business to suffer in any way possible. Liberals stereotype conservatives as old-fashioned, traditional, pro-upper class, super-religious, pro-money, anti-environment, racist, anti-change hardliners.

While some of these descriptors of each group might be true for some, they are not true of all. Its a shame that a year away from the 2008 Presidential Election that these monikers will permeate political talk ad nausium. For the first time, we have a woman running for the highest seat in the land and as of this writing, favored heavily and already, the mudslinging has already begun. The candidates are going right back to the well with the same old cliched rhetoric. Republicans preach that Democrats are not "for the war on terror" because they won't spend the money "to protect" us basically calling they unamerican. They say that the Dems are for more government, against free enterprise and an increase in taxes. The Democrats charge the GOP of being for an increased military, against taxing the rich and not caring about the poor. Blah, blah, blah...

You know what is scary, we've all heard this before and its the same old thing. It shouldn't
surprise any of us that there are people who believe alot of what they hear and are shaped by
these verbal blasts. To put it another way, the general public's opinion is shaped by stereotypes perpetrated by self-serving politicians who are constantly on a soapbox trying to garner ever point in the polls by using the same basic cliched attacks that each candidate used before them and we fall for it every time.

Here's some advice. Maybe the candidates should, ooh I don't know, focus on what they will do for America rather than what so-and-so did or didn't do or won't do. That way we don't have to weed through the endless B.S. to get to the real meat-and-potatoes of how they would handle a specific issue.

Then again, I really wonder how many presidential wannabees really have a plan of attack. These platitudes seem like a clever way to mask the fact that they probably have no plan. The plan is:

Gain popularity, get elected and worry about a plan later. I can guarantee you this: What the candidates say from here on out won't be anything new. The sad part is that most of us will believe it.

Old Article about the "Hockey Stick"

I've been meaning to show this article but never got around to it. Unfortunately, this finding never gets any pub whatsoever.



Keep in mind. I am not piling on the anti-democrat bandwagon. This, I repeat, is NOT a political statement in an way. I, like many of my colleagues, try to see the science through the garbage/politics.



The rebuttle to this finding is at the end of the article.



--------------------------------------------------------



WSJ Editorial July 14, 2006 (Original findings were published in early 2005)



It is routine these days to read in newspapers or hear — almost anywhere the subject of climate change comes up — that the 1990s were the “warmest decade in a millennium” and that 1998 was the warmest year in the last 1,000.


This assertion has become so accepted that it is often recited without qualification, and even without giving a source for the “fact.” But a report soon to be released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee by three independent statisticians underlines yet again just how shaky this “consensus” view is, and how recent its vintage.


The claim originates from a 1999 paper by paleoclimatologist Michael Mann. Prior to Mr. Mann’s work, the accepted view, as embodied in the U.N.’s 1990 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was that the world had undergone a warming period in the Middle Ages, followed by a mid-millennium cold spell and a subsequent warming period — the current one. That consensus, as shown in the first of the two IPCC-provided graphs nearby, held that the Medieval warm period was considerably warmer than the present day.


Mr. Mann’s 1999 paper eliminated the Medieval warm period from the history books, with the result being the bottom graph you see here. It’s a man-made global-warming evangelist’s dream, with a nice, steady temperature oscillation that persists for centuries followed by a dramatic climb over the past century. In 2001, the IPCC replaced the first graph with the second in its third report on climate change, and since then it has cropped up all over the place. Al Gore uses it in his movie.


The trouble is that there’s no reason to believe that Mr. Mann, or his “hockey stick” graph of global temperature changes, is right. Questions were raised about Mr. Mann’s paper almost as soon as it was published. In 2003, two Canadians, Ross McKitrick and Steven McIntyre, published an article in a peer-reviewed journal showing that Mr. Mann’s methodology could produce hockey sticks from even random, trendless data.


The report commissioned by the House Energy Committee, due to be released today, backs up and reinforces that conclusion. The three researchers — Edward J. Wegman of George Mason University, David W. Scott of Rice University and Yasmin H. Said of Johns Hopkins University — are not climatologists; they’re statisticians. Their task was to look at Mr. Mann’s methods from a statistical perspective and assess their validity. Their conclusion is that Mr. Mann’s papers are plagued by basic statistical errors that call his conclusions into doubt. Further, Professor Wegman’s report upholds the finding of Messrs. McIntyre and McKitrick that Mr. Mann’s methodology is biased toward producing “hockey stick” shaped graphs.


Mr. Wegman and his co-authors are careful to point out that doubts about temperatures in the early part of the millennium do not call into question more-recent temperature increases. But as you can see looking at these two charts, it’s all about context. In the first, the present falls easily within a range of natural historical variation. The bottom chart looks alarming and discontinuous with the past, which is why global-warming alarmists have adopted it so eagerly.


In addition to debunking the hockey stick, Mr. Wegman goes a step further in his report, attempting to answer why Mr. Mann’s mistakes were not exposed by his fellow climatologists. Instead, it fell to two outsiders, Messrs. McIntyre and McKitrick, to uncover the errors.
Mr. Wegman brings to bear a technique called social-network analysis to examine the community of climate researchers. His conclusion is that the coterie of most frequently published climatologists is so insular and close-knit that no effective independent review of the work of Mr. Mann is likely. “As analyzed in our social network,” Mr. Wegman writes, “there is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis.” He continues: “However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.”


In other words, climate research often more closely resembles a mutual-admiration society than a competitive and open-minded search for scientific knowledge. And Mr. Wegman’s social-network graphs suggest that Mr. Mann himself — and his hockey stick — is at the center of that network.


Mr. Wegman’s report was initially requested by the House Energy Committee because some lawmakers were concerned that major decisions about our economy could be made on the basis of the dubious research embodied in the hockey stick. Some of the more partisan scientists and journalists howled that this was an attempt at intimidation. But as Mr. Wegman’s paper shows, Congress was right to worry; his conclusions make “consensus” look more like group-think. And the dismissive reaction of the climate



------------------------------------


Since the original release of the statistical findings, Mann issued this rebuttle.

"...so-called 'correction' was nothing more than a botched application of the MBH98 procedure, where the authors (MM) removed 80% of the proxy data actually used by MBH98 during the 15th century period... Indeed, the bizarre resulting claim by MM of anomalous 15th century warmth (which falls within the heart of the "Little Ice Age") is at odds with not only the MBH98 reconstruction, but, in fact the roughly dozen other estimates now published that agree with MBH98 within estimated uncertainties..."

The Best Picture Ever

So a buddy of mine, on a suggestion made by his friend, decided back in early September to go to Dubai on a week's vacation.

Yes, Dubai.

Aside from the obvious cultural differences one needs to adapt to when traveling to the middle east, the trip was great according to him. But of all the pictures he took, this one of his taxi driver is by far the best one and quite frankly, the best picture I have seen in a long time.

This now resides as the background on my computer at work.