Unthreaded
tomo,
You're only meant to read the headline. It's not cricket to go looking under the covers.
Sadly, that also applies to things we might tend to agree with. This article caught my eye (linked in a comment at Jo Nova's today). It looks into recent disclosures from the German public health people at the Robert Koch Institute, and makes some statements you and I would find very believable. A couple of examples:
The German government’s reactions to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic had nothing to do with science.I think the article makes a fair case for that first statement, but the second looks far too sciency for me to trust it. It's a pity, because I argued the point here at length with TinyCO2 on the need to calibrate PCR to actual infections and the article would be vindication.
...
The PCR tests were false positive in 86.5% of all those who tested positive and measures imposed on the basis of these tests had no scientific basis.
You might remember that my point was that a test at the back of the throat is external and can't possibly be conclusive that the virus has gained entry. Secondary argument was that it only tests for material, not whether the organism is active.
This neat 86.5% figure, with no statement on variability doesn't go very well with my seat-of-the-pants reasoning, so I looked at what they'd done to come up with it. Looks like the familiar voodoo statistics of climate science.
It's not clear to me, but I think RKI did followup IgG blood tests on people who had had positive PCR tests. Excellent. Apparently they stopped doing IgG tests half-way through '21. To calibrate PCR to IgG, our researchers have taken cumulative figures of each type of test, then come up with a linear regression to adjust the large number of PCR positives down to the the IgG positives. Result: IgG=PCR×0.135+2. Magic!
That 2 looks a bit odd though, and the explanation in the text — the 2-week delay for IgG to turn positive — is fit for a used-car salesman. The y-axis is percentage, and the 2 gives you a fixed 2% infection base, which makes no sense at all.
Bigger question: why use *cumulative* figures?
For starters, I'm not at all clear what they're accumulating. There's only a percentages label on the Y axis, but it's meaningless to add yesterday's 5% positives of 200 tests to today's 3% positives of 180 tests to make 8% positives... You could add numerators and denominators to get a percentage so-far, but the resulting graph would gravitate towards the average percentage, not ramp up as their graph does.
But why cumulative figures anyway? They've plotted the raw figures for PCR (in the darker blue); why don't we see a similar graph for IgG? If their conclusion is right, it should be a scaled down and (apparently) 2-week delayed picture of the PCR figures. I can only guess that they tried with the day-by-day figures, but found they didn't give a compelling graph.
And if such a graph doesn't leap out at you, I'm going with Rutherford: better "experiment" needed. Can we put out a general plea for more brains and less computers?
Robert Swan
We just had national local government elections ... the BBC ex enviro correspondent Black Dick thinks 17% is a mandate ... arse
https://twitter.com/ECIU_UK/status/1787423562015371666
tomo
Robin Guenier,
And I wish you well with it.
DaveS,
The ABC have lately taken to pronouncing Turkey as Turkiye. I assume this is out of respect for the locals' name for their own country. The lingually dextrous newsreaders can manage that, and a nasalised, long-a France won't be much of a challenge. Deutschland would be a surprise to the listeners, but I think everybody's going to be flummoxed when a story comes up about Hungary (Magyarország).
It's not a new thing though. Remember the '80s with all the affectations about Mugabe and Nkomo, and the contests to see how much spittle the reader could get on the mic saying "Mikhail Gorbachev". Oddly enough, they didn't fit on American accents to refer to Reagan and Bush.
tomo,
It was the turbine engine driving the generator in that Toyota that piqued my interest.
Thoroughly enjoyed Leno's run in the "S1000". What a hoot! And no reverse gear; a good reason to always have a passenger with you. BUT, it's most unkind of you to point me at Matt Brown's YouTube site. Lots of rabbit holes and each one I've looked at has been Oh... I've gotta watch all of this. Don't you realise I've got other things to be getting on with and can't spend my life glued to YouTube — Just one more, then I'll get back to work...
Even deprived of his super-yacht and super-launch, I don't expect Mr Gates will be walking the talk anytime soon. A model carbon footprint we couldn't dream of matching. Can give it a go.
That FotE girl demanding the government "release our wind": she might find it easier to release her own wind if she removed the ping-pong ball from the back of her mouth.
Listened again to the John Anderson interview with Helen Joyce. This part seemed worth transcribing:
...There's a concept called the "chain of trust" in medicine where all the specialists believe all the other specialists are doing their job properly.That strikes me as an example of a more general principle of the irresponsibility of specialists and the *need* for a generalist to coordinate and take responsibility for it all.So if you're an endocrinologist and somebody comes in and they've got the piece of paper from the gender doctor saying "this person has gender dysphoria ... give them testosterone or oestrogen", you think they've done their job, and your job is just to check that they don't have some contraindication like high blood pressure or diabetes. So you then give the child hormones.
And then the child is referred on for surgery, perhaps at age 18 (in this country you can get it below 18), and that person believes the chain of trust holds too and they may remove a child's genitals or a woman's breasts or whatever because they think other people have done their job.
But at the beginning of the chain, the person who says "This child has gender dysphoria", they're not cutting anything off or giving any powerful drugs, they're not prescribing or operating. So I think it's that diffuse responsibility, you know: if everybody's responsible, nobody's responsible. Like nobody did the terrible thing, and yet the child ended up a sterile adult...
Climate science has the inverse problem. Its practitioners claim to be specialists, but you see their work and it's a smorgasbord of meteorology, physics, statistics, epidemiology, economics, psychology and who knows what else. Specialist status lets them shrug off criticisms from people with far more expertise in physics, stats, or whatever, with an Ah, but you're not a climate scientist.
.,
American's used to get good value for money building infrastructure, but $11b for that makes extortionate Australian civil engineering look like a bargain. Was $10.5b for the feasibility study?
robertswan
.
absurd FotE advert on YouTube
https://youtu.be/R-cUWeuYBb0
tomo
Bill Gates is reducing his carbon footprint
https://youtu.be/wHEtjMbiefc
tomo
EVs are the future
https://twitter.com/iainpdooley/status/1786660679992119402
tomo
Robin Guenier
thanks for taking the time to elaborate.
'opponents just go quiet' - implies that they're thinking ... I can't help thinking that once the connections / assumptions that you are dismantling with facts and rational inference start to randomly reconnect that the ideological nature of Net Zero will assert itself as the adherents of the cult realise that you are an existential threat to their delusions.
I've had similar reactions (silence) from enthusiasts of renewables when provided with evidenced unadorned simple realities and how those realities would very likely play out / impact in their life experiences - and then, later, - they return, repeating the mantras ... the religious element is difficult to challenge!
It might be possible by dint of extraordinary self control to keep things on an even keel - good luck with that !
I hope that you can get your case in front of people who are near the levers of political power - I wonder at what gatekeeping is in place....
https://twitter.com/aDissentient/status/1783772497428586806
tomo
Robert
motorcycle engined small cars was a rabbit hole I went down a few years ago having seen Kawasaki engined Fiat 500s in hill climb videos.
Matt Brown's creation was showcased on Jay Leno show.
Matt's website is littered with rabbit holes!
tomo
Robbo,
I fear you are making a "Red and Green apples taste different, therefore both cant be apples" kind of argument. Whether its exactly 86.5% or whether there should be some variance or discrepancy or what not noted is neither here nor there. The important factor is these tests were about as useful as c0ckflavoured lollipops and should NEVER have been used for the intended reasons they were used.
Anyone capable of rubbing two or more functioning brain cells together at the time already knew the tests were pointless. Just a pity so many people were more in the 'f8ck em and load em in to the cattle carts for shipping off for education because they did not do as they were told".
Mailman