Been a while hasn't it

Didn't mean to disappear quite that long, 2.5 months it turns out.  Well, I'll be picking up my posting again.  In the interim, I've been on vacation in the Peruvian Amazon, picture below, been a manager at work, and generally running around.

You probably think of piranha when thinking about the Amazon river.   We were on a fishing expedition for piranha.  My wife, the pilot, and our guide all caught piranha -- mostly red bellied, but a couple white bellied.  Above is my one catch.  It is a sardine (about 10", 25 cm).  I'm amused, or puzzled, or something.  I'm happy about it.  It's a reminder of the fact that the world is more involved and weirder than you might think.  And a reminder than if there's weirdness to be found, I'll be the one to find it.

Managing, well, I'll go back to a story from college.  A friend of mine was a highly talented computer science major who went from starting his bachelor's degree to finishing his master's in 4 years.  While we were room mates, he did a group project with the other two top students in the class.  If technical skill were the only issue in doing a technical project, this group would have done by far the best.  Instead, it was a mediocre project.  That's when he, and I by contact, developed an appreciation for good managers.  One of their skills is to get the best out of a group of people.  So that's my aim.

Still living

Still living, just been away from the blogosphere on other things.  Some of them will find their way back here as posts. 

In the mean time, Kevin O'Neill, who has introduced an interesting idea in one of his comments at Multiple Working Hypotheses, has encountered one of the annoying things about to do science.  Namely, a data set he has been using was discontinued.  I sympathize.  At work, a satellite I was about to make use of in our operations died the week before our implementation.  A resource for looking in to climate (at least as long as you don't need to go before 1979) is the The NCEP Climate Forecast System Reanalysis.  The numerical results of which do include the outgoing longwave radiation.  There are slightly differing (in resolution and time spans) archives at NCDC and NCAR.  The NCDC archive mentions that it is 500 Terabytes.  That sounds about right.  It'll take a while to download.  Or you can use the NOMADS subsetting capabilities to extract just the fields and regions that you're interested in.

I'll also be getting back to my sea ice guesses for ARCUS, and evaluating them.  This time around, as I prepare at work to do some more substantial sea ice things, I'll do a general survey of how they all performed, in all years.  Then to focus on the remaining method.  A point related to the method of multiple working hypotheses is that you have to be active in weeding them down.  You'll generate more and better ones to take their place.  But you have to make room first.

Kicking around in the 'almost done' bin is a post on how long it takes to detect an acceleration in global mean temperature.  Acceleration being a change in the trend.  This was prompted by some todo at the Washington Post Capital Weather Gang, when someone claimed that he'd found a negative acceleration (i.e., a decrease in trend, which would, if continued, turn to a cooling trend).  I'll give away the answer here -- it takes about 40 years (at least 40 years) to define the acceleration. 

Another 'nearly done' is to revisit Does CO2 correlate with Temperature?.  It's almost 6 years since the original, and for all 6 years, there's been talk of 'hiatus', 'pause', and 'climate hasn't changed in N years'.  N varies a lot by who is talking.  Perhaps the additional data will break the correlation, since CO2 has certainly been rising.

I'm also going, at some point, to play on the blog with Bayesian statistics.  Readers who like Bayes, please do correct me as I (inevitably) make mistakes.

Plus in January, when I'm done with the meetings, holidays, and other things, of December, I'll hang back out the question place shingle.  Probably some minor notes before then.

Happy New Years's

Been away for a while, I now realize.  A longer while than expected.  So in the mean time, we've passed the winter solstice, Gregorian new year, and closest approach to the sun (perihelion), and are about to reach (January 31st) the Chinese new year.  Hope all the astronomical and other dates of interest to you have been good.

In the mean time, I've been making progress on writing at work, publishing a couple notes and finally finishing a draft of another.  That's a part of the quiet here -- looks like I can only put down so many words per day in writing.

Science reading has been mostly from the professional literature, which I'll take up in more detail article by article (with, I hope, proper flags for researchblogging.org).  What good books on science (any realm) have you read in the past year?

Bits and pieces

Somehow, even though I no longer am in school, or have kids of my own who are, I'm still pretty distracted from the net around back to school time.  Maybe it's my nieces and their back to school time?

Anyhow, many things going on, though you couldn't tell from the blog here.  And some even have school connections.  One part is, I've been talking to a middle school science teacher, J, about ideas, J's and mine, for grades 6-8.  Of course I mentioned my water surface temperature project.  Also some more specific ones.

I've also been thinking of blogging some experiments that people and classes could do about the earth and eventually climate.  Start with determining the size of the earth following Eratosthenes method, earth's rotation rate (which is not 24 hours per day), and the sun's motion (which also isn't 24 hours per day). What ideas do you have?

Thursday and Friday, I'll be at ScienceOnline Climate, in Washington DC.  It's also on twitter #ScioClimate and I've been more on twitter myself lately (@rgrumbine).  A post relating to that is Liz Neely's What the Science Tells us about Trust in Science.  (Problems there with comment section, so my brilliant comment vanished in to the ether.)  Via twitter, @dougmcneal started collecting observations on why people might distrust a climate scientist.  I've added in a few I've encountered first hand.  I'll suggest you add yours -- that you feel yourself, or that someone has said directly to you.

Open Lab 2013

The Open Lab is now open again, taking nominations for posts from October 2011 through October 2012.  See Bora Zivkovic's note making the original announcement.

Also see the 'open lab 2013'  link on the right.  Feel free, of course, to nominate posts of mine.  But, more importantly, I encourage you to nominate science posts you like, regardless of where from.

Off net

I'll be off net for a while.  When I get back, I'll finally hang out the shingle for a question place.  Arctic ice will have pretty much revealed by then which, if any, of my guesses was best.

Now twittering @rgrumbine

My thoughts, between earthquake, stolen wallet, and hurricane, are now more in line with twitter than blogging.  I'm @rgrumbine there. 

For tracking the hurricane and forecasts, I like the Weather Underground.  Specifically on the hurricane, the WunderMap (r). 

But, speaking of the wallet, it was returned this morning.  Minus cash, but plus all the plastic and photos.

Adding to the blogroll

Finally got around, after broken wrist and other hiatus, to adding http://blogs.chron.com/climateabyss/ to the blogroll.  Thanks -M for the suggestion.

Other suggestions welcome.  As always, I aim for sources that lean to the educational -- science content rather than political policy.

Hiatus to end shortly

A heads up, warning, or promise of good things to come.  Depends on your viewpoint.  Still, my hiatus from blogging will be ending shortly, probably this weekend.  Many things to come, including the longer write up of my September sea ice guesses (3 of them this time, and I'll constructed a combined guess), getting back to some things from the 'what is a day' and 'where is north' posts, and some things from the articles I'm finishing in the next few days for journal publication.  That includes sea ice drift, evolutionary computing (two papers), and a topic to be named later.

Hiatus

Granted there's something odd about writing two posts the day you are mentioning that you're on blog hiatus.  Still, a bit of updating here in promise of things to come.

I haven't been napping the entire time that I've been silent here.  Quite the opposite, really.  One part being the running that I just posted.  Another, and more interesting to the usual content of this blog is that I've been doing some science at home.  Even some at work as well.  The thing is, it takes enough concentration and concerted effort to do something novel at home, after a full day at work, that I don't get over to the blog.

The good news is that, knock wood, I'll be submitting an interesting paper that I've been working on at home for professional publication shortly.  There are at least 3 stories involved in it.  Unlike most scientific work I've done or been involved with, this piece has a well-defined starting point and history.  The three will be the origin of the idea, carrying out the research at home, and what happened in/with the submission process.  Note that I'm talking about submitting the paper; whether it gets published there or elsewhere, and what happens afterwards, will be a different story still.

A couple of interesting-to-here notes are also getting started at work.  We'll see what happens with them.  In both cases, the 'what is climate?' question is major. 

Penguins

A couple of people have guessed where my 'penguindreams' id comes from, but there's a little more to it.  The obvious part is the collection of Bloom County cartoons which were collected as Penguin Dreams and Stranger Things.  There can be strange things here, so it seemed appropriate.  The penguin part has less to do with Opus, and more to do with a platypus.

The platypus is itself a story.  When I was younger (not that I'm not currently young, but back then I was less practiced at it), my sisters each had an animal they collected.  Somehow it was deemed that I should also have an animal that I should collect.  I didn't want to do so, so I spent some time trying to think up the most unlikely animal possible.  Platypus was what I finally hit on.  That served me well.  No platypi found their way to me until I was well in to college, when my grandmother had found a pattern and made one.

I was safe again until I reached graduate school, when I started working on the Antarctic.  Immediately it was decided that penguins were now my animal.  So I've got quite a few penguins, of one sort and another.  They did give my (now) wife pause back when we were dating and she saw the penguin collection.  Fortunately she believed this story.  And I've grown to like the penguins.

Back and becoming active

I'm now back to checking out the blog -- at least comments people have submitted.  So, please take a look at:
Stephen L. at Verifying Forecasts 1
William at Verifying Forecasts 2 (two comments)
Horatio Algernon on Kids are Scientists
Bayesian Bouffant, FCD on Kids are Scientists (giving us a link to a 10 year old who discovered a supernova!)
jyyh on Evolving Thoughts

I'll be posting original material myself shortly.  William's discussion is prompting a separate post or two.  There is an interesting to me point involved, which is helpful for many things in pursuing science regardless of topic.  Namely: What is your object of study?  How do you know?

Hope everybody had a good winter solstice (December 21), holiday season, new year, and perihelion (January 3).  We're now moving away from the sun and those of us in the northern hemisphere are seeing more light.  (Itself a point important to long term -- tens of thousands of years -- climate.)

My wrist has been recovering pretty well, as these things go.  Unfortunate, that does not mean complete recovery 2 months after surgery.  But the physical therapy is going ok (as these things go) and I can now type fairly normally.

Off-blog and Happy New Year

I'm going to be (even more) off-blog into the New Year.  My apologies to William, who did have some good comments over in http://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com/2010/11/verifying-forecasts-2.html that got hung up for a couple weeks as I hadn't been checking in, and hadn't told anybody about this.  I'll be checking in today for comments and to post them, but will be back to off-blog from the 24th through 3rd of January.

Not that this is major to anybody, but I'll mention that my cast came off 2 weeks ago and I've been doing physical therapy to rehabilitate the broken wrist.  Fingers are doing pretty well, the thumb is so so, and the wrist is awful -- compared to my hopes.  All are doing ok to pretty well compared to what you might expect for someone over 20 with this kind of break.  The therapy amounts to a second job -- about 2 hours a day, every day.  That's been one of the time sinks w.r.t. getting blogging.

I hope everybody is doing well, enjoying the season, and has a happy, healthy, 2011.

Hiatus to extend

Oh well.  I'd been blogging less (none) because I've been using that time to work out an idea for publication.  That is now finishing up ok.  But I went out for a run yesterday, to get away from my desk, get the blood flowing, and hope for some ideas to flow on how to handle the 'last' nagging issue on the paper (graphical, not scientific).  Instead, I took a pretty impressive fall and broke my wrist.  Since I'm left-handed, it had to be my left wrist.  This will crimp my blogging for a few weeks, as I can only type one-handed, which is about 20% the speed of my normal typing.  (and error rate is up about 5x as well).  Grr.

Still, I can hit the 'approve' button for comments, and there are several good topics which are getting comment.

And, by way of a chance for me to listen, this seems like a good time to open the floor for suggestions.  One commenter a while back mentioned a blog-usable LaTeX processor.  I'll look in to that.  Other ideas for the presentation?  Content you'd like to see?

It's been a recurring thought from readers that I really need a better way of organizing, or at least displaying the organization, the content here.  I agree with this.  The idea I've had regarding how to do it is either to test it out on a wiki, or to use the wiki as the main place.  I've set up one for experimentation.  If you're interested in the idea, please send me an email (bobg at radix dot net) and I'll add you to the list of editors (and tell you where it is).  That address gets a lot of spam, and I'm liable to be intermittent, so a follow-up message a couple days later won't be a bad idea.

Blogroll news

The updated blogroll has been in action since Satruday, but here's the note describing the newcomers.  In some cases, I've been reading the blog itself for some time.  D'Oh!

Newcomers to the blogroll:

Main focus on climate science, or some part thereof:
The Science of Doom
Neven's Arctic Sea Ice Blog
Climate Change: The Next Generation
  Climate change: The Next Generation is a different sort of blog.  Most content is pointers to the scientific literature or to science press write ups of the scientific literature.  I think this is a good way for people, particularly those who don't have major research libraries handy, to get pointers to interesting parts of the literature.

Main focus on temperature reconstruction and analysis
Moyhu (Nick Stokes)
The Whiteboard (Ron Broberg) [Updated to include]
Clear Climate Code
  (This is aimed at being more general than just temperature reconstruction and analysis, eventually, but at the moment still seems to be mostly this.)

Main focus on the computer science of climate science
Serendipity (Steve Easterbrook)

Sui Generis
ClimateSight
  The author, at least when she started, was a high school student taking an interest in learning about climate science.  If I remember correctly, she's starting university about now.  Articles tend to be about her wrestling to understand the science, and her wading through the nonscience to get there.



Suggestion that I'll invite further comment regarding:
The Green Grok
  This one didn't strike me as 'of course it should be here'.  It looks good, but the goals don't seem to align as well with mine.  I invite the comment (see also my response below to Carrot eater's previous comment) so you all can let me know why you do or don't think it would be a good addition here.  That's a different issue than whether it's a good blog.


Some comments to the previous note :

Carrot: If I ask an opinion question, then your opinion, and everyone else's, certainly does count.  It's also helpful to me to know why folks agree or disagree -- with me, or with each other.  I agree with you that irregular is fine for my blogroll, for the same reason you give.  Of course the final opinion that counts for making blunders in blog management here is mine.  Still, sometimes y'all can steer me away from some of the worst blunders.

S2: I've sent Fergus some email over the past year and heard nothing back.  Don't know if he's just left the blogosphere or what.  I do know that the author of evenmoregrumbinescience is ok, just doing other things.

M: There turn out to be multiple whiteboard blogs, and I'm not sure which one you mean.

Teacher preparing for new year

My wish for us this year: let's take care of each other so that we can take care of our students. I picture our jobs as a great big, wonderful tree house full of knowledge. Our students have to leave their life's baggage on the ground and as they climb up they realize the sky isn't all that far off. May we all remember the simple joy that comes from a fresh box of crayons and a friend to sit with at lunch. BAM!

 

Liz Martinet, teacher

Open Lab 2010 nominations

I have the logo on the right for nominating blog articles to the best of collection -- the Open Laboratory 2010. I'll suggest that you look back at the articles that you think are particularly good, here and elsewhere, and follow that link from the decorative logo, or this link to make your nominations. I was reminded of this because Bora Zivkovic, who does the 'Blog Around the Clock' (a title he perhaps is living out), is also the lead on that activity.

Note that, because of Bora's publication schedule, articles are eligible from December 2009 through November 2010.

New locations for two from blogroll

Two blogs from the blogroll have moved -- A Blog Around the Clock and All My Faults are Stress-Related.

Are there other updates?  Blogs I should be adding to the roll?  Note that 'should' requires that the blog be substantially about science -- learning and doing it -- rather than ... well, quite a few other things that are otherwise.  I grant more leeway for blogs that link over here, figuring that reciprocity is good citizenship.

Still kicking

Didn't mean to disappear and no, no problems were involved.  Just doing other things and didn't realize how much time was passing here.  One of those other things was making progress on my running.  Last week I reached 30 minutes straight running, having started with 1 minute run 1 minute walk in February.  Well, starting with physical therapy in January.

There are quite a few comments in the queue.  If you haven't seen yours, it should be coming up soon(ish).  Keep an eye at the 'most recent comments' section at the bottom. 

One of the things that brought my attention back to the blogosphere was an email from Coby Beck, who had mentioned my Does CO2 correlate with temperature?.  There was an interesting (to me at least) question from 'maxwell' which gave me the opportunity to mention a blog post a commentor to my article had made, and a professional article: David J. Thomson's Dependence of global temperatures on atmospheric CO2 and solar irradiance, PNAS, 94, 8370-8377, 1997.  My examination was intentionally pretty simple.  See Thomson for what it looks like when done professionally.  You might enjoy some of the comments in the thread at Coby's.  And, if you haven't already been doing so, take a look at his blog.

Climate in many languages

Science is so much an international activity, I tend not to think about where exactly people are from. For that matter, many are 'from' parts of the world that they're not working in. Prompted by a recent email, I've added the language that blogs on my blogroll are in, so that you're not surprised to see Swedish when you go to Emretsson.net, for instance. In that vein, please let me know what language Stig's Klimablogg is in.

While I'm thinking about it, let me also invite your suggestions as to good science, particularly climate-connected, blogs outside of English. Please mention the language and what makes it good.