+1 for Linode

prgmr.com is very cheap and has worked well for me for the last month (which is when I signed up)

This guy got me into Ruby. For that I will be forever grateful.

Actually, when a person has touched lives of so many people in a very good and profound way, he cannot escape a bit of attention back. The enquiry "are you ok?" is human and not evil.

I have spent some hundreds of hours listening to arguments for global warming, er Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change or AGW or ACC (or whatever the PC acronym is this week)

The problem that I keep getting back to is best phrased like this: archaeological climate record extrapolation is nowhere near as sure-fire as supporters make it out to be. I have many more problems, but this one addresses the current article.

I understand these are honest, hard-working scientists, and they know a heckuva lot more than I do about their particular area, but as an intelligent person I can make fairly informed guesses based on the standards of proof required and the types of phrases being used. There a lot of "it appears" and "it seems" in there, phrases that mean that while consensus has been achieved (we'll take that as a given for this comment) it's nowhere near a slam-dunk. There's also quite a bit of ad-hominem character assassination going on, even in this piece. I find that folks who have to result to labeling and name-calling usually are insecure about their position.

Especially troubling is the way the current divergence is addressed. The argument looks to me like "we can use this data as a proxy for all periods except those where we have direct measurements to verify correlation" I find that weak at best.

To me, the layman, tree-ring data is going to show you how well a certain tree grew in a certain place over time. That might or might not have implications for the larger area or the entire planet. Like so many other pieces of this argument, it depends on having a control group and repeatable experiments -- none of which are doable. So it boils down to speculation. Speculation by great, intelligent people, perhaps, but speculation nonetheless.

I know some folks will say "no matter what the proof you're never going to believe" I don't know how to respond to that, except to point out that I've always been more interested in the character of the debate around GW and the political implications of letting scientific consensus drive public policy more than I have the actual facts on the ground. I have no more emotion invested in whether the planet is cooling or warming than I do variations of the gravitational constant around the time of the big bang. Whichever way the facts lead will not change my underlying concern. So I really don't have a dog in this fight as far as the science goes, at least not to the degree that some others do.

People always worry about offending me with that comment. It has never bothered me, and there is some truth to it. With the skills I have today, I like to think I could accomplish something ambitious. However, the skill acquisition has been path dependent. Four years ago I did not even know what svn was, had never written a line of sql, had no particular marketing expertise, etc etc. I was totally unprepared to be a businessman and started only when I saw an opportunity even I could bring in. All the skills I have now are because I have been compounding marginal improvements since then.

I do not regret any of it. I do not even regret two years of salarymanning when I could have recontracted at the tech incubator. (Plusses, leaving at four thirty, no commute. Plusses for salarymanhood, much more professional growth, and everything I ship makes real people happier and real lives better. That is enough to tolerate low pay, no work life balance, and two hour commute, But not for forever.)

Not sure about next program, but I will have plenty of time to think. I secured a twenty thousand angel investment and ongoing cash injections from this crazy white guy who lives in a rice field, after all. Terms were pretty good.

Apologies for language, posting from cell．

Crockford talks about this problem here: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=crockford...

They want to use something that I wrote in something that they wrote, and they were pretty sure they weren't going to use it for evil, but they couldn't say for sure about their customers. So could I give them a special license for that?

Of course. So I wrote back – this happened literally two weeks ago – "I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil."

Pretty funny, if you ask me.