.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}
Visit Freedom's Zone Donate To Project Valour

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Happy Thanksgiving

Among those climate "science" files hacked and distributed were a bunch of programming files.

WUWT has a set of comment segments. My favorite "
What the hell is
supposed to happen here? Oh yeah - there is no 'supposed', I can make it up. So I have :-)"

The loneliness of the long distance climate programmer.


Comments:
"OH FUCK THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm
hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform
data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found."

Found this in the commented code.
 
Rob - one of those where you about pee on yourself from laughing so hard, because you have been there and done that.
 
Are these comments left in the program code?

I don't quite understand, but it's a very funny read.

I wonder is this guy the leak? You can sense his anger and frustration building to a point where he needs to get it off his chest.
 
This was coded by frat boy college kids. They are still in the mode of getting the answer the instructor wants. They don't care how that happens beyond requiring the minimum effort on their part. The goal is get the answer the instructor wants. That's their grade at stake after all.

That is a low integrity mode.

They aren't doing science. They aren't looking at the data honestly. They are trying to deliver an expected answer.

But the data doesn't support the expected answer. No wonder they are having a hard time.

I hope they do hard time. This really is criminal.
 
I'm reminded of a programming comment at my last job. I'd just started working there and was responsible for the previous programmer's code. The graphics engine was a bit unstable and this was the comment left for me.

"If I had the right font, I'd draw a pentagram here."

That was 18 years ago. Some things you just never forget, lol.
 
Mark - That IS a good one. The mind boggles.

Shtove - it's not that atypical of this type of government work. Believe it or not, there was once a model (paid for with taxpayer funds) that incorporated some chemical reactions that just could not exist in nature. Multiple scientists who worked on the thing (one of them my brother) noticed it, but it had been passed by the committee, so alchemy it was.

These comments are from one of the read-me files. There's going to be beyootiful stuff as people get a chance to look through this.
 
fboness - no, it wasn't. WYSIWYG.

See my prior comment. Due to the efforts of people like M&M and Anthony Watts, everyone has known for some time that the people in control of most of these projects are futzing the data. This is just documentary proof for those who are too lazy to look at all of the data and analysis that has been done over the years.
 
Clippy is back, and is ready to assist the tired climate programmer...

http://borepatch.blogspot.com/2009/11/what-happens-when-you-run-climate.html
 
As a former game programmer, you might find this amusing as well.

"Tes4Mod:Unofficial Oblivion Patch"

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes4Mod:Unofficial_Oblivion_Patch

"The Unofficial Oblivion Patch, Unofficial Shivering Isles Patch and Unofficial Official Mods Patch are major mods by Quarn and Kivan that fix over 2,000 bugs (and 70,000 object placement errors) left over even after the latest official patch is applied. These fixes range in importance from trees that seem to float in the air up to conflicts that could cause a crash to desktop."

It SO reminds me of Rob Dawg's first comment in this thread.

I've been playing this game on my Playstation 3 by the way. I sure wish I could apply the unofficial patch to it. It seems the official programmers gave up on it long ago though, lol.
 
I wish I could say the off-color comments explained why they wouldn't release their algorithms publicly. Sadly, their secrecy was apparently much more nefarious.
 
Happy Thanksgiving, MOM!

And thank you for sharing your wisdom so freely.

It has enriched my life.
 
Funny how life goes.

ESR has a snippet with the comment and the code, show how blatantly an array of "what we want" values was added to the array "what we have" values.

Per Carl, NYT minimizes frantically anf dishonestly.
 
As a programmer of almost thirty years experience, I can say that those comments look very, very much like real program comments, done in a shop that does not have standards for what should and what may not appear in comments.
 
Bob - yes, the NY Times' lack of standards is remarkable. These are the people yammering about science?

NJCommuter - Uh huh. I took one look at those and said "This is genuine". And nobody, but nobody, could fake the amazing conglomeration of baling wire, chewing gum and duct tape used in many of these programs. These things have evolved.
 
MOM - I agree, it would have been nearly impossible to convincingly fake code that looks like that. I'm ashamed to say, I have written code that looked almost that bad, a long, long time ago. But it did function honestly, unlike this stuff.

The e-mails are sexy and don't require any expertise to be understandable. But it's the code that is damning. If the e-mails left any doubt, the code cannot--they sat down and consciously faked the data.

It wasn't even a run-of-the-mill case of seeing what one wants to see in the data, of which anyone can be guilty. We all have to be on guard against that. All this time, I really thought that's all it was.

But no, these jokers set out to defraud the world. They cloaked themselves in science so they could participate in an enormous scheme of graft. I hate to be melodramatic, but if they aren't ridden out of town on a rail, I can feel the first chill of the next Dark Age...
 
Neil - if this is science, then give me religion.

Fortunately it really isn't science, so we are not reliant on religion IF we recant and repent.

It will be interesting to see if the same old crew shows back up in the IPCC. And if they don't, will it be a new batch relying on the faked numbers?
 
MOM, at this rate, I'm curious to see if there IS another IPCC report.

The "global consensus" on climate change seems like an unstoppable force--even the third-world nations eventually jumped on the bandwagon, as long as it meant putting lots of cash in their politicians' pockets.

But now everybody who is not in on the scam ought to be aware that they're being targeted. If you don't know who the mark is, well you're the mark! And this week there are a lot of powerful people out there who are realizing they're the marks.

I don't know how powerful the climate change movement really is, but I think we're about to find out.
 
God help these programmers - sure hope they didn't get new jobs coding mortgage loan modification algorithms.
 
Post a Comment



<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?