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Joyful Cacophony

work out these days at the downtown Y. 40+ year old building, a bit rough around the edges. I joined a couple years back when the private gym I had belonged to for 20 years closed down. The Y is not so posh, but then neither am I, and it has all the facilities I could want for my workout. The other day I got a reminder that it has one definite advantage.

I was walking up the stairs from the basement locker room to the second-floor workout area (part of my workout) when I heard the sounds of a troop of little ones coming from the first-floor lobby. In fact there were not more than 15, no doubt a Summer day camp crew, and they were making the sound always made by a collection of more than 5 kids – joyful cacophony.

OK, not always joyful, sometimes it’s “Miiiiiss, Jimmee spit on meeeee!!!” — but the default is definitely joyful. I never heard that sound at my private gym.

Mind you, if they start letting those little people into the locker room or workout area I will be much less happy about their presence, but they don’t, so I am. Happy, I mean.

Things That Made Me Go – Huh?

A good while back I published a post that consisted only of odd/funny things I had picked up on my travels around the web. [My personal favourite: “When seconds count, the government is only minutes away.”]

Perhaps I have lost my sense of humour, as I find little that’s truly funny in my www travels anymore, but here I collect a list of things I’ve encountered lately that made me go ‘huh?’.

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I had no idea there was a Socialism 2025 Conference. There is, and one was also held in 2024, and plans are being made for 2026, all in Chicago.

From the website of the Socialism 2025 Conference, held in Chicago in early July, 2025:

Masks: Attendees are required to wear a mask (N95 or K95) over their mouth and nose while indoors at the conference. Masks will be provided for those who do not have a mask. Please note: this requirement applies only to formal conference spaces and sessions—attendees should be aware of the possibility that attendees will be unmasked elsewhere in the conference hotel (or beyond) where they may informally congregate.

Speakers: The sole exception to the masking policy above applies to session speakers, who may remove their masks only while they are delivering presentations from the front of their session room. We strongly encourage session speakers planning to un-mask during their presentations to pick up a free rapid test from the registration desk and test themselves 4-6 hours before their session.

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Experiment finds yoghurt can lower house temperature

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg4rg3nqq7go

Yes, an academic says so.

“Dr Ben Roberts, a senior lecturer in healthy buildings at Loughborough University, said applying yoghurt to the outside of windows could lower the temperature by up to 3.5C.”

A ‘senior lecturer in healthy buildings’?

My question: what becomes of yogurt that has been left smeared on windows after say….two weeks?

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Dismissal with cause?

A ‘task force’ commissioned by the City of London, where I live, is considering a policy whereby city councillors who lose a re-election bid would be given severance pay.

Motability program in the UK

‘Motability’ is just a great made-up word.

From The Telegraph

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/03/13/state-funded-bmws-epitomise-britains-dysfunctional-welfare/

“If you want a brand new BMW i4 M Sport, you have two choices. The first is to lay out the full £52,770. The second is to tell the DWP [UK Dept of Work and Pensions] that your mental health makes it hard to leave the house, claim the enhanced mobility rate of the Personal Independence Payment (Pip), fork out a down payment of £7,999, and get the Government to lease it for you.

In exchange for the mobility component of your benefit, you’ll get a new BMW every three years, your insurance and accident breakdown paid for, your servicing and tyre replacements covered, and your choice of “conventional metallic paint option”.”

A Money Loser

The Wall Street Journal reports that Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show lost $40million last year, which is, coincidentally, twice the host’s annual salary.

US State Department Devastated

I don’t know who Brian York is, but he has put up a post on X which you can read here:

https://x.com/ByronYork/status/1944121390388449391

The post includes screenshots of apparent government numbers, the veracity of which I cannot determine. I can barely read them. Here’s the punchline from York, which I (and you) can read:

“Looking at State Department documents, it appears the department went from 57,340 total employees in 2007 to 72,895 in 2015 to 80,214 in 2024. So it grew by nearly 23,000 employees before the ‘devastating’ cut of 1,300.”

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Spot-fixing doesn’t just happen at the dry cleaners anymore

Again from the WSJ, MLB pitcher Luis Ortiz has been put on paid non-disciplinary leave while the MLB investigates a pitch he threw into the dirt in the third inning of a game. There had been an unusual amount of money bet on the proposition that pitch would be a ball. The concern was for something called ‘spot-fixing’, which has emerged in many sports, now that bettors can wager on almost any event that occurs within the game, either before or during said game.

Criminal pub banter comes to the UK

From The Free Press

“On the night of Wednesday, July 16, the Labour government’s Employment Rights Bill passed its second reading in the House of Lords. If the bill goes into law in its current form—and there is not much to stop it now—Britons can be prosecuted for a remark that a worker in a public space overhears and finds insulting. The law will apply to pubs, clubs, restaurants, soccer grounds, and all the other places where the country gathers and, all too frequently, ridicules one another.”

Crisis? What Crisis?

WSJ headline: The ‘Smart’ Bathrooms That Can Solve America’s Public Bathroom Crisis

 

Statisticians at Play 

Today’s posting on Gelman’s stats blog included the poster below, announcing the 2025 ‘Predict the Cherry Blossoms’ Competition. You could enter too, but there is this:

“This year, contestants will not only compete against each other for the top prizes–but against artificial intelligence. We will include one or more submissions from the most popular large language models. Our AI handlers will prompt the AI with the contest rules and the entries from previous competitions. The handlers will then execute any code written by the AI as part of their entry. Judges will review all entries without knowing which were submitted by humans and which were written by AI.”

“Any human that beats the AI will receive commemorative memorabilia indicating they “beat the bot in the 2025 International Cherry Blossom Prediction Competition.”

Why is Al Writing About Climate Change?

Quick answer – I was getting sick of politics and politicians.

Admittedly, I also came across some interesting things on a very good website I visit occasionally, Watt’s Up With That? You can read it too, at https://wattsupwiththat.com/ and it’s quite free.

And, full disclosure, I had first tried to lift the depression induced by reading about politics by reading about academic fraud. Didn’t work, don’t know why not.

Anyway, this is actually mostly about weather, and everyone likes talking about that.

So, a few items of interest (I think) from Watts Up.

1. A recent and most-read post on the site is very short and titled ‘Michael E. Mann’s Forecast Fiasco’. Mann is the fellow who way back in 2001 made famous – or perhaps infamous – the ‘hockey stick graph’ purporting to show the very recent and very dramatic increase in global temperatures relative to the last thousand-plus years. It created a lot of controversy at the time, still not resolved (although you wouldn’t know that reading Wikipedia’s entry on Mann).

Anyway, Mann, who is a prof at U Penn in Philadelphia, sent out a tweet last April predicting a ‘record-breaking 33 named storms for the North Atlantic hurricane season.’

Now, before I give you the punch line, let me just say that no one claiming to be a serious scientist should ever write something as stupid as that. I don’t know how anyone who understands even a little about statistics or weather or bloody anything thinks that they can predict a number that specific. And, not about something moderately predictable even, but about weather fergodsakes.

Well, reality eventually happened and there were 18 named storms this past season. 4 more than the average. Definitely not record-breaking. Definitely not 33.

I no more believe this will stop Mann from making future predictions about weather than I believe that ‘The President Whisperer’ will shut up after predicting a Harris electoral triumph in November.

2. Sticking with storms, what about all those scary tornadoes? There’s an article about this, too. Note that this is all about the US, but that country is the world leader in tornadoes, after all. A first quote from the article:

“While there have been no long-term trends in the frequency of tornadoes, there have been changes in tornado patterns in recent years. Research has shown that there are fewer days with at least one tornado but more days with over thirty, even as the total number of tornadoes per year has remained relatively stable. In other words, tornado events are becoming more clustered.

There is also evidence to suggest that tornado patterns have shifted geographically. The number of tornadoes in the states that make up Tornado Alley are falling, while tornado events have been on the rise in the states of Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky.”

That quote is from an article in National Geographic, by the way, hardly a bastion of climate-change denial. Here’s another quote:

“There is no real evidence that tornadoes are happening more often. A lot more are being recorded now than in 1950, but a closer look at the data shows the increase is only in the weakest category, EF0. There’s been no increase in stronger twisters, and maybe even a slight decrease in EF4s and EF5s.

That suggests we’re just spotting more of the weak and short-lived tornadoes than we did back when the country was emptier (the United States population in 1950 was less than half what it is now), we didn’t have Doppler radar, and Oklahoma highways weren’t jammed with storm-chasers.”

We can be sure that the next time a tornado happens here in Ontario, that is not the story we will hear from whatever academic or Environment Canada type they interview about it. And, we can also be sure that a team of investigators will have to be sent out first to verify that whatever happened was actually a tornado. That doesn’t happen in Oklahoma. EF0 here, mostly. You don’t quite need a microscope to see ’em, but….

And, here’s a graph from the WUWT article to illustrate that last point (I like graphs….):

3. Back to hurricanes

There’s a full article about these storms, also, and despite living in an all-but-hurricane-free part of the world, we hear about them in the media every season. Their paths are tracked on the news, even though said paths are thousands of miles away, and the papers are full of stories of damage, death and apocalypse. Well, here’s another graph showing the global frequency of tropical storms and hurricanes since 1970.

The obvious thing to see here is that there is no upward trend since 1970, but the other thing you might think a supposed scientist like Mann would notice is how bloody variable is the number of these storms from year-to-year. I’d expect that would dissuade anyone from thinking they can hope to accurately predict the number that will occur in a coming season. At least, anyone who’s not a tool.

4. I do recommend the website, it’s a bit geeky but highly sane.

Loose Ends and Random Bits

Since starting this blog, I find myself saving all kinds of things that I come across in my actual and virtual travels, storing them in my ‘blog material’ file, saying to myself ‘I bet I can use that in a future post’.

Herein a collection of such things which seem(ed) to me to be interesting or amusing and which have not been used in any previous posts.

* I walk about in my neighborhood a lot, and regularly walk past a yard that has this sign attached to the surrounding fence.

 * I was looking online for restaurants in a particular town and came upon this on a restaurant’s website:

 

 

 

* I did not keep a record of where I found this online, but…..


This just in –

Anthropologists have found what they believe to be Jimmy Buffett’s lost shaker of salt. It was declared missing in 1977, and some folks claim there’s a woman to blame.


 

* Here is an actual headline from a Wall Street Journal article of some while ago. I put it in my ‘can’t make this shit up’ file:


Migrants Entering U.S. Illegally Complain About Government’s Border App


 

* It does nothing good for one’s opinion of the human race to read the comments people write about articles in online newspapers like The Globe and Mail or The Wall Street Journal. Yet, sometimes I do….

This is from a comment on an article that Gary Mason of the Globe wrote about COP28, the UN climate change gathering that was held in Dubai 30 November to 13 December 2023:


By 2027, Thwaites (the “doomsday glacier”) will have buckled and the oceans will start rising by 2 to 9 feet. Coastal cities will drown. Millions of people will die or be displaced.


 

* Another piece of wisdom I picked up online, the provenance of which I did not record:


When seconds count, the government is only minutes away


 

* From one of my credit card bills –


At your current rates of interest, if you only make your Minimum Payment by its due date each month, it will take approximately 39 year(s) and 2 month(s) to repay the account balance shown on this statement.


 

* A headline from an article in Popular Mechanics (yea, that’s right….)


Humans Will Soon Go Extinct Unless We Can Find 5 More Earths

We’re basically in the days of the dinosaurs, according to Stanford scientists


 

* Finally, another one from my ‘can’t make this shit up’ file. This is a headline from an article in Vice:


Scientists Find Link Between Wolf Attacks and Far Right Politics

The reemergence of wolves to Germany “has been accompanied by electoral gains for far-right parties,” a new study reports


And that’s a wrap, until I accumulate another pile of these.