North Korea, Resign!

North Korea is going to be leading the UN Conference on Disarmament for a four week period. North Korea "welcomes any sort of constructive proposals that strengthened the work and credibility of the Conference on Disarmament" says So Se Pyong, the North Korean representative. Here is a proposal that would strengthen the credibility of the Conference, resign. Don't let this joke go forward but have the good taste to step down and let a non proliferating state lead.

Inappropriate Units

In this story Sen. McConnell uses time units to describe a monetary increase in the debt ceiling. This is both strange and unhelpful. The point is simple, when you start measuring the debt ceiling in terms of months instead of dollars, you have psychologically embedded the idea that spending is a constant. The entire point of trying to cut entitlements, the major point that the american people made in returning the GOP to power int he House, is that spending is a variable and we need to cut it now.

new blog

I've started up a single purpose technical blog just to document the journey of getting Pentaho BI server 3.8 up as a virtual machine. It should also have the salutory effect that if somebody else did it and I missed it on the search I did, they'll likely show up and let me know where it is.

Pentaho VMWare Design

Primary day in Indiana

Go vote

Barack Obama Launches 2012 Candidacy

Well, he's in, if anybody had any doubt. Barack Obama is sending out e-mail and other electronic notifications that he's filing papers today to launch his candidacy for the 2012 presidential term. He also wants everybody to watch this video.

It's an interesting video. My favorite bit was their older white guy figure making the pitch that Obama has respect and trust and deserves re-election even if you don't agree with him. It accurately hits where Obama's greatest vulnerability and opportunity is. If he can make his GOP opponent not worthy of trust, drive up his negatives, while retaining the trust of enough people, Obama wins. The GOP's major task is to do the opposite.

Disappearing Letter

Sometimes I just like to see how honest the left is. WUWT had an article on the problems of climate modeling joshua tree habitat going forward based on several climate models. In the comments was an outraged demand that a picture of a painting used to accompany the story needed to be taken down. Apparently the fellow in the painting was outraged that neither the painter nor he was consulted. I searched the guy and found that he'd written a dishonest nastygram. From the way he was talking he might have just been uninformed about the pros and cons of the whole debate (he actually recommended the realclimate team as a resource for people honestly wondering about global warming) and so I dropped a comment in. It was quickly deleted. So here it is for those who care.

The skeptic/denialist side on climate change (which label you pick tends to come from what side you land on the issue) has exposed an awful lot of bad science, including some done by the realclimate brigade. Things have gotten so bad that what used to be 3 groups creating global datasets has now been joined by a 4th, to be run out of UC Berkeley (not the most right wing of places). This is because of plain old bad science. We’ve spent a great deal of tax dollars to create data sets that are just unusable and now we’re likely to spend more money to do it all again. 
a 5 minute pull video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BQpciw8suk
the whole 1 hour talk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_916464&v=VbR0EPWgkEI&feature=iv
Without sites like WUWT, this scientific malfeasance would have never been exposed. The Berkeley professor believes in global warming. He just doesn’t believe in lying to get there. The realclimate people are a different breed.

I'd never heard of Chris Clarke before today but he sure made a lousy impression on me in near record time.

Fuel Cell Costs Down 24%

Instapundit links to a fantastic advance for fuel cells. One of the big headaches for a fuel cell/hydrogen future is that the small amounts of platinum available made them unlikely as a vehicle for mass use across the world economy. Now that we've got a practical, and much cheaper, carbon alternative for the expensive platinum catalyst, that bottleneck is also gone.

It's looking to be a tremendous advance, and one that's going to help us pull our economies out of their ruts if the regulators and the greens don't spike it.