64 responses to “Sandbox – 18nov16”

1. 

   Walt

   24 November 2016

   Is it Christmas already? Seems there are plenty of presents for Boardman. Here. Let me throw one more under his tree.
   http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/11/24/no-donald-trump-hasnt-suddenly-gone-soft-global-warming/

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2. 

   George Rebane

   24 November 2016

   Russ 1251pm – Thank you again Russ. The evidence of reputable scientists not accepting the warmists’ hysteria is overwhelming to all but the true believers (almost all of whom have no idea of the technologies and sciences involved). I’m afraid that Mr Boardman is among the unreachables with such data. Nevertheless, continuing the attempt earns one heaven points.

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3. 

   Walt

   24 November 2016

   And two more lumps of coal for the AGW fire.
   https://www.yahoo.com/news/tokyo-gets-november-snow-first-time-54-years-062423340.html
   http://www.climatedepot.com/2016/11/24/antarctic-sea-ice-has-not-shrunk-in-100-years/

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4. 

   George Rebane

   24 November 2016

   Walt 332pm – there you go again with facts. Nice try Mr Branson.

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5. 

   Gregory

   24 November 2016

   The list is missing a few prominent names, physicists Richard Lindzen and Eigil Friis-Christensen, biogeographer Philip Stott. Stott and Lindzen in particular, with the late author Dr. Michael Crichton, dismantled NASA-GISS luminary Gavin Schmidt in a debate almost 10 years ago at IntelligenceSquared, teaching Schmidt to avoid public discussions with the learned opposing side.
   Schmidt has recently warned Trump not to cut his funding. This should be fun to watch.
   As a whole, active Democrats are unreachable on the AGW front; it could be one of the final nails in their coffins if the GOP plays them right and Mother Nature complies with election cycles as Solar Cycle 24 winds down.
   The Democratic Party is fully invested in the AGW story; I don’t know how they could back down no matter the evidence, especially in California.
   Tokyo snow is weather and as we all know, weather is not climate unless it is unusually warm.

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6. 

   Russ

   25 November 2016

   Gregory,
   I agree Richard Lindzen and Eigil Friis-Christensen should have been on the list for the reasons you stated.
   There is a very interesting discussion of solar cycles here, including the comments to the post. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/11/24/the-bray-hallstatt-cycle/

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7. 

   Bill Tozer

   25 November 2016

   And now a word from the other side of the aisle.
   https://thinkprogress.org/trump-fools-the-new-york-times-on-climate-change-180323fa5980?ref=yfp#.2eyd2lt49

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8. 

   Bill Tozer

   26 November 2016

   Walt, must be an ancestral Viking thing.
   https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=03gxncRSJkU
   If that’s a Tuesday night, wonder what a Saturday night sounds like.

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9. 

   Walt

   26 November 2016

   Just a Swedish mating call Bill.

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10. 

    Gregory

    26 November 2016

    Well, I think it’s time visit Mr. Pink, who is on a rampage over The Union editorial regarding the $47 million bond that is still in the lurch, Measure B. Pelline takes his former employer to task, lauding some of the comments by the usual suspect but singling out Greg Zaller for a discouraging word saying the following was the only comment that was not cogent:

    Greg Zaller · California State University, Chico
    I opposed Measure B primarily because borrowing money like this, as opposed to a pay as you go tax, is terribly wasteful and there is frightfully little oversight.

    But of course, Zaller was the only sane voice. The district “fact sheet” was awfully specific that none of the $47 million could go towards administrator salaries or pensions… but anyone with a sense of how big money is fungible in big budgets would understand that it doesn’t have to be taken from the Measure B pocket to be enabled by it… and they didn’t even try to claim they wouldn’t be paying current teacher and support staff salaries, benefits or pensions out of it.
    They will be back for more.

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11. 

    Gregory

    26 November 2016

    Pelline also wonders why The Union didn’t push for B harder… I guess they aren’t just willing to throw money away because a local district decided their current revenue wasn’t enough and they wanted a quick infusion.
    Zaller was absolutely right… the interest on the bond will about double the ultimate cost to taxpayers over a pay as you go, like the library sales tax increase which, in essence, allows the County to spend the amount the sales tax brings in on other things… like CalPERS supplemental assessments.

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12. 

    Todd Juvinall

    26 November 2016

    Kind of cute. A little poem
    THE ELECTION IS OVER,
    THE NAME CALLING’S DONE
    YOUR PARTY LOST
    MY PARTY WON
    SO LET US BE FRIENDS
    LET ARGUMENTS PASS
    I”LL HUG MY ELEPHANT
    YOU KISS YOUR ASS

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13. 

    Gregory

    27 November 2016

    This sandbox is getting a bit funky, needs scooping.
    I was hoping for a Royal Flush over at His Majesty’s, with all five of the indexed comments Jeff talking to himself but, alas, that was ruined by the Keachie himself. As a consolation prize, I commend him for yet another post on Education by a Real Retired Educator that gets it all wrong. He wrote,

    Common Core has several objectives. First the notion is there that all students, in a world where parents may have to job hop across the country often in order to stay employed. deserve to at least have instruction in the key subjects of English and Math. locked down to goals for each grade level, regardless of text or teacher,
    This avoids situations in which, for example, students learn fractions twice, and miss decimals altogether.

    So far, it has mostly created situations where students avoid ever really learning how to manipulate fractions or perform long divisions.

    The second area of importance is the redesign of teaching some areas, such as elementary math. in ways that will lead to much easier teaching and comprehension of complex concepts of advanced math. What appears to be unnecessary obfuscation to parents who learned old math and then found Algebra and Caculus [sic] “too hard,” is in fact the royal “easier” road to success in STEM subjects later on.

    The obfuscation readily apparent to those skilled in math is core to the constructivist, or “discovery methods” preferred by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) Standards; the NCTM represents math teachers and education departments who loved whole math and whole language. These set California back ten years when a guy named Phil Daro poured them into California’s 1992 Mathematics Framework for the state’s Dept of Ed. Daro, who entered UC Berkeley in the early 60’s intending to become a physicist, then changed majors to math but ending an English major, doesn’t have the education required to teach math at NU or Ghiddotti, yet the State trusted the document (a veritable paen to the NCTM) on how to teach math to all kids in California Public Schools.
    The ’92 Framework was mute on what math kids needed to learn but spent 200 pages on how it should be taught. Hint: lots of drawings, groupwork and calculators on the shared worktables even for the 1st graders; actually doing the math, not so much.
    Fun! and Mathematical Power! were the rallying cry. My son entered the 1st grade at Hennessey the year MathLand was introduced across all grades in the GVSD, and entered 2nd grade at Grass Valley’s own St. Sensible a year later because of MathLand. By the standardized test our St. Sensible gave (identical to the initial STAR exam chosen by the state two+ years later), he was already significantly behind in math, despite doing two years of MathLand.
    Fast forward to 2008 when something like $300 million of Bill & Melinda Gate’s money started towards pushing the Common Core brainchild of a couple of progressive 501c3’s in Washington DC. Untainted by any real state involvement until they were finished, the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics needed a real expert to chair their drafting, and they hired a real gem to do it: the same Phil Daro who so damaged California’s math education, the same Phil Daro who still lacked any degrees in mathematics… just the BA English he managed to escape with when he found writing sonnets to be more enjoyable than doing physics or math.

    One has to remember that the later decades of the 21st century are not going to be your grandpa’s Global Economy.

    Yes, but the Common Core is the Royal Road to ruin, not science and math. Even CCSS-M co-chair and co-lead author, mathematical physicist Jason Zimba was careful to note that the Common Core was only meant to be a minimum for entry into non-competitive schools (like our community and state colleges), not the sort of colleges parents wish to be open to their children. Not the Cals, not the CalTechs. Not even the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. “STEM”? Common Core Math delays Algebra for a year, to the 9th grade, and that’s for a watered down algebra loaded with inductive lessons, eschewing the deductive approaches that have long been the standard for college preparatory sequences, not to mention general education sequences. What discovery methods most resemble are remedial education methods and one of the Common Core texts dating back to the beginnings of the NCTM Standards in 1989 is the wretchedly misnamed “College Preparatory Math” (CPM) from a company in Davis, not a part of the UC in town.
    CPM was actually formulated to be a remedial program for kids who had fallen far behind… no, it doesn’t prepare them, or anyone else, for a college and beyond career in math and the sciences.
    I know of some math professors at rather good schools who are fully expecting Common Core to have created a slow motion collapse in American education and, after years of grappling with the beast, have come to the conclusion that only a collapse will lead to a real reform, sweeping out the entrenched incompetence in K-12. One shining light on the horizon is that a bright fellow from the Hoover Institute, Williamson “Bill” Evers, a founder of HOLD of Palo Alto, the first parent’s group protesting hole math and language circa 1995, has been leading the Trump transition for the Education department.
    We live in interesting times.

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14. 

    George Rebane

    27 November 2016

    Gregory 0111pm – Good post. It deserves to inaugurate the, per your request, new 27nov16 sandbox.

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