Seth's Blog

Last week, while looking at Google Voice I noticed a button that said “Get $10″. I thought it meant “get $10 credit for trying it” so I pushed the button. Ten dollars credit showed up. Since Google Voice is free for the calls I make I had no use for $10 credit but maybe someday….

A few days later I happened to look at my credit card bill. Google had billed me $10! I didn’t even know they knew my credit card number! It hadn’t been required for the $10 transaction. I haven’t consciously used Google Checkout. I haven’t given it to them in any other connection. Talk about data mining…

When I go to Account Settings listed under my Gmail address, one of the sections is My Products, meaning My Google Products. Under that is listed Google Checkout, although I’ve never signed up for it and (I thought) never used it. So why is it there? I looked in Google Checkout. The Google Voice $10 transaction is the only transaction listed. As far as I can tell, this proves I didn’t use Google Checkout in the past (say, 4 months ago) and forget about it. Google really did get and use my credit card number without telling me, much less asking me.

My credit card company quickly gave me a refund.

One episode of A History of Ancient Britain, the recent BBC series, is about the Ice Age. If you know there was an Ice Age, you should grasp that the Earth varies in temperature a lot for reasons that have nothing to do with human activity. To measure the effect of recent human activity on global temperatures, you need to know what the Earth’s temperature would have been in the absence of human activity. Then you find the effect of humans by subtraction (actual temperature – predicted temperature assuming no human activity).

That’s hard to do. Because the non-human effects are so large, you need a really accurate model to “control” for them.  No such model is available. No current climate model has been shown to accurately predict global temperatures — the IPCC chapter called “Climate Models and Their Evaluation” (informal title: “Why You Should Believe Them”) is the most humorous evidence of that. Lack of accurate predictions means there is no good reason to trust them. (That the models can fit past data means little because they have many adjustable parameters. “With four parameters I can fit an elephant,” said John von Neumann.) The case against the view that humans have dangerously warmed the climate (sometimes called AGW, anthropogenic global warming) is that simple.

Because it is so simple, “the other side” consists of saying why 2+2 really does equal 20 or whatever. Sure, many people say it, so what? When I was an undergrad, I gave a talk called “The Scientific ____ “. I said usage of the term scientific without explaining what it meant was a sign of incompetence and a reader could safely stop reading right there. That isn’t terribly helpful, because few people use scientific that way. My grown-up version of this test is that when someone claims AGW is true, I stop taking them seriously as a thinker. I don’t mean they can’t do good work — Bill McKibben is an excellent journalist, for example. Just not original thought.

1. The Killing (the American version on AMC). The best TV is getting smarter and smarter and this is an example. It seems formulaic (combine good acting, good writing, good visuals, suspense . . . ) but the formula is so effective and well-executed I am drawn in.
2. The Good Wife. The last drama standing.
3. The Spice Trails. The global and historical origins of pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, saffron and vanilla.
   
4. Civilization: Is the West History? Pleasantly conceptual. Why did China decline, while Europe rose? Why did democracy do so much better in North America than South America?
   
5. A History of Ancient Britain. Through the eyes of an archeologist.

In 1996 I put a treadmill in my office so that I could work standing up. My goal was better sleep (the more I stood, the better I slept), not weight loss (the usual reason for a treadmill desk). It was hard to walk a lot. Mostly I stood still. It was noisy, too — my neighbors complained. When the treadmill broke I didn’t replace it.

Now I walk on a treadmill for different reasons: to lower blood sugar and learn Chinese. Above is my current setup. I use the laptop to study Chinese (using Anki) or watch TV or movies. Studying Chinese while walking is much easier than studying Chinese while standing still or sitting. I have used flashcards but Anki (shown on the computer screen) helps space repetitions optimally. The headphones (Bose noise-reduction) are for TV and movies. I don’t need them for Anki.

I’ve made yogurt a few hundred times, mostly with a yogurt maker (picture below). The usual recipe is 1 quart milk, 1/4 teaspoon whey (from previous batch), incubate 24 hours. Yesterday, after incubation finished, I opened the machine to find this:

The milk (now yogurt) had squeezed together to form a perfectly round disc a few inches thick. It had squeezed out all the whey. The only unusual feature of this batch — besides the fact that it is getting warm and relatively humid here in Beijing — is that I used maybe 10% less milk than usual. This difference means the pulling inward force was less resisted by sticking to the sides, so this outcome indeed was more likely than usual.

This is my yogurt maker.

I bought it because it came with a glass bowl. Most yogurt makers have only a plastic bowl. You simply pour the milk in the glass bowl, add the starter (whey), add hot (boiling) water around the glass bowl, and wait a day — infinitely easier than the insanely complicated yogurt recipes I find on the Web. And I am beginning to think the hot water is unnecessary.