Was just trying to find out if it's really true that the USA broadcast of Frozen Planet will not include the last episode, 'on thin ice', when I found the Daily Mail apoplectic and red-in-face: "Moving polar bear footage filmed in Germany! Eight million people tuned in! Show sold around the world! BBC denies it misled viewers!!!" That list should really end with "BBC causes mass jowel-shaking incident among the home counties! A-brbrbrbrbrrbbr!"

It's a technique that's been used in previous BBC wildlife programmes, of course, for filming something that would otherwise be next to impossible. Even in this series, I'm guessing they probably didn't have a tiny side-on camera able to follow this vole. (In fact, obviously not, it would have been impossible.) It's probably my natural leaning towards the BBC's liberal commie outlook, but I didn't feel particularly cheated by that. Actually, in both cases above, I thought, 'wow, that must have been a bugger to set up.'

What could possibly have triggered the Mail to turn the jowel-shaker to 11 on this? Might it be anything to do with the great global warming conspiracy, perpetuated by the final episode's blatant presentation of actual, physical evidence? I mean, did you see the number of scientists who are clearly swindling the taxpayer solely so they can fly around the arctic in cool planes looking sexy and rugged?

Polar bears, of course, are pretty much guaranteed to trigger this kind of reaction. Witness the recent suspension and reinstatement of Charles Monnett, following his devious reporting of seeing four dead polar bears.

Backing off slightly from my own buttons being pushed, there's an interesting comparison to the recent Jeremy Clarkson nonsense. Paul Sinha did a good job on the Now Show: however clumsily, Clarkson was actually making a joke about attempts to provide balance, giving both sides of every story. But the meme that escaped was too good to question for many, with some even calling for legal action. Hmm.

Whether the Grauniad or the Mail, pushing your reader's buttons sells papers. It gives them a little addictive high and makes them feel vindicated in their own beliefs. The long hard slog of building a daily, working relationship with the truth is much less exciting.

Update: Discovery have decided to air the climate change episode, it seems.

Jeremy Hardy had a quality rant on the News Quiz last week. I'd missed what he was ranting about - Louise Mensch on have I got news for you sneering at the Occupy protesters:

They tweet about it regularly on their iphones, perhaps in between getting cafe lattes. And they're housing themselves in some very fancy tents. So they're against capitalism, except for the lattes.

Hislop and Merton have a good go, but Jeremy's spot on:

Oh god, if you'd just think more. If caffeine were nationalised or the city was bustling with anarcho-syndicalist coffee collectives, the protesters would go to them, but we have to deal with society as it is. I don't remember before the mass privatisations of the eighties, Tories boycotting the phones, gas, electricity, water or anything made from steel. And to this day, conservatives will post a letter, phone the fire brigade - even use the NHS.

Which just goes to show that the BBC really is a leftie-liberal hornet's nest. That aside, though, Jeremy's making a pretty good point.

Hypocrisy finger-pointing crops up regularly in climate arguments. Al Gore probably holds the title for most pointed at, but my favourite is Watts calling Copenhagen `a day that will live in hypocrisy' because politicians used a lot of cars. The hypocrisy stemming, presumably, from all the carbon used to put the thing on, rather than rich and powerful people having big cars.

Hypocrisy finger-pointing is very effective: the message gets out there, and its source won't matter at all if it sticks. In a globalised world, there are two morally consistent positions: amorality or suicide. Everyone else has to put up with being tangled in the daily moral quagmire of a globalised economy. On that, looking forward to cheering myself up watching blood in the mobile.

A secret dictatorship has been ruling us all. It is impossible to hide from, and has been controlling our lives for as long as humans have existed. Try to challenge it, and it will drop you from a great height. There will be nothing you can do. Its forces are everywhere, in every direction you can think of looking. It never, ever drops its guard.

For centuries, people have fought an underground war against it, seeking to free themselves in whatever way they could. There have been small victories, from those who worked tirelessly in terrible danger to seek cracks in the system. But whenever a crack is thought to be found, the forces are there again, slamming it shut. Democracies crumble before it, whole peoples are made to do its bidding. There is no hope of reprieve. There is no escape.

We must join with it. It would be wise, my friend.

I tried out Windows 7's own speech recognition software for the first time yesterday, and I'm nearly, almost, amazed. It'll take a little while to work out what I really think about it. It is, overall, probably faster than typing. But typing is a very different process. I'm reminded of Julia Cameron saying that it's all about getting stuff down, not thinking stuff up - the direction's important. Speaking feels like thinking something up. I guess that could change with practice, but the error-rate of typing doesn't interfere with the flow in quite the same way. (Don't interrupt the flow, man... )

I just did a quick one-off test. The paragraph below is the opener for an awesome 1979 geography textbook, 'people, pattern, process', by Keith Chapman, from the days when human geography was just starting to wonder what all this critical theory business might be about. The one I include here was spoken, and I've left in all the errors it made, with corrections in square brackets. Despite my best efforts at newscaster-speak, I still mumble, and perhaps the mic isn't great (just a bog-standard headset) - but this is still pretty impressive given that I didn't need to lift a finger. So: spoken averaged 83 words per minute. I read that people can speak at 120, but that would be a fair old rush. My typing attempt averaged 40 wpm: I'm quick in short bursts but pretty error-prone so I spend a lot of time correcting, but the end product is at least accurate. That 83wpm doesn't include going back through and fixing things.

Even so, pretty impressive. Somehow, even 'Star-trekkers' presented no problem. The program also goes through and indexes your documents, so it's been managing very well at replicating both my own academic language and idiosyncracies (including 'workinz'... perhaps not ideal.) It also allows for easy correction, which it learns from, but that does of course slow things down.

When I have the money, paid speech software might be worth a go if it would improve on this already pretty smart program. But we'll see: perhaps, as I say, it doesn't come down to speed. Words through fingers are different to words aloud. Anyway, here's the speech program's attempt at interpreting my reading, done in 1 min 53 seconds as opposed to about four minutes of hapless typing:

Good science fiction should maintain a credible link between reality and imagination. A productive think of it as [should be: theme for writers of] science fiction has been man's ability to jump be on [beyond] the barriers imposed by the dimensions which define his existence - space and time. Thus HG Wells time traveller could project himself but [both] forward and backward in time. The 'transport are' [transporter] of the starship enterprise enables Captain Kirk [it knows that's a name...?] and his crew to travel through space instantaneously, although it has been known to permit simultaneous movement in both dimensions! [star trek episode in-joke in first para, wow!] Geography may appear to have little in common with such whorls [worlds. I prefer Window's word] of the imagination, but his [its] position as an academic discipline is related to its explicit concern with spatial relationships of objects and events at the surface of the earth. The universal availability of the kind of technology at the disposal of the Star-trekkers would transform these relationships by effectively nullifying the role of distance as an obstacle to movement between one place and another.

Cameron's sticking his head in the multicultural nest again and wiggling it about. Don't want to get into the wrongs and rights here, but something I've always found curious: ministers never seem to worry about the impact of people like me - students. Whether or not the just-left-home variety is better or worse than more mature chaps such as myself, we still go in and out of places en mass. Student numbers have gone from just below 350,000 a year in 1999 to near half a million now. Say we're talking about a through-put of four million students in the last decade: what impact has that had in the areas they have gone to? They pour a great deal of money in, of course, but one might argue students have also contributed to the fragmentation of existing communities and of locking out through housing price-hikes. Putnam is still my go-to guy for thinking about how the fabric of communities works: one of the foundations of social capital is staying put. In my old stomping ground, Sheffield, many students do indeed stay on. But then, what's the economic impact of that? A young, well-trained workforce competing for jobs with the locals.

This is all idle wiffle without actual research to back it up. For instance, I don't know what background inter-region migration levels are. If I'd spent more of my time doing proper geography, perhaps I would... Still, don't let that ever stop wild speculation, I say: the impact must be pretty large, given the collosal size of the population shifts. "In most respects, the sociological impacts of student versus from-outside-the-UK immigration are going to look the same." Discuss. Of course, the reason students aren't one of Cameron's punching bags - er, well, aren't more of a punching bag - would be the votes, wouldn't it?

I can't quite bring myself to seek out anyone claiming the cold proves climate change isn't happening - as if foreign weather doesn't count somehow. But I thought it worth ending the year with a quick note on two of 2010's most striking climatic occurances. The common theme emerging this year: if a complex system is changing, how do you measure when specific events mean anything? Ultimately, the answer is: for any one 'event', you can't, but you can say pretty definitively that climate change = climate disruption, and the definition of 'extreme' will shift as the variance changes.

First-off were two stories that were actually one, connected story from the summer: Russian drought and Pakistani floods. Initforthegold is as good a place as any to start with that, including a good discussion of the difference between loading the dice and changing them for ones with higher numbers. The weather underground has some good graphics showing the jetstream changes tying the two together. Russia lost a quarter of its grain crop. In Pakistan, two and a half million people were affected.

As far us freezing our asses off - it was just listening to the news, and the impact the cold is having all across Europe that prompted me to write. There's one perfect graphic for this, via Peter Sinclair's blog. The NOAA has a pretty nifty live output showing the temperature anomaly over the Northern hemisphere. Compare also to this at init: most of the total anomaly is away from the equators, towards the poles. The NOAA anomaly graph shows some spots far North that are 15 degrees celsius warmer than the 68-96 average. Spending a few moments contemplating the breadth of the difference in both directions, and having a little think about how low and high pressure work, should be enough to get across that climate change was never going to mean an even increase.

There's no real need to make any specific claims about this being 'caused by' co2-induced climate change. The important question is: can we expect this sort of disruption to increase in the future? It's not rocket science, of course: if you push a complex dynamic system with any kind of forcing, it will attempt to get back to an equilibrium. In the meantime, you get disruption - and in chaotic systems, they'll manifest themselves in all sorts of exciting ways. We already have plenty of relatively well-understand oscillations, even if their timings - like the NAO - are never predictable. It would be one thing if we could expect to get this sort of winter regularly - that's something you can prepare for. But we actually have to prepare, as much as possible, for any eventuality, since there's no exact way of knowing how the system will eventually settle.

And that's presuming, of course, we decide it might not be a good idea to carry on pushing it. The more we do, the more the regional uncertainties increase (as well as uncertainties relating to feedbacks). That's an irony that MT over at initforthegold often points out: anyone claiming that uncertainty should mean inaction hasn't understood what's happening. Or they have, and they know that doubt, however slight, is a massively appealling get-out clause that many of us would dearly love to grab with both hands.

Something for the shelf of philosophical objects...

The doughnut of empirical correctness in a theory constitutes its worth, while its hole of untruth constitutes its weakness. I regard it as a monstrous perversion of science to claim that a theory is all the better for its shortcomings; and I notice that in the luckier exact sciences, no-one dreams of making such a claim.

(Paul Samuelson in Blaug, 'The Methodology of Economics', p.97.)

Blaug does a good job of parrying that:

It is as though generations of physicists had ridiculed Newton's theory of gravity on the grounds that he committed himself to the patently unrealistic assumption that the masses of moving bodies are concentrated at their centre... Faced with the accusation that no theory with counterfactual assumptions can be taken seriously, the thesis of the irrelevance of assumptions is almost excusable. (p.104)

But mainly: new philosophical object! Almost two for the price of one, but a "hole of untruth" isn't an object, sadly.

"One day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior."

Lord Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, in Pratchett's Unseen Academicals

Often, in the moments between sleeping and waking, ideas become visceral, almost literally. This can include things like 'oh my God, Sarah Palin might be one heartbeat away from leader of the free world' or 'oh my Christ, we really are managing the fuck the one planet we have.' That last one is often accompanied by the 93 million miles between the Earth and sun shrinking so that the heavenly bodies are almost within mental grasp, almost in the same room. There really is a star blasting at us, churning our water and atmosphere.

More recently, there's been a few occasions when it's been more corporeal: yanked back from sleep and plopped into a vast dark room of consciousness, so I can have some stark fact about my physical form klaxoned at me. For some reason, my spine got that treatment (probably because of a bad back); a keen sense of bone and gristle holding my centre line together. More recently (probably after some film or other) my brain decided to get all 'aaargh' at the idea of a bullet going through it. Quite reasonable thing for it to do, one might think. The fact that usually it doesn't says something about our ability to just get on with what the world presents us with. But right then, my brain wasn't having any of it: so, here's a bullet, right? It goes through and me, this person - suddenly I'm goo, I'm all over the place.

A commenter over at Tamino's blog puts in a good word for economists:

How would you physicists like it if you had to survey a bunch of molecules to find out what they planned to do, only to have most of them change their minds anyway, and the government restructure the laws of physics because of some opinion poll?