Miljenko's Blog

First, I mostly ignored a lot of the "climategate" debates because at the end of the day they do not reveal anything new about the issue at hand - the fundamental drivers of climate change. However, when I came across an article quoting Al Gore, even I was stunned by the sheer audacity or blindness of religious zeal which can cause a relatively normal person to just so blatantly lie to us or to himself. In an interview he said: I haven’t read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old . These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus. and then repeated the same point 2 more times. These statements are simply completely wrong . In fact, as Watts Up With That shows, one Climategate email was from just two months ago. The most recent was sent on November 12 - just a month ago . The emails which have Tom Wigley seeming (to me) to choke on the deceit are all from this year . Phil Jones’ ...

That is the best one so far - apparently some "diplomats and officials" of less developed countries have suggested and continue to suggest that the US should pay reparations to the rest of the world for "decades of high emissions". If there ever was a non-starter ... Apparently they also suggest public international funding should be made available to future major polluters, the biggest one being China. Really - with 2 Trillion of reserves they should be paid by others not to build things that are going to pollute?

So there is a Facebook application "how many of you are there in the World". I put my name in and it turns out there are two of us with the name Miljenko Horvat. Then I posted a comment that I now only have to find the other guy and get rid of him and there will be only one Miljenko Horvat. Without missing a beat Hanif Younus commented: "It would be a lot easier to just kill yourself." You have got to admire the presence of mind. One simly cannot argue the point that he makes.

So we had a flooding in our basement. So that is where all of my files were. So I am going through my old files and found this e-mail from 1994: "It is a cultural thing at work in Russia. It is part of the same context as magnetic storms, 'complex lunch', not being able to come to work before 9 on Monday mornings; driving with no lights on; turning off lights; drinking champagne for any reason whatsoever; terribly salty appetizers; no hot water in the summer for a month; kinds bundled up in the winter so much that they look like the Michelin man; desire for World domination; propensity on the part of the female population to cry inexplicably during the months of Nov - March, in particular in November; sunbathing standing up; disregard for the environment; superstition and belief in "chudo"; man in space but no local furniture; cult of the "otdih"...." Well, now that I look at it quite a bit has indeed changed. Certainly nobody drives their cars wit...

We live in an era of a "Blackberry fallacy" where the assumption is that we are more "efficient" and things move along faster, better, if we type with our thumbs. The fallacy is that it is not properly understood that the "time constraint" is only one the sending end meaning on the thumb using end. On the receiving end, meaning on the head using end, reading a message of a word count of 70 is one minute different from reading a message that has a word count of 400. So we are having these truncated half-conversations or 1/3 conversations believing it is the same thing or somehow even better. It is not and I am no Luddite but I do believe it truly is a fallacy and as such, it should be exposed in order to be understood in order to be remedied not by stopping to text message or use Blackberries but to understand there has to be more to complete an interchange of thoughts in full rather than just "brb" and "lol". TTYL he he

Rush Limbaugh said "I want him to fail". I can kill a man with a pencil and I've never come closer to wanting to. But I have decided that rather than remaining angry at the idiot, I would share with friends some things recently read or heard which I found amusing, insightful and sometimes both. Here goes: - I have been told that I inspire an "intellectual gag reflex" (as in just being too freakin cerebral about everything). - "Instead of the mahi mahi, could I just get the mahi cause' I am not that hungry" - "the eyes are the nipples of the face" - when referring to a commuter plane - "we were travelling half the speed of smell" - referring to Nancy Pelosi - "there are less frenetic humming birds than that woman" - "I just think better lying down" - "life is much like the Four Seasons in Maui - you get off the elevator and you either make the turn towards ocean front suites or the other way with 99% of t...

Desperately trying to find a silver lining here but this has got to be the weirdest start to a year ever (and end of one too). German billionaire steps in front of a train; Madoff thing; Satyam thing; 500,000 jobs gone? I mean we need some good news, seriously. OK, I'll take a stab. The "investment banking model" is no more. Derivatives "have no clothes". Interest rates are low. After the worst year since 1931 how bad can 09 be? We all have too much information, that is part of the problem. I cut back this Xmas too - literally - bought a tree that was at least a foot shorter than the years before (they price them by the foot here). And even locusts would die with the weather we've been having!