Apologies for the prolonged leave of absence – moving house absorbs an inordinate amount of time, but now things are beginning to drift back to normal.
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First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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Sex and gender are both purely social concepts and open to free and unconstrained reinterpretation. From reading Vikbladh it seems that the utter nonsense of this idea is finally beginning to dawn on even the artsy chattering classes. But prior experience suggests those nonsensical prejudices will only die out with the generation holding them and many of those are quite young. There is a long road still before us.
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Desban & Wyart and Chou et al. offer an interesting mechanism, how success and defeat in later life may well be conditioned in childhood. If so, Clark’s observed stability of upper and lower class families may not all be inherited ability.
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There are two basic rules again confirmed by Ljungqvist et al. and Kirby: 1) Models are not data and 2) The better a model is made to fit data and the more complicated it is and more parameters it has, the worse does it have to be at extrapolation beyond the data range. Currently climate models are the most involved and most tuneable models there are. It will be only a small step for them to incorporate the last century’s divergent data. Will that make them more reliable for extrapolation and prediction? Certainly not.
That said Ljungqvist et al. and Kirby do provide a very valuable new dataset helping us better to understand past climate and its variability.
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Boos & Storelvmo not only cite models as data but value them higher and use them to dismiss real data as irrelevant.
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Being firmly of the Boyd-Richerson-Henrich persuasion I have my doubts about the validity of Vaesen et al.’s results, and indeed there appear to be some apparent weaknesses. But still they raise important questions that can’t just be dismissed and require answers.