Monday, June 02, 2014

Cooking Tol


Ethon flew through the night bearing the great burden that Mycroft and Scrotum had put upon him.  There better be good liver treats at the end of this the big bird thought, half listening to a mad Viscount, well, the burden was none too happy, but mad certainly.  On the long trip he had told the eagle about his cure for bad breath that was going to earn him a fortune after the grift from the climate change deniers dried up.   Chris Monckton was getting tired of that, having to haul out to the Antipodes or the old colonies to shill for contributions, and frankly, Mycroft and especially Scrotum were getting tired of having to go out there to save his butt.   Still everything, bad or good must come to an end, and comparing the waybill and the Garman, Ethon saw that he was rapidly nearing Bristol University Castle where the mythical Tol lived.  Drat, thought Ethon, UPS, FedEx, they can just drop and run, sometimes just toss the package over the fence, but Scrotum insisted on a signature at the end of the journey


Mycroft had told him that he would recognize the place by the rather eccentric (Mycroft was being, well, economical with the description) decorations, the piles of Tol papers  232, nay 112 climate change papers, still only 10 acknowledged by the Cook, the error strewn econometric bushes scattered on the ramparts and the gremlins.  Oh yes, an endless loop of gremlins, carefully going over all the lines of computer code and data tables to check where even more errors could be inserted.   Bunnies and even demons would never have thought of shifting the x-axis back and forth as needed, but this is the kind of trick well tested in paleoclimate denial.  Year zero leaves a considerable room for baby gremlings to play, but only Mad Professor Tol could use that ploy on the instrumental data record. True a few groundskeepers were employed in sweeping up, and there was someone at the gates with a  couple of dumpsters, but Ethon, Mycroft had said at the top of the tower you will find the professor.  You will know him by his hair.  Ethon asked for a description, but Mycroft merely smiled and repeated, you will know him by his hair.  Mycroft was right Ethon thought.

Landing and dumping his load, the eagle hauled out the delivery I-pad and inquired:  Mad Professor Tol, I presume?  The GWPF has sent a package for you.  Put it in the corner the tall, red-haired economancer replied, better in the closet where he can't make too much noise.  I am busy with two important things after returning from testifying where I carefully explained my superiority and the base nature of those who oppose me.  But now the vermin beset me, making sport of my gremlins, recruiting those who know statistics rather than parsing them and in the midst of this, the Cook refuses to be refuted by my mathemagical genius.  They mess with the wizard at their peril.  There is more than one journal in the world, and I, the Mad Professor after many turndowns have found the one true journal of last resort in which to publish my gruntings about the Cook's 97% paper.

The editor is in my thrall, providing the Mad Professor Tol, the first and last words, but allowing only a few from the Cook.  He shall be crushed and if not, there is always the apprentice.  Brandon is skilled in URL hacking.

Grunts were heard from the closet.  My liege, this humble viscount has done his part in your service.  Indeed you have praised my efforts (head vice warning) on the Titter. (to be continued. . .)


13 comments:

bill said...

Ho ho! I await the further adventures of Old Scrotum and co. with interest...

Second-last link to Barking at Watts' needs trimming in order to function!

bill said...

Oh, and 'making sport' has been similarly made sport of!

willard said...

Has Mycroft found a bunch of women out there who have both their eyes on the same side of their facein the mad laboratory?

dbostrom said...

Tol is actually Mycroft, or perhaps the Manchurian Candidate. Or so it would seem, with the severe disappointment he delivered to the US House SS&T committee last week. The poor fellow probably had to take the bus back to Dulles. "No black car for you, you horrid little traitor."

David B. Benson said...

I knew this was coming...

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

The vicarious Viscount is still reporting from last year's Doha summit

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Cold fish that he is, Willard has yet again mistaken a flounder for a lady.

Anonymous said...

If Professor Rabett is interested in percentages, he may be interested in this document

Marco said...

Anonymous should send this to John Cook. If they haven't already picked this up, and probably it is too late to include in their rebuttal, it is at least another point to make on Skeptical Science. Oh, and I hope someone tweets this to Tol. More gremlins...

Anonymous said...

Hi Anonymous,

I like your approach!

I think your numbers need updating though. Your S matrix should have all diagonal elements = 0 but your 1,1 and 7,7 have non-zero values in. If you want to check Tol's version of this, you can find it in the spreadsheet downloadable from the top of the list here. The matrix elements are described on the "Bias" spreadsheet in columns P through V. So your element {1,1} should be zero and {2,1} should be 0.9163. It seems that you didn't use his normalisation either, so some of the other values are slightly different, although it doesn't seem to affect the overall result by very much. Still, if you have time I would appreciate you re-running the analysis with the updated figures, and also checking that 11.8% is the correct value to use for the initial stage.

MarkR

Thomas Lee Elifritz said...

Lovely. Thanks for that, Frank, er ... whoever.

EliRabett said...

Mark, at first Eli thought you were right, but those differences are needed to make the columns and rows of the T matrix add to unity.

Anonymouse has it right.

Neal J. King said...

Eli:

A's T matrix does have the right normalization, but he obtained it by a procedure that differs from Tol's method. However, the same essential calculation can be done with the proper Tol matrix, and leads to the same conclusion: Either the original pre-reconciliation counts had negative papers, or the Tol method cannot in principle be justified in terms of the actual records at all.