Fires

[Ceka Cianci]

Every time I hear anything about thermostat nowadays.. This always comes to mind..hehehe

 

[Luna Bliss]

Well just great, if this is indeed Trumpies new plan coming from new "experts' ....herd immunity. An estimate of over 2 million dead Americans will be the result if there is a 1% fatality rate from Covid, and over 6 million dead if closer to a 3% fatality rate.

https://news.yahoo.com/terrible-strategy-trumps-herd-immunity-053454675.html

[PermaRuthed]

5 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

Well just great, if this is indeed Trumpies new plan coming from new "experts' ....herd immunity. An estimate of over 2 million dead Americans will be the result if there is a 1% fatality rate from Covid, and over 6 million dead if closer to a 3% fatality rate.

https://news.yahoo.com/terrible-strategy-trumps-herd-immunity-053454675.html

Our covid numbers would be much lower if we don't count the blue states.  Holy cow, this is the so-called elected president...

"If you take the blue states out, we're at a level that I don't think anybody in the world would be at. We're really at a very low level but some of the states – they were blue states, and blue-state managed."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/17/an-only-red-states-america-probably-isnt-one-trump-would-actually-like/

 

[Aethelwine]

3 hours ago, PermaRuthed said:

Our covid numbers would be much lower if we don't count the blue states.  Holy cow, this is the so-called elected president...

"If you take the blue states out, we're at a level that I don't think anybody in the world would be at. We're really at a very low level but some of the states – they were blue states, and blue-state managed."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/17/an-only-red-states-america-probably-isnt-one-trump-would-actually-like/

 

That was the intention and why the plans they made to deal with the virus were scrapped.

 

"Quoting an unnamed public-health expert in frequent contact with the taskforce, Vanity Fair reported that a member of Mr Kushner's team suggested a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically because the virus had hit blue states hardest.

"The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy," the expert said."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/jared-kushner-coronavirus-strategy-democrat-governors-a9648831.html

Edited September 18, 2020 by Aethelwine

[Arielle Popstar]

On 9/16/2020 at 11:38 AM, Madelaine McMasters said:

I've a neighbor who, twice in the last two decades, ranted to me about the left-wing conspiracy to alter the historical temperature record to make it appear Earth is warming. I've been unable to explain to him that recalibration of historical data is routine and necessary, as we discover errors in individual measurements, or measurement methods. These errors are sometimes detected when discrepancies in what should be identical measurements arise from those measurements being made via different methods, or when measurement points are modified or moved.

The most recent recalibration I read about concerned ocean surface temperature readings taken by cargo ships, which use seawater to cool the engines and measure both inlet and outlet temperatures for use by the engine control systems. Certain classes of ships locate the inlet sensor closer to the engine room than others, elevating inlet temperatures above actual ocean temperatures. Once enough confidence was obtained in the magnitude and consistency of the measurement bias in various kinds of ships, the bias was removed from the historical record. I haven't read the following paper, but I imagine it details some of the thinking. https://os.copernicus.org/articles/9/683/2013/os-9-683-2013.pdf

He would have none of my explanations.

He recently had a new HVAC system installed in his home, and soon claimed the system was defective because he had to constantly adjust his thermostat during the day to stay comfortable. I bought over two precision thermometers and verified that his home was within 0.5F of the indicated thermostat temperature, at the thermostat. The thermostat is in a new location, exposed to the morning sun. I did not reveal this observation at first, preferring (as I do) to have a little fun with my secret knowledge. I looked at the weather forecast and saw several overcast/rainy days ahead. I did a spooky incantation over the thermostat and proclaimed that, in a day or two, it would settle down. It did. Looking at the forecast again a few days later, I told him my spell would wear off the next day, and he would have to adjust his thermostat again. It did, and he did.

"What's going on Maddy?"

"Your furnace is part of a conspiracy to drive you nuts, though I think you're already there."

"Ha ha. No really, what do you think is going on?"

"Your thermostat was moved from the north facing wall of your hallway to the east facing wall of your kitchen, probably because you told the installers it would be easier for you to adjust from there. That wall gets morning sun, which warms the thermostat and causes it to cool the house. You have just experienced data-discontinuity caused by a sensor and sensor location change. Forevermore, you will either have to adjust the thermostat on every sunny day, or move it back to the hallway. This is precisely the kind of problem that modern researchers deal with when looking at historical temperature records that don't line up with other measurements."

"No, this nothing like that Maddy and you know it."

The installers moved his thermostat back to the hallway wall and now he claims they did something wrong. Though he no longer has to adjust the thermostat on sunny mornings, he must set it two degrees cooler than the old system to stay comfortable, and that's "costing him a lot for electricity". I reminded him that I verified the accuracy of the new thermostat and suggested he should correct his memory of the last twenty years to account for the error in the old thermostat.

He's still not buying any of it, the new thermostat and my two precision thermometers must be defective.

I will not tell him there's a way to offset the measurement in his new thermostat to match the error in his old one. I prefer to be a part of the conspiracy.

I had a similar incident several years ago when I purchased a new programmable digital thermostat for my mother, to replace her old mercury based analogue one. She too almost immediately started complaining it didn't work right and that she was alternately feeling hot and cold and she was sure it wasn't hot flashes. Being that it was a good quality thermostat from a reputable manufacturer, I was hesitant to blame the unit itself and started testing it to make sure the temperatures displayed were comparable to the old one. That worked out the same but it did seem the furnace took longer to start up then when on the old thermostat, leading us to surmise that the cut in and out temperatures of the new new had a wider variance. The mean temperature was the same but because the cut in temp was lower, she actually was starting to feel cool and because the cut out temp was a bit higher then what it was set for, she started feeling too warm before it cycled off.

After some digging around on the thermostat companies website, I discovered that they had programmed the thermostat that way by intent to maximize heating and cooling efficiency with a longer cycle times. The interesting part to me was that though there was a way to change the cut in and out temp's of the thermostat, my mother said not to bother because now that she understood what was happening, she would acclimatize to the new variance, which she did as she hasn't brought it up since. 

The moral of the story seems to be that when things are explained properly and honestly, people tend to stop assuming conspiracies. 

[Madelaine McMasters]

7 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

The moral of the story seems to be that when things are explained properly and honestly, people tend to stop assuming conspiracies. 

That might be the moral of your story, but it certainly isn't the moral of mine. My neighbor was given an explanation by someone he's known for decades and called upon for help for years. He knows I'm the electrical engineer daughter of a mechanical engineer and I know my stuff. Still, he believes his new HVAC system was designed to funnel money out of his pocket and into some mysterious cabal. I imagine he finds confirmation of his suspicions in his monthly utility bill, too. There's a bogeyman in every closet.

Last year, he ranted to me about how John McCain killed 134 sailors by hot-dogging with his jet on the USS Forrestal in 1967 and that he should have been tried and executed for his crime. It took me less than an hour  to find refuting evidence that he himself could verify. He'd been a mechanic in the Navy and was familiar with the basics of jets. I brought him the evidence and allowed him to debunk the hoax using his own expertise. He was quite happy that he'd been able to pierce through the deception with his own personal, specialized knowledge.

It's a year later and he's back to believing the conspiracy theory and calling for any honors McCain received during his life to be stripped from him posthumously. When I reminded him of the special expertise he'd use to reveal the truth of the Forrestal story, he said "yeah, all that stuff they taught me about the jets was probably wrong, too."

I recently heard part of an interview of Robert Kennedy Jr. on NPR. He was citing the damage done by organized religion while waxing rhapsodic about Catholicism, apparently blind to the abuses of that organized religion (Watch "Spotlight" or "Mea Maxima Culpa").  At some point, the interviewer seemed to spot that inconsistency and asked Kennedy if his skepticism covered "everything". Kennedy responded "Oh yes, we should question everything, absolutely everything. God gave us a brain so we could question things". That self contradiction was eye rolling enough, but yesterday I learned that Kennedy is an anti-vaxxer. There is more nuance to "question everything" than Kennedy's brain can comprehend.

All that said, I am not immune.

[Rolig Loon]

"There's no use trying," Alice said: "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll

[Lyssa Greymoon]

28 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

When I reminded him of the special expertise he'd use to reveal the truth of the Forrestal story, he said "yeah, all that stuff they taught me about the jets was probably wrong, too."

Because that makes a lot of sense. The Navy really benefits from making sure their mechanics don't know how airplanes work. 

[Arielle Popstar]

1 hour ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

That might be the moral of your story, but it certainly isn't the moral of mine.

Sorry, my comment on the moral of the story was not directed at yours per se but at what your post was responding to:

On 9/16/2020 at 7:48 AM, Theresa Tennyson said:

Thermometer placement during the 19th century was quite erratic. A researcher did testing over 61-year period and discovered that the older protocols for measuring temperature tended to read about 1 degree high.

https://theconversation.com/factcheck-was-the-1896-heatwave-wiped-from-the-record-33742

According to the linked article, there was at least in this case a reason given for why older temperature data was not included in the graph and though I find the reasoning somewhat questionable in the sense that if they know that the old data was off by 1 degree, why they would not have adjusted the older data with that amount of offset.

In the case of other "official" historic temperature data, the amount of adjustment was not always revealed and even included modifying the raw data so that future interested researchers could not look up those old temperatures and reevaluate them in the light of new findings. That leads to people questioning what is being hid and why.

Edited September 18, 2020 by Arielle Popstar
making sense of one sentence

[Rolig Loon]

2 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

According to the linked article, there was at least in this case a reason given for why older temperature data was not included in the graph and though I find the reasoning somewhat questionable in the sense that if they know that the old data was off by 1 degree, why they would not have adjusted the older data with that amount of offset.

That's one good reason why those 19th century measurement have such large error bars.  The error bars on the graphs that Teresa and I posted are 95% confidence limits, which is to say that 95% of the measurements fall somewhere between the top and the bottom of the bar.  The 5% of real oddball measurements are still in the dataset, but the average of all data is influenced most heavily by those 95% of "good" ones.

There are two ways to make the error bars on data like these smaller.  One is to make better measurements.  The technology 100+ years ago couldn't produce the same degree of precision that we take for granted today, and it was difficult (if not impossible) to calibrate thermometers against each other.  Some might consistently read a degree high, and others a degree low.  As a result, repeated measurements with the same instrument varied a lot, and it was hard to be sure that different instruments were measuring the same thing.  

The other way to reduce uncertainty is to make more measurements.  If you only make four measurements and all agree pretty well, there's still a decent chance that a fifth measurement will be quite different.  If you make 10,000 measurements and they all agree pretty well, it's fair to predict that measurement #10,001 will be just as close.  With modern electronic equipment, we make an incredibly large number of measurements all around the Earth (and from satellite) every day. The sheer number of measurements helps make those 95% confidence limits smaller than 19th Century reports, which used far fewer measurements.

[Maryanne Solo]

Omg I had opened multiple threads, (6am), and started reading this ones last few posts, inaccurate temp measurements.... etc etc, thinking yeah ok, thermometer in mouth, very latest digital technologies, places where thermometers don't go any more 😵🥴 then I'm like oh wait! Its the Fires thread.. duh. 😆

Edited September 18, 2020 by Maryanne Solo
wakey wakey!

[Silent Mistwalker]

12 minutes ago, Maryanne Solo said:

Omg I had opened multiple threads, (6am), and started reading this ones last few posts, inaccurate temp measurements.... etc etc, thinking yeah ok, thermometer in mouth, very latest digital technologies, places where thermometers don't go any more 😵🥴 then I'm like oh wait! Its the Fires thread.. duh. 😆

Needs moar kaffee. ☕