India has a fine tradition in the sciences. They in fact invented zero.
Some great Indian scientists must be developing high angular momentum in their graves at this though…
Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said the assertion in its 2007 report had “cost us dear” in the fight against global warming and helped boost the efforts of sceptics.
Despite the IPCC previously admitting it had made a mistake in its assessment on climate change, Dr Pachauri refused to personally apologise for the error because he was not responsible for that part of the report.
Look, you daft sod. We are not scpetics because we want to be. We are sceptics because we don’t believe.
In an interview published on Wednesday, the IPPC chairman said a personal apology would be a “populist” step as he continued to refuse calls to resign.
“You can’t expect me to be personally responsible for every word in a 3,000 page report,” he said.
Actually I do expect you to be responsible because we are talking here of a multi-trillion dollar re-tooling of the global economy. You lot elevated this to the greatest scientific challenge ever. Live up to it.
“I don’t do too many populist things, that is why I’m so unpopular with a certain section of society.”
Why am I reminded of Jim Hacker making “courageous” decisions here. And no, you are unpopular bcause you’re a devious cunt on the make. Got that? You also seem to be sporting a comb-over of Bobby Charltonesque proportions. Something to hide or is he just insulating your head to save energy?
“We’re in an information society today and we have to respond adequately and professionally. We’ve been weak in that regard to be honest. The IPCC is starting to realise we’re living in a very different world to what we had in 1988.”
That is the quote of the century so far. That is priceless. It’s taken them ’till 2010 to realise it’s not 1988. That is a statement of Ratnerish proportions. I’m glad he shared the profound insight that I didn’t merely imagine the last two decades with me because I was about to go to Our Price and buy the new Duran Duran album on vinyl.
Dr Pachauri, who claimed he was subject to lies about his personal income and lifestyle, admitted the mistake had seriously damaged the IPCC’s credibility and
While he claimed it was an isolated mistake, that he put down to human error and which was “totally of character” for the panel, had undermined the “basic truth” that human activity was causing temperatures to rise.
Another piece of pricelessness. The basic truth? Human error? Well yes if a scientist gets it wrong it is human error. It wasn’t the cat’s fault was it? I wouldn’t trust these fuckers with Bunsen burner let alone the future of the planet.
The IPCC admitted that the prediction was based on a report written in a science journal and even the scientist who was the subject of the original story admitted it was not based on fact.
We are now so through the looking-glass it’s beyond rational comment. I mean if science isn’t based on fact then basically you can just make any old shit up can’t you? Oh…
Dr Syed Hasnain, an Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, said that
the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research.
Right… I shall return to the academy and enroll in a PhD in guessing. Every other bugger seems to be doing it. And wasn’t Nehru the deranged loon who drank his own piss? This just gets better and better.
The article, in the New Scientist, was not even based on a research paper – it evolved from a short telephone interview with the academic.
“I think this mistake has certainly cost us dear, there’s no question about it,” Dr Pachauri said.
A telephone interview. From India. Did he also claim he could save them money on their car insurance? Dr Pauchauri still of course doesn’t get it. It has cost them dear but it has cost them dear because they are wrong and not because it has undermined public confidence or some guff like that. Science should not be a PR exercise.
“Everybody thought that what the IPCC brought out was the gold standard and nothing could go wrong. But look at the larger picture, don’t get blinded by this one mistake.
“The larger picture is solid, it’s convincing and it’s extremely important. How can we lose sight of what climate change is going to do to this planet? What it’s already doing to this planet?”
So convince me then. With like evidence and stuff and not wild speculation.
The IPCC’s remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.
In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.
The IPCC report, which is published every six years, is used by government’s worldwide to inform policy decisions that affect billions of people.
The Sunday Telegraph disclosed at the weekend that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.
The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.
Dr Pachauri defended the IPCC’s use of so-called “grey literature” – sources outside peer-reviewed academic journals, such as reports from campaign groups, companies and student theses.
Jeezus. I couldn’t make this shit up if I had an electrified shit making machine. Peer review is to science what double-blind is to drug-trials. And might those “campaign groups, companies and students” have a dog in this fight? And a nose in the trough?
He told The Guardian that reports of further errors in the IPCC report linked to grey literature were spurious and the result of a “factory” of people “only there to create pinpricks and get attention”.
I’m sorry. If this is what scientists are up to, if this is what they are reduced to then I’m ashamed. Science without scepticism might as well be medieval demonology. I have always been fond of the line from the Indiana Jones movie (forget which one), “Trust me I’m a scientist”. I shall now have to retire that. These people are terrified. They have been caught with their pants down in the convent school dorm and Mother Superior has the mangle out. The lack of rigour here is mind-blowing to me. They might as well have been reading goat entrails. It is appalling. It will do to science what kiddie-fiddling priests did to the Catholic Church. It’s really bad. It’s a shocking betrayal of the great quest for knowledge because not only are these people wrong and not only are they liars but I don’t think they even see it anymore. They are gerrymandering data to fit a conception that must be true. It is truly post-modern in it’s creation of the “truth”. Science was meant to be our last line of defence against Po-Mo thinking. Well, the enemy are already well within the fort aren’t they?
I have thought for quite some time that AGW was a crock but I never thought this level of chicanery would come out. I’m frankly stunned.
And I feel deeply betrayed.
PS I knew a lad at Leeds University who did a PhD in mathematical logic. The external examiner said his thesis was brilliant. He told him right at the start of the viva that he’d passed and then said, “Yeah, I know you wanna go down the pub with your mates but I’d really like to talk with you for an hour or so…”. He then advised the chap that he’d need to make one correction. It was in the references and it was changing a “z” to a “Z”. The student might have been a damn fine logician but he didn’t know jack about German or the fact that all nouns such as “Zeitung” are capitalised in that language. Now that is rigour. That’s how science ought to be. This examination determined one bloke’s career as an academic pure mathematician. It was done with more care than the IPCC have lavished on completely changing the global economy. That’s why I am shocked.
They in fact invented zero.
No they didn’t - the Babylonians did.
Whatever, so long as you don’t claim the Arabs did it.
You know, it takes a peculiar sort of mind to see the need to represent nothing.
Are you sure? I’ve also heard Persian claims. The important thing is someone did.
But the Indians did a lot of algebra.
I just thought it a cute opening paragraph. Possibly like the IPCC.
I want him to stay Chairman as long as possible. He is a godsend to us sceptics.
First he isn’t a scientist but a railway engineer.
Second his levels of self opinionation and arrogance are truly breathtaking in all the clips of him talking that I have seen.
Third he is going to need to grow fifteen more heads to take proper advantage of all the troughs he has his snout in, and fourth, he looks like Rasputin. Even the non religious subconsciously cross themselves when the see his picture.
By the time they prise the venal lying cunt out of his position as Chairman, the IPCC will be a laughing stock.
The Indian scientific community are never going to forgive the Voodoo science crack he made, after they very properly pointed out that his assertion that the Himalayan glaciers would all have gone by 2035, was complete and utter bollocks!
No let him stay as long as possible, he is an asset to us. Just like the secret services decided not to assassinate Hitler because he was doing such a splendid job in screwing up the war, the longer Pachauri clings on, the deeper the hole the IPCC is standing in gets.
“They in fact invented zero.”
Are you sure it wasn’t Scotland’s World Cup Squad?
[...] Counting Cats tries to explain climate skepticism to Rajendra Pachauri, head of the [...]
A wonderful, acerbic, precision and total destruction of this corrupt criminal.
Shocked and also angry. The latter sometimes calibrating emotion leads to errors, especially in a reasoned argument. Scepticism operates in all directions and its opposite is conviction! For we have scotched the snake not killed it and every “sceptical” argument is now being turned over by the sad weary footsoldiers of AGW as evidence that the science is settled and its opponents one step from Sarah Palin.
Monbiots “burn the witch” article in the Guardian today is very remarkable. Whatever ones desire for revenge on arrogant fucks who have undermined science for base reasons at a time when we need it the most it describes the morality of many of those driven into the debate by moral indignation - and it us very ugly indeed. Sack them all but sack me last: what a cunt.
One can only imagine the tension in the BBC (and indeed the Conservative Party who are nursing an historic error from which even the thinning prospect of electoral success will not deter them - a green bank for fucks sake) as they all realise they are involved in a variation of Goodbye Lenin.
Still bloody funny thanks.
Like a lot of stuff, the history is unclear. The Babylonians did have a place-value system in which they initially used a space to indicate an empty column, and then later used various special marker symbols to do so. However, it was only used in the middle of numbers, not the end (so 10 and 600 were written the same way), and it was never used on its own as a number in its own right.
Conversely, the ancient Greeks did argue about whether zero was a number, and Ptolemy used a symbol in written form in a similar way to the Babylonians. The Chinese and Mayans apparently also have similar claims. (Although I hadn’t known that until I just looked it up.)
The Indians were the first we know of to use zero as a number in its own right, fitting into the fully-developed place-value system like any other digit, rather than as a special case. So the zero you learnt at school could fairly be said to have been invented by the Indians. Although Brahmagupta did define 0/0 = 0, which is different from our arithmetic, so I suppose you could argue.
Of course, there are modern senses of the meaning of zero that were invented only far more recently. And some no doubt yet to be invented. So one could seriously question whether we’ve got there yet even today! Who knew mathematics could be so ill-defined, eh?
Game, set and match to you I think.
(@RAB - I’m with you, the longer he stays the better. Eventually he’ll make it impossible for civilised folk to even bring up the topic of Mann Made Global Warming for polite company)
Pa,
You been reading wikipedia again?
Who’s a prescient little person then?!!
Cant believe it’s happened so fast though.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7157590/India-to-pull-out-of-IPCC.html
I rather fancy moving to India. It’s going to be the “Can Do” place to be this century for sure!
Cats,
Amongst others.
http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/HistTopics/Zero.html
But a lot of it is pretty well known. And how can I resist somebody talking about numbers?
Um…I thought the Mayans claimed they invented the concept of zero? Am I wrong?
I don’t think the Mayans claimed it, but as I alluded to above, there were cases where something like a zero was used in Mayan long counts, yes. It might have been decoration though, to mark the centre. They didn’t always use the same symbol for it.
The problem is that zero isn’t a simple concept. In early uses, it was more akin to a punctuation mark; like the ellipsis… it was not a thing in itself, but a marker to keep the real things in their places. The true concept of zero would be more like using “…” to mean something like the empty word: a word signifying the absence or omission of words. You would have to be able to talk of “The …” and “it acted very …ly” if it was to be analogous in the same way as zero being an actual number. It’s not a concept we really have.
And the confusion doesn’t end there, because further meanings have been invented since. In abstract algebra, in Cantor’s cardinal and ordinals, in Frege and Russell’s set theory, in Peano’s axioms, the zero vector, the zero tensor, the zero polynomial and the zero power series.
At what point can we be said to have invented it?
[Nick here sometimes goes on about the square root of zero, or higher roots. I wouldn't normally mention it, but this is in a sense an infinitely bigger zero than the ordinary zero. The root has a Maclaurin series in which only the first term is zero while the second is infinitely big. The concept he is probably seeking is "bugger all, squared." Although if you want a really small zero, then Exp(minus infinity-squared) is even better. The idea of zeroes being bigger or smaller than one another just shows how really strange mathematics has got these days.]
Pa,
Any links?
Nick,
Links to what?
The Mayan stuff is on Wikipedia, IIRC.
The maths is off the top of my head. I’d have thought you’d know most of those versions of zero yourself. Zero vectors will be old hat to a physicist. But I can tell you about any you don’t know, or which you think might be interesting to others.
If you mean the bit about the “cube root of fuck all” or however it was you put it, the usual way to think about it is to consider the behaviour of functions very close to where they cross zero. The function f(x) = x is what you might call the basic zero, and then f(x) = x^3 counts as an even smaller zero, in the sense that x^3 / x = 0 when x = 0. That’s saying x^3 effectively vanishes into nothing if you compare its size to the basic zero.
One way of comparing them is to look at the Maclaurin series, which is a way of writing a function as a sum of powers. x has the series (0,1,0,0,0,…) while x^3 has the series (0,0,0,1,0,0,…) with more zeroes up front. The longer the sequence of zeroes at the start, the “smaller” the zero it is.
However, square and cube roots go in the opposite direction, and have a Maclaurin series that goes (0,infinity,infinity,infinity,…) which is still a zero, but counting as a “big” one. Another way to look at it is to plot the graph of y = x^3, and see that the line goes vertical as it crosses zero. The tiniest twitch in the input will yield a far less tiny output.
And I can tell you, they’re an absolute bugger if you’re trying to locate such a zero numerically. Most of the standard methods rely on finding the slope near your approximation, to know which way and how far to go next, and this slope heading off for infinity can do some strange things.
Personally, I wouldn’t mind expanding on zeroes all day, but I did solemnly promise at the start of this gig not to put any scary equations up. I do not want to be responsible for starting any fires.
I just hadn’t thought of different orders of zero…
But you explanation makes sense.
And yes, of course I know what a Maclaurin series is.
And fire away at the math.
Pa Annoyed - Thank you for that! Studied the Mayans back in my younger days but its been so long since I looked at it…well, you know the saying: if you dont use it, you lose it. Appreciate your taking the time to explain.
I just hadn’t thought of different orders of zero…
And your mathematics is supposed to be better than mine…..
What about different orders of infinity? Each a different nature to the other?
Yup,
There’s loads of them. For example the cardinality of the set of natural numbers is different from the cardinality of the continuum. On the subject of that I think it was Galileo who first discovered something groovy. The cardinality of the squares is the same as the cardinality of the natural numbers even though not all natural numbers are squares. Counter-intuitive, no? It works because you can map one-to-one between them - every number has a unique square.
For a brief introduction I would recommend “Rudy Rucker’s Infinity and the Mind”.