I have always thought that even if we can prove that Global Warming is real, even if we can show that its effects would be devastating for us, even if we can demonstrate that it is caused by human behavior and even if we had evidence that the remedy proposed has any chance to work, entrusting the job to governments is yet another receipt for increased taxation with nothing to show for it.

Now scientists around the world are becoming more and more vocal about the initial premise itself: Global Warming. Many people have voiced their disagreement before, from Coleman, the weather channel founder calling it the greatest scam in history, Lomborg who wrote one of most thorough books on the subject or Crichton who wrote a very insightful paper on bad science and politics as much as 7 years ago. But only recently have we seen those isolated voices of dissent increase to the point were more than 30,000 scientists have now signed the Oregon petition urging the US government to not sign the Kyoto agreement and arguing that there is still strong lack of evidence that AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) actually exists.

Obviously we all know (except for Gore and his minions) that consensus has nothing to do with scientific proof. And we also unfortunately know that's it impossible to prove a negative. We can only hope that the population will one day wake up huge scam designed by politicians and a few opportunists to increase their influence or stuff their pockets.

Yes, the science behind AGW is bad. As Howard Hayden, a staunch advocate of sound energy policy, says:

It has been often said that the "science is settled" on the issue of CO2 and climate. Let me put this claim to rest with a simple one-letter proof that it is false.

The letter is s, the one that changes model into models. If the science were settled, there would be precisely one model, and it would be in agreement with measurements.

Alternatively, one may ask which one of the twenty-some models settled the science so that all the rest could be discarded along with the research funds that have kept those models alive. We can take this further. Not a single climate model predicted the current cooling phase. If the science were settled, the model (singular) would have predicted it.

And then to add:

Nobody doubts that CO2 has some greenhouse effect, and nobody doubts that CO2 concentration is increasing. But what would we have to fear if CO2 and temperature actually increased?

• A warmer world is a better world. Look at weather-related death rates in winter and in summer, and the case is overwhelming that warmer is better.
• The higher the CO2 levels, the more vibrant is the biosphere, as numerous experiments in greenhouses have shown. But a quick trip to the museum can make that case in spades. Those huge dinosaurs could not exist anywhere on the earth today because the land is not productive enough. CO2 is plant food, pure and simple.
• CO2 is not pollution by any reasonable definition.
• A warmer world begets more precipitation.
• All computer models predict a smaller temperature gradient between the poles and the equator. Necessarily, this would mean fewer and less violent storms.
• The melting point of ice is 0 ºC in Antarctica, just as it is everywhere else. The highest recorded temperature at the South Pole is -14 ºC, and the lowest is -117 ºC. How, pray, will a putative few degrees of warming melt all the ice and inundate Florida, as is claimed by the warming alarmists?

Consider the change in vocabulary that has occurred. The term global warming has given way to the term climate change, because the former is not supported by the data. The latter term, climate change, admits of all kinds of illogical attributions. If it warms up, that's climate change. If it cools down, ditto. Any change whatsoever can be said by alarmists to be proof of climate change.

In a way, we have been here before. Lord Kelvin "proved" that the earth could not possibly be as old as the geologists said. He "proved" it using the conservation of energy. What he didn't know was that nuclear energy, not gravitation, provides the internal heat of the sun and the earth. Similarly, the global-warming alarmists have "proved" that CO2 causes global warming. Except when it doesn't.

To put it fairly but bluntly, the global-warming alarmists have relied on a pathetic version of science in which computer models take precedence over data, and numerical averages of computer outputs are believed to be able to predict the future climate. It would be a travesty if the EPA were to countenance such nonsense.

But this will probably fall onto deaf ears. Again.

When they hear about bank nationalizations or government intervention at the auto giants, most people don't really feel threatened. After all, they have been told over and over that all their problems today are due to bankers greed -- which they have been brainwashed for years to believe is bad! So it's not surprising that their natural reaction is to think that those ugly capitalists got what they deserve. That is always the first step when transitioning from freedom to totalitarianism: find a scape goat, blame our problems to that group and then curtail their freedom (or more). And the favorite culprit has always been successful entrepreneurs along with their perceived proxies, the Jews.

History repeats itself and today is no exception: blaming the current crisis on the Jews is a growing trend again. The only thing that prevents antisemitism to be as commonplace and as it was at the turn of the previous century is the memory of atrocities committed by Germany during WWII. But antisemitism is still there and growing, albeit disguised under under a different and somewhat more presentable name: Anti-Zionism. To the point where a political party could be created in France that calls itself the Anti-Zionist party! A party whose not so subtle tag-line can be translated as follows:

For a Free Europe! -- free of Jews, I guess
free from multiculturalism -- free of practicing Jews
free from censorship -- free to openly deny the Shoah...
free from speculators -- everyone knows that Finance means Jews!
free from NATO -- another no less subtle link between America and Jews

Why is it OK to be openly Anti-Zionist -- after all Zionism is just being in favor of the existence of a state of Israel -- and not Antisemitic? Semantics.

But few people want to hear the canary in the coal mine. Until the next logical step in the creeping authoritarianism starts to develop. Next step which is just around the corner. For example, this is what could be read in the Telegraph a couple of weeks ago:

At secondary level, 92,000 children have been denied their first choice of school, while 30,000 have been offered none anywhere. Official figures for primary schools have not yet been published, but a huge shortfall of places is reported in, among others, Birmingham, Bristol and Surrey. In London, 25 out of 33 boroughs are unable to cope with demand.

(...)

Last week, Harrow Council, in north-west London, said that it was prosecuting Mranil Patel for fraud, after she pretended she lived at her mother's address to win her son a place at a popular school. In fact, Mrs Patel was living at her husband's house two miles away. She claimed she was living at her mother's during a brief split with her husband, but reconciled with him shortly after the school's application deadline. If found guilty, she risks a fine of up to £5,000 – or a prison sentence.

A prison sentence for wanting your son in a good school: yet another step towards tyranny. This is England in 2009! But no Western country is immune. The future looks bleak indeed...

Once in a while you discover a piece of software and wonder how you could have done without for so long. Such a tool is Synergy. If you have 2 or more computers sitting next to one another forcing you to either use multiple keyboards or even a KVM switch to navigate through the screens, you owe it to yourself to look at Synergy.

This is an open source client/server application that allows you to control any computer mouse and keyboard from any other computer. Those don't have to have the same O/S and so you could easily have a macbook, a PC and a Linux box controlled by the same keyboard and mouse attached to either one of those computers.

You need to install the software on all the boxes you need to link. The one that has the keyboard and mouse is called the server. The others are called clients. You then need to specify how the screens are laid out (in other words which machine is on the right and which one is on the left). To switch control from one computer to the next you then just move the mouse over to the screen of that computer and you can now control the other machine. Completely seamless.

And as added bonus, you can even share the clipboard from one machine to the next. That, no KVM switch will do! Just copy and paste as if you were on the same machine. While cross-OS copy and paste only supports text, this is still very useful.

There are 2 caveats. The first one is that installation is really counter-intuitive. That's the most painful part of the process. But fortunately there is a very good walk-thorough at Lifehacker. The second one is due to a limitation in Windows: the inability to transfer the Ctrl+Alt+Del key combo to another client machine. Fortunately there is a workaround: if you install the client as a service (and don't forget to restart your computer after that), you can then press Ctrl+Alt+Pause to emulate the Ctrl+Alt+Del combo.

This application is not new and the code has not been updated since 2006 but this small piece of open-source software is a must-have for whoever needs to use multiple computers at the same times on a regular basis.

UPDATE: a new fork has been released that fixes some of the bugs from the original version. It's called Synergy+ and this is the one you should use. 

Amazing video from Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry from the Media Lab at MIT showing a futuristic computer interface that could soon allow us to replace screen and keyboard by hands and fingers (hat tip to Marco)!

Ubiquity is an experimental Firefox plugin designed to give you access to information very quickly... using the command line. What you loose in discoverability, you gain in speed, and for common tasks, it makes a lot of sense. It only works with Firefox right now: once the plugin is installed, Ctrl-Space (Alt-Space on the Mac -- or any key combination you choose: just type help to change the Ubiquity access keys) brings an overlay window in your browser where you can type commands and get results. That's your semantic interface to the web! While the current version is still far from a full-blown NLP platform it's still extremely useful in it's current form once you learn the limited grammar. But even this limitation could disappear once they release the next parser which is very promising.

Searching for John Galt is as simple as typing "g who is john galt". Doing a calculation using the Google engine just requires typing "gc 150 eur in usd" for example. Even simpler, you can select any text on the page and type the one or two letter shortcut for the command. If you read a page in a language that you don't master, just select a sentence in the page, bring the prompt and type "tr this to en" to instantly get the English translation. Other useful built-in commands are the ability to select some content on the page and email it using Gmail. Or selecting a group of addresses and map them using Google Maps. Or even check your Google calendar with a couple of keystrokes.

But the real power of the tool resides in its extensibility. Anyone can write a command with just a few lines of javascript. And even if you don't want to venture there, you can take advantage of those commands written by the more adventurous. I have added 3 extra commands for example that I use all the time. The first one is Text2Link that allows you to transform any web address into a hyperlink. How many times do you see those addresses which are cold and you have to copy the link, create a new tab and paste the url there? Not anymore. Just double-click to select the address, bring in the command prompt and type "te"! The next one is Share-on-Reader that allows me in a couple of clicks to select content on the web and post it to Google Reader for either later review or publishing. And the last one is Thesaurus which funnily enough is not built-in.

There is an increasing number of user-written commands and you can find them all on the Mozilla website. So if you  keyboard is itching and it's becoming jealous of your mouse, head down to the Ubiquitous website and start typing away!

Today Americans cast a historical vote. Witnessing a black reaching the top job in a country which such a history of racial discrimination is just amazing. And it as much a testament to the change that has happened in the last 50 years as the proof that change is indeed possible. As an aside, it is quite interesting that it would happen in the US and not in Europe, a continent always first to give lessons in democracy to the world...

And yet the biggest news is not the color of Obama's skin. The fact that a black was elected shows how much the world has already changed. But more change is on the way, change we might not be so proud of when we look back in a few years. The biggest piece of news, and the reason things will definitely not be the same in the future, is the fact that the new president is so much to the left of the political spectrum. America has now officialy entered the twighlight zone of Socialism, pretty much breaking with a tradition of economic freedom and laissez-faire (even though we had more retoric than reality on this in past).

Obviously, everyone in Europe is delighted to have a new friend in the US who will understand and support the interventionist, statist and redistributionist policies they have been trying to push in the past. Let's just hope that along the way someone in the administration will realize that it's Socialism that brought Nazism and Communism and that you can only achieve totalitarism by taking from one to give to another...

The Job: A look at what the City could look like in 6 months!

This cartoon is from 1987, but nothing has changed...

CEO -- Chief Embezzlement Officer.

CFO -- Corporate Fraud Officer.

BULL MARKET -- A random market movement causing an investor to mistake himself for a financial genius.

BEAR MARKET -- A 6 to 18 month period when the kids get no allowance, the wife gets no jewelry, and the husband gets no sex.

VALUE INVESTING -- The art of buying low and selling lower.

P/E RATIO -- The percentage of investors wetting their pants as the market keeps crashing.

BROKER -- What my broker has made me.

STANDARD & POOR -- Your life in a nutshell.

STOCK ANALYST -- Idiot who just downgraded your stock.

STOCK SPLIT -- When your ex-wife and her lawyer split your assets equally between themselves.

FINANCIAL PLANNER -- A guy whose phone has been disconnected.

MARKET CORRECTION -- The day after you buy stocks.

CASH FLOW -- The movement your money makes as it disappears down the toilet.

YAHOO -- What you yell after selling it to some poor sucker for $240 per share.

WINDOWS -- What you jump out of when you're the sucker who bought Yahoo @ $240 per share.

INSTITUTIONAL INVESTOR -- Past year investor who's now locked up in a nuthouse.

PROFIT -- An archaic word no longer in use.