I saw the above poll on weather.com today, so I clicked on “I’m not convinced it’s true.” I was surprised to see that the majority of the people who responded agreed with me. Of course, polls like this are not very accurate from a statistical viewpoint. First, someone has to actually visit the site, then they have to notice the poll, then they have to care enough about the issue to vote on it. A poll like this is interesting, but it’s hardly a good representation of the view of the United States population as a whole.
With that said, though, there are still two reasons why this poll is worth paying attention to. First, most people only vote in a poll like this if they really care about the issue. As you can see in the above image, over 70% of respondents really cared—either they believed in global warming and really cared about it, or they didn’t believe in it and really cared about it. Only 28% of people didn’t really care.
The second reason it’s worth paying attention to is because the majority of people who responded are not convinced that global warming is true.
Interesting.
If you listen to most media then you’re lead to believe that everyone knows global warming is true except President Bush, and if you happen to still be unconvinced then that’s because you’re stupid, illiterate, behind the times, a Bush supporter (like that’s bad for some reason), a Fox News listener, a Fox News watcher, or, God forbid, you’ve been corrupted by those ignorant conservative talk show hosts.
At least, that’s always what I hear whenever I tell people that I’m not convinced global warming is true.
Of course, when people get all red in the face and start foaming at the mouth and interrogating me about whether or not I support President Bush, I ask them if they’ve ever read any of the data on global warming for themselves. I ask if they’ve ever looked at the graphs. I ask them if they’ve read books on it (books written by people other than Al Gore—you know, people who are scientists and stuff). I ask if they’re aware that recent reports show that the average global temperature is currently going down, not up (El Nino warmed us up in 1998, and now La Nina is cooling us down) . I ask them if they’re aware that we only have accurate global temperatures from the last few decades, and that does not provide enough data to extrapolate a warming or cooling pattern. I ask them why they think the environmental activists can accurately predict the temperature 1,000 years from now when meteorologists can’t predict it 1,000 minutes from now.
The answer to those questions are almost always “No, no, no, no, no, no, and ‘Uhmmm’.”
In my experience, these people usually go back to their media outlets or college professors, and they are quickly reassured that everyone knows global warming is true except President Bush, and if you happen to still be unconvinced then that’s because you’re stupid, illiterate, behind the times, a Bush supporter, a Fox News listener, a Fox News watcher, or, God forbid, a conservative. They are quickly told that they need to be open-minded about these issues (coincidentally, being open-minded about issues like this means that you have to agree with the liberal media or your college professor; one would think that being open-minded means that you get to disagree, but unfortunately that’s not the case).
And yet this non-statistically accurate poll from weather.com shows that the majority of respondents are not convinced global warming is true.
Interesting.
I wonder if there have been any accurate polls done? I would like to know what the majority of Americans really believe about the issue. If anyone knows of any, please let me know.
There’s one final thing that I should say. People who read this might be convinced that I think global warming is false. I never said that. I said that I’m not convinced it’s true. I think we need more data and more research and more understanding about the climate before we make any determination. I am all for all research into the climate, because it has many benefits besides just finding out whether or not our globe is warming.
However, I am convinced that the media and people like Al Gore need to stop working people into a frenzy about it. Relax, folks…chill (pun intended). We don’t even know yet whether or not global warming is true. It’s hardly a crisis. There are more important things to be working on right now. Let’s keep looking for ways to help the environment (I’m all for that), let’s keep researching alternative energy (I’m all for that), and let’s take care of our world for future generations. But let’s stop calling it a crisis. It’s not. And my guess is it never will be. I think that our little planet will turn out to be a lot more resilient than most people give it credit for.
For people who want to read more facts about global warming, then I can recommend two great places to start. The first is this excellent article by the Science Daily: “Researchers Question Validity Of A ‘Global Temperature’.” The article is not anti-global warming or pro-global warming, it just raises some interesting issues that scientists (not the mainstream media) are talking about.
A second place to start is the excellent book State of Fear by Michael Crichton. It is a “factional” book (a fictional story told around real facts). The charts and graphs and facts that Crichton uses are all cited so that people can use them to launch their own research. Crichton states numerous times (through his characters and then in the epilogue) that his only goal is to show that the evidence for global warming simply does not exist. It might be happening, but we don’t know yet, so the panic-mongers are making a mountain out of something that might not even be a molehill.
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Windows Vista and I have a long and complicated history. Vista to me is like that lover that you can’t help going back to even though you know that they’ll mess up your data and cause your system to crash.
OK, so I’ve never had a lover mess up my data or cause a system crash. But if I had, then that’s what Vista would be like.
My history with Vista started back in the public beta. I set up my laptop to dual boot Vista and XP. I wanted to be able to access the files on my XP partition when I was in Vista, so I started messing around with file permissions. Bad, bad mistake. Vista grabbed ownership of all the files and I could no longer boot into XP at all.
So that mistake was partially mine. I admit it. I should have been more careful. Fortunately I was able to keep all my files and not lose any data; I just had to back them all up using Vista and then reinstall XP.
I played around with the public beta for a while, and then went back to XP. And then Vista was released. Shortly before it was released the company that I work for was given 500 copies of Vista Enterprise by Microsoft. Since we weren’t using it yet in our company I got permission to use a copy on my laptop.
I wanted to see how much progress Microsoft had made, so I installed Vista and played around with it for a while. This time I was more careful with my data. I used the Vista backup utility to do regular backups in case my PC crashed or I had to reformat. Bad, bad mistake.
Vista did crash for some reason, so I plugged in my external drive and went to restore my backups. Vista said they were invalid. All of them. Vista couldn’t recognize it’s own backups.
After taking a whole lot of deep breaths and remembering that I am a Christian, and it’s not proper to show up at Microsoft headquarters with a bunch of guns and belts of ammo wrapped all around me, I started the process of manually recovering my files. Here’s how it went.
I found out that Vista’s backup utility automatically does incremental backups. If you don’t know what that is, let me explain. An incremental backup is when a backup utility only adds the files that have changed to its latest backup. In other words, you set up a process to backup all your files, and in the initial backup it backs everything up. After that first full backup, each additional backup just scans those files to see which ones have changed. That way the backup runs faster.
Is there anything wrong with an incremental backup? Nope. It’s actually pretty smart…IF THE USER KNOWS IT’S HAPPENING!!! I thought Vista was doing full backups, so, to save space, I had deleted the original backups. (If you’re thinking that’s stupid, it’s not; there’s no point in hanging on to every backup ever made–why should you when you just need to keep the latest one or two?).
Anyway, back to my original story. I used a file recovery program to recover almost all of the original backups. Vista had saved them in a standard .zip extension, so I was able to recover almost everything. Unfortunately all of my TV shows that I had purchased from iTunes were gone. I lost the entire Firefly series :(.
Needless to say, I was ticked. I reinstalled XP shortly afterwards.
So that was my second bad experience. Now let me tell you about my third–the one that’s happening right now.
Vista has come a long way since release. It’s now a fairly stable OS. I just installed it on my work computer and I’m pretty pleased at how far they have come. It seems that most of the major bugs have been worked out. Yesterday I decided to put Vista back on my laptop. I reformat and reinstall every few months anyway, so I decided to try out Vista again instead of XP.
This time I decided I’d be more careful and outsmart Vista. I didn’t want Vista to touch my files at all. I wanted them left alone. I’ve learned that Vista + my important data = data loss.
So here’s what I did.
I repartitioned my hard drive into two separate partitions. I left all of my files on one partition, then when I installed Vista I put it on another partition. As far as my computer is concerned, I have two separate hard drives right now. At least that’s how Vista should have recognized it. Every other OS in the world would have respected that arrangement. Any previous version of Windows, any version of Linux, Unix, Mac, OS/2, anything. Every single one of them.
So did Vista respect that arrangement? Nope.
Here’s what Vista did.
When I ran the setup utility I told Vista to install in my second partition. Previous versions of Windows needed to be set up within the first 2GB of your physical hard drive, but Vista does not. You can put it anywhere on your hard drive that you like. So it shouldn’t have mattered that I put it in the second partition instead of the first one.
As a matter of fact, Vista didn’t care. It booted fine. So I happily opened up “My Computer” and opened my second partition. And what was there? One file put there by Vista. That’s it. All other space was empty.
I figured out immediately what happened, and it didn’t take me long to confirm it. Vista erased ALL data on my first partition–all of my files, documents, music, resumes, school papers, everything–without even asking–and used that space to install its bootloader (the bootloader is what tells your computer which operating systems are installed). Why did it do that? WHO KNOWS?!?!?!?! That’s not even where the bootloader is supposed to go, for crying out loud!!!
So now I spent hours partitioning my hard drive and carefully making sure everything was set up properly, only to have Vista (due to lousy and shoddy programming) erase all my data without even bothering to ask me first.
But the good news is that Vista didn’t overwrite that data, so it looks like I’ll be able to recover it all. Of course, that’s taking more hours of my time, but I’ve learned to expect that when Microsoft (especially Vista) is involved.
So the moral of the story is this: Don’t trust Vista. I mean it. If you’re going to run Vista, and you are a power user who might reformat / repartition / set up automated backups or anything that power users do, then use some non-Vista backup utility to put all your data onto an external drive and not let Vista touch it. Ever.
The other moral of the story is: Buy a Mac. Or if you’re a power user, buy a laptop that runs a Linux distro like Ubuntu or Kubuntu. They’re pretty cheap, and if you know what you’re doing you can make Ubuntu or Kubuntu outshine a Mac running Leapord both visually and in performance. (The only reason I’m not running Kubuntu right now is because my laptop has an ATI card, and the ATI card that I have does not play nice with Linux; I am saving up money to buy a laptop with an Nvidia card so that I can run Kubuntu and leave Windows far, far behind.)
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These pictures were sent to me by a friend named Zhou Li Ming (her English name is Jessica). I met her in English Corner at one of the universities. She is in the picture below.
These pictures were taken in Su Zhou city, which Jessica says is close to Shanghai. They are very pretty, so I wanted to share them. Enjoy!
UPDATE: Yes, I do look like a cave man in the above pic =P. The stubble trimmer’s battery ran down, what can I say?
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I suppose this makes a good time to mention a Firefox add-on that will make your Web surfing immeasurably safer (meaning it will protect you from many viruses, phishing schemes, hidden redirection scripts designed to capture personal information, etc.). It’s called NoScript.
If you just want a safer browsing experience then just install NoScript and don’t worry about reading further. Using it is pretty self-explanatory. However, if you want to know how to use it and why it makes your browsing experience safer, then read on :).
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