Why attack Climatologists all the time?

I have been (loosely) associated with the “climate change” sciences for a very long time. I am as confused and disinclined to form a public opinion today as i was when i started. I do have personal opinion [not always backed up by readily understood or easily accessible facts]. What i don’t get is that if i have so much trouble how come everybody else doesn’t? When i talk about “everybody” i mean people who write journalistic articles, politicians, my dad. Well to be frank here everybody is anyone who cares in the slightest [Not my mum in any way. She doesn’t give a rats]

I am not bashing people having an opinion. I really appreciate and am thankful for the freedoms we have to challenge scientific theory and also that everyone is included in discussions on every topic. What i would like is for people to stop hassling me! I have no answers for you. I am working on things. One of many people working on things. Not all of us have finished yet!

To be in the public arena these days a scientist has to be like a politician. You have to talk well, look the part and have a glib (but intelligent and slightly condescending) answer always at hand. I have met a lot of people like this. I am always slightly jealous and in awe. I have not got the skill at all. I am too plain talkin’ and inclined to call someone a “moron” as my closing argument. Plus i like to change what i think of as “answers” as the available data changes. I don’t want to get locked into any solution too soon. I like being able to change my opinion as new data becomes available.

This comes up for the simple reason that I was reading an article about climate change. The article was fine. Nothing terribly new or interesting, really. It was the comments left by other people that were intriguing. How everyone has an opinion (and they all sound a bit like those people who write letters to the editor in the paper). It always degenerates into “everyone knows” and lots of “the fact is that”. After that comes the name calling...nasty names too.

[Does anyone else get frustrated journalists do not have to supply a bibliography? I only complain because i have to (all the time) and it is really difficult. It is especially annoying when some knob-end asks my for “facts and figures” when i am at a cafe, enjoying some down time.....like i memorise that stuff or something! OK. I know a guy or two who actually DO memorise this stuff...have a handy reference or two about their person at all times]

Let me say this. The climate is always changing. It is what it does. I find it fascinating. To be fare the list of things i find fascinating is quite extensive. I one day hope to learn a little about everything on that list

I also try to stay away from people who want to “have an argument” rather than discuss. I like to discuss. Always fun at exam time. Always had trouble knowing when to stop though.
Sometimes i wonder if some of those journalists are like a friend of mine who we shall call “M”. He use to create online personalities so he could have arguments with himself in internet chat rooms. The ultimate aim was to set up massive flame wars and see how many people he could recruit to each side. Well, a man has got to have a hobby. You should see what he can do with a good climate change discussion *grin*

ANYWAY this is an excellent article about current sea ice trends (from my old department). The scientist mentioned is Dr Ian Allison who is the best of men. He was the voyager leader when when i went to Antarctica too. He is awesome.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25348657-401,00.html

passive microwave data can be used to overlay onto (say) avhrr data to get approximate ice edge and some extra information on concentraion. the avhhr is centered around the dibble ice tongue. I LOVE ice tongues - they say so much.

I once met a man who didn't read

If you don't like to read books (without pictures or drawings of any kind) then please do not be offended by the following blog. I appreciate that not everyone likes to spend their free time reading. But i do. This is my blog. My stories.

so on we go....

I once met a guy who asked me why i bothered to waste my time by reading. To say i was lost for words is the understatement. I love to read. I read all the time. I ALWAYS carry a book in my handbag. I will read in queues, at the doctors, lunch time. I even took a book to a wedding once (in my defense let me just say that i just knew how the night was going to go so wanted to be prepared. i was).

What was especially staggering was the exchange between me and said man occured on a long, long ocean voyage. I thought this was precisely the right time and place to be reading. Particularly those long boring books which you can get distracted from easily but read because they are good for you. I probably had, like, a dozen books.

Now this man was intelligent, successful and rich (not to mention more than a little to my liking). That is why i didn't immediately shout him down for casting aspersions upon my books and my habit of reading them willy-nilly! It did make me think about why i read and what i read.

In read for entertainment and/or information. I don't learn terribly well from auditory methods. Nearly everything i learnt i have taught myself. From reading and then application. Call it a disability if you will. Luckily i DO learn from practical experience although from the number of burn marks on my hands, and my age, not all lessons sink in.

[It is also why i don't drive. seriously. i forget that i am the one driving the car or how it works HALF WAY through a journey. Distressing for all concerned *grin*]

I keep pile of books by my bed. The current pile is a mixture:

• I know you got soul, clarkson
• Cover her face, P.D. James
• The Book of Animal Ignorance, Mitchinson & Lloyd
• Edison's Eve, Gaby Wood
• The Raphael Trial, Joanna Pitman
• Almost Perfect (torchwood),James Goss
• psych (novel from TV), william Rabkin
• The Secret Life of words, Henry Hitchings

I can type the titles 'cause i am sitting on my bed to do this blog. To be fair the last entry is the book i read when i really need to get to sleep. I have wide reaching and eclectic tastes. I read fast and re-read at least twice before a book stays in my library of treasured books.

One thing i am not doing, i think, is wasting my time.

Maybe this is why i am still single. Less reading and more boyfriend charming. Screw that. I like to read. Take me as i am (or not)

parting note:

i really wish books weren't so expensive in Australia. I wont say anymore cause i really do not understand the argument for publishing rights at all. The thing is that you usually have to buy the book to find out if you like it (it is not like they offer your money back if your not satisfied!). I know that the authors deserve the money (trust me with my own writing less than stellar i have utter admiration for writers) and without them i would be totally bereft.

and i wish the man had been a reader. he was my dream man otherwise :)

About Katie (and football)

This blog is in honour of the football (AFL) grand final this weekend.

The final is between Geelong and St Kilda. I had to look that up. Twice. Because seriously, i have less than zero interest in sports. However my dad use to play and so i know stuff about the game. Even though i don’t want to. Surprisingly that knowledge comes from my mum, who as far as i know has never played a game in her life. Odd how some women can be fanatical about a game they have never played. My dad can take it or leave it. Like my mum, Katie, Claire...i KNOW about you and Richmond Football club Claire.

Sorry. Got distracted. This story is about Katie. She goes for Geelong.

Last weekend i went shopping for my mother’s birthday. She was turning 60 and i had to find a very nice present indeed. As exciting as tales of me shopping might be this is not what this blog is about. Oh no. It is about Katie. Katie is my sisters’ mother-in-law. She is a little bit mad i think. However I like her and anyway we are all going to be like that when we get old. Well, i will be. This story is about Katie. Who goes for Geelong.

So. We took her shopping with us. She wanted to buy some MORE football decorations. Seriously. One of her grandchildren had hidden her football themed Christmas decorations and lights. It is September. Not even remotely Christmas decorating time. For all none AFL supporters there is a special day every September known as “the one day in September”. The date varies. However it is clearly NOT Christmas time. Katie really, really likes her football. Along with flags, bunting, cushions, posters and streamers she wanted to put up her Christmas decorations. This is because her husband won’t let her put them up at Christmas. Not because it is tacky and a little creepy but because he supports another team.

I bring this up because i think there are a lot of people like Katie. Who own all sorts of paraphernalia to support their team and who also like to dress up. She was talking of getting her fingernails painted blue and white. My sister pointed out that she would probably paint her face if she could find someone to do it for her.

The question i want answered is HOW is this different from say, oh i don’t know, a startrek fan. One who might like a few DVDs and bits and bobs and also likes to dress up? How? Not very much at all me thinks. Yet as far as i can tell it is still socially unacceptable to decorate your house or yourself after your favourite tv show. It would be really hard for me as i don’t have a favourite tv show (or film). Really, i think there is very little difference.

One day i might write a movie or novel about this. No i won’t. We all know i won’t but someone should. To make those football people realise that they are not different from sci-fi fans at all. And please don’t give me crap about it being “sports” and “outside”. It is not like Katie ever played football (she is like 70 or something so is not likely to play now).

Anyway in the end she bought a flag (but complained because the stick part wasn‘t long enough) and a poster. I did not look at the poster.

BTW i got a nice book and porcelain for my mum. Not spectacular but it is always tricky for the woman who has everything. Especially as what she most wants is for my dad to finish her unsuit bathroom. No one can help with that.

www.afl.com.au

Not much of an animal person

I am really not an animal person. I know i have a cat but we really just occupy a similar time and space. I give her food and cuddles...she sheds cat hair all over my bed. Had a gold fish once. It died. I tell you this for dramatic purposes.

As a younger university student I think I was probably one of those people who made fun of “animal studiers”. Trust me there were a lot worse names for the people in offices next to ours that did not study maths/physics/rocks/weather and such. I know that they were nice people just sometimes the science seemed a little flaky to us. But we were young. Easily led. Opinionated for no good reason. Forgive us.

All that changed for me when i worked on a little paper about penguin colonies for my supervisor. I know. For most people it would have been when they saw real, live emperor penguins for the first time. Or a whale. But we have all known for quite some time that i am on a trailing edge of the “normal” spectrum.

He was doing some research related to an Emperor Penguin colony and he asked me to do some supporting work with some satellite images. The task itself wasn’t that complex or even interesting. It just allowed for the distance to the colony from open water to be determined. Simply put it allowed for one to be able to tell how far penguins with full tummies had to waddle back to hungry baby penguins.

Anyway one particular year the fast ice did not break up early enough and the returning birds had too far to go to get back to the colony. The babies died. This didn’t hit me until a long time after i had begun working on this project. The other people knew ‘cause that is what they wanted to find out about. Why so many chicks died. Being a programmer/researcher working with remote data you quite often don’t really think about what you are doing. About what is going on in “real time”.

The type of results which we found at like this sample chart (8 years). You can clearly see that the breeding success decressed the further the colony was to open water.

Wy i bring this up is because there was some internet chatter about more sea ice around the Antarctic. Trust me when i say that it is very difficult to measure such things. You need a big picture approach, great data and some big ones to make such statements. Always brings trouble to your door.

My point is that everything about this type of research has “complex system” written all over it. It is very difficult to predict from trending. I wouldn’t ever try. I work on a tiny, tiny part of the climate system and i am often unsure about what i think i know. Yet somehow everyone i meet, with no training at all, can tell me what is happening. Not that i begrudge them their opinion. I often wish i were so certain about things.

Here is a picture of emperor penguins and not me. I wanted you to appreciate just what great big birds these things are. I mean HUGE. It is quite freaky and really made me think about a time on this planet when a lot of our animals were big. I mean really big. No. Not dinosaurs. Just regular animals. Who were freakishly big.

Why i don’t want a new cell phone

I got some junk mail the other day with all the new phones in it. I so loved looking at them. They were all pretty and could do all sorts of amazing things. I get so dazzled by all the gorgeousness. Time to buy a new phone. Surely it can’t be very long now until mine stops working. Or, more likely, i drop it while trying to do too many things at the same time.

But i like my current phone. Sure it is old. But i like it. This is not a case of not liking change. I don’t care what you say. It isn’t. I get that with plenty of other things but trust me i like new tech. I think it is all kinds of awesome. I am always drooling over other people’s phone.

But i like this phone. Do you know why i like it so much? Well, some of you who know me quite well would only have to think about what my phone looks like and what i like and just guess the answer. For everyone lat me start by saying that it is NOT because it is useful, of good quality or even particularly pretty. It is with some sadness that i say it is because it flips. Like a tri-corder. On StarTrek. See. See. I knew you wouldn’t understand.

Well. I am not going to buy a new phone. I really don’t care what people think about me when they see me with it. That is why i bought a Sony Walkman (mp3 player) as opposed to an i-pod. It suited my needs more. Also, apparently, is less likely to break. I guess i will always be the unfashionable one. Oh well. Tell me something i don’t know.

BTW the garbo man just drove all the way down my street in reverse. I like his style. One of the reasons (on a long list) why i don’t drive. Better get back to writing and stop with this internet stuff (and looking out the window).

Spot the difference

I have been working for absolutely AGES to do something that on the surface of it seems really easy (and perhaps a little pointless). Look closely at the following two images:

This is an AVHRR image (thermal/infrared) from 1999 (my test year...which just means it is the data i processed first!) The red line is the coastline (land at north). This is the Mertz polynya area (the same area as the false colour SAR/AVHRR shown previously.

Have you spotted the difference yet? I will give you a clue. It is the cloud. OK to be more precise it is the removal from the image of a particular type of cloud - a little bit of cloud over an open water area.

It is important because this little bit of cloud is over a polynya. It was incredibly complicated to remove it. First i had to identify the cloud and then decide if it was cloud over open water (and thin ice) and also if it was a designated polynya area. I am not absolutely sure yet whether it will pay off in the long run to have spent so much time doing it. What it does mean is that for a little extra processing time i can get a cloud mask with the added advantage of a more precise open water definition. Automatically. When you have thousands and thousands of images automatically (and accurately of course) is how you want things to go down.

I have sent a lot of time testing and refining (currently) 18 cloud identification algorithms BEFORE deciding that i didn’t really care that much! I was actually only interested in the open water areas and identifying any cloud over that open water. Took a lot of effort to find out what i didn’t need to know.


Who knew?

Well me. Now.

I learnt so much especially about things i didn’t know i needed to know about. Often people doing research forget that the failures (or seemingly lost research threads) can teach you a lot and be vitally important in order to come close to finding out “truth” or “an understanding”. I learnt a lot about the AVHRR instrument, what it records/measures and about clouds and cloud behaviour in Polar Regions.

if your very lucky next blog may introduce the joys of noise.

Why i am the worst fan. Ever.

As break from all the clouds and coding here is a little blog entry:

My sister thinks that i am the worst fan. Ever. I have no interest in autographs or merchandise. OK i do own a star wars mouse pad. But who doesn’t? Oh. And i have a star trek voyager mug (never used...in a box somewhere.....). But it is true. I have no interest in meeting famous people. My worst nightmare is having some actor i love from the tele right in front of me. I would try to vacate the vicinity ASAP. Let me tell you a simple little story:

My favourite author, Terry Pratchett, once visited the city i was visiting myself and i happened to be passing the bookstore (i like totally didn’t know). I got excited. I could have a signed copy of one of his books! I went into the shop and bought the book. Then i looked over at the line and could see him sitting there (it was the hat that gave him away). I froze. The girl at the counter was staring at me. “I just can’t do it”. I said. She was the nicest lady “It’s ok. Just leave it here and i will get it signed for you”.

That is the closest i have ever got to having something signed. I later gave the book to my sister. I just couldn’t keep it. It freaked me out. I never want to meet any actor or writer that i am a fan of for three simple reasons:

1. I don’t want them to be corrupted from that place of fantasy they live in (i can tell fact from fiction; i like them separate)
2. I really don’t have anything to day above “i love your show/book...whatever”
3. I also don’t want them to think that i am a dick (if you know me you might be surprised that i care what complete strangers think of me)

I have met legends from my research field and it is always a little creepy. You have an idea what type of person they should be. But they are just people. I once presented a little paper at a conference and a few hours before those nice chap came up to me. He started to tell me how much he liked the paper. I asked him how he knew about it ( i had yet to present it). Turns out he reviewed it before it was accepted. We had this lovely talk for maybe 20 minutes about it. He was a really nice guy. He then left. THEN my supervisor came over a bit nervous like and asked what we talked about. Turns out he was ultra respected and famous. It was only daft me who had never been to a conference before who didn’t know who he was. Thank God.

That is why i am quite glad i live at the edge of the world. Almost at rim fall. I will finish with saying that thank god i am not talented in any way that would make me famous. I just wouldn’t be able to cope with that i think.

I wonder how people do it. Must just have a very different psychological make up to me is all.

a little problem i am working on

Today i would like to talk about a little problem i have that most people don't see as a problem...but i sure do. I will start by pointing out the pretty picture to the left. It is a little study area i have designated B5. This is B for Buchanan Bay and 5 for a reason that no doubt made perfect sense years ago but somehow i never really wrote down why. This is is a "sample area" of the East Antarctic land mass that i like to use for testing different algorithms for how well they do a particular job and for how much processing time/power gets use up.

Trust me the bigger the data set the more inclined you are to worry about program efficiency! Plus, you are less likely to piss off other computer users (especially when your using something as valuable as a super computer run by some one else...and don't pay for it...but they do.....OLD story)

At the beginning of my research i use to pick a couple of images and use them for all my testing but the trouble was that i never had enough variability in the images i used and later on all sorts of unforeseen stuff would happen and takes AGES to sort out...and was quite dull. If you consider what i do you can only imagine how dull YOU would find it.


One of the problems i grapple with is that i want the computer to do all the analysis of an area. The thing is i want it to be as close as possible the same area each time. The following image shows the different types of problems you can encounter. The red line is a coastline. The trick is to look at how closely and in what way the image deviates.





What i now want to do is take this little sample of all my images and work on percentage of good data to bad data....with a somewhat less clearly defined "bad data" than one might think. I will do the same for another, more (i was going to say northerly.....but that only works for MY warped version of north) rather a less longitudinal area. I will then get some sort of pattern to when bad data is likely to crop up....


The thing is that it is to do with the satellite viewing angle, problems with various algorithms and sometime instrument problems. There was also the famous 1994 problem when a winter's worth of data was not collected because no at the station (Casey) realised that the tape machine was not writing data to the tapes. Yes. They sent back an entire season of BLANK tapes. Yes. They changed the tapes over every 12 hours for months...for nothing. We all had a good laugh at that one. Oh yes.


It is important when your using any data for your research that you understand the exact nature of that data. You should never except what other people write or say about it. Find out for yourself.


Now, depending on how well this little blog goes done (and how i feel on the day) you will get a blog about a Wiener Filter (which took longer to get working that i care to admit) or another story about me (or my family, or TV or....well, you get the idea).

One of those things about childhood

The other day my mother was talking to my sister about TV and children (or more precisely that her children watch too much TV. I really dislike having parents tell other parents how best to bring up children (which are not their own). Gets on my pip. REALLY gets on my sister’s pip even though you think she would be use to it by now. I was VERY surprised to hear my mum say:

“that is why I never let you children watch TV until you were 15 years old”

I was shocked. That is not the way I remember it. I k now I watched a lot of children’s TV! I remember it all. It started me really thing about it and eventually I had to talk to her about it. Turns out that she really only let me watch one hour of TV a night with the family deciding what we were going to watch (i.e. my dad). I just don’t remember it that way. I mean I just assume I watched a lot of TV like other kids! I never felt that I was different from other kids or felt left out or anything.

Turns out it was TV things like “Dr who” and “The Goodies”. Plus the news and any documentary going. I think this explains a lot about me (seriously. I am weird sometimes). Any children’s programming is from when I was about 15 and watching TV programs while getting myself ready for high school/college (we also use to make bowls of icing to eat ‘cause she wouldn’t let us have lollies.....but that is an entirely different story).

Seriously this has really upset me no end. The things you think about your own life turning out to be different than you remember and all. Turns out I know I got my first TV (just for myself) when I turned 21. I just never thought to buy myself one before that.

Do you know why my mother did it? She thought it would give my sister and I a good start in life. Now, I know I was a difficult child. I probably would have put myself in front of the TV (just to get a break from the relentless-ness that was me). I really don’t think I noticed not having TV as a child my mother thinks I watch too much TV now....but mothers, what do they know? If I didn’t watch so much TV now she thinks I might have finished my PhD ....damn.....don’t you hate it when your mother might be right?

The thing is that she use to go on and on about us ignoring her when we were reading. That we use to cost her a fortune in book money. Now I know she really didn’t mean it that way. She was really having a laugh at her own expense because she made us that way!
I really wonder what else I think (or think that I remember) about my life that are true/untrue or some where in between.

I really wish she had been into word games like my oldest friend Claire’s mum. And if you read this Claire I meant friend for the longest number or years rather than your old. Sorry about that wording there. I know that I could just delete it and not type this explanation but if you can’t call your oldest friend old who can you? *grin*