Tag: physics

August 25, 2012 0

Saturday Nights at Eli’s

By News Desk

Eli Rabett Eli Rabett Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional.

August 22, 2012 0

Eli’s Three Laws or Hansen Simply Explained

By News Desk

Eli’s Three Laws or Hansen Simply Explained There is an interesting to and fro over at Real Climate about the recent Hansen, Ruedy and Sato paper on an increase in climate extremes.  Eli had a go at the preprint.  Tamino has entered a demurral, which Eli suspects has an answer in what is below.  Now some, not Eli to be sure, think the Rabett is on occasion cryptic.  So be it, but in this case he has not quite worked through all the implications and it is better to be thought mysterious than foolish.  Still the Bunny is somewhat skilled in boiling things down, and at RC pointed out that there are three simple points in the Hansen paper First if there is an increasing/decreasing linear trend on a noisy series, the probability of reaching new maxima or minima increases with time Second, if you put more energy into a system variability increases. Third , if you put more energy into a system variability increases asymmetrically towards the direction favored by higher energy   Hank added a codicil Fourth, if you keep going in the direction you’re headed, you’ll get there.  The first point has been a standard here at RR and also in various comments about the web in the recent discussions about why there are more temperature maxima than minima.  The second is related to the idea that if the parametric landscape affecting anything is not smooth, excursions from a stable state require additional energy to overcome "attractions".

August 18, 2012 0

The Girl from Nanaimo

By News Desk

Eli Rabett Eli Rabett Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional

August 14, 2012 0

The Guillotine Drops

By News Desk

The Guillotine Drops A few weeks ago, before Joe Paterno’s statue was removed, Eli wrote in a post entitled Death Penalty Eli, as some have noted, is an ancient professor, an academic if you will.  He has followed the collapse of governance at Penn State with the interest of a bunny watching a disaster unveiled, and recently saw much back and forth about the NCAA (the folks who profit from and do the pompous on intercollegiate athletics in the US) imposing the death penalty on football at PSU.

August 9, 2012 0

Toujours Gai

By News Desk

Rabett Run has today’s SSMIS map from Uni Bremen and is now taking bets that before the end of summer there will be no ice in the Arctic below 90N 80N.  A few more days of the cyclone and the Bunny may have to offer odds.  Neven as usual has the details