Author and Novelist
1.0 Introduction That the Earth has been warming steadily for the past few centuries and intermittently for over 10,000 years is incontrovertible fact. However, there have been a number of asser-tions about global warming that are half-truths or outright falsehoods. This blog will focus on my problems with the current conventional wisdom about global warming. [ ] The post Global Warming: Only…
Updated 9/21/17 for typos and the NOAA reanalysis of the temperature plateau. Fundamental Climate Processes To understand how the Greens have fallen down the rabbit hole, I need to run through a quick description of basic Earth processes as they relate to climate. The Greens tend to be highly selective in choosing the processes they [ ] The post Fundamental Processes appeared first on H. S. Lahman…
updated 9/21/17: typos and eliminated some redundancy to other posts. Geologic History of the Earth with Respect to Climate The geological history of the Earth places the Greens in a very unflattering perspective. That history is full of facts that the Greens do not want to hear about. Before going into the details, I would [ ] The post Geologic History appeared first on H. S. Lahman .
The Keystroke Fetish. There is a fundamental assumption that pervades the software industry today: Productivity is directly improved by reducing developer keystrokes. Clearly the paradigm shift from Assembly language to 3GLs in the early ‘60s reduced keystrokes by orders of magnitude and also resulted in a major improvement in productivity. In addition, the notion that [ ] The post The Keystroke…
With the growth of the Internet that started in the mid-‘80s came an attendant growth in networking. That introduced a rapidly increasing need for applications to share data and interact with one another across platforms. The problem was that the hardware vendors could not standardize on very basic things like the way data is represented [ ] The post The Demon ASCII appeared first on H. S. Lahman…
The OO paradigm held great promise in the ‘80s because it provided a much more direct link between the customer space and the computing space due to problem space abstraction. And, in fact, it has substantially improved the maintainability of software. I once participated in a large project to evaluate OO techniques, where we collected [ ] The post OO Development Problems appeared first on H. S.…
Today every vendor of an infrastructure brands it as “object-oriented”. In fact, the vast majority of infrastructures are – if one is in a very charitable mood – just object-based. If one is in a less than charitable mood, they are just function libraries where closely related functions have been bundled into “objects”. Worse, many [ ] The post OO Infrastructures appeared first on H. S. Lahman .
First, let me say that the Agile processes institutionalized a number of excellent ideas in software development – pair programming for reviewing the product, incremental development to properly manage and estimate projects, integrating testing with development, forcing the customer to be very specific about requirements, and refactoring 3GL code to make it more maintainable, to [ ] The post…
One cannot talk about the problems of the software industry without talking about software education. Years ago I was working on a process improvement activity. The goal was to improve our interviewing techniques for June Grads. We did a typical matrix of qualities we wanted versus interview techniques. Part of the exercise was to rank [ ] The post Software Education appeared first on H. S. Lahman…
I was born on the March 20, 1938, which is the first day of Spring. Some say that childhood makes the man. I would like to think that’s a crock because I was an odious child. In fact, I can recall wishing I could grow up so I wouldn’t be so obnoxious. The fact that [ ] The post Ages 6-8 appeared first on H. S. Lahman .
Green Economics I. In their zeal to curtail CO2 emissions, the Greens maintain a number of economic positions. To say that the Greens are economically challenged is probably one of the great understatements of the 20th century. There is an aphorism that the A students in Economics go to investment banking houses; the B students [ ] The post Green Economics appeared first on H. S. Lahman .
Updated 9/21/17: minor cleanup Global Warming is All Man s Fault for burning hydrocarbons to Produce Energy This is a fundamental tenet of the Green Party Line. The basic idea is that Man has been accelerating the introduction of CO2 into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Man now contributes more than the [ ] The post It s all Man s Fault appeared first on H. S. Lahman .
Updated 9/21/17: eliminated some redundancy with prior posts. Green tactics I. The Greens employ a bunch of scare tactics to make their points, which I regard as scientific charlatanism. One of their most popular ploys is misdirection. They present data in ways that imply particular conclusions that are not justified by the data. One of [ ] The post Green Tactics appeared first on H. S. Lahman .
My Idiot Uncle (age 9). I spent some time living with my uncle near Orlando, FL. He had a place on one of four sand-bottom lakes in the area, which I believe was later preempted by Disney World. Only two homes on the lake had cleared land. Each day my uncle would shoot a couple [ ] The post Age 9 appeared first on H. S. Lahman .
I have the distinction of being the first person ever drafted out of MIT’s graduate school. I spent my two fun-filled years at Paradise in the Pines Ft. Bragg, NC, home to the XVIIIth Airborne Corps, the 82nd Airborne Division, and Special Forces. Back then the 82nd had an unblemished record they had [ ] The post Army Life appeared first on H. S. Lahman .
After the Army, I was out of money and decided to try working for a living. I was hired by Geoscience, an MIT spinoff that specialized in electrical measurements. Geologists and geophysicists are crazy. For example, Only geologists regard a rainy day as good working weather because it keeps the mosquitoes and deer flies off. [ ] The post Touring the World as a Geophysicist appeared first on H. S.…
What’s Wrong with This Picture? (age 17) We were living in New York City at the time and I needed to apply to college. I had won a Regents scholarship that was good only in NY state, so I applied to Manhattan College and Cornell. Cornell did not reply to my application and Manhattan, which [ ] The post The College Years appeared first on H. S. Lahman .
My father insisted on coming with me to register at MIT. As we drove in from Logan Airport along Storrow Drive, my father asked the taxi driver, “What are all those factories across the river?” The taxi driver replied, “That’s MIT.” MIT has what might be charitably described as an eclectic utilitarian architecture. The tallest [ ] The post Off on the Right Foot appeared first on H. S. Lahman .
MIT was an eye-opener, academically. You showed up as a hot shot Salutorian from your high school and got a rude awakening when you found that all your classmates were Valedictorians and you are graded on a curve. It can be a tough place if you take it seriously. P1, P2, and I decided [ ] The post Academia appeared first on H. S. Lahman .
First term junior year, I was taking Advanced Calculus for Engineers. The only classes I attended were the three quizzes. Since I hadn’t picked up the quizzes, I wasn’t sure where I stood. So I went to one class and after the ending bell I approached the Prof and the conversation went “Sir, I haven’t [ ] The post Quizmanship appeared first on H. S. Lahman .