Not that much happening today either. Just got back to the house -- worked until 8:00PM and went out for a few Margaritas after. DaveCave(tm) and then bed. Two good links: A 1955 article at The Economist synopsizing the work of C. Northcote Parkinson and specifically, Parkinson's Law as it applies to Government Bodies. First, Parkinson's Law:
From The Economist:
Parkinson's Law
IT is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and despatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.
Granted that work (and especially paper work) is thus elastic in its demands on time, it is manifest that there need be little or no relationship between the work to be done and the size of the staff to which it may be assigned. Before the discovery of a new scientific law - herewith presented to the public for the first time, and to be called Parkinson's Law* - there has, however, been insufficient recognition of the implications of this fact in the field of public administration. Politicians and taxpayers have assumed (with occasional phases of doubt) that a rising total in the number of civil servants must reflect a growing volume of work to be done. Cynics, in questioning this belief, have imagined that the multiplication of officials must have left some of them idle or all of them able to work for shorter hours. But this is a matter in which faith and doubt seem equally misplaced. The fact is that the number of the officials and the quantity of the work to be done are not related to each other at all. The rise in the total of those employed is governed by Parkinson's Law, and would be much the same whether the volume of the work were to increase, diminish or even disappear. The importance of Parkinson's Law lies in the fact that it is a law of growth based upon an analysis of the factors by which that growth is controlled.
The validity of this recently discovered law must rest mainly on statistical proofs, which will follow. Of more interest to the general reader is the explanation of the factors that underlie the general tendency to which this law gives definition. Omitting technicalities (which are numerous) we may distinguish, at the outset, two motive forces. They can be represented for the present purpose by two almost axiomatic statements, thus:Factor I. - An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals; and
Factor II. - Officials make work for each other.
A wonderful read written back when Management was an appreciated art-form and not something practiced by lawyers on an off day...
The other link is this -- we, the general public, are trying to understand the science of climate as it relates to the variations of temperature on this planet. A lot of people were banging the "anthropogenic Global Warming" drum, they are now banging the "Climate Change" drum and the drum circle for "Man-made Atmospheric Change" is gaining traction.
What is staggering is the lack of historical knowledge about prior climate changes and the successes and failures of civilizations based on these shifts.
Greenland was named Greenland for a specific reason while Iceland is now nice and temperate. Everyone is familiar with the El Niño/La Niña events (three to eight year cycle), a bunch of people know about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (20-30 year cycle), I just found out about Bond events today (otherwise known as Dansgaard-Oeschger). When we consider that the current state of the art climate models are not able to reproduce what we have experienced in the last 200 years when fed the data; how in everything that is Holy can these mokes claim legitimacy to their dire predictions of warming when everything points to a gradual cooling -- the Eady Minimum.
Science needs to drive politics, not the other way around.
Al Gore has made a butt-load of money in the last ten years from preaching (he bailed out of Seminary School) about Inconvenient Truths.
Turns out they were his own fabrications...
