Truth is its own credential and beauty is its sword.

In addition to a blank Sun, we currently have a very blank Magnetogram.
So much for tracking spots dead or alive under the radar.
Good grief. What’s next, spotless Magnetogram graphs?

Truth is its own credential and beauty is its sword.

Someone call for a nit harvester? ;-)

You could as well calculate the ‘error margin’ of the standard SIDC yearly number by dividing by the square root of 365.

Would that be sidereal, tropical, equinox or solar year [-1] ? I presume equinox (366 -1 = 365). And what happened to the fractional part of 36x.2xxx….

So many nits, so little time ;-)

At the bottom of:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/calendar/

is an interesting example of what folks using MS Excel must put up with due to untidy calendaring…

The better the programmer, the more compact the code.

(Or, more elaborated: A clear mind leaves out the fluff and junk that a muddled mind leaves strewn about in bad code; cutting straight to the core of the solution.)

The GIStemp code, in contrast, is about 75%+ “fluff” and nonsense.

As an extreme counter example to GIStemp, a programmer friend once was writing ‘diagnostic microcode’. This runs at a level of the machine most folks don’t even know exists. He needed to test the 64 CPU hardware registers (the code is only run when the hardware is thought defective) so every resource you use is another chance to fail (due to using and depending on the ‘failed hardware’ you are looking for…).

He wrote a bit of code that sets the “register increment counter” to either one at the “top” or negative one at the “bottom”. If you enter from the “top” the code increments to the “bottom”, turns around and decrements back to the “top” and is done. If you enter from the bottom, it counts upward to the top, turns around and increments to the bottom and is done.

The net result was 32 lines of code rather than 64, and 1/2 the odds of hitting the bad hardware (registers) on first code loading. Nice side effect was that you could run the code forward or backward with the same outcome and could choose which registers to start with (top or bottom) by entry point.

It took more text to describe here than the length of the code. Now that’s elegance!

Leif Svalgaard (21:17:26) :

supplemented by a paper that we’ve discussed before. I retract my crack about solipsism.

The technique rescales the SS cycles(disposing of differences in length and Rmax) and uses a reconstruction of geomagnetic activity to establish the heliomagnetic field strengths that must have induced this activity. This is possible because the correlation is ‘strong’ in data available since 1959.

Two, also regurgitated, thoughts: Hathaway’s original 24 prediction of Rmax 145 relied on geomagnetic storm activity following 23 Rmax of strong correlation.
The more recent post “When you can’t believe the model” centers on the failure of history to repeat itself as the source of failure in statistics-based forecasting.

I’m trying to find a dime’s worth of difference between “science” defined by scientists (versus, e.g., philosophers of science) and mere SWAG pattern matching and finding myself a nickel shy.

http://users.beagle.com.au/geoffsharp/carsten.jpg

SC13 is on a completely different path as can be seen with some imagination.

http://users.beagle.com.au/geoffsharp/carsten1906.jpg

This also has an impact on the torsional oscillations on the Sun as seen by Doppler imaging. Notice the “yellow flows” are much longer in SC23.

http://users.beagle.com.au/geoffsharp/doppler.jpg

I am betting on SC4 to be the closest to SC23 in recent times.

So the similarity exists because the scientist thinks it so, via an incommunicable solipsism.

Apart from Rmax, sun spot numerology, flaring has, for example, tended to peak on the rising or falling cycles not the ‘peak’ cycle, and with flaring UV bursts up to twice the background level.
As we have said earlier: “Average space weather might be ‘‘milder’’ with decreased solar activity, but the extreme events that dominate technological effects are not expected to disappear. In fact, they may become more common. Two of the eight strongest storms in the last
150 years occurred during solar cycle 14 (Rmax = 64) [Cliver and Svalgaard, 2004], while three of the five largest 30 MeV solar energetic proton events since 1859 [McCracken et al., 2001] occurred during cycle 13 (Rmax = 88).

Waxing on at length about the ‘facts’ doesn’t hide this paucity of synthesis.
Then why do you wax on then. Facts beats poor speculation every time.

Neither rocket science nor numerology. The simple recognition that cycles in sequence tend to rise or fall with respect to their predecessor, and that they occur like this in sets of four or five generally, however one groups them–trough to trough or peak to peak.

Apart from Rmax, sun spot numerology, flaring has, for example, tended to peak on the rising or falling cycles not the ‘peak’ cycle, and with flaring UV bursts up to twice the background level.

Cycle 23 sits on the falling margin of a symmetric grouping, cycle 13 is in a non-similar position however one selects its group. This may mean nothing, but we are at issue, simply comparing patterns of effects where the cause is implicitly not understood.

Waxing on at length about the ‘facts’ doesn’t hide this paucity of synthesis.

My pleasure Ron….I can smell something in this rotation stuff :)

Yes…I forgot about the poles need to reverse in polarity, not the flow. By looking at the butterfly pattern it also shows the step function I was proposing is very unlikely. But the overlay I did still makes me think the slower rotating area’s might induce sunspot activity. I also wonder if there is a lag between the sunspot at the surface and the differential flow beneath ( I think the Doppler measuring is 1000K from the surface)…if so, if I am thinking correctly, that might align the slower moving flows even more with the sunspots?