The 'Skeptical Science' kidz are up to no good again

Ah those kidz, what are they up to now? (Update: It has been figured out, see below) The image you see is from their “new” web page  [www.skepticalscience.com/nsh/?] which is some sort of flash javascript program with a bunch of silhouettes of people that can be rotated and moved in a pseudo-3D way. All of the silhouettes are greyed out now, but one can rest assured they be filled in with cartoonish caricatures once the countdown clock on the lower right reaches zero.

(h/t from Kadaka K.D. Knoebel)

My guess? John Cook has likely put his failed cartooning talents back to work again. Given the juvenile fascination former cartoonist turned amateur psychologist and numbers bookie for the 97% John Cook has with smearing climate skeptics, this may reveal itself as some sort of interactive “name and shame” application for the top 100 climate skeptics worldwide.

I hope it does, because if so, and if it turns out to be as libelous as I think it will be, it will give a whole bunch of people a reason to sue the pants off that whole team of creepy playtime Nazi cross dressers. Bring it.

Of course it could also be a rah-rah application, where each of the silhouettes is a “real climate scientist”, and the popup text message is all about how they “feel” about climate change…like these clowns.

Whatever it is, it will likely be the caliber of the sort of lowbrow stuff we’ve seen before, like the “designed to be funny but actually horrifying” 10:10 video which blows up children who don’t want to go along with climate change in school.

UPDATE: Commenter Joel O’Bryan has found a hidden logo that gives it away. He writes:

There is a hidden logo in the middle of the field that says:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/nsh/images/q/nsh_logo.png

97 hours of consensus with a link back URL [sks.to/97]

97 hours of consensus? Wow. Just over four days worth of mind numbing claims about a 97% number that has long since been falsified and shown to be little more than a statistical fabrication of Cook and Co. With this episode, Cook’s fixation on that fake 97% number boils down to this:

UPDATE2:

UnFrozenCavemanMD notes:

A scan through the javascript reveals it to represent 100 experts each of whom offers a “fact” followed by a description of that person’s expertise.

UPDATE3: Brandon Shollenberger notes in a comment:

If you look at that page, there’s a fair amount of code written. That includes code for displaying avatars associated with specific IDs taken from a JSON file. Currently, a dummy set being used (represented by the 100 silhouettes you can see). If that’s changed, any avatars could be displayed. My assumption they intend to allow customized avatars to be created and then displayed.

There is also code which indicates the JSON file will include other information about those IDs. When you click on an avatar, that information will be displayed. It’s not entirely clear what information will be shown as this is the code for selecting it:

function getSFacts( s ) {

var facts = “”;

if ( s ) {

if (‘t’ in s) facts = facts + s.t + ” “;

if (‘n’ in s) facts = facts + s.n + “”;

if (‘i’ in s) facts = facts + s.i + “”;

if (‘a’ in s) facts = facts + “Expertise: ” + s.a;

}

return facts;

}

My current guess is the ‘t’ variable stands for title (like Mr. or Dr.) while the ‘n’ variable stands for name. That would explain why there is only a space added between them while there are line breaks added between the other variables. I’m not sure what ‘i’ would stand for, but ‘a’ apparently stands for some measure of expertise.

Anyway, it seems this is going to be used as a virtual hangout. People will be able to create avatars, input information about themselves and then join in. I don’t see anything in the code to indicate users will be able to chat/send each other messages, but that may be added (or I could have missed something).