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

I wonder if the much vaulted American sheeple are not as stupid as AGW thinks they are. It’s true they may not be the sharpest tool in the shed or the brightest penny in the roll, however, in the land of constant scams, slight of hand, and if I have to explain it to you, you wouldn’t understand it, most Americans have a basic understanding of science. The only thing constant about AGW is the new explanations of the weather we are seeing. “It’s warmer, that’s why there is more snow”. Counterintuitive? I can tell you nobody believes that. That one statement has done more to discredit AGW than all the blogs and posts put up here. If nobody asked on a survey, this issue would be non existent, but since they do, it ranks last among American concerns.
So if they put up a cartoon about us, good. We are alive and well. And if they happen to read something on one of this sites, all the better. Whatever they publish can’t be any worse than the thin ideas from the IPCC. What people see is last year a brutally cold winter in the US, they don’t see 20 ft of water covering Manhattan, they don’t see either pole melting, they do see the Great Lakes frozen over. When you been putting out alarmist material for 20 years and weather/climate is pretty much the same, well, yawn, I’m not really interested. I wouldn’t be here either except for the political agenda the IPCC has going, and that they are just plain wrong. (and I think we are headed to a LIA or at least a cool down with little or no planning) The US will go to this UN party to cut our own throats. We can sign a treaty (or an accord) with minor players that have nothing to loose and everything to gain. Meanwhile, every other political actor is looking for a way to get off the inconvenient truth. Selling Ice Cream in July is a wonderful idea to promote global warming, except it was 50 F. Yep, I sure feel like eating ice when it’s 50 F out, sounds like fun! (in reference to the ice cream stand they put up here in Denver trying to close coal plants)

I can’t say I understand this post. The previous versions were weird, and now it says this has been “figured out” quoting:

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

But that doesn’t tell us what the app actually does. Another update says:

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.

But that’s not what I see in the Javascript. There is no singular “fact” proffered by the Javascript. There is a variable named facts which is used for display purposes. As you can guess, it being plural means there are multiple facts. The code related to it is:
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;
}
The plus sign is used to concatenate characters. That means the four variables (t, n, i and a) in the array s are combined and placed into the variable facts. The first two are separated only by a single space. My presumption is t stands for title (like Mr. or Dr.) and n stands for name. A line break is then added, after which variable i is appended. Another line break is added then the Expertise entry is appended.
Each person does not offer a “fact.” The “facts” appears to be information about each person.
I was asked about this in e-mail a couple days ago. I looked into it, and based on my examination of the page and code, I said:

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).