Why is NASA scolding me for using Microsoft?

So I'm doing some Climate Science research and I come across the CERES monthly global albedo dataset from the Terra satellite, but when I open the link it pops up a message that suggests that I should be using a Marxist / Leninist inspired, non free market, open source browser. What's up with that? It's totally unnecessary, unhelpful, distracting and stupid. This does seem to fall in line with NASAs continued employment of a totally discredited scientists as head of their Climate Change program.

Sorry for the rant, but I don't need these distractions that do nothing to advance the science of earth's climate.

Poe's law?

@Proton2: I bet you don't have any problem with the 1,000s of sites that work only on ie6/7/8! I bet you have no problem with Silverlight sites.

As C said, it should work in IE9, just a bad way of detecting features.

[As a nerd, i'm having a hard time understanding why you have no chrome/firefox/opera installed]

Yeah, because the actual scientists and people who made the website are totally the same people. Because scientists obviously have nothing better to do.

The message about incompatibility was on my Windows Phone. As most know, IE 9 is what is running on the phone, hence why no other browser was available for me.

I'm an app developer and have no need to download and install other browsers for cross compatibility reasons, so I have never, ever used any other browser, except in the early years of the internet before Microsoft had their own browser.

I probably went a little over board on the leftist terminology, but seeing an alarmist forecast of doom on the front page of my newspaper this morning got me into a bad mood.

Now I know many of you Microsoft folks are in the Redmond / Seattle area, and it rains there about as much as it does a little further north in Vancouver. Here is a link to a $700,000 study that says its going to get 25 percent drier here because of global warming, and we should spend our scarce dollars doing something about it. I'm not buying it. A further 1 million dollars is going to be spent promoting this alarmism.

http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Drier+summers+Lower+Mainland+will+require+ways+conserve+water+study/6766316/story.html#ixzz1xa5BlJEg

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I appreciate Charles clear headed and none combative response, and I will post his comment to the forum / website that I originally encountered the link to the NASA site in question.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/12/observations-on-toa-forcing-vs-temperature/

By the way, here is a graphic of the latest science of paleoclimate, clearly showing that there was a medieval warm period much warmer than today. ( http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/12/the-longest-most-high-resolution-most-inconvenient-paleoclimate-data-that-hasnt-been-published/ )

No wonder the site is only showing legacy HTML3 tables and inputs, because I am using IE10 and it can't handle their awesome data.

7 hours ago, magicalclick wrote

No wonder the site is only showing legacy HTML3 tables and inputs, because I am using IE10 and it can't handle their awesome data.

It's odd that they use CSS to style some things, but then use old HTML2 attributes to style others.

@spivonious: I'd say that was fairly typical of what I found in academia; 'I don't need someone else to set up my web pages, I'm a rocket scientist, I can figure it out' ... *hack* *hack *hack*.

Just looking at the visual style of the page screams "ACADEMICS!" to me.

Herbie

EDIT : I was guilty of this too, when I was an academic.

4 hours ago, Dr Herbie wrote

@spivonious: I'd say that was fairly typical of what I found in academia; 'I don't need someone else to set up my web pages, I'm a rocket scientist, I can figure it out' ... *hack* *hack *hack*.

Just looking at the visual style of the page screams "ACADEMICS!" to me.

Herbie

 

EDIT : I was guilty of this too, when I was an academic.

What's your excuse, now

15 hours ago, fanbaby wrote

[As a nerd, i'm having a hard time understanding why you have no chrome/firefox/opera installed]

Because IE comes with the operating system I use and it works...

12 hours ago, Proton2 wrote

By the way, here is a graphic of the latest science of paleoclimate, clearly showing that there was a medieval warm period much warmer than today. ( http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/12/the-longest-most-high-resolution-most-inconvenient-paleoclimate-data-that-hasnt-been-published/ )

You seem super proud of yourself for finding this, and I want to be fully supportive of your desire to grow and expand your knowledge of this very, very important topic.

I've submitted your post to the Nobel committee in hopes that they, too will recognize the good works you are doing.

Congratulations!

Sums up my feelings about that graph.

Sums up my feelings about that graph.

1 day ago, Dr Herbie wrote

@spivonious: I'd say that was fairly typical of what I found in academia; 'I don't need someone else to set up my web pages, I'm a rocket scientist, I can figure it out' ... *hack* *hack *hack*.

Just looking at the visual style of the page screams "ACADEMICS!" to me.

+1

The fact it has a dodgy Doctype that pushes pretty much every browser into Quirks mode and awful html (the body element is inside a form element for example) only adds weight to this theory.

Knowing the academic mindset somebody will have mentioned that the site didn't seem to work in IE8 and that will have generated the automatic 'It's Microsoft at fault' response that lead to including a browser check. Because academics never, ever, get it wrong themselves.

@ScanIAm: "You seem super proud of yourself for finding this... [chart using dataset of the best resolution and the greatest duration – the Law Dome Oxygen 18 data set (from Antarctica)]

It was easy to find as it is currently the most recent topic on one of the best climate science blogs, http://climateaudit.org/

Thank you for playing  

@Proton2: Yeah, blogs by pretend scientists are a good source of meaningless graphs due to unlabled axes.

@AndyC: since when do you need a degree to di science?

or a popular vote on who is a real scientist and who isn't?

everyone can do science.

@Maddus Mattus: I wouldn't trust a surgeon who hadn't been to university to study surgery, and I wouldn't trust a mechanic who didn't have a qualification in fixing cars. Anyone can do science, but no-one is going to listen to you if you don't have any training.

Herbie

EDIT : Actually scratch that -- science isn't so easy that anyone can do it without training.  Experimental design and statistical analysis aren't skills that you can pick up in a couple of days.  If you're not trained as a scientist, anything you do is likely to get torn to shreds by anyone with scientific training.

@Maddus Mattus: You don't necessarily need a degree. However you do kind of need to understand the basics of what you're doing, such as knowing that a graph without axes is utterly meaningless.

Would you trust a "mechanic" to fix you car if he didn't know the wheels were kinda crucial?