i'm still building boundaries, abstractly, but some rules of thumb surrounding the differences between this blog and the deathtokoalas blog are developing as follows:

- the deathtokoalas blog will avoid direct news coverage altogether, with the exception of smart-ass remarks. note, however, that some institutions (like vice news) are not treated as news coverage, but as an entertainment broadcast about news, and that some hand-picked discussions from these sites are included.
- the deathtokoalas blog will not feature commentary or discussions around lectures, speeches or other lengthy interviews.
- the deathtokoalas blog will otherwise make an attempt to document all commentary and discussions around videos that are not posted to official news sites.
- the deathtokoalas blog will not include personal commentary, insofsar as it is separate from other comments and discussions.
- this blog will avoid commentary around music videos, unless there is a political component to it.

after some very careful thought, i'm hoping i can pick this up a bit.

it's interesting to see that kind of retraction in and of itself, though.

we're all taught this model in grade school about the planets rotating around the central fire, and we're told it's newtonian, the grand achievement of the copernican revolution, without spending much time contemplating the fact that the newtonian-copernican system is actually a revised ptolemaic system, with the gravitational center of the system corrected. worse, ptolemy himself was actually reversing existing greek systems (coming from aristarchus, with origins in pythagoreanism) that at least actually got the idea of heliocentrism correct. so, we may discuss how the understanding that the earth orbits the sun, rather than vice versa, was a revolutionary achievement in the history of science, but we fail to recognize that, through all of these changes, we've held to the concept of a system orbiting a center of some sort, without really challenging the premise. and, it's something that is taught to us over and over, no doubt as a consequence of the christian appropriation of newtonianism, something the english-speaking world needs to be more forthright and open about. so, we don't challenge our conception of the solar system as being this ordered, mechanical thing, despite the utter ancientness of the assumption - and the fact that it's totally wrong.

a much more substantive scientific revolution took place at the beginning of the last century, which finally broke the old pythagorean model. all of the ideas are developed in the system that was devised by newton, but they weren't properly understood until einstein. we realize today that the solar system is really not a set of well behaved planets orbiting the sun in this polite manner, but rather a system of masses that is suspended in it's own forces, engaging in a constant tug-of-war that no side can ever win. and, if we are to calculate their orbits, we must do so in such a way that takes into account the effects of all of the participants in this gravitational soup, which means constructing difficult n-body problems, rather than ignoring them as too distant or irrelevant. that simplifying newtonian assumption, that goes back to the pythagoreans, can no longer be tolerated.

but, what are the results? don't just tell me you've "lost confidence" in the outcome. do the actual work, and tell me what happens.

this retraction is curious to me. it seems to retract the article based on some inaccurate modelling of the planetary gravitational system (they seem to have ignored the gravitational effects of the planets), and then claims a lack of confidence in the results due to that error.

but, they don't mention whether they tried to correct the results of the paper based on that better modelling decision and what would happen if they did. generally, when a paper makes an error, it can be corrected.

so, has anybody attempted to make the proper adjustments and see what the effects on the results are?

i know that this paper was keyed in on by certain denialist groups as evidence of onsetting cooling rather than the reality of warming, but what i'm more interested in is the predictive modelling of solar sunspot activity. i think that the scientific consensus is that an extended solar minimum would not prevent warming due to increased greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere altogether, but that it will slow it down a little, with exaggerated regional consequences, particularly in terrestrial regions of the northern hemisphere. 

so, i understand that the publisher and one of the authors have "lost confidence" in the correctness of the outcome due to some poor modelling decisions. but, i'd kind of like to see it actually worked out, to see if those adjustments actually affect the outcome or not.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61020-3