MSU ping-pong. Or Yo-yo. Or some word denoting here-and-then-not-here.

What the f*ck are Spencer and Christy up to? First they put up vn5.2 MSU data, then they take it down again (the May and Jun maps have the multi-year trend on, so we know they have processed all the years. And anyway, we know they processed all the years because they put up the monthly data in early July, and I downloaded it, then they removed it again).

And last night, the amusingly-named "Atheist4bush" posted to sci.env:

Athiest 4 Bush                        at Close Enough for Government Work

Subject: They're ba-aack.

Newsgroups: sci.environment,alt.global-warming

UAH MSU TLT 5.2 that is:

http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/?C=M;O=A

WMC will you re-run your analysis?

You see, I have a reputation... [BTW, I faked in the subject line for clarity, the rest is accurate]. Leaving aside the question of just how A4B knew it (does he watch their site every day? Possible) I went and looked and sure enough, the vn5.2 data was there. Fine, I thought, I'll download it tomorrow, see if its the same as the last vn5.2. So today I look... and... its gone! Its almost but not quite enough to make me mail S+C and ask what is going on: but I won't, because its more fun writing annoyed posts :-)

Amusingly enough, you can tell that something was there-and-then-not-there, because of the timestamp on the directory itself (http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/ - yes I know its not quite the same, I think they are all softlinked):

 t2/                     30-Jun-2005 07:20    -   
 t2lt/                   27-Jul-2005 08:04    -   
 t4/                     30-Jun-2005 13:12    -   

OTOH there is a file called MSU.tgz in there with a datestamp of 24 July. I wonder whats in it? Its 48M... perhaps it just a trap to waste bandwidth! I'm going to download it and see... be right back... Boooooooorrriiinggggg... its just a tar of the directory tree on the 24th, without the vn5.2 data.

[I've just noticed something a bit odd... the /public/msu/t2 dir has a datestamp of 30-Jun, but contains files with datestamps of 12-Jul-2005. Odd. I though a new file updated the dir timestamp. But my *nix may be a bit ropey on that. Anyone?]