A Savings Account at the Paleo National Bank

Thanks to my town's Open Meeting Law, I'm able to follow local officials' actions pretty closely. Our Treasurer recently reported that, a few months ago, she switched the town's savings account to the Paleo National Bank. She was attracted by its generous offer of a 6% annual percentage rate. The latest Treasurer's Report included a summary of last month's savings account statement from the PNB. It looked like this:

Beginning-of-month balance: $2,500.00
Deposits: $200.00
Withdrawals: $250.00
Average Daily Balance: $1,841.54
Interest: $6.20
End-of-month balance: $2,443.80.

At first, this looked okay -- but on closer inspection, the arithmetic seemed questionable:

$2,500.00 + $200.00 - $250.00 + $6.20 = $2,456.20

There's a difference of $12.40. It seems that Interest of $6.20 had been debited from rather than credited to the balance:

$2,500.00 + $200.00 - $250.00 - $6.20 = $2,443.80

Tiljander Proxies' Modest Effects on Mann08 Estimates... probably

Few things in life can be as rewarding as shouting "I was wrong!"

[Edit 7/13/10: That is, "probably wrong in thinking that the Tiljander proxies make an oversized contribution to Mann08's paleoclimate reconstructions (and still correct about other Tiljander-related issues)." Elaborated upon, below.]

One of the things that's annoyed Dr. Schmidt (see his Collide-a-scape 'guest post' The Main Hindrance to Dialogue (and Detente)) and other AGW Consensus advocates has been my contention that the Tiljander proxies likely provide a substantial contribution to the "hockey stick" shape of the paleotemperature reconstructions in the Mann group's 2008 PNAS paper, "Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia" (see this post for literature references). That stance has provided grist for the mill for protracted discussions at Lucia's Blackboard and other blogs. But...