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Followed by carefully selecting 1 study that presents your narrative.

It only took the very first result from 2018 on google scholar to give the lie to your assertion that "ECS seems to be trending downward"

mentioning you cited literature to brush off my argument, when my argument is literally a graph of dozens of peer reviewed studies

Yes, but apparently excluding results that don't support the narrative. But let's go down the list of results from 2018:

The first, as we mentioned earlier, is right in line with studies from 50 years ago. Better exclude it from the ironically named "No tricks zone"..

The second suggests that century-scale feedbacks can alter the climate sensitivity, so some lower estimates that rely on satellite data may be underestimating. That doesn't support the narrative. Better exclude it.

The third and fourth look at crop yields and forest growth for different sensitivities. No points either way. But the fifth finds a central figure of 3.2K with a range of (1.58.1K). Uh oh. 8K on the high end! That's not good. Better exclude it.

It's not until the sixth when we find a study with a lower estimate.

First, the amount of mercury in pollock is far more than 100x that in tuna (https://www.fda.gov/food/foodborneillnesscontaminants/metals/ucm115644.htm).

Second, mercury evaporates and goes into the environment. I am continuously puzzled how you don't understand a fundamental geochemical process like that. You seem to think that since you, an uneducated layperson on the subject, can't think off the top of your head how this mercury can be a danger, then nobody else can figure it out either which is insane. Why don't you read this article:

http://www.annualreviews.org/d...

Maybe that will clear things up.

Gun control laws decrease shooting deaths, both homicides and suicides.

So says research and common sense.

If you don't care, then fine. Your rights are more important than (usually innocent) people's lives. But when you oppose gun control, you have blood on your hands.

As to the 2nd amendment? Stop holding it so sacrosanct. Don't forget that the 3/5 clause was part of the original constitution, too.

...t to a first order approximation, if all man-made CO2 generation (not including breathing) stopped, the atmospheric levels of CO2 would return to pre-industrial levels fairly quickly (a small number of years) by natural processes.

"a small number of years" means on the order of a hundred years. Oddly, there isn't a well-defined lifetime, because there are many competing processes of absorption and reemission. About 20-35% remains in the atmosphere after equilibration with the ocean, with a lifetime of 2-20 centuries; and isn't fully removed until it's converted into calcium carbonate, with a time scale of 3 to 7 thousand years. Reference: http://www.annualreviews.org/d...

I took a look at TFA and followed up by reading the description of LibGeoDecomp:

If your application iteratively updates elements or cells depending only on cells within a fixed neighborhood radius, then LibGeoDecomp may be just the tool you've been looking for to cut down execution times from hours and days to minutes.

Gee, that seems like an extremely limited problem space, and doesn't measure up at all to the title of this Slashdot submission. It might really be a useful tool, but when I clicked to this article I expected to read about something much more general purpose, in terms of 'bringing Legacy Fortran to Supercomputers'.

Correct. We didn't try to come up with a solution for every (Fortran) program in the world. Because that would either take forever or the solution would suck in the end. Instead we tried to build something which is applicable to a certain class of applications which is important to us. So, what's in this class of iterative algorithms which can be limited to neighborhood access only?

• cellular automata
• stencil codes
• Lattice Boltzmann methods for computational fluid dynamics (technically a subclass of stencil codes)
• Particle in cell codes
• Short-ranged n-body simulations

It's interesting that almost(!) all computer simulation codes fall in one of the categories above. And supercomputers are chiefly used for simulations.

By the way, regarding the use of the word 'codes': I don't think English is the first language of this developer. Cut some slack.

Thanks :-) You're correct, I'm from Germany. I learned my English in zeh interwebs.

probably less than 5% of obese people are obese from the above listed medical conditions. The rest are obese from too much eating.

http://endocrine.niddk.nih.gov/pubs/Hypothyroidism/

http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.29.020907.090954

This, right here, is actually the best unintentional point made in this entire argument. The 'violent games' argument has been researched exhaustively. Yet idiots like Immerman continue to harp on the subject quoting only their perception. This is the kind of 'gun control studies' we can expect; ignoring contrary results, and repeating the same studies until they get it right.

The chemistry of the Earth's natural cycles and environs are identifiably altered under increased carbon dioxide uptake. Carbon dioxide forms acids with constituent components of the atmosphere, soil and water. Water is chemically neutral and oxygen readily balances out to the available reactions, contributing nothing to net chemical cycles on the Earth outside of return carbon that has been out of the cycles for thousands and millions of years (see Cretaceous Period vs the logic of biofuels and green chemistry).

However, I could be fair and ignore science and the world we currently live in, on the off chance your logic needs to be looked at for those circumstances. Actually, we don't have to, as if either of those were a current issue with similar consequences (and some of the conversation regarding the hydrogen economy suggests water could become some class of risk), we actually WOULD be having that conversation. That ISN'T our actual problem right now. Anything that had a similar long term consequence would cause the scientific community the SAME CONCERN.

Unlike you, however, I've actually thrown in some genuine, peer reviewed research. Feel free to add and any ACTUAL research you might have. None of that meta-research by people with readily confirmed biases. After all, my research sources come from a variety of institutions and have been around long enough to go past peer review and enter into the realm of confirmability.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1365-2486.1998.00164.x/full
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1985cca..proc..546B
http://wwwzb.fz-juelich.de/contentenrichment/inhaltsverzeichnisse/bis2009/ISBN-0-471-72017-8.pdf
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2001/2000GB001278.shtml
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2004.00864.x/full
http://www.esajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1890/03-5055
ftp://ftp.imarpe.pe/Curso_Modelos/Biblio%20Arnaud%202/MEPS2008-Acidification.pdf%23page=5
http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/QwPqRGcRzQM5ffhPjAdT/full/10.1146/annurev.marine.010908.163834
http://icesjms.oxfordjournals.org/content/65/3/414.short

It *is* possible to create nanotube based semiconductors by carefully introducing latice defects into the tube walls. (Creates a nanotube diode)

Sorry, paywalled:
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.matsci.34.040203.112300

Combined, the two technologies could be used to fashion an absurdly efficient solar collector. The problem is that not all photons are created equally, and that absorbed spectra might not carry sufficient energy to hop the bandgap. This would only cause the nanotubes to get hot, and reemit the photons only to be captured again by the neighbors.

Perhaps if total energy absorption is high enough, then multiple photons could be used to hop the gap, (like in red light on chlorophyll) but that would have to be some strange juju.

at times in Earth history, notably the Late Ordovician, Late Devonian, and Late Permian, widespread shelf and cratonic-basinal anoxia, and, at least in the latter two cases, photic-zone euxinia, have accompanied mass extinction (Wilde & Berry 1984; Wignall & Hallam 1992; Wang et al. 1993, 1996; Bond et al. 2004). Could sulfide poisoning serve as the kill mechanism in these extinctions?

Biomarker evidence perhaps provides a more compelling link between euxinia and extinction for the Late Devonian and Late Permian (Grice et al. 2005). . . . But why would a collapse of marine productivity trigger terrestrial ecosystem disruption and extinction?

Sulfide release from the oceans serves as a link to terrestrial biotic crisis during the end-Permian. One-dimensional atmospheric modeling by Kump et al. (2005) predicted that toxic levels of H2S could rapidly accumulate in the well-mixed troposphere once reaction of sulfide with atmospheric hydroxyl radical reduced OH to very low levels. The abrupt rise in atmospheric H2S concentrations would be accompanied by rising atmospheric methane levels and destruction of the ozone layer. Not only would terrestrial organisms be unable to escape the toxic effects of H2S, but they also would be subject to high levels of UV radiation following the predicted collapse of the ozone layer.

This does sound very tentative. On the other hand, it corresponds with my tenuous understanding of the claims of Dyer and Ward. Can you shed any light? I don't want to be going around making false claims.

This isn't quite true. As this survey paper shows http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.nutr.25.050304.092526 we have methods of increasing both the average and maximal life span in rats. That paper is primarily discussing this in the context of caloric restriction, which obviously is not a fun way of extending lifespan and has other problems. But other life extensions methods in rodents do seem to extent the maximal lifespan albeit not nearly as much as they move the average lifespan. Whether this can be applied to humans is still an open question.

A 10-second Google search turns up the following quote at the top of a Wikipedia article: Bacterial cells are much smaller than human cells, and there are at least ten times as many bacteria as human cells in the body (approximately 10^14 versus 10^13).[6][7]

Because Wikipedia isn't a primary source, it's necessary to examine the peer-reviewed references to verify this claim:

The adult human organism is said to be composed of approximately 10^13 eukaryotic animal cells (27). That statement is only an expression of a particular point of view. The various body surfaces and the gastrointestinal canals of humans may be colonized by as many as 10^14 indigenous prokaryotic and eukaryotic microbial cells (70). These microbes profoundly influence some of the physiological processes of their animal host (49, 103). From another point of view, therefore, the normal human organism can be said to be composed of over 10^14 cells, of which only about 10% are animal cells. The vast majority of the microbial cells in that mass reside someplace in the gastrointestinal tract (70). ... [Savage, Microbial Ecology of the Gastrointestinal Tract, 1977]

... For every cell in the human body (10^13 cells in total), there are ten viable indigenous bacteria in the GI tract... [Berg, The indigenous gastrointestinal microflora, 1996]

So, basically what you are saying is that there is no scientific way of convincing you otherwise? Well, guess that settles that, then.

Haven't termite gut bacteria been known to digest wood for years?

Maybe. Sort of. Perhaps. I had thought so as well, but a quick Google search indicates that those bugs are not well characterized. Having a single organism with a defined enzyme is obviously an easier system to scale up than the stomach of an insect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flora

Under "Bacterial Flora" is says 10^14 bacteria cells vs. 10^13 human cells. The reference stating this is

http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.mi.31.100177.000543

I leave it to you to check the veracity of these sources. The three seconds on Google it took me to find the above is stretching me pretty thin.

The in vitro / in vivo gap is definitely a worry. The next stages of trials will give an answer with regards to that. The current issue of Science has several articles about the spread of HIV, including a good review about why it is difficult to eradicate HIV in an infected individual. ( for those with access, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/current/ or http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/329/5988/174.pdf ) There are many great broadly neutralizing antibodies coming out right now, and even though HIV has an astonishing ability to escape our immune systems, there is hope that these will be successful for vaccines. ( http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-immunol-030409-101256 )

*lol* yeah. fych issues. Nasty.

As for actual documentation? Some studies in the 70's and 80's showed domestic violence, rape, and childhood traumas can be linked to people with excessive exposure to porn. A few minutes with google scholar will point to relevant articles and avoid getting sucked down into the depraved depths.

Google Scholar and arjounals

I think this might be like the "video games" cause violence argument. I think any reasonable person can see how it's not healthy to stare at violence all day everyday... it's also probably not healthy to stare at sex all day everyday... hell... it's probably not healthy to stare at slashdot all day everyday. Most obsessions are similarly destructive of people's lives.

I think 300+ days a year looking at porn might be like the guy who drinks two pots of coffee a day. I think it's a symptom of something bad evolving in the person's life. Symptom... not root cause. I don't have a DSM IV in front of me but I'm fairly certain that behavior alone could get you a diagnosis.

An industry which could create a few hundred thousand jobs, transmute existing long-lived nuclear waste to short-lived stuff, generate power with minimum CO2, etc. Total R&D cost, including prototype at full commercial scale, under $10B. A proton accelerator with ten times the power and same energy as the Spallation Neutron Source in Oak Ridge can be used to drive a sub-critical nuclear power system or to transmute existing nuclear waste or both. There is basic R&D and a lot of engineering needed. R&D and prototype cost would be less than ITER, the International Tokamak Experimental Reactor (fusion). Lots of messy politics because of concern about nuclear weapons proliferation, however. And NIMBY. No chance of an uncontrolled reaction, since turning off the proton beam stops the reaction in under a microsecond (speed of light from source to target).

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=rubbia+accelerator+transmutation+nuclear+waste&btnG=Search/

Carlo Rubbia proposed this around 1990, six years after his Nobel prize. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Rubbia/

https://accelconf.web.cern.ch/accelconf/e94/PDF/EPAC1994_0270.PDF/
A High Intensity Accelerator for driving the energy applifier for nuclear energy production. C. Rubbia et al.

Another citation: http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146%2Fannurev.nucl.48.1.505/
ACCELERATOR-DRIVEN SYSTEMS FOR NUCLEAR WASTE TRANSMUTATION (1998 review)

Charles D. Bowman
The ADNA Corporation, Accelerator-Driven Neutron Applications, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87544; e-mail: cbowman@roadrunner.com

  Abstract The renewed interest since 1990 in accelerator-driven subcritical systems for transmutation of commercial nuclear waste has evolved to focus on the issue of whether fast- or thermal-spectrum systems offer greater promise. This review addresses the issue by comparing the performance of the more completely developed thermal- and fast-spectrum designs. Substantial design information is included to allow an assessment of the viability of the systems compared. The performance criteria considered most important are (a) the rapidity of reduction of the current inventory of plutonium and minor actinide from commercial spent fuel, (b) the cost, and (c) the complexity. The liquid-fueled thermal spectrum appears to offer major advantages over the solid-fueled fast-spectrum system, making waste reduction possible with about half the capital requirement on a substantially shorter time scale and with smaller separations requirements.

And a quick comment on the question of who are we but our memories? It turns out that we have different kinds of memories that are stored in different parts of our brains. Some of these memories would more normally be called beliefs or strategies but are formed in a very similar way as "normal" episodic memories (like what you had for breakfast). When someone starts to lose their memories of what they had for breakfast (or whether they live, etc) we call it amnesia, and we can often still see remnants of the person (they might have the same moral compass) and they still know how gravity works, etc. When the more basic belief and rule memories start to go, we often use a different word, "dementia", to imply that the person is not acting like themselves, but rather a demented version of themselves.

I thought we had 11 senses... Why do we keep teaching that we have 5!?!?!

As is pretty clear from the wiki link in the parent post, stopping at 11 human senses is about as arbitrary as stopping at 5 human senses.

So how many senses do we have?

You can take a reductionist approach, and count the different type of "sensory receptors" in an organism. Let's define a sensory receptor as a protein on a peripheral neuron that responds to external events. However, this definition leads us to the conclusion that each kind of cone in the retina is a different sense. This implies that vision is 4 senses (3 cone types, and 1 rod type of photoreceptors) and not 1 sense. If we did the same for touch,smell, and the other ' traditional senses' we would arrive at a number over a thousands (Ok... smell is most of that , but even without smell there are many more than 11).

We get into even more trouble if we allow our definition to include changes in the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord) caused by external events. For example, inhaling, ingesting, or injecting stuffs leads to changes in varied receptors in the brain. Is this a sense? When you fall down and hit your head, that induced changes in the brain. Is that a sense? When you get an unexpected reward, your brain gives you some dopamine. By this definition you could say that you have a 'dopamine' sense.

The other approach, which might be more intuitive (and is closer to the classic definition), is a systems level approach. We see, we hear, we smell, we touch, we taste. 5 senses. And we feel acceleration, we feel sharp pain, and dull pain, and burning pain, etc. But if these are all senses, why not include the other feelings? Feeling afraid, sad, happy, horny, sneaky, humiliated, disgusted. These feelings can also be caused by external events. In fact, in the mac dictionary, one definition of feeling is "experience a sensation".

There are valid historical reasons why we separate things like vision from things like sadness. But as we learn more about brain and behavior those reasons are fading. So instead of asking how many senses we have, maybe we should be asking what's the rank of human experience?

and yes, IAAN (i am a neuroscientist).

Unless they have created some industrial strength Miracle Grow

Well, there's always Gibberellin. I bought a quantity of that stuff from Edmund Scientific back in the seventies, and grew some giantass vegetables. Of course, they weren't safe to eat, but as an experiment it was pretty cool.

Increasing temperature from 15 to 65C modestly decreases the 395-nm and increases the 470-nm excitation peak of mature wild-type GFP. Yet higher temperatures cause denaturation, with 50% of fluorescence lost at 78C

I had a link in there, sorry, I messed up: http://www.annualreviews.org/

Here you go:

http://worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/oclc/13498408
http://worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/oclc/15696265

http://scholar.google.com/url?sa=U&q=http://links. jstor.org/sici%3Fsici%3D0066-4162(1986)17%253C111% 253ATSOPG%253E2.0.CO%253B2-K
http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.114 6/annurev.es.05.110174.001545?cookieSet=1&journalC ode=ecolsys
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0066-4162(1986)17 %3C111%3ATSOPG%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7294(197912) 2%3A81%3A4%3C818%3ATEOABA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-E

Seriously, anyone who has done even a minimum of reading in primate social behavior will very quickly line up behind my comment.

Some bacteria have a neat rotary motor. There's way more flagellated bacteria than humans on the earth, so I wouldn't classify it as "almost entirely missing".

Even better, sperm has a rotary joint. Just think, you could be holding a counterexample to the above post in 5-10 minutes (well, male Slashdotters anyway - female ones might have to drive a bit).

- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."

If you have access to a good newsagent or a University library (or any reasonably sized metropolitan library I suppose) track down their New Scientist collection. There is an article in the 10th of April issue covering RSI from a slightly different angle than normal. There's an interesting theory that RSI is not caused by physical damage to the wrists/hands, but rather caused by blurring of the brain's distinctions between the fine motor control areas for the hands.

The strain is in the brain Too much typing can leave you in agony. But rather than damaged muscles or tendons being to blame for RSI, says Bob Holmes, things might be going wrong in the brain

It seems that when you spend a lot of time moving your fingers in very precise, accurate ways your brain can blur them together: you lose fine control over time. This effect has been shown to take place in monkeys made to earn food by `typing' (aside: presumably they put them on Usenet...), and there seems to be some evidence of it occuring in humans. Particularly susceptible, as you might expect, are keyboard operators and musicians.

There is a tiny tidbit from some while ago on the New Scientist web site -- unfortunately they don't appear to have put up the article I'm talking about. If anyone's sufficiently interested I daresay I could type in a couple of short extracts for review.

Here are a couple of links which you might find interesting (tracked down from the broken NS links...):

• Repetitive Motion Injuries--Annual Reviews of Medicine (1995):

  Repetitive motion injuries have presented clinicians with a significant challenge over the past two and a half decades. Acceptable treatment of inflammatory disorders is well established, but compressive neuropathies and nonspecific complaints of numbness, tingling, and discomfort in the upper extremity present vexing dilemmas. Current research and experience point to multilevel problems, including posturally induced muscular imbalance. Although surgical solutions to these problems are sometimes indicated, conservative approaches successfully treat many individuals and have narrowed the scope and indications for surgical intervention. These approaches include ergonomic changes at the workstation, postural changes, and muscle stretching and strengthening to correct imbalance.

• Stretching and Flexibility -- Everything you never wanted to know. Apparently this is a frequently recommended treatment.
• The Lancet also has a couple of hits for `RSI' and `repetitive strain': the usal username/password will get you the `free' version of the site.