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Only they didn't show the hockey graph was bogus, and lately a completely different method and analysis has confirmed the hockey graph: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~tingley/mean_variance.pdf

why do people still worry about CO2?

Maybe you should ask yourself why you fail to worry about CO2 and you will know the answer to your question?

Very low frequency radar could do this, such as the SHARAD radar used to map the subsurface water ice on Mars.

This will not be as easy as it might seem - SHARAD uses 15-25 MHz radar, or wavelengths from 1-3 meters. A 10 meter diameter tunnel (a fairly large lava tube) would only be a few wavelengths across, and thus would be hard to see.

Apollo 17 orbited a 60 meter wavelength radar system, but I don't think that this had either the surface coverage or the resolution to realistically see lava tubes.

With this finding, I expect some nation will find the money to orbit a suitable radar around the moon to hunt for more tubes.

This is yet another of those articles where somebody did something vaguely promising in materials science, and it's immediately being touted as if it were a product.

They're not talking about a "chip" at all. The material they've produced sounds more like something that might work as a disk surface. "Under these conditions the Ni-MgO system behaves as a perfect paramagnet." It's not clear what you'd use as a read/write head, even if they can create a surface of "nanodots".

Bubble? Where the hell do you live? Housing prices around here are 1/5th what they were just a few years ago. That's lower than pre-bubble prices, while the population has been growing the whole time.

What does population have to do with it? There's no demand; the ratio of housing prices to income is still too high, houses are still unaffordable. As a nation, median household income grew by 60% from 1990 to 2006, but median home prices more than doubled (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/14/AR2007091401170.html, http://www.jchs.harvard.edu/son/index.htm). In a lot of places, it was much worse than the median. A correction was and still is due if you expect people are actually going to buy any of these houses.

And don't forget the 180th meridian that came with it. When you cross the 180th meridian, you have to set your watch back/forward 23 hours !

Quite a few people are unaware of it ;-))

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1919PA.....27..416F

At my alma mater we've produced positron beams as intense as 6e8 positrons per second. AFAIK this is the most intense beam ever generated, yet in the low energy case where electron-positron annihilation generates 2 gamma rays at 511keV each, this would only generate a power output of 1.6e-5 watts (and it takes a 1MW reactor to generate that output). So you are correct in asserting that antimatter is currently a very poor potential energy source.

Which is precisely why corporate CEOs - and sundry other people at the top of various food chains - are likely to be the least ethical people you're going to meet. Ethically ambiguous people are thus more capable of making decisions that maximize profit, in true the-end-justifies-the-means fashion.

Yep, I know. Part of what led to this is the "shareholder value" ideology that originated in the 1970s and became common in the 1980s. Here is some links: http://thenextwavefutures.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/the-end-of-shareholder-value/ http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2005/oct/02/theobserver.observerbusiness4 http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dobbin/cv/articles/2005_PPST_Fligstein.pdf http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-28502078_ITM http://www.globalchange.com/shareholdervalue.htm It is off-topic though.

Here are some links I found to papers describing the software used.

FWIW I am also intrigued about what is happening at this planet. I could imagine:
- tremendous storms at the twilight zone, perhaps mixing in elements from the cold side, or maybe just spreading ash worldwide?
- With the solar winds above and heat from below, it might be like a fluidized bed reactor with all kinds of things being created - all kinds of compounds. Falling gems indeed!
- Solar wind buffeting the silica and other things in the atmosphere, could perhaps create spongy material, aerogels, glassy wings that whirl toward ground like maple seeds.
- life possible? Maybe somewhere in the world..

Okay. Use of the MAGMA software is described briefly in Fractional Vaporization of Hot Earth-like Exoplanets and a description of the algorithms and data used in the program are provided in
L. Schaefer and B. Fegley. A Thermodynamic Model of High Temperature Lava Vaporization on Io, Icarus, 169, 216-241.

Note that according to the abstract of Schaefer and Fegley's Vaporization of High Temperature Magmas on Io "Galileo NIMS observations indicate magmas with temperatures of 1700-2100K on Io. Vaporization of rock-forming oxides should occur at such temperatures. "

Also Exploring the Environment of Volcanoes gives for Earth: 2000 degrees C: Iron-Rich Rock (i.e. still rock even while under tremendous pressure 500 miles underground), and 5000 degrees C: liquid iron
  (2900 miles underground).

You may also be interested in Heavy Metal Frost on Venus
  and an overview of some of their research here.

There is another program called CONDOR that Fegley and Lodders made, which is described on their site. (See condor2.html for algorithm info.) This program is for gaseous atmospheres.

Let's try that link again: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/is99/governance/icann.html :-)

Almost identical to a ground launch. Getting 100 km up is the easy part (note: they didn't, they got less than 33 km up), getting over 7 km/s of horizontal velocity is the hard part. It's so hard that most boosters start accelerating as soon as they leave the ground.. that makes them supersonic in the low atmosphere, which means they need a fancy aeroshell or they'll burn up.

Right. To be fair, though, although getting to orbital velocity is the hard part, you do gain a bit by starting from outside (the dense part of) the atmosphere. Turns out that, for a SSTO, that's significant (mostly because SSTOs are so sensitive to small variations to start with). Ages ago I calculated that starting out above the atmosphere would give a typical SSTO about a 20% gain in mass to orbit. Interestingly, a significant fraction of this is due to the increased performance of rocket engines in vacuum compared to operating under pressure.

I'm not using them to justify the "entire" program. I picked one accomplishment out of many to highlight.

With the exception of studying the effect of microgravity on humans themselves, I can't think of a single science program using the Shuttle that couldn't have been done better, cheaper, and more reliably with unmanned rockets. That includes HST, which was only put in low-earth orbit to give the Shuttle something to do. (See, for example, this paper). The Air Force realized this long ago with respect to military payloads, and quit using the Shuttle early on, and NASA has abandoned the idea of a serviceable telescope in low-earth orbit when launching the Webb, which will be at L2.

The shuttle as originally envisaged in the 70's would have been fully reusable and capable of reaching geostationary orbit. That would have been worth the time and effort. What we have was a waste of money, doing a job that is done better (and far cheaper) by Soyuz. The ISS is even worse. The effects of microgravity on people were studied to death by the Russians on MIR. The ISS hasn't really done much of any new science at all, which is tragic when you consider all of the actual cutting-edge space science that could have been done with the ISS budget.

Do you honestly believe that the whole shuttle and ISS program is nothing more than a PR campaign?

Pretty much. The science return for the expense has been incredibly low. We have been "exploring" low-earth orbit for forty years now. There's not much more to find.

which serves to trigger the portion of the DMCA law (Britain probably has equivalent legal language now due to copyright "normalization" treaties)

And that's where you're wrong.
Like most US abominations, the DMCA is a US-only thing.

European laws prevent the adoption of any DMCA-like law in any country of the union. It does have something slightly similar though: circumvention is allowed unless it is done for illegal purposes; that means you're not allowed to spread information of how to break the protection of a certain service to render that protection ineffective and use the service for free, for example.

Well then you might want to contact your EU representatives and let them know. They appear to have gone and not only passed the EUCD . Since then, the member states have been scrambling over each other to make nasty implementations of the EUCD at home.

Besides, laws only apply to honest folk. The situation there at the BBC is that Microsoft toadies have been moving in and locking the BBC into anti-democratic technologies. M$ still hasn't made good on the legal obligations set by the European courts about media formats, players and browsers. All three violations come to play here in the BBC.

The time for putting up with Microsofters is over. They're killing services (e.g. BBC), jobs and the economy.

How about the other type of tether - the long one. (gravity-gradient) There were supposed to be 3 shuttle experiments with tethers, and at last report I think they'd done the first and smallest, and had trouble with the second. (snarling/breakage?)

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1989fmet.symp..149L
http://www.satobs.org/tss.html
http://code8100.nrl.navy.mil/programs/tips.htm

The actual shuttle experiments seem to be concerned with "dropping" a probe into the very upper atmosphere for measurments and observation. The third reference, non-shuttle deployed, seems to be materials/duration research.

None seem interested in generating effective gravity or skyhooks/pinwheels.

http://www.ogc.harvard.edu/copyright_docs/copyright_and_fair_use.pdf

Which is exactly why there ought to be legislation of some kind to prohibit the kind of thinking that makes American businesses not required to obey the Constitution when it doesn't involve dealings on American soil. American soil or not, the business operates in America, where such rights are supposedly "protected".

There is such a law that allows foreigners to sue businesses in US courts for wrongs they commit or for which they supported in other countries. The Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) of 1789 was created just for this. It has been used to sue a number businesses, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, and other large corporations have been sued using the ATCA. Shell was sued for supporting the execution of Ken Saro Wiwa and other Nigerian by the Nigerian military rulers. Chevron was sued in LA for the shooting of peaceful protesters at "Chevron's Parabe offshore platform and the destruction of two villages by soldiers in Chevron helicopters and boats" in Nigeria. Of course during his presidency Bush tried to Bush even tried to get the US Supreme Court to disallow human rights violation lawsuits, more evidence he supported torture.

Falcon

I think close to every large museum or gallery has been the victim of forgery (or "fakes").

The National Gallery of Victoria, the largest public gallery in Australia, has misattributed a painting to Van Gogh for the last 70 years. Meanwhile, it was discovered that the Art Institute of Chicago had purchased a fake Gauguin. The Wallraf-Richartz Museum has discovered that a "Monet" purchased five-and-a-half decades ago was a fake as well. Even the Getty and the Smithsonian have fallen victim to countless fakes.

The Dutch National Museum can at least be forgiven for not suspecting that a U.S. ambassador would present a fake artifact as a gift.

Windows Media Center is severely limited by the DRM that it supports. MythTV will never be limited by that.

Here's the pussy in question. Now you tell me with a straight face what you think of that!

I think anyone going near that needs a rope, flashlight and a buddy to keep from getting lost in the thickets!

Here's the pussy in question. Now you tell me with a straight face what you think of that!

It was at Harvard in the mid 90's, but I don't think the course is THAT unique (I know that MIT, Carnegie Mellon, University of Michigan, and numerous other colleges have similar courses.)

The schematics for the computer we build is available -- appears that they still build the same computer!

http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~phys123/classnotes/bigpic_0409_bw.png

This is almost exactly what Woz did -- after the course you still have a wonderful respect for him, but at the same time realize that it is humanly do-able, not taking anything away from his great work. Some of the subsequent projects other groups in our course did were incredible; one guy built a custom video D/A output with sprite-drawing subroutines so you could play his custom assembly-written pacman with the hex keypad on a standard oscilloscope. I still have photos of mine in action somewhere.

If you are heading to Boston/Cambridge, don't miss the Harvard Museum of Natural History and its excellent glass flower collection.

http://www.hmnh.harvard.edu/on_exhibit/the_glass_flowers.html

This unique collection of over 3,000 models was created by glass artisans Leopold Blaschka and his son, Rudolph. The commission began in 1886, continued for five decades, and the collection represents more than 830 plant species.

Pluto has a retarded orbit (no, that's not a scientific term)

Actually it is. Well, kind of:

Orbits Using Retarded Fields
http://authors.aps.org/eprint/files/1997/Jul/aps1997jul09_006/main.html

An economical semi-analytical orbit theory for retarded satellite motion about an oblate planet

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1980fmet.sympQ....G

and I would not be too far from correct terminology in saying that Earth's orbit is degenerate in the plane of Mars' orbit, no?

The Harvard botanical museum is worth a quick look; the displays of glass flowers and plants are worth a look.

What everyone misses is that the DMCA, for everyday people doing the right thing(TM), is not that bad.

It is pretty explicit in Sec. 1201(c)

"(c) Other Rights, Etc., Not Affected.--(1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title."

You can make your own.

Taiwan has recently been hit with a devastating typhoon. Some of the pictures show devastation similar to New Orleans after Katrina.

So, yeah, I'm glad I live here where I can worry about some schmuck in his basement spending his allowance on Eve Online and not over there where landslides are causing whole towns to disappear.

There was a supernova in NGC 1559 just a few days ago. Whole towns disappear? Try whole planets.

It's a big world, you know? Worrying about things that happen a thousand miles or a million light years away is just as much a luxury as spending your time playing some game.

Let's see what the experts say: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/domain/tm.htm

8. What constitutes trademark dilution?
In addition to bringing an action for infringement, owners of trademarks can also bring an action for trademark dilution under either federal or state law. Under federal law, a dilution claim can be brought only if the mark is "famous." In deciding whether a mark is famous, the courts will look to the following factors: (1) the degree of inherent or acquired distinctiveness; (2) the duration and extent of use; (3) the amount of advertising and publicity; (4) the geographic extent of the market; (5) the channels of trade; (6) the degree of recognition in trading areas; (7) any use of similar marks by third parties; (8) whether the mark is registered. 15 U.S.C. 1125(c). Kodak, Exxon, and Xerox are all examples of famous marks. Under state law, a mark need not be famous in order to give rise to a dilution claim. Instead, dilution is available if: (1) the mark has "selling power" or, in other words, a distinctive quality; and (2) the two marks are substantially similar. Mead Data Central, Inc. v. Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc., 875 F.2d 1026 (2d Cir. 1989).

Once the prerequisites for a dilution claim are satisfied, the owner of a mark can bring an action against any use of that mark that dilutes the distinctive quality of that mark, either through "blurring" or "tarnishment" of that mark; unlike an infringement claim, likelihood of confusion is not necessary. Blurring occurs when the power of the mark is weakened through its identification with dissimilar goods. For example, Kodak brand bicycles or Xerox brand cigarettes. Although neither example is likely to cause confusion among consumers, each dilutes the distinctive quality of the mark. Tarnishment occurs when the mark is cast in an unflattering light, typically through its association with inferior or unseemly products or services. So, for example, in a recent case, ToysRUs successfully brought a tarnishment claim against adultsrus.com, a pornographic web-site. Toys "R" Us v. Akkaoui, 40 U.S.P.Q.2d (BNA) 1836 (N.D. Cal. Oct. 29, 1996).

(1) the degree of inherent or acquired distinctiveness
The distinctiveness is there, as explained in my original reply

(2) the duration and extent of use
Duration is there, and the intent to use has not been abandoned, as explained in my original reply

(3) the amount of advertising and publicity
Definitely arguable. They have a website and are the first hit on Google for "edge game" and "edge games".

(4) the geographic extent of the market
US and UK, according the the Edge Games website.

(5) the channels of trade
They are a game company and seem intent on releasing their existing portfolio to the Wii.

(6) the degree of recognition in trading areas
Edge Games was a decently sized name back in the C64 days. Nowadays they are a bit infamous for stiffing their developers, but is infamy different from fame?

(7) any use of similar marks by third parties
I suppose Gillette probably has a trademark on Edge for their shaving gel.

(8) whether the mark is registered
Seems like it.

Langdell's Edge trademark seems to fit the requirements of fame.

The naming of the game certainly seems to dilute the trademark. Can the publishers of Edge (the game) claim that the name is sufficiently generic enough?

At the most, though, Langdell would only be able to get injunctive relief as it is unlikely that the infringers willfully traded on the plaintiff's goodwill in using the mark.

I'm not sure you're familiar with trademark law in the United States either. Your definition of "use" is unclear and its applicability in this case is questionable.

Let's see what the experts say: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/domain/tm.htm

3. What prerequisites must a mark satisfy in order to serve as a trademark?
An arbitrary or fanciful mark is a mark that bears no logical relationship to the underlying product. For example, the words "Exxon," "Kodak," and "Apple" bear no inherent relationship to their underlying products (respectively, gasoline, cameras, or computers). Similarly, the Nike "swoosh" bears no inherent relationship to athletic shoes. Arbitrary or fanciful marks are inherently distinctive -- i.e. capable of identifying an underlying product -- and are given a high degree of protection.

So the trademark "Edge" in reference to games is, given the history of the company, inherently distinctive and thus fulfills the requirements for being a trademark.

4. How do you acquire rights in a trademark?
Assuming that a trademark qualifies for protection, rights to a trademark can be acquired in one of two ways: (1) by being the first to use the mark in commerce...

Again, Langdell seems to have this base covered so far as anyone can prove.

Here we get to the crux of your post.

6. Can trademark rights be lost?
A trademark is abandoned when its use is discontinued with an intent not to resume its use. Such intent can be inferred from the circumstances. Moreover, non-use for three consecutive years is prima facie evidence of abandonment. The basic idea is that trademark law only protects marks that are being used, and parties are not entitled to warehouse potentially useful marks.

But if you take a look, Edge Games has a website, claims to be developing games, and is in no way abandoning its trademark to genericity. So while your claim that Edge Games hasn't released something for years may be true, it may not be relevant.

Junk DNA = We don't really know what it does

Not so much anymore; these days, it's more like it does not act in the simple, straightforward way that we expect genes to act. But then, genes don't seem to much, either. We're learning more and more about the many ways that "junk" DNA actually does play an active role in shaping human biology. (Original, more technical article.)

Joel Tenenbaum was a teenager at the time of his conviction, accused of downloading 7 songs from a file sharing network.

This bodes bad weather indeed. If money is what sustains the flesh, we have here a case of cannibalism.

(Somewhere, a barman in a life-jacket pours Scotch for a passenger while the cruiser sinks..)

You can slow light down, speed it up, and even stop it altogether!

That would be "Jupiter as a Sniper Rather Than a Shield"?

I also see "Jupiter: shield or sniper?".

I'm actually surprised (for better or worse) that Apple hasn't invoked the DCMA.

The DMCA has an explicit exception for "interoperability". Check it out under paragraph (f), Reverse Engineering.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/dvd/1201.html

Or, if you don't like reading, you can watch his thoroughly engaging book talk here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2008/04/zittrain

Zittrain knows his stuff. He was friends with Postel. He's got an AI background from Yale in addition to his Harvard Law degree.

A draft of the actual article is at:

I'm not sure if they can really make any claims about how humans learn language though. Aside from how unnatural the stimulus materials are (each syllable of the two-syllable words was producedy by a different talker), their conclusions are that... kids pay attention to the order of when they hear things? We already knew that and more from e.g. Saffran et al. (1996). I'd like to see them do some variation of that artificial language study with their monkeys and see if the monkeys will do two levels of distributional analysis (word segmentation and morpheme segmentation)

That has been done: Cotton-top tamarins (Hauser et al., 2001) and rats (Toro & Trobalón, 2005) can do the Saffran-type statistical computations. However, in contrast to what Saffran et al. claim, this type of computations cannot be used at all for learning words from fluent speech; if you give learners just the Saffran-type statistical cues, you can play 6 words in a loop for 600 times, and people don't remember any words at all (Endress & Mehler, 2009). Apparently, the Saffran-kind of statistics lead to a very different kind of memory encoding than what is used for encoding actual words, and is actually also a different mechanism from the one the tamarins used in our experiment.

Listen to this recording that he made. He enters a phone conversation with a judge and other parties to the litigation, and fails at the outset to let any of them know that he is recording the conversation along with a room full of students listening in. This bit of eavesdropping only comes to light when the judge asks him pointedly if the call is being recorded. That is when Mr. "Openness" admits that he is in fact recording the conversation with the presence of his students.

It seems to me that Mr. Openness, an obviously deceitful person, only turns to honesty in the face of a room full of witnesses, a very astute judge, and his own potential criminal liability for illegal wiretapping and contempt of court. Translation: his ass over his principles.

Great and open guy, that Nesson character is. Hard to miss it.

• Joel Tenenbaum's deposition
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3
  • Part 4
  • Part 5
• Telephone conversation with Judge Gertner
• Deposition of defense copyright expert John Palfrey
  • before tweet (unknown user+pass required)
  • after tweet
• Deposition of defense peer-to-peer expert Johan Pouwelse (link unknown)

• Joel Tenenbaum's deposition
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3
  • Part 4
  • Part 5
• Telephone conversation with Judge Gertner
• Deposition of defense copyright expert John Palfrey
  • before tweet (unknown user+pass required)
  • after tweet
• Deposition of defense peer-to-peer expert Johan Pouwelse (link unknown)

• Joel Tenenbaum's deposition
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3
  • Part 4
  • Part 5
• Telephone conversation with Judge Gertner
• Deposition of defense copyright expert John Palfrey
  • before tweet (unknown user+pass required)
  • after tweet
• Deposition of defense peer-to-peer expert Johan Pouwelse (link unknown)

• Joel Tenenbaum's deposition
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3
  • Part 4
  • Part 5
• Telephone conversation with Judge Gertner
• Deposition of defense copyright expert John Palfrey
  • before tweet (unknown user+pass required)
  • after tweet
• Deposition of defense peer-to-peer expert Johan Pouwelse (link unknown)

• Joel Tenenbaum's deposition
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3
  • Part 4
  • Part 5
• Telephone conversation with Judge Gertner
• Deposition of defense copyright expert John Palfrey
  • before tweet (unknown user+pass required)
  • after tweet
• Deposition of defense peer-to-peer expert Johan Pouwelse (link unknown)

• Joel Tenenbaum's deposition
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3
  • Part 4
  • Part 5
• Telephone conversation with Judge Gertner
• Deposition of defense copyright expert John Palfrey
  • before tweet (unknown user+pass required)
  • after tweet
• Deposition of defense peer-to-peer expert Johan Pouwelse (link unknown)

• Joel Tenenbaum's deposition
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3
  • Part 4
  • Part 5
• Telephone conversation with Judge Gertner
• Deposition of defense copyright expert John Palfrey
  • before tweet (unknown user+pass required)
  • after tweet
• Deposition of defense peer-to-peer expert Johan Pouwelse (link unknown)

• Joel Tenenbaum's deposition
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3
  • Part 4
  • Part 5
• Telephone conversation with Judge Gertner
• Deposition of defense copyright expert John Palfrey
  • before tweet (unknown user+pass required)
  • after tweet
• Deposition of defense peer-to-peer expert Johan Pouwelse (link unknown)

Here is the original paper : http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.2870 . Note that HST detected about 3500 of these, so this is an advance, not an overturning, of older work. These knots are pretty strange.

The Helix Nebulae is a sphere of gas expelled by a dying star, probably in multiple episodes, with. many thousands of these "comet-like objects." Typical theoretical speculation is that they are gas instabilities as old gas is overtaken by new gas expulsions, possibly with dusty cores. In addition, the knots are expanding (away from the central star) significantly slower than the gas of the nebulae. If you Google or go to Arxiv.org, you can find lots of speculation on these knots.

For myself, I have to wonder if these could be "planetary comets" - i.e., giant comets resulting from the heating of bodies in the Oort cloud of the star. The mass is about right, and that would explain their longevity, but it is not clear why they would be expanding away from the central star.

Here is the original paper : http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.2870 . Note that HST detected about 3500 of these, so this is an advance, not an overturning, of older work. These knots are pretty strange.

The Helix Nebulae is a sphere of gas expelled by a dying star, probably in multiple episodes, with. many thousands of these "comet-like objects." Typical theoretical speculation is that they are gas instabilities as old gas is overtaken by new gas expulsions, possibly with dusty cores. In addition, the knots are expanding (away from the central star) significantly slower than the gas of the nebulae. If you Google or go to Arxiv.org, you can find lots of speculation on these knots.

For myself, I have to wonder if these could be "planetary comets" - i.e., giant comets resulting from the heating of bodies in the Oort cloud of the star. The mass is about right, and that would explain their longevity, but it is not clear why they would be expanding away from the central star.

Mabye cosmic rays effect the ozone layer, I don't really know.

A recent paper shows that this may indeed by the case

However claiming that CR's increase cloud cover is stretching the science well beyond what is known.

Given that Svensmark's team has been granted an experiment slot at CERN, at least many of those in the Physics community believe it's a plausible hypothesis. There is research out there demonstrating some causal link between cloud cover and Cosmic Rays. Science is all about reaching beyond what is known. It would be pretty a pointless exercise otherwise.

And what hat did you pull that number out of?

You're right! It was 17 years.. You have my humblest apologies.

It's not the effects that are in doubt, but their magnitude.

Not quite. There's doubt not only of the magnitude of effects of C02 concentration in the real atmosphere, there's doubt of the causal correlation between anthropogenic emissions and atmospheric concentrations. Most specifically, as I think you noted above somewhere, no other greenhouse gas is significant next to the effects of water vapor. And the positive feedback between C02 and H20 alleged in the IPCC projections is not only unproven but appears to be contradicted by most real world observations.

Everything I've read indicates that CO2 absorbs a significant amount of infrared radiation and that this climate sensitivity is important -- on the order of 3 degrees C for a doubling of CO2. Why would this heating not be important as a positive feedback mechanism?

Because C02 is not in isolation in the real atmosphere. For it to absorb radiation, radiation of the appropriate wavelengths must be available. It is not clear that is actually the case, and it is definitive that C02 absorption is intricately tied to water content in ways that make the feedback numbers assumed by the AGW models somewhere between "not obviously unproven" and "baseless nonsense". A good paper to start with is "Infrared absorption by CO2 and H2O" here, if you're really concerned about the topic from first principles,

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1978fac..rept.....G

but if you want to skip into the heated-argument bits, go straight to the Hug paper discussed here that alleges the IPCC overstates radiative forcing by 80x or so.

http://nov55.com/ntyg.html

• We form groups as power units
• We all generate an in-group bias - it's part of a healthy self-esteem
• We use stereotypes as cognitive shortcuts for organising and quickly processing information. There is no way to /stop/ stereotypes from forming, they are basic mental formations. The trick is not to /believe/ in the stereotypes that somehow get implanted in your head. That's pretty darn hard, and is similar to not having opinions about people. The stereotype, like an opinion, is a mental schema with which we process information.
• As power units, groups compete, which is fertile ground for distrust and conflict (think republican vs. democrat)
• Group cohesion relies on dumbing down individual processing. This has been experimentally shown. People are smart, but groups are stupid
• The confirmation bias means that a lot of information just doesn't get critically analysed.

That's just who we are as human beings, and it means that we're always going to tread a fine line between in-group preference and out-group prejudice, and have difficulty even seeing that that's what we're doing. And that's in ideal situations when there are plenty of resources for everyone.

Lets go the other direction then. I've been studying the works of Edsger Dijkstra and Kurt Godel, getting heavy into the theory and logic behind Computer Science. However, schools seem to be "dumbing down" degrees so to speak and aren't teaching this heavy theory stuff that would be highly beneficial.

Heavy theory or heavy practical would be quite useful in most applications, or even an even mix, but they're really trying to pump out too many people with degrees they shouldn't have. Here's an article from Harvard itself denouncing the grading systems of most universities.

I honestly think the problem isn't that colleges have lost touch with reality, so much that they've become too much like companies themselves. Colleges are largely supposed to teach the subjects to greater or lesser degree but they've become so wrapped with bureaucracy and Dilbert/Corporate-style inefficiency that we end up with this mess that we have today.

I started working on GCC and getting a copyright assignment from my school in order to work on it was like pulling teeth from a pissed off tiger during mating season. It was wrapped with college "policy" and reiteration of common knowledge while being thrown from department to department while no one actually helped. It was only after involving the FSF's lawyers did anything get done.