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The bacteria you should worry about are the ones that consume metal. Accelerating those could do some really nasty things. (They're already doing nasty things in Britain.)

(Such bacteria could be quite interesting in mining metals that are hard to extract in their normal ore form. Convert the metal from a hard-to-extract form to an easy-to-extract form. So long as you could keep them where they should be.)

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/7326 http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/pdf/No_Evidence.pdf http://jimball.com.au/Warming.htm http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/35/190/ http://www.ace.mmu.ac.uk/eae/Climate_Change/Older/Ice_Ages.html I still think that it is the ultimate arrogance that humans think they can alter the planets evolution. Think of continental drift and the accompanying earthquakes, volcanic activity etc. and you'll understand how insignificant humans are.

I have said before and I'll say it again now - the human race has NO CHANCE of altering the climate at a whim. We would be better to prepare for extreme cold than extreme heat.
Imagine this scenario - the ice melts, 95% say. Lots of land goes under water. Heat rises, we get lots of rain. So much that the planet is covered by clouds. This changes the albedo of the earth so that heat from the sun is reflected into space. Suddenly, all that water cools and ice forms where before there was land.
Here's a quote -

From palaeoclimatic records scientists now know that during the last 2 million years the Earth's climate has fluctuated between periods of relative warmth and relative cold, with global average surface temperature changing by as much as 5C between the two climatic regimes. Although over the longer term (50 million years) the Earth has become much colder since the age of the dinosaurs, with permanent ice cover at both the North and South poles, the size of the polar ice caps has repeatedly grown and shrunk roughly every 100,000 years. The colder periods, called glacials or Ice Ages, have usually lasted for 80,000 to 100,000 years, whilst the intervening warmer intervals have been much shorter, lasting about 10,000 years. The last Ice Age or glacial period on Earth ended roughly 14,000 years ago. At that time, much of Northern Europe and North America lay under huge ice sheets that today remain only in Greenland. At present we may be coming towards the end of the latest warmer interglacial period, although mankind's alteration of the atmosphere through greenhouse gas pollution makes predicting the long term future of our global climate difficult.

Now tell me again that the trend is towards warming.

There are no sinks for CFCs in the lower atmosphere. As a result they are transported to the stratosphere (10 to 50km altitude) where they are broken down by UV radiation, releasing free chlorine atoms which cause significant ozone depletion. In 1998 global atmospheric concentrations of on of the CFCs, CFC-11 was 268pptv. Over the past few decades CFCs 11,12 and 113 have increased more rapidly (on a percent basis) than any other greenhouse gas, but there is now clear evidence that growth rates of CFCs have slowed significantly in the aftermath of the Montreal Protocol (1985) to prevent ozone depletion. In fact, the 1998 atmospheric concentration of CFC-11 was lower than the concentration 5 years earlier. The total forcing value for Chlorofluorocarbons is +0.3Wm-2. This includes CFC-11, 12, 113, 114, 115, methylchloroform and carbon tetrachloride. Under the Montreal Protocol, the production of CFCs 11, 12 and 113 has been successfully phased out since 1995. However, despite these measures, the concentration of CFCs in the atmosphere will remain significant into the next century because of the relatively long lifetimes associated with these compounds.

from http://www.ace.mmu.ac.uk/Resources/Teaching_Packs/ Key_Stage_4/Climate_Change/02p.html,

How long does carbon dioxide stay in the atmosphere? All gases stay in the atmosphere for a certain length of time before they are removed by their sinks. This time is known as the atmospheric lifetime of a gas. Carbon dioxide has an atmospheric lifetime of between 50 - 200 years. This means that carbon dioxide will be present in the atmosphere for at least 50 years before it is absorbed by a sink or becomes part of another chemical reaction. Consequently, carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere today could cause global warming for up to two centuries to come.

Could the multiple sites that say this, as well as the book I just read be wrong or oversimplifying the process? Yes, possible. I don't claim to be an expert; I was just saying what I read in a book. Tell me, does it make you feel good to be a jerk?

From outer space, we could tell that the Earth has a lot of metabolic activity in it, because the sky is mostly highly reactive oxygen that is a result of plant respiration.

Actually, the "sky" or atmosphere (as scientists call it) is mostly Nitrogen. Only around 20% is oxygen. Link.

Ocean water is practically alive itself, there is so much life in it. On land, the places with the greatest biomass and biodiversity are the rainforests, where they have near 100% humidity.

Ocean water is not "practically alive" in any sense whatsoever. There are vast areas where there is virtually no significant life. That is not to say those areas are sterile, but just that they do not have sufficient resources to sustain a large amount of diverse lifeforms. Such things as boundaries between ocean currents and upwellings of cold water bringing nutrients closer to the surface create conditions where life flourishes. This is why there are mass migrations of many species every year - to go where the food is. They wouldn't have to do that if the oceans were "practically alive". As for the rainforests, they have the greatest biomass due mainly to the fact that they are forests ! Forests full of massive plants called trees. Yes they do have massive bio-diversity, but that is mainly due to having the most available niches for life to succeed. From the forest floor to the canopy presents a large area in which to find suitable conditions. The Sahara desert is not entirely lifeless, but appears that way because it only provides 1 environment - the sand. Dig a little beneath the surface of the sand and you will find mammals, reptiles, insects and arachnids. Your argument is too simplistic.

My guess is that those 'extremophiles' are descendants of creatures who lived in more hospital environments and became adapted to increasingly extreme environments. I don't think that life originated in rocks or in ocean vents.

Well your guess would be pretty much wrong then. Link. What you "think" has no real bearing on the reality that science has discovered. And I don't think they had hospitals 4 billion years ago !

but I would pick Python... but if you really have to, then Java... the whole point of this course is not that you are learning a programming language... but that you are learning the fundamentals of Object Oriented Programming. The language is a means to an end... just think yourself lucky... I had to suffer Eiffel on my OOP course

You can find those links, but you couldn't be bothered to type something like "low energy bipedal advantage" in google?

A pendulum-like

A research paper
The upsides and downsides of bipedalism
Also discusses the energy-conserving nature of bipedalism, although in later bits focuses on hopping(which humans aren't equipped to do effeciently)

And just how do you keep something going that fast from burning up in the atmosphere?


...by travelling in the exosphere.

Okay, "somebody took some core samples and here's what they found." Although there appears to be a temporal relationship to ice-trapped CO2 levels and a change in human history, there's not enough data in evidence to prove a causal relationship between them. That's the whole point of my first post- there are too many confounding influences and insufficient data to draw real conclusions.

Krakatoa happened in that time period. Other volcanoes were also active.

There are also other sources of CO2 as well.

Do you even know that increased solar activity (i.e. more sonspots) actually means _less_ energy reaching the earth?

The first page states a claim that is very difficult for the global-warming denialists: "...since 1980, the solar constant has steadily decreased by 0.02 percent per year."

Well, yes and no... Here's some info on greenhouse gasses:

Natural sources of carbon dioxide include the respiration (breathing) of animals and plants, and evaporation from the oceans. Together, these natural sources release about 150 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, far outweighing the 7 billion tonnes of man-made emissions from fossil fuel burning, waste incineration, deforestation and cement manufacture.

So clearing thousands of acres of forest to install solar panels would cut down on animal / plant emissions as well as human, so the world would "benefit" twice...

j/k :)

I think we agree though - if you ignore the 95% that come from natural sources, the majority of the remainder does come from improving our standard of living. In fact, what I read somewhere (sorry, no reference) is that accepting the Kyoto treaty and cutting our emissions by 1/3 would be more devastating to our economy than any recent war or even the Great Depression.

Environmentalism looks a lot more like a religion than a science.

It's pure OO, just like smalltalk, not hybrid.

It's syntax is easy to learn, write and read.

It has assertions nicely integrated into the language, everything must meet the precontitions and postcondition you set up. It feels natural to add checks and tests pretty much everywhere instead of cluttering the code with assert()s and #ifdef DEBUG..

SmartEiffel (the GNU Eiffel compiler) compiles to ANSI-C or JVM so it's portable to every platform there is.. Some other compilers can also compile to .NET..

You can use existing C and C++ shared libraries without wrappers/bindings. (although making bindings are preferrable to make it follow standard Eiffel-style)

It manages memory for you and has a garbage collector. You never have to think about buffer overflows and malloc()/free() again!

Its runtime speed is as fast as C/C++, and sometimes even faster because the compiler compiles to C-code that is more optimized than most human beings can code..

I could rant about it forever, but I won't.. Instead you should read one of these great tutorials!
Eiffel for beginners
Eiffel: An advanced introduction
Eiffel Object-Oriented Programming

And of course, the GNU Eiffel compiler: SmartEiffel ;-)

As well as the distance from the equator, the fact that the earth is closer to the sun causes the seasons of various regions to be different.

Most of Europe, for example, although on the same latitude, has vastly different summers and winters than Toronto. Coastal variances also affect this, but a lot of it is because of the different distances from the sun.

No. The fact that Europe and Canada are at the same latitude means that they are the same distance from the sun (once you average out the rotation of the Earth).The difference in weather between the two locations is generally accepted to be due to the warming effect of the Gulf Stream.

Considering that we'be been living with the (after)effects of the Little Ice Age for the past couple of centuries, I find it difficult to be concerned... Climate fluctuation's been around longer than our race, and will continue after we're dead or fled from the planet. Deserts form, mass extinctions occur, with or without our "help."

I believe there's a meteorological phenomenon called the polar vortex that causes the ozone hole to occur at the South Pole and during Antarctic summer. See this link for more details. Short version is, during polar night there's a huge whirlpool of cold air that circulates there all night causing the CFC's we've emitted to more rapidly destroy the ozone in the region. By summer, the vortex stops, so the ozone hole disperses. There's also a vortex in the North Pole, but because there are a lot of irregular land masses there, the vortex up north is a lot weaker, hence the ozone hole up north is far smaller. But global warming is causing the northern vortex to strengthen, and hence increase the size of the hole up north.

This is what I get for watching too much Discovery Channel!

It seems that for the last eight years Wolfram has essentially been running his company by remote control, working all night, every night, on a new kind of science, which is the name of the book he will soon publish to describe it.
Wolfram's new science propounds an extraordinary idea: With a few basic objects and a few rules of behavior--run a few hundred million times--he believes it is not only possible to create structures of great complexity, but the universe itself, including its vast regions of apparent chaos.

While Stephen Wolfram is undoubtedly a very clever man, I seriously doubt whether he is the first or only person to investigate these kinds of concepts.

But you are right in that Conway was also looking for the properties you describe.

At any rate, it appears that consturctions of UTMs in Life have been around for a while. One was published in 1982 in a book by Berelekamp, Conway and Guys Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays .

In the full example, SORTABLE_ARRAY specializes, by inheritance, the plain generic class ARRAY, adding a sort method.

So, the point of it is to specialize existing generic classes.

The dictionary definition, and Dawkins's (1976) original conception of the meme, both include the idea that memes are copied from one person to another by imitation. We therefore need to be clear what is meant by imitation. Imitation is distinguished from contagion, individual learning and various kinds of non-imitative social learning such as stimulus enhancement, local enhancement and goal emulation. True imitation is extremely rare in animals other than humans, except for birdsong and dolphin vocalisation, suggesting that they can have few or no memes. I argue that more complex human cognitive processes, such as language, reading, scientific research and so on, all build in some way on the ability to imitate, and therefore all these processes are, or can be, memetic. When we are clear about the nature of imitation, it is obvious what does and does not count as a meme. I suggest that we stick to defining the meme as that which is passed on by imitation.