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Seriously, you're being an ass. I've read through this page of threads, and you've made numerous posts including mistakes of judgment that come across as lies; and then you insult your potential audience. You may have good points, but they are lost or devalued by your tone and approach. Simply as a style of argumentation, your posts wind up more alienating than convincing. This is not the way to bring people over to your way of thinking.

For others, this video evidence that rs79 posted in the GP is a talk hosted by the Sydney Institute. The Sydney Institute itself may or may not be pushing a conservative anti-AGW agenda; at any rate, Gerard Henderson is Executive Director and his wife is the Deputy Director (staff roster), with some online commentators describing them as "neocon" in their views. Gerard Henderson was an adviser to former Australian PM John Howard, whose general political leanings were quite close to those of George W. Bush.

In short, the source is a bit suspect.

The talk itself is about an hour long. I haven't listened to the whole thing yet, but the speaker is Murry Salby, professor of environmental science at Macquarie University in Australia and the university's Climate Chair (university staff page). His basic argument is that global temperature controls CO2 levels, not the other way around. His views are somewhat controversial, perhaps unsurprisingly, and are discussed and refuted to some extent in numerous articles at Skeptical Science, among other places.

...

In all fairness, I could probably dissect most arguments similarly and dig up links to this or that refutation. However, my point here is not to try to claim that Salby is wrong -- I don't know that, and I don't have the educational background to make that judgment. My point, instead, is that Salby's views do not appear to be the authoritative end-all-and-be-all slam-dunk finishing end to the argument of whether humans are responsible for global warming.

Cheers,

You've made an admirable attempt to define your question clearly, but you didn't quite succeed. General relativity can be understood at a variety of mathematical levels, so saying you want to understand "the mathematics of general relativity" doesn't really pin it down.

The other issue is that you haven't defined your physics background. If you really want to understand GR, you need to be fairly sophisticated in physics.

The first thing I'd suggest is that you build a solid foundation of understanding in special relativity. The best intro to SR is Taylor and Wheeler, Spacetime Physics, and you already have the math background to understand that.

Physically, GR is a field theory. The first field theory was electromagnetism. E&M is a lot easier to understand than GR, because it takes place on a fixed background of flat spacetime, and it also connects directly to everyday experience. The more intuition and technical skill you can build up in the context of E&M, the better prepared you'll be for GR. For someone ambitious about going far in physics, the best intro to E&M is Purcell, Electricity and Magnetism. Purcell uses vector calculus, and he tries to teach you all the vector calc you need as he goes along. However, you will want some of the preparation provided by a second-semester calc course, and you will probably also have an easier time if you can also study from a separate book on vector calculus. Here is a free online calc book that I like, and here is a free vector calc book you could use. When you're learning second-semester calc, I'd suggest you skip the integration tricks that form the bulk of such a course; they're largely irrelevant to your goal, and nowadays you can use Maxima or integrals.com for that kind of thing.

With that background, you're more than prepared to start studying GR at the level of Exploring Black Holes, by Taylor and Wheeler.

If you want to go on after that and understand GR at a higher mathematical level, you could try an upper-division undergrad book such as Hartle or my own free book, and then maybe move on to a graduate-level texts. The mathematics used in graduate-level texts is typically introduced explicitly in the text itself; basically tensors and calculus on a manifold. You don't need any more math prerequisites than vector calculus before diving in. The classic graduate text is Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler. I would still recommend it wholeheartedly, except that it's now decades out of date. A more modern alternative is Carroll; there is a free online version, plus a more complete and up to date print version. Other GR books worth owning are General Relativity by Wald and The Large-Scale Structure of Space-Time by Hawking and Ellis.

a) A Chinese knock-off

b) Reverse engineering

Here's what we need to do: email the principals: Professor Allan Snyder, Neil Weste and ask them to please re-consider making their product more open. This would get all sorts of hackers involved and result in significantly increased sales. I really do not understand Emotive's marketing strategy. If you want to own a market, a mix of closed and open source software is the route to go: the Google phone is a great example: mostly open source software with the phone communications stack closed source (for obvious reasons).

Well, it would be a bit hard to complain about the camera if it takes one photo every few years or so and dumps them in with, what, billions of other images, meh, it wouldn't bother me at all. Of course to be fair, my street is not on google view although it is in the middle of numerous other streets that are. just one of those odd google street view quirks.

In quite little old Adelaide, SA, I have found people are more irritated by their address not being properly defined on street view and not being above to say email the google link as driving directions, rather than their property of themselves showing up on street view. Perhaps it is a personal space thing, in countries like Australia where there is a lot of personal space available are more comfortable to rather impersonal distant incursions and, people in Japan who are basically stacked one atop another with very little personal space are more reactive of incursions whilst seemingly are more willing to specifically intrude upon another person's space.

Of course one has to wonder how much google's competitors secretly motivate opposition to google's street because they lack a comparable service. When it comes to finding a place on a map, MSN search, Yahoo et all suck in comparison to being able to take a squiz ( http://www.ling.mq.edu.au/news/australian_style/v16_no1/word_column.htm ) at a place and it's approaches before you get there, it certainly makes life easy and, I have to admit to being a bit of a google street view tourist.

Christ, you're lazy and ignorant.

Plato refers to how people were told they were different based on what materials god put into them - ome were gold, some silver, some bronze. You've never read Plato?

India's caste system is well-known for stratifying people based on family, in a rather rigid way (especially considering the disparate populations involved).

The House of Mirth revolves around Lily Bart, who has social standing but no money and her potential suitors. One of them, Simon Rosedale, has money but no standing and wants to marry Lily in order to make it in to society. That plot wouldn't make sense if social classes had always worked the modern way, which is apparently the only way you think they've always worked.

If you'd just skim this overview you can see that while the classes change and there is some mobility, stratification has been present in many societies and often associates itself with things other than "making your mark."

Which fields? I also am a trained observer, and my observations are somewhat different.

I have submitted to conferences and journals in two rather distinct fields (cognitive science and natural language processing) and have come across few that did not accept LaTeX, though sometimes in cognitive science it was a bit of an uphill battle.

Most commonly for conferences (which in natural language processing and some other computer science fields are the main up-to-date research publication avenue) there is a style file and document template for LaTeX, which you use as the starting point for your document. You then send through a PDF which is already formatted exactly according to their guidelines from the moment of submission.

The premiere journal in natural language processing (Computational Linguistics) for example, certainly requires LaTeX.

I'm not saying you're wrong, as I'm sure there are plenty of fields where Word is the norm. It just varies. Personally I find LaTeX extremely frustrating, but it is sufficiently less frustrating than Word that I strongly prefer it. The key benefits for me all flow from the separation of format from content. The formatting instructions are explicit, rather than hidden in invisible characters and attributes of the document. If you keep the text-based source in version control, you can always get back to a previous state, and don't wind up have multiple divergent copies as attachments to a multitude of emails. Manually merging a word document that has branched is a bit of a pain, to put it mildly.

It's up to the individual. My wife prefers Mrs instead of Ms. Perhaps the researcher in question prefers Miss instead of Ms.?
You could always ask her. (thanks slushdork)
On your doctoral point, in the above site she states that she is an Honours student. That's post-grad. Next step is Masters or Doctorate.
As she is not a Phd, Richard Macey (the author of the article ) entitled her as 'Miss'.

Will she look like this?

I think that the selling point is that the kids don't all have to be in the same room.

I did a software platform for a similar project back in 1998. The impetus for taking it online was that universities from all over the world would take part in the scenarios, which generally ran for a couple of months. The only example mentioned on the site is that in 2005 it was Macquarie University in Australia and the University of Texas taking part. At other times they've done it with the American University in Cairo, other schools in America and a few other Australian universities.

So yes, there may have been 30 kids all in the same room taking part, but there were probably another 15 kids sitting in another room a very long way away. There is no way all those kids could afford to be in the same place for the duration.

Free collaborative wiki style textbooks for the third world would be great. There are also already a few free textbooks available available on the Internet such as these:

• Discover Physics
• The Modern Revolution in Physics
• Newtonian Physics
• Lessons In Electric Circuits Volumes I - VI
• A First Course in Linear Algebra
• First Year Calculus

Perhaps we ultimately could end up with some textbooks done collaborative Wiki style and other free text books done in a different way. Either way I think free textbooks would be great especially for common slow changing subjects such algebra, calculus, English, history and such.

The term, "Dark Ages" is generally shunned by historians as it calls up inaccurate stereotypes.

"This concept of a 'Dark Age' was created by Italian humanists and was originally intended as a sweeping criticism of the character of Late Latin literature. ... Most modern historians dismiss the notion that the era was a 'Dark Age' by pointing out that this idea was based on ignorance of the period combined with popular stereotypes: many previous authors would simply assume that the era was a dismal time of violence and stagnation and use this assumption to prove itself.

"In Britain and the United States, the phrase 'Dark Ages' has occasionally been used by professionals, with severe qualification, as a term of periodization. This usage is intended as non-judgmental and simply means the relative lack of written record, 'silent' as much as 'dark.'"

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

The Roman Empire collapsed at least partially as a consequence of Romans using barbarians (ancestors of France and Germany) to fill their menial jobs, particularly in the military and government services. The reason that 410 A.D. is sometimes considered the start of the Dark Ages is that year the barbarians (Vandals, Visigoths, etc.) destroyed the City of Rome.

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

At some point in the 5th Century, the rule of Western Roman Emperors over the Western Roman Empire generally is believed to have ended, with the result of the general breakup of the Western Roman Empire. Or not:

"The traditional date of the fall of the Roman Empire is September 4, 476 when Romulus Augustus, the Emperor of the Western Roman Empire was deposed. However, many historians question this date, and use other benchmarks to describe the 'Fall.' Why the Empire fell seems to be relevant to every new generation, and a seemingly endless supply of theories are discussed on why it happened, or indeed if it happened at all."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Roman_ Empire

The history of the Dark Ages is not as simple as religion versus science. The people who coined the term, "medieval," that is, the humanists, were not necessarily a religious force, but they were opposed to intellectual rigor. As a consequence, scientific inquiry under the humanists declined. (see "EVALUATIONS OF MEDIEVAL CULTURE: The Renaissance View of the Middle Ages," Macquarie University http://www.humanities.mq.edu.au/Ockham/x5201.html )

The previous poster is quite correct that the reason that we have this scientific document today is that some monk wrote over it. You should not fault the monk for that; in the 19th Century, many European explorers were just as happy to burn piles of papyrus documents that lay strewn all about in the trash, so they could smell the odor, losing for us uncountable history in the process. The monk's re-use of the writing surface was standard practice for all sorts of writing uses for thousands of years, because writing materials were expensive. I recall that some of the great early modern European astronomers wrote their observations on a piece of wood, which they sanded down when they were finished, so they could re-use the board.

This article is useful in that it gets people thinking about the problem. Now some clever person can come up with a proposed solution and post an article about it. That's how it works.

It's not like nobody's ever discussed these issues before. Or have they?

On the matter of OSS and Australia, Things are happening to make (F)OSS adoption a bit easier for those new to the area. The Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software ASK-OSS is a government funded grant thingy (they call it an "initiative") aimed to provide a knowledge gateway specifically for the Australian higher education sector.

The website's just gone live so information's a bit thin on the ground, but there is definitely movement down here!

Lars must be doing the rounds in Sydney. Just the other week he did this same presentation at Macquarie University. Rob Pike was there too.

It's always funny to me when people defend "capitalism" without even realising that the term was invented as a perjorative by its greatest enemy. (Surely this is the definition of being a reactionary...)

Marx distinguishes capitalism from straight commerce by pointing out that, in capitalism, workers neither own the means of production, nor do they own the fruits of their labour. Thus, companies that have stakeholding and share-vesting programs are less "capitalist" than those in which workers receive a direct wage.

It's certainly true that Google treats its employees better, but I don't know if it's less capitalist than MS. Depends if they dole out shares, I suppose. As for the idea that companies have to crush the competition, no this isn't really capitalism, though I would imagine it's a fairly natural consequence of the Milton Friedman/Chicago school of free market competition.

"An Australian security firm is about to launch a clustered Linux distribution based on openMosix..."

You're kidding me, right? CHAOS has been out for some 2 years (at least). Unless I'm misunderstanding, or another Australian organization is doing this...:

CHAOS Distro

But what do I know.

Thus my standard sequence of events is to go to one of the PC labs on campus, print to PDF using Acrobat and setting it to 9-up, then copying the PDF file to my commp sci network space, going to the Solaris labs, and printing the PDF. I'd like to streamline this process. Any idea?

Try these:

• Google search
• One way
• Another way

'Mathematics is not something that you find lying around in your back yard. It's produced by the human mind. Yet if we ask where mathematics works best, it is in areas like particle physics and astrophysics, areas of fundamental science that are very, very far removed from everyday affairs.' 'It suggests to me that consciousness and our ability to do mathematics are no mere accident, no trivial detail, no insignificant by-product of evolution.'

There are a number of places in Sydney holding events for the transit. It seems that Sydney Observatory is booked out, though you can go along in the evening to watch various webcasts of the transit as it goes on in sunnier places.

The event I'm involved with is the Macquarie University Observatory event, which is taking place on the vacant lot at the intersection of Culloden and Talavera Roads, North Ryde (out behind the uni, not at the observatory).

For a gold coin donation you'll be able to look through a telescope at Venus, see the video display from one of our ccd cameras, observe the sun through a variety of projection methods and also with eclipse shades. So, it's good value, and all proceeds go to building a new observatory and planetarium (as opposed to the Feed the Starvind Astronomers Foundation, which I think is a more noble cause).

We'll be there from 3pm, see here for more information.

There are a number of places in Sydney holding events for the transit. It seems that Sydney Observatory is booked out, though you can go along in the evening to watch various webcasts of the transit as it goes on in sunnier places.

The event I'm involved with is the Macquarie University Observatory event, which is taking place on the vacant lot at the intersection of Culloden and Talavera Roads, North Ryde (out behind the uni, not at the observatory).

For a gold coin donation you'll be able to look through a telescope at Venus, see the video display from one of our ccd cameras, observe the sun through a variety of projection methods and also with eclipse shades. So, it's good value, and all proceeds go to building a new observatory and planetarium (as opposed to the Feed the Starvind Astronomers Foundation, which I think is a more noble cause).

We'll be there from 3pm, see here for more information.

No article on Nanobacteria would be complete without a reference to Philla Uwins. A geologist who in 1999 was inspecting (deep, hot and old) drilling samples from the Western Australian coastline with a scanning electron microscope discovered unusual possible life forms from 20nm to 150nm, christening them nanobes. Well below the accepted 200nm miniumum thought possible for life. (it is thought that no living thing can contain the necessary machinary in containers below 200nm).

What followed is probably more interesting than this reported story (the discovery of nanobes in blood and their possible link to disease predates this article). Things started to hot up in the nanobe world when some research money came forward to see if these nanobes contained the necessary DNA to disprove the many *non life advocates*. Even physicist Paul Davies (Australian centre for Astrobiology) pondered the possibility that nanobes could be a possible link between life and non-life.

Armed with some results the Unwin team sent off a paper to every *major* reputable scientific journal only to have them turned down. The most common reason.... too controversial.

So I read this story and think of *mayo* clinic and the *ohhh must be reputable* tag that goes with it and thinking why hasn't Nature or some other journal taken so long to publish these ideas?. Science publishing appears to be more about convincing publishers (and peers) less about looking at the data.

The postscript to the story: The dot com crash in 2000 killed off more research into the DNA tests, the possible application of the nanobes into eating plastic (nanobes had a voracious appetite for petri dishes) and a potential commercial spin off. Phillipa still works at UQ.

• 
  assorted links
  
  http://www.uq.edu.au/nanoworld/uwins.html
  
  http://aca.mq.edu.au/PaulDavies/pdavies.html
  
  http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s2015 6. htm
  
  http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s132 23 5.htm
  
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273 ,3 840998,00.html
  
  

At Club Mac we will be having a party that afternoon, with several telescopes (6 have signed up so far, one with a video monitor so that large groups can view at once) at our observatory.

If you happen to be in Sydney that day, it's a good place to view these events from, as we do have a really good view to the west. Last year's transit of Mercury was spectacular. And we had 700 descend upon the observatory for the Opposition of Mars (which was chaotic beyond belief, but a great night).

There's not much info up yet, but here's the link to the observatory's website for the party.

See? A conspiracy theory. I figured such a baseless assertion would come down to that.
On the other hand, insurance companies and the National Highway Traffic & Safety Administration will tell you differently.

Oh, and "AARP" doesn't explain how women are supposed to be more dangerous than men despite having 50% of the ratio of fatal accidents per driver compared to men. Admittedly, women do have more total accidents than men in nearly every age group by about 20-50%, but almost all of these accidents are minor fender-benders making them overall far less dangerous and adjusting insurance rates accordingly.

Also, the young and the male are overall more likely to disregard traffic laws.

Googling for his firm "Brown & Maugham" turns up this libel case from 1837 Australia. In that case the printer was warned by the court that if Messrs. Brown or Maughan had died in a duel, he would have been hanged for printing the libelous material.

(1) Insert the knob behind the lever.

In (1) you could perhaps use a handfull of terms instead of "knob" -- controlled language enforces only certain licensed terms, this increasing overall consistency (same terms for same thing). This can be checked automatically once a positive list (or typically a hierarchy called "thesaurus") has been setup.

(2) He saw the girl on the hill with the telescope.

The second/third case are lexical and structural ambiguity: we want to avoid problems like with (2), where "saw" could be past of "to see" or have another (more morbid) interpretation. Even worse, it is unclear whether the girl is on the hill, carrying the telescope or whether "he" is spying on the girl with the telescope. I leave it as an exercise to the reader how many combinations (possible interpretations) there are in a sentence like (2) [Hint: Which verb? Who is where? Who carries the telescope?].

In a Controlled Language scenario e.g. ACE, after some initial investments in thesaurus construction, thesaurus lookup and simple parsing techniques are used to report problematic passages to a human editor, who has to correct it manually.

This is not programming in natural language. Typically only large companies can afford the initial investment.

One area of study had been Repetition Blindness that thinks a person's ability to remember pictures when subjected to many at a time lessens.

This is described as remarkable lapses.

They also describe how people cannot tell subtle shifts in scenes.

A neat way of looking at the news, but I wonder how much is missed?

for a recent take on word shape see
Perea, M., & Rosa, E. (2002). Does "whole word shape" play a role in visual word recognition? Perception and Psychophysics, 64, 785-794. [pdf] from Manolo Perea's homepage
For a take from someone who used to believe in the importance of letter order (I can't really tell what his opinion is these days), see Max Coltheart's homepage (no downloads, but googling "coltheart pdf" gives some decent results). Max came up with the doual-route-model, and it is actually rather suspicious, that Kevin Larson doesn't quote him, since he is in many ways the godfather of visual word recognition research. (For a takedown of Max's main points see Van an Orden, G. C., Pennington, B. F., & Stone, G. O. (2001). What do double dissociations prove? Cognitive Science, 25, 111-172.[pdf] from Guy Van Orden's homepage (his main opponent, who miraculously also was not mentioned by Larson)

Mirror here It's at uni, so I've no idea how long it will last...

I am a christain (who goes to church on Sunday) and normaly I would never post anything on a subject like this, but I have noticed that atheists love these subjects for them to go on about how great they are for not falling for that whole religious crap.

So, I thought I would add this:

1. Why are atheists so anti-religious? Why should it matter what I believe?
2. For atheists, atheistism is their religion, which is quite ironic.
3. It is possible for someone to have an education and still be religious.
4. Some atheists really want famous scientists to be athiests.
5. ANY religion is better than none, for what good are we with out any spirituality?

Atheist's don't exist. If you ask anyone why they are an atheist they will proceed to explain their religion of non belief.
- Monksarnn

An atheist is a man who believes himself an accident.
- Francis Thompson

God not only plays dice. He sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.
- Stephen Hawking

This should not be in the "Science" heading it's just creationist political opinion.

It's the opinion of a well-known scientist, who isn't particularly kind to the Creationist argument either (he calls it unsatisfying and unscientific in the article, if you would notice).

Man do you know anything about this guy? Check out his home page: http://aca.mq.edu.au/pdavies.html. He is a professor of Natural Philosophy. You don't seem to be familiar with this term, however it's the simply the old name for what we now call Science. It does not in any way make him a "philosophy professor". This guy has done much work (and written books about) cosmology, gravitation, and quantum field theory. He's published 25 books and over 150 papers to places like Nature and The Journal of Physics. Pretty hard core. Don't be so quick to dismiss someone because you don't understand their title.

Also, as a previous post pointed out, he hinted at a basic problem with multiverse theories: many are unfalsifiable. Unfalsifiable theorys cannot be tested, and are thus scientific. So yes, maybe some fantastic equations someone gets imply there may be other universes out there, however if they are completely separate from ours, then we cannot test whether or not they exist. It's like asking if God exists or not, no experiment can disprove his existence (or indeed prove it), and thus it's not science!

This article was his scientific opinions of a theory which deals with cosmology, which is one of his primary areas of study. Maybe you don't agree with what he has to say, but it is clear cosmology is something he knows at least a little about!

It turns out that already today all successful applications of socalled "artificial intelligence" are self assembling.

In the first approaches to artificial intelligence people used programming languages to obtain systems that generate intelligent or at least apparently intelligent behavior.

All newer approaches to artificial intelligence start with a large number of very simple units that, learning from data from the real world, develop specific patterns of connections. Many models even develop their own structure in such a way.

From my perspective is intelligence as well as artificial intelligence only possible in a system that can self-structure.

"Hell, most of these clowns keep quoting stuff like 'games that run at 60 frames per second' without knowing that their fucking TV only shows them 30."

Yes, but this is important. As long as your refresh rate is double of your redraw rate, your eye won't notice tearing or other visible problems (ever benchmarked Quake with vysnc turned off?). The 60 fps is important to the timing loop of the engine, as well as to the visual quality. Grab a Dreamcast game like Shenmue which has slowdown in certain parts, and watch as the tearing suddenly appears when the engine starts dropping frames as it's rendering.

It's the same basic idea as the the DAC in your soundcard: a 44Khz sampled digital stream is required to approximate an analog 22Khz sample, due to the nature of the sound wave: "The absolute minimum number of samples per cycle needed to properly reproduce a sinusoid is two -- one at the peak, one at the trough. This will give a crude approximation to the original signal but will be able to capture the frequency and amplitude. This means that the sampling frequency should be at least twice the frequency of the sinusoid being digitised; this is know as the Nyquist Frequency." (Pretty graphs are here)

"*i* can barely tell the difference, and I am a graphic designer."

Well, now you know.

Well, "methane at depth" seems to be a bit more complex than simple CH4 at the surface. Gold points out that methane dissolves other hydrocarbons at greater depths -- see the end of a paragraph just below Figure 1 in this document. I think the isomer mixes refer to oil components other than methane, it's just a tad difficult to make 1C-to-4H molecules of shapes different than the methane shape. "The overall hydrocarbon composition corresponds to the equilibrium state at temperatures 1,300 to 1,500 C and pressures of 20 to 40 kb. The estimate is that this is the condition in the upper mantle at depths of 60 to 160 km."

Mantle volatile concentrations
Note that these concentrations are pretty much steady state now.

"The calculated primary mantle concentrations include (in ppm) 1.5 N; 335 CO2 (where CO2 =total C); 673 H20,; 32 F; 20 Cl; 0.07 Br; 0.011 I; and 174 S."
Oh, good. Carbon is dissolved in the huge amount of magma material. 335 parts per million... of 4.043 x 10^24 kg... is 1.35 x 10^21 kg of carbon in the mantle. That's 1.35 x 10^24 g, compared to 65.5 x10^21 g of carbon in the crust. Based on those numbers (there are many other estimates), there still is ten times more carbon in the mantle than in the crust.

Carbon in subducted rock has to go someplace. There are five possibilities:
So now it's changed from primordial to subducted....

Yup, I'm listening to you. If the carbon did boil off, then carbon going through subduction zones must have been cycled by the oceanic crusts several times...so I listed those possibilities of what could happen to subducted carbon.

now you have to explain why most of the world's oil is found in failed rift basins far from subduction zones.

Subduction is merely how surface carbon can get back underneath the crust, and my above comments were wondering where it could go...and apparently some of it can dissolve in magma. However, if most of the world's oil is in rift basins...a rift basin is due to at least one fracture in the crust, which is likely to offer a path for hydrocarbons to migrate upward through the crust. So I'm not surprised at the relationship with rift basins (although modify "most of the world's oil" to "many of the known oil fields").

Yup, awful crimes. How was Copernicus punished?
Irrelevant.

Not irrelevant when you're claiming that disagreement with popular opinion is relevant.

I haven't seen him dismissing plate tectonics...
Theory outline
Look at the section entitled 'The Formation Process of the Earth'. Here he asserts that many of the earth's features are formed by impact, heat sources (incorrectly indentified as around the pacific) are the result of chemical reactions, and that the mantle is unmixed

Hmm. Yup, he is saying that there is only partial melting. I see at the end of Interpretations Based on the Carbon Stable Isotopes he points out that subduction cycling also would have affected the isotope ratios. I don't see why you think there are not heat sources around the Pacific "ring of fire", but I do find it hard to dismiss plate tectonics and a molten mantle. I wonder how Gold, the namer of the magnetosphere, presently believes the Earth's magnetic field is generated.

He does state that no gases were incorporated in Earth, so carbon, water, and nitrogen must have come from material within the planet.
That sounds like a direct contradiction to me.

I should have quoted: "very little gaseous material was incorporated", which is different from "no elements which are gases in the Earth's atmosphere".

Abiogenic theories don't care what kind of rock is near the surface, although obviously an impermeable cap is needed for a reservoir where we tap one.
I've been trying to get this into your head - IF abiogenic theories were correct, THEN we would find oil where there was no source rock, or where the source rock had never been heated, BUT we don't.

Look over my previous comments, or start with Gold's deep drilling in Sweden. There are many examples of hydrocarbon finds which are not explained by biogenic source rocks.

There also are issues about the temperature and pressures being insufficient to create biogenic oil in shallow sedimentary rocks.
Care to cite any references?

"Temperatures and pressures in the sedimentary blanket are certainly far from the conditions necessary to account for the isomeric composition characteristic of all natural oils."

Carbon dioxide is not methane
Yes, and this is entirely the point; volcanoes are well known for emitting carbon dioxide, but not for methane. It's a pity Gold didn't put in any references for Hawaii, apart from 'eyewitness accounts'. After all, significant non-biogenic methane emissions from Hawaii would actually give him some evidence.

I was just pointing out that there is carbon coming from that Hawaiian hot spot which is a little far from subduction carbon sources. Carbon in any form in this location is interesting, however it has been pointed out to me that the hot spot might be melting ocean-floor carbon deposits, so the carbon could be coming from freshly-melted rock at the edge of the hot area rather than from primary magma.

"Surface" as in "origin not in deep rock". "Pools of muck" as in "plant and animal matter buried in low-oxygen conditions" (has to be low-oxygen or the long chains with hydrogen will not exist and no long-chain hydrocarbons can appear).

Actually, oil comes from fairly specific algae; these deposits are rare. But that's better than the rhetoric you were using before.

By "stripped", I assume you mean broken down from long chain molecules to simpler structures.

No, I mean escaped to the surface. And if all these hydrocarbons are methane at depth, then why the claim that the isomer mixes represent >60km depth? Can't both be right.

Mantle volatile concentrations

Note that these concentrations are pretty much steady state now.

Carbon in subducted rock has to go someplace. There are five possibilities:

So now it's changed from primordial to subducted.... now you have to explain why most of the world's oil is found in failed rift basins far from subduction zones. Carbon dioxide appears in subduction related volcanoes, yes.

Yup, awful crimes. How was Copernicus punished?

Irrelevant.

I haven't seen him dismissing plate tectonics, although I don't know if he believes that the 4 billion-year-old continental cratons contain carbon from Earth's formation, or if the deep carbon in them is from subducted ocean floor (ocean floor before 200 Ma is gone).

Theory outline

Look at the section entitled 'The Formation Process of the Earth'. Here he asserts that many of the earth's features are formed by impact, heat sources (incorrectly indentified as around the pacific) are the result of chemical reactions, and that the mantle is unmixed

He does state that no gases were incorporated in Earth, so carbon, water, and nitrogen must have come from material within the planet.

That sounds like a direct contradiction to me. As far as the moon impact goes, this would have indeed melted the entire mantle (the core had separated by then); the moon has the same composition as the earth's mantle.

Although perhaps the subduction under the Arabian plate since 650 Ma was more important in carbon sources than the movement.

Or the large scale deposition of an excellent source rock.

The pressures by surrounding plates are interesting, but I don't know if that caused any fractures in the oil-producing areas -- volcanic rock is to the west, not within the oil fields.

Oil and volcanics only show any association under conditions where he stretching factor of a basin exceeds 2 or so. For the gulf, compression-reactivation of deep structural features created many of the traps as anticlines (you should be telling me this stuff..).

Abiogenic theories don't care what kind of rock is near the surface, although obviously an impermeable cap is needed for a reservoir where we tap one.

I've been trying to get this into your head - IF abiogenic theories were correct, THEN we would find oil where there was no source rock, or where the source rock had never been heated, BUT we don't.

There also are issues about the temperature and pressures being insufficient to create biogenic oil in shallow sedimentary rocks.

Care to cite any references? Remember that oil and gas can migrate over hundreds of kilometers laterally from source rocks under good conditions. Downward pressure driven migration is also well known; it is not then a surprise to find commercial oil in basement rocks where conditions are appropriate for this.

Yes, the mid-Atlantic ridge is a spreading zone, so it should have metal-rich magma rather than the silicon-rich lava in a compression zone.

And this is relevant how? I was merely pointing out that gold's claims of a primordial heterogenious mantle were incorrect. I.e. the mantle itself is well mixed.

Carbon dioxide is not methane

Yes, and this is entirely the point; volcanoes are well known for emitting carbon dioxide, but not for methane. It's a pity Gold didn't put in any references for Hawaii, apart from 'eyewitness accounts'. After all, significant non-biogenic methane emissions from Hawaii would actually give him some evidence.

My one beef with BBEdit is it doesn't support hypertext internally. That was a cool feature of Alpha, which will soon be out for os x. I am waiting for alphaX so I can play with that feature. I work with large quantities of text documents (not always HTML but easily converted) and it would be great to have an easy way to navigate them in a primitive web browser like lynx or whatever but internal to bbedit so I don't have to switch to mozilla every time. Which of course doesn't word-wrap when you're looking at text files which is annoying if you actually want to read them rather than just edit code.

But on the brighter side, back when I first ordered bbedit (version 3 I think it was, something like $50 at educational pricing) they sent me a free "Software That Doesn't Suck" T-shirt.

I'm starting to think that the returns by allowing privacy are something like the Laffer curve with piracy along the x-axis and benefit along the y-axis; by allowing no piracy, then you don't benefit, nor do you benefit by having all copies of your software pirated. However, if you give some leeway and allow some of the copies of your software to be pirated, then it gives you maximum benefit. Unfortunately, it is entirely possible that the whole piracy vs. benefit graph is more reminiscent of a Neo-Laffer curve, where there are so many possible factors which can affect it that it is impossible to tell in advance what effect piracy will have.

If Windows is installed I'd consider the computer to be rooted anyway. For the Americans have a look in the Macquarie dictionary for root and rooted.

If Windows is installed I'd consider the computer to be rooted anyway. For the Americans have a look in the Macquarie dictionary for root and rooted.

IANAP (I Am Not a Psychologist!), but check Sociopathy.

• '[psychopaths have a personality that] emasculates the constraining force of social rules: people for whom... the idea of a common good is merely a puzzling and inconvenient abstraction.' Canter says 'Seems that back then the Internet was more or less the private playpen of academics and geeks, and any commercial solicitations were considered off limits.' That sounds like a bunch of inconvenient soial rules. Check 1
• 'Groups high on psychopathy include... high-pressure salesmen and stock promoters... unethical lawyers...' Check 2
• '... psychopaths are characterised by an absence of remorse or any conception that their behaviours ought to be changed.' In reply to the question 'Do you have any regrets about sending the spam?' Canter says 'I don't think so. Given the same set of circumstance--the same time, the stage of the Internet--I'd probably do the same thing.' Check 3

laugh> I wish I got to see it..!

I'd never heard of "Category Theory" or commuting diagrams before; thank you for the reply..!

I know this has nothing to do with edible SOUP or unedible SOAP and might be deemed off-topic, but it has to mentioned someplace on this forum. Please, observe the the use of the article "an" in an English sentence. "an" is an indefinate article, the form of "a" used before a vowel sound. See here. Here "content" does not start with a vowel, and here "German" does not start with a vowel sound.