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I have registered turingmechanics.uk. I have watched carefully for years (note my /. serial 987). I am descended academically from Turing, and after letting the mental elf numpties try to destroy my mind, and concluding that they cannot, I am confident to ring the doorbell and offer my assistance. I will for the UK Guild of Turing Mechanics for the purpose of putting Dear Alan's legacy straight. For reference, here is my entry in the mathemalogical family tree: http://www.genealogy.math.ndsu...

Famous African mathematicians: ? ? ? ?

"Famous", dunno, but I also dunno how many significant mathematicians are famous.

I also don't know whether the guy whose doctoral thesis was "Mod-2 K-Theory of the Second Iterated Loop Space on a Sphere" should have been famous as a mathematician, but then again, I don't know what a "Mod-2 K-Theory of the Second Iterated Loop Space on a Sphere" is. Do you?

See the Virtual Cell Animation Collection at http://vcell.ndsu.nodak.edu/animations/

I should add that I am with Alltel and everyone here I know who isn't with them is with Verizon. All CDMA service. And I can place a call from anywhere in that vast empty area except for places where the terrain doesn't prevent it (which happens in the bottom of the Badlands). I can even use the Gmail and other apps on my BlackBerry from those areas.

For anyone interested, this page has some quite simple (for a slashdotter :-P) diagrams that explain what I meant about "before the visual cortex".

Central Visual Pathways

Look at the second diagram. It has numbers from 1 to 6. This blind man probably has damage beyond point 6 - so he can't "see". But you can see neurons terminating in the LGN.

There's another diagram under The Pupillary Light Reflex which shows a simple pathway that would also be unaffected in this man.

The Riemann Hypothesis and RSA encryption both have to do with prime numbers, but the relationship between the two pretty much ends there. To break RSA you need to know how to factor large numbers quickly. RH, on the other hand, pretains to the distribution of prime numbers. It's pretty unlikely that a proof would make computers any faster at factorizing.

So this begs the question that a lot of people have been asking on this thread: why should you care? There tongue-in-cheek answer is that a solution is worth $1,000,000. While that response may suffice for non-mathematicians, mathematicians would have another, more important reason to celebrate. RH and its generalization, the Grand Riemann Hypothesis, have an absolutely enormous number of profound impliations in number theory, and it is difficult to overstate how critical a proof of either would be. (The implications are too technical to write about here, but you can read about them in most good survey books on analytic number theory; for example, see section 5.8 of Iwaniec & Kowalski). A successful proof probably won't affect your life in any meaningful way (unless you work with analytic number theory for a living), but it would be monumental in the world of math - indeed, this is precisely why there's a reward for solving it. If that's not enough for you, just remember that many mathematicians are motivated not by fame or money but by the beauty and elegance of mathematics, and any proof of RH would establish a truly beautiful and amazing result.

Of course, there's also the question: is Li's proof correct? I certainily don't know, and I doubt anyone will for quite some time, but there's an interesting story. Li's Ph.D. adviser was Louis de Branges who, as noted on this very website, claimed to prove RH in 2004. His proof has not been accepted by the mathematical community and is widely considered to be incorrect, in large part because the method he wclaims to use was shown, in a 2000 paper co-authored by none other than Xian-Jin Li, to have holes in it.

Interestingly, DeBranges was Xian-Jin Li's advisor:

http://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=16641

The word algebra even has an Arabic root. Perhaps we should call algebra "Liberty Arithmetic" in the post-9/11 world.

-b.

Firstly, lets compare:
        http://www.pgsql.cz/index.php/Project_of_UDF_and_i ts_realization_at_C_for_PostgreSQL
        http://empyrean.lib.ndsu.nodak.edu/~nem/mysql/udf/

AFAICT, they're both about as ugly as each other for writing your own UDFs, my point was I can download a few hundred UDFs for MySQL but I don't seem to be able to do the same thing for Postgress.

--

But say I wanted to give postgres another whirl (mostly to see if it is faster than MySQL at what I normally do). I've found SQL Fairy, is that the best approach?

I don't tend to write SQL directly. I write python code that calls the company database wrapper, which calls MySQLdb, which calls DBI, which calls MySQL. Presumably shifting to postgres involves changing the wrapper to call PyPgSQL. Is that any good, or am I in for a world of pain? I use server side cursors extensively and query the tables, but otherwise most code is just passed straight to the interpreter.

PS: I don't suppose you know if R trees are being extended in postgres beyond three dimensions? If so that would be enough justification to make me want to put serious effort in.

No, I think you're missing the point. People are interested in their own lineage and the standard icon represents this lineage. Sure, there are lots of other branches to the tree. But just as people like to construct their own family trees, rather than those of complete strangers, people like to see the history by which they came about, rather than a bunch of branches that went elsewhere or didn't go anwhere at all. When I go to this web site I can form a line going back a few hundred years showing my 'ancestry'. If I publish this line, nobody is going to make the mistake of thinking that I'm claiming that I am the inevitable outcome of people completing PhDs, they're going to to know that this is my own specific lineage.

You seem to be presuming that people are incredibly stupid. Given that it is common knowledge that there are things like bacteria, mice, earthworms and mosquitoes in existence, it should be fairly clear to anyone that nobody is proposing a theory in which bigger brains are an inevitable outcome. (Maybe you can demonstrate that there are people who do believe this.) So I am still at a complete loss to know what is supposed to be wrong with the standard icon which gives a rough outline of our own lineage.

And of course there is a sense in which brain size increase is inevitable. After all, any intelligent organism, anywhere in the universe, that is a product of evolution by natural selection, investigating its own history, is going to see an average upward trend, even if at some points in their ancestry brain sizes decreased.

http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/html/id.phtml ?id=11618&fChrono=1

According to this genealogy page, both Michael Thomas Anderson and Shing-Tung Yau attended the University of California Berkeley.

And this is not all, both of them had the SAME supervisor: H. Blaine (Herbert) Lawson, Jr.

This is amazing!!

"On one hand we have an established Harvard Phd, who has testified before the U.S. congress, against a game journalist with a bachelors degree in Psychology."

That doesn't prove anything. I have a Ph.D., and I don't know shit!

http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/html/id.phtml ?id=11874

We've got other options, though, such as switchgrass and hemp

But, until fairly recently, those weren't suitable for conversion into ethanol because they don't have the necessary sugar/carbohydrate levels. Too much cellulose.

And yes, part of the issue is climate. Sugarcane requires more heat and water than corn. Corn, while affected by drought, actually has a complex system to withstand drought type conditions and conserve water, though it costs growth. Sugarbeets, while able to produce more ethanol per acre, also require more water.

I think that when it comes to ethanol production, many crops will end up being used, customized to maximize production per acre, available water, etc... Sugarcane in the south where water is readily available, but it's a little more complicated up north.

About 30 minutes ago I looked myself up in the mathematics genealogy project and discovered I was a 'descendant' of Paul Du Bois-Reymond. I'd never heard of this guy before. And now suddenly I'm reading about his brother on Slashdot. Weird!

Hint: Volcanoes (and the platonic shifts effecting them), solar flares, et cetera. All of which dwarf ALL human activity into a single fisherman wizzing off the side of a boat into in an ocean full of causality.

Secondly, I challenge you to explain what effect solar flares have on atmospheric CO2 levels. You call me naive yet you can't even form a coherent argument.

Read this article which is a recent Slashdot Thread: [link snip]

I did read the article and the discussion around it. Personally, I find his reasoning to be shaky and his references to climate models to be disingenuous. There are a lot of climate models, but very few are effective at predicting even historical data (give it data up to 2000, does it provide any predictions that match 2000-2005?). Though they are being continuously improved, there is a limitation to predictive accuracy based on the same limitations that meteorologists have: the earth's weather system is highly chaotic.

Where do you get your numbers on the amount of CO2 released by humans.

Well, you forced me to do some more research and what I thought was a slam-dunk fact (ten thousand to one proportion) turned out to be fairly shaky and almost certainly incorrect.

One older source:
http://www.sciam.com/askexpert_question.cfm?articl eID=000D4121-91C5-1CD1-B4A8809EC588EEDF&catID=3&to picID=22

Newer source #1:
http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/frequent_quest ions/grp6/question1375.html

Newer source #2:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Global_Carbon_E mission_by_Type.png

Newer source #3:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=87

My older source and the newer sources differ substantially. The older source states 10,000:1 human:natural and 110MT CO2/year from volcanoes (implied 1100GT/year from humans). Source #1 states a long-term average of 500MT CO2/year from volcanoes and a recent average of 17.6GT CO2/year from humans. Source #2 provides recent human emission totals of 5GT to 6.5GT C/year from humans (equivalent to 16.4GT to 21.3GT CO2/year).

I think that the older source took the amount of human CO2 emissions over the past 200 years (though Source #3 states that total human CO2 emissions are 500GT CO2, so that's not enough to fully explain his error). Based on newer and better researched data, I've now updated my statements to reflect that humans release 32 times as much CO2 as volcanoes on average.

You also mention that volcano eruptions cause the Earth's temperature to drop because the sulphur compounds reflect heat. You then say that mankind releases 8181 times more that that.

Clearly an error. Humans release about 10MT SO2/year. Volcanos release on average 2.5MT SO2/year, though individual eruptions release much more than others (El Cichien 8.5MT, Pinatubo 17MT, Mt. St. Helens 212 KT). Also, the exact kind of sulphur "stuff" released and where it ends up makes a huge difference on whether it has any impact on global temperatures. Some volcanoes, like Tambora release lots of SO2 to the upper atmosphere, which causes an optically dense haze that blocks some of the sun's radiation. The SO2 in the upper atmosphere and the haze it creates can persist for more than two years. Other volcanoes, like Mt. St. Helens, release more ash, which does create more clouds in the months following the eruption, but is almost entirely washed out of the atmosphere within six months.

Most human emissions of SO2 occur in the lower atmosphere, and contribute heavily to smog and haze close to the ground, but are more quickly removed from the air by rain than the SO2 delivered to the upper atmosphere by volcanoes. Also, because the haze is lower to the ground (often at ground level), the optical scattering from the haze doesn't reflect nearly as much back out (most of the radiation is captured in one way or another by the time it reaches ground level).

To me, the biggest remaining issue is to show a caus

This paper said in the summary that this process leads to "realignment of chromosomes at themetaphase plate." So, they do not merge back into one.

What the scientists were mostly concerned with is the fact that this supported the theory that a particular protein directed cell division, at least during a certain phase. The partial reversal of mitosis was just an interesting side effect. The medical and other biological research interest comes in place because now that we have identified this protein and proven that it is indeed the one that regulates mitosis, we can prevent further mitosis by the use of an inhibitor chemical. While this may seem to be a possible cure for cancer, such a discovery would be extremely difficult to put into practice as a pill you take or shot you take. This inhibitor would likely suspend mitosis of ALL cells, breaking down the functioning of many biological processes. Unless a compound is found that preferentially affects cancer cells, which may be possible due to the high division rate in some forms of cancer. This would have little to no effect on cancers caused by a failure in apoptosis. Then again "Cancer" is just a blanket term for a large number of different disorders in which a group of cells grows and divides without control, causing detriment to the rest of the body. Making cancer study mroe difficult is that it often takes failures in several different control systems for a cell to become carcinogenic, as there is a fair bit of redundancy built into these sytems. A "predisposition" to a certain type of cancer often means that one of the inherited genes controlling one arm of the control system is already flawed, so less somatic mutations are required before carcinogenesis. Inherited failure in too many of the control pathways would probably result in termination or developmental failure at a very early stage of embryonic development.

Even if you had the technology to stop ocean currents, doing so would obviously also stop your ability to get energy (because there would be no current). The most energy you can get from a turbine is known as the Betz Limit., which is approximately 59.6% for a wind turbine. I don't know if it's the same for a water turbine, but there is a limit.

but it still doesn't approach Photoshop's ease of use or flexibility.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. I suppose pointing out "Layers->Colors->Curves" isn't going to do any good, either, is it? I mean, what the hell is this? Are you people forced to use a computer with your hands cuffed behind your back or something? Right-click. That's what the right mouse button is for. Explore *every* submenu, in order. Open a test image and run *every* menu entry on it. You don't even need to open this free book or read any of my tutorials or read anybody else's tutorials. Everything's right there. If you don't like it, don't use it, but stop insisting that all the functions don't exist. It's dumb. You have just as much access to Google as anybody else, presuming you don't live in China. And then people wonder why we get frustrated.

As I've said before, I'm *dying* to see Photoshop ported. So *Adobe* can deal with you people instead of we GNU/Linux users.

In what period exactly? The period of a few minutes the erruptions last?

Let's see: CO2's density is 1.98 kg/m, "CO2 is currently being added to Lake Nyos at a rate of at least 5 x 106 m3/year." That's 1.98*5e6 kg/year, 10,000 metric tons per year. According to this list, the tiny island of Saint Helena emits more CO2 per year.

* "The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines . . . hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) are going to starve to death." (1968) * "Smog disasters" in 1973 might kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles. (1969) * "I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." (1969) * "Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity . . . in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion." (1976)

Yet today: 1) Food production is well ahead of population growth and obesity now kills 300,000 Americans a year, 2) the air in New York and L.A. is cleaner than it has been in decades, 3) with two years until 2000, England's odds are looking mighty good, and 4) there are no key minerals facing depletion. Almost all of them, along with raw materials in general, are far cheaper now relative either to the Consumer Price Index or wages.

Shall we devote our resources to stopping that ?

The answer is, of course not.

Energy waste is bad for one simple reason, it is wasteful.

Let's devote our energy to reducing energy waste. Let's tighten up the efficiency regulations of automobiles so that SUV's aren't a 'loop-hole' (http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/freedomline/current/gu est_commentary/lynch-cafe-standard-insanity.htm) in the CAFE standards. Let's stop producing so much light pollution (url:httpwwwdarkskyorg>)that I can no longer make out the Milky Way from my back garden in a surburb of a small mid-western city . Let's insist that fuck-brains who choose to buy Harley Davidson motorcycles aren't buying them because they make A LOT OF NOISE (http://www.noisefree.org/motorcycles/loudpipes.ht ml), and really only want to look macho http://www.havasy.net/images/bike/chapsleather01_t humbnail.jpg!

No. The energy WILL disappear. Do not forget radiated heat. We won't send all the mass down at once, of course!

Across what, millions of years?

One way or another, you're dealing with huge numbers. Plus, since the rate of heat dissipation is proportional to the heat difference, if you insist on keeping the biosphere livable the entire time (spoilsport!), you're going to add some more factors of magnitude to the time it takes to dissipate the heat since you can't raise the temperature very far before it's unlivable down here; just a few hundred degrees renders the entire place unlivable. (And in this context "a few hundred degrees" is indeed "just".) We'd be engulfed by the sun long before we could move any significant amount of the moon to Earth. Yeah, I didn't do the math, but with these factors of magnitude involved, it's a safe bet.

(The Earth can actually hold onto heat pretty well, after all. Several billion years and only the top few miles have solidified; the rest remains really,
really hot.)

No. The energy WILL disappear. Do not forget radiated heat. We won't send all the mass down at once, of course!

Across what, millions of years?

One way or another, you're dealing with huge numbers. Plus, since the rate of heat dissipation is proportional to the heat difference, if you insist on keeping the biosphere livable the entire time (spoilsport!), you're going to add some more factors of magnitude to the time it takes to dissipate the heat since you can't raise the temperature very far before it's unlivable down here; just a few hundred degrees renders the entire place unlivable. (And in this context "a few hundred degrees" is indeed "just".) We'd be engulfed by the sun long before we could move any significant amount of the moon to Earth. Yeah, I didn't do the math, but with these factors of magnitude involved, it's a safe bet.

(The Earth can actually hold onto heat pretty well, after all. Several billion years and only the top few miles have solidified; the rest remains really,
really hot.)

And someone is looking for ideas to blame this on the USA. The 1985 James Bond flick A View to a Kill came up with this idea of pumping water from a lake into a fault (with a Nuke - obsession of most Bond villains with Nukes) elsewhere close to the San Diego fault to destroy Silicon Valley. There is a little scientific salt in this idea, pumping fluid (although not in small quantities) into an existing fault could initiate seismic activity. Now someone says a single sky scraper can do this with just 700,000 tonnes. Other than becoming an idea for some B-grade movie, I don't see any useful implication here. The global weather cycle is interesting, El Nino seems to be delivering lesser heat this year and there's lots more interesting changes happening. Indonesia for all the quakes has about 76 active volcanoes, the highest for a single nation. So no one was correlating recent seismic and volcanic activity with the point that Indonesia was on its way to attempt to construct the world's tallest building. Now some Taiwanese scientists have the luxury to think about tall buildings and link them to possible impending earthquakes. This is a wake up call for the real scientists, before these people start naming it the "Tower of Babel" effect. Scientific news in the media and magazines are really lacking. Popular Science reports in media is almost always a publicity stunt.

"Bizarre things are going on that we are just beginning to get a handle on," says Marcus Pembrey, a clinical geneticist at the Institute of Child Health in London. Consider the pregnant Dutch women who starved during the famine of the Second World War. Not unexpectedly, they had small babies. Far more surprisingly, those babies went on to have small babies, even though the postwar generation was well fed and no genes had been tinkered with.

[interesting article with more examples of non-genetic inheritance and gene imprinting. Google on "heritable methylation" for many more.]

Parasites and evolution:
Evolution, Ecology and Optimization of Digital Organisms by Thomas S. Ray
http://www.his.atr.jp/~ray/pubs/tierra/tierrahtml. html

see also Lynn Margolis' work

non-constancy of evolution - see "punctuated equilibrium" - related to parasite co-evolution in simulations see Ray above

Sexual selection often unrelated to fitness - a commonplace. See peacocks, stags, Pamela Anderson, homosexuals etc. The signs of desirability become divorced from the reality and lead to more waste in display than ultimate reproductive or survival benefit.

Mitochondria as indispensable commensal organisms with an independent genetic lineage, e. coli and other gut organisms as affecting fitness either way (improved digestion/ peritonitis) - (look it up yourself)
Further, the mitochondria are inherited through the ova's cytoplasm.

Immune systems in mammalian infants are initialized from the mothers to a large degree through the colostrum (first milk) and additionally through regular milk. Breastfeeding: Unraveling the Mysteries of Mother's Milk Medscape Women's Health eJournal 1(5), 1996.
by Margit Hamosh, PhD, Georgetown University Medical Center
http://www.asklenore.info/breastfeeding/additional _reading/mysteries.htm

http://www.calfnotes.com/pdffiles/CN050.pdf
the number of leukocytes in colostrum can easily exceed 1,000,000 cells/ml. Colostral leukocytes are primarily composed of lymphocytes (23%), neutrophils (38%) and macrophages (40%). ...Colostral lymphocytes can survive in the intestinal tract due to the lack of proteases found in the intestine during the first 24 hours after birth and the presence of protease inhibitors such as trypsin inhibitor. Further, leukocytes have been shown to be absorbed into
bloodstream of the newborn.

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/fessler/ pubs/F&A2004InfantMouthing.pdf
IgA from breast milk provides protection against all microbes the mother has or has had in her intestinal tract, as the mother's intestinal Peyer's patches send SIgA against current antigens to the mammary glands, and memory lymphocytes able to target past antigens congregate there as well during lactation [39]. These passively transmitted antib

Giant mutant trout with Klinefelter's syndrome. Just what the world needs.

In an amusing bit of coincidence, the best test for Klinefelter's is known as FISH.

That's the Buffalo theory"

more fuel from growing corn than it takes to grow the corn

Well, of course not. But it takes sunlight to grow corn, among other things. Sunlight is "free". "Other things" are not free. And I have seen statements that the energy output can be greater than the input ("other things").

The total input/output energy ratio shows a very positive return. For every BTU of energy used to produce the crop and process the oil, about 3.3 BTU's is produced as fuel. http://www.ext.nodak.edu/extpubs/ageng/machine/ae1 240w.htm

That should get you started. I can't find the link I want... it had a nice chart comparing corn, soybeans, rapeseed, and algae. I think corn barely puts out more than you put in (a point of contention I gather), but others are solidly energy positive (discounting, of course, the sun's energy input). Algae is nice because it can be grown in salt water...

Look at one of the links higher in this topic. There is a reference to the origional removal of the FOUO qualification here. Trust me, if it wasn't there I would have the same issue (though my stuff deals with SBU, which is the same as FOUO).

You can find the letter authorizing public release/unlimited distribution of this manual here.

It's certainly not the first time Vulcanism* has been implicated in a mass extinction - the Deccan Traps, for instance, have been implicated in the KT event that is thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 Million Years ago. There's even a school of thought that says the Chicxulub event may have triggered a major convulsion in the Traps - double jeopardy, if you will.

Except that the earth is only about 4000 years old and fossils were put there to test our faith, right?

* I nearly typed 'vulvanism', but that's a different story.

Not according to this page: Present-day carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from subaerial and submarine volcanoes are uncertain at the present time. Gerlach (1991) estimated a total global release of 3-4 x 10E12 mol/yr from volcanoes. This is a conservative estimate. Man-made (anthropogenic) CO2 emissions overwhelm this estimate by at least 150 times.

It is amazing that folks will repeat a claim without taking 5 minutes on Google to see if it is true.

• The explosion was heard over 1/13th of the Earth's surface, from points as far as 4600km away.
• Resulting Tsunamis Killed 36,000+ people, and hurling blocks of coral weighing 600 tonns.
• Ash fell on ships 6000km away
• Global temperatures dropped 1.2C for a year after the explosion.
• Every barometer in the world measured the blast wave, that circled the Earth for 5 days.
• The ash spread so far and so high, people were reporting "fires" at sunset in Poughkeepsie, NY. The sun was colored blue or green around the equator.
• Floating rafts of Pumice big enough to carry men,

If you are going for body count, sure Krakatoa was peanuts. But altering climate, and sheer power, I think this one wins.

That was a pretty Legendary event. People forgot it.

Certain types of rock often fracture and wear along orthogonal lines like that. There are even weirder forms of rock in nature on this planet. Somewhere along the coast of someplace, maybe England, there are rock formations that look like hexagonal columns of varying height all fitted together like some sort of mechanically man-made sculpture.

Here's a link. And another link. And a third link. Nature is weird. Don't be too quick to jump to conclusions about intelligent life just because you see a repeating pattern.

Or, for those folks on the west coast, there are the Columbia River Flood Basalts: http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/no rth_america/crb.html

Volcano World is an interesting site full of volcanic goodness.

Or, for those folks on the west coast, there are the Columbia River Flood Basalts: http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/no rth_america/crb.html

Volcano World is an interesting site full of volcanic goodness.

B.4 Don't volcanoes naturally release far more CO2 into the atmosphere each year than humans?

Response: No. On a global scale, volcanoes release less than 1% of human emissions of carbon dioxide and hence are a minor contributor to changes in its atmospheric concentrations. Furthermore, emissions from volcanoes have always been part of the natural cycle, [...].

On average, volcanos emit 200 million tons of CO2 per year. Human activity averages 26 BILLION tons per year.

See here, here or here, taken from an earlier Slashdot thread.

"Volcanoes are also sources of water vapour and carbon dioxide, but their contribution to the global budgets of greenhouse gases is very small. On the time-scale of decades to centuries, greenhouse gasemissions from volcanic sources cause negligible climate change."

"Present-day carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from subaerial and submarine volcanoes are uncertain at the present time. Gerlach (1991) estimated a total global release of 3-4 x 10^12 mol/yr from volcanoes. This is a conservative estimate. Man-made (anthropogenic) CO2 emissions overwhelm this estimate by at least 150 times."

this one sounds different
http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/frequent_quest ions/grp6/question1375.html

aah shit who put that slash on my link http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/im g_chimbarozo.html

It makes the summit of Chimborazo the farthest from the center of the earth see here: http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/im g_chimbarozo.html/

Most century scale carbon cycle analyses I've seen don't even mention the volcanic component.

Here's a link which doesn't agree with your claim http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/Gases/man.html . In fact it has it the other way around - 150 years of volcanic emissions are roughly equal to one year of human emissions.

Also, if you're right, exactly where is the huge spike in atmospheric carbon coming from, anyway? See http://www.climate.unibe.ch/clim_recon/co2.html. See that orange spike on the right? That look natural to you?

Note that this data is directly measured from well-dated bubbles trapped in ice cores. This is not a speculative reconstruction. It's observational data.

I'd venture to say I know what I'm talking about. One can't publish a paper about large-scale distributed primality proofs without knowing these basics. Here's a sample of my work. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to sound like a smart-ass, but I'm not going to let someone question my knowledge in this field (which I have studied for years) and remain quiet.

Now it seems people here are not familiar with the terminology associated with Mersennes, so I'll give a crash course.

A Mersenne number M_n is of the form 2^n - 1. If 2^n - 1 is prime, then M_n is a Mersenne prime. If 2^n - 1 is composite, then M_n is a Mersenne composite. The integer n in this expression is called the exponent. When I talk about `exponents of Mersenne composites', I'm refering to some prime n for which M_n = 2^n - 1 is composite.

Now if 2^n - 1 is prime, then n must be prime, but the converse is not always true, the smallest counterexample being 2^11 - 1 = 2047 = 23*89. Turns out that for prime exponents n = 24,036,583, only in 41 cases is 2^n - 1 actually prime. A list of these cases can be found here. For the other 1,509,222 prime values of n = 24,036,583, 2^n - 1 is composite. This translates to a compositeness ratio of 99.9973%.

I hope everything is clearer now.

• "Looming climatic chaos?" You have got to be joking.

• Cite please? It's the height of vanity to think that anything like us could effect world climates with any significant effect. All the power ever produced by mankind (including nuclear weapons) probably wouldn't equal one hurricane.

• Do you even understand the mechanism that causes the Gulf stream to rotate clockwise around the North Atlantic? Why do you think that eastern Asia has warm water like we have here in Florida, but California has cold water, like people have in Europe?

• Hed Herring. Nobody doubts that urban areas are visible at night due to lighting. It's a very large stretch to jump from that to "people are EEEVIL." Using your own argument, I add this extension: the Democrats are at fault. Since the people that voted for Kerry live in the areas that show up on your satellite photos, THEY must be the ones responsible for Global Warming and the Death of The Environment.

The mistake was found back in June

CO2 is heavier than air. That sounds a bit strange but if this lquid CO2 (which is only liquid because of the pressure of earth above it) escapes, it will spread a blanket of CO2 over the ground until natural air movements stir it all up. In fact this happens in some natural volcanic events like the one at lake Nyos. Photographs and description here On August 21,1986, a cloud of carbon dioxide gas was released from the lake. Because carbon dioxide is more dense than air it hugged the ground and flowed down valleys. The cloud traveled as far as 15 miles (25 km) from the lake. It was moving fast enough to flatten vegetation, including a few trees. 1,700 deaths were caused by suffocation. 845 people were hospitalized.

Despite the fact that the argument has been made over and over again for years, no one has found an example of a farm that was lost because of estate taxes. Last year, a New York Times article cited the unsuccessful search of an Iowa farm economist for one family farm that was lost because of the estate tax. That same April 2001 article notes that the American Farm Bureau Federation could not cite a single example.

In 1998, less than six percent of all farms had a net worth of $1.3 million, the amount of an estate that is completely exempt if it includes a family-owned farm. Farms are a small portion of taxable estates, about one-quarter of one percent of all assets in taxable estates in 1997. Farm and family-owned business assets accounted for less than four percent of all assets in taxable estates of less than $5 million.