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I wonder if the correlation between good writers and literature graduates is higher than the correlation between good programmers and CS graduates.

I see it in a different sense: there is an ongoing dialogue between writers and academics about the meaning of texts.

As with anything, when this becomes politically infiltrated ("PC") it loses any validity because it is turned into a propaganda organ instead of a vehicle for studying a discipline and how to do it.

Clearly most of the great writers stayed away from academia, but they also tend to have stayed away from most other things that normal people do. The rules for geniuses are... different.

What I was hoping to express, however, is that for the average legitimate college student (120+ IQ) literary theory can provide a way of understanding the complex philosophical dialogue that has been raging across literature over the centuries. It enables them to stitch together different works and see the arguments of each, made through both content and aesthetics, that shows not just the core values that literature discusses, but upholds. Having stories that have meaning (let's use that as a working simplest possible definition for "literature") is in itself valuable, as is the study of these stories.

I do not believe that writing can be taught; mechanics and story elements can be taught, but writing itself is always learned by those who undertake it as a passion. The teaching of writing as a technique, the "workshop method," helps Hollywood produce formulaic blockbusters and keeps literary magazines in business with a steady stream of alarmingly similar stories, but does not produce great literature.

In this sense, I see the teaching of theory as useful for literature mainly because it is fairly immutable; what was good in one age will be good in another, once we abstract out elements specific to that time.

For computer science, "theory" usually involves some high-handed notions that apply to very few real-world instances, and serves to teach "right ways" instead of the wisdom of the hack, which is that you do it however you have to.

Postmodernism gets a bad rap, in my view, because it was taken from its original intent into the realm of propaganda. The original idea, triggered by Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in An Extra-Moral Sense," was that truth is only as accurate as the mind of the beholder, and so humans are unequal and therefore have differing degrees of accuracy in perception. The notion of universal "truth," values, or communication was thus in doubt; this actually targeted The Enlightenment&trade-era notions of a universal truth that applied to all humanity, instead of a need for a hierarchy of people based on their degree of accuracy of perception, a measurement which is as much aesthetic (what is good, beautiful, and true to natural form) as it is factual or logical (the realm of "logical fact," misunderstood and ignored by most). In the ensuing years, other writers tried to make sense of this, with most defaulting to the dominant paradigm of universalism or the idea that what most people think is true/good must be true/good. Postmodern writers worth reading include William S. Burroughs and Don DeLillo.

http://scientistswarning.fores... 1345 students (more because of language/spelling) 33 Veterinarians 96 Anthropologist Not to mention the many names with no qualifications mentioned at all. And this is after 5 mins skimming the surface of the list. This list is a joke.

This would carry more weight if:
You weren't AC
You cited your source, because I searched and can't find the official list of names to verify

Well, here I am and here's the source -- amazingly enough, one click on a link from TFA. You didn't search very hard at all, did you?

There are tons more fun ones, like:

Thalmayer, Isaiah: Restoration Project Manager, Point Blue Conservation Science
Swanson, Diana: medicine
Swanson, John: Social Sciences - Psychology, Retired
Swanson, Patrick: Professor, Medical Microbiology and Immunology, Creighton University

It's crystal-clear this is just 15k+ random people signing a feel-good petition. Any claim that these signatories are "scientists" in general, much less ones in appropriate fields to make authoritative comments about the subject matter, is unadulterated horseshit.

I see, it's always get rid of someone else's children, isn't it ? We can just "empower girls and women" in THOSE cultures to abort their babies.

It's odd that when an article suggests reducing the rate of population growth, a certain subset of radical conservatives immediately starts shouting "We need to abort their babies!"

What the actual article says is taking the step of:

(h) further reducing fertility rates by ensuring that women and men have access to education and voluntary family-planning services, especially where such resources are still lacking;

So, why is it that you suddenly start shouting about abortion?

Do you want to actually reduce the rate of abortion? That turns out to be really simple: abortion rates decrease when people have access to birth control. Simple.

Boy, it would be really convenient of all these simple cultures would just stop procreating in the first place. Maybe the WHO could just pay some group to just sterilize them, like they did in Kenya? But you know what would really "eliminate" the problem? What if we just eliminated those humans, so they don't burn all those fuels without scrubbers, and pollute those lakes, and cut down the forests for fields to grow food? After all, those leftists are looking out for the "greater good", so it's ok if it's nonconsentual.

What part of "access to education and voluntary family planning" is it that you are referring to here?

The summary fails to link to the actual article; instead it links to articles talking about the article.
The article in question is here:
http://scientistswarning.forestry.oregonstate.edu/sites/sw/files/Ripple_et_al_warning_2017.pdf

Case in point: did you actually read the actual "Warning To Humanity" article that you're dismissing (it's here)?

If you won't bother to read the evidence in a three- page article with only nine graphs, why in the world would we think you'd care if we gave you the thousand pages of evidence you ask for?

http://scientistswarning.fores... I really wish reporters would link to the actual articles they talk about. Sort of like when they jump all over someone's statements but don't actually quote what the person said.

I had a few ideas about why Cable TV is failing, and of course others had the same idea.

1. Commercials - Time has an article about the trend over the years for more commercials per hour. The article has a 2014 date, so we're talking an increase in almost a minute per hour over 5 years.

   On cable, commercials are even more frequent, totalling 15 minutes and 38 seconds of each hour. Commercials on cable took 14 minutes and 27 seconds of each hour in 2009.

2. Content - We've all complained about how much Reality TV just plain sucks. There's a nice write-up onOregon State's sociology 499 class site (of all places) that mentions ER set a record for $13Mil per episode, while a half hour reality show can cost more like $150k.
3. Cost - Of course we the consumer complain about a steady increase in cost for little gain (another grass growing channel? really?), we don't often look at how much things cost for companies. Sports Illustrated has a nice breakdown of costs to run a 30 second ad during the super bowl. The growth is damned near exponential and was somewhere on the order of $5mil this year, and $3mil in 2010.

Basically, it's all in the pursuit of the almighty dollar. Commercials have gotten longer and more expensive, while production costs have been driven lower and lower. If only there was some way en masse to stop making stupid people famous...

And evolution. You know, those big teeth at the front of your mouth that are there specifically for ripping apart flesh?

Also, as you are probably a fan of the "Least Harm Principle" I'll share this article with you about how eating large herbivore meat in moderation actually results in less deaths than a vegan diet. Also, some work done on the same principle in Australia.

Won't you think of the grey-tailed vole?

My mistake! They *do* use Excel.

http://regclim.coas.oregonstat...

is best adapted to eat, instead, like grasses,

Bill is clearly a way better speaker than Al Gore is. You know, the guy that created the Internet. Hey, I have to take that barb. Too easy. Down to brass tacks. Yes things are warming up. We see that in earths history as well. What we see is things warm up and then we see an increase in CO2, not the other way around. So to say CO2 causes GW - not so fast. Let's see proof.

Okay, and by the way - thank you for a reasoned response. One of the times of interest is the Cambrian era, with a mean atmospheric oxygen content around 63 percent of the modern era the mean atmospheric CO2 content was around 4500 ppm, which is some 16 times the pre-industrial level settled upon as a baseline.

the mean surface temperatures were 7 degrees C higher than today over the duration.

Sea level was rising frmo 30 meters to 90 meters over present levels Note as with all these long ago measurements, the data becomes a bit fuzzy. As well, there are other factors to consider, volcanic heating or cooling, and that depends on the droplet size of the sulfuric acid created by eruptions. precession of the earth, the increasing intensity of the sun. So many things that can affect the average global temperature, with even larger effects on local weather. Here's a nice level site regarding volcanos. http://volcano.oregonstate.edu...

The so called snowball earth, when the world may have been covered by glaciers - the arguments are whether it was completely covered or almost covered, was probably warmed by underwarer volcanic activity thet reeased CO2 into the atmosphere - I suspect the oceans might have been fizzy for a good while? Those ice ages, the Marinoan, Sturtian and perhaps another were long long ago as in 700 million years ago or more, so we have ot deal in generalizations. But it can work whne combined with other evidence.

Now back to more recent times,The Devonian had about 75 percent of the O2 levels, 2200 ppm or 8 times the preindustrial level, the men temperatures were around 6 degrees C above present day levels. Sea levels started out around 190 eters higher and fell to 120 meters higher during the Devonian. The carboniferous had a Oxygen level of around 160 percent higher than now - alomst 33 percent, and mean CO2 of around 800 ppm Temperature over the period was similar to present day, but fluctuated. Ocean levels were falling from 120 metersthen rising to 80 meters above present day.

THere is the setup. There were glaciation periods, some of which are believed, to have been partially started by carbon sequestration such as during the Carboniferous. This is th etime when most of the plants that made coal were living, and as they died, they sequestered the carbon portion of their material.

Okay. You cannot get a really clear picture of the energy retention effects of the atmosphere from that, and it is used mostly as test cases to see what likely happened. The interesting thing isa correlation can be made. Not proof, but that comes later.

As most know we can take samples from ice cores of atmospheric composition and isotopic composition, as well as inclusions that can tell us about events such as volcanic activity in the form od dust, Many proxies can be inferred atmospheric content temperature precipitation gas composition, even solar variability.

And as usual the further back you go, the more dating error, so a plus or minus must be assigned, in manner similar to carbon dating.

More correlation. also used as a check.

But we all know that correlation is not causation. And interestingly enough, some of the strongest evidence of causation comes from off planet earth. But before we take off for the stars, we need to understand the core concept.

The gaseous aspect surrounding a planet is of course known as it's atmosphere. And as humans have found out, the composition of that atmosphere has an effect upon it;s

Oregon State University ( http://www-po.coas.oregonstate... ? has been recording ocean s"sea level" and other data with sophisicated instruments since the 1970's.

Interesting link, but nowhere on that page is there any mention of global measurements of sea level.

Oregon State University ( http://www-po.coas.oregonstate... ? has been recording ocean s"sea level" and other data with sophisicated instruments since the 1970's.

This is an interesting leverage of GPS technology, but the data is for the most part already being collected in much finer detail with many additional parameters.

Do stories from the US have to be routed through the New Zealand media now?

Time, Huffingtonpost, even the Daily Mail are running this story, and the original press release is here:

http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/...

This is a phenomenon where music is produced from the very sounds IT professionals most dreaded to hear. A symphony of aggravation The clattering brings to mind drives in which customers had somehow inserted two or floppies at once and managed to latch them down, bending all the retaining mechanisms. The shrill higher timbres reminiscent of a faulty drive controller or driver software run amok. Louder notes mean resonance in the enclosure which does not mean "wow what a cool sound", it means "oh shit something's loose and I'll have to disassemble the drive to discover what it is. And get it back together without creating a new one".

Anyone who can pick up these items for $10+ used but functional or $30+ may find it difficult to grasp the level of dedication that went into avoiding these sounds and the dread we experienced to hear them. From the late 70s floppy drives were in constant use, and replacement drives cost hundreds of dollars. You are a tech making $20/hour (the $80/hour of today) and you are given a drive to fix. Can you fix it? You clean the heads (thin epoxy resin over tiny coil) and put in a calibration disk, hook an oscilloscope to the analog circuit to see the Lissajous pattern, look at the patterns. Adjust the optical track-zero stop and re-index until signal is at maximum. Then go for track 79 and check the pattern. Does it get there? If not you could have stepper failure (missing pulses? grit in the slide mechanism? Graphite and tiny needlenose pliers are your only friends. Does the pattern waver on each rotation? weak spring or bent spring retainer. And so on.

Then you have fixed the drive and send it out, only to discover that all the customer's data (and backup) disks were written to with the misaligned drive and no longer read properly. You get the drive back with the discs, and must intentionally mis-align it again until they read well enough to copy to a properly aligned drive. And then explain how your time doing all this was well spent.

Not so nice music to my ears.

"We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmony which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which, set to the ear, do further the hearing greatly; we have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and, as it were, tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances."
~Francis Bacon, from New Atlantis, written in 1626 .
This dude nailed modern electronics and digital sampling some 350 years before its time.

driven by Big Agrochem trying to make shitloads of money,

You mean like every other conventionally bred seed they also sell? Better take a stand against conventional breeding. Or maybe you mean Golden Rice, developed by the International Rice Research Institute, or the Rainbow Payaya, developed by the University of Hawai'i, or any number of other GMOs I could mention that have bugger all to do with corporations and are developed by independent university, public, or NGO scientists (who nonetheless are likewise opposed while anti-GMO people ignore them or have the gall to accuse them of being corporate or even vandalize publicly funded GMO research).

acquire copyrights and patents on key food crops

You mean like conventional breeding already does and has been for a long time? You mean the patents that expire and are used in public domain works? By the way, do you have a fair alternative?

'bundle' their own special seeds with their own special pesticides and weedkillers.

Like conventional breeding? Also, selling two products that go together is immoral now? Really? Guess Nintendo must be absolutely abominable for selling gaming systems and the games that go with them for decades, those monsters. By the way, are you referring to the special herbicide (not insecticide as you wrongly imply) that went off patent in 2000? And furthermore, did it ever occur to you that maybe farmers have adopted the herbicide tolerant crops in such large number for a good reason?

You don't even want to take a tiny, tiny risk of killing off pollinating insects or having 'terminator' genes or antibiotic markers jump species.

The refusal to accept any risk at all is a flawed ideology. That's the kind of thought that leads people to refusing vaccines on a 'risk aversion basis.' When one considers your rational of terminator genes (never even been used) and horizontal gene transfer (common only on an evolutionary time frame, and no more or less likely to happen to a transgene than any other gene; maybe I say we ban conventional breeding because I don't want rice sd-1 to jump species hmm? What risk do you see the NPTII gene you refer to having anyway?), your argument falls apart completely.

only if you own shares in big agro (unless you think buying expensive seed and complimentary chemicals from multinationals and not being able to re-plant harvested seed is somehow going to cure third world hunger).

You forgot increased yield, decreased insecticide, safer for farmers and consumers, lower environment impact by replacing harsher herbicide and soil degrading tillage, and saving an entire industry from a devastating virus. You mean beside those benefits you conveniently neglected to mention? And even if none of that were the case, you'd still be wrong because you'd be saying that the present use of a technology is not good therefore there is no good use for it. That's completely absurd, and made all the mor

It was discovered in 95 by an African doctor who just guessed and saved 7 out of 8 people;

http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/...

something wasn't right about this though.

http://jvi.asm.org/content/75/...

the who was skeptical and it's only been in the last few months when it's been approved, when it was used out of desperation that the protocol has gained any traction. there are billions at stake with an EBOV vaccine, just as there was in 1948 with the polio vaccine.

"Klenner's paper (Klenner FR. The treatment of poliomyelitis and other virus diseases with vitamin C. J. South. Med. and Surg., 111:210-214, 1949.) on curing 60 cases of polio in the epidemic of 1948 should have changed the way infectious diseases were treated but it did not." - Robert Cathcart

Now look at these three:

http://en.ird.fr/the-media-cen...
http://orthomolecular.org/libr...
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/cont...

There's a reason there's no HIV vaccine and it's the same reason there never will nor can be an EBOV vaccine - Coxsackie viruses are different and if you ignore their RNA encoding and subsequent biochemical expression you're gonna have a really bad day. The second paper above explains why they cannot work, see Keshen's disease in Wikipedia, it's the Coxsackie virus disease we figured this out from.

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

There's no need to mess around with blood, honest and antibodies are not the reason it works - what do antibodies need to do their job - think!. Look at recent work in the field, Google (scholar) "selenium" with words like "hiv", "ebola", "cancer" and pay attention to the work of the last 4-5 years and especially THAT 1995 Zaire paper - the only time Pauling ever posted to the net. Thanks for the warning Linus, you clever clever boy. Now there was a Doctor.

http://scarc.library.oregonsta...

The UK has terrible economic problems but unemployment isn't particularly one of them. Wages have held up quite well considering how badly the economy was wrecked -- and rose up until 2008.

I'd suggest US wages are stagnant because of:
1. Job insecurity -- having to live off welfare in the US is a really scary proposition.
2. Stagnant minimum wage. Hasn't changed over 10 years and is lower than in the 1950s: http://oregonstate.edu/instruc...

Naturally, the economic crisis has been a big factor too.

Beta-carotene, while just one of many bioactive molecules that are grouped into "vitamin A" and usable by the body, is particularly important due to its ease of use by the body. In contrast, lycopene, lutein, and astaxanthin have no pathway to be converted into either alpha/beta-carotene by the human body, and exhibit no vitamin A behavior (both positive and negative, like toxicity). Although both lycopene and astaxanthin exhibit promising behavior as "internal sunscreens" and mops for UV-induced radicalization of DNA components, they can't replace carotene-derived vitamin A sources and might have other toxic effects for certain people who can't break down the carbon chains particularly well. They may play an important role in the body, but as of yet don't look to be as critical as beta-carotene (note: I am a chemist, but vitamins and enzyme cofactors aren't my thing, so someone else may have more experience with that.).

That is not true. The WAIS last lost mass as we came out of the last glacial maximum 20,000 years ago. It melted to its current state at that time: http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/...

The US great plains over the last two hundred years in some places went from two feet or more of topsoil covered with with Prairie grass, Native Americans, and Buffalo to now more like six inches of topsoil mostly due to atrocious soil farming practices by the European invaders more akin to strip mining than stewardship. That is a lot of carbon loss.
http://bigprairieprepress.com/...
"The farming practices of early settlers caused erosion of the topsoil. By the late 1870's the topsoil had vanished in the center of the prairie and the settlers who farmed there moved out to its edges. This was the beginning of the process that would create the Big Prairie Desert. This pattern of land use, dry conditions and soil erosion is what caused the dust bowl that was begining at about the same time in states further west."

Related (although perhaps an underestimate of the total loss):
http://boingboing.net/2011/05/...
"These pillars --- located outside a rest area off Highway 80 in Adair County, Iowa -- represent the topsoil Iowa has lost since large-scale farming began 150 years ago. In the 19th century, Iowa had 14-16 inches of topsoil. Today, it has just 6-8 inches of the stuff, and more is being lost all the time. The irony: The very farms that are depleting the topsoil desperately need it, too. "

See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde...
"Although the figure is frequently being revised upwards with new discoveries, over 2,700 Gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon is stored in soils worldwide, which is well above the combined total of atmosphere (780 Gt) or biomass (575 Gt), most of which is wood. Carbon is taken out of the atmosphere by plant photosynthesis; about 60 Gt annually is incorporated into various types of soil organic matter (SOM) including surface litter; about 60 Gt annually is respired or oxidized from soil.[2] "

So, three-quarters of more of the carbon-rich top soil of the center of an entire continent (North America) was lost, much of it a century ago. That I think may help explain some global climate changes even more than recent fossil fuel use.

From:
http://people.oregonstate.edu/...
"When we lose soil, we are losing a resource that is, for practical purposes and human timespans, essentially non-renewable. An inch of soil takes between 200 - 1000 years to form, yet it can be swept away in a few seasons."

Ways to create topsoil faster included organic farming (focusing on adding organic matter to the soil) and remineralization from ground-up rock dust.
http://remineralize.org/

Still, maybe without all the extra carbon in the air we'd already be in another mini ice age?

Did you read the entire abstract? "This increased risk was not statistically significant in either case."

Oops... there goes the ball game. Sensationalist hype for insignificant findings. Cancelled the study because there was not positive effect and a very slight negative effect.

Actually, there doesn't go the ball game, but you're right in your interpretation of the link I provided. I should have linked to the paper which included the follow-up period (discussed here http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/new... and here http://www.nih.gov/researchmat...)

From the first link:

A paper published recently from the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT) in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA. 306:1549-1556, 2011) concluded that "dietary supplementation with vitamin E significantly increased the risk of prostate cancer among healthy men."

I am not advocating such thing. I am actually very much in favor private property defended by law. Although in the end the differences only resides in who exerts the force, as any law derives its power from its enforcer capacity to inflict violence.

Might is indeed right, be it personal might, financial might or political might. There is no exception. Blaise Pascal has a very interesting essay on the subject that should be elucidative for you:

http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/pascal/pensees-b.html

Potassium carbonate.

http://extension.oregonstate.edu/gardening/wood-ash-can-be-useful-yard-if-used-caution

Why is it more pronounced in some areas?

Others have mentioned winds and tides. I'll point out that while technically the sea level is rising all along the Oregon coast, as an example, the Oregon coast is also rising at different rates. Therefore, in some places there is an apparent sea level rise, in some there is either no change or a decrease.

This is due to the subduction zone off the OR coast pushing the coast up as the offshore plate slides under the landward plate. The friction between the two plates causes a flexing that pushes the coast up. And the release of that friction causes the 500 year subduction zone earthquakes that Oregon is coming due for.

I probably shouldn't bother because I think your mind is made up but I'll mention a few.

First, the reduction in Arctic summer sea ice is affecting northern temperate zone weather and is probably a factor in the weird weather we've experienced over the past several years.

Ocean acidification is starting to affect crustaceans in the oceans such as oyster farms on the Oregon coast having trouble with larvae mortality. A just published paper in Nature finds that acidification will reduce the release of dimethylsulphide (DMS) by phytoplankton. DMS is an aerosol that helps in forming clouds and generally has a cooling effect so less of it will be a positive feedback of global warming.

There have been drought conditions most years in the American Southwest since 2000, so much so that both Lake Powell and Lake Mead on the Colorado River are around 100 feet below full pool now. They are cutting releases from Lake Powell for the first time in response. This is a predicted effect of global warming.

Those are just a few of many examples that could be listed.

Even if Antarctica becomes ice free it's still going to have several months of near total darkness every winter and it will still get cold because of that. I'm not sure how attractive a place it will be. With 220 feet of sea level rise the hill I live on in the Willamette Valley becomes an island in Willamette Sound and Oregon loses a substantial amount of agricultural land. Florida disappears and the shore along the gulf coast moves tens or hundreds of miles inland from its present location.

It's already reached the point where it's disrupting oyster growers in my state.

I doubt you or anyone else has even the least bit of evidence for that.

Evidence here.

I find the IPCC reports are pretty conservative in general. Yes, there's the infamous incident about the Himalayan glaciers but that's just one piece of information out of thousands provided. It was corrected once the error was found.

It's certainly better than minimum wage

Color me unimpressed. Adjusted for inflation the 1968 minimum wage would be $10.50, and that doesn't even take into account that the US inflation adjusted GDP per capita has doubled since 1968. Doesn't seem to me like that money is trickling down.

or a true "factory" job (in terms of safety)

The 19th century is over. Most factory jobs aren't all that dangerous.

Here's a very interesting movie about farmed salmon in BC and the ISA virus (an internationally reportable virus like mad cow). http://salmonconfidential.ca/

Basically, the Canadian government, despite highly reputable testing, continues to deny that there is ISA and other viruses in the farms, muzzles the scientist who published research on the topic, and almost passed a law making it a felony to report on infections in livestock/farmed fish. All the while, native stocks of salmon plummet due to diseases that fill the narrow passageways in which the farms are located. And no, you can't just replace wild salmon with farmed salmon -- unless you're going to truck them out to the forest and dump them because even the trees get fertilized by dead fish that bears leave around after eating the eggs (and then of course there are Orcas and seals to feed etc. etc). The rivers can provide nutrients to an entire ecosystem including people -- farmed salmon destroy that but provide profit for big business. With most fishermen being small time business people -- guess which wins. http://oregonstate.edu/instruction/fw580/pdf/15.%20MDN%20riparian.pdf

Colorado State University says that corn requires 22 inches/year for a high yield crop with a range of 20-25 inches/year. You can get a low yield crop of corn on 15-16 inches/year.
http://www.extension.org/pages/14080/corn-water-requirements

Oregon State says that hemp requires 20-28 inches/year for optimum yield.
http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/html/sb/sb681/

For comparison, Switchgrass can grow everywhere and needs 15-30 inches/year.
http://www.uky.edu/Ag/Forage/switchgrass2.pdf (PDF)

The GP stated that there is a better crop for every climate zone. That may or may not be true, I'm not going to look through every zone and every crop, but I will say that hemp is not the end-all-be-all crop it's made out to be. To me, switchgrass looks better for general industrial use (the plan is to grow it on shit land like near highways since it doesn't require much upkeep). In the southeast kudzu since it grows so easily and offers a lot of biomass. But whenever industrial crops are brought up it seems hemp is the only answer. We have lots of different crop possibilities that fit the different climate zones and needs. Hemp is just one of the possibilities and isn't necessarily the best for all purposes. It's just made to sound that way.

It should also be possible to create a solid state memory device with no moving parts to implement this technology, researchers said. Unlike conventional hard-disk drive storage, solid state memory would offer durability.

They are talking about a magnetic solid state drive of some description. Completely unrelated to NAND flash except for the lack of a spinning disk.

I think this sort of filtering research press releases through multiple non-technical writes is a big problem for science reporting. The scientists say one thing, then the university press release people try to rewrite it to make it more sound more important than it is. Then journalists try to re-write parts of the press release (without understanding it) so that they can publish it as "their own" story.

The end result is like chinese whispers: confusing and often wrong.

The fact that it "Scarcely grows weeds" is a directly contrary statement to your previous one, "farmers know how to take care of their land".

The reason the soil "scarcely grows weeds", is because of soil humus depletion, from the "100 years of continuous cultivation." There have been many studies on this.

One such digest, dated 1941! (warning, PDF)

This has been known about for a VERY long time. Nitrogen fertilizer accelerates soil humus depletion, by giving decomposing microbes a boost.

Note how the linked digest cites (correctly) that both potatoes AND corn are soil depleting! Fancy that!

http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~burnett/Forms3/forms3.html I went to OSU and Dr. Burnett was one of my professors. It was great and easy to understand. There ya go, problem solved. :)

http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2010/jan/effects-forest-fire-carbon-emissions-climate-impacts-often-overestimated-0
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_lantern/2007/10/dirty_burns.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2010/jun/24/carbon-footprint-bushfire
So no, it's not true. Forest and brush fires produce only a small fraction of the emissions that humans do. The _really_ large fires, which occur only rarely, can get up to hundreds of megatons of CO2, while we're releasing dozens of gigatons.

Comment posting limits (and time...) won't let me respond to many individual comments, so I will see if I can address a few things at the same time here.

For a given angular momentum of something going around a black hole, you can work out what potential energy it would have at different radii. In a normal Newtonian case, you can think of having some satellite orbiting at some speed. If you try to push that satellite further in, while still maintaining its angular speed, it will try to pop back out since it is essentially going too fast to orbit at a smaller radius. There is a minimum in the potential energy of the satellite where it would have a circular orbit for that given angular momentum, as it would just stay at that radius. The potential energy about this radius would be like a bowl, if you push the satellite inward, it would roll back down toward the radius corresponding to a circular orbit. Momentum would of course carry it beyond that point, so it would oscillate in radius between some place closer and some place further from the circular orbit. This would give you an elliptical orbit where the radius goes between two values. The potential energy for over radius for a given angular momentum would look roughly like the red curve in the image here.

Now, for a black hole, GR gives some differences from Newtonian gravity when you get closer. The potential energy curve now looks more like this. There is still a stable orbit, as you can see it could oscillate around the minimum there like a marble in a bowl. In other words, small pushes on a perfectly circular orbit will turn it into a slightly elliptical orbit that is still pretty close to the circular one. However, if you push it far enough inward to get over that bump, the orbital radius would be like a marble just rolling down that hill toward the black hole. Now, the size of that bump changes depending on what angular momentum you are talking about. As you increase the angular momentum, which in Newtonian gravity would just give you a smaller radius for a circular orbit, that bump gets smaller. There is a point where the bump goes away, such that you just now have a curve that decreases with decreasing radius. Hence, a particle in such an orbit would continue to move closer to the black hole, as there is lower potential energy the closer it gets.

This is all due to the geometry of space around a black hole. Weird stuff like the circumference of a circle not being 2 pi r depending on how you measure the r from the black hole, which is why orbits no longer have the same stability they have in Newtonian gravity. This is not an effect due to gravitational waves. The orbiting particle can be something like a proton where the gravitational waves would be too small to matter. However, if you are talking about the orbit of a massive object, like a star or second black hole, then the gravitational waves become significant. In that case, the orbit at any radius would slowly decay due to emitting gravitational waves. Once the decay orbit hits the radius of the innermost stable orbit, the decay would greatly accelerate.

This is also not an effect of rotation or frame dragging, as it happens with a non-spinning black hole solution too. However, spinning black holes and frame dragging do factor into it, such that for a spinning black hole, the inner most stable orbit is smaller if you are going in the right direction around the black hole. Although there are other effects that the frame dragging causes. You get things like the ergosphere, a region where due to frame dragging, you would have to go faster than light to look stationary from an outside viewer, so all matter within that region is spinning around the black hole.

This is also quite distinct from the event horizo

How exactly do they measure the magma pressure?

I looked through this whole page on volcano monitoring techniques, and it never mentions monitoring the pressure.

Go to oregonstate.edu. Look at the big orange logo in the upper left. It says "OSU".

http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2012/may/understanding-complexities-taste-smell-could-lead-improved-diet

Oregon State University now offers an online, one-year, computer science degree. The only requirement is that you have ANY bachelor's degree. This sounds perfect for this "friend." Do the time and work and you'll be employable by any company that wants to hire a CS grad. Reference: http://eecs.oregonstate.edu/new-online-post-baccalaureate-computer-science-degree

Peer review happens constantly - you're reading papers from your field, you're publishing papers others are reading.

That's not "peer review". Peer review means changes are made to correct errors prior to publication, or entire papers are withdrawn because they are bogus. It's not a "peer review" when someone arbitrary reads your paper. Google won't help you figure out if a paper is crap or not, it will only tell you that it contains a high percentage of the right keywords.

And peer review doesn't mean the paper is sent to your friends to review, it is sent to people who sometimes are your harshest critics. If a paper can withstand that kind of review, then it probably has some merit. Reviews, in most cases, improve the paper by suggesting better methods of presenting data or more easily understood language. Peer Review is a Good Thing.

Publishers don't just formalize the process a bit. They are the reason the process exists.

Open access without peer review is a bad thing. Relying on "reputation" is a bad thing, since even the most highly regarded scientists can publish nonsense. (Just last week, one such highly regarded scientist was approached by a grad student who referred to an old paper of his, to which he said "that was crap, ignore it." Names witheld to protect the honest.)

Open access will be to science what Pons and Flieschman's press conference was -- a way for more people to publish less correct work. Unless there is some mechanism added to enforce peer review, and that doesn't look likely. The scientific literature will become like wikipedia -- often wrong but ubiquitously referred to.

By the way, Oregon State did this in 2009.

As does Oregon State University: http://radiationcenter.oregonstate.edu/

Research reactors are much more common than people think.

I thought the claimed reduction in use of pesticides with GM crops was widely questioned

Well, it is widely questioned, just not by anyone who actually knows what they're talking about. There's plenty of info on the subject, and strangely the only ones disputing that are either some organic woo-mongering organization or outright quacks, and usually their evidence is pretty flimsy. They claim that GE crops, with an anti-insect protein, require higher pesticide usage? Even if the GE protein was totally ineffective (which is false) how the heck does the addition of that extra protein make the crops need more pesticides? That doesn't even make sense. Well, not scientifically, but if you think genetic engineering is some magical black box with crazy Hollywood effects, then it must be perfectly rational. GE crops have actually reduced pesticides so much in some places that non-target insects (that is to say, non-lepidopterans, as only they are effected by the currently used pest resistance trait) that were once controlled by broad-spectrum pesticides have for the first time become pests. The claim that GE crops increase pesticide use, sorry, absolute bullshit.

Now, two points of clarity, first, they have promoted an increase in use of certain herbicides. The Round-Up Ready ones, obviously, go hand in hand with an increase in Round-Up, and Liberty Link with Liberty. This sounds like a pretty good argument against them, until you consider that they do this at the benefit of replacing other, more environmentally harmful herbicides (as well as promoting no-till practices). Yes, spraying herbicides is bad, but this isn't a case of choice 1 vs the ideal, it is realistic choice 1 vs realistic choice 2, and for better or worse, the herbicide resistant ones, for all the ill will they get, come out on top. The other caveat is that, yes, some insects have developed resistance to the insect resistant GE trait. Ironically, anti-GE groups are quick to point this out, but (since they know bugger all about population genetics) don't understand that this is evidence that the GE trait is working. You don't create population shifts without selection pressure, and you don't get selection pressure by not working. If this resistance becomes widespread, the GE plants still will not need more pesticides, but they will lose the advantages they provide, which would be bad. It should be noted that this is not the fault of the plants themselves, rather, management practices, and over-reliance on a single trait, and also, that such instances are not unique to GE crops. Selection pressure is selection pressure and evolution doesn't care where it came from. Problems of resistance have happened before, and will happen again, GE or not.

The notion that people are against GE crops for patent reasons is a good one, but considering how how many plants are patented that go unprotested, it cannot be entirely true, though I'm sure it plays a role for those who know bugger all about plant breeding (which accurately describes most people who oppose GE crops). Lots of plants are under patent, and I don't see anyone complaining about them. when the Honeycrisp apple or Flavor Grenade Pluot came out, no one cared that they were patented (Honeycrisp's has since expired btw, and the royalties the breeders received from it went on to create my personal favorite apple variety, Snow Sweet, which is also patented). When the USDA announced the HoneySweet plum, or when Okanagan Specialty Fruits announced the Arctic apple, people did, and when they're released, you can bet there'll be backlash. Why, when they were pretty much the same things, and both under patent (though the HoneySweet might be free to prop

As a warm-up exercise you may want to try a much simpler problem: find at which point you do disagree with Descartes in his perfectly logical proof that God exists, preferably by reading his own Meditations (3 and 5 are the ones about God).

Now don't be too rude to the old man, we have about 300 more years of philosophy in hindsight. ;-) This particular analysis was specially helpful to me when learning about rationality.

The hole itself hardly needs to be "over" NZ or Australia to have an effect. Whenever the ozone depleted air wanders a bit (when the hole "breaks up"), it reduces the levels of ozone for quite a distance around. More info...

Growing up in Southern NZ, I was always confused by how kids on TV got to play outside all day on a really hot and sunny day whereas for us, that'd mean a horridly painful sunburn in an hour or less. The news weather reports would tell us the temperature and "burn time" for the day - often a matter of tens of minutes even when the temperature was barely high enough to not be wearing a coat.

What I will argue against however is the constant use of bullshit to try and convince people that they should hate themselves for existing, in the name of global warming.

What an awesome strawman!

I am sure that recent volcanic activity alone has affected the global climate far more than human activity.

So much for relying on facts & science. Man makes about 150 *times* more co2 than volcanoes. Per year.
http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/education/gases/man.html

Or volcanic CO2 production is about 1% of man-made CO2 production (as of 4 years ago):
http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/2007/07_02_15.html
Maybe you should go back and actually look at what these changes might make to the chemical & temperature balance of the atmosphere.

But, no, we're not affecting anything by dumping that much CO2 into the atmosphere.

Yes they are, because higher yield is a myth

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong I could dig up more from my bookmarks, but it's late here and you get the point. You might be thinking of the study titled 'Failure to Yield' a study claiming that GMOs actually had lesser yield (although it was based on data showing an increase). Actually, yield gains in developed countries are relatively low, only like 3-5%. But that is because pesticides already pushed yields to the limit. If you replace pesticides with resistant GMOs, it isn't that much difference (but make no mistake there still is a difference). Where Bt GMOs really shine is in developing countries where they might not always have access to pesticides. There, the difference can be dramatic. And of course in the case of viral resistant GMOs or fungal resistant GMOs they can make the difference between an industry continuing to exist or disappearing (without GMOs there would be no Hawaiian papaya industry and I've read some very promising information about GMOs with anti-fungal proteins).

the plants are killing insects indiscriminately (see honeybees)

The cry proteins used in the Bt GMOs are actually very specific, much more so than the pesticides they replaced. Do you have any evidence (besides some anti-GMO nutter's rantings) that Bt plants are in any way responsible for CCD, which need I remind you occures even in countries where GM crops are banned?

Also, familiarize yourself with terminator gene

I've done genetic engineering before, so I'm already pretty familiar with that thanks. Terminator technology was developed to prevent unwanted gene transfer. You know, that thing the anti-GMO groups are always complaining about. ISo, a safeguard to prevent that would make them happy, right? Ha! These people are harder to please than anti-vaxxers. They just put a nasty spin on it and freaked out even more! In other words, damned if you do and damned if you don't.I know what you (the agricultural layman) must be thinking: how horrible to keep farmers from saving seed. But you miss something very important: no one really does that anyway (besides those growing heirloom crops, the smae people the terminator gene would protect). Back in the early 1900's pretty much every farmer realized that if you use hybrids, superior crops but whose seeds do not possess genetic uniformity (making them unsuitable for seed saving), you could get higher yields. The gain was so much that it justified the cost of buying new seed every year. So, ever since then, farmers bought their seed from seed companies. Almost a hundred years later, GMOs get the blame. Makes no sense, but that's the anti-GMO movement for you. As an aside, some people are working on GMOs with apomixis traits, meaning the seeds are basically clones and as such the hybrid vigor would be preserved thus eliminating the need for seed vendors. But anyway, the terminator trait, despite the ill will directed toward it, is more misunderstood than dangerous. Course you could say the same thing of every other GM crop.

Before fiat currency, in the American colonies and later America, the purchasing power of a dollar was nearly flat for 300 years, except for a few little blips around wartime. And the economy was a hell of a lot healthier than it is now.

People repeat this lie often in hopes that it will somehow become true. Sorry, it never will. Periods of high (double digit) inflation and deflation were common before we left the gold standard, and the economy could not be described as "healthy" according to any modern definition of healthy. It's essentially an accident that the value of the dollar at the beginning and the end of that period. But don't let reality get in the way of a good story. http://oregonstate.edu/cla/polisci/faculty-research/sahr/sumprice.pdf

As someone who has done research in memory wear leveling, I can assure you that these technologies have a place. There are significant design trade-offs that must be considered for any application. Power, area, speed/latency, and maximum amount of write-erase cycles all come into play. One of the head researchers in emerging memory technologies at Penn State has an interesting presentation here on the roles of these memory technologies (yes, I realized it is hosted at Oregon State, and he is from PSU, oh well...): http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~sllu/xie.pdf

At nine years, one year behind because it came out after XP http://slackware.oregonstate.edu/slackware-8.1/ChangeLog.txt

Oh-- and I use it on my desktop.