Domain: phys.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to phys.org.
Comments · 496
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Re:AI is not "exploding"
There have been plenty of real advances in the last few years, not just speed improvements. For me, the most impressive thing was Generative Adversarial Networks in 2014, but there have been plenty of advances. The most recent article I read was on Relational Reasoning https://www.technologyreview.c... .
Here as some more recent advances
Turing Learning - https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ne...
Evolution Strategies - https://www.technologyreview.c...
Bayesian Program Synthesis - https://techxplore.com/news/20...
Gaussian Processes - https://www.wired.com/2017/02/...
AI Passes Standard Intelligence Test - https://phys.org/news/2017-01-...
Semi-Supervised Learning For Handwriting Recognition - https://phys.org/news/2016-12-...
Lipreading - https://www.technologyreview.c...
One-Shot Learning - https://www.technologyreview.c...
Differentiable Neural Computer - http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-...
Bayesian Program Learning - http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech... -
Re:Predict Malfunctions
Yeah, and I love how those futuristic designs always seem to magically solve all problems with some future key technology that is just about to be ready, so do not worry about anything, dear investors.
Well, if they have a fantastic AI that can “predict malfunctions and other problems”, why don’t they commercialise it right now, for use in crewed ships, to “help reduce the number of maritime incidents” right now? And if they don’t have it right now, why don’t they start there and wait till they have it ready, demonstrated and deployed on crewed ships, before selling us an automation pipe dream?
For crying out loud, they’re talking about autonomous airliners and ships while they’re not even yet able to track airliners that go missing over the ocean!
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Obligatory
Neonicotinoids are the problem:
https://actions.sumofus.org/a/...
https://phys.org/news/2016-04-...
http://www.motherjones.com/tom... -
There is an alternate technology for that...
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Re:Reach Mars or colonize Mars?
Meant to include a link and the brackets were supposed to remind me - photonic propulsion for the 100kg 3 day trip.
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Re:Not the first time
Other posters posted similar statements.
But ... I googled :) Fourth hit on first page:
https://phys.org/news/2011-08-...
You have to read the article, first paragraphs ... -
Re:stop rationalizing
Many of them are parents who don't want to pay for their kids. And, of course, some people are just confused, like you are.
Wait, so wanting to help other people makes me confused? Okay, now I'm confused....
And your evidence that making college free leads to a "well-educated public means less crime and more economic output" is where exactly?
Decades of history. Look at Japan. Look at California prior to the 1970s. And so on. And various studies back up that statement, too.
Society only benefits from sending kids to college if the cost of college is small compared to the increased future earnings; when that is the case, student loans are the right mechanism to finance a college education. When that is not the case, "free" college education is harmful both to the kids and to society.
Uh, no. That's not true at all, and by that, I mean that it is objectively false, rather than subjectively. Statistically, even small increases in college attendance result in large drops in crime rate. So even if the cost is high compared with the increased future earnings, society still benefits from sending kids to college, and so do the kids.
Ah, the knee-jerk response that "billionaire = conservative". Of course, that's nonsense; if anything, billionaires tilt slightly left [politico.com]. They pay negligible income tax, and even if they lost 99% of their money to the government, they'd still be wealthy.
Okay, let me restate that by replacing the word "billionaire" with "wealthy person". It is inarguable that the wealthy are substantially more likely to lean to the right than the poor and middle class.
Nope, sorry, I don't believe it. I only know of one significant study that makes that claim (Margolis), and it is wrong (in fact, I'd call it dishonest).
I would argue that the other studies are, in fact, dishonest, as they treat 100% of donations to churches as charitable giving despite the fact that only about 10-15% of those donations typically are used for programs that help the less fortunate, and the rest tends to go towards operations of the church, from which the donor typically benefits to some degree as a member, thus placing it at least to some degree into that whole "self-interest" category that you say isn't charity.
In any case, it's also irrelevant. Charity necessarily involves a personal element that you yourself just admitted the left is denying that element. So, whatever the left is doing, it's not charity.
*shrugs*. The way I see it, what matters is the result, not the approach. I don't disagree that charity involves a personal element, but I do disagree that campaigning for laws/policies/candidates that help the poor isn't a personal element. My comment about protesters earlier was not intended to imply that protests, letter writing, campaigning for office, etc. aren't useful tools, nor to imply that all of (or even the majority of) the protesters are bozos. Many of them are legitimately trying to help.
Yes, and that's what makes the left so utterly evil, namely the view that when people are successful, it is because stuff was "given" to them.
Okay, here's a challenge for you. Be born in a country that has no roads, no sewers, no clean running water, and become a billionaire. Or heck, start out poor in this country and become one. In theory, it can happen, but it is statistically a fluke. On average, people who become enormously wealthy started out at least moderately wealthy. People near the botto
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Re:Do what You Love
I believe that most of Apple's (untaxed) expenses are incurred in elsewhere, but most of its profits are made in Ireland where they are taxed at a whopping 0%. The Irish operation is said to be so efficient that it requires no office space, no utilities, and no actual employees.
No, I'm not making this up -- see https://phys.org/news/2016-08-...
The EU takes a dim view of this arrangement BTW, and says that Apple owes Ireland about $14B in back taxes.
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Re: Mars
One proposal is to deflect the solar wind with a magnetic shield.
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Re:Fuck Trump
If if was possible to have a fully-funded government agency investigating something that was fake, why isn't there a government agency to investigate perpetual motion machines, antigravity machines, the effectiveness of homeopathic medicine and "meme magic"?
After 60 seconds of researching. DOE investigates perpetual motion machine
For more than a century and a half of physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that entropy always increases, has been as close to inviolable as any law we know. In this universe, chaos reigns supreme.
But researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Argonne National Laboratory announced recently that they may have discovered a little loophole in this famous maxim.
[snip]
"Although the violation is only on the local scale, the implications are far-reaching," Vinokur said. "This provides us a platform for the practical realization of a quantum Maxwell's demon, which could make possible a local quantum perpetual motion machine."
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Throw a little calcium in too
While they are at it they can lower the acidity and sink some carbon by throwing a little calcium in to make some calcium bicarbonate...
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Re:Quantum entanglement
What if we were to send out a photon beam from a source half-way between Sirius and Earth. We can entangle photons of different frequencies such as X-rays and visible light. If the X-ray photon is absorbed somewhere, the visible light photon disappears. But if there is no intercept, the visible light photon remains. That would seem to suggest you could send two photons in opposite directions. If one is absorbed, then the other disappears. And since the source is halfway between the two destinations, information is transferred twice as fast as it normally would take.
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Re:Torque
Hydrogen as an energy storage method is extremely inefficient. It is a distraction. Battery power with grid recharging is far more efficient and convenient.
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Re:Mitigation
I say we forget trying to sequester carbon. Instead, we should create artificial hurricanes. This will have two effects: more transfer of heat from the surface to the upper atmosphere where it can be radiated to space, and since hurricanes are massive heat engines, we can just use them as power plants.
You think you're being facetious, but the Vortex Engine people are quite serious, and even have funding now. Artificial tornadoes, rather than hurricanes, but very much the same idea.
Of course, as proposed, it's supposed to work as an adjunct to an existing power plant, and what these lunatics forget is how loud a tornado is. Even though the local coal power plant is outside the metro area, it's not so far outside that a funnel cloud beside it wouldn't be both visible and audible from everywhere in the city. So not happening....
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Livestocking causes global warming
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Re: Not much for those stuck *right now*
Horseshit. The correlation is quite weak and the causation is virtually non-existent. Otherwise we wouldn't see parental income predicting a child's future income. We would see a lot of very rich construction workers - and you wouldn't see silicon valley workers taking extended vacations and lounging about in office play rooms.
Do you believe somewhere between a minivan-full and two double-decker-buses full of people are more productive, combined, than half the world's population?
The dice are fucking rigged and only those who have it rigged in their favor want us to believe they aren't. This "neutral" system brings evil results every single time it's given a chance to do so. It's time to call it what it is according to its actions - an evil system.
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Re:$162 million in 5 years ?
My education was in IT, you know, those tech jobs that are supposedly in demand. But that doesn't matter, after all the best predictor of a person's income is their father's income, because this ugly fucking evil system is just a cover for perpetuating wealth and poverty throughout the generations.
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Re:War: the robots win
That's the exact opposite of a battlefield, which is not a known environment (act like it is and the enemy will use that assumption against you), there are a very large number of possible actions, and being predictable can quickly turn into being dead.
You're delusional. The poker robots already exceed expert human players in precisely calibrating their lack of predictability.
Beyond video games: New artificial intelligence beats tactical experts in combat simulation
Fighter jet AI consistently beats "Top Gun" tactical experts
In early iterations, ALPHA easily beat other AI opponents. Lee repeatedly attempted to score a kill against more mature versions of ALPHA. However, the artificial intelligence combat simulator shot Lee out of the air every time during protracted engagements. ALPHA has bested Lee and other field experts.
"I was surprised at how aware and reactive it was," said Lee. "It seemed to be aware of my intentions and reacting instantly to my changes in flight and my missile deployment. It knew how to defeat the shot I was taking. It moved instantly between defensive and offensive actions as needed."
Lee has trained with thousands of U.S. Air Force pilots, flown in several fighter aircraft and graduated from the U.S. Fighter Weapons School, yet when Lee flies against ALPHA in hours-long sessions that mimic real missions, "I go home feeling washed out. I'm tired, drained and mentally exhausted. This may be artificial intelligence, but it represents a real challenge."
Presently, combat AI is a saber-toothed tribble-tigger confined to a small box. That box is heading for puberty real darn soon.
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Re: s/drug trials/climate change/g
Consider that the global average land+sea temperature for this month (February), averaged over the entire 20th century, was 12.1 C. In a chaotic system, one would expect a roughly equal probability of seeing a cooler temperature as a hotter one, individually or averaged, though the average of large numbers of readings are less likely to show outliers. Seasonal and other cyclical factors would skew temperatures one way for a while, then the other way, balancing out over time.
For 2015, the globally-averaged temperature for February was 0.86 C higher than that 20th century average. If that was a single reading, or a local average, that wouldn't be at all noteworthy. Even averaged across the entire globe for the month, it was merely the second-highest February recorded, next to 1998. Similarly for land-only average temperatures, though with larger variations.
But when you consider that 2015 was the 30th hotter-than-average February in a row, the odds shift dramatically. If there's a 50/50 chance that we would see a hotter-than-average February any given year, then there's 1 chance in 2^30 that we would get 30 hotter "heads" in a row - ridiculously improbable. There hasn't been a cooler-than-average February since 1985 - and February 2016 was even hotter, setting a new record at 1.21 C above the average. Clearly the global average temperature isn't stable, but is showing a long-term underlying rising trend, which makes the new highest-temperature-ever records not only more likely, but bound to happen eventually. (Incidentally, if you use yearly averages instead of just February, it's now been 38 years of above-average temperatures.)
So the existence of a rising temperature trend is virtually certain. Whether it's anthropic or caused by a hitherto-undiscovered long-term natural cycle is a separate discussion, but the probability of the former is very high indeed.
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Re:Sea ice vs projections
IPCC projections are rarely worst case; they're pretty much a consensus of the AGW proponents vs the contrarians although the latter are much fewer in number and have been for 20+ years.
The cooligans & deniers love to point out when the IPCC warming projections are too high but I haven't seen them readily point out that their Arctic sea ice decline is too low. I have heard a lot of noise about how Antarctic sea is has been increasing (slowly), not so much about the accelerating melt of some important Antarctic glaciers nor about the unexpected decline in the salinity of Antarctic Bottom Water. -
Re:Just use the Galileo navigation system instead
The US will probably need all that tax-payers money elsewhere to build the wall to Mexico, so why not use the European Galileo Satelite Navigation instead - which already provides for much better spatial resolution?
At least they flagged a potential reliability problem with GPS *before* they were launched. ESA is still trying to figure out what the reliability problem with their clocks might be...
Unfortunately, (or fortunately) space is hard...
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Re:Well, damn
The linked article says that these collapses happen naturally. However, ice shelves act as buttresses holding back glaciers flowing down to the coast. The collapse will make the area more vulnerable to climate change.
Larsen A and B ice shelves, which were situated further north on the Antarctic Peninsula, collapsed in 1995 and 2002, respectively. This resulted in the dramatic acceleration of glaciers behind them, with larger volumes of ice entering the ocean and contributing to sea-level rise.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-01-...
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Re:SpaceX plans to waste tons of fucking money
Space is already a junk pile. Read this to see exactly how bad it is.
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Re:Sounds like bullshit
What if something were so tightly packed that it started absorbing neutrinos and other particles that would normally travel straight through regular matter?
Helium-4 seems to do something strange when cooled to a super-liquid - it's just not possible to cool down into a solid because the kinetic energy exceeds the electron bond strengths.
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Re:Isn't this going backwards..?
"Dr. Eugene McCarthy is a Ph.D. geneticist who has made a career out of studying hybridization in animals. He now curates a biological information website called Macroevolution.net where he has amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that human origins can be best explained by hybridization between pigs and chimpanzees."
https://phys.org/news/2013-07-...
That's just where the muslims came from
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Isn't this going backwards..?
"Dr. Eugene McCarthy is a Ph.D. geneticist who has made a career out of studying hybridization in animals. He now curates a biological information website called Macroevolution.net where he has amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that human origins can be best explained by hybridization between pigs and chimpanzees."
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Re:Where is all the information?
This article has three links. Two of them are to a Wikipedia page and one is to a BBC article from 2015.
How much has the height of Everest changed? Where is the link from 2017 mentioning this information?
Hello? Editors?
I think this is the missing phys.org link:
https://phys.org/news/2017-01-everest-true-height-spurs-fresh.html
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Re:Catastrophic man-made global warming
Plants consume CO2 and H2O so of course you'll have more plants. Fuck this "citation needed" Wonkypedia shit. I
I asked for citations because I'm skeptical of your ideas. If you don't want people to accept your ideas, why post them?
https://phys.org/news/2013-07-...
You obviously didn't read your citation, which contradicts your assertion.
I'm still to hear one big negative factor of increased CO2 levels and global warming.
Explain how your ignorance is our problem.
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Re:Catastrophic man-made global warming
Do you have any critical thinking skills whatsoever? Plants consume CO2 and H2O so of course you'll have more plants. Fuck this "citation needed" Wonkypedia shit. I still remember when people used to be able to have critical thinking skills without being spoon fed all the time.
https://phys.org/news/2013-07-...
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/g...The fact is increased CO2 levels lead to increased vegetation cover and a reversal of desertification.
I'm still to hear one big negative factor of increased CO2 levels and global warming... It would green the planet, make more areas available for manned settlement. Even if the sea levels increase a bit it would be largely offset by the extra available land area in arid and tundra regions. Plus the sea levels have been increasing even back when the human population was a lot smaller than it was today. Also other than with massive geoengineering efforts, which are pointless to begin with taking into consideration what I said before, the CO2 levels won't go back. Nor should they. In fact the present CO2 levels are way too low.
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Re:US is not the world?
This would be about as dumb as proposals to turn off FM radio
You mean like Norway?
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Re:Oxy-morons
That's more or less what we have now, until quantum computing is real. You don't need a quantum computer to use post-quantum cryptography.
What I haven't seen is how quantum simulators rate as a threat.
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Re: Autistic People Not Needed
magnetic rays
Magnets don't make rays, magnetic fields have divergence of 0
obsessively_correcting_factual_errors while_substantially_missing_actual_point
I see you haven't uncovered the existence of my secret doomsday weapon powered by magnetic monopoles...
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Re:about time
Get a grip and RTFA and links - - - as "the satellite was removed from the rocket" and put into the planned orbit about 15 minutes after the liftoff - Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-12-j...
It's NOT attached to the ISS, it's detached and 'doing it's own thing'.
Besides, there is an on-going research project to equip the ISS with proven ion propulsion units to provide 'station keeping' capability with the extremely efficient ion engine technology - - - just a matter of time before the requirement of using the supply launch vehicles' secondary engines to boost the ISS into a clean orbit will be a 'thing of the past'.
Granted, the high-impulse delta-V of the secondary engines will still be needed for 'emergency' maneuvers to avoid the occasional wandering debris near-encounters, but the day-to-day orbital maintenance of the station can be relegated to very low cost ion engine technology.cheers . . .
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Re:Wow, all the way back to 1979...
Well, let's see now:
The wildest projections for global temperatures predict a max of 5C global temperature increase
The strongest RCP 8.5 scenario assumes continued and increasing (business-as-usual) emissions reaching 936ppm CO2 by 2100. This is likely to result in 3 to 5 degrees temperature increase by 2100 - but will certainly keep increasing well beyond that, even if we suddenly stopped all our emissions. So no, 5 is not the max. Also, that's an average, and thus specific areas can climb well beyond 5C (see Fig SPM 8 [a]).
never mind that these models have been wrong and every 10 years they have to turn them down to avoid losing all credibility
Citation needed. The first IPCC report in 1990 predicted a temperature increase between 1 and 2 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures (see Figure 8), with a rise rate of 0.1 to 0.2 degrees per decade. Right now we're about 1.2 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures, and rising at 1.7 degrees per decade.
the tropics aren't going to get much hotter due to the effects of evaporation, most of the rise will be seen at the poles and further latitudes
Again, citation needed, because Fig SPM 8 (a) shows pretty clearly that tropical land temperatures can expect 4C to 7C average rises (again under RCP 8.5).
The past is massively important to what we are currently seeing.
But solely for the purpose of identifying past forcings, so that we can evaluate them in the context of today's increases (obviously there is no direct effect). Past changes can (and did) have entirely different causes to current changes. Every natural and cyclical cause that we've identified from the paleontological record has been evaluated in the context of modern warming, and found to be insufficient to cause the observed changes.
If this global warming is due to increased solar flux/frequency shift
It definitely isn't (surely you knew that much?) See IPCC AR5 WGI Chapter 8, particularly section 8.5.
a myriad of other factors not directly or indirectly caused by man
I welcome any suggestions that climatologists may not have considered. But considering you seem to believe they didn't even check solar flux, I'm not hopeful you'll think of anything new.
that argument can be made easily looking at the global temperatures over the past 500k years; hint: palm trees used to grow on Antarctica)
Again I say: so? Why do you think that current climate changes must have the same cause as past changes? Is it not conceivable to you that we could be seeing an entirely different proximate cause? I remind you once again that we've accounted for all known natural forcings, and found them insufficient to cause current observations.
BTW, palm trees grew on Antarctica 52 million years ago (not 500k), and atmospheric CO2 was at least 600ppm. That doesn't bode well for the scope of changes we're likely to see.
all the resources we pour into fighting global warming are 100% wasted
Even if we assume (against all evidence) that current warming is unrelated to human activity, transitioning our energy infrastructure to renewable and/or carbon-neutral sources is hardly wasted. Simply getting off coal will save hundreds of billions in health costs every year, in the US alone. Removing oil-burni
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Re:Game Changer
Climate models that are calibrated to accurately 'predict' weather conditions in the past are not proven to be as accurate in predicting conditions for which they haven't been calibrated, so knowing very well that this will attract a lot of flak from the usual AGW-zealots, and acknowledging that my karma will be reduced based on their disagreeing with me--which means that slashdot effectively already does have the 'fake news' filter that facebook is only still talking about--I will not be compelled to hold back my opinion.
Run-on sentence much? Anyway, for about the bazillionth time, climate != weather.
The AGW people are not zealots, they're scientists, and those who understand how science works. What you seem to interpret as zealotry is actually a genuine concern for the future of the human race.
All models are a compromise, because they attempt to express in mathematics and algorithms the essential parts of a complex real world. They can make wrong predictions in both directions. But the practice of science works to correct this by observing discrepancies and producing better models. And guess what? Models keep improving, and they are becoming quite accurate:
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
https://www.theguardian.com/en...
https://www.theguardian.com/en...
http://www.ucsusa.org/publicat...
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/c...
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-g...Whether you accept what the models say or not, the essential take-away is that CO2 and methane are greenhouse gasses, and humanity is responsible for adding a significant amount of them to the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Enough to cause a problem that we must face and solve, or risk significant global hardship. Temperature is trending upwards. Polar ice is melting. Sea levels are rising. These are observed facts.
And maybe, in fact perhaps quite likely, efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions will be a net benefit for economies, rather than a hardship.
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Re:Any idea how it works?
One proposed theory is that it works by exploiting unruh radiation. That explanation relies on the premise that inertia is quantum in nature, and so there can be anomalies between discrete quantum levels of inertial interactions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.034...
The author has proposed that this mechanism may also be responsible for some other observational anomalies.
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Re:Is this from The Onion?
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Re:Too early to celebrate
And getting worse may mean carbon (arctic soil) or methane (ocean floor) release from permafrost, two greenhouse gases that may drop the ecosystem into a self-reinforcing carbon release, the mankind focused on electing a dancing president in the meantime .
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Re:Will climate activists argue...
> Will climate activists blame the drought on global warming and try to argue that we should have more frequent/severe tornadoes?
There have been less tornadoes, but the ones we have had have been more intense.
Which is worse? A lot of little tornadoes, or fewer but more destructive tornadoes?
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Enough rope for impeachment
It may be possible to impeach a government official for violating the Oath of Office, which includes swearing to protect and defend the Constitution. Trump has made no secret of the violations he intends to commit, after taking office. For example, Constitution specifies that one of its purposes is to "promote the general Welfare" --which does not mean promoting only the welfare of the rich, and it is mostly the rich who desperately want all the data about Anthropogenic Global Warming to be ignored, so they can keep getting richer, while ocean levels rise and drown the home of millions of ordinary citizens.
Next, Trump claims to want to make America great again, but then he goes and starts appointing people who promote ignorance, not knowledge. Knowledge Is Power! --not ignorance. It is know-how that was one of the factors that made America great in the first place. To promote ignorance is to not-hardly be consistent with the Oath of Office, to defend the Constitution and consequently promote the general Welfare!
The last thing I'll mention is Trump's claim to oppose abortion --and that means enslaving pregnant women, when they don't want to stay pregnant, in violation of the 13th Amendment. Note that the Constitution requires a Census of ALL persons ("except Indians not taxed") every 10 years, and the Founding Fathers were right there in 1790 to specify the details of how the very first Census would be done. No unborn human has ever been counted in any Census! This means that the Founding Fathers did not consider the unborn to be persons, a Constitutional Precedent far predating the Roe v Wade decision. And modern scientific data about what we might call "generic personhood" indicates that dolphins are vastly more likely to qualify as persons, before any unborn human. Our unborn are mere-animal entities, nothing more than that, and to enslave women as life-support systems for mindless animals would be a heinous crime quite worthy of impeachment. -
Wrong
Coral flourishes in lower pH conditions, and the ocean is used to higher levels at times that it will ever see from atmospheric CO2.
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Re:And the hits keep on coming ...
Less funny longer time scale:
http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx...
I was going to post the image without the disproportionate scaling, but the "doesn't appear to be increasing that fast if we scale the last section from 1/5th of a pixel to 266 pixels" would have changed the entire last section of the graph to a vertical line but too thin to be visible.
266/(2100-1860) = 1.1083 pixels / year
80/100000 = 0.0008 pixels / year
1.1083 / 0.0008 = 1,385 so the last section of the graph is happening over a thousand times faster than it appears, when compared to the rest of the graph.
266 pixels / 1,385 = 0.19 pixels -
Re:And the hits keep on coming ...
Less funny longer time scale:
http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx...
I was going to post the image without the disproportionate scaling, but the "doesn't appear to be increasing that fast if we change the scale from 100,000 years = 80 pixels to 100,000 years = 0.05 pixels for the last section" would have changed the entire last section of the graph to a vertical line but too thin to be visible.
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Just in time ...
... when now even biologists can detect the impact of global warming on the biosphere.
I am sure if we just keep ignoring the problem, it will go away.
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Re:And the hits keep on coming ...
Not true.
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Re:And the hits keep on coming ...
Less funny longer time scale:
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Particularly interesting in terms of time
It's particularly interesting as M-dwarfs last a LONG time (10 trillion years) so if life exists around them, the expectation time for life is shifted way into the future - see http://phys.org/news/2016-08-e...
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Re:And I keep coming back to my same question
Leo I think wants to increase awareness for the issue to enable people like Elon to actually perform the transition to an emission free economy.
Humans do actually have an influence over earth. Maybe not as individuals, but certainly as species.
CFC has caused a hole in the ozone layer, and measures were taken to abandon OFC for most purposes, and now the ozone hole is getting smaller again: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07...
Also, some clues have been pointing towards a possible cause for a "little ice age" that struck europe during the middle of the last millenium and caused death and starvation amongst europeans to have been man made in some sense: http://phys.org/news/2011-10-t...
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Re:Electric VTOL aircraft?
Lithium batteries are quite capable of powering a VTOL, just not for very long. It'd be interesting to see how much flight time you could get out of a large mutlirotor using the battery pack from a Tesla.
The existence of a zillion Li-poly powered drones is existence proof that batteries can power VTOLs. If you insist on limiting it to vehicles capable of carrying a person, there are a few homebuilt multi-rotors (with lots of rotors!) which can do just that. There's even a commercial man-carrying quadrotor, the Ehang 184, which allegedly has a flight time of 23 minutes. The question of lifting power is solved, the next question is for how long.
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Rights and rationality
Having your property searched (trespassed on by police) is different than not getting a loan. You own your house. You don't own the bank's money.
If police were not a privileged monopoly, they would owe restitution for bad searches, just like a trespasser does. But given that it is a monopoly, we try to rein its power in with rules.
The idea that the world is better or more rational by ignoring rational inferences is mistaken. Take for example the effort to "ban the box" (which means employers don't get to ask if you're a felon). Although such legislation are intended to help black people, but the the results appear to have been opposite [1].
People (including employers, creditors, insurers, retailers, ...) try to evaluate risks as best they can. If you make them blind to a signal, but they are unwilling to increase their risk tolerance, they will behave more conservatively, not less. They will decrease their service and use even cruder methods to control their risk.
[1] http://phys.org/news/2016-06-e...