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.., census takers are not babykillers

No, but they are assistants to concentration camp operators. That happened in the U.S. within living memory, it's not ancient history or something that can only happen in so-called "backwards" countries. It is established historical fact that census data can be used against people.

No, their plan actually calls for making evidence based policy instead of simply deciding what they want the facts to be.

Evidence would be good. Compelling people by threat of force to give evidence is not.

And it degrades the quality of the evidence. "I'm from the government. How often do you use illegal drugs? If you don't answer you're going to jail. If you say yes it goes on a permanent record that the next administration might use against you. Ah, you never use them? Thanks for the valuable sociological data, citizen.

There are ways to gather sociological data that don't involve threatening people. Give me an anonymous survey, maybe a cash incentive for filling it out.

Don't know Canada's laws but the U.S. census gets nothing from me but a number; the feds are constitutionally empowered to conduct an enumeration for purposes of allocating representatives, not to forcibly pry into my life to evaluate the effectiveness of their policies.

If you don't think this is important, ask a Japanese-American who was put in a concentration camp in the 1940s. Once the state has your data, it is not private; it can always change the rules.

I am a physicist, a real expert on stuff like that, and I know that the global temperature has not increased for almost 20 years.

Really? NASA Link for Average Global Temperature since 1884

Have you read this Scientific American article from 2010?

Or maybe you haven't seen this NOAA Graphic that says, "August 2015 average global land and ocean temperature was the warmest August since records began in 1880."

On the other hand, the sea rise from the current warming trend will leave much of the coastline (where many people live) uninhabitable.

At about 3mm / year, we're looking at a foot per century, or a meter per millennium. That's easy to adapt to..

Umm, no. Your simple version of sea level rise is really good, as long as you don't take into account just how low much of the coastline is. That and tides. That and storms. That and the fact that rise and sometimes fall are not always the same everywhere - in some areas, land is rising as it rebounds from the last ice age. So new land is being created at the shoreline.

Even so the rise is not consistent per year. Hell, in 2010, the ocean levels dropped due to a combination of conditions:

http://www.scientificamerican....

Furthermore, taking current topographical maps and combining them with sea level rise data is bullshit anyway; most coasts are sedimentary, not rocky.

While I don't have the data on most coasts, that would be much worse than a rocky coast. As inevitable storms especially when combined with king tides, low barometric pressure and wind, can take that small yearly difference, and amplify the bejabbers out of it.

What's the odds of that happening? Ask the peeps in New Jersey and New York City about Hurricane Sandy.

http://blogs.wsj.com/metropoli...

The big problem is that nobody has a clear, and widely agreed-upon idea about what to do about it.

A few clear, viable, and widely agreed-upon solutions:

- Stop burning coal

- Increase energy efficiency (buildings, appliances, vehicles, etc.) as much as possible

- Stop Deforestation

- Slow population growth

- Eat more plants and reduce production of meat

- Switch to non-fossil energy sources as quickly as possible

With a simple search, you can find plenty of lists like this all over the web:

http://www.scientificamerican....

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_w...

The whole "carbon credit" trading scheme has already proven totally shady, since it's a carte blanche license to pollute.

It would probably work great if there was one global program. But without universal participation, a more aggressive standard will only penalize participants, while rewarding outsiders. Faking it and putting in-place a system that does nothing is the only option.

Really? Because you said, 'Ice loss in the Antarctic is causing sea level rise.'

As we go on, we learn. Do you question the fact that sea level rise is happening at all? That would be an extraordinary statement.

That was a big one, as far as why and how everybody is going to die.

Histrionics much? you got the quotes for everybody is going to die?

You woke up my lecture gene this morning.....

Exhibit 1. Scenario - I was supervising a video crew that came up from Washinton D.C. a few years ago. The location was several hundred miles north of D.C.

part 1.This was a winter when the area around Washington was hammered badly by snow and cold weather. Shut the place down, and the camera crew had a hell of a time getting to us.

part 2. They arrived at the place we were working at, and the sun was shining, it was about 52 degrees in the middle of winter. They were pretty shocked at going several nudred miles north to reach springlike conditions in mid-winter.

So was the unusually cold weather in the D.C area proof that AGW didn't exist, or was the unusually warm weather in Northern Pennsylvania proof that it did exist.

The answer is neither. Those anomalous conditions were weather not climate.

And while the ice accumulation in areas of the arctic are interesting, they still belong in the local weather subgroup.

And if they are not at the moment contributing to the sea level rise, it does not mean the rise is not happening.

Here is a tough one for the deniers:

http://www.scientificamerican....

And the guns - they kinda do smoke:

http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/de...

They even used groups and tactics of the tobacco industry to do their dirty work - I always knew smoking was actually good for you - you have to agree, eh? So now that the lid is off of Exxon's and other's scandal, are they tools of the liberals and commie scientists because they were convinced AWG was happening?

Or are they good citizens because after knowing all this, they set off on a P.R. campaign using tobacco industry tactics to sow doubt?

Perhaps I exaggerate your position slightly, but is it really 'just news?' It changes nothing? I guess it wouldn't, if saving the planet from the deadly effects of AGW was never the goal in the first place.

There's not enough nuclear fuel to do that. We have enough uranium for 200 years at CURRENT consumption rates. If you build 10 times the current number of nuclear plants, you'll only have 20 years worth of fuel.

http://www.scientificamerican....

It would require other mystical technological advancements for all-nuclear to be a viable option.

But any sceptic today is immediately suspected of being on Big Oil's payroll anyway.

Not doing so would be failing to take into account the existence of all the groups funded by ExxonMobil, the Koch foundations and others: American Enterprise Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Americans for Prosperity, Beacon Hill Institute, Cato Institute, DonorsTrust, Heartland Institute, Heritage Foundation, Institute for Energy Research, , National Center for Policy Analysis, and hundreds more.

The $1.5 bln would buy a lot of scientists — especially those, who already think AGW is a real concern and whose conscience would thus be a lot cheaper.

So you would have us believe that the thousands of scientists who contributed to the IPCC report are all corrupt and not one of them spilled the beans. Not only that but since the report is reviewed by the governments of over 120 countries with competing interests you would also have us believe that they are all in on the conspiracy and that none saw fit to expose it to discredit their adversaries! And all these scientists would be producing bogus results without anyone in the organizations and countries financing them noticing something fishy?

Well, as they say, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof and all you have are unsubstantiated accusations.

I do not doubt, that you share the concerns over the fabled "Military-Industrial Complex" influencing the government towards "perpetual war" so it can forever sell the armaments.

Wow! Aren't you a bit quick putting people you disagree with into neat little boxes! What will you accuse me of next?

Why is it silly shit?

Here's why. The entire article is well worth a read, but in a nutshell: The "paleo diet", as most often defined, makes all sorts of unsupported assumptions about "paleo people", their health, how they ate, and how humans have (or have not) evolved since then. For example, studies of actual paleo cultures have revealed that there was huge variability in diets. Some cultures ate lots of meat, some ate little meat, and so on.

That's not to say that the paleo diet doesn't prescribe some eating habits that are healthier than the way most westerners (or Americans, anyway) eat, but much of the supposed rationale behind the paleo diet is pretty silly.

I grant that the analogy is far from perfect and depends on many probably-flawed assumptions. While I wasn't suggesting that the only alternative was to halt everything, I think about this subject in the context of "which approach is most likely to yield a virtual human brain soonest". Looking at [what I call] the brute-force approach of understanding how neurons work, understanding how neurons are interconnected, and simulating them, it seems like this ought to be possible in a few decades, maybe even in a century, with only incremental progress and no expectation of revolutionary discovery. Looking at the "let's understand what 'intelligence' really is before we go trying to simulate it" approach, how do you even form an estimate? Inherently, this approach does rely on some revolutionary discovery being made. Perhaps it's just me being a pessimist, but I don't believe we'll ever have an answer for that (forever is a long time, but I say "we" meaning humans-as-they-exist-today), let alone within the next century. While I don't dismiss the value of seeking to gain a fundamental understanding of intelligence, I don't think the goal itself is attainable -- how can we hope to understand something that is many orders of magnitude more complex than anything we've managed to understand before?

But C. Elegans? with only 300 neurons, 7000 synapses? That's old news (though still not quite "complete" in some sense). Though we don't yet have a complete connectome for D melanogaster (it's in the works [sorry for the shitty citation]) nor a complete model for its neurons, but simulation work on its 100000 node CNS is underway regardless. Obviously we won't see virtual flies until this connectome is fully diagrammed and more experimental data about the neurons is available and computers get a bit faster, so indeed it is true that it is too soon to expect these projects to be fully completed. Probably much too soon. But that doesn't mean it's too soon to start, and $0.5B is peanuts when you consider how much a truly successful simulation project is likely to cost.

It's not just the compute power that's a serious limiting factor, but also the availability of imaging technology that would enable us to develop a complete connectome for the brains we seek to simulate. The most immediate hurdle for projects like these isn't our lack of fundamental understanding (although to say that such understanding "would help" would be a huge understatement), it's the combination of insufficient computing resources (though if past trends continue, this won't be an issue for long) combined with insufficient knowledge of the brain's structure (which can be remedied by continuing to advance the state of medical imaging technology, and dfMRI seems very promising recently). Getting more experimental data to develop accurate neuron models for various animals is simply labor-intensive and not really waiting on anything except more funding. However, these are well-defined engineering or funding problems, and steady incremental progress is being made on all of these fronts. I expected this infusion of $0.5B to simply help that along.

We have the technology to invasively/destructively map brains and develop accurate neuronal models today. We have the technology to simulate interconnected neurons today. Progress will continue, but only at the rate at which we fund improvements in these underlying technologies as well as projects that seek to pull together these technologies to shoot for ambitious brain simulations. While I don't doubt that there are other worthy causes to spend this money on (even within neuroscience), I think it's still unfortunate if this particular approach doesn't get the green light because of the actions of one seemingly power-hungry individual.

I know you're being funny, but there really is a war on sharks, and the Chinese are winning.
Every year they kill something like 100 million sharks, although as there is an awful lot of illegal fishing, the figure could be twice that. If that rate of slaughter continues, one of the oldest types of animals in the Earth's oceans will become extinct in our lifetimes.

I don't think there's much "legal" shark hunting going on - finning is basically an undercover operation these days. Albeit, it's done out in the open, with the authorities doing a wink wink nod nod to the fact it happens. (It provides a valuable export to those countries, and you can bet organized crime is heavily involved).

Gordon Ramsay and crew were expelled from Costa Rica while filming illegal finning operations.

My source is the fact that all the waste in the US is stored in dozen different places where each one is far bigger than a foorball field:
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
or read this: http://www.nei.org/Issues-Poli... particular this: http://www.nei.org/CorporateSi...

The only thing giving your a small edge about your claim is that the above waste (first link) includes waste from weapon production and decommissioning.

FYI: http://www.wired.com/2015/07/p...

"All told, the nuclear reactors in the U.S. produce more than 2,000 metric tons of radioactive waste a year, according to the DoE"

From: http://www.scientificamerican....

I really wonder how pro nuclear advocates can be so uneducated that they not even know the basic facts.

In which desert do the USA store the biggest amount of nuclear waste in the word?

http://articles.latimes.com/ke...

" Richard Feynman, sexism and changing perceptions of a scientific icon

Whole fucking article was treading on egg shells but still got removed before being reinstated. The feminazi are strong in their influence at Sci Am.

"when he was a young, boyish looking professor at Cornell, Feynman used to pretend to be a student so he could ask undergraduate women out .. Feynman .. trying to get women in bars to sleep with him .. documented affairs with two married women"

Have these fragile flowers ever thought of saying no to sexual advances. What Feynman does/did with his dick - as long as it's between consenting adults - is nobody's business except his.

"It's not surprising to find these anecdotes disturbing and even offensive"

Well then, don't read about them.

"the propensity to lie on the beach and watch girls"

OH, shock horror !

"actions .. that were considered acceptable or amusing in 1950 would quite rightly cause instant outrage in 2014."

No they wouldn't, it's just that the political-correctness-feminista dictatorship would try and get you fired if you say any different.

Richard Feynman, sexism and changing perceptions of a scientific icon

http://www.scientificamerican....

It's just another massive pay-for-play system, passing on the immense costs to the consumer.

If the government wants to sniff our tailpipes, they certainly have the power to force the issue.

We have one state level EPA in California, and a Federal EPA, and the Clean Air Act forbids other states from creating more EPAs.

Real world testing is what we already have. They take $ 60 or so, put our vehicles on rollers, and run them through a few specific tests. Perhaps one day we'll have onboard, continuous monitoring.

What really needs to be done is establish real emission standards by fuel and weight, and end the massive pay-for-play system described in the Scientific American article above. Businesses should be able to meet standards, not engage in endless secret negotiations by year, make, and model of the vehicle.

If VW had spent the extra funding to include the AdBlue / Urea injection system, their diesels would be cleaner than many gas powered vehicles. We should be pushing more diesels. Unfortunately, the cost of AdBlue appears to have the effect of pricing the low end diesels out of the market.

The envelope of the investigation does need to be expanded -- the US needs to end the secret pay-for-play system, dissolve the dual-EPA construct, and investigate the board members that suddenly dropped the NOx level to 1/2 of the EU levels for the low end diesels.

California may have done this to increase tax revenues -- taxation without representation. Their gasoline is already about $ 1 more per gallon than the rest of the nation, and diesel fuel has much lower levels of taxation. If CAL-EPA and CARB intended to increase tax revenues by banning low end diesels, we're questioning the wrong organization.

The dual EPA system needs to end, and real emission standards need to be published by fuel and weight.

http://www.scientificamerican....

It's another massive pay-for-play system. The US does not actually have emissions standards -- every make, model, and year is evaluated in secret, on a case by case basis.

Note that California earns a lot more in taxes from a gallon of gas than a gallon of diesel. That's a heck of an incentive to block diesels by dropping the NOx limit to levels far below the EU standards.

If CARB and EPA do not have published standards, or have monetary incentives to increase taxation on the public, in secret, as described above, VW should be thanked for exposing them -- prior to dissolving CARB and CAL-EPA, and completely reforming FED-EPA.

It makes no sense to have one federal standards body and one state standards body, and then ban all other states from having their own EPA. They don't even publish a standard!

It's the deep blue progressive democrats, fleecing the public and the automakers again -- and passing the cost to We the People.

Mars has no Magnetic field because it's core cooled and is no longer a active moving iron mass. it cooled faster as it has very little radioactive isotopes and being further away from the sun it has less energy pounding it to slow the cooling.

http://www.scientificamerican....

Plus we had an event late after the formation of the planets in the solar system that also added a buttload of energy, when the moon was formed from a planetary sized impact.

Also continuing tidal forces from our moon may also play a factor in generating friction beneath the crust. This same friction has caused the lighter moon to become tidal locked with the earth, always facing us with the same side.

20+ posts already, and no one mentioned Global Warming yet? How could you, guys, miss this opportunity to refresh the fear in the hearts of your followers? If you keep burning fossil fuels, our planet too will become an airless desert devoid of life. Whether it will heat up or cool down is an impolite question, but something will happen, unless you install solar panels on your roof.

The "point of now return" — like the second coming of a deity of some unscientific cult followed by the unwashed — has been within "only a few years" for the past 4 decades.

Gebyy zl gnvy.

Mars has no Magnetic field because it's core cooled and is no longer a active moving iron mass. it cooled faster as it has very little radioactive isotopes and being further away from the sun it has less energy pounding it to slow the cooling.

http://www.scientificamerican....

Plus we had an event late after the formation of the planets in the solar system that also added a buttload of energy, when the moon was formed from a planetary sized impact.

And isn't it a bit demeaning to women to suggest that they can't make it in the world of programming if we men don't figure out a way to help them along, or become more welcoming, or whatever?

Nope. It's not about giving women an advantage, it's about giving them a level playing field where they don't have to compete on technical ability AND put up with sexist bullshit at the same time.

Do you realize the incredible advantage a competent female programmer actually has right now, with all the recent focus on getting women into coding and other tech professions? Any company would absolutely *love* to hire good female programmers, and certainly don't want to lose the ones they have.

Sadly the reality is that women are still disadvantaged when applying for jobs in STEM. The classic "resume test", where you send nearly identical resumes with male and female names with job applications demonstrates this over and over again.

http://www.pnas.org/content/10...
http://blogs.scientificamerica...

This is the same mistake Donald Trump made when he said that young black men had huge advantages. He saw some programmes to help them and assumed that they were starting from the same base as young white guys, so were now ahead. He forgot that young white guys all benefit from the greatest affirmative action program in the history of the world, namely the history of the world.

Let's see:
- Global Warming: High chance, high risk, slow action. Will happen over generations (5+).
- Killer viruses (I assume you added bacteria as well): Low chance, low risk, slow or fast action. I'd bump it down significantly.
- Rogue black holes: frankly they fall into the same category as asteroids (celestials dangerous to us)
- Rogue artificial intelligence: Pah-lease. That's coming after global warming takes care of all of us :)
- Aliens: I'd lump them into "celestials dangerous to us".
- Gamma Ray Bursts: Low chance, extreme risk, unknown probability and no way to avoid. I'd plaster the "shit happens" tag on it and pray shit doesn't happen. It's the most we can do.
- Giant solar flares: Medium chance, medium risk, no way to avoid. See "Gamma Ray Bursts".
- Magnetic field reversal: "Still, there is no evidence that a weakened magnetic field would result in a doomsday for Earth. During past polarity flips there were no mass extinctions or evidence of radiation damage." (source: http://www.scientificamerican....). High chance, low risk, it's not a Mass Extinction Event. Also, we can do nothing about it.
- Supervolcanoes: Medium chance (it WILL happen), high risk, fast action. If the year without a summer tells us something, it tells us it would be bad. Bumped up, deserves funding.
- Biotech disaster: lumped together with Killer viruses.
- Nanotechnology: are we getting that far? Maybe. Deserves funding.
- Particle accelerator chain reaction: wasn't this scientifically dismantled many times over?
- Divine Intervention: "God Help Us All!" is all the funding this deserves.

In the interests of truth could someone either find some proof that VW was cheating and post it, OR refrain from the "VW cheating" meme. You guys know something about screw ups in software. Isn't it much more likely that the engineers at VW took the software that they bought from Bosch and then added a big list of "features " that the pointy headed bosses thought would "add value". Then the software broke because they had changed the logic without knowing it. It seemed to work, so no one checked, they didn't have a budget for it. After all a logical proof would have taken decades and cost X times the German GDP. Below is the only link I can find to the so called "smoking gun". "It appears they did this with the intent of clearly making the emissions performance different on the test cycle, which I think is the most surprising,” Anair said in an interview. http://www.scientificamerican.... Note the humble technician says 'It appears that.........", he doesn't say "I have proof", and if he did have, he would have said so. The EPA has accidentally fooled the world's media. Remember that Toyota got scammed for billions because someone put a rubber mat over the throttle pedal of their car, and now GM is being scammed for more billions because people hung heavy weights on their key chains. The search for truth depends on intelligent scepticism. At the moment all we can say for certain is that VW is about to be scammed for billions. You guys can do better than this.

It always depends on how you compare. "All other things remaining equal" is one of the ways one can compare. It's valid but one has to be careful about conclusions because the other things are not remaining equal.

And then you go on to make some totally bogus comparisons, e.g. grasses and some food crops to anything relevant. To wit:

When water is not scarce most plants benefit from the extra CO2

Most plants don't benefit from the extra CO2, period, because in order to do more photosynthesis they'd have to have more sunlight, and most plants already have all the sunlight they can handle. In fact, you can literally see zonation changing with climate change; the climatic zones are marching northward. Decreased rainfall in California and increased temperatures in Oregon mean that people are starting to put in vineyards up there. The pines can't handle this weather, they're dying in droves... the ones that didn't just burn in the Butte fire, or the Valley fire, that is.

There are simply less plants in arid regions, so we don't really care if they can use more CO2. We only care if the bulk of the biomass can, and it can't — trees cannot use appreciably more CO2 than they're already using. So like I said, increasing atmospheric CO2 will really do nothing meaningful for us, while it does many things to us. Trees do use less water when CO2 levels are higher, but clearly not enough to save them — again, just stand in one place, look around you, and count the dying trees.

Back to reality -- innocent until proven guilty.

California is the only state with it's own EPA. It's only legal because of the federal EPA creation timeline.

Actual, approved smog tests are nothing like the tests being used to persecute VW and other diesel manufacturers in the press. But it gets better -- the approval levels are negotiated in secret. There is no actual "NOx" limit that applies to all vehicles. It's often based on the make, model, and vin.

When you look at the legal, approved system used to test the cars, for example, some counties in California, it's often a set of rollers and the vehicle is tested at a few different RPMs over a span matter of several minutes. It's intended to help clean the air, not monitor drivers or vehicles on a 24/7 basis.

Granted, an eco-terrorist, green weenie with a rolling lab isn't going to like a short, simple test. They don't like a lot of things. The system being described in the press, and sites like citylab, the systems being used to persecute VW in the press, are laboratory grade systems mounted in the vehicles. The cars are being driven over hill and dale for many miles under many conditions. That's not what the law requires, and it's not a violation of a smog test.

It would be useful to see one of the suspect vehicles placed on an actual, approved test bed and "defeat" the "defeat device" somehow. Let interested parties see the actual, approved test failure document, not some neurotic geekfest that could be nothing more than sensationalized eco-terrorism.

Reform the entire smog testing process to some sort of standardized limits, based on reasonable numbers. Dissolve politicized organizations like CARB, CAL-EPA, and get back to the original intent -- lowering emissions.

http://www.scientificamerican....

This article above is a small start at describing the massive political hurdles required for carmakers to even begin to pass the tests. It shouldn't be this way.

That's before anyone considers the tax issue in California. They suddenly dropped the NOx limits circa 2009, and they also charge around $1 more per gallon in taxes on gasoline. Diesel fuel is exempt from much of the taxation. That's a huge political incentive to screw diesel power, even though (with a properly designed urea system) the modern diesel engines are often cleaner and more powerful than their gasoline counterparts.

If the goal is clean air, we might be trying to get rid of the wrong engines. It's another damn good reason to stop sensationalizing science.

Actually unnecessary medical procedures are a serious problem that results in people dying.

Yes it does, also which pets we have and which area we live in.

Here's a two minute clip discussing it:
http://www.scientificamerican....

For several years the anti-fructose movement has been making noise and has been showing increasing insight is the underlying mechanisms. Famous example spokesperson of this movement is Dr Lustig, and googling his name alone gives a boatload of references.

An MD claiming a single chemical is mostly responsible for obesity? BS detector starts ticking up...

https://www.sciencebasedmedici...
http://blogs.scientificamerica...

BS readings confirmed.

No,

wrong way around.

His idea:
Fructose is causing metabolic syndrome and partly responsible for weight gain by sabotaging leptin response.
He claims obesity isn't the problem. People don't die from fat, they die from metabolic syndrome.

For several years the anti-fructose movement has been making noise and has been showing increasing insight is the underlying mechanisms. Famous example spokesperson of this movement is Dr Lustig, and googling his name alone gives a boatload of references.

An MD claiming a single chemical is mostly responsible for obesity? BS detector starts ticking up...

https://www.sciencebasedmedici...
http://blogs.scientificamerica...

BS readings confirmed.

> James Van Allen:
> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/radiation-belts-around-the-earth/

So you're going to dismiss everything learned by NASA about the belts since 1959.

Amazing.

I'm a great fan of back-of-the-envelope calculations... but these aren't calculations; they are merely assertions. And worse, not merely assertions, but assertions that seem to be based on random pseudo-facts not really understood.

Europe has the longest history of solar panel installation, and has good data for energy payback time. Energy payback time for silicon panels is between 0.5 and 1.4 years. Depending on location, it can be as high as 3 years in northern Europe.

http://cleantechnica.com/2013/...

plus the whole poisoning China thing with harvesting rare earths

Do you even know what rare earth elements are? Almost all solar panels manufactured today are crystalline silicon. Silicon isn't a rare earth element.

In the end, I have faith in the species to adapt or to invent technologies that actually will be helpful. We're not there yet. Band-aid solutions in the short term are meaningless..

I agree with you there. I'm a technological optimist; if we can identify problems, we can solve them. However, ignoring and belittling the existence of problems isn't going to help, and dismissing possible solutions with slogans and sound-bites is counterproductive.

So are gotcha-type articles about Exxon.

The point of this article was that Exxon was a major funder of the campaigns to discredit the science of global warming in the '90s and early 2000s, even though a decade earlier their own scientists were telling them that this was significant. They spent about $30 million dollars funding climate denial.

On the other hand, they did stop most of their funding to the climate-change deniers in 2007, so it does seem to me to be mostly an article about a company that isn't really the problem any more.

http://www.theguardian.com/env...
http://www.scientificamerican....
http://ecowatch.com/2015/07/17...

'Hidden Knowledge: Corporations; how they came into being, how they have changed, how they are run and how they are the key to the erosion of society, erosion to the rights and lifestyles of people, etc' link

"If we look at the corporation as a legal person, it exhibits all the characteristics of a psychopath using a personality diagnostic checklist by the World Health Organization."

Groundwater Contamination May End the Gas-Fracking Boom

"Drawing the metaphor of the early attempts to fly. The man going off of a very high cliff in his airplane, with the wings flapping, and the guys flapping the wings and the wind is in his face, and this poor fool thinks he's flying, but, in fact, he's in free fall, and he just doesn't know it yet because the ground is so far away, but, of course, the craft is doomed to crash." link

... this from 2013 http://blogs.scientificamerica...

I have trouble understanding how anyone in a technologically advanced culture can think science is decided by vote.

You have the causality exactly backwards.

O'Rly ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://blogs.scientificamerica...
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/h...

Everyone of those are examples of "CONSENSUS" that are totally disproven.

Consensus is about as relevant to scientific progress as potholes are to commuting.

The fuel of the future
Environmental lunacy in Europe
The Economist
Apr 6th 2013

WHICH source of renewable energy is most important to the European Union? Solar power, perhaps? (Europe has three-quarters of the world’s total installed capacity of solar photovoltaic energy.) Or wind? (Germany trebled its wind-power capacity in the past decade.) The answer is neither. By far the largest so-called renewable fuel used in Europe is wood.

In its various forms, from sticks to pellets to sawdust, wood (or to use its fashionable name, biomass) accounts for about half of Europe’s renewable-energy consumption. In some countries, such as Poland and Finland, wood meets more than 80% of renewable-energy demand. Even in Germany, home of the Energiewende (energy transformation) which has poured huge subsidies into wind and solar power, 38% of non-fossil fuel consumption comes from the stuff. After years in which European governments have boasted about their high-tech, low-carbon energy revolution, the main beneficiary seems to be the favoured fuel of pre-industrial societies.

The Economist

See also:

Should American Wood Fuel European Power?
Growth of wood-fueled power generation in Europe spurs protests from Southern environmentalists in the U.S.
Scientific American
By Elizabeth Harball and ClimateWire | November 14, 2014

Europe's renewable energy targets drive demand for wood pellets. Other voices in the forestry sector, including Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, said that wood-based energy is renewable because the wood burned is replaced by other trees that take in carbon dioxide, making the process carbon-neutral.

Today, however, it is not U.S. policy that is driving the growth of the wood-fuel sector. Europe depends heavily on wood-based fuels to meet its goal of sourcing 20 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2020.

-- Scientific American

If you are worried about the radiation then you have another good reason to switch from coal to nuclear. "the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy." - http://www.scientificamerican....

And then you need to consider the turnover time of CO2 in the atmosphere is measured in centuries, not years. - http://www.ipcc.ch/publication...

As to the source of the statistics, no that is your only source of statistics that CORRELATES a set amount of power plants/mega watts/tons of chemical X with some number of cancer cases.

That is LITERALLY your source. You can cite all the studies you like... I've seen a lot of them... and inside each of them that could be used to make your argument, you'll find that that is EXACTLY what they did.

And given that that is your information source what you have is a ROUGH correlation.

On that basis you can't tax me. You need CAUSATION.

People that don't grasp the distinction between correlation and causation shouldn't cite statistics AT ALL.

As to power plants being dangerous to workers etc... don't be obtuse. It makes you sound petty and quarrelsome which is not helping you.

As to internalizing costs, you cannot do that unless you can nail down causation on a case by case basis.

You can't. So you can't.

As to your statistics... they're correlative.

As to 29%... we're talking about PM2.5 in San Francisco actually if you read the source. And the amount of air pollution in San Francisco is pretty fucking low.

So 30 percent of just about nothing... is just about nothing.

Let me make this clear, you know there is arsenic in many natural water sources right? That's something we often use as RAT POISON. But it is very commonly found in natural springs and lakes. Dangerous? Nope. As any doctor will tell you, dosage is very important when determining if something is actually even a poison in the first place. And most medicines are themselves only medicines at specific dosages. Exceed the dosage and they can themselves become poisons. The old eating a bottle of asprin and then drinking half a liter of scotch suicide method.

So you say 29 percent... 29 percent doesn't mean anything from a health stand point without having some sort of scale to understand exactly how much PM2.5 San Franciscans are sucking down.

if its just about nothing... and 29 percent of that just about nothing is from china... who cares.

There's a certain amount of insect parts in your food. A certain amount feces in the air. A certain amount of urine rubbed into your hands when you get a hand shake. A certain amount of semen on your pillow when you lay down on a hotel bed. It doesn't matter if they washed and bleached it... Some remnant is there. Its just no one cares because its below a threshold where it matters to you.

As to the geo engineering... if you're not familiar with the proposed methods of geo engineering than you're not well read on climate change. Period.

Here is some more on the sulfer dioxide concept:
http://www.livescience.com/160...

Here is a bit more on the boats spraying salt water:
http://www.scientificamerican....

The cost structure for these plans is well under a billion dollars for either one. And either would entirely negate the effect of global warming. Understand... ENTIRELY negate the warming. ALL of it.

The carbon credit scheme will do nothing of the kind whilst costing trillions.

if you want the warming to stop, support a plan that will ACTUALLY work.

And then take the MASSIVE savings and sink a portion of that into funding research for new technologies. Contrary to what you might think, funding for new technologies to replace coal etc are not actually that high.

We spend a lot of money on wind farms and solar farms but we don't spend anywhere near that kind of money on research into the technology that will actually get rid of coal.

As to conflating all subsidies as equal... *sigh*... please try to watch the fallacies. You seem to operate almost entirely in them and it makes it tedious to correct simple logical errors. There are small subsidies and there are fucking massive subsides. Saying "we subsidized somethin

<sarcasm>It won't be a problem in North Carolina because they banned sea level rise planning. Texas and Florida should be fine too because you can't talk about climate change there or plan for it, so therefore it's not happening there. Clearly this so-called sea-level rise only happens in places where those pesky liberals who believe this so-called science live. Why, God will just protect these states just like he parted the Red Sea for Moses.</sarcasm>

Well, at least they're not planning to follow up the wasteful 2020 flagship to Mars with yet another flagship to Mars as part of their ongoing Mars obsession at the cost of the rest of the solar system.

While you seem to be one of those who sees those missions with disdain, there is a good logic for them.
1) Public favor. People got bored of the moon after a few visits, and Mars is the next most probe-able remote object to test probe tech on.
2) Theory testing. Mars probes have dealt with a fair deal of "that's interesting, but what about this other question?" that has lead to more advanced probes and rovers.

So, Mars is a good playground since they can't get funding to do live tests with major probes and landers on the moon anymore.

This logic is predicated on the assumption that NASA are logical and curious rather than being lead by a bunch of political appointees trying to manipulate the citizenry for votes. Or possibly "despite" instead of "rather than."

... to Titan will be approximately three weeks after never :P

Well, at least they're not planning to follow up the wasteful 2020 flagship to Mars with yet another flagship to Mars as part of their ongoing Mars obsession at the cost of the rest of the solar system.

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

The general idea is still sound. The problem is that the calorie/kilocalorie values are based on a very average and idealized man

No, the problem is that the calorie/kilocalorie values were derived by setting food on fire . Seriously, I am not making this up. Since mitochondria are not little coalmen shoveling food into furnaces, the whole idea of deriving caloric benefit values by setting food on fire is basically insane. But as the link above explains, today, we don't even do that. We just look up each ingredient in a table, a table which was derived by setting food on fire, and then decide what its caloric content is. So not only does the back of the package not tell you what percentage of the food you're going to metabolize (it can't, since we're all different and we don't actually know that much about it) it also doesn't actually tell you what the caloric content of the food is! (There are numerous other problems with the system; some of them are described in the second link.)

Setting food on fire can be fun, but it's not a very good substitute for actual knowledge of how it will behave in the body.

It's enabled managers to avoid that unfortunate human trait of compassion, feeing them to make hard nosed business decisions where employees are just another resource. The reason Japanese companies last so long is that the managers, no matter how high up, feel personally responsible when they have to make people redundant, like it's a personal failure and something they should apologise for. In the west they feel the opposite - it's a triumph, money was saved and the business streamlined, and they deserve a fat bonus.

Part of the empathy gap (at least in ANZAC cultures) is caused by massive wage inequality compared to European/Japanese cultures. In a country like the US with a population of ~300M, the "1%" constitute a group of about 3M. At this scale, they clearly should have no difficulty surrounding themselves with people in similar circumstances, and in practice wage (and wealth) inequality can create serious barriers (often actual walls) between them and the rest of the society. Such segregation is documented to reduce empathy. Moreover, reducing such segregation requires active choice, which in turn depends on the empathy that you are trying to create! So the only way to create greater inter-class empathy appears to be to force the wealthy to associate with the rest of society. And the only way I know of to do that is seriously high taxation rates (either of income, or property or both) that cannot be avoided by moving to Texas or the Cayman Islands.

Not to mention that most of the railway trackage that would have to be built, in both the Russian and the American sides, would be mostly going through permafrost. Permafrost is not the most stable foundation for a railway bed - when the Chinese built the Qinghai-Tibet railway they had to include passive cooling with ammonia refrigerant to keep the soil at a stable temperature, and avoid warping of the tracks. And even then, they are running the risks of having to reconstruct the permafrost section of the track due to unanticipated global warming effects. The chinese only had a short 500km section with which they had to contend with permafrost. The Russian-American railroad would have to contend with thousands of kilometers of permafrost.

And if there were really that much of a business case for a US to China railway connection, the same case could be argued for a China to Europe railway connection,which already exists. Yet despite being a more direct route to Europe than an ocean route, the existing Eurasian Land Bridge only carries 1% of the China-Europe trade. The vastly more expensive US to China connection would be an even more dubious business case.

Wastewater injection is known to have caused earthquakes in oklahoma: http://www.scientificamerican....

OK here's the thing with this generation of driverless cars- their motion is governed by neural nets. I am going to assume that everyone here is familiar with this programming paradigm. If not, the Wikipedia entry on it is adequate.

While in the end NN are just another form of Turning machine, currently no one can divine the algorithm of a trained neural net well enough to express it in IF THEN ELSE WHILE form.

That means given a trained NN which is 100% correct 100% of the time , no could write an imperative or procedural (broadly speaking) program which captured the logic (IF THEN ELSE) the neural net is using (defacto using, NN don't have IF THEN ELSE logic except those implicitly embedded in their activation rules) to solve the problem.

That means the algorithm the NN has arrived at is not open to analytical inspection and confirmation, except very indirectly.

This is OK for wide variety of predictive tasks in which human life does not hang in the balance. In medicine, the diagnostic results from NN and even Good Old Fashioned AI expert systems are reality--checked by human doctors.

Neural nets ALWAYS run the risk of coming to the right conclusion for the wrong reason enough of the time to fool humans into thinking it "understands" the problem domain in a way that is analogous to a human. A NN so trained will fool or lull human observers into a false sense of security until that BIG ACCIDENT happens then a post mortum reveals the shocking truth about what the NN was focusing in on to make it decisions.

The Big Idea behind NN is that, through a combination of evolutionary forces and billions of iterations the NN will learn using the same Hebbian activation princples the brain appears (now) to use and that with enough training, the exceptional cases that I am describing will be found and rooted out.

But even in nature, this doesn't happen reliably. Take for example the Australian Jewel Beetle. Over perhaps millions of years, it has of course evolved a robust way to recognize desirable mates and procreate. That is as basic an evolutionary task as you can imagine- it has to work or the species is doomed.

However, the male's algorithm for mating is not as robust as you might imagine. It seems that what males rely on to select a mate is a very, very limited set of perceptual cues. As it turns out, it is looking for big glossy brown curved things. When it sights one, it alights and starts humping away.

Well, Austrailian beer bottles fit this description *and fit it better than the female of the species*. People toss empty beer bottles in the outback and the result is the male beetles prefer the beer bottles to such a degree that the beetles were going to go extinct. Austrailia had to pass a law to change the appearance of its beer bottles.

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

This is a cautionary tale to those who think evolutionary forces produce only *robust* algorithms. What evolution actually produces is *good enough so far* algorithms. What well trained NN produce are similarly good enough algorithms. In both cases we have to do science to try to get at what it is they are relying on- what features they are *really* trained on. And we don't know there's a problem until tragedy happens and we don't know how ridiculous the problem is until we do science.

This is different from procedural programming which, the Halting Problem notwithstanding, CAN be analytically examined for correctness. Procedural type programming plus sensors is what runs water stations, trains, planes etc. The military does use NN to try to recognize things but it has humans making the final decision and when the missle gets launched, it's not left to a NN to decide where to finally land.

Moreover, self driving cars under the control of a NN can and will be attacked by the usual miz of 14 y/o kids, pranksters, criminals and terrorists

I dunno if AC will check back or not - but in no particular order:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/
http://www.reuters.com/
http://rt.com/
http://www.cbc.ca/
http://www.news.com.au/
http://www.dailytelegraph.com....
http://news.sky.com/
http://kurdishdailynews.org/
http://rt.com/
http://www.jpost.com/
http://www.aljazeera.com/
http://www.china.org.cn/
http://www.scientificamerican....
http://timesofindia.indiatimes...
http://english.pravda.ru/
http://www.projectcensored.org...
http://www.arabtimesonline.com...

I think I've covered the best - be aware, some national sites are heavy into propaganda. Pravda very much so, RT somewhat less so.

Depending on your own interests - you might type in some country in a Google search, and add "times" or "post" or "news". From time to time, I do something like that - the earthquake in Tibet for instance. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=pale... That search offered up a number of sites, but I didn't add any of them to my feeds. Note that many of the hits are very politicized, but you can still find Tibetan news sources among them.

Have fun!

Yeah, those darn scientists, just making up stuff to grow rich and fat on our hard-earned tax dollars: http://www.washingtonpost.com/....

How dare they draw conclusions from numerous studies covering hundreds of thousands of people: http://www.scientificamerican.... .

And if you have a heart condition or something then there are already games that can kill you. But it isn't the game killing you... its your fucking heart condition. And if you have one... maybe you should be smart enough to not play a game that is guaranteed to scare a little pee out of you.

Thanks Doctor. Because heart conditions are diagnosable 100% of the time.

Also, had you spent one second on Google, you'd realize what kills people from fright isn't a preexisting heart condition but heart damage caused by the sudden release of adrenaline. It can happen to anyone if the conditions are right, heart condition or no.

Maybe you should join the rest of us in the kiddy pool too with all your know how?

We don't know exactly what this guy did.

It does not matter. One does not — or, rather, should not — have a right to forcibly alter other people's memories or perception of himself. If the courts can force Google to erase the records, will they not be able to force the victim erase her memories as soon as the procedures are perfected? For the Greater Good[TM]?

Interestingly, checkers is a solved game. It turns out, with perfect play, that it's a draw every time. So not only should a human never win against a decent computer checkers program, it's provable that it would be impossible to win if the computer played perfectly.