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Moore's law like scaling does not apply to batteries.

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

For those of you who doubt the veracity of Connie St. Louis' claims, they are backed up by credible witnesses (Deborah Blum and Ivan Oransky), including members of the Korean Federation of Women's Science and Technology Association. KOFWST released an open letter demanding an apology from Tim Hunt:

"At a luncheon hosted by the Korea Federation of Women’s Science and Technology Associations (KOFWST) during the World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul on June 8, 2015, Nobel Laureate Sir Tim Hunt made some inappropriate remarks over which KOFWST would like to express its very strong regrets. ... This unfortunate incident must not be portrayed as a private story told as a joke. We cannot accept sexist remarks that threaten to reverse the gains made towards equality for women scientists, and women in the wider society." (Press Release)

Furthermore, Tim Hunt's career isn't over because he lost his "honorary appointment" at UCL. For this of you who don't know, an honorary appointment is NOT a real job. It's a title without pay. In other words, it's not a real job. And the UCL Provost has reaffirmed the position that Tim Hunt's comments (UCL Provost Statement)

So Tim Hunt got called out on really stupid remarks and non-apology (“I did mean the part about having trouble with girls.”). He lost a title and his desk at UCL. Sounds about right. What's the lesson to be drawn here? It's time to get over your sexist attitudes about women in science. If that's lost on you, then, at the very least, keep your sexist comments to yourself.

Old-style big-tube fluorescents can be annoying, but not for some dumb EM sensitivity - they cause headaches because they can hum and strobe/flicker at a just perceptible frequency, particularly when their ballasts are wearing out and/or in combination with viewing a CRT-style computer screen (which itself is also flickering). Your handful of people may have gotten conditioned by this. I can remember getting killer headaches pulling all-nighter code sessions on a library workstation with such lights buzzing away in the ceiling.

Industry experts acknowledge that day-to-day exposure to older, magnetically ballasted long tube fluorescent bulbs found mostly in industrial and institutional settings could cause headaches due to their noticeable flicker rate. The human brain can detect the 60 cycles per second such older bulbs need to refresh themselves to keep putting out light.

CFLs, on the other hand, refresh themselves at between 10,000 and 40,000 cycles per second, rates too fast for the human eye or brain to detect. I was skeptical of them at first, but since they colored down to soft-white, CFL's don't bother me in the slightest.

Old-style big-tube fluorescents can be annoying, but not for some dumb EM sensitivity - they cause headaches because they can hum and strobe/flicker at a just perceptible frequency, particularly when their ballasts are wearing out and/or in combination with viewing a CRT-style computer screen (which itself is also flickering). Your handful of people may have gotten conditioned by this. I can remember getting killer headaches pulling all-nighter code sessions on a library workstation with such lights buzzing away in the ceiling.

Industry experts acknowledge that day-to-day exposure to older, magnetically ballasted long tube fluorescent bulbs found mostly in industrial and institutional settings could cause headaches due to their noticeable flicker rate. The human brain can detect the 60 cycles per second such older bulbs need to refresh themselves to keep putting out light.

CFLs, on the other hand, refresh themselves at between 10,000 and 40,000 cycles per second, rates too fast for the human eye or brain to detect. I was skeptical of them at first, but since they colored down to soft-white, CFL's don't bother me in the slightest.

When there is absolutely no mention of the U.S. military, which is the largest energy consumer in the federal government, standing at over 80% of all consumption.

You want to move away from oil dependency? Well, 3/4's of military's energy use comes from oil, and it consumed 117 million barrels of oil in 2006. (That's 320 thousand barrels PER DAY) According to the 2005 CIA World Factbook, if it were a country, the DoD would rank 34th in the world in average daily oil use, coming in just behind Iraq and just ahead of Sweden. (!)

And he's worried about the Keystone pipeline and charging fossil fuel companies higher taxes? Really?

To some extent true, but there is load of artificial coloring which do not exist naturally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is only existing because we made it, and is not existing in insect specie or anything. Heck Some artificial coloring may induce hyperactive behavior in children. http://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/... and http://www.scientificamerican....

Assuredly evidence might not be enough to forbid the ingredients, but it is enough to warrant caution and maybe remove it from children's food. Personally I do not know the research good enough to tell. Anyway, definitively not natural. But the natural fallacy (which you might have wanted to mention) never took hold for me. Pure natural arsenic or botulism toxin is poison, artificial non naturally existing recent antibiotic, preservative additive are helpful. It is not about the natural or artificial provenance that people should look to, but the effects. But then again that's why it is called a fallacy.

A reasonably well-governed society rewards people for doing something other people want — not for being sociopaths

We're not talking about a "reasonably well-governed society". We're talking about the post-Capitalist United States.

You haven't convinced me, rich people are disproportionally sociopathic. You did imply it, but offered no evidence.

Here's your evidence:

http://www.scientificamerican....

http://opinionator.blogs.nytim...

Sorry, why do we need multiple languages again?

http://www.scientificamerican....

Just looked up the ingredients.

Vegetable oil (canola oil, soybean oil, and extra virgin olive oil), water, balsamic vinegar (water, wine vinegar, grape juice), contains less than 2% of sugar, salt, dried garlic, dijon mustard (distilled vinegar, mustard seed, water, salt, white wine, citric acid, tartaric acid, spice), spice, xanthan gum, vitamin e, dried parsley, natural flavor.

Oil and vinegar are pretty much natural preservatives. So there's no need to add in artificial ones. Perhaps a little high on the salt at 350 mg per serving, but it's really not that bad. Also, studies have actually shown that sodium is not that bad for you

I think that the proposed "rainbow gravity" (http://phys.org/news/2015-01-black-holes-space-theory.html) and the big bang theory are mutually exclusive

http://www.scientificamerican....
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

There is a vocal minority of people

Are you sure?

They are not in charge.

Are you sure?

The reality of today is that, if you communicate any secrets, you must consider the possibility of your communications being tapped/intercepted. It is even possible that hardware is compromised before you even buy it.

With backdoors, BIOS hacking and packet sniffing being part of the daily talk on slashdot, you have to be prepared to communicate end-to-end with multiple levels of pre-planned encryption. That said, I don't think I've ever said anything that needs that much security, but a nation-state might have.

Well, among other things, he revealed that:

1) The NSA intercepts and stores virtually all communications sent on electronic networks anywhere it can reach. Not just metadata. In the case of phone calls, they also speech->text them and make that archive searchable.

http://rt.com/news/172284-nsa-...
http://www.globalresearch.ca/n...
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

2) The NSA constantly works at ways to break into encrypted communications, including hacking into the VPNs of supposedly friendly governments.

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

3) The NSA listens to the cell calls of friendly foreign leaders. (hopefully, also, unfriendly ones).

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

4) The NSA may have worked to weaken encryption standards in order to make their task easier.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9...
http://www.scientificamerican....

5) The NSA has physically broken into the fiber plants of major public Internet companies (ie. Google), supposedly without their knowledge, in order to steal data sent only internally.

http://www.extremetech.com/int...

6) Major Internet companies, and all telcos, have willingly shared much or all of their client's communications with the NSA.

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/ar...

7) The NSA and foreign intelligence agencies share data in order to evade domestic spying restrictions.

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

8) The NSA has hacked into at least one major supplier of SIM cards, in order to spy on calls made from the phones made with them.

http://news.softpedia.com/news...

Ya...no direct evidence...except for:
-Fossils
-DNA, aka the universal genetic code
-Common traits and stages of life across species
-antibiotic/herbicide/pesticide resistance in bacteria plants
-ability to change the characteristics of living things through breeding
-long term evolutionary experiments, such as Lenski's E Coli experiment

http://www.scientificamerican....
http://humanorigins.si.edu/evi...
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/

I agree with your general tone and statement. However it is important to note the inherent limitations of biomedical research. Generally one CANNOT do large scale studies needed to get a statistically robust result. All of physics and astrophysics generally use the 5 sigma discover requirement which means you have to measure the effect to 3e-7. You cannot do this with people as subjects. It is hard to do this with ANY biological subject. Many of the issues brought up stem from this.

I think much of the problem is exacerbated by the public-or-perish mentality but is even more affected by the total lack of reporting null results (when you DO NOT see anything). This skews your overall distribution. It is like not accounting for trials (because you aren't). In biomedical research they need to spend more time quantifying their trials and placing their results in the proper statistical context. Just staying that you are less likely to get parkinson's disease if you drink coffee because we asked a bunch of people isn't the whole story. How many questions did you ask? Was it 100? Did you treat all those as essentially trials?

Well, how this affects human biology *IS* tech related IMHO.

Sure, but so far there has been NO discussion here about the actual tech in these pesticides. TFA doesn't even name the pesticides affected. Instead, about half way through, it switches to an unrelated rant about Canadian tar sands.

Just in case anyone is actually interested in the technology, here are a few links:

Pesticides may block male hormones
Effect of Endocrine Disrupter Pesticides: A Review
 

"Love" is the nice way to put it. "Largess at the expense of all other solar system exploration" would be more accurate. Here's a graph. And it's always the same stupid justifications - how many times can we pretend to be excited about "revelations" that Mars was once in its past a wet place? Or that we're going to stumble into life any time soon in its perchlorate-rich, destroys-organics-on-contact regolith?

And it's not just huge amounts of money that they're wasting - they're also throwing away most of the remainder of our plutonium supply. At least there's money to start making it again, but it'll take time. Plutonium is precious, and it's needed for outer planet missions.

I've been a mathematics teacher for nine years. And with the utmost sincerity, let me say this: Shut the fuck up.

Take your baseless opinions regarding educational matters and keep them to yourself. Microsoft has had as much success running schools as they had selling MP3 players. Note taking has been proven time-and-time again to be a very effective and powerful mnemonic device for learning. Studies have also shown that note taking with a pen/pencil and paper is more effective than note taking with a laptop. Furthermore, I can ask my students to have a notebook and pencil the first day of class, and for those who forgot or cannot afford it, I have plenty of spares to give them. I cannot expect the same out of a laptop or other digital device. Until you have research clearly demonstrating that any digital device is superior for learning development and comprehension, stay out of my classroom.

The link was shared with me on social media several months ago, I didn't save it unfortunately. But google found it really quickly: http://www.scientificamerican....

Quoting the article in Scientific American: "The risk of a febrile seizure following the MMR is approximately one case in 3,000 doses for children aged 12 to 15 months but one case in 1,500 doses for children aged 16 to 23 months"

Double the risk of the most common side effect.

> Women with actual skills and insights have no problems in the sciences

Nonsense. There is a constant undercurrent in the hiring process of "what if she gets pregnant", even if such bias is outlawed in many states and even if it is never written into candidate review, much as "don't hire Americans, they cost too much" is not explicitly written into hiring policies. The bias is also demonstrated both statistically in overall hiring, and by numerous repetitions of the double blind experiment on scientific papers and job applications, such as:

                    http://blogs.scientificamerica...

For years there have been reports of trace amounts of drugs in treated wastewater that could be harming wildlife and "no one seems to know which compounds need to be removed or how to remove them from the water safely", so are they filtering out these drugs before reusing the water for drinking water?

http://www.scientificamerican....

Aga said even without knowing exact impacts, consistently seeing antibiotics show up in effluent is concerning.

“Even at low levels you don’t want to have people ingest antibiotics regularly because it will promote resistance,” she said.

http://www.newrepublic.com/art...

It looked at samples from 50 large-size wastewater treatment plants nationwide and tested for 56 drugs including oxycodone, high-blood pressure medications, and over-the-counter drugs like Tylenol and ibuprofen. More than half the samples tested positive for at least 25 of the drugs monitored, the study said. High blood pressure medications appeared in the highest concentrations and most frequently.

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

Quote: "I’ve come to the conclusion that the technical details are the easy part. It’s the social engineering that’s the killer." "To be effective, a new set of institutions would have to be imbued with heavy-handed, transnational enforcement powers." If these Utopian statists get their way, say goodbye to freedom and liberty.

Wait what? No massive extinction event?

Many species are disappearing because of human activity (urbanization, deforestation), but no necessarily because of warming. Life on Earth isn't threatened by global warming (it will adapt). The main reason to fight global warming is for ourselves, not for other species.
The massive extinction you are speaking about started millenials before man-made global warming.

And one last time: there is no "too much greenhouse gasses". I have presented the arguments why. Just because you say "I don't agree" isn't going to make it go away any more than its going to make the current ongoing extinction event go away.

Just because you think your arguments are valid doesn't mean they are.
Pollution is a broad term. I guess many different definition exists. The following list CO2 as a pollutant, specifically because of its greenhouse gas effect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... http://www.skepticalscience.co... http://www.scientificamerican....
If we weren't emitting more CO2 than what the system absorbs, we wouldn't list it as a pollutant, of course.

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

Quote: "I’ve come to the conclusion that the technical details are the easy part. It’s the social engineering that’s the killer." "To be effective, a new set of institutions would have to be imbued with heavy-handed, transnational enforcement powers." If these Utopian statists get their way, say goodbye to freedom and liberty.

May 9, 2013 400 PPM: Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere Reaches Prehistoric Levels

But wait!

May 26, 2014 CO2 concentrations top 400 parts per million throughout northern hemisphere

But this is different! Yes, it's two years late, but it's March of 2015. So that means... What does that mean exactly?

It means that Batman v.s. Superman will be the top-grossing film of 2015! (For July 18th only. From 8PM to 10:30PM. In New Jersey.)

Aside from the hysteria button being pushed enough to have rubbed off the "H" from its now highly polished surface, can we consider two things?

1. There has been a huge uptick in volcanic activity in the first half of this year. Seriously; there's been more eruptions than in any previous year on record, and the year isn't even half-way over. -Aside from the inherent weirdness alarm *that* should set off (in conjunction with solar changes and the continuing rise in comet activity), can we please pause to wonder if maybe all that extra ash in the atmosphere might possibly be related?

No? Of course not. Check out the level of spin required to make the problem of too many exploding mountains go away. https://earthtrembling.wordpre...

Bravo. That's insane.

But who am I to get in the way somebody's well-crafted delusions?

Nevermind.

Don't go bringing facts into this.

Science is pure like the love of god, Scientists are people who leave ego behind and selflessly work for the betterment of humanity
Things like studying if cocaine makes quail engage in risky sexual behavior http://blogs.scientificamerica...

Are absolutely needed for your own good, and if you doubt that you are too stupid to understand science, it's settled shut the fuck up.

You do realize that the EPA would already regulate fracking if there were danger to ground water. Funny thing, but if the oil they are fracking for was anywhere near the water

You do realize that a simple google search would have confirmed that fracking fluids are already appearing in groundwater and posing a threat to health.

http://www.scientificamerican....

https://www.propublica.org/art...

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08...

http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind...

Flywheels need to spin fast. When you do that you start hitting limits with your materials. To overcome these problems expensive engineering/material tech is required. So cost is probably the issue. Though maybe that is changing.

What great news for the prospect of life on Mars! Quantities of a chemical that destroys organics on contact are so great that they suck water out of the soil and air!

Nasa's massive obsession with this self-sterilizing rock come at the cost of investigating much more interesting targets elsewhere in the solar system. The money going to Mars 2020 in particular could do so much elsewhere (we really could use a followup to Titan, there's so many mysteries there we're not even close to solving, while new missions to Mars are more trying to find new mysteries to solve and answering the same vague "questions" over and over again) At least Europe is going to get something now - not my personal favorite (if there is anything interesting there, which we don't actually know, it's buried way too deep for us to get at it for a long, long time). But at least it's not NASA's "All Mars Channel".

> It's not so cut and dried, actually. A lot of colour vision requires processing in the cortex

I think you mis-spelled "retina" there. See if you can find a copy of http://www.scientificamerican.... from Jerry Lettvin, in 1986. I had the delight of attending several of teking Jerry's "General Physiology" course at MIT, which was filled with weird anecdotes and a profound scientific view of "how do things *really* work, and how did they get that way" with the evolutionary theory of ambulatory knishes avoiding predation by hungry students in Harvard Square.

Jerry's experiments with electrodes on individual visual neurons and work with other colleagues made very clear that much of vision is edge detection in the retina itself, which explains why that silly dress color illusion works so well. The cortex does not get raw color: it gets pre-processed information about "this region is much redder than that region, and far less blue and green compared to other regions, so it's definitely red". And I'm afraid it's also why the very silly "let's put grids of electrodes in the back of the eye" is never going to to work well. The electrodes are immersed in salty fluid, and the current spreads *much* too far: it recruits far too many of the pre-processing cells, and even putting a brilliantly designed electrode grid on the retina itself would skip all the subtle pre-processing in the retina and require much more complex pre-processing than visual researches like to even think about.

This article supports your statement. http://www.scientificamerican....

Climate change certainly did contribute to triggering the Syrian civil war:

http://www.scientificamerican....

AGW won't cause a quick Roland Emmerich apocalypse, but there are definitely more interesting surprises in store if we do nothing...and you can blame them on whatever you want, it won't keep them from happening.

Texas passed on that, thank you.

> It's not. In the first place, it's the media's job to do that

Just who do you think John Oliver is?

That's precisely what Oliver was doing in that segment. Is your problem that Oliver had Snowden on camera when he did it? As if Snowden was not a willing participant in the show?

> In the second place, distilling issues down to "dick pics" is part of the problem with the modern media. Why fuel that race to the bottom?

It's not a "race to the bottom" it's about reaching the literal man on the street. Unlike, apparently, yourself regular people are busy living their lives. They simply do not have the time for nuanced discussions of abstractions and what-if scenarios. Coming up with a simple, visceral example that a normal person can immediately grasp is a good thing. That is the very definition of digestible and relatable.

Your idiocracy comment is just out-of-touch snobbery. 50% of adults sext and that number will continue to rise as old people die off. If you are offended by a discussion of a completely normal modern form of human sexuality, then you are the one with the problem.

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

Thanks for the NASA study, it's a little lighter than I expected. It only talks about carbon deaths and assumes deaths from nuclear effluent do not exist. Also, as I said the IAEA has publishing interdiction orders over the WHO in all matters nuclear which I see cited in the references which automatically bias the report.

From the article:

The study also excludes aspects of nuclear power that cannot be easily quantified, such as deaths from nuclear proliferation.

That is basically all of them.

1. Cancers from bio-accumulation of radio isotopes are not easily quantified because they travel through the food chain for a random period of time and when they are finally ingested by a human there is another 6 years before it gestates into cancer depending where in the body it end up.

2. Transgenic disease that affect subsequent generations via absorption of low level radio isotope emitters that didn't kill the parents and damage DNA.

3. Failed pregnancies from absorption of medium level emitters of radioactivity.

4. Not including deaths from Nuclear proliferation isn't reasonable because U-238 is a by-product of fuel enrichment used in warfare. The radio-isotopes there will continue killing for generations. That said, I'll go over it again when I have more time to absorb it. I appreciate you sending it to me.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

As I said, it uses the flawed results of the Vattenfal study:

I'm not certain what NASA/UN studies you refer to? I do know that some rely on a document sponsored by the nuclear industry player Vattenfal, as does the IPCC, which gives them an overly optimistic picture of what is achievable with Nuclear.

Which is exactly what the bloomberg you have sent me indirectly does, as I've already read the study the UN and IPPC based their findings on.

Not if dealt with correctly.

And yet it still isn't being dealt with correctly and every day the Nuclear Industry releases more radio isotopes into the environment. I'm not interested in talking about another fuel cycle until this one is managed.

Um... What journal was that published? Who reviewed that?

The original report was prepared for the Dutch government. The report of 1982 and its methodology has been peer reviewed by the publication of a short version in Energy Policy in 1985 [Q2]. It was also referenced by the European Parliament and updated in 2000/2001, again in 2005,2008 and 2012 before it was published on the web. It has been cited over 70 times.

All I see is a website that seems to be dedicated to anti-nuclear. Some of the reports listed at the end are in journals.

If your position is pro-nuclear then you'll characterize the information that way. They are scientists. If you read the thing they tell you they start with no fixed position and examine the lesser known parts of the industry.

Your assumptions are based on a flawed study that has not been peer reviewed and will soon been out of date. It is often used in the way you have used it, however if you read it you'll discover how flawed it is (and now, difficult to find). I'm not criticizing you, btw, it's a deception that was played on all of us. I didn't buy it and it did not take much research to see what a fragile house of cards it was.

Still, it will be interesting to see what happens over the next 4 years or whenever the next IPCC document is due.

I thought that theory was out of favor.

Less "out of favour" and more "never had any scientific attention or merit", also "lacking any archeological or fossil evidence".
See Space Ape!

There's a lot of Amazon warehouses now, and Amazon is smart enough to keep items in stock nearby people that have the buttons for the items. Very few people are going to have to have these shipped hundreds of miles.

And for me this would be more convenient for forgetfulness (I walk out of the laundry room, that whole walking-through-doors-makes-you-forget thing kicks in, and I forget to put laundry detergent on the grocery list) and back issues (I tend to buy in bulk, but I have back issues, and can't actually lift a lot of the things myself; buying things from Amazon means I don't have to drive 45 minutes in the opposite direction of the store to pick up my brother to help me, and then take him home). So for me this reduces CO2, because I'm not making an extra trip to the grocery store nor two extra to my brother's house.

Forest fires have doubled recently compared to thousands of years before that:

http://www.scientificamerican....

Must be those damn hippies setting the trees on fire to prove a point.

You enjoy a deluge of stories on the front page that aren't funny? People wouldn't be complaining so much if the stories were actually funny instead of just retarded.

Although I applaud the cleverness of your Username; I believe I have made my feelings abundantly clear in this thread, to wit:

It isn't the quality of the humor on April Fool's Day; it is just the sheer joy of everyone being allowed to be a little kid for a day.

In fact, unless you are publishing an April Fool's spoof in Scientific American or somesuch, you are not well-served to have your humor be too highbrow.

And no; Slashdot doesn't count as an "intellectual publication"; so get over it, and yourself.

Remember: One day. 24 Hours. That's it. Deal with it.

Thirdly, the 'idea' that coal emits noticeable radioactivity is a myth from the 1960s/1970s. Which is debunked since decades, everyone participating in discussions like this: should know that.

Really?: http://www.scientificamerican....

And Germany is also shutting down nuclear as fast as it can to replace it with coal, which releases far more radioactivity into the environment than the nuclear power plants it replaces!

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

  I don't know if that is GP's objections but they are pretty good reasons to think radio isotopes are a threat to the environment and ultimately, humanity.

Not if dealt with correctly.
The spent fuel can be recycled. The short lived radio isotopes do not need to be stored very long. The medium waste goes back to fuel. The low level is close to background.

"Newer" reactor designs like the LFTR and I use new only in the sense that the prototype was built and tested about 40 years ago but not put into production. Produce a lot less waste and are walk away safe.

"And speaking of vilification, that is what happened to the peer reviewed science [stormsmith.nl] regarding the energetic return of the nuclear industry"
Um... What journal was that published? Who reviewed that? All I see is a website that seems to be dedicated to anti-nuclear. Some of the reports listed at the end are in journals.

I don't know why you think so.

Here's an interview on PBS: "I went to visit indigenous people and hunter-gatherers...they don’t get that much meat because hunting is hard work."

Look at the chart half-way down, of some of the hunter/gatherer tribes that still exist. There is huge variety in one they eat....some are mostly meat, some are mostly plants.
The Paleo diet today isn't good for your health.
Unsurprisingly, here is a study in Nature that points out copying Paleolithic diets would not be very useful anyway (not in the least because we've evolved since then, through the Neolithic era).

The paleo diet is yet another fully trademarked fad diet.

Fuck the invisible hand too. Its bullshit; total unmitigated bullshit.

http://www.scientificamerican....

The Economist Has No Clothes
Unscientific assumptions in economic theory are undermining efforts to solve environmental problems
Mar 17, 2008 |By Robert Nadeau ...The strategy the economists used was as simple as it was absurd—they substituted economic variables for physical ones. Utility (a measure of economic well-being) took the place of energy; the sum of utility and expenditure replaced potential and kinetic energy. A number of well-known mathematicians and physicists told the economists that there was absolutely no basis for making these substitutions. But the economists ignored such criticisms and proceeded to claim that they had transformed their field of study into a rigorously mathematical scientific discipline...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Robert Nadeau teaches environmental science and public policy at George Mason University. His most recently published book is The Environmental Endgame (Rutgers University Press, 2006)

Relevant articles on the subject (which I have not checked for scientific validity, but the sources seem OK):
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-ocean-acidification-intimates-long-recovery-from-climate-change/
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/april/prehistoric-mass-extinction-042710.html

"In fact, roughly 121 million years ago—during an age known as the early Aptian—global CO2 levels were likely higher than 800 ppm (and possibly as high as 2,000 ppm) thanks to cataclysmic volcanic eruptions. [...] The records reveal that acidification proved a big problem for nannoplankton."

"It took at least 25,000 years for the new acidity levels reached in the surface waters to transfer to deeper waters, according to the research—and the ocean took 75,000 years to reach its peak acidity for that episode, as well as at least 160,000 years to recover. "

From the other article:
"New evidence gleaned by analyzing calcium embedded in Chinese limestone suggests that volcanoes, which spewed massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for a million years, caused the biggest mass extinction on Earth."

"[...] as carbon dioxide gas dissolved in the oceans, it raised the acidity of seawater. The research team said it was a deadly combination – carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and higher acidity in the oceans – that eventually wiped out 90 percent of marine species and about three-quarters of land species, in a cataclysmic event 250 million years ago known as the 'end-Permian extinction.' "

Just stay away from as many chemicals as you can.

You do realize that everything is made of chemicals, right?

...it innovates better than almost any place else, and failure is (sometimes) OK.

http://www.scientificamerican....

It has very little to do with employees not being able to go anywhere else...many of the people who work there come in from other countries where this isn't even an issue.

Prof Al Bartlett might disagree with you. While supplies at current rates give us probably something approaching your 100,000-year figure (this was the best I could find with a quick search, and about backs that up), that's assuming current rates of use. If our usage increases exponentially (we have always done this in the past with energy), then that 100k years, at a 10% growth rate per annum (probably a bit big, but gets the point across), drops to less than 144 years. We don't often understand exponentials.

This, along with the already known way to simply wipe-out certain memories, can go a long way towards establishing the "Right To Be Forgotten". Your ex, for example, may be able to obtain a court order for you to undergo the procedure to remove your memories of all the good times you had together...

Or, if that seems too draconian, have those memories replaced by your taking a hike or flying a kite...

"The law approved by the senate on 12 June [2012] banned scientists in state agencies from using exponential extrapolation to predict sea-level rise, requiring instead that they stick to linear projections based on historical data."

No need to limit talking in NC, they just pass legislation which limits sea rise. Science through legislation. Done and done.

http://www.scientificamerican....