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I need a picture that conveys "autofellatio shown here" to tourists.

The truth lies somewhere between the extremes, as usual - anthropocentric global warming is real, and the "scientific consensus" is not unbiased.

A decade ago, I was a global warming skeptic. I felt that it hadn't been fully established that it was happening, and that even if it was, it wasn't proven to be anthropocentric. Five years ago, I held it was most certainly happening, but anthropocentric root causes were still up in the air. Today? I believe it's happening and> that human activity causes it. This change of heart was brought about by a decade of continual scientific improvement, refinement, and study. I demanded "more research," and I'll be damned if they didn't go out and do it.

Unfortunately, that doesn't end the political debate. To put it in policy debate terms, once we've established the "inherency" (proven what the status quo is) now we must explore 1. what the consequences are of letting this go forward unchecked and 2. what we should do about it. And this debate doesn't come without teeth - there's a tremendous amount of money at stake here. Hell, there are entire companies that do nothing but purchase carbon credits and re-trade them to other companies. To say nothing of how Global Warming is used to justify and defend lavish government grants for alternative energy research (much like Russians are used to justify and defend lavish government grants for weapons research, for that matter.) There is very, very much a financial and political angle to all these concerns. One must remember that us knuckle-dragging seal-clubbing conservatives have been listening to hyperventilating eco-activists predicting flooded cities and other doomsday scenarios for decades now. I remember the expression that crawled over my face when Al Gore's two hour powerpoint presentation paused long enough to share lurid stories of drowning polar bears, how sad. The fear-mongering and partisan interests are all wrapped up in a smug veneer of superiority - as Emmit Rensin, editor at Vox.com called it, a "condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus, dressed up as a monopoly on reason." By matching the pattern of arrogant dismissal, it is dismissed out of hand in turn.

This dynamic extends to the scientists themselves - but it just means they're human, not wrong. The hockey stick graph, climategate, et al only shows that scientists are aware of how their data is interpreted by the media, and that they're concerned about their data being spun the "wrong" way. Five seconds of reading the daily news proves these concerns entirely legitimate. That's all that "climategate" was; internal e-mails between scientists bitching about how the media spins or distorts their findings, and discussion about how to prevent or counter it.

That's not how science is used in the Global Warming debate, however - it's invariably invoked as Holy Writ, the incontestable word of Truth, and all who fail to bend a knee before it are branded lunatics and Republicans, forever illogical and excommunicate. The inherent biases of science are not exactly old news, but there's a powerful incentive to gloss over those details when money and political capital are involved - and don't delude yourself into thinking they aren't! This naturally leads to an out-of-hand rejection from those of conservative bent, and the Science ends up thrown out with the bathwater.

This has to stop. Global warming is happening, we are causing it, and economically devastating policies to contain it will never gain much traction and thus will never work. The rational, sane adults on both sides of the aisle have to start ta

The truth lies somewhere between the extremes, as usual - anthropocentric global warming is real, and the "scientific consensus" is not unbiased.

A decade ago, I was a global warming skeptic. I felt that it hadn't been fully established that it was happening, and that even if it was, it wasn't proven to be anthropocentric. Five years ago, I held it was most certainly happening, but anthropocentric root causes were still up in the air. Today? I believe it's happening and> that human activity causes it. This change of heart was brought about by a decade of continual scientific improvement, refinement, and study. I demanded "more research," and I'll be damned if they didn't go out and do it.

Unfortunately, that doesn't end the political debate. To put it in policy debate terms, once we've established the "inherency" (proven what the status quo is) now we must explore 1. what the consequences are of letting this go forward unchecked and 2. what we should do about it. And this debate doesn't come without teeth - there's a tremendous amount of money at stake here. Hell, there are entire companies that do nothing but purchase carbon credits and re-trade them to other companies. To say nothing of how Global Warming is used to justify and defend lavish government grants for alternative energy research (much like Russians are used to justify and defend lavish government grants for weapons research, for that matter.) There is very, very much a financial and political angle to all these concerns. One must remember that us knuckle-dragging seal-clubbing conservatives have been listening to hyperventilating eco-activists predicting flooded cities and other doomsday scenarios for decades now. I remember the expression that crawled over my face when Al Gore's two hour powerpoint presentation paused long enough to share lurid stories of drowning polar bears, how sad. The fear-mongering and partisan interests are all wrapped up in a smug veneer of superiority - as Emmit Rensin, editor at Vox.com called it, a "condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus, dressed up as a monopoly on reason." By matching the pattern of arrogant dismissal, it is dismissed out of hand in turn.

This dynamic extends to the scientists themselves - but it just means they're human, not wrong. The hockey stick graph, climategate, et al only shows that scientists are aware of how their data is interpreted by the media, and that they're concerned about their data being spun the "wrong" way. Five seconds of reading the daily news proves these concerns entirely legitimate. That's all that "climategate" was; internal e-mails between scientists bitching about how the media spins or distorts their findings, and discussion about how to prevent or counter it.

That's not how science is used in the Global Warming debate, however - it's invariably invoked as Holy Writ, the incontestable word of Truth, and all who fail to bend a knee before it are branded lunatics and Republicans, forever illogical and excommunicate. The inherent biases of science are not exactly old news, but there's a powerful incentive to gloss over those details when money and political capital are involved - and don't delude yourself into thinking they aren't! This naturally leads to an out-of-hand rejection from those of conservative bent, and the Science ends up thrown out with the bathwater.

This has to stop. Global warming is happening, we are causing it, and economically devastating policies to contain it will never gain much traction and thus will never work. The rational, sane adults on both sides of the aisle have to start ta

Obligatory SMBC.

Self-Driving Car Ethics

Yeah. Elon Musk's argument was that if we assume any improvement rate in computers at all, then one day it will be affordable to simulate entire worlds, and therefore there are billions of simulations for every real Universe, and therefore we're likely in one.

But, like most arguments, that one is wrong. He seems to be under the impression that it's inevitable that computers will improve indefinitely, and that there's no limit to how complex and powerful they can become while still remaining inexpensive to mass produce. But there's no reason to think that is true. Just because there's a rate of improvement now doesn't mean it won't taper off and eventually flatten in the future.

Also, his thinking is sloppy.

You have provided no evidence, You have only asserted your own opinion, that of a fanatical eco-loon.

Now, who is insulting whom?

I have a PhD in Physics. What do you have?

Well then, that explains everything.

you can wonder all you want, but these guys with a NOBEL PRIZE in Physics, the world's greatest aviation engineer, and a physicist who literally wrote the (graduate) textbook on atmospheric physics all think you are very, very WRONG:

Oh look, three phyicists who have literally spent several hours reading blogs on the internet about climate change are telling everyone who'll listen how the all of climate change research must be wrong according to some amazing insight they've had that clearly no one who's spent years studying the topic would ever think of. Meanwhile, pretty much every published article on climate change in the last decade and every researcher active in the field of climate science says the opposite of these three guys, but we should definitely go with the non-expert opinions of rambling physicists.

Frankly, there is no point in continuing this conversation, you refuse to acknowledge your errors and you are clearly a wingnut with your claims of communist environmental conspiracies, your worship of old physicists who speak about things they readily admit they haven't bothered to study at all, and your penchant for making wild claims which you refuse to back up with any evidence what so ever.

Just gonna leave this here http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id...

"It's not sex! It's vagina-aided masturbation!"

This about sums it up.

I'll just leave this here... "Meat is Murder. Vegetarianism is Genocide." http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id...

You mean like this: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/social-security

The earth is flat, if you permit quite a large margin of error, much as the flatness of a floor or precision gage block is also a function of what level of error you permit.

I'll bet you're a physicist.

You still have to specify parameters to that. What is "happiness"? Would that be greatest total happiness or greatest average happiness? In either case, the mere addition paradox leads to some troubling conclusions. Or perhaps it's Rawls' minmax happiness, where happiness is measured by the least happy person? Just specifying how you're going to measure and aggregate happiness becomes a problem.

Even if you can fix that, utilitarianism has some problems of its own no matter its flavor. E.g. the possibility of utility monsters, or that a utilitarian maximization society may eventually need to dictate what everybody does all the time (a variant of the demandingness objection). These problems can all be mitigated by adding in adjustments, but then someone has to decide what adjustments to make and when the optimizer makes sense.

Idealized democracy sidesteps these problems by being black-box. Bad decisions create negative feedback and so are stopped (as long as they don't manage to destroy the system itself first). Black box mechanisms lack the elegance of simple utility functions, but it doesn't seem like we have anything better yet. Even a government by AI would presumably be based on the AI learning what happiness means and what people want, rather than some static utility function.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/com...

Imagine you're in an out of control Trolley. You're headed towards three buildings and you control which you slam into.

Is it out of control or not?

http://www.smbc-comics.com/com...

Imagine you're in an out of control Trolley. You're headed towards three buildings and you control which you slam into. Two buildings contain only one person and one building contains five people. You randomly select a building to slam into. Then one of the other buildings is revealed to contain only one person but you can't switch to that building. Should you switch the tracks to the remaining other building?

Statements like that aren't for the people who work for him, or even the /. crowd. They are for the consumption of the assorted idiots and defectives in congress as well as to placate the general populous that has know knowledge of how encryption works. He knows exactly what he is after and is positioning things so that he gets them even if he is lying through his teeth. Before the Paris attacks there were statements out of the FBI or CIA (I forget which) where one of their people said it would take a terror attack where the terrorists used encryption before they could seek to get rid of strong crypto available to the general public. Then a few weeks later the Paris attacks happen and there was tons of news coverage about the terrorists using encryption. Also lets not forget the whole San Bernardino attack and that fucking iPhone. This is just the next step in their long game. Sadly no tin foil is needed.

Well had I followed this naming scheme my first one would have probably been named "cries but doesn't eat". The second one may have been named angry shitcannon though.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id...

does it have to be a song?

No, autism causes vaccines.

Oblig SMBC http://smbc-comics.com/index.p...

Yup, autism causes vaccines (and probably better cell phones too).

Oblig SMBC

Here is a counter-argument in comic form

Counter argument in comic form.

Oh yeah?

I'll just leave this here, sorry it isn't the obligatory xkcd.

:-)

Level up
Start at the bottom

:-)

Level up
Start at the bottom

By what you state about your intellectual evolution, you seem to be well prepared to avoid falling into the Aging Physicist's Syndrome.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/ind...

Oh, and mandatory SMBC link.
Yes, I know it's supposed to be XKCD, but we're working on a budget here...

Why isn't an explanation given along with a procedure to clear your name if you're incorrectly flagged on a watch list?

The terrorists would love that.

...I can only refer you to this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoon:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id...

You should have kept going-- you might have made it over Mount Stupid.

One could argue that men traditionally are the hunters

One could argue that, but one could also argue that trying to reason based on exceptionally simplistic and often incorrect ideas about how our very distant ancestors behaved is pretty silly unless you're after one of these awards:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id...

Relevant SMBC.

I was once looking for a method of calculating 1-way latency between two computers. The standard method is to take a packet's round trip time, and divide by two. But that only gives you the average latency. It might take 100 ms to send the packet, and 20 ms to receive the response, but RTT/2 gives you 60 ms for each. So I found this paper where a grad student claimed to have found a more accurate method, and had this huge formula to represent it. I spent a whole day reading that paper, and at the end I found that his formula actually just simplified down to RTT/2. The whole paper was time-wasting garbage that had somehow gotten published.

Science articles: a guide. It's sad how many papers are in the bottom-right corner of this graph.

Relevant xkcd^H^H^H^HSMBC for a change.

"you're much more likely to die in a car accident than from a shark attack"

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC) Comics dealt with this very topic last week in an 8-panel strip:

smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3895

Relevant SMBC cartoon: http://www.smbc-comics.com/ind... You can't really even tell if you're still you when you wake up in the morning.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/ind...

Relevant SMBC

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3161

Surely you mean Pac-Man.

Not that don't appreciate the joke, but shouldn't it be RPM? If we put a magnet in the coffin with him can we make an alternator?

Obligatory SBMC Comic

Obligatory SMBC: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id...

Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. Isn't less interference worth a little lie?

We need to work together to manipulate all search results to lead to whichever xkcd is most relevant to the topic.

I think this Sunday Morning Breakfast Cereal would be perfect.

Yeah, forgive me if I trust a regular Physics Nobel Prize contestant

Poor guy.
At least he hasn't hit this point yet

Your trust is worth nothing, though.