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https://en.wikipedia.org/

Some of the corrections in there look like they're putting upwards of a .6 C temp bias on the sat data.

Sorry, you'll have to explain to me where in that link you're seeing hard figures for satellite corrections. You're not assuming "Global Temperature Anomaly" is a correction factor, are you? (it's the difference in temperature results from a mean value). All I see is that graph of those results, and some figures for trends. I followed some of the source links, but the methods they use are complex, and some of them only have abstracts available.

I have a big problem with the units you're using in that graph... Zeta Joules? Why aren't you citing this as temperature?

It's NOAA's graph, not mine, and they use joules because it's a measure of total energy change. This is helpful for discovering how much solar energy is being trapped by greenhouse gases and subsequently absorbed by oceans. Temperature is a less useful figure because it's dependant on the volume of water and thermal mass, but will show the same ongoing trend.

It's true that El Nino and La Nina cycles directly affect ocean heat, but these are relatively short cycles and can easily be smoothed out by averaging data over decades; similarly for solar cycles. There are also geologic cycles as you say, but those have a much slower effect, and can be accounted for by measuring the change in their causes (e.g. orbital changes). While we can't discount the effect of an undiscovered long-term climate cycle on what we're seeing now, nobody has yet found a natural cause that would result in such a relatively rapid change - but the effects we're observing match quite closely with the calculated effects of the rise in atmospheric CO2, so that's a sufficient and far more likely cause than postulating an unknown factor.

Similarly for sea level rises. Of course it has changed much more drastically in the past, and sometimes very rapidly too, but nonetheless the level of rise we're seeing helps confirm our hypotheses, and is still of concern to our many coastal communities.

show me the error I made here

Yeah, you're off by a factor of 1 million - 195,698,545,959 cubic meters of water is actually 195.7 cubic kilometres of water (there are 1000x1000x1000 cubic metres in a cubic kilometre). Though because the ice is freshwater, 200 Gt of ice would be closer to 200 km^3 when melted, or about 0.55mm when spread out evenly. There are of course other sources of meltwater than just Greenland + Antarctic, and thermal expansion is about 25% of the total rise too.

Where in there do they show any calculations?

The last link was to the IPCC AR5 paper; they don't do the calculations there, they summarise the conclusions of the papers that do, and cite those papers. (The link I gave you was actually a draft and was missing diagrams, so here's the relevant section of the final report).

If you look at section 13.3.6, that discusses the contributing factors to the total sea level rise, and cites a number of papers for their sources, including Shepherd et al 2012 (better link than earlier) and Church et al 2011a.

Hope that helps.

Much like homoeopaths are trained to avoid the placebo effect?

As long as they don't send the dogs in alone without communicating with them, I don't think they can get away from the effect being attributable to the handler.

Foxconn workers are not a representative sample of the total population of China.

The suicide rate at Foxconn may very well be above average for people of the age-group, gender balance and socio-economic status Foxconn workers fall into while still being below the nation-wide average.

According to a paper cited in the relevant wikipedia article "rural suicides outnumber urban suicides by a 3:1 ratio" so we would strongly expect the suicide rate at (urban) Foxconn to be low compared to the nation-wide average even if working conditions are abysmal.

Well, there have been no reports of suicides at Foxconn for over a year now, so what conclusion do we draw from this fact?

Wha?? Someone failed basic statistics. If the rate is lower over a population (where "rate" = incidents/population), how is the concentration (eh, also incidents/population) striking? In fact, it's only striking because of the *anecdotes* sensationalized by stories like this...

Foxconn workers are not a representative sample of the total population of China.

The suicide rate at Foxconn may very well be above average for people of the age-group, gender balance and socio-economic status Foxconn workers fall into while still being below the nation-wide average.

According to a paper cited in the relevant wikipedia article "rural suicides outnumber urban suicides by a 3:1 ratio" so we would strongly expect the suicide rate at (urban) Foxconn to be low compared to the nation-wide average even if working conditions are abysmal.

Earthquakes from natural gas do occur, and have been recorded from pre-fracking periods. The phenomenon has already been studied.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/uq662g4351676m63/

imposing a use tax on roads is highly regressive.

Not imposing a use tax on roads is even more regressive! As a group low-income residents, on average, pay more out-of-pocket with sales taxes for freeways than with tolls.

So if you are truly concerned about regressive taxes, then you must be in favor of tolls.

Since you don't know the difference between north and south, water and land, surface are and volume, humidity and temperature, maximum and average, it is a complete waste of time to even discuss anything with you. Merely to note that you are yet another anonymous far right wing troll on the internet, who may or may not be being paid to preach genocide on the internet. Next to that truth, there's nothing anyone can say that is worse.

However, in the off chance anyone is reading this far, some useful actual science can be found at:

1. "Modelling the influence of snow accumulation and snow-ice formation on the seasonal cycle of the Antarctic sea-ice cover" http://www.springerlink.com/index/R23VXQQD8VPTJ5W0.pdf
2. "Snowfall-Driven Growth in East Antarctic Ice Sheet Mitigates Recent Sea-Level Rise" http://wuos.org/content/308/5730/1898.short
3. "Variability of Antarctic sea ice 1979–1998" http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2002/2000JC000733.shtml
4. "Recent Antarctic ice mass loss from radar interferometry and regional climate modelling" http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v1/n2/abs/ngeo102.html
   1. High impact peer reviewed journals, as opposed to squibs from the far right wing WSJ editorial page. As Samuel L. Jackson might say, "Science, m****rf*****r do you speak it?" (Go on troll mods, rate me down, it's something you'll be ashamed of one day, smothering the truth to protect the lies. But being nice doesn't stop people who do evil for money or kicks, only the shunning of society.)

see http://www.springerlink.com/content/j2h6414430571v56/

According to all known studies on happiness, there are only 2 things that affect happiness overall - everything else people adapt to after a while and get back to their normal levels of happiness.

1. Get a pet dog - people are always happier with this on average and the buzz doesn't wear off. 2. Have a long commute - people are always unhappy with this on average and they never get used to it.

That's ridiculous. Studies have found that lots of things bring long term happiness including Money, Marriage, Social ties among many others.

Was making the exact same post as parent. Many people are thinking about privacy in vehicular networks. For example, most systems for aggregating data from cars for showing traffic speed anonymize the data in various ways to try to protect privacy. Here are some details:

A project at the University of Illinois preserves privacy when reconstructing global maps based on data collected from cars: http://www.springerlink.com/content/h545111k4g217374/

Abstract: "The proliferation of sensors in devices of frequent use, such as mobile phones, offers unprecedented opportunities for forming self-selected communities around shared sensory data pools that enable community specific applications of mutual interest. Such applications have recently been termed participatory sensing. An important category of participatory sensing applications is one that construct maps of different phenomena (e.g., traffic speed, pollution) using vehicular participatory sensing. An example is sharing data from GPS-enabled cell-phones to map traffic or noise patterns. Concerns with data privacy are a key impediment to the proliferation of such applications. This paper presents theoretical foundations, a system implementation, and an experimental evaluation of a perturbation-based mechanism for ensuring privacy of location-tagged participatory sensing data while allowing correct reconstruction of community statistics of interest (computed from shared perturbed data). The system is applied to construct accurate traffic speed maps in a small campus town from shared GPS data of participating vehicles, where the individual vehicles are allowed to “lie” about their actual location and speed at all times. An extensive evaluation demonstrates the efficacy of the approach in concealing multi-dimensional, correlated, time-series data while allowing for accurate reconstruction of spatial statistics."

The Mobile Millennium project ( http://traffic.berkeley.edu/ ) from Berkeley uses "virtual trip lines": http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5871633

Abstract: "Traffic monitoring using probe vehicles with GPS receivers promises significant improvements in cost, coverage, and accuracy over dedicated infrastructure systems. Current approaches, however, raise privacy concerns because they require participants to reveal their positions to an external traffic monitoring server. To address this challenge, we describe a system based on virtual trip lines and an associated cloaking technique, followed by another system design in which we relax the privacy requirements to maximize the accuracy of real-time traffic estimation. We introduce virtual trip lines which are geographic markers that indicate where vehicles should provide speed updates. These markers are placed to avoid specific privacy sensitive locations. They also allow aggregating and cloaking several location updates based on trip line identifiers, without knowing the actual geographic locations of these trip lines. Thus, they facilitate the design of a distributed architecture, in which no single entity has a complete knowledge of probe identities and fine-grained location information. We have implemented the system with GPS smartphone clients and conducted a controlled experiment with 100 phone-equipped drivers circling a highway segment, which was later extended into a year-long public deployment."

Everyone is working on this. This article blatantly contradicts a decade of VANET research. Even the car industry is involved in providing privacy-preserving protocols of all kinds. Here is a sample of papers covering this topic:
Privacy and identity management for vehicular communication systems: a position paper (2006)
A tutorial survey on vehicular ad hoc networks (2008)
Support of Anonymity in VANETs - Putting Pseudonymity into Practice (2007)
Towards a security architecture for vehicular ad hoc networks (2006)
Anonymity Analysis on Social Spot Based Pseudonym Changing for Location Privacy in VANETs (2011)
A Robust Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication Protocol in VANET (2009)

Also, the sevecom project and the preserve project just some examples of projects that work on this topic. In the US, pseudonyms have been standardized by IEEE 1609.2.

In other words, the claim that no-one works on it is bullcrap. Is it still bad for privacy? Maybe. With the right choices, we can build a secure and privacy-preserving system that is a lot safer than what we see on the road now. Recall the discussion on vaccination from yesterday? There, the /. hivemind tells us how the good of the community comes first if my right to choose harms others. This is the same here. Your privacy is important, and we try to protect it, but if there's a small decrease in privacy for a huge gain in safety, then you're out of luck.

they're patenting a specific method of doing so.

There is nothing specific about the methods they're patenting. I just worked on a very similar project, and after reading the patent, I see very little separating what they patented from what we did. Indeed we don't use dimensionality reduction the way they suggest (although we did use it for a while), and we don't provide specific names for the objects we discover (though we have talked about doing so via crowdsourcing). Indeed our work is more recent than the patent filing, but people have been attempting similar things for ages (e.g. [1], [2]...they are very easy to find). Worse, the two papers I cite provide enough detail to actually produce a working system, whereas the patent provides little detail beyond a few references to well-known machine learning and computer vision techniques. And even when they suggest methodology, it's always "maybe we'll use this, maybe not", and further they tend to list several potential methods without any indication that they've researched which ones work.

Akin's comments were tasteless and ignorant of current knowledge/data, but since no one else is coming to his defense, I will.

There are two aspects of his comments to which people take offense. To get the first out of the way quickly, "legitimate rape", the 2004 Maryland case of "delayed withdrawal of consent" is an example of "rape" that is not "legitimate".

Now, onto the pregnancy statistics. The theory that rape resulted in few pregnancies was common among conservatives, as TFA states. It came from the amlgamation of two scientific reports. First, studies have shown that female orgasm increases fertility because the vagina draws the sperm up like a conveyer belt as well as opens up the cervix. Second, until just a couple of years ago, rape victims reported orgasms in only 5-20% of cases. A recent study, however, showed that up to 90% of rape victims orgasm -- including those who could not otherwise normally orgasm. Women in previous studies were too ashamed to admit it (and in fact it's the greater psychological trauma than from having been penetrated).

This is an explanation for what was reported only in 2003, which is that the chance of pregnancy is greater with rape than with consensual.

Akin's information was out of date, was widely accepted by anti-abortion advocates (esp in the past), and had some scientific basis that was skewed due to rape victims' misreporting.

Citation needed for the explanation in your third paragraph. It's incorrect and it's not given in the article you linked.

Akin's comments were tasteless and ignorant of current knowledge/data, but since no one else is coming to his defense, I will.

There are two aspects of his comments to which people take offense. To get the first out of the way quickly, "legitimate rape", the 2004 Maryland case of "delayed withdrawal of consent" is an example of "rape" that is not "legitimate".

Now, onto the pregnancy statistics. The theory that rape resulted in few pregnancies was common among conservatives, as TFA states. It came from the amlgamation of two scientific reports. First, studies have shown that female orgasm increases fertility because the vagina draws the sperm up like a conveyer belt as well as opens up the cervix. Second, until just a couple of years ago, rape victims reported orgasms in only 5-20% of cases. A recent study, however, showed that up to 90% of rape victims orgasm -- including those who could not otherwise normally orgasm. Women in previous studies were too ashamed to admit it (and in fact it's the greater psychological trauma than from having been penetrated).

This is an explanation for what was reported only in 2003, which is that the chance of pregnancy is greater with rape than with consensual.

Akin's information was out of date, was widely accepted by anti-abortion advocates (esp in the past), and had some scientific basis that was skewed due to rape victims' misreporting.

Here's The scientific case for the James Webb Space Telescope. The earliest galaxies are redshifted into wavelengths that the HST can't resolve.

I've tried to solve for the Earth's nearly-diurnal free wobble, but it yielded a map that looked suspiciously like the mass trend. I think this happens because the NDFW's frequency is similar to that of the K1 tide, which experiences aliasing in the GRACE data as discussed in section 4.4 of my 2011 paper. So... no.

Insolation is only part of the energy imparted by the Sun. There's also the solar wind, solar magnetic field and it's interaction with Earth's magnetic field, gravitational tidal forces, and interactions with cosmic rays and cloud formation. If you think the only energy we get from the Sun is from photons, you're wrong.
 
Also, observed warming trends on Earth have flat-lined for the last 11 years or so, so definitely yes, Global warming did show one bit of slowing down in that period.

It's only sexually transmitted if one of the people was shooting up.

Allow me to add: fuck you.

The only needles I ever had in my veins were in the hospital, and unless they were shooting me up with heroin in used needles at age 2, your drug use reference is insulting, wrong, and simply moronic.

Realize this: until the 1989, Hep C wasn't even a recognized virus; at least as far as the patient was concerned. The diagnosis was viral non-A non-B hepatitis. Whether it was even contagious, or how it was transmitted other than blood-to-blood was not known; how long you were infectious wasn't know; whether the virus was only there when symptoms were apparent or whether it stayed active but hidden wasn't really known. I don't even have a blood transfusion on record, clean family all around, and somehow still managed to contract it as a child. Mid-90s they developed a PCR test that could tell you that you had it. And then they learned that not all non-A non-B was C viral (see Hep-D and Hep-E, GBvirusC). See this article from two years ago to see that in 20% of cases, the source of infection isn't even known!

So, in conclusion, piss off wanker

They mention that this is a pairing based system. Unfortunately, the type of pairing isn't specified, and there are hundreds of pairing based schemes out there.

For those not familiar with pairings and IBE, this quote from the fujitsu website may help:

4 Pairing-based cryptography:

A next-generation cryptography (proposed in 2001) based on a map called pairing, which offers many useful functionalities that could not be achieved by previous public-key cryptography. The security of pairing-based cryptography is based on the intractability of discrete logarithm problem (DLP). DLP is a problem to compute d such that a = gd for given g and a.

5 Identity-based encryption:

A type of public-key encryption in which the public key of a user is some unique information about the identity of the user (e.g. a user's email address). It does not require authentication of public keys unlike former public-key cryptosystems.

The year of 2001 here presumably refers to the Boneh-Franklin scheme (paper on springer behind paywall), which also immediately showed the usefulness of pairing crypto by creating the first efficient identity-based encryption scheme (wiki). Basically, IBE is any scheme where one can use an arbitrary string as the public key (assuming the other party has previously obtained the private key). There are some caveats involved (and proposed solutions for them), but I would recommend taking a crypto course if you're interested.

As an aside, it should be noted that pairings were originally developed to break certain cases of elliptic curve based schemes (eg. ECDSA, which is slowly coming into usage now), so it may be that the same thing happens here.

Good point. I just gave the first link I found.

Here are three peer reviewed studies. Had I spent more than 2 minutes with Google Scholar, I could have found more.

I do stress that this is emerging evidence, and a lot more work needs to be done. But even if there's no link found, the simple fact is that porn is not information about sex, it's misinformation about sex.

Those saying storms will likely get more frequent and/or severe have theory on their side, but little/no data

They have a hypothesis, with no support in data. There are hypotheses that say that equalized temperature over the globe will lessen the intensity of storms as well (less severe fronts). Until we have more data, it's scientifically wrong to make claims either way.

one of the four models examined (a respected model) predicts fewer strong hurricanes in a warmer world instead. - http://www.earthzine.org/2011/04/16/will-a-warmer-world-be-stormier/

The results suggest that storm-track intensity is not related in a simple way to global-mean surface temperature - http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/10/18/1011547107

Here's another way of extracting storm intensity values from a few decades back, by looking at damages: http://www.springerlink.com/content/v1851121221p0244/

(2) As a division within the Department of Commerce, NOAA is undoubtedly subject to various political pressures to toe the party line. That doesn't necessarily mean that their study is compromised, but I would want to see a confirming study from an independent group before I ascribe much weight to it.

Who's independent? JPL (below)? I'm not sure what you're getting at.

A likely source of the decrease is the change in measurement of MSLP with the cessation of
routine aircraft reconnaissance in 1987. There is no significant trend in intense storms either
before or after 1987 when the two periods are analyzed separately. - http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/3/1/124/pdf

A possible clue to the apparent discrepancy is that the increase in overall tornado reports roughly matches that of the U.S. population over this time, suggesting that the trend may be an artifact of greater tornado detection due to increases in population density, awareness of severe weather threats, and modern technological advances such as Doppler radar. At the current time, it is therefore not possible to anticipate even the sign of any climate change in tornado occurrence or strength. - NASA, same earthzine link as above.

Also, more discussion on reporting here: http://www.stanford.edu/~omramom/Diffenbaugh_Eos_08.pdf

My point is that we shouldn't make statements that do not accurately reflect the current state of science.

According to this study,

Homosexual men had 82% greater odds of being non–right-handed than heterosexual men

I guess we learn to use both at once ;)

Bitcoin is an incredible idea

Unless you want to make offline payments, in which case it is useless and will take a back seat to government issued currencies.

decentralized exchange

Which David Chaum published work on over a decade before the Bitcoin hype got off the ground. Chaum's system, of course, was based on the idea that currency is a tool of governments and banks, and not just something that materializes on its own, so it received less hype (hint: there was no get-rich-quick scheme with Chaum's systems).

totally anonymous

Except that there are anonymity-breaking attacks on Bitcoin.

no central body to print it out of existence

Thus no central body to give it value. Money without a strong source of demand is worthless; Bitcoin has a moderate source of demand arising from hype and promises of secure electronic payments, but government-issued currency has a much stronger source of demand: taxes and the legal structure that surrounds the money. When a court instructs on person to pay damages to another person using government issued money, that creates demand for that money. If courts were handing out judgements in Bitcoin, if governments were accepting Bitcoin tax payments, Bitcoin might have a chance in the real world, if it could overcome the offline payments problem (but there is every reason to think it cannot, since the amount of data that needs to be stored and transmitted will grow in the depth of the transaction chain, and there is no central authority to exchange used-up currency for fresh currency).

Would I want to store all of my wealth in bitcoin? No.

Thus creating another obstacle for Bitcoin: people are willing to store all their wealth in other currencies.

Do I like the idea of being able to convert my money into an exchange medium that is untraceable? Of course.

We already have one: paper money. What you really want is one that is electronic, so that you can spend your money securely on the Internet and not have to worry about being tracked or having your bank account raided (the latter being far more important in terms of economic security). That problem was solved a long time ago, with robust systems that go beyond what Bitcoin is capable of:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/ft361212m4256246/
http://blog.koehntopp.de/uploads/chaum_fiat_naor_ecash.pdf

To me bitcoin is the currency equivalent of TOR and shouldn't be hated on.

No, digital cash is the equivalent of Tor; Bitcoin is one attempt at digital cash, which has more shortcomings than benefits.

All indirect evidence. Personally the idea of an invisible, intangible, ethereal magical material that helps peoples sums add up is dubious at best. There are plenty of other good theories out there that do not include this populistic hypothesis.

such as http://www.springerlink.com/content/g332701735121773/

In the link there it sais: "Recently, the gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum was proposed as alternative to the dark matter paradigm."
Could this refer to my blog-posts in http://pushinggravity.wordpress.com/ ?

In theory, yes. The type of design (a "waverider") places the hypersonic shockwave directly beneath the vehicle. Basically, you're surfing the shockwave. This reduces the stresses involved, improves stability and should allow considerably more control than could be achieved with the space shuttle (you have sufficient lift from a waverider to glide). Waveriders do have disadvantages - most designs only work at specific speeds, the wings have a habit of frying and they rely on cooling by radiation (only effective at high altitude).

Old wisdom on waveriders:
http://research.lifeboat.com/surf.htm
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/design/waverider/waverider.shtml

Published theory:
http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v79/v79-79.pdf
http://www.dept.aoe.vt.edu/~mason/Mason_f/ConfigAeroHypersonics.pdf

Multi-speed waveriders:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/x75nh2154nuh5464/

Amateur waverider research:
http://www.gbnet.net/orgs/staar/waveriders.html

NB: The STAAR group beat NASA and the US DoD to the first working waverider airfoil, as noted on their site. Perhaps NASA's problem with their current design is that they're not threatening the engineers with bagpipe music.

We have so much evidence about the existence of the dark matter that's not even funny: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Observational_evidence

All indirect evidence. Personally the idea of an invisible, intangible, ethereal magical material that helps peoples sums add up is dubious at best. There are plenty of other good theories out there that do not include this populistic hypothesis.
such as http://www.springerlink.com/content/g332701735121773/

It turns out that humans are really poor at estimating velocity unless they conform to Newtonian accelerations very closely.. While there has been a lot of research on these issues, I'd like to refer to one of my favorite papers, Sverker Runeson's 1975 paper "Constant velocity — Not perceived as such".

http://www.springerlink.com/content/nt61hh074k7123q5/

What noise? Wind turbines are basically silent.

And they don't kill birds.

Except that they would be too morally bankrupt to bother.

Not necessarily; there are many instances of societies reevaluating various practices and institution, and then based on a changed moral consensus, abandoning those practices, often in spite of pressures to maintain them (be they economic, cultural, political, etcetera). A few examples, off the top of my head: The United States and European slave trade, womens' suffrage, Western child labor, Western judicial torture/killing/maiming, informed consent in medical treatment and evaluation, treatment of mental illness, decline in American lynching, etcetera. In my view, moral standards generally improve over time, in that those changes tend to (overall) reduce suffering and increase happiness and well-being.

Did the Germans end oven cremations because the Greens objected to the air pollution?

I'm not aware of the position on body disposal held by Bündnis 90/Die Grünen or any other faction that holds sway over the predominate death customs practiced by any sovereign nation. A cursory examination suggests that burial has a greater environmental impact than that of cremation, due in part to earth and groundwater contamination by cemetery leachates. My guess would be that Green parties would prefer the use of cremation over burial. I'm not certain, but the environmental impact and/or high cost associated with burial may be the reason the Germans haven't ended cremations.

For X-ray scanners this vulnerability has been known (at least in theory) since 2010, when it was discussed in a paper by Kaufman and Carlson. They concluded that 'an object such as a wire or a boxcutter blade, taped to the side of the body, or even a small gun in the same location, will be invisible.' Sounds like they were right.

Most of us would rather be well-toned than waif-like. Therefore it's not just about burning calories but building muscle. And unless you want to starve yourself, it's much easier to build muscle.

Pearson and Shaw claim that plummeting growth hormone levels is why people over 30 find exercise less beneficial in toning their bodies.
They also claim that supplements promoting growth hormone release increase/restore this ability.

This latter claim has been demonstrated in many animals including pigs:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/m7q0118602n8l37x/

Caffeine also seems to slow lipid (fat) formation:
http://www.ajcn.org/content/79/1/40.short

Both have strong effects for me. I take 200mg of niacin 1-2 hours before exercising and drink coffee with meals.

A design that is resilient to regulation is needed in order to have the advantage in the first place,

Actually, the biggest advantage of digital cash is that it prevents an untrustworthy merchant from raiding customer accounts (e.g. if a merchant is compromised, credit card data could be used to make unauthorized payments). Anonymity is a secondary goal, and even anonymous payments do not free the parties in the system from regulation -- there is plenty of regulation on cash transactions, which offer a similar level of anonymity.

at least some sort of decentralization is practically a requirement

Yes, that is true -- the payments should be decentralized in a digital cash system. It is not necessary or advantageous for currency units to be created in a decentralized way (like Bitcoin), and it actually presents disadvantages, both technical and economic. Other digital cash systems are more like paper money: issued by a central authority, spent in a decentralized manner, and periodically renewed (old paper currency is destroyed, new paper currency is issued, and likewise old digital cash tokens are replaced with fresh tokens of equal value in many digital cash systems).

If Bitcoin is valuable enough as a currency, and scalability issues become a problem, the network itself would inevitably become the transaction backbone of a most wider structure, comprising many interlinked central issuing authorities

Except that Bitcoin does not allow for central issuing authorities, and there is no advantage in having such authorities use Bitcoin -- they are inherently trusted, and it is reasonable to assume that they will trust each other (or at least that they trust each other enough to perform more standard transactions -- the real point of digital cash is for day-to-day transactions, not transactions between large institutions).

Third scenario is where we find an ultimate solution to the scalability problem. There are many methods that would make do for the foreseeable future, but there is none that does away with it once and for all. Though, if it all boils down to the renewal of tokens as you mentioned, I think it can still be done with a distributed system.

Not without a trusted party that issues the tokens. This has been discussed by researchers:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/ew2cm5yd0kg797yf/

Sorry if you don't have SprinerLink access; a non-Springer version might be available somewhere, the paper title is Transferred Cash Grows in Size, author is David Chaum.

The solutions to this involve doing things like storing receipts on hard drives (which only distributes the load, similar to Bitcoin's approach) and token renewal by an issuing authority. Token renewal is not hard in a world where Internet access is widely available and should probably be our preferred approach.

So no, for the end of the warm period to be 50,000 years from now would be quite divergent from the climatalogical pattern of the last million years, and leave us out of phase.

You need to read the literature on this subject. The glacial-interglacial cycles are not a perfect 100ky cycle (in fact, the cycles used to have a different period), and the relative importance of the eccentricity, precession, and obliquity cycles drifts over time. In fact, there is a lot of glacial dynamical theory which predicts an extended interglacial ahead. I didn't pull that 50,000 years number out of nowhere. For a couple references, see for example Berger and Loutre, Crucifix and Rougier. There is a third I saw recently that got a similar figure, and of course there are older papers too.

However, as I mentioned to the other poster, this is still very controversial within the geological community. There is a new paper by Tzedakis et al. that gets ~1500 years, and Ruddiman argues that the next glacial should already have started if it weren't for humans. On the whole, the papers I've seen tend to favor 20-50 ky rather than a shorter period of glacial inception. But this is way, way more subtle than "durr, it's a 100 ky cycle so we're due", and you can't predict anything at all from the past temperature record. At the very least, you need to study the Milankovitch forcings as well, and propagate those through a dynamics with long lag times to see what happens.

The author designed some of the instruments on Venera, in fact. I can find several articles by him in the aformentioned journal but nothing that suggests "aliens".

http://www.springerlink.com/content/0038-0946/?k=Ksanfomaliti

The "greater male variability" hypothesis has been falsified. The first link provides a current analysis of data from around the world, while the second is an older study in which a former supporter of that hypothesis also determines that it does not stand up empirically.

[1] Kane, J and Mertz, J. "Debunking Myths About Gender and Mathematics Performance." Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 2012.
[2] Feingold, A. "Gender differences in variability in intellectual abilities: A cross-cultural perspective." Sex Roles. 1994.

Let's say the jury is still out on that one.

Although recent reports of large and increasing rates of mass loss with time from GRACE-based studies cite agreement with IOM results, our evaluation does not support that conclusion.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/9k58637p80534284/

There are multiple alternatives to the public education system we have today. You propose a false dichotomy when you say that the choice is either what we have now or "everyone home-schooling". The best answer is for parents to have options and not be forced into sending their kids to a specific public school as is now the case.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/p465n3166123272m/
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0161956X.2000.9681936
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0161956X.2000.9681933
http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED378635&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED378635

http://learninfreedom.org/colleges_4_hmsc.html
http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/homeschooled_applicants
http://www.naturemoms.com/homeschool-and-college-acceptance.html
http://www.homeschool.com/articles/College05/default.asp#

If CERN was doing real science (at the LHC) they would have been able to say with confidence that they were going to find (or not find) this "new" "particle" months ago and give reasons for exactly where and how they expected to find it.

Here is a paper calculating the particle's mass back in 97. It cites an earlier work doing so in 88 that I didn't feel like looking up. Cern reports a mass of 10.539+/-0.004 (stat.)+/-0.008 (syst.) GeV for their new particle, and the paper below gives 10.525 GeV plus or minus a dozen MeV for parts of the triplet.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/hkklcq183ekd0qae/

The second run they did to look into the FTL neutrinos was science.

Did you miss the part about the analysis of the first run being a test of neutrinos travelling at a speed indistinguishable form the speed of light? They hypothesised that the neutrinos at that energy should be so relativistic, they should look like they are going at c. The faster than light result would be a component of the null hypothesis. They had a hypothesis, they saw it was rejected, and reported the results.

Maybe you should be careful thinking you can separate those that failed high school physics from those that have a PhD.

They are full of uranium hexafluoride, a gas. No possibility of it going critical.

I have a small hobby. I occasionally fact check interesting things nuclear advocates say on Slashdot. The problem with this hobby is it scares me. For example; uranium hexafluoride, it turns out, crystallises as a solid at room temperature (so could easily form a critical mass) an there have even been experiments with using it directly in nuclear reactors which means it must be able to go critical.

Please explain how my understanding is wrong. I would really appreciate being wrong.

http://web.mit.edu/~haldane/www/icerays/

Does Type II look familiar? There is even code for you to generate your own geometric window grille.

See also this link:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/u41779k5083148p7

Okay, we can play that game - proxy from China:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/gh98230822m7g01l/

For other regions, see:

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/a_regional_approach_to_the_medieval_warm_period_and_the_little_ice_age.pdf

Now, why is it any sillier to consider your chosen proxies than mine?

Science isn't about "general agreement" - state a hypothesis, state the observations that would falsify it, and ruthlessly look for those observations.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/u315626k2071q0j0/

Abstract
In China, the earthquakes induced by water injection have occurred in four oil fields including the Renqiu oil field, and in two mines. Production of oil from the Renqiu oil field began in 1975 and the injection of water into the oil field commenced in July 1976. The induced earthquakes have been occurring in the area for the past 17 years, since December 1976. The controlled experiments of water injection showed the cause and effect relation between water injection and earthquakes. Source parameters such as source dimension, seismic moment and stress drop of a large number of the induced earthquakes, andQ factor for the area have been determined. The results indicate that the stress drop varies from 0.2 to 3.0 bar and theQ factor has an average value of 75.0. The low-stress drop and lowQ factor values imply that the earthquakes are caused by the brittle fracture of weak rocks under low ambient stresses, due to a decrease in their strength because of the injection of water. The induced earthquakes are unevenly distributed in the oil field. The northern part of the oil field, where the reservoir rocks are characterized by low porosity and low permeability, exhibits high seismic activity with the largest earthquake registering a magnitude of 4.5 and about 68% of the total number of induced earthquakes in this part. Whereas, the southern part of the oil field with higher porosity and higher permeability is characterized by low seismic activity with the largest earthquake registering a magnitude of 2.5 and only 4% of the total number of earthquakes which occurred in this part. These features of the focal region suggest that larger earthquakes may not occur in the Renqiu oil field area.

I'm surprised at how infrequently France makes the cut in lists of major arms-supplying nuisances. The US has the largest share of the arms export market in absolute terms, but as a percentage of GDP the French surpass the Americans by far, and they have a great list of past clients, like the Hutus of Rwanda (1) and Gaddafi (2).

(1) French arms, war and genocide in Rwanda: http://www.springerlink.com/content/j5571355l6m6rr48/ ; see also http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/5706 and, for more recent take, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jan/11/rwanda.insideafrica.

(2) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22189006/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/gadhafi-visits-france-arms-nuclear-deals/, from that trip where he set up his tent on the Champs-Élysées. Great quote:

Human Rights Minister Rama Yade expressed disgust with the symbolism of the chosen date of International Human Rights Day. 'It would be indecent, in any case, that this visit be summed up with the signing of contracts,' she said in an interview published Monday in the daily Le Parisien.

Pascal's Wager has been completely destroyed in many, many different ways.

No, it hasn't.

Yes, situation (ii) is the one I tend to encounter in practice. It may also be the situation that TFA is describing, which could be this paper. In that study, they find a very multimodal objective function (analogous to the log-likelihood function). But whether a likelihood is multimodal is a function of the data. It can happen that if you accumulate enough data, the likelihood concentrates about one of its former modes. But in practice, that could require far more data than are available for training and validation.

1971: http://www.springerlink.com/content/v6654g6683t420p7/ "Parametric study of the anode of an implantable biological fuel cell" which cites related papers as far back as 1968.

Because we're talking about mines in context of the Ottawa Treaty, not UXO.

You keep bringing up the Ottawa Treaty, which bans land mines. Your support of clever designs in land mines violates the treaty you keep mentioning. Do you know the the US has not signed the Ottawa Treaty?

Killing people automatically is the problem.

Then we have no problem, because we don't do that.

1600-2600 people in Pakistan killed by drones from 2004 to 2011 (for a specific event: NY TImes).

Good point. Convince those people to stop trying to kill us, and we'll stop killing them.

Let's take Iraq as an example. No one from Iraq attacked the US. From 2003 to 2006 the US military killed some 600 000+ people in Iraq, mostly civilians. During which time Iraqis killed some 3000 US and UK soldiers. A reasonable interpretation of the sequence of events is that the US started the killing. This leads to the view that the Iraqis defended themselves against aggressors. A typical ethical position would be for the US to stop killing Iraqis, with the result that Iraqis would probably stop killing their attackers.

The policy is post-Vietnam. More recent policy is post-Desert Storm after we had experience with scatterable mines. Even then, policy says to not use them indiscriminately as in Vietnam, but for specific targets with specific tactical goals just as we would use artillery. We only shot about a thousand groups of these in Desert Storm, and none since.

So the US attacked Vietnam and used a huge number land mines, similar with some kind of policy modifications in 1990s Iraq, and "only shot about a thousand groups of these" during the 2003 invasion of Iraq (emphasis added). Therefore, by your own admission, the US kills people indiscriminately, automatically. The opposite of what you say above.

And the above would put the US is in violation of the Ottawa Treaty, which you and I agree is a pretty good treaty, if the US were a signer.

But I have a feeling all of these facts will fall on deaf ears/blind eyes. You've made up your mind that all of this is EEEEEEVILLLLL! and no facts will get in the way of that.

Comments like this show an emotional attachment to your position. Such attachments make you vulnerable to selecting data, misinformation, and opinions that agree with your position. Facts which disagree with your position make you feel even stronger that you're right. You would like me to consider your views, and reassess mine. I have done so and learned about mine history and policies, and am a little less ignorant thanks to you. Are you willing to do the same?

http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/news/2003/06/59220

http://www.springerlink.com/content/h010v9w83l8j3441/

This is the problem that I have with climate change scientists and proponents. While we cannot be averse to the notion that what we do affects our own climate, the question is how and by how much? Despite all protestations to the contrary that evidence is simply not there, and when you question it the above is a classic example of what the discussion boils down to - surely if we are doing something then it must have an effect.

You appear to be ignorant of (a) all research into atmospheric feedbacks and forcings and (b) all research into climate modelling. There's a substantial body of work out there (hint: Google Scholar is your friend) ... perhaps you should read some of it. As for the question of how and how much, the IPCC report has a good summary of multi-model predictions, which in turn was based on Tebaldi et al., 2004, Greene et al., 2006 and Furrer et al., 2007 ...

Currently, we know that the earth is warming, and warming substantially faster -- and to a greater extent -- than any time previously in the last 800,000 years. We know that CO2 can act as a forcing on global temperatures (and thanks to extensive research in the 50s and 60s we know this very accurately). We know that human activity has substantially increased the atmospheric concentration of CO2. We know that other GHGs can also act as forcings or feedbacks. We know that the temperature rises we are currently seeing fit extremely well with the prediction that current climate change is a result of human activity increasing the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere. Furthermore, we do not know of any other cause that could explain the temperature rise we are observing. We know that models based on research into atmospheric forcings accurately model current and past climates, and also predict a rapid and significant temperature increase if we continue to increase the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere.

The most parsimonious explanation by far, based on current research, is that increasing the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere has resulted in significant, rapid warming and will continue to cause significant, rapid warming.

PDA? That would be the Psion Organiser...

Tablet PC? A company I worked in the early 90s was looking at them for use in hospital environments in the mid 90s (see http://www.springerlink.com/content/81yaax2hwc4d0f1p/ for example). Admittedly they were Windows-based, but you can't have everything ;^D

The operative word you've used is "change" - I'm not denying that Apple took existing technology and improved on it... just that the "Apple invented it all" line that some people seem to believe isn't exactly accurate