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You are using the greatest source of information our species has ever created and you use pedantic snickering over a typo as your guide to truth?

Odd how you did not refute the claim of his golden penis but balk at beans. Shows where your mind is at.

I pity you. You are pitiful.

Knowledge
is
everywhere.
Stop
trolling.

I thought you were full of shit, so I looked.
link
Yea, algae eat CO2 from atmosphere and create O2 in water (a primary source for O2 in water actually). I've heard of using algae in reducing CO2 from powerplants.

If you are so stupid you have no clue what you are talking about, don't say anything. Its one after another AGW alarmist that blatently lies over and over that have caused the majority of the US to not believe you anymore. The only thing settled is AGW alarmists can't tell the truth.

The press release doesn't seem nearly as cool as the summary suggests (though the press release says it as well.) The photos show some sparse channels, not an interconnected vein-like network, and most certainly not enough to show that the material wouldn't weaken over time. All it really appears to show is that Helium shoots through unabated, perhaps without losing enough momentum to even save the next material. Seems like a useful shielding if thick enough but then again so is anything, and it would be much cooler if it actually formed veins than it would be in any fusion-related research (nano materials which have vein-like structures could open the door to whole new types of diodes, microfluidic and MEMS devices - but this is basically "we shot some stuff and it made holes.")

This is fascinating, however, there is no mention of 'genocide' anywhere.

The Clovis people were defined by culture. People did come across the Bering Strait into the Americas, they just weren't Clovis (yet) when they did. The Clovis culture developed after people had already settled and then spread. That's what the headline means by "Clovis People Not First Americans".

The people who settled the Americas still all have a common genetic heritage and came in a single migration. Here is an excerpt from the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M, who published the study referenced in that article:

Current data from molecular genetics do not support this model of Native American replacement of Paleoamericans. All major Native American mtDNA and Y-chromosome haplogroups emerged in the same region of central Asia, and all share similar coalescent dates, indicating that a single ancient gene pool is ancestral to all Native American populations. Similarly, all sampled native New World populations (from Alaska to Brazil) share a unique allele at a specific microsatellite locus that is not found in any Old World populations (except Koryak and Chukchi of western Beringia), which implies that all modern Native Americans descended from a single founding population that was the result of a single migration. This is further supported by ancient DNA studies showing that Paleoamericans carried the same haplogroups (and even sub-haplogroups) as modern Native groups. Thus, although the Paleoamerican sample is still small, the craniometric differences between the early and late populations are likely the result of genetic drift and natural selection, not separate migrations from different sources in Asia.

I'd like to add that when they say "different sources", they clarify elsewhere on the page that sources can be separated spatially or temporally. Meaning that the last sentence also precludes 2 separate migrations that came from the same geographic source.

If women are different from men in a way that would result in them having diverse perspectives, then why is it unreasonable to assume that those same diverse perspectives might lead them to other career choices?

As to your second point, the evidence seems to point the other way. I believe it was you who made a post in the previous thread in this topic indicating that Iranian women were more likely to be involved in software jobs as some evidence that it must be socially based. Interestingly enough, you'll see higher rates in other countries too. India is one example where there are significantly more women in computing. What you fail to understand is that this has little to do with cultural differences (and you'd be hard pressed to argue that either India or Iran have better views towards women in general than western democracies) and is the result of economic ones. Computer science jobs are well paying and in high demand, and do potentially afford you the opportunity to immigrate to a western democracy that may be preferable to the type of people who are intelligent enough to excel in the software development field.

When you remove economic pressures (the Scandinavian countries which have among the best social safety nets have the same low numbers of women in CS as the U.S.) and have a society that leaves you essentially free to pursue whatever ambitions you might have, it is hardly unsurprising that any biological tendencies that may predispose people to one field or another are more prevalent. To use an analogy, you can only really see if one strain of plant yields more only after you ensure that they all have sufficient water to thrive. If you somehow created a society that was able to ensure that everyone in life had an equal start, the only possible variance left would come down to biological differences.

There's a substantial amount of evidence to suggest men and women are different. Even at a surface level, we see large differences in things like personality, which has been demonstrated to be highly heritable. I'm not quite sure how you could look at those differences and come to the conclusion that it isn't going to result in differences in vocation selection or other life choices that can impact a person's career. I suppose you could argue that somehow all of these differences are merely a result of society, but that ignores the heritability of personality as well as evidence from studies that examined sex-based behavior difference in infants. See a recent study that examined children roughly one to two and half years of age in nurseries, a similar earlier study which examined infants 1 - 2 years of age , and another study which examined infants as young as three months old. There was another study that examined toy preference in young monkeys that found similar sex-based differences which does suggest that this is something that goes back quite far in our evolutionary history.

It's funny that you bring up global warming, because a lot of the evidence suggests that you are incorrect, yet you continue to act in much the same way as people who contest the science behind global warming. I seriously question how you could reconcile the studies I've presented above with your beliefs that biology plays such a little role in the outcomes we're observing. I suppose you could claim the science is biased, but then how do you know that the scientists publishing articles about climate change aren't biased?

While what you said may be true, it doesn't solve the issue. I used to work at Texas A&M. A&M is known for having probably the best veterinary school in the country. Because it's the best, the vet school gets four times as many applicants than they have spots available - 75% of applicants are declined. In 2015 the vet school accepted
114 women and 24 men. (114 of the 138 accepted are women - can't complain about that, under your criterion.)
http://vetmed.tamu.edu/dvm/fut...

Also, A&M has a vocational school component, which is where I used to work. That department trains a thousand firefighters every year and doesn't turn down any applicants. All females who apply and pay the fee are accepted, as are all males. I don't have the numbers handy for the fire school, so let' suppose it is:
980 male applicants, all accepted
20 female applicants, all accepted

We can add the fire school and vet school together to get the numbers for the entire university (for the moment we pretend there are no other departments):
134 women accepted
1004 men accepted

Again that makes it look like they discriminate against women, though in reality for the competitive admissions (the vet school), almost all accepted applicants are women.

* When all depertments are included, Texas A&M actually admits more women than men. That makes it a great place to meet women, if you're a young guy.

Care to show anything comparable to this blunder in C++

The lack of bounds checking in C and C++ is one of the biggest problems in computer security. 75% of vulnerabilities in 2003 were buffer overflows. It's no use saying "programmers should program better" because that's clearly never going to happen. Buffer overflows keep happening even after C\C++ have been around and in wide use for decades. The best solution is to switch to a language which offers better buffer overflow protections, like Pascal (see range checks in Free Pascal and Delphi. Pascal also has overflow checks (both Free Pascal and Delphi).

Page 4 (yes, right at beginning) of "Complex Analysis" by Joseph Bak and Donald Newman gives a low level introduction to the equivalence between complex numbers and 2D vectors. Also page 335 of "The Way of Analysis." Or you could just Wikipedia article on vector spaces which uses complex numbers as an example several times. Or if you don't like Wikipedia, here is a lecture that at the end lists complex numbers as vector space over R. There are more if you search via Google, although it is easy to get a lot of stuff for "complex vector spaces" which is a vector space over C, using complex numbers as its field (i.e. the number system for each component), which is different than the talking about the complex numbers themselves as a vector space of reals.

And if you didn't feel like looking at books or links, you can just look at the definition of a vector space itself and complex numbers become a trivial example: A set V (C in our case) and field F (R in our case) along with an addition and multiplication operation (just regular complex addition and multiplication in our case) is a vector space if: addition is associative and commutative (complex addition is both), there is an addition identity (0+0i in our case), an additive inverse (for every x in C there is a well defined -x), an identity scalar from F (1 in our case), scalar multiplication is distributive over vector and scalar addition (it is for C), and associativity of scalar multiplication (a(bx) = (ab)x for reals a, b and complex x). The dimensionality is just the size of the minimum basis set. A minimum basis set for C is just the set of 1 and i. This is a basis since you can express all complex number in terms of some real x and y with x+iy, and this basis is minimal since there is no non-trivial linear combination of basis vectors that can give you zero (i.e. there is no real x and y such that x+iy = 0 except for when both x and y equal zero). Hence the C is a vector space over reals with a dimension of 2.

"Yes. Assuming it's a legitimate fossil, we're left with divine intervention (aliens), or time travel (the end of causality as we know it). Now, it just so happens that the falsification of evolution pretty much falsifies reality as we know it, which lets you know just how strong of a theory we're dealing with"

How would you know it was a legitimate fossil? You are just going to use that word to get out of any fossil I bring you. Give me a comprehensive definition of 'legitimate' both necessary and sufficient to rule out all reasonable null hypotheses. Seriously, go read Quine's work, "“Epistemology Naturalized” is a good placce to start, and you should probably read Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" as your approach to science is hopelessly outdated.

"But while we're on hypotheticals, are you willing to entertain the following notion:

[snip]"

Richard Linzen's hypothesis is legitimate but unlikely, that is the reason he continues to get funding for his work. Why is it unlikely, well for a start he put forward ways to test his hypothesis in a paper. This paper showed evidence for the hypothesis you list. Unfortunately this work was deeply flawed and a follow up study which Prof Linzen acknowledges addresses the flaws in his paper found that the impact of clouds on climate sensitivity did not reflect a large global impact of the mechanism he proposes. The relevant citation from Trenberth is below.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

I strongly believe Linzen should continue to be funded. Even with the studies conducted so far there may be non-linear impacts from cloud cover which could have some regulatory impact on the climate. A clear understanding of the effect cloud cover will make climate models more robust, reduce the amount of disagreement between them. So yes, I give that hypothesis more credence than the explanations for a precambrian rabbit.

But just like you made the perfectly reasonable operating assumption that time travel is impossible (even though there is nothing in the laws of physics to rule it out), you should also make the perfectly reasonable assumption that the impact on the sensitivity of changes in cloud cover can be reasonably inferred from the recent temperature record and that it is not crazily non-linear, especially given the paleoclimate record (why did this non-linear effect of cloud cover not impact previous hot periods in this non-linear way?). Doing that places an upper bound on how much the sensitivity can be impacted by the effect of clouds. Especially when we have results like Dessler's:

http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfi...

It isn't comprehensive but it suggests that, at least for current levels of warming clouds may exhasperate global climate change (water vapour is a green house gas).

Much of this is covered in the IPCC 5th Assesment WG1 report, which I provide a link to below.

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5...

You want section 7.

I know you wont reflect on your position though, or read any of the citations I've provided, because I've interacted with you in the past and I strongly suspect you are a paid shill for the fossil fuel industry. So this is for anyone else reading this, look at which of the two of us is supporting their position with references to the relevant literature (be it the philsophy literature when it comes to the nature of scientific investigation, or the climate science literature when it comes climate science). hsthompson69 does not cite sources for hypotheses and claims he makes, he is likely doing this deliberately because unless like me you happen to be familiar with the literature it makes it much hard to check what he is saying, makes it hard to look up standard refutations and makes it hard to consult the relevant literature. He wont address any of the points I've brought up but will instead switch to a new set of canards and gish gallop.

I finished with college quite awhile ago, but I now live in a college town with about 50K students, who together make up about a quarter of the area's population. Thankfully, most of the students here are rather respectful and pleasant to be around. In fact, tomorrow they're engaging in the largest, annual, student-run service event in the nation, with over 20K students participating in helping people out around town with repairs, painting, cleaning up, maintenance, etc. at over 2000 homes and businesses in the area.

So, I suppose my experience with college students may be a bit different than most. ;)

I've seen dents in the leading edges of the wings just from hitting grasshoppers...

If pilots are doing 500+kts at altitudes reachable by grasshoppers, I'd be worried about the dents caused by trees. And small children.

Wow, 3000 foot tall trees? Would like to see those. Plus, there aren't a whole lot of trees and children on the test range, for good reason.

First link on google says migratory grasshoppers are commonly seen over 1km high without updrafts. The story comes complete with a silly picture of a grasshopper blocking a camera lens at 280m on a Bank of America building.

Remember how when it first went up, the hubble had problems focusing clearly? The designers forgot that its mirrors would be deformed/reshaped by the lack of gravity. Essentially, the hubble's primary mirror was optically designed to work as a telescope mirror on earth, not in space.

Uh, no. That would've been an amateur mistake to make and didn't happen.
Instead, the amateur mistake made was not to properly verify that the grinding
machine was actually grinding correctly. They even ignored measurments by
another instrument showing a faulty shape, assuming the instrument to be faulty instead.
And skipped the final post-assembly check to save time and money.

The mirror simply was ground extremely precisely into a wrong shape, and nobody noticed.

But as always in cases like this, the whole story is more complex and consists of a lot of
things not going as planned. It's a good and instructive read.

Ah. So the thing is, he did create the Internet with a capital I. Before that, it was the NSFnet and the ARPANET before that. What made it the Internet was that it was something the average person could actually connect to and use. Read the terms of use of the NSFnet - they're not at all conducive to the average person getting online. Even if a dial-up ISP would've been allowed to connect to it, there'd be nothing for the average person to do with it.

Nobody is claiming Gore had anything to do with the technology. But the difference between the NSFnet and Internet we know today has nothing to do with technology. Gore's contribution was realizing "hey, this could be huge for everybody else too" and making it happen. Reading Bush Sr.'s remarks on signing the bill is very interesting. Some quotes: "It holds the promise of changing society as much as the other great inventions of the 20th century, including the telephone, air travel, and radio and TV."

Gore really was the one guy who made everyone (outside of tech) realize that that sort of stuff would actually be possible if both companies and average people could connect their computers to a global network. Remember, in 1991, basically nobody even had a computer - but there they are talking about how this would be important well into the next century and already putting it on par with the telephone (which seems obvious now). So it's pretty fair to call it a remarkable bit of foresight.

Population growth has also slowed to pretty much replacement only, so the current increases are only from industrialization of previously undeveloped populations.

This is a common misconception. Population growth in industrialized countries is near zero and in some cases negative. It's actually developing nations which are driving the world's rampant population growth.

So if you want to slow down the world's population growth, we need to get these 3rd world countries industrialized and modernized ASAP.

Was deployed most of the time while getting a masters in math at TAMU and, well, VBA is the only programming language available on the Air Force's standard software load. I'm clearly going to hell.

Sometimes it helps to actually click on the articles on google, and see what they cited. A two minute search turned up:
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Munster/Industrial/chap17.htm
http://www.worklessparty.org/timework/chapman.htm
http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/5190.html
http://isme.tamu.edu/JSCOPE97/Belenky97/Belenky97.htm

I'm sure a more thorough search would turn up that much more. There's certainly something on JSTOR, for example.

Perhaps you are not old enough to remember the times when farmers themselves poured milk in the street in the vain effort to raise prices. For a history lesson, perhaps start here :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_Wisconsin_milk_strike

For more information on the history of the dairy industry, I recommend this: http://pdic.tamu.edu/black/stillman.pdf

The dairy industry is not simply a supply and demand equation. Any sane economic policy doesn't just rely on market pressures. Market pressures of themselves lead to the destruction of smaller businesses and the general liquidation of the middle class, by the simple fact that he who possesses more capital can remove the competition from the market by simply buying them out. For instance, in Poland recently Carlsburg bought several native breweries and immediately shut them down in order to control the market. The customers have no choice now to buy any other beer but theirs. With the consolidation of the different brands there is likewise a consolidation of production methods and in general the diversity of the market is impoverished. This is capitalism, where the small business simply has no ability to compete especially with the reality of debt and financing of capital are as they are today.

By the fact that corporate mergers have not been regulated by the government, we have the absurd situation that certain businesses are now "to big to fail", and instead of the government governing the economy the economy is governed by businesses.

To try to solve modern problems by returning to the economics of the 19th century is simply insane. What is more, the economic theories of the 19th century never worked very well to begin with - depressions were so dramatic and cyclical that people actually died of hunger. Thanks to several intelligent people who actually thought that government ought to try to regulate these things, people in the US and Europe in large measure haven't experienced hunger for the past 60 years. If you want a free market, might I suggest going to Somalia or any third world country lives according to the principles of least government. You won't get taxed, but you won't be making much money either.

They do not feel a thing. Insects lack a central nervous system, which is needed to have ability to feel what is happening to remote parts of your body.

Not so fast. You might want to reconsider that thought, especially when the dance of bees were studied and how it relates to their central nervous system.

Then there is the anatomy of a bee which shows its nervous system.

Obviously bees feel pain. The question is to what extent compared to mammals.

SLS (0.97pl?? kernel) -> Slackware (wow, packages!) -> RedHat (wow, dependencies!) -> Debian (wow, apt!)

I probably still have the fullscreen Linux 95 gif somewhere.

And for the record:

twm -> fvwm -> GNOME (very briefly) -> KDE

Ugh ....
Maryland - Goddard Space Flight Center
New Mexico - AF Research Lab - Space Vehicles, Sandia Labs, Los Alamos Labs
Colorado - Ball, Raytheon, etc
California - JPL, Livermore Labs and way too many others to list
Virginia - Navy Research Lab, Wallops Island
Texas - UT Dallas, Texas A&M, Johnson Space Center, many more
Arizona - Orbital Sciences Corp., GD, etc
Tennessee - Oakridge
Alabama - U.S. Space and Rocket Center
Utah -Space Dynamics Laboratory, L3
Florida - Kennedy, ATK and many more
Alaska - Kodiak Island

The space industry is spread out over the entire country. This list could go on and on. Saying it is only Florida and Texas that benefit is mildly absurd. I agree with the idea, but it isn't nearly as narrow as that.

According to the FBI's Uniform crime reports, http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/, and comparing that to the Texas A&M study http://econweb.tamu.edu/mhoekstra/castle_doctrine.pdf murder rates per capita have gone down in most of the states that have enacted Stand your Ground type laws. I'm afraid that my stats knowledge is not strong enough to go delving in the full study report, but it seems their best argument is that Stand your Ground states have not seen murder rates fall as fast as other states. That is a pretty hard position to argue.

My own feeling is that it probably does not affect violent crime rates at all, it just means fewer people go to jail for defensive shootings. In Ohio, if I shoot someone in self defense (there is an exception if I am in my home or my car), whether I am a murderer or not depends on if I tried to run away or not. If I did not try to run, I'm a murderer. If I did try to run, or if I claimed I was unable to run, then the cops and the courts would have to do some work to decide if I am guilty or not. Before Ohio passed a Castle Doctrine law, if someone broke down my door and started shooting, I could not legally return fire until I had retreated to another room and been pursued. Granted, the odds of a stranger trying to force their way into my house while I am home is small, but I know of a few cases in the surrounding cites where men went to jail for murder simply because they defended their homes.

Incidentally, Florida's Stand Your Ground law does not apply in the Zimmerman case because he claims to have been retreating to his car when the fight started and that he was on the ground with Martin crouched over him and reaching for the gun when he fired. Even without a Stand Your Ground type of law, that is a defensible case. It's going to come down to if the jury believes Martin or Zimmerman was the aggressor.



There are many studies that show that gun ownership is dangerous. Some do so by including suicides in the statistics. None of them include (as far as I have seen) defensive uses of firearms when no one is killed. On the other hand, gun ownership rates are higher than ever in the US and murder rates continue to drop.

Tifton 85 is a hybrid bermudagrass that was jointly developed and officially released in 1992 by the USDAARS and the University of Georgia Coastal Plain Experiment Station in Tifton, Georgia. It is a cross between a selection from South Africa (PI 290884) and Tifton 68.

That's what doesn't make sense to me. The current mean temperature of the ocean is about 4C, according to this source. And at 4C, the CTE is zero.

But I have a hard time squaring that with this graph

The graph makes it look like most of the Earth's oceans have surface temperatures significantly higher. Maybe the penetration that warmth to lower levels isn't very great?

That's what doesn't make sense to me. The current mean temperature of the ocean is about 4C, according to this source. And at 4C, the CTE is zero.

But I have a hard time squaring that with this graph

The graph makes it look like most of the Earth's oceans have surface temperatures significantly higher. Maybe the penetration that warmth to lower levels isn't very great?

On a related note, I always thought traffic congestion must waste an enormous amount of fuel. Years ago I came across a stat related to this done by a Texas university, which stated that the daily average was something like 250k barrels of oil per day - which may seem like a lot, but bear in mind the US plows through ca. 9 million barrels of gasoline per day.

My original link is now a 404 but I've found the data source they used: Congestion Data for Your City — Urban Mobility Information. Go to the data for "All 439 Urban Areas," and down to the table for sums. This states that due to traffic congestion 1,943,330,000 gallons were wasted for 2010, thus 5,324,205 per day; there are 42 gallons in a barrel, thus 126,767 barrels/day. I'm not sure if this is the correct way to calculate this, as refineries actually crank out more like 19 barrels of gasoline per full barrel of crude; so maybe 280,221 b/d? That must be how the original study came to its conclusion. Either way it's not much of a dent in the 8.71 million barrels of oil we wolfed down in the form of gasoline last week: Petroleum and Other Liquids - Data - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)

There is such a stack: Open JAUS. JAUS is the Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems used by many military robotic and unmanned systems. It's somewhat dated, and has a more open-loop approach more suited to teleoperators than fully autonomous systems.

Dealing with the time constraints in robotics rules out some of the approaches used in other software. Microsoft's Robotics Studio was built on a web-like approach, and it was a flop. Game programs tend to be tied to the display refresh rate, which isn't helpful in robotics. In robotic systems, there may be several subsystems with their own cyclic rate and processing delay, and they need to talk to each other. The inputs which have processing delays, like vision systems, produce outputs which represent the situation at some time in the past. Updates to the world model based on multiple sensors must all be synchronized to the time of the observation, not the time the data became available. This matters when you're moving fast. For slow robots, not so much. Many research robots are slow and pause a lot because they don't do this. That was the norm a few years ago, but it's not any more.

Robotic systems tend to need hard real time control. That control can be quite complex, not just a simple servo loop. Inside the more advanced and agile robots, like BigDog, you tend to find QNX, not Linux. (Typical test for a hard real-time OS: hook up a square wave oscillator to an input, and a scope to an output. Put a high-priority program in the system which turns on the output when the input comes on. Watch the input to output delay on the scope. Load up the system with lower-priority tasks. If the input to output delay is ever substantially longer, (more than a few microseconds) the system is not hard real time. The "real time" variants of Linux have trouble getting down to 1ms, and 10ms of jitter is observed. In hard real time systems, 10us is more like it. Servo control in BigDog executes every 1ms, balance every 10ms.) However, as CPUs get faster, the limitations of Linux have become less of an issue.

To paraphrase a nerd, if the cro-magnons who left cave paintings 30,000 years ago in France could've written something, they would've written something.

And to paraphrase an article I read only yesterday, those Cro-Magnons left something other than paintings: symbolic marks that look more like "writing" than anything else (sorry, can't find the link now, it may have been on http://anthropology.tamu.edu/news which seems to be down at the moment). To be fair, nobody suggests that this is writing like we understand it, more like "proto-writing", but we are damned close, IMO. These symbols see to have been used over a very large area, and considering that it takes time to develop both advanced painting techniques like the ones in the cave-paintings, and the abstract symbolism, we can be fairly confident that this ahs bee around for a long time before those painting were made. So, writing does seem to have deep roots.

Because it was Larry Mulloy and Jerald Mason. From http://ethics.tamu.edu/ethics/shuttle/shuttle1.htm

Marshall's Solid Rocket Booster Project Manager, Larry Mulloy, commented that the data was inconclusive and challenged the engineers' logic. A heated debate went on for several minutes before Mulloy bypassed Lund and asked Joe Kilminster for his opinion. Kilminster was in management, although he had an extensive engineering background. By bypassing the engineers, Mulloy was calling for a middle-management decision, but Kilminster stood by his engineers. Several other managers at Marshall expressed their doubts about the recommendations, and finally Kilminster asked for a meeting off of the net, so Thiokol could review its data. Boisjoly and Thompson tried to convince their senior managers to stay with their original decision not to launch. A senior executive at Thiokol, Jerald Mason, commented that a management decision was required. The managers seemed to believe the O-rings could be eroded up to one third of their diameter and still seat properly, regardless of the temperature. The data presented to them showed no correlation between temperature and the blow-by gasses which eroded the O-rings in previous missions. According to testimony by Kilminster and Boisjoly, Mason finally turned to Bob Lund and said, "Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat." Joe Kilminster wrote out the new recommendation and went back on line with the teleconference. The new recommendation stated that the cold was still a safety concern, but their people had found that the original data was indeed inconclusive and their "engineering assessment" was that launch was recommended, even though the engineers had no part in writing the new recommendation and refused to sign it. Alan McDonald, who was present with NASA management in Florida, was surprised to see the recommendation to launch and appealed to NASA management not to launch. NASA managers decided to approve the boosters for launch despite the fact that the predicted launch temperature was outside of their operational specifications.

How cute, linking to a 2008 (ethanol) crop report in a discussion about the flooding and/or drought in 2011.

$2 billion in cattle lost, $2 billion in cotton lost, $1 billion in corn/wheat/others lost, with the wheat production estimated to be 35% of normal while prices are 139% normal. And that's just Texas, and only "so far this year" (it's expected to stay drier than normal until next year, with La Nina in effect this winter). .

NASS's nationwide crop estimate report for September (summary of the executive summary: corn estimate had to be reduced 3% since August but is still just barely above last year's crop, soybeans are down 7% from last year, cotton is down 9%, oranges are down 8%). If I'm reading the rest right, the rice production estimate is down 20% from last year's production, sugarcane +5%, tobacco -12%, barley -7%, oats -29%, wheat -6%, peanuts -17%, spring and summer potato production were up (+3% and +15% respectively) but the larger fall crop hasn't begun yet (2010 spring summer and fall crops were roughly 2.4M, 1.1M and 36M lbs respectively).

BTW What good is a longer (summer) growing season when it delays fall planting? What good is a hotter summer growing season when July kills your crop?

And yes, you can estimate the size of various things affecting climate. And the reality is that for recent decades, the changes from human greenhouse gas emissions are an order of magnitude larger than the net forcing from other changes.

This will be my last response, as you don't seem interested in learning.

Last I checked most of the surface area of Earth is water. Why not flush toilets with saltwater when 38% of the population lives within 100km of an ocean? Tidal driven pumps could be used for energy efficiency and in desert areas, solar desalinization is a possible source of drinking and irrigation water.

1. Salt water is rather corrosive. Cheap metal pipes wouldn't last very long and even the rebar in concrete can corrode.
2. Human waste is natural fertilizer. You spread it on the ground to make plants grow. Salt is what you spread on the ground when you want to ensure that your enemies' crops won't grow. Use salt to flush with, and what do you get???
3. Running 2 sets of water lines is more expensive than running one. There are places in the US where this is done, using "gray" water to irrigate with, for example, but not all the world can spare the extra cost of multiple lines, whether pure/gray or pure/salt. Plus, even in affluent countries, some idiot will occasionally get the lines crossed. A "boil water" advisory is bad enough, without having to deal with salted drinking water.

Last I checked most of the surface area of Earth is water. Why not flush toilets with saltwater when 38% of the population lives within 100km of an ocean? Tidal driven pumps could be used for energy efficiency and in desert areas, solar desalinization is a possible source of drinking and irrigation water.

The Wikipedia entry on the greenhouse effect also says:

The major non-gas contributor to the Earth's greenhouse effect, clouds, also absorb and emit infrared radiation and thus have an effect on radiative properties of the atmosphere

Recent research on the subject indicates clouds net effect on global warming is likely slightly positive and very unlikely to be strongly negative. (Dessler 2010)

This is about a rather specialized type of quantum computer. Or more realistically, a proposed idea for a quantum computer.

One of the problems for quantum computing is the fragility of the quantum states that could be used. Even a tiny disturbance can cause the thing to screw up in a manner called decohering. So, there has been a push to find possible quantum computing elements that are extremely well insulated from the outside world, or that will tolerate a lot of disturbance without decohering.

Certain quantum states of quasi-particles called anyons (no joke. That's what they are called) in 2 dimensions are thought to be extremely stable.

Recently, there have been observations of states similar to these in surfaces of materials called topological insulators. They haven't conclusively shown that the right sort of states (called nonabelian) exist yet.

But, even if these so called "topologically protected" quantum states of the right sort exist, you still need an algorithm for how to compute with them.

What the Texas Advanced Computing Center team did was simulate a proposed algorithm called topological color coding for a specific case. When they did this, they found that it can withstand 10% of the underlying quantum bits screwing up.

So, it's a simulation of a proposed set of rules for computing with a proposed (but not yet demonstrated) set of quantum bits, using special quantum particles (that are composed of more than one normal particles bound together) that have not yet been shown to exist.

Although this is a very interesting area, it's a simulation of a vaporware program to run on a vaporware computer that is based on vaporware physics.

So, to say the least it's a ways off. But for solid state physics geeks it's a very hot topic of research.

Obligatory non-goatse links with useful info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_quantum_computer

Original paper abstract: http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.0573 with links to full paper.

This work was done by the computational physics group at Texas A&M: http://comp-phys.tamu.edu/ among others.

The link to the paper comparing surfacestations.org well/poorly placed stations is here.

The extended warming in the 1700's coincides with the Sun coming out of the Maunder minimum as do other temperature changes coincide with levels of solar activity. That is not the case now, temperatures have been increasing despite solar activity not increasing.

So your null hypothesis is to assume that it's all magical, that we don't know enough to attribute the temperature change to anything? Scientists would beg to differ. The radiative properties of CO2 are well known. Certainly they get modified when they are mixed with other gases in a dynamic atmosphere but they don't go away. Scientists didn't decide that CO2 was the cause of global warming and then look for evidence to support that supposition. Instead they asked what are the factors that go into explaining the temperature on the surface of the Earth. They have found that after changes in insolation CO2 is the biggest factor. If you want to dispute that you have to come up with a better scientific argument than they have.

Clouds effects on global warming has been pretty intensely studied for the past decade. Dessler (2010) used cloud measurements over the whole planet from the CERES satellite from March 2000 to February 2010. He concludes that although a small negative feedback is possible cloud feedbacks are most likely positive. He also says a negative feedback from clouds strong enough to overcome the positive feedbacks is not supported by his observations. I wouldn't call that *completely* uncertain despite what Anthony Watts says.

If the ocean is absorbing heat from the atmosphere it's going to get warmer. The ocean is not an infinite heat sink. Warmer oceans mean warmer atmospheric temperatures. Because of the buffer effect of the oceans atmospheric temperatures lag what they would be relative to the radiative balance of the planet by 30-40 years but the atmosphere will catch up eventually.

You really ought to drop the undersea volcanoes argument. It is a hypothesis with no evidence to back it up. It makes it sound like your grasping at straws to support your position.

CO2 in the atmosphere is NOT limited by temperature. Ocean temperature does affect the absorption/out-gassing of CO2 but there is a balance between the ocean and atmosphere based on the partial pressure. No matter how high high the level of absorbed CO2 in the ocean if the partial pressure in the atmosphere is high enough the ocean will absorb more of it or if the partial pressure is low enough the ocean will out-gas it. There is no possibility of supersaturation of CO2 in the atmosphere under current conditions on the Earth. The atmosphere could be 100% CO2 and it still wouldn't precipitate out. The maximum percentage of H20 in the atmosphere is around 4% at the surface before it starts to precipitate out but as you go higher in the atmosphere that number gets smaller because of the colder temperatures. Above the troposphere there is more CO2 than water vapor in the atmosphere.

I guess you're calling my invoking of the second law of thermodynamics a toy model. Yes, it doesn't explain all of the complexities. It's just the place to start from and you can't override it.

What solar predictions? I'm not aware of any theory that predicts what the Sun is going to do other than to keep doing what is has been. If you can believe in solar predictions you ought to be able to believe what climate scientists say as well.

If I live another 40 years I'll be on the verge of being one of those celebrated centenarians. Wish me luck.

My mistake on the meters to feet - conversion error. Going to sea takes thousands of dollars per day (estimate is around $25,000 to $35,000 per day to operate a modern oceanographic research vessel), so we don't have the frequency of repeat measurements for all areas of the world's oceans that we would like. And it takes going to sea in order to get the most accurate measurements because satellites cannot see through the water in order to give us the accuracy that we need (hence we use acoustics at sea). We only have about 5-10% of the global seafloor mapped to the highest resolutions that we'd like so, yes, new "holes" can indeed be found. New discoveries are still being made. We do have standards in terms of how these measurements are made as related to the speed of sound in water according to its salinity and temperature. So we should be able to map the same areas with different devices and get close to the same measurements of depth. For a nice overview of basic principles, you might enjoy http://1.usa.gov/jtUT7v or http://ocean.tamu.edu/Quarterdeck/1998/3/sager-1.html

Uh what? They save you money hence they are more expensive? I think you need to examine your logic, which is not. Also, I really like how you just ignored my examples of something which costs no more to make being less efficient.

Think about it, I have a choice of two refrigerators that are identical in every way except one costs $50 less per year to run. Which am I going to buy? In order for the two to be equivalent purchases for me, the cheaper to run refrigerator has to be significantly more expensive.

Second, you ignore research and development. The newer range of your original example was more expensive than the older range because the R&D (which is very significant for a consumer products device that has considerable potential dangers in it BTW) is over fewer products and a shorter period of time.

You're an ass.

Welcome to debate as it gets practiced in the real world. If I weren't an "ass", you might just blow off my disagreement. You might not even realize I disagreed with you. I use the proper tools for effective communication.

Experts disagree.

Fallacy of appealing to authority. Please keep in mind that a lot of experts get funded precisely because they exaggerate the effects of pollution, AGW, and other environmental problems.

No, it has not, at least not in this kind of quantity in the part we find interesting. It's been under the inaccurately-named biosphere, for the most part.

Keep mind both that the Gulf of Mexico has natural oil seeps and that oil wells have been leaking for a long time in the Gulf. The Deepwater Horizon accident is thought to have leaked about 5 million barrels. While that is a lot, it is worth noting that US waters experience about a tenth of that amount each year. I'd wager that more than half of that comes from the Gulf of Mexico.

We've seen what happens when you spill oil many times, but we've never seen what happens when you spill this much oil and then spray so many tons of dispersant on it.

So how does jumping to conclusions change anything? It doesn't make the Gulf of Mexico any less polluted. It doesn't reduce our dependency on oil. It is a hysterical statement that does nothing for us. There's always a first time for every variety of disaster or attempted disaster mitigation. That's why I counsel waiting and see what actually happened before we pass judgment. My bet is that a significant fraction of the oil spill is already covered with silt and on its way to being removed from the environment.

Your "wait and see" attitude is ridiculous given what we know about CO2 from our understanding of physics.

In other words, because we think we have a great handle on a few small parts of climate modeling such as radiative forcing by greenhouse gases and despite having no urgent AGW-related problems coming in the near future, we should engage now in massive social reengineering. Do you comprehend how stupid that is? Even the worst-case experts agree that AGW is not a problem for the next 70 or so years.

That gives us plenty of time both to determined whether the science is right and to determine whether fossil fuel burning will be a problem in the long run.

Having been to the heart of Ethiopia, I can tell you what they really need are jobs. Yea, food, education, clean water... that's all good, but none of it will remain there without money and they only way to keep money there is to build factories to employee the people.

I would go a step further. The vast majority of the world's population growth is in developing countries. In contrast, the population growth of industrialized nations is nearly zero. If you look at the historical population growth of industrialized nations, you'll see the same thing. Sky high population growth when there's a subsistence economy, shifting to low or even negative population growth as they achieve affluence. The desire/need to have more kids dwindles with increasing economic development.

Now apply those concepts to a country receiving humanitarian aid. Food and clean water provided as aid allow for more population growth, while the destructive influence on local economic development means it'll take even longer before that population growth is arrested. In other words, alleviating their suffering today just sets them up for even more suffering in the future. We're approaching it as a static problem where if there are hungry people, feed 'em so they aren't hungry anymore. But it's not a static problem, it's a dynamic problem, where feeding them will lead to there being even more hungry people in the future than if you hadn't fed them at all.

The focus must first be on economic development and education (both in engineering and contraception) in developing countries. Basic needs like food and water should be secondary, and preferably not provided at all. Their own progress in farming and modernizing their infrastructure should be what's providing them with more food and clean water. The way we're doing it now is like feeding deer during a spate of cold winters. By artificially increasing their food supply, you're allowing their population to balloon far beyond the land's carrying capacity, setting them up for a huge population crash when one winter you decide you can't afford to feed the deer anymore. The better solution is to teach the deer how to grow their own food.

If you feel really bad about it, you can still feed them. But their economic development has to be progressing quicker than their population growth. That is, if you find yourself feeding them more year after year, that means you need to concentrate less on food and more on economic development. Only when you have to provide them with less food each successive year will you know they're on the path to modernization and independence from international aid.

Way to go Mother Nature Network (MNN), you have tied Genghis Khan to environmentalism.

On the contrary, I think it's a connection which is both telling and needs to be made more public. The modern environmental movement and most people who are concerned about the environment have the same goal - preservation and conservation of the natural world. But they have very different opinions on the means to achieve those goals. Most people would prefer that preservation and conservation be achieved with as little inconvenience to our modern way of life as possible. Most hardcore environmentalists OTOH view controlling human population and consumption as the most effective means of achieving that goal. (Which is precisely what Ghengis Khan did through different means.)

The divergence is most telling with nuclear power. The only reason CO2 emissions are a tough problem is because of energy. CO2 is a byproduct of processes we use to extract energy. That puts the CO2 at a low energy state, and getting rid of it involves putting energy back into it. But putting energy back into CO2 defeats the purpose of burning the fuel which produced it in the first place. You'd be producing CO2 to extract energy which you then use to decompose CO2.

Nuclear doesn't have that problem. With a relatively cheap and nearly unlimited power source like nuclear, CO2 ceases to become a problem. We can build plants which do nothing but scrub CO2 from the atmosphere, pumping energy in to convert it back into oxygen and residual carbon (soot, which is a heckuva lot easier to sequester than gaseous CO2). The same thing for dangerous toxins like dioxin. They're only a problem because they're at a low energy state so natural processes (which generally don't have access to high energy levels) have a very difficult time breaking them down. With cheap energy, you can afford to run incinerators which atomize those compounds back into their constituent elements. These problems either go away or are greatly diminished with cheap energy, yet cheap energy seems to be one of the things the environmental movement vehemently opposes.

The same goes for population. Most of the developed world is close to zero population growth or even experiencing negative growth (families on average have only 2 or fewer kids). Nearly all of the world's exploding population growth is happening in undeveloped countries. Yet nearly every time you hear an environmentalist talk about overpopulation, they point to solutions involving changing what people in industrialized nations do, not changing developing nations where nearly all the population growth is happening.

We should be concentrating R&D on cheap energy sources for the future, not on cleaner but considerably more expensive "green" energy sources. It's only because productivity per person has vastly increased over the pre-industrialized era that we have the luxury to be spending time and effort doing things like worrying about the environment. But that increased productivity came about directly because of cheap energy. Make energy more expensive and our productivity goes down, meaning we can't afford some of our modern conveniences and/or we can't spend as much time and effort worrying about the environment. And we should be concentrating on modernizing and industrializing (and making contraceptives available to) undeveloped nations to arrest their population growth, not trying to get people in developed nations to adopt "low footprint" lifestyles similar to those in undeveloped nations.

But if the US, EU, AU, and Asian communities enacted a 1 child per family policy like China has done, their respective populations would drop to 1/10th present levels by 2110. i.e. From ~3 billion to 300 million. That alone would solve our pollution problem, and yes it would be humane (no need to kill anybody).

The thing is, nearly all the world's population growth is happening in undeveloped countries. The developed nations are experiencing slow or even negative population growth. So paradoxically, the way to slow down global population growth seems to be by quickening the rate at which countries are developing.

It's a technical/scientific borehole, not an exploration well. In fact, part of the whole IODP program involves evaluation of safety for all proposed wells, and one of the number one safety goals is to ensure that no significant quantities of hydrocarbons will be encountered that might be an environmental hazard, or any other type of environmental hazard (there is more than oil and gas to worry about). The safety committee is independent of the committees that evaluate the scientific merit of the sites where the holes will be drilled and how they will be drilled (See the summary here -- the "Environmental Protection and Safety Panel" is the one you want -- there's a bunch of information on their procedures if you follow the link on that page). That the safety committee does it's job properly is demonstrated by the hundreds of wells that have been drilled world-wide since the 1960s in all the oceans of the world by the preceding DSDP and ODP programs, none of which has encountered significant hydrocarbons or resulted in any other kind of spill.

And if you're looking for advice on where to drill in order to not encounter hydrocarbons, who better to ask for data and technical support than the oil companies? These companies are already collecting data in order to try to find oil. The same data is just as useful to figure out where there isn't likely to be any oil.

Just to be absolutely clear: neither Shell nor any other oil company was calling the shots. Looking at the current safety committee makeup it looks like 1/3 company, 2/3 scientific institutions. It's less than that for the science planning committee -- in fact, I don't see any there. The point is, the companies have a lot of experience drilling holes in deep water, so why wouldn't you have people with that kind of experience on the committee assessing safety? This would especially be true of areas where the scientific interests and the company interests happen to be in the same geographic area.

My employer (you'll see who in a minute, which is why this is anonymous...) has this exact same policy, informally in 2008 and formalized in 2009.

from http://rules-saps.tamu.edu/PDFs/29.01.99.M1.29.pdf :
"4.3 Where feasible, all data files are to be scanned on an annual basis to determine if those files contain SSNs. If SSNs are found or known to be present in a file, they are to be removed or appropriate risk mitigation measures applied (e.g., encryption) if their continued presence is required. The results of the file scanning and risk mitigation measures taken shall be reported during the annual ISAAC process. All SSNs that are to be retained and stored are to be reported to and approved by the Vice President and Associate Provost for Information Technology. The reporting and approval process will be in the manner indicated in the ISAAC process. Specialized information systems that cannot be scanned and are not capable of storing SSNs shall also be documented accordingly as part of the ISAAC process."

We use Identity Finder and Spider to scan. I can honestly say I'm impressed with the accuracy of Identity Finder, and it's really easy to roll out via Group Policy in an Active Directory environment. It's also pretty easy for users to scan their own personal drive space (both local profile and network shares), and for the admin to see everything in a unified console. Spider, on the other hand, for *nix and Mac systems is a pain in the rear, requiring customized regexes to prevent false positives.

As far as those people saying they'll just lie about it? If you have a computer on the network here, there is a record of it. Each device with an IP is assigned an owner and that owner, or their supervisor depending on the department, is responsible for complying with all university policies regarding IT services and data security. There is an annual IT security audit that is required for every system on the network (Texas Administrative Code section 202 plays a large part in that), and the person responsible for filling it out *and* their supervisor are required to sign it verifying that they comply with all the policies and procedures in effect. In other words, it's state law. There is no "academic freedoms" being violated in requiring a scan for confidential or privileged information which the user is not supposed to have stored on their computer in the first place.

There's a pretty easy solution for people who lie about systems or try to hide things. There is much less security risk if the computers in question no longer have network connectivity.

What we need is less technology in Elementary School.

As a mathematician, I would unquestionably back this assertion and would indeed extend it into the later years of Secondary school. My points mostly apply to mathematics, but I suspect they extend beyond it.

The most important piece of technology for a mathematics educator is a blackboard. The most importance piece of high-tech equipment is a sliding blackboard. For students, their most important tools are paper, pencils, and a ruler and compass. This is all the equipment that should ever be used in mathematics education.

Now, technology can be useful, but in elementary instruction it is more of a hindrance than a help. Remember, your ultimate objective is to teach students completely new methods and concepts. This is hard enough as it is without having to introduce them to an entire suite of new technology on top of everything else--often obsolete, inefficient, or unhelpful examples of technology at that.

The first piece of high tech equipment students should be introduced to is a digital calculator for the calculation of trignometric functions and the rest of the elementary functions. These should most certainly NOT be allowed in the primary school cycle, and when introduced should be confined only to the evaluation of such non rational results. In essence, they should only be used as a more modern replacement for the old slide rules and log tables. Nothing more.

A second level mathematics student should preferably never even see a single computer in the classroom before they enter third level education. The only exception to this is for second level computer programming courses, and these should never be made a part of any mathematics curriculum whatsoever. However, once in third level education, computers and computer programming must be introduced as a fundamental tool of modern mathematics; I quote the mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota's who said that "The future belongs to the computer-literate-squared." But the best time to introduce most students to the fundamentals of computers is in third level, after the more fundamental skills in other areas have been mastered.

Make no mistake, we have modern technology suitable for the classroom. We have bigger, cheaper black and white boards. We have better, cheaper pens and copy books for students. Books are numerous and cheaper, or at least they should be. These are the important advancements we have made and which we should allow to impact our schools. Trying to go beyond these basic tools has been a recipe for disaster wherever it has been tried--excepting the handsome profits reaped by the companies who supplied these technologies.

Computers and other high tech equipment should be banned outright from all primary schools. Their presence in secondary schools should be limited to select, computer centric subjects like programming and typewriting. Tech should only be introduced in the senior cycle of second level education and even then should never be used in most subjects. Once in University, technology can be presented--as it always has been--but before that I want students to be able to add fractions, solve quadratic equations, be familiar with trigonometry, and to know what a graph is. If western mathematics educations keeps going the way its going, that type of student is going to disappear from third level institutions, and no amount of computers is going to be able to fix the problem.

In trying to research this stuff online, and find some actual numbers and not a grade-school explanation, I constantly see diagrams like the second one on this page: http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/oceanography-book/radiationbalance.htm (it's not just the Aggies that seem confused)

This makes little physical sense. Radiation goes with the 4th power of temperature, so it seems quite unlikely that the radiative heat transfer from the atmosphere back to the Earth would be 90% of the Earth-to-atmosphere radiative transfer. (That diagram also puts evaporative transfer at 3x convective, which seems odd to me.)

Your point about convection makes sense, but I can't seem to find believable numbers anywhere on radiative cooling vs convective cooling of the Earth's surface.

Not to mention that this has already been done on Mars. The SSI "Surface Stereoscopic Imager" was used by the Phoenix Mars Scout lander in 2008.

I don't think that the AC poster really has thought through his comment very well. Nice comment there about the role meteors have played in terms of mining.... which offers some excellent thoughts on the topic.

One of the problems with heavy metals is that most of them have sunk into the center of the Earth over time, and that it is only rare exceptions.... usually due to volcanism or meteor landfalls mentioned above.... that you find deposits of the heavier elements in even modest quantities. Going to an asteroid you don't have to worry about trying to dig down a couple of miles or more to get at the ore.... because going a couple of miles you have already shot past the center and are coming out the other side.

Also not mentioned..... there is a reason most mines only go at most a couple miles down: There is this pesky thing called "gravity" that we constantly have to fight here on the Earth. Trying to push up a couple miles of pure rock at 9.8 m/s^2 constant acceleration is an incredibly difficult task if you are trying to squeeze under that rock to get at a vein or ore body that happens to lay underneath that rock. The engineering requirements for keeping that rock suspended for at least the duration you are extracting the minerals is an incredible accomplishment that has spawned its own engineering discipline: mining engineering. If you have ever heard of some of the famous "A&M" schools around the country, notable a school like Texas A&M, the "M" comes from the mining engineering school that was the very purpose for the establishment of the university (with biology programs related to agriculture being the other). I can point to a couple dozen universities across the USA that were established explicitly for this purpose. It isn't easy, and even today there are dozens of people in 1st world countries that die from mining accidents each year.... many more in developing countries like China where they die not by the dozens but by the hundreds or even thousands each year.

Another issue is that mining is an incredibly destructive process that causes incredible environmental damage, wiping out whole habitats and even ecological niches. One mine that is close to my house grew to the point it took out a whole city and even an entire mountain in the quest to dig ever deeper down to obtain the ore. In this case, to avoid problems with the overburden of the rocks, the mine has simply moved the entire mountain down the road in an attempt to get at the minerals in the mine. Why not move this environmental damage to a place that has no "environment" to damage? Mining asteroids sounds pretty good to me on this issue too, where streams aren't filled with toxic metals or even entire climate zones are left alone. Heck, once a good asteroid has been hollowed out, it might just make a new environment that we could put stuff into to develop new environmental niches that until now have simply not existed.

Recycling is also never 100% effective as much as some people would have you think otherwise. You always need to have at least some input from raw sources to maintain any sort of supply of an element no matter how effective you have become at reusing the material.

Getting back to the AC poster above:

So dig in the planet, my friend, it's all there. I know, a shovel is not as sexy as a rocket.

No, it isn't all there, at least as easy as those would have you think. Easy spots to dig and extract ore from has pretty much disappeared from the Earth. On a rare occasion you might hear about another gold rush due to a mineral deposit in a generally previously unexplored area, but where exactly are the new frontiers for humanity right now? Oh, that is right, in space! As I tried to explain above, getting down to deeper and deeper pockets of minerals is an incredibly difficult task. Modern mines that operate on the scale of current productio

The following process is completely disgusting but I've done this several times and it works:

http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~henrik/GSPSprinter/GSPSprinter.html

Basically what you do is create a fake postscript printer on Windows that prints to the Windows equivalent of stdout. This printer is shared with Linux and maybe OS X clients. Print jobs from that are handed off to the printer queue that only has acceptable drivers for Windows. Lexmark I'm looking at you......

This is everything currently known about the orbit of 99942 Apophis.

http://aeweb.tamu.edu/aero489/Apophis%20Mitigation%20Project/Predicting%20Earth%20Encounters.pdf

We'll know more in 2012/2013 when radar returns can be collected. Anyone who says that there is "no chance", "nearly no chance" or anything other than "we don't have enough data yet" is just trying to stem public panic by treating you like a child. Read the scientific papers, make your own decision and for god sakes, don't criticize the people we may be calling on to save lives in the future.

The fact is, asteroid detection systems (let alone mitigation systems) globally are woefully inadequate. We need at least a dozen radar telemetry satellites in solar orbit and improvements in the deep-space-network to handle that kind of data through-put. Total cost is likely in the tens of billions, and most of that will go on the telescopes, not the radar sats, and traditionally that's the most starved part of all national budgets diverted to space.

Bacteria and fungus abundantly live on/in organisms with no free water. Such as cheese and bread. They may release water from the organic compounds in which they live, but that is really not the same as needing water. Although you could certainly argue that without the other beings that produced the bread or cheese they wouldn't exist. Which may or may not be valid.

These bacteria and fungi have cells which contain water. The cell structure wouldn't exist without it. That water has to come from somewhere, whether it's by absorption from the environment or by chemical breakdown of food... or gifted in part by an ancestor via mitosis.

I think you are underestimating the amount of water present in a typical loaf of bread, or for that matter, in a typical cheese. (Hard cheeses might have little water in them, but there are certainly different types of cheese.) The fungi and bacteria are also free to fix moisture from the atmosphere, even if none can be obtained from the food on which they live.

If the cells contain water, then water is a necessity for life, because the chemical reactions within the cell require it. I think you're playing a little fast and loose with your definitions and your reasoning here. Or maybe you're engaging in semantic games. Either way, what you're doing isn't science.

So, I stand on the water is not a necessary requirement for life. [...] I'm not a biologist, just casual reader of such topics.

So you have an opinion that you hold dearly in the face of evidence to the contrary, but you admit that you have no actual scientific credentials in this field, and that you're basically a dilletante?

But let me go on...

When I said alcohol, I was including the entire classification of alcohols, not simply your sterilizing ethanol.

Actually, all alcohols are toxic to cellular life -- some are simply more toxic than others. Ethanol can be tolerated by humans because we have enzymes that can metabolize it relatively quickly, but humans can and have died from ethanol poisoning. Obviously, single-celled organisms don't have the body mass of a large animal to render the absorbed alcohol dilute and spread damage around.

If you want to understand why alcohol makes a crappy solvent for life as we know it (and that includes all cellular life on this planet), you need to understand the biochemistry. I found a couple decent resources here and here which explain this in enough detail to get you started.

As for your rogues gallery of bacteria, I would point out that in no case have you provided the name of a single organism that can survive without water. (No, even Deinococcus peraridilitoris requires some water. Desert sand may be pretty darned dry, but moisture does collect at night, and during the cold season. A bacterium, or even a colony of bacteria, doesn't need much.) That they are extremophiles only proves that life can invade just about any niche, but these examples do nothing to blow away any of the basic requirements.

There's another organism I've read about and seen microphotos of in a NOVA science program -- sorry, don't have a specific scientific name handy, but it lives in small pockets inside rocks that are extracted from miles-deep bore holes. You can find a good jumping-off point here These bacteria live off the chemical energy derived from slowly dissolving the minerals of the rock around them, and they divide very slowly -- on the order of once every 100 years, perhaps longer. Even here, all of the basic given requirements (yes, even water) hold true and are met.