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It carried on a lot longer than that, according to LIVING HERE.

We can see the temperatures ourselves, moron. Two days. Three if you want to pretend that 28 F is some sort of barn-burning cold. Only four days that didn't go above 32.

It's only a few days after the bomb cyclone we've started actually approaching average temperatures.

Own-goal. March 3rd to March 7th is indeed a "few days" from bomb cyclone to average high temperature. Also, not something that supports your point.

So how do we have more melting that normal with below average tertmpetures?

You misspelled "temperatures." I'd let it slide, but you have a spelling fetish it seems. How do you have more melting? Something about greater snowpack, which you admit, and daytime temperatures routinely above freezing, which we can see for ourselves. But wait, it gets better, because for some reason you want to only talk about Denver.

You can dance around it all you like, but the fact is you and your scientifically, data starved ignorant friends are simply wrong about what is happening now, and you base your forecasts on this fundamentally mistaken view of the world... sad.

You're appearing to confuse Denver with the predicted flooding areas, and then the world.

You can't locate Denver on a map. SAD. The rest of us can. It's in one of those square states full of white.

You misspelled decreasing. Just like a climate alarmists to confuse weather for climate.

No, I really didn't.

Pretty telling that I am the only one providing real data while you try to spread fear and panic by totally ignoring what the weather is actually doing.

You can't click on a hyperlink to NWS temperatures? SAD.
You should try clicking on these links. But you won't. SAD.
You think that I have the sole responsibility to provide "real data" that is being published constantly yet you actively ignore? SAD.

I'll let you have the last response, since at this point everyone is onto your game of deception... everyone except for you it would seem.

You won't. You'll come back and post some nonsense, including that fact that "everyone" (except for every single reply to your post) agrees with your delusional position.

Boy, that came out of left field, didn't it? Globalism is quite real. It's not a conspiracy theory by nutjobs. Please read here for a discussion of global governance. Education, it's always the answer.

1955??? In a backpack? The first operational laser was in 1960 in a lab.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/...

Yes, but time travel was invented in 2045.

As a teacher, I can tell that the main reason for relaxing the cell phone bans is the parents demanding it. the research is in, cell phones detract from learning.

The following is part of a letter I sent to my building administrator on this topic. The first point, that is cut out, but mentioned, had to do with my student to robot ratio.

The second is more generalized, yet it remains a problem. It is the cell phones in the school.

The research done by the London School of Economics showed that the benefit to a cell phone ban was the equivalent to an extra week of instruction. However, even more relevant to our district, is that the gain was driven by low income students. they showed an improvement equal to receiving three extra weeks of instruction per year.

Simply telling the students to put the phones is not enough. A study by the University of Chicago determined that the negative effects of the cell phone are present when the phone is in close proximity, such as in a backpack. When in close proximity, the addictive nature of the phone continues to interfere with the cognitive process.

Based on research, a simple ban of cell phones could improve the students education. In cases where the parent believes that their child needs a phone, and will not be swayed by research, a area of small lock boxes in the office would allow the students to secure their phones at the beginning of the day.

These are two proposals that would increase student engagement and learning.

Here I include summaries and abstracts from recent cell phone research:
  a couple of studies that have been completed in an attempt to assess the impact the impact of having cell-phones in school on education.

The first is a study completed by the London School of Economics. Here is the abstract:

This paper investigates the impact of schools banning mobile phones on student test scores. By surveying schools in four English cities regarding their mobile phone policies and combining it with administrative data, we find that student performance in high stakes exams significantly increases post ban. We use a difference in differences (DID) strategy, exploiting variations in schools’ autonomous decisions to ban these devices, conditioning on a range of student characteristics and prior achievement. Our results indicate that these increases in performance are driven by the lowest achieving students. This suggests that restricting mobile phone use can be a low-cost policy to reduce educational inequalities.
Source: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/down...

A more readable summary is provided by CNN:
The authors looked at how phone policies at 91 schools in England have changed since 2001, and compared that data with results achieved in national exams taken at the age of 16. The study covered 130,000 pupils.
It found that following a ban on phone use, the schools' test scores improved by 6.4%. The impact on underachieving students was much more significant -- their average test scores rose by 14%.
Source: http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/1...

This study was supported by a recent study conducted by the University of Chicago. Further, they determined that the negative effect of the cell-phone were present even if the cell-phone is put away, such as in a backpack. From the Abstract:
Results from two experiments indicate that even when people are successful at maintaining sustained attention—as when avoiding the temptation to check their phones—the mere presence of these devices reduces available cognitive capacity.
Source: http://www.journals.uchicago.e...

And heavier bulbs tended to have more offsets or bulblets formed at the base of the mother bulb, which were separated and sold individually. A tulip bulb may produce two or three offsets a year and then only for several years before it becomes too enervated to reproduce. Propagating from these offsets, which can take from one to three years to become flowering bulbs themselves, necessarily limited the number of bulbs on the market. But, unlike seeds, it was the only way to ensure that the tulips would be genetically identical. A bulb with offsets obviously had greater value but it could not be sold too soon. To do so would limit the ability of the grower to produce any more of that variety and only make it available to others—which is why prized bulbs always were in short supply and commanded such high prices. Because a bulb planted in September likely would weigh substantially more when lifted the following June, it encouraged speculation. Even if the price per aes did not change, the value of the bulb could multiply three to five times during those nine months, simply because of its increased weight. Contracting to pay a specified price at lifting, buyers speculated that the bulbs would have greater value in the future than the promissory note, which could be sold to a new buyer in hope of realizing a profit. No longer the province of liefhebbers, bulbs were purchased by the weaver, brewer, or baker. For a modest investment, often paid for in kind (when there was not the cash), these poorer craftsmen and artisans speculated in the common varieties that were the stock of mass trade. Such speculation was risky, of course. Having put everything down on deposit, if the price of tulip bulbs were to drop before lifting, there would not be the means to pay the remaining balance. Nevertheless, novices continued to enter the market and speculation increased, until in December 1636 and January 1637 it reached its height.

You need to control variables if you want to propose and test a hypothesis like this. See Freakonomics for allusions to the methods involved here. Namely, you would have to control for recent law changes at both the city and state levels that reduce punishment for crimes and release criminals early. Prior studies these guys have done point to reduced punishment as being directly correlated and most likely causative of increased crime. http://pricetheory.uchicago.ed...

Most people would recognizes that lighthouses are needed, but if governments did not build them, who would?

Not the best example, perhaps, since private lighthouses have existed, as pointed out by R. H. Coase in his article The Lighthouse in Economics in the October 1974 issue of The Journal of Law and Economics. There are any number of ways that so-called "public goods" can be provided without resorting to force.

By the way, the situation you described is not "the tragedy of the commons", which is invariably a product of interference in the market, but is rather generally referred to as the "free rider problem". Commons are not a naturally stable phenomenon. The tragedy of the commons is solved very simply by privatizing (i.e. homesteading) the commons, and thus giving someone a vested interest in maintaining it. A tragedy results only when the commons is forced to remain common, with no owner to decide how it will be used. (When a government "solves" the tragedy of the commons it does so merely by seizing the commons and acting in place of the owner. However, since the government claims to represent both present and future users of the property, while lacking any means of economic calculation, the result tends toward irreconcilable conflicts of interest.) The "free rider problem" is somewhat less tractable in cases where exclusion is not an option, but nonetheless force is not the answer.

Have you ever read They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer? The book contains first-person accounts from ordinary Germans who witnessed the rise of Nazism from 1933 to 1945. In the book, a university professor described the rise of Nazism this way:

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it--please try to believe me--unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice--‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings.

...

Each [Nazi] act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?--Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, 'everyone' is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none.... In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end?

When you say, "Just start by admitting there's a problem," I imagine Adolf Hitler saying, "Just start by admitting that the Jews are a problem." That's one of those small, seemingly inconsequential steps that is described in the quote above. It's not true--it's a falsehood--but it seems to be a very small falsehood. Nevertheless, accepting one tiny falsehood paves the road for many more, and I, for one, am not willing to go down that road.

here are enough variables and unknowns in these methods to easily have a "whoops...

Researchers do have practice with similar reconstruction techniques. In the linked case there are multiple projections of the same target with varying degrees of distortion, which narrows the range of possible of mistakes. Any proposed lens model used on such has to account for multiple (distorted) copies of the same object.

Thus, they can re-use the model on single-copy distortions with some degree of confidence.

Bifidobacterium is your free or almost free alternative.

"Next, they compared the effects of bacterial transfer against a checkpoint inhibitor, anti-PD-L1 antibodies. They found that introducing the bacteria was just as effective as treating them with anti-PD-L1 antibodies, resulting in significantly slower tumor growth.

So they began searching for the specific bacteria that made the difference. They identified microbes from the digestive tracts of JAX and TAC mice by large-scale sequencing. Although there were significant differences in 254 taxonomic families of bacteria from the two sets of mice, three groups were prominent.

When they tested the effects of each group on the mice’s immune systems, one group, the Bifidobacterium, stood out. Within two weeks of oral administration, TAC mice that received just Bifidobacterium species had a marked increase in the anti-tumor T cell responses.

Mice treated just with Bifidobacterium, rather than the full fecal transfer, displayed tumor control comparable to those who received the full mixture. The effect was long-lasting. TAC mice exposed to tumors as late as six weeks after the Bifidobacterium transfer were still able to mount a robust immune response."

https://news.uchicago.edu/arti...

One more thing about the money angle.

Over the years, I've listened to most of the EconTalk back catalog. I agree with Russ Roberts about 60% of the time, yet I have some pretty strong disagreements in the other 40%.

Part of his standard spiel about diminishing the role of government in all practical venues is his model of private charity. I just found this now, but it turns out he's actually written a paper on the subject:

A Positive Model of Private Charity and Public Transfers

The whole point of relying less on government to adjudicate public life is that every side of the argument can stump up their own pocket books, as they see fit as private citizens. My own gut instinct is that this would devolve into an extremely capricious network of civic concern and attention, by the standard mechanism of charismatic megafauna getting all the grease.

So if these protesters (or some subset thereof) turn out to have deep pockets behind them, that actually means, in certain well-established strands of orthodox libertarian theory, that they are in good standing with the giant neoliberal program of dragging big government into a small bathtub, and it would be entirely their own business how they raise their protest stake. Because under Libertarianism, all dollars are created equal, and from this assumption (and possibly also God) unencumbered moral equilibrium shall automatically flow.

Nevertheless, suck-and-blow types somehow always seem to show up with a steady supply of nefarious labels concerning the hidden ka-ching. The standard smoke machine demands this narrative. (Business As Usual wouldn't much mind if the protesters did conform to their established narrative lot of being eternally impoverished and poorly organized, so it wins either way.)

I actually prefer government as a player in many issues, because it aims (until corrupted) to be somewhat transparent (no-one ever accused government of getting anything exactly right, which I regard as a false standard, because no-one ever accused any human system of getting anything exactly right, modulo "law of the jungle, the losers can suck it"; government is simply better at counting up losers than most private-sector alternatives).

I guess many people out there figure that if America went much further toward the Libertarian end of the spectrum, we'd all be united in the Church of the Profit Motive, and this kind of dispute simply wouldn't transpire among gentlemen, and we would not be constantly up to our ankles in dark money vs. deep money shit storms. Well, I'm not personally signing up to test drive that experimental fork in the road. I'm not saying it couldn't possibly work. The world is a complicated place. But I'd rather not risk my own skin to that experiment.

Constructive public discourse is fragile. This one thing, for sure, we all know.

Seneca, Nebraska — 12 October 2016

Back in 2014 the town of Seneca, Nebraska was deeply divided. How divided? They were so fed up with each other that some citizens began circulating a petition that proposed a radical solution. If a majority wanted to they'd self-destruct, end the town, and wipe their community off the map.

Bike shed? Or canary in the coal mine?

In this instance, it's hard to say. The politics of division have this strange, new, frightening face.

Here's my homework, teacher: Article 1, section 8: Congress may lay and collect taxes for the "common defense" or "general welfare" of the United States.

This does not equate to a power to spend tax money on (or regulate) anything "for the 'common defense' or 'general welfare'". If Congress's enumerated powers included getting involved in education, this clause would grant them the power to raise money toward that end. It does not grant that power by itself. If it did, the remainder of the section (and the entire concept of enumerated powers) would be rendered meaningless, which was obviously not the authors' or signers' intent.

Don't worry, this is a very common mistake. Your reading comprehension will improve with practice. In the meantime, perhaps you would care to read what Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had to say on the subject.

First, "obvious" in the eye of the beholder. This is especially true when it comes to the constitution - people get degrees in that shit. Second, snarky "your reading comprehension" lines don't help your point. Third, if DoEd is unconstitutional, why hasn't someone sued to get the Feds out of Education. Short answer: the Supreme Court would laugh at your interpretation.

Here's my homework, teacher: Article 1, section 8: Congress may lay and collect taxes for the "common defense" or "general welfare" of the United States.

This does not equate to a power to spend tax money on (or regulate) anything "for the 'common defense' or 'general welfare'". If Congress's enumerated powers included getting involved in education, this clause would grant them the power to raise money toward that end. It does not grant that power by itself. If it did, the remainder of the section (and the entire concept of enumerated powers) would be rendered meaningless, which was obviously not the authors' or signers' intent.

Don't worry, this is a very common mistake. Your reading comprehension will improve with practice. In the meantime, perhaps you would care to read what Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had to say on the subject.

First, "obvious" in the eye of the beholder. This is especially true when it comes to the constitution - people get degrees in that shit. Second, snarky "your reading comprehension" lines don't help your point. Third, if DoEd is unconstitutional, why hasn't someone sued to get the Feds out of Education. Short answer: the Supreme Court would laugh at your interpretation.

Here's my homework, teacher: Article 1, section 8: Congress may lay and collect taxes for the "common defense" or "general welfare" of the United States.

This does not equate to a power to spend tax money on (or regulate) anything "for the 'common defense' or 'general welfare'". If Congress's enumerated powers included getting involved in education, this clause would grant them the power to raise money toward that end. It does not grant that power by itself. If it did, the remainder of the section (and the entire concept of enumerated powers) would be rendered meaningless, which was obviously not the authors' or signers' intent.

Don't worry, this is a very common mistake. Your reading comprehension will improve with practice. In the meantime, perhaps you would care to read what Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had to say on the subject.

First, "obvious" in the eye of the beholder. This is especially true when it comes to the constitution - people get degrees in that shit. Second, snarky "your reading comprehension" lines don't help your point. Third, if DoEd is unconstitutional, why hasn't someone sued to get the Feds out of Education. Short answer: the Supreme Court would laugh at your interpretation.

Here's my homework, teacher: Article 1, section 8: Congress may lay and collect taxes for the "common defense" or "general welfare" of the United States.

This does not equate to a power to spend tax money on (or regulate) anything "for the 'common defense' or 'general welfare'". If Congress's enumerated powers included getting involved in education, this clause would grant them the power to raise money toward that end. It does not grant that power by itself. If it did, the remainder of the section (and the entire concept of enumerated powers) would be rendered meaningless, which was obviously not the authors' or signers' intent.

Don't worry, this is a very common mistake. Your reading comprehension will improve with practice. In the meantime, perhaps you would care to read what Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had to say on the subject.

Here's my homework, teacher: Article 1, section 8: Congress may lay and collect taxes for the "common defense" or "general welfare" of the United States.

This does not equate to a power to spend tax money on (or regulate) anything "for the 'common defense' or 'general welfare'". If Congress's enumerated powers included getting involved in education, this clause would grant them the power to raise money toward that end. It does not grant that power by itself. If it did, the remainder of the section (and the entire concept of enumerated powers) would be rendered meaningless, which was obviously not the authors' or signers' intent.

Don't worry, this is a very common mistake. Your reading comprehension will improve with practice. In the meantime, perhaps you would care to read what Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had to say on the subject.

Here's my homework, teacher: Article 1, section 8: Congress may lay and collect taxes for the "common defense" or "general welfare" of the United States.

This does not equate to a power to spend tax money on (or regulate) anything "for the 'common defense' or 'general welfare'". If Congress's enumerated powers included getting involved in education, this clause would grant them the power to raise money toward that end. It does not grant that power by itself. If it did, the remainder of the section (and the entire concept of enumerated powers) would be rendered meaningless, which was obviously not the authors' or signers' intent.

Don't worry, this is a very common mistake. Your reading comprehension will improve with practice. In the meantime, perhaps you would care to read what Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had to say on the subject.

Financially, Congress has the power to tax, borrow, pay debt and provide for the common defense and the general welfare.

You skipped some critical words and punctuation:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; ...

Notice the comma after "Excises"—these are two separate lists, not a single broad power. The power described here is simply "To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises". That's it: to collect money, not to spend it. The purpose of that power is described by the next phrase, "to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States". That is merely clarifying language, tacked on to explain why the money is being collected and not intended to grant any additional powers. In other words, the nature of this power is merely to fund the enumerated powers given by the remainder of the section. If this sentence alone were intended to authorize absolutely anything which might be argued to "provide for the common Defense and general Welfare" then the remainder of the section would be superfluous. That (false) interpretation does away with the entire concept of enumerated powers. The authors and signers obviously did not intend for the enumeration of powers granted to Congress to be superfluous, or Section 8 would have ended immediately after the words "general Welfare".

Don't just take my word for it, though. Consider instead the writings of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison on the subject.

Financially, Congress has the power to tax, borrow, pay debt and provide for the common defense and the general welfare.

You skipped some critical words and punctuation:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; ...

Notice the comma after "Excises"—these are two separate lists, not a single broad power. The power described here is simply "To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises". That's it: to collect money, not to spend it. The purpose of that power is described by the next phrase, "to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States". That is merely clarifying language, tacked on to explain why the money is being collected and not intended to grant any additional powers. In other words, the nature of this power is merely to fund the enumerated powers given by the remainder of the section. If this sentence alone were intended to authorize absolutely anything which might be argued to "provide for the common Defense and general Welfare" then the remainder of the section would be superfluous. That (false) interpretation does away with the entire concept of enumerated powers. The authors and signers obviously did not intend for the enumeration of powers granted to Congress to be superfluous, or Section 8 would have ended immediately after the words "general Welfare".

Don't just take my word for it, though. Consider instead the writings of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison on the subject.

Financially, Congress has the power to tax, borrow, pay debt and provide for the common defense and the general welfare.

You skipped some critical words and punctuation:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; ...

Notice the comma after "Excises"—these are two separate lists, not a single broad power. The power described here is simply "To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises". That's it: to collect money, not to spend it. The purpose of that power is described by the next phrase, "to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States". That is merely clarifying language, tacked on to explain why the money is being collected and not intended to grant any additional powers. In other words, the nature of this power is merely to fund the enumerated powers given by the remainder of the section. If this sentence alone were intended to authorize absolutely anything which might be argued to "provide for the common Defense and general Welfare" then the remainder of the section would be superfluous. That (false) interpretation does away with the entire concept of enumerated powers. The authors and signers obviously did not intend for the enumeration of powers granted to Congress to be superfluous, or Section 8 would have ended immediately after the words "general Welfare".

Don't just take my word for it, though. Consider instead the writings of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison on the subject.

This single file font, arialuni.ttf, supports a ton of languages and includes glyphs for many characters:

Font Specifications and Notes

Source: Developed by Microsoft Corporation and supplied with the latest versions of Microsoft Office (2000, XP, and 2003). Also available with Microsoft's FrontPage 2000 and Publisher 20002.

Stats: Version 1.00 has 50,377 glyphs and no kerning pairs.

Support: This large font includes support for the following languages: Arabic script (Arabic including some dialect-specfic letters, Balochi, Persian, Punjabi Shahmukhi, Urdu), Armenian, Cyrillic (all or most of range), Devanagari, Georgian (Mkhedruli & Asomtavruli), Greek (including polytonic and Coptic characters), Gurmukhi, Hebrew, IPA, Japanese (Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji/Han Ideographs), Kannada, Korean (Hangul only), Latin, Tamil, Thai, Vietnamese.

OpenType Layout Tables: Arabic (default, Farsi, Urdu), Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Han Ideographic (default, Japanese, Chinese simplified, Chinese traditional), Kana (default, Japanese), Kannada, Korean, Tamil.

This could've made sense if you provided a reference to backup such a ridiculous claim. Here allow me to help: http://www.vpc.org/press/state...

Look at what that "report" shows and compare it to my claim. I said that stricter gun laws correlate to higher murder rates. What does VPC claim? Look closely. They claim stricter gun laws reduce gun death rates. Do you see the distinction? I am looking at murders regardless of the weapons used because I'm not a heartless bastard that thinks stabbing people to death is somehow "better" than shooting a person to death.

Then look at how "gun deaths" are defined.

The deaths include gun homicides, suicides, and unintentional shootings.

They include a self inflicted gun shot resulting in death, a suicide, as a "gun death" for their statistics. Four of those top five states on the VPC "report" have suicide rates above the national average, and the fifth? That is Louisiana with a suicide rate so close to the average that it is difficult to find the difference from the national score.

When looking at the 5 lowest "gun death" states we see Hawaii has an above average suicide rate, by a small margin. The other four are below average on suicide rates.

It seems the evidence shows mostly that those that choose suicide tend to do so with a gun. There is also a tendency for an armed populace to reduce murders,and an unarmed populace to choose suicide by some non-firearm means.

References:
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/previe...
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/...

I

but... http://www.press.uchicago.edu/... .... The modus operandi at play on the right, as distilled into absurdity by the trump campaign, generally follows the same path toward the cliff that the NAZIs did, in terms of divorcing people from their roles in governance and political involvement, turning groups against each other, fear/war/corruption-mongery and incessantly incremental but 'regretted' acts of curtailing both freedoms and their counterbalancing civic responsibilities. The parallels are freakish, and the man in front today far less rational or informed than the example he's being compared to.

We have to consider the possibility that he'll be WORSE... not merely 'like.' NAZI germany had to build itself up from ashes (part of their motivation, frankly), and never did have nukes to play with... meanwhile we're outspending most of the rest of the developed world combined while self-militarizing our citizenry and have enough heavy weaponry to essentially end humanity.

We can't even allow the possibility.

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.

"Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late."

I'm no fan of HRC, but in this particular comparison there is no valid argument trying to equate the two. One is likely too corporate for our long term health, but the other cheers on the possibility of violence, and lies in his speeches every 5 minutes on measured average (and likely to shorten as we get into actual debates next week) and has yet to demonstrate an EQ greater than that of a toddler, lashing out vindictively at the slightest (and oft illegitimately defined) offense... and here we are have an actual argument that could mean that the world's most top-heavy and over-inflated military might would be in those hands? To simply say that he might be 'the president we deserve' even as a self-insult, is inhumanely insular... because the damage won't be just to us.

They bought a startup called Smart Signal a few years ago.

True enough, but some can be run right from the web. Here's a fun resource: http://climatemodels.uchicago....

You are significantly mistaken. The courts don't throw out "unreasonable" contracts people willingly agree to.

The legal term for this is "unconscionable", not "unreasonable", and yes, the courts do throw them out routinely—particularly in contracts of adhesion. Stanford Law Review vol. 63:869-906 gives a good summary of how the courts have fixed various unconscionable contracts and other unfair contracts.

My understanding from John Oliver's show is that one reason there isn't good data on gun violence is that the CDC is not allowed to fund studies pertaining to it. The parties with private money to put towards research are probably few and biased one way or another.

You will get little real understanding from John Oliver since he isn't really interested in developing a genuine evenhanded understanding of the issues, he is pushing an agenda.

Going on about the CDC is misdirection as the Department of Justice has been collecting statistics and studying this for a long time. Why do you think John Oliver doesn't mention that? Example:

Gun Violence Prevention

Besides private parties and TV hosts, you should also be skeptical of academicians, some of whom are willing to lie to push a narrative.

Does Disgraced “Historian” Michael Bellesiles Deserve A Second Chance?

For your consideration:

An interview with John R. Lott, Jr.
Bogus Gun-Control Numbers

Yeah, it might blow your mind, but you can't trust the numbers on there.

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Tell you what, you write your Congressman, and you tell him you want a real comprehensive study, then you'll have some credibility to your intent to get real numbers on the subject.

No wait, you'll just keep posting those baseless numbers because they make you feel good. They give you the emotional feeling of satisfaction, so you embrace them because they say what you want to hear.

Here's the basic problem. The person who commits the attack decides where the attack will occur, who the target(s) will be, what weapons will be used, and when (or if) the attack will occur. And if you keep him from getting the weapon(s) he wants this month, he can try again next month; he only needs to succeed once.

Suppose you mandate smart guns? The attacker will get non-smart guns. Mandate limited magazine capacity? The attacker will bring extra magazines, and/or extra guns. And just hope the attacker doesn't bring explosives, or simply burn down a building with lot of people inside it at the time. Heck, I can imagine some pretty grim carnage if ten motivated attackers all simply showed up with tire irons and baseball bats.

The police want to help, but they can't be everywhere. As the old line goes, when seconds count, the police are just minutes away.

Some people will tell you that we just need to ban guns; that we need an iron-clad ban, in every state, that's enforced firmly. Those same people will tell you that people in Washington D.C. simply go to nearby Virginia or any other place with more-lax laws; ban guns everywhere and the bad guys presumably will have nowhere to go. Well, this won't work, and here's why:

Consider crack cocaine. That's subject to an iron-clad ban, in every state, that's enforced firmly. Crack is banned as hard as the wildest dreams of gun-banners, and always has been. Are the streets 100% crack-free? Crack addicts keep smoking their crack so they need to buy more on a regular basis; guns, on the other hand, are pretty durable. So if we can't get crack off our streets, there's no way we will get all the guns. It's a fantasy.

"Okay just ban the bullets!" Ammunition is easy to smuggle, and in fact easy to make. You'll never get 100% of it.

Jeff Cooper proposed that we imagine a 2x2 matrix: on one axis we have armed/not armed, and on the other we have criminals/law-abiding. The worst of all possible worlds is criminals armed/law-abiding not armed. You can discuss whether it's better to have criminals not armed/law-abiding armed, or whether you would prefer nobody be armed... but as Jeff Cooper pointed out, the bad guys always get their weapons, so the two boxes in the matrix where the bad guys are not armed are the fantasy boxes, never to be attained in the real world. That leaves you with the two possible boxes: bad guys armed/law-abiding not armed, or bad guys armed/law-abiding armed. I submit that the best that we can hope to do in the real world is to allow the law-abiding to be armed. There have been plenty of instances where a person with a gun stopped a shooting rampage before the police showed up, so this is something that has been demonstrated to work in the real world. Not with a 100% success rate (the bad guys managed to hurt or kill people before they were stopped) but that isn't a valid argument against letting people carry weapons ("it's not 100% successful so let's not allow it at all"). The key question is whether it does more good than harm.

Statistics show that citizens carrying firearms legally do not very often shoot the wrong person; in fact citizens have a better success rate than the police. This makes sense if you think about it: the citizen shot the bad guy because he/she was there, and saw the bad guy in action; whereas the police have to show up and figure out what is going on, and sometimes they make a mistake.

Statistics also show that letting citizens carry weapons does not lead to an increase in crime. The experiment has been tried, in numerous states of the USA. Crime overall has been falling despite the number of people with con

I guess the journal ISIS by Chicago University Press has gotten funding problems...

No, they are refusing to forward extortion notices because they have no legal requirement to. Whether or not the entity issuing the takedown request is the rightsholder or is authorized to act on the their part is covered by the DMCA request. The issuer has to affirm under penalty of perjury that they have the right to issue the notice, and it's no skin off the IPS's nose if it's not true -- all things being equal, they would prefer invalid claims.

The reason that they don't want to forward claims is because [a] it costs money, [b] people who infringe often tend to be more willing to pay for faster connections (or even better, excess bandwidth charges), and [c] they are legally obligated to terminate the services of repeat infringers (17 USC 512 (i)(1)(A), see also[pdf]). Currently, there is no actual legal definition of what constitutes a 'repeat infringer', nor what kind of disconnection policy meets the DMCA guidelines. As noted in TFA, the media industry has been pushing heavily for "three strikes" laws and policies: this is a direct response. It's something of a game of chicken, the ISPs are saying that if the media companies want to play hardball, the ISPs will stop forwarding notices, and then presumably cross their fingers and hope that Congress doesn't want to 'clarify' the law. It should be interesting to see how it plays out: I suspect whoever bought the best Congresscritters will win.

It's going to see if this continues without the tax breaks

Aren't you also interested in seeing if the coal industry and the oil industry are able to continue without tax breaks?

http://www.taxpayer.net/librar...

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/...

http://www.investopedia.com/ar...

And that's a wrap! AC down below has forgotten - or refuses to account for the huge amount of subsidies received by Coal, Oil and Natgas.

Now of course, the crowning acievement of subsidized energy Nookyalar! http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-...

https://lucian.uchicago.edu/bl...

I'm not even anti-nuc, but dammit, I'll wager a cup of crap that they are "free market" advocates. Those billions for that, and the taxpayers bearing the reisks of nuc plants sounds like the invisible hand of the free market is giving a reach around hand job to the nuc industry.

From the example efforts cited, you could've had the same contest in 1965 with the same results. Come on, people, there's prose generators,chatterbots today... you can't come up with at least coherent sentences?

Most adults give up hobbies as they get older.

If you see it as a "hobby" then you're probably not the ones they're talking about.

The chair of the math department that my wife works in took up sculpture in his 50s. He's 72 now, and still working in math at a very high level, publishing constantly it seems. His work shows at galleries and exhibitions and he's getting known almost as much for his sculpture as for his math. There is a difference between a "hobby" and true amateurism.

Don't take it from me, take it from no less an eminence than the great Wayne Booth:

http://press.uchicago.edu/Misc...

Artillery is ordnance not arms.

I don't think that's true for the usage of the time. When you look at the definition of 'arm' in theearliest American dicitonary, it seems to include large weapons as well. It has, "weapons, or means of attack or resistance; to take arms; as, the nations arm for war."

Also note that ordnance was not limited to artillery, it could be any weapon.

Artillery is ordnance not arms.

I don't think that's true for the usage of the time. When you look at the definition of 'arm' in theearliest American dicitonary, it seems to include large weapons as well. It has, "weapons, or means of attack or resistance; to take arms; as, the nations arm for war."

Also note that ordnance was not limited to artillery, it could be any weapon.

In 1789 "arms" meant a musket or a flint lock pistol that fired a miniball, at most twice a minute.

I'm not sure that's true. Based on the earliest American dictionary, it seems they took arms to mean "weapons." Note that it includes examples of "arming a militia" or "arming a country," and discusses arms as "weapons, or means of attack or resistance."

So I'm not sure you can rule out any weapon of the day, certainly not knives and swords, but also cannons and ships.

You're describing the legal reality. He's describing the actual practices. Copyright is something granted by law, and it is entirely correct to consider it as something which does not exist except at the determination of our legal system. Public domain is the natural state of all creative works. Jefferson gives a more eloquent statement:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

Copyright infringement is in no way analogous to theft; I'm afraid you're the person with the profound misunderstanding.

Back in the late 70's early 80's if you needed software for a research project, you had to write it yourself -- particularly a modeling and simulation project in computational geophysical fluid dynamics or computational theoretical astrophysics. And Unix -- namely BSD Unix -- on a PDP 11 or VAX 11/750 was the most cost effective way for most departments to get a powerful enough platform to develop and run such codes on.

In fact, most of the sys admins at the time -- and systems developers -- were graduate students and postdocs in the physical sciences at elite institutions. In fact, a lot of the application stack built on top of TCP/IP not to mention the systems utilities were developed by such grad students.

She did her PhD at the University of Chicago. Here, let me google that for you: http://geosci.uchicago.edu/fac... I wonder what they're doing with all those computational resources? Hmmm? And back in the day, who built them? Grad students, mostly.

It's a little rich for some Johnny-come-lately lily-white frat boy Java programmer to reject someone who was probably directly involved with the foundations of Unix network development and the implementation of codes over ARPAnet and NSFnet which eventually became -- gasp! the internet.

And, interestingly, some of the outrageously sexist behavior of the very same frat boys is excused on the basis that, well, they're programmers, so they "lack people skills."

Why is "lack of people skills" a reason to excuse the unlawful behavior of a young man, but an excuse to unlawfully not even hire an older woman?

The Prius does get subsidies

The quantum mechanics revolution at the beginning of the 20th century (it's mostly identified with the 1920s and 30s, but Einstein's 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect was part of the beginning) was a huge theoretical advance driven by a backlog of experimental evidence.

The late 1800s had built up a backlog of particle experiments producing strange and bizarre observations. This made the huge theoretical advances possible. Those advances in turn suggested more experiments, and we had a wonderful virtuous circle going for a while. (Virtuous scientifically; the morality of atom bombs are debatable.)

What's happening now is the opposite. Because of a dearth of new experimental evidence (dark matter and dark energy being one of the few major ones in the last few decades), there's an enormous backlog of theories.

Think about Shannon's definition of information: the less likely an observation, the more information it conveys. While particle experiments were producing strange and unexpected results, that was a lot of information that allowed theory to progress.

These days, theoreticians are churning out reams of paper exploring the implications of various ideas. The goal, everyone agrees, is a testable prediction. They've already thrown out the theories that conflict with existing observations, but are looking for some predicted new effect that can be measured within a reasonable time and money budget.

(For example, see the burst of short-range gravity measurements some years ago. Extra dimensions aren't expected to be that large, but the long shot might have paid off, and more importantly it was practical. So a bunch of people measured gravity at sub-mm ranges just in case.)

But instead, experiments keep returning expected results. In MMORPG terms, experimentalists are grinding away, hoping to find an experiment that drops some good (meaning rare!) loot, but they keep getting trash.

It's not completely worthless, but it is depressingly slow.

But until an experiment drops some rare loot, the theoreticians are stumbling in the dark. They're extrapolating further and further from what's known (meaning past experiments) not because they enjoy mental masturbation, but because they hope to stumble on a testable prediction.

The problem is that there's no clear path (other than "build a Planck-energy particle accelerator", which would definitely work, but has severe practicality problems), so they're exploring in all directions and arguing on philosophical grounds about which directions are most fruitful.

It's not that they like being reduced to such criteria, but it's all they have.

There are a number of research areas being pursued experimentally. A huge number of neutrino and dark matter detectors, and astronomical surveys of dark matter and energy. The recent BICEP CMB measurement is an example. (In case you didn't hear, after they announced the Planck satellite team told them the bad news that galactic dust, which can create a similar signal, is worse than they expected, and could explain 100% of the signal they saw. So they're shifting to lower frequencies, where galactic synchrotron radiation is worse but dust is better, and measuring some more.)

But those are also somewhat blind. Any new data will rule out some theories, but there are so many that we need a lot of information to thin out the field. Which means that we need some unexpected, and thus low-probability and high-entropy, observations.

When you hear people talk about "new physics", that's what they're referring to.

You realize this actually (sort of) happened, right?

Your post has some basis in scientific facts, but misrepresents their implications.

The CO2 peak is a fairly narrow range of infrared, but it's right at the wavelength that the Earth emits most strongly. To say that it's unimportant is like a traffic reporter saying that 99% of the roads in a city are wide open, only the main freeway is gridlocked, so no big deal. What matters is the fraction of total outgoing energy that CO2 prevents from escaping, which is roughly 20%. Keeping in mind that zero blockage would correspond to a global temperature of -18 C / 0 F, and 50% restriction would give a temperature of +30 C / 86 F -- 20% is a big deal. Just going from 20% to 25%, which is what we're looking at, is also a pretty big temperature shift.

Water vapor is a major greenhouse gas, but human emissions of it do not change the amount of it in the atmosphere for three reasons. First, the tight feedback you mentioned (the Clausius-Claperyon relation) means that any extra water added immediately falls out as extra rainfall. Second, human emissions of water vapor via combustion amount to 2 gigatons per year, or a global layer or liquid water 4 microns thick -- utterly insignificant next to the natural evaporation and rainfall of about 1 meter per year. Third, you mentioned increase in paved surfaces that would "catch rainwater", but precisely the opposite happens: water drains quickly off pavement and into rivers and sewers, while natural soils remain moist for longer.

That's not to say that water vapor's role as a greenhouse gas is unimportant: if temperature rises for any reason (including from CO2 greenhouse effect), the Clausius-Claperyon relation allows more water vapor to enter the atmosphere, amplifying the warming.

The upshot: water vapor is a major greenhouse gas, but that doesn't call the role of CO2 into question: instead it amplifies the importance of CO2.

http://climatemodels.uchicago....
http://www.skepticalscience.co...

Jefferson on intellectual property:

It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. . .If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.

I highly recommend reading the entire letter; if nothing else Jefferson was an excellent writer. Then if you would oblige us with a counter-argument, I am sure it would be gratifying.

"I only have to point out that the theory of evolution isn't explaining anything either. Both are matters of faith."

If that were true the discovery of Tiktaalik roseae would have been impossible.

You truly are an idiot - just as Alexander Graham Bell predicted you would be. One cannot prove that Bell did not say the thing attributed to him, but no one can find such a quote before 1997 (75 years after his death) from the falsified biography which was attempting to make Bell relevant, but no one has an image of an original document or contemporary reference to support the quotation - it is drawn from whole cloth. I can cite the source relevant to his supposed advocacy for alternative fuels which clearly shows he had no environmental concerns and confirms my statement as to his reasoning which were strictly economic contrary to many of the current attempts to rehabilitate his image as a forward-looking environmentalist instead of an industrialist: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/...

It isn't nitpicking, I simply do not believe your post required more than a cursory response. I have no obligation to address the many falsehoods you put forth, but let's start with your initial statement, "Gore is right: the science is settled. In fact, it's been understood for nearly 200 years" Again, this is revisionist history. Fourier ultimately dismissed "greenhouse" effects in his published works which disqualifies him from being credited with an understanding of the issue of planetary temperature. https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~r...

If you want to insist that Fourier understood the issue, then you must conclude as he did that the atmosphere was not part of the issue of the the planet's temperature. I am confident you do not agree with his conclusion.

Svante Arrhenius described the greenhouse effect in 1896 which at 119 years ago is not really all that near 200 years.

Perhaps you should actually educate yourself on this issue. It is clear that your sources are dubious, and that you are not a critical thinker, but merely a parrot spewing talking points.

I would suggest Neil Shubin's "Your Inner Fish" finds its way onto your bookshelf. Or video feed. While that's a superficially appealing way to envisage things, the fossil record of the evolution of land-dwelling tetrapods was considerably more complex.

See also, for an old German example: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/...
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. ..This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ... To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measure"â(TM) that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head. ..."

That said, every country is different, with different strengths and weaknesses in different situations. It is not clear how it all will play out in the USA. Like Howard Zinn wrote in 2004, on "The Optimism of Uncertainty":
http://www.commondreams.org/vi...
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth.
Let's go back a hundred years. A revolution to overthrow the tsar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers, but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Given the Russian Revolution, who could have predicted Stalin's deformation of it, or Khrushchev's astounding exposure of Stalin, or Gorbachev's succession of surprises? Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II-the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of

This is not really true. The Bill of Rights is a list of things that the government specifically cannot do. It would not be necessary if the Constitution didn't grant the federal government some pretty broad powers (such as the power to make and enforce laws).

Premonitions of the misunderstanding you've just demonstrated were the leading objection to even having a bill of rights.

However that argument lost out to the belief that no matter what, over time "scope creep" would end up creating the same mis-interpretation anyway, so better to build an imperfect bulwark than to just cross our fingers and hope for the best.

And this is all good of course, in terms of deep learning. But how does the average person then use that system to do something useful?

It seems to me that trying to come up with interfaces that are easily understood while allowing us to translate our algorithms into instructions that the computer can execute (in the context of the formal system that it is) is the best way to make the device as useful as possible to as many people as possible.

Thinking about new paradigms in computing is great; doing the Big Think is essential for technological progress; but in the meantime, how to maximize the productivity of the typical programmer? Are those "woolly" interfaces then so bad?

Creating the "woolly" interface between the human and the formal system is a quite amazing and useful feat. All hail the compiler / OS writers?