Slashdot Mirror

fair point, but if we got rid of the "richness" of a language we would lose a lot more.

Nobody ever made a joke in Esperanto for example, yet the very internally inconsistent English gives us the greatest literature and humour there ever was.

I love it when people pontificate out of their asses. I doubt you know the first thing about Esperanto beyond your preconceptions. Jokes are very much possible, and common, using the language.

http://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/scriptorium/EsperantoHumorArticle.pdf

Except for reality, that is.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

Except in reality, the energy isn't beamed down to earth, but used in space. Eventually, Earth will be using all of its solar energy and want more. Plenty exists, it's just in space. Once there collecting it, it would will probably be more economical to stay there and do all the manufacturing and living.

Except for reality, that is.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

Who cares... Just put the kid on a plane and tell him that "space" is barely higher and show him this drawing:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

"a" is the practical value of "space", and "d" is the Moon.

Get over it.

1) Our glorious future as a species colonizing the universe. Don't be skeptical about that!
2) The glorious near-term industrialization of space like space-based solar power and asteroid mining! Don't you dare ask for math!
3) The fantastic bounty of 3D printing!

Just because you tinker with technology, doesn't make you immune to irrational, quasi-religious cultish behavior.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

1) Our glorious future as a species colonizing the universe. Don't be skeptical about that!
2) The glorious near-term industrialization of space like space-based solar power and asteroid mining! Don't you dare ask for math!
3) The fantastic bounty of 3D printing!

Just because you tinker with technology, doesn't make you immune to irrational, quasi-religious cultish behavior.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

LOL. You're invoking things that barely exist in order to support a notion that makes no sense? Brilliant! Tell me how these carbon fiber struts hold up in a vacuum with unfiltered UV radiation after a few years! LOL!!!!

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

Never gonna happen. Ever.

How's that 2016 deadline for Solaren's deal with PG&E working out?

Hmmm???

As for the rest, it's delirium.

Do you have any idea how incredibly inefficient walking is in terms of energy consumption?

Factoring in how inefficient food production is, you are only getting about 40 mpg when walking.

https://physics.ucsd.edu/do-th...

Someone needs to do a bit of reading!

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

"Humanity" eh? In a thread full of knee-jerk "us vs. them" childish paranoia?

Another group independently doing a similar experiment on CBMR have found something different
the upper limit to the mass of the neutrino

http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/press...

They didn't find the upper limit to the mass of the neutrino. They just suggested that they *could* do so in the future. However, Planck data has been used for this, in combination with other cosmological data.

Another group independently doing a similar experiment on CBMR have found something different
the upper limit to the mass of the neutrino
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/press...

Exactly. Space Nutters are basically wide-eyed daydreamers with a very feeble grasp of reality, but my God they're persistent!

As Tom Murphy observed: " I never appreciated the almost cult-like religious fervor behind the assumption of a future in space"

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

I think you should read the entire thread here:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

It's an AMAZING thing to read, when a physicist explains the basics. He comments:

"This set of responses has been a real eye-opener for me. I never appreciated the almost cult-like religious fervor behind the assumption of a future in space."

You can't really reason with the religiously deluded, you can see that here already. But it's simply baffling and mind-boggling the deep faith geeks have about space, even though it's trivial to show how completely unfeasible any of the fantasies are.

And the doomsday scenarios! The same people who'd laugh at the Jehovah's Witnesses doomsday have their very own doomsday scenarios!

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

Besides, the Japanese like to announce grandiose projects that are just vaporware.

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9705/2...

We just had a 3D printing smackdown story, why are geeks such naive daydreamers?/

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

I mean, really, "LEO"? Are you insane? You don't even understand the basics of space. It's always people like you with a childish Star Trek view of space that have the most insane ideas about space.

Weeds can become resistant to roundup but this is not a serious issue. I can be easily solved by the application of alternative herbicides when a roundup resistant strain appears. The alternative herbicide will kill the roundup resistant weeds before they spread. Without weeds leaching nutrients the crops grow healthier and fuller so the world receives more food.

Insects are somewhat trickier because of their greater mobility and faster life cycles, but there are also procedures in place to handle this. These GMO crops are very different from roundup resistant crops in that they actually attack insects by producing pesticides. Every farmer who uses GMO crops that produce insecticides is required by contract and EPA regulations to also plant non GMO refuges within every field. These refuges allow non resistant insects a place to live so that in the highly unlikely event that an insect develops a resistance it has plenty of non resistant mates available and the resistance is lost in cross breeding. There are absolutely no documented incidences of insects developing Bt resistance when the refuge system is utilized. However, just in case there are new strains being developed which use up to two of the three effective pesticides. This means that in the really truly extreme unlikelihood that an insect becomes resistant to both insecticides they simply plant another strain that uses the third type and it kills the insects.

Peer reviewed citation: http://www.nature.com/nbt/jour...
Simple diagram: http://www.bt.ucsd.edu/learn/r...

There are mountains of evidence showing that GM crops produce more food per acre and have a very positive effect on feeding the world. They are also better on the environment because they reduce the usage of harsh herbicides and insecticides. There is no credible evidence that GMO crops have any negative effect on consumers. The few studies which claimed cancer links were proven false and have since been retracted. Continuing to make this work does require ongoing research and the development of new GMO plants. This research is expensive and that's why the seeds cost more. In the end the farmers still win because the increased output of the fields more than offsets the extra cost of the seed. In the process the entire world wins because we produce more food.

That is, until fear mongering groups who have no scientific proof fight to have laws put in place to prevent anyone from growing GMO crops. In their fight to "save" the world from GMO billions of people starve due to famines that could have been prevented.

This was replaced with an aluminum compound, and aluminum is correlated with diseases like Alzheimer’s. Of course, we have no evidence that aluminum accumlation causes Alzheimer’s; it could just as well accumulate as a side-effect. Still, it’s cause for investigation. .

No it isn't. And the best current theory on what causes autism is that is developmental disruption of the cortex during pregnancy, not "toxins".

There is such a thing as a safe nuclear plant, LFTR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L..., a type of reactor that is walk-away safe. No active safety systems, nothing to power to keep the plant safe, you can walk away from it and it will never melt-down. It doesn't even use the same family of fissile material.

Germany is not the top PV anything anymore: http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut...

as for storing PV-generated power, good luck with that: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

The real problem and that 90% of the people pushing alternatives like PV and such is that they don't understand that scale at which humanity consumes energy. The land needs to build enough PV are staggering, a 1MW facility requires about 7.9 acres of land, not much until you consider that most nukes produce 1200MW on about 100 acres, you would need 9480 acres to get the same capability. The amount of land needed to displace fossil fuel consumption is staggering. Solar PV is fine for your rooftop to help offset grid costs to your household, but it can not scale to satisfy the needs of the world, at least not at the ~9% efficiency they currently have, maybe at 75% or more but not now.

With cheap abundant clean electrical energy you can generate liquid fuels from the carbon in the atmosphere, the best way to get that kind of load is nuclear and the best nuke we currently have is LFTR. The key is displacing fossil fuel use with something that can maintain and grow with our current consumption. PV is not going to cut it.

Also proportion of CO2 in atmosphere becomes 0.03%

Check it out, we've passed 400ppm.

See The Energy Trap for a well-written article on why the free market can't always solve resource shortages. The short version is that although price increases incentivize investment into alternatives, if developing said alternatives takes too long (and the market take too short-term a view), then the system collapses. The government funding basic research is one way to adjust for the market's short-term thinking.

If you really want to talk about how technology is changing the world and how the next 40 years might look like, you'll have to mention peak oil and climate change.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

An interesting point. Supporting math in ``Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist'':

https://physics.ucsd.edu/do-th...

I agree with you. There would likely be a boost over land-based mw estimates. 10% seems reasonable, but I'm not sure how much exactly. I saw 144% on Wikipedia, but that number also took into account the fact that space-based uptime is better than land-based uptime in rainy and snowier places. This system uses stable weather areas as stations though, which would lower that 144% by some amount.

Good article on space-based solar here: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

The course we are on is unsustainable at our current rate of energy consumption. Tom Murphy's excellent essay "Galactic-Scale Energy" made the case rather well (and it deserves its own Slashdot entry if it hasn't already had one -- I'm too lazy too look it up). About 1400 years from now (which is less time into the future than we are from the fall of the Roman Empire) we will be using more energy than is currently produced by the entirety of the sun if we don't back off on the growth of our energy consumption, which is showing no signs of easing up.

This is completely false. US energy consumption per capital has actually fallen in recent years, and is currently no higher per capita than it was in 1970. Other developed countries have a similar trend.

Does anyone get the impression that our civilization is doomed? Short of finding a way of making practical nuclear fusion reactors work, something that has been always "30 years from now" since the time I was in middle school forty years ago, there seems to be no solution to our future energy needs that don't do evil things to our planet's climate that eventually will doom our civilization.

You are 100% correct no matter what the source of energy. The course we are on is unsustainable at our current rate of energy consumption. Tom Murphy's excellent essay "Galactic-Scale Energy" made the case rather well (and it deserves its own Slashdot entry if it hasn't already had one -- I'm too lazy too look it up). About 1400 years from now (which is less time into the future than we are from the fall of the Roman Empire) we will be using more energy than is currently produced by the entirety of the sun if we don't back off on the growth of our energy consumption, which is showing no signs of easing up. It doesn't matter if the source of the energy is fossil fuels, nuclear fusion, or some future magic, the earth cannot host that amount of energy consumption. The planet will have reached its thermodynamic limit long before then.

Let me check... Nope, no Space Nutters here. Maybe if I put dry rusty sand and a deadly radiation source under my bed, Space Nutters will come? If only I could get an environment chamber and pump it down to about 1 mTorr and keep it at -200C?

You know what else isn't under my bed? Space based solar power.

Ouch.

Go on, show me where Solaren is at right now. Has there been a single picowatt beamed down yet from that clown operation? Hmmm?

Here, some reality for you:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

To paraphrase Histrionic McSpacePants up there: You will now proceed to completely ignore reality, or respond with hysterical religious fervor. You always do. (Gosh, that IS fun, I might have to steal that routine! No one said dealing with mental patients can't be fun!)

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

But by all means, tell me about how we should spend more time and energy building a boondoggle than the energy we'll get out of it. Space-based solar power is one of those hard-to-kill ideas that are part of the category : "if we had the energy and resources to do it, we wouldn't need to."

Hey, remember Solaren? Weren't they supposed to have something by now? Hmm? Where is it?

Space-based wealth redistribution from taxpayers to scam artists, more like.

The whole Do The Math blog is worth reading, but specifically, The Energy Trap explains why the market alone can't transition away from fossil fuels without some serious growing pains.

Actually, I think accepting bitcoins for campaign donations would make it much better. Bitcoins are pseudonymous at best, they are not cryptographically anonymous. And the global transaction log shows exactly which wallets were involved, every step of the way. Track the wallet, track the campaign cash.

Sarah Meiklejohn is a researcher who was able to trace the bitcoins used for a marijuana purchase on the Silk Road. https://cse.ucsd.edu/node/2299

I'm all for allowing people to make mistakes in covering up their illicit activities.

Horrible things have been done, in the name of science, and specifically eugenics. Does that necessarily mean that any studies into eugenics is evil? I say, "Not only NO, but HELL NO!"

No, but the road to a virtuous outcome is a tightrope over an abyss. Eugenics faces a number of ethical challenges:

1) Who determines what is and isn't a fit trait? Government, parents, etc.?
2) What happens if a mistake is made -- either in who or what trait should be targeted?
3) Should people be allowed to abstain, or is participation compulsory?
4) How is the process done? Killing, sterilization, or non-sexual reproduction?
5) If the process is voluntary and non-destructive, how do we ensure equal access to "better" children?

Each of these points is an entire essay of ethical nightmares in and of itself.

If scientists announced tomorrow that they could screen for cystic fibrosis, with greater than 99% confidence, and abort the fetus early in the first trimester, would you object to that?

Putting aside the method proposed, the problem is where do you draw the line? We know that cystic fibrosis is a recessive mutation in a single gene, and you can't get it if you don't have two damaged copies. Eliminating it seems relatively easy to do under nearly any scheme within two generations once testing becomes universally available.

Okay, so that's one disease down! Now how about diseases where your genes only propose a risk of a disease? Should we block any genes that cause risks of disease? How big of a risk? What about deformities? What if a disease or deformity has a protective effect? (e.g. Sickle-cell v. malaria, or the cancer-preventing effects of a rare form of dwarfism.) Who gets to choose which is more important, looks or health?

What about mental illness? Take the infamous MAOA gene. "Defective" versions that produce less MAOA result in people who, if exposed to excessive violence as a child (e.g. child abuse, war zones, gangland killings, etc.), have a tendency to grow up to violent criminals and sociopaths -- or in another day and age, effective warriors. Do we weed that out despite the fact that most people with the gene grow up to be healthy and effective members of society?

That brings up two more issues. The first is epigenetics -- the methylization and expression of genes as influenced by the environment, some of which can be passed down in childhood. What do we do about genes that are good in the right place and time and bad in others? If we can't "clean" the genes, should we just cut them out as a risk factor?

The second is far more pernicious: what about traits that influence personality? What about traits that influence political leanings? We know that there are some biological correlations to party affiliation and that certain specific genes tie to political partisanship. Should we allow traits that encourage dissident thought or liberalism or conservatism to be bred out of the populace? Even if an oppressive government isn't invovled, should parents be allowed to customize their children to be more receptive to their own belief structure?

Forced sterilization? If we got so far along that we could screen for all the many conditions that make people's lives so miserable, sterilization wouldn't be a necessity. Instead, Mother can pick and choose traits, simply rejecting any and all number of undesirable traits.

As another poster has pointed out, that quickly becomes a "haves and have-nots" issue. Unless poor people get equal access to what will initially be a very expensive technology, you risk breeding a genetic overclas

It's time you woke up and noticed the data doesn't actually support your hypothesis :
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2013/09/the-real-population-problem/
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2013/09/the-already-written-future/

It's time you woke up and noticed the data doesn't actually support your hypothesis :
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2013/09/the-real-population-problem/
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2013/09/the-already-written-future/

You only need to cover a half a percent of the Earth's surface with off-the-shelf 15% efficient PV panels to provide all of humanity all of its energy needs. If we covered all residential rooftops in the States with PV panels, we'd generate about as much electricity as the industrialized world needs -- and that's just residential rooftops just in the US.

To suggest that solar somehow isn't enough is just laughable. Hell, with the kind of abundance that solar offers, we've got far more than enough available to distill CO2 out of the atmosphere and turn it into hydrocarbons -- an incredibly energy-intensive process -- and use those hydrocarbons as our storage and transportation mechanisms just as we do today.

What we don't have is the willingness to invest our hydrocarbon inheritance in bootstrapping ourselves into such an energy-wealthy society. Instead, we'd rather squander our inheritance on monster SUVs and petroleum-based fertilizer to feed dozens of billions of people.

Here's some perspective from somebody who can actually do the math:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/02/the-alternative-energy-matrix/

Cheers,

b&

I think I'll take the CDC as authoritative over wikipedia.

What you did is called lying through statistics, their are entire books and website about how to use statistics to lie like you did. I called you out on it, in fact here are some websites exposing the types of tactics you used.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~ricko/CSE3/Lie_with_Statistics.pdf
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/bag-of-tricks/chap10.pdf
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/stat3.html

Your personal desire to make revisionist history doesn't actually change anything. You've even attempted revisionist history on my posting where I said the US hasn't bombed civilian centers since WW2. Your either deluded or so full of hate that you couldn't see the truth if it smacked you across the face.

I think this is a decent milestone. While the reactor design itself is unlikely to ever break even, hopefully they're at least learning enough about efficiently triggering a fusion reaction that they can apply it to more productive designs

This achievement opens the door for future designs. Inertial confinement works; it needs improvement, but we're no longer debating whether it's possible to maintain symmetry or any of the other many doubts the detractors dwelled on.

The haters of NIF — and there are many — won't permit followup; they'll have it shut no matter what. For them, the whole idea of seeking energy sources that don't demand energy poverty is inherently illegitimate, and they run the show now. But the work and the results won't die at LLNL; there are other people and other nations that haven't decided to turn themselves into a windmill powered nature preserve.

So we'll have to let them take the ball and run with it. At least it will continue, now perhaps with far more enthusiasm.

Citation needed. Please show me a study where someone who becomes curious about something becomes more intelligent.

Given that we're talking about development from an extremely early age, that would be illegal, but I will do my best to explain this.

Conventional thinking right now is that intelligence is primarily genetic, and while it can be influenced by environment, it is largely fixed from birth.

This is the primary reason given for the class bias seen in IQ testing. That is not, at all, conventional thinking. Read this and this. If intelligence were genetic to the extent you suggest, the children of immigrants would be incapable of integrating at the most fundamental cultural level.

Curiousity is a personality trait. Intelligence is an ability. You can be curious and stupid, or disinterested yet intelligent. One has no bearing on the other.

If you are curious about how something works, you will be more likely to figure out how it works. Once you understand how things work, you can use that understanding to interpret more situations. This includes abstract concepts. Pattern matching, abstract reasoning, and creativity all depend on the fruits of a mind knowledgeable in such things. The brain cannot function in a vacuum (as learned from Genie, along with observations of animals in factory farms), and it cannot derive new ideas from absolute nothingness, only recombine what it has experienced (this is a central hypothesis of computational creativity).

The genetic element you're identifying is a person's potential to be intelligent. That potential is meaningless until some force motivates the person to learn to use it, whether that's curiosity, school, or parenting, because we are not born with an understanding of any axioms that we can derive new concepts or thinking strategies from. These last two don't cause self-sustaining intellectual growth, leaving curiosity as the only reliable driving force for a person's development of their intelligence.

That sounds a lot like The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil, a well-known proponent of the singularity and graphs like this one which charts exponential change going back to the beginning of life on Earth. Ray Kurzweil tends to come off as absurdly over-optimistic, but I do agree that the end of silicon in 2020 is unlikely to be the end of Moore's Law. On the other hand, unbounded exponential growth doesn't happen in the real world; Moore's Law will certainly stop at some point, it just isn't clear when. If it lasts until at least 2070 or so, that pretty much guarantees being able to pull off strong AI through the (cheating?) method of simulating an entire human brain at the physical level; if it ends sooner then strong AI will require additional breakthroughs in computer science and/or neurobiology. Also, after hitting physical limits, Moore's Law will likely continue a few years longer as those top of the line chips become affordable as the capital costs on the fabs are paid off.

the worst location in the continental U.S. is only a factor of two worse than the best solar location.

Solar is dead. Most of the US doesn't get enough sun to make solar feasible.

This article has a good solar efficiency study for the entire US. In summary, there's not a lot of difference in the contiguous US - about the only place where solar is significantly worse off is Alaska.

As the Slate piece points out, the argument about continuing manned (and womanned) space exploration because "we might need to leave Earth in the near future" seems to be quite popular right now, especially with all of the buzz about the Mars One plan to establish a semi-permanent colony on Mars. I was disappointed, though, that the Slate article didn't really address the core of the issue: believing that, if Earth were to actually become uninhabitable, we could simply colonize Mars, or Venus, or any other distant rock, is absolutely preposterous. This idea has been thoroughly discredited.

For an excellent summary of why this is nothing more than magical thinking, I suggest reading physicist Tom Murphy's excellent post on the matter. As he alludes to, if we convince ourselves that we need to spend unfathomable resources on human spaceflight so that we can "save ourselves" some day, we simply avoid fixing the real problems here on Earth, where we are very much stuck for the long haul. Pretending otherwise will only hasten our demise.

Reminds me of this article about the failings of extrapolation. Those graphs look like perfectly reasonable first-order Bode plots to me.

Yet another easy explanation for "this is why you're poor." Remember the studies that conflate household income and test scores? Or the ones that found that the more you read to your kids the more vocabulary they'll have and the smarter they'll be? The list of things that the poor cannot provide for their children is long and getting longer, and that has a permanent influence on their future lives.

This article is just more evidence of the same. The poor do not get (and cannot afford) sound financial advice. But what good would it do them? They have effectively "lost at capitalism" already by working for someone else.

Here's some hard numbers on "traditional" approaches to solar ground vs space:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/

Firstly, I think everyone realises that space-based solar power makes no sense if you have to launch it from Earth on a current generation rocket at $20,000 a pound. The only economically viable plans I've seen for building them were based on building them in space from materials collected in space, and even they fell apart when you put real-world launch costs in there rather than NASA's 1970s 'out of the ass' numbers for the space shuttle.

Secondly, from what I remember, the designs I've seen used heat engines, not solar panels. Most of the spacecraft would be mirrors, not PV cells.

Space-based solar power may not make financial sense for decades to come (if ever), but that article makes about as much sense as those in the 1920s proving that you could never build an airliner that would carry more than a handful of passengers at more than a hundred and fifty miles per hour. They were perfectly true within the assumptions they made, but their assumptions were retarded.

What you say would be true for a low alititude orbit.

According to Tom Murphy's analysis: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/ a satellite in geosynchronous orbit is so far enough away that it is only shaded for a very short period of time per day, and then only when it is near the equinox so that the earth is directly between the sun and the satellite, resulting in about 0.7% shaded time on average.

Or course at the end of the day the economics still don't seem to work out for solar power unless launch costs drop dramatically.

Here's some hard numbers on "traditional" approaches to solar ground vs space:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/
"You can even throw in batteries in the ground system without exceeding the space cost, and all the reasons for going to space have melted away."

It would be interesting if TFA had some hard numbers to compare against in terms of generation capacity vs launch costs vs upkeep/replacement schedule... Can't find anything myself though...

I don't think so. A long distance photo is not going to give enough detail. You'll need a high resolution photo of the key.

Wacky Fun!. That paper appears to deal with a less sophisticated key; but demonstrated successful attacks at 195 feet, with comparatively cheap apparatus.

the Foxconn suicide rate from those figures is lower than the suicide rate for not only CHina as a whole, but also it's lower than the US suicide rate

I'm so sick of this "gotcha" point. Guess what: Foxconn isn't a country, it's a workplace. Suicide rates at the workplace are not the same as overall suicide rates.

You can't compare to US suicide rates. You can, however, compare to US workforce suicide rates:

U.S. workplace suicides (source: http://www.bls.gov/opub/cwc/sh20040126ar01p1.htm - best source I could find):
2170 over 9 years, averaging 241 per year.

U.S. labor force during same period (I picked the lowest, so it doesn't seem like I'm cheating - http://www.dlt.ri.gov/lmi/laus/us/usadj.htm):
127 million.

Extrapolated U.S. workplace suicide rate:
0.19 per 100,000 (rounded up)

Foxconn's suicide rate:
1.5 per 100,000, or 7.8 times that of the U.S. workplace rate.

The U.S. general population rate (same period - source: http://weber.ucsd.edu/~dphillip/suicide_in_the_united_states_cdc_report.pdf):
11.1 per 100,000, or 58 times workplace suicide rates.

China's general population rate (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides):
14 per 100,000, only 9.33 times Foxconn's rate.

I can't find data on China's general workforce suicide rate, and the US numbers are really out of date. But it's a much closer comparison than comparing a factory in China to the overall U.S. population. And the delta is astonishing.

There is NOT scientific consensus on the fact that humans (we) are responsible for all of the global warming that's happening.

Yes, there is.

Javascript is Turing-complete, so validation would require infinite time.

This is false.

Properties of Turing-complete languages can be verified in finite time. The catch is that to do so, you must reject some valid programs. For example, think about a typed programming language like Java: if you take a correct program and change a type annotation to "Object", the program is still "correct" in some sense, but will fail to compile. In that sense, the type-annotations constitute a kind of proof to the compiler that the code is type-correct and therefore satisfies certain safety properties (e.g. all method calls are on objects that support that method or on a null reference, which, in compiled code, may be equivalent to not treating some user data value as a function pointer which could allow arbitrary code execution).

There is absolutely no reason why a Javascript implementation cannot be made safe (in the sense of not executing arbitrary code; you can't prevent it from crashing because, as you said, it's Turing-complete so it might have infinite loops). For example, the Quark research project builds upon WebKit but uses more sandboxing than modern browsers to give much stronger guarantees about what websites can and can't do. Of course, that relies on the OS kernel's sandbox being correct, but those are much, much simpler than Javascript sandboxes, so that is a pretty safe (and even possibly formally verifiable) assumption.