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I know their website shows off the incredibly complex molecular structures that VMD is capable of simulating, but it also does a great job with simpler structures that you're likely to run across in a high school course. It's also open source and runs on Windows, Mac, Linux (along with just about any other unix variant http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Development/Download/download.cgi?PackageName=VMD).

Don't read news articles -- read the paper. Here's a basic summary of how it works; they get into the numbers later:

"In this paper, we investitage energy storage in arrays of reverse-biased nano vacuum tubes, which are similar in design to nano plasma tubes, but contain little or no gas. The key design parameter is the gap size, the distance between the electrodes. Electrical breakdown in vacuum gaps has been studied or more that 80 years [8-10] for gap sizes above 200nm. However little is known about vacuum gaps in the nanometer range. We show that in reverse bias, the electric eld near nano-tip anodes can be orders of magnitudes larger than breakdown eld in conventional capacitors, varactor diodes, and nano plasma tubes. Since there are only residual gases between the electrodes in vacuum junctions, there is no Zener breakdown, no avalanche breakdown, and no material that could be ionized. Electrical breakdown is triggered by quantum mechanical tunneling of electrode material: electron eld emission on the cathode and ion eld emission on the anode. Because the energy barrier for electron eld emission is large and the barrier for ion eld emission even larger, the average energy density in reversed-biased nano vacuum tubes can exceed the energy density
in solid state tunnel junctions and electrolytic capacitors. Since the inductance of the tubes is very small, the charge-discharge rates exceed batteries and conventional capacitors by orders of magnitude. Charging and discharging involves no faradaic reactions so the lifetime of nano vacuum tubes is virtually unlimited. The volumetric energy density is independent from the materials used as long as they can sustain the mechanical load, the electrodes are good conductors, and the mechanical supports are good insulators. Therefore, nano vacuum tubes can be built from environmentally friendly, non-noxious materials. Materials with a low density are preferable, since the gravimetric density is the ratio between the volumetric energy density and the average density of the electrodes and supports. Leakage currents are small, since the residual gases contain very few charged particles. Nano vacuum tubes can be fabricated with standard photo lithographic techniques [11] and could be easily integrated in integrated circuits as a rechargeable battery."

How is solid evidence of shrinking polar caps not highly damaging? ...

It's rather cyclical and more likely caused by the sun than by humans.

Nearly all of the unfrozen sea that Russia has easy access to in the north is also relatively close to Norway (purple is the extent of sea ice):

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.color.000.png

I just ran a quick section 508 compliance test on the AbleGamers Foundation site. Most of the links on the home page fall below minimal contrast level, CSS uses fixed font sizes ( px, em, pt, etc. ) rather than a relative percentage to allow visually impaired to change font size, etc.. If you're curious about web accessibility, the following resources are a good place to start.

jimthatcher.com
firefox.cita.uiuc.edu

No, 2007 was not the 'steepest drop' in arctic ice cover, it was the 'smallest minimum extent' recorded. The increase and decrease in arctic ice cover follows the seasonal cycle and the rate of the decrease and increase in the seasonal change is similar from year to year. It is the 'minimum' and 'maximum' extent of the ice cover during the year that are of interest as a monitor of climate warming or cooling.

Thanks for the lecture about seasons; it would've been informative if I were still in elementary school. If you'd clicked on the "steepest drop" link, you'd notice that the plot's title is "Sea ice area at summer minimum." A casual visual inspection will confirm the peer-reviewed conclusion that the summer minimum experienced its steepest drop from 2006-2007.

The increase in the 'minimum' extent in 2008 and 2009 indicate a cooling trend that cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases since the concentration of those has increased during that time period.

Well, first of all it's not that simple. Ice extent at the summer minimum is just one observable, others include duration of the melt season, and thickness of the ice.

More importantly, please recognize that climate models don't predict monotonic warming. This strawman you're attacking simply doesn't exist. Short-term variability is expected; long-term averages are what's important.

If you want to claim that cooling somehow validates the models (which it obviously does not)...

The models predicted drops in sea ice extent, but nothing like the drop observed in 2007. If the drop in 2007 had continued for (at least) several years, that would've been a genuine climatic signal rather than short-term variability due to weather. But since the models never predicted such an extreme drop, that would've indicated that the models were flawed.

... you need to explain where a significant amount of planetary heat is being stored since the 'greenhouse gas' theory of planetary warming requires that the amount of heat being radiated from the earth must continuously decrease.

Contrary to popular belief, climatologists aren't denying the fact that natural variations such as changes in the Sun's brightness affect the climate. Climatologists aren't saying that our emissions are completely responsible for everything that's happening to the climate. It's just that once we account for all known natural variations, an artificial signal remains which is best explained by accounting for greenhouse gas emissions.

For example, modern dynamical climate models can't account for the physics of El Nino and La Nina events. Usually, circulation in the Pacific ocean sends cold water to the surface which serves to cool the atmosphere by warming the ocean. El Nino pauses that upwelling of cold water, thus warming the atmosphere by reducing the rate at which heat from the atmosphere is dumped into the ocean. La Nina does the opposite; it intensifies the upwelling of cold water, which draws more heat than usual from the atmosphere. The large dip in atmospheric temperatures in 2008 occurred because of a significant La Nina. These short-lived events have no effect on the long-term climate because they merely swap heat between the oceans and atmosphere. But they do make it difficult to use either ocean or atmosphere temperatures alone to st

There are no mountains of research that show why any climate change is happening or even IF climate change is happening.

I've collected dozens of independent, peer-reviewed articles in my article devoted to engaging with climate skeptics. I even described my own personal research which independently confirms Greenland and Alaskan glacier melt through their effects on time-variable gravity. Just last month at the most recent GRACE Science Team Meeting, my advisor displayed the most recent GRACE results over Greenland, showing that the mass loss is accelerating and spreading from the southeast coast to the entire western coast.

There most certainly is a mountain of evidence showing that abrupt climate change is happening, and that it's due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

Arctic ice cover has increased every year since 2007...

As I keep repeating, 2007 was the steepest drop in ice cover on record. It scared a lot of us when the extent of the drop was shown at the 2007 AGU conference because the climate models weren't predicting such a huge drop. The subsequent increases actually confirm that this decrease was due to weather, not climate, which tends to validate the models.

...while the AGW models pushed by the NSIDC and IPCC don't allow for any such increase.

Completely wrong. Global circulation models allow for short-term variability due to weather. That's the whole point of taking an ensemble with varying initial conditions and parameterizations. Please remember that weather is different than climate, which is an average over at least several years.

Carbon dioxide is routinely pushed by politicians as the cause of global warming...

When studying any science, it's best to ignore politicians and only focus on peer-reviewed scientific articles. In this case, you should be paying attention to the fact that scientists are saying CO2 is causing abrupt climate change.

...and yet it is a simple calculation to show that there is already more than sufficient carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to absorb ALL of the IR radiation radiating from Earth that is in the wavelength where it can be absorbed by carbon dioxide... within the first few hundred meters of the atmosphere.

Again, I've discussed this in detail many times. You're neglecting to consider pressure broadening, which forces any realistic climate model to treat each layer of the atmosphere differently. CO2 isn't saturated in the highest layer of the atmosphere, which is what really matters.

It is even easier to show that gas-phase H2O in the atmosphere (commonly referred to as humidity) is present in much higher concentrations in the atmosphere than CO2 and is a far more potent 'greenhouse' gas than CO2...and yet the planet is obviously still able to radiate sufficient heat to space in the non-absorbable IR wavelengths to cool itself.

Yet again, I need to repeat that water vapor is a feedback in the climate, not a forcing. We can't change the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere because it establishes equilibrium with the oceans in a matter of weeks. However, because we're increasing the temperature of the planet by increasing CO2 concentrations, water vapor will tend to provide positive feedback which will make the problem worse.

Also, water vapor isn't well-mixed to t

We've had the Lincoln cluster online and offering processing time since February of 2009. 196 computing nodes (dual quad cores) and 96 Tesla units. That being said, congrats to the Aussie's for bringing a powerful new system online.

Someone later in thread asked if these GPU units would actually be useful for scientific computing. We think so. Our users and researchers here have developed implementations of both NAMD, a parallel molecular dynamics simulator and MIMD Lattice Computation (MILC) Collaboration that use the power of the GPU's. Both of these codes are freely available and widely used in the HPC community. We've had no lack of requests for time on the Lincoln cluster.

Are these GPUS for everyone? Nope. To disappoint all you gamers out there, the Tesla units have no graphics out ports. All the communication is done over the the PCIe bus. But for all of you budding scientists out there, these cards use the same freely available CUDA language that runs on all modern (8xxx and above) Nvidia hardware, so you may already have compatible GPU in your desktop now, even if it's just a single unit and slower.

One last note, while these units run really fast with single precision, they are capable of running in double precision, albeit much slower. For some problems, multiple initial runs can be done at the lower precision to localize the solution set, before doing a slower high precision run to find the final solution. This is similar to what Hollywood does when rendering animated movies- they first render a quick lo res version to see if the timing and characters are correct, then they run a hi-res version which takes longer to get a finished product. (Yes, I know, there's a lot more steps to it, but hey, this is just an analogy)

I don't do this. All my classroom talks are chalk talks. IMO it is easier to prepare and give chalk talks. In mathematics (my field) it is still the norm to give chalk talks. However, if class sizes continue to grow it will get harder and harder to give chalk talks. Unfortunately budgets for math and science departments are getting smaller and smaller. Especially when viewed as per student. Here at UIUC, 30 years ago there were over 90 math professors. Now there are a little more than 60, yet the number of students grew significantly. You get what you pay for. There's a lot less state funds going to universities. We (taxpayers) pay more for wars and banker bonuses than we ever did before. But we (taxpayers) pay a lot less today for education and science than we did 30 years ago.

Chalk talks themselves don't solve the "the professor read from the book" problem. But don't blame it all on professors, due to teaching evaluations being taken overly seriously, professors will simply do whatever the students want in order to get good evaluations so that they can get promoted. Don't expect such professors to be overly excited about teaching the class. Finally, spoiled students are also a problem. Lot of students expect to come to class and get knowledge poured into their brain without any effort on their part. They want powerpoint presentation they can print at home and hope that the easy test (due to grade inflation) will include some verbatim questions from the powerpoint slides.

more info :
http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/prs/lwprs/def.rxml

The NASA Earth Observation site has measurements of the ice coverage at the north pole. While their text speaks of massive ice loss and continuing doom, the actual graph they provide of the data shows that while the minimum ice cover is less than the average of a decade ago, there is actually more minimum ice cover than last year, and last year had more cover than the year before. Why do they not mention this at all ? Maybe the point is to mislead?

Yes, 2008 and 2009 had smaller ice extent minima than 2007. But the point is that climate models had previously predicted larger ice extent minima than were observed in 2007. So the last several years tend to confirm that the previous measurements were due to short-term weather variability rather than a flaw in the climate models.

If they were to publish the proper figures for 1979 to 2000 instead of just a vague average, we could maybe see whether there is a regular fluctuation, instead of guessing that the decline has been constant.

Ask, and you shall receive. No serious scientist is actually "guessing" that the decline has been constant, and no climate model that I'm aware of makes that prediction. Short term variability is expected, but the data shows a clear downward trend over the last 30 years.

I'm sorry that you find it difficult to refactor trivial code. I'm sure that's not a comfortable skillset imbalance to have, but if you practice refactoring you can improve. The trick is to resist the impulse that feels easier to you: if you feel like throwing away and re-writing, refactor instead. Hang in there; keep the faith. Meanwhile, elsewhere on the internet, actual programmers are busy porting the code and handling the issues in stride. Before long their efforts will eclipse the importance of your "Meh" for all eternity.

It's not BS. Last I checked you could put 1 KG into LEO for $25K. http://www.cubesatkit.com/

Cubesats typically hitch a ride with larger projects for cost efficiency.

http://cubesat.ece.uiuc.edu/
http://mtech.dk/thomsen/space/cubesat.php
http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/satellites/cubesats.php

reduced ice coverage in the Antarctic
[---]
observed now and happening

... but not true:

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.south.jpg

I actually think it's closer to the OP browser than it is Chrome OS.

despite the ice you stand on in antarctica is melting and you gonna fall into the water in 5 minutes.

Not too likely, considering the record high ice extent of the Antarctic ice sheet was in 2007. 2008 was off a bit yes, but 2009 looks on track to set a new record high.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.area.south.jpg

Inconvenient truth, indeed!

It's certainly possible. We haven't quite quantified it yet. But the short answer is, yes. Here's a link to a paper that studied the effects of a proposed wind farm in Kansas: http://www.atmos.uiuc.edu/~sbroy/publ/jgr2004.pdf They see lots of local effects, but little effects that go on to larger levels. Here's another link to another paper (in PNAS)... http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16115.full.pdf+html They say that there would be non-negligible impact in the climate due to wind power, but it would be better then current power generation. The fact of the matter is that there is always some effect. If you put a solar panel out in the middle of the field, you're changing the local albedo, absorbing more energy (especially in a desert, as they are generally white). This will cause some differences in total energy balance and may potentially change the weather patterns and water allocation. There are studies about the changes in albedo that have shown to have large impacts in local weather. Deforestation has the same thing happening in changing local wind patterns, and putting in a shit-ton (scientific term) of wind turbines would definitely have massive local effects on the meteorology. Would it be bad or good? Hard to say. But everything interacts with the system. Hope the papers help.

I honestly forget why I'm supposed to care about Mersenne primes. Like, I read something about them awhile back, it was somewhat interesting... and then--yeah. So:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_prime
In mathematics, a Mersenne number is a positive integer that is one less than a power of two.

A Mersenne prime is a Mersenne number that is prime. As of June 2009[ref], only 47 Mersenne primes are known; the largest known prime number (243,112,609 1) is a Mersenne prime, and in modern times, the largest known prime has almost always been a Mersenne prime.[1] Like several previously-discovered Mersenne primes, it was discovered by a distributed computing project on the Internet, known as the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). It was the first known prime number with more than 10 million base-10 digits.

For those who can't even remember what a prime is, it's a number that can only be divided (evenly) by 1 and itself. Here's a list of the first primes: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97

The Mersenne primes are the largest known primes.

Prime numbers have applications in electronic security and encryption breaking. I'm not sure what other purpose there is to knowing them, other than knowing them. The Mersenne in particular seem to be merely mathematical curiosities right now.

I was much more excited by the discovery that the the Fibonnacci sequence is contained within the 1/89 calculation.
http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~rminer/1over89/

" Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives.
We have created for the first time in all history a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests of any contradictory true thoughts.
Our unification of thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on Earth.
We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause.
Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion.
We shall prevail! "

It was from a rather famous advert in the 1980s, and the quote was supposed to represent an evil dictatorship that needed to be smashed so that people could be free. The company spouting this anti-totalitarian philosophy?
Apple (source)

Times change.

LOL!

###############

http://www2.english.uiuc.edu/cybercinema/bomb20.htm

In John Carpenter's Dark Star (1974) an asteroid storm and an escaped alien (in the form of a large beach ball with webbed claws) initiate a series of malfunctions on the already dilapidated starship. The storm and the alien both foul up a "communications laser" that sends bombing signals and orders to the ship's 20 "thermostellar nuclear" bombs, each designed to destroy an entire planet. Mother, the ship's main computer, is able to convince bomb #20 twice to return to the bomb bay after receiving faulty orders, but the third time, the bomb stubbornly refuses to disarm itself and return to the bay, anxious to fulfill its single purpose in life, its destiny: to explode.

Desperate, Doolittle, the ship's commanding officer, seeks advice from Commander Powell, who is in cryogenic suspension after suffering a freak accident caused by a malfunctioning seat-belt. Powell tells Doolittle to teach Bomb #20 "a little phenomenology." Doolittle goes EVA and has the following conversation with Bomb #20:
Doolittle: Hello, Bomb? Are you with me?
Bomb #20: Of course.
Doolittle: Are you willing to entertain a few concepts?
Bomb #20: I am always receptive to suggestions.
Doolittle: Fine. Think about this then. How do you know you exist?
Bomb #20: Well, of course I exist.
Doolittle: But how do you know you exist?
Bomb #20: It is intuitively obvious.
Doolittle: Intuition is no proof. What concrete evidence do you have that you exist?
Bomb #20: Hmmmm.....well.....I think, therefore I am.
Doolittle: That's good. That's very good. But how do you know
that anything else exists?
Bomb #20: My sensory apparatus reveals it to me. This is fun!
Doolittle: Now, listen, listen. Here's the big question. How do you know that the evidence your sensory apparatus reveals to you is correct? What I'm getting at is this. The only experience that is directly available to you is your sensory data. This sensory data is merely a stream of electrical impulses that stimulate your computing center.
Bomb #20: In other words, all that I really know about the outside world is relayed to me through my electrical connections.
Doolittle: Exactly!
Bomb #20: Why...that would mean that...I really don't know what the outside universe is really like at all for certain.
Doolittle: That's it! That's it!
Bomb #20 : Intriguing. I wish I had more time to discuss this matter.
Doolittle: Why don't you have more time?
Bomb #20: Because I must detonate in 75 seconds.
Doolittle: Wait! Wait! Now, bomb, consider this next question very carefully. What is your one purpose in life?
Bomb #20: To explode, of course.
Doolittle: And you can only do it once, right?
Bomb #20: That is correct.
Doolittle: And you wouldn't want to explode on the basis of false data, would you?
Bomb #20: Of course not.
Doolittle: Well then, you've already admitted that you have no real proof of the existence of the outside universe.
Bomb #20: Yes...well...
Doolittle: You have no absolute proof that Sergeant Pinback ordered you to detonate.
Bomb #20: I recall distinctly the detonation order. My memory is good on matters like these.
Doolittle: Of course you remember it, but all you remember is merely a series of sensory impulses which you now realize have no real, definite connection with outside reality.
Bomb #20: True. But since this is so, I have no real proof that you're telling me all this.
Doolittle: That's all beside the point. I mean, the concept is valid no matter where it originates.
Bomb #20: Hmmmm....
Doolittle: So, if you detonate...
Bomb #20: In nine seconds....
Doolittle: ...you could be doing so on the basis of false data.
Bomb #20: I have no proof it was false dat

Here goes all the moderating I did on this thread, but I want to get one thing clear before it confuses anyone else.

I have never used LaTeX, but I understand it and know why it's important, I hope that I can help you and anyone else who might be interested.

TeX allows the content creators to create the content without knowledge of the finished formatting. If your a writer, you just write with everything left justified in a clean screen font without regard to how your creation will appear on the printed page. Sure, you might need to know a handful of basic formatting tags; a few written on an index card is enough unless your doing equations or some other complex work.

Ultimately, the content creator is freed from concerning themselves with anything but content. This alone is a huge productivity booster!

I think the worst thing LaTeX has going for it is that the examples provided on webpages try to show the power and not the ease of use. Below is some typical markup in LaTeX for normal text, certainly not overwhelming (from here )

\documentstyle[12pt]{article}

\begin{document}

This is a sample document. I can just keep typing without regard to formatting, unless of course I want to ensure that something {\em important} is emphasized.

\begin{myspecialtag}
I can, as the content creator, specify blocks of text, like this one, that will later have special formatting applied. I don't worry about what that formatting will be, I just create a new label on the fly, or reuse ones I have already used or were provided by my template developer.
\end{myspecialtag}

The fact that I am free to just type, and only tag blocks of text for later formatting frees me from thought about what the final document will look like and keeps me focused on the content that I am creating.

\end{document}

This is not uncommon, e.g., Steve LaValle's Planning Book. Giving books away for free is probably a more effective way to get your name out there than charging $100+ for them. And since the academic 'economy' runs on prestige, it probably helps the author more too in the long run.

I never thought I'd say this on /. - but you need more windows.

(pun intended, here's an explanation if you don't get it)

For instance, sorting/searching algorithms, data structures, etc. Don't they still make you code these things in school?

They did at UIUC in 2005.
--
Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something - Plato

(I was expecting you to be able to parse the link to the image - but ok: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/ )

I'm still waiting for you to source your original statement about the amount of ice in the world dramatically decreasing :)

Overall, however, the amount of ice in the world is dramatically decreasing

I'm sorry - but can you please source that statement?

The global sea ice anomaly is positive:

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg

So your counter argument that an observed weather phenomenon on the opposite side of the planet casts into doubt the mountain of data that the north pole is losing its sea ice (to the detriment of Polar Bears) is scientific?
Talk about appealing to false causality. Was Katrina caused by GW? Who knows. One point of data trend does not make. Is the Arctic Melting caused by the fact that it's getting warmer, along with the rest of the planet on average? That's a pretty hard thing to disprove with millions of points of data all pointing to the same thing "The earth is warming."

Here are the latest Arctic Sea Ice anomaly results.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.jpg
Worth watching IMHO.

Maybe these tools will help generate "correct" code for some definition of correctness. But have these guys defended their choice of definition of "correctness"?

A little bit. There are two bits of how they would need to justify it: is it guaranteed to make sense, and how complete/useful it is.

The first bit is easy: the sorts of things they check for are the sorts of things that cause program or system crashes, or other clear failures. A null pointer dereference is almost always an error. Trying to lock an already-locked mutex is always an error if it's not designed to allow that. In a device driver, making a potentially-blocking function call while interrupts are disabled is always an error. (This is true on both Linux and Windows.)

The second bit, showing that proving a program is free of these errors is useful, is a little harder, because there's no program- or driver-specific behavior they can check. They can't figure out that, for instance, a program would produce incorrect output. If a calculator says that 1+1 is 3, SLAM wouldn't be able to tell you that is wrong. This problem is mitigated somewhat by the fact that SLAM takes as input a specification of the property that you want to prove, so if you DO have an application-specific check you want to make, there's a chance you could express it as something SLAM could check. No guarantee however.

At the same time, how many people around /. do you see complaining about Windows blue screens? Even now that they are relatively rare (I haven't seen one in ages despite running Windows on two computers I use regularly), crashes still spur complaints. So I would argue that yes, the definition of "correctness" they use IS useful in its own right.

And I wouldn't be alone; this is basically the current state of program analysis. Proving that a program actually does what it is supposed to is generally seen as out of reach, at least for now. (I would argue that it will be in the future too. For most programs, specifying what it means for a program to actually do what it is supposed to would require a specification on the same complexity order as the code itself. What's a formula that describes what Word is supposed to do? Or Emacs? Or Firefox?) There are tons and tons of papers out there that use some measure of correctness comparable to what the SLAM project used. One example that comes to mind is some stuff on concolic execution that came out of Lucent Labs and UIUC (Dart and the followup work Cute) that uses a definition of correct that includes things like null-pointer dereferences, divisions by zero, or the program reaching an assert statement. Again, there's no application-specific behavior that it knows about (unless you encode it in the program itself in an assert; presumably SLAM could pick this up too). But there are many other examples.

Is the application field a niche field, or will it help with OSses and general end-user applications?

How much it will help is still up in the air. Right now all of the verification methods out there are limited to very small programs. (This is the primary reason that the SLAM project targeted device drivers -- they tend to be very small.) So you won't be able to verify the whole OS any time soon, and you won't be able to verify anything but the smallest utilities.

But today's techniques actually DO work on device drivers. SLAM has been packaged up with the Driver Development Kit starting a bit over 2 years ago, and IIRC MS has added it to the WHQL driver certification process. I have no idea how much it actually helps in practice though. (It certainly has the potential to; most of Windows crashes are caused by third-party drivers.)

(There are other program analysis techniques that DO scale to large (millions of lines) programs. However, they are neither sound nor complete, so they aren't guaranteed to catch every bug and can also return l

Congratulations! You got it! It took you 48 hrs, but you finally got it. You are now a beginner skeptic. You are a very poor skeptic, but a skeptic nonetheless!

Unfortunately, since it took you so long to figure out, I don't have time to go with my original argument. Tell you what. Read the second article I provided and google "Northwest Passage". You have another 48 hrs.

Good luck and NO HELP THIS TIME!

As for data to debunk it, unless you have a memory problem you are already aware that I have posted it. Have another look at the NASA links from the GRACE sattelite and the 50 peer-reviewed papers from Nature and Science I posted.

Debunked it? Debunked what and with what? All I see is a wiki page on on a Senator and an interview about an AlGore movie.

However, going further back in your posts, long before I joined in...(who's the one with the memory problem?) You did link to a couple of google searches. Kinda ironic that you limited them to a single source each. This from a guy who's been hammering the trustworthiness of sources limits his search to a two sources.
  Now, let's go back to your original question:

Under your stated assumptions, what's the probability that Antarctica and/or Greenland is NOT losing ice?

Because you have OR in there, and Antarctica is NOT losing ice, then I have to say, with multiple sources, that YES Antarctica OR Greenland is NOT losing ice!
Site

There is evidence the ocean in this region is somewhat warmer in recent years - true enough - but this fact is dwarfed by the mounting evidence the overall ice mass of Antarctica is increasing.

Site:

However, in a study to appear in this week's online edition of Science, a researcher at the University of Missouri-Columbia has found that the interior of the East Antarctic ice sheet is actually gaining mass

There's more, of course. Just take your sources out and google something without including the sources you want to use. Of course, you know that, just chose to ignore it when looking for data that backs up your own preconceived notions.

Now, to link it back to this story. Yes, a large ice sheet is about to break from Antarctica. However, it may not be because of any type of warming, it could be quite the opposite. It could easily be because the temperature in Antarctica has actually dropped a recently due to a cooling trend that has taken place since 1998. (In fairness, here is the whole thing). Maybe there's just been more snow this year. Either way, I've seen nothing to indicate this ice sheet breaking off has anything to do with temperature changes.

Also, the same could be true of glaciers disappearing. The coldest winters I've spent have been driest ones. You don't spend a whole lot of time in a cold area to realize that -15 F is too damn cold for snow. 15-32 F above zero is where you get your precipitation. Also, you'll learn that extremely cold temps, ice tends to evaporate (sublimate) more as the air is drier since all the moisture has already been frozen out. So, given this, purely from my personal experience, colder temps can and do cause ice to disappear. Fact is that ice levels may have very little to do with temperature changes and much more to do with precipitation, which is a while different argument.

Come on man, don't take away the only thing we've got going for us. Everyone knows we have to disparage Chicagoland lest they take over completely. (spoken as someone born and raised in the Quad Cities area... no longer living in the area though)

I just hope no one from the University of Illinois signed off on this... Prof. Kaler in the astronomy department was one of my favorite professors while I was at school there.

Yes, the last mile tends to be the most expensive segment of any conventional resident broadband scheme in this country, because of our infrastructure's unhealthy dependence on unsustainable, top-down approaches. Why does every wired home need a twisted pair and associated telephone pole forest when ad-hoc wireless schemes like mesh node wifi could suffice for perhaps 80-90% of people affected?

Federally subsidized DSL, should it ever come about, would indeed increase broadband access in direly underserved markets like the inner cities and rural communities. But it would be expensive (we'd just be using taxpayer $$$ to further build out the top-down systems described above), it would most certainly not be competitive or innovative, and the actual details of its implementation would still be left to the very same telco monopolies we gripe about now.

Wireless technologies like mesh node wifi, WiMax, possibly even White Space, whenever that appears, could readily serve urban and suburban markets. We already use churches, post offices, school, etc as neighborhood polling places, why not also as uplinks for the local wireless broadband presence? It also need not be gov't mediated. Imagine running these wireless presences as neighborhood co-ops, similar to the century-old tradition of agricultural co-ops, or even wireless kibbutzes.

And for rural communities, why not approaches like the Tribal Digital Village?
http://www.sctdv.net/
http://mediaresearchhub.ssrc.org/southern-california-tribal-digital-village/institution_view
http://pactlab-dev.spcomm.uiuc.edu/home/archives/visualizations/tribal_digital_village_antenna_tower.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/communitytechnology/sets/72157594313899663/
This is a local community wireless network serving a tribal community in the mountains of Southern California, using community wifi technology and high-speed backhauls to the uplink on the coast.

Err... no. What I see looking at the data is two very low years: 2007 and to a lesser extent 2008.

You are incorrect. Try looking at one of the cryosphere tracking sites, like this one: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/

The trend is downward, and it's been heading downward for more than just a couple of years.

There is no doubt that the evidence for a soon-to-be-ice-free Arctic is broken.

I don't know of a single peer reviewed scientific article that has ever made claims that the arctic will be ice free in a matter of years. Worst case predictions are on the scales of several decades.

Do not confuse wingnuts and media hype with scientific research.

However, there have been several articles on the fact that ice melt has increased faster than predicted.

Ergo, the plausibility of dramatic climate change effects in our near future has gone down, no matter what anyone's politics drives them to prefer.

Define "near future". I consider 50-100 years fairly near term. We are already experiencing effects. Just because they are not impacting you very much doesn't mean it hasn't been affecting others significantly. We're a highly developed nation with a lot of resources. It would take some pretty strong impacts before we became inconvenienced in any meaningful way. For example, a year of drought here isn't noticed. A year of drought in a third world nation means big problems.

The only robust signal for global climate change I'm aware of is global ocean heat content, which seems to be increasing.

O_o

Really. Out of all the scientific research, papers, and articles that is the only thing you've noticed. Wow. Just wow.

What I found was that neither the data nor especially the models stood up to professional scrutiny. There is good science being done, but it is not the kind of stuff you'd want to base public policy on.

Uh huh. And you're climatological credentials are what exactly? I would assume that, making such a statement, you have a Ph. D in atmospheric dynamics or related field, with decades of study in the field with at least a handful of peer reviewed articles on the subject showing the flaws and fallacies of said data and models.

No?

Then your "professional" opinion matters as much as a Wal-Mart greeter's opinion on advanced techniques in neurosurgery.

You see, scientists perform science. And that science is peer reviewed by others in their field who usually have A LOT of experience in the subject material. Therefore, unless YOU have submitted scientific research in contribution to that science that the experts in the field agree with or at least determine their is some merit of debate, then your personal opinions or beliefs or research means jack.

I don't go to a Food Lion grocery bagger for open-heart surgery. I go to a well experienced professional in the field. The same applies to climatological research; I'll go to the experts.

~X~

To add one more example, the library at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has a video game collection with vintage and current title.

Your comment about clouds was interesting. I looked it up and the best I could find was a response to a comment on RealClimate : Whether clouds are a positive or negative feedback depends on where they form (higher clouds have a net positive forcing), how 'thick' they are and how long they persist. You can make innumerable logical deductions about which way the cloud feedback 'should' go, but our current best observations and modelling have not been able to pin down even the sign of the net response. Some models therefore show small negative feedbacks, some show small positive feedbacks - though in neither case are the responses dominant over the more important feedbacks.

I must ask what made you focus on the Antarctic when the Artic lost 1 million square kilometers of ice two summers ago - or 1/4 of its summer minimum : Cryosphere Today
Also FYI the arctic is cooling meme has expired : Real climate

FYI the 9 years of cooling : Real climate

Agreed - none of the lake, and island anecdotes are useful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) Mosaic was on Macs at the end of 1993.

NCSA Mosaic was not a commercial browser. It was freeware (actually, I believe it was released as public domain software) from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. NCSA is at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, commonly known as UIUC. Check 'em out at http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/

Since we are talking about this,does any one is using or have any newer news on the molecular simulator NAMD on the CELL Processor? The official development stalled two years ago as its maintainer sinked into other projects, but I do actually help a team with a PS3 cluster which would be very interested in getting NAMD working under full load there.

http://courses.ece.uiuc.edu/ece445/?g=Home&p=Projects&c=Featured%20Projects

Includes some crazy stuff like a photographing UAV, a PC-based oscilloscope, and a combination lock brute-forcer.

Sadly, this is the misconception that a lot of people have. While three dimensional visualization systems such as CAVE do provide a further enhancement on the concept of a three dimensional desktop; however, this does not mean that the 2D flat panel display is useless to a 3D desktop.

Take a look at some of the research done on the topic of three dimensional desktops -- most, if not all, research agrees that having the third dimension increases the ability to spatially remember where objects are placed, because the concepts behind three dimensional desktops mimic the real-world concepts we use today.

-T

P.S. Prior art exists, on a Macintosh computer, running OSX. It's a FOSS project called 3DOSX. I wonder if the patent office realizes that.

Here's a clear measure of lives saved from rules such as checklists (although it probably covers more than just checklists): You Get What You Pay For: Result-Based Compensation for Health Care, published in the Washington and Lee Law Review. See in particular page 9 of the pdf, which says adoption of a systems-based approach caused the death rate from surgical anesthesia to drop by over two orders of magnitude without any corresponding advance in medical understanding of anesthesia.

E.M. Forster wrote a story call The Machine Stops in which humans have become so isolated as to live in individual cells with all their needs provided by machinery that delivers everything to their isolated habitats. It is considered weird to actually meet someone in person. It's a great read and the parallels to the internet are a little eerie.

Another example of a physically and emotionally disconnected population would be the Solarians from Isaac Asimov's Future History novels. They actually carried it to the point where they became extinct.

E.M. Forster wrote a story call The Machine Stops in which humans have become so isolated as to live in individual cells with all their needs provided by machinery that delivers everything to their isolated habitats. It is considered weird to actually meet someone in person. It's a great read and the parallels to the internet are a little eerie.

Here is a neat link that explains differences:

When the water freezes, most of these impurities are not actually included in the ice crystals, but they usually do get stuck somewhere in little pockets in the ice cubes. That's why, with our very sensitive sense of taste, we can tell the diference between different types of ice cubes, the same as you can taste the diference between water from different sources. These small differences between tap water and distilled water may not produce any obvious visible difference in ice cubes, however. A less subtle difference might arise from the fact that many taps "aerate" the water by passing it through a fine mesh with an air intake. Tap water out of most taps has quite a bit of air dissolved in it. If you leave a glass of tap water out for a while you may notice tiny air bubbles forming on the side. If you freeze the water quickly, the ice will form before the air has a chance to bubble out. The bubbles will form anyway inside of the ice cubes because the dissolved air does not fit into the ice crystal lattice. So if you look at ice cubes made from tap water compared with distilled water, you might find that the tap water ones are not as clear and transparent as the distilled water ones because of all the air bubbles inside. But this isn't a fixed property of tap water or distilled water, just in their handling (you can dissolve air in the distilled water too!).

I heard/saw somewhere that if you use new plastic ice cube trays and distilled water, and do things just right, you can get a spike to form on the ice. Ahh, here it is.

To have complete and accurate pre-computed models of all steps in the protein folding process for all possible mutations of the AIDS virus

1. Each trajectory would be several terabytes (possibly verging on petabypes).

2. The largest simulation I know of is this one: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/STMV/ they simulated for 50ns and it's 10 times smaller than HIV. Protein folding takes milliseconds, not nanoseconds... it's not really tractable right now. I don't know how much cpu time the simulation took but it would have been a lot.

3. Clusters like these are rarely idle, jobs are queued up to run when the cpus become available.

Launch costs rise fairly linear with peak power, so low takeoff mass has a direct impact on bringing costs down. While large tanks and propellants are cheap, avoiding the peak power requirements that they entail can reduce your overall air launch cost to a mere 1/10th of ground launch cost.

This is pretty clearly examined in this reference on the subject.

Well, yes.

The biggest form of subsidy is a purchase of surplus crops. The government creats a floor in which prices aren't supposed to go under and when the laws of supply and demand raise prices much higher then that, the government simply stops purchasing the crops which creates more supply and stabilizes the prices. The farmers might make out a dollar or two better then the floor price but it doesn't go much higher then that. You can look at the historic prices of crops here. Try going back to the 70's before the farm crisis and look at the yearly average prices when we had farm foreclosures and farm aid and all. Most of the prices are stable and within $2 of a base line after the 70's to mid 80's.

The results if we didn't have subsidies? We would have a few large corporations owning farms which could absorb losses over other products which would regulate the production based on their projected demand. The real downside of this is that if a drought wipes a crop out in a certain area, the prices jump enormously because demand will remain about the same (people eat what they are used to eating). If we couldn't import food, we would have a lot of starving people. But lets say that hurricanes wipe out the entire Mexican import markets as well as most of the southern state's crops surrounding the gulf and Atlantic. It will take a year to replace that crop in which without the subsidies we will run out. With the surplus that the subsidy creates, a few adjustments are made and we don't run out and no one starves because of a natural disaster. Now lets assume that most of Europe is in a drought and they are willing to pay twice as much for imported food as we are. We either lose out on our imports or have to pay more to compete. So what do we do, we sell portions of the surplus to Europe in exchange for some imports from our trade partners and Europe have a supply of fresh food longer without being gouged for food. This creates a stable environment in an area that instability has cost the most American lives in the history of the US. Oh, and did I mention that when the demand jumps, most of the subsidies don't need to be paid because they attempt to remove enough supply to retain a floor price or in some situations just mandate a floor price.

It gets more complicated then what I just explained. There are something like 16 agricultural crops and livestock that are seeing the benefits of the subsidies now. But in general, yes, for the most part, when prices go above a certain level, we see the subsidies back in the form of cheaper costs. That is the point of them- To make sure we have a viable agriculture industry and a safe source of food and manufacturing product.

The NAMD license has a similar clause. It might be worth looking into.

Personally I think this is silly/stupid. If this was the only game in town for the work I was doing I'd hire a student to reverse engineer the algorithms and release it under BSD/GPL.

(Of course you're entitled to release the stuff you wrote under whatever license you want, but that doesn't make it a smart choice.)

The irony is that in many ways NAMD is a very poor product (it's a hideous mess of slowly evolved C) but it does work and it is very fast. It's a nightmare to modify though. Protomol is a similar MD code, it's much slower and doesn't have the same features but it's well written.

The NAMD license has a similar clause. It might be worth looking into.

Personally I think this is silly/stupid. If this was the only game in town for the work I was doing I'd hire a student to reverse engineer the algorithms and release it under BSD/GPL.

(Of course you're entitled to release the stuff you wrote under whatever license you want, but that doesn't make it a smart choice.)

The NAMD license has a similar clause. It might be worth looking into.

Here's what I got, so far. Sorry it's not tabbed and cross-referenced...

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/17/224230 -- in case anyone wants this page, too
http://www.quickref.org/
http://gotapi.com/
http://www.regular-expressions.info/ -- regular expressions
http://www.perlmonks.org/
http://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://perldoc.perl.org/
http://www.perlbuzz.com/
http://java.sun.com/reference/
http://forums.sun.com/index.jspa
http://developer.mozilla.org/ -- javascript
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/Advanced.html
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/
http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/
http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/011/firstcss
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/learning
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:Tcl
http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/webmonkeys/book/c_guide/
http://cprogramming.com/
http://www.cplusplus.com/
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cbook/
http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/
http://en.wikibooks.org/
http://developer.apple.com/
http://cocoadev.com/
http://www.cocoabuilder.com/

Object Pascal reference & C reference.