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as a centrist

Translation: If I refuse to align with anyone, I can act superior to everyone.

Trump has actual goals and things he wants to do. He's even resorting to negotiating with democrats to accomplish them since the congressional GOP (and congress as a whole) is just as much of a clusterfuck now as it was during Obama's time. Hillary was the one with no visible message other than "Trump sucks".

Fact One: Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. It is more transparent to frequencies of visible light than frequencies of infrared light.

Fact Two: The total content of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing as a result of human activities. The two largest sources are the burning of fossil fuels, and the production of concrete.

Fact Three: The exact amount of greenhouse effect of existing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is unknown. We only know that it must be some magnitude greater than zero. See Fact One.

Fact Four: Adding still-more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere can only increase the existing greenhouse effect. See Fact One.

Question: On what basis could it be called a "good thing" to keep increasing the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?

This is more clear, more thoughtful and more direct than anything published written about climate change. The kind of presentation made above is what separates someone who is just thinking clearly from everyone else who tips into serious confirmation bias like a giant stack of plates with each conversation adding a plate. I wish the majority of points made on subjects, especially those being hotly debated, were made this way.

Fact One: Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. It is more transparent to frequencies of visible light than frequencies of infrared light.

Fact Three: The exact amount of greenhouse effect of existing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is unknown. We only know that it must be some magnitude greater than zero. See Fact One.

It's a shame there's no nearby planet where we could observe the effects of an atmosphere that is close to 100% CO2. One that we could observe with a telescope and close enough to send probes. If only there was a planet like that, we could gain a huge amount insight into the effects of CO2.

If only Mars was like that and we had any inkling of its climate. But, according to WikiPedia, despite the fact that "the atmosphere of Mars consists of about 96% carbon dioxide", and "Mars's climate has similarities to Earth's, including seasons and periodic ice ages", unfortunately it has "much lower thermal inertia" which means that it is a freezing hell hole not a boiling hell hole. Therefore it is obviously in disagreement with 97% of climate scientists, and is a Trump-supporting climate denier.

This is more of an addendum to the just-above msg, than a reply.
Fact One: Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. It is more transparent to frequencies of visible light than frequencies of infrared light.
Fact Two: The total content of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing as a result of human activities. The two largest sources are the burning of fossil fuels, and the production of concrete.
Fact Three: The exact amount of greenhouse effect of existing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is unknown. We only know that it must be some magnitude greater than zero. See Fact One.
Fact Four: Adding still-more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere can only increase the existing greenhouse effect. See Fact One.
Question: On what basis could it be called a "good thing" to keep increasing the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?

As I understand the Tor process, every tine I fire up Tor it randomly chooses an exit node(*).

Suppose I am running some exit nodes (as the NSA is suspected of doing). If I want to find the location of a hidden service I just fire up Tor and access an onion website with a specific tempo. If one of my exit nodes shows traffic with that tempo, then I know that's the exit node for this onion connection and I can trace the exit connection(**).

If you access the site many times, eventually the statistical nature of the tempo (in your own exit node) will be apparent among the random noise of other traffic. If you do the process many times, eventually you'll find a strong statistical evidence for the target IP address.

How many Tor exit nodes does the FBI run? How much time can they put into discovering each site? Can tempo-based access be automated?

See here for more info. From a paper published in 2011 comes the quote:

In this thesis we tested three correlation algorithms. [...] We found that while the two previously-existing algorithms we tested both have problems that prevent them being used in certain cases, our algorithm works reliably on all types of data.

This would be my guess.

(*) For the onion protocol it's listed as a rendezvous point and there's some protocol negotiation, but it's essentially an exit node.

(**) Actually it's even simpler. Tor reports the IP address of your exit node - just keep starting Tor until the exit node is a system you control.

First off, the original article is open access at PLOS ONE here: http://www.plosone.org/article...

The summary statement, "The tip of the olfactory nerve, which contains the smell receptors, is the only part of the human nervous system that is continuously regenerated by stem cells", implies several things that are misleading and/or totally untrue.

The tip of the olfactory nerve is the olfactory epithelium, where the olfactory sensory receptor cells are located. The olfactory nerve travels through the cribriform plate, a porous area of skull, where it then synapses with the olfactory bulb. The olfactory bulb has several cell types, and only one of these, inhibitory granule cells, is continually regenerated via neuroblasts migrating along the rostral migratory stream from the sides of the lateral ventricles. These cells are thought to play a role in associative learning and coding of new olfactory cues. The olfactory nerve does not have a capacity for self-renewal, nor do any of the olfactory receptor cells.

Furthermore, there is more than one area where neurons undergo continual self-renewal. The dentate gyrus of the hippocampus also fosters a neurogenic niche, and these new cells have important implications for learning, memory, stress, and emotion that we are just beginning to understand.

Thirdly, we don't really know if neurogenesis in the olfactory bulb has anything at all to do with the observed results because this was not measured in the study, but it is a plausible hypothesis for future study.

As a side note, one of the very intriguing aspects of neurogenesis is that after cortical injuries such as trauma or stroke, neuroblasts from the ventricles migrate toward the lesion, rather than toward the olfactory bulb. These cells are capable of forming electrochemically active synapses at the lesion site and appear to aid in recovery. Unfortunately, astrocytic scarring and inflammation limit the regenerative capacity of these cells - but this is an area of intense research in the field of neurotrauma. My current (undergraduate) research is focused on analyzing the effects of post-injury recovery environment (for rats) on subventricular and hippocampal neurogenesis.

For a good summary on neurogenesis:
http://chuang01.web.wesleyan.e...

The climate is a complicated beast. There's never going to be a simple if x then y kind of arrangement. What is simple is that fact that CO2 absorbs infra-red light. We can test that in thousands of labs around the world, like for instance these guys did. The "central conceit" is that CO2 prevents heat from escaping to space, which we can easily prove in any of those thousands of labs. It would be falsified if CO2 for some reason didn't absorb IR radiation.

That's an assertion, not a fact. The planet has *obviously* dealt with higher levels of CO2 in the past, and will obviously deal with higher levels of CO2 in the future. We've also death with higher temperatures in the past, and we will obviously deal with higher temperatures in the future.

Yes, but there were giant fucking lizards back then, not people.

Is it even possible for you to conceive of a buffer that could completely negate the minor human contribution of CO2 emissions?

Not in a way that will let us stay alive.

Looks like I found a copy here.

And how much of this tech is stolen from the USA and other nations?

It's not stolen. It's a knock-off of the Japanese Cherry Blossom Squadron.

What you will not find is a consensus on how much it affects the global temperature.

Wrong. Climate sensitivity is expressed as the temperature increase due to a doubling of CO2. Modern estimates assign a maximum likelihood value of 2.9C, with a 95% confidence that it's less than 4.9C but greater than 1.7C.

Oh wait! Are those the same models that were used to predict a steady increase in global temperatures? You know, the ones that didn't predict the coldest winter the northern hemisphere in decades or more?

Sorry, but when I see stuff like what you just typed and the hockey stick graph and emails to shut out skeptics and scientists that call it a travesty when data doesn't match the models all while Britain just had its worst snowfall in 50 years, the midwest measuring snow by the foot, Iowa temps a full 30 degrees below normal, Seoul buried in heaviest snowfall in 70 years, Vermont setting the 'all-time record for one snowstorm' and people are literally dying from the cold... you have to step back and wonder if you'd been had!

What you will not find is a consensus on how much it affects the global temperature.

Wrong. Climate sensitivity is expressed as the temperature increase due to a doubling of CO2. Modern estimates assign a maximum likelihood value of 2.9C, with a 95% confidence that it's less than 4.9C but greater than 1.7C.

Did you alter your quote for a reason, or are you constructing an obvious strawman?

You summarized one of my points as "The earth's temperature is warmer than it has been in the past" but in fact what worries scientists is the rate of the warming, which is probably higher than at any point in the last 1000 years. Scientists are concerned about the abrupt nature of these changes, not the absolute temperature.

I don't think many people realize that the entire link from CO2 to the warming is based on computer models not being able to think of any other explanation.

It's based on the fact that global circulation models account for temperatures after 1970, which can't be explained by any other process like increasing solar illumination, magnetic effects, etc. Those GCMs have been validated in multiple ways, by correctly predicting climate response to volcanic eruptions, by comparison to independent paleoclimate data and modern temperature records (which are independent because GCMs are dynamical models, not empirical models.) As I've explained, GCMs are able to reproduce strange features of modern warming like the cooling stratosphere which can't be explained using other hypotheses.

That point alone is suspect when you consider that from the time the study you linked to was published until now, the temperatures have not continued to rise as those models predicted would happen. What this means is that there are other factors affecting global temperature, that are unknown, that are at least as big as CO2 (otherwise they would have continued to rise).

Nonsense. I've already been over this. ENSO variation isn't important to the long term climate.

The computers predict a rise from 1.2 degrees to 5 degrees or so. In order to do this, they rely on feedbacks in the environmental system.

Very close. Modern estimates assign a maximum likelihood value of 2.9C, with a 95% confidence that it's less than 4.9C but greater than 1.7C.

Now, any scientist who claimed to understand all the potential positive and negative feedbacks in the system would be laughed out of the room...

Of course. What's troubling is that our estimates of the long-term feedback effects are known to be too small to account for the Milankovitch glaciation cycles.

there are known important feedbacks that they aren't considering, such as clouds (to understand the difference clouds can make, consider the difference in temperature on a cloudy day and a clear day, or even the difference of temperature in the shade of a tree).

Yes, I've already had to explain that I'm aware of how important clouds are. But why do you say clouds aren't being considered? In fact, all models take clouds into account. I've previously linked to a new paper describing recent improvements to models of clouds.

As for the fourth point, even on your web page you admit it is nothing more than a worry.

Yeah, it's a worry about the future of human civilization.

What you will not find is a consensus on how much it affects the global temperature.

Wrong. Climate sensitivity is expressed as the temperature increase due to a doubling of CO2. Modern estimates assign a maximum likelihood value of 2.9C, with a 95% confidence that it's less than 4.9C but greater than 1.7C.

The real problem is that matching the wiring diagram of a simulated brain to that of a cat probably will not result in a computer that thinks like a cat, because a brain is a dynamic entity. All sorts of things change with brain activity, including numbers of receptors, their properties, their distribution, the shape of synaptic spines, etc., etc. We don't know how much of this is really critical to the major functions of the brain, and how much of this is minor evolutionary tweaks, or even fortuitous "spandrels" that are present for incidental reasons but are not crucial to function. So perhaps a simple rule for how synaptic coupling changes over time will suffice, or perhaps it is necessary to carry the simulation down to the level of individual receptors moving around on the cell membrane.

So simply setting out to simulate a relatively large mammal like a cat is pretty much a waste of time, because it is virtually certain that the first attempt won't begin to reproduce the function of the animal brain. A model would be very useful for hypothesis testing, but it makes sense to start small. I'd be happy to see a simulated mouse brain that could do simple things like finding its way around a room or remembering where food is hidden. Even that is probably too ambitious to start with. How about a simulated fly or cockroach that reproduces the behavior (in a simulated space) of the actual insect?

Oops. The 35x faster link referred to CO2, not temperature. My bad.

Chapter 3 of the 4th IPCC report says temperatures in the last ~30 years have increased faster than at any point in the last ~1000 years, a rate which is steadily increasing.

This isn't nearly as impressive as the anomaly in the CO2 record compared to the last several million years of proxy data. But Meehl 2004 shows that the warming since ~1970 is primarily caused by anthropogenic emissions, and they used models that are consistent with a climate sensitivity having a maximum likelihood value of 2.9C, with a 95% confidence that it's less than 4.9C but greater than 1.7C.

Just by-the-by, there is no such thing as PERL. All acronyms for the language Perl's name are backronyms, and were created after the fact. Perl is the language, perl is the interpreter. Please refer to http://abelew.web.wesleyan.edu/perl_flame.html

Anyway, it may not be "shredding" it, but the disc certainly is changing fairly quickly, based on the data in this chart.

All of the high-rated comments are suggesting technical solutions. However, the person asking appears to be a teacher, not an IT person. I have been responsible for several computer labs, and I always start from the other end. I make sure the students know what is acceptable, and what the consequences are for unacceptable behavior. Then I implement what solutions I have time for, and can afford.

First, don't even let the students even turn on a computer until they understand the Acceptable Use Policy. Here are two that I have written, feel free to use or modify them:

• For Pre-K - 8th grade.
• For High School

Don't just hand these out and collect them. I always spent the first class going over it and giving concrete examples. I found that a great way to introduce the subject was to ask the students what they should and shouldn't do with computers. I would write their answers on the board, and by the end we would have almost the exact same things as those that are on the policy. Make sure to emphasize positive things as well, like research, games, asking questions, and telling someone about problems.

After that you are going to at least need some sort of imaging software. I always used Ghost, but several other programs were recommended in other posts.

Next, make sure you have security software. Firewall, anti-spam, anti-virus, and content filtering. If you don't have it, mention it often. Politely make sure that every teacher, administrator, and parent that you meet knows that the school refuses to protect the children. I eventually got eTrust from Computer Associates for a good price, and I'm sure Symantec would also be willing to give you a volume/educational discount, maybe to go with that networked version of Ghost.

Last, set boundaries. If you are a teacher, your time should be spent teaching. Of course you have to do some administrative work, but don't accept responsibilities that are not yours (i.e making accounts for hundreds of students, or setting up network hardware and software). Use what you have, and if things outside of your job description go wrong, politely remind people that it is not your fault, and not your job.

Apes might have ethics after all.

Small scale extraction may be ok, but using cold water as global energy source is a very bad idea. e.g.:
- It can change the pattern of ocean current, causing major climatic shift.
- It can cause oxygen depletion in deep ocean, causing mass extinction.
- Deep ocean water contains large amount of methane hydrate. Heating them up will release the potent green house gas into atmosphere.
The worst thing is above effects are self reinforcing, potentially generating run away positive feedback loop. For more information, see this.

However, kosher animals I believe are humanely shot, right?

Totally wrong. This is a common misconception.

To qualify as kosher, an animal must only be healthy and moving at point of death. This was a logical criterion back in 50BC, since it discouraged people from eating carrion - dead and (most likely) infected meat - which might cause food poisoning. Similarly, thou shalt not eat pork (may carry bacteria if not well cooked) and thou shalt not eat shellfish (may beget queasiness).

Fast forward two thousand years, and meat production works on factory scales. However, the same rules still apply - meat isn't kosher unless the animal was healthy and moving when it died. So if we want kosher meat, we have to find a rabbi who'll kill the animal when it's still moving. No anaesthetic, no stun gun, no bolt thrower, because in these cases then the animal would no longer no be moving (sentient) at time of death. So the rabbi slits its throat while it stands. Yep, it's still kosher, and hell, it's pretty humane as far as brutally slashing the throats of animals is concerned, because at least it's executed (pun intended) by a rabbi. I won't even start on the laws about blood-draining.

Fast forward a little more to 1990. Abattoirs know that animals who've had their throats slit when standing can be sold as kosher. Great. But some evil bastard figures out that since gentiles don't give a damn whether animals are kosher or not, hey, we may as well just make them *all* kosher. It's cheaper. They can be sold even though their throats were slit as they stood, and whadda you know, it saves costs on anaesthetics and stun guns.

The upshot: all meat is kosher, and *none* of it is humanely killed.

Review your morals, and kick your rabbi in the ass next time you see him.

Ok, no offense, but beanie-babies and erotica? There are some newsgroups that just shouldn't exist.

I'm not saying we need to eliminate Capitalism, just that our present form of Capitalism is full of government interventions that benefit the rich and hurt the lower classes. For example, extremely regressive social security taxes are used to offset shortfalls in more progressive income taxes.

If I recall correctly, there hasn't been any companies of even remotely Microsoft's scope started in Europe in the past several decades, or if not, very few.

America used to be a place that prided itself on it's small businesses, on the independence of it's craftsmen. It's interesting to see how far some of my more insane countrymen have come around to the very opposite of Jefferson's point of view, rejoicing in the fact that we need a vast monopolistic corporate oligarchy to get anything done in this country. So Europe doesn't have keiretsu--they still manage to make better cell phones and cars than America.

In addition, the progressive (to the point of confiscatory) taxes you'll find all over Europe have made things more equal, but their equality is below our median & mean income and lifestyle levels.

Measured in terms of per capita GDP, that may be technically true (though difficult to verify, because every country has different econometic standards--like how they measure unemployment or the cost of a market basket...) But a European or Canadian is still guaranteed health care, and I suspect most of the poor would trade away their allegedly higher income if they could get that.

There's only so much taxation & wealth redistribution an economic system can bear before it stops growing, and perhaps even starts to collapse.

As Keynes showed us, in some situations an economy can collapse because it doesn't have ENOUGH wealth redistribution and government spending. A good example might be our current economic policy--a roaring stock market in the late nineties produced a vast amount of industrial capacity, but there was a shortage of demand to consume that capacity. Bush cut capital gains to encourage building MORE capacity, no surprise, no additional capacity has been built. Only now, after so many years of budget deficits and extremely loose monetary policy is the economy starting to trickle back to life--but that might all be for naught if the price of oil doesn't skyrocket (funny how all the dollars we sent Asia's way for the past few years are trickling into Saudia Arabia's hands rather than back into ours.)

People like the parent poster want to pull us ever closer to that perilous edge, and I feel they need to be fought.

People are usually only anxious for a fight when they feel they have nothing to lose. Is your heart really as content with crony capitalism as your words are? It is our current course that will veer off a perilous edge--an America that has no opportunity for Americans, a World that has no opportunity for Laborers. I used to be a rabid capitalist, but I saw the handwriting on the wall--that most of the people I knew and cared about would eventually be completely unneeded by the small clique of people who currently own this country and it's economy--and neither of us are in that clique.

There is something of a culture attached to iPods, and it is not quite the same as the culture attached to macs. It overlaps a bit with the hipster community; some have even suggested that there is a style of dress associated with it.

The result of this culture is that, in general, iPod owners are somewhat more likely to have a greater degree of refinement in their musical taste than the general population. Their tastes are diverse enough that CDs become a drag and they want lots of choice, and in general are unlikely to want to listen to commercial radio. People who don't have these values are less likely to want the specific advantages of the iPod over other music media.

There is something more to this, as well. Both the iPod and hipster groups overlap with the blogging community, which of course has been publicizing its listening habits online for ages now.

Result? You have an unusually large portion of the groups most likely to want to share their music with others represented among iPod users. Hence the plugging.

There's no reason to settle for a "least bad" option. There is a good one and it is called distributivism.

Make that 11,000 gigatons. There is also a significant amount of Clathrate locked up in the Permafrost. The cited article says there is more than twice as much energy locked up in Clathrates than in all other fossil fuels put together.

Make that 11,000 gigatons. There is also a significant amount of Clathrate locked up in the Permafrost. The cited article says there is more than twice as much energy locked up in Clathrates than in all other fossil fuels put together.

ODP has been doing research into the area of gas hydrates for a while now. Not only can natural gas be turned into hydrate, but there are vast amounts of gas hydrate "stable" on the sea floor. Gas hydrates are also stable in certains areas of permafrost in the arctic. On an environmental note, it is not known exactly how hydrate. influences global climate change. Methane is 10 times the the global warmer that CO2 is. A large hydrate landslide off the northern coast of norway coincides nicely with an warm period. As sea level falls during an ice age, pressure on hydrates decreases, destabalizing them, and releasing methane into the atmosphere. This could serve as a natural buffer against ice ages. On an interesting side note, Gas hydrates have been proposed as the cause of the dissappearances in the bermuda. triangle. The theory is that a field of gas hydrates destabalizes right below a ship releasing a plume of methane gas. The water density will decrease. The ship sinks.

If they offered that program at Weslyan University, I could double major in porn and game development. cool!

For a considerably more detailed and thorough discussion of clathrates or "gas hydrates," the following page Clathrates at Weslyan is handy.

sounds like they never heard of "Music on a long thin wire"

...which, for those others who haven't, is a wonderful piece by composer Alvin Lucier, released on the Lovely Music label, with an excerpt on the invaluable collection OHM- The Early Gurus of Electronic Music.

In it, Lucier strung a long wire across a cavernous indoor space, excited it with an oscillator at one end, and left to ring for a long time. The initial performance was broadcast for a week on the radio, and got a good listenership.

Lucier's work in general may be of interest to anyone intersted in the combination of art and science. Most of it involves simple and beautiful explorations of acoustic phenomena, such as the wire.

Your 1980 English teacher might possibly even have read E. R. Dodds' The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) which, in addition to dismissing the vapor account as myth, gives a good statement of why it is irrelevant to trying to understand such phenomena:

As to the famous "vapours" to which the Pythia's inspiration was once confidently ascribed, they are a Hellenistic invention, as Wilamowitz was, I think, the first to point out [65]. Plutarch, who knew the facts, saw the difficulty of the vapour theory, and seems finally to have rejected it altogether; but like the Stoic philosophers, nineteenth-century scholars seized with relief on a nice solid materialist explanation. French excavations showed that there are to-day no vapours, and no chasm from which vapours could once have come [66]. Explanations of this type are really quite needless; if one or two living scholars still cling to them [67], it is only because they ignore the evidence of anthropology and abnormal psychology.

E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, III: The Blessings of Madness, pp.73-4

The evidence supporting the "myth" is (relatively) new. Quite fascinating how geologist and author de Boer discovered the fissure in 1981 but, having read Plutarch, assumed it was already known and only in 1995 learned that it was not known to modern science while discussing it with archaeologist John R. Hale under the influence of some wine (which is when they resolved to team up and do a thourough investigation).

As an admirer of Dodds' scholarship, I also can't resist noting that of the 311 pages of the book, 129 comprise the 1099 annotations (three of which appeared in the citation above). Not quite hyperlinks, but enough in quantity and quality for me to judge him the Knuth of his field.

I went to a medium-sized liberal arts college where I majored in theater. While there, I worked in tech support and eventually managed the helpdesk.

After graduation, I got a job at a large software company as a Program Manager on a ubiquitous productivity suite.

That product shipped, and I decided it was time for something different, so I became a news producer at a mid-size market TV station.

The point? It doesn't matter what you major in. Make sure you're well educated, and can adapt to new environments. Learning how to learn is the best education of all.

I went to a medium-sized liberal arts college where I majored in theater. While there, I worked in tech support and eventually managed the helpdesk.

After graduation, I got a job at a large software company as a Program Manager on a ubiquitous productivity suite.

That product shipped, and I decided it was time for something different, so I became a news producer at a mid-size market TV station.

The point? It doesn't matter what you major in. Make sure you're well educated, and can adapt to new environments. Learning how to learn is the best education of all.

I went to a medium-sized liberal arts college where I majored in theater. While there, I worked in tech support and eventually managed the helpdesk.

After graduation, I got a job at a large software company as a Program Manager on a ubiquitous productivity suite.

That product shipped, and I decided it was time for something different, so I became a news producer at a mid-size market TV station.

The point? It doesn't matter what you major in. Make sure you're well educated, and can adapt to new environments. Learning how to learn is the best education of all.

It's at least 5 years late. 5 years ago, Linux was already at version 1.0. Oh and since I'm nice, I won't even mention the Torvalds-Tannenbaum debate -- poor Andrew, having this shoved in his face all the time must hurt in the end ..

That site has some cool movies on it. Pity we slashdotted it out of existance for today. ;-/
Anyway you can get a couple of the movies from here (just the troops one which is the best) or here which has a couple of them.