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Hey hey hey... it sounds to me like you want to lay off all of the good folks at the TSA. Why? They're hard-working Americans. They have families that they love and have to take care of. I mean, they're just like you and I.

I mean, yeah sure, they look at all of their fellow Americans as if they're potential terrorists, and they have been known to cause problems, but it's in the name of security from those that ...would ...cause ...problems... :\

Hope some developers are reading. Using an older version, 17.3 Cinnamon.

I've used a ton, everything from total bootstraps Linux From Scratch to handholding Ubuntu and all that in between, including tangent OSes BSD and Plan9. Linux Mint is where I can forget about the OS and just do work.

That's about the best compliment I can give. It exceeds commercial OSes like Mac and Windows by a country mile, those are horrid in the meantime and never let me forget them as they try to put me in a straightjacket into their way of bullshit, whether it's procedural or upselling.

Thank You. I haven't expressed it enough. I will donate a $100 to you guys now because it deserves that a minimum. Use it as you want.

CO2 and H2O's spectra don't overlap

Here you can see that the CO2 and water vapor spectra overlap between the 15-20 micrometer wavelengths.
https://wattsupwiththat.files....

In the dry arctic air, the greenhouse effect is mostly caused by the CO2. And yes, as the temperature rises, and the ice cover shrinks, more water will evaporate, adding a positive feedback.

but you should never eat ground beef rare: It's not at all safe

You must be an American. In much of the rest of the world we cook our hamburgers medium rare. That's on those occasions where we actually bother cooking the meat.

Otherwise we just make: https://www.chefsteps.com/acti...
Or just spread it on bread without cooking it: https://kokrobin.wordpress.com...
Also why bother cooking the steak when you can just cut it and eat it with some Rucola: https://thecookful.com/make-be...

How do you handle your meat that makes you so afraid to eat it?

It's like we're getting to the point in that short story by Isaac Asimov: "Fault Intolerant."

https://aparthibo.wordpress.co...

I always liked his stuff about automation. The Reeks and Wrecks from "Player Piano" always seemed pretty predictive.

Elon Musk somehow grew more hair over a 20 year span https://nyppagesix.files.wordp...

2010 (9):

2010 +5 Informative rated - HOSTS and BGP +5 RATED (BEING HONEST)-> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
2010 +3 Informative rated - HOSTS MOD UP-> http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...
2010 +1 Insightful rated - HOSTS FILE MOD UP FOR ANDROID MALWARE-> http://mobile.slashdot.org/com...
2010 +1 Insightful rated - APK 20++ POINTS ON HOSTS MOD UP-> http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
2010 +1 Insightful rated - HOSTS MOD UP-> http://it.slashdot.org/comment...
2010 +1 Informative rated - HOSTS MOD UP-> http://it.slashdot.org/comment...
2010 +1 Informative rated - HOSTS MOD UP-> http://apple.slashdot.org/comm...
2010 +1 Interesting rated - HOSTS MOD UP-> http://it.slashdot.org/comment...
2010 +1 no rating - HOSTS MOD UP(w/ facebook known bad sites blocked)-> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
2010 +1 Informative - Mod UP -> http://news.slashdot.org/comme... + & cited by Eugene Kabelmast https://kabelmast.wordpress.co...

APK

My god, what an original and insightful comment! I don't think anybody has ever thought of that before!

Okay, let's math shit up. NASA's 2018 budget is approximately $21.5B (0.49% of the Federal budget) and the number of Americans living below poverty is approximately 39.7 million. Assuming there's zero administrative costs as well as zero costs in printing and mailing checks, that works out to be approximately $541.56 annually per poor person. Yep, that's going to make HUGE difference in people's lives alright. Never mind the fact that $541.56 per year will only cover the costs of an annual checkup and one other doctor visit, scarcely cover a single semester's tuition at a community college, and won't even cover the cost of 1 month's apartment rent in non-coastal states.

And besides, it's not like NASA's $21.5B is just going into an incinerator. That money goes to NASA employees and contracting companies who also employ people. Those people in turn contribute to the economy every time they go shopping, buy a car, repair their homes, fund their kids' education, etc.

You're forgetting, that Trump still honors the republican connection to the Saudi Prince, and that Huaweii was single handidly building Network infrastructure in Iran. Look at it under the light, that Trump just cancelled the Obama-era Iran-deal and many companies ignored the newly imposed Embargo. They did/do so by proxy companies or daughter firms, with which they keep honoring the fulfillment of existing contracts. Very much to the dismay of these guys (https://melvecsblog.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/donald-trump4.jpg

The concern with Chinese firms drying up certain niches and killing lots of companies is nothing new. The did so with steel, paper, solar panels, electronics and, most prominently, in the area of carrier grade network equipment

While you're right about end-to-end encryption protecting the content of communication, the NSA proved, how much you can do with meta-information. The biggest strategic concern with Huaweii's relatively new dominance in that sector, though, are kill switches

Source : US OFFICE OF MGMT & BUDGET. OWNED. SMOKED. SOLD AS JERKY

Republicans can't admit they're the true party of deficit spending, but the facts don't really care about their bullshit cowardly lies. That bill comes due either way.

"But instead of clicking that virtual machine button 25 times, I automated it,"

She needs 170 terabytes of space across 25 computers for 121 days to produce 31.4 (Ha!) trillion digits. And she's worried about clicking a button a few times?? Hell, even I'm not that anal unless it was a trivial solution. (for a in `seq 1 25` ; do ./push ; done)

First world problems, I guess.

So in all seriousness, how do you check that? Run it again and see if it produces the same number? If there's a timing bug, it'll differ. If there's (say) a BAD timing bug, it won't; but might differ on a different machine. Or numeric coprocessor problems: One Two Three. Or cosmic rays actually flipping a bit somewhere. (ECC CPUs?) I realize this is all fun and games, but how do you know that it's actually correct? See if you can use it to successfully square the circle, in which case it's not?

Bah! If you want some good music, listen to some Beethoven

you'd have to have a REALLY, REALLY good reason to do that, not just "we asked people and they said they wanted it"

Unfortunately, nobody wanted your opinion on whose opinions should be heard. You think you'll get somebody smart in charge, what you get is someone on top of "Mt.Stupid" because they're the most confident everybody else is wrong.

Seems to be an expectation that people will download Multi gigabyte updates. A lot of the numbers on that list are in the 10's of gigabytes, with "Halo 5: Guardians" being over 50GB.

Honestly this seems like quite a substantial wait, even with a very fast connection you'll be waiting over an hour, but people will put up with it, it seems.

Because Netflix is a home-viewing platform, critics like Spielberg say that it's better-suited for the Emmys, which celebrate TV, a medium inherent to home-viewing.

Theater ticket sales in 2017 were $11.1 billion for the U.S. + Canada, $40.6 billion worldwide.

2017 sales of the same movies on disc and digital format were $20.5 billion for the U.S., $47.8 billion worldwide. Compounding this is the fact that disc and digital movies are cheaper per viewer. So each dollar spent on disc and digital formats represents more viewers than a dollar spent at the theater.

People view theatrical release movies predominantly in the home, not in theaters. It's been this way since the 1980s when movie rentals on videotape became a thing. If you honestly make "viewed in theaters" vs "viewed at home" the distinguishing factor, then no film (except those intentionally withheld from disc and digital distribution) qualifies for the Oscars.

Here's some background on the source for the source of your second link: TLDR, RWNJ who tends to play extremely fast and very loose with the data.

Of course, the record-breaking high temperatures occurring across two states on that day had nothing to do with the price of of that electricity, did it?

Having a 15cm red star with hammer and sickle literally tatooed over your heart to show your commitment to the cause and your disdain for private property rights, as Count Dankula does, is so not left enough, he must be "far right" according to AmiMoJo.

Imagine being so far down the rabbit hole that being a radical communist in the UK with a literal "cross your heart" lifelong commitment is not left enough to be considered left, or center, or moderate conservative, but "far right" enough to be "worthy of criticism and condemnation."

Think about that when moderating AmiMoJo.

Students (and researchers) will finally be able to 1-click their way to success!

And professors (using software instances on the same cloud) will already be using AI grading software that will be fooled by it. It's all reminiscent of this cartoon which is actually a 2009 re-draw of an earlier cartoon by the same artist. It was hilarious until it actually started to happen.

As to the fear-hype about an AI doing something that humans can do just as well (piece together narratives and make things up)? LOL. To sell your startup company to spooky investors on and off the Beltway, nothing boosts your brand like starting some terrifying overblown rumor about your company's technology. The way investors think is, if it's so 'dangerous' in the future the stock will be worth a lot so I'd better get in on the ground floor with the other spooks. And become a rich immoral investor spook.

It's just the beginning. Look out for goofy advertisements that say "A.I. so advanced, to use it we must wear HAZMAT suits!" then you know you will have entered bizzaroland. I saw it all happen before with ads in 70s-80s computer magazines.

Why? Any 'math' either side of the issue presents is based on theories and statistics that may or may not represent the future.

True; actual development has show us that nuclear has a negative learning curve, renewables have positive learning curve, and the growth is constantly underestimated. So, yes, the future seems to be rather clear, save for some kind of unpredictable revolution that can't be counted on.

Eventually, SpaceX wants to build up the network to take in as many as 12,000 satellites in low Earth orbit...

That's fifteen times the number of satellites we currently have in low-Earth orbit. Is anyone else concerned that we may run out of satellite space? Or, alternatively, that every satellite we put up in the atmosphere has a greater likelihood of being struck by a meteor, adding to the minefield of space dust already in LEO?

Interestingly, I just watched Real Engineering's video of SpaceX's StarHopper construction just last night. And I didn't know how incredibly thin the walls of a rocket are, and that they are pressurized to retain rigidity. So, imagine the catastrophic destruction that would occur if one of our launches collided with a satellite, or a space dust minefield?

If only one company is asking for 12,000 low-Earth orbit satellites, what happens when one hundred more make the same request? What happens when Indian, Chinese, and Russian companies make the same request? While I don't know whether we'll ever see anything as bad as that one scene from Wall-E, but it feels like we're inching closer to that reality each day.

• https://fidelgastro83.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/img_1272.jpg
• http://www.bahnbilder.de/1200/hochgeschwindigkeitszug-crh2-schlafwagenabteil-23510--761765.jpg
• https://traintracks.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/oebb-nightjet-schlafwagen-abteil.jpg
• https://www.nach-holland.de/images/Blog/CNL_Schlafwagen.jpg

You just need to format them correctly. Throwing "defaults" EXT4 on is bad juju for an SD card. (It does wasteful read-erase-write operations, which kills the card prematurely.)

What you need to do, is discover what the erase block size is of that SD card, and then abuse the raid features of EXT4 to create aligned disk structures with that erase block size.

See also this page. It's very informative.

https://thelastmaimou.wordpres...

These baked on eMMC cards have smaller erase unit sizes, and so they translate better to "defaults" EXT4 disk structures, and so last longer and give better performance. Removable SDCards have larger erase unit sizes, because they are intended to live inside a camera that throws lots of sequential data down in a huge burst, not tipple at the cup like a traditional disk drive does.

When you create a filesystem with these extended attributes, the linux caching system changes its behavior so that disk writes are atomic with the stripe and stride. (It *IS* intended for efficiency with a RAID controller, which has to do wasteful stripe reads and writes to accomplish the task. Functionally, a large SDCard is a hardware RAID0 device, where the large erase unit size is derived from the stripe size.) This GREATLY improves throughput on reads and writes, *AND* **VERY GREATLY** improves write life.

As always, don't be a chump; disable disk swap space, and use zram instead. Your SDCard will thank you.

historical death rate in USA from measles
https://cpi1.files.wordpress.c...

But was starts with a "w".

That doesn't make it a correct literary reference.

Dr Seuss's ABC book.

The present tense is correct. It is "is".

Speaking specifically to moderation, Google already has that problem with YouTube.

NASDAQ have figured out how to make audit (moderation) into a profit centre .

See https://leaflessca.wordpress.c...

Futurologist Osmo A. Wiio said that people overestimate exponential growth in the short term, and underestimate it in the long term. For example, around the turn of the millennium I got interested in wearable computing and started reading about small single-board computers that might be applied to the idea with some hacking. A few years went by, and suddenly these consumer-friendly pocket computers were everywhere, in the form of "internet tablets" and early smartphones. We expect steady, linear progress based on what we know about today's tech, but in reality there's a mix of exponential growth (better tech helps you develop better tech) and sudden leaps (more marketing fads than genuine discoveries).

There's also a social dimension about smaller computers that helps explain the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets. If you had a computer at home in the 1980s, you usually had a dedicated computer desk at some remote corner of the house. It was a work/hobby thing, completely detached from social life and entertainment. Laptops changed things as you might bring one to a dinner table (obviously not during actual dinner, you insensitive clod) and converse with other people. It may have been rude, but at least you could have some face-to-face contact without a huge CRT at your eye level. So in this human contact sense, tablets and smartphones were the killer app, because they could be completely unobtrusive in a social setting. You could have your computer with you and still be present with your family, instead of being hunched in the corner in the glow of a CRT.

So the cool and social kids flocked to smartphones because you could have all these cool things without geeking out in the basement. But we all know it was downhill from then on. Because computers are so wonderful.

fewer angry retards to contend with vis-a-vis Linux.

Who says Linux has all the fun?

Did you know that "Days of our lives" has been renewed for its 55th season? Drama is everywhere, and is very popular.

In most of the world, if a court says to, for example, "seal" someone's juvenile records, it doesn't expect newspapers to erase them from their archives, but merely to not cite (old form of "link to") them in current publications. Changing to that would be a huge change in settled law, and would cause angry litigation over censorship.

in the original Spanish case, Mario Costeja González specifically asked for the old, obsolete articles to be added to the site's ROBOTS.TXT file, which is the modern equivalent.

As I submitted to the Canadian privacy commission, this is what sites in Canada should do, is within the powers of the commissioner to order, and has no special cost to innocent third parties such as Google.

Canadian legal sites like CanLII (the Canadian Legal Information Institute) already do this. See https://leaflessca.wordpress.c...

--dave

Parent poster.

Only Apple's bosses determine what "Apple's purpose" is. We come to know what Google's main line of business is (spying) because what now know that they have been doing (spying). Now that we know more about what Apple, Microsoft, and other proprietors do we can retroactively say what they've been doing. Snowden and others have provided irrefutable proof that software proprietors don't care about one's privacy and the structure of proprietary software was a long-time clue to those who understand the power of software non-freedom over the user regarding what is possible. Certainly keeping secrets from the user and putting in general-purpose holes into systems for future exploitation are the most practical means by which to do many things against the user's interests including but not limited to not looking out for their privacy. If Apple gets a pass amongst technocrats it's because some technically skilled users are easily distracted by details and not repeatedly taught to look at the bigger picture (software non-freedom is the root of virtually all of these abuses). Here are some more specific examples of these points:

• Apple iTunes flaw went unfixed for years and allowed remote access which enables spying and a lot more. There was also news of a hidden backdoor API in OS X for years which granted root privileges. This too could have enabled spying and a lot more.
• Apple has blocked Telegram from upgrading its app for a month. This evidently has to do with Russia's command to Apple to block Telegram in Russia. The Telegram client is free software on other platforms, but no apps are free on an iThing.
• As of 2015, Apple systematically bans apps that endorse abortion rights or would help women find abortions. This particular political slant affects other Apple services.
• There are many more vulnerabilites listed here and here which could be turned into privacy violations depending on how these vulnerabilities or backdoors are used.

Here's the airspeed indicator of a very popular plane, one I studied thoroughly, the Cessna 172:

https://fsxtimes.files.wordpre...

The stall speed (minimum speed Vni) of the 172 is listed at 48 or 53 (flaps up or down). The Vr, minimum speed for level flight, is 55.

The green arc, extending to 129, is the normal operating range. 129 is Vno, the Maximum structural cruising speed.

The yellow arc is speeds that must only be hit in smooth air, and with great caution. "Maximum structur cruising speed"" means this in this range, above 129, turbulence can break the aircraft apart.

So the airspeed at which the aircraft may break is 2 1/2 times it's minimum speed. Hurricanes are 150MPH - a heck of a lot more than 2.5 times the 10mph sea breeze! (Hurricanes are turbulent, btw).

The red line is the Velocity Never Exceed, Vne. At 158 structural failure of the aircraft is to be expected.

So you want to make an analogy to prop-driven planes? They are destroyed at three times their minimum operating airspeed.

If you want to stick to the prop plane analogy, that suggests that a turbine designed for 10MPH would have structural failure at 30MPH. Still like that analogy?

"When it comes to terrorism, backpacks are a far bigger risk than dornes"

Absolutely true. In fact, pressure cookers are a far bigger risk than recreational drone flying (3 dead, hundreds injured by pressure-cooker bombs in the Boston Marathon attack) -- so why is it that in most countries, people owning drones weighing more than 250g have to be registered yet people owning pressure cookers don't?

This incident, plus the Gatwick one shows that the hysteria over "dangerous drones" has reached unacceptable and ridiculous proportions.

How many young children have died from suffocation as a result of plastic bags? (answer: a lot more than one).

How many people have been killed by manned aircraft crashing into populated areas? (answer, a double-digit number every year).

How many people have died as a result of domesticated dog attacks? (answer, far more than you might realise)

And here's the really important question:

How many people have died as a result of recreational multirotor drone use? Answer: A BIG FAT ZERO!

That's right, despite all the claims that these things are dangerous, that these things will bring down airliners, that these things will result in needless deaths... NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON has been killed as a result of recreational multirotor drone operation ANYWHERE in the world, EVER.

Firstly they said that if a drone collides with a plane, people will die. Then, after several documented instances of collisions between drones and planes -- without even an injury to show for it, they said "Ah, but if a drone collides with a HELICOPTER, *then* people will undoubtedly die.

After the collision with a military helicopter over NY harbour where nobody was injured and the helicopter landed safely they said "Ah, but if a drone strikes a helicopter's tail rotor -- *then* people will die".

After a drone struck an MD500 helicopter's tail-rotor at the Baha races and the craft landed safely without injuries they said "Ah, but if a drone strikes an airliner, *then* people will die".

Do you see the way this is playing out?

But let's look at the science instead of the hysteria (not that the media nor the regulators seem interested in doing so).

As reported by ArsTechnica, one university crunched the numbers some time ago and came to the conclusion that drones are a lot safer than we're being led to believe.

Who are you going to believe -- academics who've done the science or a bunch of hysterical know-nothings in the media who simply want to sell papers or accumulate clicks on web-pages?

I love how this scientific paper has been completely ignored -- in favour of predictions by parties (such as unions of commercial pilots, who stand to lose their jobs if/when drones take over).

But not all pilots believe that drones are the devil's spawn. Check out what Captain Chris Mano, a veteran 737 pilot for a major US carrier has to say in his blog about the issue of drone risk to airliners.

I'm sorry but I get really peeved when I see the mainstream media blowing the true risks (as proven by the passage of time and in complete contradiction to the predictions of death and disaster by the ignorant or those parties with their own agendas) right out of proportion.

I trust that those who use Slashdot will appreciate the reality of the situation and not be suckered into believing that recreational drone use is a major threat to public safety -- as the media would have us believe.

Look at the scary list of natural pesticides found in cabbage - among them both carcinogenic and mutagenic substances.

Recall a story that appears in the 1909 book Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln edited by Allen Thorndike Rice: If you call a tail a leg, a kangaroo has five legs but a cow only four. This is because a leg bears weight, and a cow's tail does not.

That doesn't make any sense because Kangaroos don't even have four legs even if you don't define their tale as a leg. They have two legs and two arms...

captcha: physique

If someone wants to define a country called Kurdistan, or Palestine, or Candyland on a map, can't they extend to the users the ability to define such a country?

Hasbro might object to one of those.

As for the other two, I'd find it justified to map "historic Kurdish lands" and "historic Palestine", but "country" is a stretch. Just because you call something a country doesn't make it one. Recall a story that appears in the 1909 book Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln edited by Allen Thorndike Rice: If you call a tail a leg, a kangaroo has five legs but a cow only four. This is because a leg bears weight, and a cow's tail does not. Likewise, Kurdistan and Palestine fail international treaty organizations' tests for what makes a sovereign state.

...but the main point, that EdTech isn't helping children to learn is true.

The OECD commissioned a review of the research evidence and concluded that there was in inverse correlation between ICT use in classrooms & academic performance. I expect a few "no true Scotsman" arguments to follow: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c...

To anyone who works in education, studies cognitive science, &/or epistemology (i.e. theories of how we learn), this comes as no surprise. Children simply don't learn in the ways that Silicon Valley billionaires, so called "education reform gurus," & most of the general public assume.

While it's quite feasible that computers can be used to aid learning, according to cognitive science, that isn't what's happening in classrooms. Additionally, learning management systems, digital documents, online testing, etc., all come with increases in cognitive load, which in turn reduces children's learning in measurable ways. In order for an EdTech intervention to produce positive results, it has to be so effective & efficient that it overcomes this increase in cognitive load. There are strategies & techniques for doing this, e.g. see the work of cognitive psychologist Dr Richard E. Mayer, but what I've seen from Silicon Valley seems oblivious to them.

Another thing the article gets right is that classes without a qualified, experienced teacher don't help children to learn very well, e.g. Sugata Mitra's bold claims about self-teaching children in India & elsewhere weren't borne out by independently gathered evidence & review.

Let's face it, the current "factory model" of education that we have is the least bad system that anyone's come up with for educating tens of millions of children at a time. It takes the hubris of billionaires to believe that they can do better with no background in education, epistemology, or cognitive science.

Then again, I don't think their actual intentions are about improving education.

If you'd like to learn more about learning, here's a good evidence-informed blog written by experts (Dr Paul Kirschner is a veteran education & training researcher at the Open University of the Netherlands & Mirjam Neelen is a highly qualified & experienced educational consultant & learning developer): https://3starlearningexperienc...

So basically Firejail for Windows?

That is a nasty slash to the throat of America's credibility, and the blood sprays onto Canada.

How long until Trump starts calling himself the Generalissimo and wearing ridiculous outfits?

Feast your eyes: https://imincorrigible.files.w...

https://quokkaspace.wordpress....

It's a long read but full of ire at mismanagement and dashed hopes. Here's hoping they turn a corner someday.

That reminds me about the time I got a stepladder and had sex with an elephant. He kept hitting me with his tail.
 
Never. Again.

As I understand it, a US court has ordered the arrest and extradition of a Chinese corporation's CFO on charges of fraud.

Does that mean that Chinese, European and other countries' courts will now be able to arrest and extradite the American executives responsible for the 2008 crash? Between them they caused trillions of dollars of losses worldwide, not a penny of which they paid themselves. Governments had to milk their taxpayers for said trillions in order to "make good" the balance sheets and reserves of supposedly system-critical banks and other financial institutions.

This was the biggest fraud in the history of the world, yet how many executives have been indicted in the USA? https://radiofreethinker.files...

Zero.

  “Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men reported that on March 27 2009, just two months after taking office, [Obama] invited the executives of thirteen leading Wall Street institutions to the White House. After listening to their arguments for why banks had to go on paying bonuses (ostensibly to get the best talent to manage their money), Obama told them: ‘Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that’. He explained that only he could provide them with the political shield needed to forestall public pressure for reform, not to mention prosecution of financial fraud. ‘My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks’”.

- Michael Hudson, "Killing the Host", page 253

He just opposes using regulation to achieve network neutrality

Network neutrality by definition is regulation. If he opposes regulation for network neutrality then he opposes network neutrality.

worrying it would harm the internet as it is - which is working fine.

Working just fine? Do you not remember what happened with Netflix? Can you tell when they paid off Comcast?

Why people want to take a perfectly good system and tart it up with regulations that can only do harm, I've no idea.

Because we've learned from the past behavior of corporations to predict future behavior of corporations. There is no incentive for them to abide by network neutrality in the same way there is no incentive for corporations to not pollute when they are allowed.

It will never snow in DC again, then DC is crippled by snow that year.
It will never snow in UK again, then the UK is crippled by snow.

Whoever told you either of those two things is an idiot and no one in the mainstream scientific community believes that it will never snow again in those locations. What they probably said (or what the scientists said before twisted by someone somewhere) was, snow will be more rare- but also more extreme when it does occur in those locations.

Did a quick google search, the independent(I know, a joke magazine) quoted folks with seeming scientific credentials here back in 2000:
David Parker, at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Berkshire, says ultimately, British children could have only virtual experience of snow.
According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.
Heavy snow will return occasionally, says Dr Viner, but when it does we will be unprepared. “We’re really going to get caught out. Snow will probably cause chaos in 20 years time,” he said.

What I'd like is to -- someday -- see all these deniers, excuse seekers, carbon lobbyists, oil burners before a court, accused of crimes against humanity.

And I'd like to see the prosecution arguing their case using the climate predictions based on the IPCC CMIP-5 climate models and having to explain why the actual temperature data is failing to follow their doom-and-gloom scenarios -- but trust them, global warming is settled science and the defendants are de facto criminals, regardless of what actual data shows. Or explaining why the media-friendly sound bite of 10% damage to the US economy if global warming is unchecked by 2100 is based on a climate model whose predictions are so extreme that the IPCC is phasing it out of the models they use in their climate forecasts. Or how, of the more than 500 people that have to sign off on the exact wording of the IPCC 'Summary for Policymakers', only 66 are the expert authors who wrote the document, more than 50 are observers with no scientific credentials required, and over 270 are government officials; the IPCC 'Summary for Policymakers' releases aren't scientific documents, they're carefully-worded screeds to advance the political agendas of the companies represented in the approval group.

The Virtue of Heresy: Confessions of a Dissident Astronomer
Hilton Ratcliffe (2nd Ed, 2008)

"In May 2006, Arp, Burbidge, and Carosati submitted a paper to the European journal Astronomy & Astrophysics laying out the results of their comprehensive statistical analysis of alignments around the highly active, dual-nucleus galaxy NGC 4410 [44]. It was rejected, and the editors sent an unusually detailed rejection note to Dr. Arp. Because it so clearly revealed editorial bias against his work, he appended the note to his paper and published both together on the online scientific archive arXiv. Dr. Arp followed this with a letter of protest to the directors of A&A, and we patiently await their response.

Dr. Arp and I had some correspondence about the NGC 4410 paper at the time, and initially I didn't get the especial significance of that particular publication. At first, it struck me as merely a statistical review of archived material, and as such, lent no more than numerical weight to the arguments that Arp and his colleagues were constantly putting forward. In the light of his protest letter to A&A, however, I decided to revisit the paper, and it's just as well I did. The saga of NGC 4410 gave me a stark reminder that there is something crucially important about redshifts and quasars that I haven't told you, and that is an unforgivable oversight on my part. I'm sorry. Let me remedy the situation immediately.

In 1967, the Doctors Burbidge noticed something interesting: Their study of the redshifts of quasars produced a quirky statistic, that there was a particular redshift that was more popular with quasars than any other they had noticed. Quasars seemed to prefer a redshift of z = 1.95. This on its own is no more than a curiosity, and certainly not enough to prompt a rewrite of the Principia, but it got the mental juices of one K.G. Karlsson working overtime. In 1971, by which time the study of quasars and their characteristic redshifts comprised an extensive database, Karlsson had deduced that quasar redshifts are indeed quantised, and tend to have preferred values given by the simple formula (1 + z)/(1 + z) = 1.23. Have a look at a sample batch of quasars, measure their redshifts, and you will be astonished as I was to find that the values fall invariably into the series z = 0.061, 0.30, 0.60, 0.91, 1.41, 1.96 ... n. Note that the last value shown here is as close as makes no difference to the preferred redshift discovered by the Burbidges 4 years earlier. This was a truly astounding discovery, and strems of subsequent measurements soon indisputably verified it. In March 2006, M.B. Bell and D. McDiarmid of the National Research Council of Canada published an analysis of 46,400 (that's right -- forty six thousand!) quasar redshifts from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. They conclude, 'The peak found corresponds to a redshift period of z = ~0.70. Not only is a distinct power peak observed, the locations of the peaks in the redshift distributions are in agreement with the preferred redshifts predicted by the intrinsic redshift equation. [45]"

[44] H. Arp, E.M. Burbidge, and D. Carosati, Quasars and Galaxy Clusters Paired Across NGC4410 (arXiv: astro-ph/0605453)

[45] M.B. Bell and D. McDiarmid, Six Peaks Visible in Redshift Distribution of 46,400 SDSS Quasars ... Intrinsic Redshift Model (arXiv:astro-ph/0603169 v1 7 Mar 2006).

It's easy for people to not realize - since it's not been reported by science journalists - just how many papers have been published on this topic.

It's also important to understand that nobody woke up one day and decided, "Hey, I'm going to go find periodicity in my quasar dataset." It was not expected when it was observed - so the fact that it has been witnessed by so many astronomers at this point should actually mean something.

I live in central Iowa, in a city that has lots of trees and (in the 1980's anyway) had large areas of the city that were not heavily developed and basically had little islands of forrest in the middle of the city. Around 1985, I got to see an incredible sight. The monarch migration passed right through town, specifically stopping to rest at a wooded area not 300 feet from my apartment.

There were lots of older trees there, mainly maples, that stood 70-100ft tall, and they were dripping with butterflies. Every leaf had several butterflies on it, all of them slowly flexing their wings, making the entire tree look like it was breathing, in a shimmering silver-brown color. There was no green to be seen anywhere in the canopy, everything was covered with monarchs. The branches were even getting visibly weighed down from weight of butterflies, some branches that normally were ten feet off the ground were within hand's reach. You could reach up and slowly brush your hand through a living curtain of butterflies. It was amazing!

This went on for about three days. There were monarchs flying lazily around all over the place, and if you walked slowly though the area, you'd have several of them landing on you as you walked or stopped to stare at them. Monarchs are very large butterflies too. I wouldn't even want to attempt to count how many there were. I did't own a camera back then, but I wish I did. I would have taken so many pictures. But back then I was pretty young, and didn't recognize that this was a sight I would probably never get to see again, so all I have of it are the memories of the trees filled with butterflies.

We had a fair amount of "ditch weed" (milkweek) in the area, especially in the ditches along the gravel roads outside town. I used to go to the empty lots where there was still a lot of "prairie" type land between the neighborhoods, where milkweed could be plentiful, and see if I could find the vibrantly colored monarch caterpillars. They're striped yellow, white, and black. Sometimes if I found one I'd take it home along with some milkweed, and raise it. I'd have to go back and pick more milkweed from time to time. Then it would stop eating and climb to a stick in the jar and make a chrysalis and I'd have to wait a month or so for it to hatch and fly away. it started out a very interesting shape, colored green to match the milkweed, but with a ring of gold (like jewelwry gold) spots around the top crown area, like someone had painted drops of gold paint in a halo around the top of it (like https://naturetime.files.wordp...) A week or so before it hatched, the chrysalis would become transparent, and you could see the gold wings folded up inside, sometimes moving a little.

Nowadays, there are still quite a few trees in town, most yards have a tree, but there are very few vacant grass lots or clumps of trees inside town. Outside town, it's all farmland now, so again not much in the way of woods. But still lots of milkweed in the ditches around town, and I do see a monarch from time to time, but they're pretty rare. I've been considering planting some milkweed in my front yard now, to see if I can attract some monarchs. We don't really consider it a problem weed here in town. The plants are pretty solitary and don't spread fast like some other "weed" do. They have a somewhat attractive large flower also. Not something you want to eat though, they produce a large volume of a very thick white milky sap if you break off a leaf. Monarch caterpillars are one of the few insects that can eat them, and they retain the toxin as butterflies also, which is why the caterpillars and adults are so brightly colored - they're a toxic meal for most birds.

I miss those days!

The Start Menu has a new hat!

https://lachefnet.wordpress.co...

There has been a theory that the end of the last ice age was reversed temporarily, causing a re-glaciation and a dip in global temperatures around 12K years ago. So far no impact craters have been found.

This guy claims to have found a recent airburst impact zone in Mexico and crater impacts in North America, and there is a theory that observations of plasma bursts from a solar event were recorded on rock art.

The data is not available - only the massaged results are available. The raw data would probably show a different result, much like the raw GISS data shows a different result after it's heavily massaged.