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Sunspot Activity Continues To Drop
slreboy writes "The sunspot cycle is behaving a little like the stock market. Just when you think it has hit bottom, it goes even lower. The year 2008 was a bear. There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73 percent). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008. Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87 percent)..."
there was no sunspot activity yesterday. that's 1 out of 1 day or 100% !!
idiots.
The Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics states that bodies in a system must remain in equilibrium. So if we're experiencing global warming where are we getting that energy from? It must be coming from somewhere?
... sunlight that would return to the Sun and heat it back up causing sunspots. I am currently drafting a bill that will move sunspots to the endangered phenomena list. That same bill will introduce that list and hopefully this will be reason enough to form it unlike Senator Kerry's attempt to create the list when he saw Rosie O'Donnell exercising (or so he thought).
The answer, fellow scientists, is that we are stealing that energy from the Sun.
Yes, my charts and ramblings reveal that our greenhouse gases are trapping sunlight
Gentlemen, we must act now. There is no more time for debating and arguing. The sunspots are going away and without that, we may lose our natural magnetic storms and maybe even the precious Aurora Borealis. Our Northern Lights are in danger while you sit back here comfortably in your chairs. Today we are polluters in the hands of an angry environment tomorrow we may be dead. We have angered the environment and now we must face the wrath of the environment. Including, but not limited to, the loss of sunspots.
I don't know about you but when I was a kid, we celebrated sunspots with our parents. Upwards we gazed directly into the sun, fueling the optometry industry. Yes, sunspots create jobs and foster growth. Do you want to share sunspot gazing with your children and their children? I know I do.
But all is not lost. The environment is injured and may be weak enough for us to stop it before it kills us all. I propose a preemptive strike now while we still have time. We could sneak in special units disguised in ponchos and Birkenstock's with thermonuclear weapons that would devastate the environment and save us from certain death at its hands. China has already rendered the environment obsolete and it is our turn to follow suit. Gentlemen, the question today is not if we should deal a final blow to the environment but when.
My work here is dung.
Better send a huge mushroom shaped spaceship to fire a bomb into it!
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
It's stuff like this that makes me ask when will those neo-republicons take global warming seriously??? There's carbon filling up everywhere, so much the sun is losing her spots, and we just sit here and do nothing about it!!!! We need more diamonds!!!! That will get rid of the carbon!! Obama will fix it. He'll give a cadillacic converter to every car, we'll be converting carbon to diamonds every day as we drive. Diamonds are the solution!!!
Qxe4
There's a direct correlation between sunspot activity and the stock market and the economy.
Therefore once sunspots start again the economy will be okay and the stock market will rebound.
Great.
The sun just needs to build up its reserve power before catastrophically attack the Earth in a fury of solar activity in 2012!
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
We can't know how many sunspots there really are if we're only seeing only half the surface of our star, right?
Comparing a 90 day period to a 365 day period isn't a like for like comparison (obviously). Statistically it's meaningless. Why not pick a 1 day period when there wasn't a spot in 2008 and there wasn't a spot in 2009 and say "Sun spot activity is unchanged!". It's silly.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Is this caused by global warming?
Should we implement a green tax in order to help the sun get its spots back?
On the other hand maybe the sun has discoved clearasil..
"The sunspot cycle is behaving a little like the stock market."
First the pirates, then the stockmarket, then sunspots. Is there anything that global warming doesn't affect?!
Jupiter's Great Red Spot is shrinking, the number of sunspots on our sun is dwindling, and it's getting closer and closer to December 21, 2012. Anyway, it's been nice knowing you guys, but "So long, and thanks for all the fish"!
1) The Sun does effect global temperature
2) It's effects are pretty immediate
3) The Global Warming Trend does not follow the Sun activities close enough for it to be the cause of the trend.
4) The only thing we know of at this time that could be causing this global warming trend is CO2
5)We are talking about the release of trillions of tons of CO2 that has been buried for millions of years.
6) If we keep increasing will will make the planet uninhabitable by us.
7) We have workable solutions to this right now.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
/rant
While it may not be time to panic, there are some other startling signs
At this point there's nothing really we can do, but it may need an explanation as to why it has hit such a low, and when the below-average maximum will occur (supposedly in 2012).
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_minimum
I picked a good year to get licensed for ham radio. I sure get sick of hearing about how you can work Australia on a wet noodle during high Sunspot years. At least the low bands are reliable, but then again those bands require ginormous antennas. So as a consequence my house looks like some sort of martian communications test zone. I think my neighbors fear me enough not to seriously ask what's going on.
My poetry site welcomes the unusual.
I would like to point out that this law states:
"If A and B are each in thermal equilibrium with C, A is also in thermal equilibrium with B."
Important links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeroth_law_of_thermodynamics
and this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The pendulum swings both ways, and I think that Sol may swing back with a fury from this sub solar minimum to an above level solar maximum. We may wind up with the predicted power problems and possibly airline flights having to fly lower than usual to reduce dosages to their pax.
Then again, we don't really know our star very well and it is an older one, in the scope of things.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Cool! you'll fit right into our LUG! We prefer scat and ubuntu, though occasionally we try fisting and debian.
Not only is the summary ripped from the linked article without quoting it, but the article is plagiarized in whole from ScienceDaily! I knew I'd seen it before this article, and this explains why. The blogger even hotlinked the image from science daily, wasting their bandwidth.
The linked article in the summary should be adjusted to the original ScienceDaily article and the entire summary should be quoted from it rather than attributed to slreboy.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
Another plot to "The day after tomorrow"? THE END IS NEAR!! RUN FOR THE... ops... run for... where? nevermind.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Not now the sun is quiet.
What this quiet time is doing is failing to pressure us into hardening the electrical grid against electromagnetic storm events. So in 5 or 10 years when we pull up out of this point we will all have electrical cars pulling power from desert and off shore wind farms over long lines. Then the electromagnetic storm will take out the continental electrical grid.
http://www.niburu.nl/index.php?articleID=20577
http://richarddawkins.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=76911
Fun times.
The conditions on the shortwave bands seriously suck right now! I miss those "wet noodle" days that AI1P, Mr_Perl mentioned where you could work Australia with 4 watts into a mobile antenna on 20 meters and get a 589 report.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
As MC Hawking clearly states:
"You can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave the game,
'cause entropy will take it all 'though it seems a shame.
The second law, as we now know, is quite clear to state,
that entropy must increase and not dissipate.
Creationists always try to use the second law, to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!"
Don't overstate the case. It would make the planet less live-able in certain areas (principally by being underwater) and make other areas much more live-able for humans. The problem is the dislocation (which would likely happen over multiple generations) not any threat to the species.
I realize that HAM radio is a bit of an anachronism in the eyes of most slashdot readers, but it's still the most viable medium for emergency communications. Unfortunately, with sunspot activity being so low, HF communications become very limited. Whole bands of RF spectrum are almost unusable, because the E-layer of the ionosphere can no longer bounce higher frequencies of radio waves. 40m wavelength and lower tend to still be usable, 20m is come-and-go, and 17m and higher become sporadic or completely unusable.
I'm 31, I've been a HAM for 6 years. My cell phone often doesn't get coverage where I roam, and my power and internet and landline phone have been knocked out by storms and provider mistakes. Radio works when all else fails... ...but sometimes it works better than others!
The sun is outsourcing its sun spot activity to another star in a less economically developed solar system.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
Sunspot activity obviously has a lot to do with "global warming"...
Of course, that would be science instead of fascist politics.
Or maybe they were right in the 70s when they warned of the next ice age.
"El Nino is climate change, La Nina is weather"
Extremely simple explanation for global warming is *sunspots*:
http://www.321gold.com/editorials/hoye/hoye040909.pdf
NASA s latest report (March 2009) on sunspots is that there will be a massive ramp up of activity in 2010. It does not look that way to me nor the above author. Still another year or so is required to truly show the statistical trend.
Real science will prevail.
whodathunkit
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It used some Proactiv. Hope it doesn't experience any side effects
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Sorry for picking but I believe you mean "for our other readers" not "for are other readers" in the title. Those phonetic word swaps are a pet peeve of mine. Anyway carry on.
All we need to do is generate solar fusion eruptions by directing highly energetic particle beams (see article) onto the sun's surface thereby causing a superfluid gas eruption.
With the way the economy is now even the Sun has been forced to do some rightsizing while they explore new synergies and refocus on their core competencies.
I checked, and there's a little black spot on the sun today, the same old thing as yesterday.
Visit http://www.spaceweather.com/ for a real time holographic view of the far side of the sun. They've been able to detect far-side sunspots for several years now. Full details and images are available, as well as a primer about the process; look on the left sidebar beneath the front-side daily photograph.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
This is the first spot! ;-)
Solar Angular Momentum seems to describe solar activity much better than NASA's latest predictions/models. The next few years should be telling. I've seen no refutation of this possible explanation. Maybe someone can help me find one?
Actually, the (less strawman) classic argument from the second law of thermo is to apply the second law to the universe. Is the universe a closed system? If so, then second law implies eventual heat death. Therefore, we should select at least 1 choice of these options:
1. Universe is not a closed system (religious types would argue this to be true, with God as the external thing affecting it)
2. Universe is of finite age (creationist types tend to go this way, which physics eventually caught up with as big bang beat out steady state theory. When steady state theory was popular, then option 1 was argued as the reason for option 2).
3. The second law is not universally true, it is simply a localized phenomena.
That's the basic form of the second law argument as I encountered it in casual conversation with actual engineers and science folks back when I was in college.
1) The Sun does effect global temperature
True.
2) It's effects are pretty immediate
False. The effects take dozens to hundreds of years.
3) The Global Warming Trend does not follow the Sun activities close enough for it to be the cause of the trend.
False. Sunspot activities correlate to Earth's temperatures much more closely than any other known factor.
4) The only thing we know of at this time that could be causing this global warming trend is CO2
False. We already know enough about carbon dioxide to know that it impossible for it to be causing the recent warming.
5)We are talking about the release of trillions of tons of CO2 that has been buried for millions of years.
FACT: It will take thousands of years to emit that much CO2.
6) If we keep increasing will will make the planet uninhabitable by us.
Absolutely, demonstrably, irresponsibly FALSE. This isn't just false; it's a deliberate lie. There is no science -- absolutely none -- that supports it, and plenty of science that refutes it.
7) We have workable solutions to this right now.
Partially true. In fact, we have only ONE workable solution: kill off 90% of the human race and condemn those who remain to a pre-industrial-age existence of poverty, disease and starvation.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
gun ownership is a right AND a responsibility
as such, it must be strictly limited and licensed and monitored
people understand this about car ownership, why they don't understand this about gun ownership is beyond me
its some sort of fucking quasireligious fanaticism with guns in this fucking country
its the second amendment, not the goddamn ten commandments
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Do we have the ability to measure and the records to compare Venus' annual temperature? Wouldn't it provide a stable base line to compare our own planet's temperature against? It's just a thought and I'm sure someone has tried it, but I've never heard it mentioned. Venus seems like it would be a great indicator of planetary warming due to solar variance.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
You should hope you're wrong. The good thing about the global warming scare, true or false, is it gives the masses of dumb people some kind of tangible cost in the near future for their use of an unsustainable and unhealthy energy policy.
The backlash against "global warming" hype will have the opposite effect, it will make people say 'fuck it, I'm gonna drive an SUV and leave my AC at 68 degrees all day'.
Global warming is not the only (potential, if you buy into it) problem with our energy policy. Another is just plain old air quality. Our air quality is shit, and one big reason is our use of hydrocarbons.
Another flaw is that, holy shit! Guess what?! There's only so much oil and coal in the ground and it's going to get more and more expensive to pull out of the ground!
Then of course there's the US (and other country) blood spilled in pointless middle east wars, etc...
The people most scared and scary about global warming may or may not be dumbasses. But at least the actions it makes them drive towards are the right actions.
They are acting like a jilted lover after being turned down by Sun.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/162748/sun_blundered_by_turning_down_ibm.html
after all, there's over 300 years worth of data on sunspot counts:
http://sidc.oma.be/sunspot-data/
Pick your own interval for analysis.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
... like guns, or global warming.
In general, our common sense fails us badly whenever we're looking at rare events -- and in spite of what the evening news may make you believe, shootings are rare events. The solution is to look to science and statistics rather than common sense.
The correct approach to gun regulation is to examine the numbers and look at what kinds of gun control actually have beneficial effects on crime rates. Also, we need to analyze the incidence of crimes prevented by gun ownership. Even the Brady Campaign acknowledges about 100,000 such per year in the US; pro-gun organizations estimate much larger numbers.
These numbers can provide a truly rational basis for making decisions about gun control, which we can then balance appropriately against the limitation of human rights imposed by gun control, which is where common sense comes in.
If common sense alone were sufficient, we wouldn't need science and math.
Getting back to (or at least closer to) the topic, science is the right way to approach questions about global warming and man's impact on it as well. In both cases, our approach may change the more we learn, but the RIGHT way to handle it is to make policy supported by our best scientific understanding... with an appropriate appreciation for the limits of that understanding, and balancing the policy changes against impacts on people and their way of life.
"Balancing", BTW, doesn't mean "ignore the science if it would upset the economy", but it does mean that pragmatic concerns must be considered and weighed against the risks predicted by the science... and those risks must be evaluated not only in terms of likely severity, but also in terms of degree of certainty.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
compared between the usa and say the uk
i'd say just one of those deaths is worth more than 1,000 prevented muggings
and i can't imagine anyone with any grasp on reason or logic thinking that the number of deaths prevented by guns is anywhere near, by orders of magnitude, the number of pointless deaths commited with guns
and this is laughable:
"we can then balance appropriately against the limitation of human rights imposed by gun control"
i think a valid human right is the right to life
i think that right pretty much trumps any other right you are alluding to
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The sun spot cycle appears to be on track: http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml
anyone committed to getting a gun will get one, no matter what the law is
duh
the simple and obvious truth is that when you make it harder to get guns, less people get guns. its really as simple as that
the goal is not to reduce gun ownership to zero, or to prevent a massacre by a committed zealot (by the way, the moron in pittsburgh was acting on the fear obama's administration was going to take away his guns... if that irony doesn't speak volumes to you about what the real issue is here, i don't know what will)
the goal is simply get less guns in less hands, for any reason, or by any means. then you simply cut down on senseless casual deaths
easy access to guns: senseless gun deaths
hard access to guns: much less gun deaths
i don't know why this simple obvious logic escapes you
this whole "outlaw guns and only outlaws will have guns" is a nice piece of propagandistic turn of phrase, but it completely ignores the reality of limiting access: less senseless death
i think the human right to life trumps any right you can allude to being trampled on by stricter laws
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Any rational, moral, self-made man knows dependence on the Sun is entirely ludicrous. A man may seek out and enjoy the riches of his own efforts without regard of the Sun, Moon, weather, other men, or little furry animals. This is why we should cut taxes.
Japan is a much more homogenous society, all of which tend to be more stable and have a lower crime rate. Just is, is all. This may be politically incorrect to point out, but it is the raw data. In addition, they are extremely intolerant of millions of illegal or barely quasi illegal aliens running around their nation, whereas the US has tens of millions who have been for the most part unchecked. And several hundred thousand (figures vary but it is quite high) of whom are pretty nasty and violent criminals, and they constitute a rather high level of the violent crimes committed, a lot higher than just looking at random population versus crime stats. It is simply off the chart there. You can look that up, incarceration rates and what for. Very politically incorrect, but the numbers are there.
And lastly, the US is different from all other nations *by design*. we are a society based on personal sovereignty, which allows more freedoms, and byu desiogn we also made a point of having the people always mistrustful of too powerful government, noting in the past they always de evolved into dictatorships. the time scale may differ, but not the outcome.. We aren't into that allegiance to some king or emperor or whatever. A long time ago we decided that "more freedoms" was a better idea than less freedoms, even if it introduced other problems.
And if you want to go way back, before we had any gun laws and we had a *true* second amendment, even the "wild wild west" days, the crime rates were lower then. And state by state and area by area you can see the differences. For instance our state with the least amount of gun laws, vermont, pretty consistently ranks at the top for lowest crime rate nationally. Inside that state itself, crime rates are higher in both the more urban areas and in areas with less of a homogenous population, so that is a more accurate comparison with japan, both highly urban areas and rugged rural areas with a lower population structure, plus by and large more homogenous in cultural makeup. the only difference is gun ownership. You could take that "guns equal a lot more crime" and conclude vermont would have the highest rate of violent crime..yet it doesn't. You have to ask yourself then, why not? compare that another way to areas of the US with the most strict gun laws, they usually score pretty high in violent crime rate, plus have a less-homogenous local society. don't know about you, but I am starting to see a pattern here. If you want to look at europe, the two nations with the most gun ownership freedoms, switzerland and the czech republic, have some of the lowest crime rates. Looking closer there, you see the same pattern, more homogenous areas have less crime, whereas the urban areas with a more diverse cultural scene and higher density have higher crime rates.
Make of that what you will. The bottom line is the US is not anyplace else, we (used to anyway) had a better handle on things with regards personal gun ownership before they started disarming the regular honest folks.(and gunlaws, restrictions on the second amendment, were a direct racist "jim crow" law effort, along with the poll tax and anti miscegnation laws and so forth. This kept going all the way to the 1968 gun control act, which most anyone who is aware of and speaking honestly about, will admit it was an anti black law because of the riots between 65 and 68).
Criminals will always get weapons, a firearm or a knife or what have you. A nation with only the bad guys and the government armed is known as a criminal police state. Now that doesn't negate the fact that a criminal police state might be "civilized" as to internal crime rates, but a slave society with just rulers and serfs can still be "civilized". We prefer here a bit more freedom, even with the consequences, and we really *don't care* what your outside nation thinks about it, because that is your business.
And looking at the real mega statistics, and I will return to your idea of japan being less crimina
could you tell me how to fit the country known as the uk into an internet link?
k thx
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There are only weather forecasters. Climate science is not science, that would require testability and we don't have anything to test with. When weather forecasters start chucking millions of tonnes of sulphate aerosols (or whatever) into the atmosphere, then it will be science.
Deleted
Now I have another weather based topic.
In the UK all we really talk about is the weather.
I will enjoy asking people "What do you think about this blank sun? Do you think it will last long?"
Because you always need a smart fox!
Where's the data? Are the errors in the data small enough to support your claim? Are the warming trends really similar enough to point to a common origin? What are the odds of a coincidence (N = 5 is not a statistically large sample)?
Keep in mind that it's only been pretty recently that we've been able to measure global temperatures here on Earth with sufficient accuracy to make such statements. Do you really think we have comparable capability to measure other planets?
Fisting AND Debian?
Isn't that redundant?
Don't worry, Obama plans on blocking the sun!
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,513242,00.html
for the one metric we care about here in this analogy: less people drank
if you strictly control guns, less people will get them. ie, less senseless deaths will occur. this logic is flawless, i don't see how or why you would contest this
making something illegal or strictly controlly it doesn't stop anyone COMMITTED from getting that thing. but it does stop the casual yahoo. and that's the bulk of what we are talking about here
strict laws most definitely reduces the prevalency of that illicit material. for good reason or not. with marijuana, the limitation is not very morally valid. but the whole idea behind limiting guns is to limit senseless deaths: morally valid
you in fact understand this:
"Yes, it's obvious that if there were no guns they would be no gun crime. There would be other types of violent crime though, human nature being what is is. There would be 40k less deaths a year from cars if there were no cars, so we should make it really hard to get those too."
no one can pick up a knife and kill 13 people in a classroom in under a minute. the issue is that guns are a force multiplier. human violence will never go away, but we can easily reduce the number of force multiplies around. you wont stop all spree shootings, as germany with strict gun laws demonstrates. and you wont stop the truly evil committed criminals from getting guns. but you WILL stop the casual yahoos. you will stop the truly deranged who wouldn't pass review. you would remove the bulk of senseless deaths
less guns means less senseless killings. i dont understand why you cant see that this observation trumps every other observation you make or think you can make on the topic. less guns=less senseless deaths is a valid and easily reachable goal, and it trumps all other topics in play here. is there any human right that you can point out to me that trumps the human right to life?
in fact i believe that petty criminality will go up with less gun ownership. guns do deter petty crime. with less guns, there will be more muggings, for example
so what's the going rate on equivalency rate of muggings to senseless deaths? 1,000 muggings a life? this is absurd moral equivalency, but it works for me temporarily to make this point: if the usa has 10x less senseless deaths due to guns every year, with strict gun control laws, then i can easily put up with a 10,000x increase in petty crimes. why can't you?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's the lack of pirates, duh.
Sounds pretty gay.
if we have stricter laws, you'll still get one if your intent truly is as virtuous as you say
meanwhile, all the casual yahoos with guns goes away
so what's the problem?
you can't imagine that the reasons people pick up guns aren't always virtuous?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
stricter control of guns=less guns in circulation
true or false?
less guns in circulation=less gun usage, in heroic situations, and in criminal situations
true or false?
less gun usage=less senseless deaths, regardless of the virtue or lack therof of the person using the gun
true or false?
therefore, guns should be strictly controlled, in the name of reducing senseless deaths
please, dismantle the logic there. i welcome you to disproving anything above
let petty crime climb if the crime is gunless and therefore means less deaths. a trade off i am 100% happy with. more swords? more knives? 100% fine: knives are force multiplier of a much smaller degree than a gun, therefore, a knife has a much smaller chance of resulting in death
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Now, either all that hyperactivity untwisted whatever muscles needed untwisting withing the sun's inner workings, leading to the present period of serene spinal well adjustment
OR
We are entering a period of wild swings in sunspot activity ( not mutually exclusive with the previous case since possibly order and calm can foster huge buildups of solar crampitude )
...
The Universe is a closed system.
the recent spree shootings in the last week in the usa were almost all, if not completely all, committed with legally obtained guns
"most gun crime is committed by people who have already illegally obtained a gun"
i doubt that "fact", but for the sake of logical argument, lets assume for the moment that every single gun used in every single shooting spree and every single criminal act were obtained 100% illegally
guess what: if legal guns were more strictly controlled, there would be even less illegal gun circulation in circulation as well. just because there are less guns in general, less legal guns to go illegal. you are never ever going to stop the illegal flow of guns, no matter what. but every inch you tighten the vise on gun trade, it makes it that much harder for someone to get a gun, via all legal and illegal channels. more tightly controlling guns will mean less legal and illegal yahoos will own guns. simple fact
you tighten gun control, you get less sensless deaths. meanwhile, if your interest in owning a gun is truly virtuous, you will have to jump through more hoops to get your gun, but if you are a person who truly understands the connection between rights and responsibilities, you will have no problem with the increased red tape, in the interest of less guns on the street, and therefore less senselss deaths with such a potent force multiplier in easy reach
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
anyone who has ever tried to debate gun control realizes there are a lot of "facts" out there that are nothing but skewed propaganda, both for and against gun control. come to me with logic and reason, or don't come to me at all. "i have ten bullshit links and you have nine bullshit links! i win!" zzz
allow the battle bullshit propaganda "facts" to commence:
"Live with it, gun owners say, and if our murder rate is three times that of the United Kingdom and Canada, five times that of Germany, that's the deal. The price. For consolation, I guess, there is the fact that the homicide rate has been flat for some time, down from the highs of the 1980s. Still, nearly 17,000 Americans are murdered each year -- about 70 percent by guns -- and 594,276 lost their lives betweens 1976 and 2005."
http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/the-guns-of-spring/?ref=opinion
ok, now its your turn
the rules of the game are: you show me a link to some insurmountable "facts", and then i reply with a link to some insurmoutnable "facts", and we regurgitate "facts" until oblivion
or: how about you approach we with some logic and reason?
such as: if there are less force multipliers lying around in easy reach, less senseless deaths occur
your move
i await my "facts"
zzz
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It will be really interesting to plot the sunspot activity as candlesticks and see if we can predict the next move, as we learned from FOREX markets, for instance. Plot some resistance and support lines, pivot points, EMA, RSI and MACD and try to guess what's next.
According to wikipedia sunspots go in a cycle. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunspot_cycle) So in the case we are be going into a low period of the cycle, honestly though, I don't think I want to be around when there is a high period in the sunspot cycle, it would appear that it would probably cause some massive solar flares (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_flares) which would probably douse the earth in a nice bath of solar radiation (yes i know there is currently solar radiation hitting the earth, but during a solar flare the radiation is more powerful and concentrated).
and please change the links in the summary to point to the proper author of the article.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
That is because my dear Creationist friends try to take Entropy as a philosophical rather then a scientific idea. They are not the only ones who do this sort of thing though, so let us not single htem out. Far too many people try to base philosophy in science that they do not understand (Quantum Mechanics disproves/proves fate/determinism!).
DISCLAIMER: I am very rarely serious. If the above comment seems asinine makes no sense, it is most likely a bad joke.
when you cite such ideologically neutral sources as the fucking CATO institute
pffft
propaganda anyone?
here's something more neutral: fucking logic
if something is harder to get, less people get it
i know, i'm really a radical thinker here
zzz
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
are not limited and licensed and monitored enough
thats the point
and this has nothing to do with sunspots
its slashdot, not an academic conference
but we're all going to get the -1 offtopic boot anyways
as if going to slashdot in the first place isn't offtopic ;-P
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
thanks for the snake oil links form outright ideologically skewed sources and outright propaganda from random cranks
how's this, an actual fucking scholarly article?:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2006862
"It should come as no surprise that accurate data on alcohol consumption during Prohibition do not exist."
so there's no data for you to depend on. no REAL data, as opposed to cranks and propaganda which you have linked me to so far
so how about using some reason and logic with me instead? is that within the realm of your abilities?
here, i'll try:
if something is harder to get, less people will get it
you'll forgive me, i'm really going way out on a limb with that assertion, i know
(snicker)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
i'll take your avoidance of the topic and the personal attack as a tacit admission that you've lost the argument
next time, be intellectually honest and admit when you are wrong
have a better one
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"Partially true. In fact, we have only ONE workable solution: kill off 90% of the human race and condemn those who remain to a pre-industrial-age existence of poverty, disease and starvation"
Bingo!!! Anyone who does not support population reduction and claims to be 'environmentally conscious' is a hypocrite. I don't know if pre-industrial-age existence is absolutely necessary to clean up the environment, as there does come a point where the effects of human activity are cleared out by non-human environmental factors as fast as humans can create them. Of course, this equilibrium might require reducing the population by 98% or more.
" All your sunspots are belong to us! "
Changes in solar output may take a long time to effect global temperature, but the daily cycle of heating and cooling, and seasons, are effects of the sun. I suppose those things average out for the globe, but it would really suck to go without the sun for even a couple of days.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
jefferson
hobbes
etc.
these are why we live with modern freedoms
not the gun
the gun is used in regimes right now today to keep down citizens agitating for more freedoms
that the second amendment somehow keeps us free from fascism has to be the biggest lie there is. in fact, if we were to ever fall to fascism, it would be via those appealing to will to power through visceral force of the gun. our modern freedoms are crushed by mustering and agitating fools in the hinterlands with their guns, not depending on them for some sort of continuing protection. poppycock
modern rights and freedoms only exist in the context of civil society. nothing civil ever happens at the end of a gun or a sword. you have some strange notions indeed if you think anything having to do with visceral force is anything but an enemy of modern rights and freedoms
oh certainly guns are useful in keeping us free in outright war with competing ideologies from foreign geopolitical entities. but that's battlefield issues, not domestic policy
a gun or a sword or any implement of visceral force is a replacement for your sense of reason and goodwill faith towards respecting the notion of freedom in domestic, civil exchanges. in fact, when a gun is used in any civil, domestic setting, any notion of freedom has long since expired in that context
the gun protects you from nothing. it is a false vain crutch. use your mind alone, or fail utterly to perceive what the notion of freedom even is
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The third comma in the second sentence is unnecessary. /.?
Also, do you spend all day thinking about things like this, or do you only daydream about such things while on
if something is harder to acquire, less people will get it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
it is you who have been propagandized so thoroughly that you can't tell simple obvious truth:
if something is harder to acquire, less people get it
i await your absurd refutation of this obvious logic
i guess if 1+1=1 must be true in order to retain your opinion, so it will be
its sad how otherwise rational men will retain a deathgrip on illogic out of stubbornness and a misplaced passion in a failed ideology
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In the parent post, I said
Sunspot activities correlate to Earth's temperatures much more closely than any other known factor.
I should have said, "Sunspot activities correlate to Earth's temperatures much more closely than any other known factor other than a lack of Pirates."
I regret the error. May the FSM forgive me, and I hope you're all having a blessed Pasta-over.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
I ask merely because I have some Advil here. I could give it to you.
For those interested in communicating with Australia, you can forget about radio. Courtesy of kdawson/timothy et al, Slashdot is now the world's primary Australia-promotional tool, and you can talk about that nation and its greatness to your heart's content.
So 1913 had 311 sunspot-free days, and in the 95 years since then, we've never had more than 266?
What happened in 1913?
Sunspots have practically nothing to do with "Global Warming", or rather, practically nothing to do with climate change. If humans stopped producing too much Greenhouse pollution, climate change could slow or reverse as we returned to our inherited equilibrium. Continuing to emit too much Greenhouse pollution, regardless of sunspots or other natural activity, ensures we're changing the climate too much for our civilization to survive the effects.
--
make install -not war
He only reads /. for the goatse.cx links
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Actually, you can argue quite readily that evolution - at least the genetic diversity aspect - is driven by entropy. When you run that diversity over a selective grid, you get an illusion of "progress" which is what creationists frequently confound with evolution. Since it isn't, the whole issue is and has always been a debate over a strawman.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
The entire state of North Dakota doesn't exist? With its lax gun laws it had TWO murders in 2008, both STABBINGS! Mexico does have strict gun laws and look where they're heading.
P.S. the "shift" key down next to the "z" key makes big letters.
You could also argue that because this universe exists in a relatively low entropy state right now yet formed from a high entropy state, the second law simply can't be true when applied to the whole universe.
Errrrrrrrr... who said anything about equilibrium? Zeroth law of thermodynamics doesn't say shit on dynamic systems; nor time for that matter...
Errrrrrrrr... who said anything about equilibrium? Zeroth law of thermodynamics doesn't say $%£! on dynamic systems; nor time for that matter...
It always amazes me that people doubt the ability of climate scientsist to monitor and explain changes on Earth where there are hundreds of lines of evidence with literally millions of data sets. What's even more amazing is they base these doubts on evidence from the same climate scientists monitoring and explaining changes in other planets, planets where we have far fewer and much shorter lines of evidence.
Do you really think that many scientists have somehow failed to notice the firey ball in the sky? Besides the output of the sun has gone down over the last decade and the RATE of temprature INCREASED has somewhat flattened over the last few. With a bit of luck it will go into a long quiet period and give us a bit more time to do something "down to earth" about our emmissions.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I may be mistaken but i think the general observation you speak of is that earth and sun collectively make a closed system. not that I'm a creationist but i don't think the argument is as simple as you put it.
What do you mean with 'the second law implies heat death'? Who is going to die? Humanity, the universe, ...
If you mean that in the end the universe will get very hot because of entropy, that would be wrong because the universe is continuously expanding. In the end it will be kind of lukewarm, or cold, because all warmth has spread out.
Having the ability to see the sun from all sides at once would be an interesting way to see where sunspots go when they're not facing us. Perhaps they are running away from the visible face of the sun.
Wikipedia has an entry on "heat death". It basically refers to the second law reaching the point that heat "dies", that is, everything gets down near absolute zero.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe
You should hope you're wrong. The good thing about the global warming scare, true or false, is it gives the masses of dumb people some kind of tangible cost in the near future for their use of an unsustainable and unhealthy energy policy.
Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is still a bad idea, particularly when the mechanism being employed is government regulation. Allowing that sort of behavior opens the door to all kinds of stupid crap. Next thing you know, we'll have rules restricting us to arbitrarily small quantities of liquid on airplanes, when the supposed danger from them was completely imaginary.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
... if you WANT or need to base the religion on something - sun is in the advantage BECAUSE IT IS REAL.
We digressed too far... XD
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Heres's how: SOHO
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.