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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)..."
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.
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.
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..
Trolling aside, the sun doesn't follow the Gregorian calendar. Making statistics using the Gregorian calendar is therefore irrelevant at best.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
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
The sun rotates. In the course of a month, we see it from all sides.
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
Good point...after decades of studying sunspot activity, it's only natural for the Sun to get self-conscious about everyone staring at its blemishes all the time. It's only natural it would try and hide them by turning the other way.
The sun is very "spinny" and "swirly." And spots last long enough to come into view eventually.
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.
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
The material world doesn't understand seconds either. Should we drop the whole of physics? A year is just a sampling period which can be compared to previous periods. Any natural cycles will be apparent regardless of the period chosen (nyquist notwithstanding).
Wrong.
We use the Calendar, and we use it together measurements, look for trends, make predictions, etc...
By your 'logic' Atomic vibrations don't follow our time keeping methods therefore any clock using them would be irrelevant.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Heat piracy!
We've been stealing the unique output of this "star", and now the cows are coming home to roost. We've been warned about this by our friendly RIAA (Radiating Industry Association of All) - if we keep illegally taking this stuff and not supporting the stars, eventually they will stop producing.
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"...
First the pirates, then the stockmarket, then sunspots. Is there anything that global warming doesn't affect?!
Uh, in the case of pirates, you have the relationship backwards. Global warming does not cause pirates; it's a lack of pirates that causes global warming.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
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.
I checked, and there's a little black spot on the sun today, the same old thing as yesterday.
I think his point was that you should not compare a year's worth of data to 3 months' worth. They could simply take the last 365 days and compare it to the 365 before that and it would make a lot more sense.
The problem, of course, is all the -other- people already using calendar years with their data like it means something.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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?
We can't know how many sunspots there really are if we're only seeing only half the surface of our star, right?
We see more than half of the surface.
A technique called "helioseismic holography" can detect sunspots on the far side of the sun. There is also a pair of spacecraft called STEREO which are in a solar orbit that lets them see parts of the sun that are not visible from earth.
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?"
Although I know very little about the causes of sunspots (aside from cooler surface temperatures, of course), it seems to me there may be something more to our calendar than one would think. We base it on the planet's revolution. Since the Earth exerts a pull on the Sun (albeit a small one) as it revolves, maybe the calendar isn't completely unrelated. If the pull of a planet on a star is enough to locate one many light-years away, perhaps it could have an effect on something like sunspots.
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
How can there be sunspots on the dark side of the sun?
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
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
That's probably the most profound thought I've read this year. Who is DM?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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!
Fisting AND Debian?
Isn't that redundant?
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
That's probably the most profound thought I've read this year...
You must not have thought about it.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Don Marquis. Unfortunately, the sig blank isn't long enough to put that info in.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
The point of a quality calendar is to coordinate the counting of the days (usually sunrises or sunsets historically) and the changes of the seasons... principally to predict with a modest margin of error when to plant seasonal agricultural products. That is the whole point of leap days and irregular lengths of months (the time scale tied loosely to lunar cycles).
As to if the orbital positions of the various planets, with emphasis on the Earth and perhaps Jupiter (a much, much stronger influence on the Sun gravitationally speaking) have on the sunspot cycles.... I have not heard of any particular correlation suggested. The typical 11 year sunspot cycle is less than the period of Jupiter's orbit, although other factors certainly can be pointed out as well.
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 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
Hmm.. Being rather sun ignorant, I can't rule out some of the following possibility:
What if the sun periodically shifts between being spotty on one side and then the other, where 'side' precesses approximately 12'th the way around the sun each month? Could the longer solar cycles really be the manifestation of the earth's orbit not quite being in sync with this almost monthly precession?
...
Potatoes are deadly poisonous. Proof: almost everyone who has eaten a potato is dead.
...
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.
I like shark porn.
Redundant?! Are you effing kidding me?! How is that redundant?! It was one of the first things posted! Maybe we should stop giving out mod points to Stevie Wonder?!
"for the one metric we care about here in this analogy: less people drank"
Actually you are wrong.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=1360
An that was just one of hits you'd get if you took a moment & looked around instead of assuming something. You seem to be doing that an awful lot in this thread.
There is a war going on for your mind.
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
The material world understands seconds just fine. They get them at discount alls and sales all the time.
Heh heh.
wake up and hold your nose
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.
Although I know very little about the causes of sunspots (aside from cooler surface temperatures, of course), it seems to me there may be something more to our calendar than one would think. We base it on the planet's revolution. Since the Earth exerts a pull on the Sun (albeit a small one) as it revolves, maybe the calendar isn't completely unrelated. If the pull of a planet on a star is enough to locate one many light-years away, perhaps it could have an effect on something like sunspots.
Q1: which planet exerts the greatest gravitational force on the Sun?
Q2: which planet exerts the greatest tidal force on the Sun?
If you search for the answers to these two questions, you'll probably learn a lot besides. I won't tell you what the right answers are, but the Earth is the wrong answer in both cases, and by a good factor. Our calendar year is essentially irrelevant to sunspots.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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 thought it was Demetri Martin. Sounds like something he might say...
Furthermore, the sun is approximately 1,676,700,000,000 days old. How significant is a sample of less than %0.00000000025?
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?
Actually I'd assume that when your trying to measure the temperature of a whole planet, being too close would be a disadvantage, it's hard to see the forrest with all those damned trees in the way.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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.
I assume the "1/12 of the way each month" number is based on the fact that we travel 1/12 of the way through an orbit each month... but again, the Sun itself makes a full rotation under us every month. So we'd actually have to suppose that the sunspot activity was moving quite rapidly around the Sun (relative to the Sun's surface) to keep out of our view.
But the expected (and historically observed) behavior is, sunspot activity moves with the Sun's surface. If there were activity on the far side one day, then about two weeks later that activity would have rotated into our view. That sort of observation is one of the ways solar rotation was first noticed.
Could a series of short-lived sunspots just happen to be forming out of our view and dying out before rotating into our view? Seems unlikely, but I don't guess I can disprove it. The thing is, that would still indicate that either (1) the dynamics of the Sun have substantially changed so that sunspots now tend to do that more than they used to, or (2) sunspot activity has decreased to the point that nearly the only ones left are the ones that behave that way. If I had to bet on one of those two, I'd bet on the latter; but again, I think it's reasonable that we assume sunspots aren't "hiding" from us as it were.
Global warming is a side effect of the same thing that is causing the "very deep solar minimum" This is the lowest sunspot activity since 1913. This is being caused by a large magnetic interloper planet in our solar system since about 2003 -- the stuff of great action movies - NASA isn't talking about it, they know, of course. They've known since 1983 about the approach of this planet, but like typical US government agencies, they stomped on the media reporting about it, but not before a story was published in (I believe) the Washington Post in '83. I would think that the data from 1913 would not be as accurate as today, of course; (For those who would question my assertion on the basis that we have had deep solar minimums before). Also, Clearly we have not had "Global Warming" in conjunction with deep solar minimums before as well. The Science: This planet is very large, (4 X the size and 29 X the mass of Earth) Being extremely magnetic it is quieting our Sun with it's powerful North Pole pointing directly at the sun. Also, since Earth's liquid magma is also very magnetic as well, it is interacting with the magnetic influence of this planet causing a roiling of the magma. It is this roiling that is generating the heat which is causing the "Global Warming" No, it's NOT carbon dioxide, our Earth is heating up from the core "outwards" to Earth's surface. Look to see this planet not in 2012, but 2010 summer/fall. Don't go near the water. Crow.
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin!
That's probably the most .. Ah never mind.
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.
There are obviously stronger forces than the Earth. I never said we were the cause of sunspot cycles. I merely hinted that planets rotating the Sun, one of which is ours, may contribute.
... 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
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