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North Magnetic Pole Moving East Due To Core Flux

National Geographic is reporting that the migration of Earth's magnetic pole has accelerated again and is now racing in Russia's direction at a blazing 40 miles per year. This movement began in earnest around 1904 at about 9 miles per year and has been accelerating since. "Geologists think Earth has a magnetic field because the core is made up of a solid iron center surrounded by rapidly spinning liquid rock. This creates a 'dynamo' that drives our magnetic field. Scientists had long suspected that, since the molten core is constantly moving, changes in its magnetism might be affecting the surface location of magnetic north. Although the new research seems to back up this idea, Chulliat is not ready to say whether magnetic north will eventually cross into Russia. 'It's too difficult to forecast,' Chulliat said. Also, nobody knows when another change in the core might pop up elsewhere, sending magnetic north wandering in a new direction."

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  1. Re:Global Warming by Entrope · · Score: 5, Interesting

    An operating system may be too large and complicated for any one person to understand. A code of laws might also be that complicated.

    A single bill, however, is most closely analogous to a patch -- or at most a patch series -- and no open source OS would accept a patch that no one claims to understand. Are you willing to run code on your computer by maintainers who accept that kind of patch? If not, why are you willing to live your entire life according to laws that are equally poorly understood and maintained?

    Even beyond that, computer programs tend to be inherently less ambiguous and more deterministic than laws. These traits allow useful decomposition of programs into a hierarchy that allows a person to focus on single parts of the whole. Because laws lack those traits (and especially in the US where courts look at history and precedent), it is much harder to decompose laws into elements that one can analyze separately. This is compounded by legislatures being loath to revise even obviously outdated or buggy laws, which makes it hard to correct bugs in the law. (The Internet has many examples of dumb or silly laws; an obviously buggy one is the US federal law prohibiting compensation for bone marrow donations by classifying bone marrow as an organ.) On the whole, it is much more important for legislators to understand the whole of the law than it is for software developers to understand the whole of a program.

    Voters are well-known to be rationally ignorant of their choices at the ballot box. Your argument is essentially that legislators should be rationally ignorant regarding the laws they vote on. Is that really what you want to encourage in law-makers?