The first day I'd assign reading Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line" ( http://www.nealstephenson.com/command/ and http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html online ). I've used it in situations with even non-technical people to explain "Why Linux", and it's highly entertaining even if one is an expert. As another poster said, there is some "History and Philosophy". I also use it as an ESL text for engineering graduate students:-)
No particular individual dataset of observations definitively 'proves' the correlation of human caused climate change. But the cross correlations between an incredibly diverse set of observations does provide a basis for a pretty well based assumption. These include ice cap bores from Greenland, species in seabed sediments, coral growth, tree rings (even petrified trees:-), even historical accounts from a very wide variety of scientific disciplines, which use different methodologies and models, each subject to peer review within their own disciple.
What hobbles this in every case is the sample space, what is needed a fine resolution chronographic continuous globally distributed climate record. I.e. the ice caps are only located in certain areas and so it has only been in the last few years we have had satellite platforms to global measure sea temperatures. Global weather monitoring on a regular basis only started during World War Two, mostly driven by military aviation.
If Climatology is a tough nut, Paleoclimatology is even tougher. Ironically, the world wide exploration for oil combined with temperature as an indicator for petroleum formation has provided one possible set of observations. See " Optimal Surface Temperature Reconstructions Using Terrestrial Borehole Data" (and others) at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/mann2003/mann2003.html
This area of current relies on ancillary data, but could be extended to deeper wells and better distributed locations to increase the time horizons.
The diverse and broad studies around climate change complement and supplement one another to reach the conclusion and correlation. Sunspots and lemming migrations can be argued endlessly, but it is the meta analysis of all these efforts that matters. If the media has a hard time with translating and portraying the problem and controversy inside a particular specialized scientific study, it is absolutely incapable of informing the public about the meta analysis. So drowning cute polar bears isn't scientifically precise, if the imagery causes behavior change, all the better.
The other aspect of the debate is the time dynamics and values of the risk situation: What is the cost of doing business as usual in the event the warming hypothesis is wrong? If we mitigate the carbon impacts and it's wrong, so what? We have a vastly more efficient and clean economy. If it's right, the downside is potentially death and disruption for billions. Also, how long do we have to figure it out?
Counting posts is certainly a very poor method of making comparisions. Some of the things that can be used to quantitatively evaluate the quality of discussion are the ratio of active users to lurkers, the distribution of numbers of posts to individuals, the length of the posts, and the topology of the discussion threads. For instance, thread depth and breadth ( how narrow or bushy the tree is ), the decay time of threads, are most people responding to posts of a few individuals, or do folks pair up ad hoc on discussions. All the above can also incorporate the time element, i.e. do folks respond in minutes or over weeks. If you are are really an over achiever, you can also use NLP to evaluate the phrases in the posts for emotional commitment. These are just a few of the comparitive methods I've scene researchers use. Post count itself is meaningless.
I did a project more than a decade ago with EMTs and other first responders about vehicle INS systems ( before GPS became ubiquitous ). The drivers jokingly ( or maybe not ) noted that the eventual real effect of people that had overgrown vegitation, concealed drives, locked gates, non-existent or faded curb numbers, missing or angled house numbers and unlit or burned out porch lights was that response time effectively doubles or triples with a corresponding effect on medical survival rates. As society becomes more dependent of spatial technologies like StreetView, a similar counter-survival friction will occur as Fedex, Dominos, and EMTs are delayed by uncertain spots in their data. So that EMT's opinion was that eventually these 'hiding' people would be selected against and be left in the shallow end of the gene pool.
Actually, there was a letter in Aviation Week that suggested the cheapest method was for the U.S. to covertly flood the black arms market with older surplus missiles from various countries of manufacture that were rigged to explode on launch or just not function. The writer pointed out that it would be trivial to get a 10x effect, where the terrorist would have to assume 9 out of 10 times it would either not work or explode. This also method also has a social engineering aspect, because the distribution of the bgus arms is promoted and facilitated by everyone upstream in the supply chain - they got the money, after all, they don't care what the end result is for either terrorist or victim.
Disclaimer: I couldn't find a 'hard' link to a citation, but only recall this from when Napster first appeared on the scene.
It was reported then ( could be urban legend, but maybe someone out there has an actual factual report), and I recently checked this (yesterday) with some people I know that do file sharing that a considerable number of the files associated with a particular song name (file name) are either corrupt, or actually some other song ( a 'wannabe') who had appropriated the name simply for the purpose of getting their own music downloaded and exposed to listeners under this guise. The past tactic by companies was to flood the P2P system with bogus files, probably in the hope that frustration would simply cause people to give up on attempting to download or use services and mover to another title. My contacts also told me that it wasn't unusual for song meta data to be spoofed in similar ways, and sometimes it would take several attempts to find a 'good' copy. The most direct approach would probably subpoena the labels about whether or not they themselves were engaging in this obscuring tactic. People uploading there own covers of personal songs ( like the billion or so Happy Birthday vids on youTube) might have the same title : -)
Other than Wikipedia, how do you conclude this? The Albacore (1953 vintage) was the first modern hull submarine, and official USN documents place her speed at 34 knots in 1966. (BTW since then, the 'official' speed for nuclear subs has always been (35+ knots). As far as SSBNs go, hydrodynamic efficiency actually increase with size in general (the precise curves relating to contour, prismatic, wetted area, appendages, etc. is more actually more complicate than that, but it'll do unless you want the actual hull parameters to put into FASTSHIPS or other CFD algorithm ). I'd agree with 20 kn as a patrol or stealth speed, but some basic math on the non-cavitating RPM on a particular size propeller, the estimated shaft horsepower from steam turbines of that era would indicate a much higher possible speed than 20 kn. It's certainly doubtful that the top possible speed (along with max depth) was ever attempted outside of initial trials, but all the external publicly viewable does not indicate a design maximum of only 20 kn. One only has to look at some of the experimental swath vessels to see that a submarine like hull can reach 50 kn speeds. Even if the sub only moved at ten knots, my point about sat tracking still stands, a fixed predictable sensor has little chance to detect a moving target with knowledge of the sensor' approximate position. If someone wants to work the math to prove otherwise there are several excellent web accessible sources), I'd happily change my opinion, but not from wikipedia as a source.
What sensor would be the most likely candidate.... That was my point - there are not any candidates, except maybe a crystal ball or dowsing rod. Even if you discounted all the other crud in the ocean, and it was as clear as the finest optical glass, it would still absorb all the light at that depth. Some how a photon (at least ONE) needs to get down there, then bounce off and travel all the way back to orbit to hit the CCD on the sensor.
..... ancient trade routes buried under meters of sand. I've been away from the remote sensing community to even know what the current sensor packages are even capable of. The SAR stuff has revealed a lot of fascinating archaeological discoveries and is re-writing a lot of history. The current platforms are the same just better resolution, more coverage, more spectral bands, same basic principles. Only fairly new stuff is non-military SAR of a decent resolution (5 meters), true color stereo is now being done at 3 meter, and they have a few things bouncing laser beams off the surface. Biggest innovation is just being able to find the stuff, most data centers have their databases online, so that is easier.
... within the earth from outer space. 'Within'? Note I used the term 'atmosphere propagation', the radar is still following a path between the sand particles and gravel, so it might be hairsplitting, this is still stuff piled on top the earth, not inside of it. Even Ground Penetrating Radar relies on there being some path to and from the target, even it it's between the granules in minerals. Ditto with the gravimetric anomaly detection, these are sensing field variations by their positional effects, and do not use radiation of any form, so these aren't looking 'inside' the earth, they are influenced by the field around the earth, which maybe by inference indicates the presence of mascons (mass concentrations). The only way to see anything 'inside' the earth is by using a signal that propagates in that medium, sound or vibrations from other sources such as earthquakes.
... you would launch specialized military satellites designed to find subs in real-time... Not really - contrary to the Hollywood depictions of some sort of fixed 'eye in the sky, satellites move, and although some have various degrees of maneuverability, and when they come back around (repeat) it's rarely over the same piece of real estate. Some satellites s use a Molniya orbit that can give them a real good and close hang time over the target, but again, then your ROI is more or less fixed, and the sub is moving. Since the orbital parameters are known (at least by any potential enemy that my be capable of hitting your subs), it's not all that difficult to arrange your patrol not to be in the observable area - SSBNs are very fast ( probably well over 50 knots), so even if you were in the scene, you could just follow a bearing along the satellite track at flank speed and the best they would get is maybe a few pixels, and most likely, none. There are various ways of attempting to track - one interesting one was looking for the phytoplankton phosphorescence 'bloom' caused when the motion disturbance hit the surface, another was using some high power filtering to detect the minute bow wave disturbance as it distorted the surface. But there were relative trivial operational methods the sub could use to defeat these. I won't get into down link, processing, and band width issues, bu just about nothing with satellites is 'real time', despite the cool cross hairs and zoom capability shown on TV and the movies.
.... what is available if you PAY up for quality data. Light (and all radiation) obeys the same rules of physics along the optical path, it doesn't care how much you 'pay' for it. The example I gave was Google (and they DO pay for their data, although they post it for free), but I do buy a lot of data ( I just purchased a bunch from the Alaska SAR Facility). I've worked with almost every type of sensor out there in most every atmospheric propagating wavelength - SAR, LIDAR, IR, NIR, Visible, from Landsat, Aster, Alos, Quickbird, from airborne and space located platforms. I even bout the X-ray glasses from comic books ads when I was a kid http://www.tomheroes.com/images/COMICAD%20xray%20g lasses.JPG... And military platforms also have to obey the same physical constraints, although they do have certain other advantages. There is no 'magic' part of the spectrum which penetrates to the depths he speaks of, the best that's every been done in that zone were some air-borne active blue-green laser experiments.
His claims of course are WAY suspect - light of whatever wavelength needs to get to the target, then reflect BACK to the sensor, and well, the reason water is blue is that it's pretty much impervious to most wavelengths, and as far as IR, that wreck that deep would probably have cooled down really well by now to the ambient water temperature. I have seen sunken wrecks from satellite images though... Scapa Flow has quite a few scuttled wrecks from WW II. See http://www.scapaflow.co.uk/graphics/blockship.jpg and then http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&ll=58.927777,- 3.310318&spn=0.059626,0.126343&t=k&z=13&om=1
(.... Hmmm, been spending WAY to much time looking at synthetic aperture radar scenes.... )
Slashdot Mirror
The first day I'd assign reading Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line" ( http://www.nealstephenson.com/command/ and http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html online ). I've used it in situations with even non-technical people to explain "Why Linux", and it's highly entertaining even if one is an expert. As another poster said, there is some "History and Philosophy". I also use it as an ESL text for engineering graduate students :-)
No particular individual dataset of observations definitively 'proves' the correlation of human caused climate change. But the cross correlations between an incredibly diverse set of observations does provide a basis for a pretty well based assumption. These include ice cap bores from Greenland, species in seabed sediments, coral growth, tree rings (even petrified trees :-), even historical accounts from a very wide variety of scientific disciplines, which use different methodologies and models, each subject to peer review within their own disciple.
What hobbles this in every case is the sample space, what is needed a fine resolution chronographic continuous globally distributed climate record. I.e. the ice caps are only located in certain areas and so it has only been in the last few years we have had satellite platforms to global measure sea temperatures. Global weather monitoring on a regular basis only started during World War Two, mostly driven by military aviation.
If Climatology is a tough nut, Paleoclimatology is even tougher. Ironically, the world wide exploration for oil combined with temperature as an indicator for petroleum formation has provided one possible set of observations. See " Optimal Surface Temperature Reconstructions Using Terrestrial Borehole Data" (and others) at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/mann2003/mann2003.html This area of current relies on ancillary data, but could be extended to deeper wells and better distributed locations to increase the time horizons.
The diverse and broad studies around climate change complement and supplement one another to reach the conclusion and correlation. Sunspots and lemming migrations can be argued endlessly, but it is the meta analysis of all these efforts that matters. If the media has a hard time with translating and portraying the problem and controversy inside a particular specialized scientific study, it is absolutely incapable of informing the public about the meta analysis. So drowning cute polar bears isn't scientifically precise, if the imagery causes behavior change, all the better.
The other aspect of the debate is the time dynamics and values of the risk situation: What is the cost of doing business as usual in the event the warming hypothesis is wrong? If we mitigate the carbon impacts and it's wrong, so what? We have a vastly more efficient and clean economy. If it's right, the downside is potentially death and disruption for billions. Also, how long do we have to figure it out?
Counting posts is certainly a very poor method of making comparisions. Some of the things that can be used to quantitatively evaluate the quality of discussion are the ratio of active users to lurkers, the distribution of numbers of posts to individuals, the length of the posts, and the topology of the discussion threads. For instance, thread depth and breadth ( how narrow or bushy the tree is ), the decay time of threads, are most people responding to posts of a few individuals, or do folks pair up ad hoc on discussions. All the above can also incorporate the time element, i.e. do folks respond in minutes or over weeks. If you are are really an over achiever, you can also use NLP to evaluate the phrases in the posts for emotional commitment. These are just a few of the comparitive methods I've scene researchers use. Post count itself is meaningless.
I did a project more than a decade ago with EMTs and other first responders about vehicle INS systems ( before GPS became ubiquitous ). The drivers jokingly ( or maybe not ) noted that the eventual real effect of people that had overgrown vegitation, concealed drives, locked gates, non-existent or faded curb numbers, missing or angled house numbers and unlit or burned out porch lights was that response time effectively doubles or triples with a corresponding effect on medical survival rates. As society becomes more dependent of spatial technologies like StreetView, a similar counter-survival friction will occur as Fedex, Dominos, and EMTs are delayed by uncertain spots in their data. So that EMT's opinion was that eventually these 'hiding' people would be selected against and be left in the shallow end of the gene pool.
Actually, there was a letter in Aviation Week that suggested the cheapest method was for the U.S. to covertly flood the black arms market with older surplus missiles from various countries of manufacture that were rigged to explode on launch or just not function. The writer pointed out that it would be trivial to get a 10x effect, where the terrorist would have to assume 9 out of 10 times it would either not work or explode. This also method also has a social engineering aspect, because the distribution of the bgus arms is promoted and facilitated by everyone upstream in the supply chain - they got the money, after all, they don't care what the end result is for either terrorist or victim.
Disclaimer: I couldn't find a 'hard' link to a citation, but only recall this from when Napster first appeared on the scene.
It was reported then ( could be urban legend, but maybe someone out there has an actual factual report), and I recently checked this (yesterday) with some people I know that do file sharing that a considerable number of the files associated with a particular song name (file name) are either corrupt, or actually some other song ( a 'wannabe') who had appropriated the name simply for the purpose of getting their own music downloaded and exposed to listeners under this guise. The past tactic by companies was to flood the P2P system with bogus files, probably in the hope that frustration would simply cause people to give up on attempting to download or use services and mover to another title. My contacts also told me that it wasn't unusual for song meta data to be spoofed in similar ways, and sometimes it would take several attempts to find a 'good' copy. The most direct approach would probably subpoena the labels about whether or not they themselves were engaging in this obscuring tactic. People uploading there own covers of personal songs ( like the billion or so Happy Birthday vids on youTube) might have the same title : -)
Other than Wikipedia, how do you conclude this? The Albacore (1953 vintage) was the first modern hull submarine, and official USN documents place her speed at 34 knots in 1966. (BTW since then, the 'official' speed for nuclear subs has always been (35+ knots). As far as SSBNs go, hydrodynamic efficiency actually increase with size in general (the precise curves relating to contour, prismatic, wetted area, appendages, etc. is more actually more complicate than that, but it'll do unless you want the actual hull parameters to put into FASTSHIPS or other CFD algorithm ). I'd agree with 20 kn as a patrol or stealth speed, but some basic math on the non-cavitating RPM on a particular size propeller, the estimated shaft horsepower from steam turbines of that era would indicate a much higher possible speed than 20 kn. It's certainly doubtful that the top possible speed (along with max depth) was ever attempted outside of initial trials, but all the external publicly viewable does not indicate a design maximum of only 20 kn. One only has to look at some of the experimental swath vessels to see that a submarine like hull can reach 50 kn speeds. Even if the sub only moved at ten knots, my point about sat tracking still stands, a fixed predictable sensor has little chance to detect a moving target with knowledge of the sensor' approximate position. If someone wants to work the math to prove otherwise there are several excellent web accessible sources), I'd happily change my opinion, but not from wikipedia as a source.
..... ancient trade routes buried under meters of sand. I've been away from the remote sensing community to even know what the current sensor packages are even capable of. The SAR stuff has revealed a lot of fascinating archaeological discoveries and is re-writing a lot of history. The current platforms are the same just better resolution, more coverage, more spectral bands, same basic principles. Only fairly new stuff is non-military SAR of a decent resolution (5 meters), true color stereo is now being done at 3 meter, and they have a few things bouncing laser beams off the surface. Biggest innovation is just being able to find the stuff, most data centers have their databases online, so that is easier.
... within the earth from outer space. 'Within'? Note I used the term 'atmosphere propagation', the radar is still following a path between the sand particles and gravel, so it might be hairsplitting, this is still stuff piled on top the earth, not inside of it. Even Ground Penetrating Radar relies on there being some path to and from the target, even it it's between the granules in minerals. Ditto with the gravimetric anomaly detection, these are sensing field variations by their positional effects, and do not use radiation of any form, so these aren't looking 'inside' the earth, they are influenced by the field around the earth, which maybe by inference indicates the presence of mascons (mass concentrations). The only way to see anything 'inside' the earth is by using a signal that propagates in that medium, sound or vibrations from other sources such as earthquakes.
... you would launch specialized military satellites designed to find subs in real-time
.... what is available if you PAY up for quality data. Light (and all radiation) obeys the same rules of physics along the optical path, it doesn't care how much you 'pay' for it. The example I gave was Google (and they DO pay for their data, although they post it for free), but I do buy a lot of data ( I just purchased a bunch from the Alaska SAR Facility). I've worked with almost every type of sensor out there in most every atmospheric propagating wavelength - SAR, LIDAR, IR, NIR, Visible, from Landsat, Aster, Alos, Quickbird, from airborne and space located platforms. I even bout the X-ray glasses from comic books ads when I was a kid http://www.tomheroes.com/images/COMICAD%20xray%20His claims of course are WAY suspect - light of whatever wavelength needs to get to the target, then reflect BACK to the sensor, and well, the reason water is blue is that it's pretty much impervious to most wavelengths, and as far as IR, that wreck that deep would probably have cooled down really well by now to the ambient water temperature. I have seen sunken wrecks from satellite images though ... Scapa Flow has quite a few scuttled wrecks from WW II. See http://www.scapaflow.co.uk/graphics/blockship.jpg and then http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&ll=58.927777,- 3.310318&spn=0.059626,0.126343&t=k&z=13&om=1
(.... Hmmm, been spending WAY to much time looking at synthetic aperture radar scenes .... )