Aahh! Now I see more clearly the point of view of parent poster. I find I still strongly disagree, but now on a much more narrow basis.
Please cite where, in any international system of jurisprudence, it states that a "cyber attack launched by a government against another is an act of war." Because that cannot be done yet, since there are no treaties or other instruments of law that have addressed this issue, or even defined it.
Perhaps one can imagine a world where such acts would be considered treason, etc, but that is the stuff of science fiction. Perhaps author of parent post imagines that some existing treaty or law could be extended to encompass "cyber attack", but that is only an exercise of imagination, since the very concept of "cyber attack" lacks any legal definition.
Non-violent sabotage of the Iranian nuclear development effort only seems counter to the public USA policy until it is examined more closely. Consider:
That policy does not extend to allowing them to develop nuclear fuels, and thus take another step toward nuclear weapons. The production of nuclear fuel might have been the target of Stuxnet: no one yet knows.
Also, arranging a series of hands-on demonstrations that show Iran's ruling regime is incapable of properly starting up a nuclear power plant let alone operating it would not violate the policy. Providing them the opportunity build a plant is not the same as somehow assuring their success in bringing it on line, and does not mean that Iran should be exempt from running the gauntlet of hazards every other nuclear program faces. And just like every other nuclear power program, they really need to be able to manage things like Stuxnet as these come up.
I believe that Iran is too dependent on buying foreign expertise to develop nuclear technology while simultaneously taking an isolationist "we are holier than thou" stance with regard to the rest of the world. Maybe if they could build the microchips themselves, using microcode that they had developed and tested themselves, maybe then they could get away with trying to go it alone. But they cannot do that. Instead, they will forever be in that place where they need to question whether Israel or some other foreign power could at any moment shut down their nuclear program, or prevent their air force from taking off, or cause their missiles to explode on the launch pad....
Iran should really divest itself of its current religious regime and join the secular nations who are trying to get along with each other, and even help each other out a bit. Iran's culture is a resourceful one, it is rich in artistry and talented in design and manufacture. Too bad it is saddled by religious strictures that are barbaric even by standards that are 500 years old.
It would best serve the interests of everyone who is not part of the Iranian regime if this nuclear power plant failed in a way that was clearly due to Iran's inability to manage it all by itself. Stuxnet has done damage to their program, at the very least because they now have to clean the control systems of the thing. That Stuxnet got into their system to begin with is due to their failure to properly manage their program. We could get into long arguments about whether this was a security failure, or a purchasing failure, or a failure of their quality assurance programs. But it was definitely a MANAGEMENT failure.
It is likely that it won't be the only management failure. It is quite possible that through no direct fault of the Russians or any other nation, this nuclear power plant will fall far behind schedule and far exceed its budgeted costs, and never achieve any of its stated goals.
It might be that a religious hierarchy is incapable of properly managing something like nuclear power generation. Perhaps that kind of complexity requires a secular management system that can deal with the issues on a strictly pragmatic basis. Just saying...
What everyone including parent post has so far overlooked is that the announcement of this story is ALL BY ITSELF damaging to the Iran nuclear development effort.
Whatever the goal of Stuxnet might be, Iran must now spend time and effort checking whether all kinds of computer control systems include hidden time bombs... things that might do anything from overspinning centrifuges until they break to overheating core enough to warp the fuel rods and force their replacement. And the only sure way that Iran can proceed from this point is to replace all the PLCs with homegrown technology... but it would take them a decade or more to develop that technology on their own. I don't think they have any microchip manufacturing capability at all.
All this has been accomplished at the very low cost of publicizing a few factoids within a very suggestive framing in such a way that third parties are going to fall all over themselves to do further investigation in ways that can only magnify the perceived risks. This is a perfect con game. The more so because even if someone comes out and says its a con, Iran cannot afford to rely on that. Stuxnet might not even have a payload, but it will still cause the Iran nuclear effort months of delay. Long enough, probably, to lay the groundwork for Son Of Stuxnet, whatever that might be.
I'd like to know more about the assumptions made in this survey, since it would seem to me that places with congested traffic would benefit more from online shopping than otherwise.
I'm guessing that the researchers are not bothering to factor in that a single trip by a delivery truck will fulfill multiple orders in a neighborhood. And shopping at online stores that use Fedex or UPS who make regular visits to every neighborhood anyway is not going to bump the carbon footprint at all.
The story is bogus. The question is why have the authors put their name on such drivel? Cui bono? Do the authors have a vested interest in the parking lot repaving industry? Has April Fools Day come early?
The old, large, abandoned city garbage dumps in my region now sport rain caps to keep the interiors dry to reduce the risk of spontaneous combustion, and networks of pipes to collect the methane they generate. They are definitely biologically active.
It is true that occasionally a garbologist finds a 50 year old hot dog buried in one of these heaps that looks as fresh as it did when it came out off the grill. But I think that says more about the nutritional value of highly commercialized foods than it does about the science of garbology.
This cannot work the way TFA suggests: TFA is far too simplistic. Just piling up agricultural byproducts would only produce a large compost heap. It would remain bioactive until it either caught fire through spontaneous combustion or turned into soil. Either way, the carbon has not been sequestered; it remains in the biosphere. The cycle of repose in the large heaps is just too short to be useful.
That said, there is an approach that would work, in those parts of the world that have snow in the winter. We could create artificial peat bogs.
Dig pit a couple of acres in cross section and a thousand feet deep. Make it water tight and fill it to the brim with icy cold (4 degree C) fresh water-- it doesn't have to be potable and sea water might work but I only know about fresh water peat bogs, Add a compression mechanism, such as a sinkable platform the size of the pit, weighed down with some of the rock from the digging. Let it sink to the bottom of the pit. Chip the plant material down to a size that will compact easily, then slowly force the chippings under the compressor. That's it. Once operating, the main cost is that of stuffing the new chippings into the bottom of the pit.
There will be some slow anaerobic activity but so long as the pits are small in diameter relative to their depth, the water will stay cold, stagnant, and deoxygenated. The chip injector needs to be designed to avoid stirring the waters: you want that stagnation. You want dead, cold water that will minimize bioactivity.
A peat farm of ten pits each 2 acres by 1,000 feet deep could accept more than 4,000 acre-feet of agricultural byproduct each year for one hundred years before it fills, and then it would continue operations indefinitely. For at that point the compressor could be removed since the weight of the old peat would be enough to hold new chippings at the bottom, and the top few feet of finished peat could be removed each year for longer term storage elsewhere. Such as tilling it into desert sand dunes to stabilize them or stuffing it into depleted mine shafts, or storing blocks of the stuff in the Greenland or Antarctic iceboxes.
Eventually most of the carbon in the peat would return to the biosphere, but this approach would help buy us time to get off our fossil fuel dependency. For that matter, peat is not only a useable substrate for developing petroleum products, it is an effective fuel all by itself. It could be that peat farms could directly replace coal and oil, once we get our needs for petrochemicals down to sustainable levels.
Actually their involvement in medical transcription rather bothers me. Much of medical transcription in the USA is now outsourced to India. If companies like this one exhibit ethically questionable behavior in regards to one aspect of communications, can they be trusted to properly handle the sensitive identity and health care information that is at the core of medical transcription? There is no assurance that these greaseballs who admit to deliberately corrupting portions of the Internet are not doing things like compiling lists of patients with terminal diagnoses to sell to funeral homes so the undertakers can use targeted marketing techniques more effectively....
I'd like to see some USA Federal or State Attorney General do some investigation about whether there may be criminal activity, or the potential for that, here.
I wish I could mobilize 4chan dwellers and/b/tards in particular to go out and vote for their national Pirate Party come election time, but it appears the vast majority haven't reached the age of maturity yet...
So as a group they are indistinguishable from the Tea Party and several other voting blocks?
Each of you is unique... just like everyone else. But then there's Einstein...
So "more unique" is a distinct concept expressed succinctly to cover the Einsteinian cases. It is not logical-- it is in fact an oxymoron-- but it is used in the English language, not PHP, Perl, or any of our other logical languages. Any processor capable of properly parsing spoken English would have less difficulty with 'more unique" than with "there, their, they're". It is good English. Good English is not logical: it is used by entities that are not logical to communicate mostly irrational expressions between themselves. Generally for either arguing, boasting, or while trying to get into someone's pants.
I don't see anything about the Canadian government requiring prior approval before politicians in office, or those seeking office, are allowed to talk about public issues, such as Canada's history and its resources.
Without that, this represents a very blatant attempt to discriminate against scientists based solely on their behavior (which is doing things in a scientific way, rather than a political or religious way).
Yes I did say mathematics. Sorry about muddying the waters.
The central premise is that the best that our minds can do is make some pretty durn interesting models of reality, and play around with those. And sometimes the models lead to some interesting technologies that help put food on the table, keep a roof overhead, or keep the wolves away from the door.
But it is a serious mistake to confuse these models with reality. When talking about the laws of physics, as soon as you step away from the models and begin to think that the laws are based in reality, you've screwed up your mind. Closed it off to further scientific inquiry in basic directions. Accepted as dogma that which should remain open to further questioning. Don't do that. Remain skeptical of even your core scientific beliefs, since they are after all just based on models. And remember that the best thing we can ever do with a new model is to use it to break all the old ones.
Mathematics is of course not physics; it is pure model-building completely independent of reality. For whatever reason, it has proven useful in building models of reality. Perhaps reality is basically mathematical; perhaps it is just that our modes of perception are rooted in an innate sense of mathematics. It doesn't matter; never mind.
What does matter is that even in mathematics there are these irrational pieces here and there where unknowns have to be accepted because they cannot be excluded. Does this tell you something about the physical, "objective" Universe? It is hard to see how it could since mathematics is entirely separate from physics: it is a world unto itself. A set of models that in its pure form never interact with anything outside of mathematics. So maybe this says something about who we are. Maybe it says that we are beings who are intrinsically incapable of building an accurate model of anything.
That is not a negative statement. It is simply an indication that the challenges we face in our intellectual endeavors are worthy ones, ones that challenge us to push ourselves to the very limits of our potential. That, I feel, makes the scientific experience much more vital and interesting than if it was merely a matter of making our lists of "known" facts longer and longer. Be skeptical, and be particularly skeptical about those things you think must be true. They are, after all, only pieces of models, not the Real Thing.
Showing a method of deriving pi does not render it any less irrational. Any real world application that involves pi carries an intrinsic amount of the unknown that has nothing to do with imprecision in measurement.
Just accept that none of our models can perfectly match reality, and recognize that our physics is all about our models, and about nothing other than those models. The real universe is unknowable. Get used to it.
It is also worth pointing out that the second law of thermodynamics is better expressed as "a closed system tends toward maximum entropy".
Unfortunately it is very difficult to construct a closed system in anything but your imagination. A few decades ago, the common belief among physicists and cosmologists was that the Universe was a closed system. Now no one is so sure about that. From another side, the implications of the discovery of chaotic processes and of fractals suggest that it might be impossible to distinguish a truly closed system from one which is merely in a momentarily quiescent state.
If parent post is the product of someone with a college education, that person should consider suing their alma matta for criminal negligence for teaching about 100 years behind current understanding. Or for dummying down the issues to grease the wheels of the diploma factory.
Occam's Razor: The simplest solution is usually the correct one.
No.
Parent post (along with many others) is confusing Occam's razor with parsimony. These are only superficially similar. Quirks in the English language can make it hard to appreciate the difference, but it is very definitely there.
Parsimony: as expressed above.
Occam's razor: when presented with two hypothetical processes that suggest identical outcomes, choose the simpler one (since it will be easier to test). Note that there is nothing here to indicate that reality might be one way or the other. Occam's razor has to do with model building, which is as different from reality as map making is from exploring the territory.
Unless a "rebounding crust" can also cause sea-level rise?
You were not supposed to notice that.
More seriously, though, if post ice age rebound is significant enough that it needs to be included in these models, then these questions follow:
To what degree is this rebound making the glacial slopes of Antarctica and Greenland steeper, and thus contributing to the accelerated movement of ice into open ocean?
Is this a positive feedback process?
To what degree is this rebound lifting some continental shelves and thus directly contributing to the increase in sea level through displacement of volume from depth to shallower waters?
At most, the research suggests that the changes we face are less anthropogenic and thus more difficult to forestall than we might have hoped for. If the rise in sea levels is unavoidable, then we need to more stringently control the variables that we CAN influence, and plan on a warmer, possibly wetter, world anyway.
Question: I have yet to see any empirical science behind the idea that thermal expansion is a major contributor to the increase in sea level. Is this hypothetical guessing? Or have we really enough historical data on average deep ocean temperatures to support the conjecture?
You confuse my beliefs, which I have not expressed, with some very broad descriptions of general belief systems that I mentioned solely as background. You then defend yourself against my correction of this by admitting that you are responding emotionally, with "an expression of scorn", rather than rationally.
I could go on, but that is sufficient reason to conclude that there is no further rational discussion possible. Have a good day.
QM rigorously defines a pinhole through which those who have confined their thinking to the box of the empirical method must recognize that there is Mystery: that which cannot under any circumstances be known. Quantum foam shows that when you extend the QM model beyond simple particle interactions you find that this Mystery is involved at the margins of every little thing, and thus implicated in every interaction between different things: there is a little bit of unknowable in everything that happens. If you want to get away from physics for a moment, in mathematics there is the contemplation of pi and the impossibility of comprehending why it should be as it is, making everything based on circles or cycles forever imprecise. And in astronomy there is the other side of the event horizon: clearly something is going on there, but just as clearly we can never get any information about what it is.
But back to QM. It demonstrates that there is something about the universe that lies outside of the area that the methods of science can address. It does not put a limit on how large that something is-- and rationally there is no way that a limit can be placed on what is unknown. It seems that those who would limit their thinking to just the scientific model are doing themselves a disservice: the normal human mind is quite capable of handling concepts that lie outside of science, if the owner of that mind is willing to do the study needed to learn to handle such concepts appropriately. There was a time when I would have added here that zennist study is one good way of doing this. But that was Zen; this is Tao.
I am not saying that those who choose to limit themselves to thinking only within the science box should do anything else. Do as you will with your life, so long as you harm none in the doing.
But don't insinuate your dogma into public discussions in a way that might cause others to accept it without critically appraising it. That does harm the discourse, and is doubleplus ungood, bad karma, dysphoric, etc etc. Don't proselytize your faith in science.
And consider: Many active researchers who are intimately involved in extending our scientific models regard these as very incomplete and terribly insufficient to base their lives upon. Some study sacred texts, others work in groups to grapple with the universal issues, I have encountered some who use shamanic techniques. So I am far from alone in recognizing that science works well in its corner of the playground where it builds its models, but that there is also so much more to life than the scientific model.
About the second law of thermodynamics being the same as Occam's razor: no, I don't think so. At least not in the known universe.
Of course the existence of this conversation demonstrates that the laws of thermodynamics are only applicable within the limits of physics model that frames them, and do not apply to reality itself. For if it were otherwise, there would be no life nor any other self-organizing systems. Think of this as one of the trivial applications of the anthropomorphic principle.
Physics works with models of reality. Not with reality itself. Don't confuse the map with the territory.
I don't see how it is any more unfair than your proselytizing, though I'm not advocating a religion.
It was your proselytizing for the dogma of science as you see it that provoked my response. I do not volunteer my beliefs, let alone assert them as something others should adopt; I do not proselytize. As you point out with some evident frustration later in your post, I do not even say what my beliefs are. I sometimes respond to your type of proselytizing when it occurs in certain public forums, as I have done here. I rather believe that Galileo would respond in the same fashion were he to see your posts, since his biographies suggest that he really hated it when anyone tried to insinuate their dogma into a discussion in such a way that others would accept it without critically assessing it.
You are advocating a religion. You are simply using what Orwell called doublethink to hide that from yourself.
Here's a couple of books worth reading and thinking about for a couple of decades:
Fritjof Capra, __The tao of physics__, now in its 4th edition and 35 years of continuous printing, translated into over 20 languages. If author of parent post is going to continue his attempts to convert others to his way of thinking, he really needs to read this book to at least get some appreciation of the alternatives.
Gary Zukav, __The dancing wu li masters__, in print for 30+ years. Covers much of the same ground as Capra, but where Capra is a physicist working through a reconciliation of physics (especially quantum mechanics) with his heritage world view, Zukav is a journalist and perhaps more accessible to lay readers because of that viewpoint.
BTW, I am quite comfortable with secular humanism, I dance to its assumptions quite frequently. One of its core tenets is that each individual has the right (and for some S H believers, the obligation) to examine every belief with every tool they can bring to bear before accepting it. You do not seem to be doing that yourself. Certainly your words are an attempt to get others to accept as true certain assumptions that you have invested your ego in.
It is probably worthwhile to mention in passing that mysticism has a fairly precise technical definition that can be described as the recognition that the human capacity to comprehend the Universe is limited, and there are unknowable facets that are outside our scope. This is roughly mirrored with the Copenhagen convention of physics, which can be loosely described as "There are things we know; there are things we don't know; and there are almost certainly things we can never know. So our understanding of reality is currently quite limited and very likely will always be wrong to some degree. But we can build models, and those are not only fun but they can lead to some interesting technologies."
It's not a matter of faith, it's a matter of evidence. Applying Occcam's Razor says that the process of evolution doesn't need such a being, and there is no evidence for Gaea. There is always room for further evidence, however.
I find your faith in Occam's Razor... amusing.
Within the limitations of the world view you espouse, your argument is irrefutable. It is just that you are proselytizing in a very public forum for a rather limited world view, and thus possibly affecting an unknown number of others who have yet to think these issues through. I regard that as unfair to those in the audience who have the mental capabilities to learn to dance between world views without shackling themselves to any particular one. So I argue with you in this public place.
If you were to present the same argument at a gathering of the College Of Neurosurgeons Of The Americas, I would probably not speak up. You would pretty much be preaching to the choir, and those few surgeons in attendance who were also comfortable with other modes of thought would recognize what you were doing and not be swayed by your words.
But there are a number of Slashdot readers who have access to other modes of approaching reality (either by being raised Hindu, Zen, Buddhist, Apache, Sioux, British Traditional Witchcraft, Stregheria, Voudon, etc, or by exposure to shamanic, mystic, gnostic or other systems of modeling reality. Your insistence that the only true model of the world is the scientific model could cause some these persons to turn their backs on an enriching source of knowledge, and that would be like poisoning another person's well. Don't do that.
And do you want to talk about whatever partnerships produce deserts or ice ages?
What are these partnerships of which you speak? Man and Rabbit in Australia? Man does seem uniquely positioned to work to enforce or destroy ecosystems. It seems to me that a certain amount of responsibility should go along with that power. And since science is deliberately agnostic about this kind of responsibility, we do need other modes of modeling the world to guide the application of our technologies.
Whether the evolution of the global ecosystem and each of its parts is in some grand sense moving forward or just changing a lot is not a scientifically decidable question, at least for the foreseeable future. The structure of the question depends on faith: either faith in Gaea or some other Supreme Being, or an equally strong faith that no such being exists. As a neopagan of the witchy type, I personally believe that the most evolved way to handle these kinds of issues is to learn to dance smoothly and quickly between the two different world views. But i recognize that the idea of deliberately Crafting one's life is not acceptable to a lot of people. For one thing, it takes a great deal of time and effort that will go unrewarded by anyone else: others don't even see what you are doing.
But putting all that aside, when looking at smaller segments of the ecosystem and more specific goal states, then you can certainly use a goal-oriented model to describe the realities of evolution. This is most clear when considering convergence, where separate species have evolved similar traits because those traits are uniquely suited to meeting a common need. So porpoises and sharks have converged on a similar body shape, and the wings of bats, flying fish, and birds have generally similar aerodynamic properties.
In these distinct areas, it does make sense to talk as if there was a competition between species. The prize of being most evolved in certain specific categories is a secure ecological niche.
Of course you don't want to get locked into that kind of model building, since then you end up doing silly things like regarding the salmon as being just a very good fast swimming predator fish. That would make it too easy to lose sight of Salmon's partnership with Bear and Eagle to fertilize the otherwise barren heights of the Pacific Northwest with then nutrients from the ocean that make the region's forests so richly verdant. But to even talk about that role of Salmon requires dancing away from the scientific mind set and into the totemic mind set for at least a moment. Persons with less evolved minds will find that impossible.
Which isn't to say that such persons are less intellectual or anything like that. They may well be very clever, and could easily become major players in businsess or technology. They simply have less evolved minds.
Second time suggests that sector of industry is corrupt to the point of endangering everyone. If you have property near a filling station, petroleum pipeline, tank farm, transfer site, refinery, or anything else involved in processing petrochemicals, it is time to start agitating for some third party safety audits to make sure that your property's value isn't about to get blown to smithers.
I'm not saying that your stuff is directly at risk. But if we have another explosion, pipeline leak, or similar event anywhere within USA jurisdiction, your property values will get tarred by a very broad brush. Anyone at risk of this needs to get politicking for some kind of review that will assure potential buyers that they won't be shafted by their petrochemical neighbors.
BTW, there is absolutely no need to lay this kind of thing off to enemy action. Not when 8+ years of ineffective oversight coupled with corporate "long term" planning that fails to look beyond next quarter's profit and loss statement are more than adequate to account for these incidents. (I was about to say "accidents", but it appears that these are far from accidental. They look much more like the productive of short term greed multiplied by long term stupidity.)
My conception of what is important is very different from what many of those who send me emails consider important. And my assessment of the subject line is highly dependent on the context provided by the from and to lines.
Maybe Google's approach will have some value for me. Expecting that some magical training will get everyone else to use subject lines the way that I think they should be used would be a foolish notion.
of course YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
Aahh! Now I see more clearly the point of view of parent poster. I find I still strongly disagree, but now on a much more narrow basis.
Please cite where, in any international system of jurisprudence, it states that a "cyber attack launched by a government against another is an act of war." Because that cannot be done yet, since there are no treaties or other instruments of law that have addressed this issue, or even defined it.
Perhaps one can imagine a world where such acts would be considered treason, etc, but that is the stuff of science fiction. Perhaps author of parent post imagines that some existing treaty or law could be extended to encompass "cyber attack", but that is only an exercise of imagination, since the very concept of "cyber attack" lacks any legal definition.
Non-violent sabotage of the Iranian nuclear development effort only seems counter to the public USA policy until it is examined more closely. Consider:
I believe that Iran is too dependent on buying foreign expertise to develop nuclear technology while simultaneously taking an isolationist "we are holier than thou" stance with regard to the rest of the world. Maybe if they could build the microchips themselves, using microcode that they had developed and tested themselves, maybe then they could get away with trying to go it alone. But they cannot do that. Instead, they will forever be in that place where they need to question whether Israel or some other foreign power could at any moment shut down their nuclear program, or prevent their air force from taking off, or cause their missiles to explode on the launch pad....
Iran should really divest itself of its current religious regime and join the secular nations who are trying to get along with each other, and even help each other out a bit. Iran's culture is a resourceful one, it is rich in artistry and talented in design and manufacture. Too bad it is saddled by religious strictures that are barbaric even by standards that are 500 years old.
I disagree.
It would best serve the interests of everyone who is not part of the Iranian regime if this nuclear power plant failed in a way that was clearly due to Iran's inability to manage it all by itself. Stuxnet has done damage to their program, at the very least because they now have to clean the control systems of the thing. That Stuxnet got into their system to begin with is due to their failure to properly manage their program. We could get into long arguments about whether this was a security failure, or a purchasing failure, or a failure of their quality assurance programs. But it was definitely a MANAGEMENT failure.
It is likely that it won't be the only management failure. It is quite possible that through no direct fault of the Russians or any other nation, this nuclear power plant will fall far behind schedule and far exceed its budgeted costs, and never achieve any of its stated goals.
It might be that a religious hierarchy is incapable of properly managing something like nuclear power generation. Perhaps that kind of complexity requires a secular management system that can deal with the issues on a strictly pragmatic basis. Just saying...
What everyone including parent post has so far overlooked is that the announcement of this story is ALL BY ITSELF damaging to the Iran nuclear development effort.
Whatever the goal of Stuxnet might be, Iran must now spend time and effort checking whether all kinds of computer control systems include hidden time bombs... things that might do anything from overspinning centrifuges until they break to overheating core enough to warp the fuel rods and force their replacement. And the only sure way that Iran can proceed from this point is to replace all the PLCs with homegrown technology... but it would take them a decade or more to develop that technology on their own. I don't think they have any microchip manufacturing capability at all.
All this has been accomplished at the very low cost of publicizing a few factoids within a very suggestive framing in such a way that third parties are going to fall all over themselves to do further investigation in ways that can only magnify the perceived risks. This is a perfect con game. The more so because even if someone comes out and says its a con, Iran cannot afford to rely on that. Stuxnet might not even have a payload, but it will still cause the Iran nuclear effort months of delay. Long enough, probably, to lay the groundwork for Son Of Stuxnet, whatever that might be.
I'd like to know more about the assumptions made in this survey, since it would seem to me that places with congested traffic would benefit more from online shopping than otherwise.
I'm guessing that the researchers are not bothering to factor in that a single trip by a delivery truck will fulfill multiple orders in a neighborhood. And shopping at online stores that use Fedex or UPS who make regular visits to every neighborhood anyway is not going to bump the carbon footprint at all.
The story is bogus. The question is why have the authors put their name on such drivel? Cui bono? Do the authors have a vested interest in the parking lot repaving industry? Has April Fools Day come early?
The old, large, abandoned city garbage dumps in my region now sport rain caps to keep the interiors dry to reduce the risk of spontaneous combustion, and networks of pipes to collect the methane they generate. They are definitely biologically active.
It is true that occasionally a garbologist finds a 50 year old hot dog buried in one of these heaps that looks as fresh as it did when it came out off the grill. But I think that says more about the nutritional value of highly commercialized foods than it does about the science of garbology.
This cannot work the way TFA suggests: TFA is far too simplistic. Just piling up agricultural byproducts would only produce a large compost heap. It would remain bioactive until it either caught fire through spontaneous combustion or turned into soil. Either way, the carbon has not been sequestered; it remains in the biosphere. The cycle of repose in the large heaps is just too short to be useful.
That said, there is an approach that would work, in those parts of the world that have snow in the winter. We could create artificial peat bogs.
Dig pit a couple of acres in cross section and a thousand feet deep. Make it water tight and fill it to the brim with icy cold (4 degree C) fresh water-- it doesn't have to be potable and sea water might work but I only know about fresh water peat bogs, Add a compression mechanism, such as a sinkable platform the size of the pit, weighed down with some of the rock from the digging. Let it sink to the bottom of the pit. Chip the plant material down to a size that will compact easily, then slowly force the chippings under the compressor. That's it. Once operating, the main cost is that of stuffing the new chippings into the bottom of the pit.
There will be some slow anaerobic activity but so long as the pits are small in diameter relative to their depth, the water will stay cold, stagnant, and deoxygenated. The chip injector needs to be designed to avoid stirring the waters: you want that stagnation. You want dead, cold water that will minimize bioactivity.
A peat farm of ten pits each 2 acres by 1,000 feet deep could accept more than 4,000 acre-feet of agricultural byproduct each year for one hundred years before it fills, and then it would continue operations indefinitely. For at that point the compressor could be removed since the weight of the old peat would be enough to hold new chippings at the bottom, and the top few feet of finished peat could be removed each year for longer term storage elsewhere. Such as tilling it into desert sand dunes to stabilize them or stuffing it into depleted mine shafts, or storing blocks of the stuff in the Greenland or Antarctic iceboxes.
Eventually most of the carbon in the peat would return to the biosphere, but this approach would help buy us time to get off our fossil fuel dependency. For that matter, peat is not only a useable substrate for developing petroleum products, it is an effective fuel all by itself. It could be that peat farms could directly replace coal and oil, once we get our needs for petrochemicals down to sustainable levels.
Actually their involvement in medical transcription rather bothers me. Much of medical transcription in the USA is now outsourced to India. If companies like this one exhibit ethically questionable behavior in regards to one aspect of communications, can they be trusted to properly handle the sensitive identity and health care information that is at the core of medical transcription? There is no assurance that these greaseballs who admit to deliberately corrupting portions of the Internet are not doing things like compiling lists of patients with terminal diagnoses to sell to funeral homes so the undertakers can use targeted marketing techniques more effectively....
I'd like to see some USA Federal or State Attorney General do some investigation about whether there may be criminal activity, or the potential for that, here.
I wish I could mobilize 4chan dwellers and /b/tards in particular to go out and vote for their national Pirate Party come election time, but it appears the vast majority haven't reached the age of maturity yet...
So as a group they are indistinguishable from the Tea Party and several other voting blocks?
Oh, wait... you prolly meant "age of majority"...
I fully agree with parent.
Each of you is unique... just like everyone else. But then there's Einstein...
So "more unique" is a distinct concept expressed succinctly to cover the Einsteinian cases. It is not logical-- it is in fact an oxymoron-- but it is used in the English language, not PHP, Perl, or any of our other logical languages. Any processor capable of properly parsing spoken English would have less difficulty with 'more unique" than with "there, their, they're". It is good English. Good English is not logical: it is used by entities that are not logical to communicate mostly irrational expressions between themselves. Generally for either arguing, boasting, or while trying to get into someone's pants.
I don't see anything about the Canadian government requiring prior approval before politicians in office, or those seeking office, are allowed to talk about public issues, such as Canada's history and its resources.
Without that, this represents a very blatant attempt to discriminate against scientists based solely on their behavior (which is doing things in a scientific way, rather than a political or religious way).
The whole thing is a bit of bad joke, eh?
Yes I did say mathematics. Sorry about muddying the waters.
The central premise is that the best that our minds can do is make some pretty durn interesting models of reality, and play around with those. And sometimes the models lead to some interesting technologies that help put food on the table, keep a roof overhead, or keep the wolves away from the door.
But it is a serious mistake to confuse these models with reality. When talking about the laws of physics, as soon as you step away from the models and begin to think that the laws are based in reality, you've screwed up your mind. Closed it off to further scientific inquiry in basic directions. Accepted as dogma that which should remain open to further questioning. Don't do that. Remain skeptical of even your core scientific beliefs, since they are after all just based on models. And remember that the best thing we can ever do with a new model is to use it to break all the old ones.
Mathematics is of course not physics; it is pure model-building completely independent of reality. For whatever reason, it has proven useful in building models of reality. Perhaps reality is basically mathematical; perhaps it is just that our modes of perception are rooted in an innate sense of mathematics. It doesn't matter; never mind.
What does matter is that even in mathematics there are these irrational pieces here and there where unknowns have to be accepted because they cannot be excluded. Does this tell you something about the physical, "objective" Universe? It is hard to see how it could since mathematics is entirely separate from physics: it is a world unto itself. A set of models that in its pure form never interact with anything outside of mathematics. So maybe this says something about who we are. Maybe it says that we are beings who are intrinsically incapable of building an accurate model of anything.
That is not a negative statement. It is simply an indication that the challenges we face in our intellectual endeavors are worthy ones, ones that challenge us to push ourselves to the very limits of our potential. That, I feel, makes the scientific experience much more vital and interesting than if it was merely a matter of making our lists of "known" facts longer and longer. Be skeptical, and be particularly skeptical about those things you think must be true. They are, after all, only pieces of models, not the Real Thing.
Showing a method of deriving pi does not render it any less irrational. Any real world application that involves pi carries an intrinsic amount of the unknown that has nothing to do with imprecision in measurement.
Just accept that none of our models can perfectly match reality, and recognize that our physics is all about our models, and about nothing other than those models. The real universe is unknowable. Get used to it.
It is also worth pointing out that the second law of thermodynamics is better expressed as "a closed system tends toward maximum entropy".
Unfortunately it is very difficult to construct a closed system in anything but your imagination. A few decades ago, the common belief among physicists and cosmologists was that the Universe was a closed system. Now no one is so sure about that. From another side, the implications of the discovery of chaotic processes and of fractals suggest that it might be impossible to distinguish a truly closed system from one which is merely in a momentarily quiescent state.
If parent post is the product of someone with a college education, that person should consider suing their alma matta for criminal negligence for teaching about 100 years behind current understanding. Or for dummying down the issues to grease the wheels of the diploma factory.
Occam's Razor: The simplest solution is usually the correct one.
No.
Parent post (along with many others) is confusing Occam's razor with parsimony. These are only superficially similar. Quirks in the English language can make it hard to appreciate the difference, but it is very definitely there.
Parsimony: as expressed above.
Occam's razor: when presented with two hypothetical processes that suggest identical outcomes, choose the simpler one (since it will be easier to test). Note that there is nothing here to indicate that reality might be one way or the other. Occam's razor has to do with model building, which is as different from reality as map making is from exploring the territory.
Unless a "rebounding crust" can also cause sea-level rise?
You were not supposed to notice that.
More seriously, though, if post ice age rebound is significant enough that it needs to be included in these models, then these questions follow:
At most, the research suggests that the changes we face are less anthropogenic and thus more difficult to forestall than we might have hoped for. If the rise in sea levels is unavoidable, then we need to more stringently control the variables that we CAN influence, and plan on a warmer, possibly wetter, world anyway.
Question: I have yet to see any empirical science behind the idea that thermal expansion is a major contributor to the increase in sea level. Is this hypothetical guessing? Or have we really enough historical data on average deep ocean temperatures to support the conjecture?
You confuse my beliefs, which I have not expressed, with some very broad descriptions of general belief systems that I mentioned solely as background. You then defend yourself against my correction of this by admitting that you are responding emotionally, with "an expression of scorn", rather than rationally.
I could go on, but that is sufficient reason to conclude that there is no further rational discussion possible. Have a good day.
QM rigorously defines a pinhole through which those who have confined their thinking to the box of the empirical method must recognize that there is Mystery: that which cannot under any circumstances be known. Quantum foam shows that when you extend the QM model beyond simple particle interactions you find that this Mystery is involved at the margins of every little thing, and thus implicated in every interaction between different things: there is a little bit of unknowable in everything that happens. If you want to get away from physics for a moment, in mathematics there is the contemplation of pi and the impossibility of comprehending why it should be as it is, making everything based on circles or cycles forever imprecise. And in astronomy there is the other side of the event horizon: clearly something is going on there, but just as clearly we can never get any information about what it is.
But back to QM. It demonstrates that there is something about the universe that lies outside of the area that the methods of science can address. It does not put a limit on how large that something is-- and rationally there is no way that a limit can be placed on what is unknown. It seems that those who would limit their thinking to just the scientific model are doing themselves a disservice: the normal human mind is quite capable of handling concepts that lie outside of science, if the owner of that mind is willing to do the study needed to learn to handle such concepts appropriately. There was a time when I would have added here that zennist study is one good way of doing this. But that was Zen; this is Tao.
I am not saying that those who choose to limit themselves to thinking only within the science box should do anything else. Do as you will with your life, so long as you harm none in the doing.
But don't insinuate your dogma into public discussions in a way that might cause others to accept it without critically appraising it. That does harm the discourse, and is doubleplus ungood, bad karma, dysphoric, etc etc. Don't proselytize your faith in science.
And consider: Many active researchers who are intimately involved in extending our scientific models regard these as very incomplete and terribly insufficient to base their lives upon. Some study sacred texts, others work in groups to grapple with the universal issues, I have encountered some who use shamanic techniques. So I am far from alone in recognizing that science works well in its corner of the playground where it builds its models, but that there is also so much more to life than the scientific model.
About the second law of thermodynamics being the same as Occam's razor: no, I don't think so. At least not in the known universe.
Of course the existence of this conversation demonstrates that the laws of thermodynamics are only applicable within the limits of physics model that frames them, and do not apply to reality itself. For if it were otherwise, there would be no life nor any other self-organizing systems. Think of this as one of the trivial applications of the anthropomorphic principle.
Physics works with models of reality. Not with reality itself. Don't confuse the map with the territory.
I don't see how it is any more unfair than your proselytizing, though I'm not advocating a religion.
It was your proselytizing for the dogma of science as you see it that provoked my response. I do not volunteer my beliefs, let alone assert them as something others should adopt; I do not proselytize. As you point out with some evident frustration later in your post, I do not even say what my beliefs are. I sometimes respond to your type of proselytizing when it occurs in certain public forums, as I have done here. I rather believe that Galileo would respond in the same fashion were he to see your posts, since his biographies suggest that he really hated it when anyone tried to insinuate their dogma into a discussion in such a way that others would accept it without critically assessing it.
You are advocating a religion. You are simply using what Orwell called doublethink to hide that from yourself.
Here's a couple of books worth reading and thinking about for a couple of decades:
BTW, I am quite comfortable with secular humanism, I dance to its assumptions quite frequently. One of its core tenets is that each individual has the right (and for some S H believers, the obligation) to examine every belief with every tool they can bring to bear before accepting it. You do not seem to be doing that yourself. Certainly your words are an attempt to get others to accept as true certain assumptions that you have invested your ego in.
It is probably worthwhile to mention in passing that mysticism has a fairly precise technical definition that can be described as the recognition that the human capacity to comprehend the Universe is limited, and there are unknowable facets that are outside our scope. This is roughly mirrored with the Copenhagen convention of physics, which can be loosely described as "There are things we know; there are things we don't know; and there are almost certainly things we can never know. So our understanding of reality is currently quite limited and very likely will always be wrong to some degree. But we can build models, and those are not only fun but they can lead to some interesting technologies."
It's not a matter of faith, it's a matter of evidence. Applying Occcam's Razor says that the process of evolution doesn't need such a being, and there is no evidence for Gaea. There is always room for further evidence, however.
I find your faith in Occam's Razor... amusing.
Within the limitations of the world view you espouse, your argument is irrefutable. It is just that you are proselytizing in a very public forum for a rather limited world view, and thus possibly affecting an unknown number of others who have yet to think these issues through. I regard that as unfair to those in the audience who have the mental capabilities to learn to dance between world views without shackling themselves to any particular one. So I argue with you in this public place.
If you were to present the same argument at a gathering of the College Of Neurosurgeons Of The Americas, I would probably not speak up. You would pretty much be preaching to the choir, and those few surgeons in attendance who were also comfortable with other modes of thought would recognize what you were doing and not be swayed by your words.
But there are a number of Slashdot readers who have access to other modes of approaching reality (either by being raised Hindu, Zen, Buddhist, Apache, Sioux, British Traditional Witchcraft, Stregheria, Voudon, etc, or by exposure to shamanic, mystic, gnostic or other systems of modeling reality. Your insistence that the only true model of the world is the scientific model could cause some these persons to turn their backs on an enriching source of knowledge, and that would be like poisoning another person's well. Don't do that.
And do you want to talk about whatever partnerships produce deserts or ice ages?
What are these partnerships of which you speak? Man and Rabbit in Australia? Man does seem uniquely positioned to work to enforce or destroy ecosystems. It seems to me that a certain amount of responsibility should go along with that power. And since science is deliberately agnostic about this kind of responsibility, we do need other modes of modeling the world to guide the application of our technologies.
Whether the evolution of the global ecosystem and each of its parts is in some grand sense moving forward or just changing a lot is not a scientifically decidable question, at least for the foreseeable future. The structure of the question depends on faith: either faith in Gaea or some other Supreme Being, or an equally strong faith that no such being exists. As a neopagan of the witchy type, I personally believe that the most evolved way to handle these kinds of issues is to learn to dance smoothly and quickly between the two different world views. But i recognize that the idea of deliberately Crafting one's life is not acceptable to a lot of people. For one thing, it takes a great deal of time and effort that will go unrewarded by anyone else: others don't even see what you are doing.
But putting all that aside, when looking at smaller segments of the ecosystem and more specific goal states, then you can certainly use a goal-oriented model to describe the realities of evolution. This is most clear when considering convergence, where separate species have evolved similar traits because those traits are uniquely suited to meeting a common need. So porpoises and sharks have converged on a similar body shape, and the wings of bats, flying fish, and birds have generally similar aerodynamic properties.
In these distinct areas, it does make sense to talk as if there was a competition between species. The prize of being most evolved in certain specific categories is a secure ecological niche.
Of course you don't want to get locked into that kind of model building, since then you end up doing silly things like regarding the salmon as being just a very good fast swimming predator fish. That would make it too easy to lose sight of Salmon's partnership with Bear and Eagle to fertilize the otherwise barren heights of the Pacific Northwest with then nutrients from the ocean that make the region's forests so richly verdant. But to even talk about that role of Salmon requires dancing away from the scientific mind set and into the totemic mind set for at least a moment. Persons with less evolved minds will find that impossible.
Which isn't to say that such persons are less intellectual or anything like that. They may well be very clever, and could easily become major players in businsess or technology. They simply have less evolved minds.
Second time suggests that sector of industry is corrupt to the point of endangering everyone. If you have property near a filling station, petroleum pipeline, tank farm, transfer site, refinery, or anything else involved in processing petrochemicals, it is time to start agitating for some third party safety audits to make sure that your property's value isn't about to get blown to smithers.
I'm not saying that your stuff is directly at risk. But if we have another explosion, pipeline leak, or similar event anywhere within USA jurisdiction, your property values will get tarred by a very broad brush. Anyone at risk of this needs to get politicking for some kind of review that will assure potential buyers that they won't be shafted by their petrochemical neighbors.
BTW, there is absolutely no need to lay this kind of thing off to enemy action. Not when 8+ years of ineffective oversight coupled with corporate "long term" planning that fails to look beyond next quarter's profit and loss statement are more than adequate to account for these incidents. (I was about to say "accidents", but it appears that these are far from accidental. They look much more like the productive of short term greed multiplied by long term stupidity.)
combined assets of $14.2 million and debt totaling $5.2 million
I don't think those numbers are right. I don't think you can file for bankruptcy if your assets are roughly three times greater than your debts.
Or is there another way of reading the sentence that I am not seeing?
The key phrase being supposed to be for.
My conception of what is important is very different from what many of those who send me emails consider important. And my assessment of the subject line is highly dependent on the context provided by the from and to lines.
Maybe Google's approach will have some value for me. Expecting that some magical training will get everyone else to use subject lines the way that I think they should be used would be a foolish notion. of course YMMV.