Thanks for the clarification. As a tangent to the subject, I'd just like to note that there is a liberal move afoot here in the USA to go to socialized medicine. Those of us who work (or who have worked) for a living don't like that idea since we are naturally opposed to socialized anything. We have been spiraling downhill every since Franklin Roosevelt whose good idea has turned into "welfare" being the number 1 use for our income tax dollars. When (not if) we get socialized medicine, together with our uncontrolled immigration of millions of uneducated Mexicans, and millions of lazy, entitlement-oriented citizens, the country will be doomed. By that I mean the middle class will cease to exist because they will be taxed into poverty to pay TWICE their previous tax burden. It's all called Redistribution of Wealth. Some of my friends say this will happen within ten years. Watch this space.......
Re:I worked with Dr. Worsey to open a cave
on
Explosives Camp
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for the info. I did some caving when I was in the Spelunker's Club at [then] UMR. Visiting Carroll Cave was probably the highlight of the couple of years doing that. Some of my friends helped map the place.
There is so much wrong-headed justice in this country (not just Texas). I read the other day it is common practice for courts to require the payment of paternity if the mother alleges the man is the father of the baby even IF DNA TESTS PROVE IT IS NOT SO!!!! And I have a friend, who was beaten, shot, and left for dead by hoodlums who saw him watching them casing a convenience store. The police shortly found the shooter, but a judge released him on $3,000 bail two hours later. My friend spent a month in a comma, two additional months in rehab, and was left with $400,000 in medical bills. The prosecutor says he is too busy to press the case. Perhaps if the victim had died....... SO MUCH INJUSTICE.
$500??? $650??? These numbers are small. Even when I had employer-provided health insurance, it cost about $35/week for coverage, still leaving co-pays and a large deductible each year to pay. After retirement, I had to pay upwards of $1,000 per month for coverage, also with a large deductible. Result: I was paying something like $16,000 per year for medical costs, and my family was/is in good health. I shudder to think what it would have cost if we had a health problem of any consequence. Now that I am eligible for Tricare (the retired military's "free" insurance), I have no premiums, but I have to pay 20% to 25% of any costs, more if I don't go to one of their selected hard-to-find providers.
Your good point 7 about aerosol pollution reflecting sunlight thus reducing global temperatures says we should maybe get rid of the environmental controls rather than imposing additional ones. That might seem simple-minded, but a little high altitude haze would be a far lesser penalty on civilization than decreasing CO2 emisions to the stone-age level.
You went to a lot of trouble to document your comments; that is flattering.
Since neither you nor I will change our minds, I see no need to continue this dialog (though I enjoy debating with someone with a brain).
Warm regards...(no pun intended)
I'm glad you are so convinced in your beliefs. But maybe if you read just ONE article, you might reconsider. I've included one short below (of the hundreds or maybe thousands available), but if it doesn't at least raise doubts that the "climatologists" are doing bad science to the point of hysteria, then I give up. The following article was published in the Wall Street Journal, and the author DOES quote his sources.
Plus Ça (Climate) Change
The Earth was warming before global warming was cool.
BY PETE DU PONT
Wednesday, February 21, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
When Eric the Red led the Norwegian Vikings to Greenland in the late 900s, it was an ice-free farm country--grass for sheep and cattle, open water for fishing, a livable climate--so good a colony that by 1100 there were 3,000 people living there. Then came the Ice Age. By 1400, average temperatures had declined by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, the glaciers had crushed southward across the farmlands and harbors, and the Vikings did not survive.
Such global temperature fluctuations are not surprising, for looking back in history we see a regular pattern of warming and cooling. From 200 B.C. to A.D. 600 saw the Roman Warming period; from 600 to 900, the cold period of the Dark Ages; from 900 to 1300 was the Medieval warming period; and 1300 to 1850, the Little Ice Age.
During the 20th century the earth did indeed warm--by 1 degree Fahrenheit. But a look at the data shows that within the century temperatures varied with time: from 1900 to 1910 the world cooled; from 1910 to 1940 it warmed; from 1940 to the late 1970s it cooled again, and since then it has been warming. Today our climate is 1/20th of a degree Fahrenheit warmer than it was in 2001.
Many things are contributing to such global temperature changes. Solar radiation is one. Sunspot activity has reached a thousand-year high, according to European astronomy institutions. Solar radiation is reducing Mars's southern icecap, which has been shrinking for three summers despite the absence of SUVS and coal-fired electrical plants anywhere on the Red Planet. Back on Earth, a NASA study reports that solar radiation has increased in each of the past two decades, and environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg, citing a 1997 atmosphere-ocean general circulation model, observes that "the increase in direct solar irradiation over the past 30 years is responsible for about 40 percent of the observed global warming."
Statistics suggest that while there has indeed been a slight warming in the past century, much of it was neither human-induced nor geographically uniform. Half of the past century's warming occurred before 1940, when the human population and its industrial base were far smaller than now. And while global temperatures are now slightly up, in some areas they are dramatically down. According to "Climate Change and Its Impacts," a study published last spring by the National Center for Policy Analysis, the ice mass in Greenland has grown, and "average summer temperatures at the summit of the Greenland ice sheet have decreased 4 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the late 1980s." British environmental analyst Lord Christopher Monckton says that from 1993 through 2003 the Greenland ice sheet "grew an average extra thickness of 2 inches a year," and that in the past 30 years the mass of the Antarctic ice sheet has grown as well.
Earlier this month the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a summary of its fourth five-year report. Although the full report won't be out until May, the summary has reinvigorated the global warming discussion.
While global warming alarmism has become a daily American press feature, the IPCC, in its new report, is backtracking on its warming predictions. While Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" warns of up to 20 feet of sea-level increase, the IPCC has halved its estimate of the rise in sea level by the end of this century, to 17 inches from 36. It has reduced its estimate of the impact of global greenhouse-gas emissions on global climate by more than one-third, because, it says, po
Well, if you won't read the factual documentation.....
That global warming is a myth is carefully documented in the literature. It is a fantasy dreamed up by liberals to control the masses. The "climate experts" are paid by the wacko environmental lobby to come up with these scientifically unsupportable notions. Photos are doctored, data are ignored or simply made up. Shameful, shameful.....
Shrinking ice caps are supposedly one of the tell-tales of global warming. Yet the ice caps are shrinking on Mars right now too. Are there too many SUVs up there?
We could go on and on. Have you seen Gore's movie? Water rising 20 feet in a century? Pure made-up number.
I prefer not to believe in paranoid fantacies. A few years ago the experts were warning about "global cooling." The sky is always falling for somebody, and the liberals are always jumping on the respective bandwagons to control your life so you properly fear it.
Don't believe all the liberal crap about global warming. There is global warming, but it is minor and it is not caused by humans. The current minor warming we are seeing is a micro-view of longer-period cycles stretching over centuries or even millenia. The atmospheric models that point to humans being the cause are not designed for this, and are often used by people ill-equipped to use them even if they were accurate. The minor warming we are seeing is only about 1 deg C per century, and is caused by solar and earth tilt changes. Humans, cows, and trees have almost nothing to do with anything except small local polution. The intellectual lemmings are letting the liberal elite, headed by Al Gore, do their thinking for them. Gore's movie was politicized fiction masquerading as a documentary.
Conspiracy theory aside, the resolution of any telescope is limited only by the diameter of the optics, the distance to the object being examined, and the wavelength of the light of interest. This assumes of course that the optics and any intervening medium (e.g., atmosphere) are non-distorting. Notwithstanding folding optics, the largest mirror that can be launched is some 4 meters in diameter limiting the resolution from the nearest earth orbit to about 5 inches (please pardon the mixed units). Thus, "reading license plates," an example often in the news, is not possible from space (much less reading handwriting). This argument doesn't even point out the hard part of slewing the optics to accommodate the "camera" moving at orbital velocity. One day (well, year) soon I expect optical telescopes to be phased such that orbiting telescopes far apart can add their information, resulting in a LARGE aperture, and thus significantly increasing the resolution of the system. We might even be able to image extra-solar worlds. Wow!
It is good to at least discover why I can't get DSL (the phone company has been no help). I chose to live in rural Tennessee, with all that comes with it and all that doesn't come with it. If high speed is mandatory, I shouldn't have moved here. The infrastructure it would take to provide me with high speed access would be nice, but cost everybody. I can only get 1.5 mbs download (max) and 512 kbs upload (max) via satellite, but that has been adequate. No DSL, no cable, no cell phone (closest tower is 10 miles). Obviously, nation-wide cable (and therefore high bandwidth access) is easier in the smaller nations than in the US, which is a pretty big place. I see no solution.
I really like your idea expressed in the final paragraph. Very logical; therefore, it can't possibly be adoopted! But you know, almost all of us have had ideas, some even written down, that are interesting and potentially profitible, that years later someone else had and also had the energy, time, and finances to get a patent and find a manufacturer and distributor. I thought of roller blades as a teenager, probably so did thousands of others, but not until 40 years later did someone come up with them, so that risk-taker deserves the bounty. I understand the motivation to change from what one writes down to what risk one takes to garner possible gain. Your solution is perfect I think.
The impact of global warming will not be any worse this century than it was in the last one. Waters have been rising about 2mm per year for millinea, so tides and storm swells will have much more impact than rising waters. They'll probably have the entrance about 100 feet above sea level, and possibly a way to shut the entrance just in case of a tidal wave.
Nice to actually know there are human beings at TT. I've used desktop TT for several years (maybe ten), and it gets more and more complicated with less and less visibility into whata is actually being done. But what else is one to do these days? Before TT, I used TaxCut, but it always had bugs. Next year, old bugs fixed, new bugs present. Anyway, one problem I had with TT this year was it would not save certain data. For example, whenever I'd visit the dependent page where it asks one to check any of several boxes, I'd have to re-enter the checks every time I did the page. There were about three screens like this -- very annoying. Another thing, I send TT at least four email messages complaining of certain things, such as an insufficient explanation of Section 179 carryovers, but never got a single reply. A couple of days after I submitted my return, TT sent me a survey to take, and after I completed it, I was told I would be a reviewer/evaluator (or some such term). I had then to fill out a questionaire similar to the survey I'd just completed. After I did this, I did not hear back from TT, so I expect nothing was done either with the survey or questionaire. Since you are one of the TT online support staff, I wonder if you ever hear of problems from the field like these, or if they just get tossed into the trash bin. Anyway, reading your message was refreshing since one doubts otherwise there is any human at TT. Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the clarification. As a tangent to the subject, I'd just like to note that there is a liberal move afoot here in the USA to go to socialized medicine. Those of us who work (or who have worked) for a living don't like that idea since we are naturally opposed to socialized anything. We have been spiraling downhill every since Franklin Roosevelt whose good idea has turned into "welfare" being the number 1 use for our income tax dollars. When (not if) we get socialized medicine, together with our uncontrolled immigration of millions of uneducated Mexicans, and millions of lazy, entitlement-oriented citizens, the country will be doomed. By that I mean the middle class will cease to exist because they will be taxed into poverty to pay TWICE their previous tax burden. It's all called Redistribution of Wealth. Some of my friends say this will happen within ten years. Watch this space.......
Thanks for the info. I did some caving when I was in the Spelunker's Club at [then] UMR. Visiting Carroll Cave was probably the highlight of the couple of years doing that. Some of my friends helped map the place.
There is so much wrong-headed justice in this country (not just Texas). I read the other day it is common practice for courts to require the payment of paternity if the mother alleges the man is the father of the baby even IF DNA TESTS PROVE IT IS NOT SO!!!! And I have a friend, who was beaten, shot, and left for dead by hoodlums who saw him watching them casing a convenience store. The police shortly found the shooter, but a judge released him on $3,000 bail two hours later. My friend spent a month in a comma, two additional months in rehab, and was left with $400,000 in medical bills. The prosecutor says he is too busy to press the case. Perhaps if the victim had died....... SO MUCH INJUSTICE.
$500??? $650??? These numbers are small. Even when I had employer-provided health insurance, it cost about $35/week for coverage, still leaving co-pays and a large deductible each year to pay. After retirement, I had to pay upwards of $1,000 per month for coverage, also with a large deductible. Result: I was paying something like $16,000 per year for medical costs, and my family was/is in good health. I shudder to think what it would have cost if we had a health problem of any consequence. Now that I am eligible for Tricare (the retired military's "free" insurance), I have no premiums, but I have to pay 20% to 25% of any costs, more if I don't go to one of their selected hard-to-find providers.
Your good point 7 about aerosol pollution reflecting sunlight thus reducing global temperatures says we should maybe get rid of the environmental controls rather than imposing additional ones. That might seem simple-minded, but a little high altitude haze would be a far lesser penalty on civilization than decreasing CO2 emisions to the stone-age level. You went to a lot of trouble to document your comments; that is flattering. Since neither you nor I will change our minds, I see no need to continue this dialog (though I enjoy debating with someone with a brain). Warm regards...(no pun intended)
I'm glad you are so convinced in your beliefs. But maybe if you read just ONE article, you might reconsider. I've included one short below (of the hundreds or maybe thousands available), but if it doesn't at least raise doubts that the "climatologists" are doing bad science to the point of hysteria, then I give up. The following article was published in the Wall Street Journal, and the author DOES quote his sources. Plus Ça (Climate) Change The Earth was warming before global warming was cool. BY PETE DU PONT Wednesday, February 21, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST When Eric the Red led the Norwegian Vikings to Greenland in the late 900s, it was an ice-free farm country--grass for sheep and cattle, open water for fishing, a livable climate--so good a colony that by 1100 there were 3,000 people living there. Then came the Ice Age. By 1400, average temperatures had declined by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, the glaciers had crushed southward across the farmlands and harbors, and the Vikings did not survive. Such global temperature fluctuations are not surprising, for looking back in history we see a regular pattern of warming and cooling. From 200 B.C. to A.D. 600 saw the Roman Warming period; from 600 to 900, the cold period of the Dark Ages; from 900 to 1300 was the Medieval warming period; and 1300 to 1850, the Little Ice Age. During the 20th century the earth did indeed warm--by 1 degree Fahrenheit. But a look at the data shows that within the century temperatures varied with time: from 1900 to 1910 the world cooled; from 1910 to 1940 it warmed; from 1940 to the late 1970s it cooled again, and since then it has been warming. Today our climate is 1/20th of a degree Fahrenheit warmer than it was in 2001. Many things are contributing to such global temperature changes. Solar radiation is one. Sunspot activity has reached a thousand-year high, according to European astronomy institutions. Solar radiation is reducing Mars's southern icecap, which has been shrinking for three summers despite the absence of SUVS and coal-fired electrical plants anywhere on the Red Planet. Back on Earth, a NASA study reports that solar radiation has increased in each of the past two decades, and environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg, citing a 1997 atmosphere-ocean general circulation model, observes that "the increase in direct solar irradiation over the past 30 years is responsible for about 40 percent of the observed global warming." Statistics suggest that while there has indeed been a slight warming in the past century, much of it was neither human-induced nor geographically uniform. Half of the past century's warming occurred before 1940, when the human population and its industrial base were far smaller than now. And while global temperatures are now slightly up, in some areas they are dramatically down. According to "Climate Change and Its Impacts," a study published last spring by the National Center for Policy Analysis, the ice mass in Greenland has grown, and "average summer temperatures at the summit of the Greenland ice sheet have decreased 4 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the late 1980s." British environmental analyst Lord Christopher Monckton says that from 1993 through 2003 the Greenland ice sheet "grew an average extra thickness of 2 inches a year," and that in the past 30 years the mass of the Antarctic ice sheet has grown as well. Earlier this month the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a summary of its fourth five-year report. Although the full report won't be out until May, the summary has reinvigorated the global warming discussion. While global warming alarmism has become a daily American press feature, the IPCC, in its new report, is backtracking on its warming predictions. While Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" warns of up to 20 feet of sea-level increase, the IPCC has halved its estimate of the rise in sea level by the end of this century, to 17 inches from 36. It has reduced its estimate of the impact of global greenhouse-gas emissions on global climate by more than one-third, because, it says, po
Well, if you won't read the factual documentation..... That global warming is a myth is carefully documented in the literature. It is a fantasy dreamed up by liberals to control the masses. The "climate experts" are paid by the wacko environmental lobby to come up with these scientifically unsupportable notions. Photos are doctored, data are ignored or simply made up. Shameful, shameful..... Shrinking ice caps are supposedly one of the tell-tales of global warming. Yet the ice caps are shrinking on Mars right now too. Are there too many SUVs up there? We could go on and on. Have you seen Gore's movie? Water rising 20 feet in a century? Pure made-up number. I prefer not to believe in paranoid fantacies. A few years ago the experts were warning about "global cooling." The sky is always falling for somebody, and the liberals are always jumping on the respective bandwagons to control your life so you properly fear it.
Okay, take a look at these (just a short list of the many refutations to global warming): https://www.conservativebookclub.com/Join/SingleBo okJoin.asp?sour_cd=sb242az&prod_cd=c7020
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/moregw.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHjczyA75jU
Don't believe all the liberal crap about global warming. There is global warming, but it is minor and it is not caused by humans. The current minor warming we are seeing is a micro-view of longer-period cycles stretching over centuries or even millenia. The atmospheric models that point to humans being the cause are not designed for this, and are often used by people ill-equipped to use them even if they were accurate. The minor warming we are seeing is only about 1 deg C per century, and is caused by solar and earth tilt changes. Humans, cows, and trees have almost nothing to do with anything except small local polution. The intellectual lemmings are letting the liberal elite, headed by Al Gore, do their thinking for them. Gore's movie was politicized fiction masquerading as a documentary.
Conspiracy theory aside, the resolution of any telescope is limited only by the diameter of the optics, the distance to the object being examined, and the wavelength of the light of interest. This assumes of course that the optics and any intervening medium (e.g., atmosphere) are non-distorting. Notwithstanding folding optics, the largest mirror that can be launched is some 4 meters in diameter limiting the resolution from the nearest earth orbit to about 5 inches (please pardon the mixed units). Thus, "reading license plates," an example often in the news, is not possible from space (much less reading handwriting). This argument doesn't even point out the hard part of slewing the optics to accommodate the "camera" moving at orbital velocity. One day (well, year) soon I expect optical telescopes to be phased such that orbiting telescopes far apart can add their information, resulting in a LARGE aperture, and thus significantly increasing the resolution of the system. We might even be able to image extra-solar worlds. Wow!
It is good to at least discover why I can't get DSL (the phone company has been no help). I chose to live in rural Tennessee, with all that comes with it and all that doesn't come with it. If high speed is mandatory, I shouldn't have moved here. The infrastructure it would take to provide me with high speed access would be nice, but cost everybody. I can only get 1.5 mbs download (max) and 512 kbs upload (max) via satellite, but that has been adequate. No DSL, no cable, no cell phone (closest tower is 10 miles). Obviously, nation-wide cable (and therefore high bandwidth access) is easier in the smaller nations than in the US, which is a pretty big place. I see no solution.
I really like your idea expressed in the final paragraph. Very logical; therefore, it can't possibly be adoopted! But you know, almost all of us have had ideas, some even written down, that are interesting and potentially profitible, that years later someone else had and also had the energy, time, and finances to get a patent and find a manufacturer and distributor. I thought of roller blades as a teenager, probably so did thousands of others, but not until 40 years later did someone come up with them, so that risk-taker deserves the bounty. I understand the motivation to change from what one writes down to what risk one takes to garner possible gain. Your solution is perfect I think.
The impact of global warming will not be any worse this century than it was in the last one. Waters have been rising about 2mm per year for millinea, so tides and storm swells will have much more impact than rising waters. They'll probably have the entrance about 100 feet above sea level, and possibly a way to shut the entrance just in case of a tidal wave.
Nice to actually know there are human beings at TT. I've used desktop TT for several years (maybe ten), and it gets more and more complicated with less and less visibility into whata is actually being done. But what else is one to do these days? Before TT, I used TaxCut, but it always had bugs. Next year, old bugs fixed, new bugs present. Anyway, one problem I had with TT this year was it would not save certain data. For example, whenever I'd visit the dependent page where it asks one to check any of several boxes, I'd have to re-enter the checks every time I did the page. There were about three screens like this -- very annoying. Another thing, I send TT at least four email messages complaining of certain things, such as an insufficient explanation of Section 179 carryovers, but never got a single reply. A couple of days after I submitted my return, TT sent me a survey to take, and after I completed it, I was told I would be a reviewer/evaluator (or some such term). I had then to fill out a questionaire similar to the survey I'd just completed. After I did this, I did not hear back from TT, so I expect nothing was done either with the survey or questionaire. Since you are one of the TT online support staff, I wonder if you ever hear of problems from the field like these, or if they just get tossed into the trash bin. Anyway, reading your message was refreshing since one doubts otherwise there is any human at TT. Thanks.