HP / EDS pulled the same stunt. Oh, except that the CEO's taking a 20% cut in his basic (but pulled a $40,000,000 bonus last year), and there's no vote involved.
"It's been a rough week for the RIAA as massive layoffs are about to cost many employees their job [...]"
Awwwwwwww. We had a whip-round at the office for 'em. Guess we'll just have to go looking for them on skid row - I hope they remember to wear those ATF-style RIAA jackets and caps so we know who to tip it over. To, I mean, who to tip it TO.
"Our investigation team, led by Robert and Ryan Woodâ"a father and son team with 50 years of combined UFO studyâ"has applied their skills as both sleuths and scholars. Painstakingly verifying âoedeep throatâ sources, meticulously analyzing old and controversial documents, they arrive finally at conclusions that are as well grounded in fact as they are stunning in their implications. UFO-related secret programs have consumed a significant part of Americaâ(TM)s black budget since the Manhattan Project. [...]"
As a Brit I find it bizarre that most US homes seem to be built of wood. Over here we call those "sheds", not buildings. We use brick concrete or (in the older houses like mine) stone.
I think perhaps you don't appreciate the power of these fires. In a firestorm like this, where the radiant heat's enough to kill a couple of hundred metres away, it's not really going to make much difference having a stone or tin roof.
, the Moon will be economically the most valuable body outside of Earth
I apologise for quibbling with your reasonable, informed and intelligent response:)
However! IMNSHO, the notion of an economic return from the moon or indeed any other body is a chimera, at least until there's a functioning market for hard science data and results. (Same goes for asteroid mining and other putative money-making schemes.) I posit that no-one's ever going to get as far as even attempting a PoC mission, for the same reason it hasn't happened to date: the economics just don't stack up. There's nothing on the moon or anywhere else that has anything remotely approaching even the order of magnitude of the cost of going and getting it. (Not counting pure data, of course, which I at least value greatly. At some point it may or may not become worthwhile from the PoV of pure science to spend the astonishing sums needed for even an unmanned MSR (Mars Sample Return), though note that proposals for doing this have been going down like the Hindenberg every couple of years for the last three decades, and counting.
Um, you do realise what a SpaceX Falcon-1 launch actually costs, don't you? (Hint: no.) Yes, it's a great achievement and yes, it looks like it's got the potential to significantly reduce the cost-per-kg to LEO number; but it's still very, very expensive even just to launch a passive ballast into orbit. And once you start looking into the cost of building a payload that actually does something, the cost benefits look a bit less dramatic. (A lot less potential for COTS and economies of scale benefits when the vast majority of stuff in orbit was custom built.)
Oh, and the -1 Flamebait poster up there ("Fucking Moron") actually have a point, amongst the abuse; the current launchers ARE designed built and operated by the private sector.
So long as my tax dollars aren't going to fund it, I'm entirely happy for you to enjoy whatever dream you like. Me, I'm dreaming about that geek girl at work. Whooo boy, I tell ya, she's smokin' and no mistake. *wistful sigh*
s/eventual/possible/ . I don't think that's going to happen either. I just hope they don't hose too much budget on the impossible dream before they see sense.
RealClimate, and their FAQs as well, are accessible to a motivated person (it's easier if you've got some sort of grasp of science and "how she is spoke", of course.)
Many workers in the field have published books for the general reader; again, RC has some good pointers. Finally, the IPCC assessment reports are reasonably accessible (the summaries in particular.)
Now, you could say that getting into this level of research is a non-trivial thing to do, and you'd be right. There's jargon and shorthands for concepts and acronyms that mean little to the outsider. Climate is also, fundamentally, a very complicated phenomena; work in the field covers a multitude of specialist disciplines, an understanding of statistical methods, chemistry, biology, emergent phenomena, atmospheric physics, paleoclimatology (ice and sediment cores and the like), and so on and so forth. Fair enough, if you don't want to put that amount of effort in, you get to *take their word for it*.
We (rightfully) will want a further look at the data used all along regardless.
OK, here you go, have fun. All the data in modern climate science is freely available in massive quantities. (The GISS datasets are just one example.)
It's certainly true that there's a lot of crap journalism around climate change; please don't confuse the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. Go read RealClimate, or Scientific American (hell, even New Scientist if you like comics) or (better yet) search out the specialist journals.
The radiation absorbtion and emission characteristics of a gas are invariant by volume. If you dispute that, you really are flying in the face of physics as we know it at a very fundamental level.
Without checking procedures and facts that went into a study, you can never be sure about the results.
Replication studies are completely routine, they're done all the time. Here's an example.
most of the 'studies' I've seen floating around the press smell fishy to me
A free clue: try getting your science from journals or at least popular science publications, rather than the third-hand chinese-whisper versions perpetrated by the mass media (largely staffed with scientifically ignorant arts grads these days, sadly.)
What's the point of being consistent with a flawed methodology?
From TFA:
Some people might ask why we don't simply switch to the EOS AMSR-E sensor. AMSR-E is a newer and more accurate passive microwave sensor. However, we do not use AMSR-E data in our analysis because it is not consistent with our historical data. Thus, while AMSR-E gives us greater accuracy and more confidence on current sea ice conditions, it actually provides less accuracy on the long-term changes over the past thirty years. There is a balance between being as accurate as possible at any given moment and being as consistent as possible through long time periods. Our main scientific focus is on the long-term changes in Arctic sea ice. With that in mind, we have chosen to continue using the SSM/I sensor, which provides the longest record of Arctic sea ice extent.
Oh, and it's not a flawed methodology. It's a different set of sensors. Dataset != methodology.
Slashdot Mirror
Small robots could build landing site for moon base, and monkeys could fly out of my butt. The odds of it actually happening are about the same.
HP / EDS pulled the same stunt. Oh, except that the CEO's taking a 20% cut in his basic (but pulled a $40,000,000 bonus last year), and there's no vote involved.
http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/19/hp_pay_cuts/
Awwwwwwww. We had a whip-round at the office for 'em. Guess we'll just have to go looking for them on skid row - I hope they remember to wear those ATF-style RIAA jackets and caps so we know who to tip it over. To, I mean, who to tip it TO.
That is almost nutty enough to be interesting, to the extent that I dug up the original paper:
http://pdf.aiaa.org/preview/CDReadyMPDC04_865/PV2004_1419.pdf
Alas only the first page is available; they charge $25 for the full text.
Robert Wood seems to have had an interesting career but to have fetched up in areas that aren't terribly good for his credibility:
(From http://www.majesticdocuments.com/documents/intro.php ):
"lovestock", eh? ewwww.
As a Brit I find it bizarre that most US homes seem to be built of wood. Over here we call those "sheds", not buildings. We use brick concrete or (in the older houses like mine) stone.
I think perhaps you don't appreciate the power of these fires. In a firestorm like this, where the radiant heat's enough to kill a couple of hundred metres away, it's not really going to make much difference having a stone or tin roof.
Yes, you're right that individual weather events can't be attributed, but then bush fires aren't really weather. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/02/bushfires-and-climate/langswitch_lang/fr
This must be some previously unknown usage of the term "debunked" to mean "replicated and demonstrated to be robust".
I apologise for quibbling with your reasonable, informed and intelligent response :)
However! IMNSHO, the notion of an economic return from the moon or indeed any other body is a chimera, at least until there's a functioning market for hard science data and results. (Same goes for asteroid mining and other putative money-making schemes.) I posit that no-one's ever going to get as far as even attempting a PoC mission, for the same reason it hasn't happened to date: the economics just don't stack up. There's nothing on the moon or anywhere else that has anything remotely approaching even the order of magnitude of the cost of going and getting it. (Not counting pure data, of course, which I at least value greatly. At some point it may or may not become worthwhile from the PoV of pure science to spend the astonishing sums needed for even an unmanned MSR (Mars Sample Return), though note that proposals for doing this have been going down like the Hindenberg every couple of years for the last three decades, and counting.
Um, you do realise what a SpaceX Falcon-1 launch actually costs, don't you? (Hint: no.) Yes, it's a great achievement and yes, it looks like it's got the potential to significantly reduce the cost-per-kg to LEO number; but it's still very, very expensive even just to launch a passive ballast into orbit. And once you start looking into the cost of building a payload that actually does something, the cost benefits look a bit less dramatic. (A lot less potential for COTS and economies of scale benefits when the vast majority of stuff in orbit was custom built.)
Oh, and the -1 Flamebait poster up there ("Fucking Moron") actually have a point, amongst the abuse; the current launchers ARE designed built and operated by the private sector.
Yes, for we must close teh shiny gap!!!1!
It's an awful lot of money to spend on indeterminate, unquantifiable benefits.
So long as my tax dollars aren't going to fund it, I'm entirely happy for you to enjoy whatever dream you like. Me, I'm dreaming about that geek girl at work. Whooo boy, I tell ya, she's smokin' and no mistake. *wistful sigh*
Not as cool as surfacing my bathroom with diamonds, though, and a lot more expensive and pointless.
s/eventual/possible/ . I don't think that's going to happen either. I just hope they don't hose too much budget on the impossible dream before they see sense.
How remarkably clever of you, especially as Gmail only entered it's initial invitation-only beta in 2003...
RealClimate, and their FAQs as well, are accessible to a motivated person (it's easier if you've got some sort of grasp of science and "how she is spoke", of course.)
Many workers in the field have published books for the general reader; again, RC has some good pointers. Finally, the IPCC assessment reports are reasonably accessible (the summaries in particular.)
Now, you could say that getting into this level of research is a non-trivial thing to do, and you'd be right. There's jargon and shorthands for concepts and acronyms that mean little to the outsider. Climate is also, fundamentally, a very complicated phenomena; work in the field covers a multitude of specialist disciplines, an understanding of statistical methods, chemistry, biology, emergent phenomena, atmospheric physics, paleoclimatology (ice and sediment cores and the like), and so on and so forth. Fair enough, if you don't want to put that amount of effort in, you get to *take their word for it*.
Er, you do know that there are prizes for science, as well as the Peace Prize, right?
OK, here you go, have fun. All the data in modern climate science is freely available in massive quantities. (The GISS datasets are just one example.) It's certainly true that there's a lot of crap journalism around climate change; please don't confuse the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. Go read RealClimate, or Scientific American (hell, even New Scientist if you like comics) or (better yet) search out the specialist journals.
The radiation absorbtion and emission characteristics of a gas are invariant by volume. If you dispute that, you really are flying in the face of physics as we know it at a very fundamental level.
Replication studies are completely routine, they're done all the time. Here's an example.
A free clue: try getting your science from journals or at least popular science publications, rather than the third-hand chinese-whisper versions perpetrated by the mass media (largely staffed with scientifically ignorant arts grads these days, sadly.)
All we would like you to do is burn less fossil fuels. This will save you money. DUH.
From TFA:
Oh, and it's not a flawed methodology. It's a different set of sensors. Dataset != methodology.
So, are the nurses looking after you alright? Can you feed yourself OK with that rubber spoon?