Because that's clear. We've literally already had guilty pleas and indictments related to that. We have a lot of actual information about what the Russians were trying to do. See e.g. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/more-than-half-of-russian-facebook-ads-focused-on-race.html. The question is how high up it went, how involved Trump was, and most difficult, how much, if any, impact it had on the election. The last is least important from a criminal investigatory standpoint, but is something we will hopefully still get information about.
It is unlikely that Russia stole the election in any meaningful way. There is however, clear evidence that Russia tried to influence the US election, and that people in the Trump campaign were involved in that. How much involvement and how much influence we still don't know. That's part of why we have Mueller's investigation. Don't make conclusions until they are done with their jobs.
While it is true that one could argue for putting all monitoring under a single agency, the fact is that for a whole bunch of historical reasons that isn't the case. In general, NOAA has done more direct monitoring of the climate as is, while NASA has done more for CO2 and methane levels themselves. This is due in part to them both having different primary areas of expertise (and given that NASA has done chemistry investigations for other planets they have relevant expertise where atmospheric chemistry is concerned). But more to the point, this isn't a consolidation- the NASA funding is getting cut, and there aren't any corresponding increases in NOAA funding, so the result is simply that there will be substantially less monitoring in general.
Seriously, this again? Categories by nature have fuzzy boundaries. We'll have trouble telling how best to categorize the edge cases. What matters is what categories are most useful for understanding things. If the experts in an area decide to categorize something one way then let them.
To add insult to injury, they amended their convoluted definition with the vindictive and linguistically paradoxical statement that "a dwarf planet is not a planet." This seemingly served no purpose but to satisfy those motivated by a desire -- for whatever reason -- to ensure that Pluto was "demoted" by the new definition.
If I'm following this argument correctly, they are arguing that it is "linguistically paradoxical" to have something of the form "[adjective] x" to not also be in the category labeled "x". But we do this all the time. For example, in math a "skew field" is not necessarily a field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_ring, and one can come up with many other examples in STEM fields. This is a natural thing that we do all the time. And the specific reason in this case that dwarf planets were not planets was to avoid then making Eris and Ceres and a a whole bunch of other objects also planets.
I'm fascinated that with everything else going on the world, serious people apparently think that arguing over what we call a planet or not is an important issue.
nonsense, carbon offsets are a scam, billions of euros in fraud known and the true extent of the crime unknown.
using less fossil fuel is the only way, not trading scams.
There have been serious problems with fraudulent carbon offsets. That doesn't mean that carbon offsets themselves are scams, any more than the existence of fraudulent charities in general is an argument that charity is itself a scam. If you read the comment you are replying to, you will note that I didn't advocate carbon offsets in general, I pointed to a specific method of carbon offsets which is well-vetted.
Since I explicitly referred to using less fossil fuels, and articulated specific ways to do so, I'm not sure what your argument there is.
your donations are useful for helping people but pointless for reducing carbon output of civilization, the magnitude is a gnat's fart in a hurricane.
That's true in general for any form of charity. As individuals we can do very little. Collectively, the situation is very different.
Um, I explicitly didn't advise people to get new cars. I said "If you get a new car" and then discussed how one should do that if one is going to. I'm also not sure how you think advising people to use more public transit isn't productive, or what your objection is to getting solar panels or donating to causes which buy more solar panels.
There are three main aspects, personal, political and charitable:
In terms of personal lifestyle differences, the biggest options are to eat less meat and to use a personal car less. If you live somewhere where public transit is an option, you can massively cut down on your carbon footprint by simply using public transit. Not everyone has that option, since you may live somewhere where public transit isn't available or may have a job or family that necessitates getting a car, in which case, if you get a new car, make sure to buy an electric or hybrid. Also in terms of personal activity, one can keep the air conditioning or heating in one's house at not as extreme temperatures or one can better insulate one's house. If one is somewhere installing solar on one's home either for electricity or just for water heating then do it. All these personal changes are also things which overall cause one to save money so there's good reason to do it..
Political change is also important. Much of Europe is taking sensible approaches to these issues (although Germany's anti-nuclear kick isn't helping) but the US is very much not so. In general, the Democrats have a much better record on climate issues and other environmental issues than the current Republicans. This means voting for Democratic candidates and donating to them is important.
In terms of charity, this is a really good way of effecting direct change. Two good options for solar are donating to Everybody Solar https://www.everybodysolar.org/ which gets solar panels for non-profits like museums and homeless shelters, and the Solar Electric Light Fund https://www.self.org/ who helps get solar panels for locations in the developing world. SELF's work is especially important because it helps to cut off the potential of rising carbon dioxide in the developing world even as it helps increase their economies. For wind power, I recommend donating to The New England Wind Fund https://www.massenergy.org/the-wind-fund. Also, helping buy carbon offsets is important. The most efficient way of offsetting carbon in terms of tons offset per a dollar spent is Cool Earth https://www.coolearth.org/. Every little bit helps.
It was well known that one never needs more than 7 colors- this comes from a little work where one can tile the plane with hexagons and then pick 7 distinct colors cleverly. It was also known that you needed at least 4 colors, since one can construct configurations which require 4 colors. Both of these parts are simple enough that working out the details are fun exercises. What Aubrey de Grey did is use a careful construction involving certain specific subconfigurations to aid a computer search to construct a very big configuration which was highly likely to need 5 colors; he then verified using a computer system that this configuration did require 5 colors. But note that while this is progress this isn't a full solution; this shows that the number of colors needed is at least 5, but whether it is 5,6 or 7 is unclear. My own guess based on his work is tentatively towards 6 because it looks like there's a lot of room in his configuration that might allow one to bump it up to 6 with a few more ideas and the argument for why one needs at most 7 is so simple that it seems like something should be able to reduce that even if no one has figured it out yet.
We can be worried about more than one environmental issue. Heck it is particularly easy since for the most part the political candidates concerned about any given major environmental issue are generally concerned about others as well, and because there's pretty heavy overlap between issues. For example, burning coal for power plants involves coal mining which is a serious source of pollution in fresh water systems.
Yeah, but this is one of the few advantages of a really non-functional Congress- they are much less likely to get their act together to do the usual repeated extensions of copyrights.
Confidential medical data is a standard thing. Under this rule, all sorts of data that would be normally confidential (especially identifying information of patients or subjects in studies) would need to be public for it to be used. This cannot for a whole host of reasons occur.
I actually encountered a truck rolling coal when I was in Georgia for a conference a while back. Apparently a pedestrian walking on a road rarely used by pedestrians was enough to to be deliberately hit with a blast. Frankly, not only is rolling coal gross and damaging to the environment as a whole, the deliberate blast settings should constitute assault.
Yeah, there are some pretty toxic subreddits, but for many niches or specific interests they are really good./r/spacex is pretty much the best place to discuss SpaceX and a lot of other New Space things,/r/math is pretty good for mathematical discussion that's more relaxing and not has high level as Math Overflow, etc. One of the real problems that Reddit has which is really a problem not just with Reddit but in many other parts of the internet is the bubble problem: people self-organize into subreddits not just based on interests but on beliefs. So one has left-wing or right-wing subreddits for example who just reinforce their preexisting political viewpoints. This mixes in really badly with confirmation bias and other standard cognitive biases.
Yes, Carter did get peace in the Middle East between Egypt and Israel. And in fact, that really did lead to real and lasting peace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93Israel_Peace_Treaty. The fact that there are other parts of the Middle East which have violence doesn't make that accomplishment go away.
after all, to Obama any agency that was not funneling money directly to friends was rather a waste.
What utter nonsense and outright projection of Trump's faults onto other people. Last I checked, Obama's administration wasn't the one that functionally required the Secret Service to pay money to the club he owned http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/355244-secret-service-paid-tens-of-thousands-to-trumps-mar-a-lago-club. Obama didn't pay close attention to NASA but the idea that he was trying to funnel money to friends is insane, especially when we currently have a President who isn't even funelling money to friends, he's funneling it to himself.
I'm sure that the five minutes of thought you've put in to this have found a critical flaw that the scientists didn't anticipate at all in their calculations. I suggest you look at for example https://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/00007256-200232060-00002 which discusses in more detail some of the underlying biology for why putting in more red blood cells has an effect of the type they are predicting.
I agree that this guy is very suboptimal but the summary isn't very fair either especially the unnecessary snark that "In further news, our rockets will now be coal powered, and gay people aren't allowed in space." There's a legitimate criticism about his views on climate change and that should be expanded, especially as a major part of NASA's Earth observing work is precisely to understand the global environment and how it is changing. But the summary doesn't mention the primary criticism of Bridenstine. Prior administrators have almost always had a combination of adminsitrative and scientific skills. For example Griffin had a background in physics and engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin, Lightfoot the current acting administrator is an engineer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._Lightfoot_Jr., Bolden was himself an astronaut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bolden. Etc. Putting in someone whose primary qualifications are political rather than scientific is very suboptimal; NASA has suffered enough the last few years due to congressional politics and politics dictating goals rather than science and engineering. The SLS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System is a really good example of this. Putting in a head of NASA whose qualifications are political with no real experience is very bad, and that would be bad even if he weren't a climate change denier (which does admittedly make it worse but at this point given who is in charge of the EPA should be about expected for this administration).
From TFA: When you go hold your breath and are surrounded by water you have a bunch of physiological responses that happen automatically. One major one is that your spleen contracts delivering more red blood cells to your arteries. Since they have larger spleens, there's a larger reservoir of red blood cells ready to get pushed out when necessary.
I don't think that the DNC did everything they could to make Clinton win. I think they did about as much as is standard when there's a clear front-runner and the major competition is someone who has come essentially from outside the party. It would be hard for them to "make up the Russiagate narrative" given a) the general evidence and b) that the allegations have been made and supported by many who are not on the left or otherwise have no association with the DNC.
Slashdot Mirror
Because that's clear. We've literally already had guilty pleas and indictments related to that. We have a lot of actual information about what the Russians were trying to do. See e.g. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/more-than-half-of-russian-facebook-ads-focused-on-race.html. The question is how high up it went, how involved Trump was, and most difficult, how much, if any, impact it had on the election. The last is least important from a criminal investigatory standpoint, but is something we will hopefully still get information about.
It is unlikely that Russia stole the election in any meaningful way. There is however, clear evidence that Russia tried to influence the US election, and that people in the Trump campaign were involved in that. How much involvement and how much influence we still don't know. That's part of why we have Mueller's investigation. Don't make conclusions until they are done with their jobs.
While it is true that one could argue for putting all monitoring under a single agency, the fact is that for a whole bunch of historical reasons that isn't the case. In general, NOAA has done more direct monitoring of the climate as is, while NASA has done more for CO2 and methane levels themselves. This is due in part to them both having different primary areas of expertise (and given that NASA has done chemistry investigations for other planets they have relevant expertise where atmospheric chemistry is concerned). But more to the point, this isn't a consolidation- the NASA funding is getting cut, and there aren't any corresponding increases in NOAA funding, so the result is simply that there will be substantially less monitoring in general.
Seriously, this again? Categories by nature have fuzzy boundaries. We'll have trouble telling how best to categorize the edge cases. What matters is what categories are most useful for understanding things. If the experts in an area decide to categorize something one way then let them.
To add insult to injury, they amended their convoluted definition with the vindictive and linguistically paradoxical statement that "a dwarf planet is not a planet." This seemingly served no purpose but to satisfy those motivated by a desire -- for whatever reason -- to ensure that Pluto was "demoted" by the new definition.
If I'm following this argument correctly, they are arguing that it is "linguistically paradoxical" to have something of the form "[adjective] x" to not also be in the category labeled "x". But we do this all the time. For example, in math a "skew field" is not necessarily a field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_ring, and one can come up with many other examples in STEM fields. This is a natural thing that we do all the time. And the specific reason in this case that dwarf planets were not planets was to avoid then making Eris and Ceres and a a whole bunch of other objects also planets.
I'm fascinated that with everything else going on the world, serious people apparently think that arguing over what we call a planet or not is an important issue.
The part about meat v. eating local is false. The vast majority of CO2 production from food occurs in production, not transport, so not eating meat has a much bigger impact than eating local food. See https://insteading.com/blog/which-is-better-for-the-environment-local-or-vegetarian/.
nonsense, carbon offsets are a scam, billions of euros in fraud known and the true extent of the crime unknown. using less fossil fuel is the only way, not trading scams.
There have been serious problems with fraudulent carbon offsets. That doesn't mean that carbon offsets themselves are scams, any more than the existence of fraudulent charities in general is an argument that charity is itself a scam. If you read the comment you are replying to, you will note that I didn't advocate carbon offsets in general, I pointed to a specific method of carbon offsets which is well-vetted.
Since I explicitly referred to using less fossil fuels, and articulated specific ways to do so, I'm not sure what your argument there is.
your donations are useful for helping people but pointless for reducing carbon output of civilization, the magnitude is a gnat's fart in a hurricane.
That's true in general for any form of charity. As individuals we can do very little. Collectively, the situation is very different.
They didn't say that total coal use increased. They said that they are building new coal plants.
Um, I explicitly didn't advise people to get new cars. I said "If you get a new car" and then discussed how one should do that if one is going to. I'm also not sure how you think advising people to use more public transit isn't productive, or what your objection is to getting solar panels or donating to causes which buy more solar panels.
This is bad news among good news. In general, CO2 output levels have been flat or going down in both the US and some other countries for a few years. 2018 is actually the first year in the last 4 where the total CO2 production of the US are going up, while they declined for the previous few years https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-natgas-eia-steo/update-1-u-s-carbon-emissions-seen-at-25-year-low-in-2017-idUSL1N1J311B. But we need to do a lot more. So what can you do to help?
There are three main aspects, personal, political and charitable:
In terms of personal lifestyle differences, the biggest options are to eat less meat and to use a personal car less. If you live somewhere where public transit is an option, you can massively cut down on your carbon footprint by simply using public transit. Not everyone has that option, since you may live somewhere where public transit isn't available or may have a job or family that necessitates getting a car, in which case, if you get a new car, make sure to buy an electric or hybrid. Also in terms of personal activity, one can keep the air conditioning or heating in one's house at not as extreme temperatures or one can better insulate one's house. If one is somewhere installing solar on one's home either for electricity or just for water heating then do it. All these personal changes are also things which overall cause one to save money so there's good reason to do it..
Political change is also important. Much of Europe is taking sensible approaches to these issues (although Germany's anti-nuclear kick isn't helping) but the US is very much not so. In general, the Democrats have a much better record on climate issues and other environmental issues than the current Republicans. This means voting for Democratic candidates and donating to them is important.
In terms of charity, this is a really good way of effecting direct change. Two good options for solar are donating to Everybody Solar https://www.everybodysolar.org/ which gets solar panels for non-profits like museums and homeless shelters, and the Solar Electric Light Fund https://www.self.org/ who helps get solar panels for locations in the developing world. SELF's work is especially important because it helps to cut off the potential of rising carbon dioxide in the developing world even as it helps increase their economies. For wind power, I recommend donating to The New England Wind Fund https://www.massenergy.org/the-wind-fund. Also, helping buy carbon offsets is important. The most efficient way of offsetting carbon in terms of tons offset per a dollar spent is Cool Earth https://www.coolearth.org/. Every little bit helps.
"Maths" is a standard British English term for what American English call "math."
It was well known that one never needs more than 7 colors- this comes from a little work where one can tile the plane with hexagons and then pick 7 distinct colors cleverly. It was also known that you needed at least 4 colors, since one can construct configurations which require 4 colors. Both of these parts are simple enough that working out the details are fun exercises. What Aubrey de Grey did is use a careful construction involving certain specific subconfigurations to aid a computer search to construct a very big configuration which was highly likely to need 5 colors; he then verified using a computer system that this configuration did require 5 colors. But note that while this is progress this isn't a full solution; this shows that the number of colors needed is at least 5, but whether it is 5,6 or 7 is unclear. My own guess based on his work is tentatively towards 6 because it looks like there's a lot of room in his configuration that might allow one to bump it up to 6 with a few more ideas and the argument for why one needs at most 7 is so simple that it seems like something should be able to reduce that even if no one has figured it out yet.
We can be worried about more than one environmental issue. Heck it is particularly easy since for the most part the political candidates concerned about any given major environmental issue are generally concerned about others as well, and because there's pretty heavy overlap between issues. For example, burning coal for power plants involves coal mining which is a serious source of pollution in fresh water systems.
You would think Ukraine and Libya would be lessons about what giving up weaponry for promises is worth.
Yeah, but this is one of the few advantages of a really non-functional Congress- they are much less likely to get their act together to do the usual repeated extensions of copyrights.
This appears to be false. Assuming that every launch with an unspecified government customer or with DoD is an NSA launch one gets that about a fifth of ULA launches are for the NSA. See breakdown here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atlas_launches_(2010%E2%80%932019)- and here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Thor_and_Delta_launches_(2010%E2%80%9319)#Launch_history. Their biggest customer is the NRO.
Confidential medical data is a standard thing. Under this rule, all sorts of data that would be normally confidential (especially identifying information of patients or subjects in studies) would need to be public for it to be used. This cannot for a whole host of reasons occur.
I actually encountered a truck rolling coal when I was in Georgia for a conference a while back. Apparently a pedestrian walking on a road rarely used by pedestrians was enough to to be deliberately hit with a blast. Frankly, not only is rolling coal gross and damaging to the environment as a whole, the deliberate blast settings should constitute assault.
Yeah, there are some pretty toxic subreddits, but for many niches or specific interests they are really good. /r/spacex is pretty much the best place to discuss SpaceX and a lot of other New Space things, /r/math is pretty good for mathematical discussion that's more relaxing and not has high level as Math Overflow, etc. One of the real problems that Reddit has which is really a problem not just with Reddit but in many other parts of the internet is the bubble problem: people self-organize into subreddits not just based on interests but on beliefs. So one has left-wing or right-wing subreddits for example who just reinforce their preexisting political viewpoints. This mixes in really badly with confirmation bias and other standard cognitive biases.
Yes, Carter did get peace in the Middle East between Egypt and Israel. And in fact, that really did lead to real and lasting peace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93Israel_Peace_Treaty. The fact that there are other parts of the Middle East which have violence doesn't make that accomplishment go away.
after all, to Obama any agency that was not funneling money directly to friends was rather a waste.
What utter nonsense and outright projection of Trump's faults onto other people. Last I checked, Obama's administration wasn't the one that functionally required the Secret Service to pay money to the club he owned http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/355244-secret-service-paid-tens-of-thousands-to-trumps-mar-a-lago-club. Obama didn't pay close attention to NASA but the idea that he was trying to funnel money to friends is insane, especially when we currently have a President who isn't even funelling money to friends, he's funneling it to himself.
I'm sure that the five minutes of thought you've put in to this have found a critical flaw that the scientists didn't anticipate at all in their calculations. I suggest you look at for example https://link.springer.com/article/10.2165/00007256-200232060-00002 which discusses in more detail some of the underlying biology for why putting in more red blood cells has an effect of the type they are predicting.
I agree that this guy is very suboptimal but the summary isn't very fair either especially the unnecessary snark that "In further news, our rockets will now be coal powered, and gay people aren't allowed in space." There's a legitimate criticism about his views on climate change and that should be expanded, especially as a major part of NASA's Earth observing work is precisely to understand the global environment and how it is changing. But the summary doesn't mention the primary criticism of Bridenstine. Prior administrators have almost always had a combination of adminsitrative and scientific skills. For example Griffin had a background in physics and engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin, Lightfoot the current acting administrator is an engineer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._Lightfoot_Jr., Bolden was himself an astronaut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bolden. Etc. Putting in someone whose primary qualifications are political rather than scientific is very suboptimal; NASA has suffered enough the last few years due to congressional politics and politics dictating goals rather than science and engineering. The SLS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System is a really good example of this. Putting in a head of NASA whose qualifications are political with no real experience is very bad, and that would be bad even if he weren't a climate change denier (which does admittedly make it worse but at this point given who is in charge of the EPA should be about expected for this administration).
From TFA: When you go hold your breath and are surrounded by water you have a bunch of physiological responses that happen automatically. One major one is that your spleen contracts delivering more red blood cells to your arteries. Since they have larger spleens, there's a larger reservoir of red blood cells ready to get pushed out when necessary.
I don't think that the DNC did everything they could to make Clinton win. I think they did about as much as is standard when there's a clear front-runner and the major competition is someone who has come essentially from outside the party. It would be hard for them to "make up the Russiagate narrative" given a) the general evidence and b) that the allegations have been made and supported by many who are not on the left or otherwise have no association with the DNC.
Yes, nothing came out of that leak that wasn't what one generally expects a political party to do to support their front-runner.