And not a very good simulation at that. Whoever wrote it couldn't even synchronize time, even at a local level. And that hard coded top speed limit? Because "No one in there is ever going to need to go that fast anyway" I bet. And the way it shits itself when you put too much mass in one place? Very sloppy! It's probably just the N-Dimensional equivalent of a potato battery, proudly displayed at "Take your Kindred-Daughter to work day", for a very inefficient method of converting hydrogen into plutonium.
The final exam in some high school course; "Build a simple simulation of reality. You will find the materials beneath your desk"
What's to say it's not? Neuroscience shows that free will is an illusion I mean if you believe that the universe follows a set of rules, even if we don't understand them (QM), then it is a big state machine and we're all automatons. How could free will even exist? It would be like a computer deciding that it did not want to take a particular branch this time around.
Free will is just a matter of semantics. Most people admit that "free will" is limited by physics; i.e. we can't flap our arms and fly no matter how much we want to. But this holds on the biomolecular level as well, inside our brains. Most people are materialists when it comes to consciousness these days, i.e. we believe that consciousness is the work of the brain so our decisions are going to be based on the physical characteristics of our brain, however complex that may be. If complex enough we think it pseudorandom, much the same way as in statistics we toss all the little causes we can't quantify as "noise" or "random error".
So the question is really the classic, how do the immaterial phenomenon of consciousness and the physical realm of the brain relate to each other? How does an immaterial thing affect a material thing? How does my consciousness manipulate the synapses in the neurons in my brain to make my arm move?
If you want to stay in the realm of science and out of the realm of mystical speculation, you're stuck with the actual thinking being done in the machinery there, and the immaterial stuff just along for the ride.
Except that we would be entirely incapable of doing so. Our lives would be prescribed, our actions determined entirely by machine state. We may think we have free will, what we actually are is an equation determined by state.
Simulation doesn't have to be on a digital computer or the equivalent. Might not be a state machine.
My God, the moderation in the MS thread was so bad I thought MS bribed/., but the moderations in this thread are just as stupid. A guy who's not even logged in gets modded up to a 4 for saying Tyson, who holds a PhD in astrophysics isn't a scientist??
Because you have no control to test against, and because the simulation may well change the rules on you without you knowing it.
There are certain characteristics a simulated universe is likely to have - you can test for their presence.
You can only guess at what they might be, and an intelligent computer running the simulation may catch that and alter the conditions as needed. Keep in mind, you're just a simulation as well in this example, so the computer can alter you as well.:)
It's definitely a testable hypotheses.
Not without a control it isn't... you have no way of knowing what any proper behavior should be, or if the simulation is adjusting the conditions on the fly...
And I'll repeat... if this IS a simulation, then so are you, and frankly you won't be able to accomplish anything the computer doesn't want you to anyway.:)
Yeah; presumably not only would the degree of curiosity regarding this being a simulation be part of the simulation, then also what the answers would be and how we would react to them would also be.
Existing models have failed to correctly predict "the pause", so why should we continue to trust them blindly ? They are obviously missing something...
Of course, models without an anthropogenic component completely miss the increase in temp for the past 60 years http://www.skepticalscience.co..., so they are obviously missing something; AGW, to be specific.
You think that's a more practical solution than emissions control?
Phase out the coal & oil, transition to carbon-neutral energy, and now we can support high populations, economic growth, and lavish lifestyles with no fear of climate change.
Specific causes are mainly a combination of anthropogenic global warming and a major El Nino adding a spike on it. There are other lesser things to factor in.
The timing and strength of El Ninos is not predictable in advance so any general climate model run would not capture that. If after the fact you force a climate model to follow the actual timing and strength of the El Nino they get pretty accurate.
Exactly. Or without even forcing; it was noticed a few months back that in years where one or models got the El Nino/La Nina right (as a side effect of the overall modeling), that model or models did pretty well at predicting the average global temperature. Turns out the El Nino/La Nina oscillation is the major forcing on the climate of the east coast of the Pacific, and thus affects overall global average temp. We had a big El Nino in 1998, it's been mostly La Ninas since, therefore the "it hasn't been warming for (current date minus 1998) years" sound bite, but when it looked like this year was going to be another big El Nino, well, we catch up for lost time So, predicting El Ninos is the new frontier of climate science, but it does NOT in any way invalidate AGW; by definition you can't cancel a monotonic trend forever with a cyclical or quasicyclical phenomenon on top of it.
I suspect the same people who talk about 2016 being the "warmest on record" are going to be awful quiet during next year's likely La Nina.
Yeah, and I bet when winter comes and it gets cold, they'll shut up then, too.
Heck, right now it's midnight and it's a lot cooler than it was at noon. Global warming, debunked!
It's an important data point because among other things it ties in with the recent widespread coral bleaching event.
The current models are often insanely complex
Yet apparently still able to be understood and debunked by economists and bug-eyed sudoko puzzle composers. Funny how a game gets played both ways in order to deny reality. Either it's so simple we don't need the experts or it's too complicated for the experts but the science deniers are claiming both!
Well, denialists are smarter than us, because they can have completely opposite beliefs in their heads without freezing up like Nomad in that Star Trek episode. I.e. You can't trust models because they just tweak them to predict whatever they want them to predict; and besides, the models can't even predict recent temperatures correctly.
What exactly am I supposed to do about global warming?
Birth control.
When you cut through all the environmentalism BS, you see that the real underlying problem is obviously overpopulation.
No it's not. why do people keep saying this? Overpopulation has its problems, but AGW is not specifically one of them. Overpopulation of the Western world, in particularly the US, is the underlying problem of AGW, but until recently all those teeming overpopulated overbreeding billions in China and India and the rest of the third world had zero effect on AGW, as the whole problem is FOSSIL FUEL OXIDATION and the third world wasn't doing a lot of that, whereas we in the first world were just burning through the stuff, so to speak.
For instance, it might theoretically be possible for the average temperate to stop increasing, but we could still suffer catastrophic effects from some other aspect of climate change - e.g. the proposed effect on Europe of a massive glacial ice melt causing the warm water flow across the Atlantic to stop.
...which would in turn lead to additional warming, because the ice has melted, and decreased albedo. So no, that would lead to more warming, thanks though.
It's also only accurate on a global scale;
Yes, that's why we call it global warming. Thanks for playing, but you lose.
It seems at least theoretically possible that there could be hypothetical situations where the warming could trip some mechanism that would lead to lower temperatures. For instance, the current situation leads to more ice precipitating on the Antarctic, as higher evaporation on most of the globe meets the last cold part of the earth left. It doesn't seem totally impossible to imagine a somewhat different planet where oceans, land, and temperatures are such that the increasing polar ice caps from warming lead to higher polar albedos which lead to greater polar cooling which leads to increased polar ice caps, etc. etc., and a positive feedback process gets tripped whose forcing ends up greater than that of the "greenhouse gas" increase, and the planet heads into an ice age.
No, that specific effect is not relevant to earth; but I don't think you can totally rule a similar paradoxical effect from AGW out theoretically. Of course, the best argument that the climate is going to become hotter and more humid in general over most of the planet is that for most of its history, the earth was hotter and more humid, until the plants converted so much CO2 to fossil carbon and reduced the atmospheric level for us. We're just letting the climate snap back to its default state, probably.
It's just one of many data points, but many people still think "global warming" rather than the more accurate "climate change"
How is "global warming" less accurate? The average temperatire is warming and that causes the climate to change. It's two facets of the same thing.
Yes and no.... some fraction of the added energy comes out in more energetic air currents, more evaporation of water, etc. rather than actual change of temperature. But it is a relatively subtle difference.
why is the temperature record significant?
are the specific causes known and how exactly?
if the causes are known was the temperature with accuracy predicted by models when those causes were included? why not?
Translation: I will deny the very possibility of AGW until there exists an AGW model which, using historical data, can predict the temperature right this second in this square mm of my backyard to 0.01 degrees K precision. And the fact that no model without AGW is even remotely near to any global average for the past 30 years does nothing to temper my denial.
I was typing in a hurry. That should be Pu-239. Anyway, try to stay within your protective skin. Without your skin to protect you, plutonium can be dangerous. So don't eat it.
Right, it's not like anybody ever drinks water that comes out of the ground, right? Drinkable water comes in bottles or pipes, duh.
I mean, the Hanford site isn't, like, close to the Columbia River or anything... Oh wait
Well, at least the columbia river isn't used for agriculture... Ummm
ok ok, nobody is drinking this shit are they... a yeah
The rightwing mantra: It's not a problem until there are bodies. And after there are bodies, the invisible hand of the market will ensure that it doesn't happen again.
You're being an ass. I know you know the saying that "there is nothing so permanent as a temporary solution." Dealing with this in a permanent manner was not feasible, and may still not be feasible. However long the tanks were designed to last, people were going to ignore them until they became a problem. There is a lot of radioactive shit that needs to be cleaned up there, and limited resources to do it with. It's not the engineer's job to force political action, and in point of fact that's damned hard to do with a fucking tank design. It's not like you can use politicians for structural supports.
In most jobs, anybody who says "that's not my job" is looking to get fired.
Slashdot Mirror
And not a very good simulation at that. Whoever wrote it couldn't even synchronize time, even at a local level. And that hard coded top speed limit? Because "No one in there is ever going to need to go that fast anyway" I bet. And the way it shits itself when you put too much mass in one place? Very sloppy! It's probably just the N-Dimensional equivalent of a potato battery, proudly displayed at "Take your Kindred-Daughter to work day", for a very inefficient method of converting hydrogen into plutonium.
The final exam in some high school course; "Build a simple simulation of reality. You will find the materials beneath your desk"
What's to say it's not? Neuroscience shows that free will is an illusion I mean if you believe that the universe follows a set of rules, even if we don't understand them (QM), then it is a big state machine and we're all automatons. How could free will even exist? It would be like a computer deciding that it did not want to take a particular branch this time around.
Free will is just a matter of semantics. Most people admit that "free will" is limited by physics; i.e. we can't flap our arms and fly no matter how much we want to. But this holds on the biomolecular level as well, inside our brains. Most people are materialists when it comes to consciousness these days, i.e. we believe that consciousness is the work of the brain so our decisions are going to be based on the physical characteristics of our brain, however complex that may be. If complex enough we think it pseudorandom, much the same way as in statistics we toss all the little causes we can't quantify as "noise" or "random error".
So the question is really the classic, how do the immaterial phenomenon of consciousness and the physical realm of the brain relate to each other? How does an immaterial thing affect a material thing? How does my consciousness manipulate the synapses in the neurons in my brain to make my arm move?
If you want to stay in the realm of science and out of the realm of mystical speculation, you're stuck with the actual thinking being done in the machinery there, and the immaterial stuff just along for the ride.
Except that we would be entirely incapable of doing so. Our lives would be prescribed, our actions determined entirely by machine state. We may think we have free will, what we actually are is an equation determined by state.
Simulation doesn't have to be on a digital computer or the equivalent. Might not be a state machine.
Bats aren't blind?!
You never see a bat with glasses.
My God, the moderation in the MS thread was so bad I thought MS bribed /., but the moderations in this thread are just as stupid. A guy who's not even logged in gets modded up to a 4 for saying Tyson, who holds a PhD in astrophysics isn't a scientist??
WTF????
He thought it was Mike Tyson.
Why not.
Because you have no control to test against, and because the simulation may well change the rules on you without you knowing it.
There are certain characteristics a simulated universe is likely to have - you can test for their presence.
You can only guess at what they might be, and an intelligent computer running the simulation may catch that and alter the conditions as needed. Keep in mind, you're just a simulation as well in this example, so the computer can alter you as well. :)
It's definitely a testable hypotheses.
Not without a control it isn't... you have no way of knowing what any proper behavior should be, or if the simulation is adjusting the conditions on the fly...
And I'll repeat... if this IS a simulation, then so are you, and frankly you won't be able to accomplish anything the computer doesn't want you to anyway. :)
Yeah; presumably not only would the degree of curiosity regarding this being a simulation be part of the simulation, then also what the answers would be and how we would react to them would also be.
notably one that says odds are we are likely in a simulation that came out about ten years ago (along with he proof).
Remind me, what does "proof" mean again in philosophy?
two times the percentage of alcohol in your beverage
What makes me cry a little is that you probably honestly believe that and you have a lot of company.
https://thelogicofscience.com/...
Existing models have failed to correctly predict "the pause", so why should we continue to trust them blindly ? They are obviously missing something...
Of course, models without an anthropogenic component completely miss the increase in temp for the past 60 years http://www.skepticalscience.co..., so they are obviously missing something; AGW, to be specific.
The answer is "Vote in elected representatives who will enact a global carbon tax".
That's the "solution" that's waiting in the wings.
It's uncertain if that solution will address this problem but it's what some people want to impose upon us.
LK
Alternately, "Vote in elected representatives who will backpedal solar and wind power, and continue to favor the petroleum and coal industries".
That's the "other solution" that's waiting in the wings.
It's very uncertain if that solution will address this problem but it's what the other people want to impose upon us.
You think that's a more practical solution than emissions control?
Phase out the coal & oil, transition to carbon-neutral energy, and now we can support high populations, economic growth, and lavish lifestyles with no fear of climate change.
Well, it's a different type of emissions control.
aka, the "im just asking" line of attack.
Known to every skilled robber. "Can you give me a few bucks? Just asking"
Specific causes are mainly a combination of anthropogenic global warming and a major El Nino adding a spike on it. There are other lesser things to factor in.
The timing and strength of El Ninos is not predictable in advance so any general climate model run would not capture that. If after the fact you force a climate model to follow the actual timing and strength of the El Nino they get pretty accurate.
Exactly. Or without even forcing; it was noticed a few months back that in years where one or models got the El Nino/La Nina right (as a side effect of the overall modeling), that model or models did pretty well at predicting the average global temperature. Turns out the El Nino/La Nina oscillation is the major forcing on the climate of the east coast of the Pacific, and thus affects overall global average temp.
We had a big El Nino in 1998, it's been mostly La Ninas since, therefore the "it hasn't been warming for (current date minus 1998) years" sound bite, but when it looked like this year was going to be another big El Nino, well, we catch up for lost time
So, predicting El Ninos is the new frontier of climate science, but it does NOT in any way invalidate AGW; by definition you can't cancel a monotonic trend forever with a cyclical or quasicyclical phenomenon on top of it.
aka, the "im just asking" line of attack.
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/...
I suspect the same people who talk about 2016 being the "warmest on record" are going to be awful quiet during next year's likely La Nina.
Yeah, and I bet when winter comes and it gets cold, they'll shut up then, too. Heck, right now it's midnight and it's a lot cooler than it was at noon. Global warming, debunked!
It's an important data point because among other things it ties in with the recent widespread coral bleaching event.
Yet apparently still able to be understood and debunked by economists and bug-eyed sudoko puzzle composers. Funny how a game gets played both ways in order to deny reality. Either it's so simple we don't need the experts or it's too complicated for the experts but the science deniers are claiming both!
Well, denialists are smarter than us, because they can have completely opposite beliefs in their heads without freezing up like Nomad in that Star Trek episode.
I.e. You can't trust models because they just tweak them to predict whatever they want them to predict;
and besides, the models can't even predict recent temperatures correctly.
What exactly am I supposed to do about global warming?
Birth control. When you cut through all the environmentalism BS, you see that the real underlying problem is obviously overpopulation.
No it's not. why do people keep saying this? Overpopulation has its problems, but AGW is not specifically one of them. Overpopulation of the Western world, in particularly the US, is the underlying problem of AGW, but until recently all those teeming overpopulated overbreeding billions in China and India and the rest of the third world had zero effect on AGW, as the whole problem is FOSSIL FUEL OXIDATION and the third world wasn't doing a lot of that, whereas we in the first world were just burning through the stuff, so to speak.
For instance, it might theoretically be possible for the average temperate to stop increasing, but we could still suffer catastrophic effects from some other aspect of climate change - e.g. the proposed effect on Europe of a massive glacial ice melt causing the warm water flow across the Atlantic to stop.
...which would in turn lead to additional warming, because the ice has melted, and decreased albedo. So no, that would lead to more warming, thanks though.
It's also only accurate on a global scale;
Yes, that's why we call it global warming. Thanks for playing, but you lose.
It seems at least theoretically possible that there could be hypothetical situations where the warming could trip some mechanism that would lead to lower temperatures. For instance, the current situation leads to more ice precipitating on the Antarctic, as higher evaporation on most of the globe meets the last cold part of the earth left. It doesn't seem totally impossible to imagine a somewhat different planet where oceans, land, and temperatures are such that the increasing polar ice caps from warming lead to higher polar albedos which lead to greater polar cooling which leads to increased polar ice caps, etc. etc., and a positive feedback process gets tripped whose forcing ends up greater than that of the "greenhouse gas" increase, and the planet heads into an ice age.
No, that specific effect is not relevant to earth; but I don't think you can totally rule a similar paradoxical effect from AGW out theoretically.
Of course, the best argument that the climate is going to become hotter and more humid in general over most of the planet is that for most of its history, the earth was hotter and more humid, until the plants converted so much CO2 to fossil carbon and reduced the atmospheric level for us. We're just letting the climate snap back to its default state, probably.
It's just one of many data points, but many people still think "global warming" rather than the more accurate "climate change"
How is "global warming" less accurate? The average temperatire is warming and that causes the climate to change. It's two facets of the same thing.
Yes and no.... some fraction of the added energy comes out in more energetic air currents, more evaporation of water, etc. rather than actual change of temperature. But it is a relatively subtle difference.
why is the temperature record significant? are the specific causes known and how exactly? if the causes are known was the temperature with accuracy predicted by models when those causes were included? why not?
Translation: I will deny the very possibility of AGW until there exists an AGW model which, using historical data, can predict the temperature right this second in this square mm of my backyard to 0.01 degrees K precision. And the fact that no model without AGW is even remotely near to any global average for the past 30 years does nothing to temper my denial.
I was typing in a hurry. That should be Pu-239. Anyway, try to stay within your protective skin. Without your skin to protect you, plutonium can be dangerous. So don't eat it.
Right, it's not like anybody ever drinks water that comes out of the ground, right? Drinkable water comes in bottles or pipes, duh.
I mean, the Hanford site isn't, like, close to the Columbia River or anything... Oh wait Well, at least the columbia river isn't used for agriculture... Ummm ok ok, nobody is drinking this shit are they... a yeah
http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/nwp/faq.htm
#cantwaittellsombodysaysitisn'tabigdealcausethereisnowaytheleakagecangetintothecolumbia
The rightwing mantra: It's not a problem until there are bodies. And after there are bodies, the invisible hand of the market will ensure that it doesn't happen again.
A slightly less breathless account is at the Seattle Times: http://www.seattletimes.com/se...
or bhttp://www.wmsym.org/archives/2014/papers/14178.pdf
supposed to be http://www.wmsym.org/archives/... obviously
A slightly less breathless account is at the Seattle Times: http://www.seattletimes.com/se...
or bhttp://www.wmsym.org/archives/2014/papers/14178.pdf
You're being an ass. I know you know the saying that "there is nothing so permanent as a temporary solution." Dealing with this in a permanent manner was not feasible, and may still not be feasible. However long the tanks were designed to last, people were going to ignore them until they became a problem. There is a lot of radioactive shit that needs to be cleaned up there, and limited resources to do it with. It's not the engineer's job to force political action, and in point of fact that's damned hard to do with a fucking tank design. It's not like you can use politicians for structural supports.
In most jobs, anybody who says "that's not my job" is looking to get fired.