Well rather than just guessing, lets find out what the
climate scientists think about the recent "cooling".
In short while in general the mean atmospheric temperature has not risen since 1998, the sea has. Therefore the Earth is still warming.
Remember as well, climate scientists are not trying to prove global warming. They are trying to understand what influences the climate. Surprise. When they look at recent solar forcing or cosmic rays they find only a very tiny effect.
Maybe geoengineering raises ethical issues, like inadvertently causing more harm than good.
Religion need not be mentioned.
Also how would Global Warming effect the morality of geoengineering?
The Lords have been much saner then the elected politicians recently. For instance the House of Lords chucked out the ID Card Bill 5 times. Unfortunately after such a long battle, Parliament convinced the house of the Lords to "except the will of the people" . Suggesting that because the members of Parliament are elected they therefore represent the people. LOL
One of the first things Labour did when they came into power was to propose the House of Lords should be an elected chamber.They never got round to completing this, maybe because they know they can always undermine the House of Lords by simply pointing out the are unelected and wave the Parliament act at them.
yea, this research is completely useless. the only potential application i can see for this is to sell software to insecure individuals with low self-esteem so that they can hide behind altered photos of themselves online, further reinforcing their negative self image.
honestly, this program embodies what is most wrong with modern western culture--superficiality, vanity, and an abhorrence of eccentricity or individuality.
So it will be a massive hit and a great money spinner?
I think you make a good argument that if something passes a sufficiently difficult Turing test then that agent is intelligent. But what I wonder is, does failing the Turing test mean the agent is not intelligent?
For example an intelligent alien may behave totally differently to us. Their intelligence could be focused more on some things than others. Maybe they are really good mathematicians but have very poor eye sight and hearing. Therefore the Turing test may fail a large category of intelligent things and focus too much on human intelligence.
I propose that our intelligence and consciousness is intimately linked to our evolutionary history and our physical form. An adolescent does not necessarily behave so differently to a 70 year old due to lack of experience and wisdom. It is also due to the different gene expression and level of hormones.
You make an important distinction which I think is important to this discussion. This distinction is between
evolving any significant changes
i.e. speciation, and
genetic variability
.
On one hand the points you make and other factors of the modern world are likely to inhibit speciation. While unintuitively these same factors may enhance the genetic variability of the whole population.
For instance widespread easy travel (Point A) means that one method of speciation, where two populations who are separated over a long time will naturally drift apart, is prevented. Conversely the genetic mixing of these populations which we are experiencing now will bring together different variations much quicker. Genetic variations which may never have had a chance to be together before in the same organism.
To keep it short he is both right and wrong, depending on what you picture evolution to be. Either way I don't think the discussion is important because generally species appear constant over long periods of time. Who knows where we will be in 50,000 years time.
This link is worth reading and explains one way evolution will keep on happening.
Evolution stops only when we stop breeding. Oh wait, he's right - for Slashdot;)
...If you CHANGE those numbers, you CHANGE a lot of things...
Originally posted by by arminw (717974)
Not so. For example, take the famous equation e=mc^2.
Atomic rest masses "m" are proportional to 1/(c^2). Thus when c was higher, rest masses were lower. If the rest mass does down as c goes up then energy will be conserved.
LOL
arminw you are a God of illogical thinking, having your cake and eating it too!
Simply put on this off-topic discussion. The majority of evidence points to an unchanging value of c, with a small amount of evidence which could be a changing value of c.
Either way this has nothing to do with evolution because many different lines of evidence points to the Earth being billions of years old. Such evidence includes geology, cosmology, radio active decay and evolution.
Well it's true Afghanistan does not have oil, but there is some curious timing where just before 9/11 America was very close to a deal with the Taliban over an oil pipeline Bin Laden has said he did not do it and also strongly hinted that he had some part in it. Was he lying to his supporters to get more kudos or did he want to lie low for awhile?
Hmm, not much should be read into Nostradamus because the Quatrains are meant to be obscure to begin with.
Here are two other interpretations.
Flee, flee, people of Geneva, your times of plenty will become times of need. Those against Iran will be exterminated. Before this event, there will be signs in the sky.
Here the literal gold into lead has been obviously interpreted to mean hard times. RAYPOZ is a anagram of Zopyra which this person thinks refers to Persia.
OR
[a failed prophecy of an attack by the Emperor Charles V on the Protestant enclave at Geneva]
Flee, flee Geneva, each and every one!
Saturn shall change himself from gold to iron -
the opposite! Zopira [Charles V] shall exterminate you all.
Before he arrives the sky shall show signs [of it].
The
quiet impressive terminology for someone who lived in the XVI century
is purely of your own making.
Amusingly the guy at the blog (http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/05/nostradamus-and-lhc.html) thinks that Saturn was only discovered after Gaileo invented the telescope.
In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared went out of his way to show that some cultures were stupider than others because of all of these manner of environmental forces.
That is exactly what Jared did not do. He even mentions in his own opinion that less technologically advanced peoples like the New Guineans may be on average have more intelligent people. This is because if you are stupid you die, while in the West for instance you may even breed more.
No what Jared was saying in Guns, Germs and Steel were some peoples were given a bad hand compared to others due to their environment.
they dominated because every other culture had some lame excuse for not taking mathematics from basic algebra into the calculus or some other technological advance.
No the "lame" excuse was that without good food production you don't simply have the time nor reason to invent mathematics or other technology. Technology often has to advance beyond a certain point before the new way is better than the old.
Let's think about the gobbledygook we right, Jared!
Well, what you say may be true for the USA, but for the world NASA, WMO [PDF] and the MET office all disagree. Nice mis-information there.
USA != World
How interesting, actually Nintendo's Wii games do NOT sell well, if you look in to the attach rates for the Wii they are significantly lower than both the 360 and the PS3, there's a large large quantity of Wii owners out there with either one game (Wii sports) or perhaps one more)
Well the attach rate is lower, as expected if you believe that the Wii has had a wider appeal outside the usual young male market for computer games. But to say that Nintendo's games do not sell well is ludicrous, looking at VGChartz http://vgchartz.com/games/ best selling games for this week, out of the top ten FOUR are Nintendo games for the Wii! Last year Nintendo was the largest http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15779 publisher of computer games.
I think this Christmas will be an interesting time for the Wii, by then the 3rd party developers should have been able to write some good games after initially ignoring the Wii.
The entire MMO market is saturated right now, with WoW. Those who want to play other MMOs, such as Age of Conan or Warhammer Online will wait indefinitely for one simple reason: they are dissatisfied with Blizzard for one reason or another, and these are the people who are not only just dissatisfied, but will also remain dissatisfied indefinitely.
One thing which occurs to me with Warhammer Online is many people already know a lot of the background from Games Workshop games. I would say it is a better than average fantasy setting with a huge history and world. Therefore if the game is fairly good it's possible for people who do like WoW would still be tempted to try Warhammer Online out.
The most important thing for multi player games is a fairly broad player base, any game is more fun playing with your mates. Therefore releasing a MMORPG unfinished will just disillusion the people who would buy it anyway and their friends won't bother.
WoW only became so dominating because of this bandwagon effect. Ah well I guess I will wait for the next so called "WoW killer". Warhammer 40K could rock.
Thus simply reducing CO2 does nothing and, in fact, tends to make things worse because we move to greater polluting methods.
So you are saying that burning coal or oil is less polluting than wind, solar, recycling and other methods of reducing CO2? Cos this is the first I've heard of this.
The result of this will be:
Zero extra rape/murder convictions.
Tens of violent crime convictions.
Thousands of litter and traffic violations convictions.
Cost millions.
Assuming your skin tone is not too light for your latitude then it seems likely that evolution over the last 10,000 years (last glacial period) or more has prepared your body against sun burn and cancer. So why can I look on a summer's beach and see so many sun burnt people? Ignoring the case where people have moved to somewhere much sunnier like Australia it's because of our lifestyle.
Before a few hundred years ago almost everyone was outside all the time. This gave your skin a chance to slowly tan at the end of winter and into spring ready for the summer. My little sister who's fair like me starts to get a tan in March even though she lives in Wales (cloudy and wet weather). She spends most of her free time surfing, while I'm in front of my computer with no tan at all.
The mistake we make now is spending hours outside on the sunniest days in mid summer without being outside all day in the cooler months. The worst thing you could do is go to sunnier climes and spend a week in the sun like so many western holiday makers. Sunburn = skin damage.
No, the world will end with a scientist uttering "Oh, sweet!" So the end of the world will be caused by the invention of aspartame?
Darn it the tin foil hat did nothing.
I'm not really sure why you dismiss Turing's approach as a disaster, I had a quick look at your idea of a "Universal Behaving Machine". To me it seems the same as a Turing machine. The state of one part of the UBM effects another part. How is a UBM any different?
Turing did not come up with anything really new about computers that had not already been invented by Charles Babbage a century earlier. If you don't believe me, ask any programmer to name one of Turing's unique contributions to computer science that they use in their every day work. Just one. To say that Charles Babbage machine was essentially a Turing machine therefore Turing did not come up with anything new makes no sense. The reason why they are so similar is because a Turing machine is such a powerful device for computing, Babbage would have an impossible time making a computing device that could not be done with a Turing machine. Programmers do not generally look up Turing's papers during their daily work because Turing was a mathematician proving certain results, not writing a book on how to program. If you ask a computer scientist or a mathematician working in the area of computation then I'm sure they can come up with multiple results that Turing came up with.
Finally in regards to parallelism, unless you use different physical processes like quantum mechanics then of course it will be sequential. At the same time, other than a performance penalty, parallelism can be done simply by running multiple sequential processes together. After all that what parallelism is. If you can create some magic new computing device which is totally parallel how does that solve the difficulties programmers have with designing such a program? It does nothing to make it any easier.
To me the lag of CO2 levels compared to temperature paints a very different picture. The most common reason put forward to explain ice ages and interglacial periods are changes in Earth's orbit not CO2 concentrations. If changes in Earth's orientation and distance to the Sun is the cause why has the CO2 changed?
Well it implies that certain processes increase the amount of CO2 in the air as temperature raises. As it is almost certain that higher CO2 also increases mean global temperatures then we have a positive feedback. So to me this lag is actually quite worrying and not something which disproves CO2 based global warming.
As you will be simulating a species evolution over millions of years it would have to be a pretty powerful computer. I guess you'll need a computer exactly the size of the Earth.
Strangely enough the Sysadmin for our company which is similarly sized has had a similar experience with Vista.
He installed it on his fairly new Pentium D 2Gig Dell so he could learn Vista to support future Windows installs.
He's been whinging about the long boot up times, slowness of his system and the constant UAC prompts ever since. Apparently you can't turn off UAC if your are part of a domain (though I would guess it would be configurable in group policy). Today he was particularly pissed, some how Vista became corrupted and would not allow him to log in.
He will be moving back to XP very soon.
To me the phrase, "However, the latest data suggests that the ring surfaces are even younger than previously thought, meaning, ironically, that the rings themselves are much older" is fine. According to http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=irony/, irony can be:
5. an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.
6. the incongruity of this.
Is this not recognised as irony? It certainly is a commonly used meaning for the word.
Slashdot Mirror
Well rather than just guessing, lets find out what the climate scientists think about the recent "cooling".
In short while in general the mean atmospheric temperature has not risen since 1998, the sea has. Therefore the Earth is still warming.
Remember as well, climate scientists are not trying to prove global warming. They are trying to understand what influences the climate. Surprise. When they look at recent solar forcing or cosmic rays they find only a very tiny effect.
Maybe geoengineering raises ethical issues, like inadvertently causing more harm than good. Religion need not be mentioned.
Also how would Global Warming effect the morality of geoengineering?
just because Linux foundation says the Linux footprint is worth $25 Billion, is a fallicy because nobody can purchase it.
Oh really?.
Why doesn't the Lords do something?
The Lords have been much saner then the elected politicians recently. For instance the House of Lords chucked out the ID Card Bill 5 times. Unfortunately after such a long battle, Parliament convinced the house of the Lords to "except the will of the people" . Suggesting that because the members of Parliament are elected they therefore represent the people. LOL
One of the first things Labour did when they came into power was to propose the House of Lords should be an elected chamber.They never got round to completing this, maybe because they know they can always undermine the House of Lords by simply pointing out the are unelected and wave the Parliament act at them.
Well it is often assumed then sexual offenders must have a high re-offend rate. The figures shows the opposite.
Surprising isn't it?
yea, this research is completely useless. the only potential application i can see for this is to sell software to insecure individuals with low self-esteem so that they can hide behind altered photos of themselves online, further reinforcing their negative self image. honestly, this program embodies what is most wrong with modern western culture--superficiality, vanity, and an abhorrence of eccentricity or individuality.
So it will be a massive hit and a great money spinner?
I think you make a good argument that if something passes a sufficiently difficult Turing test then that agent is intelligent. But what I wonder is, does failing the Turing test mean the agent is not intelligent?
For example an intelligent alien may behave totally differently to us. Their intelligence could be focused more on some things than others. Maybe they are really good mathematicians but have very poor eye sight and hearing. Therefore the Turing test may fail a large category of intelligent things and focus too much on human intelligence.
I propose that our intelligence and consciousness is intimately linked to our evolutionary history and our physical form. An adolescent does not necessarily behave so differently to a 70 year old due to lack of experience and wisdom. It is also due to the different gene expression and level of hormones.
evolving any significant changes
i.e. speciation, and
;)
genetic variability
. On one hand the points you make and other factors of the modern world are likely to inhibit speciation. While unintuitively these same factors may enhance the genetic variability of the whole population.
For instance widespread easy travel (Point A) means that one method of speciation, where two populations who are separated over a long time will naturally drift apart, is prevented.
Conversely the genetic mixing of these populations which we are experiencing now will bring together different variations much quicker. Genetic variations which may never have had a chance to be together before in the same organism.
To keep it short he is both right and wrong, depending on what you picture evolution to be. Either way I don't think the discussion is important because generally species appear constant over long periods of time. Who knows where we will be in 50,000 years time.
This link is worth reading and explains one way evolution will keep on happening. Evolution stops only when we stop breeding. Oh wait, he's right - for Slashdot
...If you CHANGE those numbers, you CHANGE a lot of things...
Originally posted by by arminw (717974)
Not so. For example, take the famous equation e=mc^2. Atomic rest masses "m" are proportional to 1/(c^2). Thus when c was higher, rest masses were lower. If the rest mass does down as c goes up then energy will be conserved.
LOL arminw you are a God of illogical thinking, having your cake and eating it too!
Simply put on this off-topic discussion. The majority of evidence points to an unchanging value of c, with a small amount of evidence which could be a changing value of c.
Either way this has nothing to do with evolution because many different lines of evidence points to the Earth being billions of years old. Such evidence includes geology, cosmology, radio active decay and evolution.
Well it's true Afghanistan does not have oil, but there is some curious timing where just before 9/11 America was very close to a deal with the Taliban over an oil pipeline
Bin Laden has said he did not do it and also strongly hinted that he had some part in it. Was he lying to his supporters to get more kudos or did he want to lie low for awhile?
Flee, flee, people of Geneva, your times of plenty will become times of need. Those against Iran will be exterminated. Before this event, there will be signs in the sky.
Here the literal gold into lead has been obviously interpreted to mean hard times. RAYPOZ is a anagram of Zopyra which this person thinks refers to Persia.
OR
[a failed prophecy of an attack by the Emperor Charles V on the Protestant enclave at Geneva]
Flee, flee Geneva, each and every one! Saturn shall change himself from gold to iron - the opposite! Zopira [Charles V] shall exterminate you all. Before he arrives the sky shall show signs [of it].
The
quiet impressive terminology for someone who lived in the XVI century
is purely of your own making. Amusingly the guy at the blog (http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/05/nostradamus-and-lhc.html) thinks that Saturn was only discovered after Gaileo invented the telescope.
In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared went out of his way to show that some cultures were stupider than others because of all of these manner of environmental forces.
That is exactly what Jared did not do. He even mentions in his own opinion that less technologically advanced peoples like the New Guineans may be on average have more intelligent people. This is because if you are stupid you die, while in the West for instance you may even breed more. No what Jared was saying in Guns, Germs and Steel were some peoples were given a bad hand compared to others due to their environment.
they dominated because every other culture had some lame excuse for not taking mathematics from basic algebra into the calculus or some other technological advance.
No the "lame" excuse was that without good food production you don't simply have the time nor reason to invent mathematics or other technology. Technology often has to advance beyond a certain point before the new way is better than the old.
Let's think about the gobbledygook we right, Jared!
Good advice ;>)
Well, what you say may be true for the USA, but for the world NASA, WMO [PDF] and the MET office all disagree. Nice mis-information there.
USA != World
How interesting, actually Nintendo's Wii games do NOT sell well, if you look in to the attach rates for the Wii they are significantly lower than both the 360 and the PS3, there's a large large quantity of Wii owners out there with either one game (Wii sports) or perhaps one more)
Well the attach rate is lower, as expected if you believe that the Wii has had a wider appeal outside the usual young male market for computer games. But to say that Nintendo's games do not sell well is ludicrous, looking at VGChartz http://vgchartz.com/games/ best selling games for this week, out of the top ten FOUR are Nintendo games for the Wii! Last year Nintendo was the largest http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15779 publisher of computer games. I think this Christmas will be an interesting time for the Wii, by then the 3rd party developers should have been able to write some good games after initially ignoring the Wii.
The entire MMO market is saturated right now, with WoW. Those who want to play other MMOs, such as Age of Conan or Warhammer Online will wait indefinitely for one simple reason: they are dissatisfied with Blizzard for one reason or another, and these are the people who are not only just dissatisfied, but will also remain dissatisfied indefinitely.
One thing which occurs to me with Warhammer Online is many people already know a lot of the background from Games Workshop games. I would say it is a better than average fantasy setting with a huge history and world. Therefore if the game is fairly good it's possible for people who do like WoW would still be tempted to try Warhammer Online out. The most important thing for multi player games is a fairly broad player base, any game is more fun playing with your mates. Therefore releasing a MMORPG unfinished will just disillusion the people who would buy it anyway and their friends won't bother. WoW only became so dominating because of this bandwagon effect. Ah well I guess I will wait for the next so called "WoW killer". Warhammer 40K could rock.
Thus simply reducing CO2 does nothing and, in fact, tends to make things worse because we move to greater polluting methods.
So you are saying that burning coal or oil is less polluting than wind, solar, recycling and other methods of reducing CO2? Cos this is the first I've heard of this.
and the law is Vladimir Putin.
The result of this will be: Zero extra rape/murder convictions. Tens of violent crime convictions. Thousands of litter and traffic violations convictions. Cost millions.
Assuming your skin tone is not too light for your latitude then it seems likely that evolution over the last 10,000 years (last glacial period) or more has prepared your body against sun burn and cancer. So why can I look on a summer's beach and see so many sun burnt people? Ignoring the case where people have moved to somewhere much sunnier like Australia it's because of our lifestyle.
Before a few hundred years ago almost everyone was outside all the time. This gave your skin a chance to slowly tan at the end of winter and into spring ready for the summer. My little sister who's fair like me starts to get a tan in March even though she lives in Wales (cloudy and wet weather). She spends most of her free time surfing, while I'm in front of my computer with no tan at all.
The mistake we make now is spending hours outside on the sunniest days in mid summer without being outside all day in the cooler months. The worst thing you could do is go to sunnier climes and spend a week in the sun like so many western holiday makers. Sunburn = skin damage.
Programmers do not generally look up Turing's papers during their daily work because Turing was a mathematician proving certain results, not writing a book on how to program. If you ask a computer scientist or a mathematician working in the area of computation then I'm sure they can come up with multiple results that Turing came up with.
Finally in regards to parallelism, unless you use different physical processes like quantum mechanics then of course it will be sequential. At the same time, other than a performance penalty, parallelism can be done simply by running multiple sequential processes together. After all that what parallelism is. If you can create some magic new computing device which is totally parallel how does that solve the difficulties programmers have with designing such a program? It does nothing to make it any easier.
To me the lag of CO2 levels compared to temperature paints a very different picture. The most common reason put forward to explain ice ages and interglacial periods are changes in Earth's orbit not CO2 concentrations. If changes in Earth's orientation and distance to the Sun is the cause why has the CO2 changed? Well it implies that certain processes increase the amount of CO2 in the air as temperature raises. As it is almost certain that higher CO2 also increases mean global temperatures then we have a positive feedback. So to me this lag is actually quite worrying and not something which disproves CO2 based global warming.
As you will be simulating a species evolution over millions of years it would have to be a pretty powerful computer. I guess you'll need a computer exactly the size of the Earth.
Strangely enough the Sysadmin for our company which is similarly sized has had a similar experience with Vista. He installed it on his fairly new Pentium D 2Gig Dell so he could learn Vista to support future Windows installs. He's been whinging about the long boot up times, slowness of his system and the constant UAC prompts ever since. Apparently you can't turn off UAC if your are part of a domain (though I would guess it would be configurable in group policy). Today he was particularly pissed, some how Vista became corrupted and would not allow him to log in.
He will be moving back to XP very soon.
To me the phrase, "However, the latest data suggests that the ring surfaces are even younger than previously thought, meaning, ironically, that the rings themselves are much older" is fine. According to http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=irony/, irony can be:
5. an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.
6. the incongruity of this.
Is this not recognised as irony? It certainly is a commonly used meaning for the word.