. It then goes on to claim that somehow the CO2 STILL causes it.
The first link actually says, "Though this period does not demonstrate greenhouse gas initiated warming, it does lend support to the importance of CO2 and CH4 in setting the planetary thermostat."
The key point is that it has long been suspected that the variation in Earth's climate in the past is usually driven by
Milankovitch cycles.
What the CO2 and temperature records indicate is that seems to be true. AND that increase in temperature increases CO2 which in turn leads to a higher increase in temperature.
How do I support that CO2 makes it worse,
basic physics.
So in reality we do not have CO2 either causes past climate or is driven by the climate. We have both!
I'm going to have to reply as I just spent my weekend trying to get Kubuntu installed properly.
1. NVIDIA graphics card drivers weren't installed because they were proprietary. Come on. Even then, dragging windows around and typing into text boxes had a minor delay that didn't feel natural.
Ubuntu offered to install those for me after starting up the system, I clicked a checkbox and it was installed - no issue.
It's nice to be able to just click a button. Though I had to click it about 6 times to get it to do anything. Once installed Ubuntu decided to start doing crazy things like set the refresh rate to 50 or 53Hz. I spent ages trying to get a decent resolution and refresh rate with no success. I gave up once I managed to get 800x600@60Hz.
2. All websites looked different and ugly as sin, because the package didn't come with the fonts that every other system used. Come on!
ubuntu-restricted-extras is rather easy to install.
Agreed it looks a lot better than it used to.
I installed Ubuntu for the first time last year, and man, I was disappointed.
I'm sceptical after you mentioned point one.
Well my experience in the last few days was one filled with woe:(
Kubuntu decided to uninstall the Nvidia sound drivers for no reason and I could not get pulse to work.
Configuring windows shares is STILL a nightmare, all I want to do is share some folders through windows workgroup. Yet the configure share button did nothing. Hacking the Samba config file also met with no success.
I have given up and will install windows 2000 tonight. Though I would rather have a more modern OS.
Gotta say that was a very long post that repeated a lot of conventional wisdom but said almost nothing to answer OP's question...
"What is it specifically that requires us to lose consciousness to get what we need from sleep?"
From a neurobiological perspective that will not be answered satisfactorily until we know at a basic biochemical level what happens during sleep to "recharge" the brain to its normal function.
Well as a guess the real reason why we lose consciousness when we sleep is, "Why be consciousness and active 24 hours a day?".
Most (all?) land animals go through periods of activity and rest throughout the day. Presumably consciousness is an energy expensive state and therefore to rest and save energy it is worth being less aware while we sleep.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is no biochemical reason though, rather sleep has probably evolved in mammals to fulfil several separate roles.
While I agree with your first two sentences, I think you go wrong from there.
The article explicitly states that the process they used could not have happened as they did it. But all the ingredients were likely to be around before life began on Earth.
Since when do organisms add material and cleanse and add and cleanse?
Hey, I bathe atleast once a year!
Assuming you mean naturally occurring process, rather than organism. How about a tidal pool where the chemistry is likely to change every day. Or near a periodic geyser, or a volcanic plume under the sea.
Why would the RNA need "instructions"? We are simply trying to make some.
There are too many holes... this isn't a breakthrough in science, It's an episode of "The Frugal Gourmet"
How so? They are proving that from simple precursors which would have been on early Earth that RNA can be made. True they are not showing the exact way life started, just that it is plausible with relatively simple natural like chemistry. I think it is a worthy scientific piece of knowledge.
Well except the cynobacteria creating an oxygen environment. The plants who probably caused the Karoo Ice Age.
The earthworms which till the soil.
The insects who influenced the evolution of flowering plants and the general interaction between species and viruses which has shaped the evolution of everything.
In fact the Gaia hypothesis is saying that life brings great changes to the whole planet. Earth would look entirely different without life.
I am ready to compromise if we are talking about GM transplants of genes within a species, such as transplanting blight resistance genes from non wine producing blight resistant grapes to the wine making varieties since the blight resistant non wine producing grapes are probably still edible and have been consumed by humans for millennia.
No! No! Nooo!
There is no difference between shifting genes within or between species. Genes are coded like words and every species uses the same alphabet.
What species the gene comes from is irrelevant, what the gene does is everything.
OK then.
Evolution is the change of something. In terms of biology the change in life as it replicates.
So if you have replicators. Check!
Which pass along heritable characteristics. Wow that's them genes. Check!
Which produce offspring which are possibly slightly different. Nothing is perfect so Check!
So over many generations how can you not have change and therefore evolution? This is so simple it is basically math.
If the slight differences give slight changes in survivability then some will be more prevalent than others. Well if you know anything about exponential growth then you can see that a slight change is massive over time.
Hurrah! We have now arrived at a simple theory of Evolution by Natural Selection one of the simplest and most beautiful theories in Science.
Does it not make you feel warm inside when you look around at the variety of life and know that each one of them is a distant cousin. {Hugs all round}
"Micro evolution" happens.
Life is has been around for billions of years.
What prevents something from changing slightly over millions of years to becoming completely different?
Fossils can be dated.
Type of fossils (species) only appear between certain dates. Never before or after.
Why?
The genetic code of many domains of life has been read.
The genetic code is almost exactly the same for everything from bacteria to animals.
Is not everything therefore sharing a common origin though the genetic code itself? If the common origin was through a designer would it not try different designs?
The theory of evolution gives predictions and reasons for the points above. Creationism simply hand waves them away, "It just happened that way cos God did it".
Yeah I have the same problem with Newton's theory. It tries to predict how motion happens, yet it does not predict the Big Bang. What an amazing failure the theory has and obviously means none of it is true!
Oh wait a second, evolution by natural selection is all about replicators which pass on heritable information. It is not meant to explain abiogenesis.
As has been pointed out you have two choices. Acquiesce or possibly fight in court.
There is a third way(TM) to get around the possible copyright infringement and that is re-write the questions.
Of course it takes some work and you may find it hard to reword all the questions while keeping the same meaning.
Does changing the question, "I like mechanics magazines" to "Do you like reading articles on engineering" change the meaning too much? I don't believe so.
Some of these qustions are
illegal
in the US as well. They are not allowed to ask them. Of course they can and if you do nothing then nothing will happen. But you can sue the pants of them. In fact they may be a good income in the economic climate, keep the stupid questions coming!
Hmm, I'm very sceptical of these claims, especially this.
..reflecting gravitational waves that spread through the walls and hit objects on the floors below, knocking them over.
Considering no-one has ever detected gravitational waves, not even from colliding black holes or neutron star then how could anyone generate gravitational waves strong enough toknock over objects.
That is the worst you can find? some guy that managed to 'dodge' 5000 dollars over 3 years?
Isn't it amazing how Democrats rationalize corruption in the exact same manner as Republicans?
No, no no.
What Geekoid is saying is that Republican's are just much better. If you want something done well vote Republican, especially if it's fraud.
I generally agree, but I also think they are making a very bad money investment as well. While I don't mind whether Shell fund renewable energy projects or not. I would expect them to invest relatively wisely in the short term.
Carbon capture seems a difficult way of making coal expensive. I can't see how it will ever be a wise move. It is not easy separating the CO2 nor transporting and storing it. How do you make money with it without massive government tax or subsidy? At least with wind and possibly solar power it is possible to make a profit without government involvement.
Bio-fuels are OK but seem a stop-gap. Once oil reaches high prices then cars will go electric. While oil is not at a high price then bio-fuels will be too expensive. Therefore it may have a relatively short period of large profits.
Even with using algae I can't see how it can scale-up to provide anywhere close to the current world demand for petrol/diesel (over 1800 million tonnes per year).
Regarding your points on fusion, they are correct but are they really that important? The problem with fusion is that not much money is being spend on it. For instance ITER, by far the biggest project, has an estimated cost of 5 billion Euros in total. This is divided by over 30 countries over 30 years, this is not very much money considering.
In fact it is laughable, as anyone with an ounce of thought can see that over the coming decades power generation is going to become a large and very expensive problem. Will ITER work? Who knows, but it's worth finding out soon.
P.S. In December 2007, the United States zeroed funding for ITER in fiscal year 2008. </cry>
They're talking about the fine tuning required for life to form anywhere. For example, the universe has not collapsed on itself, atoms can form, as can stars - all of these would be prerequisites for any kind of life to form anywhere, and require incredible fine tuning, but these are not explained by the Atheist account.
So how does the religions view explain anything? Why is existence "fine-tuned" for the existence of God?
Simply it does not, it is hand waved away as, "God did it". Rather than excepting that none of us have a clue.
Possibly a better reason for computers would be quantum computing. Probably the easiest way to store a qubit and manipulate it is in a superconducting material.
It is hard to store a qubit and let it interact with other qubits without the quantum effects being "washed out" by thermal effects and other interactions. Superconductors side-step this problem, well except it seems superconductivity suffers a similar problem. Hence no room temperature superconductivity.
In fact you could argue it provides good evidence that room temperature superconductivity will never be possible.
Slashdot Mirror
. It then goes on to claim that somehow the CO2 STILL causes it.
The first link actually says, "Though this period does not demonstrate greenhouse gas initiated warming, it does lend support to the importance of CO2 and CH4 in setting the planetary thermostat."
The key point is that it has long been suspected that the variation in Earth's climate in the past is usually driven by Milankovitch cycles. What the CO2 and temperature records indicate is that seems to be true. AND that increase in temperature increases CO2 which in turn leads to a higher increase in temperature.
How do I support that CO2 makes it worse, basic physics.
So in reality we do not have CO2 either causes past climate or is driven by the climate. We have both!
Ubuntu offered to install those for me after starting up the system, I clicked a checkbox and it was installed - no issue.
It's nice to be able to just click a button. Though I had to click it about 6 times to get it to do anything. Once installed Ubuntu decided to start doing crazy things like set the refresh rate to 50 or 53Hz. I spent ages trying to get a decent resolution and refresh rate with no success. I gave up once I managed to get 800x600@60Hz.
ubuntu-restricted-extras is rather easy to install.
Agreed it looks a lot better than it used to.
I'm sceptical after you mentioned point one.
Well my experience in the last few days was one filled with woe :(
Kubuntu decided to uninstall the Nvidia sound drivers for no reason and I could not get pulse to work. Configuring windows shares is STILL a nightmare, all I want to do is share some folders through windows workgroup. Yet the configure share button did nothing. Hacking the Samba config file also met with no success. I have given up and will install windows 2000 tonight. Though I would rather have a more modern OS.
Gotta say that was a very long post that repeated a lot of conventional wisdom but said almost nothing to answer OP's question...
"What is it specifically that requires us to lose consciousness to get what we need from sleep?"
From a neurobiological perspective that will not be answered satisfactorily until we know at a basic biochemical level what happens during sleep to "recharge" the brain to its normal function.
Well as a guess the real reason why we lose consciousness when we sleep is, "Why be consciousness and active 24 hours a day?". Most (all?) land animals go through periods of activity and rest throughout the day. Presumably consciousness is an energy expensive state and therefore to rest and save energy it is worth being less aware while we sleep.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is no biochemical reason though, rather sleep has probably evolved in mammals to fulfil several separate roles.
free often can't work without a good business model
Last I checked proprietary suffers from the exact same problem.
Well of course proprietary software has this problem, they haven't got the law changed in their favour enough yet. :P
Since when do organisms add material and cleanse and add and cleanse?
Hey, I bathe atleast once a year!
Assuming you mean naturally occurring process, rather than organism. How about a tidal pool where the chemistry is likely to change every day. Or near a periodic geyser, or a volcanic plume under the sea.
Who threw the sugar in the first primordial soup?
The sugar was already there.
Where would RNA get it's instructions?
Why would the RNA need "instructions"? We are simply trying to make some.
There are too many holes... this isn't a breakthrough in science, It's an episode of "The Frugal Gourmet"
How so? They are proving that from simple precursors which would have been on early Earth that RNA can be made. True they are not showing the exact way life started, just that it is plausible with relatively simple natural like chemistry. I think it is a worthy scientific piece of knowledge.
How does the efficiency compare to electricity generation and distribution?
God hates it when you anthropomorphise nature.
Well except the cynobacteria creating an oxygen environment. The plants who probably caused the Karoo Ice Age. The earthworms which till the soil. The insects who influenced the evolution of flowering plants and the general interaction between species and viruses which has shaped the evolution of everything.
In fact the Gaia hypothesis is saying that life brings great changes to the whole planet. Earth would look entirely different without life.
I am ready to compromise if we are talking about GM transplants of genes within a species, such as transplanting blight resistance genes from non wine producing blight resistant grapes to the wine making varieties since the blight resistant non wine producing grapes are probably still edible and have been consumed by humans for millennia.
No! No! Nooo!
There is no difference between shifting genes within or between species. Genes are coded like words and every species uses the same alphabet.
What species the gene comes from is irrelevant, what the gene does is everything.
I'm telling you, it's bottled love potion.
That's true, but it's the work of the alcohol. Try again with no alcohol Champagne and see :)
So autism == trailer park?
I thought to twitter was to talk incessantly about inane crap.
Oh wait!
> ...to an outside observer, an object never falls into a black hole, it only approaches
> the event horizon without ever quite reaching it.
This implies that a black hole can never be observed to come into existence.
Have you ever seen a black hole?
See there you go!
OK then. Evolution is the change of something. In terms of biology the change in life as it replicates. So if you have replicators. Check!
Which pass along heritable characteristics. Wow that's them genes. Check!
Which produce offspring which are possibly slightly different. Nothing is perfect so Check!
So over many generations how can you not have change and therefore evolution? This is so simple it is basically math.
If the slight differences give slight changes in survivability then some will be more prevalent than others. Well if you know anything about exponential growth then you can see that a slight change is massive over time.
Hurrah! We have now arrived at a simple theory of Evolution by Natural Selection one of the simplest and most beautiful theories in Science.
Does it not make you feel warm inside when you look around at the variety of life and know that each one of them is a distant cousin.
{Hugs all round}
"Micro evolution" happens.
Life is has been around for billions of years.
What prevents something from changing slightly over millions of years to becoming completely different?
Fossils can be dated.
Type of fossils (species) only appear between certain dates. Never before or after.
Why?
The genetic code of many domains of life has been read.
The genetic code is almost exactly the same for everything from bacteria to animals.
Is not everything therefore sharing a common origin though the genetic code itself? If the common origin was through a designer would it not try different designs?
The theory of evolution gives predictions and reasons for the points above. Creationism simply hand waves them away, "It just happened that way cos God did it".
Yeah I have the same problem with Newton's theory. It tries to predict how motion happens, yet it does not predict the Big Bang. What an amazing failure the theory has and obviously means none of it is true!
Oh wait a second, evolution by natural selection is all about replicators which pass on heritable information. It is not meant to explain abiogenesis.
Of course it takes some work and you may find it hard to reword all the questions while keeping the same meaning.
Does changing the question, "I like mechanics magazines" to "Do you like reading articles on engineering" change the meaning too much? I don't believe so.
Some of these qustions are illegal in the US as well. They are not allowed to ask them. Of course they can and if you do nothing then nothing will happen. But you can sue the pants of them. In fact they may be a good income in the economic climate, keep the stupid questions coming!
Considering no-one has ever detected gravitational waves, not even from colliding black holes or neutron star then how could anyone generate gravitational waves strong enough toknock over objects.
That is the worst you can find? some guy that managed to 'dodge' 5000 dollars over 3 years?
Isn't it amazing how Democrats rationalize corruption in the exact same manner as Republicans?
No, no no. What Geekoid is saying is that Republican's are just much better. If you want something done well vote Republican, especially if it's fraud.
<quote> .org and not in .us</quote>
.us sites and found almost none.
And slashdot.org is not an american-only site as it's domain name ends in
Yeah when is America going to start using the Internet? I checked for all the
What a backwater!
I generally agree, but I also think they are making a very bad money investment as well.
While I don't mind whether Shell fund renewable energy projects or not. I would expect them to invest relatively wisely in the short term.
Carbon capture seems a difficult way of making coal expensive. I can't see how it will ever be a wise move. It is not easy separating the CO2 nor transporting and storing it. How do you make money with it without massive government tax or subsidy? At least with wind and possibly solar power it is possible to make a profit without government involvement.
Bio-fuels are OK but seem a stop-gap. Once oil reaches high prices then cars will go electric.
While oil is not at a high price then bio-fuels will be too expensive. Therefore it may have a relatively short period of large profits.
Even with using algae I can't see how it can scale-up to provide anywhere close to the current world demand for petrol/diesel (over 1800 million tonnes per year).
Regarding your points on fusion, they are correct but are they really that important?
The problem with fusion is that not much money is being spend on it. For instance ITER, by far the biggest project, has an estimated cost of 5 billion Euros in total. This is divided by over 30 countries over 30 years, this is not very much money considering.
In fact it is laughable, as anyone with an ounce of thought can see that over the coming decades power generation is going to become a large and very expensive problem. Will ITER work? Who knows, but it's worth finding out soon.
P.S. In December 2007, the United States zeroed funding for ITER in fiscal year 2008. </cry>
They're talking about the fine tuning required for life to form anywhere. For example, the universe has not collapsed on itself, atoms can form, as can stars - all of these would be prerequisites for any kind of life to form anywhere, and require incredible fine tuning, but these are not explained by the Atheist account.
So how does the religions view explain anything? Why is existence "fine-tuned" for the existence of God?
Simply it does not, it is hand waved away as, "God did it". Rather than excepting that none of us have a clue.
Possibly a better reason for computers would be quantum computing. Probably the easiest way to store a qubit and manipulate it is in a superconducting material. It is hard to store a qubit and let it interact with other qubits without the quantum effects being "washed out" by thermal effects and other interactions. Superconductors side-step this problem, well except it seems superconductivity suffers a similar problem. Hence no room temperature superconductivity. In fact you could argue it provides good evidence that room temperature superconductivity will never be possible.