This is a very insightfull remark imho, something that should makes all sides pause and re-assert where they stand in the objective scientist - activist scale.
If very small amounts of something aren't dangerous, you wouldn't mind drinking a glass containing the same INCREASE IN concentration of nerve toxin as the INCREASE IN concentration of CO2 from pre-industrial atmosphere, would you?
There, fixed your analogy for you.
I, for one, would accept to drink 1.5 times the amount of nerve toxin you drink, if you are fine after drinking it, and still fine after a few day. Sure, I will take a risk, but it will be small and not mainly linked to the increase in nerve toxin absorbed, but more to the fact that I may be more sensitive to this particular toxin than you are.
Now that I have fixed your analogy, maybe you want to try again and find another one?
Nope, as soon as you start practizing a sport competitively, you will get hurt. Professional athletes are followed by their own doctors, have tailored diets, and basically do little less than training. They get hurt. A lot. Basically, that's why I didn't said they train continuously: They can't, cause they also spend a lot of time in surgery and re-education. Then they have to stop around 40 at best, and, depending on the sport, are sometimes in bad health compared to general population in their 60...Care to check the average life expectancies for marathon runners? Bicycle champions? Not so great.
Basically, if you exercise only for your health, your doctors will advice walking/light running regularly, maybe 1h each day....and swimming, again long distance low intensity, and not in the sun and try to avoid chlorine....Yuck, booooooring!
I do sport (well, less so now, getting older;-) ), but for fun....and I was injured a few times, mainly because falls and sometimes muscle injuries...
Bikes and cars do not share the road easily, it is dangerous and very annoying for the minority (bike or car). Ever walked behing someone whose natual pace is half of yours, in a narrow corridor where simply passing him is difficult? Incredibly annoying and nervously tiring, most people simply can not slow down their pace and fall into a very nervous stop/go/stop/go....
Well, when you drive a car behind a cyclist (or another very slow car), it is exactly the same. Slowing down your natural pace is always annoying, within a car, on a cycle (these pedestrian ar soooo slow and imprevisible), or just walking. Making overtake manoeuvre difficult or dangerous is not a good idea for any shared way/track/sidewalk....
Could not have said it better myself! I addition, how much of active population trains as (professional or volunteer) firefighters? not so much. Does it happen that there are not enough firefighters to deal with a massive fire? Yes, sure....Clearly, we need more firefighters!!! time to raise salaries and enroll everyone that can carry a bucket!!!!...It does not matter that current staff is enough to deal with most fires, that the extra workforce will be usefull maybe once every 20 years, and that training all the time they will have no freetime nor can do other useful jobs...Nobody care about that, at least we will be 100% SAFE from FIRE (instead of 99%, but surely you do not want to have innocent victims on your hands, right? what do you wait to get join your local firefighting team? we can not accept less than 100% safety!!!)
If it was a credible threat, I would agree with your analysis....However, it was not: The WHO has been issuing warning every last six years with the regularity of a swiss clock, globally, monopolizing media attention for weeks, without the fear materializing even once. This last one is probably the one too much, as it has cost a lot of money to governments in a period where it is scarce, and having a lot of unused vaccines is very bad PR. It is clear that WHO have incentives to scaremonger continuously, it justify its own existence and can not hurt its budget allocation. However, they also continously become less and less relevant each time they shout "Wolf!". Their utility as a early warning system is thus already compromised, and I wonder if it is still worth it, and budget allocation has to be reviewed.... Now, rightfully, some investigations will occur to check if they are other incentive in the WHO alarmism, in form of accointance with vaccine producers. If it is the case, WHO higher staff has to be fired, the whole stuff reorganised, so that it regain some legitimity and start fresh without the accumulated industry/media links that kill any chance of objectivism and promote bribery...
If you look at various vehicles, the smaller it is, the more direct the control is, and there are good reasons for that:
In a small vehicle, there are a lot of feedbacks (vibration, inertial forces, sound) that help the driver control it, in fact it adds a lot of information above just vision and makes fine control possible. If the vehicle is very small, there is also a direct influence on body position on the handling...This trend of "the smaller your vehicle is, the more direct the controls should be" is evident if you consider those few examples:
skateboard/rollers/ski/snowboard/...: direct control through your feets, huge influence of whole body, more like a different way of running than a vehicle : simulations sucks and are completely useless for mastering those sports
bicycle/motorcyle: direct control without multiplication of steering angle through handle bar, body position very important, need good balance, simulation very poor and almost useless for learning to drive.
quad: like a small car, but input is still direct and body position quite important. Balnaces skilss are not as vital as for 2-wheeled vehicles. Simulation stil not very usefull....
car: direct input with fixed demultiplication, body position mostly not relevant but still a lot of direct feedback. Simulation usefull, but not really for racedrivng or getting used to heavy traffic/different road conditions.
slow moving 4-wheeled vehicles, trucks: body position unimportant, few direct feedback (but still some),: Simulation quite usefull, except for traffic
planes, trains: body position unimportant, few direct feedback besides inertial forces (and approximating those with angling simulation cabins work good for large planes), no direct interraction with other vehicles. simualtion very usefull, you can really learn to pilot this way, because it is in a way a much more abstract and, yes, simpler control (hence the auto-pilot...)
Given that, extending stick driving to trucks may be feasible (but still, they are on the same roads as car)...
We emulate our peers, especially when their behavior has noticeable positive benefit to them individually. Obviously, the more peers in the network emulate positive behavior with evident benefit, the more likely more peers will follow the example.
If someone in your circle of friends started doing something new, which benefited them greatly, you'd probably be more likely to do it. Right? Compared to if someone in your group started an obviously self-harmful behavior (drug use, dropping out of school, smoking, watching NASCAR and eating bon bons all day). You might not excise the person from your network, but you probably wouldn't do what they do.
Well, my point was that the contagion effect is precisely because the change of lifestyle of this friend automatically remove him from your network, without this reflecting any kind of moral judgement. It is not systematic of course, but I think that the fact that being friend and spending a lot of time together in hobby activities is highly correlated is probably enough to explain in large part the contagion effect.
This is noticeable with the child factor, for example: Few people will look negatively at a friend because he is just having a baby, on the contrary. And few will consiously consider him less a friend because he is now a father (or she is a mother). However, the change of lifestyle are often considerable, and this is enough to either make him drift away from your circle of friend...or add some pressure to become yourself a father, if you want to be still able to spend time together....
My "theory" predict that family status (married/non-married, with or without children), because they influence lifestyle tremendously, will be highly "contagious" when analyzing social networks...and they are: Ever noticed the single friend that drifted away from your group of buddies when he got married and had children, but then came back naturally after his divorce? I have, multiple times, so much that I now expect it...No imitation or change of metric for judging behaviors here, only the fact that lifestyles change in your life for all sort of reasons, and groups of friend/buddies are, with overwhelming majority, sharing lifestyles... The article was nicely done and they examined multiple explanation for the phenomenon, but I feel they did not considered this "lifestyle" effect with the attention it desserves...
Based on my own behavior, I have an alternative explanation, somewhat between real contagion of social habits, and auto-clustering of people when they are more alike...
I think that we have to consider how the habit/behavior/new event would affect the main activities of the group of friends. For example, if you gain weight, it may means you have reduced your sport practice and changed your diet, i.e. some kind of lifestyle change. Then, the friend which stick around you will change their lifestyle and suffer the same effects, or just drift out of friendship just because of lack of common interrest/time spend together. People which were not going to be friend because they had zero desire to spend weekends running around a track suddenly may drift in your circle of friend because they shared your new interrest in home-made cookies...
All of those effect will have strong effect on apparent contagion of habits, but will not be based on change in what you consider "socially acceptable" or change your scales for evaluating body images (like the interpretation for obesity that was given in the article). It is not really contagious behavior either, but only linked to the fact the friendships are often linked to some shared lifestyle and shared activities.
It is a slight twist to the interpretations given in the article, but it may be interresting to look at the contagious effect in this way. For example, the fact that contagion is higher in same-sex friends is normal: identical lifestyle and shared activities are more important between same-sex friends than opposite sex friends of sexual partners. So is the difference between coworker and personal friends.
Under this interpretation, I would expect some behavior to be highly anti-correlated: the tendency to organise things for example (leadership). A group sharing an activity would be more enjoyable for everybody if one good organiser take responsability for organising stuffs while the other are happy following. So I guess that "tendency of organizing stuff" or "leadership" (it would have to be carefully worded to avoid positive/negative bias for lack of the characteristic) would not be contageous, while it should be if the explanantion was mainly through behavioral mimicking...
"giant man-eating birds... a raptor that became extinct just 500 years ago."
I guess it means that finally men won...
Yes, like always: big predator hunting homo sapiens means that the predator is on the fastlane to extinction....Except if it can retreat to a territory where human population is non-existent or very sparse (like polar bear for example), it is doomed....
You totally forgot New Zealand's only native land mammal, the bat. There's an amazing video of the native bat running, because it'd evolved to be flightless like the birds.
Haasts Eagle bones were identified in 1870 by Julius Von Haast. This thing preyed on the Moa, a 12-foot tall 500lb flightless bird. There is no question that a human would have been a much easier much more defenseless snack than a Moa. It would be unlikely that they didn't eat the occasional human.
A human much easier meal than a moa? The first humans before they knew about Haast eagle maybe, then the occasional child or woman, and then it was over for the easy meals, more likely encounter was full grown Maori males looking for a vengence and the high status of coming back in the tribe with Haast eagle beak, talons and feathers...
Imho it was the occasional human meal was what caused the extinction of Haast eagle, probably more than overhunting of the Moas: No easy meal after the first few unaware victims, and systematic destruction of nests, youngs and preying adults afterwards...just like all other predators meeting the homo sapiens and having the bad idea (well, more the natural idea not yet eradicated by darwinian evolution) of thinking "this naked monkey looks like easy meal".
And not only eat the good old homo sapiens, but also eating any of his food stock would turn a bad idea for long term survival: RIP wolves, american lions, lynx,...: a top predator sharing territory with a sufficiently dense human population is doomed.
Exactly, and there are few cases that merit this kind of apology more than A. Turing. This guy was a great scientist, and has helped tremendously defeating the Axe during WWII, so UK should really be grateful. Typically the kind of guy that bring more that it takes from society....Yet he was judged under a disgusting law (one that condamned people for private action where all participants where willing and free), one law that lowered UK exactly to the same level as the Axe itself. State ingratitude and hypocrite morality at it's finest... Imho apology is more than deserved, comes much too late (but better late than never), and is much too lenient as a mea culpa (but again, better too little than nothing...especially from governments, as they are notably reluctant to make any apologies... )
French is largely stagnant - oddly enough, because the French actively try to keep "un-French" words OUT of their language. There was the idiocy a few years back when the French government actually outlawed the word "e-mail" in official gov't correspondence in favor of the longer "courier electronique" phrase, trying their damndest to keep that "eeevil" english wording out of their parlance. It didn't work well.
Well, you can not say that it didn't work well, and that french is largely stagnant: The fact that it didn't work well (I agree with you on that) proove that french is not stagnant (which is a fact, just look at the spoken form of it, it changes as much as English does).
The only difference is that the "academie francaise" is trying to centrally define an official version of it, but appart from that French and English languages are similar: Huge variation between Quebec french, French french (belgian french and swiss french being much smaller variants), and the various creole spoken in America/Africa...Just like American english, British ones (huge local variation there), Indian one,...
English is maybe even more butchered, being spoken by so many non-native speakers, but that comes with its global dominance, it's not a feature of the language...
They do, for simple business purpose. For detailed legal documents, they have interprets and lawyers. They are not fluent, and can not pretend to speak like local speakers (then, which ones? Indians? NY americans? Texas ones? Hip-Hop wannabee? Londoners? Scottish? Japanese with passable english may be more understandable than some of those;-) ), and most of them could not care less...
That's what a second language is: if you can get yourself understood, and you understand it in your field of expertise, you speak it well enough....
French is loosing ground fast, even in Africa.... And I doubt many people from Indochine (Vietnam, part of cambodge and Laos) still speak french. They mostly learn english nowadays, in addition to heir local language and the official language of their country (which is often different): Not so many people from colonial indochine still around...
Spanish is the only international language that still has some traction besides english imho, but it will not threaten english as the global lingua franca, except in south america maybe (they could have an easier time building a south america union that we have in Europe, the goal of a common language/culture is easier there).
So I believe simplified english will remain the true esperanto for quite a while...without threatening local languages to oblivion, many local cultures remains strong and so is the associated local language. Some cultures/langages are threatened, but in the modern world, this is to be expected, below a critical mass they can not resist national education and global communications/medias...
BTW, I am a native french speaker, so no french bashing in my comment at all, just realism: French culture/language has missed it's opportunity for global domination a few centuries ago...but is not under any threat of extinction;-)
Not really. 8h is, I feel, an average, and trying to sleep more than what you need will (at least for me) makes you feel worse and, paradoxically, kind of tired (like unhealthy tired).
5-6 hours is quite uncommon, but most people indeed need less sleep as they get older. I needed at least 8 h, preferably 9 hours in my twenties. Now that I am 37, 7-7.5 hour is my norm. It is what I do in the week, the week-end, and during long holidays. I also have a very good internal clock, I usually wake up just before my 8 am alarm (yes, my work is very close to my home;-) ) in the week (nice), and not much later than 8:30 the week-ends (pity when I had some long parties before, then I can be below my 7h and need to get it back the next days or start to feel tired). No caffeine involved, I did not drink coffee up to last year, much later than my change in sleep hours needed (I started drinking cofee because I now like the taste - another thing that change with age, much more tolerance - even attraction - for bitterness).
There is a huge variation in how much people need to sleep, and how they sleep. This is not a new discovery, some of my friends need 9h still in their late thirties, and basically enjoy holidays partly because it allow them to sleep longer. Other just need 6:30 now....But the huge majority sleep less now that during their twenties, and not because of professional constraints.
Same with the internal clock: some are very regular (like me), some have almost no rythm at all (which, for modern life and given the ubiquitious presence of alarm clocks, is imho better, very flexible and they suffer much less from jetlag).
No sense in advising your sleep habits to someone that does not feel chronically tired: chances are he just does not sleep like you do but is perfectly fine with his own habits...
You misunderstand. This has nothing to do with models or predictions.
Sorry, but I think I undertand quite well: you said that doubting the warming comes from human perturbation (release of greenhouse gases, mainly CO2) is not reasonable. To say that, you need to trust the current climate models, because it is using a model that you can discern between various contributions to global temperature change and identify the CO2 release from fossil fuel burning as the main cause. Without models, all you can say is that global temperature has risen (especially during the 1990-2000 decade) and that atmospheric CO2 concentration is rising too. Not too bad, but not enough to link the two by a causality relation and certainly not to make prediction about future global temperature...
And what is this "IPCC numerical model" that you speak of? Surely the IPCC relies on models external to it, such a GISS?
Mainly the models cited in the 4th IPCC report, section about numerical models. Global circulation models mainly. I know that it is summarized (even if it contains more details that the summary for policy makers), but as an example I do no like some phrasing of the vulgarisation. Telling it is manily based on basic physical eqution (like Navier Stokes for example) is misleading, N-S with a a grid size measured in tenth of kilometers and the air reynolds number? Mentioning N-S should not even be done.... In such simulations, subgrid models are the main stuff, and I am not convinced by the current ones...
It may have been beyond reasonable doubts until about 2005.
Unlike the OP you've got no class at all! No formal Truth, logical or empirical, just lies!
I mentioned 2005 because, from most the global temperature curves I have seen, the nice exponential or power curve that fit 1990-2000 data and is characteristic of IPCC-reviewed models does not seems to fit the data. Global temperature seems to become flat, or even go downward. Not time enough to be sure, as a running mean of 5 years is needed to get somwhat smooth curves, but the upward trend is much less convincing now that it was 5 years ago...
The Fourth Assessment Report, published in 2007 found:
"Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.
My emphasis. "Very likely" is defined as >95% confidence. Perhaps you are arguing about the limits of "reasonability?"
I would not argue about a 95% confidence coming from experimental data (perhaps I should, but experiments are not my speciality). But my trust in 95% confidence is not so high when it comes from average of simulation. It could have if I trusted the models, and the variability came from unknown initial conditions and not from difference among models. But here different models produce different output with the same initial conditions. So it is the models that are uncertain, and performing an average on this is better than nothing, but will certainly not give me a 95% confidence. It would lead me to suspect models are not complete and investigate them much further and try to refine them to get some convergence, before trusting predictions...Especially for model that makes me think of turbulent modeling with a lot of averaging and huge grid size. Those are tricky, and climate models seems very optimistic compared to what people in fluid dynamic claims...
... the recent scientific advances and newest global data are not so supportive of the idea that man-produced CO2 is responsible for the bulk of global warming.
What "advances"? Which "global data"? Do you just make this stuff up as you go along, or is there some kind of denialist RSS feed that you re
Not that I was deeply perturbed for being tagged as Troll (a first for me, though...Does it need some kind of celebration?;-)), but i would have expected a troll to know he is trolling....being an involuntary troll kind of ruin the experience...
Also, I think that moderators should consider with extra care tagging a non-anonymous post as troll. I may be naive, but I would think that a real troll would post anonymously...At least, if I ever feel the irresistible urge to start trolling, I will do it as an AC...
Huh? You're not under the impression that climate models are empirical models, are you?
I am not, I am sufficiently well informed to know that those models are solving huge set of nonlinear PDE representing simplified thermal radiation equation, convection, gaz exchanges,..., so they are based on basic laws of physics.
Problem is, i am more informed than that: I solve big sets linear PDE for a living, create the models and simplification under it, and had a go to nonlinear PDE during my Phd. Not a climatologist, i worked more in fluid dynamic and vibro-acoustic...
Now, you are not trying to tell me that the tuning of adjustable numerical parameters, grid size, time steps, simplifications, linearisation techniques, and choosing of unknown physical parameters in the simplified mathematical models are not of the utmost importance, are you? That, except if you are extremely careful and work in a field for which mathematical modeling is not under discussion, your numerical models are, when you are honest, sophisticated empirical models that may give insight to fine details, but always produce pretty color plots in 3D? The validations I have seen for those models (single curve fitting over small period) are not convincing enough, too much local errors for such a model to be reliable imho. I am aware that it is the best we can currently do, but I have enough experience in numerical models to consider it is far from being enough to trust...
A few flaws:
- no model takes clouds into account. Albedo variations seems not considered as important as greenhouse effect
- I do not have seen any attempt of applying models to past conditions where CO2 concentration was higher than today
- models predictions seems much better in the 1990-2000 region than in 2000-2010, but adjustable parameters were tuned to fit 1990-2000 data...not a good sign for a numerical model...
- cyclic variation of solar power is taken into account, but other effects on cloud formations are not (not surprising, as cloud are not taken into account anyway). But recent studies suggest that the main effect of solar cycles is linked to magnetic effects, not incoming solar radiation.
-much more emphasis (as in your article) to positive feedback effects than negative one. In fact, positive feedback is set at the stability limit: a little bit more and the system would be instable and the climate we had before industrialisation would simply not have been possible, you would have had a runaway warming or cooling. You need to have this quasi-unstable feddback factor to get sufficient impact of CO2 to fit the 1990-2000 data....but then how would you be able to fit paleoclimate data, where CO2 varied hugely and temperature not so much? Anyway, a natural process with quasi-unstable feedback is of course possible, but certainly not the norm, it seems suspect to me...
I have read your article, and it is not convincing. Especially, the way you insist that the model should be applyied to recent time only is not sound: a numerical model should be tested in as much conditions as possible, especially for other input that the ones that have been used to calibrate it!!! And man produced CO2 is just the same as natural CO2, any attempt to spearate the two (one have a greater effect that the other???) is highly suspect.
In fact, I think many reader objections in your article are valid, and you seem to agree as you do not really debunk the well formulated ones...
Indeed, I think the consensus is shifting right now, and I guess that at one point it may become funny and some heads could start to roll...A few more years of flat or decreasing global temperatures, a few more theoretical and experimental blows to IPCC models, a few more scientists resigning from IPCC or publicly expressing doubts, and it's done.
It will not be so fast though, given the media and political huge investment in global warming: they will try to keep it silent, quietly put the last decade hysteria under the rug and will not easily do a mea culpa...I have noticed much less mention of global warming on TV since about 2 month though, while it was cruising at full sail propaganda before...Maybe some are feeling the wind turn already?;-)
We don't know exactly, however it has been established beyond any reasonable doubt that human activity is a major contributor.
Really? Then I guess that my doubts are not reasonable, and I should not worry that IPCC numerical models predictions are more and more challenged by experimental data, and by dissidents within the IPCC itself...
It may have been beyond reasonable doubts until about 2005. I do not think it is anymore, the recent scientific advances and newest global data are not so supportive of the idea that man-produced CO2 is responsible for the bulk of global warming, and even less of the more catastrophic predictions for future climate change...
Nope, this is a legend, that was proposed in a satyrical work from J. Swift. Never seriously proposed, and of course never followed.
I guess you could find (with difficulty, as it is certainly not common) some culture eating sacrificed children for religious reasons.
Cultures where children (poor or not, slave or not) were food livestock never existed. I was not even aware it could be a urban legend, but apparently it is. Simply because if it was a common pratice to eat children from a part of the population, revolt from this part of the population is 100% certain to ensure, even if it was suicidal: you do not mess easily with reproductive and care instinct;-)
BTW, I hope you have false memories from your school teaching...else this school should better have some inspection from the state....soon!;-)
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Wow, just wow....
This is a very insightfull remark imho, something that should makes all sides pause and re-assert where they stand in the objective scientist - activist scale.
pity i am not a moderator now...
If very small amounts of something aren't dangerous, you wouldn't mind drinking a glass containing the same INCREASE IN concentration of nerve toxin as the INCREASE IN concentration of CO2 from pre-industrial atmosphere, would you?
There, fixed your analogy for you.
I, for one, would accept to drink 1.5 times the amount of nerve toxin you drink, if you are fine after drinking it, and still fine after a few day. Sure, I will take a risk, but it will be small and not mainly linked to the increase in nerve toxin absorbed, but more to the fact that I may be more sensitive to this particular toxin than you are.
Now that I have fixed your analogy, maybe you want to try again and find another one?
Well, may I suggest another possibility:
4) designers, musicians, and other creative professionals are fashion whores worse than teenage girls or snowboarders.
Blind brand loyalty of apple worshipper is in the same ballpark as those of Vuiton or Oxbow
Nope, as soon as you start practizing a sport competitively, you will get hurt. Professional athletes are followed by their own doctors, have tailored diets, and basically do little less than training. They get hurt. A lot. Basically, that's why I didn't said they train continuously: They can't, cause they also spend a lot of time in surgery and re-education. Then they have to stop around 40 at best, and, depending on the sport, are sometimes in bad health compared to general population in their 60...Care to check the average life expectancies for marathon runners? Bicycle champions? Not so great.
Basically, if you exercise only for your health, your doctors will advice walking/light running regularly, maybe 1h each day....and swimming, again long distance low intensity, and not in the sun and try to avoid chlorine....Yuck, booooooring!
I do sport (well, less so now, getting older ;-) ), but for fun....and I was injured a few times, mainly because falls and sometimes muscle injuries...
Bikes and cars do not share the road easily, it is dangerous and very annoying for the minority (bike or car).
Ever walked behing someone whose natual pace is half of yours, in a narrow corridor where simply passing him is difficult? Incredibly annoying and nervously tiring, most people simply can not slow down their pace and fall into a very nervous stop/go/stop/go....
Well, when you drive a car behind a cyclist (or another very slow car), it is exactly the same. Slowing down your natural pace is always annoying, within a car, on a cycle (these pedestrian ar soooo slow and imprevisible), or just walking. Making overtake manoeuvre difficult or dangerous is not a good idea for any shared way/track/sidewalk....
Could not have said it better myself! I addition, how much of active population trains as (professional or volunteer) firefighters? not so much. Does it happen that there are not enough firefighters to deal with a massive fire? Yes, sure....Clearly, we need more firefighters!!! time to raise salaries and enroll everyone that can carry a bucket!!!!...It does not matter that current staff is enough to deal with most fires, that the extra workforce will be usefull maybe once every 20 years, and that training all the time they will have no freetime nor can do other useful jobs...Nobody care about that, at least we will be 100% SAFE from FIRE (instead of 99%, but surely you do not want to have innocent victims on your hands, right? what do you wait to get join your local firefighting team? we can not accept less than 100% safety!!!)
If it was a credible threat, I would agree with your analysis....However, it was not: The WHO has been issuing warning every last six years with the regularity of a swiss clock, globally, monopolizing media attention for weeks, without the fear materializing even once. This last one is probably the one too much, as it has cost a lot of money to governments in a period where it is scarce, and having a lot of unused vaccines is very bad PR.
It is clear that WHO have incentives to scaremonger continuously, it justify its own existence and can not hurt its budget allocation. However, they also continously become less and less relevant each time they shout "Wolf!". Their utility as a early warning system is thus already compromised, and I wonder if it is still worth it, and budget allocation has to be reviewed....
Now, rightfully, some investigations will occur to check if they are other incentive in the WHO alarmism, in form of accointance with vaccine producers. If it is the case, WHO higher staff has to be fired, the whole stuff reorganised, so that it regain some legitimity and start fresh without the accumulated industry/media links that kill any chance of objectivism and promote bribery...
If you look at various vehicles, the smaller it is, the more direct the control is, and there are good reasons for that:
In a small vehicle, there are a lot of feedbacks (vibration, inertial forces, sound) that help the driver control it, in fact it adds a lot of information above just vision and makes fine control possible.
If the vehicle is very small, there is also a direct influence on body position on the handling...This trend of "the smaller your vehicle is, the more direct the controls should be" is evident if you consider those few examples:
skateboard/rollers/ski/snowboard/...: direct control through your feets, huge influence of whole body, more like a different way of running than a vehicle : simulations sucks and are completely useless for mastering those sports
bicycle/motorcyle: direct control without multiplication of steering angle through handle bar, body position very important, need good balance, simulation very poor and almost useless for learning to drive.
quad: like a small car, but input is still direct and body position quite important. Balnaces skilss are not as vital as for 2-wheeled vehicles. Simulation stil not very usefull....
car: direct input with fixed demultiplication, body position mostly not relevant but still a lot of direct feedback. Simulation usefull, but not really for racedrivng or getting used to heavy traffic/different road conditions.
slow moving 4-wheeled vehicles, trucks: body position unimportant, few direct feedback (but still some),: Simulation quite usefull, except for traffic
planes, trains: body position unimportant, few direct feedback besides inertial forces (and approximating those with angling simulation cabins work good for large planes), no direct interraction with other vehicles. simualtion very usefull, you can really learn to pilot this way, because it is in a way a much more abstract and, yes, simpler control (hence the auto-pilot...)
Given that, extending stick driving to trucks may be feasible (but still, they are on the same roads as car)...
For car, it looks like a really really bad idea.
For motorcycles, it is simply suicide....
We emulate our peers, especially when their behavior has noticeable positive benefit to them individually. Obviously, the more peers in the network emulate positive behavior with evident benefit, the more likely more peers will follow the example.
If someone in your circle of friends started doing something new, which benefited them greatly, you'd probably be more likely to do it. Right? Compared to if someone in your group started an obviously self-harmful behavior (drug use, dropping out of school, smoking, watching NASCAR and eating bon bons all day). You might not excise the person from your network, but you probably wouldn't do what they do.
Well, my point was that the contagion effect is precisely because the change of lifestyle of this friend automatically remove him from your network, without this reflecting any kind of moral judgement. It is not systematic of course, but I think that the fact that being friend and spending a lot of time together in hobby activities is highly correlated is probably enough to explain in large part the contagion effect.
This is noticeable with the child factor, for example: Few people will look negatively at a friend because he is just having a baby, on the contrary. And few will consiously consider him less a friend because he is now a father (or she is a mother). However, the change of lifestyle are often considerable, and this is enough to either make him drift away from your circle of friend...or add some pressure to become yourself a father, if you want to be still able to spend time together....
My "theory" predict that family status (married/non-married, with or without children), because they influence lifestyle tremendously, will be highly "contagious" when analyzing social networks...and they are:
Ever noticed the single friend that drifted away from your group of buddies when he got married and had children, but then came back naturally after his divorce?
I have, multiple times, so much that I now expect it...No imitation or change of metric for judging behaviors here, only the fact that lifestyles change in your life for all sort of reasons, and groups of friend/buddies are, with overwhelming majority, sharing lifestyles...
The article was nicely done and they examined multiple explanation for the phenomenon, but I feel they did not considered this "lifestyle" effect with the attention it desserves...
Based on my own behavior, I have an alternative explanation, somewhat between real contagion of social habits, and auto-clustering of people when they are more alike...
I think that we have to consider how the habit/behavior/new event would affect the main activities of the group of friends. For example, if you gain weight, it may means you have reduced your sport practice and changed your diet, i.e. some kind of lifestyle change. Then, the friend which stick around you will change their lifestyle and suffer the same effects, or just drift out of friendship just because of lack of common interrest/time spend together. People which were not going to be friend because they had zero desire to spend weekends running around a track suddenly may drift in your circle of friend because they shared your new interrest in home-made cookies...
All of those effect will have strong effect on apparent contagion of habits, but will not be based on change in what you consider "socially acceptable" or change your scales for evaluating body images (like the interpretation for obesity that was given in the article). It is not really contagious behavior either, but only linked to the fact the friendships are often linked to some shared lifestyle and shared activities.
It is a slight twist to the interpretations given in the article, but it may be interresting to look at the contagious effect in this way. For example, the fact that contagion is higher in same-sex friends is normal: identical lifestyle and shared activities are more important between same-sex friends than opposite sex friends of sexual partners. So is the difference between coworker and personal friends.
Under this interpretation, I would expect some behavior to be highly anti-correlated: the tendency to organise things for example (leadership). A group sharing an activity would be more enjoyable for everybody if one good organiser take responsability for organising stuffs while the other are happy following. So I guess that "tendency of organizing stuff" or "leadership" (it would have to be carefully worded to avoid positive/negative bias for lack of the characteristic) would not be contageous, while it should be if the explanantion was mainly through behavioral mimicking...
"giant man-eating birds... a raptor that became extinct just 500 years ago."
I guess it means that finally men won...
Yes, like always: big predator hunting homo sapiens means that the predator is on the fastlane to extinction....Except if it can retreat to a territory where human population is non-existent or very sparse (like polar bear for example), it is doomed....
You totally forgot New Zealand's only native land mammal, the bat. There's an amazing video of the native bat running, because it'd evolved to be flightless like the birds.
Haasts Eagle bones were identified in 1870 by Julius Von Haast. This thing preyed on the Moa, a 12-foot tall 500lb flightless bird. There is no question that a human would have been a much easier much more defenseless snack than a Moa. It would be unlikely that they didn't eat the occasional human.
A human much easier meal than a moa? The first humans before they knew about Haast eagle maybe, then the occasional child or woman, and then it was over for the easy meals, more likely encounter was full grown Maori males looking for a vengence and the high status of coming back in the tribe with Haast eagle beak, talons and feathers...
Imho it was the occasional human meal was what caused the extinction of Haast eagle, probably more than overhunting of the Moas: No easy meal after the first few unaware victims, and systematic destruction of nests, youngs and preying adults afterwards...just like all other predators meeting the homo sapiens and having the bad idea (well, more the natural idea not yet eradicated by darwinian evolution) of thinking "this naked monkey looks like easy meal".
And not only eat the good old homo sapiens, but also eating any of his food stock would turn a bad idea for long term survival: RIP wolves, american lions, lynx, ...: a top predator sharing territory with a sufficiently dense human population is doomed.
Exactly, and there are few cases that merit this kind of apology more than A. Turing. This guy was a great scientist, and has helped tremendously defeating the Axe during WWII, so UK should really be grateful. Typically the kind of guy that bring more that it takes from society....Yet he was judged under a disgusting law (one that condamned people for private action where all participants where willing and free), one law that lowered UK exactly to the same level as the Axe itself. State ingratitude and hypocrite morality at it's finest...
Imho apology is more than deserved, comes much too late (but better late than never), and is much too lenient as a mea culpa (but again, better too little than nothing...especially from governments, as they are notably reluctant to make any apologies... )
No kidding.
French is largely stagnant - oddly enough, because the French actively try to keep "un-French" words OUT of their language. There was the idiocy a few years back when the French government actually outlawed the word "e-mail" in official gov't correspondence in favor of the longer "courier electronique" phrase, trying their damndest to keep that "eeevil" english wording out of their parlance. It didn't work well.
Well, you can not say that it didn't work well, and that french is largely stagnant: The fact that it didn't work well (I agree with you on that) proove that french is not stagnant (which is a fact, just look at the spoken form of it, it changes as much as English does).
The only difference is that the "academie francaise" is trying to centrally define an official version of it, but appart from that French and English languages are similar: Huge variation between Quebec french, French french (belgian french and swiss french being much smaller variants), and the various creole spoken in America/Africa...Just like American english, British ones (huge local variation there), Indian one, ...
English is maybe even more butchered, being spoken by so many non-native speakers, but that comes with its global dominance, it's not a feature of the language...
If I wanted to communicate over Minitel I would speak French. N'est-ce pas?
I hope you don't really want to do that, do you? It was only proposed as a theoretical example, right? Please?
They do, for simple business purpose. For detailed legal documents, they have interprets and lawyers. They are not fluent, and can not pretend to speak like local speakers (then, which ones? Indians? NY americans? Texas ones? Hip-Hop wannabee? Londoners? Scottish? Japanese with passable english may be more understandable than some of those ;-) ), and most of them could not care less...
That's what a second language is: if you can get yourself understood, and you understand it in your field of expertise, you speak it well enough....
French is loosing ground fast, even in Africa.... And I doubt many people from Indochine (Vietnam, part of cambodge and Laos) still speak french. They mostly learn english nowadays, in addition to heir local language and the official language of their country (which is often different): Not so many people from colonial indochine still around...
Spanish is the only international language that still has some traction besides english imho, but it will not threaten english as the global lingua franca, except in south america maybe (they could have an easier time building a south america union that we have in Europe, the goal of a common language/culture is easier there).
So I believe simplified english will remain the true esperanto for quite a while...without threatening local languages to oblivion, many local cultures remains strong and so is the associated local language. Some cultures/langages are threatened, but in the modern world, this is to be expected, below a critical mass they can not resist national education and global communications/medias...
BTW, I am a native french speaker, so no french bashing in my comment at all, just realism: French culture/language has missed it's opportunity for global domination a few centuries ago...but is not under any threat of extinction ;-)
Not really. 8h is, I feel, an average, and trying to sleep more than what you need will (at least for me) makes you feel worse and, paradoxically, kind of tired (like unhealthy tired).
5-6 hours is quite uncommon, but most people indeed need less sleep as they get older. I needed at least 8 h, preferably 9 hours in my twenties. Now that I am 37, 7-7.5 hour is my norm. It is what I do in the week, the week-end, and during long holidays. I also have a very good internal clock, I usually wake up just before my 8 am alarm (yes, my work is very close to my home ;-) ) in the week (nice), and not much later than 8:30 the week-ends (pity when I had some long parties before, then I can be below my 7h and need to get it back the next days or start to feel tired). No caffeine involved, I did not drink coffee up to last year, much later than my change in sleep hours needed (I started drinking cofee because I now like the taste - another thing that change with age, much more tolerance - even attraction - for bitterness).
There is a huge variation in how much people need to sleep, and how they sleep. This is not a new discovery, some of my friends need 9h still in their late thirties, and basically enjoy holidays partly because it allow them to sleep longer. Other just need 6:30 now....But the huge majority sleep less now that during their twenties, and not because of professional constraints.
Same with the internal clock: some are very regular (like me), some have almost no rythm at all (which, for modern life and given the ubiquitious presence of alarm clocks, is imho better, very flexible and they suffer much less from jetlag).
No sense in advising your sleep habits to someone that does not feel chronically tired: chances are he just does not sleep like you do but is perfectly fine with his own habits...
You misunderstand. This has nothing to do with models or predictions.
Sorry, but I think I undertand quite well: you said that doubting the warming comes from human perturbation (release of greenhouse gases, mainly CO2) is not reasonable. To say that, you need to trust the current climate models, because it is using a model that you can discern between various contributions to global temperature change and identify the CO2 release from fossil fuel burning as the main cause. Without models, all you can say is that global temperature has risen (especially during the 1990-2000 decade) and that atmospheric CO2 concentration is rising too. Not too bad, but not enough to link the two by a causality relation and certainly not to make prediction about future global temperature...
And what is this "IPCC numerical model" that you speak of? Surely the IPCC relies on models external to it, such a GISS?
Mainly the models cited in the 4th IPCC report, section about numerical models. Global circulation models mainly. I know that it is summarized (even if it contains more details that the summary for policy makers), but as an example I do no like some phrasing of the vulgarisation. Telling it is manily based on basic physical eqution (like Navier Stokes for example) is misleading, N-S with a a grid size measured in tenth of kilometers and the air reynolds number? Mentioning N-S should not even be done....
In such simulations, subgrid models are the main stuff, and I am not convinced by the current ones...
It may have been beyond reasonable doubts until about 2005.
Unlike the OP you've got no class at all! No formal Truth, logical or empirical, just lies!
I mentioned 2005 because, from most the global temperature curves I have seen, the nice exponential or power curve that fit 1990-2000 data and is characteristic of IPCC-reviewed models does not seems to fit the data. Global temperature seems to become flat, or even go downward. Not time enough to be sure, as a running mean of 5 years is needed to get somwhat smooth curves, but the upward trend is much less convincing now that it was 5 years ago...
The Fourth Assessment Report, published in 2007 found:
"Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.
My emphasis. "Very likely" is defined as >95% confidence. Perhaps you are arguing about the limits of "reasonability?"
I would not argue about a 95% confidence coming from experimental data (perhaps I should, but experiments are not my speciality). But my trust in 95% confidence is not so high when it comes from average of simulation. It could have if I trusted the models, and the variability came from unknown initial conditions and not from difference among models. But here different models produce different output with the same initial conditions. So it is the models that are uncertain, and performing an average on this is better than nothing, but will certainly not give me a 95% confidence. It would lead me to suspect models are not complete and investigate them much further and try to refine them to get some convergence, before trusting predictions...Especially for model that makes me think of turbulent modeling with a lot of averaging and huge grid size. Those are tricky, and climate models seems very optimistic compared to what people in fluid dynamic claims...
What "advances"? Which "global data"? Do you just make this stuff up as you go along, or is there some kind of denialist RSS feed that you re
I am a "he" ;-), and thanks for that...
Not that I was deeply perturbed for being tagged as Troll (a first for me, though...Does it need some kind of celebration? ;-)), but i would have expected a troll to know he is trolling....being an involuntary troll kind of ruin the experience...
Also, I think that moderators should consider with extra care tagging a non-anonymous post as troll. I may be naive, but I would think that a real troll would post anonymously...At least, if I ever feel the irresistible urge to start trolling, I will do it as an AC...
Huh? You're not under the impression that climate models are empirical models, are you?
I am not, I am sufficiently well informed to know that those models are solving huge set of nonlinear PDE representing simplified thermal radiation equation, convection, gaz exchanges, ..., so they are based on basic laws of physics.
Problem is, i am more informed than that: I solve big sets linear PDE for a living, create the models and simplification under it, and had a go to nonlinear PDE during my Phd. Not a climatologist, i worked more in fluid dynamic and vibro-acoustic...
Now, you are not trying to tell me that the tuning of adjustable numerical parameters, grid size, time steps, simplifications, linearisation techniques, and choosing of unknown physical parameters in the simplified mathematical models are not of the utmost importance, are you? That, except if you are extremely careful and work in a field for which mathematical modeling is not under discussion, your numerical models are, when you are honest, sophisticated empirical models that may give insight to fine details, but always produce pretty color plots in 3D? The validations I have seen for those models (single curve fitting over small period) are not convincing enough, too much local errors for such a model to be reliable imho. I am aware that it is the best we can currently do, but I have enough experience in numerical models to consider it is far from being enough to trust...
A few flaws:
- no model takes clouds into account. Albedo variations seems not considered as important as greenhouse effect
- I do not have seen any attempt of applying models to past conditions where CO2 concentration was higher than today
- models predictions seems much better in the 1990-2000 region than in 2000-2010, but adjustable parameters were tuned to fit 1990-2000 data...not a good sign for a numerical model...
- cyclic variation of solar power is taken into account, but other effects on cloud formations are not (not surprising, as cloud are not taken into account anyway). But recent studies suggest that the main effect of solar cycles is linked to magnetic effects, not incoming solar radiation.
-much more emphasis (as in your article) to positive feedback effects than negative one. In fact, positive feedback is set at the stability limit: a little bit more and the system would be instable and the climate we had before industrialisation would simply not have been possible, you would have had a runaway warming or cooling. You need to have this quasi-unstable feddback factor to get sufficient impact of CO2 to fit the 1990-2000 data....but then how would you be able to fit paleoclimate data, where CO2 varied hugely and temperature not so much? Anyway, a natural process with quasi-unstable feedback is of course possible, but certainly not the norm, it seems suspect to me...
I have read your article, and it is not convincing. Especially, the way you insist that the model should be applyied to recent time only is not sound: a numerical model should be tested in as much conditions as possible, especially for other input that the ones that have been used to calibrate it!!! And man produced CO2 is just the same as natural CO2, any attempt to spearate the two (one have a greater effect that the other???) is highly suspect.
In fact, I think many reader objections in your article are valid, and you seem to agree as you do not really debunk the well formulated ones...
Indeed, I think the consensus is shifting right now, and I guess that at one point it may become funny and some heads could start to roll...A few more years of flat or decreasing global temperatures, a few more theoretical and experimental blows to IPCC models, a few more scientists resigning from IPCC or publicly expressing doubts, and it's done.
It will not be so fast though, given the media and political huge investment in global warming: they will try to keep it silent, quietly put the last decade hysteria under the rug and will not easily do a mea culpa...I have noticed much less mention of global warming on TV since about 2 month though, while it was cruising at full sail propaganda before...Maybe some are feeling the wind turn already? ;-)
We don't know exactly, however it has been established beyond any reasonable doubt that human activity is a major contributor.
Really? Then I guess that my doubts are not reasonable, and I should not worry that IPCC numerical models predictions are more and more challenged by experimental data, and by dissidents within the IPCC itself...
It may have been beyond reasonable doubts until about 2005. I do not think it is anymore, the recent scientific advances and newest global data are not so supportive of the idea that man-produced CO2 is responsible for the bulk of global warming, and even less of the more catastrophic predictions for future climate change...
Nope, this is a legend, that was proposed in a satyrical work from J. Swift.
Never seriously proposed, and of course never followed.
I guess you could find (with difficulty, as it is certainly not common) some culture eating sacrificed children for religious reasons.
Cultures where children (poor or not, slave or not) were food livestock never existed. I was not even aware it could be a urban legend, but apparently it is. Simply because if it was a common pratice to eat children from a part of the population, revolt from this part of the population is 100% certain to ensure, even if it was suicidal: you do not mess easily with reproductive and care instinct ;-)
BTW, I hope you have false memories from your school teaching...else this school should better have some inspection from the state....soon! ;-)