So many interesting parallels... "The Sea and Summer" by Australian author George Turner comes to mind. It was written in 1987 and mentions this exact issue. It's a bit cheesy overall but quite a good book really.
I respectfully suggest everyone read "The King, the Mice and the Cheese" by Nancy Gurney and Eric Gurney. Then think carefully about any large scale geoengineering experiments. Then remember that we have only one laboratory for these experiments. Also remember that it is already engaged in a poorly designed and mostly out of control experiment.
Careful. Planting trees on a large scale will change the surface albedo and moisture balance. The albedo change will probably act to increase absorption of incoming shortwave radiation which could result in a net warming. The real result depends on what the trees are replacing. Crops? Grassland? Shrubs? The moisture balance problem is more complicated but could have negative or positive feedbacks. Studies in the Amazon region have shown that tree removal or addition on the scale of 50 km causes significant local changes to rainfall and cloud cover.
Also, trees won't grow where they won't grow. That is, you can only plant them where conditions are appropriate. Finally, trees die eventually and unless you bury their carcasses somewhere deep the carbon all goes back into the system. That's why it is called a carbon cycle.
My point is that none of this is simple. I don't think we are going to engineer an easy solution whether it is with mechanical devices or natural ones.
Someone is just eyeing a chance to make money. Not that I worship the memory of dead authors but why not publish new work by new authors? I guess that would have more built in risk.
Shouldn't they? If the OS fails because of an application, no matter how poorly it is written, then the OS has failed. Shouldn't applications find it impossible to crash the OS?
Furthermore, probabilities have been assigned to some specific phrases used in the report.
"In this Summary for Policymakers, the following terms have been used to indicate the assessed likelihood, using expert judgement, of an outcome or a result: Virtually certain > 99% probability f occurrence, Extremely likely > 95%, Very likely > 90%, Likely > 66%, More likely than not > 50%, unlikely 33%, Very unlikely 10%, Extremely unlikely 5%."
Summary for Policymakers, A report of Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC Fourth Assesment Report.
Re:Next, Lego Will Make It a Creativity-Free Kit
on
Beijing 2008 In Lego
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I forgot the Bionicle kits. My boy loved them and would combine them to build super sized things. I couldn't come close to keeping up with him when he was on a roll. He knew what parts he had so he could hold a structure in his mind while he hunted down the pieces. He could remember where he had used certain parts before and would disassemble other creations to get at them. It's such a wonderful toy. I can't repeat it enough.
Re:Next, Lego Will Make It a Creativity-Free Kit
on
Beijing 2008 In Lego
·
· Score: 5, Informative
That's what I thought until I started to buy kits for my son. He did build according to the instructions. Then he proceeded to do what I had done, and what you are waxing nostalgic about, 20 years before. He built whatever he pleased. He built, destroyed, rebuilt, on and on. He would spend entire days surrounded by his Lego.
I think the blocks are all good. Old and new. He seems to have outgrown them now. He's 14 and he started with Lego when he was two or three. The thousands of dollars worth of newer generation blocks (and all of the instructions) are boxed away with the older generation blocks (with no instructions -- they got lost somewhere along the way) for future rediscovery.
I think that Lego blocks are _still_ the world's greatest toy.
High thin clouds have a different effect from low thick clouds with respect to surface temperature.
High thin clouds reflect/reradiate more infrared energy downwards while low thick clouds reflect more incoming visible band radiation back to space. The infrared band energy radiated by the surface is heading out to space to balance the incoming (from the sun) higher frequency radiation. The result is that high clouds may warm the surface while low clouds cool it.
TeX and LaTeX are amazing (the X is the greek chi, pronounced more like "ck" or scottish "ch"). They can be painful to use but they provide real, professional quality typesetting of a wide range of things that are difficult to put into print (namely, equations) and are free in every sense of that word. They provide access to automatic bibliography functions and reference tools, automatic indexing, useful (if cryptic) table generation too. They allow effortless inclusion of proper, scalable postscript figures. Text is actually typeset well with proper kerning. Popular tools like Word (for example) don't do these things well or at all. Postscript in Word can be painful since for decades it seemed that Microsoft thought Postscript was evil. Word never used to adjust the kerning on text properly or at all. I don't know if it does now. Word data is stored in some kind of crazy format where you have no easy fix when something goes wrong which it does frequently when you are generating a document like a thesis with many included figures, tables, equations, etc. TeX files are text, human readable, and are run through a compiler to generate the output. Figures are included at compile time. Equations in TeX take a bit of learning but the result is very satisfying. Equations (indeed anything you like) can be automatically numbered and referenced in the text by assigning them a name and then using that tag elsewhere. I have found that using something like Word for a sophisticated document results in a process equally or more painful than learning LaTeX.
I do understand that this is a silly thing to discuss but it seems to fit whatever passes for tradition here. If White Knight Two is "the apogee of the application of carbon composites to aerospace" doesn't that imply that things won't be getting any better? Why would they put this in a press release?
As for the cyclical patterns we observe in the climate, these are caused by all manner of complex forcing and internal feedbacks. There are indeed quasi-periodic annual, decadal and longer cycles in the climate system. The really long patterns (millenial) are driven by orbital forcing. Shorter ones are the result of interactions between land, ocean and atmosphere systems. The global carbon cycle is a terrifically complicated puzzle involving systems in every part of the earth, the atmosphere, surface, living things, even the deep crust and mantle. Really it's mind boggling. Nonetheless modellers are putting it all together piece by piece and coming up with answers... and more questions. I don't think any one of the modellers would tell you that they have the one answer to the problem of understanding the climate system. I don't see a better option than putting our best understanding of physics into these models and seeing what comes out. Then, improving them.
Basic climate science ( how the atmosphere warms the surface of the earth) goes back at least to Fourier in the early 1800s. The basic relationship between greenhouse gases and climate has been clearly understood for at least 100 years (see the work of Arrhenius published in the early 1900s). I could go on but you hopefully get my point.
Global warming is not a "weather problem". There will be problems with the weather as a result of climate change but it doesn't really work the other way around.
At the moment weather events occur on (approximately) normally distributed probability distributions. There's a mean and a variance. Climate change will alter the distributions so that the mean changes, the variance changes or both change. A little thought will make this clear. For example let's assume that only the variance changes, increases in fact. This means that events that were rare before will occur more frequently. So heavy rains or extreme heat or cold (yes you read that correctly) could be more frequent. Remember that if the variance changes and the mean stays the same there must be an increase in extremes on both sides of the mean. These are bad things in terms of planning and stability etc. What if only the mean changes? If the average temperature increases then the probability of extreme heat also goes up. These individual events, too much rain in one storm, higher than expected temperature or winds, these are weather events. They occur with probabilities measured by the climate. This is a really important point that people don't seem to get.
It's handy to remember that climate is what we expect but weather is what we get.
Have any of you read "The King, the Mice and the Cheese"? It's a children's reader.
Mice are eating the King's cheese. So the King gets cats to eat the mice. Then the cats become a pain so dogs are brought in. Eventually, lions get rid of the dogs and finally elephants scare the lions. But what do we do about elephants? Why, mice of course. Elephants are terrified of mice.
Do you have a 13 year old son? Have you reread these and many others of the classics of early science fiction? I think you will find the style extremely dated. It just doesn't fit well with modern kids. My son said "Have Space Suit Sill Travel" was boring. This hurt me a bit, until I reread it. Then I could see what he meant. I grew up in the 70s and 80s on Tom Swift, books by
Heinlein, Asimov and their contemporaries. After thinking a bit more critically about them, I don't think they are actually that brilliant. They are a bit hokey and contrived and Heinlein especially has such an agenda. I was probably quite impressionable. Sadly, most SF is really not good literature though it can be fine entertainment.
My son and his older sister really liked books from The Three Investigators series. Not SF and written a little later (well the first batch is from the nineteen-sixties). The writing also isn't really that good in this case.
There are many age appropriate fantasy titles out there. Unfortunately, there are too many fantasy titles out there. Far too many. Most of them are drivel.
I'm pretty sure that floating ice displaces its melted volume not 90% of it. I think you are confusing the density difference due to changes in the volume of solid and liquid water with differences in mass of equivalent volumes of water and ice.
Slashdot Mirror
So many interesting parallels... "The Sea and Summer" by Australian author George Turner comes to mind. It was written in 1987 and mentions this exact issue. It's a bit cheesy overall but quite a good book really.
My wife, who is a survivor of lymphoma, also has coeliac disease. Since beer contains gluten proteins she cannot drink it. This makes her sad.
I respectfully suggest everyone read "The King, the Mice and the Cheese" by Nancy Gurney and Eric Gurney. Then think carefully about any large scale geoengineering experiments. Then remember that we have only one laboratory for these experiments. Also remember that it is already engaged in a poorly designed and mostly out of control experiment.
Careful. Planting trees on a large scale will change the surface albedo and moisture balance. The albedo change will probably act to increase absorption of incoming shortwave radiation which could result in a net warming. The real result depends on what the trees are replacing. Crops? Grassland? Shrubs? The moisture balance problem is more complicated but could have negative or positive feedbacks. Studies in the Amazon region have shown that tree removal or addition on the scale of 50 km causes significant local changes to rainfall and cloud cover.
Also, trees won't grow where they won't grow. That is, you can only plant them where conditions are appropriate. Finally, trees die eventually and unless you bury their carcasses somewhere deep the carbon all goes back into the system. That's why it is called a carbon cycle.
My point is that none of this is simple. I don't think we are going to engineer an easy solution whether it is with mechanical devices or natural ones.
Someone is just eyeing a chance to make money. Not that I worship the memory of dead authors but why not publish new work by new authors? I guess that would have more built in risk.
Shouldn't they? If the OS fails because of an application, no matter how poorly it is written, then the OS has failed. Shouldn't applications find it impossible to crash the OS?
I thought of it immediately too. That highway crossing scene was something else the first time I saw it.
Furthermore, probabilities have been assigned to some specific phrases used in the report.
"In this Summary for Policymakers, the following terms have been used to indicate the assessed likelihood, using expert judgement, of an outcome or a result: Virtually certain > 99% probability f occurrence, Extremely likely > 95%, Very likely > 90%, Likely > 66%, More likely than not > 50%, unlikely 33%, Very unlikely 10%, Extremely unlikely 5%."
Summary for Policymakers, A report of Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC Fourth Assesment Report.
Yeah, I forgot the Bionicle kits. My boy loved them and would combine them to build super sized things. I couldn't come close to keeping up with him when he was on a roll. He knew what parts he had so he could hold a structure in his mind while he hunted down the pieces. He could remember where he had used certain parts before and would disassemble other creations to get at them. It's such a wonderful toy. I can't repeat it enough.
That's what I thought until I started to buy kits for my son. He did build according to the instructions. Then he proceeded to do what I had done, and what you are waxing nostalgic about, 20 years before. He built whatever he pleased. He built, destroyed, rebuilt, on and on. He would spend entire days surrounded by his Lego.
I think the blocks are all good. Old and new. He seems to have outgrown them now. He's 14 and he started with Lego when he was two or three. The thousands of dollars worth of newer generation blocks (and all of the instructions) are boxed away with the older generation blocks (with no instructions -- they got lost somewhere along the way) for future rediscovery.
I think that Lego blocks are _still_ the world's greatest toy.
How were those milk crates obtained?
There is at least one tool to convert images to text so that emacs and vi become useful image editors.
http://sng.sourceforge.net/
Also, emacs is clearly superior.
Can you give a hint as to where you live? The city? Maybe just the name of the store? I would love to use this system.
High thin clouds have a different effect from low thick clouds with respect to surface temperature.
High thin clouds reflect/reradiate more infrared energy downwards while low thick clouds reflect more incoming visible band radiation back to space. The infrared band energy radiated by the surface is heading out to space to balance the incoming (from the sun) higher frequency radiation. The result is that high clouds may warm the surface while low clouds cool it.
Neat eh?
TeX and LaTeX are amazing (the X is the greek chi, pronounced more like "ck" or scottish "ch"). They can be painful to use but they provide real, professional quality typesetting of a wide range of things that are difficult to put into print (namely, equations) and are free in every sense of that word. They provide access to automatic bibliography functions and reference tools, automatic indexing, useful (if cryptic) table generation too. They allow effortless inclusion of proper, scalable postscript figures. Text is actually typeset well with proper kerning. Popular tools like Word (for example) don't do these things well or at all. Postscript in Word can be painful since for decades it seemed that Microsoft thought Postscript was evil. Word never used to adjust the kerning on text properly or at all. I don't know if it does now. Word data is stored in some kind of crazy format where you have no easy fix when something goes wrong which it does frequently when you are generating a document like a thesis with many included figures, tables, equations, etc. TeX files are text, human readable, and are run through a compiler to generate the output. Figures are included at compile time. Equations in TeX take a bit of learning but the result is very satisfying. Equations (indeed anything you like) can be automatically numbered and referenced in the text by assigning them a name and then using that tag elsewhere. I have found that using something like Word for a sophisticated document results in a process equally or more painful than learning LaTeX.
Well done!
I do understand that this is a silly thing to discuss but it seems to fit whatever passes for tradition here. If White Knight Two is "the apogee of the application of carbon composites to aerospace" doesn't that imply that things won't be getting any better? Why would they put this in a press release?
Well said. The ad business feels so slimy and rotten to me. I am looking forward to the new web. Unless it's worse.
As for the cyclical patterns we observe in the climate, these are caused by all manner of complex forcing and internal feedbacks. There are indeed quasi-periodic annual, decadal and longer cycles in the climate system. The really long patterns (millenial) are driven by orbital forcing. Shorter ones are the result of interactions between land, ocean and atmosphere systems. The global carbon cycle is a terrifically complicated puzzle involving systems in every part of the earth, the atmosphere, surface, living things, even the deep crust and mantle. Really it's mind boggling. Nonetheless modellers are putting it all together piece by piece and coming up with answers ... and more questions. I don't think any one of the modellers would tell you that they have the one answer to the problem of understanding the climate system. I don't see a better option than putting our best understanding of physics into these models and seeing what comes out. Then, improving them.
Basic climate science ( how the atmosphere warms the surface of the earth) goes back at least to Fourier in the early 1800s. The basic relationship between greenhouse gases and climate has been clearly understood for at least 100 years (see the work of Arrhenius published in the early 1900s). I could go on but you hopefully get my point.
Global warming is not a "weather problem". There will be problems with the weather as a result of climate change but it doesn't really work the other way around.
At the moment weather events occur on (approximately) normally distributed probability distributions. There's a mean and a variance. Climate change will alter the distributions so that the mean changes, the variance changes or both change. A little thought will make this clear. For example let's assume that only the variance changes, increases in fact. This means that events that were rare before will occur more frequently. So heavy rains or extreme heat or cold (yes you read that correctly) could be more frequent. Remember that if the variance changes and the mean stays the same there must be an increase in extremes on both sides of the mean. These are bad things in terms of planning and stability etc. What if only the mean changes? If the average temperature increases then the probability of extreme heat also goes up. These individual events, too much rain in one storm, higher than expected temperature or winds, these are weather events. They occur with probabilities measured by the climate. This is a really important point that people don't seem to get.
It's handy to remember that climate is what we expect but weather is what we get.
"There is a high correlation between climate and sun spot activities."
You really have to stop bringing this up.
Have any of you read "The King, the Mice and the Cheese"? It's a children's reader.
Mice are eating the King's cheese. So the King gets cats to eat the mice. Then the cats become a pain so dogs are brought in. Eventually, lions get rid of the dogs and finally elephants scare the lions. But what do we do about elephants? Why, mice of course. Elephants are terrified of mice.
It's a wonderful book.
Do you have a 13 year old son? Have you reread these and many others of the classics of early science fiction? I think you will find the style extremely dated. It just doesn't fit well with modern kids. My son said "Have Space Suit Sill Travel" was boring. This hurt me a bit, until I reread it. Then I could see what he meant. I grew up in the 70s and 80s on Tom Swift, books by Heinlein, Asimov and their contemporaries. After thinking a bit more critically about them, I don't think they are actually that brilliant. They are a bit hokey and contrived and Heinlein especially has such an agenda. I was probably quite impressionable. Sadly, most SF is really not good literature though it can be fine entertainment.
My son and his older sister really liked books from The Three Investigators series. Not SF and written a little later (well the first batch is from the nineteen-sixties). The writing also isn't really that good in this case.
There are many age appropriate fantasy titles out there. Unfortunately, there are too many fantasy titles out there. Far too many. Most of them are drivel.
Chricton is, in some sense that I don't truly understand, a good writer of fiction. Nothing more, nothing less.
I'm pretty sure that floating ice displaces its melted volume not 90% of it. I think you are confusing the density difference due to changes in the volume of solid and liquid water with differences in mass of equivalent volumes of water and ice.