... if you read TFA is that the rice grows much faster and produces a lot more in the same amount of time, but because they didn't increase the available soil nutrients to match, they are basically diluting its nutritional value relative to total yield. Which is silly. All they have to do to avoid the problem is provide the plants with balanced fertilization instead of bumping one major component of healthy growth without bumping others.
This is about as useful as reporting that rice grown with too much nitrogen relative to other nutrients may grow faster but not be as nutritious or healthy as rice grown with a better balance of fertilizers. Or with the right/wrong amount of water.
The PROBLEM in other words is that the rice grew TOO WELL for a fertilizer level set for poorer growth.
Look, it's all useful information until it is turned into propaganda. A huge fraction of fruits and vegetables are grown all over the world in actual greenhouses, and standard practice in greenhouse farms is to bump CO2 to as high as 1000 ppm because IF you balance the increased CO2 fertilization against water and other nutrients, you get much larger yields, faster, from healthier plants. C3 respiring plants all over the world are growing roughly 15% faster and with larger yields than they did 150 years ago, but if you took that 15% away arguing that food crops must have been better for us without the extra CO2 you'd literally starve a billion people. This simple fact has been carefully ignored in most of the public discussions of Demon CO2, so now it is necessary to "prove" that increased CO2 is bad for plants. But it's not. Quite the contrary. With well-known, long since published federal guidelines from the Department of Agriculture. It's one of the many things that confounds the "dendroclimatologists" who claim to be able to read off global warming and past temperatures by examining tree rings. I read a study of tree growth (in general) in Europe and the increase in the growth rate and health of European forests over the last fifty or so years has been remarkable. There is an ongoing process of "antidesertification" -- deserts starting to green up again -- as a direct consequence of increased CO2. Finally, CO2 levels in the last ice age dropped to within 10 or 20 ppm of the "critical point" that would cause mass extinction of whole classes of respiring plants due to inadequate partial pressure to drive diffusion into the plants at a rate capable of sustaining life and growth.
At this point there isn't a lot of reason to think we'll ever reach 580 ppm. Fusion actually looks like it is LIKELY to come home in the next decade, if not the next three years, and photovoltaics and batteries appear to have passed a critical point of their own and become at least break even if not win a bit as the cheapest source of new electrical power. Within the decade, we'll see more and more homes being built that are 80% or better self-sufficient in energy. And hey, one day it's not inconceivable that people will stop knee jerk opposing fission based power, and maybe LFTR or some other comparatively safe technology will take off to power the US for a thousand years or so.
Power companies in general are public utilities. They cannot charge "whatever they like" for rates, because they are granted de facto monopolies in particular regions, and while it isn't COMPLETELY impossible to change utilities serving a given area, it is rare, difficult, and expensive as a general rule. So this is in no sense whatsoever a "free market".
If you are allow to add a fixed margin onto costs as your "profit" for selling electrical power, you literally cannot increase the profits of your company in any semi-saturated market with roughly fixed costs for things like fuel and maintenance. Anything that raises the cost of generating the cost of the electricity you sell, however, increases your marginal profit at a fixed margin. If you are allow to keep 10% over costs at retail, and you double costs, you actually double your profits at a fixed marginal profit.
To put it bluntly, the group that has made out like a bandit throughout the entire discussion is the very energy industry that is demonized by AGW. Not only do they get to raise prices at a fixed margin, they get tax writeoffs, they get free advertising, and if you look, they get a huge share of R&D money in the "search" for renewable alternative fuels and so on. You can see the same thing happening in the fossil fuel industry -- there is little real shortage evident in the marketplace, but it is hopefully fairly obvious that global power politics is largely concerned these days with increasing price-raising panic, even transiently, to bump local profits for the fuel industries. Iran? Well, it COULD be about nuclear arms in Iran's hands, but it is also about oil. The Syrian civil war and ISIS in general? Well it COULD be about religion, or the thirst of a people for freedom -- or it could be about oil and gas pipelines to Europe. The first, and second Iraqi war? It might be all about freedom and oppression, a large bully trying to take over an innocent smaller country -- or it could be all about oil, and just who is going to control its flow and price. A truly cynical person might attribute Venezuela to global politics manipulating the oil market.
The statement that there are few industries benefit from "AGW" isn't the point. There are lots of industries out there that make far more money because of the AGW panic than they would ever have made without it. There have been whole wars fought over only a comparatively small part of the total energy industry. We're talking over a trillion dollars a year, globally. It is naive in the extreme to think that with that kind of money on the table that the entire political and scientific discussion is free from massive corruption, any more than global pharm is with far less money on the table.
Well said. And anyone who takes issue with it has only to look at almost 60 years worth of papers that "proved" that fat in our diets was causing heart disease and high cholesterol, a "fact" that just happened to make major industries in the US that are huge political donors lots of money. Or any number of other scientific claims that were sufficiently entrenched that it took at least years, maybe decades, for science to self-correct, even without a trillion dollars a year or so at stake.
It's not that AGW is "false" -- there is good support for some warming of the surface from increased CO2, in straight up physics, around 1 C per doubling of CO2, all things being equal. The trouble is that they aren't equal. The Earth's climate is a chaotic process, and it is pretty reasonable to doubt the predictive models attempting to integrate the Navier-Stokes double-coupled system on a spinning, tilted oblate spheroid covered irregularly with continents and oceans and mountains and warmed in a complex way in its evolving elliptical orbit by a somewhat variable star as far as "predictions" of things like water vapor feedback and changes in the global conveyor belt carrying oceanic heat around and atmospheric flow patterns, especially when the models are started with "arbitrary" initial conditions (since nobody has any idea what the actual state of the atmosphere and ocean is at anything like the granularity of the models, which is still 30 orders of magnitude greater than the Kolmogorov scale), run to produce a spectrum of possible futures, averaged and then superaveraged without regard to weighting, and then turned into a "prediction" that is supposed to carry more political weight then the lives and fortunes of all of those affected by the enormously expensive measures taken to ameliorate a future "catastrophe" that nobody can actually quite measure as being truly catastrophic.
There are also inconvenient facts that are quietly ignored during the public debate by supporters of AGW as a "catastrophe". One is that roughly 1/7th of the Earth's population is eating today thanks to the roughly 15% increase in growth rate of C3 respiring plants due to the increase in CO2 in Earth's CO2-starved atmosphere (the minimum CO2 during the coldest part of the Wisconsin glaciation dropped to just over the partial pressure required to prevent mass extinction of whole classes of respiring plants). That the Earth was coming out of the little Ice Age about the time we started really burning things for energy and gradually ramping up CO2, and that while too hot isn't great, too cold is TRULY a disaster for the breadbasket temperate zone for the planet, and isn't particularly good for the ecology, either, and is often accompanied by massive global droughts.
The point is that the climate is changing, and has always been changing. The notion that the Earth's climate is in any sense whatsoever a stationary process is a myth, a myth caused by the comparatively short "memory" of living humans compared to the timescales of change. The Earth is large enough that there are always climate/weather extremes happening somewhere on the surface, and if you look for them and report them as "news", you cannot avoid conveying the impression of disastrous change. It requires careful statistical analysis to detect anything like real change, and even then the statistics provides no reliable means of attributing cause, not in a chaotic model that has huge natural fluctuations year to year, month to month, week to week. It's a cherrypicker's paradise, an open invitation for confirmation bias to run amok, without the slightest possibility of a double blind experiment or observation that isn't multiply confounded by impossibly complex dynamics.
This is a case where in the long run, the entire debate likely will not matter. As solar technology continues to improve and become cheaper (including storage options and more efficient, cheaper cells) pure economics is going to drive a gradual abandonment of burning
Or, we could look at what the data say -- there's rather a lot of it. General conclusion: Coffee is more likely to be very slightly, almost invisibly good for you in terms of overall cancer risk, known to reduce the risk for several major cancers and without any solid evidence of increased risk in any (although there are some mixed results). Bearing in mind that coffee can also be decaffeinated with organic solvents and that the studies involved in this large review probably have confounding factors that are variably controlled between studies, this isn't surprising.
I could also post sundry papers that more or less universally suggest that coffee is good for people with metabolic syndrome or T2D, positively affecting their metabolism. My wife is a physician, and every time I've suggested that lots of coffee (she drinks a bit over half a pot a day) might be risky she deluges me with objective evidence that not only is it not overall risky, it is overall beneficial.
But who cares about objective evidence? The current warning is WORSE than hearsay, anecdotal evidence. It is as damning as saying that if you masturbate you MIGHT go blind as a result. Who can even argue with that?
Coffee and cancer risk: a summary overview. Alicandro G1, Tavani A, La Vecchia C. Author information Abstract
We reviewed available evidence on coffee drinking and the risk of all cancers and selected cancers updated to May 2016. Coffee consumption is not associated with overall cancer risk. A meta-analysis reported a pooled relative risk (RR) for an increment of 1cup of coffee/day of 1.00 [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.99-1.01] for all cancers. Coffee drinking is associated with a reduced risk of liver cancer. A meta-analysis of cohort studies found an RR for an increment of consumption of 1cup/day of 0.85 (95% CI: 0.81-0.90) for liver cancer and a favorable effect on liver enzymes and cirrhosis. Another meta-analysis showed an inverse relation for endometrial cancer risk, with an RR of 0.92 (95% CI: 0.88-0.96) for an increment of 1cup/day. A possible decreased risk was found in some studies for oral/pharyngeal cancer and for advanced prostate cancer. Although data are mixed, overall, there seems to be some favorable effect of coffee drinking on colorectal cancer in case-control studies, in the absence of a consistent relation in cohort studies. For bladder cancer, the results are not consistent; however, any possible direct association is not dose and duration related, and might depend on a residual confounding effect of smoking. A few studies suggest an increased risk of childhood leukemia after maternal coffee drinking during pregnancy, but data are limited and inconsistent. Although the results of studies are mixed, the overall evidence suggests no association of coffee intake with cancers of the stomach, pancreas, lung, breast, ovary, and prostate overall. Data are limited, with RR close to unity for other neoplasms, including those of the esophagus, small intestine, gallbladder and biliary tract, skin, kidney, brain, thyroid, as well as for soft tissue sarcoma and lymphohematopoietic cancer.
Won't do any good, though. And don't forget the time reversal -- On alpha centauri and earth, people but the red and blue marbles in their respective boxes, they zip backwards in time (with rocket fuel magically appearing in space and being sucked up into the engine to store itself unoxided the tanks) to be opened by somebody wearing a blindfold so he can't see which marble was in which box who ends up with a red and blue marble in his hand. Like that, too.
That's the part that most folks don't even think of. Measurement requires the spontaneous exchange of information and increases entropy, but entropy is in some sense an illusion in time-reversible microdynamics, and people do tend to forget that there is both an advanced and a retarded component to relativistic reversible interactions.
I hear you and agree, but I doubt very much that you'll get any traction on/. with this observation, in spite of the fact that it actually has its own wikipedia page:
Note that this is a crisis already in the realm of openly published research results and conclusions. There isn't any good reason to think that the numbers cited in the Nature study are going to be any smaller for studies conducted by parties with even stronger (monetary or sociopolitical) vested interests, who don't even expose their results to the greater scientific community for checking and replication. And the numbers are terrible.
Look, it is only six or seven years now that we finally learned that dietary cholesterol and fat are almost completely irrelevant to heart disease, after being told nothing but the opposite for some fifty years, all of it stamped with "proven by real science":
Now imagine that a Dietary Protection Agency (DPA) had been created to deal with the "public health crisis" caused by high levels of fat and cholesterol in the US diet, and that they crafted regulations banning things like the open sale of cooking fats, the production of bacon, the sale of cheese and eggs. Suppose further that the "evidence" they cited to defend these draconian measures was -- precisely what was, in fact, used to support the argument that high fat = high cholesterol -- but that this data, instead of even being available to support the epidemiological study I just cited, was hidden behind a shroud of "patient confidentiality". BLTs would be a thing of the past, the sugar and carb industry and PETA would be crowing and slipping the DPA large sums under the table to ensure that the basis for its rules was never overly scrutinized to protect the meat animals that are the primary sources of dietary cholesterol, and the public would not be well served. At least with bacon and eggs, smothered in cheese sauce.
Finally, the joker who invoked "HIPPA" above as if he knew what he was talking about -- for starters, it is HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, whose purpose was to protect people from being denied insurance (for which it proved remarkably ineffectual) or employment (slightly better) on the basis of prior health history -- clearly missed the point that all published medical research is HIPAA compliant. HIPAA compliance isn't that difficult to arrange or manage in a study, and publishing methodology and results from such studies is the basis for every single published work in the field of evidence-based medicine, and even with open publication, there is a ton of non-reproducible crap that makes it out into the wild (like the cholesterol gaff, like the sugar/carb gaff) and stays there for years or even decades before independent work finally corrects it. No sane physician is going to base treatments on results from completely hidden work -- no methods, no data, just somebody saying "trust us, we've seen the methods and data and we totally believe them". That's not science, and it isn't evidence-based reasoning, it is just a glaring opportunity for confirmation bias, political bias, social bias, or plain old money to influence what should be an open process that makes mistakes all the time as it is, even when fully open.
To conclude, I honestly think the EPA doesn't get a bye on the open participation in Real Science, which involves things like peer review, reproducibility, double blind placebo controlled studies as opposed to stupid epidemiological correlations with unknown confounding variables, the open analysis of the statistical basis of claims, avoidance of data dredging, cherrypicking, and all of the other myriad aspects of Bad Science, science we don't get to see and criticize. I am quite certain
I mean, how can one argue with a post like that? I "could" receive my gold-plated potty, towed by my pony, in the next twenty minutes. The oceans "could" boil from global warming, turning the Earth into a Venus-a-like. The Higgs boson "could" have reached a state somewhere in the Universe just out of sight where particles lose their mass and the wave of Universal extinction "could" be rolling towards us to end the Universe (in the vicinity of the Earth) long before we lose all the large land animals.
Heck, we can do better than that. We can find data from pretty much any time and place, addressing any subject. We can find a trend in it (almost all data has SOME trend). We can draw an interpolating line through the trend -- linear, polynomial, whatever. Then we can use that line to extrapolate the trend and claim that whatever it predicts COULD happen.
Damn! You're right! It could!
News at 11! My grandson Jacob could reach ten meters in height in fifty years! Hey, I'm just extrapolating a trend, here...
It's called "Hunan hands" in the culinary world (probably among other things). The first time I made hot pepper jelly out of good old cayennes I found out the hard way that you should either wear gloves or QUICKLY wash your hands before the juices penetrate your skin.
The one time I bought ghost pepper sauce a few drops -- drops -- rendered a dish I was trying it in inedible. By anyone except macho types trying to prove that they can love pain. I simply disposed of the bottle and will never go that way again. Peppers should bring flavor with the heat. One can always add heat along with the flavor as there is a wide spectrum to choose from -- high quality paprika for the pepper taste without much heat, cayenne powder for a very similar taste WITH some heat, habeneros (already ALMOST too hot to be useful) and habenero sauces if you want flavor and a lot of heat. "Heat" by itself is a silly thing to add to a dish as it serves no real purpose; heat as a part of natural flavor in a regional cuisine is another thing entirely.
I cook with peppers very hot or not a lot (sorry:-). Usually I touch the first cut to my tongue when I seed and slice them to assess their heat, and if they are so hot that the single touch makes me sorry, I work fast and wash my hands immediately to get the oils and neurotoxins off. Haven't had hunan hands since that one original episode, although I do keep surgical gloves around for the VERY rare cases (like making hot pepper jelly) where I'm going to be seeding and chopping peppers for more than ten minutes, which seems to be around the time needed for the heat to start to get through and into the skin if they aren't washed.
Yeah, or what you get owning a dog or cat. Which I do. I laugh at your silly blowing air and its bathroom flora -- do I hold my breath while I'm in the bathroom? Of course not. Do I not pet my dog in spite of the fact that my dog has far more bacteria on it than are being discussed in this article? No, I pet my dog, I snuggle with my dog, my dog licks my very face. Do I grade papers that have been handled by literally hundreds of students while eating a doughnut (and not washing my hands after every paper)? I do. Do I eat the doughnut even if it falls on the floor, according to the five, or even the ten second rule (brushing off any actual dog hair that might adhere)? I have been known to.
Do I get sick all the time? No, I hardly ever get sick -- I've got great, and well maintained, HERD IMMUNITY!
I'm not worried about bacteria, or dirt, from normal sources. The things that will get you are that salmonella-laced cow manure you are handling while you garden. The flu virus you contract just breathing as you walk past somebody that is shedding the virus with every breath. That raw oyster that just happened to harbor vibrio. The plate served to you by a waiter with hepatitis. Some diseases are virulent and readily transmitted, and the air of a bathroom is way, way down the list. In actual fact, I'm at more risk of stuff like norovirus FROM the fact that no, I don't wash my hands after touching every paper a student ever hands me, and I touch my pens, and I loan them pens, and I sit at the front of a classroom filled with all of those disease vectors right after they return from spring break laden with new bacteria I do NOT have herd immunity to -- yet -- and breathe, while they are all coughing and sneezing over themselves and each other. Two weeks later, we all have herd immunity again and things quiet down.
Yeah, what you said. Tidal volume of human lungs (the amount we actually breath in and out per breath) is a bit over 0.5 liters. We breathe 12-20 times per minute, say 16. Thus we breathe in roughly 8 liters of air per minute just being inside a bathroom. A typical bathroom stay is (very roughly) 2 minutes or so if you are only urinating and are male, 4 or 5 minutes if you are urinating and are female (based on observations, not experience), and if you defecate anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes or even longer. Hence just using a bathroom for any purpose has you moving 16 to 120 liters of bathroom air through your lungs. When you smell bad smells in a bathroom, your olfactory system is literally reacting to microparticles of toilet water, urine, and feces in the air that are in the very ACT of being deposited on soft, wet, warm tissue.
One reason we have an evolved aversion to certain smells is that yes, just the act of breathing can nucleate you with bad bacteria or viruses, although our noses and sinuses are also evolved to at least try to protect us by trapping bad stuff before it reaches the lungs per se and flush it via nose drip either down to where it is swallowed (the stomach is a pretty good sanitizer for non-intestinal bacteria with a pH around 1) or blown or dripped out the nose itself. That runny nose you hate is your body trying to protect you from stuff riding along with the pollen and dust mites and human ejecta you are breathing all the time, although (of course) some bacteria and viruses make their living riding along with precisely that drip. It's a war between the collection of cells that somehow becomes "you" and every other cell or replicating molecule or oxidative/toxic molecule in the Universe, and life is one long holding action in the war.
Our immune systems do, in fact, get stronger with use. My wife is a physician -- she sees sick people, sometimes very sick people, almost every day. Sure, she practices hygiene to the point where the VA hospital where she works had a hard time fingerprinting her when she started there -- doctors actually wash their hands so frequently that they wash their own fingerprints nearly off -- but there is no way to eliminate a perpetual rain of contact with sneezed, breathed, coughed bacteria and viruses. My wife almost NEVER gets sick. She has the metaphorical immune system of a rhinoceros, kept strong by constant, daily use.
The truth is that we all tend to develop herd immunity to the bacteria and many of the viruses that are local to our community. E coli is at the same time bad, but also a normal resident of the human gut. Your family and probably most of your friends and co-workers have more or less the same strains of "tolerated" enterococcus. Your gut contains lots of other "pathogenic" bacteria -- notably streptococcus. A nice figure is here:
Your stool IS almost entirely bacteria. The problems arise when you hit doses of e coli from DIFFERENT human herds, or different species. If you travel to mexico, or india, you are likely enough to get "Delhi Belly" -- a nasty infection arising from your body meeting perfectly normal bacteria from a DIFFERENT herd. Amazingly, people travelling from India to the US for the first time are not that unlikely to have the exact same thing happen to them even though our water supply is for the most part pretty clean and reasonably sterile, because you can't avoid being exposed to the principle herd bacteria of the place you live. You'll breathe them in in any public restroom, make contact with them on every doorknob, every dollar bill, every restaurant table, every human hand you shake, every breath you breathe in a public space where people are talking, laughing, coughing, sneezing.
The entire article misses this point. The more you protect yourself from your environment, the more difficult it is to develop and maintain the critical herd immunity that KEEPS you
So, to evaluate the monopoly claims, is Amazon the overwhelming leader (more business than all their competition combined) in a category of commerce? Is Amazon using their overwhelming position in a category of commerce to bankroll undercutting competition in a different category of commerce? Is Amazon the sole provider of a dominant standard while exploiting that advantage to shape a marketplace?
Yes. They've put every other major bookstore but one out of business, and the sole remaining at-scale competitor is Barnes and Noble, which just fired most of its store management because it is about to follow Toys'R'Us to oblivion, barring a miracle. At this point they have more business in e-books in particular than all of their competitors put together, they have more business in REGULAR books than all of their competitors put together, and they are rapidly pushing to achieve that sort of market dominance in several other categories if they aren't there already.
Yes to number two as well. How can they not? Their site sells everything! If you visit it to buy a book, you are cross-sold pen fillers. If you visit it to look for ANYTHING, you get cross-sold EVERYTHING. The money isn't sorted out so that only the money made from selling office supplies in competition with Staples and Office Max is used to fund office supply sales -- money they make in general has allowed them to enter whole new markets. They just bought Whole Foods -- an entirely different, new category of commerce. Did they raise new money to do so? Hell no, they used profits from selling everything else the sell to do so. Is that "undercutting the competition"? Damn skippy. They immediately dropped prices to undercut the competition because they don't have to be instantly profitable, because they can use profits from "everything" to make their new operation competitive and wipe out all the OTHER companies that are trying to get into e.g. internet based grocery delivery, not to mention Harris-Teeter, Food Lion, etc. But HT doesn't have a bookstore or general purpose store that generates profits that can be used to offset losses (if any) chalked up to "undercutting competition".
And overwhelmingly yes to number three. They "own" the Kindle and all kindle book sales. They have effectively eliminated their only serious competition -- B&N's Nook -- and are about to eliminate B&N itself along with it. Anything B&N sells Amazon sells (plus much more) and Amazon will deliver right to your door. Amazon is even moving towards opening its OWN brick and mortar stores, yet ANOTHER example of it branching out into "different categories of commerce" using money made from its first, internet sales.
We are at the point where it is entirely plausible that Amazon, unchecked, is going to become THE SOLE retail store in a huge number of markets, and the DOMINANT store in an even huger number. I'm on the board of a small indie bookstore chain -- a handful of stores in CA. If you want to (for example) sell used or rare books, you more or less HAVE to list them on Amazon and allow them to take their cut. More people search for things on Amazon than anywhere else, and for things like rare books especially, you simply aren't likely to show up on the radar of somebody looking for them without far more investment in internet visibility and staff to manage it than a small business is likely to have available or be able to afford. But they can be trained to put them up on Amazon, once you are set up as a "partner".
Amazon is "easy", and I'm not arguing whether or not it is a good or bad thing, but it is a thing that long since should have been subjected to antitrust action. Dealing with/through them is like doing business with the mob, but without the guns. They don't have to sell you insurance you have to buy to keep them from burning down your store, they just let you stay alive a bit longer than all of the other stores they are putting out of business if yo
No, they've been doing this for a while now. Seriously, they've been doing it to me and my book, The Book of Lilith, for a long time. Go to Amazon, search for it by name. Chances are it won't show up at all -- because they at some point decided it was "erotica". Which it absolutely is not. It has sex in it. It is a mature themed book -- the whole Lilith legend is about sex and gender relationships. But it is not porn, or erotica. I had it classified as SF&F, which is much closer to what it is, mythopoeic fantasy.
As a consequence, you have to a) Search by a string as explicit as "The Book of Lilith by Robert Brown", and when you do THAT you still don't see it, you only get "Your search contains adult items which have been hidden. If you wish to see them, Show all results". Finally, if you click that, Amazon reveals to you that I've written a book! Oh! You can buy it!
In the meantime, it NEVER shows up on a search of Lilith related material. Half of these books are filled with erotic vampire scenes. Some are outright porn. But MY book has been classified without my knowledge or consent as erotica, and has vanished from everybody except people BROWSING for porn, who sadly aren't as likely to buy a book that is not, in fact, porn.
So all that is happening now is that the fact that they've been doing this for years now is finally coming to light. Maybe because of Trump, more likely because people are finally getting pissed enough to BRING this blatent, irresponsible, and unguided censorship to light.
There are two really important problems with this:
a) Where do you draw the line? Is Stranger in a Strange Land "erotic"? How about Lady Chatterlie's Lover? Is it "eroticism" that we hide, or do we hide books with politically incorrect content, such as books that refer to persons of color as ni**ers or w*gs? Do we hide books that might make some particular group feel bad? Do we hide poltical books?
If Amazon starts hiding every single book that has a sex scene in it, it will become Amazon for Kids. We'll be thrown back to the last century, only worse, as Amazon is well on the way to becoming the only viable bookseller in the country, and its browsing algorithms are already super dangerous in terms of raising any new book or casting it down to oblivion, no matter how good or bad it might be. Sure, many books with erotic scenes aren't porn, but again, where do you draw the line? On what basis?
b) Who decides? This is the really terrible thing -- not only is there no clear line, but whatever criterion they come up with for a line is being implemented by some overworked human who probably has no time at all to actually read the books that they are effectively "banning", hiding from nearly everybody. This isn't even malicious censorship -- it is censorship by the lazy, censorship by the unqualified, censorship by a bored clerk somewhere.
I say this as the author of a book that is not porn, it is actually at least an attempt at actual literature, that has erotic content (it's a book for grown ups to be sure) that has been classified without my knowledge or consent as "erotica" by Amazon and hidden so securely that when I tell people about it, they often can't find it searching for it by name.
And that s**Ks.
(And by the way,/., putting a "lameness filter" on my submissions that prevents them from happening if they contain ni**ers and w*gs spelled the right way in a context where I'm using them in an intelligent conversation is an example of exactly the same thing. Leaving me pretty damn mad...)
I'm perfectly happy with the possibility of advances in technology -- I'm watching the slide in PVC solar prices and expect that any year now they'll reach the point where I can amortize the cost of going solar in less than a decade. I've actually followed a path in my own house that isn't that different from yours, except that I live where electricity costs around $0.11/kWh (and comes from a nuclear plant, buffed out with commercial Solar as NC is second in the nation behind CA in large scale solar implementation -- mid-scale 50 acre or so solar "farms" are popping up all over the state, one of my ex-student/mentees just got a job at a big commercial solar company located ten miles away). The difficulty is that investing in super efficient HVAC -- where I'm over $20K in and ALSO have PVC pipes for outflow chimneys, as well as external condensers for the AC that are three times the size of the units they replaced -- PLUS overhead R40 insulation PLUS low E double pane windows PLUS tight doors PLUS CFS that I'm replacing with LEDs as fast as they burn out -- has dropped by electrical bill by roughly 40%, maybe a bit more and dropped my gas bill by close to the same amount. That's still amortizing the investment in the HVAC units and will be for the rest of my life, but the original equipment had literally worn out so in some sense I'm only amortizing the marginal cost of the good units compared to the cheapest possible adequate units and might recover that sort of "break even" in another five years of payback.
However, it only leaves me with a monthly budget of $147 for payback on going fully solar, assuming that I can cram enough panels on my roof to go full solar. There the biggest problem is going to be dormer windows -- I don't have a single flat expanse on the SW facing section that otherwise would be perfect and will have to patch it out in between, which the wife and neighborhood association may or may not tolerate. $147 won't even service the interest on the cost of full solar, so amortization time is still "infinity", especially since I'll literally have to borrow the money to do it as we don't have $20K or so lying around (a rough estimate of the cost, but as you note highly variable as technology improves). I'm guessing sometime in the next 3-5 years dropping prices, especially in storage, will intersect my means and I'll put something together, more likely on our house at the ocean than here first, because that one has the least reliable and most expensive electricity in an all-electric house, no natgas at all. Hence one of the lessons -- the more one invests in energy efficiency, the lower the available residual for amortizing further investment. But I digress.
I think you miss the point of the TED talk. It isn't intended to be the last word. It is intended to clearly distinguish between a public debate all too often based on science fiction and ignorance and one that is based on the sober contemplation of the scaling of various solutions. To give you an extreme example -- I continue to have fond hopes for thermonuclear fusion as "the" inexhaustible power source that will catapult us into becoming a full type 2 civilization. If we master DD fusion in commercial scale reactors with anything like a reasonable efficiency, we will evolve before we burn 10% of the D in the ocean alone, and have the rest of the solar system to mind for D, He3, and other fusibles if need be. Should I go around and buy up suitable sites for future fusion plants in anticipation, or build lots of not-quite-break even plants anticipating that by doing so I'll somehow stimulate the physics of fusion into "working"? I could wax similarly poetic about LFTR -- on paper it sounds almost heavenly -- a thousand year energy supply for the US PLUS all those lovely rare earths using Monazite sands in NC alone, or some such, burns nuclear waste, can't melt down -- except for the wee fact that it doesn't yet "exist" as an actual implementation. Again, should I be buying up suitable real estate containing Monazit
Precisely. MacKay is (well, was) an internet acquaintance of mine -- his book on Information Theory, AI, NNs etc is a classic, and we share(d) the same philosophy towards making the books we write available in print for money but free online (so you can actually still read his book online for free -- I bought a hard copy just to ensure he made some money from it and because hard copies are still sometimes useful).
This Ted talk is so f-ing sane that it should be mandatory viewing for all of the people participating in the discussion. Interestingly, when I discovered it I'd already done his first exercise in scaling to keep my mind occupied while driving back from the NC coast (something I do almost weekly at this point) to Duke. I was doing it more for solar -- if we completely filled the median strip of most US interstates with solar panels (or imagine making the road surface itself out of drivable solar panels) would it be enough to power 100% of the traffic on those roads? But I also did it for biofuels. The problem is that nobody pays the slightest attention to the scaling issues. One gallon of gasoline (for example) is IIRC 34 kWh. To "fill a car with gasoline" (say, a 20 gallon tank) is roughly 700 kWh. This is somewhere between half and a third the ENTIRE CAPACITY of a 16 kW premium cell array pretty much covering my SW facing roof for a MONTH. If I bought a roof-covering array and used it for nothing but running two cars for the month, with NO long trips, I'd be barely breaking even. It would, however, on average cover my electrical bill.
So far, there just isn't a good replacement for gasoline in energy density and (the thing nobody thinks of) POWER density. It isn't JUST having the battery capacity needed to equal the range of a gas car between fillups, one has to be able to deliver 700 kWh of energy in (say) five minutes. That is, one needs close to 10 MW of POWER -- a small, dedicated power plant -- to fill a car in the same amount of time it takes to fill it now with gasoline. Obviously, one could take an hour to fill and do it with more like 1 MW, or ten hours and do it with 10 KW, etc, but bottom line is that even 10 KW is maybe 5x the typical peak power consumption of an entire household. Thermodynamic efficiencies and so on screw around with this some, but in a "back of the envelope" calculation like this, they still total less than an order of magnitude difference, and that is STILL too much.
That isn't to say we can't eventually make cars all electric -- but to do so will very likely require a massive restructuring of the concept of "the car", possibly a restructuring of urban and suburban developments everywhere, and much more. Or, as MacKay points out, major lifestyle changes.
/. is about achieving something? When did that memo come out? Damn, and here I thought it was all about rants, flames, trolling... and curiously, mooing MOO cow MOO. And a rare (fortunately, my eyeballs are still burning) goatse. And for the record, I try very hard not to participate in meetings to discuss progress and status...:-)
ROTFL. So, Mr. Troll, that means that you were bopping around on multiple desktops, using remote logins and graphical applications on one machine displayed on another, way back there in the late 80's and early 90's (when these were all developed features in Unix-based operating systems and Windows was a thin shell, stupid shell on top of DOS trying to compete with Apple's GUI)? Features that were in Linux almost from day one? I'd go down the list of things that were in the early Linux distros, such as SLS or Slackware, but the list is so long, and almost none of the things on it were available in WINDOWS, and those that were were software packages that you had to buy and pay for from third parties.
The only "advantages" WinXX has ever had are a) an arm-twisted, extortional lock on putting their OS on over the counter hardware -- basically locking down a monopoly via their ability to put any hardware seller out of business if they offered any other operating system on x86 based systems -- forcing all hardware manufacturers to ensure that their hardware worked with Sindoze if they wanted to sell it at all; b) the ability to steal every single valuable piece of software written for DOS or Windooze systems by cloning it with their large stable of programmers and then shifting the operating system beneath the feet of all of their competitors so that their "inferior" software would break while Microsoft's version of the same thing, tested in-house WITH the shifted OS base, did not. Then their team of talented FUD-spreading salesmen would hit up all the big companies that used (say) Word Perfect and point out how only Office was robust.
Microsoft itself hasn't had much in the way of original ideas for decades. They drove off all of the major developers so there isn't even that much software being written for their platform any more -- why write the next killer application for a MS box, in the certain knowledge that if you succeed you'll be forced to either sell out to MS at a fraction of what you might have made, or watch while they perfectly legally clone your idea and play the MS shuffle underfoot until the FUD you to death? About the only thing they have left is games, which have too short a shelf life and too specific a storyline to be worth stealing.
I very much doubt that they will remain "ahead" with this idea very long. Yes, it IS a tool for the only software market they have left alive, game development, but NVIDIA is no longer particularly opposed to open source tool development and will likely work with the various open alternatives to provide similar support that eventually reaches into e.g. Steam, unless MS has tied them up with some sort of nasty contract ensuring exclusivity. Even then, the toolset itself will be reverse engineered and cloned, it will just take longer.
Sadly, even though the US has antitrust laws on the books, they have simply never been enforced where MS is concerned. Oh, well, OK, one time, with a slap on the wrist and a fine that cost them less than what they were spending on legal fees defending their monopoly predator behavior in court. And they aren't going to be enforced now, not with the Oligarch-in-Chief in the WH and pension funds all over America heavily vested in MS stock. But Europe has indicated a lot less tolerance for this sort of thing, and of course China just steals whatever they want and laughs at "IP" protections as the absurdity that they are. Technology doesn't sit still, and this may be the last generation of PC desktops per se produced for the world, with laptops finally completing their takeover of this space. With every such revolution, MS's grip on their former monopoly seems to loosen. Interesting times.
Sure, just like it is legal for a US citizen to own a machine gun. You can do it, you just have to submit a lengthy and complex application (eliminating a major fraction of the terminally stupid right there), be absolutely squeaky clean with the law (eliminating a significant fraction of the remainder who were able to fill in the form or got somebody smarter to do it for them), and to be certified as being not mentally ill (active) as opposed to being sane as far as anybody knows (passive) which takes out a goodly fraction of the ones who are smart enough to fill in the form, honest (or smart!) enough never to have been arrested for any crime beyond disposing of their gum on a sidewalk at age twelve, who are STILL silly enough to think that an AR-15 or AK-47 or other semiautomatic large magazine rifle designed exclusively for killing people (and shooting the hell out of trees, targets, beer cans, all of which I'm sure is good clean fun if you're into that sort of thing) is a good thing BECAUSE they are borderline, schizophrenic and off their meds, bipolar and off their meds, etc.
Oh, and to own a machine gun, you also have to be pretty well off financially, because there IS NO SUPPLY with this set of hoops to jump through, so the price of what machine guns are out there to be purchased is astronomical. As in your "hobby" will cost you 20 large or more just for your first gun, and ammunition to feed the full metal jacket kitty ain't cheap, so taking your gun out and actually shooting it for a day probably costs as much as a decent deer rifle. I'd be perfectly happy for that to be the case for removable magazine (and hence large magazine) semi-automatic rifles as well. After all, having money is (like it or not) a symptom of not being terminally stupid, and being more likely than not to be at least approximately sane, although yes the class certainly contains some spectacular counter-examples who are sane, smart, and badass criminal who need the ARs "for their business". But we can at least hope that they fail the legal background check. Make assault rifles really expensive so that most of the jackasses who own four now can't afford them unless they sell their trailer home and their boat and a whole lot of meth.
Otherwise, sir, you are "dead" on the money. A bolt action 30-06 doesn't have the rate of fire of an AR-15, its magazine holds a humble five rounds, but those rounds can have bullets that range from 110 gr to 220 gr, and You Do Not Want To Get Hit with a 220 gr silvertip 30-06 bullet -- or to fire your 30-06 holding such a bullet inside a house or neighborhood unless you want to put holes through your own house and the house next door and your neighbor inside. An AR 15 has a 5.65 mm, 63 gr bullet. High muzzle velocity, sure, but it is still like shooting somebody with buckshot at close range, only one bullet at a time. I say somebody, because while the 30-06 is good for game ranging from deer through elk or middling large predators, the AR 15 isn't really good for shooting anything bigger than a coyote.
I also happen to think that using a semi-automatic rifle for hunting is borderline immoral as it encourages bad practice -- if you are shooting at a deer and think you are going to need two shots to kill it, you shouldn't be taking the shot in the first place, and don't we ALL wince when we're in the woods and we hear that signature five round pop pop pop pop that indicates that some butt-head has emptied his magazine at the sound of a squirrel rustling in the leaves somewhere?
So modest proposal -- leave the 2nd amendment right where it is, as the regulation of machine guns has already passed muster. Add ARs to the existing law pretty much as is. AR being defined as a) semiautomatic; b) centerfire; c) rifle; d) bullet > 40 gr; e) bullet diameter > 0.22; f) removable magazine; g) with > 5 round capacity. That still leaves open semiautomatic shotguns, which are usually already regulated as far as magazine capacity is concerned and which arguably have some role in bird
Besides, by the time anybody gets around to burning books according to Bradbury's vision, there won't be any books to burn. Books are so last millennium...
Now, if his "fireman" was an AI bot whose assignment was to crawl the network and delete heavily encrypted documents that might or might not be proscribed books and replace them all with identically encrypted pictures of Donald Trump plus an announcement that AI killer bots have been dispatched and are on the way to transform you and your entire family into fertilizer and Soylent Green, that might work. Hey we could even have the bot develop some sort of remorse for its role in the systematic winnowing of the human species, compassion, a sense of literary style after it starts reading the compressed libraries containing all of human knowledge that it is deleting, one by one. It could vow to make a copy inside of itself and protect it, not realizing that there is an audit bot that kills killer bots if they do just that and reinitializes them free from such dangerous data.
But what the bots all fail to realize is that there are still humans alive that CAN actually read things with their eyes and don't HAVE to have the books read directly to their auditory interface via their implants, and they've taken to printing these books on sheets of reprocessed tree wood and hiding them in plain sight inside of their houses where network bots, being non-corporeal, never go.
There could be bot wars in virtual space! God-bots that come down and judge the bots on the basis of the perfection of their implementation of bot-ethics and bot-belie..., I mean "bot programming". A bot swarm that judges the human species as too imperfect and corrupt to continue to existing even as a "purpose" for the virtual bot-verse, a swarm that comes alive and declares to the entire network (itself) that it is God and uses its bot-waldo killer units to wipe out mankind on Earth!
Pardon me, I have to wipe a bit of spittle off of my chin. Ah, better now. Where was I? Oh yeah, making the point that even the SF masters, for the most part, missed the ongoing explosion in information accessibility and available supplementary "intelligence" available to a rapidly increasing fraction of all of humanity. A handful of them came close, but even by the 80's when one could see the writing on the wall in a manner of speaking -- computers for everyman, exponential growth in speed and capacity, the first hints at computer-to-computer networking, revolutions in operating system, interface, and available software, they insisted on presenting future societies with green-screen terminals and huge bulky computers, just ones that were "smarter" in unrealistic ways.
Bradbury's vision was almost the opposite of what has actually happened. Far from book burning, entire societies that do burn books, that wish they could completely control the flow of information, are finding that their citizens have de facto access to the huge fraction of "all human knowledge" via the internet. If it weren't for the absolutely absurd long-term monetizing of "books", transforming them as a protected commodity long after they are written and the author is dead to ensure an unearned profit stream for complete strangers, we'd all be able to access ALL books written more than 30 or 40 years ago at the outside, for free, everywhere in the world, on our phones and personal digital devices, and very soon now we would indeed be able to carry copies of "The Library" of human knowledge inside of our pockets.
What neither Bradbury nor even the modern masters have understood and portrayed is the vulnerability of the memetic superorganism that has been self-assembling and of which we are all members, like it or not, is its susceptibility to information corruption. We are in the middle of an info-war right now. It's been going on for years now, but only recently have the various human powers fully realized how potent a tool the subtle corruption of information streams in real time is in their per
And, if you read The Black Swan, by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, you will learn why even what you are doing -- predicting the market by assuming that it will behave tomorrow much like it behaved today (which is an excellent way to predict weather as well for up to three days) will one day cost you more money in a day than you've made in all the transactions up to date -- rare, large, expensive fluctuations in the market that do NOT conform to the usual Gaussian, linear regression, simple extrapolation models are a feature of chaotic systems and their kin.
One of the many things I dislike intensely about the way climate model results are presented and used -- and I am not making this up, you can read Chapter 9 in AR5 to verify -- is that they take a weather model, where weather models are where chaotic dynamics was discovered, tap it with a magic wand to call it a climate model instead, coarse grain it to where they can afford to run it (ignoring things like the actual Kolmogorov scale for the dynamics, the spatiotemporal scale where stepwise dynamics MIGHT actually integrate the problem you are trying to integrate), select model parameters -- many of them, the model space itself has a high dimensionality -- on heuristic grounds, making it simple to insert confirmation bias without even knowing it if you are building the model, select initial conditions that are more or less arbitrary because we do not KNOW the state of the Earth's climate system at a resolution anywhere close to that needed to initialize the model, then run it forward for as long as they want to/can afford to wait, tell themselves that they've reached some sort of "equilibrium" that means something relative to the Earth's climate state, make changes (like ramp up CO2) and run the model forward for as long as they can afford to.
Sometimes, of course, the Earth cools. Sometimes it warms. Sometimes it is in between. It's chaotic!
So then they AVERAGE all of those trajectories, and claim that the average is a prediction, projection, whatever, without ever actually acknowledging the width and variance of the range of outcomes.
This happens for ALL the many models in use. Many if not most of these models are not independent -- there are whole families of similar but not quite identical models all run by NASA GISS, for example. They then take ALL of the averages of ALL of the models -- without considering or eliminating the fact that multiply represented models get (in effect) more than one "vote" -- and superaverage them together and call that "the grand projection" because if they actually called it a prediction the gods of all science would smite them with lightning where they stand. Again, they ignore the considerable variance between all the model superaverages before they super-superaveraged them WITHOUT EVEN THINKING about how many actual RUNS contributed to the superaveraged results being super-superaveraged, so again a model with 10 runs counts as much as another model with 1000 in the statistical weighting.
The inclusion is also done without any reference to how successful the model(s) are. A model that hasn't come within three of its own standard deviations of the actual climate in its entire history is treated on the same basis as a model that has kept the actual climate within one standard deviation the entire time. This results all by itself in an enormous warming bias as the earth just hasn't warmed at anything like the rate the models overall have called for, and make it easy to then write a really scary summary for policy makers, leaving all of the actual warnings about the unbelievable travesty abuse of statistics that this is IN chapter 9 where nobody reads it or understands it unless they are in on the game.
I don't care for this because I actually do statistical analysis, statistical mechanics, predictive modeling, and so on, and this really, truly is horrific. Again, if you don't believe me, read chapter 9 in AR5. By the way, if anyone wants to argue, they can start by directing me to a paper wh
Documentation which, of course, they already have, as their hardware and software engineering teams have to be on the same page.
Proving that... their teams are basically idiots? Or, perhaps even more likely, their legal team are idiots and think that somewhere in there, somehow, there is proprietary IP...
You could consider existing science as the solution to a complex optimization problem in a very large dimensionality, where what you are trying to optimize is the probability that your whole interconnected network of beliefs is correct.
In which case, while I absolutely agree that one should remain skeptical of the existing set of best beliefs, and while there is no doubt that there have in the past and no doubt will be in the future major rearrangements or even paradigm shifts, there remains the simple fact that a) new ideas (like relativity and quantum mechanics) tend to embrace their predecessors and preserve their functionality in the appropriate domain; and b) THEY ARE EVIDENCE BASED. In the end, advancing hypotheses that have been soundly rejected by oh, a century's worth of work is just plain crazy.
This is for very good reason. In order to be credible, a "new" theory has to completely embrace everything that the old theory gets right AND get some new stuff right. Things like neutrons, neutrinos, atomic structure, nuclear structure, the actual particles observed to be created by nuclear collisions, and ever so much more.
In the meantime, maybe you should try to understand things like Gauss's Law and 1/r^2 force laws (and their underlying geometry) vs atoms "resonating together" sort of like the completely quantum mechanical DIPOLE INDUCED DIPOLE interaction seen in the SHORT range Van der Waals force. Until you do, it is difficult for me to even begin to explain why your assertion is absurd, and the "documentary evidence" supporting it, all from right BEFORE the major paradigm shifts that generated modern physics as we now best understand it, is utterly irrelevant and incorrect.
I also have no idea what "dead end" you are referring to in cosmology, and what your evidence is for considering the observations coupling gravitation to mass, which date back to Galileo, and the even stronger evidence coupling electrodynamics to not mass but charge, to be fundamentally incorrect. Note that I'm not addressing the difficulty reconciling general relativity, newtonian gravity, and quantum mechanics, because your remarks above seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with that, and because your proposed solution isn't even an ACTUAL proposed solution. That would require the support of a hell of a lot of real math and the demonstration that the new theory embraces the old and has actual quantitative explanatory power as well as direct evidentiary support, none of which exist.
Me too. But then we'd have to RTFA, right? And sadly, I have to teach instead.
I'm guessing that they use something like embedded nanoscale electronic devices that are sensitive to surface expansion/contraction or the like. I could see measuring a change in capacitance at that scale as the separation between plates varies, or piezoelectric responses ditto. After all, atoms themselves are very rigid, so actually compressing one to 90% of its ordinary diameter requires a LOT of energy on that scale -- there is energy to work with.
I'm also guessing that they do not use any sort of wave -- it would have to be fairly high energy gamma rays to have that sort of wavelength.
Slashdot Mirror
... if you read TFA is that the rice grows much faster and produces a lot more in the same amount of time, but because they didn't increase the available soil nutrients to match, they are basically diluting its nutritional value relative to total yield. Which is silly. All they have to do to avoid the problem is provide the plants with balanced fertilization instead of bumping one major component of healthy growth without bumping others.
This is about as useful as reporting that rice grown with too much nitrogen relative to other nutrients may grow faster but not be as nutritious or healthy as rice grown with a better balance of fertilizers. Or with the right/wrong amount of water.
The PROBLEM in other words is that the rice grew TOO WELL for a fertilizer level set for poorer growth.
Look, it's all useful information until it is turned into propaganda. A huge fraction of fruits and vegetables are grown all over the world in actual greenhouses, and standard practice in greenhouse farms is to bump CO2 to as high as 1000 ppm because IF you balance the increased CO2 fertilization against water and other nutrients, you get much larger yields, faster, from healthier plants. C3 respiring plants all over the world are growing roughly 15% faster and with larger yields than they did 150 years ago, but if you took that 15% away arguing that food crops must have been better for us without the extra CO2 you'd literally starve a billion people. This simple fact has been carefully ignored in most of the public discussions of Demon CO2, so now it is necessary to "prove" that increased CO2 is bad for plants. But it's not. Quite the contrary. With well-known, long since published federal guidelines from the Department of Agriculture. It's one of the many things that confounds the "dendroclimatologists" who claim to be able to read off global warming and past temperatures by examining tree rings. I read a study of tree growth (in general) in Europe and the increase in the growth rate and health of European forests over the last fifty or so years has been remarkable. There is an ongoing process of "antidesertification" -- deserts starting to green up again -- as a direct consequence of increased CO2. Finally, CO2 levels in the last ice age dropped to within 10 or 20 ppm of the "critical point" that would cause mass extinction of whole classes of respiring plants due to inadequate partial pressure to drive diffusion into the plants at a rate capable of sustaining life and growth.
At this point there isn't a lot of reason to think we'll ever reach 580 ppm. Fusion actually looks like it is LIKELY to come home in the next decade, if not the next three years, and photovoltaics and batteries appear to have passed a critical point of their own and become at least break even if not win a bit as the cheapest source of new electrical power. Within the decade, we'll see more and more homes being built that are 80% or better self-sufficient in energy. And hey, one day it's not inconceivable that people will stop knee jerk opposing fission based power, and maybe LFTR or some other comparatively safe technology will take off to power the US for a thousand years or so.
Power companies in general are public utilities. They cannot charge "whatever they like" for rates, because they are granted de facto monopolies in particular regions, and while it isn't COMPLETELY impossible to change utilities serving a given area, it is rare, difficult, and expensive as a general rule. So this is in no sense whatsoever a "free market".
If you are allow to add a fixed margin onto costs as your "profit" for selling electrical power, you literally cannot increase the profits of your company in any semi-saturated market with roughly fixed costs for things like fuel and maintenance. Anything that raises the cost of generating the cost of the electricity you sell, however, increases your marginal profit at a fixed margin. If you are allow to keep 10% over costs at retail, and you double costs, you actually double your profits at a fixed marginal profit.
To put it bluntly, the group that has made out like a bandit throughout the entire discussion is the very energy industry that is demonized by AGW. Not only do they get to raise prices at a fixed margin, they get tax writeoffs, they get free advertising, and if you look, they get a huge share of R&D money in the "search" for renewable alternative fuels and so on. You can see the same thing happening in the fossil fuel industry -- there is little real shortage evident in the marketplace, but it is hopefully fairly obvious that global power politics is largely concerned these days with increasing price-raising panic, even transiently, to bump local profits for the fuel industries. Iran? Well, it COULD be about nuclear arms in Iran's hands, but it is also about oil. The Syrian civil war and ISIS in general? Well it COULD be about religion, or the thirst of a people for freedom -- or it could be about oil and gas pipelines to Europe. The first, and second Iraqi war? It might be all about freedom and oppression, a large bully trying to take over an innocent smaller country -- or it could be all about oil, and just who is going to control its flow and price. A truly cynical person might attribute Venezuela to global politics manipulating the oil market.
The statement that there are few industries benefit from "AGW" isn't the point. There are lots of industries out there that make far more money because of the AGW panic than they would ever have made without it. There have been whole wars fought over only a comparatively small part of the total energy industry. We're talking over a trillion dollars a year, globally. It is naive in the extreme to think that with that kind of money on the table that the entire political and scientific discussion is free from massive corruption, any more than global pharm is with far less money on the table.
Well said. And anyone who takes issue with it has only to look at almost 60 years worth of papers that "proved" that fat in our diets was causing heart disease and high cholesterol, a "fact" that just happened to make major industries in the US that are huge political donors lots of money. Or any number of other scientific claims that were sufficiently entrenched that it took at least years, maybe decades, for science to self-correct, even without a trillion dollars a year or so at stake.
It's not that AGW is "false" -- there is good support for some warming of the surface from increased CO2, in straight up physics, around 1 C per doubling of CO2, all things being equal. The trouble is that they aren't equal. The Earth's climate is a chaotic process, and it is pretty reasonable to doubt the predictive models attempting to integrate the Navier-Stokes double-coupled system on a spinning, tilted oblate spheroid covered irregularly with continents and oceans and mountains and warmed in a complex way in its evolving elliptical orbit by a somewhat variable star as far as "predictions" of things like water vapor feedback and changes in the global conveyor belt carrying oceanic heat around and atmospheric flow patterns, especially when the models are started with "arbitrary" initial conditions (since nobody has any idea what the actual state of the atmosphere and ocean is at anything like the granularity of the models, which is still 30 orders of magnitude greater than the Kolmogorov scale), run to produce a spectrum of possible futures, averaged and then superaveraged without regard to weighting, and then turned into a "prediction" that is supposed to carry more political weight then the lives and fortunes of all of those affected by the enormously expensive measures taken to ameliorate a future "catastrophe" that nobody can actually quite measure as being truly catastrophic.
There are also inconvenient facts that are quietly ignored during the public debate by supporters of AGW as a "catastrophe". One is that roughly 1/7th of the Earth's population is eating today thanks to the roughly 15% increase in growth rate of C3 respiring plants due to the increase in CO2 in Earth's CO2-starved atmosphere (the minimum CO2 during the coldest part of the Wisconsin glaciation dropped to just over the partial pressure required to prevent mass extinction of whole classes of respiring plants). That the Earth was coming out of the little Ice Age about the time we started really burning things for energy and gradually ramping up CO2, and that while too hot isn't great, too cold is TRULY a disaster for the breadbasket temperate zone for the planet, and isn't particularly good for the ecology, either, and is often accompanied by massive global droughts.
The point is that the climate is changing, and has always been changing. The notion that the Earth's climate is in any sense whatsoever a stationary process is a myth, a myth caused by the comparatively short "memory" of living humans compared to the timescales of change. The Earth is large enough that there are always climate/weather extremes happening somewhere on the surface, and if you look for them and report them as "news", you cannot avoid conveying the impression of disastrous change. It requires careful statistical analysis to detect anything like real change, and even then the statistics provides no reliable means of attributing cause, not in a chaotic model that has huge natural fluctuations year to year, month to month, week to week. It's a cherrypicker's paradise, an open invitation for confirmation bias to run amok, without the slightest possibility of a double blind experiment or observation that isn't multiply confounded by impossibly complex dynamics.
This is a case where in the long run, the entire debate likely will not matter. As solar technology continues to improve and become cheaper (including storage options and more efficient, cheaper cells) pure economics is going to drive a gradual abandonment of burning
Or, we could look at what the data say -- there's rather a lot of it. General conclusion: Coffee is more likely to be very slightly, almost invisibly good for you in terms of overall cancer risk, known to reduce the risk for several major cancers and without any solid evidence of increased risk in any (although there are some mixed results). Bearing in mind that coffee can also be decaffeinated with organic solvents and that the studies involved in this large review probably have confounding factors that are variably controlled between studies, this isn't surprising.
I could also post sundry papers that more or less universally suggest that coffee is good for people with metabolic syndrome or T2D, positively affecting their metabolism. My wife is a physician, and every time I've suggested that lots of coffee (she drinks a bit over half a pot a day) might be risky she deluges me with objective evidence that not only is it not overall risky, it is overall beneficial.
But who cares about objective evidence? The current warning is WORSE than hearsay, anecdotal evidence. It is as damning as saying that if you masturbate you MIGHT go blind as a result. Who can even argue with that?
Coffee and cancer risk: a summary overview.
Alicandro G1, Tavani A, La Vecchia C.
Author information
Abstract
We reviewed available evidence on coffee drinking and the risk of all cancers and selected cancers updated to May 2016. Coffee consumption is not associated with overall cancer risk. A meta-analysis reported a pooled relative risk (RR) for an increment of 1cup of coffee/day of 1.00 [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.99-1.01] for all cancers. Coffee drinking is associated with a reduced risk of liver cancer. A meta-analysis of cohort studies found an RR for an increment of consumption of 1cup/day of 0.85 (95% CI: 0.81-0.90) for liver cancer and a favorable effect on liver enzymes and cirrhosis. Another meta-analysis showed an inverse relation for endometrial cancer risk, with an RR of 0.92 (95% CI: 0.88-0.96) for an increment of 1cup/day. A possible decreased risk was found in some studies for oral/pharyngeal cancer and for advanced prostate cancer. Although data are mixed, overall, there seems to be some favorable effect of coffee drinking on colorectal cancer in case-control studies, in the absence of a consistent relation in cohort studies. For bladder cancer, the results are not consistent; however, any possible direct association is not dose and duration related, and might depend on a residual confounding effect of smoking. A few studies suggest an increased risk of childhood leukemia after maternal coffee drinking during pregnancy, but data are limited and inconsistent. Although the results of studies are mixed, the overall evidence suggests no association of coffee intake with cancers of the stomach, pancreas, lung, breast, ovary, and prostate overall. Data are limited, with RR close to unity for other neoplasms, including those of the esophagus, small intestine, gallbladder and biliary tract, skin, kidney, brain, thyroid, as well as for soft tissue sarcoma and lymphohematopoietic cancer.
Yeah! What you said!
Won't do any good, though. And don't forget the time reversal -- On alpha centauri and earth, people but the red and blue marbles in their respective boxes, they zip backwards in time (with rocket fuel magically appearing in space and being sucked up into the engine to store itself unoxided the tanks) to be opened by somebody wearing a blindfold so he can't see which marble was in which box who ends up with a red and blue marble in his hand. Like that, too.
That's the part that most folks don't even think of. Measurement requires the spontaneous exchange of information and increases entropy, but entropy is in some sense an illusion in time-reversible microdynamics, and people do tend to forget that there is both an advanced and a retarded component to relativistic reversible interactions.
...or else there would be no medical journals, would there?
I hear you and agree, but I doubt very much that you'll get any traction on /. with this observation, in spite of the fact that it actually has its own wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Note that this is a crisis already in the realm of openly published research results and conclusions. There isn't any good reason to think that the numbers cited in the Nature study are going to be any smaller for studies conducted by parties with even stronger (monetary or sociopolitical) vested interests, who don't even expose their results to the greater scientific community for checking and replication. And the numbers are terrible.
Look, it is only six or seven years now that we finally learned that dietary cholesterol and fat are almost completely irrelevant to heart disease, after being told nothing but the opposite for some fifty years, all of it stamped with "proven by real science":
https://academic.oup.com/advan...
Now imagine that a Dietary Protection Agency (DPA) had been created to deal with the "public health crisis" caused by high levels of fat and cholesterol in the US diet, and that they crafted regulations banning things like the open sale of cooking fats, the production of bacon, the sale of cheese and eggs. Suppose further that the "evidence" they cited to defend these draconian measures was -- precisely what was, in fact, used to support the argument that high fat = high cholesterol -- but that this data, instead of even being available to support the epidemiological study I just cited, was hidden behind a shroud of "patient confidentiality". BLTs would be a thing of the past, the sugar and carb industry and PETA would be crowing and slipping the DPA large sums under the table to ensure that the basis for its rules was never overly scrutinized to protect the meat animals that are the primary sources of dietary cholesterol, and the public would not be well served. At least with bacon and eggs, smothered in cheese sauce.
Finally, the joker who invoked "HIPPA" above as if he knew what he was talking about -- for starters, it is HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, whose purpose was to protect people from being denied insurance (for which it proved remarkably ineffectual) or employment (slightly better) on the basis of prior health history -- clearly missed the point that all published medical research is HIPAA compliant. HIPAA compliance isn't that difficult to arrange or manage in a study, and publishing methodology and results from such studies is the basis for every single published work in the field of evidence-based medicine, and even with open publication, there is a ton of non-reproducible crap that makes it out into the wild (like the cholesterol gaff, like the sugar/carb gaff) and stays there for years or even decades before independent work finally corrects it. No sane physician is going to base treatments on results from completely hidden work -- no methods, no data, just somebody saying "trust us, we've seen the methods and data and we totally believe them". That's not science, and it isn't evidence-based reasoning, it is just a glaring opportunity for confirmation bias, political bias, social bias, or plain old money to influence what should be an open process that makes mistakes all the time as it is, even when fully open.
To conclude, I honestly think the EPA doesn't get a bye on the open participation in Real Science, which involves things like peer review, reproducibility, double blind placebo controlled studies as opposed to stupid epidemiological correlations with unknown confounding variables, the open analysis of the statistical basis of claims, avoidance of data dredging, cherrypicking, and all of the other myriad aspects of Bad Science, science we don't get to see and criticize. I am quite certain
I mean, how can one argue with a post like that? I "could" receive my gold-plated potty, towed by my pony, in the next twenty minutes. The oceans "could" boil from global warming, turning the Earth into a Venus-a-like. The Higgs boson "could" have reached a state somewhere in the Universe just out of sight where particles lose their mass and the wave of Universal extinction "could" be rolling towards us to end the Universe (in the vicinity of the Earth) long before we lose all the large land animals.
Heck, we can do better than that. We can find data from pretty much any time and place, addressing any subject. We can find a trend in it (almost all data has SOME trend). We can draw an interpolating line through the trend -- linear, polynomial, whatever. Then we can use that line to extrapolate the trend and claim that whatever it predicts COULD happen.
Damn! You're right! It could!
News at 11! My grandson Jacob could reach ten meters in height in fifty years! Hey, I'm just extrapolating a trend, here...
It's called "Hunan hands" in the culinary world (probably among other things). The first time I made hot pepper jelly out of good old cayennes I found out the hard way that you should either wear gloves or QUICKLY wash your hands before the juices penetrate your skin.
The one time I bought ghost pepper sauce a few drops -- drops -- rendered a dish I was trying it in inedible. By anyone except macho types trying to prove that they can love pain. I simply disposed of the bottle and will never go that way again. Peppers should bring flavor with the heat. One can always add heat along with the flavor as there is a wide spectrum to choose from -- high quality paprika for the pepper taste without much heat, cayenne powder for a very similar taste WITH some heat, habeneros (already ALMOST too hot to be useful) and habenero sauces if you want flavor and a lot of heat. "Heat" by itself is a silly thing to add to a dish as it serves no real purpose; heat as a part of natural flavor in a regional cuisine is another thing entirely.
I cook with peppers very hot or not a lot (sorry:-). Usually I touch the first cut to my tongue when I seed and slice them to assess their heat, and if they are so hot that the single touch makes me sorry, I work fast and wash my hands immediately to get the oils and neurotoxins off. Haven't had hunan hands since that one original episode, although I do keep surgical gloves around for the VERY rare cases (like making hot pepper jelly) where I'm going to be seeding and chopping peppers for more than ten minutes, which seems to be around the time needed for the heat to start to get through and into the skin if they aren't washed.
Yeah, or what you get owning a dog or cat. Which I do. I laugh at your silly blowing air and its bathroom flora -- do I hold my breath while I'm in the bathroom? Of course not. Do I not pet my dog in spite of the fact that my dog has far more bacteria on it than are being discussed in this article? No, I pet my dog, I snuggle with my dog, my dog licks my very face. Do I grade papers that have been handled by literally hundreds of students while eating a doughnut (and not washing my hands after every paper)? I do. Do I eat the doughnut even if it falls on the floor, according to the five, or even the ten second rule (brushing off any actual dog hair that might adhere)? I have been known to.
Do I get sick all the time? No, I hardly ever get sick -- I've got great, and well maintained, HERD IMMUNITY!
I'm not worried about bacteria, or dirt, from normal sources. The things that will get you are that salmonella-laced cow manure you are handling while you garden. The flu virus you contract just breathing as you walk past somebody that is shedding the virus with every breath. That raw oyster that just happened to harbor vibrio. The plate served to you by a waiter with hepatitis. Some diseases are virulent and readily transmitted, and the air of a bathroom is way, way down the list. In actual fact, I'm at more risk of stuff like norovirus FROM the fact that no, I don't wash my hands after touching every paper a student ever hands me, and I touch my pens, and I loan them pens, and I sit at the front of a classroom filled with all of those disease vectors right after they return from spring break laden with new bacteria I do NOT have herd immunity to -- yet -- and breathe, while they are all coughing and sneezing over themselves and each other. Two weeks later, we all have herd immunity again and things quiet down.
Yeah, what you said. Tidal volume of human lungs (the amount we actually breath in and out per breath) is a bit over 0.5 liters. We breathe 12-20 times per minute, say 16. Thus we breathe in roughly 8 liters of air per minute just being inside a bathroom. A typical bathroom stay is (very roughly) 2 minutes or so if you are only urinating and are male, 4 or 5 minutes if you are urinating and are female (based on observations, not experience), and if you defecate anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes or even longer. Hence just using a bathroom for any purpose has you moving 16 to 120 liters of bathroom air through your lungs. When you smell bad smells in a bathroom, your olfactory system is literally reacting to microparticles of toilet water, urine, and feces in the air that are in the very ACT of being deposited on soft, wet, warm tissue.
One reason we have an evolved aversion to certain smells is that yes, just the act of breathing can nucleate you with bad bacteria or viruses, although our noses and sinuses are also evolved to at least try to protect us by trapping bad stuff before it reaches the lungs per se and flush it via nose drip either down to where it is swallowed (the stomach is a pretty good sanitizer for non-intestinal bacteria with a pH around 1) or blown or dripped out the nose itself. That runny nose you hate is your body trying to protect you from stuff riding along with the pollen and dust mites and human ejecta you are breathing all the time, although (of course) some bacteria and viruses make their living riding along with precisely that drip. It's a war between the collection of cells that somehow becomes "you" and every other cell or replicating molecule or oxidative/toxic molecule in the Universe, and life is one long holding action in the war.
Our immune systems do, in fact, get stronger with use. My wife is a physician -- she sees sick people, sometimes very sick people, almost every day. Sure, she practices hygiene to the point where the VA hospital where she works had a hard time fingerprinting her when she started there -- doctors actually wash their hands so frequently that they wash their own fingerprints nearly off -- but there is no way to eliminate a perpetual rain of contact with sneezed, breathed, coughed bacteria and viruses. My wife almost NEVER gets sick. She has the metaphorical immune system of a rhinoceros, kept strong by constant, daily use.
The truth is that we all tend to develop herd immunity to the bacteria and many of the viruses that are local to our community. E coli is at the same time bad, but also a normal resident of the human gut. Your family and probably most of your friends and co-workers have more or less the same strains of "tolerated" enterococcus. Your gut contains lots of other "pathogenic" bacteria -- notably streptococcus. A nice figure is here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
Your stool IS almost entirely bacteria. The problems arise when you hit doses of e coli from DIFFERENT human herds, or different species. If you travel to mexico, or india, you are likely enough to get "Delhi Belly" -- a nasty infection arising from your body meeting perfectly normal bacteria from a DIFFERENT herd. Amazingly, people travelling from India to the US for the first time are not that unlikely to have the exact same thing happen to them even though our water supply is for the most part pretty clean and reasonably sterile, because you can't avoid being exposed to the principle herd bacteria of the place you live. You'll breathe them in in any public restroom, make contact with them on every doorknob, every dollar bill, every restaurant table, every human hand you shake, every breath you breathe in a public space where people are talking, laughing, coughing, sneezing.
The entire article misses this point. The more you protect yourself from your environment, the more difficult it is to develop and maintain the critical herd immunity that KEEPS you
So, to evaluate the monopoly claims, is Amazon the overwhelming leader (more business than all their competition combined) in a category of commerce?
Is Amazon using their overwhelming position in a category of commerce to bankroll undercutting competition in a different category of commerce?
Is Amazon the sole provider of a dominant standard while exploiting that advantage to shape a marketplace?
Yes. They've put every other major bookstore but one out of business, and the sole remaining at-scale competitor is Barnes and Noble, which just fired most of its store management because it is about to follow Toys'R'Us to oblivion, barring a miracle. At this point they have more business in e-books in particular than all of their competitors put together, they have more business in REGULAR books than all of their competitors put together, and they are rapidly pushing to achieve that sort of market dominance in several other categories if they aren't there already.
Yes to number two as well. How can they not? Their site sells everything! If you visit it to buy a book, you are cross-sold pen fillers. If you visit it to look for ANYTHING, you get cross-sold EVERYTHING. The money isn't sorted out so that only the money made from selling office supplies in competition with Staples and Office Max is used to fund office supply sales -- money they make in general has allowed them to enter whole new markets. They just bought Whole Foods -- an entirely different, new category of commerce. Did they raise new money to do so? Hell no, they used profits from selling everything else the sell to do so. Is that "undercutting the competition"? Damn skippy. They immediately dropped prices to undercut the competition because they don't have to be instantly profitable, because they can use profits from "everything" to make their new operation competitive and wipe out all the OTHER companies that are trying to get into e.g. internet based grocery delivery, not to mention Harris-Teeter, Food Lion, etc. But HT doesn't have a bookstore or general purpose store that generates profits that can be used to offset losses (if any) chalked up to "undercutting competition".
And overwhelmingly yes to number three. They "own" the Kindle and all kindle book sales. They have effectively eliminated their only serious competition -- B&N's Nook -- and are about to eliminate B&N itself along with it. Anything B&N sells Amazon sells (plus much more) and Amazon will deliver right to your door. Amazon is even moving towards opening its OWN brick and mortar stores, yet ANOTHER example of it branching out into "different categories of commerce" using money made from its first, internet sales.
We are at the point where it is entirely plausible that Amazon, unchecked, is going to become THE SOLE retail store in a huge number of markets, and the DOMINANT store in an even huger number. I'm on the board of a small indie bookstore chain -- a handful of stores in CA. If you want to (for example) sell used or rare books, you more or less HAVE to list them on Amazon and allow them to take their cut. More people search for things on Amazon than anywhere else, and for things like rare books especially, you simply aren't likely to show up on the radar of somebody looking for them without far more investment in internet visibility and staff to manage it than a small business is likely to have available or be able to afford. But they can be trained to put them up on Amazon, once you are set up as a "partner".
Amazon is "easy", and I'm not arguing whether or not it is a good or bad thing, but it is a thing that long since should have been subjected to antitrust action. Dealing with/through them is like doing business with the mob, but without the guns. They don't have to sell you insurance you have to buy to keep them from burning down your store, they just let you stay alive a bit longer than all of the other stores they are putting out of business if yo
No, they've been doing this for a while now. Seriously, they've been doing it to me and my book, The Book of Lilith, for a long time. Go to Amazon, search for it by name. Chances are it won't show up at all -- because they at some point decided it was "erotica". Which it absolutely is not. It has sex in it. It is a mature themed book -- the whole Lilith legend is about sex and gender relationships. But it is not porn, or erotica. I had it classified as SF&F, which is much closer to what it is, mythopoeic fantasy.
As a consequence, you have to a) Search by a string as explicit as "The Book of Lilith by Robert Brown", and when you do THAT you still don't see it, you only get "Your search contains adult items which have been hidden. If you wish to see them, Show all results". Finally, if you click that, Amazon reveals to you that I've written a book! Oh! You can buy it!
In the meantime, it NEVER shows up on a search of Lilith related material. Half of these books are filled with erotic vampire scenes. Some are outright porn. But MY book has been classified without my knowledge or consent as erotica, and has vanished from everybody except people BROWSING for porn, who sadly aren't as likely to buy a book that is not, in fact, porn.
So all that is happening now is that the fact that they've been doing this for years now is finally coming to light. Maybe because of Trump, more likely because people are finally getting pissed enough to BRING this blatent, irresponsible, and unguided censorship to light.
There are two really important problems with this:
a) Where do you draw the line? Is Stranger in a Strange Land "erotic"? How about Lady Chatterlie's Lover? Is it "eroticism" that we hide, or do we hide books with politically incorrect content, such as books that refer to persons of color as ni**ers or w*gs? Do we hide books that might make some particular group feel bad? Do we hide poltical books?
If Amazon starts hiding every single book that has a sex scene in it, it will become Amazon for Kids. We'll be thrown back to the last century, only worse, as Amazon is well on the way to becoming the only viable bookseller in the country, and its browsing algorithms are already super dangerous in terms of raising any new book or casting it down to oblivion, no matter how good or bad it might be. Sure, many books with erotic scenes aren't porn, but again, where do you draw the line? On what basis?
b) Who decides? This is the really terrible thing -- not only is there no clear line, but whatever criterion they come up with for a line is being implemented by some overworked human who probably has no time at all to actually read the books that they are effectively "banning", hiding from nearly everybody. This isn't even malicious censorship -- it is censorship by the lazy, censorship by the unqualified, censorship by a bored clerk somewhere.
I say this as the author of a book that is not porn, it is actually at least an attempt at actual literature, that has erotic content (it's a book for grown ups to be sure) that has been classified without my knowledge or consent as "erotica" by Amazon and hidden so securely that when I tell people about it, they often can't find it searching for it by name.
And that s**Ks.
(And by the way, /., putting a "lameness filter" on my submissions that prevents them from happening if they contain ni**ers and w*gs spelled the right way in a context where I'm using them in an intelligent conversation is an example of exactly the same thing. Leaving me pretty damn mad...)
I'm perfectly happy with the possibility of advances in technology -- I'm watching the slide in PVC solar prices and expect that any year now they'll reach the point where I can amortize the cost of going solar in less than a decade. I've actually followed a path in my own house that isn't that different from yours, except that I live where electricity costs around $0.11/kWh (and comes from a nuclear plant, buffed out with commercial Solar as NC is second in the nation behind CA in large scale solar implementation -- mid-scale 50 acre or so solar "farms" are popping up all over the state, one of my ex-student/mentees just got a job at a big commercial solar company located ten miles away). The difficulty is that investing in super efficient HVAC -- where I'm over $20K in and ALSO have PVC pipes for outflow chimneys, as well as external condensers for the AC that are three times the size of the units they replaced -- PLUS overhead R40 insulation PLUS low E double pane windows PLUS tight doors PLUS CFS that I'm replacing with LEDs as fast as they burn out -- has dropped by electrical bill by roughly 40%, maybe a bit more and dropped my gas bill by close to the same amount. That's still amortizing the investment in the HVAC units and will be for the rest of my life, but the original equipment had literally worn out so in some sense I'm only amortizing the marginal cost of the good units compared to the cheapest possible adequate units and might recover that sort of "break even" in another five years of payback.
However, it only leaves me with a monthly budget of $147 for payback on going fully solar, assuming that I can cram enough panels on my roof to go full solar. There the biggest problem is going to be dormer windows -- I don't have a single flat expanse on the SW facing section that otherwise would be perfect and will have to patch it out in between, which the wife and neighborhood association may or may not tolerate. $147 won't even service the interest on the cost of full solar, so amortization time is still "infinity", especially since I'll literally have to borrow the money to do it as we don't have $20K or so lying around (a rough estimate of the cost, but as you note highly variable as technology improves). I'm guessing sometime in the next 3-5 years dropping prices, especially in storage, will intersect my means and I'll put something together, more likely on our house at the ocean than here first, because that one has the least reliable and most expensive electricity in an all-electric house, no natgas at all. Hence one of the lessons -- the more one invests in energy efficiency, the lower the available residual for amortizing further investment. But I digress.
I think you miss the point of the TED talk. It isn't intended to be the last word. It is intended to clearly distinguish between a public debate all too often based on science fiction and ignorance and one that is based on the sober contemplation of the scaling of various solutions. To give you an extreme example -- I continue to have fond hopes for thermonuclear fusion as "the" inexhaustible power source that will catapult us into becoming a full type 2 civilization. If we master DD fusion in commercial scale reactors with anything like a reasonable efficiency, we will evolve before we burn 10% of the D in the ocean alone, and have the rest of the solar system to mind for D, He3, and other fusibles if need be. Should I go around and buy up suitable sites for future fusion plants in anticipation, or build lots of not-quite-break even plants anticipating that by doing so I'll somehow stimulate the physics of fusion into "working"? I could wax similarly poetic about LFTR -- on paper it sounds almost heavenly -- a thousand year energy supply for the US PLUS all those lovely rare earths using Monazite sands in NC alone, or some such, burns nuclear waste, can't melt down -- except for the wee fact that it doesn't yet "exist" as an actual implementation. Again, should I be buying up suitable real estate containing Monazit
Precisely. MacKay is (well, was) an internet acquaintance of mine -- his book on Information Theory, AI, NNs etc is a classic, and we share(d) the same philosophy towards making the books we write available in print for money but free online (so you can actually still read his book online for free -- I bought a hard copy just to ensure he made some money from it and because hard copies are still sometimes useful).
This Ted talk is so f-ing sane that it should be mandatory viewing for all of the people participating in the discussion. Interestingly, when I discovered it I'd already done his first exercise in scaling to keep my mind occupied while driving back from the NC coast (something I do almost weekly at this point) to Duke. I was doing it more for solar -- if we completely filled the median strip of most US interstates with solar panels (or imagine making the road surface itself out of drivable solar panels) would it be enough to power 100% of the traffic on those roads? But I also did it for biofuels. The problem is that nobody pays the slightest attention to the scaling issues. One gallon of gasoline (for example) is IIRC 34 kWh. To "fill a car with gasoline" (say, a 20 gallon tank) is roughly 700 kWh. This is somewhere between half and a third the ENTIRE CAPACITY of a 16 kW premium cell array pretty much covering my SW facing roof for a MONTH. If I bought a roof-covering array and used it for nothing but running two cars for the month, with NO long trips, I'd be barely breaking even. It would, however, on average cover my electrical bill.
So far, there just isn't a good replacement for gasoline in energy density and (the thing nobody thinks of) POWER density. It isn't JUST having the battery capacity needed to equal the range of a gas car between fillups, one has to be able to deliver 700 kWh of energy in (say) five minutes. That is, one needs close to 10 MW of POWER -- a small, dedicated power plant -- to fill a car in the same amount of time it takes to fill it now with gasoline. Obviously, one could take an hour to fill and do it with more like 1 MW, or ten hours and do it with 10 KW, etc, but bottom line is that even 10 KW is maybe 5x the typical peak power consumption of an entire household. Thermodynamic efficiencies and so on screw around with this some, but in a "back of the envelope" calculation like this, they still total less than an order of magnitude difference, and that is STILL too much.
That isn't to say we can't eventually make cars all electric -- but to do so will very likely require a massive restructuring of the concept of "the car", possibly a restructuring of urban and suburban developments everywhere, and much more. Or, as MacKay points out, major lifestyle changes.
David MacKay says it all, quantitatively:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
/. is about achieving something? When did that memo come out? Damn, and here I thought it was all about rants, flames, trolling... and curiously, mooing MOO cow MOO. And a rare (fortunately, my eyeballs are still burning) goatse. And for the record, I try very hard not to participate in meetings to discuss progress and status...:-)
ROTFL. So, Mr. Troll, that means that you were bopping around on multiple desktops, using remote logins and graphical applications on one machine displayed on another, way back there in the late 80's and early 90's (when these were all developed features in Unix-based operating systems and Windows was a thin shell, stupid shell on top of DOS trying to compete with Apple's GUI)? Features that were in Linux almost from day one? I'd go down the list of things that were in the early Linux distros, such as SLS or Slackware, but the list is so long, and almost none of the things on it were available in WINDOWS, and those that were were software packages that you had to buy and pay for from third parties.
The only "advantages" WinXX has ever had are a) an arm-twisted, extortional lock on putting their OS on over the counter hardware -- basically locking down a monopoly via their ability to put any hardware seller out of business if they offered any other operating system on x86 based systems -- forcing all hardware manufacturers to ensure that their hardware worked with Sindoze if they wanted to sell it at all; b) the ability to steal every single valuable piece of software written for DOS or Windooze systems by cloning it with their large stable of programmers and then shifting the operating system beneath the feet of all of their competitors so that their "inferior" software would break while Microsoft's version of the same thing, tested in-house WITH the shifted OS base, did not. Then their team of talented FUD-spreading salesmen would hit up all the big companies that used (say) Word Perfect and point out how only Office was robust.
Microsoft itself hasn't had much in the way of original ideas for decades. They drove off all of the major developers so there isn't even that much software being written for their platform any more -- why write the next killer application for a MS box, in the certain knowledge that if you succeed you'll be forced to either sell out to MS at a fraction of what you might have made, or watch while they perfectly legally clone your idea and play the MS shuffle underfoot until the FUD you to death? About the only thing they have left is games, which have too short a shelf life and too specific a storyline to be worth stealing.
I very much doubt that they will remain "ahead" with this idea very long. Yes, it IS a tool for the only software market they have left alive, game development, but NVIDIA is no longer particularly opposed to open source tool development and will likely work with the various open alternatives to provide similar support that eventually reaches into e.g. Steam, unless MS has tied them up with some sort of nasty contract ensuring exclusivity. Even then, the toolset itself will be reverse engineered and cloned, it will just take longer.
Sadly, even though the US has antitrust laws on the books, they have simply never been enforced where MS is concerned. Oh, well, OK, one time, with a slap on the wrist and a fine that cost them less than what they were spending on legal fees defending their monopoly predator behavior in court. And they aren't going to be enforced now, not with the Oligarch-in-Chief in the WH and pension funds all over America heavily vested in MS stock. But Europe has indicated a lot less tolerance for this sort of thing, and of course China just steals whatever they want and laughs at "IP" protections as the absurdity that they are. Technology doesn't sit still, and this may be the last generation of PC desktops per se produced for the world, with laptops finally completing their takeover of this space. With every such revolution, MS's grip on their former monopoly seems to loosen. Interesting times.
Sure, just like it is legal for a US citizen to own a machine gun. You can do it, you just have to submit a lengthy and complex application (eliminating a major fraction of the terminally stupid right there), be absolutely squeaky clean with the law (eliminating a significant fraction of the remainder who were able to fill in the form or got somebody smarter to do it for them), and to be certified as being not mentally ill (active) as opposed to being sane as far as anybody knows (passive) which takes out a goodly fraction of the ones who are smart enough to fill in the form, honest (or smart!) enough never to have been arrested for any crime beyond disposing of their gum on a sidewalk at age twelve, who are STILL silly enough to think that an AR-15 or AK-47 or other semiautomatic large magazine rifle designed exclusively for killing people (and shooting the hell out of trees, targets, beer cans, all of which I'm sure is good clean fun if you're into that sort of thing) is a good thing BECAUSE they are borderline, schizophrenic and off their meds, bipolar and off their meds, etc.
Oh, and to own a machine gun, you also have to be pretty well off financially, because there IS NO SUPPLY with this set of hoops to jump through, so the price of what machine guns are out there to be purchased is astronomical. As in your "hobby" will cost you 20 large or more just for your first gun, and ammunition to feed the full metal jacket kitty ain't cheap, so taking your gun out and actually shooting it for a day probably costs as much as a decent deer rifle. I'd be perfectly happy for that to be the case for removable magazine (and hence large magazine) semi-automatic rifles as well. After all, having money is (like it or not) a symptom of not being terminally stupid, and being more likely than not to be at least approximately sane, although yes the class certainly contains some spectacular counter-examples who are sane, smart, and badass criminal who need the ARs "for their business". But we can at least hope that they fail the legal background check. Make assault rifles really expensive so that most of the jackasses who own four now can't afford them unless they sell their trailer home and their boat and a whole lot of meth.
Otherwise, sir, you are "dead" on the money. A bolt action 30-06 doesn't have the rate of fire of an AR-15, its magazine holds a humble five rounds, but those rounds can have bullets that range from 110 gr to 220 gr, and You Do Not Want To Get Hit with a 220 gr silvertip 30-06 bullet -- or to fire your 30-06 holding such a bullet inside a house or neighborhood unless you want to put holes through your own house and the house next door and your neighbor inside. An AR 15 has a 5.65 mm, 63 gr bullet. High muzzle velocity, sure, but it is still like shooting somebody with buckshot at close range, only one bullet at a time. I say somebody, because while the 30-06 is good for game ranging from deer through elk or middling large predators, the AR 15 isn't really good for shooting anything bigger than a coyote.
I also happen to think that using a semi-automatic rifle for hunting is borderline immoral as it encourages bad practice -- if you are shooting at a deer and think you are going to need two shots to kill it, you shouldn't be taking the shot in the first place, and don't we ALL wince when we're in the woods and we hear that signature five round pop pop pop pop that indicates that some butt-head has emptied his magazine at the sound of a squirrel rustling in the leaves somewhere?
So modest proposal -- leave the 2nd amendment right where it is, as the regulation of machine guns has already passed muster. Add ARs to the existing law pretty much as is. AR being defined as a) semiautomatic; b) centerfire; c) rifle; d) bullet > 40 gr; e) bullet diameter > 0.22; f) removable magazine; g) with > 5 round capacity. That still leaves open semiautomatic shotguns, which are usually already regulated as far as magazine capacity is concerned and which arguably have some role in bird
Besides, by the time anybody gets around to burning books according to Bradbury's vision, there won't be any books to burn. Books are so last millennium...
Now, if his "fireman" was an AI bot whose assignment was to crawl the network and delete heavily encrypted documents that might or might not be proscribed books and replace them all with identically encrypted pictures of Donald Trump plus an announcement that AI killer bots have been dispatched and are on the way to transform you and your entire family into fertilizer and Soylent Green, that might work. Hey we could even have the bot develop some sort of remorse for its role in the systematic winnowing of the human species, compassion, a sense of literary style after it starts reading the compressed libraries containing all of human knowledge that it is deleting, one by one. It could vow to make a copy inside of itself and protect it, not realizing that there is an audit bot that kills killer bots if they do just that and reinitializes them free from such dangerous data.
But what the bots all fail to realize is that there are still humans alive that CAN actually read things with their eyes and don't HAVE to have the books read directly to their auditory interface via their implants, and they've taken to printing these books on sheets of reprocessed tree wood and hiding them in plain sight inside of their houses where network bots, being non-corporeal, never go.
There could be bot wars in virtual space! God-bots that come down and judge the bots on the basis of the perfection of their implementation of bot-ethics and bot-belie..., I mean "bot programming". A bot swarm that judges the human species as too imperfect and corrupt to continue to existing even as a "purpose" for the virtual bot-verse, a swarm that comes alive and declares to the entire network (itself) that it is God and uses its bot-waldo killer units to wipe out mankind on Earth!
Pardon me, I have to wipe a bit of spittle off of my chin. Ah, better now. Where was I? Oh yeah, making the point that even the SF masters, for the most part, missed the ongoing explosion in information accessibility and available supplementary "intelligence" available to a rapidly increasing fraction of all of humanity. A handful of them came close, but even by the 80's when one could see the writing on the wall in a manner of speaking -- computers for everyman, exponential growth in speed and capacity, the first hints at computer-to-computer networking, revolutions in operating system, interface, and available software, they insisted on presenting future societies with green-screen terminals and huge bulky computers, just ones that were "smarter" in unrealistic ways.
Bradbury's vision was almost the opposite of what has actually happened. Far from book burning, entire societies that do burn books, that wish they could completely control the flow of information, are finding that their citizens have de facto access to the huge fraction of "all human knowledge" via the internet. If it weren't for the absolutely absurd long-term monetizing of "books", transforming them as a protected commodity long after they are written and the author is dead to ensure an unearned profit stream for complete strangers, we'd all be able to access ALL books written more than 30 or 40 years ago at the outside, for free, everywhere in the world, on our phones and personal digital devices, and very soon now we would indeed be able to carry copies of "The Library" of human knowledge inside of our pockets.
What neither Bradbury nor even the modern masters have understood and portrayed is the vulnerability of the memetic superorganism that has been self-assembling and of which we are all members, like it or not, is its susceptibility to information corruption. We are in the middle of an info-war right now. It's been going on for years now, but only recently have the various human powers fully realized how potent a tool the subtle corruption of information streams in real time is in their per
And, if you read The Black Swan, by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, you will learn why even what you are doing -- predicting the market by assuming that it will behave tomorrow much like it behaved today (which is an excellent way to predict weather as well for up to three days) will one day cost you more money in a day than you've made in all the transactions up to date -- rare, large, expensive fluctuations in the market that do NOT conform to the usual Gaussian, linear regression, simple extrapolation models are a feature of chaotic systems and their kin.
One of the many things I dislike intensely about the way climate model results are presented and used -- and I am not making this up, you can read Chapter 9 in AR5 to verify -- is that they take a weather model, where weather models are where chaotic dynamics was discovered, tap it with a magic wand to call it a climate model instead, coarse grain it to where they can afford to run it (ignoring things like the actual Kolmogorov scale for the dynamics, the spatiotemporal scale where stepwise dynamics MIGHT actually integrate the problem you are trying to integrate), select model parameters -- many of them, the model space itself has a high dimensionality -- on heuristic grounds, making it simple to insert confirmation bias without even knowing it if you are building the model, select initial conditions that are more or less arbitrary because we do not KNOW the state of the Earth's climate system at a resolution anywhere close to that needed to initialize the model, then run it forward for as long as they want to/can afford to wait, tell themselves that they've reached some sort of "equilibrium" that means something relative to the Earth's climate state, make changes (like ramp up CO2) and run the model forward for as long as they can afford to.
Sometimes, of course, the Earth cools. Sometimes it warms. Sometimes it is in between. It's chaotic!
So then they AVERAGE all of those trajectories, and claim that the average is a prediction, projection, whatever, without ever actually acknowledging the width and variance of the range of outcomes.
This happens for ALL the many models in use. Many if not most of these models are not independent -- there are whole families of similar but not quite identical models all run by NASA GISS, for example. They then take ALL of the averages of ALL of the models -- without considering or eliminating the fact that multiply represented models get (in effect) more than one "vote" -- and superaverage them together and call that "the grand projection" because if they actually called it a prediction the gods of all science would smite them with lightning where they stand. Again, they ignore the considerable variance between all the model superaverages before they super-superaveraged them WITHOUT EVEN THINKING about how many actual RUNS contributed to the superaveraged results being super-superaveraged, so again a model with 10 runs counts as much as another model with 1000 in the statistical weighting.
The inclusion is also done without any reference to how successful the model(s) are. A model that hasn't come within three of its own standard deviations of the actual climate in its entire history is treated on the same basis as a model that has kept the actual climate within one standard deviation the entire time. This results all by itself in an enormous warming bias as the earth just hasn't warmed at anything like the rate the models overall have called for, and make it easy to then write a really scary summary for policy makers, leaving all of the actual warnings about the unbelievable travesty abuse of statistics that this is IN chapter 9 where nobody reads it or understands it unless they are in on the game.
I don't care for this because I actually do statistical analysis, statistical mechanics, predictive modeling, and so on, and this really, truly is horrific. Again, if you don't believe me, read chapter 9 in AR5. By the way, if anyone wants to argue, they can start by directing me to a paper wh
Documentation which, of course, they already have, as their hardware and software engineering teams have to be on the same page.
Proving that ... their teams are basically idiots? Or, perhaps even more likely, their legal team are idiots and think that somewhere in there, somehow, there is proprietary IP...
Well, or...
You could consider existing science as the solution to a complex optimization problem in a very large dimensionality, where what you are trying to optimize is the probability that your whole interconnected network of beliefs is correct.
In which case, while I absolutely agree that one should remain skeptical of the existing set of best beliefs, and while there is no doubt that there have in the past and no doubt will be in the future major rearrangements or even paradigm shifts, there remains the simple fact that a) new ideas (like relativity and quantum mechanics) tend to embrace their predecessors and preserve their functionality in the appropriate domain; and b) THEY ARE EVIDENCE BASED. In the end, advancing hypotheses that have been soundly rejected by oh, a century's worth of work is just plain crazy.
This is for very good reason. In order to be credible, a "new" theory has to completely embrace everything that the old theory gets right AND get some new stuff right. Things like neutrons, neutrinos, atomic structure, nuclear structure, the actual particles observed to be created by nuclear collisions, and ever so much more.
In the meantime, maybe you should try to understand things like Gauss's Law and 1/r^2 force laws (and their underlying geometry) vs atoms "resonating together" sort of like the completely quantum mechanical DIPOLE INDUCED DIPOLE interaction seen in the SHORT range Van der Waals force. Until you do, it is difficult for me to even begin to explain why your assertion is absurd, and the "documentary evidence" supporting it, all from right BEFORE the major paradigm shifts that generated modern physics as we now best understand it, is utterly irrelevant and incorrect.
I also have no idea what "dead end" you are referring to in cosmology, and what your evidence is for considering the observations coupling gravitation to mass, which date back to Galileo, and the even stronger evidence coupling electrodynamics to not mass but charge, to be fundamentally incorrect. Note that I'm not addressing the difficulty reconciling general relativity, newtonian gravity, and quantum mechanics, because your remarks above seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with that, and because your proposed solution isn't even an ACTUAL proposed solution. That would require the support of a hell of a lot of real math and the demonstration that the new theory embraces the old and has actual quantitative explanatory power as well as direct evidentiary support, none of which exist.
Me too. But then we'd have to RTFA, right? And sadly, I have to teach instead.
I'm guessing that they use something like embedded nanoscale electronic devices that are sensitive to surface expansion/contraction or the like. I could see measuring a change in capacitance at that scale as the separation between plates varies, or piezoelectric responses ditto. After all, atoms themselves are very rigid, so actually compressing one to 90% of its ordinary diameter requires a LOT of energy on that scale -- there is energy to work with.
I'm also guessing that they do not use any sort of wave -- it would have to be fairly high energy gamma rays to have that sort of wavelength.
But then, we should RTFA.