The big question will be whether or not it takes the desktop while there is still a desktop to take...
Not an issue from my point of view. I abandoned Windows somewhere back there around the 3.2 to whatever transition. At this point Steam is gradually making even the thorny games issue moot, although it is still not the case that all games run on linux too (sadly) and there are still lots of games that don't run on steam (and which then require superpowers to get to run on linux).
The two things that still ensure a MS lock are:
* Their stranglehold on the pre-installed OS market. Either one preinstalls Windows on "all" the new systems you sell, or the price per copy for the users that do want it ensures that you cannot compete, and as long as the vast majority of systems sold are Windows by the "requirements" of the purchaser, this will not change. That's what is so interesting -- users are pissed enough about Win8+ that this percentage is actually dropping. Somewhere in there is a critical point where major resellers will actually see marginal gains in selling systems preinstalled with linux (or no OS at all) compared to having to pay the premium for Windows and pass it on as a "tax" to their clients. We're still not there, though, and honestly I doubt that we are particularly close. Call me when we get Windows down to maybe 67% and falling...
* The sad truth that there are still plenty of business desktop applications that are only available for Windows. Often mission critical ones. An auxiliary truth is that even if a linux version DOES exist, if you use it you are on your own, because the "MCSE"'s who (on a good day with a tail wind) "support" the application are actually revealed as the idiots they often are the first time you ask a question you don't already know the answer to better than they do...
Things that threaten it? IF linux ever successfully makes a truly transparent layering of the OS to the point where one can install Win apps fully automagically and have them "just run" with all library support available, current, and functional, then it would truly be a war. Games would stop being an issue at all. And so would those mission critical apps. Their windows versions might well suck, but they'd suck on linux the same way that they suck on Windows and a Windows support team "might" be able to provide at least some support without having to actually understand things like networking and library support. Containerization might actually make this a reality before I die of old age -- or not. This is the kind of thing that could easily be the tipping point. If one can install e.g. MS Office on linux by just doing it and have it work perfectly, then one doesn't have to deal with training office staff to use OOffice instead after they went and took an actual class in MSO and are terrified of having to learn something different. Or use an EHR written for Windows. Or use an office DB-driven app for inventory and POS that simply doesn't exist for linux transparently on Linux, install it and it works.
Only a little bit of this could convince DEVELOPERS that Windows is a bigger PITA to support than it is worth, especially if they can use a really good toolkit to do the containerizing so a single build just does it.
Probably a fantasy for years yet, but it is hard to say. I suspect this is the plan of Red Hat and hence a major factor driving the future development of linux, but we'll see...
I think if you calculated the amount of water that could be desalinated from a football size array of solar panels, you would be surprised how little it it.
You mean, compared to simply building a solar distilling plant with the same floating plastic? Could it possibly be less efficient to collect solar energy at a penalty of (say) 90% and use that energy at an additional penalty to desalinate water no matter how you try to do it than it is to take close to 100% of the energy -- including the infrared and UV -- and simply heat up a black sheet with a thin skin of water over it and use cooler water circulated up from depth by a very small solar power to condense the water vapor cooking off of the top so it can be collected?
Solar stills have been around for a long time. You can buy them online. They often are included in life raft equipment. A 24" floating solar still can produce around 1.4 L of fresh water in an overcast day, more than that on a sunny day, and doesn't even use cooler water from under the surface layer to enhance the condensation rate. If we assume 1 foot in radius per 1.5 Q, that's pi square feet per 1.5 Q. A football field is 300x300 \approx pi x 30000, so it should produce 30,000 x 1.5 q = 45,000 Q/day in cloudy conditions, more in sunny ones. That' a bit over 10,000 gallons/day, and needs solar cells or alternative power only to pump the resulting water from the collector to somewhere else.
Now, is that only a "little"? Depends on what you want it for. That's enough for quite a few houses or people. Not enough to do much irrigation in a very hot climate, but it is not nothing, either. But there are a lot of football field sized areas in the ocean, and a direct side effect of this is the cooling of the ocean underneath, which can have either good or bad ecological effects but in moderation probably mostly good.
And the last drought was due to a strong La Nina, as they often are. California has had horrendous droughts, some of which have lasted for centuries, over the last 2000 years. Climates always are changing, and California's has actually been comparatively benign (for California) for most of the last 160 years, with the exception of the Great Dust Bowl years and a few other minidroughts that are more or less identical to the one just ended, or at least paused, by the strong El Nino.
The problem with the AGW assertions -- a problem so severe that they changed the entire assertion to ACC ("climate change", not "global warming") is that it is very, very difficult to separate anecdotes from statistically meaningful evidence. Indeed, the only other human discipline that seems to incorporate a worse rate of anecdotal assertion as statistical truth is -- maybe -- health care. Maybe not! A second, closely related problem is the near impossibility of separating out causal factors for any statistically meaningful change that is observed. Is the CA drought caused by or part of -- note the separate assertions:
a) Anthropogenic (specifically, caused by anthropogenic CO2, not other anthropogenic silliness like land use change or oversubscribing the water supply ten times over) b) Global (not local -- part of a global, statistically discernible pattern and not a local anecdote) c) Warming and/or Climate Change?
How can one even begin to answer this question? Is the drought different in magnitude, duration, timing, from any of the ten odd droughts that have occurred over the period of scientific records? Is it exceptional on the basis of e.g. tree ring data? Even if "exceptional", is it truly a statistical outlier or just at the level of statistical noise and the imperfection of records, truly indistinguishable from many of the past droughts? Is it part of a pattern of increasing drought? And even if it is exceptional, part of a pattern, an outlier, is it caused by anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the specific sense that if humans had done everything else that they did to California -- tap the available water to support far more people than the land should support, plant huge farms, cover vast stretches of countryside with roads and malls and houses -- but done it without burning anything so CO2 was still order of 300 ppm, there would be no La Nina associated droughts, or those droughts would not be so severe?
We have answers to some of these questions. The drought was not particularly exceptional, and its impact was greatly enhanced by non-CO2 (but anthropogenic) factors, specifically the fact that California is carrying far more people than it should given its history of being mostly desert for most of the last 2000 years. We have no possible way to answer others, specifically the attribution to anthropogenic CO2.
But that never stops the media, politicians, and even some scientists who should know better from doing it anyway. The study in the top article is remarkable in that it states something that most people have long since observed and noted even without the help of "Science". The climate today is far better than it was 60 years ago, or 100 years ago, or 150 years ago. It is much closer to a climate "optimum" that the Earth was during the Little Ice Age. It isn't just humans that have benefited, either. The entire biosphere is -- on average -- far better off. The planet was starved for CO2 in the middle of the Wisconsin glaciation -- levels dropped to the edge of mass extinction for certain classes of respiring plants.
Here's a thought for the day. Of the world's seven billion people, one billion will dine today courtesy of the additional plant growth d
Let's examine the real public health crisis. It is a simple matter of fact that jail is bad for your health. In fact, being arrested is bad for your health even if you don't end up going to jail as a consequence. It is also very, very bad for your economic health, as being arrested or sent to jail can cause you to lose your job and your insurance and can lead to the separation and breakup of families, which provide a robust basis for a healthy and productive life. Yet the United States in general, and Utah in particular, seem to lead the world in their persecution -- sorry, I mean "prosecution" of victimless crimes. To quote from Edward Gibbons and "The Tragedy of Victimless Crimes: https://www.prisonlegalnews.or... ,
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigor of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind – Edward Gibbon from “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”
The governor of Utah needs to get a grip. Purchasing pornography produced by consenting adults (or nowadays, often provided for free by consenting adults on the Internet) is an utterly victimless "crime" as no one is harmed by it. Masturbation is not a crime, and if anything it is probably good for you, if perhaps lonely. The making of ANY pornography without the consent of those portrayed or by violating already existing laws against child abuse or assault is already a crime, but much less so for the person purchasing it or owning it (who may be in no position to verify its provenance). Furthermore, it is already a crime right where it needs to be -- a crime committed by the maker of the pornographic image, a crime committed by a KNOWING redistributor of that image, where it is no more the responsibility of the owner or purchaser to validate an image's provenance than it is for the buyer of a car or cell phone to ascertain whether or not it was ever stolen.
Sending somebody to jail for looking at pornography so that they can -- with an appallingly high probability -- be raped, physically abused, and turned into actual criminals in our unbelievably poorly managed, expensive, and dangerous prison system as a public health issue is beyond any joke. Why don't we just cut off their hands and blind them? That way they could never again damage their health by looking at naked persons and/or causing themselves to have an orgasm while doing so. Oh, wait! That's close to what they already do in some of the most repressive regimes on the planet! Congrats to Utah for wanting to join them.
In the meantime, let's not forget the comparative health risk of possessing a pound of pot and going to jail for five years for the "crime" of possessing a pound of pot, the health risk of marrying someone of your own sex as compared to going to prison for marrying someone of your own sex, removing your bra in public versus going to jail for removing your bra in public, and so on down the line. We actively damage the health of anyone who is arrested, ever, at least statistically, but because there is a burgeoning private prison industry in the US that profits enormously from being paid to keep these dangerous criminals incarcerated and lobbies and quietly bribes accordingly to ensure an adequate supply of criminals to keep them in clover, nobody cares.
Maybe nobody DOES care. But still, dressing up an utterly victimless anti-pornography religious moral crusade as a health issue, that's just wrong. Go on and say it the way it really is, Governor. It isn't about "health", it is about God's Will and the Commandments. It's about an absurd religious mythology, imposed on others with the force of law using "health" as no more than an excuse, carefully avoiding any look at the already enormous public health burden of the millions of Americans who have been arrested and incarcerated and hence rendered virtually unemployable and uninsurable, all for committing crimes that are not, in fact, actual crimes.
Sure, but in the vicinity of the galactic center there could easily be a steady supply of infalling "stuff" -- maybe it was a three star system and a supergiant was feeding the pair of black holes as they were spiralling into one another, for example. So it is hard to rule out a surrounding plasma gas on the basis of a simple model, the assumption of completely isolated BHs, or the no-hair rule. Remember, the only way we can sort-of-observe black holes directly at all (e.g. Cygnus X-1) is by the x-rays given off by infalling plasma, so it is pretty hard to claim that black holes are never surrounded by an infalling plasma. The interesting question is whether or not a gravity wave can carry enough energy to actually compress infalling stardust maintained as a plasma by the x-rays emitted by the infalling stuff to produce a coherence brightened pulse at all, or (equally interesting) to cause a possible neighboring supergiant to go nova as it swept across its fusion core. THAT would be some interesting "amplification", although the lag doesn't seem long enough for that to be plausible.
It's all just games (I'm a theorist myself and love to play) without any real data... and I doubt that the observational data is up to the task of differentiating the possibilities very cleanly when we cannot be certain that the two are even causally connected instead of being a coincidence. We really need triangulation, not just two LIGO sites, to at least create a MODERATELY narrow cone of possible directions instead of a very wide one indeed.
Sure. Really, one can imagine a bunch of ways for there to be a GRB in association with a black hole collapse, up to and including them not quite being black holes, or one of them not being a black hole. Imagine a neutron star collapsing into a black hole, swirling around at lightspeed in its last fatal orbits with its magnetic field going nuts! Another very interesting possibility that one could probably infer from the spectrum, maybe, would be the effect of the gravity wave itself operating at very short range on a surrounding plasma cloud, exciting it so it basically gamma ray lased (really, coherence brightening along the outgoing track of compression caused by the gravity wave). This is the sort of thing one might be able to model -- gravitational wave creating a solitonic acoustical wave that lags very slightly and that is continuously brightened in the compressed region by stimulated emission as the plasma on the rear side of the soliton emits into the soliton itself. I think there are models for this sort of thing out there already -- something like this was once proposed as a possible mechanism to describe Quasars?
Furthermore, the fallacy that you can isolate an EM beam of light from the planetary EM field is quite silly. A solar flare with its neutrinos, and charged particles (which have measurable and sometimes visible effects when interacting with the EM field of Earth), seems the most likely explanation.
OK, I'm not sure what this even means, or what it has to do with the context of the top post or the reply, as a GRB is nothing at all like light produced by solar wind interacting with the planetary EM field -- you are off by a few orders of magnitude in energy scale and wavelength, for example, let alone spectrum. I realize, AC, that you are probably posting just to accomplish -- something -- but unless that thing is to confuse the reader, you might want to clarify. For example, my eyes are excellent detectors of the electromagnetic radiation field constituting a "beam of light" from all sorts of stars including the sun, reflected light from the moon, the light from the computer screen I'm working at. They effortlessly isolate it from the "planetary electromagnetic field", which isn't even light, generally speaking. Since I live far from the poles, light of the sort you seem to describe (the Aurora Borealis) is almost never seen at night so "isolating" starlight from it is absolutely trivial.
Surely you know this -- or perhaps not, I don't know -- but granting you the benefit of the doubt, you need to make your point a lot clearer since nobody is talking about an EM beam of light in any part of the EM spectrum where there is the faintest chance of it being associated in any way with a solar event and/or the planetary field, unless you are asserting that the Sun itself exploded and we missed it. No? Then what?
Um, not as a participant as I have no dog in either race, but you are confusing phase velocity and group velocity. If I shout in the middle of a room, detectors on both sides of the room can hear me at EXACTLY the same time. That doesn't mean that the sound wave went across the room at transluminal speeds.
A seismic wave originating inside the Earth can easily be detected at the same time at two points separated by an arbitrary distance on the Earth's surface. In that case one inverts the argument and uses the time required for the wave to propagate to determine the likely origin inside the Earth, although it takes three detectors to triangulate it. If there were three LIGO detectors separated by a large baseline, we could do a lot better than say that the wave "came from the southern hemisphere" -- we could say that it came from some narrow cone overhead OR that it came from inside of the Earth.
The gamma ray burst actually makes it a lot more likely, however, that the seismic explanation is incorrect, and one presumes that this is further bolstered by information obtained from the umpty-zillion seismographs scattered across the planet. Presumably they would have detected an S-wave earthquake event as precisely that, occurring at the same time, and with a comparatively precise interior location, and it would be very easy to determine that it was the probable cause of the LIGO signal. Granting the people who run LIGO simple competence and honesty, I'm pretty sure they ruled this out as ruling it out has to be standard operating procedure lest they call every single earthquake (of the dozens that occur in a day) a "gravitational wave". The GRB coincidence just rules it IN a bit more strongly.
So no, it isn't the speed of light that is an issue here, as an S-wave that originated in just the right place could ripple across the surface much FASTER than light. It is almost certainly the lack of coincidence with detectors designed and utilized to detect S-waves, ruling out this sort of explanation.
This is precisely my experience. Every time I've been broken into and called the police, a bored looking cop comes out, takes a statement, looks at the point of entry and then leaves, never to be heard from again. They only do this much so you can file your insurance, if you are stupid enough to file your insurance (since the insurance company will then just upgrade your risk and raise your rates enough to cover your payout plus an indefinite bleed of additional profit for them for the rest of eternity. No fingerprints. No searching area fences or eBay for your lost goods. No questioning likely suspects. If they are feeling enormously helpful, they may suggest that you get the broken lock fixed as the bad guys might come back and steal some more, and no, they aren't going to stake the joint out to find out.
Law enforcement is almost non-existent. Police are often called on to "keep the peace" -- to intervene in potentially dangerous situations involving human conflict or risk -- but they don't go out of their way to arrest anybody even then. They do arrest shoplifters, but that is because there is usually hard evidence and the perps are caught in the act. They do arrest anybody who rubs drug usage in their face and spend at least some time arresting the merely unwary. They do a decent job at pulling drunk drivers, when they catch them for obvious driving errors. Outside of that, by far -- far -- my most common interaction with Law Enforcement is getting pulled with a car tag a month out of date. Damn, they are hell on car registration. Makes me feel safe at night, knowing that no scofflaw is able to drive around without properly registered tags, unless of course they are an illegal alien without any driver's license or insurance at all driving a company truck.
Sure! And I know for a fact that I've used the bathroom at the same time as gay individuals who are actually interested in my sex or gender or whatever you want to call it as opposed to the other one -- some of them friends of mine. I've been hit on, gently, one or two times, easily blocked. But who the hell cares? Don't people have enough to do without worrying about this? And for the easily weirded out, which one is weirder, sharing the bathroom with a woman in drag who looks like a short, dumpy male with a crewcut or sharing the bathroom with a man in full drag who has to hike his skirt up to take a pee? The NC law now REQUIRES the latter to use the urinal right next to me. Which is fine -- I love light amusement while I'm taking a piss -- but the religious bluenoses that are pushing this silly law might want to think about permitting the drag queen to use a stall in the ladies room and put his makeup back on over there instead.
As for surgical transgender persons -- how they hell is anybody going to ever tell? Seriously! Are we supposed to grab the short dumpy person who looks like they MIGHT be XX and check his prick to see if it is surgically created? Are we going to jam a speculum up into the vagina of a tallish woman with broad shoulders who looks like she MIGHT be an XY to see if there is actually a cervix up there, or do an adam's apple check on their throat with a biopsy to ensure that it isn't cancer or a thyroid problem?
Some people just don't have enough to do, and erupt in self-righteous religious fury over nothing. This is SO much ado about nothing. The lawmakers in my state that voted for this should be ashamed, but they won't be. They're no doubt going around feeling proud of themselves for defending all the Good Christians in this state in their God Given Right to pee only with people that share their chromosomal makeup.
I wonder what they plan to do with true intersexuality? It is a medical fact that some observable degree of intersexuality occurs in something like 1 in 2 to 3 thousand births, ranging from small things up to being a full blown hermaphrodite or Klinefelter's (XXY) or XYY or...
The idiots of the religious right would like to pretend that all of this just doesn't exist, that sexual orientation in the brain "must" match the XX or XY in your chromosomes, if you are fortunate enough to have pure XX or XY chromosomes in the first place. But sex and gender identity are doubtless encoded in lots of places in our chromosomes, and we know that the way a fetus develops depends in part not only on the chromosomes but in the hormones and other biochemical cues present during development, and ALL of the systems involved in this are vulnerable to defects or accidents. A trauma or chemical imbalance in the mother could easily change the brain itself. I know the parents of a transgender (eventually) child. The child was nominally male, but never exhibited male development patterns. They knew there was a problem when the child was five years old, long before there is anything sexual involved, and long before one could accuse the child of "choosing" to be a sinner by behaving like a little girl instead of a little boy.
If anything, transgender persons and gay persons deserve the compassion and sympathy of the "normals" of the world. It is a lot harder to be gay or TG than it is to be normal. Some of that is just because that's the way it is, just like it is harder to have a cleft palette than it is not to, or harder to have a great big birthmark across your face than not to. But for gay and TG persons, we make it a lot harder even so. A lot harder.
They (the lawmakers who pushed through this piece of crap legislation) should be so very ashamed. I'm an atheist, but Jesus preached (if anything) compassion. Buddha preached compassion. This legislation is not compassionate -- it is the opposite of compassionate.
One more thing, I see you calling Muslim societies "malignant"... I would *love* to dip into the subject of the "Intolerance of Intolerance" found thriving in the left wing of American politics, but that is a topic for another time... I find your words for their society to be quite... intolerant.
Not all Muslim societies or individuals are malignant, but the Quran itself is. That is a simple matter of fact, clearly visible to anyone who reads it, including Muslims. They simple have to let their eyes glide over the parts where Allah promises to burn the skins off of all unbelievers, then regrow the skin, then burn it off again, forever. So is much of the Bible, don't get me wrong. In fact, I have little patience with any of the Abrahamic religions -- I consider the Book of Mormon to be something between a sorry joke and an enormously successful con, on those days that I can't make myself see it as the first work of American science fiction. I am indeed intolerant of all of the above. And no, I don't agree with the widely held perception that it is somehow OK to use one entire system of epistemology for science and matters of fact and a second one for religion where anybody's opinion is as good as anybody's else because there is no possible way to decide between competing religious propositions, any more than it is possible to decide upon whether or not pink unicorns are real. The best that we can say is that nobody has ever reliably observed and reported a real pink unicorn, a little good reason to believe in one. If a little child wants to believe in it, that's fine, but to openly encourage this sort of behavior in fully grown adults is not virtuous.
I wasn't advocating for tolerance in the issue of rest rooms. I was simply pointing out that there is no rational reason to enforce bathroom dimorphism by law. That won't, and hasn't, stopped people from doing it anyway, any more than the clear constitutional prohibition of mixing religion and state hasn't stopped people from putting "In God We Trust" on national currency, any more than one can walk onto a public beach and swim naked in the sea. I wasn't even advocating for "human rights", since those are a human invention, although a lovely one. But the more irrational elements we enforce as law, the more irrational our society, and irrationality has a price. Sometimes an enormous one.
to having laws or societies forbidding contact between the sexes while taking a shit or piss.
It causes harm to societal order. That in itself is cause for regulation and is a much higher priority in most people's minds than you may believe.
It does no such thing. For one thing, it doesn't happen. There isn't any "contact between the sexes" when I shit or piss in the same room with other males. I mean, eeeew! For another, I've been married for a rather long time and believe me, there is very little "contact between the sexes" even when one is married to the other person while they are eliminating waste products. Again, eeeew. Now showering together, maybe, at least if one is washing the other person's erogenous zones. But we're not talking about public showers, and even public all-sex showers aren't a threat to societal disorder anywhere but in the minds of people who live in the fantasy world where nakedness is something to be ashamed of or so sexually stimulating that they cannot help but rape, rape, rape.
Exactly the same argument is used by much of the Muslim world to justify forcing women to completely cover up before they leave their father's, brother's, or husband's house. Oh My, the sight of an un-burka'd woman causes harm to the social order! Or rather, it does no such thing anywhere except in the malignant culture that makes up such an absurd rule and teaches its males that it is OK to rape any woman that dresses otherwise because they must be a whore and are asking for it. Which is all part of the global, and I do mean global, cultural prejudice against women. Having two bathrooms is a milder expression of exactly the same thing, and perpetuates exactly the same cultural myths, that men are all rapists who can't control themselves if they just know that there is a woman behind this locked stall door taking a piss, that women all need "protection" from those transgender would-be-rapists, that men's dignity is assaulted by women listening to them fart and grunt while on the pot (the latter is true, of course, but irrelevant as NOBODY is dignified on the pot).
I think you're half right. Some prejudice is irrational, but some is rational. Or at the least it may be rational to great swathes of people, and irrational to a small group.
I do not think that word means what you think it means. Or even those words (prejudice and rational/irrational). It may be the custom of a society not to permit a woman to expose her naked breasts in public, it may be against the law for a woman to expose her naked breasts in public as determined by majority vote enforcing the custom, but it is not and will never be rational to have either the custom or the law no matter how many people agree with it. There is, quite literally no harm outside of cultural inventions and taboos and humans expressing unsane behavior in exposing the human breast, male or female to the gaze of other humans. There is no survival or evolutionary advantage to covering it up outside of obvious and irrelevant things like preventing skin cancer if it is sunny and you are fair skinned, staying warm if it is really cold out, avoiding age related droop for a bit longer if you have very large breasts. Many cultures have existed that did not have this cultural taboo, and they did not fail because of it.
Similarly it may be the custom to avoid sharing bathrooms with roughly half of the human race (unless you happen to be related to them in which case it is OK) but it isn't rational. Some customs may be rational enough -- customs that prohibit killing your neighbors if they play loud music late at night have some point to them -- but not this one. First of all, nobody parades around in a public bathroom naked, male or female. Second, there is a strong custom against "looking" at anybody in a public bathroom, male or female, already -- we try to give each other what privacy we can instead of (for men) craning our necks to see how big the penis is of the guy at the next urinal over, and feel uncomfortable if they guy in the next stall invades our space or stares at our junk, no matter how our self-imagined "genders" align.
Third, what is there to see? I literally cannot remember seeing anybody's genitalia in a public bathroom (as a male) in spite of the fact that urinals are basically standup affairs with no real visual barriers. Women use sit-down toilets in regular stalls, and you wouldn't even know a woman was in a men's room unless you watched her going out or coming in. Nobody can see anything "interesting" through a bathroom stall wall, nobody can see through my pants from the backside when I'm standing up at a urinal. You are no more "exposed" than you are walking down the street and visible only from the rear, and are LESS exposed than you are seen from the front any time, and are WAY more exposed to your spouse if you are married as most toilets have no stalls and married people usually share bathrooms without even thinking about it, at least once they are past their honeymoon. Ditto twice over for women: unless you have x-ray vision, you aren't going to see a damned thing "exciting" in a woman's bathroom and if you have x-ray vision, who cares about bathrooms in the first place as there is no privacy no matter what?
Having sex/gender segregated public bathrooms makes ZERO sense, and is (I'm sure) a major additional expense. The only group that it advantages is males, since men's rooms have both urinals and stalls and the latter take up less room and allow for a better match to the frequency of urination vs defecation and thereby allow men in and out with less wait time when the facility is crowded. A double size omnisex public bathrooom with the right balance of urinals and stalls would be cheaper, would functionally reduce female wait time by making the often-idle stalls of a men's room available, and would only slightly increase male wait time. All other sensitivities over the issue are cosmically, incredibly stupid and irrational, even as they are very real and connected to our bizarre cultural rituals and beliefs about sex, court
I'd mod you up for pointing out the obvious if I had mod points, but pointing out the obvious to the oblivious never works. Scenario a) is an XY who identifies as female using a female bathroom, and feeling more comfortable, but at the expense of all the other female users of the bathroom feeling uncomfortable for a variety of reasons (not commenting on whether or not they are good reasons -- that's like commenting on whether or not laws requiring clothes in public are based on good reasons as part of a spectrum that ends up with women wearing burkas lest they make men feel "uncomfortable" and helpless to avoid raping or beating the women in response to their visible sexuality). One person is more comfortable, many are less comfortable (if they know about it -- a TG XY dressed like a female or who has undergone surgery may not even be identifiable as an XY making the whole argument moot unless people have to show a birth certificate to get into a public bathroom). Scenario b) is the XY who identifies as a female using a male bathroom, which makes him/her less comfortable but leaves the other male users as comfortable as they ever are, unless the XY/female is dressed as a female or has had surgery to make them physically conform to female, in which case it might make everybody uncomfortable, just as it might if an XX dressed up as a male but still obviously a female might make them uncomfortable.
In terms of total human comfort given our irrational prejudices that give rise to the discomfort in the first place it clearly minimizes discomfort to require people use the sex-restricted bathroom that conforms to their physical body and dress, not their XX/XY status per se. One can argue that humans shouldn't feel any more discomfort sharing a bathroom with strangers of different sex or gender identity than they do sharing it with strangers of the same sex or gender identity, and you might be right, but that won't stop people who do from feeling the discomfort. One can also say, quite truthfully, that if I went in to teach my class today wearing nothing but skin, it shouldn't be the business of any of the students or my employers as my personal appearance is my business, not theirs, or one can say equally truthfully that women in certain Muslim cultures should not be punished for exactly the same thing (at a different point on the spectrum) by not wearing a full-body covering drapery in public or that one shouldn't have to rub blue mud on your belly to fit in with quaint native or religious customs anywhere in the world, but that won't stop people from defending their prejudices and silliness as if it is a god-given right and the only way the world should ever work.
We will now get back to the chorus of voices who, as always, fail to address the broader issue of whether social rules, customs or laws are ever fully sane.
Bought them in anticipation of an electric car in a few years.
Hmmm, somewhere in there one has to do some arithmetic. 1 Gallon of Gasoline = 33 kW-hours and will drive a Toyota Prius 50 miles on a good day traveling slightly downhill (I know this for a fact as I own two). Most "normal" subcompact cars it will move no more than 30 miles. A Tesla model S sports measurements of 90 to 100 MPGe (34 to 38 kW-hr/100 miles). A largish household solar panel system might be 5 kW peak capacity (enough to provide order of 24 kW-hr in 24 hours with average-ish insolation). This system might cost $25K to $35K installed.
You will note that if one diverted 100% of the output of a solar collection system that cost almost as much as the car itself into charging the car's battery, one would accrue energy in its battery at "rate" of roughly 60 miles (range) per day. If one is running a household that consumes most of that, the overcapacity is all you can accumulate. 10% overcapacity would give you 6 miles per day. To drive an average of 20 miles a day (ballpark average driving for commuters) you'd need at least 30% overcapacity on a system of this general scale, which would cost an additional $10K to install. $10K would buy 5000 gallons of gasoline at current prices, more like 6000 or 7000 gallons if one is honest and adds in the cost of money amortized over the driving period. In my Prius, at 45 miles/gallon sustained, 6000 x 45 = 270,000 miles, which is ballpark the total expected range of a car over its entire lifetime. The models of the Prius that are comparable in interior size and comfort and that get this average mileage are currently around $24,000.
So, one can buy a Tesla 3 at $35K for the car and either buy $10K worth of solar panels to be able to drive 20 miles round trip per day with no additional expenditure plus pay for the money borrowed to install the solar for an additional $5K for a total cost of $50K for roughly 250,000 total miles driven OR I can buy a Toyota Prius for $25K and pay for gas out of pocket for the lifetime of the car, in which case I'll pay around $35K total for the same 250,000 miles and can use the leftover money to pay for hookers and cocaine. (Or I can buy any one of a number of cars that cost less than $20K but get around 30 mpg, pay roughly $17K for gasoline to reach 250,000 miles, and come in close to the Prius, or I can pay far less than any of these for a car used for a year or so and come in even lower than any of these estimates but not have a shiny new car to impress the hookers with).
If I do NOT have an extra 7 or 8 kW-hr generating capacity and buy the Tesla, then of course I have to pay for electricity the hard way. This will make the cost of driving one mile on a Tesla at (say) 36 kW-hr/100 miles highly variable, depending on how much your state inflates the cost of electricity. In Hawaii, electricity is awesomely expensive. In about half of the US, it is more than $0.16 kwh and the cost per mile on a Tesla will be roughly 6 cents. But it is also highly variable -- in NC it is closer to $0.10 per kwh and the cost per mile is more like 4 cents. For comparison (although gas prices and gas taxes are also highly variable) in NC at current prices a Prius costs just over 4 cents per mile in gasoline to drive and is close to a wash with a Tesla. In Virginia next door, gas taxes are lower and the Prius matches or even wins a bit relative to the Tesla. California and New England have very high electrical prices and the Tesla loses ground. But in California in particular, gasoline prices are inflated to almost 50% higher than they are in NC and close to the way electricity prices are inflated, so they come in close to a wash again. But one can fill a Prius in roughly 2 minutes at a gas pump anywhere across the country, where "filling" a car that requires 80 odd kWh of electricity to fully charge does not, not, not take 2 minutes, and in fact cannot be done at all in 99% of the countryside where one might want to drive.
I was going to say, where can I get one of these? First MS product in forever I've actually wanted to buy. I imagine I could use electroshock to moderate the Neo-Nazi bit, but then again, dressed in a bit of virtual leather, shiny black boots... what's not to like?
... except for salt. I guess salt has never been genetically modified compared to (say) 1000 to 5000 years ago, perhaps because it doesn't contain any genes.
Everything else -- arguably including wild game -- has been modified by humans manipulating its genes, most often by the tried and true method of waiting for "nature" to cause a mutation and then selectively breeding to stabilize it in a domesticated population.
So General Foods etc should retaliate by simply labelling all food products as having been modified relative to their "natural" state prior to the existence of mankind. Then consumers will get bored looking at the label (and possibly might be educated about the meaning of "GMO" relative to the biological human universe). End of problem.
Your data is boring, but I'm a space alien terrorist who smuggles vast quantities of drugs in from outer space while maintaining my part time job as secretary at all of the Illuminati meetings in between outing Hillary Clinton's love notes to Donald Trump from high school (the ones where she says "I love your... fingers!"). Up to now, I've had to keep all of my written records of my activities (illegal on seventeen worlds) using things like LaTeX and ordinary text editors, and whenever I wanted to convert them to EPUB format, well, let's just say it hasn't been pretty! But now that Google supports EPUB all I have to do is port the documents from text plus latex markup into some silly WYSIWYG editor and I can save them into text plus EPUB markup, with the extra bonus that I can securely access them from any of my personal digital devices on the cloud! This is so exciting!
I'm sure nothing can go wrong. Everybody knows that the cloud is totally secure, and the NSA is completely bound by the constitution to find a judge willing to issue a warrant accusing me of being a space alien terrorist drug smuggling traitor to the US before they can go through my private documents. Besides, the NSA is controlled by the Illuminati.
Time will tell who is right. The problem is if the climate scientists are right then we just move that much further down the path before we do anything about it which makes the problem that much worse.
There are several problems. One is that by making energy more expensive, we are lining the pockets of the very "bad guys" that are supposedly "destroying the planet". Who benefits most from the climate hysteria? Try Exxon. Big power companies. BP. Power companies don't give a shit how they make the electricity they sell you -- they are public utilities and make a more or less fixed margin regardless. What they do care about is the PRICE. Higher price makes for a higher MARGINAL profit, as a percentage. Power companies have made out like gangbusters as we've take step after step to raise the price of electrical power. So have coal companies and oil companies and nuclear and...
Another is that as we divert billions of dollars into horribly expensive power sources with very long amortization times, divert tens, hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide into what amounts to boutique power supplies that only the rich (that's us) can afford, we are literally damning the poorest 1/3 of the world's population to continue to live in 17th century misery, without clean water, sewage treatment, energy for factories and jobs and transportation, and all of the other benefits you and I take for granted because hey, they are a light switch away. Hell, at this point I can turn the light switches on and off with my cell phone. We are de facto killing several million people a year, most of the children, by spending a fortune on a windmill that only produces power intermittantly so that one has to maintain almost the same total fossil fuel generation capability as before to have a reliable grid instead of spending the same amount to bring the third world a century or two forward in their standard of living.
A third is that it fundamentally corrupts the trust people have in scientists, or will if the climate continues to diverge from the hysterical predictions. And make no mistake about it. It is diverging from those predictions, and has been for somewhere between 17 and 25 years now. People who should know better have made absolutely absurd predictions about "no more snow in winter by 2010", "collapse of ice pack", "sea level rise of half a meter by 2012" -- seriously, it is easy to go back and find the "headlines" of these jokers -- none of which have come even close to true. SLR is a perfect case in point. Total SLR over the last 140 years has been on the order of ten, count them ten, whole inches. An average of less than a tenth of an inch per year. The current rate is not spectacular -- I own a house that is about a meter above high tide in the mid-atlantic and this does matter to me -- it is invisible. It is so slow that whole generations don't even notice it, lost in the daily tide. Yet if you listen to the media, you'd think Florida is about to disappear under the sea.
Florida is PROJECTED to disappear under the sea. IF -- and it is a big if -- the models that are currently failing stop failing, IF Antarctica suddenly starts melting (for the last few years Antarctic ice coverage has been at an all time high), IF the high Greenland icepack actually rises above freezing for more than ten minutes every decade, IF the projected Maunder-level minimum in solar output doesn't occur. People -- and sadly, this includes you -- confuse the predictions of a model with reality, with science in progress (which is what climate science even more than almost any other scientific discipline really is) from "settled science". Not even gravitation is settled science, but it is a damn sight more settled than climate science. At some point a Bayesian analysis of all of the priors conditioning the predictions renders the conclusion as meaningful as a coin flip.
Climate scientists are risking the credibility of science itself. Science should be honest. Honesty requires that we op
Seriously. When an idea is so clearly developed that they've made movies involving the use of it, how can a corporation even think of patenting it? This is ridiculous.
I'm not even sure that there are grounds for patenting particular implementations of the glove. The idea of building a glove with electronics to measure e.g. finger bend and pressure is out there in the public domain -- there are dozens of ways to implement it and NONE of them should be patentable, not unless they contain a truly unique invention that is patentable in its own right for e.g. measuring the bend. But I'm not seeing much of that.
This is just trolling. Next up -- Sony patents a socket that can be inserted in the human brain so one can play the game without any controller at all. Oh, wait, that too was invented by SF authors (plural), e.g. William Gibson. Maybe they should just put Gibson on retainer.
I have my doubts whether your example of different models for the multielectron atom is comparable to the situation with climate models. It seems more likely to me that it's more like multiple models for just one of your multielectron atom examples.
Instead of having doubts, why not look up some of the models and find out? In fact, why not read AR5's section on the statistical practices used in generating the MME and PPE and learn that they openly acknowledge the problem -- in a chapter no policy maker will ever read -- and fail to address it? The averaging process is so bad that it doesn't even adjust for the number of PPE runs produced by a model compared to other models by reweighting its contribution, so a model with only (say) ten runs contributes with the same weight as a model with 150 runs. The models in CMIP5 aren't even independent. They average as if there are 36, but 7 groups utterly dominate the space by running 2, 3, or even 4 models that are "slightly different" (but not perturbations of a single model -- we're talking different code segments and algorithms). Outside of that, there is a huge amount of code sharing. There aren't 36 "independent" models contributing, it is more like 7, or 10, although it is difficult even to estimate statistical dependencies in this context.
The models themselves are very likely written and by people working in good faith, sure. But the stuff that is done to the results in order to produce the SPM is a political travesty, not statistical science.
BTW, just FYI I don't "deny" that CO2 causes atmospheric warming due to the greenhouse effect. I often argue(d) the contrary on list/blogs I participated in. As a condensed matter physicist, I have run large scale thermodynamic simulations and have taught the laws of thermodynamics for decades. I have Grant Petty's book on atmospheric radiative physics sitting about a foot from my right elbow, and have worked through it several times. I teach graduate and undergraduate electrodynamics and have taught quantum mechanics. I've made my own fits of the data from the last 166 years (HadCRUT goes back to 1850, although the ACKNOWLEDGED errors back then make the data nearly useless, and IMO they underestimate the error by a factor of 2-3). And yes, my simple physics-based one-significant-parameter model outperforms CMIP5 both singly and collectively, at least as far as global temperature is concerned. It is a direct, empirical fit of the logarithmic warming as a non-lagged function of CO2 concentration, and yields an estimate of TCS of around 1.8 C/doubling of CO2, well under the claims of AR-X for any value of X, and it is still quite possibly high.
There are creditable papers out now suggesting that net feedbacks, which are used without exception to amplify the warming expected from CO2 alone, might be zero (or even net negative). The direct warming from CO2 is expected to be around 1 C per doubling -- all the rest is feedback in a system that we don't properly understand with parameters that directly control the feedback. It is a confirmation bias paradise, a playground where even somebody who is quite honest can easily fool themselves into making an egregious prediction that agrees with their prior beliefs.
You understand that even for a single model the the final output is a result of a number of model runs combined together, don't you?
Of course. But it remains to be proven that the average or variance of many PPE runs is a meaningful quantity period -- especially when the variation is usually so broad as to make the envelope almost useless, especially when "nature" is (for most of the models) out at the extreme edges of the envelope, especially when if one looks at e.g. the autocorrelation times inherent in the models they are usually egregiously wrong indicating that they are failing the fluctuation-dissipation theorem and have, unsurprisingly, the wrong dissipative structure at all relevant timescales. But do you understand these things?
Arguing that we don't expect agreement in less than 30 years, in addition to moving goalposts yet again by yet another decade (making the models safely non-falsifiable and allowing people to continue to use them to direct the expenditure of a few hundred billion dollars over much shorter timeframes) does not count as evidence that the models are right, does it?
Let me give you an analogy from physics. Let's consider three models for the multielectron atom. One is Hartree, only the crudest of correlation, no exchange. One is Hartree-Fock, with crude correlation, no exchange, both basically single electron mean field theories except Hartree-Fock includes one kind of two electron correlation. One is (say) Kohn-Sham density functional theory.
Now let's do what climate scientists are doing. They generate 14 Hartree models, written by 8 different groups, using data from the low part of the periodic table to semi-empirically adjust some parameters. They add to this 14 more Hartree-Fock models, also adjusted in various ways, produced by 10 more groups with some overlap. They throw in 8 LDF models, which are intrinsically semi-phenomenological, but, a bit more sanely fit over a longer range.
Now lets use them all to predict e.g. ground state energies, spectra, whatever, for the entire periodic table. And just for grins, we'll flat average the results and call that not "our best guess, but probably with huge errors" but a valid prediction. In fact, we'll claim that reality must lie within the envelope of the predictions, because it does -- barely -- for the first 20 or so elements.
If you did this in actual physics or quantum chemistry, you'd be laughed out of the room. All of these are single electron models. All of them underestimate the electron hole (although LDF models can by this point in time do pretty well -- but remember, you aren't allowed to keep only the models that are actually WORKING, because if you do you'll predict far too low a ground state energy for the politically correct narrative that basically says that all of that nasty old multi-electron microscopic correlation energy is adequately represented by the models in the high part of the periodic table where, we can pretend, nobody has looked yet. If you took the results of these models and used them to predict chemistry or quantum electronics and invested real money in the silly predictions, you'd a) go broke; and b) never work in the field again.
The point being that the average of an "ensemble" of ordinary models in physics in no sense averages over "random" perturbations in some "space of possible models" in a way that is likely to converge in some mean to reality. It's a silly concept. It's just plain wrong.
Now justify doing it not for comparatively simple stuff, stuff where maybe we can use common sense to limit our trust of the results and pull some small useful bits out of what is a work in progress, but in the case of the hardest computational physics problem ever attempted, one where we know we are 30 magnitudes shy of the correct integration scale, one where we know that the underlying dynamical system is nonlinear and chaotic.
You get there in the first place by using the light sail to speed up or slow down in your orbit around the sun, NOT by lifting straight out. You speed up by reflecting light at a vector that increases your speed, slow down by reflecting it in the other direction.
Nobody stops in space, unless they want to fall into the sun. You just match up orbital speeds and directions (sometimes for orbits around orbiting objects).
Slashdot Mirror
The big question will be whether or not it takes the desktop while there is still a desktop to take...
Not an issue from my point of view. I abandoned Windows somewhere back there around the 3.2 to whatever transition. At this point Steam is gradually making even the thorny games issue moot, although it is still not the case that all games run on linux too (sadly) and there are still lots of games that don't run on steam (and which then require superpowers to get to run on linux).
The two things that still ensure a MS lock are:
* Their stranglehold on the pre-installed OS market. Either one preinstalls Windows on "all" the new systems you sell, or the price per copy for the users that do want it ensures that you cannot compete, and as long as the vast majority of systems sold are Windows by the "requirements" of the purchaser, this will not change. That's what is so interesting -- users are pissed enough about Win8+ that this percentage is actually dropping. Somewhere in there is a critical point where major resellers will actually see marginal gains in selling systems preinstalled with linux (or no OS at all) compared to having to pay the premium for Windows and pass it on as a "tax" to their clients. We're still not there, though, and honestly I doubt that we are particularly close. Call me when we get Windows down to maybe 67% and falling...
* The sad truth that there are still plenty of business desktop applications that are only available for Windows. Often mission critical ones. An auxiliary truth is that even if a linux version DOES exist, if you use it you are on your own, because the "MCSE"'s who (on a good day with a tail wind) "support" the application are actually revealed as the idiots they often are the first time you ask a question you don't already know the answer to better than they do...
Things that threaten it? IF linux ever successfully makes a truly transparent layering of the OS to the point where one can install Win apps fully automagically and have them "just run" with all library support available, current, and functional, then it would truly be a war. Games would stop being an issue at all. And so would those mission critical apps. Their windows versions might well suck, but they'd suck on linux the same way that they suck on Windows and a Windows support team "might" be able to provide at least some support without having to actually understand things like networking and library support. Containerization might actually make this a reality before I die of old age -- or not. This is the kind of thing that could easily be the tipping point. If one can install e.g. MS Office on linux by just doing it and have it work perfectly, then one doesn't have to deal with training office staff to use OOffice instead after they went and took an actual class in MSO and are terrified of having to learn something different. Or use an EHR written for Windows. Or use an office DB-driven app for inventory and POS that simply doesn't exist for linux transparently on Linux, install it and it works.
Only a little bit of this could convince DEVELOPERS that Windows is a bigger PITA to support than it is worth, especially if they can use a really good toolkit to do the containerizing so a single build just does it.
Probably a fantasy for years yet, but it is hard to say. I suspect this is the plan of Red Hat and hence a major factor driving the future development of linux, but we'll see...
I think if you calculated the amount of water that could be desalinated from a football size array of solar panels, you would be surprised how little it it.
You mean, compared to simply building a solar distilling plant with the same floating plastic? Could it possibly be less efficient to collect solar energy at a penalty of (say) 90% and use that energy at an additional penalty to desalinate water no matter how you try to do it than it is to take close to 100% of the energy -- including the infrared and UV -- and simply heat up a black sheet with a thin skin of water over it and use cooler water circulated up from depth by a very small solar power to condense the water vapor cooking off of the top so it can be collected?
Solar stills have been around for a long time. You can buy them online. They often are included in life raft equipment. A 24" floating solar still can produce around 1.4 L of fresh water in an overcast day, more than that on a sunny day, and doesn't even use cooler water from under the surface layer to enhance the condensation rate. If we assume 1 foot in radius per 1.5 Q, that's pi square feet per 1.5 Q. A football field is 300x300 \approx pi x 30000, so it should produce 30,000 x 1.5 q = 45,000 Q/day in cloudy conditions, more in sunny ones. That' a bit over 10,000 gallons/day, and needs solar cells or alternative power only to pump the resulting water from the collector to somewhere else.
Now, is that only a "little"? Depends on what you want it for. That's enough for quite a few houses or people. Not enough to do much irrigation in a very hot climate, but it is not nothing, either. But there are a lot of football field sized areas in the ocean, and a direct side effect of this is the cooling of the ocean underneath, which can have either good or bad ecological effects but in moderation probably mostly good.
rgb
To do that you have to look at the history of climates to see what the patterns are in the first place.
I fully agree.
http://www.mercurynews.com/sci...
And the last drought was due to a strong La Nina, as they often are. California has had horrendous droughts, some of which have lasted for centuries, over the last 2000 years. Climates always are changing, and California's has actually been comparatively benign (for California) for most of the last 160 years, with the exception of the Great Dust Bowl years and a few other minidroughts that are more or less identical to the one just ended, or at least paused, by the strong El Nino.
The problem with the AGW assertions -- a problem so severe that they changed the entire assertion to ACC ("climate change", not "global warming") is that it is very, very difficult to separate anecdotes from statistically meaningful evidence. Indeed, the only other human discipline that seems to incorporate a worse rate of anecdotal assertion as statistical truth is -- maybe -- health care. Maybe not! A second, closely related problem is the near impossibility of separating out causal factors for any statistically meaningful change that is observed. Is the CA drought caused by or part of -- note the separate assertions:
a) Anthropogenic (specifically, caused by anthropogenic CO2, not other anthropogenic silliness like land use change or oversubscribing the water supply ten times over)
b) Global (not local -- part of a global, statistically discernible pattern and not a local anecdote)
c) Warming and/or Climate Change?
How can one even begin to answer this question? Is the drought different in magnitude, duration, timing, from any of the ten odd droughts that have occurred over the period of scientific records? Is it exceptional on the basis of e.g. tree ring data? Even if "exceptional", is it truly a statistical outlier or just at the level of statistical noise and the imperfection of records, truly indistinguishable from many of the past droughts? Is it part of a pattern of increasing drought? And even if it is exceptional, part of a pattern, an outlier, is it caused by anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the specific sense that if humans had done everything else that they did to California -- tap the available water to support far more people than the land should support, plant huge farms, cover vast stretches of countryside with roads and malls and houses -- but done it without burning anything so CO2 was still order of 300 ppm, there would be no La Nina associated droughts, or those droughts would not be so severe?
We have answers to some of these questions. The drought was not particularly exceptional, and its impact was greatly enhanced by non-CO2 (but anthropogenic) factors, specifically the fact that California is carrying far more people than it should given its history of being mostly desert for most of the last 2000 years. We have no possible way to answer others, specifically the attribution to anthropogenic CO2.
But that never stops the media, politicians, and even some scientists who should know better from doing it anyway. The study in the top article is remarkable in that it states something that most people have long since observed and noted even without the help of "Science". The climate today is far better than it was 60 years ago, or 100 years ago, or 150 years ago. It is much closer to a climate "optimum" that the Earth was during the Little Ice Age. It isn't just humans that have benefited, either. The entire biosphere is -- on average -- far better off. The planet was starved for CO2 in the middle of the Wisconsin glaciation -- levels dropped to the edge of mass extinction for certain classes of respiring plants.
Here's a thought for the day. Of the world's seven billion people, one billion will dine today courtesy of the additional plant growth d
Let's examine the real public health crisis. It is a simple matter of fact that jail is bad for your health. In fact, being arrested is bad for your health even if you don't end up going to jail as a consequence. It is also very, very bad for your economic health, as being arrested or sent to jail can cause you to lose your job and your insurance and can lead to the separation and breakup of families, which provide a robust basis for a healthy and productive life. Yet the United States in general, and Utah in particular, seem to lead the world in their persecution -- sorry, I mean "prosecution" of victimless crimes. To quote from Edward Gibbons and "The Tragedy of Victimless Crimes: https://www.prisonlegalnews.or... ,
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigor of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind – Edward Gibbon from “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”
The governor of Utah needs to get a grip. Purchasing pornography produced by consenting adults (or nowadays, often provided for free by consenting adults on the Internet) is an utterly victimless "crime" as no one is harmed by it. Masturbation is not a crime, and if anything it is probably good for you, if perhaps lonely. The making of ANY pornography without the consent of those portrayed or by violating already existing laws against child abuse or assault is already a crime, but much less so for the person purchasing it or owning it (who may be in no position to verify its provenance). Furthermore, it is already a crime right where it needs to be -- a crime committed by the maker of the pornographic image, a crime committed by a KNOWING redistributor of that image, where it is no more the responsibility of the owner or purchaser to validate an image's provenance than it is for the buyer of a car or cell phone to ascertain whether or not it was ever stolen.
Sending somebody to jail for looking at pornography so that they can -- with an appallingly high probability -- be raped, physically abused, and turned into actual criminals in our unbelievably poorly managed, expensive, and dangerous prison system as a public health issue is beyond any joke. Why don't we just cut off their hands and blind them? That way they could never again damage their health by looking at naked persons and/or causing themselves to have an orgasm while doing so. Oh, wait! That's close to what they already do in some of the most repressive regimes on the planet! Congrats to Utah for wanting to join them.
In the meantime, let's not forget the comparative health risk of possessing a pound of pot and going to jail for five years for the "crime" of possessing a pound of pot, the health risk of marrying someone of your own sex as compared to going to prison for marrying someone of your own sex, removing your bra in public versus going to jail for removing your bra in public, and so on down the line. We actively damage the health of anyone who is arrested, ever, at least statistically, but because there is a burgeoning private prison industry in the US that profits enormously from being paid to keep these dangerous criminals incarcerated and lobbies and quietly bribes accordingly to ensure an adequate supply of criminals to keep them in clover, nobody cares.
Maybe nobody DOES care. But still, dressing up an utterly victimless anti-pornography religious moral crusade as a health issue, that's just wrong. Go on and say it the way it really is, Governor. It isn't about "health", it is about God's Will and the Commandments. It's about an absurd religious mythology, imposed on others with the force of law using "health" as no more than an excuse, carefully avoiding any look at the already enormous public health burden of the millions of Americans who have been arrested and incarcerated and hence rendered virtually unemployable and uninsurable, all for committing crimes that are not, in fact, actual crimes.
rgb
Sure, but in the vicinity of the galactic center there could easily be a steady supply of infalling "stuff" -- maybe it was a three star system and a supergiant was feeding the pair of black holes as they were spiralling into one another, for example. So it is hard to rule out a surrounding plasma gas on the basis of a simple model, the assumption of completely isolated BHs, or the no-hair rule. Remember, the only way we can sort-of-observe black holes directly at all (e.g. Cygnus X-1) is by the x-rays given off by infalling plasma, so it is pretty hard to claim that black holes are never surrounded by an infalling plasma. The interesting question is whether or not a gravity wave can carry enough energy to actually compress infalling stardust maintained as a plasma by the x-rays emitted by the infalling stuff to produce a coherence brightened pulse at all, or (equally interesting) to cause a possible neighboring supergiant to go nova as it swept across its fusion core. THAT would be some interesting "amplification", although the lag doesn't seem long enough for that to be plausible.
It's all just games (I'm a theorist myself and love to play) without any real data... and I doubt that the observational data is up to the task of differentiating the possibilities very cleanly when we cannot be certain that the two are even causally connected instead of being a coincidence. We really need triangulation, not just two LIGO sites, to at least create a MODERATELY narrow cone of possible directions instead of a very wide one indeed.
Sure. Really, one can imagine a bunch of ways for there to be a GRB in association with a black hole collapse, up to and including them not quite being black holes, or one of them not being a black hole. Imagine a neutron star collapsing into a black hole, swirling around at lightspeed in its last fatal orbits with its magnetic field going nuts! Another very interesting possibility that one could probably infer from the spectrum, maybe, would be the effect of the gravity wave itself operating at very short range on a surrounding plasma cloud, exciting it so it basically gamma ray lased (really, coherence brightening along the outgoing track of compression caused by the gravity wave). This is the sort of thing one might be able to model -- gravitational wave creating a solitonic acoustical wave that lags very slightly and that is continuously brightened in the compressed region by stimulated emission as the plasma on the rear side of the soliton emits into the soliton itself. I think there are models for this sort of thing out there already -- something like this was once proposed as a possible mechanism to describe Quasars?
rgb
Furthermore, the fallacy that you can isolate an EM beam of light from the planetary EM field is quite silly. A solar flare with its neutrinos, and charged particles (which have measurable and sometimes visible effects when interacting with the EM field of Earth), seems the most likely explanation.
OK, I'm not sure what this even means, or what it has to do with the context of the top post or the reply, as a GRB is nothing at all like light produced by solar wind interacting with the planetary EM field -- you are off by a few orders of magnitude in energy scale and wavelength, for example, let alone spectrum. I realize, AC, that you are probably posting just to accomplish -- something -- but unless that thing is to confuse the reader, you might want to clarify. For example, my eyes are excellent detectors of the electromagnetic radiation field constituting a "beam of light" from all sorts of stars including the sun, reflected light from the moon, the light from the computer screen I'm working at. They effortlessly isolate it from the "planetary electromagnetic field", which isn't even light, generally speaking. Since I live far from the poles, light of the sort you seem to describe (the Aurora Borealis) is almost never seen at night so "isolating" starlight from it is absolutely trivial.
Surely you know this -- or perhaps not, I don't know -- but granting you the benefit of the doubt, you need to make your point a lot clearer since nobody is talking about an EM beam of light in any part of the EM spectrum where there is the faintest chance of it being associated in any way with a solar event and/or the planetary field, unless you are asserting that the Sun itself exploded and we missed it. No? Then what?
rgb
...at the speed of light?
Um, not as a participant as I have no dog in either race, but you are confusing phase velocity and group velocity. If I shout in the middle of a room, detectors on both sides of the room can hear me at EXACTLY the same time. That doesn't mean that the sound wave went across the room at transluminal speeds.
A seismic wave originating inside the Earth can easily be detected at the same time at two points separated by an arbitrary distance on the Earth's surface. In that case one inverts the argument and uses the time required for the wave to propagate to determine the likely origin inside the Earth, although it takes three detectors to triangulate it. If there were three LIGO detectors separated by a large baseline, we could do a lot better than say that the wave "came from the southern hemisphere" -- we could say that it came from some narrow cone overhead OR that it came from inside of the Earth.
The gamma ray burst actually makes it a lot more likely, however, that the seismic explanation is incorrect, and one presumes that this is further bolstered by information obtained from the umpty-zillion seismographs scattered across the planet. Presumably they would have detected an S-wave earthquake event as precisely that, occurring at the same time, and with a comparatively precise interior location, and it would be very easy to determine that it was the probable cause of the LIGO signal. Granting the people who run LIGO simple competence and honesty, I'm pretty sure they ruled this out as ruling it out has to be standard operating procedure lest they call every single earthquake (of the dozens that occur in a day) a "gravitational wave". The GRB coincidence just rules it IN a bit more strongly.
So no, it isn't the speed of light that is an issue here, as an S-wave that originated in just the right place could ripple across the surface much FASTER than light. It is almost certainly the lack of coincidence with detectors designed and utilized to detect S-waves, ruling out this sort of explanation.
No, no, no. You can use it to buy bread in the morning, but you can toast it on the way home!
This is precisely my experience. Every time I've been broken into and called the police, a bored looking cop comes out, takes a statement, looks at the point of entry and then leaves, never to be heard from again. They only do this much so you can file your insurance, if you are stupid enough to file your insurance (since the insurance company will then just upgrade your risk and raise your rates enough to cover your payout plus an indefinite bleed of additional profit for them for the rest of eternity. No fingerprints. No searching area fences or eBay for your lost goods. No questioning likely suspects. If they are feeling enormously helpful, they may suggest that you get the broken lock fixed as the bad guys might come back and steal some more, and no, they aren't going to stake the joint out to find out.
Law enforcement is almost non-existent. Police are often called on to "keep the peace" -- to intervene in potentially dangerous situations involving human conflict or risk -- but they don't go out of their way to arrest anybody even then. They do arrest shoplifters, but that is because there is usually hard evidence and the perps are caught in the act. They do arrest anybody who rubs drug usage in their face and spend at least some time arresting the merely unwary. They do a decent job at pulling drunk drivers, when they catch them for obvious driving errors. Outside of that, by far -- far -- my most common interaction with Law Enforcement is getting pulled with a car tag a month out of date. Damn, they are hell on car registration. Makes me feel safe at night, knowing that no scofflaw is able to drive around without properly registered tags, unless of course they are an illegal alien without any driver's license or insurance at all driving a company truck.
Sigh.
The two laws that get en
Sure! And I know for a fact that I've used the bathroom at the same time as gay individuals who are actually interested in my sex or gender or whatever you want to call it as opposed to the other one -- some of them friends of mine. I've been hit on, gently, one or two times, easily blocked. But who the hell cares? Don't people have enough to do without worrying about this? And for the easily weirded out, which one is weirder, sharing the bathroom with a woman in drag who looks like a short, dumpy male with a crewcut or sharing the bathroom with a man in full drag who has to hike his skirt up to take a pee? The NC law now REQUIRES the latter to use the urinal right next to me. Which is fine -- I love light amusement while I'm taking a piss -- but the religious bluenoses that are pushing this silly law might want to think about permitting the drag queen to use a stall in the ladies room and put his makeup back on over there instead.
As for surgical transgender persons -- how they hell is anybody going to ever tell? Seriously! Are we supposed to grab the short dumpy person who looks like they MIGHT be XX and check his prick to see if it is surgically created? Are we going to jam a speculum up into the vagina of a tallish woman with broad shoulders who looks like she MIGHT be an XY to see if there is actually a cervix up there, or do an adam's apple check on their throat with a biopsy to ensure that it isn't cancer or a thyroid problem?
Some people just don't have enough to do, and erupt in self-righteous religious fury over nothing. This is SO much ado about nothing. The lawmakers in my state that voted for this should be ashamed, but they won't be. They're no doubt going around feeling proud of themselves for defending all the Good Christians in this state in their God Given Right to pee only with people that share their chromosomal makeup.
I wonder what they plan to do with true intersexuality? It is a medical fact that some observable degree of intersexuality occurs in something like 1 in 2 to 3 thousand births, ranging from small things up to being a full blown hermaphrodite or Klinefelter's (XXY) or XYY or...
The idiots of the religious right would like to pretend that all of this just doesn't exist, that sexual orientation in the brain "must" match the XX or XY in your chromosomes, if you are fortunate enough to have pure XX or XY chromosomes in the first place. But sex and gender identity are doubtless encoded in lots of places in our chromosomes, and we know that the way a fetus develops depends in part not only on the chromosomes but in the hormones and other biochemical cues present during development, and ALL of the systems involved in this are vulnerable to defects or accidents. A trauma or chemical imbalance in the mother could easily change the brain itself. I know the parents of a transgender (eventually) child. The child was nominally male, but never exhibited male development patterns. They knew there was a problem when the child was five years old, long before there is anything sexual involved, and long before one could accuse the child of "choosing" to be a sinner by behaving like a little girl instead of a little boy.
If anything, transgender persons and gay persons deserve the compassion and sympathy of the "normals" of the world. It is a lot harder to be gay or TG than it is to be normal. Some of that is just because that's the way it is, just like it is harder to have a cleft palette than it is not to, or harder to have a great big birthmark across your face than not to. But for gay and TG persons, we make it a lot harder even so. A lot harder.
They (the lawmakers who pushed through this piece of crap legislation) should be so very ashamed. I'm an atheist, but Jesus preached (if anything) compassion. Buddha preached compassion. This legislation is not compassionate -- it is the opposite of compassionate.
rgb
One more thing, I see you calling Muslim societies "malignant"... I would *love* to dip into the subject of the "Intolerance of Intolerance" found thriving in the left wing of American politics, but that is a topic for another time... I find your words for their society to be quite... intolerant.
Not all Muslim societies or individuals are malignant, but the Quran itself is. That is a simple matter of fact, clearly visible to anyone who reads it, including Muslims. They simple have to let their eyes glide over the parts where Allah promises to burn the skins off of all unbelievers, then regrow the skin, then burn it off again, forever. So is much of the Bible, don't get me wrong. In fact, I have little patience with any of the Abrahamic religions -- I consider the Book of Mormon to be something between a sorry joke and an enormously successful con, on those days that I can't make myself see it as the first work of American science fiction. I am indeed intolerant of all of the above. And no, I don't agree with the widely held perception that it is somehow OK to use one entire system of epistemology for science and matters of fact and a second one for religion where anybody's opinion is as good as anybody's else because there is no possible way to decide between competing religious propositions, any more than it is possible to decide upon whether or not pink unicorns are real. The best that we can say is that nobody has ever reliably observed and reported a real pink unicorn, a little good reason to believe in one. If a little child wants to believe in it, that's fine, but to openly encourage this sort of behavior in fully grown adults is not virtuous.
I wasn't advocating for tolerance in the issue of rest rooms. I was simply pointing out that there is no rational reason to enforce bathroom dimorphism by law. That won't, and hasn't, stopped people from doing it anyway, any more than the clear constitutional prohibition of mixing religion and state hasn't stopped people from putting "In God We Trust" on national currency, any more than one can walk onto a public beach and swim naked in the sea. I wasn't even advocating for "human rights", since those are a human invention, although a lovely one. But the more irrational elements we enforce as law, the more irrational our society, and irrationality has a price. Sometimes an enormous one.
to having laws or societies forbidding contact between the sexes while taking a shit or piss.
It causes harm to societal order. That in itself is cause for regulation and is a much higher priority in most people's minds than you may believe.
It does no such thing. For one thing, it doesn't happen. There isn't any "contact between the sexes" when I shit or piss in the same room with other males. I mean, eeeew! For another, I've been married for a rather long time and believe me, there is very little "contact between the sexes" even when one is married to the other person while they are eliminating waste products. Again, eeeew. Now showering together, maybe, at least if one is washing the other person's erogenous zones. But we're not talking about public showers, and even public all-sex showers aren't a threat to societal disorder anywhere but in the minds of people who live in the fantasy world where nakedness is something to be ashamed of or so sexually stimulating that they cannot help but rape, rape, rape.
Exactly the same argument is used by much of the Muslim world to justify forcing women to completely cover up before they leave their father's, brother's, or husband's house. Oh My, the sight of an un-burka'd woman causes harm to the social order! Or rather, it does no such thing anywhere except in the malignant culture that makes up such an absurd rule and teaches its males that it is OK to rape any woman that dresses otherwise because they must be a whore and are asking for it. Which is all part of the global, and I do mean global, cultural prejudice against women. Having two bathrooms is a milder expression of exactly the same thing, and perpetuates exactly the same cultural myths, that men are all rapists who can't control themselves if they just know that there is a woman behind this locked stall door taking a piss, that women all need "protection" from those transgender would-be-rapists, that men's dignity is assaulted by women listening to them fart and grunt while on the pot (the latter is true, of course, but irrelevant as NOBODY is dignified on the pot).
rgb
I think you're half right. Some prejudice is irrational, but some is rational. Or at the least it may be rational to great swathes of people, and irrational to a small group.
I do not think that word means what you think it means. Or even those words (prejudice and rational/irrational). It may be the custom of a society not to permit a woman to expose her naked breasts in public, it may be against the law for a woman to expose her naked breasts in public as determined by majority vote enforcing the custom, but it is not and will never be rational to have either the custom or the law no matter how many people agree with it. There is, quite literally no harm outside of cultural inventions and taboos and humans expressing unsane behavior in exposing the human breast, male or female to the gaze of other humans. There is no survival or evolutionary advantage to covering it up outside of obvious and irrelevant things like preventing skin cancer if it is sunny and you are fair skinned, staying warm if it is really cold out, avoiding age related droop for a bit longer if you have very large breasts. Many cultures have existed that did not have this cultural taboo, and they did not fail because of it.
Similarly it may be the custom to avoid sharing bathrooms with roughly half of the human race (unless you happen to be related to them in which case it is OK) but it isn't rational. Some customs may be rational enough -- customs that prohibit killing your neighbors if they play loud music late at night have some point to them -- but not this one. First of all, nobody parades around in a public bathroom naked, male or female. Second, there is a strong custom against "looking" at anybody in a public bathroom, male or female, already -- we try to give each other what privacy we can instead of (for men) craning our necks to see how big the penis is of the guy at the next urinal over, and feel uncomfortable if they guy in the next stall invades our space or stares at our junk, no matter how our self-imagined "genders" align.
Third, what is there to see? I literally cannot remember seeing anybody's genitalia in a public bathroom (as a male) in spite of the fact that urinals are basically standup affairs with no real visual barriers. Women use sit-down toilets in regular stalls, and you wouldn't even know a woman was in a men's room unless you watched her going out or coming in. Nobody can see anything "interesting" through a bathroom stall wall, nobody can see through my pants from the backside when I'm standing up at a urinal. You are no more "exposed" than you are walking down the street and visible only from the rear, and are LESS exposed than you are seen from the front any time, and are WAY more exposed to your spouse if you are married as most toilets have no stalls and married people usually share bathrooms without even thinking about it, at least once they are past their honeymoon. Ditto twice over for women: unless you have x-ray vision, you aren't going to see a damned thing "exciting" in a woman's bathroom and if you have x-ray vision, who cares about bathrooms in the first place as there is no privacy no matter what?
Having sex/gender segregated public bathrooms makes ZERO sense, and is (I'm sure) a major additional expense. The only group that it advantages is males, since men's rooms have both urinals and stalls and the latter take up less room and allow for a better match to the frequency of urination vs defecation and thereby allow men in and out with less wait time when the facility is crowded. A double size omnisex public bathrooom with the right balance of urinals and stalls would be cheaper, would functionally reduce female wait time by making the often-idle stalls of a men's room available, and would only slightly increase male wait time. All other sensitivities over the issue are cosmically, incredibly stupid and irrational, even as they are very real and connected to our bizarre cultural rituals and beliefs about sex, court
I'd mod you up for pointing out the obvious if I had mod points, but pointing out the obvious to the oblivious never works. Scenario a) is an XY who identifies as female using a female bathroom, and feeling more comfortable, but at the expense of all the other female users of the bathroom feeling uncomfortable for a variety of reasons (not commenting on whether or not they are good reasons -- that's like commenting on whether or not laws requiring clothes in public are based on good reasons as part of a spectrum that ends up with women wearing burkas lest they make men feel "uncomfortable" and helpless to avoid raping or beating the women in response to their visible sexuality). One person is more comfortable, many are less comfortable (if they know about it -- a TG XY dressed like a female or who has undergone surgery may not even be identifiable as an XY making the whole argument moot unless people have to show a birth certificate to get into a public bathroom). Scenario b) is the XY who identifies as a female using a male bathroom, which makes him/her less comfortable but leaves the other male users as comfortable as they ever are, unless the XY/female is dressed as a female or has had surgery to make them physically conform to female, in which case it might make everybody uncomfortable, just as it might if an XX dressed up as a male but still obviously a female might make them uncomfortable.
In terms of total human comfort given our irrational prejudices that give rise to the discomfort in the first place it clearly minimizes discomfort to require people use the sex-restricted bathroom that conforms to their physical body and dress, not their XX/XY status per se. One can argue that humans shouldn't feel any more discomfort sharing a bathroom with strangers of different sex or gender identity than they do sharing it with strangers of the same sex or gender identity, and you might be right, but that won't stop people who do from feeling the discomfort. One can also say, quite truthfully, that if I went in to teach my class today wearing nothing but skin, it shouldn't be the business of any of the students or my employers as my personal appearance is my business, not theirs, or one can say equally truthfully that women in certain Muslim cultures should not be punished for exactly the same thing (at a different point on the spectrum) by not wearing a full-body covering drapery in public or that one shouldn't have to rub blue mud on your belly to fit in with quaint native or religious customs anywhere in the world, but that won't stop people from defending their prejudices and silliness as if it is a god-given right and the only way the world should ever work.
We will now get back to the chorus of voices who, as always, fail to address the broader issue of whether social rules, customs or laws are ever fully sane.
rgb
Bought them in anticipation of an electric car in a few years.
Hmmm, somewhere in there one has to do some arithmetic. 1 Gallon of Gasoline = 33 kW-hours and will drive a Toyota Prius 50 miles on a good day traveling slightly downhill (I know this for a fact as I own two). Most "normal" subcompact cars it will move no more than 30 miles. A Tesla model S sports measurements of 90 to 100 MPGe (34 to 38 kW-hr/100 miles). A largish household solar panel system might be 5 kW peak capacity (enough to provide order of 24 kW-hr in 24 hours with average-ish insolation). This system might cost $25K to $35K installed.
You will note that if one diverted 100% of the output of a solar collection system that cost almost as much as the car itself into charging the car's battery, one would accrue energy in its battery at "rate" of roughly 60 miles (range) per day. If one is running a household that consumes most of that, the overcapacity is all you can accumulate. 10% overcapacity would give you 6 miles per day. To drive an average of 20 miles a day (ballpark average driving for commuters) you'd need at least 30% overcapacity on a system of this general scale, which would cost an additional $10K to install. $10K would buy 5000 gallons of gasoline at current prices, more like 6000 or 7000 gallons if one is honest and adds in the cost of money amortized over the driving period. In my Prius, at 45 miles/gallon sustained, 6000 x 45 = 270,000 miles, which is ballpark the total expected range of a car over its entire lifetime. The models of the Prius that are comparable in interior size and comfort and that get this average mileage are currently around $24,000.
So, one can buy a Tesla 3 at $35K for the car and either buy $10K worth of solar panels to be able to drive 20 miles round trip per day with no additional expenditure plus pay for the money borrowed to install the solar for an additional $5K for a total cost of $50K for roughly 250,000 total miles driven OR I can buy a Toyota Prius for $25K and pay for gas out of pocket for the lifetime of the car, in which case I'll pay around $35K total for the same 250,000 miles and can use the leftover money to pay for hookers and cocaine. (Or I can buy any one of a number of cars that cost less than $20K but get around 30 mpg, pay roughly $17K for gasoline to reach 250,000 miles, and come in close to the Prius, or I can pay far less than any of these for a car used for a year or so and come in even lower than any of these estimates but not have a shiny new car to impress the hookers with).
If I do NOT have an extra 7 or 8 kW-hr generating capacity and buy the Tesla, then of course I have to pay for electricity the hard way. This will make the cost of driving one mile on a Tesla at (say) 36 kW-hr/100 miles highly variable, depending on how much your state inflates the cost of electricity. In Hawaii, electricity is awesomely expensive. In about half of the US, it is more than $0.16 kwh and the cost per mile on a Tesla will be roughly 6 cents. But it is also highly variable -- in NC it is closer to $0.10 per kwh and the cost per mile is more like 4 cents. For comparison (although gas prices and gas taxes are also highly variable) in NC at current prices a Prius costs just over 4 cents per mile in gasoline to drive and is close to a wash with a Tesla. In Virginia next door, gas taxes are lower and the Prius matches or even wins a bit relative to the Tesla. California and New England have very high electrical prices and the Tesla loses ground. But in California in particular, gasoline prices are inflated to almost 50% higher than they are in NC and close to the way electricity prices are inflated, so they come in close to a wash again. But one can fill a Prius in roughly 2 minutes at a gas pump anywhere across the country, where "filling" a car that requires 80 odd kWh of electricity to fully charge does not, not, not take 2 minutes, and in fact cannot be done at all in 99% of the countryside where one might want to drive.
Personally, I do
I was going to say, where can I get one of these? First MS product in forever I've actually wanted to buy. I imagine I could use electroshock to moderate the Neo-Nazi bit, but then again, dressed in a bit of virtual leather, shiny black boots... what's not to like?
... except for salt. I guess salt has never been genetically modified compared to (say) 1000 to 5000 years ago, perhaps because it doesn't contain any genes.
Everything else -- arguably including wild game -- has been modified by humans manipulating its genes, most often by the tried and true method of waiting for "nature" to cause a mutation and then selectively breeding to stabilize it in a domesticated population.
So General Foods etc should retaliate by simply labelling all food products as having been modified relative to their "natural" state prior to the existence of mankind. Then consumers will get bored looking at the label (and possibly might be educated about the meaning of "GMO" relative to the biological human universe). End of problem.
Your data is boring, but I'm a space alien terrorist who smuggles vast quantities of drugs in from outer space while maintaining my part time job as secretary at all of the Illuminati meetings in between outing Hillary Clinton's love notes to Donald Trump from high school (the ones where she says "I love your ... fingers!"). Up to now, I've had to keep all of my written records of my activities (illegal on seventeen worlds) using things like LaTeX and ordinary text editors, and whenever I wanted to convert them to EPUB format, well, let's just say it hasn't been pretty! But now that Google supports EPUB all I have to do is port the documents from text plus latex markup into some silly WYSIWYG editor and I can save them into text plus EPUB markup, with the extra bonus that I can securely access them from any of my personal digital devices on the cloud! This is so exciting!
I'm sure nothing can go wrong. Everybody knows that the cloud is totally secure, and the NSA is completely bound by the constitution to find a judge willing to issue a warrant accusing me of being a space alien terrorist drug smuggling traitor to the US before they can go through my private documents. Besides, the NSA is controlled by the Illuminati.
Google Docs, Here I Come!
rgb
Time will tell who is right. The problem is if the climate scientists are right then we just move that much further down the path before we do anything about it which makes the problem that much worse.
There are several problems. One is that by making energy more expensive, we are lining the pockets of the very "bad guys" that are supposedly "destroying the planet". Who benefits most from the climate hysteria? Try Exxon. Big power companies. BP. Power companies don't give a shit how they make the electricity they sell you -- they are public utilities and make a more or less fixed margin regardless. What they do care about is the PRICE. Higher price makes for a higher MARGINAL profit, as a percentage. Power companies have made out like gangbusters as we've take step after step to raise the price of electrical power. So have coal companies and oil companies and nuclear and...
Another is that as we divert billions of dollars into horribly expensive power sources with very long amortization times, divert tens, hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide into what amounts to boutique power supplies that only the rich (that's us) can afford, we are literally damning the poorest 1/3 of the world's population to continue to live in 17th century misery, without clean water, sewage treatment, energy for factories and jobs and transportation, and all of the other benefits you and I take for granted because hey, they are a light switch away. Hell, at this point I can turn the light switches on and off with my cell phone. We are de facto killing several million people a year, most of the children, by spending a fortune on a windmill that only produces power intermittantly so that one has to maintain almost the same total fossil fuel generation capability as before to have a reliable grid instead of spending the same amount to bring the third world a century or two forward in their standard of living.
A third is that it fundamentally corrupts the trust people have in scientists, or will if the climate continues to diverge from the hysterical predictions. And make no mistake about it. It is diverging from those predictions, and has been for somewhere between 17 and 25 years now. People who should know better have made absolutely absurd predictions about "no more snow in winter by 2010", "collapse of ice pack", "sea level rise of half a meter by 2012" -- seriously, it is easy to go back and find the "headlines" of these jokers -- none of which have come even close to true. SLR is a perfect case in point. Total SLR over the last 140 years has been on the order of ten, count them ten, whole inches. An average of less than a tenth of an inch per year. The current rate is not spectacular -- I own a house that is about a meter above high tide in the mid-atlantic and this does matter to me -- it is invisible. It is so slow that whole generations don't even notice it, lost in the daily tide. Yet if you listen to the media, you'd think Florida is about to disappear under the sea.
Florida is PROJECTED to disappear under the sea. IF -- and it is a big if -- the models that are currently failing stop failing, IF Antarctica suddenly starts melting (for the last few years Antarctic ice coverage has been at an all time high), IF the high Greenland icepack actually rises above freezing for more than ten minutes every decade, IF the projected Maunder-level minimum in solar output doesn't occur. People -- and sadly, this includes you -- confuse the predictions of a model with reality, with science in progress (which is what climate science even more than almost any other scientific discipline really is) from "settled science". Not even gravitation is settled science, but it is a damn sight more settled than climate science. At some point a Bayesian analysis of all of the priors conditioning the predictions renders the conclusion as meaningful as a coin flip.
Climate scientists are risking the credibility of science itself. Science should be honest. Honesty requires that we op
Teledildonics? But what about telefellatronics?
Great word, actually.
rgb
Seriously. When an idea is so clearly developed that they've made movies involving the use of it, how can a corporation even think of patenting it? This is ridiculous.
I'm not even sure that there are grounds for patenting particular implementations of the glove. The idea of building a glove with electronics to measure e.g. finger bend and pressure is out there in the public domain -- there are dozens of ways to implement it and NONE of them should be patentable, not unless they contain a truly unique invention that is patentable in its own right for e.g. measuring the bend. But I'm not seeing much of that.
This is just trolling. Next up -- Sony patents a socket that can be inserted in the human brain so one can play the game without any controller at all. Oh, wait, that too was invented by SF authors (plural), e.g. William Gibson. Maybe they should just put Gibson on retainer.
rgb
I have my doubts whether your example of different models for the multielectron atom is comparable to the situation with climate models. It seems more likely to me that it's more like multiple models for just one of your multielectron atom examples.
Instead of having doubts, why not look up some of the models and find out? In fact, why not read AR5's section on the statistical practices used in generating the MME and PPE and learn that they openly acknowledge the problem -- in a chapter no policy maker will ever read -- and fail to address it? The averaging process is so bad that it doesn't even adjust for the number of PPE runs produced by a model compared to other models by reweighting its contribution, so a model with only (say) ten runs contributes with the same weight as a model with 150 runs. The models in CMIP5 aren't even independent. They average as if there are 36, but 7 groups utterly dominate the space by running 2, 3, or even 4 models that are "slightly different" (but not perturbations of a single model -- we're talking different code segments and algorithms). Outside of that, there is a huge amount of code sharing. There aren't 36 "independent" models contributing, it is more like 7, or 10, although it is difficult even to estimate statistical dependencies in this context.
The models themselves are very likely written and by people working in good faith, sure. But the stuff that is done to the results in order to produce the SPM is a political travesty, not statistical science.
BTW, just FYI I don't "deny" that CO2 causes atmospheric warming due to the greenhouse effect. I often argue(d) the contrary on list/blogs I participated in. As a condensed matter physicist, I have run large scale thermodynamic simulations and have taught the laws of thermodynamics for decades. I have Grant Petty's book on atmospheric radiative physics sitting about a foot from my right elbow, and have worked through it several times. I teach graduate and undergraduate electrodynamics and have taught quantum mechanics. I've made my own fits of the data from the last 166 years (HadCRUT goes back to 1850, although the ACKNOWLEDGED errors back then make the data nearly useless, and IMO they underestimate the error by a factor of 2-3). And yes, my simple physics-based one-significant-parameter model outperforms CMIP5 both singly and collectively, at least as far as global temperature is concerned. It is a direct, empirical fit of the logarithmic warming as a non-lagged function of CO2 concentration, and yields an estimate of TCS of around 1.8 C/doubling of CO2, well under the claims of AR-X for any value of X, and it is still quite possibly high.
There are creditable papers out now suggesting that net feedbacks, which are used without exception to amplify the warming expected from CO2 alone, might be zero (or even net negative). The direct warming from CO2 is expected to be around 1 C per doubling -- all the rest is feedback in a system that we don't properly understand with parameters that directly control the feedback. It is a confirmation bias paradise, a playground where even somebody who is quite honest can easily fool themselves into making an egregious prediction that agrees with their prior beliefs.
rgb
You understand that even for a single model the the final output is a result of a number of model runs combined together, don't you?
Of course. But it remains to be proven that the average or variance of many PPE runs is a meaningful quantity period -- especially when the variation is usually so broad as to make the envelope almost useless, especially when "nature" is (for most of the models) out at the extreme edges of the envelope, especially when if one looks at e.g. the autocorrelation times inherent in the models they are usually egregiously wrong indicating that they are failing the fluctuation-dissipation theorem and have, unsurprisingly, the wrong dissipative structure at all relevant timescales. But do you understand these things?
Arguing that we don't expect agreement in less than 30 years, in addition to moving goalposts yet again by yet another decade (making the models safely non-falsifiable and allowing people to continue to use them to direct the expenditure of a few hundred billion dollars over much shorter timeframes) does not count as evidence that the models are right, does it?
Let me give you an analogy from physics. Let's consider three models for the multielectron atom. One is Hartree, only the crudest of correlation, no exchange. One is Hartree-Fock, with crude correlation, no exchange, both basically single electron mean field theories except Hartree-Fock includes one kind of two electron correlation. One is (say) Kohn-Sham density functional theory.
Now let's do what climate scientists are doing. They generate 14 Hartree models, written by 8 different groups, using data from the low part of the periodic table to semi-empirically adjust some parameters. They add to this 14 more Hartree-Fock models, also adjusted in various ways, produced by 10 more groups with some overlap. They throw in 8 LDF models, which are intrinsically semi-phenomenological, but, a bit more sanely fit over a longer range.
Now lets use them all to predict e.g. ground state energies, spectra, whatever, for the entire periodic table. And just for grins, we'll flat average the results and call that not "our best guess, but probably with huge errors" but a valid prediction. In fact, we'll claim that reality must lie within the envelope of the predictions, because it does -- barely -- for the first 20 or so elements.
If you did this in actual physics or quantum chemistry, you'd be laughed out of the room. All of these are single electron models. All of them underestimate the electron hole (although LDF models can by this point in time do pretty well -- but remember, you aren't allowed to keep only the models that are actually WORKING, because if you do you'll predict far too low a ground state energy for the politically correct narrative that basically says that all of that nasty old multi-electron microscopic correlation energy is adequately represented by the models in the high part of the periodic table where, we can pretend, nobody has looked yet. If you took the results of these models and used them to predict chemistry or quantum electronics and invested real money in the silly predictions, you'd a) go broke; and b) never work in the field again.
The point being that the average of an "ensemble" of ordinary models in physics in no sense averages over "random" perturbations in some "space of possible models" in a way that is likely to converge in some mean to reality. It's a silly concept. It's just plain wrong.
Now justify doing it not for comparatively simple stuff, stuff where maybe we can use common sense to limit our trust of the results and pull some small useful bits out of what is a work in progress, but in the case of the hardest computational physics problem ever attempted, one where we know we are 30 magnitudes shy of the correct integration scale, one where we know that the underlying dynamical system is nonlinear and chaotic.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Not do
You get there in the first place by using the light sail to speed up or slow down in your orbit around the sun, NOT by lifting straight out. You speed up by reflecting light at a vector that increases your speed, slow down by reflecting it in the other direction.
Nobody stops in space, unless they want to fall into the sun. You just match up orbital speeds and directions (sometimes for orbits around orbiting objects).
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