Whatever the heuristics are between the "beings", the act of decision is the same. And that's why it's not a magical "human right of free will". AI Free Will is a snap. We're just desperately afraid of it. See T2, "If the wrong heuristic gets in there..." - well that's what sociopathic killers are. Humans running a badly flawed HumanOS.
Well, there is one small difference. With an AI, one can always, precisely, deconstruct why and how the system makes the decision that it makes, unless it uses truly random sources to distribute choices over some space at some point. Heinlein recognized the importance of unpredictability in free will long, long before the top article, and his AIs always had lots of random number generators built in even though he couldn't precisely articulate why. Random number generators of course, are not random at all, so one has to resort to quantum sources or entropic sources where one is truly missing the information needed to predict the decision and where there is a probability that, given precisely the same initial conditions, they AI would decide differently.
With a human intelligence (HI), one cannot ever deconstruct why and how the system makes the decision that it makes. It is "random" in at least the sense of being unpredictable at countless levels involving the whole non-Markovian process of evolution from the very first cell through to the present organism making the decision. Worse, even the human itself doesn't know why it makes the decision it makes, not really. Chocolate or Vanilla ice cream today? "Chocolate because I like chocolate more than vanilla" is ultimately semantically null, because one cannot answer why one likes chocolate more than vanilla, and no matter what set of reasons one cooks up for it the ultimate answer is associated with a subjective response that is a sublime blend of (evolutionarily and experientially) preprogrammed stuff, experience, and the "mood of the moment", utterly unpredictable.
At least say "that I think that you will have to answer for. Honesty is important, don't you think?
I think that there is nothing there to answer to, simply because there isn't any evidence that there is. That doesn't prove that there isn't, BTW, it just seems unlikely given what I know about the brain, physics, and so on. You have to postulate an entire unseen, unexperienced super-Universe with its own physics and so on to be right. Sure, maybe, but I have to say -- I doubt it. Why would I believe such an invention without any evidence that it exists? It's like believing in "fairyland" or believing in middle earth.
Evidence is important. It's what helps us differentiate between fantasy and reality. I'll bet that you are very good at differentiating the Hindu fantasy or Norse fantasy from reality. It's a shame that you can't manage it for the Christian fantasy.
All assertions are not the same, people don't exist in a vacuum with no independent knowledge. Unlike being brainwashed into having faith in religion, atheists have decided based on facts and evidence that there is no god.
Probably is no god. Give us evidence and we will cheerfully increase our degree of belief. Jesus is welcome to manifest himself in my den at any moment and provide me with direct evidence of his existence and omnipotent omnibenevolent deity, although he and I will have to have a serious discussion about the necessity of the existence of blood-sucking, disease-carrying ticks if he does. I'd assert that the Universe could get along perfectly well without ticks, and be a strictly better place to live for every single species but, well, ticks.
Here, you are doing exactly what every believer does - which is to arbitrarily group everybody else together. "My beliefs are internally consistent: [arbitrary grouping of other beliefs] is not consistent => how could anyone believe that nonsense?!?"
You need to read what I actually wrote, which is: most descriptions of God are horribly inconsistent... That is not grouping "everybody else together", is it? Show me a specific theory of God, I'll offer a specific judgment as to its logical consistency. I wish I could do so for Christianity, but there is no such thing as a theory of God for Christianity. There isn't even "a" Christianity -- there are myriad major and minor variants of Christianity, layered on top of Judaism (which is somewhat segmented on its own account). And that doesn't include the major Christian heresies that were purged post-Constantine.
I actually think that pandeism can be expressed in a way that is logically consistent. However, asserting that the Universe (which undoubtedly exists) is God as anything but a definition leads one to some serious difficulties when one tries to imagine how it could be falsified empirically (a definition cannot be falsified empirically). One has to go beyond the assignment of identity and add some sort of traits -- the most obvious one being sentience -- for the Universe to be God. This alone makes the proposition both implausible (lack of evidence) and pushes it right out there at the edge of mathematically inconsistent when analyzed with information theory and complexity theory and any sort of assumption that the physics we see is the physics we get. It also leaves one with a great big "and so what", because Universe, God, whatever, still symbols for the same thing and nothing has really changed unless/until the sentient superbeing established direct communications and elevates the probability of its actual existence somewhere above that of pink unicorns.
As for your logic, you are making a rather common error. You are trying to use boolean/aristotelian logic with true/false values to analyze propositions about the real world. You cannot do this. You need to use probability theory. When you assert "my son has a blue shirt" I don't even think about whether or not it is true, I think about whether or not it is PROBABLY true. In fact, I use Bayesian reasoning to do so. I start with wondering for a moment about whether or not you have an actual son or are engaging in rhetorical discourse. I think that it is at least somewhat likely that the latter is true, reducing the overall probability that your statement is true to perhaps 0.8 even before I consider it further. Then I begin the conditional analysis -- if your son is living and older than a few months, it is highly likely that he has shirts (because I have substantial empirical evidence that this is true, having raised three sons). If he has shirts, it is probable that they exist in several colors (at least, mine did, I have shirts of many colors, I see shirts of many colors on males every day). Blue is a comparatively common color, often associated with boys. If you and/or your son (who might or might not be old enough to be living independently, another probability tree) is very poor (another one), he might have only a few shirts, making it more likely that blue is omitted. Pause for a moment to consider how to count shirts with patterns with blue in it (dominant or not) and just what you might mean by a "blue shirt". In the end, I'd say that if you have a son, it is extremely likely that he has a shirt with blue in it and very likely that he has, in fact, got a blue shirt. Subtracting for the rhetorical possibility that you have no children or only daughters, I think that it is actually rather probable that your statement is true, but not certain. I could easily increase my degree of belief if you were to send me pictures of your son wearing a blue shirt, or decrease my degree of belief if you were to laugh and say "Hah, I fooled you with
I sleep just fine, at least when my back isn't sore from sleeping on a too-firm mattress. But then, I actually understand why I follow the ethical principles that I follow.
And as I'm fond of pointing out, if Jesus doesn't like the way I live or is -- regretfully -- planning to cast me into a fiery pit for not believing in him in the very best of faith, and for the rather defensible reasons that I have very little reason to be certain that he ever existed other than as a syncretic collation of several myths and even if a person who almost certainly was not named Jesus -- look up the meaning of "yeshua" (mistranslated as Jesus), Christ, and so on -- these are titles, not names -- well, nobody seriously believes that humans can raise the dead or cure blindness by rubbing muddy spit in somebody's eyes in ANY world-mythology (although ALL world-mythologies have such tales in abundance, all obviously "just stories" and almost certainly untrue), then Jesus (who supposedly loves me and does not WANT to cast me into a fiery furnace for eternity can, given that he is God and can do anything he wants, pop into my den right now, turn some tap water into a few beers, and sit down with me and explain my mistake.
I'm a teacher. Generally speaking we don't take students that make an honest mistake and pour gasoline on them and set them on fire, we talk to them in human person and try to explain the mistake. God, on the other hand...
I'm confused because I'm a "non-believer"? As in "believers" in an one particular ancient fairy tale filled with improbable things, events that no human being alive has witnessed ever happening in the present (while they successfully manage not to believe in all of the other equally improbable fairy stories from ancient times and who would in fact argue that Krishna or Odin or Zeus are all myths because it is obvious that most of the stories about them are impossible) aren't confused, but people who don't believe in fairy stories at all because, well, they are stories -- we're confused?
Also I'm not accusing anyone of making judgment "on others", whatever that means. I'm simply pointing out that believing in things just because you are raised in a culture that believes in them and when mere common sense tells you that things like that never happen is not the best practice of reason. Arguing that God is without sin because he is God is obviously circular reasoning as well -- but then, arguing with any "beleaver" about religion is just an opportunity to play logical fallacy bingo.
So if God decides on a whim to (say) curse a bunch of Egyptian newborns to die horribly, or if he punishes the great-great grandchildren of somebody who once pissed him off, that's not sinful because hey, this is God and God is exempt from the rules of ordinary compassion or common sense. If Moses orders his troops to massacre the old men, women, and children, right down to the babes in arms and the fetuses in tummy, of the Midianite captives, except for the young virgins among them who he gives permission to rape and enslave in either order, that's not sinful because God hates Midianites and God can't sin and Moses can't sin because he is just doing what God told him to do (Numbers 31, in case you're not up on horrific immorality in the Bible) but when Hitler does almost exactly the same thing on about the same scale, given the range of their respective cultures, that makes him a horribly evil guy. I see.
Do you see how that makes Christians and religious zealots more than a bit scary? Since you don't have any moral sense except what the Bible tells you, and since you can justify anything using what the Bible tells you as it is chock full of contradictions, if this passage won't do it try another, you can work perfect evil in the name of God and even feel self-righteous about doing it.
Just like the Saudis. Hey man, Allah says we are to whip the living shit out of anybody who dances naked on the rooftop. How else can we judge it? It's Allah who says it has to be done, not me...
Or, we might try asking ourselves -- what is the harm in it? How does it harm others? Why in the world would God -- assuming God exists, which seems unlikely -- care? But all of that requires that you have, and use, a moral sense that didn't come out of a book but rather came out of a sense of natural compassion and even a certain amount of enlightened self-interest. For example, I not only don't want people to be whipped to death for violating a silly rule, I don't want to live in a culture where anyone can whip me to death because I violate a silly rule, especially one that some priest just makes up on the spot and then validates by stating that it is "God's Will" and hence (according to your rules) Must Be True.
So sorry. Time to go stone my neighbors. It's God's Will.
Even MORE interesting. So we live in a giant MMORPG? I gotta ask, are we players or NPCs?
From the sound of it, you consider us to be NPCs, in which case yes, I gotta do what I was programmed to do. I'm not really a flesh-eating demon, sorry, I'm just an NPC doing my thing.
But you still miss my point about justice, but sure, let's do it in game context, as I do agree that most Christians view the real Universe as some sort of bizarre video game. You assert that God is Just. But I can easily imagine a game writer whose game is NOT just. The poor NPCs who are condemned to attack attack attack (because otherwise the game is boring) -- how just is that? A where the secret to winning is to believe something without evidence or rubbing blue mud in your belly because the game designer "justly" thought that was the thing to do. A game where the most successful players -- in game context -- are usually the ones that break the rules, who hack the game. In a non-just game, some players might (for example) be born in Sub-Saharan Africa, infected with HIV, and die a pointless death in complete misery before they reach the "game age" of three, while other players are born into happy homes, live an entire life in reasonable comfort, and die of old age (while feeling quite virtuous and beloved of God because of their good fortune). Just? Don't make me laugh.
There ain't no justice. Seriously. Not in any part of the game you can see. All you are doing is asserting that there MUST be justice somewhere you CAN'T see because the game is really just.
I, on the other hand, don't think it is a game, which is the difference between us. I think it is reality. I think conflating the real world with a game is rather disturbing. And there isn't one single piece of evidence or reason that suggests that reality is "created". In fact, all the evidence we have suggests the opposite, that it is not created. Even in your metaphor -- how could I create a SIMs game or RPG without a pre-existing real world to create it IN? Who set up the rules for THAT game? Somewhere there has to be a level of uncreated reality or there cannot be any games.
No, Atheists do not believe that there is a God. Or, to be more precise still, they do not find any convincing evidence that there is a God, any more than there is convincing evidence of pink unicorns. Their default state of belief for the infinity of possible assertions that are unsupported by sound evidence is "lack", not "faith". They don't have faith that there is no God -- that would require positive evidence of a negative statement, as they say in the inference business, lack of evidence is not positive evidence of lack. Humans in the West had little evidence that black swans existed (and hence didn't much believe in them) until they did and then they did. Black swans existed just fine without humans having "faith" that they did, and people who didn't believe in them when nobody they knew or heard of had ever seen one didn't have "faith" that they did NOT exist, they just had no reason to think that they did.
Atheists do have to spend a fair bit of time shooting holes in the mish-mosh of hearsay from the dark ages that passes for conclusive evidence in the minds of the religious, just like good scientists have to spend a fair bit of time shooting holes in weak evidence from poorly done studies in many other contexts. Scientists don't "have faith that the magnetic monopole doesn't exist" just because nobody has (yet) credibly seen one, any more than they had faith that the Higgs boson didn't exist before someone allegedly saw a few at the LHC. They just weren't convinced by the evidence and arguments so far that they do exist.
So actually, many Atheists are both rational and faithless and are neither ignorant nor idiots. Since they would consider the word "agnostic" to mean "lacking knowledge of" (because that's what it means, and their not idiots or ignorant) they could probably care less if you called them "agnostic about God", except for the weak connotation of agnostic that suggests that the proposition involved is somehow reasonable. I'm agnostic about monopoles because I find them reasonable, but don't believe in them (yet) due to a lack of evidence. I'm not exactly agnostic about pink unicorns that love to lay their heads in the laps of virgins and can cure disease with their horns -- yes, there's a lack of evidence but the proposition isn't particularly reasonable -- it is inconsistent with a lot of things I believe more strongly because there is a lot of evidence.
An atheist might well not consider themselves to be an agnostic because they think that at the very least, most descriptions of God are horribly inconsistent, often logically contradictory, sometimes ethically contradictory, and arguments about evidence concerning God are an excellent opportunity to play "Logical Fallacy Bingo". So they often, but not always, are not the sort of thing one can properly be said to feel "agnostic" about. But at the end of the day, show me a pink unicorn healing virgin amputees with a touch of its horn, and after I've taken a dose or two of anti-psychotic medication (just in case somebody slipped me some LSD in my coffee) I will reluctantly increase my degree of belief in them.
In the meantime, perhaps you might avoid making sweeping, incorrect statements about atheism, which is lack of belief in god, not active belief that no god exists, and certainly does not involve faith in any of the many reasonable meanings of the word.
he is without sin because he is God. Interesting. So your definition of sin is "whatever God says it is, because he is God." Not something that actually makes sense.
I agree that does give you a great excuse to never have to actually use your own personal moral sense or anything like human judgment. Thinking about right and wrong is so very difficult. It's a lot easier to just memorize a bunch of rules written down by a greedy priesthood in a stone age culture.
Sorry, GTG. My neighbors were out mowing their grass last Sunday (or is it Saturday, God knows when the Sabbath is supposed to really be) and I've got to find a bunch of big heavy stones to beat them to death with.
Well, or else Peter and his cronies knew he was holding back, so they grabbed him and tortured him until he coughed up the dough and then killed him, then later his wife came in so they killed her too, and then they carried the bodies out and piously said "Look what GOD does to people that hold out on us when they join up". That actually explains all of the supposed facts (assuming that "Luke" got them right in the first place) and hey, it doesn't require anything supernatural!
To put it another way, if you pulled that stunt today: Two people walk into a house where you and some burly young associates are sitting, and a short while later you carry out two dead bodies and explain to the crowd how all of the money that was in their pockets (a substantial sum, since they supposedly sold everything) is really your money -- I mean "God's" money, but you just happen to be his treasurer -- and God struck the two people down because they changed their mind about giving it all over, do you really think that any jury in the world would buy the "God did it" defense? Of course not. Because, in fact, we've never seen anybody ever get struck down by God, not even when they did things like fill entire warehouse sized buildings with men, women, children and bars of fake soap and then filled the buildings with cyanide and burned the bodies, or kidnapped, raped, killed, and ate children, or enslaved entire populations. In fact, we have really good evidence that you can commit any sin you want and while humans may not like it, not one single thing will happen to you because of God not liking it.
That's the reason Christians invented the whole "heaven/hell" thing. Since there is very, very visibly no such thing as cosmic justice in our real lives in the real world, they needed an entire infinite posthumous existence where one could be rewarded or punished to be able to argue that a just God exists at all.
If God truly disliked hypocrites, would one single member of congress be out there not yet struck dead, or blinded, or maimed, or enslaved or raped or tortured (because God loves slavery -- it says so right there in the Bible, just like God approves of marriage by rape plus 50 shekels)? I don't think so. If God punished religious liars, would all of the members of the Catholic priesthood who raped small boys and went on to live their entire lives receiving the communion -- often enough from the very hands of those that were aware of their crimes -- and doing other religious stuff not have had their equipment blasted off by a lightning bolt the first time they reached for an innocent? How is it that so many Christians simultaneously oppose abortion and favor the death penalty and support the idea of a just war without being swallowed up by a pit? I don't think you can assert that God opposes hypocrisy at all. God, after all, is a hypocrite, ten times over, according to the many, many contradictions in the infallible bible.
The "healthier than water" part comes from hundreds of years ago when Beer was cleaner than water.
Or, the 10 seconds ago where beer is still cleaner than water in much of the world. I grew up in India, under "water discipline" -- drink only water that has been boiled (possibly in e.g. the form of tea) or drink coca-cola (nothing lives in coke!) or drink beer. When we went on long road trips and ran low on water, I drank Golden Eagle way back when I was seven or eight years old. Over seven years, I never got amoebic dysentery, cholera, or more than the usual (mild) viral enterics because I never, ever, drank unboiled water.
If I returned to India tomorrow, I would probably follow exactly the same discipline, possibly with more beer and less tea or coke. Wouldn't you?
Thanks for the link. I've read Hardin's work but wasn't aware of the counterpoint article with the clever name. I'm not sure that the formal Tragedy of the Anticommons argument presented is sufficient to explain all possible failures of capitalism, so that it is not clear that "successful capitalism" is its inverse as suggested in the wikipedia article -- monopoly is a more or less independent failure mode brought about by e.g. absurdly long copyrights even when the copyright is held by a single individual, by serial patents, or by just plain old manipulation of the markets and political systems in ways that fall outside of IP ownership, and then there is the tragedy of recession/depression that occurs in unsuccessful capitalism too much "capital" is speculative and ultimately unfounded and can vanish overnight as human confidence shifts.
But still, a good addition to my understanding of things and yes, quite applicable in this context.
It is indeed finding and excuse to build rockets and space stations, which rarely make sense at $10,000/kg except for one-off research platforms and for communications.
In NC electricity is a lot cheaper -- that's why I just can't make it work. OTOH we probably get a lot more sun than Toronto:-). But as you say, it keeps dropping. I was shopping in West Marine for boat stuff and took a moment to look at their 90 and 130 W polycrystalline panels -- for almost exactly $1/watt, with (boat scale) inverters included. There are also nice larger scale systems out there, but I still at best break even -- a few years after I will probably be dead -- at $1/watt installed, with mandated power buyback from the local utility to serve instead of local storage. By 2015, 2017, somewhere in there, I expect that it will cross the magic line, and when I have enough kids graduated from college and launched I might do it, if only because I'm a physicist and PV solar is so cool that it's worth it to me at anything on the high side of break even even if I don't live to get the full amortized payback. Somebody will, when they buy the house, and hopefully my heirs would recover at least some of the investment then.
If I were building a new house, I'd probably build it in anyway, because who gives a damn about an extra $10-20K on the mortgage, which should get me at least a few KW on the roof at break even compared to the mortgage. $100/month on the mortgage vs $100/month for electricity -- it's a wash no matter what the amortization. Right now I pay $190/month for electricity, including all summer AC. It would be hard to recover that for the equivalent cost in a refinanced mortage, but it is at least getting close.
And yeah, it would be so lovely if anybody would learn to do EVEN arithmetic, but hey, I teach physics at Duke to very bright students and THEY struggle with "Fermi estimates", scaling arguments, and yes, sometimes even arithmetic when it isn't a matter of plugging into a provided formula, and then there is the algebra...
I'd point out that climate science in general suffers from this problem, especially when the lay population wants to play, but this is/. and if I did I would be excoriated, burned in effigy, and so on, because looking at the actual numbers is verboten when there are highly politicized summaries one can quote from instead.
No argument from me. I was presenting the most favorable case (made a few years ago -- PV solar keeps dropping (and, I think, will continue to drop) and as I noted, cheaper solar cells favor ground based installations even more because you have to pay truly absurd amounts to lift any solar cell into orbit, many, many times the actual cost of the cell.
I was equally generous in guesstimates of transmission efficiency (trying to make the case FOR as best I could) but yeah, even though "in principle" microwave power transmission can be as high as 90% efficient, I'd be rather surprised if it averages 50%.
But if you are in the business, you fully understand all of this even better than I do. It is no longer a matter of if, but when, and it won't matter if power companies build large scale generating plants or not, because as prices creep down from $1/watt, amortization times (which are a function of local power costs and local insolation) decrease to where they range from being a no-brainer to a new home builder (buy this home for $10,000 more, but with free electricity for a lifetime included in the price) and a reasonable investment to an older home owner. They are JUST too expensive for me to really justify in NC right now, partly because electricity is so cheap here. And, note well, I've already bought some $20,000 of replacement high efficiency AC/furnaces for the house (with at least decadal amortization times) simply because they DID make long term sense. This of course actually increases my amortization time, because with R40 in the attic, low-E windows throughout, and high efficiency multi-level AC and natural gas units, my energy costs are already easily halved from what they were before with old hardware and cheap wood frame windows and R11 in the attic. Even if I dropped my energy costs to zero (which I can't do with natural gas for cooking, hot water, and heat) it would take me a solid decade to amortize a rooftop array capable of handling the AC and other electrical loads, neglecting maintenance.
In California or Arizona, higher power costs, better insolation, less natural gas availability (maybe) it probably makes sense for everybody with the free capital already. By 2020, it will probably make good sense in NC where it is still marginal. By 2025, what will be the point? The entire lower 2/3 of the US will be installing solar with or without any sort of subsidy, at the level of individual homeowners even if the major power companies DON'T decide to investing in a few square kilometers of collectors per state. The square kilometers will accumulate a rooftop at a time either way.
Then, I have a model for building a large-scale solar updraft generator that can probably kick even PV solar's butt, that will work ideally in comparatively arid states with sunny south-facing mountains. It has the further advantage of actually contributing to global cooling by directly transporting heat from the surface up to the upper troposphere, above the bulk of the greenhouse layer, where it can radiatively cool much more efficiently (although yeah, this is a drop in the proverbial bucket of incoming energy:-)
None of this changes the conclusion -- putting solar cells in orbit to fuel the Earth is just plain stupid, however nifty or cool it appears to be at first glance. We'd be far better off putting the $100 billion directly into research into how to drop transmission costs (improve long distance transmission efficiencies) and/or store energy in high capacity long lifetime batteries (or other storage modalities, e.g. pumping water uphill during the day with a fraction of the solar to recover hydroelectric at night, or ditto with compressed air in giant underground caverns created with small nukes). Either one would be a game changer for solar, because a trivial fraction of the Saraha or the southwest US could supply 100% of the energy needs of the rest of the US or of Europe if we could either/both store it during the day and transmit it to the polar regions without a huge efficien
The obvious question is if the beams can be focused, and used as a weapon, it could provide a no-warning and very destructive attack anywhere in the world. It seems to be what Mankins is trying to avoid, and I tend to agree that (aside from cost) we really, really need to make sure that the power sources of the future are not just being used to cloak the real objective: Making powerful weapons.
Let me help you with that. The answer to your obvious question is "yes". Hence the problem...
Of course there are dozens of ways to use a high orbital position to control the Earth. Nuclear armed satellites. Project Thor. A nice collection of medium sized asteroids movable/targetable by means of e.g. Orion (small nukes used to push them, solar powered ion jets or solar sails for finer control).
I worked through the physics of this out of sheer curiosity a few years ago, and no, it really won't ever really be "safe", nor will it ever be cost effective. It is, in fact, a really stupid idea as far as I can tell. Solar cells are cheap and plentiful right here on the Earth, and are getting cheaper all the time. If you take a square kilometer of the Earth's surface, you have order of million square meters of collector (times cosine theta). On a cloud free day, you have anywhere from 700 to 900 watts/m^2 hitting the collector panels (peak a bit higher, these are sort-of-averages). Depending on the kind of panel, you get (say) 10% conversion (cheaper panels get less, more expensive ones get more). Call it 90 watts per square meter. Your one kilometer square area thus yields ballpark of 90 megawatts -- but let's say only 50 (and of course, only during the daytime). 20 square kilometers is thus a gigawatt plant, which is quite respectable -- an area some (say) 5 km squared, allowing for roads and access and the need to be able to tip them through at least some angle to maintain a small angle of incidence as the sun moves overhead. The cost per watt of the panels is order of $1 (probably less, at this scale). The cost of the land is whatever we want it to be, if we use public lands or inexpensive fallow lands that cannot be used for much else (abundant in the southwest, less so in the more developed midwest and east). Let's presume that the additional cost of the land, the electronics, and at least a modest storage array to buffer small fluctuations in power delivery is another $1/watt. You end up with a 1 GW plant for 2 billion dollars, which is actually not particularly crazy even now in places where electricity costs a lot (which is why private citizens are doing it). In reality, I think it would end up costing maybe half of this by the time economies of scale kicked in, which would give you an amortization time of less than a decade on the initial capital investment and at least a decade of pure profit. Not the fastest way to make money, but not a money loser and in a market dominated by low interest rates a not unreasonable ROI.
Now take the same solar panels -- the EXACT same solar panels, mind you -- into orbit. A couple of useful (approximate) numbers. It costs 64 megajoules to give 1 kg escape velocity (1/2 times 1 kg times (11.2 \times 10^6)^2). An orbit costs anywhere from 1/2 of this to the full amount, depending on the orbit. A geosynchronous orbit would actually cost most of it at 5 R_e -- call it 50 megajoules per kilogram. Of course, this is the pure energy cost at perfect efficiency. In fact, the cost in US dollars per kilogram in GEO is order of $10,000!
Assuming -- not unreasonably -- that the solar panels we lift into orbit mass out at a 100 grams per square meter, and are absolutely egregious in assuming that they get ten times the power per square meter compared to collectors on the Earth's surface (2-3 from higher insolation, the rest from extending "daylight" hours by a factor of almost three, still leaves us short but with round numbers) we can, indeed, get our (earth surface equivalent) orbiting GW at an equivalent cost factor of roughly 100. That m
As you can see, even though the black plague may have killed 1/3 of the world's population, it didn't kill them all at the same time, and it isn't even clear that the world's population ever actually receded during the events, at least according to this table (which also exposes a fundamental limitation -- look at the spread in estimates for the total population in the 1200s and 1300s -- at least 150 million or about 1/3 of the total value, making it difficult to resolve even 120 million people dying all at once from the natural noise in the estimates. None of the table columns show a decrease of a third of the world's population even in the fourteenth century, and most show a pretty steady slowly increasing population across even that time. By 1500 -- still an easy 100 years before the LIA -- the world's population was back to being larger than it was in 1300.
A single human needs so many hectares of land to survive whether or not they live in urban or rural settings, and the total world population at the time ranged from 300 million to just under 600 million just before the actual start of the LIA. The largest population drop on any of the table columns (where as noted we can assume error bars much larger than the estimated drop) was 70 million out of 443 million at the start, or around 1/6 of the world's population (and not a third), and it was concentrated in Europe. I'd have to consider this very weak, speculative evidence that the LIA was caused by CO_2 sequestration in rapidly reforested land. You might want to rethink your assertion that farmland was abandoned away from population centers -- it was my understanding that the plague worked even more efficiently in the population centers than in the countryside (it's where the rats concentrate and the probability of all variants of rat-flea-human transmission is maximized, after all) and that the reforestation was anything more than a blip as the post-plague generations rapidly recolonized the lands. Urban populations also needed firewood to burn and wood to build and pulled wood in from a much larger area than just the farmland. Finally, trees take a fairly long time to grow, but a short time to cut down.
Even reforested lands would not sequester that much carbon, that rapidly, given the buffering evident in the Bern model, not unless the critics of the Bern model are correct and the timescale of CO_2 sequestration is centuries.
Overall, the argument is an interesting one, but not exactly a convincing one. In particular it is difficult to explain why the actual LIA started around 1600 and persisted for some 125 years before slowly warming, then descending a lesser amount to a less protracted minimum that lasted all the way up to the mid to late 1800s before beginning the post-LIA warming of roughly 1 C (inclusive) that persists today. Why a lag of almost 200 years, with an effect that appeared long after the CO_2 sequestered in the forest regrowth had been returned the atmosphere times two? The solar dynamics arguments have better agreement than that, and they are far from proven as well.
Basically, we do not know why the LIA occurred. There are competing theories, none of which have real predictive/hindcasting value. We do not know why the MWP preceded it. We cannot explain any of the features of the climate variation of the Holocene save through heuristic arguments -- we are incapable of quantitatively hindcasting it. I know it is popular to think that the climate is a one-knob linear system, but it is not. It is also popular to claim that the existence of many papers from studies conducted to demonstrate the existence of CO_2 based catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is sufficient proof that the those papers are all right, but as Sanjay Gupta confessed
Seriously? There is a 0.4 C spike from 1910 to 1940, compared to 0.6 C from 1970 to 2000, and you think that the extra 0.2 C is sufficient evidence of runaway anthropogenic global warming, given a non-anthropogenic spike 2/3 as large in the only two samples of spikes we have in the moderately reliable instrumental record e.g. here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png?
Note well that I am not claiming that the latter spike is or isn't natural. I'm asserting that the instrumental record is sufficient evidence of natural climate spikes at least as large as 0.13C/decade sustained over at least three decades because there is one of them present in that record. Indeed, the actual record -- woefully inadequate as it is -- suggests that spikes like this are common, that the climate often fluctuates and/or rises on average by 0.13 C per decade, for decade-long intervals. That is evident even in the noise. The noise is important, because of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem for non-equilibrium thermodynamical systems (that is, it is relevant to the problem). It suggests that the relaxation rates apparent in the noise should indeed be characteristic of the response to changes in the drivers. I'd say that this is obviously very likely true in the instrumental graph above, and furthermore that the record strongly suggests that there are natural drivers with long (multidecadal) lifetimes that make nearly discrete changes in the "equilibrium" set point of the system.
It is early to conclude things (not that that ever stops anyone who wants to make egregious claims for the second of the two spikes being almost entirely anthropogenic while ignoring the first:-) but it is by no means clear that the latter spike is continuing at anything like its peak rate, and we frankly lack the data to be able to determine if that peak rate is normal for precisely the reasons you state above -- outside of the instrumental record the error bars grow and the coarse grained intervals to which a given average temperature is assigned grow faster, to where we really cannot make very strong statements concerning the scale of natural fluctuations based on the actual instrumental data at our disposal beyond the obvious one -- with two clearly visible spikes with very similar slopes plus fluctuation-dissipation, it is at least even odds that spikes like the one in the latter half of the twentieth century are commonplace over any given interval of 1000 years or more. Seriously.
So you're saying that the Bern model for CO_2 sequestration is wrong, then? I don't think we know enough to say that it is right OR wrong yet, and won't for some time yet, but sure, it might be wrong.
However, you need to actually do the numbers before you conclude that killing off 1/3 of everybody from India to Iceland might have sequestered "huge amounts of CO_2" and you might point out some evidence that this occurred in the various CO_2 proxies before basically making something up to explain something that we currently cannot satisfactorily explain or predict even WITH the knowledge we have from proxies.
As for no warming vs no statistically significant warming, they are precisely the same thing, are they not? Or do you claim perfect knowledge WITHOUT error bars. For part of that interval there is equally statistically insignificant cooling. The point is that the GCMs have almost without exception predicted significant warming across that same interval. Indeed, if one uses actual statistical analysis and hypothesis testing the way it is axiomatically supported, to test the GCMs instead of to take untested GCMs en masse and use them to make literally indefensible statements about the probability of future warming scenarios, one would reject nearly all of the GCMs one at a time, easily at the 5% confidence level and many of them at the 3% or even less confidence level. They are all significantly too warm.
Finally, you might consider what the error bars on our probable knowledge of things like global temperature really are, instead of introducing a false analogy. For example, how many significant digits do you think you might get measuring the average air temperature in your own back yard? How many thermometers might it take, and where might you locate them? How well would they agree with thermometers located across the street, or two blocks over? How would you measure this average? How well would this average extrapolate and infill to predict the average temperature of your city, your county, your state, the United States (if you American)?
Curiously, James Hansen has spoken on this in a Q/A and the answers might surprise you.
In the meantime, the way temperature is reported is as an "anomaly", in part because the various models used to extrapolate, infill, and otherwise massage the actual raw data produce global averages that differ by over a degree F. Since there aren't that many of them, this is a reasonable lower bound estimate for sigma. Of course, the models themselves all extrapolate and infill and use data that is itself corrupted and imperfect in various ways, so that the models have a model error that is almost certainly at least as large, and because they are using overlapping data one cannot conclude that the spread in model means represents this internal purely statistical and experimental error. I would be rather surprised if we know global average temperature to within 1 C.
Now let's put your analogy into true perspective. The actual absolute temperature involved is pretty close to 300 C, so let us go with that and equate it to 30 mph. Our probable error in this number is around 1 C, or 0.1 mph. The entire post LIA warming is around 1 C -- barely resolvable. The entire warming from the beginning of the instrumental era to the middle of that era is around 0.4 C, with almost all of that increase occurring from 1910 to 1940 and not, according to climate scientists, attributable to increased CO_2 (as this was largely pre-industrial as far as the world is concerned and CO_2 hadn't started to bump yet. So we have 0.4 over 30 years, mind you, little or no CO_2 involved, all instrumental records and hence at least moderately reliable although -- note well, we're really talking about variation that is on the order of the error bar on absolute temperature (where we could then get into a HUGE discussion of whether one can cheat statistics and claim a smaller one on the ANOMALY, arguing effectively that we somehow know the second moment of a distribution mo
You might want to look at two things. One is the actual thermal record over geological time, which shows intervals of extremely rapid natural warming and cooling. Second, you might want to consider the fact that much of that record is essentially smeared out by imprecision in the proxies used so that one is comparing two different kinds of averages -- one averaged over a very short time interval, and another where the average might well be over a period longer than the entire time we have had thermometers. If you then perform a regression estimate of extrema, you will conclude that no, it cannot be safely or reasonably concluded that the "very very fastest warming we've seen is attributed to man".
Curiously, not even most climate scientists would assert such a thing, I don't think. Some might. For one thing, there hasn't been any statistically significant warming for roughly 16 years, in spite of "man". For another, some unknown fraction of the observed warming post Little Ice Age was natural -- all of it, up to perhaps 1950, and very likely some of it since then as well. There are plenty of natural things that produce rapid warming, and cooling, as evidenced by the geological record. We just don't understand them yet.
Actually, my first thought was "In Saudi Arabia, they kill people or whip them almost to death for apostasy or blasphemy and yet they eat camel in spite of it being a mammal that does not have a cloven hoof and chews the cud and hence is explicitly banned in the OT (shared by all of the Abrahamic faiths) right alongside of the other "unclean" meats like pork and dog and horse". Way to go, guys! I guess those holy scriptures are "optional" when it doesn't involve stuff like killing people for being gay, female, Sunni (if you are Shia), Shia (if you are Sunni), non-Muslim in general, Jewish in particular, etc etc.
Besides, there's a lot of meat on a camel. Hate to just waste it. There's being religious, I guess, and then there is losing money in a potentially lucrative side business.
Mind you, I'm not religious at all and think there is nothing spiritually evil about eating camel, but a lot of those OT religious rules were founded on empirical observation that eating certain animals was more likely to sicken you to death than others. Moses has nice meal of raw oysters, contracts vibrio vulnificus, and the next thing you know Moses is ten pounds lighter and weak as a kitten and seafood without scales is on the banned list, that sort of thing.
So in a sense, there is something almost -- dare I say Biblically just? -- about a fatal virus that resides in camels as an animal reservoir being contracted by people that can be dogmatic and violent wherever it doesn't conflict with a perfectly understandable economic interest in turning a potential liability into an asset.
Next up: Jakob-Creutzfeldt hops to camels! Mad Camel Syndrome spreads throughout the Middle East!
Wow, beautiful reply. The bottom line message for me was that it was a one-off, in a sense security by obscurity (or, as you put it, by expensive obfuscation), and that to make it work you had to hand code it at a key point in a suitable application. And it doesn't make functional reverse engineering more difficult (seeing what the application does and trying to duplicate it functionally), it just makes disassembling the code into semantically meaningful functional units that can similarly work together to accomplish the desired work considerably more difficult, for a value of considerably intended to discourage people who lack NSA-class resources and nothing better to do.
After all, even the use of the term "dongle" in your reply is telling -- none of this stuff has much of a lifetime. It isn't about making it impossible, it is about making it too difficult to accomplish (probably) without a big at-risk investment during the limited lifetime that the program has value, that dongles or parallel ports to attach them to exist, that a real competitor hasn't eaten your lunch in by simply producing a better program to do the same thing.
I also enjoyed your remarks on patents and emergent obviousness. However, I would note that in the case of many, many great ideas, they are obvious after somebody has the burst of insight and explains them. The entire structure of physical science comes to mind. While anybody could have invented calculus at any time over several thousand years, nobody did until Newton and/or Liebnitz did. Afterwards, sure, it is obvious, I can derive calculus in a few lines of work and then it is just a tedious matter of working out all of the completely inevitable consequences (not all of which are easy, at least until they are done and added to the list of no-longer-difficult obvious stuff). I still think that unique solutions to expensive problems deserve patent protection even though AFTER they are revealed people look at it and go "Gee, that's obvious, I could have done that."
So why didn't they?
Perhaps because it was not, in fact, all that obvious until the obvious solution was pointed out?
Even better than the grocery list is Searle's Chinese Room. A man sits in a sealed room. He doesn't speak or read chinese, but every now and then somebody pokes a slip of paper in under the door with some Chinese on it. The man picks it up and goes to a vast filing cabinet, matches the symbols on the paper, and pulls out a paper with other symbols on it which he pushes out the door. In this way the entire room can act like a "speaker of Chinese" even though the man in the room doesn't recognize a word of it:
The interesting question is whether or not one can LEARN Chinese if one is the man in the room by monitoring the messages. And this, in turn, is a matter of information theory and complexity -- to be able to learn Chinese by monitoring a flow of symbols like this utterly without context might well be very, very difficult. The cabinet drawers, after all, might have not a single message in them but a stack of messages of similar form but equivalent meaning, shuffled. The man might have to look up the drawer to open not just on the basis of the current message but on the basis of the last ten, or hundred, messages. The drawers themselves might periodically rearrange themselves so that the man has to constantly do a tedious calculation in order to determine the current location of the right drawer in order to get the current top of stack message on the basis of the last twenty exchanges.
Now imagine that the actual conversation isn't one such room, it is thirty, or fifty, or five hundred. The first man gets the input message, goes to a drawer and gets a response, but that is not the REAL response, it is just a message to the man in the second room. That man looks up a message for the third room, etc, and it is only the man in the last room that looks up the actual response and returns it.
One can imagine lots of crypto-class transformations one can insert into the lookup process -- each man can use e.g. a one way hash of the message they receive (known to the sender as well) to permute the cabinet drawers after each response; the next message even with the same "content" might then be directions to a completely different drawer. Even a comparatively few rooms filled with many constantly whirling drawers would make it pretty hard to learn Chinese, especially the Chinese associated with rarely used drawers or contexts. And learning it at all would require SOME ability to connect at least the input and output symbols with actual contexts. Even if one mapped the location and content of every drawer and reverse engineered the entire algorithm for doing the shuffling, one still has to assemble the result into a full semantic map. Not easy, although as noted not impossible.
Um, how? Using Dark Matter detectors? Look, neutrinos couple to existing, known particles -- leptons, although via other more complex processes e.g. inverse beta decay they can couple to protons in nuclei as well. The response we can detect is in proportion to the density of those particles in a medium that can function as a detector, which in turn is proportional to straight up mass density. The interaction probability is phenomenally low for all of the known particles, so one requires large volumes of material to make ANY kind of detector. There are strict limits on the density of ordinary matter, and even more stringent limits on the density of matter that can conceivably used as a detector
So I'm curious -- given that the ratio between the mass density of water and the mass density of e.g. Tungsten, Uranium, Plutonium is only a single order of magnitude, and a reaction cross section that AFAIK depends solely on the mass density, where exactly are the other two orders of magnitude going to come from from any possible variation in materials?
"Systems", well, perhaps. If we use underground cavities filled with water to look for Cerenkov radiation, or chlorine detectors to look for outgassing Argon, we can always make them 10x bigger and hence increase the detector volume 1000 fold. But this is morally equivalent to building 1000 detectors like we have today and combining the data, and it still leaves us with the same issues if one wishes to determine flavor information and not just raw e.g. neutral current flux. Indeed, to get flavor information we will very likely be limited to building 1000 detectors to get 1000 fold increase in data simply because there are size constraints on detectors that are going to detect and resolve e.g. a muon produced in a charged current interaction.
So sure, we can always scale up our existing technology or minor improvements of it to improve detection rates. But I don't think that materials or systems that improve the scaling of the detection technologies we already have are particularly plausible, based on what I now know. So what did you have in mind (as in, do you know something I don't)? Are there other materials that are likely to have orders of magnitude higher cross section for inverse beta decay, or are you just thinking of building bigger/more detectors?
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever the heuristics are between the "beings", the act of decision is the same. And that's why it's not a magical "human right of free will". AI Free Will is a snap. We're just desperately afraid of it. See T2, "If the wrong heuristic gets in there..." - well that's what sociopathic killers are. Humans running a badly flawed HumanOS.
Well, there is one small difference. With an AI, one can always, precisely, deconstruct why and how the system makes the decision that it makes, unless it uses truly random sources to distribute choices over some space at some point. Heinlein recognized the importance of unpredictability in free will long, long before the top article, and his AIs always had lots of random number generators built in even though he couldn't precisely articulate why. Random number generators of course, are not random at all, so one has to resort to quantum sources or entropic sources where one is truly missing the information needed to predict the decision and where there is a probability that, given precisely the same initial conditions, they AI would decide differently.
With a human intelligence (HI), one cannot ever deconstruct why and how the system makes the decision that it makes. It is "random" in at least the sense of being unpredictable at countless levels involving the whole non-Markovian process of evolution from the very first cell through to the present organism making the decision. Worse, even the human itself doesn't know why it makes the decision it makes, not really. Chocolate or Vanilla ice cream today? "Chocolate because I like chocolate more than vanilla" is ultimately semantically null, because one cannot answer why one likes chocolate more than vanilla, and no matter what set of reasons one cooks up for it the ultimate answer is associated with a subjective response that is a sublime blend of (evolutionarily and experientially) preprogrammed stuff, experience, and the "mood of the moment", utterly unpredictable.
rgb
At least say "that I think that you will have to answer for. Honesty is important, don't you think?
I think that there is nothing there to answer to, simply because there isn't any evidence that there is. That doesn't prove that there isn't, BTW, it just seems unlikely given what I know about the brain, physics, and so on. You have to postulate an entire unseen, unexperienced super-Universe with its own physics and so on to be right. Sure, maybe, but I have to say -- I doubt it. Why would I believe such an invention without any evidence that it exists? It's like believing in "fairyland" or believing in middle earth.
Evidence is important. It's what helps us differentiate between fantasy and reality. I'll bet that you are very good at differentiating the Hindu fantasy or Norse fantasy from reality. It's a shame that you can't manage it for the Christian fantasy.
rgb
All assertions are not the same, people don't exist in a vacuum with no independent knowledge.
Unlike being brainwashed into having faith in religion, atheists have decided based on facts and evidence that there is no god.
Probably is no god. Give us evidence and we will cheerfully increase our degree of belief. Jesus is welcome to manifest himself in my den at any moment and provide me with direct evidence of his existence and omnipotent omnibenevolent deity, although he and I will have to have a serious discussion about the necessity of the existence of blood-sucking, disease-carrying ticks if he does. I'd assert that the Universe could get along perfectly well without ticks, and be a strictly better place to live for every single species but, well, ticks.
rgb
Here, you are doing exactly what every believer does - which is to arbitrarily group everybody else together. "My beliefs are internally consistent: [arbitrary grouping of other beliefs] is not consistent => how could anyone believe that nonsense?!?"
You need to read what I actually wrote, which is: most descriptions of God are horribly inconsistent...
That is not grouping "everybody else together", is it? Show me a specific theory of God, I'll offer a specific judgment as to its logical consistency. I wish I could do so for Christianity, but there is no such thing as a theory of God for Christianity. There isn't even "a" Christianity -- there are myriad major and minor variants of Christianity, layered on top of Judaism (which is somewhat segmented on its own account). And that doesn't include the major Christian heresies that were purged post-Constantine.
I actually think that pandeism can be expressed in a way that is logically consistent. However, asserting that the Universe (which undoubtedly exists) is God as anything but a definition leads one to some serious difficulties when one tries to imagine how it could be falsified empirically (a definition cannot be falsified empirically). One has to go beyond the assignment of identity and add some sort of traits -- the most obvious one being sentience -- for the Universe to be God. This alone makes the proposition both implausible (lack of evidence) and pushes it right out there at the edge of mathematically inconsistent when analyzed with information theory and complexity theory and any sort of assumption that the physics we see is the physics we get. It also leaves one with a great big "and so what", because Universe, God, whatever, still symbols for the same thing and nothing has really changed unless/until the sentient superbeing established direct communications and elevates the probability of its actual existence somewhere above that of pink unicorns.
As for your logic, you are making a rather common error. You are trying to use boolean/aristotelian logic with true/false values to analyze propositions about the real world. You cannot do this. You need to use probability theory. When you assert "my son has a blue shirt" I don't even think about whether or not it is true, I think about whether or not it is PROBABLY true. In fact, I use Bayesian reasoning to do so. I start with wondering for a moment about whether or not you have an actual son or are engaging in rhetorical discourse. I think that it is at least somewhat likely that the latter is true, reducing the overall probability that your statement is true to perhaps 0.8 even before I consider it further. Then I begin the conditional analysis -- if your son is living and older than a few months, it is highly likely that he has shirts (because I have substantial empirical evidence that this is true, having raised three sons). If he has shirts, it is probable that they exist in several colors (at least, mine did, I have shirts of many colors, I see shirts of many colors on males every day). Blue is a comparatively common color, often associated with boys. If you and/or your son (who might or might not be old enough to be living independently, another probability tree) is very poor (another one), he might have only a few shirts, making it more likely that blue is omitted. Pause for a moment to consider how to count shirts with patterns with blue in it (dominant or not) and just what you might mean by a "blue shirt". In the end, I'd say that if you have a son, it is extremely likely that he has a shirt with blue in it and very likely that he has, in fact, got a blue shirt. Subtracting for the rhetorical possibility that you have no children or only daughters, I think that it is actually rather probable that your statement is true, but not certain. I could easily increase my degree of belief if you were to send me pictures of your son wearing a blue shirt, or decrease my degree of belief if you were to laugh and say "Hah, I fooled you with
I sleep just fine, at least when my back isn't sore from sleeping on a too-firm mattress. But then, I actually understand why I follow the ethical principles that I follow.
And as I'm fond of pointing out, if Jesus doesn't like the way I live or is -- regretfully -- planning to cast me into a fiery pit for not believing in him in the very best of faith, and for the rather defensible reasons that I have very little reason to be certain that he ever existed other than as a syncretic collation of several myths and even if a person who almost certainly was not named Jesus -- look up the meaning of "yeshua" (mistranslated as Jesus), Christ, and so on -- these are titles, not names -- well, nobody seriously believes that humans can raise the dead or cure blindness by rubbing muddy spit in somebody's eyes in ANY world-mythology (although ALL world-mythologies have such tales in abundance, all obviously "just stories" and almost certainly untrue), then Jesus (who supposedly loves me and does not WANT to cast me into a fiery furnace for eternity can, given that he is God and can do anything he wants, pop into my den right now, turn some tap water into a few beers, and sit down with me and explain my mistake.
I'm a teacher. Generally speaking we don't take students that make an honest mistake and pour gasoline on them and set them on fire, we talk to them in human person and try to explain the mistake. God, on the other hand...
rgb
I'm confused because I'm a "non-believer"? As in "believers" in an one particular ancient fairy tale filled with improbable things, events that no human being alive has witnessed ever happening in the present (while they successfully manage not to believe in all of the other equally improbable fairy stories from ancient times and who would in fact argue that Krishna or Odin or Zeus are all myths because it is obvious that most of the stories about them are impossible) aren't confused, but people who don't believe in fairy stories at all because, well, they are stories -- we're confused?
Also I'm not accusing anyone of making judgment "on others", whatever that means. I'm simply pointing out that believing in things just because you are raised in a culture that believes in them and when mere common sense tells you that things like that never happen is not the best practice of reason. Arguing that God is without sin because he is God is obviously circular reasoning as well -- but then, arguing with any "beleaver" about religion is just an opportunity to play logical fallacy bingo.
So if God decides on a whim to (say) curse a bunch of Egyptian newborns to die horribly, or if he punishes the great-great grandchildren of somebody who once pissed him off, that's not sinful because hey, this is God and God is exempt from the rules of ordinary compassion or common sense. If Moses orders his troops to massacre the old men, women, and children, right down to the babes in arms and the fetuses in tummy, of the Midianite captives, except for the young virgins among them who he gives permission to rape and enslave in either order, that's not sinful because God hates Midianites and God can't sin and Moses can't sin because he is just doing what God told him to do (Numbers 31, in case you're not up on horrific immorality in the Bible) but when Hitler does almost exactly the same thing on about the same scale, given the range of their respective cultures, that makes him a horribly evil guy. I see.
Do you see how that makes Christians and religious zealots more than a bit scary? Since you don't have any moral sense except what the Bible tells you, and since you can justify anything using what the Bible tells you as it is chock full of contradictions, if this passage won't do it try another, you can work perfect evil in the name of God and even feel self-righteous about doing it.
Just like the Saudis. Hey man, Allah says we are to whip the living shit out of anybody who dances naked on the rooftop. How else can we judge it? It's Allah who says it has to be done, not me...
Or, we might try asking ourselves -- what is the harm in it? How does it harm others? Why in the world would God -- assuming God exists, which seems unlikely -- care? But all of that requires that you have, and use, a moral sense that didn't come out of a book but rather came out of a sense of natural compassion and even a certain amount of enlightened self-interest. For example, I not only don't want people to be whipped to death for violating a silly rule, I don't want to live in a culture where anyone can whip me to death because I violate a silly rule, especially one that some priest just makes up on the spot and then validates by stating that it is "God's Will" and hence (according to your rules) Must Be True.
So sorry. Time to go stone my neighbors. It's God's Will.
rgb
Even MORE interesting. So we live in a giant MMORPG? I gotta ask, are we players or NPCs?
From the sound of it, you consider us to be NPCs, in which case yes, I gotta do what I was programmed to do. I'm not really a flesh-eating demon, sorry, I'm just an NPC doing my thing.
But you still miss my point about justice, but sure, let's do it in game context, as I do agree that most Christians view the real Universe as some sort of bizarre video game. You assert that God is Just. But I can easily imagine a game writer whose game is NOT just. The poor NPCs who are condemned to attack attack attack (because otherwise the game is boring) -- how just is that? A where the secret to winning is to believe something without evidence or rubbing blue mud in your belly because the game designer "justly" thought that was the thing to do. A game where the most successful players -- in game context -- are usually the ones that break the rules, who hack the game. In a non-just game, some players might (for example) be born in Sub-Saharan Africa, infected with HIV, and die a pointless death in complete misery before they reach the "game age" of three, while other players are born into happy homes, live an entire life in reasonable comfort, and die of old age (while feeling quite virtuous and beloved of God because of their good fortune). Just? Don't make me laugh.
There ain't no justice. Seriously. Not in any part of the game you can see. All you are doing is asserting that there MUST be justice somewhere you CAN'T see because the game is really just.
I, on the other hand, don't think it is a game, which is the difference between us. I think it is reality. I think conflating the real world with a game is rather disturbing. And there isn't one single piece of evidence or reason that suggests that reality is "created". In fact, all the evidence we have suggests the opposite, that it is not created. Even in your metaphor -- how could I create a SIMs game or RPG without a pre-existing real world to create it IN? Who set up the rules for THAT game? Somewhere there has to be a level of uncreated reality or there cannot be any games.
No, Atheists do not believe that there is a God. Or, to be more precise still, they do not find any convincing evidence that there is a God, any more than there is convincing evidence of pink unicorns. Their default state of belief for the infinity of possible assertions that are unsupported by sound evidence is "lack", not "faith". They don't have faith that there is no God -- that would require positive evidence of a negative statement, as they say in the inference business, lack of evidence is not positive evidence of lack. Humans in the West had little evidence that black swans existed (and hence didn't much believe in them) until they did and then they did. Black swans existed just fine without humans having "faith" that they did, and people who didn't believe in them when nobody they knew or heard of had ever seen one didn't have "faith" that they did NOT exist, they just had no reason to think that they did.
Atheists do have to spend a fair bit of time shooting holes in the mish-mosh of hearsay from the dark ages that passes for conclusive evidence in the minds of the religious, just like good scientists have to spend a fair bit of time shooting holes in weak evidence from poorly done studies in many other contexts. Scientists don't "have faith that the magnetic monopole doesn't exist" just because nobody has (yet) credibly seen one, any more than they had faith that the Higgs boson didn't exist before someone allegedly saw a few at the LHC. They just weren't convinced by the evidence and arguments so far that they do exist.
So actually, many Atheists are both rational and faithless and are neither ignorant nor idiots. Since they would consider the word "agnostic" to mean "lacking knowledge of" (because that's what it means, and their not idiots or ignorant) they could probably care less if you called them "agnostic about God", except for the weak connotation of agnostic that suggests that the proposition involved is somehow reasonable. I'm agnostic about monopoles because I find them reasonable, but don't believe in them (yet) due to a lack of evidence. I'm not exactly agnostic about pink unicorns that love to lay their heads in the laps of virgins and can cure disease with their horns -- yes, there's a lack of evidence but the proposition isn't particularly reasonable -- it is inconsistent with a lot of things I believe more strongly because there is a lot of evidence.
An atheist might well not consider themselves to be an agnostic because they think that at the very least, most descriptions of God are horribly inconsistent, often logically contradictory, sometimes ethically contradictory, and arguments about evidence concerning God are an excellent opportunity to play "Logical Fallacy Bingo". So they often, but not always, are not the sort of thing one can properly be said to feel "agnostic" about. But at the end of the day, show me a pink unicorn healing virgin amputees with a touch of its horn, and after I've taken a dose or two of anti-psychotic medication (just in case somebody slipped me some LSD in my coffee) I will reluctantly increase my degree of belief in them.
In the meantime, perhaps you might avoid making sweeping, incorrect statements about atheism, which is lack of belief in god, not active belief that no god exists, and certainly does not involve faith in any of the many reasonable meanings of the word.
rgb
he is without sin because he is God.
Interesting. So your definition of sin is "whatever God says it is, because he is God." Not something that actually makes sense.
I agree that does give you a great excuse to never have to actually use your own personal moral sense or anything like human judgment. Thinking about right and wrong is so very difficult. It's a lot easier to just memorize a bunch of rules written down by a greedy priesthood in a stone age culture.
Sorry, GTG. My neighbors were out mowing their grass last Sunday (or is it Saturday, God knows when the Sabbath is supposed to really be) and I've got to find a bunch of big heavy stones to beat them to death with.
rgb
I absolutely agree that no matter what happens, I will never win an argument with God.
Or the tooth-fairy.
rgb
Well, or else Peter and his cronies knew he was holding back, so they grabbed him and tortured him until he coughed up the dough and then killed him, then later his wife came in so they killed her too, and then they carried the bodies out and piously said "Look what GOD does to people that hold out on us when they join up". That actually explains all of the supposed facts (assuming that "Luke" got them right in the first place) and hey, it doesn't require anything supernatural!
To put it another way, if you pulled that stunt today: Two people walk into a house where you and some burly young associates are sitting, and a short while later you carry out two dead bodies and explain to the crowd how all of the money that was in their pockets (a substantial sum, since they supposedly sold everything) is really your money -- I mean "God's" money, but you just happen to be his treasurer -- and God struck the two people down because they changed their mind about giving it all over, do you really think that any jury in the world would buy the "God did it" defense? Of course not. Because, in fact, we've never seen anybody ever get struck down by God, not even when they did things like fill entire warehouse sized buildings with men, women, children and bars of fake soap and then filled the buildings with cyanide and burned the bodies, or kidnapped, raped, killed, and ate children, or enslaved entire populations. In fact, we have really good evidence that you can commit any sin you want and while humans may not like it, not one single thing will happen to you because of God not liking it.
That's the reason Christians invented the whole "heaven/hell" thing. Since there is very, very visibly no such thing as cosmic justice in our real lives in the real world, they needed an entire infinite posthumous existence where one could be rewarded or punished to be able to argue that a just God exists at all.
If God truly disliked hypocrites, would one single member of congress be out there not yet struck dead, or blinded, or maimed, or enslaved or raped or tortured (because God loves slavery -- it says so right there in the Bible, just like God approves of marriage by rape plus 50 shekels)? I don't think so. If God punished religious liars, would all of the members of the Catholic priesthood who raped small boys and went on to live their entire lives receiving the communion -- often enough from the very hands of those that were aware of their crimes -- and doing other religious stuff not have had their equipment blasted off by a lightning bolt the first time they reached for an innocent? How is it that so many Christians simultaneously oppose abortion and favor the death penalty and support the idea of a just war without being swallowed up by a pit? I don't think you can assert that God opposes hypocrisy at all. God, after all, is a hypocrite, ten times over, according to the many, many contradictions in the infallible bible.
rgb
The "healthier than water" part comes from hundreds of years ago when Beer was cleaner than water.
Or, the 10 seconds ago where beer is still cleaner than water in much of the world. I grew up in India, under "water discipline" -- drink only water that has been boiled (possibly in e.g. the form of tea) or drink coca-cola (nothing lives in coke!) or drink beer. When we went on long road trips and ran low on water, I drank Golden Eagle way back when I was seven or eight years old. Over seven years, I never got amoebic dysentery, cholera, or more than the usual (mild) viral enterics because I never, ever, drank unboiled water.
If I returned to India tomorrow, I would probably follow exactly the same discipline, possibly with more beer and less tea or coke. Wouldn't you?
rgb
Thanks for the link. I've read Hardin's work but wasn't aware of the counterpoint article with the clever name. I'm not sure that the formal Tragedy of the Anticommons argument presented is sufficient to explain all possible failures of capitalism, so that it is not clear that "successful capitalism" is its inverse as suggested in the wikipedia article -- monopoly is a more or less independent failure mode brought about by e.g. absurdly long copyrights even when the copyright is held by a single individual, by serial patents, or by just plain old manipulation of the markets and political systems in ways that fall outside of IP ownership, and then there is the tragedy of recession/depression that occurs in unsuccessful capitalism too much "capital" is speculative and ultimately unfounded and can vanish overnight as human confidence shifts.
But still, a good addition to my understanding of things and yes, quite applicable in this context.
rgb
No, that would be Linux 3.14.15926535897... oh, did I exhaust the length of the minor version number register?
It is indeed finding and excuse to build rockets and space stations, which rarely make sense at $10,000/kg except for one-off research platforms and for communications.
In NC electricity is a lot cheaper -- that's why I just can't make it work. OTOH we probably get a lot more sun than Toronto:-). But as you say, it keeps dropping. I was shopping in West Marine for boat stuff and took a moment to look at their 90 and 130 W polycrystalline panels -- for almost exactly $1/watt, with (boat scale) inverters included. There are also nice larger scale systems out there, but I still at best break even -- a few years after I will probably be dead -- at $1/watt installed, with mandated power buyback from the local utility to serve instead of local storage. By 2015, 2017, somewhere in there, I expect that it will cross the magic line, and when I have enough kids graduated from college and launched I might do it, if only because I'm a physicist and PV solar is so cool that it's worth it to me at anything on the high side of break even even if I don't live to get the full amortized payback. Somebody will, when they buy the house, and hopefully my heirs would recover at least some of the investment then.
If I were building a new house, I'd probably build it in anyway, because who gives a damn about an extra $10-20K on the mortgage, which should get me at least a few KW on the roof at break even compared to the mortgage. $100/month on the mortgage vs $100/month for electricity -- it's a wash no matter what the amortization. Right now I pay $190/month for electricity, including all summer AC. It would be hard to recover that for the equivalent cost in a refinanced mortage, but it is at least getting close.
And yeah, it would be so lovely if anybody would learn to do EVEN arithmetic, but hey, I teach physics at Duke to very bright students and THEY struggle with "Fermi estimates", scaling arguments, and yes, sometimes even arithmetic when it isn't a matter of plugging into a provided formula, and then there is the algebra...
I'd point out that climate science in general suffers from this problem, especially when the lay population wants to play, but this is /. and if I did I would be excoriated, burned in effigy, and so on, because looking at the actual numbers is verboten when there are highly politicized summaries one can quote from instead.
rgb
No argument from me. I was presenting the most favorable case (made a few years ago -- PV solar keeps dropping (and, I think, will continue to drop) and as I noted, cheaper solar cells favor ground based installations even more because you have to pay truly absurd amounts to lift any solar cell into orbit, many, many times the actual cost of the cell.
I was equally generous in guesstimates of transmission efficiency (trying to make the case FOR as best I could) but yeah, even though "in principle" microwave power transmission can be as high as 90% efficient, I'd be rather surprised if it averages 50%.
But if you are in the business, you fully understand all of this even better than I do. It is no longer a matter of if, but when, and it won't matter if power companies build large scale generating plants or not, because as prices creep down from $1/watt, amortization times (which are a function of local power costs and local insolation) decrease to where they range from being a no-brainer to a new home builder (buy this home for $10,000 more, but with free electricity for a lifetime included in the price) and a reasonable investment to an older home owner. They are JUST too expensive for me to really justify in NC right now, partly because electricity is so cheap here. And, note well, I've already bought some $20,000 of replacement high efficiency AC/furnaces for the house (with at least decadal amortization times) simply because they DID make long term sense. This of course actually increases my amortization time, because with R40 in the attic, low-E windows throughout, and high efficiency multi-level AC and natural gas units, my energy costs are already easily halved from what they were before with old hardware and cheap wood frame windows and R11 in the attic. Even if I dropped my energy costs to zero (which I can't do with natural gas for cooking, hot water, and heat) it would take me a solid decade to amortize a rooftop array capable of handling the AC and other electrical loads, neglecting maintenance.
In California or Arizona, higher power costs, better insolation, less natural gas availability (maybe) it probably makes sense for everybody with the free capital already. By 2020, it will probably make good sense in NC where it is still marginal. By 2025, what will be the point? The entire lower 2/3 of the US will be installing solar with or without any sort of subsidy, at the level of individual homeowners even if the major power companies DON'T decide to investing in a few square kilometers of collectors per state. The square kilometers will accumulate a rooftop at a time either way.
Then, I have a model for building a large-scale solar updraft generator that can probably kick even PV solar's butt, that will work ideally in comparatively arid states with sunny south-facing mountains. It has the further advantage of actually contributing to global cooling by directly transporting heat from the surface up to the upper troposphere, above the bulk of the greenhouse layer, where it can radiatively cool much more efficiently (although yeah, this is a drop in the proverbial bucket of incoming energy:-)
None of this changes the conclusion -- putting solar cells in orbit to fuel the Earth is just plain stupid, however nifty or cool it appears to be at first glance. We'd be far better off putting the $100 billion directly into research into how to drop transmission costs (improve long distance transmission efficiencies) and/or store energy in high capacity long lifetime batteries (or other storage modalities, e.g. pumping water uphill during the day with a fraction of the solar to recover hydroelectric at night, or ditto with compressed air in giant underground caverns created with small nukes). Either one would be a game changer for solar, because a trivial fraction of the Saraha or the southwest US could supply 100% of the energy needs of the rest of the US or of Europe if we could either/both store it during the day and transmit it to the polar regions without a huge efficien
The obvious question is if the beams can be focused, and used as a weapon, it could provide a no-warning and very destructive attack anywhere in the world. It seems to be what Mankins is trying to avoid, and I tend to agree that (aside from cost) we really, really need to make sure that the power sources of the future are not just being used to cloak the real objective: Making powerful weapons.
Let me help you with that. The answer to your obvious question is "yes". Hence the problem...
Of course there are dozens of ways to use a high orbital position to control the Earth. Nuclear armed satellites. Project Thor. A nice collection of medium sized asteroids movable/targetable by means of e.g. Orion (small nukes used to push them, solar powered ion jets or solar sails for finer control).
I worked through the physics of this out of sheer curiosity a few years ago, and no, it really won't ever really be "safe", nor will it ever be cost effective. It is, in fact, a really stupid idea as far as I can tell. Solar cells are cheap and plentiful right here on the Earth, and are getting cheaper all the time. If you take a square kilometer of the Earth's surface, you have order of million square meters of collector (times cosine theta). On a cloud free day, you have anywhere from 700 to 900 watts/m^2 hitting the collector panels (peak a bit higher, these are sort-of-averages). Depending on the kind of panel, you get (say) 10% conversion (cheaper panels get less, more expensive ones get more). Call it 90 watts per square meter. Your one kilometer square area thus yields ballpark of 90 megawatts -- but let's say only 50 (and of course, only during the daytime). 20 square kilometers is thus a gigawatt plant, which is quite respectable -- an area some (say) 5 km squared, allowing for roads and access and the need to be able to tip them through at least some angle to maintain a small angle of incidence as the sun moves overhead. The cost per watt of the panels is order of $1 (probably less, at this scale). The cost of the land is whatever we want it to be, if we use public lands or inexpensive fallow lands that cannot be used for much else (abundant in the southwest, less so in the more developed midwest and east). Let's presume that the additional cost of the land, the electronics, and at least a modest storage array to buffer small fluctuations in power delivery is another $1/watt. You end up with a 1 GW plant for 2 billion dollars, which is actually not particularly crazy even now in places where electricity costs a lot (which is why private citizens are doing it). In reality, I think it would end up costing maybe half of this by the time economies of scale kicked in, which would give you an amortization time of less than a decade on the initial capital investment and at least a decade of pure profit. Not the fastest way to make money, but not a money loser and in a market dominated by low interest rates a not unreasonable ROI.
Now take the same solar panels -- the EXACT same solar panels, mind you -- into orbit. A couple of useful (approximate) numbers. It costs 64 megajoules to give 1 kg escape velocity (1/2 times 1 kg times (11.2 \times 10^6)^2). An orbit costs anywhere from 1/2 of this to the full amount, depending on the orbit. A geosynchronous orbit would actually cost most of it at 5 R_e -- call it 50 megajoules per kilogram. Of course, this is the pure energy cost at perfect efficiency. In fact, the cost in US dollars per kilogram in GEO is order of $10,000!
Assuming -- not unreasonably -- that the solar panels we lift into orbit mass out at a 100 grams per square meter, and are absolutely egregious in assuming that they get ten times the power per square meter compared to collectors on the Earth's surface (2-3 from higher insolation, the rest from extending "daylight" hours by a factor of almost three, still leaves us short but with round numbers) we can, indeed, get our (earth surface equivalent) orbiting GW at an equivalent cost factor of roughly 100. That m
Heavily farmed? You might take a glance at the population of the world then and now. I'll help:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_estimates
As you can see, even though the black plague may have killed 1/3 of the world's population, it didn't kill them all at the same time, and it isn't even clear that the world's population ever actually receded during the events, at least according to this table (which also exposes a fundamental limitation -- look at the spread in estimates for the total population in the 1200s and 1300s -- at least 150 million or about 1/3 of the total value, making it difficult to resolve even 120 million people dying all at once from the natural noise in the estimates. None of the table columns show a decrease of a third of the world's population even in the fourteenth century, and most show a pretty steady slowly increasing population across even that time. By 1500 -- still an easy 100 years before the LIA -- the world's population was back to being larger than it was in 1300.
A single human needs so many hectares of land to survive whether or not they live in urban or rural settings, and the total world population at the time ranged from 300 million to just under 600 million just before the actual start of the LIA. The largest population drop on any of the table columns (where as noted we can assume error bars much larger than the estimated drop) was 70 million out of 443 million at the start, or around 1/6 of the world's population (and not a third), and it was concentrated in Europe. I'd have to consider this very weak, speculative evidence that the LIA was caused by CO_2 sequestration in rapidly reforested land. You might want to rethink your assertion that farmland was abandoned away from population centers -- it was my understanding that the plague worked even more efficiently in the population centers than in the countryside (it's where the rats concentrate and the probability of all variants of rat-flea-human transmission is maximized, after all) and that the reforestation was anything more than a blip as the post-plague generations rapidly recolonized the lands. Urban populations also needed firewood to burn and wood to build and pulled wood in from a much larger area than just the farmland. Finally, trees take a fairly long time to grow, but a short time to cut down.
Even reforested lands would not sequester that much carbon, that rapidly, given the buffering evident in the Bern model, not unless the critics of the Bern model are correct and the timescale of CO_2 sequestration is centuries.
Overall, the argument is an interesting one, but not exactly a convincing one. In particular it is difficult to explain why the actual LIA started around 1600 and persisted for some 125 years before slowly warming, then descending a lesser amount to a less protracted minimum that lasted all the way up to the mid to late 1800s before beginning the post-LIA warming of roughly 1 C (inclusive) that persists today. Why a lag of almost 200 years, with an effect that appeared long after the CO_2 sequestered in the forest regrowth had been returned the atmosphere times two? The solar dynamics arguments have better agreement than that, and they are far from proven as well.
Basically, we do not know why the LIA occurred. There are competing theories, none of which have real predictive/hindcasting value. We do not know why the MWP preceded it. We cannot explain any of the features of the climate variation of the Holocene save through heuristic arguments -- we are incapable of quantitatively hindcasting it. I know it is popular to think that the climate is a one-knob linear system, but it is not. It is also popular to claim that the existence of many papers from studies conducted to demonstrate the existence of CO_2 based catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is sufficient proof that the those papers are all right, but as Sanjay Gupta confessed
Seriously? There is a 0.4 C spike from 1910 to 1940, compared to 0.6 C from 1970 to 2000, and you think that the extra 0.2 C is sufficient evidence of runaway anthropogenic global warming, given a non-anthropogenic spike 2/3 as large in the only two samples of spikes we have in the moderately reliable instrumental record e.g. here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png?
Note well that I am not claiming that the latter spike is or isn't natural. I'm asserting that the instrumental record is sufficient evidence of natural climate spikes at least as large as 0.13C/decade sustained over at least three decades because there is one of them present in that record. Indeed, the actual record -- woefully inadequate as it is -- suggests that spikes like this are common, that the climate often fluctuates and/or rises on average by 0.13 C per decade, for decade-long intervals. That is evident even in the noise. The noise is important, because of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem for non-equilibrium thermodynamical systems (that is, it is relevant to the problem). It suggests that the relaxation rates apparent in the noise should indeed be characteristic of the response to changes in the drivers. I'd say that this is obviously very likely true in the instrumental graph above, and furthermore that the record strongly suggests that there are natural drivers with long (multidecadal) lifetimes that make nearly discrete changes in the "equilibrium" set point of the system.
It is early to conclude things (not that that ever stops anyone who wants to make egregious claims for the second of the two spikes being almost entirely anthropogenic while ignoring the first:-) but it is by no means clear that the latter spike is continuing at anything like its peak rate, and we frankly lack the data to be able to determine if that peak rate is normal for precisely the reasons you state above -- outside of the instrumental record the error bars grow and the coarse grained intervals to which a given average temperature is assigned grow faster, to where we really cannot make very strong statements concerning the scale of natural fluctuations based on the actual instrumental data at our disposal beyond the obvious one -- with two clearly visible spikes with very similar slopes plus fluctuation-dissipation, it is at least even odds that spikes like the one in the latter half of the twentieth century are commonplace over any given interval of 1000 years or more. Seriously.
rgb
So you're saying that the Bern model for CO_2 sequestration is wrong, then? I don't think we know enough to say that it is right OR wrong yet, and won't for some time yet, but sure, it might be wrong.
However, you need to actually do the numbers before you conclude that killing off 1/3 of everybody from India to Iceland might have sequestered "huge amounts of CO_2" and you might point out some evidence that this occurred in the various CO_2 proxies before basically making something up to explain something that we currently cannot satisfactorily explain or predict even WITH the knowledge we have from proxies.
As for no warming vs no statistically significant warming, they are precisely the same thing, are they not? Or do you claim perfect knowledge WITHOUT error bars. For part of that interval there is equally statistically insignificant cooling. The point is that the GCMs have almost without exception predicted significant warming across that same interval. Indeed, if one uses actual statistical analysis and hypothesis testing the way it is axiomatically supported, to test the GCMs instead of to take untested GCMs en masse and use them to make literally indefensible statements about the probability of future warming scenarios, one would reject nearly all of the GCMs one at a time, easily at the 5% confidence level and many of them at the 3% or even less confidence level. They are all significantly too warm.
Finally, you might consider what the error bars on our probable knowledge of things like global temperature really are, instead of introducing a false analogy. For example, how many significant digits do you think you might get measuring the average air temperature in your own back yard? How many thermometers might it take, and where might you locate them? How well would they agree with thermometers located across the street, or two blocks over? How would you measure this average? How well would this average extrapolate and infill to predict the average temperature of your city, your county, your state, the United States (if you American)?
Curiously, James Hansen has spoken on this in a Q/A and the answers might surprise you.
In the meantime, the way temperature is reported is as an "anomaly", in part because the various models used to extrapolate, infill, and otherwise massage the actual raw data produce global averages that differ by over a degree F. Since there aren't that many of them, this is a reasonable lower bound estimate for sigma. Of course, the models themselves all extrapolate and infill and use data that is itself corrupted and imperfect in various ways, so that the models have a model error that is almost certainly at least as large, and because they are using overlapping data one cannot conclude that the spread in model means represents this internal purely statistical and experimental error. I would be rather surprised if we know global average temperature to within 1 C.
Now let's put your analogy into true perspective. The actual absolute temperature involved is pretty close to 300 C, so let us go with that and equate it to 30 mph. Our probable error in this number is around 1 C, or 0.1 mph. The entire post LIA warming is around 1 C -- barely resolvable. The entire warming from the beginning of the instrumental era to the middle of that era is around 0.4 C, with almost all of that increase occurring from 1910 to 1940 and not, according to climate scientists, attributable to increased CO_2 (as this was largely pre-industrial as far as the world is concerned and CO_2 hadn't started to bump yet. So we have 0.4 over 30 years, mind you, little or no CO_2 involved, all instrumental records and hence at least moderately reliable although -- note well, we're really talking about variation that is on the order of the error bar on absolute temperature (where we could then get into a HUGE discussion of whether one can cheat statistics and claim a smaller one on the ANOMALY, arguing effectively that we somehow know the second moment of a distribution mo
You might want to look at two things. One is the actual thermal record over geological time, which shows intervals of extremely rapid natural warming and cooling. Second, you might want to consider the fact that much of that record is essentially smeared out by imprecision in the proxies used so that one is comparing two different kinds of averages -- one averaged over a very short time interval, and another where the average might well be over a period longer than the entire time we have had thermometers. If you then perform a regression estimate of extrema, you will conclude that no, it cannot be safely or reasonably concluded that the "very very fastest warming we've seen is attributed to man".
Curiously, not even most climate scientists would assert such a thing, I don't think. Some might. For one thing, there hasn't been any statistically significant warming for roughly 16 years, in spite of "man". For another, some unknown fraction of the observed warming post Little Ice Age was natural -- all of it, up to perhaps 1950, and very likely some of it since then as well. There are plenty of natural things that produce rapid warming, and cooling, as evidenced by the geological record. We just don't understand them yet.
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Actually, my first thought was "In Saudi Arabia, they kill people or whip them almost to death for apostasy or blasphemy and yet they eat camel in spite of it being a mammal that does not have a cloven hoof and chews the cud and hence is explicitly banned in the OT (shared by all of the Abrahamic faiths) right alongside of the other "unclean" meats like pork and dog and horse". Way to go, guys! I guess those holy scriptures are "optional" when it doesn't involve stuff like killing people for being gay, female, Sunni (if you are Shia), Shia (if you are Sunni), non-Muslim in general, Jewish in particular, etc etc.
Besides, there's a lot of meat on a camel. Hate to just waste it. There's being religious, I guess, and then there is losing money in a potentially lucrative side business.
Mind you, I'm not religious at all and think there is nothing spiritually evil about eating camel, but a lot of those OT religious rules were founded on empirical observation that eating certain animals was more likely to sicken you to death than others. Moses has nice meal of raw oysters, contracts vibrio vulnificus, and the next thing you know Moses is ten pounds lighter and weak as a kitten and seafood without scales is on the banned list, that sort of thing.
So in a sense, there is something almost -- dare I say Biblically just? -- about a fatal virus that resides in camels as an animal reservoir being contracted by people that can be dogmatic and violent wherever it doesn't conflict with a perfectly understandable economic interest in turning a potential liability into an asset.
Next up: Jakob-Creutzfeldt hops to camels! Mad Camel Syndrome spreads throughout the Middle East!
But would anybody notice?
rgb
Wow, beautiful reply. The bottom line message for me was that it was a one-off, in a sense security by obscurity (or, as you put it, by expensive obfuscation), and that to make it work you had to hand code it at a key point in a suitable application. And it doesn't make functional reverse engineering more difficult (seeing what the application does and trying to duplicate it functionally), it just makes disassembling the code into semantically meaningful functional units that can similarly work together to accomplish the desired work considerably more difficult, for a value of considerably intended to discourage people who lack NSA-class resources and nothing better to do.
After all, even the use of the term "dongle" in your reply is telling -- none of this stuff has much of a lifetime. It isn't about making it impossible, it is about making it too difficult to accomplish (probably) without a big at-risk investment during the limited lifetime that the program has value, that dongles or parallel ports to attach them to exist, that a real competitor hasn't eaten your lunch in by simply producing a better program to do the same thing.
I also enjoyed your remarks on patents and emergent obviousness. However, I would note that in the case of many, many great ideas, they are obvious after somebody has the burst of insight and explains them. The entire structure of physical science comes to mind. While anybody could have invented calculus at any time over several thousand years, nobody did until Newton and/or Liebnitz did. Afterwards, sure, it is obvious, I can derive calculus in a few lines of work and then it is just a tedious matter of working out all of the completely inevitable consequences (not all of which are easy, at least until they are done and added to the list of no-longer-difficult obvious stuff). I still think that unique solutions to expensive problems deserve patent protection even though AFTER they are revealed people look at it and go "Gee, that's obvious, I could have done that."
So why didn't they?
Perhaps because it was not, in fact, all that obvious until the obvious solution was pointed out?
rgb
Even better than the grocery list is Searle's Chinese Room. A man sits in a sealed room. He doesn't speak or read chinese, but every now and then somebody pokes a slip of paper in under the door with some Chinese on it. The man picks it up and goes to a vast filing cabinet, matches the symbols on the paper, and pulls out a paper with other symbols on it which he pushes out the door. In this way the entire room can act like a "speaker of Chinese" even though the man in the room doesn't recognize a word of it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
The interesting question is whether or not one can LEARN Chinese if one is the man in the room by monitoring the messages. And this, in turn, is a matter of information theory and complexity -- to be able to learn Chinese by monitoring a flow of symbols like this utterly without context might well be very, very difficult. The cabinet drawers, after all, might have not a single message in them but a stack of messages of similar form but equivalent meaning, shuffled. The man might have to look up the drawer to open not just on the basis of the current message but on the basis of the last ten, or hundred, messages. The drawers themselves might periodically rearrange themselves so that the man has to constantly do a tedious calculation in order to determine the current location of the right drawer in order to get the current top of stack message on the basis of the last twenty exchanges.
Now imagine that the actual conversation isn't one such room, it is thirty, or fifty, or five hundred. The first man gets the input message, goes to a drawer and gets a response, but that is not the REAL response, it is just a message to the man in the second room. That man looks up a message for the third room, etc, and it is only the man in the last room that looks up the actual response and returns it.
One can imagine lots of crypto-class transformations one can insert into the lookup process -- each man can use e.g. a one way hash of the message they receive (known to the sender as well) to permute the cabinet drawers after each response; the next message even with the same "content" might then be directions to a completely different drawer. Even a comparatively few rooms filled with many constantly whirling drawers would make it pretty hard to learn Chinese, especially the Chinese associated with rarely used drawers or contexts. And learning it at all would require SOME ability to connect at least the input and output symbols with actual contexts. Even if one mapped the location and content of every drawer and reverse engineered the entire algorithm for doing the shuffling, one still has to assemble the result into a full semantic map. Not easy, although as noted not impossible.
rgb
Um, how? Using Dark Matter detectors? Look, neutrinos couple to existing, known particles -- leptons, although via other more complex processes e.g. inverse beta decay they can couple to protons in nuclei as well. The response we can detect is in proportion to the density of those particles in a medium that can function as a detector, which in turn is proportional to straight up mass density. The interaction probability is phenomenally low for all of the known particles, so one requires large volumes of material to make ANY kind of detector. There are strict limits on the density of ordinary matter, and even more stringent limits on the density of matter that can conceivably used as a detector
So I'm curious -- given that the ratio between the mass density of water and the mass density of e.g. Tungsten, Uranium, Plutonium is only a single order of magnitude, and a reaction cross section that AFAIK depends solely on the mass density, where exactly are the other two orders of magnitude going to come from from any possible variation in materials?
"Systems", well, perhaps. If we use underground cavities filled with water to look for Cerenkov radiation, or chlorine detectors to look for outgassing Argon, we can always make them 10x bigger and hence increase the detector volume 1000 fold. But this is morally equivalent to building 1000 detectors like we have today and combining the data, and it still leaves us with the same issues if one wishes to determine flavor information and not just raw e.g. neutral current flux. Indeed, to get flavor information we will very likely be limited to building 1000 detectors to get 1000 fold increase in data simply because there are size constraints on detectors that are going to detect and resolve e.g. a muon produced in a charged current interaction.
So sure, we can always scale up our existing technology or minor improvements of it to improve detection rates. But I don't think that materials or systems that improve the scaling of the detection technologies we already have are particularly plausible, based on what I now know. So what did you have in mind (as in, do you know something I don't)? Are there other materials that are likely to have orders of magnitude higher cross section for inverse beta decay, or are you just thinking of building bigger/more detectors?
Not flames, BTW -- an honest question.
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