A tidally locked planet would have all of its atmosphere period precipitated out on the dark side. There would be no habitable band. The antipode opposite the sun would be open to space, cooling the surface there, essentially 100% of the time. There would be no factors driving global circulation -- the atmosphere would rapidly stratify (and get very hot indeed, stably, on the side facing the sun). Eventually, where by eventually I mean in a matter of a few days if one stopped the Earth from rotating without vaporizing it (can't be done, sure, I know) it get cold enough to first rain, then snow, the snow carbon dioxide, then the greenhouse effect disappears and the temperature really plummets, and in just a little bit more time you have a rain of oxygen and nitrogen followed (as they deplete the atmosphere by a fall of solid oxygen-nitrogen sleet). As fast as it falls out on the dark side, it is replenished from the warm side (cooling as it comes) until the warm side -- now bloody hot not unlike the lit side of the moon -- has almost no atmosphere at all. The dark side has a rather large mountain of frozen air centered fairly symmetrically on the solar antipode. There would probably be some residual partial pressure of gas, but it wouldn't be enough to keep your blood from boiling anywhere on the planet's surface.
If the atmosphere was a more exotic mix, you'd actually precipitate out the gases in layers, frozen methane in one layer, oxygen in another, hydrogen and helium on top of the whole mess at the end.
All this being said, any kind of intellectual property law is a farce against the nature of any truly free market because it violates real property rights. It essentially posits that I cannot use my materials to make things I want to make because somebody else "owns" the "idea" of using materials that way. No government should be able to tell somebody that they cannot make things with their own property, or configure their property in some way that another lays claim to. Either you own something (physically!) and have control over its disposition or you don't. The whole concept of "intellectual property" should be excised from society.
Good luck with books, movies, and so on, then. It takes millions to make a good movie. Once digitized, it takes zero dollars (not really, but a number asymptotically approaching zero) to make and distribute one billion copies of it. If I have to right to use my own materials (my computer) to make anything I want (a copy of the movie) and sell it (although god knows what I'm selling, a pattern of electrical energy that happens to have meaning and hence value?) without restriction, then there will be no more movies that are more creative than stupid pet tricks or youtube. There will be no more books -- as an author, I can tell you that it takes an enormous amount of hard work to write a book, and to write it with no possibility of reward makes it too big a waste of time (and requires one to have a day job to support it, leaving one with even less time). There will be an enormous impoverishment in music, in art, in literature, in film, in theater -- even the author of a play needs to make money or it isn't worth it to write plays.
Good luck with drugs, too. It requires order of a billion dollars to develop a new drug and bring it to market. Once that is done, of course, the synthesis chain is known and anybody can make it for a fraction of the development cost. Companies take huge risks now developing drugs and without some protected period to make back their investment and a sufficient profit before companies with no actual investment at all in the development can make the product and undersell them we won't see any more new drugs. It won't be worth it. One can go right on down the line with inventions of all sorts. Inventing them is one thing, investing money in bringing them to market another, but once they are proven it is invariably trivial to clone them at a fraction of the development cost and with none of the risk.
The problem with patent and copyright IP laws isn't that they aren't valuable and necessary. It is that they have long gone from protecting the legitimate right of the inventor author to make a protected profit from the time and money they risked creating something new that benefits everybody to protecting the "rights" of an entire legion of bloodsucking parasites that have attached themselves to every aspect of delivery of that benefit to the consumer and who want their right to the protected profit stream to exist independent of the original purpose, that is, the reward of the original creators and risk takers.
We already have the concept of taxation of things "at risk" in a way that is differentiated from riskless taxation in corporate investment. We need to apply this same concept to copyright and patent protection, and issue it in such a way that it only applies as long as the original risk takers are receiving some predefined fraction of the income, and then only for a finite period of time.
I thought that the government was, by definition, the group who has the biggest gun, for as long as that state lasts. So there is no in between.
Life in the state of nature is ugly, nasty, brutish and short, and we all live in a state of nature at all times. All aspects of the social contract are our attempt to collectively minimize our risks and maximize our advantages and benefits, generally by ganging up on would-be bullies or out-group folks. Historically, this has been a lot easier to accomplish with memetic support structures like the illusion of human rights, religious duties and obligations, the fear of a supernatural deity with the biggest gun that one could ever conceive of (but one that is only used after you are dead), and government bureaucracy. Traditions, too.
In the end, patent rights and copy rights are what "we" say they are, collectively, and can enforce by the direct threat of and delivery of violence on members of the herd that disagree. "We" generally establish these illusory rights according to some mushy but reasonable principles such as rewarding the inventor and/or author (so that they will continue to produce inventions and stories and so on -- it is in our own self-interest to keep them motivated). However, a much smaller set of "we" also benefit tremendously from the delivery systems for the inventions, books, music, art and so on created by the talented few but enjoyed by the greedy many. Those delivery systems have long since been co-opted as the true basis for patent and copyright law, more the latter than the former. Patents at least have a reasonable lifetime, but a copyright now is damn near forever, long past the actual lifetime of an author.
The corporate interests of the world would, I'm certain, like to turn patents and copyrights into property forever, with no time out. That way they become pure commodities that can be bought and sold indefinitely. Imagine a world where the rights to Shakespeare's plays were still for sale, traded like pork bellies or mattresses. Imagine a world where you have to pay somebody every time you read, see, or hear one of Shakespeare's plays, where even media copies are sold per use, not as things you can own. That's the ideal of the publishing industry, with the ideal of the manufacturing sector and drug industry regarding patents close behind.
This leaves the problem of enforcement, the big guns. Any law that is ignored as universally as the copyright laws are currently ignored is no law. They are unenforceable, and everybody hates them. The illusion that they are somehow necessary in order to reward the actual creators of IP, carefully fostered by the media industry, is finally breaking down as well. At some point in the evolution of the digital Universe we will probably find some way of directly rewarding the authors of books, creators of music, inventors of fabulous machines only but in a way that strips away the guarantee of huge profits for the (largely unnecessary) middlemen. But to get there, we have to pry congress away from the clutches of the large, wealthy, and loud lobbying groups that advocate for the protection of their "rights" to charge the moral equivalent of a toll for going down a public road.
I used Perl-Tk for mine -- SDL wasn't around yet IIRC, nor was Gtk, and I was porting an interface I originally wrote in Tcl/Tk once I realized that Tcl was insanely out of sync with the way I think and code. In the end it worked perfectly, but it was a bit of a mess to write. Not an exercise I'm eager to repeat (and I long since learned to code in C/Gtk for the same kind of application), but I still have the source squirrelled away in case I ever need to recycle it in some way. But the amazing thing about a dancing bear isn't how gracefully it dances but that it dances at all. A >>simple Tk interface in perl was, and probably still is, a piece of cake and you have all of that string parsing power just sitting there at your beck and call.
Games, though -- wow! But then, as one of the top posters noted perl is relatively efficient as scripting languages go, sometimes within an order of magnitude of compiled code. Hard to do much better than that with any of the languages that do dynamical allocation of all variables as you use them, creating everything as complex opaque hashes behind the scene just so you can address a[34] without defining or allocating a or even assigning values or referencing a[0] to a[33] (where I'm deliberately leaving off the $ -- this remark isn't only about perl). The same thing that makes it perfect for sloppy one-offs makes it slow for everything else, but slow is relative, given computers with several billion instructions per second at your disposal. In lots of cases, the time required to write the program is vastly greater than the time required to run it, so writing in an easy and forgiving language where you can dash off working code in thirty minutes instead of a couple of days is totally worth it.
And C is the best to write operating systems (and a lot of other stuff) in and APL is actually pretty nifty for writing certain kinds of vector code and...
Personally, I still love Perl and use it by preference when I need a short one-off program that doesn't have to be fast, especially one that does a lot of parsing. It is a great on-the-fly translator, and is often used to facilitate data conversion of one sort or another because it is so easy to use for that purpose. I have written far more complicated stuff -- actual interactive GUI applications -- in Perl, but that's where one is probably pushing it outside of its area of primary utility and I probably won't do that again. And yeah, one of the best features of Perl is its ability to split lines and do regex processing in a syntactically compact way. Tools like awk/sed/bash are also very useful for doing simple stuff -- pattern matches and substitutions -- but sed rapidly becomes arcane to the point where one has to keep a library of sed 1 liners or examples handy to remember how to pull the third octet out of an IP address, add 24 to it, and write it back or the like. In Perl doing this takes several lines of code (if you want the result to be readable) but it is easy and robust to code and understand. I used to use awk a lot (15-20 years ago), but Perl completely superceded that. I do still use sed simply because s/aaa/bbb/g is so damn useful on the fly, more so if you chain several sed conversions and other stuff together in a pipe. But once the complexity passes a fairly low threshold, Perl is very much a tool of choice.
Of course it is not unique. Nowadays, lots of people like other similar languages e.g. python that serve more or less the same space. But arguing about which of the available languages is "best" is a fruitless exercise. Philosophically they are very different. Some people like what I would call "fascist" languages (where python is in that category IMO) with strict rules on e.g. indentation and structure. Some people like loose, free languages that don't care how you indent and use brackets instead. Some people like procedural languages. Some people like object oriented languages. Some people are agnostic and like languages that do both, each in its place. And whatever the programmer likes, there is also the task -- some tasks manipulate data or perform computations in procedural ways, some work with data objects.
Personally, I think any rumor of the demise of Perl is likely exaggerated and premature (and I'd want data to support it!) I use it all the time, and obviously I wasn't surveyed. A lot of the rise and fall of scripting languages is dictated by what schools are teaching and what people need in jobs, and these days it is dominantly java (or javascript), python (because it is easy to teach structured programming in python), php (because it enables web programming), and even "html" (which isn't really a programming language but so what). For web programming -- a major if not the major marketplace for programmers -- and even for database programming (web interface to database) this set makes sense. Perl was popular early on for writing web scripts because it worked, but it wasn't really designed for that purpose and languages that were (but were otherwise remarkably perl-like) eventually won out. So what? That wasn't what Perl was written for, and it's not what it does best.
Only a few quibbles. First, it doesn't explain a known issue with the models. It is a potential explanation for one of many known issues with the models that remains to be demonstrated as an explanation. Second, it may well invalidate the overall predictions in the specific sense that altering the circulation patterns enough to affect weather -- the assertion of the article -- is more than enough to alter heating and cooling efficiencies, albedo variation, cloud distribution, and more. In a highly nonlinear general circulation model, this is more than enough to alter the actual predictions for e.g. climate sensitivity.
Furthermore, if it alters the UHI data and corrections made thereof, it alters the data that goes into the models. It also alters -- and from the sound of things lowers significantly, over a widespread area -- the claimed amount of observed warming, as a function of time as urbanization itself is a time dependent trend. This actually has secondary support in the form of UAH and RSS satellite observation, which has differed from GISS and HADCRUT (especially after ongoing "adjustments") by a time dependent positive trend. Correcting for this (by effectively cooling the present relative to the past) would actually put the major temperature sets into better agreement over the last 33 years.
The waste heat production of humans is absolutely irrelevant compared to solar heating as a direct source of global warming, but it is a well-known and consistently underestimated source of local warming in the weather stations used to create land temperature estimates (as has already been shown in peer reviewed publications, if a glance at e.g. the Weather Underground local weather station maps surrounding any urban center isn't enough to convince you). This suggests that the effect is not as spatially confined as previously believed and to accomplish long range effects at all has indirect effects that exceed the local ones. This is not impossible -- I've read papers that suggest that the mere presence of the turbulent air downstream coming off of the vanes of a windmill farm cause significant mixing of the air near the surface that would otherwise be stratified over an area of tens to hundreds of square kilometers, affecting the mean nighttime temperature over all of this area.
The proper issue regarding global warming is not whether or not it has occurred or is occurring -- the world has definitely warmed on average since the LIA, with almost all of that warming occurring without the help of carbon dioxide. Nor is it whether or not increased carbon dioxide will all things being equal cause more warming -- that's simple physics, although the net warming expected from carbon dioxide alone is not particularly alarming. It is whether or not we know enough about the nonlinear feedbacks in the chaotic system to be able to build general circulation models at all with predictive value ten to a hundred years into the future. It is about the climate sensitivity.
Any negative adjustment in current temperatures simply exacerbates the already serious problem those models face -- there has been no statistically significant warming for the last 14 to 16 years, roughly half of the entire reliable RSS/UAH record. The warming visible over the entire record is at the moderate rate of 0.1C to 0.15 C per decade, in almost perfect agreement with the warming expected from CO_2 alone, with neutral feedback. Almost all of the warming occurred in a single spike of warming that is precisely correlated with the 1997-1998 "super El Nino" -- effectively flat before that, effectively flat after that. Carbon dioxide, in the meantime, has inexorably crept up.
Personally I don't think this falsifies assertions of possibly catastrophic global warming, because we don't know enough about the timescales, the chaotic dynamics, the feedbacks, neglected effects like the extended UHI effect discussed above, neglected effects from solar-driven stratospheric atmospheric chemistry, the fra
OK, seriously, let's try doing some arithmetic. The energy cost per kilogram of lifting something into low Earth orbit is half of it's escape energy. Escape speed is roughly 11,000 meters per second, so that energy is 1/4 x 121 x 10^6, call it 30 MJ/kg. Multiply that by something like 1000 (maybe more) due to rocket inefficiencies where you have to lift the fuel to lift the fuel to lift the fuel that lifts the payload. But it doesn't matter -- lift it at 100% efficiency and you're already dead. So lifting sand into orbit to melt it is enormously stupid. One might as well melt it in solar furnaces here on Earth, except that this is silly, joule for joule you'd be far better off collecting a megajoule of solar energy and converting it into a hundred kilojoules of electrical power. Even cheap low efficiency solar can manage that, and the return is at least twice that of silicon nanoparticle energy. Indeed, you'd be far better off taking the silicon you purified and turning it into solar cells -- those are already close to break even with at least some sources of energy in some locations, and a kilogram of silicon used that way can generate at least tens of watts (probably order of 100) for at least 20,000 seconds of an 86,400 second day. That's order of two megajoules a day, for a projected lifetime of 20 years. And note well, that is still not an economic win without exception in all locations when its amortized cost is compared to the value of commercial coal or nuclear or natural gas generated power, and it is only available when the sun shines, because kilowatt-hours of commercial electric cost anywhere from 6 to 16 cents in most locations, and at 6 cents it takes effectively forever to recover the cost of $1/watt solar cells. At 16 cents it breaks even to wins a bit with a seven to ten year amortization, and hence is a not unattractive investment. At 10 cents it is marginal (call it 5 watt-hours a day, 200 days to get a kw-hour and thereby earn 10 cents, 2000 days to break even on the solar cell itself, 4000 days to break even on installation, inversion, and the cost of the money. That's eleven years before you start to turn a profit, more if you install a battery to store the energy instead of resell surplus back to the grid. 16 cents drops it to under seven years, which starts to look attractive.
Saddest of all, in seven to ten years, solar cells will very likely go down to 50 cents a watt or even less, at which point they'll become attractive at 10 cents a kW-hour, a no-brainer where electricity is more expensive, and still it won't be a suitable solution for powering civilization, not without a serious storage and transportation technology to back it up. Otherwise it is at best a load leveller for conventional plants.
As I said, I can't really see any good reason to invest in silicon nanoparticle generated hydrogen gas powering fuel cells to make electricity except -- perhaps -- for exotic "one off" problems like a military application or a space application with nonlinear constraints or benefits. And even for the military, if they think this is a winning solution I think they're out of their minds. Somewhere in there common sense has to come into play.
Because Obama hasn't given me a call yet to make me the offer, I suppose. I'm not sure I accept it if he did -- it has to be a thankless job these days and I'm enough of a climate skeptic to think that energy resources need to have net positive present cost-benefit before implementing them on a broad scale. Until then research and even prototyping is lovely and worthwhile, but no large scale implementation at a loss until it results in something at least cost-competitive with existing fully developed resources.
Where does silicon come from? Silicon dioxide, a.k.a. "sand". How tightly is it bound? Very, very, very tightly. Indeed, a whopping 910.86 kJ/mole. So it requires at LEAST this much energy to turn sand into silicon and oxygen, except that one cannot electrolyze or reduce it until it is molten, so add to this enough energy to melt sand, after raising its temperature to some 1500 C. Then, one has to engineer "nanoparticles" out of the purified silicon metal. At a guess -- only a guess, of course -- this involves heating the silicon to the vaporization point and either vapor depositing it on a suitable substrate and scraping off the nanoparticles or spraying silicon vapor into a suitable medium that causes it to condense out small particles and then filtering or otherwise separating out the 'nano' particles from those that are merely small. Sounds like more energy to me.
At the end of the day, you can get at most the 250 or so kJ/mole back from the hydrogen gas produced after the silicon nanoparticles steal the hydrogen back from water. I think it would be an absolute miracle if it this is as much as 10% of the energy invested in making the nanoparticles, and the energy costs are probably at most half of the total manufacturing costs. Down to 5%. Multiply by roughly 50% again (efficiency of fuel cell).
This "Fermi estimate" of the probable economic efficiency is on the order of 2.5%, then, compared to the cost of just buying electricity or any other form of concentrated energy. Even if I'm too aggressive in my pessimism, 10% is a pretty safe upper bound. I'm not seeing this as a game changer. Gasoline or other hydrocarbons are still the gold standard for readily available energy density at ballpark 35 MJ/liter, and don't require investing 20 times the energy eventually recovered in their preparation.
There is a major difference between talk and prototyping. We built small scale prototypes of liquid thorium salt reactors forty or fifty years ago, but politics shut down the development when money was requested to go the next step and build a prototype to scale. We could pick up where we left off in less than a year if money were committed not to paper research that delays the project indefinitely but to prototyping and practical engineering, actually building one or more of the damn things and tinkering as we go to solve engineering problems in situ, not in theoretical analysis.
We could revive the last working thorium design in at most a year or two -- it didn't take that long to build the first time. We could be working on scaling it up in parallel, so that we had a working scale model in four or five years tops. We could be building working full scale LFTR power plants by 2020, and could solve both the "carbon problem" and the world's energy poverty problem by 2030 to 2040 and coast to world peace and abundance by 2050. The cost through the working scale model is on the order of a few billion dollars, tops. We used to spend that much in Iraq every week.
Or we could continue to dick around investing billions into wind power that requires the rare earth magnets that come from processing Thorium rich salts somewhere and that don't generate power when the wind doesn't blow, which is most of the time. We could continue to drop billions down the rat-hole of defending "free" access to major oil deposits under the guise of defending national security or promoting personal and religious freedoms for people living half a world away. We can make bankers and corporate interests rich with complex 'carbon trading' schemes that so far have had zero effect on global CO_2 levels at enormous annualized costs, costs so great that they probably single handedly caused the European banking crisis (or could have ameliorated it in any event). We spend more money on long-shot always a decade away fusion energy than we do on LFTR, and burned more federal money on solar cells in one failed company than it would cost to get started on LFTR.
There is a singular lack of urgency in thorium based energy research and investment. Too many people make too much money within the status quo.
Hell yes! Sapphires too. Even gold mines (one of the largest gold mines in the world prior to the California gold rush is a few miles from where I'm sitting). But you do have to watch out if you want to mine any of this stuff, or you'll catch hell.
North Carolina has Uranium as well, but there is so strong a NIMBY movement that any politician that suggested that we mine it and achieve energy independence in the state would find himself going to hell in a handbasket. Thorium too -- in the form of Monzanite Sands, which are -- surprise -- around 24% lanthanum, about 17% neodymium, and full of other useful stuff as well. The minute somebody realizes that national "rare earth shortages" are complete bullshit caused almost entirely by our reluctance to treat Thorium as a potentially useful nuclear fuel instead of as a pollutant, there will be hell to pay, but in the long run North Carolina has more than enough heaven in it to compensate.
Personally, sitting as I am a mere fifteen or twenty miles from Shearon-Harris (a pressurized water nuclear plant with one of the largest nuclear waste cooling pool facilities in the world) I'd be thrilled if our state took a hell of a risk and directly invested in the promotion of rare earth mining with the deliberate extraction of the associated Thorium and in the further investment in Thorium based nuclear reactors that produce "no" nuclear waste in comparison with Uranium Oxide, but between NIMBY and corporate interests that currently make shit-piles of money providing UO fuel or coal based energy, it will be a cold day in Half Hell, NC before that happens.
Now, finding rare earth deposits with almost no thorium in them is a real feat, and getting the US government to find ways to store thorium would a world-class miracle.
No, a world class miracle would be getting the U. S. government to fund the development of an LFTR that would provide the world with essentially unlimited cheap electricity, provide us with ample supples of rare earth elements and other exotic but useful isotopes as a side effect, generate almost no nuclear waste (LFTR consumes nearly all of the meso-scale "waste" like plutonium and turns it into energy), in a process that cannot melt down (the reaction just stops) in a reactor vessel that is not pressurized, using fuel that does not have to be hand assembled and delivered only by the company that made your reactor originally, at a small fraction of the cost of solid Uranium Oxide fuel, using reactions that make it relatively difficult to build bombs undetected, while eliminating world (energy) poverty without the use of carbon (whether or not you happen to think CO_2 is a problem, carbon fuels release more radioactivity than all the nuclear plants on earth combined times 100, soot, a variety of known carcinogens, teratogenic mercury, and acid precursors).
But no, we have to protect General Electric and Westinghouse and our ability to scavenge plutonium from expended and enormously expensive fuel. Big oil or coal is happy to invest all sorts of chump change in solar and wind projects because they know that they are not viable without subsidy and the subsidy is always enough to make them break even or win a bit economically without threatening their main profit stream. Thorium would disrupt the entire energy delivery system and drop the cost of energy in all forms dramatically, at the expense of huge recurring profits for some huge players that make equally huge contributions to the entire political establishment. So while storing thorium would make enormous sense, we will neither store it nor invest in using it until the need to do so exceeds the price of votes in Washington. Which, sadly, will be around a decade after the Chinese perfect the technology and market it to the entire world, including us, while maintaining a virtual monopoly on the heavier rare earths (as noted, almost always found with Thorium as a "pollutant"). Hell, even fusion might happen first, and that is an uphill battle all the way.
It's actually an excellent bellwether of the Green movement. At the moment, it is perfectly happy to condemn two billion plus of the world's population to continue to live in energy poverty so profound that they burn dung to cook on, wash clothes (if at all) by hand, and use oil lamps (if anything) to light the night while pushing enormous sums into technologies (like wind) that are visibly a major fail and will remain so into the indefinite future. They trumpet the dangers of CO_2 and catastrophic global warming in the distant future while perpetuating the ongoing real time catastrophe that affects over a third of the earth's population right now, while playing into the hands of the very agents that provide the carbon based power they demonize as the alternatives they push are not technologically or economically feasible (yet).
The one existing technology that "could" permit the continuation of civilization and reduction of global poverty while reducing CO_2 production at a feasible cost is nuclear (which is not a single technology but a many technologies, some of them the subject of research and development). Thorium based reactors are in a sense proven technology -- they were built back in the 60s and 70s and successfully run long enough to verify that they are indeed almost certainly a safe, meltdown-proof nuclear technology with far lower risks and far greater benefits in every category from cost to waste to nuclear proliferation -- but they do require four or five years of intensive research to complete an engineering cycle to scale. The day the Greens recognize this and take their foot off of the backs
And how pitiful it is that this prediction is by people that should know better. I'm a physicist and better than average at predicting social and political events (I predicted the fall of the Soviet Union and reunification of Germany several years before they occurred, much to the surprise and amusement of my colleagues when they actually happened, for example) and yet I know better than to make long term predictions of doom in highly nonlinear, nearly unpredictable systems with enormous feedbacks acting against catastrophes of all sorts. And then there are Black Swan events, where the catastrophe that occurs isn't the one you expected.
It's all the more pointless given that the world has never been safer, healthier, wealthier, or freer. Not that we are "there yet", but it is far more plausible to assert that our risk of some sort of global disaster is decreasing, not increasing or remaining constant. The end of the cold war all by itself should have moved the damn clock back by a few hours if it where anything other than a complex political statement.
Yeah, like that, assuming you have the ? operator.
Fun but dumb. This is the sort of thing I assign as one of the first few programming assignments in any language I'm teaching a student (usually in an independent study, since I generally teach physics and not programming except to select students). I'm about to teach a student matlab (not my first choice, but a decent thing to choose to be first for a total programming novice) and I'll be sure to include this right after I have them do the "count to 100" exercise that is just the loop itself.
What a taunting "invitation". You say "come over to my house and watch the game" then leave the door locked, the knocker gone and the doorbell disconnected because you're sure your invitee won't show.
Piffle. How can you lock the door on God? You have inflated Jesus in your mind into some sort of arrogant bastard, to help reduce the cognitive dissonance caused by the unsolvable problem of theodicy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy...in case you haven't worked through it. None of the proposed "solutions" are at all logical or appealing, and they are infinitely less appealing with the hell meme, which makes God infinitely unjust for punishing a finite offense committed by a flawed character for an eternity.
No, I'm merely assuming for the sake of the argument that you are correct, that Jesus is real, but I'm insisting on applying the exact same rules I used to determine the reality of everything else to verify that. You have a vague feeling in your mind and say "Aha, Jesus!" I insist on rather more. My mind is certainly capable of generating a feeling of Jesus, or Ganesh, or Buddha, or The Great Spirit watching over me, because my mind is complex, far more than just my interior dialogue or current focus of attention. So is yours. As I'm married, I'm perfectly aware that my mind is capable of synthesizing entire fantasies and substituting them for a memory of reality (if you are married, I'm sure your wife or husband has successfully demonstrated this to you as well). When I teach, I often say one thing but my hand writes something else at the board. Who wrote that? Jesus? Satan? Or is my brain just more complex than what's going on in my verbal centers and sometimes confused, sometimes feeding garbage from one part into the sensory channels of another?
Also, why do I even need to ask? Why does anyone? If you believe that the contents of the Bible are factually correct -- God knows how you possibly could, given the vast collection of internal contradictions and contradictions with simple known facts, but if -- then you agree that Jesus revealed himself to certain people "in person". Saul/Paul was my example, but according to SPaul "hundreds of others, some of whom are now asleep" (dead). Spaul wasn't inviting Jesus at all; nor was he taunting. He simply thought that Jesus was yet another false messiah and that Jews that thought otherwise were blasphemers, which is not, actually, an unreasonable proposition given the straight up beliefs of Judaism at that time. In persecuting them, he was simply following the rules laid down in the Old Testament for dealing with blasphemy and idolatry.
One has to assume that SPaul would have gone to hell had Jesus not intervened, completely uninvited, personally. One has to assume that nearly everybody on Earth will end up in hell if Jesus doesn't intervene, uninvited, personally since it is still the case that 2 out of 3 people living are not even nominally Christian (and one has to assume, as you seem to agree, that many of those that claim to be Christian on a sheet are not, although that's a No True Scotsman logical fallacy for anyone to assert about anyone else). So here I am, surely no worse thatn SPaul on the road to Damascus. As I've pointed out, probably better -- I hardly ever persecute anybody but undergraduates who are flunking my course. My disbelief in Jesus is utterly reasonable and completely honest disbelief, just as your belief is completely unreasonable as you've never actually seen Jesus, touched Jesus, or had any of the usual sensory experiences associated with things that are actually objectively real (forgive me for speaking for you here, but you know this is true -- you've never shared a glass of wine with Jesus in the real world and chatted about theodicy to see how God explains the solution to the problem).
Not athiestic, polytheistic. I spent a year in Thailand while in the USAF and knew a LOT of Bhuddists. They burn incense to various gods, and have ornate little "spirit houses" outside their homes so the spirits will inhabit the beautiful little spirit houses and not their homes.
Since Buddhism is not a religion but a philosophy, one can certainly incorporate the religion into other spiritual or religious practice. Hinduism, for example, just made the Buddha into an avatar of Vishnu (and hence a bona-fide Hindu god). Thai Buddhism is derived from this branch of the family tree. In China and Tibet it often was mixed with Taoism or various forms of spiritualism, giving rise to e.g. Zen and still other flavors. In a similar way, Quakerism is sufficiently broad that there actually exist atheistic Quakers and Buddhist Quakers. However, the words of Buddha himself, to the extent that one believes that e.g. the Pali Canons preserve them, do not teach of God or Gods, but rather the contrary:
To put it more literally, Buddha argued that believing in Gods is not useful. It is pointless. Even if they exist it is pointless, because they too are bound the the wheel and must seek enlightenment, and then, there is no evidence that they exist. To the spiritually enlightened in Hinduism and Buddhism alike, the gods are viewed as metaphors, as crutches to aid human understanding by personifying traits both desirable and undesirable. A perhaps better summary is here:
which also explains the minor differences between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism, where Theravada is more abstract and less religious. Buddhist "devotion" should not be confused with theism, and Buddha explicitly stated that he was not a God and that the entire idea of God is a distraction from the path to Enlightenment. Of course, Jesus explicitly stated in the New Testament that he wasn't God as well, but look how well that worked.
People want to believe that the Universe is personal, not impersonal. They want to believe that there is a point to it all. They want to believe in cosmic/divine justice, because there ain't no justice here on Earth in any living being's actual life. They will invent Gods or deify innocent philosophers given half a chance, if that's the only way they can have them.
This is not clearly presented even by Buddhists. They often prefer to present Buddhism as "non-theistic" but not atheistic without recognizing that "non" is the literal meaning of the "a" in atheistic. They also often present atheists as people who assert that they can prove that there is no such thing as God. Neither of these is true. Atheists don't assert that there definitely is no God. They assert that there is no good reason to think that there is. On a really good day, a really famous atheist like David Hume might go so far as to logically prove that there never can be good reason to think that there is, any more than some finite observation can prove the existence of something infinite. Buddha asserted both that there is no good reason to believe in a God, and furthermore, that worrying or arguing about it is equally pointless, establishing himself as both an atheist and a reasoner who anticipated Hume's argument 2100 years earlier.
A Christian doesn't NEED a church. Any Christian can perform a baptism or communion. Christ himself said "whenever two or three are gathered in my name, I will be there."
Depending, of course, on what kind of Christian you are. Christianity isn't a religion -- it is many. We could also go down a list of what Christ is supposed to have said -- For example: "Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are
No arguments. I fully agree we have plenty of splinters in our own eyes. And without the monarchy, what would the tabloids do? I don't know that plea bargaining is the problem you make it out to be, but there are plenty of other problems that are so who cares?
The sad thing is that in both our countries there is a huge gap between people who profess to be Christian and those that actually practice some aspect of Christianity e.g. attend church. 70% in the US profess to be Christian currently -- way down from previous years, but still well short of 43%. In the US this matters, because it misrepresents the political leverage of the religious right. But that too is changing, slowly. Give it a few more decades...
Historians have a strong consensus that Jesus of Nazareth, Mohammed, and Gautama Buddha were real, historical people, and it's on their words major religions are based. So even if you don't believe in the Divinity of, well, anything, to put these major religious figures on the same level as a green rubber puppet is just ignorant of history and culture.
Dear Sir Garlon,
Please read: Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman. Or Forged, by Bart Ehrman. Or Jesus, Interrupted, by Bart Ehrman. Ehrman is an apostatic ex-born-again Christian who is currently a professor of religious studies at UNC-Chapel Hill (who happens to live about a mile away from where I'm sitting right now at Duke, where his wife works). He started studying the Bible thinking it was God's word, but the facts (as he will exhaustively and clearly teach you, if you bother to actually try to learn) did not support this. In fact, his conclusion after years of devoted study was rather the opposite.
Regarding the historical reality of Jesus -- there is no contemporary evidence -- outside of the obviously suspect writings of the Church itself -- for this. None. Not one word, one relic, one corroborating fact. The earliest mention -- and only first century mention -- of Jesus is in a probable second or third century insertion in Josephus (the language is infinitely improbable for a man who was a devout Jew). It was also written around 90 CE, which would mean that even if it were written by Josephus, he could not possibly have been reporting events from circa 30 CE as an eyewitness. Note that at this time adult life expectancy was pathetic -- there were probably no surviving humans who even might have witnessed any of the events recorded in the gospels by the time one single historical word about Jesus was written anywhere.
There are no Roman records or Jewish records that confirm a single one of the events reported in the Gospels. In most cases they directly contradict assertions made in the Gospels, such as the idea that the Jewish priesthood had no law to put a man to death. Puh-leeze, they did it all the time. Remember, Jewish Law called for people to be stoned to death for an appallingly long list of "crimes" including adultery, blasphemy, disrespect of your parents. One can go down quite a list of these problems (and of course, many people have done so).
Turning to Christian writings (automatically suspect given their vested interest): The gospels that speak of the birth of Jesus (Matthew and Luke) cannot be reconciled -- one (Matthew) places the birth of Jesus firmly in the time of King Herod the Great with the supposed slaughter of innocents and flight to Egypt. The other (Luke) places the birth of Jesus firmly in the time of Herod Antipas, when Cyrenius was governor of Syria. These two times are separated by at least fifteen years. Clearly neither Matthew nor Luke had ever met Jesus or had the foggiest idea when or how or if he was born. Mark, considered by most serious Bible historians to be the primary document from which both Matthew and Luke were later derived (that is, the earliest document actually written) was a) almost certainly not written until after the Jewish revolt and fall of the temple and b) was absolutely not written by an eyewitness. It doesn't even get the geography of Palestine right, and many of the cities it describes -- such as Nazareth -- literally did not exist at the time Jesus was supposed to have come from them (making your reference to "Jesus of Nazareth" interesting in the extreme). The Romans were excellent record keepers and kept excellent tax rolls, and Nazareth was founded no earlier than late in the first or early in the second century, primarily to exploit the increasing numbers of Christian pilgrims.
Or, note that giant or not, the semolinic deity in question is hurtling through space, hence flying. Also that any flying noodly mass capable of creating a Universe must, in fact, be giant. Pastafarianism is therefore identical to megastafarianism in all ways that matter, provided only that they share the same general beliefs about the finer points of the faith -- in particular about pirates.
So Arrr, mateys! Do ya now, or do ya not accept as yer true creed and faith that global warming was caused by the decline in piracy from the golden age of piracy (which took place, by no coincidence at all, very close to the peak of the Little Ice Age) to the present, with pasta-scorching heat only recently being narrowly averted by the heroism of pirate clans in Somalia and the Carribean and the South Pacific (who are clearly responsible for the recent flat interval in the lower troposphere temperatures)?
If not, yer no no true worshipper, touched by His Noodly Appendage. Ye probably are subgenius heretics who consider J. R. "Bob" Dobbs to be the human avatar of Fettucini and Meat Balls, served with a white sauce. But beware, a pot of boiling, slightly salted water awaits those who reject the smallest caper...
Do you have any hard evidence of that? A survey, perhaps? I mean, Americans drink a lot. This is a possible explanation for why England apparently has only 2148 Scientologists while the US has over 25,000 (still). I suspect that it is absolutely impossible to become a Scientologist if you're both sane and sober. Of course, this could just reflect the prevalence of mental illness in both countries instead.
The good news is that -- according to ARIS, the US religious census last conducted in 2008 -- Scientology is seriously on the wane (as are most of the lesser Christian denominations and some of the major ones) to the point where in only one or two decades more it could completely disappear. More good news from ARIS is that a full 15% of Americans are atheist/agnostic and another 5% are "don't know" (which translates into agnostic, question answered by somebody who sadly doesn't know what the word means) and another 5% or so on top of that are non-scriptural deists who believe in a non-personal higher power but not any sort of personal god associated with an organized religion. And this still doesn't include the Buddhists (where Buddhism is not a religion, it is an atheistic philosophy and ethical practice that fulfills many of the same social rituals as a religion).
That makes a whopping one American in four who does not buy into any of the scripture-based antique mythologies, with Christianity down from 90% or so of the population several decades ago to 70% today (and falling!).
The survey goes further. Even among those that formally identify as being Christian, many no longer attend any sort of church or participate in any of the primary religious rituals; a substantial fraction don't even plan to have a religious funeral should they die. It is difficult to assess this accurately, as people do not always tell the truth about this sort of thing when they perceive of something being an "accepted" social norm (as "being Christian" has been in America for a very long time) but it is quite plausible that another 10 to 20% of the US population that are nominally Christian are really socially Christian but have little to no actual belief in the Christian creed, do not attend Church or do so only very rarely or to attend weddings or funerals, and (perhaps most importantly) do not give money to a Church. I haven't read the breakdown by age, but I suspect that young people who have been taught critical thinking are failing to enter their parents' religion and over time, the older members of the Churches are dying off unreplaced.
The survey strongly suggests that many of the church denominations are more or less in crisis. Since they are funded by donations, a decline in membership cuts off the funds required to sustain the top-level infrastructure and leadership that gives the denomination its named identity. As numbers drop below critical values in various communities, they can no longer sustain or support a priest or minister and a church. Christianity in the US is heading for a financial crisis due to declining membership that could wipe out a number of smaller denominations or lead to some sort of consolidation, and the numbers of non-religious Americans is already large enough that it is no longer impossible or risky to openly acknowledge that one is atheist (although it is sadly still probably political suicide to do so).
I do feel for you in England, though. Having a national religion is a clear violation of established human rights (and this isn't being smug or superior -- having "In God We Trust" on US currency is also a clear violation of established human rights). It makes us no better than countries seeking to establish Sharia and entrench Islam as a state religion. Religions should receive no tax advantages and no special treatment whatsoever by any government; if anything, governments should continue to aggressively teach critical thinking so that belief in antique mythologies continues its well-deserved slide into oblivion. But then,
Slashdot Mirror
A tidally locked planet would have all of its atmosphere period precipitated out on the dark side. There would be no habitable band. The antipode opposite the sun would be open to space, cooling the surface there, essentially 100% of the time. There would be no factors driving global circulation -- the atmosphere would rapidly stratify (and get very hot indeed, stably, on the side facing the sun). Eventually, where by eventually I mean in a matter of a few days if one stopped the Earth from rotating without vaporizing it (can't be done, sure, I know) it get cold enough to first rain, then snow, the snow carbon dioxide, then the greenhouse effect disappears and the temperature really plummets, and in just a little bit more time you have a rain of oxygen and nitrogen followed (as they deplete the atmosphere by a fall of solid oxygen-nitrogen sleet). As fast as it falls out on the dark side, it is replenished from the warm side (cooling as it comes) until the warm side -- now bloody hot not unlike the lit side of the moon -- has almost no atmosphere at all. The dark side has a rather large mountain of frozen air centered fairly symmetrically on the solar antipode. There would probably be some residual partial pressure of gas, but it wouldn't be enough to keep your blood from boiling anywhere on the planet's surface.
If the atmosphere was a more exotic mix, you'd actually precipitate out the gases in layers, frozen methane in one layer, oxygen in another, hydrogen and helium on top of the whole mess at the end.
So "tidally locked" is indeed a fatal problem.
All this being said, any kind of intellectual property law is a farce against the nature of any truly free market because it violates real property rights. It essentially posits that I cannot use my materials to make things I want to make because somebody else "owns" the "idea" of using materials that way. No government should be able to tell somebody that they cannot make things with their own property, or configure their property in some way that another lays claim to. Either you own something (physically!) and have control over its disposition or you don't. The whole concept of "intellectual property" should be excised from society.
Good luck with books, movies, and so on, then. It takes millions to make a good movie. Once digitized, it takes zero dollars (not really, but a number asymptotically approaching zero) to make and distribute one billion copies of it. If I have to right to use my own materials (my computer) to make anything I want (a copy of the movie) and sell it (although god knows what I'm selling, a pattern of electrical energy that happens to have meaning and hence value?) without restriction, then there will be no more movies that are more creative than stupid pet tricks or youtube. There will be no more books -- as an author, I can tell you that it takes an enormous amount of hard work to write a book, and to write it with no possibility of reward makes it too big a waste of time (and requires one to have a day job to support it, leaving one with even less time). There will be an enormous impoverishment in music, in art, in literature, in film, in theater -- even the author of a play needs to make money or it isn't worth it to write plays.
Good luck with drugs, too. It requires order of a billion dollars to develop a new drug and bring it to market. Once that is done, of course, the synthesis chain is known and anybody can make it for a fraction of the development cost. Companies take huge risks now developing drugs and without some protected period to make back their investment and a sufficient profit before companies with no actual investment at all in the development can make the product and undersell them we won't see any more new drugs. It won't be worth it. One can go right on down the line with inventions of all sorts. Inventing them is one thing, investing money in bringing them to market another, but once they are proven it is invariably trivial to clone them at a fraction of the development cost and with none of the risk.
The problem with patent and copyright IP laws isn't that they aren't valuable and necessary. It is that they have long gone from protecting the legitimate right of the inventor author to make a protected profit from the time and money they risked creating something new that benefits everybody to protecting the "rights" of an entire legion of bloodsucking parasites that have attached themselves to every aspect of delivery of that benefit to the consumer and who want their right to the protected profit stream to exist independent of the original purpose, that is, the reward of the original creators and risk takers.
We already have the concept of taxation of things "at risk" in a way that is differentiated from riskless taxation in corporate investment. We need to apply this same concept to copyright and patent protection, and issue it in such a way that it only applies as long as the original risk takers are receiving some predefined fraction of the income, and then only for a finite period of time.
rgb
I thought that the government was, by definition, the group who has the biggest gun, for as long as that state lasts. So there is no in between.
Life in the state of nature is ugly, nasty, brutish and short, and we all live in a state of nature at all times. All aspects of the social contract are our attempt to collectively minimize our risks and maximize our advantages and benefits, generally by ganging up on would-be bullies or out-group folks. Historically, this has been a lot easier to accomplish with memetic support structures like the illusion of human rights, religious duties and obligations, the fear of a supernatural deity with the biggest gun that one could ever conceive of (but one that is only used after you are dead), and government bureaucracy. Traditions, too.
In the end, patent rights and copy rights are what "we" say they are, collectively, and can enforce by the direct threat of and delivery of violence on members of the herd that disagree. "We" generally establish these illusory rights according to some mushy but reasonable principles such as rewarding the inventor and/or author (so that they will continue to produce inventions and stories and so on -- it is in our own self-interest to keep them motivated). However, a much smaller set of "we" also benefit tremendously from the delivery systems for the inventions, books, music, art and so on created by the talented few but enjoyed by the greedy many. Those delivery systems have long since been co-opted as the true basis for patent and copyright law, more the latter than the former. Patents at least have a reasonable lifetime, but a copyright now is damn near forever, long past the actual lifetime of an author.
The corporate interests of the world would, I'm certain, like to turn patents and copyrights into property forever, with no time out. That way they become pure commodities that can be bought and sold indefinitely. Imagine a world where the rights to Shakespeare's plays were still for sale, traded like pork bellies or mattresses. Imagine a world where you have to pay somebody every time you read, see, or hear one of Shakespeare's plays, where even media copies are sold per use, not as things you can own. That's the ideal of the publishing industry, with the ideal of the manufacturing sector and drug industry regarding patents close behind.
This leaves the problem of enforcement, the big guns. Any law that is ignored as universally as the copyright laws are currently ignored is no law. They are unenforceable, and everybody hates them. The illusion that they are somehow necessary in order to reward the actual creators of IP, carefully fostered by the media industry, is finally breaking down as well. At some point in the evolution of the digital Universe we will probably find some way of directly rewarding the authors of books, creators of music, inventors of fabulous machines only but in a way that strips away the guarantee of huge profits for the (largely unnecessary) middlemen. But to get there, we have to pry congress away from the clutches of the large, wealthy, and loud lobbying groups that advocate for the protection of their "rights" to charge the moral equivalent of a toll for going down a public road.
rgb
Not blow up. Deliver a roundhouse kick and shatter it. See long problem 5 here:
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Class/intro_physics_1_review.php
I wouldn't be surprised if the asteroid is going to miss Earth because, you know, word gets around. Don't mess with Earth. Chuck Norris is waiting.
rgb
I used Perl-Tk for mine -- SDL wasn't around yet IIRC, nor was Gtk, and I was porting an interface I originally wrote in Tcl/Tk once I realized that Tcl was insanely out of sync with the way I think and code. In the end it worked perfectly, but it was a bit of a mess to write. Not an exercise I'm eager to repeat (and I long since learned to code in C/Gtk for the same kind of application), but I still have the source squirrelled away in case I ever need to recycle it in some way. But the amazing thing about a dancing bear isn't how gracefully it dances but that it dances at all. A >>simple Tk interface in perl was, and probably still is, a piece of cake and you have all of that string parsing power just sitting there at your beck and call.
Games, though -- wow! But then, as one of the top posters noted perl is relatively efficient as scripting languages go, sometimes within an order of magnitude of compiled code. Hard to do much better than that with any of the languages that do dynamical allocation of all variables as you use them, creating everything as complex opaque hashes behind the scene just so you can address a[34] without defining or allocating a or even assigning values or referencing a[0] to a[33] (where I'm deliberately leaving off the $ -- this remark isn't only about perl). The same thing that makes it perfect for sloppy one-offs makes it slow for everything else, but slow is relative, given computers with several billion instructions per second at your disposal. In lots of cases, the time required to write the program is vastly greater than the time required to run it, so writing in an easy and forgiving language where you can dash off working code in thirty minutes instead of a couple of days is totally worth it.
rgb
And C is the best to write operating systems (and a lot of other stuff) in and APL is actually pretty nifty for writing certain kinds of vector code and...
Personally, I still love Perl and use it by preference when I need a short one-off program that doesn't have to be fast, especially one that does a lot of parsing. It is a great on-the-fly translator, and is often used to facilitate data conversion of one sort or another because it is so easy to use for that purpose. I have written far more complicated stuff -- actual interactive GUI applications -- in Perl, but that's where one is probably pushing it outside of its area of primary utility and I probably won't do that again. And yeah, one of the best features of Perl is its ability to split lines and do regex processing in a syntactically compact way. Tools like awk/sed/bash are also very useful for doing simple stuff -- pattern matches and substitutions -- but sed rapidly becomes arcane to the point where one has to keep a library of sed 1 liners or examples handy to remember how to pull the third octet out of an IP address, add 24 to it, and write it back or the like. In Perl doing this takes several lines of code (if you want the result to be readable) but it is easy and robust to code and understand. I used to use awk a lot (15-20 years ago), but Perl completely superceded that. I do still use sed simply because s/aaa/bbb/g is so damn useful on the fly, more so if you chain several sed conversions and other stuff together in a pipe. But once the complexity passes a fairly low threshold, Perl is very much a tool of choice.
Of course it is not unique. Nowadays, lots of people like other similar languages e.g. python that serve more or less the same space. But arguing about which of the available languages is "best" is a fruitless exercise. Philosophically they are very different. Some people like what I would call "fascist" languages (where python is in that category IMO) with strict rules on e.g. indentation and structure. Some people like loose, free languages that don't care how you indent and use brackets instead. Some people like procedural languages. Some people like object oriented languages. Some people are agnostic and like languages that do both, each in its place. And whatever the programmer likes, there is also the task -- some tasks manipulate data or perform computations in procedural ways, some work with data objects.
Personally, I think any rumor of the demise of Perl is likely exaggerated and premature (and I'd want data to support it!) I use it all the time, and obviously I wasn't surveyed. A lot of the rise and fall of scripting languages is dictated by what schools are teaching and what people need in jobs, and these days it is dominantly java (or javascript), python (because it is easy to teach structured programming in python), php (because it enables web programming), and even "html" (which isn't really a programming language but so what). For web programming -- a major if not the major marketplace for programmers -- and even for database programming (web interface to database) this set makes sense. Perl was popular early on for writing web scripts because it worked, but it wasn't really designed for that purpose and languages that were (but were otherwise remarkably perl-like) eventually won out. So what? That wasn't what Perl was written for, and it's not what it does best.
rgb
Only a few quibbles. First, it doesn't explain a known issue with the models. It is a potential explanation for one of many known issues with the models that remains to be demonstrated as an explanation. Second, it may well invalidate the overall predictions in the specific sense that altering the circulation patterns enough to affect weather -- the assertion of the article -- is more than enough to alter heating and cooling efficiencies, albedo variation, cloud distribution, and more. In a highly nonlinear general circulation model, this is more than enough to alter the actual predictions for e.g. climate sensitivity.
Furthermore, if it alters the UHI data and corrections made thereof, it alters the data that goes into the models. It also alters -- and from the sound of things lowers significantly, over a widespread area -- the claimed amount of observed warming, as a function of time as urbanization itself is a time dependent trend. This actually has secondary support in the form of UAH and RSS satellite observation, which has differed from GISS and HADCRUT (especially after ongoing "adjustments") by a time dependent positive trend. Correcting for this (by effectively cooling the present relative to the past) would actually put the major temperature sets into better agreement over the last 33 years.
The waste heat production of humans is absolutely irrelevant compared to solar heating as a direct source of global warming, but it is a well-known and consistently underestimated source of local warming in the weather stations used to create land temperature estimates (as has already been shown in peer reviewed publications, if a glance at e.g. the Weather Underground local weather station maps surrounding any urban center isn't enough to convince you). This suggests that the effect is not as spatially confined as previously believed and to accomplish long range effects at all has indirect effects that exceed the local ones. This is not impossible -- I've read papers that suggest that the mere presence of the turbulent air downstream coming off of the vanes of a windmill farm cause significant mixing of the air near the surface that would otherwise be stratified over an area of tens to hundreds of square kilometers, affecting the mean nighttime temperature over all of this area.
The proper issue regarding global warming is not whether or not it has occurred or is occurring -- the world has definitely warmed on average since the LIA, with almost all of that warming occurring without the help of carbon dioxide. Nor is it whether or not increased carbon dioxide will all things being equal cause more warming -- that's simple physics, although the net warming expected from carbon dioxide alone is not particularly alarming. It is whether or not we know enough about the nonlinear feedbacks in the chaotic system to be able to build general circulation models at all with predictive value ten to a hundred years into the future. It is about the climate sensitivity.
Any negative adjustment in current temperatures simply exacerbates the already serious problem those models face -- there has been no statistically significant warming for the last 14 to 16 years, roughly half of the entire reliable RSS/UAH record. The warming visible over the entire record is at the moderate rate of 0.1C to 0.15 C per decade, in almost perfect agreement with the warming expected from CO_2 alone, with neutral feedback. Almost all of the warming occurred in a single spike of warming that is precisely correlated with the 1997-1998 "super El Nino" -- effectively flat before that, effectively flat after that. Carbon dioxide, in the meantime, has inexorably crept up.
Personally I don't think this falsifies assertions of possibly catastrophic global warming, because we don't know enough about the timescales, the chaotic dynamics, the feedbacks, neglected effects like the extended UHI effect discussed above, neglected effects from solar-driven stratospheric atmospheric chemistry, the fra
OK, seriously, let's try doing some arithmetic. The energy cost per kilogram of lifting something into low Earth orbit is half of it's escape energy. Escape speed is roughly 11,000 meters per second, so that energy is 1/4 x 121 x 10^6, call it 30 MJ/kg. Multiply that by something like 1000 (maybe more) due to rocket inefficiencies where you have to lift the fuel to lift the fuel to lift the fuel that lifts the payload. But it doesn't matter -- lift it at 100% efficiency and you're already dead. So lifting sand into orbit to melt it is enormously stupid. One might as well melt it in solar furnaces here on Earth, except that this is silly, joule for joule you'd be far better off collecting a megajoule of solar energy and converting it into a hundred kilojoules of electrical power. Even cheap low efficiency solar can manage that, and the return is at least twice that of silicon nanoparticle energy. Indeed, you'd be far better off taking the silicon you purified and turning it into solar cells -- those are already close to break even with at least some sources of energy in some locations, and a kilogram of silicon used that way can generate at least tens of watts (probably order of 100) for at least 20,000 seconds of an 86,400 second day. That's order of two megajoules a day, for a projected lifetime of 20 years. And note well, that is still not an economic win without exception in all locations when its amortized cost is compared to the value of commercial coal or nuclear or natural gas generated power, and it is only available when the sun shines, because kilowatt-hours of commercial electric cost anywhere from 6 to 16 cents in most locations, and at 6 cents it takes effectively forever to recover the cost of $1/watt solar cells. At 16 cents it breaks even to wins a bit with a seven to ten year amortization, and hence is a not unattractive investment. At 10 cents it is marginal (call it 5 watt-hours a day, 200 days to get a kw-hour and thereby earn 10 cents, 2000 days to break even on the solar cell itself, 4000 days to break even on installation, inversion, and the cost of the money. That's eleven years before you start to turn a profit, more if you install a battery to store the energy instead of resell surplus back to the grid. 16 cents drops it to under seven years, which starts to look attractive.
Saddest of all, in seven to ten years, solar cells will very likely go down to 50 cents a watt or even less, at which point they'll become attractive at 10 cents a kW-hour, a no-brainer where electricity is more expensive, and still it won't be a suitable solution for powering civilization, not without a serious storage and transportation technology to back it up. Otherwise it is at best a load leveller for conventional plants.
As I said, I can't really see any good reason to invest in silicon nanoparticle generated hydrogen gas powering fuel cells to make electricity except -- perhaps -- for exotic "one off" problems like a military application or a space application with nonlinear constraints or benefits. And even for the military, if they think this is a winning solution I think they're out of their minds. Somewhere in there common sense has to come into play.
rgb
Because Obama hasn't given me a call yet to make me the offer, I suppose. I'm not sure I accept it if he did -- it has to be a thankless job these days and I'm enough of a climate skeptic to think that energy resources need to have net positive present cost-benefit before implementing them on a broad scale. Until then research and even prototyping is lovely and worthwhile, but no large scale implementation at a loss until it results in something at least cost-competitive with existing fully developed resources.
rgb
Where does silicon come from? Silicon dioxide, a.k.a. "sand". How tightly is it bound? Very, very, very tightly. Indeed, a whopping 910.86 kJ/mole. So it requires at LEAST this much energy to turn sand into silicon and oxygen, except that one cannot electrolyze or reduce it until it is molten, so add to this enough energy to melt sand, after raising its temperature to some 1500 C. Then, one has to engineer "nanoparticles" out of the purified silicon metal. At a guess -- only a guess, of course -- this involves heating the silicon to the vaporization point and either vapor depositing it on a suitable substrate and scraping off the nanoparticles or spraying silicon vapor into a suitable medium that causes it to condense out small particles and then filtering or otherwise separating out the 'nano' particles from those that are merely small. Sounds like more energy to me.
At the end of the day, you can get at most the 250 or so kJ/mole back from the hydrogen gas produced after the silicon nanoparticles steal the hydrogen back from water. I think it would be an absolute miracle if it this is as much as 10% of the energy invested in making the nanoparticles, and the energy costs are probably at most half of the total manufacturing costs. Down to 5%. Multiply by roughly 50% again (efficiency of fuel cell).
This "Fermi estimate" of the probable economic efficiency is on the order of 2.5%, then, compared to the cost of just buying electricity or any other form of concentrated energy. Even if I'm too aggressive in my pessimism, 10% is a pretty safe upper bound. I'm not seeing this as a game changer. Gasoline or other hydrocarbons are still the gold standard for readily available energy density at ballpark 35 MJ/liter, and don't require investing 20 times the energy eventually recovered in their preparation.
rgb
There is a major difference between talk and prototyping. We built small scale prototypes of liquid thorium salt reactors forty or fifty years ago, but politics shut down the development when money was requested to go the next step and build a prototype to scale. We could pick up where we left off in less than a year if money were committed not to paper research that delays the project indefinitely but to prototyping and practical engineering, actually building one or more of the damn things and tinkering as we go to solve engineering problems in situ, not in theoretical analysis.
We could revive the last working thorium design in at most a year or two -- it didn't take that long to build the first time. We could be working on scaling it up in parallel, so that we had a working scale model in four or five years tops. We could be building working full scale LFTR power plants by 2020, and could solve both the "carbon problem" and the world's energy poverty problem by 2030 to 2040 and coast to world peace and abundance by 2050. The cost through the working scale model is on the order of a few billion dollars, tops. We used to spend that much in Iraq every week.
Or we could continue to dick around investing billions into wind power that requires the rare earth magnets that come from processing Thorium rich salts somewhere and that don't generate power when the wind doesn't blow, which is most of the time. We could continue to drop billions down the rat-hole of defending "free" access to major oil deposits under the guise of defending national security or promoting personal and religious freedoms for people living half a world away. We can make bankers and corporate interests rich with complex 'carbon trading' schemes that so far have had zero effect on global CO_2 levels at enormous annualized costs, costs so great that they probably single handedly caused the European banking crisis (or could have ameliorated it in any event). We spend more money on long-shot always a decade away fusion energy than we do on LFTR, and burned more federal money on solar cells in one failed company than it would cost to get started on LFTR.
There is a singular lack of urgency in thorium based energy research and investment. Too many people make too much money within the status quo.
rgb
Hell yes! Sapphires too. Even gold mines (one of the largest gold mines in the world prior to the California gold rush is a few miles from where I'm sitting). But you do have to watch out if you want to mine any of this stuff, or you'll catch hell.
North Carolina has Uranium as well, but there is so strong a NIMBY movement that any politician that suggested that we mine it and achieve energy independence in the state would find himself going to hell in a handbasket. Thorium too -- in the form of Monzanite Sands, which are -- surprise -- around 24% lanthanum, about 17% neodymium, and full of other useful stuff as well. The minute somebody realizes that national "rare earth shortages" are complete bullshit caused almost entirely by our reluctance to treat Thorium as a potentially useful nuclear fuel instead of as a pollutant, there will be hell to pay, but in the long run North Carolina has more than enough heaven in it to compensate.
Personally, sitting as I am a mere fifteen or twenty miles from Shearon-Harris (a pressurized water nuclear plant with one of the largest nuclear waste cooling pool facilities in the world) I'd be thrilled if our state took a hell of a risk and directly invested in the promotion of rare earth mining with the deliberate extraction of the associated Thorium and in the further investment in Thorium based nuclear reactors that produce "no" nuclear waste in comparison with Uranium Oxide, but between NIMBY and corporate interests that currently make shit-piles of money providing UO fuel or coal based energy, it will be a cold day in Half Hell, NC before that happens.
rgb
Now, finding rare earth deposits with almost no thorium in them is a real feat, and getting the US government to find ways to store thorium would a world-class miracle.
No, a world class miracle would be getting the U. S. government to fund the development of an LFTR that would provide the world with essentially unlimited cheap electricity, provide us with ample supples of rare earth elements and other exotic but useful isotopes as a side effect, generate almost no nuclear waste (LFTR consumes nearly all of the meso-scale "waste" like plutonium and turns it into energy), in a process that cannot melt down (the reaction just stops) in a reactor vessel that is not pressurized, using fuel that does not have to be hand assembled and delivered only by the company that made your reactor originally, at a small fraction of the cost of solid Uranium Oxide fuel, using reactions that make it relatively difficult to build bombs undetected, while eliminating world (energy) poverty without the use of carbon (whether or not you happen to think CO_2 is a problem, carbon fuels release more radioactivity than all the nuclear plants on earth combined times 100, soot, a variety of known carcinogens, teratogenic mercury, and acid precursors).
But no, we have to protect General Electric and Westinghouse and our ability to scavenge plutonium from expended and enormously expensive fuel. Big oil or coal is happy to invest all sorts of chump change in solar and wind projects because they know that they are not viable without subsidy and the subsidy is always enough to make them break even or win a bit economically without threatening their main profit stream. Thorium would disrupt the entire energy delivery system and drop the cost of energy in all forms dramatically, at the expense of huge recurring profits for some huge players that make equally huge contributions to the entire political establishment. So while storing thorium would make enormous sense, we will neither store it nor invest in using it until the need to do so exceeds the price of votes in Washington. Which, sadly, will be around a decade after the Chinese perfect the technology and market it to the entire world, including us, while maintaining a virtual monopoly on the heavier rare earths (as noted, almost always found with Thorium as a "pollutant"). Hell, even fusion might happen first, and that is an uphill battle all the way.
It's actually an excellent bellwether of the Green movement. At the moment, it is perfectly happy to condemn two billion plus of the world's population to continue to live in energy poverty so profound that they burn dung to cook on, wash clothes (if at all) by hand, and use oil lamps (if anything) to light the night while pushing enormous sums into technologies (like wind) that are visibly a major fail and will remain so into the indefinite future. They trumpet the dangers of CO_2 and catastrophic global warming in the distant future while perpetuating the ongoing real time catastrophe that affects over a third of the earth's population right now, while playing into the hands of the very agents that provide the carbon based power they demonize as the alternatives they push are not technologically or economically feasible (yet).
The one existing technology that "could" permit the continuation of civilization and reduction of global poverty while reducing CO_2 production at a feasible cost is nuclear (which is not a single technology but a many technologies, some of them the subject of research and development). Thorium based reactors are in a sense proven technology -- they were built back in the 60s and 70s and successfully run long enough to verify that they are indeed almost certainly a safe, meltdown-proof nuclear technology with far lower risks and far greater benefits in every category from cost to waste to nuclear proliferation -- but they do require four or five years of intensive research to complete an engineering cycle to scale. The day the Greens recognize this and take their foot off of the backs
And how pitiful it is that this prediction is by people that should know better. I'm a physicist and better than average at predicting social and political events (I predicted the fall of the Soviet Union and reunification of Germany several years before they occurred, much to the surprise and amusement of my colleagues when they actually happened, for example) and yet I know better than to make long term predictions of doom in highly nonlinear, nearly unpredictable systems with enormous feedbacks acting against catastrophes of all sorts. And then there are Black Swan events, where the catastrophe that occurs isn't the one you expected.
It's all the more pointless given that the world has never been safer, healthier, wealthier, or freer. Not that we are "there yet", but it is far more plausible to assert that our risk of some sort of global disaster is decreasing, not increasing or remaining constant. The end of the cold war all by itself should have moved the damn clock back by a few hours if it where anything other than a complex political statement.
rgb
Ow, you got me. That's why I like to actually debug my code. Needed a ! &&. Rats!
Yeah, like that, assuming you have the ? operator.
Fun but dumb. This is the sort of thing I assign as one of the first few programming assignments in any language I'm teaching a student (usually in an independent study, since I generally teach physics and not programming except to select students). I'm about to teach a student matlab (not my first choice, but a decent thing to choose to be first for a total programming novice) and I'll be sure to include this right after I have them do the "count to 100" exercise that is just the loop itself.
rgb
Inelegant. You really only need three conditionals and no else. Fewer lines of code (including the terminating LF).
for i in 1 to 100 loop
if mod(i,3) == 0 then print 'fizz';
if mod(i,5) == 0 then print 'buzz';
if(mod(i,3) || mod(i,5)) print i;
print '\n';
end loop
What a taunting "invitation". You say "come over to my house and watch the game" then leave the door locked, the knocker gone and the doorbell disconnected because you're sure your invitee won't show.
Piffle. How can you lock the door on God? You have inflated Jesus in your mind into some sort of arrogant bastard, to help reduce the cognitive dissonance caused by the unsolvable problem of theodicy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy ...in case you haven't worked through it. None of the proposed "solutions" are at all logical or appealing, and they are infinitely less appealing with the hell meme, which makes God infinitely unjust for punishing a finite offense committed by a flawed character for an eternity.
No, I'm merely assuming for the sake of the argument that you are correct, that Jesus is real, but I'm insisting on applying the exact same rules I used to determine the reality of everything else to verify that. You have a vague feeling in your mind and say "Aha, Jesus!" I insist on rather more. My mind is certainly capable of generating a feeling of Jesus, or Ganesh, or Buddha, or The Great Spirit watching over me, because my mind is complex, far more than just my interior dialogue or current focus of attention. So is yours. As I'm married, I'm perfectly aware that my mind is capable of synthesizing entire fantasies and substituting them for a memory of reality (if you are married, I'm sure your wife or husband has successfully demonstrated this to you as well). When I teach, I often say one thing but my hand writes something else at the board. Who wrote that? Jesus? Satan? Or is my brain just more complex than what's going on in my verbal centers and sometimes confused, sometimes feeding garbage from one part into the sensory channels of another?
Also, why do I even need to ask? Why does anyone? If you believe that the contents of the Bible are factually correct -- God knows how you possibly could, given the vast collection of internal contradictions and contradictions with simple known facts, but if -- then you agree that Jesus revealed himself to certain people "in person". Saul/Paul was my example, but according to SPaul "hundreds of others, some of whom are now asleep" (dead). Spaul wasn't inviting Jesus at all; nor was he taunting. He simply thought that Jesus was yet another false messiah and that Jews that thought otherwise were blasphemers, which is not, actually, an unreasonable proposition given the straight up beliefs of Judaism at that time. In persecuting them, he was simply following the rules laid down in the Old Testament for dealing with blasphemy and idolatry.
One has to assume that SPaul would have gone to hell had Jesus not intervened, completely uninvited, personally. One has to assume that nearly everybody on Earth will end up in hell if Jesus doesn't intervene, uninvited, personally since it is still the case that 2 out of 3 people living are not even nominally Christian (and one has to assume, as you seem to agree, that many of those that claim to be Christian on a sheet are not, although that's a No True Scotsman logical fallacy for anyone to assert about anyone else). So here I am, surely no worse thatn SPaul on the road to Damascus. As I've pointed out, probably better -- I hardly ever persecute anybody but undergraduates who are flunking my course. My disbelief in Jesus is utterly reasonable and completely honest disbelief, just as your belief is completely unreasonable as you've never actually seen Jesus, touched Jesus, or had any of the usual sensory experiences associated with things that are actually objectively real (forgive me for speaking for you here, but you know this is true -- you've never shared a glass of wine with Jesus in the real world and chatted about theodicy to see how God explains the solution to the problem).
I believe -- mostly -- in the laptop I'm typing
Not athiestic, polytheistic. I spent a year in Thailand while in the USAF and knew a LOT of Bhuddists. They burn incense to various gods, and have ornate little "spirit houses" outside their homes so the spirits will inhabit the beautiful little spirit houses and not their homes.
Since Buddhism is not a religion but a philosophy, one can certainly incorporate the religion into other spiritual or religious practice. Hinduism, for example, just made the Buddha into an avatar of Vishnu (and hence a bona-fide Hindu god). Thai Buddhism is derived from this branch of the family tree. In China and Tibet it often was mixed with Taoism or various forms of spiritualism, giving rise to e.g. Zen and still other flavors. In a similar way, Quakerism is sufficiently broad that there actually exist atheistic Quakers and Buddhist Quakers. However, the words of Buddha himself, to the extent that one believes that e.g. the Pali Canons preserve them, do not teach of God or Gods, but rather the contrary:
http://buddhism.about.com/od/basicbuddhistteachings/a/buddhaatheism.htm
To put it more literally, Buddha argued that believing in Gods is not useful. It is pointless. Even if they exist it is pointless, because they too are bound the the wheel and must seek enlightenment, and then, there is no evidence that they exist. To the spiritually enlightened in Hinduism and Buddhism alike, the gods are viewed as metaphors, as crutches to aid human understanding by personifying traits both desirable and undesirable. A perhaps better summary is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism
which also explains the minor differences between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism, where Theravada is more abstract and less religious. Buddhist "devotion" should not be confused with theism, and Buddha explicitly stated that he was not a God and that the entire idea of God is a distraction from the path to Enlightenment. Of course, Jesus explicitly stated in the New Testament that he wasn't God as well, but look how well that worked.
People want to believe that the Universe is personal, not impersonal. They want to believe that there is a point to it all. They want to believe in cosmic/divine justice, because there ain't no justice here on Earth in any living being's actual life. They will invent Gods or deify innocent philosophers given half a chance, if that's the only way they can have them.
This is not clearly presented even by Buddhists. They often prefer to present Buddhism as "non-theistic" but not atheistic without recognizing that "non" is the literal meaning of the "a" in atheistic. They also often present atheists as people who assert that they can prove that there is no such thing as God. Neither of these is true. Atheists don't assert that there definitely is no God. They assert that there is no good reason to think that there is. On a really good day, a really famous atheist like David Hume might go so far as to logically prove that there never can be good reason to think that there is, any more than some finite observation can prove the existence of something infinite. Buddha asserted both that there is no good reason to believe in a God, and furthermore, that worrying or arguing about it is equally pointless, establishing himself as both an atheist and a reasoner who anticipated Hume's argument 2100 years earlier.
A Christian doesn't NEED a church. Any Christian can perform a baptism or communion. Christ himself said "whenever two or three are gathered in my name, I will be there."
Depending, of course, on what kind of Christian you are. Christianity isn't a religion -- it is many. We could also go down a list of what Christ is supposed to have said -- For example: "Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are
No arguments. I fully agree we have plenty of splinters in our own eyes. And without the monarchy, what would the tabloids do? I don't know that plea bargaining is the problem you make it out to be, but there are plenty of other problems that are so who cares?
The sad thing is that in both our countries there is a huge gap between people who profess to be Christian and those that actually practice some aspect of Christianity e.g. attend church. 70% in the US profess to be Christian currently -- way down from previous years, but still well short of 43%. In the US this matters, because it misrepresents the political leverage of the religious right. But that too is changing, slowly. Give it a few more decades...
Historians have a strong consensus that Jesus of Nazareth, Mohammed, and Gautama Buddha were real, historical people, and it's on their words major religions are based. So even if you don't believe in the Divinity of, well, anything, to put these major religious figures on the same level as a green rubber puppet is just ignorant of history and culture.
Dear Sir Garlon,
Please read: Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman. Or Forged, by Bart Ehrman. Or Jesus, Interrupted, by Bart Ehrman. Ehrman is an apostatic ex-born-again Christian who is currently a professor of religious studies at UNC-Chapel Hill (who happens to live about a mile away from where I'm sitting right now at Duke, where his wife works). He started studying the Bible thinking it was God's word, but the facts (as he will exhaustively and clearly teach you, if you bother to actually try to learn) did not support this. In fact, his conclusion after years of devoted study was rather the opposite.
Regarding the historical reality of Jesus -- there is no contemporary evidence -- outside of the obviously suspect writings of the Church itself -- for this. None. Not one word, one relic, one corroborating fact. The earliest mention -- and only first century mention -- of Jesus is in a probable second or third century insertion in Josephus (the language is infinitely improbable for a man who was a devout Jew). It was also written around 90 CE, which would mean that even if it were written by Josephus, he could not possibly have been reporting events from circa 30 CE as an eyewitness. Note that at this time adult life expectancy was pathetic -- there were probably no surviving humans who even might have witnessed any of the events recorded in the gospels by the time one single historical word about Jesus was written anywhere.
There are no Roman records or Jewish records that confirm a single one of the events reported in the Gospels. In most cases they directly contradict assertions made in the Gospels, such as the idea that the Jewish priesthood had no law to put a man to death. Puh-leeze, they did it all the time. Remember, Jewish Law called for people to be stoned to death for an appallingly long list of "crimes" including adultery, blasphemy, disrespect of your parents. One can go down quite a list of these problems (and of course, many people have done so).
Turning to Christian writings (automatically suspect given their vested interest): The gospels that speak of the birth of Jesus (Matthew and Luke) cannot be reconciled -- one (Matthew) places the birth of Jesus firmly in the time of King Herod the Great with the supposed slaughter of innocents and flight to Egypt. The other (Luke) places the birth of Jesus firmly in the time of Herod Antipas, when Cyrenius was governor of Syria. These two times are separated by at least fifteen years. Clearly neither Matthew nor Luke had ever met Jesus or had the foggiest idea when or how or if he was born. Mark, considered by most serious Bible historians to be the primary document from which both Matthew and Luke were later derived (that is, the earliest document actually written) was a) almost certainly not written until after the Jewish revolt and fall of the temple and b) was absolutely not written by an eyewitness. It doesn't even get the geography of Palestine right, and many of the cities it describes -- such as Nazareth -- literally did not exist at the time Jesus was supposed to have come from them (making your reference to "Jesus of Nazareth" interesting in the extreme). The Romans were excellent record keepers and kept excellent tax rolls, and Nazareth was founded no earlier than late in the first or early in the second century, primarily to exploit the increasing numbers of Christian pilgrims.
It is also a simple fact -- a
Would that be right behind the worship of Elbereth?
Or, note that giant or not, the semolinic deity in question is hurtling through space, hence flying. Also that any flying noodly mass capable of creating a Universe must, in fact, be giant. Pastafarianism is therefore identical to megastafarianism in all ways that matter, provided only that they share the same general beliefs about the finer points of the faith -- in particular about pirates.
So Arrr, mateys! Do ya now, or do ya not accept as yer true creed and faith that global warming was caused by the decline in piracy from the golden age of piracy (which took place, by no coincidence at all, very close to the peak of the Little Ice Age) to the present, with pasta-scorching heat only recently being narrowly averted by the heroism of pirate clans in Somalia and the Carribean and the South Pacific (who are clearly responsible for the recent flat interval in the lower troposphere temperatures)?
If not, yer no no true worshipper, touched by His Noodly Appendage. Ye probably are subgenius heretics who consider J. R. "Bob" Dobbs to be the human avatar of Fettucini and Meat Balls, served with a white sauce. But beware, a pot of boiling, slightly salted water awaits those who reject the smallest caper...
Do you have any hard evidence of that? A survey, perhaps? I mean, Americans drink a lot. This is a possible explanation for why England apparently has only 2148 Scientologists while the US has over 25,000 (still). I suspect that it is absolutely impossible to become a Scientologist if you're both sane and sober. Of course, this could just reflect the prevalence of mental illness in both countries instead.
The good news is that -- according to ARIS, the US religious census last conducted in 2008 -- Scientology is seriously on the wane (as are most of the lesser Christian denominations and some of the major ones) to the point where in only one or two decades more it could completely disappear. More good news from ARIS is that a full 15% of Americans are atheist/agnostic and another 5% are "don't know" (which translates into agnostic, question answered by somebody who sadly doesn't know what the word means) and another 5% or so on top of that are non-scriptural deists who believe in a non-personal higher power but not any sort of personal god associated with an organized religion. And this still doesn't include the Buddhists (where Buddhism is not a religion, it is an atheistic philosophy and ethical practice that fulfills many of the same social rituals as a religion).
That makes a whopping one American in four who does not buy into any of the scripture-based antique mythologies, with Christianity down from 90% or so of the population several decades ago to 70% today (and falling!).
The survey goes further. Even among those that formally identify as being Christian, many no longer attend any sort of church or participate in any of the primary religious rituals; a substantial fraction don't even plan to have a religious funeral should they die. It is difficult to assess this accurately, as people do not always tell the truth about this sort of thing when they perceive of something being an "accepted" social norm (as "being Christian" has been in America for a very long time) but it is quite plausible that another 10 to 20% of the US population that are nominally Christian are really socially Christian but have little to no actual belief in the Christian creed, do not attend Church or do so only very rarely or to attend weddings or funerals, and (perhaps most importantly) do not give money to a Church. I haven't read the breakdown by age, but I suspect that young people who have been taught critical thinking are failing to enter their parents' religion and over time, the older members of the Churches are dying off unreplaced.
The survey strongly suggests that many of the church denominations are more or less in crisis. Since they are funded by donations, a decline in membership cuts off the funds required to sustain the top-level infrastructure and leadership that gives the denomination its named identity. As numbers drop below critical values in various communities, they can no longer sustain or support a priest or minister and a church. Christianity in the US is heading for a financial crisis due to declining membership that could wipe out a number of smaller denominations or lead to some sort of consolidation, and the numbers of non-religious Americans is already large enough that it is no longer impossible or risky to openly acknowledge that one is atheist (although it is sadly still probably political suicide to do so).
I do feel for you in England, though. Having a national religion is a clear violation of established human rights (and this isn't being smug or superior -- having "In God We Trust" on US currency is also a clear violation of established human rights). It makes us no better than countries seeking to establish Sharia and entrench Islam as a state religion. Religions should receive no tax advantages and no special treatment whatsoever by any government; if anything, governments should continue to aggressively teach critical thinking so that belief in antique mythologies continues its well-deserved slide into oblivion. But then,
And therefore celebrates Newtonmas instead. Or possibly Crimbus. Keep your winterbush trimmed and wet, because Winterman cometh!