Right, and the 33 year trend is just over 0.13/decade, and the 15 year trend is flat, and the ten year trend is slightly negative, which pretty much makes nonsense of the 0.04 C/decade "at the 95% confidence level" to the extent that fitting any curve you like to a selected (or if you prefer, "cherrypicked" segment of a highly variable dataset makes sense in the first place. The predictive value of any of these fits is diddly, joined by its friend squat.
My point is that that there is precisely zero evidence in the form of a fit to actual data with any meaningful confidence level for a 4 C rise over the century. Even the IPCC AR5 isn't going to come close to that -- it is dropping its predictions to ~2.5C/Century, and every year with neutral temperatures will drop it further still. If one compares the actual temperature record to Hansen's early predictions over the last 35 or so years, the temperature curve is coming in slightly below his "no feedback" extrapolation, indicating neutral to perhaps slightly negative net feedback. His strong feedback curve is positively rejected. His intermediate feedback curve -- one that leads to the 2.5C/century type of warming -- is very inconsistent with the data but because the natural variability of the climate is basically not well known it leaves open the possibility that the current 15 year levelling might return to a strong warming trend at some point.
So it isn't just "sites on the internet" -- one of the most reliable sources of data available over the last 33 years (and arguably one of the only sources that is both truly global and not susceptible to various forms of bias known to corrupt the thermometric record) is absolutely inconsistent with a 4C/century warming trend, which is out at the very-low-confidence limit of the current AR report in progress. So the top article is pretty much alarmist nonsense.
IMO, the most likely century-scale warming we might expect based on the data is between 1 and 2 C. That is entirely consistent with the warming expected from CO_2 only, plus neutral to week feedback or climate sensitivity. It isn't very likely -- nothing like bullshit "95% confidence" levels -- because we still don't know and cannot predict most of the important natural variation in the climate and do not understand the feedbacks between things like aerosols, ozone, CO_2, cloud formation and the coupling of the climate to things like the phase of the major atmospheric oscillations and oceanic currents or the sun. The climate could indeed warm by 2.5C, or even 4 or 5C (unlikely to very unlikely). It could also actually cool some, or warm less than a degree. We cannot even be certain of what the CO_2 levels will be then regardless of the steps "actively" taken to ameliorate it. If somebody invents "cold fusion" (or hot fusion) at commercially viable efficiency, or the world starts to get off its thumb and build e.g. liquid thorium fission plants it would clearly make a large difference. Whether or not these things happen, in 10 to 20 years PV solar is going to overtake just about everything in terms of cost-efficiency, sooner if somebody invents a really good battery. That too will have a large impact. So even predictions that begin "assuming a doubling of CO_2" are simply adding a Bayesian condition to the probability distribution of final temperatures that is somewhat dubious -- we might well never reach 600, or even 500, ppm before it starts to fall back
So as the Hitchhiker's Guide says, Do Not Panic. And hold onto your wallet while not panicking.
What operating system the computer (because that's what a game console is, a computer) is running is irrelevant. Everything you are describing is operating system agnostic, or nearly so -- you're just talking about the toplevel interface, the windowing system as it were. Linux can run anything from a TTY-only interface, to a TTY interface with a single graphical application, to a full blown windowing system with a general purpose window manager like gnome or kde. At one point, so could Windows (back when it was still DOS inside). Apple's OS originally could not -- it was graphical all the way down into the kernel, for some bizarre reason -- but probably can now that it is really Unix. I'm guessing Windows can as well, but it is probably a lot harder to get at a TTY-only console in Windows 8...
Your game console absolutely needs a multitasking operating system (and has one). We could go down a list of things it manages "in parallel" via multitasking -- managing network interrupts, handling disk or other media access during game play, coping with the human interface, the datastream coming in from some remote network connection, and the outgoing datastream back to the game server, all the while updating the screen every 60th of a second or so -- but we'd still only list a small fraction of the housekeeping visible when running "top" in a Linux computer running a single graphical task. And then there are modern processors that are almost without exception multicore (core-level coarse grain parallelism is multitasking) not to mention the fact that each core is effectively itself parallelized with multiple ALUs and execution threads that are all managed by multitasking.
What you mean is that you want the top level game interface to not support or run lots of single user applications at once. You want the entire graphical console interface to be devoted to a single task, selected from a relatively short list of single tasks, so that (as you correctly put it) "whatever program is running should have full reign over the console so it can take full advantage of the hardware".
To be honest, I think you are overreacting -- if one plays, e.g. World of Warcraft on a linux box and doesn't start a half dozen things on different desktops right before beginning, that's pretty much what you get already. I realize that you are annoyed with your phone as a game interface -- of course you are, as the phone is a phone first and doesn't stop being a phone while you play the game. It also has a relatively lousy network interface no matter whether it is connecting through 3G or 4G or Wireless -- the latter with iffy reception on heavily shared lines, the latter burning power like crazy. Phones suck as game consoles, no arguments.
Android tablets, OTOH, are much better. They typically do for the most part run just one application at a time on the console and don't necessarily do a lot of background user task execution while they do (the thing you really object to, not multitasking) although one CAN run a user task in the background on an android tablet and degrade game performance if you want to for some reason.
Regular computers, however, -- in my opinion -- are in the end the best gaming platforms out there. The offer you the following benefits:
a) A minimum of two cores, more likely four, with very large CPU caches. The intel 3rd gen i7 is truly awe inspiring in its performance -- it can manage 8 simultaneous contexts so smoothly that I've measured linear performance scaling on floating point intensive code out to 8 tasks even though the processor itself is only four cores. This is the ultimate anodyne for your "multitasking" concerns -- a computer that could be evaluating pi to ten zillion places, checking the prices of your stocks in real time, playing tic-tac-toe with itself out of sheer core boredom, and be running the game you are playing flawlessly with human-perceptually instantaneous response time.
Just to actually answer your question, the original inflation of space (supposedly) took only a very, very short time, so even if the two points were "close together" at the instant of the big bang itself, they ended up very far apart (and moving farther apart) at the end of a second or so. The parts of the universe in question did not exceed the speed of light because speed is distance over time in spacetime and it is the latter that was inflating. Think of a very small balloon with a picture of the Universe printed on its surface being suddenly blown up -- when the balloon is small, everything is compact, but when it is inflated it is much further apart. Then make it a balloon with a three dimensional "surface" and no interior...
There is a lot more to learn about this, much of it in e.g. wikipedia pages as noted in the thread or in astronomy textbooks, and it is actually a lot of fun to learn. One very interesting thing, for example, is to follow the scientific argument from parallax, blackbody radiation, and our knowledge of how radiation intensity drops off with distance, through the discovery of the Hubble constant, out to how we estimate/compute the size and age of the Universe. Another interesting thing is to learn about "the Great Dark" that followed the big bang up until the formation of the earliest stars some 200 million years later, the chain of nucleosynthesis within those starts and the supernovae that ended them, and the gradual accumulation of "metals" (elements heavier than hydrogen and helium) in the ashes of those stars. The entire planet Earth and we ourselves are composed of stardust, the ash of ancient stars that gave rise to the elements that make up our bodies in their dying explosions.
It's well worth it to take a course in astronomy at some point if this sort of thing interests you, although a lot of it is covered in discovery channel stuff and shows you can probably find on netflix if that's too time or money consuming for you.
rgb (who occasionally teaches astronomy and hasn't lost his sense of wonder at how it all works out)
Not at all. I'm saying that when the people who are making the most noise and asserting things like "storms are more violent and frequent and it is due to global warming" (an argument that it is difficult to make at the moment especially with hurricanes, given that we are continuing the longest stretch in recorded history without a category 3 or better hurricane making landfall in the US, given that unbiased statistical analyses show no such thing) are also making a lot of money off of the panic that they create -- panic that isn't based on AGW per se (which might well exist but be moderate and at least partly beneficial), it is about catastrophic AGW, doomsday stuff -- it might be wise to take a very close look at who the big winners are in the "game" described above and be at least a little bit cynical about their motives and the validity of their public claims.
The losers are easy to find. It's everybody else, including you and me, because if CAGW is correct, carbon trading is a complete and expensive waste of time (because even its proponents don't think it will make any real difference in the CO_2 levels around 2100 -- not without destroying human civilization in the meantime, baby with bathwater), and if CAGW is not correct, it is a complete and expensive swindle, one that diverts an enormous amount of resources away from where they might be far better used to, say, bring 2/3 of the world up out of poverty and ignorance.
Real solutions to carbon, like building lots of e.g. thorium salt nuclear power plants, seem anathema, while elsewhere people get rich trading virtual rocks. World of Warcraft gold-farming translated into a hundred billion dollar business that enriches people who do nothing to earn the money, leaves others in abject poverty living in huts lit and warmed with burning cow dung, and without even solving the original problem and "saving the world" (if it is, in fact, in danger). It takes real talent to do that.
* All (capable of lying) humans lie at one time or another. * Most humans commit sex crimes (although there are doubtless exceptions, but bear in mind sex crime is defined by law, not nature). * Humans who eat/do not eat meat therefore are certain to lie, and likely to commit sex crimes. * Many humans eat meat or do not eat meat, enough so that the statistical probability that there are no meat-eating or vegetarian humans who commit sex crimes is effectively zero (zero to enough digits that you'd get tired of counting them before encountering the first non-zero digit).
Therefore, it is a logical certainty that all meat eating humans capable of lying lie, and a statistical certainty that at least some of them commit sex crimes. The same is true for non-meat eating humans.
So what's all the fuss about? Why shouldn't a textbook make true statements?
Oh, you mean the implication that non-meat eating humans do not? That's why assume makes an ass outa u and me. If it doesn't clearly state it, don't assume it to be true.
...or you'll be able to break those bones into itty-bitty pieces. Even as it is, bone and cartilage often have to withstand muscular forces that are ten to thirty times greater than the limb itself is actually exerting due to mechanical disadvantage at the torque pivots.
Multiply that by 25 and you'll very likely exert fracture-level stresses on the bone or severely damage the cartilage. So if you plan to "go bionic" either use scaled down versions of these "muscles" or go bionic all the way with adamantium bones.
So what you are saying is that the entire thing is basically a scheme whereby certain parties get enormously rich selling each other (literally) rocks, that has nothing to do with AGW or the plausibility of Catastrophic AGW as opposed to not so catastrophic moderate AGW on top of natural GW or the amelioration of same? Naaah, that couldn't possibly be right. Al Gore has all of our best interests at heart and doesn't make any money at all from carbon futures and almost-hurricane Sandy was clearly caused by AGW because that sort of thing couldn't possibly happen naturally and nothing like it every happened before back before the entire northeast Atlantic seaboard was one big expensive playground.
Damn, for mod points. Mod parent up for reference to the Tragedy of the Commons, by Hardin. Mod up double as it appears he/she might actually have read it. All the rest of you who haven't -- well, it's high time that you did.
...or we could go with evidence. For example, the well-documented Flynn Effect. Or, for those that don't like the Flynn Effect because of the difficulty of measuring real intelligence -- right back at you, if intelligence is so difficult to measure, how can we make an absurd conclusion like "our ancestors 2000 years ago were, on average, more intelligent that people, on average, are today"? After all, we cannot even measure their (apparently rising) intelligence even today. Or we could take note of human accomplishments. Or we could take note of fraction of the human race who actively participated in irrational and unsupported world mythologies 2000 years ago. Or we could note that over most of the intervening 2000 years, human intelligence has been strongly selected for. Literate humans outsurvive illiterate ones (selecting for verbal ability). Wealthy humans outsurvive poor ones (and for the most part, a fool and money are soon parted). Smart but poor people tend to outsurvive stupid, poor people. I cannot think of any complex human social interaction or competition, including war, the economic rat race, even religious interactions where intelligence isn't advantaged relative to stupidity. War (almost unending over the last 2000 years) is a great selector of intelligence, both on the battlefield (if you are stupid enough to end up there) and off (where the smartest people have by and large avoided ending up there).
This isn't a "sharp" selector any more than anything else -- evolution is a fuzzy, imperfect process where sometimes a complete loser wins and a perfect winner loses, but on average a very good definition of intelligence is "an integrated ability to function optimally in a complex and often rapidly changing environment", a race it is difficult to imagine stupidity ever winning.
I've always found a sucker rod very effective. In this case applied to the case of the system, vigorously, for a period of thirty or forty seconds while screaming "No! No! Bad! Die system die!" as parts spatter this way and that. Then -- slowly -- raise your eyes from the system to meet the eyes of the owner and say "Now, can I help you pick out a nice, shiny, new Linux-based system, sir?"
It is best to wear safety goggles while performing this procedure. I also used to keep a hammer handy in case the sucker rod proved inadequate to strip the case screws. And don't forget to spit tiny flecks of froth! They make an unforgettable impact.
Well, I assume that a site performing a meta-analysis of many polls is taking this sort of thing into account and correcting for poll biases using Bayesian methods. Nate Silver got his start doing baseball stats and is hardly ignorant of this sort of problem in his meta-analysis either. As he points out, the probability that some twenty distinct polls all get it wrong is not all that high -- you have to posit systematic bias in all of them, in only one direction. I'd guess that the Illinois site is even more meticulous, as they very likely use some serious statistical tools (e.g. R) to perform the meta-analysis along with some presumably well-founded set of Bayesian priors.
Of course you could be right, and all of the polling margins could be spurious and due to incorrect compensation for "enthusiasm", and Obama is balanced on the cusp between "throw the rascals out" (poor economy, incumbent loses) and "don't change horses when things are going well" (gangbusters economy, encumbent wins) mentality so one can make up scenarios of a hidden groundswell that will unseat him, but hidden groundswells seem less likely than things are as they seem, according to the summation of the poll samplings.
In any event, the day should decide it, and then we can finally turn our minds to something else for a while. Win or lose (either way) that has to be a blessing of sorts.
I've been tracking http://electionanalytics.cs.illinois.edu/ for some time now -- a University managed site that uses Bayesian analysis of all of the available polls to come up with their estimates. I tend to think that Universities are less likely to biased in their poll meta-analysis in the first place, and of course I'm a big fan of Bayesian analysis for large multifactorial problems with many levels of conditional and marginal probability. Anyway, this site is a lot less ambiguous -- it currently calls it for Obama at the level of 99.6% probability, with an expected electoral vote count of almost 303 for Obama (where "EEV" isn't an integer valued function but rather reflects the expected mean outcome of many "elections" held assuming that there is some sort of unbiased iid process underlying the poll noise). Romney's numbers are dropping, fairly rapidly, over the last week -- it looks like Obama is very likely to be 99.9% likely to win going into the actual election on Tuesday.
You won't see this on the major news stations, of course, as they long ago gave up any pretence at objectivity in the election, and besides, if the election were statistically certain going into Election Day (as this one appears to be) it might actually influence the outcome, just as the stations that persist in claiming that Romney HAS a chance, or HAS "momentum" (whatever the hell that means outside of the context of physics in an environment where his polling numbers are almost without exception going down) are trying to influence the election, just as the stations that make the opposite claim for Obama are trying to influence the elections.
The other nice thing about the election analytics site is that it also predicts the cumulative outcome of the Senate and House races. The Senate race currently suggests that Obama will win by enough to have some coattails to catch and help out in close races there, although the House races appear to be a lock at this point. We'll see if any house races end up as surprises -- possible if Obama beats 300 EV by a substantial margin, possible if the fact that the election is "over" in many states and districts causes the Republicans to just stay home and not bother to vote "only" for a congressional candidate where a lot of democrats show up to ride the Obama wave home.
I actually love dog -- I mean dogs -- but I was kidding. I know on/. it is sometimes hard to tell. Although on Halloween I was tempted to extend the joke and point out that police officer is very tasty as well, especially if turned into delicious Eastern NC style barbecue...
Ah, you mean 100,000 years where it "worked", in the sense that the human race failed to die out? I agree. Of course during most of the last 6000 years (where we actually have a historical record) the mean life expectancy was less than 20, women were de facto chattel and slaves, crime was no less commonplace than it is today (for all that it was punished far more severely), humanity was trapped in a state of unbelievable ignorance concerning the natural state of affairs that led them to adopt the most extravagant and absurd mythologies and use them to transform the status quo into "the will of the gods", and life was sufficiently close to the state of nature that it was ugly, nasty, brutish and very, very short even in what laughingly passed for "civilization". No noble savages these, but men and women for whom violence and misery were the normal state of affairs.
The poorest and meanest individuals living in modern society live better than the rulers of vast empires lived a mere century or two ago.
And then there is war. And the fact that what you call "sexual liberation" has never been anything but the rule for the lusty old human species, however much some of those antique and false mythologies sought to demonize it and regulate it. That, in fact, is why sex "worked" to perpetuate the species. Evolution requires warm bodies, produced in abundance, and lets abilities and luck sort it all out afterwards.
Personally, I think that while TFA is undoubtedly correct that it is really gangbusters good to love your children and provide them with a stimulating environment and the occasional kick in the pants to overcome the natural sloth to which our species (with its energy conserving reptile-brain core) is prone, "sexual liberation" has far less to do with any sort of social ennui or malaise visible among youth than the fact that our society forces them to delay acceptance into society as adults until they are in their 20s, when their evolved biology presumes that they would be 50% likely to be dead by their 20s and that "adulthood" begins at age 13 or thereabouts.
There is a deadly window in the teenage years where every hormone flooding a young brain is whispering to them to have sex, start a family, challenge the tribal leaders for status, run away to found your own tribe. It stimulates risk taking (which fuels evolution, successful risk takers being good genetic stock). It is the occult cause of gangs (tribes where youth can gain status), teen-age pregnancy, overt and covert rebellion against parents, society, experimentation with drugs and alcohol, tattoos and piercings. Failure to attain social status during these years is deadly indeed -- it is often the kids that are "outsiders", who don't fit in, who become depressed, although mere brain dysfunction due to imbalances of various neurotransmitters or damage from the toxins rampant in modern civilization no doubt contribute more than their fair share. One of the largest causes of death at this age is the humble automobile -- we let children in the throes of this transition drive massive machines at high speeds largely because it is more convenient to the adults to permit them to do so, and pay the price in human misery when they not terribly surprisingly run their cars into trees, into other cars, into ditches and rivers as they drive them too fast, without enough fear of consequence or attention, with other equally distracted youth in the car with them egging them on in pushing the envelope.
For all that -- your "rampant suicide, depression, crime and delinquency" -- youth outlive their predecessors from more than 50 years ago by an increasing margin, and one that is clearly correlated with both reproductive age/female fertility (negatively) and education (positively) across many countries and social strata. Not to introduce anything like data into a good social rant, but you might look at things like: www.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/sosis/.../BulledSosis2010.pdf to see how the actual numbers work out.
Lessee, grows like a weed, etc. Could it be -- hemp? It is a weed. Everybody calls it "weed". And it definitely generates all sorts of creative energy when it burns.
Yes! Ship me the petabytes! Somewhere in there is a steganographic message from space aliens, or God. Or maybe the message is God is a Space Alien!
Lessee, 20 megabits per second (except when we're watching netflix) 2 times ten to the seventh divided into 2 times ten to the fifteenth is ten to the eighth, where a year is pi times ten to the seventh seconds and -- oops, a byte is eight bits, damn, call it ten to the ninth seconds, pi squared is ten, so it would take, lessee, pi times ten -- only 31 years give or take a bit to download the missing data to my house!
Well heck, that's not so long! Time to go out and buy a thousand 2 terabyte drives! With luck I'll live to 88 and hence still be here to receive the message!
Amusingly, they did a fairly recent survey on the quad of Harvard University, asking random students who passed by to explain the correct relative orientation of the Earth, the Sun and the Moon when the moon is (full, first quarter, last quarter, new). IIRC 2/3 of them could not. I teach physics and astronomy and have done my own "survey" in some of the classes I've taught, and Duke students -- mostly students majoring in the sciences, mind you -- are little better than their Harvard peers.
So while some people may well have known that the Earth wasn't flat for a long time, most people did not BCE. The unknown authors of Genesis -- assuming that Genesis was written BCE -- clearly did not. On the other hand, Aristarchus of Samos proposed a heliocentric model for a round Earth, and Eratosthones actually did a credible job of estimating its circumference and its axial tilt ballpark 200 BCE. Some people probably haven't figured out that the world is round even yet, and it is difficult to see how even Harvard students could make the inference that the Earth is round from the observation of a curved shadow during a lunar eclipse without first working out the relative position of Sun, Earth and Moon.
Nor does this address the problem of whether or not it is wise to leave science out of a standard curriculum, even for students for whom learning it is a struggle. Personally I think it is a lot better to at least try to teach people the best possible evidence supported moderately consistent worldview for countless (IMO excellent) reasons. Enabling them to eventually differentiate between fantasy and reality is just one of many of them, although one that usually forms at least part of the basis of a psych evaluation. Sadly, even our "modern" culture generally fails such an evaluation (largely from a lack of an education that allows one to become sane), resulting in things like a group of armed, fully grown men who hunt down and shoot a young girl in the head simply because she disagrees with them.
rgb
P.S. -- nice signature, BTW. Almost true, too -- except for the word "except" (one expects an exhaustive list which you obviously couldn't provide) and the presence of communism, which hasn't yet been ended (point one) and which underwent a number of historically recent diminishments without, actually, any proximate war to help it along. But I'm sure war helped along the way, and war has "solved" many, many problems historically -- or at least been a major contributor to change.
... a time when general ignorance of things like chemistry, biology, physics, and geology permitted people to be suckered in to believing that the world was flat, the sun, moon and stars went around it, that it was around 6000 years old and created in six days by an Old Guy with a proclivity to go off on rants and wipe out entire populations with floods or fire and brimstone if he got pissed off (and nearly anything pissed him off).
Oh, wait, that's still true today for 46% of the population of the US, according to at least one horrific poll. And you want permission to add your own son to the list of the terminally ignorant... shame on you.
I have a son who has serious ADD as well -- so much so that he will likely never finish college (he's started it several times but his dysfunction is too severe to make it through, at least so far). It plagued him through high school. He sucked at science and math in high school. But he benefitted enormously from taking the courses -- even when he failed or did very poorly while passing. Even in failure or a low pass, he learned that the science is a consistent statement of knowledge and not casually to be rejected on the basis of faulty or non-existent or hearsay evidence (like the Book of Genesis). Even in failure or a low pass he learned enough chemistry to be able to appreciate the molecular description of the quotidian universe. Even in failure or a low pass he learned enough math and math concepts to be able to hand the math needed in the everyday world, enough to engage in conceptual reasoning and to use logic, geometry, visualization in argumentation.
With that said, every student is unique, and with some students (including all students with mild mental retardation as well as many with reasonable intelligence but serious learning disabilities) math/science requirements are indeed pissing into the wind. However, dealing with this isn't a matter of modifying the general curriculum -- it is a matter of accepting the fact that your kid is LD and needs a special curriculum, perhaps one with a specialized and limited treatment of science, which in fact is often available in schools now.
But enrollment in those courses stigmatizes and traumatizes the enrollee, marking them as relatively "dumb". So instead we should just dumb down the curriculum for everybody else to match...
As already noted, you are a decade or so behind on the neutrino oscillation problem. My office in the physics building at Duke (I'm a physicist, BTW) is across the hall from an entire group of neutrino specialists and you are categorically wrong. There is absolutely no doubt that the sun is powered by thermonuclear fusion.
Your argument fails for numerous other reasons, most of them revealing an appalling lack of understanding of elementary thermodynamics and mathematics. For example, you wish to assert that the sun is hottest on the outside and coolest on the inside so that sunspots are a glimpse into a cooler solar interior. Sadly, this is complete and rather obvious nonsense. The heat equation (look it up) states quite clearly that the distribution of temperatures in the absence of sources or sinks satisfies the laplace equation. One of the first things you learn in the study of partial differential equations is that the laplace equation always has both the maximum and the minimum temperature on the boundary surface of any enclosed volume (there is actually a lot more one can tell without even building an actual solution, but this is one of the theorems). There are also average theorems -- the temperature inside any spherical ball is the average of the temperatures on the surface of that ball. Therefore the temperature in the center of the sun cannot be less than the average temperature of the surface, and even with the simplest imaginable model of stellar formation, there would still be leftover heat on the interior from mere gravitational collapse (see e.g. brown dwarfs) and hence even without any fusion whatsoever the solar core would be hotter than the solar surface, even if the surface was being actively heated. So your argument there is again, simply incorrect.
Third, you seem to have some sort of strange bias against mechanisms or objects that cannot be observed "on the Earth". Sadly, I would have a very hard time writing out the number of 9's in the 99.99999.....9999% of the Universe that is not "the Earth", including pretty much all of the stars and galaxies and planets and ever so much more. In fact, we don't have a star at all on the Earth, not even the relatively nearby Sun, and not even in fusion thermonuclear bombs do we build a creditable approximation of the pressures, densities, and temperatures present in the Sun's core where fusion occurs. Do the arithmetic -- every second the Sun releases the total energy content of the complete conversion of 4.26 billion kilograms of mass -- call it one cubic kilometer of mass at Earth-like densities. Electromagnetic fields are easy to measure. We measure them precisely throughout the solar system. They are openly published. They are completely, totally inadequate to serve as a free energy source for the Sun. Electromagnetic forces are, in the end, what drives ordinary chemistry, and ordinary chemistry is orders of magnitude away from being able to account for the energy output, and this direct coulomb interaction energy is many orders of magnitude again stronger than the magnetic interaction energy on a per-atom basis.
You are incorrect that it is an "assumption" that the speed of light and constants of nature have been constant throughout all of the ages of time. We can look back in time 13.73 billion years by looking outward. We can see that the spectral lines of stars are unchanged over all of this time period. Since those spectral lines are determined by (among other things) the values of Planck's constant and the speed of light, both of which contribute to the fine structure constant, one has to propose an enormously convoluted and peculiar scaling that somehow causes them to vary, but vary in precisely the right way so that the Universe precisely and consistently appears to be as large and old as it is, but really it's not. That isn't impossible, but it is absurdly far from the best possible belief given the data. By far the simplest and best explanation of the data is that yeah, the
Depends on how seriously you take information theory and the information content of the Universe. If, as seems rather reasonable, the information content of the (visible) Universe is irreducible/uncompressible, it would take at supercomputer with at least as many bits of storage as there are bits of information in the specification of the Universe's state. This requires a computer that is strictly larger than (in the sense of having at least as much "stuff" devoted to storage of all of those bits) than the Universe itself. Finally, since the supercomputer is part of the Universe (at least, if we built it), it also has to be self-referential and store its own state information. If it is to have any processing capability at all, it then is in a deadly game of catch-up, adding bits to describe every elementary particle in its processors and memory and losing the race even if it requires only one elementary particle to store the bit content of another (which will never be the case).
In the end, it is provably, mathematically impossible to build a supercomputer that stores the complete state of the Universe, where the Universe is cleanly defined to be everything with objective existence. The same proof works to prove that there can be no omniscient God, since God suffers from precisely the same issues with information content and storage. A processing system cannot even precisely specify its own encoded state unless it is a truly bizarre fully compressible self-referential system the likes of which we cannot even begin to schematize, and there are lovely theorems on the rates of production of entropy in state switching on top of any actual physical mechanism for computation, all of which make this an interesting but ultimately absurd proposition.
If you don't like information theory, then there are the limitations of physics itself, at least so far. We can only see back to (shortly after, the end of The Great Dark) the big bang, some ~14 bya. It is literally impossible for us to extract state information from outside of a sphere some 27.5 billion light years across. However, making reasonable assumptions of isotropy and continuity and the coupling of the "cosmic egg" that was the early post BB unified field state, cosmological measurements suggest that the Universe is no less than 200 times larger than this, that is, a ball some 500 billion light years across (where it is most unlikely that we are in the center of any actually compact Universe). Obviously, we cannot get any state information at all beyond indirect inference of mere existence from strictly less than 1 - (1/200)^3 of the actual Universe unless and until we have new transluminal physics. And from the first argument, even if you turned this 99.99999% of the actual Universe into a computer to fully describe only the 0.00001% visible sphere that we actually inhabit, you'd barely have enough material to create the bits needed to hold the information at current peak matter-per-bit levels (and then there is the problem of the free energy needed to drive any computation, the need for a cold reservoir into which to dump the entropy, but I digress). So it is safe to say that it is also physically impossible to build a supercomputer that can store/duplicate the information content of the entire Universe (and again, the same argument works against the existence of a God presuming only that this deity requires internal switching mechanisms on top of some sort of medium in order to store information and process it.
The only exception to both is the specific case where the Universe and/or God are one and the same entity, and its "storage" of information is the irreducible representation of the information content of mass-energy in the mass-energy itself, and the irreducible computational mechanism is the laws of physics themselves.
But of course you really do understand this, if you get outside of the willing suspension of disbelief required of science fiction (and yeah
Gold from gold chloride is truly not interesting. Gold from seawater -- that would be interesting. Gold from seawater at macroscopic rates with no external energy input in unattended apparatus, that would be very interesting. Sadly, this is not that.
Black holes, dark matter, and dark energy has never been observed in the real world, because they are mathematical fictions that only exist in the equations and computers of theoretical astrophysicists.
Things that have "never been observed in the real world" by this sort of standard include nearly everything we know. Here's how science, more specifically physics, works. A regularity of nature is observed, for example, letting go of rocks and observing them to fall. Second, a theory is proposed to explain it, a theory that has been equations that supposedly predict the outcome from the time of Newton on. Third, computations are done that compare observations old and new to the predictions of the theory. Fourth -- and this is a key step -- the consistency of the theory, both with ongoing future observations and with all of the other theories that seem to consistently explain observational data is challenged and re-verified, ad infinitum. Steps three and four never really end, and sometimes require a revisitation of step two to either modify (small step) or throw out (big step) the theory altogether.
This process of guided, consistent inference is the basis for all human knowledge about the real world, scientific or not. When you say black holes have never been observed in the real world but plasma has, you are splitting a very subtle hair. Plasma has never been observed in the real world either -- light from plasma has, other phenomena connected to a hypothesized plasma have. On the basis of these indirect measurements of effect, we infer the existence of things we cannot directly "observe" (whatever that means, given the coarseness and finite range of our senses) as the cause, and believe in this cause to the extent that it is part of an extensive theory with substantial predictive power that consistently fits in to the overall interconnected web of such theories that constitute "physics", "chemistry", "biology", and all of the other sciences that provide well-founded knowledge about the real world.
Gravitation is precisely such a "theory", indeed, the first such theory, the theory that more or less began the Enlightenment. It is especially amusing that you recite black holes, dark matter, and dark energy as examples of "mathematical fictions" where (by assumption, since you seem to accept the existence of gravitation) gravity is real and observed; in all three cases they are either theories that result from the need to make gravitation consistent both with observation and with the equally well-accepted theory of electromagnetism, which among other things implies relativity theory and physically observed phenomena such as the bending of light by strong gravitational fields and the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, or from the need to rescue gravitation from complete oblivion as a failed theory, in the case of dark matter/dark energy. We can see -- direct observation, although sure it is with pretty extensive equipment that substantially enhances our senses -- many galaxies where the orbital velocity field of the galaxy is not consistent with the apparent mass of the galaxy. We can observe similar deviations from the expected behavior of gravitation in other cosmological measurements. A number of theories have been proposed, over many decades at this point, to account for these failures of observation to consistently agree with the existing theory of gravitation plus the other physics we strongly believe. One of many is that Newton's theory of gravitation is indeed wrong. Another is the existence of a "fifth force" that is "gravity like" in certain ways and that modifies the long range behavior of gravitation. Dark matter and dark energy are yet another, one that preserves the general theory of gravitation and accounts for the deviation via the presence of unseen mass in the case of dark matter, and what is more or less again a fifth force in the case of dark energy.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, and the 33 year trend is just over 0.13/decade, and the 15 year trend is flat, and the ten year trend is slightly negative, which pretty much makes nonsense of the 0.04 C/decade "at the 95% confidence level" to the extent that fitting any curve you like to a selected (or if you prefer, "cherrypicked" segment of a highly variable dataset makes sense in the first place. The predictive value of any of these fits is diddly, joined by its friend squat.
My point is that that there is precisely zero evidence in the form of a fit to actual data with any meaningful confidence level for a 4 C rise over the century. Even the IPCC AR5 isn't going to come close to that -- it is dropping its predictions to ~2.5C/Century, and every year with neutral temperatures will drop it further still. If one compares the actual temperature record to Hansen's early predictions over the last 35 or so years, the temperature curve is coming in slightly below his "no feedback" extrapolation, indicating neutral to perhaps slightly negative net feedback. His strong feedback curve is positively rejected. His intermediate feedback curve -- one that leads to the 2.5C/century type of warming -- is very inconsistent with the data but because the natural variability of the climate is basically not well known it leaves open the possibility that the current 15 year levelling might return to a strong warming trend at some point.
So it isn't just "sites on the internet" -- one of the most reliable sources of data available over the last 33 years (and arguably one of the only sources that is both truly global and not susceptible to various forms of bias known to corrupt the thermometric record) is absolutely inconsistent with a 4C/century warming trend, which is out at the very-low-confidence limit of the current AR report in progress. So the top article is pretty much alarmist nonsense.
IMO, the most likely century-scale warming we might expect based on the data is between 1 and 2 C. That is entirely consistent with the warming expected from CO_2 only, plus neutral to week feedback or climate sensitivity. It isn't very likely -- nothing like bullshit "95% confidence" levels -- because we still don't know and cannot predict most of the important natural variation in the climate and do not understand the feedbacks between things like aerosols, ozone, CO_2, cloud formation and the coupling of the climate to things like the phase of the major atmospheric oscillations and oceanic currents or the sun. The climate could indeed warm by 2.5C, or even 4 or 5C (unlikely to very unlikely). It could also actually cool some, or warm less than a degree. We cannot even be certain of what the CO_2 levels will be then regardless of the steps "actively" taken to ameliorate it. If somebody invents "cold fusion" (or hot fusion) at commercially viable efficiency, or the world starts to get off its thumb and build e.g. liquid thorium fission plants it would clearly make a large difference. Whether or not these things happen, in 10 to 20 years PV solar is going to overtake just about everything in terms of cost-efficiency, sooner if somebody invents a really good battery. That too will have a large impact. So even predictions that begin "assuming a doubling of CO_2" are simply adding a Bayesian condition to the probability distribution of final temperatures that is somewhat dubious -- we might well never reach 600, or even 500, ppm before it starts to fall back
So as the Hitchhiker's Guide says, Do Not Panic. And hold onto your wallet while not panicking.
rgb
You mean things like the UAH lower troposphere temperature over over the last 15 years?
Just asking.
What operating system the computer (because that's what a game console is, a computer) is running is irrelevant. Everything you are describing is operating system agnostic, or nearly so -- you're just talking about the toplevel interface, the windowing system as it were. Linux can run anything from a TTY-only interface, to a TTY interface with a single graphical application, to a full blown windowing system with a general purpose window manager like gnome or kde. At one point, so could Windows (back when it was still DOS inside). Apple's OS originally could not -- it was graphical all the way down into the kernel, for some bizarre reason -- but probably can now that it is really Unix. I'm guessing Windows can as well, but it is probably a lot harder to get at a TTY-only console in Windows 8...
Your game console absolutely needs a multitasking operating system (and has one). We could go down a list of things it manages "in parallel" via multitasking -- managing network interrupts, handling disk or other media access during game play, coping with the human interface, the datastream coming in from some remote network connection, and the outgoing datastream back to the game server, all the while updating the screen every 60th of a second or so -- but we'd still only list a small fraction of the housekeeping visible when running "top" in a Linux computer running a single graphical task. And then there are modern processors that are almost without exception multicore (core-level coarse grain parallelism is multitasking) not to mention the fact that each core is effectively itself parallelized with multiple ALUs and execution threads that are all managed by multitasking.
What you mean is that you want the top level game interface to not support or run lots of single user applications at once. You want the entire graphical console interface to be devoted to a single task, selected from a relatively short list of single tasks, so that (as you correctly put it) "whatever program is running should have full reign over the console so it can take full advantage of the hardware".
To be honest, I think you are overreacting -- if one plays, e.g. World of Warcraft on a linux box and doesn't start a half dozen things on different desktops right before beginning, that's pretty much what you get already. I realize that you are annoyed with your phone as a game interface -- of course you are, as the phone is a phone first and doesn't stop being a phone while you play the game. It also has a relatively lousy network interface no matter whether it is connecting through 3G or 4G or Wireless -- the latter with iffy reception on heavily shared lines, the latter burning power like crazy. Phones suck as game consoles, no arguments.
Android tablets, OTOH, are much better. They typically do for the most part run just one application at a time on the console and don't necessarily do a lot of background user task execution while they do (the thing you really object to, not multitasking) although one CAN run a user task in the background on an android tablet and degrade game performance if you want to for some reason.
Regular computers, however, -- in my opinion -- are in the end the best gaming platforms out there. The offer you the following benefits:
a) A minimum of two cores, more likely four, with very large CPU caches. The intel 3rd gen i7 is truly awe inspiring in its performance -- it can manage 8 simultaneous contexts so smoothly that I've measured linear performance scaling on floating point intensive code out to 8 tasks even though the processor itself is only four cores. This is the ultimate anodyne for your "multitasking" concerns -- a computer that could be evaluating pi to ten zillion places, checking the prices of your stocks in real time, playing tic-tac-toe with itself out of sheer core boredom, and be running the game you are playing flawlessly with human-perceptually instantaneous response time.
b) Enormous amounts of RAM. Yes, this
Just to actually answer your question, the original inflation of space (supposedly) took only a very, very short time, so even if the two points were "close together" at the instant of the big bang itself, they ended up very far apart (and moving farther apart) at the end of a second or so. The parts of the universe in question did not exceed the speed of light because speed is distance over time in spacetime and it is the latter that was inflating. Think of a very small balloon with a picture of the Universe printed on its surface being suddenly blown up -- when the balloon is small, everything is compact, but when it is inflated it is much further apart. Then make it a balloon with a three dimensional "surface" and no interior...
There is a lot more to learn about this, much of it in e.g. wikipedia pages as noted in the thread or in astronomy textbooks, and it is actually a lot of fun to learn. One very interesting thing, for example, is to follow the scientific argument from parallax, blackbody radiation, and our knowledge of how radiation intensity drops off with distance, through the discovery of the Hubble constant, out to how we estimate/compute the size and age of the Universe. Another interesting thing is to learn about "the Great Dark" that followed the big bang up until the formation of the earliest stars some 200 million years later, the chain of nucleosynthesis within those starts and the supernovae that ended them, and the gradual accumulation of "metals" (elements heavier than hydrogen and helium) in the ashes of those stars. The entire planet Earth and we ourselves are composed of stardust, the ash of ancient stars that gave rise to the elements that make up our bodies in their dying explosions.
It's well worth it to take a course in astronomy at some point if this sort of thing interests you, although a lot of it is covered in discovery channel stuff and shows you can probably find on netflix if that's too time or money consuming for you.
rgb (who occasionally teaches astronomy and hasn't lost his sense of wonder at how it all works out)
Not at all. I'm saying that when the people who are making the most noise and asserting things like "storms are more violent and frequent and it is due to global warming" (an argument that it is difficult to make at the moment especially with hurricanes, given that we are continuing the longest stretch in recorded history without a category 3 or better hurricane making landfall in the US, given that unbiased statistical analyses show no such thing) are also making a lot of money off of the panic that they create -- panic that isn't based on AGW per se (which might well exist but be moderate and at least partly beneficial), it is about catastrophic AGW, doomsday stuff -- it might be wise to take a very close look at who the big winners are in the "game" described above and be at least a little bit cynical about their motives and the validity of their public claims.
The losers are easy to find. It's everybody else, including you and me, because if CAGW is correct, carbon trading is a complete and expensive waste of time (because even its proponents don't think it will make any real difference in the CO_2 levels around 2100 -- not without destroying human civilization in the meantime, baby with bathwater), and if CAGW is not correct, it is a complete and expensive swindle, one that diverts an enormous amount of resources away from where they might be far better used to, say, bring 2/3 of the world up out of poverty and ignorance.
Real solutions to carbon, like building lots of e.g. thorium salt nuclear power plants, seem anathema, while elsewhere people get rich trading virtual rocks. World of Warcraft gold-farming translated into a hundred billion dollar business that enriches people who do nothing to earn the money, leaves others in abject poverty living in huts lit and warmed with burning cow dung, and without even solving the original problem and "saving the world" (if it is, in fact, in danger). It takes real talent to do that.
rgb
So do non-meat-eaters. Here's the logical proof:
* All (capable of lying) humans lie at one time or another.
* Most humans commit sex crimes (although there are doubtless exceptions, but bear in mind sex crime is defined by law, not nature).
* Humans who eat/do not eat meat therefore are certain to lie, and likely to commit sex crimes.
* Many humans eat meat or do not eat meat, enough so that the statistical probability that there are no meat-eating or vegetarian humans who commit sex crimes is effectively zero (zero to enough digits that you'd get tired of counting them before encountering the first non-zero digit).
Therefore, it is a logical certainty that all meat eating humans capable of lying lie, and a statistical certainty that at least some of them commit sex crimes. The same is true for non-meat eating humans.
So what's all the fuss about? Why shouldn't a textbook make true statements?
Oh, you mean the implication that non-meat eating humans do not? That's why assume makes an ass outa u and me. If it doesn't clearly state it, don't assume it to be true.
rgb
...or you'll be able to break those bones into itty-bitty pieces. Even as it is, bone and cartilage often have to withstand muscular forces that are ten to thirty times greater than the limb itself is actually exerting due to mechanical disadvantage at the torque pivots.
Multiply that by 25 and you'll very likely exert fracture-level stresses on the bone or severely damage the cartilage. So if you plan to "go bionic" either use scaled down versions of these "muscles" or go bionic all the way with adamantium bones.
With that said, it's still kind of cool...
rgb
So what you are saying is that the entire thing is basically a scheme whereby certain parties get enormously rich selling each other (literally) rocks, that has nothing to do with AGW or the plausibility of Catastrophic AGW as opposed to not so catastrophic moderate AGW on top of natural GW or the amelioration of same? Naaah, that couldn't possibly be right. Al Gore has all of our best interests at heart and doesn't make any money at all from carbon futures and almost-hurricane Sandy was clearly caused by AGW because that sort of thing couldn't possibly happen naturally and nothing like it every happened before back before the entire northeast Atlantic seaboard was one big expensive playground.
Damn, for mod points. Mod parent up for reference to the Tragedy of the Commons, by Hardin. Mod up double as it appears he/she might actually have read it. All the rest of you who haven't -- well, it's high time that you did.
rgb
In short, no one wants to pay a shitload of money for an uncertain payoff.
...which sounds so, I dunno, wise?
rgb
...or we could go with evidence. For example, the well-documented Flynn Effect. Or, for those that don't like the Flynn Effect because of the difficulty of measuring real intelligence -- right back at you, if intelligence is so difficult to measure, how can we make an absurd conclusion like "our ancestors 2000 years ago were, on average, more intelligent that people, on average, are today"? After all, we cannot even measure their (apparently rising) intelligence even today. Or we could take note of human accomplishments. Or we could take note of fraction of the human race who actively participated in irrational and unsupported world mythologies 2000 years ago. Or we could note that over most of the intervening 2000 years, human intelligence has been strongly selected for. Literate humans outsurvive illiterate ones (selecting for verbal ability). Wealthy humans outsurvive poor ones (and for the most part, a fool and money are soon parted). Smart but poor people tend to outsurvive stupid, poor people. I cannot think of any complex human social interaction or competition, including war, the economic rat race, even religious interactions where intelligence isn't advantaged relative to stupidity. War (almost unending over the last 2000 years) is a great selector of intelligence, both on the battlefield (if you are stupid enough to end up there) and off (where the smartest people have by and large avoided ending up there).
This isn't a "sharp" selector any more than anything else -- evolution is a fuzzy, imperfect process where sometimes a complete loser wins and a perfect winner loses, but on average a very good definition of intelligence is "an integrated ability to function optimally in a complex and often rapidly changing environment", a race it is difficult to imagine stupidity ever winning.
rgb
I've always found a sucker rod very effective. In this case applied to the case of the system, vigorously, for a period of thirty or forty seconds while screaming "No! No! Bad! Die system die!" as parts spatter this way and that. Then -- slowly -- raise your eyes from the system to meet the eyes of the owner and say "Now, can I help you pick out a nice, shiny, new Linux-based system, sir?"
It is best to wear safety goggles while performing this procedure. I also used to keep a hammer handy in case the sucker rod proved inadequate to strip the case screws. And don't forget to spit tiny flecks of froth! They make an unforgettable impact.
rgb
Well, I assume that a site performing a meta-analysis of many polls is taking this sort of thing into account and correcting for poll biases using Bayesian methods. Nate Silver got his start doing baseball stats and is hardly ignorant of this sort of problem in his meta-analysis either. As he points out, the probability that some twenty distinct polls all get it wrong is not all that high -- you have to posit systematic bias in all of them, in only one direction. I'd guess that the Illinois site is even more meticulous, as they very likely use some serious statistical tools (e.g. R) to perform the meta-analysis along with some presumably well-founded set of Bayesian priors.
Of course you could be right, and all of the polling margins could be spurious and due to incorrect compensation for "enthusiasm", and Obama is balanced on the cusp between "throw the rascals out" (poor economy, incumbent loses) and "don't change horses when things are going well" (gangbusters economy, encumbent wins) mentality so one can make up scenarios of a hidden groundswell that will unseat him, but hidden groundswells seem less likely than things are as they seem, according to the summation of the poll samplings.
In any event, the day should decide it, and then we can finally turn our minds to something else for a while. Win or lose (either way) that has to be a blessing of sorts.
rgb
I've been tracking http://electionanalytics.cs.illinois.edu/ for some time now -- a University managed site that uses Bayesian analysis of all of the available polls to come up with their estimates. I tend to think that Universities are less likely to biased in their poll meta-analysis in the first place, and of course I'm a big fan of Bayesian analysis for large multifactorial problems with many levels of conditional and marginal probability. Anyway, this site is a lot less ambiguous -- it currently calls it for Obama at the level of 99.6% probability, with an expected electoral vote count of almost 303 for Obama (where "EEV" isn't an integer valued function but rather reflects the expected mean outcome of many "elections" held assuming that there is some sort of unbiased iid process underlying the poll noise). Romney's numbers are dropping, fairly rapidly, over the last week -- it looks like Obama is very likely to be 99.9% likely to win going into the actual election on Tuesday.
You won't see this on the major news stations, of course, as they long ago gave up any pretence at objectivity in the election, and besides, if the election were statistically certain going into Election Day (as this one appears to be) it might actually influence the outcome, just as the stations that persist in claiming that Romney HAS a chance, or HAS "momentum" (whatever the hell that means outside of the context of physics in an environment where his polling numbers are almost without exception going down) are trying to influence the election, just as the stations that make the opposite claim for Obama are trying to influence the elections.
The other nice thing about the election analytics site is that it also predicts the cumulative outcome of the Senate and House races. The Senate race currently suggests that Obama will win by enough to have some coattails to catch and help out in close races there, although the House races appear to be a lock at this point. We'll see if any house races end up as surprises -- possible if Obama beats 300 EV by a substantial margin, possible if the fact that the election is "over" in many states and districts causes the Republicans to just stay home and not bother to vote "only" for a congressional candidate where a lot of democrats show up to ride the Obama wave home.
rgb
I actually love dog -- I mean dogs -- but I was kidding. I know on /. it is sometimes hard to tell. Although on Halloween I was tempted to extend the joke and point out that police officer is very tasty as well, especially if turned into delicious Eastern NC style barbecue...
rgb
And don't forget, dog can be very tasty. I understand that it's legal to hunt on your own property...
Ah, you mean 100,000 years where it "worked", in the sense that the human race failed to die out? I agree. Of course during most of the last 6000 years (where we actually have a historical record) the mean life expectancy was less than 20, women were de facto chattel and slaves, crime was no less commonplace than it is today (for all that it was punished far more severely), humanity was trapped in a state of unbelievable ignorance concerning the natural state of affairs that led them to adopt the most extravagant and absurd mythologies and use them to transform the status quo into "the will of the gods", and life was sufficiently close to the state of nature that it was ugly, nasty, brutish and very, very short even in what laughingly passed for "civilization". No noble savages these, but men and women for whom violence and misery were the normal state of affairs.
The poorest and meanest individuals living in modern society live better than the rulers of vast empires lived a mere century or two ago.
And then there is war. And the fact that what you call "sexual liberation" has never been anything but the rule for the lusty old human species, however much some of those antique and false mythologies sought to demonize it and regulate it. That, in fact, is why sex "worked" to perpetuate the species. Evolution requires warm bodies, produced in abundance, and lets abilities and luck sort it all out afterwards.
Personally, I think that while TFA is undoubtedly correct that it is really gangbusters good to love your children and provide them with a stimulating environment and the occasional kick in the pants to overcome the natural sloth to which our species (with its energy conserving reptile-brain core) is prone, "sexual liberation" has far less to do with any sort of social ennui or malaise visible among youth than the fact that our society forces them to delay acceptance into society as adults until they are in their 20s, when their evolved biology presumes that they would be 50% likely to be dead by their 20s and that "adulthood" begins at age 13 or thereabouts.
There is a deadly window in the teenage years where every hormone flooding a young brain is whispering to them to have sex, start a family, challenge the tribal leaders for status, run away to found your own tribe. It stimulates risk taking (which fuels evolution, successful risk takers being good genetic stock). It is the occult cause of gangs (tribes where youth can gain status), teen-age pregnancy, overt and covert rebellion against parents, society, experimentation with drugs and alcohol, tattoos and piercings. Failure to attain social status during these years is deadly indeed -- it is often the kids that are "outsiders", who don't fit in, who become depressed, although mere brain dysfunction due to imbalances of various neurotransmitters or damage from the toxins rampant in modern civilization no doubt contribute more than their fair share. One of the largest causes of death at this age is the humble automobile -- we let children in the throes of this transition drive massive machines at high speeds largely because it is more convenient to the adults to permit them to do so, and pay the price in human misery when they not terribly surprisingly run their cars into trees, into other cars, into ditches and rivers as they drive them too fast, without enough fear of consequence or attention, with other equally distracted youth in the car with them egging them on in pushing the envelope.
For all that -- your "rampant suicide, depression, crime and delinquency" -- youth outlive their predecessors from more than 50 years ago by an increasing margin, and one that is clearly correlated with both reproductive age/female fertility (negatively) and education (positively) across many countries and social strata. Not to introduce anything like data into a good social rant, but you might look at things like: www.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/sosis/.../BulledSosis2010.pdf to see how the actual numbers work out.
Lessee, grows like a weed, etc. Could it be -- hemp? It is a weed. Everybody calls it "weed". And it definitely generates all sorts of creative energy when it burns.
Now if we can only run cars with it.
rgb
Yes! Ship me the petabytes! Somewhere in there is a steganographic message from space aliens, or God. Or maybe the message is God is a Space Alien!
;-) rgb
Lessee, 20 megabits per second (except when we're watching netflix) 2 times ten to the seventh divided into 2 times ten to the fifteenth is ten to the eighth, where a year is pi times ten to the seventh seconds and -- oops, a byte is eight bits, damn, call it ten to the ninth seconds, pi squared is ten, so it would take, lessee, pi times ten -- only 31 years give or take a bit to download the missing data to my house!
Well heck, that's not so long! Time to go out and buy a thousand 2 terabyte drives! With luck I'll live to 88 and hence still be here to receive the message!
Amusingly, they did a fairly recent survey on the quad of Harvard University, asking random students who passed by to explain the correct relative orientation of the Earth, the Sun and the Moon when the moon is (full, first quarter, last quarter, new). IIRC 2/3 of them could not. I teach physics and astronomy and have done my own "survey" in some of the classes I've taught, and Duke students -- mostly students majoring in the sciences, mind you -- are little better than their Harvard peers.
So while some people may well have known that the Earth wasn't flat for a long time, most people did not BCE. The unknown authors of Genesis -- assuming that Genesis was written BCE -- clearly did not. On the other hand, Aristarchus of Samos proposed a heliocentric model for a round Earth, and Eratosthones actually did a credible job of estimating its circumference and its axial tilt ballpark 200 BCE. Some people probably haven't figured out that the world is round even yet, and it is difficult to see how even Harvard students could make the inference that the Earth is round from the observation of a curved shadow during a lunar eclipse without first working out the relative position of Sun, Earth and Moon.
Nor does this address the problem of whether or not it is wise to leave science out of a standard curriculum, even for students for whom learning it is a struggle. Personally I think it is a lot better to at least try to teach people the best possible evidence supported moderately consistent worldview for countless (IMO excellent) reasons. Enabling them to eventually differentiate between fantasy and reality is just one of many of them, although one that usually forms at least part of the basis of a psych evaluation. Sadly, even our "modern" culture generally fails such an evaluation (largely from a lack of an education that allows one to become sane), resulting in things like a group of armed, fully grown men who hunt down and shoot a young girl in the head simply because she disagrees with them.
rgb
P.S. -- nice signature, BTW. Almost true, too -- except for the word "except" (one expects an exhaustive list which you obviously couldn't provide) and the presence of communism, which hasn't yet been ended (point one) and which underwent a number of historically recent diminishments without, actually, any proximate war to help it along. But I'm sure war helped along the way, and war has "solved" many, many problems historically -- or at least been a major contributor to change.
... a time when general ignorance of things like chemistry, biology, physics, and geology permitted people to be suckered in to believing that the world was flat, the sun, moon and stars went around it, that it was around 6000 years old and created in six days by an Old Guy with a proclivity to go off on rants and wipe out entire populations with floods or fire and brimstone if he got pissed off (and nearly anything pissed him off).
Oh, wait, that's still true today for 46% of the population of the US, according to at least one horrific poll. And you want permission to add your own son to the list of the terminally ignorant... shame on you.
I have a son who has serious ADD as well -- so much so that he will likely never finish college (he's started it several times but his dysfunction is too severe to make it through, at least so far). It plagued him through high school. He sucked at science and math in high school. But he benefitted enormously from taking the courses -- even when he failed or did very poorly while passing. Even in failure or a low pass, he learned that the science is a consistent statement of knowledge and not casually to be rejected on the basis of faulty or non-existent or hearsay evidence (like the Book of Genesis). Even in failure or a low pass he learned enough chemistry to be able to appreciate the molecular description of the quotidian universe. Even in failure or a low pass he learned enough math and math concepts to be able to hand the math needed in the everyday world, enough to engage in conceptual reasoning and to use logic, geometry, visualization in argumentation.
With that said, every student is unique, and with some students (including all students with mild mental retardation as well as many with reasonable intelligence but serious learning disabilities) math/science requirements are indeed pissing into the wind. However, dealing with this isn't a matter of modifying the general curriculum -- it is a matter of accepting the fact that your kid is LD and needs a special curriculum, perhaps one with a specialized and limited treatment of science, which in fact is often available in schools now.
But enrollment in those courses stigmatizes and traumatizes the enrollee, marking them as relatively "dumb". So instead we should just dumb down the curriculum for everybody else to match...
rgb
As already noted, you are a decade or so behind on the neutrino oscillation problem. My office in the physics building at Duke (I'm a physicist, BTW) is across the hall from an entire group of neutrino specialists and you are categorically wrong. There is absolutely no doubt that the sun is powered by thermonuclear fusion.
Your argument fails for numerous other reasons, most of them revealing an appalling lack of understanding of elementary thermodynamics and mathematics. For example, you wish to assert that the sun is hottest on the outside and coolest on the inside so that sunspots are a glimpse into a cooler solar interior. Sadly, this is complete and rather obvious nonsense. The heat equation (look it up) states quite clearly that the distribution of temperatures in the absence of sources or sinks satisfies the laplace equation. One of the first things you learn in the study of partial differential equations is that the laplace equation always has both the maximum and the minimum temperature on the boundary surface of any enclosed volume (there is actually a lot more one can tell without even building an actual solution, but this is one of the theorems). There are also average theorems -- the temperature inside any spherical ball is the average of the temperatures on the surface of that ball. Therefore the temperature in the center of the sun cannot be less than the average temperature of the surface, and even with the simplest imaginable model of stellar formation, there would still be leftover heat on the interior from mere gravitational collapse (see e.g. brown dwarfs) and hence even without any fusion whatsoever the solar core would be hotter than the solar surface, even if the surface was being actively heated. So your argument there is again, simply incorrect.
Third, you seem to have some sort of strange bias against mechanisms or objects that cannot be observed "on the Earth". Sadly, I would have a very hard time writing out the number of 9's in the 99.99999.....9999% of the Universe that is not "the Earth", including pretty much all of the stars and galaxies and planets and ever so much more. In fact, we don't have a star at all on the Earth, not even the relatively nearby Sun, and not even in fusion thermonuclear bombs do we build a creditable approximation of the pressures, densities, and temperatures present in the Sun's core where fusion occurs. Do the arithmetic -- every second the Sun releases the total energy content of the complete conversion of 4.26 billion kilograms of mass -- call it one cubic kilometer of mass at Earth-like densities. Electromagnetic fields are easy to measure. We measure them precisely throughout the solar system. They are openly published. They are completely, totally inadequate to serve as a free energy source for the Sun. Electromagnetic forces are, in the end, what drives ordinary chemistry, and ordinary chemistry is orders of magnitude away from being able to account for the energy output, and this direct coulomb interaction energy is many orders of magnitude again stronger than the magnetic interaction energy on a per-atom basis.
You are incorrect that it is an "assumption" that the speed of light and constants of nature have been constant throughout all of the ages of time. We can look back in time 13.73 billion years by looking outward. We can see that the spectral lines of stars are unchanged over all of this time period. Since those spectral lines are determined by (among other things) the values of Planck's constant and the speed of light, both of which contribute to the fine structure constant, one has to propose an enormously convoluted and peculiar scaling that somehow causes them to vary, but vary in precisely the right way so that the Universe precisely and consistently appears to be as large and old as it is, but really it's not. That isn't impossible, but it is absurdly far from the best possible belief given the data. By far the simplest and best explanation of the data is that yeah, the
Depends on how seriously you take information theory and the information content of the Universe. If, as seems rather reasonable, the information content of the (visible) Universe is irreducible/uncompressible, it would take at supercomputer with at least as many bits of storage as there are bits of information in the specification of the Universe's state. This requires a computer that is strictly larger than (in the sense of having at least as much "stuff" devoted to storage of all of those bits) than the Universe itself. Finally, since the supercomputer is part of the Universe (at least, if we built it), it also has to be self-referential and store its own state information. If it is to have any processing capability at all, it then is in a deadly game of catch-up, adding bits to describe every elementary particle in its processors and memory and losing the race even if it requires only one elementary particle to store the bit content of another (which will never be the case).
In the end, it is provably, mathematically impossible to build a supercomputer that stores the complete state of the Universe, where the Universe is cleanly defined to be everything with objective existence. The same proof works to prove that there can be no omniscient God, since God suffers from precisely the same issues with information content and storage. A processing system cannot even precisely specify its own encoded state unless it is a truly bizarre fully compressible self-referential system the likes of which we cannot even begin to schematize, and there are lovely theorems on the rates of production of entropy in state switching on top of any actual physical mechanism for computation, all of which make this an interesting but ultimately absurd proposition.
If you don't like information theory, then there are the limitations of physics itself, at least so far. We can only see back to (shortly after, the end of The Great Dark) the big bang, some ~14 bya. It is literally impossible for us to extract state information from outside of a sphere some 27.5 billion light years across. However, making reasonable assumptions of isotropy and continuity and the coupling of the "cosmic egg" that was the early post BB unified field state, cosmological measurements suggest that the Universe is no less than 200 times larger than this, that is, a ball some 500 billion light years across (where it is most unlikely that we are in the center of any actually compact Universe). Obviously, we cannot get any state information at all beyond indirect inference of mere existence from strictly less than 1 - (1/200)^3 of the actual Universe unless and until we have new transluminal physics. And from the first argument, even if you turned this 99.99999% of the actual Universe into a computer to fully describe only the 0.00001% visible sphere that we actually inhabit, you'd barely have enough material to create the bits needed to hold the information at current peak matter-per-bit levels (and then there is the problem of the free energy needed to drive any computation, the need for a cold reservoir into which to dump the entropy, but I digress). So it is safe to say that it is also physically impossible to build a supercomputer that can store/duplicate the information content of the entire Universe (and again, the same argument works against the existence of a God presuming only that this deity requires internal switching mechanisms on top of some sort of medium in order to store information and process it.
The only exception to both is the specific case where the Universe and/or God are one and the same entity, and its "storage" of information is the irreducible representation of the information content of mass-energy in the mass-energy itself, and the irreducible computational mechanism is the laws of physics themselves.
But of course you really do understand this, if you get outside of the willing suspension of disbelief required of science fiction (and yeah
Gold from gold chloride is truly not interesting. Gold from seawater -- that would be interesting. Gold from seawater at macroscopic rates with no external energy input in unattended apparatus, that would be very interesting. Sadly, this is not that.
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Black holes, dark matter, and dark energy has never been observed in the real world, because they are mathematical fictions that only exist in the equations and computers of theoretical astrophysicists.
Things that have "never been observed in the real world" by this sort of standard include nearly everything we know. Here's how science, more specifically physics, works. A regularity of nature is observed, for example, letting go of rocks and observing them to fall. Second, a theory is proposed to explain it, a theory that has been equations that supposedly predict the outcome from the time of Newton on. Third, computations are done that compare observations old and new to the predictions of the theory. Fourth -- and this is a key step -- the consistency of the theory, both with ongoing future observations and with all of the other theories that seem to consistently explain observational data is challenged and re-verified, ad infinitum. Steps three and four never really end, and sometimes require a revisitation of step two to either modify (small step) or throw out (big step) the theory altogether.
This process of guided, consistent inference is the basis for all human knowledge about the real world, scientific or not. When you say black holes have never been observed in the real world but plasma has, you are splitting a very subtle hair. Plasma has never been observed in the real world either -- light from plasma has, other phenomena connected to a hypothesized plasma have. On the basis of these indirect measurements of effect, we infer the existence of things we cannot directly "observe" (whatever that means, given the coarseness and finite range of our senses) as the cause, and believe in this cause to the extent that it is part of an extensive theory with substantial predictive power that consistently fits in to the overall interconnected web of such theories that constitute "physics", "chemistry", "biology", and all of the other sciences that provide well-founded knowledge about the real world.
Gravitation is precisely such a "theory", indeed, the first such theory, the theory that more or less began the Enlightenment. It is especially amusing that you recite black holes, dark matter, and dark energy as examples of "mathematical fictions" where (by assumption, since you seem to accept the existence of gravitation) gravity is real and observed; in all three cases they are either theories that result from the need to make gravitation consistent both with observation and with the equally well-accepted theory of electromagnetism, which among other things implies relativity theory and physically observed phenomena such as the bending of light by strong gravitational fields and the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, or from the need to rescue gravitation from complete oblivion as a failed theory, in the case of dark matter/dark energy. We can see -- direct observation, although sure it is with pretty extensive equipment that substantially enhances our senses -- many galaxies where the orbital velocity field of the galaxy is not consistent with the apparent mass of the galaxy. We can observe similar deviations from the expected behavior of gravitation in other cosmological measurements. A number of theories have been proposed, over many decades at this point, to account for these failures of observation to consistently agree with the existing theory of gravitation plus the other physics we strongly believe. One of many is that Newton's theory of gravitation is indeed wrong. Another is the existence of a "fifth force" that is "gravity like" in certain ways and that modifies the long range behavior of gravitation. Dark matter and dark energy are yet another, one that preserves the general theory of gravitation and accounts for the deviation via the presence of unseen mass in the case of dark matter, and what is more or less again a fifth force in the case of dark energy.
Do physicists "believe" in any