Although for the most part, sure, I agree. The Holocene could be ending as it has already been warmer, longer, than it has been in the last few interglacials. Given a record of climate extremes (most of which occurred without human-sourced CO_2) it certainly would be wise to prepare for more. And hey, it is simply a grand idea to build alternative energy sources and get off of our dependence on oil, for lots of other very good reasons, as long as we don't create anything as silly as a global market for "carbon credits".
The solar activity levels are at their highest in ten thousand years, and have only been this high a handful of times in the entire Holocene. You're trying to understand a curve by looking at noise at the very end, where it isn't even properly detrended. Oh, and you might try overlaying any temperature reconstruction of the last thousand years that you happen to be fond of onto the end of this, so you can actually see the correlation between the grand maximum we have been in for the last 150 years and the increasing temperatures over the last 150 years. If it's one that actually still shows the medieval optimum and little ice age the effect is more dramatic, of course, but suit yourself.
I'm not precisely sure by what measure the last three solar cycles represent a meaningful decrease in solar activity, given that the peaks are all very nearly the same height and are in any event so very, very high compared to the mean over the Holocene. Now this cycle -- it is going to be a low one. Very low, in fact. But don't worry. If, by any chance, the AGW hypothesis turns out to be incorrect and the warming we've seen is almost entirely due to Mr. Sun, then the fact that a Little Ice Age now would only kill what, a billion people, well, what the heck. That's why they call it "science". We'd better just hope that the completely uncontrollable sun behaves itself and doesn't regress towards the mean or anything"unlikely" like that.
Count me as a second computational physicist who feels exactly the same way, only more strongly. Add to this that what is basically being done is nonlinear multiple regression -- fitting CO_2 as a driver in competition with all of the other climate drivers, to fit a nonlinear dynamical system that is the literal poster child for chaotic (that is, more or less unpredictable) responses. Curve fitting is optimization (basically) on a complex landscape. It is entirely plausible that if you set your parameters in one way, you can get a decent fit in a model that makes CO_2 the primary driver for long term climate change. Set them differently (that is, change the model) and you may well get an even better fit where CO_2 is more or less irrelevant. The current models presume a level of understanding of the physics of many extremely important climate modulators -- such as solar state -- that we just don't have.
Excuse me, what does the UAH lower troposphere global mean have to do with continental temperatures in Antarctica, specifically?
I wasn't claiming that the Earth's temperatures were or were not warmer -- I was referring to the fact that Steig 2009 finds substantial warming in Antarctica as an artifact of poor methodology. This is, in fact, clear. It is also clear that the mean temperature in continental Antarctica dropped from 1980 to 2010, whether or not it rose elsewhere. The penguins are safe from being cooked where they stand.
There has indeed been warming of the globe since the Dalton minimum in the 1800s. It has been directly associated with an increase in solar activity across most of that time, especially in the late 19th and 20th century (which has had some of the highest solar activity in the last three solar cycles observed in the last twelve thousand years, see: http://solarphysics.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrsp-2008-3/). There is a very strong correlation between solar activity and global temperature over that entire range, one that is completely evident in the "hockey stick" increase in solar activity at the right hand end of the graph (where the blue areas following 1000 CE are the Wolf, Oort and Maunder grand minima) leading up to the peak of a grand maximum, one that looks like it could be the highest in ten thousand years (just like the alleged global temperature). What a coincidence!
Could it be, do you think, that solar forcing could be tied to some aspect of solar state, something that climatologists seem to want to vehemently deny (because if true, everything they've done and claimed for twenty years will turn out to not only be wrong, but dangerously, expensively wrong)? Bear in mind that anthropogenic CO_2 over this interval looks nothing like this and is absurdly decorrelated from global temperature across the entire range except the last 150 years, right there in that confounding pesky solar activity grand maximum.
There are two distinct problems in climate research today. One is that to even a casual observer who actually looks at the data instead of uncritically believing what is being trumpeted in the newspapers every few weeks, global warming is not necessarily "just" due to anthropogenic CO_2. It is a fact that the thermal record of the entire Holocene makes it extremely implausible that CO_2 is solely, or even primarily, responsible for the modest twentieth century temperature increases. This, however, is a point that you will never find mentioned in any of the canonical papers warning of the dire consequences of CO_2 warming egregiously forced with an assumption of extreme climate sensitivity to multiply the otherwise uninteresting temperature increase to alarming. Sensitivity that remains completely unproven, especially given that current models do not include solar state in any significant way. Indeed, the keepers of the global climate models would have you believe that solar state is irrelevant to global temperature in spite of the fact that the overall Holocene data says otherwise quite convincingly.
The second is that climatologists need to learn how to do statistics without bias! I'm not accusing Steig of "lying", but I am accusing the author(s), the journal, and the referees of not just this paper but many of the AGW papers of sloppy statistics, laziness and too-easy acceptance of flawed methodology. Egregious claims are made and backed up with methodology that, when carefully examined, often turns out to be almost painfully flawed starting with MBH. The really sad thing is that climatologists seem unwilling to police themselves and outsiders such as Steve McIntyre have to hammer through the critical examination of methodology when the published results (such as the infamous "hockey stick") are just plain unbelievable, obviously wrong from the beginning if you just
I disagree. They ignore that there is an extremely strong and longstanding correlation between the state of the sun and the earth's temperature. When the sun is magnetically active, the solar wind and solar magnetic field significantly alter the Earth's magnetosphere, modulating a number of quantities, e.g. the incident flux rate of galactic cosmic rays. The correlations here are statistically supported at an extremely high level, and of course the physical mechanism is well understood. The interesting thing is that -- if you throw out Mann, Bradley and Hughes (as nearly everybody has by now, even though the AGW folks never talk about it) it turns out that the temperature fluctuations over the last thousand years from the Medieval Warm Period through the present are very strongly correlated with solar state. Periods of high solar activity tend to be warm; periods of low solar activity tend to be cool. Periods with no solar activity, such as the stretch from roughly 1640 to 1720 (the Maunder Minimum) are cold -- this is the "little ice age" erased in the MBH hockety stick fit.
Correlation is not causality, of course, but the fact of the matter is that while CO_2 has more or less monotonically increased for as long as the Mauna Loa record exists, temperature has not, and the fluctuations in temperature nearly perfectly correspond to solar activity variations.
A recent paper by Svensmark (2007) has studied historical correlations between cloud formation and GCRs. There is apparently a strong correlation between low solar activity, high GCR levels, and higher than normal rates of low altitude, low latitude cloud formation over the last three solar cycles (for which satellites give us good measures of global cloud levels). This is further correlated with relative local cooling, as the high albedo of clouds is well known to be an important modulator of insolation. Svensmark has at least limited direct laboratory evidence that GCR cascades can create nucleation points for cloud formation, effectly "seeding" saturated air to where feedback accelerates overall cloud formation rates, although the hypothesis that this is what is happening is far from proven.
However, this all by itself is clear evidence that scientists have not been successful in ruling out solar variability as being the primary driver of climate change with CO_2 variation being a relatively unimportant secondary modulator. They absolutely haven't ruled out the causal chain -- experiments are just now underway to test the GCR-nucleation mechanism further.
It is worth noting in conclusion that we are just now coming off of a century of some of the highest levels of solar activity in the last thousand years, as either directly observed or extrapolated by means of proxies such as C14 or Be10. Those proxies, in turn, are strongly correlated with arctic sea ice levels across the entire Holocene (See Bond et. al, in Science (2001)). Again, mere correlation, but the correlation is compelling. To quote: "Our correlations are evidence, therefore, that over the last 12,000 years virtually every centennial time scale increase in drift ice documented in our North Atlantic records was tied to a distinct interval of variable and, overall, reduced solar output."
Similar correlations are clearly visible in the direct temperature records since the invention of thermometers (see e.g. Lassen and Friis-Christensen: http:www.tmgnow.com/repository/solar/lassen1.html and more recent work as well).
The current solar cycle (as some of you may know as I think it was linked here quite recently) has been delayed almost two years and the level of solar activity has been so low that current estimates for the solar peak expected this time are perhaps half of what they have been for the last three cycles, if that. The trend is worth a peek: http://s
If you have actually followed the debate that arose over the infamous "hockey stick" graph that erased the medieval warm period and little ice age (McIntyre and McKittrick) and sundry additional papers since, you know that while they may or may not have done anything to the data per se, they've abused the hell out of statistical analysis, for example experimenting with untested and unstudied methodologies until they get one that shows warming, then publishing results obtained using it without giving any hint of the fact that what they are doing is most sketchy. I've been following this with great interest for just under a decade now, and IMO there is absolutely no question that this has been repeatedly done in the past (by MBH and nearly all the papers on which any of them have collaborated) and continues to be done today. And I won't even go into the bristlecone pine problem and the general problem of using tree-ring proxies for temperature when tree ring thickness is not a monotonic function of temperature only.
For example, a recent paper was published in Science (Steig) that claimed that the Antarctic is warming at an alarming rate. I've read over the paper and the counterchallenge to the statistical methodology used (which basically coarse grained thermal sensors on the thin peninsula that sticks out into the ocean from continental Antarctica until their generally warming trend overwhelmed the generally and clearly trend of the mainland). This all involved infilling data on continental thermal sensors on the basis of temperatures basically on the other side of the continent, an effect clearly visible if one computes the (infilled) sensor-sensor correlation as a function of sensor separation. The actual real (not infilled) sensor-sensor correlation falls off with distance fairly rapidly, as one might expect (Chicago weather isn't like LA's weather). The infilled correlation function shows substantial station correlation out at two or three thousand kilometers. If one simply includes one more principle component in the PCA, this effect disappears, and so does most of the warming; cooling for the last 30 years appears instead.
Is this lying with or manipulating data or simple lack of competence with statistics? You decide.
A reliable statistical estimate of warming of the sort that somebody with no horse in the race might do (and the sort that is done in computing the actual global average temperature from satellite data) shows moderate warming from 1957 to 1980, and cooling from 1980 to 2010. The latter, of course, confounds the predictions that as CO_2 goes steadily up, everything gets warmer; the fact that the fifty year warming is completely negligible is anathema to the scientists who make a living from the AGW hysteria.
Of course, anyone in the world who wants to can go read the climategate emails (or the comments in the actual hockey stick code), where it is made perfectly clear that the "hockey team" set out to erase the MWP and LIA and does anything and anything necessary to defend the AGW conclusion, right up to having journal editors fired if they dare to print a paper that concludes otherwise. Perhaps science is broad enough that they did all of this in good faith, although if they pulled these sorts of shenanigans in medical research e.g. verifying drug safety there would be immediate, permanent, negative sequellae. But it doesn't make it good science.
Anybody who actually understands statistics and things like R^2 and principle component analysis can read over things and judge for themselves, of course. If I point out that R^2 for the infamous hockey stick graph in the extrapolated region was basically 0, you will understand exactly what that means...
AGW may or may not be true, but so far it has been a poster child for confirmation bias, incredibly poor statistical analysis, cherrypicking of data (of course it has happened and continues
Only a few tiny modifications to this otherwise dead on observation.
* Nodes don't need video, and nearly any server/cluster motherboard will have onboard cheap video anyway, so save the video cards.
* "Rack them" is a bit more than Infiniband and parts off of NewEgg. Right idea, but there is a bit of work involved in selecting racks, rackmountable chassis that will fit your motherboard and provide adequate power and cooling, mounting your motherboards by hand in the chassis, and racking them up. Not difficult but not for idiots either, and it is usually a lot easier to buy ready-to-plug-in chassis mounted nodes from the many companies that sell them (with service contracts).
* There are some subtleties in the "Install Linux" part as well. There are "cluster specific" distros that support certain kinds of supercomputing, and more general off-the-cuff Fedora or whatever. Either will work, but if you want to run a centrally managed supercomputer with the ability to do reasonably fine grained computation, there is a bit of work involved in matching up your hardware, network, operating system, cluster environment. Again, not difficult but shall we say "Expert Friendly" -- at the very least you have to be a solidly competent Linux/Unix/Network admin and sytems geek to assemble, install, and manage everything.
So there are a few hard parts even before writing the software. How hard it is to parallelize your software depends on what it is and what you want to do with it. If all you want to do is run a bunch of Monte Carlo simulations in parallel to get good cumulative statistics, it's bone simple and you don't need any fancy version of Linux, OTC Debian or Fedora or whatever will work fine. If you want to solve tightly coupled astrophysics problems involving massively distributed solutions to sets of coupled ODEs, well, that's a real chore and you have to think about it BEFORE you go buy all that hardware at NewEgg.
Then there is the infrastructure -- power and AC -- which might well be a problem in Iraq. It won't do to have the power go down just before your three week long computation finishes, and AC failures can destroy your entire cluster overnight.
The point is that building your own beowulf, while easy enough for geeks, is still a bit of an engineering chore and works better if you have experience and/or expert help. The cluster in the picture looks like it is the size of a midrange University cluster in the US, hardly even worth submitting to the Top500 list.
I'm suspicious even before RTFA (and remain so afterwards) for two very simple reasons.
* Correlation is not causation; to demonstrate causation it really helps to have a physically plausible mechanism.
* There is no physically plausible mechanism. The total power radiated from a cell phone is between 1 and 4 watts. No more than a third of this (more likely a quarter) goes in the direction of "the head", so call it a watt. The skin depth is little more than the depth of the human skin, meaning that one has exponential attenuation going into the tissue. The Wikipedia page that examines this question suggests that the total power per kilogram that actually makes it through the human skull is maybe a microwatt per kilogram, and that only at the very surface of the brain on that side because it isn't like the attenuation stops or anything.
To put this in perspective, a flashlight emits a total power in watts that is comparable to that of a cell phone. The energy comes out in a roughly blackbody curve (for an incandescent bulb) and is directionally focussed by a mirror. The skin depth for its radiation is also very short (although one can certainly see some radiation through human skin, as in the thickness of the eyelid). You are at exactly the same risk holding a flashlight up to your head as you are using a cellphone. Oh, wait, you are at greater risk -- directional power vs dipolar, as much or more power to begin with, and it still isn't enough to measurably warm even the surface of the skin at point-blank range.
If you want something risky, try sunlight. Approximately a KW per square meter, it dwarfs the output of both cell phone and flashlight (you can't even see the beam of a flashlight directed as an object at ten or twenty centimeters in direct sunlight). It has lots of nice high frequency ionizing radiation (UV) that can actually cause cellular damage on a quantum scale, where cell phone radiation at most causes water molecules to wiggle a bit. It clearly goes right through eyelid-thickness skin; it is painful to lift one's head to the sun so that sunlight falls directly on the closed eyelids because so much leaks through. It is known to actually increase cancer rates, something repeated studies have been unable to demonstrate for cell phones. I'll believe that cell phones can actually cause meaningful changes in brain activity/temperature only when I get to design the study that does it and when the physics of the effect is at the very least plausibly hypothesized.
We can do an instant poll of/. readers right here inline! Then it wouldn't be anecdotal. Errrr, well, maybe it would but it would be less anecdotal. Except for the self-selection and lack of double blind and randomly selected poll targets and...
Personally, I'm typing this on a linux system and have been using linux desktops more or less exclusively for oh, fifteen years, sixteen years, who can remember. Since the days that Slowaris replaced SunOS. I do run XP Pro safely in a nice little VM on the rare occasions I need a specific piece of Win-only software, where it can do no harm. Obviously Linux cannot possibly provide a functional desktop, and the fact that my Luddite wife is typing away on the other side of the room is some sort of atavistic exception or the result of spacetime distortion from another dimension.
One does wonder just what the German Foreign Office was doing that required them to "write printer and scanner drivers" or train people. I envision a training session just like this:
Hello, today I'll be your personal trainer, and we'll see if we can wean you away from Windows. Let's see -- login, check. Type your userid into this itty bitty box, then your password. That's p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d. Now, to write a word-processed document you have to click this icon and select this second icon. No, I know, there's no fourcolor box at the lower left. Yes, I mean the foot. I know, a foot isn't as pretty as the fourcolor square thingie, but click it anyway, there. Now that one, yes. Good job!
What? You don't know what to do? Look, see the funny little blinky thing? That's called a cursor. Now, press a key. Look! A letter appears on the screen! It is the same letter. If you want to write a document, say a strongly worded note urging Mubarak to step down, you press these keys in sequence to type a letter. I know, I know, you miss your Microsoft Word (tm). It came with Strongly Worded Letter templates and Open Office doesn't, but try to bear with me. Now, let's see if you can s-a-v-e and p-r-i-n-t. Yes, yes, yes, no, not that one, down one, oh, sorry did we forget to change the character set and language settings to German well here, oh look now you can read all of the commands except of course all of the icons are little pictures and you don't really need to. Goodness, it isn't printing!
Hans? Hans! Could you write a print driver for this printer? She wants to print. What's that? Did we actually plug the printer in to the system and select it from a menu? No, we tried inserting this CD that came with the printer and it wouldn't run, said something about needing Windows. Cups? No thank you, it is too early for a cups of beer, but cups of coffee would be nice. Systems administrators? Why certainly. All of our systems were set up by MCSEs, who (as everybody knows) have the best possible education in systems management and training that money can buy and earn fabulous salaries as a consequence. Hans? Well, he's our only linux trained admin -- we didn't want to have to fire all of our former staff -- and because none of these CDs work, he has to spend all of his time writing drivers for these cheap-ass Taiwanese printers we bought.
Now let's work on the Internet. We are going to s-u-r-f the w-e-b using a b-r-o-w-s-e-r. I know, I know, there is no little "e" on the menu bar, click on that reddish orange thing. It's supposed to be a "firefox". What? Yes, I know there is no such thing as a firefox. Y'know, it does look a bit more like a pearl dripping orange sherbet or a plucked out eyeball, now that you mention it. Look, try squinting a bit. See it? A firefox. Anyway, try clicking it. I know, you're used to clicking the "e" for "explorer" and this is quite different, but go ahead, give it a shot. There! See? Where are all of the ads? What happened to the viruses you used to get that would send Mubarak offers to
Sorry, but the Old Testament was probably written in the interval between 500 BCE and 800 BCE, solidly in the iron age. In fact, Tubal Cain in Genesis was reported as an "Artificer in iron", an anachronism as wide and glaring as steel swords and Middle Eastern plants and animals in the New World in TBOM, but anybody who thinks that it rained at a rate of six inches per minute on every square foot of the planet for 40 days straight isn't going to be put off by a little thing like consistency. You're confusing it with the time being written about -- Moses (if he lived at all and wasn't just a myth or legend being recalled by means of an oral tradition some 500-800 years after the fact) would have been dated at the very end of the Bronze Age in the Middle East (the Iron Age is usually dated at around 1200 BCE) , but the tribe that would one day become the Israelites didn't have writing (as far as archeology can tell) until 1000 BCE and didn't write the very first books of the Torah until much later (and then rewrote them after the Babylonian captivity, as it isn't clear that any of the original manuscripts survived).
However, I agree, that even at the Iron Age time of writing the moronic morality was so yesterday, just so Bronze Age...(sniff)
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8) Real geeks can't do any useful work from a smartphone
9) If real geeks were to do any useful work with a smartphone, it would involve gigabytes of data and enormous charges (and a keyboard).
10) Real old geeks can't work on 3" screens without reading glasses a centimeter thick, which makes them look even geekier than normal, outside of the bounds of acceptable nerdosity.
11) Real geeks already own notepad, laptops, 3g/4g access points, and data plans that let them work WITH a keyboard and screen, and all bundled together they are still cheaper than a smartphone.
And I'm sure there are still more. If they actually gave you unlimited data and let you replace your 3g/4g wireless access point AND still work for a long time, maybe, but last time I checked (within the last six months) Verizon laughed at this...
Or he'd realize that the instant he puts his tech people in positions of corporate power, they will grow pointy hair.
Actually, Microsoft-and-squishy is so bloated that at this point, the only thing that can rescue them from themselves is being broken up into lots of little Microsofties. Or is that Microsoftettes? How long has it been, after all, since MS last had an actual Idea, all by themselves, that they didn't just steal and then use their usual moves of creating FUD, yanking the OS-level code base around to give the FUD some basis as they break competitors' code, and finally leveraging it into their contracted market on a preferential basis until they dominate the market and people gradually forget that it wasn't MS's idea in the first place. Word processors? Spreadsheets? Integrated development environments? Web browsers? Mail clients? Windowing interfaces? Java? Windowing interfaces with multiple desktops (ooo, forgot, they still haven't figured that one out, have they)? All NIH.
Unless the other species had skin that was just perfect for sewing into oblong shaped bladders and whose loin meat, finely chopped and robustly seasoned, made a damned fine chili for game day...
It's not as simple as that. I've taught two classes in physics with a serious remote component so far -- one with a single remote student, one with twelve. The single was pretty happy -- she could control the view/zoom of the local camera and focus her "attention" in a fairly natural way. The camera in the other was viewpoint-controlled by a "trained orderly" (my TA at the other end) who tried to track the algebra at the board and demos as I did them. The students were much less happy -- cameras lack peripheral vision and have to zoom in on the board to make it possible to see what I'm writing or drawing, and student can't multitask on note-taking, watching, and listening anywhere nearly as conveniently.
To really make this work as an actual moderately interactive classroom experience (and not just be "teaching movies") would probably require at least two, maybe three screens -- a wide-angle view, a mid-range view, and a zoom -- some means of managing "note lag" on the zoom, where different students are at different points in taking down what is in camera focus, two trained camera operators -- or a remote controlled camera per remove student. Or something else -- I'm still thinking about how to make it work better, as I'll probably be doing this next fall again and last semester wasn't as satisfactory as I'd like.
Personally I think that the robot solution here is pretty cool. With a single student/viewpoint, controlled by the remote student, attention can be focussed appropriately, although I still think having a widescreen view separate from the zoom isn't crazy (and may be what I try to set up this fall). It's lovely technology that isn't quite worked out yet, but all the tools are there to make it work.
That observation never quite sat with me though. It works for an ant - incapable of reason, but swap out the situation for a PERSON sitting on another circular surface (like, say, a planet), and we have figured out quite readily that our surface is unending but finite - it's obvious - go in another direction and you end up circling back.
Obvious how? The ant lives on a manifold (a locally Euclidean space). If the ant is very, very, clever, perhaps it measures some local derivatives or comes up with an exotic theory that suggests that the locally flat space it lives on has some global curvature that stretches as far as it can see.
Which, alas, isn't very far! Especially in any scale invariant way. Sure, it can infer that the local curvature it has measured continues without limit, so that the space curves back on itself, but just over its (event or other) visible horizon the curvature could invert and space could be anything from endlessly flat to covered with fractal dimples that never, ever close. Since the ant has at most measurements (based on a small mountain of assumptions it cannot really prove) of some local curvature, the hyper-"spherical" curvature it imagines could even be a hyper-paraboloid or hyperboloid of revolution, endlessly curved but never closed. How could it tell?
The rest of this I agree with, sort of, recognizing that I'm just an ant and making any actual inferences that extend beyond my range of local vision is deeply contingent on assumptions I cannot prove and really, I cannot even argue are better than any of the alternatives. In other words, as soon as you start speculating on the other side of the event horizon of the visible universe, you are inventing a religious mythology. I'm deeply suspicious of the "Bayesian argument" used in the original article, for example. What are their priors? What is the evidence from which they infer that their priors are true? If I were the ant, I'd assume something like "The curvature I measure is (hyper)-circular curvature, therefore the universe must be closed", begging the hell out of the question (what if it were ellipsoidal? parabolic? hyperbolic? or worse -- once we get to speculative geometries there are much worse, because the ant's balloon could itself live on an ant's hyperballoon that is on another ant's hyper-hyperballoon (iterate ad infinitum) and the whole infinite series could itself still be embedded in a completely flat Euclidean space within which there are an infinite number of these infinite hyperballoonic nested manifolds. How's the ant going to figure that out? He's living in locally flatland, and until Edwin Abbot's finger penetrates the page and violates various pieces of flatland physics in ways that permit the conditional inference of a higher-dimensional space (as at least one consistent explanation of the violation) he has no possible evidence that any of his imaginings, however lovely and entertaining, are true!
Oh? That would be a neat trick -- from inside the circle. Can you show me an infinite number of points outside of space-time?
Of course we can easily imagine an infinite number of points lying outside any given manifold we imagine by imaginarily embedding the manifold in an imagined space of higher dimension, and if we imagine that the higher dimensional space is unbounded and/or a continuum and/or tangent to the underlying (infinite) manifold, well, maybe, sure, if you want to call this "showing" something contingent upon a host of imagined propositions. Alternatively, we could imagine that inside the circle there is just one point, outside the circle there is just one point, and if we try very hard, we can imagine that they are the same point.
The universe is (by definition) everything that exists. Once upon a time, one might have said that a vacuum doesn't exist, but in quantum theory (at least) it does. The visible universe is also homogeneous on a suitable coarse-grained scale. There is thus no particular reason to think that if the universe is 250 times larger than the visible universe that there is any point where this changes and the vacuum is empty.
Of course the universe could be sharply bounded by a thin wall of glass out there at 13.8 billion light years. If it were, we couldn't measure it, and the only way we can pretend to infer it without any real evidence would be to make a non-verifiable or falsifiable assumption such as "the universe doesn't suddenly change structure so that it is surrounded by a thin glass wall after which there is nothing". At least until you get to the other marbles in the bag...
Yeah, like this. Sorry I didn't see your post. My Ph.D. advisor, Larry Biedenharn, was heavily involved in this for four or five years, but as I said, it didn't quite pan out partly because of the sticking problem, partly because one can only make muons at something like 10% energy efficiency (remembering from the many seminars we had on this back in those days, not looking up the exact numbers). Larry always thought they'd do it with a special "breeder" fission reactor to get the muons for free as a side-effect of making energy the other way to boost fission returns by a factor of 50% or so, but this never happened AFAIK.
It is still an open problem -- the question is really is there an environment where the He sticking problem is suppressed (they didn't find one, but I doubt the search was exhaustive) and is there any way to produce muons at higher efficiencies -- say some sort of resonant conversion of electrons into muons that beats 5-10%. My recollection is that they were within a factor of ten, maybe even within a factor of 2-3 of break even but couldn't quite find a way over the hump. They know way more about neutrinos now than they did back then -- one wonders if anybody is even thinking about it any more.
The interesting possibility is and remains muon-catalyzed fusion. The stoichiometry is within roughly one order of magnitude of breaking even -- it costs too much to make a muon, a muon can catalyze too few fusion reactions to pay for itself in its lifetime, but it is close. Of course if you have a source of "free" muons, e.g. a nuclear reactor, one can basically use them to augment the energy production of the fission processes.
I thought that the auger replacement of electrons in diatomic hydrogen (and resulting collapse of the molecule to where fusion via tunnelling is likely) was already a pretty good test of mass effects in quantum theory twenty plus years ago, but this is still pretty science.
This whole article is a crock. First of all, no genes for "religiousosity" have been identified, so no one has any idea where or how such genes are "hitchhiking" on the human genome. Second, if there is any such thing as an inhomogeneously distributed predisposition towards religion based on genetic factors, that predisposition is almost certainly extraordinarily multifactorial, not just a gene, but dozens, hundreds of genes, spread out over many chromosomes. The population genetics of transmission in this case are vastly more complicated than any simplistic model could reveal.
To be more explicit, the study is arguing that:
* There are two distinct strains of humanity, one that is genetically religious, one that is not.
* Certain religions promote larger families (not all religions do, note well).
* People that are genetically religious are statistically more likely to belong to the religions that promote larger families.
* Larger families guarantee a higher survival to reproduction rate (note well that this assumption is not generally true in nature, where survival rates for smaller families and less populous cultures are generally higher than those for larger ones with dilution of resources and more competition).
* No mechanism exists where non-religious people secularists can compete in reproduction rate, say by having multiple partners, engaging in infidelity and adultery, and so on (most of which are frowned on by the very religions that encourage high reproduction rates).
* Reproduction rate is ultimately the only thing that matters in population genetics. (So much for the long term survival of the homosexuality genes, eh?)
* Religiousosity genes in religions that encourage high reproduction rates will therefore always have a positive derivative in the enormously complex set of coupled differential equations that describe the gene distribution of the population, and must therefore eventually take over the population and become universal.
This is complete, utter, bullshit. It is bad science. It is terrible mathematics. Have these bozos never heard of complex systems and chaotic differential systems? Even if all of the assumptions above were true -- where clearly, most of them are pretty dubious -- the argument is naive in the extreme in a system so complex that there are doubtless many strange attractors on a constantly shifting landscape. Things it ignores:
* Memetics. Oh, wait, religions are memetic constructs, they are social superorganisms, not genetically encoded theistic beliefs. The key step in preparing a new generation of theists is the brainwashing of the children by bringing them up in the delusion. Perhaps there are genes that predispose one to being brainwashed, perhaps not, but as secular society continues to control information transmission to the very young there is a much, much faster mechansim than genetics acting to actively reduce the relative numbers of theists worldwide by simply educating young people so that they can see that the base doctrines and myths underlying the primary theisms are false.
* Non-religious, non-genetic factors that suppress or enhance survival rates. The Amish are a perfect example. They live within and are protected by a secular society. Plop them down in the Middle East and suddenly they would be a heavily persecuted minority. Plop them down in billion-person strong mostly-secular China and they'd have no capability of isolating their children for the key brainwashing step; the children would be taught from the earliest of ages that their parents religious beliefs were stupid myths. Alter American culture so that religions such as this no longer had tax advantages and insist that Amish children learn about astronomy and evolution and the fact that Amish mythology is mythology and you'd increase the defection rate to secular society.
* The fact that the number of secular non-religious people worldwide appears to be growing at
Ultimately, you cannot be sure you won't get screwed, ever. Not even by hackers outside of your organization, let alone ones inside. It is possible to -- reasonably -- secure a system using methods described above (offsite backups managed by a third party commercial affair, onsite backups under lock and key, careful logging and so on). However, in nearly any network there is one toplevel admin that doles out the privileges and so on, that set the system up, that works on the system many times more often and at a much higher level than the people that typically have permission to do a few things enabled by sudo. There, no matter what, you will be vulnerable.
This is a classic problem: Quid custodes custode (who will guard the guardians)?
Paradoxically, you are probably slightly safer if your admins are not uberkinder supergeeks. If I, or any of a dozen people I know, were your toplevel sysadmin and was not the completely honest and trustworthy person that I am, there is no measure you could take for protection that I could not suborn in such a way as to cause you great pain and loss. After all, who would be implementing the measures? Log files are pointless ways to reveal the activities of the person who set up the logging system. Subtly corrupting the backups for long enough to roll over the offsite images (which could be as simple a measure as installing an encrypted filesystem "for security reasons" and making sure that I'm the only person that has the real key). An amateur (or less skilled professional) is less likely to know enough to do dirt and hide their tracks.
There is no real protection against hiring people to do mission critical work of any sort who have a serious personality disorder. So your best protection of all is to hire toplevel systems staff who are, as far as you can tell looking hard, completely ethical and personality disorder free, and then treating them with respect.
Good advice for keeping ordinary employees from going postal, good advice for any organization or task, actually.
There is one more solution -- the NSA sort. Throw an enormous amount of money at it, and hope that the people you hire aren't smarter than the (unknown) one you are defending against and that they leave no holes in what they set up. Hiring ten top sysadmins all tasked with watching each other is good. Having commercial consultants who know what they are doing help you set up a system is good (in other words, if you have to ask the question you need to get an answer somewhere other than/. and it is going to cost you money). Basically, the more you try to secure things on the cheap, the more likely it will be that you have a setup with holes you can drive a truck through given the root password and access.
Gigs? 25000 x 1000 = 25 MEGAbytes, and that's probably an overestimate. All in a handful of mail spools files. State officials (assuming Alaska sysadmins aren't totally incompetent, which of course is probably not a good assumption) should have informed the governor and her cronies that all mail sent or received on official servers was a matter of public record and instructed her not to use it for personal purposes. Even if they were poorly spooled with no sender cc (so they are mixed into other people's spool files) a single day armed with procmail and a few regular expressions would sort the whole thing out. As a matter of public record, they could just slap it up on a website and let anybody download it at will. It would take me some thirty seconds to get the whole ball of wax sitting where I am right now if they did this -- why should msnbc.com have access where "the people" do not?
The interesting thing to me is the 25,000 number in the first place. That's an average of 17 emails a day over a four year term. In an eight hour day, that is two an hour. Take weekends etc into account, more like 3 an hour, or one every twenty minutes. That's actually remarkably dense email utilization -- I doubt most/. geeks manage half of that (although I receive hundreds a day, most of them are spam or systems messages or user problem messages; the number I actually write is probably only rarely as many as ten). If the messages have any real content and aren't just "Do you want to go shoot a moose after work today?" (reducing the size of the spool way down even from 25 MB) Palin didn't have time to do any actual work!
The second most interesting thing, no matter what they release, will be her literacy on display. It's one thing to give folksy speeches and use big words your scriptwriters have put into them. It's another to use big words yourself (and actually spell them and use them correctly).
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You do know that 90,000 of the last 100,000 years was an ice age, right?
You might actually look a bit further: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/last_400k_yrs.html
Although for the most part, sure, I agree. The Holocene could be ending as it has already been warmer, longer, than it has been in the last few interglacials. Given a record of climate extremes (most of which occurred without human-sourced CO_2) it certainly would be wise to prepare for more. And hey, it is simply a grand idea to build alternative energy sources and get off of our dependence on oil, for lots of other very good reasons, as long as we don't create anything as silly as a global market for "carbon credits".
rgb
You mean like Svensmark's paper, and the twelve thousand year record of correlation between solar activity and temperature?
Naaaaa.
rgb
Seriously, just look at this:
http://solarphysics.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrsp-2008-3
The solar activity levels are at their highest in ten thousand years, and have only been this high a handful of times in the entire Holocene. You're trying to understand a curve by looking at noise at the very end, where it isn't even properly detrended. Oh, and you might try overlaying any temperature reconstruction of the last thousand years that you happen to be fond of onto the end of this, so you can actually see the correlation between the grand maximum we have been in for the last 150 years and the increasing temperatures over the last 150 years. If it's one that actually still shows the medieval optimum and little ice age the effect is more dramatic, of course, but suit yourself.
I'm not precisely sure by what measure the last three solar cycles represent a meaningful decrease in solar activity, given that the peaks are all very nearly the same height and are in any event so very, very high compared to the mean over the Holocene. Now this cycle -- it is going to be a low one. Very low, in fact. But don't worry. If, by any chance, the AGW hypothesis turns out to be incorrect and the warming we've seen is almost entirely due to Mr. Sun, then the fact that a Little Ice Age now would only kill what, a billion people, well, what the heck. That's why they call it "science". We'd better just hope that the completely uncontrollable sun behaves itself and doesn't regress towards the mean or anything"unlikely" like that.
rgb
Count me as a second computational physicist who feels exactly the same way, only more strongly. Add to this that what is basically being done is nonlinear multiple regression -- fitting CO_2 as a driver in competition with all of the other climate drivers, to fit a nonlinear dynamical system that is the literal poster child for chaotic (that is, more or less unpredictable) responses. Curve fitting is optimization (basically) on a complex landscape. It is entirely plausible that if you set your parameters in one way, you can get a decent fit in a model that makes CO_2 the primary driver for long term climate change. Set them differently (that is, change the model) and you may well get an even better fit where CO_2 is more or less irrelevant. The current models presume a level of understanding of the physics of many extremely important climate modulators -- such as solar state -- that we just don't have.
rgb
Excuse me, what does the UAH lower troposphere global mean have to do with continental temperatures in Antarctica, specifically?
I wasn't claiming that the Earth's temperatures were or were not warmer -- I was referring to the fact that Steig 2009 finds substantial warming in Antarctica as an artifact of poor methodology. This is, in fact, clear. It is also clear that the mean temperature in continental Antarctica dropped from 1980 to 2010, whether or not it rose elsewhere. The penguins are safe from being cooked where they stand.
There has indeed been warming of the globe since the Dalton minimum in the 1800s. It has been directly associated with an increase in solar activity across most of that time, especially in the late 19th and 20th century (which has had some of the highest solar activity in the last three solar cycles observed in the last twelve thousand years, see: http://solarphysics.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrsp-2008-3/). There is a very strong correlation between solar activity and global temperature over that entire range, one that is completely evident in the "hockey stick" increase in solar activity at the right hand end of the graph (where the blue areas following 1000 CE are the Wolf, Oort and Maunder grand minima) leading up to the peak of a grand maximum, one that looks like it could be the highest in ten thousand years (just like the alleged global temperature). What a coincidence!
Could it be, do you think, that solar forcing could be tied to some aspect of solar state, something that climatologists seem to want to vehemently deny (because if true, everything they've done and claimed for twenty years will turn out to not only be wrong, but dangerously, expensively wrong)? Bear in mind that anthropogenic CO_2 over this interval looks nothing like this and is absurdly decorrelated from global temperature across the entire range except the last 150 years, right there in that confounding pesky solar activity grand maximum.
There are two distinct problems in climate research today. One is that to even a casual observer who actually looks at the data instead of uncritically believing what is being trumpeted in the newspapers every few weeks, global warming is not necessarily "just" due to anthropogenic CO_2. It is a fact that the thermal record of the entire Holocene makes it extremely implausible that CO_2 is solely, or even primarily, responsible for the modest twentieth century temperature increases. This, however, is a point that you will never find mentioned in any of the canonical papers warning of the dire consequences of CO_2 warming egregiously forced with an assumption of extreme climate sensitivity to multiply the otherwise uninteresting temperature increase to alarming. Sensitivity that remains completely unproven, especially given that current models do not include solar state in any significant way. Indeed, the keepers of the global climate models would have you believe that solar state is irrelevant to global temperature in spite of the fact that the overall Holocene data says otherwise quite convincingly.
The second is that climatologists need to learn how to do statistics without bias! I'm not accusing Steig of "lying", but I am accusing the author(s), the journal, and the referees of not just this paper but many of the AGW papers of sloppy statistics, laziness and too-easy acceptance of flawed methodology. Egregious claims are made and backed up with methodology that, when carefully examined, often turns out to be almost painfully flawed starting with MBH. The really sad thing is that climatologists seem unwilling to police themselves and outsiders such as Steve McIntyre have to hammer through the critical examination of methodology when the published results (such as the infamous "hockey stick") are just plain unbelievable, obviously wrong from the beginning if you just
I disagree. They ignore that there is an extremely strong and longstanding correlation between the state of the sun and the earth's temperature. When the sun is magnetically active, the solar wind and solar magnetic field significantly alter the Earth's magnetosphere, modulating a number of quantities, e.g. the incident flux rate of galactic cosmic rays. The correlations here are statistically supported at an extremely high level, and of course the physical mechanism is well understood. The interesting thing is that -- if you throw out Mann, Bradley and Hughes (as nearly everybody has by now, even though the AGW folks never talk about it) it turns out that the temperature fluctuations over the last thousand years from the Medieval Warm Period through the present are very strongly correlated with solar state. Periods of high solar activity tend to be warm; periods of low solar activity tend to be cool. Periods with no solar activity, such as the stretch from roughly 1640 to 1720 (the Maunder Minimum) are cold -- this is the "little ice age" erased in the MBH hockety stick fit.
Correlation is not causality, of course, but the fact of the matter is that while CO_2 has more or less monotonically increased for as long as the Mauna Loa record exists, temperature has not, and the fluctuations in temperature nearly perfectly correspond to solar activity variations.
A recent paper by Svensmark (2007) has studied historical correlations between cloud formation and GCRs. There is apparently a strong correlation between low solar activity, high GCR levels, and higher than normal rates of low altitude, low latitude cloud formation over the last three solar cycles (for which satellites give us good measures of global cloud levels). This is further correlated with relative local cooling, as the high albedo of clouds is well known to be an important modulator of insolation. Svensmark has at least limited direct laboratory evidence that GCR cascades can create nucleation points for cloud formation, effectly "seeding" saturated air to where feedback accelerates overall cloud formation rates, although the hypothesis that this is what is happening is far from proven.
However, this all by itself is clear evidence that scientists have not been successful in ruling out solar variability as being the primary driver of climate change with CO_2 variation being a relatively unimportant secondary modulator. They absolutely haven't ruled out the causal chain -- experiments are just now underway to test the GCR-nucleation mechanism further.
It is worth noting in conclusion that we are just now coming off of a century of some of the highest levels of solar activity in the last thousand years, as either directly observed or extrapolated by means of proxies such as C14 or Be10. Those proxies, in turn, are strongly correlated with arctic sea ice levels across the entire Holocene (See Bond et. al, in Science (2001)). Again, mere correlation, but the correlation is compelling. To quote: "Our correlations are evidence, therefore, that over the last 12,000 years virtually every centennial time scale increase in drift ice documented in our North Atlantic records was tied to a distinct interval of variable and, overall, reduced solar output."
Similar correlations are clearly visible in the direct temperature records since the invention of thermometers (see e.g. Lassen and Friis-Christensen: http:www.tmgnow.com/repository/solar/lassen1.html and more recent work as well).
The current solar cycle (as some of you may know as I think it was linked here quite recently) has been delayed almost two years and the level of solar activity has been so low that current estimates for the solar peak expected this time are perhaps half of what they have been for the last three cycles, if that. The trend is worth a peek: http://s
If you have actually followed the debate that arose over the infamous "hockey stick" graph that erased the medieval warm period and little ice age (McIntyre and McKittrick) and sundry additional papers since, you know that while they may or may not have done anything to the data per se, they've abused the hell out of statistical analysis, for example experimenting with untested and unstudied methodologies until they get one that shows warming, then publishing results obtained using it without giving any hint of the fact that what they are doing is most sketchy. I've been following this with great interest for just under a decade now, and IMO there is absolutely no question that this has been repeatedly done in the past (by MBH and nearly all the papers on which any of them have collaborated) and continues to be done today. And I won't even go into the bristlecone pine problem and the general problem of using tree-ring proxies for temperature when tree ring thickness is not a monotonic function of temperature only.
For example, a recent paper was published in Science (Steig) that claimed that the Antarctic is warming at an alarming rate. I've read over the paper and the counterchallenge to the statistical methodology used (which basically coarse grained thermal sensors on the thin peninsula that sticks out into the ocean from continental Antarctica until their generally warming trend overwhelmed the generally and clearly trend of the mainland). This all involved infilling data on continental thermal sensors on the basis of temperatures basically on the other side of the continent, an effect clearly visible if one computes the (infilled) sensor-sensor correlation as a function of sensor separation. The actual real (not infilled) sensor-sensor correlation falls off with distance fairly rapidly, as one might expect (Chicago weather isn't like LA's weather). The infilled correlation function shows substantial station correlation out at two or three thousand kilometers. If one simply includes one more principle component in the PCA, this effect disappears, and so does most of the warming; cooling for the last 30 years appears instead.
Is this lying with or manipulating data or simple lack of competence with statistics? You decide.
A reliable statistical estimate of warming of the sort that somebody with no horse in the race might do (and the sort that is done in computing the actual global average temperature from satellite data) shows moderate warming from 1957 to 1980, and cooling from 1980 to 2010. The latter, of course, confounds the predictions that as CO_2 goes steadily up, everything gets warmer; the fact that the fifty year warming is completely negligible is anathema to the scientists who make a living from the AGW hysteria.
Of course, anyone in the world who wants to can go read the climategate emails (or the comments in the actual hockey stick code), where it is made perfectly clear that the "hockey team" set out to erase the MWP and LIA and does anything and anything necessary to defend the AGW conclusion, right up to having journal editors fired if they dare to print a paper that concludes otherwise. Perhaps science is broad enough that they did all of this in good faith, although if they pulled these sorts of shenanigans in medical research e.g. verifying drug safety there would be immediate, permanent, negative sequellae. But it doesn't make it good science.
Anybody who actually understands statistics and things like R^2 and principle component analysis can read over things and judge for themselves, of course. If I point out that R^2 for the infamous hockey stick graph in the extrapolated region was basically 0, you will understand exactly what that means...
AGW may or may not be true, but so far it has been a poster child for confirmation bias, incredibly poor statistical analysis, cherrypicking of data (of course it has happened and continues
Only a few tiny modifications to this otherwise dead on observation.
* Nodes don't need video, and nearly any server/cluster motherboard will have onboard cheap video anyway, so save the video cards.
* "Rack them" is a bit more than Infiniband and parts off of NewEgg. Right idea, but there is a bit of work involved in selecting racks, rackmountable chassis that will fit your motherboard and provide adequate power and cooling, mounting your motherboards by hand in the chassis, and racking them up. Not difficult but not for idiots either, and it is usually a lot easier to buy ready-to-plug-in chassis mounted nodes from the many companies that sell them (with service contracts).
* There are some subtleties in the "Install Linux" part as well. There are "cluster specific" distros that support certain kinds of supercomputing, and more general off-the-cuff Fedora or whatever. Either will work, but if you want to run a centrally managed supercomputer with the ability to do reasonably fine grained computation, there is a bit of work involved in matching up your hardware, network, operating system, cluster environment. Again, not difficult but shall we say "Expert Friendly" -- at the very least you have to be a solidly competent Linux/Unix/Network admin and sytems geek to assemble, install, and manage everything.
So there are a few hard parts even before writing the software. How hard it is to parallelize your software depends on what it is and what you want to do with it. If all you want to do is run a bunch of Monte Carlo simulations in parallel to get good cumulative statistics, it's bone simple and you don't need any fancy version of Linux, OTC Debian or Fedora or whatever will work fine. If you want to solve tightly coupled astrophysics problems involving massively distributed solutions to sets of coupled ODEs, well, that's a real chore and you have to think about it BEFORE you go buy all that hardware at NewEgg.
Then there is the infrastructure -- power and AC -- which might well be a problem in Iraq. It won't do to have the power go down just before your three week long computation finishes, and AC failures can destroy your entire cluster overnight.
The point is that building your own beowulf, while easy enough for geeks, is still a bit of an engineering chore and works better if you have experience and/or expert help. The cluster in the picture looks like it is the size of a midrange University cluster in the US, hardly even worth submitting to the Top500 list.
rgb
I'm suspicious even before RTFA (and remain so afterwards) for two very simple reasons.
* Correlation is not causation; to demonstrate causation it really helps to have a physically plausible mechanism.
* There is no physically plausible mechanism. The total power radiated from a cell phone is between 1 and 4 watts. No more than a third of this (more likely a quarter) goes in the direction of "the head", so call it a watt. The skin depth is little more than the depth of the human skin, meaning that one has exponential attenuation going into the tissue. The Wikipedia page that examines this question suggests that the total power per kilogram that actually makes it through the human skull is maybe a microwatt per kilogram, and that only at the very surface of the brain on that side because it isn't like the attenuation stops or anything.
To put this in perspective, a flashlight emits a total power in watts that is comparable to that of a cell phone. The energy comes out in a roughly blackbody curve (for an incandescent bulb) and is directionally focussed by a mirror. The skin depth for its radiation is also very short (although one can certainly see some radiation through human skin, as in the thickness of the eyelid). You are at exactly the same risk holding a flashlight up to your head as you are using a cellphone. Oh, wait, you are at greater risk -- directional power vs dipolar, as much or more power to begin with, and it still isn't enough to measurably warm even the surface of the skin at point-blank range.
If you want something risky, try sunlight. Approximately a KW per square meter, it dwarfs the output of both cell phone and flashlight (you can't even see the beam of a flashlight directed as an object at ten or twenty centimeters in direct sunlight). It has lots of nice high frequency ionizing radiation (UV) that can actually cause cellular damage on a quantum scale, where cell phone radiation at most causes water molecules to wiggle a bit. It clearly goes right through eyelid-thickness skin; it is painful to lift one's head to the sun so that sunlight falls directly on the closed eyelids because so much leaks through. It is known to actually increase cancer rates, something repeated studies have been unable to demonstrate for cell phones. I'll believe that cell phones can actually cause meaningful changes in brain activity/temperature only when I get to design the study that does it and when the physics of the effect is at the very least plausibly hypothesized.
rgb
We can do an instant poll of /. readers right here inline! Then it wouldn't be anecdotal. Errrr, well, maybe it would but it would be less anecdotal. Except for the self-selection and lack of double blind and randomly selected poll targets and...
Personally, I'm typing this on a linux system and have been using linux desktops more or less exclusively for oh, fifteen years, sixteen years, who can remember. Since the days that Slowaris replaced SunOS. I do run XP Pro safely in a nice little VM on the rare occasions I need a specific piece of Win-only software, where it can do no harm. Obviously Linux cannot possibly provide a functional desktop, and the fact that my Luddite wife is typing away on the other side of the room is some sort of atavistic exception or the result of spacetime distortion from another dimension.
One does wonder just what the German Foreign Office was doing that required them to "write printer and scanner drivers" or train people. I envision a training session just like this:
Hello, today I'll be your personal trainer, and we'll see if we can wean you away from Windows. Let's see -- login, check. Type your userid into this itty bitty box, then your password. That's p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d. Now, to write a word-processed document you have to click this icon and select this second icon. No, I know, there's no fourcolor box at the lower left. Yes, I mean the foot. I know, a foot isn't as pretty as the fourcolor square thingie, but click it anyway, there. Now that one, yes. Good job!
What? You don't know what to do? Look, see the funny little blinky thing? That's called a cursor. Now, press a key. Look! A letter appears on the screen! It is the same letter. If you want to write a document, say a strongly worded note urging Mubarak to step down, you press these keys in sequence to type a letter. I know, I know, you miss your Microsoft Word (tm). It came with Strongly Worded Letter templates and Open Office doesn't, but try to bear with me. Now, let's see if you can s-a-v-e and p-r-i-n-t. Yes, yes, yes, no, not that one, down one, oh, sorry did we forget to change the character set and language settings to German well here, oh look now you can read all of the commands except of course all of the icons are little pictures and you don't really need to. Goodness, it isn't printing!
Hans? Hans! Could you write a print driver for this printer? She wants to print. What's that? Did we actually plug the printer in to the system and select it from a menu? No, we tried inserting this CD that came with the printer and it wouldn't run, said something about needing Windows. Cups? No thank you, it is too early for a cups of beer, but cups of coffee would be nice. Systems administrators? Why certainly. All of our systems were set up by MCSEs, who (as everybody knows) have the best possible education in systems management and training that money can buy and earn fabulous salaries as a consequence. Hans? Well, he's our only linux trained admin -- we didn't want to have to fire all of our former staff -- and because none of these CDs work, he has to spend all of his time writing drivers for these cheap-ass Taiwanese printers we bought.
Now let's work on the Internet. We are going to s-u-r-f the w-e-b using a b-r-o-w-s-e-r. I know, I know, there is no little "e" on the menu bar, click on that reddish orange thing. It's supposed to be a "firefox". What? Yes, I know there is no such thing as a firefox. Y'know, it does look a bit more like a pearl dripping orange sherbet or a plucked out eyeball, now that you mention it. Look, try squinting a bit. See it? A firefox. Anyway, try clicking it. I know, you're used to clicking the "e" for "explorer" and this is quite different, but go ahead, give it a shot. There! See? Where are all of the ads? What happened to the viruses you used to get that would send Mubarak offers to
Sorry, but the Old Testament was probably written in the interval between 500 BCE and 800 BCE, solidly in the iron age. In fact, Tubal Cain in Genesis was reported as an "Artificer in iron", an anachronism as wide and glaring as steel swords and Middle Eastern plants and animals in the New World in TBOM, but anybody who thinks that it rained at a rate of six inches per minute on every square foot of the planet for 40 days straight isn't going to be put off by a little thing like consistency. You're confusing it with the time being written about -- Moses (if he lived at all and wasn't just a myth or legend being recalled by means of an oral tradition some 500-800 years after the fact) would have been dated at the very end of the Bronze Age in the Middle East (the Iron Age is usually dated at around 1200 BCE) , but the tribe that would one day become the Israelites didn't have writing (as far as archeology can tell) until 1000 BCE and didn't write the very first books of the Torah until much later (and then rewrote them after the Babylonian captivity, as it isn't clear that any of the original manuscripts survived).
However, I agree, that even at the Iron Age time of writing the moronic morality was so yesterday, just so Bronze Age...(sniff) rgb
8) Real geeks can't do any useful work from a smartphone
9) If real geeks were to do any useful work with a smartphone, it would involve gigabytes of data and enormous charges (and a keyboard).
10) Real old geeks can't work on 3" screens without reading glasses a centimeter thick, which makes them look even geekier than normal, outside of the bounds of acceptable nerdosity.
11) Real geeks already own notepad, laptops, 3g/4g access points, and data plans that let them work WITH a keyboard and screen, and all bundled together they are still cheaper than a smartphone.
And I'm sure there are still more. If they actually gave you unlimited data and let you replace your 3g/4g wireless access point AND still work for a long time, maybe, but last time I checked (within the last six months) Verizon laughed at this...
rgb
Or he'd realize that the instant he puts his tech people in positions of corporate power, they will grow pointy hair.
Actually, Microsoft-and-squishy is so bloated that at this point, the only thing that can rescue them from themselves is being broken up into lots of little Microsofties. Or is that Microsoftettes? How long has it been, after all, since MS last had an actual Idea, all by themselves, that they didn't just steal and then use their usual moves of creating FUD, yanking the OS-level code base around to give the FUD some basis as they break competitors' code, and finally leveraging it into their contracted market on a preferential basis until they dominate the market and people gradually forget that it wasn't MS's idea in the first place. Word processors? Spreadsheets? Integrated development environments? Web browsers? Mail clients? Windowing interfaces? Java? Windowing interfaces with multiple desktops (ooo, forgot, they still haven't figured that one out, have they)? All NIH.
Wait, I know! Vista!
I guess they've still got it...
rgb
The sharks ate them while they were swimming around the platform sites. Now there aren't any.
However, there are sea turtles who might be confused and try to mate with the platforms.
Unless the other species had skin that was just perfect for sewing into oblong shaped bladders and whose loin meat, finely chopped and robustly seasoned, made a damned fine chili for game day...
It's not as simple as that. I've taught two classes in physics with a serious remote component so far -- one with a single remote student, one with twelve. The single was pretty happy -- she could control the view/zoom of the local camera and focus her "attention" in a fairly natural way. The camera in the other was viewpoint-controlled by a "trained orderly" (my TA at the other end) who tried to track the algebra at the board and demos as I did them. The students were much less happy -- cameras lack peripheral vision and have to zoom in on the board to make it possible to see what I'm writing or drawing, and student can't multitask on note-taking, watching, and listening anywhere nearly as conveniently.
To really make this work as an actual moderately interactive classroom experience (and not just be "teaching movies") would probably require at least two, maybe three screens -- a wide-angle view, a mid-range view, and a zoom -- some means of managing "note lag" on the zoom, where different students are at different points in taking down what is in camera focus, two trained camera operators -- or a remote controlled camera per remove student. Or something else -- I'm still thinking about how to make it work better, as I'll probably be doing this next fall again and last semester wasn't as satisfactory as I'd like.
Personally I think that the robot solution here is pretty cool. With a single student/viewpoint, controlled by the remote student, attention can be focussed appropriately, although I still think having a widescreen view separate from the zoom isn't crazy (and may be what I try to set up this fall). It's lovely technology that isn't quite worked out yet, but all the tools are there to make it work.
rgb
That observation never quite sat with me though. It works for an ant - incapable of reason, but swap out the situation for a PERSON sitting on another circular surface (like, say, a planet), and we have figured out quite readily that our surface is unending but finite - it's obvious - go in another direction and you end up circling back.
Obvious how? The ant lives on a manifold (a locally Euclidean space). If the ant is very, very, clever, perhaps it measures some local derivatives or comes up with an exotic theory that suggests that the locally flat space it lives on has some global curvature that stretches as far as it can see.
Which, alas, isn't very far! Especially in any scale invariant way. Sure, it can infer that the local curvature it has measured continues without limit, so that the space curves back on itself, but just over its (event or other) visible horizon the curvature could invert and space could be anything from endlessly flat to covered with fractal dimples that never, ever close. Since the ant has at most measurements (based on a small mountain of assumptions it cannot really prove) of some local curvature, the hyper-"spherical" curvature it imagines could even be a hyper-paraboloid or hyperboloid of revolution, endlessly curved but never closed. How could it tell?
The rest of this I agree with, sort of, recognizing that I'm just an ant and making any actual inferences that extend beyond my range of local vision is deeply contingent on assumptions I cannot prove and really, I cannot even argue are better than any of the alternatives. In other words, as soon as you start speculating on the other side of the event horizon of the visible universe, you are inventing a religious mythology. I'm deeply suspicious of the "Bayesian argument" used in the original article, for example. What are their priors? What is the evidence from which they infer that their priors are true? If I were the ant, I'd assume something like "The curvature I measure is (hyper)-circular curvature, therefore the universe must be closed", begging the hell out of the question (what if it were ellipsoidal? parabolic? hyperbolic? or worse -- once we get to speculative geometries there are much worse, because the ant's balloon could itself live on an ant's hyperballoon that is on another ant's hyper-hyperballoon (iterate ad infinitum) and the whole infinite series could itself still be embedded in a completely flat Euclidean space within which there are an infinite number of these infinite hyperballoonic nested manifolds. How's the ant going to figure that out? He's living in locally flatland, and until Edwin Abbot's finger penetrates the page and violates various pieces of flatland physics in ways that permit the conditional inference of a higher-dimensional space (as at least one consistent explanation of the violation) he has no possible evidence that any of his imaginings, however lovely and entertaining, are true!
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Oh? That would be a neat trick -- from inside the circle. Can you show me an infinite number of points outside of space-time?
Of course we can easily imagine an infinite number of points lying outside any given manifold we imagine by imaginarily embedding the manifold in an imagined space of higher dimension, and if we imagine that the higher dimensional space is unbounded and/or a continuum and/or tangent to the underlying (infinite) manifold, well, maybe, sure, if you want to call this "showing" something contingent upon a host of imagined propositions. Alternatively, we could imagine that inside the circle there is just one point, outside the circle there is just one point, and if we try very hard, we can imagine that they are the same point.
Now, take away the point.
Edwin Abbot has clearly lived in vain.
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The universe is (by definition) everything that exists. Once upon a time, one might have said that a vacuum doesn't exist, but in quantum theory (at least) it does. The visible universe is also homogeneous on a suitable coarse-grained scale. There is thus no particular reason to think that if the universe is 250 times larger than the visible universe that there is any point where this changes and the vacuum is empty.
Of course the universe could be sharply bounded by a thin wall of glass out there at 13.8 billion light years. If it were, we couldn't measure it, and the only way we can pretend to infer it without any real evidence would be to make a non-verifiable or falsifiable assumption such as "the universe doesn't suddenly change structure so that it is surrounded by a thin glass wall after which there is nothing". At least until you get to the other marbles in the bag...
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Fucking magnets suck, of course.
Yeah, like this. Sorry I didn't see your post. My Ph.D. advisor, Larry Biedenharn, was heavily involved in this for four or five years, but as I said, it didn't quite pan out partly because of the sticking problem, partly because one can only make muons at something like 10% energy efficiency (remembering from the many seminars we had on this back in those days, not looking up the exact numbers). Larry always thought they'd do it with a special "breeder" fission reactor to get the muons for free as a side-effect of making energy the other way to boost fission returns by a factor of 50% or so, but this never happened AFAIK.
It is still an open problem -- the question is really is there an environment where the He sticking problem is suppressed (they didn't find one, but I doubt the search was exhaustive) and is there any way to produce muons at higher efficiencies -- say some sort of resonant conversion of electrons into muons that beats 5-10%. My recollection is that they were within a factor of ten, maybe even within a factor of 2-3 of break even but couldn't quite find a way over the hump. They know way more about neutrinos now than they did back then -- one wonders if anybody is even thinking about it any more.
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The interesting possibility is and remains muon-catalyzed fusion. The stoichiometry is within roughly one order of magnitude of breaking even -- it costs too much to make a muon, a muon can catalyze too few fusion reactions to pay for itself in its lifetime, but it is close. Of course if you have a source of "free" muons, e.g. a nuclear reactor, one can basically use them to augment the energy production of the fission processes.
I thought that the auger replacement of electrons in diatomic hydrogen (and resulting collapse of the molecule to where fusion via tunnelling is likely) was already a pretty good test of mass effects in quantum theory twenty plus years ago, but this is still pretty science.
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This whole article is a crock. First of all, no genes for "religiousosity" have been identified, so no one has any idea where or how such genes are "hitchhiking" on the human genome. Second, if there is any such thing as an inhomogeneously distributed predisposition towards religion based on genetic factors, that predisposition is almost certainly extraordinarily multifactorial, not just a gene, but dozens, hundreds of genes, spread out over many chromosomes. The population genetics of transmission in this case are vastly more complicated than any simplistic model could reveal.
To be more explicit, the study is arguing that:
* There are two distinct strains of humanity, one that is genetically religious, one that is not.
* Certain religions promote larger families (not all religions do, note well).
* People that are genetically religious are statistically more likely to belong to the religions that promote larger families.
* Larger families guarantee a higher survival to reproduction rate (note well that this assumption is not generally true in nature, where survival rates for smaller families and less populous cultures are generally higher than those for larger ones with dilution of resources and more competition).
* No mechanism exists where non-religious people secularists can compete in reproduction rate, say by having multiple partners, engaging in infidelity and adultery, and so on (most of which are frowned on by the very religions that encourage high reproduction rates).
* Reproduction rate is ultimately the only thing that matters in population genetics. (So much for the long term survival of the homosexuality genes, eh?)
* Religiousosity genes in religions that encourage high reproduction rates will therefore always have a positive derivative in the enormously complex set of coupled differential equations that describe the gene distribution of the population, and must therefore eventually take over the population and become universal.
This is complete, utter, bullshit. It is bad science. It is terrible mathematics. Have these bozos never heard of complex systems and chaotic differential systems? Even if all of the assumptions above were true -- where clearly, most of them are pretty dubious -- the argument is naive in the extreme in a system so complex that there are doubtless many strange attractors on a constantly shifting landscape. Things it ignores:
* Memetics. Oh, wait, religions are memetic constructs, they are social superorganisms, not genetically encoded theistic beliefs. The key step in preparing a new generation of theists is the brainwashing of the children by bringing them up in the delusion. Perhaps there are genes that predispose one to being brainwashed, perhaps not, but as secular society continues to control information transmission to the very young there is a much, much faster mechansim than genetics acting to actively reduce the relative numbers of theists worldwide by simply educating young people so that they can see that the base doctrines and myths underlying the primary theisms are false.
* Non-religious, non-genetic factors that suppress or enhance survival rates. The Amish are a perfect example. They live within and are protected by a secular society. Plop them down in the Middle East and suddenly they would be a heavily persecuted minority. Plop them down in billion-person strong mostly-secular China and they'd have no capability of isolating their children for the key brainwashing step; the children would be taught from the earliest of ages that their parents religious beliefs were stupid myths. Alter American culture so that religions such as this no longer had tax advantages and insist that Amish children learn about astronomy and evolution and the fact that Amish mythology is mythology and you'd increase the defection rate to secular society.
* The fact that the number of secular non-religious people worldwide appears to be growing at
Ultimately, you cannot be sure you won't get screwed, ever. Not even by hackers outside of your organization, let alone ones inside. It is possible to -- reasonably -- secure a system using methods described above (offsite backups managed by a third party commercial affair, onsite backups under lock and key, careful logging and so on). However, in nearly any network there is one toplevel admin that doles out the privileges and so on, that set the system up, that works on the system many times more often and at a much higher level than the people that typically have permission to do a few things enabled by sudo. There, no matter what, you will be vulnerable.
/. and it is going to cost you money). Basically, the more you try to secure things on the cheap, the more likely it will be that you have a setup with holes you can drive a truck through given the root password and access.
This is a classic problem: Quid custodes custode (who will guard the guardians)?
Paradoxically, you are probably slightly safer if your admins are not uberkinder supergeeks. If I, or any of a dozen people I know, were your toplevel sysadmin and was not the completely honest and trustworthy person that I am, there is no measure you could take for protection that I could not suborn in such a way as to cause you great pain and loss. After all, who would be implementing the measures? Log files are pointless ways to reveal the activities of the person who set up the logging system. Subtly corrupting the backups for long enough to roll over the offsite images (which could be as simple a measure as installing an encrypted filesystem "for security reasons" and making sure that I'm the only person that has the real key). An amateur (or less skilled professional) is less likely to know enough to do dirt and hide their tracks.
There is no real protection against hiring people to do mission critical work of any sort who have a serious personality disorder. So your best protection of all is to hire toplevel systems staff who are, as far as you can tell looking hard, completely ethical and personality disorder free, and then treating them with respect.
Good advice for keeping ordinary employees from going postal, good advice for any organization or task, actually.
There is one more solution -- the NSA sort. Throw an enormous amount of money at it, and hope that the people you hire aren't smarter than the (unknown) one you are defending against and that they leave no holes in what they set up. Hiring ten top sysadmins all tasked with watching each other is good. Having commercial consultants who know what they are doing help you set up a system is good (in other words, if you have to ask the question you need to get an answer somewhere other than
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Gigs? 25000 x 1000 = 25 MEGAbytes, and that's probably an overestimate. All in a handful of mail spools files. State officials (assuming Alaska sysadmins aren't totally incompetent, which of course is probably not a good assumption) should have informed the governor and her cronies that all mail sent or received on official servers was a matter of public record and instructed her not to use it for personal purposes. Even if they were poorly spooled with no sender cc (so they are mixed into other people's spool files) a single day armed with procmail and a few regular expressions would sort the whole thing out. As a matter of public record, they could just slap it up on a website and let anybody download it at will. It would take me some thirty seconds to get the whole ball of wax sitting where I am right now if they did this -- why should msnbc.com have access where "the people" do not?
/. geeks manage half of that (although I receive hundreds a day, most of them are spam or systems messages or user problem messages; the number I actually write is probably only rarely as many as ten). If the messages have any real content and aren't just "Do you want to go shoot a moose after work today?" (reducing the size of the spool way down even from 25 MB) Palin didn't have time to do any actual work!
The interesting thing to me is the 25,000 number in the first place. That's an average of 17 emails a day over a four year term. In an eight hour day, that is two an hour. Take weekends etc into account, more like 3 an hour, or one every twenty minutes. That's actually remarkably dense email utilization -- I doubt most
The second most interesting thing, no matter what they release, will be her literacy on display. It's one thing to give folksy speeches and use big words your scriptwriters have put into them. It's another to use big words yourself (and actually spell them and use them correctly).
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