If you haven't seen evidence of a scan yet, then you have been paying attention. What is interesting about he CRU e-mails is how little evidence they give for a scam. Compare them to some of the tobacco company documents to see what a real conspiracy looks like.
No. No. No. Let's put this urban myth to bed for good. The Y2k bug was very real, but it was greatly overstated by some in the media, and by people who stood to make a lot of money by pandering to y2k fear. For example, there were people who were loudly saying that almost every device or process that had a silicon chip in it would fail at the stroke of midnight on Dec 31, 1999. The vast majority of these were not patched, they were left alone, and in the vast majority of cases nothing happened. This is not because of hard-working programmers, but because there was never a problem with them in the first place.
The y2k bug was real, and in some cases it was necessary to fix potential problems before they occurred. However, it was a far smaller problem that was made out at the time. It was not a case of heroic programmers saving the world.
Yes, we would see the same timescale regardless of the base that was used. The only difference would be the value of the exponent. The value of the exponent itself is not the key, it is the timescale that the exponent (in combination with the base) implies. The timescale may very well be a coincidence, but if it does merit some consideration to see if there is any evidence to suggest that the timescale is real. Fortunately, there are many tests that can be made to see if there is any evidence for some sort of periodicity or pseudo-periodicity. OF course, this whole idea falls apart if the timescale for the smallest attacks is significantly different from one day, which is another test of the hypothesis.
That is certainly true, but it would be interesting to see if there is some sort of periodicity, particularly considering that there are many different annual events and cycles that could affect insurgencies and the way that they plan and carry out attacks. The 2.5 exponent may be completely unrelated to the year, but it is interesting that it does roughly correspond to an order of magnitude larger attack on roughly annual timescales.
The value of the exponent is interesting. If one assumes that the smallest attacks happen roughly once a day then the attacks that are an order of magnitude larger happen about once a year. This implies that there may be some sort of calendar event that triggers these larger events. If these events can be identified then it may help avoid some of the large attacks. It would be interesting to check this by looking at the timing of the largest attacks in the data set that was used for this study.
> The total amount of attack will/power stays the same, no matter what size > the individual attacks are? No shit? I could have told you that too.
But you did not. I am constantly amazed that every time some sort of insightful discovery is made there is a chorus of voices saying " I could have told you that". Wake me when someone actually does "tell me that" before someone else publishes it.
Moving the Earth would help, but it would need to be a gradual thing, done at the rate of something like a few kilometres per century in order to maintain a nearly constant insolation. I doubt that we would need to move out as far as Mars. As for putting Mars in orbit around the Earth, tides would be a big problem. It would make for some great romantic evenings though.
The Sun is slowly getting hotter (over timescales of hundreds of millions of years) due to changes in the composition of its core. In about one billion years this increase in temperature will be enough to have boiled off Earth's oceans making Earth a dead planet. This will happen long before the Sun becomes a red giant, so unfortunately there will be no humans around to witness it, unless if we leave first and pay a visit to watch Sol's demise.
I would like to see this technique tweaked and used as a method of hibernation to stave off boredome and conserve supplies when there is nothing good on tv.
I am not sure what you are trying to say or imply here, but no, I have not seen any evidence for a systematic effort to destroy evidence or distort findings. There are some stupid statements, but when one follows up on the particular issues that these stupid statements were made about then these statements turn out to be mostly a lot of hot air. For example, the alleged conspiracy to keep a particular paper out of an IPCC report was just talk. That paper did appear in the IPCC report. So no, I do not see any evidence for criminal activity other than the theft of the documents.
No, he is absolutely right. Also, there tend to be warning signs when a government is about to go off the deep end. (Some of which we have seen in the US over the past several years.) In general having governments is safe than not having governments.
Afghanistan is a testing ground for the UAV. It is a fairly safe testing ground because the Afghanis do not have anything that has a realistic chance at shooting it down. The fact that it was at an international aeroport suggests that the US does not consider it to be one of their secret planes anymore. It will be interesting to see (five or ten years from now) what the real cutting edge of military aviation is in 2009.
It is not a matter of trust. It is a matter of learning to read IDL code (which is not that hard) and comparing the plotting commands to the published plot.
As for the "hopeless state" comment, that sounds quite plausible, and it is fully consistent with the way the code appears to have been use to experiment with various ways of correcting the data for the various problems in the data. This sort of thing goes on all the time. It is called experimentation, and it is the way that science is done. In real life things do not wok like they do on CSI.
The fact that this aircraft has been publicly acknowledged suggests that they have something far more advanced that they are not telling us about at the Skunk Works.
The ironic thing is that what the so-called skeptics are doing is adjusting the data to fit their preconceived idea that climate change is not happening. They decided in advance what the e-mails and source code mean and they are refusing to consider any data that disagrees with those pre-determined conclusions. It would be nice if these skeptic would simply apply the scientific method to the data (e-mails and source code) and revise their hypothesis (that there is evidence for fraud) accordingly. Instead they are adjusting the data (taking e-mails out of context, mis-reading source code) to get the answer that they want.
Which version was used to produce the plot that is in the Nature paper? It is easy enough to tell by looking at the Nature paper. Hint, the plot in the paper does not have this correction applied.
It is not the millions of dollars in research grants that you need to worry about. It is the hundreds of billions of dollars in industries that stand to be affected if this research is true that you need to be concerned about. Follow the money.
The source code is another thing that has been taken completely out of context. For example, the "Very ARTIFICIAL correction" in was computed, but the line where it was applied was commented out. This is clearly a case of someone playing around with the output to explore various effects and scenarios. They did the experiment, then commented it out to removed that effect from the production output. Does anyone really believe that a real attempt at fraud would be blatantly labeled in the code?
I suspect that most people think that the problem is the rest of the population. The portion of the population that makes up their culture is usually not considered to be part of the problem, but everyone else is.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, a lot of the world works that way.
If you haven't seen evidence of a scan yet, then you have been paying attention. What is interesting about he CRU e-mails is how little evidence they give for a scam. Compare them to some of the tobacco company documents to see what a real conspiracy looks like.
No. No. No. Let's put this urban myth to bed for good. The Y2k bug was very real, but it was greatly overstated by some in the media, and by people who stood to make a lot of money by pandering to y2k fear. For example, there were people who were loudly saying that almost every device or process that had a silicon chip in it would fail at the stroke of midnight on Dec 31, 1999. The vast majority of these were not patched, they were left alone, and in the vast majority of cases nothing happened. This is not because of hard-working programmers, but because there was never a problem with them in the first place.
The y2k bug was real, and in some cases it was necessary to fix potential problems before they occurred. However, it was a far smaller problem that was made out at the time. It was not a case of heroic programmers saving the world.
Yes, we would see the same timescale regardless of the base that was used. The only difference would be the value of the exponent. The value of the exponent itself is not the key, it is the timescale that the exponent (in combination with the base) implies. The timescale may very well be a coincidence, but if it does merit some consideration to see if there is any evidence to suggest that the timescale is real. Fortunately, there are many tests that can be made to see if there is any evidence for some sort of periodicity or pseudo-periodicity. OF course, this whole idea falls apart if the timescale for the smallest attacks is significantly different from one day, which is another test of the hypothesis.
That is certainly true, but it would be interesting to see if there is some sort of periodicity, particularly considering that there are many different annual events and cycles that could affect insurgencies and the way that they plan and carry out attacks. The 2.5 exponent may be completely unrelated to the year, but it is interesting that it does roughly correspond to an order of magnitude larger attack on roughly annual timescales.
The value of the exponent is interesting. If one assumes that the smallest attacks happen roughly once a day then the attacks that are an order of magnitude larger happen about once a year. This implies that there may be some sort of calendar event that triggers these larger events. If these events can be identified then it may help avoid some of the large attacks. It would be interesting to check this by looking at the timing of the largest attacks in the data set that was used for this study.
> The total amount of attack will/power stays the same, no matter what size
> the individual attacks are? No shit? I could have told you that too.
But you did not. I am constantly amazed that every time some sort of insightful discovery is
made there is a chorus of voices saying " I could have told you that". Wake me when someone
actually does "tell me that" before someone else publishes it.
It is a car. A car is a tool for getting from one place to another. When it becomes part of your personality then something is going wrong.
Moving the Earth would help, but it would need to be a gradual thing, done at the rate of something like a few kilometres per century in order to maintain a nearly constant insolation. I doubt that we would need to move out as far as Mars. As for putting Mars in orbit around the Earth, tides would be a big problem. It would make for some great romantic evenings though.
The Sun is slowly getting hotter (over timescales of hundreds of millions of years) due to changes in the composition of its core. In about one billion years this increase in temperature will be enough to have boiled off Earth's oceans making Earth a dead planet. This will happen long before the Sun becomes a red giant, so unfortunately there will be no humans around to witness it, unless if we leave first and pay a visit to watch Sol's demise.
I would like to see this technique tweaked and used as a method of hibernation to stave off boredome and conserve supplies when there is nothing good on tv.
I am not sure what you are trying to say or imply here, but no, I have not seen any evidence for a systematic effort to destroy evidence or distort findings. There are some stupid statements, but when one follows up on the particular issues that these stupid statements were made about then these statements turn out to be mostly a lot of hot air. For example, the alleged conspiracy to keep a particular paper out of an IPCC report was just talk. That paper did appear in the IPCC report. So no, I do not see any evidence for criminal activity other than the theft of the documents.
Yes, there is fairly clear evidence that a large set of documents were stolen.
No, he is absolutely right. Also, there tend to be warning signs when a government is about to go off the deep end. (Some of which we have seen in the US over the past several years.)
In general having governments is safe than not having governments.
Afghanistan is a testing ground for the UAV. It is a fairly safe testing ground because the Afghanis do not have anything that has a realistic chance at shooting it down. The fact that it was at an international aeroport suggests that the US does not consider it to be one of their secret planes anymore. It will be interesting to see (five or ten years from now) what the real cutting edge of military aviation is in 2009.
It is not a matter of trust. It is a matter of learning to read IDL code (which is not that hard) and comparing the plotting commands to the published plot.
As for the "hopeless state" comment, that sounds quite plausible, and it is fully consistent with the way the code appears to have been use to experiment with various ways of correcting the data for the various problems in the data. This sort of thing goes on all the time. It is called experimentation, and it is the way that science is done. In real life things do not wok like they do on CSI.
The fact that this aircraft has been publicly acknowledged suggests that they have something far more advanced that they are not telling us about at the Skunk Works.
Yes, one can tell, if one knows how to read IDL code. The correction has not been applied to the published results.
The ironic thing is that what the so-called skeptics are doing is adjusting the data to fit their preconceived idea that climate change is not happening. They decided in advance what the e-mails and source code mean and they are refusing to consider any data that disagrees with those pre-determined conclusions. It would be nice if these skeptic would simply apply the scientific method to the data (e-mails and source code) and revise their hypothesis (that there is evidence for fraud) accordingly. Instead they are adjusting the data (taking e-mails out of context, mis-reading source code) to get the answer that they want.
Which version was used to produce the plot that is in the Nature paper? It is easy enough to tell by looking at the Nature paper. Hint, the plot in the paper does not have this correction applied.
It is not the millions of dollars in research grants that you need to worry about. It is the hundreds of billions of dollars in industries that stand to be affected if this research is true that you need to be concerned about. Follow the money.
The source code is another thing that has been taken completely out of context. For example, the "Very ARTIFICIAL correction" in was computed, but the line where it was applied was commented out. This is clearly a case of someone playing around with the output to explore various effects and scenarios. They did the experiment, then commented it out to removed that effect from the production output. Does anyone really believe that a real attempt at fraud would be blatantly labeled in the code?
This is probably the answer.
I suspect that most people think that the problem is the rest of the population. The portion of the population that makes up their culture is usually not considered to be part of the problem, but everyone else is.
Science is the ability to formulate hypothesis and test them against experiments or observations (or both). So yes, astrophysics is a science.