Re:It's not a game....
on
Review: Spore
·
· Score: 1
Its not nearly as good as Civ or Sim City, not even close, and that's the problem. Space stage is the only part of the game that plays like a real game, all the other parts behave as though you are stuck in this perpetual world of level one. There is no complexity, no nuance, no difficulty until you reach the space stage. Then, as others have said that has its own problems. Its like, can you imagine sim city if all you could build was your first little farming town, imagine Warcraft 3 when you are still limited to building farms, a barracks and two units, hell imagine the sims if you can't have kids or go to work. This is stage 1-4 of spore.
I personally like space stage, but now that I'm there I still can't figure out what the hell the other stages were about. Space stage makes up 90% of the game, and all those little creatures you made are now just tiny little blobs of pixels for the most part, or an icon in your ships cargo bay. Even your buildings are barely recognisable from your one spacecraft. The reason I like it is that terraforming planets is fun and quite involved. You have to stabilise the temperature and humidity, then add biodiversity, there are 3 levels of this. And when you do improve it you can add another city, and another, then buildings are cheaper. With more cities, more buildings you get more spice, which you sell to other empires for profit. You can hunt for good deals on selling stuff, and good deals on buying stuff which is cool. Being attacked or attacking others is pretty lame, you just fly over and click, or rely on your autofire weapon, or just let your allies do it for you. The main point though is that NONE of this has ANYTHING to do with the creature creator, creature stage, evolution, or any of the features that were heavily marketed. This is what you will be doing for most of the game. I personally just do not get it, I do not understand what the hell was the point of stages 1-4. It is just a disjointed, simple (like even simpler than the sims) waste of a very short amount of time.
You make an awful lot of assumptions about me based on the little I have said addressing ONE issue in one discussion on one forum on the internet. I'm glad you are so skilled in this area.
I am not about to throw away the notion that we need to protect our environment simply because I think we need to accept our part in nature, as a part of it. Shit mate That doesn't even make sense! I don't know where you drew your conclusions but I'm guessing my remarks regarding the religious stuff got your neck hairs up didn't it?
You may think you are special, you may be well grounded in high and mighty morals. 99% of real people on the other hand think they are special, and therefore nature can go to hell if it gets in their way. Have you ever lived on a farm? In the country? Lived with a snake in your roof, bugs in your house, birds, bats, bees, tended a garden, cared for animals? I'm not saying you haven't but I'm guessing it. And if not you then the vast majority of high and mighty, think they are better than the wilderness, latte sipping urban green warriors. 99% of people who now have suddenly discovered climate change are the same people who run from a spider, can't be near a snake, find animals dirty and all other manner of bullshit like that. You all think we can cut greenhouse gases, buy a hybrid and the world is saved right? Yeah, and the other 900,000 issues facing the environment go out the window because its all climate change isn't it, thats just THE issue.
I say we, you, everyone needs to come to grips with the reality that on a fundamental scientific level, we are no different, no better than any other animal out there. Nothing we have done makes us special. Pretty damn clever right on, but when you think about the fragility of the human versus say, any common insect in evolutionary terms, we are pretty weak shit, we'll be gone, a forgotten memory and the cockroaches live on. How clever is that? How special is that?
Just ask yourself, by what measure are you special? Is it by some fundamental law of the universe that you are a special being? Or will you admit it is by your own selfish egocentric measure, the one you decided upon because it makes you feel better about life. We are not special, we are nature, THAT is why we should behave sensibly. Because the truth is, cut mother nature down enough and she'll wipe us off the face of our planet and barely remember we ever existed.
Special? How? How are we thus apart from nature because we are smart? Why do we need to feel special about ourselves to choose a moral path? Are you saying that human morality is simply a high and mighty way of us reaffirming how much better we are than nature?
It is possible to be both morally driven, and accepting that we are nature. In fact if you can't see how this is the way it needs to be, that people will never turn around their environmentally destructive ways so long as they see themselves as above nature, apart from it, better than it, then I find you morally bankrupt like all the others. Why do we need to feel so special about ourselves to simply do the right thing? That is the most morally corrupt view of the natural world I can think of, in a subtle way, but a very real way.
Where in your head to you figure that humans are somehow 'apart' from nature? I don't get this crap, this judeo-christian oriented narrative that humans are separate from nature and somehow 'unnatural' because we behave sort of funny. That's right I said judeo-christian.
All science to this point tells us we are not special, we are not different, we arose out of the same circumstances as all other animals. We just got lucky and figured some tricks out, slowly evolved at a more rapid rate than our cousins, until we started believing we came from a different family.
Nature exists *everywhere* you idiot, in a natural state! And the fact that humans interact with it and change it is irrelevant to whether life on earth is 'natural' or 'artificial'. All species in nature interact with each other leaving their mark, and surviving as they must within the circumstances that our rock, moon and plasma ball combo dish out.
Repeat after me: We are not special. We, the humans, are a *part* of nature just like all the other animals. Buildings, machines, bridges cars airplanes and boats are nature, just like we are, because we made them, by the laws of nature. The same laws that govern how an otter cracks a shell with a rock. Same shit man, its all the same shit.
36 orders of magnitude greater in what sense? On the quantum level, yes, but there is a relativity to that. I don't count on an extremely potent, but small rare earth magnet from a hard drive being able to hold up an automobile against the power of the earths gravity. 36 orders of magnitude greater doesn't mean much in this sense. Of course a much larger electromagnet can do this easily. You may be thinking: 'yes, exactly' But what I am saying is that the premise of '36 orders of magnitude greater than gravity' is a form of denying the antecedent. Just because electromagnetism is the dominant force on the quantum scale does not imply that electromagnetism is the dominant force on the cosmic scale, in fact I think observation suggests otherwise, this is the whole point of general relativity, which I might add began from the assumptions of electromagnetism being valid.
I'm not refuting what you have said, I honestly don't know much about astrology and find it all a bit weak given that we make only the mildest of observations from our little well in the first place. What I did notice is that you speak as though you are implying a force on the quantum scale that is 36 orders of magnitude greater than another force scales up to mean there should be 36 orders of magnitude greater effects, or at least much more. I think that is naive.
I agree with you, I'd like to see the error margin in those temperature readings, but the truth is that since you are not directly measuring the temperature - it is derived from other measurements, the error is compounded. Then you have to assume we have the correct model to use to predict temperatures from ice core samples and that there isn't just something simple in the science we missed (cos you know, that barely ever happens right?) which throws them out by say quarter of a degree, or a tenth of a degree. Seems right now you could be out by one one hundredth of a degree and suddenly all the derived historical temperature readings fall into line with current measurements.
I always ask myself: what if, rather than simply having the wrong model, there is a bias in the model we use to infer historical temperature as in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_of_an_estimator
Look I'm sure the scientists involved have done the error analysis but still, uncertainty is the name of the game and this sort of extrapolation of data is considerably error prone. Engineering is what I understand, but I can tell you there's a shitload of money out there for engineering research, mostly because it is something that companies and governments see as having true measurable economic benefits, and still what we understand of the world is marginal, fudged, weighted, curve fitted, extrapolated, inferred, assumed and most certainly uncertain. We are talking about systems that are infinitely more complex than simple engineering systems, models that require thousands upon thousands of interacting variables to properly describe.
I'm not a skeptic of the evidence to suggest warming and cooling trends, past or present. But given what I know about science I am deeply skeptical of our ability to accurately model those trends and the human impact on them.
So on a slightly off topic note, does that invalidate the theory of 'wormholes' for some hypothetical FTL space travel? Surely, were it possible to create a wormhole in spacetime, you could set up a perpetual motion machine that works exactly like you describe, thus violating the second law. A nice simple thought experiment, I like it.
What I want to know is this: At what point in the history of Slashdot did it become necessary to explain and defend the fundamental philosophies of science?
Seems this place has suffered along with digg when every 12 year old and their Wii were granted internet acess...?
Molten steel present.... MONTHS after the collapse? Yeah right buddy, so tell me how this complete physical anomaly that appears to defy all laws of physics confirms your crackpot theory?
The whole molten steel claim is utter tripe, based on a handful of highly questionable anecdotal reports. By the same quality of evidence we also know that the US government actually blew up the levy walls in New Orleans during Katrina, after all, people *heard* the explosions.
Please, please don't tell me you are a software engineer.
FWIW I'm a 3rd year Mech Eng student, also studying a second degree in mathematics.
I'm not claiming to have combed through all the evidence, but I will claim that neither have you. Why don't you trust the engineers who actually have combed through the evidence?
And I suppose you have applied the relevant scaling laws to your lego model? Please, enlighten us to the dimensionless constants which define your system?
"I have looked at everything I could find, and am still uncomfortable with any theory I have heard put forward."
And you, clearly, are not a fucking engineer so why does your armchair opinion count for more than two bars of shit?
Every day you walk out of your house, designed and built by engineers, into your car, designed and built by engineers, or onto a train or bus or plane or boat, designed and built by engineers. You LITERALLY put your life in the hands of the competence of trained professionals every... single... day... without so much as thinking about it for a second, without questioning their abilities or knowledge, and yet here at the drop of a hat you throw all that out the window because suddenly the work of engineers doesn't satisfy you?? Because the science you are not trained to understand doesn't make you "comfortable"??
Occams Razor, the observed facts are: Planes, large ones, flew into large buildings, fire ensued, buildings fell down. Your conclusion involves multiplying the evidence beyond necessity and therefore fails at the basic level of scientific theory. You make your assumptions in events that were not observed trying to debunk the events which were observed.
God I get sick of this. Same arguments again and again, 7 years now, 7 years and we are still faced with the same psuedo-scientific babble.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to summarise here. Steel does not need to be 'melted' to be weakened well beyond safety margins, and beyond its required design strength. At moderately high temperatures it is weakened significantly. Go look up a materials handbook or two. The buildings collapsed in an entirely ordinary and predictable manner, they did not 'free fall'. Structures such as that are designed to collapse pancake style, like a concertina, they do not ever topple over. Can you imagine the extreme dangers that a toppling building of say 110 stories would pose to say, half of the surrounding CBD? The bomber in the 40s was not a jumbo jet, not even remotely close, there weren't even planes that big built back then. Neither did the planes that existed in those days have the same high strength materials embedded in them as in this case. I believe the NIST report suggests that elements such as the titanium axles used in the engines caused significant structural damage to the building core in certain places.
You *are* peddling a conspiracy theory. Multiple investigations and simulations have drawn the conclusion that the buildings fell down as a result of the observed evidence: Two fucking giant jumbo jets flew into them. Occams razor my friend. And you are here jabbering on repeating the same debunked theories of a small group of complete crackpots in the face of it.
Ok, no need for the acid tongue please. You guys are proving to be really good at misconstruing just about everything I have said.
Point out to me where I have suggested we do nothing? Point out to me where I have said modeling is useless? Don't patronise me, I know full well the usefulness of advanced modeling. This does not mean we should not USE CAUTION when making predictions with computer simulations.
Furthermore, the examples you cite are not even remotely as complicated problems as modeling the behaviour of all the gasses surrounding our entire planet. All of the examples you cite involve models that can make predictions which can be directly tested in a short time period. Invariably the models are found to be lacking and are corrected as needed. With climate modeling it is a case of 50 years or more before the predictions can be tested against our models. Then they will be corrected, then another huge gap and we might start to get a clearer picture. And you want politicians to formulate policy based on this vague understanding of nature?
Either way, you have more or less proven my point. I make the mere suggestion that we err on the side of caution when using a simplified computer model to predict the behaviour of a poorly understood physical phenomenon and this invites me to be ridiculed. This is precisely the problem I have been talking about.
Of course I like models, all science is heavily dependent on them, you are missing my point. Please don't think I am saying modeling can't be trusted, hell the whole reason I am studying mathematics is so that I will have the skills to create advanced models myself.
My point is that they are to be taken with a grain of salt until they are proven to be very robust. In general right now, this is not happening in the public debate. There is a fantastic post further down pointing out that we never even discuss the actual models. Now if you believe we can accurately model the climate with our current level of advancement in mathematics, think about this: We have no model of turbulence in fluids, we have no model that will precisely tell us how fluids flow over any arbitrary body. There is no n-body solution to orbital mechanics. In fracture mechanics there is no theory that will accurately predict the behaviour of cracks in arbitrarily complex bodies without relying on computer simulation and experiment. In these rather simple and fundamental sciences we have equations, sure, but they are mostly unsolvable except for the simplest cases.
Climate models are making predictions that cannot be tested save for sitting on our hands for the next 50 years and watching. It is a difficult situation to make a judgement on but I for one will not put full faith in any model that can't be tested rigorously until it is agreeing with data to a high tolerance. It took 400 years or so of effort to get the navier-stokes equations, they describe a single differential element of a fluid, with continuum assumptions, and still there is no proof that solutions exist, they don't even work for rarefied systems. why do you think a model of the *entire planet* is an even remotely achievable task with current knowledge?
Yes we use statistics, but so do stock traders. They can't make accurate predictions yet, why on earth are climate models different?
But then you run into the problem of correlation vs causation. This is as yet the unresolved feature of the debate. Not only that but you are dismissing the potential to simply make the wrong assumptions when averaging all that data and projecting it forward. Yes, statistical modeling is useful to attempt to describe data you have collected, but no, you cannot simply project that data into the future. Future data points do not belong to the set you derived you statistical model from. In which case, unless you have an extremely robust statistical model, and last I checked we do not, or you are happy to accept the dramatic downturn in the probability that your projected data point will agree with your previous one, you are back to square one, that is to say: modeling a chaotic system.
Now if I am not mistaken, this is precisely what all those fancy, assumption laden computer models do is it not?
Thank you for this post. I am no scientist, but I am an undergrad in a dual major in Engineering/Science (mathematics), there are certain things that really trouble me about contemporary climate science. For one, there appears to be an over reliance on climate models based on broad sweeping assumptions, and an extreme exaggeration of the capacity of any given model to produce accurate results. Increasingly, the GW science seems to be violating Poppers fundamental philosophy of scientific hypothesis: The only theory worth considering is that which can be disproven. Or rather, science is not about proving as such, it is about disproving. I want to see the falsifiability of climate change theory thoroughly discussed, but it never is, nobody can challenge the models, nobody is allowed to question the methods, nobody is allowed to offer alternative to the mainstream narrative. Its a dangerous place for science to be. More and more I see GW predictions failing the falsifiability test: hot year? Earth is warming, cold year? Earth is unstable due to warming, flood: GW, everything, everything under the sun is being attributed to GW.
The 'consensus' worries me also, moreso in fact. There is rarely consensus in science, especially when dealing with fundamentally complex, non-linear dynamical systems which are proven to be inherently chaotic. Even when a theory is sound and mature, the most important consideration is that you are making predictions by using a model, an inherently and unavoidably flawed model. It is always, always important to cite assumptions and errors when making predictions with any model. But if you question the validity of current climate modelling, you are branded a heretic, a denier, and the worst of all: a skeptic. As if being a skeptic in science is suddenly the wrong thing to do? What happened?
All scientists are skeptics, a scientist without skepticism is no scientist, he is a fool. Worse still believing that computer models are completely trustworthy is like believing your lego starship enterprise will fly you to the moon.
I am not a denier, but I am certainly skeptical. I am certainly open to hypotheses, theories, models and all manner of explanations for given data sets, observations etc. But I am deeply troubled by the way discussion and debate about something as highly chaotic and poorly understood as the climate is shut down so vigorously these days. Worse still, the politicians and economists are on board. I can't help but be just a tad aware that politicians will leap on any populist position and economists are always hungry for new derivatives markets.
Of course it is entirely possible, and common (as in more often the case than not) for completely well defined, well described deterministic systems to be utterly unpredictable. Its called chaos. Even with sufficient information you cannot always make predictions about the future state of certain nonlinear dynamical systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Its not nearly as good as Civ or Sim City, not even close, and that's the problem. Space stage is the only part of the game that plays like a real game, all the other parts behave as though you are stuck in this perpetual world of level one. There is no complexity, no nuance, no difficulty until you reach the space stage. Then, as others have said that has its own problems. Its like, can you imagine sim city if all you could build was your first little farming town, imagine Warcraft 3 when you are still limited to building farms, a barracks and two units, hell imagine the sims if you can't have kids or go to work. This is stage 1-4 of spore.
I personally like space stage, but now that I'm there I still can't figure out what the hell the other stages were about. Space stage makes up 90% of the game, and all those little creatures you made are now just tiny little blobs of pixels for the most part, or an icon in your ships cargo bay. Even your buildings are barely recognisable from your one spacecraft. The reason I like it is that terraforming planets is fun and quite involved. You have to stabilise the temperature and humidity, then add biodiversity, there are 3 levels of this. And when you do improve it you can add another city, and another, then buildings are cheaper. With more cities, more buildings you get more spice, which you sell to other empires for profit. You can hunt for good deals on selling stuff, and good deals on buying stuff which is cool. Being attacked or attacking others is pretty lame, you just fly over and click, or rely on your autofire weapon, or just let your allies do it for you. The main point though is that NONE of this has ANYTHING to do with the creature creator, creature stage, evolution, or any of the features that were heavily marketed. This is what you will be doing for most of the game. I personally just do not get it, I do not understand what the hell was the point of stages 1-4. It is just a disjointed, simple (like even simpler than the sims) waste of a very short amount of time.
You make an awful lot of assumptions about me based on the little I have said addressing ONE issue in one discussion on one forum on the internet. I'm glad you are so skilled in this area.
I am not about to throw away the notion that we need to protect our environment simply because I think we need to accept our part in nature, as a part of it. Shit mate That doesn't even make sense! I don't know where you drew your conclusions but I'm guessing my remarks regarding the religious stuff got your neck hairs up didn't it?
You may think you are special, you may be well grounded in high and mighty morals. 99% of real people on the other hand think they are special, and therefore nature can go to hell if it gets in their way. Have you ever lived on a farm? In the country? Lived with a snake in your roof, bugs in your house, birds, bats, bees, tended a garden, cared for animals? I'm not saying you haven't but I'm guessing it. And if not you then the vast majority of high and mighty, think they are better than the wilderness, latte sipping urban green warriors. 99% of people who now have suddenly discovered climate change are the same people who run from a spider, can't be near a snake, find animals dirty and all other manner of bullshit like that. You all think we can cut greenhouse gases, buy a hybrid and the world is saved right? Yeah, and the other 900,000 issues facing the environment go out the window because its all climate change isn't it, thats just THE issue.
I say we, you, everyone needs to come to grips with the reality that on a fundamental scientific level, we are no different, no better than any other animal out there. Nothing we have done makes us special. Pretty damn clever right on, but when you think about the fragility of the human versus say, any common insect in evolutionary terms, we are pretty weak shit, we'll be gone, a forgotten memory and the cockroaches live on. How clever is that? How special is that?
Just ask yourself, by what measure are you special? Is it by some fundamental law of the universe that you are a special being? Or will you admit it is by your own selfish egocentric measure, the one you decided upon because it makes you feel better about life. We are not special, we are nature, THAT is why we should behave sensibly. Because the truth is, cut mother nature down enough and she'll wipe us off the face of our planet and barely remember we ever existed.
Special? How? How are we thus apart from nature because we are smart? Why do we need to feel special about ourselves to choose a moral path? Are you saying that human morality is simply a high and mighty way of us reaffirming how much better we are than nature?
It is possible to be both morally driven, and accepting that we are nature. In fact if you can't see how this is the way it needs to be, that people will never turn around their environmentally destructive ways so long as they see themselves as above nature, apart from it, better than it, then I find you morally bankrupt like all the others. Why do we need to feel so special about ourselves to simply do the right thing? That is the most morally corrupt view of the natural world I can think of, in a subtle way, but a very real way.
Where in your head to you figure that humans are somehow 'apart' from nature? I don't get this crap, this judeo-christian oriented narrative that humans are separate from nature and somehow 'unnatural' because we behave sort of funny. That's right I said judeo-christian.
All science to this point tells us we are not special, we are not different, we arose out of the same circumstances as all other animals. We just got lucky and figured some tricks out, slowly evolved at a more rapid rate than our cousins, until we started believing we came from a different family.
Nature exists *everywhere* you idiot, in a natural state! And the fact that humans interact with it and change it is irrelevant to whether life on earth is 'natural' or 'artificial'. All species in nature interact with each other leaving their mark, and surviving as they must within the circumstances that our rock, moon and plasma ball combo dish out.
Repeat after me: We are not special. We, the humans, are a *part* of nature just like all the other animals. Buildings, machines, bridges cars airplanes and boats are nature, just like we are, because we made them, by the laws of nature. The same laws that govern how an otter cracks a shell with a rock. Same shit man, its all the same shit.
36 orders of magnitude greater in what sense? On the quantum level, yes, but there is a relativity to that. I don't count on an extremely potent, but small rare earth magnet from a hard drive being able to hold up an automobile against the power of the earths gravity. 36 orders of magnitude greater doesn't mean much in this sense. Of course a much larger electromagnet can do this easily. You may be thinking: 'yes, exactly' But what I am saying is that the premise of '36 orders of magnitude greater than gravity' is a form of denying the antecedent. Just because electromagnetism is the dominant force on the quantum scale does not imply that electromagnetism is the dominant force on the cosmic scale, in fact I think observation suggests otherwise, this is the whole point of general relativity, which I might add began from the assumptions of electromagnetism being valid.
I'm not refuting what you have said, I honestly don't know much about astrology and find it all a bit weak given that we make only the mildest of observations from our little well in the first place. What I did notice is that you speak as though you are implying a force on the quantum scale that is 36 orders of magnitude greater than another force scales up to mean there should be 36 orders of magnitude greater effects, or at least much more. I think that is naive.
Because that doesn't sell.
I agree with you, I'd like to see the error margin in those temperature readings, but the truth is that since you are not directly measuring the temperature - it is derived from other measurements, the error is compounded. Then you have to assume we have the correct model to use to predict temperatures from ice core samples and that there isn't just something simple in the science we missed (cos you know, that barely ever happens right?) which throws them out by say quarter of a degree, or a tenth of a degree. Seems right now you could be out by one one hundredth of a degree and suddenly all the derived historical temperature readings fall into line with current measurements.
I always ask myself: what if, rather than simply having the wrong model, there is a bias in the model we use to infer historical temperature as in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_of_an_estimator
Look I'm sure the scientists involved have done the error analysis but still, uncertainty is the name of the game and this sort of extrapolation of data is considerably error prone. Engineering is what I understand, but I can tell you there's a shitload of money out there for engineering research, mostly because it is something that companies and governments see as having true measurable economic benefits, and still what we understand of the world is marginal, fudged, weighted, curve fitted, extrapolated, inferred, assumed and most certainly uncertain. We are talking about systems that are infinitely more complex than simple engineering systems, models that require thousands upon thousands of interacting variables to properly describe.
I'm not a skeptic of the evidence to suggest warming and cooling trends, past or present. But given what I know about science I am deeply skeptical of our ability to accurately model those trends and the human impact on them.
So what you mean is: other than 2, no even numbers are primes. I dunno about you but I wouldn't call just one number "the first few" ;)
So on a slightly off topic note, does that invalidate the theory of 'wormholes' for some hypothetical FTL space travel? Surely, were it possible to create a wormhole in spacetime, you could set up a perpetual motion machine that works exactly like you describe, thus violating the second law. A nice simple thought experiment, I like it.
What I want to know is this: At what point in the history of Slashdot did it become necessary to explain and defend the fundamental philosophies of science?
Seems this place has suffered along with digg when every 12 year old and their Wii were granted internet acess...?
Molten steel present.... MONTHS after the collapse? Yeah right buddy, so tell me how this complete physical anomaly that appears to defy all laws of physics confirms your crackpot theory?
The whole molten steel claim is utter tripe, based on a handful of highly questionable anecdotal reports. By the same quality of evidence we also know that the US government actually blew up the levy walls in New Orleans during Katrina, after all, people *heard* the explosions.
They call this: "clutching at straws".
"I am an engineer"
Please, please don't tell me you are a software engineer.
FWIW I'm a 3rd year Mech Eng student, also studying a second degree in mathematics.
I'm not claiming to have combed through all the evidence, but I will claim that neither have you. Why don't you trust the engineers who actually have combed through the evidence?
And I suppose you have applied the relevant scaling laws to your lego model? Please, enlighten us to the dimensionless constants which define your system?
"I have looked at everything I could find, and am still uncomfortable with any theory I have heard put forward."
And you, clearly, are not a fucking engineer so why does your armchair opinion count for more than two bars of shit?
Every day you walk out of your house, designed and built by engineers, into your car, designed and built by engineers, or onto a train or bus or plane or boat, designed and built by engineers. You LITERALLY put your life in the hands of the competence of trained professionals every... single... day... without so much as thinking about it for a second, without questioning their abilities or knowledge, and yet here at the drop of a hat you throw all that out the window because suddenly the work of engineers doesn't satisfy you?? Because the science you are not trained to understand doesn't make you "comfortable"??
Occams Razor, the observed facts are: Planes, large ones, flew into large buildings, fire ensued, buildings fell down. Your conclusion involves multiplying the evidence beyond necessity and therefore fails at the basic level of scientific theory. You make your assumptions in events that were not observed trying to debunk the events which were observed.
God I get sick of this. Same arguments again and again, 7 years now, 7 years and we are still faced with the same psuedo-scientific babble.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to summarise here. Steel does not need to be 'melted' to be weakened well beyond safety margins, and beyond its required design strength. At moderately high temperatures it is weakened significantly. Go look up a materials handbook or two. The buildings collapsed in an entirely ordinary and predictable manner, they did not 'free fall'. Structures such as that are designed to collapse pancake style, like a concertina, they do not ever topple over. Can you imagine the extreme dangers that a toppling building of say 110 stories would pose to say, half of the surrounding CBD? The bomber in the 40s was not a jumbo jet, not even remotely close, there weren't even planes that big built back then. Neither did the planes that existed in those days have the same high strength materials embedded in them as in this case. I believe the NIST report suggests that elements such as the titanium axles used in the engines caused significant structural damage to the building core in certain places.
You *are* peddling a conspiracy theory. Multiple investigations and simulations have drawn the conclusion that the buildings fell down as a result of the observed evidence: Two fucking giant jumbo jets flew into them. Occams razor my friend. And you are here jabbering on repeating the same debunked theories of a small group of complete crackpots in the face of it.
Ok, no need for the acid tongue please. You guys are proving to be really good at misconstruing just about everything I have said.
Point out to me where I have suggested we do nothing? Point out to me where I have said modeling is useless? Don't patronise me, I know full well the usefulness of advanced modeling. This does not mean we should not USE CAUTION when making predictions with computer simulations.
Furthermore, the examples you cite are not even remotely as complicated problems as modeling the behaviour of all the gasses surrounding our entire planet. All of the examples you cite involve models that can make predictions which can be directly tested in a short time period. Invariably the models are found to be lacking and are corrected as needed. With climate modeling it is a case of 50 years or more before the predictions can be tested against our models. Then they will be corrected, then another huge gap and we might start to get a clearer picture. And you want politicians to formulate policy based on this vague understanding of nature?
Either way, you have more or less proven my point. I make the mere suggestion that we err on the side of caution when using a simplified computer model to predict the behaviour of a poorly understood physical phenomenon and this invites me to be ridiculed. This is precisely the problem I have been talking about.
Of course I like models, all science is heavily dependent on them, you are missing my point. Please don't think I am saying modeling can't be trusted, hell the whole reason I am studying mathematics is so that I will have the skills to create advanced models myself.
My point is that they are to be taken with a grain of salt until they are proven to be very robust. In general right now, this is not happening in the public debate. There is a fantastic post further down pointing out that we never even discuss the actual models. Now if you believe we can accurately model the climate with our current level of advancement in mathematics, think about this: We have no model of turbulence in fluids, we have no model that will precisely tell us how fluids flow over any arbitrary body. There is no n-body solution to orbital mechanics. In fracture mechanics there is no theory that will accurately predict the behaviour of cracks in arbitrarily complex bodies without relying on computer simulation and experiment. In these rather simple and fundamental sciences we have equations, sure, but they are mostly unsolvable except for the simplest cases.
Climate models are making predictions that cannot be tested save for sitting on our hands for the next 50 years and watching. It is a difficult situation to make a judgement on but I for one will not put full faith in any model that can't be tested rigorously until it is agreeing with data to a high tolerance. It took 400 years or so of effort to get the navier-stokes equations, they describe a single differential element of a fluid, with continuum assumptions, and still there is no proof that solutions exist, they don't even work for rarefied systems. why do you think a model of the *entire planet* is an even remotely achievable task with current knowledge?
Yes we use statistics, but so do stock traders. They can't make accurate predictions yet, why on earth are climate models different?
But then you run into the problem of correlation vs causation. This is as yet the unresolved feature of the debate. Not only that but you are dismissing the potential to simply make the wrong assumptions when averaging all that data and projecting it forward. Yes, statistical modeling is useful to attempt to describe data you have collected, but no, you cannot simply project that data into the future. Future data points do not belong to the set you derived you statistical model from. In which case, unless you have an extremely robust statistical model, and last I checked we do not, or you are happy to accept the dramatic downturn in the probability that your projected data point will agree with your previous one, you are back to square one, that is to say: modeling a chaotic system.
Now if I am not mistaken, this is precisely what all those fancy, assumption laden computer models do is it not?
Thank you for this post. I am no scientist, but I am an undergrad in a dual major in Engineering/Science (mathematics), there are certain things that really trouble me about contemporary climate science. For one, there appears to be an over reliance on climate models based on broad sweeping assumptions, and an extreme exaggeration of the capacity of any given model to produce accurate results. Increasingly, the GW science seems to be violating Poppers fundamental philosophy of scientific hypothesis: The only theory worth considering is that which can be disproven. Or rather, science is not about proving as such, it is about disproving. I want to see the falsifiability of climate change theory thoroughly discussed, but it never is, nobody can challenge the models, nobody is allowed to question the methods, nobody is allowed to offer alternative to the mainstream narrative. Its a dangerous place for science to be. More and more I see GW predictions failing the falsifiability test: hot year? Earth is warming, cold year? Earth is unstable due to warming, flood: GW, everything, everything under the sun is being attributed to GW.
The 'consensus' worries me also, moreso in fact. There is rarely consensus in science, especially when dealing with fundamentally complex, non-linear dynamical systems which are proven to be inherently chaotic. Even when a theory is sound and mature, the most important consideration is that you are making predictions by using a model, an inherently and unavoidably flawed model. It is always, always important to cite assumptions and errors when making predictions with any model. But if you question the validity of current climate modelling, you are branded a heretic, a denier, and the worst of all: a skeptic. As if being a skeptic in science is suddenly the wrong thing to do? What happened?
All scientists are skeptics, a scientist without skepticism is no scientist, he is a fool. Worse still believing that computer models are completely trustworthy is like believing your lego starship enterprise will fly you to the moon.
I am not a denier, but I am certainly skeptical. I am certainly open to hypotheses, theories, models and all manner of explanations for given data sets, observations etc. But I am deeply troubled by the way discussion and debate about something as highly chaotic and poorly understood as the climate is shut down so vigorously these days. Worse still, the politicians and economists are on board. I can't help but be just a tad aware that politicians will leap on any populist position and economists are always hungry for new derivatives markets.
Of course it is entirely possible, and common (as in more often the case than not) for completely well defined, well described deterministic systems to be utterly unpredictable. Its called chaos. Even with sufficient information you cannot always make predictions about the future state of certain nonlinear dynamical systems.