All that the new paper does is provide a non-life based explanation for the "fossils" on the meteorite. At some point, the complexity of crafting ever more clever and obtuse explanations for an inorganic origins of a system outweighs the obvious conclusion that one is looking at a fossil. The logic being used here is ultimately circular. That, life doesn't exist elsewhere off of earth, so therefor, this non-life based explanation must be more valid.
This is not science, this is religion.
If someone found a footprint and a bone next to it with some sort of a bow and arrow on Mars, you would have scientists trying to argue against it, simply because they don't want to believe in the unsettling notion of life on other worlds. There would be papers explaining how peculiar air currents and dust devils and landslides conspired to produce a foot print, the bone is really a certain kind of deposit, and the bow and arrow the result of some sudden unfreezing of carbon dioxide on some random day.
You can't call a paper scientific when it tries to arrange facts ever so obtusely against the obvious.
Occam's razor applies. Sometimes a fossil, is just that, a fossil!
And start a total national race among other nations to try and get their and stake their claims. Then, claim Mars, and repeat. You'll never get to space if no one can own it.
"Hi, I made Lotus Notes, can you make me the Architect of Microsoft".
"Why yes!"
I don't mean to rail on anything, but I don't believe there has ever been a time in recorded history when Lotus Notes was either good, or cool. Notes has always been a lame forms engine talking to a junky database and the end result is a ridiculous compromise. Sure, the vision had some elegance on it, on some level, if you believe that organizations just love to sit around and make up forms. The end result is that Notes is just a junky email client with a bunch of lame database and forms stuff that no one uses.
The USAF dropped two 500lb bombs on Zarqawi's house. Even if you were to make the extremely conservative assumption that 1000lb of today's munitions is equivalent to 1000lbs of TNT, you would have to say that Zarqawi was killed by a pro-rated NASA estimate of 17 billion / 4 tons *.5 tons = 2.125 billion joules on one man's head. That is bad ass!
The grid regulator, such as PJM, even in a privatized structure, can order generators to be brought online in order to bring spot power prices down to a manageable level.
If you want to go a little further down, Abraham Lincoln publicly stated that he had no intrest in slavery either way, it was none of his business. He engaged int eh civil war to hold together the Union and nothing else. His later decision to emancipate the slaves in the area under martial law was commendable, but it wasn't part of his agenda,
That's an interesting way of looking at things, but a few facts lend itself to a different interpretation. First off, the Republican Party was an abolitionist party. It was founded to be abolitionist. Lincoln could not have been possibly been nomimated as a Presidential candidate if he wasn't abolitionist. It would be as absurd as Democrats nominating someone who was pro-life or Republicans pro-choice, it just is not going to happen.
Furthermore, Lincoln had plenty of quotes against Slavery:
"The institution of slavery is founded upon both injustice and bad policy" 1837 "I have always hated slavery" 1858 "I believe the declaration that all men are created equal is the great fundamental principal" 1858 "Those who deny freedom to others, do not deserve it for themselves" 1859
So, basically, from the beginning of his career, all the way up to and including the civil war, which included being the first Presidential Candidate by an abolitionist party, Lincoln was anti-slavery.
Lincoln's civil war spin about 'preserving the union' was, well, a lie. The civil war was always about slavery. Lincoln lied to the American People about why the civil war was being fought, and he pretty much did it for his own religious beliefs. He overruled his generals, he alienated Europe, and in fact, at the height the war, one of his ex-generals actually ran for President against him, and it was only a set of victories for the Union that handed Lincoln his re-election. Fancy that. The one thing I don't get about Lincoln, is why he made his disasterous choice of Vice President.
I'm surprised you're surprised. Have you ever used his company's products?
Ok, let's check this.
Linux vs Windows. Linux is better in a lot of ways, but, the edge still goes to Windows. Windows has always had better font handling, Direct X has way more features than OpenGL implementations, and drivers, to boot. Windows has native kernel queues, Linux doesn't. Windows has a native 16 bit unicode implementation, and Linux doesn't. Finally, Windows has a single desktop, with a single clipboard, and on Linux you have stupid politics such that my Gnome apps such as Evolution don't mind the KDE desktop settings and vice versa. Or, cut and paste randomly works on either. One huge advantage for Linux is that it is a better 64 bit platform, but, with Linux people telling everyone that they don't need 64 bits, the one advantage that they have, they piss away. But, then we have to talk about how Windows has a single COM object model that is pervasive, which Linux doesn't have (oh we got two of those, and get this, one of those is based on a ripoff "Mono", of C#. And where's Linux's own native protocol for file and print sharing? The one that Linux uses, Samba, is a ripoff of Windows Networking.
Office vs ???. MS Office is better than Open Office. It just is. In fact, Open Office hasn't even really caught up to Office 2000, and, its 2006.
IE vs ???. Firefox is better than IE, although I think the tabs are overrated. Haven't tried Opera in a while, but the ads annoy me.
Exchange vs ???
SQL Server vs MySQL. Hands down, SQL Server.
SQL Server vs *Gress. Hands down, SQL Server.
Visual Studio vs KDevelop. For C++, I think KDevelop is -almost- as good, but, I do like Visual Studio's debugger a lot better. And, there is NOT a Java, Python, or any other alternative language product that has an environment as good as that for Visual C# or a GUI as a good as Winforms 2.0. Back in the C++ realm yet, do they even have grid controls on Linux yet? Data binding?
Age of Empires vs ????. Better RTG than Rise of Nations?
XBox 360 vs Sony ???, oh wait, Playstation 3 isn't even out yet. Someday.. Sigh.
On the other hand, there are areas where MS continues to trail or lose:
iPod vs ??? what MS thing?
Natural Keyboard vs Logitech? Logitech is still better.
For example, if you kept leaking keys and established their credibility, you could start making up keys about high value targets coming to Afghanistan in order to draw out insurgents. For example, you could leak a key saying Rumsfeld will be at Bagram in July, will do a one day road tour, along this road, and let the insurgents come out in numbers and pay them back with cluster munitions.
On the other hand, solar has already surpassed nuclear for power generation, although maybe that's just in the US or something, not sure if it's a worldwide statistic or not, and wind is well on its way
Solar power is not even close to passing nuclear for power generation, and neither is wind.
It is absolutely meaningless to contemplate any feasible fuel alternative to gasoline as anything other than an energy transport mechanism, if you want it to be renewable. By very definition, you can't get more energy out of a system than is put in. Our fossil fuels represent millions of years of stored solar power, for example, and we just don't have millions of years to let potential fuels develop.
So.. for hydrogen as fuel, there's going to be more energy consumed in its making, than would be available to be extracted by the car. And, there are many studies that indicate that ethanol has a similar problem.
The only near term way either works is either by using coal plants or nuclear plants to produce it. Thus far, nuclear seems to be the preferred alternative, because, even if you take into account a periodic chernobyl sized disaster, nuclear power remains safer than fossil fuels when you correctly factor in the true costs of fossil fuels - greenhouse gasses, their own radioactive releases, mercury, etc. Natural gas is not an option, because, we are running out of that too. So really, to understand the cars of the future, you can't ask how the economics work versus gasoline, you have to ask, how do the economics work with other energy transport mechanisms, such as batteries, and have to accept that our energy portfolio needs to be nuclear, unless, barring some minor miracle, ITER actually works and we can start building fusion plants down the road.
What I'm really calling for is a climate wikki. Scientists would enter zones that they did research on, and fill in a form indicating the inputs to that zone of various chemicals, such as CO2, and the outputs, such as, well CO2. Determing how zones interacted is important, but, right now, just getting a basically tally of the zones of the earth, in a consistent format, seems like it would be exceedingly useful, in particular, for those that want to build data driven climate models with the latest experimentally verified data. I would like to, for example, be able to have a chart of the earth, click on a pixel, and say, here's how you get the CO2 output for the zone. If I clicked on the ocean, the instructions might be, take a bucket, put in water, put into CO2 machine, but of course, introduce all the complications of samples at various altitudes and depths.
That's the real problem of global warming arguments. I would like to assemble a Bill of Materials of Carbon Dioxide Uptake and Production for the planet. On each item on this bill, I would like to have the experiment that establishes CO2 levels, step by step, so that anyone could do it, assuming that they have access to high sky rockets, ocean research vessels, submarines, 3km drill heads, or even portable gas spectrometers. Then, I could tally up, quite easily, all the sources of carbon dioxide, and see that a comprehensive case has been made. But, until that time, I think all we really have in the academic community is a bunch of fundraising baby birds all chirping for some funds.
Despite the shrill hype, there remains no reason to believe any part of the global warming debate. The science that there is scattered, and the producers of that science, given their political affiliations, are wide open to ad-hominen attack. To rephrase slightly, I, as a skeptic, have no way of assessing the completeness with which the earth has been measured, and, that only undermines those claims.
There is much discussion of a "mountain of scientific evidence", but where is it actually? To actually build a complete picture of global warming requires a fair amount of research in and of itself, and, even worse, most of the papers on global warming are being published in journals whose subscriptions run thousands of dollars of year. It is no wonder that someone might be skeptical about global warming, simply because you have to pay so much to see the "proof". I went to try and find out, for example, what the CO2 emissions from the midatlantic ridge are. Are there any? What's the proof, what experiment did they do? What about gigantic limestone formations? Anything there? What's the impact of Mt. Everest on the climate? Any papers? Or what is the CO2 consumption per acre of a tropical rain forest, or of a North American forest? Or a superhighway? Finding any of this information is impossible and the best Google gives you is a bunch of fanboy environmental sites that make statements as to each but often have no indications as to how they were measured. The information is simply not there, and, that, more than anything else, leads me to believe that so much of global warming is not only made up, its being made up by people with a vested interest in screwing my life up and wrecking the United States.
Unfortunately, I think the perception of political bias in the scientific community cannot be overcome at all, because it is partially true, and, any global warming policy is going to be the result of an intensive power struggle. However, the notion of science in global warming can be overcome by a brute force gathering of all of the global warming measurements into a single, giant project plan that is organized in a format that is believable, reproducable, in a standardized, McFormat, and is properly edited to separate speculation of the scientist from the actual experimental results.
Specifically, the earth needs to be divided up into hundreds of climate zones, if not thousands, and the results of those zones must be placed online, and in a consistent format. Each zone would have with it a characterization of the zone's gross chemistry, steps to establish CO2 content, and, what other zones that CO2 propogates into. Each zone, in other words, will have the total CO2 emitted or consumed, per a standardized unit of measure, say, cubic miles for atmosphere, square miles for various surface types, and some sort of a square mile by a rectangular depth range for both ocean and ground. In the cases of the ocean, the sea might be divided into 300 meter depths, and the same for the atmosphere. Finally, the frequency with which each zone occurs should be identified, and a total made. Thus, we could exactly know that, yes, the superhighway zones are producing xyz tons of CO2 per year, because here's the calculated emissions based on gasoline consumed, and furthermore, there are no other hidden zones producing CO2.
The point is ultimately that global warming is NOT a human CO2 production problem, it is a planetwide CO2 management problem. The goal is to balance the CO2 in the atmosphere to a level that is geopolitically advantageous to the United States and her allies, however, we cannot do that without an understanding as to how to do that. It might turn out, for example, that there's some goofy thing going on on the bottom of the ocean, in the midatlantic ridge, in a bacteria living in rocks a mile underground, that we simply do not know about, and efforts to control the climate by reducing CO2 production are a waste of time. I think what we really need to learn is to how to sink CO2 better, and, understanding how CO2 works, planet wide, and in a consistent way, provides the best overall tool for policy makers, skeptics, and advocates, to understand climate management on the same page.
Do we have any way of knowing how long Venus has been a runaway greenhouse? (That phrase, by the way, invokes a really bizarre mental image... )
Almost from the get go. From what I've read, Venus has simply way, way too much Carbon Dioxide. Carl Sagan's romantic plan of seeding Venus with bacteria to eat up the CO2 simply fails because there is way too much CO2. To get Venus straightened out for human habitation, you would have flat out get rid of something like 89 parts out of 90 in the Venutian atmosphere, and there's really no place to put that much air. There've been some proposals to freeze it into giant CO2 chunks and launch them into space, or, slam some kind of an asteroid or even planet into Venus to jack the air into space, but both are so far beyond our technology as to be unimaginable. There's also not enough of other gasses in Venus's atmosphere - you really need a lot of nitrogen or something like it, like, well, the Earth has.
Then again, the Earth has an aweful of lot of Carbon Dioxide in the oceans and the limestone.... maybe we could all be doomed.
Is it conceivable that the climate there went haywire within human history? Given the current pressure, temperature, and chemical composition of the atmosphere on Venus, is there any chance that any indications at all could have survived of a possible former ecosystem there?
Well, there's one famous Internet crackpot that swears he sees Zeppelins on Venus and there are people there...and NASA is covering it up. But, outside of that, I think Venus has always been dead. Venus has a lot of problems even besides the grueling atmosphere. It has a long rotational period and lacks a magnetosphere.
As far as the earth goes, the most spectacular environment catastrophe posited is Snowball Earth. Basically, the entire Earth was frozen over with a sheet of ice two miles thick, everything died and there was no oxygen in the atmosphere, for a period of a few hundred million years. It was a rough time, but, ironically, the Earth was saved by an accumulation of 350 times our present level of CO2.
What's really interesting about Earth's past is that the atmospheric composition has varied rather wildly. It is not at all automatic that we have 78% nitrogen, 20% oxygen and then some other gasses. I have no idea how they infer atmosphere, but it must have something to do with chemicals found in rocks and knowledge of how those chemicals must have been made, coupled with radioactive dating. Incidentally, the overall portion of CO2 in the air is rather small, something like 0.04% (and going up). For all the talk about whether the CO2 is manmade or not, or whether it causes global warming, some facts are most certainly known. First, the CO2 level has doubled in a 100 years, and when a planet wide change happens that fast, you really do have to have cause for concern. All sorts of questions need to be asked, but the big one is, is the rate of doubling changing? Like, will we double it again in 50 years, then 25 again, and so on? I think we only need to double the atmosphere not too many times before we all die.
Unless Republican is synonymous with "historian" or "logician" I'll have to take that with a gargle of salt.:)
Actually it was meant as sort of a joke. A lot of lefties around here assume Republicans and Nazis are the same and I thought it entertaining to make some humor of it for a change.
As far as the history goes, I used to be avidly interested in World War II and how the Nazis came to pass, and I don't recall a source for Hitler having an epiphany by reading Martin Luther. I don't seek to defend protestantism, but, for the historical accuracy, I do believe that Hitler seems to have formed his mission at a young age - he speaks of being caught up with Wagnerian Operas and had already identified with being a historic figure as a child. When World War I broke out, Hitler was more than delighted to volunteer and go. With that said, the region was already violently anti-semetic even at the turn of the 20th century, if not earlier than that. You almost don't need a dramatic moment to make a Hitler out of that batch. You just need a grandiose kid, permissive recognition that a particular minority is a problem, and boom, you got yourself a Hitler.
The question is, how pervasive and how deep is that general labelling of a minority as a problem is necessary? Right now if you walked into a bar, in the USA, and said that, "I think we should pull all the troops out of the middle east and just nuke all billion of them", a lot of people would agree with you, but I still don't think we're not at the cattle car point yet - the Germans during their Nazi heyday would see things like Abu Ghraib as harmless entertainment by rightful exploitation of an evil but weaker race. But, left unchecked and for a few decades more, who knows, maybe a genocidal war against the middle east of the sort that Hitler waged against Poland and then Russia is not out of reach for the United States.
I have to say that I agree that X is way too big. For all of its other knocks, Windows actually has had a history of running on hardware the Unix refused to venture on until the early 1990s. I ran Windows 3.1, for all of its faults, on 386SX with 1 Mb of RAM, and it actually worked pretty well. Mind you, that was a 25Mhz chip! Or was it only 16Mhz? Of course, my Amiga had a destkop that ran fairly well 1Mb of RAM, but the Amiga's windowing engine did not have font system anywhere near as good as Microsoft's True Type...Unix wasn't really an option until PC's started to become more like workstations in their memory, speed, and CPU throughput.
If there were a God, the only kind I can possibly imagine would reward the former, not the latter.
God really is a bloodthirsty volcano god of doom! In which case, he's going to reward whoever screws with people the most to make Universe 1.0 the most entertaining screen saver ever!
Bingo. Rockefeller fixed prices, had thugs blow up rival refining operations, and generally ruined the lives of anyone that would not sell out to him, and Carnegie had his private army of Pinkertons gun down a bunch of people trying to unionize, but, they also funded the universities and academic institutions that would cause America to become the industrial power that it once was.
You don't need evidence to demonstrate that the godless can be bad people. We're just people, after all, not some radically different form of life
I agree to disagree with your historical assesment as to the meanings of Nazism, but, since I'm a Republican you'll have to trust that I'm more familiar with it.
In all seriousness, there's that aspect of liberalism that believes that if we eliminate God from the social discourse, humanity will improve. There's a lot of people of that John Lennon ilk "Imagine there's no religion", that believe that if we could deconstruct every existing social institution we could have new world order where everyone would love each other. And me, I just think that will give us some new thing to have wars about. Of course, in saying that, that doesn't mean that there's not aspects of conservatism that are equally stupid. Intelligent design comes to mind... I mean, what takes more of God's brains, designing a plant leaf by itself, or, designing an entire unwinding mechanism of physics and chemistry so that plants and animals and man would arise as a part of a majesty of his will. It's almost like to argue ID is to say that God is too stupid to design an evolutionary process or too vain to give Man free will upon the Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
All that the new paper does is provide a non-life based explanation for the "fossils" on the meteorite. At some point, the complexity of crafting ever more clever and obtuse explanations for an inorganic origins of a system outweighs the obvious conclusion that one is looking at a fossil. The logic being used here is ultimately circular. That, life doesn't exist elsewhere off of earth, so therefor, this non-life based explanation must be more valid.
This is not science, this is religion.
If someone found a footprint and a bone next to it with some sort of a bow and arrow on Mars, you would have scientists trying to argue against it, simply because they don't want to believe in the unsettling notion of life on other worlds. There would be papers explaining how peculiar air currents and dust devils and landslides conspired to produce a foot print, the bone is really a certain kind of deposit, and the bow and arrow the result of some sudden unfreezing of carbon dioxide on some random day.
You can't call a paper scientific when it tries to arrange facts ever so obtusely against the obvious.
Occam's razor applies. Sometimes a fossil, is just that, a fossil!
And start a total national race among other nations to try and get their and stake their claims. Then, claim Mars, and repeat. You'll never get to space if no one can own it.
"Hi, I made Lotus Notes, can you make me the Architect of Microsoft".
"Why yes!"
I don't mean to rail on anything, but I don't believe there has ever been a time in recorded history when Lotus Notes was either good, or cool. Notes has always been a lame forms engine talking to a junky database and the end result is a ridiculous compromise. Sure, the vision had some elegance on it, on some level, if you believe that organizations just love to sit around and make up forms. The end result is that Notes is just a junky email client with a bunch of lame database and forms stuff that no one uses.
The USAF dropped two 500lb bombs on Zarqawi's house. Even if you were to make the extremely conservative assumption that 1000lb of today's munitions is equivalent to 1000lbs of TNT, you would have to say that Zarqawi was killed by a pro-rated NASA estimate of 17 billion / 4 tons * .5 tons = 2.125 billion joules on one man's head. That is bad ass!
Zarqawi Getting Blasted Video
Listen up pilgrim, we have the right to call ourselves Americans because everyone on our continent wants to be one!
Stork replied to:
>For that matter when has MS ever been innovative
Microsoft Access was very innovative, compared to the likes of dBase IV or others.
The grid regulator, such as PJM, even in a privatized structure, can order generators to be brought online in order to bring spot power prices down to a manageable level.
If you want to go a little further down, Abraham Lincoln publicly stated that he had no intrest in slavery either way, it was none of his business. He engaged int eh civil war to hold together the Union and nothing else. His later decision to emancipate the slaves in the area under martial law was commendable, but it wasn't part of his agenda,
That's an interesting way of looking at things, but a few facts lend itself to a different interpretation. First off, the Republican Party was an abolitionist party. It was founded to be abolitionist. Lincoln could not have been possibly been nomimated as a Presidential candidate if he wasn't abolitionist. It would be as absurd as Democrats nominating someone who was pro-life or Republicans pro-choice, it just is not going to happen.
Furthermore, Lincoln had plenty of quotes against Slavery:
http://www.nps.gov/liho/slavery/al01.htm
"The institution of slavery is founded upon both injustice and bad policy" 1837
"I have always hated slavery" 1858
"I believe the declaration that all men are created equal is the great fundamental principal" 1858
"Those who deny freedom to others, do not deserve it for themselves" 1859
So, basically, from the beginning of his career, all the way up to and including the civil war, which included being the first Presidential Candidate by an abolitionist party, Lincoln was anti-slavery.
Lincoln's civil war spin about 'preserving the union' was, well, a lie. The civil war was always about slavery. Lincoln lied to the American People about why the civil war was being fought, and he pretty much did it for his own religious beliefs. He overruled his generals, he alienated Europe, and in fact, at the height the war, one of his ex-generals actually ran for President against him, and it was only a set of victories for the Union that handed Lincoln his re-election. Fancy that. The one thing I don't get about Lincoln, is why he made his disasterous choice of Vice President.
If Linux did have more features than Windows, you would be bragging about it, no? I would.
You most certainly can't own Linux. GPL, is, after all General Public LICENSE.
I'm surprised you're surprised. Have you ever used his company's products?
Ok, let's check this.
Linux vs Windows. Linux is better in a lot of ways, but, the edge still goes to Windows. Windows has always had better font handling, Direct X has way more features than OpenGL implementations, and drivers, to boot. Windows has native kernel queues, Linux doesn't. Windows has a native 16 bit unicode implementation, and Linux doesn't. Finally, Windows has a single desktop, with a single clipboard, and on Linux you have stupid politics such that my Gnome apps such as Evolution don't mind the KDE desktop settings and vice versa. Or, cut and paste randomly works on either. One huge advantage for Linux is that it is a better 64 bit platform, but, with Linux people telling everyone that they don't need 64 bits, the one advantage that they have, they piss away. But, then we have to talk about how Windows has a single COM object model that is pervasive, which Linux doesn't have (oh we got two of those, and get this, one of those is based on a ripoff "Mono", of C#. And where's Linux's own native protocol for file and print sharing? The one that Linux uses, Samba, is a ripoff of Windows Networking.
Office vs ???. MS Office is better than Open Office. It just is. In fact, Open Office hasn't even really caught up to Office 2000, and, its 2006.
IE vs ???. Firefox is better than IE, although I think the tabs are overrated. Haven't tried Opera in a while, but the ads annoy me.
Exchange vs ???
SQL Server vs MySQL. Hands down, SQL Server.
SQL Server vs *Gress. Hands down, SQL Server.
Visual Studio vs KDevelop. For C++, I think KDevelop is -almost- as good, but, I do like Visual Studio's debugger a lot better. And, there is NOT a Java, Python, or any other alternative language product that has an environment as good as that for Visual C# or a GUI as a good as Winforms 2.0. Back in the C++ realm yet, do they even have grid controls on Linux yet? Data binding?
Age of Empires vs ????. Better RTG than Rise of Nations?
XBox 360 vs Sony ???, oh wait, Playstation 3 isn't even out yet. Someday.. Sigh.
On the other hand, there are areas where MS continues to trail or lose:
iPod vs ??? what MS thing?
Natural Keyboard vs Logitech? Logitech is still better.
Oracle vs SQL Server? Oracle, hands down.
OS/X vs Windows XP... I gotta say OS/X.
For example, if you kept leaking keys and established their credibility, you could start making up keys about high value targets coming to Afghanistan in order to draw out insurgents. For example, you could leak a key saying Rumsfeld will be at Bagram in July, will do a one day road tour, along this road, and let the insurgents come out in numbers and pay them back with cluster munitions.
On the other hand, solar has already surpassed nuclear for power generation, although maybe that's just in the US or something, not sure if it's a worldwide statistic or not, and wind is well on its way
Solar power is not even close to passing nuclear for power generation, and neither is wind.
It is absolutely meaningless to contemplate any feasible fuel alternative to gasoline as anything other than an energy transport mechanism, if you want it to be renewable. By very definition, you can't get more energy out of a system than is put in. Our fossil fuels represent millions of years of stored solar power, for example, and we just don't have millions of years to let potential fuels develop.
So.. for hydrogen as fuel, there's going to be more energy consumed in its making, than would be available to be extracted by the car. And, there are many studies that indicate that ethanol has a similar problem.
The only near term way either works is either by using coal plants or nuclear plants to produce it. Thus far, nuclear seems to be the preferred alternative, because, even if you take into account a periodic chernobyl sized disaster, nuclear power remains safer than fossil fuels when you correctly factor in the true costs of fossil fuels - greenhouse gasses, their own radioactive releases, mercury, etc. Natural gas is not an option, because, we are running out of that too. So really, to understand the cars of the future, you can't ask how the economics work versus gasoline, you have to ask, how do the economics work with other energy transport mechanisms, such as batteries, and have to accept that our energy portfolio needs to be nuclear, unless, barring some minor miracle, ITER actually works and we can start building fusion plants down the road.
What I'm really calling for is a climate wikki. Scientists would enter zones that they did research on, and fill in a form indicating the inputs to that zone of various chemicals, such as CO2, and the outputs, such as, well CO2. Determing how zones interacted is important, but, right now, just getting a basically tally of the zones of the earth, in a consistent format, seems like it would be exceedingly useful, in particular, for those that want to build data driven climate models with the latest experimentally verified data. I would like to, for example, be able to have a chart of the earth, click on a pixel, and say, here's how you get the CO2 output for the zone. If I clicked on the ocean, the instructions might be, take a bucket, put in water, put into CO2 machine, but of course, introduce all the complications of samples at various altitudes and depths.
That's the real problem of global warming arguments. I would like to assemble a Bill of Materials of Carbon Dioxide Uptake and Production for the planet. On each item on this bill, I would like to have the experiment that establishes CO2 levels, step by step, so that anyone could do it, assuming that they have access to high sky rockets, ocean research vessels, submarines, 3km drill heads, or even portable gas spectrometers. Then, I could tally up, quite easily, all the sources of carbon dioxide, and see that a comprehensive case has been made. But, until that time, I think all we really have in the academic community is a bunch of fundraising baby birds all chirping for some funds.
Despite the shrill hype, there remains no reason to believe any part of the global warming debate. The science that there is scattered, and the producers of that science, given their political affiliations, are wide open to ad-hominen attack. To rephrase slightly, I, as a skeptic, have no way of assessing the completeness with which the earth has been measured, and, that only undermines those claims.
There is much discussion of a "mountain of scientific evidence", but where is it actually? To actually build a complete picture of global warming requires a fair amount of research in and of itself, and, even worse, most of the papers on global warming are being published in journals whose subscriptions run thousands of dollars of year. It is no wonder that someone might be skeptical about global warming, simply because you have to pay so much to see the "proof". I went to try and find out, for example, what the CO2 emissions from the midatlantic ridge are. Are there any? What's the proof, what experiment did they do? What about gigantic limestone formations? Anything there? What's the impact of Mt. Everest on the climate? Any papers? Or what is the CO2 consumption per acre of a tropical rain forest, or of a North American forest? Or a superhighway? Finding any of this information is impossible and the best Google gives you is a bunch of fanboy environmental sites that make statements as to each but often have no indications as to how they were measured. The information is simply not there, and, that, more than anything else, leads me to believe that so much of global warming is not only made up, its being made up by people with a vested interest in screwing my life up and wrecking the United States.
Unfortunately, I think the perception of political bias in the scientific community cannot be overcome at all, because it is partially true, and, any global warming policy is going to be the result of an intensive power struggle. However, the notion of science in global warming can be overcome by a brute force gathering of all of the global warming measurements into a single, giant project plan that is organized in a format that is believable, reproducable, in a standardized, McFormat, and is properly edited to separate speculation of the scientist from the actual experimental results.
Specifically, the earth needs to be divided up into hundreds of climate zones, if not thousands, and the results of those zones must be placed online, and in a consistent format. Each zone would have with it a characterization of the zone's gross chemistry, steps to establish CO2 content, and, what other zones that CO2 propogates into. Each zone, in other words, will have the total CO2 emitted or consumed, per a standardized unit of measure, say, cubic miles for atmosphere, square miles for various surface types, and some sort of a square mile by a rectangular depth range for both ocean and ground. In the cases of the ocean, the sea might be divided into 300 meter depths, and the same for the atmosphere. Finally, the frequency with which each zone occurs should be identified, and a total made. Thus, we could exactly know that, yes, the superhighway zones are producing xyz tons of CO2 per year, because here's the calculated emissions based on gasoline consumed, and furthermore, there are no other hidden zones producing CO2.
The point is ultimately that global warming is NOT a human CO2 production problem, it is a planetwide CO2 management problem. The goal is to balance the CO2 in the atmosphere to a level that is geopolitically advantageous to the United States and her allies, however, we cannot do that without an understanding as to how to do that. It might turn out, for example, that there's some goofy thing going on on the bottom of the ocean, in the midatlantic ridge, in a bacteria living in rocks a mile underground, that we simply do not know about, and efforts to control the climate by reducing CO2 production are a waste of time. I think what we really need to learn is to how to sink CO2 better, and, understanding how CO2 works, planet wide, and in a consistent way, provides the best overall tool for policy makers, skeptics, and advocates, to understand climate management on the same page.
Do we have any way of knowing how long Venus has been a runaway greenhouse? (That phrase, by the way, invokes a really bizarre mental image ... )
Almost from the get go. From what I've read, Venus has simply way, way too much Carbon Dioxide. Carl Sagan's romantic plan of seeding Venus with bacteria to eat up the CO2 simply fails because there is way too much CO2. To get Venus straightened out for human habitation, you would have flat out get rid of something like 89 parts out of 90 in the Venutian atmosphere, and there's really no place to put that much air. There've been some proposals to freeze it into giant CO2 chunks and launch them into space, or, slam some kind of an asteroid or even planet into Venus to jack the air into space, but both are so far beyond our technology as to be unimaginable. There's also not enough of other gasses in Venus's atmosphere - you really need a lot of nitrogen or something like it, like, well, the Earth has.
Then again, the Earth has an aweful of lot of Carbon Dioxide in the oceans and the limestone.... maybe we could all be doomed.
Is it conceivable that the climate there went haywire within human history? Given the current pressure, temperature, and chemical composition of the atmosphere on Venus, is there any chance that any indications at all could have survived of a possible former ecosystem there?
Well, there's one famous Internet crackpot that swears he sees Zeppelins on Venus and there are people there...and NASA is covering it up. But, outside of that, I think Venus has always been dead. Venus has a lot of problems even besides the grueling atmosphere. It has a long rotational period and lacks a magnetosphere.
As far as the earth goes, the most spectacular environment catastrophe posited is Snowball Earth. Basically, the entire Earth was frozen over with a sheet of ice two miles thick, everything died and there was no oxygen in the atmosphere, for a period of a few hundred million years. It was a rough time, but, ironically, the Earth was saved by an accumulation of 350 times our present level of CO2.
What's really interesting about Earth's past is that the atmospheric composition has varied rather wildly. It is not at all automatic that we have 78% nitrogen, 20% oxygen and then some other gasses. I have no idea how they infer atmosphere, but it must have something to do with chemicals found in rocks and knowledge of how those chemicals must have been made, coupled with radioactive dating. Incidentally, the overall portion of CO2 in the air is rather small, something like 0.04% (and going up). For all the talk about whether the CO2 is manmade or not, or whether it causes global warming, some facts are most certainly known. First, the CO2 level has doubled in a 100 years, and when a planet wide change happens that fast, you really do have to have cause for concern. All sorts of questions need to be asked, but the big one is, is the rate of doubling changing? Like, will we double it again in 50 years, then 25 again, and so on? I think we only need to double the atmosphere not too many times before we all die.
Unless Republican is synonymous with "historian" or "logician" I'll have to take that with a gargle of salt. :)
Actually it was meant as sort of a joke. A lot of lefties around here assume Republicans and Nazis are the same and I thought it entertaining to make some humor of it for a change.
As far as the history goes, I used to be avidly interested in World War II and how the Nazis came to pass, and I don't recall a source for Hitler having an epiphany by reading Martin Luther. I don't seek to defend protestantism, but, for the historical accuracy, I do believe that Hitler seems to have formed his mission at a young age - he speaks of being caught up with Wagnerian Operas and had already identified with being a historic figure as a child. When World War I broke out, Hitler was more than delighted to volunteer and go. With that said, the region was already violently anti-semetic even at the turn of the 20th century, if not earlier than that. You almost don't need a dramatic moment to make a Hitler out of that batch. You just need a grandiose kid, permissive recognition that a particular minority is a problem, and boom, you got yourself a Hitler.
The question is, how pervasive and how deep is that general labelling of a minority as a problem is necessary? Right now if you walked into a bar, in the USA, and said that, "I think we should pull all the troops out of the middle east and just nuke all billion of them", a lot of people would agree with you, but I still don't think we're not at the cattle car point yet - the Germans during their Nazi heyday would see things like Abu Ghraib as harmless entertainment by rightful exploitation of an evil but weaker race. But, left unchecked and for a few decades more, who knows, maybe a genocidal war against the middle east of the sort that Hitler waged against Poland and then Russia is not out of reach for the United States.
I agree with the rest of your post completely.
I have to say that I agree that X is way too big. For all of its other knocks, Windows actually has had a history of running on hardware the Unix refused to venture on until the early 1990s. I ran Windows 3.1, for all of its faults, on 386SX with 1 Mb of RAM, and it actually worked pretty well. Mind you, that was a 25Mhz chip! Or was it only 16Mhz? Of course, my Amiga had a destkop that ran fairly well 1Mb of RAM, but the Amiga's windowing engine did not have font system anywhere near as good as Microsoft's True Type...Unix wasn't really an option until PC's started to become more like workstations in their memory, speed, and CPU throughput.
Come on, you had this guy getting chased by this "nano-cloud". I read that and I was immediately reminded of 50's era atomic test monster movies.
If there were a God, the only kind I can possibly imagine would reward the former, not the latter.
God really is a bloodthirsty volcano god of doom! In which case, he's going to reward whoever screws with people the most to make Universe 1.0 the most entertaining screen saver ever!
Carnegies and the Rockafellers
Bingo. Rockefeller fixed prices, had thugs blow up rival refining operations, and generally ruined the lives of anyone that would not sell out to him, and Carnegie had his private army of Pinkertons gun down a bunch of people trying to unionize, but, they also funded the universities and academic institutions that would cause America to become the industrial power that it once was.
Sun exhorts people to make clockless chips
You don't need evidence to demonstrate that the godless can be bad people. We're just people, after all, not some radically different form of life
I agree to disagree with your historical assesment as to the meanings of Nazism, but, since I'm a Republican you'll have to trust that I'm more familiar with it.
In all seriousness, there's that aspect of liberalism that believes that if we eliminate God from the social discourse, humanity will improve. There's a lot of people of that John Lennon ilk "Imagine there's no religion", that believe that if we could deconstruct every existing social institution we could have new world order where everyone would love each other. And me, I just think that will give us some new thing to have wars about. Of course, in saying that, that doesn't mean that there's not aspects of conservatism that are equally stupid. Intelligent design comes to mind... I mean, what takes more of God's brains, designing a plant leaf by itself, or, designing an entire unwinding mechanism of physics and chemistry so that plants and animals and man would arise as a part of a majesty of his will. It's almost like to argue ID is to say that God is too stupid to design an evolutionary process or too vain to give Man free will upon the Earth.