Sounds like the best solution to the problem may be a disposal deposit for things like fluorescents tubes and batteries, just as we have for glass bottles and car batteries. Sure, it doesn't solve every problem (I have had a car battery sitting in my garage *for ever* because it wasn't worth my time to get the $8 or whatever the core deposit was back). Done properly, it may be possible for some enterprising soul to make it work.
In that vein, wouldn't it also make more sense just to put a hefty tax on the incandescents rather than ban them outright? Bans like that are awfully tough to enforce, and you need a million exceptions as other posters have noted. Just make it expensive. Most people who don't need them will stop using them. The people who do will find it worthwhile to pay a few bucks more. There's very little overhead enforcement cost, and the tax money can be spent on making it easier/cheaper/more environmentally friendly to dispose of CFL bulbs.
I don't know about the rest of California, but it's already illegal to throw fluorescent lamps in the trash in my county. They have to be disposed of at special locations along with electronic waste and batteries for the very reason you state.
That's another interesting point. I can't quite figure out what the love fest over Obama is all about. He's clearly a bright guy and a good speaker, but that can be said of any number of people. He's not some brilliant elder statesman with a long history of successes. He's apparently just a likable guy who has the charisma to propel himself forward. I'm a registered Democrat (oh, the shame), and I'd love to see the party field a palatable candidate, but I'm not nearly moved enough to jump on the Obama bandwagon.
Then there's Hillary Clinton, who seems to have nothing going for her at all aside from name recognition and political savvy. On the one hand, she clearly appears to stand for nothing in particular and drifts from poll to poll. A neural network could probably take poll input values and predict key phrases in her next speech. On the other hand, the right has managed to portray her as some sort of insane leftist Satan who will turn us into baby eating communists and force men to marry young boys. I would almost prefer that to be true because at least it would be a tangible position grounded in some sort of ethos. As it stands, I can't see how she could possibly scrape a significant number of votes from either side. Like Obama, the media finds her to be a shiny enough bauble to fixate on her, and that may well be enough to push her forward to undue success (or disastrous electoral failure).
I can't quite figure it out, but the whole thing makes me uneasy about the next election.
I don't know which is more depressing--the fact that people make all manner of assumptions about Senator Obama's religious beliefs, or the fact that he has to vociferously deny being a member of a very large mainstream religion in order to stay alive in politics.
No, no they're not. There's a whole other set of benefits that you get based on the number of dependents you have. That's where you start filling in the children on the list.
And of course, the benefits of marriage aren't only financial.
No, neither I nor the GP were using the non-economic meaning of either value or price. see Wikipedia, price and value have different meanings to an economist.
My point is that your statement dismissing price as a reflection of economic value is simply not correct. Price is not solely a demand side concept ("what someone is willing to pay"). It is a reflection of both the willingness to pay (which, one would hope, would closely reflect the utility of the good) and the supplier's willingness to supply it. Presumably (once again), the supplier's willingness to pay reflects the value he could get from that good by putting it to its next best use. The grandparent was also wrong, but he was searching for a reasonably accurate idea whereas you simply seemed to want to rant about economists.
Here's where I'm coming from: I work as an engineer, but I earned degrees in both engineering and economics (emphasizing mathematical modeling). I have a soft spot for economics and economists. I'm constantly amazed by the contempt with which my colleagues who use math to do "real" things view economists when they clearly don't understand the first thing about the topic. I mainly hang out on these threads because the level of crackpottery is extermely high (The Federal Reserve wants to pollute our precious bodily fluids! Bring back the yak-fur standard!). Maybe it's the typical engineering ego: "My field uses math and so does yours, but mine is harder, so that makes me a master of your field as well." I'm beginning to think that the Salem hypothesis is true, but for reasons other than its creator stated.
But just because we can't measure it's utility doesn't mean it has none, nor does it mean that price is the best substitute we have.
If you want to have any meaningful measurement of value, you need to have some sort of unit to attach to it. A good's price in "money" may not reflect your sentimental love of your grandfather's watch, but it's a very good reflection of the watch's utility in terms of timekeeping, aesthetics, and the value of the inputs. The market price is a great measure of value because it gives you a commonly agreed upon valuation in units that reflect a composite set of goods across the entire economy. At some point, if you want to talk about value in a meaningful way, you have to either talk about its market price or the value of its inputs in their next best use. Of course, if you opt for the latter, you'll eventually end up looking at a market price somewhere down the line. It's not turtles all the way down.
Most of the reason for my post is it looked like someone was saying price isn't just a substitute for measuring value (utility is part of value) but that they were the same thing, as if there is no difference between me and how tall I am.
You're right on that point, but it's more subtle than that.
No, I would not say that. But there are few things you can do with stocks or bonds, mostly sell them for money. This is a different kind of value than that of a warm coat or a good meal. Price does a very poor job of capturing those differences.
That's true, but you can put a price on those things as well. I would argue that price is a very good measurement of the value of a warm coat and a good meal. If it weren't, I would gladly trade you a very nice meal for $10,000 in treasury bills. Price isn't a good reflection of the value of the love of your children, but if it's an asset that is scarce, rival, and useful, market prices tend to follow "value" very well for most reasonable definitions of value. One time when this is clearly not true is speculative bubbles when most of the "value" people place on an asset when determining its market price is not its intrinsic value but rather what they expect people to be willing to pay for it later, regardless of whether it's actually used for. I think that the efficient markets hypothe
It is economic idiocy like this that has put us into the trouble that we are now in. Value, in economic sense, is not determined by what someone is willing to pay for it. That is 'price', a very different thing.
Errr, congratulations. You've taken the grandparent's specific use of the word "value" in an "economic" sense and pointed out that it's not the same as the concept of "value" in the general sense, thus making economists stupid. I hope you get around to telling computer engineers that memory isn't something you can buy and physicists that heat is a measure of how attractive a woman is.
We would love to measure the actual utility of a good, but since there's no such unit as a "util" we're stuck working with what the average consumer is willing to pay for the good. Such is life. I hope your opinion of economists and economics isn't too colored by the armchair economics you see from slashdotters whose total experience with the field is getting a 3 on the AP economics exam.
The same thing is happening with houses. Far to much of the price of houses today is due not to the value of a house (what you can do with a house, live in it) but instead due to how much people think that they can sell the house for later.
People are modeling houses and metals as assets with both intrinsic value and yield. You wouldn't say that a stock certificate or a government bond has "no value" because it's just a certificate and you can't eat it. Both of those assets have a yield in and of themselves. Whether or not the market will value it the same way tomorrow is a different matter. Yes, "values" can spiral out of control if people are overly speculative and discount risks, but until you can give me a number for the value of water, I'll be working with prices.
The value of clean air is the same almost everywhere, - it keeps you alive - The price is zero in most places on earth.
Yes, and diamonds are practically worthless save some industrial uses and jewelry. There's no reason for them to have a higher price than steel, which is good for all sorts of stuff. And economists have no way of explaining this phenomenon. The whole field is simply baffled. Do contact the Nobel committee when you publish your paper.
Do you think that having more and more of our currency in electronic form (out of circulation, but still in use, as it were) has an effect on this?
Depending on your take on the quantity theory of money, it's probably significant in that electronic currency tends to increase the velocity of money in an economy.
The Iraq war is really a very low level war. The liberals are whining about a few thousand American deaths in 3 years, but that's nothing compared to WW2 or Vietnam.
If I had known the Iraq war was going to be such a steal, I would have bought a few more!
Well, technically speaking the Federal Reserve banks are corporations with stock held by private banks, but they're a totally different animal from actual for-profit corporations. It's kind of a unique and complicated relationship, but you're right, they're far from being anything like private banks. Unfortunately, the relationship they have to private banks is subtle enough to bring the conspiracy kooks out of the woodwork.
Ad hominem. Your reply doesn't deserve a response.
Ad hominem isn't Latin for, "That's mean!" You can't throw out an entire substantive post because the first line was insulting and somehow claim the debate high ground. Come on.
And when does the war end? WHEN THE ENEMY SURRENDERS. If they don't that's their tough luck.
Which enemy? Osama? Al Qaeda in Iraq? The People's Front of Al Qaeda? The Al Qaedan People's Front? If you're not fighting an actual enemy but rather a bunch of tiny fragments following a particular agenda, do you just keep everybody in prison until there's nobody left who holds to the agenda? Should all of the Confederate soldiers have died in prison after the US Civil War because some people still believe in the secession of the southern states?
That's where the question of a *localized* flood comes in.
It is, however, a large enough flood to have been "mentioned by something like 110 civilizations" so it's not exactly a tiny one. And of course, if you are holding up the Bible as a source of infallible revealed knowledge, you have to remember that the Bible does in fact claim that the flood was worldwide.
But thanks for calling me a nutjob, anyway. That method is sure to assist you in convincing people you're open-minded in the future.
Well, I was actually calling whomever came up with the original hypothesis and started spreading it around without sanity checking it a nutjob, mainly because it totally contradicts huge bodies of data and physics and doesn't appear to have a lot of data supporting it. As for being open minded, I did take the time to do some calculations, which proved to be a disaster for the hypothesis. Unless I've done something demonstrably wrong, energy and chemistry concerns alone (some very fundamental concerns) make the whole idea a non-starter, regardless of how well it explains gouges in Portugal and jibes with classical mythology.
And where'd it go? Don't we lose both oxygen and water each day, slipping out into space? It makes at least as much sense as manmade-global-warming or other arguments that get such worldwide play.
Run the numbers. How much water had to disappear over how much time? How high does water vapor float in the atmosphere? Does a water molecule have sufficient velocity to escape the upper atmosphere? I think that you'll run into some severe constraints on the very idea, especially if you posit only a few thousand years since the flood. We're talking about a tremendous change in atmospheric pressure alone. As for global warming, there *are* good calculations that support the feasibility of the hypothesis. Not to mention the fact that global warming proponents are suggesting a change in the balance of the atmosphere to change its insulation properties and you're proposing the ex-nihilo creation and destruction of quantities of matter that simply don't exist anywhere in our atmosphere.
This isn't *in* the Bible, it's an attempt to explain things like the waterfall-gouge that's found southwest of Portugal, and a search for more evidence of the flood.
Well, I'm not familiar with this particular gouge, and googling around doesn't produce much. Why could it not have simply been caused by--a waterfall? Unfortunately, if you're going to posit a worldwide flood occurring in recent recorded history, you'll have more than a waterfall gouge to explain.
All the replies I get are like this; they all make assumptions based on their own experiences, which, these days is from the media and culture. BUT IF THEY'D GO SEE THE SERIES, they could decide for themselves. (This is what the left calls being "open minded".)
I've poked around the site, and it seems like the same set of special pleading, assertions unsupported by data, and ideas that clearly haven't been smell checked against known history or basic physical law. If you want to talk about specific details, feel free. I had fun with the last calculation.
I find it similarly odd that, despite all this checkability, people still dismiss it, or consider it the opposite of science.
Well, I think the point is that the idea is, in fact checkable, and it fails the check. If you can propose some dimensions for the flood and a timeframe, we can re-run the numbers and see if it's even viable. If it's viable, it's worth exploring further. If it doesn't even correlate to known reality, why waste the time?
As for the film specifically, time has some value. A text summary of the evidence is a good quick read. Video is just too low information density for me at the moment. It takes too much time to ge
Off the top of my head, there's the question of where the water went. Then you'll have to consider an oxygen source plentiful enough to produce the amount of water you're talking about. Then there are the energy concerns of how much heat would be released by dropping that amount of water (or even that volume of hydrogen ions) from the upper atmosphere to Earth's surface. Running some random numbers:
Let's say you want to cover the world in about 5m of water (that is, increase mean sea level by 5m--let's ignore hills and mountains, which make this whole exercise ridiculous). Using the mean radius of the earth as 6370998.685023 meters, we'll need 1.91274248123187e+15 cubic meters of water at 1,000,000g per cubic meter (1.91274248123187e+21 grams of water). Water is about 88 percent oxygen by mass, so that gives us 1.68321338348405e+21 grams of oxygen. The total mass of the atmosphere is currently about 5.1480e+21 grams. Roughly 23 percent of that is oxygen (roughly 1.1822e+21 grams). So, if we poofed enough hydrogen into existence and mingled it with ALL of the oxygen in our atmosphere to produce water, we couldn't even create a 5 meter layer of it today. This problem gets worse as the cube of the depth of water you want to add. You're either suggesting that the pre-flood atmosphere was insanely high pressure and insanely high in oxygen (I'll let the chemists of/. think about the ramifications of that--especially of the ramifications of changing it to its current conditions over the course of less than a year) or that the worldwide flood didn't exactly cover the *whole* world.
Getting back to our 1.91274248123187e+21 grams of water... Let's convert to kg and get 1.91274248123187e+18. Let's assume that, rather than forming high in the atmosphere the water, on average, forms at about the middle of the troposphere at roughly 9,000m. Using the formula for gravitational potential, that means that the whole process of the water falling had to dissipate 1.68876033667962e+23 joules of energy. If it's done uniformly over the course of 40 days (was it 40 days?), that's 4.88645930752205e+16 watts of continuous power over the surface of the earth. Given an estimated surface of the Earth of about 5.1006426135478e+14 square meters, that's just shy of 100 watts of extra energy per square meter. To put that in perspective, according to Wikipeda, North America receives an average of 125-375 watts per square meter over a the course of a 24 hour day, you're talking about a pretty significant extra chunk of extra heat to deal with over time. Again, the amount of water you're dropping is proportional to the *cube* of the depth you want the flood to reach, and 5m isn't exactly enough to reach mountains (or even hilltops or tall building walls). The whole result is pretty unpleasant.
There are probably some glitches here or there in the calculations, but I think that the reasoning is pretty sound as off-the-cuff calculations go--without even asking where all the extra water went. So my question is, do the people who propose these nutjob hypotheses even do a sanity check?
Of course, those features come at a cost. Goofy title screens that require you to sit through several seconds of wizz-bang animation as you move from menu to menu. The ability to prevent you from fast forwarding through certain segments of the DVD. Title screen music that loops awkwardly while you go make your popcorn.
Remember back when desktop publishing software like Word came out and everybody suddenly had access to a million different fonts? Everybody's documents started looking like ransom notes. I think we saw the same thing with DVDs. Just because the blink tag exists doesn't mean you have to use it.
and if the magnetic poles changed [see current speculations] the Van Allen belts would temporarily collapse...causing the hydrogen and hydrogen ions to come in contact with the atmosphere's oxygen, tada, instant massive flood.
I think the word the grandparent was looking for was "censored." Of course, the FCC can't censor content, so what the GP really wanted to say was, "Allowed by the FCC to broadcast whatever they want at the risk of enormous fines for inappropriate content."
By your logic, if I just complained about things enough, I'd be a patriot?
If you complained about the right things, maybe. If the government wants to start a war that you believe will harm the nation, is it more patriotic to enlist or to speak out against the idiocy?
Well, people seem to be finding ways around the Great Firewall on a fairly regular basis. You're right that China's censorship of the Internet is remarkably effective given its scale, but the sheer size of the censorship and monitoring operations aren't sustainable. I can't imagine that they'll be nearly as successful as they currently are five years from now.
Aside from NPR news (which, I agree, has more meaningful raw data in it than just about any other news source), the non-news political / current events programs are also superior to their commercial counterpart. Talk of the Nation, for example, covers the same set of controversial topics that any other news / analysis show offers, and it has groups of people on it who strongly disagree with one another, yet somehow, they retain the notion that they're discussing things and not trying to out-shout one another. The moderators on those programs do just that--they moderate. They generally don't add fuel to an unnecessary fire.
Perhaps best of all, there are no know-it-all egomaniac hosts whose entire program is devoted to them expounding on topics they know nothing about. The format is generally a host/moderator and one or more *experts* who actually know what they're talking about. They prefer callers who either have meaningful information to add or relevant questions to ask over callers who have a strong opinion to rant about. You're far more likely to hear a caller say, "I'm a labor economist, and I recently did a paper on how immigration affects the workforce, and here's what I found..." than, "They took our jobs!"
Commercial news television and radio generally does a great job of exploiting the conflict and passion inherent in politics to drum up an audience, but in my opinion, every minute spent broadcasting empty passion is a minute that could have been spent broadcasting something that makes the audience think rather than feel. Jon Stewart had it right in his infamous Crossfire appearance: It's mostly theater masquerading as serious discussion. NPR and other public broadcasting networks may be flawed, but I'll take them over their commercial counterparts almost every time.
I doubt most people would agree that omitting a detail is as egregious as completely fabricating a detail. Neither scenario is acceptable or "morally right", but there's not a big "gotcha" moment for the bloggers to say "see, you forgot to mention detail X" vs. "you bastards completely doctored this photo, look at my photoshop comparisons".
That's not really an apt comparison. The major meltdowns with the "liberal" media outlets have been the result of relying on incorrect information and doing insufficient fact checking on questionable sources. The example presented by the grandparent was a matter of discarding highly relevant and well known facts that completely change the face of the story. Sadly, that leaves us with a choice between incompetence and malice, but I suppose that's what we're stuck with.
Aren't heterosexual marriage documents still handed out by churches?
Speaking from California (not sure about other states)--not exactly. If you want to get married in CA, you need a marriage license issued by the state. Somebody has to officiate the wedding, though. That could be a judge (no church required) or a church official, or anybody else who is certified to officiate weddings. My wife and I went the easy route and had a friend of the family who was ordained in the Universal Life Church perform the ceremony and sign the certificate, but we still had to pay the state to issue the paperwork.
Setting aside whether those quotes make valid points or not, my issue was with your use of the word "only" which seems sort of... out of place. You seemed to be saying that you've never heard the phrase "Blame America first" or accusations that certain people aren't "supporting the troops" and the like. That you've never heard anybody questioning Democrats' patriotism is, at least, a sign that you're not listening to "pundits" like Coulter and Savage. I'm just suggesting that the overblown "you hate America" rhetoric is not the exclusive territory of "Bush haters."
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like the best solution to the problem may be a disposal deposit for things like fluorescents tubes and batteries, just as we have for glass bottles and car batteries. Sure, it doesn't solve every problem (I have had a car battery sitting in my garage *for ever* because it wasn't worth my time to get the $8 or whatever the core deposit was back). Done properly, it may be possible for some enterprising soul to make it work.
In that vein, wouldn't it also make more sense just to put a hefty tax on the incandescents rather than ban them outright? Bans like that are awfully tough to enforce, and you need a million exceptions as other posters have noted. Just make it expensive. Most people who don't need them will stop using them. The people who do will find it worthwhile to pay a few bucks more. There's very little overhead enforcement cost, and the tax money can be spent on making it easier/cheaper/more environmentally friendly to dispose of CFL bulbs.
I don't know about the rest of California, but it's already illegal to throw fluorescent lamps in the trash in my county. They have to be disposed of at special locations along with electronic waste and batteries for the very reason you state.
That's another interesting point. I can't quite figure out what the love fest over Obama is all about. He's clearly a bright guy and a good speaker, but that can be said of any number of people. He's not some brilliant elder statesman with a long history of successes. He's apparently just a likable guy who has the charisma to propel himself forward. I'm a registered Democrat (oh, the shame), and I'd love to see the party field a palatable candidate, but I'm not nearly moved enough to jump on the Obama bandwagon.
Then there's Hillary Clinton, who seems to have nothing going for her at all aside from name recognition and political savvy. On the one hand, she clearly appears to stand for nothing in particular and drifts from poll to poll. A neural network could probably take poll input values and predict key phrases in her next speech. On the other hand, the right has managed to portray her as some sort of insane leftist Satan who will turn us into baby eating communists and force men to marry young boys. I would almost prefer that to be true because at least it would be a tangible position grounded in some sort of ethos. As it stands, I can't see how she could possibly scrape a significant number of votes from either side. Like Obama, the media finds her to be a shiny enough bauble to fixate on her, and that may well be enough to push her forward to undue success (or disastrous electoral failure).
I can't quite figure it out, but the whole thing makes me uneasy about the next election.
I don't know which is more depressing--the fact that people make all manner of assumptions about Senator Obama's religious beliefs, or the fact that he has to vociferously deny being a member of a very large mainstream religion in order to stay alive in politics.
And of course, the benefits of marriage aren't only financial.
My point is that your statement dismissing price as a reflection of economic value is simply not correct. Price is not solely a demand side concept ("what someone is willing to pay"). It is a reflection of both the willingness to pay (which, one would hope, would closely reflect the utility of the good) and the supplier's willingness to supply it. Presumably (once again), the supplier's willingness to pay reflects the value he could get from that good by putting it to its next best use. The grandparent was also wrong, but he was searching for a reasonably accurate idea whereas you simply seemed to want to rant about economists.
Here's where I'm coming from: I work as an engineer, but I earned degrees in both engineering and economics (emphasizing mathematical modeling). I have a soft spot for economics and economists. I'm constantly amazed by the contempt with which my colleagues who use math to do "real" things view economists when they clearly don't understand the first thing about the topic. I mainly hang out on these threads because the level of crackpottery is extermely high (The Federal Reserve wants to pollute our precious bodily fluids! Bring back the yak-fur standard!). Maybe it's the typical engineering ego: "My field uses math and so does yours, but mine is harder, so that makes me a master of your field as well." I'm beginning to think that the Salem hypothesis is true, but for reasons other than its creator stated.
If you want to have any meaningful measurement of value, you need to have some sort of unit to attach to it. A good's price in "money" may not reflect your sentimental love of your grandfather's watch, but it's a very good reflection of the watch's utility in terms of timekeeping, aesthetics, and the value of the inputs. The market price is a great measure of value because it gives you a commonly agreed upon valuation in units that reflect a composite set of goods across the entire economy. At some point, if you want to talk about value in a meaningful way, you have to either talk about its market price or the value of its inputs in their next best use. Of course, if you opt for the latter, you'll eventually end up looking at a market price somewhere down the line. It's not turtles all the way down.
You're right on that point, but it's more subtle than that.
That's true, but you can put a price on those things as well. I would argue that price is a very good measurement of the value of a warm coat and a good meal. If it weren't, I would gladly trade you a very nice meal for $10,000 in treasury bills. Price isn't a good reflection of the value of the love of your children, but if it's an asset that is scarce, rival, and useful, market prices tend to follow "value" very well for most reasonable definitions of value. One time when this is clearly not true is speculative bubbles when most of the "value" people place on an asset when determining its market price is not its intrinsic value but rather what they expect people to be willing to pay for it later, regardless of whether it's actually used for. I think that the efficient markets hypothe
We would love to measure the actual utility of a good, but since there's no such unit as a "util" we're stuck working with what the average consumer is willing to pay for the good. Such is life. I hope your opinion of economists and economics isn't too colored by the armchair economics you see from slashdotters whose total experience with the field is getting a 3 on the AP economics exam.
People are modeling houses and metals as assets with both intrinsic value and yield. You wouldn't say that a stock certificate or a government bond has "no value" because it's just a certificate and you can't eat it. Both of those assets have a yield in and of themselves. Whether or not the market will value it the same way tomorrow is a different matter. Yes, "values" can spiral out of control if people are overly speculative and discount risks, but until you can give me a number for the value of water, I'll be working with prices.
Yes, and diamonds are practically worthless save some industrial uses and jewelry. There's no reason for them to have a higher price than steel, which is good for all sorts of stuff. And economists have no way of explaining this phenomenon. The whole field is simply baffled. Do contact the Nobel committee when you publish your paper.
Well, technically speaking the Federal Reserve banks are corporations with stock held by private banks, but they're a totally different animal from actual for-profit corporations. It's kind of a unique and complicated relationship, but you're right, they're far from being anything like private banks. Unfortunately, the relationship they have to private banks is subtle enough to bring the conspiracy kooks out of the woodwork.
It is, however, a large enough flood to have been "mentioned by something like 110 civilizations" so it's not exactly a tiny one. And of course, if you are holding up the Bible as a source of infallible revealed knowledge, you have to remember that the Bible does in fact claim that the flood was worldwide.
Well, I was actually calling whomever came up with the original hypothesis and started spreading it around without sanity checking it a nutjob, mainly because it totally contradicts huge bodies of data and physics and doesn't appear to have a lot of data supporting it. As for being open minded, I did take the time to do some calculations, which proved to be a disaster for the hypothesis. Unless I've done something demonstrably wrong, energy and chemistry concerns alone (some very fundamental concerns) make the whole idea a non-starter, regardless of how well it explains gouges in Portugal and jibes with classical mythology.
Run the numbers. How much water had to disappear over how much time? How high does water vapor float in the atmosphere? Does a water molecule have sufficient velocity to escape the upper atmosphere? I think that you'll run into some severe constraints on the very idea, especially if you posit only a few thousand years since the flood. We're talking about a tremendous change in atmospheric pressure alone. As for global warming, there *are* good calculations that support the feasibility of the hypothesis. Not to mention the fact that global warming proponents are suggesting a change in the balance of the atmosphere to change its insulation properties and you're proposing the ex-nihilo creation and destruction of quantities of matter that simply don't exist anywhere in our atmosphere.
Well, I'm not familiar with this particular gouge, and googling around doesn't produce much. Why could it not have simply been caused by--a waterfall? Unfortunately, if you're going to posit a worldwide flood occurring in recent recorded history, you'll have more than a waterfall gouge to explain.
I've poked around the site, and it seems like the same set of special pleading, assertions unsupported by data, and ideas that clearly haven't been smell checked against known history or basic physical law. If you want to talk about specific details, feel free. I had fun with the last calculation.
Well, I think the point is that the idea is, in fact checkable, and it fails the check. If you can propose some dimensions for the flood and a timeframe, we can re-run the numbers and see if it's even viable. If it's viable, it's worth exploring further. If it doesn't even correlate to known reality, why waste the time?
As for the film specifically, time has some value. A text summary of the evidence is a good quick read. Video is just too low information density for me at the moment. It takes too much time to ge
Getting back to our 1.91274248123187e+21 grams of water... Let's convert to kg and get 1.91274248123187e+18. Let's assume that, rather than forming high in the atmosphere the water, on average, forms at about the middle of the troposphere at roughly 9,000m. Using the formula for gravitational potential, that means that the whole process of the water falling had to dissipate 1.68876033667962e+23 joules of energy. If it's done uniformly over the course of 40 days (was it 40 days?), that's 4.88645930752205e+16 watts of continuous power over the surface of the earth. Given an estimated surface of the Earth of about 5.1006426135478e+14 square meters, that's just shy of 100 watts of extra energy per square meter. To put that in perspective, according to Wikipeda, North America receives an average of 125-375 watts per square meter over a the course of a 24 hour day, you're talking about a pretty significant extra chunk of extra heat to deal with over time. Again, the amount of water you're dropping is proportional to the *cube* of the depth you want the flood to reach, and 5m isn't exactly enough to reach mountains (or even hilltops or tall building walls). The whole result is pretty unpleasant.
There are probably some glitches here or there in the calculations, but I think that the reasoning is pretty sound as off-the-cuff calculations go--without even asking where all the extra water went. So my question is, do the people who propose these nutjob hypotheses even do a sanity check?
Of course, those features come at a cost. Goofy title screens that require you to sit through several seconds of wizz-bang animation as you move from menu to menu. The ability to prevent you from fast forwarding through certain segments of the DVD. Title screen music that loops awkwardly while you go make your popcorn.
Remember back when desktop publishing software like Word came out and everybody suddenly had access to a million different fonts? Everybody's documents started looking like ransom notes. I think we saw the same thing with DVDs. Just because the blink tag exists doesn't mean you have to use it.
I think the word the grandparent was looking for was "censored." Of course, the FCC can't censor content, so what the GP really wanted to say was, "Allowed by the FCC to broadcast whatever they want at the risk of enormous fines for inappropriate content."
Well, people seem to be finding ways around the Great Firewall on a fairly regular basis. You're right that China's censorship of the Internet is remarkably effective given its scale, but the sheer size of the censorship and monitoring operations aren't sustainable. I can't imagine that they'll be nearly as successful as they currently are five years from now.
Aside from NPR news (which, I agree, has more meaningful raw data in it than just about any other news source), the non-news political / current events programs are also superior to their commercial counterpart. Talk of the Nation, for example, covers the same set of controversial topics that any other news / analysis show offers, and it has groups of people on it who strongly disagree with one another, yet somehow, they retain the notion that they're discussing things and not trying to out-shout one another. The moderators on those programs do just that--they moderate. They generally don't add fuel to an unnecessary fire.
Perhaps best of all, there are no know-it-all egomaniac hosts whose entire program is devoted to them expounding on topics they know nothing about. The format is generally a host/moderator and one or more *experts* who actually know what they're talking about. They prefer callers who either have meaningful information to add or relevant questions to ask over callers who have a strong opinion to rant about. You're far more likely to hear a caller say, "I'm a labor economist, and I recently did a paper on how immigration affects the workforce, and here's what I found..." than, "They took our jobs!"
Commercial news television and radio generally does a great job of exploiting the conflict and passion inherent in politics to drum up an audience, but in my opinion, every minute spent broadcasting empty passion is a minute that could have been spent broadcasting something that makes the audience think rather than feel. Jon Stewart had it right in his infamous Crossfire appearance: It's mostly theater masquerading as serious discussion. NPR and other public broadcasting networks may be flawed, but I'll take them over their commercial counterparts almost every time.
Setting aside whether those quotes make valid points or not, my issue was with your use of the word "only" which seems sort of... out of place. You seemed to be saying that you've never heard the phrase "Blame America first" or accusations that certain people aren't "supporting the troops" and the like. That you've never heard anybody questioning Democrats' patriotism is, at least, a sign that you're not listening to "pundits" like Coulter and Savage. I'm just suggesting that the overblown "you hate America" rhetoric is not the exclusive territory of "Bush haters."