Reaper drone: $17M (and this is not the cheapest drone) F/A-18E/F Super Hornet: $67M (and this is far from the most expensive manned aircraft)
You were saying?
Yeah, yeah, I know these prices on Wikipedia are very rough estimates, military hardware has a variable price tag depending on procurement negotiations, and drones that are mainly used for ground attack fall into an entirely different category than multirole fighters, making the comparison almost meaningless. But think of it, how could a drone not be cheaper? Compared to a manned aircraft, you save money by throwing out all life support systems including oxygen system and G-suit and the pneumatic system supporting it, human interfaces (basically mostly everything in the cockpit), a transparent canopy that provides visibility at the cost of drag, and an ejection seat. Yes, you'll need to replace these with redundant military-grade flight computers and sophisticated sensors and communication systems, but guess what? Modern fighters already have most of that. Then you save some more money on safety/reliability/hardiness/redundancy; you don't want your drones to be falling out of the sky by the dozens or be destroyed by one hit of a bullet, but they are allowed to be considerably less secure if the life of an expensive-to-train pilot (and potential interrogee/hostage/propaganda tool) is not on the line. Once you're done with all that, you'll find your plane has become several hundred kg lighter and more streamlined too. So you can get away with smaller engines and wings, which make the plane even lighter... the final percentage gain in weight is higher than the original percentage of weight that was needed to support a pilot. And once you're done with all that, you'll not only find your end product has become dramatically cheaper, but also more maneuverable, since the fragile human body is no longer limiting the number of Gs you can pull.
Except that your deterrent relies on a generalization that is simply wrong
I have no idea what you're talking about; you're clearly reading something in my post that isn't there. What I wrote is that one of the main intended effects of punishment in society/sociology is its deterrent effect. This much is generally accepted. How good it at accomplishing that intended effect is open for debate. In this debate, I offered the empirical sociological observation that deterrent effect of harsher punishments quickly levels off beyond a certain point. All you're doing in your "counter-argument" is describing one of the proposed mechanisms behind that observation; you're substantiating my standpoint rather than proving me "wrong".
Just a thought, but might this simply indicate that fake facial are trained/wired to fool humans (and the attributes a human watcher would consciously or subconsciously use to judge the expression), not computers?
Really, couldn't we just instate a best practice that slashdot editors should refrain from posting stories that are pulled out straight out of the telegraph? There seems to be such a strong correlation between that and the story being hogwash...
That's not the full story; there's also a very important component of deterring other people from doing the same thing. Then again, we know from psychology (as well as history and comparison between countries) that the deterrent effect of harsher punishments quickly levels off beyond a certain point, so this only supports your conclusion that "harsh punishment just isn't that important".
Be that as it may, intentional copying of a design is not a problem unless the original design is protected. Which, according to TFA, is difficult to figure out. In my understanding, that's what the story is about.
Oh, so then can you explain why big European cities, which are much more conservative about touching their >400 years old landmarks, feature sprawling competition, with much higher speeds and lower prices than the old American cities you speak of?
Telomer breakdown is not a bug, it's a feature. An anti-cancer feature to be exact. One of the many safeguards a would-be cancerous cell needs to mutate around in order to be successful. As people are getting older because of "regular" medical progress, cancer becomes an increasingly prevalent cause of death. Disabling telomer breakdown would be a step in the exact opposite direction from where you seem to want to go.
The general problem with aging is that it cannot be captured in a soundbite. You have mechanical wear and tear, oxidative damage, errors in DNA replication, certain tissues that haven't evolved a regeneration mechanism, accumulation of gunk in the arteries,... No single subsystem of our body has endured any selective pressure to substantially outlive its expiration date. Someone claiming to work on "curing aging" must either endeavor to redesign the human body from scratch, or be a quack. Looks from TFA Dr. Venter is trying the former approach - good luck with that. As for the quacks, it turns out telling rich fools that there might be a chance for them to live much longer is a good way to separate them from their money. Just look at how, even on this site, all critical thinking goes straight out of the window when these stupid "let's cure aging" stories come up.
The way you quoted my last sentence and started your post suggested otherwise to me, and this being slashdot, it's usually safe to assume the other party didn't fully read one's post. But yeah, in retrospect, your explanation is equally likely. This misunderstanding could easily have been prevented (like, by quoting a more resource-oriented part, or simply starting your post with "Yeah,"), but of course, you didn't think of how your post could be misinterpreted. Thanks for clarifying a posteriori.
What part of the following sentence did you not understand?
Even then, there's no way the Germans alone could have won against most of the rest of the world, but they might have been able to make the battle for Germany expensive enough to negotiate more favorable conditions for surrender (...)
And yet, they succeeded to launch over 3,000 strategically ineffective V-2s, which were complex to build, expensive, and used materials and chemical production capacity that could have been put to "better" use. Freeman Dyson famously said "the V-2 program was almost as good as if Hitler had adopted a policy of unilateral disarmament", and according to Albert Speer, if Germany would have steered the V-2 research more towards development of their radar-guided SAMs, and used the resources made available by doing so (as well as by scrapping the V-1s) to build more Me 262s, it might have been able to prevent the allies from gaining air superiority over its territory and bombing its military production capacity into pieces. This in turn would have made it much harder for the allies to waltz through Germany. Even then, there's no way the Germans alone could have won against most of the rest of the world, but they might have been able to make the battle for Germany expensive enough to negotiate more favorable conditions for surrender, or perhaps even an armistice. (Assuming they also succeeded to keep airplane-dropped nukes out through military or diplomatic means.)
Its seems like the world has to thank Hitler's maniacal obsession with offensive strategy, tactics and weaponry for the relative quick ending of fighting in Europe.
That's because "climate change denier" is almost always applied to people who accept that the climate is changing...
Maybe you find yourself in that category, but I'm sure over 60% of the people I bicker with about this topic on slashdot flat-out deny that the climate is changing. And this is supposed to be a smart crowd...
but need better evidence than a positive correlation to accept anthropogenic causes.
So then you're talking about people who have been living under a rock for the last 30 years and somehow never heard of the greenhouse effect? You know, the causative link that was first proposed by Svante Arrhenius in 1896 purely based on the spectroscopic properties of CO2, and that has survived every scientific challenge since then, to be confirmed starting from the 1980s by:
- the correlation you're talking about
- spectroscopic satellite measurements of the earth's albedo
- sophisticated quantitative calculations/simulations.
If you accept the positive correlation, and know about the greenhouse effect, and are still whining about lack of evidence for anthropogenic causes, then surely, you're in denial about something...
And "evolution denier" is similarly attached...
By whom? You're railing against strawman arguments, but that sounds just as much like a strawman.
to people who have no problem with adaptation of species but don't necessarily accept that evolution is how life began.
There it becomes a semantic discussion, depending on where you pin "the beginning of life". I have no problem with putting the label "evolution deniers" on people who think eukaryotic life forms are not the product of evolution. Conversely, if you define "the beginning of life" as the first molecules which, however inefficiently, could trick their environment into making copies of themselves, then you're arguably right that one cannot really speak of evolution before that point.
It's also amply demonstrated in this discussion when one of the posters claimed that anti-vaccine people wanted a return of virulent diseases. It's an easy straw man to set up, claiming that anyone who disagrees with you on a specific point is seeking something much broader than is actually said. For example, it can't be that "anti-vaccine people" want to make sure that vaccines are as safe as possible, it must be that they are pro-disease.
I agree it's a a bit dihonest to accuse the anti-vaccine people of wanting the return of virulent diseases, but there are now many studies showing the effect of their (however well-meaning) efforts is just that. Vaccines are as safe as current technology allows; on this front, the FDA of the country of medical malpractice lawsuits is not cutting any corners. A lot of anti-vaccine people are against vaccines because they contain scary synthetic molecules and (demonstrated-safe doses of) equally scary-sounding elements, which is a very similar argument, and equally irrational, as the one in favor of the most diluted forms of homeopathy. And then there are also some that are against vaccines because there have been incidences of adverse effects (no matter how many orders of magnitude lower than the disabling and deadly effect of the diseases they prevent). For both categories, which together account for the bulk of anti-vaccine people, their definition of safe (ie. "not sounding scary" or "never ever triggering a single adverse reaction"), there will never be safe vaccines. Again, I know it's not their conscious intention, but they are doing bupkis, nada, zilch for making vaccines as safe as possible. The de facto effect of their actions is, indeed, the return of virulent diseases.
You could have made a point of "deniers" indicating bias 30 years ago. Welcome the the 21st century; science has advanced, and at this point, "climate change denier" is about as biased as "evolution denier".
With that out of the way, I do fully agree with the rest of your post. The article indeed seems to consist of the author fantasizing about associations between things he doesn't like. No evidence is given whatsoever to support his central thesis that Whole Foods' entire business model is based upon unscientific snake oil; no evidence but horrible populist stereotyping. Among the scientists I know (ie. most of my friends), many go to whole foods on occasion - including myself. They go there mainly for the rich selection of specialty items (like cheeses). Some also go there because they can buy animal products that have an independent animal welfare label, or because they don't want to contribute to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that is partially caused by gratuitous use of antibiotics in farming. Of course, they shun the more hippie new age parts of the store, but as you correctly pointed out, they have to do the same thing at other stores. And one can disagree with any of the above viewpoints, but calling them "snake oil" is hardly justified.
Even the crowd who thinks the FDA does not sufficiently apply the precautionary principle in assessing the heath effects of growth hormones, antibiotics and pesticides, and buy organic meats and/or dairy and/or vegetables, arguably has a point; one can accuse them of being somewhat irrationally cautious, but not of believing outright falsehoods.
I've been faithfully following science stories on the BBC site for years now, and this one stands out like a sore thumb. Until now, they almost always interviewed independent UK scientists to help them interpret the impact of the original research in a new and noteworthy publication. Specifically, they almost always interview a scientist who downplays the impact, and usually also one who is more excited about it. I've always assumed this was part of their journalistic standard, and a shining example for a lot of other news outlets; interpreting scientific papers is tricky, and including varying opinions of independent scientists is paramount to giving the audience the full picture.
Now here, there's suddenly none of that; they only interviewed the first author of the paper, who naturally has a tendency to exaggerate the the impact of their research. No ill will, mind you; being passionate about one's work is a prerequisite to stay motivated as a scientists in the face of frustrating work and inhumanely long working hours. This passion will naturally bias any scientist in favor of their own research. Moreover, this kind of exaggeration is implicitly required by most granting agencies: they almost always require applicants to demonstrate wider impact, which in the case of fundamental research implies wild speculation.
Either way, since the BBC didn't do its job, allow me to cast myself in the role of the "skeptical" scientists they failed to interview. My field of research is not athmospheric science, but I'm familiar with both the underlying physical mechanisms and with fields that rely heavily on models. Here is what I learned by reading some of the paper and references. The problem they sought to tackle is that (local) athmospheric models fail to to accurately predict the amount of aerosols produced in the atmosphere from the low-volatility organic compounds emitted by boreal forests. This appears to be a well-known problem in their field, as testified by the cited references (especially ref. 2, Hallquist et al. in the open access journal "Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics" 2009, vol. 9, pp. 5155–5236). So all TFA does is provide new insights in the underlying physical processes that could likely be used to rectify the (local) athmospheric models; this is nice work and worthy of publication in Nature. As customary, the authors begin and end their paper by speculating about the wider impact of their research, which is a natural thing to do, as explained above. In this case, they speculate that (global, long-timescale) climate models may suffer from the same flaw as the above athmospheric models, and that adjusting them accordingly will lead to less extreme climate change predictions (note how nobody spoke of qualitatively different outcomes). This sounds very much unwarranted to me; in my field, coarser, higer-level models are not build on lower-level models, but on the empirical observations the latter try to explain, and judging by the Hallquist paper, the fact that boreal forests produce more aerosols than expected has already been part of our empirical knowledge for many years. Which is unsurprising: we have satellites in space that very accurately measure the planet's local albedo.
TL;DR version: the authors speculate that their cool fundamental findings might have impact on a different subdiscipline (climate science), but from the information I could find, this speculation seems both unwarranted and unlikely. Not being deeply familiar with the science, the journalist converts this speculative part (of an otherwise good paper) into a misleading headline. They make the capital mistake of only interviewing the paper's first author, who does a poor job at putting their speculation into perspective. This is particularly unfortunate because it's such a sensitive subject; given this curious break of routine practices, the journalist (and by extension, the BBC) is exposing themselves to accusations of politically/financially motivated bias.
You are citing Amontons' Law of Pressure-Temperature, aka. Gay-Lussac’s Law. This law is only valid for constant-volume systems. A planetary atmosphere is not constant-volume; it can and does expand and contract freely. There's also a more fundamental error in your thinking; if you were right, all cylinders with compressed gas would be incredibly hot, with no way of cooling them, which is obviously absurd. Look here for a more exhaustive rebuttal.
Amontons' Law is taught in secondary school, but has few real-life applications, especially in planetary science. The fact that you're even bringing it up shows you know even less about thermodynamics than I initially assumed. Which makes it all the more ridiculous that you're trying to insult our resident professional planetary scientist for not having the slightest idea about thermodynamics. Look, kid, the level at which you're talking about thermodynamics is so basic that even a high school science teacher could correct you. You don't possess special elite insight that allows you to see things a professional scientists fails to see. All you have shown so far is ignorance of your own ignorance.
Cute, but that law is only valid if the volume is held constant, as in a fixed quantity of gas in a rigid vessel. Under these conditions, the pressure cannot be altered by external forces other than heating or cooling (transferring thermal energy into or out of the system). A planetary atmosphere is not constant-volume; it can and does expand and contract freely. Ironically, this is explicitly mentioned in the document you're citing; at the end of the section "doing the experiment", the reader is invited to use Gay-Lussac’s Law (aka. Amontons' Law of Pressure-Temperature) to calculate the temperatures at different altitudes on earth, then it is explained that "The reason the observed temperatures do not reach these extremes is because in nature the volume is not held constant. The volume of the gas expands and contracts to counter the changes in temperature."
A slightly more appropriate argument would be to argue that adiabatic compression (where the volume is allowed to vary but the system is thermally perfectly insulated) also results in temperature increase. However, this would still be irrelevant because a planetary atmosphere is everything but thermally insulated.
Then, if you'd know a bit more about thermodynamics, you might say "fine, forget about temperature for a moment, you cannot deny that if I increase the pressure on a gas while allowing the volume to vary, part of the work I exerted will be converted to thermal energy or heat." To which I would reply, yes, but in the example of the high pressures in Venus' lower atmosphere, this is a one-time event. When Venus was formed, gases got gravitationally compressed and heat was produced. Since then, the system has had billions of years to equilibrate and the one-time heat release at its creation has become irrelevant to its present equilibrium state. This is the most fundamental mistake in your thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
At best, it has yet to be born out by fact, and at worst it is a bunch of fanciful and wishful thinking.
Translation: "I zoned out at 'but think of it'".
Reaper drone: $17M (and this is not the cheapest drone)
F/A-18E/F Super Hornet: $67M (and this is far from the most expensive manned aircraft)
You were saying?
Yeah, yeah, I know these prices on Wikipedia are very rough estimates, military hardware has a variable price tag depending on procurement negotiations, and drones that are mainly used for ground attack fall into an entirely different category than multirole fighters, making the comparison almost meaningless. But think of it, how could a drone not be cheaper? Compared to a manned aircraft, you save money by throwing out all life support systems including oxygen system and G-suit and the pneumatic system supporting it, human interfaces (basically mostly everything in the cockpit), a transparent canopy that provides visibility at the cost of drag, and an ejection seat. Yes, you'll need to replace these with redundant military-grade flight computers and sophisticated sensors and communication systems, but guess what? Modern fighters already have most of that. Then you save some more money on safety/reliability/hardiness/redundancy; you don't want your drones to be falling out of the sky by the dozens or be destroyed by one hit of a bullet, but they are allowed to be considerably less secure if the life of an expensive-to-train pilot (and potential interrogee/hostage/propaganda tool) is not on the line. Once you're done with all that, you'll find your plane has become several hundred kg lighter and more streamlined too. So you can get away with smaller engines and wings, which make the plane even lighter... the final percentage gain in weight is higher than the original percentage of weight that was needed to support a pilot. And once you're done with all that, you'll not only find your end product has become dramatically cheaper, but also more maneuverable, since the fragile human body is no longer limiting the number of Gs you can pull.
Damn it, that should have been "fake facial expressions". Where is the "edit" button on this thing?
Except that your deterrent relies on a generalization that is simply wrong
I have no idea what you're talking about; you're clearly reading something in my post that isn't there. What I wrote is that one of the main intended effects of punishment in society/sociology is its deterrent effect. This much is generally accepted. How good it at accomplishing that intended effect is open for debate. In this debate, I offered the empirical sociological observation that deterrent effect of harsher punishments quickly levels off beyond a certain point. All you're doing in your "counter-argument" is describing one of the proposed mechanisms behind that observation; you're substantiating my standpoint rather than proving me "wrong".
Just a thought, but might this simply indicate that fake facial are trained/wired to fool humans (and the attributes a human watcher would consciously or subconsciously use to judge the expression), not computers?
Deranged offtopic rant of the day. Where are the moderators when you need them?
Really, couldn't we just instate a best practice that slashdot editors should refrain from posting stories that are pulled out straight out of the telegraph? There seems to be such a strong correlation between that and the story being hogwash...
That's not the full story; there's also a very important component of deterring other people from doing the same thing. Then again, we know from psychology (as well as history and comparison between countries) that the deterrent effect of harsher punishments quickly levels off beyond a certain point, so this only supports your conclusion that "harsh punishment just isn't that important".
Be that as it may, intentional copying of a design is not a problem unless the original design is protected. Which, according to TFA, is difficult to figure out. In my understanding, that's what the story is about.
Oh, so then can you explain why big European cities, which are much more conservative about touching their >400 years old landmarks, feature sprawling competition, with much higher speeds and lower prices than the old American cities you speak of?
Not this again...
Telomer breakdown is not a bug, it's a feature. An anti-cancer feature to be exact. One of the many safeguards a would-be cancerous cell needs to mutate around in order to be successful. As people are getting older because of "regular" medical progress, cancer becomes an increasingly prevalent cause of death. Disabling telomer breakdown would be a step in the exact opposite direction from where you seem to want to go.
The general problem with aging is that it cannot be captured in a soundbite. You have mechanical wear and tear, oxidative damage, errors in DNA replication, certain tissues that haven't evolved a regeneration mechanism, accumulation of gunk in the arteries,... No single subsystem of our body has endured any selective pressure to substantially outlive its expiration date. Someone claiming to work on "curing aging" must either endeavor to redesign the human body from scratch, or be a quack. Looks from TFA Dr. Venter is trying the former approach - good luck with that. As for the quacks, it turns out telling rich fools that there might be a chance for them to live much longer is a good way to separate them from their money. Just look at how, even on this site, all critical thinking goes straight out of the window when these stupid "let's cure aging" stories come up.
Flamebait? Guess some people left their sense of humor at the door...
The way you quoted my last sentence and started your post suggested otherwise to me, and this being slashdot, it's usually safe to assume the other party didn't fully read one's post. But yeah, in retrospect, your explanation is equally likely. This misunderstanding could easily have been prevented (like, by quoting a more resource-oriented part, or simply starting your post with "Yeah,"), but of course, you didn't think of how your post could be misinterpreted. Thanks for clarifying a posteriori.
Even then, there's no way the Germans alone could have won against most of the rest of the world, but they might have been able to make the battle for Germany expensive enough to negotiate more favorable conditions for surrender (...)
And yet, they succeeded to launch over 3,000 strategically ineffective V-2s, which were complex to build, expensive, and used materials and chemical production capacity that could have been put to "better" use. Freeman Dyson famously said "the V-2 program was almost as good as if Hitler had adopted a policy of unilateral disarmament", and according to Albert Speer, if Germany would have steered the V-2 research more towards development of their radar-guided SAMs, and used the resources made available by doing so (as well as by scrapping the V-1s) to build more Me 262s, it might have been able to prevent the allies from gaining air superiority over its territory and bombing its military production capacity into pieces. This in turn would have made it much harder for the allies to waltz through Germany. Even then, there's no way the Germans alone could have won against most of the rest of the world, but they might have been able to make the battle for Germany expensive enough to negotiate more favorable conditions for surrender, or perhaps even an armistice. (Assuming they also succeeded to keep airplane-dropped nukes out through military or diplomatic means.)
Its seems like the world has to thank Hitler's maniacal obsession with offensive strategy, tactics and weaponry for the relative quick ending of fighting in Europe.
Is it tasting good, that kool-aid?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
That's because "climate change denier" is almost always applied to people who accept that the climate is changing...
Maybe you find yourself in that category, but I'm sure over 60% of the people I bicker with about this topic on slashdot flat-out deny that the climate is changing. And this is supposed to be a smart crowd...
but need better evidence than a positive correlation to accept anthropogenic causes.
So then you're talking about people who have been living under a rock for the last 30 years and somehow never heard of the greenhouse effect? You know, the causative link that was first proposed by Svante Arrhenius in 1896 purely based on the spectroscopic properties of CO2, and that has survived every scientific challenge since then, to be confirmed starting from the 1980s by:
- the correlation you're talking about
- spectroscopic satellite measurements of the earth's albedo
- sophisticated quantitative calculations/simulations.
If you accept the positive correlation, and know about the greenhouse effect, and are still whining about lack of evidence for anthropogenic causes, then surely, you're in denial about something...
And "evolution denier" is similarly attached...
By whom? You're railing against strawman arguments, but that sounds just as much like a strawman.
to people who have no problem with adaptation of species but don't necessarily accept that evolution is how life began.
There it becomes a semantic discussion, depending on where you pin "the beginning of life". I have no problem with putting the label "evolution deniers" on people who think eukaryotic life forms are not the product of evolution. Conversely, if you define "the beginning of life" as the first molecules which, however inefficiently, could trick their environment into making copies of themselves, then you're arguably right that one cannot really speak of evolution before that point.
It's also amply demonstrated in this discussion when one of the posters claimed that anti-vaccine people wanted a return of virulent diseases. It's an easy straw man to set up, claiming that anyone who disagrees with you on a specific point is seeking something much broader than is actually said. For example, it can't be that "anti-vaccine people" want to make sure that vaccines are as safe as possible, it must be that they are pro-disease.
I agree it's a a bit dihonest to accuse the anti-vaccine people of wanting the return of virulent diseases, but there are now many studies showing the effect of their (however well-meaning) efforts is just that. Vaccines are as safe as current technology allows; on this front, the FDA of the country of medical malpractice lawsuits is not cutting any corners. A lot of anti-vaccine people are against vaccines because they contain scary synthetic molecules and (demonstrated-safe doses of) equally scary-sounding elements, which is a very similar argument, and equally irrational, as the one in favor of the most diluted forms of homeopathy. And then there are also some that are against vaccines because there have been incidences of adverse effects (no matter how many orders of magnitude lower than the disabling and deadly effect of the diseases they prevent). For both categories, which together account for the bulk of anti-vaccine people, their definition of safe (ie. "not sounding scary" or "never ever triggering a single adverse reaction"), there will never be safe vaccines. Again, I know it's not their conscious intention, but they are doing bupkis, nada, zilch for making vaccines as safe as possible. The de facto effect of their actions is, indeed, the return of virulent diseases.
You could have made a point of "deniers" indicating bias 30 years ago. Welcome the the 21st century; science has advanced, and at this point, "climate change denier" is about as biased as "evolution denier".
With that out of the way, I do fully agree with the rest of your post. The article indeed seems to consist of the author fantasizing about associations between things he doesn't like. No evidence is given whatsoever to support his central thesis that Whole Foods' entire business model is based upon unscientific snake oil; no evidence but horrible populist stereotyping. Among the scientists I know (ie. most of my friends), many go to whole foods on occasion - including myself. They go there mainly for the rich selection of specialty items (like cheeses). Some also go there because they can buy animal products that have an independent animal welfare label, or because they don't want to contribute to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that is partially caused by gratuitous use of antibiotics in farming. Of course, they shun the more hippie new age parts of the store, but as you correctly pointed out, they have to do the same thing at other stores. And one can disagree with any of the above viewpoints, but calling them "snake oil" is hardly justified.
Even the crowd who thinks the FDA does not sufficiently apply the precautionary principle in assessing the heath effects of growth hormones, antibiotics and pesticides, and buy organic meats and/or dairy and/or vegetables, arguably has a point; one can accuse them of being somewhat irrationally cautious, but not of believing outright falsehoods.
[citation needed]
I've been faithfully following science stories on the BBC site for years now, and this one stands out like a sore thumb. Until now, they almost always interviewed independent UK scientists to help them interpret the impact of the original research in a new and noteworthy publication. Specifically, they almost always interview a scientist who downplays the impact, and usually also one who is more excited about it. I've always assumed this was part of their journalistic standard, and a shining example for a lot of other news outlets; interpreting scientific papers is tricky, and including varying opinions of independent scientists is paramount to giving the audience the full picture.
Now here, there's suddenly none of that; they only interviewed the first author of the paper, who naturally has a tendency to exaggerate the the impact of their research. No ill will, mind you; being passionate about one's work is a prerequisite to stay motivated as a scientists in the face of frustrating work and inhumanely long working hours. This passion will naturally bias any scientist in favor of their own research. Moreover, this kind of exaggeration is implicitly required by most granting agencies: they almost always require applicants to demonstrate wider impact, which in the case of fundamental research implies wild speculation.
Either way, since the BBC didn't do its job, allow me to cast myself in the role of the "skeptical" scientists they failed to interview. My field of research is not athmospheric science, but I'm familiar with both the underlying physical mechanisms and with fields that rely heavily on models. Here is what I learned by reading some of the paper and references. The problem they sought to tackle is that (local) athmospheric models fail to to accurately predict the amount of aerosols produced in the atmosphere from the low-volatility organic compounds emitted by boreal forests. This appears to be a well-known problem in their field, as testified by the cited references (especially ref. 2, Hallquist et al. in the open access journal "Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics" 2009, vol. 9, pp. 5155–5236). So all TFA does is provide new insights in the underlying physical processes that could likely be used to rectify the (local) athmospheric models; this is nice work and worthy of publication in Nature. As customary, the authors begin and end their paper by speculating about the wider impact of their research, which is a natural thing to do, as explained above. In this case, they speculate that (global, long-timescale) climate models may suffer from the same flaw as the above athmospheric models, and that adjusting them accordingly will lead to less extreme climate change predictions (note how nobody spoke of qualitatively different outcomes). This sounds very much unwarranted to me; in my field, coarser, higer-level models are not build on lower-level models, but on the empirical observations the latter try to explain, and judging by the Hallquist paper, the fact that boreal forests produce more aerosols than expected has already been part of our empirical knowledge for many years. Which is unsurprising: we have satellites in space that very accurately measure the planet's local albedo.
TL;DR version: the authors speculate that their cool fundamental findings might have impact on a different subdiscipline (climate science), but from the information I could find, this speculation seems both unwarranted and unlikely. Not being deeply familiar with the science, the journalist converts this speculative part (of an otherwise good paper) into a misleading headline. They make the capital mistake of only interviewing the paper's first author, who does a poor job at putting their speculation into perspective. This is particularly unfortunate because it's such a sensitive subject; given this curious break of routine practices, the journalist (and by extension, the BBC) is exposing themselves to accusations of politically/financially motivated bias.
The acorn risk processor was designed for the British "BBC Microcomputer" to be attached via the "Tube" second processor system
Oooh then we can stream BBC classics such as Monty Python's Flying Cicrus over you"Tube"!
...golly look at the time - I'll get my coat.
Moron.
You are citing Amontons' Law of Pressure-Temperature, aka. Gay-Lussac’s Law. This law is only valid for constant-volume systems. A planetary atmosphere is not constant-volume; it can and does expand and contract freely. There's also a more fundamental error in your thinking; if you were right, all cylinders with compressed gas would be incredibly hot, with no way of cooling them, which is obviously absurd. Look here for a more exhaustive rebuttal.
Amontons' Law is taught in secondary school, but has few real-life applications, especially in planetary science. The fact that you're even bringing it up shows you know even less about thermodynamics than I initially assumed. Which makes it all the more ridiculous that you're trying to insult our resident professional planetary scientist for not having the slightest idea about thermodynamics. Look, kid, the level at which you're talking about thermodynamics is so basic that even a high school science teacher could correct you. You don't possess special elite insight that allows you to see things a professional scientists fails to see. All you have shown so far is ignorance of your own ignorance.
Cute, but that law is only valid if the volume is held constant, as in a fixed quantity of gas in a rigid vessel. Under these conditions, the pressure cannot be altered by external forces other than heating or cooling (transferring thermal energy into or out of the system). A planetary atmosphere is not constant-volume; it can and does expand and contract freely. Ironically, this is explicitly mentioned in the document you're citing; at the end of the section "doing the experiment", the reader is invited to use Gay-Lussac’s Law (aka. Amontons' Law of Pressure-Temperature) to calculate the temperatures at different altitudes on earth, then it is explained that "The reason the observed temperatures do not reach these extremes is because in nature the volume is not held constant. The volume of the gas expands and contracts to counter the changes in temperature."
A slightly more appropriate argument would be to argue that adiabatic compression (where the volume is allowed to vary but the system is thermally perfectly insulated) also results in temperature increase. However, this would still be irrelevant because a planetary atmosphere is everything but thermally insulated.
Then, if you'd know a bit more about thermodynamics, you might say "fine, forget about temperature for a moment, you cannot deny that if I increase the pressure on a gas while allowing the volume to vary, part of the work I exerted will be converted to thermal energy or heat." To which I would reply, yes, but in the example of the high pressures in Venus' lower atmosphere, this is a one-time event. When Venus was formed, gases got gravitationally compressed and heat was produced. Since then, the system has had billions of years to equilibrate and the one-time heat release at its creation has become irrelevant to its present equilibrium state. This is the most fundamental mistake in your thinking.
lovin the reasoned argument backed up by facts.
Oh, so when other people do it, it's suddenly not cool?
I'm at least now more comfortable that I'm less wrong than them.
That's the Dunning–Kruger effect for you. What other people see is someone who talks like a crackpot.