Ick, you have to ask? For starters it's a round parenthesis language like C, Java, and other icky goo.
Well, it does have prototypes so it's not all totally lost.
Heck, even C is getting blocks now with llvm and clang over at apple - grand central dispatch relies upon lambda blocks like smalltalk has for decades.
If you like javascript that's great, good for you. It's just not for all of us who prefer other languages. That's were the chrome native binary api comes in with the browsers. It let's us download natively compiled components written in OUR FAVORITE language - whatever it happens to be - and we're then not restricted by the goo and ick in the javascript. It also means that our existing code bases can be utilized in the browsers even if it's C, Objective-C, C++, Smalltalk, Perl, LISP, Forth, ERlang,......... and so on....
It's about FREEDOM of choice for ME the developer rather than icky javascript being FORCED upon me as it has been for the last decade and a half or whatever it's been....
As for youtube they have too much power... decentralize now with the video and audio tags!
Dump Flash and Silverlight into the dust bin of bit history along with the YouTube master control! Onward!
How about adopting Chromes Native Code Binary API plugins for all the browsers while we're at it? Let's get it so that we can auto download plugins written in languages other than that icky JavaScript gooicky stuff.
Get on with it guys! The web browser is still just so much as a dumb terminal spitting screens to a central server master control program!
Wow, that's quite the fish story. Pretty interesting hypothesis though it needs solid, er, liquid evidence to back it up... otherwise it's flowing into the dust bin, er, drain of science history as a pretty darn cool and silly theory that didn't make it.
Well actually he's saying that there is a "main field" and that the ocean currents are a modification or additional field. Cool. Cutting edge science can be fun. It's where cross currents of ideas and beliefs mix until evidence eventually coalesces with a vortex pulling everyone to the indisputable conclusions - if you're lucky and on course of course.
I wonder if this hypothesis might explain the "magnetic anomalies" in the oceans around the world that are constantly changing? I'd love to see a three dimensional simulation of the raw data collected by the magnetic sensing satellites and the gravity satellites correlated together with ocean current movements.
Does this theory spin the other way in the southern hemisphere?
Patent examiners need to get their heads examined.
Patents, a strange concept anyhow to have a government imposed monopoly. Revoke your governments power to have patents. That should take care of the pesky problem. Prior art helps too.
So because you don't like their "politics" you discount the science that the do? Sounds like you're a non-scientist making a political decision femtobyte rather than considering the actual facts and the actual science. That shows your bias very clearly.
Nothing you've said has anything to do with the actual science femtobyte! Isn't that interesting. It's just peer pressure to not listen to a group of scientists. That indicates that you are in a cult attempting to apply pressure to avoid a factual investigation of the science. So please stop the political pressure and read the darn report.
Read the report. Open your eyes dude. Set aside your bias or at least hold it in check while you reconsider the evidence and the arguments.
Here is a taste related to what I was saying before about forecasting, although they don't make the exact point I was making, their points are essentially irrefutable as they point out the flaws of forecasting or as I put it, Living in the Shadows of Soothsayers ( http://pathstoknowledge.wordpress.com/2009/02/23/living-in-the-shadow-of-soothsayers/ ).
The following excerpt from chapter one of the NIPCC 2009 Report is a scathing indictment of the IPCC indicating BAD SCIENCE at the least.
1.1. Models and Forecasting
J. Scott Armstrong, professor, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and a leading figure in the discipline of professional forecasting, has pointed out that forecasting is a practice and discipline in its own right, with its own institute (International Institute of Forecasters, founded in 1981), peer-reviewed journal (International Journal of Forecasting), and an extensive body of research that has been compiled into a set of scientific procedures, currently numbering 140, that must be used to make reliable forecasts (Principles of Forecasting: A Handbook for Researchers and Practitioners, by J. Scott Armstrong, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001).
According to Armstrong, when physicists, biologists, and other scientists who do not know the rules of forecasting attempt to make climate predictions based on their training and expertise, their forecasts are no more reliable than those made by nonexperts, even when they are communicated through complex computer models (Armstrong, 2001). In other words, forecasts by scientists, even large numbers of very distinguished scientists, are not necessarily scientific forecasts. In support of his position, Armstrong and a colleague cite research by Philip E. Tetlock (2005), a psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at the University of California, Berkeley, who "recruited 288 people whose professions included 'commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends.' He asked them to forecast the probability that various situations would or would not occur, picking areas (geographic and substantive) within and outside their areas of expertise. By 2003, he had accumulated more than 82,000 forecasts. The experts barely if at all outperformed non-experts and neither group did well against simple rules" (Green and Armstrong, 2007).
The failure of expert opinion to lead to reliable forecasts has been confirmed in scores of empirical studies (Armstrong, 2006; Craig et al., 2002; Cerf and Navasky, 1998; Ascher, 1978) and illustrated in historical examples of incorrect forecasts made by leading experts (Cerf and Navasky, 1998). In 2007, Armstrong and Kesten C. Green of Monash University conducted a "forecasting audit" of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (Green and Armstrong, 2007). The authors' search of the contribution of Working Group I to the IPCC "found no references... to the primary sources of inf
I think you are mischaracterizing the information and painting it in a negative light and getting all confused with your non-science beliefs all of which are irrelevant.
I've not fallen for any "canards" dude as I don't believe nor disbelieve the science being put forward, I need proof, actual open independently VERIFIABLE and AUDITABLE proof - show all the steps of the science from premise to data collection to analysis and conclusions with all raw data, intermediate data and all source code for programs used.
Stories and belief have no place in science. Not that the actual science is driving the pro-disaster crowd who seem to have seen too many science fiction movies like "The Day After Tomorrow" and "An Inconvenient Truth" or "The Day the Earth Caught Fire".
Rolling dice is quite a bit different than weather dude. Thus the analysis is also different.
I do apply the highest standards that I can to all claims from any source on any topic. As a person committed to minimal belief and maximum tested knowledge in as many areas of life as possible I take it quite seriously.
Unfortunately what is clear is that "climate science", ahem, isn't as hard a science as we are lead to believe nor is it as "settled" as we are lead to believe. Physics has one up on climate science in many regards.
There are many problems with climate science: bad data, limited data, inferred data, statistically - ahem magically - corrected data, bad data collection sites, bad science by scientists, refusals to provide data and programs, political agendas,.... the list goes on and on and on and on.... like the energizer bunny.... (no I don't work for Duracell;-).
I won't repeat what others are more capable of reporting in depth: http://climateaudit.org/http://wattsupwiththat.com/ - two excellent sites that work to provide an audit and rational analysis of what is going on in the science and in the actual world. Oh and http://surfacestations.org/ - when you can't trust the sources of the raw data (if you can even get that) how can you trust any conclusions drawn from said data?
I'm not an expert by any means. In fact I'm quite ignorant of much of the climate science science but I'm learning step by step. It's a complicated field with many flaws and whacked out conclusions drawn seemingly from extreme disaster scenarios and good and bad hollywood movies.
I am a computer scientist and as such I do know about simulations. I've written some. I also know about cellular automata and how they can generate their own randomness within their systems. As Wolfram has demonstrated with a number of proofs Nature is a universal computing system that not only includes continuous systems but also discrete cellular automata like systems. It's highly likely that weather and climate systems are systems that generate their own randomness from within their own systems. This means that they can never be simulated with any accuracy. This means that the only way to know how those "natural computations" are going to end up is to watch them run to their conclusions. This means that all computer models for climate are bogus in regard to their ability to predict the future. That is an inherent flaw not due to a lack of human ingenuity but due to a fundamental aspect of Nature. The fundamental notion that "the map is not the territory" has been violated by the climate scientists running simulations WHEN they BELIEVE in their simulations and WHEN they distort the raw input data with statistical games that alter the data so much that fundamentally alter the trends visibly. (See this blink comparator: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/28/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-87-grilling-in-the-cornhusker-state/). Is statistically massaged data that misrepresents scientific fraud? That is a good question that is being investigated and is part of the reason that the likes of Dr. Mann (of hockey stick fame) are so defensive. They don't like their work being scrutinized in depth. Dr. Mann has already been admonished by the NAS.
However, it turns out that there are many such questions with climate science which looks like it's in a big need of a serious revamping of it's peer review process. Also if the claims are as dire as the likes of Gore predict or even 1/50th as bad then it's extremely important that we OPEN the Climate Science to maximal scrutiny by people of all fields to vet it and find the flaws and frauds and correct these mistakes and transgressions and to improve our knowledge of climate science and really find out what is occurring on planet Earth in the dynamic Sol-Earth-Moon-solar-system syste
Sorry about the unintentional redundant posts which were a result of Slashdot not responding for minutes before I tried again and again.... finally it went through. I guess the bugs with the firehose haven't all been worked out yet.
NO I'm not a skeptical person with regards to the CLAIMS of science! I'm a scientist that DEMANDS PROOF OF ANY AND ALL scientific CLAIMS! When I see claims that are unsupportable given the counter evidence then it's very difficult to accept those claims. I need actual evidence not political propaganda pretending to be science. The claims of the AGW Hypothesis are very much like the claims of Young Earth Creationists, all the counter evidence is dismissed. As you'll see the AGW hypothesis has been disproven now, at least enough to require HARD EVIDENCE beyond refute before it can be taken seriously.
Of course I know as most people do that a white surface reflects more heat off of a surface than a black surface does. You shouldn't insult people like that.
Your experiment is lacking in finesse to reproduce the effect with enough confidence to know for sure that it models reflection off the Earth's surface and through the atmosphere.
Well there is a chance that you might be right about the reflection of the radiation back into space, I'll grant you that. I'll have to study the materials you pointed me to in depth.
"I guess that you think of yourself as being a "skeptical" person with regards to the claims of science."
However, it's been calculated that only ~1.5% of the surface of the Earth cities or towns and even if everything in every town and city was painted a perfect reflecting color that's simply not enough to correct the increasing temp of Earth.
Besides your and the others are proceeding on a false assumption that humans have caused global warming and even on the faulty assumption that global warming is a bad thing! It's not. In fact our human civilizations have benefited tremendously from warmer temperatures in the past than it is now. The ice core records from Greenland show that it's been much warmer than it is now for thousands of years about 8,000 years ago. Then during the roman age about ~4,000 years ago through ~2,000 years ago the temperature started deceasing by about 2.5c but they still didn't reach the recent bottom as there was the medieval warm period where it got warmer. It wasn't until ~140 years ago that the temperature of earth reached bottom in what is know as the little ice age. The temp has been climbing since way before man started driving cars and emitting C02 (an essential plant nutrient). See the video here: http://pathstoknowledge.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/proofs-against-anthropogenic-global-warming/ . The point is that the Mann hockey stick graph distorts the facts by not looking at the last 10,000 year record and by the use of statistical games and bizarre weirdness in his temperature proxy data selection policy that it's essentially useless except to promote lies that we are doomed.
I'm not a skeptic for skeptics sake. I'm simply not one to take anything on belief. I will take correction when I make mistakes. If it turns out that you are right about the reflected light staying the same (that would imply a perfect reflective surface that doesn't alter the frequency nor absorb too many photons) then I'll admit I'm wrong.
To think that AWG is "proven" is folly. In fact the counter evidence is tremendous and damningly so.
Oh, now you come out with claims that I have monetary motives in stating my opinions! How typical of the nut jobs. No I don't make any money. Have you seen my web site, http://w
Of course I know as most people do that a white surface reflects more heat off of a surface than a black surface does. Dah!
Your experiment is lacking in finesse to reproduce the effect with enough confidence to know for sure that it models reflection off the Earth's surface and through the atmosphere.
Well there is a chance that you might be right about the reflection of the radiation back into space, I'll grant you that. I'll have to study the materials you pointed me to in depth.
"I guess that you think of yourself as being a "skeptical" person with regards to the claims of science."
However, it's been calculated that only ~1.5% of the surface of the Earth cities or towns and even if everything in every town and city was painted a perfect reflecting color that's simply not enough to correct the increasing temp of Earth.
Besides your and the others are proceeding on a false assumption that humans have caused global warming and even on the faulty assumption that global warming is a bad thing! It's not. In fact our human civilizations have benefited tremendously from warmer temperatures in the past than it is now. The ice core records from Greenland show that it's been much warmer than it is now for thousands of years about 8,000 years ago. Then during the roman age about ~4,000 years ago through ~2,000 years ago the temperature started deceasing by about 2.5c but they still didn't reach the recent bottom as there was the medieval warm period where it got warmer. It wasn't until ~140 years ago that the temperature of earth reached bottom in what is know as the little ice age. The temp has been climbing since way before man started driving cars and emitting C02 (an essential plant nutrient). See the video here: http://pathstoknowledge.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/proofs-against-anthropogenic-global-warming/ . The point is that the Mann hockey stick graph distorts the facts by not looking at the last 10,000 year record and by the use of statistical games and bizarre weirdness in his temperature proxy data selection policy that it's essentially useless except to promote lies that we are doomed.
I'm not a skeptic for skeptics sake. I'm simply not one to take anything on belief. I will take correction when I make mistakes. If it turns out that you are right about the reflected light staying the same (that would imply a perfect reflective surface that doesn't alter the frequency nor absorb too many photons) then I'll admit I'm wrong.
To think that AWG is "proven" is folly. In fact the counter evidence is tremendous and damningly so.
Oh, now you come out with claims that I have monetary motives in stating my opinions! How typical of the nut jobs. No I don't make any money. Have you seen my web site, http://www.pathstoknowledge.net/ which is all about science and debunking the gooey mind poo that gets spit at us all from all directions? Not a single advertisement! No, I'm simply a humble human being who doesn't like stupidity being shoveled at him from government dummies with their agenda of control. I also ask questions and find out the answers.
Objective reality is my guide not belief, not faith, not some hidden agenda. My only agenda is living a healthy and happy life and learning as much about objective reality as possible and to share that knowledge. I work in the computer field doing computer science so yeah I'm not as much a
That's funny, polarization, good one... however I'm not confused at all about the AGW hypothesis nor about the green house gas theory in particular.
Trust me in the winter spring and fall in Canada, even the relatively warm cities like Vancouver, heat is a serious problem in the winter.
A one shoe fits all scenarios for reducing energy consumption, such as magic white paint, won't help us. It's just bad science to think that magically painting every darn thang white is going to do much.
In buildings that require air conditioning put up SOLAR PANELS to offset some or all of the cost of cooling the buildings.
It is a well know fact that white buildings reflect heat from the sun. This is a fact that humans have taken advantage of for thousands of years if not more. Confusing it with the nonsense of AWG makes no sense.
It does make a lot of sense to reduce the energy consumption of every building. In Canada this has been encouraged for decades to save energy! We also add insulation to keep heat in during the cold times and heat out during the hot, and we design our residential and industrial roofs to have good heat venting.
AWG has replaced being environmentally responsible as it's the latest buzz word for social control and now it would seem government control of our lives at every level. Quite pernicious.
Chu is simply spouting political propaganda disguised as science when it's bad science to mix unrelated notions.
If Chu simply said that we should check to see if it makes sense for any particular building to have a coat of white paint as part of it's energy management that would have been fine. To mix in the AGWH just tarnishes his reputation as a scientist and moves him squarely into the Belief Stricken AGW crowd who are on a political terrorforming campaign to alter our planet's atmosphere.
We in Canada want it to get warmer. Thanks very much for not adjusting the planet's thermostat downwards.
An increase in pale surfaces would help to contain climate change both by reflecting more solar radiation into space and by reducing the amount of energy needed to keep buildings cool by air-conditioning.
What? The AWG hypothesis says that the radiation is being kept IN by the C02 in the atmosphere... thus it matters not that it's reflected back into space by white surfaces on the SURFACE of the Earth SINCE they ARE well within and UNDER the green house gas layers of the atmosphere (not counting the painting of mount everest et. al.)! Dah!
What kind of bizarro world is this where the radiation can be reflected back and NOT be stopped by the VERY C02 (and other) GREEN HOUSE GASES that are the problem?
It is the height of nonsense coming out of Chu's brain as you can't have it both ways there Steve and Al, either the green house gasses keep the radiation trapped in OR they don't! Which will it be?
If the green house gasses can't keep the heat radiation in then it follows that AWG is now proven false.
If the green house gases do keep in the heat radiation then AWG might have some tiny probability of being true AND Steven Chu's been proven an idiot for wanting to paint the world a 1984 gray.
I don't know about you but in Canada we like it toasty thus darker colors for buildings are better to keep it warm in the winter and use less energy for heating.
White buildings in the southern regions closer to the equator make sense to keep the buildings cooler in the heat that is there most of the time.
Actually you're not quite right about C... it's not that efficient at all... most C instructions generate many actual machine instructions so C is quite removed from the bare hardware and how "the processor actually thinks" dude. Assembly language is much closer to the metal. Yes it's not a "high level language" but then neither is C, not really! C is a low level systems language.
"Pointers" are not to be feared, mistakes with pointers are what is feared. Many higher level languages simply prevent those mistakes while providing all the usually necessary operational flexibility.
For sure "message sending languages" such as Java and Smalltalk implement programming paradigms that the processor doesn't know about.
Modern processors execute multiple instructions per cycle (instruction level parallelism). The game of speed is all about filling those instruction slots with useful productive instructions and not letting them go to waste unused. EVERY LANGUAGE that aims for any amount of speed must meet the challenge of filling those slots.
C compilers are notorious for NOT filling these instruction slots for each cycle.
Often it's not the compiler's fault since the code they are compiling is too sequential or branches too much to fill all the slots in a cycle. Also all the slots on the cpu are not created equal and may not even be the same across all versions of a manufacturers chip line.
Assembly will almost always beat C even hands down since it's always possible to write better code than the compiler can. It's a matter of HUMAN TIME COST. Assembly usually takes longer to write than C just as C usually takes longer to write than code in higher level languages.
So when you are interested in speed, is that speed of execution or speed of development where dollar and human time cost is paramount?
There are efforts underway to make the compilers for languages like Smalltalk just as fast as C by the use of many techniques including the use of hidden inlining of code (this is effective in Smalltalk since the methods on classes tend to be very short at an average of under nine lines) and custom compilation of methods based on discovered object types. Essentially message sends are eliminated in many cases and types are discovered and specialized versions of the code is compiled for those types - either on the fly or at development time. In languages like Smalltalk all variable references are pointers references so pointers are not to be feared as the spycraft-fu mistakenly asserts. In fact a uniform use of pointers makes the language easier to understand while maintaining a one to one mapping of "object structure" to "how the machine thinks" - you could not have a closer mapping! The advanced work currently being done looks like it could bring Smalltalk compilers to produce code that is consistently at or above the speed of C compilers. Oops.
Remember the game is filling the instruction slots in modern super scalar processors. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscalar).
One of the hidden costs of C is the debugging time when things go wrong.
Recently I undertook the task of updating an 15 year old program written mostly in C and C++ with a good bit of Assembly Language. I didn't have to change the assembly language one iota since it was "well thought out". As for the C and C++, both had many errors of the classic sort one finds with C based languages: buffer overflows left right and center - even where they were not expected! Funny enough one of the bigger non-buffer overflow bugs was found by tracing an unexpected buffer overflow as it did it's damage. It was also interesting that adding any code to "manage" buffer overflows would noticeably slow down (by 10% or more on inner loops) the program which was a heavy data cruncher. Once again the number of lines of code generated for each line of C was many, with numerous possible assembly optimizations still possible.
Sure C might be faster but often that's because the C programmers took too many BIG risks with the
Yes, it has many predictions with many of those verified and mathematically PROVEN in the book itself.
You've got a terrible misreading of Wolfram's A New Kind of Science dude. Of course if YOU assume he premise is "these are simple therefore they are ubiquitous, likely, and fundamental" you'll have a negative point of view on it. Remember those are YOUR words which reveal your prejudice against the work, no wonder you've got a negative point of view, you didn't understand what Wolfram had actually written.
If you can't see how the principles of simple systems such as cellular automata don't apply to the real world you need to read the book again until you do see that. That is assuming you care to have a better understanding of the work rather than your misguided perception of it.
The point is that it's a complex and voluminous work and that it can take a bit of effort to understand all the aspects of it in depth.
Rather than scoffing at the author, Stephen Wolfram, how about reading the work again and actually attempting to think how it could apply to any particular science of your choice?
Haven't you seen the original The Blob movie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blob) with Steve McQueen? It's PINKish red goo!!! Ok, in some scenes it's transparent so it might confuse you for being grey...
... wait there's more... act now and you'll get a FREE appendix... it's not good for anything but you'll get it with your purchase of a self-replicating human... act now... and we'll even throw in the fat collecting genes with that purchase... don't waste those calories but burning them in your human... store them... for later use... act now... there is no better time than now...
Slashdot Mirror
Ick, you have to ask? For starters it's a round parenthesis language like C, Java, and other icky goo.
Well, it does have prototypes so it's not all totally lost.
Heck, even C is getting blocks now with llvm and clang over at apple - grand central dispatch relies upon lambda blocks like smalltalk has for decades.
If you like javascript that's great, good for you. It's just not for all of us who prefer other languages. That's were the chrome native binary api comes in with the browsers. It let's us download natively compiled components written in OUR FAVORITE language - whatever it happens to be - and we're then not restricted by the goo and ick in the javascript. It also means that our existing code bases can be utilized in the browsers even if it's C, Objective-C, C++, Smalltalk, Perl, LISP, Forth, ERlang, ... ... ... and so on....
It's about FREEDOM of choice for ME the developer rather than icky javascript being FORCED upon me as it has been for the last decade and a half or whatever it's been....
As for youtube they have too much power... decentralize now with the video and audio tags!
Dump Flash and Silverlight into the dust bin of bit history along with the YouTube master control! Onward!
How about adopting Chromes Native Code Binary API plugins for all the browsers while we're at it? Let's get it so that we can auto download plugins written in languages other than that icky JavaScript gooicky stuff.
Get on with it guys! The web browser is still just so much as a dumb terminal spitting screens to a central server master control program!
Let the independent distributed revolution begin!
Yes, they did! While it was good for the first 24 episodes the second "series" really sucked more as if that's possible.
Of course, it's Sept 13, 1999 all over again if they try it!
Here is the TRUE evidence of what happened that fateful day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npaRNpjV5IE .
They don't want you to know! The Truth is Out there somewhere... who the heck knows... someone does and they are not telling!!!
A pot whole of good BC bud makes surfing those waves much easier as time slips into the future, into the future...
Slip sliding away.... slip sliding away....
Wow, that's quite the fish story. Pretty interesting hypothesis though it needs solid, er, liquid evidence to back it up... otherwise it's flowing into the dust bin, er, drain of science history as a pretty darn cool and silly theory that didn't make it.
Well actually he's saying that there is a "main field" and that the ocean currents are a modification or additional field. Cool. Cutting edge science can be fun. It's where cross currents of ideas and beliefs mix until evidence eventually coalesces with a vortex pulling everyone to the indisputable conclusions - if you're lucky and on course of course.
I wonder if this hypothesis might explain the "magnetic anomalies" in the oceans around the world that are constantly changing? I'd love to see a three dimensional simulation of the raw data collected by the magnetic sensing satellites and the gravity satellites correlated together with ocean current movements.
Does this theory spin the other way in the southern hemisphere?
That's sorta like the Rhinoceros Party winning a seat in Canada.
Strange I was just researching MapReduce online when this slashdot posting appeared.
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ralf/MapReduce/paper.pdf
http://cnx.org/content/m20644/latest/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapReduce
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_File_System
Patent examiners need to get their heads examined.
Patents, a strange concept anyhow to have a government imposed monopoly. Revoke your governments power to have patents. That should take care of the pesky problem. Prior art helps too.
So because you don't like their "politics" you discount the science that the do? Sounds like you're a non-scientist making a political decision femtobyte rather than considering the actual facts and the actual science. That shows your bias very clearly.
Nothing you've said has anything to do with the actual science femtobyte! Isn't that interesting. It's just peer pressure to not listen to a group of scientists. That indicates that you are in a cult attempting to apply pressure to avoid a factual investigation of the science. So please stop the political pressure and read the darn report.
Read the report. Open your eyes dude. Set aside your bias or at least hold it in check while you reconsider the evidence and the arguments.
Here is a taste related to what I was saying before about forecasting, although they don't make the exact point I was making, their points are essentially irrefutable as they point out the flaws of forecasting or as I put it, Living in the Shadows of Soothsayers ( http://pathstoknowledge.wordpress.com/2009/02/23/living-in-the-shadow-of-soothsayers/ ).
http://pathstoknowledge.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/nongovernmental-international-panel-on-climate-change-nipcc-2009-report/
The following excerpt from chapter one of the NIPCC 2009 Report is a scathing indictment of the IPCC indicating BAD SCIENCE at the least.
1.1. Models and Forecasting
J. Scott Armstrong, professor, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and a leading figure in the discipline of professional forecasting, has pointed out that forecasting is a practice and discipline in its own right, with its own institute (International Institute of Forecasters, founded in 1981), peer-reviewed journal (International Journal of Forecasting), and an extensive body of research that has been compiled into a set of scientific procedures, currently numbering 140, that must be used to make reliable forecasts (Principles of Forecasting: A Handbook for Researchers and Practitioners, by J. Scott Armstrong, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001).
According to Armstrong, when physicists, biologists, and other scientists who do not know the rules of forecasting attempt to make climate predictions based on their training and expertise, their forecasts are no more reliable than those made by nonexperts, even when they are communicated through complex computer models (Armstrong, 2001). In other words, forecasts by scientists, even large numbers of very distinguished scientists, are not necessarily scientific forecasts. In support of his position, Armstrong and a colleague cite research by Philip E. Tetlock (2005), a psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at the University of California, Berkeley, who "recruited 288 people whose professions included 'commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends.' He asked them to forecast the probability that various situations would or would not occur, picking areas (geographic and substantive) within and outside their areas of expertise. By 2003, he had accumulated more than 82,000 forecasts. The experts barely if at all outperformed non-experts and neither group did well against simple rules" (Green and Armstrong, 2007).
The failure of expert opinion to lead to reliable forecasts has been confirmed in scores of empirical studies (Armstrong, 2006; Craig et al., 2002; Cerf and Navasky, 1998; Ascher, 1978) and illustrated in historical examples of incorrect forecasts made by leading experts (Cerf and Navasky, 1998). In 2007, Armstrong and Kesten C. Green of Monash University conducted a "forecasting audit" of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (Green and Armstrong, 2007). The authors' search of the contribution of Working Group I to the IPCC "found no references ... to the primary sources of inf
I think you are mischaracterizing the information and painting it in a negative light and getting all confused with your non-science beliefs all of which are irrelevant.
Correlation is not proof of causation.
I've not fallen for any "canards" dude as I don't believe nor disbelieve the science being put forward, I need proof, actual open independently VERIFIABLE and AUDITABLE proof - show all the steps of the science from premise to data collection to analysis and conclusions with all raw data, intermediate data and all source code for programs used.
Stories and belief have no place in science. Not that the actual science is driving the pro-disaster crowd who seem to have seen too many science fiction movies like "The Day After Tomorrow" and "An Inconvenient Truth" or "The Day the Earth Caught Fire".
Rolling dice is quite a bit different than weather dude. Thus the analysis is also different.
The NIPCC recently released report (yesterday) should set you on your way to seeing that the science is not settled as you'd believe it to be. http://pathstoknowledge.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/nongovernmental-international-panel-on-climate-change-nipcc-2009-report/
Thanks.
I do apply the highest standards that I can to all claims from any source on any topic. As a person committed to minimal belief and maximum tested knowledge in as many areas of life as possible I take it quite seriously.
Unfortunately what is clear is that "climate science", ahem, isn't as hard a science as we are lead to believe nor is it as "settled" as we are lead to believe. Physics has one up on climate science in many regards.
There are many problems with climate science: bad data, limited data, inferred data, statistically - ahem magically - corrected data, bad data collection sites, bad science by scientists, refusals to provide data and programs, political agendas, .... the list goes on and on and on and on.... like the energizer bunny.... (no I don't work for Duracell ;-).
I won't repeat what others are more capable of reporting in depth: http://climateaudit.org/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/ - two excellent sites that work to provide an audit and rational analysis of what is going on in the science and in the actual world. Oh and http://surfacestations.org/ - when you can't trust the sources of the raw data (if you can even get that) how can you trust any conclusions drawn from said data?
I'm not an expert by any means. In fact I'm quite ignorant of much of the climate science science but I'm learning step by step. It's a complicated field with many flaws and whacked out conclusions drawn seemingly from extreme disaster scenarios and good and bad hollywood movies.
I am a computer scientist and as such I do know about simulations. I've written some. I also know about cellular automata and how they can generate their own randomness within their systems. As Wolfram has demonstrated with a number of proofs Nature is a universal computing system that not only includes continuous systems but also discrete cellular automata like systems. It's highly likely that weather and climate systems are systems that generate their own randomness from within their own systems. This means that they can never be simulated with any accuracy. This means that the only way to know how those "natural computations" are going to end up is to watch them run to their conclusions. This means that all computer models for climate are bogus in regard to their ability to predict the future. That is an inherent flaw not due to a lack of human ingenuity but due to a fundamental aspect of Nature. The fundamental notion that "the map is not the territory" has been violated by the climate scientists running simulations WHEN they BELIEVE in their simulations and WHEN they distort the raw input data with statistical games that alter the data so much that fundamentally alter the trends visibly. (See this blink comparator: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/28/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-87-grilling-in-the-cornhusker-state/). Is statistically massaged data that misrepresents scientific fraud? That is a good question that is being investigated and is part of the reason that the likes of Dr. Mann (of hockey stick fame) are so defensive. They don't like their work being scrutinized in depth. Dr. Mann has already been admonished by the NAS.
However, it turns out that there are many such questions with climate science which looks like it's in a big need of a serious revamping of it's peer review process. Also if the claims are as dire as the likes of Gore predict or even 1/50th as bad then it's extremely important that we OPEN the Climate Science to maximal scrutiny by people of all fields to vet it and find the flaws and frauds and correct these mistakes and transgressions and to improve our knowledge of climate science and really find out what is occurring on planet Earth in the dynamic Sol-Earth-Moon-solar-system syste
Sorry about the unintentional redundant posts which were a result of Slashdot not responding for minutes before I tried again and again.... finally it went through. I guess the bugs with the firehose haven't all been worked out yet.
NO I'm not a skeptical person with regards to the CLAIMS of science! I'm a scientist that DEMANDS PROOF OF ANY AND ALL scientific CLAIMS! When I see claims that are unsupportable given the counter evidence then it's very difficult to accept those claims. I need actual evidence not political propaganda pretending to be science. The claims of the AGW Hypothesis are very much like the claims of Young Earth Creationists, all the counter evidence is dismissed. As you'll see the AGW hypothesis has been disproven now, at least enough to require HARD EVIDENCE beyond refute before it can be taken seriously.
Of course I know as most people do that a white surface reflects more heat off of a surface than a black surface does. You shouldn't insult people like that.
Your experiment is lacking in finesse to reproduce the effect with enough confidence to know for sure that it models reflection off the Earth's surface and through the atmosphere.
Well there is a chance that you might be right about the reflection of the radiation back into space, I'll grant you that. I'll have to study the materials you pointed me to in depth.
"I guess that you think of yourself as being a "skeptical" person with regards to the claims of science."
No not at all. I am a scientist.
It's clear that what Chu has been saying has little relevant science to back it up as it's mostly political nonsense designed to bring in more political control systems under the pretense of the faulty AWG Hypothesis which has now been disproven (see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/24/disproving-the-anthropogenic-global-warming-agw-problem/).
However, it's been calculated that only ~1.5% of the surface of the Earth cities or towns and even if everything in every town and city was painted a perfect reflecting color that's simply not enough to correct the increasing temp of Earth.
Besides your and the others are proceeding on a false assumption that humans have caused global warming and even on the faulty assumption that global warming is a bad thing! It's not. In fact our human civilizations have benefited tremendously from warmer temperatures in the past than it is now. The ice core records from Greenland show that it's been much warmer than it is now for thousands of years about 8,000 years ago. Then during the roman age about ~4,000 years ago through ~2,000 years ago the temperature started deceasing by about 2.5c but they still didn't reach the recent bottom as there was the medieval warm period where it got warmer. It wasn't until ~140 years ago that the temperature of earth reached bottom in what is know as the little ice age. The temp has been climbing since way before man started driving cars and emitting C02 (an essential plant nutrient). See the video here: http://pathstoknowledge.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/proofs-against-anthropogenic-global-warming/ . The point is that the Mann hockey stick graph distorts the facts by not looking at the last 10,000 year record and by the use of statistical games and bizarre weirdness in his temperature proxy data selection policy that it's essentially useless except to promote lies that we are doomed.
I'm not a skeptic for skeptics sake. I'm simply not one to take anything on belief. I will take correction when I make mistakes. If it turns out that you are right about the reflected light staying the same (that would imply a perfect reflective surface that doesn't alter the frequency nor absorb too many photons) then I'll admit I'm wrong.
To think that AWG is "proven" is folly. In fact the counter evidence is tremendous and damningly so.
Oh, now you come out with claims that I have monetary motives in stating my opinions! How typical of the nut jobs. No I don't make any money. Have you seen my web site, http://w
Of course I know as most people do that a white surface reflects more heat off of a surface than a black surface does. Dah!
Your experiment is lacking in finesse to reproduce the effect with enough confidence to know for sure that it models reflection off the Earth's surface and through the atmosphere.
Well there is a chance that you might be right about the reflection of the radiation back into space, I'll grant you that. I'll have to study the materials you pointed me to in depth.
"I guess that you think of yourself as being a "skeptical" person with regards to the claims of science."
No not at all. I am a scientist.
It's clear that what Chu has been saying has little relevant science to back it up as it's mostly political nonsense designed to bring in more political control systems under the pretense of the faulty AWG Hypothesis which has now been disproven (see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/24/disproving-the-anthropogenic-global-warming-agw-problem/).
However, it's been calculated that only ~1.5% of the surface of the Earth cities or towns and even if everything in every town and city was painted a perfect reflecting color that's simply not enough to correct the increasing temp of Earth.
Besides your and the others are proceeding on a false assumption that humans have caused global warming and even on the faulty assumption that global warming is a bad thing! It's not. In fact our human civilizations have benefited tremendously from warmer temperatures in the past than it is now. The ice core records from Greenland show that it's been much warmer than it is now for thousands of years about 8,000 years ago. Then during the roman age about ~4,000 years ago through ~2,000 years ago the temperature started deceasing by about 2.5c but they still didn't reach the recent bottom as there was the medieval warm period where it got warmer. It wasn't until ~140 years ago that the temperature of earth reached bottom in what is know as the little ice age. The temp has been climbing since way before man started driving cars and emitting C02 (an essential plant nutrient). See the video here: http://pathstoknowledge.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/proofs-against-anthropogenic-global-warming/ . The point is that the Mann hockey stick graph distorts the facts by not looking at the last 10,000 year record and by the use of statistical games and bizarre weirdness in his temperature proxy data selection policy that it's essentially useless except to promote lies that we are doomed.
I'm not a skeptic for skeptics sake. I'm simply not one to take anything on belief. I will take correction when I make mistakes. If it turns out that you are right about the reflected light staying the same (that would imply a perfect reflective surface that doesn't alter the frequency nor absorb too many photons) then I'll admit I'm wrong.
To think that AWG is "proven" is folly. In fact the counter evidence is tremendous and damningly so.
Oh, now you come out with claims that I have monetary motives in stating my opinions! How typical of the nut jobs. No I don't make any money. Have you seen my web site, http://www.pathstoknowledge.net/ which is all about science and debunking the gooey mind poo that gets spit at us all from all directions? Not a single advertisement! No, I'm simply a humble human being who doesn't like stupidity being shoveled at him from government dummies with their agenda of control. I also ask questions and find out the answers.
Objective reality is my guide not belief, not faith, not some hidden agenda. My only agenda is living a healthy and happy life and learning as much about objective reality as possible and to share that knowledge. I work in the computer field doing computer science so yeah I'm not as much a
How can your assertions be tested at home in a scientific way to demonstrate that they are correct or false?
That's an interesting hypothesis, please provide references that support it.
Additional material can be found at Proofs against Anthropogenic Global Warming.
That's funny, polarization, good one... however I'm not confused at all about the AGW hypothesis nor about the green house gas theory in particular.
Trust me in the winter spring and fall in Canada, even the relatively warm cities like Vancouver, heat is a serious problem in the winter.
A one shoe fits all scenarios for reducing energy consumption, such as magic white paint, won't help us. It's just bad science to think that magically painting every darn thang white is going to do much.
Besides the AGW hypothesis hasn't been proven yet. In fact it's heading the opposite direction: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/24/disproving-the-anthropogenic-global-warming-agw-problem/ .
In buildings that require air conditioning put up SOLAR PANELS to offset some or all of the cost of cooling the buildings.
It is a well know fact that white buildings reflect heat from the sun. This is a fact that humans have taken advantage of for thousands of years if not more. Confusing it with the nonsense of AWG makes no sense.
It does make a lot of sense to reduce the energy consumption of every building. In Canada this has been encouraged for decades to save energy! We also add insulation to keep heat in during the cold times and heat out during the hot, and we design our residential and industrial roofs to have good heat venting.
AWG has replaced being environmentally responsible as it's the latest buzz word for social control and now it would seem government control of our lives at every level. Quite pernicious.
Chu is simply spouting political propaganda disguised as science when it's bad science to mix unrelated notions.
If Chu simply said that we should check to see if it makes sense for any particular building to have a coat of white paint as part of it's energy management that would have been fine. To mix in the AGWH just tarnishes his reputation as a scientist and moves him squarely into the Belief Stricken AGW crowd who are on a political terrorforming campaign to alter our planet's atmosphere.
We in Canada want it to get warmer. Thanks very much for not adjusting the planet's thermostat downwards.
An increase in pale surfaces would help to contain climate change both by reflecting more solar radiation into space and by reducing the amount of energy needed to keep buildings cool by air-conditioning.
What? The AWG hypothesis says that the radiation is being kept IN by the C02 in the atmosphere... thus it matters not that it's reflected back into space by white surfaces on the SURFACE of the Earth SINCE they ARE well within and UNDER the green house gas layers of the atmosphere (not counting the painting of mount everest et. al.)! Dah!
What kind of bizarro world is this where the radiation can be reflected back and NOT be stopped by the VERY C02 (and other) GREEN HOUSE GASES that are the problem?
It is the height of nonsense coming out of Chu's brain as you can't have it both ways there Steve and Al, either the green house gasses keep the radiation trapped in OR they don't! Which will it be?
If the green house gasses can't keep the heat radiation in then it follows that AWG is now proven false.
If the green house gases do keep in the heat radiation then AWG might have some tiny probability of being true AND Steven Chu's been proven an idiot for wanting to paint the world a 1984 gray.
I don't know about you but in Canada we like it toasty thus darker colors for buildings are better to keep it warm in the winter and use less energy for heating.
White buildings in the southern regions closer to the equator make sense to keep the buildings cooler in the heat that is there most of the time.
Actually you're not quite right about C... it's not that efficient at all... most C instructions generate many actual machine instructions so C is quite removed from the bare hardware and how "the processor actually thinks" dude. Assembly language is much closer to the metal. Yes it's not a "high level language" but then neither is C, not really! C is a low level systems language.
"Pointers" are not to be feared, mistakes with pointers are what is feared. Many higher level languages simply prevent those mistakes while providing all the usually necessary operational flexibility.
For sure "message sending languages" such as Java and Smalltalk implement programming paradigms that the processor doesn't know about.
Modern processors execute multiple instructions per cycle (instruction level parallelism). The game of speed is all about filling those instruction slots with useful productive instructions and not letting them go to waste unused. EVERY LANGUAGE that aims for any amount of speed must meet the challenge of filling those slots.
C compilers are notorious for NOT filling these instruction slots for each cycle.
Often it's not the compiler's fault since the code they are compiling is too sequential or branches too much to fill all the slots in a cycle. Also all the slots on the cpu are not created equal and may not even be the same across all versions of a manufacturers chip line.
Assembly will almost always beat C even hands down since it's always possible to write better code than the compiler can. It's a matter of HUMAN TIME COST. Assembly usually takes longer to write than C just as C usually takes longer to write than code in higher level languages.
So when you are interested in speed, is that speed of execution or speed of development where dollar and human time cost is paramount?
There are efforts underway to make the compilers for languages like Smalltalk just as fast as C by the use of many techniques including the use of hidden inlining of code (this is effective in Smalltalk since the methods on classes tend to be very short at an average of under nine lines) and custom compilation of methods based on discovered object types. Essentially message sends are eliminated in many cases and types are discovered and specialized versions of the code is compiled for those types - either on the fly or at development time. In languages like Smalltalk all variable references are pointers references so pointers are not to be feared as the spycraft-fu mistakenly asserts. In fact a uniform use of pointers makes the language easier to understand while maintaining a one to one mapping of "object structure" to "how the machine thinks" - you could not have a closer mapping! The advanced work currently being done looks like it could bring Smalltalk compilers to produce code that is consistently at or above the speed of C compilers. Oops.
Remember the game is filling the instruction slots in modern super scalar processors. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscalar).
One of the hidden costs of C is the debugging time when things go wrong.
Recently I undertook the task of updating an 15 year old program written mostly in C and C++ with a good bit of Assembly Language. I didn't have to change the assembly language one iota since it was "well thought out". As for the C and C++, both had many errors of the classic sort one finds with C based languages: buffer overflows left right and center - even where they were not expected! Funny enough one of the bigger non-buffer overflow bugs was found by tracing an unexpected buffer overflow as it did it's damage. It was also interesting that adding any code to "manage" buffer overflows would noticeably slow down (by 10% or more on inner loops) the program which was a heavy data cruncher. Once again the number of lines of code generated for each line of C was many, with numerous possible assembly optimizations still possible.
Sure C might be faster but often that's because the C programmers took too many BIG risks with the
Yes, it has many predictions with many of those verified and mathematically PROVEN in the book itself.
You've got a terrible misreading of Wolfram's A New Kind of Science dude. Of course if YOU assume he premise is "these are simple therefore they are ubiquitous, likely, and fundamental" you'll have a negative point of view on it. Remember those are YOUR words which reveal your prejudice against the work, no wonder you've got a negative point of view, you didn't understand what Wolfram had actually written.
If you can't see how the principles of simple systems such as cellular automata don't apply to the real world you need to read the book again until you do see that. That is assuming you care to have a better understanding of the work rather than your misguided perception of it.
The point is that it's a complex and voluminous work and that it can take a bit of effort to understand all the aspects of it in depth.
Rather than scoffing at the author, Stephen Wolfram, how about reading the work again and actually attempting to think how it could apply to any particular science of your choice?
oh the horrors are us! run for the hills!
We are the goo, we are the goo!
Haven't you seen the original The Blob movie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blob) with Steve McQueen? It's PINKish red goo!!! Ok, in some scenes it's transparent so it might confuse you for being grey...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AASYGG7mrw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP-KzJbKR_o
... wait there's more... act now and you'll get a FREE appendix... it's not good for anything but you'll get it with your purchase of a self-replicating human... act now... and we'll even throw in the fat collecting genes with that purchase... don't waste those calories but burning them in your human... store them... for later use... act now... there is no better time than now...