It has to do with your V1 and V5 neurons getting "hits". Visual Cortex neurons are tuned to recognize certain things, even complex things like faces. With a spinning pattern moving rapidly, it'll randomly trigger various neurons. People will see different colors, for example, from the same spinning black and white patterns. I think purple is the most common though.
Let's say it's 100,000 a year, which matches their "200-500 species a day going extinct".
That was back in the early 80s. It's been 30 years, so 3,000,000 species would have to have gone extinct since then. There's only 2-10 million "interesting" species on the planet. I think we'd have noticed, to be perfectly honest.
Do you know where they came up with that number? There was a study back in the 70s where they taped off a section of land in the middle of nowhere, counted the species in it, including insects, then came back a year later and recounted. If they didn't see the same beetle there a year later, they considered it "extinct". This poorly run study was the basis for all of these hyperbolic claims. Based on other claims, peo
A better way of exposing these claims as bullshit is to see that the WWF counts species as "near threatened" as part of this list, which means pretty much any animal anywhere in contact with humans (near threatened is the lowest category after "least concern"). Or another way of looking at it is that only nine endangered species have gone extinct since the 1970s in America.
No, but nukes are an easy way of meeting every CO2 target for the United States. If other green power gets cheap enough, then them too. But nuclear is the only green technology right now that won't raise energy costs from switching from coal.
Be confident without being overconfident. Know how to communicate and also when to leave other people alone. Don't be too pessimistic or too optimistic when setting goals. Don't be a pushover, but don't be a dick, either. Be productive, positive, and competent. Always work to improve yourself.
They're saying here 50,000 per year, but honestly nobody really knows any numbers, so they just make up statistics and call it fact. Here's there pulled-out-of-their-ass guesswork in a nutshell: http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/biodiversity/biodiversity/
"IF we are losing just 0.1% of species a year and IF there are a million species on the planet..."
>>Given that countries can have a higher standard of living with a lot less carbon footprint shows that it should not be a problem for the USA to fix that too.
It shouldn't be a problem, except environmentalists have been locking us into the status quo for the last 30 years. If you want to throw rocks at someone... take aim at a Green.
They've blocked nuclear power, solar plants, wind plants, tidal plants... given us the SUV, and discouraged rational thinking.
Am I wrong, or would a clever misspelling on a ticket bypass the entire point of an automated no-fly list?
I know the people that check your boarding passes don't check *that* closely. If your name is Faisal Shahzad, you could probably substitute an a for an e or a silent q or something without it being noticed.
Or am I helping the terrorists now? It's all very confusion.
>>Small entity inventors already get 50% off most USPTO fees, and USPTO Director Kappos has suggested creating a "micro-entity" inventor class for whom the fees would have an even smaller impact relative to that for large entities.
Indeed.
Also, I have nothing against raising fees to whatever it actually costs the USPTO to process an application.
In general, I think gov't fees should be set this way. If they charge less, then it encourages overfiling. If they charge more (i.e. outrageous corporate fees in California), then it's really just a tax by the backdoor, that they raise just because they can't increase taxes without a 2/3rds majority.
It means this: "..was scathing about the "standard practice" among the climate science community of not routinely releasing all of its data and computer codes."
I'm sorry if the words appear to be meaningless to you, but the one means the other.
Can you not read? Go back up the thread, see what claims I made, and then read.
"MPs today strongly criticised the University of East Anglia for not tackling a "culture of withholding information" among the climate change scientists"
"The parliamentary science and technology select committee was scathing about the "standard practice" among the climate science community of not routinely releasing all its raw data and computer codes - something the committee's chair, Phil Willis MP, described as "reprehensible". He added: "That practice needs to change and it needs to change quickly.""
"...it said he should have been better supported by the university in dealing with requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act."
"...on accusations relating to freedom of information, we consider that much of the responsibility should lie with UEA, not CRU."
"...this was "no excuse" for not responding properly to FOI requests."
"It is important in terms of scientific endeavour that that material is made available,"
Sure, a non-peer-reviewed paper isn't necessarily worthless, but that's where you get problems like the Himalayan glaciers melting prediction and such. And sources like the WWF are honestly just going to be too biased to really be used... they're the same folks that said that 10,000 species a day were going extinct and whatnot back in the 80s, which means that by nowadays we only have something like -10,000,000 species left on the planet.
>>It's desktop software, right? Isn't it written in C? Doesn't work on Android, right?
Not yet, maybe.
If Google is interested enough in it, well... Android has needed a good file browser / desktop for a while. I use Astro File manager, which is kind of like Midnight Commander. Decent enough or me as a Unix guy, but not exactly the sort of thing that will grab you mainstream market share.
It looks like a nice little 3D desktop optimized for multitouch - but given that Android doesn't currently use multitouch (I believe it *could* use it, but doesn't?) it will be interesting to see if this means that Google has a paradigm shift in mind for the Android user experience.
>>Boycotting a journal because they have people you think are idiots ont the board is a sane, reasonable and good thing to do.
I wasn't necessarily criticizing the move, just explaining what it was in the context of the Climategate emails.
>>As for quoting the WWF, well why not, as long as the quote is attributed and deemed valid.
Because they're a partisan group making non-peer-reviewed claims that then get incorporated into AR4 and then treated like gospel? It's problematic.
>>Do yourself a favour, and stop watching it: the signal to noise ratio of stuff getting to you will improve.
I don't watch it, except very occasionally. It was an online article linked to from somewhere else.
And I take rather the opposite approach - I try to read articles from as many viewpoints as possible, find out on which facts they disagree, and then research those facts myself. If you never listen to Fox, or always listen to Fox (replace Fox with any other information source), you'll end up with biases because your assumptions were never challenged.
>>You may also not know this, but papers are usually reviewed by more than one guy. Also, the decision to publish does not belong to the reviewers, but to the editor.
The issue in question with Climategate was Phil Jones getting people to boycott a journal because they put a skeptic on their editorial board. From what I've heard, the journal did go downhill after that, but... chicken, egg, etc.
There's also an apparent issue with the IPCC using non-peer-reviewed papers in their reports. According to Fox (I know, I know), the majority of the sources cited in AR4 were not peer-reviewed, and they quoted partisan groups like the WWF (not the pro wrestlers) quite extensively. I haven't verified this claim, so take it with a grain of salt.
In comes the Global Warming researchers who find evidence their data has flaws. Bury the evidence. Luckily for them they were all on the same page so the 'scientific method' could be ignored in the interest of promoting dogma and protecting research funds. Then the emails and other information surface. What happens? Those who want to point out the Earth may not be flat are called names like wackos. Usually accompanied by overall anti-Conservative rhetoric and references to fringe elements.
Precisely. The real story behind Climategate was the pulling back of the curtain, so to speak, on the anti-scientific culture of secrecy, data-hiding and FOIA-dodging that Phil Jones and his merry band were up to.
What rabid partisans on both sides can't understand is that there are MORE positions than just: 1) AGW is real, and we must do everything we can to stop it, and 2) AGW is a fraud, and we must ignore all science to the contrary, and sue scientists that support the notion.
I think it's a real problem. I also think that most of our proposed solutions are either ridiculously too expensive for the benefit (paint our roofs white), horribly designed (i.e. Kyoto), or impractical (ask people nicely to stop driving cars). I also think that Climategate revealed very serious problems with the inner workings of the climatology community. Not fraud, as Fox reported, but rather anti-scientific behavior. For a field desperately trying to win respect as a real science, so to speak, it was a tremendous blow.
Also, sites like Real Climate.org don't really help very much. They're so partisan that they even defend real mistakes that Phil Jones, or Al Gore, or whoever, make... even when they're clearly wrong.
>>Scientists are scientists, not marketeers, how can they convince people who believe the world is 6000 years old that CO2 does absorb infrared radiation?
My, what a large paintbrush you have there, grandma.
It's just as I mentioned. The culture of secrecy, not having mechanisms in place for dealing with FOIA requests etc. As I said in my original post in this thread, they exonerated the people for malfeasance, but they still found plenty of severe systemic problems in how they were conducting science. Even RC.org agrees with a lot of the conclusions, though with their customary bias, they said, "These conclusions were not unexpected" and refusing to elaborate further on the problems found.
As I said before, these problems were the true story of Climategate, not the OMG LIARZ story Fox and Friends has been running. You simply cannot conduct science if your results are not reproducible.
>>You obviously know a better set of people than those who drive near me
Oh, heh. I used to live in San Francisco, which has the very worst drivers I've seen outside of Italy.
I'm actually just repeating what traffic engineering uses as a rule of thumb - the 90% percentile of driver speeds is what is used to set speed limits.
Except on interstates. Those are set artificially low by statute, at least here in California. (They were designed for 75MPH, as I said. My grandfather was an engineer peripherally involved in the design and building of the interstates.) Other states are better or worse. Texas is with 55MPH-at-night on huge empty interstates in the middle of nowhere. Rigorously enforced by Texas Rangers who have nothing better to do than violently harass people driving a reasonable speed at night. Indianapolis, home of the most famous speedway? 55MPH all day long on its interstates. Etc., etc.
I'd vote for any party that would set a national speed limit on interstates to 75.
>>They're only a money making scheme because people are too stupid and arrogant to keep to the speed limit.
Stupid and arrogant?
People generally know better than the state what an appropriate speed limit is on a road. Traffic engineering uses the rule of thumb that 90% of people drive at a safe speed, and 10% of drivers, by contrast, are reckless fools. However, the safe speed crowd generally drives the same speed on a road - regardless of the speed limit - unless the speed limit law is very strictly enforced.
The interstate system (at least here in CA) is the worst for this, with the interstates exempt from the speed tests that the state uses on normal roads to establish speed limits. They were designed with 75MPH in mind, but are artificially set much lower (at 65MPH in most places, or 70MPH in the country).
The politicians love it, since when the entire bloody interstate is driving 75MPH (which happens any time there's no traffic) CHP officers are able to give out tickets like candy.
>>Everybody I know keeps their keys and trinkets around their neck on a lanyard along with their badges.
How can that possibly be comfortable?
If the OP is uncomfortable with having his keys in his pockets (you know, the place that's designed for keys), how could a lanyard be better.
UNLESS, he's actually a girl, and is forced to wear all those impractical female clothings that don't have pockets. (But that's what boyfriends are for, you say? Remember, the OP has a girlfriend, or maybe three.)
The only time I don't carry keys is when I go on an airplane. Seats are uncomfortable enough without having a handful of sharp pointy bits digging into your thighs.
A good example of what I mean is when Health Care Reform was recently debated.
A lot of ideas were put on the table. Ideas that went contrary to the interests of lawyers (i.e. tort reform, malpractice reform, liability limitations, etc.) were *removed* from the table. So we got a kitchen sink health care bill that left the status quo in place, thus benefiting lawyers.
If the Democrats were not lawyers, and supported by lawyers, they probably wouldn't have acted to protect them in such a manner.
Slashdot Mirror
>>I have no idea how this works...
It has to do with your V1 and V5 neurons getting "hits". Visual Cortex neurons are tuned to recognize certain things, even complex things like faces. With a spinning pattern moving rapidly, it'll randomly trigger various neurons. People will see different colors, for example, from the same spinning black and white patterns. I think purple is the most common though.
Silly Brits.
This is why they need a reasonable, commonsense system like our electoral college.
Let's say it's 100,000 a year, which matches their "200-500 species a day going extinct".
That was back in the early 80s. It's been 30 years, so 3,000,000 species would have to have gone extinct since then. There's only 2-10 million "interesting" species on the planet. I think we'd have noticed, to be perfectly honest.
Do you know where they came up with that number? There was a study back in the 70s where they taped off a section of land in the middle of nowhere, counted the species in it, including insects, then came back a year later and recounted. If they didn't see the same beetle there a year later, they considered it "extinct". This poorly run study was the basis for all of these hyperbolic claims. Based on other claims, peo
A better way of exposing these claims as bullshit is to see that the WWF counts species as "near threatened" as part of this list, which means pretty much any animal anywhere in contact with humans (near threatened is the lowest category after "least concern"). Or another way of looking at it is that only nine endangered species have gone extinct since the 1970s in America.
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=18741&Cr=uranium
I prefer the real Carnegie, myself.
>>Not just France, however. It's not just nukes.
No, but nukes are an easy way of meeting every CO2 target for the United States. If other green power gets cheap enough, then them too. But nuclear is the only green technology right now that won't raise energy costs from switching from coal.
Be confident without being overconfident.
Know how to communicate and also when to leave other people alone.
Don't be too pessimistic or too optimistic when setting goals.
Don't be a pushover, but don't be a dick, either.
Be productive, positive, and competent.
Always work to improve yourself.
>>10,000 species a day sounds pretty hyperbolic to me.
The actual numbers vary pretty widely, but that's what was tossed at us when I was in zoo school back in the 1980s (at the San Diego Zoo, no less).
Just a quick browse on the WWF site reveals that in the time it takes you to read this sentence, another species will have gone extinct!
http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/endangered_species/
They're saying here 50,000 per year, but honestly nobody really knows any numbers, so they just make up statistics and call it fact. Here's there pulled-out-of-their-ass guesswork in a nutshell:
http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/biodiversity/biodiversity/
"IF we are losing just 0.1% of species a year and IF there are a million species on the planet..."
Yeah.
>>Given that countries can have a higher standard of living with a lot less carbon footprint shows that it should not be a problem for the USA to fix that too.
It shouldn't be a problem, except environmentalists have been locking us into the status quo for the last 30 years. If you want to throw rocks at someone... take aim at a Green.
They've blocked nuclear power, solar plants, wind plants, tidal plants... given us the SUV, and discouraged rational thinking.
>>Europe is an existence proof for how we can live pretty well with half the CO2 footprint, and high gas prices.
If we switch to nuclear power, we'll halve our CO2 footprint.
You know... kind of like France.
Am I wrong, or would a clever misspelling on a ticket bypass the entire point of an automated no-fly list?
I know the people that check your boarding passes don't check *that* closely. If your name is Faisal Shahzad, you could probably substitute an a for an e or a silent q or something without it being noticed.
Or am I helping the terrorists now? It's all very confusion.
>>Small entity inventors already get 50% off most USPTO fees, and USPTO Director Kappos has suggested creating a "micro-entity" inventor class for whom the fees would have an even smaller impact relative to that for large entities.
Indeed.
Also, I have nothing against raising fees to whatever it actually costs the USPTO to process an application.
In general, I think gov't fees should be set this way. If they charge less, then it encourages overfiling. If they charge more (i.e. outrageous corporate fees in California), then it's really just a tax by the backdoor, that they raise just because they can't increase taxes without a 2/3rds majority.
What do you think 'systemic problems' means?
It means this:
"..was scathing about the "standard practice" among the climate science community of not routinely releasing all of its data and computer codes."
I'm sorry if the words appear to be meaningless to you, but the one means the other.
Can you not read? Go back up the thread, see what claims I made, and then read.
"MPs today strongly criticised the University of East Anglia for not tackling a "culture of withholding information" among the climate change scientists"
"The parliamentary science and technology select committee was scathing about the "standard practice" among the climate science community of not routinely releasing all its raw data and computer codes - something the committee's chair, Phil Willis MP, described as "reprehensible". He added: "That practice needs to change and it needs to change quickly.""
"...it said he should have been better supported by the university in dealing with requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act."
"...on accusations relating to freedom of information, we consider that much of the responsibility should lie with UEA, not CRU."
"...this was "no excuse" for not responding properly to FOI requests."
"It is important in terms of scientific endeavour that that material is made available,"
Good information, thanks.
Sure, a non-peer-reviewed paper isn't necessarily worthless, but that's where you get problems like the Himalayan glaciers melting prediction and such. And sources like the WWF are honestly just going to be too biased to really be used... they're the same folks that said that 10,000 species a day were going extinct and whatnot back in the 80s, which means that by nowadays we only have something like -10,000,000 species left on the planet.
>>It's desktop software, right? Isn't it written in C? Doesn't work on Android, right?
Not yet, maybe.
If Google is interested enough in it, well... Android has needed a good file browser / desktop for a while. I use Astro File manager, which is kind of like Midnight Commander. Decent enough or me as a Unix guy, but not exactly the sort of thing that will grab you mainstream market share.
It looks like a nice little 3D desktop optimized for multitouch - but given that Android doesn't currently use multitouch (I believe it *could* use it, but doesn't?) it will be interesting to see if this means that Google has a paradigm shift in mind for the Android user experience.
>>Boycotting a journal because they have people you think are idiots ont the board is a sane, reasonable and good thing to do.
I wasn't necessarily criticizing the move, just explaining what it was in the context of the Climategate emails.
>>As for quoting the WWF, well why not, as long as the quote is attributed and deemed valid.
Because they're a partisan group making non-peer-reviewed claims that then get incorporated into AR4 and then treated like gospel? It's problematic.
>>Do yourself a favour, and stop watching it: the signal to noise ratio of stuff getting to you will improve.
I don't watch it, except very occasionally. It was an online article linked to from somewhere else.
And I take rather the opposite approach - I try to read articles from as many viewpoints as possible, find out on which facts they disagree, and then research those facts myself. If you never listen to Fox, or always listen to Fox (replace Fox with any other information source), you'll end up with biases because your assumptions were never challenged.
>>You may also not know this, but papers are usually reviewed by more than one guy. Also, the decision to publish does not belong to the reviewers, but to the editor.
The issue in question with Climategate was Phil Jones getting people to boycott a journal because they put a skeptic on their editorial board. From what I've heard, the journal did go downhill after that, but... chicken, egg, etc.
There's also an apparent issue with the IPCC using non-peer-reviewed papers in their reports. According to Fox (I know, I know), the majority of the sources cited in AR4 were not peer-reviewed, and they quoted partisan groups like the WWF (not the pro wrestlers) quite extensively. I haven't verified this claim, so take it with a grain of salt.
Precisely. The real story behind Climategate was the pulling back of the curtain, so to speak, on the anti-scientific culture of secrecy, data-hiding and FOIA-dodging that Phil Jones and his merry band were up to.
What rabid partisans on both sides can't understand is that there are MORE positions than just:
1) AGW is real, and we must do everything we can to stop it, and
2) AGW is a fraud, and we must ignore all science to the contrary, and sue scientists that support the notion.
I think it's a real problem. I also think that most of our proposed solutions are either ridiculously too expensive for the benefit (paint our roofs white), horribly designed (i.e. Kyoto), or impractical (ask people nicely to stop driving cars). I also think that Climategate revealed very serious problems with the inner workings of the climatology community. Not fraud, as Fox reported, but rather anti-scientific behavior. For a field desperately trying to win respect as a real science, so to speak, it was a tremendous blow.
Also, sites like Real Climate.org don't really help very much. They're so partisan that they even defend real mistakes that Phil Jones, or Al Gore, or whoever, make... even when they're clearly wrong.
>>Scientists are scientists, not marketeers, how can they convince people who believe the world is 6000 years old that CO2 does absorb infrared radiation?
My, what a large paintbrush you have there, grandma.
It's just as I mentioned. The culture of secrecy, not having mechanisms in place for dealing with FOIA requests etc. As I said in my original post in this thread, they exonerated the people for malfeasance, but they still found plenty of severe systemic problems in how they were conducting science. Even RC.org agrees with a lot of the conclusions, though with their customary bias, they said, "These conclusions were not unexpected" and refusing to elaborate further on the problems found.
As I said before, these problems were the true story of Climategate, not the OMG LIARZ story Fox and Friends has been running. You simply cannot conduct science if your results are not reproducible.
>>You obviously know a better set of people than those who drive near me
Oh, heh. I used to live in San Francisco, which has the very worst drivers I've seen outside of Italy.
I'm actually just repeating what traffic engineering uses as a rule of thumb - the 90% percentile of driver speeds is what is used to set speed limits.
Except on interstates. Those are set artificially low by statute, at least here in California. (They were designed for 75MPH, as I said. My grandfather was an engineer peripherally involved in the design and building of the interstates.) Other states are better or worse. Texas is with 55MPH-at-night on huge empty interstates in the middle of nowhere. Rigorously enforced by Texas Rangers who have nothing better to do than violently harass people driving a reasonable speed at night. Indianapolis, home of the most famous speedway? 55MPH all day long on its interstates. Etc., etc.
I'd vote for any party that would set a national speed limit on interstates to 75.
>>They're only a money making scheme because people are too stupid and arrogant to keep to the speed limit.
Stupid and arrogant?
People generally know better than the state what an appropriate speed limit is on a road. Traffic engineering uses the rule of thumb that 90% of people drive at a safe speed, and 10% of drivers, by contrast, are reckless fools. However, the safe speed crowd generally drives the same speed on a road - regardless of the speed limit - unless the speed limit law is very strictly enforced.
The interstate system (at least here in CA) is the worst for this, with the interstates exempt from the speed tests that the state uses on normal roads to establish speed limits. They were designed with 75MPH in mind, but are artificially set much lower (at 65MPH in most places, or 70MPH in the country).
The politicians love it, since when the entire bloody interstate is driving 75MPH (which happens any time there's no traffic) CHP officers are able to give out tickets like candy.
>>Everybody I know keeps their keys and trinkets around their neck on a lanyard along with their badges.
How can that possibly be comfortable?
If the OP is uncomfortable with having his keys in his pockets (you know, the place that's designed for keys), how could a lanyard be better.
UNLESS, he's actually a girl, and is forced to wear all those impractical female clothings that don't have pockets. (But that's what boyfriends are for, you say? Remember, the OP has a girlfriend, or maybe three.)
The only time I don't carry keys is when I go on an airplane. Seats are uncomfortable enough without having a handful of sharp pointy bits digging into your thighs.
Fair enough.
A good example of what I mean is when Health Care Reform was recently debated.
A lot of ideas were put on the table. Ideas that went contrary to the interests of lawyers (i.e. tort reform, malpractice reform, liability limitations, etc.) were *removed* from the table. So we got a kitchen sink health care bill that left the status quo in place, thus benefiting lawyers.
If the Democrats were not lawyers, and supported by lawyers, they probably wouldn't have acted to protect them in such a manner.