They blame multihoming - however there is a limit of 65535 possible autonomous systems out there under BGP4, so if each of these has an average of 3 entries, doesn't that give a max number of route entries of under 200,000? Except you also have to multiply by the number of IP address ranges (networks and subnets) advertised by each AS - but still there would seem to be a limit not too far from where we are now. Which probably does mean it's time to replace BGP...
Physics News Update also has an interesting discussion of this paper at http://www.aip.org/physnews/update/532-1.html. In the sense used by the author of this paper, a black hole is "the ultimate computer". The paper is in essence about the limits of computation!
Ng [...] finds [...] that the foaminess of spacetime leads to an uncertainty in timekeeping (the more accurate the clock, the shorter its lifetime) which in turn leads to a bound on information processing (speed and memory simultaneously) analogous to the Heisenberg bound on simultaneous measurement of momentum and position.
Launch costs per pound are available here. Assuming Tito (plus accessories) is under 200 pounds, his direct launch costs to near earth orbit in a Soyuz are at most $0.5 million. Maybe $1 million counting food etc. The full cost of a Soyuz launch is $35-40 million, so he's paying the Russians for about 1/2 of one launch. Now, granted, he's not paying NASA anything, but it seems to me the fee is more than enough to cover his costs. And NASA has been subsidizing the Russian Space program for a while, why not let somebody else help subsidize it?
There doesn't seem to be any good rational explanation for the NASA (and ESA) opposition - so in one sense or another this must boil down to some kind of politics. Is it because Tito, a Republican, helped raise funds for "W" to get elected, and NASA's Goldin can't stand him for that? Or is it just typical inter-organizational squabbling?
At least one of the referees produced a nice, thoughtful, 2-paragraph report; I don't have any information on the other report. 24 hours is plenty of time to read and evaluate clear and careful experimental research of this sort. We do have some other papers in process on this that are going to take longer to get published since the experimental or theoretical analysis for them is not so cut and dried.
I work for Physical Review Letters (and related journals at the American Physical Society) which is publishing the papers from the Ames, Iowa group. Interestingly enough, the first published paper (in the print journal today, available online since last week at http://link.aps.org/abstract/prl/v86/p1877) has set some new records in our office, in part thanks to increasingly all-electronic processing:
Manuscript received: 30 January 2001
sent to 2 referees: 31 January
Both referees report: 1 February
approved: 2 February
scheduled for an issue: 2 Feb
Updated manuscript received: 2 Feb
proofs available to author: 6 Feb
Author returned proofs (on the web): 8 Feb 2001
A final proof of the article available just over one week after being submitted, and going through a complete peer-review cycle!
More typically each step takes a week or two, though times have been generally improving lately.
But these new superconductors are pretty important!
Also interesting is that Nature has a nice "prepublication" look at the article on the original research, which they are publishing March 1 - Nature in the past has had an "embargo" policy preventing scientists from even talking to journalists about their work before the official publication date, but they've had this page up roughly since we published our related article online. The nature of scientific publishing is changing too here...
The first "high-Tc" superconductor was also only around 40 K - the thing was it was a new type of material (an oxide ceramic) that had previously never before been tested; similar to this case, although this time the material seems to be even simpler. With the old-style high-Tc materials it was only a few months before they got the things working above liquid nitrogen; it's possible tweaking this material will do the same thing or even better, you never know. Really exciting!
We've tracked statistics of browser adoption by our users for the past 4 years:
http://ridge.aps.org/APSMITH/osstats/
-- people, or at least this group of people, do gradually upgrade; it just takes a while. If Mozilla/Netscape 6 had been available sooner, we'd certainly have wider adoption by now. But just wait a year or two, and nearly everybody will be using it (or IE 5+ where that's available). Does it really matter that much to try to force it to happen sooner?
Re:Science is ignoring global warming?
on
Spidergoats
·
· Score: 2
Umm. Show me an article in a reputable peer-reviewed scientific journal (say Science, or Nature, or one of the journals of the American Geophysical Union), not some garbage on the web. And the 15,000 signature business was a hoax perpetrated on well-meaning scientists by some very unscruplous anti-climate people; and that was before the consensus on climate change had become as violently clear as it has in the last few years.
As to going back to the stone age, that's really not necessary. Fossil fuels are far from the only energy sources. Nuclear does quite a good job and actually produces less radioactive pollution (and far less waste) than coal. Wind, hydropower, and ocean-based energy systems can contribute something. But the source of all those (and of fossil fuels originally too) is the Sun; solar energy in the long run can make a huge difference. Why do we spend almost no money on research into it? Space-based solar power could potentially provide us billions of times more energy than we use now; there's no lack of resources out there. But too many people have their heads in the sand to make that investment now. At least some changes are starting to happen though.
Re:Science is ignoring global warming?
on
Spidergoats
·
· Score: 2
Ok, I just have to respond to the various comments that have been made on the global warming subject though this is getting off-topic (but the thread is dead anyway)...
More technically, "global warming" is referred to scientifically as "global climate change", and the issue on which there has been a SCIENTIFIC consensus for a long, long time (actually over 40 years now) is that humans have been putting enough CO2 gas into the atmosphere to make major long-term changes to global climate. Whether its a warming or cooling and by how much has certainly been a scientific debate for a while, but the fact that we are putting enough of these gases into the atmosphere now to make a difference has been agreed on for a long time. And that is what the politicians (sponsored by our huge oil, energy, and automotive industries) have ignored, and magnified scientific debates into do-nothingism.
More to the point on the warming side, the fact that extra CO2 in the atmosphere can lead to an enhanced greenhouse effect (warming) was first discovered by Arrhenius, over 100 years ago. This direct effect of CO2 has NEVER been refuted. What has been at issue are the sequence of consequences from enhanced CO2-based heat trapping, and obviously it's very complicated. But anybody with a smidgen of understanding of physics and chemistry intuitively knows that when a new force is imposed (human production of CO2) the response is almost always in the direction of that force, even if the response is buffered by other factors. I.E. Warming was always expected by the majority of scientists, though the degree was quite uncertain.
What triggered scientists concern was the extensive data taken and discussions that ensued from the International Geophysical Year 1957-1958. At that point the issue was considered more a curiosity - it did not really come to public attention until after 20 years of scientific discussion and conferences on the subject, when Congress was persuaded to pass the "National Climate Program Act" in 1978; the first World Climate Conference was held in Geneva the following year. 10 more years of international meetings followed, and then (under the Bush administration!) Congress passed the "Global Change Research Act" in 1989. The UN IPCC was also formed around that time, which continues to produce the most thorough reports on the issue.
Early on, the greenhouse forcing by human-introduced CO2 was known to have differing effects in different parts of the world, and in the late 1970's there were arguments that the Northern Hemisphere would cool, even while the tropics heated (increased desertification). However, by 1985 (BEFORE the hot summers of the late 1980's and even hotter years of the 1990's) the scientific consensus was pretty firm on warming:
As a result of the increasing
concentrations of greenhouse gases, it is now believed that in the first half of the next century a rise of global mean temperature could
occur which is greater than any in man's history.
was the conclusion of the second World Climate Program conference in 1985.
The scientific story has changed in only tiny details in 16 years since then, and what have our politicians done? Hemmed and hawed and said we need more research. Well, the "first half of the next century" is here, and now we have hosts of people who should know better (slashdot users in particular) who have bought the political line (paid for by our good old oil companies) without question, completely ignoring this over 100 year history of the question. Even the oil companies are abandoning their hard line now - BP is now "Beyond Petroleum"; but here in the US so many cling tenaciously to their deceptions and refuse to be disillusioned.
While this is interesting, the disagreement is still not so far out of the range of experimental errors (2 sigmas) - I'd have been a lot more confident this really meant an indication of something beyond the standard model if it was 4 or 5 sigmas, or even a second experiment with different techniques was corroborating the measurement. Let's just hope it doesn't turn into another of those cases where they announced prematurely and it turns out there was really nothing there after all.
Science is ignoring global warming?
on
Spidergoats
·
· Score: 2
It's the George Bush's, John Sununu's, and particularly Rush Limbaugh's of the world that are why we haven't done anything about global warming. Scientists have been worrying about global warming, and been ignored by politicians (and the media, and hence the public) for at least 30 years.
All of these issues (except maybe the Clippers) get ignored and their proponents squashed by a simple factor - how much money either industry or the US government sees fit to invest in the necessary R&D. And that in turn is very much determined by public and consumer interest in these things. If you feel they are important, get out there and evangelize! But don't blame "Science".
I work for a nonprofit publisher, and we're faced every year with the opposite end of the "increasing returns to scale" equation - if libraries cancel subscriptions, the high value of our information content (relative to the cost of printing the books, and even more so for purely electronic distribution) means we have to charge our remaining customers even more money. Which means more people feel they need to cancel the following year - it's a vicious cycle. What we all need is new markets that we can sell our content to, or new non-content services, but it's hard to see exactly what services we can provide as a publisher, beyond selecting and publishing particular bits of content!
But we have taken one big step with a new product, scanning in 100 years of our old content and selling it relatively cheaply - it's already gaining a sales base close to the size of the current content, and growing very quickly. If we can transition to that as a new revenue source with a much larger subscription base, we might be able to get out of the vicious cycle. But it really is tough to be a publisher in this climate!
The author somehow seemed to have a fixation about sex and evolutionary imperatives (overpopulating the Earth and all that too). But the message to expand beyond our one planet and one star system is clear; if we could direct some of the billions that would have gone into dot.coms into the various space startups we might really get somewhere. I do think it has to be through private enterprise initiative - NASA's view is too tied to the restrictive national security priorities that make it do things like force commercial companies to use the shuttle, rely on defence contractors with their obscene billing practices and skewed priorities, and balk at "tourists" like Tito coming to their station.
Going along with blaming this reporting on grumpy old men - have you ever noticed that the older types seem to keep downplaying the fact that the distribution of unrenormalized IQ scores has been steadily rising, something like 5-10 points with each generation, ever since the 1930s? Why is that anyway? Better schooling? Better parenting? More nutrition? More information availability? A healthier environment? At least taking the lead out of the environment has helped. But the gloom-and-doom types like to ignore this fact.
One of the most amusing (yet supposedly serious) books I ever read was a debate from some time in the 1970's between a proponent of "nature" (i.e. genetic predetermination of IQ scores) and another fellow who claimed (A) "nurture" was very important and (B) IQ didn't measure much meaningful anyway. The "nature" guy got into hysterics over "regression to the mean"; from which he seemed to take the conclusion that dumb people had dumb kids (of course), but smart people tended to have dumb kids too (that regression to the mean thing). From which he concluded we were doomed to ever-increasing levels of stupidity in our descendants!
The only point to going back to re-doing something is if the users are ready for a significantly enhanced product. If the thing they have is working well enough for them, you're going to get zero support for an effort to clean up the code, even if it will reduce maintenance work in the long run. Clean bits here and there while you fix other bugs, but a complete rewrite is only warranted if the software system is really not meeting current requirements.
The tone of comments here seems to me to reflect a real head-in-the-sand attitude... if the release of chunks of ice the size of a small state is no big deal, what WILL get your attention? So what if this has been going on for 14,000 years - it's clearly speeded up tremendously in the last ten or so. And sure, we can put up a big dike to save Manhattan, but what about the 10 million people who live in other parts of the NYC metro area? Not to mention the other 50-100 million Americans living in coastal areas.
To give a specific example, I live in eastern Long Island, where a huge fuss is made about protecting our "sole source aquifer" from pollutants. What's the biggest threat to the aquifer? Salt water encroachment - and the extent of that is determined by the effective "height above sea level" of the water pressure. Currently the highest pressure points are 50 feet above sea level - but huge areas of the aquifer are only at pressures a few feet above sea level, so a sea level rise of even 3 feet would tremendously reduce the quantity of fresh water available here.
Multiply that problem by thousands of local regions with similar issues, and you're talking some serious costs that go with even a small sea level rise. This is a big deal folks!
Whether that's actually true or not for Earth-based solar power, it's unlikely to be true for Criswell's lunar power scheme. Read the links. In space the sun is there all the time. Plus most solar cell arrangements don't use concentration, but solar cells are capable of handling 10x or 100x concentration of sunlight, sometimes at even higher efficiency than under ambient lighting. Believe me, serious people have looked at this, and it does work.
You're not generating any CO2, so there's no extra heat-trapping caused by fossil-fuel burning. The amount of power we're talking about to power the electrical needs of the planet (5-10 TW) is pretty small compared to the actual incoming solar energy (100,000 TW or so).
Dec 2000 - a scientist claims that, while climate change is serious, more research is needed...
Nov 2000 - well it was too slow to load, so all I have are the search quotes, referring to the "stalled climate treaty", the Hague conference, etc. Doesn't look like much one way or the other there.
May 1999 Bush warms to global warming! - Even George Bush is quoted as saying: "I've had some briefings recently and I'm becoming more convinced that the science proves there's global warming."
All the remaining references I could find there date back 2 years or more - have they been having trouble recently finding any real scientists who agree with their position?
Oh yeah, that's an unbiased look at the science alright. 10 sentences on the "science", and pages and pages on the economic disaster the Kyoto treaty is foisting upon us! 68 cents/gallon higher gas taxes! 2.4 million American jobs lost! And a little "instant expert" page that tells you among other things, "the best strategy to pursue is one of 'no regrets.'" - doesn't that tell you something?
Have you tried reading the REAL sites on global warming, like
the EPA's site? They don't just TELL you everythings terrible (or OK, like the globalwarming site) - they show you in pages after page of graphs, numbers, and statistics. Read through that stuff, and then go back to the globalwarming.org site and decide which one looks more believable to you.
Nope - since when did Volcanos manufacture complex chloro-fluorocarbons? Pinatubo spewed lots of chlorine (and some fluorine) into the air, but it all got rained out within a year or two - quite different from the effects of man-made ozone-destroying chemicals. Of course this article was about CO2, not CFC's, so what's the story there? Pinatubo also didn't send up much CO2, but it did produce a lot of sulfur dioxide, resulting in airborne sulfuric acid droplets that likely cooled global temperatures by 1 degree for a year or so. But they got rained out too. The problem with CO2 (and CFC's) unlike what comes out of volcanos - they don't drop out of the air in rain, they just accumulate. Like a lot of other man-made pollutants.
Nope, Celsius is perfectly linear - it's just Kelvins plus 273 degrees - of course since Kelvin's are absolute then for any absolute comparison (eg. today is 1% hotter than yesterday) you want Kelvin, but Celsius is fine for addition/subtraction purposes.
Time to start work on off-Earth power sources - a good first step is lunar-based solar... see Criswell's plans for example. A cure for global warming, power plant pollution, and more. And no need for nuke's.
PRL publication information
on
Stop, Light.
·
· Score: 2
The Phys Rev Letters paper will be available online (though isn't there yet) at:
http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/V86/P783
The official citation is Phys Rev Letters, Volume 86, p. 783 (published 29 Jan 2001).
Slashdot Mirror
They blame multihoming - however there is a limit of 65535 possible autonomous systems out there under BGP4, so if each of these has an average of 3 entries, doesn't that give a max number of route entries of under 200,000? Except you also have to multiply by the number of IP address ranges (networks and subnets) advertised by each AS - but still there would seem to be a limit not too far from where we are now. Which probably does mean it's time to replace BGP...
Here's the actual paper in Physical Review Letters:
http://link.aps.org/abstract/prl/v86/p2946
The title is "From Computation to Black Holes and Space-Time Foam".
Launch costs per pound are available here. Assuming Tito (plus accessories) is under 200 pounds, his direct launch costs to near earth orbit in a Soyuz are at most $0.5 million. Maybe $1 million counting food etc. The full cost of a Soyuz launch is $35-40 million, so he's paying the Russians for about 1/2 of one launch. Now, granted, he's not paying NASA anything, but it seems to me the fee is more than enough to cover his costs. And NASA has been subsidizing the Russian Space program for a while, why not let somebody else help subsidize it?
There doesn't seem to be any good rational explanation for the NASA (and ESA) opposition - so in one sense or another this must boil down to some kind of politics. Is it because Tito, a Republican, helped raise funds for "W" to get elected, and NASA's Goldin can't stand him for that? Or is it just typical inter-organizational squabbling?
At least one of the referees produced a nice, thoughtful, 2-paragraph report; I don't have any information on the other report. 24 hours is plenty of time to read and evaluate clear and careful experimental research of this sort. We do have some other papers in process on this that are going to take longer to get published since the experimental or theoretical analysis for them is not so cut and dried.
I work for Physical Review Letters (and related journals at the American Physical Society) which is publishing the papers from the Ames, Iowa group. Interestingly enough, the first published paper (in the print journal today, available online since last week at http://link.aps.org/abstract/prl/v86/p1877) has set some new records in our office, in part thanks to increasingly all-electronic processing:
Manuscript received: 30 January 2001
sent to 2 referees: 31 January
Both referees report: 1 February
approved: 2 February
scheduled for an issue: 2 Feb
Updated manuscript received: 2 Feb
proofs available to author: 6 Feb
Author returned proofs (on the web): 8 Feb 2001
A final proof of the article available just over one week after being submitted, and going through a complete peer-review cycle!
More typically each step takes a week or two, though times have been generally improving lately.
But these new superconductors are pretty important!
Also interesting is that Nature has a nice "prepublication" look at the article on the original research, which they are publishing March 1 - Nature in the past has had an "embargo" policy preventing scientists from even talking to journalists about their work before the official publication date, but they've had this page up roughly since we published our related article online. The nature of scientific publishing is changing too here...
The first "high-Tc" superconductor was also only around 40 K - the thing was it was a new type of material (an oxide ceramic) that had previously never before been tested; similar to this case, although this time the material seems to be even simpler. With the old-style high-Tc materials it was only a few months before they got the things working above liquid nitrogen; it's possible tweaking this material will do the same thing or even better, you never know. Really exciting!
We've tracked statistics of browser adoption by our users for the past 4 years:
http://ridge.aps.org/APSMITH/osstats/
-- people, or at least this group of people, do gradually upgrade; it just takes a while. If Mozilla/Netscape 6 had been available sooner, we'd certainly have wider adoption by now. But just wait a year or two, and nearly everybody will be using it (or IE 5+ where that's available). Does it really matter that much to try to force it to happen sooner?
Umm. Show me an article in a reputable peer-reviewed scientific journal (say Science, or Nature, or one of the journals of the American Geophysical Union), not some garbage on the web. And the 15,000 signature business was a hoax perpetrated on well-meaning scientists by some very unscruplous anti-climate people; and that was before the consensus on climate change had become as violently clear as it has in the last few years.
As to going back to the stone age, that's really not necessary. Fossil fuels are far from the only energy sources. Nuclear does quite a good job and actually produces less radioactive pollution (and far less waste) than coal. Wind, hydropower, and ocean-based energy systems can contribute something. But the source of all those (and of fossil fuels originally too) is the Sun; solar energy in the long run can make a huge difference. Why do we spend almost no money on research into it? Space-based solar power could potentially provide us billions of times more energy than we use now; there's no lack of resources out there. But too many people have their heads in the sand to make that investment now. At least some changes are starting to happen though.
More technically, "global warming" is referred to scientifically as "global climate change", and the issue on which there has been a SCIENTIFIC consensus for a long, long time (actually over 40 years now) is that humans have been putting enough CO2 gas into the atmosphere to make major long-term changes to global climate. Whether its a warming or cooling and by how much has certainly been a scientific debate for a while, but the fact that we are putting enough of these gases into the atmosphere now to make a difference has been agreed on for a long time. And that is what the politicians (sponsored by our huge oil, energy, and automotive industries) have ignored, and magnified scientific debates into do-nothingism.
More to the point on the warming side, the fact that extra CO2 in the atmosphere can lead to an enhanced greenhouse effect (warming) was first discovered by Arrhenius, over 100 years ago. This direct effect of CO2 has NEVER been refuted. What has been at issue are the sequence of consequences from enhanced CO2-based heat trapping, and obviously it's very complicated. But anybody with a smidgen of understanding of physics and chemistry intuitively knows that when a new force is imposed (human production of CO2) the response is almost always in the direction of that force, even if the response is buffered by other factors. I.E. Warming was always expected by the majority of scientists, though the degree was quite uncertain.
What triggered scientists concern was the extensive data taken and discussions that ensued from the International Geophysical Year 1957-1958. At that point the issue was considered more a curiosity - it did not really come to public attention until after 20 years of scientific discussion and conferences on the subject, when Congress was persuaded to pass the "National Climate Program Act" in 1978; the first World Climate Conference was held in Geneva the following year. 10 more years of international meetings followed, and then (under the Bush administration!) Congress passed the "Global Change Research Act" in 1989. The UN IPCC was also formed around that time, which continues to produce the most thorough reports on the issue.
Early on, the greenhouse forcing by human-introduced CO2 was known to have differing effects in different parts of the world, and in the late 1970's there were arguments that the Northern Hemisphere would cool, even while the tropics heated (increased desertification). However, by 1985 (BEFORE the hot summers of the late 1980's and even hotter years of the 1990's) the scientific consensus was pretty firm on warming:
was the conclusion of the second World Climate Program conference in 1985.
The scientific story has changed in only tiny details in 16 years since then, and what have our politicians done? Hemmed and hawed and said we need more research. Well, the "first half of the next century" is here, and now we have hosts of people who should know better (slashdot users in particular) who have bought the political line (paid for by our good old oil companies) without question, completely ignoring this over 100 year history of the question. Even the oil companies are abandoning their hard line now - BP is now "Beyond Petroleum"; but here in the US so many cling tenaciously to their deceptions and refuse to be disillusioned.
If anybody who reads this is ready for disillusionment, check out the EPA's excellent site:
http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/index.html.
Historical information on meetings and US government involvement is available at:
http://www.cnie.org/nle/clim-6.html
While this is interesting, the disagreement is still not so far out of the range of experimental errors (2 sigmas) - I'd have been a lot more confident this really meant an indication of something beyond the standard model if it was 4 or 5 sigmas, or even a second experiment with different techniques was corroborating the measurement. Let's just hope it doesn't turn into another of those cases where they announced prematurely and it turns out there was really nothing there after all.
It's the George Bush's, John Sununu's, and particularly Rush Limbaugh's of the world that are why we haven't done anything about global warming. Scientists have been worrying about global warming, and been ignored by politicians (and the media, and hence the public) for at least 30 years.
All of these issues (except maybe the Clippers) get ignored and their proponents squashed by a simple factor - how much money either industry or the US government sees fit to invest in the necessary R&D. And that in turn is very much determined by public and consumer interest in these things. If you feel they are important, get out there and evangelize! But don't blame "Science".
I work for a nonprofit publisher, and we're faced every year with the opposite end of the "increasing returns to scale" equation - if libraries cancel subscriptions, the high value of our information content (relative to the cost of printing the books, and even more so for purely electronic distribution) means we have to charge our remaining customers even more money. Which means more people feel they need to cancel the following year - it's a vicious cycle. What we all need is new markets that we can sell our content to, or new non-content services, but it's hard to see exactly what services we can provide as a publisher, beyond selecting and publishing particular bits of content!
But we have taken one big step with a new product, scanning in 100 years of our old content and selling it relatively cheaply - it's already gaining a sales base close to the size of the current content, and growing very quickly. If we can transition to that as a new revenue source with a much larger subscription base, we might be able to get out of the vicious cycle. But it really is tough to be a publisher in this climate!
The author somehow seemed to have a fixation about sex and evolutionary imperatives (overpopulating the Earth and all that too). But the message to expand beyond our one planet and one star system is clear; if we could direct some of the billions that would have gone into dot.coms into the various space startups we might really get somewhere. I do think it has to be through private enterprise initiative - NASA's view is too tied to the restrictive national security priorities that make it do things like force commercial companies to use the shuttle, rely on defence contractors with their obscene billing practices and skewed priorities, and balk at "tourists" like Tito coming to their station.
Going along with blaming this reporting on grumpy old men - have you ever noticed that the older types seem to keep downplaying the fact that the distribution of unrenormalized IQ scores has been steadily rising, something like 5-10 points with each generation, ever since the 1930s? Why is that anyway? Better schooling? Better parenting? More nutrition? More information availability? A healthier environment? At least taking the lead out of the environment has helped. But the gloom-and-doom types like to ignore this fact.
One of the most amusing (yet supposedly serious) books I ever read was a debate from some time in the 1970's between a proponent of "nature" (i.e. genetic predetermination of IQ scores) and another fellow who claimed (A) "nurture" was very important and (B) IQ didn't measure much meaningful anyway. The "nature" guy got into hysterics over "regression to the mean"; from which he seemed to take the conclusion that dumb people had dumb kids (of course), but smart people tended to have dumb kids too (that regression to the mean thing). From which he concluded we were doomed to ever-increasing levels of stupidity in our descendants!
The only point to going back to re-doing something is if the users are ready for a significantly enhanced product. If the thing they have is working well enough for them, you're going to get zero support for an effort to clean up the code, even if it will reduce maintenance work in the long run. Clean bits here and there while you fix other bugs, but a complete rewrite is only warranted if the software system is really not meeting current requirements.
The tone of comments here seems to me to reflect a real head-in-the-sand attitude... if the release of chunks of ice the size of a small state is no big deal, what WILL get your attention? So what if this has been going on for 14,000 years - it's clearly speeded up tremendously in the last ten or so. And sure, we can put up a big dike to save Manhattan, but what about the 10 million people who live in other parts of the NYC metro area? Not to mention the other 50-100 million Americans living in coastal areas.
To give a specific example, I live in eastern Long Island, where a huge fuss is made about protecting our "sole source aquifer" from pollutants. What's the biggest threat to the aquifer? Salt water encroachment - and the extent of that is determined by the effective "height above sea level" of the water pressure. Currently the highest pressure points are 50 feet above sea level - but huge areas of the aquifer are only at pressures a few feet above sea level, so a sea level rise of even 3 feet would tremendously reduce the quantity of fresh water available here.
Multiply that problem by thousands of local regions with similar issues, and you're talking some serious costs that go with even a small sea level rise. This is a big deal folks!
Whether that's actually true or not for Earth-based solar power, it's unlikely to be true for Criswell's lunar power scheme. Read the links. In space the sun is there all the time. Plus most solar cell arrangements don't use concentration, but solar cells are capable of handling 10x or 100x concentration of sunlight, sometimes at even higher efficiency than under ambient lighting. Believe me, serious people have looked at this, and it does work.
You're not generating any CO2, so there's no extra heat-trapping caused by fossil-fuel burning. The amount of power we're talking about to power the electrical needs of the planet (5-10 TW) is pretty small compared to the actual incoming solar energy (100,000 TW or so).
We have from this website:
Dec 2000 - a scientist claims that, while climate change is serious, more research is needed...
Nov 2000 - well it was too slow to load, so all I have are the search quotes, referring to the "stalled climate treaty", the Hague conference, etc. Doesn't look like much one way or the other there.
May 1999 Bush warms to global warming! - Even George Bush is quoted as saying: "I've had some briefings recently and I'm becoming more convinced that the science proves there's global warming."
All the remaining references I could find there date back 2 years or more - have they been having trouble recently finding any real scientists who agree with their position?
Oh yeah, that's an unbiased look at the science alright. 10 sentences on the "science", and pages and pages on the economic disaster the Kyoto treaty is foisting upon us! 68 cents/gallon higher gas taxes! 2.4 million American jobs lost! And a little "instant expert" page that tells you among other things, "the best strategy to pursue is one of 'no regrets.'" - doesn't that tell you something?
Have you tried reading the REAL sites on global warming, like
the EPA's site? They don't just TELL you everythings terrible (or OK, like the globalwarming site) - they show you in pages after page of graphs, numbers, and statistics. Read through that stuff, and then go back to the globalwarming.org site and decide which one looks more believable to you.
Nope - since when did Volcanos manufacture complex chloro-fluorocarbons? Pinatubo spewed lots of chlorine (and some fluorine) into the air, but it all got rained out within a year or two - quite different from the effects of man-made ozone-destroying chemicals. Of course this article was about CO2, not CFC's, so what's the story there? Pinatubo also didn't send up much CO2, but it did produce a lot of sulfur dioxide, resulting in airborne sulfuric acid droplets that likely cooled global temperatures by 1 degree for a year or so. But they got rained out too. The problem with CO2 (and CFC's) unlike what comes out of volcanos - they don't drop out of the air in rain, they just accumulate. Like a lot of other man-made pollutants.
Nope, Celsius is perfectly linear - it's just Kelvins plus 273 degrees - of course since Kelvin's are absolute then for any absolute comparison (eg. today is 1% hotter than yesterday) you want Kelvin, but Celsius is fine for addition/subtraction purposes.
Time to start work on off-Earth power sources - a good first step is lunar-based solar... see Criswell's plans for example. A cure for global warming, power plant pollution, and more. And no need for nuke's.
The Phys Rev Letters paper will be available online (though isn't there yet) at:
http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/V86/P783
The official citation is Phys Rev Letters, Volume 86, p. 783 (published 29 Jan 2001).