It's not actually inevitable, per se, just very difficult to prevent in the short term.
In the long term, we have a lot of choices. As it turns out, reducing greenhouse emissions is quite probably better economically than blindly emitting as we currently are. (Exact models vary on that, naturally.) The cost of adapting is very high and the saving involved in not wasting so much energy are actually significant.
Wow, that post is full of misinformation, it's difficult to know where to begin.
Yes, *some* types of plants grow better in higher concentrations of CO2. Not all, some. That's important because there are a lot of different kinds of plants on this planet and they don't all react in the same way to their environments. (In fact, I seem to recall that some types of plants grow worse in higher CO2 environments. It'd be a pity if those includes grasses, wouldn't it?)
So you're "obvious" fact is, as obvious facts often are, at least partially wrong. But never mind facts. What's worse is that the CO2-loving plants don't help that much. Even the researchers who have shown the correlation between CO2 and grown rates admit that right in their papers. One of the reasons for that is that plants just don't take up that much CO2 on our planet. Look at where the carbon is. Even if they did take up a large fraction of the total, there's no reason to think that they can take up much *more* than they already do. Do you honestly think that lack of CO2 has been limiting plant growth all these millions of years? The plants need other nutrients, water, and sunlight to grow. These are much more likely to limit the growth of the plants than CO2.
AND, say that plants like corn (shown to grown faster in extra CO2) did take up a significant fraction of the CO2 from the atmosphere. What do you plan to do with it when corn does what it always does int he fall: die? Since you claim to understand biology, do you know where that CO2 goes? Yep, back into the air as the planet matter decays. Whoops.
I won't touch your rant about water except to say that water isn't very important toward the anthropomorphic greenhouse effect since water already is doing most of the absorbing it can do.
Not really, in all likelihood. Cassini's lifetime is more likely to be limited by its supply of reaction mass for maneuvering or the speed at which its reaction wheels degrade. The RTG's life expectancy is something like 20+ years, if I recall right from when I asked about this a month ago during the extended mission planning at JPL. If we make it sufficiently far that the RTG is a limiting factor on the mission, I'll be shocked. Pleasantly so, but shocked. Also, remember that the rate at which the RTGs degrade is a fairly easy thing to model. There aren't a lot of components to go bad, so you're mostly just looking at radioactive decay times. Compare that to how long it takes a moving part to break or radiation damage to destroy electronics and you see that the modeling for the RTG is a cake walk.
A taser is *not* a 100% safe tool to use on someone. We had a death here in Boulder (or maybe it was Broomfield) a few months ago when a young man was tasered while fleeing police on a non-violent drug offense. (He was suspected of growing marijuana in a public area.) Granted, it turns out that the young man had an unknown heart condition if I recall correctly, but the incident has made the local police alter their tasering policies somewhat to recognize what should have been somewhat obvious: you don't taser someone unless you really need to. It's like doctors treating patients with drugs: you never know for sure that it will be really safe, so you don't employ unless it's really warranted.
Was it *really* warranted? This young man wasn't behaving violently, so the police cannot reasonably claim that they felt he was a threat. Arguing that they might break bones is a stretch at best and I doubt any court would accept that. Arguing that they were worried that they might get a riot is an even weaker case: if they wanted to avoid a riot, they should have calmly diffused the situation, not tasered the guy. Anyone with an ounce of brains can see that assaulting someone (with a billy-club, a taser, or anything else) is more likely to ignite a volatile situation than to diffuse it.
The cops were dead wrong on this one, especially with several of them there. If they can't deal with a non-violence, if protesting, party without resorting to violence, they need to be fired. Not just for brutality, but because they're obviously incompetent or ineffective at their jobs.
The "radiation" in the Van Allen belts isn't made up of radioactive particles. It's mostly protons, electrons, and a few heavier ions (most of which should be your lighter elements like oxygen). Neutrons don't stick around for obvious reasons. The heavier ions have little penetrating power, so that leaves the protons and electrons. Both will be have energies in the few tens of MeVs, typically. That's in the gamma range, while as far as I can tell, the typical irradiation gamma is around 1 MeV. So we're talking similar effects on the water, really.
Uh, to the best of my knowledge, it is public domain. I don't think we have ever gone after anyone for posting our image products before, anyway. The point of a press-release is pretty much to get the images or movies out there.
"...starting to get exciting again"? Since Galileo arrived at Jupiter more than a decade ago and there has hardly been a lull in flagship-class missions (let alone missions to Mars, comets, asteroids, Venus, etc.) since then, I tend to feel that we're well past the start:)
Yes, but the Earth's *surface* follows the SB law quite well. If memory serves, it's basically within half a percent of the actual theoretical curve. Most dense objects are pretty close to perfect emitters. The atmosphere is obvious at a different temperature in different points and only a fool would treat the whole system as a single blackbody. (Or a person interested soly in the emision to space temperature, of course.) As you and I both know, radiative transfer models used in modern climate studies account pretty well for the atmosphere's many exciting and frustrating quirks where radiative transfer is concerned.
(I am a planetary scientist and, while I'm not a climatologist, I took the RT in atmospheres courses in grad school with the climate folks. I'm sure you know the details better than I, though.)
Number of windows isn't a great metric, really. You need to really count number of tabs or files open in the editor, I think. Rather than open a new instance of Xemacs for each file, I have one instance running on each machine I'm logged into. I have four xterms open on my Linux box and the have a total of 25 separate tabs going, all of which are being used. Those four instances are on three machines, by the way. I got so many open on my local workstation that I need a two instances to hold them all reasonably. I have around 30 files open to edit, and typically three to six tabs in Firefox. (I try to keep it pared down to three, but it balloons up when I'm working with lots of pages.) Also, a number of applications have multiple windows but really aren't any more interesting than multiple tabs. For example, are the different chat windows in Trillian really different from the different tabs in Gaim?
I recommend Eric Chaisson's book, "Hubble Wars" for lots of examples. He cites one example of STScI producing a mess of posters about HST for school classrooms. NASA made them destroy the posters because NASA's logo was the same size (not larger than) the SCScI and ESA logos. Another example: we're currently planning the Cassini extended mission. We've been given two years. Odds are that we'll end up with more than that, but they haven't allocated the funding. This matters because if we were allowed to plan for more than two years, it would change our trajectory and let us more efficiently hit our targets. (Less precious reaction mass would be required, extending the mission further.) I've also heard of situations where people were told not to share rooms on travel because it makes their bookkeeping difficult. (Never mind that it saves NASA money.)
NASA does good work, by and large. It remains one of the most trusted Federal agencies among the public, and for good reason. *But* it has become a bureaucracy. One needs to bear that in mind whenever considering NASA's behavior, actual or expected.
You, sir, have more faith in NASA's bureaucracy than I do. Having had to battle their system and watched one bone-headed decision after another, I salute your optimism but fear that it is misplaced.
There is a new telescope in the works, but it's not due to launch until 2013. (This is the James Webb Space Telescope.) It does not duplicate what HST does since it will primarily be an infrared telescope.
In fairness, a lot of women are opposed to the pill because of the side-effects for them. I would not be surprised if the male pills ended up more consistent in their effects on men, so it wouldn't be unreasonable for men to go for the pill (or patch) in that case.
And I agree, there is a lot of trust there for women, but if they don't trust the guy: a) Maybe sex isn't such a great idea? b) There are other forms of birth control than the pill. Not all of them inhibit spontaneity, either. I think all of my female friends who want birth control have found something that works without horrific side effects or being too much of a bother. It took several of them a few tries and several doctor visits to find the right system, though.
OK, the article was just fine, but I think that the story suggestions off to the side need reconsideration. "The Humble Banger: the secret life of the British sausage" just seems like it's pushing it on this particular story, doesn't it?
Those guys could easily be using condoms. Looking at the probabilities, you can't help but come to the conclusion that you should always try to have two methods of BC in place unless one party is known to be sterile. Besides, condoms prevent the transmission of diseases as well as production of kids. Any guy who gets "trapped" in the way you mention deserves it for being lazy and/or selfish in the first place. (I'm a bit incredulous that this happens very often anyway, but that's another story.)
All of that rant said, I very much would welcome alternative forms of BC under my own control. I've always trusted my girlfriends, but I also like being able to check for myself *and* I had to see the burden for BC use pushed on just one party. (I also welcome alternatives for women for pretty symmetric reasons: everyone should have options, control, and responsibility.)
It's the FOX question mark, as explained by Jon Stewart a few weeks ago. As in, "Hillary Clinton Photographed Sacrificing Babies to Satan?" or "Your Mother's a Whore?" (Seriously, they do it a lot. Mr. Stewart speculated, quite possibly correctly, that the question mark is a cover-your-ass manuver. Actually, not just FOX, but they do appear to be the masters of it.)
Actually, preventing people from doing those things *is* censorship. Why on earth do you think that they call it "censoring" when they remove sensative parts of soldiers letters?
You're just trying to define "censorship" as something you don't like by excepting the cases that you agree with. If you go around doin that, you make the word useless because everyone will want the same privlidge.
Not really, since they also made it pretty clear that giving aid to enemies of the US is treason, that there is such a thing as libel and slander, and that there is such a thing as copyright. All of those things can easily impinge on your freedom to say whatsoever you may choose. Clearly, the Found Fathers thoughts in much more subtle terms than you seem willing to use.
Oddly, the Supreme Court does agree with me and has consistently for at least a century. What's your basis for thinking that the Founding Father's would approve of, say, leaking battle plans to the enemy or shouting fire in the cliche, crowded theater?
Ah, but: "A witty saying proves nothing." -- Voltaire.
I think most will agree that the real world cannot be boiled down to such absolute statements. There are certainly times and places where censorship is a lesser evil than what it's meant to prevent. However, we all probably agree that those times are few and far between and probably agree that this case is not one of them. But I for one would not over-generalize from this.
Already own a PowerBook and my next machine purchases will be Macs as well. So yes.
I think that one might argue that part of acting like a toy, for a computer, is *looking* like one. Perhaps even a large part of acting like a toy is looks. That said, look (and acting) like a toy aren't even necessarily bad things. I think that there's a case to be made that says that toys look and act the way that they do because they're simple, intuitive, and friendly. A lot of computer programs and OSes could learn a lot from that, to be honest.
When OS X Leopard comes out, it will look very professional when placed side-by-side with Vista, which looks like a toy.
Not that I want to dispute anything you said, but I would like to note that I know at least one person who avoids OS X partially because she feels that IT looks like a toy compared to XP. So I kind of suspect that that view is in the eye of the beholder. And, when you get right down to it, that isn't a very damning criticism. I don't really care if my OS looks like a toy or an industrial warning sign as much as I care about how well it works provided it doesn't really offend good taste. If the toy-looking OS has the better performance and interface, I'll take it.
I'm an Eagle Scout and I agree wholeheartedly. I'm proud of my Eagle and had a great experience in my (small) troop back in the day, but I refuse to donate any time or money to the BSA these days. Mostly, this is due to what I feel is an unforgivably intolerant stance towards gays, athiests, and agnostics and their almost-interolable exclusion of girl younger than Explorer-ages. On top of that -- as if it weren't enough -- there's crap like this. They really need to re-evaluate what they're doing and why. They've come dangerously close to being a knee-jerk, right-wing indoctrination organization. The program is still good at its core and lord knows kids need a way to get outside and learn life skills to supplement what's taught in schools, but I fear that the politics of the people running the show are getting in the way far too much.
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It's not actually inevitable, per se, just very difficult to prevent in the short term.
In the long term, we have a lot of choices. As it turns out, reducing greenhouse emissions is quite probably better economically than blindly emitting as we currently are. (Exact models vary on that, naturally.) The cost of adapting is very high and the saving involved in not wasting so much energy are actually significant.
Wow, that post is full of misinformation, it's difficult to know where to begin.
Yes, *some* types of plants grow better in higher concentrations of CO2. Not all, some. That's important because there are a lot of different kinds of plants on this planet and they don't all react in the same way to their environments. (In fact, I seem to recall that some types of plants grow worse in higher CO2 environments. It'd be a pity if those includes grasses, wouldn't it?)
So you're "obvious" fact is, as obvious facts often are, at least partially wrong. But never mind facts. What's worse is that the CO2-loving plants don't help that much. Even the researchers who have shown the correlation between CO2 and grown rates admit that right in their papers. One of the reasons for that is that plants just don't take up that much CO2 on our planet. Look at where the carbon is. Even if they did take up a large fraction of the total, there's no reason to think that they can take up much *more* than they already do. Do you honestly think that lack of CO2 has been limiting plant growth all these millions of years? The plants need other nutrients, water, and sunlight to grow. These are much more likely to limit the growth of the plants than CO2.
AND, say that plants like corn (shown to grown faster in extra CO2) did take up a significant fraction of the CO2 from the atmosphere. What do you plan to do with it when corn does what it always does int he fall: die? Since you claim to understand biology, do you know where that CO2 goes? Yep, back into the air as the planet matter decays. Whoops.
I won't touch your rant about water except to say that water isn't very important toward the anthropomorphic greenhouse effect since water already is doing most of the absorbing it can do.
Why are you worried about the upper atmosphere? The greenhouse effect occurs in the troposphere, basically.
Not really, in all likelihood. Cassini's lifetime is more likely to be limited by its supply of reaction mass for maneuvering or the speed at which its reaction wheels degrade. The RTG's life expectancy is something like 20+ years, if I recall right from when I asked about this a month ago during the extended mission planning at JPL. If we make it sufficiently far that the RTG is a limiting factor on the mission, I'll be shocked. Pleasantly so, but shocked.
Also, remember that the rate at which the RTGs degrade is a fairly easy thing to model. There aren't a lot of components to go bad, so you're mostly just looking at radioactive decay times. Compare that to how long it takes a moving part to break or radiation damage to destroy electronics and you see that the modeling for the RTG is a cake walk.
A taser is *not* a 100% safe tool to use on someone. We had a death here in Boulder (or maybe it was Broomfield) a few months ago when a young man was tasered while fleeing police on a non-violent drug offense. (He was suspected of growing marijuana in a public area.) Granted, it turns out that the young man had an unknown heart condition if I recall correctly, but the incident has made the local police alter their tasering policies somewhat to recognize what should have been somewhat obvious: you don't taser someone unless you really need to. It's like doctors treating patients with drugs: you never know for sure that it will be really safe, so you don't employ unless it's really warranted.
Was it *really* warranted? This young man wasn't behaving violently, so the police cannot reasonably claim that they felt he was a threat. Arguing that they might break bones is a stretch at best and I doubt any court would accept that. Arguing that they were worried that they might get a riot is an even weaker case: if they wanted to avoid a riot, they should have calmly diffused the situation, not tasered the guy. Anyone with an ounce of brains can see that assaulting someone (with a billy-club, a taser, or anything else) is more likely to ignite a volatile situation than to diffuse it.
The cops were dead wrong on this one, especially with several of them there. If they can't deal with a non-violence, if protesting, party without resorting to violence, they need to be fired. Not just for brutality, but because they're obviously incompetent or ineffective at their jobs.
The "radiation" in the Van Allen belts isn't made up of radioactive particles. It's mostly protons, electrons, and a few heavier ions (most of which should be your lighter elements like oxygen). Neutrons don't stick around for obvious reasons. The heavier ions have little penetrating power, so that leaves the protons and electrons. Both will be have energies in the few tens of MeVs, typically. That's in the gamma range, while as far as I can tell, the typical irradiation gamma is around 1 MeV. So we're talking similar effects on the water, really.
Uh, to the best of my knowledge, it is public domain. I don't think we have ever gone after anyone for posting our image products before, anyway. The point of a press-release is pretty much to get the images or movies out there.
You can get the press-release from the source at http://ciclops.org/view_event.php?id=57, if you so desire.
"...starting to get exciting again"? Since Galileo arrived at Jupiter more than a decade ago and there has hardly been a lull in flagship-class missions (let alone missions to Mars, comets, asteroids, Venus, etc.) since then, I tend to feel that we're well past the start :)
Yes, but the Earth's *surface* follows the SB law quite well. If memory serves, it's basically within half a percent of the actual theoretical curve. Most dense objects are pretty close to perfect emitters. The atmosphere is obvious at a different temperature in different points and only a fool would treat the whole system as a single blackbody. (Or a person interested soly in the emision to space temperature, of course.) As you and I both know, radiative transfer models used in modern climate studies account pretty well for the atmosphere's many exciting and frustrating quirks where radiative transfer is concerned.
(I am a planetary scientist and, while I'm not a climatologist, I took the RT in atmospheres courses in grad school with the climate folks. I'm sure you know the details better than I, though.)
Dude, most of the POPES haven't been saints, either literally or figuratively. You picked a bad example.
Number of windows isn't a great metric, really. You need to really count number of tabs or files open in the editor, I think. Rather than open a new instance of Xemacs for each file, I have one instance running on each machine I'm logged into. I have four xterms open on my Linux box and the have a total of 25 separate tabs going, all of which are being used. Those four instances are on three machines, by the way. I got so many open on my local workstation that I need a two instances to hold them all reasonably. I have around 30 files open to edit, and typically three to six tabs in Firefox. (I try to keep it pared down to three, but it balloons up when I'm working with lots of pages.) Also, a number of applications have multiple windows but really aren't any more interesting than multiple tabs. For example, are the different chat windows in Trillian really different from the different tabs in Gaim?
I recommend Eric Chaisson's book, "Hubble Wars" for lots of examples. He cites one example of STScI producing a mess of posters about HST for school classrooms. NASA made them destroy the posters because NASA's logo was the same size (not larger than) the SCScI and ESA logos. Another example: we're currently planning the Cassini extended mission. We've been given two years. Odds are that we'll end up with more than that, but they haven't allocated the funding. This matters because if we were allowed to plan for more than two years, it would change our trajectory and let us more efficiently hit our targets. (Less precious reaction mass would be required, extending the mission further.) I've also heard of situations where people were told not to share rooms on travel because it makes their bookkeeping difficult. (Never mind that it saves NASA money.)
NASA does good work, by and large. It remains one of the most trusted Federal agencies among the public, and for good reason. *But* it has become a bureaucracy. One needs to bear that in mind whenever considering NASA's behavior, actual or expected.
You, sir, have more faith in NASA's bureaucracy than I do. Having had to battle their system and watched one bone-headed decision after another, I salute your optimism but fear that it is misplaced.
There is a new telescope in the works, but it's not due to launch until 2013. (This is the James Webb Space Telescope.) It does not duplicate what HST does since it will primarily be an infrared telescope.
In fairness, a lot of women are opposed to the pill because of the side-effects for them. I would not be surprised if the male pills ended up more consistent in their effects on men, so it wouldn't be unreasonable for men to go for the pill (or patch) in that case.
And I agree, there is a lot of trust there for women, but if they don't trust the guy:
a) Maybe sex isn't such a great idea?
b) There are other forms of birth control than the pill. Not all of them inhibit spontaneity, either. I think all of my female friends who want birth control have found something that works without horrific side effects or being too much of a bother. It took several of them a few tries and several doctor visits to find the right system, though.
OK, the article was just fine, but I think that the story suggestions off to the side need reconsideration. "The Humble Banger: the secret life of the British sausage" just seems like it's pushing it on this particular story, doesn't it?
Those guys could easily be using condoms. Looking at the probabilities, you can't help but come to the conclusion that you should always try to have two methods of BC in place unless one party is known to be sterile. Besides, condoms prevent the transmission of diseases as well as production of kids. Any guy who gets "trapped" in the way you mention deserves it for being lazy and/or selfish in the first place. (I'm a bit incredulous that this happens very often anyway, but that's another story.)
All of that rant said, I very much would welcome alternative forms of BC under my own control. I've always trusted my girlfriends, but I also like being able to check for myself *and* I had to see the burden for BC use pushed on just one party. (I also welcome alternatives for women for pretty symmetric reasons: everyone should have options, control, and responsibility.)
It's the FOX question mark, as explained by Jon Stewart a few weeks ago. As in, "Hillary Clinton Photographed Sacrificing Babies to Satan?" or "Your Mother's a Whore?" (Seriously, they do it a lot. Mr. Stewart speculated, quite possibly correctly, that the question mark is a cover-your-ass manuver. Actually, not just FOX, but they do appear to be the masters of it.)
Actually, preventing people from doing those things *is* censorship. Why on earth do you think that they call it "censoring" when they remove sensative parts of soldiers letters?
You're just trying to define "censorship" as something you don't like by excepting the cases that you agree with. If you go around doin that, you make the word useless because everyone will want the same privlidge.
Not really, since they also made it pretty clear that giving aid to enemies of the US is treason, that there is such a thing as libel and slander, and that there is such a thing as copyright. All of those things can easily impinge on your freedom to say whatsoever you may choose. Clearly, the Found Fathers thoughts in much more subtle terms than you seem willing to use.
Oddly, the Supreme Court does agree with me and has consistently for at least a century. What's your basis for thinking that the Founding Father's would approve of, say, leaking battle plans to the enemy or shouting fire in the cliche, crowded theater?
Ah, but: "A witty saying proves nothing." -- Voltaire.
I think most will agree that the real world cannot be boiled down to such absolute statements. There are certainly times and places where censorship is a lesser evil than what it's meant to prevent. However, we all probably agree that those times are few and far between and probably agree that this case is not one of them. But I for one would not over-generalize from this.
Already own a PowerBook and my next machine purchases will be Macs as well. So yes.
I think that one might argue that part of acting like a toy, for a computer, is *looking* like one. Perhaps even a large part of acting like a toy is looks. That said, look (and acting) like a toy aren't even necessarily bad things. I think that there's a case to be made that says that toys look and act the way that they do because they're simple, intuitive, and friendly. A lot of computer programs and OSes could learn a lot from that, to be honest.
Not that I want to dispute anything you said, but I would like to note that I know at least one person who avoids OS X partially because she feels that IT looks like a toy compared to XP. So I kind of suspect that that view is in the eye of the beholder. And, when you get right down to it, that isn't a very damning criticism. I don't really care if my OS looks like a toy or an industrial warning sign as much as I care about how well it works provided it doesn't really offend good taste. If the toy-looking OS has the better performance and interface, I'll take it.
I'm an Eagle Scout and I agree wholeheartedly. I'm proud of my Eagle and had a great experience in my (small) troop back in the day, but I refuse to donate any time or money to the BSA these days. Mostly, this is due to what I feel is an unforgivably intolerant stance towards gays, athiests, and agnostics and their almost-interolable exclusion of girl younger than Explorer-ages. On top of that -- as if it weren't enough -- there's crap like this. They really need to re-evaluate what they're doing and why. They've come dangerously close to being a knee-jerk, right-wing indoctrination organization. The program is still good at its core and lord knows kids need a way to get outside and learn life skills to supplement what's taught in schools, but I fear that the politics of the people running the show are getting in the way far too much.