The article is interesting, but does make some gross errors and omissions and is full of emotive language. When an article of any kind uses emotive language, it should serve as a warning to take anything stated in the article with caution.
I won't cover all the dubious points made in the article, but I will cover some of the more obvious ones.
The UN dated its list of "forcings" (influences on temperature) from 1750, when the sun, and consequently air temperature, was almost as warm as now. But its start-date for the increase in world temperature was 1900, when the sun, and temperature, were much cooler.
The only data available for solar irradiance since 1750 is the sunspot count. Before the invention of the telescope sunspots were not known to European science. Yet the article also makes this statement:
Sami Solanki, a solar physicist, says that in the past half-century the sun has been warmer, for longer, than at any time in at least the past 11,400 years, contributing a base forcing equivalent to a quarter of the past century's warming.
The only evidence available for solar warming over this whole period is indirect evidence from a variety of sources. Yet all he does is include this statement in the article and we're expected to accept it because it is allegedly a quotation from a solar physicist. Evidently we're expected to accept this assertion without question. I do question the assertion. What is the evidence for the history of solar irradiance over the past 11,400 years? Do all solar physicists agree on the validity of this evidence? Is there contradictory evidence? Are there conflicting points of view on the past history of solar irradiance?
[In the medieval warm period] there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes: today they're there.
This statement is false because it implies that all the ice in these glaciers is less than 1000 years old. Yet glaciologists have done ice cores in these glaciers that go back more than 5000 years.
The UN expresses its heat-energy forcings in watts per square metre per second. It estimates that the sun caused just 0.3 watts of forcing since 1750. Begin in 1900 to match the temperature start-date, and the base solar forcing more than doubles to 0.7 watts. Multiply by 2.7, which the Royal Society suggests is the UN's current factor for climate feedbacks, and you get 1.9 watts - more than six times the UN's figure.
The entire 20th-century warming from all sources was below 2 watts. The sun could have caused just about all of it.
The above mathematics is dubious and misleading. It uses the UN's 2.7 figure from one set of data and multiplies it by another figure he's apparently plucked out of thin air (this figure is probably valid but one cannot check it because there are no cross references). How do we know it is mathematically correct to do this? If the 2.7 figure is in any way calculated based on the other figure (which is possible), then the article is being misleading. Even if it is correct to do this, I want to see firm proof of the validity of this method before I would accept it.
Next, the UN slashed the natural greenhouse effect by 40 per cent from 33C in the climate-physics textbooks to 20C, making the man-made additions appear bigger.
Oh, please. Are we to believe that all climate-physics textbooks are written by the UN? Is the author implying that there's a UN conspiracy afoot? More likely, the changes to the textbooks originated from peer-reviewed scientific papers which refined figures that they demonstrated to be incorrect. It happens in science all the time. This does not mean the 20C figure is any more correct than the 33C figure, but that the 20C figure is the one that is currently accepted.
In the attached PDF, the following conclusion is made:
That taking precautions, just in case, would be the responsible cause. False
Water is an important issue and does need to be taken into consideration. You answered the question in your post when you said that trees change climate. Indeed they do. The more trees there are in a region, the more they transpire, the more water they return to the atmosphere, and the more rain they make. So to some extent the trees water themselves. This may not hold true in all cases, however.
Waste land comes in many varieties, not all of which are suited for growing trees for various reasons. Land that's been rendered unusable because of high lead levels, toxic waste or other such contaminants could be used in this way because the land may not be useful for much else. If trees were planted in such land, the trees would capture the carbon and may also play a part in rehabilitating the land.
In any urban area it's not difficult to find parcels of land that have not been put to use. Many of these parcels of land may be quite small, such as a small triangle of land near a carpark, or a steep bit of land that is not useful for much. Even the planting of a single tree in a parcel of land too small to hold two trees would capture a bit of carbon.
As for highways and freeways, not all land near them is suited for tree planting for the reasons you cited. However, other freeway land is potentially useful for tree planting, such as cuttings, cloverleaf exchanges and the like. I have driven through bypasses in cuttings that have been planted with native vegetation. The trees there pose no risk because they are higher than the road, and they serve a useful purpose because they prevent erosion of the road cutting. A 40-km roadway development near where I live that is currently under construction includes the planting of millions of trees along the roadway. These trees will be above the level of the road so pose no risk to traffic.
It would be terribly inefficient to plant another billion trees
In what way is it so terribly inefficient?
Startup costs? Well, all one does is dig a hole and drop the seedling tree in. It's possible for one person to plant more than 300 trees an hour with the right equipment. How much does that cost, maybe 20 cents per tree? The land needs to be acquired as well. There's plenty of waste land that can be used, like the land near freeways. It will require a lot of land, but that's the only major resource that would be required. When compared to the billions of dollars of farm subsidies that the US already pays to agriculture producers, a subsidy for growing trees would be small by comparison.
There won't be maintenance costs, except for possible subsidies to private growers. The costs when the tree needs to be replaced won't be great either.
So let's make our own carbon converters. 2CO2 + energy -> C2 + 2O2.. it's really not complicated.
Such conversion is what trees are good at. Why invent useless technology when natural means are already available that can do what is required for less cost? The big cost in the conversion will be the energy. The energy input in your equation has to come from somewhere, and when noncarbon energy is in short supply that is an important consideration. Trees capture the energy for free.
Assuming global warming is true (a point I will neither defend nor oppose), the money spent on preventing global warming is a waste.
Not true.
The majority of the energy that the world consumes today is from non-renewable sources - coal, oil, uranium and so on. These sources of energy will be depleted eventually. In 100 years oil will be scarce, easily-extractable uranium may be in short supply and coal, although still plentiful, may not be used as widely for energy as it is now.
Even if one believes the most optimistic view (against all available evidence) that increasing the CO2 concentration from the preindustrial level of 280 ppm to a much higher level has no effect on the planet's climate and the ecology, one cannot deny that we will need new sources of renewable energy. If global warming provides us with an opportunity to implement renewable energy, it would provide economic stability for future generations.
Thus, the money would not be wasted. Instead, it should be considered as an insurance policy.
Here in Melbourne, spring is happening right now. It seems to have arrived about two weeks early this year. The buds are bursting, my nectarine tree is breaking into blossom and everywhere I look I see fruit trees in bloom. The birds also seem to be active. I haven't yet seen birds with nesting material but that's probably because I haven't been looking for them.
The winter was also early, and in some districts unusually cold. For about a week in June, the weather report was listing quite a lot of places in country Victoria that experienced record low temperatures. Some of the records even broke records that were set the previous night. Although lows of -8C and -9C are quite mild compared to winters in many places, they come as a bit of a shock when the lowest temperature each winter is usually about 0C to -2C.
However, that's just my local situation. As the parent poster suggests, the seasons are local phenomena.
"The bill has a clear prohibition on anything going in without your permission. You have to grant permission," said Jolley, R-Edmond. "You can look at your license agreement. It will say whether they have the ability to take that information or not."
Somehow I don't feel comfortable with a representative from "R-Edmond" sponsoring a Microsoft bill.
I will ask, AGAIN, how can "the corporation" maximize profit by NOT providing solutions? (In this case, how can "the corporation" maximize profits by NOT providing an AIDS cure?).
That is easy. Pharmaceutical corporations involved in medical research for profit as a rule do not research cures. They research treatments. The difference is important. Cures can only be sold once. Treatments can be sold to the same patients again and again for the rest of the patients' lives.
Which approach is likely to earn more money, cures or treatments?
Company spokesman Jack Evans said Microsoft had been considering Windows Defender among several possible names for the product, formerly known as Windows AntiSpyware. In the course of investigating the proposed names, he said, Microsoft discovered the Windows Defender program.
That was when the law firm contacted Lyttle on Microsoft's behalf, Evans said. Under trademark law, companies need to pursue cases of trademark infringement as part of the process of ensuring that their marks are protected.
Compare it to this from the same article:
Redmond startup Vista.com raised similar [trademark infringement] questions when Microsoft announced plans to call the next version of its operating system Windows Vista. Microsoft defended the choice by saying the combination of "Windows" and "Vista" would avoid confusion.
If I interpret this correctly, then according to Microsoft's own representatives, Adam Lyttle would have been entitled to use the name "Windows Defender" because the combination of "Windows" and "Defender" would avoid confusion.
I think the lesson here is clear. If you get a legal-looking letter from some large corporation, speak to a lawyer, if possible one that specialises in the area of law in question.
Most mutations are NOT beneficial. Yet, naturalistic speciation depends on this process, pluse time. This simply seems implausible to me. You answer the question yourself:
"MOST mutations are NOT beneficial" implies that "SOME mutations are beneficial." Even if 99.9% of mutations are harmful, that leaves 0.1% of mutations as being beneficial. Benefit here does not necessarily mean a better ability to fight off predators, or increased resistance to disease. It's the ability to pass more genes on to the next generation. A male Bird of Paradise with a more impressive feather display because of a mutation will mate with more females, and thus pass more of his genes onto his progeny.
As to time, that's not a barrier either. The law of averages sees to that. Evolution is not 4 billion years of history. It's 4 billion years multiplied by the average number of individual organisms that have existed on Earth during its history. Each individual organism experiences events that benefit it or harm it. If an organism has a harmful mutation, on average it is less likely to pass its genes onto its progeny. An organism with a beneficial mutation is more likely to pass its genes on. Evolution is not the effects of individual mutations on individual creatures, it is the sum total of all mutations on all creatures in the biosphere. Roll the evolutionary dice enough times and the creatures with the house edge eventually get all the prizes.
The answer is obvious, really.
Here's a simple example of evolution in action, from the real world.
There is a species of moth in the British Isles that lives in forests. This moth rests during the day on the trunks of certain trees. These tree trunks are pale in colour, so the moths have a similar pale colouration so as to be camouflaged. A rare mutation may create dark moths. This mutation is harmful because the dark moths stand out on the light tree trunks and are easy for the birds to find and eat.
Then something happened during the Industrial Revolution. The burning of coal drove the wheels of industry. All this coal-burning spread black dust over the factories, and the homes. The trees were also blackened by all the smoke.
This had an interesting effect on the moths. The light-coloured moths were suddenly the ones that possessed the harmful mutation, and the rare dark moths possessed the beneficial mutation! In the space of a few years, the birds had eaten most of the light-coloured moths, and the moths were mostly dark with a few light-coloured moths. This, then is natural selection in action. There's no supernatural being sitting on the shoulders of all the birds, whispering in their ears: "Eat the obvious moths". Instead, it's just birds doing what birds do, without being told by anyone.
The moth story also had a sequel when Britain moved away from coal-burning industries. The tree trunks turned light again, the dark-coloured moths now stood out and were preferentially eaten, and pretty quickly all the moths of that species turned light again.
Alas, this mathematical method is easily defeated.
The first attack to try would be a birthday paradox attack. Suppose there were 100 different questions all based on numbers. It would only take about 11 tries before a repeated question had a greater than 50% chance of being served. The attacker could then have a good idea of the size of the question pool. Retry enough times, and the attacker would know the size of the question pool, and many of the basic questions. The only variable is the number and that is trivial to parse.
If the question was "What is half of 20?" the attacker could pattern match the question, extract the number, and compute the answer.
I have little experience with such attacks, but I'm sure I could defeat this particular test in a day should I choose to do it.
If it is proper for creationism to be taught in science class, it must also be proper to teach other creation myths in theology classes. Why should the Biblical creation myth have a monopoly? In religious studies, one should also teach all the other creation myths, such as the many Universe model of Hindu belief, the Dreamtime myths of the Australian aborigines and other like myths. After all, the creation story in the Bible is only a creation myth, and other creation myths should be taught.
I have a problem with non-compete clauses because of the almost universal practice of the company demanding the noncompete clause without offering anything in return. If the employee's work is so valuable that they must sign these clauses, then the company should pay full salary for the duration of the noncompete.
The upshot of all of this is for all prospective employees to have all employment contracts vetted by a lawyer before signing.
That's incorrect. A metre was once defined as one ten-millionth of the distance between the equator and the north pole. The polar circumference was chosen because a polar circumference passes through Paris.
The mass definition was thus based on the length of the metre, not the other way around.
It's a bit optimistic to extrapolate over 1000 years!
This is why I made sure to state that the formula was an approximation.
Although it is unlikely that such formulae are going to be accurate 1 million years form now, it does not detract from the point that I raise, namely that our current definition of 86400 seconds to the day and 1 second = 9192631770 cesium transitions cannot both last indefinitely.
Will there be six leap seconds in 3000? Unlikely. But suppose you owned a very accurate wrist watch and were transported into the year 3000, in the style of Futurama. Your wrist watch will still keep good time, gaining maybe six seconds over the course of a year (the hypothetical leap seconds). Your watch doesn't keep quite as good time anymore, but being six seconds early is not going to affect you significantly. You won't arrive too early for the maglev, or your appointment with your temporal displacement counsellor.
On the other hand, a similar displacement a million years into the future will be a great deal more noticeable. Your watch now gains somewhere between 10 and 20 seconds per day because the mean solar day has stretched to between 86410 and 86420 seconds. Over the course of a month your watch would gain maybe seven or eight minutes, and over the course of a year your once-accurate timepiece now gains an hour and a half. That's a lot.
While these extrapolations are unlikely to be accurate for the reasons you state, the point remains the same - at some point the second as derived from the cesium standard must diverge from the second as derived from the rotation of the earth. It already does this but not noticeably so. However, there will come a time when new time standards must be adopted.
I have calculated[1] that in 1000 years a leap second will be required about every two months. It's likely that at that time we would still be using time standards similar to those in use now.
On the other hand, in 1 million years, about 15 leap seconds will be required each day. Therefore, at some point timekeeping must necessarily divide the day into units that are not an integral number of seconds. We would have a situation where the record for the 100 metres dash is expressed in seconds, but the length of the second used for dividing up the day is not the same length. Such "stretched time" has already been used for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars.
[1] A common formula for approximating the evolution of delta-T over time is 31 * Cy^2, where Cy is expressed in centuries.
It's more like someone took a freaking 12 gauge shotgun to my poor 21" SyncMaster!
That is why the analogy in the grandparent post is so apt. For some people it doesn't matter much, and for others, well it's like someone used a 12-gauge shotgun on a dictionary and grammar text.
We could call the letter wynn. That's what the letter was in Old English before the Norman French scribes systematically stripped out all the wynns, thorns, eths, yoghs and macrons in the 11th century.
You raise good points. I guess it depends on the level of formality of the environment.
If it's an informal public forum like Slashdot then I assume that every mistake I see is a typo and act accordingly. For example, my spelling is good but my typing can be spectacularly awful, so I must be forgiving. My early days online were in the days of 300 bps modems and often spectacular line noise. Have you ever seen what line noise could do to otherwise coherent messages?
On the other hand, if it's a formal specification for a software project or other similar formal document, then I would feel free to query every misspelling and grammar error I encounter, especially in the specs for the user interface. Professional software must be spelt 100% correctly.
(BTW, it seems the line noise gremlins got to you today, flipping one bit to change "grammar" into "grammer". Damn those gremlins.)
Agreed. If the Chinese can convert from "Traditional" to "Simplified" characters, surely it's not so hard to do. On the other hand, the reason why it's possible for China to change its characters is because a Chinese language authority exists. (Taiwan still uses Traditional characters, however.) There's no such world standard for the English language, which is why the English language is becoming increasingly fragmented. (Is it called a "cell phone" or a "mobile phone"? Are they called "traffic lights" or "stoplights"?)
It's America. There is a higher court: the media and public opinion. Use them well, for nothing sells like scandal. Spread the story far and wide. Make sure that every person who rents the new offices, every person who stays in the new hotel and every person who otherwise uses the new facilities know the truth. Make sure they all know that the land on which the buildings will soon stand once had private homes, homes that rang with the laughter of children and that have now been seized by a greedy developer for profit. Make it known to all that a developer that can stoop so low as to profit on such unjust seizure of private property will likely do so again; and at all costs they must be pursued and the truth announced to all they would do business with lest they seize more private homes for their greedy ends.
The idea of hiding the CO2 underground makes me uneasy. There's no guarantee that the CO2 is going to stay put. Suppose an earthquake ruptures the chamber. What then? If the CO2 comes out, it will kill anyone in the vicinity through asphyxiation.
They don't know how fast it is spinning. It would be tidally locked to the star, especially if it's in a circular orbit. No sunrise, no sunset, no seasons.
Of course life would be possible with that gravity. Microorganisms don't care particularly about gravity, and any multicellular life that might evolve would adapt to whatever the local conditions are.
What would make life untenable would be a lack of liquid water. This world is very close to the star and would be tidally locked to the star. Unless there are deep ocean basins on the nightside to permit the water to cycle back, the water would eventually freeze out on the nightside. Even if the water didn't freeze out, with a temperature of over 200 Celsius the world would not be very hospitable. Life may be possible but the conditions are not ideal.
The best bit about exams where you must show the working is that it is possible to get all the right answers yet fail the exam. This is possible if the questions are graded so the right answer is worth 2 marks and the working is worth 3.
It's all well and good to know that 1/4 + 1/6 = 5/12. It's better if you can demonstrate the steps needed to derive that answer. If I was a teacher marking that question, the answer of 10/24 would probably be worth 4 marks (forgot to reduce to lowest terms) and just giving the answer 5/12 without working would only be worth 2.
Slashdot Mirror
I won't cover all the dubious points made in the article, but I will cover some of the more obvious ones.
The only data available for solar irradiance since 1750 is the sunspot count. Before the invention of the telescope sunspots were not known to European science. Yet the article also makes this statement:
The only evidence available for solar warming over this whole period is indirect evidence from a variety of sources. Yet all he does is include this statement in the article and we're expected to accept it because it is allegedly a quotation from a solar physicist. Evidently we're expected to accept this assertion without question. I do question the assertion. What is the evidence for the history of solar irradiance over the past 11,400 years? Do all solar physicists agree on the validity of this evidence? Is there contradictory evidence? Are there conflicting points of view on the past history of solar irradiance?
This statement is false because it implies that all the ice in these glaciers is less than 1000 years old. Yet glaciologists have done ice cores in these glaciers that go back more than 5000 years.
The above mathematics is dubious and misleading. It uses the UN's 2.7 figure from one set of data and multiplies it by another figure he's apparently plucked out of thin air (this figure is probably valid but one cannot check it because there are no cross references). How do we know it is mathematically correct to do this? If the 2.7 figure is in any way calculated based on the other figure (which is possible), then the article is being misleading. Even if it is correct to do this, I want to see firm proof of the validity of this method before I would accept it.
Oh, please. Are we to believe that all climate-physics textbooks are written by the UN? Is the author implying that there's a UN conspiracy afoot? More likely, the changes to the textbooks originated from peer-reviewed scientific papers which refined figures that they demonstrated to be incorrect. It happens in science all the time. This does not mean the 20C figure is any more correct than the 33C figure, but that the 20C figure is the one that is currently accepted.
In the attached PDF, the following conclusion is made:
Water is an important issue and does need to be taken into consideration. You answered the question in your post when you said that trees change climate. Indeed they do. The more trees there are in a region, the more they transpire, the more water they return to the atmosphere, and the more rain they make. So to some extent the trees water themselves. This may not hold true in all cases, however.
Waste land comes in many varieties, not all of which are suited for growing trees for various reasons. Land that's been rendered unusable because of high lead levels, toxic waste or other such contaminants could be used in this way because the land may not be useful for much else. If trees were planted in such land, the trees would capture the carbon and may also play a part in rehabilitating the land.
In any urban area it's not difficult to find parcels of land that have not been put to use. Many of these parcels of land may be quite small, such as a small triangle of land near a carpark, or a steep bit of land that is not useful for much. Even the planting of a single tree in a parcel of land too small to hold two trees would capture a bit of carbon.
As for highways and freeways, not all land near them is suited for tree planting for the reasons you cited. However, other freeway land is potentially useful for tree planting, such as cuttings, cloverleaf exchanges and the like. I have driven through bypasses in cuttings that have been planted with native vegetation. The trees there pose no risk because they are higher than the road, and they serve a useful purpose because they prevent erosion of the road cutting. A 40-km roadway development near where I live that is currently under construction includes the planting of millions of trees along the roadway. These trees will be above the level of the road so pose no risk to traffic.
In what way is it so terribly inefficient?
Startup costs? Well, all one does is dig a hole and drop the seedling tree in. It's possible for one person to plant more than 300 trees an hour with the right equipment. How much does that cost, maybe 20 cents per tree? The land needs to be acquired as well. There's plenty of waste land that can be used, like the land near freeways. It will require a lot of land, but that's the only major resource that would be required. When compared to the billions of dollars of farm subsidies that the US already pays to agriculture producers, a subsidy for growing trees would be small by comparison.
There won't be maintenance costs, except for possible subsidies to private growers. The costs when the tree needs to be replaced won't be great either.
Such conversion is what trees are good at. Why invent useless technology when natural means are already available that can do what is required for less cost? The big cost in the conversion will be the energy. The energy input in your equation has to come from somewhere, and when noncarbon energy is in short supply that is an important consideration. Trees capture the energy for free.
Not true.
The majority of the energy that the world consumes today is from non-renewable sources - coal, oil, uranium and so on. These sources of energy will be depleted eventually. In 100 years oil will be scarce, easily-extractable uranium may be in short supply and coal, although still plentiful, may not be used as widely for energy as it is now.
Even if one believes the most optimistic view (against all available evidence) that increasing the CO2 concentration from the preindustrial level of 280 ppm to a much higher level has no effect on the planet's climate and the ecology, one cannot deny that we will need new sources of renewable energy. If global warming provides us with an opportunity to implement renewable energy, it would provide economic stability for future generations.
Thus, the money would not be wasted. Instead, it should be considered as an insurance policy.
Here in Melbourne, spring is happening right now. It seems to have arrived about two weeks early this year. The buds are bursting, my nectarine tree is breaking into blossom and everywhere I look I see fruit trees in bloom. The birds also seem to be active. I haven't yet seen birds with nesting material but that's probably because I haven't been looking for them.
The winter was also early, and in some districts unusually cold. For about a week in June, the weather report was listing quite a lot of places in country Victoria that experienced record low temperatures. Some of the records even broke records that were set the previous night. Although lows of -8C and -9C are quite mild compared to winters in many places, they come as a bit of a shock when the lowest temperature each winter is usually about 0C to -2C.
However, that's just my local situation. As the parent poster suggests, the seasons are local phenomena.
Which approach is likely to earn more money, cures or treatments?
Everyone knows the Earth was created a week ago last Thursday. Any evidence to the contrary was specifically created to hide this.
Compare it to this from the same article:
If I interpret this correctly, then according to Microsoft's own representatives, Adam Lyttle would have been entitled to use the name "Windows Defender" because the combination of "Windows" and "Defender" would avoid confusion.
I think the lesson here is clear. If you get a legal-looking letter from some large corporation, speak to a lawyer, if possible one that specialises in the area of law in question.
Most mutations are NOT beneficial. Yet, naturalistic speciation depends on this process, pluse time. This simply seems implausible to me.
You answer the question yourself:
"MOST mutations are NOT beneficial" implies that "SOME mutations are beneficial." Even if 99.9% of mutations are harmful, that leaves 0.1% of mutations as being beneficial. Benefit here does not necessarily mean a better ability to fight off predators, or increased resistance to disease. It's the ability to pass more genes on to the next generation. A male Bird of Paradise with a more impressive feather display because of a mutation will mate with more females, and thus pass more of his genes onto his progeny.
As to time, that's not a barrier either. The law of averages sees to that. Evolution is not 4 billion years of history. It's 4 billion years multiplied by the average number of individual organisms that have existed on Earth during its history. Each individual organism experiences events that benefit it or harm it. If an organism has a harmful mutation, on average it is less likely to pass its genes onto its progeny. An organism with a beneficial mutation is more likely to pass its genes on. Evolution is not the effects of individual mutations on individual creatures, it is the sum total of all mutations on all creatures in the biosphere. Roll the evolutionary dice enough times and the creatures with the house edge eventually get all the prizes.
The answer is obvious, really.
Here's a simple example of evolution in action, from the real world.
There is a species of moth in the British Isles that lives in forests. This moth rests during the day on the trunks of certain trees. These tree trunks are pale in colour, so the moths have a similar pale colouration so as to be camouflaged. A rare mutation may create dark moths. This mutation is harmful because the dark moths stand out on the light tree trunks and are easy for the birds to find and eat.
Then something happened during the Industrial Revolution. The burning of coal drove the wheels of industry. All this coal-burning spread black dust over the factories, and the homes. The trees were also blackened by all the smoke.
This had an interesting effect on the moths. The light-coloured moths were suddenly the ones that possessed the harmful mutation, and the rare dark moths possessed the beneficial mutation! In the space of a few years, the birds had eaten most of the light-coloured moths, and the moths were mostly dark with a few light-coloured moths. This, then is natural selection in action. There's no supernatural being sitting on the shoulders of all the birds, whispering in their ears: "Eat the obvious moths". Instead, it's just birds doing what birds do, without being told by anyone.
The moth story also had a sequel when Britain moved away from coal-burning industries. The tree trunks turned light again, the dark-coloured moths now stood out and were preferentially eaten, and pretty quickly all the moths of that species turned light again.
Alas, this mathematical method is easily defeated.
The first attack to try would be a birthday paradox attack. Suppose there were 100 different questions all based on numbers. It would only take about 11 tries before a repeated question had a greater than 50% chance of being served. The attacker could then have a good idea of the size of the question pool. Retry enough times, and the attacker would know the size of the question pool, and many of the basic questions. The only variable is the number and that is trivial to parse.
If the question was "What is half of 20?" the attacker could pattern match the question, extract the number, and compute the answer.
I have little experience with such attacks, but I'm sure I could defeat this particular test in a day should I choose to do it.
Let's take the "equal time" principle further.
If it is proper for creationism to be taught in science class, it must also be proper to teach other creation myths in theology classes. Why should the Biblical creation myth have a monopoly? In religious studies, one should also teach all the other creation myths, such as the many Universe model of Hindu belief, the Dreamtime myths of the Australian aborigines and other like myths. After all, the creation story in the Bible is only a creation myth, and other creation myths should be taught.
I have a problem with non-compete clauses because of the almost universal practice of the company demanding the noncompete clause without offering anything in return. If the employee's work is so valuable that they must sign these clauses, then the company should pay full salary for the duration of the noncompete.
The upshot of all of this is for all prospective employees to have all employment contracts vetted by a lawyer before signing.
That's incorrect. A metre was once defined as one ten-millionth of the distance between the equator and the north pole. The polar circumference was chosen because a polar circumference passes through Paris.
The mass definition was thus based on the length of the metre, not the other way around.
It's a bit optimistic to extrapolate over 1000 years!
This is why I made sure to state that the formula was an approximation.
Although it is unlikely that such formulae are going to be accurate 1 million years form now, it does not detract from the point that I raise, namely that our current definition of 86400 seconds to the day and 1 second = 9192631770 cesium transitions cannot both last indefinitely.
Will there be six leap seconds in 3000? Unlikely. But suppose you owned a very accurate wrist watch and were transported into the year 3000, in the style of Futurama. Your wrist watch will still keep good time, gaining maybe six seconds over the course of a year (the hypothetical leap seconds). Your watch doesn't keep quite as good time anymore, but being six seconds early is not going to affect you significantly. You won't arrive too early for the maglev, or your appointment with your temporal displacement counsellor.
On the other hand, a similar displacement a million years into the future will be a great deal more noticeable. Your watch now gains somewhere between 10 and 20 seconds per day because the mean solar day has stretched to between 86410 and 86420 seconds. Over the course of a month your watch would gain maybe seven or eight minutes, and over the course of a year your once-accurate timepiece now gains an hour and a half. That's a lot.
While these extrapolations are unlikely to be accurate for the reasons you state, the point remains the same - at some point the second as derived from the cesium standard must diverge from the second as derived from the rotation of the earth. It already does this but not noticeably so. However, there will come a time when new time standards must be adopted.
It depends on your definition of "significant".
I have calculated[1] that in 1000 years a leap second will be required about every two months. It's likely that at that time we would still be using time standards similar to those in use now.
On the other hand, in 1 million years, about 15 leap seconds will be required each day. Therefore, at some point timekeeping must necessarily divide the day into units that are not an integral number of seconds. We would have a situation where the record for the 100 metres dash is expressed in seconds, but the length of the second used for dividing up the day is not the same length. Such "stretched time" has already been used for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars.
[1] A common formula for approximating the evolution of delta-T over time is 31 * Cy^2, where Cy is expressed in centuries.
It's more like someone took a freaking 12 gauge shotgun to my poor 21" SyncMaster!
That is why the analogy in the grandparent post is so apt. For some people it doesn't matter much, and for others, well it's like someone used a 12-gauge shotgun on a dictionary and grammar text.
We should rename the letter.
We could call the letter wynn. That's what the letter was in Old English before the Norman French scribes systematically stripped out all the wynns, thorns, eths, yoghs and macrons in the 11th century.
You raise good points. I guess it depends on the level of formality of the environment.
If it's an informal public forum like Slashdot then I assume that every mistake I see is a typo and act accordingly. For example, my spelling is good but my typing can be spectacularly awful, so I must be forgiving. My early days online were in the days of 300 bps modems and often spectacular line noise. Have you ever seen what line noise could do to otherwise coherent messages?
On the other hand, if it's a formal specification for a software project or other similar formal document, then I would feel free to query every misspelling and grammar error I encounter, especially in the specs for the user interface. Professional software must be spelt 100% correctly.
(BTW, it seems the line noise gremlins got to you today, flipping one bit to change "grammar" into "grammer". Damn those gremlins.)
We should throw out the old spelling.
Agreed. If the Chinese can convert from "Traditional" to "Simplified" characters, surely it's not so hard to do. On the other hand, the reason why it's possible for China to change its characters is because a Chinese language authority exists. (Taiwan still uses Traditional characters, however.) There's no such world standard for the English language, which is why the English language is becoming increasingly fragmented. (Is it called a "cell phone" or a "mobile phone"? Are they called "traffic lights" or "stoplights"?)
Sic transit gloria verbae.
Alas, there's no higher court
It's America. There is a higher court: the media and public opinion. Use them well, for nothing sells like scandal. Spread the story far and wide. Make sure that every person who rents the new offices, every person who stays in the new hotel and every person who otherwise uses the new facilities know the truth. Make sure they all know that the land on which the buildings will soon stand once had private homes, homes that rang with the laughter of children and that have now been seized by a greedy developer for profit. Make it known to all that a developer that can stoop so low as to profit on such unjust seizure of private property will likely do so again; and at all costs they must be pursued and the truth announced to all they would do business with lest they seize more private homes for their greedy ends.
"It's Mabo, it's the vibe...." -- The Castle
The idea of hiding the CO2 underground makes me uneasy. There's no guarantee that the CO2 is going to stay put. Suppose an earthquake ruptures the chamber. What then? If the CO2 comes out, it will kill anyone in the vicinity through asphyxiation.
p
http://www.snopes.com/horrors/freakish/smother.as
Google for "carbon dioxide lake deaths" to learn more on why this is a dangerous idea.
They don't know how fast it is spinning.
It would be tidally locked to the star, especially if it's in a circular orbit. No sunrise, no sunset, no seasons.
The gravity would be about twice Earth's.
Of course life would be possible with that gravity. Microorganisms don't care particularly about gravity, and any multicellular life that might evolve would adapt to whatever the local conditions are.
What would make life untenable would be a lack of liquid water. This world is very close to the star and would be tidally locked to the star. Unless there are deep ocean basins on the nightside to permit the water to cycle back, the water would eventually freeze out on the nightside. Even if the water didn't freeze out, with a temperature of over 200 Celsius the world would not be very hospitable. Life may be possible but the conditions are not ideal.
The best bit about exams where you must show the working is that it is possible to get all the right answers yet fail the exam. This is possible if the questions are graded so the right answer is worth 2 marks and the working is worth 3.
It's all well and good to know that 1/4 + 1/6 = 5/12. It's better if you can demonstrate the steps needed to derive that answer. If I was a teacher marking that question, the answer of 10/24 would probably be worth 4 marks (forgot to reduce to lowest terms) and just giving the answer 5/12 without working would only be worth 2.