i recalled a controversy way back and googled a bit and found this in wikipedia.
A 1998 meta-analysis by Rind et al. generated controversy by suggesting that child sexual abuse does not always cause pervasive harm, that some college students reported such encounters as positive experiences and that the extent of psychological damage depends on whether or not the child described the encounter as "consensual."[60] The study was criticized for flawed methodology and conclusions,[61][62] though its publication by peer-review has been tacitly or implicitly defended.[63][64] Following extensive publicity, the US Congress condemned the study for its conclusions and for providing material used by pedophile organizations to justify their activities.[65] Russell speculated that the perception of a sexually abusive event as 'positive' could stem from a mechanism for coping with traumatic experiences, a form of rationalization.[66]
somehow I do not think this is going to be an attractive area of study.
let us consider 19th century thermodynamics as a stopping point. it happens that often physics as finite is a dominate thought and in that particular period some prominent types thought we had discovered everything to be discovered in physics. some noted things like radioactivity and the photoelectric effect, but pretty much nobody important thought there was anything big yet to be discovered. this does not say anything to your main point.
on ai, I am more talking about the difficulty in defining the problem, then the difficulty in solving the problem. I know it is bad form to talk about soft stuff, but reflect on skinner. this is pretty much a settled dispute, but consider how he reduced human behavior to a very minimalized and tractable characterization. i claim the ai people do a similar thing and from similar causes. simplifying the problem is fine, but then you should avoid claiming that only the simple exists.
let me try it this way. culture and culturally transmitted tech are not unique to humans, but a big chunk of our genome was created by tech, which seems unique, and we are able to consciously discover fundamental principles of the universe, which is unique. so this area might be significant. You want to look at the before and after picture on the change in thermodynamic equations. better you look at the inbetween, a point that so far you have perhaps missed.
the use of the word putative was sort of a reference to how i figured you would view the cited example. i suppose i was being too clever.
so the blackboard example is certainly in a process sense factual. you may claim in some way it is not relevant. but consider the general reference which is obviously to creativity. clearly creativity is relevant in a very strong sense to the creation and continued existence of the human race. from some espistomologies, that makes it a stronger truth than thermodynamics. consider creativity as existential for instance. if you consider the case of creativity that discovers fundamental principes of the universe then there are limits on how far you can go to reify it. if creativity is part of the universe and you cannot reify creativity, then you cannot reify the universe. and thermodynamics is all reification, of the kind where the universe is made up of hard little balls of shit.
obvious examples are often ignored by science, pooh, consider that chemist who came up with moving continents in the 1930's. figure the problem was there was a strong bias toward static. this is at the core a philosophical error of the geologists. I guess everyone had to die and a new generation of geologists come up before some sort of plate technoics was accepted. so maybe they did not quite ignore him. perhaps villify might be the correct word.
oh sure, most successful theory in physics, but it just takes one counter example to falsify. i think it fair to treat both all the data on where it works and the one putative counter example as being of the methodology "emperical". perhaps my definition is wrong, so i am fine with you explaining this perhaps nominalist fallacy
I did some underraduate physics through say quantum electrodynamics. You can figure that I once knew something about thermodynamics. On the other hand, that you do not recognize your assumption that the universe is made up of hard little balls of shit does not mean that is what the universe is made of.
just talking, suppose i laborously create some order and stick in an out of the way place. presumedly there would necessarily be a material substrata. if we do not think protons decay, the order might be around for even the time scales under consideration. then at any point, the order could be used to do work, then the universe up to that point has not reached heat death
also, heat death assumes I think physics is finite. emperically, the detailed claims of finite have not held up. and you might have a philiosophy that says something different. so treat the universe as bounded but infinite, an idea that is fairly popular. consider in what way it is infinite. some of the answers do not require heat death and relate thru a non-finite physics
as far as "machine", "reductionist" might be more useful if you know a bit
on what thermo explains, you miss the point that 19ty century thermodynamics did not explain the universe and while very radically I do not expect that kind of truth from science, the possibility that for humans, fundamental science truths change says something about the universe that is in conflict with thermodynamics. the question might be approached from say objective truth, espistomology, or what I like, the existence of creativity. since we are on slashdot, it is useful to reflect on the all the flakiness the ai types have come up with in talking about sapience.
on creativity by a machine, i have heard the following defense and it at least comes from a certain clarity
can you conceive of a machine that could think out of the box some small number of times.
as it happens I think this is a rather good argument, so it is necessary on my side to talk about the discovery of fundamental principles of the universe as an expression of creativity
Heat death arguments are all about the laws of thermodynamics and there are probably three good criticisms.
the experimental basis last i looked was some system in equillibrium with a container around it and instrumentation outside the container. so in the heat death argument there is an implication that the universe is in equillibrium and the idea of a container and an observer outside the universe is a meaniful concept. To be clear, I am not particularly looking here at something simple like feasibility. I am fine with thought experiments up to a point.
there is a parallel assumption, very deep in the usual science and a lot of math, that the universe is a machine.
emperically, thermodynamics is fundamentally wrong. consider events around the end of the 19th century. thermodynamics was around. the equations were established. in fact, there was, based on a flakey idea that physics was finite, the thought that we knew everything. There were a few unimportant oddities. One of them was radioactivity. so the thermo equations on the blackboard got rewritten. right at that point, thermodynamics did not hold. so what does this say about the fundamental nature of the universe?
the usual tradition is that governments can do whatever they want. the tradition is different in the united states, and it happens we are in a period where in the united states the tradition is actualized. shelley speaks to this.
regarding the soviets, a defining feature of marxist leninism is the claim that you can keep variable capital real low indefinitely. Marx doubtless rolled over in his grave, but lenin figured the russian situation was outside the bounds of what Marx considered. for the alternative approach, consider rosa luxenburg, but i am not sure what you would really want is translated
you cited some apparently relevant links. This general issue has had enough past importance to me that i might well work with some of them. on the other hand awg is publicly discredited for a long time. and internationally, it is dead as a doornail. and domestically, the beltway is no longer in control of what happens in d.c. i tend to be more immeadiately interested right now in say crushing pete peterson
but here is something from just yesterday about ipcc report. it will probably make domestic tv in a couple days
ipcc report Falling Apart as More Frauds Are Discovered Printer-friendly versionPrinter-friendly versionSend to friendSend to friend
January 24, 2010 (LPAC)—The revelation, earlier this week, that the chapter of the IPCC report on the Himalayan glaciers was fraudulent has been joined by another: The chapter on the supposed connection between global warming and increased intensity of natural disasters was based on an unreviewed report whose authors later withdrew their claims. The chapter cited one study to argue that there's an underlying trend of an increase in financial losses due to natural disasters caused by global warming. The London Sunday Times found that that one study was not peer-reviewed in 2007, when the IPCC report was published, and when the study was published, in 2008, the authors included this caveat: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses." The IPCC now claims to be reviewing the chapter and it could be withdrawn.
This latest revelation followed by less than a day, IPCC Chairman R.K. Pachauris' admission that the chapter on Himalayan glaciers included "unfortunate" mistakes. Earlier this week, it was revealed that the section of the report dealing with Himalayan glaciers was based on a 1999 interview with a single glaciologist, rather than on science. The IPCC forecast that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035, but now admits that that forecast was poorly substantiated. The section, in fact, is riddled with errors, according to numerous reports. The report predicts that the total area of Himalayan glaciers will shrink from 500,000 sq. km. to 100,000 sq. km. by 2035, but there are only 33,000 sq. km. of glaciers, today. It also says that between 1845 and 1965, the Pindari glacier shrunk at a rate of 135 meters a year, but the actual rate is only 23.5 meters per year. The section is apparently based on a 2005 publication of the World Wildlife Fund, which got the prediction from an Indian scientist who now blames the interviewer for assigning the date.
Pachauri admitted there are other errors in the report as well, but he blamed them on "human errors," and the IPCC's two co-chairmen at the time, both of whom have since moved on. Pachauri is refusing to resign despite the exposing of these obvious frauds, and insisted, instead today, that the Himalayan glaciers are still melting, and they're melting because of global warming.
There apparently is little sympathy in Britain for Pachauri, despite London's being the home of the climate change hoax. Most of the readers' comments on the Times story about Pachauri and the IPCC mistakes were unsympathetic to Pachauri and included this zinger, parodying the definition of the do-do bird:
"Climate change scientists claimed today that there is a 67.8% chance of Dr. Pachauri rapidly disappearing up his own fundament by the summer. 'We're absolutely sure of the science,' averred one senior government-paid researcher. After all, you can trust us, we're expert statisticians, and have a way with figures. There is no doubt that Dr. Pachauri will be gradually vanishing in ever-decreasing circles into a space where no sun shines, within a matter of months if not weeks or even days. The prospect of this phenomenon, which we call elliptical auto-destruction is just inconceivable in its ramifications. Governments should be paying lots and lots more scientists now to reverse the process, as Dr. Pachauri is most definitely anthropogenically causated.'"
it happens I can actually say something about man made cooling theories politically
consider the obama science czar. something like that. I forget his name. It turns out he was supposedly a scientist. And he pushed man made global cooling theories. but when awg stuff came out he switched to awg very quickly. Some would think the haste was unseemly. Now this guy is in the climategate files with an email, 2005?, telling the guy who got burned that everyone must be a true believer in global warming.
economically, sure there are always scavengers. but many people manage to have a sense that there is something different between a casino and a machine tool manufacturing plant. monetarists cannot see a difference. one thing that ends up happening is the financial markets become a casino and needing actual wealth to keep up the assets values, suck the life out of the productive economy. so there is even less real wealth around to support the fictitious assets. at that point you need to loot the population. so you get austerity, fascism, and depopulation. Copenhagen had all these purposes, including a cap and trade new speculative bubble.
Keep an eye on obama's state of the union address. He is going for a pete peterson style austerity mechanism. He cannot get it out of congress so it is going in by executive order. I hear another try at health care austerity, but also medicare, medicaid, social security.
keen is not immeadiately convincing. he is slandered a lot, but that is not necessarily a big deal, but his classroom behavior appears to be judged at either a positive or negative extreme and so it is likely judging him correctly is difficult. I might guess he does not suffer fools well.
looking at the keen slanders, it appears that a guy name piekle is slandered for supporting keen, but by the attack, it appears that piekle is a bit hard to slander. and it looks like piekle turned out to be important. here is a mass media url that mentions piekle: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece
looks like piekle is the guy who forced cre to admit that the raw data was long gone, so sorry folks. interesting article, because of the comments. I though some were rather pointed and valid
but let me just talk some more about your link to nasa data. I have heard that pretty much everyone relies on just five data sets and they all go through cre. so I suppose the nasa data does too. this was global data over maybe 100 years. if the raw data is gone for your cite, it is a little interesting you sort of claim this surely highly processed data graph is raw data. this is, like someone said about the fact of the missing data, a convenient error.
i had looked at the link, but i find it hard to consider it raw data, so you have not cited all the possibilities in your reply. for instance, some troublemaker looked at nasa data and forced a significant revision. He figured it was such a gross error that it threw into doubt the reliabilty of nasa proceures for analysis.
so if it was actually raw data, I do not expect I would have the skills to do anything. I have a math bs and have been paid to spss stuff. since I use the old name, you can tell "not recently" more generally, I feel deeply that I do not know anything, and I rarely manage to reach actual conclusions. on the other hand, acting agressively is still possible for me. So it happens I acted very aggressively on Copenhagen. Perhaps we should try discussing proper actions.
Anyway, I liked your response. So the guy I cited is probably reachable by email and I will see. I hear his claim elsewhere, but as on your side, it is not necessarily an idependent claim. but I am inclined to contact him, so it is vaguely possible I will be back.
i believe the originals stick was to 1000ad. this is a little strange since this is right in the middle of a well documented european warming, which does not much show. and for some reason i thought the main rise was since 1950 and there had been no north american warming in 20 years and for the last ten it has been cooling and it cooled enough to take out all the warming.
anyway you offered me urls so i thought it reasonable to google a bit, but there is now so much, i did not last long
i did find this
“Earth has cooled since 1998 in defiance of the predictions by the UN-IPCC.The global temperature for 2007 was the coldest in a decade and the coldest of the millenniumwhich is why ‘global warming’ is now called ‘climate change.’” - Climatologist Dr. Richard Keen of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado.
now neither of us have looked at the actual data, but i deal a bit in political patterns
the shrivelled queen, quite contrary to whatever passes for a brit constitution, crawled out of her hole and told the assembled commonwealth nations that Britain was taking leadership of the world to force global warming to be dealt with at copenhagen.
as to the so, one way to look at awg is that it got started when man caused cooling theories could not get traction. and the key media result was the hockey stick, which was north american temperature based. predictions were made about the future shape of the graph. no one has felt foolhearty enough lately to claim reality supported this prediction. instead, we get flakey claims about the number of hottest days in north america recently. and the flakiness points to the dishonesty, but the real deal is that you in particular ended up using a different data set which nessarily does not speak properly to the actual prediction
so somewhere above we a got a lot of cites to a variety of data sets, including some ice data
so here is some ice data. it is sort of like the london orange trees
in far northern areas, ice free ports are a big deal. port author was ice free circa 1850 so we had the russian-japanese war over it. very concrete data. now it is iced up.
so you might erronously think the awgers respectable, but you would not figure them having a completely explanatory theory. in other words, it is wrong. it does not follow that it is not useful, but do you want to spent a lot of wealth and lives based on it? do you want to set up a world government based on it? Well, clearly if massive genocide is seen as useful, then you would.
oh, you sound sensible, but i note the gold standard was supposed to be the thermometers. this helped produce the hockey stick supposedly. now the thermometers have been showing a distinct north american cooling. so nobody talks about the thermometers anymore. funny about that.
people try to call economy a science, but the standard macro theories are not predictive. It is pretty much something for lackeys. so the big awgers are pretty much scientists in the same sense. this is not to say there cannot be an honest and careful fool awger.
The East Goes Nuclear While the West Heads for the Caves Printer-friendly versionPrinter-friendly versionSend to friendSend to friend
THE EAST GOES NUCLEAR WHILE THE WEST HEADS FOR THE CAVES
by Michael Billington
January 18, (LPAC)—In the midst of the greatest international financial crisis in modern history, all of Asia, including, emphatically, the Russian Federation, is engaged in a process of rapid expansion of nuclear power construction, a source of great pride to the nuclear producer-nations, and of great hope to their clients among the developing sector nations. These former colonies have been systematically deprived of their natural right to the use of nuclear power by the continuing legacy of British imperial power. What was promised by the Atoms for Peace process of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy—access to the virtually unlimited power potential of nuclear energy, to escape from the colonial legacy of backwardness and poverty—was abruptly sabotaged in the 1970s. This was done under the cover of the anti-nuclear hysteria fostered by Prince Philip's environmentalist movement, and the fraudulent argument that non-proliferation of nuclear weapons required a halt to peaceful uses of nuclear power. Now, the nations of Asia has definitively rejected British imperial dictates, asserting their long-term development to be centered, necessarily, upon expanded nuclear power capacities.
Unfortunately, the West is still mired in the British Empire's muck. While Asian nations are currently engaged in the construction of 43 nuclear plants, the entire rest of the world is constructing only 12. The United States, once the unquestioned leader in nuclear power development, is now constructing but one facility—and that is simply the completion of a mothballed TVA plant, suspended in the 1980s. All of Western Europe is constructing only two plants, while Germany and Sweden have determined to phase out all their nuclear power plants—although the global economic collapse is forcing a reconsideration of that lunacy.
In the United States, 224 nuclear scientists, engineers, and others have issued a public letter this week to President Obama's Science Advisor John Holdren, himself an anti-nuclear, anti-science zero-growther, warning that "the world is leaving us behind." The letter reads in part: "Our nation needs to proceed quickly—not twenty or fifty years from now—while the people who pioneered this science and engineering can still provide guidance to a new generation of scientists and engineers. There is no political, economic, or technical justification for delaying the benefits that nuclear power will bring to the United States, while the rest of the world forges ahead."
Contrast this to South Korea, where the Ministry of Knowledge Economy announced Jan. 13 that South Korea intends to export 80 nuclear plants, with a total value of $400 billion, by 2030. South Korea recently became only the sixth nuclear exporter, by winning a contract to build four nuclear units for the UAE.
Lyndon LaRouche described this situation starkly: "What you are seeing in the trans-Atlantic region is a dying civilization, a dying, self-doomed civilization. What you are seeing in the trans-Pacific region—especially on the Asian side, and the Indian Ocean side of that—you're seeing progress! When you look at the Pacific economy, the Pacific Ocean orientation, you find nuclear power increasing all over the place. But when you look at the trans-Atlantic area, you find nuclear power is almost banned, and backwardness goes back almost to the depths of the cavemen."
- Russia Leads the Way -
The Oct. 13, 2009 agreements signed between Russia and China during Prime Miniser Vladimir Putin's visit to Beijing, which centered on cooperative development of nuclear power and high-speed rail transportation systems, characterize the transformation of all of Asia taking place today. Similar agreements were signed by India, with both Ru
I am kind of amused by this story. a lot of people are my country right or wrong patriots, but they are patriots. Looking as most recently yesterdays vote in mass. I wonder how long anybody is going to tolerate all this stuff. it does not look to me very much longer. nothing to pat ourselves on the back about yet, but things are looking up. does not have much of anything to do with political parties. pooh, in mass., both candidates were completely credible for the usual core voters.
openbsd is rather secure, at least until you put applications on it. part of this is cryptography as a os service. so in the us, the os is a export restricted munition and so the openbsd people do not allow us citizens to work on the os. I speculate that this has a negative effect on development of the os. since associated projects like openssl are widely used, one might think there are negative impacts on the use of cryptography in the us.
so maybe it is not security they are really interested in
here are a few thoughts
most federal electric policy seems to be designed to make price gouging practical. from a certain point of view, the problem with last big electrical speculation frenzy is that the power transmission lines could not support the manipulation, so the big push was for more power transmission lines
so only authorized persons should have your data. think of the political and ideological advantages of knowing exactly what you were using energy for and being able to control how you used the electricity.
then there is ideology. I figure a lot of this effort involves at the heart energy conservation ideology. it is pretty easy to show this is ranges from dumb to evil
Hah, here is something interesting. Nuclear power is going in everywhere. Many slashdoters would find reasons to approve. I figure anyone who is serious is building nuclear power plants. Worldwide, there are 58 plants going in. In the US, there is one!. And it is an old mothballed plant being brought up by the TVA. So asia is very busy building. think of it as a nascent trans-pacific civilization. And the trans-atlantic civilization could go down at any time. oops, I forgot. I am obviously wrong. "The recession is over." On the other hand, BIS had an emergency meeting this past weekend. One insider characterized the situation as perhaps worse than 2007.
I do not have much use for coincidence. On the other hand, I do not have much use for what passes as statistical reasoning. Given that the cell tower had been turned off for some time and the lawsuit is proceeding, I speculate that there is some evil involved on the part of the plaintiffs. I do like patterns. Here in the United States I would assume intentional and conscious anti-development ideology. This is almost a world-wide problem, but the particulars of a country still count for something
you have a fine argument, but the details are less interesting than the pattern. And just looking at this weeks headlines with respect to AIG, the new york fed, and the sec, it seems pretty clear legality is not the first priority:-)
Perhaps we will manage to do something about some of this. but long term i favor reduced civil rights for politicians and public servants. make it hard to stonewall. make it easy to convict them
I RTFA and thought that it suggested chimp y evolved a lot, but did not really see much to say human Y evolved a lot.
The essential points in the article go like this
chimp and human y were the same 6 million years ago now the chimp Y is missing a lot of stuff that human Y has here is a theory that says the chimp Y had a lot of deletions
This might not be exactly it, but the copenhagen conference failure was a really big deal for the oligarchs. Pooh, even the shriveled up queen of england was out there making demands and assuming leadership. I hear the leadership countries of the opposition are all under attack. I personally have noted that Sudan is all the sudden being set up for dismembering by the usual suspects.
The word attack is being used for a spying attack. You can get away with it, but if you wanted to be precise, you would not say it that way. On the other hand, if you wanted to inflame nuts, you might.
As far as a stern response from Washington, I would classify this incident as a much lesser thing than say the Israel spy ring that got nuclear bomb secrets from us. Reference Pollard. Perhaps we issued some sort of stern letter then, but it is not a sure bet.
Slashdot Mirror
i recalled a controversy way back and googled a bit and found this in wikipedia.
A 1998 meta-analysis by Rind et al. generated controversy by suggesting that child sexual abuse does not always cause pervasive harm, that some college students reported such encounters as positive experiences and that the extent of psychological damage depends on whether or not the child described the encounter as "consensual."[60] The study was criticized for flawed methodology and conclusions,[61][62] though its publication by peer-review has been tacitly or implicitly defended.[63][64] Following extensive publicity, the US Congress condemned the study for its conclusions and for providing material used by pedophile organizations to justify their activities.[65] Russell speculated that the perception of a sexually abusive event as 'positive' could stem from a mechanism for coping with traumatic experiences, a form of rationalization.[66]
somehow I do not think this is going to be an attractive area of study.
i liked your reply
let us consider 19th century thermodynamics as a stopping point. it happens that often physics as finite is a dominate thought and in that particular period some prominent types thought we had discovered everything to be discovered in physics. some noted things like radioactivity and the photoelectric effect, but pretty much nobody important thought there was anything big yet to be discovered. this does not say anything to your main point.
on ai, I am more talking about the difficulty in defining the problem, then the difficulty in solving the problem. I know it is bad form to talk about soft stuff, but reflect on skinner. this is pretty much a settled dispute, but consider how he reduced human behavior to a very minimalized and tractable characterization. i claim the ai people do a similar thing and from similar causes. simplifying the problem is fine, but then you should avoid claiming that only the simple exists.
let me try it this way. culture and culturally transmitted tech are not unique to humans, but a big chunk of our genome was created by tech, which seems unique, and we are able to consciously discover fundamental principles of the universe, which is unique. so this area might be significant. You want to look at the before and after picture on the change in thermodynamic equations. better you look at the inbetween, a point that so far you have perhaps missed.
the use of the word putative was sort of a reference to how i figured you would view the cited example. i suppose i was being too clever.
so the blackboard example is certainly in a process sense factual. you may claim in some way it is not relevant. but consider the general reference which is obviously to creativity. clearly creativity is relevant in a very strong sense to the creation and continued existence of the human race. from some espistomologies, that makes it a stronger truth than thermodynamics. consider creativity as existential for instance. if you consider the case of creativity that discovers fundamental principes of the universe then there are limits on how far you can go to reify it. if creativity is part of the universe and you cannot reify creativity, then you cannot reify the universe. and thermodynamics is all reification, of the kind where the universe is made up of hard little balls of shit.
obvious examples are often ignored by science, pooh, consider that chemist who came up with moving continents in the 1930's. figure the problem was there was a strong bias toward static. this is at the core a philosophical error of the geologists. I guess everyone had to die and a new generation of geologists come up before some sort of plate technoics was accepted. so maybe they did not quite ignore him. perhaps villify might be the correct word.
oh sure, most successful theory in physics, but it just takes one counter example to falsify. i think it fair to treat both all the data on where it works and the one putative counter example as being of the methodology "emperical". perhaps my definition is wrong, so i am fine with you explaining this perhaps nominalist fallacy
I did some underraduate physics through say quantum electrodynamics. You can figure that I once knew something about thermodynamics. On the other hand, that you do not recognize your assumption that the universe is made up of hard little balls of shit does not mean that is what the universe is made of.
hmm, nice response
just talking, suppose i laborously create some order and stick in an out of the way place. presumedly there would necessarily be a material substrata. if we do not think protons decay, the order might be around for even the time scales under consideration. then at any point, the order could be used to do work, then the universe up to that point has not reached heat death
also, heat death assumes I think physics is finite. emperically, the detailed claims of finite have not held up. and you might have a philiosophy that says something different. so treat the universe as bounded but infinite, an idea that is fairly popular. consider in what way it is infinite. some of the answers do not require heat death and relate thru a non-finite physics
as far as "machine", "reductionist" might be more useful if you know a bit
on what thermo explains, you miss the point that 19ty century thermodynamics did not explain the universe and while very radically I do not expect that kind of truth from science, the possibility that for humans, fundamental science truths change says something about the universe that is in conflict with thermodynamics. the question might be approached from say objective truth, espistomology, or what I like, the existence of creativity. since we are on slashdot, it is useful to reflect on the all the flakiness the ai types have come up with in talking about sapience.
on creativity by a machine, i have heard the following defense and it at least comes from a certain clarity
can you conceive of a machine that could think out of the box some small number of times.
as it happens I think this is a rather good argument, so it is necessary on my side to talk about the discovery of fundamental principles of the universe as an expression of creativity
I liked the post above a lot.
Heat death arguments are all about the laws of thermodynamics and there are probably three good criticisms.
the experimental basis last i looked was some system in equillibrium with a container around it and instrumentation outside the container. so in the heat death argument there is an implication that the universe is in equillibrium and the idea of a container and an observer outside the universe is a meaniful concept. To be clear, I am not particularly looking here at something simple like feasibility. I am fine with thought experiments up to a point.
there is a parallel assumption, very deep in the usual science and a lot of math, that the universe is a machine.
emperically, thermodynamics is fundamentally wrong. consider events around the end of the 19th century. thermodynamics was around. the equations were established. in fact, there was, based on a flakey idea that physics was finite, the thought that we knew everything. There were a few unimportant oddities. One of them was radioactivity. so the thermo equations on the blackboard got rewritten. right at that point, thermodynamics did not hold. so what does this say about the fundamental nature of the universe?
the usual tradition is that governments can do whatever they want. the tradition is different in the united states, and it happens we are in a period where in the united states the tradition is actualized. shelley speaks to this.
regarding the soviets, a defining feature of marxist leninism is the claim that you can keep variable capital real low indefinitely. Marx doubtless rolled over in his grave, but lenin figured the russian situation was outside the bounds of what Marx considered. for the alternative approach, consider rosa luxenburg, but i am not sure what you would really want is translated
sympathy on the post lost. it just happened to me
you cited some apparently relevant links. This general issue has had enough past importance to me that i might well work with some of them. on the other hand awg is publicly discredited for a long time. and internationally, it is dead as a doornail. and domestically, the beltway is no longer in control of what happens in d.c. i tend to be more immeadiately interested right now in say crushing pete peterson
but here is something from just yesterday about ipcc report. it will probably make domestic tv in a couple days
ipcc report Falling Apart as More Frauds Are Discovered
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January 24, 2010 (LPAC)—The revelation, earlier this week, that the chapter of the IPCC report on the Himalayan glaciers was fraudulent has been joined by another: The chapter on the supposed connection between global warming and increased intensity of natural disasters was based on an unreviewed report whose authors later withdrew their claims. The chapter cited one study to argue that there's an underlying trend of an increase in financial losses due to natural disasters caused by global warming. The London Sunday Times found that that one study was not peer-reviewed in 2007, when the IPCC report was published, and when the study was published, in 2008, the authors included this caveat: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses." The IPCC now claims to be reviewing the chapter and it could be withdrawn.
This latest revelation followed by less than a day, IPCC Chairman R.K. Pachauris' admission that the chapter on Himalayan glaciers included "unfortunate" mistakes. Earlier this week, it was revealed that the section of the report dealing with Himalayan glaciers was based on a 1999 interview with a single glaciologist, rather than on science. The IPCC forecast that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035, but now admits that that forecast was poorly substantiated. The section, in fact, is riddled with errors, according to numerous reports. The report predicts that the total area of Himalayan glaciers will shrink from 500,000 sq. km. to 100,000 sq. km. by 2035, but there are only 33,000 sq. km. of glaciers, today. It also says that between 1845 and 1965, the Pindari glacier shrunk at a rate of 135 meters a year, but the actual rate is only 23.5 meters per year. The section is apparently based on a 2005 publication of the World Wildlife Fund, which got the prediction from an Indian scientist who now blames the interviewer for assigning the date.
Pachauri admitted there are other errors in the report as well, but he blamed them on "human errors," and the IPCC's two co-chairmen at the time, both of whom have since moved on. Pachauri is refusing to resign despite the exposing of these obvious frauds, and insisted, instead today, that the Himalayan glaciers are still melting, and they're melting because of global warming.
There apparently is little sympathy in Britain for Pachauri, despite London's being the home of the climate change hoax. Most of the readers' comments on the Times story about Pachauri and the IPCC mistakes were unsympathetic to Pachauri and included this zinger, parodying the definition of the do-do bird:
"Climate change scientists claimed today that there is a 67.8% chance of Dr. Pachauri rapidly disappearing up his own fundament by the summer. 'We're absolutely sure of the science,' averred one senior government-paid researcher. After all, you can trust us, we're expert statisticians, and have a way with figures. There is no doubt that Dr. Pachauri will be gradually vanishing in ever-decreasing circles into a space where no sun shines, within a matter of months if not weeks or even days. The prospect of this phenomenon, which we call elliptical auto-destruction is just inconceivable in its ramifications. Governments should be paying lots and lots more scientists now to reverse the process, as Dr. Pachauri is most definitely anthropogenically causated.'"
it happens I can actually say something about man made cooling theories politically
consider the obama science czar. something like that. I forget his name. It turns out he was supposedly a scientist. And he pushed man made global cooling theories. but when awg stuff came out he switched to awg very quickly. Some would think the haste was unseemly. Now this guy is in the climategate files with an email, 2005?, telling the guy who got burned that everyone must be a true believer in global warming.
economically, sure there are always scavengers.
but many people manage to have a sense that there is something different between a casino and a machine tool manufacturing plant. monetarists cannot see a difference. one thing that ends up happening is the financial markets become a casino and needing actual wealth to keep up the assets values, suck the life out of the productive economy. so there is even less real wealth around to support the fictitious assets.
at that point you need to loot the population. so you get austerity, fascism, and depopulation. Copenhagen had all these purposes, including a cap and trade new speculative bubble.
Keep an eye on obama's state of the union address. He is going for a pete peterson style austerity mechanism. He cannot get it out of congress so it is going in by executive order. I hear another try at health care austerity, but also medicare, medicaid, social security.
so I looked for an hour
keen is not immeadiately convincing. he is slandered a lot, but that is not necessarily a big deal, but his classroom behavior appears to be judged at either a positive or negative extreme and so it is likely judging him correctly is difficult. I might guess he does not suffer fools well.
looking at the keen slanders, it appears that a guy name piekle is slandered for supporting keen, but by the attack, it appears that piekle is a bit hard to slander. and it looks like piekle turned out to be important. here is a mass media url that mentions piekle: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece
looks like piekle is the guy who forced cre to admit that the raw data was long gone, so sorry folks. interesting article, because of the comments. I though some were rather pointed and valid
but let me just talk some more about your link to nasa data. I have heard that pretty much everyone relies on just five data sets and they all go through cre. so I suppose the nasa data does too. this was global data over maybe 100 years. if the raw data is gone for your cite, it is a little interesting you sort of claim this surely highly processed data graph is raw data. this is, like someone said about the fact of the missing data, a convenient error.
i had looked at the link, but i find it hard to consider it raw data, so you have not cited all the possibilities in your reply. for instance, some troublemaker looked at nasa data and forced a significant revision. He figured it was such a gross error that it threw into doubt the reliabilty of nasa proceures for analysis.
so if it was actually raw data, I do not expect I would have the skills to do anything. I have a math bs and have been paid to spss stuff. since I use the old name, you can tell "not recently"
more generally, I feel deeply that I do not know anything, and I rarely manage to reach actual conclusions. on the other hand, acting agressively is still possible for me. So it happens I acted very aggressively on Copenhagen. Perhaps we should try discussing proper actions.
Anyway, I liked your response. So the guy I cited is probably reachable by email and I will see. I hear his claim elsewhere, but as on your side, it is not necessarily an idependent claim. but I am inclined to contact him, so it is vaguely possible I will be back.
i believe the originals stick was to 1000ad. this is a little strange since this is right in the middle of a well documented european warming, which does not much show. and for some reason i thought the main rise was since 1950 and there had been no north american warming in 20 years and for the last ten it has been cooling and it cooled enough to take out all the warming.
anyway you offered me urls so i thought it reasonable to google a bit, but there is now so much, i did not last long
i did find this
“Earth has cooled since 1998 in defiance of the predictions by the UN-IPCC.The global temperature for 2007 was the coldest in a decade and the coldest of the millenniumwhich is why ‘global warming’ is now called ‘climate change.’” - Climatologist Dr. Richard Keen of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado.
now neither of us have looked at the actual data, but i deal a bit in political patterns
the shrivelled queen, quite contrary to whatever passes for a brit constitution, crawled out of her hole and told the assembled commonwealth nations that Britain was taking leadership of the world to force global warming to be dealt with at copenhagen.
so, you want to consider this as a science issue?
not bad, I should have been more precise
as to the so, one way to look at awg is that it got started when man caused cooling theories could not get traction. and the key media result was the hockey stick, which was north american temperature based. predictions were made about the future shape of the graph. no one has felt foolhearty enough lately to claim reality supported this prediction. instead, we get flakey claims about the number of hottest days in north america recently. and the flakiness points to the dishonesty, but the real deal is that you in particular ended up using a different data set which nessarily does not speak properly to the actual prediction
so somewhere above we a got a lot of cites to a variety of data sets, including some ice data
so here is some ice data. it is sort of like the london orange trees
in far northern areas, ice free ports are a big deal. port author was ice free circa 1850 so we had the russian-japanese war over it. very concrete data. now it is iced up.
so you might erronously think the awgers respectable, but you would not figure them having a completely explanatory theory. in other words, it is wrong. it does not follow that it is not useful, but do you want to spent a lot of wealth and lives based on it? do you want to set up a world government based on it? Well, clearly if massive genocide is seen as useful, then you would.
oh, you sound sensible, but i note the gold standard was supposed to be the thermometers. this helped produce the hockey stick supposedly. now the thermometers have been showing a distinct north american cooling. so nobody talks about the thermometers anymore. funny about that.
people try to call economy a science, but the standard macro theories are not predictive. It is pretty much something for lackeys. so the big awgers are pretty much scientists in the same sense. this is not to say there cannot be an honest and careful fool awger.
The East Goes Nuclear While the West Heads for the Caves
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THE EAST GOES NUCLEAR WHILE THE WEST HEADS FOR THE CAVES
by Michael Billington
January 18, (LPAC)—In the midst of the greatest international financial crisis in modern history, all of Asia, including, emphatically, the Russian Federation, is engaged in a process of rapid expansion of nuclear power construction, a source of great pride to the nuclear producer-nations, and of great hope to their clients among the developing sector nations. These former colonies have been systematically deprived of their natural right to the use of nuclear power by the continuing legacy of British imperial power. What was promised by the Atoms for Peace process of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy—access to the virtually unlimited power potential of nuclear energy, to escape from the colonial legacy of backwardness and poverty—was abruptly sabotaged in the 1970s. This was done under the cover of the anti-nuclear hysteria fostered by Prince Philip's environmentalist movement, and the fraudulent argument that non-proliferation of nuclear weapons required a halt to peaceful uses of nuclear power. Now, the nations of Asia has definitively rejected British imperial dictates, asserting their long-term development to be centered, necessarily, upon expanded nuclear power capacities.
Unfortunately, the West is still mired in the British Empire's muck. While Asian nations are currently engaged in the construction of 43 nuclear plants, the entire rest of the world is constructing only 12. The United States, once the unquestioned leader in nuclear power development, is now constructing but one facility—and that is simply the completion of a mothballed TVA plant, suspended in the 1980s. All of Western Europe is constructing only two plants, while Germany and Sweden have determined to phase out all their nuclear power plants—although the global economic collapse is forcing a reconsideration of that lunacy.
In the United States, 224 nuclear scientists, engineers, and others have issued a public letter this week to President Obama's Science Advisor John Holdren, himself an anti-nuclear, anti-science zero-growther, warning that "the world is leaving us behind." The letter reads in part: "Our nation needs to proceed quickly—not twenty or fifty years from now—while the people who pioneered this science and engineering can still provide guidance to a new generation of scientists and engineers. There is no political, economic, or technical justification for delaying the benefits that nuclear power will bring to the United States, while the rest of the world forges ahead."
Contrast this to South Korea, where the Ministry of Knowledge Economy announced Jan. 13 that South Korea intends to export 80 nuclear plants, with a total value of $400 billion, by 2030. South Korea recently became only the sixth nuclear exporter, by winning a contract to build four nuclear units for the UAE.
Lyndon LaRouche described this situation starkly: "What you are seeing in the trans-Atlantic region is a dying civilization, a dying, self-doomed civilization. What you are seeing in the trans-Pacific region—especially on the Asian side, and the Indian Ocean side of that—you're seeing progress! When you look at the Pacific economy, the Pacific Ocean orientation, you find nuclear power increasing all over the place. But when you look at the trans-Atlantic area, you find nuclear power is almost banned, and backwardness goes back almost to the depths of the cavemen."
- Russia Leads the Way -
The Oct. 13, 2009 agreements signed between Russia and China during Prime Miniser Vladimir Putin's visit to Beijing, which centered on cooperative development of nuclear power and high-speed rail transportation systems, characterize the transformation of all of Asia taking place today. Similar agreements were signed by India, with both Ru
I am kind of amused by this story. a lot of people are my country right or wrong patriots, but they are patriots. Looking as most recently yesterdays vote in mass. I wonder how long anybody is going to tolerate all this stuff. it does not look to me very much longer. nothing to pat ourselves on the back about yet, but things are looking up. does not have much of anything to do with political parties. pooh, in mass., both candidates were completely credible for the usual core voters.
openbsd is rather secure, at least until you put applications on it. part of this is cryptography as a os service. so in the us, the os is a export restricted munition and so the openbsd people do not allow us citizens to work on the os. I speculate that this has a negative effect on development of the os. since associated projects like openssl are widely used, one might think there are negative impacts on the use of cryptography in the us.
so maybe it is not security they are really interested in
here are a few thoughts
most federal electric policy seems to be designed to make price gouging practical. from a certain point of view, the problem with last big electrical speculation frenzy is that the power transmission lines could not support the manipulation, so the big push was for more power transmission lines
so only authorized persons should have your data. think of the political and ideological advantages of knowing exactly what you were using energy for and being able to control how you used the electricity.
then there is ideology. I figure a lot of this effort involves at the heart energy conservation ideology. it is pretty easy to show this is ranges from dumb to evil
Hah, here is something interesting. Nuclear power is going in everywhere. Many slashdoters would find reasons to approve. I figure anyone who is serious is building nuclear power plants. Worldwide, there are 58 plants going in. In the US, there is one!. And it is an old mothballed plant being brought up by the TVA. So asia is very busy building. think of it as a nascent trans-pacific civilization. And the trans-atlantic civilization could go down at any time. oops, I forgot. I am obviously wrong. "The recession is over." On the other hand, BIS had an emergency meeting this past weekend. One insider characterized the situation as perhaps worse than 2007.
I do not have much use for coincidence. On the other hand, I do not have much use for what passes as statistical reasoning. Given that the cell tower had been turned off for some time and the lawsuit is proceeding, I speculate that there is some evil involved on the part of the plaintiffs. I do like patterns. Here in the United States I would assume intentional and conscious anti-development ideology. This is almost a world-wide problem, but the particulars of a country still count for something
you have a fine argument, but the details are less interesting than the pattern. And just looking at this weeks headlines with respect to AIG, the new york fed, and the sec, it seems pretty clear legality is not the first priority:-)
Perhaps we will manage to do something about some of this. but long term i favor reduced civil rights for politicians and public servants. make it hard to stonewall. make it easy to convict them
I RTFA and thought that it suggested chimp y evolved a lot, but did not really see much to say human Y evolved a lot.
The essential points in the article go like this
chimp and human y were the same 6 million years ago
now the chimp Y is missing a lot of stuff that human Y has
here is a theory that says the chimp Y had a lot of deletions
The article is hardly convincing, but it is fun
This might not be exactly it, but the copenhagen conference failure was a really big deal for the oligarchs. Pooh, even the shriveled up queen of england was out there making demands and assuming leadership. I hear the leadership countries of the opposition are all under attack. I personally have noted that Sudan is all the sudden being set up for dismembering by the usual suspects.
Seriously, where are you coming from?
The word attack is being used for a spying attack. You can get away with it, but if you wanted to be precise, you would not say it that way. On the other hand, if you wanted to inflame nuts, you might.
As far as a stern response from Washington, I would classify this incident as a much lesser thing than say the Israel spy ring that got nuclear bomb secrets from us. Reference Pollard. Perhaps we issued some sort of stern letter then, but it is not a sure bet.