The $60 per barrel argument is correct, but that's not why fracking shale became popular. In the late 70's/early 80's the price per barrel was over $100 but nobody was fracking. It became popular because of technological advances in horizontal drilling in the late 90s. The shale layer is frequently tight - 5-500 ft thick at depths of 5000-15000 ft (http://www.marcellus.psu.edu/resources-maps-graphics.html) The only way to make the effort of fracking economical is if your well bore can run down, and then along the shale layer for 1000's of feet or miles. That requires horizontal drilling.
It also helps that there's a lot of natural gas in shale, making fracking all that much more economical outside of the price-per-barrel of hydrocarbon. In some areas (eg Marcellus) that's the only reason to frack. In other areas the methane is of minor value compared to the heavier hydrocarbons that come out (like natural gas liquids).
I remember talking to an engineer from a drilling company a few years ago that said with current drilling technology they could drill down, under the Grand Canyon, then back up on the other side and hit a target at the surface only a few feet wide. There are major negative environmental impacts of fracking and the subsequent use of the produced fuel, but the the horizontal drilling capability on its face is an engineering marvel (to me at least).
For my work account I let the email pile up in the inbox, ie no sorting outside of some filters to pull out journal TOCs and persistent spam, but I make sure I have no unread emails. I use thunderbird which has a good enough (not great) search capability that I don't see the benefit of going through the work to manually sort the email.
In my personal account I just let it pile up and look out for emails from folks I care about. Like others I also have a junk.lastname@gmail.com account that I use when webpages ask for my email to give me "special offers from trusted partners".
Slightly off topic by what do folks think of gmail's spam filter? I'm impressed by how well mine works, but my wife's is notorious for filtering emails that she wants...
Good description of the CO2 GHG effect. One molecule in 2500 can make a big difference. If folks want their mind blown they should consider that the ozone hole was caused by molecules with concentrations of a few in a trillion.
Just to support the IPCC predictions you mentioned:
The first link you have up there is for the US southeast which is a noisy outlier in temperature trends compared to the global climate. Southeast US trends are not representative of the world.
Those temperature adjustments made by NOAA are tiny compared to the scale of the temperature rise over the past 40 years (see link above). And they result in *less* cooling since 1900 instead of more.
That's a deceptive oversimplification of the technological side-benefits of scientific research. You don't send people to the moon because you want to make better pens. You do it for a lot of scientific and non scientific reasons (in that case mostly political), and the advancements made along the way can and sometimes do benefit society. The space program is rife with such benefits, much more important than pens. So are particle collider programs.
I get that you don't want to trust scientists when they are taking about the importance of their work. Obvious bias there. But that doesn't mean BEC is useless because applications have yet to be found. Who should we trust? Folks who claim to see the future? Because that's what it would take to identify scientific pursuits that are sure to have applications.
The larger and more important question that you're actually asking is "how much should we be funding curiosity based research, vs research with clear application/commercial potential?" That's a legitimate question and certainly there needs to be a balance struck between them that allows for "pure" scientific discovery that may have unforeseen societal benefit, without blowing all our cash on pie-in-the-sky pursuits that won't pay off in the short or long run. Ideally, taxpayer-funded scientific research produces benefits on short (year), medium (decade) and long (several decade or longer) timescales.
So 20 years is your limit? What about 30 years? 100 years? Point is that the path from scientific discovery to technical application is sometimes a very long and winding road, other times a straight path (eg transistor).
The BEC was a big deal, even if we don't have an application yet. We discovered a new state of matter with unique properties. That should be what the physics field is excited about, full stop. That it hasn't resulted in an application yet on an arbitrary time horizon is irrelevant to it's scientific value. Should we stop studying dark matter, or neutrinos, because we don't have an application in mind (yet)?
This, by the way, is ignoring the side benefits of the pursuit of BEC. Cornell and others pushed the limits of lasers in order the get the laser cooling required to create the BEC. Their research has also led to advancements in atom and ion trap technologies.
That's kind of hard to argue, given then Twitch and esports competitions in general are taking off as we speak, and attracting many spectators.
IMO, there is value in going somewhere to watch people that are the best at what they do perform at the peak of their abilities. Many athletes are great role models (anecdotal bad actors don't spoil the whole set), and I'm happy to bring my kid to see them perform.
Specifically going to a ballpark is more than about the game. Did you know that if you go early during warmup, in a lot of stadiums you can go down near the dugout and get autographs? Many players (especially rookies) are happy to talk with you (/your kid). Most stadiums have activities for adults and kids that you can do (between innings or when the game gets boring, which happens sometimes). It can be a positive experience for any age.
Are things way overpriced? Yes. Are there bad fans out there? Yes. Is the whole experience too expensive? Probably. If those are turnoffs for you for baseball, I suggest checking out your local minor league or independent league (if one is nearby). Tickets/food/beer are dirt cheap, there are tons of kids activities (if needed), the fans are generally more tame and enjoyable, and you can get closer to the field. The independent league stadium near where I used to live will even call you a cab and pay for it if you're worried that you shouldn't drive home. The quality of the sport isn't quite as good, but the experience (especially for kids) is arguably better.
Of course none of this is a substitute for physical activity. Of course bring your kid to a park to play, whether it be organized sports or running around on a plan structure.
The picture that goes with the story is pretty, but carries no actual information about the planets that were detected. The story also gives the impression that the planets were actually imaged thanks to microlensing, which I donâ(TM)t think is true. Does anyone have access to the original AJL article?
My understanding (from the OU press release and abstract) is that they analyzed the high frequency fluctuations of atomic line energy shifts of the lensed light to determine that there were small, fast moving objects in the galaxy. They modeled those fluctuations to determine planets in the size range of moon to Jupiter were consistent with what they saw.
If thatâ(TM)s correct, then what theyâ(TM)re able to do here is impressive. Theyâ(TM)re claiming to be able to identify the presence of small objects based upon their contribution to the lensing from a much larger parent object.
If the hots and colds were equaling each other out, then yes, the average would be constant. But that's not what's happening. There are more extreme hot days than extreme cold days. There's a great set of visuals made by James Hansen and NY Times on this:
The mean temperature is rising, but the distribution of temperatures is also widening, meaning more extreme weather, with heat being more common than cold.
That's a really interesting point that the climate science community has discuss thoroughly over the past 30 years and understands. If you're interested in understanding why this lag has happened in the past, check out this:
That short story is that yes, CO2 has lagged behind temperature over the past several hundred thousand years because CO2 hasn't driven those temperature changes - those changes happened due to orbital variations. In fact, during those periods CO2 was released from the oceans due to the warming (hence the lag), and that release *amplified* the warming as a result.
So that very same historical record that you refer to provides evidence that releasing CO2 into the atmosphere can increase temperatures.
The fact that historical changes in temperature have not been initiated by CO2 increases does not speak to whether our current unprecedented rise in CO2 will initiate temperature rise. The fact that historical increases in CO2 have amplified temperature rises *does* speak to whether increases in CO2 cause temperature rises (they do).
Does he also not believe that airplanes get to 35,000 ft? I mean, why launch yourself a few thousand feet using a steam rocket when you could buy a nice comfy first class ticket and enjoy the view of the curvature from 35,000 ft?
Unless he thinks that a large chunk of the human population (air travelers) is in on the conspiracy.
Diesel trucks frequently refuel using two pumps simultaneously (one pump for the curbside tank and one for the roadside tank). Thereâ(TM)s no reason Teslaâ(TM)s filling stations couldnâ(TM)t be similar: have 2, 3, 4 simultaneous plug-ins.
Agreed, but Alphabet isnâ(TM)t a utility provider. Iâ(TM)m betting that many folks who have a (charged) phone appreciate access to information that they didnâ(TM)t otherwise have. And the ability to at least text family and friends.
Could you supply that list of scientists that have checked off yes or no to AGW? I keep hearing about the majority or 97%, but never have seen this running list of scientists that say yea or nay. I do not believe you have one or that this list actually exists, but if you plan to cite this fib please provide this one measure of evidence.
There are many papers about the scientific consensus on global warming. The third hit on google is the Wikipedia article that reviews several of these articles:
Several of those studies are based on polling of scientists. Others are based on literature reviews. If you are looking for an actual list of names, good luck, that would be a long list. The lack of a list does not make the consensus numbers a fib, it just means that they are not derived from a publicly-available poll. To my knowledge no one has set up such a public poll (one that only card-carrying climate scientists can take part in, whatever that would mean). You can find a few lists of notable scientists that do not believe in climate change (or that it is human driven) but their ranks are getting thin.
The atmospheric science community is generally skeptical of anti-climate-change attitudes because of this consensus. But that does not make it a cult, it makes it a scientific community that, like other fields, demands extraordinary evidence if a consensus is to be overturned. That consensus did not magically appear - it came about because of a large amount data over many years that points in a certain direction.
Likewise, a scientist claiming the earth is flat would require extraordinary evidence to convince the geography community of that. That does not mean there is a round-earth cult or that geographers are especially tight knit. It just means that there is consensus about the earth being round.
One question I keep asking folks who deny that humans are driving climate change: is there any amount or type of evidence that scientists can provide that will convince them to change their mind?
Iâ(TM)ve heard this before and while the soviets had a lot of successes (which were impressive), to say that the US had only one success is disingenuous. NASA had many, many firsts:
First geostationary satellite First successful interplanetary flyby First mars flyby First human orbit of moon First humans on moon First spacecraft to orbit another planet First spacecraft in escape trajectory from sun First Jupiter flyby First gravity assist First mercury flyby First space shuttle launch First Uranus and Neptune flyby First Mars orbiter First manned lunar rover First Saturn flyby First pictures from mars First comet flyby (collaboration) First asteroid flyby First Jupiter orbiter First planetary rover First Saturn orbiter First comet impact First Pluto flyby
Actually you raise an interesting question here that I hadnâ(TM)t really thought about until now: how much of the cost of cloud storage is for the actual storage? That is to say, if the cost of HDDâ(TM)s miraculously were $0, how much would Dropbox, Amazon cloud, etc cost? How much goes into maintenance/labor, encryption/security, server upgrading, etc?
The point of the/. front page is that it presents summaries of other stories. This is a three paragraph opinion piece on the front page that Iâ(TM)ve now skipped over. I come to/. because it gives a quick glimpse into interesting tech news, not to read some guyâ(TM)s full opinion about googleâ(TM)s design capabilities.
I really hope this was accidental and editors just werenâ(TM)t paying atttention.
See, I feel the other way about Ayn Rand. Her writing outstrips her ideas, to me. She tries way too hard to convince the reader of her rather naive ideas, but she does it so beautifully it makes up for the ideas she trying to push.
I found that if I read her more like a fantasy novel (outside of current world behavior/expectations), I enjoyed her writing immensely.
For what itâ(TM)s worth, in the sci-fi realm, Enders Game (first) has my vote.
How is this possibly working well enough in test markets to move forward? It's like going to department store and having the salesperson say "hey, why don't I come to your house and see what's in your closet, so I can tell you what clothes to buy?"
Then there's the thought of having someone waking through my house making a mental inventory of my technology, which is easily the most valuable stuff I have (outside of a car). The cynic in me wonders how long before we hear stories of people getting robbed a few days after being visited by Best Buy reps...
I agree with the logic that fingerprints have been used for a hundred years for ID and are therefore a tried and true method. By that same logic, though, humans have been using facial recognition for thousands, even millions of years as a means of identification.
I assume that they're going with a 3D scan because a 2D image is too easily faked? I've read lots of examples of fingerprint scanners getting tricked - anybody have examples of the 3D scan getting tricked?
Tornadoes, cyclones, etc have not decreased. The very same EPA page that you link to has the data that shows that those events are not decreasing. The data is all right there on the page you yourself are citing.
In terms of extrapolation, what you're doing is the very definition of extrapolation. You're looking at a limited dataset (US trends in diurnal highs and lows) and saying that the rest of the world is doing the same. But you don't need to look at the limited US dataset. You have the global dataset right there in the journal article I linked to. Why bother with the logic of: "1) US has this diurnal high/low trend, which is interesting, 2) the average world and US temp trends are similar, 3) the world must have the same diurnal high/low trend", when you can just look at the global data and say "1) this is the global diurnal high/low trend"?
Your underlying assumption is that the global diurnal high/low trend must look like the US trend because the averages are similar. That assumption is false. The average is not the same as taking the high and low and averaging them. The temperatures are taken frequently, sometimes as fast as once per second depending on the sensor. The max and min are the high/low temps, and average temp is the average over the entire daily dataset. On a northern hemisphere winter day, the days are short and nights are long, so the "colder" part of the day is longer than the "warmer" part of the day, making the average temperature less than (max+min)/2.
It sounds like you've come across something that you think the scientific community is pushing under the rug. But they're not. That data isn't new, and has been known and discussed in the community for a long time (see this paper from 1984 and the 149 other papers that cite it: http://journals.ametsoc.org/do.... That paper I cited earlier (have you looked at it?) shows the same US trend you observe on page 287. They're not saying it's wrong, nor are they hiding it. They're putting it in a global context, and showing that it's not representative of the global high/low trend.
You can insist that the global diurnal trend is the same as the US diurnal trend all you want so you don't have to admit you're wrong, but that won't change the facts: the US highs are decreasing and leveling off (cooling less), but the global highs are increasing and accelerating (warming more). The US diurnal trend is different than the global diurnal trend.
Let's recap. I recognized your daytime temp data for the US (falling trend) is correct. I then showed you clear, peer-reviewed data that demonstrates that the rest of the world has rising daytime temps. That's different than the US-only data, but doesn't make the US-only data wrong - it tells us that the US and global daytime temp trends are not the same.
If you're incapable of seeing that the US daytime temp trend is different than the rest of the world, then I can't help you any further.
Slashdot Mirror
The $60 per barrel argument is correct, but that's not why fracking shale became popular. In the late 70's/early 80's the price per barrel was over $100 but nobody was fracking. It became popular because of technological advances in horizontal drilling in the late 90s. The shale layer is frequently tight - 5-500 ft thick at depths of 5000-15000 ft (http://www.marcellus.psu.edu/resources-maps-graphics.html) The only way to make the effort of fracking economical is if your well bore can run down, and then along the shale layer for 1000's of feet or miles. That requires horizontal drilling.
It also helps that there's a lot of natural gas in shale, making fracking all that much more economical outside of the price-per-barrel of hydrocarbon. In some areas (eg Marcellus) that's the only reason to frack. In other areas the methane is of minor value compared to the heavier hydrocarbons that come out (like natural gas liquids).
I remember talking to an engineer from a drilling company a few years ago that said with current drilling technology they could drill down, under the Grand Canyon, then back up on the other side and hit a target at the surface only a few feet wide. There are major negative environmental impacts of fracking and the subsequent use of the produced fuel, but the the horizontal drilling capability on its face is an engineering marvel (to me at least).
For my work account I let the email pile up in the inbox, ie no sorting outside of some filters to pull out journal TOCs and persistent spam, but I make sure I have no unread emails. I use thunderbird which has a good enough (not great) search capability that I don't see the benefit of going through the work to manually sort the email.
In my personal account I just let it pile up and look out for emails from folks I care about. Like others I also have a junk.lastname@gmail.com account that I use when webpages ask for my email to give me "special offers from trusted partners".
Slightly off topic by what do folks think of gmail's spam filter? I'm impressed by how well mine works, but my wife's is notorious for filtering emails that she wants...
That's correct, and water is also a greenhouse gas. Current estimates are that it accounts for about half of the temperature rise that we are seeing.
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/rese...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/m...
Also, regarding how such a small amount of CO2 can make a big difference, here's a great article about it.
https://www.scientificamerican...
Good description of the CO2 GHG effect. One molecule in 2500 can make a big difference. If folks want their mind blown they should consider that the ozone hole was caused by molecules with concentrations of a few in a trillion.
Just to support the IPCC predictions you mentioned:
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
They've actually been pretty quantitatively accurate since 1990 (in addition to qualitative).
Please, please keep educating yourself about this:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/ex...
The first link you have up there is for the US southeast which is a noisy outlier in temperature trends compared to the global climate. Southeast US trends are not representative of the world.
Those temperature adjustments made by NOAA are tiny compared to the scale of the temperature rise over the past 40 years (see link above). And they result in *less* cooling since 1900 instead of more.
That's a deceptive oversimplification of the technological side-benefits of scientific research. You don't send people to the moon because you want to make better pens. You do it for a lot of scientific and non scientific reasons (in that case mostly political), and the advancements made along the way can and sometimes do benefit society. The space program is rife with such benefits, much more important than pens. So are particle collider programs.
I get that you don't want to trust scientists when they are taking about the importance of their work. Obvious bias there. But that doesn't mean BEC is useless because applications have yet to be found. Who should we trust? Folks who claim to see the future? Because that's what it would take to identify scientific pursuits that are sure to have applications.
The larger and more important question that you're actually asking is "how much should we be funding curiosity based research, vs research with clear application/commercial potential?" That's a legitimate question and certainly there needs to be a balance struck between them that allows for "pure" scientific discovery that may have unforeseen societal benefit, without blowing all our cash on pie-in-the-sky pursuits that won't pay off in the short or long run. Ideally, taxpayer-funded scientific research produces benefits on short (year), medium (decade) and long (several decade or longer) timescales.
So 20 years is your limit? What about 30 years? 100 years? Point is that the path from scientific discovery to technical application is sometimes a very long and winding road, other times a straight path (eg transistor).
The BEC was a big deal, even if we don't have an application yet. We discovered a new state of matter with unique properties. That should be what the physics field is excited about, full stop. That it hasn't resulted in an application yet on an arbitrary time horizon is irrelevant to it's scientific value. Should we stop studying dark matter, or neutrinos, because we don't have an application in mind (yet)?
This, by the way, is ignoring the side benefits of the pursuit of BEC. Cornell and others pushed the limits of lasers in order the get the laser cooling required to create the BEC. Their research has also led to advancements in atom and ion trap technologies.
That's kind of hard to argue, given then Twitch and esports competitions in general are taking off as we speak, and attracting many spectators.
IMO, there is value in going somewhere to watch people that are the best at what they do perform at the peak of their abilities. Many athletes are great role models (anecdotal bad actors don't spoil the whole set), and I'm happy to bring my kid to see them perform.
Specifically going to a ballpark is more than about the game. Did you know that if you go early during warmup, in a lot of stadiums you can go down near the dugout and get autographs? Many players (especially rookies) are happy to talk with you (/your kid). Most stadiums have activities for adults and kids that you can do (between innings or when the game gets boring, which happens sometimes). It can be a positive experience for any age.
Are things way overpriced? Yes. Are there bad fans out there? Yes. Is the whole experience too expensive? Probably. If those are turnoffs for you for baseball, I suggest checking out your local minor league or independent league (if one is nearby). Tickets/food/beer are dirt cheap, there are tons of kids activities (if needed), the fans are generally more tame and enjoyable, and you can get closer to the field. The independent league stadium near where I used to live will even call you a cab and pay for it if you're worried that you shouldn't drive home. The quality of the sport isn't quite as good, but the experience (especially for kids) is arguably better.
Of course none of this is a substitute for physical activity. Of course bring your kid to a park to play, whether it be organized sports or running around on a plan structure.
The picture that goes with the story is pretty, but carries no actual information about the planets that were detected. The story also gives the impression that the planets were actually imaged thanks to microlensing, which I donâ(TM)t think is true. Does anyone have access to the original AJL article?
My understanding (from the OU press release and abstract) is that they analyzed the high frequency fluctuations of atomic line energy shifts of the lensed light to determine that there were small, fast moving objects in the galaxy. They modeled those fluctuations to determine planets in the size range of moon to Jupiter were consistent with what they saw.
If thatâ(TM)s correct, then what theyâ(TM)re able to do here is impressive. Theyâ(TM)re claiming to be able to identify the presence of small objects based upon their contribution to the lensing from a much larger parent object.
If the hots and colds were equaling each other out, then yes, the average would be constant. But that's not what's happening. There are more extreme hot days than extreme cold days. There's a great set of visuals made by James Hansen and NY Times on this:
https://www.nytimes.com/intera...
The mean temperature is rising, but the distribution of temperatures is also widening, meaning more extreme weather, with heat being more common than cold.
That's a really interesting point that the climate science community has discuss thoroughly over the past 30 years and understands. If you're interested in understanding why this lag has happened in the past, check out this:
https://skepticalscience.com/c...
That short story is that yes, CO2 has lagged behind temperature over the past several hundred thousand years because CO2 hasn't driven those temperature changes - those changes happened due to orbital variations. In fact, during those periods CO2 was released from the oceans due to the warming (hence the lag), and that release *amplified* the warming as a result.
So that very same historical record that you refer to provides evidence that releasing CO2 into the atmosphere can increase temperatures.
The fact that historical changes in temperature have not been initiated by CO2 increases does not speak to whether our current unprecedented rise in CO2 will initiate temperature rise. The fact that historical increases in CO2 have amplified temperature rises *does* speak to whether increases in CO2 cause temperature rises (they do).
Yes! This article is to my knowledge the best concise description of the warming trend as well as increase in extreme temperatures:
https://www.nytimes.com/intera...
It should be noted that this is just data. No models, no predictions, just historical data.
Does he also not believe that airplanes get to 35,000 ft? I mean, why launch yourself a few thousand feet using a steam rocket when you could buy a nice comfy first class ticket and enjoy the view of the curvature from 35,000 ft?
Unless he thinks that a large chunk of the human population (air travelers) is in on the conspiracy.
Diesel trucks frequently refuel using two pumps simultaneously (one pump for the curbside tank and one for the roadside tank). Thereâ(TM)s no reason Teslaâ(TM)s filling stations couldnâ(TM)t be similar: have 2, 3, 4 simultaneous plug-ins.
...is that the rail company apologized even though nobody actually complained about it - now that's honesty!
Agreed, but Alphabet isnâ(TM)t a utility provider. Iâ(TM)m betting that many folks who have a (charged) phone appreciate access to information that they didnâ(TM)t otherwise have. And the ability to at least text family and friends.
Could you supply that list of scientists that have checked off yes or no to AGW? I keep hearing about the majority or 97%, but never have seen this running list of scientists that say yea or nay. I do not believe you have one or that this list actually exists, but if you plan to cite this fib please provide this one measure of evidence.
There are many papers about the scientific consensus on global warming. The third hit on google is the Wikipedia article that reviews several of these articles:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Several of those studies are based on polling of scientists. Others are based on literature reviews. If you are looking for an actual list of names, good luck, that would be a long list. The lack of a list does not make the consensus numbers a fib, it just means that they are not derived from a publicly-available poll. To my knowledge no one has set up such a public poll (one that only card-carrying climate scientists can take part in, whatever that would mean). You can find a few lists of notable scientists that do not believe in climate change (or that it is human driven) but their ranks are getting thin.
The atmospheric science community is generally skeptical of anti-climate-change attitudes because of this consensus. But that does not make it a cult, it makes it a scientific community that, like other fields, demands extraordinary evidence if a consensus is to be overturned. That consensus did not magically appear - it came about because of a large amount data over many years that points in a certain direction.
Likewise, a scientist claiming the earth is flat would require extraordinary evidence to convince the geography community of that. That does not mean there is a round-earth cult or that geographers are especially tight knit. It just means that there is consensus about the earth being round.
One question I keep asking folks who deny that humans are driving climate change: is there any amount or type of evidence that scientists can provide that will convince them to change their mind?
Iâ(TM)ve heard this before and while the soviets had a lot of successes (which were impressive), to say that the US had only one success is disingenuous. NASA had many, many firsts:
First geostationary satellite
First successful interplanetary flyby
First mars flyby
First human orbit of moon
First humans on moon
First spacecraft to orbit another planet
First spacecraft in escape trajectory from sun
First Jupiter flyby
First gravity assist
First mercury flyby
First space shuttle launch
First Uranus and Neptune flyby
First Mars orbiter
First manned lunar rover
First Saturn flyby
First pictures from mars
First comet flyby (collaboration)
First asteroid flyby
First Jupiter orbiter
First planetary rover
First Saturn orbiter
First comet impact
First Pluto flyby
Actually you raise an interesting question here that I hadnâ(TM)t really thought about until now: how much of the cost of cloud storage is for the actual storage? That is to say, if the cost of HDDâ(TM)s miraculously were $0, how much would Dropbox, Amazon cloud, etc cost? How much goes into maintenance/labor, encryption/security, server upgrading, etc?
The point of the /. front page is that it presents summaries of other stories. This is a three paragraph opinion piece on the front page that Iâ(TM)ve now skipped over. I come to /. because it gives a quick glimpse into interesting tech news, not to read some guyâ(TM)s full opinion about googleâ(TM)s design capabilities.
I really hope this was accidental and editors just werenâ(TM)t paying atttention.
See, I feel the other way about Ayn Rand. Her writing outstrips her ideas, to me. She tries way too hard to convince the reader of her rather naive ideas, but she does it so beautifully it makes up for the ideas she trying to push.
I found that if I read her more like a fantasy novel (outside of current world behavior/expectations), I enjoyed her writing immensely.
For what itâ(TM)s worth, in the sci-fi realm, Enders Game (first) has my vote.
How is this possibly working well enough in test markets to move forward? It's like going to department store and having the salesperson say "hey, why don't I come to your house and see what's in your closet, so I can tell you what clothes to buy?"
Then there's the thought of having someone waking through my house making a mental inventory of my technology, which is easily the most valuable stuff I have (outside of a car). The cynic in me wonders how long before we hear stories of people getting robbed a few days after being visited by Best Buy reps...
I agree with the logic that fingerprints have been used for a hundred years for ID and are therefore a tried and true method. By that same logic, though, humans have been using facial recognition for thousands, even millions of years as a means of identification.
I assume that they're going with a 3D scan because a 2D image is too easily faked? I've read lots of examples of fingerprint scanners getting tricked - anybody have examples of the 3D scan getting tricked?
Tornadoes, cyclones, etc have not decreased. The very same EPA page that you link to has the data that shows that those events are not decreasing. The data is all right there on the page you yourself are citing.
In terms of extrapolation, what you're doing is the very definition of extrapolation. You're looking at a limited dataset (US trends in diurnal highs and lows) and saying that the rest of the world is doing the same. But you don't need to look at the limited US dataset. You have the global dataset right there in the journal article I linked to. Why bother with the logic of: "1) US has this diurnal high/low trend, which is interesting, 2) the average world and US temp trends are similar, 3) the world must have the same diurnal high/low trend", when you can just look at the global data and say "1) this is the global diurnal high/low trend"?
Your underlying assumption is that the global diurnal high/low trend must look like the US trend because the averages are similar. That assumption is false. The average is not the same as taking the high and low and averaging them. The temperatures are taken frequently, sometimes as fast as once per second depending on the sensor. The max and min are the high/low temps, and average temp is the average over the entire daily dataset. On a northern hemisphere winter day, the days are short and nights are long, so the "colder" part of the day is longer than the "warmer" part of the day, making the average temperature less than (max+min)/2.
It sounds like you've come across something that you think the scientific community is pushing under the rug. But they're not. That data isn't new, and has been known and discussed in the community for a long time (see this paper from 1984 and the 149 other papers that cite it: http://journals.ametsoc.org/do.... That paper I cited earlier (have you looked at it?) shows the same US trend you observe on page 287. They're not saying it's wrong, nor are they hiding it. They're putting it in a global context, and showing that it's not representative of the global high/low trend.
You can insist that the global diurnal trend is the same as the US diurnal trend all you want so you don't have to admit you're wrong, but that won't change the facts: the US highs are decreasing and leveling off (cooling less), but the global highs are increasing and accelerating (warming more). The US diurnal trend is different than the global diurnal trend.
Well, we've exited the realm of reason here.
Let's recap. I recognized your daytime temp data for the US (falling trend) is correct. I then showed you clear, peer-reviewed data that demonstrates that the rest of the world has rising daytime temps. That's different than the US-only data, but doesn't make the US-only data wrong - it tells us that the US and global daytime temp trends are not the same.
If you're incapable of seeing that the US daytime temp trend is different than the rest of the world, then I can't help you any further.