Except that the latest UAH and RSS data sets (still in beta, so unofficial) show no warming for the last 18 years - something your link even acknowledges. (In 2009 he mentions "I have to say I find this all very puzzling.")
Have they been good at predicting things, or are the things predicted being 'adjusted' to better match the predictions?
"Last month, we are told, the world enjoyed âoeits hottest March since records began in 1880â. This year, according to âoeUS government scientistsâ, already bids to outrank 2014 as âoethe hottest everâ. The figures from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were based, like all the other three official surface temperature records on which the worldâ(TM)s scientists and politicians rely, on data compiled from a network of weather stations by NOAAâ(TM)s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). But here there is a puzzle. These temperature records are not the only ones with official status. The other two, Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and the University of Alabama (UAH), are based on a quite different method of measuring temperature data, by satellites. And these, as they have increasingly done in recent years, give a strikingly different picture. Neither shows last month as anything like the hottest March on record, any more than they showed 2014 as âoethe hottest year everâ.
Back in January and February, two items in this column attracted more than 42,000 comments to the Telegraph website from all over the world. The provocative headings given to them were âoeClimategate the sequel: how we are still being tricked by flawed data on global warmingâ and âoeThe fiddling with temperature data is the biggest scientific scandalâ. My cue for those pieces was the evidence multiplying from across the world that something very odd has been going on with those official surface temperature records, all of which ultimately rely on data compiled by NOAAâ(TM)s GHCN. Careful analysts have come up with hundreds of examples of how the original data recorded by 3,000-odd weather stations has been âoeadjustedâ, to exaggerate the degree to which the Earth has actually been warming. Figures from earlier decades have repeatedly been adjusted downwards and more recent data adjusted upwards, to show the Earth having warmed much more dramatically than the original data justified. So strong is the evidence that all this calls for proper investigation that my articles have now brought a heavyweight response. The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has enlisted an international team of five distinguished scientists to carry out a full inquiry into just how far these manipulations of the data may have distorted our picture of what is really happening to global temperatures."
A lot of people claim the soft sciences are not 'really science' due to the intangibility of their results - and this plays directly into that bias.
However, it's very much not just the softer sciences that have this issue. There's a growing realization that it's pervasive across many hard science disciplines:
We're inundated with data that, due to the specificity of the field or detail of the results, has to come from 'experts' and doesn't lend itself to a sort of common-sense vetting that we can use to filter bullshit in the usual course of our lives. Whether it's from ignorance of statistical methods, poor experimental technique, motivated mendacity (for whatever reason), or simply experimental results that represent only an unusual end of a bell-curve, there are many, many reasons that scientific data has to be taken with a serious grain of salt. It can't be assumed to be conclusive until we've reproduced it in whatever context we're trying to apply it.
Google is now supposed to 'vet' the sites they link to as far as authenticity and "proper" interpretations of highly-disputed events?
How the fuck are they supposed to do that?
(Not to mention, the minute such entities - search engines, ISPs, etc - start value-filtering content, you can kiss the moral justification for net neutrality goodbye.)
...Tribalism is a thing. If we don't have nationalism (or patriotism as it's sometimes termed) we get irate and defensive over our favorite football team, or whether we liked the Partridge Family more than the Brady Bunch.
I think the OP was commenting more about the begged question in the title "how to increase the number of female engineers" - implying that there is some societo-/cultural-/mystical- NEED for more women to be engineers.
My question is that since dwarfism (specifically Diastrophic dysplasia) is believed to occur in about 1 in every 35,000 births, and there are approximately 3.5 million scientists and engineers, are there 100 dwarf engineers? If not, why don't we have more programs to get dwarfs in engineering?
Except that: "...One has to charge, but one never has to go to a gas station, and most people would find plugging in in their garage much more convenient than a special trip to a gas station and standing outside in whatever weather. This leaves open the question of charge times, of course. But if you can drive hundreds of miles on a single charge and charge up on a fast charger during lunch and then take off again, it's pretty irrelevant...."
Aside from the fact that it simply doesn't exist, sure.
Nobody minds plugging in, but when you have to plug in for 2-4x the time you can drive at highway speeds, that's ridiculous.. The tesla model S is the best in class with a range of 265 mi/charge. That's 10-12h at 220V, so a 'drive:charge' time ratio of 1:3. Gas engined cars are ~400 mi tank, what, maybe 5 mins to fill? That's a ratio of 80:1, or what, about 2 orders of magnitude better? That's more than you can hand-wave away.
I disagree. They aren't mutual, they are absolute opposites.
Absolute freedom is anarchy - everyone can do what they want, and nobody has security. Absolute security is freedomless - one's actions are circumscribed in every possible way to reduce risk.
Of course, reality is always a compromise between such theoretical poles.
If you take as a hypothetical the TV show Lost: the characters in that drama had essentially no government, no police, and the freedom to do pretty much what they wanted. Concurrently, they had very little security. Alternatively, if you have a society in which the government is expected to mitigate every risk, to protect from every harm, you have substantial security (ostensibly) but very limited freedoms (sacrificed on the altar of the "greater good" or "protect the children" or "fighting terror").
We seem to want the latter; we just spent 10 years at war and trillions of dollars over an attack that cost the US a (relatively trivial) 3000 lives. You say the modern police-state has failed? I'd disagree - we are getting *precisely* the state that we as a body public have voted for. I'm a libertarian, I truly would prefer a country with more freedom, cognizant that this means fewer safety nets, but I recognize too that I'm in a far minority, and will be outweighed by the masses that want single-payer health care, massive social safety-nets, and a society that weeps piteously over every sparrow that falls from their nest.
Read up on social contract theory, and then read John Campbell's Tribesman, Barbarian, and Citizen. (I found the full text of the piece quoted at http://www.baenebooks.com/chap... )
Knowing *nothing* about you beside the idea that you have been driving the same SUV since 1994, I'm certain that you are at least a couple standard deviations away from the center of the bell-curve of SUV buyers in 2015.
If a person claims authority on a subject based on falsified experiences isn't that pretty much the essential definition of FRAUD? (Particularly if money is made in the process.)
If your advice is connected to peoples' actions that could have ramifications for their health and safety, then negligent manslaughter might be included as well.
Look at it this way, if we started this, we'd at least have fewer celebrities talking about health issues, which is ultimately a net good.
Or, perhaps the young are still naive enough to believe their rage matters?
"Change is coming" - sure it is. What will change is only that the naive, hopeful young will grow up and recognize that short of actual revolution, nothing is going to substantially change (no matter how many "causes" you "like" on facebook!) and that their energies are better spent just focusing on the things and people that are important to them.
Or maybe just eliminate subsidies to the car industry altogether? - eliminate loopholes to the CAFE standards, - eliminate tax breaks, salvage loans, and hidden subsidies to the petro-car mfgrs (there is no "too big to fail") - eliminate green subsidies to the electrical/hybrid car mfg...and just let the market/consumers eventually decide.
Then again, gas prices MAY be low throughout the reasonable lifespan of that car - likely someone buying an SUV is only going to keep it 2-3-4 years ANYWAY.
I'm not buying a car for forever, I'm buying it for now. And if the price/performance curve is in favor of gas, I'll buy a gasoline car (I do wish the US auto fleet had *some* decent diesels available, for cripes sake they're not the chuggy-fumey 1980s diesels anymore).
And no, we're not going to run out of oil anytime soon, either. People have been crying about peak-oil for nearly 100 years. (shrug) There WILL be a time when the price for gas is prohibitive, and THEN I'll buy an electric, or a hydrogen, or whatever car that the tech can provide at that time. I *genuinely* don't see the point in paying for a hybrid or electric on "principle" - particularly when the payoff, even with gov't subsidies, isn't there over the life of the car.
While I suspect we agree on the principles here, let me just call out that quote by Franklin as one of those thoughtless crap statements that's far too often repeated. (Like "correlation doesn't prove causation" as another example.)
We trade "freedom" for "security" every day; it's called civilization, and it's what separates the ego-driven society of barbarians from the rule of law of townsmen. The fact that our civilization is so successful suggests that it is overall a worthwhile choice.
While the images are certainly pretty, and also certainly scientifically useful, nonscientists generally expect to look at a color image and see what they'd see if they were looking at it out the window.
Instead of showing us "image" vs "enhanced image" of the crab nebula, I'd rather that they took some pictures of things we see regularly - a person, for example - and show us the results of the SAME image-processing on these familiar images, so we could judge if the 'enhancement' is trivial or substantially changing the image.
"ollan describes an experiment done by animal biologist Monica Gagliano. She presented research that suggests the mimosa pudica plant can learn from experience. And, Pollan says, merely suggesting a plant could learn was so controversial that her paper was rejected by 10 scientific journals before it was finally published.
Mimosa is a plant, which looks something like a fern, that collapses its leaves temporarily when it is disturbed. So Gagliano set up a contraption that would drop the mimosa plant, without hurting it. When the plant dropped, as expected, its leaves collapsed. She kept dropping the plants every five to six seconds.
"After five or six drops, the plants would stop responding, as if they'd learned to tune out the stimulus as irrelevent," Pollan says. "This is a very important part of learning â" to learn what you can safely ignore in your environment."
Maybe the plant was just getting worn out from all the dropping? To test that, Gagliano took the plants that had stopped responding to the drops and shook them instead.
"They would continue to collapse," Pollan says. "They had made the distinction that [dropping] was a signal they could safely ignore. And what was more incredible is that [Gagliano] would retest them every week for four weeks and, for a month, they continued to remember their lesson.""
Precisely why are we stopping at recognizing chimps as people, except some sort of gross, obvious anthropocentrism?
Let's point out that there is an entire class of life forms on this planet that have ALSO gone through millions of years of evolution to reach where they are, and yet they are continually exploited, manipulated, and murdered on behalf of humans whims: that's right, I'm talking about plants.
There is no question that they live, breed, and grow. There is ample evidence that they feel pain, and even communicate with each other in ways that we barely understand. In many ways, they are far more in touch with their environment than we are, yet we chop vegetables up for food, we decapitate grass by the billions every week because they had the audacity to try to flourish, heck, we RIP THEM UP BY THEIR ROOTS and chemically sterilize them simply for living in the wrong place, dismissing it by calling them "weeds". We annihilate them, and even have the gall to use their corpses for DECORATION.
We are perpetuating a moral crime, yet nobody can be "bothered" because they don't have fur, a face, or make cute baby pictures.
This is supposed to be a technically-minded site, not FARK.
"Blasting" with lasers? Really?
- first, nothing gets "blasted" with a laser; a laser is - optimally - a point extreme heat source. The "shooting crap down" thing going on in the military today really is about DISABLING the guidance, control, or propulsive systems on whatever aerial platform they're shooting at, or at least disrupting (for missiles) their aerodynamics enough that their own velocity tears them apart. The laser "blasts" nothing. Disabling the guidance, control, or propulsive systems on what is already "space junk" is logically, pointless.
- even assuming a laser did "blast" something, it's pretty much the last thing you want to do in orbit. Unless you're pulverizing it to flecks so tiny that a) they simply don't carry enough kinetic energy to harm something (ie dust) or b) a signficant fraction of them will be deorbited by air-friction in low orbit, you're simply trading one character of threat with another. The Chinese "blasted" a satellite, so now instead of one piece of dangerous junk we need to track and avoid, there's 12000+.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that the latest UAH and RSS data sets (still in beta, so unofficial) show no warming for the last 18 years - something your link even acknowledges. (In 2009 he mentions "I have to say I find this all very puzzling.")
Have they been good at predicting things, or are the things predicted being 'adjusted' to better match the predictions?
"Last month, we are told, the world enjoyed âoeits hottest March since records began in 1880â. This year, according to âoeUS government scientistsâ, already bids to outrank 2014 as âoethe hottest everâ. The figures from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were based, like all the other three official surface temperature records on which the worldâ(TM)s scientists and politicians rely, on data compiled from a network of weather stations by NOAAâ(TM)s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN).
But here there is a puzzle. These temperature records are not the only ones with official status. The other two, Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and the University of Alabama (UAH), are based on a quite different method of measuring temperature data, by satellites. And these, as they have increasingly done in recent years, give a strikingly different picture. Neither shows last month as anything like the hottest March on record, any more than they showed 2014 as âoethe hottest year everâ.
Back in January and February, two items in this column attracted more than 42,000 comments to the Telegraph website from all over the world. The provocative headings given to them were âoeClimategate the sequel: how we are still being tricked by flawed data on global warmingâ and âoeThe fiddling with temperature data is the biggest scientific scandalâ.
My cue for those pieces was the evidence multiplying from across the world that something very odd has been going on with those official surface temperature records, all of which ultimately rely on data compiled by NOAAâ(TM)s GHCN. Careful analysts have come up with hundreds of examples of how the original data recorded by 3,000-odd weather stations has been âoeadjustedâ, to exaggerate the degree to which the Earth has actually been warming. Figures from earlier decades have repeatedly been adjusted downwards and more recent data adjusted upwards, to show the Earth having warmed much more dramatically than the original data justified.
So strong is the evidence that all this calls for proper investigation that my articles have now brought a heavyweight response. The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has enlisted an international team of five distinguished scientists to carry out a full inquiry into just how far these manipulations of the data may have distorted our picture of what is really happening to global temperatures."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/com...
Difference between raw and final data sets (this is an official graph from NOAA):
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/c...
A lot of people claim the soft sciences are not 'really science' due to the intangibility of their results - and this plays directly into that bias.
However, it's very much not just the softer sciences that have this issue. There's a growing realization that it's pervasive across many hard science disciplines:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB... : 64% of pharma trials couldn't be reproduced.
http://retractionwatch.com/201... - half of researchers couldn't reproduce published findings.
We're inundated with data that, due to the specificity of the field or detail of the results, has to come from 'experts' and doesn't lend itself to a sort of common-sense vetting that we can use to filter bullshit in the usual course of our lives. Whether it's from ignorance of statistical methods, poor experimental technique, motivated mendacity (for whatever reason), or simply experimental results that represent only an unusual end of a bell-curve, there are many, many reasons that scientific data has to be taken with a serious grain of salt. It can't be assumed to be conclusive until we've reproduced it in whatever context we're trying to apply it.
...hipster tragedy*:
"Oh no, my trendy tattoo is interfering with my Apple Smart watch! What ever will I do?"
*also called comedy by the rest of us.
Google is now supposed to 'vet' the sites they link to as far as authenticity and "proper" interpretations of highly-disputed events?
How the fuck are they supposed to do that?
(Not to mention, the minute such entities - search engines, ISPs, etc - start value-filtering content, you can kiss the moral justification for net neutrality goodbye.)
...Tribalism is a thing.
If we don't have nationalism (or patriotism as it's sometimes termed) we get irate and defensive over our favorite football team, or whether we liked the Partridge Family more than the Brady Bunch.
We're chimps, that's it.
I'm sure 'caveat emptor' is at least 2000 years old as a phrase, but the concept pretty much dates back to as long as there was commerce.
I think the OP was commenting more about the begged question in the title "how to increase the number of female engineers" - implying that there is some societo-/cultural-/mystical- NEED for more women to be engineers.
My question is that since dwarfism (specifically Diastrophic dysplasia) is believed to occur in about 1 in every 35,000 births, and there are approximately 3.5 million scientists and engineers, are there 100 dwarf engineers? If not, why don't we have more programs to get dwarfs in engineering?
I'm going to posit that engineers in general have been desiring more vaginas in close proximity for pretty much ever.
Wait, that's not what you're saying?
Well, it is in fact exactly what your saying.
Except that:
"...One has to charge, but one never has to go to a gas station, and most people would find plugging in in their garage much more convenient than a special trip to a gas station and standing outside in whatever weather. This leaves open the question of charge times, of course. But if you can drive hundreds of miles on a single charge and charge up on a fast charger during lunch and then take off again, it's pretty irrelevant...."
Aside from the fact that it simply doesn't exist, sure.
Nobody minds plugging in, but when you have to plug in for 2-4x the time you can drive at highway speeds, that's ridiculous.. The tesla model S is the best in class with a range of 265 mi/charge. That's 10-12h at 220V, so a 'drive:charge' time ratio of 1:3. Gas engined cars are ~400 mi tank, what, maybe 5 mins to fill? That's a ratio of 80:1, or what, about 2 orders of magnitude better? That's more than you can hand-wave away.
....that's 100% more than radio stations are paying to play the same songs.
I disagree. They aren't mutual, they are absolute opposites.
Absolute freedom is anarchy - everyone can do what they want, and nobody has security.
Absolute security is freedomless - one's actions are circumscribed in every possible way to reduce risk.
Of course, reality is always a compromise between such theoretical poles.
If you take as a hypothetical the TV show Lost: the characters in that drama had essentially no government, no police, and the freedom to do pretty much what they wanted. Concurrently, they had very little security.
Alternatively, if you have a society in which the government is expected to mitigate every risk, to protect from every harm, you have substantial security (ostensibly) but very limited freedoms (sacrificed on the altar of the "greater good" or "protect the children" or "fighting terror").
We seem to want the latter; we just spent 10 years at war and trillions of dollars over an attack that cost the US a (relatively trivial) 3000 lives. You say the modern police-state has failed? I'd disagree - we are getting *precisely* the state that we as a body public have voted for. I'm a libertarian, I truly would prefer a country with more freedom, cognizant that this means fewer safety nets, but I recognize too that I'm in a far minority, and will be outweighed by the masses that want single-payer health care, massive social safety-nets, and a society that weeps piteously over every sparrow that falls from their nest.
Read up on social contract theory, and then read John Campbell's Tribesman, Barbarian, and Citizen. (I found the full text of the piece quoted at http://www.baenebooks.com/chap... )
Knowing *nothing* about you beside the idea that you have been driving the same SUV since 1994, I'm certain that you are at least a couple standard deviations away from the center of the bell-curve of SUV buyers in 2015.
If a person claims authority on a subject based on falsified experiences isn't that pretty much the essential definition of FRAUD? (Particularly if money is made in the process.)
If your advice is connected to peoples' actions that could have ramifications for their health and safety, then negligent manslaughter might be included as well.
Look at it this way, if we started this, we'd at least have fewer celebrities talking about health issues, which is ultimately a net good.
Or, perhaps the young are still naive enough to believe their rage matters?
"Change is coming" - sure it is. What will change is only that the naive, hopeful young will grow up and recognize that short of actual revolution, nothing is going to substantially change (no matter how many "causes" you "like" on facebook!) and that their energies are better spent just focusing on the things and people that are important to them.
Or maybe just eliminate subsidies to the car industry altogether? ...and just let the market/consumers eventually decide.
- eliminate loopholes to the CAFE standards,
- eliminate tax breaks, salvage loans, and hidden subsidies to the petro-car mfgrs (there is no "too big to fail")
- eliminate green subsidies to the electrical/hybrid car mfg
Then again, gas prices MAY be low throughout the reasonable lifespan of that car - likely someone buying an SUV is only going to keep it 2-3-4 years ANYWAY.
I'm not buying a car for forever, I'm buying it for now.
And if the price/performance curve is in favor of gas, I'll buy a gasoline car (I do wish the US auto fleet had *some* decent diesels available, for cripes sake they're not the chuggy-fumey 1980s diesels anymore).
And no, we're not going to run out of oil anytime soon, either. People have been crying about peak-oil for nearly 100 years. (shrug) There WILL be a time when the price for gas is prohibitive, and THEN I'll buy an electric, or a hydrogen, or whatever car that the tech can provide at that time. I *genuinely* don't see the point in paying for a hybrid or electric on "principle" - particularly when the payoff, even with gov't subsidies, isn't there over the life of the car.
While I suspect we agree on the principles here, let me just call out that quote by Franklin as one of those thoughtless crap statements that's far too often repeated. (Like "correlation doesn't prove causation" as another example.)
We trade "freedom" for "security" every day; it's called civilization, and it's what separates the ego-driven society of barbarians from the rule of law of townsmen. The fact that our civilization is so successful suggests that it is overall a worthwhile choice.
While the images are certainly pretty, and also certainly scientifically useful, nonscientists generally expect to look at a color image and see what they'd see if they were looking at it out the window.
Instead of showing us "image" vs "enhanced image" of the crab nebula, I'd rather that they took some pictures of things we see regularly - a person, for example - and show us the results of the SAME image-processing on these familiar images, so we could judge if the 'enhancement' is trivial or substantially changing the image.
http://science.howstuffworks.c...
http://www.pri.org/stories/201...
"ollan describes an experiment done by animal biologist Monica Gagliano. She presented research that suggests the mimosa pudica plant can learn from experience. And, Pollan says, merely suggesting a plant could learn was so controversial that her paper was rejected by 10 scientific journals before it was finally published.
Mimosa is a plant, which looks something like a fern, that collapses its leaves temporarily when it is disturbed. So Gagliano set up a contraption that would drop the mimosa plant, without hurting it. When the plant dropped, as expected, its leaves collapsed. She kept dropping the plants every five to six seconds.
"After five or six drops, the plants would stop responding, as if they'd learned to tune out the stimulus as irrelevent," Pollan says. "This is a very important part of learning â" to learn what you can safely ignore in your environment."
Maybe the plant was just getting worn out from all the dropping? To test that, Gagliano took the plants that had stopped responding to the drops and shook them instead.
"They would continue to collapse," Pollan says. "They had made the distinction that [dropping] was a signal they could safely ignore. And what was more incredible is that [Gagliano] would retest them every week for four weeks and, for a month, they continued to remember their lesson.""
Precisely why are we stopping at recognizing chimps as people, except some sort of gross, obvious anthropocentrism?
Let's point out that there is an entire class of life forms on this planet that have ALSO gone through millions of years of evolution to reach where they are, and yet they are continually exploited, manipulated, and murdered on behalf of humans whims: that's right, I'm talking about plants.
There is no question that they live, breed, and grow. There is ample evidence that they feel pain, and even communicate with each other in ways that we barely understand. In many ways, they are far more in touch with their environment than we are, yet we chop vegetables up for food, we decapitate grass by the billions every week because they had the audacity to try to flourish, heck, we RIP THEM UP BY THEIR ROOTS and chemically sterilize them simply for living in the wrong place, dismissing it by calling them "weeds". We annihilate them, and even have the gall to use their corpses for DECORATION.
We are perpetuating a moral crime, yet nobody can be "bothered" because they don't have fur, a face, or make cute baby pictures.
#stopthehate
#lawnmowersaregenocide
#christmastreeisahatecrime
As "fuck you"s go, that's about as morally commendable as it gets.
This is supposed to be a technically-minded site, not FARK.
"Blasting" with lasers? Really?
- first, nothing gets "blasted" with a laser; a laser is - optimally - a point extreme heat source. The "shooting crap down" thing going on in the military today really is about DISABLING the guidance, control, or propulsive systems on whatever aerial platform they're shooting at, or at least disrupting (for missiles) their aerodynamics enough that their own velocity tears them apart. The laser "blasts" nothing. Disabling the guidance, control, or propulsive systems on what is already "space junk" is logically, pointless.
- even assuming a laser did "blast" something, it's pretty much the last thing you want to do in orbit. Unless you're pulverizing it to flecks so tiny that a) they simply don't carry enough kinetic energy to harm something (ie dust) or b) a signficant fraction of them will be deorbited by air-friction in low orbit, you're simply trading one character of threat with another. The Chinese "blasted" a satellite, so now instead of one piece of dangerous junk we need to track and avoid, there's 12000+.
Wouldn't this pretty much just kick the can down the road a little, encouraging MORE people to move to what's essentially a water-starved area?
So you won't watch a whole insightful TED talk because the guy tosses out a completely irrelevant rhetorical device?
I understand your point, but obsessing over it just makes you a pedant.