A couple days later they showed up in person to demand, with absolutely no diplomacy (like asking politely), that I remove my own personal keyboard (one of them old clunky IBMs because modern keyboards suck) because it was against company policy to modify hardware.
I thought this was crazy until you revealed that this was a defense contractor. They have good reasons (government paranoia) to forbid unauthorized hardware and software installs. I used to work at a company whose only customer was Lockheed Martin and which was in fact formed by Lockheed Martin. (They form little companies for themselves like this so they can pay crappy wages with no benefits for doing work that doesn't require a classification. The concept of a company with a single customer comes quite naturally to these people.) When I did work in the actual Lockheed Martin facility I had an escort badge. Every time I needed to take a piss, they walked me down the hall and waited outside the bathroom.
I'm surprised you didn't get fired for plugging in a weird keyboard. They canned me for opening a telnet session one day and sending an email home saying I'd be late.
I don't have much experience with guns- having only fired a Glock on one occasion- but I can proudly say that I have been forced to play paintball in order to keep my job. (This was for "team-building" purposes- the PHB decided that there wasn't enough "synergy" between the programmers and the salesmen, and he decided to solve the problem with mandatory paintball.) Overall I had to admit that even though it was forced, I had fun- but my girlfriend was alarmed, especially when I took my shirt off that night and was covered with welts.
During the several minutes that one team was dispersing into the woods, the redneck who ran the place had the other team as a captive audience and would take the opportunity to parrot everything he heard on Rush Limbaugh that day- so we were shivering in the cold holding our paintball guns while we got inept lectures on how teenagers get partial birth abortions so they can look good in their bathing suits, etc. (Note to Rush fans: it doesn't sound like bullshit as much when Rush says it, which is why he's raking in the big bucks while you're a grumbling loser with a boombox in a cubicle.)
I never met people who spouted such a density of falsehoods until the media started calling itself "liberally biased".
Reading Newsweek's inside scoop on the Kerry campaign, you learn about Kerry's damaging indecision and obsession with talking to advisors on his cell phone, and you learn that he didn't release his war diary because it reveals that he met with terrorists in Paris.
Terrorists? You mean North Korea?
And yet the media tried it's hardest to even go so far as to forge documents to attack old National Guard Service.
Someone forged documents, but this doesn't change Bush's dismal record in the National Guard one way or the other.
And yet people give CBSNews a pass to this day for it--
What are you smoking?
if FoxNews had done that to Kerry, everyonen would be chewing their heads off.
What a persuasive argument. Fox News in fact released a number of false stories about Kerry.
News editors instructed their journalists to refer to the Swift Boat Vets as "unsubstantiated claims"
...as opposed to simply calling them what they were, liars. The media is simply incapable of publicly identifying someone who is lying- and after all, a lie can be proven objectively. But everything has to be he said, she said, for "balance".
and yet the Kerry campaign was forced to acknowledge that Kerry wasn't in Cambodia on Christmas
Yes, he was in Cambodia during the wrong month. So? The mere fact that this of all things gets trumpeted shows how bankrupt the arguments were.
and that he may have earned a Purple Heart due to self-inflicted wounds.
Kerry earned two Purple Hearts. Were they both "self-inflicted"? What do Republicans have against people who have earned Purple Hearts?
And yet the mainstream media buried that story
after taking it out back and shooting it to put it out of its misery
and continued to claim the Swift Boat Vets were "exaggerating."
While you analysis isn't bad, it is fundamentally flawed by the fact that you ignore the rest of the GHG's. If we were to triple the CO2 content of the atmosphere, we would still be overwhelmed by water vapor.
This is irrelevant. I used 1970 as a control, so the baseline GHGs are accounted for already. The ice coexisted with water vapor, baseline CO2, and all other GHG for millenia before 1970. Within a very small amount of time we increased CO2 by 40 ppm and suddenly the ice is gone. The chance that the ice melted purely by chance in such a short period of time, just when CO2 levels increased over historic levels, is relatively small.
I suppose that part of the temperature rise as calculated by ice loss could be caused by additional water vapor in the atmosphere that wasn't around thirty years ago. But it really doesn't matter if temperatures rise purely because of CO2, or if they rise partly because of CO2 and partly because of increased water vapor concentration caused by the CO2. Directly or indirectly, the increased CO2 would still be responsible for the greenhouse delta between 1970-2000.
If we cut all CO2 production today, nature would make up for our lack of production. (Human produced CO2 makes up about 4% of the total CO2 produced in the environment.)
So nature is responsible for 96% of the 280->370 ppm rise in the past 120 years? I don't think so.
This is an example of lying with statistics. Natural CO2 sources are counterbalanced by carbon sinks to form a closed circuit in steady state equilibrium, as evidenced by the fact that CO2 ppm concentrations were historically stable during early measurements. So even if your statistic is correct, it's misleading and irrelevant. Even if we only contribute an additional 4%, our additional carbon is obviously not participating in this system, or is at least overflowing the available sinks. The proof is that the concentration of carbon has increased from 280 to 370 ppm.
Hate to burst your bubble, but 40ppm is 40/1,000,000 or 0.000040, or 0.004%, not 0.04% as you state above. All of your further figures are off by an order of magnitude.
Damn, I always screw up percents- but this doesn't burst my bubble, it makes it ten times bigger. If the excess CO2 (generated since 1970) represents 0.004% of the atmosphere and not 0.04%, it means I overestimated our kWh usage by a factor of 10 which makes the denominator smaller- meaning 2.7 is now 27. For each pound of ice we melt by burning carbon, 27 pounds of Arctic sea-ice disappear.
You also ignore the fact that the antarctic and arctic have shown an increase in snowfall that makes up (largely) for the ice sheets that have detached and melted in the oceans.
It doesn't even largely make up for it. There's just no way. The Arctic Circle surrounds 8,000,000 square miles. To compensate for the 1,000,000 square miles of ice that melted, you'd need a lot of snow. The ice was 3 meters thick, and ice is about 7-9 times denser than snow, so 3 m * 8 (density ratio) / 8 (area ratio) = 3 meters of snowfall required to make up the difference. But typical snowfall in the Arctic is only 5-15 inches per year, and 3 meters is about 120 inches. The Arctic snowfall doesn't even fall within an order of magnitude of the amount you'd need to make up for the detached ice sheets. (Of course this is a fudge, since the snow melts if it falls on ocean water instead of land or ice, but that just means you need even more snow falling on land areas. The desert Antarctic will help out a bit, but it receives only 5 inches of snow a year.)
Think about it - A power station burns coal to produce electricity which is leaked as heat over power lines to your house where you run your stereo / computers / appliances(heaters!) / etc. Global temps rise and produce super storms...
Your hair dryer doesn't produce enough thermal pollution to affect the weather and produce storms. But the CO2 from the coal that was burned to power your hair dryer interferes with the ground's radiation of IR into space. For every BTU of power extracted from coal to produce electricity for your hair dryer, x BTUs will be trapped in the Earth's atmosphere by the CO2 that was released from burning that coal. To calculate a good lower limit on x you can compute how many kilowatt-hours of energy would be required to, say, account for the melting of the 1,000,000 square km of sea-ice that disappeared over the past 30 years (a figure from an article on the wires today), and divide by the actual kilowatt-hours that have been generated from burning carbon over the same 30 year period.
So assume the ice is 3m thick: 3,000 cubic km of ice is 3*10^12 cubic meters of ice. The density of ice is.931 and it takes 334 kiloJoules per kg to melt it, so one cubic meter weighing 931 kg absorbs 310954 kiloJoules, or 86 kilowatt-hours, upon melting. Approximately 2.6*10^14 kWh of heat energy would be required to melt the quantities of sea-ice that disappeared over the past 30 years.
That was the numerator. Now for the denominator. How many kilowatt-hours have been obtained from generating CO2 over the past 30 years? You could gather data from all countries regarding vehicle emissions, electricity usage, etc. But there is a direct way to calculate it: use the increase in atmospheric CO2 that occurred between 1970 and 2000. The concentration increased from 330 ppm to 370 ppm, a net change of 40 ppm. (Pre-industrial was 280 ppm.) Atmospheric pressure is 10 tons per square meter. There are 4.4*10^14 square meters on the earth, so the atmosphere weighs 4.4*10^15 tons, 0.04% of which is new CO2, or 1.76*10^11 tons. Since 1 ton of carbon produces 3.7 tons of CO2, 4.76*10^10 tons of this is carbon. You get about one kilowatt-hour of energy from burning one pound of coal. That would mean about 10^14 kilowatt-hours have been gotten from fossil fuels in the past 30 years, uncorrected for CO2 sinks like the Amazon which are estimated to be absorbing about 25% of our yearly output.
THEREFORE x is at least 2.7 from melting Arctic sea ice alone. If we are to make the reasonable assumption that the ice's sudden disappearance over my lifetime has something to do with CO2 being one-third more abundant than it used to be when I was a kid, it means that if you burn enough coal to melt one pound of ice, 2.7 pounds of Arctic sea-ice will disappear as a result. If we took all the coal, oil, and natural gas that's been burned since 1970 and did nothing with it except melt ice, we would have melted only 40% as much ice as this. And that's just in one place. This lower limit calculation only considered the Arctic sea-ice in today's wire story. But the rest of the planet- continents, oceans, land ice in Greenland - warms up too. The true ratio may be in the hundreds or thousands. And this is a figure only covering excess heat observed over the past 30 years. The CO2 will take time to dissipate, causing the ratio to rise even if we stopped all CO2 production today.
The problem is obviously not direct thermal pollution. Over just a few decades a liter of CO2 will retain much more thermal energy from the sun than we got out of it when we burned it. This should also put our windmill problems into some perspective.
Re:What is special about prime numbers?
on
Fun with Prime Numbers
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm wondering who moderated you as "Insightful" when your comment proves nothing. Vioxx and Phen-Fen held promise of a huge return on investment during the period they were under development. Those two turned out to fail but a certain percentage of lucrative drugs are expected to fail. This puts them in a different class than drugs which from the very start can be ruled out as showing little promise of a return on investment at all- even though they may be needed to maintain public health.
There is a reason we have Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, and no flu vaccine.
Really, my statement is prejudicial? Gosh, maybe I should have said something like "[if] you find my comment prejudicial (which, really, you should, because it is)".
Yeah, I saw that, and I thought we were talking about it hypothetically. And I explained what would be wrong with that statement if you were to make it for real, but I understood you weren't actually making it.
Besides, the worst racists I've ever known are all Democrats. Ever heard of Robert Byrd?
Yes, he used to be a member of the KKK in his youth. What does it have to do with anything now?
So it's not prejudiced to say black men are more likely to be violent, since more black men are in jail for violent offenses than white men? If you find my comment prejudicial (which, really, you should, because it is), then you should realize yours is, too.
Your statement is, but do you know why?
It's not because it's wrong to say anything "bad" about any racial group, or any group at all. That statement purposefully obscures what is really going on. Black men are more likely to be poor. And poor men are more likely to be in jail for violent offenses. There are rich black people, who are no more likely to get in trouble than anybody else, and poor white people, who get into plenty. "Black men are more likely to be violent" cherry-picks a single correlation, removes it from its context, and implies a causation from it, as if the problem were black people.
I said that conservatives are more likely to be racist than progressives, and I backed it up with an explanation of the cause: the pool of racists that we have in this country identifies much more strongly with one side at the expense of the other. Maybe you can refine that and explain why. I don't think, though, that you can deny that it's true.
A black person is not free to stop being black. You, on the other hand, were not born a conservative, and are perfectly free to stop being one. Victimhood arguments ring hollow when made by conservatives or members of any group defined entirely by its politics.
As a conservative, let me tell you that I'm not racist. By-and-large, conservatives are not racist. That we're percieved as such, however, says a *lot* about the prejudices held by those who would call us racist.
If I see you, as a conservative individual, and say "oh, you must be a racist!", that is prejudice.
It is not prejudiced to note overall trends. You are correct in noting that most self-described conservatives are not racists. In fact, on the contrary- as a group conservatives in America seem to have an idealized vision of their nation that views racism as a thing of the past, a former problem that has largely been fixed by now, and as individuals they fancy themselves to be racially color-blind.
But extremely few racists actually describe themselves as racists. They overwhelmingly prefer the word conservative.
What could Bush possibly do, then, to make people like you lose faith in him? He's already done just about everything I could think of, and you wiggle and squirm and invent excuses for him every time.
They're forgetting one of the fundamental problems - most smokers like smoking because it's more habitual. They're used to the act of having a cigarette in their hand and the act of blowing smoke.
I think this has a lot to do with why people start. They want to look like they're in a movie. But it's not why they keep doing it.
Few people realize how much more addictive tobacco is when it comes in the form of a cigarette (as opposed to chewing tobacco, or gum, or even a cigar). There is a real reason people smoke cigarettes as opposed to other forms of nicotine. It isn't all about looking cool. Patches would be so much more convenient, less smelly, easy to hide, and they work on airplanes- why don't smokers switch to patches?
Cigarettes allow easy titration of the dose. The physiological response to nicotine is extremely dose responsive- small doses have a stimulant effect, while larger doses have a paradoxical relaxing effect. When you smoke a cigarette you are able to subconsciously control the amount of nicotine absorbed by the body, until you get the effect that you want. Once you get into the target zone, you can take an occasional puff that is subconsciously timed to maintain the desired chemical disequilibrium (your body is making adjustments to correct for the presence of the nicotine- you have to stay a little ahead of it).
Try doing that with a patch, which releases nicotine at a fixed rate. Or chewing tobacco- which supplies a massive dose of nicotine that is very hard to control (but is less habit forming). Tobacco is at its most addictive when it's been rolled into cigarettes. That's partly why you see cigarettes more than any other form of nicotine.
Whether a systematic bias was implemented on purpose or not is irrelevant at this point. We are about to have a kangaroo election, with machines that are precise yet inaccurate, favoring one candidate over the other.
Maybe it's possible that this is a source of random error and not systematic error. If reports start coming out where Bush voters are having their votes changed to Kerry votes, then this might be random error. Otherwise it's systematic error, and it won't have mattered afterwards whether malice or incompetence was responsible for it.
It seems reassuring to think this was an off-by-one error only because off-by-one errors have never posed this much of a threat to democracy.
Plus with an exposed water surface you get evaporative cooling for free.
Better yet, you could take a completely empty radiator and partially submerge it in the bucket, leaving most fins exposed to the air, to recover most of the benefits of convective cooling. And any large metal object with lots of surface area will suffice. If you avoid using car parts, you don't have to wait for the kudzu to cover up the unsightly lumps of wreckage in your yard.
The problem with this setup is mildew. Make sure to poison your water or at least keep phosphate out of it.
Travis County election officials have responded to complaints that voters casting straight-party Democratic ballots are discovering, when performing a final check of their ballots, that their votes for president have been changed from Kerry/Edwards to Bush/Cheney. The officials say that, after trying and failing to replicate the problem on its eSlate voting machines, they have concluded the vote changes are due to
voter error rather than mechanical failure.
Gail Fisher, manager of the county's Elections Division, theorizes that after selecting their straight party vote, some voters are going to the next page on the electronic ballot and pressing "enter," perhaps thinking they are pressing "cast ballot" or "next page." Since the Bush/Cheney ticket is the first thing on the page, it is highlighted when the page comes up - and thus, pressing "enter" at that moment causes the Kerry/Edwards vote to be changed to Bush/Cheney.
Fisher stressed very strongly that voters should not rush, but carefully and thoroughly examine their ballots on the final review page before pressing "cast ballot."
Fisher said the county has received "less than a dozen" complaints from the more than 70,000 voters that had cast ballots by Friday afternoon. She said the county has also received a complaint from the Travis County Democratic Party. TCDP Executive Director
Elizabeth Yevich said it was not a formal complaint, but that the party had expressed concern and the county had been "receptive and responsive."
After reading the above selection-
1. Can you identify any UI design flaws in the user interface described above?
2. What would be a more reasonable default selection in this case?
3. Are poor UI design and user error mutually exclusive?
Agreed, paper receipts taken home by voters are a bad idea. It leads directly to vote-buying. And there is no use-case I can imagine where this would be useful. "Could everyone please bring their receipts back to the school gymnasium for the recount!"
An auditable paper trail shouldn't involve paper that leaves the custody of the state.
Slashdot Mirror
A couple days later they showed up in person to demand, with absolutely no diplomacy (like asking politely), that I remove my own personal keyboard (one of them old clunky IBMs because modern keyboards suck) because it was against company policy to modify hardware.
I thought this was crazy until you revealed that this was a defense contractor. They have good reasons (government paranoia) to forbid unauthorized hardware and software installs. I used to work at a company whose only customer was Lockheed Martin and which was in fact formed by Lockheed Martin. (They form little companies for themselves like this so they can pay crappy wages with no benefits for doing work that doesn't require a classification. The concept of a company with a single customer comes quite naturally to these people.) When I did work in the actual Lockheed Martin facility I had an escort badge. Every time I needed to take a piss, they walked me down the hall and waited outside the bathroom.
I'm surprised you didn't get fired for plugging in a weird keyboard. They canned me for opening a telnet session one day and sending an email home saying I'd be late.
I don't have much experience with guns- having only fired a Glock on one occasion- but I can proudly say that I have been forced to play paintball in order to keep my job. (This was for "team-building" purposes- the PHB decided that there wasn't enough "synergy" between the programmers and the salesmen, and he decided to solve the problem with mandatory paintball.) Overall I had to admit that even though it was forced, I had fun- but my girlfriend was alarmed, especially when I took my shirt off that night and was covered with welts.
During the several minutes that one team was dispersing into the woods, the redneck who ran the place had the other team as a captive audience and would take the opportunity to parrot everything he heard on Rush Limbaugh that day- so we were shivering in the cold holding our paintball guns while we got inept lectures on how teenagers get partial birth abortions so they can look good in their bathing suits, etc. (Note to Rush fans: it doesn't sound like bullshit as much when Rush says it, which is why he's raking in the big bucks while you're a grumbling loser with a boombox in a cubicle.)
I never met people who spouted such a density of falsehoods until the media started calling itself "liberally biased".
Reading Newsweek's inside scoop on the Kerry campaign, you learn about Kerry's damaging indecision and obsession with talking to advisors on his cell phone, and you learn that he didn't release his war diary because it reveals that he met with terrorists in Paris.
Terrorists? You mean North Korea?
And yet the media tried it's hardest to even go so far as to forge documents to attack old National Guard Service.
Someone forged documents, but this doesn't change Bush's dismal record in the National Guard one way or the other.
And yet people give CBSNews a pass to this day for it--
What are you smoking?
if FoxNews had done that to Kerry, everyonen would be chewing their heads off.
What a persuasive argument. Fox News in fact released a number of false stories about Kerry.
News editors instructed their journalists to refer to the Swift Boat Vets as "unsubstantiated claims"
...as opposed to simply calling them what they were, liars. The media is simply incapable of publicly identifying someone who is lying- and after all, a lie can be proven objectively. But everything has to be he said, she said, for "balance".
and yet the Kerry campaign was forced to acknowledge that Kerry wasn't in Cambodia on Christmas
Yes, he was in Cambodia during the wrong month. So? The mere fact that this of all things gets trumpeted shows how bankrupt the arguments were.
and that he may have earned a Purple Heart due to self-inflicted wounds.
Kerry earned two Purple Hearts. Were they both "self-inflicted"? What do Republicans have against people who have earned Purple Hearts?
And yet the mainstream media buried that story
after taking it out back and shooting it to put it out of its misery
and continued to claim the Swift Boat Vets were "exaggerating."
When they were in fact, lying.
While you analysis isn't bad, it is fundamentally flawed by the fact that you ignore the rest of the GHG's. If we were to triple the CO2 content of the atmosphere, we would still be overwhelmed by water vapor.
This is irrelevant. I used 1970 as a control, so the baseline GHGs are accounted for already. The ice coexisted with water vapor, baseline CO2, and all other GHG for millenia before 1970. Within a very small amount of time we increased CO2 by 40 ppm and suddenly the ice is gone. The chance that the ice melted purely by chance in such a short period of time, just when CO2 levels increased over historic levels, is relatively small.
I suppose that part of the temperature rise as calculated by ice loss could be caused by additional water vapor in the atmosphere that wasn't around thirty years ago. But it really doesn't matter if temperatures rise purely because of CO2, or if they rise partly because of CO2 and partly because of increased water vapor concentration caused by the CO2. Directly or indirectly, the increased CO2 would still be responsible for the greenhouse delta between 1970-2000.
If we cut all CO2 production today, nature would make up for our lack of production. (Human produced CO2 makes up about 4% of the total CO2 produced in the environment.)
So nature is responsible for 96% of the 280->370 ppm rise in the past 120 years? I don't think so.
This is an example of lying with statistics. Natural CO2 sources are counterbalanced by carbon sinks to form a closed circuit in steady state equilibrium, as evidenced by the fact that CO2 ppm concentrations were historically stable during early measurements. So even if your statistic is correct, it's misleading and irrelevant. Even if we only contribute an additional 4%, our additional carbon is obviously not participating in this system, or is at least overflowing the available sinks. The proof is that the concentration of carbon has increased from 280 to 370 ppm.
Hate to burst your bubble, but 40ppm is 40/1,000,000 or 0.000040, or 0.004%, not 0.04% as you state above. All of your further figures are off by an order of magnitude.
Damn, I always screw up percents- but this doesn't burst my bubble, it makes it ten times bigger. If the excess CO2 (generated since 1970) represents 0.004% of the atmosphere and not 0.04%, it means I overestimated our kWh usage by a factor of 10 which makes the denominator smaller- meaning 2.7 is now 27. For each pound of ice we melt by burning carbon, 27 pounds of Arctic sea-ice disappear.
You also ignore the fact that the antarctic and arctic have shown an increase in snowfall that makes up (largely) for the ice sheets that have detached and melted in the oceans.
It doesn't even largely make up for it. There's just no way. The Arctic Circle surrounds 8,000,000 square miles. To compensate for the 1,000,000 square miles of ice that melted, you'd need a lot of snow. The ice was 3 meters thick, and ice is about 7-9 times denser than snow, so 3 m * 8 (density ratio) / 8 (area ratio) = 3 meters of snowfall required to make up the difference. But typical snowfall in the Arctic is only 5-15 inches per year, and 3 meters is about 120 inches. The Arctic snowfall doesn't even fall within an order of magnitude of the amount you'd need to make up for the detached ice sheets. (Of course this is a fudge, since the snow melts if it falls on ocean water instead of land or ice, but that just means you need even more snow falling on land areas. The desert Antarctic will help out a bit, but it receives only 5 inches of snow a year.)
Think about it - A power station burns coal to produce electricity which is leaked as heat over power lines to your house where you run your stereo / computers / appliances(heaters!) / etc. Global temps rise and produce super storms...
.931 and it takes 334 kiloJoules per kg to melt it, so one cubic meter weighing 931 kg absorbs 310954 kiloJoules, or 86 kilowatt-hours, upon melting. Approximately 2.6*10^14 kWh of heat energy would be required to melt the quantities of sea-ice that disappeared over the past 30 years.
Your hair dryer doesn't produce enough thermal pollution to affect the weather and produce storms. But the CO2 from the coal that was burned to power your hair dryer interferes with the ground's radiation of IR into space. For every BTU of power extracted from coal to produce electricity for your hair dryer, x BTUs will be trapped in the Earth's atmosphere by the CO2 that was released from burning that coal. To calculate a good lower limit on x you can compute how many kilowatt-hours of energy would be required to, say, account for the melting of the 1,000,000 square km of sea-ice that disappeared over the past 30 years (a figure from an article on the wires today), and divide by the actual kilowatt-hours that have been generated from burning carbon over the same 30 year period.
So assume the ice is 3m thick: 3,000 cubic km of ice is 3*10^12 cubic meters of ice. The density of ice is
That was the numerator. Now for the denominator. How many kilowatt-hours have been obtained from generating CO2 over the past 30 years? You could gather data from all countries regarding vehicle emissions, electricity usage, etc. But there is a direct way to calculate it: use the increase in atmospheric CO2 that occurred between 1970 and 2000. The concentration increased from 330 ppm to 370 ppm, a net change of 40 ppm. (Pre-industrial was 280 ppm.) Atmospheric pressure is 10 tons per square meter. There are 4.4*10^14 square meters on the earth, so the atmosphere weighs 4.4*10^15 tons, 0.04% of which is new CO2, or 1.76*10^11 tons. Since 1 ton of carbon produces 3.7 tons of CO2, 4.76*10^10 tons of this is carbon. You get about one kilowatt-hour of energy from burning one pound of coal. That would mean about 10^14 kilowatt-hours have been gotten from fossil fuels in the past 30 years, uncorrected for CO2 sinks like the Amazon which are estimated to be absorbing about 25% of our yearly output.
THEREFORE x is at least 2.7 from melting Arctic sea ice alone. If we are to make the reasonable assumption that the ice's sudden disappearance over my lifetime has something to do with CO2 being one-third more abundant than it used to be when I was a kid, it means that if you burn enough coal to melt one pound of ice, 2.7 pounds of Arctic sea-ice will disappear as a result. If we took all the coal, oil, and natural gas that's been burned since 1970 and did nothing with it except melt ice, we would have melted only 40% as much ice as this. And that's just in one place. This lower limit calculation only considered the Arctic sea-ice in today's wire story. But the rest of the planet- continents, oceans, land ice in Greenland - warms up too. The true ratio may be in the hundreds or thousands. And this is a figure only covering excess heat observed over the past 30 years. The CO2 will take time to dissipate, causing the ratio to rise even if we stopped all CO2 production today.
The problem is obviously not direct thermal pollution. Over just a few decades a liter of CO2 will retain much more thermal energy from the sun than we got out of it when we burned it. This should also put our windmill problems into some perspective.
Brief overview. There is also the Prime Spiral.
I'm wondering who moderated you as "Insightful" when your comment proves nothing. Vioxx and Phen-Fen held promise of a huge return on investment during the period they were under development. Those two turned out to fail but a certain percentage of lucrative drugs are expected to fail. This puts them in a different class than drugs which from the very start can be ruled out as showing little promise of a return on investment at all- even though they may be needed to maintain public health.
There is a reason we have Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, and no flu vaccine.
Really, my statement is prejudicial? Gosh, maybe I should have said something like "[if] you find my comment prejudicial (which, really, you should, because it is)".
Yeah, I saw that, and I thought we were talking about it hypothetically. And I explained what would be wrong with that statement if you were to make it for real, but I understood you weren't actually making it.
Besides, the worst racists I've ever known are all Democrats. Ever heard of Robert Byrd?
Yes, he used to be a member of the KKK in his youth. What does it have to do with anything now?
So it's not prejudiced to say black men are more likely to be violent, since more black men are in jail for violent offenses than white men? If you find my comment prejudicial (which, really, you should, because it is), then you should realize yours is, too.
Your statement is, but do you know why?
It's not because it's wrong to say anything "bad" about any racial group, or any group at all. That statement purposefully obscures what is really going on. Black men are more likely to be poor. And poor men are more likely to be in jail for violent offenses. There are rich black people, who are no more likely to get in trouble than anybody else, and poor white people, who get into plenty. "Black men are more likely to be violent" cherry-picks a single correlation, removes it from its context, and implies a causation from it, as if the problem were black people.
I said that conservatives are more likely to be racist than progressives, and I backed it up with an explanation of the cause: the pool of racists that we have in this country identifies much more strongly with one side at the expense of the other. Maybe you can refine that and explain why. I don't think, though, that you can deny that it's true.
A black person is not free to stop being black. You, on the other hand, were not born a conservative, and are perfectly free to stop being one. Victimhood arguments ring hollow when made by conservatives or members of any group defined entirely by its politics.
As a conservative, let me tell you that I'm not racist. By-and-large, conservatives are not racist.
That we're percieved as such, however, says a *lot* about the prejudices held by those who would call us racist.
If I see you, as a conservative individual, and say "oh, you must be a racist!", that is prejudice.
It is not prejudiced to note overall trends. You are correct in noting that most self-described conservatives are not racists. In fact, on the contrary- as a group conservatives in America seem to have an idealized vision of their nation that views racism as a thing of the past, a former problem that has largely been fixed by now, and as individuals they fancy themselves to be racially color-blind.
But extremely few racists actually describe themselves as racists. They overwhelmingly prefer the word conservative.
Like a company who I won't name that outsourced almost all their development to India and laid off most of their US staff.
Why does nobody ever want to name these companies?
What could Bush possibly do, then, to make people like you lose faith in him? He's already done just about everything I could think of, and you wiggle and squirm and invent excuses for him every time.
The other 52% will learn so over the next 4 years.
Don't jump to conclusions. George could stand at a podium and eat a fetus, and they'd admire his moral resolve for it.
Why were the exit polls the exact opposite of the vote count?
They're forgetting one of the fundamental problems - most smokers like smoking because it's more habitual. They're used to the act of having a cigarette in their hand and the act of blowing smoke.
I think this has a lot to do with why people start. They want to look like they're in a movie. But it's not why they keep doing it.
Few people realize how much more addictive tobacco is when it comes in the form of a cigarette (as opposed to chewing tobacco, or gum, or even a cigar). There is a real reason people smoke cigarettes as opposed to other forms of nicotine. It isn't all about looking cool. Patches would be so much more convenient, less smelly, easy to hide, and they work on airplanes- why don't smokers switch to patches?
Cigarettes allow easy titration of the dose. The physiological response to nicotine is extremely dose responsive- small doses have a stimulant effect, while larger doses have a paradoxical relaxing effect. When you smoke a cigarette you are able to subconsciously control the amount of nicotine absorbed by the body, until you get the effect that you want. Once you get into the target zone, you can take an occasional puff that is subconsciously timed to maintain the desired chemical disequilibrium (your body is making adjustments to correct for the presence of the nicotine- you have to stay a little ahead of it).
Try doing that with a patch, which releases nicotine at a fixed rate. Or chewing tobacco- which supplies a massive dose of nicotine that is very hard to control (but is less habit forming). Tobacco is at its most addictive when it's been rolled into cigarettes. That's partly why you see cigarettes more than any other form of nicotine.
Actually it was a sly reference to a leaflet that someone has been distributing in Democratic areas of Alabama:
Of course, the election is on Nov. 2. It's just like Soviet Russia- if you try to vote on Nov. 4, the fraud has been committed on you!
Is this why I keep getting text messages warning me that if I went over my minutes I'll get arrested at the polls on November 4?
Yup, things will get scary for you poor guys soon.
bottom line is: we will go right after you left wing anti-american geeks
You can't be for real. Are you really a Republican, or are you just pretending to be one? Because this is only the second post you've ever made.
Plenty of people are dressing up pretending to be the opposition so it wouldn't be surprising.
Agreed, there's definitely something to this. I'm going to vote for Kerry, and I just got a new cellphone this weekend!
Whether a systematic bias was implemented on purpose or not is irrelevant at this point. We are about to have a kangaroo election, with machines that are precise yet inaccurate, favoring one candidate over the other.
Maybe it's possible that this is a source of random error and not systematic error. If reports start coming out where Bush voters are having their votes changed to Kerry votes, then this might be random error. Otherwise it's systematic error, and it won't have mattered afterwards whether malice or incompetence was responsible for it.
It seems reassuring to think this was an off-by-one error only because off-by-one errors have never posed this much of a threat to democracy.
Plus with an exposed water surface you get evaporative cooling for free.
Better yet, you could take a completely empty radiator and partially submerge it in the bucket, leaving most fins exposed to the air, to recover most of the benefits of convective cooling. And any large metal object with lots of surface area will suffice. If you avoid using car parts, you don't have to wait for the kudzu to cover up the unsightly lumps of wreckage in your yard.
The problem with this setup is mildew. Make sure to poison your water or at least keep phosphate out of it.
This reduces the danger of electing the loser by a mere factor of two. Unacceptable.
1. Can you identify any UI design flaws in the user interface described above?
2. What would be a more reasonable default selection in this case?
3. Are poor UI design and user error mutually exclusive?
Agreed, paper receipts taken home by voters are a bad idea. It leads directly to vote-buying. And there is no use-case I can imagine where this would be useful. "Could everyone please bring their receipts back to the school gymnasium for the recount!"
An auditable paper trail shouldn't involve paper that leaves the custody of the state.