I skimmed the summary not even noticing the stupid "bathing" thing', and then guess what 99% of the comments here are about?
Every time a summary has the tiniest little compiler error in it, no matter what it's about, any interest that might have been gleaned from TFA is lost. All you karma whores storm in like a Black Friday Walmart crowd trying to score your 5, Funny first posts and you fill up this board with this redundantly unfunny goofballing- "huh huh huh it's bathing the cosmos not the other way around huh huh huh"! My heart pains for any infrared astronomer out there drowning in this shit.
But the constant use of forms of the words "prove" and "proof" in regard to scientific theories should be treated with humor, since such words are an open statement that the author doesn't know much at all about scientific methods. Those are media and propaganda terms; they have very little use in scientific discussions.
Outside the context of a scientific paper, I always just assumed the word "proven" with regard to scientific theory was just shorthand for a more precise meaning involving the probability of a null hypothesis being confined below a certain margin of error, because it's obvious that scientific experiments don't "prove" things in the way that mathematical proofs do.
What word would you prefer we use instead? Or must we be pedantic and spew out a whole word salad in every other sentence where we would otherwise say proof or proven, as if we're constantly writing abstracts?
No, "they" are ridiculed because of the absence of anything approximating proof of the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming.
Except the absence you assert exists, does not, in fact, exist. There is a total absence of the "absence of anything approximating proof of the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming".
...the absence of proof elevates the value of ridicule from mere fun to pivotal.
Since you have proven nothing by your silly assertions it is pivotal that I call you a goofball.
A guy at work was always talking about using gummy bears to commit the perfect crime. You somehow make a mold of someone's fingerprint using that gummy bear material. Then you use it on a fingerprint scanner, which gets fooled by it, and it lets you in. Then, get this- you eat the gummy bear fingerprint mold, and permanently destroy the evidence of your intrusion.
That always struck me as a little improbable. You mean you're just going to eat that thing right after you pressed it against a disgusting fingerprint scanner?
And their remote controls that you're forced to use, along with your real remote that always works with everything except their box, usually have their biggest, largest buttons devoted to buying crap. They're like Verizon phones.
I get my new from google, and slashdot... which one of those is tied to the US government?
Well, neither one, as far as we know at the moment.
OTOH Yahoo is charging them between $30 and $40 for the contents of your Yahoo account. But it's still up in the air what business ties exist between the government and Google- and how much (and to what extent) they're charging the cops for access to your gmail account.
As for Slashdot, I guess it depends on whether law enforcement thinks your posts are really worth handing Bob Malda a $5.
Allegedly GWBush has a fairly high IQ (well at least 120+)
(Allegedly there, I FTFY.) That's alleged by people who allegedly have an allegedly low IQ themselves (well at least 80-, allegedly) and will, I allege, show up shortly to allege otherwise. I'll also allege that I'd like to hear what new alleged topics Bush allegedly had the capacity to allegedly understand.
They allegedly always allege that Bush was allegedly smarter than Obama (allegedly our new president, although he allegedly has some alleged paperwork problem allegedly involving his alleged birth in the State allegedly of Hawaii- allegedly one of the States which are themselves alleged to be United- that magically [allegedly] transports his alleged birth to the alleged nation of Kenya as if that would allegedly make them alleged victims even if it were allegedly true in the alleged first place).
Now before anyone allegedly jumps on me, please allegedly remember that I allegedly only alleged these things were alleged, so I'm allegedly sorry.
I talked to Google but flunked the initial 20 minute phone screen. In the last five minutes the guy asked one of those puzzle questions where you have to find the O(N) vs O(N^2) solution and I didn't see the O(N) trick in time.
Now every time I use gmail the ad at top says "Google is looking for software engineers! Apply today!" and I want to punch a hole through the screen.
Well, this is a probe, being conducted by people with legal training, into the intricacies of a past scientific discussion. Any perceived irregularity in the history of remarks back and forth in that discussion is being viewed as destruction of evidence. They're going through these stupid emails with the gusto they would have raiding a lawyer's office seeking incriminating documents that have been withheld or suppressed.
Lawyers seek truth, but of the legal sort in the eyes of the law. Scientists seek to refine theory and they view "truth" as something unattainable but that can be approximated by a theoretical framework to an arbitrary extent depending on its supporting evidence... to the point at which only a few crackpots ignorant of statistics might be waving a single data point around. Here, we are essentially seeing lawyers fancying themselves as seeking the answer to the same question that the scientists were supposedly discussing, on their way to their final goal- proving in court or in some official hearing that the entire climate climate change hypothesis has been nothing more than a big scam for money. This is a meme that's spreading fast and gaining credence.
This sort of probe would be understandable in certain circumstances, e.g. if the scientists were discussing how they'll get away with cross-breeding humans and llamas, which is (now) illegal. But in this case, what they are after is evidence that this particular scientific hypothesis is a fraud being pushed by a wide conspiracy of thousands of scientists. For supporting evidence, they plan to submit as evidence their Exhibit A- climate change is not occurring. Which indicates that the hypothesis was merely conspiratorial. Maybe they can even get a judge to agree, who knows. They'll at least get their hands on a bit of goofy documentary evidence that looks fishy- good enough for their conspiracy theory fans who currently whine about birth certificates.
I left out the page I referenced with a schematic. (The page is still there.) Everything to the right of his "C1" capacitor is what I'm describing; the stuff to the left is just for making a DC wall adapter to power it.
GOOFUS has a PhD.
GALLANT has a PhD in a field unrelated to his research.
GOOFUS gets little respect as a scientist outside the scientific community.
GALLANT gets little respect as a scientist inside the scientific community.
GOOFUS drives a beat-up old car.
GALLANT drives a BMW unless his chauffeur is driving.
GOOFUS wears street clothes to work, maybe a lab suit on occasion.
GALLANT wears three piece suits at all times.
GOOFUS is employed by a "university", a "hospital", or a "laboratory".
GALLANT is employed by a "Coalition", an "Institute", an "Association", a "Foundation", a "Council", or a "White House".
GOOFUS earns $30000 per year unless they cut his funding.
GALLANT earns $200000 per year but makes his real money from speaking fees.
GOOFUS lives anywhere in the country.
GALLANT lives in a wealthy area near Washington DC, but may have additional homes elsewhere.
GOOFUS may sometimes be filmed standing in front of big melting icebergs.
GALLANT may be filmed sitting in front of a bookcase or standing behind a podium at a $2000 per plate fundraiser, although there may be ice melting in his drink.
GOOFUS is a dues-paying member of several scientific grassroots organizations.
GALLANT is on the payroll of several scientific astroturf organizations.
GOOFUS gets summoned for jury duty but is never picked as a juror.
GALLANT claims "the jury is still out" on evolution or global warming, since he considers himself to be on the jury.
GOOFUS maintains the world is five billion years old.
GALLANT isn't really saying, but creationists distribute his pamphlets all the time.
GOOFUS claims the world is warming as a direct result of human activity.
GALLANT either claims that climate change doesn't exist, or if it does, that humans have nothing to do with it.
GOOFUS and his graduate students do the dirty work of collecting raw data and looking for conclusions to be drawn from it.
GALLANT does the dirty work of discrediting GOOFUS by manipulating his data in Excel with statistically invalid techniques.
GOOFUS writes scientific papers and grant proposals.
GALLANT writes the nation's environmental legislation and a column for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
GOOFUS draws scientific conclusions from the data he collects that usually come out in agreement with the scientific consensus.
GALLANT paints the scientific consensus as being entirely political in nature and enjoys comparing himself to Galileo.
GOOFUS is heavily trained to be a skeptic and to treat information from all sources with a skeptical mind.
GALLANT is heavily marketed as a skeptic but reserves his skepticism for GOOFUS.
GOOFUS isn't paid much attention by the press since his opinions are commonplace among scientists.
GALLANT holds maverick opinions for a scientist which keeps him busy running from one balanced talk show to the next.
GOOFUS has no PR skills.
GALLANT leverages his PR experience all the time, although he has access to paid PR staff.
GOOFUS claims the sky is falling and we have to take painful steps to reduce CO2 emissions now.
GALLANT claims the free market will take care of it and recommends solving the problem by conning Zimbabwe out of their pollution credits.
GOOFUS advises his kids not to go into science.
GALLANT advises the president.
What a bunch of babies everybody is. We implementing method calls in XML over HTTP from server to server as if they're pretending to be frigging browsers to each other. Remember when the world was simpler and we were using CORBA for that stuff? Or when we were going down to the TCP/IP layer and using sockets, and figuring our own stuff out? Before TCP we were sending raw IP packets. Uphill. Both ways. And it was good enough for us. We weren't kids anymore, writing BASIC programs on our little 8 bit machines. Of course BASIC was way too slow and you really had to go down to the machine code level to write anything that wouldn't embarrass you in front of your little friends. Really, all this stuff is based on a protocol that everybody should be using: TTL. And transistor-transistor logic should be good enough for anybody. If you can't rewrite your goofy SOA application using TTL it just shows how ignorant you are about what you're really doing.
(I'm going to be a lameass and repost this that I wrote this seven years ago, when an "old busted TV" meant a CRT tube. For purposes of this discussion it still does)
You can easily make a Tesla coil if you have an old busted TV to rip apart. In general, the older and bigger the TV is, the better. And color TVs are better than black and white. This won't be a *great* Tesla coil, but it will throw a spark a few inches long and you can do all the standard Tesla coil tricks with it (St. Elmo's fire, etc.) without investing too much time or money.
Yank the flyback transformer out of the TV, and discard all its primary windings. Keep the big high voltage secondary winding (the one with the zillions of turns). It's usually encased in rubber and may look like a big rubber wheel. Its main lead has really thick insulation and connects to the side of the picture tube (where it looks like a stethoscope). The other lead (the ground) won't be as heavily insulated.
The only other parts you need are two NPN power transistors (2N3055), two 5W power resistors (20 ohm and 200 ohm), some wire, and a good supply of DC current (12-24 V). The circuit is a piece of cake. The first time I did it, I put the whole thing together with alligator clips.
This circuit has two primary windings around the flyback transformer core. The power winding is 8 turns, with a tap in the middle. The feedback winding is smaller (4 turns), also with a tap in the middle. The power winding leads connect to the collector leads on the transistors, with the center tap going to the +24 V DC power source. The feedback winding leads connect to the gate leads, with the center tap there going to +2-3 V DC (connect the resistors in series across the DC power to get the lower voltage in between). The emitter leads are grounded.
As current flows through one transistor, the changing field in the core induces a voltage in the feedback windings that turns that transistor off and the other one on. Then current flows the other way, and the same thing happens in reverse. So the circuit tunes itself to the proper frequency. But it also means that the first time you power it up you run a 50-50 chance of connecting the leads to the wrong transistor gates, in which case you get a stable DC circuit. So if it doesn't work the first time, try exchanging the gate leads.
This circuit is fairly well known, and doing a Google search for "flyback" and "Tesla" I found a schematic [aaroncake.net] for it right away. The guy mentions on that page that the transistors get really hot and he is not kidding- they do. Don't leave it running for more than a minute without a heat sink. The RF noise generated by Tesla coils is incredible, so expect to generate some interference. They make lots of smelly ozone. And if you let a spark go through paper, you can start a fire so be careful.
If you're lucky you can get 20-30 kV, which throws a purple spark a couple inches. (I only got about 4 kV out of mine- the spark was about a half inch long.) Pick up a neon bulb when you're at Radio Shack- these light up if they're around. If you touch one terminal of a fluorescent to ground then half of it will glow brightly between that end and the place you are holding it. The effect on a candle flame is interesting. Don't stick your bare finger near it because the spark does hurt if it hits unprotected skin. But if you hold a metal object and use that to touch it, you don't feel a thing (it's high frequency AC). Cool tricks include having sparks jump from the coil to a metal object in your hand, having sparks jump from a metal object in your other hand to ground (even a lousy ground), and having fluorescent tubes glow softly if you hold them in your other hand.
Slashdot Mirror
> Its is their JOB to notice such "tiniest little compiler error(s)".
No, that's the job of the compiler.
I skimmed the summary not even noticing the stupid "bathing" thing', and then guess what 99% of the comments here are about?
Every time a summary has the tiniest little compiler error in it, no matter what it's about, any interest that might have been gleaned from TFA is lost. All you karma whores storm in like a Black Friday Walmart crowd trying to score your 5, Funny first posts and you fill up this board with this redundantly unfunny goofballing- "huh huh huh it's bathing the cosmos not the other way around huh huh huh"! My heart pains for any infrared astronomer out there drowning in this shit.
Oh get real. A word can have different shades of meaning.
But the constant use of forms of the words "prove" and "proof" in regard to scientific theories should be treated with humor, since such words are an open statement that the author doesn't know much at all about scientific methods. Those are media and propaganda terms; they have very little use in scientific discussions.
Outside the context of a scientific paper, I always just assumed the word "proven" with regard to scientific theory was just shorthand for a more precise meaning involving the probability of a null hypothesis being confined below a certain margin of error, because it's obvious that scientific experiments don't "prove" things in the way that mathematical proofs do.
What word would you prefer we use instead? Or must we be pedantic and spew out a whole word salad in every other sentence where we would otherwise say proof or proven, as if we're constantly writing abstracts?
No, "they" are ridiculed because of the absence of anything approximating proof of the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming.
...the absence of proof elevates the value of ridicule from mere fun to pivotal.
Except the absence you assert exists, does not, in fact, exist. There is a total absence of the "absence of anything approximating proof of the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming".
Since you have proven nothing by your silly assertions it is pivotal that I call you a goofball.
I am an American, and I have rights.
This attitude is why everyone in the rest of the world thinks you're a bunch of dicks. Habeus corpus is just for you too- we've already seen that.
Worst case, they simply won't ask.
A guy at work was always talking about using gummy bears to commit the perfect crime. You somehow make a mold of someone's fingerprint using that gummy bear material. Then you use it on a fingerprint scanner, which gets fooled by it, and it lets you in. Then, get this- you eat the gummy bear fingerprint mold, and permanently destroy the evidence of your intrusion.
That always struck me as a little improbable. You mean you're just going to eat that thing right after you pressed it against a disgusting fingerprint scanner?
And their remote controls that you're forced to use, along with your real remote that always works with everything except their box, usually have their biggest, largest buttons devoted to buying crap. They're like Verizon phones.
I get my new from google, and slashdot... which one of those is tied to the US government?
Well, neither one, as far as we know at the moment.
OTOH Yahoo is charging them between $30 and $40 for the contents of your Yahoo account. But it's still up in the air what business ties exist between the government and Google- and how much (and to what extent) they're charging the cops for access to your gmail account.
As for Slashdot, I guess it depends on whether law enforcement thinks your posts are really worth handing Bob Malda a $5.
Maybe this will help?
Oh well... in a few years they'll be after me for dressing like Chris Hansen.
Allegedly GWBush has a fairly high IQ (well at least 120+)
(Allegedly there, I FTFY.) That's alleged by people who allegedly have an allegedly low IQ themselves (well at least 80-, allegedly) and will, I allege, show up shortly to allege otherwise. I'll also allege that I'd like to hear what new alleged topics Bush allegedly had the capacity to allegedly understand.
They allegedly always allege that Bush was allegedly smarter than Obama (allegedly our new president, although he allegedly has some alleged paperwork problem allegedly involving his alleged birth in the State allegedly of Hawaii- allegedly one of the States which are themselves alleged to be United- that magically [allegedly] transports his alleged birth to the alleged nation of Kenya as if that would allegedly make them alleged victims even if it were allegedly true in the alleged first place).
Now before anyone allegedly jumps on me, please allegedly remember that I allegedly only alleged these things were alleged, so I'm allegedly sorry.
Well I think we've seen by now that the astronauts aboard the ISS would be cool with it.
I talked to Google but flunked the initial 20 minute phone screen. In the last five minutes the guy asked one of those puzzle questions where you have to find the O(N) vs O(N^2) solution and I didn't see the O(N) trick in time.
Now every time I use gmail the ad at top says "Google is looking for software engineers! Apply today!" and I want to punch a hole through the screen.
I just poked Osama Bin Laden on his wall.
If you want a movie of successive MRI layers, you can check out this animated GIF of an MRI scan of my own head (sagittal plane).
Of course not. I wouldn't dream of violating the Agreement between Verizon and myself as defined in their brand new AUP.
Well, this is a probe, being conducted by people with legal training, into the intricacies of a past scientific discussion. Any perceived irregularity in the history of remarks back and forth in that discussion is being viewed as destruction of evidence. They're going through these stupid emails with the gusto they would have raiding a lawyer's office seeking incriminating documents that have been withheld or suppressed.
Lawyers seek truth, but of the legal sort in the eyes of the law. Scientists seek to refine theory and they view "truth" as something unattainable but that can be approximated by a theoretical framework to an arbitrary extent depending on its supporting evidence... to the point at which only a few crackpots ignorant of statistics might be waving a single data point around. Here, we are essentially seeing lawyers fancying themselves as seeking the answer to the same question that the scientists were supposedly discussing, on their way to their final goal- proving in court or in some official hearing that the entire climate climate change hypothesis has been nothing more than a big scam for money. This is a meme that's spreading fast and gaining credence.
This sort of probe would be understandable in certain circumstances, e.g. if the scientists were discussing how they'll get away with cross-breeding humans and llamas, which is (now) illegal. But in this case, what they are after is evidence that this particular scientific hypothesis is a fraud being pushed by a wide conspiracy of thousands of scientists. For supporting evidence, they plan to submit as evidence their Exhibit A- climate change is not occurring. Which indicates that the hypothesis was merely conspiratorial. Maybe they can even get a judge to agree, who knows. They'll at least get their hands on a bit of goofy documentary evidence that looks fishy- good enough for their conspiracy theory fans who currently whine about birth certificates.
It's a repost from four years ago. I didn't bother editing.
I left out the page I referenced with a schematic. (The page is still there.) Everything to the right of his "C1" capacitor is what I'm describing; the stuff to the left is just for making a DC wall adapter to power it.
With apologies to myself.
GOOFUS has a PhD.
GALLANT has a PhD in a field unrelated to his research.
GOOFUS gets little respect as a scientist outside the scientific community.
GALLANT gets little respect as a scientist inside the scientific community.
GOOFUS drives a beat-up old car.
GALLANT drives a BMW unless his chauffeur is driving.
GOOFUS wears street clothes to work, maybe a lab suit on occasion.
GALLANT wears three piece suits at all times.
GOOFUS is employed by a "university", a "hospital", or a "laboratory".
GALLANT is employed by a "Coalition", an "Institute", an "Association", a "Foundation", a "Council", or a "White House".
GOOFUS earns $30000 per year unless they cut his funding.
GALLANT earns $200000 per year but makes his real money from speaking fees.
GOOFUS lives anywhere in the country.
GALLANT lives in a wealthy area near Washington DC, but may have additional homes elsewhere.
GOOFUS may sometimes be filmed standing in front of big melting icebergs.
GALLANT may be filmed sitting in front of a bookcase or standing behind a podium at a $2000 per plate fundraiser, although there may be ice melting in his drink.
GOOFUS is a dues-paying member of several scientific grassroots organizations.
GALLANT is on the payroll of several scientific astroturf organizations.
GOOFUS gets summoned for jury duty but is never picked as a juror.
GALLANT claims "the jury is still out" on evolution or global warming, since he considers himself to be on the jury.
GOOFUS maintains the world is five billion years old.
GALLANT isn't really saying, but creationists distribute his pamphlets all the time.
GOOFUS claims the world is warming as a direct result of human activity.
GALLANT either claims that climate change doesn't exist, or if it does, that humans have nothing to do with it.
GOOFUS and his graduate students do the dirty work of collecting raw data and looking for conclusions to be drawn from it.
GALLANT does the dirty work of discrediting GOOFUS by manipulating his data in Excel with statistically invalid techniques.
GOOFUS writes scientific papers and grant proposals.
GALLANT writes the nation's environmental legislation and a column for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
GOOFUS draws scientific conclusions from the data he collects that usually come out in agreement with the scientific consensus.
GALLANT paints the scientific consensus as being entirely political in nature and enjoys comparing himself to Galileo.
GOOFUS is heavily trained to be a skeptic and to treat information from all sources with a skeptical mind.
GALLANT is heavily marketed as a skeptic but reserves his skepticism for GOOFUS.
GOOFUS isn't paid much attention by the press since his opinions are commonplace among scientists.
GALLANT holds maverick opinions for a scientist which keeps him busy running from one balanced talk show to the next.
GOOFUS has no PR skills.
GALLANT leverages his PR experience all the time, although he has access to paid PR staff.
GOOFUS claims the sky is falling and we have to take painful steps to reduce CO2 emissions now.
GALLANT claims the free market will take care of it and recommends solving the problem by conning Zimbabwe out of their pollution credits.
GOOFUS advises his kids not to go into science.
GALLANT advises the president.
My applets run just fine on a Timex Sinclair 1000.
What a bunch of babies everybody is. We implementing method calls in XML over HTTP from server to server as if they're pretending to be frigging browsers to each other. Remember when the world was simpler and we were using CORBA for that stuff? Or when we were going down to the TCP/IP layer and using sockets, and figuring our own stuff out? Before TCP we were sending raw IP packets. Uphill. Both ways. And it was good enough for us. We weren't kids anymore, writing BASIC programs on our little 8 bit machines. Of course BASIC was way too slow and you really had to go down to the machine code level to write anything that wouldn't embarrass you in front of your little friends. Really, all this stuff is based on a protocol that everybody should be using: TTL. And transistor-transistor logic should be good enough for anybody. If you can't rewrite your goofy SOA application using TTL it just shows how ignorant you are about what you're really doing.
(I'm going to be a lameass and repost this that I wrote this seven years ago, when an "old busted TV" meant a CRT tube. For purposes of this discussion it still does)
You can easily make a Tesla coil if you have an old busted TV to rip apart. In general, the older and bigger the TV is, the better. And color TVs are better than black and white. This won't be a *great* Tesla coil, but it will throw a spark a few inches long and you can do all the standard Tesla coil tricks with it (St. Elmo's fire, etc.) without investing too much time or money.
Yank the flyback transformer out of the TV, and discard all its primary windings. Keep the big high voltage secondary winding (the one with the zillions of turns). It's usually encased in rubber and may look like a big rubber wheel. Its main lead has really thick insulation and connects to the side of the picture tube (where it looks like a stethoscope). The other lead (the ground) won't be as heavily insulated.
The only other parts you need are two NPN power transistors (2N3055), two 5W power resistors (20 ohm and 200 ohm), some wire, and a good supply of DC current (12-24 V). The circuit is a piece of cake. The first time I did it, I put the whole thing together with alligator clips.
This circuit has two primary windings around the flyback transformer core. The power winding is 8 turns, with a tap in the middle. The feedback winding is smaller (4 turns), also with a tap in the middle. The power winding leads connect to the collector leads on the transistors, with the center tap going to the +24 V DC power source. The feedback winding leads connect to the gate leads, with the center tap there going to +2-3 V DC (connect the resistors in series across the DC power to get the lower voltage in between). The emitter leads are grounded.
As current flows through one transistor, the changing field in the core induces a voltage in the feedback windings that turns that transistor off and the other one on. Then current flows the other way, and the same thing happens in reverse. So the circuit tunes itself to the proper frequency. But it also means that the first time you power it up you run a 50-50 chance of connecting the leads to the wrong transistor gates, in which case you get a stable DC circuit. So if it doesn't work the first time, try exchanging the gate leads.
This circuit is fairly well known, and doing a Google search for "flyback" and "Tesla" I found a schematic [aaroncake.net] for it right away. The guy mentions on that page that the transistors get really hot and he is not kidding- they do. Don't leave it running for more than a minute without a heat sink. The RF noise generated by Tesla coils is incredible, so expect to generate some interference. They make lots of smelly ozone. And if you let a spark go through paper, you can start a fire so be careful.
If you're lucky you can get 20-30 kV, which throws a purple spark a couple inches. (I only got about 4 kV out of mine- the spark was about a half inch long.) Pick up a neon bulb when you're at Radio Shack- these light up if they're around. If you touch one terminal of a fluorescent to ground then half of it will glow brightly between that end and the place you are holding it. The effect on a candle flame is interesting. Don't stick your bare finger near it because the spark does hurt if it hits unprotected skin. But if you hold a metal object and use that to touch it, you don't feel a thing (it's high frequency AC). Cool tricks include having sparks jump from the coil to a metal object in your hand, having sparks jump from a metal object in your other hand to ground (even a lousy ground), and having fluorescent tubes glow softly if you hold them in your other hand.