The code in the sig downloads and displays all stories in the/. rss feed while filtering out those posted by kdawson. That just can't (practically) be done with a oneliner in perl, python or ruby. I've been using Linux for eight years, but the GP is right, that blows all other shells out of the water.
import feedparser; print "\n--\n".join([x.summary_detail.value for x in feedparser.parse("http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot").entries if x.author != "kdawson"])
No, I'm saying that bash is perfectly adequate for most interactive shell purposes, and if you want to do anything more OO, or generally prorgamming oriented you learn something that will actually do that job (just one of (pick your poison) perl, python, ruby, or scheme). Yes, it's not ideal, but it is quite adequate.
I suspect it would go down better today now people are used to writing object-oriented code, which is a much better match to the message-passing idea than the C code that was more common at the time.
Indeed, it isn't that hard to take the OO paradigm and simply say that a method call is a message being passed from the caller object to the object for which the the method is being applied. Add some niceties to define which objects can be executed in parallel and method preconditions as wait conditions and you have a fairly simply way to program in object-oriented fashion and have the compiler do the work to make it multithreaded. See SCOOP for the basic ideas. Sadly, since it was proposed for Eiffel rather than C++ (and no-one in the C++ world bothers to look at what other languages are doing), I doubt it will actually get any traction and catch on.
It's rather newish (2006) but IMO PowerShell generally blows bash and all other Unix shells out of the water. Arguably, PowerShell is much better for Windows, as more APIs in Windows are object-oriented and thus fit better with PowerShell.
Take a look at my sig...
Usually if people want to do things along the lines of your sig they'll use perl or python, and yes, that can and does mean as one-liners on the command line with "perl -e" or "python -c". Bash is good at what it is primarily designed for, which is managing files (usually text based), and that's more useful on UNIX since a great many things are presented as text files to be managed. If you need anything more complicated then there are certainly tools to do that ready at hand from perl and python and ruby, though to things like scsh if scheme is more to your taste.
The software is too new of a version. I want/need version 2.5 and the version that apt-get wants to install is 3.0. Now what?
The you're still probably better off than on other systems if you can only find/download/buy version 3.0 and no one will sell you 2.5 anymore. If you're lucky on linux you may be able to acquire and compile the source for the old version -- not pretty, but better than it simply being unavailable.
Isn't a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis necessarily non-constructive? If so, a computer can't answer your question.
A computer can answer the question if the answer is that the hypothesis is false. A proof would indeed be non-constructive, but a counterexample is perfectly constructible (though there are theorems demonstrating that it has to be potentially computationally infeasibly large -- at least on current hardware).
Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures.
You may have an interesting definition of significant change. The satellite data for temperatures shows an increase that is quite notable.
Average ground station readings do show a mild warming of 0.6 to 0.8C over the last 100 years, which is well within the natural variations recorded in the last millennium.
Most reconstructions of temperatures over the last millenium (and that includes many more than those offered by Mann and Bradley) show that the current observed warming is significant in terms of the rate at which it has occurred. Indeed, most show the current warming over the last 100 years as outside the range of reconstructed temperatures over the last millenium.
The ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas ("heat islands"), which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas ("land use effects").
Of course the land based records attempt to take such effects into account, but aside from that we also have the ocean temperature records (which agree closely with the land based records), and several studies which all conclude that UHI effects don't cause the warming observed: [Parker 2004], [Parker 2006], [Peterson 2003]. Not to mention that if we go back to the question of satellite temperatures we see that they show no significant difference in trend to land based observations.
Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time. For instance, the Medieval Warm Period, from around 1000 to1200 AD (when the Vikings farmed on Greenland) was followed by a period known as the Little Ice Age
Mention of the Vikings on Greenland wrt the medieval warm period being very warm is deceptive. If you actually look at where the viking settlements were (Eastern Settlement, Western Settlement), and then check satellite imagery of those areas (Eastern Settlement, Western Settlement), you'll see that they are in sheltered fjords that are naturally quite green and suitable for farming. Some photos of the Viking ruins will confirm this (eg. this, or this).
The "hockey stick", a poster boy of both the UN's IPCC and Canada's Environment Department, ignores historical recorded climatic swings, and has now also been proven to be flawed and statistically unreliable as well. It is a computer construct and a faulty one at that.
Of course, as noted earlier, the Mann, Bradley, Hughes temperature reconstruction of 1998 is far from the only such effort. The others produced qualitatively similar results. Further, while there has been dispute of the original 1998 piece, the National Academy of Science report on the subject concluded tha
In fact, I'd wager that if you came to the US with a camera, and took a thousand random pictures of a thousand random locations, you'd see the exact same number of US flags as you would Aussie flags if you did the same in Australia.
Having travelled in both the US and Australia I'm pretty sure that's wrong -- you would see far more US flags than Australian flags in my experience.
I think what you *really* noticed is how perceptive one is of flags when they aren't their own flags, and how unnoticed their own flag goes.
Except I am not Australian so it wasn't *my* flag going unnoticed. Furthermore, having travelled in Canada, the UK, and New Zealand, I would say the same about the relative prevalence of national flags there. Am I just somehow failing to notice commonwealth flags? Fine, I've also travelled in Japan and France and, you know what, you get the same result: national flags there are less common than US flags are in the US.
I find it bizarre that the US and Canada don't have something similar to the Schengen agreement in Europe
I suspect Canada would be open to such an agreement, but would require that it be reciprocal, and allow Canadians to travel and work in the US. I'm guessing that this is the sticking point. The US seems happy with the free trade agreement because Canada honours it, and the US simply ignores it whenever it is inconvenient for them (see the soft wood lumber dispute).
It's trivial to change the size of the smoothing window in the code, so I played around with sizes in the range you suggest, but to no avail. The correlation you claim just isn't there.
Also, for all of us who doubt all the global warming CO2 spoonfeeding, that would like do have some DIY experience; do these steps;
download sunspot data for the previous century from somewhere
sum those data over 30 years
compare those to any of the global temperature datasets
Did you know that there were about twice as many sunspots in the last decades of the previous century as in the early 1900s? And three times as many as in 1830?
Okay, I followed your steps (well, actually I followed some similar steps a while ago) and the result was this. Historically things don't look to bad, but the last 50 years or so show a distinct divergence in sunspot activity and temperature trends. That divergence happens to line up nicely with CO2 trends. Your claims of clear correlation in sunspot activity with recent warming just don't hold up upon inspection of the data. Yes there are clear correlations between sunspot activity and global temperature; that should come as no surprise: of course changes in solar activity affect climate. Those correlations do not in any way account for the current observed rise in temperatures however.
The python code to generate the plot (pulling the latest data directly from online sources) is included on the linked page, so if you want to play, have at it.
Not to mention all the R&D in the Space program. Bi that was all "new" technology. I don't see a whole lot new in batteries. How much more can be done in batteries without getting into the exotic and expensive superconducting type of materials. I think it's a boondoogle and a waste of money.
Yes, if you don't see anything new that could be done with battery technology then clearly nothing can be done and its a waste of money. Or possibly you aren't an expert on cutting edge approaches in battery technology? I'm certainly not an expert, but I am aware of considerable research effort going in to batteries right now, with significant promise of gains in the near future. The "killer app" (so to speak) is batteries for electric cars (though, of course, there will be many other spin-offs). That means we ideally want something small, light, quick to recharge, and with very large capacity. There is plenty of room for improvement in all those aspects despite significant improvement in all of them over the last decade. More research can only help.
I'd say you weren't paying attention. I didn't say that static typing never catches errors, I said that it does not catch as many errors as originally envisioned. As nearly any programmer can attest, it's a rare treat to have a program operate correctly after the first compile. More often than not, you need to perform iterative development and debugging to ensure the correctness of the code.
I'm not actually sure that's so. Yes, with many popular statically typed languages that's the case. On the other hand I've heard plenty of stories of Ada, Haskell, and other language programmers finding that, indeed, if they can get it to compile it works as they intended. This, of course, raises its own issues: you may have to do some hoop jumping and work to manage to get that compile to actually work. That means those languages might not be so ideal when you just want to muck out or quickly protoype some code (depending on exactly what you want to do of course). On the other hand, you are actually getting something for all that static typing.
The point is that is a flawed design that promotes inadvertent errors in code just like C's '=' and '==' operators are too easy to carelessly mix up
May I suggest you try Ada or Eiffel then, which go to some trouble to try and weed out any such errors as early as possible (usually at compilation time).
My position is simply that other factors have been ignored by the run-of-the-mill, everyday "greenhouse gas alarmist"...
Which is true, but I wouldn't think it should be of great concern since the science actually shows solar and other influences to be a minor element in current warming -- it is greenhouse gases that are of significant concern. The general public has a simplified view, taking only the most important points, of almost every scientific issue, simply because a person can't know all the details and nuances of everything. Given the relatively low impact of solar variation and other natural forcings, they really aren't crucial to a basic understanding of the issue. I wonder if you are perhaps ignoring factors as well -- such as the cooling effects of aerosols, particularly sulphate aeorsols, that have been dampening warming effects, or the fact that the oceans actually absorb a large amount of the CO2 we produce (so atmospheric levels don't climb at the rate we emit) but are approaching saturation, etc.
And I just cited at least two papers that specifically address the issue of solar variability with regard to it's explanatory power with regard to current warming and to what degree it better explains the warming than CO2. Both papers come up with the same result: the numbers just don't add up as required, and CO2 remains the best candidate.
You seem to be under some impression that solar variation as a possible influence in current warming has been ignored by those scientists who view CO2 as the major contributor. This is simply false. There have been many people working on solar variation as a contributor to global warming. Let's go straight to the summaries by those you potentially feel are ignoring it: the IPCC. In the Third Assessment Report from 2001* the IPCC devotes an entire section to considering solar variation and its impact as a forcing causing current warming. There's several pages there, so be sure to click "next", and feel free to follow up any and all of the references given. The forcing chart shows that solar variation is considered signifcant, but not as much of a contributor as greenhouse gas forcings. Admittedly it is listed as "very poorly understood". You may, however, wish to read the section on attribution of climate change to get an idea of how such conclusions are made -- again, please feel free to follow up the referenced papers from that section also.
That brings us to the Fourth Assessment Report from 2008. The forcing chart is now on page 4 of the Summary for Policy Makers and shows that, with further study, then forcing extent of solar variation has been reduced. You can read Chapter 2, from page 188 onwards, for the details of the various studies (with references that you can follow up as you please) into how such conclusions were reached. In other words, solar variability has been considered an important potential contributor, and source of significant study, even to the IPCC for many many years. No one is ignoring it -- rather they are quantifying it, and considering it closely when attributing recent warming.
Since then we also have that Damon and Laut study (reference int he previous post) which covers the issue of solar influence via cosmic rays. So again, no one is ignoring solar variation, it just doesn't add up so far when you actually sit down and run the numbers, while greenhouse gases do.
* (The Second Assessment Report from 1995 also considered solar variation, but I can't link to that online)
Well yes, I was discussing the figure I linked first in my comment: the graph which demonstrates the lack of correlation between sunspots and the most recent warming, while showing the greater correlation in overall trend with CO2. That is, this one. You'll note that that temperature data is indeed from the CRU. This, of course also explains why the sunspot data is different, and also why I mention CO2 data. A perusal of all the figures I linked would probably have made this clear very quickly...
Along that line, there is no explanation as to how deuterium data relates to sunspots. Is it a linear relationship? How would a reader know?
Well, for that figure I would presume anyone actually curious about such details would manage to note that the delta-deuterium data is a proxy for temperature not sunspots, and to try a simple search on the relevant terms. They'll rapidly pull up things like this, which should get them started (and answer your question off the bat -- yes, it is a linear relationship). After all, that's how I learned any of this.
My point being that considering just the information that was presented, as I saw it, even WITH the two sources you referenced, does not exactly prove anything.
Well no, the second figure showing data for the last 10000 years simply shows that there is some general correlation between solar activity and sunspots (though it is imperfect). It was the first figure that counts: it shows that while there may have been good correlation historically, the current warming trend does not correlate at all well with sunpots, but instead correlates rather better than with CO2 -- exactly the opposite of your original claims.
Look, I have little doubt that the sun influences the earth's climate. Nor do I have any care to argue that, historically, there are correlations between solar activity, sunspot numbers, and global temperatures.; I agree that that is decently established. The question, however, is not whether there is a solar influence on climate, but whether the current warming can be adequately attributed to such effects. People have studied this, because it's an important question. The result is that, according to most studies, up to around 30% of the current warming can be attributed to solar factors, but that leaves a large chunk for which, at this time, greenhouse gases remain by far the best explanation. Since you like references to published papers, perhaps a good start would be:
Foukal, Peter; et al. (2006). "Variations in solar luminosity and their effect on the Earth's climate". Nature 443 (7108): 161-166. doi:10.1038/nature05072
Damon, Paul E.; Paul Laut (28 September 2004). "Pattern of Strange Errors Plagues Solar Activity and Terrestrial Climate Data". Eos 85 (39): 370-374. doi:10.1029/2004EO390005
And this chart is made up of data that came from... where?
The data sources listed in the Data Sources section on the page.
I did not see ANY citations of sources on that Wikipedia page
You didn't look too hard. The sites from which the raw data was taken are all listed. A cursory inspection of those sites will provide the information you want. Since that seems to be too much work:
Brohan, P., J.J. Kennedy, I. Harris, S.F.B. Tett and P.D. Jones, 2006: Uncertainty estimates in regional and global observed temperature changes: a new dataset from 1850. J. Geophysical Research 111, D12106, doi:10.1029/2005JD006548
Jones, P.D., New, M., Parker, D.E., Martin, S. and Rigor, I.G., 1999: Surface air temperature and its variations over the last 150 years. Reviews of Geophysics 37, 173-199.
Rayner, N.A., P. Brohan, D.E. Parker, C.K. Folland, J.J. Kennedy, M. Vanicek, T. Ansell and S.F.B. Tett, 2006: Improved analyses of changes and uncertainties in marine temperature measured in situ since the mid-nineteenth century: the HadSST2 dataset. J. Climate, 19, 446-469.
Rayner, N.A., Parker, D.E., Horton, E.B., Folland, C.K., Alexander, L.V, Rowell, D.P., Kent, E.C. and Kaplan, A., 2003: Globally complete analyses of sea surface temperature, sea ice and night marine air temperature, 1871-2000. J. Geophysical Research 108, 4407, doi:10.1029/2002JD002670
Carbonell, M., Terradas, J., Olivier, R. and Ballester, J.L. The statistical significance of the North-South asymmetry of solar activity revisited, A&A, 476, p 951-957.
Balthasar, H. Rotational periodicities in sunspot relative numbers, A&A, 471, p 281-287.
Pishkalo, M. Reconstruction of the Heliospheric Current Sheet Tilts Using Sunspot Numbers, Solar Physics, 233, p 277-290
Kunjaya, C., Radiman, I., Dupe Z., Herdiwidjaja, D., Hakim, M.I. On The Prediction of El Niño 2002 Based On the Peak Of Sunspot Number in 2000, Proceedings of the ISCS Symp. 2003: Solar Variability as an Input to the Earth's Environment, ESA SP-535.
Rybak, J. Karlovsky, V. Mutual relations of the intermediate periodicities of the Wolf sunspot number, Proceedings of the ISCS Symp. 2003: Solar Variability as an Input to the Earth's Environment, ESA SP-535 p.145-148
The CO2 data was drawn from two listed sources. The first is the Mauna Loa observatory, and the second is the Law Dome ice core project in Antarctica. Both data sets are available via the NOAA. Mauna Loa data is from the Earth Systems Research Laboratory, Global Monitoring Division. Among the papers using this data set are:
C.D. Keeling, R.B. Bacastow, A.E. Bainbridge, C.A. Ekdahl, P.R. Guenther, and L.S. Waterman, Atmospheric carbon dioxide variations at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, Tellus, vol. 28, 538-551, 1976.
K.W. Thoning, P.P. Tans, and W.D. Komhyr, Atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa Observatory 2. Analysis of the NOAA GMCC data, 1974-1985, J. Geophys. Research, vol. 94, 8549-8565, 1989.
Etheridge, D.M., G.I. Pearman, and F. de Silva. 1988. Atmospheric trace-gas variations as revealed by air trapped in an ice core from Law Dome, Antarctica. Ann. Glaciol.
Further, it completely ignores the inverse correlation of warming with sunspot activity, which is a much stronger correlation than greenhouse gases could ever pretend to be...Don't believe my statement about sunspots? Then look it up. I did.
Okay, I did. I pulled the raw data from the Climatic Research Unit is the UK, the Solar Influences Data Analysis Center in Belgium, and CO2 data from Mauna Loa and ice core data. If you plot them you get this. Once we smooth out the high frequency signal so we can actually look at the major trends we see you don't really have much of a point at all. Okay, maybe I'm looking at the wrong time scales. Let's pull 10000 years worth of reconstructed proxy data on sunspots and temperature directly from the NOAA. The result is this. Yup, there's some (imperfect) historical correlation (as one might expect since the sun is clearly going to have some effect on climate). But back to the first plot -- there we have no solar correlation to the recent warming... so what exactly are you talking about?
Doesn't get in the way ? As soon as you click in a window it comes to the front and obscures the material you were trying to view...I suppose it can be turned off by editing the Gnome XML configuration file (a staple of the traditional Gnome user friendliness) but it's a major pain in the neither region.
Out of curiousity, I opened the configuration editor (the graphical frontend to all those XML files that you can, if you wish, edit by hand instead). I selected Edit->Find, and typed "raise" in the search field (and selected "Search also in key names"). That produced a list of results, including "/apps/metacity/general/raise_on_click"; selecting that in the search results took me to the relevant key, with an obvious checkbox beside it, and a detailed description. The checkbox was selected. I unselected it. Now clicking on windows doesn't make them raise (instead we have the traditional UNIX WM of a click on the titlebar being required to raise the window). This setting was easy to find, clearly described, and (very) easy to change, all through the GUI for configuration changes in GNOME. Beyond the fact that it is classed as a more advanced configuration option (and thus only accessible through the configuration editor, and not directly exposed in the basic preferences) I really don't see the problem.
I'm pulling it from the Climatic Research Unit in the UK. They've been very meticulous about maintinaing and publishing their data sets. The basic FAQ on the dataset and collection methodology is here. Among the many papers published over the years on the methodology and estimation of uncertainty, there is at least this freely available, though you can check:
Jones, P.D., New, M., Parker, D.E., Martin, S. and Rigor, I.G., 1999: Surface air temperature and its variations over the last 150 years. Reviews of Geophysics 37, 173-199
Rayner, N.A., P. Brohan, D.E. Parker, C.K. Folland, J.J. Kennedy, M. Vanicek, T. Ansell and S.F.B. Tett, 2006: Improved analyses of changes and uncertainties in marine temperature measured in situ since the mid-nineteenth century: the HadSST2 dataset. J. Climate, 19, 446-469.
Rayner, N.A., Parker, D.E., Horton, E.B., Folland, C.K., Alexander, L.V, Rowell, D.P., Kent, E.C. and Kaplan, A., 2003: Globally complete analyses of sea surface temperature, sea ice and night marine air temperature, 1871-2000. J. Geophysical Research 108, 4407
as well if you like (and have access to the respective journals).
The entire "this century is hotter then last" has been disproved back when they found errors in the calculations the US made.
Actually no. There were errors, and they did have an effect on which years were the hottest for the US, but had a much smaller (almost neglible effect) on the calculated global temperatures. And, of course, that is the NASA GISS dataset that you are speaking of. The datasets I'm referring to, HadCRUT3 and CRUTEM3, from the UK, are quite independent in their processing of raw data, and did not contain the same errors.
In fact, I haven't heard claims like your making in over 4 years after they revised a bunch of shit found to of been faulty.
Really? He claimed:
The hottest 10yrs on record have occured in the last 12yrs.
Every year in the 21st century has been hotter than any year in the 20th century (exluding 1998).
which is actually a very reasonable claim. We can put it to the test easily enough. Here is the latest CRUTEM data, fully up to date, including 2008 data. According to the file format description, we find the average annual global anomaly (from the average temperature from 1961-1990 used as a base point) in the last column of every second row. Scan down. You'll find the the original poster is indeed correct in his claims.
Just because you are so certain, let's go with the dataset you're referring to: Hansen's GISTemp from NASA. Again, let's grab the latest data with the relevant corrections you are complaining about made: here (that's global averages for land and sea surface temperatures). Again, scan down and you'll see that, surprisingly enough, the original poster is still correct in his claims.
One of the wonderful things about the internet is that it actually puts a vast array of resources and data right at your fingertips, so you can actually go to the source data itself rather than relying on second and third hand reports. Apparently that was too much work for you. Hopefully, however, with the links laid out above, you can click through and verify for yourself that the data actually shows what it is claimed to show.
Do you ever find it frustrating that the same people who mock Ted Stevens for his ignorant ideas about the internet, which he stated with such arrogant certainty, have their own ignorant ideas about other fields which they state with even greater arrogant certainty? The "I know something, therefore I know as much as experts" mentality that seems particularly pervasive in, say, global warming debates.
The reality is that the climate has been remarkably calm and forgiving for the last 400 years or so. Much further back than we have detailed history of. What was the climate like in 1200 AD? How about 150 AD? 2500 BC? Sorry, but all we can do is guess from some very indistinct records. We have some evidence in ice cores, some historical documents and some biological evidence.
Well, actually we have ice cores, tree ring data, data from corals, and from sediment records, all from various locations all over the word, which can be cross referenced against one another. Yes, that means we have a "guess", and each individual record is indistinct, but in combination they provide a fairly good record.
That wouldn't be allowed at work, on the grounds that nobody could take over and edit the equations if I went under a bus.
There are things like the OOolatex plugin that provide a managed method for such image insertion, allowing you to simply select and equation, call up a dialog box with the TeX, re-edit, and re-insert the new rendering conveniently and easily. It's a very basic plugin for OpenOffice.org. I am pretty sure very similar things exist for Microsoft Word. At that point the only difficulty in someone else editing the equations is their inability to read and write LaTeX; and if they have any business writing and editing any number of equations they should know LaTeX.
Where do all you folks work, that you can choose the tools you work with? And how do they manage business continuity?
Any sane person who writes a lot of equations for a living will happily grab LaTeX, even if it is in the form of a plugin for standard word processors described above. Once you have an entire department/work group saying that this small free piece of software is going to have a very significant boost to their productivity very few companies say no. I doubt these people are getting to pick and choose thier softare completely, but they can request software that is going to have a large positive impact on their productivity, and they will often get it.
Slashdot Mirror
The code in the sig downloads and displays all stories in the /. rss feed while filtering out those posted by kdawson. That just can't (practically) be done with a oneliner in perl, python or ruby. I've been using Linux for eight years, but the GP is right, that blows all other shells out of the water.
import feedparser; print "\n--\n".join([x.summary_detail.value for x in feedparser.parse("http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot").entries if x.author != "kdawson"])
No, I'm saying that bash is perfectly adequate for most interactive shell purposes, and if you want to do anything more OO, or generally prorgamming oriented you learn something that will actually do that job (just one of (pick your poison) perl, python, ruby, or scheme). Yes, it's not ideal, but it is quite adequate.
I suspect it would go down better today now people are used to writing object-oriented code, which is a much better match to the message-passing idea than the C code that was more common at the time.
Indeed, it isn't that hard to take the OO paradigm and simply say that a method call is a message being passed from the caller object to the object for which the the method is being applied. Add some niceties to define which objects can be executed in parallel and method preconditions as wait conditions and you have a fairly simply way to program in object-oriented fashion and have the compiler do the work to make it multithreaded. See SCOOP for the basic ideas. Sadly, since it was proposed for Eiffel rather than C++ (and no-one in the C++ world bothers to look at what other languages are doing), I doubt it will actually get any traction and catch on.
It's rather newish (2006) but IMO PowerShell generally blows bash and all other Unix shells out of the water. Arguably, PowerShell is much better for Windows, as more APIs in Windows are object-oriented and thus fit better with PowerShell.
Take a look at my sig...
Usually if people want to do things along the lines of your sig they'll use perl or python, and yes, that can and does mean as one-liners on the command line with "perl -e" or "python -c". Bash is good at what it is primarily designed for, which is managing files (usually text based), and that's more useful on UNIX since a great many things are presented as text files to be managed. If you need anything more complicated then there are certainly tools to do that ready at hand from perl and python and ruby, though to things like scsh if scheme is more to your taste.
The software is too new of a version. I want/need version 2.5 and the version that apt-get wants to install is 3.0. Now what?
The you're still probably better off than on other systems if you can only find/download/buy version 3.0 and no one will sell you 2.5 anymore. If you're lucky on linux you may be able to acquire and compile the source for the old version -- not pretty, but better than it simply being unavailable.
Isn't a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis necessarily non-constructive? If so, a computer can't answer your question.
A computer can answer the question if the answer is that the hypothesis is false. A proof would indeed be non-constructive, but a counterexample is perfectly constructible (though there are theorems demonstrating that it has to be potentially computationally infeasibly large -- at least on current hardware).
Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures.
You may have an interesting definition of significant change. The satellite data for temperatures shows an increase that is quite notable.
Average ground station readings do show a mild warming of 0.6 to 0.8C over the last 100 years, which is well within the natural variations recorded in the last millennium.
Most reconstructions of temperatures over the last millenium (and that includes many more than those offered by Mann and Bradley) show that the current observed warming is significant in terms of the rate at which it has occurred. Indeed, most show the current warming over the last 100 years as outside the range of reconstructed temperatures over the last millenium.
The ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas ("heat islands"), which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas ("land use effects").
Of course the land based records attempt to take such effects into account, but aside from that we also have the ocean temperature records (which agree closely with the land based records), and several studies which all conclude that UHI effects don't cause the warming observed: [Parker 2004], [Parker 2006], [Peterson 2003]. Not to mention that if we go back to the question of satellite temperatures we see that they show no significant difference in trend to land based observations.
Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time. For instance, the Medieval Warm Period, from around 1000 to1200 AD (when the Vikings farmed on Greenland) was followed by a period known as the Little Ice Age
Mention of the Vikings on Greenland wrt the medieval warm period being very warm is deceptive. If you actually look at where the viking settlements were (Eastern Settlement, Western Settlement), and then check satellite imagery of those areas (Eastern Settlement, Western Settlement), you'll see that they are in sheltered fjords that are naturally quite green and suitable for farming. Some photos of the Viking ruins will confirm this (eg. this, or this).
The "hockey stick", a poster boy of both the UN's IPCC and Canada's Environment Department, ignores historical recorded climatic swings, and has now also been proven to be flawed and statistically unreliable as well. It is a computer construct and a faulty one at that.
Of course, as noted earlier, the Mann, Bradley, Hughes temperature reconstruction of 1998 is far from the only such effort. The others produced qualitatively similar results. Further, while there has been dispute of the original 1998 piece, the National Academy of Science report on the subject concluded tha
In fact, I'd wager that if you came to the US with a camera, and took a thousand random pictures of a thousand random locations, you'd see the exact same number of US flags as you would Aussie flags if you did the same in Australia.
Having travelled in both the US and Australia I'm pretty sure that's wrong -- you would see far more US flags than Australian flags in my experience.
I think what you *really* noticed is how perceptive one is of flags when they aren't their own flags, and how unnoticed their own flag goes.
Except I am not Australian so it wasn't *my* flag going unnoticed. Furthermore, having travelled in Canada, the UK, and New Zealand, I would say the same about the relative prevalence of national flags there. Am I just somehow failing to notice commonwealth flags? Fine, I've also travelled in Japan and France and, you know what, you get the same result: national flags there are less common than US flags are in the US.
I find it bizarre that the US and Canada don't have something similar to the Schengen agreement in Europe
I suspect Canada would be open to such an agreement, but would require that it be reciprocal, and allow Canadians to travel and work in the US. I'm guessing that this is the sticking point. The US seems happy with the free trade agreement because Canada honours it, and the US simply ignores it whenever it is inconvenient for them (see the soft wood lumber dispute).
It's trivial to change the size of the smoothing window in the code, so I played around with sizes in the range you suggest, but to no avail. The correlation you claim just isn't there.
Also, for all of us who doubt all the global warming CO2 spoonfeeding, that would like do have some DIY experience; do these steps;
Did you know that there were about twice as many sunspots in the last decades of the previous century as in the early 1900s? And three times as many as in 1830?
Okay, I followed your steps (well, actually I followed some similar steps a while ago) and the result was this. Historically things don't look to bad, but the last 50 years or so show a distinct divergence in sunspot activity and temperature trends. That divergence happens to line up nicely with CO2 trends. Your claims of clear correlation in sunspot activity with recent warming just don't hold up upon inspection of the data. Yes there are clear correlations between sunspot activity and global temperature; that should come as no surprise: of course changes in solar activity affect climate. Those correlations do not in any way account for the current observed rise in temperatures however.
The python code to generate the plot (pulling the latest data directly from online sources) is included on the linked page, so if you want to play, have at it.
Not to mention all the R&D in the Space program. Bi that was all "new" technology. I don't see a whole lot new in batteries. How much more can be done in batteries without getting into the exotic and expensive superconducting type of materials. I think it's a boondoogle and a waste of money.
Yes, if you don't see anything new that could be done with battery technology then clearly nothing can be done and its a waste of money. Or possibly you aren't an expert on cutting edge approaches in battery technology? I'm certainly not an expert, but I am aware of considerable research effort going in to batteries right now, with significant promise of gains in the near future. The "killer app" (so to speak) is batteries for electric cars (though, of course, there will be many other spin-offs). That means we ideally want something small, light, quick to recharge, and with very large capacity. There is plenty of room for improvement in all those aspects despite significant improvement in all of them over the last decade. More research can only help.
I'd say you weren't paying attention. I didn't say that static typing never catches errors, I said that it does not catch as many errors as originally envisioned. As nearly any programmer can attest, it's a rare treat to have a program operate correctly after the first compile. More often than not, you need to perform iterative development and debugging to ensure the correctness of the code.
I'm not actually sure that's so. Yes, with many popular statically typed languages that's the case. On the other hand I've heard plenty of stories of Ada, Haskell, and other language programmers finding that, indeed, if they can get it to compile it works as they intended. This, of course, raises its own issues: you may have to do some hoop jumping and work to manage to get that compile to actually work. That means those languages might not be so ideal when you just want to muck out or quickly protoype some code (depending on exactly what you want to do of course). On the other hand, you are actually getting something for all that static typing.
The point is that is a flawed design that promotes inadvertent errors in code just like C's '=' and '==' operators are too easy to carelessly mix up
May I suggest you try Ada or Eiffel then, which go to some trouble to try and weed out any such errors as early as possible (usually at compilation time).
My position is simply that other factors have been ignored by the run-of-the-mill, everyday "greenhouse gas alarmist"...
Which is true, but I wouldn't think it should be of great concern since the science actually shows solar and other influences to be a minor element in current warming -- it is greenhouse gases that are of significant concern. The general public has a simplified view, taking only the most important points, of almost every scientific issue, simply because a person can't know all the details and nuances of everything. Given the relatively low impact of solar variation and other natural forcings, they really aren't crucial to a basic understanding of the issue. I wonder if you are perhaps ignoring factors as well -- such as the cooling effects of aerosols, particularly sulphate aeorsols, that have been dampening warming effects, or the fact that the oceans actually absorb a large amount of the CO2 we produce (so atmospheric levels don't climb at the rate we emit) but are approaching saturation, etc.
And I just cited at least two papers that specifically address the issue of solar variability with regard to it's explanatory power with regard to current warming and to what degree it better explains the warming than CO2. Both papers come up with the same result: the numbers just don't add up as required, and CO2 remains the best candidate.
You seem to be under some impression that solar variation as a possible influence in current warming has been ignored by those scientists who view CO2 as the major contributor. This is simply false. There have been many people working on solar variation as a contributor to global warming. Let's go straight to the summaries by those you potentially feel are ignoring it: the IPCC. In the Third Assessment Report from 2001* the IPCC devotes an entire section to considering solar variation and its impact as a forcing causing current warming. There's several pages there, so be sure to click "next", and feel free to follow up any and all of the references given. The forcing chart shows that solar variation is considered signifcant, but not as much of a contributor as greenhouse gas forcings. Admittedly it is listed as "very poorly understood". You may, however, wish to read the section on attribution of climate change to get an idea of how such conclusions are made -- again, please feel free to follow up the referenced papers from that section also.
That brings us to the Fourth Assessment Report from 2008. The forcing chart is now on page 4 of the Summary for Policy Makers and shows that, with further study, then forcing extent of solar variation has been reduced. You can read Chapter 2, from page 188 onwards, for the details of the various studies (with references that you can follow up as you please) into how such conclusions were reached. In other words, solar variability has been considered an important potential contributor, and source of significant study, even to the IPCC for many many years. No one is ignoring it -- rather they are quantifying it, and considering it closely when attributing recent warming.
Since then we also have that Damon and Laut study (reference int he previous post) which covers the issue of solar influence via cosmic rays. So again, no one is ignoring solar variation, it just doesn't add up so far when you actually sit down and run the numbers, while greenhouse gases do.
* (The Second Assessment Report from 1995 also considered solar variation, but I can't link to that online)
Yes, I was in a hurry this morning and did indeed miss your references.
These things happen. The trick is to not just assume the worst, and double check to see if you perhaps missed something...
Above, you cite your temperature data source as
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/
but in the Wiki entry, the stated source of temperature data is
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/climate_forcing/solar_variability/solanki2004-ssn.txt
Well yes, I was discussing the figure I linked first in my comment: the graph which demonstrates the lack of correlation between sunspots and the most recent warming, while showing the greater correlation in overall trend with CO2. That is, this one. You'll note that that temperature data is indeed from the CRU. This, of course also explains why the sunspot data is different, and also why I mention CO2 data. A perusal of all the figures I linked would probably have made this clear very quickly...
Along that line, there is no explanation as to how deuterium data relates to sunspots. Is it a linear relationship? How would a reader know?
Well, for that figure I would presume anyone actually curious about such details would manage to note that the delta-deuterium data is a proxy for temperature not sunspots, and to try a simple search on the relevant terms. They'll rapidly pull up things like this, which should get them started (and answer your question off the bat -- yes, it is a linear relationship). After all, that's how I learned any of this.
My point being that considering just the information that was presented, as I saw it, even WITH the two sources you referenced, does not exactly prove anything.
Well no, the second figure showing data for the last 10000 years simply shows that there is some general correlation between solar activity and sunspots (though it is imperfect). It was the first figure that counts: it shows that while there may have been good correlation historically, the current warming trend does not correlate at all well with sunpots, but instead correlates rather better than with CO2 -- exactly the opposite of your original claims.
Look, I have little doubt that the sun influences the earth's climate. Nor do I have any care to argue that, historically, there are correlations between solar activity, sunspot numbers, and global temperatures.; I agree that that is decently established. The question, however, is not whether there is a solar influence on climate, but whether the current warming can be adequately attributed to such effects. People have studied this, because it's an important question. The result is that, according to most studies, up to around 30% of the current warming can be attributed to solar factors, but that leaves a large chunk for which, at this time, greenhouse gases remain by far the best explanation. Since you like references to published papers, perhaps a good start would be:
Foukal, Peter; et al. (2006). "Variations in solar luminosity and their effect on the Earth's climate". Nature 443 (7108): 161-166. doi:10.1038/nature05072
Damon, Paul E.; Paul Laut (28 September 2004). "Pattern of Strange Errors Plagues Solar Activity and Terrestrial Climate Data". Eos 85 (39): 370-374. doi:10.1029/2004EO390005
And this chart is made up of data that came from... where?
The data sources listed in the Data Sources section on the page.
I did not see ANY citations of sources on that Wikipedia page
You didn't look too hard. The sites from which the raw data was taken are all listed. A cursory inspection of those sites will provide the information you want. Since that seems to be too much work:
On The Prediction of El Niño 2002 Based On the Peak Of Sunspot Number in 2000, Proceedings of the ISCS Symp. 2003: Solar Variability as an Input to the Earth's Environment, ESA SP-535.
Mutual relations of the intermediate periodicities of the Wolf sunspot number, Proceedings of the ISCS Symp. 2003: Solar Variability as an Input to the Earth's Environment, ESA SP-535 p.145-148
You can see this page for a full list.
The Law Dome data was taken from Word Data Center for Paleoclimatology Ice Core Gateway. Among the papers using this dataset are:
Further, it completely ignores the inverse correlation of warming with sunspot activity, which is a much stronger correlation than greenhouse gases could ever pretend to be...Don't believe my statement about sunspots? Then look it up. I did.
Okay, I did. I pulled the raw data from the Climatic Research Unit is the UK, the Solar Influences Data Analysis Center in Belgium, and CO2 data from Mauna Loa and ice core data. If you plot them you get this. Once we smooth out the high frequency signal so we can actually look at the major trends we see you don't really have much of a point at all. Okay, maybe I'm looking at the wrong time scales. Let's pull 10000 years worth of reconstructed proxy data on sunspots and temperature directly from the NOAA. The result is this. Yup, there's some (imperfect) historical correlation (as one might expect since the sun is clearly going to have some effect on climate). But back to the first plot -- there we have no solar correlation to the recent warming... so what exactly are you talking about?
Doesn't get in the way ? As soon as you click in a window it comes to the front and obscures the material you were trying to view...I suppose it can be turned off by editing the Gnome XML configuration file (a staple of the traditional Gnome user friendliness) but it's a major pain in the neither region.
Out of curiousity, I opened the configuration editor (the graphical frontend to all those XML files that you can, if you wish, edit by hand instead). I selected Edit->Find, and typed "raise" in the search field (and selected "Search also in key names"). That produced a list of results, including "/apps/metacity/general/raise_on_click"; selecting that in the search results took me to the relevant key, with an obvious checkbox beside it, and a detailed description. The checkbox was selected. I unselected it. Now clicking on windows doesn't make them raise (instead we have the traditional UNIX WM of a click on the titlebar being required to raise the window). This setting was easy to find, clearly described, and (very) easy to change, all through the GUI for configuration changes in GNOME. Beyond the fact that it is classed as a more advanced configuration option (and thus only accessible through the configuration editor, and not directly exposed in the basic preferences) I really don't see the problem.
I'm pulling it from the Climatic Research Unit in the UK. They've been very meticulous about maintinaing and publishing their data sets. The basic FAQ on the dataset and collection methodology is here. Among the many papers published over the years on the methodology and estimation of uncertainty, there is at least this freely available, though you can check:
as well if you like (and have access to the respective journals).
The entire "this century is hotter then last" has been disproved back when they found errors in the calculations the US made.
Actually no. There were errors, and they did have an effect on which years were the hottest for the US, but had a much smaller (almost neglible effect) on the calculated global temperatures. And, of course, that is the NASA GISS dataset that you are speaking of. The datasets I'm referring to, HadCRUT3 and CRUTEM3, from the UK, are quite independent in their processing of raw data, and did not contain the same errors.
In fact, I haven't heard claims like your making in over 4 years after they revised a bunch of shit found to of been faulty.
Really? He claimed:
which is actually a very reasonable claim. We can put it to the test easily enough. Here is the latest CRUTEM data, fully up to date, including 2008 data. According to the file format description, we find the average annual global anomaly (from the average temperature from 1961-1990 used as a base point) in the last column of every second row. Scan down. You'll find the the original poster is indeed correct in his claims.
Just because you are so certain, let's go with the dataset you're referring to: Hansen's GISTemp from NASA. Again, let's grab the latest data with the relevant corrections you are complaining about made: here (that's global averages for land and sea surface temperatures). Again, scan down and you'll see that, surprisingly enough, the original poster is still correct in his claims.
One of the wonderful things about the internet is that it actually puts a vast array of resources and data right at your fingertips, so you can actually go to the source data itself rather than relying on second and third hand reports. Apparently that was too much work for you. Hopefully, however, with the links laid out above, you can click through and verify for yourself that the data actually shows what it is claimed to show.
Do you ever find it frustrating that the same people who mock Ted Stevens for his ignorant ideas about the internet, which he stated with such arrogant certainty, have their own ignorant ideas about other fields which they state with even greater arrogant certainty? The "I know something, therefore I know as much as experts" mentality that seems particularly pervasive in, say, global warming debates.
The reality is that the climate has been remarkably calm and forgiving for the last 400 years or so. Much further back than we have detailed history of. What was the climate like in 1200 AD? How about 150 AD? 2500 BC? Sorry, but all we can do is guess from some very indistinct records. We have some evidence in ice cores, some historical documents and some biological evidence.
Well, actually we have ice cores, tree ring data, data from corals, and from sediment records, all from various locations all over the word, which can be cross referenced against one another. Yes, that means we have a "guess", and each individual record is indistinct, but in combination they provide a fairly good record.
That wouldn't be allowed at work, on the grounds that nobody could take over and edit the equations if I went under a bus.
There are things like the OOolatex plugin that provide a managed method for such image insertion, allowing you to simply select and equation, call up a dialog box with the TeX, re-edit, and re-insert the new rendering conveniently and easily. It's a very basic plugin for OpenOffice.org. I am pretty sure very similar things exist for Microsoft Word. At that point the only difficulty in someone else editing the equations is their inability to read and write LaTeX; and if they have any business writing and editing any number of equations they should know LaTeX.
Where do all you folks work, that you can choose the tools you work with? And how do they manage business continuity?
Any sane person who writes a lot of equations for a living will happily grab LaTeX, even if it is in the form of a plugin for standard word processors described above. Once you have an entire department/work group saying that this small free piece of software is going to have a very significant boost to their productivity very few companies say no. I doubt these people are getting to pick and choose thier softare completely, but they can request software that is going to have a large positive impact on their productivity, and they will often get it.