don't like change and don't like societies transformed by science
I don't like societies transformed by government mandate, because that's the hallmark of fascist and communist societies.
the amount of change required to move from coal burning power stations to nuclear/wind/solar and from fossil fuel burning vehicles to electric is pretty trivial
Great, then it's going to happen by itself! Let the government deal with much harder problems, then, like how to regulate pornography or organic food!
The odds of human induced climate change being wrong are so low that its simply not up for debate anymore in the sciences
You're right, it isn't. But that's not all the IPCC or the national curriculum say. They also say that climate change will be huge and have devastating consequences, and that's unproven. It isn't even a question physics can answer.
I suspect a lot of AGW denialists are also Evolution deniers, and it's worth noting that a lot of the testing process for Evolution involves 'hind-casting' rather than forecasting
It is also worth noting that nobody is proposing a single gigantic change to the global economy and energy market based on the prediction that 100 years from now some species may evolve that may kill us.
Believing that theory X is true doesn't require believing that theory X can be used to make reliable forecasts for the next century.
What you are calling "training" , in science is called "Hind-casting" and its a standard method of testing scientific theories where we can't feasibly do experiments
And the conclusions are correspondingly weak. Each time you do "hind casting", there is at least a small probability that your data set accidentally supports the theory even though the theory is false (or you just select a data set that happens to support your theory, there are many to choose from). After you've run a few dozen analyses on a data set, you are almost certain to have found strong support for several false hypotheses. Combined with publication bias and confirmation bias, you can end up with a steady stream of publications repeatedly giving strong support for a false theory.
Hindcasting is reasonable for speculative theories in the sciences. It is inadequate for scientific result strong enough to support major policy initiatives.
Here's the thing, as you post on Slashdot, I'm going to assume you troubleshoot problems. If errors are getting thrown everywhere, do you apply band-aid fixes that "seem to work" but you don't know why?
But errors aren't getting thrown everywhere when it comes to climate. There isn't even anything to apply band-aid fixes to. And even if we take IPCC predictions at face value, we have a century to adapt to warmer temperatures; futile attempts to stop carbon emissions are not the best engineering solution, adaptation is.
it's just another attempt to sow doubt on a model that is just as predictive as Evolution.
Good analogy. Although we know a great deal about evolution and the theory of evolution is universally accepted among biologists, we can't actually control the evolution of species at a global scale; there are too many variables, it's politically impossible, and trying to do so may do more harm than good. It's the same with climate change: having a good theory is not enough to engage in planet-wide projects.
Get ready to read a bunch of posts from people who pride themselves on being scientific, but reject a theory that enjoys more support in climatology than the Standard Model does in physics
There is no "theory of climate change" to reject. There are dozens of different hypotheses, and people advancing political action switch what they call that theory according to what argument they want to make. To deconstruct this:
(1) Human activity has raised the level of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere beyond what it would otherwise be. [Uncontroversial]
(2) Mean global temperatures have increased over the 20th century. [mostly accepted]
(3) Human activity has contributed to some degree to that increase. [mostly accepted]
(4) Human activity is the primary cause of temperature increase over the 20th century. [unproven]
(5) Human activity will result in temperature increases in the 21st century that are larger than those experienced in the 20th century. [unproven, speculative]
(6) Temperature increase in the 21st century will have devastating consequences for humans. [highly speculative, controversial]
(7) Government intervention now can reduce temperature increases in the 21st century significantly. [highly speculative, completely implausible]
So, the only thing that scientists agree on are (1-3). The rest is unproven, speculative, and often implausible. But without (4-7), observations (1-3) simply aren't worth teaching in school. And activists and politicians promoting government action like to pretend that agreement on (1-3) implies agreement on (4-7).
And in terms of politics, I used to be a solid Democrat. But digging into the science behind climate change (and then some other issues where Democrats like to talk about science) has made me an independent, because Democrats are abusing science for political purposes. They like to pick some half-ass scientific result that fits their agenda, try to use it to get people riled up to vote for them or transfer billions into the coffers of their corporate buddies, and accuse anybody who disagrees with their political agenda as "unscientific". Just like you did.
Let's be clear: like most scientists, I agree with what is actually the agreed upon theory of climate change, namely points (1-3). But that's all science supports right now; the rest is speculation and politics.
Yes, you should know the meaning of that word very well, if you only realized it.
Those kinds of megaprojects are not so much about engineering, they are about a political and economic ideology; they are popular particularly with progressivists, and their close cousins, fascists and socialists. The US experimented with those ideologies in the 1930's but never went as far as Europe. Fortunately, the world seems to be growing out of it. Some people (like you apparently) never learn from history.
You should look up the term "Luddite"; it doesn't mean what you think it means. It certainly doesn't refer to objecting to environmentally destructive, overly expensive megaprojects. Nor does it refer to government handouts to powerful politicians and lobbyists from rural states.
in my completely unscientific and laymen point of view, the overeating is caused by sugar/carbs.
That's a good guess. And it also means that eating carbs causes both obesity and a preference for larger portion sizes, so portion size is an effect, not a cause.
And it's no mystery where that dietary preference for carbs came from either: recommendations from the US government and "health authorities". There was a "scientific consensus" a few decades ago that fat was bad and carbs were good. The whole thing has been supported through massive agricultural subsidies and tariffs ever since. It's not unlike more recent "scientific consensus" of what's good for us and the ensuing subsidies.
I beg to differ, i think it absolutely explains why obesity is increasing
So, how does that work? You seem to claim that the increase in food portion sizes causes increases in obesity. If that's the case, then what caused food portion sizes to increase in the first place? And why have Europeans reached US levels of obesity of a few years ago at much smaller portion sizes?
The math seriously works out to something akin to a 200 pound man needing to climb ~20 flights of stairs to burn the equivalent of a single piece of white bread.
And now apply that insight back to portion sizes. If large portion sizes caused overeating, then obese people would still be eating more calories than regular people, but they stop when they are somewhere around 20-50 pounds overweight, even though they could easily gain another 20 pounds every year simply by overeating only 10%. And even at US obesity rates, there are plenty of people who are not obese despite large portion sizes.
Sorry, I don't see any way in which the hypothesis "large portion sizes cause obesity" makes sense as an explanation of the obesity epidemic.
I wouldn't call it "poor". That's a pretty good correlation for such a simple measure. It is best used for population analysis, but even at the individual level, if your BMI is around 25 or above, you definitely should find out why. Unless you are discovering that you are a somnambulating body builder, you should probably get it down.
And no, you can't live without carbohydrates, you'd die of starvation.... If we don't get enough carbs in our diets, our brains start to "digest themselves" producing ketones which make your breath smell of pears.
Complete nonsense. Ketone bodies are produced from fat in the liver:
So, it's no "fucking mystery" why the two correlate. But it's not an explanation for why people are obese. Economically, restaurants and food producers have no interest in making portion sizes bigger unless customers demand it. People who are obese tend to have bigger appetites, so they demand bigger portion sizes and the market responds. They also crave sugar, so sugary drinks is what the market supplies in abundance.
Ultimately, the simple reality is that people make lifestyle choices that make them obese: they don't exercise and they eat fatty and sweet foods because they actually like them and the consequences are not that serious all things considered. People make the rational choice that enjoying good food in their 30's is worth losing a couple of years in their 70's. The only real problem is that they are forcing others to pay for their diabetes and heart disease treatments through socialized health care costs.
You're not obese, but you are almost certainly overweight, since you are not a body builder.
That's not a judgment, it just should encourage you to get your actual body fat measured (a few dollars for calipers), and then take steps to get it down to some reasonable level. You should aim for less than 20% (you're probably somewhere around 25%). Also have regular physicals and check your blood pressure.
America is a dying empire whose finest engineering achievements took place over 50 years ago.
If by "finest engineering projects", you mean "huge government financed engineering megaprojects", you're right: we have neither the engineering skill nor political will to engage in those anymore. Good riddance.
Fortran has been an "APL style language" since Fortran 95, with most of the APL operations present. That was done both for optimization and for convenience. And other APL-style languages are very popular as well, foremost MATLAB.
First, you say it makes sense to talk about them in isolation, and then you go on for two paragraphs blathering on about tradeoffs. If you actually read my message, you saw that I did exactly what you agreed one should do, I weighed the pros and cons. You just don't like my conclusions, which roughly come down to that we shouldn't try to emulate Europe even if that were a possible option, because the European situation is not a desirable one.
This is not a platitude, but the only reasonable way of judging if given measure saves lives or not - assume that every life is equal and see if number of deaths is gets lower. Otherwise you could sink ANY idea as long as you prove that it caused even one death (no matter if it saved 100 000 or not).
You're missing his point. It's not about trading off lives saved vs lives lost, it's about trading off lives vs liberty.
Gun control advocates and progressives in general seem to think that when it comes to owning things (guns, drugs, etc.) that can harm the owner or others, the state has a right to demand justification for the possession of those things. Others (including myself) include that an unjust intrusion into our liberty.
I don't own a gun and never intend to own one. In fact, in my personal life, I'm a pacifist. But I value my liberty. If you follow the gun control logic, our liberties evaporate entirely. That's not a slippery slope argument: objectively, guns are no more dangerous than a million other objects we currently can use freely, so if even constitutionally protected gun ownership falls, any liberty is fair game for arbitrary government interference.
The war on drugs used similar arguments to gun control. Not only has it been woefully ineffective in achieving its goals, it has destroyed the ability of citizens to engage in chemistry. If gun control goes through, it will basically destroy the ability of citizens to make stuff out of metal, because the only way you can have any meaningful gun control is if you control metal drills and saws.
It doesn't make sense to talk about single factors in isolation. You simply cannot lower crime rate without paying for it somehow. For example, you can achieve very low crime rates by creating a police state. Would that be a good trade-off? Obviously not.
Europe's and Asia's lower murder rates (other crime rates are actually generally higher than in the US) come at a cost. Many of the social factors that lead to those lower murder rates, we couldn't replicate in the US even if we wanted to.
Open Sourced" can mean "derived from open sources" or it can mean "released under an open source license", so it is at best ambiguous.
But I think it's pretty clear that the people running OSVDB are deliberately trying to mislead people into thinking that they are somehow part of the open source movement, when in fact they are effectively nothing more than a commercial vendor of a proprietary database aggregated from public sources.
The problem with OSVDB is not their business model, it's that they pretend to be something that they are not.
Based on their web site and description, "OSVD" may have started out as an "open source database", but now it seems to have morphed into something that is effectively a commercial data aggregator and vendor hiding behind a non-profit and giving out limited, free samples. In any case, whatever it is, their database clearly is not "open".
The law in the US is roughly that if it functions like a gun, it must look like a gun (it's probably the same elsewhere). Gun laws contain definitions like:
The term “any other weapon” means any weapon or device capable of being concealed on the person from which a shot can be discharged through the energy of an explosive,
That's why guns all look the same. In the 19th century, people built guns in lots of shapes in order to conceal them.
Slashdot Mirror
You obviously have no idea what the IPCC predictions are based on. I suggest you read up on them.
You can't simplify what you don't understand, and your understanding of the models underlying IPCC predictions is obviously nil.
I don't like societies transformed by government mandate, because that's the hallmark of fascist and communist societies.
Great, then it's going to happen by itself! Let the government deal with much harder problems, then, like how to regulate pornography or organic food!
You're right, it isn't. But that's not all the IPCC or the national curriculum say. They also say that climate change will be huge and have devastating consequences, and that's unproven. It isn't even a question physics can answer.
It is also worth noting that nobody is proposing a single gigantic change to the global economy and energy market based on the prediction that 100 years from now some species may evolve that may kill us.
Believing that theory X is true doesn't require believing that theory X can be used to make reliable forecasts for the next century.
And the conclusions are correspondingly weak. Each time you do "hind casting", there is at least a small probability that your data set accidentally supports the theory even though the theory is false (or you just select a data set that happens to support your theory, there are many to choose from). After you've run a few dozen analyses on a data set, you are almost certain to have found strong support for several false hypotheses. Combined with publication bias and confirmation bias, you can end up with a steady stream of publications repeatedly giving strong support for a false theory.
Hindcasting is reasonable for speculative theories in the sciences. It is inadequate for scientific result strong enough to support major policy initiatives.
But errors aren't getting thrown everywhere when it comes to climate. There isn't even anything to apply band-aid fixes to. And even if we take IPCC predictions at face value, we have a century to adapt to warmer temperatures; futile attempts to stop carbon emissions are not the best engineering solution, adaptation is.
Good analogy. Although we know a great deal about evolution and the theory of evolution is universally accepted among biologists, we can't actually control the evolution of species at a global scale; there are too many variables, it's politically impossible, and trying to do so may do more harm than good. It's the same with climate change: having a good theory is not enough to engage in planet-wide projects.
There is no "theory of climate change" to reject. There are dozens of different hypotheses, and people advancing political action switch what they call that theory according to what argument they want to make. To deconstruct this:
(1) Human activity has raised the level of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere beyond what it would otherwise be. [Uncontroversial]
(2) Mean global temperatures have increased over the 20th century. [mostly accepted]
(3) Human activity has contributed to some degree to that increase. [mostly accepted]
(4) Human activity is the primary cause of temperature increase over the 20th century. [unproven]
(5) Human activity will result in temperature increases in the 21st century that are larger than those experienced in the 20th century. [unproven, speculative]
(6) Temperature increase in the 21st century will have devastating consequences for humans. [highly speculative, controversial]
(7) Government intervention now can reduce temperature increases in the 21st century significantly. [highly speculative, completely implausible]
So, the only thing that scientists agree on are (1-3). The rest is unproven, speculative, and often implausible. But without (4-7), observations (1-3) simply aren't worth teaching in school. And activists and politicians promoting government action like to pretend that agreement on (1-3) implies agreement on (4-7).
And in terms of politics, I used to be a solid Democrat. But digging into the science behind climate change (and then some other issues where Democrats like to talk about science) has made me an independent, because Democrats are abusing science for political purposes. They like to pick some half-ass scientific result that fits their agenda, try to use it to get people riled up to vote for them or transfer billions into the coffers of their corporate buddies, and accuse anybody who disagrees with their political agenda as "unscientific". Just like you did.
Let's be clear: like most scientists, I agree with what is actually the agreed upon theory of climate change, namely points (1-3). But that's all science supports right now; the rest is speculation and politics.
Yes, you should know the meaning of that word very well, if you only realized it.
Those kinds of megaprojects are not so much about engineering, they are about a political and economic ideology; they are popular particularly with progressivists, and their close cousins, fascists and socialists. The US experimented with those ideologies in the 1930's but never went as far as Europe. Fortunately, the world seems to be growing out of it. Some people (like you apparently) never learn from history.
You should look up the term "Luddite"; it doesn't mean what you think it means. It certainly doesn't refer to objecting to environmentally destructive, overly expensive megaprojects. Nor does it refer to government handouts to powerful politicians and lobbyists from rural states.
That's a good guess. And it also means that eating carbs causes both obesity and a preference for larger portion sizes, so portion size is an effect, not a cause.
And it's no mystery where that dietary preference for carbs came from either: recommendations from the US government and "health authorities". There was a "scientific consensus" a few decades ago that fat was bad and carbs were good. The whole thing has been supported through massive agricultural subsidies and tariffs ever since. It's not unlike more recent "scientific consensus" of what's good for us and the ensuing subsidies.
So, how does that work? You seem to claim that the increase in food portion sizes causes increases in obesity. If that's the case, then what caused food portion sizes to increase in the first place? And why have Europeans reached US levels of obesity of a few years ago at much smaller portion sizes?
And now apply that insight back to portion sizes. If large portion sizes caused overeating, then obese people would still be eating more calories than regular people, but they stop when they are somewhere around 20-50 pounds overweight, even though they could easily gain another 20 pounds every year simply by overeating only 10%. And even at US obesity rates, there are plenty of people who are not obese despite large portion sizes.
Sorry, I don't see any way in which the hypothesis "large portion sizes cause obesity" makes sense as an explanation of the obesity epidemic.
I wouldn't call it "poor". That's a pretty good correlation for such a simple measure. It is best used for population analysis, but even at the individual level, if your BMI is around 25 or above, you definitely should find out why. Unless you are discovering that you are a somnambulating body builder, you should probably get it down.
There is a "new BMI formula" here:
http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/t...
Tall people get a slight bonus on BMI, but less than you might think, and the measure doesn't seem to be much better than the old BMI.
You are 3D, but if you're healthy, you grow preferentially along one axis.
Complete nonsense. Ketone bodies are produced from fat in the liver:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...
You really don't need carbs in your diet.
So, it's no "fucking mystery" why the two correlate. But it's not an explanation for why people are obese. Economically, restaurants and food producers have no interest in making portion sizes bigger unless customers demand it. People who are obese tend to have bigger appetites, so they demand bigger portion sizes and the market responds. They also crave sugar, so sugary drinks is what the market supplies in abundance.
Ultimately, the simple reality is that people make lifestyle choices that make them obese: they don't exercise and they eat fatty and sweet foods because they actually like them and the consequences are not that serious all things considered. People make the rational choice that enjoying good food in their 30's is worth losing a couple of years in their 70's. The only real problem is that they are forcing others to pay for their diabetes and heart disease treatments through socialized health care costs.
BMI gives some rough, useful information and correlates decently with obesity:
http://openi.nlm.nih.gov/detai...
It is known that for tall people, BMI overestimates obesity, but that just knocks you down from a BMI of about 28.3 to 27.3, still way too high.
http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/t...
You're not obese, but you are almost certainly overweight, since you are not a body builder.
That's not a judgment, it just should encourage you to get your actual body fat measured (a few dollars for calipers), and then take steps to get it down to some reasonable level. You should aim for less than 20% (you're probably somewhere around 25%). Also have regular physicals and check your blood pressure.
If by "finest engineering projects", you mean "huge government financed engineering megaprojects", you're right: we have neither the engineering skill nor political will to engage in those anymore. Good riddance.
In what way is a tunnel that connects two places nobody wants to travel between "money well spent"?
For freight, ships are both far more efficient and cheaper.
Fortran has been an "APL style language" since Fortran 95, with most of the APL operations present. That was done both for optimization and for convenience. And other APL-style languages are very popular as well, foremost MATLAB.
First, you say it makes sense to talk about them in isolation, and then you go on for two paragraphs blathering on about tradeoffs. If you actually read my message, you saw that I did exactly what you agreed one should do, I weighed the pros and cons. You just don't like my conclusions, which roughly come down to that we shouldn't try to emulate Europe even if that were a possible option, because the European situation is not a desirable one.
You're missing his point. It's not about trading off lives saved vs lives lost, it's about trading off lives vs liberty.
Gun control advocates and progressives in general seem to think that when it comes to owning things (guns, drugs, etc.) that can harm the owner or others, the state has a right to demand justification for the possession of those things. Others (including myself) include that an unjust intrusion into our liberty.
I don't own a gun and never intend to own one. In fact, in my personal life, I'm a pacifist. But I value my liberty. If you follow the gun control logic, our liberties evaporate entirely. That's not a slippery slope argument: objectively, guns are no more dangerous than a million other objects we currently can use freely, so if even constitutionally protected gun ownership falls, any liberty is fair game for arbitrary government interference.
The war on drugs used similar arguments to gun control. Not only has it been woefully ineffective in achieving its goals, it has destroyed the ability of citizens to engage in chemistry. If gun control goes through, it will basically destroy the ability of citizens to make stuff out of metal, because the only way you can have any meaningful gun control is if you control metal drills and saws.
It doesn't make sense to talk about single factors in isolation. You simply cannot lower crime rate without paying for it somehow. For example, you can achieve very low crime rates by creating a police state. Would that be a good trade-off? Obviously not.
Europe's and Asia's lower murder rates (other crime rates are actually generally higher than in the US) come at a cost. Many of the social factors that lead to those lower murder rates, we couldn't replicate in the US even if we wanted to.
Open Sourced" can mean "derived from open sources" or it can mean "released under an open source license", so it is at best ambiguous.
But I think it's pretty clear that the people running OSVDB are deliberately trying to mislead people into thinking that they are somehow part of the open source movement, when in fact they are effectively nothing more than a commercial vendor of a proprietary database aggregated from public sources.
The problem with OSVDB is not their business model, it's that they pretend to be something that they are not.
Based on their web site and description, "OSVD" may have started out as an "open source database", but now it seems to have morphed into something that is effectively a commercial data aggregator and vendor hiding behind a non-profit and giving out limited, free samples. In any case, whatever it is, their database clearly is not "open".
The law in the US is roughly that if it functions like a gun, it must look like a gun (it's probably the same elsewhere). Gun laws contain definitions like:
That's why guns all look the same. In the 19th century, people built guns in lots of shapes in order to conceal them.