Holy crap! An estimated top speed of 250mph! I wonder how the performance compares to one of those drag racing bikes (though I know that they're very different structurally).
Just finished reading it in more detail. The bubble is not "made of water molecules", as Yahoo reports. It's largely hydrogen (which makes much more sense), with small amounts of water and other chemicals. It's just that the water was what they first detected. Also, it's not definitely a sphere. They just happen to see an arc instead of a jet, and the arc seems to fit a circle fairly well.
True enough, but I think you missed his point. We "well-informed" people all understand that scientists (in many fields, not just physics) are working very hard to answer various fundamental questions, and that the scientific method often leads us to questions something we took for granted. The general populace, though, doesn't necessarily look at it this way. They don't see how unstable science is (look how bizarre the picture of "reality" has gotten from the point of view of a physicist, or the frequent startling discoveries in the biological history of our planet). All a lot of people will see is "It explains why we're here", they'll read the article, decide it's just a bunch of nerds playing with very large, expensive toys, then *wham*, no more Superconducting Supercollider, decreased public opinion of NASA, etc... a big snowball effect. There've been far too many misleading headlines like this recently, and all it does is disappoint people.
It makes me ill reading things like this. I can't believe people are so ignorant about such simple things. Maybe it's just because I grew up in a family of biologists (though I'm not one myself). Yes, it sounds like Jurassic Park, though I'll refer to the book instead of the movie, which was a terrible bastardization of the book. Remeber, the book was science fiction. It was based on fact: yes, there's probably an evolutionary link between dinosaurs and amphibians (IIRC, that was the rationale given in the book). And yes, amphibians are hermaphroditic in some cases. And yes, it has been documented that some fish can change sexes (though I don't know all that much about it). But this doesn't mean that a school of killer salmon are going to get loose and destroy the planet. This modification that they've done is just a more direct form of something we've been doing for ages. Look at modern domestic cows and pigs. Those animals are gross exaggerations of what they were before we started breeding them. Sure, we're pumpin' 'em up with horomones. The FDA looked into it, just as they will with this. They decided that the people breeding these animals aren't doing anything dangerous, just as they probably will with the salmon.
On a side note, it's interesting that the FDA is regulating the fish because "it considers the added gene to be an animal drug". While I suppose that's true, I certainly hope that isn't the official phrasing. Apparently "the agency does not have deep experience in assessing environmental consequences". That's where your concern should be. Yes, people should be concerned about these issues, but you've got to be informed before you start reacting, dammit! The problem is that the government doesn't seem to be much more informed than the general populace on this topic. Isn't it about time for an agency that's actually knowledgeable on these topics?
In regards to your first point... I've done a pretty large amount of work with Medline. Certainly the technique does to some extent rely on a standard nomenclature. This is probably not such a hurdle, though. Each citation indexed in Medline is tagged with particular MeSH headings. MeSH is a controlled vocabulary of medical terms, with quite extensive supplements that include genetic and chemical information. The most relevent part here is that each heading is associated with a number of synonyms. So in addition to each article being indexed against a controlled vocabulary (by a trained human indexer), that vocabulary itself provides relationship information between various terms, both internal and external to the actual vocab. Also, there's the whole Unified Medical Language System, but I'm not really up to speed on that. It's pretty much independent from MeSH, and it's not used directly in Medline, AFAIK.
There are still some interesting (if not necessarily productive) thought experiments that you can do though. For example, imagine moving into the black hole. If you found a large enough black hole (and certainly they're out there... ones equivalent to billions of solar masses), the tidal forces at the event horizon would be small enough that you could pass it without harm. (In other words, since the radius of the event horizon (in the Schwarzschild metric sense) is so large, the gravitational force is essentially constant, like on the surface of the earth.) Of course you still couldn't see anything coming from a gravitational potential lower than yours. So what would that be like? Then there are other metrics that turn the event horizon into something you can only asymptotically approach, but the singularity itself is flattened out (don't remember the name of the metric). Passing through the singularity, the space coordinates become imaginary, and time becomes real (!), but there's no discontinuity at the origin (where the singularity is in the Schwarzschild metric). The sci.physics black hole FAQ has some more interesting info.
This is really fascinating. The original start that formed the black hole was spinning. It had an easily observable property of rotation. Then it collapsed into a singularity which inherited that angular momentum. But once it's a singularity, the angular momentum (if I understand correctly) is only expressible as a quantum state of spin, which (from my one semester of quantum physics) doesn't really have any macroscopic meaning. (How can a point be rotating?) That's curious enough in itself to me. It's even more fascinating that now we've observed that indeed that spin does then cause a macroscopic effect, such that the matter falling into it tends to spin around it faster. The Rossi instrument also observed frame dragging a few years ago.
It's not like these things are hard to research. If you look at the patent, they've got a whole system worked out for it. I'm not gonna repeat all the details. One critical part, though, is that it's not just an MD5 of the whole document. They've got it set up so you can just tag a relevant portion of the document, thus giving you the ability to only receive change notices when something important changes. I still think this is something fairly obvious, but the details are what make it more worth patenting. I've seen much worse, as I'm sure most of us have.
According to MD Robotics' site, they were also awarded the contract for building the workstation. Sadly, the page is lacking in detail. I find the workstation to be the most interesting part of the whole package. Controlling a 17 meter arm with 7 degrees of freedom has to be a very complicated task (although granted the arm will probably generally move very slowly). It makes me wonder what kind of software interface they've got to manage the tremendous amount of information that would go into controlling it (including the Special Purpose Dextrous Manipulator, which has twice as many degrees of freedom).
You get a lot more detail in the PDFs at the end of the SPDM page, in particular, this one. It gives you a better sense of scale, as some of the diagrams actually show an astronaut working on installing the device. There's also an interesting closeup of the control panel for the workstation. It appears that the three monitors on the workstation can show input from any of ten cameras. A central knob selects which joint of the SPDM the joystick on the right of the console is controlling. Looks kludgy, but pretty functional. They've also got a series of computer renderings that show the SPDM servicing itself (err... replacing a failed component).
Apparently MDA will be providing the Operations Control Software, but I can't find any details about it. EMS is responsible for the workstation hardware. Also skimpy on details.
There's some more information on MD Robotics' site about the actual STS-100 mission.
It's important to realize that while NASA is not technically getting a budget cut, its funding certainly isn't increasing. It's just decreasing less quickly. There are some interesting details on the budget changes at NASA Watch. The budget "increase" is 2%, but the compounded inflation for the last seven years appears to be about 14% (GDP based) (IANA economics expert, so my calculation could be off, but you get the idea). So you see that while the budget did increase by a few hundred million dollars, the amount of money they have to work with has been steadily declining.
I remeber seeing an interesting article in Science News on a related topic. Basically, researchers had pulled the brain out of a lamprey, preserved it in some kind of device or solution, and hooked it up to a pair of wheels. The brain learned how to use the wheels to maneuver either away from or toward a light source (I can't remember which; whichever would be natural for a lamprey to want to do). Kind of takes this concept to the next level, neh? My brother pointed out that we don't really know what the lamprey's brain was thinking while hooked up to this device... perhaps it just experienced horrific pain when near the light, and thus learned to get away from it. Anyway, just thought you might find this interesting.
I read an article about armadillos and leprosy recently (sorry, don't know where, possibly Discover, not exactly the best source for science news). The problem (as far as studying it goes) isn't so much that only humans and armadillos get it. Rather, it's proven essentially impossible to culture outside of a human or armadillo. Neither of which are necessarily good places to try and grow or study it:). I seem to remeber that the article pointing out that they'd started to make progress culturing the responsible bacterium in the feet/pads of mice. Anyway, perhaps having the entire genome available will make it possible to select bits and pieces of the genome for study in other easier-to-culture bacteria. I don't exactly understand what the relationship between having lost about half of its non-essential genes and having the longest doubling time of any known bacterium is. Sounds kind of counter-intuitive.
You might think so, but in fact, I have a perfect driving record. Except one freakin' speeding ticket. Not too many 20 year olds who've put 50,000 miles on their car can say that, which is why my insurance rates are so low compared to most people my age.
In any case, you seem to have missed the point. A car is a very powerful tool, and used incorrectly can be very dangerous. I don't think a hacked-on solution based on not-too-reliable technology is ready to replace my (apparently quite good) driving instincts.
It's exactly this kind of attitude that's destroying our control of our lives. You have decided that some large, easily influenced government body knows how fast you are capable of driving safely than you do. Instead of crippling my car, wouldn't it be easier for them to research ways of detecting people who are driving erratically or recklessly? Isn't that a better solution than just assuming everybody everywhere will want to drive dangerously, then removing an important part of the control of their car to be safe? Good lord, it's just ridiculous.
I've been following the development of speeding-ticket technology pretty closely, as it *ahem* affects me personally. I read about this several months ago and thought it sounded ridiculous. But we've been sliding down this slope for years and years now. I probably wasn't old enough to drive (maybe not even alive) when radar guns came into wide use. They're often quite inaccurate and difficult to aim, so much so that now "radar guns" are mostly laser-based (AFAIK). (How many people wrongly received tickets before this truth was accepted?) Aerial surveilance has been used for quite some time, as well. A camera in a plane snaps one time-stamped picture of you at one white marker, then another at the next, and your ticket comes in the mail. Next came cameras mounted on overpasses or stoplight posts. They're linked to a speed-detector. Speed, *click*, ticket. Now we won't even have the option despite how important speeding can be sometimes. Our speed will be regulated by unreliable technology (though I'm sure it will improve by the time they unleash it on the public).
On a related note, there is a way to recapture at least some peace of mind (for us in the US, at least). I discovered Speetrap.com quite a while ago. It's a wonderful site. Excellent info on what kinds of speed traps to look for, what patrol cars look like, and all kinds of stuff (organized by state). Check it out before your next road-trip!
I don't think any respectable researchers in the field expect that synthesizing a living organism from "raw chemicals" (atoms, elements, simple molecules, whatever you want to define it as) would give us the "ultimate understanding of life". But we are making remarkable progress in the field. Not too long ago (less than two centuries ago) people still didn't even have the concept of a microscopic germ. Now we have identified essentially every molecule involved in the life cycle of a simple bacterium (say, E. coli for example). In fact, we have such a great understanding of such bacteria, that scientists are working on identifying a minimal set of genes that allows reproduction and respiration (some basic, more or less well-accepted properties of life). I've read several articles about this, but I don't have any specific references off the top of my head. I'm sure a small amount of research could turn up some related articles, though.
I worked for the Construction Engineering Research Lab for a couple of years, and I must say I agree. The lab had a number of projects going on about simulating battle situations (movements of units, use of terrain, and so forth, largely aimed at understanding the environmental impact of the maneuvers). Unforunately, it seems the projects are all years away from being able to simulate current war conditions. The models are generally primitive and run on legacy systems, despite being under active development. I think you're absolutely correct in saying these simulations are aimed at finding a general course for military R&D, and not intended to accurately represent the future of combat. (I know the simulations that CERL does are quite different from what this article is talking about, but i think the analogy is quite relevant.)
Interesting, but I don't know where you got your information, and it seems likely to be wrong. A Google representative gave an excellent talk here at the U of I and explained as much as he could without giving away their "secrets". Actually, much of the information they make available already. The key component is the PageRank system, which assigns a rank to a page based on how often it's linked to. Obviously, this isn't at all trivial in a graph as complicated as the web (esp. considering the amount of dynamic content around these days).
In any case, the point is that I specifically asked the guy (he was actually one of their engineers, responsible for Google's SafeSearch, IIRC) if they did any click-through analysis to try and improve the relevance of their results. He responded with an emphatic "no". They believe it's just too much of a privacy concern.
No need to preach. This has nothing to do with inheritance. It's ridiculous to suggest that the government should get the profits. Nobody should profit at the expense of international culture, particularly if the profiteer has no intent to devote the profits back to where they came from (the fine arts). It's scary to think of our humanity being bled away by people "inheriting" specific pieces of our culture and tossing the money away during an unproductive life. We owe it to a) the memory of our ancestors, b) our current standard of living, and c) our children and future generations to prevent culture from being commoditized like that.
Grrrrrr.... you seem to have totally missed the point. Any long-term protection like this is a burden on society. Just think about it. It may sound cold-hearted, and I may regret this stance if I produce something my future children might profit off of, but I think letting your descendents simply profit off your creativity, ingenuity, or hard work is simply wrong. It just encourages apathy, or an attitude that "I'm a worthwhile member of society because my dad wrote this great song." which is so destructive. Instead of trying to make unearned profits off of great things done by relatives, get off your butt and do something of your own!
The license they distribute their music under (MutopiaBSD) sounds quite fair, and it sounds like a good deal of it is public domain anyway. I hope this succeeds. It'd be a great example of a free collection of human culture and creativity. Perhaps Project Gutenberg will eventually head down the same path that Mutopia is. PG's massive text prepended to every work and the very primitive formatting of the text makes it difficult to live with at times. (Don't get me wrong; it's still a great resource!)
It does seem like they're just ridiculously paranoid sometimes, but my impression is that in a lot of cases the amount of money lost to piracy is significant relative to legitimate sales. I guess that impression is based on how much I hear about international piracy of M$ products (which is just hilarious, but that's another issue). But the more important point is that their whole god damn conception of how to make money is totally wrong in this era. There are too many people holding jobs that simply have no place in a market structure like this (with people being able to exchange content).
Problems like this seem to arise everywhere in nature. People like to take the easy way out and just sweep the details under the rug and yell "chaos". While there are clearly infinite possibilities when it comes to a system as complex as a global climate, you have to keep in mind that some possibilities are too unlikely to worry about. And because the possibilities are so endless, it's easy to draw practically any conclusion you'd like, depending on what facts you choose.
I'd also point out that there seems to be a lot of confusion about what "global warming" means. I can't say myself, but certainly, as in any probabilistic system like this, there's an average trend, then an expected deviation from the trend. So while it may be getting warmer on average, if the expected deviation from the average is also increasing, it's very reasonable to assume that we'd be getting some serious cold weather, too.
Slashdot Mirror
-- Steven N. Severinghaus
Just finished reading it in more detail. The bubble is not "made of water molecules", as Yahoo reports. It's largely hydrogen (which makes much more sense), with small amounts of water and other chemicals. It's just that the water was what they first detected. Also, it's not definitely a sphere. They just happen to see an arc instead of a jet, and the arc seems to fit a circle fairly well.
The space.com report gives much more information.
True enough, but I think you missed his point. We "well-informed" people all understand that scientists (in many fields, not just physics) are working very hard to answer various fundamental questions, and that the scientific method often leads us to questions something we took for granted. The general populace, though, doesn't necessarily look at it this way. They don't see how unstable science is (look how bizarre the picture of "reality" has gotten from the point of view of a physicist, or the frequent startling discoveries in the biological history of our planet). All a lot of people will see is "It explains why we're here", they'll read the article, decide it's just a bunch of nerds playing with very large, expensive toys, then *wham*, no more Superconducting Supercollider, decreased public opinion of NASA, etc... a big snowball effect. There've been far too many misleading headlines like this recently, and all it does is disappoint people.
On a side note, it's interesting that the FDA is regulating the fish because "it considers the added gene to be an animal drug". While I suppose that's true, I certainly hope that isn't the official phrasing. Apparently "the agency does not have deep experience in assessing environmental consequences". That's where your concern should be. Yes, people should be concerned about these issues, but you've got to be informed before you start reacting, dammit! The problem is that the government doesn't seem to be much more informed than the general populace on this topic. Isn't it about time for an agency that's actually knowledgeable on these topics?
In regards to your first point... I've done a pretty large amount of work with Medline. Certainly the technique does to some extent rely on a standard nomenclature. This is probably not such a hurdle, though. Each citation indexed in Medline is tagged with particular MeSH headings. MeSH is a controlled vocabulary of medical terms, with quite extensive supplements that include genetic and chemical information. The most relevent part here is that each heading is associated with a number of synonyms. So in addition to each article being indexed against a controlled vocabulary (by a trained human indexer), that vocabulary itself provides relationship information between various terms, both internal and external to the actual vocab. Also, there's the whole Unified Medical Language System, but I'm not really up to speed on that. It's pretty much independent from MeSH, and it's not used directly in Medline, AFAIK.
There are still some interesting (if not necessarily productive) thought experiments that you can do though. For example, imagine moving into the black hole. If you found a large enough black hole (and certainly they're out there... ones equivalent to billions of solar masses), the tidal forces at the event horizon would be small enough that you could pass it without harm. (In other words, since the radius of the event horizon (in the Schwarzschild metric sense) is so large, the gravitational force is essentially constant, like on the surface of the earth.) Of course you still couldn't see anything coming from a gravitational potential lower than yours. So what would that be like? Then there are other metrics that turn the event horizon into something you can only asymptotically approach, but the singularity itself is flattened out (don't remember the name of the metric). Passing through the singularity, the space coordinates become imaginary, and time becomes real (!), but there's no discontinuity at the origin (where the singularity is in the Schwarzschild metric). The sci.physics black hole FAQ has some more interesting info.
This is really fascinating. The original start that formed the black hole was spinning. It had an easily observable property of rotation. Then it collapsed into a singularity which inherited that angular momentum. But once it's a singularity, the angular momentum (if I understand correctly) is only expressible as a quantum state of spin, which (from my one semester of quantum physics) doesn't really have any macroscopic meaning. (How can a point be rotating?) That's curious enough in itself to me. It's even more fascinating that now we've observed that indeed that spin does then cause a macroscopic effect, such that the matter falling into it tends to spin around it faster. The Rossi instrument also observed frame dragging a few years ago.
It's not like these things are hard to research. If you look at the patent, they've got a whole system worked out for it. I'm not gonna repeat all the details. One critical part, though, is that it's not just an MD5 of the whole document. They've got it set up so you can just tag a relevant portion of the document, thus giving you the ability to only receive change notices when something important changes. I still think this is something fairly obvious, but the details are what make it more worth patenting. I've seen much worse, as I'm sure most of us have.
You get a lot more detail in the PDFs at the end of the SPDM page, in particular, this one. It gives you a better sense of scale, as some of the diagrams actually show an astronaut working on installing the device. There's also an interesting closeup of the control panel for the workstation. It appears that the three monitors on the workstation can show input from any of ten cameras. A central knob selects which joint of the SPDM the joystick on the right of the console is controlling. Looks kludgy, but pretty functional. They've also got a series of computer renderings that show the SPDM servicing itself (err... replacing a failed component).
Apparently MDA will be providing the Operations Control Software, but I can't find any details about it. EMS is responsible for the workstation hardware. Also skimpy on details.
There's some more information on MD Robotics' site about the actual STS-100 mission.
It's important to realize that while NASA is not technically getting a budget cut, its funding certainly isn't increasing. It's just decreasing less quickly. There are some interesting details on the budget changes at NASA Watch. The budget "increase" is 2%, but the compounded inflation for the last seven years appears to be about 14% (GDP based) (IANA economics expert, so my calculation could be off, but you get the idea). So you see that while the budget did increase by a few hundred million dollars, the amount of money they have to work with has been steadily declining.
I remeber seeing an interesting article in Science News on a related topic. Basically, researchers had pulled the brain out of a lamprey, preserved it in some kind of device or solution, and hooked it up to a pair of wheels. The brain learned how to use the wheels to maneuver either away from or toward a light source (I can't remember which; whichever would be natural for a lamprey to want to do). Kind of takes this concept to the next level, neh? My brother pointed out that we don't really know what the lamprey's brain was thinking while hooked up to this device... perhaps it just experienced horrific pain when near the light, and thus learned to get away from it. Anyway, just thought you might find this interesting.
I read an article about armadillos and leprosy recently (sorry, don't know where, possibly Discover, not exactly the best source for science news). The problem (as far as studying it goes) isn't so much that only humans and armadillos get it. Rather, it's proven essentially impossible to culture outside of a human or armadillo. Neither of which are necessarily good places to try and grow or study it :). I seem to remeber that the article pointing out that they'd started to make progress culturing the responsible bacterium in the feet/pads of mice. Anyway, perhaps having the entire genome available will make it possible to select bits and pieces of the genome for study in other easier-to-culture bacteria. I don't exactly understand what the relationship between having lost about half of its non-essential genes and having the longest doubling time of any known bacterium is. Sounds kind of counter-intuitive.
In any case, you seem to have missed the point. A car is a very powerful tool, and used incorrectly can be very dangerous. I don't think a hacked-on solution based on not-too-reliable technology is ready to replace my (apparently quite good) driving instincts.
It's exactly this kind of attitude that's destroying our control of our lives. You have decided that some large, easily influenced government body knows how fast you are capable of driving safely than you do. Instead of crippling my car, wouldn't it be easier for them to research ways of detecting people who are driving erratically or recklessly? Isn't that a better solution than just assuming everybody everywhere will want to drive dangerously, then removing an important part of the control of their car to be safe? Good lord, it's just ridiculous.
On a related note, there is a way to recapture at least some peace of mind (for us in the US, at least). I discovered Speetrap.com quite a while ago. It's a wonderful site. Excellent info on what kinds of speed traps to look for, what patrol cars look like, and all kinds of stuff (organized by state). Check it out before your next road-trip!
I don't think any respectable researchers in the field expect that synthesizing a living organism from "raw chemicals" (atoms, elements, simple molecules, whatever you want to define it as) would give us the "ultimate understanding of life". But we are making remarkable progress in the field. Not too long ago (less than two centuries ago) people still didn't even have the concept of a microscopic germ. Now we have identified essentially every molecule involved in the life cycle of a simple bacterium (say, E. coli for example). In fact, we have such a great understanding of such bacteria, that scientists are working on identifying a minimal set of genes that allows reproduction and respiration (some basic, more or less well-accepted properties of life). I've read several articles about this, but I don't have any specific references off the top of my head. I'm sure a small amount of research could turn up some related articles, though.
I worked for the Construction Engineering Research Lab for a couple of years, and I must say I agree. The lab had a number of projects going on about simulating battle situations (movements of units, use of terrain, and so forth, largely aimed at understanding the environmental impact of the maneuvers). Unforunately, it seems the projects are all years away from being able to simulate current war conditions. The models are generally primitive and run on legacy systems, despite being under active development. I think you're absolutely correct in saying these simulations are aimed at finding a general course for military R&D, and not intended to accurately represent the future of combat. (I know the simulations that CERL does are quite different from what this article is talking about, but i think the analogy is quite relevant.)
Interesting, but I don't know where you got your information, and it seems likely to be wrong. A Google representative gave an excellent talk here at the U of I and explained as much as he could without giving away their "secrets". Actually, much of the information they make available already. The key component is the PageRank system, which assigns a rank to a page based on how often it's linked to. Obviously, this isn't at all trivial in a graph as complicated as the web (esp. considering the amount of dynamic content around these days).
In any case, the point is that I specifically asked the guy (he was actually one of their engineers, responsible for Google's SafeSearch, IIRC) if they did any click-through analysis to try and improve the relevance of their results. He responded with an emphatic "no". They believe it's just too much of a privacy concern.
No need to preach. This has nothing to do with inheritance. It's ridiculous to suggest that the government should get the profits. Nobody should profit at the expense of international culture, particularly if the profiteer has no intent to devote the profits back to where they came from (the fine arts). It's scary to think of our humanity being bled away by people "inheriting" specific pieces of our culture and tossing the money away during an unproductive life. We owe it to a) the memory of our ancestors, b) our current standard of living, and c) our children and future generations to prevent culture from being commoditized like that.
Grrrrrr.... you seem to have totally missed the point. Any long-term protection like this is a burden on society. Just think about it. It may sound cold-hearted, and I may regret this stance if I produce something my future children might profit off of, but I think letting your descendents simply profit off your creativity, ingenuity, or hard work is simply wrong. It just encourages apathy, or an attitude that "I'm a worthwhile member of society because my dad wrote this great song." which is so destructive. Instead of trying to make unearned profits off of great things done by relatives, get off your butt and do something of your own!
The license they distribute their music under (MutopiaBSD) sounds quite fair, and it sounds like a good deal of it is public domain anyway. I hope this succeeds. It'd be a great example of a free collection of human culture and creativity. Perhaps Project Gutenberg will eventually head down the same path that Mutopia is. PG's massive text prepended to every work and the very primitive formatting of the text makes it difficult to live with at times. (Don't get me wrong; it's still a great resource!)
It does seem like they're just ridiculously paranoid sometimes, but my impression is that in a lot of cases the amount of money lost to piracy is significant relative to legitimate sales. I guess that impression is based on how much I hear about international piracy of M$ products (which is just hilarious, but that's another issue). But the more important point is that their whole god damn conception of how to make money is totally wrong in this era. There are too many people holding jobs that simply have no place in a market structure like this (with people being able to exchange content).
Problems like this seem to arise everywhere in nature. People like to take the easy way out and just sweep the details under the rug and yell "chaos". While there are clearly infinite possibilities when it comes to a system as complex as a global climate, you have to keep in mind that some possibilities are too unlikely to worry about. And because the possibilities are so endless, it's easy to draw practically any conclusion you'd like, depending on what facts you choose. I'd also point out that there seems to be a lot of confusion about what "global warming" means. I can't say myself, but certainly, as in any probabilistic system like this, there's an average trend, then an expected deviation from the trend. So while it may be getting warmer on average, if the expected deviation from the average is also increasing, it's very reasonable to assume that we'd be getting some serious cold weather, too.