The article's review of K-Meleon stated most clearly what they were looking for:
"A browser that looks and performs like the software of yesteryear. Only an option for those running equally aged hardware."
Translation:
A browser that doesn't supply the flashy, cpu-maximizing eye candy that we like.
Of course, it's easy to understand that this is what's important to a lot of people. But those of us in the market for a sleek, compact browser that doesn't interfere with the important things that are also running on our machines, reviews like this simply tell us that we should find a different reviewer. Is there a review out there that compares these (and other) browsers on the basis of functionality, resource usage, and other more practical attributes?
(Of course, people like that probably aren't much using Windows 7, so maybe this article was a good review for most of the actual customer base.;-)
So how do I get it to display the other browsers that this article talks about? There's no scrollbar in my FF window that's showing that page. I tried a mouseover, and nothing happened. I told NoScript to allow scripts from the site, and that also produced no changes.
(Maybe it's because I looked at it from my Macbook Pro and my Ubuntu machine. Perhaps I should try it on my wife's Macbook, where she has a virtual Windows XP installed, and even has IE6 on it. This is for work reasons of course; she hates Windows.;-)
"There's no quality control being offered, either -- they're simply the '12 most widely-used web browsers that run on Windows 7,' based on usage share in the European Economic Area."
So they're intentionally excluding any new browsers that may exist or may be built in the future. Yeah, I guess this is a lot how they get their politicians; the built-in advantage of being an incumbent is well known. Blocking entry to newcomers is an old tradition in both commerce and politics.
Actually, I have heard of Buffon's needle. We might note that if one looks at the equations that turn up in probability and statistics, one sees a lot of instances of pi (and e).
Pi might have been originally defined in terms of the diameter and circumference of a circle (in the Euclidean plane), but that's not the only way it can be defined. Any of the many other equations containing a related "magic number" would do as well. The Euclidean circle is just one of the simplest things that uses this number, understandable by people with very primitive technology.
We can expect that any other intelligent species in this universe (or any other) that develops technology will also discover pi. They may use the ratio of a circle's circumference to its radius. They may (and mostly will) count using a different numeric base. Very few of them will call it "pi". But they'll use a closely related number that's a simple multiple of our pi. They'll need it for the same reasons we do. And similarly for e.
In any case, if Pi is truly Random (it is isn't it?) won't every possible message occur?
Hmmm... You must be using an unusual definition of "random", which usually means that the value is unpredictable. Pi is the opposite of random. It's precisely defined and always has the same value for anyone who calculates it correctly. (Which leaves out the religious folks, but that's to be expected for anything requiring validity.;-) Pi would even be the same in a different universe with different physical laws, because its value isn't dependent on anything physical.
As for every message occurring, I think you're thinking of normal numbers. There is a conjecture that pi is normal, but it hasn't been proved. So far, statistics of the digits of pi are consistent with it being normal to as many digits as have been tested. A normal number does contain every possible message, in every possible encoding. If pi is normal, then so is e. [The proof is trivial for anyone who knows the well-known equation relating e and pi.]
And yes, this mathematical (ab)use of the word "normal" is one of the silliest things that mathematicians have ever done. But there is a long tradition of such silly misuse of common words as mathematical terms.
To me it suggests that older drivers are having more difficulty coping with the situation once it arises.
To me it suggests that the author of the article should learn a bit of basic statistics. Drawing conclusions from a sample of 24, in which the highest and lowest numbers are all single digits, is merely a case of using bogus statistics to meet your publishing deadline.
i'd feel much better with drivers who know they should pop the car into NEUTRAL if it starts accelerating out of control for any reason,...
Except we have testimony from any number of the Toyota acceleration victims that they had put the transmission into the "N" position, but the car just ignored it and kept accelerating. They also claimed that they knew how to use the brake, but the car also ignored that.
As a software guy, I'm quite familiar with ways that software will do things like this, and I find the testimony quite credible. But we might consider that the victims might be lying to us. Or that the auto company might be lying. Or both.
Myself, I'd believe them all better if there were "black box" recording devices with logs of the incidents. Rumors have it that some auto manufacturers are considering such gadgetry. But of course it would add to the price of a car and make it less competitive in a price-conscious market. So we might not see such recording devices soon, or if we do, they'll be very limited and won't be able to answer the sorts of questions that people are asking here.
In any case, it's a bit bemusing to see people automatically attributing failures of a "drive-by-wire" vehicle to 100% driver error. The cars we're talking about are controlled by computers, not by people; the driver is just there to give advice to the computers. How often have you pressed a button on your computer, and seen nothing happen in response? We're hearing the testimony of people saying that this happened with their computer-controlled car. Anyone with any experience at all with commercially-built computer systems would believe the "user", not the manufacturer, because we have far too much experience with commercially-built computers to believe otherwise.
OTOH, the CS guys will tell us that are a lot of really stupid computer users out there. And most of them are also drivers...
As a writer of fiction, I use the darknet extensively: I've got hidden wikis and websites where I collect information I don't yet want to share publicly, and where I compose rough drafts that I want to share with only a selected few. I am sure that I am not alone in this approach. I can't imagine any new authors of the 21st century who are not doing the same kind of thing.
This approach goes back way before the Web. The mailing list systems that developed back in the late 1970s and 1980s had "moderated" and limited-distribution lists for similar purposes.
In some cases, privatizing a discussion can be a requirement of having the discussion. Thus, early on the biologists found that it was a good idea to limit the ability to post to their lists, because if they didn't do this, they would be flooded with zillions of pages of text from the religious folks who would respond to any message that matched patterns like "evol[uv]". Similarly, professional historians limited access to discussions of topics such as the Middle East, because they were being buried by messages from bots that automatically posted huge quantities of text in response to a number of strings like "Israel".
Of course, many of these lists were fairly open to readers; they usually only restricted posting to cut down on the "spam" from ideological believers. But now that the Net is a commercial success, there are many reasons to carry out discussions totally in secret. That way, you are protected from the commercial folks who will file patents on your ideas, or publish your words or code or music as their own and then sue you for infringement.
"The deep web isn't half as strange or sinister as it sounds. In computer-science speak, it refers to those portions of the web that, for whatever reason, have been invisible to conventional search engines such as Google."
In reality, we might be better off if more of the Web were "dark" in this sense. Google (and the other major search sites) are fairly good at indexing text in English (and other human languages). But there's a lot of data online in those "sprawling databases" that are not encoded in human language, and are much better indexed by separate software that is designed to do that job right. One of the very real problems with google is that it so often returns sites that seem to contain strings of "words", but in fact aren't human language. I'm sure most people here are quite familiar with the results of "matches" on such data.
This isn't any sort of new observation. There are by now several thousand projects around the Net that deal with distributed databases of information encoded in various ways that are relevant and important to the people who use that data. One very well-known example is the GIS data that's used by the mapping software in your GPS gadget. This is very useful information, but for google to index it and return it when you google for "Brittney Spears" is not really a good idea. Similarly, there are large online databases of such stuff as astronomy and DNA data, and the person looking for the info on Madonna or Shakespeare is not happy with getting strings of parsed DNA.
I've been involved in building a search facility for several kinds of technical data, whose nature is uninteresting to nearly everyone here, but would server as one of many such examples. There are a thousand or so sites that use these formats. The data is "encoded" in plain-text form, mostly for ease of sending via any available method such as email. But most of the sites use robots.txt to tell the search bots to ignore the directories that contain this data, because the people using it are themselves annoyed by getting their own data back in google searches. The data contains shorts bursts of letters, so search bots treat it as text and index all the "words". The result is worthless to nearly anyone, including those who are familiar with and using this data encoding.
As an example, I found a file in my site that contains the string "red haired girl", did a google search, and it found a match on the file. People who click on that match, perhaps due to a redhead fetish, might be disappointed to find that it contains lines of text like "E3 ECE | FAB Ace | fec ecA | B2 e efg | age f2 a |fec ecA |BAB cAE |1 FAF FAF:|2 FAF". That's probably not what most people would expect for such a search. (Of course, if you follow irtrad-l, you'll probably recognize that notation and start humming along.;-)
A much more rational approach would be to develop separate search sites for each such kind of specialized data. The google gang does sorta understand this, of course. Thus, Google Maps uses the GIS data, but Google Search doesn't return GIS data (very often;-). They have software for searching GIS data, as do all the mapmakers, but they understand that there's little benefit in trying to merge GIS and human-language searches. Share some of the software, yes, since net navigation is a common task in all of them. Present the GIS addressing info in text form, too, since it's useful for humans to search that. But the text analysis and indexing schemes for the basic data have little in common, and need mostly separate software to do a good job of searching the data.
Anyway, it's no doubt true that there is a lot of "suspicious" information (semi-)hidden online. But it's also true that a lot of data is hidden from the major searchers simply because they don't do much that's useful with the data, and there's no reason to waste a server's CPU time servicing requests from googlebot or the other human-language search bots.
I'd still let the guy buy me dinner if he's ever in my town.
Don't think I would. It'd probably be full of worms and viruses and whatnot.
I'd rather have my dinner supplied by folks who are open about what went into it. Not that that's always a real choice, y'know, but still...
(I have found that many of my favorite meals have been made by people who want to discuss at great detail everything they did to make it. But I suppose not everyone is such a cooking geek.)
Actually, capsaicin is used in some human medicines as a pain suppressant. The actual mechanism doesn't seem to be well understood (probably because the studies haven't been funded yet;-), but it seems to be effective for some kinds of pain.
Capsaicin is also used in some treatments for minor sports injuries. The mechanism seems to be that it induces vasodilation, increasing blood flow to the area, and that's really what treats the problem.
Or do you just mean "mistaken" in the overly-pedantic, I-like-telling-people-they're-wrong sort of way?
I think that's it.;-)
Or perhaps I was misunderstanding the OP's claim that capsaicin causes an "irritation". There have been numerous medical comments that hot peppers don't seem to actually cause measurable irritation or any other sort of cellular damage. The mystery was why our nerves shout so loudly "I'm being burned!", when no such damage, not even mild irritation, seems to be measurable. The answer turns out that what capsaicin does isn't (what medical people call) "irritation"; it's rather a case of binding to our temperature sensors and tricking them into sending a false signal. This wouldn't usually be called "irritation" in medical terminology, though I suppose the term could easily be misused that way in common speech.
There are any number of other chemical compounds, mostly from plants, that cause injury-type responses in animals when no injury has actually happened. Capsaicin's "hot" effect is just one of the examples. It's interesting that we've adopted the plant as a flavor ingredient specifically because of this false-injury response.
There are other "hot" spices, of course, such as horseradish and black pepper. I haven't yet read of anyone pinning down their mechanism in the detail that was done for hot peppers. But then, I haven't been explicitly looking for that information, so it might be in The Literature. It has been verified that our sensory system can distinguish several such "hot" things, in that we can become accustomed to just one of them. Thus, people who eat a lot of hot peppers become tolerant of them, while wasabi remains hot, and vice versa. So if you want to qualify these kinds of "heat" as flavors, you'd have to say that capsaicin and wasabi are different flavors. Or you could say that false signals in temperature sensors shouldn't be called "flavor", because those aren't flavor sensors.
1-Click fails on every point, but most of all on prior art. A single click to "perform action X now" has been around at least since Douglas Englebart gave the Mother Of All Demos in 1968.
Yeah, I've sorta wondered about this since the "one click patent" thing became an issue. Amazon's patent is basically for using a single "click" to say "send me that thing". An obvious prior art for this is any web browser, since from the start they have all used a single click to mean "send me the thing this link points to". It's not obvious to me how Amazon's use is different, other than to send via a different protocol than HTTP. But sending physical goods via the mail system or other commercial delivery service is hardly a new idea.
So what is there in the patent that's not present earlier delivery system or in the earliest web browsers? The "one click" thing can't be part of it, because that was the primary request method in the first browsers.
I may be mistaken, but I think it is generally considered that spicy or picante does not have a flavor receptor and that the picante experience can be attributed to chemicals that cause irritation in our mouths.
Yeah; you probably are mistaken.;-) For a long time, there has been a bit of a medical mystery about how hot peppers produce a sensation that feels like major heat damage, but medical tests can't detect any actual tissue damage of any sort. This was answered a few years ago by some researchers who determined that the capsaicin chemical that does the job targets specifically the nerve endings that detect heat, and tricks them into sending a false signal to the brain saying "I'm being burned!"
An interesting aspect to this was verification that capsaicin does target specifically mammalian heat sensors, and doesn't work with birds. Anyone who has pet birds is familiar with this. Seed mixtures intended for birds such as parrots usually contain hot peppers, which the birds like. I like to grow my own hot peppers in pots that I bring in during the winter. I have to protect them from our pet conure and cockatiels, because they'll land and the plants and devastate them. When I decide to pick the ripe ones, the conure especially is right there demanding samples of the harvest, which she devours whole.
Further research is needed on the topic, but the hypothesis is that hot peppers evolved their "hot" chemical explicitly to distinguish between mammals and birds. Pepper seeds have a thin, leathery shell which doesn't survive the long, slow digestive system of most mammals. But birds can't afford to carry food around for long; they have a short, powerful digestive system that extracts just the easily-digested stuff and dumps the rest after only a few hours, because it would take more energy to transport it than it contains. The leathery shells of pepper seeds do survive a bird's digestive process. So the hypothesis is that peppers are specifically encouraging birds as seed-transport agents, and discouraging mammals that would digest the seeds.
There's some sort of biological irony in the fact that hot peppers have been spread from their origin (South America) to the rest of the world by a mammal (us). Of course, we can easily do something that's difficult for other mammals: We can dilute the hot pepper enough that it's just a minor (or not so minor) flavor mixed with other flavors, and not overpowering as it is if you eat the pepper alone.
In any case, to be on topic, we should note that the hotness of hot peppers isn't really a "flavor". It's more a case of our heat sensors being tricked by a chemical produced by plants that are trying to prevent us from eating their fruit and digesting their seeds.
I hadn't heard of this site before, so I checked it out. Very good site, it's now bookmarked.
Which site do you mean? I first guessed that you meant smashingmag.com, so I looked at it - and was duly horrified. Maybe they like it, but there's no way I'd want any site I built to look or act like that. Especially since it seems to violate the growing requirement that it work sensibly on a handheld/smartphone. I tried it from my G1 and my wife's iPhone, and it was unreadable on either (in Japanese or English;-).
So I'm assuming you liked some other site, but I can't tell which one.
It has occurred to me that I'd really like a site that has examples (good and bad) of pages that work well (or poorly) on various kinds of client gadgets. If I can't find one, I may make one, set up as a wiki, and see if I can attract any contributors. There are a lot of problems with accomodating the flock of new, small, portable gadgetry that I don't know how to handle well, and it'd be useful to get input from others who have solved specific problems.
Actually, I'm working at home right now, so nobody but my ISP (and the NSA and google;-) can see what I'm doing online. It's becoming fairly common for companies to save IT expenses by having everyone who can work at home. It's sorta like a return to the bad old days of "cottage industry", where most people work at home and are responsible for all their expenses, but the megacorps that control the "market" are in charge^Wcontrol of the distribution of goods (and profits).
I do have a few demos on my home machine's web server of the fun things that can be done to you by a site you visit if you have javascript enabled. I tend to visit unknown sites with firefox, where I have NoScript and a few other blockers installed.
It will be nice when the day comes when open source has taken over and all of this will be a moot point.
Not likely. We should note that, as Bruce Perens and others pointed out the the open-source court decision story the other day, for open-source software to stay open and available requires that it be copyrighted (and/or patented), and accompanied by the right license that's been vetted by knowledgeable lawyers. Corporations like to treat open source as public domain, which permits them to make their own claim for it, sue you for infringement, and bankrupt you with legal expenses.
Of course, the idea of disconnecting people "for downloading copyrighted material", as the summary puts it, has its own built-in threat to all of us. Note, for example, the slashdot correctly places at the bottom of discussion pages: "All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster." This is literally correct in the US, the EU, and most other countries. Everything you're reading here is copyrighted. This message is copyrighted by me, by default, since I didn't explicitly declare it to be public domain.
You don't have written permission from me or anyone else to download this message or any other message on the page you're reading. So according to the proposed rule, you should be disconnected for unauthorized downloading of copyrighted material. Pretty much everything on every web page is copyrighted, with very few exceptions for quotes of ancient text that's out of copyright. So the proposed rule simply says that anyone using the Internet can legally be disconnected at any time by anyone in power. The charge of downloading copyrighted material will always be trivially true, unless the "copyrighted by default" law is repealed (or "fair use" is radically expanded and enforced).
(note: I might have a skewed view of state politics since I'm from Illinois - here's hoping our next elected Governor isn't arrested)
Hmmm... One might take this as evidence that Illinois politics is less corrupt than most other states. After all, in most states there isn't the slightest chance that a sitting governor would be arrested. If this happens in Illinois, it means that the legal system isn't in the governor's pocket, and the governor can be held accountable for actions while in office. Compared with states where a governor can get away with nearly anything, this is an extraordinary instance of law enforcement against the powerful.
Of course, I could be wrong, and the Illinois politicians are so over-the-top corrupt that they offend even the on-the-take police and prosecutors. That's hard to believe, but I suppose it's possible.
These people are talking about on the scale of thousands of years, the point where recovering data is a matter of "What were our ancestors like?" rather than "Oh look, a zip disk!".
We have had a very recent success story of a case like this. After the Spanish destroyed most of the civilization of Central America, the Mayan writing system became unreadable. There are thousands of "stelae", stone columns covered with writing, all over the area, and they were generally understood to be historic markers. They did contain dates that were readable (since any mathematician will recognize the numbers as such and will understand the notation), but nothing else could be decoded. The writing was cracked in the 1970s, with a lot of help from speakers of the modern Mayan languages. Scholars are now busy decoding all those historic markers and the inscriptions on ruins of old buildings. Most of the original Mayan libaries were burned as "heretical", and only a handful of books survived (ironically smuggled to Europe by Catholic priests who understood their value). One of them is an astronomical reference text that tells us a lot about the capabilities of Mayan astronomers, but we don't have much else of what could have been thousands of other technical works.
So in that case, we've gone from "Oh look, a carved stone historical marker; I wonder what happened here" to "Hmmm... On July 27, 1147, there was a battle here in which the forces of so-and-so city won. I wonder where that city was? Does anyone recognize the name?"
A funnier example: A few years ago, someone published recipes for drinks made from ground chocolate beans and hot peppers (and no sugar), translated from some old writings. There are several companies in Central America now selling the ingredients and instructions for making such potions, which were apparently quite popular with the Mayan upper crust a thousand years ago. They're really macho drinks, guaranteed to fry your tonsils.
Both of these do tell us a lot more about those societies than just "Oh look, a stone pillar covered with writing!"
(In case anyone wants a good scholarly project to work on, people are also tackling the pre-Mayan writing systems, e.g. the Olmec writing. They're all related, so cracking Mayan writing is helping decode the others. There are images online, so interested people anywhere in the world can get involved. That should satisfy just about anyone's nerdy desire to get involved in decoding obscure encoding systems.;-)
But 5000 years from now, how does someone interpret a shiny little disk?
They wouldn't be able to use that stuff because of copyrights and DRM
You're probably right; copyright extensions will probably eventually last that long.
But historically, this whole issue is nothing new.A number of historians have pointed out that, for example, our "scientific methods" have been independently discovered by intelligent people in most societies. The "scientific revolution" in the Western world wasn't based on discovery of scientific methods of investigation. Rather, it was the result of the new concept of open publication. Before that, technical knowledge was generally closely held by "guilds", organizations that controlled and restricted access to their specialized knowledge. This is clear in medical areas, where there is all sorts of "folk medicine" that typically turns out to include knowledge of a lot of naturally-occurring drugs. Western medicine surpassed the "medicine men" of other cultures in the late 1900s, because the Western medical people started publishing their results. This slowly produced a distributed body of knowledge that was available to all the practitioners.
But even in modern Western societies, there's a major exception: Knowledge developed by "private" organizations such as corporations is still closely held, and protected by the legal system. Even the patent system, which generally requires publishing the details of a patent, limits the usability of the information to people who have paid the appropriate license fees. The motive is profit, but the actual effect is very often to block use of the information by others. Trade Secret is, of course, the old guild-style secrecy in a modern form. Information handled this was is routinely lost when the single owner dies or loses interest due to low profits.
In any case, what's happening with digital records fits right in with the historic secrecy that most societies have had. The Western scientific community is one of the few known cases of free and open sharing of information. You'd think its spectacular success over the past few centuries would have taught us something. But this seems to not be the case. Even the computer industry, which is especially dependent on modern science for its very existence, tends to keep most of its records in closed, proprietary forms that are protected by trade secrecy. We do have a significant "Open Source" subculture whose results have been in line with the rest of the scientific world's. But most of the commercial part of the industry treats the Open Source approach with contempt and does extensive PR to prevent its adoption by the wider culture.
So it shouldn't be surprising that digitized records are a sinkhole of information. Such data has been and will continue to be quickly lost in the same way that the traditional Guild system lost most of its information within a few generations. If you want information saved, you have to put it into a form that will survive and be readable in the future. Most of our current digital media won't even outlive the people who write to it.
I have heard that some of the braided ropes left by Mayans might actually be a "written" language.
Can you give some references for this? I'm familiar with the Inca knotted-rope notation, but I've never read of any instances of it in Mayan areas. I did a quick google check of "Mayan braided rope writing", which gets a few thousand hits, but none of them seem to actually talk about such a Mayan writing system. They just use those words in different sentences, such as talking about braided-rope decorations in one paragraph and writing in another. I also substituted "Inca" for "Mayan", and google's first page linked to descriptions of the familiar Inca notation.
Also, the Inca knot notation has been understood as some sort of notation all along; it's just that nobody knows how to decode it. This was also true of Mayan writing, but it was finally cracked in the 1970s and 1980s with the help of native speakers of the modern Mayan languages (and there's a fair amount of scholarly research on the subject now).
You know what the hell of it is? If someone blew the whistle that the government was steaming open everyone's mail that passed through the USPS, people would be going ape-shit.
But the fact that they monitor all electronic communications? Yawn.
It's all part of a more general phenomenon that many people have noticed: A computer instantly invalidates all precedent. As soon as the word "computer" appears, people usually forget everything they ever knew, and have to relearn everything from scratch.
This is especially clear in the legal field. Consider any "freedom" that your local laws declare. Look around for how the freedom is treated in the vicinity of a computer. You'll find that almost always, and authority (your boss, your ISP, your government, you school system) completely ignores that freedom in anything dealing with computers.
For instance, many countries have laws saying that legal authorities can't invade your home without a court warrant (or whatever it's called in the local language). But legal authorities everywhere routinely do this with computers. In most cases, they'll even invade your home to get at your computer, and even remove it from the premises, without bothering to get permission from any court. They also routinely "crack" citizens' computers to get electronic access, to take copies of your files. This is in clear violation of the law nearly everywhere, but since there's a computer involved, all laws are moot, until the legal system establishes the same protections near computers that apply everywhere else.
Look around at discussions like this; you'll find that the rule "All precedent disappears in the presence of a computer" is a workable explanation for pretty much all of them.
Or we could just make a little list of the bill's supporters, and arrange for the local authorities to get anonymous tips that they're suspected of downloading child porn.
You mean there were no "hurricanes, snowstorms, tornadoes, wildfires, desertification, droughts, etc. etc. etc." before industrialization? Who knew all these things were man made?
Actually, there's pretty good evidence that some of those things in the ancient world were in good part due to human activity. Probably not the hurricanes, snowstorms or tornadoes. But humans are known to have been involved in at least some of the others.
The case of wildfires is obvious. In several parts of the world, prairie-like ecosystems covered around twice their natural area, and a major factor in all of them was the fires started by humans. This was generally done intentionally, to limit the growth of trees, because a prairie system puts more energy into growing greenery and supports a much higher animal population than most forests. But it only works in dry areas; you can't convert a rain forest to a prairie with fires. And yes, a controlled burn isn't a "wildfire". But controlled fires did frequently get out of control and burn more than was intended, and lightning did start some of those fires. The archaeological evidence supporting all this has only been understood for a few decades, but it is in the literature.
The situation with desertification is also fairly well documented. Thus, historians say they have evidence that the problem of under-irrigation leading to salinification was well understood in the "Fertile Crescent" at least 3000 years ago. But the people chose short-term profit in the form of maximum crops this year, knowing full well what it would do to the land that their grandchildren would inherit. You can see the results in any news videos of the Iraq countryside.
This is much more widespread than just Mesopotamia+Levant. There was a series of experiments back in the 1970s, in which areas across the southwest-Asian arid zone (Syria to Pakistan) in chunks of 2-5 square km were surrounded by goat-proof fences to keep out grazers, and left fallow. In all of them, a year later they were covered with grasses and other forbs. Conclusion: The "desert" in this area is unnatural, and is a consequence of overgrazing. There aren't very many wild grazing critters in this area now; the grazers are almost all domesticated animals. If they could be removed for a year or two, the area would revert to grassland. The land would then support a much larger grazer population than is there now, as long as the grazing were limited so that the bare ground isn't exposed. But humans won't do this; they'll always maximize their grazing animals, until the grasses are killed, and then move on, complaining about how they're mistreated by their gods (or corporations or governments or whatever).
There's evidence that this applies to deserts in other areas, in the form of similar land control development. If you google for "bocage" plus other desert-related keywords, you can find some information about it. (Warning: As you might guess from the term, it's mostly in French.;-) This term refers to a plot of land surrounded by a goat-proof fence and usually some dikes to catch storm runoff. They have been built in various parts of the "Sahel". By limiting grazers and catching water, people have converted their chunks of dry land to greenery. Of course these are widely considered "pilot studies", and aren't taking seriously by the political system or the people who believe that climate is too big to be effected by humans. Some of the aerial photos of these plots of land are impressive. And this can't much be done in areas where fighting is going on.
This story was covered in a lot of "discussion" sections of various scientific journals back in the 1970s and 80s. The consensus was that the political system probably couldn't be made aware of the implications, and the documented spreading of the Sahara would continue due to overpopulation and overgrazing. But the information has been around, available to people who are interested and apolitical enough to look for it (
Slashdot Mirror
The article's review of K-Meleon stated most clearly what they were looking for:
"A browser that looks and performs like the software of yesteryear. Only an option for those running equally aged hardware."
Translation:
A browser that doesn't supply the flashy, cpu-maximizing eye candy that we like.
Of course, it's easy to understand that this is what's important to a lot of people. But those of us in the market for a sleek, compact browser that doesn't interfere with the important things that are also running on our machines, reviews like this simply tell us that we should find a different reviewer. Is there a review out there that compares these (and other) browsers on the basis of functionality, resource usage, and other more practical attributes?
(Of course, people like that probably aren't much using Windows 7, so maybe this article was a good review for most of the actual customer base. ;-)
link to http://www.browserchoice.eu/
So how do I get it to display the other browsers that this article talks about? There's no scrollbar in my FF window that's showing that page. I tried a mouseover, and nothing happened. I told NoScript to allow scripts from the site, and that also produced no changes.
(Maybe it's because I looked at it from my Macbook Pro and my Ubuntu machine. Perhaps I should try it on my wife's Macbook, where she has a virtual Windows XP installed, and even has IE6 on it. This is for work reasons of course; she hates Windows. ;-)
"There's no quality control being offered, either -- they're simply the '12 most widely-used web browsers that run on Windows 7,' based on usage share in the European Economic Area."
So they're intentionally excluding any new browsers that may exist or may be built in the future. Yeah, I guess this is a lot how they get their politicians; the built-in advantage of being an incumbent is well known. Blocking entry to newcomers is an old tradition in both commerce and politics.
Actually, I have heard of Buffon's needle. We might note that if one looks at the equations that turn up in probability and statistics, one sees a lot of instances of pi (and e).
Pi might have been originally defined in terms of the diameter and circumference of a circle (in the Euclidean plane), but that's not the only way it can be defined. Any of the many other equations containing a related "magic number" would do as well. The Euclidean circle is just one of the simplest things that uses this number, understandable by people with very primitive technology.
We can expect that any other intelligent species in this universe (or any other) that develops technology will also discover pi. They may use the ratio of a circle's circumference to its radius. They may (and mostly will) count using a different numeric base. Very few of them will call it "pi". But they'll use a closely related number that's a simple multiple of our pi. They'll need it for the same reasons we do. And similarly for e.
In any case, if Pi is truly Random (it is isn't it?) won't every possible message occur?
Hmmm ... You must be using an unusual definition of "random", which usually means that the value is unpredictable. Pi is the opposite of random. It's precisely defined and always has the same value for anyone who calculates it correctly. (Which leaves out the religious folks, but that's to be expected for anything requiring validity. ;-) Pi would even be the same in a different universe with different physical laws, because its value isn't dependent on anything physical.
As for every message occurring, I think you're thinking of normal numbers. There is a conjecture that pi is normal, but it hasn't been proved. So far, statistics of the digits of pi are consistent with it being normal to as many digits as have been tested. A normal number does contain every possible message, in every possible encoding. If pi is normal, then so is e. [The proof is trivial for anyone who knows the well-known equation relating e and pi.]
And yes, this mathematical (ab)use of the word "normal" is one of the silliest things that mathematicians have ever done. But there is a long tradition of such silly misuse of common words as mathematical terms.
To me it suggests that older drivers are having more difficulty coping with the situation once it arises.
To me it suggests that the author of the article should learn a bit of basic statistics. Drawing conclusions from a sample of 24, in which the highest and lowest numbers are all single digits, is merely a case of using bogus statistics to meet your publishing deadline.
i'd feel much better with drivers who know they should pop the car into NEUTRAL if it starts accelerating out of control for any reason, ...
Except we have testimony from any number of the Toyota acceleration victims that they had put the transmission into the "N" position, but the car just ignored it and kept accelerating. They also claimed that they knew how to use the brake, but the car also ignored that.
As a software guy, I'm quite familiar with ways that software will do things like this, and I find the testimony quite credible. But we might consider that the victims might be lying to us. Or that the auto company might be lying. Or both.
Myself, I'd believe them all better if there were "black box" recording devices with logs of the incidents. Rumors have it that some auto manufacturers are considering such gadgetry. But of course it would add to the price of a car and make it less competitive in a price-conscious market. So we might not see such recording devices soon, or if we do, they'll be very limited and won't be able to answer the sorts of questions that people are asking here.
In any case, it's a bit bemusing to see people automatically attributing failures of a "drive-by-wire" vehicle to 100% driver error. The cars we're talking about are controlled by computers, not by people; the driver is just there to give advice to the computers. How often have you pressed a button on your computer, and seen nothing happen in response? We're hearing the testimony of people saying that this happened with their computer-controlled car. Anyone with any experience at all with commercially-built computer systems would believe the "user", not the manufacturer, because we have far too much experience with commercially-built computers to believe otherwise.
OTOH, the CS guys will tell us that are a lot of really stupid computer users out there. And most of them are also drivers ...
As a writer of fiction, I use the darknet extensively: I've got hidden wikis and websites where I collect information I don't yet want to share publicly, and where I compose rough drafts that I want to share with only a selected few. I am sure that I am not alone in this approach. I can't imagine any new authors of the 21st century who are not doing the same kind of thing.
This approach goes back way before the Web. The mailing list systems that developed back in the late 1970s and 1980s had "moderated" and limited-distribution lists for similar purposes.
In some cases, privatizing a discussion can be a requirement of having the discussion. Thus, early on the biologists found that it was a good idea to limit the ability to post to their lists, because if they didn't do this, they would be flooded with zillions of pages of text from the religious folks who would respond to any message that matched patterns like "evol[uv]". Similarly, professional historians limited access to discussions of topics such as the Middle East, because they were being buried by messages from bots that automatically posted huge quantities of text in response to a number of strings like "Israel".
Of course, many of these lists were fairly open to readers; they usually only restricted posting to cut down on the "spam" from ideological believers. But now that the Net is a commercial success, there are many reasons to carry out discussions totally in secret. That way, you are protected from the commercial folks who will file patents on your ideas, or publish your words or code or music as their own and then sue you for infringement.
"The deep web isn't half as strange or sinister as it sounds. In computer-science speak, it refers to those portions of the web that, for whatever reason, have been invisible to conventional search engines such as Google."
In reality, we might be better off if more of the Web were "dark" in this sense. Google (and the other major search sites) are fairly good at indexing text in English (and other human languages). But there's a lot of data online in those "sprawling databases" that are not encoded in human language, and are much better indexed by separate software that is designed to do that job right. One of the very real problems with google is that it so often returns sites that seem to contain strings of "words", but in fact aren't human language. I'm sure most people here are quite familiar with the results of "matches" on such data.
This isn't any sort of new observation. There are by now several thousand projects around the Net that deal with distributed databases of information encoded in various ways that are relevant and important to the people who use that data. One very well-known example is the GIS data that's used by the mapping software in your GPS gadget. This is very useful information, but for google to index it and return it when you google for "Brittney Spears" is not really a good idea. Similarly, there are large online databases of such stuff as astronomy and DNA data, and the person looking for the info on Madonna or Shakespeare is not happy with getting strings of parsed DNA.
I've been involved in building a search facility for several kinds of technical data, whose nature is uninteresting to nearly everyone here, but would server as one of many such examples. There are a thousand or so sites that use these formats. The data is "encoded" in plain-text form, mostly for ease of sending via any available method such as email. But most of the sites use robots.txt to tell the search bots to ignore the directories that contain this data, because the people using it are themselves annoyed by getting their own data back in google searches. The data contains shorts bursts of letters, so search bots treat it as text and index all the "words". The result is worthless to nearly anyone, including those who are familiar with and using this data encoding.
As an example, I found a file in my site that contains the string "red haired girl", did a google search, and it found a match on the file. People who click on that match, perhaps due to a redhead fetish, might be disappointed to find that it contains lines of text like "E3 ECE | FAB Ace | fec ecA | B2 e efg | age f2 a |fec ecA |BAB cAE |1 FAF FAF :|2 FAF". That's probably not what most people would expect for such a search. (Of course, if you follow irtrad-l, you'll probably recognize that notation and start humming along. ;-)
A much more rational approach would be to develop separate search sites for each such kind of specialized data. The google gang does sorta understand this, of course. Thus, Google Maps uses the GIS data, but Google Search doesn't return GIS data (very often ;-). They have software for searching GIS data, as do all the mapmakers, but they understand that there's little benefit in trying to merge GIS and human-language searches. Share some of the software, yes, since net navigation is a common task in all of them. Present the GIS addressing info in text form, too, since it's useful for humans to search that. But the text analysis and indexing schemes for the basic data have little in common, and need mostly separate software to do a good job of searching the data.
Anyway, it's no doubt true that there is a lot of "suspicious" information (semi-)hidden online. But it's also true that a lot of data is hidden from the major searchers simply because they don't do much that's useful with the data, and there's no reason to waste a server's CPU time servicing requests from googlebot or the other human-language search bots.
I'd still let the guy buy me dinner if he's ever in my town.
Don't think I would. It'd probably be full of worms and viruses and whatnot.
I'd rather have my dinner supplied by folks who are open about what went into it. Not that that's always a real choice, y'know, but still ...
(I have found that many of my favorite meals have been made by people who want to discuss at great detail everything they did to make it. But I suppose not everyone is such a cooking geek.)
Actually, capsaicin is used in some human medicines as a pain suppressant. The actual mechanism doesn't seem to be well understood (probably because the studies haven't been funded yet ;-), but it seems to be effective for some kinds of pain.
Capsaicin is also used in some treatments for minor sports injuries. The mechanism seems to be that it induces vasodilation, increasing blood flow to the area, and that's really what treats the problem.
Or do you just mean "mistaken" in the overly-pedantic, I-like-telling-people-they're-wrong sort of way?
I think that's it. ;-)
Or perhaps I was misunderstanding the OP's claim that capsaicin causes an "irritation". There have been numerous medical comments that hot peppers don't seem to actually cause measurable irritation or any other sort of cellular damage. The mystery was why our nerves shout so loudly "I'm being burned!", when no such damage, not even mild irritation, seems to be measurable. The answer turns out that what capsaicin does isn't (what medical people call) "irritation"; it's rather a case of binding to our temperature sensors and tricking them into sending a false signal. This wouldn't usually be called "irritation" in medical terminology, though I suppose the term could easily be misused that way in common speech.
There are any number of other chemical compounds, mostly from plants, that cause injury-type responses in animals when no injury has actually happened. Capsaicin's "hot" effect is just one of the examples. It's interesting that we've adopted the plant as a flavor ingredient specifically because of this false-injury response.
There are other "hot" spices, of course, such as horseradish and black pepper. I haven't yet read of anyone pinning down their mechanism in the detail that was done for hot peppers. But then, I haven't been explicitly looking for that information, so it might be in The Literature. It has been verified that our sensory system can distinguish several such "hot" things, in that we can become accustomed to just one of them. Thus, people who eat a lot of hot peppers become tolerant of them, while wasabi remains hot, and vice versa. So if you want to qualify these kinds of "heat" as flavors, you'd have to say that capsaicin and wasabi are different flavors. Or you could say that false signals in temperature sensors shouldn't be called "flavor", because those aren't flavor sensors.
1-Click fails on every point, but most of all on prior art. A single click to "perform action X now" has been around at least since Douglas Englebart gave the Mother Of All Demos in 1968.
Yeah, I've sorta wondered about this since the "one click patent" thing became an issue. Amazon's patent is basically for using a single "click" to say "send me that thing". An obvious prior art for this is any web browser, since from the start they have all used a single click to mean "send me the thing this link points to". It's not obvious to me how Amazon's use is different, other than to send via a different protocol than HTTP. But sending physical goods via the mail system or other commercial delivery service is hardly a new idea.
So what is there in the patent that's not present earlier delivery system or in the earliest web browsers? The "one click" thing can't be part of it, because that was the primary request method in the first browsers.
I may be mistaken, but I think it is generally considered that spicy or picante does not have a flavor receptor and that the picante experience can be attributed to chemicals that cause irritation in our mouths.
Yeah; you probably are mistaken. ;-) For a long time, there has been a bit of a medical mystery about how hot peppers produce a sensation that feels like major heat damage, but medical tests can't detect any actual tissue damage of any sort. This was answered a few years ago by some researchers who determined that the capsaicin chemical that does the job targets specifically the nerve endings that detect heat, and tricks them into sending a false signal to the brain saying "I'm being burned!"
An interesting aspect to this was verification that capsaicin does target specifically mammalian heat sensors, and doesn't work with birds. Anyone who has pet birds is familiar with this. Seed mixtures intended for birds such as parrots usually contain hot peppers, which the birds like. I like to grow my own hot peppers in pots that I bring in during the winter. I have to protect them from our pet conure and cockatiels, because they'll land and the plants and devastate them. When I decide to pick the ripe ones, the conure especially is right there demanding samples of the harvest, which she devours whole.
Further research is needed on the topic, but the hypothesis is that hot peppers evolved their "hot" chemical explicitly to distinguish between mammals and birds. Pepper seeds have a thin, leathery shell which doesn't survive the long, slow digestive system of most mammals. But birds can't afford to carry food around for long; they have a short, powerful digestive system that extracts just the easily-digested stuff and dumps the rest after only a few hours, because it would take more energy to transport it than it contains. The leathery shells of pepper seeds do survive a bird's digestive process. So the hypothesis is that peppers are specifically encouraging birds as seed-transport agents, and discouraging mammals that would digest the seeds.
There's some sort of biological irony in the fact that hot peppers have been spread from their origin (South America) to the rest of the world by a mammal (us). Of course, we can easily do something that's difficult for other mammals: We can dilute the hot pepper enough that it's just a minor (or not so minor) flavor mixed with other flavors, and not overpowering as it is if you eat the pepper alone.
In any case, to be on topic, we should note that the hotness of hot peppers isn't really a "flavor". It's more a case of our heat sensors being tricked by a chemical produced by plants that are trying to prevent us from eating their fruit and digesting their seeds.
I hadn't heard of this site before, so I checked it out. Very good site, it's now bookmarked.
Which site do you mean? I first guessed that you meant smashingmag.com, so I looked at it - and was duly horrified. Maybe they like it, but there's no way I'd want any site I built to look or act like that. Especially since it seems to violate the growing requirement that it work sensibly on a handheld/smartphone. I tried it from my G1 and my wife's iPhone, and it was unreadable on either (in Japanese or English ;-).
So I'm assuming you liked some other site, but I can't tell which one.
It has occurred to me that I'd really like a site that has examples (good and bad) of pages that work well (or poorly) on various kinds of client gadgets. If I can't find one, I may make one, set up as a wiki, and see if I can attract any contributors. There are a lot of problems with accomodating the flock of new, small, portable gadgetry that I don't know how to handle well, and it'd be useful to get input from others who have solved specific problems.
Actually, I'm working at home right now, so nobody but my ISP (and the NSA and google ;-) can see what I'm doing online. It's becoming fairly common for companies to save IT expenses by having everyone who can work at home. It's sorta like a return to the bad old days of "cottage industry", where most people work at home and are responsible for all their expenses, but the megacorps that control the "market" are in charge^Wcontrol of the distribution of goods (and profits).
I do have a few demos on my home machine's web server of the fun things that can be done to you by a site you visit if you have javascript enabled. I tend to visit unknown sites with firefox, where I have NoScript and a few other blockers installed.
It will be nice when the day comes when open source has taken over and all of this will be a moot point.
Not likely. We should note that, as Bruce Perens and others pointed out the the open-source court decision story the other day, for open-source software to stay open and available requires that it be copyrighted (and/or patented), and accompanied by the right license that's been vetted by knowledgeable lawyers. Corporations like to treat open source as public domain, which permits them to make their own claim for it, sue you for infringement, and bankrupt you with legal expenses.
Of course, the idea of disconnecting people "for downloading copyrighted material", as the summary puts it, has its own built-in threat to all of us. Note, for example, the slashdot correctly places at the bottom of discussion pages: "All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster." This is literally correct in the US, the EU, and most other countries. Everything you're reading here is copyrighted. This message is copyrighted by me, by default, since I didn't explicitly declare it to be public domain.
You don't have written permission from me or anyone else to download this message or any other message on the page you're reading. So according to the proposed rule, you should be disconnected for unauthorized downloading of copyrighted material. Pretty much everything on every web page is copyrighted, with very few exceptions for quotes of ancient text that's out of copyright. So the proposed rule simply says that anyone using the Internet can legally be disconnected at any time by anyone in power. The charge of downloading copyrighted material will always be trivially true, unless the "copyrighted by default" law is repealed (or "fair use" is radically expanded and enforced).
Goto www.freeubuntu.com or www.freepuppy.com for your free computer OS.
Damn! I was really hoping that www.freepuppy.com was a real site. What a letdown.
A few months ago, I saw a cute sign in a store warning visitors that unaccompanied children would be given an espresso and a free puppy.
(note: I might have a skewed view of state politics since I'm from Illinois - here's hoping our next elected Governor isn't arrested)
Hmmm ... One might take this as evidence that Illinois politics is less corrupt than most other states. After all, in most states there isn't the slightest chance that a sitting governor would be arrested. If this happens in Illinois, it means that the legal system isn't in the governor's pocket, and the governor can be held accountable for actions while in office. Compared with states where a governor can get away with nearly anything, this is an extraordinary instance of law enforcement against the powerful.
Of course, I could be wrong, and the Illinois politicians are so over-the-top corrupt that they offend even the on-the-take police and prosecutors. That's hard to believe, but I suppose it's possible.
These people are talking about on the scale of thousands of years, the point where recovering data is a matter of "What were our ancestors like?" rather than "Oh look, a zip disk!".
We have had a very recent success story of a case like this. After the Spanish destroyed most of the civilization of Central America, the Mayan writing system became unreadable. There are thousands of "stelae", stone columns covered with writing, all over the area, and they were generally understood to be historic markers. They did contain dates that were readable (since any mathematician will recognize the numbers as such and will understand the notation), but nothing else could be decoded. The writing was cracked in the 1970s, with a lot of help from speakers of the modern Mayan languages. Scholars are now busy decoding all those historic markers and the inscriptions on ruins of old buildings. Most of the original Mayan libaries were burned as "heretical", and only a handful of books survived (ironically smuggled to Europe by Catholic priests who understood their value). One of them is an astronomical reference text that tells us a lot about the capabilities of Mayan astronomers, but we don't have much else of what could have been thousands of other technical works.
So in that case, we've gone from "Oh look, a carved stone historical marker; I wonder what happened here" to "Hmmm ... On July 27, 1147, there was a battle here in which the forces of so-and-so city won. I wonder where that city was? Does anyone recognize the name?"
A funnier example: A few years ago, someone published recipes for drinks made from ground chocolate beans and hot peppers (and no sugar), translated from some old writings. There are several companies in Central America now selling the ingredients and instructions for making such potions, which were apparently quite popular with the Mayan upper crust a thousand years ago. They're really macho drinks, guaranteed to fry your tonsils.
Both of these do tell us a lot more about those societies than just "Oh look, a stone pillar covered with writing!"
(In case anyone wants a good scholarly project to work on, people are also tackling the pre-Mayan writing systems, e.g. the Olmec writing. They're all related, so cracking Mayan writing is helping decode the others. There are images online, so interested people anywhere in the world can get involved. That should satisfy just about anyone's nerdy desire to get involved in decoding obscure encoding systems. ;-)
You're probably right; copyright extensions will probably eventually last that long.
But historically, this whole issue is nothing new.A number of historians have pointed out that, for example, our "scientific methods" have been independently discovered by intelligent people in most societies. The "scientific revolution" in the Western world wasn't based on discovery of scientific methods of investigation. Rather, it was the result of the new concept of open publication. Before that, technical knowledge was generally closely held by "guilds", organizations that controlled and restricted access to their specialized knowledge. This is clear in medical areas, where there is all sorts of "folk medicine" that typically turns out to include knowledge of a lot of naturally-occurring drugs. Western medicine surpassed the "medicine men" of other cultures in the late 1900s, because the Western medical people started publishing their results. This slowly produced a distributed body of knowledge that was available to all the practitioners.
But even in modern Western societies, there's a major exception: Knowledge developed by "private" organizations such as corporations is still closely held, and protected by the legal system. Even the patent system, which generally requires publishing the details of a patent, limits the usability of the information to people who have paid the appropriate license fees. The motive is profit, but the actual effect is very often to block use of the information by others. Trade Secret is, of course, the old guild-style secrecy in a modern form. Information handled this was is routinely lost when the single owner dies or loses interest due to low profits.
In any case, what's happening with digital records fits right in with the historic secrecy that most societies have had. The Western scientific community is one of the few known cases of free and open sharing of information. You'd think its spectacular success over the past few centuries would have taught us something. But this seems to not be the case. Even the computer industry, which is especially dependent on modern science for its very existence, tends to keep most of its records in closed, proprietary forms that are protected by trade secrecy. We do have a significant "Open Source" subculture whose results have been in line with the rest of the scientific world's. But most of the commercial part of the industry treats the Open Source approach with contempt and does extensive PR to prevent its adoption by the wider culture.
So it shouldn't be surprising that digitized records are a sinkhole of information. Such data has been and will continue to be quickly lost in the same way that the traditional Guild system lost most of its information within a few generations. If you want information saved, you have to put it into a form that will survive and be readable in the future. Most of our current digital media won't even outlive the people who write to it.
I have heard that some of the braided ropes left by Mayans might actually be a "written" language.
Can you give some references for this? I'm familiar with the Inca knotted-rope notation, but I've never read of any instances of it in Mayan areas. I did a quick google check of "Mayan braided rope writing", which gets a few thousand hits, but none of them seem to actually talk about such a Mayan writing system. They just use those words in different sentences, such as talking about braided-rope decorations in one paragraph and writing in another. I also substituted "Inca" for "Mayan", and google's first page linked to descriptions of the familiar Inca notation.
Also, the Inca knot notation has been understood as some sort of notation all along; it's just that nobody knows how to decode it. This was also true of Mayan writing, but it was finally cracked in the 1970s and 1980s with the help of native speakers of the modern Mayan languages (and there's a fair amount of scholarly research on the subject now).
So where can we read about Mayan knot notation?
You know what the hell of it is? If someone blew the whistle that the government was steaming open everyone's mail that passed through the USPS, people would be going ape-shit.
But the fact that they monitor all electronic communications? Yawn.
It's all part of a more general phenomenon that many people have noticed: A computer instantly invalidates all precedent. As soon as the word "computer" appears, people usually forget everything they ever knew, and have to relearn everything from scratch.
This is especially clear in the legal field. Consider any "freedom" that your local laws declare. Look around for how the freedom is treated in the vicinity of a computer. You'll find that almost always, and authority (your boss, your ISP, your government, you school system) completely ignores that freedom in anything dealing with computers.
For instance, many countries have laws saying that legal authorities can't invade your home without a court warrant (or whatever it's called in the local language). But legal authorities everywhere routinely do this with computers. In most cases, they'll even invade your home to get at your computer, and even remove it from the premises, without bothering to get permission from any court. They also routinely "crack" citizens' computers to get electronic access, to take copies of your files. This is in clear violation of the law nearly everywhere, but since there's a computer involved, all laws are moot, until the legal system establishes the same protections near computers that apply everywhere else.
Look around at discussions like this; you'll find that the rule "All precedent disappears in the presence of a computer" is a workable explanation for pretty much all of them.
Or we could just make a little list of the bill's supporters, and arrange for the local authorities to get anonymous tips that they're suspected of downloading child porn.
You mean there were no "hurricanes, snowstorms, tornadoes, wildfires, desertification, droughts, etc. etc. etc." before industrialization? Who knew all these things were man made?
Actually, there's pretty good evidence that some of those things in the ancient world were in good part due to human activity. Probably not the hurricanes, snowstorms or tornadoes. But humans are known to have been involved in at least some of the others.
The case of wildfires is obvious. In several parts of the world, prairie-like ecosystems covered around twice their natural area, and a major factor in all of them was the fires started by humans. This was generally done intentionally, to limit the growth of trees, because a prairie system puts more energy into growing greenery and supports a much higher animal population than most forests. But it only works in dry areas; you can't convert a rain forest to a prairie with fires. And yes, a controlled burn isn't a "wildfire". But controlled fires did frequently get out of control and burn more than was intended, and lightning did start some of those fires. The archaeological evidence supporting all this has only been understood for a few decades, but it is in the literature.
The situation with desertification is also fairly well documented. Thus, historians say they have evidence that the problem of under-irrigation leading to salinification was well understood in the "Fertile Crescent" at least 3000 years ago. But the people chose short-term profit in the form of maximum crops this year, knowing full well what it would do to the land that their grandchildren would inherit. You can see the results in any news videos of the Iraq countryside.
This is much more widespread than just Mesopotamia+Levant. There was a series of experiments back in the 1970s, in which areas across the southwest-Asian arid zone (Syria to Pakistan) in chunks of 2-5 square km were surrounded by goat-proof fences to keep out grazers, and left fallow. In all of them, a year later they were covered with grasses and other forbs. Conclusion: The "desert" in this area is unnatural, and is a consequence of overgrazing. There aren't very many wild grazing critters in this area now; the grazers are almost all domesticated animals. If they could be removed for a year or two, the area would revert to grassland. The land would then support a much larger grazer population than is there now, as long as the grazing were limited so that the bare ground isn't exposed. But humans won't do this; they'll always maximize their grazing animals, until the grasses are killed, and then move on, complaining about how they're mistreated by their gods (or corporations or governments or whatever).
There's evidence that this applies to deserts in other areas, in the form of similar land control development. If you google for "bocage" plus other desert-related keywords, you can find some information about it. (Warning: As you might guess from the term, it's mostly in French. ;-) This term refers to a plot of land surrounded by a goat-proof fence and usually some dikes to catch storm runoff. They have been built in various parts of the "Sahel". By limiting grazers and catching water, people have converted their chunks of dry land to greenery. Of course these are widely considered "pilot studies", and aren't taking seriously by the political system or the people who believe that climate is too big to be effected by humans. Some of the aerial photos of these plots of land are impressive. And this can't much be done in areas where fighting is going on.
This story was covered in a lot of "discussion" sections of various scientific journals back in the 1970s and 80s. The consensus was that the political system probably couldn't be made aware of the implications, and the documented spreading of the Sahara would continue due to overpopulation and overgrazing. But the information has been around, available to people who are interested and apolitical enough to look for it (