You could, but you'd get a less precise tracking of changes in recent years.
You basically have three choices here: (1) Limit yourself to in instruments and stations in use in 1850. (2) Add new stations and technologies but ignore their effect on the average. (3) Add new stations and technologies then use statistical techniques to find the approximation that best fits the datapoints you have.
Simply limiting yourself to the instruments you had in place in 1850 is bound to *overestimate* the amount of warming. That's because the land-based instruments are likely to be overwhelmed by waste heat generated by urban sprawl. Instruments that were in quiet rural suburbs are now in the center of cities with hard, heat-catching surfaces like asphalt and concrete, surrounded by buildings heated with what by 1850 standards are vast amounts of energy. So even if you tried approach 1 you'd still have to adjust the figures (in this case discounting some of the spurious "warming" you're seeing) to get a reasonable estimate of change.
The instrumental "global average temperature" is an artificial construct in any case. We know there must *be* a global average temperature, but we can't measure it directly, short of measuring the temperature continuously over very point on the surface of the Earth. All we have are discrete measurements taken from a finite number of stations. You need some kind of model for how representative you think those measurements you do have are of the whole.
If you look through the data you'll see these are the ten coldest years after 1849, coolest first:
1911, 1909, 1904, 1908, 1862, 1910, 1903, 1864, 1917, 1893.
These are the ten hottest years prior to 2015, hottest first:
2014, **2010, *2005, ***/++1998, **2003, *2006, **2009, **2002, *2007, 2013.
I've also noted El Niño years with stars and La Niña with plusses: * = weak El Niño year ** = moderate El Niño year ***/++ = 1998 started as a very strong El Niño and ended as a moderate La Niña.
2015 is an El Niño year (which tend to be hot), but is not in this dataset yet. Note that 8/10 of the top 10 years have an El Niño component, except 2013 and 2014, which were "ordinary" but very warm years.
I didn't note the ENSO (El Niño / Southern oscillation) status for the coldest years, because all ten of the coldest years are before 1912 and there is no reliable ENSO data for before 1950 so far as I know. However it's a safe bet that many of these were La Niñas, which tend to be colder than average. The last colder-than-average year was 1985, which was a La Niña; all six La Niña years since have been warmer than the 1850-2014 average. The last "ordinary" (non-ENSO) year that was colder than average was 1970.
Here is the average temperature anomaly by decade: Decade Anomaly 1850 -0.3174 1860 -0.3296 1870 -0.2548 1880 -0.3 1890 -0.3623 1900 -0.4099 1918 -0.2494 1930 -0.1182 1940 -0.0036 1950 -0.061 1960 -0.0535 1970 -0.0769 1980 +0.0943 1990 +0.274 2000 +0.4622 2010 +0.4998// partial, obviously
Note that all the decades up to the 70s are colder than the "average" year because "average" is dominated by the acceleration of warming from the 90s to present.
The average of the instrumental record... just like last year, and the year before that. The thing that you're missing is that it's reasonable to do this to account for the fact that you've added additional stations to the dataset, which would alter the raw average.
Yes, showing concrete damages is the usual requirement, so the judge is technically correct which he has to be. But that doesn't mean that the plaintiffs haven't been harmed. People don't steal private information to do harmless things, and exposure and the uncertainty that comes with it inflicts harm as well -- we just can't precisely quantify that harm.
The legal system in effect sets a conventional amount to the value of harm it knows happened but can't quantify, and that value is $0. And that's arguably the right general convention to use; it keeps the courts from being clogged with speculative lawsuits. But it doesn't mean that it's the right conventional amount in these kinds of situations. In effect Michaels gets off with simply having to do what it ought to have been doing all along; it shifts the risk of its practices onto its customers, and we know from economics that risk has real monetary value. This is to say nothing of the distress and time the uncertainty over exposure costs the customers.
So $0 in this case is quite demonstrably unjust, even if we can't put a precise dollar figure on that injustice. Fortunately there's a solution to this: the legislature can set a conventional amount of damages for a particular kind of situation that is greater than $0; this is called "statutory damages". This amount should be set, not necessarily to cover all the potential damages suffered by victims, but at least to force companies to bear some of the financial risks of their sloppy practices. Let's say we set the amount of statutory damages at $20; not much from the victim's standpoint I know. Multiply that by three million customers, and we're talking sixty million dollars. That's a lot of money, well worth hiring some security experts to audit your system to avoid, but according to Michael's most recent 10Q they have over a billion dollars in current assets that could be liquidated to cover that sixty million; in fact fifty million of that is in cash.
So clearly it is possible to set statutory damages at a level which will strongly incentivize companies to act more responsibly without destroying them financially over speculative damages.
Interesting, thanks for the link. I still like the idea of using an alloy that can be melted at typical cooking oven temperatures, though -- say 350 degrees. That eliminates having to find a place to run a furnace that will get to 1500 F you need to get your aluminum to so that it'll get to every part of your investment.
I've been waiting for 3d printers to get cheap enough to buy for amusement's sake, so I've been watching the low end of the market for one that would be afforable, yet more fun than a PITA. Most of the ones in that sub $500 range print reliably in PLA only; metal is totally out of the question.
But it makes me wonder -- why not print in some wax-like material instead? That would allow you to do lost-wax casting. If you were making things one-off you could even skip the moulding step and 3d print the model with the "spruing" (channels for molten material) in place. For home use you could make the final product with some kind of low melting point metal. Some fusible alloys melt at less than the boiling point of water; many cooking ovens get hot enough to melt useful lead-free tin/bismuth alloys. You can get tin/bismuth ingots for about $15/pound that melt at roughly the temperature you cook a turkey at -- well above the boiling point of water.
Is this just something people wouldn't be interested in? Or is there some technical reason it wouldn't be practical?
The body camera can show what actually happened, at least from one perspective at least, and that's good. I think all cops should wear them, subject to developing reasonable rules for privacy etc. But they can't show you what the officer thinks is happening, or the contextual information that led him to that. Those things are critical to judging whether the cop's actions are justifiable or criminal. A cop can shoot an innocent person because of bad information. Likewise a cop can shoot someone where the circumstances justify it, but without knowing that. In that case it's likely nothing will be done on the "no harm, no foul" theory, but you'd still have a rogue cop running around.
Take the case of the shooting of John Crawford III, who was gunned down by a police team in a Walmart. When this happens we get dueling, simplistic narratives: if Crawford was shot it must have been because he was a thug... Or, if you prefer, he was shot because the cops are evil racists. When the video came out the discrepancies between the police accounts and what you could see for yourself strengthened the left wing construction of the scenario: the police are evil, lying racists. Without denying the existence of racist, lying cops, this interpretation of events doesn't explain why the cops would want to shoot a harmless stranger in the first place. Yes, you can't rule out utter depravity, but if you consider all the circumstances the more likely explanation is that they were primed to expect an active shooter. Recent science can explain pretty well how someone can perceive what he expects to perceive, although of course explanation is not the same as proof. What an explanation should do is raise doubts about interpretation.
The Walmart videos essentially show the cops showing up and shooting Crawford immediately; there is no time for any of the things the police report happening to happen. Lying is the obvious explanation, but this could also be the product of a phenomenon many people have experienced personally: the brain's subjective experience of time is highly elastic. When you think you are in danger things seem to move in slow motion. That can interact with another, long-known physiological fact about visual perception. Look at your thumbnail at arm's length; that's roughly the area of the fovea centralis, which covers less than 1% of the area of your visual field, but accounts for about 50% of the information your brain receives. A few degrees to either side of that area and you can't tell the difference between a man and a woman, an adult and a child, or zucchini and a hand gun. But you don't experience looking at the world through a narrow tube, you experience it in super-widescreen high definition. That high def picture doesn't actually exist, it's constructed by your brain as your eye flits around the scene -- a fact exploited by magicians to create illusions. When your sense of time slows down, the picture doesn't go blurry; you still get the super-widescreen high def picture, but most of it consists of what you expect to be there. I expect this is what happened in the shooting of Tamir Rice. The officers perceived an adult male with a real gun, and perceived themselves having plenty of time for a good look, and were mistaken in every respect.
Controversial videos often tend to discount the ready-made "blacks are thugs" explanation, although sometimes we may be missing some key context. But what about the "cops are racists" explanation? Well, there's no doubt the police have their share of racist psychopaths, but the problem with jumping to that conclusion is that when you're wrong you end up leaving the underlying problem in place. That includes institutional racism, which by definition is impersonal. The problem stop-and-frisk, arrest quotas, and other attempts to employ police as behavioral control agents is that they lead to conflict and hostility becoming the routine mo
There won't be less nitrogen compounds, there will be the same absolute amount of nitrogen compounds produced, but since there will be more carbohydrates (e.g. sugars, starches and cellulose) there will relatively less protein.
In other words ramping up carbohydrate production won't magically cause more nitrogen to be fixed; the result is bigger but less protein dense plants.
That's ignoring competition. Sure, a certain plant may do better in a carefully weeded bed because it has more CO2, but it may not do so well if surrounded by other plants (e.g. weeds) that are more CO2 limited than it is.
But nobody ever mentions the actual level - which is pretty damn important because 40 times 1 part per thousand is a lot more significant than 40 times 1 part per trillion.
You need to carry that logic out a bit farther -- by multiplying by the number of these cars on the road. In Germany almost 1/3 of cars on the road are diesels; that translates to about fourteen million cars.
Scale matters when it comes to environmental impact. If there were only a few hundred diesel cars on the road then very high levels of pollution per vehicle would be acceptable. As long as the level of exhaust from a vehicle didn't make bystanders acutely sick, it'd be OK. But squeeze a million diesel vehicles into a densely developed city and the average one has to be very, very clean otherwise people living next to a congested roadway will get a big dose of NOx and PM2.5.
True, 40x the permitted level probably isn't a big deal if you live in Kansas City, MO, which has the lightest traffic of any city in the US, but it's a different kettle of fish in LA, a city ten times the size of KC and which has the worst traffic in the US. There are 6.2 million cars registered in LA county not counting the cars that commute in and out of the county on a daily basis. That works out to 1500 cars/square mile in LA, greater than the number of people per square mile in KC MO.
So it's not true that cheating has no practical effect because the impact of any single vehicle is negligible. Because vehicles are free to move around, the standards have to be set with the places that will have the highest concentrations of them in mind.
Plants need water too, that doesn't mean you can plant a cactus in a marsh or a rosebush in a koi pond. Different plants have different needs for/tolerances for water in the soil, so if the level of dampness changes at a site the population of plants will change.
This is true for any nutrient -- including CO2. That means things aren't as simple as "More nutrients == Better"; it depends where and what the nutrient is. Applying fertilizer to your lawn will help your bluegrass compete with the hardier crab grasses, which is good. When enough of that fertilizer drains into rivers and lakes those waters will become choked with aquatic weeds and algae, which is bad. So change is neither good nor bad, it's often good in some places and bad in others.
CO2 is a trace element in the atmosphere (about 0.04%), which means that some plants in any ecosystem are bound to be limited by it. An increase in CO2 will cause some plants which are minor components of a plant community to emerge as major weeds.
In agriculture, where you actively control which species is growing, crops will grow faster in a high CO2 atmosphere. However that additional growth will be in the form of carbohydrate; the protein density of crops will drop, because the synthesis of proteins is nitrogen limited (proteins are composed of amino acids, which are carboxylic acids with an NH2 group). Where crops are grown in close proximity to their wild relatives (e.g. rice) there will be increased hybridization resulting in lower food yields despite higher biomass. Overall these are changes we can adapt to, but it's not as simple as "faster growth == cheaper food".
So CO2 as pollution is far from bullshit. "CO2 == plant food" may be true in a limited sense but the whole argument that this makes rising CO2 a good thing is nonsense.
I suppose that's one possible spin to put on matters, but it's not Mazda's spin. They claim that the introduction of the new engines has been delayed because of new, more stringent testing procedures put into place by the EPA in the wake of the Volkswagen scandal.
So, either (a) you are right and the government is deliberately trying to increase the pollution to higher levels by preventing consumers from buying clean engines; or (b) you are wrong and the government is actually trying to reduce pollution by ensuring dirty engines aren't being fraudulently sold as "clean". In Bayesian terms, which you see as more plausible depends on your prior belief that EPA administrators are intentionally evil.
Well, in addition to choices of poison you have to weight your alternative options for paying the piper. You can pay the piper now by tuning your diesel engine to produce either (a) soot or (b) NOx and then add the appropriate emissions equipment, or you can pay it later in terms of adapting to climate changes.
Because life is too short for people to spend their precious time fighting a fringe ideology like neo-nazism, but nonetheless feel "something ought to be done".
When "something ought to be done" is the only guideline people have, it's because whether that something is effective is unimportant to them.
... that could be construed a bigoted, sexist or unpatriotic. It will go viral, and a flame war will rage across social media in which the public shamers and defenders will vie to twist the narrative of what was in fact a moment of misspeaking into proof that their respective world views are, not only right, but the only conscionable viewpoint to have.
And, even knowing in advance fully how futile and unsatisfying it will be, you won't be able to resist weighing in with what seems to you to be a reasonable and nuanced take on the matter. This will not be perceived by anyone as reasonable and nuanced. Then, like a gambler vainly trying to win back his stake, your participation in the controversy will grow in proportion to your dissatisfaction with it.
An when it is all over a few weeks later it will all happen again.
We often talk as if the men who act boorishly towards women are a representative sample of the men in any online community, but this is almost always going to be untrue, because boors by definition act in ways that are obnoxiously more noticeable than the norm.
It may well be that "software development in general and Open Source communities are frequented by males who have social development issues"... but what does that mean we can infer about typical males in those communities? Almost nothing, because the proportion of boors in a population doesn't have to be particularly high before they begin to sour the tone.
This goes both ways, by the way. Hating men is not the norm for feminists, but the law of large numbers means that in any sufficiently large community that attracts feminists you're guaranteed to have enough man-haters to make things uncomfortable for many men. Remember that woman who recorded all the harassment she received walking around NYC? Well later a man did the same thing, and he caught it from both women AND men. In either case if you figure the number of people you encounter in eight or ten hours of walking around Manhattan, it's clear that the rate of boorish behavior in Manhattan is extraordinarily low, while at the same time the frequency with which you encounter it is uncomfortably high.
So we shouldn't be worrying about an empathy gap, because there isn't necessarily any such gap. What we need to be worrying about is policing boorish behavior.
Fibbing in many cases is harder than telling the truth, because to tell a good fib you have to understand what the audience wants to believe.
So I think we will get to the point where a robot will be able to tell (using some kind of mathematical model) that a certain dress makes you look fat. It won't know it should tell you "No, you look fabulous, but the color doesn't flatter your complexion," except as a special case (like Eliza).
Except the Sahara is big. Really, really, really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. At 9.4 million square kilometers, it's over twice the size of the EU, and about 6% larger than the contiguous area of the contiguous 48 US states.
So forget the idea of covering all the Sahara with solar plants; it's way too big. Since the idea is to supply Europe with power, you start with the parts that are closest to Europe, which are coincidentally the parts farthest from Boko Haram. Let's say the Mahgreb states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. These states are unstable by European standards, but they're way more stable than Niger and Chad. Plus they are sparsely populated and conveniently located for NATO military intervention. You could easily fly sorties from land bases in Italy and Spain.
Standing desks are no better than sitting desks. Maintaining any position for a long period of time is harmful. They key here is movement.
Except with a standing desk you do move around more than if you are in a chair. You naturally shift your weight and position when you aren't confined to a chair.
The problem is that is that a standing desk a really tough transition if you're carrying extra weight. I built one for myself (have you seen how much those things cost?) a couple years ago and found I didn't like it. It put way too much stress on my feet and legs, even with anti-fatigue mats and support hose. Then I lost 60 pounds and now I use the standing desk about half the time. Of course it's hard to say how much I benefit from the desk, apart from the other changes I've made (like regular daily exercise); I just like standing some of the time now. There is evidence that long bouts of regular sitting are strongly correlated with increased overall mortality rate, but I don't know whether there's any actual evidence that standing in place is any better. It seems unlikely to hurt, especially if you take regular breaks.
If a standing desk isn't active enough for you, the next step is a treadmill desk. The research support for the physiological benefits of a treadmill desks is much stronger than the evidence for standing desks, although that's hardly surprising.
Well, that's how copyright works. You don't have to justify why you treat derivative project A differently from derivative project B; unlike trademarks you aren't required to defend copyrights to maintain your monopoly on the material.
In fact I can think of one big advantage to not having a publicly announced policy as to why you are allowing project A: I'm thinking that a publicly announced policy might be construed as a kind of general license. You don't have to write that policy in away that anticipates all the ways that someone could harm your economic interests; if you think project B harms your bottom line in a way that project A does not, you can simply demand they stop and drop the legal hammer on them if they don't. Granted this leaves fan filmmakers in an uncertain situation, but that isn't Paramount's problem. Is that really more dickish than just going after everyone regardless of whether they hurt your interests?
In this case I think it's the combination of the people involved and the amount of money raised that has Paramount spooked. As long as a fan film is no better than amazingly good for an amateur production on a shoestring, that film is a net benefit to them; it amounts to free advertising for the franchise. But film pros with even a modest budget could potentially put out a product good enough to contest Paramount's control of what fans consider "canon".
Well, the US Army used mules regularly until 1957, and they're still used occasionally in special operations. The Marine Corps still conducts training in handling pack animals at it's mountain warfare training center.
Pack animals do make sense in limited situations, and mules are superior to horses in those situations because they require less and lower quality feed.
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You could, but you'd get a less precise tracking of changes in recent years.
You basically have three choices here:
(1) Limit yourself to in instruments and stations in use in 1850.
(2) Add new stations and technologies but ignore their effect on the average.
(3) Add new stations and technologies then use statistical techniques to find the approximation that best fits the datapoints you have.
Simply limiting yourself to the instruments you had in place in 1850 is bound to *overestimate* the amount of warming. That's because the land-based instruments are likely to be overwhelmed by waste heat generated by urban sprawl. Instruments that were in quiet rural suburbs are now in the center of cities with hard, heat-catching surfaces like asphalt and concrete, surrounded by buildings heated with what by 1850 standards are vast amounts of energy. So even if you tried approach 1 you'd still have to adjust the figures (in this case discounting some of the spurious "warming" you're seeing) to get a reasonable estimate of change.
The instrumental "global average temperature" is an artificial construct in any case. We know there must *be* a global average temperature, but we can't measure it directly, short of measuring the temperature continuously over very point on the surface of the Earth. All we have are discrete measurements taken from a finite number of stations. You need some kind of model for how representative you think those measurements you do have are of the whole.
Here's the data.
If you look through the data you'll see these are the ten coldest years after 1849, coolest first:
1911, 1909, 1904, 1908, 1862, 1910, 1903, 1864, 1917, 1893.
These are the ten hottest years prior to 2015, hottest first:
2014, **2010, *2005, ***/++1998, **2003, *2006, **2009, **2002, *2007, 2013.
I've also noted El Niño years with stars and La Niña with plusses:
* = weak El Niño year
** = moderate El Niño year
***/++ = 1998 started as a very strong El Niño and ended as a moderate La Niña.
2015 is an El Niño year (which tend to be hot), but is not in this dataset yet. Note that 8/10 of the top 10 years have an El Niño component, except 2013 and 2014, which were "ordinary" but very warm years.
I didn't note the ENSO (El Niño / Southern oscillation) status for the coldest years, because all ten of the coldest years are before 1912 and there is no reliable ENSO data for before 1950 so far as I know. However it's a safe bet that many of these were La Niñas, which tend to be colder than average. The last colder-than-average year was 1985, which was a La Niña; all six La Niña years since have been warmer than the 1850-2014 average. The last "ordinary" (non-ENSO) year that was colder than average was 1970.
Here is the average temperature anomaly by decade: // partial, obviously
Decade Anomaly
1850 -0.3174
1860 -0.3296
1870 -0.2548
1880 -0.3
1890 -0.3623
1900 -0.4099
1918 -0.2494
1930 -0.1182
1940 -0.0036
1950 -0.061
1960 -0.0535
1970 -0.0769
1980 +0.0943
1990 +0.274
2000 +0.4622
2010 +0.4998
Note that all the decades up to the 70s are colder than the "average" year because "average" is dominated by the acceleration of warming from the 90s to present.
I hope this helps.
The average of the instrumental record ... just like last year, and the year before that. The thing that you're missing is that it's reasonable to do this to account for the fact that you've added additional stations to the dataset, which would alter the raw average.
Yes, showing concrete damages is the usual requirement, so the judge is technically correct which he has to be. But that doesn't mean that the plaintiffs haven't been harmed. People don't steal private information to do harmless things, and exposure and the uncertainty that comes with it inflicts harm as well -- we just can't precisely quantify that harm.
The legal system in effect sets a conventional amount to the value of harm it knows happened but can't quantify, and that value is $0. And that's arguably the right general convention to use; it keeps the courts from being clogged with speculative lawsuits. But it doesn't mean that it's the right conventional amount in these kinds of situations. In effect Michaels gets off with simply having to do what it ought to have been doing all along; it shifts the risk of its practices onto its customers, and we know from economics that risk has real monetary value. This is to say nothing of the distress and time the uncertainty over exposure costs the customers.
So $0 in this case is quite demonstrably unjust, even if we can't put a precise dollar figure on that injustice. Fortunately there's a solution to this: the legislature can set a conventional amount of damages for a particular kind of situation that is greater than $0; this is called "statutory damages". This amount should be set, not necessarily to cover all the potential damages suffered by victims, but at least to force companies to bear some of the financial risks of their sloppy practices. Let's say we set the amount of statutory damages at $20; not much from the victim's standpoint I know. Multiply that by three million customers, and we're talking sixty million dollars. That's a lot of money, well worth hiring some security experts to audit your system to avoid, but according to Michael's most recent 10Q they have over a billion dollars in current assets that could be liquidated to cover that sixty million; in fact fifty million of that is in cash.
So clearly it is possible to set statutory damages at a level which will strongly incentivize companies to act more responsibly without destroying them financially over speculative damages.
Interesting, thanks for the link. I still like the idea of using an alloy that can be melted at typical cooking oven temperatures, though -- say 350 degrees. That eliminates having to find a place to run a furnace that will get to 1500 F you need to get your aluminum to so that it'll get to every part of your investment.
I've been waiting for 3d printers to get cheap enough to buy for amusement's sake, so I've been watching the low end of the market for one that would be afforable, yet more fun than a PITA. Most of the ones in that sub $500 range print reliably in PLA only; metal is totally out of the question.
But it makes me wonder -- why not print in some wax-like material instead? That would allow you to do lost-wax casting. If you were making things one-off you could even skip the moulding step and 3d print the model with the "spruing" (channels for molten material) in place. For home use you could make the final product with some kind of low melting point metal. Some fusible alloys melt at less than the boiling point of water; many cooking ovens get hot enough to melt useful lead-free tin/bismuth alloys. You can get tin/bismuth ingots for about $15/pound that melt at roughly the temperature you cook a turkey at -- well above the boiling point of water.
Is this just something people wouldn't be interested in? Or is there some technical reason it wouldn't be practical?
The body camera can show what actually happened, at least from one perspective at least, and that's good. I think all cops should wear them, subject to developing reasonable rules for privacy etc. But they can't show you what the officer thinks is happening, or the contextual information that led him to that. Those things are critical to judging whether the cop's actions are justifiable or criminal. A cop can shoot an innocent person because of bad information. Likewise a cop can shoot someone where the circumstances justify it, but without knowing that. In that case it's likely nothing will be done on the "no harm, no foul" theory, but you'd still have a rogue cop running around.
Take the case of the shooting of John Crawford III, who was gunned down by a police team in a Walmart. When this happens we get dueling, simplistic narratives: if Crawford was shot it must have been because he was a thug... Or, if you prefer, he was shot because the cops are evil racists. When the video came out the discrepancies between the police accounts and what you could see for yourself strengthened the left wing construction of the scenario: the police are evil, lying racists. Without denying the existence of racist, lying cops, this interpretation of events doesn't explain why the cops would want to shoot a harmless stranger in the first place. Yes, you can't rule out utter depravity, but if you consider all the circumstances the more likely explanation is that they were primed to expect an active shooter. Recent science can explain pretty well how someone can perceive what he expects to perceive, although of course explanation is not the same as proof. What an explanation should do is raise doubts about interpretation.
The Walmart videos essentially show the cops showing up and shooting Crawford immediately; there is no time for any of the things the police report happening to happen. Lying is the obvious explanation, but this could also be the product of a phenomenon many people have experienced personally: the brain's subjective experience of time is highly elastic. When you think you are in danger things seem to move in slow motion. That can interact with another, long-known physiological fact about visual perception. Look at your thumbnail at arm's length; that's roughly the area of the fovea centralis, which covers less than 1% of the area of your visual field, but accounts for about 50% of the information your brain receives. A few degrees to either side of that area and you can't tell the difference between a man and a woman, an adult and a child, or zucchini and a hand gun. But you don't experience looking at the world through a narrow tube, you experience it in super-widescreen high definition. That high def picture doesn't actually exist, it's constructed by your brain as your eye flits around the scene -- a fact exploited by magicians to create illusions. When your sense of time slows down, the picture doesn't go blurry; you still get the super-widescreen high def picture, but most of it consists of what you expect to be there. I expect this is what happened in the shooting of Tamir Rice. The officers perceived an adult male with a real gun, and perceived themselves having plenty of time for a good look, and were mistaken in every respect.
Controversial videos often tend to discount the ready-made "blacks are thugs" explanation, although sometimes we may be missing some key context. But what about the "cops are racists" explanation? Well, there's no doubt the police have their share of racist psychopaths, but the problem with jumping to that conclusion is that when you're wrong you end up leaving the underlying problem in place. That includes institutional racism, which by definition is impersonal. The problem stop-and-frisk, arrest quotas, and other attempts to employ police as behavioral control agents is that they lead to conflict and hostility becoming the routine mo
There won't be less nitrogen compounds, there will be the same absolute amount of nitrogen compounds produced, but since there will be more carbohydrates (e.g. sugars, starches and cellulose) there will relatively less protein.
In other words ramping up carbohydrate production won't magically cause more nitrogen to be fixed; the result is bigger but less protein dense plants.
That's ignoring competition. Sure, a certain plant may do better in a carefully weeded bed because it has more CO2, but it may not do so well if surrounded by other plants (e.g. weeds) that are more CO2 limited than it is.
My point is that cost/time is part of the tradeoff.
This makes a great story:
But nobody ever mentions the actual level - which is pretty damn important because 40 times 1 part per thousand is a lot more significant than 40 times 1 part per trillion.
You need to carry that logic out a bit farther -- by multiplying by the number of these cars on the road. In Germany almost 1/3 of cars on the road are diesels; that translates to about fourteen million cars.
Scale matters when it comes to environmental impact. If there were only a few hundred diesel cars on the road then very high levels of pollution per vehicle would be acceptable. As long as the level of exhaust from a vehicle didn't make bystanders acutely sick, it'd be OK. But squeeze a million diesel vehicles into a densely developed city and the average one has to be very, very clean otherwise people living next to a congested roadway will get a big dose of NOx and PM2.5.
True, 40x the permitted level probably isn't a big deal if you live in Kansas City, MO, which has the lightest traffic of any city in the US, but it's a different kettle of fish in LA, a city ten times the size of KC and which has the worst traffic in the US. There are 6.2 million cars registered in LA county not counting the cars that commute in and out of the county on a daily basis. That works out to 1500 cars/square mile in LA, greater than the number of people per square mile in KC MO.
So it's not true that cheating has no practical effect because the impact of any single vehicle is negligible. Because vehicles are free to move around, the standards have to be set with the places that will have the highest concentrations of them in mind.
Plants need water too, that doesn't mean you can plant a cactus in a marsh or a rosebush in a koi pond. Different plants have different needs for/tolerances for water in the soil, so if the level of dampness changes at a site the population of plants will change.
This is true for any nutrient -- including CO2. That means things aren't as simple as "More nutrients == Better"; it depends where and what the nutrient is. Applying fertilizer to your lawn will help your bluegrass compete with the hardier crab grasses, which is good. When enough of that fertilizer drains into rivers and lakes those waters will become choked with aquatic weeds and algae, which is bad. So change is neither good nor bad, it's often good in some places and bad in others.
CO2 is a trace element in the atmosphere (about 0.04%), which means that some plants in any ecosystem are bound to be limited by it. An increase in CO2 will cause some plants which are minor components of a plant community to emerge as major weeds.
In agriculture, where you actively control which species is growing, crops will grow faster in a high CO2 atmosphere. However that additional growth will be in the form of carbohydrate; the protein density of crops will drop, because the synthesis of proteins is nitrogen limited (proteins are composed of amino acids, which are carboxylic acids with an NH2 group). Where crops are grown in close proximity to their wild relatives (e.g. rice) there will be increased hybridization resulting in lower food yields despite higher biomass. Overall these are changes we can adapt to, but it's not as simple as "faster growth == cheaper food".
So CO2 as pollution is far from bullshit. "CO2 == plant food" may be true in a limited sense but the whole argument that this makes rising CO2 a good thing is nonsense.
The fact of the matter is that the government regulators are keeping the overall level of emissions higher than the market is trying to provide.
I suppose that's one possible spin to put on matters, but it's not Mazda's spin. They claim that the introduction of the new engines has been delayed because of new, more stringent testing procedures put into place by the EPA in the wake of the Volkswagen scandal.
So, either (a) you are right and the government is deliberately trying to increase the pollution to higher levels by preventing consumers from buying clean engines; or (b) you are wrong and the government is actually trying to reduce pollution by ensuring dirty engines aren't being fraudulently sold as "clean". In Bayesian terms, which you see as more plausible depends on your prior belief that EPA administrators are intentionally evil.
Well, in addition to choices of poison you have to weight your alternative options for paying the piper. You can pay the piper now by tuning your diesel engine to produce either (a) soot or (b) NOx and then add the appropriate emissions equipment, or you can pay it later in terms of adapting to climate changes.
Because life is too short for people to spend their precious time fighting a fringe ideology like neo-nazism, but nonetheless feel "something ought to be done".
When "something ought to be done" is the only guideline people have, it's because whether that something is effective is unimportant to them.
... that could be construed a bigoted, sexist or unpatriotic. It will go viral, and a flame war will rage across social media in which the public shamers and defenders will vie to twist the narrative of what was in fact a moment of misspeaking into proof that their respective world views are, not only right, but the only conscionable viewpoint to have.
And, even knowing in advance fully how futile and unsatisfying it will be, you won't be able to resist weighing in with what seems to you to be a reasonable and nuanced take on the matter. This will not be perceived by anyone as reasonable and nuanced. Then, like a gambler vainly trying to win back his stake, your participation in the controversy will grow in proportion to your dissatisfaction with it.
An when it is all over a few weeks later it will all happen again.
We often talk as if the men who act boorishly towards women are a representative sample of the men in any online community, but this is almost always going to be untrue, because boors by definition act in ways that are obnoxiously more noticeable than the norm.
It may well be that "software development in general and Open Source communities are frequented by males who have social development issues" ... but what does that mean we can infer about typical males in those communities? Almost nothing, because the proportion of boors in a population doesn't have to be particularly high before they begin to sour the tone.
This goes both ways, by the way. Hating men is not the norm for feminists, but the law of large numbers means that in any sufficiently large community that attracts feminists you're guaranteed to have enough man-haters to make things uncomfortable for many men. Remember that woman who recorded all the harassment she received walking around NYC? Well later a man did the same thing, and he caught it from both women AND men. In either case if you figure the number of people you encounter in eight or ten hours of walking around Manhattan, it's clear that the rate of boorish behavior in Manhattan is extraordinarily low, while at the same time the frequency with which you encounter it is uncomfortably high.
So we shouldn't be worrying about an empathy gap, because there isn't necessarily any such gap. What we need to be worrying about is policing boorish behavior.
Fibbing in many cases is harder than telling the truth, because to tell a good fib you have to understand what the audience wants to believe.
So I think we will get to the point where a robot will be able to tell (using some kind of mathematical model) that a certain dress makes you look fat. It won't know it should tell you "No, you look fabulous, but the color doesn't flatter your complexion," except as a special case (like Eliza).
Except the Sahara is big. Really, really, really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. At 9.4 million square kilometers, it's over twice the size of the EU, and about 6% larger than the contiguous area of the contiguous 48 US states.
So forget the idea of covering all the Sahara with solar plants; it's way too big. Since the idea is to supply Europe with power, you start with the parts that are closest to Europe, which are coincidentally the parts farthest from Boko Haram. Let's say the Mahgreb states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. These states are unstable by European standards, but they're way more stable than Niger and Chad. Plus they are sparsely populated and conveniently located for NATO military intervention. You could easily fly sorties from land bases in Italy and Spain.
Standing desks are no better than sitting desks. Maintaining any position for a long period of time is harmful. They key here is movement.
Except with a standing desk you do move around more than if you are in a chair. You naturally shift your weight and position when you aren't confined to a chair.
The problem is that is that a standing desk a really tough transition if you're carrying extra weight. I built one for myself (have you seen how much those things cost?) a couple years ago and found I didn't like it. It put way too much stress on my feet and legs, even with anti-fatigue mats and support hose. Then I lost 60 pounds and now I use the standing desk about half the time. Of course it's hard to say how much I benefit from the desk, apart from the other changes I've made (like regular daily exercise); I just like standing some of the time now. There is evidence that long bouts of regular sitting are strongly correlated with increased overall mortality rate, but I don't know whether there's any actual evidence that standing in place is any better. It seems unlikely to hurt, especially if you take regular breaks.
If a standing desk isn't active enough for you, the next step is a treadmill desk. The research support for the physiological benefits of a treadmill desks is much stronger than the evidence for standing desks, although that's hardly surprising.
Well, that's how copyright works. You don't have to justify why you treat derivative project A differently from derivative project B; unlike trademarks you aren't required to defend copyrights to maintain your monopoly on the material.
In fact I can think of one big advantage to not having a publicly announced policy as to why you are allowing project A: I'm thinking that a publicly announced policy might be construed as a kind of general license. You don't have to write that policy in away that anticipates all the ways that someone could harm your economic interests; if you think project B harms your bottom line in a way that project A does not, you can simply demand they stop and drop the legal hammer on them if they don't. Granted this leaves fan filmmakers in an uncertain situation, but that isn't Paramount's problem. Is that really more dickish than just going after everyone regardless of whether they hurt your interests?
In this case I think it's the combination of the people involved and the amount of money raised that has Paramount spooked. As long as a fan film is no better than amazingly good for an amateur production on a shoestring, that film is a net benefit to them; it amounts to free advertising for the franchise. But film pros with even a modest budget could potentially put out a product good enough to contest Paramount's control of what fans consider "canon".
Their house, their rules. If that makes the bigots vote with their feet, well, then Twitter will have to do without that revenue.
"Blame" is not the same thing as legal culpability.
At least until someone figures out how to make being a dick illegal, acting like a dick won't be a crime.
do they have one for hillary and burnie as well?
There's only so much you can expect an extension to do; it can't read your mind.
Well, the US Army used mules regularly until 1957, and they're still used occasionally in special operations. The Marine Corps still conducts training in handling pack animals at it's mountain warfare training center.
Pack animals do make sense in limited situations, and mules are superior to horses in those situations because they require less and lower quality feed.