It's a lot like developing Type 2 diabetes. Quite a bit down the road you've looking at all kinds of things that could result in quick death, as well as other catastrophic results like blindness and limb amputations. But for the moment al you really need to do is get serious about exercise and eating better. Let's say it'll be five years or so before your body's cells start giving up and drowning in glucose.
Is that a crisis?
Well, if change were simply as easy as marking the flag day on your calendar then, no. You probably have a year or two before it becomes mandatory to make changes. Except that you have to expect false starts. You start to run every day but then you develop knee problems. Your plan to swear off bread falls apart. You have a rough stretch at work and suddenly you find yourself spending 18 hours a day trying to get through the week on junk food. If you allow for all the false starts and failures you'll experience it's important to start making changes now. So it *is* a crisis. A slowly unfolding crisis.
Any problem that requires future action that isn't guaranteed to fix things on the first try is potentially a slowly unfolding crisis.
In a world where the Internet gives every crackpot a soapbox from which to preach to his fellow crackpots, it's not longer possible to distinguish ironic self-deprecation from a serious but deranged complaint about other people.
Would Canada under Harper and the Conservatives be that much better? His government brought forth the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act which did not mention children or predators anywhere but in the title, and would have expanded government surveillance powers had the bill not been stopped by public outcry.
Scotland would have been a good choice had the independence referendum passed. So I guess now you're going to have to learn Swedish.
Creationism is a pseudoscience invented by modern Christians, true. But that doesn't mean Genesis isn't a Jewish myth. Myths aren't intended to be science, or even history. They're intended to resonate emotionally.
This is what I think the Garden of Eden story is about: I think it's saying that the kind of "paradise" where you sit around all day without working or suffering is incompatible with human freedom. The experience (aka "knowledge") of both good and evil is a consequence of human choice. We might be better off in some ways living in a kind of Cosmic kennel, but we wouldn't have any of the richness and meaning of human life without the experience of good and evil.
Now it so happens that in the Middle Ages certain Christians re-created this naive picture of paradise. They pictured heaven as a choir in which the faithful gathered around God in concentric circles and sang His praises forever and ever. But what if one day you felt like doing something different? If being fed and amused perpetually is your idea of paradise, then you naturally won't be open to some implications of the Eden story.
The Garden of Eden story turns out to be very interesting as a myth. It's just not very interesting as science.
Well, this is one of those things where copyright law doesn't necessarily behave the way people think it should.
Take the famous case of science fiction author Marion Zimmer Bradley. For years she encouraged fan fiction in her Darkover universe -- until she wanted to use some plot ideas from a fan story she had read in one of her own novels. The author of the fan story successfully blocked the publication of MZB's novel.
So it's clear that original authors don't automatically get ownership of derivative works. What they get is more like a veto power over various uses the derivative author can put his work to. Actually slinging around the word "ownership" in this kind of context tends to be misleading. Copyright is considerably different from the usual concept of "ownership", e.g., the way that you own your car or your pants. It's actually a kind of legal monopoly on certain activities as they apply to a work. That explains why an interlocking web of monopoly rights can lead to a work being simply unusable; that's a result which violates people's intuition that someone must "own" the work and therefore must be able to do whatever he pleases with it.
In this case the best position for the developer to take is that his posting is covered in some way by fair use.
Here's the thing though. Consider my Bandar connection; he was ambassador to the US, and has LOTS of connected and influential people -- especially in the petroleum industry. But my indirect connection could just as easily be to some radical imam who is not hobnobbing with the Bushes. That could raise a red flag, even though such an indirect connection clearly is usually meaningless.
I've been involved in contracts that had public health modeling components. Being "way off" is not necessarily a proof the model is no good when you're modeling a chaotic process which depends on future parameters that aren't predictable. In our case it was the exact timing of future rainfall. In their case it probably had to do with human behavior. A small thing, like an unseasonable rainstorm, or an infected person showing up in an unexpected place, can have immense consequences.
You look at all the data you have, and you think, "Hey, this is a lot of data, I should be able to predict stuff from it," but the truth is while it looks like a lot of data it's a tiny fraction of all the data that's out there in the world -- and not even a representative sample. So you have to guess "plausible" values, and if they're wrong you might not see the kind of result that eventually happens, even after many model runs.
So in most cases you can't expect a computer model to have the power to predict specific future events. It can do other things, like generate research questions. One of our models suggested that having a lot of infected mosquitoes early in the season reduced human transmission of a certain mosquito borne disease later in the season, which was a surprising result. When we looked at it, it turned out that the reason was that the epidemic peaked in the animal population early in the season before people were out doing summer stuff and getting bit. Does that actually happen? We had no idea, but it sounded plausible. The model didn't give us any answers, it generated an interesting question.
I mean, if the workers *are* terrorists then they should be arrested, right? Short of that there are countless ways a non-terrorist can be "linked" with terrorists, and due to the "six degrees of separation" phenomenon it's quite common to have surprising looking connections.
For example Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan and I happen to have a common common friend. I met the friend through work and Bandar knew him because his family was a neighbor in Aspen where Bandar has a house. And since Bandar is in the Saudi royal family and Osama bin Laden belonged to a prominent Saudi family, it's almost certain that Bandar knew him from before his Mujahideen days in Afghanistan. So I'm only two two acquaintances removed from Osama bin Laden. That sounds alarming! But in fact I've never *met* Bandar, in fact I've never met any Saudis at all.
I've been racking my brains for people I've met from the actual Middle East, and it turns out that at one point in my career met the Egyptian-American space researcher Farouk el-Baz (who has a TNG shuttlecraft named after him!). El-Baz comes from a connected family; his brother for example was high up in Hosni Mubarak's government, and Farouk himself was at one time a science adviser to Anwar Sadat. It's a fair bet that he knows somebody from Egypt who later went on to be involved with the Muslim Brotherhood -- it wouldn't reflect on him at all. But if that were true I'd be just one acquaintance away from a direct "connection" with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Now it also happens that my wife went to graduate school with someone who was the first woman valedictorian of the US Naval academy. Since I know her directly, I have all kinds of one-degree of separation relationships to people in all kinds of sensitive military and national security positions. I also two different one-degree of separation connections to the Clintons and current Secretary of State John Kerry. If you count my "connections" to my college professors at MIT I'm one-degree of separation away from several Manhattan Project scientists.
If you plotted out my social network to two or three links away it'd look remarkable, in some cases even disturbing. But it's not. "Connection" means almost nothing. There have been cases of people "connected" to terrorists because the frequently called the same number -- a Manhattan pizza restaurant.
Which according to Woody Allen's book "Without Feathers" is "a mythological beast with the head of a lion and the body of a lion, though not the same lion."
Well, I went to MIT but have taken classes at Harvard, but not being a mind reader I guess I'm at a disadvantage here. All I have to go on is the people I've met there.
There's no question that for certain fields like finance Harvard's a great headstart on networking. But for English, foreign major, science and social science majors the reason to go to Harvard is that it's a great school, and I can tell you from firsthand experience that some Harvard classes are every bit as tough as any of the classes I took at MIT.
The problem is that the banking system has been rigged in order to socialize risk. This guy exploited that fact, realized he made more money than an individual human being could possibly amuse himself with and decided to dispose of a big chunk of that were it might do a little good.
People are shouting "Harvard! Harvard! Harvard!" because they don't want you to think about the rigged banking system. They'd rather focus any anti-elitist backlash on intellectuals.
... and wild animals don't waste valuable calories or protein. It's not that the nutrients in the placenta are *especially* good for you, it's just that nutrients period are good for you and hard to come by.
I once went on a winter hike with a park ranger, and he identified some tracks in the snow as coyote tracks. So I naturally asked how he could tell it was a coyote and not a dog being taken for a walk. The answer was that domestic dogs are so well-fed they waste energy running all over the place; coyotes are always on the edge of starvation so they nearly always travel in a perfectly straight line.
Forty years is easy, if you don't insist on instant-access convenience. Print your data onto low acid paper and store in a fireproof cabinet. Either (a) people will still be using computers in 40 years, in which case they'll no doubt have scanners and OCR OR civilization as we know it will have collapsed and boy will you be glad you have hard copy.
As for a million years, I think the DNA idea is terrible. While there have been instances of DNA as old as 700,000 years being sequenced, the horse bone used to sequence that genome was recovered from ancient permafrost -- almost ideal conditions. If there is unexpected warmth, water or air exposure, then your DNA molecules will start to get manky fast.
But we can look to dinosaurs for the answer. What we have of them is mineralized bone. I've personally helped a paleontologist reconstruct a triceratops skull, so I've seen it up close. You can still see the pattern of veins preserved on the surface of the frill. So some kind of engraved mineral might be the way to go. Encoding data on noble metal plates or synthetic gems would seem more promising.
I have a simple test for judging the sincerity of an educational scheme: I ask whether the elite in this country use it on their own offspring.
For example a lot of people argue that class size doesn't make any difference to educational performance. However if you look at a prep school like Phillips Andover, where the Bush's send their scions, classes are three or four students sitting around the table having a discussion with a PhD teacher. This tells me right away that class size and teacher qualification are the most important factors, not computers or testing, both of which probably play some role in instruction but neither of which is the centerpiece.
If you want to improve school performance then, don't micromanage or replace teachers; reduce class sizes and increase teacher qualifications, paying whatever is necessary to attract someone with the absurdly high qualifications you demand for the job. That'd be fabulously expensive, but only if you don't count opportunity cost. There's practically no social investment that could pay higher dividends than education, at least over the lifetime of anyone who's relatively young. Naturally if you're 70 your hedonic planning horizon is closer than if you're 40.
Well one person's "massaging" is another person's "interpreting in a less highly selective context". I'll tell a personal story that illustrates this.
I once was tasked at converting a public health agency's legacy records into a new database. One of their datasets was mosquito trapping records -- the supervisor boasted they had almost thirty years of historical data. Now by this point I'd had a lot of experience with similar datasets, so I knew that any given trapping station would follow some kind of pattern. Depending on the local habitat and species one trap might produce most when the weather got hot while another would be more sensitive to rain. One thing I liked to do was plot El Nino years to see how the weekly production varied with the anomalously cool and wet weather. But when I did my usual set of plots I found no discernible patterns across years for the trapping stations, which was highly unusual. I'd handled dozens of datasets like this and had never seen that happen.
Now one of the things I like to do when I look at events in a dataset like that is ask how comparable event records really are. Catching mosquitoes is like catching fish; moving your trap a few feet can totally skew your readings between years. So I talked to the field workers, and what I discovered that while everyone talked about "trap locations", the numbers in the legacy data were actually trap *numbers*. Trap #1 might have been placed on one end of the county one year and then on the opposite end the following year.
When I looked at the *raw* data, and the absence of the expected patterns is what alerted me to the fact the dataset was screwy. However the *aggregate* numbers across all stations could in theory be comparable between years because they sampled the same locations, they just couldn't tell which was which. But of course it's not that simple. I'd also have needed to account for the difference in *methods*. They must have at several points in thirty years upgraded their mosquito light traps; perhaps adding octanol as a chemical attractant some years or CO2 in other years. Even the difference in reliability between trap designs biases the aggregate results. To accurately compare years I need to take into account the relative effectiveness of the changing methods used. This process is of course subject to bias, but just taking the *raw* data would yield nothing but literally confounded nonsense.
This is what environmental data tends to be like. In a laboratory you control conditions so every measurement set is complete and self-comparable right off the instrument reading if possible. But in a regional, multi-decade environmental dataset you don't have that luxury, and aggregating that data is not as simple as taking an average. For example you may have 10x as many monitoring stations in 2005 than you had in 1935, so the raw aggregates don't tell you anything because any underlying difference is confounded with the fact the bulk of stations you're measuring in 2005 didn't exist in '35. To make an *aggregate* data comparable between decades you have to massage it using some kind of model of the effect of confounding factors is. This is always a debatable process, but that doesn't mean one guess is as good as any another. That's why claims like this are published in journals, to be ripped to shreds if possible, and if that's not accomplished to become the basis of a new scientific consensus.
(1) Getting a serious fusion effort off the ground is fabulously expensive. Even if you have some kind of whizbang micro-reactor concept you need a small army of physicists, engineers and highly skilled fabricators. People who don't come cheap.
(2) Running out of cash is what most startups do.
(3) They probably didn't have as much cash as "everyone knows they have", for the simple reason that the best way to convince someone to give you the mountain of cash you need is to make them thing you've as good as got it from someone else.
I agree that zero tolerance is a bad idea, but what they've struck down is the "reasonable person" standard in any kind of criminal case. It has nothing to do with zero tolerance.
IANAL, but I suspect the issue is that to convict someone for a serious crime you generally have to show "mens rea" ("guilty mind") -- that the defendant had the intent of committing the crime in question. If so the ruling may be reasonable, but not for the reasons you suggest. If I'm right, what SCOTUS is saying is that the jury has to determine that the husband actually intended to threaten his wife.
As for the civil liberties implications, they appear to be more limited than most people seem to believe. Threatening someone is still a crime. It's just not a crime to say something someone would misconstrue as a threat, even if that person is being reasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
Or we could rename the fish from "mudfish" to "sparkly rainbow fish" and people like you won't feel so bad about giving enough water to survive.
It's a lot like developing Type 2 diabetes. Quite a bit down the road you've looking at all kinds of things that could result in quick death, as well as other catastrophic results like blindness and limb amputations. But for the moment al you really need to do is get serious about exercise and eating better. Let's say it'll be five years or so before your body's cells start giving up and drowning in glucose.
Is that a crisis?
Well, if change were simply as easy as marking the flag day on your calendar then, no. You probably have a year or two before it becomes mandatory to make changes. Except that you have to expect false starts. You start to run every day but then you develop knee problems. Your plan to swear off bread falls apart. You have a rough stretch at work and suddenly you find yourself spending 18 hours a day trying to get through the week on junk food. If you allow for all the false starts and failures you'll experience it's important to start making changes now. So it *is* a crisis. A slowly unfolding crisis.
Any problem that requires future action that isn't guaranteed to fix things on the first try is potentially a slowly unfolding crisis.
In a world where the Internet gives every crackpot a soapbox from which to preach to his fellow crackpots, it's not longer possible to distinguish ironic self-deprecation from a serious but deranged complaint about other people.
Would Canada under Harper and the Conservatives be that much better? His government brought forth the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act which did not mention children or predators anywhere but in the title, and would have expanded government surveillance powers had the bill not been stopped by public outcry.
Scotland would have been a good choice had the independence referendum passed. So I guess now you're going to have to learn Swedish.
Creationism is a pseudoscience invented by modern Christians, true. But that doesn't mean Genesis isn't a Jewish myth. Myths aren't intended to be science, or even history. They're intended to resonate emotionally.
This is what I think the Garden of Eden story is about: I think it's saying that the kind of "paradise" where you sit around all day without working or suffering is incompatible with human freedom. The experience (aka "knowledge") of both good and evil is a consequence of human choice. We might be better off in some ways living in a kind of Cosmic kennel, but we wouldn't have any of the richness and meaning of human life without the experience of good and evil.
Now it so happens that in the Middle Ages certain Christians re-created this naive picture of paradise. They pictured heaven as a choir in which the faithful gathered around God in concentric circles and sang His praises forever and ever. But what if one day you felt like doing something different? If being fed and amused perpetually is your idea of paradise, then you naturally won't be open to some implications of the Eden story.
The Garden of Eden story turns out to be very interesting as a myth. It's just not very interesting as science.
Well, this is one of those things where copyright law doesn't necessarily behave the way people think it should.
Take the famous case of science fiction author Marion Zimmer Bradley. For years she encouraged fan fiction in her Darkover universe -- until she wanted to use some plot ideas from a fan story she had read in one of her own novels. The author of the fan story successfully blocked the publication of MZB's novel.
So it's clear that original authors don't automatically get ownership of derivative works. What they get is more like a veto power over various uses the derivative author can put his work to. Actually slinging around the word "ownership" in this kind of context tends to be misleading. Copyright is considerably different from the usual concept of "ownership", e.g., the way that you own your car or your pants. It's actually a kind of legal monopoly on certain activities as they apply to a work. That explains why an interlocking web of monopoly rights can lead to a work being simply unusable; that's a result which violates people's intuition that someone must "own" the work and therefore must be able to do whatever he pleases with it.
In this case the best position for the developer to take is that his posting is covered in some way by fair use.
Or ... the chaotic bits may lay outside your nice linear model. Either way prediction of future events is off the table.
Here's the thing though. Consider my Bandar connection; he was ambassador to the US, and has LOTS of connected and influential people -- especially in the petroleum industry. But my indirect connection could just as easily be to some radical imam who is not hobnobbing with the Bushes. That could raise a red flag, even though such an indirect connection clearly is usually meaningless.
I've been involved in contracts that had public health modeling components. Being "way off" is not necessarily a proof the model is no good when you're modeling a chaotic process which depends on future parameters that aren't predictable. In our case it was the exact timing of future rainfall. In their case it probably had to do with human behavior. A small thing, like an unseasonable rainstorm, or an infected person showing up in an unexpected place, can have immense consequences.
You look at all the data you have, and you think, "Hey, this is a lot of data, I should be able to predict stuff from it," but the truth is while it looks like a lot of data it's a tiny fraction of all the data that's out there in the world -- and not even a representative sample. So you have to guess "plausible" values, and if they're wrong you might not see the kind of result that eventually happens, even after many model runs.
So in most cases you can't expect a computer model to have the power to predict specific future events. It can do other things, like generate research questions. One of our models suggested that having a lot of infected mosquitoes early in the season reduced human transmission of a certain mosquito borne disease later in the season, which was a surprising result. When we looked at it, it turned out that the reason was that the epidemic peaked in the animal population early in the season before people were out doing summer stuff and getting bit. Does that actually happen? We had no idea, but it sounded plausible. The model didn't give us any answers, it generated an interesting question.
I mean, if the workers *are* terrorists then they should be arrested, right? Short of that there are countless ways a non-terrorist can be "linked" with terrorists, and due to the "six degrees of separation" phenomenon it's quite common to have surprising looking connections.
For example Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan and I happen to have a common common friend. I met the friend through work and Bandar knew him because his family was a neighbor in Aspen where Bandar has a house. And since Bandar is in the Saudi royal family and Osama bin Laden belonged to a prominent Saudi family, it's almost certain that Bandar knew him from before his Mujahideen days in Afghanistan. So I'm only two two acquaintances removed from Osama bin Laden. That sounds alarming! But in fact I've never *met* Bandar, in fact I've never met any Saudis at all.
I've been racking my brains for people I've met from the actual Middle East, and it turns out that at one point in my career met the Egyptian-American space researcher Farouk el-Baz (who has a TNG shuttlecraft named after him!). El-Baz comes from a connected family; his brother for example was high up in Hosni Mubarak's government, and Farouk himself was at one time a science adviser to Anwar Sadat. It's a fair bet that he knows somebody from Egypt who later went on to be involved with the Muslim Brotherhood -- it wouldn't reflect on him at all. But if that were true I'd be just one acquaintance away from a direct "connection" with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Now it also happens that my wife went to graduate school with someone who was the first woman valedictorian of the US Naval academy. Since I know her directly, I have all kinds of one-degree of separation relationships to people in all kinds of sensitive military and national security positions. I also two different one-degree of separation connections to the Clintons and current Secretary of State John Kerry. If you count my "connections" to my college professors at MIT I'm one-degree of separation away from several Manhattan Project scientists.
If you plotted out my social network to two or three links away it'd look remarkable, in some cases even disturbing. But it's not. "Connection" means almost nothing. There have been cases of people "connected" to terrorists because the frequently called the same number -- a Manhattan pizza restaurant.
Which according to Woody Allen's book "Without Feathers" is "a mythological beast with the head of a lion and the body of a lion, though not the same lion."
where it might do a little good
no. Harvard is garbage. Have you ever had a Harvard primadonna as a coworker?
No. I've had Harvard graduates as coworkers though. None of them happened to be prima donnas, although I'm sure it happens.
Well, I went to MIT but have taken classes at Harvard, but not being a mind reader I guess I'm at a disadvantage here. All I have to go on is the people I've met there.
There's no question that for certain fields like finance Harvard's a great headstart on networking. But for English, foreign major, science and social science majors the reason to go to Harvard is that it's a great school, and I can tell you from firsthand experience that some Harvard classes are every bit as tough as any of the classes I took at MIT.
And if you take that bait, you're a sap.
The problem is that the banking system has been rigged in order to socialize risk. This guy exploited that fact, realized he made more money than an individual human being could possibly amuse himself with and decided to dispose of a big chunk of that were it might do a little good.
People are shouting "Harvard! Harvard! Harvard!" because they don't want you to think about the rigged banking system. They'd rather focus any anti-elitist backlash on intellectuals.
Apparently you are under the impression that symbols can only be physical objects.
Complaining about how what the kids are into makes no sense? Congratulations, you are now middle-aged. You have become the thing you hated.
... and wild animals don't waste valuable calories or protein. It's not that the nutrients in the placenta are *especially* good for you, it's just that nutrients period are good for you and hard to come by.
I once went on a winter hike with a park ranger, and he identified some tracks in the snow as coyote tracks. So I naturally asked how he could tell it was a coyote and not a dog being taken for a walk. The answer was that domestic dogs are so well-fed they waste energy running all over the place; coyotes are always on the edge of starvation so they nearly always travel in a perfectly straight line.
I'd send them hard copy printouts in 6 pt type on anti-copy security paper. It's perfectly legible, even in a photocopy, but a pain to OCR.
Why would anyone need or want hard copy of such a thing, except if they're posing?
Forty years is easy, if you don't insist on instant-access convenience. Print your data onto low acid paper and store in a fireproof cabinet. Either (a) people will still be using computers in 40 years, in which case they'll no doubt have scanners and OCR OR civilization as we know it will have collapsed and boy will you be glad you have hard copy.
As for a million years, I think the DNA idea is terrible. While there have been instances of DNA as old as 700,000 years being sequenced, the horse bone used to sequence that genome was recovered from ancient permafrost -- almost ideal conditions. If there is unexpected warmth, water or air exposure, then your DNA molecules will start to get manky fast.
But we can look to dinosaurs for the answer. What we have of them is mineralized bone. I've personally helped a paleontologist reconstruct a triceratops skull, so I've seen it up close. You can still see the pattern of veins preserved on the surface of the frill. So some kind of engraved mineral might be the way to go. Encoding data on noble metal plates or synthetic gems would seem more promising.
I have a simple test for judging the sincerity of an educational scheme: I ask whether the elite in this country use it on their own offspring.
For example a lot of people argue that class size doesn't make any difference to educational performance. However if you look at a prep school like Phillips Andover, where the Bush's send their scions, classes are three or four students sitting around the table having a discussion with a PhD teacher. This tells me right away that class size and teacher qualification are the most important factors, not computers or testing, both of which probably play some role in instruction but neither of which is the centerpiece.
If you want to improve school performance then, don't micromanage or replace teachers; reduce class sizes and increase teacher qualifications, paying whatever is necessary to attract someone with the absurdly high qualifications you demand for the job. That'd be fabulously expensive, but only if you don't count opportunity cost. There's practically no social investment that could pay higher dividends than education, at least over the lifetime of anyone who's relatively young. Naturally if you're 70 your hedonic planning horizon is closer than if you're 40.
Well one person's "massaging" is another person's "interpreting in a less highly selective context". I'll tell a personal story that illustrates this.
I once was tasked at converting a public health agency's legacy records into a new database. One of their datasets was mosquito trapping records -- the supervisor boasted they had almost thirty years of historical data. Now by this point I'd had a lot of experience with similar datasets, so I knew that any given trapping station would follow some kind of pattern. Depending on the local habitat and species one trap might produce most when the weather got hot while another would be more sensitive to rain. One thing I liked to do was plot El Nino years to see how the weekly production varied with the anomalously cool and wet weather. But when I did my usual set of plots I found no discernible patterns across years for the trapping stations, which was highly unusual. I'd handled dozens of datasets like this and had never seen that happen.
Now one of the things I like to do when I look at events in a dataset like that is ask how comparable event records really are. Catching mosquitoes is like catching fish; moving your trap a few feet can totally skew your readings between years. So I talked to the field workers, and what I discovered that while everyone talked about "trap locations", the numbers in the legacy data were actually trap *numbers*. Trap #1 might have been placed on one end of the county one year and then on the opposite end the following year.
When I looked at the *raw* data, and the absence of the expected patterns is what alerted me to the fact the dataset was screwy. However the *aggregate* numbers across all stations could in theory be comparable between years because they sampled the same locations, they just couldn't tell which was which. But of course it's not that simple. I'd also have needed to account for the difference in *methods*. They must have at several points in thirty years upgraded their mosquito light traps; perhaps adding octanol as a chemical attractant some years or CO2 in other years. Even the difference in reliability between trap designs biases the aggregate results. To accurately compare years I need to take into account the relative effectiveness of the changing methods used. This process is of course subject to bias, but just taking the *raw* data would yield nothing but literally confounded nonsense.
This is what environmental data tends to be like. In a laboratory you control conditions so every measurement set is complete and self-comparable right off the instrument reading if possible. But in a regional, multi-decade environmental dataset you don't have that luxury, and aggregating that data is not as simple as taking an average. For example you may have 10x as many monitoring stations in 2005 than you had in 1935, so the raw aggregates don't tell you anything because any underlying difference is confounded with the fact the bulk of stations you're measuring in 2005 didn't exist in '35. To make an *aggregate* data comparable between decades you have to massage it using some kind of model of the effect of confounding factors is. This is always a debatable process, but that doesn't mean one guess is as good as any another. That's why claims like this are published in journals, to be ripped to shreds if possible, and if that's not accomplished to become the basis of a new scientific consensus.
"Not settled" is not the same as "any statement is as likely to be correct as any other."
Almost certainly the case on three grounds.
(1) Getting a serious fusion effort off the ground is fabulously expensive. Even if you have some kind of whizbang micro-reactor concept you need a small army of physicists, engineers and highly skilled fabricators. People who don't come cheap.
(2) Running out of cash is what most startups do.
(3) They probably didn't have as much cash as "everyone knows they have", for the simple reason that the best way to convince someone to give you the mountain of cash you need is to make them thing you've as good as got it from someone else.
I agree that zero tolerance is a bad idea, but what they've struck down is the "reasonable person" standard in any kind of criminal case. It has nothing to do with zero tolerance.
IANAL, but I suspect the issue is that to convict someone for a serious crime you generally have to show "mens rea" ("guilty mind") -- that the defendant had the intent of committing the crime in question. If so the ruling may be reasonable, but not for the reasons you suggest. If I'm right, what SCOTUS is saying is that the jury has to determine that the husband actually intended to threaten his wife.
As for the civil liberties implications, they appear to be more limited than most people seem to believe. Threatening someone is still a crime. It's just not a crime to say something someone would misconstrue as a threat, even if that person is being reasonable.