Of course where the cost-risk-benefit calculations gets really political is where the people bearing the costs and taking the risks are different.
This makes an already difficult question incredibly difficult.
Take water. Even in areas where people get their water from a public entity, not everyone will agree on how much to pay for a given level of safety. In fact differences can be traced to objective bases; someone who is 75 isn't going to be interested in cancers that will arise in 30 years, unless he has grandchildren in the district.
In areas where water is provided by a private monopoly, things get even more complicated, because it's not necessarily in the company's interest that people understand what's at stake. I know of one private water company that sold off most of its watershed protection land to developers. Both the company and the developers were politically connected, so friendly regulators let it pass. I don't think most people in the district realized it, but this means water prices will go up in the long term as additional treatment is needed. And when that happens, they'll blame the environmentalists.
So what observation can a human make that would *not* be political under those criteria?
Could you walk out the door on a February morning and say, "Geez, it's cold out," without being political? After all the atmosphere doesn't care what temperature you expect it to be.
Of course we can talk in general terms, but what happened here was a weak implementation was chosen because it performed well. This was a specific design decision that could have been caught in review.
It's only after the decision was taken and incorporated into the software that it became hard to find. In fact it made the software appear better on the easier-to-observe non-functional requirement of performance.
If software needs to robust, you need to go looking for problems. Not every application justifies the same level of effort, but I'd say high-security crypto hardware qualifies.
So they were using trial and error, but it wasn't science?
Exactly correct. Trial and error is an essential part of science, but it is not in itself science. Just as developing explanations for an observation is part of science, but is not science in and of itself -- something a lot of people here would do well to learn.
In any case, your premise that there was no chemistry except for whatever lofty purpose you claimed is bollocks.
Well it depends on what you mean. Humans are the product of evolution; evolution is mediated by chemical processes, so in a sense "chemistry" pre-dates the emergence of humans. But we're not talking about "chemistry" in that sense; we are talking about chemistry as a scientific field.
Science is the systematic pursuit, by empirical means, of generalizable knowledge. Dyers, through generations of trial and error, may discover the usefulness of mordants to fix dyes to cotton fabric; chemists however, discover the general mechanism of coordination compounds, which also gives them insight into things like how hemoglobin functions in animal blood -- a totally unrelated application.
Don't forget the key role chemistry played in developing electrical technologies.
Both Faraday and Volta were chemists; Faraday started his career as an assistant in Humphrey Davies' lab, where he discovered benzene and explored the synthesis of chlorine compounds. His electromagnetism work stemmed from experiments with constructing voltaic piles (electric batteries), devices which had no practical application yet. Absent the idle curiosity inspired by making severed frog legs twitch or transforming water into volatile gasses, nobody would ever have gained the understanding electricity and magnetism they needed to develop electric motors and generators.
Next up, curve 25519 and millions of apple fan boys crying into their caramel latte.
If that happens, it won't just be Apple fan boys who are put out.
In any case, it doesn't take a math genius to predict something like this would happen with factorization. There was no breakthrough on the fundamental problem, only a discovery of a weak key choice algorithm. This is where nearly every exploit in the world comes from: not from advances in mathematics, but the discovery of sloppy implementations.
The problem with software is that it is almost irresistibly considered finished when it looks right.
New England had a very dry year overall. The Norway maples and hickories in my yard dropped most of their leaves in August, and what's left are brown and dry -- first time in twenty-five years living here that's happened. Twenty yards downhill trees with a better water supply are still green unseasonably late, but are starting to fade to yellow.
Normally by this time of year there would be brilliant red foliage everywhere.
(1) We have had an unseasonably warm fall. (2) Cooling temperatures trigger the production of red and purple pigments in leaves. (3) We expect to see less red foliage this year.
Explain to me which of these statements is *political*.
I'd argue that the thing that really separates our society from all other advanced civilizations in the past is our unique mastery of chemistry. The Romans were extremely good at engineering, and over the course of a thousand years developed some excellent recipes for materials like steel and concrete; but they had no idea what they were doing on a fundamental level; they were stumbling along blindly through stubborn trial and error.
The significance of chemistry is often overlooked by geeks; physics, math and computer science have more geek cachet. But if you look around, nothing shapes our world more. And the thing is, chemistry only became chemistry when it turned away from the practical concern of creating gold to the impractical one of understanding the universe.
If, like many people, you need an analogy to understand this, think of science as like going to the gym. The things you do in the gym are pointless; what gets you through them initially is the useful strength you hope to take away from the gym. But that never sustains anyone for long. The people who obtain the benefits of the gym are the ones who end up doing it for its own sake.
A society that does not pursue science for its own sake is inherently weak. It could not respond to a challenge like Puerto Rico if it wanted to. And it certainly has no power to withstand a more advanced society.
This is an example of that at it's purest, the culmination of years of effort by hundreds of people, all for a moment that might not have happened in their lifetimes.
You know, the Dubai police also have a fleet of 14 hypercars -- Bugattis, Lambos, McLarens. With your engineer hat, you'd wonder why not pick one and standardize on that?
Because they don't have them to chase down joy riders in other supercars, as most people assume. The Dubai police has a collection of million dollar cars for the same reason a middle-aged dot-com billionaire does: because they think it makes them look cool. The Dubai police hypercars don't do high speed chases on desert highways, they patrol places with lots of pedestrian traffic. You can flag one down and the officer will let you take a selfie with him.
They don't buy this kind shit for policing. They buy it for branding. And it works. If they didn't do this kind of stuff far fewer people around the world would even have heard about them. Now everybody know that Dubai is not only rich, but ridiculously rich. That gives them a higher profile, and in turn translates into political influence.
I was about to say this. It takes a lot more time and dedication, though. There's also the problem of people fooling themselves into thinking they're having a mystic experience too.
I think there's also a difference between "reviews" and "criticism". They're related, but distinct things.
You use a "review" to decide where to direct your purchasing dollars. If I'm buying a new washing machine, I'll check the reviews of the ones that seem to meet my criteria. However by-in-large I don't need a review to know whether I'm going to see the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbuster in the theaters; I just know.
You use "criticism" to enhance your enjoyment and understanding of something. In the unlikely event that I see Thor:Ragnarok a critique afterward gives me a second bite of the apple as it were; it might even change my mind. Screen Junkies "Honest Trailers" on YouTube are an example of critique; they're intended for people who've already seen the movie.
In a review you do need elements of criticism, but those elements have to be discreet. A review ought to tell you why you want to experience this thing without interfering with that experience. And while a reviewer's feelings are more important in a review than a critics feelings are in a critique, a little critical objectivity is still very useful in a reviewer. A good reviewer should be able to tell you why you want to see a movie that he himself hates.
Smart doesn't come into it. You don't have to be a genius to think critically; it's more a habit than a talent.
Nobody who spent twenty minutes thinking about the "CO2 was much higher in the past" would realize that this is an idiotic argument; sure they were higher in the Eocene 50 million years ago, but the Eocene warming event was accompanied by global mass extinctions -- as was the subsequent cooling. But both the "rapid" warming and cooling happened much more slowly, slowly enough for new species to emerge as for old ones to disappear. "Rapid" in terms of the Eocene Optimum event was 0.3 C/1000 years. The current rate of warming is sixty times faster.
You don't have to be a genius to figure this out. You just have to be curious enough to look into it. So I have to ask again, do you actually think about this crap before you choose to believe it, or do you just go by how it makes you feel? Clearly, based on your strawman argument, you think how you feel about the messenger makes some difference.
CO2 is fungible, so it doesn't matter which CO2 source you offset.
The problem here I see is scaling this to the point where it makes a difference. Human emissions of CO2 amount to 10 gigatons of CO2/annum. Let's say to have a significant effect, you need to remove 5% of that. We need to remove five hundred billion kilograms of CO2 every year.
CO2 has a molar mass of 44.01 g/mol; calcium carbonate has a molar mass of 100.09. So for every kg of CO2 you remove, you generate roughly 2.3 kg of CaCO3.
That means to have a significant effect we'd have to find some place to put 1.115 x 10^12 kg of CaCO3. The densest form of calcium carbonate has a density of 2.83 g/cm^3. That means we'd be generating almost 400 million cubic meters. Imagine a block of calcium carbonate a 1 x 1 km wide and long and 400 m high. If you set the Empire State building next to it, just the radio mast would peek over it.
It's not the absolute level of CO2, it's the rate of change that will lead to mass extinctions. If you said we were headed for 1000 ppm in a million years, I'd say "big deal". If you said we were headed for 100 ppm in eighty years, I'd say, that's very big deal.
If analogies are your thing, it's like the difference diving into the pool and hitting the water at 10 mph vs. hitting the water 12,500 mph. One is a fun experience, and the best thing you could say about the other is that it's not an experience at all.
I have a question for people who spread memes like the above: do you ever actually think for yourself, or do you just repeat what you're told?
If your line in the sand is wisdom, then this is what you have to ask: can computers provide a substitute for wisdom that is cheap and convenient enough we can live with its shortcomings?
Think of wisdom as hardwood flooring and machine learning algorithms as floating melamine resin tiles with wood grain printing. Yes, solid maple tongue-and-groove planks are considered more valuable, but a lot more people put laminate tile in because it's way cheaper to buy and install.
I remember Mt St. Helens very well, because I was working as a technician in the lab which sent seismometers there. It's an irrelevant example, because the Mt. St. Helens event is something that could be prepared for with a few weeks warning.
The larger scale the event, the longer you need to plan for it. A supervolcano can eject several thousand cubic kilometers of material. Mt St. Helens ejected 0.21 km^3. The last Yellowstone super-eruption was roughly twelve thousand time larger. If it happened today it would bury everything from California to Chicago in 10 feet of ash. It would effectively halt agriculture worldwide for several years. Given that the world's global food reserve is only adequate (if perfectly distributed) for 73 days, how many decades of planning do you think we'd need to be ready? How much of that time would be spent debating whether this was real, then debating on who was going to pay?
Also, I'm not sure you understand what "geologic timescale" means. The usual unit of time used is the Ma or Mega annum. Decades don't enter into it.
If your bar for "civilization" is "possesses any sort of permanent artificial shelter," sure. But I see that more as a precursor to civilization, which involves specialization and political organization. If the survivors of a catastrophic event were reduced to living in isolated huts with no political or economic organization above the immediate family group, I'd call that an end to civilization.
However I can use your benchmark and my point still stands.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course where the cost-risk-benefit calculations gets really political is where the people bearing the costs and taking the risks are different.
This makes an already difficult question incredibly difficult.
Take water. Even in areas where people get their water from a public entity, not everyone will agree on how much to pay for a given level of safety. In fact differences can be traced to objective bases; someone who is 75 isn't going to be interested in cancers that will arise in 30 years, unless he has grandchildren in the district.
In areas where water is provided by a private monopoly, things get even more complicated, because it's not necessarily in the company's interest that people understand what's at stake. I know of one private water company that sold off most of its watershed protection land to developers. Both the company and the developers were politically connected, so friendly regulators let it pass. I don't think most people in the district realized it, but this means water prices will go up in the long term as additional treatment is needed. And when that happens, they'll blame the environmentalists.
So what observation can a human make that would *not* be political under those criteria?
Could you walk out the door on a February morning and say, "Geez, it's cold out," without being political? After all the atmosphere doesn't care what temperature you expect it to be.
Of course we can talk in general terms, but what happened here was a weak implementation was chosen because it performed well. This was a specific design decision that could have been caught in review.
It's only after the decision was taken and incorporated into the software that it became hard to find. In fact it made the software appear better on the easier-to-observe non-functional requirement of performance.
If software needs to robust, you need to go looking for problems. Not every application justifies the same level of effort, but I'd say high-security crypto hardware qualifies.
So they were using trial and error, but it wasn't science?
Exactly correct. Trial and error is an essential part of science, but it is not in itself science. Just as developing explanations for an observation is part of science, but is not science in and of itself -- something a lot of people here would do well to learn.
In any case, your premise that there was no chemistry except for whatever lofty purpose you claimed is bollocks.
Well it depends on what you mean. Humans are the product of evolution; evolution is mediated by chemical processes, so in a sense "chemistry" pre-dates the emergence of humans. But we're not talking about "chemistry" in that sense; we are talking about chemistry as a scientific field.
Science is the systematic pursuit, by empirical means, of generalizable knowledge. Dyers, through generations of trial and error, may discover the usefulness of mordants to fix dyes to cotton fabric; chemists however, discover the general mechanism of coordination compounds, which also gives them insight into things like how hemoglobin functions in animal blood -- a totally unrelated application.
Don't forget the key role chemistry played in developing electrical technologies.
Both Faraday and Volta were chemists; Faraday started his career as an assistant in Humphrey Davies' lab, where he discovered benzene and explored the synthesis of chlorine compounds. His electromagnetism work stemmed from experiments with constructing voltaic piles (electric batteries), devices which had no practical application yet. Absent the idle curiosity inspired by making severed frog legs twitch or transforming water into volatile gasses, nobody would ever have gained the understanding electricity and magnetism they needed to develop electric motors and generators.
Next up, curve 25519 and millions of apple fan boys crying into their caramel latte.
If that happens, it won't just be Apple fan boys who are put out.
In any case, it doesn't take a math genius to predict something like this would happen with factorization. There was no breakthrough on the fundamental problem, only a discovery of a weak key choice algorithm. This is where nearly every exploit in the world comes from: not from advances in mathematics, but the discovery of sloppy implementations.
The problem with software is that it is almost irresistibly considered finished when it looks right.
New England had a very dry year overall. The Norway maples and hickories in my yard dropped most of their leaves in August, and what's left are brown and dry -- first time in twenty-five years living here that's happened. Twenty yards downhill trees with a better water supply are still green unseasonably late, but are starting to fade to yellow.
Normally by this time of year there would be brilliant red foliage everywhere.
(1) We have had an unseasonably warm fall.
(2) Cooling temperatures trigger the production of red and purple pigments in leaves.
(3) We expect to see less red foliage this year.
Explain to me which of these statements is *political*.
I'd argue that the thing that really separates our society from all other advanced civilizations in the past is our unique mastery of chemistry. The Romans were extremely good at engineering, and over the course of a thousand years developed some excellent recipes for materials like steel and concrete; but they had no idea what they were doing on a fundamental level; they were stumbling along blindly through stubborn trial and error.
The significance of chemistry is often overlooked by geeks; physics, math and computer science have more geek cachet. But if you look around, nothing shapes our world more. And the thing is, chemistry only became chemistry when it turned away from the practical concern of creating gold to the impractical one of understanding the universe.
If, like many people, you need an analogy to understand this, think of science as like going to the gym. The things you do in the gym are pointless; what gets you through them initially is the useful strength you hope to take away from the gym. But that never sustains anyone for long. The people who obtain the benefits of the gym are the ones who end up doing it for its own sake.
A society that does not pursue science for its own sake is inherently weak. It could not respond to a challenge like Puerto Rico if it wanted to. And it certainly has no power to withstand a more advanced society.
"Chance favors the prepared mind."
This is an example of that at it's purest, the culmination of years of effort by hundreds of people, all for a moment that might not have happened in their lifetimes.
You know, the Dubai police also have a fleet of 14 hypercars -- Bugattis, Lambos, McLarens. With your engineer hat, you'd wonder why not pick one and standardize on that?
Because they don't have them to chase down joy riders in other supercars, as most people assume. The Dubai police has a collection of million dollar cars for the same reason a middle-aged dot-com billionaire does: because they think it makes them look cool. The Dubai police hypercars don't do high speed chases on desert highways, they patrol places with lots of pedestrian traffic. You can flag one down and the officer will let you take a selfie with him.
They don't buy this kind shit for policing. They buy it for branding. And it works. If they didn't do this kind of stuff far fewer people around the world would even have heard about them. Now everybody know that Dubai is not only rich, but ridiculously rich. That gives them a higher profile, and in turn translates into political influence.
Can be taken out with a lasso.
I was about to say this. It takes a lot more time and dedication, though. There's also the problem of people fooling themselves into thinking they're having a mystic experience too.
My mother-in-law lived to the age of 96. By your logic I'm guaranteed another 40 years.
You can't calculate by analogy.
Pay $33 to Jeff Bezos for a hardcover copy of The Anarchist's Cookbook?
Truly irony *is* dead.
I think there's also a difference between "reviews" and "criticism". They're related, but distinct things.
You use a "review" to decide where to direct your purchasing dollars. If I'm buying a new washing machine, I'll check the reviews of the ones that seem to meet my criteria. However by-in-large I don't need a review to know whether I'm going to see the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbuster in the theaters; I just know.
You use "criticism" to enhance your enjoyment and understanding of something. In the unlikely event that I see Thor:Ragnarok a critique afterward gives me a second bite of the apple as it were; it might even change my mind. Screen Junkies "Honest Trailers" on YouTube are an example of critique; they're intended for people who've already seen the movie.
In a review you do need elements of criticism, but those elements have to be discreet. A review ought to tell you why you want to experience this thing without interfering with that experience. And while a reviewer's feelings are more important in a review than a critics feelings are in a critique, a little critical objectivity is still very useful in a reviewer. A good reviewer should be able to tell you why you want to see a movie that he himself hates.
Smart doesn't come into it. You don't have to be a genius to think critically; it's more a habit than a talent.
Nobody who spent twenty minutes thinking about the "CO2 was much higher in the past" would realize that this is an idiotic argument; sure they were higher in the Eocene 50 million years ago, but the Eocene warming event was accompanied by global mass extinctions -- as was the subsequent cooling. But both the "rapid" warming and cooling happened much more slowly, slowly enough for new species to emerge as for old ones to disappear. "Rapid" in terms of the Eocene Optimum event was 0.3 C/1000 years. The current rate of warming is sixty times faster.
You don't have to be a genius to figure this out. You just have to be curious enough to look into it. So I have to ask again, do you actually think about this crap before you choose to believe it, or do you just go by how it makes you feel? Clearly, based on your strawman argument, you think how you feel about the messenger makes some difference.
CO2 is fungible, so it doesn't matter which CO2 source you offset.
The problem here I see is scaling this to the point where it makes a difference. Human emissions of CO2 amount to 10 gigatons of CO2/annum. Let's say to have a significant effect, you need to remove 5% of that. We need to remove five hundred billion kilograms of CO2 every year.
CO2 has a molar mass of 44.01 g/mol; calcium carbonate has a molar mass of 100.09. So for every kg of CO2 you remove, you generate roughly 2.3 kg of CaCO3.
That means to have a significant effect we'd have to find some place to put 1.115 x 10^12 kg of CaCO3. The densest form of calcium carbonate has a density of 2.83 g/cm^3. That means we'd be generating almost 400 million cubic meters. Imagine a block of calcium carbonate a 1 x 1 km wide and long and 400 m high. If you set the Empire State building next to it, just the radio mast would peek over it.
It's not the absolute level of CO2, it's the rate of change that will lead to mass extinctions. If you said we were headed for 1000 ppm in a million years, I'd say "big deal". If you said we were headed for 100 ppm in eighty years, I'd say, that's very big deal.
If analogies are your thing, it's like the difference diving into the pool and hitting the water at 10 mph vs. hitting the water 12,500 mph. One is a fun experience, and the best thing you could say about the other is that it's not an experience at all.
I have a question for people who spread memes like the above: do you ever actually think for yourself, or do you just repeat what you're told?
And once they've built the adjacency matrix, they can raise it to another power and connect acquaintances you have that are in disparate circle.
When your wife gets your old college girlfriend as a suggested friend, she might start putting 2 + 2 together.
If your line in the sand is wisdom, then this is what you have to ask: can computers provide a substitute for wisdom that is cheap and convenient enough we can live with its shortcomings?
Think of wisdom as hardwood flooring and machine learning algorithms as floating melamine resin tiles with wood grain printing. Yes, solid maple tongue-and-groove planks are considered more valuable, but a lot more people put laminate tile in because it's way cheaper to buy and install.
No, I understand. But I'm assuming that people still *care* that Facebook has this information even if they don't personally *see* it.
I remember Mt St. Helens very well, because I was working as a technician in the lab which sent seismometers there. It's an irrelevant example, because the Mt. St. Helens event is something that could be prepared for with a few weeks warning.
The larger scale the event, the longer you need to plan for it. A supervolcano can eject several thousand cubic kilometers of material. Mt St. Helens ejected 0.21 km^3. The last Yellowstone super-eruption was roughly twelve thousand time larger. If it happened today it would bury everything from California to Chicago in 10 feet of ash. It would effectively halt agriculture worldwide for several years. Given that the world's global food reserve is only adequate (if perfectly distributed) for 73 days, how many decades of planning do you think we'd need to be ready? How much of that time would be spent debating whether this was real, then debating on who was going to pay?
Also, I'm not sure you understand what "geologic timescale" means. The usual unit of time used is the Ma or Mega annum. Decades don't enter into it.
How? Purchasing datasets and mining them. That's how they connected this person to her clients. They didn't need any of their *own* data to do that.
If your bar for "civilization" is "possesses any sort of permanent artificial shelter," sure. But I see that more as a precursor to civilization, which involves specialization and political organization. If the survivors of a catastrophic event were reduced to living in isolated huts with no political or economic organization above the immediate family group, I'd call that an end to civilization.
However I can use your benchmark and my point still stands.