There's no reason to believe that QM is non-deterministic, especially in time-reversible formulations. I wasn't intending to imply that QM is non-deterministic. It's certainly not necessary that it be deterministic, and since consciousness exists, it's not necessarily non-deterministic. As I said, deterministic is not the same thing as predictable.
Personally, I think we'll find consciousness is a general consequence of evolution of complex life forms and is only dependent on information processing abilities, and not on the underlying physics. (That finding would disappoint a lot of people). In most cases organism without a sense of self is at a significant disadvantage relative to one with.
Yes, but any civilization in the galaxy more than a few centuries beyond us (assuming our technological growth continues) will know that this star has an earth mass planet with both liquid and solid surface and a biosphere driven by oxygenic photosynthesis. We've been broadcasting that fact for half a billion years. If they were going the point a directional antenna at a planet and transmit a beacon, we'd be a very good choice.
They are called upper limits and lower limits. Just because you don't know the value of a specific quantity, you can often place limits and in some cases determine the shape of the likelihood distribution for the value.
That all seems like a line drawing game. How come burn a tree, plant a tree is carbon neutral, but burn a tree, plant some corn is not? Doesn't corn also absorb CO2 from the air?
The difference is that a tree lives a century, and then decays over the course of centuries. In theory some of the carbon from the tree remains in the soil even after that. So a tree removes carbon from the air for centuries. Corn, on the other hand, grows for 1 year. The grain from a corn plant is eaten nearly immediately, releasing its carbon into the air. The corn stalks are usually chopped and burned, chopped and composted, or chopped and fermented. In all those cases, the carbon dioxide is returned to the air within a year. A corn field has no long term carbon storage. Then think about the fertilizers used on a corn field. Most are made from fossil fuels, and the process of making them releases vast amounts of carbon dioxide.
A lot of people don't understand the difference between weather and climate, so you're not alone in having that question.
In the northern mid-latitudes like New England, weather is the result of a converging flows of air: warm moist air from the tropics moving north-east, and cold relatively dry air from high latitudes moving south-west.. These flows are due to convective heat flow from the equator to the poles. Where these flows of air collide is where you get storms. Above the boundary, the rising divergent air columns create a jet stream. That's why there's often bad weather marked by the jet stream.
The boundary where these two air masses meet is not straight. It deviates north or south as it is pushed by the air masses. But large quantities of air can't flow past the boundary. So if you have a large amount of warm air in one spot pushing north, the cold air has to get out of the way by pushing south somewhere else. Similarly if cold air pushes south, warm air will move north in other places. When you add energy by heating up tropical air and increasing its moisture content (i.e. global warming), these deviations can get larger, and the storms along the boundary get worse because of more moisture and higher temperature differential.
So this winter, when you were freezing, it was because Alberta was having record high temperatures. (Above freezing in Edmonton in January). The push of warm air that is causing me to freeze in the west now is bringing higher temperatures to you in New England. The stream on the west coast is down in Mid California, but is over Hudson Bay in the east. The warm air pushing north has been the cause of many of those tornadoes.
2. We can't actually prove it, but correlation == causation.
No. Correlation != causation, but the theoretical basis of the greenhouse effect (infrared opacity of CO2 trapping heat) has been known for more than a century. Correlation+theoretical mechanism == probable causation.
3. Okay, correlation != causation, but we have a consensus
4. True, Earth as the center of the universe was once a consensus too, but we're right this time!
Yes, people once thought that the earth was the center of the universe. That conclusion was not reached scientifically, It was the scientific process that resulted in a scientific consensus that the earth was not at the center of the universe. Much like the scientific process has resulted in a scientific consensus of the reality of anthropogenic global warming. No climate scientist is claiming 100% certainty. There's a 1 or 2% chance that we're wrong.
Suppose you went to your doctor and he said there's a mass on your liver, and tests show there's a 98% chance it's cancerous. To remove it you would need surgery, and with liver surgery there's a 1or 2% chance you will die on the table. Would you have the surgery? Or would you opt out because of the 0.04% chance you will die for a non-cancerous growth.
Like how the progressive solutions to poverty tend to keep people poor, or how the progressive solutions to crime end up increasing crime.
This is exactly the same kind of conservative denialism seen in global warming deniers. Any evidence from poverty rates or crime rates is ignored. The costs of the conservative "solutions" to those problems is ignored. The only evidence this type of person will believe is a report from a conservative think tank. Besides God likes conservatives better, so the conservative solution must be the right one.
Global temperatures will continue to rise as they have for the last 5 decades.
Global sea levels will continue to rise.
Worldwide mass of sea ice an land ice will continue to decrease
We've been predicting these things for decades, and when they come true, you just ignore us and pick tiny exceptions to global rules and claim it's all wrong. Your main reason for disbelief is that you don't want to believe.
Wow! what country has executions for not paying your bills?
Not the death penalty yet. But apparently you can be incarcerated indefinitely in some states of the USA for failing to pay your bills. The police are thinking of changing their motto to "To serve and collect".
Yes, axis stabilization. But I don't know who ever believed it was a requirement. Planets in our solar system without large moons appear to have fairly stable axes.
Yes, given that there was no real reason to believe that a large moon is necessary for complex life to exist. A look at the rotational axes of planets in the solar system indicates that they are more stable than would be expected with the naive moon-no-moon estimate. The only reasonable way that would happen is if other tidal torques are large enough to add stability. But given that it took nearly 4 billion years for complex life to arise here, it's probably fairly rare even if conditions would allow it to develop.
But the Drake equation is meant only to estimate the number of possible civilizations, not to be an exact calculation. There is nothing "fake" about it. When I plug in numbers I get that there is no reason there couldn't be 750,000 civilizations in our galaxy. It's also quite possible that there may only be 1 civilization per 20 million galaxies. There's a lot more certainty in some of the parameters, so I should recalculate, but that low end estimate probably won't get much larger.
It's 100% certain that chemical reactions involve quantum mechanics.
It's 100% certain that consciousness involves chemical reactions.
Therefore, consciousness involves quantum mechanics
But it would be greatly overreaching to state that consciousness requires changes to quantum theory. Consciousness doesn't even require non-deterministic physics. Deterministic is not the same thing as predictable.
GEM, a genuine full-fledged, GUI with overlapping windows, shipped in 1985 for the 8086. I don't remember it having much success as an OS or user environment, but there was one faintly successful product--was it a desktop publishing program? that actually incorporated GEM as an integral part of the program.
I think you're thinking of Ventura Publisher. There may have been some other programs that shipped with a GEM runtime. It wasn't actually that odd at the time. A usable CAD program called In-A-Vision shipped with the Windows 1 runtime. You could also run it under Windows 2 and Windows 3 (real mode only). And, of course, the original AOL clients shipped with the GEOS runtime.
Windows 1 would multi-task DOS applications. It would give up a time slice for each DOS call. There were dummy calls to give up a slice without doing I/O. I used to run compile or run C-ROBOTS in the background on an 800x600 super-EGA display. Of course Windows 2 killed that. Was overlapping windows a big enough deal that we had to give up DOS in a Window?
If a Soyuz has a bad launch, the command module ends up in Siberia.
There are phases of any launch that are unsurvivable if the worst case happens. It goes with the territory. The goal is to minimize them as much as possible. But we're going eventually lose a crew with another manned launch vehicle. Pretending that it won't happen makes the consequences on space exploration worse when it does.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no reason to believe that QM is non-deterministic, especially in time-reversible formulations. I wasn't intending to imply that QM is non-deterministic. It's certainly not necessary that it be deterministic, and since consciousness exists, it's not necessarily non-deterministic. As I said, deterministic is not the same thing as predictable.
Personally, I think we'll find consciousness is a general consequence of evolution of complex life forms and is only dependent on information processing abilities, and not on the underlying physics. (That finding would disappoint a lot of people). In most cases organism without a sense of self is at a significant disadvantage relative to one with.
Yes, but any civilization in the galaxy more than a few centuries beyond us (assuming our technological growth continues) will know that this star has an earth mass planet with both liquid and solid surface and a biosphere driven by oxygenic photosynthesis. We've been broadcasting that fact for half a billion years. If they were going the point a directional antenna at a planet and transmit a beacon, we'd be a very good choice.
They are called upper limits and lower limits. Just because you don't know the value of a specific quantity, you can often place limits and in some cases determine the shape of the likelihood distribution for the value.
Humans emit 100 times more CO2 than volcanoes.
You have no idea how error analysis and uncertainties work.
"The facts of life are conservative." Margaret Thatcher
"Maggie Thatcher is a crack whore." Casper Weinburger
They have multimillion dollar mansions and huge CO2 footprints?
Let's adjust the radon concentration in that AC's house to 0.04%. It's a small number, so he won't have any ill effects.
Sorry, 13,000. Must have had soot in my eyes.
This report suggests that coal fired power plants kill 15,000 people in the US annually. I think that would fit in the "terrible" category.
That all seems like a line drawing game. How come burn a tree, plant a tree is carbon neutral, but burn a tree, plant some corn is not? Doesn't corn also absorb CO2 from the air?
The difference is that a tree lives a century, and then decays over the course of centuries. In theory some of the carbon from the tree remains in the soil even after that. So a tree removes carbon from the air for centuries. Corn, on the other hand, grows for 1 year. The grain from a corn plant is eaten nearly immediately, releasing its carbon into the air. The corn stalks are usually chopped and burned, chopped and composted, or chopped and fermented. In all those cases, the carbon dioxide is returned to the air within a year. A corn field has no long term carbon storage. Then think about the fertilizers used on a corn field. Most are made from fossil fuels, and the process of making them releases vast amounts of carbon dioxide.
how come I'm freezing my ass off in New England?
A lot of people don't understand the difference between weather and climate, so you're not alone in having that question.
In the northern mid-latitudes like New England, weather is the result of a converging flows of air: warm moist air from the tropics moving north-east, and cold relatively dry air from high latitudes moving south-west.. These flows are due to convective heat flow from the equator to the poles. Where these flows of air collide is where you get storms. Above the boundary, the rising divergent air columns create a jet stream. That's why there's often bad weather marked by the jet stream.
The boundary where these two air masses meet is not straight. It deviates north or south as it is pushed by the air masses. But large quantities of air can't flow past the boundary. So if you have a large amount of warm air in one spot pushing north, the cold air has to get out of the way by pushing south somewhere else. Similarly if cold air pushes south, warm air will move north in other places. When you add energy by heating up tropical air and increasing its moisture content (i.e. global warming), these deviations can get larger, and the storms along the boundary get worse because of more moisture and higher temperature differential.
So this winter, when you were freezing, it was because Alberta was having record high temperatures. (Above freezing in Edmonton in January). The push of warm air that is causing me to freeze in the west now is bringing higher temperatures to you in New England. The stream on the west coast is down in Mid California, but is over Hudson Bay in the east. The warm air pushing north has been the cause of many of those tornadoes.
Al Gore is not a climate scientist. Whether he believes in it or not is beside the point, and has no bearing on whether it is real or not.
1. Man is causing global warming.
Yes. Exactly.
2. We can't actually prove it, but correlation == causation.
No. Correlation != causation, but the theoretical basis of the greenhouse effect (infrared opacity of CO2 trapping heat) has been known for more than a century. Correlation+theoretical mechanism == probable causation.
3. Okay, correlation != causation, but we have a consensus
Yes, we certainly do.
4. True, Earth as the center of the universe was once a consensus too, but we're right this time!
Yes, people once thought that the earth was the center of the universe. That conclusion was not reached scientifically, It was the scientific process that resulted in a scientific consensus that the earth was not at the center of the universe. Much like the scientific process has resulted in a scientific consensus of the reality of anthropogenic global warming. No climate scientist is claiming 100% certainty. There's a 1 or 2% chance that we're wrong.
Suppose you went to your doctor and he said there's a mass on your liver, and tests show there's a 98% chance it's cancerous. To remove it you would need surgery, and with liver surgery there's a 1or 2% chance you will die on the table. Would you have the surgery? Or would you opt out because of the 0.04% chance you will die for a non-cancerous growth.
5. Rapture
There will be no Rapture to save us.
Like how the progressive solutions to poverty tend to keep people poor, or how the progressive solutions to crime end up increasing crime.
This is exactly the same kind of conservative denialism seen in global warming deniers. Any evidence from poverty rates or crime rates is ignored. The costs of the conservative "solutions" to those problems is ignored. The only evidence this type of person will believe is a report from a conservative think tank. Besides God likes conservatives better, so the conservative solution must be the right one.
Global temperatures will continue to rise as they have for the last 5 decades.
Global sea levels will continue to rise.
Worldwide mass of sea ice an land ice will continue to decrease
We've been predicting these things for decades, and when they come true, you just ignore us and pick tiny exceptions to global rules and claim it's all wrong. Your main reason for disbelief is that you don't want to believe.
I've posted it before. I'll post it again. Responses to 163 bogus arguments made by global warming deniers.
Oh my, the communists are coming!
Please go live on your libertarian utopia island. I hope you don't mind the rest of the world using air strikes to reduce your carbon emissions.
Wow! what country has executions for not paying your bills?
Not the death penalty yet. But apparently you can be incarcerated indefinitely in some states of the USA for failing to pay your bills. The police are thinking of changing their motto to "To serve and collect".
Yes, axis stabilization. But I don't know who ever believed it was a requirement. Planets in our solar system without large moons appear to have fairly stable axes.
Yes, given that there was no real reason to believe that a large moon is necessary for complex life to exist. A look at the rotational axes of planets in the solar system indicates that they are more stable than would be expected with the naive moon-no-moon estimate. The only reasonable way that would happen is if other tidal torques are large enough to add stability. But given that it took nearly 4 billion years for complex life to arise here, it's probably fairly rare even if conditions would allow it to develop.
But the Drake equation is meant only to estimate the number of possible civilizations, not to be an exact calculation. There is nothing "fake" about it. When I plug in numbers I get that there is no reason there couldn't be 750,000 civilizations in our galaxy. It's also quite possible that there may only be 1 civilization per 20 million galaxies. There's a lot more certainty in some of the parameters, so I should recalculate, but that low end estimate probably won't get much larger.
It's 100% certain that chemical reactions involve quantum mechanics.
It's 100% certain that consciousness involves chemical reactions.
Therefore, consciousness involves quantum mechanics
But it would be greatly overreaching to state that consciousness requires changes to quantum theory. Consciousness doesn't even require non-deterministic physics. Deterministic is not the same thing as predictable.
GEM, a genuine full-fledged, GUI with overlapping windows, shipped in 1985 for the 8086. I don't remember it having much success as an OS or user environment, but there was one faintly successful product--was it a desktop publishing program? that actually incorporated GEM as an integral part of the program.
I think you're thinking of Ventura Publisher. There may have been some other programs that shipped with a GEM runtime. It wasn't actually that odd at the time. A usable CAD program called In-A-Vision shipped with the Windows 1 runtime. You could also run it under Windows 2 and Windows 3 (real mode only). And, of course, the original AOL clients shipped with the GEOS runtime.
Windows 1 would multi-task DOS applications. It would give up a time slice for each DOS call. There were dummy calls to give up a slice without doing I/O. I used to run compile or run C-ROBOTS in the background on an 800x600 super-EGA display. Of course Windows 2 killed that. Was overlapping windows a big enough deal that we had to give up DOS in a Window?
If a Soyuz has a bad launch, the command module ends up in Siberia.
There are phases of any launch that are unsurvivable if the worst case happens. It goes with the territory. The goal is to minimize them as much as possible. But we're going eventually lose a crew with another manned launch vehicle. Pretending that it won't happen makes the consequences on space exploration worse when it does.
Like all of the Ares launch vehicles, it was primarily a welfare program for Alliant Techsystems (formerly Thiokol)