Agreed -- with most people most things are just not a big deal. Most people, for instance, walk away from auto wrecks. Most people survive plane crashes with at most minor injuries. Most people survived smallpox and the bubonic plague, too.
Does it therefore follow that they're not worth preventing?
My favorite part about comments like this is that there's no way anybody could reasonably look at the body available evidence on the subject and come to this extreme of a position.
It therefore follows that that "body of evidence" is fabricated to hide the truth. Which proves that there's a conspiracy of all of the scientists in several different fields from around the world!
One guy was afraid of global cooling and he got onto the cover of Time. It was about as scientific as the Time Cube guy getting mainstream media coverage.
Unlike damn near everyone else, I actually looked up that article and read it. The science is not nearly what it's played up to be.
The researcher was actually working with a real climatological problem: from around WWII to the 70s, there was a distinct cooling in global temperatures. If you look closely you can see it in the GISS data. The question isn't "was the Earth cooling" but "what is causing the Earth to cool?"
Well, we later figured it out. It was air pollution. In particular, the huge upturn in worldwide burning of high-sulphur fuels starting in the 30s and accelerating from then through the 70s put a lot of sulphur oxides in the upper atmosphere, and they're pretty good at blocking incoming solar energy (similar to the Mount Pinatubo cooling in the early 90s).
However, atmospheric sulphur has other problems. Like acid rain, ozone depletion, asthma, things like that. So we cut back on it, and the temperatures returned to trend.
At the time, the Earth was cooling -- but the lesson isn't what you'll hear from the people pushing that as a reply to real climate science.
Resources will never run out, thanks to conservation of matter.
As long as you're content with the elements arranged (or dispersed) however they end up, that works pretty well.
On the other hand, if you're looking for phosphorus in quantities sufficient for agricultural use, refining it out of the oceans is not going to be profitable. Likewise with helium from atmospheric extraction compared to tapping into geological gas pockets.
Now it could be that chicken pox can be worse than what I know of it.
Yes, it can be. I know personally of cases where a child got pox blisters in the airway, for instance. The mortality rate isn't the same as measles (about 2/100K for healthy children), but on the other hand chicken pox (like all herpes infections) is forever. It's just that when it comes back at my age it's called "shingles."
Considering that, unlike measles, herpes zoster specifically infects the nervous system, it's hardly surprising that encephalitis is a common complication. That, plus pneumonia, are responsible for hospitalizing about one in fifty paediatric patients.
Measles outbreaks have been reported in Mexico this century
The USA has had several measles outbreaks not only this century but in the past year. Oh.
All of the outbreaks have been traced to unvaccinated travelers to Europe, in particular Switzerland. (Not a big source of brown-skinned immigrants, by the way.)
Mexico has an extremely thorough measles vaccination program and treats outbreaks far more aggressively than the USA does.
I don't see why there's such a big screaming panic about a disease that gives you spots and a bit of a temperature, and a couple of days off school...
Because for about two per thousand cases, it causes meningitis which kills about half of the affected patients, leaving many of the survivors brain damaged for life. For quite a few who don't get meningitis, it causes blindness and deafness (measles was the #1 cause of both in the 50s.) Because it causes pneumonia of the "hospitalized for days" variety in up to 30% of cases (and before oxygen therapy, IV fluids, and antibiotics killed about 10% of patients.)
I had measles before there were vaccines for it. All I have to do is mention measles to get my mother worked up -- she remembers spending a couple of weeks terrified for me, because she grew up before those treatments and even in a small town in rural Illinois she knew families who had children die of it and others who were handicapped for life.
Talk to people from India about measles, or any of the other vaccine-preventable diseases. You won't find any of them who will tell you those diseases are no big deal, because they know them. In the USA, we've mostly forgotten how bad they are. Thanks to vaccines.
And why wouldn't increase in CO2 and temperatures cause an increase in algae population (which would then uptake the excess CO2)?
Because excessively acidic oceans tend to go anaerobic, which screws with the whole ecology including the algae. Just because an organism needs CO2 doesn't mean that more CO2 is good for it.
The Earth's climate is mostly convection as well, with IR radiation from the surface a lesser form of surface cooling.
How does that warm air get cooled to space? Oh, wait -- radiation, right? So how much does air radiate, vs. how much does the surface radiate? (Bear in mind that the upper atmosphere is cold, and remember that T^4 rule.)
Let's test this: if the atmosphere radiates heat at night and sinks to cool the ground, the air will cool more rapidly than the ground does. If, on the other hand, the ground cools by radiation at night the ground will be colder than the air. On an autumn morning when you first see frost, is the air temperature higher or lower than the ground temperature?
Alternately, you can do what atmospheric physics students do: take a spectrograph of the night sky. Care to guess which wavelengths of IR are coming back (reradiated) from the night sky and which wavelengths are missing because the sky is transparent?
Finally, for another read of the same question (radiated wavelengths of the Earth's atmosphere) you can look at the readings from NASA satellites looking down on the Earth. Care to guess which wavelengths are missing (absorbed) vs. radiated? Care to compare to the spectrum looking up?
We're still stuck on 3.6 waiting for the plug-ins to catch up
There is no justifiable excuse for this.
I think that's what we're saying: I have a number of important features that I use: flashblock, NoScript, TabKit, and a few more. I use the platform that supports them. If that's not your current offering (e.g. IE or FF5) then there's no point in my using your platform.
That logic is exactly the same as the logic behind operating system choices: I really don't give a rat's ass how gee-whiz your new and wonderful BeOS clone is if I can't use it to run the applications that matter to me, because I choose platform software for its ability to support the tasks I want to perform, not because it's all shiny and has the newest buzzwords.
By the time the cow-orkers' managed laptops get through with virus checks, update checks, etc. there's plenty of time to go for coffee and maybe a bagel.
Fortunately, I only have to listen to them bitching since I'm not using Windows. I don't even have to say anything any more, just quietly smile. They then go off on all the reasons that they have to have Microsoft, and thus mission accomplished: they've gone from complaining to the counting the benefits.
I'm assuming you understand Ohm's Law: the back EMF across a current path is proportional to the current and the resistance (or more generally the impedance.) That's a simple linear relationship, but electrical loads aren't always linear. Sometimes you have to use the more general case of
dE/di = Z(i)
in other words, the slope of the curve at a given point. Now, you can't have a literal negative resistance where a positive current results in a negative voltage -- that generates power. However, it's not at all unusual to have a situation where an increase in current results in a reduction in current. There are even simple primitive semiconductor devices that do that (look up Esaki diodes.)
Now think of what happens when the mains supply has a limited ability to provide current. With a positive impedance load, a drop in the supply voltage results in a drop in current. That's a "brown out." In a power network, it's a simple relationship that makes it fairly easy to manage the load, since the supply voltage isn't guaranteed to be rock-steady. More loads, more current, voltage drops, current drops, balance achieved until they put more generators online.
When you have an actively managed load such as computer power supply (draws as much power as it needs regardless of the line voltage, the current is inversely proportional to the voltage. Which, if you think about it, is a negative impedance relationship. Now when you turn on an extra computer, the network current increases and the voltage drops -- and the current increases, the voltage drops some more, etc.
Who's going to get on the wrong side of Homeland Security by providing it?
Bear in mind that a carrier's messaging traffic is a data gold mine. In a totally open market (as distinct from the cosy oligopoly that telecom really is) you might see one carrier offer security as a value-added marketing advantage. Sort of like SMS at less than the per-minute voice charge.
However, getting on the wrong side of Homeland Security just makes it that little bit less attractive to step out of line.
Not necessary. All of the major communications hubs have built-in taps (this sounds awfully tinfoil-hat, doesn't it?)
Getting humans involved, especially at the carrier end, is expensive, time-consuming, and totally pointless. Instead, someone at Homeland Security just taps the data directly.
Looks like the Brits are still not getting the basics right. Back in the 60s we'd already taught the authorities who tapped our phones, read our mail, and sent ringers to our gatherings not to trust that kind of "intelligence."
It only takes a few cases where they prosecute someone based on that kind of "evidence" and it turns out that the defendant was in another country to make the prosecutor a laughing stock. Again.
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I seem to recall some prior art in this subject.
Does it therefore follow that they're not worth preventing?
My favorite part about comments like this is that there's no way anybody could reasonably look at the body available evidence on the subject and come to this extreme of a position.
It therefore follows that that "body of evidence" is fabricated to hide the truth. Which proves that there's a conspiracy of all of the scientists in several different fields from around the world!
One guy was afraid of global cooling and he got onto the cover of Time. It was about as scientific as the Time Cube guy getting mainstream media coverage.
Unlike damn near everyone else, I actually looked up that article and read it. The science is not nearly what it's played up to be.
The researcher was actually working with a real climatological problem: from around WWII to the 70s, there was a distinct cooling in global temperatures. If you look closely you can see it in the GISS data. The question isn't "was the Earth cooling" but "what is causing the Earth to cool?"
Well, we later figured it out. It was air pollution. In particular, the huge upturn in worldwide burning of high-sulphur fuels starting in the 30s and accelerating from then through the 70s put a lot of sulphur oxides in the upper atmosphere, and they're pretty good at blocking incoming solar energy (similar to the Mount Pinatubo cooling in the early 90s).
However, atmospheric sulphur has other problems. Like acid rain, ozone depletion, asthma, things like that. So we cut back on it, and the temperatures returned to trend.
At the time, the Earth was cooling -- but the lesson isn't what you'll hear from the people pushing that as a reply to real climate science.
Resources will never run out, thanks to conservation of matter.
As long as you're content with the elements arranged (or dispersed) however they end up, that works pretty well.
On the other hand, if you're looking for phosphorus in quantities sufficient for agricultural use, refining it out of the oceans is not going to be profitable. Likewise with helium from atmospheric extraction compared to tapping into geological gas pockets.
Now it could be that chicken pox can be worse than what I know of it.
Yes, it can be. I know personally of cases where a child got pox blisters in the airway, for instance. The mortality rate isn't the same as measles (about 2/100K for healthy children), but on the other hand chicken pox (like all herpes infections) is forever. It's just that when it comes back at my age it's called "shingles."
Considering that, unlike measles, herpes zoster specifically infects the nervous system, it's hardly surprising that encephalitis is a common complication. That, plus pneumonia, are responsible for hospitalizing about one in fifty paediatric patients.
Measles outbreaks have been reported in Mexico this century
The USA has had several measles outbreaks not only this century but in the past year. Oh.
All of the outbreaks have been traced to unvaccinated travelers to Europe, in particular Switzerland. (Not a big source of brown-skinned immigrants, by the way.)
Mexico has an extremely thorough measles vaccination program and treats outbreaks far more aggressively than the USA does.
Getting measles = potential death.
Measles kills about 600,000 kids a year.
We mentioned that we'd skipped MMR and the doctor confirmed that the single vaccines give a higher level of protection.
Find another pediatrician. The one you have is at best incompetent and at worst a quack.
Also, in places where the mercury containing ingredient was removed, the autism rate did not go down
You're missing the best part of that: the MMR never did have any mercury in it.
Wait, and this isn't Darwinism at work either?
Actually, the people most at risk are those who cannot be vaccinated: the very young, and those with weak immune systems.
I never really looked at it that way. I suppose eventually evolution will select against the "youth" trait and nobody will suffer from it any more.
I don't see why there's such a big screaming panic about a disease that gives you spots and a bit of a temperature, and a couple of days off school...
Because for about two per thousand cases, it causes meningitis which kills about half of the affected patients, leaving many of the survivors brain damaged for life. For quite a few who don't get meningitis, it causes blindness and deafness (measles was the #1 cause of both in the 50s.) Because it causes pneumonia of the "hospitalized for days" variety in up to 30% of cases (and before oxygen therapy, IV fluids, and antibiotics killed about 10% of patients.)
I had measles before there were vaccines for it. All I have to do is mention measles to get my mother worked up -- she remembers spending a couple of weeks terrified for me, because she grew up before those treatments and even in a small town in rural Illinois she knew families who had children die of it and others who were handicapped for life.
Talk to people from India about measles, or any of the other vaccine-preventable diseases. You won't find any of them who will tell you those diseases are no big deal, because they know them. In the USA, we've mostly forgotten how bad they are. Thanks to vaccines.
For that we'll have to melt the glaciers on Greenland and the solid-ground portions of Antarctica.
Volcanoes emit more CO2 in one explosion than all of humanity in one year.
Your basis for this assertion is ... ?
My sources indicate otherwise, but I'm willing to be persuaded.
And why wouldn't increase in CO2 and temperatures cause an increase in algae population (which would then uptake the excess CO2)?
Because excessively acidic oceans tend to go anaerobic, which screws with the whole ecology including the algae. Just because an organism needs CO2 doesn't mean that more CO2 is good for it.
The Earth's climate is mostly convection as well, with IR radiation from the surface a lesser form of surface cooling.
How does that warm air get cooled to space? Oh, wait -- radiation, right? So how much does air radiate, vs. how much does the surface radiate? (Bear in mind that the upper atmosphere is cold, and remember that T^4 rule.)
Let's test this: if the atmosphere radiates heat at night and sinks to cool the ground, the air will cool more rapidly than the ground does. If, on the other hand, the ground cools by radiation at night the ground will be colder than the air. On an autumn morning when you first see frost, is the air temperature higher or lower than the ground temperature?
Alternately, you can do what atmospheric physics students do: take a spectrograph of the night sky. Care to guess which wavelengths of IR are coming back (reradiated) from the night sky and which wavelengths are missing because the sky is transparent?
Finally, for another read of the same question (radiated wavelengths of the Earth's atmosphere) you can look at the readings from NASA satellites looking down on the Earth. Care to guess which wavelengths are missing (absorbed) vs. radiated? Care to compare to the spectrum looking up?
It detected something out on one wing.
We're still stuck on 3.6 waiting for the plug-ins to catch up
There is no justifiable excuse for this.
I think that's what we're saying: I have a number of important features that I use: flashblock, NoScript, TabKit, and a few more. I use the platform that supports them. If that's not your current offering (e.g. IE or FF5) then there's no point in my using your platform.
That logic is exactly the same as the logic behind operating system choices: I really don't give a rat's ass how gee-whiz your new and wonderful BeOS clone is if I can't use it to run the applications that matter to me, because I choose platform software for its ability to support the tasks I want to perform, not because it's all shiny and has the newest buzzwords.
Fortunately, I only have to listen to them bitching since I'm not using Windows. I don't even have to say anything any more, just quietly smile. They then go off on all the reasons that they have to have Microsoft, and thus mission accomplished: they've gone from complaining to the counting the benefits.
dE/di = Z(i)
in other words, the slope of the curve at a given point. Now, you can't have a literal negative resistance where a positive current results in a negative voltage -- that generates power. However, it's not at all unusual to have a situation where an increase in current results in a reduction in current. There are even simple primitive semiconductor devices that do that (look up Esaki diodes.)
Now think of what happens when the mains supply has a limited ability to provide current. With a positive impedance load, a drop in the supply voltage results in a drop in current. That's a "brown out." In a power network, it's a simple relationship that makes it fairly easy to manage the load, since the supply voltage isn't guaranteed to be rock-steady. More loads, more current, voltage drops, current drops, balance achieved until they put more generators online.
When you have an actively managed load such as computer power supply (draws as much power as it needs regardless of the line voltage, the current is inversely proportional to the voltage. Which, if you think about it, is a negative impedance relationship. Now when you turn on an extra computer, the network current increases and the voltage drops -- and the current increases, the voltage drops some more, etc.
Crash the electrical grid.
Our cells carry loads of genetic material picked up pretty much everywhere.
They're called Endogenous Retroviruses.
Abbie is never gonna forgive me.
Bear in mind that a carrier's messaging traffic is a data gold mine. In a totally open market (as distinct from the cosy oligopoly that telecom really is) you might see one carrier offer security as a value-added marketing advantage. Sort of like SMS at less than the per-minute voice charge.
However, getting on the wrong side of Homeland Security just makes it that little bit less attractive to step out of line.
Getting humans involved, especially at the carrier end, is expensive, time-consuming, and totally pointless. Instead, someone at Homeland Security just taps the data directly.
they are probably already doing it for someone else... India, Saudi Arabia, US??
They don't need to in the USA, since the ability to go fishing in RIM's data and connections was designed in from the beginning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement_Act
It only takes a few cases where they prosecute someone based on that kind of "evidence" and it turns out that the defendant was in another country to make the prosecutor a laughing stock. Again.