I've wondered for a long time why we don't have every commercial building rooftop covered in solar panels.
Mostly for the same reason commercial buildings aren't covered in rooftop gardens in order to supply food to the cafeteria downstairs. It doesn't make any sense to the people who actually have to allocate their scarce resources toward accomplishing useful things.
Except you're wrong. Right now, solar panels are actually cheaper than roofing per square meter.
The reason it isn't done is simply the inertia of the existing technology.
Ah, but what of the pollution costs of rare earth mining and refining ? **MY** background is as a geologist.
... and not a semiconductor engineer.
Silicon solar cells (and for that matter, the rest of the glass-encapsulated solar array) don't require rare earth materials.
This was brilliant; I wonder why he posted as anonymous coward*; I want to give him credit.
*(Well, I can guess why-- he probably figured that half the moderators would rate this -1 incoherent and his Karma would drop to values you have to measure in Kelvin. Say, why doesn't slashdot have a moderation "-1 incoherent", anyway?)
That's not clear to me, since the names and photo-icons on the site are pseudonyms. Three of them who imply their sex in the narratives are female (despite male-appearing photo-icons)
All of the photo-icons on the site are of Appelbaum.
!!!
The site would be much clearer if they actually mentioned that minor fact.
The way the site is arranged makes it appear that each photo is a picture of the person whose narrative is linked. I can only assume that they believe that everybody in the world knows what Appelbaum looks like, and so they don't need to bother making it clear who these are pictures of.
Was he not married? I don't understand what the story is saying.
The link to the allegations is in the summery, but if you don't want to scroll up, here: jacobappelbaum.net
He was sexually harassing men? women? or both?
That's not clear to me, since the names and photo-icons on the site are pseudonyms. Three of them who imply their sex in the narratives are female (despite male-appearing photo-icons)
Why are we posting nasty things like this with no effort to investigate their veracity?
Posting it because it's news. There are a bunch of creeps in the software business; this is not really out of line with what's reported elsewhere. With multiple people now coming up and vouching for the veracity of the complaints, this is beginning to sound pretty plausible.
The actual statement from Facebook continued on beyond the single sentence quoted in the summary: "We only access your microphone if you have given our app permission and if you are actively using a specific feature that requires audio. This might include recording a video or using an optional feature we introduced two years ago to include music or other audio in your status updates."
I get Fossil watch ads frequently without talking about watches (nor searching anything related), so I will suggest maybe this one is coincidence, or more likely the attention effect (you don't notice the Fossil ads until Fossil is brought to the front of your attention, then they seem everywhere).
Or possibly reverse causality: the topic of Fossil watches came up because the company was running a web campaign and buying a lot of ads.
I'd suspect the market for a $14,000 phone is kinda slim
Well, the market for cell phones is in the billions. If they only sell to 0.01% of the richest and stupidest of possible customers, that's a billion dollars of sales.
Heck, if they just sell seventy or eighty of them, that's a million dollars. Not bad for a hundred dollars worth of hardware and some coding that none of the users are likely to understand anyway.
Brilliant! I think the same should be applied to piloting and surgery!
Actually, it would be really cool if K-12 had taught piloting and surgery. I would have loved that.
And, in this ever-changing world in which we're living, with drones and MRI scans and 3-D modelling and virtual reality, that's not entirely out of the question...
The one "watered down" CS element that I would like to see taught in elementary schools is the art of drawing flow charts. Now, that's something that can be useful across the board, as a tool for thinking,
But, as for the rest of it-- let the teachers figure out how to best teach.
it's possible that somebody who is completely full of confidence but doesn't really know the field and has never done this kind of analysis before is full of s**t.
He has a Phd in the subject from Princeton and worked under Stephen Hawking.
To my knowledge, Stephen Hawking has never worked on asteroids, nor for that matter, done any observational astronomy whatsoever.
chances are high, that he is right in both accusations he made in the past years.
1. He only posts in his personal field of interests.
Being "interested" is, unfortunately, no guarantee of being correct. Crackpots are all interested, that doesn't make them right.
2. He has no personal benefit, except for his own knowledge gain..
Translation: nobody is actually paying him for this work. Translation of translation: he's not actually a professional in the field.
3. He tried to contact the original researchers and asked for clarification, but got no real answer for it..
A lot of the public does believe that it is the duty of scientists to drop everything and give unpaid tutorials to anybody in the public who calls up and asks you to explain the basics of their field, but really, it's impossible; you can't. At some point you just have to say "there are textbooks available, read them."
4. The peer review process is broken and everybody knows it. anybody heard about the "chocolate diet"?.
Except nevertheless, peer review is better than no peer review, which is what Myhrvold has so far
5. Many studies are often tweaked to show results, where there are non, because in our society a result with "no, there is nothing new here" is considered a failure.
Except this isn't "results"-- it is counts of number of astroids as a function of size. What Myhrvold is saying is that it should be different counts of numbers.
Anybody seen a Paper with the headline: "We failed at [...] and thats why?" Or "Our Colleges are right at [...]"
So yes: I strongly believe a interested rich man can check results of some scientists and he might be able to point out studies which are faked for some reasons.
And I strongly believe than arrogant rich man can be wrong. Here's an interesting thing: once you get rich, people start telling you how smart you are. And stop telling you when you're acting like an idiot.
On the other hand, Myhrvold made verifiable claims and corrections, whereas the NASA guys basically just went full ad hominem.
1. The NASA WISE team released all their data to the public, and publish their results in peer-reviewed journals. The whole reason he can do this analysis is because they are open with the data. I think it's a little disingenuous to say that they don't make "verifiable claims and corrections."
On the other hand, Myhrvold has not made verifiable claims, and hasn't published in peer-reviewed journals. He says he's done a reanalysis, but according to the article: "Wright says his team doesn’t have Myhrvold’s computer codes, “so we don’t know why he’s screwing up.”
2. What NASA guys are "basically full ad hominem"? In the article cited, there was one-- count it, one-- snarky comment. Which I think was deserved.
I can't say who's right either, but I think NASA is showing a serious lack of professionalism.
You know, sometimes you get tired of people who basically don't seem to know anything about a subject telling you that you are completely wrong and don't know what you're doing. One guy made one snarky comment. Give them a little slack, "NASA guys" are human, too.
Shit happens, and yes, it's possible that someone outside the inner circle calls you up on it.
And crackpots happen, and yes, it's possible that somebody who is completely full of confidence but doesn't really know the field and has never done this kind of analysis before is full of s**t.
Makes sense to me.
I no longer bother to bookmark pages I want to refer to later; it's easier to just google search them than it is to find them in my own bookmarks.
The summary is much more sensationalistic than the article.
The actual article doesn't include phrases like "render Earth even more unlivable than scientists had previously projected" nor "uninhabitable to humans " nor ""will scorch Earth". The most sensationalistic words in the abstract are "could ultimately result in considerably more profound climate changes than previously suggested."
You could call that a little bit sensationalistic, I suppose, but it's not nearly as doom as "will scorch Earth" as the headline says.
(Also, by the way, the highest temperatures in the Jurassic were about 10 warmer than the current era. So, 15-20C would, in fact, be higher than temperatures in the era of dinosaurs.)
There is so much wrong with your post its not even funny >#1 being that you dont know what an ice age is, the fact that we are currently IN an ice age and what an interglacial period is.
Was your comment directed at me, or the person I was quoting? The text I was referring to is this:
the trend is sure to continue because we're coming out of an ice age.
I apologize for using the terminology of the person to whom I was responding in the way that they used it, and going on actually discuss facts, rather than spending my time correcting their usage.
the trend is sure to continue because we're coming out of an ice age.
Nope. The ice age ended ten thousand years ago, and the hottest years of the post-ice-age holocene was eight thousand years ago. So, no, we're not warming due to coming out a glaciation, because that warming already finished eight thousand years ago.
the stability of the global climate in the last 200 years or so is an exception, not the rule.
What's more important, though, is that the cause is well understood. We know why the climate is warming, because we have very good measurements of other possible causes, such as solar variation, and they aren't large enough to create the temperatures we see. So, the worry isn't about the small amount of warming we've already seen-- the worry is that we are still emitting carbon dioxide, and the physics of carbon dioxide hasn't changed.
I guess I'm a Climate Change "Denier". But what I'm denying is that taxes and more government is going to solve anything. Which is ultimately what any "solution" is all about.
If you don't believe that taxes and government intervention are going to solve climate problems, that's not "denier." You are a denier if you believe that taxes and government intervention are bad, and therefore you attack the climate science (not the politics, the science) because it's a soft target.
The science is correct, or incorrect, regardless of your views on the desirability of particular solutions.
What I have seen, however, is that people who advocate a libertarian philosophy tend to attack the science because if the science actually were correct, they don't have any solutions to offer. Since they don't have any solutions, they deny the problem.
Yeah.
I actually like Wikipedia, and I like the model that citations are critical: if you can't cite a reliable source, it shouldn't be in the article. (In fact, one of the best things about Wikipedia is that it's a good place to find links to good sources.)
But, get afoul of the wrong people, or post even a minor change in a topic that some troll considers his personal property, and you will see the toxicity,
From the article:
Wikipedia is notoriously unwelcoming to newcomers and has a dizzying list of guidelines, principles, and rules that are disproportionately applied across the site. The community is intense and passionate, which means its editors are often zealous in their policing of what goes on the site, and the ensuing discussion is not always civil.
["not always civil." Yeah, that's a bit of an understatement.]
Some people on the Wikipedia-L listed echoed the editor's woes. “This editor and their editing may be an extreme case, but they are not alone,” one person response. “Yup. It's very, very toxic at times. And nobody really cares,” another person wrote.
Slashdot Mirror
Mostly for the same reason commercial buildings aren't covered in rooftop gardens in order to supply food to the cafeteria downstairs. It doesn't make any sense to the people who actually have to allocate their scarce resources toward accomplishing useful things.
Except you're wrong. Right now, solar panels are actually cheaper than roofing per square meter.
The reason it isn't done is simply the inertia of the existing technology.
Ah, but what of the pollution costs of rare earth mining and refining ? **MY** background is as a geologist.
... and not a semiconductor engineer. Silicon solar cells (and for that matter, the rest of the glass-encapsulated solar array) don't require rare earth materials.
Really? I stopped thunking about the post when I got to "in route"
You've got a pint. That should have been "in root."
That post really made me thunk.
This was brilliant; I wonder why he posted as anonymous coward*; I want to give him credit.
*(Well, I can guess why-- he probably figured that half the moderators would rate this -1 incoherent and his Karma would drop to values you have to measure in Kelvin. Say, why doesn't slashdot have a moderation "-1 incoherent", anyway?)
He was sexually harassing men? women? or both?
That's not clear to me, since the names and photo-icons on the site are pseudonyms. Three of them who imply their sex in the narratives are female (despite male-appearing photo-icons)
All of the photo-icons on the site are of Appelbaum.
!!!
The site would be much clearer if they actually mentioned that minor fact.
The way the site is arranged makes it appear that each photo is a picture of the person whose narrative is linked. I can only assume that they believe that everybody in the world knows what Appelbaum looks like, and so they don't need to bother making it clear who these are pictures of.
Was he not married? I don't understand what the story is saying.
The link to the allegations is in the summery, but if you don't want to scroll up, here: jacobappelbaum.net
He was sexually harassing men? women? or both?
That's not clear to me, since the names and photo-icons on the site are pseudonyms. Three of them who imply their sex in the narratives are female (despite male-appearing photo-icons)
Why are we posting nasty things like this with no effort to investigate their veracity?
Posting it because it's news. There are a bunch of creeps in the software business; this is not really out of line with what's reported elsewhere. With multiple people now coming up and vouching for the veracity of the complaints, this is beginning to sound pretty plausible.
The actual statement from Facebook continued on beyond the single sentence quoted in the summary: "We only access your microphone if you have given our app permission and if you are actively using a specific feature that requires audio. This might include recording a video or using an optional feature we introduced two years ago to include music or other audio in your status updates."
Or possibly reverse causality: the topic of Fossil watches came up because the company was running a web campaign and buying a lot of ads.
I'd suspect the market for a $14,000 phone is kinda slim
Well, the market for cell phones is in the billions. If they only sell to 0.01% of the richest and stupidest of possible customers, that's a billion dollars of sales.
Heck, if they just sell seventy or eighty of them, that's a million dollars. Not bad for a hundred dollars worth of hardware and some coding that none of the users are likely to understand anyway.
Brilliant! I think the same should be applied to piloting and surgery!
Actually, it would be really cool if K-12 had taught piloting and surgery. I would have loved that.
And, in this ever-changing world in which we're living, with drones and MRI scans and 3-D modelling and virtual reality, that's not entirely out of the question...
The one "watered down" CS element that I would like to see taught in elementary schools is the art of drawing flow charts. Now, that's something that can be useful across the board, as a tool for thinking,
But, as for the rest of it-- let the teachers figure out how to best teach.
Buy once, cry once. Ongoing maintenance is cheaper than $15 hour.
I'm not sure about that. Maintenance is cheap... when they work.
And the other problem with robots is that they're obsolete in two years, and you need to buy an upgrade, or another one.
it's possible that somebody who is completely full of confidence but doesn't really know the field and has never done this kind of analysis before is full of s**t.
He has a Phd in the subject from Princeton and worked under Stephen Hawking.
To my knowledge, Stephen Hawking has never worked on asteroids, nor for that matter, done any observational astronomy whatsoever.
chances are high, that he is right in both accusations he made in the past years.
1. He only posts in his personal field of interests.
Being "interested" is, unfortunately, no guarantee of being correct. Crackpots are all interested, that doesn't make them right.
2. He has no personal benefit, except for his own knowledge gain..
Translation: nobody is actually paying him for this work. Translation of translation: he's not actually a professional in the field.
3. He tried to contact the original researchers and asked for clarification, but got no real answer for it..
A lot of the public does believe that it is the duty of scientists to drop everything and give unpaid tutorials to anybody in the public who calls up and asks you to explain the basics of their field, but really, it's impossible; you can't. At some point you just have to say "there are textbooks available, read them."
4. The peer review process is broken and everybody knows it. anybody heard about the "chocolate diet"?.
Except nevertheless, peer review is better than no peer review, which is what Myhrvold has so far
5. Many studies are often tweaked to show results, where there are non, because in our society a result with "no, there is nothing new here" is considered a failure.
Except this isn't "results"-- it is counts of number of astroids as a function of size. What Myhrvold is saying is that it should be different counts of numbers.
Anybody seen a Paper with the headline: "We failed at [...] and thats why?" Or "Our Colleges are right at [...]"
So yes: I strongly believe a interested rich man can check results of some scientists and he might be able to point out studies which are faked for some reasons.
And I strongly believe than arrogant rich man can be wrong. Here's an interesting thing: once you get rich, people start telling you how smart you are. And stop telling you when you're acting like an idiot.
On the other hand, Myhrvold made verifiable claims and corrections, whereas the NASA guys basically just went full ad hominem.
1. The NASA WISE team released all their data to the public, and publish their results in peer-reviewed journals. The whole reason he can do this analysis is because they are open with the data. I think it's a little disingenuous to say that they don't make "verifiable claims and corrections."
On the other hand, Myhrvold has not made verifiable claims, and hasn't published in peer-reviewed journals. He says he's done a reanalysis, but according to the article: "Wright says his team doesn’t have Myhrvold’s computer codes, “so we don’t know why he’s screwing up.”
2. What NASA guys are "basically full ad hominem"? In the article cited, there was one-- count it, one-- snarky comment. Which I think was deserved.
I can't say who's right either, but I think NASA is showing a serious lack of professionalism.
You know, sometimes you get tired of people who basically don't seem to know anything about a subject telling you that you are completely wrong and don't know what you're doing. One guy made one snarky comment. Give them a little slack, "NASA guys" are human, too.
Shit happens, and yes, it's possible that someone outside the inner circle calls you up on it.
And crackpots happen, and yes, it's possible that somebody who is completely full of confidence but doesn't really know the field and has never done this kind of analysis before is full of s**t.
Makes sense to me. I no longer bother to bookmark pages I want to refer to later; it's easier to just google search them than it is to find them in my own bookmarks.
I'm having trouble with this part: "This would make most of Earth uninhabitable to humans."
I do want to point out that this line comes from the sensationalist slashdot summary. It's not in the article being discussed.
(Also, the number quoted is "15 to 20C"-- not the 10 you have in your post's headline.)
Here is the press release from the University of Victoria:
www.communications.uvic.ca/releases/tip.php?date=23052016
and here are some sources that discuss the paper without quite as much in the way of scare words and hype:
www.reportingclimatescience.com/2016/05/23/unmitigated-emissions/
www.metronews.ca/news/vancouver/2016/05/23/uvic-researcher-models-worst-case-climate-change.html
(Also, by the way, the highest temperatures in the Jurassic were about 10 warmer than the current era. So, 15-20C would, in fact, be higher than temperatures in the era of dinosaurs.)
There is so much wrong with your post its not even funny >#1 being that you dont know what an ice age is, the fact that we are currently IN an ice age and what an interglacial period is.
Was your comment directed at me, or the person I was quoting? The text I was referring to is this:
the trend is sure to continue because we're coming out of an ice age.
I apologize for using the terminology of the person to whom I was responding in the way that they used it, and going on actually discuss facts, rather than spending my time correcting their usage.
the trend is sure to continue because we're coming out of an ice age.
Nope. The ice age ended ten thousand years ago, and the hottest years of the post-ice-age holocene was eight thousand years ago. So, no, we're not warming due to coming out a glaciation, because that warming already finished eight thousand years ago.
the stability of the global climate in the last 200 years or so is an exception, not the rule.
Nope. The current warming is exceptional: warmer than it's been over the last 2000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What's more important, though, is that the cause is well understood. We know why the climate is warming, because we have very good measurements of other possible causes, such as solar variation, and they aren't large enough to create the temperatures we see. So, the worry isn't about the small amount of warming we've already seen-- the worry is that we are still emitting carbon dioxide, and the physics of carbon dioxide hasn't changed.
I guess I'm a Climate Change "Denier". But what I'm denying is that taxes and more government is going to solve anything. Which is ultimately what any "solution" is all about.
If you don't believe that taxes and government intervention are going to solve climate problems, that's not "denier." You are a denier if you believe that taxes and government intervention are bad, and therefore you attack the climate science (not the politics, the science) because it's a soft target.
The science is correct, or incorrect, regardless of your views on the desirability of particular solutions.
What I have seen, however, is that people who advocate a libertarian philosophy tend to attack the science because if the science actually were correct, they don't have any solutions to offer. Since they don't have any solutions, they deny the problem.
But, get afoul of the wrong people, or post even a minor change in a topic that some troll considers his personal property, and you will see the toxicity, From the article:
Yep.
http://gizmodo.com/updated-anti-science-trolls-are-starting-edit-wars-on-1724422402