Scientists didn't know, so they got more data and analysed the data they had more carefully so that they got closer to knowing. While a few "respected scientists" can be found to hold out against just about anything, virtually any competent authority will now agree that there is accelerating warming over the last 100-200 years which does not look like part of any of the cycles we can see in the climatic record.
This srticle is not old. Journals would not publish it if there were. There is new data, and more careful analysis, and yes, it still supports the view that anomalous warming is occurring.
It's happening. What do you think ITER is? Kyoto was also, in part, as scheme by which the world's governments got together and agreed rules that would force them all to dveelop an deploy cleaner energy sources. Sadly the US withdrew,
Breeder technology was seen as the way forward here (in the UK) for some decades, but eventually shelved more for technical and economic than environmental and political reasons. To make use of breeders you have to reprocess the spent fuel, and this is not at all easy to do safely or cheaply, let alone both. Also, if you're going to reprocess, some of the nicest reactor technologies (like the bed of carbon/cermaic pebbles) don't work so well. The better the fuel is contained in the reactor, the harder it is to get it out in the reprocessing plant. Trying to remotely manipulate ton lots of hot radioiactive concentrated nitric acid contaminated with just about every element you can think of is never going to be easy or cheap.
I mean how could DNA or the process of cell division 'evolve' if evolution itself requires cells to divide and carry on it's genetic blueprint.
We don't know the details, since there are no records and we haven't had the time or space to run experiments on the necessary scale (a whole planet for 100 million years or more) and furthermore I am not a biologist, but, as I understand it, the process goes something like this:
1. general chemical soup in the seas and atmosphere of primordial Earth -- water, ammonia, methane, CO2, etc., 2. energy input from the Sun, lightning, volcanoes and/or under-sea vents drives the formation of more complex chemicals (the beginnings of this process has been observed in the lab 3. (and here we get speculative) more complex chemicals form, which catalyse further reactions in the chemical soup, causing it's bulk composition to start changing more quickly and less randomly 4. eventually you get a molecule which can catalyse its own synthesis from the soup. Best guess is that this is something like RNA, but we don't know. 5. now we have self-replicating systems, and, after a short time, competition for resources. Now natural selection plays a role 6. gradually these molecules become more complex, and become teams of molecules, forming primitive virus-like or bacteria-like organisms. 7. then comes the switch to DNA for long term genetic storage, offering less error and more flexibility, and the structured cell with a nucleus and mitochondria, offering more efficient and flexible operations.
I am not aware of any instance of irreducible complexity which is not thoroughly debunked.
The paper is in Science. How peer-reviewed do you want?
Yes, most of the atmosphere is not CO2 (or methane) but what matters here is how transparent the atmosphere is to thermal infrared, which depends very much on exactly how much CO2 and methane and water and a few other things are in it.
The level of water is controlled by the temperature at the sea surface and there's not much we can do about that, but the numbers fit very well with the idea that all the extra CO2 we've released over the last couple of hundred years by burning coal and forests is still in the atmosphere and has not been taken up either plants or the slower process of absorbtion into sea water and then into carbonate rocks.
This new data shows that natural climate cycles exist, and covers about 7 of them, including 3 or 4 since a big change that happened 300K or so years ago and 3 or 4 before it. In all of them, rises in CO2 and methane led the rises in temperature, and in none of them did CO2 or methane rise as fast or as high as it has in the last 200 years. These are facts, measured, as such things go, relatively directly.
Conclusions from these facts about cause and effect are, inevitably. more speculative. We do not have a supply of identical planets on which to perform controlled experiments. Nevertheless, the theory that
a) the immediate cause of global temperature variation is changes in the proportion of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere
and
b) human actions have led to a recent very sudden and somewhat unprecedented rise in levels of key greenhouse gasses since the industrial revolution
The part that I don't get (so kindly link me to an explanation) is, just because there is no way of measuring where a given particle is, that doesn't mean it's in two places at the same time. It just means we don't know.
What you're hankering after is a "hidden variable model". There is a variable that we can't observe, but it has a definite value. Unfortunately, no simple hidden variable model can explain observations. There are lots of ways of demonstrating this, but all have some complexity.
One of my favourties is due to John Conway and some other people, and it goes like this.
Physics tells us that if we pick any set of three directions at right anfles (eg up, backwards and left) and measure the squared spin of a simple particle (like an electron) in each of them, we get two 0s and a 1 in suitable units. The order of the three measurements doesn't matter.
Now, Conway et al found a set of points on a sphere (ie a set of directions) out of which you can choose lots of triples that are all at right angles. What you can't do is label these points 0 and 1 in such a way that every such triple has two 0s and a 1. So there can't be a hidden variable for the squared spin in each direction, because which one you get depends on which other ones you measure, even though these measurements don't interfere with each other. Using entangled particles and a bit of jiggery pokery you could even do the three measurements at the same time and far apart so there would be no time for information interchange.
A similar, although more subtle effect occurs in EPR. You give each "rocket captain" a choice of directions to measure the polarisation in, and you find a degree of correlation that you could not expect purely from a hidden variable model.
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
Apparently (and I'm no expert) what happens is that the pandemic strain mutates further into less and less virulent strains which are still close enough to it to confer immunity. After a while everyoe has had one of these weakened forms, and so becomes more or less immune to the pandemic strain.
It does seem that he says he wants to help in public, but thers is some specific problem with him cooperating with the actual tests that at least some actual doctors want to do.
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Certainly H5N1 could go that way, but the flu virus is incredibly flexible, and there is absolutely no reason why it won't come up with another variant as communicable and as lethal as the 1918 variant. If it does, the experts tell us that nothing modern medicine has come up with will help a whole lot. Basically it will infect everyone and kill a proportion and then the rest of us will be immune. Unless we can find a treatment that blocks, or ameliorates all varants of the influenza virus at once, or a way to mass produce a new vaccine in weeks rather than years, then we are still wide open to whatever mutation comes along.
You're thinking of Gravity Probe B http://einstein.stanford.edu/, another tour de force of ultra-precise instrumentation. That mission has now finished and they're analysing the data.
There are multiple layers of noise removal, of course. One trick is that the mirrors are suspended in such a way that any disturbance will likly make them vibrate at a very specific fequency. Signals at that frequency are ignored.
You are taking the analogy between a space elevator and a normal elevator much too literally. A space elevator is not supported by the ground. It's held up by the fact that the Centre of Mass is (roughly) in orbit. The "elevator cars" would not be pulled along by moving cables but would "crawl" along the cable under their own power (how to get the power too them was the subject of this competition).
You have an evil and paranoid enemy, who you wish to poison. Fortunately, You have a circulare cake in the centre of which a microscopic drop of deadly poison has been placed. You have to cut the cake, using vertical, but possibly curved, cuts, to comply with your enemies paranoic requirements while ensuring that they eat a poisoned piece and you do not. You therefore have to divide the cake into some number of pieces such that:
a) they are all the same shape (or your enemy might take a liking to the "wrong" piece) b) at least one piece avoids the centre (so that you can eat it) c) no cake is left over (wasting cake is punished by a horrible death)
More formally, you have to divide a circle into a finite number of congruent pieces so that at least one piece avoids the centre by some non-zero distance.
c in meters/second, m in KILOgrams gives e in Joules c in centimeters/second, m in grams, gives e in Ergs
This is not a coincidence or anything. A Joule is by definition the work done by a force of 1 Newton pushing something 1 meter. Meanwhile a Newton is the force which, applied to 1 kilogram body will accelerate it at 1 meter/second/second, so a Joule is a kilogram meter^2/second^2. A similar story holds for centimeters, grams and ergs.
So, you can get a truly unit free formulation: the energy equivalent of a certain amount of mass is the work done by a force sufficient to accelerate it to the speed of light in one time period, pushing an object as far as light travels in that time period. This gives the same answer, no matter what time period you take.
No. The two GRB's they are interested in were about 1 billion light years away -- well outside our galaxy, but closer than the regaular long-duration GRBs which are several billion lys away.
You may be confusing this with the recent outburst from (probably) a magnetar on the other side of the galaxy, which is a Soft Gamma Repeater (SGR), a different thing again.
It seems that neutron stars are born on a cusp. If they're spinning fast enough, a self-sustaining dynamo process, similar to that in the Earth's core starts up in the first few milliseconds of it's life. Within a few seconds, energy from the initial immense heat of the star is siphoned off to increase the (already huge) magnetic field by hundreds or thousands of times, and this field is then locked in place as the star cools.
The event in starquake was a whole lot LESS violent than this one. Magnetars are MUCH weirder than neutron stars. An explosion on a magnetar features in Steven Baxter's Exultant.
No. Pulsars flash regularly, but mainly radiate at optical and radio frequencies. They are pretty surely neutron stars and relatively nearby (within a few thousand light years). Gamma Ray Bursts are one-off events, probably very far away (billions of light years) and radiate mainly gamma rays. We are less sure what they are, but it's something VERY violent.
The original topic. magnetars. are actually in between. They radiate pulses of lower energy gamma rays that repeat irregularly. We think they are highly magnetic neutron stars tens of thousands of light years away, that undergo very violent "starquakes" from time to time.
You are thinking of Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs). They are actually much MORE violent events than this one, but also MUCH further away. They are still being studied, and their causes are still somewhat ambiguous, but black holes are almost certainly involved. One theory, if I recall correctly is big bright short-lived stars in the early universse reaching the end of their life. The core of the star then collapses very suddenly, forming a black hole (in a regular supernova you get a neutron star) and the outer part of the star follows it in, and get heated and churned by the implosion, and then explodes out. Another theory is that a GRB represents the last moments a a neutron star falling into a black hole, or two neutron stars colliding to form a black hole.
These magnetar related events are much less energetic, but loads nearer.
This is not an article about phones, it's an article about how to sell computers.
The essential observation is that there is a large, wealthy population (including roughly no one on/.) who treat a computer as an appliance to do a handful of things (Websurf, email, Outlook, Word), and are quite dissatisfied with it, because from that perspective, a Windows PC as standardly setup is not very good -- it exposes too much of its internals, has a UI with too many modes, and has some unnecessary choice. Nevertheless, if you sell a computer too many people have slightly conflicting expectations of what it should do, so it is hard to get away from these problems.
Now look at this same community. What ARE they satisfied with? -- by and large, their mobile phones (or in some cases their Blackberrys). This may be more true in Europe and Japan than the US. Anyway, how do we make a computer as popular with this group as a phone? Answer sell it as a booster box for that phone. Buy this box, or sign up for a years contract and get this box for free, and your phone gets better! When it's in bluetooth range, or plugged in, it gets to use a bigger screen; has unlimited storage for songs, etc.; is backed up against loss of phone or data; can process faster; can print; etc. etc. In fact, the computer is doing all this, but you don't tell the user that.
If done right, it could be killer idea. All these people will be saying, "I don't need that annoying computer any more. Now I have a booster box and I do everything on my phone". This isn't really true, and most of the people saying it would know that if you challenged them, but that doesn't matter.
I teach at a University and our less technically minded students are exactly the people who would buy this. Not our Gramdmothers but our kids!
Slashdot Mirror
Scientists didn't know, so they got more data and analysed the data they had
more carefully so that they got closer to knowing. While a few "respected scientists" can be found to hold out against just about anything,
virtually any competent authority will now agree that there is accelerating warming over the last 100-200 years
which does not look like part of any of the cycles we can see in the climatic record.
This srticle is not old. Journals would not publish it if there were. There is new data, and more careful analysis, and yes, it still supports the view that anomalous warming is occurring.
It's happening. What do you think ITER is? Kyoto was also, in part, as scheme by which the world's governments got together and agreed rules that would force them all to dveelop an deploy cleaner energy sources. Sadly the US withdrew,
Breeder technology was seen as the way forward here (in the UK) for some decades, but eventually shelved more for technical and economic than environmental and political reasons. To make use of breeders you have to reprocess the spent fuel, and this is not at all easy to do safely or cheaply, let alone both. Also, if you're going to reprocess, some of the nicest reactor technologies (like the bed of carbon/cermaic pebbles) don't work so well. The better the fuel is contained in the reactor, the harder it is to get it out in the reprocessing plant. Trying to remotely manipulate ton lots of hot radioiactive concentrated nitric acid contaminated with just about every element you can think of is never going to be easy or cheap.
I mean how could DNA or the process of cell division 'evolve' if evolution itself requires cells to divide and carry on it's genetic blueprint.
We don't know the details, since there are no records and we haven't had the time or space to run experiments on the necessary scale (a whole planet for 100 million years or more) and furthermore I am not a biologist, but, as I understand it, the process goes something like this:
1. general chemical soup in the seas and atmosphere of primordial Earth -- water, ammonia, methane, CO2, etc.,
2. energy input from the Sun, lightning, volcanoes and/or under-sea vents drives the formation of more complex chemicals (the beginnings of this process has been observed in the lab
3. (and here we get speculative) more complex chemicals form, which catalyse further reactions in the chemical soup, causing it's bulk composition to start changing more quickly and less randomly
4. eventually you get a molecule which can catalyse its own synthesis from the soup. Best guess is that this is something like RNA, but we don't know.
5. now we have self-replicating systems, and, after a short time, competition for resources. Now natural selection plays a role
6. gradually these molecules become more complex, and become teams of molecules, forming primitive virus-like or bacteria-like organisms.
7. then comes the switch to DNA for long term genetic storage, offering less error and more flexibility, and the structured cell with a nucleus and mitochondria, offering more efficient and flexible operations.
I am not aware of any instance of irreducible complexity which is not thoroughly debunked.
Detectig and studying non-luminous objects like Buffy is a lot harder than luminous ones like Sirius B.
The paper is in Science. How peer-reviewed do you want?
Yes, most of the atmosphere is not CO2 (or methane) but what matters here
is how transparent the atmosphere is to thermal infrared, which depends very
much on exactly how much CO2 and methane and water and a few other things are in it.
The level of water is controlled by the temperature at the sea surface and there's not
much we can do about that, but the numbers fit very well with the idea that all the extra CO2
we've released over the last couple of hundred years by burning coal and forests is still
in the atmosphere and has not
been taken up either plants or the slower process of absorbtion into sea water and then into
carbonate rocks.
This new data shows that natural climate cycles exist, and covers about 7 of them, including 3 or 4
since a big change that happened 300K or so years ago and 3 or 4 before it. In all of them, rises in CO2 and
methane led the rises in temperature, and in none of them did CO2 or methane rise as fast or as high
as it has in the last 200 years. These are facts, measured, as such things go, relatively directly.
Conclusions from these facts about cause and effect are, inevitably. more speculative. We do not have a
supply of identical planets on which to perform controlled experiments. Nevertheless, the theory that
a) the immediate cause of global temperature variation is changes in the proportion of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere
and
b) human actions have led to a recent very sudden and somewhat unprecedented rise in levels of key greenhouse gasses
since the industrial revolution
seems simple and fits the known facts quite well.
The part that I don't get (so kindly link me to an explanation) is, just because there is no way of measuring where a given particle is, that doesn't mean it's in two places at the same time. It just means we don't know.
What you're hankering after is a "hidden variable model". There is a variable that we can't observe, but it has a definite value. Unfortunately, no simple hidden variable model can explain observations. There are lots of ways of demonstrating this, but all have some complexity.
One of my favourties is due to John Conway and some other people, and it goes like this.
Physics tells us that if we pick any set of three directions at right anfles (eg up, backwards and left) and measure the squared spin of a simple particle (like an electron) in each of them, we get two 0s and a 1 in suitable units. The order of the three measurements doesn't matter.
Now, Conway et al found a set of points on a sphere (ie a set of directions) out of which you can choose lots of triples that are all at right angles. What you can't do is label these points 0 and 1 in such a way that every such triple has two 0s and a 1. So there can't be a hidden variable for the squared spin in each direction, because which one you get depends on which other ones you measure, even though these measurements don't interfere with each other. Using entangled particles and a bit of jiggery pokery you could even do the three measurements at the same time and far apart so there would be no time for information interchange.
A similar, although more subtle effect occurs in EPR. You give each "rocket captain" a choice of directions to measure the polarisation in, and you find a degree of correlation that you could not expect purely from a hidden variable model.
Apparently (and I'm no expert) what happens is that the pandemic strain mutates further into less and less virulent strains which are still close enough to it to confer immunity. After a while everyoe has had one of these weakened forms, and so becomes more or less immune to the pandemic strain.
It does seem that he says he wants to help in public, but thers is some specific problem with him cooperating with the actual tests that at least some actual doctors want to do.
Certainly H5N1 could go that way, but the flu virus is incredibly flexible, and there is
absolutely no reason why it won't come up with another variant as communicable and as lethal as the 1918 variant. If it does, the experts tell us that nothing modern medicine has come up with will help a whole lot. Basically it will infect everyone and kill a proportion and then the rest of us will be immune. Unless we can find a treatment that blocks, or ameliorates all varants of the influenza virus at once, or a way to mass produce a new vaccine in weeks rather than years, then we are still wide open to whatever mutation comes along.
You're thinking of Gravity Probe B http://einstein.stanford.edu/, another tour de force of ultra-precise instrumentation. That mission has now finished and they're analysing the data.
There are multiple layers of noise removal, of course. One trick is that the mirrors are suspended in such a way that
any disturbance will likly make them vibrate at a very specific fequency. Signals at that frequency are ignored.
You are taking the analogy between a space elevator and a normal elevator much too literally. A space elevator is not supported by the ground. It's held up by the fact that the Centre of Mass is (roughly) in orbit. The "elevator cars" would not be pulled along by moving cables but would "crawl" along the cable under their own power (how to get the power too them was the subject of this competition).
You have an evil and paranoid enemy, who you wish to poison. Fortunately, You have a circulare cake in the centre of which a microscopic drop of deadly poison has been placed. You have to cut the cake, using vertical, but possibly curved, cuts, to comply with your enemies paranoic requirements while ensuring that they eat a poisoned piece and you do not. You therefore have to divide the cake into some number of pieces such that:
a) they are all the same shape (or your enemy might take a liking to the "wrong" piece)
b) at least one piece avoids the centre (so that you can eat it)
c) no cake is left over (wasting cake is punished by a horrible death)
More formally, you have to divide a circle into a finite number of congruent pieces so that at least one piece avoids the centre by some non-zero distance.
c in meters/second, m in KILOgrams gives e in Joules
c in centimeters/second, m in grams, gives e in Ergs
This is not a coincidence or anything. A Joule is by definition the work done by a force of 1 Newton pushing something 1 meter. Meanwhile a Newton is the force which, applied to 1 kilogram body will accelerate it at 1 meter/second/second, so a Joule is a kilogram meter^2/second^2. A similar story holds for centimeters, grams and ergs.
So, you can get a truly unit free formulation: the energy equivalent of a certain amount of mass is the work done by a force sufficient to accelerate it to the speed of light in one time period, pushing an object as far as light travels in that time period. This gives the same answer, no matter what time period you take.
Presumably they'd have been delighted to attend, or even fund, the ceremony, if the organisers would just send them US$10000 to help
get their visas.
No. The two GRB's they are interested in were about 1 billion light years away -- well outside our galaxy, but closer than the regaular long-duration GRBs which are several billion lys away.
You may be confusing this with the recent outburst from (probably) a magnetar on the other side of the galaxy, which is a Soft Gamma Repeater (SGR), a different thing again.
Luckily, it's NOT a magnetar. One of those 200 ly away would be serious cause for concern.
l which does a good job of explaining the physics in non-technical terms.
There's a good site at http://solomon.as.utexas.edu/~duncan/magnetar.htm
It seems that neutron stars are born on a cusp. If they're spinning fast enough, a self-sustaining dynamo process, similar to that in the Earth's core starts up in the first few milliseconds of it's life. Within a few seconds, energy from the initial immense heat of the star is siphoned off to increase the (already huge) magnetic field by hundreds or thousands of times, and this field is then locked in place as the star cools.
The event in starquake was a whole lot LESS violent than this one. Magnetars are MUCH weirder than neutron stars.
An explosion on a magnetar features in Steven Baxter's Exultant.
Over millions of years, stars move. On the other hand magnetars seem to be quite rare.
No. Pulsars flash regularly, but mainly radiate at optical and radio frequencies. They are pretty surely neutron stars and relatively nearby (within a few thousand light years). Gamma Ray Bursts are one-off events, probably very far away (billions of light years) and radiate mainly gamma rays. We are less sure what they are, but it's something VERY violent.
The original topic. magnetars. are actually in between. They radiate pulses of lower energy gamma rays that repeat irregularly. We think they are highly magnetic neutron stars tens of thousands of light years away, that undergo very violent "starquakes" from time to time.
You are thinking of Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs). They are actually much MORE violent events than this one, but also MUCH further away.
They are still being studied, and their causes are still somewhat ambiguous, but black holes are almost certainly involved. One theory, if I recall correctly is big bright short-lived stars in the early universse reaching the end of their life. The core of the star then collapses very suddenly, forming a black hole (in a regular supernova you get a neutron star) and the outer part of the star follows it in, and get heated and churned by the implosion, and then explodes out. Another theory is that a GRB represents the last moments a a neutron star falling into a black hole, or two neutron stars colliding to form a black hole.
These magnetar related events are much less energetic, but loads nearer.
Since they're geopositional, once you have "heard" from a satelites its the same as sighting a star.
Um. Not really. GPS uses the time of flight of the radio signal from the satellite to the receiver, rather than the direction of the satellite.
This is not an article about phones, it's an article about how to sell computers.
/.) who treat a computer as an appliance to do a handful of things (Websurf, email, Outlook, Word), and are quite dissatisfied with it, because from that perspective, a Windows PC as standardly setup is not very good -- it exposes too much of its internals, has a UI with too many modes, and has some unnecessary choice. Nevertheless, if you sell a computer too many people have slightly conflicting expectations of what it should do, so it is hard to get away from these problems.
The essential observation is that there is a large, wealthy population (including roughly no one on
Now look at this same community. What ARE they satisfied with? -- by and large, their mobile phones (or in some cases their Blackberrys). This may be more true in Europe and Japan than the US. Anyway, how do we make a computer as popular with this group as a phone? Answer sell it as a booster box for that phone. Buy this box, or sign up for a years contract and get this box for free, and your phone gets better! When it's in bluetooth range, or plugged in, it gets to use a bigger screen; has unlimited storage for songs, etc.; is backed up against loss of phone or data; can process faster; can print; etc. etc. In fact, the computer is doing all this, but you don't tell the user that.
If done right, it could be killer idea. All these people will be saying, "I don't need that annoying computer any more. Now I have a booster box and I do everything on my phone". This isn't really true, and most of the people saying it would know that if you challenged them, but that doesn't matter.
I teach at a University and our less technically minded students are exactly the people who would buy this. Not our Gramdmothers but our kids!
The article doesn't say it's no rotating. they say there is no (hot) matter close enough to it to allow them to measure its rotation.