Crichton is also a physician. He earned his MD before he became a successful author.
Heck, most of Crichton's works are about the dangers of people incautiously tampering with nature and/or complex systems. (Think about it: "Andromeda Strain", "The Terminal Man", "Westworld", "Jurassic Park", "Prey" etc.)
So what exactly qualifies a physician (specialised in medicine) to talk about matters of climate change?
Lovelock is a Fellow of the Royal Society - a somewhat more distinguished qualification, I would have thought.
If he's dissing environmental alarmism, I'd be inclined to listen to him.
And I certainly wouldn't. His science in his books is so bad it is laughable - his misuse of chaos theory in Jurassic Park stands out as a classic. (I actually found the end of 'Prey' extremely funny, as it was so absurd).
There is also some evidence that a global increase in CO2 concentration is causing a global increase in vegetation, though much, if not all of this, is mitigated by our increasing resource depletion.
This is a good point. However, it is not widely realised that land vegetation is largely (and O2) carbon-neutral. It traps carbon during growth, but releases the same amount during decay. Primary CO2 removal is via the oceans, where plant life that traps carbon sinks to the sea bed when it dies and traps CO2 in sediment. Far from being 'the lungs of the planet' (as frequently stated) areas of land vegetation like rain forests have very little impact on atmospheric gases.
However, it is likely that we may revert to feudal, or even pre-feudal, societies in an attempt to preserve what remains of civilization.
Why? A highly technological civilization would be extremely sustainable at that sort of population.
Starving people banding together to rape and pillage? Not in this culture and not in this day. When humans were animals, they performed these things. I don't see it happening as there is a higher signal:noise ratio of intelligence:animals than ever before.
Good post. Although people in modern-day cultures do awful things, the idea that all cultures will collapse to barbarism at the same time everywhere is beyond rational belief.
Which is one of science's major faults: it can come down to a popularity contest (how many scientific theorys were ridiculed for long periods of time before finally being accepted).
Ah - the old 'just because an individual is ridiculed therefore he is right' argument.
Sorry, but this argument doesn't work. Science works by testing ideas against evidence, not as a popularity contest. Ideas that global warming is not happening and is not man-made fail the test of evidence.
Well, considering that the second part of that sentence is pure bunk (we're still colder now than at the high point of the MWP), maybe you should check out more recent surveys of MWP climate data.
I have. From the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:
"The Northern Hemisphere mean temperature estimates of Jones et al. (1998), Mann et al. (1999), and Crowley and Lowery (2000) show temperatures from the 11th to 14th centuries to be about 0.2C warmer than those from the 15th to 19th centuries, but rather below mid-20th century temperatures [3]."
and
Thus current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this timeframe, and the conventional terms of Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries. (ibid)
So, sorry, but the 'warming from Little Ice Age' argument doesn't work.
Your post is so full of unscientific bunk, it's funny that you're trying to point out problems with the parent post. I'd love for you to go and point to a site with actual data to back up every 'fact' that you posted.
OK - what data do you want? I am prepared to back up every point. But let's have a reasoned debate, OK?
The societies you've listed are all engaged in the same behavior: powering their economies with the burning of fossil fuels. The Earth's ecosystem as a single entity is under threat because our activities affect the entire globe without distinction or prejudice.
Yes, but different areas of the world will be affected in different ways - some may even become colder. The idea that all areas of the world will become so uninhabitable as to collapse cultures everywhere is totally unreasonable.
Er, I know - having done it. To say that Lovelock is 'without post-doc work' is the most supreme nonsense. He has been publishing 'post doctoral' work for decades. He is is a fellow of the Royal Society - one of the most prestigious scientific positions in the world; awarded for contribution science - it is hard to think of any better qualification or evidence of actual scientific work.
Chrichton has spent his career writing books, some of which have involved a huge amount of in depth research (of the results of other scientists), for which he is well qualified.
The resulting quality of science in his books shows he is not well qualified for this.
So I checked, last week, with a friend who is, in fact, a well regarded climate expert (PhD: Climatology. Current profession: Distinguished Professor, Climatology).
I'm sure I could find a qualified friend (even a professor) who could back up any point of view I want. Single voices in this field don't matter (not even Lovelock's) - what matters is the scientific consensus.
The science of man-caused (anthropogenic) global warming is junk. The paleoclimatic data is of inadequate quality. Modeling is not reliable (he has done climate modeling and now is doing paleo work).
He may have that opinion. Most don't. What matters in science is majority opinion.
Everyone agrees that planet is warming - it is recovering from a little ice age a few centuries ago.
This is nonsense. We have already warmed way beyond the temperature at the start of the little ice age, and even beyond that of the medieval warm period before that. At current rates the Arctic ice will be gone in a few decades. There has never been a lack of Arctic ice in the history of humanity.
The hysteria over anthropogenic global warming is disappointing. So is the scare mongering by some scientists in the field.
The Arctic ice is already 1/2 of the thickness it was decades ago. The permafrost in Northern Europe is melting. Glacier movements in Greenland have sped up many-fold.
Hysteria? I think not.
Furthermore, we know that weather is chaotic - hence the GCM's for weather are simply not trustworthy beyond 5 days when one is lucky, and less than a day when one is not. Now extend to 100 years and you get a better idea of the problem.
The modelling of climate over periods of decades and centuries has nothing to do with the chaos of weather over days.
I'm sorry, but the fact that you posted this sentence undermines any scientific credibility your post may have had.
Making cultural changes to avert disaster is much like getting a locomotive to hit the brakes before it hits that stalled car on the tracks. You have to have enough advance notice and act as soon as possible. It doesn't matter if you realize you needed to hit the breaks sooner when you're 100 yards away from the car.
The problem is that what he is saying is more like 'it is too late to break, prepare to die'.
One theory is that at this point in time, we're actually coming OUT of an ice age, which suggests that even if we didn't pollute excessively, the world would be warming anyway (albeit at a decreased rate).
Almost no-one believes this. It looks far more likely that we are at the end of an inter-glacial period, and the ice should come soon. In fact, there is a reasonable proposal that an ice age should have started millenia ago, but methane resulting from massive deforestation and conversion to farmland has held of the very first stages.
If I have understood the Gaia hypothesis correctly, it claims that the Earth could "flip over" into a different equilibrium if enough pressure is put on the biosphere. That could for example mean that the oxygen level in the atmosphere changes permanently.
This might happen, but not with the current situation - we are talking about thermal changes, not gas changes. The oxygen level has remained pretty constant for a long time, through very warm periods and ice ages.
forgive me for thinking you're absolutely full of shit to think we'll all be able to do that with a huge climate event in the mix. millions of people will die, and if you think the world will be the same for the survivors you're an absolute idiot.
I did not say that, or anything like that.
What I was saying is that we are are not capable of doing anything which would change things irreversibly to the degree (to quote the GP post) to which we would need to install oxygen generators.
We could well make things extremely difficult for ourselves, but the biosphere will recover.
I really don't think you can compare The Andromeda Strain et al to scientific papers. Chrichton wrote the book to be entertaining. Keeping it believable was one of his goals, but I doubt he was trying to be completely scientifically accurate.
My point is that to someone who understand biology it wasn't even slightly believable. There is no evidence that he is scientifically literate in the areas in which he is now commenting.
You should familiarize yourself with Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (he also wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel, and he's hardly a radical). In this book, there are many examples of societies that have altered their environments to such a degree that they crumble and vanish. The Mayan is one such culture.
We aren't one society, or one culture. We are many. The idea that all current societies - North American, South American, West European, East European, Australiasian, Asian... etc. all crumble and vanish at the same time is ludicrous.
The idea that civilization couldn't possibly collapse is more than naive. What omnipotent guiding hand is there to save us?
The idea that all current civilizations will collapse is pushing the odds.
We're talking about a expert writer with an exceptional scientific background background.
No, that isn't an exceptional scientific background. He graduated, was a teacher, got and M.D. and was a postdoctoral fellow. That is far from 'exceptional'. I have more scientific qualifications than that, and I would not call myself exceptional, and I would certainly not consider myself an expert in an area in which Lovelock has been a respected scientist for decades
Just because you have moderate scientific experience in one area does not qualify you to comment in others, especially when you have published such scientific nonsense (Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park) as has Crichton.
Re:Doomsday can come only from governments
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Forecasting Doomsday
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There's no guarantee that a few hundred years from now some tipping point could be reached that causes the atmosphere's composition to change in a way that could not be reversed without some massive effort (like having to build oxygen creation plants, or something).
That isn't going to happen. If the atmosphere survived the impact of a huge asteroid (causing the extinction of the dinosaurs), with an energy equal to a million nuclear weapons, then we aren't going to have an irreversible impact.
James Lovelock is certain we're doomed while Michael Chrichton is giving speeches detailing environmentalism as a religion.
Who do we believe? The physician or the author? I don't think either are adequately qualified to make the call.
Well, Lovelock is a respected expert in biology and climate, whereas Chrichton is an expert in writing.
So who do we believe more about biology and climate? Not that hard a question, I think.
However, I think Lovelock is being too dramatic. The point is that we have no idea what is going to happen with climate change. He is putting forward one extreme idea in which positive feedback runs riot and we get huge temperature rises. However, there are other possibilities, including one in which we may get severe local cooling in the North Atlantic.
It is even possible (perhaps likely) that our activities have been masking an incipient ice age, and once the oil runs out (very soon) and we stop polluting, we could start to see significant global cooling.
His point is that we are dealing with uncertainties and we have to start preparing for things right now, not in 10 or 20 years. I think his idea that civilization as a whole will collapse is absurd - in past centuries we have survived the loss of significant parts of our population (such as during the Black Death) and our culture continued - but that does not mean we should not be worried - we could be in for severe world-wide water and food shortages, and extremes of climate and flooding. We need to start looking for alternatives.
Then maybe they should spend their money on making this fact more widely known. I didn't know this, and I doubt many others did either.
The JVM/JRE is a platform that many develop on. There is no central control over what languages are developed, so who would make these languages widely known? What you get is individual language vendors promoting their product.
This emphasises a difference between Java and.NET - Java has a wider culture.
Still, even with 200 implementations it's not quite visual studio, is it?
I think that it is better. There are very high quality cross-platform, multi-language IDEs like Eclipse and NetBeans. This is a far better situation than with Visual Studio.
Even though it's only slightly less than $1.65 for every person in the US, it's still not an insignificant sum.Even though it's only slightly less than $1.65 for every person in the US, it's still not an insignificant sum.
I would have thought that that is very good definition of an insignificant sum, especially when compared to defense spending.
Anyway, what if the rate of decay changes over time? Seems new theory indicates that c may change. If c changes I would fully expect rates of decay to change.
We are talking about possible changes in C over 10 billion years ago. This would have an insignificant impact on radioactive dating.
While this was a truly impressive stunt, er...mission...it was completely unnecessary. Its scientific results don't matter to anyone, nor do they change or improve the lives of anyone.
How can the results not matter? How can anyone not wish to find out their origins or their place in the universe?
When you have a kid with an earache and you can't get medical insurance because your job only pays $11 an hour and your local community health clinic shut down because the federal funds went to the trillion dollar insane war or to reduce the taxes of the super rich, then you will have an appreciation of how stupid, insulting, and unnecessary it is to spend money on pathetic stunts such as this.
The money spend on these things is nothing compared to the money spend on the Iraq war, or on defense in general
Without the ability to explore or to increase our understanding, many of us feel our lives would be less worth living.
I find the idea that such research should be prevented insulting to humanity.
We must judge these space and so-called research projects from the perspective of the total and effective benefit to our society,
Have you no soul? There are millions in our societies who follow such investigations with awe and wonder. They don't have small closed minds which won't look up above the horizon.
Projects like this make lives better.
Then grow up and join the human race. Learn to see all these stunt projects with a long-term humanistic sense of understanding.
This is precisely about a humanistic attitude.
We can stay living small lives on a small planet, perhaps trapped in our religions, or we can look billions of miles beyond our world and raise humanity to a space-exploring species.
If this capsule brought back a cure for cancer, malaria, or AIDS, then it could be celibrated by everyone. But, in reality, there nothing in it but a few milligrams of dust.
The urge to investigate is what will help cure these things. It should not be stifled.
But anyway, you are wrong - it is not dust.
It is star dust. There is an astronomical and wondrous difference.
Urrm... having trouble reading, are you?From the message you just replied to: ".net's CLI/CLR may have its flaws, but it fixes much of the brain damage of the original JVM design."
The problem with this statement is that it assumes that the JVM design was 'brain damaged'. It wasn't. There were very specific design considerations which it met well: To be easily JITted/translated to native code, to be a compact code and the well suit procedural/OOP language Java.
The.NET/CLR is very similar. It may have a few more features that better suit other languages, but they are few. Although there have been successful implementations of dynamic languages on the CLR (IronPython), many dynamic languages (like Smalltalk) have struggled to make use of the CLR, and have had to make compromises.
The idea that the JVM is 'brain damaged' is just ranting. The sheer number of languages successfully implemented on the JVM provide the clearest possible evidence against this statement. Things could certainly be better, and it is likely that new opcodes will be added to future versions to make implementation of dynamic languages easier.
But anyway, one developer's 'brain damage' is another developer's sensible choice, so using such terms is meaningless.
Rails sounds like a perfect fit. You should be able to have something useful up in a matter of days if not hours.
Yes, but there are major issues. Having your data model determined in the database is one - it can potentially make portability between databases a problem (Rails is starting to deal with this, but it's support for portability is not good).
Almost all other object-relational mapping tools in other languages do things the right way - by at least allowing the definition of database tables from an object model, and providing a mapping layer than can isolate your code from changes in the schema. Java has good mature, fast ORMs - JDO, Hibernate etc. Of course, Rails abandons decades of experience in this matter and assumes it is doing things correctly.
Secondly, don't fall into the 'ruby is fast enough' trap. I have done that in the past with Cold Fusion and PHP, and have regretted it.
Java is NOT the way to go for reduced development time.
Anyone with experience of a good java JDO tool with reverse mapping and schema generation facilities (like Kodo) knows this statement is nonsense. You get reduced development time by knowing a language and its tools well. This is the case for Ruby on Rails. It is the case with Java, JDO and JSF or whatever.
I'm not saying that everybody should do.NET, but I'm saying that Java has real life weakness where.NET is much better. I also think that denying that would not help anybody else than Microsoft.
But also wrong would be to deny that.NET has fundamental weaknesses where Java is much better. One is performance - in all high-performance tests JVMs generally do better than the CLR. The other, of course, (and this is a real show-stopper for many of us) is it's lack of cross-platform portability). Many of us have been through the single-platform single-vendor route before and will never risk it again.
On the web front I'd wager my pets on Ruby, PHP or even.NET ASP gaining much speed, not JSP or Java application servers.
Well the evidence is to the contrary. J2EE takeup continues to grow.
On the desktop, I've not yet seen swarm of formidable Java graphical applications. Anyone who has done things in both fields, is not hard pressed to figure out why it would be so.
You aren't likely to see a swarm of Java graphical applications, just like you aren't likely to see a swarm of WinForms applications. Virtually all client-side applications are for internal company use. Mind you, there are some Java graphical applications that are successful and getting quite well known (like Moneydance).
"Of course you can mix and match data structures between these languages.
Liar... certainly not in the way that.net's CLI/CLR allows you to do."
You can use any class or data structure written in one language on the JVM in any other, providing it is a compiled class. There are no restrictions. In OOP languages you can inherit from any other class, no matter what the language the original was written in. Just like.NET.
The words "byte code" apparently shot right over your head, just like many of the crappy things about Java.
Why can't we have a polite debate?
The JVM was designed to run Java -- and it shows.
and the CLR was designed to run languages like C#, J# and VB.NET - and it shows! Perhaps you ought to read some of the development blogs of various language implementors..NET is certainly a better platform for some languages in some ways than Java, but to assume there are no problems is false. Have a look at the journal of the developers of SmallScript on this matter - it is illuminating!
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Crichton is also a physician. He earned his MD before he became a successful author.
Heck, most of Crichton's works are about the dangers of people incautiously tampering with nature and/or complex systems. (Think about it: "Andromeda Strain", "The Terminal Man", "Westworld", "Jurassic Park", "Prey" etc.)
So what exactly qualifies a physician (specialised in medicine) to talk about matters of climate change?
Lovelock is a Fellow of the Royal Society - a somewhat more distinguished qualification, I would have thought.
If he's dissing environmental alarmism, I'd be inclined to listen to him.
And I certainly wouldn't. His science in his books is so bad it is laughable - his misuse of chaos theory in Jurassic Park stands out as a classic. (I actually found the end of 'Prey' extremely funny, as it was so absurd).
There is also some evidence that a global increase in CO2 concentration is causing a global increase in vegetation, though much, if not all of this, is mitigated by our increasing resource depletion.
This is a good point. However, it is not widely realised that land vegetation is largely (and O2) carbon-neutral. It traps carbon during growth, but releases the same amount during decay. Primary CO2 removal is via the oceans, where plant life that traps carbon sinks to the sea bed when it dies and traps CO2 in sediment. Far from being 'the lungs of the planet' (as frequently stated) areas of land vegetation like rain forests have very little impact on atmospheric gases.
However, it is likely that we may revert to feudal, or even pre-feudal, societies in an attempt to preserve what remains of civilization.
Why? A highly technological civilization would be extremely sustainable at that sort of population.
Starving people banding together to rape and pillage? Not in this culture and not in this day. When humans were animals, they performed these things. I don't see it happening as there is a higher signal:noise ratio of intelligence:animals than ever before.
Good post. Although people in modern-day cultures do awful things, the idea that all cultures will collapse to barbarism at the same time everywhere is beyond rational belief.
Which is one of science's major faults: it can come down to a popularity contest (how many scientific theorys were ridiculed for long periods of time before finally being accepted).
Ah - the old 'just because an individual is ridiculed therefore he is right' argument.
Sorry, but this argument doesn't work. Science works by testing ideas against evidence, not as a popularity contest. Ideas that global warming is not happening and is not man-made fail the test of evidence.
Well, considering that the second part of that sentence is pure bunk (we're still colder now than at the high point of the MWP), maybe you should check out more recent surveys of MWP climate data.
I have. From the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:
"The Northern Hemisphere mean temperature estimates of Jones et al. (1998), Mann et al. (1999), and Crowley and Lowery (2000) show temperatures from the 11th to 14th centuries to be about 0.2C warmer than those from the 15th to 19th centuries, but rather below mid-20th century temperatures [3]."
and
Thus current evidence does not support
globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this timeframe, and the conventional terms of Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries. (ibid)
So, sorry, but the 'warming from Little Ice Age' argument doesn't work.
Your post is so full of unscientific bunk, it's funny that you're trying to point out problems with the parent post. I'd love for you to go and point to a site with actual data to back up every 'fact' that you posted.
OK - what data do you want? I am prepared to back up every point. But let's have a reasoned debate, OK?
The societies you've listed are all engaged in the same behavior: powering their economies with the burning of fossil fuels. The Earth's ecosystem as a single entity is under threat because our activities affect the entire globe without distinction or prejudice.
Yes, but different areas of the world will be affected in different ways - some may even become colder. The idea that all areas of the world will become so uninhabitable as to collapse cultures everywhere is totally unreasonable.
Lovelock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock#Profes sional_career is also an MD (like Chrichton) but without the post-doc work. MD post-doc work is the actual practice of science.
Er, I know - having done it. To say that Lovelock is 'without post-doc work' is the most supreme nonsense. He has been publishing 'post doctoral' work for decades. He is is a fellow of the Royal Society - one of the most prestigious scientific positions in the world; awarded for contribution science - it is hard to think of any better qualification or evidence of actual scientific work.
Chrichton has spent his career writing books, some of which have involved a huge amount of in depth research (of the results of other scientists), for which he is well qualified.
The resulting quality of science in his books shows he is not well qualified for this.
So I checked, last week, with a friend who is, in fact, a well regarded climate expert (PhD: Climatology. Current profession: Distinguished Professor, Climatology).
I'm sure I could find a qualified friend (even a professor) who could back up any point of view I want. Single voices in this field don't matter (not even Lovelock's) - what matters is the scientific consensus.
The science of man-caused (anthropogenic) global warming is junk. The paleoclimatic data is of inadequate quality. Modeling is not reliable (he has done climate modeling and now is doing paleo work).
He may have that opinion. Most don't. What matters in science is majority opinion.
Everyone agrees that planet is warming - it is recovering from a little ice age a few centuries ago.
This is nonsense. We have already warmed way beyond the temperature at the start of the little ice age, and even beyond that of the medieval warm period before that. At current rates the Arctic ice will be gone in a few decades. There has never been a lack of Arctic ice in the history of humanity.
The hysteria over anthropogenic global warming is disappointing. So is the scare mongering by some scientists in the field.
The Arctic ice is already 1/2 of the thickness it was decades ago. The permafrost in Northern Europe is melting. Glacier movements in Greenland have sped up many-fold.
Hysteria? I think not.
Furthermore, we know that weather is chaotic - hence the GCM's for weather are simply not trustworthy beyond 5 days when one is lucky, and less than a day when one is not. Now extend to 100 years and you get a better idea of the problem.
The modelling of climate over periods of decades and centuries has nothing to do with the chaos of weather over days.
I'm sorry, but the fact that you posted this sentence undermines any scientific credibility your post may have had.
Making cultural changes to avert disaster is much like getting a locomotive to hit the brakes before it hits that stalled car on the tracks. You have to have enough advance notice and act as soon as possible. It doesn't matter if you realize you needed to hit the breaks sooner when you're 100 yards away from the car.
The problem is that what he is saying is more like 'it is too late to break, prepare to die'.
People don't respond well to that.
One theory is that at this point in time, we're actually coming OUT of an ice age, which suggests that even if we didn't pollute excessively, the world would be warming anyway (albeit at a decreased rate).
Almost no-one believes this. It looks far more likely that we are at the end of an inter-glacial period, and the ice should come soon. In fact, there is a reasonable proposal that an ice age should have started millenia ago, but methane resulting from massive deforestation and conversion to farmland has held of the very first stages.
If I have understood the Gaia hypothesis correctly, it claims that the Earth could "flip over" into a different equilibrium if enough pressure is put on the biosphere. That could for example mean that the oxygen level in the atmosphere changes permanently.
This might happen, but not with the current situation - we are talking about thermal changes, not gas changes. The oxygen level has remained pretty constant for a long time, through very warm periods and ice ages.
forgive me for thinking you're absolutely full of shit to think we'll all be able to do that with a huge climate event in the mix. millions of people will die, and if you think the world will be the same for the survivors you're an absolute idiot.
I did not say that, or anything like that.
What I was saying is that we are are not capable of doing anything which would change things irreversibly to the degree (to quote the GP post) to which we would need to install oxygen generators.
We could well make things extremely difficult for ourselves, but the biosphere will recover.
I really don't think you can compare The Andromeda Strain et al to scientific papers. Chrichton wrote the book to be entertaining. Keeping it believable was one of his goals, but I doubt he was trying to be completely scientifically accurate.
My point is that to someone who understand biology it wasn't even slightly believable. There is no evidence that he is scientifically literate in the areas in which he is now commenting.
You should familiarize yourself with Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (he also wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel, and he's hardly a radical). In this book, there are many examples of societies that have altered their environments to such a degree that they crumble and vanish. The Mayan is one such culture.
We aren't one society, or one culture. We are many. The idea that all current societies - North American, South American, West European, East European, Australiasian, Asian... etc. all crumble and vanish at the same time is ludicrous.
The idea that civilization couldn't possibly collapse is more than naive. What omnipotent guiding hand is there to save us?
The idea that all current civilizations will collapse is pushing the odds.
We're talking about a expert writer with an exceptional scientific background background.
No, that isn't an exceptional scientific background. He graduated, was a teacher, got and M.D. and was a postdoctoral fellow. That is far from 'exceptional'. I have more scientific qualifications than that, and I would not call myself exceptional, and I would certainly not consider myself an expert in an area in which Lovelock has been a respected scientist for decades
Just because you have moderate scientific experience in one area does not qualify you to comment in others, especially when you have published such scientific nonsense (Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park) as has Crichton.
There's no guarantee that a few hundred years from now some tipping point could be reached that causes the atmosphere's composition to change in a way that could not be reversed without some massive effort (like having to build oxygen creation plants, or something).
That isn't going to happen. If the atmosphere survived the impact of a huge asteroid (causing the extinction of the dinosaurs), with an energy equal to a million nuclear weapons, then we aren't going to have an irreversible impact.
James Lovelock is certain we're doomed while Michael Chrichton is giving speeches detailing environmentalism as a religion.
Who do we believe? The physician or the author? I don't think either are adequately qualified to make the call.
Well, Lovelock is a respected expert in biology and climate, whereas Chrichton is an expert in writing.
So who do we believe more about biology and climate? Not that hard a question, I think.
However, I think Lovelock is being too dramatic. The point is that we have no idea what is going to happen with climate change. He is putting forward one extreme idea in which positive feedback runs riot and we get huge temperature rises. However, there are other possibilities, including one in which we may get severe local cooling in the North Atlantic.
It is even possible (perhaps likely) that our activities have been masking an incipient ice age, and once the oil runs out (very soon) and we stop polluting, we could start to see significant global cooling.
His point is that we are dealing with uncertainties and we have to start preparing for things right now, not in 10 or 20 years. I think his idea that civilization as a whole will collapse is absurd - in past centuries we have survived the loss of significant parts of our population (such as during the Black Death) and our culture continued - but that does not mean we should not be worried - we could be in for severe world-wide water and food shortages, and extremes of climate and flooding. We need to start looking for alternatives.
Then maybe they should spend their money on making this fact more widely known. I didn't know this, and I doubt many others did either.
.NET - Java has a wider culture.
The JVM/JRE is a platform that many develop on. There is no central control over what languages are developed, so who would make these languages widely known? What you get is individual language vendors promoting their product.
This emphasises a difference between Java and
Still, even with 200 implementations it's not quite visual studio, is it?
I think that it is better. There are very high quality cross-platform, multi-language IDEs like Eclipse and NetBeans. This is a far better situation than with Visual Studio.
Even though it's only slightly less than $1.65 for every person in the US, it's still not an insignificant sum.Even though it's only slightly less than $1.65 for every person in the US, it's still not an insignificant sum.
I would have thought that that is very good definition of an insignificant sum, especially when compared to defense spending.
what a waste of money. Period. People are dying from aids, war, strife and we're collecting moon fuckin dust.
Have you any idea how little this costs compared to defense expenditure? If you want to attack spending, attack that.
Anyway, what if the rate of decay changes over time? Seems new theory indicates that c may change. If c changes I would fully expect rates of decay to change.
We are talking about possible changes in C over 10 billion years ago. This would have an insignificant impact on radioactive dating.
While this was a truly impressive stunt, er...mission...it was completely unnecessary. Its scientific results don't matter to anyone, nor do they change or improve the lives of anyone.
.
How can the results not matter? How can anyone not wish to find out their origins or their place in the universe?
When you have a kid with an earache and you can't get medical insurance because your job only pays $11 an hour and your local community health clinic shut down because the federal funds went to the trillion dollar insane war or to reduce the taxes of the super rich, then you will have an appreciation of how stupid, insulting, and unnecessary it is to spend money on pathetic stunts such as this.
The money spend on these things is nothing compared to the money spend on the Iraq war, or on defense in general
Without the ability to explore or to increase our understanding, many of us feel our lives would be less worth living.
I find the idea that such research should be prevented insulting to humanity.
We must judge these space and so-called research projects from the perspective of the total and effective benefit to our society,
Have you no soul? There are millions in our societies who follow such investigations with awe and wonder. They don't have small closed minds which won't look up above the horizon.
Projects like this make lives better.
Then grow up and join the human race. Learn to see all these stunt projects with a long-term humanistic sense of understanding.
This is precisely about a humanistic attitude.
We can stay living small lives on a small planet, perhaps trapped in our religions, or we can look billions of miles beyond our world and raise humanity to a space-exploring species.
If this capsule brought back a cure for cancer, malaria, or AIDS, then it could be celibrated by everyone. But, in reality, there nothing in it but a few milligrams of dust
The urge to investigate is what will help cure these things. It should not be stifled.
But anyway, you are wrong - it is not dust.
It is star dust. There is an astronomical and wondrous difference.
Urrm... having trouble reading, are you?From the message you just replied to: ".net's CLI/CLR may have its flaws, but it fixes much of the brain damage of the original JVM design."
.NET/CLR is very similar. It may have a few more features that better suit other languages, but they are few. Although there have been successful implementations of dynamic languages on the CLR (IronPython), many dynamic languages (like Smalltalk) have struggled to make use of the CLR, and have had to make compromises.
The problem with this statement is that it assumes that the JVM design was 'brain damaged'. It wasn't. There were very specific design considerations which it met well: To be easily JITted/translated to native code, to be a compact code and the well suit procedural/OOP language Java.
The
The idea that the JVM is 'brain damaged' is just ranting. The sheer number of languages successfully implemented on the JVM provide the clearest possible evidence against this statement. Things could certainly be better, and it is likely that new opcodes will be added to future versions to make implementation of dynamic languages easier.
But anyway, one developer's 'brain damage' is another developer's sensible choice, so using such terms is meaningless.
Rails sounds like a perfect fit. You should be able to have something useful up in a matter of days if not hours.
Yes, but there are major issues. Having your data model determined in the database is one - it can potentially make portability between databases a problem (Rails is starting to deal with this, but it's support for portability is not good).
Almost all other object-relational mapping tools in other languages do things the right way - by at least allowing the definition of database tables from an object model, and providing a mapping layer than can isolate your code from changes in the schema. Java has good mature, fast ORMs - JDO, Hibernate etc. Of course, Rails abandons decades of experience in this matter and assumes it is doing things correctly.
Secondly, don't fall into the 'ruby is fast enough' trap. I have done that in the past with Cold Fusion and PHP, and have regretted it.
Java is NOT the way to go for reduced development time.
Anyone with experience of a good java JDO tool with reverse mapping and schema generation facilities (like Kodo) knows this statement is nonsense. You get reduced development time by knowing a language and its tools well. This is the case for Ruby on Rails. It is the case with Java, JDO and JSF or whatever.
I'm not saying that everybody should do .NET, but I'm saying that Java has real life weakness where .NET is much better. I also think that denying that would not help anybody else than Microsoft.
.NET has fundamental weaknesses where Java is much better. One is performance - in all high-performance tests JVMs generally do better than the CLR. The other, of course, (and this is a real show-stopper for many of us) is it's lack of cross-platform portability). Many of us have been through the single-platform single-vendor route before and will never risk it again.
But also wrong would be to deny that
On the web front I'd wager my pets on Ruby, PHP or even .NET ASP gaining much speed, not JSP or Java application servers.
Well the evidence is to the contrary. J2EE takeup continues to grow.
On the desktop, I've not yet seen swarm of formidable Java graphical applications. Anyone who has done things in both fields, is not hard pressed to figure out why it would be so.
You aren't likely to see a swarm of Java graphical applications, just like you aren't likely to see a swarm of WinForms applications. Virtually all client-side applications are for internal company use. Mind you, there are some Java graphical applications that are successful and getting quite well known (like Moneydance).
"Of course you can mix and match data structures between these languages.
.net's CLI/CLR allows you to do."
.NET.
.NET is certainly a better platform for some languages in some ways than Java, but to assume there are no problems is false. Have a look at the journal of the developers of SmallScript on this matter - it is illuminating!
Liar... certainly not in the way that
You can use any class or data structure written in one language on the JVM in any other, providing it is a compiled class. There are no restrictions. In OOP languages you can inherit from any other class, no matter what the language the original was written in. Just like
The words "byte code" apparently shot right over your head, just like many of the crappy things about Java.
Why can't we have a polite debate?
The JVM was designed to run Java -- and it shows.
and the CLR was designed to run languages like C#, J# and VB.NET - and it shows! Perhaps you ought to read some of the development blogs of various language implementors.