You know absolutely nothing about astronomy, stop talking. It's making you look like either Glenn Beck or a Retard...
You repeated repeated yourself there. Either that, or you're being mean to retards.
In any case, since sunspots are not mentioned anywhere in the Bible it is clear that this is just some secular humanist hoax. No one can actually predict astronomical events like the aurora, which are caused by God.
How could an auroral display be caused by the sun, anyway? They happen at NIGHT! Duh.
Either that, or this is just one more on the long, long list of "things Science can do that Faith can't," along with curing disease, reattaching limbs, generating clean, safe power, providing clean water and effective sewage treatment, increasing crop yeilds and preventing famine, and building depressingly deadly weapons.
in addition to Bush's idiotic 700 billion banker bailout
Strangely, I never heard a word out of any of these people when Bush was running up huge deficits... their voices only became so massively amplified when a Democrat walked in to the Oval Office.
No, Liberal Arts is about thinking the way pre-scientific people did it.
Read CP Snow's "Two Cultures", which laments the divide between the sciences and the liberal arts, and justly so.
So long as the liberal arts fail to adapt to the scientific world-view, including accepting the importance of mathematical reasoning alongside poetry etc, they have ceased to be what they once were, which is the living voice of Western culture. Instead they are just a cozy backwater for the scientifically illiterate.
The sciences, at the same time, become a cozy backwater for the poetically illiterate.
I can't find the specific document I was thinking of, which was a detailed technical report on a particular GCM by the people who wrote it, but if you dig into the details of any GCM description you will find statements like this: "In this process, salinity is added to the newly formed snow-ice to guarantee the salt conservation. It is more physically reasonable to reduce the salinity of sea ice, but such a treatment requires to deal with the sea ice salinity as a prognostic variable."
That one happens to deal with non-conservation of salinity, but the problem and the procedure in the same in all cases: the models do not strictly conserve some important quantity, and is therefore "fixed up" by performing some ad hoc adjustment. This is unphysical, and anyone who has ever done a long-term integration of any model describing any physical system that can be actually tested in the lab knows that such ad hoc corrections almost always produce significantly unphysical behaviour in the results.
I'll hasten to say that model authors are up-front about this stuff: the GCM's I've looked at have been well-described. But they have also all been unphysical in one respect or another, from artificially fixed boundary conditions to non-conservation of energy (which was then "fixed up" by adjusting air temperatures) and that is a serious problem for the predictive power of their long-term integrations.
From the linked article: "For example, about 11,500 years ago, averaged annual temperatures on the Greenland icepack warmed by around 8C over 40 years, in three steps of five years (see [2], Stewart, chapter 13) - 5C change over 30-40 yrs more common." (emphasis added).
They have a periodicity of about 1500 years, so it's not like we're talking about a one-off at the end of the last glaciation, either.
Beyond all of this, we use a wide variety of physics models -- both global models and models for specific components. A model can be something as simple as a calculation of radiative heat transfer under different gas mixtures, or as complicated as something that models the sources and sinks over the entire planet and covers all of the various feedback mechanisms. Models are nearly all based on first principles in large part or entirity. Depending on the type of model, they're either validated with lab data or historic climate data.
I haven't looked at the current report, although it looks at first glance like they have used some fairly strong, robust, estimators, which is good. It is extremely unfortunate that the reporting around it is the typical sensationalist nonsense that has done so much to discredit anyone with concerns about climate change. In a year or two when someone finds an error in the data and it turns out that the past ten years WEREN'T "the warmest on record" we'll inevitably treated by another round of self-serving propoganda from the same smug bastards who spent years promoting 1998 as THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD as if that was proof the world was ending, and then said, "well, it really isn't all that important" when the claim turned out to be false.
No serious Bayesian would accpet that A can vastly increase the plausibility of B, but !A does not decrease the plausibility of B one little bit.
However, your claim that most of the models used in climate research are true to first principles is false. I am a computational physicist, and every GCM I have looked at has non-physical aspects that violate well-established physical principles, most worriesomely conservation of energy. For a model that is nohting but a long-term integration of a physical system to violate conservation of energy is extremely problematic, and yet I have seen no discussion anywhere that looks at how this and other unphysical assumptions affect the model results.
This is unusual: in the area of radition transport physics, for example, there are a variety of relatively standard computational models that are used, with minor variants. Despite the tiny size of the community compared to climate science, there are a significant number of papers exploring nothing but the effects of various unphysical aspects of the models.
If you could point me to anything similar for any major GCM I would be most greatful. The publications I have seen are all over-views of the model, detailing the assumptions but not donig anything to explore their effects.
For the record: I think dumping tonnes of shit into the atmosphere is a bad idea, and strongly support cap and trade on the basis of how well it worked for sulphur emmissions in the '90's; I think ocean temperatures are by far the most compelling evidence for global climate change; I think our understanding of the science is inadequate to use as a basis for public policy; I think people who pass from "the science is established" to "we must do XYZ to fix things" are letting their emotional concern for the possible consquences of the science and one particular interpretation of the results get in the way of their objectivity and contribute more noise than value to the debate.
That's a rather juvenile way to put it as I don't know any serious Christian who honestly believes the transcendental God of the Bible is a corporeal being who levitates in Earth's atmosphere.... but okay. They believed "that some old man in the sky was watching them all the time." They did not believe that some old man in the sky was coming up with clever ways for them to watch their neighbors all the time.
There's a lot wrong with your claims. I guess you don't know very much about Christianity, either in contemporary practise or historically.
The Reverend Jerry Fallwell once described the establishment of the Kingdom of God after Armageddon as "moving his headquarters from planet Heaven to planet Earth." The literal role of the sky in various Protest Fundamentalist theologies is very important, as suggested by the terminology they use to describe then end of days.
So saying the GP's description is juvenile is incorrect: it is a fair reflection of extremely common beliefs amongst apparently sincere and serious mainstream Christian groups that are active in the United States today.
With regard to your second claim, I believe you ought to learn a little about the role of confession in Catholicism, particularly up to the time of the Reformation. There are perfectly sound sociological analyses of the institution that strongly suggest it was nothing but a means of social control via constant surveillance, by self and others.
So please, before you post about Christianity inform yourself as to what actual living Christians believe and have believed. That way you won't embarrass yourself quite so much with your ignorance of this widely held an diverse faith.
Maybe its just me, but it seems like an aweful lot of 'science' recently has been based on pure speculation.
It is, indeed, just you.
"Pure" speculation would be speculation without reference to facts or well established abstract principles.
In the present case, there is a distinct feature in the upper atmosphere of Neptune. That is a fact. We also have a whole bunch of facts about the details of the feature. Furthermore, we have a bunch of facts about the properties of comets and the odds of a comet of a given size hitting Neptune in the past few hundred years. And finally, we have a bunch of facts about how the atmosphere of a gas giant reacts to being hit by a comet of a given size, as we have observed such impacts. And really finally, we have an enormous wealth of fact regarding the properties and behaviours of fluid systems. It's called 'fluid mechanics' and is one of the most well-established areas of physics, although it is not without it's ongoing challenges due to non-linearity.
None of that is speculation. Zero. All facts, all the time. To be "pure speculation" something would have to not use any of those facts.
Now, given those facts, we can extrapolate from what we know and ask, "Given the facts that we have about comets and gas giants and fluid mechanics and this specific feature on Neptune, can we interpret this specific feature on Neptune about which we have many facts as the result of a relatively recent cometary impact?" The answer is "yes".
That is not speculation, pure or otherwise. That is science: rational inference from well-established facts and abstract principles.
If you don't approve of science done in this way you should stop using your computer, cell phone, etc, and never drive a car or fly in a plane, as all of those technologies depend on scientific discoveries that are equally "speculative".
Have you ever SEEN, for example, with your own eyes, the lift that a plane's wing provides? I don't think so. You just notice that planes have wings and that they don't fall down, and engage in some pure speculation" that wings provide lift. I call bullshit.
unless they're sociopaths who don't give a damn about other people's health, well being, or livlihood.
Never assume venality where stupidity will do. There are actually two types of people who are opposed to government regulation: the sociopaths, and the dupes. I know this because I was once a dupe.
The arguments for "the free market" can sound pretty compelling to someone who is naive and basically decent, who doesn't appreciate the depths of human depravity in the wild. We still see libertarians regularly on/. who are so sincerely addled by their ideology that they don't recognize state failures like Somalia and the tribal lands in northern Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan as real world examples of their theories in action. They simply can't believe that people would behave in such obviously idiotic, sub-optimal ways for centuries or longer.
Yet anyone who looks at history realizes that stateless, unregulated societies are unstable against tribalism. If humans were economically rational automatons they would not be, but we aren't.
On the flip side, being "for" regulation doesn't mean that we can't disagree vigorously over what kind of regulation is appropiate. But having that debate means first figuring out that we aren't sociopaths on either the left or the right (and don't kid yourself: at the level of the political leadership the left has always been dominated by sociopaths, just like the right, and for the same reasons.)
A corporation's only goal is to maximize profit. That's how it works. They actually have a responsibility to their shareholders to make money.
Actually this is a huge problem with the modern public corporation: the people who run them (managers and executives) have interests that are different from and very frequently opposed to the owners (shareholders).
This crisis in governance is an acute and ongoing disaster, and how it ultimately plays out is going to shape the world in the 21st century.
You will be developing our SkyNet and Colossus robot based anti personnel devices.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could develop stuff like the Internet without at the same time spending such a vast quantity of otherwise productive wealth on deadweight loss activities like developing weapons systems?
And if we simply must pour huge amounts of otherwise productive wealth into deadweight loss activities, why not make it space exploration, unlikely-to-pay-off energy research, a cure for the common heartbreak?
What is it about killing people in large numbers that is so fascinating that it compels our interest?
It certainly isn't any actual utility: violience is the least efficient and effective way of solving any problem. History supports this with endless examples and a handful of counter-examples. So it can't be that anyone remotely sane ever looks at the world and says, "I know, what we need is more and better ways of killing people, because what we have isn't enough!"
So what is it? Why do people build such huge deadweight loss systems, far beyond anything required to simply protect ourselves from invasion by others? It can't be the purported serendipitous benefits because they could be had in far less devastating ways.
Your correct but the engineers want every vehicle on the road to be either gas or electric, preferably electric. Hmm about 100,000 horses stabled in NYC, give or take, so at a 2kwh charging load thats 2,000 & 100,000 = 200,000,000 or 200 mega-watt hours and that is more then the entire supply that the state of New York has available and thats a combination of all available fuels we have on line.
1900 called... they want their argument back.
By 1940 or 1950, the 40 to 50 years you don't see this happening before, how many horses were still stabled in New York City?
It's wrapped in extreme amounts of emotive narrative, but that story just describes how something can go horribly wrong if you do extremely dangerous things without planning them properly, and don't follow established rules.
None of which changes the fact that cave diving is extremely dangerous with a very high fatality rate even when you plan them properly and do follow established rules.
Cave divers sometimes emphasize the errors people made in a few cases and seem to want to imply that that means everyone who dies while cave diving has made a mistake. But other than entering the cave in the first place that is known to be false: it is possible to die while cave diving even though you do everything right. That's why cave diving has such a high rate of deaths amongst experienced divers, unlike ordinary diving, where experienced divers virtually never die even though novices do with depressing regularity.
That is, simply because A => B, doesn't mean that B doesn't happen when !A. And we know from raw empirical fact that experienced cave divers who are doing everything right still die. We even know why that is the case: there are any number of relatively minor malfunctions that do not have any response except death.
When cave diving goes wrong, it goes horribly wrong.
And despite the optimistic claims of many people posting here, it can go wrong even if you do everything right. This is quite different from ordinary diving, where fatalities are almost always a result of someone doing something stupid in a situation than a more experienced person would survive.
Cave diving fatalities are if anything more prevalent in experienced divers, and all the smug folks here talking about how you just have to Do It My Way--which for some reason is never justified via actual statistical analysis or good empiricism, just lots of anecdotes and manly blustering--are just fatalities waiting to happen.
In over thirty years of participation in a variety of activities I've experienced relatively serious equipment malfunctions or other problems while scuba diving, sky-diving and climbing (including free climbing places I really shouldn't have) and I've survived all of them by responding appropriately. In a cave dive, especially a deep one, there are any number of relatively minor things that can go wrong that you don't have any way of responding to.
That's not adventure: it's stupidity. You may as well play Russian Roulette and then brag about the thrill and belittle the sane people who think you're an idiot.
You can drill all you want and test your gear all you want, but the reality remains that gear does fail, and in extreme cave diving there are any number of relatively minor failures that you have no way of responding to except death. That is why people die in caves, and not in open water, and all the manly bluster in the world won't save you when it happens.
People who dive in caves are engaging in the same kind of technological and personal over-confidence that let BP drill a mile underwater without ever seriously and realistically considering what could go wrong, or recognizing that they had no useful response available when it inevitably did.
A lot of scientists do philosophy, and a lot of modern philosophers are giant science junkies.
Then why does anyone teach logics where Leibniz's Law is true, given that it is false, has known to be false for over half a century, and this falsity has profound everyday consequences?
In the areas I'm interested in--identity theory, empiricist epistemology, ontology, and ethical choice under uncertainty--I am not aware of anyone working in the fields who has anything resembling a grasp of the relevant science done in the past half-century.
With regard to epistemological and ontological questions, for example, I've never read any philosopher who seems able to grasp that ontology can constrain concepts without determining them, whereas anyone with a modicum of scientific literacy has no difficulty at all with it. And if you talk to a philsopher about the ontology of actions (waves, for example) you'll rapidly find a level of innumeracy that's embarrassing. There are people out there who are willing to not just talk about but actually pronounce upon the ontology of classical waves without being able to solve the wave equation.
Go ask your favourite ontologist, "Can a wave be properly conceptualized as an action or a thing or both?" The answer will almost certainly stun you with its lack of understanding of the topic, unless you don't understand the topic yourself.
By "understanding science" I don't mean "read the blogs and pop sci garbage we see on/." I mean "actually have a working grasp of the topic", because that is what is required to do reasonable philosophy in an area.
Then why are Americans so rude compared to Canadians? And why has not American courtesy increased with the expansion of concealed and open carry laws in the past decade or two?
but why haven't humans or other mammalian species evolved to see/detect/transmit infrared or microwave radio?
We can detect IR at short range. It's called heat. I'm not kidding.
Long-range image forming sensors outside the visible haven't formed because they aren't needed, and in any case there's a notch about ten orders of magnitude deep in the absorption spectrum of water that precisely overlaps the visible spectrum. When your primary sensor is made out of water there is very strong evolutionary pressure to limit the range of sensitivty to the range where water is reasonably transparent.
But you're missing the fact that, from the bird's perspective, it's simply reality. It's not augmented, it's part of it.
You clearly failed philosophy (I mean that in a good way.) One of the big differences between philosophers and scientists is that philosophers still think that there's something interesting about human perceptions and human scales, rather than them just accidentally being the ones we happen to have access to.
By limiting themselves to the scale of human perceptions in every respect philosophers ensure that their conclusions will virtually never be about reality, but only about the irrelevant accidents of human perception. Oddly, Kant actually pointed them in the right direction, but because philosophers are so steadfastly innumerate and hostile to testing their ideas by systematic observation and experiment (which would make them scientists) they have consigned themselves to a permanent backwater of irrelevance.
A plain English description of the system can not be directly used to achieve the function of the patent.
This is the crux, and I hold that your claim is false.
When that becomes possible (not just theoretically possible, but can be demonstrated on a real computer), it will make the issue far more interesting. Doing this will require huge advances in artificial intelligence, though, so I doubt it will happen any time soon.
I claim that natural intelligence will do. In particular, I am talking about writing a fully customized parser to run against that specific patent document, not anything that at all general. A single-purpose language that will only parse that document or tiny variations thereof. Such a parser does define a language, and by existing makes the patent in violation of itself.
It is a curious question as to where the locus of violation lies, though: in the patent document, which is now demonstrably an instance of the invention, or in the parser. It would be bizarre in the extreme if a parser were to be held to be a violation of a patent that has nothing to do with parsers.
I agree the onus is on me to demonstrate that such a parser is possible, but anyone who has worked extensively with text processing knows that the difference between "plain English" and a somewhat manky formal language is smaller than the average person might think.
He sat down with a patent and wrote code to implement it.
Nope, he sat down with a patent and wrote code to describe it, and blogged that code to explain how the patent worked.
The code snippets are in the blog to show how the algorithm works, and are present in their usual form as an utterly common means of communication between developers.
Now, he also ran the code, to ensure he was getting it right, like someone experimenting with a prototype based on a patent to understand how it worked prior to licensing--which, by the way, is extremely common. No point in licensing something if it won't do the job you want.
Now, the patent itself is nothing but an obscure description of the algorithm, and a sufficiently clever person could build a custom parser that reduced it to an executable form. "Source code" is not a priveledged term. Anything can be "source code", as anyone who's ever written a custom language for fun knows.
So the distinction between "source code" and "the patent document" is not a difference. The patent violates itself.
The software analog of a schematic would be a textual (or possibly pseudocode, though I'm not certain on that) description of the algorithm. The source code is the implementation.
How does the "textual" description differ from "the source code", which is also text the last time I looked. And how does "pseudo code" differ from Python, exactly (seriously, I frequently treat Python as pseudo code for C++).
In particular: for any complete description of an algorithm, I can write a custom parser that reduces that textual description to executable code, possibly via an intermediate languge. At that point the patent document is the object claimed and the patent office itself is violating it, just as if they had manufactured a physical widget and given it away.
Anyone who makes a distinction between a "textual descriptoin of an algorithm" and "the source code for the algorithm" has an insufficiently advanced understanding of how software actually works.
If I patent a gizmo, and you make your own, it doesn't matter if you distributed it, you are liable for patent infringement.
But a software patent is nothing but a description of an algorithm. Full disclosure: the reason I know this is because I am a co-inventor on a software patent (I was evil once, but I got better.)
So apparently the First Rule of Software Patents is you do not talk about software patents, because by doing so you are actually in violation of the patent.
And don't kid yourself: code is how developers communicate with each other, and the distinction between pseudo-code and the real thing is utterly moot these days. Most of us write in sufficiently high level languages that our pseudo-code is indistinguishable from Python. So whenver a couple of developers talk about a patented algorithm they are almost certain to be violating the patent.
He does walk a fine line though... if he says: "Here's what Shazaam does, and here's my code to download that will do it for you" then he is coming very close to an "offer to sell" (giving it away for free is a little tenuous, but any monetary advantage he gets, even advertising revenue from page hits caused by people visiting & downloading the patented code.)
The fine line seems to me to be between the software as implemented and the patent claims description of it.
Suppose I do the following:
1) Create a custom parser that is designed to do nothing but read a particular patent document on the the USPTO's website.
2) Add a backend to the parser that generates machine code--possibly via an intermediate form like C++, Python or Java--that is nothing but a representation of the steps outlined in the patent.
3) Run said machine code.
At what point have I violated the patent? And why have I violated the patent? I have done nothing but transform the description of the steps layed out in the patent document to an isomorophic form. Since it cannot be a violaton of the patent to simply talk about it or write about it, and since the primary purpose of high level programming languages is to allow humans to describe algorithms, at what point does a description of the patent claims become a violation of the patent?
It seems to me that by granting software patents the USPTO has put the world in a position where someone who simply describes the patent in the clearest possible way is putting themselves in a position where they can be accused of contributory infringement. That would be analogous to someone who published a clearer drawing of patented material than was in the original patent documents being accused of the same.
But if all that checked out and you still had this discrepancy, you'd start to wonder if your ruler and your micrometer were really measuring the same units.
The grape analogy is not a particularly good one. Consider instead a peach analogy. With an electron you're looking at it from 20 m away. With a muon from 10 cm away.
At 10 cm you're going to be vastly more sensitive to the detailed structure of the peach. What at 20 m looked like it could be characterized adequately by a single radial parameter is now clearly a copmlex shape that doesn't even have a very sharp boundary, being covered with fuzz and all.
By far the most likely explanation of this result is something slightly wrong with our understanding of the tails of the proton's structure function, not anything as deep as physics beyond the standard model.
Massive neutrinos aside--as they require only the most minor tweak in the form of off-diagonal elements in the KM matrix--physics beyond the standard model is a bit like fusion power: we've been a few years away from detecting it for the past thirty years... It's gotta be out there somewhere, granted, but I'll be shocked if this experiment is the smoking gun.
At best it means either the theory or the experiment is wrong, and the "wrong" can vary from mundane to really interesting, with the vast weight of probability on the side of mundane.
The structure function of the proton is not simple, and calculating it depends on QCD approximations that are even less simple. The notion that it can be characterized by a single parameter is questionable.
Muons probe a very different part of the proton structure function than electrons. Muon orbitals are much smaller than electron orbitals, so protons look even less like a point mass to them. As such it is not surprising that they would result in a significantly different value for a single parameter in a particular model of the proton, even if the experiment is not in error somehow. By far the hardest part of the structure function of nucleons to model in QCD are the tails, and that is exactly what muons will be most sensitive too.
This is how experimentalists react to anomalous results: the most probable explanation, always, is that the people doing the work screwed up. We then set out to prove how they screwed up. If we can't, we start to think about other corrections seriously.
Theorists will of course have no difficulty explaining this result, even if it later turns out to be incorrect. But even if the results are correct, they will almost certainly be accounted for by relatively insignificant tweaking of QCD estimates of the proton structure function, which is good solid science, but not the kind of great big deal that TFA seems to want to make of it.
Slashdot Mirror
You know absolutely nothing about astronomy, stop talking. It's making you look like either Glenn Beck or a Retard...
You repeated repeated yourself there. Either that, or you're being mean to retards.
In any case, since sunspots are not mentioned anywhere in the Bible it is clear that this is just some secular humanist hoax. No one can actually predict astronomical events like the aurora, which are caused by God.
How could an auroral display be caused by the sun, anyway? They happen at NIGHT! Duh.
Either that, or this is just one more on the long, long list of "things Science can do that Faith can't," along with curing disease, reattaching limbs, generating clean, safe power, providing clean water and effective sewage treatment, increasing crop yeilds and preventing famine, and building depressingly deadly weapons.
in addition to Bush's idiotic 700 billion banker bailout
Strangely, I never heard a word out of any of these people when Bush was running up huge deficits... their voices only became so massively amplified when a Democrat walked in to the Oval Office.
I wonder why that is?
Liberal Arts at the core is about thinking.
No, Liberal Arts is about thinking the way pre-scientific people did it.
Read CP Snow's "Two Cultures", which laments the divide between the sciences and the liberal arts, and justly so.
So long as the liberal arts fail to adapt to the scientific world-view, including accepting the importance of mathematical reasoning alongside poetry etc, they have ceased to be what they once were, which is the living voice of Western culture. Instead they are just a cozy backwater for the scientifically illiterate.
The sciences, at the same time, become a cozy backwater for the poetically illiterate.
I can't find the specific document I was thinking of, which was a detailed technical report on a particular GCM by the people who wrote it, but if you dig into the details of any GCM description you will find statements like this: "In this process, salinity is added to the newly formed snow-ice to guarantee the salt conservation. It is more physically reasonable to reduce the salinity of sea ice, but such a treatment requires to deal with the sea ice salinity as a prognostic variable."
That one happens to deal with non-conservation of salinity, but the problem and the procedure in the same in all cases: the models do not strictly conserve some important quantity, and is therefore "fixed up" by performing some ad hoc adjustment. This is unphysical, and anyone who has ever done a long-term integration of any model describing any physical system that can be actually tested in the lab knows that such ad hoc corrections almost always produce significantly unphysical behaviour in the results.
I'll hasten to say that model authors are up-front about this stuff: the GCM's I've looked at have been well-described. But they have also all been unphysical in one respect or another, from artificially fixed boundary conditions to non-conservation of energy (which was then "fixed up" by adjusting air temperatures) and that is a serious problem for the predictive power of their long-term integrations.
where in this 'long history of global warming and global cooling' did the average temperature rise 0.56C (1F) a degree in 50 years?
During any Dansgaard-Oeschger event, obviously.
From the linked article: "For example, about 11,500 years ago, averaged annual temperatures on the Greenland icepack warmed by around 8C over 40 years, in three steps of five years (see [2], Stewart, chapter 13) - 5C change over 30-40 yrs more common." (emphasis added).
They have a periodicity of about 1500 years, so it's not like we're talking about a one-off at the end of the last glaciation, either.
Beyond all of this, we use a wide variety of physics models -- both global models and models for specific components. A model can be something as simple as a calculation of radiative heat transfer under different gas mixtures, or as complicated as something that models the sources and sinks over the entire planet and covers all of the various feedback mechanisms. Models are nearly all based on first principles in large part or entirity. Depending on the type of model, they're either validated with lab data or historic climate data.
I haven't looked at the current report, although it looks at first glance like they have used some fairly strong, robust, estimators, which is good. It is extremely unfortunate that the reporting around it is the typical sensationalist nonsense that has done so much to discredit anyone with concerns about climate change. In a year or two when someone finds an error in the data and it turns out that the past ten years WEREN'T "the warmest on record" we'll inevitably treated by another round of self-serving propoganda from the same smug bastards who spent years promoting 1998 as THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD as if that was proof the world was ending, and then said, "well, it really isn't all that important" when the claim turned out to be false.
No serious Bayesian would accpet that A can vastly increase the plausibility of B, but !A does not decrease the plausibility of B one little bit.
However, your claim that most of the models used in climate research are true to first principles is false. I am a computational physicist, and every GCM I have looked at has non-physical aspects that violate well-established physical principles, most worriesomely conservation of energy. For a model that is nohting but a long-term integration of a physical system to violate conservation of energy is extremely problematic, and yet I have seen no discussion anywhere that looks at how this and other unphysical assumptions affect the model results.
This is unusual: in the area of radition transport physics, for example, there are a variety of relatively standard computational models that are used, with minor variants. Despite the tiny size of the community compared to climate science, there are a significant number of papers exploring nothing but the effects of various unphysical aspects of the models.
If you could point me to anything similar for any major GCM I would be most greatful. The publications I have seen are all over-views of the model, detailing the assumptions but not donig anything to explore their effects.
For the record: I think dumping tonnes of shit into the atmosphere is a bad idea, and strongly support cap and trade on the basis of how well it worked for sulphur emmissions in the '90's; I think ocean temperatures are by far the most compelling evidence for global climate change; I think our understanding of the science is inadequate to use as a basis for public policy; I think people who pass from "the science is established" to "we must do XYZ to fix things" are letting their emotional concern for the possible consquences of the science and one particular interpretation of the results get in the way of their objectivity and contribute more noise than value to the debate.
That's a rather juvenile way to put it as I don't know any serious Christian who honestly believes the transcendental God of the Bible is a corporeal being who levitates in Earth's atmosphere.... but okay. They believed "that some old man in the sky was watching them all the time." They did not believe that some old man in the sky was coming up with clever ways for them to watch their neighbors all the time.
There's a lot wrong with your claims. I guess you don't know very much about Christianity, either in contemporary practise or historically.
The Reverend Jerry Fallwell once described the establishment of the Kingdom of God after Armageddon as "moving his headquarters from planet Heaven to planet Earth." The literal role of the sky in various Protest Fundamentalist theologies is very important, as suggested by the terminology they use to describe then end of days.
So saying the GP's description is juvenile is incorrect: it is a fair reflection of extremely common beliefs amongst apparently sincere and serious mainstream Christian groups that are active in the United States today.
With regard to your second claim, I believe you ought to learn a little about the role of confession in Catholicism, particularly up to the time of the Reformation. There are perfectly sound sociological analyses of the institution that strongly suggest it was nothing but a means of social control via constant surveillance, by self and others.
So please, before you post about Christianity inform yourself as to what actual living Christians believe and have believed. That way you won't embarrass yourself quite so much with your ignorance of this widely held an diverse faith.
Maybe its just me, but it seems like an aweful lot of 'science' recently has been based on pure speculation.
It is, indeed, just you.
"Pure" speculation would be speculation without reference to facts or well established abstract principles.
In the present case, there is a distinct feature in the upper atmosphere of Neptune. That is a fact. We also have a whole bunch of facts about the details of the feature. Furthermore, we have a bunch of facts about the properties of comets and the odds of a comet of a given size hitting Neptune in the past few hundred years. And finally, we have a bunch of facts about how the atmosphere of a gas giant reacts to being hit by a comet of a given size, as we have observed such impacts. And really finally, we have an enormous wealth of fact regarding the properties and behaviours of fluid systems. It's called 'fluid mechanics' and is one of the most well-established areas of physics, although it is not without it's ongoing challenges due to non-linearity.
None of that is speculation. Zero. All facts, all the time. To be "pure speculation" something would have to not use any of those facts.
Now, given those facts, we can extrapolate from what we know and ask, "Given the facts that we have about comets and gas giants and fluid mechanics and this specific feature on Neptune, can we interpret this specific feature on Neptune about which we have many facts as the result of a relatively recent cometary impact?" The answer is "yes".
That is not speculation, pure or otherwise. That is science: rational inference from well-established facts and abstract principles.
If you don't approve of science done in this way you should stop using your computer, cell phone, etc, and never drive a car or fly in a plane, as all of those technologies depend on scientific discoveries that are equally "speculative".
Have you ever SEEN, for example, with your own eyes, the lift that a plane's wing provides? I don't think so. You just notice that planes have wings and that they don't fall down, and engage in some pure speculation" that wings provide lift. I call bullshit.
unless they're sociopaths who don't give a damn about other people's health, well being, or livlihood.
Never assume venality where stupidity will do. There are actually two types of people who are opposed to government regulation: the sociopaths, and the dupes. I know this because I was once a dupe.
The arguments for "the free market" can sound pretty compelling to someone who is naive and basically decent, who doesn't appreciate the depths of human depravity in the wild. We still see libertarians regularly on /. who are so sincerely addled by their ideology that they don't recognize state failures like Somalia and the tribal lands in northern Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan as real world examples of their theories in action. They simply can't believe that people would behave in such obviously idiotic, sub-optimal ways for centuries or longer.
Yet anyone who looks at history realizes that stateless, unregulated societies are unstable against tribalism. If humans were economically rational automatons they would not be, but we aren't.
On the flip side, being "for" regulation doesn't mean that we can't disagree vigorously over what kind of regulation is appropiate. But having that debate means first figuring out that we aren't sociopaths on either the left or the right (and don't kid yourself: at the level of the political leadership the left has always been dominated by sociopaths, just like the right, and for the same reasons.)
A corporation's only goal is to maximize profit. That's how it works. They actually have a responsibility to their shareholders to make money.
Actually this is a huge problem with the modern public corporation: the people who run them (managers and executives) have interests that are different from and very frequently opposed to the owners (shareholders).
This crisis in governance is an acute and ongoing disaster, and how it ultimately plays out is going to shape the world in the 21st century.
You will be developing our SkyNet and Colossus robot based anti personnel devices.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could develop stuff like the Internet without at the same time spending such a vast quantity of otherwise productive wealth on deadweight loss activities like developing weapons systems?
And if we simply must pour huge amounts of otherwise productive wealth into deadweight loss activities, why not make it space exploration, unlikely-to-pay-off energy research, a cure for the common heartbreak?
What is it about killing people in large numbers that is so fascinating that it compels our interest?
It certainly isn't any actual utility: violience is the least efficient and effective way of solving any problem. History supports this with endless examples and a handful of counter-examples. So it can't be that anyone remotely sane ever looks at the world and says, "I know, what we need is more and better ways of killing people, because what we have isn't enough!"
So what is it? Why do people build such huge deadweight loss systems, far beyond anything required to simply protect ourselves from invasion by others? It can't be the purported serendipitous benefits because they could be had in far less devastating ways.
Your correct but the engineers want every vehicle on the road to be either gas or electric, preferably electric. Hmm about 100,000 horses stabled in NYC, give or take, so at a 2kwh charging load thats 2,000 & 100,000 = 200,000,000 or 200 mega-watt hours and that is more then the entire supply that the state of New York has available and thats a combination of all available fuels we have on line.
1900 called... they want their argument back.
By 1940 or 1950, the 40 to 50 years you don't see this happening before, how many horses were still stabled in New York City?
It's wrapped in extreme amounts of emotive narrative, but that story just describes how something can go horribly wrong if you do extremely dangerous things without planning them properly, and don't follow established rules.
None of which changes the fact that cave diving is extremely dangerous with a very high fatality rate even when you plan them properly and do follow established rules.
Cave divers sometimes emphasize the errors people made in a few cases and seem to want to imply that that means everyone who dies while cave diving has made a mistake. But other than entering the cave in the first place that is known to be false: it is possible to die while cave diving even though you do everything right. That's why cave diving has such a high rate of deaths amongst experienced divers, unlike ordinary diving, where experienced divers virtually never die even though novices do with depressing regularity.
That is, simply because A => B, doesn't mean that B doesn't happen when !A. And we know from raw empirical fact that experienced cave divers who are doing everything right still die. We even know why that is the case: there are any number of relatively minor malfunctions that do not have any response except death.
When cave diving goes wrong, it goes horribly wrong.
And despite the optimistic claims of many people posting here, it can go wrong even if you do everything right. This is quite different from ordinary diving, where fatalities are almost always a result of someone doing something stupid in a situation than a more experienced person would survive.
Cave diving fatalities are if anything more prevalent in experienced divers, and all the smug folks here talking about how you just have to Do It My Way--which for some reason is never justified via actual statistical analysis or good empiricism, just lots of anecdotes and manly blustering--are just fatalities waiting to happen.
In over thirty years of participation in a variety of activities I've experienced relatively serious equipment malfunctions or other problems while scuba diving, sky-diving and climbing (including free climbing places I really shouldn't have) and I've survived all of them by responding appropriately. In a cave dive, especially a deep one, there are any number of relatively minor things that can go wrong that you don't have any way of responding to.
That's not adventure: it's stupidity. You may as well play Russian Roulette and then brag about the thrill and belittle the sane people who think you're an idiot.
You can drill all you want and test your gear all you want, but the reality remains that gear does fail, and in extreme cave diving there are any number of relatively minor failures that you have no way of responding to except death. That is why people die in caves, and not in open water, and all the manly bluster in the world won't save you when it happens.
People who dive in caves are engaging in the same kind of technological and personal over-confidence that let BP drill a mile underwater without ever seriously and realistically considering what could go wrong, or recognizing that they had no useful response available when it inevitably did.
A lot of scientists do philosophy, and a lot of modern philosophers are giant science junkies.
Then why does anyone teach logics where Leibniz's Law is true, given that it is false, has known to be false for over half a century, and this falsity has profound everyday consequences?
In the areas I'm interested in--identity theory, empiricist epistemology, ontology, and ethical choice under uncertainty--I am not aware of anyone working in the fields who has anything resembling a grasp of the relevant science done in the past half-century.
With regard to epistemological and ontological questions, for example, I've never read any philosopher who seems able to grasp that ontology can constrain concepts without determining them, whereas anyone with a modicum of scientific literacy has no difficulty at all with it. And if you talk to a philsopher about the ontology of actions (waves, for example) you'll rapidly find a level of innumeracy that's embarrassing. There are people out there who are willing to not just talk about but actually pronounce upon the ontology of classical waves without being able to solve the wave equation.
Go ask your favourite ontologist, "Can a wave be properly conceptualized as an action or a thing or both?" The answer will almost certainly stun you with its lack of understanding of the topic, unless you don't understand the topic yourself.
By "understanding science" I don't mean "read the blogs and pop sci garbage we see on /." I mean "actually have a working grasp of the topic", because that is what is required to do reasonable philosophy in an area.
An armed society is a polite society.
Then why are Americans so rude compared to Canadians? And why has not American courtesy increased with the expansion of concealed and open carry laws in the past decade or two?
but why haven't humans or other mammalian species evolved to see/detect/transmit infrared or microwave radio?
We can detect IR at short range. It's called heat. I'm not kidding.
Long-range image forming sensors outside the visible haven't formed because they aren't needed, and in any case there's a notch about ten orders of magnitude deep in the absorption spectrum of water that precisely overlaps the visible spectrum. When your primary sensor is made out of water there is very strong evolutionary pressure to limit the range of sensitivty to the range where water is reasonably transparent.
But you're missing the fact that, from the bird's perspective, it's simply reality. It's not augmented, it's part of it.
You clearly failed philosophy (I mean that in a good way.) One of the big differences between philosophers and scientists is that philosophers still think that there's something interesting about human perceptions and human scales, rather than them just accidentally being the ones we happen to have access to.
By limiting themselves to the scale of human perceptions in every respect philosophers ensure that their conclusions will virtually never be about reality, but only about the irrelevant accidents of human perception. Oddly, Kant actually pointed them in the right direction, but because philosophers are so steadfastly innumerate and hostile to testing their ideas by systematic observation and experiment (which would make them scientists) they have consigned themselves to a permanent backwater of irrelevance.
A plain English description of the system can not be directly used to achieve the function of the patent.
This is the crux, and I hold that your claim is false.
When that becomes possible (not just theoretically possible, but can be demonstrated on a real computer), it will make the issue far more interesting. Doing this will require huge advances in artificial intelligence, though, so I doubt it will happen any time soon.
I claim that natural intelligence will do. In particular, I am talking about writing a fully customized parser to run against that specific patent document, not anything that at all general. A single-purpose language that will only parse that document or tiny variations thereof. Such a parser does define a language, and by existing makes the patent in violation of itself.
It is a curious question as to where the locus of violation lies, though: in the patent document, which is now demonstrably an instance of the invention, or in the parser. It would be bizarre in the extreme if a parser were to be held to be a violation of a patent that has nothing to do with parsers.
I agree the onus is on me to demonstrate that such a parser is possible, but anyone who has worked extensively with text processing knows that the difference between "plain English" and a somewhat manky formal language is smaller than the average person might think.
He sat down with a patent and wrote code to implement it.
Nope, he sat down with a patent and wrote code to describe it, and blogged that code to explain how the patent worked.
The code snippets are in the blog to show how the algorithm works, and are present in their usual form as an utterly common means of communication between developers.
Now, he also ran the code, to ensure he was getting it right, like someone experimenting with a prototype based on a patent to understand how it worked prior to licensing--which, by the way, is extremely common. No point in licensing something if it won't do the job you want.
Now, the patent itself is nothing but an obscure description of the algorithm, and a sufficiently clever person could build a custom parser that reduced it to an executable form. "Source code" is not a priveledged term. Anything can be "source code", as anyone who's ever written a custom language for fun knows.
So the distinction between "source code" and "the patent document" is not a difference. The patent violates itself.
The software analog of a schematic would be a textual (or possibly pseudocode, though I'm not certain on that) description of the algorithm. The source code is the implementation.
How does the "textual" description differ from "the source code", which is also text the last time I looked. And how does "pseudo code" differ from Python, exactly (seriously, I frequently treat Python as pseudo code for C++).
In particular: for any complete description of an algorithm, I can write a custom parser that reduces that textual description to executable code, possibly via an intermediate languge. At that point the patent document is the object claimed and the patent office itself is violating it, just as if they had manufactured a physical widget and given it away.
Anyone who makes a distinction between a "textual descriptoin of an algorithm" and "the source code for the algorithm" has an insufficiently advanced understanding of how software actually works.
If I patent a gizmo, and you make your own, it doesn't matter if you distributed it, you are liable for patent infringement.
But a software patent is nothing but a description of an algorithm. Full disclosure: the reason I know this is because I am a co-inventor on a software patent (I was evil once, but I got better.)
So apparently the First Rule of Software Patents is you do not talk about software patents, because by doing so you are actually in violation of the patent.
And don't kid yourself: code is how developers communicate with each other, and the distinction between pseudo-code and the real thing is utterly moot these days. Most of us write in sufficiently high level languages that our pseudo-code is indistinguishable from Python. So whenver a couple of developers talk about a patented algorithm they are almost certain to be violating the patent.
He does walk a fine line though... if he says: "Here's what Shazaam does, and here's my code to download that will do it for you" then he is coming very close to an "offer to sell" (giving it away for free is a little tenuous, but any monetary advantage he gets, even advertising revenue from page hits caused by people visiting & downloading the patented code.)
The fine line seems to me to be between the software as implemented and the patent claims description of it.
Suppose I do the following:
1) Create a custom parser that is designed to do nothing but read a particular patent document on the the USPTO's website.
2) Add a backend to the parser that generates machine code--possibly via an intermediate form like C++, Python or Java--that is nothing but a representation of the steps outlined in the patent.
3) Run said machine code.
At what point have I violated the patent? And why have I violated the patent? I have done nothing but transform the description of the steps layed out in the patent document to an isomorophic form. Since it cannot be a violaton of the patent to simply talk about it or write about it, and since the primary purpose of high level programming languages is to allow humans to describe algorithms, at what point does a description of the patent claims become a violation of the patent?
It seems to me that by granting software patents the USPTO has put the world in a position where someone who simply describes the patent in the clearest possible way is putting themselves in a position where they can be accused of contributory infringement. That would be analogous to someone who published a clearer drawing of patented material than was in the original patent documents being accused of the same.
This is, to put it mildly, insane.
But if all that checked out and you still had this discrepancy, you'd start to wonder if your ruler and your micrometer were really measuring the same units.
The grape analogy is not a particularly good one. Consider instead a peach analogy. With an electron you're looking at it from 20 m away. With a muon from 10 cm away.
At 10 cm you're going to be vastly more sensitive to the detailed structure of the peach. What at 20 m looked like it could be characterized adequately by a single radial parameter is now clearly a copmlex shape that doesn't even have a very sharp boundary, being covered with fuzz and all.
By far the most likely explanation of this result is something slightly wrong with our understanding of the tails of the proton's structure function, not anything as deep as physics beyond the standard model.
Massive neutrinos aside--as they require only the most minor tweak in the form of off-diagonal elements in the KM matrix--physics beyond the standard model is a bit like fusion power: we've been a few years away from detecting it for the past thirty years... It's gotta be out there somewhere, granted, but I'll be shocked if this experiment is the smoking gun.
Which means that the theory is wrong
At best it means either the theory or the experiment is wrong, and the "wrong" can vary from mundane to really interesting, with the vast weight of probability on the side of mundane.
The structure function of the proton is not simple, and calculating it depends on QCD approximations that are even less simple. The notion that it can be characterized by a single parameter is questionable.
Muons probe a very different part of the proton structure function than electrons. Muon orbitals are much smaller than electron orbitals, so protons look even less like a point mass to them. As such it is not surprising that they would result in a significantly different value for a single parameter in a particular model of the proton, even if the experiment is not in error somehow. By far the hardest part of the structure function of nucleons to model in QCD are the tails, and that is exactly what muons will be most sensitive too.
This is how experimentalists react to anomalous results: the most probable explanation, always, is that the people doing the work screwed up. We then set out to prove how they screwed up. If we can't, we start to think about other corrections seriously.
Theorists will of course have no difficulty explaining this result, even if it later turns out to be incorrect. But even if the results are correct, they will almost certainly be accounted for by relatively insignificant tweaking of QCD estimates of the proton structure function, which is good solid science, but not the kind of great big deal that TFA seems to want to make of it.