There should be no errors. Period. Your program should not allow errors.
So what is a program supposed to do when the hardware it talks to fails or is not plugged in? Or when the network resource it requires is not available? Shuffle its feet and hem and haw and hope the user won't notice?
Anyone who says "there should be no errors" doesn't know how the word "error" is used in computing. That there should be no BUGS may be a formally realizable goal (at least that's what my functional programmer friends tell me) but let me ask you: when was the last time you drove a car that had no error notifications on the dashboard? No idiot lights, no oil pressure gauge, no fuel gauge, nothing but a speedometer?
Never, right? That's because all machines have a physical component whose state is sometimes unable to fulfill user requirements, and we need to communicate that state to users. We call those communications "error messages" in the software world, and they cover everything from "out of memory" to "printer on fire."
On another note, I like the ball-kicking idea, but my users are mostly female, so it won't work. Recently I've had a bunch of complaints about missing hardware because they are clicking through the dialog that detects that hardware is missing, and then complaining when the main UI comes up and tells them there is no hardware connected. They never remember they've clicked through because they are so used to simply clicking OK on any dialog that comes up, a phenomenon that has gotten much worse in the past few years.
Ummmm. Isn't one of the leading definitions of a "random" process that it is a process which exhibits maximum complexity, and thus is not predictable except by the execution of the identical process. ?
Yes it is. So what?
You've pointed out that randomness implies unpredictability.
You seem to be asking about how non-random data can be unpredictable, which is an unrelated question.
A => B does not mean !A => !B.
Everyone in Canada has decent health care. That is completely unrelated to the question of whether anyone in the United States or France or Australia (that is, people who are not in Canada) has decent health care.
Couldn't disagree more, except that Descartes was clearly an important transitional figure whose philosophical work, like Hume's, is as relevant to what serious modern philosophy ought to be doing as Newton's alchemical work is to what serious modern chemistry ought to be doing.
"Having God as a first premise" is trivially incoherent. It leaves unanswered and the questions, "What is God?" and "How do I know anything about God in the first place?" which can obviously only be answered by reference to something else, which in fact is sense-experience, rather that "thought" as Descarte imagined. Since sense-experience is trivially prior to the very notion of God, it is clear that having God as a first premise is incoherent at best and dishonest at worst.
Descartes big mistake in this regard was to believe that since he could fantasize about a disembodied intelligence that it had some ontological weight. Everyone but philosophers now knows that this method is useless, because we know that it is easy for us to imagine things that are contradictory and impossible. Humans suck at deducitve closure, so it is easy for us to fail to notice the incoherence of our own imaginings. We have only two methods of ensuring such coherence: empirical investigation and mathematical deduction, neither of which philosophers have adopted because they don't care about truth. They continue to treat their imaginings and the limits of their imaginings as being ontological determinative.
Descartes' mathematical work, which was fundamental to the eventual melding of algebra and geometry that gave us modern mathematics, has had lasting value. His philosophical work was important only for its transitional role. He was a step on the way that's best forgotten today by all but historians.
Hume is even less coherent than Descarte, with less excuse. His attempts to undertake an empirical analsyis of sense-experience are so far off the mark as to be laughable. Even knowing what was known in his own time about the perception of objects it was obvious he didn't have a clue what he was talking about with his fantasies of pure sensations, which are incredibly hard to produce even in the laboratory. Hume somehow failed to notice that he had never had a pure sensation in his life. That tells you something about the quality of his philosophy. That he ultimatly ends up arguing that his own books should be burned--since they clearly fail to fulfill the criteria for non-burning he sets out--is another clue to just how incoherent he was.
Hume is to be honoured for waking Kant from his "dogmatical slumber", but not much else.
My kid's broken arm cost $7,500 for the ER visit, and another couple of grand for the cast work.
One of my kids was thrown from a horse at the age of 10 or so. He was bleeding from one ear. I took him to emerg where he was seen in minutes. Busted eardrum. Doc cleaned it out, prescribed some kick-ass anti-biotic that's used for injuries in cases where there's a high chance of infection, and away we went
Cost of antibiotics: about $100.
Cost of seeing the doc: $0 (other than what I pay in taxes for health care).
Oh, yeah: I am Canadian. There's great peace of mind in a situation like that, knowing that whatever happens your child is going to get the best care available.
I've lived and worked in the States, and I wouldn't take your health care system for anything. My only major beef with the Canadian system is we have too many restrictions on private provision of medical services, and that is strictly a defensive move against the predatory health care industry to the south of us, which would move in, take over and fuck things up if we gave it the least bit of wiggle room.
The MIT test didn't work based on calls, it used a program that would run every 5 minutes to locate itself based on cell tower information (a low grade GPS).
I live near the Canada-US border with nothing but water between me and them. My phone regularly picks up cell towers on the far side. So anyone tracking my location via cell tower will find that I magically teleport tens of kilometers and to another country on a regular basis, especially in the middle of the night.
Never thought I'd be such a cynical old fart at 30, but if I want to socialise with people I'll do it down the fucking pub thank you very much:)
That's not cynicism, that's humanity.
I'm pretty sure that 30 years from now there will still be pubs with people in them. I'm equally sure there won't be twitter.
But I do have a terrible feeling that half the people in the pub will have borg-implant cameras feeding their "SelfBook" stream, and we will all be stars in someone else's reality TV show.
When that happens I'm opening a bar called the Faraday Cage...
It's a pretty chilling description of the collapse of convention, law, norms, and the very meaning of words in the face of violence.
It also has a disorientingly modern ring to it. I read Thucydides sometime in the 90's, and there were a couple of conflicts in the headlines at the time that his description of social collapse on Corcyra could have applied to pretty much word-for-word.
The hilarious thing about Hobbes is that he is using historical empiricism to argue for totalitarian subjectivism, abandoning any pretence of self-consistency rather than accepting the possibility of multi-culturalism, which he must have known about because the Romans practised it pretty broadly. And while the Roman Empire didn't last forever, neither did anything else, and the nominal epistemic authority of the Senate (to do things like proclaim dead emperor's to be gods) didn't save it anymore than its relatively relaxed view of what other gods a person might believe in or customs they might have.
Mozart had a particular style - how many hours of listening to Mozart-ish music do you need before it becomes commonplace and boring?
This is a frankly idiotic objection that nevertheless hints at a deeper truth. It is idiotic because obviously you can burn out on Mozart even more easily than Mozart-like music, because there's so much less of it.
Furthermore, the formulaic nature of most popular music gives the lie to the claim that people are more likely to burn out on such genres: the whole reason such genres exist is that people love them.
But... art does not exist in a critical vacuum, and critics are full of shit that depends on the monkey hierarchies that humans use to organize themselves. The vastly more idiotic question in the summary, opposing "soul" and "mere mathematics" is aimed at this point. It isn't about soul: it's about power
, the power of critics and the artists who achieve critical acclaim based on monkey politics.
Once this technology matures there will be a little bit of work left for people who develop new fundamental styles--or more likely learn how to capture organically-developed styles of real performers into algorithms, but once those algorithms are captured, anyone will be able to download them and create endless novel compositions in that style.
Not much opportunity for power or monkey politics in that. Which sounds like a truly wonderful thing to me.
Using open source deprives closed source vendors of potential revenue, which is the same argument used against pirates
The "way" in which this is "true" would be the one known as "false", right?
To see how stupid this argument is, consider the case where my company sells product X that competes with your product Y, but product X is cheaper or better. Then by your argument my company deprives your company of "potential revenue", whatever that is. Which you are arguing makes me a pirate "in a way". And the only "way" I can see is "not one little bit."
Of course in "free market capitalist America" the way companies deal with any competitor is to deploy all the legal and lobbying clout they can to shut down commercial competitors that might deprived them of that precious "potential revenue". It looks like fascism to me, but fat white men keep on calling it "free market capitalism" so who am I to argue?
The problem is that FOSS can't be suppressed this way, so the fascist corporations and their lackies in the American oligarchy are trying to use other means: in this case an absurdly false claim that encouraging the use of FOSS, which can only exist in the form it does because of strong copyright protections that creators can use to restrict copying via license terms, somehow weakens strong copyright protections.
When you figure out how encouraging something that depends on strong copyright protections for its existence weakens copyright, do please get back to us.
It only makes sense to take precautions so as to avoid any chance of eliminating your own species.
Unfortunately, you are carefully innumerate here. You seem to be suggesting for some reason that the cost of "precautions" is necessarily small. One of Lomberg's main points is that what has been suggested so far is expensive and ineffective, and that much of the money spent could be deployed more effectively fighting problems that are unequivocal: malaria, poor water supply infrastructure, etc.
Who are you, when compared to humanity?
One might reasonably surmise that I am part of humanity, and therefore due the same dignity and consideration as every individual. "Humanity" after all is nothing but the sum total of all human individuals, so you would have to be insane or evil--probably both if the history of the 20th century is any indication--to even suggest that any individual should ever be sacrified for the good of "humanity."
I think the thing that pisses people off about Lomberg is that he is bringing rational, real-world, pragmatic considerations into something that power-hungry assholes want to be an ideological crusade. He is pointing out that there is no particular justification for making global climate change the dominant policy driver of the 21st century, as opposed to, say, malaria erradication.
Eliminating malaria would save far more lives with much greater certainty than any amount of speculative insurance against AGW, although there are other reasons to invest in clean power--notably that oil is running out and coal has enough environmental problems to fill a strip-mine.
But eliminating malaria doesn't give power-hungry assholes any excuse to claim that only they can save "humanity" while stomping on the faces of individuals, forever. So boring, practical, rational policy does not get made, and Lomberg is pointing that out. Power-hungry assholes--who want to sacrifice individual rights and well-being for the sake of "humanity" and who ask arrogant rhetorical questions like, "Who are you when compared to humanity?"--hate that.
I am humanity. So are you. So is everyone else. Attempting to put individual humans in opposition to abstract humanity is the rhetorical tool of petty tyrants, and is in that respect quite useful, because as soon as someone does it you know they do not care about human life or well-being, but only about their own rapacious quest for power.
I guess we'll never really know. Maybe it was both.
We do really know. There is no plausible answer to Michael Frayn's argument in his play "Cophenhagen". Ergo, the matter is incontrovertibly settled: there is simply no way that Heisenberg could have got his initial estimate of the mass of a uranium bomb so badly wrong (several tonnes) at Farm Hall if he had been working on such a project for the NAZIs.
This is one of those controversies that has been going on for so long that there's a little industry built up around it, but like buggy-whip makers the product they are pushing is no longer much needed.
Everybody should read "Copenhagen" at some point, it's really the first and last word on this issue.
It certainly isn't the first word: the Farm Hall debriefings would probably qualify as that. But as someone who knows a little bit about neutron diffusion calculations I do believe it is the last: Frayne has put together a very difficult argument to answer regarding Heisenberg's role in any NAZI A-bomb project. His portrayal of Heisenberg as a experimentally naive theorist also rings true.
Read it if you must, but play is definitely worth seeing, although the first part of the second act limps a bit.
Experimental violation of Bell's inequalities indicates that either the universe is not locally deterministic (which is equivalent to being acausal, for obvious relativiistic reasons) or it is superdeterministic.
Those are the only two choices: the specific interpretations you put on the violation of local determinism all amount to the same ultimate phenomonology, which is truly unknownable things, like when a radioactive atom is going to decay. If the decay can be caused by something outside of our backward light-cone, it is for all practical purposes acausal, and always will be, unless you believe time travel is possible. I don't, personally.
Superdeterminism is not a theory that anyone sane would choose to believe in. There are no self-consistent arguments that can be advanced in its favour, and anyone who does advance an argument in its favour is simply guilty of either hypocrisy or stupidity, as an argument is nothing but a purported reason to choose one belief over the another.
Nor is it clear why a superdeterministic universe would happen to come about in such a way that Bell's Inequalities were always violated. Nor does superdeterminism give us any reason to believe that Bell's Inequalities will continue to be violated tomorrow. But of course, the very act of anyone anywhere being convinced that superdeterminism is true proves it false, so it isn't a very interesting theory on any account.
Something to get excited about in the field of basic electronic components.
It's an interesting bit of basic research. There's probably another decade of almost-as-basic research to be done before we'll know if this will ever get out of the lab.
There are uncountably many interesting phenomena that never make it out of the lab for every one that does. Doing the basic research is a necessary aspect of technological innovation, but it is by no means sufficient, and the ability to do something on a small-scale with hands-on expertise is no indication that it will be useful or usable in an industrial setting.
One of the problems with tech news reporting is that the continual stream of stories like this one, full of breathless anticipation, is never followed by an honest review five years later of where the "breakthrough" ended up, which means "breakthroughs" tend to fade quietly from memory without any awareness or acknowledgement that they didn't pan out as expected.
If we saw more followups on ideas that never got beyond the "interesting phenomenon" stage we'd have a greater appreciation for the tiny fraction of innovations that do live to see the light of day in industrial applications. But that would require tech reporters to do more than lightly edit press releases and call them "news".
So I insert an off-color or dumb joke, or stop at that point and ask a simple question, or just get up and move around. Students perk up, I proceed. In a classroom, you can actually see boredom, confusion, excitement, and so on.
This is, in its own way, as unimaginative a response to the possibilities of new tech as the "let's lay off all the teachers" thing.
When a student starts to zone out in an online lecture they can pause it, go get a cup of tea, stretch, whatever, and then resume. The locus of responsibility and control is completely different, and your complaint misses that entirely.
So long as we try to do nothing but deliver canned lectures over the Web, just replacing the horse with an internal combustion engine, we'll end up making expensive and mostly useless toys. Its only when someone figures out how to take advantage of the new opportunities the new tech creates by seeing past the "problems" created by being unable to do things the old way that we'll see what the possibilities really are. In the case of the automobile, it was really cheap mass production of the complete car, which was never of value for carriages because the horse was always the biggest expense.
I'm not smart enough to know how to do that for education, but I do know that the "school" of the late 21st century will look very little like that of the late 20th century, which was itself the result of Victorian-era social reforms.
We'd then expect, over the next decade, to have rapidly increasing temperatures as all the warming factors are positive, then probably a flat profile after that
Solar radiation is remarkably invariant, as Warmers point out every time Denialists mention it. Now suddenly it's an important variable?
No significant volcanoes since the 1992 Mount Pinatubo erruption, which shaved about 1 C off global temperatures for a year. Volcanic timescales are very short compared to a 15 year scale.
El Nino is a climate effect as well as a cause. If a climate model able to correctly predict its direction and strength I'd be pretty impressed.
So yeah, the next decade may see a marked increase in the warming rate. If it does, I'll take it seriously.
If it doesn't, what'll you do?
Also, isn't it curious that there's no evidence of warming in the past 15 years but we keep on hearing about how Arctic ice is melting at record rates. What do you suppose is driving that?
If global temperatures have not increased, yet Arctic melting is not only going on but going on at a rate far faster than anyone predicted (which is what I always see reported) what is driving it?
Clearly not anything to do with the Earth's overall heat budget, which you have just admited has been very nearly neutral in the past 15 years.
That is: since there has been no significant increase in the Earth's atmospheric heat content in the past 15 years, none of the climate effects seen in that time can be anything but the result of something else, unless the cumulative effect of GW/CC up to 1995 is somehow the cause, but since the water cycle has an extremely short timescale it seems implausible that the effects would continue to worsen over 15 years with no warming.
I'm not saying this to be faceious... it really does seem to me to be extremely odd, to the point where one might want to look elsewhere for the climate effects that have been observed in the past 15 years, if we all agree the Earth's heat budget has been almost perfectly neutral over that time.
in the meantime we have to progress on a path of caution -- which effectively means continuing to reduce carbon emissions IN CASE they are causing the problem...
The precautionary principle applies just as much to economic harm as any other kind, so this approach requires paying a great deal of attention to the economic consequences of CO2 reduction. Which is as it should be, although based on past experience with enclosure of the commons while the transition is bound to be bumpy the eventual outcome ought to be not too bad.
The only problem I have with the precautionary principle is that people use it as if only the things that they happen to be worried about personally require a precautionary approach, so they count environmental damage but not economic damage on one side, and vice versa on the other.
Funny that absent from their "concerns" of foreign citizens is the statement that "increasing temperatures will increase drought and famine in equatorial developing nations resulting in starvation and displacement."
Maybe because even though what these clowns are doing borders on declaring PI to be equal to three, they know a tiny bit about what GW/CC models, for all their stunning inadequacies predict?
The effects of GW/CC are dominantly polar, with some effects at high altitudes in lower latitudes. I know that there was a letter signed by a bunch of Nobelists that said something about how the developing/equatorial regions were going to get hit hardest, but that is just laughably wrong if you take GW/CC models seriously.
If you're just making things up to grab headlines and political power, though, I guess it makes a lot of sense.
That's because you need more than 15 years to get statistically significant figures.
You do realize you're just making that up? And that if the past 15 years showed marginally significant warming you'd be trumpeting it as "proof" that GW/CC was a "fact"? This is what bugs scientists about the AGW crowd: you use quite different standards for confirming and disconfirming evidence. The anti-AGW crowd do the same thing. I've been on both sides of the fence as I've learned more about the evidence, and neither is a particularly comfortable place for a scientist, as one gets continually pushed by anti-scientific individuals who introduce absolute irrelevancies, like the dangers to the ecology or the economy if their preferred belief happens to be true.
One useful way of determining you are dealing the an anti-scientist is that they mix introduce claims about the effects of GW/CC (or carbon dioxide reduction policies) as if they were arguments for or against GW/CC. As soon as someone does that, you know they aren't interested in science, but in politics and power.
With regard to Phil Jones' statement: an estimated rate of 0.13 C per decade would lead one to expect 0.2 C in 15 years. Instead, the rate is statistically equivalent to zero. That's interesting, but a more interesting question is: what is the highest rate that the observed trend is consistent with?
If it is higher than 0.13 C then the models are not in trouble. If it is not, then the models are.
But you cannot say at the same time that an observed rate that is consistent with the models over 15 years is confirmatory, and that an observed rate that is inconsistent with the models over 15 years is not disconfirmatory.
Feel free to keep using your local area to prove/disprove climate change
The OP was asking, quite reasonably, what evidence would it take for you to stop believing in global warming or climate change.
You have ignored the question and replied with various carefully selected bits of evidence from different isolated locales that do support your notions of global warming or climate change.
You've missed his point: there are serious people coming up with disconfirming cases. Those Greek hydrologists, for example, who found that of the local long-term temperature records they compared to model results, there was most an anti-correlation between the model predictions and the data.
It is easy to hand-wave and dismiss the odd thing here and there. It happens all the time in science. But with regard to GW/CC and AGW in particular, there are a LOT of odd things, and the current flat trend in "global temperature" is one of them.
Scientists are more interested in where and how their models are WRONG, and I'm not hearing a lot of that from the GW/CC folks. I'm hearing a lot of what the OP pointed out: the carefully crafted political use of every climate event whatsoever to attempt to bolster their position that we need to kill everyone and invade Poland before it's too late. Or something like that--I may have the details of their proposed solutions wrong, but they sound dire enough to warrant a really high degree of certainty, and a complete lack of faith.
Sounds a bit more measured and reasonable than your biased histrionics. Yes?
No, it sounds like he has said there is no warming trend in the past 14 or 15 years. "Almost significant" means "not significant." Nor is p = 0.05 exactly a stellar level of certainty. Physicists like things at the three sigma level, for the most part.
And you have ignored the OP's quite reasonable question: what data would make you change your beliefs regarding global warming/climate change? If any climate event whatsoever constitutes "evidence" for global warming/climate change in your mind, then you are acting on faith and the kinds of arguments that rational individuals might use to convince you of the error of your ways are quite different than if you are acting on a rational basis.
See now how that's nothing like the denial you spun it as?
I don't see that at all, but perhaps that's because I understand statistics, as perhaps the OP does and you, very clearly, do not.
"Not significant at p = 0.05" means "not significant at p = 0.05". Or, given that p = 0.05 is the usual bound on statistical significance in even the fuzziest subjects, it means "not statistically significant."
"There has been an uptrend that is not significant" is more properly interpretable as "there has been no warming" than anything else. Anyone who understands anything about statistics understands this. If you don't, I can only presume it is because you don't understand statistics.
Declaring your ignorance of statistics, and your belief in global warming, does not make the truth of global warming any more plausible.
And you have quite significantly failed the answer the OP's question: what would it take to make you question your faith?
In particular, what do the models say about warming in the past 15 years? Are they consistent with the observed data? The interesting scientific question is regarding the validity of the models, which are radically unphysical parameterizations of a very complex, nonlinear physical system. Why is no one asking that question? Because this is what scientists do, in the normal course of events: we test ideas, other people's and our own, to destruction. Which is why, by the way, that only someone violently anti-scientific would withhold data from people who might use it to argue against them.
But please do keep repeating speculations unsupported by the preponderance of evidence as if they were widely and uncontroversially believed. It helps muddy the waters, and god knows the waters need to be muddied.
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There should be no errors. Period. Your program should not allow errors.
So what is a program supposed to do when the hardware it talks to fails or is not plugged in? Or when the network resource it requires is not available? Shuffle its feet and hem and haw and hope the user won't notice?
Anyone who says "there should be no errors" doesn't know how the word "error" is used in computing. That there should be no BUGS may be a formally realizable goal (at least that's what my functional programmer friends tell me) but let me ask you: when was the last time you drove a car that had no error notifications on the dashboard? No idiot lights, no oil pressure gauge, no fuel gauge, nothing but a speedometer?
Never, right? That's because all machines have a physical component whose state is sometimes unable to fulfill user requirements, and we need to communicate that state to users. We call those communications "error messages" in the software world, and they cover everything from "out of memory" to "printer on fire."
On another note, I like the ball-kicking idea, but my users are mostly female, so it won't work. Recently I've had a bunch of complaints about missing hardware because they are clicking through the dialog that detects that hardware is missing, and then complaining when the main UI comes up and tells them there is no hardware connected. They never remember they've clicked through because they are so used to simply clicking OK on any dialog that comes up, a phenomenon that has gotten much worse in the past few years.
Ummmm. Isn't one of the leading definitions of a "random" process that it is
a process which exhibits maximum complexity, and thus is not predictable
except by the execution of the identical process. ?
Yes it is. So what?
You've pointed out that randomness implies unpredictability.
You seem to be asking about how non-random data can be unpredictable, which is an unrelated question.
A => B does not mean !A => !B.
Everyone in Canada has decent health care. That is completely unrelated to the question of whether anyone in the United States or France or Australia (that is, people who are not in Canada) has decent health care.
Couldn't disagree more, except that Descartes was clearly an important transitional figure whose philosophical work, like Hume's, is as relevant to what serious modern philosophy ought to be doing as Newton's alchemical work is to what serious modern chemistry ought to be doing.
"Having God as a first premise" is trivially incoherent. It leaves unanswered and the questions, "What is God?" and "How do I know anything about God in the first place?" which can obviously only be answered by reference to something else, which in fact is sense-experience, rather that "thought" as Descarte imagined. Since sense-experience is trivially prior to the very notion of God, it is clear that having God as a first premise is incoherent at best and dishonest at worst.
Descartes big mistake in this regard was to believe that since he could fantasize about a disembodied intelligence that it had some ontological weight. Everyone but philosophers now knows that this method is useless, because we know that it is easy for us to imagine things that are contradictory and impossible. Humans suck at deducitve closure, so it is easy for us to fail to notice the incoherence of our own imaginings. We have only two methods of ensuring such coherence: empirical investigation and mathematical deduction, neither of which philosophers have adopted because they don't care about truth. They continue to treat their imaginings and the limits of their imaginings as being ontological determinative.
Descartes' mathematical work, which was fundamental to the eventual melding of algebra and geometry that gave us modern mathematics, has had lasting value. His philosophical work was important only for its transitional role. He was a step on the way that's best forgotten today by all but historians.
Hume is even less coherent than Descarte, with less excuse. His attempts to undertake an empirical analsyis of sense-experience are so far off the mark as to be laughable. Even knowing what was known in his own time about the perception of objects it was obvious he didn't have a clue what he was talking about with his fantasies of pure sensations, which are incredibly hard to produce even in the laboratory. Hume somehow failed to notice that he had never had a pure sensation in his life. That tells you something about the quality of his philosophy. That he ultimatly ends up arguing that his own books should be burned--since they clearly fail to fulfill the criteria for non-burning he sets out--is another clue to just how incoherent he was.
Hume is to be honoured for waking Kant from his "dogmatical slumber", but not much else.
My kid's broken arm cost $7,500 for the ER visit, and another couple of grand for the cast work.
One of my kids was thrown from a horse at the age of 10 or so. He was bleeding from one ear. I took him to emerg where he was seen in minutes. Busted eardrum. Doc cleaned it out, prescribed some kick-ass anti-biotic that's used for injuries in cases where there's a high chance of infection, and away we went
Cost of antibiotics: about $100.
Cost of seeing the doc: $0 (other than what I pay in taxes for health care).
Oh, yeah: I am Canadian. There's great peace of mind in a situation like that, knowing that whatever happens your child is going to get the best care available.
I've lived and worked in the States, and I wouldn't take your health care system for anything. My only major beef with the Canadian system is we have too many restrictions on private provision of medical services, and that is strictly a defensive move against the predatory health care industry to the south of us, which would move in, take over and fuck things up if we gave it the least bit of wiggle room.
The MIT test didn't work based on calls, it used a program that would run every 5 minutes to locate itself based on cell tower information (a low grade GPS).
I live near the Canada-US border with nothing but water between me and them. My phone regularly picks up cell towers on the far side. So anyone tracking my location via cell tower will find that I magically teleport tens of kilometers and to another country on a regular basis, especially in the middle of the night.
Never thought I'd be such a cynical old fart at 30, but if I want to socialise with people I'll do it down the fucking pub thank you very much :)
That's not cynicism, that's humanity.
I'm pretty sure that 30 years from now there will still be pubs with people in them. I'm equally sure there won't be twitter.
But I do have a terrible feeling that half the people in the pub will have borg-implant cameras feeding their "SelfBook" stream, and we will all be stars in someone else's reality TV show.
When that happens I'm opening a bar called the Faraday Cage...
It's a pretty chilling description of the collapse of convention, law, norms, and the very meaning of words in the face of violence.
It also has a disorientingly modern ring to it. I read Thucydides sometime in the 90's, and there were a couple of conflicts in the headlines at the time that his description of social collapse on Corcyra could have applied to pretty much word-for-word.
The hilarious thing about Hobbes is that he is using historical empiricism to argue for totalitarian subjectivism, abandoning any pretence of self-consistency rather than accepting the possibility of multi-culturalism, which he must have known about because the Romans practised it pretty broadly. And while the Roman Empire didn't last forever, neither did anything else, and the nominal epistemic authority of the Senate (to do things like proclaim dead emperor's to be gods) didn't save it anymore than its relatively relaxed view of what other gods a person might believe in or customs they might have.
Mozart had a particular style - how many hours of listening to Mozart-ish music do you need before it becomes commonplace and boring?
This is a frankly idiotic objection that nevertheless hints at a deeper truth. It is idiotic because obviously you can burn out on Mozart even more easily than Mozart-like music, because there's so much less of it.
Furthermore, the formulaic nature of most popular music gives the lie to the claim that people are more likely to burn out on such genres: the whole reason such genres exist is that people love them.
But... art does not exist in a critical vacuum, and critics are full of shit that depends on the monkey hierarchies that humans use to organize themselves. The vastly more idiotic question in the summary, opposing "soul" and "mere mathematics" is aimed at this point. It isn't about soul: it's about power
, the power of critics and the artists who achieve critical acclaim based on monkey politics.
Once this technology matures there will be a little bit of work left for people who develop new fundamental styles--or more likely learn how to capture organically-developed styles of real performers into algorithms, but once those algorithms are captured, anyone will be able to download them and create endless novel compositions in that style.
Not much opportunity for power or monkey politics in that. Which sounds like a truly wonderful thing to me.
Using open source deprives closed source vendors of potential revenue, which is the same argument used against pirates
The "way" in which this is "true" would be the one known as "false", right?
To see how stupid this argument is, consider the case where my company sells product X that competes with your product Y, but product X is cheaper or better. Then by your argument my company deprives your company of "potential revenue", whatever that is. Which you are arguing makes me a pirate "in a way". And the only "way" I can see is "not one little bit."
Of course in "free market capitalist America" the way companies deal with any competitor is to deploy all the legal and lobbying clout they can to shut down commercial competitors that might deprived them of that precious "potential revenue". It looks like fascism to me, but fat white men keep on calling it "free market capitalism" so who am I to argue?
The problem is that FOSS can't be suppressed this way, so the fascist corporations and their lackies in the American oligarchy are trying to use other means: in this case an absurdly false claim that encouraging the use of FOSS, which can only exist in the form it does because of strong copyright protections that creators can use to restrict copying via license terms, somehow weakens strong copyright protections.
When you figure out how encouraging something that depends on strong copyright protections for its existence weakens copyright, do please get back to us.
That sound you just heard? Yep, you got it. Whoosh
Ok, now I get it! Oops.
I'm afraid my perspective on quantum ontology makes references to complementarity and uncertainty more than a little obscure.
It only makes sense to take precautions so as to avoid any chance of eliminating your own species.
Unfortunately, you are carefully innumerate here. You seem to be suggesting for some reason that the cost of "precautions" is necessarily small. One of Lomberg's main points is that what has been suggested so far is expensive and ineffective, and that much of the money spent could be deployed more effectively fighting problems that are unequivocal: malaria, poor water supply infrastructure, etc.
Who are you, when compared to humanity?
One might reasonably surmise that I am part of humanity, and therefore due the same dignity and consideration as every individual. "Humanity" after all is nothing but the sum total of all human individuals, so you would have to be insane or evil--probably both if the history of the 20th century is any indication--to even suggest that any individual should ever be sacrified for the good of "humanity."
I think the thing that pisses people off about Lomberg is that he is bringing rational, real-world, pragmatic considerations into something that power-hungry assholes want to be an ideological crusade. He is pointing out that there is no particular justification for making global climate change the dominant policy driver of the 21st century, as opposed to, say, malaria erradication.
Eliminating malaria would save far more lives with much greater certainty than any amount of speculative insurance against AGW, although there are other reasons to invest in clean power--notably that oil is running out and coal has enough environmental problems to fill a strip-mine.
But eliminating malaria doesn't give power-hungry assholes any excuse to claim that only they can save "humanity" while stomping on the faces of individuals, forever. So boring, practical, rational policy does not get made, and Lomberg is pointing that out. Power-hungry assholes--who want to sacrifice individual rights and well-being for the sake of "humanity" and who ask arrogant rhetorical questions like, "Who are you when compared to humanity?"--hate that.
I am humanity. So are you. So is everyone else. Attempting to put individual humans in opposition to abstract humanity is the rhetorical tool of petty tyrants, and is in that respect quite useful, because as soon as someone does it you know they do not care about human life or well-being, but only about their own rapacious quest for power.
I guess we'll never really know. Maybe it was both.
We do really know. There is no plausible answer to Michael Frayn's argument in his play "Cophenhagen". Ergo, the matter is incontrovertibly settled: there is simply no way that Heisenberg could have got his initial estimate of the mass of a uranium bomb so badly wrong (several tonnes) at Farm Hall if he had been working on such a project for the NAZIs.
This is one of those controversies that has been going on for so long that there's a little industry built up around it, but like buggy-whip makers the product they are pushing is no longer much needed.
Everybody should read "Copenhagen" at some point, it's really the first and last word on this issue.
It certainly isn't the first word: the Farm Hall debriefings would probably qualify as that. But as someone who knows a little bit about neutron diffusion calculations I do believe it is the last: Frayne has put together a very difficult argument to answer regarding Heisenberg's role in any NAZI A-bomb project. His portrayal of Heisenberg as a experimentally naive theorist also rings true.
Read it if you must, but play is definitely worth seeing, although the first part of the second act limps a bit.
Experimental violation of Bell's inequalities indicates that either the universe is not locally deterministic (which is equivalent to being acausal, for obvious relativiistic reasons) or it is superdeterministic.
Those are the only two choices: the specific interpretations you put on the violation of local determinism all amount to the same ultimate phenomonology, which is truly unknownable things, like when a radioactive atom is going to decay. If the decay can be caused by something outside of our backward light-cone, it is for all practical purposes acausal, and always will be, unless you believe time travel is possible. I don't, personally.
Superdeterminism is not a theory that anyone sane would choose to believe in. There are no self-consistent arguments that can be advanced in its favour, and anyone who does advance an argument in its favour is simply guilty of either hypocrisy or stupidity, as an argument is nothing but a purported reason to choose one belief over the another.
Nor is it clear why a superdeterministic universe would happen to come about in such a way that Bell's Inequalities were always violated. Nor does superdeterminism give us any reason to believe that Bell's Inequalities will continue to be violated tomorrow. But of course, the very act of anyone anywhere being convinced that superdeterminism is true proves it false, so it isn't a very interesting theory on any account.
Something to get excited about in the field of basic electronic components.
It's an interesting bit of basic research. There's probably another decade of almost-as-basic research to be done before we'll know if this will ever get out of the lab.
There are uncountably many interesting phenomena that never make it out of the lab for every one that does. Doing the basic research is a necessary aspect of technological innovation, but it is by no means sufficient, and the ability to do something on a small-scale with hands-on expertise is no indication that it will be useful or usable in an industrial setting.
One of the problems with tech news reporting is that the continual stream of stories like this one, full of breathless anticipation, is never followed by an honest review five years later of where the "breakthrough" ended up, which means "breakthroughs" tend to fade quietly from memory without any awareness or acknowledgement that they didn't pan out as expected.
If we saw more followups on ideas that never got beyond the "interesting phenomenon" stage we'd have a greater appreciation for the tiny fraction of innovations that do live to see the light of day in industrial applications. But that would require tech reporters to do more than lightly edit press releases and call them "news".
But, how do the stone tools fit into the, um, picture? (No no, please don't imagine it.)
No imagination required
So I insert an off-color or dumb joke, or stop at that point and ask a simple question, or just get up and move around. Students perk up, I proceed. In a classroom, you can actually see boredom, confusion, excitement, and so on.
This is, in its own way, as unimaginative a response to the possibilities of new tech as the "let's lay off all the teachers" thing.
When a student starts to zone out in an online lecture they can pause it, go get a cup of tea, stretch, whatever, and then resume. The locus of responsibility and control is completely different, and your complaint misses that entirely.
So long as we try to do nothing but deliver canned lectures over the Web, just replacing the horse with an internal combustion engine, we'll end up making expensive and mostly useless toys. Its only when someone figures out how to take advantage of the new opportunities the new tech creates by seeing past the "problems" created by being unable to do things the old way that we'll see what the possibilities really are. In the case of the automobile, it was really cheap mass production of the complete car, which was never of value for carriages because the horse was always the biggest expense.
I'm not smart enough to know how to do that for education, but I do know that the "school" of the late 21st century will look very little like that of the late 20th century, which was itself the result of Victorian-era social reforms.
We'd then expect, over the next decade, to have rapidly increasing temperatures as all the warming factors are positive, then probably a flat profile after that
Solar radiation is remarkably invariant, as Warmers point out every time Denialists mention it. Now suddenly it's an important variable?
No significant volcanoes since the 1992 Mount Pinatubo erruption, which shaved about 1 C off global temperatures for a year. Volcanic timescales are very short compared to a 15 year scale.
El Nino is a climate effect as well as a cause. If a climate model able to correctly predict its direction and strength I'd be pretty impressed.
So yeah, the next decade may see a marked increase in the warming rate. If it does, I'll take it seriously.
If it doesn't, what'll you do?
Also, isn't it curious that there's no evidence of warming in the past 15 years but we keep on hearing about how Arctic ice is melting at record rates. What do you suppose is driving that?
If global temperatures have not increased, yet Arctic melting is not only going on but going on at a rate far faster than anyone predicted (which is what I always see reported) what is driving it?
Clearly not anything to do with the Earth's overall heat budget, which you have just admited
has been very nearly neutral in the past 15 years.
That is: since there has been no significant increase in the Earth's atmospheric heat content in the past 15 years, none of the climate effects seen in that time can be anything but the result of something else, unless the cumulative effect of GW/CC up to 1995 is somehow the cause, but since the water cycle has an extremely short timescale it seems implausible that the effects would continue to worsen over 15 years with no warming.
I'm not saying this to be faceious... it really does seem to me to be extremely odd, to the point where one might want to look elsewhere for the climate effects that have been observed in the past 15 years, if we all agree the Earth's heat budget has been almost perfectly neutral over that time.
in the meantime we have to progress on a path of caution -- which effectively means continuing to reduce carbon emissions IN CASE they are causing the problem...
The precautionary principle applies just as much to economic harm as any other kind, so this approach requires paying a great deal of attention to the economic consequences of CO2 reduction. Which is as it should be, although based on past experience with enclosure of the commons while the transition is bound to be bumpy the eventual outcome ought to be not too bad.
The only problem I have with the precautionary principle is that people use it as if only the things that they happen to be worried about personally require a precautionary approach, so they count environmental damage but not economic damage on one side, and vice versa on the other.
Funny that absent from their "concerns" of foreign citizens is the statement that "increasing temperatures will increase drought and famine in equatorial developing nations resulting in starvation and displacement."
Maybe because even though what these clowns are doing borders on declaring PI to be equal to three, they know a tiny bit about what GW/CC models, for all their stunning inadequacies predict?
The effects of GW/CC are dominantly polar, with some effects at high altitudes in lower latitudes. I know that there was a letter signed by a bunch of Nobelists that said something about how the developing/equatorial regions were going to get hit hardest, but that is just laughably wrong if you take GW/CC models seriously.
If you're just making things up to grab headlines and political power, though, I guess it makes a lot of sense.
That's because you need more than 15 years to get statistically significant figures.
You do realize you're just making that up? And that if the past 15 years showed marginally significant warming you'd be trumpeting it as "proof" that GW/CC was a "fact"? This is what bugs scientists about the AGW crowd: you use quite different standards for confirming and disconfirming evidence. The anti-AGW crowd do the same thing. I've been on both sides of the fence as I've learned more about the evidence, and neither is a particularly comfortable place for a scientist, as one gets continually pushed by anti-scientific individuals who introduce absolute irrelevancies, like the dangers to the ecology or the economy if their preferred belief happens to be true.
One useful way of determining you are dealing the an anti-scientist is that they mix introduce claims about the effects of GW/CC (or carbon dioxide reduction policies) as if they were arguments for or against GW/CC. As soon as someone does that, you know they aren't interested in science, but in politics and power.
With regard to Phil Jones' statement: an estimated rate of 0.13 C per decade would lead one to expect 0.2 C in 15 years. Instead, the rate is statistically equivalent to zero. That's interesting, but a more interesting question is: what is the highest rate that the observed trend is consistent with?
If it is higher than 0.13 C then the models are not in trouble. If it is not, then the models are.
But you cannot say at the same time that an observed rate that is consistent with the models over 15 years is confirmatory, and that an observed rate that is inconsistent with the models over 15 years is not disconfirmatory.
Not if you care about science, anyway.
Feel free to keep using your local area to prove/disprove climate change
The OP was asking, quite reasonably, what evidence would it take for you to stop believing in global warming or climate change.
You have ignored the question and replied with various carefully selected bits of evidence from different isolated locales that do support your notions of global warming or climate change.
You've missed his point: there are serious people coming up with disconfirming cases. Those Greek hydrologists, for example, who found that of the local long-term temperature records they compared to model results, there was most an anti-correlation between the model predictions and the data.
It is easy to hand-wave and dismiss the odd thing here and there. It happens all the time in science. But with regard to GW/CC and AGW in particular, there are a LOT of odd things, and the current flat trend in "global temperature" is one of them.
Scientists are more interested in where and how their models are WRONG, and I'm not hearing a lot of that from the GW/CC folks. I'm hearing a lot of what the OP pointed out: the carefully crafted political use of every climate event whatsoever to attempt to bolster their position that we need to kill everyone and invade Poland before it's too late. Or something like that--I may have the details of their proposed solutions wrong, but they sound dire enough to warrant a really high degree of certainty, and a complete lack of faith.
Sounds a bit more measured and reasonable than your biased histrionics. Yes?
No, it sounds like he has said there is no warming trend in the past 14 or 15 years. "Almost significant" means "not significant." Nor is p = 0.05 exactly a stellar level of certainty. Physicists like things at the three sigma level, for the most part.
And you have ignored the OP's quite reasonable question: what data would make you change your beliefs regarding global warming/climate change? If any climate event whatsoever constitutes "evidence" for global warming/climate change in your mind, then you are acting on faith and the kinds of arguments that rational individuals might use to convince you of the error of your ways are quite different than if you are acting on a rational basis.
See now how that's nothing like the denial you spun it as?
I don't see that at all, but perhaps that's because I understand statistics, as perhaps the OP does and you, very clearly, do not.
"Not significant at p = 0.05" means "not significant at p = 0.05". Or, given that p = 0.05 is the usual bound on statistical significance in even the fuzziest subjects, it means "not statistically significant."
"There has been an uptrend that is not significant" is more properly interpretable as "there has been no warming" than anything else. Anyone who understands anything about statistics understands this. If you don't, I can only presume it is because you don't understand statistics.
Declaring your ignorance of statistics, and your belief in global warming, does not make the truth of global warming any more plausible.
And you have quite significantly failed the answer the OP's question: what would it take to make you question your faith?
In particular, what do the models say about warming in the past 15 years? Are they consistent with the observed data? The interesting scientific question is regarding the validity of the models, which are radically unphysical parameterizations of a very complex, nonlinear physical system. Why is no one asking that question? Because this is what scientists do, in the normal course of events: we test ideas, other people's and our own, to destruction. Which is why, by the way, that only someone violently anti-scientific would withhold data from people who might use it to argue against them.
It's thought to be a primary ingredient for heavy hurricane seasons.
This is actually a highly contentious notion that Christopher Landsea, an expert on hurricanes and climate, disputes.
But please do keep repeating speculations unsupported by the preponderance of evidence as if they were widely and uncontroversially believed. It helps muddy the waters, and god knows the waters need to be muddied.