But the other variables in the Drake equation? What fraction of "habitable" planets actually develop life?
Almost all.
What fraction of those develop intelligent life?
Almost none.
The other two questions are irrelevant, because the probability of evolving specifically human-like, machine-building intelligence is so close to zero as to make everything else moot.
Specifically human, machine-building intelligence of the kind that builds radios, writes symphonies, creates industrial civilizations are almost certainly approximately zero. We can say this because a) it only evolved in one species on Earth (as opposed to flight, the eye, swimming, etc, all of which evolved many times) and b) it confers no evolutionary benefit until you actually get around to building civilizations, so it must be an accidental capability selected for by some other process.
The current best theory is that human intelligence is a kind of peacock's tail: a functionally useless display mechanism that was created by the accidents of a "race to the bottom" during the process of sexual selection. As such, the evolution of specifically human, machine-building intelligence of the kind likely to be detectable at interstellar distances is arbitrarily close to zero, to the extent that we may be the only species in the universe with that capability (which suggests we might want to take better care of ourselves...)
I am amused that my original comment got a Troll mod, though. I don't see how correcting a reference from a plagiarized version to the original counts as a troll, personally.
Nobody ever mistypes, and nobody ever means things in a non-literal fashion
But people do craft egregiously wrong summaries to ensure that there is something to talk about in response to it. Without that we'd get nothing but misguided comments about how the poster has thought of a defect in the technology/idea/whatever that the people doing it have not, dull variants on standard joke templates, rants against the Obama/Bush administration or American foreign policy, etc.
the bacteria are obviously programmed to do what is best to ensure the survival of the species.
Why does everyone who's learned the slightest bit of evolutionary theory suddenly think everything is about the survival of the species?
It's never about the survival of the species. In this case, where some kin-selection has unsurprisingly being going on, it's about survival of the most closely related individuals.
Don't you mean Utnapishtim's ark? The Noah story is just a thinly edited rip of the Sumerian flood story, and it's really irritating to see an second-hand imitation get all the credit.
If people are going to take ancient writings literally they really ought to focus on the primary sources, and not the secondary copies like the Noah story.
Air bubbles trapped in ice for hundreds of thousands of years have revealed that humans are changing the composition of the atmosphere in a manner that has no known natural parallel.
Curious, but I wonder why the article doesn't mention the dramatic and sudden rise in temperature ~9000 BC due to a Dansgaard-Oeschger event, which is a far larger effect (8 C rise in ~ 40 years!) than anything projected by unphysical AGW simulations. It's almost as if the author of the article is deliberately engaging in anti-scientific fear-mongering by focusing on purported causes rather than actual effects.
Hence, it was probably re-built at a different site with different local effects.
And regardless, I'm sure I can find someplace that happens to have had the coldest year on record. Which proves nothing, because we're talking about "climate change", not "global warming".
There's a lot of good science in climatology, but anyone who claims that AGW is a slam-dunk, rather than a highly plausible proposition, is not making the claim on scientific but rather political grounds.
You know, I think a lot of us here understand basic physics well enough
A lot of readers here don't. They are the ones that make the simple stuff worth addressing.
With regard to efficiency, in the case of a photon drive you're creating the photons, after all, and that takes energy. In this case you're merely differentially scattering some vacuum modes, which could easily take less energy, although it could easily take more, for all I know.
You are correct that it's "just a reaction drive", as anything has to be if it doesn't violate the invariance of physical laws with position (which is what would be required for linear momentum to not be conserved.)
"You can't see moons around Jupiter. If there were, it would mean the Earth isn't the center of the universe." (Galileo's critics really said this.)
"You can't sail across the Atlantic to China. If you could, it would mean the Earth was round" (many, many errors on all sides of that statement!)
"Anyone who is talks about the practical uses of nuclear power is talking moonshine" (Rutherford in 1920, more-or-less.)
Scientific progress is the process of tearing down previously believed truths as well as discovering new, hopefully somewhat less contingent truths (although of course non-zero contingency always remains, which is a big deal to philosophers,mathematicians and other insane people, but not something anyone else cares very much about.)
People who have done actual calculations, rather than an arm-chair analysis on/., think that it is possible to change the momentum of vacuum modes, thereby making them non-vacuum modes (one would presume) by introducing asymmetries from rotating magneto-electric materials and in various other ways.
Introducing asymmetries has long been know to produce real particles from the vacuum. One of the most dramatic theoretical instances of this is a step-function potential with more than twice the electron mass. If you solve the Dirac equation in this situation you get weird phenomena like negative transmission and reflection coefficients that are negative or greater than unity.
The explanation is that such a large potential (so long as the step occurs over a scale of less than the Compton wavelength of the electron, which is about a pico-metre) has the ability to separate the virtual pairs that make up the "Dirac sea", thus turning them into actual particles (at the cost of the required amount of energy). If you could actualize this you could then accelerate the electron and positron to fire them off in the same direction, giving your apparatus a push in the process. At the most abstract level, what these guys are proposing is no different from that.
When you move across cultures, different body language can have specific interpretations, or in one country be a habit where in another country it is considered a rudeness.
That there are differences does not mean there are not universals.
While it is true that "body language" broadly defined is not universal, aspects of it are, as are aspects of facial expression, just as they are in other species.
Pointing out the existence of differences says nothing about the existence of universals.
So attack the scientists for being human if you must, but the science is sound and must be heeded.
This is exactly the problem: arrogant over-confidence on the part of the ignorant on both sides with regard to what "sound" science means for public policy.
Most climate research is sound science. Climate researchers are doing the best they can to understand a ferociously complex system that is dominated by turbulent and chaotic phenomena on all pretty much all scales, a complex fluid whose thermodynamic properties vary in all dimensions and is subject to feedbacks that are at best understood approximately, and modelled with codes that are, at root, profoundly unnphysical.
Some of the predictions they make seem to be validated by the data (the pattern of glacial retreat, for example) but others seem to be contradicted (long-term single-point temperature records that show no warming even withouth heat-island correction when models predict warming for those regions.)
Nothing like a robust, closed-form argument exists for anthropogenic global warming. We have unphysical computer models and imperfect data. That's all sound science.
And then some smug bastard comes along and says we "must" do XYZ (insert the smug bastard's favourite policy options here) on the basis of "sound science."
Well yeah, the science is sound. But that doesn't remotely mean it is adequate as a basis for public policy, even on the basis of the precautionary principle, which must be applied to economic as well as environmental consequences.
On the other side of the debate, we have Big Hydrocarbons, which wants to keep raping the planet with impunity, and can come up with some plausibility arguments as to why we should ignore the cases where climate science is in agreement with the data, in the same way AGW advocates can come up with plausibility arguments as to why we should ignore the cases where climate science predictions disagree with the data.
But plausibility arguments are lame. Only more data, more research, more science will help.
In the meantime, there are a lots of reasons--independently of the risks of AGW--to rein in Big Hydrocarbons, not least of which is the general protection of everyone's interest in the atmospheric commons.
But by linking the policy debate to the "soundness" of the science, the climate community has made it politically problematic to revise their conclusions in certain ways. That is damaging to science: far moreso than the fairly weak attacks that Big Hydrocarbons have launched.
And a whole lot cheaper to observe the collisions.
Not if by "observe" you mean "observe with multiple layers of detectors that the collision happens inside of", which is the only sense of the term anyone would use in this context.
Re:This is what linguists have been waiting for
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Monkeys With Syntax
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However, it might be the case that this "syntax" has developed in parallel to human syntax from some common protolanguage
What is interesting here is not the structure of the language, but the fact of it.
Humans are possessed of a wide range of incredibly powerful, flexible and general linguistic mechanisms. Non-human animals are frequently held to be entirely non-linguistic.
This is implausible on the most basic evolutionary grounds: evolution is an elaborative process, and to have such remarkable abilities amongst humans strongly suggests a lot of linguistic or proto-linguistic capability in our ancestral line, and probably in other animals too. Otherwise, it would be like humans having the ability to run fifty miles in one go in a world where no other animal has legs.
While the sexual selection forces that drove the evolution of human intelligence are powerful and able to produce relatively rapid elaboration of new capabilities, those capabilities have to be elaborations of something that already existed, and so we should naively expect this kind of discovery. Unfortunately, because linguists seem for some reason to think that human language is the only possible model for language (see the other comments from linguists in this thread, for example) it can be difficult to recognize the linguistic (or possibly linguist-ish) capabilities of non-human species that do not conform well to that model.
Or perhaps if I have something that I don't want anyone to know, it's NONE OF THEIR FUCKING BUSINESS!
There's also a nice bit of equivocation in Schmidt's statement. Privacy is mostly not about "not wanting anyone to know"; it's mostly about not wanting everyone to know.
My g/f knows what I like in the bedroom. My mother (I hope!) does not and never will.
Privacy is about personal control over facts about ourselves. We want to be able to limit who knows what about us, and that is an entirely reasonable desire.
"Google" is a collection of people who at the moment mostly claim to want to protect our control over facts about ourselves, but those facts persist on the servers those people have control over pretty much forever, and tomorrow or ten years from now those servers will be under the control of an entirely different group of people. So as a matter of inevitable fact, any information that the group of people who constitute "Google" have today will be in the hands of a random group of strangers in the future.
So be prepared for everything you have ever allowed the people at Google to tie to your personal identity to be public knowledge at some future date. It is certain to happen.
You do realize that a lot of glaciers and polar caps are melting?
Pointing out that X, which is predicted by AGW models, is happening, does not change the fact that Y, which is also predicted by AGW models, is not happening.
So your point in no way addresses my observation (I am the GP above--dunno how it came out A/C'd) that the evidence is mixed. Just like the observation that the possible consequences of AGW are dire, the observation that some evidence is consistent with AGW predictions fails to address the sceptic's point, which is that there are significant pieces of evidence that do not match AGW predictions, and that the range of AGW predictions is sufficiently broad that you can find a prediction for most phenomena, including local cooling.
That's all well and good, but AGW proponents cannot point to the cases where the data are consistent with relatively robust predictions and say, "This proves AGW is happening" while at the same time ignoring data--like the local temperature records I mention above--that is inconsistent with similar predictions and say, "This does not disprove AGW is happening."
That is, the seriousness with which AGW proponents and deniers take any particular data set is entirely dependent on how well is supports their preferred outcome.
An honest sceptic will point out both the data on both sides, as I did. Replying to such a sceptic with a rhetorical question regarding one particular piece of data on your favoured side simply adds noise to the debate without meaningfully furthering it.
To further the debate we need more data, better models and more open and accessible data and models: given the huge public policy implications of climate science, the climate science community has an absolute obligation to make all of their raw data and metadata available to everyone. Anything else and there will be a justified suspicion that the data are being massaged or used selectively for political purposes.
Regardless of which side of the debate you're on, if you're interested in the science you must be in favour of this kind of open process.
Seems like there is an article like this posted at least once a year by someone marveling at the "resurgence" of vinyl.
Shhh.... stupid people get angry when you point out their dumb behaviour.
The phenomenon of "vinyl is about the make a comeback" goes back at least to the early 90's, when vinyl was still a siginificant fraction of the new-music market. I remember being told knowingly by some idiot audiophile that vinyl was going to be the next big thing in '91 or thereabouts, and was he proud of his deep insight into the future of music and contemptuous of my naive belief that digital music probably had a few advantages that would cause it to complete its sweep of the market in a few years.
Me and my friends have been talking about the resurgence of vinyl DJs for years
This pretty much explains the boring "vinyl is the new black" story that has popped up with completely predictable regularity every few years since the mid 80's.
"Me and my friends" want to be cool and trendy (and ungrammatical, although I've probably spelled "ungrammatical" wrong) and ahead of the great unwashed, so we're going to say that vinyl is the greatest thing and about to make a come-back so we can say we were the first.
Unfortunately for the trendy kids, vinyl has been "about to make a comeback" since 1990. It isn't clear how repeating the same tired old chesnut is remotely trendy.
When vinyl gets up over a few percent of the total music market, I'll be willing to say it's making a comeback. Hanging on to a less-than-1% niche isn't a comeback. It's a nostalgia item.
And your quest for exclusivity? Welcome to the digital world. Nothing but your actual skills and talents are even remotely exclusive to you. Anything that can be copied, will be. The search for exclusive content is a sad wet relic of the analog age.
DRM obsolescence of content sold by perfectly viable companies is a known problem. It has nothing to do with companies going out of business or ceasing to sell a particular device. It's all about the DRM technology and the chance for the company to get a sweeter licensing deal from someone else, and by-the-way force their customers to repurchase any content they still care about in the new DRM-crippled form.
If you buy DRM-crippled content there is a near certainty that you will lose it over a timescale of a few years. As someone who still has a few books he bought thirty years ago or more, that is not even remotely acceptable to me.
I think the real cost of publishing these articles is not the 'printing' of the article, (basically just pasting the pdf submitted to the web) but in peer-reviewing the articles.
Reviewers don't get paid (trust me on this) so it isn't clear why this should be a large cost. Hell, for many journals even a significant number of the editorial positions are paid only a nominal stipend, being filled by academics who want to pad their CV (and in fairness, who want to contribute something of value to the community.)
If you present different information to Googlebot than to normal users and Google finds out about it, you get kicked out of the Google index
False. Springer, the academic publisher, has dozens of paywalled journals that routinely return hits on Google that lead to pages that have none of the search terms and whose contents are inaccessible. Nor is there any metadata in those pages that would justify the hit, and I'm damned sure their pagerank isn't due to having many other high quality pages pointing at their requests for $29.95 for PDF download. The only way this is happening is if the GoogleBot is seeing something that ordinary users can't.
There is some non-obvious game being played here between Google and the newspapers, and I don't know what it is, but it doesn't smell good. This is "public policy theatre" we're watching here, which plays the same role as "security theatre": it distracts people from the real issues and makes them feel like their freedom is being taken away for a reason (yeah, ok, I'll take my tinfoil hat off now...)
I have written to their support, posted on their forums -please Google - if you are listening - MAKE PAYWALLED SITES AN OPTION in my preferences and set it OFF by default.
YES, please. My god I hate this aspect of Google, which is an incredibly annoying time-suck. It's even worse for me because I have a uni account that gives me access to most of the paywalled research, but only when I'm on campus, so when I'm off-campus and I want to know something I just desperately want the option to turn off all that paywalled crap.
This is by far the most hateful, stupid and annoying thing Google does, and in close to a decade of searches I have never once purchased article access from one of these pirates (academics don't get paid by journals for their manuscripts, and now that publishing costs have fallen to almost nothing due to Web delivery there is absolutely no excuse for the kind of rates academic publishers are charging. Open access journals are the future, and the sooner Google gets on board with the future, the better).
If you want my theory, we're dealing with an unknown autistic artist's work.
That's an interesting idea, with the key word being "artist". The almost complete lack of errors and corrections in the text strongly suggest that it's nonsense rather than any kind of encoded message. Considered as a weird kind of autistic art, that might be kind of cool, although by far the more likely solution is that John Dee or one of his associates created the thing as a fraud to bilk gullible aristocrats or royalty (Charles V gets mentioned as a possible target, if I recall correctly.)
Seriously: an error-free exotic MS with bizarre and suggestive (in the broadest sense) drawings that we are pretty sure passed through the hands of known "magicians" at least some of whom almost certainly accepted in their own minds that much of what they sold was fraudulent (many probably at least half-believed in what they were doing, but still...)
Never assume intelligence when venality will do, or something like that.
but in that case, nobody has a reason to mislabel a more expensive product and sell it to you as a less-expensive product.
This is an excellent logical analysis of the Vegetarian Society's lame argument. I'm thinking they are probably just squeamish.
A vegetarian friend and I debated this question a couple of years ago, and she pointed out that she would feel creepy eating vat-grown meat (just as she felt creepy eating fake tofu-based meat when she lived in Taiwan, where apparently it can be really hard to tell the difference between the fake stuff and the real stuff.) To explain her attitude--which she acknowledged had no particularly rational basis, she asked if I'd be comfortable eating vat-grown human meat.
I could argue that human meat has all kinds of hygiene issues associated with it, but that would be cowardice: the fact is it would just creep me out to eat it, and I can understand how many vegetarians would be creeped out by vat-grown meat. They should just have the courage to say so, instead of making up bizarre and logically unsupportable claims about labelling.
In other words, guilds bear a pretty piss-poor correlation to street gangs, compared to just about any small real-world organization.
This is actually a plus: they have found a single, rather simple, underlying mathematical model that can be used to account for the formation dynamics of two quite different types of human group, and the model is not a simple "like-seeks-like" idea, but rather a "team formation" thing that includes the value of diversity of skills amongst group members.
I agree that this is an odd thing to be found in Phys. Rev. E, but on the other hand: dynamics are dynamics, and we can learn things from simplistic mathematical models just as well as we can from simplistic non-mathematical models (and if you think the models used by math-phobic social scientists aren't simplistic, you aren't sufficiently conversant with the social sciences.)
Disclaimer: I am a physicist who has worked professionally in several fields, particularly genomics, and found that the underlying concepts used by physicists to build mathematical models of complex systems are applicable to complex systems that don't happen to be "physical systems" in the usual sense of the term. Like I said, dynamics is dynamics, and there's not one shred of evidence that the dynamics of human systems are any more complex than the dynamics of viscous flows, say.
Rubbish, the scientists aren't "pushing for" anything, they're just presenting results. These results may of course suggest the need for action, but that's in the realm of politics.
There are multiple problems with this stance. The first is that scientists almost always have preferred answers. When the first Hubble results were coming in an the value of Ho seemed anomalously high, I recalled someone commenting that if so-and-so had a religion, it would be 50 (the low end of expected Ho values.)
Most of the time, this doesn't matter. With AGW it does, precisely because people with money and power would like to use the purported risk of AGW to get more money and power, and Big Hydrocarbons would like to kill everyone and invade Poland, or whatever the industrial equivalent of that is.
There are huge economic and political stakes in this game, and they ultimately turn on the quality of the data and the strength of the results. Those are complex things to analyze, and when scientists have an agenda--which they almost always do--they tend to overstate the quality of their data and interpretations over others (in paleoanthropology I believe this is called the "Leakey Effect").
I don't think there's anything going on in the AGW crowd beyond typically optimistic group-think, but if you don't think that's a problem, well... we disagree with each other.
As for finding common ground: we find it in the data--all of which should be openly published, unmassaged, to allow for honest dialog--and in the fundamental theories--physics and chemistry, mostly--that underpin the often unphysical climate models.
Insofar as sceptics deny those things, they are hopeless. But if they play the game of science by the rules, using their biases to provide viable alternatives to the AGW consensus or valid criticisms of other work, they should be fully engaged in the scientific process.
The public policy issues related to AGW are too important to leave any honest voices unheard.
Slashdot Mirror
But the other variables in the Drake equation? What fraction of "habitable" planets actually develop life?
Almost all.
What fraction of those develop intelligent life?
Almost none.
The other two questions are irrelevant, because the probability of evolving specifically human-like, machine-building intelligence is so close to zero as to make everything else moot.
Specifically human, machine-building intelligence of the kind that builds radios, writes symphonies, creates industrial civilizations are almost certainly approximately zero. We can say this because a) it only evolved in one species on Earth (as opposed to flight, the eye, swimming, etc, all of which evolved many times) and b) it confers no evolutionary benefit until you actually get around to building civilizations, so it must be an accidental capability selected for by some other process.
The current best theory is that human intelligence is a kind of peacock's tail: a functionally useless display mechanism that was created by the accidents of a "race to the bottom" during the process of sexual selection. As such, the evolution of specifically human, machine-building intelligence of the kind likely to be detectable at interstellar distances is arbitrarily close to zero, to the extent that we may be the only species in the universe with that capability (which suggests we might want to take better care of ourselves...)
If only there was a "-1, Non sequitur" mod...
I am amused that my original comment got a Troll mod, though. I don't see how correcting a reference from a plagiarized version to the original counts as a troll, personally.
Nobody ever mistypes, and nobody ever means things in a non-literal fashion
But people do craft egregiously wrong summaries to ensure that there is something to talk about in response to it. Without that we'd get nothing but misguided comments about how the poster has thought of a defect in the technology/idea/whatever that the people doing it have not, dull variants on standard joke templates, rants against the Obama/Bush administration or American foreign policy, etc.
the bacteria are obviously programmed to do what is best to ensure the survival of the species.
Why does everyone who's learned the slightest bit of evolutionary theory suddenly think everything is about the survival of the species?
It's never about the survival of the species. In this case, where some kin-selection has unsurprisingly being going on, it's about survival of the most closely related individuals.
Noah's ark.
Don't you mean Utnapishtim's ark? The Noah story is just a thinly edited rip of the Sumerian flood story, and it's really irritating to see an second-hand imitation get all the credit.
If people are going to take ancient writings literally they really ought to focus on the primary sources, and not the secondary copies like the Noah story.
Air bubbles trapped in ice for hundreds of thousands of years have revealed that humans are changing the composition of the atmosphere in a manner that has no known natural parallel.
Curious, but I wonder why the article doesn't mention the dramatic and sudden rise in temperature ~9000 BC due to a Dansgaard-Oeschger event, which is a far larger effect (8 C rise in ~ 40 years!) than anything projected by unphysical AGW simulations. It's almost as if the author of the article is deliberately engaging in anti-scientific fear-mongering by focusing on purported causes rather than actual effects.
Hence, it was probably re-built at a different site with different local effects.
And regardless, I'm sure I can find someplace that happens to have had the coldest year on record. Which proves nothing, because we're talking about "climate change", not "global warming".
There's a lot of good science in climatology, but anyone who claims that AGW is a slam-dunk, rather than a highly plausible proposition, is not making the claim on scientific but rather political grounds.
You know, I think a lot of us here understand basic physics well enough
A lot of readers here don't. They are the ones that make the simple stuff worth addressing.
With regard to efficiency, in the case of a photon drive you're creating the photons, after all, and that takes energy. In this case you're merely differentially scattering some vacuum modes, which could easily take less energy, although it could easily take more, for all I know.
You are correct that it's "just a reaction drive", as anything has to be if it doesn't violate the invariance of physical laws with position (which is what would be required for linear momentum to not be conserved.)
You can't change the momentum of the vacuum.
"You can't see moons around Jupiter. If there were, it would mean the Earth isn't the center of the universe." (Galileo's critics really said this.)
"You can't sail across the Atlantic to China. If you could, it would mean the Earth was round" (many, many errors on all sides of that statement!)
"Anyone who is talks about the practical uses of nuclear power is talking moonshine" (Rutherford in 1920, more-or-less.)
Scientific progress is the process of tearing down previously believed truths as well as discovering new, hopefully somewhat less contingent truths (although of course non-zero contingency always remains, which is a big deal to philosophers,mathematicians and other insane people, but not something anyone else cares very much about.)
People who have done actual calculations, rather than an arm-chair analysis on /., think that it is possible to change the momentum of vacuum modes, thereby making them non-vacuum modes (one would presume) by introducing asymmetries from rotating magneto-electric materials and in various other ways.
Introducing asymmetries has long been know to produce real particles from the vacuum. One of the most dramatic theoretical instances of this is a step-function potential with more than twice the electron mass. If you solve the Dirac equation in this situation you get weird phenomena like negative transmission and reflection coefficients that are negative or greater than unity.
The explanation is that such a large potential (so long as the step occurs over a scale of less than the Compton wavelength of the electron, which is about a pico-metre) has the ability to separate the virtual pairs that make up the "Dirac sea", thus turning them into actual particles (at the cost of the required amount of energy). If you could actualize this you could then accelerate the electron and positron to fire them off in the same direction, giving your apparatus a push in the process. At the most abstract level, what these guys are proposing is no different from that.
When you move across cultures, different body language can have specific interpretations, or in one country be a habit where in another country it is considered a rudeness.
That there are differences does not mean there are not universals.
While it is true that "body language" broadly defined is not universal, aspects of it are, as are aspects of facial expression, just as they are in other species.
Pointing out the existence of differences says nothing about the existence of universals.
So attack the scientists for being human if you must, but the science is sound and must be heeded.
This is exactly the problem: arrogant over-confidence on the part of the ignorant on both sides with regard to what "sound" science means for public policy.
Most climate research is sound science. Climate researchers are doing the best they can to understand a ferociously complex system that is dominated by turbulent and chaotic phenomena on all pretty much all scales, a complex fluid whose thermodynamic properties vary in all dimensions and is subject to feedbacks that are at best understood approximately, and modelled with codes that are, at root, profoundly unnphysical.
Some of the predictions they make seem to be validated by the data (the pattern of glacial retreat, for example) but others seem to be contradicted (long-term single-point temperature records that show no warming even withouth heat-island correction when models predict warming for those regions.)
Nothing like a robust, closed-form argument exists for anthropogenic global warming. We have unphysical computer models and imperfect data. That's all sound science.
And then some smug bastard comes along and says we "must" do XYZ (insert the smug bastard's favourite policy options here) on the basis of "sound science."
Well yeah, the science is sound. But that doesn't remotely mean it is adequate as a basis for public policy, even on the basis of the precautionary principle, which must be applied to economic as well as environmental consequences.
On the other side of the debate, we have Big Hydrocarbons, which wants to keep raping the planet with impunity, and can come up with some plausibility arguments as to why we should ignore the cases where climate science is in agreement with the data, in the same way AGW advocates can come up with plausibility arguments as to why we should ignore the cases where climate science predictions disagree with the data.
But plausibility arguments are lame. Only more data, more research, more science will help.
In the meantime, there are a lots of reasons--independently of the risks of AGW--to rein in Big Hydrocarbons, not least of which is the general protection of everyone's interest in the atmospheric commons.
But by linking the policy debate to the "soundness" of the science, the climate community has made it politically problematic to revise their conclusions in certain ways. That is damaging to science: far moreso than the fairly weak attacks that Big Hydrocarbons have launched.
And a whole lot cheaper to observe the collisions.
Not if by "observe" you mean "observe with multiple layers of detectors that the collision happens inside of", which is the only sense of the term anyone would use in this context.
However, it might be the case that this "syntax" has developed in parallel to human syntax from some common protolanguage
What is interesting here is not the structure of the language, but the fact of it.
Humans are possessed of a wide range of incredibly powerful, flexible and general linguistic mechanisms. Non-human animals are frequently held to be entirely non-linguistic.
This is implausible on the most basic evolutionary grounds: evolution is an elaborative process, and to have such remarkable abilities amongst humans strongly suggests a lot of linguistic or proto-linguistic capability in our ancestral line, and probably in other animals too. Otherwise, it would be like humans having the ability to run fifty miles in one go in a world where no other animal has legs.
While the sexual selection forces that drove the evolution of human intelligence are powerful and able to produce relatively rapid elaboration of new capabilities, those capabilities have to be elaborations of something that already existed, and so we should naively expect this kind of discovery. Unfortunately, because linguists seem for some reason to think that human language is the only possible model for language (see the other comments from linguists in this thread, for example) it can be difficult to recognize the linguistic (or possibly linguist-ish) capabilities of non-human species that do not conform well to that model.
Or perhaps if I have something that I don't want anyone to know, it's NONE OF THEIR FUCKING BUSINESS!
There's also a nice bit of equivocation in Schmidt's statement. Privacy is mostly not about "not wanting anyone to know"; it's mostly about not wanting everyone to know.
My g/f knows what I like in the bedroom. My mother (I hope!) does not and never will.
Privacy is about personal control over facts about ourselves. We want to be able to limit who knows what about us, and that is an entirely reasonable desire.
"Google" is a collection of people who at the moment mostly claim to want to protect our control over facts about ourselves, but those facts persist on the servers those people have control over pretty much forever, and tomorrow or ten years from now those servers will be under the control of an entirely different group of people. So as a matter of inevitable fact, any information that the group of people who constitute "Google" have today will be in the hands of a random group of strangers in the future.
So be prepared for everything you have ever allowed the people at Google to tie to your personal identity to be public knowledge at some future date. It is certain to happen.
You do realize that a lot of glaciers and polar caps are melting?
Pointing out that X, which is predicted by AGW models, is happening, does not change the fact that Y, which is also predicted by AGW models, is not happening.
So your point in no way addresses my observation (I am the GP above--dunno how it came out A/C'd) that the evidence is mixed. Just like the observation that the possible consequences of AGW are dire, the observation that some evidence is consistent with AGW predictions fails to address the sceptic's point, which is that there are significant pieces of evidence that do not match AGW predictions, and that the range of AGW predictions is sufficiently broad that you can find a prediction for most phenomena, including local cooling.
That's all well and good, but AGW proponents cannot point to the cases where the data are consistent with relatively robust predictions and say, "This proves AGW is happening" while at the same time ignoring data--like the local temperature records I mention above--that is inconsistent with similar predictions and say, "This does not disprove AGW is happening."
That is, the seriousness with which AGW proponents and deniers take any particular data set is entirely dependent on how well is supports their preferred outcome.
An honest sceptic will point out both the data on both sides, as I did. Replying to such a sceptic with a rhetorical question regarding one particular piece of data on your favoured side simply adds noise to the debate without meaningfully furthering it.
To further the debate we need more data, better models and more open and accessible data and models: given the huge public policy implications of climate science, the climate science community has an absolute obligation to make all of their raw data and metadata available to everyone. Anything else and there will be a justified suspicion that the data are being massaged or used selectively for political purposes.
Regardless of which side of the debate you're on, if you're interested in the science you must be in favour of this kind of open process.
Seems like there is an article like this posted at least once a year by someone marveling at the "resurgence" of vinyl.
Shhh.... stupid people get angry when you point out their dumb behaviour.
The phenomenon of "vinyl is about the make a comeback" goes back at least to the early 90's, when vinyl was still a siginificant fraction of the new-music market. I remember being told knowingly by some idiot audiophile that vinyl was going to be the next big thing in '91 or thereabouts, and was he proud of his deep insight into the future of music and contemptuous of my naive belief that digital music probably had a few advantages that would cause it to complete its sweep of the market in a few years.
Me and my friends have been talking about the resurgence of vinyl DJs for years
This pretty much explains the boring "vinyl is the new black" story that has popped up with completely predictable regularity every few years since the mid 80's.
"Me and my friends" want to be cool and trendy (and ungrammatical, although I've probably spelled "ungrammatical" wrong) and ahead of the great unwashed, so we're going to say that vinyl is the greatest thing and about to make a come-back so we can say we were the first.
Unfortunately for the trendy kids, vinyl has been "about to make a comeback" since 1990. It isn't clear how repeating the same tired old chesnut is remotely trendy.
When vinyl gets up over a few percent of the total music market, I'll be willing to say it's making a comeback. Hanging on to a less-than-1% niche isn't a comeback. It's a nostalgia item.
And your quest for exclusivity? Welcome to the digital world. Nothing but your actual skills and talents are even remotely exclusive to you. Anything that can be copied, will be. The search for exclusive content is a sad wet relic of the analog age.
You would only have to worry about losing access to DRM books if you get them from a company that may go bankrupt or stop making ebook readers.
What?
DRM obsolescence of content sold by perfectly viable companies is a known problem. It has nothing to do with companies going out of business or ceasing to sell a particular device. It's all about the DRM technology and the chance for the company to get a sweeter licensing deal from someone else, and by-the-way force their customers to repurchase any content they still care about in the new DRM-crippled form.
If you buy DRM-crippled content there is a near certainty that you will lose it over a timescale of a few years. As someone who still has a few books he bought thirty years ago or more, that is not even remotely acceptable to me.
I think the real cost of publishing these articles is not the 'printing' of the article, (basically just pasting the pdf submitted to the web) but in peer-reviewing the articles.
Reviewers don't get paid (trust me on this) so it isn't clear why this should be a large cost. Hell, for many journals even a significant number of the editorial positions are paid only a nominal stipend, being filled by academics who want to pad their CV (and in fairness, who want to contribute something of value to the community.)
If you present different information to Googlebot than to normal users and Google finds out about it, you get kicked out of the Google index
False. Springer, the academic publisher, has dozens of paywalled journals that routinely return hits on Google that lead to pages that have none of the search terms and whose contents are inaccessible. Nor is there any metadata in those pages that would justify the hit, and I'm damned sure their pagerank isn't due to having many other high quality pages pointing at their requests for $29.95 for PDF download. The only way this is happening is if the GoogleBot is seeing something that ordinary users can't.
There is some non-obvious game being played here between Google and the newspapers, and I don't know what it is, but it doesn't smell good. This is "public policy theatre" we're watching here, which plays the same role as "security theatre": it distracts people from the real issues and makes them feel like their freedom is being taken away for a reason (yeah, ok, I'll take my tinfoil hat off now...)
I have written to their support, posted on their forums -please Google - if you are listening - MAKE PAYWALLED SITES AN OPTION in my preferences and set it OFF by default.
YES, please. My god I hate this aspect of Google, which is an incredibly annoying time-suck. It's even worse for me because I have a uni account that gives me access to most of the paywalled research, but only when I'm on campus, so when I'm off-campus and I want to know something I just desperately want the option to turn off all that paywalled crap.
This is by far the most hateful, stupid and annoying thing Google does, and in close to a decade of searches I have never once purchased article access from one of these pirates (academics don't get paid by journals for their manuscripts, and now that publishing costs have fallen to almost nothing due to Web delivery there is absolutely no excuse for the kind of rates academic publishers are charging. Open access journals are the future, and the sooner Google gets on board with the future, the better).
If you want my theory, we're dealing with an unknown autistic artist's work.
That's an interesting idea, with the key word being "artist". The almost complete lack of errors and corrections in the text strongly suggest that it's nonsense rather than any kind of encoded message. Considered as a weird kind of autistic art, that might be kind of cool, although by far the more likely solution is that John Dee or one of his associates created the thing as a fraud to bilk gullible aristocrats or royalty (Charles V gets mentioned as a possible target, if I recall correctly.)
Seriously: an error-free exotic MS with bizarre and suggestive (in the broadest sense) drawings that we are pretty sure passed through the hands of known "magicians" at least some of whom almost certainly accepted in their own minds that much of what they sold was fraudulent (many probably at least half-believed in what they were doing, but still...)
Never assume intelligence when venality will do, or something like that.
but in that case, nobody has a reason to mislabel a more expensive product and sell it to you as a less-expensive product.
This is an excellent logical analysis of the Vegetarian Society's lame argument. I'm thinking they are probably just squeamish.
A vegetarian friend and I debated this question a couple of years ago, and she pointed out that she would feel creepy eating vat-grown meat (just as she felt creepy eating fake tofu-based meat when she lived in Taiwan, where apparently it can be really hard to tell the difference between the fake stuff and the real stuff.) To explain her attitude--which she acknowledged had no particularly rational basis, she asked if I'd be comfortable eating vat-grown human meat.
I could argue that human meat has all kinds of hygiene issues associated with it, but that would be cowardice: the fact is it would just creep me out to eat it, and I can understand how many vegetarians would be creeped out by vat-grown meat. They should just have the courage to say so, instead of making up bizarre and logically unsupportable claims about labelling.
In other words, guilds bear a pretty piss-poor correlation to street gangs, compared to just about any small real-world organization.
This is actually a plus: they have found a single, rather simple, underlying mathematical model that can be used to account for the formation dynamics of two quite different types of human group, and the model is not a simple "like-seeks-like" idea, but rather a "team formation" thing that includes the value of diversity of skills amongst group members.
I agree that this is an odd thing to be found in Phys. Rev. E, but on the other hand: dynamics are dynamics, and we can learn things from simplistic mathematical models just as well as we can from simplistic non-mathematical models (and if you think the models used by math-phobic social scientists aren't simplistic, you aren't sufficiently conversant with the social sciences.)
Disclaimer: I am a physicist who has worked professionally in several fields, particularly genomics, and found that the underlying concepts used by physicists to build mathematical models of complex systems are applicable to complex systems that don't happen to be "physical systems" in the usual sense of the term. Like I said, dynamics is dynamics, and there's not one shred of evidence that the dynamics of human systems are any more complex than the dynamics of viscous flows, say.
Rubbish, the scientists aren't "pushing for" anything, they're just presenting results. These results may of course suggest the need for action, but that's in the realm of politics.
There are multiple problems with this stance. The first is that scientists almost always have preferred answers. When the first Hubble results were coming in an the value of Ho seemed anomalously high, I recalled someone commenting that if so-and-so had a religion, it would be 50 (the low end of expected Ho values.)
Most of the time, this doesn't matter. With AGW it does, precisely because people with money and power would like to use the purported risk of AGW to get more money and power, and Big Hydrocarbons would like to kill everyone and invade Poland, or whatever the industrial equivalent of that is.
There are huge economic and political stakes in this game, and they ultimately turn on the quality of the data and the strength of the results. Those are complex things to analyze, and when scientists have an agenda--which they almost always do--they tend to overstate the quality of their data and interpretations over others (in paleoanthropology I believe this is called the "Leakey Effect").
I don't think there's anything going on in the AGW crowd beyond typically optimistic group-think, but if you don't think that's a problem, well... we disagree with each other.
As for finding common ground: we find it in the data--all of which should be openly published, unmassaged, to allow for honest dialog--and in the fundamental theories--physics and chemistry, mostly--that underpin the often unphysical climate models.
Insofar as sceptics deny those things, they are hopeless. But if they play the game of science by the rules, using their biases to provide viable alternatives to the AGW consensus or valid criticisms of other work, they should be fully engaged in the scientific process.
The public policy issues related to AGW are too important to leave any honest voices unheard.