I don't where you heard that story, but it's loaded with factual errors. It's an utter apologetics whitewash of a number of extremely embarrassing facts.
February 19, 1616 An Inquisition commissioned theologians to prepare a formal report on the heliocentric view of the universe.
February 24 1616 the unanimous report concluded that a stationary Sun and moving earth is "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture".
February 25 1616 The Pope declares an an order for Galileo to "abandon this doctrine, not to teach it to others, not to defend it, and not to treat of it", and threatens stronger action if Galileo did not comply.
February 26 1616 Galileo receives the order: "to abstain completely from teaching or defending this doctrine and opinion or from discussing it... to abandon completely... the opinion that the sun stands still at the center of the world and the earth moves, and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing".
March 5 1616 The Pope ordered a complete ban on any book advocating the moving Earth model on the basis that it was "altogether contrary to Holy Scripture". This ban was not limited to Galileo's work, but also included Kepler's work, Copernicus's work, and any such work in general.
Next we jump ahead to 1632, two Popes later. Galileo has a good relationship with the new Pope. Galileo wants to write a new book, and the Pope demands that his geocentric arguments be included. So apparently the Pope knew of and consented to a new book. The Pope's garbage geocentric arguments naturally get demolished in the book, and the character who presented them came off looking foolish. The new Pope takes it personally, and orders the new book banned.
Galileo is then brought to trial "for holding as true the false doctrine taught by some that the sun is the center of the world", in violation of the 1616 order.
Galileo is threatened with torture and interrogated.
June 22 1633 The Inquisition finds Galileo guilty of Heresy for teaching that the Earth moves after a moving Earth had been explicitly declared contrary to Holy Scripture. Galileo was sentenced to prison, which was reduced to house arrest. Furthermore the Inquisition bans the publication of anything ever published by Galileo, whether it deals with the solar system or not.
January 8 1642 Galileo dies, after a 9 year life-sentence arrest.
1835 Galileo's work is finally removed from the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, after more than 200 years of being on the Church's prohibited list.
1992 Pope John Paul II finally issues a public vindication of Galileo and acknowledgement of the Church's fuckup: "Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world's structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture."
Note that "theologians of the time" refers to the official position of the Church and at least two Popes who attacked Galileo. And "they maintained the centrality of the Earth" refers to their insistence that the Earth is the center of the universe and does not move because Bible says the Earth does not move, and the Bible is the infallible word of God.
And I don't think this would really be complete without pointing out exactly why the Church declared that the Bible stated the Sun orbits a non-moving Earth. That includes, but not necessarily limited to:
Psalm 104:5 (English Standard Version) He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved.
When people think "fossils" they generally think dinosaurs or other large animals. (Note that when I say "large animals" I am including the smallest mouse.) It is extraordinarily rare for a large animal to leave a fossil record, and the fossil record of large animals is extremely random and extremely spotty.
Large animal fossils are extremely glamorous, but often overlooked the largest proportion of fossils we have. The small animal fossils. Animals roughly the size of a grain of sand, such as Forams (phylum foraminifera). Forams are tiny animals that live in the ocean.... trillions of them. Every day vast numbers of forams die and settle down to the deep dark cold sea floor, in the slowly accumulating sediment. Forams have often elaborate mineral "skeletons" called tests. Every day vast numbers of these tests become ideal fossils in the undisturbed see floor sediment. Sediment that very slowly builds up in virtually perfect layers.
Back in the 1970's oil companies developed technology for deep sea oil exploration and started bringing up long exploratory drill cores from the deep seabed. Each drill core was filled with tens of thousands tests. An effectively limitless supply of ideal perfectly layered fossils.
We have a continuous and complete fossil record spanning tens of millions of years for a large chunk of phylum foraminifera. Not merely a continuous and complete record of each transitional species, but a continuous and complete record of all the transitional forms along each species-to-species transition. A continuous and complete record tracing diverse foram species back to a common ancestor.
(Note: The group "forams" is roughly equivalent to the group "mammals". There are herbivores and carnivores and even forams that grow internal algae farms. So when I say "diverse species of forams" traced back to a common ancestor, it's roughly comparable to tracing cows and lions back to a common ancestor.)
But animals the size of a grain of sand aren't glamorous. The fossils look like tiny specks unless you look at them through a low-power microscope. Almost no one has ever heard of "forams". Forams are a type of plankton, and while many people have heard of plankton almost no one knows or cares about it.
So the elephant in the room is that we *do* have a continuous and complete fossil record for a significant chunk of the tree of life. The best possible record a scientist would wish for documenting the fact of evolution in extraordinary detail. And virtually no one has heard of it because it's an incredibly obscure and otherwise unremarkable branch of almost microscopic animals.
The glorious fossil record 19 November 1998: The fossil record may not be complete for all groups at all times and in all places. But, argues Dr Paul Pearson, when we have reason to believe that it is, the dates that can be assigned to fossils are invaluable for unravelling the paths of evolution.
PAUL PEARSON In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin lamented that the imperfection of the fossil record detracts from the glory of geology. Fossilization is such a rare and capricious event, our collections are so poor, and sedimentary formations are so full of gaps, that Darwin could not point to a single example where fossils in successive geological strata showed evolution from one species to another.
Unknown to Darwin, uninterrupted sedimentation does occur in the open ocean, especially on aseismic ridges and plateaux. These areas experience a continuous rain of particles to the sea bed, and are among the most geologically quiescent places on Earth. A steady build-up of sediment is the result.
Now, after thirty years of systematic ocean drilling, many of these sites can be studied. Piston coring generally allows hundreds of meters of sediment to be fully recovered, spanning millions of years of deposition. Where gaps occur, they can easily be identified.
You've got your definition wrong. "Creationism" is not merely the idea that God created the universe. Creationism is specifically defied in opposition to evolution. Creationist is specifically the position that God directly crafted the variety of species in substantially the same form we see them today, and virtually always in accordance with some specific religion genesis account as in the Koran / Bible / Vedic text or whatever.
The official position of the Catholic Church is that Evolution is compatible with Catholicism, and in fact the Catholic Church hosts many scientific conferences that explicitly affirm the validity of Evolution, and which explicitly reject Creationism and Intelligent Design.
The Catholic Church's position is that God created the universe and all of the scientific mechanisms and processes within the universe, and that this equally includes the laws of physics, chemistry, and the evolution of life on earth.
The official Catholic position is Evolutionist, subcategory Theistic Evolutionist. The position that God created the universe, and that Evolution is just another one of God's chosen mechanisms for running His universe.
I was explicit in including Veterans Benefits. It is is obviously part of the military compensation package. The figures I looked at had a listing for "Medicare&Medicaid" which explains why your figure for "Department of Health and Human Services including Medicare and Medicaid" was slightly higher.
In any case, there are are three almost exactly equal budget categories that dominate the federal budget at over 20% each, vastly larger than anything else in the budget. There's no reasonable way to call any of those three "a small fraction of the federal budget".
And, yes, that's a small fraction of any nation's budget.
NASA should definite send a probe out to whatever planet you're living on.
Defense+Veterans is about tied with Medicare+Medicaid for largest budget category, followed by Social Security third. Nothing else even makes it onto the radar. Lumping together ALL other discretionary spending (education, non-defense research, transportation, CDC, NASA, etc etc etc etc) still only adds up to 4th place in the budget.
I should also mention that if increased CO2 staves off the next Ice Age, it will be an enormous win
It's silly how far climate denialists reach trying to glob onto anything that remotely fits into the narrative they want to hear.
First of all, the ice age cycle is approximately fifty thousand years from now. Secondly, entering or exiting an ice age involves a natural rate of change of of approximately one degree C per thousand years. We're talking about a almost a degree C over the last hundred years and 2 to 5 degree C CO2-induced increase over the next hundred years. The rate of human induced warming is dozens of times faster than a catastrophic-level-natural-global-event such as entering or exiting an ice age.
You're basically saying that throwing a child down an elevator shaft today is a good thing because it might keep him from bumping his head when he becomes and adult.
The move sequence you posted does represent a valid example of perfect-play presuming a perfect opponent. However if we expand "perfect play" to mean perfect play vs a perfect opponent while also maximizing the real-world odds of winning, then your second X move is quite bad, chuckle. It presents the O player with a chain of blatant forced-block moves, forcing a tie.
A far stronger play sequence is X1, O5, X9.
This presents player O with an apparently free choice play. The choice boils down to playing in a corner or a side. Humans have an implicit knowledge that corner squares are more powerful than side squares. Furthermore the symmetry of the X1, O5, X9 board amplifies the reflex to play in the more symmetrical corner square. In my experience above-average-intelligence-humans have a greater than 95% likelihood of playing a corner move when facing that position! This leads to X playing a forced block in the opposite corner, and a win for X.
If O's second move is a side square then it leads to a trivial forced-block sequence draw. However human psychology makes it very hard for people to find that play without either a comical number of trial-and-error games, or a shockingly rare tactical analysis of the 159 position.
The human psychology kicks in even stronger after someone loses their first game to the 159 position. In subsequent games people will almost always associate the shocking loss with their first O-center move. In subsequent games they start exploring non-center opening moves for O. All non-center opening moves for O can be turned into a win for X. The extreme memorability of the initial shocking loss with the O-center opening means they avoid re-exploring it for a long time, and when they do try O-center again they almost inevitably repeat the mistake of playing in the corner, reinforcing their aversion to the O-center opening move.
Everyone knows that tic-tac-toe is a tie-game, but in practice almost no one actually knows how to reach a tie when playing O.
Finally, I'll leave you with the words of a noted global warming proponent and researcher:
"Pauses as long as 15 years are rare in the simulations, and âwe expect that [real-world] warming will resume in the next few years,â(TM) the Hadley Centre group writes. Researchers agree that no sort of natural variability can hold off greenhouse warming much longer." - Richard Kerr, Science (2009) So, we'll see...2009 is already five long years in the past, and the pause shows no sign of stopping at this point...
What pause? The one you've been hearing about on denialist websites? How about instead of hearsay, we actually look at the data?
That's why you should get your information from legitimate scientists. The 15 year trend is warmer, as you can see from the global mean temperature data.
An additional point, legitimate scientists know that yearly variations make a 15 year sample unreasonably small. Real scientists examine all available data, not merely anomalous fragment-of-the-day that happens to fit the story they want to tell. Real scientists look at 50 or 100 year trend lines, and all other available evidence.
And most importantly, real scientists obey THE LAWS OF PHYSICS. Sunlight comes in through the atmosphere, hits the ground, turns into infrared thermal radiation, and that infrared thermal radiation is blocked from escaping by CO2. Only crackpots deny basic laws of physics, only a crackpot could deny the effect is real. There is currently about 3,000 gigatonnes of CO2 in the entire Earth's atmosphere, and and humans are adding 30-odd gigatonnes per year. CO2 levels are up 42% since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and at our current rate CO2 levels will have doubled around 2050.
The natural levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases already generate a 50 degree F warming effect. (That's what generally keeps us out of an ice-age.) Most of that effect is due to water vapor, but gases like CO2 and methane have an independent warming effect because they block different infrared frequencies.
First of all, volcanic activity has been low for a couple of decades now. The last VEI 6 or larger eruption was Mt. Pinatubo in 1991.
There has been exactly ONE VEI event above 5 in the last hundred years. The fact that it was in 1991 would, if anything, make it recent and "above normal". Not that it really matters, because it only affects temperatures for a year or two. All you've really done is point out that the warming trend over the last 15 years *isn't* distorted by any volcanic activity in that period.
Furthermore, it's conspiracy-theory logic to suggest either (A) the global scientific community is deliberately excluding volcanic activity from their their analysis, or (B) the entire global scientific community is utterly brain-damaged-stupid that none of them ever bothered to consider volcanic activity in their analysis.
So, it is in fact quite surprising if you're a devotee of climate alarmism to see temperatures stabilize like this.
There's absolutely nothing surprising. Temperatures haven't stabilized. There is no pause. There has been a warming trend of the last 15 years. And as I demonstrated in my last post, it's trivially easy for a crank to cherry pick data points and manufacture totally fake "pauses" or "cooling periods". You did look at and understand the graph I posted before, right?
I understand there are theories regarding this heat hiding in the deep ocean somehow (rather in violation of entropy it seems)
They aren't "theories". They are measurements. You know, legitimate climate scientists going out with scientific instruments and collecting real-world sea-temperature
Your warped interpretation/abuse of language is quite interesting.
First, the use of the word "believe" implies that they lack faith in a belief, rather than acceptance of truth. I would agree with that implication
7% of people polled do not believe we landed on the moon.
Perhaps now you are going go ahead and say my comment about people not "believing" in the moon landing is some secret code word implying the moon landing isn't truth. I wouldn't be TOO surprised if you did. NASA scientists confirm that the planet is warming and that humans are responsible, so you're already accusing NASA scientists of being part of one kooky global conspiracy theory, so it's not too much of a leap for you to believe they're part of two kooky global conspiracy theories.
You become a pariah if you publish Anti Global Warming stuff.
You might also become a "pariah" if you try to push astrology in an astronomy journal. You might also become a "pariah" if you try to publish denials of tobacco-lung-cancer link in medical journals. You might also become a "pariah" if you try to publish atom denialism in a chemistry journal. You might also become a "pariah" if you try to publish 2+2=5 in math journals.
So yeah, if you demonstrate scientific incompetence, if you try to publish flawed science papers twisted to push some crackpot ideological position, yeah, it's kinda possible that the general scientific community will no longer consider you a respectable scientist.
By the way, did you notice that you're making the exact argument that creationists make? They like to believe that there are tons of scientists who reject evolution, and they have this fantasy that there's some vast body of invisible evolution-rejecting scientists who are merely poor victims of oppression, that they are all hiding.
The most powerful and most important red flag that you're sliding into paranoidconspiracytheoryism is when an absence of evidence supporting your case itself becomes a key element supporting the theory.
You've got an invisible army of climate scientists who agree with you, and the fact that they're all in hiding proves how vast and powerful the conspiracy is.
The wiggly red-orange line is global mean temperatures for the last 50 years. The pale blue straight line on the right, that's the fictitious cooling period we've had for the last 12 years. The straight purple line is the preceding 5 years of fictional global cooling. And before that is the blue line in the middle, 8 years of fictitious global cooling. And the decade before that is the green line, another fictitious period of global cooling. And the straight red line on the left is the preceding 12 year period of fictional global cooling.
That graph shows that we've had nothing but (fictional) cooling periods or "leveling off periods" essentially EVERY YEAR FOR THE LAST FIFTY YEARS.
The series of straight lines.... average declining temperatures lines... is a blatant staircase going up. And it illustrates just how absurd and wrong it is when denialists trot out your claim that warming has stopped or flattened. It is blatantly fraudulent to claim any of the straight lines in the posted graph represent any halt or even slowing in the rate of temperature rise.
There has been no halt in the temperature rise. There has been no slowing in the temperature rise. You're just grabbing at cherry-picked random fluctuations to draw a fictional staircase composed of fictional horizontal (or declining) steps.
Screw those stupid laws of physics which say sunlight comes in through the atmosphere, turns into thermal radiation, which is then blocked from escaping building up heat.
Look at that squirrel over there. This year I saw it bury twice as many nuts as last year. And buried nuts make more trees grow. And trees affect the weather. No one has been able to explain why the squirrel buried more nuts this year. And they don't have any really reliable prediction for how many nuts squirrels are going to bury next year. This is an enormous hole in the knowledge needed to do predictions that mean anything. Until you can accurately predict squirrel behavior with some degree of proven accuracy, the climatologists are, well, just guessing. We need a mathematical model of squirrel behavior, but we simply do NOT HAVE IT.
Those other so-called-scientists are biased, they have a financial interest in getting grant money, and all their physics calculations on the heat trapping properties of CO2 is nothing but a scam to get more grant money.
The BSafe and TIPEM source code are NOT "freely" available.
I never said they were. I said, "The algorithm and source code for it is public". And they are. The Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm is a standard published by the U.S. government.
We know the code in the RSA products are functionally identical to the published algorithm and code because if it weren't then they would fail the test suite and never have received certification.
More likely, the NSA paid for a source code license at $10M..made a modification and then put the modified source back into their source control - perhaps removing the old code in the process.
You seem to be misunderstanding the problem here. There was no code modification, there was no need for code modification. The algorithm as originally published by the government had an embedded back door. The algorithm was so blatantly atrocious and so blatantly insecure that no half-educated security professional would ever want to select it. The government paid RSA to include the algorithm, and furthermore paid RSA to set it as the default. RSA then faithfully copied the blatantly backdoored algorithm to their products, and set it as the default.
When someone chooses to confirm nor deny an accusation, it isn't an admission of guilt - Like pleading the 5th
This isn't a courtroom, and this isn't an abstract exercise on what is and isn't theoretically possible. This is a corporation that is doubtless losing millions of dollars in business, and has taken devastating and potentially permanent damage to their reputation for trustworthiness in an industry where trustworthiness is the end-all-be-all of a product. To suggest that RSA management knew the widely reported $10-million-NSA-contract report was false, and declined to say so, is beyond implausible. In fact I suspect failing to say so would get them in serious legal trouble for violating their fiduciary responsibility to stockholders.
And just to bury them even deeper, a minimum of three RSA employees were explicitly aware of the backdoor issue, as they were all members of the ANSI X9F1 Tool Standards and Guidelines Group where the backdoor issue was initially raised.
I'll break this issue down into three levels. First there's the compromised algorithm itself. The algorithm and source code for it is public. Anyone can trivially test that it's about a hundred times SLOWER than the alternative algorithms. It has zero redeeming features. And anyone with the slightest security knowledge can see that it was covered in huge red flags all over it (unexplained magic numbers pulled out of the algorithm-submitter's ass are a HUGE security no-no). It had squat track record of being vetted by the global security community for flaws. No one with the slightest security expertise would ever willingly use it, much less set it as a default algorithm.
Second, there's RSA's products. Anyone who bought it can check the configuration to see that the compromised algorithm is in there, and that it's set as the default. Anyone with an internet connection can do a search and check the product specs. I'll admit I haven't personally checked this detail, but it's beyond implausible that the story has run this long without anyone here posting a fact-check on it if it were false.
So that just leaves the third aspect. Whether RSA got paid twenty pieces of silver.... errr.... I mean ten million dollars....to set the compromised algorithm as the default in their products. I would say that is a forgone issue when RSA's response on the story was an astonishingly lame we-didn't-know-it-was-compromised and we-would-never-knowingly-compromise-our-customer's-security. If they hadn't been paid $10 million by the NSA to do, then the first words out of their mouths would have been to deny the $10 million NSA payment.
So that just leaves us with two possibilities. Either RSA knowingly took a $10 million payoff to look the other way and install a compromised back door as the default setting in their products, or they don't have a single competent security person on their entire staff.
It's hard to say which of those two possibility would be worse for a security company, but we don't have to ponder which applies here. It is utterly implausible that RSA doesn't have competent security experts on staff. They make highly sophisticated security products. They know damn well how to make products that will strongly protect you from attack by random hackers. However they are also willing to sell out your security so that the US Government has a back door into your system.
So... if you want top tier security products to protect your business and you don't give a hoot that it comes with a back door for US spook agencies, sure, go with RSA. They've got some of the top security experts. But if you want security products that don't come with back doors, there are other world-class security companies to turn to. World class security companies with world class security experts who, even in a drunken stupor, would neverselect an unproven absurdly slow ugly blatantly-backdoored random number generator to use.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't where you heard that story, but it's loaded with factual errors. It's an utter apologetics whitewash of a number of extremely embarrassing facts.
February 19, 1616 An Inquisition commissioned theologians to prepare a formal report on the heliocentric view of the universe.
February 24 1616 the unanimous report concluded that a stationary Sun and moving earth is "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture ".
February 25 1616 The Pope declares an an order for Galileo to "abandon this doctrine, not to teach it to others, not to defend it, and not to treat of it", and threatens stronger action if Galileo did not comply.
February 26 1616 Galileo receives the order: "to abstain completely from teaching or defending this doctrine and opinion or from discussing it... to abandon completely... the opinion that the sun stands still at the center of the world and the earth moves, and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing".
March 5 1616 The Pope ordered a complete ban on any book advocating the moving Earth model on the basis that it was "altogether contrary to Holy Scripture". This ban was not limited to Galileo's work, but also included Kepler's work, Copernicus's work, and any such work in general.
Next we jump ahead to 1632, two Popes later. Galileo has a good relationship with the new Pope. Galileo wants to write a new book, and the Pope demands that his geocentric arguments be included. So apparently the Pope knew of and consented to a new book. The Pope's garbage geocentric arguments naturally get demolished in the book, and the character who presented them came off looking foolish. The new Pope takes it personally, and orders the new book banned.
Galileo is then brought to trial "for holding as true the false doctrine taught by some that the sun is the center of the world", in violation of the 1616 order.
Galileo is threatened with torture and interrogated.
June 22 1633 The Inquisition finds Galileo guilty of Heresy for teaching that the Earth moves after a moving Earth had been explicitly declared contrary to Holy Scripture. Galileo was sentenced to prison, which was reduced to house arrest. Furthermore the Inquisition bans the publication of anything ever published by Galileo, whether it deals with the solar system or not.
January 8 1642 Galileo dies, after a 9 year life-sentence arrest.
1835 Galileo's work is finally removed from the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, after more than 200 years of being on the Church's prohibited list.
1992 Pope John Paul II finally issues a public vindication of Galileo and acknowledgement of the Church's fuckup:
"Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world's structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture. "
Note that "theologians of the time" refers to the official position of the Church and at least two Popes who attacked Galileo. And "they maintained the centrality of the Earth" refers to their insistence that the Earth is the center of the universe and does not move because Bible says the Earth does not move, and the Bible is the infallible word of God.
And I don't think this would really be complete without pointing out exactly why the Church declared that the Bible stated the Sun orbits a non-moving Earth. That includes, but not necessarily limited to:
Psalm 104:5 (English Standard Version)
He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved.
1
When people think "fossils" they generally think dinosaurs or other large animals. (Note that when I say "large animals" I am including the smallest mouse.) It is extraordinarily rare for a large animal to leave a fossil record, and the fossil record of large animals is extremely random and extremely spotty.
Large animal fossils are extremely glamorous, but often overlooked the largest proportion of fossils we have. The small animal fossils. Animals roughly the size of a grain of sand, such as Forams (phylum foraminifera). Forams are tiny animals that live in the ocean.... trillions of them. Every day vast numbers of forams die and settle down to the deep dark cold sea floor, in the slowly accumulating sediment. Forams have often elaborate mineral "skeletons" called tests. Every day vast numbers of these tests become ideal fossils in the undisturbed see floor sediment. Sediment that very slowly builds up in virtually perfect layers.
Back in the 1970's oil companies developed technology for deep sea oil exploration and started bringing up long exploratory drill cores from the deep seabed. Each drill core was filled with tens of thousands tests. An effectively limitless supply of ideal perfectly layered fossils.
We have a continuous and complete fossil record spanning tens of millions of years for a large chunk of phylum foraminifera. Not merely a continuous and complete record of each transitional species, but a continuous and complete record of all the transitional forms along each species-to-species transition. A continuous and complete record tracing diverse foram species back to a common ancestor.
(Note: The group "forams" is roughly equivalent to the group "mammals". There are herbivores and carnivores and even forams that grow internal algae farms. So when I say "diverse species of forams" traced back to a common ancestor, it's roughly comparable to tracing cows and lions back to a common ancestor.)
But animals the size of a grain of sand aren't glamorous. The fossils look like tiny specks unless you look at them through a low-power microscope. Almost no one has ever heard of "forams". Forams are a type of plankton, and while many people have heard of plankton almost no one knows or cares about it.
So the elephant in the room is that we *do* have a continuous and complete fossil record for a significant chunk of the tree of life. The best possible record a scientist would wish for documenting the fact of evolution in extraordinary detail. And virtually no one has heard of it because it's an incredibly obscure and otherwise unremarkable branch of almost microscopic animals.
The glorious fossil record 19 November 1998:
The fossil record may not be complete for all groups at all times and in all places. But, argues Dr Paul Pearson, when we have reason to believe that it is, the dates that can be assigned to fossils are invaluable for unravelling the paths of evolution.
PAUL PEARSON
In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin lamented that the imperfection of the fossil record detracts from the glory of geology. Fossilization is such a rare and capricious event, our collections are so poor, and sedimentary formations are so full of gaps, that Darwin could not point to a single example where fossils in successive geological strata showed evolution from one species to another.
Unknown to Darwin, uninterrupted sedimentation does occur in the open ocean, especially on aseismic ridges and plateaux. These areas experience a continuous rain of particles to the sea bed, and are among the most geologically quiescent places on Earth. A steady build-up of sediment is the result.
Now, after thirty years of systematic ocean drilling, many of these sites can be studied. Piston coring generally allows hundreds of meters of sediment to be fully recovered, spanning millions of years of deposition. Where gaps occur, they can easily be identified.
A co
Catholics are creationists by definition.
You've got your definition wrong. "Creationism" is not merely the idea that God created the universe. Creationism is specifically defied in opposition to evolution. Creationist is specifically the position that God directly crafted the variety of species in substantially the same form we see them today, and virtually always in accordance with some specific religion genesis account as in the Koran / Bible / Vedic text or whatever.
The official position of the Catholic Church is that Evolution is compatible with Catholicism, and in fact the Catholic Church hosts many scientific conferences that explicitly affirm the validity of Evolution, and which explicitly reject Creationism and Intelligent Design.
The Catholic Church's position is that God created the universe and all of the scientific mechanisms and processes within the universe, and that this equally includes the laws of physics, chemistry, and the evolution of life on earth.
The official Catholic position is Evolutionist, subcategory Theistic Evolutionist. The position that God created the universe, and that Evolution is just another one of God's chosen mechanisms for running His universe.
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I was explicit in including Veterans Benefits. It is is obviously part of the military compensation package. The figures I looked at had a listing for "Medicare&Medicaid" which explains why your figure for "Department of Health and Human Services including Medicare and Medicaid" was slightly higher.
In any case, there are are three almost exactly equal budget categories that dominate the federal budget at over 20% each, vastly larger than anything else in the budget. There's no reasonable way to call any of those three "a small fraction of the federal budget".
And, yes, that's a small fraction of any nation's budget.
I can't find global figures breaking down military spending expenses as a portion of each "nations budget", but I did easily find global figures breaking down military spending as a percentage of the entire GrossDomesticProduct.
The United States spends an extraordinarily high percentage on the military.
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NASA should definite send a probe out to whatever planet you're living on.
Defense+Veterans is about tied with Medicare+Medicaid for largest budget category, followed by Social Security third. Nothing else even makes it onto the radar. Lumping together ALL other discretionary spending (education, non-defense research, transportation, CDC, NASA, etc etc etc etc) still only adds up to 4th place in the budget.
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I should also mention that if increased CO2 staves off the next Ice Age, it will be an enormous win
It's silly how far climate denialists reach trying to glob onto anything that remotely fits into the narrative they want to hear.
First of all, the ice age cycle is approximately fifty thousand years from now.
Secondly, entering or exiting an ice age involves a natural rate of change of of approximately one degree C per thousand years.
We're talking about a almost a degree C over the last hundred years and 2 to 5 degree C CO2-induced increase over the next hundred years. The rate of human induced warming is dozens of times faster than a catastrophic-level-natural-global-event such as entering or exiting an ice age.
You're basically saying that throwing a child down an elevator shaft today is a good thing because it might keep him from bumping his head when he becomes and adult.
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The move sequence you posted does represent a valid example of perfect-play presuming a perfect opponent. However if we expand "perfect play" to mean perfect play vs a perfect opponent while also maximizing the real-world odds of winning, then your second X move is quite bad, chuckle. It presents the O player with a chain of blatant forced-block moves, forcing a tie.
A far stronger play sequence is X1, O5, X9.
This presents player O with an apparently free choice play. The choice boils down to playing in a corner or a side. Humans have an implicit knowledge that corner squares are more powerful than side squares. Furthermore the symmetry of the X1, O5, X9 board amplifies the reflex to play in the more symmetrical corner square. In my experience above-average-intelligence-humans have a greater than 95% likelihood of playing a corner move when facing that position! This leads to X playing a forced block in the opposite corner, and a win for X.
If O's second move is a side square then it leads to a trivial forced-block sequence draw. However human psychology makes it very hard for people to find that play without either a comical number of trial-and-error games, or a shockingly rare tactical analysis of the 159 position.
The human psychology kicks in even stronger after someone loses their first game to the 159 position. In subsequent games people will almost always associate the shocking loss with their first O-center move. In subsequent games they start exploring non-center opening moves for O. All non-center opening moves for O can be turned into a win for X. The extreme memorability of the initial shocking loss with the O-center opening means they avoid re-exploring it for a long time, and when they do try O-center again they almost inevitably repeat the mistake of playing in the corner, reinforcing their aversion to the O-center opening move.
Everyone knows that tic-tac-toe is a tie-game, but in practice almost no one actually knows how to reach a tie when playing O.
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Finally, I'll leave you with the words of a noted global warming proponent and researcher:
"Pauses as long as 15 years are rare in the simulations, and âwe expect that [real-world] warming will resume in the next few years,â(TM) the Hadley Centre group writes. Researchers agree that no sort of natural variability can hold off greenhouse warming much longer." - Richard Kerr, Science (2009)
So, we'll see...2009 is already five long years in the past, and the pause shows no sign of stopping at this point...
What pause? The one you've been hearing about on denialist websites? How about instead of hearsay, we actually look at the data?
Green is the mean global temp for the last 15 years, red is the 15 year trend line
That's why you should get your information from legitimate scientists. The 15 year trend is warmer, as you can see from the global mean temperature data.
An additional point, legitimate scientists know that yearly variations make a 15 year sample unreasonably small. Real scientists examine all available data, not merely anomalous fragment-of-the-day that happens to fit the story they want to tell. Real scientists look at 50 or 100 year trend lines, and all other available evidence.
And most importantly, real scientists obey THE LAWS OF PHYSICS. Sunlight comes in through the atmosphere, hits the ground, turns into infrared thermal radiation, and that infrared thermal radiation is blocked from escaping by CO2. Only crackpots deny basic laws of physics, only a crackpot could deny the effect is real. There is currently about 3,000 gigatonnes of CO2 in the entire Earth's atmosphere, and and humans are adding 30-odd gigatonnes per year. CO2 levels are up 42% since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and at our current rate CO2 levels will have doubled around 2050.
The natural levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases already generate a 50 degree F warming effect. (That's what generally keeps us out of an ice-age.) Most of that effect is due to water vapor, but gases like CO2 and methane have an independent warming effect because they block different infrared frequencies.
First of all, volcanic activity has been low for a couple of decades now. The last VEI 6 or larger eruption was Mt. Pinatubo in 1991.
There has been exactly ONE VEI event above 5 in the last hundred years. The fact that it was in 1991 would, if anything, make it recent and "above normal". Not that it really matters, because it only affects temperatures for a year or two. All you've really done is point out that the warming trend over the last 15 years *isn't* distorted by any volcanic activity in that period.
Furthermore, it's conspiracy-theory logic to suggest either (A) the global scientific community is deliberately excluding volcanic activity from their their analysis, or (B) the entire global scientific community is utterly brain-damaged-stupid that none of them ever bothered to consider volcanic activity in their analysis.
So, it is in fact quite surprising if you're a devotee of climate alarmism to see temperatures stabilize like this.
There's absolutely nothing surprising. Temperatures haven't stabilized. There is no pause. There has been a warming trend of the last 15 years. And as I demonstrated in my last post, it's trivially easy for a crank to cherry pick data points and manufacture totally fake "pauses" or "cooling periods". You did look at and understand the graph I posted before, right?
I understand there are theories regarding this heat hiding in the deep ocean somehow (rather in violation of entropy it seems)
They aren't "theories". They are measurements.
You know, legitimate climate scientists going out with scientific instruments and collecting real-world sea-temperature
However, your language is quite interesting.
Your warped interpretation/abuse of language is quite interesting.
First, the use of the word "believe" implies that they lack faith in a belief, rather than acceptance of truth. I would agree with that implication
7% of people polled do not believe we landed on the moon.
Perhaps now you are going go ahead and say my comment about people not "believing" in the moon landing is some secret code word implying the moon landing isn't truth. I wouldn't be TOO surprised if you did. NASA scientists confirm that the planet is warming and that humans are responsible, so you're already accusing NASA scientists of being part of one kooky global conspiracy theory, so it's not too much of a leap for you to believe they're part of two kooky global conspiracy theories.
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You become a pariah if you publish Anti Global Warming stuff.
You might also become a "pariah" if you try to push astrology in an astronomy journal.
You might also become a "pariah" if you try to publish denials of tobacco-lung-cancer link in medical journals.
You might also become a "pariah" if you try to publish atom denialism in a chemistry journal.
You might also become a "pariah" if you try to publish 2+2=5 in math journals.
So yeah, if you demonstrate scientific incompetence, if you try to publish flawed science papers twisted to push some crackpot ideological position, yeah, it's kinda possible that the general scientific community will no longer consider you a respectable scientist.
By the way, did you notice that you're making the exact argument that creationists make? They like to believe that there are tons of scientists who reject evolution, and they have this fantasy that there's some vast body of invisible evolution-rejecting scientists who are merely poor victims of oppression, that they are all hiding.
The most powerful and most important red flag that you're sliding into paranoidconspiracytheoryism is when an absence of evidence supporting your case itself becomes a key element supporting the theory.
You've got an invisible army of climate scientists who agree with you, and the fact that they're all in hiding proves how vast and powerful the conspiracy is.
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Yes, denialist.
And here's a graph showing exactly how your denialism works, and exactly how laughably wrong it is:
Global temperature graph.
The wiggly red-orange line is global mean temperatures for the last 50 years.
The pale blue straight line on the right, that's the fictitious cooling period we've had for the last 12 years. The straight purple line is the preceding 5 years of fictional global cooling. And before that is the blue line in the middle, 8 years of fictitious global cooling. And the decade before that is the green line, another fictitious period of global cooling. And the straight red line on the left is the preceding 12 year period of fictional global cooling.
That graph shows that we've had nothing but (fictional) cooling periods or "leveling off periods" essentially EVERY YEAR FOR THE LAST FIFTY YEARS.
The series of straight lines.... average declining temperatures lines... is a blatant staircase going up. And it illustrates just how absurd and wrong it is when denialists trot out your claim that warming has stopped or flattened. It is blatantly fraudulent to claim any of the straight lines in the posted graph represent any halt or even slowing in the rate of temperature rise.
There has been no halt in the temperature rise. There has been no slowing in the temperature rise. You're just grabbing at cherry-picked random fluctuations to draw a fictional staircase composed of fictional horizontal (or declining) steps.
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Whenever I see someone try to use "geek" or "nerd" as an insult, I come back with the following:
Geek (noun); twenty first century term for billionaire.
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Hell yeah!
Screw those stupid laws of physics which say sunlight comes in through the atmosphere, turns into thermal radiation, which is then blocked from escaping building up heat.
Look at that squirrel over there. This year I saw it bury twice as many nuts as last year. And buried nuts make more trees grow. And trees affect the weather. No one has been able to explain why the squirrel buried more nuts this year. And they don't have any really reliable prediction for how many nuts squirrels are going to bury next year. This is an enormous hole in the knowledge needed to do predictions that mean anything. Until you can accurately predict squirrel behavior with some degree of proven accuracy, the climatologists are, well, just guessing. We need a mathematical model of squirrel behavior, but we simply do NOT HAVE IT.
Those other so-called-scientists are biased, they have a financial interest in getting grant money, and all their physics calculations on the heat trapping properties of CO2 is nothing but a scam to get more grant money.
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After I got infected by the Good Times virus my compiler stopped pre-computing constant value functions.
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It's the code that the Obama administration uses to inject subliminal messages into all video to indoctrinate our children into the homosexual agenda.
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They won't suck like our current politicians.
They will suck in interesting new ways.
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He has a fetish for Sarah Palin, Nancy Pelosi, Michele Bachmann, and Hillary Clinton.
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Watson, Will IBM's clients pay lots of money for all that cognitive power? Or will you ultimately prove an overhyped sideshow?"
Reply hazy try again
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There's a bit of gameplay built in, which challenges users to do better next time
For a dollar a day I pay a kid in China to farm points for me.
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The BSafe and TIPEM source code are NOT "freely" available.
I never said they were.
I said, "The algorithm and source code for it is public".
And they are. The Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm is a standard published by the U.S. government.
We know the code in the RSA products are functionally identical to the published algorithm and code because if it weren't then they would fail the test suite and never have received certification.
More likely, the NSA paid for a source code license at $10M..made a modification and then put the modified source back into their source control - perhaps removing the old code in the process.
You seem to be misunderstanding the problem here. There was no code modification, there was no need for code modification. The algorithm as originally published by the government had an embedded back door. The algorithm was so blatantly atrocious and so blatantly insecure that no half-educated security professional would ever want to select it. The government paid RSA to include the algorithm, and furthermore paid RSA to set it as the default. RSA then faithfully copied the blatantly backdoored algorithm to their products, and set it as the default.
When someone chooses to confirm nor deny an accusation, it isn't an admission of guilt - Like pleading the 5th
This isn't a courtroom, and this isn't an abstract exercise on what is and isn't theoretically possible. This is a corporation that is doubtless losing millions of dollars in business, and has taken devastating and potentially permanent damage to their reputation for trustworthiness in an industry where trustworthiness is the end-all-be-all of a product. To suggest that RSA management knew the widely reported $10-million-NSA-contract report was false, and declined to say so, is beyond implausible. In fact I suspect failing to say so would get them in serious legal trouble for violating their fiduciary responsibility to stockholders.
And just to bury them even deeper, a minimum of three RSA employees were explicitly aware of the backdoor issue, as they were all members of the ANSI X9F1 Tool Standards and Guidelines Group where the backdoor issue was initially raised.
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Huh?
I'll break this issue down into three levels. First there's the compromised algorithm itself. The algorithm and source code for it is public. Anyone can trivially test that it's about a hundred times SLOWER than the alternative algorithms. It has zero redeeming features. And anyone with the slightest security knowledge can see that it was covered in huge red flags all over it (unexplained magic numbers pulled out of the algorithm-submitter's ass are a HUGE security no-no). It had squat track record of being vetted by the global security community for flaws. No one with the slightest security expertise would ever willingly use it, much less set it as a default algorithm.
Second, there's RSA's products. Anyone who bought it can check the configuration to see that the compromised algorithm is in there, and that it's set as the default. Anyone with an internet connection can do a search and check the product specs. I'll admit I haven't personally checked this detail, but it's beyond implausible that the story has run this long without anyone here posting a fact-check on it if it were false.
So that just leaves the third aspect. Whether RSA got paid twenty pieces of silver.... errr.... I mean ten million dollars....to set the compromised algorithm as the default in their products. I would say that is a forgone issue when RSA's response on the story was an astonishingly lame we-didn't-know-it-was-compromised and we-would-never-knowingly-compromise-our-customer's-security. If they hadn't been paid $10 million by the NSA to do, then the first words out of their mouths would have been to deny the $10 million NSA payment.
So that just leaves us with two possibilities. Either RSA knowingly took a $10 million payoff to look the other way and install a compromised back door as the default setting in their products, or they don't have a single competent security person on their entire staff.
It's hard to say which of those two possibility would be worse for a security company, but we don't have to ponder which applies here. It is utterly implausible that RSA doesn't have competent security experts on staff. They make highly sophisticated security products. They know damn well how to make products that will strongly protect you from attack by random hackers. However they are also willing to sell out your security so that the US Government has a back door into your system.
So... if you want top tier security products to protect your business and you don't give a hoot that it comes with a back door for US spook agencies, sure, go with RSA. They've got some of the top security experts. But if you want security products that don't come with back doors, there are other world-class security companies to turn to. World class security companies with world class security experts who, even in a drunken stupor, would neverselect an unproven absurdly slow ugly blatantly-backdoored random number generator to use.
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I'm going to have to disagree. A company's CEO getting involved in child porn would definitely be worse.
What sort of company has a child as CEO?
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You had a room? Sheesh! When I was a kid we lived in 2D, all we had were a couple of lines for walls.
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But with the wind chill it feels like -40K.
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I have no idea where people get these ideas.
Humans are irrational, superstitious, paranoid, panicky herd animals.
And those are just the ones without any psychological abnormality.
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