I really can't see humans going extinct anytime soon barring some crazy weapon. A nuclear winter could cause the end of civilization as we know it (same with an asteroid), but we ain't going extinct.. Climate change can't kill us, but it will cause serious problems. Of course, it will be ignored, and we will have to pay to deal with those problems.
FOSS people may have looked like wackjobs 10 years ago, but now we are have a very real steady erosion of openness in computing. It's happening, and UEFI secure boot is another step. The walled garden model of smartphones and tablets is coming to desktops.
A mathematician can't pinpoint errors in reasoning about climate change because he/she is not a specialist in the field. You need the knowledge to properly analyze the evidence. Serge Lang was a great algebraist/number theorist, and yet he was an AIDS/HIV denialist. Clearly his superior intelligence and logical powers were able to deduce that the AIDS researchers were wrong all along about HIV.
I was doing some science outreach stuff at a museum a while back, and a seemingly intelligent looking thirtysomething woman with two children asked me if the Sun goes around the Earth, or the other way around. That is when I gave up.
How do you think you should teach science then? The actual problem is that most students are stupid, and they are raised by stupid parents. Throughout most of human history almost everybody hunted or worked in the field, and it's only now we expect the average individual to be able to think rationally.
The last IPCC ignored completely the possible contribution of Greenland and Antarctica, which hold the vast, vast majority of the world's ice. That's why it's 59 cm. That's what the 2007 IPCC said, but that doesn't mean it's a consensus projection. This was because it was too difficult to quantify at the time. Now it is clear that Greenland is reacting to climate change by increased ablation around the flanks and acceleration of many outlet glaciers. Greenland is clearly going to contribute to sea level rise.
Antarctica is more complicated. There is a small possibility of a West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse, and it is pretty sure that there will be mass loss. WAIS is losing mass right now. The bed there is below sea level and has a reverse slope going into the Weddell Sea makes the ice sheet unstable. If butressing ice shelves collapse and the ice sheet retreats a bit from its current stable position, it will then retreat rapidly.
Nah. 1 meter is around the consensus projection. It may be lower, but there is also a small chance of a much larger rise (through, e.g. collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet).
Planning for sea level rise is an example of decision making under uncertainty. If you want to prepare rationally, you don't just look at the most likely scenario or, in the case of Republicans, the scenario you want to beleive. Instead, you take the expected damages and payoffs for various mitigation strategies across all scenarios to generate the optimum expected result.
After all, you have to buy fire insurance if you have a loan on your house. You are extraordinarily unlikely to have a fire. A fire is not expected. But you still plan for the possibility, don't you?
People are actually more active today than they were a few decades ago. It's a combination of processed foods with HFCS and little fiber, along with large portion sizes. Excersize is very important to stay healthy and can help you lose weight, but still, a half hour of vigorous running may only burn 300-400 calories. That's two soda cans.
Re:Linux has become like MS Windows was
on
Linux 3.4 Released
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· Score: 1
Just use LXDE or XFCE with Arch or something, mang.
Do you live near a freeway? That doubles the rate of atherosclerosis. Air pollution kills hundreds of thousands a year in the US, and also causes other significant morbidity like asthma in children. Way more dangerous that a measly radiation dose. Yet, I don't see people wanting to evacuate from around coal plants and freeways.
I use Gentoo and opensuse these days on my desktops and laptop, but Ubuntu/Unity on my netbook. It does work very well with small netbook screens, which was the original intended application (at first Unity was just for the netbook edition). It's extremely difficult to use on a big desktop screen, especially if you have to do big-boy work with a lot of multitasking. There's a reason why the desktop metaphor has been the dominant gui design for the past 30 years.
Windows is falling into the same trap with Windows 8. I guess smartphones and tablets are just so cool now that the same interface must work everywhere.
Charge enormous sums of money for subscriptions to the journals, charge the scientists providing the content money for putting in figures (instead of the traditional paying-the-content-provider model), and the editors work for free.
The NIH already requires that all papers published with their grants are available freely. Why the NSF can't do that, I don't know. It's a huge problem not only in academia but also in government. Government workers, such as ones at NOAA or USGS, often have little to no journal access. I'm sure it's the same in industry. This impacts everybody.
Libreoffice writer is more annoying to use than Word, but it's not so bad. I use LaTeX/vim for the vast majority of what I write. It actually does what I tell it to do, which is better than any WYSISWG program.
What's really bad is Impress. It's a complete mess from a usability standpoint. When I need to make a presentation, I use Powerpoint. I should figure out how to use LaTeX instead.
Come on, take off your tin foil hat. The easiest way to succeed in science is to tear other people's work down. Any scientist would jump at the chance to get the recognition of falsifying one of the best supported theories in modern science. You'd get much more money and media attention than publishing with the consensus. Afterall, look at Watts. He's not even a real scientist, just a weatherman, and look at the money and attention that jackhole gets.
Lintzen is really the only credible denialist out there. He's very smart and has contributed a great deal to atmospheric science, but he's a perpetual contrarian. He's unconvinced of the smoking/lung cancer link, for example,
And even he does not deny that AGW is happening, but he thinks the climate sensitivity to CO2 is much less than usually reckoned.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not try dwm? 2000 lines of C, very customizable and powerful tiling WM.
I really can't see humans going extinct anytime soon barring some crazy weapon. A nuclear winter could cause the end of civilization as we know it (same with an asteroid), but we ain't going extinct.. Climate change can't kill us, but it will cause serious problems. Of course, it will be ignored, and we will have to pay to deal with those problems.
Yeah, why bother, huh?
Thirty years is not long at all. The Earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years, and we are changing it massively in less than a century.
FOSS people may have looked like wackjobs 10 years ago, but now we are have a very real steady erosion of openness in computing. It's happening, and UEFI secure boot is another step. The walled garden model of smartphones and tablets is coming to desktops.
Humans aren't robots, dude. I can analyze evidence mostly rationally but rationality doesn't govern all of my behavior.
A mathematician can't pinpoint errors in reasoning about climate change because he/she is not a specialist in the field. You need the knowledge to properly analyze the evidence. Serge Lang was a great algebraist/number theorist, and yet he was an AIDS/HIV denialist. Clearly his superior intelligence and logical powers were able to deduce that the AIDS researchers were wrong all along about HIV.
I was doing some science outreach stuff at a museum a while back, and a seemingly intelligent looking thirtysomething woman with two children asked me if the Sun goes around the Earth, or the other way around. That is when I gave up.
How many of those actually study climate science or know anything about it? This sort of thing is classic appeal to authority.
There is near consensus. Accept it.
How do you think you should teach science then? The actual problem is that most students are stupid, and they are raised by stupid parents. Throughout most of human history almost everybody hunted or worked in the field, and it's only now we expect the average individual to be able to think rationally.
The last IPCC ignored completely the possible contribution of Greenland and Antarctica, which hold the vast, vast majority of the world's ice. That's why it's 59 cm. That's what the 2007 IPCC said, but that doesn't mean it's a consensus projection. This was because it was too difficult to quantify at the time. Now it is clear that Greenland is reacting to climate change by increased ablation around the flanks and acceleration of many outlet glaciers. Greenland is clearly going to contribute to sea level rise.
Antarctica is more complicated. There is a small possibility of a West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse, and it is pretty sure that there will be mass loss. WAIS is losing mass right now. The bed there is below sea level and has a reverse slope going into the Weddell Sea makes the ice sheet unstable. If butressing ice shelves collapse and the ice sheet retreats a bit from its current stable position, it will then retreat rapidly.
Nah. 1 meter is around the consensus projection. It may be lower, but there is also a small chance of a much larger rise (through, e.g. collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet).
Planning for sea level rise is an example of decision making under uncertainty. If you want to prepare rationally, you don't just look at the most likely scenario or, in the case of Republicans, the scenario you want to beleive. Instead, you take the expected damages and payoffs for various mitigation strategies across all scenarios to generate the optimum expected result.
After all, you have to buy fire insurance if you have a loan on your house. You are extraordinarily unlikely to have a fire. A fire is not expected. But you still plan for the possibility, don't you?
People are actually more active today than they were a few decades ago. It's a combination of processed foods with HFCS and little fiber, along with large portion sizes. Excersize is very important to stay healthy and can help you lose weight, but still, a half hour of vigorous running may only burn 300-400 calories. That's two soda cans.
Just use LXDE or XFCE with Arch or something, mang.
So why does society decide that it makes sense to evacuate people from around Fukushima but not freeways if the risk is similar?
Do you live near a freeway? That doubles the rate of atherosclerosis. Air pollution kills hundreds of thousands a year in the US, and also causes other significant morbidity like asthma in children. Way more dangerous that a measly radiation dose. Yet, I don't see people wanting to evacuate from around coal plants and freeways.
I use Gentoo and opensuse these days on my desktops and laptop, but Ubuntu/Unity on my netbook. It does work very well with small netbook screens, which was the original intended application (at first Unity was just for the netbook edition). It's extremely difficult to use on a big desktop screen, especially if you have to do big-boy work with a lot of multitasking. There's a reason why the desktop metaphor has been the dominant gui design for the past 30 years.
Windows is falling into the same trap with Windows 8. I guess smartphones and tablets are just so cool now that the same interface must work everywhere.
Both work for free, actually.
Charge enormous sums of money for subscriptions to the journals, charge the scientists providing the content money for putting in figures (instead of the traditional paying-the-content-provider model), and the editors work for free.
The NIH already requires that all papers published with their grants are available freely. Why the NSF can't do that, I don't know. It's a huge problem not only in academia but also in government. Government workers, such as ones at NOAA or USGS, often have little to no journal access. I'm sure it's the same in industry. This impacts everybody.
My pinky hurts.
Libreoffice writer is more annoying to use than Word, but it's not so bad. I use LaTeX/vim for the vast majority of what I write. It actually does what I tell it to do, which is better than any WYSISWG program.
What's really bad is Impress. It's a complete mess from a usability standpoint. When I need to make a presentation, I use Powerpoint. I should figure out how to use LaTeX instead.
I mostly use python these days, mainly to work with FEniCS. I really don't like the syntax, though. Matlab's syntax is just so slick by comparison:
Matlab: foo = [1 2;3 4] Python: foo= array([[1,2],[3,4]]) R: foo - matrix(c(1,2,3,4),2,2)
A numerical language should be able to do simple tasks like this with as few keystrokes as possible.
Come on, take off your tin foil hat. The easiest way to succeed in science is to tear other people's work down. Any scientist would jump at the chance to get the recognition of falsifying one of the best supported theories in modern science. You'd get much more money and media attention than publishing with the consensus. Afterall, look at Watts. He's not even a real scientist, just a weatherman, and look at the money and attention that jackhole gets.
Lintzen is really the only credible denialist out there. He's very smart and has contributed a great deal to atmospheric science, but he's a perpetual contrarian. He's unconvinced of the smoking/lung cancer link, for example,
And even he does not deny that AGW is happening, but he thinks the climate sensitivity to CO2 is much less than usually reckoned.
PBI seems to work well, but there's so few packages that ports tree is still basically the only game in town.