FYI, very few real scientists have accepted some "ordinary view" or "consensus".
Have you ever seen an atom? How many scientists have actually reproduced the Rutherford scattering experiment? Well, most scientists have not, so everybody is following the consensus that atoms are built in a certain way. Damn, most people rely on the consensus about the world being round instead of flat—there is not that much space in the ISS.
I work with methanol, and I never ran spectroscopy to ascertain that methanol actually is CH3OH. I never checked out that the gas it reacts into actually is CO2. I never checked out the circuits in the mass-flow controllers to check they are measuring the right flow, and even then I would have to check that Maxwell's laws are actually true.
Everybody, and this goes for scientists too, make a huge number of reasonable assumptions. That's the consensus, and it is a consensus because it works.
Those individuals who discovered valuable and meaningful knowledge were generally frowned upon for challenging the "ordinary view".
Strawman. Who would those be? Einstein changed the view more than any other, and the only reason certain people frowned upon him was unrelated to his science—he was a Jew. Galileo was surely frowned upon, but certainly not by scientists; and what about the discovery of DNA, the proof of Poincaré's conjecture, nuclear physics—were all those scientists doing ground-breaking work being "frowned upon"?
In fact, making bold new claims is all there is to a scientist's life. You need to publish new stuff, which needs to pass anonymous peer review. It's not just a formality, and when I was called for some reviews I have actually sunk a couple of papers which made fundamental mistakes. The problem you have is, you cannot just make absurd claims without any proof on the only basis of faith or personal political bias.
There is over fucking whelming evidence that global warming and global cooling has happened repeatedly, [...]
... and that is misleading, bordering on falsehood. It has never happened this fast in nature, which leaves human activity as the most likely cause. If you make this kind of extraordinary claims you should follow it up with extraordinary proof.
The earth is warming. Evolution is at work.
Oh my god, gas-guzzling climate-change deniers have interbred with the evolution-denying fundies! Let's hope they do not meet the flat-earthers too...
If norwegian is your first langauge outside english, I'd call it optimistic to understand swedish and danish as well.
I stand my ground and aim higher: Norwegian and Swedish are pretty much the same language, with some quaint words on either side to mark the difference. Norwegians and Swedes always speak each their own language when talking to each other, and I never heard anyone having problems with that.
As for Danish, sometimes I read Danish and realise it is not Norwegian only after a few lines. Danish pronunciation is however much more difficult.
Well, there is not much that can go wrong. Assuming the Swedish system is not too different from the Norwegian, expect increased healthcare costs, since Germany is based on private (and public) insurances; my expenses more than doubled. On the other hand, supposing you are a post-doc, you will pay no taxes.
More on healthcare: watch out carefully for very convenient offers geared for academicians. I got such an offer for about 50 euros a month, but reading the small print I figured out they do not pay for anything expensive, such as transplants and chronic diseases... remind me again, why did I want an insurance? Go to a public agency such as AOK and you will be safe, though it's a stiff 350 euros/month. Note that there are also cheaper, private ones, but as an immigrant your choices are limited to those that pay for your abortions. It does not matter you are a guy, I am too, but my insurance must pay for my abortions in case I defy nature and get knocked up; that's German bureaucracy for you. That's because some imbecile in the Bundestag feared that immigrants started reproducing like rabbits.
Otherwise, brace yourself for for the language barrier: a lot of people do not speak English to a workable level, especially in the East. I can report of personnel of the main immigration bureau of a German state capital who could not speak English, I shit thee not. You should get a crash-course in German before you even get there.
Not Norwegian myself, though lived there 7 years. Possibly moving back in the near future.
1. Pretty good I would say. The country has had budget surplus for years and is not feeling the effects of the crisis as bad as e.g. Iceland. Estate prices actually went up 4% first quarter (most Norwegians do own their home, so it's a good indicator).
2. Norwegian is not as difficult as German but not as easy as French, many words are not guessable. Main difficulty is that everybody speaks very good English and practising Norwegian is quite difficult if you are not strong-willed. Also, most imported TV shows and movies are in original language (i.e. 90% English). Learning Norwegian also means you can read Danish and read/understand Swedish.
3. Insane, but you pay what you get for. Alcoholic beverages quite expensive because of local edition of prohibition never really being abolished. Foodstuffs are expensive because of protectionism, and quality is lacking (keep in mind I come from a country with high food standard, so I am picky; from the US it's probably still an improvement). Other wares (computer parts, internet connections, whatever could interest a slashdotter) are in line with most of Europe. However, salaries are pretty high for most standards. Note that the Gini index is quite low, i.e. as a sysadmin you will make more than in the US, but not as a CEO.
You forgot to ask for:
Taxes; it's 25% VAT IIRC, plus about 25-30% on your income (that's for a typical engineering job, after all detractions are taken care of). In 2007 I made 458 kNOK (about $100k) gross as a C++ programmer and paid 29.5% in direct taxes.
Healthcare: Grand Old Socialist system. You pay 7.8% of gross income (that's already included in the figure at the previous point), when you go to the hospital you could have to pay a fee; anything beyond a certain amount (it used to be 1600 NOK / $250) is shouldered by the state, though. Dentists are for reasons unknown to me only private (and guess what, that's the part of the Norwegian health care that it expensive and broken).
Bureaucracy: pretty efficient. I live in Germany now and I think the Norwegians did a better job. Not boneheaded at following rules, result-oriented but not scruffy.
So yes, it's a pretty nice place to be, unless you can't stand snow, rain, and socialists in power.
Same time Queen Elizabeth II is. At least the office of head of state in Iran is up for election, however rigged and preposterous that could be. Also, the "Assembly of Experts", which has elected him, can dismiss him.
The Paks power plant was built over 20 years by the People's Republic of Hungary. This means it was built with the Hungarian people's taxes. It's easy to turn a profit when someone else is footing your capital-cost bills, which are especially high for nuclear power plants.
The GP's point was that no nuclear power plant has ever paid for itself, proof of which is that no private entity has ever built, run and made money out of a nuclear plant without substantial subsidies, be it in the form of participation to capital costs, tax breaks, or socialisation of accident risks (as in the US).
Feel free to produce a counterexample. In the meantime, check out "Will Nuclear Power Pay for itself?", by Jeffrey Paine, The Social Science Journal 33(4), 459-473, 1996; that's a peer-reviewed scientific journal. From the abstract: "[...] even under the most optimistic conditions [...] the current generation of the nuclear option over its lifetime may be best be economically marginal."
Well, now CO2 is not an emission? "Emission" comes from Latin "ex" and "mittere", i.e. "from" and "to send", or "to send out". Ergo, CO2 is an emission produced by car engines, just like water is for that sake.
You seem to imply that CO2 is not a polluting emission, and curiously you call people who think it is "indoctrinated"; somewhat ironic, since the scientific consensus is that anthropogenic global warming is as real as science gets. If you are an AGW denier, you are the one indoctrinated by certain interest groups (fortunately mostly confined to the US), so much indoctrinated in fact that you ignore the world-wide consensus of people who know much more than you or I about this issue.
So, if you want to disprove the consensus (which historically has indeed happened a number of times), the only thing you need is to prove it wrong. So do not waste your time posting your wisdom on Slashdot, but submit your theories, measurements and simulations to a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and when the article is accepted we will have something to talk about.
Otherwise, you could simply find a peer-reviewed scientific article (even if only one) that disproves AGW. Good luck with that, since it has been attempted before.
Next they will say that lashing people is not blatantly unconstitutional because people are secure in their persons against unreasonable searches and seizures, not unreasonable lashings.
Been there, done that. Hear what Justice Scalia says about torture: it's not unconstitutional, because phrase "cruel and unusual punishment" refers to punishment, not to preventive torture against somebody who has not been convicted of anything. That's Justice Antonin Gregory Scalia, member of the Supreme Court of the United States. I for one would feel safer if Lionel Hutz had his job.
It does make a certain sense. Remember who is in charge in Italy. The guy owns a^Hthe media conglomerate in the country. His company (or was that the government?) has sued Youtube already, and his government becomes hyperactive every time his private interests are in question.
On the other hand, remember that trials in Italy last for insane amounts of time: it can take decades on average for some kind of trials to reach the end, and at the same time the statutory terms are relatively short and keep running during trial: it's a system engineered to keep MPs out of jail. Therefore, TPB runs quite a low risk.
I am not even surprised anymore by the priorities of our judiciary system. We have mafia, we have rampant corruption, and here is what we focus on. Ahi serva Italia...
I'm pretty sure your body reacts to the lack of oxygen, not the excess of carbon dioxide.
You are in fact pretty wrong. The body uses what we control engineers call "inferential control", i.e. watches a certain variable (carbon dioxide) rather than another (oxygen); I am not sure of the advantages, but may have to do with ease of measurement, response time, or simple evolutionary randomness. See the Wikipedia article on hyperventilation.
In normal conditions this works all right, since when there is little oxygen there is also a lot of carbon dioxide; in conditions for which we did not evolve, like a 100% nitrogen atmosphere, the strategy fails.
This phenomenon has a number of implications: if you hyperventilate before swimming underwater, you do not feel as much the need for oxygen because of the reduced carbon dioxide in your blood, but you still have it just like before: that's how free-divers used to die, not noticing they were lacking oxygen and passing out under water.
Also, I work at a research institute, and at my first course in laboratory safety I was told loud and clear that nitrogen is the main laboratory killer, because everyone assumes it is harmless, while in fact it can easily kill without any warning. Every lab using liquid nitrogen has big yellow signs with "asphyxiation danger" written on them.
As the number of CO2 molecules increases, the insulating effect of each molecule starts to decline. Eventually increases stop mattering.
Great, only by that point our planet will be uninhabitable.
Methane is like 80 times more insulating and Nitrous Oxides can be well over 200 times more insulating than CO2.
And that's not important because they react with oxygen to give water, CO2 and nitrogen. CO2, instead, is inert and is going nowhere.
Illegals, being outside of the eye of the law are cheaper to hire.
As I already commented, any free-market supporter will turn protectionist as soon as he's getting the bad end of the deal. And I don't care if the libertarian thought police mods me down.
That's because voting third-party in the US is effectively wasting your vote. In many (not all) EU countries, there are 5-6 major parties, and chances are better to find a party whose platform suits you better.
That mistake is one of those I classify "under the radar", i.e. below the background noise of variations of English. Or at least I think, since adverb positioning is a shady subject anyway. I was thinking of something like an "always-first" adjective instead of a "usually-after-sometimes-first" one.
Wah, I blame Slashdot anyway. There are so many bad spellers here that, after a while, I started misspelling its, theirs and your, which had never given me trouble.
the above paragraph doesn't even mention how incredibly different the use of the latin alphabet is in french and in english!
No, not really. If you think French and English are "incredibly different", you make me thing you do not know that many languages; there are even weirder ways to abuse the Latin alphabet. Their systems are not that far apart, being ludicrously close for the words that are in common, which are quite a lot.
(have you ever noticed the diacritics on top of french letters?)
I have diacritics in my language without resorting to French, thanks. So do most languages, including yours to a reduced extent, so don't be "naïve".
You make a lot of good points, and indeed I may have been a bit loose on the use of the "close" word. What I was pointing at was the amount of study necessary to attain a good level of English, and I am positive French is the language (among the larger ones at least) from which this amount is minimal.
Grammar is relatively fast: most irregular English verbs are laughable, with all their irregular forms neatly aligned on a line, and a complete list filling a few pages; there are entire manuals for Romance languages. I don't mean it demeaningly, simplicity is great!
I distinctly remember making only once the mistake of adding a number concord on an adjective, when I was 13: it was "the yellows cars", third or fourth English lesson. I needed that explained once, and off I went. Remembering to put the adjectives always first took some time, since I had to rearrange some thinking patterns, or so I think. But what really took decades has been building up a large vocabulary. That's the advantage French (and, to a minor degree, other Romance-language) speakers have.
most of the basic vocabulary is [Germanic] as well
[My bold] Sure it is, but what takes time when learning a language (I got 2 1/2 to an acceptable level under my belt) is not the basic vocabulary; you learn that fast enough to learn that in school. For instance, the word "vocabulary" itself is not basic vocabulary, and, say, a Japanese would have to learn the spelling and pronunciation of a fairly long word. A French simply takes "vocabulaire", applies a standard -aire -> -ary transformation, et voila, here is English. This helps enormously in memorisation (because there is little to actually memorise) and ability to improvise. Considering how vast the English vocabulary is, this advantage is much more important than having a similar grammar, which can anyway be learnt in a matter of a few months.
There is an enormous amount of Romance words in English, more so than e.g. in German (can't really say anything about Dutch, which others mentioned); note that I speak Italian as a mother language, fluent Norwegian and a German still subject to improvement, so I do have some hands-on comparative experience on this.
French or French-related words used in this post:
Sure, language, acceptable, level, basic, vocabulary, school, instance, Japanese (well at least the -ese suffix), suffix, pronunciation, simply, applies, standard, transformation, enormously, memorisation, because (the "cause" part), part, actually, memorise, ability, improvise, Considering, vast, advantage, important, similar, grammar, matter, amount, Romance, German (yup, that's actually the Latin word for it), really, others (maybe a cognate? anyway recognizable), cognate, recognizable, mentioned, note, Italian, fluent, subject, improvement, comparative, experience, post.
Whew! I swear I was not writing to maximise the amount of French words. Oh damn: maximise, amount, damn
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever seen an atom? How many scientists have actually reproduced the Rutherford scattering experiment? Well, most scientists have not, so everybody is following the consensus that atoms are built in a certain way. Damn, most people rely on the consensus about the world being round instead of flat—there is not that much space in the ISS.
I work with methanol, and I never ran spectroscopy to ascertain that methanol actually is CH3OH. I never checked out that the gas it reacts into actually is CO2. I never checked out the circuits in the mass-flow controllers to check they are measuring the right flow, and even then I would have to check that Maxwell's laws are actually true.
Everybody, and this goes for scientists too, make a huge number of reasonable assumptions. That's the consensus, and it is a consensus because it works.
Strawman. Who would those be? Einstein changed the view more than any other, and the only reason certain people frowned upon him was unrelated to his science—he was a Jew. Galileo was surely frowned upon, but certainly not by scientists; and what about the discovery of DNA, the proof of Poincaré's conjecture, nuclear physics—were all those scientists doing ground-breaking work being "frowned upon"?
In fact, making bold new claims is all there is to a scientist's life. You need to publish new stuff, which needs to pass anonymous peer review. It's not just a formality, and when I was called for some reviews I have actually sunk a couple of papers which made fundamental mistakes. The problem you have is, you cannot just make absurd claims without any proof on the only basis of faith or personal political bias.
... and that is misleading, bordering on falsehood. It has never happened this fast in nature, which leaves human activity as the most likely cause. If you make this kind of extraordinary claims you should follow it up with extraordinary proof.
Oh my god, gas-guzzling climate-change deniers have interbred with the evolution-denying fundies! Let's hope they do not meet the flat-earthers too...
... because they are using a square wheel instead of a round one?
I stand my ground and aim higher: Norwegian and Swedish are pretty much the same language, with some quaint words on either side to mark the difference. Norwegians and Swedes always speak each their own language when talking to each other, and I never heard anyone having problems with that.
As for Danish, sometimes I read Danish and realise it is not Norwegian only after a few lines. Danish pronunciation is however much more difficult.
Well, there is not much that can go wrong. Assuming the Swedish system is not too different from the Norwegian, expect increased healthcare costs, since Germany is based on private (and public) insurances; my expenses more than doubled. On the other hand, supposing you are a post-doc, you will pay no taxes.
More on healthcare: watch out carefully for very convenient offers geared for academicians. I got such an offer for about 50 euros a month, but reading the small print I figured out they do not pay for anything expensive, such as transplants and chronic diseases... remind me again, why did I want an insurance? Go to a public agency such as AOK and you will be safe, though it's a stiff 350 euros/month.
Note that there are also cheaper, private ones, but as an immigrant your choices are limited to those that pay for your abortions. It does not matter you are a guy, I am too, but my insurance must pay for my abortions in case I defy nature and get knocked up; that's German bureaucracy for you. That's because some imbecile in the Bundestag feared that immigrants started reproducing like rabbits.
Otherwise, brace yourself for for the language barrier: a lot of people do not speak English to a workable level, especially in the East. I can report of personnel of the main immigration bureau of a German state capital who could not speak English, I shit thee not. You should get a crash-course in German before you even get there.
Not Norwegian myself, though lived there 7 years. Possibly moving back in the near future.
You forgot to ask for:
So yes, it's a pretty nice place to be, unless you can't stand snow, rain, and socialists in power.
Same time Queen Elizabeth II is. At least the office of head of state in Iran is up for election, however rigged and preposterous that could be. Also, the "Assembly of Experts", which has elected him, can dismiss him.
Khamenei ran against Mohammad Reza Golpaygani, winning by two-thirds of the votes.
Let me guess: you're using NoScript, like me. Then, allow scripts from fsdn.com.
The Paks power plant was built over 20 years by the People's Republic of Hungary. This means it was built with the Hungarian people's taxes. It's easy to turn a profit when someone else is footing your capital-cost bills, which are especially high for nuclear power plants.
The GP's point was that no nuclear power plant has ever paid for itself, proof of which is that no private entity has ever built, run and made money out of a nuclear plant without substantial subsidies, be it in the form of participation to capital costs, tax breaks, or socialisation of accident risks (as in the US).
Feel free to produce a counterexample. In the meantime, check out "Will Nuclear Power Pay for itself?", by Jeffrey Paine, The Social Science Journal 33(4), 459-473, 1996; that's a peer-reviewed scientific journal. From the abstract: "[...] even under the most optimistic conditions [...] the current generation of the nuclear option over its lifetime may be best be economically marginal."
Use Qt assistant instead. The class index function is much faster than navigating through the links with the browser.
Well, now CO2 is not an emission? "Emission" comes from Latin "ex" and "mittere", i.e. "from" and "to send", or "to send out". Ergo, CO2 is an emission produced by car engines, just like water is for that sake.
You seem to imply that CO2 is not a polluting emission, and curiously you call people who think it is "indoctrinated"; somewhat ironic, since the scientific consensus is that anthropogenic global warming is as real as science gets. If you are an AGW denier, you are the one indoctrinated by certain interest groups (fortunately mostly confined to the US), so much indoctrinated in fact that you ignore the world-wide consensus of people who know much more than you or I about this issue.
So, if you want to disprove the consensus (which historically has indeed happened a number of times), the only thing you need is to prove it wrong. So do not waste your time posting your wisdom on Slashdot, but submit your theories, measurements and simulations to a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and when the article is accepted we will have something to talk about.
Otherwise, you could simply find a peer-reviewed scientific article (even if only one) that disproves AGW. Good luck with that, since it has been attempted before.
... As opposed to "we'll make this temporary later"? O_o
Been there, done that. Hear what Justice Scalia says about torture: it's not unconstitutional, because phrase "cruel and unusual punishment" refers to punishment, not to preventive torture against somebody who has not been convicted of anything. That's Justice Antonin Gregory Scalia, member of the Supreme Court of the United States. I for one would feel safer if Lionel Hutz had his job.
It does make a certain sense. Remember who is in charge in Italy. The guy owns a^Hthe media conglomerate in the country. His company (or was that the government?) has sued Youtube already, and his government becomes hyperactive every time his private interests are in question.
On the other hand, remember that trials in Italy last for insane amounts of time: it can take decades on average for some kind of trials to reach the end, and at the same time the statutory terms are relatively short and keep running during trial: it's a system engineered to keep MPs out of jail. Therefore, TPB runs quite a low risk.
I am not even surprised anymore by the priorities of our judiciary system. We have mafia, we have rampant corruption, and here is what we focus on. Ahi serva Italia...
I think this falls more in the "stuff that matters" part.
It would not be a third party, it would be the first. Back to square one.
You are in fact pretty wrong. The body uses what we control engineers call "inferential control", i.e. watches a certain variable (carbon dioxide) rather than another (oxygen); I am not sure of the advantages, but may have to do with ease of measurement, response time, or simple evolutionary randomness. See the Wikipedia article on hyperventilation.
In normal conditions this works all right, since when there is little oxygen there is also a lot of carbon dioxide; in conditions for which we did not evolve, like a 100% nitrogen atmosphere, the strategy fails.
This phenomenon has a number of implications: if you hyperventilate before swimming underwater, you do not feel as much the need for oxygen because of the reduced carbon dioxide in your blood, but you still have it just like before: that's how free-divers used to die, not noticing they were lacking oxygen and passing out under water.
Also, I work at a research institute, and at my first course in laboratory safety I was told loud and clear that nitrogen is the main laboratory killer, because everyone assumes it is harmless, while in fact it can easily kill without any warning. Every lab using liquid nitrogen has big yellow signs with "asphyxiation danger" written on them.
As a matter of fact, yes it is.
Great, only by that point our planet will be uninhabitable.
And that's not important because they react with oxygen to give water, CO2 and nitrogen. CO2, instead, is inert and is going nowhere.
As I already commented, any free-market supporter will turn protectionist as soon as he's getting the bad end of the deal. And I don't care if the libertarian thought police mods me down.
That's because voting third-party in the US is effectively wasting your vote. In many (not all) EU countries, there are 5-6 major parties, and chances are better to find a party whose platform suits you better.
It's so cute when free-market conservatives turn protectionist as soon their job is threatened.
Das gilt für "English" auch.
That mistake is one of those I classify "under the radar", i.e. below the background noise of variations of English. Or at least I think, since adverb positioning is a shady subject anyway. I was thinking of something like an "always-first" adjective instead of a "usually-after-sometimes-first" one.
Wah, I blame Slashdot anyway. There are so many bad spellers here that, after a while, I started misspelling its, theirs and your, which had never given me trouble.
No, not really. If you think French and English are "incredibly different", you make me thing you do not know that many languages; there are even weirder ways to abuse the Latin alphabet. Their systems are not that far apart, being ludicrously close for the words that are in common, which are quite a lot.
I have diacritics in my language without resorting to French, thanks. So do most languages, including yours to a reduced extent, so don't be "naïve".
You make a lot of good points, and indeed I may have been a bit loose on the use of the "close" word. What I was pointing at was the amount of study necessary to attain a good level of English, and I am positive French is the language (among the larger ones at least) from which this amount is minimal.
Grammar is relatively fast: most irregular English verbs are laughable, with all their irregular forms neatly aligned on a line, and a complete list filling a few pages; there are entire manuals for Romance languages. I don't mean it demeaningly, simplicity is great!
I distinctly remember making only once the mistake of adding a number concord on an adjective, when I was 13: it was "the yellows cars", third or fourth English lesson. I needed that explained once, and off I went. Remembering to put the adjectives always first took some time, since I had to rearrange some thinking patterns, or so I think. But what really took decades has been building up a large vocabulary. That's the advantage French (and, to a minor degree, other Romance-language) speakers have.
[My bold] Sure it is, but what takes time when learning a language (I got 2 1/2 to an acceptable level under my belt) is not the basic vocabulary; you learn that fast enough to learn that in school. For instance, the word "vocabulary" itself is not basic vocabulary, and, say, a Japanese would have to learn the spelling and pronunciation of a fairly long word. A French simply takes "vocabulaire", applies a standard -aire -> -ary transformation, et voila, here is English. This helps enormously in memorisation (because there is little to actually memorise) and ability to improvise. Considering how vast the English vocabulary is, this advantage is much more important than having a similar grammar, which can anyway be learnt in a matter of a few months.
There is an enormous amount of Romance words in English, more so than e.g. in German (can't really say anything about Dutch, which others mentioned); note that I speak Italian as a mother language, fluent Norwegian and a German still subject to improvement, so I do have some hands-on comparative experience on this.
French or French-related words used in this post: Sure, language, acceptable, level, basic, vocabulary, school, instance, Japanese (well at least the -ese suffix), suffix, pronunciation, simply, applies, standard, transformation, enormously, memorisation, because (the "cause" part), part, actually, memorise, ability, improvise, Considering, vast, advantage, important, similar, grammar, matter, amount, Romance, German (yup, that's actually the Latin word for it), really, others (maybe a cognate? anyway recognizable), cognate, recognizable, mentioned, note, Italian, fluent, subject, improvement, comparative, experience, post.
Whew! I swear I was not writing to maximise the amount of French words. Oh damn: maximise, amount, damn
Why, English has 26 letters, Italian only 21 (lacks J, K, W, X and Y).