The problem with people accepting anthropogenic global warming is not a matter of understanding. It's a matter of people believing what they want to believe. If people want to believe in God and think that evolution diminishes the importance God or think that evolutions are saying that God doesn't exist, they look for any evidence that evolution doesn't happen, no matter how flimsy it is, to prevent having to feel uncomfortable emotions. If people believe that they have to give up a comfortable lifestyle to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, they will look for any evidence that AGW is incorrect, no matter how flimsy it is. You can see this behavior for what it is when people cling to a mistaken idea for dear life. In a way, they feel that their way of life does depend on that belief, because that belief is their way of comforting themselves.
Most of the bulbs in my house are at or above head level, and heat rises, so they don't really heat the area that I'm interested in heating. I suppose some of the heat generated does make it down to where people are. Of course, the generated heat is negated by the air conditioning used to remove the excess heat during the summer. I think most of the heat generated by incandescents in the U.S. is a waste or counterproductive.
Just tax the carbon used to create energy. Also tax imports from countries that rely heavily on high-carbon sources of energy such as coal. Unfortunately, voters don't elect policitians who are in favor of more taxes.
Climate is like the probability a side of a die will land up, and weather is like one particular die roll. Let's say you have a die and the probability that it will roll a 1 is increasing and the probability that it will roll a 6 is also increasing. You cannot tell from any one particular die roll whether that is evidence that the probabilities of the die rolling particular values is changing. But if you graph the die rolls over a long period of time and observe the change in probabilities empirically, that is evidence that the probabilities are changing. Any particular roll of a 1 or a 6 proves nothing, other than the probability of rolling a 1 or a 6 is not zero. But if you roll the die 100 times and observe 50 of those rolls are a 1 or 6, that does say something about the distribution of die rolls, in particular that the die does seem to now be favoring 1 and 6 results.
Similarly, we can graph the number of record highs we observe and the number of record lows we observe. If we graph these results and observe that the ratio of record highs to record lows is increasing over time, it does appear that the climate is changing toward warmer. This is exactly what we observe. No one particular record high or record low shows this, however. You cannot do statistics on a sample of one.
The media will always be sensationalist, as long as it gets them more eyeballs and clicks. Don't disagree with the science just because of the way the media presents it.
This is why Russell and Norvig sidestep the issue in their book. They provide the notion of "behaving rationally", which is performing well according to some performance metric within a given environment. So essentially any problem for which we cannot write a program that quickly finds the best answer leads to some programs which can do better than others. The ones that do better behave more rationally than the ones that do worse. There really isn't any intelligence in the way that you mean in these programs. A translation program doesn't understand the sentences it's translating any more than a chess-playing program understands that it's playing chess any more than a sorting program understands it's sorting things.
Watson is as much AI as any other project I've ever seen. On the other hand, no AI I've ever seen understands what it's doing. Just as Deep Blue doesn't understand it's playing chess, just performing alpha-beta search on a game tree, Watson is just performing statistical analysis against entries in its database. It's similar to how modern translation programs work -- they do not parse and understand what a sentence says -- they instead perform statistical correlations to figure out which string of characters is most often associated with some other string of characters. Translation programs don't understand the sentences they are translating any more than Watson understands the answers it's giving. That's why modern translation programs are far from matching human performance.
The problem is that there are people who don't want to believe in the warming and take these jokes very seriously and repeat them seriously. It creates loads of misinformation that we then need to correct.
Take a look at the temperature record for the last 1000 years and you can see that the earth is warmer now than at any other time in the previous 1000 years and warming rapidly.
No. The warming is due to the fact that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, which traps the sun's heat. The amount of energy trapped in the fossil fuels is not nearly enough to account for the warming we've observed.
True environmentalists would insulate their houses and use efficient heating to keep comfortable and reduce their energy bills. Reducing carbon dioxide emissions does not mean that we suffer.
No. Global warming is the observation that the mean temperature of the earth has increased over the past several decades, as shown in this graph. Only warming is proof of warming. We can also see effects of this warming, such as the Arctic ice and Antarctic ice melting.
The equation e=mc^2 means that matter and energy are the same thing, just in different forms. When you move, you gain kinetic energy and therefore gain in mass and therefore exert more gravity on other bodies. The equation just gives a way of converting units of mass to units of energy. It's just like converting nanometers to kilometers -- both units represent the same kind of quantity (length), just different amounts.
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The problem with people accepting anthropogenic global warming is not a matter of understanding. It's a matter of people believing what they want to believe. If people want to believe in God and think that evolution diminishes the importance God or think that evolutions are saying that God doesn't exist, they look for any evidence that evolution doesn't happen, no matter how flimsy it is, to prevent having to feel uncomfortable emotions. If people believe that they have to give up a comfortable lifestyle to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, they will look for any evidence that AGW is incorrect, no matter how flimsy it is. You can see this behavior for what it is when people cling to a mistaken idea for dear life. In a way, they feel that their way of life does depend on that belief, because that belief is their way of comforting themselves.
That's why there have been standards in place for more efficient applicances and cars. People just don't bitch about those so much.
Most of the bulbs in my house are at or above head level, and heat rises, so they don't really heat the area that I'm interested in heating. I suppose some of the heat generated does make it down to where people are. Of course, the generated heat is negated by the air conditioning used to remove the excess heat during the summer. I think most of the heat generated by incandescents in the U.S. is a waste or counterproductive.
Just tax the carbon used to create energy. Also tax imports from countries that rely heavily on high-carbon sources of energy such as coal. Unfortunately, voters don't elect policitians who are in favor of more taxes.
If you read the book, you find that the spinal operation was purely voluntary and optional.
Well, that's after millions of dollars of research was thrown at producing better chess programs and billions on faster chips.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Climate is like the probability a side of a die will land up, and weather is like one particular die roll. Let's say you have a die and the probability that it will roll a 1 is increasing and the probability that it will roll a 6 is also increasing. You cannot tell from any one particular die roll whether that is evidence that the probabilities of the die rolling particular values is changing. But if you graph the die rolls over a long period of time and observe the change in probabilities empirically, that is evidence that the probabilities are changing. Any particular roll of a 1 or a 6 proves nothing, other than the probability of rolling a 1 or a 6 is not zero. But if you roll the die 100 times and observe 50 of those rolls are a 1 or 6, that does say something about the distribution of die rolls, in particular that the die does seem to now be favoring 1 and 6 results.
Similarly, we can graph the number of record highs we observe and the number of record lows we observe. If we graph these results and observe that the ratio of record highs to record lows is increasing over time, it does appear that the climate is changing toward warmer. This is exactly what we observe. No one particular record high or record low shows this, however. You cannot do statistics on a sample of one.
The media will always be sensationalist, as long as it gets them more eyeballs and clicks. Don't disagree with the science just because of the way the media presents it.
This is why Russell and Norvig sidestep the issue in their book. They provide the notion of "behaving rationally", which is performing well according to some performance metric within a given environment. So essentially any problem for which we cannot write a program that quickly finds the best answer leads to some programs which can do better than others. The ones that do better behave more rationally than the ones that do worse. There really isn't any intelligence in the way that you mean in these programs. A translation program doesn't understand the sentences it's translating any more than a chess-playing program understands that it's playing chess any more than a sorting program understands it's sorting things.
Python is very similar to Perl, and also has most of the characteristics that make Lisp a good language to program AI algorithms.
The algorithm is an AI algorithm. It's using hueristics to attempt to minimize some function, as many AI algorithms do.
No, it's P!=NP.
I think you're confusing science with technology and engineering.
Watson is as much AI as any other project I've ever seen. On the other hand, no AI I've ever seen understands what it's doing. Just as Deep Blue doesn't understand it's playing chess, just performing alpha-beta search on a game tree, Watson is just performing statistical analysis against entries in its database. It's similar to how modern translation programs work -- they do not parse and understand what a sentence says -- they instead perform statistical correlations to figure out which string of characters is most often associated with some other string of characters. Translation programs don't understand the sentences they are translating any more than Watson understands the answers it's giving. That's why modern translation programs are far from matching human performance.
No problem! Just scortch the sky so they can't get solar power any more.
The problem is that there are people who don't want to believe in the warming and take these jokes very seriously and repeat them seriously. It creates loads of misinformation that we then need to correct.
Take a look at the temperature record for the last 1000 years and you can see that the earth is warmer now than at any other time in the previous 1000 years and warming rapidly.
No. The warming is due to the fact that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, which traps the sun's heat. The amount of energy trapped in the fossil fuels is not nearly enough to account for the warming we've observed.
The ice they are stuck in is old ice that was able to escape because the ice around it melted. The melting is why more of the ice on land is breaking off and flowing into the sea. Read the article I linked to above.
True environmentalists would insulate their houses and use efficient heating to keep comfortable and reduce their energy bills. Reducing carbon dioxide emissions does not mean that we suffer.
No. Global warming is the observation that the mean temperature of the earth has increased over the past several decades, as shown in this graph. Only warming is proof of warming. We can also see effects of this warming, such as the Arctic ice and Antarctic ice melting.
Sigh. Take a look at this graph and read the article.
The equation e=mc^2 means that matter and energy are the same thing, just in different forms. When you move, you gain kinetic energy and therefore gain in mass and therefore exert more gravity on other bodies. The equation just gives a way of converting units of mass to units of energy. It's just like converting nanometers to kilometers -- both units represent the same kind of quantity (length), just different amounts.
As has been explained before, the reason there's lots of ice in the Antarctic sea is that the ice on the land is melting, which makes more of the ice flow into the sea. http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/antarctic-ice-melt