Another way of saying that is that the residence time of water in the atmosphere is short... only nine days. We can increase the humidity of the atmosphere for a short time by emitting water vapor, but after a week or two the excess just precipitates out as dew, rain, or snow.
How do you know it's nutty pseudoscience before you perform the experiments? It seems to me that performing the experiments and testing hypotheses is science, but dismissing an idea as nutty without performing an experiment is pseudoscience. It's belief without evidence that makes something pseudoscience, even if it's believing an idea is nutty.
I was about to say it had no comments, but then I found this gem: /* stopping at 2^70 bytes per nonce is user's responsibility */
That'll come in handy as soon as someone wants to encrypt more than 2^70 bytes!
All models ignore parameters. A "model" that ignores no parameters is reality. Models are used as simplified versions of reality that can be used to make predictions about what we will observe in reality. All those equations you learned in chemistry and physics are models that are simplified, abstract versions of reality that ignore any parameters that are not included in the model.
I suppose "blindly trust" and "verify" are contradictory. Science, and just about all of life, isn't built around blind trust. I trust that people will drive on the right side of the road and stop at red lights, but I watch just to make sure some fool doesn't violate those basic rules. If I didn't trust in those things, driving would be terrifying experience. But if I trusted blindly, I would get into far more accidents than I do.
My understanding is that to diagnose diseases, all they needed to do to Watson was change the front end and the database it was using. If it is true that a similar change could get Watson to guess prices, then we could say Watson could play The Price is Right. But I don't think there's any connection between looking up facts in a database to answer questions and estimating prices. Do you have an argument that would suggest a simple change to Watson could get it to estimate the price of an item that it can see visually? It seems to me to be a completely kind of different task.
Well, a "properly prepared" Watson wouldn't be Watson any more. The games Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, and The Price is Right have little in common in terms of the type of algorithm and program needed. Jeopardy is about looking up relatively common factual information, Wheel of Fortune is about guessing phrases, and The Price is Right is about estimating prices -- all worlds apart when it comes to which algorithms would be used.
I suppose the point is that even our most "intelligent" programs and computers are still programmed to be good at one, and only one, task. It can perhaps be reprogrammed to perform a slightly different but almost identical task, but you can't use a program that is designed for one task and expect it to perform reasonably at some quite different task. Different tasks require different algorithms and sometimes even different specialized hardware.
Show me a group of scientists who are telling us shit is going to happen without explaining their reasoning, and then I will see the point of your post.
Watson would fail miserably, because it wasn't designed for those games. It's like asking how Deep Blue would do at checkers. It doesn't play checkers. It plays chess.
They didn't say "if you get a scrape you will die." They said "if you get a scrape you could potentially die," which is a factual statement if we have no effective antibiotics.
This is a common strawman argument. Restate a scientists' position so that it is extreme, then chide the scientists for taking such an extreme position. It seems to be remarkably effective with a significant percentage of the population, but it seems transparent enough to me.
I think you've been watching too many Hollywood movies and reading sensationalist newspaper and magazine articles. Pandemics, just like hurricanes and earthquakes, happen all the time and kill millions, but they don't "devastate the world" and "kill us all." You're being alarmist.
They just want money, so they say there will be some sort of catastrophe so they can get funding for their so-called studies. They even managed to throw in think of the children on top of their other hyperbole. I, for one, want absolute iron-clad proof that something disastrous will happen before we lift a finger to prevent it.
The above post may contain toxic doses of sarcasm.
In any case, we're going to need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions some day. Fossil fuels won't last forever. I'd prefer a gradual, controlled reduction rather than a quick drop in supply that would cause fuel costs to skyrocket. Not to mention that the excess carbon dioxide is also acidifying the oceans.
Exactly. That's why there's a warning when you go to an HTTPS site and it gives you a self-signed certificate, and why it would be a mistake to remove the warning.
The problem with self-signed certs is that there isn't a good way to determine whether a site is legitimately using a self-signed cert, or if an attacker is successfully accomplishing a man-in-the-middle attack using a self-signed cert. If I use HTTPS, I want an assurance of security, and if there's a possible MITM attack in progress, I surely want to know immediately.
NASA is more about engineering than science. NASA rockets carry science experiments, but from what I know those experiments are developed by researchers who do not work (directly) for NASA.
According to the EPA, sea level rise is predicted to be 30 to 70 inches over the next 100 years. That sounds much closer to all the other estimates I have heard. That sea level rise is enough to cause hundreds of millions of people and the corresponding infrastructure to relocate. And there's no reason that the sea level will magically stop rising after 100 years. It'll keep rising unless we can somehow scrub the excess CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Since I replaced most of the bulbs in my house to CFLs, I'm changing light bulbs far less often. They last far longer than incandescents in my experience, exactly as claimed on the box. I've also bought several 65W LED floodlights, and they produce light just as good as incandescents, turn on to full brightness nearly instantly, and use about an eighth the electricity of incandescents.
The worst is when someone adds some random bit of trivia in the middle of a paragraph for no apparent reason. Maybe what they added is a true statement, but did they really think they actually improved the article? Encyclopedia articles are more than random collections of trivia thrown together, and it seems like many people just cannot see the difference.
I've never had that problem. I occasionally run into someone who insists on making poor edits, but they usually go away. Whenever I see someone making a claim like yours, and I am able to go and see what they're talking about, there are genuine problems with their edits, such as not providing references for claims they are trying to add or making personal attacks (which you seem to be doing here).
How do you become an editor? You go in and make an edit. Make it a good one: well written, with good grammar and punctuation, written to a non-technical and unsophisticated audience, and back up your factual claims with references. It's an encyclopedia, after all, and one of the most visited sites on the web. If you post utter crap such as unintelligible garble or something obviously untrue, expect it to be immediately deleted.
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Messing around with model rockets is easy. Actually getting a rocket to the moon is hard.
Another way of saying that is that the residence time of water in the atmosphere is short... only nine days. We can increase the humidity of the atmosphere for a short time by emitting water vapor, but after a week or two the excess just precipitates out as dew, rain, or snow.
We do need to worry about it because increased temperatures means increased humidity in the atmosphere which leads to positive feedback.
How do you know it's nutty pseudoscience before you perform the experiments? It seems to me that performing the experiments and testing hypotheses is science, but dismissing an idea as nutty without performing an experiment is pseudoscience. It's belief without evidence that makes something pseudoscience, even if it's believing an idea is nutty.
I was about to say it had no comments, but then I found this gem:
/* stopping at 2^70 bytes per nonce is user's responsibility */
That'll come in handy as soon as someone wants to encrypt more than 2^70 bytes!
All models ignore parameters. A "model" that ignores no parameters is reality. Models are used as simplified versions of reality that can be used to make predictions about what we will observe in reality. All those equations you learned in chemistry and physics are models that are simplified, abstract versions of reality that ignore any parameters that are not included in the model.
Check your calculator. According to mine, 1 000 000 / 999 900 = 1.000 100 010 001
I suppose "blindly trust" and "verify" are contradictory. Science, and just about all of life, isn't built around blind trust. I trust that people will drive on the right side of the road and stop at red lights, but I watch just to make sure some fool doesn't violate those basic rules. If I didn't trust in those things, driving would be terrifying experience. But if I trusted blindly, I would get into far more accidents than I do.
My understanding is that to diagnose diseases, all they needed to do to Watson was change the front end and the database it was using. If it is true that a similar change could get Watson to guess prices, then we could say Watson could play The Price is Right. But I don't think there's any connection between looking up facts in a database to answer questions and estimating prices. Do you have an argument that would suggest a simple change to Watson could get it to estimate the price of an item that it can see visually? It seems to me to be a completely kind of different task.
Well, a "properly prepared" Watson wouldn't be Watson any more. The games Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, and The Price is Right have little in common in terms of the type of algorithm and program needed. Jeopardy is about looking up relatively common factual information, Wheel of Fortune is about guessing phrases, and The Price is Right is about estimating prices -- all worlds apart when it comes to which algorithms would be used.
I suppose the point is that even our most "intelligent" programs and computers are still programmed to be good at one, and only one, task. It can perhaps be reprogrammed to perform a slightly different but almost identical task, but you can't use a program that is designed for one task and expect it to perform reasonably at some quite different task. Different tasks require different algorithms and sometimes even different specialized hardware.
Show me a group of scientists who are telling us shit is going to happen without explaining their reasoning, and then I will see the point of your post.
Watson would fail miserably, because it wasn't designed for those games. It's like asking how Deep Blue would do at checkers. It doesn't play checkers. It plays chess.
It's been more than fifteen years since Deep Blue beat Kasparov. Certainly humans don't stand a chance against modern chess software and hardware.
They didn't say "if you get a scrape you will die." They said "if you get a scrape you could potentially die," which is a factual statement if we have no effective antibiotics.
This is a common strawman argument. Restate a scientists' position so that it is extreme, then chide the scientists for taking such an extreme position. It seems to be remarkably effective with a significant percentage of the population, but it seems transparent enough to me.
I think you've been watching too many Hollywood movies and reading sensationalist newspaper and magazine articles. Pandemics, just like hurricanes and earthquakes, happen all the time and kill millions, but they don't "devastate the world" and "kill us all." You're being alarmist.
They just want money, so they say there will be some sort of catastrophe so they can get funding for their so-called studies. They even managed to throw in think of the children on top of their other hyperbole. I, for one, want absolute iron-clad proof that something disastrous will happen before we lift a finger to prevent it.
The above post may contain toxic doses of sarcasm.
In any case, we're going to need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions some day. Fossil fuels won't last forever. I'd prefer a gradual, controlled reduction rather than a quick drop in supply that would cause fuel costs to skyrocket. Not to mention that the excess carbon dioxide is also acidifying the oceans.
Exactly. That's why there's a warning when you go to an HTTPS site and it gives you a self-signed certificate, and why it would be a mistake to remove the warning.
The problem with self-signed certs is that there isn't a good way to determine whether a site is legitimately using a self-signed cert, or if an attacker is successfully accomplishing a man-in-the-middle attack using a self-signed cert. If I use HTTPS, I want an assurance of security, and if there's a possible MITM attack in progress, I surely want to know immediately.
NASA is more about engineering than science. NASA rockets carry science experiments, but from what I know those experiments are developed by researchers who do not work (directly) for NASA.
According to the EPA, sea level rise is predicted to be 30 to 70 inches over the next 100 years. That sounds much closer to all the other estimates I have heard. That sea level rise is enough to cause hundreds of millions of people and the corresponding infrastructure to relocate. And there's no reason that the sea level will magically stop rising after 100 years. It'll keep rising unless we can somehow scrub the excess CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Since I replaced most of the bulbs in my house to CFLs, I'm changing light bulbs far less often. They last far longer than incandescents in my experience, exactly as claimed on the box. I've also bought several 65W LED floodlights, and they produce light just as good as incandescents, turn on to full brightness nearly instantly, and use about an eighth the electricity of incandescents.
The worst is when someone adds some random bit of trivia in the middle of a paragraph for no apparent reason. Maybe what they added is a true statement, but did they really think they actually improved the article? Encyclopedia articles are more than random collections of trivia thrown together, and it seems like many people just cannot see the difference.
I've never had that problem. I occasionally run into someone who insists on making poor edits, but they usually go away. Whenever I see someone making a claim like yours, and I am able to go and see what they're talking about, there are genuine problems with their edits, such as not providing references for claims they are trying to add or making personal attacks (which you seem to be doing here).
How do you become an editor? You go in and make an edit. Make it a good one: well written, with good grammar and punctuation, written to a non-technical and unsophisticated audience, and back up your factual claims with references. It's an encyclopedia, after all, and one of the most visited sites on the web. If you post utter crap such as unintelligible garble or something obviously untrue, expect it to be immediately deleted.