Quantum Apostrophe (the "space nutter" AC) did the heavy lifting here. Apollo cost a lot of money (something like $!50-200 billion in today's money, I believe) and we just didn't get that much out of it. especially in the long term. Sorry, that's the way it is.
That's why I continue to call it not very valuable.
What do you think I mean by "valuable". I'm not comparing it to the typical value of garden gnomes here. I'm comparing it to what you can do with $150-200 billion dollars in today's money. Sure, it's probably somewhat more valuable than half a year of the 2000s Iraqi occupation, but notice how you can't come up with any tangible benefits from the program. There's the vague "common good" thing. There's the "vast advances" in stuff which would have experienced those vast advances anyway.
The "learned lots of stuff" thing (one of the last things you mentioned) is the only category that can be stretched to include anything concrete in it. We would be a lot more ignorant about Earth and the Solar System without the plentiful samples we returned from the Moon. And the technology demonstrations such as showing that it is possible to land people on the Moon or the economic value of sending many multiple space probes instead of one-offs, was useful though it is worth noting that Saturn V was a technology dead end.
So it was useful, but $150-200 billion useful? No way.
That is what I mean by continuing to say that Apollo wasn't that valuable. If the US had spent an order of magnitude less on it, then it would be valuable - and we might well still be launching Saturn Vs today.
Let's look at the actual paper and the actual claim:
Results are given in section 3, where we present evidence that a change in the regionâ(TM)s climate has been detected and that it is unlikely that the observed Novemberâ"April Mediterranean drying since 1902 occurred due to internal variability alone. Diagnosis of the CMIP3 coupled models reveals that this detected change toward drier conditions is attributable, in part, to the Mediterranean regionâ(TM)s sensitivity to time-evolving external radiative forcing. The amplitude of the externally forced, area-averaged drying signal is roughly one-half the magnitude of the observed drying during 1902â"2010, indicating that other processes likely also contributed.
They are speaking of really poor correlation here. There are other man-made effects that need to be considered, like water table depletion, vegetation removal, and agricultural practices.
"Climate" is used several times, but aside from empty assertions that climate affects or impacts the potential range of a disease, no connection has been claimed between the incident of tropic diseases in the US and climate change. The actual connection is travel with people bringing back diseases from the tropics.
Oh, prices are low right now. Just wait until a significant part of farmland becomes desert or salt marsh.
No, they aren't. And the primary reason why farmland would become desert or salt marsh is mismanagement both of the land and water resources. This is quite relevant because climate change might negatively impact the productivity of farmland (or it might not), but poor land and water management will negatively impact the productivity of farmland frequently to the point of the land no longer being viable farmland.
My view is that management is far more important than climate when it comes to agriculture and growing the food we need to the point that it doesn't really matter what the climate does.
The temperature range best for us is almost certainly what we've adapted to over the centuries.
You mean over the last 40 years with A/C.
We're having changes in climate a lot faster than natural adaptation, creating extinctions and disruptions in the ecosystems, and it's getting to be faster than human society can easily absorb.
Deal with habitat destruction and invasive species and you've dealt with the climate change disruptions. Don't dealt with those two things and it won't matter if there is climate change or not.
Second, once again we have this noise about human societies being unable to deal with slight changes in temperature while ignoring that many of those societies didn't even exist over the time frames we're interested in. We're not even close to challenging the adaptability of human societies from climate change. In particular, the societies that are failing now, like Syria, for example, are doing so for reason that have nothing to do with climate change.
Without human CO2 emissions the global temperature trend would be negative. That indicates quite heavily that human activity is responsible for all of the warming.
If you had read my post, you would have realized I more or less agree, though I don't agree that we know what the temperature trend would be in the absence of human activity.
Read the IPCC reports. Your questions have been answered. Either you are really, really lazy or you just don't care to know the answers.
The problem here is that the IPCC assertion I highlighted ("recognizing the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius") is not based on fact. Rereading the IPCC report will not change that.
But having said that, the IPCC reports do demonstrate, repeatedly, that the IPCC is firstly a propaganda tool which I suppose could be a related question. At this point, I think the IPCC reviews should just drop the "Summary for Policy Makers" due to the biases and exaggerations contained in those sections.
You exemplify a very common problem in modern politics. You argue at length against other people who want to improve things and do not make a single useful suggestion of your own.
Actually, I did suggest something. Do nothing seems to be a better strategy. I'll repeat that suggestion first.
For my second, how about just picking low lying fruit that pretty much everyone can agree on, like increasing the albedo of urban areas and putting out coal fires?
Said the person who has obviously never read Plato (and probably not a page of any other philosopher, either).
Plato's virtue is that he was the first to write stuff like this down. If he were to do it now, he'd just be another kook with a blog rehashing stale ideas. While there is still some value to his work, a lot of it is valuable just for the dead ends that are illustrated and eventually dismissed so that we may avoid them. The theory of forms is one of those dead ends.
For example, it is completely irrelevant to us whether a concept is a real object or not. We don't use ideal tables or ideal numbers, we use real world objects that happen to have properties in common with these concepts.
Even the concept itself is actually a description or a representation and we can come up with rival descriptions or representations, sometimes quite alien ones, without requiring a concept to be real or seeing even the slightest difference in our lives or arguments for real versus not real.
IMHO completely depends on your definition of reality. But one way is implied by the language you use, such as "concepts" and "abstract ideas" which are only used for certain not real things.
Another thing to consider here is whether it matters. For example, does it matter if ideas are real? Does it matter if only ideas that can be fully described or represented in our universe are real? Does it matter if no ideas are real (though clearly we can still speak of real representations of some of these ideas just due to our ability to describe them)?
Yet another argument conflating epic mismanagement of resources with global warming. If in a desert you pump out your ground water in order to grow cotton, there will be drought not matter if there is global warming or not.
Unless doing something about it is worse than doing nothing about it - such as crippling your society in order to make a barely measurable change in CO2 emissions. There is a lot of profoundly bad policy aimed at mitigating global warming.
And you breezily sidestepped the issue. I'm talking about healthy volunteers who risk their lives.
I am too. Even a dying patient is a healthier volunteer than a dead one. Just because you are sick, it doesn't mean that you can't do anything to make your situation considerably worse and not just in transitioning from dying to dead.
I think more highly of you with every post you make.
I disagree. If you were actually thinking, you would be saying something else.
One of the common problems with any field of science or math is how hard it is for outsiders to understand what's going on inside. What sort of challenging problems, profound conjectures, sublime proofs, or versatile tools and applications do you feel languish in obscurity or are greatly underappreciated by either the layman and/or a knowledgeable mathematician outside your field(s) of interest?
recognizing the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius
There is no such scientific view. I admit there is a consensus that humans have caused some degree of warming and I even agree with that. But to blandly claim without a bit of supporting evidence that there is a consensus on what temperature range is best for us is ridiculous.
What makes it worse is the lack of support for a temperature increase that small. There are a lot of countries that simply aren't on board with curbing human activities enough to avoid the cutbacks that are claimed to be necessary for holding warming to below 2 C. Time for a plan B that isn't stupid.
The customer for a flashy command center/situation room is the executive who thought it was a good idea. Lot's of sexy graphics and blinking lights will satisfy that customer.
Come to think of it, brain implants would be interesting to try out. If I don't have to pay for the surgery and animal testing shows they've mostly fixed the side effects (like build up of scar tissue in the brain), I'd be willing to give them a try.
Slashdot Mirror
Quantum Apostrophe (the "space nutter" AC) did the heavy lifting here. Apollo cost a lot of money (something like $!50-200 billion in today's money, I believe) and we just didn't get that much out of it. especially in the long term. Sorry, that's the way it is.
That's why I continue to call it not very valuable.
Apollo wasn't that valuable? I beg to differ...
What do you think I mean by "valuable". I'm not comparing it to the typical value of garden gnomes here. I'm comparing it to what you can do with $150-200 billion dollars in today's money. Sure, it's probably somewhat more valuable than half a year of the 2000s Iraqi occupation, but notice how you can't come up with any tangible benefits from the program. There's the vague "common good" thing. There's the "vast advances" in stuff which would have experienced those vast advances anyway.
The "learned lots of stuff" thing (one of the last things you mentioned) is the only category that can be stretched to include anything concrete in it. We would be a lot more ignorant about Earth and the Solar System without the plentiful samples we returned from the Moon. And the technology demonstrations such as showing that it is possible to land people on the Moon or the economic value of sending many multiple space probes instead of one-offs, was useful though it is worth noting that Saturn V was a technology dead end.
So it was useful, but $150-200 billion useful? No way.
That is what I mean by continuing to say that Apollo wasn't that valuable. If the US had spent an order of magnitude less on it, then it would be valuable - and we might well still be launching Saturn Vs today.
The only way to get Apollo again is by socialism, just like the first one.
Perhaps, but whether or not that is true, it glosses over another problem, namely, that Apollo just wasn't that valuable.
And as for droughts - they are increasing as a direct result of climate change: http://phys.org/news/2011-10-h...
Let's look at the actual paper and the actual claim:
Results are given in section 3, where we present evidence that a change in the regionâ(TM)s climate has been detected and that it is unlikely that the observed Novemberâ"April Mediterranean drying since 1902 occurred due to internal variability alone. Diagnosis of the CMIP3 coupled models reveals that this detected change toward drier conditions is attributable, in part, to the Mediterranean regionâ(TM)s sensitivity to time-evolving external radiative forcing. The amplitude of the externally forced, area-averaged drying signal is roughly one-half the magnitude of the observed drying during 1902â"2010, indicating that other processes likely also contributed.
They are speaking of really poor correlation here. There are other man-made effects that need to be considered, like water table depletion, vegetation removal, and agricultural practices.
ORLY? http://www.scientificamerican....
"Climate" is used several times, but aside from empty assertions that climate affects or impacts the potential range of a disease, no connection has been claimed between the incident of tropic diseases in the US and climate change. The actual connection is travel with people bringing back diseases from the tropics.
Oh, prices are low right now. Just wait until a significant part of farmland becomes desert or salt marsh.
No, they aren't. And the primary reason why farmland would become desert or salt marsh is mismanagement both of the land and water resources. This is quite relevant because climate change might negatively impact the productivity of farmland (or it might not), but poor land and water management will negatively impact the productivity of farmland frequently to the point of the land no longer being viable farmland.
My view is that management is far more important than climate when it comes to agriculture and growing the food we need to the point that it doesn't really matter what the climate does.
Remember, the idea is that hiring offshore is supposed to be a *last* resort
Let's not waste our time with this. It's clearly not true or enforced.
The temperature range best for us is almost certainly what we've adapted to over the centuries.
You mean over the last 40 years with A/C.
We're having changes in climate a lot faster than natural adaptation, creating extinctions and disruptions in the ecosystems, and it's getting to be faster than human society can easily absorb.
Deal with habitat destruction and invasive species and you've dealt with the climate change disruptions. Don't dealt with those two things and it won't matter if there is climate change or not.
Second, once again we have this noise about human societies being unable to deal with slight changes in temperature while ignoring that many of those societies didn't even exist over the time frames we're interested in. We're not even close to challenging the adaptability of human societies from climate change. In particular, the societies that are failing now, like Syria, for example, are doing so for reason that have nothing to do with climate change.
Where do you think the money for those sub-prime mortgages came from?
Central banks and a relaxing of the regulations on reserve amounts (to 50 to 1 leverage) actually.
It was the derivatives.
They could have held US treasuries and still screw up at 50 to 1 leverage.
Do you really think having an MBA indicates someone is good at trading in a prediction market?
Without human CO2 emissions the global temperature trend would be negative. That indicates quite heavily that human activity is responsible for all of the warming.
If you had read my post, you would have realized I more or less agree, though I don't agree that we know what the temperature trend would be in the absence of human activity.
Read the IPCC reports. Your questions have been answered. Either you are really, really lazy or you just don't care to know the answers.
The problem here is that the IPCC assertion I highlighted ("recognizing the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius") is not based on fact. Rereading the IPCC report will not change that.
But having said that, the IPCC reports do demonstrate, repeatedly, that the IPCC is firstly a propaganda tool which I suppose could be a related question. At this point, I think the IPCC reviews should just drop the "Summary for Policy Makers" due to the biases and exaggerations contained in those sections.
He does have that thousand yard stare down.
How would an enlightened foreigner say "That never gets old?"
You exemplify a very common problem in modern politics. You argue at length against other people who want to improve things and do not make a single useful suggestion of your own.
Actually, I did suggest something. Do nothing seems to be a better strategy. I'll repeat that suggestion first.
For my second, how about just picking low lying fruit that pretty much everyone can agree on, like increasing the albedo of urban areas and putting out coal fires?
What is the brain research program you are signing up for?
I think rather the question is where is it? Buried by short sighted FDA regulations seems to be the answer.
Hollywood does their own exciting things - like glorifying violence. And we do other things with oil than merely be bad to Mother Earth.
We're talking about 1880-s - at that time they were able to measure hundredths of a degree. With regular mercury thermometers.
Precision != accuracy.
Said the person who has obviously never read Plato (and probably not a page of any other philosopher, either).
Plato's virtue is that he was the first to write stuff like this down. If he were to do it now, he'd just be another kook with a blog rehashing stale ideas. While there is still some value to his work, a lot of it is valuable just for the dead ends that are illustrated and eventually dismissed so that we may avoid them. The theory of forms is one of those dead ends.
For example, it is completely irrelevant to us whether a concept is a real object or not. We don't use ideal tables or ideal numbers, we use real world objects that happen to have properties in common with these concepts.
Even the concept itself is actually a description or a representation and we can come up with rival descriptions or representations, sometimes quite alien ones, without requiring a concept to be real or seeing even the slightest difference in our lives or arguments for real versus not real.
IMHO completely depends on your definition of reality. But one way is implied by the language you use, such as "concepts" and "abstract ideas" which are only used for certain not real things.
Another thing to consider here is whether it matters. For example, does it matter if ideas are real? Does it matter if only ideas that can be fully described or represented in our universe are real? Does it matter if no ideas are real (though clearly we can still speak of real representations of some of these ideas just due to our ability to describe them)?
Tell that to the Syrians.
Yet another argument conflating epic mismanagement of resources with global warming. If in a desert you pump out your ground water in order to grow cotton, there will be drought not matter if there is global warming or not.
So lets do something about it.
Unless doing something about it is worse than doing nothing about it - such as crippling your society in order to make a barely measurable change in CO2 emissions. There is a lot of profoundly bad policy aimed at mitigating global warming.
Khallow is channelling Mother Theresa today, and would gladly give his life if just one person could be helped.
Nonsense. But one death per several thousand to several million saved is my speed.
Brought tears to my eyes, If I could only be so altruistic.
You're so altruistic, you'd damn millions to save a few. Thus is the price of the morally bankrupt viewpoint.
And you breezily sidestepped the issue. I'm talking about healthy volunteers who risk their lives.
I am too. Even a dying patient is a healthier volunteer than a dead one. Just because you are sick, it doesn't mean that you can't do anything to make your situation considerably worse and not just in transitioning from dying to dead.
I think more highly of you with every post you make.
I disagree. If you were actually thinking, you would be saying something else.
One of the common problems with any field of science or math is how hard it is for outsiders to understand what's going on inside. What sort of challenging problems, profound conjectures, sublime proofs, or versatile tools and applications do you feel languish in obscurity or are greatly underappreciated by either the layman and/or a knowledgeable mathematician outside your field(s) of interest?
recognizing the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius
There is no such scientific view. I admit there is a consensus that humans have caused some degree of warming and I even agree with that. But to blandly claim without a bit of supporting evidence that there is a consensus on what temperature range is best for us is ridiculous.
What makes it worse is the lack of support for a temperature increase that small. There are a lot of countries that simply aren't on board with curbing human activities enough to avoid the cutbacks that are claimed to be necessary for holding warming to below 2 C. Time for a plan B that isn't stupid.
The customer for a flashy command center/situation room is the executive who thought it was a good idea. Lot's of sexy graphics and blinking lights will satisfy that customer.
Come to think of it, brain implants would be interesting to try out. If I don't have to pay for the surgery and animal testing shows they've mostly fixed the side effects (like build up of scar tissue in the brain), I'd be willing to give them a try.