And at the risk of Godwinning the discussion, there's at least one Christian country that also killed as many members of what it considered to be an "enemy" religion in the middle of the last Century.
Which country would that be? The Fascists were atheist. The Communists were atheist. That doesn't leave many left.
I was about to say the same thing. When you write:
No radioactive fallout was detected
that rules out a nuclear test. We should be able to go out to the sea floor of the site right now and detect fallout. I believe it's been since concluded that this was a meteor.
The thing is, it's a remarkably hard problem to figure out because a lot of the research simply will not state pollution emissions by country. For example, consider this UN report on mercury emissions. They have a decent resolution heat map of atmospheric mercury emissions (pg 22) and they'll break down mercury emissions by continent to the tenth of a percent of global emissions. They have the ability to do pollution per country (which in turn is what you need to do these pollution per capita calculations) easily, but they aren't touching that third rail.
The only thing they say on any country is:
China accounts for three-quarters of East and Southeast Asian emissions, or about one third of the globalÂtotal.
Given a population of around 1.36 billion out of 7.3 billion, I get a bit over double the per capita atmospheric emissions of the rest of the world. Meanwhile from the heatmap, I see that a North America cell which includes the lower 48 and a strongly polluting Mexico contributes 7.2%, That's less than a factor of four. Including Mexico's population, it's about a third the size of China. I think that's good enough to indicate that China emits several times more atmospheric mercury emissions per capita than the US does.
That's all you're going to get. I don't see the need to do the same for particulate matter or the other measures of pollution that I consider more important than CO2 emissions. I'll just note that both China's regulations are much less strict than the US's on this stuff and they have laxer enforcement of those regulations.
That's like someone mocking the guys making frogs' legs jump with electrical current in the 18th century. "Oh yes, very interesting, but so what?"
But that research had considerable short term value. After all, wouldn't you consider it very useful to know that electricity is the basis of biological communication/control between brain and muscle? And the research was cheap. The experiment wasn't that expensive to undertake. LHC is a lot more.
Merely hoping that the long term value of research exceeds its cost, is profoundly unscientific. Even if we choose to ignore that scientific research is no different than any other organized human endeavor, we still have that the systematic and rigorous exploration of scientific research routinely, mysteriously absents itself from the funding of the experiments in question and the valuation of that research.
I think all researchers would benefit from a research economics course in college just like the one they have for engineers.
These are not companies just barely making it. They are making a bunch of profits from doing this, and they hold to the idea that "anything we do to increase our profits is fine".
That's how the argument for this dysfunction spiral goes. Any businesses which survive were making a bunch of profits. And the ones that weren't, we didn't want anyway. Then that creates unemployed workers and lower demand for labor. Which in turn creates a race to the bottom for employers who still survive and are still trying to maintain that profit. Then a new round of poorly thought-out regulation happens, with more businesses shoved towards the edge of bankruptcy and the society sinks even deeper into stagnation and dissolution.
But I'm sure it'll all work out once you get rid of all those greedy businesspeople.
But that doesn't change the question of whether or not they *can* pick up the tab. Municipalities are imploding under the weight of impossible to keep promises. Just look at the disaster that is Chicago.
Then don't promise things that can't be kept. I see this as creating a cost and then passing it on to the employer. And this is a typical straw on a camel's back situation. It's not an isolated passing of cost on to employers, but part of a mass of ongoing costs added to businesses. Eventually something will break.
You can't just make recommendations based on some moral inner-voice that makes you feel good.
How about making recommendations for pragmatic reasons, like for the future of your society?
Hmmm. looking at a distribution of asteroids by size, there's probably somewhere around 100-500 million asteroids of the size of this one (10 meter radius) in the inner Solar System. That's harder than I originally thought which would make 2035 a difficult deadline to meet on current funding.
Gravity is stable and enduring, hot or cold. If we can concentrate one, I don't understand why we can't the other, other than we're just not there yet.
The problem is that gravity is a weak force. When you try to concentrate it, by packing a bunch of matter in one place, then electromagnetic repulsion pushes stuff apart.
Well, there's another problem. Concentrating gravity doesn't actually get you anywhere. For example, your tractor beam would work, but it would require lugging a considerable amount of mass around to pull the smaller mass that you really want to move. That's much harder than merely moving the smaller mass around with chemical rocket engines.
You can look up my quote yourself, which is opinion and hence, self-citing by definition. You can look up the year of the meteor yourself. There's no further need for you to waste your time wasting my time.
We don't have the mathematical tools to model non-linear analog systems (like the 'puppy' robot in the article), but this is not stopping people from using them. In the article they describe a new approach from a mathematical modelling perspective. These robots are exploring completely nonlinear systems with infinite state space, and getting some pretty amazing results. It's just that until recently it's been more or less heuristic.
I mentioned two such tools we do have. Variational calculus and differential geometry (as applied to control systems) are a couple more (both useful for reducing the dimensional complexity of the problems in the article). And I don't see an example of a "completely nonlinearizable" system mentioned in the article. They seem pretty mundane to be honest.
What if the research would require about 20% more energy than the LHC is capable of?
It's not that simple. LHC can find such things, it just takes more time to do the statistics. You really would need an order of magnitude difference in energy to make a difference.
I read that we scanned less than 1% of the sky with any regularity, if at all.
We already have 100% coverage of the sky, just not at the desired resolution and light sensitivity. Further, asteroids don't spontaneously spring into existence or jump around. Once you have nailed down the position of an asteroid, it's not going to disappear on you. And you don't need to look at the entire sky to find all inner Solar System asteroids. They have to pass through certain regions of the sky as viewed from Earth.
Aside from the obvious fact that no, we aren't actually willing to pay any price for knowledge, you still have opportunity cost. We could spend as in the example given, a trillion dollars to run this new machine or we could spend that trillion dollars on other research, indeed other high energy physics, and get more knowledge.
To claim that there's no price to high is to be profoundly ignorant of economics.
What makes you think current amounts spent on asteroid defense are insufficient? I think at current funding we're a couple of decades from finding every rock in the inner Solar System large enough to cause property damage of any sort on Earth.
Having said that, dumping a bunch of money on NASA so that they can go to Mars may be a poor use of the money.
Propulsion science is just too primitive at this time. This is where the bulk of the money needs to be spent.
What do you mean? We've already developed the propulsion means, chemical propulsion engines, that's going to get stuff off of Earth for the first half of this century, perhaps longer. And we've developed several means such as electric propulsion, vacuum-optimized chemical propulsion, and solar sails for moving things in free fall in space. Current means are sufficiently advanced for what we want to do with it. And we'll have plenty of time to develop more advanced propulsion for when we'll need that.
Meh, your anecdote smacks of US executives observing Japanese team bonding exercises and assuming those were why Japanese corproations were so successful, instead of their permanent jobs with good salaries and conditions, leading to an endless circus of cargo cult morale building which mostly annoyed people.and generated zero company loyalty.
Speaking of "cargo cult", how does the act of paying people for this particular wage/job profile lead to successful corporations? Isn't there usually something asked in return which the worker happens to be capable of delivering on? Isn't the fact that the company can pay someone on a permanent basis an indication that the company started out successful? And couldn't we just go to some place cheap, like Somalia, and buy lots of people for those permanent jobs?
When the observer decides it does. So you've decided. But in their defense, this sort of circle-jerking has been going on long before the current trend, such as the jury-rig that costs more than a proper repair would.
An obvious rebuttal to the superiority of analog is the study of differential equations. Every classical analog circuit of finite extent (not counting effects of relativity or QM) can be expressed in terms of polynomial differential equations of one variable (polynomial in the function(s) and the variable). There are several observations to make at this point. First, linearized, digital numerical methods (eg, finite difference or finite elements methods) are vastly faster and more accurate even in the situations where one tries to come up with models which break the linearization (chaos, singularities, etc) because the analog models are even more fragile (due to the noise inherent in an analog system and propagation delays) and only operate in real time.
Second, the solutions to polynomial differential equations form a small, though very important subset of a much larger space of smooth nonlinear functions for which the digital methods are vastly superior. Namely, digital methods don't lose effectiveness while you no longer have any claim to an exact solution (plus noise) for an analog model with finite number of elements.
And that's not even considering the flexibility of digital approaches which allow you to automatically and quickly apply the method when you are given a differential equation to solve/model. You have to construct the analog system in order to get it to work the same way.
Yeah, you need a long-term trend too. 150 years ought to do it. It also helps to have a single causal hypothesis that follows established science, and whose calculated effect accounts nicely for the observed trend.
You also need an amount.
Ah, peer review is now pseudoscience, is it?
Yes, because you have yet to state any evidence for support of your position.
Tell me, if peer review isn't sufficient for determining which evidence is accurate and relevant, and which is the product of poor methodology, bad analysis, shoddy observation, fudged numbers, or just plain made up - then what is your proposed alternative?
Evidence is sufficient for itself. Come up with the evidence not a giant argument from authority fallacy.
Pollution doesn't happen in a vacuum, Those poor countries benefit from the trade and economic activity that occurs as a result of the fossil fuel use.
Personally i would forego the compensation though, I would rather see them spend the tiny fraction of that it would cost to end their CO2 dependence.
If it really is that simple a matter, then I don't see why you don't just spend that money and save us all from CO2 dependence. You do realize BTW that the world already spends about that much each year on various climate change related things and we have yet to end dependence on CO2?
Those pollutants are overwhelmingly local. Carbon is global pollution.
Even if that were true, and it's not (for example, Chinese air pollution makes up a detectable portion of California air pollution these days despite having to cross the entire Pacific Ocean), this is the first that anyone has indicated that global versus local matters.
They produce more. Once again, we have the dishonest assertion that every pollutant is equal. The US doesn't produce more particulate matter, more mercury, or raw sewage pollution per capita than China does.
but their past is far less damaging to the environment per capita than the US has been
And their present is far more damaging to the environment per capita than the US is now. Maybe we should worry about now rather than some past which has been corrected?
Slashdot Mirror
And at the risk of Godwinning the discussion, there's at least one Christian country that also killed as many members of what it considered to be an "enemy" religion in the middle of the last Century.
Which country would that be? The Fascists were atheist. The Communists were atheist. That doesn't leave many left.
No radioactive fallout was detected
that rules out a nuclear test. We should be able to go out to the sea floor of the site right now and detect fallout. I believe it's been since concluded that this was a meteor.
The thing is, it's a remarkably hard problem to figure out because a lot of the research simply will not state pollution emissions by country. For example, consider this UN report on mercury emissions. They have a decent resolution heat map of atmospheric mercury emissions (pg 22) and they'll break down mercury emissions by continent to the tenth of a percent of global emissions. They have the ability to do pollution per country (which in turn is what you need to do these pollution per capita calculations) easily, but they aren't touching that third rail.
The only thing they say on any country is:
China accounts for three-quarters of East and Southeast Asian emissions, or about one third of the globalÂtotal.
Given a population of around 1.36 billion out of 7.3 billion, I get a bit over double the per capita atmospheric emissions of the rest of the world. Meanwhile from the heatmap, I see that a North America cell which includes the lower 48 and a strongly polluting Mexico contributes 7.2%, That's less than a factor of four. Including Mexico's population, it's about a third the size of China. I think that's good enough to indicate that China emits several times more atmospheric mercury emissions per capita than the US does.
That's all you're going to get. I don't see the need to do the same for particulate matter or the other measures of pollution that I consider more important than CO2 emissions. I'll just note that both China's regulations are much less strict than the US's on this stuff and they have laxer enforcement of those regulations.
That's like someone mocking the guys making frogs' legs jump with electrical current in the 18th century. "Oh yes, very interesting, but so what?"
But that research had considerable short term value. After all, wouldn't you consider it very useful to know that electricity is the basis of biological communication/control between brain and muscle? And the research was cheap. The experiment wasn't that expensive to undertake. LHC is a lot more.
Merely hoping that the long term value of research exceeds its cost, is profoundly unscientific. Even if we choose to ignore that scientific research is no different than any other organized human endeavor, we still have that the systematic and rigorous exploration of scientific research routinely, mysteriously absents itself from the funding of the experiments in question and the valuation of that research.
I think all researchers would benefit from a research economics course in college just like the one they have for engineers.
These are not companies just barely making it. They are making a bunch of profits from doing this, and they hold to the idea that "anything we do to increase our profits is fine".
That's how the argument for this dysfunction spiral goes. Any businesses which survive were making a bunch of profits. And the ones that weren't, we didn't want anyway. Then that creates unemployed workers and lower demand for labor. Which in turn creates a race to the bottom for employers who still survive and are still trying to maintain that profit. Then a new round of poorly thought-out regulation happens, with more businesses shoved towards the edge of bankruptcy and the society sinks even deeper into stagnation and dissolution.
But I'm sure it'll all work out once you get rid of all those greedy businesspeople.
But that doesn't change the question of whether or not they *can* pick up the tab. Municipalities are imploding under the weight of impossible to keep promises. Just look at the disaster that is Chicago.
Then don't promise things that can't be kept. I see this as creating a cost and then passing it on to the employer. And this is a typical straw on a camel's back situation. It's not an isolated passing of cost on to employers, but part of a mass of ongoing costs added to businesses. Eventually something will break.
You can't just make recommendations based on some moral inner-voice that makes you feel good.
How about making recommendations for pragmatic reasons, like for the future of your society?
And when society has to pick up the slack in government benefits for the employees of employers cutting costs like this, constantly? What then?
Then society picks up the tab. They made the choice, they get to live by the consequences of that choice.
Hmmm. looking at a distribution of asteroids by size, there's probably somewhere around 100-500 million asteroids of the size of this one (10 meter radius) in the inner Solar System. That's harder than I originally thought which would make 2035 a difficult deadline to meet on current funding.
Gravity is stable and enduring, hot or cold. If we can concentrate one, I don't understand why we can't the other, other than we're just not there yet.
The problem is that gravity is a weak force. When you try to concentrate it, by packing a bunch of matter in one place, then electromagnetic repulsion pushes stuff apart.
Well, there's another problem. Concentrating gravity doesn't actually get you anywhere. For example, your tractor beam would work, but it would require lugging a considerable amount of mass around to pull the smaller mass that you really want to move. That's much harder than merely moving the smaller mass around with chemical rocket engines.
Thanks for providing that authoritative cite.
You can look up my quote yourself, which is opinion and hence, self-citing by definition. You can look up the year of the meteor yourself. There's no further need for you to waste your time wasting my time.
We don't have the mathematical tools to model non-linear analog systems (like the 'puppy' robot in the article), but this is not stopping people from using them. In the article they describe a new approach from a mathematical modelling perspective. These robots are exploring completely nonlinear systems with infinite state space, and getting some pretty amazing results. It's just that until recently it's been more or less heuristic.
I mentioned two such tools we do have. Variational calculus and differential geometry (as applied to control systems) are a couple more (both useful for reducing the dimensional complexity of the problems in the article). And I don't see an example of a "completely nonlinearizable" system mentioned in the article. They seem pretty mundane to be honest.
What if the research would require about 20% more energy than the LHC is capable of?
It's not that simple. LHC can find such things, it just takes more time to do the statistics. You really would need an order of magnitude difference in energy to make a difference.
And yet the fireball that hit russia a few years ago was spontaneous?
It just hadn't been spotted yet. And I don't recall saying that we knew where everything was in 2014, but rather that we would in 2035.
I read that we scanned less than 1% of the sky with any regularity, if at all.
We already have 100% coverage of the sky, just not at the desired resolution and light sensitivity. Further, asteroids don't spontaneously spring into existence or jump around. Once you have nailed down the position of an asteroid, it's not going to disappear on you. And you don't need to look at the entire sky to find all inner Solar System asteroids. They have to pass through certain regions of the sky as viewed from Earth.
There is no price too high for knowledge.
Aside from the obvious fact that no, we aren't actually willing to pay any price for knowledge, you still have opportunity cost. We could spend as in the example given, a trillion dollars to run this new machine or we could spend that trillion dollars on other research, indeed other high energy physics, and get more knowledge.
To claim that there's no price to high is to be profoundly ignorant of economics.
What makes you think current amounts spent on asteroid defense are insufficient? I think at current funding we're a couple of decades from finding every rock in the inner Solar System large enough to cause property damage of any sort on Earth.
Having said that, dumping a bunch of money on NASA so that they can go to Mars may be a poor use of the money.
Propulsion science is just too primitive at this time. This is where the bulk of the money needs to be spent.
What do you mean? We've already developed the propulsion means, chemical propulsion engines, that's going to get stuff off of Earth for the first half of this century, perhaps longer. And we've developed several means such as electric propulsion, vacuum-optimized chemical propulsion, and solar sails for moving things in free fall in space. Current means are sufficiently advanced for what we want to do with it. And we'll have plenty of time to develop more advanced propulsion for when we'll need that.
Meh, your anecdote smacks of US executives observing Japanese team bonding exercises and assuming those were why Japanese corproations were so successful, instead of their permanent jobs with good salaries and conditions, leading to an endless circus of cargo cult morale building which mostly annoyed people.and generated zero company loyalty.
Speaking of "cargo cult", how does the act of paying people for this particular wage/job profile lead to successful corporations? Isn't there usually something asked in return which the worker happens to be capable of delivering on? Isn't the fact that the company can pay someone on a permanent basis an indication that the company started out successful? And couldn't we just go to some place cheap, like Somalia, and buy lots of people for those permanent jobs?
When the observer decides it does. So you've decided. But in their defense, this sort of circle-jerking has been going on long before the current trend, such as the jury-rig that costs more than a proper repair would.
An obvious rebuttal to the superiority of analog is the study of differential equations. Every classical analog circuit of finite extent (not counting effects of relativity or QM) can be expressed in terms of polynomial differential equations of one variable (polynomial in the function(s) and the variable). There are several observations to make at this point. First, linearized, digital numerical methods (eg, finite difference or finite elements methods) are vastly faster and more accurate even in the situations where one tries to come up with models which break the linearization (chaos, singularities, etc) because the analog models are even more fragile (due to the noise inherent in an analog system and propagation delays) and only operate in real time.
Second, the solutions to polynomial differential equations form a small, though very important subset of a much larger space of smooth nonlinear functions for which the digital methods are vastly superior. Namely, digital methods don't lose effectiveness while you no longer have any claim to an exact solution (plus noise) for an analog model with finite number of elements.
And that's not even considering the flexibility of digital approaches which allow you to automatically and quickly apply the method when you are given a differential equation to solve/model. You have to construct the analog system in order to get it to work the same way.
Surely if she wants to actively fight gender discrimination she should push it as long as she can.
Odds are good she's way past that point by now.
hasn't been trending up very fast.
In your opinion.
We can substitute observation here.
Yeah, you need a long-term trend too. 150 years ought to do it. It also helps to have a single causal hypothesis that follows established science, and whose calculated effect accounts nicely for the observed trend.
You also need an amount.
Ah, peer review is now pseudoscience, is it?
Yes, because you have yet to state any evidence for support of your position.
Tell me, if peer review isn't sufficient for determining which evidence is accurate and relevant, and which is the product of poor methodology, bad analysis, shoddy observation, fudged numbers, or just plain made up - then what is your proposed alternative?
Evidence is sufficient for itself. Come up with the evidence not a giant argument from authority fallacy.
Personally i would forego the compensation though, I would rather see them spend the tiny fraction of that it would cost to end their CO2 dependence.
If it really is that simple a matter, then I don't see why you don't just spend that money and save us all from CO2 dependence. You do realize BTW that the world already spends about that much each year on various climate change related things and we have yet to end dependence on CO2?
Those pollutants are overwhelmingly local. Carbon is global pollution.
Even if that were true, and it's not (for example, Chinese air pollution makes up a detectable portion of California air pollution these days despite having to cross the entire Pacific Ocean), this is the first that anyone has indicated that global versus local matters.
but doesn't produce 5 times the pollutants
They produce more. Once again, we have the dishonest assertion that every pollutant is equal. The US doesn't produce more particulate matter, more mercury, or raw sewage pollution per capita than China does.
but their past is far less damaging to the environment per capita than the US has been
And their present is far more damaging to the environment per capita than the US is now. Maybe we should worry about now rather than some past which has been corrected?