In combination with surgery and sometimes chemotherapy, radiation does offer significant improvements in cure and long term survival rates. Yes, it's a blunt tool, but what are we meant to do - refuse to offer patients anything that is not a 100% cure?
Remember that the Earth is really like a huge ball of liquid, molten rock (the mantle) with a thin crust of solidified material on the outside.
No, it isn't. Your 'professor' should be sacked. The Earth is - at the frequencies involved - solid apart from the outer core.
What happens when you flick a water balloon really hard with your finger, but don't break it?
Have you tried this experiment with a water balloon containing layers with very different properties and responses, and a rubber layer varying by 300% in thickness? You may find that the vast majority of the energy is scattered or defocussed. In order for your effect to work you would either need an impactor with a mass in the range of several 1/10ths of a percent of the planet (minimum) or a completely homogenous planet.. Neither of which are present.
What - like Long Term Capital Management had?
(Actually, I'm quite hoping for some sort of financial crisis that ends up requiring large scale inflation to 'inflate debts away', as long as I manage to hang on to my job. You would too if you had my mortgage..)
Actually, the overall cure rate for cancer currently stands at around 55-60%, depending on how you so the stats. Advanced metastatic cancers are extremely hard to treat, however.
It is estimated, I believe, that 90% of cancers or pre cancerous cells are wiped out by the immune system well before the person involved even notices them; those that survive have mutations which stop attack by the immune system. Unfortunately, the implication here is that the cancer will evolve to become resistant to this treatment.
The 'normal' glacial-interglacial cycle appears to be driven largely by changes in summer insolation tipping off ice melting in the northern hemisphere, which leads to a rapid decrease in albedo and hence feedback. Changes in CO2 concentration appear to be caused by these changes and act to 'fix' the deglaciated state.
So what you are looking at is confirmation that increasing temperatures lead to additional feedbacks.
If CO2 was a 'bit-player', the oceans would be frozen solid; the author of the junkscience article appears completely ignorant of the basic feedback effects.
Since the effect of CO2 doubling is in the range 2.5-4.5K, and the annual temperature range is over 30K, the idea that a change in CO2 levbels of less than 1% would override the annual temperature variations is beyond stupid. The author of that article simply isn;'t capable of understanding the most basic bits of climate, never mind AGW.
And as for you, I'd just like to ask why you think more plant growth would cause more CO2 emissions. (Hint: Plants absorb CO2 as they grow)
Are you off your rocker? There is something infinitely more important than elections, vote counting, or even the existence of a voting process: limits on government power. They don't need to be voted on. That's what the consitution was supposed to be for, remember?
Although this is certainly important, ultimately if a particular government cannot be replaced democratically by accurate vote counting, then any constitutional limits will progressively get ignored. A major constraint on the power grabbing actions of politicians is the thought of what the other lot could do with the same powers..
Noticed this when driving a hire car in the US.. we kept being first away from every lights. At least we always went first at STOP junctions.
Took ages to work out what 'Ped Xing' meant. Kept having to clean the blood off of the windscreen.
The thing is, you need roundabouts, non-STOP junctions, not having lights everywhere, single track roads with passing points, and decent handling cars(*) with manual gearshift before you can do *properly* aggressive driving. I'm sorry, but the LA freeways just don't have anything on my daily commute..
(*) Not SUVs. SUVs are entirely defensive 'I'm scared of driving' cars for the faint of heart.
So on one hand we have a single graph of a temperature proxy in the Sargasso sea, which may indicate a temperature change.
On the other hand we have a several, independant, large studies of different proxies from different locations which show the warming stated in the article.
Do you understand even the basics of the scientific process? Do you understand - at any level - that just picking out the one result that you want to be correct is wrong, or will you lie and deny doing that?
"hey, wait a minute, why are we spending billions of taxpayer dollars on a technology which will never work in the marketplace, which no one will ever use outside of experimental vehicles?"
Well, it's a great way to LOOK like you are doing something whilst being sure that nothing actually changes. After all, one of the few reasons to use hydrogen is the high energy density per unit mass - binding it to a heavy metal such as palladium removes even this advantage. I strongly suspect that it would be more efficient (not to say much cheaper and simpler) just to have a battery powered car.
Of course, if your average 2-car family converted to one battery powered runaround for short/local trips and one modern diesel for the longer journeys, then you would make some serious fuel savings with minimal/no lifestyle sacrifice. But that would be far too easy..
There is no way we should be burying this stuff, or at least the vast majority.
As has already been mentioned, IFR-style reactors can burn all of the actinide wastes - the stuff that has the nasty 100kyear half lives. With a decent breeder program, we should also be able to use up what we currently have as depleted uranium. We should not be burying used fuel rods, it's a pathetic cop-out.
Once the actinides are dealt with, the vast majority of the fisson products have half lives in the 30 year region. Concentrated, these make excellent material for nuclear batteries - the ultimate in UPS. Those people responsable for running hospitals, airports, server farms or other places where 24/7 power is absolutely vital may appreciate this; the fact that the power is also essentially free would be a side advantage. Importantly, if people are using the stuff for a commercial application, they will be highly motivated to maintain and secure it.
This leaves a very small amount indeed of genuine long lived fission products (Tc-99 et al). The technology does exist to transmute these into stable elements; however, if deep burial is seen as cheaper, then vitrification and burial on the small scale required, sufficiently deep so that no warning could be needed should not be a major problem.
Listen, there are whackos all over the place. It just happens that the US attracts the whole lot. Be glad they're not vocal in your country.
Hey, we had a deal with the Natives.. we ship over all of our religous whackos from Europe, they get an easy source of protein. Damm those communicable diseases.
I mean, we tried to deal with the problem ourselves - when it comes to reliegous genocide, you Americans haven't even made the starting grid yet - but these fundies breed.
Again, science is not a consensus discipline. For example, the strong consensus in the '70s was that we were about to enter a new ice age.
Utter rubbish. But standard fare from 'skeptics' who are curiously credulous of whatever supports what they already believe.
In a very real sense, scientific progress comes about not from the 100 corroborating experiments but from the single anomalous one.
Again, garbage. Progress comes from the 100 corrobarating experiments that may have been suggested by the original anomoly. It does NOT come from throwing out existing theories because of a single one off result. The 'isolated hero' model of science is just hollywood bunkum.
If you think that picking out individual temperature recored proves anything apart from a complete ignorance of stastitics, then again you are talking rubbish.
Come back when you've finished kindergarten.
You should try to get your paleoclimatology information from sources other than Hollywood.
Yes, the voices in your head appear to be a more reliable source. Your 'posts below' are a mish mash of isolated facts (it appears that you have no concept of the difference between geological time and current events), which you appear - wrongly - to think discredit AGW.
The theory of common descent is an example of a belief system that is taken with zero proof.
Apart from the entire fossil record, independantly verified by genetic evidence. You forgot that vast mountain of evidence, but there again creationists do seem to have very poor memories about such things. Almost like thet want to declate it out of existance.
The Cambrian Explosion is a proverbial fly in that ointment BTW.
Yes, it's amazing how difficult it is to come up with new body plans in only 10 million generations or so.. or perhaps not.
There is yet no empirical proof that one species, ONE SPECIES, has evolved into another species.
Much of the Evolution fairy tale must be believed by faith.
Much of Physics fairy tale must be believed by faith. How many quarks have you seen today?
Scientists BELIEVE that the earth is so many billion years old.
This is true. There is a huge amount of evidence to back it up as well.
When, where, why, and how did life come from non-living matter?
Between 4.4 and 3.8 billion years ago, around an oceanic hot vent, as an inevitable result of the laws of chemistry, and very likely due to the complex interaction of Fe/S structrures with already existing nucleotides and ammino acids.
When, where, why, and how did life learn to reproduce itself?
Reproduction is one of the fundamental properties of life.
With what did the first cell capable of sexual reproduction reproduce?
I'd advise you to look up bacterial sex and DNA sharing. A cell that can reproduce either sexually or asexually has no problems here.
Answers? You don't know.
No, YOU don't know because you are an arrogant, lazy idiot who won't get of their backside and actually learn stuff. Science is hard. Ignorance is easy.
If you don't know, then whatever theory you guys have must be accepted by faith/belief in the absence of facts and evidence.
This is just wishful thinking on your part. You want scientists to ba as lazy as you. Bad news: they are not.
His ideas were radical at the time and were ridiculed as unscientific simply because the ideas were different from established theories.
No, they were ridiculed because they were - and still are - completely wrong.
Why can't some scientists objectively approach these kinds of subjects instead of dismissing them outright without applying rational scrutiny. To suggest that his theories were flawed or some type of voodoo science is in itself unscientific
Some scientists DID apply rational scrutiny to Velikovsky's ideas; and confirmed that, yes, they are a load of codswallop. Out of interest, just how many peer reviewed papers has Velikovsky had published?
Many arguments against Velikovsky's theories are supported by more theory, not fact.
*Sigh* Repeat after me: It is up to Velikovsky (and/or his supporters) to actually publish the papers, calculations, observations and sosuch to establish his ideas as a hypothesis. Not to write a speculative book and then demand to be accepted unless people can prove him wrong.
The theory of slow evolution of the earth's geologic features are still theory, NOT established fact.
It is theory supported by overwhelming amounts of evidence, unlike Velikovsky which is speculation flying in the face of observation and models. To pretend that there is any equality between the two is frankly silly.
In a nutshell, the movement of Africa towards Europe managed to close the straits of Gibraltar around 6 million years ago; as the rivers feeding the Med don't make up for evaporation, the whole sea evaporated (the degree of this is disputed, but large deposits of salt lie under the sediments of the sea).
On the other hand, I am astounded by how many people seem to think that it has merit as an argument.
I'm equally astounded by the number of people claiming that it's a silly or non-existant argument, without being able to tell us why.
Of course, *I* know that the whole FSM thing is clearly silly, since the world was created 17 weeks ago by the Invisible Pink Unicorn - may we all be skewered on her righteous horn - but I'm not sure what the ID people argue.
Although I'm not a great fan of crop-based biofuels (algal-pond could actually be useful, but it's still hgighly speculative), it has to be pointed out that 'energy return' studies are VERY susceptable to political manipulation - you can always find a study to back up your favorite source, or a study to 'prove' that something you don't like has a negative return. After all, if you include the energy cost of replacing topsoil and cleaning up all pollution, then the entire economy has a negative EROEI. Yet the light switch still works..
Having said that, Corn based ethanol is only even considered due to political lobbying in the US; it is not a practical replacement for oil on any worthwhile scale. Indeed, the issue with biofuels is not 'do they have a positive energy return', but 'What happens when you try to replace 25% of current oil usage?'. For corn baesed ethanol, or biodiesel, the answer is simple; you run out of feedstocks long before you reach this stage.
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True, but if you ever want a proper spaceship that can do more than just take off and drift, antimatter would be handy.
In combination with surgery and sometimes chemotherapy, radiation does offer significant improvements in cure and long term survival rates. Yes, it's a blunt tool, but what are we meant to do - refuse to offer patients anything that is not a 100% cure?
Remember that the Earth is really like a huge ball of liquid, molten rock (the mantle) with a thin crust of solidified material on the outside.
No, it isn't. Your 'professor' should be sacked. The Earth is - at the frequencies involved - solid apart from the outer core.
What happens when you flick a water balloon really hard with your finger, but don't break it?
Have you tried this experiment with a water balloon containing layers with very different properties and responses, and a rubber layer varying by 300% in thickness? You may find that the vast majority of the energy is scattered or defocussed. In order for your effect to work you would either need an impactor with a mass in the range of several 1/10ths of a percent of the planet (minimum) or a completely homogenous planet.. Neither of which are present.
You mean, if you die of a heart attack at 50 you are unlikely to die of cancer?
If you want your house to collapse in the first mid-major earthquake to occur, you'll build it with rock.
If you want your house to collapse in the first mid-major tropical storm to occur, you'll build it with wood and cardboard.
If you live in California, build a wooden house. If you live in Florida, build a brick/concrete house..
What - like Long Term Capital Management had? (Actually, I'm quite hoping for some sort of financial crisis that ends up requiring large scale inflation to 'inflate debts away', as long as I manage to hang on to my job. You would too if you had my mortgage..)
Would it not be vastly simpler to put a tax on fuel?
Simply, UV-splitting of water in the atmosphere to hydroven and oxygen; the hydrogen is then lost to spave by diffusion. See Venus for an example..
Actually, the overall cure rate for cancer currently stands at around 55-60%, depending on how you so the stats. Advanced metastatic cancers are extremely hard to treat, however.
It is estimated, I believe, that 90% of cancers or pre cancerous cells are wiped out by the immune system well before the person involved even notices them; those that survive have mutations which stop attack by the immune system. Unfortunately, the implication here is that the cancer will evolve to become resistant to this treatment.
It's actually worse than the other way around.
The 'normal' glacial-interglacial cycle appears to be driven largely by changes in summer insolation tipping off ice melting in the northern hemisphere, which leads to a rapid decrease in albedo and hence feedback. Changes in CO2 concentration appear to be caused by these changes and act to 'fix' the deglaciated state.
So what you are looking at is confirmation that increasing temperatures lead to additional feedbacks.
If CO2 was a 'bit-player', the oceans would be frozen solid; the author of the junkscience article appears completely ignorant of the basic feedback effects. Since the effect of CO2 doubling is in the range 2.5-4.5K, and the annual temperature range is over 30K, the idea that a change in CO2 levbels of less than 1% would override the annual temperature variations is beyond stupid. The author of that article simply isn;'t capable of understanding the most basic bits of climate, never mind AGW. And as for you, I'd just like to ask why you think more plant growth would cause more CO2 emissions. (Hint: Plants absorb CO2 as they grow)
Are you off your rocker? There is something infinitely more important than elections, vote counting, or even the existence of a voting process: limits on government power. They don't need to be voted on. That's what the consitution was supposed to be for, remember?
Although this is certainly important, ultimately if a particular government cannot be replaced democratically by accurate vote counting, then any constitutional limits will progressively get ignored. A major constraint on the power grabbing actions of politicians is the thought of what the other lot could do with the same powers..
Noticed this when driving a hire car in the US.. we kept being first away from every lights. At least we always went first at STOP junctions. Took ages to work out what 'Ped Xing' meant. Kept having to clean the blood off of the windscreen. The thing is, you need roundabouts, non-STOP junctions, not having lights everywhere, single track roads with passing points, and decent handling cars(*) with manual gearshift before you can do *properly* aggressive driving. I'm sorry, but the LA freeways just don't have anything on my daily commute.. (*) Not SUVs. SUVs are entirely defensive 'I'm scared of driving' cars for the faint of heart.
So on one hand we have a single graph of a temperature proxy in the Sargasso sea, which may indicate a temperature change. On the other hand we have a several, independant, large studies of different proxies from different locations which show the warming stated in the article. Do you understand even the basics of the scientific process? Do you understand - at any level - that just picking out the one result that you want to be correct is wrong, or will you lie and deny doing that?
"hey, wait a minute, why are we spending billions of taxpayer dollars on a technology which will never work in the marketplace, which no one will ever use outside of experimental vehicles?"
Well, it's a great way to LOOK like you are doing something whilst being sure that nothing actually changes. After all, one of the few reasons to use hydrogen is the high energy density per unit mass - binding it to a heavy metal such as palladium removes even this advantage. I strongly suspect that it would be more efficient (not to say much cheaper and simpler) just to have a battery powered car.
Of course, if your average 2-car family converted to one battery powered runaround for short/local trips and one modern diesel for the longer journeys, then you would make some serious fuel savings with minimal/no lifestyle sacrifice. But that would be far too easy..
There is no way we should be burying this stuff, or at least the vast majority.
As has already been mentioned, IFR-style reactors can burn all of the actinide wastes - the stuff that has the nasty 100kyear half lives. With a decent breeder program, we should also be able to use up what we currently have as depleted uranium. We should not be burying used fuel rods, it's a pathetic cop-out.
Once the actinides are dealt with, the vast majority of the fisson products have half lives in the 30 year region. Concentrated, these make excellent material for nuclear batteries - the ultimate in UPS. Those people responsable for running hospitals, airports, server farms or other places where 24/7 power is absolutely vital may appreciate this; the fact that the power is also essentially free would be a side advantage. Importantly, if people are using the stuff for a commercial application, they will be highly motivated to maintain and secure it.
This leaves a very small amount indeed of genuine long lived fission products (Tc-99 et al). The technology does exist to transmute these into stable elements; however, if deep burial is seen as cheaper, then vitrification and burial on the small scale required, sufficiently deep so that no warning could be needed should not be a major problem.
Listen, there are whackos all over the place. It just happens that the US attracts the whole lot. Be glad they're not vocal in your country.
Hey, we had a deal with the Natives.. we ship over all of our religous whackos from Europe, they get an easy source of protein. Damm those communicable diseases.
I mean, we tried to deal with the problem ourselves - when it comes to reliegous genocide, you Americans haven't even made the starting grid yet - but these fundies breed.
Again, science is not a consensus discipline. For example, the strong consensus in the '70s was that we were about to enter a new ice age.
Utter rubbish. But standard fare from 'skeptics' who are curiously credulous of whatever supports what they already believe.
In a very real sense, scientific progress comes about not from the 100 corroborating experiments but from the single anomalous one.
Again, garbage. Progress comes from the 100 corrobarating experiments that may have been suggested by the original anomoly. It does NOT come from throwing out existing theories because of a single one off result. The 'isolated hero' model of science is just hollywood bunkum.
If you think that picking out individual temperature recored proves anything apart from a complete ignorance of stastitics, then again you are talking rubbish. Come back when you've finished kindergarten.
You should try to get your paleoclimatology information from sources other than Hollywood.
Yes, the voices in your head appear to be a more reliable source. Your 'posts below' are a mish mash of isolated facts (it appears that you have no concept of the difference between geological time and current events), which you appear - wrongly - to think discredit AGW.
The theory of common descent is an example of a belief system that is taken with zero proof.
Apart from the entire fossil record, independantly verified by genetic evidence. You forgot that vast mountain of evidence, but there again creationists do seem to have very poor memories about such things. Almost like thet want to declate it out of existance.
The Cambrian Explosion is a proverbial fly in that ointment BTW.
Yes, it's amazing how difficult it is to come up with new body plans in only 10 million generations or so.. or perhaps not.
There is yet no empirical proof that one species, ONE SPECIES, has evolved into another species.
Apart from these, of course.
Much of the Evolution fairy tale must be believed by faith.
Much of Physics fairy tale must be believed by faith. How many quarks have you seen today?
Scientists BELIEVE that the earth is so many billion years old.
This is true. There is a huge amount of evidence to back it up as well.
When, where, why, and how did life come from non-living matter?
Between 4.4 and 3.8 billion years ago, around an oceanic hot vent, as an inevitable result of the laws of chemistry, and very likely due to the complex interaction of Fe/S structrures with already existing nucleotides and ammino acids.
When, where, why, and how did life learn to reproduce itself?
Reproduction is one of the fundamental properties of life.
With what did the first cell capable of sexual reproduction reproduce?
I'd advise you to look up bacterial sex and DNA sharing. A cell that can reproduce either sexually or asexually has no problems here.
Answers? You don't know.
No, YOU don't know because you are an arrogant, lazy idiot who won't get of their backside and actually learn stuff. Science is hard. Ignorance is easy.
If you don't know, then whatever theory you guys have must be accepted by faith/belief in the absence of facts and evidence.
This is just wishful thinking on your part. You want scientists to ba as lazy as you. Bad news: they are not.
His ideas were radical at the time and were ridiculed as unscientific simply because the ideas were different from established theories.
No, they were ridiculed because they were - and still are - completely wrong.
Why can't some scientists objectively approach these kinds of subjects instead of dismissing them outright without applying rational scrutiny. To suggest that his theories were flawed or some type of voodoo science is in itself unscientific
Some scientists DID apply rational scrutiny to Velikovsky's ideas; and confirmed that, yes, they are a load of codswallop. Out of interest, just how many peer reviewed papers has Velikovsky had published?
Many arguments against Velikovsky's theories are supported by more theory, not fact.
*Sigh* Repeat after me: It is up to Velikovsky (and/or his supporters) to actually publish the papers, calculations, observations and sosuch to establish his ideas as a hypothesis. Not to write a speculative book and then demand to be accepted unless people can prove him wrong.
The theory of slow evolution of the earth's geologic features are still theory, NOT established fact.
It is theory supported by overwhelming amounts of evidence, unlike Velikovsky which is speculation flying in the face of observation and models. To pretend that there is any equality between the two is frankly silly.
The 'black sea flood' didn't actually happen. Meltwater inputs into the Volga, Deniper and other major rivers in Ukraine were, as far as the evidence shoes, greater than evaporation, leading to an outflow across the Bospohorous; it was not until ca. 7500 years ago that the Med rose to a similar level to the black sea.
The event is calles the Messinian Salinity Crisis.
In a nutshell, the movement of Africa towards Europe managed to close the straits of Gibraltar around 6 million years ago; as the rivers feeding the Med don't make up for evaporation, the whole sea evaporated (the degree of this is disputed, but large deposits of salt lie under the sediments of the sea).On the other hand, I am astounded by how many people seem to think that it has merit as an argument.
I'm equally astounded by the number of people claiming that it's a silly or non-existant argument, without being able to tell us why.
Of course, *I* know that the whole FSM thing is clearly silly, since the world was created 17 weeks ago by the Invisible Pink Unicorn - may we all be skewered on her righteous horn - but I'm not sure what the ID people argue.
Although I'm not a great fan of crop-based biofuels (algal-pond could actually be useful, but it's still hgighly speculative), it has to be pointed out that 'energy return' studies are VERY susceptable to political manipulation - you can always find a study to back up your favorite source, or a study to 'prove' that something you don't like has a negative return. After all, if you include the energy cost of replacing topsoil and cleaning up all pollution, then the entire economy has a negative EROEI. Yet the light switch still works.. Having said that, Corn based ethanol is only even considered due to political lobbying in the US; it is not a practical replacement for oil on any worthwhile scale. Indeed, the issue with biofuels is not 'do they have a positive energy return', but 'What happens when you try to replace 25% of current oil usage?'. For corn baesed ethanol, or biodiesel, the answer is simple; you run out of feedstocks long before you reach this stage.