All the article says is that forcings related to orbital mechanics may have been larger on a millenium time scale than estimated before. Even that is speculation - the core of the paper is presenting a improved method for evaluating tree ring proxies. The paper, however, does not call into doubt that the industrial age has added a significant greenhouse gas forcing, which gets bigger as we continue to add CO2 and methane.
No, but it calls into question if CO2 forcing plays as large of a role as has been assumed. That's why Mann, et al, have worked so hard to kill the Medieval Warming Period, to create the shaft of the hockey stick: to make recent warming "unprecedented" and hence imply a very strong CO2 forcing. If the relatively recent past was in fact warmer than they would have us believe, perhaps today's temperatures are not unprecedented, and since we know that CO2 was well below present levels, perhaps CO2 is not as strong of a forcing.
Doesn't mean that CO2 isn't an issue, doesn't mean that temperatures could be increasing. But would mean that the overall catastrophic scenario is questionable.
We're talking about the latest MacBooks here. Please be specific as to which of the "most are previous generation" parts you are referring to. Some of them have appeared previously in other brands, but they're not "previous generation".
(Perhaps you're making the point that MacBooks are not always on the latest generation, which has been true in the past. I don't see it this time, though.)
People seem to go uniquely crazy when it comes to computers.
Do they wear trashbags for clothing because it's cheap and water/stainproof, or do they buy attractive clothing for a lot more money? Do they shave their heads to save on haircuts or do they pay someone to cut it? Do they drive a crappy, rusted-out hulk of a car or do they buy something attractive that "feels good" to them? Do they use milk crates for furniture in a tent, or do they buy a nice house and nice furniture?
Do they buy whatever movies and music they can get in the dollar bin, or do they get music and videos they actually enjoy? Do they... Well, you get the picture. In almost every area of their lives, style, appearance, "fit", "feel" all matter. But then they run into a computer that's more stylish (not gimmicky like Alienware's) and an OS that's more stylish (not gimmicky like Windows), and they rage against style, appearance, fit, feel, and anything except checkboxes on a spec sheet!
You do this with a MacBook Pro? I wasn't aware that they had "double battery" capabilities. Or are you talking about other brands? I've easily gotten 7+ hours of usage on a bus trip with my old 17" Macbook pro, non-replaceable battery, and I'm trying to think of a usage scenario where I'd use it more intensely or longer without any access to power.
I've played WoW, Diablo III, etc, on my MacBook Pros. I've also booted it into Windows to play Skyrim. I bought it to do more than gaming, but it certainly does satisfy my gaming urges reasonably well. The new Macbook Pro Retina will actually perform better, even at the highest resolution (with Diablo III, anyhow), and at the same resolution as my old MacBook Pro it will fly.
(People talk about gaming as a proxy for things like 3D work, video editing, and other tasks that a MacBook Pro might primarily be purchased for.)
The Alienware M14x only has Bluetooth 3, has 20% less battery life, is 50% thicker, weighs 20% more, and has a smaller screen (14" versus 15.4"). It has a few more built-in ports (plenty of room in the larger and heavier body). No mystery that it would be less expensive.
Let me put it another way, for the same price as your $49-more Alienware, I can get a 29880x1800 resolution display, en enclosure that's half as thick as the Alienware, longer battery life, and the same SSD capacity (though probably faster transfer speed). Yes, I only get 8 GB of RAM for that, but for $29 of the $49 more I can get an Ethernet adapter. Oh, your Alienware also has a higher-rez webcam. Woot!
Several reviews I've read say that the new model tends to run cooler. Apple also made a big deal of redesigned fans that don't have a single peak frequency, making them less annoying. They also made a big deal of the redesigned air flow as well. I believe that the automatic graphics switching will also decrease overall heat (if you tended to keep the GPU enabled even though you don't use it a lot).
Perhaps if you also added, "No other competitor offers this combination of features in this small a package. Most compact competitors do not offer discrete graphics, nor quad-core CPUs. No laptop of any kind offers a retinal display for any price. Most competitors are only beginning to offer Intel's Thunderbolt connectivity. Apple continues to design systems, while their competitors throw components together."
You should've spent an additional 10 seconds to think. Exactly how will you cram TWO of those 8GB SIMMs into a chassis as small as the MacBook Pro Retina? Of course, you can't. So you're comparing relatively low-density, multiple-card solutions to something much smaller, and figure Apple's tacking on $50 to solder it in?
Even if you assume that the main cost is the chips on the DIMM, Apple's still offering a high-density solution that other manufacturers don't (or can't) match at any price.
What do you mean? Do residents not have internet access at all? In our condo, we have a choice between Comcast and Verizon for TV, phone, internet. So perhaps you're in a very old condo that doesn't even have cable?
The BBC article says, "Terahertz wi-fi would probably only work over ranges of about 10m, but could in theory support data rates up to 100Gb/s - close to 15 times higher than the next-generation 802.11ac wi-fi standard that is under development." So the distance would pretty much limit wi-fi saturation whether its ability to penetrate materials did or not.
Users should be forced to learn a few things. This isn't 1992. This is 2012. If you can't be bothered to learn how to save a file properly, get off the computer.
I think you have your dates backwards. The whole point is that in 1992, you HAD to learn how to save files and all of the quirky differences between a hard drive and a floppy disk, and the characters you are and are not allowed to use in a filename, and so on. In 2012, people want to just use their device without worrying that there is a filesystem underneath. (Make no mistake, iOS has a full-blown filesystem under the hood.) Not to mention the security concerns involved in letting any app access any file it wants. That was DOS in 1992, not a modern, secure OS.
You might also note that iOS has an Open With... system that lets you open files with other apps. I just tapped on a PDF in Dropbox and got offered to open it in iBooks, GoodReader, Kindle, SUndry Notes, and Box. I tapped on a movie in GoodReader and it offered to open it in VLC, Dropbox, and Box, too.
Your phone is a phone, not a desktop computer, and that's the way the vast majority of phone users want it.
Why is this even remotely interesting? We know Intel has released Ivy Bridge. We know there are other companies already using Ivy Bridge. Apple's current offerings are a generation or two behind the existing status quo for high-end hardware on the laptop/desktop market. It is a no brainer that, yes, Apple would also use the next generation of hardware, too.
In spite of being "a generation or two behind", people really like Mac laptops, so are excited about what might happen. (In actuality, as UnknowingFool points out, Apple is also ahead of competitors by years: Thunderbolt, Ultrabook, etc.) The fact that Apple will probably be releasing Mountain Lion at the same time, may have Air-ified the MacBook Pro lineup, might add full-width trackpad, etc, adds interest even if it's not directly related to Ivy Bridge.
How exactly do you calculate the risk of terrorism -- in this case hijacking or bombing? It's not as simple as taking the current number of hijackings and bombings, dividing by the current number of flights, ignoring the fact that screening is currently in place (and has been since the 1970's), and thus "proving" that we don't need screening of any kind.
And how are you accounting for the "success effect"? At one point in the early 70's there were over 60 hijackings in a single year, because they were fairly easy to do and they fairly easily achieved their goals (and hence were "successful")? If it were as easy to kill thousands or tens of thousands of infidels as walking on to a plane, do you doubt that there would be many more than there are currently? (In 9/11: we were incredibly lucky. Fully-fueled planes crashed into high-density areas and only killed, on average, about 1,000 people each. That's amazingly low, and it of course doesn't count the economic cost, rendering multiple city blocks uninhabitable for years, etc.)
Not saying that any kind of screening or abrogation of our rights and privileges can be justified. Just not feeling the honor system for flights would work out all that well.
Faster frame rates require higher shutter speeds, and higher shutter speeds decrease motion blur. This can make footage look stroboscopic-like and unpleasant.
I noticed this years ago in televised (American) Football. Some shots appeared smooth, while other shots appeared harsh and stroboscopic. I eventually figured out that newer video cameras were being set at higher shutter speeds, so that you could have crisper frame-by-frame reviews of plays (without motion blur). It was terribly annoying.
240 fps TVs are bad for a different reason: they're interpolating frames out and motion interpolation is simply not all that great. In either case, higher shutter speeds are not necessarily better or more watchable.
One of the linked-to articles sums up issues with the study very well:
"[Consider] philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and George Berkeley. The idea that the beliefs of those individuals would have vanished had they been more analytical is, if nothing else, amusing. Gervais and Norenzayan’s findings should help to combat religion as an indolent obstacle to better explanations of the natural world. But it can’t really engage with the rich tradition of religious thought."
At the very lowest level, Matlab is appealing, as in your example. Beyond that, it's a horrible language, lacking features that S and other languages had 20+ years ago.
Yes, it appears that the study did a reasonable job, and its findings jibe with the opinions of many historians that deaths were undercounted.
At the same time, a one-off historical event is not quite the same as a physics experiment, or chemistry, or even psychology. Exactly what other time period or event could you compare the Civil War to in order to estimate war-time emigration/immigration rates? Doesn't seem like you can control very well for that. Considering the enormity of 600,000 dying, the scorched-earth tactics of the Union, draft riots, etc, I doubt that there really is a comparable, well-documented period to be found.
Also, I can't find the actual article, but the press didn't report any error margins, which might in fact be huge. (Not even sure how accurate those estimates would be.) If you know anything about statistics, a number with no error margins (confidence intervals, whatever you call them) is meaningless.
The fact that the press talks about a "sophisticated statistics package" is a red flag, but it may be due to reporters and not the actual study. (You can easily obtain, for free, a statistical package that can do whatever calculations they did. It's not the package that matters, it's the skill of the analyst.)
Yes, statistics and modeling can be useful in any field. But your unbridled enthusiasm isn't warranted. As you point out, in the past historians have had pet theories that were essentially Appeals to Authority (i.e. "I'm a famous historian and this is what I think"), but you have to be careful of the other side of the Appeal to Authority coin: "I used a sophisticated statistics tool to prove...".
What a zealot. You may disagree with Apple's view of its customers, but at least it views us end users as its customers. Google has no such illusions: their customers are carriers, and secondarily manufacturers. You know, those same carriers and manufacturers who have been screwing us for years?
So yes, when it comes to serving its customers, I believe Apple (me as a customer) over Google (my carrier as a customer, and my information as its asset) any day of the week. And twice on weekends.
Is no one going to talk about using the Internet before they invented the @ sign for email addresses? (That is, the old UUNET days?) In 1980 in college, to send email to someone you had to know the path it would take to get there. Something like: "engineer1!myuniversity!anotheruniversity!berkeley!somecompany!anotheruniversity!address" as I remember, except much longer. Eventually, DNS and other nice things allowed you to instead send the email to: "address@anotheruniversity", and (Internet) email became much more useful.
I agree with some other posters that the key to the Internet was that it was developed by hackers, for hackers, and without egos and monetization getting in the way. You know, back when there were RFC's (Request for Comments) in an attempt to find the best solution?
Tsk, tsk, you simply do not get more funding for biological research now-a-days unless you mention that climate change is going to kill the species you're studying... *unless*, of course, you are given funds to study it in more detail.
... more durable than a $30 textbook, especially in a school environment where some textbooks can last for a decade or more.
How many of those books are up-to-date after that decade or more? How about if you compare, say, 6 of those textbooks in a backpack versus an iPad in a backpack: which leads to a more durable back, neck, and shoulders? How many of those books can be marked up by each student to fit their study style? (Not counting the first student or two who uses them.)
How many of those books actually cost $30? Can students keep them after they've studied the subject?
There are a LOT of advantages to electronic books that are done well.
Strange, the original article only mentions religion in a single sentence, to caution that it's only one of many contributing factors. Yet the ill-informed, hating first poster goes on and on about religion. Huh? "It's all the fault of religion". Totally unrelated to the article. Not related to any real issues that have been in the news lately. (Unless you assume everyone who is a skeptic of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is so because they are "religious".) Totally ignorant of philosophy, history, and probably has never actually done science themselves.
The two actual factors we have to address are: 1) decades of emphasizing self-esteem rather than learning, and 2) the Wall-street-ization of our jobs. US students are very confident that they're "good at math", but in fact are not, and we're busy churning out business students and many of our students who actually are mathematically talented spend their lives inventing increasingly dangerous financial derivatives.
Slashdot Mirror
All the article says is that forcings related to orbital mechanics may have been larger on a millenium time scale than estimated before. Even that is speculation - the core of the paper is presenting a improved method for evaluating tree ring proxies. The paper, however, does not call into doubt that the industrial age has added a significant greenhouse gas forcing, which gets bigger as we continue to add CO2 and methane.
No, but it calls into question if CO2 forcing plays as large of a role as has been assumed. That's why Mann, et al, have worked so hard to kill the Medieval Warming Period, to create the shaft of the hockey stick: to make recent warming "unprecedented" and hence imply a very strong CO2 forcing. If the relatively recent past was in fact warmer than they would have us believe, perhaps today's temperatures are not unprecedented, and since we know that CO2 was well below present levels, perhaps CO2 is not as strong of a forcing.
Doesn't mean that CO2 isn't an issue, doesn't mean that temperatures could be increasing. But would mean that the overall catastrophic scenario is questionable.
We're talking about the latest MacBooks here. Please be specific as to which of the "most are previous generation" parts you are referring to. Some of them have appeared previously in other brands, but they're not "previous generation".
(Perhaps you're making the point that MacBooks are not always on the latest generation, which has been true in the past. I don't see it this time, though.)
People seem to go uniquely crazy when it comes to computers.
Do they wear trashbags for clothing because it's cheap and water/stainproof, or do they buy attractive clothing for a lot more money? Do they shave their heads to save on haircuts or do they pay someone to cut it? Do they drive a crappy, rusted-out hulk of a car or do they buy something attractive that "feels good" to them? Do they use milk crates for furniture in a tent, or do they buy a nice house and nice furniture?
Do they buy whatever movies and music they can get in the dollar bin, or do they get music and videos they actually enjoy? Do they... Well, you get the picture. In almost every area of their lives, style, appearance, "fit", "feel" all matter. But then they run into a computer that's more stylish (not gimmicky like Alienware's) and an OS that's more stylish (not gimmicky like Windows), and they rage against style, appearance, fit, feel, and anything except checkboxes on a spec sheet!
It doesn't make any sense.
You do this with a MacBook Pro? I wasn't aware that they had "double battery" capabilities. Or are you talking about other brands? I've easily gotten 7+ hours of usage on a bus trip with my old 17" Macbook pro, non-replaceable battery, and I'm trying to think of a usage scenario where I'd use it more intensely or longer without any access to power.
I've played WoW, Diablo III, etc, on my MacBook Pros. I've also booted it into Windows to play Skyrim. I bought it to do more than gaming, but it certainly does satisfy my gaming urges reasonably well. The new Macbook Pro Retina will actually perform better, even at the highest resolution (with Diablo III, anyhow), and at the same resolution as my old MacBook Pro it will fly.
(People talk about gaming as a proxy for things like 3D work, video editing, and other tasks that a MacBook Pro might primarily be purchased for.)
"meeeeeeeh... Anyone can do it."
I won't hold my breath waiting for Anyone Corp to actually do it.
Loosen some screws with the super-secret, special screwdriver and pull out the SSD. It's not glued in.
The Alienware M14x only has Bluetooth 3, has 20% less battery life, is 50% thicker, weighs 20% more, and has a smaller screen (14" versus 15.4"). It has a few more built-in ports (plenty of room in the larger and heavier body). No mystery that it would be less expensive.
Let me put it another way, for the same price as your $49-more Alienware, I can get a 29880x1800 resolution display, en enclosure that's half as thick as the Alienware, longer battery life, and the same SSD capacity (though probably faster transfer speed). Yes, I only get 8 GB of RAM for that, but for $29 of the $49 more I can get an Ethernet adapter. Oh, your Alienware also has a higher-rez webcam. Woot!
Several reviews I've read say that the new model tends to run cooler. Apple also made a big deal of redesigned fans that don't have a single peak frequency, making them less annoying. They also made a big deal of the redesigned air flow as well. I believe that the automatic graphics switching will also decrease overall heat (if you tended to keep the GPU enabled even though you don't use it a lot).
Perhaps if you also added, "No other competitor offers this combination of features in this small a package. Most compact competitors do not offer discrete graphics, nor quad-core CPUs. No laptop of any kind offers a retinal display for any price. Most competitors are only beginning to offer Intel's Thunderbolt connectivity. Apple continues to design systems, while their competitors throw components together."
You should've spent an additional 10 seconds to think. Exactly how will you cram TWO of those 8GB SIMMs into a chassis as small as the MacBook Pro Retina? Of course, you can't. So you're comparing relatively low-density, multiple-card solutions to something much smaller, and figure Apple's tacking on $50 to solder it in?
Even if you assume that the main cost is the chips on the DIMM, Apple's still offering a high-density solution that other manufacturers don't (or can't) match at any price.
What do you mean? Do residents not have internet access at all? In our condo, we have a choice between Comcast and Verizon for TV, phone, internet. So perhaps you're in a very old condo that doesn't even have cable?
Or do you mean you want to add Wi-Fi for all?
Don't tackle a problem larger than it has to be.
The BBC article says, "Terahertz wi-fi would probably only work over ranges of about 10m, but could in theory support data rates up to 100Gb/s - close to 15 times higher than the next-generation 802.11ac wi-fi standard that is under development." So the distance would pretty much limit wi-fi saturation whether its ability to penetrate materials did or not.
Users should be forced to learn a few things. This isn't 1992. This is 2012. If you can't be bothered to learn how to save a file properly, get off the computer.
I think you have your dates backwards. The whole point is that in 1992, you HAD to learn how to save files and all of the quirky differences between a hard drive and a floppy disk, and the characters you are and are not allowed to use in a filename, and so on. In 2012, people want to just use their device without worrying that there is a filesystem underneath. (Make no mistake, iOS has a full-blown filesystem under the hood.) Not to mention the security concerns involved in letting any app access any file it wants. That was DOS in 1992, not a modern, secure OS.
You might also note that iOS has an Open With... system that lets you open files with other apps. I just tapped on a PDF in Dropbox and got offered to open it in iBooks, GoodReader, Kindle, SUndry Notes, and Box. I tapped on a movie in GoodReader and it offered to open it in VLC, Dropbox, and Box, too.
Your phone is a phone, not a desktop computer, and that's the way the vast majority of phone users want it.
Why is this even remotely interesting? We know Intel has released Ivy Bridge. We know there are other companies already using Ivy Bridge. Apple's current offerings are a generation or two behind the existing status quo for high-end hardware on the laptop/desktop market. It is a no brainer that, yes, Apple would also use the next generation of hardware, too.
In spite of being "a generation or two behind", people really like Mac laptops, so are excited about what might happen. (In actuality, as UnknowingFool points out, Apple is also ahead of competitors by years: Thunderbolt, Ultrabook, etc.) The fact that Apple will probably be releasing Mountain Lion at the same time, may have Air-ified the MacBook Pro lineup, might add full-width trackpad, etc, adds interest even if it's not directly related to Ivy Bridge.
How exactly do you calculate the risk of terrorism -- in this case hijacking or bombing? It's not as simple as taking the current number of hijackings and bombings, dividing by the current number of flights, ignoring the fact that screening is currently in place (and has been since the 1970's), and thus "proving" that we don't need screening of any kind.
And how are you accounting for the "success effect"? At one point in the early 70's there were over 60 hijackings in a single year, because they were fairly easy to do and they fairly easily achieved their goals (and hence were "successful")? If it were as easy to kill thousands or tens of thousands of infidels as walking on to a plane, do you doubt that there would be many more than there are currently? (In 9/11: we were incredibly lucky. Fully-fueled planes crashed into high-density areas and only killed, on average, about 1,000 people each. That's amazingly low, and it of course doesn't count the economic cost, rendering multiple city blocks uninhabitable for years, etc.)
Not saying that any kind of screening or abrogation of our rights and privileges can be justified. Just not feeling the honor system for flights would work out all that well.
Faster frame rates require higher shutter speeds, and higher shutter speeds decrease motion blur. This can make footage look stroboscopic-like and unpleasant.
I noticed this years ago in televised (American) Football. Some shots appeared smooth, while other shots appeared harsh and stroboscopic. I eventually figured out that newer video cameras were being set at higher shutter speeds, so that you could have crisper frame-by-frame reviews of plays (without motion blur). It was terribly annoying.
240 fps TVs are bad for a different reason: they're interpolating frames out and motion interpolation is simply not all that great. In either case, higher shutter speeds are not necessarily better or more watchable.
One of the linked-to articles sums up issues with the study very well:
"[Consider] philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and George Berkeley. The idea that the beliefs of those individuals would have vanished had they been more analytical is, if nothing else, amusing. Gervais and Norenzayan’s findings should help to combat religion as an indolent obstacle to better explanations of the natural world. But it can’t really engage with the rich tradition of religious thought."
At the very lowest level, Matlab is appealing, as in your example. Beyond that, it's a horrible language, lacking features that S and other languages had 20+ years ago.
Yes, it appears that the study did a reasonable job, and its findings jibe with the opinions of many historians that deaths were undercounted.
At the same time, a one-off historical event is not quite the same as a physics experiment, or chemistry, or even psychology. Exactly what other time period or event could you compare the Civil War to in order to estimate war-time emigration/immigration rates? Doesn't seem like you can control very well for that. Considering the enormity of 600,000 dying, the scorched-earth tactics of the Union, draft riots, etc, I doubt that there really is a comparable, well-documented period to be found.
Also, I can't find the actual article, but the press didn't report any error margins, which might in fact be huge. (Not even sure how accurate those estimates would be.) If you know anything about statistics, a number with no error margins (confidence intervals, whatever you call them) is meaningless.
The fact that the press talks about a "sophisticated statistics package" is a red flag, but it may be due to reporters and not the actual study. (You can easily obtain, for free, a statistical package that can do whatever calculations they did. It's not the package that matters, it's the skill of the analyst.)
Yes, statistics and modeling can be useful in any field. But your unbridled enthusiasm isn't warranted. As you point out, in the past historians have had pet theories that were essentially Appeals to Authority (i.e. "I'm a famous historian and this is what I think"), but you have to be careful of the other side of the Appeal to Authority coin: "I used a sophisticated statistics tool to prove ...".
What a zealot. You may disagree with Apple's view of its customers, but at least it views us end users as its customers. Google has no such illusions: their customers are carriers, and secondarily manufacturers. You know, those same carriers and manufacturers who have been screwing us for years?
So yes, when it comes to serving its customers, I believe Apple (me as a customer) over Google (my carrier as a customer, and my information as its asset) any day of the week. And twice on weekends.
Is no one going to talk about using the Internet before they invented the @ sign for email addresses? (That is, the old UUNET days?) In 1980 in college, to send email to someone you had to know the path it would take to get there. Something like: "engineer1!myuniversity!anotheruniversity!berkeley!somecompany!anotheruniversity!address" as I remember, except much longer. Eventually, DNS and other nice things allowed you to instead send the email to: "address@anotheruniversity", and (Internet) email became much more useful.
I agree with some other posters that the key to the Internet was that it was developed by hackers, for hackers, and without egos and monetization getting in the way. You know, back when there were RFC's (Request for Comments) in an attempt to find the best solution?
Tsk, tsk, you simply do not get more funding for biological research now-a-days unless you mention that climate change is going to kill the species you're studying... *unless*, of course, you are given funds to study it in more detail.
... more durable than a $30 textbook, especially in a school environment where some textbooks can last for a decade or more.
How many of those books are up-to-date after that decade or more? How about if you compare, say, 6 of those textbooks in a backpack versus an iPad in a backpack: which leads to a more durable back, neck, and shoulders? How many of those books can be marked up by each student to fit their study style? (Not counting the first student or two who uses them.)
How many of those books actually cost $30? Can students keep them after they've studied the subject?
There are a LOT of advantages to electronic books that are done well.
Strange, the original article only mentions religion in a single sentence, to caution that it's only one of many contributing factors. Yet the ill-informed, hating first poster goes on and on about religion. Huh? "It's all the fault of religion". Totally unrelated to the article. Not related to any real issues that have been in the news lately. (Unless you assume everyone who is a skeptic of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is so because they are "religious".) Totally ignorant of philosophy, history, and probably has never actually done science themselves.
The two actual factors we have to address are: 1) decades of emphasizing self-esteem rather than learning, and 2) the Wall-street-ization of our jobs. US students are very confident that they're "good at math", but in fact are not, and we're busy churning out business students and many of our students who actually are mathematically talented spend their lives inventing increasingly dangerous financial derivatives.