The energy that the sun inputs into the earth (radiation, gravitational) has no order to speak of. So the _rate_ at which order is imported into the interface is basically zero.
This is the problem with using "order" to mean "negative entropy" -- it invites inappropriate application of human notions of what seems like "order". If you insist on using "order" to mean "negative entropy" then you need to remember that "negative entropy" is what matters, not "stuff what looks organized to me."
The entropy contained in the slice of solar blackbody radiation that is heating the earth is significantly less than the entropy in the blackbody radiation emitted by the earth in all directions into space. The earth has a net entropy output. Ergo the entropy input to earth is negative.
Hence, the rate of increase in order, anywhere on earth, must also be basically zero.
Entropy must increase in processes on earth, so the "increase in order" must be negative. And it does.
When you freeze water in your freezer, the ice has lower entropy than the water before it. However this is more than compensated by the increase in entropy emitted from the radiator.
Similarly if you build a spaceship, the decreased entropy of the spaceship will be more than compensated by increased entropy in the spaceship factory.
The chemical processes that create highly-organized you as a consequence increase entropy elsewhere. Considering the system as a whole, your existence results in a net increase in entropy.
This is another problem with thinking of negative entropy as "order" -- it invites one to look at something that is ordered and say "Hey, entropy decreased here! We have a problem!" when if you actually accounted for all entropy increases and decreases involved in bringing that order about, you'd see that there was no problem at all.
What if it's not? What if, instead, life is very probable in places with the right environment? What would that mean? What would that imply about all the planets around other stars that we are finding? Could there be life, even civilizations? Are they watching our star and wondering about the rocky planets orbiting it?
All of these just being components of one of the biggest questions humanity has ever asked itself:
Are we alone in the universe?
If you just aren't interested in the answer, fine, but to me it is that viewpoint that exemplifies the concept of "uninteresting".
This is what happens: we know that in quantum mechanics, measurement fundamentally changes a system. So making a measurement on 1 & 4 changes the possible outcomes to the measurement on 2 & 3, which is made later. When Alice and Bob record the same polarization, they change the system in such a way that Victor will never be able to observe "DIFFERENT" if he happens to decide to measure the entangled property (nothing unexpected happens when measuring 2 & 3 individually). Likewise, when Alice and Bob observe different polarizations, Victor will never get "SAME" if he decides to measure the entangled property of the pair of photons. In this case, Victor's measurement on 2 & 3 made it seem like the future influencing the past. In reality, it is the Alice and Bob's measurement on 1 & 4 that closes the door on all contradictory futures. Causality wins the day, yet again.
That... makes an insane amount of sense. It doesn't even sound like anything that weird is happening (minus the whole 'quantum entanglement' thing). A & B measure some state, and if V entangles the matching entangled photons then what he measures will correlate with A & B's as if they were entangled all along.
If we're *truly* concerned about this being an issue, we need to start searching all the babies and toddlers as they enter the grocery stores, movie theaters and sports arenas - and definitely at least pat down and wand everyone before they start to use a gas pump at a filling station! Huge potential for disaster otherwise, there.
But we're not, because there haven't been any major terrorist attacks along those vectors. As soon as they are, expect movement towards ineffective reactionary security theater in those venues.
Did the Shoe Bomber invent hiding bombs in a shoe? Did the Underpants Bomber invent hiding a bomb in your tighty-whities? Was the concept of a binary explosive unheard of before there was supposedly an attempt? Are none of these things that a TSA based around fighting real security threats would have anticipated?
No. Instead, they perform some real security (metal detectors, baggage scanners), and then a bunch of security theater on top of that which is designed to make it seem like They Are Doing Something about the "new" threats that show up.
Well that's the irony, isn't it? DRM is supposed to make piracy inconvenient so people will buy, but what it really does is make piracy more convenient than paying for the product.
What I find hilarious is that you apparently think people who are too stingy to pay for their media will grudgingly do so anyway when piracy is made slightly more inconvenient, rather than continuing to be stingy and finding a torrent, or just not acquiring the media in question in the first place.
This is like thinking you can cure a man of his heroin addiction by putting a "No Junkies!" sign on the front of your country club.
The earth may not be a closed system, but the universe is.
And the entropy of the universe is undoubtedly increasing. The second law does not preclude local, temporary decreases in entropy (which is what we are) so long as the total in the system increases, which it is. Eventually the entire universe will have such high entropy that essentially nothing will ever happen -- heat death -- regardless of what we do during our brief existence.
Energy alone is not enough to increase order.
Yes, you need some other mechanisms that make use of energy, like chemistry.
On a side note, I personally think that all of this gives a nice, if not a little superficial, definition of life. That is that life is the organized resistance to entropy.
So you personally think crystals are alive. You're welcome to your belief, but I thought that was more of a New Age thing than a Creationist thing.
It is important to note, too, that while the crystal itself has less entropy than its liquid precursors, the total entropy of the system (here drawing a box around the crystal instead of the entire universe) has increased because crystal formation releases highly entropic heat.
So too with you and I.
There is no second law violation implied by evolution.
Yet there is a whole field of AI called genetic algorithms. It doesn't randomly change the object code
Most of the time because the problem you're trying to solve can be parameterised more simply, but it's certainly possible to "evolve" object code, even object code that is responsible for its own replication.
I do like how the GP presented this concept of billions of self-replicating computer programs as if it was a hypothetical, but one that would obviously result in disorder.
Well, yeah... except that my objection to the post I was answering to was not against letting the bacteria do what they were pressured to do, but against tapping into it.
I can't imagine what connotation you are inferring for "tap" that would require I change my response. Taking bacteria cultures and dumping them on locations polluted by pesticides is "tapping" into their capabilities.
If I have a billion self replicating programs, and randomly change the object code in all of them every second, they all won't suddenly die, but I will see the entire population gradully LOSE information and thus FUNCTION.
You should actually try this. I have. So have many others. What we've learned by doing it is that if you just randomly modify your billion programs with an external program and use this same program to do the copying (so none of the population of programs you're "evolving" can ever fail to reproduce), and nothing else then yeah you'll just get a big mess of programs that mostly don't work.
However if you constrain those that are allowed to be copied in some way, for example by running them through some tests to see if they have the desired functionality and only copying the best-working programs then randomly modify them, you prevent regression and select for enhancement. Iterating on this process, you'll find that you can achieve order and you can increase function. Dramatically so, and faster than you would think, too.
There's a whole field of computer science on the subject: genetic algorithms. They're only like biological evolution in principle, but it's the principle of random changes resulting in increased order that you have an issue with. Well, genetic algorithms provide a mathematical description of how that is not only perfectly possible, but a common, expected outcome.
We call the criterion we use to decide what solutions will be allowed to propagate the "fitness function", and it is the main thing that guides what the solution looks like, so defining it well is the major issue when you're a human trying to solve a specific problem. Even if you do a good job, you can still get solutions that are wildly outside what you assumed the solution should look like -- which is one of the strengths of genetic algorithms.
In nature, the "fitness function" is the same as the problem to be solved: Survive to reproduce. And what we see is the incredible number of ways that problem can be solved.
Few creationists deny natural selection. Few creationists deny genetic mutations occur.
Great! Then few creationists would deny evolutionary theory! Because natural selection + mutations explains the diversity of species very, very well!
Effectively, what we do deny is that these mechanisms can violate the second law of themodynamics
Creationists always try to use the second law, to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw. The second law is quite precise about where it applies, only in a closed system must the entropy count rise. The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun, so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun! - MC Hawking, "Entropy"
My point: for the time being, those bacteria requires a gut to function.
Not all of them do.:P Even the summary says this was just one strain of a number of pesticide-eating bacteria.
I fully agree with being leery of and avoiding introducing species, but these bacteria evolved in places where there was heavy pesticide use. So they aren't exactly introduced species when used to clean up pesticides, they aren't that far removed from their natural environment. When the pesticide is gone, the pressure would be to return towards their previous food sources. Of course I couldn't say that would be the case, but it's not as big an shock to the ecosystem as many introductions.
Thank you, ancestral survivors of the Black Plague, for bestowing genetic immunity against 95% of known HIV upon me, through knocking out my CCR5 receptor.
Hey! My ancestors survived the Black Plague too, and all I got was an immune system that kills most stuff at the cost of going apeshit at the drop of a hat and giving me allergies. Not that I'm complaining, but suddenly I feel ripped off.
Aquaman: "We'll never catch The Traveling Salesman! Not even the Bat Computer can match the efficiency of his route!" Superman: "Unless we can enhance the Bat Computer by using my Super Spinning to change the vibrations of space in the area..." Batman: "... to duplicate The Traveling Salesman's powers! It just might work!"
Announcer: "Superman begins to spin faster than light, causing P to equal NP!"
There's no point in building a heavy lift vehicle to build a lunar base that's going to use the water if we can't access the water.
There's no point in building a heavy lift vehicle to go to the moon in the first place.
It's vastly easier to get from LEO to the moon and back than it is to get to LEO from the earth's surface. If NASA finds usable water on the moon that can be turned into propellant, then we should take that and bring it to LEO to use as a fueling station. Then when we want to go to the moon, we only need to lift the craft itself and not all the propellant that it will need to get from earth to the moon (which has an exponential effect on the size of rocket you need to get to orbit).
What we need to start doing is treating space missions as two steps: 1) earth surface to earth orbit 2) earth orbit to wherever. And ideally stage 1) should never be lifting anything for stage 2) that doesn't need to come from earth.
NASA is indeed doing it right. They know this is the way to do things in the future, and it's what they're trying to aim for.
Of course then there's the Congress-mandated SLS pork rocket. Nice!
I honestly don't know how the results of this experiment factor in. I'm just explaining that you can't know that a particle is entangled just by looking at it, and so you can't just use two entangled particles to communicate FTL.
The events in this experiment had a time-like separation, just seemingly in the wrong direction. In the paper, the authors say that this may look like a violation of causality but it really isn't. From page 6:
If one views the quantum state as a real physical object, one could get the seemingly paradoxical situation that future actions appear as having an influence on past and already irrevocably recorded events. However, there is never a paradox if the quantum state is viewed as to be no more than a âoecatalogue of our knowledgeâ2. Then the state is a probability list for all possible measurement outcomes, the relative temporal order of the three observerâ(TM)s events is irrelevant and no physical interactions whatsoever between these events, especially into the past, are necessary to explain the delayed-choice entanglement swapping.
Or does maybe the makeup of the atmosphere come in to play for that? Because Venus is warmer than earth based off of distance and brightness of star than Earth, so does that mean that it's off as well?
Yes, genius, that was exactly the point. Minus the greenhouse effect due to earth's atmosphere, the earth would be roughly 30 C colder. Venus is an even more extreme example of a greenhouse effect resulting in much higher temperature than a barren rock would be at. It's why Venus is hotter than Mercury (and why Venus' temperature doesn't vary significantly between day and night sides, similar to how we are seeing nights increase in temperature here on earth).
Ergo, it is completely ludicrous to deny the greenhouse effect from greenhouse gasses since it is simple to calculate that if it didn't exist, neither would we because the earth would be frozen.
I think (and I could be wrong; it's been a while since I read on this) that the posited mechanism is that CO2 absobs more heat before it re-radiates it than many other chemicals.
No, that's not it exactly.
The mechanism is simply this: CO2 is transparent to the majority of incoming solar radiation. CO2 is opaque to the majority of radiation emitted by the earth, i.e. infrared. So more radiation gets in than is allowed to escape. It's the same principle by which a greenhouse works.
This guy is saying the sort of things that have been getting me downmodded here on slashdot for years.
You mean things like "the warming has stopped in the last decade", which is only true if you simply do a two-point comparison between today and 1998, which is a complete bullshit method of tracking the long term trend in a noisy signal? Looking at all the data, either with a 5-year rolling average or simply looking at the yearly data while understanding it is not a monotonic signal, it's obvious that the warming has continued with only a relatively small period of stability, and 1998 was just a weirdly hot year, just like 1999 was a weirdly cold year. If climate scientists were bullshit artists like you, they could use that year to claim that the warming this century has been INCREDIBLE. But that would be bullshit.
Speaking of glomming and bullshit, when a scientists goes from one bullshit extreme to the other, you happily glom onto them as long as the extreme is the one you like.
By the way, I love the false dichotomy of "do nothing" and "destroy civilization". I also love that you think there are a lot of politicians with an anti-Western-civilization bias. That's just hilarious.
Every time I go to google a way to fix the problems with Unity, I end up googling for other debian-based distros instead. Seems like the best way to fix all the issues in one fell swoop.
My problem with Unity isn't appearance (it's very pretty and slick looking), it's functionality.
In particular I'd like to single out the scroll bars as an abomination. I'm running Ubuntu Classic and I still can't get away from these fuckers. Not having the scroll bar appear unless I mouse over the little rectangle that appears to the left of where the scroll bar marker would be is god-awful. That the little rectangle appears inside the application window and thus can be obscured by, say, a same-colored selection rectangle (as happens in the file viewer, geeqie image viewer, and plenty of other apps) means I basically have to fucking *guess* where the scroll bar should be.
Is there an obvious "make scroll bars not retarded" option I'm missing? Is this shit supposed to be good on a tablet? Am I supposed to be glad that my desktop has a tablet interface?
I'm actually scared of upgrading my friend's desktop to a newer version of Ubuntu. He's computer illiterate and has been using Ubuntu more-or-less fine for several years now, but I know him and while I can tolerate even the most bone-headed of interface (I used old versions of Mentor Graphics for example) this shit is going to drive him insane and he'll stop using it.
Slashdot Mirror
The energy that the sun inputs into the earth (radiation, gravitational) has no order to speak of. So the _rate_ at which order is imported into the interface is basically zero.
This is the problem with using "order" to mean "negative entropy" -- it invites inappropriate application of human notions of what seems like "order". If you insist on using "order" to mean "negative entropy" then you need to remember that "negative entropy" is what matters, not "stuff what looks organized to me."
The entropy contained in the slice of solar blackbody radiation that is heating the earth is significantly less than the entropy in the blackbody radiation emitted by the earth in all directions into space. The earth has a net entropy output. Ergo the entropy input to earth is negative.
Hence, the rate of increase in order, anywhere on earth, must also be basically zero.
Entropy must increase in processes on earth, so the "increase in order" must be negative. And it does.
When you freeze water in your freezer, the ice has lower entropy than the water before it. However this is more than compensated by the increase in entropy emitted from the radiator.
Similarly if you build a spaceship, the decreased entropy of the spaceship will be more than compensated by increased entropy in the spaceship factory.
The chemical processes that create highly-organized you as a consequence increase entropy elsewhere. Considering the system as a whole, your existence results in a net increase in entropy.
This is another problem with thinking of negative entropy as "order" -- it invites one to look at something that is ordered and say "Hey, entropy decreased here! We have a problem!" when if you actually accounted for all entropy increases and decreases involved in bringing that order about, you'd see that there was no problem at all.
utterly improbable
What if it's not? What if, instead, life is very probable in places with the right environment? What would that mean? What would that imply about all the planets around other stars that we are finding? Could there be life, even civilizations? Are they watching our star and wondering about the rocky planets orbiting it?
All of these just being components of one of the biggest questions humanity has ever asked itself:
Are we alone in the universe?
If you just aren't interested in the answer, fine, but to me it is that viewpoint that exemplifies the concept of "uninteresting".
Super Pork Launcher! Sounds like a little-known SNES title, and is about as relevant to space exploration today.
This is what happens: we know that in quantum mechanics, measurement fundamentally changes a system. So making a measurement on 1 & 4 changes the possible outcomes to the measurement on 2 & 3, which is made later. When Alice and Bob record the same polarization, they change the system in such a way that Victor will never be able to observe "DIFFERENT" if he happens to decide to measure the entangled property (nothing unexpected happens when measuring 2 & 3 individually). Likewise, when Alice and Bob observe different polarizations, Victor will never get "SAME" if he decides to measure the entangled property of the pair of photons. In this case, Victor's measurement on 2 & 3 made it seem like the future influencing the past. In reality, it is the Alice and Bob's measurement on 1 & 4 that closes the door on all contradictory futures. Causality wins the day, yet again.
That... makes an insane amount of sense. It doesn't even sound like anything that weird is happening (minus the whole 'quantum entanglement' thing). A & B measure some state, and if V entangles the matching entangled photons then what he measures will correlate with A & B's as if they were entangled all along.
If we're *truly* concerned about this being an issue, we need to start searching all the babies and toddlers as they enter the grocery stores, movie theaters and sports arenas - and definitely at least pat down and wand everyone before they start to use a gas pump at a filling station! Huge potential for disaster otherwise, there.
But we're not, because there haven't been any major terrorist attacks along those vectors. As soon as they are, expect movement towards ineffective reactionary security theater in those venues.
Did the Shoe Bomber invent hiding bombs in a shoe? Did the Underpants Bomber invent hiding a bomb in your tighty-whities? Was the concept of a binary explosive unheard of before there was supposedly an attempt? Are none of these things that a TSA based around fighting real security threats would have anticipated?
No. Instead, they perform some real security (metal detectors, baggage scanners), and then a bunch of security theater on top of that which is designed to make it seem like They Are Doing Something about the "new" threats that show up.
Well that's the irony, isn't it? DRM is supposed to make piracy inconvenient so people will buy, but what it really does is make piracy more convenient than paying for the product.
But, where will all the coke and hooker parties be held at?
That's why right below the first sign is one that says "Coke-heads w/ escorts welcome."
Too stingy yo pay for your media?
What I find hilarious is that you apparently think people who are too stingy to pay for their media will grudgingly do so anyway when piracy is made slightly more inconvenient, rather than continuing to be stingy and finding a torrent, or just not acquiring the media in question in the first place.
This is like thinking you can cure a man of his heroin addiction by putting a "No Junkies!" sign on the front of your country club.
The earth may not be a closed system, but the universe is.
And the entropy of the universe is undoubtedly increasing. The second law does not preclude local, temporary decreases in entropy (which is what we are) so long as the total in the system increases, which it is. Eventually the entire universe will have such high entropy that essentially nothing will ever happen -- heat death -- regardless of what we do during our brief existence.
Energy alone is not enough to increase order.
Yes, you need some other mechanisms that make use of energy, like chemistry.
On a side note, I personally think that all of this gives a nice, if not a little superficial, definition of life. That is that life is the organized resistance to entropy.
So you personally think crystals are alive. You're welcome to your belief, but I thought that was more of a New Age thing than a Creationist thing.
It is important to note, too, that while the crystal itself has less entropy than its liquid precursors, the total entropy of the system (here drawing a box around the crystal instead of the entire universe) has increased because crystal formation releases highly entropic heat.
So too with you and I.
There is no second law violation implied by evolution.
Yet there is a whole field of AI called genetic algorithms. It doesn't randomly change the object code
Most of the time because the problem you're trying to solve can be parameterised more simply, but it's certainly possible to "evolve" object code, even object code that is responsible for its own replication.
I do like how the GP presented this concept of billions of self-replicating computer programs as if it was a hypothetical, but one that would obviously result in disorder.
Their certainly was genetic change in the bacteria.
Well, yeah... except that my objection to the post I was answering to was not against letting the bacteria do what they were pressured to do, but against tapping into it.
I can't imagine what connotation you are inferring for "tap" that would require I change my response. Taking bacteria cultures and dumping them on locations polluted by pesticides is "tapping" into their capabilities.
If I have a billion self replicating programs, and randomly change the object code in all of them every second, they all won't suddenly die, but I will see the entire population gradully LOSE information and thus FUNCTION.
You should actually try this. I have. So have many others. What we've learned by doing it is that if you just randomly modify your billion programs with an external program and use this same program to do the copying (so none of the population of programs you're "evolving" can ever fail to reproduce), and nothing else then yeah you'll just get a big mess of programs that mostly don't work.
However if you constrain those that are allowed to be copied in some way, for example by running them through some tests to see if they have the desired functionality and only copying the best-working programs then randomly modify them, you prevent regression and select for enhancement. Iterating on this process, you'll find that you can achieve order and you can increase function. Dramatically so, and faster than you would think, too.
There's a whole field of computer science on the subject: genetic algorithms. They're only like biological evolution in principle, but it's the principle of random changes resulting in increased order that you have an issue with. Well, genetic algorithms provide a mathematical description of how that is not only perfectly possible, but a common, expected outcome.
We call the criterion we use to decide what solutions will be allowed to propagate the "fitness function", and it is the main thing that guides what the solution looks like, so defining it well is the major issue when you're a human trying to solve a specific problem. Even if you do a good job, you can still get solutions that are wildly outside what you assumed the solution should look like -- which is one of the strengths of genetic algorithms.
In nature, the "fitness function" is the same as the problem to be solved: Survive to reproduce. And what we see is the incredible number of ways that problem can be solved.
Few creationists deny natural selection. Few creationists deny genetic mutations occur.
Great! Then few creationists would deny evolutionary theory! Because natural selection + mutations explains the diversity of species very, very well!
Effectively, what we do deny is that these mechanisms can violate the second law of themodynamics
Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
- MC Hawking, "Entropy"
My point: for the time being, those bacteria requires a gut to function.
Not all of them do. :P Even the summary says this was just one strain of a number of pesticide-eating bacteria.
I fully agree with being leery of and avoiding introducing species, but these bacteria evolved in places where there was heavy pesticide use. So they aren't exactly introduced species when used to clean up pesticides, they aren't that far removed from their natural environment. When the pesticide is gone, the pressure would be to return towards their previous food sources. Of course I couldn't say that would be the case, but it's not as big an shock to the ecosystem as many introductions.
Thank you, ancestral survivors of the Black Plague, for bestowing genetic immunity against 95% of known HIV upon me, through knocking out my CCR5 receptor.
Hey! My ancestors survived the Black Plague too, and all I got was an immune system that kills most stuff at the cost of going apeshit at the drop of a hat and giving me allergies. Not that I'm complaining, but suddenly I feel ripped off.
Aquaman: "We'll never catch The Traveling Salesman! Not even the Bat Computer can match the efficiency of his route!"
Superman: "Unless we can enhance the Bat Computer by using my Super Spinning to change the vibrations of space in the area..."
Batman: "... to duplicate The Traveling Salesman's powers! It just might work!"
Announcer: "Superman begins to spin faster than light, causing P to equal NP!"
I'd watch that episode.
There's no point in building a heavy lift vehicle to build a lunar base that's going to use the water if we can't access the water.
There's no point in building a heavy lift vehicle to go to the moon in the first place.
It's vastly easier to get from LEO to the moon and back than it is to get to LEO from the earth's surface. If NASA finds usable water on the moon that can be turned into propellant, then we should take that and bring it to LEO to use as a fueling station. Then when we want to go to the moon, we only need to lift the craft itself and not all the propellant that it will need to get from earth to the moon (which has an exponential effect on the size of rocket you need to get to orbit).
What we need to start doing is treating space missions as two steps: 1) earth surface to earth orbit 2) earth orbit to wherever. And ideally stage 1) should never be lifting anything for stage 2) that doesn't need to come from earth.
NASA is indeed doing it right. They know this is the way to do things in the future, and it's what they're trying to aim for.
Of course then there's the Congress-mandated SLS pork rocket. Nice!
I honestly don't know how the results of this experiment factor in. I'm just explaining that you can't know that a particle is entangled just by looking at it, and so you can't just use two entangled particles to communicate FTL.
The events in this experiment had a time-like separation, just seemingly in the wrong direction. In the paper, the authors say that this may look like a violation of causality but it really isn't. From page 6:
If one views the quantum state as a real physical object, one could get the seemingly paradoxical situation that future actions appear as having an influence on past and already irrevocably recorded events. However, there is never a paradox if the quantum state is viewed as to be no more than a âoecatalogue of our knowledgeâ2. Then the state is a probability list for all possible measurement outcomes, the relative temporal order of the three observerâ(TM)s events is irrelevant and no physical interactions whatsoever between these events, especially into the past, are necessary to explain the delayed-choice entanglement swapping.
I don't really understand it.
Or does maybe the makeup of the atmosphere come in to play for that? Because Venus is warmer than earth based off of distance and brightness of star than Earth, so does that mean that it's off as well?
Yes, genius, that was exactly the point. Minus the greenhouse effect due to earth's atmosphere, the earth would be roughly 30 C colder. Venus is an even more extreme example of a greenhouse effect resulting in much higher temperature than a barren rock would be at. It's why Venus is hotter than Mercury (and why Venus' temperature doesn't vary significantly between day and night sides, similar to how we are seeing nights increase in temperature here on earth).
Ergo, it is completely ludicrous to deny the greenhouse effect from greenhouse gasses since it is simple to calculate that if it didn't exist, neither would we because the earth would be frozen.
I think (and I could be wrong; it's been a while since I read on this) that the posited mechanism is that CO2 absobs more heat before it re-radiates it than many other chemicals.
No, that's not it exactly.
The mechanism is simply this: CO2 is transparent to the majority of incoming solar radiation. CO2 is opaque to the majority of radiation emitted by the earth, i.e. infrared. So more radiation gets in than is allowed to escape. It's the same principle by which a greenhouse works.
This guy is saying the sort of things that have been getting me downmodded here on slashdot for years.
You mean things like "the warming has stopped in the last decade", which is only true if you simply do a two-point comparison between today and 1998, which is a complete bullshit method of tracking the long term trend in a noisy signal? Looking at all the data, either with a 5-year rolling average or simply looking at the yearly data while understanding it is not a monotonic signal, it's obvious that the warming has continued with only a relatively small period of stability, and 1998 was just a weirdly hot year, just like 1999 was a weirdly cold year. If climate scientists were bullshit artists like you, they could use that year to claim that the warming this century has been INCREDIBLE. But that would be bullshit.
Speaking of glomming and bullshit, when a scientists goes from one bullshit extreme to the other, you happily glom onto them as long as the extreme is the one you like.
By the way, I love the false dichotomy of "do nothing" and "destroy civilization". I also love that you think there are a lot of politicians with an anti-Western-civilization bias. That's just hilarious.
No. Is that what Unity is copying? Does it suck balls as a desktop interface too?
Every time I go to google a way to fix the problems with Unity, I end up googling for other debian-based distros instead. Seems like the best way to fix all the issues in one fell swoop.
My problem with Unity isn't appearance (it's very pretty and slick looking), it's functionality.
In particular I'd like to single out the scroll bars as an abomination. I'm running Ubuntu Classic and I still can't get away from these fuckers. Not having the scroll bar appear unless I mouse over the little rectangle that appears to the left of where the scroll bar marker would be is god-awful. That the little rectangle appears inside the application window and thus can be obscured by, say, a same-colored selection rectangle (as happens in the file viewer, geeqie image viewer, and plenty of other apps) means I basically have to fucking *guess* where the scroll bar should be.
Is there an obvious "make scroll bars not retarded" option I'm missing? Is this shit supposed to be good on a tablet? Am I supposed to be glad that my desktop has a tablet interface?
I'm actually scared of upgrading my friend's desktop to a newer version of Ubuntu. He's computer illiterate and has been using Ubuntu more-or-less fine for several years now, but I know him and while I can tolerate even the most bone-headed of interface (I used old versions of Mentor Graphics for example) this shit is going to drive him insane and he'll stop using it.