This talking point has always bothered me, if consensus is not part of science then why do scientists place so much importance on peer-review?
Consensus is not a dirty word in science, it's the modern term for what Karl Popper called "the republic of science", it is a measure of agreement amoungst the experts in a particular field as documented in Journals and text books. It is the difference in confidence between the phrases "A scientists says" and "Scientists says".
[predictions] don't really show a compelling amount of accuracy
The one's I've seen from Hansen (1980's) and those from IPCC (early 90's) are all well within the error bars given with the predictions. Therefore they are accurate to within the stated margin of error which is all you ever get from a scientific prediction. Note that such predictions usually come in sets with different emmission senarios and it's common for intellectually dishonest people to ignore this and present a "worst case senario" prediction as a "most likely senario" prediction in an attempt to ether, discredit the work for political reasons, or try to scare people for political reasons, (depending on wich side of the politics they take)
Um, if you listen to the latest news reports, they have a lot of self-proclaimed scientists claiming today that the heat waves and droughts the US is experiencing right now are clear evidence of climate change.
There are psudeo-scientists on both sides of the political divide on this issue. I have followed the issue with interest since 1981, I don't recommend "news reports" as a reliable source of information about climate science (particularly in the US), and if you are a geek "El Reg" is also a noteable bottomless pit of misinformnation on the issue. I will however say that many reputable climate scientists have been predicting for at least the last decade that the US grain belt is in danger of sever droughts from AGW. The basic physics says the sub-tropical desert zone will dry out more and expand, while at the same time monsoons will become wetter. Both are an expected consequences of increased convection in the equitorial "Hadley Cells". This is complicated by the jet stream in the N. Hemisphere which can cause the western half of the US to be in drought while the other is flooded. Having said that, what is undisputable is that long term climate predictions are much more accurate on a global scale (global temp, humidity, etc) than regional predictions, regional predictions will always be more difficult and less precise.
Why do you need a battery when the grid can store it for you in a plain old hydro dam? You push extra power onto the grid when the sun is out, draw it back when it's not. The only people here in Australia that have batteries attached to their panels live in places where the grid isn't.
I think picking one winning technology at this point is ludicrous, the goal is to (cheaply) reduce CO2 whilst still keeping the lights on. Some places can do that with the sun, others with wind, waves, tides, nukes, geothermal, etc. You start small and then ramp up whatever works best in a particular location, then trade from one location to another across the grid like we already do. A side benefit of this is you can save the hydrocarbons for things only they can do such as plastics, medicine, jet-fuel, etc. Another benefit is that it removes FF's as a source of international tensions. The downside is that existing energy corporations have built their infrastructure around FF's, many are willing to invest in change if given clear regulatory direction, the others are in a word, 'Luddites'.
From the pdf - "Two national time series were made using the same homogeneity adjusted data set and the same
gridding and area averaging technique used by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center for its
annual climate monitoring. One analysis was for the full USHCN version 2 data set. The other
used only USHCN version 2 data from the 70 stations that surfacestations.org classified as good
or best. We would expect some differences simply due to the different area covered: the 70
stations only covered 43% of the country with no stations in, for example, New Mexico, Kansas,
Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee or North Carolina. Yet the
two time series, shown below as both annual data and smooth data, are remarkably similar.
Clearly there is no indication from this analysis that poor station exposure has imparted a bias in
the U.S. temperature trends".
In this new diatribe published by Watts, he has found a reason to reduce those 70 to 12. 12 is now too small a sample to do that experiment and claim any sort of statistical significance. It's the same nonsensical claim that totally ignores existing contra-evidence, all he has done is changed the way he classifies stations so that NOAA can no longer apply that test.
Non peer reviewed talking points don't falsify anything.
Umm...Watts has never published a peer-reviewed paper and is attempting to falisfy AGW, so why are you giving him the benifit of the doubt but not NOAA?
As I said you do not understand the discussion. Climate scientists have known about the UHI effect since at least the 1980's, long before Watts came along and claimed the instrumental record is useless. NOAA released the document to address Watts' talking points, they are called talking points because Watts' keeps talking about them but refuses to publish anything in a peer-reviewed journal. Watts' talking points have not changed (even though the exact wording has), the arguments in the NOAA document prove his claims are fundamentally flawed and will remain that way until he answers NOAA's rebuttal.
PS: This paper, 2012, builds upon new research - Leroy
There are a plethora of peer-revieved papers discussing the UHI streaching back almost 3 decades that Watt's belives are wrong, however he is not even playing the same game as climate scientists so why should they (or anyone else) give him any attention at all? Until Watts goes and publishes something properly he can claim whatever the hell likes, expecting knowledgeable people to take time out of their research to write a peer-reviewed paper rebutting the nonsense on his web site is unreasonable and unscientific.
How can non peer reviewed talking points from 2009 debunk a non peer reviewed paper from 2012, building upon peer reviewed methods from 2010?
Apart from the fact that science is not a neat linear progression, all of them are discussing Watts' claims. Once a scientist's claim has been falsified (2009) said scientist normally goes back to the drawing board, not Watts however, no-sireee, he was right the first time and everyone else is wrong so he re-presents the same claim (2012).
I'm not sure you understand the scientific method.
Yep and here's NOAA's extrodinary evidence debunking Watts' extraordinary claims. It's a blindingly simple statistical experiment that you can do yourself. Here's the youtube video about it that Watt's tried to take down with dubious DCMA notices. It's not a total loss though, it's true he has collected the best database on the condition of US weather stations (which NOAA used to debunk his claims in the pdf). Such a database sounds like it might be useful for improving the stations but the pdf above list several reasons as to why it might not be so useful.
An intellectually honest person (ie: an amateur scientist), would take those sort of criticisms seriously and either rebut them or withdraw the claim. Watts' behavior is little better than a youtube troll, I suspect he gets a buzz out of the attention.
Apple is not running a shop, it's running a market, they are not "stocking" apps they are providing a marketplace for others to sell them in. They can stop "censoring" by allowing people to sell whatever content they want on that market. They can keep their market's image clean with a content rating system, the same thing can be seen in a bricks and mortar market where the naughty stuff is hidden from direct view.
Of course you may not see it as a marketplace, you may see Apple as akin to a publisher that picks and chooses what they publish, but that is not how they paint themselves.
By definition all lawful arrests are "justified", they are nothing more than the physical precursor to a formal accusation (charges), in many cases they are also used simply to "keep the peace" by physically separating drunks from each other long enough for them to "sleep it off" . Are people charged and jailed for dubious reasons? - Of course, the US alone has half a million "drug criminals" locked up. Do innocent people get framed or otherwise wrongly convicted? - You bet, I believe Texas executed an innocent man not long ago.
Is there a better alternative to the western system of justice? - There's always room for improvement* but I've yet to hear anyone describe a fundamentally new system.
*suggested improvements to the US system:
1. Ban capital punishment. Think of it as insurance. I personally have no moral objection to the concept of the death penalty, some people certainly DO deserve to die. I do however have a moral objection to killing innocent people who do not deserve the death penalty. The track record of the death penalty, whenever and wherever it has been implemented, is such that a great number of people who did NOT deserve to die have been put to death by the state.
2. Stop circumventing judges with pre-trial plea deals, sure remorse should count in the prisoner's favor, but it should be unconditional remorse, not the bargaining-chip kind of remorse used to negotiate "justice" between two lawyers.
GGP was asking for public companies to be forced to carry everything
No they asked for "a law against censoring content in a public marketplace by a public company". You and Karlt1 interpreted that to mean every company must stock every item. You are therefore (unintentionally) using a strawman argument.
...but a proffesional public service doesn't, the long term energy plan for most industrial nations is to spend the next couple of centuries burning every last ounce of coal they can find.
Not really, most of the major religions already accept evolution. Religion is not a theory, it's a story, they will fit little green men into the plot like they do everything else, some of the smaller churches like Scientology will be delighted and claim it proves them right.
Shares are worth exactly what people are prepared to pay for them, what people paid FB for them a few months ago turned out to be the maximum price, therefore it was "perfectly priced' from the companies POV. FB pocketed that difference, not Zuckerberg, his shares are also worth 40% less than their initial value. But he has already sold enough of he shares to fill his swimming pool with cash, he is more interested in the control his remaining shares give him over FB. He now wants what every billionaire wants - his 'legacy' to outlive him.
Having said that, they were probably a bit on the high side of "perfectly priced" since some institutional investors had to buy deeper into it than they had planned just to make the IPO work, ( apparently it would have somehow been worse for them if it didn't work ). If the institutional knew they bought too high then they have probably been trying to cut and run in an orderly manner (at the same time as trying to cut each others legs off).
This results in a buyer's market that drives the price down to a point where the institutions lose the incentive to sell and start trading in a more stable manner. FB has a healthy profit margin for a large corporation 10+% so there is a calculable "real value", however what everyone has betting on up until now is growth. They claim ~1 Billion registered users which is (on the surface) very similar to the number of PC's connected to the net, they are the second most visited site on the net, so I personally can't see a lot of room for user based growth. IMO they went public because they saw the end of the explosive growth on the horizon, the buyers thought they saw another "google IPO".
OTOH there is a lot of potential for growth in a different way. I grew up in the 60's (born a year after Sputnik, the first generation with global TV/ networks), unlike my parents I have been able to watch history unfold in realtime, for "free". In the long term I think social networks are the end state of a technical revolution that really will profoundly change our civilization(s). Whether that change is beneficial/harmful to society will be decided by the rules we are making up now such as net neutrality, censorship, universal access, IP, sales tax, etc.
People used to talk a lot about the "global village" and although I don't personally use FB I recognize that historically we have reached the "global village". What we are doing now in a historical sense is working out a global etiquette.....noob.
I seem to remember reading/hearing that the LEM walls were on the order of soda-can thickness
I knew I should have used scare quotes for "tinfoil":)
Soda-can thickness is a good description of how I imagined it. Thick enough that it doesn't tear when it flexes but thin enough to rupture if you fell against it the wrong way.
My solution is simple: reduce the size and scope of the government and these companies will no longer feel like they have anything to gain from lobbying the government.
...or have anything to lose by ignoring their laws.
No, we should not have to rely on the whims of a mega-rich individual to do something about malaria. I'm not saying people shouldn't be allowed to become rich but there is a major difference in scale between a rich man and a billionaire. I don't think it's wise for society to collectively invest billions in a handfull of random individuals and then just hope they do the right thing with it.
Meh, the walls of the Apollo moon lander were literally made out of tinfoil, the astronaughts could easily have wrecked the cramped ship with a careless movement of an arm or a leg when they were putting on their suits (which they did in the lander, not beforehand on the orbiter).
Yes, but we know the Milankovich cycles are responible for the ice ages, just like we know increased CO2 concentration is responsible for the current Artic melt. Long term changes in climate are by definition not flukes (climate is the statistics of weather), a fluke is an asteroid impact who's climatic impact lasts a few years but in doing so sets the biosphere to a new state. To change the climate requires a "forcing", the amount the climate changes also depends on both forcings and "feedbacks". In the Milankovich cycles senario "orbital wobbles" are the dominant forcing and CO2 is a feedback. In the current senario, CO2 is both the dominant forcing and a feedback. Manmade areosols are a strong -ve forcing (ie: cooling influence) but not enough to balance the +ve CO2 forcing.
On human time scales of a few centuries climate is not mathematically chaotic, on a geologic scale it is, and that is mainly due to the fact that life itself has determined the composition of our atmosphere for at least the last billion years, but mankind is the first species to do so knowingly.
so whether they exist and what the production mechanism is is still up for grabs
Agree. Also agree that orbiting stars are convincing evidence, whereas x-ray point sources are just likely targets. I also think the origin of SMBH is not well understood, but until someone comes up with a more convincing alternative I will stick with ammalgamation as the most likely origin. Perhaps the demographics of black holes changes as the universe evolves, but finding likely targets may be difficult since the x-rays come from the accretion disk, so their strength is not a good indicator of mass. If we do find one, it will likely help us figure out how to find more.
I recall reading in the paper about people living around Land's End complaining about sonic booms, that was in the early days, IIRC they compromised by making it fly further out to sea before it was allowed to go supresonic. Boeing may have made some hay from those complaints but the complaints were genuine and were about sonic booms not afterburners. I loved the Concorde but lets face it, commercially it was a rich man's carnival ride, sure it got across the pond real fast but what use is that when you have to book your seat weeks in advance.
No argument with your points, they're all good. However, it's not just intution, it's an "educated guess" which is the same as what you are doing. TFA suggests star clusters as a possible mechanisim for forming IMBH's which changes some of the assumptions you're using, particularly about the density of gavitationally bound stars in a given volume of space.
For an old fart like me it doesn't seem that long ago when scientists were insisting black holes of ANY size were no more than a "mathematical curiosity". We still haven't directly observed a black hole but very few people doubt their existance. I don't know that our instruments are up to the task of taking an acurate survey for the purpose counting and weighing black holes within out galaxy, let alone the universe.
That's why we invented maths. Statistically a heatwave like the one in TFA occurs on AVERAGE once in 150yrs, technically if we get a couple more like it in the next decade or so it could still be due to "luck", the same technicality applies even if the entire ice cap melts, it could still be just a random once in a 100M yr event. - The same unreasoning was used by the same immoral stink tanks to convince people that smoking did not cause cancer. A single extreme weather event is obviously not enough to determine a weather pattern, but that is not what they are claiming.
It's much more complex than that. Natural populations often grow to a point where they destroy their food source and the population simply collapses to (near) zero. Easter Island is a good analogy to the global problems we face today. They cut down every tree and lost the ability to build boats which was their main source of food, the food was still there but they lost the ability to harvest it. The famine and fighting that followed restablised the population of a few thousand living in a 'tropical paradise' to ~200 clinging to a barren rock. I've seen this phenomena first hand in the form of rabbit/mouse plauges here in Australia. Oil (for fertiliser, transport, tractors, etc) is the modern global equivalent of the trees on Easter Island, it's not our food source but it might as well be.
Unlike mice, rabbits, and fermenting yeast, we can make pretty good guesses at the future and self regulate to avoid problems, it's THE thing that has put us at the top of the food chain, acid rain and erradication of smallpox are good examples, but sadly they're vastly outnumbered by not so good examples. I agree healthy competition is the most effecient way to solve a problem, be it social, economic, or technical, but it requires informed co-operation to define the 'problem' to the satisfaction of a healthy majority.
OTOH the above may just be wishful thinking, perhaps there are no aliens because at some point all technological species wipe themselves out with something as silly as, removing phone sanitisers, chopping down the last tree. But aliens are not the only evidence, how many civilizations have come and gone before the current, global civilization that exists today?
Perhaps we need a "science" party, but then again, who would vote for them??
This is what a strong public service is supposed to provide. They are supposed to be a meritocracy staffed by technocrats with the balls to "speak truth to power", the IPCC and NASA are good examples of such a service. Politicians are then supposed to weigh the science and budgeting options against another old fashioned concept called "the common good" to form a sane policy.
A weak public service leads to corrupt legislature, a weak legislature leads to a corrupt public service. From a foriegn POV, the majority of Americans appear to want both to be weak, which (IMO) is the worst possible combination in a democracy.
Surely people aren't really born in waves like that anyway, especially not world-wide.
The first modern "wave" came in the aftermath of WW2, young men returned home from the war and started families. That created a baby boom, I am at the tail end of the "boomers", my dad was an english soldier in occupied Germany just after the war, I was just a bit too young to play with the big kids at Woodstock but benifited from the abolishion of the draft in the west. Subsequent "waves" initiated by those who survived the war still occur but each one is flatter that the previous one. Six decades later in 2012 the wiggly bits in the population curve have been smoothed out.
Nowadays new generations seem to be defined every decade and are something people use to define target markets They appear to be based on shared childhood culture, for example both my parents and my children complain that my music is too loud (but the grandkids are on my side:).
Slashdot Mirror
consensus
This talking point has always bothered me, if consensus is not part of science then why do scientists place so much importance on peer-review? Consensus is not a dirty word in science, it's the modern term for what Karl Popper called "the republic of science", it is a measure of agreement amoungst the experts in a particular field as documented in Journals and text books. It is the difference in confidence between the phrases "A scientists says" and "Scientists says".
[predictions] don't really show a compelling amount of accuracy
The one's I've seen from Hansen (1980's) and those from IPCC (early 90's) are all well within the error bars given with the predictions. Therefore they are accurate to within the stated margin of error which is all you ever get from a scientific prediction. Note that such predictions usually come in sets with different emmission senarios and it's common for intellectually dishonest people to ignore this and present a "worst case senario" prediction as a "most likely senario" prediction in an attempt to ether, discredit the work for political reasons, or try to scare people for political reasons, (depending on wich side of the politics they take)
Um, if you listen to the latest news reports, they have a lot of self-proclaimed scientists claiming today that the heat waves and droughts the US is experiencing right now are clear evidence of climate change.
There are psudeo-scientists on both sides of the political divide on this issue. I have followed the issue with interest since 1981, I don't recommend "news reports" as a reliable source of information about climate science (particularly in the US), and if you are a geek "El Reg" is also a noteable bottomless pit of misinformnation on the issue. I will however say that many reputable climate scientists have been predicting for at least the last decade that the US grain belt is in danger of sever droughts from AGW. The basic physics says the sub-tropical desert zone will dry out more and expand, while at the same time monsoons will become wetter. Both are an expected consequences of increased convection in the equitorial "Hadley Cells". This is complicated by the jet stream in the N. Hemisphere which can cause the western half of the US to be in drought while the other is flooded. Having said that, what is undisputable is that long term climate predictions are much more accurate on a global scale (global temp, humidity, etc) than regional predictions, regional predictions will always be more difficult and less precise.
Why do you need a battery when the grid can store it for you in a plain old hydro dam? You push extra power onto the grid when the sun is out, draw it back when it's not. The only people here in Australia that have batteries attached to their panels live in places where the grid isn't.
I think picking one winning technology at this point is ludicrous, the goal is to (cheaply) reduce CO2 whilst still keeping the lights on. Some places can do that with the sun, others with wind, waves, tides, nukes, geothermal, etc. You start small and then ramp up whatever works best in a particular location, then trade from one location to another across the grid like we already do. A side benefit of this is you can save the hydrocarbons for things only they can do such as plastics, medicine, jet-fuel, etc. Another benefit is that it removes FF's as a source of international tensions. The downside is that existing energy corporations have built their infrastructure around FF's, many are willing to invest in change if given clear regulatory direction, the others are in a word, 'Luddites'.
From the pdf - "Two national time series were made using the same homogeneity adjusted data set and the same gridding and area averaging technique used by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center for its annual climate monitoring. One analysis was for the full USHCN version 2 data set. The other used only USHCN version 2 data from the 70 stations that surfacestations.org classified as good or best. We would expect some differences simply due to the different area covered: the 70 stations only covered 43% of the country with no stations in, for example, New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee or North Carolina. Yet the two time series, shown below as both annual data and smooth data, are remarkably similar. Clearly there is no indication from this analysis that poor station exposure has imparted a bias in the U.S. temperature trends".
In this new diatribe published by Watts, he has found a reason to reduce those 70 to 12. 12 is now too small a sample to do that experiment and claim any sort of statistical significance. It's the same nonsensical claim that totally ignores existing contra-evidence, all he has done is changed the way he classifies stations so that NOAA can no longer apply that test.
Non peer reviewed talking points don't falsify anything.
Umm...Watts has never published a peer-reviewed paper and is attempting to falisfy AGW, so why are you giving him the benifit of the doubt but not NOAA?
As I said you do not understand the discussion. Climate scientists have known about the UHI effect since at least the 1980's, long before Watts came along and claimed the instrumental record is useless. NOAA released the document to address Watts' talking points, they are called talking points because Watts' keeps talking about them but refuses to publish anything in a peer-reviewed journal. Watts' talking points have not changed (even though the exact wording has), the arguments in the NOAA document prove his claims are fundamentally flawed and will remain that way until he answers NOAA's rebuttal.
PS: This paper, 2012, builds upon new research - Leroy
There are a plethora of peer-revieved papers discussing the UHI streaching back almost 3 decades that Watt's belives are wrong, however he is not even playing the same game as climate scientists so why should they (or anyone else) give him any attention at all? Until Watts goes and publishes something properly he can claim whatever the hell likes, expecting knowledgeable people to take time out of their research to write a peer-reviewed paper rebutting the nonsense on his web site is unreasonable and unscientific.
How can non peer reviewed talking points from 2009 debunk a non peer reviewed paper from 2012, building upon peer reviewed methods from 2010?
Apart from the fact that science is not a neat linear progression, all of them are discussing Watts' claims. Once a scientist's claim has been falsified (2009) said scientist normally goes back to the drawing board, not Watts however, no-sireee, he was right the first time and everyone else is wrong so he re-presents the same claim (2012).
I'm not sure you understand the scientific method.
I'm not sure you understand the discussion.
Yep and here's NOAA's extrodinary evidence debunking Watts' extraordinary claims. It's a blindingly simple statistical experiment that you can do yourself. Here's the youtube video about it that Watt's tried to take down with dubious DCMA notices. It's not a total loss though, it's true he has collected the best database on the condition of US weather stations (which NOAA used to debunk his claims in the pdf). Such a database sounds like it might be useful for improving the stations but the pdf above list several reasons as to why it might not be so useful.
An intellectually honest person (ie: an amateur scientist), would take those sort of criticisms seriously and either rebut them or withdraw the claim. Watts' behavior is little better than a youtube troll, I suspect he gets a buzz out of the attention.
Apple is not running a shop, it's running a market, they are not "stocking" apps they are providing a marketplace for others to sell them in. They can stop "censoring" by allowing people to sell whatever content they want on that market. They can keep their market's image clean with a content rating system, the same thing can be seen in a bricks and mortar market where the naughty stuff is hidden from direct view.
Of course you may not see it as a marketplace, you may see Apple as akin to a publisher that picks and chooses what they publish, but that is not how they paint themselves.
By definition all lawful arrests are "justified", they are nothing more than the physical precursor to a formal accusation (charges), in many cases they are also used simply to "keep the peace" by physically separating drunks from each other long enough for them to "sleep it off" . Are people charged and jailed for dubious reasons? - Of course, the US alone has half a million "drug criminals" locked up. Do innocent people get framed or otherwise wrongly convicted? - You bet, I believe Texas executed an innocent man not long ago. Is there a better alternative to the western system of justice? - There's always room for improvement* but I've yet to hear anyone describe a fundamentally new system.
*suggested improvements to the US system: 1. Ban capital punishment. Think of it as insurance. I personally have no moral objection to the concept of the death penalty, some people certainly DO deserve to die. I do however have a moral objection to killing innocent people who do not deserve the death penalty. The track record of the death penalty, whenever and wherever it has been implemented, is such that a great number of people who did NOT deserve to die have been put to death by the state.
2. Stop circumventing judges with pre-trial plea deals, sure remorse should count in the prisoner's favor, but it should be unconditional remorse, not the bargaining-chip kind of remorse used to negotiate "justice" between two lawyers.
The best government is the least government (I didn't say none).
This is where we fundementally differ, size has nothing to do with good governance.
GGP was asking for public companies to be forced to carry everything
No they asked for "a law against censoring content in a public marketplace by a public company". You and Karlt1 interpreted that to mean every company must stock every item. You are therefore (unintentionally) using a strawman argument.
politicians think too shortterm
...but a proffesional public service doesn't, the long term energy plan for most industrial nations is to spend the next couple of centuries burning every last ounce of coal they can find.
Not really, most of the major religions already accept evolution. Religion is not a theory, it's a story, they will fit little green men into the plot like they do everything else, some of the smaller churches like Scientology will be delighted and claim it proves them right.
Shares are worth exactly what people are prepared to pay for them, what people paid FB for them a few months ago turned out to be the maximum price, therefore it was "perfectly priced' from the companies POV. FB pocketed that difference, not Zuckerberg, his shares are also worth 40% less than their initial value. But he has already sold enough of he shares to fill his swimming pool with cash, he is more interested in the control his remaining shares give him over FB. He now wants what every billionaire wants - his 'legacy' to outlive him.
Having said that, they were probably a bit on the high side of "perfectly priced" since some institutional investors had to buy deeper into it than they had planned just to make the IPO work, ( apparently it would have somehow been worse for them if it didn't work ). If the institutional knew they bought too high then they have probably been trying to cut and run in an orderly manner (at the same time as trying to cut each others legs off).
This results in a buyer's market that drives the price down to a point where the institutions lose the incentive to sell and start trading in a more stable manner. FB has a healthy profit margin for a large corporation 10+% so there is a calculable "real value", however what everyone has betting on up until now is growth. They claim ~1 Billion registered users which is (on the surface) very similar to the number of PC's connected to the net, they are the second most visited site on the net, so I personally can't see a lot of room for user based growth. IMO they went public because they saw the end of the explosive growth on the horizon, the buyers thought they saw another "google IPO".
OTOH there is a lot of potential for growth in a different way. I grew up in the 60's (born a year after Sputnik, the first generation with global TV/ networks), unlike my parents I have been able to watch history unfold in realtime, for "free". In the long term I think social networks are the end state of a technical revolution that really will profoundly change our civilization(s). Whether that change is beneficial/harmful to society will be decided by the rules we are making up now such as net neutrality, censorship, universal access, IP, sales tax, etc.
People used to talk a lot about the "global village" and although I don't personally use FB I recognize that historically we have reached the "global village". What we are doing now in a historical sense is working out a global etiquette.....noob.
I seem to remember reading/hearing that the LEM walls were on the order of soda-can thickness
I knew I should have used scare quotes for "tinfoil" :)
Soda-can thickness is a good description of how I imagined it. Thick enough that it doesn't tear when it flexes but thin enough to rupture if you fell against it the wrong way.
My solution is simple: reduce the size and scope of the government and these companies will no longer feel like they have anything to gain from lobbying the government.
...or have anything to lose by ignoring their laws.
THAT is how it should work
No, we should not have to rely on the whims of a mega-rich individual to do something about malaria. I'm not saying people shouldn't be allowed to become rich but there is a major difference in scale between a rich man and a billionaire. I don't think it's wise for society to collectively invest billions in a handfull of random individuals and then just hope they do the right thing with it.
Meh, the walls of the Apollo moon lander were literally made out of tinfoil, the astronaughts could easily have wrecked the cramped ship with a careless movement of an arm or a leg when they were putting on their suits (which they did in the lander, not beforehand on the orbiter).
Yes, but we know the Milankovich cycles are responible for the ice ages, just like we know increased CO2 concentration is responsible for the current Artic melt. Long term changes in climate are by definition not flukes (climate is the statistics of weather), a fluke is an asteroid impact who's climatic impact lasts a few years but in doing so sets the biosphere to a new state. To change the climate requires a "forcing", the amount the climate changes also depends on both forcings and "feedbacks". In the Milankovich cycles senario "orbital wobbles" are the dominant forcing and CO2 is a feedback. In the current senario, CO2 is both the dominant forcing and a feedback. Manmade areosols are a strong -ve forcing (ie: cooling influence) but not enough to balance the +ve CO2 forcing.
On human time scales of a few centuries climate is not mathematically chaotic, on a geologic scale it is, and that is mainly due to the fact that life itself has determined the composition of our atmosphere for at least the last billion years, but mankind is the first species to do so knowingly.
so whether they exist and what the production mechanism is is still up for grabs
Agree. Also agree that orbiting stars are convincing evidence, whereas x-ray point sources are just likely targets. I also think the origin of SMBH is not well understood, but until someone comes up with a more convincing alternative I will stick with ammalgamation as the most likely origin. Perhaps the demographics of black holes changes as the universe evolves, but finding likely targets may be difficult since the x-rays come from the accretion disk, so their strength is not a good indicator of mass. If we do find one, it will likely help us figure out how to find more.
I recall reading in the paper about people living around Land's End complaining about sonic booms, that was in the early days, IIRC they compromised by making it fly further out to sea before it was allowed to go supresonic. Boeing may have made some hay from those complaints but the complaints were genuine and were about sonic booms not afterburners. I loved the Concorde but lets face it, commercially it was a rich man's carnival ride, sure it got across the pond real fast but what use is that when you have to book your seat weeks in advance.
No argument with your points, they're all good. However, it's not just intution, it's an "educated guess" which is the same as what you are doing. TFA suggests star clusters as a possible mechanisim for forming IMBH's which changes some of the assumptions you're using, particularly about the density of gavitationally bound stars in a given volume of space.
For an old fart like me it doesn't seem that long ago when scientists were insisting black holes of ANY size were no more than a "mathematical curiosity". We still haven't directly observed a black hole but very few people doubt their existance. I don't know that our instruments are up to the task of taking an acurate survey for the purpose counting and weighing black holes within out galaxy, let alone the universe.
That's why we invented maths. Statistically a heatwave like the one in TFA occurs on AVERAGE once in 150yrs, technically if we get a couple more like it in the next decade or so it could still be due to "luck", the same technicality applies even if the entire ice cap melts, it could still be just a random once in a 100M yr event. - The same unreasoning was used by the same immoral stink tanks to convince people that smoking did not cause cancer. A single extreme weather event is obviously not enough to determine a weather pattern, but that is not what they are claiming.
It's much more complex than that. Natural populations often grow to a point where they destroy their food source and the population simply collapses to (near) zero. Easter Island is a good analogy to the global problems we face today. They cut down every tree and lost the ability to build boats which was their main source of food, the food was still there but they lost the ability to harvest it. The famine and fighting that followed restablised the population of a few thousand living in a 'tropical paradise' to ~200 clinging to a barren rock. I've seen this phenomena first hand in the form of rabbit/mouse plauges here in Australia. Oil (for fertiliser, transport, tractors, etc) is the modern global equivalent of the trees on Easter Island, it's not our food source but it might as well be.
Unlike mice, rabbits, and fermenting yeast, we can make pretty good guesses at the future and self regulate to avoid problems, it's THE thing that has put us at the top of the food chain, acid rain and erradication of smallpox are good examples, but sadly they're vastly outnumbered by not so good examples. I agree healthy competition is the most effecient way to solve a problem, be it social, economic, or technical, but it requires informed co-operation to define the 'problem' to the satisfaction of a healthy majority.
OTOH the above may just be wishful thinking, perhaps there are no aliens because at some point all technological species wipe themselves out with something as silly as, removing phone sanitisers, chopping down the last tree. But aliens are not the only evidence, how many civilizations have come and gone before the current, global civilization that exists today?
Perhaps we need a "science" party, but then again, who would vote for them??
This is what a strong public service is supposed to provide. They are supposed to be a meritocracy staffed by technocrats with the balls to "speak truth to power", the IPCC and NASA are good examples of such a service. Politicians are then supposed to weigh the science and budgeting options against another old fashioned concept called "the common good" to form a sane policy.
A weak public service leads to corrupt legislature, a weak legislature leads to a corrupt public service. From a foriegn POV, the majority of Americans appear to want both to be weak, which (IMO) is the worst possible combination in a democracy.
As for population, the NWO are not doing a very good job
Surely people aren't really born in waves like that anyway, especially not world-wide.
The first modern "wave" came in the aftermath of WW2, young men returned home from the war and started families. That created a baby boom, I am at the tail end of the "boomers", my dad was an english soldier in occupied Germany just after the war, I was just a bit too young to play with the big kids at Woodstock but benifited from the abolishion of the draft in the west. Subsequent "waves" initiated by those who survived the war still occur but each one is flatter that the previous one. Six decades later in 2012 the wiggly bits in the population curve have been smoothed out.
:).
Nowadays new generations seem to be defined every decade and are something people use to define target markets They appear to be based on shared childhood culture, for example both my parents and my children complain that my music is too loud (but the grandkids are on my side