Excellent you are appealing to the scientific method and skepticisim, and failing to use either.
BTW: Consensus is an integral part of science, it's implied every time you hear the phrase "scientists say". Now go and use your skepticisim to find out what the overwhelming majority of scientists actually say on the subject and get back to us when you can scientifically refute one or more of the three claims that are made by EVERY national science body on the planet.
"So that would be a bit of an impractical grid to put around you, now wouldn't it ?"
13.6 cm is a bit smaller than chicken wire but (as you say) since their is no evidence of harm from wifi, practicality goes out the window when one seriously contemplates using a grid for protection against wifi, doesn't it?;)
"oh and there is obviously a difference between Christians and hippies, for starters the fact that Christians actually have a purpose and generally act very sensibly"
That's not obvious to me, but I have observed that all idealogs and zealots have a superiority complex and generaly act in a presumptious, condesending, even violent manner to anyone who does not share their faith.
"I seriously doubt that if their were a scientifically founded protection for EM radiation, these people wouldn't use it."
It's called a Faraday cage, you could probably get one made in the shape of a pyramid and kill too birds with one stone.
"If I have to listen to people complain about second hand smoke so much that I feel like a goddamned leppar then why can't I complain even the least little bit about electromagnetic radiation?"
You can complain all you like, just don't expect anyone to listen until you have robust scientific evidence like the second hand smoker's do. I'm also a smoker and I'm willing to act reasonably by smoking outside. However when a second-hand smoker waves their face while walking past a leppar colony on a smog filled street I feel justified in telling them to wear a gas mask if they don't like it.
Same deal for EM radition, either put up the evidence or STFU and let me use my mobile.
Disclaimer: I saw Woodstock on the news when I was 8-9yo, had hair down to my arse in the 70's. The Hippie ideal of maximum freedom and minimum harm is still very appealing to me. I'm simply unwilling to ignore human nature and throw out the philosophy of scientific skepticisim. Unlike any "other way of thinking" it is demonstratably usefull to me beyond a healthy body and control of my emotional state (not that I have either:). One of scientific skepticisim's prime uses is to judge claims from others against what you "know" (eg: does EM radiation harm anyone?).
Like Yoga in wich the rituals can be useful for a healthy mind/body, scientific skepticisim is also a usefull skill that can be taught, of course you then have to work at it for a while before you see the benifits. The hardest part of that "work" for a good skeptic is accepting that you cannot "know" anything but you can have scientific evidence that goes beyond reasonable doubt.
"Some people need to be taught the difference between Want and Need."
While others need to learn the meaning of irrational envy.
"And my company has never had an engineering layoff in the entire 85+ year history of the company."
The confidence of youth is mainly due to a lack of experience. Now before you start lecturing me about the GoodOldDays(TM) I should inform you that my eldest son was born two years before you were. Like yourself he has never had to find work in a recession, let alone the depression you are wishing for.
"I think I'm doing pretty good."
So STFU and enjoy it instead of bitching about people you know nothing about.
'R' is not a general programing language but that hardly means it's not a language. Producing a stand alone executable is not a feature of any language, it's a feature of the tool set.
"Oh to be 21 again. However, 5 jobs at 21 wouldn't be impossible..."
Hah, I worked in the building industry when I left school in the 70's - 5 jobs in a month wasn't unheard of, OTOH all you needed to qualify as a labourer was "a strong back and a weak head".
Do you realise you are bitching and moaning about people bitching and moaning?
I don't speak for the GP but personally I would trust pebble-bed reactors more than I would trust "any bureaucratic entity", (ie: impossible to melt-down or explode with or without red tape).
To summarise your post: Everyone is suffering from a loss of integrity except Limbaugh and Fox News. You also know all your assertions are "true" because Fox and Limbaugh told you they were "true".
The depressing irony is that propoganda has convinced you that you are immune to propoganda.
"My personal belief is that a lot of times, such nominatives are rather used far more to draw attention to one's self as being different than for genuine identity, and despite the constant protestations that one does not want to be seen or treated as different in any way."
Yes it's like the phony voice and mannerisims that some men use to attract attention to their homosexuality. I don't give a rat's arse if they are gay but I wish they would lose the childish theatrics.
For sure, I think the idea has been worth testing. IMHO it has come up wanting but I have no objection to more tests if that's what people want to do with their money, (Disclaimer: I live in Australia, a high demand for iron ore is a GoodThing(TM) for our economy).
"|NOt to mention...but, haven't the last couple of years been some of the coolest years in recent history? Yet, they still yell global warming....sheesh. I think they need to look closer at what natures LONG tern cycles are..."
Ok "insightful" troll, I think you need to take your head out of your arse and "take a closer look" yourself, so I will feed you...
1. The hottest 10yrs on record have occured in the last 12yrs.
2. Every year in the 21st century has been hotter than any year in the 20th century (exluding 1998).
Yes 20yrs ago it was an interesting idea based on the observation that dust from deserts fertilizes the oceans (eg: 40M tons of dust is transported by wind from N. Africa all the way to the Amazon each year, so the Atlantic ocean already recieves a nice dusting in the summer. The results from dumping iron dust have been inconclusive at best, but even if it did work as well as the promoters claim the problem would then be scale and distribution.
The simplest answer given by the overwhelming majority of scientists who have looked at the problem (including Lovelock), is to cut back emmissions from ~10Gt/yr to ~3Gt/yr as fast or faster than we built them up, in otherwords moderate our current uncontrolled experiment in geo-engineering as rapidly as possible. However to some people the idea of emmission controls amounts to social-engineering and an economic acpocalypse, thus we get the political bullshit, half-truths, think tanks, and psuedo-skeptics that have accompanied any discussion of climate over the last couple of decades.
"More to the point, who thought that James Lovelock was a 'climate scientist'? That Gaia thing seems like crackpottery to me..."
James Lovelock has been called the the father of Earth Science, climate science is a subset of Earth science. The term Gaia is more or less interchangeable with the term Biosphere. The hippies picked up the idea and made Gaia into some sort of god that has feelings, this initially confused the hell out of many of his scientific peers (eg: gaia was initially critisied by Dawkins & Gould). Those who have a vested interest in fucking up the planet still encorage that mis-informed view and consequently the term has fallen into disrepute since the general population now see gaia as the God of the bush-bunnies rather than the glue that holds the Earth sciences together.
The term "climate scientist" was not invented when he gained his Phd. He was initially trained in medicine so it's no surprise that he proposes that problems with the Earth's biosphere be tackled the same way as a doctor treats a patient (patient = unique living system), "first do no harm". However, Lovelock is no Hippie, he has upset Greenpeace and other like minded political organisations for proposing nuclear reators as a short term (50-100yr) solution to AGW. In my book he is a genuine "giant" of the 20th century who's theories/ideas have allowed others to see further and have upset both sides of environmental politics at various times over the last four or five decades.
There are piles and piles of papers available that treat the biosphere as an oragisim (unique living system), eg: life makes it possible for methane and oxygen to exist together in atmosphere, plants and plankton consume C02 and produced the ALL the available oxygen currently in the atmosphere, limestone and peat are produced by life, islands are built from coral, rainforests create their own rain, etc, etc, etc. It's definitely not crackpottery, in fact the idea that the biosphere is a unique living system is now so entrenched in modern science that most papers don't even bother defining "biosphere".
BTW: In TFA (which I have not read), I believe he is not speaking as a climate scientist but as a "futurist", futurists are confined by their imagination not by practicalities (eg: Dyson).
"Once you can do that with one subgroup of humans, you can do it for any."
To a westener in India it stands out like dogs-balls but if you look again you will find all humans spend a lot of time behaving like this, wealth just makes the behaviour more potent. Once you see that, all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense. Not saying it's right or wrong it's just the way our wetware bios works.
I agree. In fact I would go so far as to say that in general active volcanos stink and produce more "pollution" than the people living on their flanks. I also think that long before we were human we evolved a survival mechanisim that perceives the stink as a warning to stay away, when we learned to write that mechanisim became the Bible's "fire and brimstone". Many tribal religions that actually live on volcanos are more sophisticated than that, they recognise that the volcano can also bring new life in the form of rain and fertilzer. The mistake that all these tribes make is that they think they can appeal to the volcano's "good side", nature doesn't have a "good side" and doesn't care one bit if she covers you and your tribe with molten rock.
/rant
The tribal view is also applicable to the industrial revolution. Factories provide us with a lifestyle that few of us are willing/able to give up, but it's clear those factories are killing environmental canaries at an alarming rate.
I witnessed Mao's famine on a B&W TV as a child and that's what would happen if we stopped the industrial revolution, but I also recognise we are now so numerous that to continue with bussiness as usual means a global Easter Island is a real risk for my grandkids (first one due in March). It's not that we don't have the technology to have our environmental cake and eat it, it's that (until recently) most of our "chiefs" have been busy fighting each other over the right to kiss the factory god's arse. The world's witch doctors who collectively create our technology are ignored when they point out fatal but potentialy fixable bugs such as the tradjedy of the commons. Like the tribal witch-doctors appealing to the "good side" of the volcano god's I fear that our witch-doctors are appealing to the "good side" of human nature.
There are now over twice as many people on the planet than when I was born, I was a moderate greenie before the term "greenie" was invented. I watched the rural town where I grew up swallowed by the city of Melbourne. I have been visiting the local beach where I now live for 45yrs, over that time it went from clean to filthy and back to clean again, in fact the entire bay did likewise (Port Phillip Bay) and the fishing is slowly returning to what it used to be in the 60's (recreational fishing licenses were introduced to buy back commercial scallop boat licences). The strip of wetlands on the other side of where I live is a paradise for birds and a breeding ground for fish. It's still a shit farm but not like the original one that ruined the beach in the 70's, this one produces "drinkable" water and fertlizer for nearby turf farms. OTOH like a more intense version of California, much of the land that supported Melboune's growth is dead, dying, in drought, or in flames.
Technological supremacy is what seperates us from other animals, if we don't use it to our long term advantage we are just like any other predatorless mammal and will soon eat and shit ourselves into a population crash that according to the witch doctors will also drag much of the planets biosphere down with it. Currently middle eastern goat hearders are best equiped to deal with the aftermath of the witch-doctors visions.
Having followed the science for at least 25yrs I don't need the Greens or Al Gore to tell me you have been brainwashed into supporting an anti-science agenda.
More recently Mt Pinatubo caused a small but measurable drop in global temprature. Several similar events occured in the 20th century, the mesurable effect lasts a few years at most.
Long term? - During the 20th century mankind's GHG emmissions dwarfed those from volcanos and I suspect our areosols (soot,etc) over the same period have done more to keep a lid on warming than the ash from volcanos.
Unlike anthropogenic climate change there is nothing much we can do about a volcanos except get out of the way, the fact that humans exist at all demonstrates primates have managed to do that for millions of years. The industrial age has only been going in earnest for a couple of centuries but already it has caused the sixth great extinction.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent you are appealing to the scientific method and skepticisim, and failing to use either.
BTW: Consensus is an integral part of science, it's implied every time you hear the phrase "scientists say". Now go and use your skepticisim to find out what the overwhelming majority of scientists actually say on the subject and get back to us when you can scientifically refute one or more of the three claims that are made by EVERY national science body on the planet.
We have very large chickens in Australia. ;)
"So that would be a bit of an impractical grid to put around you, now wouldn't it ?"
;)
13.6 cm is a bit smaller than chicken wire but (as you say) since their is no evidence of harm from wifi, practicality goes out the window when one seriously contemplates using a grid for protection against wifi, doesn't it?
"oh and there is obviously a difference between Christians and hippies, for starters the fact that Christians actually have a purpose and generally act very sensibly"
That's not obvious to me, but I have observed that all idealogs and zealots have a superiority complex and generaly act in a presumptious, condesending, even violent manner to anyone who does not share their faith.
"I seriously doubt that if their were a scientifically founded protection for EM radiation, these people wouldn't use it."
It's called a Faraday cage, you could probably get one made in the shape of a pyramid and kill too birds with one stone.
"If I have to listen to people complain about second hand smoke so much that I feel like a goddamned leppar then why can't I complain even the least little bit about electromagnetic radiation?"
You can complain all you like, just don't expect anyone to listen until you have robust scientific evidence like the second hand smoker's do. I'm also a smoker and I'm willing to act reasonably by smoking outside. However when a second-hand smoker waves their face while walking past a leppar colony on a smog filled street I feel justified in telling them to wear a gas mask if they don't like it.
Same deal for EM radition, either put up the evidence or STFU and let me use my mobile.
Disclaimer: I saw Woodstock on the news when I was 8-9yo, had hair down to my arse in the 70's. The Hippie ideal of maximum freedom and minimum harm is still very appealing to me. I'm simply unwilling to ignore human nature and throw out the philosophy of scientific skepticisim. Unlike any "other way of thinking" it is demonstratably usefull to me beyond a healthy body and control of my emotional state (not that I have either:). One of scientific skepticisim's prime uses is to judge claims from others against what you "know" (eg: does EM radiation harm anyone?).
Like Yoga in wich the rituals can be useful for a healthy mind/body, scientific skepticisim is also a usefull skill that can be taught, of course you then have to work at it for a while before you see the benifits. The hardest part of that "work" for a good skeptic is accepting that you cannot "know" anything but you can have scientific evidence that goes beyond reasonable doubt.
"Some people need to be taught the difference between Want and Need."
While others need to learn the meaning of irrational envy.
"And my company has never had an engineering layoff in the entire 85+ year history of the company."
The confidence of youth is mainly due to a lack of experience. Now before you start lecturing me about the GoodOldDays(TM) I should inform you that my eldest son was born two years before you were. Like yourself he has never had to find work in a recession, let alone the depression you are wishing for.
"I think I'm doing pretty good."
So STFU and enjoy it instead of bitching about people you know nothing about.
'R' is not a general programing language but that hardly means it's not a language. Producing a stand alone executable is not a feature of any language, it's a feature of the tool set.
"defining what Bush's Vision for Space Exploration meant"
It meant: stop looking at Earth's environment.
The dude came right out and said "I can't provide any real insight in this decision. "
Yes, that was the insightfull part.
"Oh to be 21 again. However, 5 jobs at 21 wouldn't be impossible..."
Hah, I worked in the building industry when I left school in the 70's - 5 jobs in a month wasn't unheard of, OTOH all you needed to qualify as a labourer was "a strong back and a weak head".
"If you didn't know how to think, you'd never have passed the entrance exam."
Passing an exam means you can learn stuff other people have already thought about, it does not mean you can think for yourself.
"Heck, back in the day, Saddam Hussein was giving about $16,000 to each family of a successful suicide bomber."
Is that "back in the day" when Israel was bulldozing their homes as routine government policy, sometimes deliberately entombing said relatives?
"This week is lopsided only if you ignore history."
The death toll has never been in the Palestinians favour, unless you read history with one eye closed.
Do you realise you are bitching and moaning about people bitching and moaning?
I don't speak for the GP but personally I would trust pebble-bed reactors more than I would trust "any bureaucratic entity", (ie: impossible to melt-down or explode with or without red tape).
"So....anyone that doesn't agree with you is a troll?"
No, Francis only comes out for sumdumass.
To summarise your post: Everyone is suffering from a loss of integrity except Limbaugh and Fox News. You also know all your assertions are "true" because Fox and Limbaugh told you they were "true".
The depressing irony is that propoganda has convinced you that you are immune to propoganda.
"My personal belief is that a lot of times, such nominatives are rather used far more to draw attention to one's self as being different than for genuine identity, and despite the constant protestations that one does not want to be seen or treated as different in any way."
Yes it's like the phony voice and mannerisims that some men use to attract attention to their homosexuality. I don't give a rat's arse if they are gay but I wish they would lose the childish theatrics.
Great post but I have found sumdumass to be impervious to reason in the past...
Nah, the guy I was calling a troll was probably one of your sock-puppets.
For sure, I think the idea has been worth testing. IMHO it has come up wanting but I have no objection to more tests if that's what people want to do with their money, (Disclaimer: I live in Australia, a high demand for iron ore is a GoodThing(TM) for our economy).
"|NOt to mention...but, haven't the last couple of years been some of the coolest years in recent history? Yet, they still yell global warming....sheesh. I think they need to look closer at what natures LONG tern cycles are..."
Ok "insightful" troll, I think you need to take your head out of your arse and "take a closer look" yourself, so I will feed you...
1. The hottest 10yrs on record have occured in the last 12yrs.
2. Every year in the 21st century has been hotter than any year in the 20th century (exluding 1998).
Yes 20yrs ago it was an interesting idea based on the observation that dust from deserts fertilizes the oceans (eg: 40M tons of dust is transported by wind from N. Africa all the way to the Amazon each year, so the Atlantic ocean already recieves a nice dusting in the summer. The results from dumping iron dust have been inconclusive at best, but even if it did work as well as the promoters claim the problem would then be scale and distribution.
The simplest answer given by the overwhelming majority of scientists who have looked at the problem (including Lovelock), is to cut back emmissions from ~10Gt/yr to ~3Gt/yr as fast or faster than we built them up, in otherwords moderate our current uncontrolled experiment in geo-engineering as rapidly as possible. However to some people the idea of emmission controls amounts to social-engineering and an economic acpocalypse, thus we get the political bullshit, half-truths, think tanks, and psuedo-skeptics that have accompanied any discussion of climate over the last couple of decades.
"More to the point, who thought that James Lovelock was a 'climate scientist'? That Gaia thing seems like crackpottery to me..."
James Lovelock has been called the the father of Earth Science, climate science is a subset of Earth science. The term Gaia is more or less interchangeable with the term Biosphere. The hippies picked up the idea and made Gaia into some sort of god that has feelings, this initially confused the hell out of many of his scientific peers (eg: gaia was initially critisied by Dawkins & Gould). Those who have a vested interest in fucking up the planet still encorage that mis-informed view and consequently the term has fallen into disrepute since the general population now see gaia as the God of the bush-bunnies rather than the glue that holds the Earth sciences together.
The term "climate scientist" was not invented when he gained his Phd. He was initially trained in medicine so it's no surprise that he proposes that problems with the Earth's biosphere be tackled the same way as a doctor treats a patient (patient = unique living system), "first do no harm". However, Lovelock is no Hippie, he has upset Greenpeace and other like minded political organisations for proposing nuclear reators as a short term (50-100yr) solution to AGW. In my book he is a genuine "giant" of the 20th century who's theories/ideas have allowed others to see further and have upset both sides of environmental politics at various times over the last four or five decades.
There are piles and piles of papers available that treat the biosphere as an oragisim (unique living system), eg: life makes it possible for methane and oxygen to exist together in atmosphere, plants and plankton consume C02 and produced the ALL the available oxygen currently in the atmosphere, limestone and peat are produced by life, islands are built from coral, rainforests create their own rain, etc, etc, etc. It's definitely not crackpottery, in fact the idea that the biosphere is a unique living system is now so entrenched in modern science that most papers don't even bother defining "biosphere".
BTW: In TFA (which I have not read), I believe he is not speaking as a climate scientist but as a "futurist", futurists are confined by their imagination not by practicalities (eg: Dyson).
"Once you can do that with one subgroup of humans, you can do it for any."
To a westener in India it stands out like dogs-balls but if you look again you will find all humans spend a lot of time behaving like this, wealth just makes the behaviour more potent. Once you see that, all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense. Not saying it's right or wrong it's just the way our wetware bios works.
I agree. In fact I would go so far as to say that in general active volcanos stink and produce more "pollution" than the people living on their flanks. I also think that long before we were human we evolved a survival mechanisim that perceives the stink as a warning to stay away, when we learned to write that mechanisim became the Bible's "fire and brimstone". Many tribal religions that actually live on volcanos are more sophisticated than that, they recognise that the volcano can also bring new life in the form of rain and fertilzer. The mistake that all these tribes make is that they think they can appeal to the volcano's "good side", nature doesn't have a "good side" and doesn't care one bit if she covers you and your tribe with molten rock.
/rant
/rant
The tribal view is also applicable to the industrial revolution. Factories provide us with a lifestyle that few of us are willing/able to give up, but it's clear those factories are killing environmental canaries at an alarming rate.
I witnessed Mao's famine on a B&W TV as a child and that's what would happen if we stopped the industrial revolution, but I also recognise we are now so numerous that to continue with bussiness as usual means a global Easter Island is a real risk for my grandkids (first one due in March). It's not that we don't have the technology to have our environmental cake and eat it, it's that (until recently) most of our "chiefs" have been busy fighting each other over the right to kiss the factory god's arse. The world's witch doctors who collectively create our technology are ignored when they point out fatal but potentialy fixable bugs such as the tradjedy of the commons. Like the tribal witch-doctors appealing to the "good side" of the volcano god's I fear that our witch-doctors are appealing to the "good side" of human nature.
There are now over twice as many people on the planet than when I was born, I was a moderate greenie before the term "greenie" was invented. I watched the rural town where I grew up swallowed by the city of Melbourne. I have been visiting the local beach where I now live for 45yrs, over that time it went from clean to filthy and back to clean again, in fact the entire bay did likewise (Port Phillip Bay) and the fishing is slowly returning to what it used to be in the 60's (recreational fishing licenses were introduced to buy back commercial scallop boat licences). The strip of wetlands on the other side of where I live is a paradise for birds and a breeding ground for fish. It's still a shit farm but not like the original one that ruined the beach in the 70's, this one produces "drinkable" water and fertlizer for nearby turf farms. OTOH like a more intense version of California, much of the land that supported Melboune's growth is dead, dying, in drought, or in flames.
Technological supremacy is what seperates us from other animals, if we don't use it to our long term advantage we are just like any other predatorless mammal and will soon eat and shit ourselves into a population crash that according to the witch doctors will also drag much of the planets biosphere down with it. Currently middle eastern goat hearders are best equiped to deal with the aftermath of the witch-doctors visions.
Having followed the science for at least 25yrs I don't need the Greens or Al Gore to tell me you have been brainwashed into supporting an anti-science agenda.
More recently Mt Pinatubo caused a small but measurable drop in global temprature. Several similar events occured in the 20th century, the mesurable effect lasts a few years at most.
Long term? - During the 20th century mankind's GHG emmissions dwarfed those from volcanos and I suspect our areosols (soot,etc) over the same period have done more to keep a lid on warming than the ash from volcanos.
Unlike anthropogenic climate change there is nothing much we can do about a volcanos except get out of the way, the fact that humans exist at all demonstrates primates have managed to do that for millions of years. The industrial age has only been going in earnest for a couple of centuries but already it has caused the sixth great extinction.