"Generally, when nothing better was available, because eating them is a Bad Idea."
The reason it was considered a "BAD idea" by tribes who came into contact with other apes is that tribes saw the apes as just another sub-human tribe. Nothing special since all other tribes were also considered either "sub" or "super" human. It's the same behaviour that gives rise to what we now call "racisim", "chauvanisim" or "child abuse" depending on the target. It's also the reason that the members of one's own religion are always "special", even Atheists think they have some special insight. It human behaviour, or more precisely: The Monkeysphere.
Not sure about Africa but in SE Asia "canabilisim" is aimed at both human & ape and is still practised in parts of Papua as a kind of judicial system that is based on the good/bad spirit model, not that different to the "civilized world's" capital punishment when you think about it except that the "cannibal" has an extra parasite or two to deal with ( CJD is one that springs to mind ). I'm pretty sure when food is scarce tribal societies are seeing "evil spirits" everywhere, IMHO: "Drought is to Evil spririts" as "Oil is to Terrorists".
BTW: Here in Australia "bush meat" is anything that is not certified by the health dept. You can pick up just as many nasty parasites from eating a wild pig as you can from eating a wild dog, getting close to a Water Buffallo with TB is not a good idea. Eating wild dogs liver will give you vitimain A poisining, an unpleasant condition where the victim's skin starts peeling off. Both Scott's & Mawson's Antartic expeditions suffered when they ate the livers of their sled dogs, I'm guessing a "wild human" would rather starve than eat the dogs liver.
"why the heck not send a rover and land it next to viking to repeat the tests?"
Because the test itself is not sufficient to draw a robust conclusion, that's why we get a summary with the words "a scientist believes" rather than "scientists believe".
"What you really need is a random strategy generator."
Would a recursive strategy make it go boom? Would a "mexican stand off" freeze the input device?
The only strategy here is "raise the signal to noise ratio", aka "FUD". I'm sure their mates who plant stories in the media can get some coverage for a bullshit (but not worthless) patent. It may be that it ends up bringing in royalties from their favoured game maker's public releases.
I hope not, I love shoot-em-ups and think using them to train troops is a good idea. However the thought that a portion of the shelf price is going directly to the US military kinda takes the shine off for this non-american.
You can ask some of the most respected aurthors of the IPCC report technical questions on this site, however if you are too lazy to look at the reference section of the IPCC when someone points it out to you I don't like you chances of getting an answer. And seriously, if you are serious you need to spend some cash to access journal articles (at a minimum "Nature" and "Science"). Suggesting the data and methodology is somehow more obscure than evidence used in other scientific fields is utter nonesense.
As for computer models, source code for many of them is not hard to track down using the RealClimate link above. In a nutshell, the "secret sauce" is finite element analysis.
"a bunch of bickering and bargaining until they could get a majority to vote for 80. Very scientific stuff."
You don't seem to understand that "bickering and bargaining" is "very scientific stuff", it's what the term "the republic of science" means and when applied to ~2800 scientists it results in a scientifically conservative document.
"Yeah, the best of luck to anyone trying to find actual methodology on the IPCC site."
Yes their web site is less than "user freindly" but that doesn't change the fact that the IPCC is a huge scientific effort rivaling such projects as the LHD or Nasa's "Great observatories".
I agree. A machine that prints ballots is at worst a waste of money, a machine that counts ballots is at best a waste of money.
I'm fifty-ish with 20yrs in software development for med-large systems and I seriously don't know what was wrong with manual counting in the first place. Was it too much effort? Too slow? Too much healthy competion and transparency? And as an Aussie I have to ask, why Tuesday?
"...do you actually know anything about Einstein? If you did, you'd know he was incredibly socially awkward, as many people with a mind like his were."
I have read two biographies on Albert, he was a tad eccentric but was far from "socially awkward" as demonstrated by this speech he gave before he left Germany.
"I'm pretty sure Einstein never worked for the USPTO"
Correct, he worked as a clerk for the Swiss patent office in 1904, roughly 30yrs before he came to the US. While at the Swiss patent office he reportedly had trouble understanding "double-entry" bookeeping but it's more likely the PHB who tried to explain it to him was the one having trouble.
Melbourne Australia has had an "E-Tag" system of toll roads for about a decade, speed & red light cameras for longer - no big deal. We also had one of those 'point to point' systems but it failed and they were forced to pull it down. As much as they are a pain in the arse, technology and lots of patrol car have dropped our states road toll from a peak of 1500 in 1969 down to 300-400 and yet there must be at least 4-5 times as many cars now as there was in 1969.
"The only thing that makes people not take theories of human origins from space seriously is their egos. I'm not saying anyone knows the truth, but it isn't that drivel that they fed you in school."
Poppycock, finding where life on Earth came from doesn't tell you anything about the origins of life! If life can spontaneously arise in one ball of rock and goop in the universe then given the size of the Universe it's extremely likely it can arise on many balls of rock and goop in the Universe. We will never know where the first microbe arose/landed on Earth but who cares? - It's how it arose in the first place that is important.
Multi-cellular life did not land/arise on Earth until a couple of billion years after microbes, again it's not the where that is important (or even likeley to be knowable) it's the how.
The rest is evolutionary history that is grossly over-simplified for school kids as a worm-to-human progression.
"...an open mind would have to say, "C, something else"."
No. An open mind would read more than the high scool text book, unless of course it's ego won't allow it.
"I'm just really fucking tired of getting thrown in with these FOSS zealots"
Yes, why is it a "double standard"? - The "open source community" is made up of many individuals with different ways of thinking and working, AFAIK there is no central authority and personally I like it that way. Sounds to me like typical mass media hype - select two extreme view's within a "community" and cry "hypocrite".
Ok, I'm not talking about Atlantic hurricanes in particular and I agree the models failed to predict that particular region (not entirely a bad thing since when things go wrong we learn more - in this case wind shear from a changed jet stream was found to kill storm development). IANAC so if I am to be part of the discussion I need to accept that the IPCC report describe what is otherwise known as "the consensus" and examine their assumptions. The IPCC reports predict that storms in general will be more severe and/or more common, that certainly looks to be the case on a global scale but the jury is still out since the level of certainty is weak.
If the models were only predicting temprature then yes you could create a simple fit with a calculator and extrapolate. However the models take in a myriad of factors of varying certainty and predict such things as "polar amplification" that field scientists then go and look for (and in that case found). Also there is no single model, there are many different models with different resolutions and different emphasis on things like areosols, GHG concentrations, feedbacks, ect, ect. The IPCC takes the "average" of those models for particular emmision scenarios that range from "bussiness as usual" to "a complete halt".
In essence they use "finite element analisis" to do the calculations so the basic idea is just as sound as the models used to calculate spaceship trajectories, certainly not as accurate but there is still much to learn.
The word "reliable" is very subjective, the IPCC use "certainty estimates" to try and quantify it. If you want to find out more the IPCC reports are here, the working group II SPM is probably the most relevant. Another excellent source written by climatologists and aimed at the educated layman is here.
"what Dyson was talking about"
I don't think Dyson is wrong when he says the models could be improved, in fact the IPCC reports list the same "problems" as "poorly understood". I think he is wrong when he implies climatologists are not "real" scientists, implies the models are useless, neglegts to mention that the IPCC reports agree with his list of "problems" and published them in the 2007 SPM, and neglects to mention that solving the "problems" will not radically change the prognosis but will simply narrow the error bars. All of that is part of the "consensus" so to my way of thinking he is arguing against a strawman when he implies climatologists think otherwise. I would rather he had put his considerable brain-power towards solving some of the problems.
My original point that is now modded to hell by the astroturfers who came thru of the second day was that in this particular abstract he is acting as an authority figure throwing stones at climatologists rather than the "heritical" role he is (admirably) trying to promote. Herasy (skeptcisim) is more than just shouting bullshit on a "gut feeling", IMHO he has failed skeptics-101 in TFA because he failed to be skeptical of his own example.
"I am a climatologist...I see nowhere where he [Dyson] has been unreasonable."
Glad to hear you have a thick skin, IANAC but the way I read the abstract he is clearly infering climatologists are not "real" scientists.
"minor objections to some of his arguments"
I think what he says about the "problems" in models is esentially correct, what he doesn't say is that the IPCC reports list the same "problems" and that solving them will only narrow the error bars not change the overall prognosis. I won't go on telling you how to "suck eggs" but if you are genuine and interested read my other posts - IMHO his abstract demonstrated what he is preaching against by throwing verbal "stones" at something he doesn't (or doesn't want to) understand. If he wanted to be "heretical" there is always the sacred cow of string theory to pick on, much closer to his own field and completely untestable.
Yes it is, my feeble excuse is that the "old people" jab was related to another post I couldn't be bothered answering. I don't object to Dyson's message I object to his example, the irony there is he has failed to be skeptical of his own assumptions about climatology, his "problems" are listed as poorly understood in the IPCC reports, solving them will simply narrow the error bars within the existing range.
It is not an example of "herasy" to disparage other people's work when they have already told you about the "problems", it's an example of rock throwing by an authority figure.
"When climatologists make some models that are reliable prediction tools people who don't know what they are talking about will probably shut up."
Darwin wrote his book 150yrs ago, the idea that emissions can warm the planet is 50yrs younger and took longer to catch on. The "reliable" (but not flawless) tools have been in use for at least a decade but even those from two or three decades ago have turned out to be "reliable" predictors. Having said that I do recognise the fact that many people have "shut up" in the last year or two, not the least of which have been Murdoch, Bush, and Howard(Aussie PM).
In the same vein I think Tony Blair & Al Gore deserve the title of "heritic" for their stance. All up it's has been an education to watch the tide turn in a debate that I have followed since the early eighties. I supose that now AGW is "establishment" I will have to be "heretical" about something else....politics perhaps....maybe the couple of million poor bastards crammed into the west bank who democratically voted for the wrong team and will be systematically robbed, shot at, and blown up by remote control, utill they ALL demand another chance pick the right team.
I agree, Sagan's Pale blue dot is magical philosphical prose, the man was nothing short of a modern day prophet of the highest order. However it doesn't mean atheists are on a more solid footing than any other religion.
How do you know the ant's don't care? Perhaps that's why they attack our woodwork, as you say there are untold billions of them and they have been around for at least 65 million years, that's a better track record than the puny humans and their wooden nests.:)
"I mean, that if you can "benefit" the universe, it has some agenda which can be fulfilled more efficiently with certain factors present/absent. This doesn't make any sense.
It may not make any sense, but that is the philosophical viewpoint at least 90% of the population subscribe to.
"The AGW assumptions are faith-based. Those assumptions are hard-coded in the models..."
All science is based on assumptions, the role of the "heritic" is to effectively challenge one or more assumptions with something more substantial than ad-homs against a particular field of study. A classic example is Eienstien's three page paper that challenged Newton's assumption that time is constant (one of only two assumption stated in Newton's legendary "principa mathematica").
"in order to make the models' results fit as closely as possible the dataset we have"
Yes that is the aim of a all models, trust in the accuracy of the prediction of any model can only be predicated on it's past performance. Climate models did not just pop-up yestrday, they have a pretty good track record of verified predictions over the last 30yrs and have predicted phenomena such a "polar amplification" that had not been previously observed (much the same way as black holes were predicted and astronomers found them). And yes they have also got things wrong with some of their predictions, the "missing methane" is a prime example. If you had read the science rather than just parroting Dyson (who freely admits he doesn't know the subject) then you would already know this.
"not to be confused with scientific prediction"
One of us is confused about the philosophical foundations of science and I pretty sure it's not me. If you define "scientific prediction" perhaps we can sort it out?
"If you have a model that predicts the sun will not rise tomorrow and also says that it didn't rise on more than zero occasions in the past, your model is bogus."
To the Greenich observatory:
Dear timelords, it has come to my attention that the sun does not rise every day inside the Artic circle and that further more this has been going on for several billion years, as such your model is bogus and I appeal to you in the name of a random slashdot user to stop spamming us with your bogus "UTC coordinates".
I am not a climatologist, but I do know how to research my own questions when I'm interested enough to find out why one expert I've never heard of clashes with thousands of other experts on a subject I have followed for 30 of my 50yrs.
Slashdot Mirror
A bit of trivia: The word "Oranghutan" is of native origin, orang = "person", hutan = "forest". ie: "The wild man of Borneo".
"Generally, when nothing better was available, because eating them is a Bad Idea."
The reason it was considered a "BAD idea" by tribes who came into contact with other apes is that tribes saw the apes as just another sub-human tribe. Nothing special since all other tribes were also considered either "sub" or "super" human. It's the same behaviour that gives rise to what we now call "racisim", "chauvanisim" or "child abuse" depending on the target. It's also the reason that the members of one's own religion are always "special", even Atheists think they have some special insight. It human behaviour, or more precisely: The Monkeysphere.
Not sure about Africa but in SE Asia "canabilisim" is aimed at both human & ape and is still practised in parts of Papua as a kind of judicial system that is based on the good/bad spirit model, not that different to the "civilized world's" capital punishment when you think about it except that the "cannibal" has an extra parasite or two to deal with ( CJD is one that springs to mind ). I'm pretty sure when food is scarce tribal societies are seeing "evil spirits" everywhere, IMHO: "Drought is to Evil spririts" as "Oil is to Terrorists".
BTW: Here in Australia "bush meat" is anything that is not certified by the health dept. You can pick up just as many nasty parasites from eating a wild pig as you can from eating a wild dog, getting close to a Water Buffallo with TB is not a good idea. Eating wild dogs liver will give you vitimain A poisining, an unpleasant condition where the victim's skin starts peeling off. Both Scott's & Mawson's Antartic expeditions suffered when they ate the livers of their sled dogs, I'm guessing a "wild human" would rather starve than eat the dogs liver.
Make it low priority, apparently it only affects 0.005% of the universe.
"why the heck not send a rover and land it next to viking to repeat the tests?"
Because the test itself is not sufficient to draw a robust conclusion, that's why we get a summary with the words "a scientist believes" rather than "scientists believe".
"What you really need is a random strategy generator."
Would a recursive strategy make it go boom? Would a "mexican stand off" freeze the input device?
The only strategy here is "raise the signal to noise ratio", aka "FUD". I'm sure their mates who plant stories in the media can get some coverage for a bullshit (but not worthless) patent. It may be that it ends up bringing in royalties from their favoured game maker's public releases.
I hope not, I love shoot-em-ups and think using them to train troops is a good idea. However the thought that a portion of the shelf price is going directly to the US military kinda takes the shine off for this non-american.
Ad-homs are tiresome, put up or shut up.
"Pay attention to what the real scientist are saying directly."
Good advice
"Seriously, please post if you find it."
You can ask some of the most respected aurthors of the IPCC report technical questions on this site, however if you are too lazy to look at the reference section of the IPCC when someone points it out to you I don't like you chances of getting an answer. And seriously, if you are serious you need to spend some cash to access journal articles (at a minimum "Nature" and "Science"). Suggesting the data and methodology is somehow more obscure than evidence used in other scientific fields is utter nonesense.
As for computer models, source code for many of them is not hard to track down using the RealClimate link above. In a nutshell, the "secret sauce" is finite element analysis.
"a bunch of bickering and bargaining until they could get a majority to vote for 80. Very scientific stuff."
You don't seem to understand that "bickering and bargaining" is "very scientific stuff", it's what the term "the republic of science" means and when applied to ~2800 scientists it results in a scientifically conservative document.
"Yeah, the best of luck to anyone trying to find actual methodology on the IPCC site."
Yes their web site is less than "user freindly" but that doesn't change the fact that the IPCC is a huge scientific effort rivaling such projects as the LHD or Nasa's "Great observatories".
I agree. A machine that prints ballots is at worst a waste of money, a machine that counts ballots is at best a waste of money.
I'm fifty-ish with 20yrs in software development for med-large systems and I seriously don't know what was wrong with manual counting in the first place. Was it too much effort? Too slow? Too much healthy competion and transparency? And as an Aussie I have to ask, why Tuesday?
"...do you actually know anything about Einstein? If you did, you'd know he was incredibly socially awkward, as many people with a mind like his were."
I have read two biographies on Albert, he was a tad eccentric but was far from "socially awkward" as demonstrated by this speech he gave before he left Germany.
"I'm pretty sure Einstein never worked for the USPTO"
Correct, he worked as a clerk for the Swiss patent office in 1904, roughly 30yrs before he came to the US. While at the Swiss patent office he reportedly had trouble understanding "double-entry" bookeeping but it's more likely the PHB who tried to explain it to him was the one having trouble.
Melbourne Australia has had an "E-Tag" system of toll roads for about a decade, speed & red light cameras for longer - no big deal. We also had one of those 'point to point' systems but it failed and they were forced to pull it down. As much as they are a pain in the arse, technology and lots of patrol car have dropped our states road toll from a peak of 1500 in 1969 down to 300-400 and yet there must be at least 4-5 times as many cars now as there was in 1969.
"The only thing that makes people not take theories of human origins from space seriously is their egos. I'm not saying anyone knows the truth, but it isn't that drivel that they fed you in school."
Poppycock, finding where life on Earth came from doesn't tell you anything about the origins of life! If life can spontaneously arise in one ball of rock and goop in the universe then given the size of the Universe it's extremely likely it can arise on many balls of rock and goop in the Universe. We will never know where the first microbe arose/landed on Earth but who cares? - It's how it arose in the first place that is important.
Multi-cellular life did not land/arise on Earth until a couple of billion years after microbes, again it's not the where that is important (or even likeley to be knowable) it's the how.
The rest is evolutionary history that is grossly over-simplified for school kids as a worm-to-human progression.
"...an open mind would have to say, "C, something else"."
No. An open mind would read more than the high scool text book, unless of course it's ego won't allow it.
"I'm just really fucking tired of getting thrown in with these FOSS zealots"
Yes, why is it a "double standard"? - The "open source community" is made up of many individuals with different ways of thinking and working, AFAIK there is no central authority and personally I like it that way. Sounds to me like typical mass media hype - select two extreme view's within a "community" and cry "hypocrite".
"Thank you very much."
:)
Your welcome.
"What tools are these you speak of?"
Ok, I'm not talking about Atlantic hurricanes in particular and I agree the models failed to predict that particular region (not entirely a bad thing since when things go wrong we learn more - in this case wind shear from a changed jet stream was found to kill storm development). IANAC so if I am to be part of the discussion I need to accept that the IPCC report describe what is otherwise known as "the consensus" and examine their assumptions. The IPCC reports predict that storms in general will be more severe and/or more common, that certainly looks to be the case on a global scale but the jury is still out since the level of certainty is weak.
If the models were only predicting temprature then yes you could create a simple fit with a calculator and extrapolate. However the models take in a myriad of factors of varying certainty and predict such things as "polar amplification" that field scientists then go and look for (and in that case found). Also there is no single model, there are many different models with different resolutions and different emphasis on things like areosols, GHG concentrations, feedbacks, ect, ect. The IPCC takes the "average" of those models for particular emmision scenarios that range from "bussiness as usual" to "a complete halt".
In essence they use "finite element analisis" to do the calculations so the basic idea is just as sound as the models used to calculate spaceship trajectories, certainly not as accurate but there is still much to learn.
The word "reliable" is very subjective, the IPCC use "certainty estimates" to try and quantify it. If you want to find out more the IPCC reports are here, the working group II SPM is probably the most relevant. Another excellent source written by climatologists and aimed at the educated layman is here.
"what Dyson was talking about"
I don't think Dyson is wrong when he says the models could be improved, in fact the IPCC reports list the same "problems" as "poorly understood". I think he is wrong when he implies climatologists are not "real" scientists, implies the models are useless, neglegts to mention that the IPCC reports agree with his list of "problems" and published them in the 2007 SPM, and neglects to mention that solving the "problems" will not radically change the prognosis but will simply narrow the error bars. All of that is part of the "consensus" so to my way of thinking he is arguing against a strawman when he implies climatologists think otherwise. I would rather he had put his considerable brain-power towards solving some of the problems.
My original point that is now modded to hell by the astroturfers who came thru of the second day was that in this particular abstract he is acting as an authority figure throwing stones at climatologists rather than the "heritical" role he is (admirably) trying to promote. Herasy (skeptcisim) is more than just shouting bullshit on a "gut feeling", IMHO he has failed skeptics-101 in TFA because he failed to be skeptical of his own example.
"I am a climatologist...I see nowhere where he [Dyson] has been unreasonable."
Glad to hear you have a thick skin, IANAC but the way I read the abstract he is clearly infering climatologists are not "real" scientists.
"minor objections to some of his arguments"
I think what he says about the "problems" in models is esentially correct, what he doesn't say is that the IPCC reports list the same "problems" and that solving them will only narrow the error bars not change the overall prognosis. I won't go on telling you how to "suck eggs" but if you are genuine and interested read my other posts - IMHO his abstract demonstrated what he is preaching against by throwing verbal "stones" at something he doesn't (or doesn't want to) understand. If he wanted to be "heretical" there is always the sacred cow of string theory to pick on, much closer to his own field and completely untestable.
"the irony is rich"
Yes it is, my feeble excuse is that the "old people" jab was related to another post I couldn't be bothered answering. I don't object to Dyson's message I object to his example, the irony there is he has failed to be skeptical of his own assumptions about climatology, his "problems" are listed as poorly understood in the IPCC reports, solving them will simply narrow the error bars within the existing range.
It is not an example of "herasy" to disparage other people's work when they have already told you about the "problems", it's an example of rock throwing by an authority figure.
"When climatologists make some models that are reliable prediction tools people who don't know what they are talking about will probably shut up."
Darwin wrote his book 150yrs ago, the idea that emissions can warm the planet is 50yrs younger and took longer to catch on. The "reliable" (but not flawless) tools have been in use for at least a decade but even those from two or three decades ago have turned out to be "reliable" predictors. Having said that I do recognise the fact that many people have "shut up" in the last year or two, not the least of which have been Murdoch, Bush, and Howard(Aussie PM).
In the same vein I think Tony Blair & Al Gore deserve the title of "heritic" for their stance. All up it's has been an education to watch the tide turn in a debate that I have followed since the early eighties. I supose that now AGW is "establishment" I will have to be "heretical" about something else....politics perhaps....maybe the couple of million poor bastards crammed into the west bank who democratically voted for the wrong team and will be systematically robbed, shot at, and blown up by remote control, utill they ALL demand another chance pick the right team.
I agree, Sagan's Pale blue dot is magical philosphical prose, the man was nothing short of a modern day prophet of the highest order. However it doesn't mean atheists are on a more solid footing than any other religion.
How do you know the ant's don't care? Perhaps that's why they attack our woodwork, as you say there are untold billions of them and they have been around for at least 65 million years, that's a better track record than the puny humans and their wooden nests. :)
"I mean, that if you can "benefit" the universe, it has some agenda which can be fulfilled more efficiently with certain factors present/absent. This doesn't make any sense.
It may not make any sense, but that is the philosophical viewpoint at least 90% of the population subscribe to.
"The AGW assumptions are faith-based. Those assumptions are hard-coded in the models..."
All science is based on assumptions, the role of the "heritic" is to effectively challenge one or more assumptions with something more substantial than ad-homs against a particular field of study. A classic example is Eienstien's three page paper that challenged Newton's assumption that time is constant (one of only two assumption stated in Newton's legendary "principa mathematica").
"in order to make the models' results fit as closely as possible the dataset we have"
Yes that is the aim of a all models, trust in the accuracy of the prediction of any model can only be predicated on it's past performance. Climate models did not just pop-up yestrday, they have a pretty good track record of verified predictions over the last 30yrs and have predicted phenomena such a "polar amplification" that had not been previously observed (much the same way as black holes were predicted and astronomers found them). And yes they have also got things wrong with some of their predictions, the "missing methane" is a prime example. If you had read the science rather than just parroting Dyson (who freely admits he doesn't know the subject) then you would already know this.
"not to be confused with scientific prediction"
One of us is confused about the philosophical foundations of science and I pretty sure it's not me. If you define "scientific prediction" perhaps we can sort it out?
Freeman has the cojones; you don't.
The world needs heritics, I can't stop you from picking up Dyson's stone and throwing it yourself.
"If you have a model that predicts the sun will not rise tomorrow and also says that it didn't rise on more than zero occasions in the past, your model is bogus."
To the Greenich observatory:
Dear timelords, it has come to my attention that the sun does not rise every day inside the Artic circle and that further more this has been going on for several billion years, as such your model is bogus and I appeal to you in the name of a random slashdot user to stop spamming us with your bogus "UTC coordinates".
I am not a climatologist, but I do know how to research my own questions when I'm interested enough to find out why one expert I've never heard of clashes with thousands of other experts on a subject I have followed for 30 of my 50yrs.
"How do the models account for..."
Do I look like your personal research assistant? These climatologists may be able to help you if you ask politely.
"I do not doubt the validity of the models given our current level of understanding, the data is what concerns me."
Healthy skepticisim says you should continue to question both....forever!