I don't think it can be considered opinion, WP advertises itself as an encyclopedia, it goes out of its way to base its claims on citations. I'm a strong supporter of WP and this guys sounds like a "flim-flam man", however that doesn't mean he is wrong and it does appear that at least one editor was hell bent on causing him financial damage. OTOH $10M is a ludicrous exaggeration of any real damages, or it would be were it not happening in the US.
It gets even stranger from the POV of the photon/neutrino. Anything travelling at the speed of light does not experience time or distance. As far as these particles are concerned they hit the telescope at the same time they leave supernova.
Nothing we can do in the next 50 years will give us the technological expertise needed to do much of anything about warming or cooling.
It has been known for a while now that CO2 has been the "thermostat of global climate", for the at least as long a multi-cellular life has been around. In the past CO2 was a natural positive feedback wrt the direction of change, thus amplifying the ice ages changes that are driven by orbital cycles. This effect is still at work today and it's perfectly feasible to control the CO2 concentration to ward of the extremes of these changes. We have been doing this for a while now but in wrong direction, over the next 40yrs we will add half a trillion tons of CO2 into the air, the same amount as what we have put into the air over the last 250yrs, the spike in CO2 due to man is not the highest in the geologic record but it is almost certainly the most rapid change in levels (up 30% in 250yrs and accelerating exponentially ).
It's been clearly shown to all independent observers that we have already significantly altered climate with the first half trillion tons, we can easily observe the North pole melting over the last few decades. So given all that, what makes you think the next half trillion tons won't have an accumulative effect on climate? We could, if we so desired, start scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere today to restore the climate to the equilibrium our agriculture and civilizations have evolved to suit, the technology is there to do whatever the politics wills with CO2 levels over the next 50yrs.
and the idea of using those records to get a global temperature that's accurate to.1 degree Celsius from measurements that were, at best, accurate to half a degree is just plain ludicrous.
The central limit theorem is ridiculous, who knew? Seriously, for what you claim to be true you must demonstrate that the errors of measurement are not normally distributed across the independent samples, pretty sure there's a nobel prize waiting for whoever saves the world by solving that "conundrum".
All well and good, but we're not looking at the absolute temperature, we're looking at the change in temperature. A thermometer is quite likely to give you an inaccurate spot reading but the error will be consistent across all the spot reading from that thermometer. ie: There is much less room for error when looking at the variance over time, which is what we are interested in.
You can demonstrate this quite easily as many others have already done, take the "best" 100 stations listed by the contrarian Anthony watts and compare it to his "worst" 100 stations, the upward temperature trends for both sets are almost identical and match the trend for the entire data set of ~1100 stations, precisely because the absolute reading need not be accurate to get good idea of the variance.
Watts and his followers are actually doing us all a favour by pushing for better climate monitoring, but the data he has does not support his claims, nor has he ever attempted to publish his claims in the peer-reviewed literature.
Google "Frank Lutz memo", that's where this stupid "change of name" thing originated. The term "global warming" was coined in the seventies to describe observations of climate change, the phrase "climate change" goes back to the 50's. People in the 1950's were not looking for global warming they were trying to explain the ice ages, which cannot be done without understanding the role of CO2. The detected AGW as a consequence of that investigation. It was not until the 1950's that spectroscopes (for heat seeking missiles) became good enough to separate the H20 and CO2 absorption spectra. Until that time the H2O absorption spectra was assumed to overlap the C02 absorption spectra and thus CO2 was thought to have no effect on climate.
Exactly, the people in the study are self reporting on what they think, which often has very little to do with how they behave over time. There's a much better way to measure it, sales figures, and if the ad leads to a virtual shopping cart then you can measure the ROI very accurately. Old fashioned paper coupons do the same thing, when you use it you are also telling the company which advert lead you to their store. Companies are not just going to hand that information over to an academic researcher, a quantifiable marketing strategy is financially sensitive information and a strong competitive advantage.
Personally I don't use ad block, I don't even tick the "disable advertising" on slashdot, I click on a random advert maybe once every 2-3 months (usually software/book related). Auto-play video and sound piss me off and will drive me away from a site faster than a goatse pic. I'm single, in my 50's and have a healthy disposable income, other than my sweet tooth, I'm just not a particularly impulsive buyer. Having said that, the internet gets my business if I want something relatively expensive like a new set of tyres, household appliance, etc, the first thing I do is research it on the web. An excellent example of this is buying a house, I bought my first house in the early 90's, spent several weekends driving from one agent to the next. Found my next house on the web a few years ago, it lead me directly to the agent. Ditto with the last car I bought.
The web was invented when I was studying for my degree, I didn't think it was important nor did I know anyone who did. The ultra optimism of the late 90's no longer exists, the enthusiasm that remains has been funneled into places like kickstarter. Large marketing firms have already worked out what works for their bottom line and what doesn't. Personally I think for the most part the internet has found a reasonable balance between entertaining/informing/advertising over the past 20 odd yrs, from a purely historical POV it's still growing and improving at a spectacular rate.
Does finding a reason to discount one piece of data allow you to discount all of it, in your opinion?
Isn't that what you're doing by highlighting these minority view papers, ie: cherry-picking? No matter what the question you will almost certainly find a handful of papers that disagree with the consensus position, that's what is supposed to happen in Science. If you claim 95% certainity then by definition it means one in 20 papers will return a contradictory result. If you claim 100% certainty then it's not Science, right?
Your post demonstrates the problem here, you are convinced "they need to be stopped" but you have no idea what it is "they" are doing. It's the government snoop's "if you have nothing to hide" accusation in reverse.
And once it's official? What then? "Too late?!"
In a democracy it's never too late, that's why the constitution has amendments. Really, just relax and wait until they get their shit together and tell you what they want, they're not getting it until they do so, so what's the problem?
A mechanic is not an engineer, they are different skill sets. By analogy, you won't get far trying to apply CS if you don't know what CS is in the first place, what you can do however is tinker with the machine and make it do something interesting, perhaps even useful. CS is a branch of mathematics, it's closely related to Operations Research (or logistics as it is often called in the US), it makes heavy use of statistics, calculus, and other mathematical tools to solve computationally expensive optimization problems. CS is fundamentally linked to OR, which is fundamentally linked to Turing and others who solved real world problems presented by WW2.
Above all CS is about creating mathematical models. At the end of the day Science is a mathematical model of reality, which is why every scientists and engineer on the planet knows something about AP CS. I've attended lectures like the ones you describe, where they simply went over the syntax of some language. Yes they are boring and ultimately pointless if you can RTFM but fortunately I found them to be the exception rather than the rule. The guy teaching the class simply wasn't interested, he was preoccupied with some pet project in China and teaching was taking time away from that. But more often than not I went to lectures and found myself struggling with mathematical concepts that were at the time just beyond my level of understanding. I'm certainly no math genius, but if you want to hear what geniuses like Turing and Godel have to say then you first need to learn the language in which they speak - maths.
A too often ignored, third option, is that "There should be money in software."
That's the crux of many problems, not just software. The "entrepreneurs" are allowed to take far more than their fair share of the "innovation" cake. For some reason many people hold this up as a virtue of the system. Just look at the financial trajectories of Woz and Jobs, yet neither could have built Apple alone.
Disclaimer: Fellow old fart here, cut my teeth on Turbo Pascal and Applesoft basic. Dear old dad is 80, a retired mechanical engineer, I introduced him to Turbo Pascal in the 80's, he traded Delphi for Python last year, he said he had outgrown it and wanted to play with android.:)
It's been argued that had Huffman implemented his famous compression algorithm in hardware rather than software he would have been granted a patent. The social/legal problem is that modern Science is demonstrating the term "the laws of nature, including the laws of mathematics" is synonymous with "everything". Particularly in the computer and biotech industries.
Renewable are nice, but they cannot provide base load
I have nothing against nukes and you raise some good points. However the "base load" thing is absolute bullshit, a modern city does not have a flat demand curve, so why would you want a flat supply curve? Coal and Nuclear cannot work by providing a flat supply they must have supplemental technology to meet fluctuating demand. They must store energy (say in a hydro dam) when it's output is running above demand and it must have a bunch of gas powered generators to prevent brown-outs during the daily peaks. I don't know what the maintenance requirements are for a reactor but with coal fired "base load" you will need to build seven plants to get the advertised base load of six.
In some specific situations solar is much better at meeting the demand curve than "base load" generation, for example air-conditioners are at peak consumption at precisely the same time as solar is at peak output. The answer is not a binary choice, it's a combination of different low/zero emissions technologies that are tailored to suit local resources and demand. It would be economically foolish for Arizona not to take advantage of it's sunshine, it would be economically foolish for Chicago not to take advantage of it's famous winds. It would be environmentally foolish to stick with coal in Wyoming. I don't know much about Wyoming but if it doesn't have a lot of sun or wind then that's where nukes may make the most economical/environmental sense under these rules. Outside of the US, nations such as Japan with a high density industrialized population and very few natural resources may have no other choice than to go nuclear.
As for economic viability of coal over renewables, the proposed coal mines in Queensland's Galilee basin are currently uneconomical to develop. Demand for coal from China has dropped quite dramatically as they push ahead with their well funded renewables program. This hasn't stopped our far-right government from pushing ahead with dredging for the "world's biggest coal port" at Abbot point to serve said mines. However HSBC bank, the royal bank of Scotland and other large financiers of the port project have all walked away citing economic and environmental concerns as the reason.
It really does not help the Australian economy when the PM goes around saying things like "It would be a crime to leave our coal in the ground". If the rest of the world is busy trying to make it worthless via renewables then acting like a stubborn buggy whip manufacturer will significantly harm our economy in the not too distant future.
You do realise that regulations are what forms an economic market, right?
For instance, how would a stock market operate without property law? This is not to say that all regulation are good or even necessary but if your are going to bitch about them you need to be specific, precisely which regulations/policies do you see holding back the uptake of safe and clean nuclear reactors? - The one that says they are responsible for cleaning up their own mess and cannot rely on the taxpayer to do so in 40yrs time? Should we make a rule that forces insurance companies to underwrite nuclear reactors against their better judgement? Should the NIMBY's be excluded from the decision process by law?
The government is damned if it does pick winners (Solindra), and damned if they don't. These new rules target emissions without prescribing the solution, It has "free market" solution written all over it.
My own government (Australia) is disappointingly doing everything they can to avoid even talking about climate change, however they are taking a proposal to the G20 to eliminate the $500M or so of FF subsidies the G20 nations are currently providing to the industry. They are doing so on economic grounds since Australian coal would be more competitive against other nations without the subsidies. They are however ideologically opposed to mitigating climate change. For example, they are currently battling the senate to dismantle the clean energy fund. The fund doesn't provide grants, it provides loans to commercial clean energy projects at reserve bank interest rates and makes a modest profit for the taxpayer. There's no economically rational reason to dismantle a profitable scheme that performs a social good other than to protect their coal mining mates.
I'd give it an Overratted if had a point to spare.
The Vietnam war didn't end, congress stopped funding it. Putting money into a slush fund doesn't suddenly make it legal to spend it on the defunded activity, just ask the Iran-contra guys. As has already been said the obvious loophole is that it names particular agencies, why coat the obvious with conspiratorial nonsense?
The met someone who was quite badly afflicted, it came out when he was dumped by a girl at age 17. He developed this thing for sneaking off and climbing trees during thunderstorms, he went missing about a decade ago, he lived on the south coast of NSW, the cops found his abandoned car in nearby bushland (dotted with gold rush era mine shafts), recent heavy rain meant dogs and human trackers had nothing to follow. AFAIK, he's still missing.
Socialising with the mentally ill can be difficult but it's often what they need most. So a word of warning from personal experience, if you do find yourself in a social setting with a schizophrenic who starts losing the plot, then whatever you do, do not offer them a bong hit thinking it will calm them down. If you have a conscious then at a minimum you will be obliged to confess your ignorance to the ambulance crew, you will then be subjected to a short lecture in just how stupid you are by an angry psychiatric nurse, followed by a full-length repeat performance from the wife.
because the voices in her head said so, then she does need help.
Yes, she needs help to deal with them, but the standard approach is to try and get rid of the voices. I think this woman's alternative view of the voices in her head is worth listening to.
Slashdot Mirror
Dark Star was a lot funnier than the Matrix.
I don't think it can be considered opinion, WP advertises itself as an encyclopedia, it goes out of its way to base its claims on citations. I'm a strong supporter of WP and this guys sounds like a "flim-flam man", however that doesn't mean he is wrong and it does appear that at least one editor was hell bent on causing him financial damage. OTOH $10M is a ludicrous exaggeration of any real damages, or it would be were it not happening in the US.
"Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other possibilities." - Churchill
It gets even stranger from the POV of the photon/neutrino. Anything travelling at the speed of light does not experience time or distance. As far as these particles are concerned they hit the telescope at the same time they leave supernova.
Nothing we can do in the next 50 years will give us the technological expertise needed to do much of anything about warming or cooling.
It has been known for a while now that CO2 has been the "thermostat of global climate", for the at least as long a multi-cellular life has been around. In the past CO2 was a natural positive feedback wrt the direction of change, thus amplifying the ice ages changes that are driven by orbital cycles. This effect is still at work today and it's perfectly feasible to control the CO2 concentration to ward of the extremes of these changes. We have been doing this for a while now but in wrong direction, over the next 40yrs we will add half a trillion tons of CO2 into the air, the same amount as what we have put into the air over the last 250yrs, the spike in CO2 due to man is not the highest in the geologic record but it is almost certainly the most rapid change in levels (up 30% in 250yrs and accelerating exponentially ).
It's been clearly shown to all independent observers that we have already significantly altered climate with the first half trillion tons, we can easily observe the North pole melting over the last few decades. So given all that, what makes you think the next half trillion tons won't have an accumulative effect on climate? We could, if we so desired, start scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere today to restore the climate to the equilibrium our agriculture and civilizations have evolved to suit, the technology is there to do whatever the politics wills with CO2 levels over the next 50yrs.
and the idea of using those records to get a global temperature that's accurate to .1 degree Celsius from measurements that were, at best, accurate to half a degree is just plain ludicrous.
The central limit theorem is ridiculous, who knew? Seriously, for what you claim to be true you must demonstrate that the errors of measurement are not normally distributed across the independent samples, pretty sure there's a nobel prize waiting for whoever saves the world by solving that "conundrum".
All well and good, but we're not looking at the absolute temperature, we're looking at the change in temperature. A thermometer is quite likely to give you an inaccurate spot reading but the error will be consistent across all the spot reading from that thermometer. ie: There is much less room for error when looking at the variance over time, which is what we are interested in.
You can demonstrate this quite easily as many others have already done, take the "best" 100 stations listed by the contrarian Anthony watts and compare it to his "worst" 100 stations, the upward temperature trends for both sets are almost identical and match the trend for the entire data set of ~1100 stations, precisely because the absolute reading need not be accurate to get good idea of the variance.
Watts and his followers are actually doing us all a favour by pushing for better climate monitoring, but the data he has does not support his claims, nor has he ever attempted to publish his claims in the peer-reviewed literature.
Google "Frank Lutz memo", that's where this stupid "change of name" thing originated. The term "global warming" was coined in the seventies to describe observations of climate change, the phrase "climate change" goes back to the 50's. People in the 1950's were not looking for global warming they were trying to explain the ice ages, which cannot be done without understanding the role of CO2. The detected AGW as a consequence of that investigation. It was not until the 1950's that spectroscopes (for heat seeking missiles) became good enough to separate the H20 and CO2 absorption spectra. Until that time the H2O absorption spectra was assumed to overlap the C02 absorption spectra and thus CO2 was thought to have no effect on climate.
Exactly, the people in the study are self reporting on what they think, which often has very little to do with how they behave over time. There's a much better way to measure it, sales figures, and if the ad leads to a virtual shopping cart then you can measure the ROI very accurately. Old fashioned paper coupons do the same thing, when you use it you are also telling the company which advert lead you to their store. Companies are not just going to hand that information over to an academic researcher, a quantifiable marketing strategy is financially sensitive information and a strong competitive advantage.
Personally I don't use ad block, I don't even tick the "disable advertising" on slashdot, I click on a random advert maybe once every 2-3 months (usually software/book related). Auto-play video and sound piss me off and will drive me away from a site faster than a goatse pic. I'm single, in my 50's and have a healthy disposable income, other than my sweet tooth, I'm just not a particularly impulsive buyer. Having said that, the internet gets my business if I want something relatively expensive like a new set of tyres, household appliance, etc, the first thing I do is research it on the web. An excellent example of this is buying a house, I bought my first house in the early 90's, spent several weekends driving from one agent to the next. Found my next house on the web a few years ago, it lead me directly to the agent. Ditto with the last car I bought.
The web was invented when I was studying for my degree, I didn't think it was important nor did I know anyone who did. The ultra optimism of the late 90's no longer exists, the enthusiasm that remains has been funneled into places like kickstarter. Large marketing firms have already worked out what works for their bottom line and what doesn't. Personally I think for the most part the internet has found a reasonable balance between entertaining/informing/advertising over the past 20 odd yrs, from a purely historical POV it's still growing and improving at a spectacular rate.
Who ever gave you the idea that pollution must be toxic? Pollution = "a resource out of place". eg: don't pollute my scotch with water.
Does finding a reason to discount one piece of data allow you to discount all of it, in your opinion?
Isn't that what you're doing by highlighting these minority view papers, ie: cherry-picking? No matter what the question you will almost certainly find a handful of papers that disagree with the consensus position, that's what is supposed to happen in Science. If you claim 95% certainity then by definition it means one in 20 papers will return a contradictory result. If you claim 100% certainty then it's not Science, right?
Are you kidding? - The cold war was (and still is) all about oil and gas.
And once it's official? What then? "Too late?!"
In a democracy it's never too late, that's why the constitution has amendments. Really, just relax and wait until they get their shit together and tell you what they want, they're not getting it until they do so, so what's the problem?
A mechanic is not an engineer, they are different skill sets. By analogy, you won't get far trying to apply CS if you don't know what CS is in the first place, what you can do however is tinker with the machine and make it do something interesting, perhaps even useful. CS is a branch of mathematics, it's closely related to Operations Research (or logistics as it is often called in the US), it makes heavy use of statistics, calculus, and other mathematical tools to solve computationally expensive optimization problems. CS is fundamentally linked to OR, which is fundamentally linked to Turing and others who solved real world problems presented by WW2.
Above all CS is about creating mathematical models. At the end of the day Science is a mathematical model of reality, which is why every scientists and engineer on the planet knows something about AP CS. I've attended lectures like the ones you describe, where they simply went over the syntax of some language. Yes they are boring and ultimately pointless if you can RTFM but fortunately I found them to be the exception rather than the rule. The guy teaching the class simply wasn't interested, he was preoccupied with some pet project in China and teaching was taking time away from that. But more often than not I went to lectures and found myself struggling with mathematical concepts that were at the time just beyond my level of understanding. I'm certainly no math genius, but if you want to hear what geniuses like Turing and Godel have to say then you first need to learn the language in which they speak - maths.
Good guess, it matches the summary quite well - "in 10 years will begin to explore the origins of the universe". ;)
A too often ignored, third option, is that "There should be money in software."
That's the crux of many problems, not just software. The "entrepreneurs" are allowed to take far more than their fair share of the "innovation" cake. For some reason many people hold this up as a virtue of the system. Just look at the financial trajectories of Woz and Jobs, yet neither could have built Apple alone. :)
Disclaimer: Fellow old fart here, cut my teeth on Turbo Pascal and Applesoft basic. Dear old dad is 80, a retired mechanical engineer, I introduced him to Turbo Pascal in the 80's, he traded Delphi for Python last year, he said he had outgrown it and wanted to play with android.
It's been argued that had Huffman implemented his famous compression algorithm in hardware rather than software he would have been granted a patent. The social/legal problem is that modern Science is demonstrating the term "the laws of nature, including the laws of mathematics" is synonymous with "everything". Particularly in the computer and biotech industries.
The money didn't upset me, it was the fraudulent photos they use as bait.
Hmmm....it was posted Saturday morning in Oz.
Anonymous Luddite would be a more accurate handle.
Renewable are nice, but they cannot provide base load
I have nothing against nukes and you raise some good points. However the "base load" thing is absolute bullshit, a modern city does not have a flat demand curve, so why would you want a flat supply curve? Coal and Nuclear cannot work by providing a flat supply they must have supplemental technology to meet fluctuating demand. They must store energy (say in a hydro dam) when it's output is running above demand and it must have a bunch of gas powered generators to prevent brown-outs during the daily peaks. I don't know what the maintenance requirements are for a reactor but with coal fired "base load" you will need to build seven plants to get the advertised base load of six.
In some specific situations solar is much better at meeting the demand curve than "base load" generation, for example air-conditioners are at peak consumption at precisely the same time as solar is at peak output. The answer is not a binary choice, it's a combination of different low/zero emissions technologies that are tailored to suit local resources and demand. It would be economically foolish for Arizona not to take advantage of it's sunshine, it would be economically foolish for Chicago not to take advantage of it's famous winds. It would be environmentally foolish to stick with coal in Wyoming. I don't know much about Wyoming but if it doesn't have a lot of sun or wind then that's where nukes may make the most economical/environmental sense under these rules. Outside of the US, nations such as Japan with a high density industrialized population and very few natural resources may have no other choice than to go nuclear.
As for economic viability of coal over renewables, the proposed coal mines in Queensland's Galilee basin are currently uneconomical to develop. Demand for coal from China has dropped quite dramatically as they push ahead with their well funded renewables program. This hasn't stopped our far-right government from pushing ahead with dredging for the "world's biggest coal port" at Abbot point to serve said mines. However HSBC bank, the royal bank of Scotland and other large financiers of the port project have all walked away citing economic and environmental concerns as the reason.
It really does not help the Australian economy when the PM goes around saying things like "It would be a crime to leave our coal in the ground". If the rest of the world is busy trying to make it worthless via renewables then acting like a stubborn buggy whip manufacturer will significantly harm our economy in the not too distant future.
You do realise that regulations are what forms an economic market, right?
For instance, how would a stock market operate without property law? This is not to say that all regulation are good or even necessary but if your are going to bitch about them you need to be specific, precisely which regulations/policies do you see holding back the uptake of safe and clean nuclear reactors? - The one that says they are responsible for cleaning up their own mess and cannot rely on the taxpayer to do so in 40yrs time? Should we make a rule that forces insurance companies to underwrite nuclear reactors against their better judgement? Should the NIMBY's be excluded from the decision process by law?
Why is the government supposed to pick winners?
The government is damned if it does pick winners (Solindra), and damned if they don't. These new rules target emissions without prescribing the solution, It has "free market" solution written all over it.
My own government (Australia) is disappointingly doing everything they can to avoid even talking about climate change, however they are taking a proposal to the G20 to eliminate the $500M or so of FF subsidies the G20 nations are currently providing to the industry. They are doing so on economic grounds since Australian coal would be more competitive against other nations without the subsidies. They are however ideologically opposed to mitigating climate change. For example, they are currently battling the senate to dismantle the clean energy fund. The fund doesn't provide grants, it provides loans to commercial clean energy projects at reserve bank interest rates and makes a modest profit for the taxpayer. There's no economically rational reason to dismantle a profitable scheme that performs a social good other than to protect their coal mining mates.
I'd give it an Overratted if had a point to spare.
The Vietnam war didn't end, congress stopped funding it. Putting money into a slush fund doesn't suddenly make it legal to spend it on the defunded activity, just ask the Iran-contra guys. As has already been said the obvious loophole is that it names particular agencies, why coat the obvious with conspiratorial nonsense?
Socialising with the mentally ill can be difficult but it's often what they need most. So a word of warning from personal experience, if you do find yourself in a social setting with a schizophrenic who starts losing the plot, then whatever you do, do not offer them a bong hit thinking it will calm them down. If you have a conscious then at a minimum you will be obliged to confess your ignorance to the ambulance crew, you will then be subjected to a short lecture in just how stupid you are by an angry psychiatric nurse, followed by a full-length repeat performance from the wife.
because the voices in her head said so, then she does need help.
Yes, she needs help to deal with them, but the standard approach is to try and get rid of the voices. I think this woman's alternative view of the voices in her head is worth listening to.