Precisely, and the summary is still propagating their bullshit. Researches did not change the terms, it was yet another false debate, both terms had been in use for decades, there was (and still is) a journal called "climatic change" that was established in the 70's, around the same time the term "global warming" started appearing in the literature to describe the current direction of change. The term "climatic change" goes way back, it was in the title of a 1950's paper and probably goes back further than that.
The entire "scientists changed the name" meme was the brain fart of a PR advisor to GWB ( Frank Luntz) who suggested in a memo to Bush that the government change the phrase in it's communications to the public in an attempt to "challenge the science" (ie: shameless propaganda)
From the link: In a 2002 memo to President George W. Bush titled "The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America", obtained by the Environmental Working Group, Luntz wrote: "The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science.... Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field."
They did a similar thing to James Hansen, he gave a talk on his work and was told he couldn't talk about it in public without permission from NASA's political minders. Hansen went to the NYT and the courts to protest and get the censorship lifted, the government complied but then changed the wording of NASA's mission statement, removing the "to understand and protect the home planet" words that justified Hansen's budget.
You can turn anything you like blue by reversing the polarities and fine tuning the sub-space frequencies. I think it's fantastic that popular shows such as BB/Simpsons/Futurama/BBT are not only doing a good job of getting the science right but are also making it a feature of the show. Fiction writers have poetic license and have always researched their work to some degree, particularly the historical and geographic bits. What the author is trying to do in a drama is make the characters real and for that to happen his audience must be willing to suspend disbelief.
The ability/willingness of the audience to suspend disbelief depends on their own experience and worldview. For example the infinitely zoom-able pictures on a detectives computer, most people groan when they see it today but 20yrs ago it was an acceptable plot device because the punters simply did not know what a "pixel" was..
A moron in the UK is commonly referred to as a "useless git". A "git" is an old ironworkers term, it's the (useless) bit of metal that solidifies in the pour hole of a cast. I think "git" software derives it's name from the way some Americans pronounce "get", but I have no idea if that's true..
Instead it is based on a physics-challenged notion of "trapping radiation"
So now Fourier who, aside from being one of the greatest polymaths of all time, accurately predicted the GHG properties of CO2 while inventing the branch of physics we now call spectroscopy in 1824, is "physics-challenged"? Jane you crack me up, that's the best bullshit you have come up with in a long time, and it's nice to see you creating your own bullshit rather than simply parroting Anthony Watts.
which is not how thermal insulation works
I'm sure the Slashdot audience would be highly entertained by your thoughts on how it works, care to elucidate?
But seriously AGW was not invented by Al Gore, so do us all a favour and spend an afternoon on WP.
Apparently Earth awaits the same fate a Venus in about 500My. Runaway greenhouse such as occurred on Venus is irreversible and inevitable for an Earth like planet, the oceans will boil and the water vapour will be split by sunlight, eventually all the hydrogen will bleed off into space and the Oxygen with bind with any Carbon it finds. Hydrogen and other gasses can escape Venus more easily than Earth because of it's much weaker magnetic field. Given enough time Earth and Venus will lose their atmosphere and look much more like Mars. Pressure has interesting effects here on Earth, In the troposphere CO2 has a waring effect, above that it cooling effect, "stratospheric cooling" was predicted by climate models before it was observed in nature.
When stratospheric cooling was detected by satellite measurements the disingenuous tried to convince the public it proved the Earth was getting cooler.
As for nukes, now the cold war is over and they have stopped blowing up small islands, disarmament is progressing (even if it is at a snails pace). The issue has dropped off the public's radar but I assure you it was a huge issue from the late 60's to the80's. The reason of course is because the threat of nuclear war is directly related to what's happening in geo-politics, you can't uninvent nukes so nobody (other than diplomats and politicians) really cares about the number of bombs you have stockpiled if your not threatening to use them.
War is the failure of politics. It's a sure bet that disarmament will go under the bus as soon as we hear the sound of war drums again.
This interview with Feynman talks about his elation at ending the war followed by a deep nihilistic anger at society. Oppenheimer came to deeply regret his stiff opposition to the petition after he saw the destruction in Japan, he confessed that urging the president to use the bomb on civilians without warning was a "mistake".
My most treasured home movies are on super 8 in the top of the closet, I've got a few hours of 3min films spliced together with stick tape and a razor about 30yrs ago and wound onto 8 inch reels. I get them down every now and then for a "home movie night", my three pre-school grand-daughters get a kick out seeing their mum at their age and love the "antique" (early 80's) reel to reel projector.
Well said, allowing a toddler to play on the road would draw the attention of child protection authorities, allowing them to go unvaccinated should provoke a similar response.
Every character in the show is the butt of a joke, including Penny and her ape-man ex-boyfriend. As a kid, "Looney Tunes" introduced me to classical music, it's good to see science presented in a similar way with shows like the Simpson/Futurama/BBT, all of which are light entertainment and a good laugh for young and old.
Disclaimer: I don't have a youtwitface account and the characters in the show are from my children's generation.
One lawyer with a Watson could do the work of dozens.....you're looking at putting a ton of highly educated people out of work.
Precisely. Watson is already good enough to pass an oral exam for a GP's licence, it's now being used as an expert assistant for medical research, having devoured the medical text books and journal papers of mankind, it can find relationship and patterns that humans have failed to notice. It won.t be long before someone teaches it how to develop software, more importantly it will learn how to extract the broad requirements for that software from the companies archived emails and documents.
Just that the implications for society are rather huge.
Better tools means more leisure time, but that's not really how it worked out when robots took over heavy manufacturing, banking, mining, insurance, the typing pool,....all the way back to when the original human computers were made redundant during WW2. People still work 40+hrs a week, just like my dad di in the 50's. What has happened during this takeover is that people who have jobs can fill their home with more stuff made by both robots and humans, those who don't have jobs are less likely to starve to death due to modern social "safety nets".
Assuming we don't fall into an Orwellian future or suffocate in our own waste, the future employment market will be mainly baby-sitting robots and each others children. Which pays the most will expose our true priorities (as it does now).
Why? I've spent time around farms and I like pigs, very similar to dogs, smart animals with highly developed personalities and social structures, will gladly eat their own vomit. They are often reared in horrendously cruel conditions and their minds certainly deserve better treatment, but I don't feel the slightest twinge of guilt when enjoying a bacon and egg breakfast, so I'm sure as hell not going to feel guilty about powering off the PC. - If the screams of the dying PC bother you, turn the speakers off.
IBM's blue brain project has been simulating real brains by painstakingly mapping slices of rat/cat brains onto their software model for more than a decade now. IBM's "Watson" appears to me to be an spin off from that project. The Jeopardy "stunt" proved Watson is indisputably superior to the best humans at general knowledge questions (an open ended problem domain). IBM have developed similar 'brain on a chip" technology and have been using it for a while now. The hardware that won the Jeopardy games a couple of years ago required "20 tons of equipment", IBM are just now starting to lease instances of Watson to "development partners", last time I checked each Watson clone runs on a 50kg "bar fridge" server.
The Blue brain project is primarily aimed at medical research and I believe it's now part of the EU's larger and more ambitious Human brain project.
Here it comes: Hate to say "I told you so" but..... I said "it's here" when I saw the Jeopardy stunt, my SO looked at me and said "It's looking up the answers, what's the big deal?". The "big deal" of course is that it finds the correct answer from the mass of unstructured textual data returned by a simple web crawler, which from a black box POV strongly implies it "understands" the question. Further, when Watson falls for bullshit he reads on the internet or lacks context, the developers correct the misunderstanding by "teaching it" new facts. As one of the developers puts it, it the computer knows everything there is to know about human anatomy how do you get it to correctly interpret the phrase "Noses run and feet smell"? Systems like Watson can do this themselves, essentially they are finding meaning by reading unstructured data! Which at the end of that day is conceptually no different to what any other "brain" does.
prophecy/
Anyone who wants a software dev job in the not too distant future better start thinking less about programming them and more about training them.
/prophecy
I'm 10yrs from retirement I dropped our of HS in 1976 and have spent the last 26 as a degree qualified developer. Before my degree I spent 15yrs as a labourer, I did a stint as a brickies labourer, spent a year in a remote Aussie sawmill, farm hand, deck hand, concrete formwork, and many more "strong back, weak head" style jobs, I married young and had a wife a two young kids, I'd willing have done pretty much anything people were willing to pay me to do....
- The most physically demanding was deck hand on a fishing boat in the notorious "Bass Straight" although the sawmill comes a close second the boat involved working 36hrs straight (30 min break every 5hrs), plus 30hrs travel time where you were either on 2hr watch in the wheelhouse, or hanging on to your bunk for dear life. The visual and auditory hallucinations from lack of sleep on the boat were a bit concerting at first but mine were the comedic variety, about 1 in 4 new deck hands have the horrific variety and quit after the first voyage. Oddly I look back at both of these with fond memories, possibly because it's when I was at peak fitness and surrounded by wilderness and good mates. There was "something good" about those jobs that you just don't get in an office building, I have never been to war but I imagine the comradely found in a foxhole is a more extreme example of what I'm talking about.
- The most stressful and mentally draining job was 12hrs behind the wheel of a city taxi.
- The most unhealthy and socially isolating job was 5yrs rotating shift work in a nylon factory
- The most ridiculous, sweeping a 5 acre concrete slab with a yard broom. (2 days, if you're wondering).
- The most uncomfortable - empting one ton bags of lime into a hopper, under a bare tin roof, on a 45degC day.
Software development - "find a job you love and you'll never have to work again".
What's the difference between talking on a cell phone and talking to a passenger?
The difference is you're much more likely to crash while talking to your (hand held) phone, nobody seems to know why but that doesn't change the statistics. Personally I haven't used a phone in the car since the early 90's. I found myself turning my eyes upward thinking about what was being said by the caller and realised I hadn't been looking at the road for several seconds. The fact that it happened when I already had 15yrs experience behind the wheel scared the shit out of me.
As for talking to passengers, if you have ever tried to teach you're kid to drive on a public road you will realise (to your horror) that talking to passengers while driving is definitely a learned skill. Perhaps talking on the phone while driving is also a learned skill? - Although 3yrs during the 80's trying to make a buck by yammering into a taxi radio did not adequately prepare me for the task.
The guy with the jammer needs psychological help from a professional, not a huge fine.
My father was a UK war baby who served in occupied Germany after the war. Lard (sheep's fat) was a common substitute for butter in Europe during WW2. He was raised in a rural village in the north of England but even as an adult living in Australia he would save the fat from the Sunday roast so he could "enjoy" cold lard and salt sandwiches for the rest of the week. His three children and wife all thought it tasted like axle grease, so he had it all to himself. He's 80 now and still going strong.
and they didn't die of malnutrion as a kid, like a staggering percentage of farm kids did before the evil food industry started putting additives in food
Agreed but let's not forget it was WW2 and parts of Europe such as Holland, France, and Italy were experiencing famines of varying degrees even after the war had ended.
Sure, "art reflects life", that's why it's "inspirational", "sad, "funny", or whatever other emotion you care to name. Also "getting a girlfriend" is a primary biological urge, where as "personal interests" are primarily learned behaviours.
Will we get information from this rock concerning ancient life?
If you want blood from a stone I know a good lawyer, he reckons the legality of using a laser on the bastard is a bit "iffy" and should only be used if you have a ironclad alibi.
I could be wrong but they don't look like compound eyes to me. Coincidently I recently photographed a large green Mantis in my yard using a macro lens, unlike other large insects it feels like they are looking at you, they have what look like rudimentary pupils in the center of their eyes and turn their head so to follow your movements. The "head cocking" behaviour they display when observing a human is very similar to the way a bird behaves when it looks at you. Another similarity to birds is their reaction to shadows, they instinctively "duck down" when a heavy shadow passes over them.
Dragonflies are an example of a large insect that definitely does have compound eyes, a swivelling head, and if you've watched them hunt smaller flying bugs it's obvious they have very accurate depth perception. Their eyes allow them to see all directions at once and therefore don't appear to look at you at all, let alone watch your every move for 10-15 minutes while you fiddle with the camera.
Slashdot Mirror
Precisely, and the summary is still propagating their bullshit. Researches did not change the terms, it was yet another false debate, both terms had been in use for decades, there was (and still is) a journal called "climatic change" that was established in the 70's, around the same time the term "global warming" started appearing in the literature to describe the current direction of change. The term "climatic change" goes way back, it was in the title of a 1950's paper and probably goes back further than that.
The entire "scientists changed the name" meme was the brain fart of a PR advisor to GWB ( Frank Luntz) who suggested in a memo to Bush that the government change the phrase in it's communications to the public in an attempt to "challenge the science" (ie: shameless propaganda)
From the link: In a 2002 memo to President George W. Bush titled "The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America", obtained by the Environmental Working Group, Luntz wrote: "The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science.... Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field."
They did a similar thing to James Hansen, he gave a talk on his work and was told he couldn't talk about it in public without permission from NASA's political minders. Hansen went to the NYT and the courts to protest and get the censorship lifted, the government complied but then changed the wording of NASA's mission statement, removing the "to understand and protect the home planet" words that justified Hansen's budget.
You can turn anything you like blue by reversing the polarities and fine tuning the sub-space frequencies. I think it's fantastic that popular shows such as BB/Simpsons/Futurama/BBT are not only doing a good job of getting the science right but are also making it a feature of the show. Fiction writers have poetic license and have always researched their work to some degree, particularly the historical and geographic bits. What the author is trying to do in a drama is make the characters real and for that to happen his audience must be willing to suspend disbelief.
The ability/willingness of the audience to suspend disbelief depends on their own experience and worldview. For example the infinitely zoom-able pictures on a detectives computer, most people groan when they see it today but 20yrs ago it was an acceptable plot device because the punters simply did not know what a "pixel" was..
A moron in the UK is commonly referred to as a "useless git". A "git" is an old ironworkers term, it's the (useless) bit of metal that solidifies in the pour hole of a cast. I think "git" software derives it's name from the way some Americans pronounce "get", but I have no idea if that's true..
You offer botched police raids as proof the cops are worst than the Third Reich? - Must be Saturday night.
Instead it is based on a physics-challenged notion of "trapping radiation"
So now Fourier who, aside from being one of the greatest polymaths of all time, accurately predicted the GHG properties of CO2 while inventing the branch of physics we now call spectroscopy in 1824, is "physics-challenged"? Jane you crack me up, that's the best bullshit you have come up with in a long time, and it's nice to see you creating your own bullshit rather than simply parroting Anthony Watts.
which is not how thermal insulation works
I'm sure the Slashdot audience would be highly entertained by your thoughts on how it works, care to elucidate?
But seriously AGW was not invented by Al Gore, so do us all a favour and spend an afternoon on WP.
Apparently Earth awaits the same fate a Venus in about 500My. Runaway greenhouse such as occurred on Venus is irreversible and inevitable for an Earth like planet, the oceans will boil and the water vapour will be split by sunlight, eventually all the hydrogen will bleed off into space and the Oxygen with bind with any Carbon it finds. Hydrogen and other gasses can escape Venus more easily than Earth because of it's much weaker magnetic field. Given enough time Earth and Venus will lose their atmosphere and look much more like Mars. Pressure has interesting effects here on Earth, In the troposphere CO2 has a waring effect, above that it cooling effect, "stratospheric cooling" was predicted by climate models before it was observed in nature. When stratospheric cooling was detected by satellite measurements the disingenuous tried to convince the public it proved the Earth was getting cooler.
As for nukes, now the cold war is over and they have stopped blowing up small islands, disarmament is progressing (even if it is at a snails pace). The issue has dropped off the public's radar but I assure you it was a huge issue from the late 60's to the80's. The reason of course is because the threat of nuclear war is directly related to what's happening in geo-politics, you can't uninvent nukes so nobody (other than diplomats and politicians) really cares about the number of bombs you have stockpiled if your not threatening to use them.
War is the failure of politics. It's a sure bet that disarmament will go under the bus as soon as we hear the sound of war drums again.
In the grand scheme of things, gas is still preferable to coal.
e) listen to the collective advice of the people who have just delivered the "ultimate weapon" to you.
This interview with Feynman talks about his elation at ending the war followed by a deep nihilistic anger at society. Oppenheimer came to deeply regret his stiff opposition to the petition after he saw the destruction in Japan, he confessed that urging the president to use the bomb on civilians without warning was a "mistake".
-1 comprehension fail. The nugget is a quote from the (now +3 insightful?) parent post.
My most treasured home movies are on super 8 in the top of the closet, I've got a few hours of 3min films spliced together with stick tape and a razor about 30yrs ago and wound onto 8 inch reels. I get them down every now and then for a "home movie night", my three pre-school grand-daughters get a kick out seeing their mum at their age and love the "antique" (early 80's) reel to reel projector.
Well said, allowing a toddler to play on the road would draw the attention of child protection authorities, allowing them to go unvaccinated should provoke a similar response.
PS: Apparently "Looney Tunes" teaches kids to be violent, I and most of the people I know must have been slow learners. ;)
Every character in the show is the butt of a joke, including Penny and her ape-man ex-boyfriend. As a kid, "Looney Tunes" introduced me to classical music, it's good to see science presented in a similar way with shows like the Simpson/Futurama/BBT, all of which are light entertainment and a good laugh for young and old.
Disclaimer: I don't have a youtwitface account and the characters in the show are from my children's generation.
One lawyer with a Watson could do the work of dozens.....you're looking at putting a ton of highly educated people out of work.
Precisely. Watson is already good enough to pass an oral exam for a GP's licence, it's now being used as an expert assistant for medical research, having devoured the medical text books and journal papers of mankind, it can find relationship and patterns that humans have failed to notice. It won.t be long before someone teaches it how to develop software, more importantly it will learn how to extract the broad requirements for that software from the companies archived emails and documents.
Just that the implications for society are rather huge.
Better tools means more leisure time, but that's not really how it worked out when robots took over heavy manufacturing, banking, mining, insurance, the typing pool,....all the way back to when the original human computers were made redundant during WW2. People still work 40+hrs a week, just like my dad di in the 50's. What has happened during this takeover is that people who have jobs can fill their home with more stuff made by both robots and humans, those who don't have jobs are less likely to starve to death due to modern social "safety nets".
Assuming we don't fall into an Orwellian future or suffocate in our own waste, the future employment market will be mainly baby-sitting robots and each others children. Which pays the most will expose our true priorities (as it does now).
Meanwhile we need to ask ourselves...
Why? I've spent time around farms and I like pigs, very similar to dogs, smart animals with highly developed personalities and social structures, will gladly eat their own vomit. They are often reared in horrendously cruel conditions and their minds certainly deserve better treatment, but I don't feel the slightest twinge of guilt when enjoying a bacon and egg breakfast, so I'm sure as hell not going to feel guilty about powering off the PC. - If the screams of the dying PC bother you, turn the speakers off.
IBM's blue brain project has been simulating real brains by painstakingly mapping slices of rat/cat brains onto their software model for more than a decade now. IBM's "Watson" appears to me to be an spin off from that project. The Jeopardy "stunt" proved Watson is indisputably superior to the best humans at general knowledge questions (an open ended problem domain). IBM have developed similar 'brain on a chip" technology and have been using it for a while now. The hardware that won the Jeopardy games a couple of years ago required "20 tons of equipment", IBM are just now starting to lease instances of Watson to "development partners", last time I checked each Watson clone runs on a 50kg "bar fridge" server.
The Blue brain project is primarily aimed at medical research and I believe it's now part of the EU's larger and more ambitious Human brain project.
Here it comes: Hate to say "I told you so" but..... I said "it's here" when I saw the Jeopardy stunt, my SO looked at me and said "It's looking up the answers, what's the big deal?". The "big deal" of course is that it finds the correct answer from the mass of unstructured textual data returned by a simple web crawler, which from a black box POV strongly implies it "understands" the question. Further, when Watson falls for bullshit he reads on the internet or lacks context, the developers correct the misunderstanding by "teaching it" new facts. As one of the developers puts it, it the computer knows everything there is to know about human anatomy how do you get it to correctly interpret the phrase "Noses run and feet smell"? Systems like Watson can do this themselves, essentially they are finding meaning by reading unstructured data! Which at the end of that day is conceptually no different to what any other "brain" does.
prophecy/
Anyone who wants a software dev job in the not too distant future better start thinking less about programming them and more about training them.
/prophecy
I'm 10yrs from retirement I dropped our of HS in 1976 and have spent the last 26 as a degree qualified developer. Before my degree I spent 15yrs as a labourer, I did a stint as a brickies labourer, spent a year in a remote Aussie sawmill, farm hand, deck hand, concrete formwork, and many more "strong back, weak head" style jobs, I married young and had a wife a two young kids, I'd willing have done pretty much anything people were willing to pay me to do....
- The most physically demanding was deck hand on a fishing boat in the notorious "Bass Straight" although the sawmill comes a close second the boat involved working 36hrs straight (30 min break every 5hrs), plus 30hrs travel time where you were either on 2hr watch in the wheelhouse, or hanging on to your bunk for dear life. The visual and auditory hallucinations from lack of sleep on the boat were a bit concerting at first but mine were the comedic variety, about 1 in 4 new deck hands have the horrific variety and quit after the first voyage. Oddly I look back at both of these with fond memories, possibly because it's when I was at peak fitness and surrounded by wilderness and good mates. There was "something good" about those jobs that you just don't get in an office building, I have never been to war but I imagine the comradely found in a foxhole is a more extreme example of what I'm talking about.
- The most stressful and mentally draining job was 12hrs behind the wheel of a city taxi.
- The most unhealthy and socially isolating job was 5yrs rotating shift work in a nylon factory
- The most ridiculous, sweeping a 5 acre concrete slab with a yard broom. (2 days, if you're wondering).
- The most uncomfortable - empting one ton bags of lime into a hopper, under a bare tin roof, on a 45degC day.
Software development - "find a job you love and you'll never have to work again".
What's the difference between talking on a cell phone and talking to a passenger?
The difference is you're much more likely to crash while talking to your (hand held) phone, nobody seems to know why but that doesn't change the statistics. Personally I haven't used a phone in the car since the early 90's. I found myself turning my eyes upward thinking about what was being said by the caller and realised I hadn't been looking at the road for several seconds. The fact that it happened when I already had 15yrs experience behind the wheel scared the shit out of me.
As for talking to passengers, if you have ever tried to teach you're kid to drive on a public road you will realise (to your horror) that talking to passengers while driving is definitely a learned skill. Perhaps talking on the phone while driving is also a learned skill? - Although 3yrs during the 80's trying to make a buck by yammering into a taxi radio did not adequately prepare me for the task.
The guy with the jammer needs psychological help from a professional, not a huge fine.
and they didn't die of malnutrion as a kid, like a staggering percentage of farm kids did before the evil food industry started putting additives in food
Agreed but let's not forget it was WW2 and parts of Europe such as Holland, France, and Italy were experiencing famines of varying degrees even after the war had ended.
Sure, "art reflects life", that's why it's "inspirational", "sad, "funny", or whatever other emotion you care to name. Also "getting a girlfriend" is a primary biological urge, where as "personal interests" are primarily learned behaviours.
The US leads the world in installed wind power - provided you count the EU as 27 separate countries.
Will we get information from this rock concerning ancient life?
If you want blood from a stone I know a good lawyer, he reckons the legality of using a laser on the bastard is a bit "iffy" and should only be used if you have a ironclad alibi.
I could be wrong but they don't look like compound eyes to me. Coincidently I recently photographed a large green Mantis in my yard using a macro lens, unlike other large insects it feels like they are looking at you, they have what look like rudimentary pupils in the center of their eyes and turn their head so to follow your movements. The "head cocking" behaviour they display when observing a human is very similar to the way a bird behaves when it looks at you. Another similarity to birds is their reaction to shadows, they instinctively "duck down" when a heavy shadow passes over them.
Dragonflies are an example of a large insect that definitely does have compound eyes, a swivelling head, and if you've watched them hunt smaller flying bugs it's obvious they have very accurate depth perception. Their eyes allow them to see all directions at once and therefore don't appear to look at you at all, let alone watch your every move for 10-15 minutes while you fiddle with the camera.
You obviously haven't tried to hide something from a 2yo.
Psychosomatic nose bleeds? Really?