Skeptical Science is a propaganda machine. They adopted the "skeptical" monitor in order to try to infiltrate the actual skeptics. Just sayin'...
Let go of the politics, Gore did a slide show of the then current IPCC reports. I have never seen his movie since I had already read most of the reports. The main authors of those reports were the "source" I listened to when I read the reviews, they said he did a good job of disseminating their contents to a wide audience. Knowing what the primary source actually says (ie actually reading the reports) is why I believe the sceptical science site is a reputable source. Another positive sign is they are admitting a "retreat", I have never seen a pseudo-sceptical lobby group exercise self-skepticisim in the face of evidence, have you?.
TFA itself (which I haven't read) is good news in a scientific sense, it implies that feedback models are now considered good enough to put a hard upper limit on climate sensitivity which when you look at the "most likely" numbers hasn't really changed that much since it was first estimated in the 70's. That hard upper limit is a significant step forward since they have been looking for it for about 40yrs now. It also implies they have ruled out catastrophic feedbacks such as the frozen methane deposits in the N hemisphere. Mathematically it's obviously "difficult" to compare a bounded and unbounded curve, I expect pseudo-skeptics are already weaving that into their bullshit. Some lobbyists is probably banging out a WSJ opinion column as we speak, the obvious argument being that it was done so that nobody could track their predictions.
Propaganda depends solely on the ignorance of the audience to be effective, for instance your post implies that somehow climate scientists are not by definition skeptics? I mean no offense when I say that you don't know what your talking about and your ignorance on this subject is getting in the way of your intelligence.
My 4yo granddaughter sometimes gets up at 4.30-5.00 in the morning, sneaks into mum's room and steals the iPad, then sits in bed browsing youtube videos. She hasn't worked out to put it back before mum gets up.:) Personally I think the educational software available for kids on tablets is fantastic, it's light years ahead of the family encyclopaedia that was the norm in my childhood.
"No secrets" can only work if everybody's room is open, I'm not sure how anyone else feels about toilet doors, but I'm kind of fond of them, I even went on strike in the 80's to have them returned after the factory boss had removed them because he wasn't "paying people to read the newspaper"..:)
Seriously, how the hell do you expect the cops to execute a search warrant if the subject of the warrant knows the cops are coming before they have even left the fucking court room? Or do you expect burglars to start emailing the cops their "to do" list? Really, some of the shallow thinking expressed on Slashdot makes Mao's ideas about human nature look almost sane in comparison..
I mean, America was only ever great because it was a nation that was acting as The People. But slowly slowly, it became regulated, and then government corruption took over.
When will Americans stop believing that fucking Disneyland fairytale, honestly it's worse than listening to someone rant about their fucking horoscope. America, like many empires before it, has had moments of greatness and vision, but lets not pretend the life of a commoner was better in the 17/18/19th or even the first half of the 20th century. Just ask any black grandfather or white grandmother about how great life was in the 50's and 60's.
No doubt the CIA would want the conservatives to win over Whitlam. However, I was at HS when Whitlam was elected, there's no doubt he has left many admirable legacies, not the least of those being cheap effective UHC. IMHO he lost that election because he stopped talking about his agenda, he assumed voters were as outraged as he was and would rise up to correct the "injustice". What he should have done is call the election himself when it was clear there was a double dissolution. It was a strategic blunder on Whitlam's part, had he followed the rules and called the election himself, I'd dare say he would have won a second term.
But he didn't, he dug his heels in and refused to do the "honourable" thing that a PM is expected to do when the government's agenda is gridlocked by a hostile senate. The process demands there has to be an election one way or another. Whitlam's bloody mindedness in refusing to call an election when he had the chance gave the opposition the constitutional weapons to do it the "hard way". Had he followed the constitutional process "the dismissal" then the opposition would not have been able to paint him as a "sore loser" who was throwing a tantrum because his "communist" ideology had been overruled by the democratic process.
An election takes a few months to organise, by the end of it people like me who would have voted for him were sick to death of hearing how "unfair" it was he had to be subjected to another general election. Basically he fucked up because he took the dismissal as a personal attack as opposed to a legitimate political move by the opposition. He was seen to be arguing with the "umpire" by basing his whole campaign around Kerr's (legitimate) decision to force an election. It was an ugly aberration in an otherwise charming and witty personality, voters punished it accordingly, just as they did when KRuddy's "god complex" became apparent in the recent election..
U2 can be put under the heading "Christian rock", although they did piss off a few Christians with the "I still haven't found what I'm looking for" line.
In short, the music recording industry may be taking a hit, but the music culture is going through a renaissance.
Yep, why does Ireland have so many popular musicians and singers for such a small country? Go to a good Irish pub and you will find out. All UK pubs were like that at one time, no need to hire entertainment since the pub is full of talented locals who are more interested in entertaining each other than getting paid..
Maybe they disrupt the bonds in cologne or lipids, either one would turn a human into a large puddle, although you'd still be left with a very noticeable pile of bones....
Often on TV, killing is actually easier than dealing with the bodies.
Yep, Indians in John Wayne movies are another example, they fall off the horse and then mysteriously vanish. I grew up in the 60's, the first time I saw gore in a movie I was 10, it was "The battle of Britain" scene where the pilots goggles filled with blood, must have had an impact for me to still remember it 45yrs later. Of course the hero's best mate is always given a proper funeral where the hero inevitably shows he has a heart that can be broken.
I think the overall pattern says a lot more about human nature than it does about the Hollywood producers profiting from it.
cos they think having MS on their resume is 1337 creds
I have 20+yrs of experience, tertiary qualified, with good stints at the world's top three IT service companies on my resume, I've hired more than a few developers over those years. I don't have MS on my resume, and judging from the content of your post, I wouldn't want your name on it either for exactly the same reason.
The new age explanation is bullshit but let's not confuse their observational claims with their conclusions.
For example, I saw a bright "aura" around my headmaster when I was in grade 3. That was close to 50yrs ago but I still remember it clearly because it was the first and by far the brightest aura I've seen, hot Aussie summers day, assembly yard was giant concrete oven, the sun was high in the sky with heavy shade forming a backdrop to the podium, I wasn't the only kid to see it and I believed I had seen an aura well into my twenties, I went to university in my late-20's, now I'm convinced it was a "rainbow" effect caused by the evaporating sweat of an "Englishman in the midday sun", combined with just the right viewing angle and backdrop.
Other examples from my childhood, Meteorologists claimed "ball lightning does not exist" until it was observed melting a hole through a window of the NY meteorological centre. Black holes were a "mathematical curiosity". It was a "physical impossibility" for exo-planets to be observed with a telescope. At the end of the day, "Science rocks" because it has something no other philosophy offers, the balls to admit when it's wrong.
As for TFA. Most of the comments here simply don't "get it". Japan is renowned for wacky inventions, it's more of an art form than anything else, the (cheap) inventions are intended to be impractical, a kind of "fart cushion" for the Japanese sense of humour. The more impractical the invention, the more the fans it will love it. This one is a fine example, it involves cars, computers, exposed wires, and a silly hat with a jelly coating on the inside. Although it probably won't make as much money as the "baby mop" which offers more value to a western sense of humour.
The same thing could be said about maintaining our natural spaceship, it's life support system is collapsing, why aren't we fixing that? If we can't build a self-sustaining biodome on Earth where there are few limits on the initial raw material, what makes anyone think we can do it on Mars?
It means that 1.0 or below is considered safe to consume, it says nothing about what level makes you sick/dead just that anything above 1.0 is not considered safe.
For that matter, oil floats on top of water, so how does the lower 99% get contaminated?
Why do so many geeks have so much trouble comprehending simple guidelines? The water at the bottom is below 1.0ppm and therefore safe to consume, matter of fact many Aussies put some oil in their water tank to prevent mosquito wrigglers (the little fuckers can't come up to breath when there's a layer of oil on top). Note that not all oils float nice and neatly on the top of the water, heavy crude oil has a tendency to form tarballs and sink to the bottom, given a large enough body of still water, light oil will spread out to an unbroken film exactly one molecule thick.
There's a big difference between negligence and criminal negligence. Years ago my foreman was in a hurry and turned the bubbler too high on a rubber latex storage tank, when the factory owner drove in two hours later the rear car park was covered in several tons of liquid rubber latex. The foreman was certainly negligent since he took a shortcut (I saw him do it) but rather than owning up to his mistake the coward lied and convinced the owner it was my fault with the result that I got the sack before I knew why! Having said that, nothing he did means he was criminally negligent, like many blue collar workers he was simply overworked and underpaid, he lied because he had a family to look our for, I was a disinterested 18yro kid who was almost pleased to be sacked..
The heavy hand of criminal law should be reserved for cases where it is beyond reasonable doubt it was deliberate, or when the company refuses to rectify the problem. Finding someone to blame and throwing them into jail is not working for the US, to the extent that even as a die hard "greenie" from the 70's I would not want to see a "war on pollution". The good news here is that the EPA are getting the problem fixed in a timely manner at the companies expense, which after all is the crux of the matter.
There was some concern of the hypothetical danger creation of such black holes might pose.
More concerning to me was the uninformed speculation that lead to those concerns. As one physicist quipped here on Slashdot at the time, "You misunderstand what motivates physicists. If the LHC did get sucked up by a mini black hole we would not run from the building in fear, we would run towards it with notebooks at hand".
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I didn't notice it was you Jane. Don't bother replying, my community service is done.
Skeptical Science is a propaganda machine. They adopted the "skeptical" monitor in order to try to infiltrate the actual skeptics. Just sayin'...
Let go of the politics, Gore did a slide show of the then current IPCC reports. I have never seen his movie since I had already read most of the reports. The main authors of those reports were the "source" I listened to when I read the reviews, they said he did a good job of disseminating their contents to a wide audience. Knowing what the primary source actually says (ie actually reading the reports) is why I believe the sceptical science site is a reputable source. Another positive sign is they are admitting a "retreat", I have never seen a pseudo-sceptical lobby group exercise self-skepticisim in the face of evidence, have you?.
TFA itself (which I haven't read) is good news in a scientific sense, it implies that feedback models are now considered good enough to put a hard upper limit on climate sensitivity which when you look at the "most likely" numbers hasn't really changed that much since it was first estimated in the 70's. That hard upper limit is a significant step forward since they have been looking for it for about 40yrs now. It also implies they have ruled out catastrophic feedbacks such as the frozen methane deposits in the N hemisphere. Mathematically it's obviously "difficult" to compare a bounded and unbounded curve, I expect pseudo-skeptics are already weaving that into their bullshit. Some lobbyists is probably banging out a WSJ opinion column as we speak, the obvious argument being that it was done so that nobody could track their predictions.
Propaganda depends solely on the ignorance of the audience to be effective, for instance your post implies that somehow climate scientists are not by definition skeptics? I mean no offense when I say that you don't know what your talking about and your ignorance on this subject is getting in the way of your intelligence.
Any true skeptic is obligated [to rectify that]
.
hell, I'd be proud if they could operate them
My 4yo granddaughter sometimes gets up at 4.30-5.00 in the morning, sneaks into mum's room and steals the iPad, then sits in bed browsing youtube videos. She hasn't worked out to put it back before mum gets up. :) Personally I think the educational software available for kids on tablets is fantastic, it's light years ahead of the family encyclopaedia that was the norm in my childhood.
Yep, probably how the Amish got started.
I hate to be pedantic, but, the past tense of fish is fush
Only in New Zealand.
"No secrets" can only work if everybody's room is open, I'm not sure how anyone else feels about toilet doors, but I'm kind of fond of them, I even went on strike in the 80's to have them returned after the factory boss had removed them because he wasn't "paying people to read the newspaper".. :)
Seriously, how the hell do you expect the cops to execute a search warrant if the subject of the warrant knows the cops are coming before they have even left the fucking court room? Or do you expect burglars to start emailing the cops their "to do" list? Really, some of the shallow thinking expressed on Slashdot makes Mao's ideas about human nature look almost sane in comparison..
I mean, America was only ever great because it was a nation that was acting as The People. But slowly slowly, it became regulated, and then government corruption took over.
When will Americans stop believing that fucking Disneyland fairytale, honestly it's worse than listening to someone rant about their fucking horoscope. America, like many empires before it, has had moments of greatness and vision, but lets not pretend the life of a commoner was better in the 17/18/19th or even the first half of the 20th century. Just ask any black grandfather or white grandmother about how great life was in the 50's and 60's.
No doubt the CIA would want the conservatives to win over Whitlam. However, I was at HS when Whitlam was elected, there's no doubt he has left many admirable legacies, not the least of those being cheap effective UHC. IMHO he lost that election because he stopped talking about his agenda, he assumed voters were as outraged as he was and would rise up to correct the "injustice". What he should have done is call the election himself when it was clear there was a double dissolution. It was a strategic blunder on Whitlam's part, had he followed the rules and called the election himself, I'd dare say he would have won a second term.
But he didn't, he dug his heels in and refused to do the "honourable" thing that a PM is expected to do when the government's agenda is gridlocked by a hostile senate. The process demands there has to be an election one way or another. Whitlam's bloody mindedness in refusing to call an election when he had the chance gave the opposition the constitutional weapons to do it the "hard way". Had he followed the constitutional process "the dismissal" then the opposition would not have been able to paint him as a "sore loser" who was throwing a tantrum because his "communist" ideology had been overruled by the democratic process.
An election takes a few months to organise, by the end of it people like me who would have voted for him were sick to death of hearing how "unfair" it was he had to be subjected to another general election. Basically he fucked up because he took the dismissal as a personal attack as opposed to a legitimate political move by the opposition. He was seen to be arguing with the "umpire" by basing his whole campaign around Kerr's (legitimate) decision to force an election. It was an ugly aberration in an otherwise charming and witty personality, voters punished it accordingly, just as they did when KRuddy's "god complex" became apparent in the recent election..
I grew up in the 60's cold war era, on face value this deal is a win for humanity.
U2 can be put under the heading "Christian rock", although they did piss off a few Christians with the "I still haven't found what I'm looking for" line.
In short, the music recording industry may be taking a hit, but the music culture is going through a renaissance.
Yep, why does Ireland have so many popular musicians and singers for such a small country? Go to a good Irish pub and you will find out. All UK pubs were like that at one time, no need to hire entertainment since the pub is full of talented locals who are more interested in entertaining each other than getting paid..
Maybe they disrupt the bonds in cologne or lipids, either one would turn a human into a large puddle, although you'd still be left with a very noticeable pile of bones....
Often on TV, killing is actually easier than dealing with the bodies.
Yep, Indians in John Wayne movies are another example, they fall off the horse and then mysteriously vanish. I grew up in the 60's, the first time I saw gore in a movie I was 10, it was "The battle of Britain" scene where the pilots goggles filled with blood, must have had an impact for me to still remember it 45yrs later. Of course the hero's best mate is always given a proper funeral where the hero inevitably shows he has a heart that can be broken.
I think the overall pattern says a lot more about human nature than it does about the Hollywood producers profiting from it.
Don't ask me, I thought the good doctor said "jiggawatt".
A small pig farm can turn a human body into methane in a matter of hours, those things eat like...well...pigs
How is judging a political leader's skills and ideology by the clothes they wear, insightful?
cos they think having MS on their resume is 1337 creds
I have 20+yrs of experience, tertiary qualified, with good stints at the world's top three IT service companies on my resume, I've hired more than a few developers over those years. I don't have MS on my resume, and judging from the content of your post, I wouldn't want your name on it either for exactly the same reason.
The new age explanation is bullshit but let's not confuse their observational claims with their conclusions.
For example, I saw a bright "aura" around my headmaster when I was in grade 3. That was close to 50yrs ago but I still remember it clearly because it was the first and by far the brightest aura I've seen, hot Aussie summers day, assembly yard was giant concrete oven, the sun was high in the sky with heavy shade forming a backdrop to the podium, I wasn't the only kid to see it and I believed I had seen an aura well into my twenties, I went to university in my late-20's, now I'm convinced it was a "rainbow" effect caused by the evaporating sweat of an "Englishman in the midday sun", combined with just the right viewing angle and backdrop.
Other examples from my childhood, Meteorologists claimed "ball lightning does not exist" until it was observed melting a hole through a window of the NY meteorological centre. Black holes were a "mathematical curiosity". It was a "physical impossibility" for exo-planets to be observed with a telescope. At the end of the day, "Science rocks" because it has something no other philosophy offers, the balls to admit when it's wrong.
As for TFA. Most of the comments here simply don't "get it". Japan is renowned for wacky inventions, it's more of an art form than anything else, the (cheap) inventions are intended to be impractical, a kind of "fart cushion" for the Japanese sense of humour. The more impractical the invention, the more the fans it will love it. This one is a fine example, it involves cars, computers, exposed wires, and a silly hat with a jelly coating on the inside. Although it probably won't make as much money as the "baby mop" which offers more value to a western sense of humour.
Just curious, which warlock are you? - Charlie Sheen or William Shatner?
Why aren't we?
The same thing could be said about maintaining our natural spaceship, it's life support system is collapsing, why aren't we fixing that? If we can't build a self-sustaining biodome on Earth where there are few limits on the initial raw material, what makes anyone think we can do it on Mars?
For that matter, oil floats on top of water, so how does the lower 99% get contaminated?
Why do so many geeks have so much trouble comprehending simple guidelines? The water at the bottom is below 1.0ppm and therefore safe to consume, matter of fact many Aussies put some oil in their water tank to prevent mosquito wrigglers (the little fuckers can't come up to breath when there's a layer of oil on top). Note that not all oils float nice and neatly on the top of the water, heavy crude oil has a tendency to form tarballs and sink to the bottom, given a large enough body of still water, light oil will spread out to an unbroken film exactly one molecule thick.
There's a big difference between negligence and criminal negligence. Years ago my foreman was in a hurry and turned the bubbler too high on a rubber latex storage tank, when the factory owner drove in two hours later the rear car park was covered in several tons of liquid rubber latex. The foreman was certainly negligent since he took a shortcut (I saw him do it) but rather than owning up to his mistake the coward lied and convinced the owner it was my fault with the result that I got the sack before I knew why! Having said that, nothing he did means he was criminally negligent, like many blue collar workers he was simply overworked and underpaid, he lied because he had a family to look our for, I was a disinterested 18yro kid who was almost pleased to be sacked..
The heavy hand of criminal law should be reserved for cases where it is beyond reasonable doubt it was deliberate, or when the company refuses to rectify the problem. Finding someone to blame and throwing them into jail is not working for the US, to the extent that even as a die hard "greenie" from the 70's I would not want to see a "war on pollution". The good news here is that the EPA are getting the problem fixed in a timely manner at the companies expense, which after all is the crux of the matter.
There was some concern of the hypothetical danger creation of such black holes might pose.
More concerning to me was the uninformed speculation that lead to those concerns. As one physicist quipped here on Slashdot at the time, "You misunderstand what motivates physicists. If the LHC did get sucked up by a mini black hole we would not run from the building in fear, we would run towards it with notebooks at hand".
Yes, but "off by a factor of two" is considered accurate for cosmology.
Agree, my windows box updated itself last night, you would think a "disaster" would be noticeable, .