Ah yes, pardon me. I momentarily forgot that slashdot is a bad place to mention anything religious unless you wish to
(a) disparage it
(b) joke about it
(c) automatically be dismissed as a new-age hack
I won't make the mistake again.
Perhaps rather than knowing through science, God knows both position and momentum intuitively. I think that perhaps the only way to truly understand the universe is through intuition, and this intuition cannot be taught.
Um. . . This is not such an issue for machines you own. The problem this "ask slashdot" brings up relates to machines on your network that you DO NOT own (ie student's personal machines). In this case, creating an anti-worm and using it without students' permission would be pretty unethical, and perhaps illegal. Get your facts straight before you post, please.
I went to one of the top 10 liberal arts colleges, w/ tuition and fees over 30k/year. My parents are far from rich. I ended up with less than $15k in loans, which in my book isn't unreasonable at all.
I now go to grad school at a major and highly ranked state school. In comparison with the education I got as an undergrad, the students here are getting nothing. Why? The professors don't care about teaching because there is no significant reward for doing a good job. Everything is pegged to research. What's the lesson here? If you want to get a good undergrad education, look very hard at some of the top liberal arts colleges and smaller universities. They often have excellent financial aid programs with limited loans, and the professors will actually care about whether you learn anything.
And I guess I'm just tired of having people tell me they "don't believe" in global warming every time I mention my research.
I also want to make clear: I have no problem with skepticism regarding human induced global warming. If you couldn't tell, I'm (if not skeptical) then at least willing to listen to well-thought-out arguments against human-induced warming made by scientists who aren't paid by oil companies (yes, there are some, in my department in fact). What I don't appreciate are the arguments of those who want to avoid the policy impications of potential warming because those implications could hurt their pocket books in the short term. I realize that this is an understandable reaction, but it's also one that I profoundly disagree with.
So from a policy perspective, I guess I am far more frustrated than from a scientific perspective. Personally, I would be happy to see funding given legitimate researchers whose past publications have cast doubt on human induced global warming. However, to continue to ignore the implications of potential warming on policy questions seems very short-sighted to me. As you said.
Back to the scientific questions: From my perspective, the extreme warming in the last 150 years seems pretty watertight. We have solid climate proxy records from multiple sources (ice cores, lake sediment cores (pollen and choronomids), tree rings, deep ocean cores, peat cores, etc.) at least back to near the end of the last glaciation (lets say 12000 years bp as a conservative estimate). That would be 80 150-year periods. If our current period has the most extreme temperature change of any of those 150-year sections (even considering the precipitous drop and rise assocaited with the younger dryas), as much research suggests, then I have heard few good arguments regarding other possible causes of warming. If you have other reasonable hypotheses, I would love to hear them. (Incidentally, your comments are so much more well-though-out than is usual on slashdot. thanks.)
I'd like to offer a more balanced and less ideological reply to this post. First, my credentials. I'm working on a PhD at UCLA with a focus on arctic climate and hydrology. Thus, I've read most of the relevant research in the field, in addition to doing some of my own (I work on river ice breakup in the arctic).
To begin with, you confuse two different questions. The first is whether the globe is warming up. This is, almost certainly, the case. It is complicated by the fact, however, that different regions have different climate trends. For example, large parts of Canada are actually cooling. This research is based not on modeling of future events but on currently available climate data from all over the globe. If you want to assault the theory of global warming, this is not the place to do it.
There is much more uncertainty regarding the role of human influence in global climate change. The preponderance of evidence shows that humans are having some impact on the global climate, but the magnitude of that influence is indeed difficult to measure. One point that suggests greater human influence is the precipitous rise in global temperatures over the past 150 years or so. We have never seen a change in global temperatures quite this rapid, going back thousands of years. Presumably, the frequency of things like volcanic eruptions (which incidentally tend to cool the globe more than warm it because of particulates releasd) hasn't changed that much. The time frame is too short and the change too quick for global cycles like the Milankovich cycle to have much of an impact. This is not to say that humans are the only influence on this rapid climate change, but we certainly have to look very closely at the role of humans in climate change.
Regarding the so-called grant effect: the reasoning behind this theory is questionable at best. First, most of the grants used for academic research on global warming come from government organizations (NASA, NSF, etc.) that tend to be fairly unbiased in their funding. Indeed it seems that, given it's position, the current administration would be more than happy to fund research that could cast doubts on global warming. In addition, you sell a lot of the researchers short in terms of their lack of bias. Many researchers that I know, including my advisor, have published works that show little or no trend in various signals that, theoretically, could be tied to global climate change. In addition, most researcher done on climate change doesn't address the whole scope of the problem directly. You don't apply for a grant to fund research denying global warming. Instead, a whole bunch of different researchers study smaller aspects of climate change at various scales. If human-induced global warming weren't a distinct possibility, it never would have emerged from the research in the first place. Whatever the case may be, calling global warming some kind of a liberal conspiracy theory insults both the integrity and intelligence of the thousands of researchers world-wide who study it.
So is global warming happening? Almost certainly.
Do humans play a role in this? Probably, but how much is still a big question.
Are you right to say that we should take steps to ameliorate potential impacts before it's too late? In my opinion, yes.
I think it's interesting that this was published in an Elsevier journal. At least in my discipline, geography, that's where you publish your second-class stuff. They're good journals for papers that have some interesting material but just aren't up to snuff in other ways. Not to say that there is no valuable science published in them, just that the peer review process isn't quite as rigorous as in the leading journals of a field, much less places like Science or Nature.
Having not read the actual paper, it's hard to comment on the methodology used, but some of the conclusions (particularly re: testosterone levels) seem to be a bit far-fetched for the evidence presented.
Also, in the field of music, with which I am most familiar of those mentioned, I can think of a bunch of examples where marriage hasn't significantly impacted genius: Bach (as mentioned earlier), Dvorak, Ives, and Shostakovich all produced many great works after they were married. In poetry, Robert Frost comes to mind. Anyways, I take this piece with a large grain of salt.
Not true. I bought Mandrake 9.1 at Bestbuy in LA a couple of weeks ago. They had that and SuSE. No Redhat, surpsisingly.
Re:FOR PARENTS WHO ARE DRUGGING THEIR CHILDREN
on
Working with ADHD?
·
· Score: 1
Listing the Washington Times as a source automatically destroys your credibility. When I was a policy debater in high school we would use it only when we wanted the most outrageous and one-sided (conservative) opinions. It made great entertainment, but it is NOT a reasonable source on which to base any real-world decision. I won't even comment on adhdfraud.com.
One other point:
ADD/ADHD is not a binary disease. Some people are impacted to a much greater degree than others. Thus, there are some who don't need medication (David Neeleman might be an example here), while others are completely unable to function without it. Perhaps Ritalin and other drugs are overperscribed, but that does not mean that they don't have a place in the lives of some people.
After reading this essay, I was perplexed for a few minutes as to why my junior high and high school experiences didn't seem like terrible memories, even though I was definitely a nerd. I certainly never contemplated suicide, and I was generally pretty happy. After thinking things through for a few minutes, I think I've come up with a couple of points:
1. Nerds aren't always as unpopular as they think they are. In high school, I was conviced that I was a ridiculously inept and disgusting creature who no girl in their right mind would ever look at, much less date. Looking back on my experience, my lack of popularity had far more to do with this perception than any external stigma. I'm pretty sure, in fact, that a number of the popular girls would have been happy to date me if I hadn't been so hung up on my unpopularity.
2. I don't know where the author of this essay went to school, but it sure wasn't my high school. I'm working on a PhD in hydrology/climatology right now and I use stuff that I learned in high school all the time. Even at the time, most of my classes seemed at least somewhat relevant. My high school calculus class is still one of the 4 or 5 most useful classes I've ever taken.
In any case, I guess Paul Graham's experience just wasn't anything like my own. Some of his points are certainly valid, but many seem to be based on stereotypes that are certainly not universal in time or in space.
It seems like people aren't really differentiating between two different lines of research going on here. I was actually at the AGU session where this research was presented, so I know. One involved finding bacteria at extreme depths in SA gold mines, which is being discussed a lot. In the other one, scientists working in a lab squeezed bacteria between two diamonds until the pressure was extremely high--almost three times as high as the pressure needed to turn liquid water into ice. However, in cracks in this ice a significant number of bacteria survived. In my opinion, this is particularly interesting with regards to extraterrestrial life as any environment on Mars, Europa, or Titan (the three likeliest candidates for life in our solar system) where life could be fould would probably be both icy and high-pressure.
My sympathy is with you wholeheartedly. I've been using GIS long enough to have seen ESRI transition from a fairly open company that supported both Unix and Windows (heck, I even remember AV for Mac!) to a pure MS croney.
I run both W2K and Mandrake 8.2, but sadly I have to do much of my GIS work on the former. The only bright spot is in remote sensing, where ENVI is still fantastic on Solaris. Unfortunately, a poor grad student can't afford his own Solaris box, much less an ENVI license for it.
Finally, there is the option of GRASS. While it works fine in Linux, it is somewhat like the Gimp in my estimation: Most of the functionality is there, but it's damn hard to get at. I would truly love to see a reputable GIS/RS group put out a package for Linux. If you think about it, most GIS users are exactly the types who would be willing to make the switch. After all, anyone with any pre-8.0 ArcInfo experience is already more than accustomed to a command line.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes, pardon me. I momentarily forgot that slashdot is a bad place to mention anything religious unless you wish to
(a) disparage it
(b) joke about it
(c) automatically be dismissed as a new-age hack
I won't make the mistake again.
Perhaps rather than knowing through science, God knows both position and momentum intuitively. I think that perhaps the only way to truly understand the universe is through intuition, and this intuition cannot be taught.
Um. . . This is not such an issue for machines you own. The problem this "ask slashdot" brings up relates to machines on your network that you DO NOT own (ie student's personal machines). In this case, creating an anti-worm and using it without students' permission would be pretty unethical, and perhaps illegal. Get your facts straight before you post, please.
I now go to grad school at a major and highly ranked state school. In comparison with the education I got as an undergrad, the students here are getting nothing. Why? The professors don't care about teaching because there is no significant reward for doing a good job. Everything is pegged to research. What's the lesson here? If you want to get a good undergrad education, look very hard at some of the top liberal arts colleges and smaller universities. They often have excellent financial aid programs with limited loans, and the professors will actually care about whether you learn anything.
I also want to make clear: I have no problem with skepticism regarding human induced global warming. If you couldn't tell, I'm (if not skeptical) then at least willing to listen to well-thought-out arguments against human-induced warming made by scientists who aren't paid by oil companies (yes, there are some, in my department in fact). What I don't appreciate are the arguments of those who want to avoid the policy impications of potential warming because those implications could hurt their pocket books in the short term. I realize that this is an understandable reaction, but it's also one that I profoundly disagree with.
So from a policy perspective, I guess I am far more frustrated than from a scientific perspective. Personally, I would be happy to see funding given legitimate researchers whose past publications have cast doubt on human induced global warming. However, to continue to ignore the implications of potential warming on policy questions seems very short-sighted to me. As you said.
Back to the scientific questions: From my perspective, the extreme warming in the last 150 years seems pretty watertight. We have solid climate proxy records from multiple sources (ice cores, lake sediment cores (pollen and choronomids), tree rings, deep ocean cores, peat cores, etc.) at least back to near the end of the last glaciation (lets say 12000 years bp as a conservative estimate). That would be 80 150-year periods. If our current period has the most extreme temperature change of any of those 150-year sections (even considering the precipitous drop and rise assocaited with the younger dryas), as much research suggests, then I have heard few good arguments regarding other possible causes of warming. If you have other reasonable hypotheses, I would love to hear them. (Incidentally, your comments are so much more well-though-out than is usual on slashdot. thanks.)
To begin with, you confuse two different questions. The first is whether the globe is warming up. This is, almost certainly, the case. It is complicated by the fact, however, that different regions have different climate trends. For example, large parts of Canada are actually cooling. This research is based not on modeling of future events but on currently available climate data from all over the globe. If you want to assault the theory of global warming, this is not the place to do it.
There is much more uncertainty regarding the role of human influence in global climate change. The preponderance of evidence shows that humans are having some impact on the global climate, but the magnitude of that influence is indeed difficult to measure. One point that suggests greater human influence is the precipitous rise in global temperatures over the past 150 years or so. We have never seen a change in global temperatures quite this rapid, going back thousands of years. Presumably, the frequency of things like volcanic eruptions (which incidentally tend to cool the globe more than warm it because of particulates releasd) hasn't changed that much. The time frame is too short and the change too quick for global cycles like the Milankovich cycle to have much of an impact. This is not to say that humans are the only influence on this rapid climate change, but we certainly have to look very closely at the role of humans in climate change.
Regarding the so-called grant effect: the reasoning behind this theory is questionable at best. First, most of the grants used for academic research on global warming come from government organizations (NASA, NSF, etc.) that tend to be fairly unbiased in their funding. Indeed it seems that, given it's position, the current administration would be more than happy to fund research that could cast doubts on global warming. In addition, you sell a lot of the researchers short in terms of their lack of bias. Many researchers that I know, including my advisor, have published works that show little or no trend in various signals that, theoretically, could be tied to global climate change. In addition, most researcher done on climate change doesn't address the whole scope of the problem directly. You don't apply for a grant to fund research denying global warming. Instead, a whole bunch of different researchers study smaller aspects of climate change at various scales. If human-induced global warming weren't a distinct possibility, it never would have emerged from the research in the first place. Whatever the case may be, calling global warming some kind of a liberal conspiracy theory insults both the integrity and intelligence of the thousands of researchers world-wide who study it.
So is global warming happening? Almost certainly.
Do humans play a role in this? Probably, but how much is still a big question.
Are you right to say that we should take steps to ameliorate potential impacts before it's too late? In my opinion, yes.
Also, in the field of music, with which I am most familiar of those mentioned, I can think of a bunch of examples where marriage hasn't significantly impacted genius: Bach (as mentioned earlier), Dvorak, Ives, and Shostakovich all produced many great works after they were married. In poetry, Robert Frost comes to mind. Anyways, I take this piece with a large grain of salt.
Not true. I bought Mandrake 9.1 at Bestbuy in LA a couple of weeks ago. They had that and SuSE. No Redhat, surpsisingly.
One other point:
ADD/ADHD is not a binary disease. Some people are impacted to a much greater degree than others. Thus, there are some who don't need medication (David Neeleman might be an example here), while others are completely unable to function without it. Perhaps Ritalin and other drugs are overperscribed, but that does not mean that they don't have a place in the lives of some people.
1. Nerds aren't always as unpopular as they think they are. In high school, I was conviced that I was a ridiculously inept and disgusting creature who no girl in their right mind would ever look at, much less date. Looking back on my experience, my lack of popularity had far more to do with this perception than any external stigma. I'm pretty sure, in fact, that a number of the popular girls would have been happy to date me if I hadn't been so hung up on my unpopularity.
2. I don't know where the author of this essay went to school, but it sure wasn't my high school. I'm working on a PhD in hydrology/climatology right now and I use stuff that I learned in high school all the time. Even at the time, most of my classes seemed at least somewhat relevant. My high school calculus class is still one of the 4 or 5 most useful classes I've ever taken.
In any case, I guess Paul Graham's experience just wasn't anything like my own. Some of his points are certainly valid, but many seem to be based on stereotypes that are certainly not universal in time or in space.
It seems like people aren't really differentiating between two different lines of research going on here. I was actually at the AGU session where this research was presented, so I know. One involved finding bacteria at extreme depths in SA gold mines, which is being discussed a lot. In the other one, scientists working in a lab squeezed bacteria between two diamonds until the pressure was extremely high--almost three times as high as the pressure needed to turn liquid water into ice. However, in cracks in this ice a significant number of bacteria survived. In my opinion, this is particularly interesting with regards to extraterrestrial life as any environment on Mars, Europa, or Titan (the three likeliest candidates for life in our solar system) where life could be fould would probably be both icy and high-pressure.
My sympathy is with you wholeheartedly. I've been using GIS long enough to have seen ESRI transition from a fairly open company that supported both Unix and Windows (heck, I even remember AV for Mac!) to a pure MS croney. I run both W2K and Mandrake 8.2, but sadly I have to do much of my GIS work on the former. The only bright spot is in remote sensing, where ENVI is still fantastic on Solaris. Unfortunately, a poor grad student can't afford his own Solaris box, much less an ENVI license for it. Finally, there is the option of GRASS. While it works fine in Linux, it is somewhat like the Gimp in my estimation: Most of the functionality is there, but it's damn hard to get at. I would truly love to see a reputable GIS/RS group put out a package for Linux. If you think about it, most GIS users are exactly the types who would be willing to make the switch. After all, anyone with any pre-8.0 ArcInfo experience is already more than accustomed to a command line.