While understanding Yellowstone is certainly an interesting and significant problem, EarthScope will probably be of more immediate social benefit in helping us understand what's going on at the San Andreas fault system and the Cascadian subduction zone. The impacts of earthquakes in California and volcanic eruptions in the Cascades are much more immediate than the potential of a catastrophic caldera-forming eruption at Yellowstone. The more likely threat at Yellowstone is from localized hydrothermal (steam) eruptions. It would be nice to be able to get the tourists out of the way if one of those is about to blow. The local sesimic arrays already in place at Yellowstone are probably more useful in predicting these sorts of eruptions than EarthScope will be.
The whole CO2 situation has arisen because we have liberated carbon that was sequestered in fossil fuels, burned it, and pumped the resulting CO2 into the atmosphere. We temporarily short-circuited the carbon cycle.
I haven't read the book, so I won't comment directly on Gold's mechanism for rising gas-rich magmas. However, volcanologists and igneous petrologists know that the characteristics of magma (such as density and viscosity) depend on the original composition of the magma (including volatile content) as well as its history, such as the composition of any country rock incorporated into the magma body as it rises, components lost to fractional crystallization, mixing of multiple magma bodies, etc. As in most of the earth sciences, the physical systems involved are complex. Highly gas-rich erupted lavas are probably like the "froth" that pours out of a bottle of champagne when the cork is released. As the outgassing proceeds, some of the confining liquid is carried along. That doesn't imply that the entire volume of liquid is as gassy as the froth. I'm suspicious of anyone who would say "I've got a great new mechanism that explains everything". He'd better have some good evidence to back it up that is consistent with what we already know about the composition and physical characteristics of magmas. And if he claims that the geologists have been neglecting important information, he'd better have good evidence for that, too.
Methane clathrates are not frozen methane. They are composed of methane molecules trapped within crystals of water ice. I have never heard that methane "freezing out of the atmosphere" is the source of these deposits. The generally accepted explanation is that natural gas (methane) migrates along faults to the ocean bottom. The low temperatures (even in the tropics) and high pressures at the sea floor lead to the formation of clathrates. Oil and gas seeps are well known in the Gulf of Mexico, thus it's not surprising that clathrates are found there. If geologists once asserted that clathrates form from atmospheric methane, I've never heard of it.
I took a look at Hogan's website a while back. See my followup comments here. He's about a reliable source on scientific issues as Steven Milloy. That is, anything he says is highly colored by his ideological views and lots of rhetoric with little argument.
Actually, many (most?) coal seams occur in repeated cycles of oceanic transgression/regression, the coal appearing in just the right place for it to have been formed in a swamp. As far as I know, the evidence for the biological origins of coal is good; the evidence (fossilized plants, paleoclimate indicators) converges to support this hypothesis. I haven't read Thomas Gold's work, so I don't know what the proposed mechanism would be for turning methane into coal.
As to oil forming from primordial methane, that at least seems more plausible. My understanding, though, is that various chemical and/or isotopic signatures imply a biological origin. I should probably read the book reviewed in the parent article. However, most earth scientists I know are not favorably disposed to the primordial methane hypothesis. Unlike continental drift in the 1920s, I haven't seen much debate on the issue in the journals or at conferences. But maybe I haven't looked hard enough.
I doubt that the Middle Eastern oil reserves or the East African Rift have much to do with an upwelling of "methane-rich" rocks. The Middle East oil reserves have much more to do with the presence of very good reservoir rocks deformed into large, gentle structures perfect for trapping hydrocarbons. In other parts of the world, the hydrocarbons either escape or are trapped in much smaller structures.
Do you know what happens to water when you dissolve CO2 in it? It becomes acidic (that is, the pH drops). The resulting solution is known as carbonic acid. This BBC story from a few months back reports on a study indicating that the pH of the ocean may go lower than it has in several hundred million years if CO2 emissions continue increasing at their current rate. As an earth scientist, I'm not too keen on that idea. We really don't know how such changes might affect oceanic life.
Sorry for the double post, but I just found this document, the debate in the South Carolina Convention, which voted for secession (the first state to do so). They discuss whether slavery or tariffs are the issue. In the end, the declaration they adopted named issues surrounding slavery as the cause for secession.
The post I replied to said slavery was a "very minor political issue", whereas the information I found indicates that it was a major enough issue that at least 2 Consitutional amendments were proposed to deal with it, and Southerners were citing the possibility of abolition as reason to secede. Note that in my comment I didn't claim that the issue of slavery was the "only" reason the Southern states seceded, just that it wasn't a minor reason. My knowledge of the history of the area where I grew up (the Kansas-Missouri border) indicates that people were willing to fight to preserve and extend slavery. However, it's probably also true that many of the soldiers fighting the war (such as my 2 Union and 1 Confederate ancestors) fought more out of loyalty to their home state than for any particular feelings towards slavery.
So if slavery wasn't an issue in the Civil War, why was this Constitutional amendment regulating slavery proposed by the "Virginia Peace Conference" in 1861? Or a similar amendment proposed in 1860? And here is a letter from a Virginian named John Cochran to his mother, lamenting the effects on the South if the Peace Conference amendment is adopted. He advocates revolution. An earlier letter from him lays out the States' Rights argument, framed largely in the context of slavery. It was not a "very minor political issue" for him.
Now, I found these original sources with a few minutes Googling. If this is a representative sample, it looks to me like both politicians and ordinary people saw the potential abolition of slavery as a motivating factor for secession.
Actually, that book is by Peter Drucker (check it out at Amazon). Alfred P. Sloan wrote My Years With General Motors. (I haven't read either, but they sound interesting).
This is a false dilemma. There are many things in the budget of the US government other than famine relief and high energy physics. The Department of Defense comes to mind as a place we could have reduced investment over the years (how many times over did we need to blow up the world, anyway?). Should we be funding malnutrition relief over research into heart disease? Cancer? Should we not have funded that dead-end research into the workings of obscure "retroviruses" in the 70s that seemed at the time not to have any application to human disease? (Hint: HIV is a retrovirus)
The choice is not between high energy physics and hunger relief. The developed world (this includes Europe) could do much more to help the poor in their own and other countries. It could (and should) be done, IMHO, without defunding basic research. We can do both. Now the job is to work to convince the politicians of that. That's a lot harder than going on Slashdot and recommending the murder of physicists.
He probably meant that the fields in which the seeds were planted were sprayed with Roundup. Roundup is a weed-killer, so spraying the crop seeds wouldn't be particularly effective.
IIRC, the guy who took the picture was a teenager. The BBC had a story about it, I think. His friend said "look at that", and he turned and took the picture, not knowing what it was. Maybe the Concorde made a loud noise. The kid sent the photo to NASA saying "what's this?", and their first interpretation was a fireball.
I had noticed that NASA had already revised their interpretation within a day or 2 of the original report. If you look here, you will see that they reinterpreted it as a contrail reflecting the sun.
Well, as someone in the imaging business (geophysical, not medical), my understanding of what the other guys did is that it's more than details. They used back-projection to solve equations related to the gradient. Not my area of expertise, but it's complicated. It's not just taking a bunch of individual readings and painting them on a pixmap. It requires the solution of systems of equations. Did Damadian do any work with the magnetic field gradient? That seems to have been the key insight in being able to do imaging, as the Nobel cites the work of both Mansfield and Lauterbur in the context of gradients.
Note that I have no personal reason for wanting Damadian to have or have not won the Nobel. I had never heard of him until last week. I'm just wondering if his complaints have any merit (not that he can do anything about it if they do).
FYI, the Peace Nobel is given by a separate (Norwegian) body from the Medicine Nobel.
According to this link, Damadian intended to use MRI for tissue characterization, not imaging. It was Laterbur that first used MRI to make a 2-dimensional image. If you look at Damadian's patent, there is no mention made of imaging. Rather, it covers two methods specifically designed to detect the presence of cancerous tissue (either in a sample or in the body). No imaging is implied. So, while he may have been important in magnetic resonance research, it doesn't look (to me, and I'm not a biomedical researcher) like he invented magnetic resonance imaging, which is what the Nobel was awarded for.
Note that the "slippery slope" is a rhetorical, not a logical, argument. The point about the electric grid is that it is something that was actually designed and built by human beings and is, in fact, controllable by them. The other examples you cite deal with the interchange of information (computer data, money, speech). The flow of electricity and the flow of information are two different things. The grid is most definitely a machine (cutting a wire in East Podunk physically causes the electricity to go out in West Succotash). The Internet is too, although physically may be more redundant. However, in all 3 of your examples, the machine you describe is a model, not the thing itself. Calling the economy a machine in the same way that the grid is a machine would be a category mistake. Maybe someone would try that argument, but it should be easily refutable.
Unlike the flow of information on the net, the flow of electricity in the grid must be managed properly, since there are real physical consequences (generators blowing up, power lines melting, etc.). If you want to go off-grid, that's your choice. It's possible, but not easy. In the future, we may all have our own electricity generation and storage systems in our homes and businesses. But, right now, that's not a choice most people can afford.
Well, I'm not an electrical engineer (IANAEE?), but the fact that disturbing the system in Ohio affects things in New York indicates that the machines and networks are not independent. A and B are only independent if fiddling with A cannot affect B. Those "ad hoc interconnects" make it a single system. Just because it's not engineered at the system level doesn't mean it's not a system. There are continuous electrical connections, made up of many components (transmission lines, transformers, generators, etc), connecting all the pieces of the grid. It may be a Rube Goldberg machine, but it's a machine.
Now that we know how (or at least why) the cookie crumbles, can we figure out who the "they" are in "that's what they say"? Or maybe how much wood a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
If someone comes up with a whizbang new boot system. great. Just make sure that if something goes wrong, or something needs to be changed, it's:
Easy to determine where the problem is.
Easy to fix using minimal tools available in single-user mode (i.e., vi).
I don't want some horrific equivalent of the Windows Registry lurking in the background. There should be no mysteries about what gets started and when. I'm not a Windows guru, so maybe this stuff is easy to determine in XP or Server 2003, but I've always found plain ol' text files to be much easier to deal with than fancy-dancy databases. Or at least compile the databases from plain ol' text files.
The "Canary scenario" is not universally accepted by workers in the field of tsunami hazards. Both the likelihood of such a mass wasting event occuring as well as the modeling of what would happen if it did have been called into question.
The distributed climate project is not trying to find that one card that happens to predict the winner. Rather, they are perturbing the input parameters to see how they affect the outcome. They want to see the distribution of results one gets with varying inputs. Each model they run is perfectly deterministic. But, since uncertainty in the input values is inescapable, it will be good to know how changing these values affects the output. These sorts of Monte Carlo simulations are perfectly acceptable as long as one does not try to just "pick the winner". That's not the point of the exercise.
Slashdot Mirror
While understanding Yellowstone is certainly an interesting and significant problem, EarthScope will probably be of more immediate social benefit in helping us understand what's going on at the San Andreas fault system and the Cascadian subduction zone. The impacts of earthquakes in California and volcanic eruptions in the Cascades are much more immediate than the potential of a catastrophic caldera-forming eruption at Yellowstone. The more likely threat at Yellowstone is from localized hydrothermal (steam) eruptions. It would be nice to be able to get the tourists out of the way if one of those is about to blow. The local sesimic arrays already in place at Yellowstone are probably more useful in predicting these sorts of eruptions than EarthScope will be.
The whole CO2 situation has arisen because we have liberated carbon that was sequestered in fossil fuels, burned it, and pumped the resulting CO2 into the atmosphere. We temporarily short-circuited the carbon cycle.
Methane clathrates are not frozen methane. They are composed of methane molecules trapped within crystals of water ice. I have never heard that methane "freezing out of the atmosphere" is the source of these deposits. The generally accepted explanation is that natural gas (methane) migrates along faults to the ocean bottom. The low temperatures (even in the tropics) and high pressures at the sea floor lead to the formation of clathrates. Oil and gas seeps are well known in the Gulf of Mexico, thus it's not surprising that clathrates are found there. If geologists once asserted that clathrates form from atmospheric methane, I've never heard of it.
I took a look at Hogan's website a while back. See my followup comments here. He's about a reliable source on scientific issues as Steven Milloy. That is, anything he says is highly colored by his ideological views and lots of rhetoric with little argument.
As to oil forming from primordial methane, that at least seems more plausible. My understanding, though, is that various chemical and/or isotopic signatures imply a biological origin. I should probably read the book reviewed in the parent article. However, most earth scientists I know are not favorably disposed to the primordial methane hypothesis. Unlike continental drift in the 1920s, I haven't seen much debate on the issue in the journals or at conferences. But maybe I haven't looked hard enough.
I doubt that the Middle Eastern oil reserves or the East African Rift have much to do with an upwelling of "methane-rich" rocks. The Middle East oil reserves have much more to do with the presence of very good reservoir rocks deformed into large, gentle structures perfect for trapping hydrocarbons. In other parts of the world, the hydrocarbons either escape or are trapped in much smaller structures.
Do you know what happens to water when you dissolve CO2 in it? It becomes acidic (that is, the pH drops). The resulting solution is known as carbonic acid. This BBC story from a few months back reports on a study indicating that the pH of the ocean may go lower than it has in several hundred million years if CO2 emissions continue increasing at their current rate. As an earth scientist, I'm not too keen on that idea. We really don't know how such changes might affect oceanic life.
Sorry for the double post, but I just found this document, the debate in the South Carolina Convention, which voted for secession (the first state to do so). They discuss whether slavery or tariffs are the issue. In the end, the declaration they adopted named issues surrounding slavery as the cause for secession.
The post I replied to said slavery was a "very minor political issue", whereas the information I found indicates that it was a major enough issue that at least 2 Consitutional amendments were proposed to deal with it, and Southerners were citing the possibility of abolition as reason to secede. Note that in my comment I didn't claim that the issue of slavery was the "only" reason the Southern states seceded, just that it wasn't a minor reason. My knowledge of the history of the area where I grew up (the Kansas-Missouri border) indicates that people were willing to fight to preserve and extend slavery. However, it's probably also true that many of the soldiers fighting the war (such as my 2 Union and 1 Confederate ancestors) fought more out of loyalty to their home state than for any particular feelings towards slavery.
Now, I found these original sources with a few minutes Googling. If this is a representative sample, it looks to me like both politicians and ordinary people saw the potential abolition of slavery as a motivating factor for secession.
Actually, that book is by Peter Drucker (check it out at Amazon). Alfred P. Sloan wrote My Years With General Motors. (I haven't read either, but they sound interesting).
This is a false dilemma. There are many things in the budget of the US government other than famine relief and high energy physics. The Department of Defense comes to mind as a place we could have reduced investment over the years (how many times over did we need to blow up the world, anyway?). Should we be funding malnutrition relief over research into heart disease? Cancer? Should we not have funded that dead-end research into the workings of obscure "retroviruses" in the 70s that seemed at the time not to have any application to human disease? (Hint: HIV is a retrovirus)
The choice is not between high energy physics and hunger relief. The developed world (this includes Europe) could do much more to help the poor in their own and other countries. It could (and should) be done, IMHO, without defunding basic research. We can do both. Now the job is to work to convince the politicians of that. That's a lot harder than going on Slashdot and recommending the murder of physicists.
He probably meant that the fields in which the seeds were planted were sprayed with Roundup. Roundup is a weed-killer, so spraying the crop seeds wouldn't be particularly effective.
IIRC, the guy who took the picture was a teenager. The BBC had a story about it, I think. His friend said "look at that", and he turned and took the picture, not knowing what it was. Maybe the Concorde made a loud noise. The kid sent the photo to NASA saying "what's this?", and their first interpretation was a fireball.
I had noticed that NASA had already revised their interpretation within a day or 2 of the original report. If you look here, you will see that they reinterpreted it as a contrail reflecting the sun.
I, for one, welcome our supercooled rodent overlords!
Note that I have no personal reason for wanting Damadian to have or have not won the Nobel. I had never heard of him until last week. I'm just wondering if his complaints have any merit (not that he can do anything about it if they do).
According to this link, Damadian intended to use MRI for tissue characterization, not imaging. It was Laterbur that first used MRI to make a 2-dimensional image. If you look at Damadian's patent, there is no mention made of imaging. Rather, it covers two methods specifically designed to detect the presence of cancerous tissue (either in a sample or in the body). No imaging is implied. So, while he may have been important in magnetic resonance research, it doesn't look (to me, and I'm not a biomedical researcher) like he invented magnetic resonance imaging, which is what the Nobel was awarded for.
Unlike the flow of information on the net, the flow of electricity in the grid must be managed properly, since there are real physical consequences (generators blowing up, power lines melting, etc.). If you want to go off-grid, that's your choice. It's possible, but not easy. In the future, we may all have our own electricity generation and storage systems in our homes and businesses. But, right now, that's not a choice most people can afford.
Well, I'm not an electrical engineer (IANAEE?), but the fact that disturbing the system in Ohio affects things in New York indicates that the machines and networks are not independent. A and B are only independent if fiddling with A cannot affect B. Those "ad hoc interconnects" make it a single system. Just because it's not engineered at the system level doesn't mean it's not a system. There are continuous electrical connections, made up of many components (transmission lines, transformers, generators, etc), connecting all the pieces of the grid. It may be a Rube Goldberg machine, but it's a machine.
Now that we know how (or at least why) the cookie crumbles, can we figure out who the "they" are in "that's what they say"? Or maybe how much wood a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
If someone comes up with a whizbang new boot system. great. Just make sure that if something goes wrong, or something needs to be changed, it's:
I don't want some horrific equivalent of the Windows Registry lurking in the background. There should be no mysteries about what gets started and when. I'm not a Windows guru, so maybe this stuff is easy to determine in XP or Server 2003, but I've always found plain ol' text files to be much easier to deal with than fancy-dancy databases. Or at least compile the databases from plain ol' text files.
DBus is something currently under development that is meant to serve as a fairly generic message passing system. There's a link in the Slashdot item.
The "Canary scenario" is not universally accepted by workers in the field of tsunami hazards. Both the likelihood of such a mass wasting event occuring as well as the modeling of what would happen if it did have been called into question.
The distributed climate project is not trying to find that one card that happens to predict the winner. Rather, they are perturbing the input parameters to see how they affect the outcome. They want to see the distribution of results one gets with varying inputs. Each model they run is perfectly deterministic. But, since uncertainty in the input values is inescapable, it will be good to know how changing these values affects the output. These sorts of Monte Carlo simulations are perfectly acceptable as long as one does not try to just "pick the winner". That's not the point of the exercise.