But political persecution of scientists is bad... like 15th century Vatican bad.
Tell that to Michael Mann. The "persecution" he's suffering is nothing but payback for the persecution of other scientists who dared to investigate issues and come to unapproved conclusions that don't support the AGW agenda. That's not science, it's a cult. He's due a thorough investigation and the rest of his cohort too.
This is only one of the problem with airborn systems. There's also the fact that racks in a datacenter don't move on three axes during normal operation - which is important when your data storage platform is the surface of a bunch of gyroscopes.
Lots of cores are good. A good amount of RAM helps too. And when you put a bunch of servers that do real services in one box, storage and network bandwidth and latency are also important. At the moment memory seems to be the sticking point rather than cores.
For many virtualization scenarios right now with VMWare there is the VMWare licensing to consider. The 8GB DIMMS are still spendy but so is the VMWare licensing so there's tension between server density with expensive DIMMs to minimize rackspace and licensing cost, or twice as many servers with the cheaper DIMMS and paying the increased licensing.
HP and Cisco both have interesting propositions in this area, with blades that do 10GbE and FC for good bandwidth, have dual 6-core processors and support 192GB of RAM or more. When better processors and cheaper memory come out the Cisco UCS solution may have challenges because the architecture may become I/O bound with only 2 10Gbps links for both network and storage per half-width blade, and sharing at least half of that in the chassis uplink. The HP blade solution supports full line rate between servers and an insane amount of uplink - and it's denser than the UCS so it takes up less rack space. The UCS solution uses an ASIC to more than double the number of memory sockets, so for example a full-width server supports up to 192GB using the cheaper 4GB DIMMS and they claim they all work at 1333MHz. I don't know what IBM and Dell are doing here but I know they have products too.
All of the basic virtual environments are basically free (except Microsoft's Hyper-V, of course). Microsoft software is practically free in education environments so they're making inroads there. But in the enterprise the high availability and reliability features of the advanced commercial packages are compelling. There's something awesome about asking an admin management type to evacuate a server so you can work on it (because the local IT support is out today), and watching her migrate the VMs off in a few seconds so you can take it down.
One of the really neat things about VM consolidation is that 20 physical servers with 4x 1Gbps Ethernet don't actually use it so by consolidating them you eliminate waste. Not only that, but by moving to the VM host with 10GbE you get virtual servers that have multiple 1Gbps connections but each has a 0.2ms ping to the external gateway and each other. This makes many things work faster like databases, websites and such. The downside is the downside of sharing: if you don't plan carefully and get a storm load, the servers will contend for bandwidth and knock each other offline.
Now that DDR3 is becoming cheaper than DDR2, I'm glad to see AMD adopt it. I like their 8-core server chips for workstation stuff - a coworker and I are building out dual-8 core boxes for virtual machines and such.
The steps that these scientists would have us make involve trillions of dollars. It's not enough that they are confident of their numbers. They must offer proof. The word "proof" obviously involves a more rigorous standard than that to which you are accustomed, at least in the financial case.
Actually, my nym is symbolset exactly because I'm a linguist, logician, philosopher and computer scientist. Didn't you get that that nym is the nexus of those vectors? Did you think that was an accident?
It's a whitewash deal. The investigators are in and out, and don't look to get gigs at CRU (one would hope). They get their sugar afterward in consultancies for the coal companies and whatnot.
I'll give you a 10 of 10 for factual, and another 10 for depth of inference even if they were somewhat oblique. Perhaps you were projecting an audience from a prior era of slashdot - today the audience is more common. For accessibility you get a 2 because that was difficult to work through and long. Also for references you get a 0 because there are no links.
Your post was brilliant even though it was painful to read and unreferenced. A solid 7 out of 10.
Start next time with an intriguing hook and use it to draw us into your thinking, and put your links in your comment rather than in the replies.
Sorry about the truncated subject. Character length limits and all.
Here's the post you had issues with:
Even modern climate scientists agree that the Earth should now be cooling. That's a huge part of their objection - that manmade warming is preventing the onset of a global ice age that is due. We should, according to them, embrace the natural reality of shrinking arable land and expansion of glaciers because that is the natural course according to their calculations. The warming of the Earth must be prevented even if we benefit from it.
And of the billions who would starve to death in that course? They don't figure. Rounding errors. Casualties of math.
Explain that to them.
I said it then and I'll say it again: the warmist problem is that Men are by their activity preventing an ice age that is due, and they think that's not natural and so it is bad. As for the billions who would die in the onset of an ice age - they consider them collateral damage - insignificant in the course of restoring the natural balance of ice.
Whether the warmists win or not, the ice will come. The Earth's orbit ensures it and what CO2 we blanket ourselves with can only delay the inevitable. It were best if we got off the dependency on terrestrial air temperatures - preferably somewhere in the Asteroid beld.
The data is known to be bad. Their own data mangler said so in his log.
Today we have awesome temperature measurement tools. I can, for example, prepare a collection of 16 T-type thermocouples calibrated with NIST instruments to within.05C, and use those to sample the air temperature at a point two meters above ground on the verge of a forest in the shade at intervals of once each second. Doing so I can derive the averaged measured air temperature at that point in those conditions within.01C but those 1.4 million measurements per day would not give me a lock on the climate of the day, let alone the era if discarded all but the greatest and the least. Almost certainly neither the median nor the mean temperature of the day will be (Max+Min)/2 within three degrees C. If the next day a city moves closer to me, that's an input not measured on my log. Most certainly the resolution of this measurement will not bear extrapolation over 35000x (a century) to within fractions of a degree C.
You see, air temperature is a very fungible thing. The temperature of the air tells you very little about its energy potential unless you also know the barometric pressure and the humidity - and the net energy potential of the air is the actual thing that climatologists should be hoping to measure. We're ignoring those factors now because the climatologists don't have historical records for them. Well net energy potential and the CO2 percentage that helps drive photosynthesis are keys to understanding what is happening in climate.
Over time the observation stations move closer to city cores or cities move closer to them - and cities are known to be warmer than rural areas. It's called the Urban Heat Island effect, or UHI. The observation stations also move lower in elevation, and south. There are even serious questions about the physical locations where the historical data was gathered. The charts don't adjust for these known biases, and the motivation behind that lack is the reason people suspect the provenance of the unpublished data.
These folk aren't building nuclear weapons. They're measuring the temperature of the day at various points. The temperature of the day today isn't a state secret, and it most certainly isn't for days in the distant past. There is no reason why they cannot publish the observations they use to make their models, except that they promised not to share observations of temperature in the distant past. They should not use data derived from such sources because it is not credible.
If you're a dendroclimatologist in 1960 when the phrase was coined, you curve fit your observed temperature data against the available rings and it's a plausible but unverified theory for extrapolating prior temperature and predicting future temperatures. When moving forward the data observations don't agree with your curve you don't continue to use your curve for periods prior to observatons and just say that for new periods it's not a good measure any more. Instead you make a new theory - hopefully involving some additional data like precipitation, grazing animals providing both fertilizer and eating foliage, periods of insect pestilence. You also try to trim your prior dataset to observations that contain indica - avoiding samples like strip bark trees which are irrelevant to periodic measurment because of the known irregular method of their growth. Strip bark trees don't always have bark over the same exterior section of tree and so can have no rings at all for centuries in an individual sample, which naturally destroys the chronological sequence that drives the sampling of them. Strip bark trees are a strong draw for the dentroclimatologist because they live a long time. The Bristlecone Pine, for example, can live for more than 10,000 years. To have an accurate measure of the environment of the tree a core sample will not do - you have to cut the tree down and examine the rings carefully from a full section of the trunk (and even then it's iffy) - and of course since that breed of tree is endangered such a thing would not be allowed.
Most assuredly you don't pretend that in 1960 trees just changed a modus operandi they had maintained for the previous 100 million years in your theory, without good evidence to support that change. That new observations don't fit your expectations is not enough evidence.
Read the CRU's own data mangler commenting on his massaging of the data. You can not read that log and not assign the credibility of reports built on that data any more confidence than "rough guess" - barely better than "complete swiff". Certainly not enough to assert that "the argument is over, the science is proven, there is no doubt." By his own account he's making stuff up in the worst case and curve fitting in the average case.
Curve fitting is fine when you're developing a theory for what happened to be validated by further observations. When your data is temporal (point in time observations that can't be replicated because the time of observation is part of the data) and the further observations don't agree with your curve you don't save the theory by saying it doesn't work with forward observations, but only with temporally backward ones but it still creates a cause for action NOW. When that happens you throw out the disproved theory and try to build a new one that agrees with the available data, and wait for some time to get confirmation from future events before moving forward with an action plan. If necessary it's OK to abandon prior temporal third-party measurements as inaccurate if that leads to predictable future phenomena. At least that's how science used to work back when I was in school. Maybe we have New Science now and I'm not up to date.
And yes, I have some serious questions about the validity of measuring the mean temperature of a day by two datapoints - the minimum and maximum. I have even more serious questions about the quality of such observations in periods prior to the invention of the datalogger that measures data continuously because in that time we rely on timed measurements by people who checked their thermometers twice each day at the same time when they were able to read the thermometer in the appointed place and at the appointed - and inconvenient - hour. With measurements that vary by one degree per century on the average, there must necessarily be some questions about rounding versus truncating also.
At best the quality of this data is not good. At worst it's not representative of the thing they're claiming it measured.
Such is UK government. A third body is looking into the issues. It doesn't look to be packed with warmists, and it is funded and has promised to look into the actual data.
They normalized their tree ring data to the observations prior to 1960 because that's when they began using tree rings as climate data, and they used that data to extrapolate prior temperatures because it seemed logical at the time - they found a curve that fit. When the rings failed then to match their dataset on an ongoing basis, they discarded the tree ring data after 1960 when it was known to not agree with thermometer observations, but kept the extrapolated data for periods prior to thermometer data because they had no conflicting data for that time.
A scientist would have a problem with this. The tree rings are now proven not to be good proxies for temperature - many other factors influence the growth of trees.
Representative trees came from all the forests around the world to vote on changing the tree aspiration method in order to randomize the growth of bark and rings relative to temperature. This was done to discourage the dendroclimatologists' proclivity for penetrating trees - even the sick, elderly and endangered ones - with painful disease-inducing coreborers in order to extract their data. The keynote speech was given by an extremely revered elder Brislecone pine who had been so raped even though it was an endangered strip-bark tree and its rings had been long known to not contain any useful climate data whatsoever. As is his wont he closed his sparkling 9-day oratory with a joke about a blind squirrel. The vote was 700:5 in favor of moving to a blended available water, fertilizer, sunshine and temperature model with seasonal parasite threats variables that vary by tree species and offers no meaningful climate data. 1238 trees either abstained or were unable to get their votes in on time.
A subcommittee meeting will be held again in 2750 to determine if the practice was effective. (Trees don't travel much, and prefer infrequent meetings.)
Click the score and it shows right now Moderation +4: 20% insightful, 30% overrated, 10% flamebait. So far that post was modded down 13 times and up 17 times - 30 moderations for one post isn't a record for me but it's got to be in my top 10. I imagine for slashdot as a whole you would have to get several hundred to be in the top 100 most moderated comments. Whatever the merits of this fine article or the comment are the mood is running hot - this is obviously a divisive issue. There will probably be more moderations in the days ahead. That this one post gets so much attention when there are others more worthy of it is interesting to me.
I rarely get mod points anymore either - but when it rains, it pours. I've given up trying to figure it out - I don't really like to moderate anyway, and the moderation system seems to be working ok without my input. I guess if it didn't seem to be working I'd metamod for a few days.
The Panel was not concerned with the question of whether the conclusions of
the published research were correct. Rather it was asked to come to a view on
the integrity of the Unit's research and whether as far as could be determined
the conclusions represented an honest and scientifically justified interpretation
of the data. The Panel worked by examining representative publications by
members of the Unit and subsequently by making two visits to the University
and interviewing and questioning members of the Unit. Not all the panel were
present on both occasions but two members were present on both occasions to
maintain continuity. About fifteen person/days were spent at the University
discussing the Unit's work.
So... we didn't look into whether their numbers were right. We looked over their published papers and chatted with them a couple of times and they seem like forthright folks. We won't tell you who was there each time - that would be too much disclosure.
No whitewash here. Oh, no. Further:
We have not exhaustively reviewed the external criticism of the
dendroclimatological work, but it seems that some of these criticisms show a
rather selective and uncharitable approach to information made available by
CRU.
So people who want hard numbers, underlying datasets and provenance of data are being "uncharitable".
In the latter part of the 20th century CRU pioneered the methods for taking into
account a wide range of local influences that can make instrumental records
from different locations hard to compare. These methods were very labour
intensive and were somewhat subjective.
The methods were subjective? This is science? Maybe it's me. Maybe I don't understand the term "science".
We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that
depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close
collaboration with professional statisticians.
Here we go. That's an axe to the groin there.
We agree with the CRU view that the authority for releasing unpublished raw data to third parties should stay with those who collected it.
Ah, but then they don't need to provide provenance or data. That's so comforting.
I am so mollified by this report I'm left without speech. It seems perfectly reasonable, rational and diligent to me. Let's close this case and begin the Cap&Trade.
When you have a full understanding of the RFCs you must then appreciate that you cannot understand them because they cannot be understood. They are a Gordian Knot. The intricacies of their contradictions are beautiful both in their symmetry and their horror. Some of them are simply humor. That the Internet that we so rely upon is built upon these is nothing less than a triumph of irony.
They are not laws, per se. They are questions. Hence the title: "Request For Comments". The ambivalence is diabolical in its simplicity. It works only because nobody else has come up with better questions.
Re:The lesser known Zen Coding koans
on
Zen Coding
·
· Score: 1
* If an exception gets thrown in an operating system, and no one is around to catch it, does it make a
sound?
No. An uncaught exception is ignored. Some other ill might come of it, but the throwing of an uncaught exception makes no sound itself because it hits only the absence of a try.
ZEN is traded on the London exchange
on
Zen Coding
·
· Score: 1
A nanosecond is one billionth of a second, so 100ns is 1 second/10,000,000. That means that rollover would occur if they were using seconds and borrowing your numbers, about year 320,000,000,000. Cosmological theory has heat death of the universe at a googol years give or take a couple orders of magnitude. Yes, you're right - 2^256 bits is better used for the significand of time. 320 billion years can only describe the current era, but that squared should do it for all time - at least to our current understanding. That squared thrice should provide a good cusion for now.
Slashdot Mirror
But political persecution of scientists is bad... like 15th century Vatican bad.
Tell that to Michael Mann. The "persecution" he's suffering is nothing but payback for the persecution of other scientists who dared to investigate issues and come to unapproved conclusions that don't support the AGW agenda. That's not science, it's a cult. He's due a thorough investigation and the rest of his cohort too.
This is only one of the problem with airborn systems. There's also the fact that racks in a datacenter don't move on three axes during normal operation - which is important when your data storage platform is the surface of a bunch of gyroscopes.
Lots of cores are good. A good amount of RAM helps too. And when you put a bunch of servers that do real services in one box, storage and network bandwidth and latency are also important. At the moment memory seems to be the sticking point rather than cores.
For many virtualization scenarios right now with VMWare there is the VMWare licensing to consider. The 8GB DIMMS are still spendy but so is the VMWare licensing so there's tension between server density with expensive DIMMs to minimize rackspace and licensing cost, or twice as many servers with the cheaper DIMMS and paying the increased licensing.
HP and Cisco both have interesting propositions in this area, with blades that do 10GbE and FC for good bandwidth, have dual 6-core processors and support 192GB of RAM or more. When better processors and cheaper memory come out the Cisco UCS solution may have challenges because the architecture may become I/O bound with only 2 10Gbps links for both network and storage per half-width blade, and sharing at least half of that in the chassis uplink. The HP blade solution supports full line rate between servers and an insane amount of uplink - and it's denser than the UCS so it takes up less rack space. The UCS solution uses an ASIC to more than double the number of memory sockets, so for example a full-width server supports up to 192GB using the cheaper 4GB DIMMS and they claim they all work at 1333MHz. I don't know what IBM and Dell are doing here but I know they have products too.
All of the basic virtual environments are basically free (except Microsoft's Hyper-V, of course). Microsoft software is practically free in education environments so they're making inroads there. But in the enterprise the high availability and reliability features of the advanced commercial packages are compelling. There's something awesome about asking an admin management type to evacuate a server so you can work on it (because the local IT support is out today), and watching her migrate the VMs off in a few seconds so you can take it down.
One of the really neat things about VM consolidation is that 20 physical servers with 4x 1Gbps Ethernet don't actually use it so by consolidating them you eliminate waste. Not only that, but by moving to the VM host with 10GbE you get virtual servers that have multiple 1Gbps connections but each has a 0.2ms ping to the external gateway and each other. This makes many things work faster like databases, websites and such. The downside is the downside of sharing: if you don't plan carefully and get a storm load, the servers will contend for bandwidth and knock each other offline.
Now that DDR3 is becoming cheaper than DDR2, I'm glad to see AMD adopt it. I like their 8-core server chips for workstation stuff - a coworker and I are building out dual-8 core boxes for virtual machines and such.
Holocene Optimum.
The steps that these scientists would have us make involve trillions of dollars. It's not enough that they are confident of their numbers. They must offer proof. The word "proof" obviously involves a more rigorous standard than that to which you are accustomed, at least in the financial case.
Actually, my nym is symbolset exactly because I'm a linguist, logician, philosopher and computer scientist. Didn't you get that that nym is the nexus of those vectors? Did you think that was an accident?
It's a whitewash deal. The investigators are in and out, and don't look to get gigs at CRU (one would hope). They get their sugar afterward in consultancies for the coal companies and whatnot.
I'll give you a 10 of 10 for factual, and another 10 for depth of inference even if they were somewhat oblique. Perhaps you were projecting an audience from a prior era of slashdot - today the audience is more common. For accessibility you get a 2 because that was difficult to work through and long. Also for references you get a 0 because there are no links.
Your post was brilliant even though it was painful to read and unreferenced. A solid 7 out of 10.
Start next time with an intriguing hook and use it to draw us into your thinking, and put your links in your comment rather than in the replies.
Sorry about the truncated subject. Character length limits and all.
Here's the post you had issues with:
Even modern climate scientists agree that the Earth should now be cooling. That's a huge part of their objection - that manmade warming is preventing the onset of a global ice age that is due. We should, according to them, embrace the natural reality of shrinking arable land and expansion of glaciers because that is the natural course according to their calculations. The warming of the Earth must be prevented even if we benefit from it.
And of the billions who would starve to death in that course? They don't figure. Rounding errors. Casualties of math.
Explain that to them.
I said it then and I'll say it again: the warmist problem is that Men are by their activity preventing an ice age that is due, and they think that's not natural and so it is bad. As for the billions who would die in the onset of an ice age - they consider them collateral damage - insignificant in the course of restoring the natural balance of ice.
Whether the warmists win or not, the ice will come. The Earth's orbit ensures it and what CO2 we blanket ourselves with can only delay the inevitable. It were best if we got off the dependency on terrestrial air temperatures - preferably somewhere in the Asteroid beld.
The data is known to be bad. Their own data mangler said so in his log.
Today we have awesome temperature measurement tools. I can, for example, prepare a collection of 16 T-type thermocouples calibrated with NIST instruments to within .05C, and use those to sample the air temperature at a point two meters above ground on the verge of a forest in the shade at intervals of once each second. Doing so I can derive the averaged measured air temperature at that point in those conditions within .01C but those 1.4 million measurements per day would not give me a lock on the climate of the day, let alone the era if discarded all but the greatest and the least. Almost certainly neither the median nor the mean temperature of the day will be (Max+Min)/2 within three degrees C. If the next day a city moves closer to me, that's an input not measured on my log. Most certainly the resolution of this measurement will not bear extrapolation over 35000x (a century) to within fractions of a degree C.
You see, air temperature is a very fungible thing. The temperature of the air tells you very little about its energy potential unless you also know the barometric pressure and the humidity - and the net energy potential of the air is the actual thing that climatologists should be hoping to measure. We're ignoring those factors now because the climatologists don't have historical records for them. Well net energy potential and the CO2 percentage that helps drive photosynthesis are keys to understanding what is happening in climate.
As for the change in tree behavior in 1960, I've posted about that.
Over time the observation stations move closer to city cores or cities move closer to them - and cities are known to be warmer than rural areas. It's called the Urban Heat Island effect, or UHI. The observation stations also move lower in elevation, and south. There are even serious questions about the physical locations where the historical data was gathered. The charts don't adjust for these known biases, and the motivation behind that lack is the reason people suspect the provenance of the unpublished data.
These folk aren't building nuclear weapons. They're measuring the temperature of the day at various points. The temperature of the day today isn't a state secret, and it most certainly isn't for days in the distant past. There is no reason why they cannot publish the observations they use to make their models, except that they promised not to share observations of temperature in the distant past. They should not use data derived from such sources because it is not credible.
I already commented on this.
If you're a dendroclimatologist in 1960 when the phrase was coined, you curve fit your observed temperature data against the available rings and it's a plausible but unverified theory for extrapolating prior temperature and predicting future temperatures. When moving forward the data observations don't agree with your curve you don't continue to use your curve for periods prior to observatons and just say that for new periods it's not a good measure any more. Instead you make a new theory - hopefully involving some additional data like precipitation, grazing animals providing both fertilizer and eating foliage, periods of insect pestilence. You also try to trim your prior dataset to observations that contain indica - avoiding samples like strip bark trees which are irrelevant to periodic measurment because of the known irregular method of their growth. Strip bark trees don't always have bark over the same exterior section of tree and so can have no rings at all for centuries in an individual sample, which naturally destroys the chronological sequence that drives the sampling of them. Strip bark trees are a strong draw for the dentroclimatologist because they live a long time. The Bristlecone Pine, for example, can live for more than 10,000 years. To have an accurate measure of the environment of the tree a core sample will not do - you have to cut the tree down and examine the rings carefully from a full section of the trunk (and even then it's iffy) - and of course since that breed of tree is endangered such a thing would not be allowed.
Most assuredly you don't pretend that in 1960 trees just changed a modus operandi they had maintained for the previous 100 million years in your theory, without good evidence to support that change. That new observations don't fit your expectations is not enough evidence.
Read the CRU's own data mangler commenting on his massaging of the data. You can not read that log and not assign the credibility of reports built on that data any more confidence than "rough guess" - barely better than "complete swiff". Certainly not enough to assert that "the argument is over, the science is proven, there is no doubt." By his own account he's making stuff up in the worst case and curve fitting in the average case.
Curve fitting is fine when you're developing a theory for what happened to be validated by further observations. When your data is temporal (point in time observations that can't be replicated because the time of observation is part of the data) and the further observations don't agree with your curve you don't save the theory by saying it doesn't work with forward observations, but only with temporally backward ones but it still creates a cause for action NOW. When that happens you throw out the disproved theory and try to build a new one that agrees with the available data, and wait for some time to get confirmation from future events before moving forward with an action plan. If necessary it's OK to abandon prior temporal third-party measurements as inaccurate if that leads to predictable future phenomena. At least that's how science used to work back when I was in school. Maybe we have New Science now and I'm not up to date.
And yes, I have some serious questions about the validity of measuring the mean temperature of a day by two datapoints - the minimum and maximum. I have even more serious questions about the quality of such observations in periods prior to the invention of the datalogger that measures data continuously because in that time we rely on timed measurements by people who checked their thermometers twice each day at the same time when they were able to read the thermometer in the appointed place and at the appointed - and inconvenient - hour. With measurements that vary by one degree per century on the average, there must necessarily be some questions about rounding versus truncating also.
At best the quality of this data is not good. At worst it's not representative of the thing they're claiming it measured.
Such is UK government. A third body is looking into the issues. It doesn't look to be packed with warmists, and it is funded and has promised to look into the actual data.
Hopefully we'll see some truth yet.
They normalized their tree ring data to the observations prior to 1960 because that's when they began using tree rings as climate data, and they used that data to extrapolate prior temperatures because it seemed logical at the time - they found a curve that fit. When the rings failed then to match their dataset on an ongoing basis, they discarded the tree ring data after 1960 when it was known to not agree with thermometer observations, but kept the extrapolated data for periods prior to thermometer data because they had no conflicting data for that time.
A scientist would have a problem with this. The tree rings are now proven not to be good proxies for temperature - many other factors influence the growth of trees.
Representative trees came from all the forests around the world to vote on changing the tree aspiration method in order to randomize the growth of bark and rings relative to temperature. This was done to discourage the dendroclimatologists' proclivity for penetrating trees - even the sick, elderly and endangered ones - with painful disease-inducing coreborers in order to extract their data. The keynote speech was given by an extremely revered elder Brislecone pine who had been so raped even though it was an endangered strip-bark tree and its rings had been long known to not contain any useful climate data whatsoever. As is his wont he closed his sparkling 9-day oratory with a joke about a blind squirrel. The vote was 700:5 in favor of moving to a blended available water, fertilizer, sunshine and temperature model with seasonal parasite threats variables that vary by tree species and offers no meaningful climate data. 1238 trees either abstained or were unable to get their votes in on time.
A subcommittee meeting will be held again in 2750 to determine if the practice was effective. (Trees don't travel much, and prefer infrequent meetings.)
Click the score and it shows right now Moderation +4: 20% insightful, 30% overrated, 10% flamebait. So far that post was modded down 13 times and up 17 times - 30 moderations for one post isn't a record for me but it's got to be in my top 10. I imagine for slashdot as a whole you would have to get several hundred to be in the top 100 most moderated comments. Whatever the merits of this fine article or the comment are the mood is running hot - this is obviously a divisive issue. There will probably be more moderations in the days ahead. That this one post gets so much attention when there are others more worthy of it is interesting to me.
I rarely get mod points anymore either - but when it rains, it pours. I've given up trying to figure it out - I don't really like to moderate anyway, and the moderation system seems to be working ok without my input. I guess if it didn't seem to be working I'd metamod for a few days.
The Panel was not concerned with the question of whether the conclusions of the published research were correct. Rather it was asked to come to a view on the integrity of the Unit's research and whether as far as could be determined the conclusions represented an honest and scientifically justified interpretation of the data. The Panel worked by examining representative publications by members of the Unit and subsequently by making two visits to the University and interviewing and questioning members of the Unit. Not all the panel were present on both occasions but two members were present on both occasions to maintain continuity. About fifteen person/days were spent at the University discussing the Unit's work.
So... we didn't look into whether their numbers were right. We looked over their published papers and chatted with them a couple of times and they seem like forthright folks. We won't tell you who was there each time - that would be too much disclosure.
No whitewash here. Oh, no. Further:
We have not exhaustively reviewed the external criticism of the dendroclimatological work, but it seems that some of these criticisms show a rather selective and uncharitable approach to information made available by CRU.
So people who want hard numbers, underlying datasets and provenance of data are being "uncharitable".
In the latter part of the 20th century CRU pioneered the methods for taking into account a wide range of local influences that can make instrumental records from different locations hard to compare. These methods were very labour intensive and were somewhat subjective.
The methods were subjective? This is science? Maybe it's me. Maybe I don't understand the term "science".
We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians.
Here we go. That's an axe to the groin there.
We agree with the CRU view that the authority for releasing unpublished raw data to third parties should stay with those who collected it.
Ah, but then they don't need to provide provenance or data. That's so comforting.
I am so mollified by this report I'm left without speech. It seems perfectly reasonable, rational and diligent to me. Let's close this case and begin the Cap&Trade.
Shhh! The first rule of RFC 0 is you don't tell people about RFC 0. That's what the header "SECRET" means.
Wait, uh, nevermind.
When you have a full understanding of the RFCs you must then appreciate that you cannot understand them because they cannot be understood. They are a Gordian Knot. The intricacies of their contradictions are beautiful both in their symmetry and their horror. Some of them are simply humor. That the Internet that we so rely upon is built upon these is nothing less than a triumph of irony.
They are not laws, per se. They are questions. Hence the title: "Request For Comments". The ambivalence is diabolical in its simplicity. It works only because nobody else has come up with better questions.
* What is the sound of one interrupt flapping?
That would be this. Note: bad music.
* If an exception gets thrown in an operating system, and no one is around to catch it, does it make a sound?
No. An uncaught exception is ignored. Some other ill might come of it, but the throwing of an uncaught exception makes no sound itself because it hits only the absence of a try.
link
I did that. I do believe I mentioned that. Do you know something I don't?
You'll like it.
A nanosecond is one billionth of a second, so 100ns is 1 second/10,000,000. That means that rollover would occur if they were using seconds and borrowing your numbers, about year 320,000,000,000. Cosmological theory has heat death of the universe at a googol years give or take a couple orders of magnitude. Yes, you're right - 2^256 bits is better used for the significand of time. 320 billion years can only describe the current era, but that squared should do it for all time - at least to our current understanding. That squared thrice should provide a good cusion for now.