He's still a better man. The guys who sent him the letter have shit for evidence, they're just trolling for a juridisction. Of course, if he wanted to properly screw them over, he wouldn't tell them squat, but would tip off the opposing lawyers on this matter. They'd be HAPPY to point this out, in a professional manner, when it would do the maximum actual damage to the other jerk lawyers' case. Fraudulent jurisdiction shopping, there's bound to be some penalty for that.
not knowing much more about your situation, I might suggest biking. It has the advantage of you can get some use out of your exercise time (depending on whether it is practical for your commute, for your shopping, etc). It is lower impact than walking, higher impact than swimming, but you can monkey with lots of settings (saddle height/angle/fore-aft, crank length, "tread" or Q factor, foot position on pedal) to help your ankle out.
I should add, biking 50miles/week doesn't do that much for my weight, though I feel great. If I crank it up to 100/week (or more), I start to experience some of that craving you are talking about (ooooh, chicken fat, tasty, ummmm).
I'm guessing echolocation. Avoiding cars (except those sneaky Priuses) is easy, they're noisy as hell. And since lots of bikers run red lights anyway, who's going to notice one more? A blind biker at least as a really good excuse.
Short answer is, "Antarctica's different". It's bigger, it's whiter (hence, less conversion of non-IR to IR in the first place), it's "always" been colder, and it hasn't got an ocean under its middle. Beyond that, I am not enough of a climate scientist to know.
And do note, I consider also the advance in the CO2 rise at the Mauna Loa data, earlier river melts, and earlier tree blooms as part of the historical data. It's not just the Arctic. (You're focusing on ocean temperatures, I'm trying to look at time-integrated data where the measurement methodology remains constant. I don't think we can have complete confidence in any of these measurements -- ocean currents change (El Nino, La Nina), we don't have long-term samples over all of the ocean at multiple depths, etc. -- and there's bound to be wacky influences on the historical data).
I mentioned hurricanes only because it is an embarrassing part of the popular GW noise. The year we had Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, looked darn unusual, but because we don't have good aircraft data going all the way back to the 1900s (it does go back surprisingly far -- and the aircraft matter more than the satellites) we cannot even say for sure that it was in fact that unusual, let alone that it was a consequence of global warming. (Those storms' peak intensities were all observed offshore; no ship would have survived to report them.)
I note also that the saturation issue has been known for some time, and one assumes that this is therefore part of any modern climate models, and that if that particular IR band were indeed completely saturated, that they would pack up their computational toys and go home. I know some climate scientists, I've corresponded with others, they're not stupid (whereas, a statistical sampling of SlashDot posts would not result in the same conclusion, see "THEIR R NO KRODILZ IN FLORIDA U MORAN!" posts from a month or so back).
1998 was a very warm year; it's not that outlandish not to have exceeded it yet. I'm not thrilled at the delightful amounts of noisiness in the data, or the additional knobs that we are discovering (soot warmed ice, haze-cooled earth). We also have the problem that the field itself has gotten very noisy, and there is plenty of money that depends on what policies we end up with, and that money is funding noise.
Nonetheless, to simply pick the warmest year yet from a noisy warming series, and claim that failure to exceed it (yet) casts doubt on global warming, is a wingnut argument.
What convinces me is three things: the historical information (river melt dates, flower blooming dates, advancing CO2 dip each year in the Hawaiian data); the melting ice (Greenland, arctic ice cap, glaciers) tell us that things are indeed getting warmer; and the basic mechanism -- CO2 is a greenhouse gas, you would expect it to have an effect. The historical info and the glacier melts are relatively independent of changes in temperature measurement methodology, or urban heat islands, or changes in tracking hurricanes (etc).
Skimming TFA, I found myself wondering if we might not have hired a few wingnuts into the EPA during the Bush years. "No warming in 11 years", in particular, is a wingnut claim.
And with a PhD in Economics, he's not a climate scientist.
Stealing an election, while not uncommon, is not a good thing, and it isn't on Mousavi's resume yet.
This is at least a good reason to root against Ahmadinejad and the people who helped him pull this off.
The "daydream" part is that people are mighty resistant to changing their priorities. Consider US energy consumption -- we could make substantial changes in very little time, if we simply changed our diet (eat less meat; replace mammal meat with bird meat). No money investment required in buying a new fuel-efficient car, no time/skill/exercise investment required in using a bike to get around instead of a car). Just change your diet -- it would make a huge difference. All the energy spent on producing nitrogen fertilizer to grow corn to grow beef/pork, gone. All the GHGs from that energy, and all the GHGs from the fields, and all the GHGs from the animals and their manure, gone. My understanding is it is of the same magnitude as replacing an SUV with a small car, for each person that does this. See http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~gidon/papers/nutri/nutri.html
If changing priorities were easy, then we could easily set ourselves on a path to not needing to worry about greenhouse gasses -- do the diet change, change building codes to mandate better-insulation in new construction, quit buying oversize cars, get serious about bicycle infrastructure. Not risky, not rocket science, not really a cut in your standard of living, either, but different enough that we've got plenty of resistance to doing it. If you'll notice, lots of research is devoted to finding ways to save energy that don't require that "ordinary people" do so much as lift a finger.
Except that this assumes that pilots are not themselves error-inducing, or at least that the number of crashes caused by pilots is smaller than the number prevented by pilots. That's the problem; even well-trained humans, given enough time, can make boneheaded mistakes. (Of course, this assumes that the guys programming the computers, are infallible:-).
A gazillion years ago, I rode on some airline (Muse? Love? Some weird four letter name) about two days before they were scheduled to shut down, and I guess the pilot just felt like flying figure-8s over the Grand Canyon ("bad weather in Las Vegas", yeah, right).
It was really something, a view like you would not believe, and if we had not been doing our figure-8s over something that impressive, I would have been really pissed, because my tummy was also doing figure-8s.
No kidding. The number of crashes is small, the number where the computer-or-human choice might make a difference is smaller yet. The putdown in the Hudson, I think I give to the human, but that other relatively heroic effort in the past few decades -- where the pilot steered the plane with thrust, not rudder, ultimately crash-landing without complete fatalities -- apparently is NOW handled well by autopilots, probably better than a human could do it. But, at the time, the people programming the autopilots judged total loss of rudder to be too improbable to worry about. Oops.
On the other hand, not making stupid, well-known mistakes, is something computers are really good at.
Having seen all the responses go by, mistaking white materials for white paint, and positing a safety issue when such light-colored roads exist already (in the South, out west, and who knows where else), and believing that a reported temperature increase on Mars (which we measure ever-so-accurately, plus we have so many millenia of data) means that in fact greenhouse gasses have nothing to do with temperature increases on Earth (where our observations are incredibly inaccurate, or so I hear)...
There was also the article, some weeks back, mentioning crocodiles in Florida, and it was great fun to see how confidently people would incorrectly assert that there are no crocodiles in Florida.
I'm not sure we have evidence for "above average". Much more certain, perhaps, but not necessarily more correct.
Demolished in peer review doesn't necessarily mean it is a bad or non-working idea. Certain CS communities have goofy norms; for instance, for a paper on a lock-free queue, I wrote the algorithms with all the necessary barrier points noted (i.e., so it could be used on a real computer). My co-author, with more experience in that conference to which the paper was submitted, said that they had to come out, that these guys prefer an idealized (aka, "non-existent") memory consistency model. The advantage of this approach is that example algorithms work equally well (i.e., not) on all real hardware, instead of having papers with a bias towards the favored memory models of Sparc, PowerPC, or x86.
I can easily imagine a ban on proposals that "aren't TCP", no matter whether they would work or not.
Do you have any evidence for this claim? Hint: I'm in local town meeting, I go to local government meetings. We have multi-decade plans for water/sewer upgrades; we completed (I think) a multi-year plan to remove old leaded supply lines; we proposed (but it was voted down) a tax increase to fund about 20 years of gradual road repair and upgrade -- instead, we have embarked on a policy of a letting our roads rot over the next few decades, but it is not a short-term plan.
Our worst problem is that for years, money was saved by deferring, or simply not doing, maintenance, so we have a couple of buildings that are falling apart and need replacement, as well as a town building that was only renovated after polite accessibility requests failed, after years passed, after the court case was lost, and after the judge got mad. Again, not really short term, unless you view it as a consistent policy of cutting spending the short term, and "tomorrow is another day" for the future.
You don't just raise the carbon tax, and leave everything else alone. The tax goal is a certain amount of money, with a certain degree of progressive skew to who is taxed. If you increase the carbon tax, you might also give everyone a tax credit. If you wanted to, you could pretty much just spend your tax credit on the much more expensive gasoline, and carry on as you always did. Or, you might instead use the tax credit to buy a much more efficient car, or to buy a bicycle, or to electrify your existing bicycle, or to rent someplace much closer to where you work.
Cellulose is close-but-no-cigar -- hence all the rah-rah about research to produce "cellulosic ethanol". However, some portion of the root is starch (used in Japanese and/or Chinese cooking, I think), and surely we can just burn the leaves to produce energy in power plants.
Slashdot Mirror
But the vast majority of people are "idiots" ....
There, I fixed it.
Really? How many fatalities per year?
And what does illegal have to do with your horn?
Horn means "watch out, safety problem". Didn't they teach you that in driver's ed? "Get out of the way" is a siren with flashing lights.
Wow! Automation. Word processing. I had never imagined the computers were capable of such a thing.
Next you'll be telling me that they can automatically spot spelling errors, and wrap text at an 80-character margin.
He's still a better man. The guys who sent him the letter have shit for evidence, they're just trolling for a juridisction. Of course, if he wanted to properly screw them over, he wouldn't tell them squat, but would tip off the opposing lawyers on this matter. They'd be HAPPY to point this out, in a professional manner, when it would do the maximum actual damage to the other jerk lawyers' case. Fraudulent jurisdiction shopping, there's bound to be some penalty for that.
I double-dog-dare you to make fun of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and his noodly appendages.
not knowing much more about your situation, I might suggest biking. It has the advantage of you can get some use out of your exercise time (depending on whether it is practical for your commute, for your shopping, etc). It is lower impact than walking, higher impact than swimming, but you can monkey with lots of settings (saddle height/angle/fore-aft, crank length, "tread" or Q factor, foot position on pedal) to help your ankle out.
I should add, biking 50miles/week doesn't do that much for my weight, though I feel great. If I crank it up to 100/week (or more), I start to experience some of that craving you are talking about (ooooh, chicken fat, tasty, ummmm).
And oddly enough, we perceive a problem in the small car, not the large one.
I'm guessing echolocation. Avoiding cars (except those sneaky Priuses) is easy, they're noisy as hell. And since lots of bikers run red lights anyway, who's going to notice one more? A blind biker at least as a really good excuse.
Short answer is, "Antarctica's different". It's bigger, it's whiter (hence, less conversion of non-IR to IR in the first place), it's "always" been colder, and it hasn't got an ocean under its middle. Beyond that, I am not enough of a climate scientist to know.
And do note, I consider also the advance in the CO2 rise at the Mauna Loa data, earlier river melts, and earlier tree blooms as part of the historical data. It's not just the Arctic. (You're focusing on ocean temperatures, I'm trying to look at time-integrated data where the measurement methodology remains constant. I don't think we can have complete confidence in any of these measurements -- ocean currents change (El Nino, La Nina), we don't have long-term samples over all of the ocean at multiple depths, etc. -- and there's bound to be wacky influences on the historical data).
I mentioned hurricanes only because it is an embarrassing part of the popular GW noise. The year we had Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, looked darn unusual, but because we don't have good aircraft data going all the way back to the 1900s (it does go back surprisingly far -- and the aircraft matter more than the satellites) we cannot even say for sure that it was in fact that unusual, let alone that it was a consequence of global warming. (Those storms' peak intensities were all observed offshore; no ship would have survived to report them.)
I note also that the saturation issue has been known for some time, and one assumes that this is therefore part of any modern climate models, and that if that particular IR band were indeed completely saturated, that they would pack up their computational toys and go home. I know some climate scientists, I've corresponded with others, they're not stupid (whereas, a statistical sampling of SlashDot posts would not result in the same conclusion, see "THEIR R NO KRODILZ IN FLORIDA U MORAN!" posts from a month or so back).
1998 was a very warm year; it's not that outlandish not to have exceeded it yet. I'm not thrilled at the delightful amounts of noisiness in the data, or the additional knobs that we are discovering (soot warmed ice, haze-cooled earth). We also have the problem that the field itself has gotten very noisy, and there is plenty of money that depends on what policies we end up with, and that money is funding noise.
Nonetheless, to simply pick the warmest year yet from a noisy warming series, and claim that failure to exceed it (yet) casts doubt on global warming, is a wingnut argument.
What convinces me is three things: the historical information (river melt dates, flower blooming dates, advancing CO2 dip each year in the Hawaiian data); the melting ice (Greenland, arctic ice cap, glaciers) tell us that things are indeed getting warmer; and the basic mechanism -- CO2 is a greenhouse gas, you would expect it to have an effect. The historical info and the glacier melts are relatively independent of changes in temperature measurement methodology, or urban heat islands, or changes in tracking hurricanes (etc).
It's an observation of noisy data. What makes it a wingnut claim is that we haven't exceeded the warmest year ever, yet.
Skimming TFA, I found myself wondering if we might not have hired a few wingnuts into the EPA during the Bush years. "No warming in 11 years", in particular, is a wingnut claim. And with a PhD in Economics, he's not a climate scientist.
Stealing an election, while not uncommon, is not a good thing, and it isn't on Mousavi's resume yet. This is at least a good reason to root against Ahmadinejad and the people who helped him pull this off.
The "daydream" part is that people are mighty resistant to changing their priorities. Consider US energy consumption -- we could make substantial changes in very little time, if we simply changed our diet (eat less meat; replace mammal meat with bird meat). No money investment required in buying a new fuel-efficient car, no time/skill/exercise investment required in using a bike to get around instead of a car). Just change your diet -- it would make a huge difference. All the energy spent on producing nitrogen fertilizer to grow corn to grow beef/pork, gone. All the GHGs from that energy, and all the GHGs from the fields, and all the GHGs from the animals and their manure, gone. My understanding is it is of the same magnitude as replacing an SUV with a small car, for each person that does this. See http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~gidon/papers/nutri/nutri.html
If changing priorities were easy, then we could easily set ourselves on a path to not needing to worry about greenhouse gasses -- do the diet change, change building codes to mandate better-insulation in new construction, quit buying oversize cars, get serious about bicycle infrastructure. Not risky, not rocket science, not really a cut in your standard of living, either, but different enough that we've got plenty of resistance to doing it. If you'll notice, lots of research is devoted to finding ways to save energy that don't require that "ordinary people" do so much as lift a finger.
pilots, to handle things we can't plan for
:-).
Except that this assumes that pilots are not themselves error-inducing, or at least that the number of crashes caused by pilots is smaller than the number prevented by pilots. That's the problem; even well-trained humans, given enough time, can make boneheaded mistakes. (Of course, this assumes that the guys programming the computers, are infallible
A gazillion years ago, I rode on some airline (Muse? Love? Some weird four letter name) about two days before they were scheduled to shut down, and I guess the pilot just felt like flying figure-8s over the Grand Canyon ("bad weather in Las Vegas", yeah, right).
It was really something, a view like you would not believe, and if we had not been doing our figure-8s over something that impressive, I would have been really pissed, because my tummy was also doing figure-8s.
No kidding. The number of crashes is small, the number where the computer-or-human choice might make a difference is smaller yet. The putdown in the Hudson, I think I give to the human, but that other relatively heroic effort in the past few decades -- where the pilot steered the plane with thrust, not rudder, ultimately crash-landing without complete fatalities -- apparently is NOW handled well by autopilots, probably better than a human could do it. But, at the time, the people programming the autopilots judged total loss of rudder to be too improbable to worry about. Oops.
On the other hand, not making stupid, well-known mistakes, is something computers are really good at.
Having seen all the responses go by, mistaking white materials for white paint, and positing a safety issue when such light-colored roads exist already (in the South, out west, and who knows where else), and believing that a reported temperature increase on Mars (which we measure ever-so-accurately, plus we have so many millenia of data) means that in fact greenhouse gasses have nothing to do with temperature increases on Earth (where our observations are incredibly inaccurate, or so I hear)...
There was also the article, some weeks back, mentioning crocodiles in Florida, and it was great fun to see how confidently people would incorrectly assert that there are no crocodiles in Florida.
I'm not sure we have evidence for "above average". Much more certain, perhaps, but not necessarily more correct.
I wondered about this myself. Sagans and Sagans of international encrypted BitTorrent traffic, it just seems to me this cannot make the NSA happy.
Demolished in peer review doesn't necessarily mean it is a bad or non-working idea. Certain CS communities have goofy norms; for instance, for a paper on a lock-free queue, I wrote the algorithms with all the necessary barrier points noted (i.e., so it could be used on a real computer). My co-author, with more experience in that conference to which the paper was submitted, said that they had to come out, that these guys prefer an idealized (aka, "non-existent") memory consistency model. The advantage of this approach is that example algorithms work equally well (i.e., not) on all real hardware, instead of having papers with a bias towards the favored memory models of Sparc, PowerPC, or x86.
I can easily imagine a ban on proposals that "aren't TCP", no matter whether they would work or not.
Do you have any evidence for this claim? Hint: I'm in local town meeting, I go to local government meetings. We have multi-decade plans for water/sewer upgrades; we completed (I think) a multi-year plan to remove old leaded supply lines; we proposed (but it was voted down) a tax increase to fund about 20 years of gradual road repair and upgrade -- instead, we have embarked on a policy of a letting our roads rot over the next few decades, but it is not a short-term plan.
Our worst problem is that for years, money was saved by deferring, or simply not doing, maintenance, so we have a couple of buildings that are falling apart and need replacement, as well as a town building that was only renovated after polite accessibility requests failed, after years passed, after the court case was lost, and after the judge got mad. Again, not really short term, unless you view it as a consistent policy of cutting spending the short term, and "tomorrow is another day" for the future.
Net zero gas tax sounds great. They propose to reduce income taxes with tax credits at the bottom, right? :-)
You don't just raise the carbon tax, and leave everything else alone. The tax goal is a certain amount of money, with a certain degree of progressive skew to who is taxed. If you increase the carbon tax, you might also give everyone a tax credit. If you wanted to, you could pretty much just spend your tax credit on the much more expensive gasoline, and carry on as you always did. Or, you might instead use the tax credit to buy a much more efficient car, or to buy a bicycle, or to electrify your existing bicycle, or to rent someplace much closer to where you work.
Cellulose is close-but-no-cigar -- hence all the rah-rah about research to produce "cellulosic ethanol". However, some portion of the root is starch (used in Japanese and/or Chinese cooking, I think), and surely we can just burn the leaves to produce energy in power plants.