Given that the Maunder minimum led to global cooling, killing off (every last man, woman and child) in the -then- populated Greenland, almost a million people, and caused a number of famines everywhere else, I sure hope so
That's not only wrong, it's nonsense! First, the Norse Settlement died out in the early to middle Fifteenth Century, two hundred years before the Maunder Minimum or the journal you cite. Second, the colony never exceeded a population of about 4500 or so. Not only couldn't the land have supported the million you claim, if you tried to stuff that many people into the sites of the two settlements, they'd be standing on each other's toes.
...are destined to repeat it. I can remember, back in the early '80s, when computer games on floppies (remember them?) were "protected" by weird copy protection schemes, including scrambling the directory so that if you tried to copy the files you'd just get garbage. There were even games that blanked the directory as part of their startup, only re-writing it at the end, so that if you removed the disk before the game was over, you lost everything. It didn't last, because, among other things, people always found ways around it. Now, Blizzard is learning that old lesson Yet Again: copy protection is, and always will be a lost cause.
Good Question. AIUI, we went that far north mostly because Dougout Doug considerably overstepped his authority. This was one of the reasons he got fired.
Actually, no. There've been others, including the war against the Barbary Pirates, the Civil War and Korea. (Remember, in Korea, we were basically fighting to maintain the status quo ante, and for all practical purposes, that's what we ended up with.) WWII gets mentioned so often simply because the issues were very clear, and most people today understand them.
Nick van Rijn explained it this way in one of Poul Anderson's stories: "It's a seller's market, and all we can do is hope they don't use too big a reamer on us."
There's a comment farther down in this thread that explains it, with a link to an interesting article. Basically, it has to do with the way muscle fibers react as the heat up and cool down again.
As is pointed out farther down the thread, the difference has nothing to do with chemistry. If you cut open a steak the moment it comes off of the grill, large amounts of very tasty juice run out onto your plate; give it a few minutes to rest and all that juice stays in the steak, giving it a better flavor.
Obviously. First, a good restaurant chef will time things so that they get done as close to each other as possible. Second, some of the dishes will come off of the stove or out of the oven a bit hotter than the perfect temperature and need a minute or two to cool down; generally, those are plated first, so that by the time everything else is done, they're Just Right.
What if someone showed that 95% of betamax users had at some time infringed copyright (seems quite possible to me).
VHS, quite possibly, but not betamax. The reason VHS won out, even though betamax was higher quality is that a betamax player couldn't act as a recorder; you needed a separate machine for that.
As many others have pointed out, it doesn't matter how many primary colors the set is capable of displaying if the signal only uses three. This reminds me of a scanner I saw about ten years or so ago that was capable of recording scans in a 48-bit mode, if the software was capable of using the extra bits. If (and only if) you looked very closely at the text on the box, you'd see a note that few, if any scanner packages supported 48-bit color. It also didn't tell you that it was highly unlikely that any scanner software would ever support that, because 32-bit color could already encode more colors than the human eye could distinguish. It's possible, I suppose, that there's some kind of scientific use for such a thing, but I doubt that consumer-grade software will ever need it. I suspect that this New! Improved! Shiny! technology is just more of the same.
True, and I'm not qualified to say. However, the impression I got from the quotes from Climategate was that the members of the CRU didn't care if they upheld proper standards, they were going to get them rejected because they didn't like their conclusions. Of course, that's only one layman's opinion. YMMV.
I am not a climate scientist. I don't even play one on Slashdot. I don't claim to be qualified either to refute or to prove those claims. I am, however, pointing out that any time somebody who is, in fact, qualified, claims to have had a contrarian paper rejected for publication, the AGW fanatics attack him like starving piranha.
I was thinking the same thing. Apparently, subverting the peer review process to keep contrarian papers from being published is OK; complaining about it in public is EVIL.
For all practical purposes, my older sister is an Aunt Millie. She fell in love with Ubuntu after five minutes with a LiveCD. I watched her install it, because she wanted me to make sure she wasn't nuking her existing Windows installation. As it turned out, she got everything right on her own, although she asked me once or twice if she was making the right choices.
...natural variability does not preclude such a result
On that, at least, we can agree.
...globally it was not that cold.
One thing I've been wondering: just how do climate scientists calculate the global temperature? How much, if at all, does the set of stations used vary from year to year?
No, I didn't mean that. I meant that after it was clear that the winter was going to be extra cold, there were articles in the press about how climate researchers suddenly came out with the idea that GW caused both hotter summers and colder winters; more of a general case than a specific. (And yes, a highly-specific prediction like that would have been a tad fishy, I'll agree.) It's just that I might actually have been impressed favorably if somebody had come up with the idea three or four years ago that in the long run such a thing would happen. As it is, it looks like AGW is turning into a "theory of everything," so that there's no outcome (except, maybe, a complete lack of change) that the supporters can't claim is proof that it's right. YMMV and clearly does, but that's how it looks to me, and to a number of people I know.
No climate model can start from known conditions 20 years ago and predict what will happen today (as in April 24, 2010 or even the whole year 2010). That's not what they're designed to do.
If they're not designed to be able to extrapolate twenty years, why should we believe what they say about twenty (or more) years into the future? The point is, if they can predict how the climate will change in the future, then giving it conditions in the past should allow them to predict the present. If, as you admit, they can't, why do you think their results about the future are accurate?
What I'm referring to is the way the AGW supporters suddenly started to say that cold winters were caused by Global Warming after we had a cold winter. I might have been impressed if they'd thought of it ahead of time, but as it is, it looks like they're making ad hoc modifications to make it look like it predicts what just happened.
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That's not only wrong, it's nonsense! First, the Norse Settlement died out in the early to middle Fifteenth Century, two hundred years before the Maunder Minimum or the journal you cite. Second, the colony never exceeded a population of about 4500 or so. Not only couldn't the land have supported the million you claim, if you tried to stuff that many people into the sites of the two settlements, they'd be standing on each other's toes.
...are destined to repeat it. I can remember, back in the early '80s, when computer games on floppies (remember them?) were "protected" by weird copy protection schemes, including scrambling the directory so that if you tried to copy the files you'd just get garbage. There were even games that blanked the directory as part of their startup, only re-writing it at the end, so that if you removed the disk before the game was over, you lost everything. It didn't last, because, among other things, people always found ways around it. Now, Blizzard is learning that old lesson Yet Again: copy protection is, and always will be a lost cause.
Good Question. AIUI, we went that far north mostly because Dougout Doug considerably overstepped his authority. This was one of the reasons he got fired.
Actually, no. There've been others, including the war against the Barbary Pirates, the Civil War and Korea. (Remember, in Korea, we were basically fighting to maintain the status quo ante, and for all practical purposes, that's what we ended up with.) WWII gets mentioned so often simply because the issues were very clear, and most people today understand them.
Nick van Rijn explained it this way in one of Poul Anderson's stories: "It's a seller's market, and all we can do is hope they don't use too big a reamer on us."
There's a comment farther down in this thread that explains it, with a link to an interesting article. Basically, it has to do with the way muscle fibers react as the heat up and cool down again.
One question: how many times has each of them been sued by somebody who was falsely accused by a self-proclaimed "media watchdog" company?
As is pointed out farther down the thread, the difference has nothing to do with chemistry. If you cut open a steak the moment it comes off of the grill, large amounts of very tasty juice run out onto your plate; give it a few minutes to rest and all that juice stays in the steak, giving it a better flavor.
Obviously. First, a good restaurant chef will time things so that they get done as close to each other as possible. Second, some of the dishes will come off of the stove or out of the oven a bit hotter than the perfect temperature and need a minute or two to cool down; generally, those are plated first, so that by the time everything else is done, they're Just Right.
If you think that's bad, consider what it would be like living on a Lone Star Planet, AKA A Planet For Texans.
VHS, quite possibly, but not betamax. The reason VHS won out, even though betamax was higher quality is that a betamax player couldn't act as a recorder; you needed a separate machine for that.
As many others have pointed out, it doesn't matter how many primary colors the set is capable of displaying if the signal only uses three. This reminds me of a scanner I saw about ten years or so ago that was capable of recording scans in a 48-bit mode, if the software was capable of using the extra bits. If (and only if) you looked very closely at the text on the box, you'd see a note that few, if any scanner packages supported 48-bit color. It also didn't tell you that it was highly unlikely that any scanner software would ever support that, because 32-bit color could already encode more colors than the human eye could distinguish. It's possible, I suppose, that there's some kind of scientific use for such a thing, but I doubt that consumer-grade software will ever need it. I suspect that this New! Improved! Shiny! technology is just more of the same.
True, and I'm not qualified to say. However, the impression I got from the quotes from Climategate was that the members of the CRU didn't care if they upheld proper standards, they were going to get them rejected because they didn't like their conclusions. Of course, that's only one layman's opinion. YMMV.
I am not a climate scientist. I don't even play one on Slashdot. I don't claim to be qualified either to refute or to prove those claims. I am, however, pointing out that any time somebody who is, in fact, qualified, claims to have had a contrarian paper rejected for publication, the AGW fanatics attack him like starving piranha.
Correction: all of them are fallible. It's just that some of them aren't honest enough to admit it.
I was thinking the same thing. Apparently, subverting the peer review process to keep contrarian papers from being published is OK; complaining about it in public is EVIL.
For all practical purposes, my older sister is an Aunt Millie. She fell in love with Ubuntu after five minutes with a LiveCD. I watched her install it, because she wanted me to make sure she wasn't nuking her existing Windows installation. As it turned out, she got everything right on her own, although she asked me once or twice if she was making the right choices.
I know quite a few Aunt Millies using Ubuntu who'd disagree with you.
Where is this place called "Theory" that you mentioned? Are your company's offices located there? If not, what does it matter what would happen there?
Yes. The Israelis are interested in providing security; the TSA is only interested in providing security kabuki theater.
On that, at least, we can agree.
One thing I've been wondering: just how do climate scientists calculate the global temperature? How much, if at all, does the set of stations used vary from year to year?
No, I didn't mean that. I meant that after it was clear that the winter was going to be extra cold, there were articles in the press about how climate researchers suddenly came out with the idea that GW caused both hotter summers and colder winters; more of a general case than a specific. (And yes, a highly-specific prediction like that would have been a tad fishy, I'll agree.) It's just that I might actually have been impressed favorably if somebody had come up with the idea three or four years ago that in the long run such a thing would happen. As it is, it looks like AGW is turning into a "theory of everything," so that there's no outcome (except, maybe, a complete lack of change) that the supporters can't claim is proof that it's right. YMMV and clearly does, but that's how it looks to me, and to a number of people I know.
If they're not designed to be able to extrapolate twenty years, why should we believe what they say about twenty (or more) years into the future? The point is, if they can predict how the climate will change in the future, then giving it conditions in the past should allow them to predict the present. If, as you admit, they can't, why do you think their results about the future are accurate?
What I'm referring to is the way the AGW supporters suddenly started to say that cold winters were caused by Global Warming after we had a cold winter. I might have been impressed if they'd thought of it ahead of time, but as it is, it looks like they're making ad hoc modifications to make it look like it predicts what just happened.
There's a great reply to that: "Yet."