The NASA paper does not say that Sandy was not influenced by climate change. What they actually calculate is that Sandy-like hurricanes occur once in 700 years under pre-industrial conditions. Here is one of many relevant quotes:
The fact that our calculations show Sandy’s track to be so rare under long-term average climate conditions lends support to a climate-change influence. On the other hand, the most recent climate model simulations project reductions in blocking frequency in a warmer climate [Dunn-Sigouin and Son, 2012]. Global high-resolution models suggest that tropical cyclone frequency will decrease globally, while mean intensity will increase. There is growing consensus that the most intense events will increase in frequency, but there is high uncertainty, especially in individual basins [Knutson et al., 2010]. On the other hand, further sea level rise is almost certain, with a meter or more expected in the next century [Nicholls and Cazenave, 2010]. This will exacerbate TC-induced flooding even if the storms themselves do not change.
OK, so people are trying to argue that this paper supports one view or another in a trivial manner. I don't think it's that simple.
I can't even being to interpret what this means without a lot more reading. I'm not even sure I know all the questions that need to be asked. But here's a couple which occur to me immediately...
1. This is a new method of measuring ice loss, and from what I can tell is rather hard to interpret given the interacting phenomena. There are long established methods which are far simpler - most obviously measuring the speed of ice flow. Does this new paper bring ice loss estimates into line with estimates from traditional methods, or does it contradict the estimates from traditional methods?
2. Even ignoring that question, ice loss contributes to sea level rise, which is also being observed. If less sea level rise can be attributed to ice loss, does that therefore mean that more must be attributed to thermal expansion, thus increasing estimates the rate at which the earth is absorbing and storing energy? (I think the answer to this one is that the ice-loss contribution is minimal and so the change is also minimal, but it needs checking.)
Yes, I feel perfectly safe. The energy is just as dangerous as the vast amounts of nuclear energy stored in the atomic nuclei of the apple sitting on my desk.
I suspect it is completely useless to batteries, unfortunately. To 'charge' the material you need a diamond anvil cell capable of generating a million atmospheres.
It's not clear to me if they've even got a way of releasing the energy (is the compressed form stable?). If they have, then you're going to have to generate electricity from the mechanical expansion of a solid. The most obvious way we achieve that currently is a coiled spring, which probably won't work in this case.
"The science PROVES it - along with several other things"
No, damnit, science does not prove anything. Furthermore, science cannot prove OR disprove a damn thing that happens in the bible. Scientific theories are basically educated guesses that are tested through experimentation and thus can only be disproved by an experiment in which the hypothesis does not hold. It doesn't matter how many experiments are consistent with the hypothesis, it is never PROVEN because there's the possibility that an experiment will disprove it in the future.
Uh, you realise that there have been philosophers of science since Popper, don't you? Kuhn and Feyerbrand for example. O'Hear has a good overview from Bacon to the current day.
Religion and science are two entirely separate things...... The two are diametrically opposed.
I think that one of the world's top evolutionary biologists, Steven Jay Gould, might disagree with you there.
"So, I need to put my brain in the trash bin to have a religion?" Yes, because believing in any religion requires believing in things with no evidence to support their existence, which is stupid.
Ah, think what Bacon, Kepler, Linnaeus, Faraday, Babbage, Maxwell, Kelvin, or Plank might have achieved had they not put their brains in the trash!
In the UK we have lots of 'speed warning' signs. When you approach them, if you are exceeding the speed limit, they light up and tell you (and anyone behind you) how fast you are going. And that's all. No penalties. They seem to make a significant difference in residuntial areas. I think they are often paid for by the local community rather than the state.
In Portugal I saw a cute system - if you pass a sensor driving faster than the speed limit, then a traffic signal 200yards/metres down the road turns red for 10 seconds, making you (and again anyone behind you) stop.
The psychology behind these systems is interesting - both rely on shaming you in front of other drivers. The Portugese system goes further and makes other drivers angry with you for speeding.
Absolutely! I'm flabbergasted!
The US commercial air fleet could be grounded for days at a time during the next sunspot maximum (probably around 2015).
NFN (Normal for Netherlands).
I've seen people riding with ladders, and lawn furniture. Carrying a passenger on the rear carrier is normal too (illegal in the UK).
It's a great place to cycle though. You can go anywhere by bike, often avoiding roads completely.
Re:Great, still doesn't fix the Houston problem.
on
The Year of the E-Bicycle
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
York is good too. York actually has a higher proportion of resident cycle commuters than Cambridge, but Cambridge wins out during term time due to the student population.
The fact that both are old citied and the narrow streets would gridlock immediately if everyone tried to drive, is also a factor. Once when cycling across York I beat an ambulance with it's sirens going (and I obey traffic lights, unlike some).
I understand that peer-review used to be the response of the scientific community to a piece of work over a period of years, sometimes decades.
However, since the rise of the scientific journal as the major means of scientific publication and the implementation of "peer review" as part of the publication process, it has come to mean (among most members of the public and also many members of the scientific community) the review of a paper by 2 or 3 scientists who may be qualified to comment on some portion of the work, but certainly don't have time to do their own experiments, re-analyze the data, do further work to test the results of the paper in new ways, or do new original work depending on the paper.
I think this is a major problem for the public perception of science, because it gives the public an unrealistic impression of how scientific results are validated. The fact that many scientists have also adopted this mistaken usage may also be harmful because it perpetuates the misleading usage.
...at least as presented in the article, which frequently assumes that the text of a communication carries its meaning. The article keeps hinting at the problems, but comes back to the position that you just to make more links with more text. That's simply not true, and shows a rather understanding of the nature of language.
The meaning of a piece if a communication involves not just the text, but the specific context (who is the source, who is the recipient), the social context, and the cultural context.
For an example of the first - a 8 year old who says "I'm going to shoot her" (especially if the context is a game of cops and robbers) should be understood differently to an adult to says the same thing. And the meaning also varies depending on whether the adult is a photographer or not, and whether 'her' refers to a model or an ex-wife. None of these things may be made explicit anywhere in a any intercepted communication.
As another example, a description of a gory murder by a wild animal carries a very different meaning if the text starts with the words "Once upon a time".
You can't separate text, meaning and culture and consciousness. Which is why the problem of interpreting natural language is so hard; harder than even the article author seems to acknowledge.
None of them are really pay-as-you-go if you read the fine-print - they are more accurately called rolling monthly contracts. (ie. any credit you buy will expire within the month, you just aren't tied in to a 12/18 month contract.)
Not true. I've had 5 PAYG phones now, and I've never had a contract like you describe. I only use my phone for emergencies, so I top it up with £10 about once a year, and the credit never expires. My last phone (which died last month) was with O2, my new one is Tesco mobile.
If you bought a rolling monthly contract labelled as a PAYG, then it was being mis-sold.
Orbital dynamics is rather unlikely to be the problem, given the vast pool of data to support it.
Our understanding of the tidal interactions between planets and stars, which is the basis of the expected orbital decay, requires rather more levels of inference and are based on considerably more tenuous data. This is where I would be looking for the problems.
For comparison, WASP-18b's infall timescale is an order of magnitude shorter than that of the much-discussed OGLE-TR-56b6, 7 (assuming that Q is the same for both), and gives a current rate of period change of â"0.00073 (106/Q) s/yr. For low values of Q this would accumulate to a detectable change in transit epoch in less than a decade (for Q = 106 the transit time shifts by 28 s after 10 yr, which compares with a currently achievable timing accuracy of 5 s). Thus WASP-18b is a diagnostic planet, either (for a low Q) being an exceptionally rare object in which the tidal decay is directly measurable, or forcing a reappraisal to much higher Q values; either way it will help establish the dynamical ages of the class of hot-Jupiter planets. WASP-18 will also help constrain our understanding of stellar interiors, given that the Q value depends on the dissipation of interior waves excited by the tidal forcing.
So if the orbit is decaying, we'll be able to measure it in 10 years, otherwise there will be useful data to refine theories about tidal forces in the surfaces of stars.
The term "Intelligent Design Creationism" seems to me a little unhelpful.
Intelligent design and (young earth) creationism are in general rather distinct, although the rather large differences are sometimes blurred both by proponents trying to gather support and by opponents who want to simply ridicule both groups instead of trying to reason with them. In order to argue effectively against either of them, you must first identify which of the viewpoints the other party is proposing. Otherwise you just end up talking past one another, which is OK for scoring points with the peanut gallery but does nothing to advance the debate.
(I guess someone will argue that there is no point reasoning with either group. However, in any public forum there will often be someone who is prepared to listen to a carefully constructed argument. On the other hand, this is the internet.)
The best audio compression algorithms require on modelling the way we perceive sound - and produce better results (as evaluated by users) than simple wavelet compression.
In the same way I suspect that the best image compression algorithms (for the purposes of viewing) will model how we see images, rather than just relying on any particular mathematical algorithm. I think this approach has significant promise as an image compression algorithm because we probably do see things in terms of regions of colour.
Lets do a crude calculation: the image presented involves 50 polygons. Assume 9 points/poly, 2x2byte coords per point, plus 4 bytes for rgb/alpha = 40 bytes per polygon. That's 2K for the whole image, even without any clever compression of the resulting bitstream.
If I take the same image and turn it into a jpeg (which is not a wavelet method, but has some similarities to one) in gimp at 20% quality then is about 2.3K, so the approach is already competitive.
But the interesting thing is what will happen if we make the image larger. I suspect the polygon method is going to scale rather better than the jpeg approach.
It might be possible to make a lossless compression algorithm from it though by using the polygons to make an approximate image, and then calculating deltas between the polygon image and the original image.
Then you use lossless compression on the delta image. Maybe it will compress smaller than the original minus the polygon info.
Hmm... That would work with any lossy algorithm wouldn't it? So from the fast that people don't already do this, I guess it doesn't work. Oh well.
The lack of player elimination doesn't mean that that is no competition - just that everyone gets to play to the end. Even if you are out of the race to win, you can still play to acheive the best result you can.
Good examples include:
Chinatown: We play this instead of Monopoly. Unlike Monopoly, the game is fixed length (6 turns), and everyone plays to the end. The person who makes the smartest trades usually wins, although lucky deals sometimes affect the result. However, you often don't know who that is until you count the money at the end.
Vinci: We play this instead of Risk - and unusually for a Eurogame it does involve direct conflict. However, instead of playing a single civilization, you play several in succession - part of the strategy involves deciding when to let your current civilization decline and bring on a new one. You also get to pick the special abilities of the new civilization from a limited menu - making the right choice depends on the board.
Chinatown and Vinci give much of the feel of Monopoly and Risk, but they play in 90 minutes and end before anyone gets bored. I find them both more thought provoking.
Having said that, a strong case can be made that the Eurogames genre was founded by an American designer: Sid Sackson, whose games include classics like Acquire and Can't Stop.
If you go to the article on WIRED, you are presented with the text accompanied by a picture of a shiny new boeing airliner. Presumably we are supposed to infer that the picture shows the aircraft concerned, perhaps rendered using CGI? In fact, mouseover the image and a balloon help pops up saying 'dreamliner', and the file is called "dreamliner.jpg".
However if I'm not very much mistaken, the picture is not a 787/dreamliner, but rather a Boeing 737/700 - a much smaller jet made mostly from more conventional materials. In fact, it's the same image used on the 737 wikipedia page. Careless journalism from WIRED too, perhaps?
OK, you'll have to explain it to me. Neither the slashdot story, the linked article, or the scientific research are by someone called 'kdawson'. However there is a slashdot called 'kdawson'.
So I'm guessing you are alledging that 'i_like_spam' is a sock puppet of 'kdawson'. Is that right, or have I got the wrong end of the stick?
I note that 'etcetera' makes a similar comment a few posts further down.
Slashdot Mirror
The NASA paper does not say that Sandy was not influenced by climate change. What they actually calculate is that Sandy-like hurricanes occur once in 700 years under pre-industrial conditions. Here is one of many relevant quotes:
Someone should have RTFA.
Nearly. I think the canonical form for this name would be:
OK, so people are trying to argue that this paper supports one view or another in a trivial manner. I don't think it's that simple.
I can't even being to interpret what this means without a lot more reading. I'm not even sure I know all the questions that need to be asked. But here's a couple which occur to me immediately...
1. This is a new method of measuring ice loss, and from what I can tell is rather hard to interpret given the interacting phenomena. There are long established methods which are far simpler - most obviously measuring the speed of ice flow. Does this new paper bring ice loss estimates into line with estimates from traditional methods, or does it contradict the estimates from traditional methods?
2. Even ignoring that question, ice loss contributes to sea level rise, which is also being observed. If less sea level rise can be attributed to ice loss, does that therefore mean that more must be attributed to thermal expansion, thus increasing estimates the rate at which the earth is absorbing and storing energy? (I think the answer to this one is that the ice-loss contribution is minimal and so the change is also minimal, but it needs checking.)
The 369 signatories (377 now) are all MEPs (members of the European Parliament). 369 is significant because it is a majority of the eligible votes.
The linked page is just one of the relevant pages - you have to follow the links on the left to get at the rest. Here's a couple of interesting pages:
http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/Written_Declaration_12/2010_signatories_list
http://www.laquadrature.net/en/ACTA
Yes, I feel perfectly safe. The energy is just as dangerous as the vast amounts of nuclear energy stored in the atomic nuclei of the apple sitting on my desk.
It's not clear to me if they've even got a way of releasing the energy (is the compressed form stable?). If they have, then you're going to have to generate electricity from the mechanical expansion of a solid. The most obvious way we achieve that currently is a coiled spring, which probably won't work in this case.
As the article says, this is basic science.
"The science PROVES it - along with several other things" No, damnit, science does not prove anything. Furthermore, science cannot prove OR disprove a damn thing that happens in the bible. Scientific theories are basically educated guesses that are tested through experimentation and thus can only be disproved by an experiment in which the hypothesis does not hold. It doesn't matter how many experiments are consistent with the hypothesis, it is never PROVEN because there's the possibility that an experiment will disprove it in the future.
Uh, you realise that there have been philosophers of science since Popper, don't you? Kuhn and Feyerbrand for example. O'Hear has a good overview from Bacon to the current day.
Religion and science are two entirely separate things. ..... The two are diametrically opposed.
I think that one of the world's top evolutionary biologists, Steven Jay Gould, might disagree with you there.
"So, I need to put my brain in the trash bin to have a religion?" Yes, because believing in any religion requires believing in things with no evidence to support their existence, which is stupid.
Ah, think what Bacon, Kepler, Linnaeus, Faraday, Babbage, Maxwell, Kelvin, or Plank might have achieved had they not put their brains in the trash!
In Portugal I saw a cute system - if you pass a sensor driving faster than the speed limit, then a traffic signal 200yards/metres down the road turns red for 10 seconds, making you (and again anyone behind you) stop.
The psychology behind these systems is interesting - both rely on shaming you in front of other drivers. The Portugese system goes further and makes other drivers angry with you for speeding.
Absolutely! I'm flabbergasted! The US commercial air fleet could be grounded for days at a time during the next sunspot maximum (probably around 2015).
NFN (Normal for Netherlands). I've seen people riding with ladders, and lawn furniture. Carrying a passenger on the rear carrier is normal too (illegal in the UK). It's a great place to cycle though. You can go anywhere by bike, often avoiding roads completely.
York is good too. York actually has a higher proportion of resident cycle commuters than Cambridge, but Cambridge wins out during term time due to the student population. The fact that both are old citied and the narrow streets would gridlock immediately if everyone tried to drive, is also a factor. Once when cycling across York I beat an ambulance with it's sirens going (and I obey traffic lights, unlike some).
I understand that peer-review used to be the response of the scientific community to a piece of work over a period of years, sometimes decades.
However, since the rise of the scientific journal as the major means of scientific publication and the implementation of "peer review" as part of the publication process, it has come to mean (among most members of the public and also many members of the scientific community) the review of a paper by 2 or 3 scientists who may be qualified to comment on some portion of the work, but certainly don't have time to do their own experiments, re-analyze the data, do further work to test the results of the paper in new ways, or do new original work depending on the paper.
I think this is a major problem for the public perception of science, because it gives the public an unrealistic impression of how scientific results are validated. The fact that many scientists have also adopted this mistaken usage may also be harmful because it perpetuates the misleading usage.
The meaning of a piece if a communication involves not just the text, but the specific context (who is the source, who is the recipient), the social context, and the cultural context.
For an example of the first - a 8 year old who says "I'm going to shoot her" (especially if the context is a game of cops and robbers) should be understood differently to an adult to says the same thing. And the meaning also varies depending on whether the adult is a photographer or not, and whether 'her' refers to a model or an ex-wife. None of these things may be made explicit anywhere in a any intercepted communication.
As another example, a description of a gory murder by a wild animal carries a very different meaning if the text starts with the words "Once upon a time".
You can't separate text, meaning and culture and consciousness. Which is why the problem of interpreting natural language is so hard; harder than even the article author seems to acknowledge.
None of them are really pay-as-you-go if you read the fine-print - they are more accurately called rolling monthly contracts. (ie. any credit you buy will expire within the month, you just aren't tied in to a 12/18 month contract.)
Not true. I've had 5 PAYG phones now, and I've never had a contract like you describe. I only use my phone for emergencies, so I top it up with £10 about once a year, and the credit never expires. My last phone (which died last month) was with O2, my new one is Tesco mobile. If you bought a rolling monthly contract labelled as a PAYG, then it was being mis-sold.
Orbital dynamics is rather unlikely to be the problem, given the vast pool of data to support it. Our understanding of the tidal interactions between planets and stars, which is the basis of the expected orbital decay, requires rather more levels of inference and are based on considerably more tenuous data. This is where I would be looking for the problems.
So if the orbit is decaying, we'll be able to measure it in 10 years, otherwise there will be useful data to refine theories about tidal forces in the surfaces of stars.
Intelligent design and (young earth) creationism are in general rather distinct, although the rather large differences are sometimes blurred both by proponents trying to gather support and by opponents who want to simply ridicule both groups instead of trying to reason with them. In order to argue effectively against either of them, you must first identify which of the viewpoints the other party is proposing. Otherwise you just end up talking past one another, which is OK for scoring points with the peanut gallery but does nothing to advance the debate.
(I guess someone will argue that there is no point reasoning with either group. However, in any public forum there will often be someone who is prepared to listen to a carefully constructed argument. On the other hand, this is the internet.)
Comic sans may have its detractors, but it is more readable for dyslexics than many, see for example dyslexic.com, British Dyslexia Association, Wikipedia.
I disagree.
The best audio compression algorithms require on modelling the way we perceive sound - and produce better results (as evaluated by users) than simple wavelet compression.
In the same way I suspect that the best image compression algorithms (for the purposes of viewing) will model how we see images, rather than just relying on any particular mathematical algorithm. I think this approach has significant promise as an image compression algorithm because we probably do see things in terms of regions of colour.
Lets do a crude calculation: the image presented involves 50 polygons. Assume 9 points/poly, 2x2byte coords per point, plus 4 bytes for rgb/alpha = 40 bytes per polygon. That's 2K for the whole image, even without any clever compression of the resulting bitstream.
If I take the same image and turn it into a jpeg (which is not a wavelet method, but has some similarities to one) in gimp at 20% quality then is about 2.3K, so the approach is already competitive.
But the interesting thing is what will happen if we make the image larger. I suspect the polygon method is going to scale rather better than the jpeg approach.
Just to check I understand your method:
The final image in your demonstration (i.e. after 2.5 million generations) is the sum of 2.5 million circles?
It might be possible to make a lossless compression algorithm from it though by using the polygons to make an approximate image, and then calculating deltas between the polygon image and the original image.
Then you use lossless compression on the delta image. Maybe it will compress smaller than the original minus the polygon info.
Hmm... That would work with any lossy algorithm wouldn't it? So from the fast that people don't already do this, I guess it doesn't work. Oh well.
Good examples include:
- Chinatown: We play this instead of Monopoly. Unlike Monopoly, the game is fixed length (6 turns), and everyone plays to the end. The person who makes the smartest trades usually wins, although lucky deals sometimes affect the result. However, you often don't know who that is until you count the money at the end.
- Vinci: We play this instead of Risk - and unusually for a Eurogame it does involve direct conflict. However, instead of playing a single civilization, you play several in succession - part of the strategy involves deciding when to let your current civilization decline and bring on a new one. You also get to pick the special abilities of the new civilization from a limited menu - making the right choice depends on the board.
Chinatown and Vinci give much of the feel of Monopoly and Risk, but they play in 90 minutes and end before anyone gets bored. I find them both more thought provoking.Having said that, a strong case can be made that the Eurogames genre was founded by an American designer: Sid Sackson, whose games include classics like Acquire and Can't Stop.
If you go to the article on WIRED, you are presented with the text accompanied by a picture of a shiny new boeing airliner. Presumably we are supposed to infer that the picture shows the aircraft concerned, perhaps rendered using CGI? In fact, mouseover the image and a balloon help pops up saying 'dreamliner', and the file is called "dreamliner.jpg".
However if I'm not very much mistaken, the picture is not a 787/dreamliner, but rather a Boeing 737/700 - a much smaller jet made mostly from more conventional materials. In fact, it's the same image used on the 737 wikipedia page. Careless journalism from WIRED too, perhaps?
Doh! Thanks!
OK, you'll have to explain it to me. Neither the slashdot story, the linked article, or the scientific research are by someone called 'kdawson'. However there is a slashdot called 'kdawson'.
So I'm guessing you are alledging that 'i_like_spam' is a sock puppet of 'kdawson'. Is that right, or have I got the wrong end of the stick?
I note that 'etcetera' makes a similar comment a few posts further down.