If your phone produces ionizing radiation you're doin' it wrong.
The concept of a tritium backlight for cellphone is strangely appealing to me. Occasionally you see a promotional bling-phone that costs $50K or whatever which is merely a plain old $200 phone encrusted with $49800 worth of ugly gold and ugly gemstones. But a tritium backlight would be so freaking expensive it probably would be a genuine $100K phone that really internally contains $100K worth of stuff (stuff in this case being H3).
Granite doesn't look good once its got "some wear and tear" and its soooo stereotypical 00's housing bubble (kind of like avocado appliances screamed 70s) that its not cool anymore. So Corian for me.
I'm hardly in the class of FUD'ed WRT to radiation. None the less if I lived in Japan and one farmers market table pinned the needle on my phone and the other one was normal, I'd choose the normal one.
Since this phone apparently contains a 'chip'(quite possibly just a CCD of some sort packaged so that most of the pxel hits can be assumed to be from high energy radiation, possibly something cleverer/more specialized),
Its interesting to speculate about "the chip". I'm guessing a scintillation counter like you're describing would be too complicated and doing the old "count SEU in a bank of ram" trick just isn't sensitive enough at the low end, or at least at a reasonable sample rate. The way I'd design it is a traditional ionization counter by playing wire bond games inside a ceramic chip with the input lead of a really high impedance op-amp, all on one little chip. The trick is building a ionization chamber that is not a microphone or seismometer. Although the phone has a microphone and accelerometer so given enough DSP... Hmm.
Go to google and type in "homemade ionization detector". Most designs are "getting old" and I think modern opamps could do a better job than 30 year old discrete jfets.
Depends on the tech. Those old fashioned static charged human hair things were awful. Geiger tubes used in a high flux environment need it pretty bad. Geigers in general need it... sorta, due to long term gas leakage and quench gas issues. solid state is not nearly as drifty.
Its kind of like measuring length and declaring that since my old gauge block set technically required annual recertification that means no one would ever buy a wooden ruler, because how would be ship them all to Starrett
This phone is a ruse, to captalise by make people think they can manage this. In other words, it is a comfort item, not an actual safety measure
Well thats just foolish, of course its useful if its sample rate is fast enough. I strongly encourage my genetic competitors in the race of evolution to not worry about exposing themselves and their kids to excess radiation.
Hold it over each farmers market table and buy from the one with the lower reading.
Concerned about lifetime exposure? Wave it over a granite countertop and then a corian countertop and tell me which you want in your food prep area.
Its like saying fire extinguishers are a ruse because they make people think they can manage fire, or it improves safety. Well, uh, yeah, it does.
Sure about your numbers? "one micro" is in the background range (which varies from place to place by about two orders of magnitude total), so 0.05 is a pretty good low that will probably never be reached. High enough that bananas won't set it off unless you bake it into a loaf of banana bread, but low enough to tell that you're in a normal area.
I agree the high end is ridiculously low. That thing is going to go bonkers if you have it in your pocket while getting a dental xray. You read stuff on wiki about modern dental xrays being ten micros or so, and that may be the case with a brand new CCD imager blah blah but in ye olden days it was quite a bit more. A mammogram is about a fifty times more (well, think of the volume difference, unless you've got some mighty weird bodily proportions). Wonder if that would burn out the sensor...
I think it's more likely to cause irrational behavior than help.
The only behavior for the general public regarding radiation is irrational behavior.
More FUD! I really do not see what Linus's problem is with the GPL3. What it does is...
... require eighty bazillion historical authors (Linus didn't write every line of code) unfortunately including, I believe, the estate of some dead people and the current IP owners of some dead companies, to relicense their past work as GPL3 or have someone do a psuedo-cleanroom reimplementation of the GPL2 code.
Yes, the GPL3 is better than the GPL2, a little. But linux wasn't written by one dude last week.
Linus could, if he so desired, declare he will no longer accept GPL2 patches or code, and in probably just 10 or 20 years there would be no remaining GPL2 code in the kernel, probably. Aside from whatever personal views Linus has about the GPL3, re licensing linux just isn't going to happen, at least not any time soon.
What can be done to avoid political bias and how do we do it consistently?
Don't write about political topics that are relevant to you?
For example writing about modern civil rights (gay marriage, gun rights, etc) in the USA is going to get a intention and/or unintentional bias from me.
However if I research and report on the political situation in France, where I have no dog in the fight, I'll probably end up pretty much unbiased.
Its a big interconnected world... there's really no reason for locals to have to write biased filler about local issues.
Doesn't have to be geographic. I have no personal interest in the gay marriage thing, not being gay or close to those in their subculture and not being hyper-christian, so I can be extremely unbiased about the topic. This SHOULD work, but it fails anyway, because my completely unbiased view unsurprisingly seems to match the (few) non-cowardly (D) and oppose almost all the neo-(R) so I'll be accused of being "politically biased" based on results, although I obviously don't have any reason to care that would influence the process of writing about it. Think of how everyone naturally decides that slavery was a dumb idea now, but it was a hot political football around 1860 or so in the USA.
There's some other hints, like if you find evidence of sloganeering in your writing you're probably doing it wrong.
3) There are bigger natural climate changes that we need an advanced industrialized civilization to fight
Like what? I'm really interested in this, I've never heard anything like it.
Really? Glacier/Ice Age? It depends a lot on where you live and where you grew up. Where I live, just a couple dozen centuries ago there was 2 miles of ice right where I'm sitting now, which pretty much smashed and completely reshaped the land (which admittedly looks pretty cool, but I wouldn't want to be here while its being reshaped...). It is an absolute guaranteed phenomena that in a couple dozen more centuries where I'm sitting will be covered by two miles of ice again.
Although not "climate" on a longer term there's the natural effects of volcanism, earthquakes, tsunamis... Somewhat rarer is asteroid impacts, solar flares, whatever.
Just to stir the pot, instantly raising the sea level temporarily by a wave in Japan by 20 meters caused horrific loss of life and destruction, but life and civilization has none the less gone on. Now supposedly incredibly slowly raising the sea level by a thousandth that amount is going to destroy civilization and kill us ALL and destroy the earth. Yet I can't help but do some long division and 100K dead in Japan divided by a thousandth the sea level rise is 100 over the course of centuries and across the entire planet... and realize that the rise is so slow that the number is more likely 0. Its a FUD attack, just like 9/11 and the patriot act. We need to completely redesign and socially engineer our world and make the poor poorer and the rich richer and get rid of all our freedoms and increase taxes because there's a terrorist hiding behind every tree stump... or no, wait, because the sea level might (or might not) rise a few cm per century. Its all a stinking pile of FUD by control freaks looking for a rationalization.
Could you name monetary cost or number of people killed that would make it important enough to do something about?
No. And people are notoriously bad at comparing risks. How bout speaking generically a small multiple of current "worse than current weather related death rate of lightning + wind + flooding + hurricanes + tornados + famine" and/or a small multiple of the std deviation of that number (which is likely to be pretty big) . Realizing that "doing something" historically means the politicians F stuff up and the cure is going to kill more than the disease, if those morons are in charge (and they are)
What's your standard for "really bad"?
See above?
What level of proof would you require to decide that a particular event was caused by climate change?
This is like "what level of proof do I need that that life was caused by god" Well, a lot I guess. Get back to me with the analogy of "butterfly wing flaps in Costa Rica leading to tornado in Kansas" Discussing individual events means we're deep into religious belief territory. Precisely which of the 7 mm of rain I got last night were due to 1) global warming 2) butterflies in Costa Rica 3) Angels on head of pin 4) Sinfullness in general However, long term averages and trends ARE fair game.
For instance, if climate change was thought by some to be a possible cause of greater hurricane intensity, what kind of evidence would you need supporting this hypothesis to decide that the costs of the more intense hurricane should be considered part of the cost of climate change?
Thats like the biggest cross cultural engineering project in the history of the world without very much long term historical data. "Housing prices only go up" Well yeah thats true if you're under 40 or so. And you can whip the statistics to prove anything about that. Until the cold hand of reality smack-down.
How about given the immense large standard deviation in the numbers, a couple sigma of observational evidence using a rather large sample size or many sigmas of computer modeling that accurately predicts reality for awhile thus is probably likely to continue to predict reality? Reproduced at a couple facilities?
3) There are bigger natural climate changes that we need an advanced industrialized civilization to fight
Source, please?
Good lord man, any geology textbook written in the last two centuries?
I am not a climate conservative who thinks the average high and low temps have never changed. I live over/near a limestone quarry laid down because my land was a warm semi-tropical sea at one time, and more recently over/near some massive cool glacial features.
I'm not thinking going all pol pot is going to help people cope the next time Mt St Helens explodes. Oddly enough human suffering seems to increase during natural disaster in direct proportion with poverty. So an increase in voluntary poverty will inevitably result in an increase in human suffering during the next natural disaster. I'm not seeing that as a win.
"Nasty, brutish, and short" is not a lifestyle to aspire to.
4) I hate being FUDed so reflexively that I'll fight against the side using FUD, in this case the orthodox climate panic-ers.
That seems like a pretty dumb way of deciding these things.
LOL so if I try to manipulate you using known scammy techniques, you shouldn't hold that against me in general? LOL In that case, it just so turns out I'm a poor Nigerian climate change scientist working in Africa and I'm trying to move TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS from my country to NCAR to pay for a global warming simulation run, but I'm having some trouble getting the cash thru customs, so I was wondering if I could mail you a genuine nigerian personal check for ELEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS and then you could cash it into your account, then you could forward ten
reduction would result in more concrete and observable human agony, poverty, and suffering than the rather theoretical claims of "what might happen"
Another very important point is a voluntary reduction in "human power" might lead to more agony in the long run. Here's what I envision as a worst case scenario: city floods, but due to restrictions we no longer have the fuel or economic power to save the victims... at all. Would you rather have a Katrina thats 5% worse than it actually was, or have another Katrina and not have the overall "human power" anymore to help them at all.
Its the kind of problem that crys out for a game theory discussion, not emotional and political cries.
Hmm OK I'll extend my protocol. Everyone in afghanistan gets EWTN on their TV for one hour per person attacked... every time it happens, even if its during a soccer game or whatever. Or maybe an hour of USA top 40 music on all radio stations per person attacked. Its a cultural attack. We don't like the way their culture treats female people worse than farm animals, we will see how much they enjoy having our culture jammed down their throats every time they act like savages. Either they civilize themselves on their own (preferable), or we subvert their culture with a superior one, that being our own. Either way, as long as we control the transmitters, we win.
Or we could keep doing what we're doing, which results in nothing more than dead brown people and rich defense contractors. I can guess how this is going to turn out.
Oh here's a weird one. Go to www.amazon.com view source look at last line which is a comment "MEOW" what does that mean, I buy furry stuff or what? I remember trying to figure that out, didn't put too much time into it, didn't get too far. Some theories were its inserted by a load balancer, or maybe something suffixes it to the end of all generated pages to prove its not truncated, or...?
"view source" every chance you get, there's weird stuff out there.
My belief was if its got.in email addresses and I can't read it, its hindi. I admit it could have been some other language. I couldn't ID the language, but the notes did contain.in addresses for certain.
You've never seen comments in a HTML file in Hindi?
I don't keep a log of this but I was inspired by a 2600 magazine article to go read the source of webpages. You know, like we used to do in 1996 before GUI programs SUPPOSEDLY made handwritten html obsolete.
Go to www.cnn.com right now, click view source and control f and "less than" "exclamation point" "minus" "minus" and you get an extra life in mario kart... oh just kidding thats the start of a html comment.
I don't think slashcode likes html in comments very much so I'll edit some cut and pastes below from www.cnn.com
" this is where the breaking news CSI code will go " "/cnn TV Promo tool include "
you can learn all kinds of fascinating things about web pages by doing this. The funniest I've seen is financial places that promise to release "The Big Report" at 9am Monday morning to the stock market, but they actually put it up and comment it out a week or two earlier. Come to think of it, thats probably illegal for them to do and me to look at. Hmm.
Anyway back to Hindi.. I don't remember where I've seen it but whatever language it was it contained.in email addresses and just a bunch of stuff.
Also, the current western model of government is not a true democracy, but rather a representative democracy, which is quite different. People do not vote for things, they vote for people.
You have one party, the rich guys party, and two competing PR firms with totally different ad campaigns. Oligarchy not representative democracy or democracy.
Technically I do get to vote locally on local govt education bonds, true, although very limited, direct democracy. I'm told some states sometimes have binding referendums, but I've never experienced that.
Also when I was a kid, we had theoretically non political party local judicial elections, which is true representative democracy, but that was done away with a decade or two ago, and in practice the R's shilled for their candidate and the D's shilled for their candidate anyway. There is no longer a representative democracy where I live.
What guides individual risk perception, on this account, is not the truth of those beliefs but rather their congruence with individuals’ cultural commitments.
Here's the fail. What is this "truth" they're measuring against?
Something like F=ma seems to correlate with education, not so much with culture. I would hazard a guess that indicates F=ma is a scientific topic.
Something like Jesus is the son of god and belief in him results in your salvation seems to correlate much higher with culture than with education. For example even the dumbest redneck from Texas and some scientist from Texas might agree, but a highly educated scientist from TX might disagree with a highly educated scientist from Japan from a non-christian Japanese family. I would hazard a guess that indicates Jesus's parentage is a non-scientific topic.
Along comes "concern over climate change" and there is a wishy washy hand wringy that based on observation its getting a non-scientific response from the general public. You can almost see the literary dancing to avoid suggesting that maybe, just maybe, the PC orthodoxy about the dangers of climate change is, in fact, non-scientific?
Now please don't jump all over me assuming I think humans have no effect or climate change could never matter. I am well aware its occurring. However, 1) I don't think its very important relative to other more pressing concerns. Seriously, it just isn't that important. 2) I think there is nothing to do anyway. We've burned at least a majority of the EROEI positive carbon fuels and nothing really bad has happened. Twice not much is still not much. The closely related semi-permanent economic decline we've been experiencing for a few decades, and will continue to experience, will "naturally" take care of the rest. The TLDR is SUVs don't matter not because we passed enviro laws, but because they'll never be affordable to the masses again. By the time the next credit bubble comes around, maybe 70 years or so, we'll be waaaaay past peak oil, etc, it just won't matter anymore. 3) There are bigger natural climate changes that we need an advanced industrialized civilization to fight 4) I hate being FUDed so reflexively that I'll fight against the side using FUD, in this case the orthodox climate panic-ers.
Their culture is inhumane and should be replaced without qualm or concern. Problem solved. Aside from that, the protocol is simple, build two identical schools on each side of town, each morning flip coin and heads the boys go to the north school, tails the girls go to the north school. Ditto the delivery of water trucks (like last incident) etc.
Hasn't silverlight been abandoned? First release in '07 and according to the wikipedia article the staggering market penetration of 0.3% (thats zero point three, I didn't drop a leading 9 or something...)
Well, as anti-democratic as it sounds to express a heresy like this, "no".
If 90% of the population doesn't want another war, or a bank bailout, its gonna happen anyway if the campaign donors and political hacks want it, as recently proven. A mere 40% of the population has no control over the nation or our politics or our culture.
The people who are politically relevant and culturally influential are the guys donating millions to election campaigns, the party hacks who organize campaigns and advertising and conventions, network news directors, etc...
Scientific response to a single failure: Well, that theory is now known and proven wrong and should be trashed and try a new theory
Religious response to a single failure: Well, our domain merely shrinks to "everything other than this single failure" we're still correct!
Find one verified and provable example where, perhaps, general relativity doesn't "work" and its "wrong" and try another approach. Therefore find one example where a religion doesn't work that means its "wrong" and try something else.
Slashdot Mirror
If your phone produces ionizing radiation you're doin' it wrong.
The concept of a tritium backlight for cellphone is strangely appealing to me. Occasionally you see a promotional bling-phone that costs $50K or whatever which is merely a plain old $200 phone encrusted with $49800 worth of ugly gold and ugly gemstones. But a tritium backlight would be so freaking expensive it probably would be a genuine $100K phone that really internally contains $100K worth of stuff (stuff in this case being H3).
For instance, use one of these if you live near power lines and see if you actually are far enough away from them...
I think you're confusing ionizing and non-ionizing radiation.
Granite doesn't look good once its got "some wear and tear" and its soooo stereotypical 00's housing bubble (kind of like avocado appliances screamed 70s) that its not cool anymore. So Corian for me.
I'm hardly in the class of FUD'ed WRT to radiation. None the less if I lived in Japan and one farmers market table pinned the needle on my phone and the other one was normal, I'd choose the normal one.
Since this phone apparently contains a 'chip'(quite possibly just a CCD of some sort packaged so that most of the pxel hits can be assumed to be from high energy radiation, possibly something cleverer/more specialized),
Its interesting to speculate about "the chip". I'm guessing a scintillation counter like you're describing would be too complicated and doing the old "count SEU in a bank of ram" trick just isn't sensitive enough at the low end, or at least at a reasonable sample rate. The way I'd design it is a traditional ionization counter by playing wire bond games inside a ceramic chip with the input lead of a really high impedance op-amp, all on one little chip. The trick is building a ionization chamber that is not a microphone or seismometer. Although the phone has a microphone and accelerometer so given enough DSP... Hmm.
Go to google and type in "homemade ionization detector". Most designs are "getting old" and I think modern opamps could do a better job than 30 year old discrete jfets.
Depends on the tech. Those old fashioned static charged human hair things were awful. Geiger tubes used in a high flux environment need it pretty bad. Geigers in general need it ... sorta, due to long term gas leakage and quench gas issues. solid state is not nearly as drifty.
Its kind of like measuring length and declaring that since my old gauge block set technically required annual recertification that means no one would ever buy a wooden ruler, because how would be ship them all to Starrett
This phone is a ruse, to captalise by make people think they can manage this. In other words, it is a comfort item, not an actual safety measure
Well thats just foolish, of course its useful if its sample rate is fast enough. I strongly encourage my genetic competitors in the race of evolution to not worry about exposing themselves and their kids to excess radiation.
Hold it over each farmers market table and buy from the one with the lower reading.
Concerned about lifetime exposure? Wave it over a granite countertop and then a corian countertop and tell me which you want in your food prep area.
Its like saying fire extinguishers are a ruse because they make people think they can manage fire, or it improves safety. Well, uh, yeah, it does.
Sure about your numbers? "one micro" is in the background range (which varies from place to place by about two orders of magnitude total), so 0.05 is a pretty good low that will probably never be reached. High enough that bananas won't set it off unless you bake it into a loaf of banana bread, but low enough to tell that you're in a normal area.
I agree the high end is ridiculously low. That thing is going to go bonkers if you have it in your pocket while getting a dental xray. You read stuff on wiki about modern dental xrays being ten micros or so, and that may be the case with a brand new CCD imager blah blah but in ye olden days it was quite a bit more. A mammogram is about a fifty times more (well, think of the volume difference, unless you've got some mighty weird bodily proportions). Wonder if that would burn out the sensor...
I think it's more likely to cause irrational behavior than help.
The only behavior for the general public regarding radiation is irrational behavior.
More FUD! I really do not see what Linus's problem is with the GPL3. What it does is ...
... require eighty bazillion historical authors (Linus didn't write every line of code) unfortunately including, I believe, the estate of some dead people and the current IP owners of some dead companies, to relicense their past work as GPL3 or have someone do a psuedo-cleanroom reimplementation of the GPL2 code.
Yes, the GPL3 is better than the GPL2, a little. But linux wasn't written by one dude last week.
Linus could, if he so desired, declare he will no longer accept GPL2 patches or code, and in probably just 10 or 20 years there would be no remaining GPL2 code in the kernel, probably. Aside from whatever personal views Linus has about the GPL3, re licensing linux just isn't going to happen, at least not any time soon.
What can be done to avoid political bias and how do we do it consistently?
Don't write about political topics that are relevant to you?
For example writing about modern civil rights (gay marriage, gun rights, etc) in the USA is going to get a intention and/or unintentional bias from me.
However if I research and report on the political situation in France, where I have no dog in the fight, I'll probably end up pretty much unbiased.
Its a big interconnected world... there's really no reason for locals to have to write biased filler about local issues.
Doesn't have to be geographic. I have no personal interest in the gay marriage thing, not being gay or close to those in their subculture and not being hyper-christian, so I can be extremely unbiased about the topic. This SHOULD work, but it fails anyway, because my completely unbiased view unsurprisingly seems to match the (few) non-cowardly (D) and oppose almost all the neo-(R) so I'll be accused of being "politically biased" based on results, although I obviously don't have any reason to care that would influence the process of writing about it. Think of how everyone naturally decides that slavery was a dumb idea now, but it was a hot political football around 1860 or so in the USA.
There's some other hints, like if you find evidence of sloganeering in your writing you're probably doing it wrong.
3) There are bigger natural climate changes that we need an advanced industrialized civilization to fight
Like what? I'm really interested in this, I've never heard anything like it.
Really? Glacier/Ice Age? It depends a lot on where you live and where you grew up. Where I live, just a couple dozen centuries ago there was 2 miles of ice right where I'm sitting now, which pretty much smashed and completely reshaped the land (which admittedly looks pretty cool, but I wouldn't want to be here while its being reshaped...). It is an absolute guaranteed phenomena that in a couple dozen more centuries where I'm sitting will be covered by two miles of ice again.
Although not "climate" on a longer term there's the natural effects of volcanism, earthquakes, tsunamis... Somewhat rarer is asteroid impacts, solar flares, whatever.
Just to stir the pot, instantly raising the sea level temporarily by a wave in Japan by 20 meters caused horrific loss of life and destruction, but life and civilization has none the less gone on. Now supposedly incredibly slowly raising the sea level by a thousandth that amount is going to destroy civilization and kill us ALL and destroy the earth. Yet I can't help but do some long division and 100K dead in Japan divided by a thousandth the sea level rise is 100 over the course of centuries and across the entire planet... and realize that the rise is so slow that the number is more likely 0. Its a FUD attack, just like 9/11 and the patriot act. We need to completely redesign and socially engineer our world and make the poor poorer and the rich richer and get rid of all our freedoms and increase taxes because there's a terrorist hiding behind every tree stump... or no, wait, because the sea level might (or might not) rise a few cm per century. Its all a stinking pile of FUD by control freaks looking for a rationalization.
Could you name monetary cost or number of people killed that would make it important enough to do something about?
No. And people are notoriously bad at comparing risks. How bout speaking generically a small multiple of current "worse than current weather related death rate of lightning + wind + flooding + hurricanes + tornados + famine" and/or a small multiple of the std deviation of that number (which is likely to be pretty big) . Realizing that "doing something" historically means the politicians F stuff up and the cure is going to kill more than the disease, if those morons are in charge (and they are)
What's your standard for "really bad"?
See above?
What level of proof would you require to decide that a particular event was caused by climate change?
This is like "what level of proof do I need that that life was caused by god" Well, a lot I guess.
Get back to me with the analogy of "butterfly wing flaps in Costa Rica leading to tornado in Kansas"
Discussing individual events means we're deep into religious belief territory.
Precisely which of the 7 mm of rain I got last night were due to 1) global warming 2) butterflies in Costa Rica 3) Angels on head of pin 4) Sinfullness in general
However, long term averages and trends ARE fair game.
For instance, if climate change was thought by some to be a possible cause of greater hurricane intensity, what kind of evidence would you need supporting this hypothesis to decide that the costs of the more intense hurricane should be considered part of the cost of climate change?
Thats like the biggest cross cultural engineering project in the history of the world without very much long term historical data.
"Housing prices only go up" Well yeah thats true if you're under 40 or so. And you can whip the statistics to prove anything about that. Until the cold hand of reality smack-down.
How about given the immense large standard deviation in the numbers, a couple sigma of observational evidence using a rather large sample size or many sigmas of computer modeling that accurately predicts reality for awhile thus is probably likely to continue to predict reality? Reproduced at a couple facilities?
3) There are bigger natural climate changes that we need an advanced industrialized civilization to fight
Source, please?
Good lord man, any geology textbook written in the last two centuries?
I am not a climate conservative who thinks the average high and low temps have never changed. I live over/near a limestone quarry laid down because my land was a warm semi-tropical sea at one time, and more recently over/near some massive cool glacial features.
I'm not thinking going all pol pot is going to help people cope the next time Mt St Helens explodes. Oddly enough human suffering seems to increase during natural disaster in direct proportion with poverty. So an increase in voluntary poverty will inevitably result in an increase in human suffering during the next natural disaster. I'm not seeing that as a win.
"Nasty, brutish, and short" is not a lifestyle to aspire to.
4) I hate being FUDed so reflexively that I'll fight against the side using FUD, in this case the orthodox climate panic-ers.
That seems like a pretty dumb way of deciding these things.
LOL so if I try to manipulate you using known scammy techniques, you shouldn't hold that against me in general? LOL In that case, it just so turns out I'm a poor Nigerian climate change scientist working in Africa and I'm trying to move TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS from my country to NCAR to pay for a global warming simulation run, but I'm having some trouble getting the cash thru customs, so I was wondering if I could mail you a genuine nigerian personal check for ELEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS and then you could cash it into your account, then you could forward ten
Perhaps they come to the conclusion that
reduction would result in more concrete and observable human agony, poverty, and suffering than the rather theoretical claims of "what might happen"
Another very important point is a voluntary reduction in "human power" might lead to more agony in the long run. Here's what I envision as a worst case scenario: city floods, but due to restrictions we no longer have the fuel or economic power to save the victims... at all. Would you rather have a Katrina thats 5% worse than it actually was, or have another Katrina and not have the overall "human power" anymore to help them at all.
Its the kind of problem that crys out for a game theory discussion, not emotional and political cries.
I'm intolerant of inhumane behavior, sure. As if thats a bad thing?
Hmm OK I'll extend my protocol. Everyone in afghanistan gets EWTN on their TV for one hour per person attacked... every time it happens, even if its during a soccer game or whatever. Or maybe an hour of USA top 40 music on all radio stations per person attacked. Its a cultural attack. We don't like the way their culture treats female people worse than farm animals, we will see how much they enjoy having our culture jammed down their throats every time they act like savages. Either they civilize themselves on their own (preferable), or we subvert their culture with a superior one, that being our own. Either way, as long as we control the transmitters, we win.
Or we could keep doing what we're doing, which results in nothing more than dead brown people and rich defense contractors. I can guess how this is going to turn out.
How will he ever be elected?
Our system is based on "one dollar one vote" more or less whoever donates the most re-election funds.
So his election donors have no idea how he will vote, vs the other guy who will do what he is paid to do.
Will he be able to afford to run a campaign at all?
Oh here's a weird one. Go to www.amazon.com view source look at last line which is a comment "MEOW" what does that mean, I buy furry stuff or what? ...?
I remember trying to figure that out, didn't put too much time into it, didn't get too far. Some theories were its inserted by a load balancer, or maybe something suffixes it to the end of all generated pages to prove its not truncated, or
"view source" every chance you get, there's weird stuff out there.
My belief was if its got .in email addresses and I can't read it, its hindi. I admit it could have been some other language. I couldn't ID the language, but the notes did contain .in addresses for certain.
You've never seen comments in a HTML file in Hindi?
I don't keep a log of this but I was inspired by a 2600 magazine article to go read the source of webpages. You know, like we used to do in 1996 before GUI programs SUPPOSEDLY made handwritten html obsolete.
Go to www.cnn.com right now, click view source and control f and "less than" "exclamation point" "minus" "minus" and you get an extra life in mario kart ... oh just kidding thats the start of a html comment.
I don't think slashcode likes html in comments very much so I'll edit some cut and pastes below from www.cnn.com
" this is where the breaking news CSI code will go " /cnn TV Promo tool include "
"
you can learn all kinds of fascinating things about web pages by doing this. The funniest I've seen is financial places that promise to release "The Big Report" at 9am Monday morning to the stock market, but they actually put it up and comment it out a week or two earlier. Come to think of it, thats probably illegal for them to do and me to look at. Hmm.
Anyway back to Hindi.. I don't remember where I've seen it but whatever language it was it contained .in email addresses and just a bunch of stuff.
At 0.3% market presentation after 5 years, does that imply Netflix might be the only non-MS website using silverlight? Gotta wonder about that.
Also, the current western model of government is not a true democracy, but rather a representative democracy, which is quite different. People do not vote for things, they vote for people.
You have one party, the rich guys party, and two competing PR firms with totally different ad campaigns. Oligarchy not representative democracy or democracy.
Technically I do get to vote locally on local govt education bonds, true, although very limited, direct democracy. I'm told some states sometimes have binding referendums, but I've never experienced that.
Also when I was a kid, we had theoretically non political party local judicial elections, which is true representative democracy, but that was done away with a decade or two ago, and in practice the R's shilled for their candidate and the D's shilled for their candidate anyway. There is no longer a representative democracy where I live.
What guides individual risk perception, on this account, is not the truth of those beliefs but rather their congruence with individuals’ cultural commitments.
Here's the fail. What is this "truth" they're measuring against?
Something like F=ma seems to correlate with education, not so much with culture. I would hazard a guess that indicates F=ma is a scientific topic.
Something like Jesus is the son of god and belief in him results in your salvation seems to correlate much higher with culture than with education. For example even the dumbest redneck from Texas and some scientist from Texas might agree, but a highly educated scientist from TX might disagree with a highly educated scientist from Japan from a non-christian Japanese family. I would hazard a guess that indicates Jesus's parentage is a non-scientific topic.
Along comes "concern over climate change" and there is a wishy washy hand wringy that based on observation its getting a non-scientific response from the general public. You can almost see the literary dancing to avoid suggesting that maybe, just maybe, the PC orthodoxy about the dangers of climate change is, in fact, non-scientific?
Now please don't jump all over me assuming I think humans have no effect or climate change could never matter. I am well aware its occurring. However,
1) I don't think its very important relative to other more pressing concerns. Seriously, it just isn't that important.
2) I think there is nothing to do anyway. We've burned at least a majority of the EROEI positive carbon fuels and nothing really bad has happened. Twice not much is still not much. The closely related semi-permanent economic decline we've been experiencing for a few decades, and will continue to experience, will "naturally" take care of the rest. The TLDR is SUVs don't matter not because we passed enviro laws, but because they'll never be affordable to the masses again. By the time the next credit bubble comes around, maybe 70 years or so, we'll be waaaaay past peak oil, etc, it just won't matter anymore.
3) There are bigger natural climate changes that we need an advanced industrialized civilization to fight
4) I hate being FUDed so reflexively that I'll fight against the side using FUD, in this case the orthodox climate panic-ers.
Their culture is inhumane and should be replaced without qualm or concern. Problem solved.
Aside from that, the protocol is simple, build two identical schools on each side of town, each morning flip coin and heads the boys go to the north school, tails the girls go to the north school. Ditto the delivery of water trucks (like last incident) etc.
Hasn't silverlight been abandoned?
First release in '07 and according to the wikipedia article the staggering market penetration of 0.3% (thats zero point three, I didn't drop a leading 9 or something...)
Well, as anti-democratic as it sounds to express a heresy like this, "no".
If 90% of the population doesn't want another war, or a bank bailout, its gonna happen anyway if the campaign donors and political hacks want it, as recently proven. A mere 40% of the population has no control over the nation or our politics or our culture.
The people who are politically relevant and culturally influential are the guys donating millions to election campaigns, the party hacks who organize campaigns and advertising and conventions, network news directors, etc...
Scientific response to a single failure: Well, that theory is now known and proven wrong and should be trashed and try a new theory
Religious response to a single failure: Well, our domain merely shrinks to "everything other than this single failure" we're still correct!
Find one verified and provable example where, perhaps, general relativity doesn't "work" and its "wrong" and try another approach. Therefore find one example where a religion doesn't work that means its "wrong" and try something else.