There's also something to be said for a tightly-controlled economy backed by a government with absolute power. Nobody starves, and all that.
Alas, that situation turns out to be unstable in the long run because it can't cope with an ever-changing, inherently uncontrollable world, the "absolute power" thing corrupts absolutely, and various other defects not visible within the tightly-controlled system, even after they are visible to everybody else.
Long run, it appears that the unplanned, unmanageable, chaotic, unstable, failure-allowing "free" system actually works better. It even let fewer people starve, oddly enough.
Since communism provably killed and tortured more people than Nazism, the rhetorical device is at least as offensive and overblown, so I would now like to claim the fastest implementation of Godwin's Law in Slashdot history!
The google you could have done in a fraction of the time taken for all the insults was
survey of scientists on global warming 97%
Of that, I only had to type "survey of sc" before google finished the rest for me, except the "97%" that I remembered from the news. The first link that came up was CNN:
which would have told you the study was conducted by the University of Illinois, using names pulled from "The American Geological Institute's Directory of Geoscience Departments".
Since your next six sentences all boil down to the same problem, that you don't see why an overwhelming majority is significant and that the smallest number of contrary opinions should be respected equally, I'll repeat my point very carefully a few times.
1) This does not endorse "burning Galileo"; it endorses the Vatican not taking what vast numbers of others say is a large risk, just because Galileo says so. I don't think Galileo would have minded that much.
2) I'm not trying to make a war with "numbers of scientists"; the "war" seems to be with those suing them and publicly defaming them.
3) I'm talking about "battalions of PhD's" to emphasize the sheer number, it gives a visual.
4) Actually, it makes a lot of sense to most people.
5) I'm glad you can point to PhD's that are skeptics. They should be. So are the ones on the other side; they're skeptics that became convinced by evidence. And, yet again, there are a lot more of them. Public policy (elections) and justice (juries) depend on numbers for confidence of correctness.
6) Again, my point is that my conclusion is not my own, it's the conclusion of many, many, many, and that in turn is what convinced me.
And lastly, my entire point is that people having a hard time absorbing this are not "stupid", they are human, and it is normal human behaviour to resist unwelcome news. "Chocolate is bad for you" is resisted, "Chocolate is good for you" is instantly believed.
The only problem I'm left with is wondering whether your post was serious, or fabricated to help me prove my point.
Thanks, though, for not doing that google and goading me to do it for you. The second link was from the Gallup organization:
Well, there's an additional problem. It isn't just the resistance of people in general to paying somewhat more for electricity, heating, vehicle fuel, and so on. It's the very active and well-funded resistance of the fossil fuel companies that doesn't just parallel the denial of cigarettes causing cancer by Phillip Morris; it's the exact same P.R. firms doing the work.
That was the journalistic work of George Monbiot to which I referred:
When I went back to using the term "deniers", it's not for people that are honestly doubtful, it's for the P.R. people funded by those firms. They include the "Heartland Institute", and Steven Milloy of "junkscience.com", much used by Fox News Channel through 2006. (At least a search of Fox News site just now found no hits on "junkscience" later than 2006, the year when Monbiot's book "Heat" came out.)
The active denial of cigarettes-cause-cancer lasted a good 20 years after the 1964 Surgeon General's report and likely added an extra million or more to the early-death toll, over and above the normal resistance that people would have had to breaking their addiction.
It's fair enough to say "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof", but the point of the letter that started this story is that researchers are not just having careful work demanded of them, their integrity and honesty - and careers - are being aggressively attacked.
I'm a proud skeptic, that is, somebody who wants to see evidence of extraordinary claims.
George Monbiot has pointed out that "skeptic" is not an appropriate word for somebody who goes far out of their way to ignore evidence presented to them and seizes upon the thinnest contrary statements. That was his defense of the word "denier" and it started me using the word again. I remained skeptical until about five years ago, when the evidence started to look very convincing. Then the 2007 IPCC report won me over.
What we're seeing the last few months is, to me, a fascinating study of how resistant people are to news they don't want to believe. The climate science has been slowly building up for decades, one peer-reviewed article after another, one dataset after another, the same story emerging from multiple angles. The scientific disputes dwindled away until we now have 97% of climate scientists surveyed last year on board with the same basic conclusions. Some thousands of scientists represented by the IPCC summary.
Yes, Michael Crichton was correct that science isn't subject to voting and one guy can be right and a thousand wrong. But public policy makers should go with the preponderance of evidence, just like a court; leaning to the views of a small minority is not sound policy-making. If 97% of 1000 nuclear scientists thought a nuclear plant would blow up, would you build it?
Then along comes "climategate" and everybody is actually told that they are being read a few sentences cherry-picked from thousands of E-mails, stripped of context. Hundreds of voices protest that the word "trick" is widely used for legitimate data manipulations.
Nonetheless, not only do the denier voices, many of them from organizations shown to be funded by Exxon, immediately proclaim this to outweigh decades of work by a couple of battalions of PhDs, the general public starts polling sharp drops in agreement with climate-change theory that had slowly won them over.
Conclusion: when people don't want to believe something because of its terrible costs, you have to convince them with a weight of evidence on the order of magnitude of 1000:1.
A thousand to one. Oh, man, we get all the hard jobs.
1) Raise trees on tree farms with land that would be marginal for food crops. 2) Use as paper. 3) Pyrolize it into "biochar", generating power. 4) Bury the biochar. 5) Environmental profit!
We could probably be burying hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon annually, world-wide, just biochar-ing the paper we use.
The wikipedia article on "biochar" seems to think it would even have commercial profit, if you could sell your "carbon credits" for something over $37 per tonne.
The "NAP of the Americas" with 160 networks converging on it, sounds like the opposite of the Internet's original decentralized design. Not that the 7-inch-thick concrete panel walls sound fragile, but hardly impregnable, either. I'm thinking the truckload of glorified fertilizer that demolished the Murrah building would still give it a bad day.
No doubt I was silly to think even a few of these monsters were out of the way in places easier to secure with a chain-link fence and a few cameras that could see a truck coming; somewhere out in the boonies, right near the actual hydro plant. (I'd heard many were locating "near hydro sources" for the assured power; of course, they just meant "cities served by hydro".)
Naturally, they want them minimum latency away from huge customers, like downtown Chicago, New York, and Dallas.
I'd read (probably in Slashdot) that the Internet was no longer remotely the decentralized nuclear-war-survivor of its 1950's design goals; but it's even more sobering to think that most of the main OC-192 bandwidth switches AND vast amounts of storage and processing could be taken out by one parking lot's worth of Oklahoma-City type wingnutmobiles.
And now the TFA just neatly summarized their top 10 target list. Swell.
I tried to think of an SF story with completely inevitable future seeing and only came up with Heinlein's very first story, where the guy could predict your death-date and nothing could be done about it. Well, now that I mention it, his classic "By His Bootstraps" also had immutable time; the character kept discovering he'd only fulfilled what he'd known would happen.
My favourite for approaching the idea was an awful early 80's movie called "Krull". Some race asked a rather malevolent godling for the power to see the future. He gave them only the power to see their own death...and if they used the power to avoid it, the vision was immediately replaced by their new death, which was much more horrible. Naturally, the movie character has to use it a couple of times to save his fellows, eventually resulting in a really appalling death of massive suffering.
I think Star Trek eventually had the shame to have a couple of time-cops ask a main character if "This is one of those unapproved time trips where your interference turned out to be the exact thing needed to make history play out as we knew it had to?"
For sure. I wasn't arguing with the central point, I was pretty much nitpicking on his phrase "my muscles are faster", also the term "physical reaction time". I just wanted to draw out the distinction between what's happening in the body and in the brain.
The body is the same - nerve transmission is nerve transmission, muscle contraction is muscle contraction. All the time-savings are happening from the neck up.
The point is important because it means that training is everything. There are no people with *inherently* "faster reflexes" as if nerve transmission speeds were like height.
There are surely people who LEARN faster in the physical sense just as there are people who learn faster at math. They will always pick up those trained reflexes in fewer repetitions and be more talented athletes for the same amount of training.
But below the Olympic level, where everybody trains all the time and the talented always come out ahead, you can get to the top of your local baseball league by training harder and building "quick reflexes" the way anybody can build muscle. You cannot, alas, get to the top of your local basketball league by training hard to be taller.
I believe that both your muscles contract and your nerves transmit signals at the same speed as those beginners. Yet another bit of casual TV learning left from Discovery channel, or Nova or some such, more recently went into fencing (well, that Japanese Kendo "fencing" with wooden staves, anyway) and similar sports, and they, too identified two speedups.
One was the anticipation I mentioned in my first post; the other wasn't somehow speeding up body functions pretty dependent on laws of physics, it was which part of the brain handled the "decision" and the orders to move.
Heavily trained sportsmen have basically programmed firmware, a slashdotter might say; the tactical level of see-aim-move is handled by the part of the brain near the bottom, down close to the stem, whose name I've managed to forget. They don't order their body around move-by-move any more than a pianist thinks out each finger press. It takes thousands of repetitions to develop, near-daily practice to maintain, though.
Your ripostes are pretty much executed on auto and the conscious "you" is an observer playing catch-up, free to worry about strategy and anticipation. It's a little spooky to think there are parts of your brain that are acting somewhat independently, but, hey, a lower level of that keeps your heart going. You can program complex actions to be like breathing, consciously-controlled if desired, or you "let yourself go" and they become unconscious.
(I don't think it's even possible to ski moguls at speed if you have to "think" about it; you have to be sending the order to turn around the thing down your spine before you've even reached it. The "firmware programming" is a minimum necessary requirement to do the sport at all! Every ski instructor tells you to just "let yourself go, you have to feel it".)
At least, that was what I abstracted from a show I don't remember well enough to tell you the name of that bottom part of the brain. I could be twisting the story a bit.
...predicting the future is the most powerful superpower of all.
Nic Cage was arguably a superhero in Next because seeing 2 minutes into the future let him outmanouver bad guys and walk through machine gun bursts untouched. Seeing an hour into the future let Tom Cruise and the precogs eliminate murder. And seeing a whole day into the future in Paycheck let Ben Affleck save the world.
Even Dick's novels don't feed the need; Push showed Dakota Fanning the most important of a bunch of psychic heroes because the seers are always a step ahead of you.
Not that Dick was way out there with that; it was the most powerful spice-given power in Dune, and even George Lucas makes it a plot-steering device in Star Wars. Just the ability to see a fraction of a second into the future made 9-year-old Anakin a top race driver.
(Funny coincidence: not long after the recent Star Wars movies came out, BBC did a special "Top Gear" about race driving and the host actually took Michael Schumacher into a bar and demonstrated Schumacher was no better than anybody else at the old trick of "catch the bill before I drop it through your fingers". He has the same physical reaction time as anybody else. Top drivers like Schumacher *anticipate* what's coming next - seeing into the future by the ordinary ability of the brain to model the world - and actually start reacting to things before they happen. Lucas is really pretty smart, just not so hot at dialogue.)
Never mind Haiti, kids these days are getting out to more movies that older people, and they know they have to be prepared for the coming Zombie Apocalypse.
From what I could see at the site, there are few seeders left for any TV show that was broadcast more than 20 DAYS earlier. By the 20-month mark, you have none worth mentioning. Try downloading some torrent-megastar like BSG from two seasons ago, and good luck with that.
Ellen Ullman was a programmer for a full career before she discovered she was also a talented writer. The above link is to a Salon.com article that was basically an excerpt from her excellent book, "Close to the Machine".
She writes about getting a PC and stripping off Windows, DOS, everything, until the (old even for 1998) BIOS is saying "Basic Not Loaded", then building Linux on it.
Her conclusions do sound a smidge "kids these days" when she writes about modern programmers that only know libraries and IDEs, but I know the/. gang will love it:
"Most of the programming team consisted of programmers who had great facility with Windows, Microsoft Visual C++ and the Foundation Classes. In no time at all, it seemed, they had generated many screenfuls of windows and toolbars and dialogs, all with connections to networks and data sources, thousands and thousands of lines of code. But when the inevitable difficulties of debugging came, they seemed at sea. In the face of the usual weird and unexplainable outcomes, they stood a bit agog. It was left to the UNIX-trained programmers to fix things. The UNIX team members were accustomed to having to know. Their view of programming as language-as-text gave them the patience to look slowly through the code. In the end, the overall "productivity" of the system, the fact that it came into being at all, was the handiwork not of tools that sought to make programming seem easy, but the work of engineers who had no fear of "hard." ---
I do recall some/. (or maybe it's in Salon) commenter at the time who replied, "Yeah, and your Dad thinks you're a weenie because you don't know how to wire transistors on a circuit board, and his Dad thinks he's a weenie because he can't wind the copper wire around his own inductors". Which is fair enough. Even log cabins can't be made without manufactured tools unless you can mold a kiln from clay and smelt iron for the axe yourself.
Still, the point of the desire is to have *maximum* control of the level of tool you are able to work directly with. The philosophy was echoed by Neal Stephenson in his essay, "In the Beginning Was the Command Line", the googling of which I will leave to the student. It's on-line.
Even the article itself says that compared to Europe, we trail only an "elite group" of (mostly northern) countries.
The problem with that, (if you're old enough to remember the sixties when the destruction of WW2 was recent enough to have much of Europe still like developing nations today where you couldn't trust the water), is that WE used to be the "elite". That even some European countries have pulled way ahead when they used to be far behind is all the proof you want that we haven't done nearly as well as we could have. (And as for Japan and South Korea pulling way ahead of us: both countries REALLY were developing nations when I was a kid. People in shacks. Widespread hunger.)
Secondly, it's not how well we're doing leveraging an old 1930's copper wire infrastructure that was paid off by 1960 by telephones, or what we're doing with a 1970's coax infrastructure paid off by 1990 by cable TV bills; it's how well we're doing at putting in a whole new infrastructure for the Internet itself - one that will wipe the other two away.
That is, where are we with fiber-to-the-home? Ten years ago, it was reasonable to address voracious demand for the new service by piggybacking it on old infrastructures never designed for it, but were sitting there, already deployed. That should have been matched by an aggressive build-out of the replacement infrastructure designed for the job. It should be nearly done by now.
Alas, being able to send out TWO bills for the same infrastructure after dropping a few humming boxes on either end of the old wires, was far too lucrative to give up in favour of spending about 3 years of bills per house to run new lines, and government dropped the ball on regulating them to do that.
Whether just a few, or several, European countries are were just as sloppy, their regulators just as captured, as ours, does not mitigate the mistake; it just gives us some more company. Big deal.
Assuming the median value of $750K/box, and that you need to save 5% of that per year to pay off a 5% mortgage, ($187k/yr, $140k/9-months) yes, they're screwed.
Very large corporate purchases that can get the business prime rate of 2.25% (Bank of Canada, today: http://www.bankofcanada.ca/en/rates/digest.html ) would only need save $67,500 per year to make interest, leaving this project with another $60K/year to pay down principal...probably a 25-year payback.
IF the bloom box lasts 25 years and has little in the way of maintenance or replacements the whole time. In short, yes, they have to drop the capital outlay to make this work. But not by much! They are nearly there now, and it's early days.
Also, you're forgetting the money-cost of carbon. Which is right, there isn't one. Nobody will impose one until there are alternatives that allow such costs to not send civilization to a grinding halt.
The Bloom Box is advertised as 60% efficient at turning methane energy into electrical energy. The best most heat engines can do is about 35% - and that's for huge, billion-dollar coal plants.
By going to gas-fired generation, our costs all nearly double compared to coal, but our carbon output drops by a good half. The Bloom Box could let it drop by three-quarters. Moreover, it effectively doubles the gas supply by using half as much to get the same electricity.
"Half" is good, but not good enough to level off carbon in the atmosphere. Three-quarters, now you're talking.
All that said, I don't imagine multi-billion-dollar, gigawatt Bloom Box power plants in our future. If they can indeed make the costs really drop, then I can see any kind of rural area, hard to put on the grid, going to these for distributed power generation.
And the developing world, where the grid hasn't reached half of humanity yet - well, it could be just huge. There's insane amounts of gas in Russia, an overland pipeline away from China and India, and nearly as vast amounts in the Arabian Gulf, not so far from Africa and less-developed parts of the middle east.
If these places can develop a low-carbon power solution, especially if China could quit opening a sulfurous brown-coal plant EVERY WEEK, it could be a big chunk of the solution.
My doctor is an independent businessman who can dump me any time, or I him. He can send his tests to any of a number of labs; business can migrate away from the bad ones.
We have government-backed health INSURANCE. Even that is not a government department; my doctor's bills are paid by "Alberta Health Services", which certainly gets all its money from the government and has its board of citizens picked by them - but is still at arm's length. Not a government department, so politicians have little control over day-to-day functions, just year-to-year budgets; specifically, they can't get their kids jumped to the head of the line for care, or other corruptions.
We wrestle all the time with fine-tuning issues like doctors running private clinics that compete with hospitals for some operations. (Ironically, we have a mirror-image fear of a slippery slope that has American-grade care at the bottom, just as the US fears a slippery-slope down to "socialism"...as if even real "socialist health care" countries had worse outcomes...which they don't, dollar-for-dollar.)
But the basic principles are the same: keep the government out of the medical care entirely. Keep them at arm's-length from the insurance and hospital management. Their job is to control the purse strings and keep the costs from getting out of hand.
I, for one, would like to THANK the American demagogues that have trashed our health system. Until they started accusing it of all evils, I never really looked up much about it. Now that I understand it better, I appreciate it more.
It's painful, watching the American debate. Like watching that endless train wreck in "The Fugitive", only with train engineers in the engine screaming insults at the onlookers about how badly they are running their cars and what danger they are in, even as the train flies off the track.
I thought Kennedy had rather too-strong opinions on the subject when he appeared on Jon Stewart a few years back. Then I found this article on Slate, 2005:
http://www.slate.com/id/2123647/...by Arthur Allen, the guy who first did an in-depth story on the subject for the New York Times magazine in 2002.
Early paragraph:
"Since then, four perfectly good studies comparing large populations of kids have showed that thimerosal did not cause the increased reporting of autism. The best evidence comes from Denmark, which stopped putting thimerosal in vaccines in 1992; the rate of autism in kids born afterward continued to increase. "
...suffice to say, by the end of that article, I'd lost interest in the subject. About the only question of interest here, is "what took the Lancet so long?"
Physician and SF writer F.Paul Wilson runs a blog at TrueSlant.com: http://trueslant.com/fpaulwilson/...where his most recent post riffs off the BBC story about the Lancet article author actually being cited for "acting unethically". Wilson puts it:
The MMR is the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. The UK's General Medical Council also ruled that Dr. Andrew Wakefield...acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in doing his research...
Get this: the guy is a gastroenterologist and he was doing spinal taps on kids. He paid kids and his son's birthday party £5 each for blood. His so-called research was published in 1998 in the respected journal The Lancet, but he neglected to mention that he was being paid to advise the lawyers for parents who believed their children had been harmed by the MMR.
The board said he had acted with "callous disregard for the distress and pain the children might suffer".
Click on Dr. Wilson's link to see his copy of a graph showing the slight drop in MMR vaccinations resulting in a sharp increase in measles cases. Fortunately, a mere thousand or so more per year will only mean a couple of deaths, blindings, sterilizations, and so forth.
Words fail me.
I'm just old enough to remember the Watergate hearings (early teens at the time, just starting to pay attention to politics). I remember the wall-to-wall coverage of them - the hush that fell on the hearing room when Alexander Butterfield told the Ervin commission that he had set up tape recorders to go on automatically in the Oval Office so that every word of Nixon's every discussion was recorded.
So, if that was the coverage of the hearings on a small burglary and wiretapping case, why is nobody watching the vastly more important hearings about a government systematically distorting intelligence to mislead the country into war, demanding Tom Ridge elevate terror alerts when elections were upcoming, giving the OK to warrantless wiretapping, imprisoning Americans without trial, and torturing prisoners?
Oh, yeah. There weren't any hearings.
"News" today, "Leaks" in particular, are just formal and informal press releases, respectively. And the "journalists" do stenography of those releases to maintain their precious "access". The most "Access"-heavy insider of all is former Watergate hero Bob Woodward, who writes hagiographies of pols when they are in power and mild criticism of them when they are falling out of it anyway and the criticism no longer matters.
I'll read anybody who purveys checkable facts that the powerful didn't want them to know.
...a "successor to MP3", which removes the most popular feature of MP3, the ability to control your own purchased copy of the property. Yeah, that'll bring back the customers you chased away with the last 3 attempts at controlled digital content.
It can be "updated"...who wants to bet that one kind of "update" is like the Amazon "update" of their sale of Orwell's '1984'...total deletion.
Do not pass "Go", do not collect millions of customers...go directly to the ash-heap of computer history.
Required reading for the Period It All Changed is Steven Levy's book "Hackers". He focused on Sierra On-Line, which started off programming Apple ][ games in assembler, with founder Ken Williams as programmer/guru to houseloads of teenage programmers that were making up to a quarter-mill a year (in 1983 dollars) for inventing Frogger and the like, because Williams gave percentages of what the game made to the developers.
This changed at remarkable speed to a market where the owners of capital got everything but "what the traffic will bear" in terms of how little programmers would work for.
And young people doing something that gives them a buzz (and, let's face it, fellow addicts, writing an elegant algorithm, solving a knotty problem, producing a slick-looking result on-screen, especially in a problem area where the output is intensely visual...there's no buzz like it) will work for pretty much nothing.
And, no, my "owners of capital" term isn't the start of some socialist screed. The critics are right: the workers can just walk away any time they come to their senses. The profit split may resemble a 19th-century company town by a coal mine, but "Labour" here isn't some hapless bunch of illiterates with no options; they just have to accept that they're being "paid" in buzz, and any time they want to switch over to money, they can go program payroll systems.
There's some buzz there, too, believe it or not, you find elegant algorithms, and user interfaces that match the human intuition and expectations hand-in-glove, in lots of places. And you're home by six, good paycheque warm in your pocket.
There are satisfactions, too, in being part of actually building the Real World, not just amusing people with fantasy ones.
Thank you both. I'd say that the legal personhood of bodies corporate has been growing from 1844 to 1886, and is still at it. I should have fact-checked.
The "recent" I had in mind when I wrote refers, really, to the pervasiveness of hugely expensive TV "political speech", just in my lifetime. It was a rare novelty 40 years back, and political campaigns, in equivalent dollar terms, were far cheaper. Now, with TV "speech" so equated to money, it makes visible the corporation as political actor.
Slashdot Mirror
They finally get shifting gears right just as we switch to electric cars that don't need then.
There's also something to be said for a tightly-controlled economy backed by a government with absolute power. Nobody starves, and all that.
Alas, that situation turns out to be unstable in the long run because it can't cope with an ever-changing, inherently uncontrollable world, the "absolute power" thing corrupts absolutely, and various other defects not visible within the tightly-controlled system, even after they are visible to everybody else.
Long run, it appears that the unplanned, unmanageable, chaotic, unstable, failure-allowing "free" system actually works better. It even let fewer people starve, oddly enough.
Since communism provably killed and tortured more people than Nazism, the rhetorical device is at least as offensive and overblown, so I would now like to claim the fastest implementation of Godwin's Law in Slashdot history!
The TV series "House, M.D." will now become a six-minute "webisode" show.
The google you could have done in a fraction of the time taken for all the insults was
survey of scientists on global warming 97%
Of that, I only had to type "survey of sc" before google finished the rest for me, except the "97%" that I remembered from the news. The first link that came up was CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/01/19/eco.globalwarmingsurvey/index.html
which would have told you the study was conducted by the University of Illinois, using names pulled from "The American Geological Institute's Directory of Geoscience Departments".
Since your next six sentences all boil down to the same problem, that you don't see why an overwhelming majority is significant and that the smallest number of contrary opinions should be respected equally, I'll repeat my point very carefully a few times.
1) This does not endorse "burning Galileo"; it endorses the Vatican not taking what vast numbers of others say is a large risk, just because Galileo says so. I don't think Galileo would have minded that much.
2) I'm not trying to make a war with "numbers of scientists"; the "war" seems to be with those suing them and publicly defaming them.
3) I'm talking about "battalions of PhD's" to emphasize the sheer number, it gives a visual.
4) Actually, it makes a lot of sense to most people.
5) I'm glad you can point to PhD's that are skeptics. They should be. So are the ones on the other side; they're skeptics that became convinced by evidence. And, yet again, there are a lot more of them. Public policy (elections) and justice (juries) depend on numbers for confidence of correctness.
6) Again, my point is that my conclusion is not my own, it's the conclusion of many, many, many, and that in turn is what convinced me.
And lastly, my entire point is that people having a hard time absorbing this are not "stupid", they are human, and it is normal human behaviour to resist unwelcome news. "Chocolate is bad for you" is resisted, "Chocolate is good for you" is instantly believed.
The only problem I'm left with is wondering whether your post was serious, or fabricated to help me prove my point.
Thanks, though, for not doing that google and goading me to do it for you. The second link was from the Gallup organization:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/126560/americans-global-warming-concerns-continue-drop.aspx ...which was a group of survey results over time showing how public belief in AGW, and indeed the numbers of public that believe *scientists* generally support AGW, has been dropping recently, which was another of my points. I'll have to save the link.
Well, there's an additional problem. It isn't just the resistance of people in general to paying somewhat more for electricity, heating, vehicle fuel, and so on. It's the very active and well-funded resistance of the fossil fuel companies that doesn't just parallel the denial of cigarettes causing cancer by Phillip Morris; it's the exact same P.R. firms doing the work.
That was the journalistic work of George Monbiot to which I referred:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/dec/07/george-monbiot-blog-climate-denial-industry
When I went back to using the term "deniers", it's not for people that are honestly doubtful, it's for the P.R. people funded by those firms. They include the "Heartland Institute", and Steven Milloy of "junkscience.com", much used by Fox News Channel through 2006. (At least a search of Fox News site just now found no hits on "junkscience" later than 2006, the year when Monbiot's book "Heat" came out.)
The active denial of cigarettes-cause-cancer lasted a good 20 years after the 1964 Surgeon General's report and likely added an extra million or more to the early-death toll, over and above the normal resistance that people would have had to breaking their addiction.
It's fair enough to say "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof", but the point of the letter that started this story is that researchers are not just having careful work demanded of them, their integrity and honesty - and careers - are being aggressively attacked.
I'm a proud skeptic, that is, somebody who wants to see evidence of extraordinary claims.
George Monbiot has pointed out that "skeptic" is not an appropriate word for somebody who goes far out of their way to ignore evidence presented to them and seizes upon the thinnest contrary statements. That was his defense of the word "denier" and it started me using the word again. I remained skeptical until about five years ago, when the evidence started to look very convincing. Then the 2007 IPCC report won me over.
What we're seeing the last few months is, to me, a fascinating study of how resistant people are to news they don't want to believe. The climate science has been slowly building up for decades, one peer-reviewed article after another, one dataset after another, the same story emerging from multiple angles. The scientific disputes dwindled away until we now have 97% of climate scientists surveyed last year on board with the same basic conclusions. Some thousands of scientists represented by the IPCC summary.
Yes, Michael Crichton was correct that science isn't subject to voting and one guy can be right and a thousand wrong. But public policy makers should go with the preponderance of evidence, just like a court; leaning to the views of a small minority is not sound policy-making. If 97% of 1000 nuclear scientists thought a nuclear plant would blow up, would you build it?
Then along comes "climategate" and everybody is actually told that they are being read a few sentences cherry-picked from thousands of E-mails, stripped of context. Hundreds of voices protest that the word "trick" is widely used for legitimate data manipulations.
Nonetheless, not only do the denier voices, many of them from organizations shown to be funded by Exxon, immediately proclaim this to outweigh decades of work by a couple of battalions of PhDs, the general public starts polling sharp drops in agreement with climate-change theory that had slowly won them over.
Conclusion: when people don't want to believe something because of its terrible costs, you have to convince them with a weight of evidence on the order of magnitude of 1000:1.
A thousand to one. Oh, man, we get all the hard jobs.
Stop recycling the stuff!
1) Raise trees on tree farms with land that would be marginal for food crops.
2) Use as paper.
3) Pyrolize it into "biochar", generating power.
4) Bury the biochar.
5) Environmental profit!
We could probably be burying hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon annually, world-wide, just biochar-ing the paper we use.
The wikipedia article on "biochar" seems to think it would even have commercial profit, if you could sell your "carbon credits" for something over $37 per tonne.
You joke, and so of course was Bush when he pretended to look under tables at a DC supper.
Since the stash was found in DC, though, it turns out Bush was a lot closer to some WMDs than anybody in Baghdad was at the time!
The "NAP of the Americas" with 160 networks converging on it, sounds like the opposite of the Internet's original decentralized design. Not that the 7-inch-thick concrete panel walls sound fragile, but hardly impregnable, either. I'm thinking the truckload of glorified fertilizer that demolished the Murrah building would still give it a bad day.
No doubt I was silly to think even a few of these monsters were out of the way in places easier to secure with a chain-link fence and a few cameras that could see a truck coming; somewhere out in the boonies, right near the actual hydro plant. (I'd heard many were locating "near hydro sources" for the assured power; of course, they just meant "cities served by hydro".)
Naturally, they want them minimum latency away from huge customers, like downtown Chicago, New York, and Dallas.
I'd read (probably in Slashdot) that the Internet was no longer remotely the decentralized nuclear-war-survivor of its 1950's design goals; but it's even more sobering to think that most of the main OC-192 bandwidth switches AND vast amounts of storage and processing could be taken out by one parking lot's worth of Oklahoma-City type wingnutmobiles.
And now the TFA just neatly summarized their top 10 target list. Swell.
OK, time to back up my Gmail.
I tried to think of an SF story with completely inevitable future seeing and only came up with Heinlein's very first story, where the guy could predict your death-date and nothing could be done about it. Well, now that I mention it, his classic "By His Bootstraps" also had immutable time; the character kept discovering he'd only fulfilled what he'd known would happen.
My favourite for approaching the idea was an awful early 80's movie called "Krull". Some race asked a rather malevolent godling for the power to see the future. He gave them only the power to see their own death...and if they used the power to avoid it, the vision was immediately replaced by their new death, which was much more horrible. Naturally, the movie character has to use it a couple of times to save his fellows, eventually resulting in a really appalling death of massive suffering.
I think Star Trek eventually had the shame to have a couple of time-cops ask a main character if "This is one of those unapproved time trips where your interference turned out to be the exact thing needed to make history play out as we knew it had to?"
"No."
"Good. I hate those."
For sure. I wasn't arguing with the central point, I was pretty much nitpicking on his phrase "my muscles are faster", also the term "physical reaction time". I just wanted to draw out the distinction between what's happening in the body and in the brain.
The body is the same - nerve transmission is nerve transmission, muscle contraction is muscle contraction. All the time-savings are happening from the neck up.
The point is important because it means that training is everything. There are no people with *inherently* "faster reflexes" as if nerve transmission speeds were like height.
There are surely people who LEARN faster in the physical sense just as there are people who learn faster at math. They will always pick up those trained reflexes in fewer repetitions and be more talented athletes for the same amount of training.
But below the Olympic level, where everybody trains all the time and the talented always come out ahead, you can get to the top of your local baseball league by training harder and building "quick reflexes" the way anybody can build muscle. You cannot, alas, get to the top of your local basketball league by training hard to be taller.
I believe that both your muscles contract and your nerves transmit signals at the same speed as those beginners. Yet another bit of casual TV learning left from Discovery channel, or Nova or some such, more recently went into fencing (well, that Japanese Kendo "fencing" with wooden staves, anyway) and similar sports, and they, too identified two speedups.
One was the anticipation I mentioned in my first post; the other wasn't somehow speeding up body functions pretty dependent on laws of physics, it was which part of the brain handled the "decision" and the orders to move.
Heavily trained sportsmen have basically programmed firmware, a slashdotter might say; the tactical level of see-aim-move is handled by the part of the brain near the bottom, down close to the stem, whose name I've managed to forget. They don't order their body around move-by-move any more than a pianist thinks out each finger press. It takes thousands of repetitions to develop, near-daily practice to maintain, though.
Your ripostes are pretty much executed on auto and the conscious "you" is an observer playing catch-up, free to worry about strategy and anticipation. It's a little spooky to think there are parts of your brain that are acting somewhat independently, but, hey, a lower level of that keeps your heart going. You can program complex actions to be like breathing, consciously-controlled if desired, or you "let yourself go" and they become unconscious.
(I don't think it's even possible to ski moguls at speed if you have to "think" about it; you have to be sending the order to turn around the thing down your spine before you've even reached it. The "firmware programming" is a minimum necessary requirement to do the sport at all! Every ski instructor tells you to just "let yourself go, you have to feel it".)
At least, that was what I abstracted from a show I don't remember well enough to tell you the name of that bottom part of the brain. I could be twisting the story a bit.
...predicting the future is the most powerful superpower of all.
Nic Cage was arguably a superhero in Next because seeing 2 minutes into the future let him outmanouver bad guys and walk through machine gun bursts untouched. Seeing an hour into the future let Tom Cruise and the precogs eliminate murder. And seeing a whole day into the future in Paycheck let Ben Affleck save the world.
Even Dick's novels don't feed the need; Push showed Dakota Fanning the most important of a bunch of psychic heroes because the seers are always a step ahead of you.
Not that Dick was way out there with that; it was the most powerful spice-given power in Dune, and even George Lucas makes it a plot-steering device in Star Wars. Just the ability to see a fraction of a second into the future made 9-year-old Anakin a top race driver.
(Funny coincidence: not long after the recent Star Wars movies came out, BBC did a special "Top Gear" about race driving and the host actually took Michael Schumacher into a bar and demonstrated Schumacher was no better than anybody else at the old trick of "catch the bill before I drop it through your fingers". He has the same physical reaction time as anybody else. Top drivers like Schumacher *anticipate* what's coming next - seeing into the future by the ordinary ability of the brain to model the world - and actually start reacting to things before they happen. Lucas is really pretty smart, just not so hot at dialogue.)
Never mind Haiti, kids these days are getting out to more movies that older people, and they know they have to be prepared for the coming Zombie Apocalypse.
From what I could see at the site, there are few seeders left for any TV show that was broadcast more than 20 DAYS earlier. By the 20-month mark, you have none worth mentioning. Try downloading some torrent-megastar like BSG from two seasons ago, and good luck with that.
http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/05/cov_12feature.html
Ellen Ullman was a programmer for a full career before she discovered she was also a talented writer. The above link is to a Salon.com article that was basically an excerpt from her excellent book, "Close to the Machine".
She writes about getting a PC and stripping off Windows, DOS, everything, until the (old even for 1998) BIOS is saying "Basic Not Loaded", then building Linux on it.
Her conclusions do sound a smidge "kids these days" when she writes about modern programmers that only know libraries and IDEs, but I know the /. gang will love it:
"Most of the programming team consisted of programmers who had great facility with Windows, Microsoft Visual C++ and the Foundation Classes. In no time at all, it seemed, they had generated many screenfuls of windows and toolbars and dialogs, all with connections to networks and data sources, thousands and thousands of lines of code. But when the inevitable difficulties of debugging came, they seemed at sea. In the face of the usual weird and unexplainable outcomes, they stood a bit agog. It was left to the UNIX-trained programmers to fix things. The UNIX team members were accustomed to having to know. Their view of programming as language-as-text gave them the patience to look slowly through the code. In the end, the overall "productivity" of the system, the fact that it came into being at all, was the handiwork not of tools that sought to make programming seem easy, but the work of engineers who had no fear of "hard."
---
I do recall some /. (or maybe it's in Salon) commenter at the time who replied, "Yeah, and your Dad thinks you're a weenie because you don't know how to wire transistors on a circuit board, and his Dad thinks he's a weenie because he can't wind the copper wire around his own inductors". Which is fair enough. Even log cabins can't be made without manufactured tools unless you can mold a kiln from clay and smelt iron for the axe yourself.
Still, the point of the desire is to have *maximum* control of the level of tool you are able to work directly with. The philosophy was echoed by Neal Stephenson in his essay, "In the Beginning Was the Command Line", the googling of which I will leave to the student. It's on-line.
Even the article itself says that compared to Europe, we trail only an "elite group" of (mostly northern) countries.
The problem with that, (if you're old enough to remember the sixties when the destruction of WW2 was recent enough to have much of Europe still like developing nations today where you couldn't trust the water), is that WE used to be the "elite". That even some European countries have pulled way ahead when they used to be far behind is all the proof you want that we haven't done nearly as well as we could have. (And as for Japan and South Korea pulling way ahead of us: both countries REALLY were developing nations when I was a kid. People in shacks. Widespread hunger.)
Secondly, it's not how well we're doing leveraging an old 1930's copper wire infrastructure that was paid off by 1960 by telephones, or what we're doing with a 1970's coax infrastructure paid off by 1990 by cable TV bills; it's how well we're doing at putting in a whole new infrastructure for the Internet itself - one that will wipe the other two away.
That is, where are we with fiber-to-the-home? Ten years ago, it was reasonable to address voracious demand for the new service by piggybacking it on old infrastructures never designed for it, but were sitting there, already deployed. That should have been matched by an aggressive build-out of the replacement infrastructure designed for the job. It should be nearly done by now.
Alas, being able to send out TWO bills for the same infrastructure after dropping a few humming boxes on either end of the old wires, was far too lucrative to give up in favour of spending about 3 years of bills per house to run new lines, and government dropped the ball on regulating them to do that.
Whether just a few, or several, European countries are were just as sloppy, their regulators just as captured, as ours, does not mitigate the mistake; it just gives us some more company. Big deal.
Assuming the median value of $750K/box, and that you need to save 5% of that per year to pay off a 5% mortgage, ($187k/yr, $140k/9-months) yes, they're screwed.
Very large corporate purchases that can get the business prime rate of 2.25% (Bank of Canada, today: http://www.bankofcanada.ca/en/rates/digest.html ) would only need save $67,500 per year to make interest, leaving this project with another $60K/year to pay down principal...probably a 25-year payback.
IF the bloom box lasts 25 years and has little in the way of maintenance or replacements the whole time. In short, yes, they have to drop the capital outlay to make this work. But not by much! They are nearly there now, and it's early days.
Also, you're forgetting the money-cost of carbon. Which is right, there isn't one. Nobody will impose one until there are alternatives that allow such costs to not send civilization to a grinding halt.
The Bloom Box is advertised as 60% efficient at turning methane energy into electrical energy. The best most heat engines can do is about 35% - and that's for huge, billion-dollar coal plants.
By going to gas-fired generation, our costs all nearly double compared to coal, but our carbon output drops by a good half. The Bloom Box could let it drop by three-quarters. Moreover, it effectively doubles the gas supply by using half as much to get the same electricity.
"Half" is good, but not good enough to level off carbon in the atmosphere. Three-quarters, now you're talking.
All that said, I don't imagine multi-billion-dollar, gigawatt Bloom Box power plants in our future. If they can indeed make the costs really drop, then I can see any kind of rural area, hard to put on the grid, going to these for distributed power generation.
And the developing world, where the grid hasn't reached half of humanity yet - well, it could be just huge. There's insane amounts of gas in Russia, an overland pipeline away from China and India, and nearly as vast amounts in the Arabian Gulf, not so far from Africa and less-developed parts of the middle east.
If these places can develop a low-carbon power solution, especially if China could quit opening a sulfurous brown-coal plant EVERY WEEK, it could be a big chunk of the solution.
Arrgh! We do NOT have "socialized health care"!
My doctor is an independent businessman who can dump me any time, or I him. He can send his tests to any of a number of labs; business can migrate away from the bad ones.
We have government-backed health INSURANCE. Even that is not a government department; my doctor's bills are paid by "Alberta Health Services", which certainly gets all its money from the government and has its board of citizens picked by them - but is still at arm's length. Not a government department, so politicians have little control over day-to-day functions, just year-to-year budgets; specifically, they can't get their kids jumped to the head of the line for care, or other corruptions.
We wrestle all the time with fine-tuning issues like doctors running private clinics that compete with hospitals for some operations. (Ironically, we have a mirror-image fear of a slippery slope that has American-grade care at the bottom, just as the US fears a slippery-slope down to "socialism"...as if even real "socialist health care" countries had worse outcomes...which they don't, dollar-for-dollar.)
But the basic principles are the same: keep the government out of the medical care entirely. Keep them at arm's-length from the insurance and hospital management. Their job is to control the purse strings and keep the costs from getting out of hand.
I, for one, would like to THANK the American demagogues that have trashed our health system. Until they started accusing it of all evils, I never really looked up much about it. Now that I understand it better, I appreciate it more.
It's painful, watching the American debate. Like watching that endless train wreck in "The Fugitive", only with train engineers in the engine screaming insults at the onlookers about how badly they are running their cars and what danger they are in, even as the train flies off the track.
Click on Dr. Wilson's link to see his copy of a graph showing the slight drop in MMR vaccinations resulting in a sharp increase in measles cases. Fortunately, a mere thousand or so more per year will only mean a couple of deaths, blindings, sterilizations, and so forth. Words fail me.
I'm just old enough to remember the Watergate hearings (early teens at the time, just starting to pay attention to politics). I remember the wall-to-wall coverage of them - the hush that fell on the hearing room when Alexander Butterfield told the Ervin commission that he had set up tape recorders to go on automatically in the Oval Office so that every word of Nixon's every discussion was recorded.
So, if that was the coverage of the hearings on a small burglary and wiretapping case, why is nobody watching the vastly more important hearings about a government systematically distorting intelligence to mislead the country into war, demanding Tom Ridge elevate terror alerts when elections were upcoming, giving the OK to warrantless wiretapping, imprisoning Americans without trial, and torturing prisoners?
Oh, yeah. There weren't any hearings.
"News" today, "Leaks" in particular, are just formal and informal press releases, respectively. And the "journalists" do stenography of those releases to maintain their precious "access". The most "Access"-heavy insider of all is former Watergate hero Bob Woodward, who writes hagiographies of pols when they are in power and mild criticism of them when they are falling out of it anyway and the criticism no longer matters.
I'll read anybody who purveys checkable facts that the powerful didn't want them to know.
Geoffrey, Kanye called, and he's gonna let you finish, but the Voyager flights were the most AWESOME science mission EVER!
...a "successor to MP3", which removes the most popular feature of MP3, the ability to control your own purchased copy of the property. Yeah, that'll bring back the customers you chased away with the last 3 attempts at controlled digital content.
It can be "updated"...who wants to bet that one kind of "update" is like the Amazon "update" of their sale of Orwell's '1984'...total deletion.
Do not pass "Go", do not collect millions of customers...go directly to the ash-heap of computer history.
Required reading for the Period It All Changed is Steven Levy's book "Hackers". He focused on Sierra On-Line, which started off programming Apple ][ games in assembler, with founder Ken Williams as programmer/guru to houseloads of teenage programmers that were making up to a quarter-mill a year (in 1983 dollars) for inventing Frogger and the like, because Williams gave percentages of what the game made to the developers.
This changed at remarkable speed to a market where the owners of capital got everything but "what the traffic will bear" in terms of how little programmers would work for.
And young people doing something that gives them a buzz (and, let's face it, fellow addicts, writing an elegant algorithm, solving a knotty problem, producing a slick-looking result on-screen, especially in a problem area where the output is intensely visual...there's no buzz like it) will work for pretty much nothing.
And, no, my "owners of capital" term isn't the start of some socialist screed. The critics are right: the workers can just walk away any time they come to their senses. The profit split may resemble a 19th-century company town by a coal mine, but "Labour" here isn't some hapless bunch of illiterates with no options; they just have to accept that they're being "paid" in buzz, and any time they want to switch over to money, they can go program payroll systems.
There's some buzz there, too, believe it or not, you find elegant algorithms, and user interfaces that match the human intuition and expectations hand-in-glove, in lots of places. And you're home by six, good paycheque warm in your pocket.
There are satisfactions, too, in being part of actually building the Real World, not just amusing people with fantasy ones.
Thank you both. I'd say that the legal personhood of bodies corporate has been growing from 1844 to 1886, and is still at it. I should have fact-checked.
The "recent" I had in mind when I wrote refers, really, to the pervasiveness of hugely expensive TV "political speech", just in my lifetime. It was a rare novelty 40 years back, and political campaigns, in equivalent dollar terms, were far cheaper. Now, with TV "speech" so equated to money, it makes visible the corporation as political actor.