...and yet many companies use United Healthcare, which has this neat little program where nicotine users (cigs, dip, vape, whatever) get to pay an extra $70/mo. for their health insurance, and if your spouse smokes? That'll be $140/mo that you get pay, please.
Oh, you don't partake and claim yourself exempt? You get random annual bodily-fluid testing where you get to prove that you're nicotine-free.
Did I mention that if caught smoking when you said you didn't? You get fired for-cause.
You've got two people who want you to lend them $1000. One is an alcoholic gambling addict, the other is a responsible adult with a long stable work history and no debt. Which do you lend money to?
This isn't rocket science here. Insurance companies aren't non-profit charities. Their ability to stay afloat relies on their ability to accurately assess risk and charge accordingly. If you engage in high risk behaviors (smoking, excessive drinking, weighing 400 lbs and eating nothing but cheeseburgers and donuts while snorting lines of coke off a hooker's ass, etc.), then an insurance company is going to adjust your rates higher than someone who leads a healthy lifestyle.
And if you lie and say your the pinnacle of health when in fact your one deep fried cheese stick from a coronary, I'm not sure why you seem to think that's any different than lying in any other aspect of your job. Your dishonest and selfish behavior just cost the company $150,000 for your triple bypass, raising the rates the company has to pay and thus your co-workers have to pay.
The only person who has a remote chance of caring about us is Trump.
Trump doesn't give one shit about people, and all you need to do is look at his history.
I am well aware of that... but he also has nothing to gain by screwing us at this point. He is now old, very wealthy, and has nothing else to do but take the country in a new direction.
Bullshit. People like Trump want one thing and one thing only: MORE. They don't care about you. They don't care about the US, the world, terrorists, or any of the crap. They are amoral, borderline sociopaths who'd just as soon wipe an entire third world country off the map just so they can make 10 cents on the dollar for some useless piece of electronic garbage.
Yeah, I'm tired of the same old same old crap in Washington as well, but I'm not about to hand over the reigns of a world super power to asshole blowhard with the science understanding of a 2 year old. That's not different. That's just plain fucking stupid.
He also isn't owned by lobbyists or 30 years of political connections the way Bush and Clinton are.
Oh, but he wants to be. Nothing pleases a someone like Trump than having his ass kissed, cock sucked, and pockets lined by the world elite. He's leading the republican polls, and he's already got people with knee-pads and wallets just begging for the chance.
If Bush or Clinton are elected, exactly nothing will change. If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always gotten.
Which is a hell of a lot better than giving a racist asshole the keys to the kingdom. The whole point of an election is to make things better, not worse. Also, considering that Trump has pissed off just about everyone on both sides of the aisle, exactly how does that improve the situation in Washington?
At least Trump will kick over the table and say, "new direction".
No, he will say "BEND OVER BITCHES" and proceed to screw us over through idiocy and malice, because that's what he does.
Will it turn out well?
Absolutely not. He's already expressed his almost laughable grasp of complex subjects and has outright lied on multiple occasions. Worse, he doesn't even apologize when caught. He just doubles down. Why do people think American politics is a joke in the rest of the world? Because idiots like Trump actually can lead in the polls. I'm sure they'd be laughing if they weren't terrified that someone like Trump has a finger on the button.
Hard to say, we won't really know without trying, but at some point we either try something new, or accept the current situation forever.
Really? Have you even WATCHED what the hell this douchebag has been saying and doing since he began his campaign?
Look, I understand your desire to try something different. I share the same desire. But Trump is by leaps and bounds the WORST candidate on the list.
I'm not sure what your point is. The way science works is that scientists are constantly improving their work. You would be more worried if they didn't upgrade their data analysis methods from time to time.
There's a vast difference between improving your analysis and dropping data you don't like.
There's also a vast difference between ignorant and being willfully ignorant. There is a full detailed scientific explanation of WHY the change was made. It has nothing to do with "Oh we don't like it".
If it's been 400 years since the Maunder Minimum, and assuming we peak on temperature right now, wouldn't that mean the new minimum is still a problem for our [great-]+grandchildren?
No, because solar variation even during the minimum wouldn't even be close to enough to offset the additional warming we've introduced. Even if our temperature peaked right now, we're at about.8C above the 20th century average. A Maunder Minimum type event would drop that by about.2C. So even if this was as warm as it gets (which it isn't) then global average temperature would still be about.6C above the 20th century average.
I would just like climatologists to admit that most of their prior models have had their faults and this one may as well...
I'm going to take a wild guess here and say you don't really ever read research papers. Because if you did, you'd know that just about every piece of research includes a section for ERROR ANALYSIS. In other words, scientists know there are errors and they analyze them to describe what they are, how they're bounded, etc.
This is where I have an issue. ANY piece of science than, in any way, might somehow make someone question the global warming dogma is immediately attacked and discredited. As a former scientist, this is really scary.
Every scientific point of view deserves scrutiny. To immediately try to discredit people of differing opinions to stop the global warming money train is really scary.
Same thing happened back in the 90s, when the theory of dinosaurs evolving into birds surfaced. For a few years there, any opposing theory was mocked and laughed at.
If you were a real scientist then you wouldn't type that "money train" denialist bullshit.
Also, if you were real scientist then you would actually have a clue about what the research actually was. People aren't attacking the the double dynamo hypothesis proposed by the paper. They're attacking the outrageous stupidity by the media and science deniers saying that a predicted solar minimum event will result in a mini ice age.
If you passed third grade math class then you should be able to tell pretty quickly that the "mini-ice age" claim is 100% garbage. Even during the Maunder Minimum (which, if you read the paper, isn't what's predicted to happen) insolation changed by a whopping.2%. The forcing from additional greenhouse gases significantly exceeds that to the point where it will barely make a dent in the best case scenario (2C temperature increase).
It's syntactical sugar really. As noted, most of the work is handled under the covers by what are essentially library calls. Any language can replicate this, and in a similar number of lines of code (given that the functionality available in a similar library).
All joking aside, nuclear missiles will do precisely dick to any incoming impactor that could threaten even a city. A 1 km wide nickel-iron asteroid traveling at a typical impactor's velocity would yield about 60,000 megatons. Throwing a handful of nukes at it would be about as effective as throwing pebbles at a tank.
...It's just so fucking awful, and I've worked with some pretty awful languages in the past...
Yep. Writing a short script here and there was what it was designed for. For large scale application development and maintenance? I can think of few worse.
At the very end, all that will remain is a sign floating innocuously through space as a lonely reminder that yes, once intelligent life flourished here. The sign will read:
Except for people who care that Obama and his administration blatantly lied about what happened in the period right before an election. And we see that Hillary Clinton knew very well that what was being said by both State and White House spokesdroids (and by her, and the president himself) was pure fabricated BS meant to placate prospective voters. They deliberately lied about what happened so that those events wouldn't contradict the narrative that Obama was trying to sell in his re-election bid. The people who actually know this, and who claim they don't care, are desperately hoping that Clinton's complicity in spreading that lie won't remain on people's minds during this upcoming election.
Except for people who care that Bush and his administration blatantly lied about what happened in the period right before an election. And we see that Colin Powell knew very well that what was being said by both State and White House spokesdroids (and by him, and the president himself) was pure fabricated BS meant to placate prospective voters. They deliberately lied about what happened so that those events wouldn't contradict the narrative that Bush was trying to sell in his re-election bid. The people who actually know this, and who claim they don't care, are desperately hoping that Powell's complicity in spreading that lie won't remain on people's minds during this upcoming election.
The hypocrisy is real.
At least if there was some sort of conspiracy involved, this one kept the body count in single digits and didn't destabilize an entire region of the globe. But whatever helps you sleep at night.
The news side is fairly reliable. The editorial page has been brain-dead since the Carter administration, and that was long before Rupert Murdoch bought the paper.
You have to actually wade into the issue and form a discrete opinion of it.
By far the coolest part of all this is now a "crowd" will form an opinion about Clinton and Benghazi from reading her emails. Primary sources FTW. Not want any journalist wants them to think, not a quote picked carefully for a political ad, but by actually reading what was said at the time. That's more informed democracy already than I expected in this whole election cycle!
Not really. The amount of cognitive dissonance that runs through this country when it comes to things like politics and, sadly, science, is quite staggering. People aren't going through those emails to become informed. They're going through them for dirt/vindication/etc. of whatever biases they have.
There's going to be a thousand cherry picked quotes out of context and a thousand facepalms. Fox news will more than likely take some of the juiciest out-of-context quotes and try to make Hillary sound like the next Pol Pot. MSNBC will make her out to be a saint. CNN will create some sort of pointless 3D fly through graphic that has nothing to do with anything and will make blue hairs think they didn't take their meds.
Whatever. "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu
"It's a well-kept secret, but 95 per cent of the climate models... have been found... to be in error."
Ha ha ha. He used the notorious passive voice: "have been found". I wonder why?
Clues:
1. Does not specify who did the finding. 2. Provides no link to any actual information.
More importantly, he's flat out wrong.
1. It isn't a secret. Every single research article includes an error analysis. So unless he'scompletely ignorant, batshit insane, or completely fucking stupid he and anyone else should be well aware that models/research/etc. contain errors.
2. 100% of climate models are in error. 100% of any model is in error. That's why they're models. It's logic and algorithms trying to simulate complex real world situations. And since you never have absolutely perfect information nor absolutely perfect algorithms, there is always some error. Hence why scientists include error analysis in their research.
There's no excuse for this level of stupidity, other than malice. Nice fat paychecks in exchange for support to continue screwing up our environment.
nobody has a grant which depends on finding out that global warming is real. nobody has that grant because we have known it is real, for sure, since the 1980s Any academic would stand to make a huge name for himself or herself by finding compelling evidence that it *wasn't* real.
Correction, we've known it for almost 200 years. Fourier (which I'm sure most slashdotters have heard of) laid the preliminary groundwork back in the 1820's. The first climate model predicting global warming as a result of increased greenhouse gases was developed in the 1890's by Svante Arrhenius (if you're a chemist, you know who this guy is). Greenhouse theory and the theory of anthropogenic global warming are not new science. It is OLD SCIENCE.
The only thing relatively new is that our modern technology allows us to collect more data and run far more detailed and advanced global climate models. Instead of just predicting warming, we can get a better idea of what the impacts of that warming will be.
I have an idea. How about instead of wiping his ass with the Constitution, burning it, then shitting on the ashes for good measure, maybe this Stalinist assclown could try to protect us from some real threats to the American people.
Terrorism? Fucking idiot. Terrorism isn't a threat. Heart disease is a threat. Obesity and complications related to obesity are a threat. Car accidents are a threat. Cancer is a threat.
In fact, just about everything in life is more of a threat to the average American than terrorism, from accidentally dropping an electrical appliance in the tub while you're in it to falling down the fucking stairs. Even getting struck by lightning is more of a fucking threat.
Terrorism? This guy needs to get some fucking perspective.Terrorism is an excuse. It's a cash cow. It's a blunt object to club over the collective head of the populace. The fear of terrorism is doing more to destroy this country than any terrorist or terrorist organization could ever hope to accomplish on their own. In fact, if terrorists really want to bring down America all they need to do is open cheap shops of deep fried donut wrapped sausages and watch us die by the millions from strokes and heart attacks. They can laugh their asses off watching us drop like flies while we chant "protect us from the terrorists!".
A Maunder or Dalton type minimum would have almost no effect on climate given the current forcings. The Maunder minimum represented about a 0.25% change in overall solar output. Multiple papers have been written on the subject, including what would happen today if such a minimum occurred. The average cooling expected from several papers on the subject would be a cooling of about 0.2C. The most conservative estimate of warming due to increased anthropogenic forcings is about 10 times greater than that.
Scientists are well aware that the sun has very minor variations in solar output. They are also well aware that a Maunder type minimum would do jack to offset the current warming.
....It's premature to throw a Singularity party but it's definitely premature to declare the device to not be a warp drive.
It isn't a warp drive, nor has anyone claimed it is. A warp drive operates by affecting local space-time. The method of propulsion here is no different than any other rocket, except instead of propellants it's using EM fields.
IF experiments continue to validate, then there could be some interesting physics that come out of this. Perhaps it's actually acting like a form of hydrodynamic thruster for dark matter. Maybe the quantum foam isn't as "frameless" as originally thought. Or it could simply be experimental error.
I RTFA and don't get the controversy. Of course the data used to form regulations should be easily available to everybody. The only reason to use secret data is you want to hide something.
Not trying to troll here, just not seeing the other side.
So you'd be okay with the EPA releasing your personal data if you were part of health impact study? You'd be okay with letting some company dump unknown toxins into your water because the EPA can only regulate what's publicly available and said toxins are guarded by "trade secrets"? How about nuclear waste, where the contents, sources, and locations are all "secret" knowledge?
Do you see where this going?
Any bill regarding the EPA pushed forward by republicans is designed to destroy the EPA. They don't give a single fuck about pollution or destroying the environment. They want to go back to the days where you could set Lake Eerie on fire and getting black lung from living downwind of a coal plant. They want science to die a miserable death in all it's forms.
Always read the fine print. This bill is specifically crafted to remove the EPA's ability to function, with the eventual goal of disbanding it entirely.
ESRI is the Tomacco of GIS software. It's terrible, but they can't stop using it.
I was pulled onto a legacy application that was using ESRI, and after seeing what a disaster it was (the project was on the verge of losing funding) I trashed the whole thing and rebuilt it from the ground up using open source tools and libraries. What used to take weeks to months of hair pulling frustration from programmers now takes a couple minutes for a non-techie user.
Anecdotes are a dime a dozen though. I'm sure ArcGIS and friends have their uses, and in some cases may be the only game in town for some features. I just haven't found where'd I use ESRI vs. an open source equivalent.
Yes, but they also have certain commonalities. Just like almost all gas engines have a fuel pump, if you want to kill a gas engine, you might want to consider cutting power to the fuel pump. They have have different types of ignition systems, they might have forced air induction, they might be 4, 6, 8 cylinders, etc... but most cancer cells do share a lot of common pathways.
The problem isn't that they share certain characteristics. The problem is that they share the same characteristics with healthy cells.
Killing cancer cells is easy. Killing cancer cells without also destroying everything else is a very hard problem to solve. If this protein can force cancer cells back into healthy cells (or at least self-destruct) WITHOUT negatively affecting healthy tissues then this would be significant.
Is it really common practice now to have laid off workers escorted out by security?
It is fairly common. Sometime the terminatees will delete files, copy confidential information, or even sabotage equipment. I have seen all of these things happen, and was sometimes surprised by who did it. The polite quiet submissive people often have the most bottled up rage.
Your assessment is flawed. Warmer temperatures do mean more water can evaporate, but that does not mean it will precipitate in nearby regions. There are many regions around the world that are hot, humid, and still dry as a bone (Somalia, Northwestern Peru, most Middle Eastern countries that border the ocean, etc.).This is like the other bad science assumption often tossed around by deniers: " Well if there is more water vapor then there will be more clouds and so the world will cool down!". No, it doesn't work like that.
There are conditions that need to be met for cloud formation and precipitation. If the atmosphere is stable, then it really doesn't matter how much moisture is present. If a blocking ridge forms over the region, then those warm moist air masses are going to move somewhere else. If there is a thick enough layer of dry air beneath the moist air, then it'll just be virga. If the air masses destabilize before coming ashore, then it'll just dump rain back into the ocean.
Slashdot Mirror
...and yet many companies use United Healthcare, which has this neat little program where nicotine users (cigs, dip, vape, whatever) get to pay an extra $70/mo. for their health insurance, and if your spouse smokes? That'll be $140/mo that you get pay, please.
Oh, you don't partake and claim yourself exempt? You get random annual bodily-fluid testing where you get to prove that you're nicotine-free.
Did I mention that if caught smoking when you said you didn't? You get fired for-cause.
You've got two people who want you to lend them $1000. One is an alcoholic gambling addict, the other is a responsible adult with a long stable work history and no debt. Which do you lend money to?
This isn't rocket science here. Insurance companies aren't non-profit charities. Their ability to stay afloat relies on their ability to accurately assess risk and charge accordingly. If you engage in high risk behaviors (smoking, excessive drinking, weighing 400 lbs and eating nothing but cheeseburgers and donuts while snorting lines of coke off a hooker's ass, etc.), then an insurance company is going to adjust your rates higher than someone who leads a healthy lifestyle.
And if you lie and say your the pinnacle of health when in fact your one deep fried cheese stick from a coronary, I'm not sure why you seem to think that's any different than lying in any other aspect of your job. Your dishonest and selfish behavior just cost the company $150,000 for your triple bypass, raising the rates the company has to pay and thus your co-workers have to pay.
The only person who has a remote chance of caring about us is Trump.
Trump doesn't give one shit about people, and all you need to do is look at his history.
I am well aware of that... but he also has nothing to gain by screwing us at this point. He is now old, very wealthy, and has nothing else to do but take the country in a new direction.
Bullshit. People like Trump want one thing and one thing only: MORE. They don't care about you. They don't care about the US, the world, terrorists, or any of the crap. They are amoral, borderline sociopaths who'd just as soon wipe an entire third world country off the map just so they can make 10 cents on the dollar for some useless piece of electronic garbage.
Yeah, I'm tired of the same old same old crap in Washington as well, but I'm not about to hand over the reigns of a world super power to asshole blowhard with the science understanding of a 2 year old. That's not different. That's just plain fucking stupid.
He also isn't owned by lobbyists or 30 years of political connections the way Bush and Clinton are.
Oh, but he wants to be. Nothing pleases a someone like Trump than having his ass kissed, cock sucked, and pockets lined by the world elite. He's leading the republican polls, and he's already got people with knee-pads and wallets just begging for the chance.
If Bush or Clinton are elected, exactly nothing will change. If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always gotten.
Which is a hell of a lot better than giving a racist asshole the keys to the kingdom. The whole point of an election is to make things better, not worse. Also, considering that Trump has pissed off just about everyone on both sides of the aisle, exactly how does that improve the situation in Washington?
At least Trump will kick over the table and say, "new direction".
No, he will say "BEND OVER BITCHES" and proceed to screw us over through idiocy and malice, because that's what he does.
Will it turn out well?
Absolutely not. He's already expressed his almost laughable grasp of complex subjects and has outright lied on multiple occasions. Worse, he doesn't even apologize when caught. He just doubles down. Why do people think American politics is a joke in the rest of the world? Because idiots like Trump actually can lead in the polls. I'm sure they'd be laughing if they weren't terrified that someone like Trump has a finger on the button.
Hard to say, we won't really know without trying, but at some point we either try something new, or accept the current situation forever.
Really? Have you even WATCHED what the hell this douchebag has been saying and doing since he began his campaign?
Look, I understand your desire to try something different. I share the same desire. But Trump is by leaps and bounds the WORST candidate on the list.
I'm not sure what your point is. The way science works is that scientists are constantly improving their work. You would be more worried if they didn't upgrade their data analysis methods from time to time.
There's a vast difference between improving your analysis and dropping data you don't like.
There's also a vast difference between ignorant and being willfully ignorant. There is a full detailed scientific explanation of WHY the change was made. It has nothing to do with "Oh we don't like it".
Grow up.
If it's been 400 years since the Maunder Minimum, and assuming we peak on temperature right now, wouldn't that mean the new minimum is still a problem for our [great-]+grandchildren?
No, because solar variation even during the minimum wouldn't even be close to enough to offset the additional warming we've introduced. Even if our temperature peaked right now, we're at about .8C above the 20th century average. A Maunder Minimum type event would drop that by about .2C. So even if this was as warm as it gets (which it isn't) then global average temperature would still be about .6C above the 20th century average.
I would just like climatologists to admit that most of their prior models have had their faults and this one may as well...
I'm going to take a wild guess here and say you don't really ever read research papers. Because if you did, you'd know that just about every piece of research includes a section for ERROR ANALYSIS. In other words, scientists know there are errors and they analyze them to describe what they are, how they're bounded, etc.
This is where I have an issue. ANY piece of science than, in any way, might somehow make someone question the global warming dogma is immediately attacked and discredited. As a former scientist, this is really scary.
Every scientific point of view deserves scrutiny. To immediately try to discredit people of differing opinions to stop the global warming money train is really scary.
Same thing happened back in the 90s, when the theory of dinosaurs evolving into birds surfaced. For a few years there, any opposing theory was mocked and laughed at.
If you were a real scientist then you wouldn't type that "money train" denialist bullshit.
Also, if you were real scientist then you would actually have a clue about what the research actually was. People aren't attacking the the double dynamo hypothesis proposed by the paper. They're attacking the outrageous stupidity by the media and science deniers saying that a predicted solar minimum event will result in a mini ice age.
If you passed third grade math class then you should be able to tell pretty quickly that the "mini-ice age" claim is 100% garbage. Even during the Maunder Minimum (which, if you read the paper, isn't what's predicted to happen) insolation changed by a whopping .2%. The forcing from additional greenhouse gases significantly exceeds that to the point where it will barely make a dent in the best case scenario (2C temperature increase).
It's syntactical sugar really. As noted, most of the work is handled under the covers by what are essentially library calls. Any language can replicate this, and in a similar number of lines of code (given that the functionality available in a similar library).
All joking aside, nuclear missiles will do precisely dick to any incoming impactor that could threaten even a city. A 1 km wide nickel-iron asteroid traveling at a typical impactor's velocity would yield about 60,000 megatons. Throwing a handful of nukes at it would be about as effective as throwing pebbles at a tank.
...It's just so fucking awful, and I've worked with some pretty awful languages in the past...
Yep. Writing a short script here and there was what it was designed for. For large scale application development and maintenance? I can think of few worse.
At the very end, all that will remain is a sign floating innocuously through space as a lonely reminder that yes, once intelligent life flourished here. The sign will read:
Burma Shave
nobody gives a shit about Benghazi
Except for people who care that Obama and his administration blatantly lied about what happened in the period right before an election. And we see that Hillary Clinton knew very well that what was being said by both State and White House spokesdroids (and by her, and the president himself) was pure fabricated BS meant to placate prospective voters. They deliberately lied about what happened so that those events wouldn't contradict the narrative that Obama was trying to sell in his re-election bid. The people who actually know this, and who claim they don't care, are desperately hoping that Clinton's complicity in spreading that lie won't remain on people's minds during this upcoming election.
Except for people who care that Bush and his administration blatantly lied about what happened in the period right before an election. And we see that Colin Powell knew very well that what was being said by both State and White House spokesdroids (and by him, and the president himself) was pure fabricated BS meant to placate prospective voters. They deliberately lied about what happened so that those events wouldn't contradict the narrative that Bush was trying to sell in his re-election bid. The people who actually know this, and who claim they don't care, are desperately hoping that Powell's complicity in spreading that lie won't remain on people's minds during this upcoming election.
The hypocrisy is real.
At least if there was some sort of conspiracy involved, this one kept the body count in single digits and didn't destabilize an entire region of the globe. But whatever helps you sleep at night.
The news side is fairly reliable. The editorial page has been brain-dead since the Carter administration, and that was long before Rupert Murdoch bought the paper.
As long as it isn't politics or science.
You have to actually wade into the issue and form a discrete opinion of it.
By far the coolest part of all this is now a "crowd" will form an opinion about Clinton and Benghazi from reading her emails. Primary sources FTW. Not want any journalist wants them to think, not a quote picked carefully for a political ad, but by actually reading what was said at the time. That's more informed democracy already than I expected in this whole election cycle!
Not really. The amount of cognitive dissonance that runs through this country when it comes to things like politics and, sadly, science, is quite staggering. People aren't going through those emails to become informed. They're going through them for dirt/vindication/etc. of whatever biases they have.
There's going to be a thousand cherry picked quotes out of context and a thousand facepalms. Fox news will more than likely take some of the juiciest out-of-context quotes and try to make Hillary sound like the next Pol Pot. MSNBC will make her out to be a saint. CNN will create some sort of pointless 3D fly through graphic that has nothing to do with anything and will make blue hairs think they didn't take their meds.
Whatever. "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu
"It's a well-kept secret, but 95 per cent of the climate models ... have been found ... to be in error."
Ha ha ha. He used the notorious passive voice: "have been found". I wonder why?
Clues:
1. Does not specify who did the finding.
2. Provides no link to any actual information.
More importantly, he's flat out wrong.
1. It isn't a secret. Every single research article includes an error analysis. So unless he'scompletely ignorant, batshit insane, or completely fucking stupid he and anyone else should be well aware that models/research/etc. contain errors.
2. 100% of climate models are in error. 100% of any model is in error. That's why they're models. It's logic and algorithms trying to simulate complex real world situations. And since you never have absolutely perfect information nor absolutely perfect algorithms, there is always some error. Hence why scientists include error analysis in their research.
There's no excuse for this level of stupidity, other than malice. Nice fat paychecks in exchange for support to continue screwing up our environment.
nobody has a grant which depends on finding out that global warming is real.
nobody has that grant because we have known it is real, for sure, since the 1980s
Any academic would stand to make a huge name for himself or herself by finding compelling evidence that it *wasn't* real.
Correction, we've known it for almost 200 years. Fourier (which I'm sure most slashdotters have heard of) laid the preliminary groundwork back in the 1820's. The first climate model predicting global warming as a result of increased greenhouse gases was developed in the 1890's by Svante Arrhenius (if you're a chemist, you know who this guy is). Greenhouse theory and the theory of anthropogenic global warming are not new science. It is OLD SCIENCE.
The only thing relatively new is that our modern technology allows us to collect more data and run far more detailed and advanced global climate models. Instead of just predicting warming, we can get a better idea of what the impacts of that warming will be.
I have an idea. How about instead of wiping his ass with the Constitution, burning it, then shitting on the ashes for good measure, maybe this Stalinist assclown could try to protect us from some real threats to the American people.
Terrorism? Fucking idiot. Terrorism isn't a threat. Heart disease is a threat. Obesity and complications related to obesity are a threat. Car accidents are a threat. Cancer is a threat.
In fact, just about everything in life is more of a threat to the average American than terrorism, from accidentally dropping an electrical appliance in the tub while you're in it to falling down the fucking stairs. Even getting struck by lightning is more of a fucking threat.
Terrorism? This guy needs to get some fucking perspective.Terrorism is an excuse. It's a cash cow. It's a blunt object to club over the collective head of the populace. The fear of terrorism is doing more to destroy this country than any terrorist or terrorist organization could ever hope to accomplish on their own. In fact, if terrorists really want to bring down America all they need to do is open cheap shops of deep fried donut wrapped sausages and watch us die by the millions from strokes and heart attacks. They can laugh their asses off watching us drop like flies while we chant "protect us from the terrorists!".
Sad.
A Maunder or Dalton type minimum would have almost no effect on climate given the current forcings. The Maunder minimum represented about a 0.25% change in overall solar output. Multiple papers have been written on the subject, including what would happen today if such a minimum occurred. The average cooling expected from several papers on the subject would be a cooling of about 0.2C. The most conservative estimate of warming due to increased anthropogenic forcings is about 10 times greater than that.
Scientists are well aware that the sun has very minor variations in solar output. They are also well aware that a Maunder type minimum would do jack to offset the current warming.
....It's premature to throw a Singularity party but it's definitely premature to declare the device to not be a warp drive.
It isn't a warp drive, nor has anyone claimed it is. A warp drive operates by affecting local space-time. The method of propulsion here is no different than any other rocket, except instead of propellants it's using EM fields.
IF experiments continue to validate, then there could be some interesting physics that come out of this. Perhaps it's actually acting like a form of hydrodynamic thruster for dark matter. Maybe the quantum foam isn't as "frameless" as originally thought. Or it could simply be experimental error.
More experiments please.
I RTFA and don't get the controversy. Of course the data used to form regulations should be easily available to everybody. The only reason to use secret data is you want to hide something.
Not trying to troll here, just not seeing the other side.
So you'd be okay with the EPA releasing your personal data if you were part of health impact study? You'd be okay with letting some company dump unknown toxins into your water because the EPA can only regulate what's publicly available and said toxins are guarded by "trade secrets"? How about nuclear waste, where the contents, sources, and locations are all "secret" knowledge?
Do you see where this going?
Any bill regarding the EPA pushed forward by republicans is designed to destroy the EPA. They don't give a single fuck about pollution or destroying the environment. They want to go back to the days where you could set Lake Eerie on fire and getting black lung from living downwind of a coal plant. They want science to die a miserable death in all it's forms.
Always read the fine print. This bill is specifically crafted to remove the EPA's ability to function, with the eventual goal of disbanding it entirely.
ESRI is the Tomacco of GIS software. It's terrible, but they can't stop using it.
I was pulled onto a legacy application that was using ESRI, and after seeing what a disaster it was (the project was on the verge of losing funding) I trashed the whole thing and rebuilt it from the ground up using open source tools and libraries. What used to take weeks to months of hair pulling frustration from programmers now takes a couple minutes for a non-techie user.
Anecdotes are a dime a dozen though. I'm sure ArcGIS and friends have their uses, and in some cases may be the only game in town for some features. I just haven't found where'd I use ESRI vs. an open source equivalent.
Yes, but they also have certain commonalities. Just like almost all gas engines have a fuel pump, if you want to kill a gas engine, you might want to consider cutting power to the fuel pump. They have have different types of ignition systems, they might have forced air induction, they might be 4, 6, 8 cylinders, etc... but most cancer cells do share a lot of common pathways.
The problem isn't that they share certain characteristics. The problem is that they share the same characteristics with healthy cells.
Killing cancer cells is easy. Killing cancer cells without also destroying everything else is a very hard problem to solve. If this protein can force cancer cells back into healthy cells (or at least self-destruct) WITHOUT negatively affecting healthy tissues then this would be significant.
Is it really common practice now to have laid off workers escorted out by security?
It is fairly common. Sometime the terminatees will delete files, copy confidential information, or even sabotage equipment. I have seen all of these things happen, and was sometimes surprised by who did it. The polite quiet submissive people often have the most bottled up rage.
Have you seen my red swingline stapler?
Your assessment is flawed. Warmer temperatures do mean more water can evaporate, but that does not mean it will precipitate in nearby regions. There are many regions around the world that are hot, humid, and still dry as a bone (Somalia, Northwestern Peru, most Middle Eastern countries that border the ocean, etc.).This is like the other bad science assumption often tossed around by deniers: " Well if there is more water vapor then there will be more clouds and so the world will cool down!". No, it doesn't work like that.
There are conditions that need to be met for cloud formation and precipitation. If the atmosphere is stable, then it really doesn't matter how much moisture is present. If a blocking ridge forms over the region, then those warm moist air masses are going to move somewhere else. If there is a thick enough layer of dry air beneath the moist air, then it'll just be virga. If the air masses destabilize before coming ashore, then it'll just dump rain back into the ocean.
But I'm sure you know all this.
This is Florida, correct? Isn't their system something like:
1. YELLATUM!
2. GETEMRUNNIN!
3. CHUTUM!
4. DONCHATALKERBUTGLABALWURMIN!
...Are they TRYING to destroy the country!?
Of course not. That's just a side benefit of their short term thinking.