No question that the update worked for some people. Including - presumably, anyway - the developer who built it.
But the thread I pointed out was but one of many that has sprung up this month, each with several, sometimes many, Mac users going "say... what the heck?" Take look at the other threads. Tons of people talking about failures, with one or two saying "worked for me." Lots of well-intentioned people (not from Apple) suggesting workaround attempts (try deleting your lists of trusted networks, switch encryption modes, use ethernet) and no one saying "here is Apple's fix." That's not the ratio you want to see.
My own situation is Mac centric; I use a mini Intel dual-core as the source of the wifi, and normally have various Mac clients, an XP client, a Wii client and a PS3 client. The update hosed me; no individual client or set of clients can connect to the mini more than once; the mini has to be rebooted before a new connection can be opened. My network is open; no passwords, no WEP or WPx or etc.; There are no other wifi networks within reception range, no competing signals in the same spectrum (rural life has at least these advantages), and the distance of any client to the mini is less than 30 feet along any one vector - meaning full strength reception, basically - so it is about the simplest situation you can imagine.
Everything had been working perfectly until 2007-002. Since then, I've added the.9 update to the OS, no change. Considering that adding 2007-002 to the mini broke the XP machine's ability to play client, I'm rather convinced that there are multiple problems - most reports talk about their Mac not talking to a hub (such as a DLink) - so they can't have broken host for them, only client; while in my situation, the Mac *is* the host, and the update would not have affected the XP, Wii or PS3 clients, though it could, and apparently did, hose my Macbook pro and the other minis. So there are at least two problems, one for host use and one for client use.
It is an interesting and frustrating situation. I hope it is resolved shortly. I don't much like having Ethernet strung all over the place at home, and I can't take my Macbook pro anywhere and get online via wifi; it won't connect unless it is wired. Luckily I have an ethernet connection at work, we don't use wifi there; but I *was* in the habit of surfing at the coffee shop, the doctor's office, the hospital and at friend's houses. You don't realize how much you're going to miss convenience like that until it's gone.
The original work, "Make Room, Make Room", by Harry Harrison had no such plot element in it; it didn't need it. After all, it was written for intelligent readers.
When you get your entertainment from Hollywood, you have to expect screaming morons and adulterated plots.
also which plants grow (just like weeds) that we can weave and wear,
An... an... make ROPE, man! We need plants to make ROPE! An... An... I know the answer, dude. I do. It's pot, man. Or hemp, anyway. But the deal is, see, even if you can't make rope with pot...
Is confining people to prisons with nothing to do any better than putting them to work?
Confining them with no opportunity to do anything is stupid. If rehabilitation - education, in particular, but there are other positive things you can do - is the focus, then for the unfairly imprisoned, you are not making things worse. Enslaving them is making things worse. For the legitimately imprisoned, education gives them skills they could use instead of, for instance, robbing you and I.
That's not all that needs to be fixed, though. The prison system is a huge, abusive mess, and the after-prison system is designed to almost guarantee that there will be further offenses, because these people can't get jobs. Not just because we're not educating them, but because it is legal to discriminate against someone who has paid their debt for an alleged crime.
The question is, and always has been, what are we trying to accomplish? Do we want these people to come back out and successfully integrate, having learned a lesson? Or do we want them coming out mad as wasps that have been trapped in a bag of noxious smoke, not only with skills to re-offend, but reasons to? I think it is pretty clear that if you can think your way out of a paper bag, you'd want the former, not the latter.
Given that, does tagging them forever as "untouchable" serve the purpose? Does using them as slave labor serve the purpose? Does educating them serve the purpose? Does accepting the idea they have paid their debt to society serve the purpose? Does counseling serve the purpose?
Well, you know what? It doesn't matter. Society is made up of clueless sheep who can't see they're making things worse for themselves by cheering on the abuse of these people. Released inmates will continue to be driven to the very lowest strata of society and held there, they will continue to react just as you'd expect to that, and society will begin to use them as slaves and probably worse - forced organ donors, pharma test subjects and so on. We're well down the slope already.
In a just world, you should be my indentured servant until you earn enough to buy me a new house.
Yes; if they burned your house down. What if you have the wrong person? This is often the case with the justice system. How can you blithely say "it is ok because a court said so"?
For practical reasons, prison factories or labor camps are the best way to facilitate this, especially with provisions for skilled labor.
The problem is the practical instantiates the unforgivable - enslaving the innocent. That is completely, utterly unacceptable, and it renders the entire idea anathema.
This actually does what your "armored door" is intended to do. It isolates the cockpit crew from all pressures that could cause them to make decisions under duress, and it prevents unauthorized access to control of the aircraft.
During a recent post on slashdot, you failed to use an opening <pendant> tag. The committee, upon detecting this failure on your part, has acted decisively in response. Your geek license has been suspended for unbalanced use of tags.
Which makes the fact that we want to replace them with prison labor particularly interesting.
...as well as the observation that the 13th amendment specifically reserves the right for the government to create and keep slaves and indentured servants out of the class defined by those who have been convicted of a crime. Any crime:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
The only morally and ethically sound basis for slavery is where the individual knowingly and in an informed manner submits to such a role in return for what they consider sufficient compensation. For example, perhaps a person who has no way to educate their children would exchange a number of years of slavery in exchange for a trust fund, the purpose of which is to educate those children.
There are two other major problems with the government reserving slavery for itself in the fashion it has. First, the legal system has been entirely unable to prevent innocents from being convicted. This makes the government unavoidably complicit in exactly the same type of slavery as the plantation owners of the south were, the very antithesis of freedom. Second, as use of slave labor becomes economically attractive (for instance, as they exclude migrant workers from the country), they are faced with a strong motivation to swell the ranks of the prison population.
Right now, as the prisons are filled to the seams with citizens convicted of victimless crimes, particularly targets of the administration's "war" against drugs, the latter threat seems distant, at best. But there are many signs that the government's drug policies are beginning to waver. If those people regain their freedom, as it seems quite clear they should, a need will arise for warm bodies should the prison system become involved in the economy with regard to supplying laborers.
Still, you cannot expect people who have expended the time and energy to learn to speak a language well to be sanguine about the deterioration of that language as found in mispronunciation, intuitive reversals, and the slurring, fractured attempts by society's least well educated to carve out dialects for themselves. The process may be natural, but it is about as pleasant as stabbing yourself in the leg with a fork.
Every time I hear George W Bush mangle a word or a phrase (in other words, just about every time he opens his mouth), I have to carefully recall that my dislike of the man needs to be based upon his inability to be a president who benefits society, rather than his inability to speak the language. Incorrect use, even when quite common, is transparent only to the least competent members of society.
If you look around slashdot, you'll find many examples of posters trying to get other posters to use the language as it was taught to them; from the its/it's issue to lose/loose to phrases such as "I couldn't care less", these things are signs of people responding to a definite lack language skills. It isn't inconsequential, and it isn't a matter of the rank and file looking at language as an evolving medium — we were taught that a particular usage was correct, and that's generally how we think. The drive towards a stable language is a positive thing. No sensible person wants Ebonics, on the one hand, and within that reasonable attitude one finds the seeds for sensible people trying to encourage others to use the language along its baseline.
I don't remember a handsome, powerfully built older man telling me he was me, and then warning me about some upcoming mis-steps, no, but there is that whole "every change forks a future" thing, and maybe I'll get to help someone else, uh, who is me. Sort of. Bring on the wormholes, I tell ya. It'd be fun to tell a version of myself some things, even if it didn't change the path this me followed, which it probably wouldn't for a number of causality related reasons.
If [it is just a natural cycle] is his argument, he leaves out a lot of things that need to be explained to me before I let it go. Like, why are polar bears suddenly on the endangered species list? What's happening to all the snow on the tops of mountains? Where are the ice glaciers (with ice that has been around for thousands if not millions of years) going?
According to the quote, he's not saying warming isn't happening. So polar bears, snowcaps and glacier retreats are all acknowledged implicity - these would all be side effects of warming, and you said yourself that he said that warming was a natural cycle - not that it wasn't happening. All you have to do is say that the warming is a little more pronounced than it has been, and you'll have new effects. The question he raises is not "is there warming", but rather, he is casting doubt on the theory that says "we did it" when he says "it is a natural cycle."
What is his retort to the CO2 levels being their highest ever--even after looking at ice core samples?
I don't know what his is, but I can tell you what mine is: In the core records, CO2 levels rise after periods of warming. In other words, they're not a cause, they are an effect. Pointing to ice cores and claiming that CO2 has historically been an indicator of warming is disingenuous. The role of CO2 as a warming catalyst in previous warming cycles has absolutely not been established. As one for instance, we have no evidence as to how the far more effective (in terms of moderating warming and greenhouse effects) evaporative water cycle will counter or enhance the slight effect we can anticipate from more CO2 being present in the atmosphere. We've heard a lot of FUD about CO2 being long term, while moisture has a very short cycle, but that again is disingenuous. You cannot argue that moisture, once cycled, will not immediately cycle again; each time it does, it carries heat to the upper atmosphere and brings cooling to the surface, and while CO2 may remain for quite some time as a very minor heat-intensifier, moisture circulation remains as a cooling engine that never quits and which responds directly to additional heat by putting more moisture into the atmosphere.
Now, I'm not saying that we should not reduce emissions; CO2 and pollution in general. We should. We should strive to not alter the atmosphere until we manage to get ourselves to as neutral a position as we can for the simple reason that the atmosphere that nurtured us is, as far as we know, is the atmosphere that is best for us, not to mention for all the other life on the planet. But I am saying that it is not clear cut that we are causing this particular warming cycle. We might very well reduce CO2 emissions and find the warming cycle continues onwards regardless. There are many factors involved, and we've seen very recent failures in the climate models, for instance in the antarctic. These cannot be explained away as insignificant; the models aren't very high quality, nor should we expect them to be when they're trying to predict behavior we have not previously seen (that is, CO2 caused warming - as I mentioned up top, there is no previous record of such a thing. CO2 level rise follows warming in the fossil record, it does not precede warming.)
So you're quite sure it wasn't bumped into a different orbit after forming from the same accretion disk? You figure it came from... sirius or some other solar system?
You mention "other evidence" than the orbit, but you aren't specific. How about a few hints so I can follow that up?
I don't know of course, your idea seems possible, certainly, but it also seems like a far stretch. There are perfectly good and reasonable scenarios for it to be "one of us" as it were. So until someone lands there and finds non solar-system evidence (like wildly different ratios of elements or rocks in the "older than our solar system" range), I'm strongly inclined to call it brother, rather than foreigner. We know so very little about it; just where it is, how bright it is, and the fact that it has a companion.
Please propose how you would get life out of chemicals other than the ones used in earth bound life
Silicon life is most likely only a few years to a few decades away here. It won't be an evolved life, but there is no reason it can't be set up as a complete life cycle. Life implies reproduction, and presumes some energy-based interaction with the environment. We'll have something far more sophisticated than a plant, and far more interesting as well. So that's an example of primarily silicon based life.
Engineered life may use all manner of chemicals to create the engine, as it were. The idea that carbon-based life is the only possibility is simple hubris. However, I wasn't saying that we should have an active search program for something which we cannot define; I was simply saying that it is misleading and counterproductive to consider life as being only "like us."
To achieve the complexity needed for life you are going to have a hard time doing it with anything other than carbon.
It has taken us less than a hundred years of fooling with silicon to develop the theories behind artificial life based upon it. Others may have done the same with other technologies. Nature managed to cobble together DNA and turn it into something, or allow it to turn itself into something, in spite of apparently long odds against the start. I think your "this is all that can be" attitude isn't justified by what we've learned so far.
You are, of course, entitled to your opinion. Anonymous and cowardly thought it might be.:-)
I'd like them to modify their finding to some thing like..."Scientists develop tools to detect life similar to Earth's life on Mars."
That's precisely on the mark. It isn't that we should not be looking for life that is similar, since we know that such life has developed under some circumstances, and that's all we know, but finding none of the above is in no way definitive with regard to declaring Mars, or any other planet, "lifeless" — but when the generalization is mis-stated as you have pointed out, that leads the mind down the wrong road.
If the center of rotation is INSIDE one of the objects, the other object is a moon, if not, a binary planet.
I agree; I've posted so elsewhere in the thread.
A 1% maximum average difference would probably be a good place to start, though you might want to put in a compensation for rotational bulge.
I think that percentage will vary based on what the composition of the planet is. It could be that outside of our solar system, we might run into planets that are largely made up of things that we only have smallish amounts of, leading to different ranges of variance (and different ranges for bulges, too.) Bulges are going to depend upon rotational speed, I think, and we know that can vary quite a bit just from the examples we have here and some stars we've been keeping tabs on.
Therefore, Pluto is the 11th planet discovered by your definition, not the 9th.:-P
I'm all good with that. Never memorized the order they were discovered in anyway, not highly useful information in my line of work - so no preconceptions to disturb along these lines.
Also, what about Charon? How does you differentiate between planet-moon and double-planet? After all, Pluto and Charon both orbit a point in space exterior to their surfaces (unlike the moons of the other planets).
Then they are binary planets. Same rationale as stars. I addressed this somewhere else in the thread, btw.
Have any alternative suggestions? Right now at least, I'm inclined to think that "debris" isn't an invalid term for broken, useless, or discarded stuff we leave around. We call stuff in the gutter debris, we call the remains of a destroyed ship floating about on the surface of the water debris, we call the chunks of matter that are left when we blow up a satellite debris... so I think it is fairly clear that one widely accepted, and commonly used, meaning of debris is "stuff left around by people where it wasn't initially present."
The very first definition in my Mac's dictionary is:
"scattered fragments, typically of something wrecked or destroyed : the bomb hits it, showering debris from all sides."
Lastly, geology offers up very specific terms (such as talus) for various kinds of collections of rocks and rubble. I don't think they'll miss debris.:-)
This isn't science. This is simply nomenclature that arises from entirely arbitrary attempts at classing. As for the rest, I decline to respond, as you have convinced me that you are being intentionally abrasive.
Making schoolchildren memorize arbitrary nomenclature is often useless and one of the many signs that our school systems are structured and run by the clueless.
As to why you'd have them memorize the names of any planets at all, you'd probably mention to them (not make them memorize) the first few discovered by our relatively limited earthbound observations as an unimportant but mildly interesting historical issue, and any beyond that which might be educational in and of themselves. I suspect you'd want to tell them how large the current planet count has become, again purely as a matter of interest, and as an intellectual fulcrum for you to inform them that said number is expected to change shortly, and often. Along with the asteroid count, the comet count, the satellite count, the star count, the galaxy count, etc.
There is no need for them to "memorize" any of these names and numbers until or unless they decide to focus on space science one way or another. And perhaps not even then. They just need to know that there are other planets out there in our system, and how planetary systems work, so they don't get caught up in superstitious nonsense.
On top of this, they need to know how to look things up so that when they want a fact for some reason, they can go get it with minimal fanfare.
Intellectual honesty, critical thinking skills, and the ability to use reference materials fluidly are all far more educationally valuable than canned, arbitrary information that came from a committee not entirely in internal agreement anyway.
I'm going to have to take issue with that, at least to the extent that it is no less scientific of me to call Pluto a planet than it is for others to call it something else. A broad classification upon which nothing else depends (other than more names) isn't a matter of science, it is simply a matter of non-critical nomenclature. It doesn't deny any scientific fact, nor does it attempt to put anything on the table that doesn't jibe with established theory. Pluto is still what it was in terms of any scientific information we have, and regardless of any scientific errors we have made. Naming it is not a scientific issue, nor is classing it, or at least it isn't until some matter of actual import turns upon it, of which, I might add, there is no sign.
An important subtext in the argument about Pluto's planetary status is that scientific knowledge isn't set in stone.
Pluto's planetary status isn't a scientific issue. And I agree, arbitrary nomenclature isn't set in stone. So I set mine where I wanted it. You should have no objection on that very basis.
Science is about learning how the universe works, and scientists are going to make mistakes and false starts in that process. They have to be given the chance to go back and revise their ideas and definitions when they learn more.
Fine, but Pluto's classification / definition doesn't affect how the universe works.
The decision to call Pluto a planet was exactly that kind of mistake. The discoverers grossly overestimated its size and had strong political reasons for wanting to call it a planet regardless of whether doing so was accurate. (The observatory that found Pluto was set up specifically to look for a hypothetical ninth planet; when they found something they certainly weren't going to admit that it wasn't up to planetary standards.)
Your argument assumes facts not in evidence. First of all, that "planetary standards" are binding on anyone, or that they are "scientific" (they aren't — they are entirely arbitrary.) They are simply nomenclature, and not very important nomenclature at that. Given that it is an issue of nomenclature, I have as much right to decide how I want to work out what makes a planet a planet as the next guy over, and I see no particular need to be "scientific" about it; I'm more interested in developing a consistent and easily managed classing system, which I think has very high value when it comes to messing with things and thinking about them. But that's all within my own outlook. You, of course, are free to submit to other people's classifications of these matters if it pleases you.
We shouldn't be bound by the mistakes of the past when we know better today.
Exactly. Mistakes like deciding Pluto isn't a planet.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
No question that the update worked for some people. Including - presumably, anyway - the developer who built it.
But the thread I pointed out was but one of many that has sprung up this month, each with several, sometimes many, Mac users going "say... what the heck?" Take look at the other threads. Tons of people talking about failures, with one or two saying "worked for me." Lots of well-intentioned people (not from Apple) suggesting workaround attempts (try deleting your lists of trusted networks, switch encryption modes, use ethernet) and no one saying "here is Apple's fix." That's not the ratio you want to see.
My own situation is Mac centric; I use a mini Intel dual-core as the source of the wifi, and normally have various Mac clients, an XP client, a Wii client and a PS3 client. The update hosed me; no individual client or set of clients can connect to the mini more than once; the mini has to be rebooted before a new connection can be opened. My network is open; no passwords, no WEP or WPx or etc.; There are no other wifi networks within reception range, no competing signals in the same spectrum (rural life has at least these advantages), and the distance of any client to the mini is less than 30 feet along any one vector - meaning full strength reception, basically - so it is about the simplest situation you can imagine.
Everything had been working perfectly until 2007-002. Since then, I've added the .9 update to the OS, no change. Considering that adding 2007-002 to the mini broke the XP machine's ability to play client, I'm rather convinced that there are multiple problems - most reports talk about their Mac not talking to a hub (such as a DLink) - so they can't have broken host for them, only client; while in my situation, the Mac *is* the host, and the update would not have affected the XP, Wii or PS3 clients, though it could, and apparently did, hose my Macbook pro and the other minis. So there are at least two problems, one for host use and one for client use.
It is an interesting and frustrating situation. I hope it is resolved shortly. I don't much like having Ethernet strung all over the place at home, and I can't take my Macbook pro anywhere and get online via wifi; it won't connect unless it is wired. Luckily I have an ethernet connection at work, we don't use wifi there; but I *was* in the habit of surfing at the coffee shop, the doctor's office, the hospital and at friend's houses. You don't realize how much you're going to miss convenience like that until it's gone.
Well, I guess it's moot right now, since Apple broke it's wireless support thoroughly with the 2007-002 update back at the beginning of March, and has remained silent about addressing the problem since then. I've been back to wired connections for weeks now.
It is somewhat problematic to try to hack a connection that won't connect. :-)
I suppose eventually they'll fix this; the silence is a little disturbing, though. It seems... poorly thought out.
There, fixed that for you.
The original work, "Make Room, Make Room", by Harry Harrison had no such plot element in it; it didn't need it. After all, it was written for intelligent readers.
When you get your entertainment from Hollywood, you have to expect screaming morons and adulterated plots.
If you really want to prevent children from seeing harmful content, the bit should be set for all political sites.
An... an... make ROPE, man! We need plants to make ROPE! An... An... I know the answer, dude. I do. It's pot, man. Or hemp, anyway. But the deal is, see, even if you can't make rope with pot...
Confining them with no opportunity to do anything is stupid. If rehabilitation - education, in particular, but there are other positive things you can do - is the focus, then for the unfairly imprisoned, you are not making things worse. Enslaving them is making things worse. For the legitimately imprisoned, education gives them skills they could use instead of, for instance, robbing you and I.
That's not all that needs to be fixed, though. The prison system is a huge, abusive mess, and the after-prison system is designed to almost guarantee that there will be further offenses, because these people can't get jobs. Not just because we're not educating them, but because it is legal to discriminate against someone who has paid their debt for an alleged crime.
The question is, and always has been, what are we trying to accomplish? Do we want these people to come back out and successfully integrate, having learned a lesson? Or do we want them coming out mad as wasps that have been trapped in a bag of noxious smoke, not only with skills to re-offend, but reasons to? I think it is pretty clear that if you can think your way out of a paper bag, you'd want the former, not the latter.
Given that, does tagging them forever as "untouchable" serve the purpose? Does using them as slave labor serve the purpose? Does educating them serve the purpose? Does accepting the idea they have paid their debt to society serve the purpose? Does counseling serve the purpose?
Well, you know what? It doesn't matter. Society is made up of clueless sheep who can't see they're making things worse for themselves by cheering on the abuse of these people. Released inmates will continue to be driven to the very lowest strata of society and held there, they will continue to react just as you'd expect to that, and society will begin to use them as slaves and probably worse - forced organ donors, pharma test subjects and so on. We're well down the slope already.
Yes; if they burned your house down. What if you have the wrong person? This is often the case with the justice system. How can you blithely say "it is ok because a court said so"?
The problem is the practical instantiates the unforgivable - enslaving the innocent. That is completely, utterly unacceptable, and it renders the entire idea anathema.
Not quite. But close. Here's what needs to be done:
This actually does what your "armored door" is intended to do. It isolates the cockpit crew from all pressures that could cause them to make decisions under duress, and it prevents unauthorized access to control of the aircraft.
Dear M. Slashdot Poster:
During a recent post on slashdot, you failed to use an opening <pendant> tag. The committee, upon detecting this failure on your part, has acted decisively in response. Your geek license has been suspended for unbalanced use of tags.
Sincerely yours,
Geek Committee
The only morally and ethically sound basis for slavery is where the individual knowingly and in an informed manner submits to such a role in return for what they consider sufficient compensation. For example, perhaps a person who has no way to educate their children would exchange a number of years of slavery in exchange for a trust fund, the purpose of which is to educate those children.
There are two other major problems with the government reserving slavery for itself in the fashion it has. First, the legal system has been entirely unable to prevent innocents from being convicted. This makes the government unavoidably complicit in exactly the same type of slavery as the plantation owners of the south were, the very antithesis of freedom. Second, as use of slave labor becomes economically attractive (for instance, as they exclude migrant workers from the country), they are faced with a strong motivation to swell the ranks of the prison population.
Right now, as the prisons are filled to the seams with citizens convicted of victimless crimes, particularly targets of the administration's "war" against drugs, the latter threat seems distant, at best. But there are many signs that the government's drug policies are beginning to waver. If those people regain their freedom, as it seems quite clear they should, a need will arise for warm bodies should the prison system become involved in the economy with regard to supplying laborers.
Still, you cannot expect people who have expended the time and energy to learn to speak a language well to be sanguine about the deterioration of that language as found in mispronunciation, intuitive reversals, and the slurring, fractured attempts by society's least well educated to carve out dialects for themselves. The process may be natural, but it is about as pleasant as stabbing yourself in the leg with a fork.
Every time I hear George W Bush mangle a word or a phrase (in other words, just about every time he opens his mouth), I have to carefully recall that my dislike of the man needs to be based upon his inability to be a president who benefits society, rather than his inability to speak the language. Incorrect use, even when quite common, is transparent only to the least competent members of society.
If you look around slashdot, you'll find many examples of posters trying to get other posters to use the language as it was taught to them; from the its/it's issue to lose/loose to phrases such as "I couldn't care less", these things are signs of people responding to a definite lack language skills. It isn't inconsequential, and it isn't a matter of the rank and file looking at language as an evolving medium — we were taught that a particular usage was correct, and that's generally how we think. The drive towards a stable language is a positive thing. No sensible person wants Ebonics, on the one hand, and within that reasonable attitude one finds the seeds for sensible people trying to encourage others to use the language along its baseline.
I don't remember a handsome, powerfully built older man telling me he was me, and then warning me about some upcoming mis-steps, no, but there is that whole "every change forks a future" thing, and maybe I'll get to help someone else, uh, who is me. Sort of. Bring on the wormholes, I tell ya. It'd be fun to tell a version of myself some things, even if it didn't change the path this me followed, which it probably wouldn't for a number of causality related reasons.
I say we let it go on. I'm planning to use some of those global wormholes to go back in time and warn myself about a few things.
According to the quote, he's not saying warming isn't happening. So polar bears, snowcaps and glacier retreats are all acknowledged implicity - these would all be side effects of warming, and you said yourself that he said that warming was a natural cycle - not that it wasn't happening. All you have to do is say that the warming is a little more pronounced than it has been, and you'll have new effects. The question he raises is not "is there warming", but rather, he is casting doubt on the theory that says "we did it" when he says "it is a natural cycle."
I don't know what his is, but I can tell you what mine is: In the core records, CO2 levels rise after periods of warming. In other words, they're not a cause, they are an effect. Pointing to ice cores and claiming that CO2 has historically been an indicator of warming is disingenuous. The role of CO2 as a warming catalyst in previous warming cycles has absolutely not been established. As one for instance, we have no evidence as to how the far more effective (in terms of moderating warming and greenhouse effects) evaporative water cycle will counter or enhance the slight effect we can anticipate from more CO2 being present in the atmosphere. We've heard a lot of FUD about CO2 being long term, while moisture has a very short cycle, but that again is disingenuous. You cannot argue that moisture, once cycled, will not immediately cycle again; each time it does, it carries heat to the upper atmosphere and brings cooling to the surface, and while CO2 may remain for quite some time as a very minor heat-intensifier, moisture circulation remains as a cooling engine that never quits and which responds directly to additional heat by putting more moisture into the atmosphere.
Now, I'm not saying that we should not reduce emissions; CO2 and pollution in general. We should. We should strive to not alter the atmosphere until we manage to get ourselves to as neutral a position as we can for the simple reason that the atmosphere that nurtured us is, as far as we know, is the atmosphere that is best for us, not to mention for all the other life on the planet. But I am saying that it is not clear cut that we are causing this particular warming cycle. We might very well reduce CO2 emissions and find the warming cycle continues onwards regardless. There are many factors involved, and we've seen very recent failures in the climate models, for instance in the antarctic. These cannot be explained away as insignificant; the models aren't very high quality, nor should we expect them to be when they're trying to predict behavior we have not previously seen (that is, CO2 caused warming - as I mentioned up top, there is no previous record of such a thing. CO2 level rise follows warming in the fossil record, it does not precede warming.)
So you're quite sure it wasn't bumped into a different orbit after forming from the same accretion disk? You figure it came from... sirius or some other solar system?
You mention "other evidence" than the orbit, but you aren't specific. How about a few hints so I can follow that up?
I don't know of course, your idea seems possible, certainly, but it also seems like a far stretch. There are perfectly good and reasonable scenarios for it to be "one of us" as it were. So until someone lands there and finds non solar-system evidence (like wildly different ratios of elements or rocks in the "older than our solar system" range), I'm strongly inclined to call it brother, rather than foreigner. We know so very little about it; just where it is, how bright it is, and the fact that it has a companion.
Silicon life is most likely only a few years to a few decades away here. It won't be an evolved life, but there is no reason it can't be set up as a complete life cycle. Life implies reproduction, and presumes some energy-based interaction with the environment. We'll have something far more sophisticated than a plant, and far more interesting as well. So that's an example of primarily silicon based life.
Engineered life may use all manner of chemicals to create the engine, as it were. The idea that carbon-based life is the only possibility is simple hubris. However, I wasn't saying that we should have an active search program for something which we cannot define; I was simply saying that it is misleading and counterproductive to consider life as being only "like us."
It has taken us less than a hundred years of fooling with silicon to develop the theories behind artificial life based upon it. Others may have done the same with other technologies. Nature managed to cobble together DNA and turn it into something, or allow it to turn itself into something, in spite of apparently long odds against the start. I think your "this is all that can be" attitude isn't justified by what we've learned so far.
You are, of course, entitled to your opinion. Anonymous and cowardly thought it might be. :-)
RTT prior to commenting. You'd be amazed what you might run into. :-)
That's precisely on the mark. It isn't that we should not be looking for life that is similar, since we know that such life has developed under some circumstances, and that's all we know, but finding none of the above is in no way definitive with regard to declaring Mars, or any other planet, "lifeless" — but when the generalization is mis-stated as you have pointed out, that leads the mind down the wrong road.
I agree; I've posted so elsewhere in the thread.
I think that percentage will vary based on what the composition of the planet is. It could be that outside of our solar system, we might run into planets that are largely made up of things that we only have smallish amounts of, leading to different ranges of variance (and different ranges for bulges, too.) Bulges are going to depend upon rotational speed, I think, and we know that can vary quite a bit just from the examples we have here and some stars we've been keeping tabs on.
I'm all good with that. Never memorized the order they were discovered in anyway, not highly useful information in my line of work - so no preconceptions to disturb along these lines.
Then they are binary planets. Same rationale as stars. I addressed this somewhere else in the thread, btw.
Have any alternative suggestions? Right now at least, I'm inclined to think that "debris" isn't an invalid term for broken, useless, or discarded stuff we leave around. We call stuff in the gutter debris, we call the remains of a destroyed ship floating about on the surface of the water debris, we call the chunks of matter that are left when we blow up a satellite debris... so I think it is fairly clear that one widely accepted, and commonly used, meaning of debris is "stuff left around by people where it wasn't initially present."
The very first definition in my Mac's dictionary is:
My thesaurus offers up:
Lastly, geology offers up very specific terms (such as talus) for various kinds of collections of rocks and rubble. I don't think they'll miss debris. :-)
This isn't science. This is simply nomenclature that arises from entirely arbitrary attempts at classing. As for the rest, I decline to respond, as you have convinced me that you are being intentionally abrasive.
Making schoolchildren memorize arbitrary nomenclature is often useless and one of the many signs that our school systems are structured and run by the clueless.
As to why you'd have them memorize the names of any planets at all, you'd probably mention to them (not make them memorize) the first few discovered by our relatively limited earthbound observations as an unimportant but mildly interesting historical issue, and any beyond that which might be educational in and of themselves. I suspect you'd want to tell them how large the current planet count has become, again purely as a matter of interest, and as an intellectual fulcrum for you to inform them that said number is expected to change shortly, and often. Along with the asteroid count, the comet count, the satellite count, the star count, the galaxy count, etc.
There is no need for them to "memorize" any of these names and numbers until or unless they decide to focus on space science one way or another. And perhaps not even then. They just need to know that there are other planets out there in our system, and how planetary systems work, so they don't get caught up in superstitious nonsense.
On top of this, they need to know how to look things up so that when they want a fact for some reason, they can go get it with minimal fanfare.
Intellectual honesty, critical thinking skills, and the ability to use reference materials fluidly are all far more educationally valuable than canned, arbitrary information that came from a committee not entirely in internal agreement anyway.
I'm going to have to take issue with that, at least to the extent that it is no less scientific of me to call Pluto a planet than it is for others to call it something else. A broad classification upon which nothing else depends (other than more names) isn't a matter of science, it is simply a matter of non-critical nomenclature. It doesn't deny any scientific fact, nor does it attempt to put anything on the table that doesn't jibe with established theory. Pluto is still what it was in terms of any scientific information we have, and regardless of any scientific errors we have made. Naming it is not a scientific issue, nor is classing it, or at least it isn't until some matter of actual import turns upon it, of which, I might add, there is no sign.
Pluto's planetary status isn't a scientific issue. And I agree, arbitrary nomenclature isn't set in stone. So I set mine where I wanted it. You should have no objection on that very basis.
Fine, but Pluto's classification / definition doesn't affect how the universe works.
Your argument assumes facts not in evidence. First of all, that "planetary standards" are binding on anyone, or that they are "scientific" (they aren't — they are entirely arbitrary.) They are simply nomenclature, and not very important nomenclature at that. Given that it is an issue of nomenclature, I have as much right to decide how I want to work out what makes a planet a planet as the next guy over, and I see no particular need to be "scientific" about it; I'm more interested in developing a consistent and easily managed classing system, which I think has very high value when it comes to messing with things and thinking about them. But that's all within my own outlook. You, of course, are free to submit to other people's classifications of these matters if it pleases you.
Exactly. Mistakes like deciding Pluto isn't a planet. :-)