No, but what America does have is a situation where a small group of fanatics who do oppose science are successfully gaming the system to attack science.
Small?
Stats: 80% plus of americans (including our current elected leader) hold one (or more) superstitions as the basis for the formation (and often more) of the world and universe. 50% (more, actually, because there are many at the center of the curve) of Americans have an IQ of 100 or under. They wouldn't know science from sophist nonsense if you gave them a roadmap, a GPS, and a seeing-eye dog. They don't know what theory is, what it means, or what it implies. This is not their fault, at least in my view; it is the fault of the educational and political system, mainly. In a system that does not protect its citizens, why would we not expect them to turn their eyes to Zeus or the constellations?
Religionists (and some cosmologists, sad to say) are constantly self-reinforcing the proposition(s) that things happen(ed) by what amounts to magic, and that science is merely the bastard stepchild of some supernatural entity's imagination, a descriptive convenience, no more.
When fervent assertions that entirely lack evidence in the form of objective fact form an important, or the important, part of your thinking, how are you going to be able to discern the difference between convincing reality and this conviction without any reality at all?
Yes, there might be one person doing the main attacking; but mark my words, there are hundreds of mute, average or below average folks standing quietly in the wings behind that person, urging them on, funding them, and so forth.
As science knowledge expands, the cracks between the known parts get thinner and thinner. These are the dark places where religion and superstition live. But people cherish those thoughts; we have to expect that as those superstitious ideas are squeezed into the light (which generally speaking, kills them) the holders of those ideas are going to react.
This is where "intelligent design" came from. it is purest sophist nonsense with no objective fact backing up the assertions is makes, trying to hide the idea of a god under a cloak that they cry as loudly as possible "is science" when in fact it is not. Nothing testable is put forth. It's just more hand-waving. I expect the light will kill it shortly.
I don't know when it happened, but clearly, it happened.
A couple of weeks back, I bought a copy to put on a friend's machine (he's an artist, I thought he'd enjoy the cool brushing features with tubes and so forth) and when I habitually went to jasc.com to buy it (I always try to buy direct from the manufacturer... they get the whole margin that way), I was forwarded to corel.com, and lo and behold, right there was PSP as a Corel product.
We'll have to see how the product fares under Corel's umbrella. PSP has traditionally been a very user friendly product from a very user friendly company. I would class the support I saw JASC provide in newsgroups as somewhere between "poster-child for support how-to" and "legendary." Hopefully, we can look forward to more of the same from Corel.
...can a D battery heat blood to nearly 100 deg. F like the human body can?
Yes, no problem. After all, a D battery can heat a lamp filament to burning incandescence in a fraction of a second, then keep it there for hours; it takes far less than that to heat a little (more) blood to a lower temperature and keep it there for a few minutes. If, in the unlikely case it was insufficient, one could always get a lantern battery from the hardware store. That'd boil some blood for a while.:-)
You'd think it would take more than 4.5 volts, but I'm probably wrong.
A D battery is 1.5 volts, not 4.5. It's not about voltage, or at least, not exclusively. It is about voltage X amperage. V x A = Watts, and you can convert watts pretty much directly to heat if the power is all dissipated in a resistive load, like a lamp or a resistor. In fact, the battery will also warm up because it has an internal resistance equivalence. A lantern battery is six volts, and can deliver quite a bit of amperage as well. Lots of heat available there. A thermistor, a transistor, a linear power amp, a pump, and a microprocessor with D/a and A/d convertors on board, and you'd have blood circulating at the correct temperature and pressure(s).
Dvorak's just not paying attention to the extremely powerful and low cost tools that are out there. They've been tailored for image editing for years, like the justly popular Paint Shop Pro and our own WinImages.
As the maker of WinImages, as you can imagine I'm rather biased towards it, but either of these would more than satisfy the needs of the vast majority of photo editing folk. Not only can one find the basic features one needs to edit photos, there are other features available you can't get in Photoshop — and they are useful, to the point, and powerful in the context of photo editing. Some examples include PSP's handling of brushes, which is vastly superior to Photoshop's, and WinImage's approach to area selection, which likewise makes Photoshop look like a horse and buggy.
You have to keep in mind that Dvorak is paid to rant. He takes advantage of the ignorance of his readers by asserting that the market is free of tools, when that is in fact not the case at all.
Just how difficult do you think it would be to cauterize the stump, and put a periodic pressure generator into an artery or two or six? Maybe even put a pump between major arteries and major veins to get true flow through the hand? It's not like the thing needs to be sterile, you could probably build it with a hand bulb pump. Or hey, get fancy, throw a PIC CPU on there and get yourself a decent pressure curve that looks like the dual pulse the heart puts out at the extremities. Put a D battery on it and you could even heat the blood. None of this is beyond any electronic hacker's capabilities, and it definitely isn't beyond an engineer's capabilities (and yes, I'm an engineer.)
...and you whine because it doesn't look like your other apps?
No. I don't. Try to read for comprehension instead of maximum possible hysteria.
My primary objection was it doesn't use native fonts; my secondary, and noted as tentative, objection was that they used java for the DB component. The former is a functionality problem, a big one for people who do DTP and have an artistic and financial investment in fonts, the latter is a potential problem that I've seen bite other applications. I did mention that the UI is an issue for some Mac users; that is nothing less than the truth. However, it is not for me. I run Linux, Mac and XP, jumping about as I need to all day long. Doesn't bother me a bit. In fact, it's kind of fun.
Gimme a break!
....erm, well, if you insist. However, perhaps you would reconsider that, considering the hint my URL gives you.:-)
But the whole Mac mentality of "aesthetics are all that matters; performance, compatibility, market share, software availability, and price don't matter" is stupid.
Actually, since that's not the Mac mentality at all, your accusation is without any basis in fact.
For example, most of the Mac applications that I use whip the living heck out of the linux and XP apps in the same genres, not only in functionality but in reliability which is something that has great, and legitimate, value. On top of that, OSX is basically linux/unix/bsd-like under its skin, and that means that the really cool stuff that we find for linux can often be made to run there — examples of such things include Apache, PostgreSQL, and about every H/M/L-LL you can think of (including python, he said with great satisfaction.)
Performance... it's there. Compatibility is decent, depending on what you're looking for. It's quite commonly a graphics platform (just as linux is quite commonly a server platform) and compatibility (and performance and features and etc.) in that area is outstanding. Price... I can't see it as a problem. Does $500.00 for a really functional (and pleasing) RTR computer feel like too much to you? If it does, OK, but I'd have to say you are in the minority in that case. Sure, you can buy expensive Macs, but you can buy expensive PC's, too.
That, and Apple's inane penchant for replacing useful parts of Unix (init, cron, inetd) with insanely large, bloated, and overengineered replacements (launchd) in the name of "enhancement".
I will say this: They know their customer base pretty well in the general sense, and if they think that a touchy-feelie GUI thing is a better idea than hand-editing your crontab, I'm unlikely to be the one to step into the aisle and try to second guess them. There are other issues, too: Installations tend to be very heavy because they install everything you might need, regardless of if you actually need it or not. You can get hundreds of megs of storage back on a typical Mac just by pulling out localization resources you won't ever use. And so on. Every OS has high points and low points. But running OSX is, frankly, a very reasonable and pleasant experience. Installing software just works (I won't bore you with the linux experience, I'm sure you know exactly what the issues are there.)
With regard to OO, it has some distance to go before it can offer the functionality you can already get on the Mac, and that assumes that there is a native install that integrates well with the OS (fonts...) at some point. Without that, I can tell you frankly that a lot of Mac users will stay away. You can rant and scream about it all you want, but the fact is, the UI on the Mac is extremely consistent and consequently many users have a very narrow view of what is acceptable.
I was referring, not very clearly and for that I apologize, to the bracing mess that is Java and comes all the way back from C. Being a fan of Python as I am, I'm a proponent of forgetting about braces altogether, as they seem to me to serve the compiler and not the programmer. Indentation, on the other hand, serves both and losing braces is a matter of considerably increased clarity — to me.
I didn't mean to say that java's functionality was comparable or descended from C. I realize it's object oriented, like Python, just not as clean and clear and uniform in implementation as Python.:-)
To wit:
if python: [indent] dependent_clause
if (java) [random_uncontrolled_whitespace] { [random_uncontrolled_whitespace] [random_uncontro lled_whitespace] dependent_clause [random_uncontrolled_whitespace] }
(...runs away from crowd of Java programmers waving pitchforks, tar, and feathers...)
No, it does't run under OSX. It runs, poorly (meaning, without access to system fonts because it's an xwindows app, not an OSX app) on PPC Macs but not as released (you have to dig up the right copy) and it's not integrated with the OS in terms of style which annoys a lot of OSX users (which is one of the claims for OO 2.) It doesn't annoy me, I can deal with whatever interface, but the fact that it can't access the system's fonts is a stone killer problem.
I'm a little worried about the decision to use Java for the DB, too, but I may be buying trouble that doesn't exist. I'm just going by the various interplatform/interapplication incompatibilities that I see on web pages because the wrong Java is installed (eg, flickr works on firefox but not on omniweb, etc.)
Too bad they didn't write it in python. Make java look like the c-descended nightmare it is.;-)
I'm saying the OS needs a standard GUI. The GUI needs to not be financially encumbered. The GUI needs to be present. Not "installable", not "downloadable", not "part of our install", but present. It needs not to be a hurdle you have to jump, but an always-present assist up to the next step on the ladder. Calls to GUI routines need to be as dependable and omnipresent as memory allocation and command line parameters. It needs to not enforce a language (you should be able to get directly to it from assembler to C to C++ to the most obtuse HLL you can think of.) The only thing that even comes close is *cough* xwindows itself, if you want to code your own widgets, which does no one else any good because they're not there unless you put them there.
It's as if there were 50 networking standards, and everyone said, "gee, you can use this, or you can use that, but you have to pay for this one and if you use that one you have to open your code and if you use this one over here, you can't use any of those libraries over there..." No one would put up with it, and rightly so. The thing I've never understood is why linux folk put up with GUIs in precisely the same state.
Look at Windows, the Mac... want a widget? Bam, you've got it. It's part of the OS. Of course it is. It was on the Amiga, which was a glorious machine to write code for. Perhaps someone can say if Be has a standard GUI, I don't know but I'm thinking it probably does. But linux does not. And Linux is the platform that has managed to go great guns into the environment where what is standard in the OS is present, in other words networks and servers... but when it comes to graphics, it's like entering the mind of a psychotic... and there are very few serious general linux apps out there that aren't highly specialized or network-centric. Some of the (very few) examples I know of are the Gimp. OOo, and GnuCash. All three of these "big dogs" lag far, far behind apps in the same venues on other platforms, and only OOo can make a somewhat reasonable claim. And where are the commercial and OS competitors? Really, there aren't any. Under linux, anyway. But there are plenty elsewhere. I think it comes down the GUI problems, I really do.
In our case, we ran into zero problem other than GUI. Almost everything in our app is self-contained, barring a very few calls into the standard C library. As soon as you need a file dialog, a palette, a button, a list... you're on your way to the lawyer, typically. If not the bank. or both. I sure am glad no one else takes this approach. After banging our heads on this problem, we went to do a Mac port, and you can't believe how smooth that is going. It just works. Both the PPC and the Insmell versions. Windows just works too, but we were used to that, so after linux, the Mac looks like heaven.
I thought it would be a great idea to port to linux. I was wrong. It took considerably more money, time, and legal advice than porting to the mac. When we were done, we still had a "works here, but not there, here if this lib is in but otherwise not..." result. That makes no sense to me, and it surely made no sense to my accountants.
...is provide an OS-wide, encumbrance free standard set of UI elements like every other operating system and they'll see a surge of activity. IMHO. No one will bite you if you ask the system for a directory listing — but use a widget and suddenly you have to open source your code?
I'm speaking as/for a commercial developer which already has a working port on Linux of a very large and powerful app but can't release because of the license mess the linux GUI/OS is in.
It's entirely one thing to co-develop open tools. It's another to shoot yourself in the foot by making them block entry into your space.
If there is a plot to keep linux off desktops, the significance of it is dwarfed by the OS's licensing problems.
IIRC, the T-Rex skeleton on display at Montana State University was dug up somewhere in the neighbourhood of Gallatin Gateway
I'm over on the east side by Fort Peck lake, which is where most of the good stuff is and where most of the big dinos are found. Tyrannosaurs, Stegosaurs, Triceratops... even our local high school (Glasgow, MT) has a reasonably complete (and large!) triceratops in the hallway next to the football trophies; that's a good indicator of the richness of the field here. I've found vertebrate remains myself, but I am a rock collector (though I hunt crystals, not fossils, they are in the same region) so I'm out there fairly often.
I recall from the "humanity will destroy the world" models popular some decades back, that the big fear back-then was indeed global cooling due to industrial particulate matter. I want to see the factory that can compete with Krakatoa.;)
When Mt. St. Helens blew (and mind you, it's 1/3 of a continent away from here) we had to clean the ash off our cars each morning. When Yellowstone burned — many hundreds of miles from here — our sunsets were altered for an entire summer. When the panic-stricken scream about global warming... nothing happens. Imagine that.;-)
And [moving] won't be disruptive? How much do you think it's going to cost to move coastal cities to higher ground?
(a) Slow population movement occurs all the time. I've moved six times in my life of fifty years, once even with a business bringing several employees with me from Florida to Montana. Sure, it's disruptive. That's not a death knell, you know. It is also an opportunity. (b) I don't know how much it will cost, because I can only guess at when (if) it will happen at all, and because I don't know (nor do you) what our technological tools will be at the time, and that's the issue that cost will turn upon.
People and businesses object to the cost of reducing emissions, but won't mind the cost of migrating?
It's not a question of "minding", they won't have a choice if all this vague hand-waving comes to pass, which again, there is no certainty of whatsoever. There's a big difference between arguing with the local congress-critter about a business cost imposed by human whim, and finding utterly implacable water lapping at your feet. In the one case, you may or may not pay, go to court, get an exemption, write the editor, etc. In the other, you will move. End of story.
But will it be a zero-sum change, even if you discount the transition costs?
For the precise same reasons described above, I don't know, you don't know, and your question is ridiculous.
When changes in arability change haves to have-nots, is that change going to be resolved peaceably?
Almost certainly. My mom didn't kill anyone when the government stole her home using "eminent domain" for the Tocks island Dam project under false pretenses, though I rather wish she had. People are pretty good at bowing to the inevitable. And at doing, and believing, what they're told (cough*religion*cough.) That's why you're all upset over global warming. There is no actual threat anywhere near an event horizon, yet you, and millions of people like you, are very upset about it. Me, I say that's just fine, you worry all you want. If you want to convince me, you're going to need data — not just claims — and that data is going to have to be a lot more solid than what we have, and there's going to have to be a lot more agreement in the scientific community about what seems to be going on.
Something else that occurs to me (because I have a suspicious nature) is that it is very much in the best interests of the people in power to try to distract us from real, current problems that are affecting our lives now that they are totally screwing up in handling, like the "war" on drugs, the erosion of our civil rights, the malignant growth of censorship, the incursion of religion and superstition into the realm of science in our schools, wars (like Iraq II) begin under entirely false pretenses, failure to apprehend Osama Bin Blows Camels, and more... by bringing up the distant spectre of Global Warming! OMG! Holy CoW... and making it seem as scary as possible. I try to hold society to as low a standard as possible, but somehow, they always exceed my expectations and go lower. Global warming? No. Nowhere in sight. But I'm supposed to be worried about it. Now the government has to know about every bank account I have, I'm not allowed to be exposed to the "dirty" stories on some website, and the re-elected leader of my country is a superstitious nincompoop far beyond the level of most of his predecessors. He thinks God tells him to attack Iraq as if he was a medieval crusader. And I'm not supposed to be worried about that, but I should be pissing down my leg over some vague, unsubstantiated, arguable and non-consensus spectre of global warming. Not gonna happen. Seems like someone's not paying
But on a global scale, over a number of years, continuing to break the previous record by 0.04 deg C adds up to an ecological crisis.
We're not "continuing to break the previous record" 2005 may break the record for 1998, which is something else entirely. There is no sign that 2006 will do it again, and in fact since 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, and 1999 didn't, I wouldn't be the least surprised if it didn't happen again for five more years, or even at all.
Yes, adding.04 degrees for ten consecutive years results in.4 degrees. Adding it every five means that it'll take fifty to go the same distance. And in the meantime, the whole world will change. Fossil fuels will become very expensive. Technology will proceed apace, hydrogen or who-knows-what becoming the energy source du jour. Our current technical ability to absorb CO2 (which is already considerable) will increase, our manufacturing will become more sophisticated... maybe we'll welcome rebuilding a city or two. Panic and frenzy is simply not called for.
1/2 a degree can have a huge impact when it's the difference between below freezing and above freezing. It can accelerate the beginning of spring weather and delay the onset of winter. This can lead to extinctions of cooperative species when plants that bloom before the pollinating insects arrive.
This has happened many times before, and it will happen many times again. When I was a kid, my yard was filled with lightning bugs. Little flashy buggers everywhere. They're gone now. Things change. That doesn't bother me. I never thought we had a mandate for world stagnation in any case. If things change for the worse, I'll worry. They're not changing for the worse. What we're hearing is that some scientists think that things may change for the worse at some point in the future, based upon very skimpy data. That's not enough to get excited about.
Also, the global changes are not spread out evenly, so that tropical areas are not as affected, while the poles are losing ice at an alarming rate, which creates a positive feedback because the white snow and ice is no longer reflecting sunlight.
Again, no different from any other time. Things change. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Get used to the idea. Adapt. It's in your genes. Or at least, it's in mine.
You are right in that human beings will adapt. However don't expect that process to be quick, or painless.
There will be no need for it to be quick. We're talking about the consequences of very, very slowly rising temperature and sea levels. Because it isn't quick, the pain, such as it is, will most likely be well spread out, and so not very painful in point of fact.
This isn't comparable to war. It's not a given. It might be happening, and it might not.
If it is happening, then it'll be extremely slow, most unlike war. No maybe about that; it will be glacially slow. The temperature changes a few degrees in a hundred years. We won't notice at all on an individual basis, and agriculture will have plenty of time to adjust. The sea comes up a few feet in a hundred years. We'll pull back from the shore at a commensurate rate. In some places — others won't be affected. Now, what's interesting about this is that cities, ports and so on go through large changes over these periods anyway, as an educational walk along the NYC docks will show you. Buildings and docks fall down, access decays and must be rebuilt, waterways must be dredged and so on.
And of course, in the mean time we'll have developed another hundred more years of technology to backstop us.
Nope, I'm definitely not worried about the pain level.:-)
it is... the rate of change, more than the degree, that is causing alarm right now.
No, mainly it's just panic by the uniformed. While there are scientists who advance theories that global warming is a terrible threat, there are also scientists that advance theories that is it not. Both have interesting and complex arguments, and both sets of arguments depend on uncertain data.
Now, given the fact that the sensational gets media time, which group do you think you're going to see on your TV? of course, those who claim there is a threat. Now again, given that the majority of people will believe any silly thing they are told if it is done from an apparent position of authority (cough*religion*cough), why do you think that public opinion is that global warming is a threat? Not because it actually is, but because some pundit on the 6 o'clock news says it is.
The scientific issue is still unclear. Panic is not called for. Observation is called for. We're doing that. Transition from oil fuel is called for. We're doing that too (we couldn't avoid it if we wanted to... there's a limited supply and the cost is rising as it gets more scarce.)
While you worry about the specter of global warming, I'll worry about Bush and crew fragging our civil rights. Now there is a disaster we may have trouble recovering from.
Global Warming is a Fact because there's 7 billion people heaving and sweating and mowing the grass and heaving and sweating some more.
And before there were all those people, there were zillions of animals, all heaving and sweating and farting (especially herbivores, great sources of gasses.) Now they're gone, we're here. That's just the normal course of the dominant life form shifting from animals to us. Nothing to be afraid of, or have a panic attack about, unless it is from the standpoint of sympathy for the animals, but that is definitely another issue.
Certainly, we need new technologies. And we're getting them. Oil will become more and more expensive (as we are seeing today), and consequently a balance will be inevitably be reached between the cost of other technologies and oil, and at that time, we'll transition.
We're doing fine. We're adapting. We'll adapt some more. That's what we do. You can stop panicking and fretting about the rain forest now. The rain forest isn't the only source of oxygen on the planet, either currently, or in some imaginary future if a blight hits it. We know how to plant things, and we know how to make them grow. We even know how to absorb and deactivate atmospheric carbon dioxide in huge volume. If we need to, we will.
Physics. The fact that an ice chunk doesn't melt all at once; the outside melts, the inside remains cold until it is the outside. Also, the ice won't just suddenly plop into the ocean unmelted and raise the level. A lot of it is on land, and it is thick. Assuming that it all melts, it'll take a heck of a long time to do so. Years and years. Some of it won't even make it off of land, it'll be captured by the terrain. If this happens (again, not by any means certain) the seas will rise very, very slowly indeed. You know how your tub level doesn't rise very fast, even though the faucet is turned on full? That's because there is a lot of volume to fill compared to the volume coming in. The seas are like that too, only more so. To raise sea level just one cm would take an incredible amount of melting. Remember, the Pacific and the Atlantic and all the other major oceans are one body of water. That's a darned big tub to fill.
How big? About 1,200,000,000 square kilometers. Imagine raising that area up one cm. Just one. It's not going to happen overnight. Period.
Physics. You should look into it. It has predictive powers your beliefs can't match.
Several meters in one decade is plenty of warning. If portions of NYC and other coastal cities have to be abandoned (which, mind you, is not by any means certain) we've got the means (financial and otherwise) to adjust to it, and we will have to. We won't be stopping the sea from rising. We will adapt. Period. And as I said previously, we'll probably manage to take advantage of it. You say, imagine the damage... I say, imagine new, planned cities that don't have the centuries of poor planning that NYC carries as baggage.
I know it's fun to rant and rave, but you have to face whatever happens and deal with it. And we will. That's what humans do,
Assuming, of course, that any of this comes to pass which is not a given.
Katrina is exactly the wrong thing to compare the possibility of global warming consequences to. Katrina itself came with about four or five days warning. Most of the citizens did leave, too, but in a hurry, which will not be the case if they're paying attention to global warming. If the seas rise, they will rise with years and years of warning. The issue in New Orleans, rather than Katrina, was that here we have a city that was known to already be under sea level, with seawalls that were rated for only storms known to be smaller than those that traverse the gulf, and folks elected to stay and/or move in there despite these issues. So one day, a storm kicked up, and they got hammered. Inevitable and obvious — not vague fear-mongering like "the seas will rise when the polar caps melt.". If you ignore the inevitable and obvious, you're going to pay for it. That's a not a problem with weather or global warming; that's a problem with human nature, and nothing you can do will alleviate it. Nothing about it forced intelligent people to move there, or from moving out if they were already there.
Nothing new or unusually worrisome about any of this. Certainly nothing that raises a flag about the very distant and vague possibility of a slow rise in sea level and temperature.
A one degree warming will result in various lowland areas being flooded and millions of people be displaced.
Shouldn't we be doing something to stop the huge problems that will result
Well, consider. This isn't a really bad Hollywood movie like "The Day After Tomorrow", it is reality, and there is natural law to mediate between nature and your nightmares. The fact is, if the flooding you speak of occurs, it won't happen such that a bunch of lowland dwellers go to sleep Tuesday night, dry, and wake up Wednesday morning floating on their mattresses. We will see it coming, people and businesses can migrate (and they will... believe me, they will.)
Again, if the climate is changing along these lines, you can be certain that just as Florida's coral outcrop goes under and provides zillions of new acres of game fish habitat, other parts of the country will change also. Areas that are too cold for raising oranges, for instance, will warm up and become useful in that way. Areas like mine, that see -40 degree temperatures some winters will see (perhaps) -35 degrees instead, and we won't have to plug in our cars as many evenings, saving some energy. Death Valley will probably still suck every day of the year.
And so on. The one thing you can be certain of is that things will change, and as they change, humans will adapt.
I see no reason for anyone to panic, or even seriously worry, at this point. We should pay attention, and we are. There is no indication we are facing any big changes in the near future, nor any sudden ones in any future as far as global warming goes. Nature will supply us with the facts no matter what they are. In the meantime, the sky isn't falling, and that's a fact. The sky might move a little, though we cannot be certain of this, and if it does, it'll do so slowly and gently and we will have plenty of time to rearrange ourselves as required, both as a civilization and as individuals.
And you know what else? If and as change comes, we'll no doubt turn it to our advantage. More heat, more energy, more liquid water, more opportunity. It's what we do. The ones of us who aren't running in circles, screaming hysterically about global warming, that is.
Sometimes it is. But quite often, it is the main thing leading you down the wrong path.
In this case, the "I know what's happening crowd" is looking at some very tiny variations from a very abbreviated data set and drawing some very large conclusions from them, and then clamoring for some very profound and difficult reactions on the part of, well, just about everyone.
It is well to keep in mind that that the.04 degree quoted in the article is not.04% (it is much less) and that the highest recorded temperature means that we've got a number which should be evaluated as one sample out of 1x10^6 if we want to understand what this year's temperature stats mean in terms of human history.
Yet... it can only be evaluated as one sample out of 2x10^3, which can be fairly characterized as what it means to my grandfather and not a lot more.
That's not to say that global warming is, or isn't, happening. Just that these temperature measurements are woefully lacking as good quality signposts. We can add to that a few core measurements and some general knowledge, which doesn't significantly improve the quality of the data for our current situation.
We should keep in mind that the earth sees huge temperature swings without the aid of man's actions. At one time, North America was tropical here in Montana. I live not even 15 miles from where you can dig T. Rex skeletons from the ground as well as tropical vegetation. At another time, this area was covered by glaciers. Neither circumstance required or depended upon man's intervention or activity.
Yes, the world changes without our approval. Yes, we'll have to adapt if it does. Yes, we'll have to be clever about it when the changes are major. No, this year's temperature isn't a certain sign of any such change. Yes, we should continue to pay attention. No, we shouldn't start running around like chickens.
We now return you to your usual sensationalist ravings.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Small?
Stats: 80% plus of americans (including our current elected leader) hold one (or more) superstitions as the basis for the formation (and often more) of the world and universe. 50% (more, actually, because there are many at the center of the curve) of Americans have an IQ of 100 or under. They wouldn't know science from sophist nonsense if you gave them a roadmap, a GPS, and a seeing-eye dog. They don't know what theory is, what it means, or what it implies. This is not their fault, at least in my view; it is the fault of the educational and political system, mainly. In a system that does not protect its citizens, why would we not expect them to turn their eyes to Zeus or the constellations?
Religionists (and some cosmologists, sad to say) are constantly self-reinforcing the proposition(s) that things happen(ed) by what amounts to magic, and that science is merely the bastard stepchild of some supernatural entity's imagination, a descriptive convenience, no more.
When fervent assertions that entirely lack evidence in the form of objective fact form an important, or the important, part of your thinking, how are you going to be able to discern the difference between convincing reality and this conviction without any reality at all?
Yes, there might be one person doing the main attacking; but mark my words, there are hundreds of mute, average or below average folks standing quietly in the wings behind that person, urging them on, funding them, and so forth.
As science knowledge expands, the cracks between the known parts get thinner and thinner. These are the dark places where religion and superstition live. But people cherish those thoughts; we have to expect that as those superstitious ideas are squeezed into the light (which generally speaking, kills them) the holders of those ideas are going to react.
This is where "intelligent design" came from. it is purest sophist nonsense with no objective fact backing up the assertions is makes, trying to hide the idea of a god under a cloak that they cry as loudly as possible "is science" when in fact it is not. Nothing testable is put forth. It's just more hand-waving. I expect the light will kill it shortly.
A couple of weeks back, I bought a copy to put on a friend's machine (he's an artist, I thought he'd enjoy the cool brushing features with tubes and so forth) and when I habitually went to jasc.com to buy it (I always try to buy direct from the manufacturer... they get the whole margin that way), I was forwarded to corel.com, and lo and behold, right there was PSP as a Corel product.
We'll have to see how the product fares under Corel's umbrella. PSP has traditionally been a very user friendly product from a very user friendly company. I would class the support I saw JASC provide in newsgroups as somewhere between "poster-child for support how-to" and "legendary." Hopefully, we can look forward to more of the same from Corel.
Yes, no problem. After all, a D battery can heat a lamp filament to burning incandescence in a fraction of a second, then keep it there for hours; it takes far less than that to heat a little (more) blood to a lower temperature and keep it there for a few minutes. If, in the unlikely case it was insufficient, one could always get a lantern battery from the hardware store. That'd boil some blood for a while. :-)
A D battery is 1.5 volts, not 4.5. It's not about voltage, or at least, not exclusively. It is about voltage X amperage. V x A = Watts, and you can convert watts pretty much directly to heat if the power is all dissipated in a resistive load, like a lamp or a resistor. In fact, the battery will also warm up because it has an internal resistance equivalence. A lantern battery is six volts, and can deliver quite a bit of amperage as well. Lots of heat available there. A thermistor, a transistor, a linear power amp, a pump, and a microprocessor with D/a and A/d convertors on board, and you'd have blood circulating at the correct temperature and pressure(s).
As the maker of WinImages, as you can imagine I'm rather biased towards it, but either of these would more than satisfy the needs of the vast majority of photo editing folk. Not only can one find the basic features one needs to edit photos, there are other features available you can't get in Photoshop — and they are useful, to the point, and powerful in the context of photo editing. Some examples include PSP's handling of brushes, which is vastly superior to Photoshop's, and WinImage's approach to area selection, which likewise makes Photoshop look like a horse and buggy.
You have to keep in mind that Dvorak is paid to rant. He takes advantage of the ignorance of his readers by asserting that the market is free of tools, when that is in fact not the case at all.
As we've known for years...
"locks are for honest people"
"hands are for honest people"
Definitely an advance in security.
Now identity thieves will cut off a hand at the wrist instead of just a finger.
No. I don't. Try to read for comprehension instead of maximum possible hysteria.
My primary objection was it doesn't use native fonts; my secondary, and noted as tentative, objection was that they used java for the DB component. The former is a functionality problem, a big one for people who do DTP and have an artistic and financial investment in fonts, the latter is a potential problem that I've seen bite other applications. I did mention that the UI is an issue for some Mac users; that is nothing less than the truth. However, it is not for me. I run Linux, Mac and XP, jumping about as I need to all day long. Doesn't bother me a bit. In fact, it's kind of fun.
Actually, since that's not the Mac mentality at all, your accusation is without any basis in fact.
For example, most of the Mac applications that I use whip the living heck out of the linux and XP apps in the same genres, not only in functionality but in reliability which is something that has great, and legitimate, value. On top of that, OSX is basically linux/unix/bsd-like under its skin, and that means that the really cool stuff that we find for linux can often be made to run there — examples of such things include Apache, PostgreSQL, and about every H/M/L-LL you can think of (including python, he said with great satisfaction.)
Performance... it's there. Compatibility is decent, depending on what you're looking for. It's quite commonly a graphics platform (just as linux is quite commonly a server platform) and compatibility (and performance and features and etc.) in that area is outstanding. Price... I can't see it as a problem. Does $500.00 for a really functional (and pleasing) RTR computer feel like too much to you? If it does, OK, but I'd have to say you are in the minority in that case. Sure, you can buy expensive Macs, but you can buy expensive PC's, too.
I will say this: They know their customer base pretty well in the general sense, and if they think that a touchy-feelie GUI thing is a better idea than hand-editing your crontab, I'm unlikely to be the one to step into the aisle and try to second guess them. There are other issues, too: Installations tend to be very heavy because they install everything you might need, regardless of if you actually need it or not. You can get hundreds of megs of storage back on a typical Mac just by pulling out localization resources you won't ever use. And so on. Every OS has high points and low points. But running OSX is, frankly, a very reasonable and pleasant experience. Installing software just works (I won't bore you with the linux experience, I'm sure you know exactly what the issues are there.)
With regard to OO, it has some distance to go before it can offer the functionality you can already get on the Mac, and that assumes that there is a native install that integrates well with the OS (fonts...) at some point. Without that, I can tell you frankly that a lot of Mac users will stay away. You can rant and scream about it all you want, but the fact is, the UI on the Mac is extremely consistent and consequently many users have a very narrow view of what is acceptable.
I didn't mean to say that java's functionality was comparable or descended from C. I realize it's object oriented, like Python, just not as clean and clear and uniform in implementation as Python. :-)
To wit:
(...runs away from crowd of Java programmers waving pitchforks, tar, and feathers...)
"Syntactic sugar causes syntactic diabetes"
No, it does't run under OSX. It runs, poorly (meaning, without access to system fonts because it's an xwindows app, not an OSX app) on PPC Macs but not as released (you have to dig up the right copy) and it's not integrated with the OS in terms of style which annoys a lot of OSX users (which is one of the claims for OO 2.) It doesn't annoy me, I can deal with whatever interface, but the fact that it can't access the system's fonts is a stone killer problem.
I'm a little worried about the decision to use Java for the DB, too, but I may be buying trouble that doesn't exist. I'm just going by the various interplatform/interapplication incompatibilities that I see on web pages because the wrong Java is installed (eg, flickr works on firefox but not on omniweb, etc.)
Too bad they didn't write it in python. Make java look like the c-descended nightmare it is. ;-)
...you were "pool whoring"?
I'm saying the OS needs a standard GUI. The GUI needs to not be financially encumbered. The GUI needs to be present. Not "installable", not "downloadable", not "part of our install", but present. It needs not to be a hurdle you have to jump, but an always-present assist up to the next step on the ladder. Calls to GUI routines need to be as dependable and omnipresent as memory allocation and command line parameters. It needs to not enforce a language (you should be able to get directly to it from assembler to C to C++ to the most obtuse HLL you can think of.) The only thing that even comes close is *cough* xwindows itself, if you want to code your own widgets, which does no one else any good because they're not there unless you put them there.
It's as if there were 50 networking standards, and everyone said, "gee, you can use this, or you can use that, but you have to pay for this one and if you use that one you have to open your code and if you use this one over here, you can't use any of those libraries over there..." No one would put up with it, and rightly so. The thing I've never understood is why linux folk put up with GUIs in precisely the same state.
Look at Windows, the Mac... want a widget? Bam, you've got it. It's part of the OS. Of course it is. It was on the Amiga, which was a glorious machine to write code for. Perhaps someone can say if Be has a standard GUI, I don't know but I'm thinking it probably does. But linux does not. And Linux is the platform that has managed to go great guns into the environment where what is standard in the OS is present, in other words networks and servers... but when it comes to graphics, it's like entering the mind of a psychotic... and there are very few serious general linux apps out there that aren't highly specialized or network-centric. Some of the (very few) examples I know of are the Gimp. OOo, and GnuCash. All three of these "big dogs" lag far, far behind apps in the same venues on other platforms, and only OOo can make a somewhat reasonable claim. And where are the commercial and OS competitors? Really, there aren't any. Under linux, anyway. But there are plenty elsewhere. I think it comes down the GUI problems, I really do.
In our case, we ran into zero problem other than GUI. Almost everything in our app is self-contained, barring a very few calls into the standard C library. As soon as you need a file dialog, a palette, a button, a list... you're on your way to the lawyer, typically. If not the bank. or both. I sure am glad no one else takes this approach. After banging our heads on this problem, we went to do a Mac port, and you can't believe how smooth that is going. It just works. Both the PPC and the Insmell versions. Windows just works too, but we were used to that, so after linux, the Mac looks like heaven.
I thought it would be a great idea to port to linux. I was wrong. It took considerably more money, time, and legal advice than porting to the mac. When we were done, we still had a "works here, but not there, here if this lib is in but otherwise not..." result. That makes no sense to me, and it surely made no sense to my accountants.
All IMHO, of course. YMWDV. :-)
encumbrance-free
I'm speaking as/for a commercial developer which already has a working port on Linux of a very large and powerful app but can't release because of the license mess the linux GUI/OS is in.
It's entirely one thing to co-develop open tools. It's another to shoot yourself in the foot by making them block entry into your space.
If there is a plot to keep linux off desktops, the significance of it is dwarfed by the OS's licensing problems.
I'm over on the east side by Fort Peck lake, which is where most of the good stuff is and where most of the big dinos are found. Tyrannosaurs, Stegosaurs, Triceratops... even our local high school (Glasgow, MT) has a reasonably complete (and large!) triceratops in the hallway next to the football trophies; that's a good indicator of the richness of the field here. I've found vertebrate remains myself, but I am a rock collector (though I hunt crystals, not fossils, they are in the same region) so I'm out there fairly often.
When Mt. St. Helens blew (and mind you, it's 1/3 of a continent away from here) we had to clean the ash off our cars each morning. When Yellowstone burned — many hundreds of miles from here — our sunsets were altered for an entire summer. When the panic-stricken scream about global warming... nothing happens. Imagine that. ;-)
(a) Slow population movement occurs all the time. I've moved six times in my life of fifty years, once even with a business bringing several employees with me from Florida to Montana. Sure, it's disruptive. That's not a death knell, you know. It is also an opportunity. (b) I don't know how much it will cost, because I can only guess at when (if) it will happen at all, and because I don't know (nor do you) what our technological tools will be at the time, and that's the issue that cost will turn upon.
It's not a question of "minding", they won't have a choice if all this vague hand-waving comes to pass, which again, there is no certainty of whatsoever. There's a big difference between arguing with the local congress-critter about a business cost imposed by human whim, and finding utterly implacable water lapping at your feet. In the one case, you may or may not pay, go to court, get an exemption, write the editor, etc. In the other, you will move. End of story.
For the precise same reasons described above, I don't know, you don't know, and your question is ridiculous.
Almost certainly. My mom didn't kill anyone when the government stole her home using "eminent domain" for the Tocks island Dam project under false pretenses, though I rather wish she had. People are pretty good at bowing to the inevitable. And at doing, and believing, what they're told (cough*religion*cough.) That's why you're all upset over global warming. There is no actual threat anywhere near an event horizon, yet you, and millions of people like you, are very upset about it. Me, I say that's just fine, you worry all you want. If you want to convince me, you're going to need data — not just claims — and that data is going to have to be a lot more solid than what we have, and there's going to have to be a lot more agreement in the scientific community about what seems to be going on.
Something else that occurs to me (because I have a suspicious nature) is that it is very much in the best interests of the people in power to try to distract us from real, current problems that are affecting our lives now that they are totally screwing up in handling, like the "war" on drugs, the erosion of our civil rights, the malignant growth of censorship, the incursion of religion and superstition into the realm of science in our schools, wars (like Iraq II) begin under entirely false pretenses, failure to apprehend Osama Bin Blows Camels, and more... by bringing up the distant spectre of Global Warming! OMG! Holy CoW... and making it seem as scary as possible. I try to hold society to as low a standard as possible, but somehow, they always exceed my expectations and go lower. Global warming? No. Nowhere in sight. But I'm supposed to be worried about it. Now the government has to know about every bank account I have, I'm not allowed to be exposed to the "dirty" stories on some website, and the re-elected leader of my country is a superstitious nincompoop far beyond the level of most of his predecessors. He thinks God tells him to attack Iraq as if he was a medieval crusader. And I'm not supposed to be worried about that, but I should be pissing down my leg over some vague, unsubstantiated, arguable and non-consensus spectre of global warming. Not gonna happen. Seems like someone's not paying
We're not "continuing to break the previous record" 2005 may break the record for 1998, which is something else entirely. There is no sign that 2006 will do it again, and in fact since 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, and 1999 didn't, I wouldn't be the least surprised if it didn't happen again for five more years, or even at all.
Yes, adding .04 degrees for ten consecutive years results in .4 degrees. Adding it every five means that it'll take fifty to go the same distance. And in the meantime, the whole world will change. Fossil fuels will become very expensive. Technology will proceed apace, hydrogen or who-knows-what becoming the energy source du jour. Our current technical ability to absorb CO2 (which is already considerable) will increase, our manufacturing will become more sophisticated... maybe we'll welcome rebuilding a city or two. Panic and frenzy is simply not called for.
This has happened many times before, and it will happen many times again. When I was a kid, my yard was filled with lightning bugs. Little flashy buggers everywhere. They're gone now. Things change. That doesn't bother me. I never thought we had a mandate for world stagnation in any case. If things change for the worse, I'll worry. They're not changing for the worse. What we're hearing is that some scientists think that things may change for the worse at some point in the future, based upon very skimpy data. That's not enough to get excited about.
Again, no different from any other time. Things change. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Get used to the idea. Adapt. It's in your genes. Or at least, it's in mine.
There will be no need for it to be quick. We're talking about the consequences of very, very slowly rising temperature and sea levels. Because it isn't quick, the pain, such as it is, will most likely be well spread out, and so not very painful in point of fact.
This isn't comparable to war. It's not a given. It might be happening, and it might not.
If it is happening, then it'll be extremely slow, most unlike war. No maybe about that; it will be glacially slow. The temperature changes a few degrees in a hundred years. We won't notice at all on an individual basis, and agriculture will have plenty of time to adjust. The sea comes up a few feet in a hundred years. We'll pull back from the shore at a commensurate rate. In some places — others won't be affected. Now, what's interesting about this is that cities, ports and so on go through large changes over these periods anyway, as an educational walk along the NYC docks will show you. Buildings and docks fall down, access decays and must be rebuilt, waterways must be dredged and so on.
And of course, in the mean time we'll have developed another hundred more years of technology to backstop us.
Nope, I'm definitely not worried about the pain level. :-)
No, mainly it's just panic by the uniformed. While there are scientists who advance theories that global warming is a terrible threat, there are also scientists that advance theories that is it not. Both have interesting and complex arguments, and both sets of arguments depend on uncertain data.
Now, given the fact that the sensational gets media time, which group do you think you're going to see on your TV? of course, those who claim there is a threat. Now again, given that the majority of people will believe any silly thing they are told if it is done from an apparent position of authority (cough*religion*cough), why do you think that public opinion is that global warming is a threat? Not because it actually is, but because some pundit on the 6 o'clock news says it is.
The scientific issue is still unclear. Panic is not called for. Observation is called for. We're doing that. Transition from oil fuel is called for. We're doing that too (we couldn't avoid it if we wanted to... there's a limited supply and the cost is rising as it gets more scarce.)
While you worry about the specter of global warming, I'll worry about Bush and crew fragging our civil rights. Now there is a disaster we may have trouble recovering from.
And before there were all those people, there were zillions of animals, all heaving and sweating and farting (especially herbivores, great sources of gasses.) Now they're gone, we're here. That's just the normal course of the dominant life form shifting from animals to us. Nothing to be afraid of, or have a panic attack about, unless it is from the standpoint of sympathy for the animals, but that is definitely another issue.
Certainly, we need new technologies. And we're getting them. Oil will become more and more expensive (as we are seeing today), and consequently a balance will be inevitably be reached between the cost of other technologies and oil, and at that time, we'll transition.
We're doing fine. We're adapting. We'll adapt some more. That's what we do. You can stop panicking and fretting about the rain forest now. The rain forest isn't the only source of oxygen on the planet, either currently, or in some imaginary future if a blight hits it. We know how to plant things, and we know how to make them grow. We even know how to absorb and deactivate atmospheric carbon dioxide in huge volume. If we need to, we will.
Physics. The fact that an ice chunk doesn't melt all at once; the outside melts, the inside remains cold until it is the outside. Also, the ice won't just suddenly plop into the ocean unmelted and raise the level. A lot of it is on land, and it is thick. Assuming that it all melts, it'll take a heck of a long time to do so. Years and years. Some of it won't even make it off of land, it'll be captured by the terrain. If this happens (again, not by any means certain) the seas will rise very, very slowly indeed. You know how your tub level doesn't rise very fast, even though the faucet is turned on full? That's because there is a lot of volume to fill compared to the volume coming in. The seas are like that too, only more so. To raise sea level just one cm would take an incredible amount of melting. Remember, the Pacific and the Atlantic and all the other major oceans are one body of water. That's a darned big tub to fill.
How big? About 1,200,000,000 square kilometers. Imagine raising that area up one cm. Just one. It's not going to happen overnight. Period.
Physics. You should look into it. It has predictive powers your beliefs can't match.
I know it's fun to rant and rave, but you have to face whatever happens and deal with it. And we will. That's what humans do,
Assuming, of course, that any of this comes to pass which is not a given.
Katrina is exactly the wrong thing to compare the possibility of global warming consequences to. Katrina itself came with about four or five days warning. Most of the citizens did leave, too, but in a hurry, which will not be the case if they're paying attention to global warming. If the seas rise, they will rise with years and years of warning. The issue in New Orleans, rather than Katrina, was that here we have a city that was known to already be under sea level, with seawalls that were rated for only storms known to be smaller than those that traverse the gulf, and folks elected to stay and/or move in there despite these issues. So one day, a storm kicked up, and they got hammered. Inevitable and obvious — not vague fear-mongering like "the seas will rise when the polar caps melt.". If you ignore the inevitable and obvious, you're going to pay for it. That's a not a problem with weather or global warming; that's a problem with human nature, and nothing you can do will alleviate it. Nothing about it forced intelligent people to move there, or from moving out if they were already there.
Nothing new or unusually worrisome about any of this. Certainly nothing that raises a flag about the very distant and vague possibility of a slow rise in sea level and temperature.
Well, consider. This isn't a really bad Hollywood movie like "The Day After Tomorrow", it is reality, and there is natural law to mediate between nature and your nightmares. The fact is, if the flooding you speak of occurs, it won't happen such that a bunch of lowland dwellers go to sleep Tuesday night, dry, and wake up Wednesday morning floating on their mattresses. We will see it coming, people and businesses can migrate (and they will... believe me, they will.)
Again, if the climate is changing along these lines, you can be certain that just as Florida's coral outcrop goes under and provides zillions of new acres of game fish habitat, other parts of the country will change also. Areas that are too cold for raising oranges, for instance, will warm up and become useful in that way. Areas like mine, that see -40 degree temperatures some winters will see (perhaps) -35 degrees instead, and we won't have to plug in our cars as many evenings, saving some energy. Death Valley will probably still suck every day of the year.
And so on. The one thing you can be certain of is that things will change, and as they change, humans will adapt.
I see no reason for anyone to panic, or even seriously worry, at this point. We should pay attention, and we are. There is no indication we are facing any big changes in the near future, nor any sudden ones in any future as far as global warming goes. Nature will supply us with the facts no matter what they are. In the meantime, the sky isn't falling, and that's a fact. The sky might move a little, though we cannot be certain of this, and if it does, it'll do so slowly and gently and we will have plenty of time to rearrange ourselves as required, both as a civilization and as individuals.
And you know what else? If and as change comes, we'll no doubt turn it to our advantage. More heat, more energy, more liquid water, more opportunity. It's what we do. The ones of us who aren't running in circles, screaming hysterically about global warming, that is.
Sometimes it is. But quite often, it is the main thing leading you down the wrong path.
In this case, the "I know what's happening crowd" is looking at some very tiny variations from a very abbreviated data set and drawing some very large conclusions from them, and then clamoring for some very profound and difficult reactions on the part of, well, just about everyone.
It is well to keep in mind that that the .04 degree quoted in the article is not .04% (it is much less) and that the highest recorded temperature means that we've got a number which should be evaluated as one sample out of 1x10^6 if we want to understand what this year's temperature stats mean in terms of human history.
Yet... it can only be evaluated as one sample out of 2x10^3, which can be fairly characterized as what it means to my grandfather and not a lot more.
That's not to say that global warming is, or isn't, happening. Just that these temperature measurements are woefully lacking as good quality signposts. We can add to that a few core measurements and some general knowledge, which doesn't significantly improve the quality of the data for our current situation.
We should keep in mind that the earth sees huge temperature swings without the aid of man's actions. At one time, North America was tropical here in Montana. I live not even 15 miles from where you can dig T. Rex skeletons from the ground as well as tropical vegetation. At another time, this area was covered by glaciers. Neither circumstance required or depended upon man's intervention or activity.
Yes, the world changes without our approval. Yes, we'll have to adapt if it does. Yes, we'll have to be clever about it when the changes are major. No, this year's temperature isn't a certain sign of any such change. Yes, we should continue to pay attention. No, we shouldn't start running around like chickens.
We now return you to your usual sensationalist ravings. :-)