"Creationists claim that everything needs a cause, including the universe, then posit a god as the necessary cause and immediately proclaim that that god is immune to the "everything needs a cause" claim."
Citation needed. I've never heard that proclamation. There are many theories out there to why a god exists and why we exist in relation to them. You just dismissed them in favor of an illogical one.
SN 1987A was a supernova in the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy. It occurred approximately 51.4 kiloparsecs from Earth,[1] close enough that it was visible to the naked eye. It could be seen from the Southern Hemisphere. It was the closest observed supernova since SN 1604, which occurred in the Milky Way itself. The light from the supernova reached Earth on February 23, 1987. As the first supernova discovered in 1987, it was labeled "1987A". Its brightness peaked in May with an apparent magnitude of about 3 and slowly declined in the following months. It was the first opportunity for modern astronomers to see a supernova up close.
[...]
Approximately three hours before the visible light from SN 1987A reached the Earth, a burst of neutrinos was observed at three separate neutrino observatories. This is due to the neutrino emission (which occurs simultaneously with core collapse) preceding the emission of visible light (which occurs only after the shock wave reaches the stellar surface). At 7:35am Universal time, Kamiokande II detected 11 antineutrinos, IMB 8 antineutrinos and Baksan 5 antineutrinos, in a burst lasting less than 13 seconds.
The Hidden History of the Human Race is a frustrating book. The motivation of the authors, "members of the Bhaktivedanta Institute, a branch of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness" (p. xix), is to find support in the data of paleoanthropology and archaeology for the Vedic scriptures of India. Their methods are borrowed from fundamentalist Christian creationists (whom they assiduously avoid citing). They catalog odd "facts" which appear to conflict with the modern scientific understanding of human evolution and they take statements from the work of conventional scholars and cite them out of context to support some bizarre assertion which the original author would almost certainly not have advocated. Cremo and Thompson regard their collection of dubious facts as "anomalies" that the current paradigm of paleoanthropology cannot explain. Sadly, they offer no alternative paradigm which might accommodate both the existing data and the so-called anomalies they present; although they do indicate that a second volume is planned which will relate their "extensive research results" to their "Vedic source material" (p. xix). Kuhn noted that "To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself" (1970, p. 79); and that is precisely what Cremo and Thompson do. They claim that "mechanistic science" is a "militant ideology, skillfully promoted by the combined effort of scientists, educators, and wealthy industrialists, with a view towards establishing worldwide intellectual dominance" (p. 196).
[... ]
Cremo and Thompson's claim that anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens have been around for hundreds of millions of years is an outrageous notion. Accepting that there is a place in science for seemingly outrageous hypotheses (cf. Davis, 1926) there is no justification for the sort of sloppy rehashing of canards, hoaxes, red herrings, half-truths and fantasies Cremo and Thompson offer in the service of a religious ideology. Readers who are interested in a more credible presentation of the overwhelming evidence for human evolution should consult Ian Tattersall's wonderful recent book The Fossil Trail: how we know what we think we know about human evolution.
Why is that a bewildering number of people paint the world as black-and-white?...
Choice == Freedom. Monopoly == Slavery.
You've got a mighty big brush there yourself.
First: You exaggerate. US healthcare is more costly, but only by 1.1x not 2x. Foreign healthcare like Canada is also costly, but most of the cost is hidden behind bureaucracy and taxes.
You are looking for "Table 1. Health Care Spending in OECD Countries, 2004"
In 2004, health care spending in the United States averaged $6,102 per person, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The OECD consists of 30 democracies (listed in Table 1), most of which are considered to be the most economically advanced countries in the world.1 As shown in Figure 1 and Table 1, U.S. per capita health care spending was well over double the average of OECD countries, which was $2,560 in 2004. Health care made up 15.3% of the U.S. economy in 2004, as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) -- up from 5.1% of GDP in 1960. No other OECD country devotes as much of its economy to health care, also shown in Table 1.
The table before that ("Table 1. Health Care Spending in OECD Countries, 2004") shows the breakdown between private and public funding for health care in industrialized countries. In case you didn't feel like doing the math, it works out to about $2,684 spent by the US government last year for your health care, which is more than the Canadian government spent on universal health care per capita ($2,183).
Please stop peddling this bullshit like you aren't going to get called out on it.
Not that we shouldn't build HDR plants where they make sense, but good luck building them in Florida (or anywhere in the lower 48 states of the US east of the Rockies). The rock just isn't hot enough, even at 6km.
You say that like you know anything at all about me. Maybe you would be less inclined to assume idiotic things about people if you watched less fox news?
Anything with the word cyber in it is automatically bullshit as far as I'm concerned, so lets dig a little deeper. Who is coming to this meeting?
Among those invited is Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which represents a range of critical private security industries concerned about cybersecurity.
Ah, the Internet Security Alliance. And who do they represent? No major software or hardware companies are listed. (Symantec doesn't count) Funny enough, I see companies like Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. I'm just speculating (you know, this being/. and all), but something tells me the good ol' boys of the defense industry are trying to get another gravy train started up here.
While two years is a long time in politics, I think the only chance he has is if the Democrats screw it up. The man has a veritable buffet of words to eat between now and then.
By a narrow 48 - 45 percent margin, voters disapprove of the job Sen. Joseph Lieberman is doing and give him a negative 43 - 49 percent favorability. Republicans approve 75 - 20 percent. Democrats disapprove 70 - 21 percent and independent voters split 48 - 46 percent.
By contrast, State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal gets a 79 - 12 percent approval rating and 71 - 13 percent favorability rating. Republicans approve of the Democrat 66 - 25 percent. Democrats approve 85 - 6 percent and independent voters approve 81 - 10 percent.
If Sen. Lieberman faces Blumenthal in 2012, the Democratic challenger has an early 58 - 30 percent lead. Republicans go with Lieberman 67 - 23 percent while Blumenthal leads 83 - 9 percent among Democrats and 55 - 29 percent among independent voters
My numbers were for total energy usage worldwide, not electricity usage in the US. Also I was replying to someone who apparently thought it smarter to research solar power rather than fusion power. I was simply trying to make the point that it is probably "easier" (from a resource perspective) to figure out fusion than convert to 100% solar.
As to the numbers... so to put a minimum surface area to generate enough energy to power everything on the planet assuming 100% efficiency and electric planes...
Total energy usage (including the 90% of usage that is not electricity): 15 TW
15,000,000,000,000 W / ~1,300 W/m^2 = ~11,538,461,538 m^2 or ~11,538,461 km^2
Go ahead and take an order of magnitude or two off that, it is still totally unreasonable. We would need asteroid mining and space based manufacturing to even begin to think about a project in orbit of that scale. I would be completely behind that kind of effort, but at the same time I'd rather see the trillions we could spend on that poured into fusion research instead. Fusion power would make everything else (like building asteroid mines and space based manufacturing plants) that much easier.
To give you some sense of scale here: we have about 130,000 km^2 of pavement in the US. By your numbers (17 mi^2 per state) we would need about 30,000 km^2 of solar panels just to replace our power plants. What about our cars, airplanes, and ships? You are going to need a whole lot more solar panels if we're going to talk about energy storage for use in transportation.
certainly the minimal technology to significantly supplement gas/coal/nuclear power generation
Which was precisely my original point; solar will never be able to do anything other than supplement our electricity generation (which is perfectly fine!!). Solar can fulfill a significant amount of our energy demand but to say we can run the whole country using it is a fantasy. I would love nothing more than to see the whole world powered by the sun but it simply isn't going to happen any time soon.
As for the topic at hand, like fusion reactors the main problem will be getting MORE energy than you consume.
Way to go captain obvious.
Perhaps a smarter move would be to figure out how to harness the star we already have
Thanks for the laugh. Even with 100% efficient orbital solar stations we would need a few million km^2 of panels just to match current energy usage. That number seemed large to me so I did a little digging and found this image that details electricity consumption alone. Switching to 100% solar and building a grid capable of redistributing that power from where it is generated to where it is used (nevermind orbital based power stations) would be a megaproject to dwarf every other construction project in history combined.
Did you bother to read what I quoted before lashing out at my supposed lack of understanding? I was asking for a reference regarding the CRU destroying documentation. Everything I have read referred to only the data itself being deleted.
they also destroyed the documentation of exactly how the value-added dataset they produced was actually produced.
they actually delete their copy of the data, but more embarrassingly they also destroyed the documentation of exactly how the value-added dataset they produced was actually produced.
You have a reference for that?
I think its a little more than amusing that you're screaming at the top of your lungs that the data has been deleted and we have no way of reconstructing it because they deleted the documentation, yet you are 100% positive they are WRONG.
It's the Apocalyptic Global Warming crowd that needs to prove
If you're looking for proof in science, you're doing it wrong.
1. The Globe has warmed significantly
2. the warming is unprecedented and therefore man-made
3. the warming is not do to UHI, Urban Heat Islands, or land use changes
4. reducing CO2 to pre-industry revolution levels will return temperatures to pre-industry revolution levels also;
Of course you would never stop to think about the uncontrolled experiment we're running right now. You know, the one where we are dumping millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every day. After all, humans are way too small toaffectourenvironment, right?
I think the burden of proof should be upon the polluters to show that doing this to our planet is in fact not harmful. Too bad there is too much momentum to take a step back and have an objective look at what we're doing as a species.
How does it work for multiple copies of Apache to all be looking at port 80? I mean, from the outside world, there can only be one port 80 at that IP address, right?
Realistically you wouldn't have completely separate instances of Apache on the same machine, hence the virtualhosts stuff. When you said multiple copies of Apache I assumed you meant they would be on the same server because if they were on VMs it doesn't make sense to say "multiple copies of Apache trying to listen to port 80".
It doesn't sound like it applies to running multiple virtual machines, each of which has its own copy of Apache, each of which is trying to listen to port 80.
Your VMs would have separate IP addresses with one copy of Apache per VM. If that is a problem then make it NAT and put a proxy in front of it, though I've only seen it done for load balancing with physical servers.
If laws shut down businesses that were operating fine before, that's a bad thing for the economy.
Shutting down the slave trade was bad for the economy too. Pollution has a cost and it is much more insidious because the final costs are in no way related to the up front costs. While you are technically correct in saying that R-12 is cheaper than R-134a, that does not factor in increased treatment of skin cancer because of increased UV exposure (among other detrimental effects). I would argue that the banning of R-12 had an initial negative economic effect that does not even begin to compare to the negative economic effects of a nonfunctional ozone layer.
I for one am glad you can no longer dump ozone depleting gasses into the atmosphere because it happens to be better for your bottom line. Do you cry yourself to sleep every night thinking about the economic harm to all those whale oil salesmen and slave traders that were put out of business? I'm sure those guys had to find another source of income too.
Check your facts. The only private high school where I live is significantly more expensive than you claim it to be. Try $10,700/year. And that doesn't include books, uniforms, or anything other than tuition.
Slashdot Mirror
"Creationists claim that everything needs a cause, including the universe, then posit a god as the necessary cause and immediately proclaim that that god is immune to the "everything needs a cause" claim."
Citation needed. I've never heard that proclamation. There are many theories out there to why a god exists and why we exist in relation to them. You just dismissed them in favor of an illogical one.
It usually isn't explicitly stated. Thomistic cosmological argument
We haven't had a supernova that was visible to the naked eye in Earth's night-time sky in quite a long time
1987 wasn't very long ago.
SN 1987A was a supernova in the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy. It occurred approximately 51.4 kiloparsecs from Earth,[1] close enough that it was visible to the naked eye. It could be seen from the Southern Hemisphere. It was the closest observed supernova since SN 1604, which occurred in the Milky Way itself. The light from the supernova reached Earth on February 23, 1987. As the first supernova discovered in 1987, it was labeled "1987A". Its brightness peaked in May with an apparent magnitude of about 3 and slowly declined in the following months. It was the first opportunity for modern astronomers to see a supernova up close.
[...]
Approximately three hours before the visible light from SN 1987A reached the Earth, a burst of neutrinos was observed at three separate neutrino observatories. This is due to the neutrino emission (which occurs simultaneously with core collapse) preceding the emission of visible light (which occurs only after the shock wave reaches the stellar surface). At 7:35am Universal time, Kamiokande II detected 11 antineutrinos, IMB 8 antineutrinos and Baksan 5 antineutrinos, in a burst lasting less than 13 seconds.
The first rule of survival is to stay calm. If you can't stay calm enough to remember how to signal for help you already have bigger problems.
Off Amazon, order a book called the Hidden History of the Human Race (The Condensed Edition of Forbidden Archeology)
No, please don't.
The Hidden History of the Human Race is a frustrating book. The motivation of the authors, "members of the Bhaktivedanta Institute, a branch of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness" (p. xix), is to find support in the data of paleoanthropology and archaeology for the Vedic scriptures of India. Their methods are borrowed from fundamentalist Christian creationists (whom they assiduously avoid citing). They catalog odd "facts" which appear to conflict with the modern scientific understanding of human evolution and they take statements from the work of conventional scholars and cite them out of context to support some bizarre assertion which the original author would almost certainly not have advocated. Cremo and Thompson regard their collection of dubious facts as "anomalies" that the current paradigm of paleoanthropology cannot explain. Sadly, they offer no alternative paradigm which might accommodate both the existing data and the so-called anomalies they present; although they do indicate that a second volume is planned which will relate their "extensive research results" to their "Vedic source material" (p. xix). Kuhn noted that "To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself" (1970, p. 79); and that is precisely what Cremo and Thompson do. They claim that "mechanistic science" is a "militant ideology, skillfully promoted by the combined effort of scientists, educators, and wealthy industrialists, with a view towards establishing worldwide intellectual dominance" (p. 196).
[ ... ]
Cremo and Thompson's claim that anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens have been around for hundreds of millions of years is an outrageous notion. Accepting that there is a place in science for seemingly outrageous hypotheses (cf. Davis, 1926) there is no justification for the sort of sloppy rehashing of canards, hoaxes, red herrings, half-truths and fantasies Cremo and Thompson offer in the service of a religious ideology. Readers who are interested in a more credible presentation of the overwhelming evidence for human evolution should consult Ian Tattersall's wonderful recent book The Fossil Trail: how we know what we think we know about human evolution.
Why is that a bewildering number of people paint the world as black-and-white? ...
Choice == Freedom. Monopoly == Slavery.
You've got a mighty big brush there yourself.
First: You exaggerate. US healthcare is more costly, but only by 1.1x not 2x. Foreign healthcare like Canada is also costly, but most of the cost is hidden behind bureaucracy and taxes.
Total horseshit.
You are looking for "Table 1. Health Care Spending in OECD Countries, 2004"
In 2004, health care spending in the United States averaged $6,102 per person,
according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD). The OECD consists of 30 democracies (listed in Table 1), most of which
are considered to be the most economically advanced countries in the world.1
As shown in Figure 1 and Table 1, U.S. per capita health care spending was
well over double the average of OECD countries, which was $2,560 in 2004. Health
care made up 15.3% of the U.S. economy in 2004, as measured by Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) -- up from 5.1% of GDP in 1960. No other OECD country devotes
as much of its economy to health care, also shown in Table 1.
The table before that ("Table 1. Health Care Spending in OECD Countries, 2004") shows the breakdown between private and public funding for health care in industrialized countries. In case you didn't feel like doing the math, it works out to about $2,684 spent by the US government last year for your health care, which is more than the Canadian government spent on universal health care per capita ($2,183).
Please stop peddling this bullshit like you aren't going to get called out on it.
Not that we shouldn't build HDR plants where they make sense, but good luck building them in Florida (or anywhere in the lower 48 states of the US east of the Rockies). The rock just isn't hot enough, even at 6km.
You say that like you know anything at all about me. Maybe you would be less inclined to assume idiotic things about people if you watched less fox news?
So what do you call the pro-nuclear power hippies like me?
Anything with the word cyber in it is automatically bullshit as far as I'm concerned, so lets dig a little deeper. Who is coming to this meeting?
Among those invited is Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which represents a range of critical private security industries concerned about cybersecurity.
Ah, the Internet Security Alliance. And who do they represent? No major software or hardware companies are listed. (Symantec doesn't count) Funny enough, I see companies like Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. I'm just speculating (you know, this being /. and all), but something tells me the good ol' boys of the defense industry are trying to get another gravy train started up here.
Not one bit.
Vote for Angle! It doesn't matter what her opinions are 'cuz she isn't Harry Reid!
While two years is a long time in politics, I think the only chance he has is if the Democrats screw it up. The man has a veritable buffet of words to eat between now and then.
Have you been asleep for the past 6 months?
By a narrow 48 - 45 percent margin, voters disapprove of the job Sen. Joseph Lieberman is doing and give him a negative 43 - 49 percent favorability. Republicans approve 75 - 20 percent. Democrats disapprove 70 - 21 percent and independent voters split 48 - 46 percent.
By contrast, State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal gets a 79 - 12 percent approval rating and 71 - 13 percent favorability rating. Republicans approve of the Democrat 66 - 25 percent. Democrats approve 85 - 6 percent and independent voters approve 81 - 10 percent.
If Sen. Lieberman faces Blumenthal in 2012, the Democratic challenger has an early 58 - 30 percent lead. Republicans go with Lieberman 67 - 23 percent while Blumenthal leads 83 - 9 percent among Democrats and 55 - 29 percent among independent voters
He will be crushed in the next election.
Latest poll
Poll: Lieberman Hated By Everyone In Connecticut After Health Care Debates
Poll: Lieberman Would Lose 2012 Re-Election In Landslide
Thank you for the correction, I obviously wasn't paying attention there...
Considering the current (and near future) cost of solar panels it still isn't any more feasible than my wrong number though.
My numbers were for total energy usage worldwide, not electricity usage in the US. Also I was replying to someone who apparently thought it smarter to research solar power rather than fusion power. I was simply trying to make the point that it is probably "easier" (from a resource perspective) to figure out fusion than convert to 100% solar.
As to the numbers... so to put a minimum surface area to generate enough energy to power everything on the planet assuming 100% efficiency and electric planes...
Total energy usage (including the 90% of usage that is not electricity): 15 TW
Insolation in orbit: ~1300W/m^2
15,000,000,000,000 W / ~1,300 W/m^2 = ~11,538,461,538 m^2 or ~11,538,461 km^2
Go ahead and take an order of magnitude or two off that, it is still totally unreasonable. We would need asteroid mining and space based manufacturing to even begin to think about a project in orbit of that scale. I would be completely behind that kind of effort, but at the same time I'd rather see the trillions we could spend on that poured into fusion research instead. Fusion power would make everything else (like building asteroid mines and space based manufacturing plants) that much easier.
To give you some sense of scale here: we have about 130,000 km^2 of pavement in the US. By your numbers (17 mi^2 per state) we would need about 30,000 km^2 of solar panels just to replace our power plants. What about our cars, airplanes, and ships? You are going to need a whole lot more solar panels if we're going to talk about energy storage for use in transportation.
certainly the minimal technology to significantly supplement gas/coal/nuclear power generation
Which was precisely my original point; solar will never be able to do anything other than supplement our electricity generation (which is perfectly fine!!). Solar can fulfill a significant amount of our energy demand but to say we can run the whole country using it is a fantasy. I would love nothing more than to see the whole world powered by the sun but it simply isn't going to happen any time soon.
As for the topic at hand, like fusion reactors the main problem will be getting MORE energy than you consume.
Way to go captain obvious.
Perhaps a smarter move would be to figure out how to harness the star we already have
Thanks for the laugh. Even with 100% efficient orbital solar stations we would need a few million km^2 of panels just to match current energy usage. That number seemed large to me so I did a little digging and found this image that details electricity consumption alone. Switching to 100% solar and building a grid capable of redistributing that power from where it is generated to where it is used (nevermind orbital based power stations) would be a megaproject to dwarf every other construction project in history combined.
Did you bother to read what I quoted before lashing out at my supposed lack of understanding? I was asking for a reference regarding the CRU destroying documentation. Everything I have read referred to only the data itself being deleted.
they also destroyed the documentation of exactly how the value-added dataset they produced was actually produced.
they actually delete their copy of the data, but more embarrassingly they also destroyed the documentation of exactly how the value-added dataset they produced was actually produced.
You have a reference for that?
I think its a little more than amusing that you're screaming at the top of your lungs that the data has been deleted and we have no way of reconstructing it because they deleted the documentation, yet you are 100% positive they are WRONG.
It's the Apocalyptic Global Warming crowd that needs to prove
If you're looking for proof in science, you're doing it wrong.
1. The Globe has warmed significantly
2. the warming is unprecedented and therefore man-made
3. the warming is not do to UHI, Urban Heat Islands, or land use changes
4. reducing CO2 to pre-industry revolution levels will return temperatures to pre-industry revolution levels also;
Of course you would never stop to think about the uncontrolled experiment we're running right now. You know, the one where we are dumping millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every day. After all, humans are way too small to affect our environment, right?
I think the burden of proof should be upon the polluters to show that doing this to our planet is in fact not harmful. Too bad there is too much momentum to take a step back and have an objective look at what we're doing as a species.
There was no way to prove if the data had been tampered with because the data was deleted. The only thing that was left was their "value added" data.
You don't know what you're talking about
I was replying to your comment, not the article:
How does it work for multiple copies of Apache to all be looking at port 80? I mean, from the outside world, there can only be one port 80 at that IP address, right?
Realistically you wouldn't have completely separate instances of Apache on the same machine, hence the virtualhosts stuff. When you said multiple copies of Apache I assumed you meant they would be on the same server because if they were on VMs it doesn't make sense to say "multiple copies of Apache trying to listen to port 80".
It doesn't sound like it applies to running multiple virtual machines, each of which has its own copy of Apache, each of which is trying to listen to port 80.
Your VMs would have separate IP addresses with one copy of Apache per VM. If that is a problem then make it NAT and put a proxy in front of it, though I've only seen it done for load balancing with physical servers.
Yes
CFCs destroy ozone. You've really never heard of the ozone hole?
If laws shut down businesses that were operating fine before, that's a bad thing for the economy.
Shutting down the slave trade was bad for the economy too. Pollution has a cost and it is much more insidious because the final costs are in no way related to the up front costs. While you are technically correct in saying that R-12 is cheaper than R-134a, that does not factor in increased treatment of skin cancer because of increased UV exposure (among other detrimental effects). I would argue that the banning of R-12 had an initial negative economic effect that does not even begin to compare to the negative economic effects of a nonfunctional ozone layer.
Wow.
I for one am glad you can no longer dump ozone depleting gasses into the atmosphere because it happens to be better for your bottom line. Do you cry yourself to sleep every night thinking about the economic harm to all those whale oil salesmen and slave traders that were put out of business? I'm sure those guys had to find another source of income too.
Check your facts. The only private high school where I live is significantly more expensive than you claim it to be. Try $10,700/year. And that doesn't include books, uniforms, or anything other than tuition.