Actually, he was attacking fundamentalist Christians (as is clear by the context). Their beliefs do constitute a religion (well, several different ones).
Let's change part of the hypothetical: substitute Hassidic Jews for Jews.
Same idea - a subgroup, an attack on which would probably draw extreme sanction.
I labelled it an anti-ID class based on his email, not on the use of the word "myth." As far as was reported, the outcry was against his characterization of "fundies" in his email, not the class itself.
Your argument about "Jews" or "Muslims" is irrelevant. Again, the reaction had he done so would most likely have been pretty bad. Christians tend to be fair game these days.
It is unfortunate that the anti-evolutionists have done so much damage in Kansas. It would, however, be unreasonable for universities to refuse to accept students from Kansas high schools, except when the criteria required a serious biology course, and evolution was *prohibited* from being taught, and no advance placement type exame was used to measure evolutionary knowledge. In other words, it would be more likely that those universities are actually taking such stances to initerfere in Kansas' choices.
While we would like most students to understand evolution, the fact is that our schools (including colleges) do a terrible job of even teaching what science is about, which is far more important than specific scientific results. Try to find a journalist, for example, who can actually explain science. You'll find a few.
BTW, what is the new definition of science from the BOE, btw? I have not heard of that. Isn't that sort of like legislating that pi = 3?
Actually, a class in the philosophy of science would do well to study ID - because it illustrates a fine point in science - the inadmissibility of supernatural phenomenon. It is a fact that parts of evolution (a theory to which I subscribe and which most Christian sects including the Catholic Church view as reality) are based on faith. However, it is really the faith that given enough evidence (and more is discovered every day - especially in the realm of molecular biology) we could use scientific methods to explain gaps. ID is another faith that could explain the gaps, but is unscientific because it (in its most common form) relies on an active supernatural power. However, one could argue that there is as much evidence in some areas that alien beings made certain shifts as there is evolution, and be correct. It's just that you would almost certainly be wrong about what actually happened, even though you were right about the equivallence of evidence. Evolution is a very strong theory, but because it has predictions across such a very wide realm, not all of them can be verified/falsified, and hence those predictions are a matter of faith.
But in most cases, ID is a stalking horse for active intervention by a Christian God, and that is simply unacceptable as a scientific hypothesis for good reasons.
Having worked with the Swift Boeat people in last year's campaign, and having watched the media's response to information they and our (VVFT) organization gave them, I wouldn't believe a single thing the main stream media says against the swifties. I have an affidavit here signed by one swift boat veteran which makes a small and immaterial change to a previous affidavit. This was trumpeted by the Boston Globe as the veteran "recanting" his criticism of John Kerry, even though the affidavit specifically states that the change is in no way material and should not be taken as any change to the veteran's opinion on Kerry. John O'Neil, the co-author of the main book, a former swift boat captain, and the primary spokesman for the SBVT, is widely respected in the Houston legal community for his honesty.
I also met a number of the POW's who tried to get their story out in "Stolen Honor" - a documentary http://www.stolenhonor.com/home.asp produced by Carlton Sherwood on Kerry's impact on the POWs. The mainstream media described this Pulitzer Prize winning reporter as "a fringe right wing journalist," which is perhaps why they elected him to serve for years on the board of the Washinton Press CLub. Media pressure forced this documentary to never be shown, but Carlton was sued - a standard tactic to shut up those who have less money than you and to discourage others from criticism. Discustingly, some POWs were also sued as a result of this documentary. Did you ever hear about this from the media?
Believe what you want, but if you get your beliefs from the scum at the Main Stream Media, you might as well be... well... an ID fundie!
The injuries are real? The beating is a bit suspect - I give it 50-50 odds of being real.
But let's assume it is real. In that case, the guy is an idiot. Someplace with no witnesses he stops his car while being aggressibely tailed, and gets out? That is, at a minimum, dumb. And by the way, how did they find him and know who he was? Perhaps his beating was...well.. a case of intelligent design?
The last time I was aggressively tailed near Lawrence, I ran them off with warning shots (note: I knew who they were and they were dangerous folks).
As anyone who uses email knows, if you don't want people upset about what you write, don't write it. I saw a multimillion dollar business deal vanish in a flash when the wrong person got the email. Once again, this guy shows idiocy. His email hardly showed "open mindedness" that his society is supposedly about! I don't mean about ID (which is just plan not science) but the "fundies." Is there anyone here who believes he would even have his job, tenure or not, if he had used the words "Jews" or "Muslims" instead of "fundies"?
Finally, why is a professor of religion teaching an anti-ID class? If you want to attack ID, you need a professor of the philosophy of science, or a scientist.
I went to school at KU and lived in Lawrence quite a while. My father was a professor there. The town is probably the most liberal in Kansas - too much for my liking), and is a very nice place. I hope people don't get the wrong idea about Kansas because a tiny minority is causing trouble by pushing ID into the education system.
There is an alternate theory to the linear response which says that the rate at which radiation is delivered is an important factor, especially at lower levels (which, btw, aren't THAT low by nucleophobe standards). The theory is based on observations (which have the same problem of being retrospective ) and the idea that having more than one radiation incident in a cell at near the same time may be significantly more damaging than those same two incidents spread out of a long time (and, I would guess, not hitting the same cell). In other words, the damage is not a linear function of the dose, but is a higher order function with low levels being far safer than a linear model (used, as far as I know, for all radiation safety policies).
It makes sense since cells have some ability to repair DNA damage and lower level free radical damage.
These results you report may support that theory.
The political/social impacts of these results could be a recovery of relatively high radiation land in years or decades rather than millenium, although it appears that nucleophobia is a disease hard to cure. It could also lead to more sane debates about nuclear power risks, rather than the completely phobic policies we see in so many countries.
As for 60 minutes - they have a number of agendas and are happy to treat you to propaganda in favor of them. I wouldn't trust anything those bastards say (or many of the others in the "main stream media"). Truth suffers when filtered through political and social agendas.
Sorry, dude, but what you call a nube we call a yahoo, depending on attitude.
May 3, 1999 was an exceptional (and hence very rare) event. It had a large number of long lived tornados (a friend of mine drove their from Alabama and arrived in time to see 11 of them).
But the exception does not change my statement that long lived tornados are very rare.
There is also the matter of luck and forecasting skill, although much of my chasing is with true professionals - researchers or professional forecasters - and in those cases I usually defer to their forecasts. Because I don't live in Oklahoma, I have to spend vacation time to chase, so I don't have nearly the opportunity to chase on the really good days that people closer to the action do. They can pick the best days to go out and chase, but I only have the days, planned in advance, when I am in the area.
As I wrote, the thyroid cancer is a provable negative effect of Chernobyl. My primary contention is that the wild assertions about hundreds of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl were nonsense, but are now received wisdom. I find that to be a deterrent to rational decision making. The only effect I, a non-specialst who tracks this stuff a bit, can find is the thyroid cancers. I believe there may have been one study with an increase in SNP's in animals right next to the plant, but I don't know if it was refuted. At this point, there may have been many more. I do wonder why today's children aren't dosed with potassium iodide to prevent accumulation of radioactive iodine (I-131?) in the children's thyroids, but perhaps that agent cannot be used chronically.
I would ask your wife about the statistical power of the studies showing the other increaases. Also, in a highly visible incident, there is often sampling bias in the statistics. Risk increases on the order of 25 to 50%, while scary to the public, are often very difficult to justify by epidemiology due to the difficulty of studies that cannot be well controlled, but rather rely on sampling an already exposed, and emotionally invested population.
Perhaps you remember the cancer cluster nonsense of a decade or two ago in West Phoenix. No matter what the experts said, those with cancer (or their loved ones) we absolutely convinced that their particular cancer was caused by the tiny amount of ground water contamination. This is the sort of thing that bolixes up the best planned studies. For one thing, it leads to sampling bias. It also leads to poor recollection of patient history, which is one of the difficulties of ex post facto epidemiological studies.
It is quite easy to do a statistical study (given access to records or participants) but it is much, much harder to do a reliable one.
I would not be surprised if there are other negative effects of Chernobyl, perhaps the ones you write about (or link to). But epidemiological studies showing only small risk increases have to be done extremely carefully, especially with a highly visible incident, to achieve the statistical power often implied by the numbers.
I have read summary articles about genetic changes in animals (such as the frequency of SNP's (single nucleotide polymorphisms) in ground burrowing animals right next to the plant) and most of them have come up with neglibile effect. Perhaps today's lower cost in molecular biology allows more sensitive or widespread detection of SNP's, which are thought to be a harbinger of mutagenic and teratogenic activity. Very likely, if the animals living right next to the plant do not have statistically significant problems, then humans with lower exposures do not either (which is why these studies are done). And perhaps, as I said, there are now reliable studies showing significant problems with those animals.
In a situation like this, it is hard to separate political agendas and sampling bias from science. Perhaps your wife has the contacts and experties to evaluate the studies and tell us which ones are meaningful (it takes more than statistical expertise - it also helps to know the reputation and methodology of the authors of the papers). I would very much like to read the results.
I live downwind from Palo Verde plant (Arizona) myself, and it doesn't worry me at all. I have also participated in the annual "nuclear emergency" drill and have seen the expected area of effect in the event of a severe accident - it doesn't reach my house:-)
I think the biggest risk of nuclear power today is terrorism, and I don't think enough has been done about that issue (although a lot of the security issues are classified so it is hard for us to know).
Also, the last I heard, the Russians were still building a Chernobyl design power reactor (carbon moderated, positive temperature coefficient )in Cuba. Lets hope that my information is out of date. Likewise, I would not want to live near Chernobyl because of the instability of the "sarcophagus" and the possibility of sudden extreme releases of radiation (although it would be hard to beat a days long fire lofted plume of reactor core contents as the original accident had).
You might be right, but a charity that relies on Belorus figures (check out the form of government there) is hardly a reliable source. They have an inherent conflict of interest - inflated figures are to their benefit. Belorus itself has the same conflict.
That Belorus children will have a greatly increased rate of thyroid cancer is certainly true - especially if the government doesn't give the potassium iodide. Fortunately that cancer is one of the most treatable around. Of course, that is not meant to minimize the suffering of those children who have to have their thyroids removed.
I am open to evidence, but so far, the evidence I have seen belies what the charity is saying. For example, the exclusion zone right next to the reactor is RIGHT NOW safe for visiting - you don't have to wait tens of thousands of years. Yes, it has a higher radiation level, but, as I said before, so do a number of areas of the earth where people have long lived healthy lives.
Only the linear dose response theory can make the most frightening projections, and as I wrote earlier, there is reason to doubt that theory at lower levels and with exposures that take place over a long time rather than with intensive radiation (the theory does not differentiate - the risk is computed as the sum of all radiation received in a lifetime, whether it comes in a few seconds as it did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or evenly spread out over 70 years.
Since I haven't reviewed the literature in a few years, there may very well be good *scientific* evidence of more serious or widespread effects. If so, I would hope someone here will provide us links.
It is very common for people to attribute cancers to some man-caused event, even though there isn't the slightest evidence that the cancers were actually caused by that event.
The phenomenon of "cancer clusters" is a result of this.
In other words, if you had relatives in Sweden that died of Leukemia, it is highly unlikely that Chernobyl caused it. More likely was a shared genetic predisposition to the disease, plus bad luck
As far as I know, the method using multiple towers involves time difference of arrival - more like Loran than triangulation. Signal strength is a very poor indicator of distance because of obstacles to the signal (attenuation) and multipath.
Your point about individual towers is presumably correct.
The funny thing about CSI in this case is that it is possible, today, to track cell phones using GPS. But not because they talk back to the satellite, but rather some cell phones will send their GPS position to the cell phone system. This is part of the 911 upgrade to the cell phone system in the US to allow callers to 911 emergency numbers to be located. There is an alternate technology (using time difference of arrival at different cell towers). I have no idea what percentage of providers use which system.
You are right about one thing - it was the idiot Nixon who signed it.
I never claimed it had anything to do with safety. I showed it as an example of a speed limit that was NOT related to safety! Good grief.
Oh, and as long as we are picking nits, I was wrong to say it was repealed in 1994. It was repealed, of course, by the Republican majority elected in 1994, who of course couldn't vote on anything until 1995 when they removed this onerous law. As a storm chaser, I was very pleased, as we need speed to get to the storms and being able to go 75 instead of 55 made a big difference.
Re:Great for Electricity but...
on
Artificial Tornadoes
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Actually, you must get your information only from the mainstream media, without looking at little things like numbers and scientific papers.
Yes, as I said, there were a lot of cases of childhood thyroid cancer, the ONLY human effects that have been measured, and that (last time I checked) had caused exactly one death.
The 1000 square miles (or whatever the exclusion zone size is) is, if you care to check, so nice a place that it has been suggested as a wildlife park. Yes, it has more than normal background radiation (as do a number of places in the world where man had nothing to do with it), but there is no evidence that it is dangerous - only an unproven theory.
Much of the fear that people have about radioactivity is based on the linear dose no threshold theory - one which is the consensus for safety reasons, but is really a "precautionary principle" sort of idea. The evidence for it is basically non-existent - it is derived from extreme extrapolation. Humans have poor intuition about toxicology (and radiation behaves as a toxin), finding it difficult to deal with the many orders of magnitude involved. Hence, people are terrified of tiny levels of radiation while large numbers of people from Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still alive 60 years after being dosed with hundreds of REM (far more than you would get if you lived right next to Chernobyl). The linear dose hypothesis leads to the dramatic high estimates of radiation deaths - estimates which have not been proven out.
Prior to 9-11 (you wouldn't want to do it today) I took a small digital geiger counter up on an airliner. At 10,000 feet MSL it was singing - off scale in its counts-per-minute mode. Scary, eh? Not to me.
When there are popular phobias, especially those that match someones' agenda (and you did mention agendas, didn't you - no, I'm not a libertarian), looking at the underlying evidence can be an edifying experience. You might want to try it sometime.
The largest reactor complex in the US was built 45 mi west of here (Phoenix, AZ) in the '80s, AFTER TMI. The economic reason for not building reactors is the thicket of environmental regulations and guaranteed lawsuits, not the inherent economics of reactors. After all, lots of other countries went on building them, and lots of those countries were not economic fools. It is true that the US didn't do a good job of economizing on reactors compared to other countries, and we had ample natural gas to provide cheap power (that has changed recently as the gas prices have gone through the roof).
Carter was a nuclear engineer - experienced in the small scale, highly different technology of a submarine. He didn't know squat about power reactors, which are radically different beasts. It is like saying that an electrical engineer who designs chips knows plenty about, well, long distance electric power generation systems.
As for batteries, storage is a very serious problem for those who are worried about environmental pollution (such as CO2), because the internal combustion engine uses an easy-to-store, high density energy source, and alternately fueled systems must compete with that. Batteries and hydrogen are the two main contenders for that problem, and both have very serious problems. They also are additional steps which reduce energy efficiency (but I'd still love it if batteries got much better and cheaper, because electric cars, given good batteries, are much niftier beasts than IC cars).
Power generation is easy - do it with nukes, do it with coal (we have vast reserves of coal here in the US, and the technology to clean up coal emissions is very advanced now), do it with Canadian oil (they have the second largest oil reserves in the world). But power has to be delivered to where it is needed, and that is where storage comes in when dealing with power used for mobility - whether as gasoline, diesel fuel, batteries, or hydrogen.
If geothermal power was so economically efficient ("cheap steam"), why is there a whole lot more of it being used? That "cheap steam" has a few problems, including the fact that it is very dirty and thus ages the systems very quickly - but I don't know the other reasons for the lack of significant geothermal power - just that it is obvious that there is one (and conspiracy theories just don't cut it).
The poster would seem to have learned about GPS systems from watching TV cop shows, where the implication is commonly given that the GPS device sends signals to the satellite.
WRONG!
A GPS device is a receiver only. It can detect speed changes very quickly (and exceedingly accurately). It has very little latency. Modern systems will rarely lose enough satellites to fail, but obviously a system like this should simply stop interfering with driving if it loses adequate information (which means you can put it out of order with a little aluminum foil placed in the right position - over the antenna if you know where it is).
The poster seems to be under the delusion that speed limits are always tied to the current maximum safe speed.
This is absurd, as other factors can be at work:
political (the town I live in has 5mph lower speed limits on exactly the same roads and road conditions as the towns around it - and not coincidentally is the first town in the US to use photo-radar).
legal - in the US, every state (except perhaps one) has an absolute maximum for speed limits. Clearly some roads and vehicles are capable of being driven safely at much higher speeds on some road segments in those states. Not that long ago, the idiot Jimmy Carter forced a 55mph maximum speed limit throughout the US, that lasted until 1994. The interstate highway system was built for much higher speeds (I believe 75mph) and the Kansas Turnpike for 80mph, it's previous speed limit.
safety for non-familiar drivers - a road can have conditions which make the maximum safe speed lower than the apparent (to non-familiar drivers) safe speed. The authorities may choose to set the speed limit lower to compensate.
weather - the speed limit may be lowered to compensate for common but not continuous weather conditions such as high winds.
Traffic engineers used to set speed limits, in the absence of other factors, determining the 85th percentile speed of unconstrained drivers. In other words, presumably 85 percent of the drivers, based on their experience and perceptions, drove at or below the maximum safe speed. They would, of course, set them lower at hard to see hazards such as hidden curves.
If one is going to have such a system, soft but effective feedback seems much better than hard limits.
BTW... some cars have unadvertised built-in speed limits. My 2001 Toyota Sequoia appears to have a 100mph limit. One day on a storm chase, on a very good road with almost infinite visibility, we tried it, and at 100mph the engine refused to go faster, even though it clearly had the capacity. I suspect this may be because they didn't want to put bigger tables into the engine computer.
The more serious problem is how to get much energy out of it.
First, a couple of concepts - CAPE and "cap."
CAPE, Convective Available Potential Energy, is the amount of energy a parcel of atmosphere would release if lifted from a level near the ground to the tropopause. CAPE is a strong function of dew point and the temperature profile and moisture profile of the atmosphere (the dry and wet lines on a SKEW-T/LOG-P chart).
"cap" - this is a thermal inversion (or at least a reversed slope temperature profile area) in the middle atmosphere which serves to trap rising air before it can release enough energy (through condensation) to produce a thunderstorm. A "capped" atmosphere is often clear or contains small convective towers ("turkey towers") which are unable to maintain convection.
A parcel of air which cannot penetrate the cap will release little energy - only the kinetic energy it gains as it rises below the cap, and perhaps some condensation energy if it forms a cloud). A parcel that can pierce the cap will reach a region where the energy release is dramatically higher, and will typically accelerate up to near the tropopause, releasing energy the whole type.
The conditions required for this device to produce much energy - high CAPE (Convective Available Potential Energy) - are not that common or reliable. Furthermore, high CAPE is often tied to enough wind to make the stability of the vortex very questionable. When it isn't (such as the US midwest during the summer "capped" time), the total time that adequate CAPE is present isn't that great, and the vortex would have to be tall enough to reach the convective cap (and contain enough lift to break through that cap) before it started to generate significant power.
Atmospheric dynamics can also produce significant lift, but those conditions almost always have wind associated with them.
Tornados are usually short vortices - perhaps a few hundred to a couple thousand meters high - coupled to larger, more stable, and much lower speed vortices (mesocyclones) that are quite a bit deeper. Even so, tornados are notoriously unstable and most last no more than a few minutes (in 11 years of serious, science based tornado chasing, I have seen *one* that lasted more than 15 minutes and it was a mile in diameter and weak - F1). (I won't bother to discuss landspouts or waterspouts here).
In contrast, this man-made vortex will have to reach high enough into the atmosphere to penetrate the cap, which is much harder to achieve (read: takes more energy) and hard to maintain. A tornado doesn't have this problem, as it has a very large area of rising air (hundreds to thousands of square kilometers) which can pierce the cap, and once it is pierced in just one spot, a very large thunderstorm (normally a supercell) then develops and puts a geographically large hole in the cap, and generates lots of energy, a tiny bit of which actually goes into the tornado. Most supercells, in spite of their high energy release and their rotation do not produce tornados, to the frustration of weather forecasters and storm chasers.
One could perhaps put one of these vortex-based power systems in an area prone to dust devils, which use a different mechanism to generate lift - solar heating in the presence of a super-adiabatic lapse rate. But dust devils are much weaker, because they do not rely on the energy released by condensing moisture, and use energy from a much smaller layer of atmosphere.
Ultimately, this scheme seems to be an over-complex, inefficient and unreliable solar power machine. Other forms of harvesting solar power are probably much better in those areas, and yet only windmills seem to be close to cost efficient.
As a harvester of excess industrial heat... forget it. There are MUCH simpler and more efficient ways of doing that, and they are already in use in cogeneration facilities.
Re:Great for Electricity but...
on
Artificial Tornadoes
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
TMI did almost zero environmental damage. The only real damage was to the stockholders and ratepayers, because a very expensive plant had to be shut down.
Chernobyl likewise did very little environmental damage, in spite of its release of a huge amount of radiation. The exclusion zone around Chernobyl is full of healthy wildlife (and not 6 foot tall mice or anything), and in spite of all the hype, the total number of deaths attributable to Chernobyl is under 50, including the firefighters (the number of excess cases of childhood thyroid cancer is over 1000, but that disease is very rarely fatal). However, I wouldn't want a Chernobyl style power plant in my backyard, especially run by a soviet style bureacracy (or for that matter, the typical power plant bureaucracy, although I guess they have gotten better at running reactors in the US after a few widely publicized mistakes).
Since TMI, even though the US stopped building new reactors at that time (due to the ridiculous hype from the main stream media and envirowackos), the amount of nuclear electricity produced in the US has grown significantly.
At the same time, many other countries produce vast amounts of electricity from nukes (I think it is around 70% in France, but I'm too lazy to Google it).
Furthermore, "inherently safe" reactor designs exist (in reality, NOTHING is completely safe), and the biggest danger of nuclear reactors is action by terrorists (and we could, if we were serious about it, mitigate that danger dramatically).
Nukes aren't the solution to the entire energy "problem" (but they work a lot better than Kyoto, a total non-solution to the speculative anthropogenic global warming hypothesis). If one could make good enough batteries (and people have been trying very hard for 100 years), they could supplant hydrocarbons through the use of electric cars (at a significant energy loss), but today the battery of an electric car is still nowhere close to adequate for most needs.
If the terrorists wanted merely for us to improve our ability to defeat them, while giving up a small amount of liberty, the above silly post might be right.
But Islamofascist terrorists have a bit more ambition - they want to destroy our ability to stop their creation ofr a vast califate of the most extreme and repressive form of Islam.
It may be that in today's world, where terrorists may be able to get or make terrible weapons (Moore's law has been exceeded in genetic engineering, should you want to make a biological weapon), some liberties must be given up.
Of course, the old saw that "those who would give up liberty for security deserve neither" (paraphrase of Ben Franklin), always comes up at the slightest impact on civil liberties, even those that simply roll them back slightly to levels still more free than our historical norm. But the man who uttered those words chose to create a government which in fact cost liberties (a lot more than we have now) in order to create collective security.
Civil liberties absolutism is no more sensible than religious fundamentalism. Both are unworkable utopian ideas put forth by those who don't understand the consequences.
Also, it is important for the ahistorical crowd (which sadly is most Americans these days) to recognize that massive reductions of civil liberties (by today's standards) were undertaken in every war that we have won. And yet, we are in most ways freer now than before those wars, which means that necessary restrictions of civil liberties in wartime do not stick after the need is gone.
If you want to worry aboutt civil liberties, go after John McCain's campaign "reform" law, which gives vast powers to rich partisans like George Soros while hobbling the free speech of ordinary citizens.
If civil libertarians focused on making sure that things like extra surveillance capabilities simply had adequate controls to prevent misuse, instead of trying to throw out every one, they would be far more useful.
Just imagine what happens after a serious dirty bomb goes off in a couple of US cities, scaring the public to death and perhaps reucing the viability of cities in general. Who is going to listen to the ACLU? When citizens faced REAL serious threats, they are going to pay more attention to those who are serious about the tradeoffs between civil liberties and collective security, and ignore those who have been extremist on the civil liberties bandwagon.
By the way, I would be remiss if I didn't address the ACLU defending KKK marches mem. This is a standard ACLU tactic to make it appear that they really aren't the left wing extremist organization that they really are. Protecting a few KKK'ers is harmless to the left (or anyone else) because there are so few of those idiots in the country. But don't expect to see the ACLU often protecting one's right to self defense, or to say unpopular things (such as religious expression almost anywhere in our culture). They have a long history of pretending to be for civil liberties in general, while really only supporting those which coincide with a particular agenda.
The way to get an objective article is to take the information given from all sides of a controversy, validate it, and include it. This has not been done to this day on the Kerry article, which still contains positive information but not negative. In other words, it is not objective, because it does not contain appropriate, factual negative information.
I did not write a negative article. I provided a few sentences with negative information. It was no more negative than the information in the Bush section. The way in which it was dismissed was a clear result of bias - the failure of the moderator to even check the reference makes that clear.
So by your definition, this encyclopedia should only hold positive information about presidential candidates during an election?
ROFLMAO
Your argument has been reduced to complete absurdity.
Have you looked at the entry on Bush? Did you look at it at the time I was providing FACTS abouts Kerry? Is/was there any negative information (I'll save you the trouble - the answer is yes, and it has been updated to events within the last month).
Furthermore, you once again are implying, by your wording, that my information was propaganda, and not verifiable ("no matter whether you think it's true"). Furthermore, you seem to believe that a partisan critizing Kerry (or perhaps all partisans) are dissidents (your word). How odd... in a nation with two major political parties, someone providing negative facts about the nominee of one of the parties is a "dissident?"
Hardly.
It would appear that you conflate motive (my partisanship) with the quality of my information and whether the information should be included in an encylopedia. This seems to be common among those who are too emotionally involved in a subject, or who fail to apply critical thinking to the issue. It certainly is illogical, which is odd for someone self characterized as a professional in logic.
Information itself is not partisan. Furthermore, your contextual examples were irrelevant. An encyclopedia tries to hold as much accurate information as possible on the subjects of interest - especially on-line where there is no cost to having large amounts of information, and hyperlinks improve navigability. To say that it should not hold negative information about its subjects is to say that it should be an unreliable source of information.
Wikipedia, a good experiment and a valuable resource, deserves better than such an absurd call for inaccuracy.
I will be interested in what level of nonsense you bring in next. This is getting quite amusing.
You assume that the information I provided was "inappropriate."
How do you know that? What kind of information is inappropriate? If the information is true, germaine and validatable, is it inappropriate?
Again, you are making assumptions about my information.
As for Kerry, as I said before, he's a dead issue. We are discussing Wikipedia and it's inability, as currently operating, to have accurate information on at least this one contentious topic.
For a person with "too much education in formal logic" you are remarkably poor at applying it, since you still are assuming that my information, because of my viewpoint, is wrong. If you don't consider that sort of logic to be related to ad hominem, then which logical fallacy is it?
Your postings make my point rather well, actually. Throwing out my information (including information you don't know about because it was not in the list I gave), because of my viewpoint, is exactly the problem with whoever moderated it out at Wikipedia. Information doesn't have a viewpoint, but the way it is presented and the way it is interpreted can - and an invalid analysis is to completely discredit the viewpoint because it comes from a partisan. It would be reasonable to be suspicious of the information if it comes from a declared partisan, but then one should be just as supicious if it comes from a declared neutral - the latter could be a conscious partisan but lying, or an unconscious partisan - but the real reason for suspicion shouldn't be the political beliefs of the presenter, but the general suspicion given to all new assertions.
If you go to http://www.wintersoldier.com/, you will find, in one of the essays, that I defend one aspect of John Kerry's past - not because I like him (I detest him) but in the interest of accuracy. Too bad you apparently don't believe that an anti-Kerry partisan could possibly have any truth to tell, much less truth that helps the pro-Kerry argument.
Formal logic does not lead one to discarding information due to the views of the source. And yes, I also have been trained in formal logic, but perhaps not as recently as you, and perhaps not in the same areas. Shall we have a propositional calculus war too, just to score some points?
As to ad hominem, have fun, dude, but you are missing the obviuos.
"being" ad hominem, in the context is was used, clearly means using ad hominem argumentation. Ad hominem argumentation is what I was talking about. It means attacking the person making the argument rather than addressing that person's points. It is a common but usually invalid rhetorical tactic.
In Latin - it means "to the person."
Partisan politics is the only kind of politics that exists, and politics is how a democracy operates. Sorry you don't understand that, or understand that Wikipedia, in the instance I mentioned, was engaging in partisan politics itself. Being a partisan is not an indicator of small mindedness or large mindedness. To presume either one is poor thinking.
You line of fallacious reasoning is:
1) A person providing information has taken a particular side of a related argument.
2) Therefore, the information is false or otherwise unworthy of inclusion.
Talk about a lack of critical thinking, and small-mindedness! This is exactly the fallacy that ad hominem argumentation frequently leads to.
There were a number of easily validated facts about John Kerry that appeared (at the time) neither in Wikipedia nor the main stream media. One example is the contemporanious publication by North Vietnam of the propaganda piece, quoting Kerry, that I provided in my previous posting. There were many others. A harder to validate one (but one which we validated) was that Kerry's picture hung in the Saigon war museum ("War Remnants Museum") in a room dedicated to foreigners who helped the North Vietnamese win the war. How about the fact that the two "Kerry crewmembers" who spoke for him at the Democratic National Convention had a total of six days of service under Kerry between them, while the one who is against him served longer than any other Kerry crewman (but of more importance is the testimony of boat captains, because the boats always operated in groups, and it was the captains with the most situational awareness)? Then there's the odd way in which his Navy discharge dates (on his website) changed when he was forced to put out some of his military records - from impossible dates (and since I joined the same month he did, I know the possible dates easily) to more reasonable ones which were still incorrect? How about the press conference where every officer who had ever had Kerry in his chain of command (while Kerry was on the Swift Boats), up to CINCPAC, said he was unfit to be Commander in Chief - an event unprecedented in American history? And on... and on... and on...
I just looked at the current Wikipedia section on Kerry and it biased to the point of being hagiographic. It leaves out many facts, and the general tone is very favorable to Kerry - especially in the section about Kerry's testimony to the Senate, the nature of the Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth and who served on which boat (and the irrelevancy of that particular issue), and the nature of the VVAW.
As a Vietnam veteran, I became a partisan after hearing Kerry's Senate testimony for the first time early last year. It was so full of lies, and so vile in it's clearly intended effect, that it galvanized my activism, as it did many other Vietnam vets. Being painted as a psycho baby killer sometimes has that effect on people!
But Kerry's a dead issue so I feel no need to try and correct the article and once again face an unrealistic standard of truth that the current article could never survive. If the Wikipedia operators truly care about the truth, they will try to fix it themselves - the information is easily available - much of it at http://www.wintersoldier.com/ - and much of that information can be validated even though that site is anti-Kerry (which, to your narrow way of thinking, means all he information on it is useless).
Right now, the Wikipedia entry on Kerry is a propaganda piece, which is sad, but illustrative of the difficulty of having an accurate encyclopedia using the Wiki process - at least the way the Wikipedia folks are doing it.
Nathan, you are being ad hominem again, using my partisanship as a counter to my argument.
Yes, I know what the phrase means, in both the rhetorical sense and in Latin.
Since you don't know what information I offered, you are simply making a leap of faith that it was propaganda. That is pathetic.
I encountered many, especially in the main stream media, who were equally blinded by their partisanship.
It is a shame when critical thinking goes out the window on certain subjects. And yes, that statement is an ad hominem comment about you, among others.
If you would like to see real propaganda, in which Kerry has a starring role, check out this piece which came out during the campaign last year and never made the news. Also note the URL. Maybe you can learn about what real propaganda is: http://vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn/2004-06/10/Stor ies/16.htm
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, he was attacking fundamentalist Christians (as is clear by the context). Their beliefs do constitute a religion (well, several different ones).
Let's change part of the hypothetical: substitute Hassidic Jews for Jews.
Same idea - a subgroup, an attack on which would probably draw extreme sanction.
I labelled it an anti-ID class based on his email, not on the use of the word "myth." As far as was reported, the outcry was against his characterization of "fundies" in his email, not the class itself.
Your argument about "Jews" or "Muslims" is irrelevant. Again, the reaction had he done so would most likely have been pretty bad. Christians tend to be fair game these days.
It is unfortunate that the anti-evolutionists have done so much damage in Kansas. It would, however, be unreasonable for universities to refuse to accept students from Kansas high schools, except when the criteria required a serious biology course, and evolution was *prohibited* from being taught, and no advance placement type exame was used to measure evolutionary knowledge. In other words, it would be more likely that those universities are actually taking such stances to initerfere in Kansas' choices.
While we would like most students to understand evolution, the fact is that our schools (including colleges) do a terrible job of even teaching what science is about, which is far more important than specific scientific results. Try to find a journalist, for example, who can actually explain science. You'll find a few.
BTW, what is the new definition of science from the BOE, btw? I have not heard of that. Isn't that sort of like legislating that pi = 3?
Actually, a class in the philosophy of science would do well to study ID - because it illustrates a fine point in science - the inadmissibility of supernatural phenomenon. It is a fact that parts of evolution (a theory to which I subscribe and which most Christian sects including the Catholic Church view as reality) are based on faith. However, it is really the faith that given enough evidence (and more is discovered every day - especially in the realm of molecular biology) we could use scientific methods to explain gaps. ID is another faith that could explain the gaps, but is unscientific because it (in its most common form) relies on an active supernatural power. However, one could argue that there is as much evidence in some areas that alien beings made certain shifts as there is evolution, and be correct. It's just that you would almost certainly be wrong about what actually happened, even though you were right about the equivallence of evidence. Evolution is a very strong theory, but because it has predictions across such a very wide realm, not all of them can be verified/falsified, and hence those predictions are a matter of faith.
But in most cases, ID is a stalking horse for active intervention by a Christian God, and that is simply unacceptable as a scientific hypothesis for good reasons.
Having worked with the Swift Boeat people in last year's campaign, and having watched the media's response to information they and our (VVFT) organization gave them, I wouldn't believe a single thing the main stream media says against the swifties. I have an affidavit here signed by one swift boat veteran which makes a small and immaterial change to a previous affidavit. This was trumpeted by the Boston Globe as the veteran "recanting" his criticism of John Kerry, even though the affidavit specifically states that the change is in no way material and should not be taken as any change to the veteran's opinion on Kerry. John O'Neil, the co-author of the main book, a former swift boat captain, and the primary spokesman for the SBVT, is widely respected in the Houston legal community for his honesty.
I also met a number of the POW's who tried to get their story out in "Stolen Honor" - a documentary http://www.stolenhonor.com/home.asp produced by Carlton Sherwood on Kerry's impact on the POWs. The mainstream media described this Pulitzer Prize winning reporter as "a fringe right wing journalist," which is perhaps why they elected him to serve for years on the board of the Washinton Press CLub. Media pressure forced this documentary to never be shown, but Carlton was sued - a standard tactic to shut up those who have less money than you and to discourage others from criticism. Discustingly, some POWs were also sued as a result of this documentary. Did you ever hear about this from the media?
Believe what you want, but if you get your beliefs from the scum at the Main Stream Media, you might as well be... well... an ID fundie!
The injuries are real? The beating is a bit suspect - I give it 50-50 odds of being real.
But let's assume it is real. In that case, the guy is an idiot. Someplace with no witnesses he stops his car while being aggressibely tailed, and gets out? That is, at a minimum, dumb. And by the way, how did they find him and know who he was? Perhaps his beating was...well.. a case of intelligent design?
The last time I was aggressively tailed near Lawrence, I ran them off with warning shots (note: I knew who they were and they were dangerous folks).
As anyone who uses email knows, if you don't want people upset about what you write, don't write it. I saw a multimillion dollar business deal vanish in a flash when the wrong person got the email. Once again, this guy shows idiocy. His email hardly showed "open mindedness" that his society is supposedly about! I don't mean about ID (which is just plan not science) but the "fundies." Is there anyone here who believes he would even have his job, tenure or not, if he had used the words "Jews" or "Muslims" instead of "fundies"?
Finally, why is a professor of religion teaching an anti-ID class? If you want to attack ID, you need a professor of the philosophy of science, or a scientist.
I went to school at KU and lived in Lawrence quite a while. My father was a professor there. The town is probably the most liberal in Kansas - too much for my liking), and is a very nice place. I hope people don't get the wrong idea about Kansas because a tiny minority is causing trouble by pushing ID into the education system.
Thank you for that post. It is very interesting.
There is an alternate theory to the linear response which says that the rate at which radiation is delivered is an important factor, especially at lower levels (which, btw, aren't THAT low by nucleophobe standards). The theory is based on observations (which have the same problem of being retrospective ) and the idea that having more than one radiation incident in a cell at near the same time may be significantly more damaging than those same two incidents spread out of a long time (and, I would guess, not hitting the same cell). In other words, the damage is not a linear function of the dose, but is a higher order function with low levels being far safer than a linear model (used, as far as I know, for all radiation safety policies).
It makes sense since cells have some ability to repair DNA damage and lower level free radical damage.
These results you report may support that theory.
The political/social impacts of these results could be a recovery of relatively high radiation land in years or decades rather than millenium, although it appears that nucleophobia is a disease hard to cure. It could also lead to more sane debates about nuclear power risks, rather than the completely phobic policies we see in so many countries.
As for 60 minutes - they have a number of agendas and are happy to treat you to propaganda in favor of them. I wouldn't trust anything those bastards say (or many of the others in the "main stream media"). Truth suffers when filtered through political and social agendas.
Sorry, dude, but what you call a nube we call a yahoo, depending on attitude.
May 3, 1999 was an exceptional (and hence very rare) event. It had a large number of long lived tornados (a friend of mine drove their from Alabama and arrived in time to see 11 of them).
But the exception does not change my statement that long lived tornados are very rare.
There is also the matter of luck and forecasting skill, although much of my chasing is with true professionals - researchers or professional forecasters - and in those cases I usually defer to their forecasts. Because I don't live in Oklahoma, I have to spend vacation time to chase, so I don't have nearly the opportunity to chase on the really good days that people closer to the action do. They can pick the best days to go out and chase, but I only have the days, planned in advance, when I am in the area.
As I wrote, the thyroid cancer is a provable negative effect of Chernobyl. My primary contention is that the wild assertions about hundreds of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl were nonsense, but are now received wisdom. I find that to be a deterrent to rational decision making. The only effect I, a non-specialst who tracks this stuff a bit, can find is the thyroid cancers. I believe there may have been one study with an increase in SNP's in animals right next to the plant, but I don't know if it was refuted. At this point, there may have been many more. I do wonder why today's children aren't dosed with potassium iodide to prevent accumulation of radioactive iodine (I-131?) in the children's thyroids, but perhaps that agent cannot be used chronically.
:-)
I would ask your wife about the statistical power of the studies showing the other increaases. Also, in a highly visible incident, there is often sampling bias in the statistics. Risk increases on the order of 25 to 50%, while scary to the public, are often very difficult to justify by epidemiology due to the difficulty of studies that cannot be well controlled, but rather rely on sampling an already exposed, and emotionally invested population.
Perhaps you remember the cancer cluster nonsense of a decade or two ago in West Phoenix. No matter what the experts said, those with cancer (or their loved ones) we absolutely convinced that their particular cancer was caused by the tiny amount of ground water contamination. This is the sort of thing that bolixes up the best planned studies. For one thing, it leads to sampling bias. It also leads to poor recollection of patient history, which is one of the difficulties of ex post facto epidemiological studies.
It is quite easy to do a statistical study (given access to records or participants) but it is much, much harder to do a reliable one.
I would not be surprised if there are other negative effects of Chernobyl, perhaps the ones you write about (or link to). But epidemiological studies showing only small risk increases have to be done extremely carefully, especially with a highly visible incident, to achieve the statistical power often implied by the numbers.
I have read summary articles about genetic changes in animals (such as the frequency of SNP's (single nucleotide polymorphisms) in ground burrowing animals right next to the plant) and most of them have come up with neglibile effect. Perhaps today's lower cost in molecular biology allows more sensitive or widespread detection of SNP's, which are thought to be a harbinger of mutagenic and teratogenic activity. Very likely, if the animals living right next to the plant do not have statistically significant problems, then humans with lower exposures do not either (which is why these studies are done). And perhaps, as I said, there are now reliable studies showing significant problems with those animals.
In a situation like this, it is hard to separate political agendas and sampling bias from science. Perhaps your wife has the contacts and experties to evaluate the studies and tell us which ones are meaningful (it takes more than statistical expertise - it also helps to know the reputation and methodology of the authors of the papers). I would very much like to read the results.
I live downwind from Palo Verde plant (Arizona) myself, and it doesn't worry me at all. I have also participated in the annual "nuclear emergency" drill and have seen the expected area of effect in the event of a severe accident - it doesn't reach my house
I think the biggest risk of nuclear power today is terrorism, and I don't think enough has been done about that issue (although a lot of the security issues are classified so it is hard for us to know).
Also, the last I heard, the Russians were still building a Chernobyl design power reactor (carbon moderated, positive temperature coefficient )in Cuba. Lets hope that my information is out of date. Likewise, I would not want to live near Chernobyl because of the instability of the "sarcophagus" and the possibility of sudden extreme releases of radiation (although it would be hard to beat a days long fire lofted plume of reactor core contents as the original accident had).
You might be right, but a charity that relies on Belorus figures (check out the form of government there) is hardly a reliable source. They have an inherent conflict of interest - inflated figures are to their benefit. Belorus itself has the same conflict.
That Belorus children will have a greatly increased rate of thyroid cancer is certainly true - especially if the government doesn't give the potassium iodide. Fortunately that cancer is one of the most treatable around. Of course, that is not meant to minimize the suffering of those children who have to have their thyroids removed.
I am open to evidence, but so far, the evidence I have seen belies what the charity is saying. For example, the exclusion zone right next to the reactor is RIGHT NOW safe for visiting - you don't have to wait tens of thousands of years. Yes, it has a higher radiation level, but, as I said before, so do a number of areas of the earth where people have long lived healthy lives.
Only the linear dose response theory can make the most frightening projections, and as I wrote earlier, there is reason to doubt that theory at lower levels and with exposures that take place over a long time rather than with intensive radiation (the theory does not differentiate - the risk is computed as the sum of all radiation received in a lifetime, whether it comes in a few seconds as it did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or evenly spread out over 70 years.
Since I haven't reviewed the literature in a few years, there may very well be good *scientific* evidence of more serious or widespread effects. If so, I would hope someone here will provide us links.
Prove that Chernobyl caused the Leukemia.
It is very common for people to attribute cancers to some man-caused event, even though there isn't the slightest evidence that the cancers were actually caused by that event.
The phenomenon of "cancer clusters" is a result of this.
In other words, if you had relatives in Sweden that died of Leukemia, it is highly unlikely that Chernobyl caused it. More likely was a shared genetic predisposition to the disease, plus bad luck
As far as I know, the method using multiple towers involves time difference of arrival - more like Loran than triangulation. Signal strength is a very poor indicator of distance because of obstacles to the signal (attenuation) and multipath.
Your point about individual towers is presumably correct.
The funny thing about CSI in this case is that it is possible, today, to track cell phones using GPS. But not because they talk back to the satellite, but rather some cell phones will send their GPS position to the cell phone system. This is part of the 911 upgrade to the cell phone system in the US to allow callers to 911 emergency numbers to be located. There is an alternate technology (using time difference of arrival at different cell towers). I have no idea what percentage of providers use which system.
You are right about one thing - it was the idiot Nixon who signed it.
I never claimed it had anything to do with safety. I showed it as an example of a speed limit that was NOT related to safety! Good grief.
Oh, and as long as we are picking nits, I was wrong to say it was repealed in 1994. It was repealed, of course, by the Republican majority elected in 1994, who of course couldn't vote on anything until 1995 when they removed this onerous law. As a storm chaser, I was very pleased, as we need speed to get to the storms and being able to go 75 instead of 55 made a big difference.
Actually, you must get your information only from the mainstream media, without looking at little things like numbers and scientific papers.
Yes, as I said, there were a lot of cases of childhood thyroid cancer, the ONLY human effects that have been measured, and that (last time I checked) had caused exactly one death.
The 1000 square miles (or whatever the exclusion zone size is) is, if you care to check, so nice a place that it has been suggested as a wildlife park. Yes, it has more than normal background radiation (as do a number of places in the world where man had nothing to do with it), but there is no evidence that it is dangerous - only an unproven theory.
Much of the fear that people have about radioactivity is based on the linear dose no threshold theory - one which is the consensus for safety reasons, but is really a "precautionary principle" sort of idea. The evidence for it is basically non-existent - it is derived from extreme extrapolation. Humans have poor intuition about toxicology (and radiation behaves as a toxin), finding it difficult to deal with the many orders of magnitude involved. Hence, people are terrified of tiny levels of radiation while large numbers of people from Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still alive 60 years after being dosed with hundreds of REM (far more than you would get if you lived right next to Chernobyl). The linear dose hypothesis leads to the dramatic high estimates of radiation deaths - estimates which have not been proven out.
Prior to 9-11 (you wouldn't want to do it today) I took a small digital geiger counter up on an airliner. At 10,000 feet MSL it was singing - off scale in its counts-per-minute mode. Scary, eh? Not to me.
When there are popular phobias, especially those that match someones' agenda (and you did mention agendas, didn't you - no, I'm not a libertarian), looking at the underlying evidence can be an edifying experience. You might want to try it sometime.
The largest reactor complex in the US was built 45 mi west of here (Phoenix, AZ) in the '80s, AFTER TMI. The economic reason for not building reactors is the thicket of environmental regulations and guaranteed lawsuits, not the inherent economics of reactors. After all, lots of other countries went on building them, and lots of those countries were not economic fools. It is true that the US didn't do a good job of economizing on reactors compared to other countries, and we had ample natural gas to provide cheap power (that has changed recently as the gas prices have gone through the roof).
Carter was a nuclear engineer - experienced in the small scale, highly different technology of a submarine. He didn't know squat about power reactors, which are radically different beasts. It is like saying that an electrical engineer who designs chips knows plenty about, well, long distance electric power generation systems.
As for batteries, storage is a very serious problem for those who are worried about environmental pollution (such as CO2), because the internal combustion engine uses an easy-to-store, high density energy source, and alternately fueled systems must compete with that. Batteries and hydrogen are the two main contenders for that problem, and both have very serious problems. They also are additional steps which reduce energy efficiency (but I'd still love it if batteries got much better and cheaper, because electric cars, given good batteries, are much niftier beasts than IC cars).
Power generation is easy - do it with nukes, do it with coal (we have vast reserves of coal here in the US, and the technology to clean up coal emissions is very advanced now), do it with Canadian oil (they have the second largest oil reserves in the world). But power has to be delivered to where it is needed, and that is where storage comes in when dealing with power used for mobility - whether as gasoline, diesel fuel, batteries, or hydrogen.
If geothermal power was so economically efficient ("cheap steam"), why is there a whole lot more of it being used? That "cheap steam" has a few problems, including the fact that it is very dirty and thus ages the systems very quickly - but I don't know the other reasons for the lack of significant geothermal power - just that it is obvious that there is one (and conspiracy theories just don't cut it).
Wait a minute! Latencies?
The poster would seem to have learned about GPS systems from watching TV cop shows, where the implication is commonly given that the GPS device sends signals to the satellite.
WRONG!
A GPS device is a receiver only. It can detect speed changes very quickly (and exceedingly accurately). It has very little latency. Modern systems will rarely lose enough satellites to fail, but obviously a system like this should simply stop interfering with driving if it loses adequate information (which means you can put it out of order with a little aluminum foil placed in the right position - over the antenna if you know where it is).
The poster seems to be under the delusion that speed limits are always tied to the current maximum safe speed.
This is absurd, as other factors can be at work:
political (the town I live in has 5mph lower speed limits on exactly the same roads and road conditions as the towns around it - and not coincidentally is the first town in the US to use photo-radar).
legal - in the US, every state (except perhaps one) has an absolute maximum for speed limits. Clearly some roads and vehicles are capable of being driven safely at much higher speeds on some road segments in those states. Not that long ago, the idiot Jimmy Carter forced a 55mph maximum speed limit throughout the US, that lasted until 1994. The interstate highway system was built for much higher speeds (I believe 75mph) and the Kansas Turnpike for 80mph, it's previous speed limit.
safety for non-familiar drivers - a road can have conditions which make the maximum safe speed lower than the apparent (to non-familiar drivers) safe speed. The authorities may choose to set the speed limit lower to compensate.
weather - the speed limit may be lowered to compensate for common but not continuous weather conditions such as high winds.
Traffic engineers used to set speed limits, in the absence of other factors, determining the 85th percentile speed of unconstrained drivers. In other words, presumably 85 percent of the drivers, based on their experience and perceptions, drove at or below the maximum safe speed. They would, of course, set them lower at hard to see hazards such as hidden curves.
If one is going to have such a system, soft but effective feedback seems much better than hard limits.
BTW... some cars have unadvertised built-in speed limits. My 2001 Toyota Sequoia appears to have a 100mph limit. One day on a storm chase, on a very good road with almost infinite visibility, we tried it, and at 100mph the engine refused to go faster, even though it clearly had the capacity. I suspect this may be because they didn't want to put bigger tables into the engine computer.
The more serious problem is how to get much energy out of it.
First, a couple of concepts - CAPE and "cap."
CAPE, Convective Available Potential Energy, is the amount of energy a parcel of atmosphere would release if lifted from a level near the ground to the tropopause. CAPE is a strong function of dew point and the temperature profile and moisture profile of the atmosphere (the dry and wet lines on a SKEW-T/LOG-P chart).
"cap" - this is a thermal inversion (or at least a reversed slope temperature profile area) in the middle atmosphere which serves to trap rising air before it can release enough energy (through condensation) to produce a thunderstorm. A "capped" atmosphere is often clear or contains small convective towers ("turkey towers") which are unable to maintain convection.
A parcel of air which cannot penetrate the cap will release little energy - only the kinetic energy it gains as it rises below the cap, and perhaps some condensation energy if it forms a cloud). A parcel that can pierce the cap will reach a region where the energy release is dramatically higher, and will typically accelerate up to near the tropopause, releasing energy the whole type.
The conditions required for this device to produce much energy - high CAPE (Convective Available Potential Energy) - are not that common or reliable. Furthermore, high CAPE is often tied to enough wind to make the stability of the vortex very questionable. When it isn't (such as the US midwest during the summer "capped" time), the total time that adequate CAPE is present isn't that great, and the vortex would have to be tall enough to reach the convective cap (and contain enough lift to break through that cap) before it started to generate significant power.
Atmospheric dynamics can also produce significant lift, but those conditions almost always have wind associated with them.
Tornados are usually short vortices - perhaps a few hundred to a couple thousand meters high - coupled to larger, more stable, and much lower speed vortices (mesocyclones) that are quite a bit deeper. Even so, tornados are notoriously unstable and most last no more than a few minutes (in 11 years of serious, science based tornado chasing, I have seen *one* that lasted more than 15 minutes and it was a mile in diameter and weak - F1). (I won't bother to discuss landspouts or waterspouts here).
In contrast, this man-made vortex will have to reach high enough into the atmosphere to penetrate the cap, which is much harder to achieve (read: takes more energy) and hard to maintain. A tornado doesn't have this problem, as it has a very large area of rising air (hundreds to thousands of square kilometers) which can pierce the cap, and once it is pierced in just one spot, a very large thunderstorm (normally a supercell) then develops and puts a geographically large hole in the cap, and generates lots of energy, a tiny bit of which actually goes into the tornado. Most supercells, in spite of their high energy release and their rotation do not produce tornados, to the frustration of weather forecasters and storm chasers.
One could perhaps put one of these vortex-based power systems in an area prone to dust devils, which use a different mechanism to generate lift - solar heating in the presence of a super-adiabatic lapse rate. But dust devils are much weaker, because they do not rely on the energy released by condensing moisture, and use energy from a much smaller layer of atmosphere.
Ultimately, this scheme seems to be an over-complex, inefficient and unreliable solar power machine. Other forms of harvesting solar power are probably much better in those areas, and yet only windmills seem to be close to cost efficient.
As a harvester of excess industrial heat... forget it. There are MUCH simpler and more efficient ways of doing that, and they are already in use in cogeneration facilities.
TMI did almost zero environmental damage. The only real damage was to the stockholders and ratepayers, because a very expensive plant had to be shut down.
Chernobyl likewise did very little environmental damage, in spite of its release of a huge amount of radiation. The exclusion zone around Chernobyl is full of healthy wildlife (and not 6 foot tall mice or anything), and in spite of all the hype, the total number of deaths attributable to Chernobyl is under 50, including the firefighters (the number of excess cases of childhood thyroid cancer is over 1000, but that disease is very rarely fatal). However, I wouldn't want a Chernobyl style power plant in my backyard, especially run by a soviet style bureacracy (or for that matter, the typical power plant bureaucracy, although I guess they have gotten better at running reactors in the US after a few widely publicized mistakes).
Since TMI, even though the US stopped building new reactors at that time (due to the ridiculous hype from the main stream media and envirowackos), the amount of nuclear electricity produced in the US has grown significantly.
At the same time, many other countries produce vast amounts of electricity from nukes (I think it is around 70% in France, but I'm too lazy to Google it).
Furthermore, "inherently safe" reactor designs exist (in reality, NOTHING is completely safe), and the biggest danger of nuclear reactors is action by terrorists (and we could, if we were serious about it, mitigate that danger dramatically).
Nukes aren't the solution to the entire energy "problem" (but they work a lot better than Kyoto, a total non-solution to the speculative anthropogenic global warming hypothesis). If one could make good enough batteries (and people have been trying very hard for 100 years), they could supplant hydrocarbons through the use of electric cars (at a significant energy loss), but today the battery of an electric car is still nowhere close to adequate for most needs.
If the terrorists wanted merely for us to improve our ability to defeat them, while giving up a small amount of liberty, the above silly post might be right.
But Islamofascist terrorists have a bit more ambition - they want to destroy our ability to stop their creation ofr a vast califate of the most extreme and repressive form of Islam.
It may be that in today's world, where terrorists may be able to get or make terrible weapons (Moore's law has been exceeded in genetic engineering, should you want to make a biological weapon), some liberties must be given up.
Of course, the old saw that "those who would give up liberty for security deserve neither" (paraphrase of Ben Franklin), always comes up at the slightest impact on civil liberties, even those that simply roll them back slightly to levels still more free than our historical norm. But the man who uttered those words chose to create a government which in fact cost liberties (a lot more than we have now) in order to create collective security.
Civil liberties absolutism is no more sensible than religious fundamentalism. Both are unworkable utopian ideas put forth by those who don't understand the consequences.
Also, it is important for the ahistorical crowd (which sadly is most Americans these days) to recognize that massive reductions of civil liberties (by today's standards) were undertaken in every war that we have won. And yet, we are in most ways freer now than before those wars, which means that necessary restrictions of civil liberties in wartime do not stick after the need is gone.
If you want to worry aboutt civil liberties, go after John McCain's campaign "reform" law, which gives vast powers to rich partisans like George Soros while hobbling the free speech of ordinary citizens.
If civil libertarians focused on making sure that things like extra surveillance capabilities simply had adequate controls to prevent misuse, instead of trying to throw out every one, they would be far more useful.
Just imagine what happens after a serious dirty bomb goes off in a couple of US cities, scaring the public to death and perhaps reucing the viability of cities in general. Who is going to listen to the ACLU? When citizens faced REAL serious threats, they are going to pay more attention to those who are serious about the tradeoffs between civil liberties and collective security, and ignore those who have been extremist on the civil liberties bandwagon.
By the way, I would be remiss if I didn't address the ACLU defending KKK marches mem. This is a standard ACLU tactic to make it appear that they really aren't the left wing extremist organization that they really are. Protecting a few KKK'ers is harmless to the left (or anyone else) because there are so few of those idiots in the country. But don't expect to see the ACLU often protecting one's right to self defense, or to say unpopular things (such as religious expression almost anywhere in our culture). They have a long history of pretending to be for civil liberties in general, while really only supporting those which coincide with a particular agenda.
The way to get an objective article is to take the information given from all sides of a controversy, validate it, and include it. This has not been done to this day on the Kerry article, which still contains positive information but not negative. In other words, it is not objective, because it does not contain appropriate, factual negative information.
I did not write a negative article. I provided a few sentences with negative information. It was no more negative than the information in the Bush section. The way in which it was dismissed was a clear result of bias - the failure of the moderator to even check the reference makes that clear.
ROFLMAO
Your argument has been reduced to complete absurdity.
Have you looked at the entry on Bush? Did you look at it at the time I was providing FACTS abouts Kerry? Is/was there any negative information (I'll save you the trouble - the answer is yes, and it has been updated to events within the last month).
Furthermore, you once again are implying, by your wording, that my information was propaganda, and not verifiable ("no matter whether you think it's true"). Furthermore, you seem to believe that a partisan critizing Kerry (or perhaps all partisans) are dissidents (your word). How odd... in a nation with two major political parties, someone providing negative facts about the nominee of one of the parties is a "dissident?"
Hardly.
It would appear that you conflate motive (my partisanship) with the quality of my information and whether the information should be included in an encylopedia. This seems to be common among those who are too emotionally involved in a subject, or who fail to apply critical thinking to the issue. It certainly is illogical, which is odd for someone self characterized as a professional in logic.
Information itself is not partisan. Furthermore, your contextual examples were irrelevant. An encyclopedia tries to hold as much accurate information as possible on the subjects of interest - especially on-line where there is no cost to having large amounts of information, and hyperlinks improve navigability. To say that it should not hold negative information about its subjects is to say that it should be an unreliable source of information.
Wikipedia, a good experiment and a valuable resource, deserves better than such an absurd call for inaccuracy.
I will be interested in what level of nonsense you bring in next. This is getting quite amusing.
inappropriate
Okay, I misjudged your logical fallacy.
You assume that the information I provided was "inappropriate."
How do you know that? What kind of information is inappropriate? If the information is true, germaine and validatable, is it inappropriate?
Again, you are making assumptions about my information.
As for Kerry, as I said before, he's a dead issue. We are discussing Wikipedia and it's inability, as currently operating, to have accurate information on at least this one contentious topic.
For a person with "too much education in formal logic" you are remarkably poor at applying it, since you still are assuming that my information, because of my viewpoint, is wrong. If you don't consider that sort of logic to be related to ad hominem, then which logical fallacy is it?
Your postings make my point rather well, actually. Throwing out my information (including information you don't know about because it was not in the list I gave), because of my viewpoint, is exactly the problem with whoever moderated it out at Wikipedia. Information doesn't have a viewpoint, but the way it is presented and the way it is interpreted can - and an invalid analysis is to completely discredit the viewpoint because it comes from a partisan. It would be reasonable to be suspicious of the information if it comes from a declared partisan, but then one should be just as supicious if it comes from a declared neutral - the latter could be a conscious partisan but lying, or an unconscious partisan - but the real reason for suspicion shouldn't be the political beliefs of the presenter, but the general suspicion given to all new assertions.
If you go to http://www.wintersoldier.com/, you will find, in one of the essays, that I defend one aspect of John Kerry's past - not because I like him (I detest him) but in the interest of accuracy. Too bad you apparently don't believe that an anti-Kerry partisan could possibly have any truth to tell, much less truth that helps the pro-Kerry argument.
Formal logic does not lead one to discarding information due to the views of the source. And yes, I also have been trained in formal logic, but perhaps not as recently as you, and perhaps not in the same areas. Shall we have a propositional calculus war too, just to score some points?
As to ad hominem, have fun, dude, but you are missing the obviuos.
"being" ad hominem, in the context is was used, clearly means using ad hominem argumentation. Ad hominem argumentation is what I was talking about. It means attacking the person making the argument rather than addressing that person's points. It is a common but usually invalid rhetorical tactic.
In Latin - it means "to the person."
Partisan politics is the only kind of politics that exists, and politics is how a democracy operates. Sorry you don't understand that, or understand that Wikipedia, in the instance I mentioned, was engaging in partisan politics itself. Being a partisan is not an indicator of small mindedness or large mindedness. To presume either one is poor thinking.
You line of fallacious reasoning is:
1) A person providing information has taken a particular side of a related argument.
2) Therefore, the information is false or otherwise unworthy of inclusion.
Talk about a lack of critical thinking, and small-mindedness! This is exactly the fallacy that ad hominem argumentation frequently leads to.
There were a number of easily validated facts about John Kerry that appeared (at the time) neither in Wikipedia nor the main stream media. One example is the contemporanious publication by North Vietnam of the propaganda piece, quoting Kerry, that I provided in my previous posting. There were many others. A harder to validate one (but one which we validated) was that Kerry's picture hung in the Saigon war museum ("War Remnants Museum") in a room dedicated to foreigners who helped the North Vietnamese win the war. How about the fact that the two "Kerry crewmembers" who spoke for him at the Democratic National Convention had a total of six days of service under Kerry between them, while the one who is against him served longer than any other Kerry crewman (but of more importance is the testimony of boat captains, because the boats always operated in groups, and it was the captains with the most situational awareness)? Then there's the odd way in which his Navy discharge dates (on his website) changed when he was forced to put out some of his military records - from impossible dates (and since I joined the same month he did, I know the possible dates easily) to more reasonable ones which were still incorrect? How about the press conference where every officer who had ever had Kerry in his chain of command (while Kerry was on the Swift Boats), up to CINCPAC, said he was unfit to be Commander in Chief - an event unprecedented in American history? And on... and on... and on...
I just looked at the current Wikipedia section on Kerry and it biased to the point of being hagiographic. It leaves out many facts, and the general tone is very favorable to Kerry - especially in the section about Kerry's testimony to the Senate, the nature of the Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth and who served on which boat (and the irrelevancy of that particular issue), and the nature of the VVAW.
As a Vietnam veteran, I became a partisan after hearing Kerry's Senate testimony for the first time early last year. It was so full of lies, and so vile in it's clearly intended effect, that it galvanized my activism, as it did many other Vietnam vets. Being painted as a psycho baby killer sometimes has that effect on people!
But Kerry's a dead issue so I feel no need to try and correct the article and once again face an unrealistic standard of truth that the current article could never survive. If the Wikipedia operators truly care about the truth, they will try to fix it themselves - the information is easily available - much of it at http://www.wintersoldier.com/ - and much of that information can be validated even though that site is anti-Kerry (which, to your narrow way of thinking, means all he information on it is useless).
Right now, the Wikipedia entry on Kerry is a propaganda piece, which is sad, but illustrative of the difficulty of having an accurate encyclopedia using the Wiki process - at least the way the Wikipedia folks are doing it.
Nathan, you are being ad hominem again, using my partisanship as a counter to my argument.
r ies/16.htm
Yes, I know what the phrase means, in both the rhetorical sense and in Latin.
Since you don't know what information I offered, you are simply making a leap of faith that it was propaganda. That is pathetic.
I encountered many, especially in the main stream media, who were equally blinded by their partisanship.
It is a shame when critical thinking goes out the window on certain subjects. And yes, that statement is an ad hominem comment about you, among others.
If you would like to see real propaganda, in which Kerry has a starring role, check out this piece which came out during the campaign last year and never made the news. Also note the URL. Maybe you can learn about what real propaganda is: http://vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn/2004-06/10/Sto