The FA is about nanowires not nanotubes. They specifically point out the large difference between the two and say that nanowires can be made reliably and require no sorting. They also state that they are easy to make at room temperature.
What I find intriguing is that the article mentions how conducive nanowire technology is to three dimensional circuit construction with a per-layer size of 100nm. That means I can build 1100 layers into a 0.11 mm thick sandwich. How about 100 Athlon 64 CPUs intermixed with 1000 1GB memory arrays? With how reliable they are claiming this technology is, that would represent a 100 core CPU, with 1 Terabyte of memory mixed in. Seems like this is clearly the future of the CPU market. Especially if the heat disappation is as good as they claim.
How do you like my new Athlon 64 X100 with 1TB of memory running at 16 GHz?
As opposed to what? Should I link to RealClimate.org and use the highly quoted and totally accepted "Hockey Stick" which we now know is basically a giant crock of sh_t?
The Hockey Stick is on the web, and for ten years no one decided to question its veracity. Except of course for McKitrick and McIntyre for which they were roundly and soundly criticized for daring to question the "truth" of the Holy Hockey Stick.
Now it turns out that they were right. Mann hid his methods and data, from a publicly funded study, until forced to reveal them in what almost came down to an act of Congress.
John Daly was just an average guy, who was struck by the screaming about rising sea levels, when he lived next to the sea level marker left in New Zealand in the 1800s. The fact that the sea level is now below this mark (which is carved in solid stone) is a very telling thing. The fact that the largest rise in sea level shown by satellite data is 0.03mm/year is also well below the 1.2cm/year the IPCC promised us in 2000 is also extremely damaging to the GCC crowd, but they hide that as well.
Those IPCC studies are on the web too. Why don't you question them with the same veracity that you complain about my sources? All the climate data on John Daly's page are linked to the sources and have references. That's better than anything on Mann's site, where they regularly throw out things like "because we say so" (paraphrase) and delete posts that question them.
Please go look at this page before assuming you understand the role of CO2 in the atmosphere. Realize that man's total contribution to CO2 represents about 0.28% of the effective greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and that the largest greenhouse contributor is water vapor, which varies daily between 30% and 75% of the gasses.
But all that and more is made clear on the above page...
It hasn't been updated in three years because he died in 2002. The data all comes from other sources, he simply compiled it. I could have dug down and tracked a dozen sources and linked those instead. I chose the simpler means of selecting a page that linked to them all. It's called the web.
And here is a chart of carbon dioxide going back several million years. And, oh look, the planet is just as cool now as it ever was before. And when we hit levels of 4500 ppm back in the Silurian era, we were colder then any other time on the planet.
Sheesh. The largest increase in CO2 emissions by humans was between 1900 and 1940. Yet, the Earth somehow responded with a massive wave of cooling from 1950-1980 that caused many scientists to worry we were plunging into the next ice age. You are extrapolating 30 years of data out by a century or more. Bad Science! No Doughnut!
The fact is that we are in a period of CO2 starvation on the planet. Recent estimates have suggested that the increase in CO2 in the modern era is responsible for as much as 30% of the "extra" food that has helped to feed more than a billion people in the last 50 years. If Gore had his 280 ppm, we might be able to lay one billion people who starved to death at his feet. The law of unintended consequences runs rampant in this "catastrophe". http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/ar ticles/V4/N8/EDIT.jsp
And it's not like the Earth hasn't been warmer before in human history. In the 12th century there were orange groves in Berlin and vineyards in England. http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm
If memory serves, from the last year for which Federal budget data is available (2003) the NSA receives just over $10 billion a year in funding.
In comparison:
Education - $56 Billion (And remember that federal funding represents about 10% of total school funding, which is mostly provided directly by the states.)
Healthcare (Medicare/Medicaid): $316 Billion
Veterans Administration: $24 Billion -- which I'll agree is a criminally low number.
However, the idea that spending only 0.44% of the federal budget on an agency tasked with protecting the citizens from enemies foreign and domestic is somehow horribly wasteful... well, I have to disagree.
As for the OP's talk of stem cell research, clearly he doesn't understand that the only thing you can't do is use Federal grant money to dice up an embryo to create a new cell line. Not that embryonic stem cell research has provided a single working cure.
Now, adult stem cell research, on the other hand, is currently in the process of saving the life of my favorite fiction author, Robert Jordan.
Linux (FC3) server: Uptime 62 days and counting after a power outage - Serves 10,000 web hits a day. Blocks 3-10,000 SSH login attempts per day. (damn script kiddies)
Windows (2003AS): 9 days, after having to reboot 3 times in four hours because of printer problems. Serves 10-20 FTP transfers per day, and running MailExchange for about 1,500 e-mails per day.
Take a look at the satellite photos of the Pentagon and answer the question: What buildings?
For security reasons, the Pentagon is surrounded by a huge amount of open space. The plane flew up the Potomac, over Reagan National Airport and into the side of the pentagon. Look at this image Satellite of Pentagon to get the picture. They didn't fly over anything but highways and parking lots (and they clipped the light poles on the highway.)
It's amazing that you're willing to believe that the WTC could be intentionally bombed with demolition charges (the only clear alternative) which normally takes days of painstaking set-up work and results in columns wrapped with what are clearly, bulky high-explosive charges, as opposed to, "a chunk of hot burning debris (clearly visible on many videos of the day) plunged into the WTC 7 building, doing extensive damage." You talk about a "strengthened and shielded tank". Sorry, it was a standard set of three tanks, two 20,000 gallon, and one 7,000 gallon tank, made out of thin-walled 1/8" steel. They were in the middle of a building (in the basement actually) and were not, "strengthened and shielded". They were there to provide 15 days of electrical power generation to the emergency command center.
As for not flammible... Diesel fuel is basically kerosene. It burns with a smoky, red flame and can be easily ignited by a match. It's believed that the debris that struck WTC7 was part of the engine of the second plane. That engine typically runs in the 800-1200 degree celsius range. More than hot enough to ignite a little diesel fuel (flash point of about 210 degrees C. In fact, diesel ignites 36 degrees C cooler than gasoline.)
Let's also not forget that there was a 4" gas main in the building that firemen reported as having broken. For three hours, flame and smoke poured out of the WTC7 building. By the time it collapsed it was a gutted shell.
WTC7 was in the direct path of the debris from the second airliner. The idea that somehow it's more believable that some clandestine force snuck in and carefully demolished it without anyone knowing is ludicrous.
As for the second part, yes, there was evidence that OBL wanted to strike in the US. That was in every briefing since 1992. He suceeded in 1993 when Yusef bombed the WTC. What no one expected, or knew, was that the planes had been hijacked, or that they were full of terrorists, or that there were more than one. But I've already answered all this in another post. Read the 9/11 commision report. While it is a crappy job, done by political hacks, they did determine that Bush wasn't "sitting on his hands", he just didn't have enough information.
As for plane attacks, yeah Tom Clancy had one, but quite frankly, NORAD planned to run a test scenario of a plane flying into the Pentagon in April of 2000 and the joint chiefs canceled it as being "too far fetched."
Yes, there will always be questions, but Occam's Razor says we can believe in 19 al-qaeda funded terrorists, for which we have ample information and motivation (Mohammed Atta's luggage with all the plans in it along with his journal and records missed the connection and was recovered by the morning of September 12th. It's why we knew so much about the terrorists so quickly.) and a fundamental hatred of the United States trained for a year and hijacked four airplanes to fly them into buildings in the culmination of 10 years of planning, or you can believe that a shadowy government agency, built in eight months by the Bush Administration, masterminded hundreds of demolitions experts into destroying one of the largest buildings in the world, killing thousands. That thousands of people were involved in secretly building and flying remote controlled jets into the buildings, and that 100+ pentagon people were sacrificed to make it look real. And that somewhere there's about 250 people who were supposed to be on the jets that have been secretly hidden away from the outside world. And that none of these hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of people who were involved in the killings of 3,000 Americans have gotten a nagging conscience and come forward.
Bush made his "lousy pilot" comment in an interview after the fact. He said "the first thought that went through my mind was, 'That's one lousy pilot.'" Until the FAA confirmed that the planes were hijacked, everyone, and I mean everyone, thought that the first plane was some terrible accident, not an intentional attack. I'd heard from the radio that it was a small plane that hit the WTC. There was a lot of confusion in the first few minutes. When the first plane was reported to Bush, it was reported as "a plane, we think a small commuter plane, hit the World Trade Center building a few minutes ago." (From an interview with the Secret Service agent who informed him.)
The film we've all seen of Bush with the guy whispering in his ear was when the Secret Service told him there was now information that it was a large, commercial airliner, and that the FAA was saying that it had transmitted a hijack code. They also told him it would take about 5 minutes to get transportation arranged to get him out of the school and set up the motorcade back to Air Force One. There was no one who considered him as being actively under threat, so they were informing law enforcement and the crews that the schedule was changing. As far as this point, it was clearly an attack, but an isolated one. The damage was already done and rushing out wouldn't save anyone or anything.
Now, Bush was with a group of young children, and you can't exactly just leap up and say, "There's been a horrible accident, people are dead, and I have to go." These kids were waiting for months to meet the President, and he wanted to give them a fair amount of time. Remember, no one thought this was anything more than an isolated incident yet.
From the moment Bush was told, you can see his look is much more grim, and he's constantly "looking off to the side". Well, he was looking at his Secret Service detail, who was waiting to signal him when the transportation was ready. A few minutes later, he got that signal, apologized to the children and made his way back to the limosine. He was in the limosine and on his way to the airport when the second plane hit. All this is in the 9/11 commission report timeline, if you'd care to read it.
As for me, I kept on brushing, because I didn't turn the TV on until about 5 minutes after the second plane hit.
I've read a lot of information that the airfoil of the Goose was too shallow to generate enough lift to get it out of ground effect, but *shrug* I'm sure it wasn't really that stable either. The dihedral was shallow and I can't imagine that the wood was strong enough to prevent massive flexion over those surfaces. A resonant vortex shedding event would have been disastrous. Of course, Hughes didn't have the advantage of massive computers and wind tunnel modeling. He just did things by feel, and he was a hell of an aviator, even if he ended up as a loon.
In any case, I was just using it as an example of the "power of ground effect", that plane was "flying" at something like fifty miles an hour, while actual, non-ground effect flight probably would have required airspeeds in the 90-100mph range.
But they *didn't* avoid things on the ground. I believe something like 11 light poles were snapped off at the breakaway bolts when the wing sheared them. Witnesses said he hit the ground just shy of the pentagon and bounced slightly before impact. There's also nothing really around the Pentagon for obvious security reasons. Look at a satellite photo of the Pentagon some time. Then look all around it. It's mostly empty lawns.
The terrorists weren't able to make "amazingly tight turns." The words of the air traffic controller was that they "were making dangerously sharp turns" and that "you shouldn't fly a 757 that way." Rookie luck, or rookie blundering? Turning a plane too hard is typical of rookies. Face it, they didn't really care about how much stress they put on the passengers or the plane. I doubt they were worried about the maintenance record that day.
WTC7 collapsed because debris ignited the 47,000 gallons of diesel fuel stored in the building as part of the emergency command center. The building was burning and belching smoke from nearly every window for three hours before it finally collapsed. No one was surprised by it. The firemen evacuated the area around it two hours before it fell because they knew it was going to come down when huge cracks appeared up and down the facade.
As for the twin towers and why and how they collapsed -- simply look up any of the dozens of engineering studies on the failure mode of the building. The impact most likely knocked away the "blown on" insulation over the steel, and the jet fuel and collateral materials burned long enough to heat the steel. As the steel expanded, it would have snapped the joints connecting the support beams to the floor connections. As soon as one floor collapses, it puts that much more weight on the floor below it, then that floor fails, then the floor beneath, etc. What you get is a perfect "stack of pancakes" collapse, which is exactly the failure mode you see in the towers. The central core stabilizes the collapse and maintains the nearly vertical fall. I've seen interviews with the designer of the building, and he said that the way the building fell is exactly how it was *designed* to fail in a catastrophic event. No one wanted the building to wipe out half a mile of buildings around it in some unplanned catastrophe.
What was Bush doing reading? Perhaps he was scheduled to read to a group of elementary students for weeks or months in advance. Perhaps the terrorists weren't considerate enough to inform Mr. Bush of the impending attack on the World Trade Center. According to reports, when the first sketchy information about a plane hitting the World Trade Center came in, Bush's first reaction was, "That's one lousy pilot." Which, I have to admit was my first reaction upon hearing the news on my clock radio that morning. In fact, I spent twenty minutes getting up and ready before I switched to headline news to see "if they might show the moron". By that time, the second plane had already hit. According to the Conspiracy Theorists out there, I must have been part of the conspiracy because I was brushing my teeth while the planes hit the buildings. It's just as valid as your statement about Bush.
Clearly the terrorists wanted to learn how to fly because they needed the knowledge. Clearly they knew they weren't going to land, so they didn't bother with that part of the training. Was it well rehearsed and well planned out? In retrospect, it was blatantly obvious and amazingly amateurish. In retrospect. Of course, before 9/11 no one thought about flying planes into buildings.
In retrospect, the theory of gravity is blatantly obvious. Clearly we should be calling Newton incompetent and claiming that he was part of the "Gravity Conspiracy". Sheesh.
It is, in fact, very easy to fly a plane close to the ground without crashing. There is a wonderful thing known as "ground effect" that causes this to happen. Normally when a plane is flying, the air pushing down off the wings forms a circular vortex. However, as the plane approaches the ground (to within 2/3 the width of the wing) this vortex becomes compressed and oval. In that case, the amount of lift on the wing increases because now it requires the extra force to "squash" the vortex. This is why the "Spruce Goose" (Howard Hughe's Hercules airplane) can't actually fly, but went airborne during testing. It was entirely flown within the realm of ground effect. In fact, it cannot generate enough lift to actually achieve free flight.
In this case, a "rookie pilot" with dozens of hours in a simulator, could ease the plane towards the ground and actually find it like "dropping into a pillow" as he got close to ground level and being able to run the plane straight into the Pentagon.
On the other hand, landing a plane involves a ballet of speed, flaps, landing gear, drag, nose angle, angle of attack and half a dozen other variables. Doing everything perfectly in a landing is the *hardest* part of flying.
Ask a pilot about ground effect, and they'll tell you all about it.
Sorry, my own bug. The size of a neutron star is measured in tens or hundreds of miles. Not the size of the Earth. I had a white-dwarf moment there and mixed up scales.
An interesting article, but it says nothing about creating heavy metals. In fact, it's impossible for a neutron star to create anything but hydrogen. Even if the star was somehow torn to bits, the neutrons would simply decay to a proton and electron (elemental hydrogen). When two neutron stars collide, nothing comes out but radiation and maybe a small handful of neutrons. If anything, most collisions will result in black holes, which aren't going to be contributing much of anything of consequence to the universe. (Hawking radiation being an immensely slow process, and pretty much generating only Hydrogen, if any non-esoterric particles are emitted at all.)
So, I don't know what this has to do with the discussion of the formation of heavy elements.
It's a common fallacy that's crept into the English written language because of the poor pronunciation and grammar that runs rampant in American Public Schools. People are often heard saying, "I should 'av' done that," when they say, "I should have done that." The "av" is pronounced with a sound very close to "of" and eventually the idiom becomes automatic.
People then write down what they have repeatedly wrongly been saying without being corrected because of the current belief that "self-esteem is more important than being perfectly correct." It is a sign of the decay of the American educational system.
For the record, I am not a "grammar Nazi" but I did minor in English at College.
Political correctness and stupidity "don't make good people" either. If you feel the need to call me out, at least do it with a real name, don't hide behind the AC tag.
Thanks, I've been working on it. Of course, at least I put my name on my responses.
I don't feel a lot of need to be polite to ignorance, and I've often found that a good wake-up call is best delivered with a figurative slap-in-the-face.
To be accurate, no fusion ever occurs "near the surface of the star". Current estimates are that when our own sun burns out in about 5 Billion years, it will have burned only about 10% of the available hydrogen in the star. Were we to have some method to "stir" the Sun, then we could keep it merrily burning along for several billion more years.
However, yes, there are more than the few steps I listed in the reactions that go towards a supernova. And several of them probably take place at the same time. As the hydrogen in the core begins to thin out, mixed with its helium waste, the force of the fusion will decrease and gravity will press down on the mix. When this happens, the outer shell often starts to drift outward, as the photonic pressure on the surface balances it against the gravity. Then as the core squeezes down, the photosphere remains balanced by the outgoing energy (which takes upwards of a million years to make the trip from core to surface) and since the rest of the star falls inward, the photosphere gets pushed out and you get the start of a planetary nebula.
Then when the pressure and heat in the core get high enough, the next stage begins. Hydrogen, mixed with Helium will fuse to lithium, helium fused to helium will give you beryllium...
Each stage will have a brief period of balance, as a rule, lasting about half as long as the previous stage, so if it took a billion years to run out of hydrogen, then the "helium burning" stage will take about half a billion years, and so on.
Each stage also precipitates another outward and inward push. Each stage makes a new "puff" of the outer shells into the rather stunning view that is a planetary nebula.
But when the star runs out of anything but iron in the core, there's probably still about 70% of the star's mass remaining that's still 90%+ hydrogen. It's not like the whole star is turning into a big iron ball.
Once you reach iron, the compression begins, and since there's no fusion beyond that point, you begin to squeeze the electron shells until they have no room to move, but instead slam into the nucleus of the atoms. When they do this, the protons and electrons fuse into neutrons (emitting neutrinos in the process). This final collapse has been estimated to take seconds, or possibly fractions of a second.
This will fuse anything left that isn't iron in the core, the collapse to neutrons is also hugely energetic. (I'm not sure where the other poster got the idea that everything suddenly changes back to helium. That would violate lots of physical laws, entropy among them.) The inner layers (up against the core) are hit with a stunning shock wave, and they begin to fuse, adding to the energy of the shock wave. The fusion rips through this inner area converting lower elements to higher ones because the shock wave is so powerful. Rapidly this energy is absorbed by electron shells further up, and are re-emitted as nasty, nasty high-energy x-rays and gamma rays. These will be so powerful that when they overtake the rings of expelled matter, they will super-heat them and you'll get glowing rings of gas lit by the wave of energy.
It's this massive wave of energy as the core collapses into a neutron star that *is* a supernova. What's left is an Earth sized ball of pure neutrons, spinning hundreds, perhaps thousands of times a second. From our observations of SN1987A (the supernova of 20-S Doradus) we know that the neutron star spinning madly is basically a pulsar, shedding x-rays as matter falls to its surface, pushing clouds of gas away under a stellar wind that dwarfs our Sun's paltry flow.
In fact, SN1987A is so massive that it should have collapsed to a black hole, but for the moment, it's spinning *so* rapidly that it cannot collapse all the way down, centrifical force holding it at the brink of collapse.
For now it's pushing the mass it expelled away from itself, where it will give birth to new stars and planets. Later, it will collapse into a black hole, somewhat dampening the party potential for any sentient life-forms in the area.
The explosion in the article happened 13,000 light years away. That's a measure of distance. This has nothing, repeat nothing, to do with our solar system. Our solar system was formed as the result of a supernova *more* than 5 Billion years ago. The U238 on our planet is the remnant from *that* supernova, not from one that happened 100,000 years ago.
Sheesh.
On the other hand, if your rather confused grammar is trying to say that the precursor star to the sun (or many precursor stars as supernovas often occur in groups -- being formed from groups of super-giant blue-white stars [see Pleides]) created all the U238 4.6BYA and that the Earth must therefore be less than 4.6BY old. If that's the case, then yeah, maybe the Earth itself is less than 4.6BY old. So what? It just means that the rock it formed from took a little while to condense into its current shape. It's not like the Earth formed, oceans, mountains, and all on Tuesday the 13th of July, 4,600,000,000 BC. It takes tens of millions of years for the matter to acrete into a planet.
If you're wondering in general did all the U238 come from a supernova, then the answer is simple. Yes. So did every element heavier than iron on the periodic table. A supernova is the only place those elements can be formed in nature (at least in any quantity.)
Iron is the energy dead end. When a star runs out of hydrogen, it starts "burning" Helium, when it's out of Helium it starts "burning" boron, and carbon, and oxygen into heavier elements. But when it hits iron, that's the end of the road. There's simply no more energy to get out by fission or fusion. The star is effectively dead. The trick is, if a star can actually reach the silicon "burning" stage where iron is the byproduct, then it's so massive, it's going to go supernova anyway. Part of the energy of the supernova goes into fusing Iron and other leftover bits to produce elements higher on the periodic table. This *costs* energy, so the only place it can happen is a supernova. Thus every element higher than iron (Silver, gold, platinum, lead, mercury, uranium, praseodimium, lanthanum, radium, etc.) had to be formed in a supernova.
Welcome to the universe. You are made of exploded stars. If there had been no Phase I (metal-poor) stars, there would be no planets, no humans, no nothing, because everything else is made of their exploded corpses.
The Social Security Trust Fund and Medicare Trust Fund exist on paper only. About 35 years ago a senior senator from Massachusettes by the name of Edward Kennedy came up with the brilliant idea that the Trust Funds should be invested in a "safe" investment. So, what do these funds buy? Why U.S. Savings bonds, of course. Which means that every dollar that goes into Social Security is immediately converted into money in the General Fund, and the SSTF holds an "IOU".
All current benefits are paid out of incoming funds, with each recipient being paid for by between 4 and six current workers. This situation is about to change drastically with the influx of the baby boomers, meaning that you will need between 8 and 12 workers supporting each recipient, or you'll need to raise the tax rate, or the SSTF will have to call in it's $3.7 Trillion in savings bonds.
If you go for the last option, effectively tripling the deficit, then by 2035, that 3.7 trillion is exhausted, and the Social Security Trust Fund goes completely broke. To maintain current levels, given trends in lifespans and birth rates, by 2036, the Social Security tax rate will need to be 85% to cover all the recipients, with many recipients spending as many years on Social Security as they spent working.
So, your first item is more or less a lie. The fact is that the 36% of the budget that goes *back* to Social Security, Medicaid, and the like are a line item on the budget, in addition to what comes out of the savings bonds purchased by the SSTF. In fact, the fictitious "surplusses" of the Clinton Era included this Social Security Trust Fund "investment" in order to balance the budget. Now that the CBO doesn't include this extra 4-500 billion, we have deficits. Go figure.
National Defense has always taken between 18-25% of the budget, and since it's the only one of the above list specifically authorized by the constitution, I'm fine with that.
The fact that you break Social Programs into two categories shows the disingenuousness of the argument. Social programs now represent 57% of the budget. Add in the 6% spent on education and you're up to 63% of the budget spent on "public good" programs, a category created whole cloth by Alexander Hamilton... Find Social Security in the Constitution, I dare you.
The fact that we hear the tired old mantra of "Cut the Millitary" over and over is mind-numbing.
Ask yourself this. Bill Clinton bragged from 1996 on that he'd cut the Welfare Rolls by 50%. Welfare represents an expenditure in excess of $100 Billion per year. If he really cut the Welfare Rolls by 50%, then why haven't we cut welfare funding by a penny? In fact, we've raised spending something like 13% since 1996, to serve half as many people. At that rate, we could cut each welfare recipient a check for $175,000 and end poverty in the nation.
Don't you dare whine about the millitary. At least they work for their money.
They do this trick now in their Vegas show, but they've upped the ante. They drop a plastic "line" across the stage, and from that moment, no one goes from one side of the line to the other. Then they bring out *two* guns, with *two* bullets, have a different audience member mark each one (never crossing sides) and then they go to opposite sides of the stage, pull back *all* the curtains so you can see the prop cages backstage (and so that clearly no one is running things behind the curtains) and then exchange fire through a sheet of glass on each side (both shatter) and each one catches the other one's bullet in their mouth. Then they show the bullet to the other side's signer (again, without anyone crossing the center line) and "tadah" they're the right bullet.
Great trick. I've seen it twice live in Vegas, and although I thought I caught part of the "trick" the first time, they dropped the back curtain for the second show and ruined the idea I had for the whole "trick".
Definitely worth seeing, as it's the finale of a great show.
Did you *actually read* the entire message? I said, I refuse to accept that the *ESTIMATE* that they chose to use *CAUSED* this to be the hottest year on record, when they have *PERFECTLY VALID SATELLITE DATA* that they could use.
Specifically I said, when the study that comes out using this *MEASURED DATA* instead of *ESTIMATED DATA*, when both are availble, is the one I'll believe.
You're asking me to trust someone, whose job and future funding relies on continuing climate change, to "fudge" 20% of the data, and (amazingly enough) it's that very data that makes his result exactly what will make sure that he's got a job and funding for next year.
This isn't an asterisk, to further your metaphor, this is a big, glowing sign saying "MARK MCGWIRE USED STEROIDS TO HIT THOSE 72 HOME RUNS!" It's not a minor difference, like Maris' asterisk. This is flat out changing the parameters of the experiment. It's like moving the fences in by 100 feet and claiming the home-run record is equivalent.
You need to use your brain to make critical judgements, not just accept things at face value.
Slashdot Mirror
The FA is about nanowires not nanotubes. They specifically point out the large difference between the two and say that nanowires can be made reliably and require no sorting. They also state that they are easy to make at room temperature.
What I find intriguing is that the article mentions how conducive nanowire technology is to three dimensional circuit construction with a per-layer size of 100nm. That means I can build 1100 layers into a 0.11 mm thick sandwich. How about 100 Athlon 64 CPUs intermixed with 1000 1GB memory arrays? With how reliable they are claiming this technology is, that would represent a 100 core CPU, with 1 Terabyte of memory mixed in. Seems like this is clearly the future of the CPU market. Especially if the heat disappation is as good as they claim.
How do you like my new Athlon 64 X100 with 1TB of memory running at 16 GHz?
As opposed to what? Should I link to RealClimate.org and use the highly quoted and totally accepted "Hockey Stick" which we now know is basically a giant crock of sh_t?
The Hockey Stick is on the web, and for ten years no one decided to question its veracity. Except of course for McKitrick and McIntyre for which they were roundly and soundly criticized for daring to question the "truth" of the Holy Hockey Stick.
Now it turns out that they were right. Mann hid his methods and data, from a publicly funded study, until forced to reveal them in what almost came down to an act of Congress.
John Daly was just an average guy, who was struck by the screaming about rising sea levels, when he lived next to the sea level marker left in New Zealand in the 1800s. The fact that the sea level is now below this mark (which is carved in solid stone) is a very telling thing. The fact that the largest rise in sea level shown by satellite data is 0.03mm/year is also well below the 1.2cm/year the IPCC promised us in 2000 is also extremely damaging to the GCC crowd, but they hide that as well.
Those IPCC studies are on the web too. Why don't you question them with the same veracity that you complain about my sources? All the climate data on John Daly's page are linked to the sources and have references. That's better than anything on Mann's site, where they regularly throw out things like "because we say so" (paraphrase) and delete posts that question them.
Speak for yourself. The first time I watched a DVD, I dumped all my VHS movies (over 200). The quality is, by far, the reason I went to DVD.
Please go look at this page before assuming you understand the role of CO2 in the atmosphere. Realize that man's total contribution to CO2 represents about 0.28% of the effective greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and that the largest greenhouse contributor is water vapor, which varies daily between 30% and 75% of the gasses.
But all that and more is made clear on the above page...
It hasn't been updated in three years because he died in 2002. The data all comes from other sources, he simply compiled it. I could have dug down and tracked a dozen sources and linked those instead. I chose the simpler means of selecting a page that linked to them all. It's called the web.
And here is a chart of carbon dioxide going back several million years. And, oh look, the planet is just as cool now as it ever was before. And when we hit levels of 4500 ppm back in the Silurian era, we were colder then any other time on the planet.
r ticles/V4/N8/EDIT.jsp
Sheesh. The largest increase in CO2 emissions by humans was between 1900 and 1940. Yet, the Earth somehow responded with a massive wave of cooling from 1950-1980 that caused many scientists to worry we were plunging into the next ice age. You are extrapolating 30 years of data out by a century or more. Bad Science! No Doughnut!
The fact is that we are in a period of CO2 starvation on the planet. Recent estimates have suggested that the increase in CO2 in the modern era is responsible for as much as 30% of the "extra" food that has helped to feed more than a billion people in the last 50 years. If Gore had his 280 ppm, we might be able to lay one billion people who starved to death at his feet. The law of unintended consequences runs rampant in this "catastrophe". http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/a
And it's not like the Earth hasn't been warmer before in human history. In the 12th century there were orange groves in Berlin and vineyards in England. http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm
If memory serves, from the last year for which Federal budget data is available (2003) the NSA receives just over $10 billion a year in funding.
In comparison:
Education - $56 Billion (And remember that federal funding represents about 10% of total school funding, which is mostly provided directly by the states.)
Healthcare (Medicare/Medicaid): $316 Billion
Veterans Administration: $24 Billion -- which I'll agree is a criminally low number.
However, the idea that spending only 0.44% of the federal budget on an agency tasked with protecting the citizens from enemies foreign and domestic is somehow horribly wasteful... well, I have to disagree.
As for the OP's talk of stem cell research, clearly he doesn't understand that the only thing you can't do is use Federal grant money to dice up an embryo to create a new cell line. Not that embryonic stem cell research has provided a single working cure.
Now, adult stem cell research, on the other hand, is currently in the process of saving the life of my favorite fiction author, Robert Jordan.
Linux (FC3) server: Uptime 62 days and counting after a power outage - Serves 10,000 web hits a day. Blocks 3-10,000 SSH login attempts per day. (damn script kiddies)
Windows (2003AS): 9 days, after having to reboot 3 times in four hours because of printer problems. Serves 10-20 FTP transfers per day, and running MailExchange for about 1,500 e-mails per day.
Yeah, looks like the article is dead on...
Take a look at the satellite photos of the Pentagon and answer the question: What buildings?
For security reasons, the Pentagon is surrounded by a huge amount of open space. The plane flew up the Potomac, over Reagan National Airport and into the side of the pentagon. Look at this image Satellite of Pentagon to get the picture. They didn't fly over anything but highways and parking lots (and they clipped the light poles on the highway.)
It's amazing that you're willing to believe that the WTC could be intentionally bombed with demolition charges (the only clear alternative) which normally takes days of painstaking set-up work and results in columns wrapped with what are clearly, bulky high-explosive charges, as opposed to, "a chunk of hot burning debris (clearly visible on many videos of the day) plunged into the WTC 7 building, doing extensive damage." You talk about a "strengthened and shielded tank". Sorry, it was a standard set of three tanks, two 20,000 gallon, and one 7,000 gallon tank, made out of thin-walled 1/8" steel. They were in the middle of a building (in the basement actually) and were not, "strengthened and shielded". They were there to provide 15 days of electrical power generation to the emergency command center.
As for not flammible... Diesel fuel is basically kerosene. It burns with a smoky, red flame and can be easily ignited by a match. It's believed that the debris that struck WTC7 was part of the engine of the second plane. That engine typically runs in the 800-1200 degree celsius range. More than hot enough to ignite a little diesel fuel (flash point of about 210 degrees C. In fact, diesel ignites 36 degrees C cooler than gasoline.)
Let's also not forget that there was a 4" gas main in the building that firemen reported as having broken. For three hours, flame and smoke poured out of the WTC7 building. By the time it collapsed it was a gutted shell.
WTC7 was in the direct path of the debris from the second airliner. The idea that somehow it's more believable that some clandestine force snuck in and carefully demolished it without anyone knowing is ludicrous.
As for the second part, yes, there was evidence that OBL wanted to strike in the US. That was in every briefing since 1992. He suceeded in 1993 when Yusef bombed the WTC. What no one expected, or knew, was that the planes had been hijacked, or that they were full of terrorists, or that there were more than one. But I've already answered all this in another post. Read the 9/11 commision report. While it is a crappy job, done by political hacks, they did determine that Bush wasn't "sitting on his hands", he just didn't have enough information.
As for plane attacks, yeah Tom Clancy had one, but quite frankly, NORAD planned to run a test scenario of a plane flying into the Pentagon in April of 2000 and the joint chiefs canceled it as being "too far fetched."
Yes, there will always be questions, but Occam's Razor says we can believe in 19 al-qaeda funded terrorists, for which we have ample information and motivation (Mohammed Atta's luggage with all the plans in it along with his journal and records missed the connection and was recovered by the morning of September 12th. It's why we knew so much about the terrorists so quickly.) and a fundamental hatred of the United States trained for a year and hijacked four airplanes to fly them into buildings in the culmination of 10 years of planning, or you can believe that a shadowy government agency, built in eight months by the Bush Administration, masterminded hundreds of demolitions experts into destroying one of the largest buildings in the world, killing thousands. That thousands of people were involved in secretly building and flying remote controlled jets into the buildings, and that 100+ pentagon people were sacrificed to make it look real. And that somewhere there's about 250 people who were supposed to be on the jets that have been secretly hidden away from the outside world. And that none of these hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of people who were involved in the killings of 3,000 Americans have gotten a nagging conscience and come forward.
I know which way Occam's Razor cuts for me.
Bush made his "lousy pilot" comment in an interview after the fact. He said "the first thought that went through my mind was, 'That's one lousy pilot.'" Until the FAA confirmed that the planes were hijacked, everyone, and I mean everyone, thought that the first plane was some terrible accident, not an intentional attack. I'd heard from the radio that it was a small plane that hit the WTC. There was a lot of confusion in the first few minutes. When the first plane was reported to Bush, it was reported as "a plane, we think a small commuter plane, hit the World Trade Center building a few minutes ago." (From an interview with the Secret Service agent who informed him.)
The film we've all seen of Bush with the guy whispering in his ear was when the Secret Service told him there was now information that it was a large, commercial airliner, and that the FAA was saying that it had transmitted a hijack code. They also told him it would take about 5 minutes to get transportation arranged to get him out of the school and set up the motorcade back to Air Force One. There was no one who considered him as being actively under threat, so they were informing law enforcement and the crews that the schedule was changing. As far as this point, it was clearly an attack, but an isolated one. The damage was already done and rushing out wouldn't save anyone or anything.
Now, Bush was with a group of young children, and you can't exactly just leap up and say, "There's been a horrible accident, people are dead, and I have to go." These kids were waiting for months to meet the President, and he wanted to give them a fair amount of time. Remember, no one thought this was anything more than an isolated incident yet.
From the moment Bush was told, you can see his look is much more grim, and he's constantly "looking off to the side". Well, he was looking at his Secret Service detail, who was waiting to signal him when the transportation was ready. A few minutes later, he got that signal, apologized to the children and made his way back to the limosine. He was in the limosine and on his way to the airport when the second plane hit. All this is in the 9/11 commission report timeline, if you'd care to read it.
As for me, I kept on brushing, because I didn't turn the TV on until about 5 minutes after the second plane hit.
Heck, on the Airbus A-380 you just press the "Land" button. Supposedly...
I've read a lot of information that the airfoil of the Goose was too shallow to generate enough lift to get it out of ground effect, but *shrug* I'm sure it wasn't really that stable either. The dihedral was shallow and I can't imagine that the wood was strong enough to prevent massive flexion over those surfaces. A resonant vortex shedding event would have been disastrous. Of course, Hughes didn't have the advantage of massive computers and wind tunnel modeling. He just did things by feel, and he was a hell of an aviator, even if he ended up as a loon.
In any case, I was just using it as an example of the "power of ground effect", that plane was "flying" at something like fifty miles an hour, while actual, non-ground effect flight probably would have required airspeeds in the 90-100mph range.
But they *didn't* avoid things on the ground. I believe something like 11 light poles were snapped off at the breakaway bolts when the wing sheared them. Witnesses said he hit the ground just shy of the pentagon and bounced slightly before impact. There's also nothing really around the Pentagon for obvious security reasons. Look at a satellite photo of the Pentagon some time. Then look all around it. It's mostly empty lawns.
The terrorists weren't able to make "amazingly tight turns." The words of the air traffic controller was that they "were making dangerously sharp turns" and that "you shouldn't fly a 757 that way." Rookie luck, or rookie blundering? Turning a plane too hard is typical of rookies. Face it, they didn't really care about how much stress they put on the passengers or the plane. I doubt they were worried about the maintenance record that day.
WTC7 collapsed because debris ignited the 47,000 gallons of diesel fuel stored in the building as part of the emergency command center. The building was burning and belching smoke from nearly every window for three hours before it finally collapsed. No one was surprised by it. The firemen evacuated the area around it two hours before it fell because they knew it was going to come down when huge cracks appeared up and down the facade.
As for the twin towers and why and how they collapsed -- simply look up any of the dozens of engineering studies on the failure mode of the building. The impact most likely knocked away the "blown on" insulation over the steel, and the jet fuel and collateral materials burned long enough to heat the steel. As the steel expanded, it would have snapped the joints connecting the support beams to the floor connections. As soon as one floor collapses, it puts that much more weight on the floor below it, then that floor fails, then the floor beneath, etc. What you get is a perfect "stack of pancakes" collapse, which is exactly the failure mode you see in the towers. The central core stabilizes the collapse and maintains the nearly vertical fall. I've seen interviews with the designer of the building, and he said that the way the building fell is exactly how it was *designed* to fail in a catastrophic event. No one wanted the building to wipe out half a mile of buildings around it in some unplanned catastrophe.
What was Bush doing reading? Perhaps he was scheduled to read to a group of elementary students for weeks or months in advance. Perhaps the terrorists weren't considerate enough to inform Mr. Bush of the impending attack on the World Trade Center. According to reports, when the first sketchy information about a plane hitting the World Trade Center came in, Bush's first reaction was, "That's one lousy pilot." Which, I have to admit was my first reaction upon hearing the news on my clock radio that morning. In fact, I spent twenty minutes getting up and ready before I switched to headline news to see "if they might show the moron". By that time, the second plane had already hit. According to the Conspiracy Theorists out there, I must have been part of the conspiracy because I was brushing my teeth while the planes hit the buildings. It's just as valid as your statement about Bush.
Clearly the terrorists wanted to learn how to fly because they needed the knowledge. Clearly they knew they weren't going to land, so they didn't bother with that part of the training. Was it well rehearsed and well planned out? In retrospect, it was blatantly obvious and amazingly amateurish. In retrospect. Of course, before 9/11 no one thought about flying planes into buildings.
In retrospect, the theory of gravity is blatantly obvious. Clearly we should be calling Newton incompetent and claiming that he was part of the "Gravity Conspiracy". Sheesh.
It is, in fact, very easy to fly a plane close to the ground without crashing. There is a wonderful thing known as "ground effect" that causes this to happen. Normally when a plane is flying, the air pushing down off the wings forms a circular vortex. However, as the plane approaches the ground (to within 2/3 the width of the wing) this vortex becomes compressed and oval. In that case, the amount of lift on the wing increases because now it requires the extra force to "squash" the vortex. This is why the "Spruce Goose" (Howard Hughe's Hercules airplane) can't actually fly, but went airborne during testing. It was entirely flown within the realm of ground effect. In fact, it cannot generate enough lift to actually achieve free flight.
In this case, a "rookie pilot" with dozens of hours in a simulator, could ease the plane towards the ground and actually find it like "dropping into a pillow" as he got close to ground level and being able to run the plane straight into the Pentagon.
On the other hand, landing a plane involves a ballet of speed, flaps, landing gear, drag, nose angle, angle of attack and half a dozen other variables. Doing everything perfectly in a landing is the *hardest* part of flying.
Ask a pilot about ground effect, and they'll tell you all about it.
Sorry, my own bug. The size of a neutron star is measured in tens or hundreds of miles. Not the size of the Earth. I had a white-dwarf moment there and mixed up scales.
An interesting article, but it says nothing about creating heavy metals. In fact, it's impossible for a neutron star to create anything but hydrogen. Even if the star was somehow torn to bits, the neutrons would simply decay to a proton and electron (elemental hydrogen). When two neutron stars collide, nothing comes out but radiation and maybe a small handful of neutrons. If anything, most collisions will result in black holes, which aren't going to be contributing much of anything of consequence to the universe. (Hawking radiation being an immensely slow process, and pretty much generating only Hydrogen, if any non-esoterric particles are emitted at all.)
So, I don't know what this has to do with the discussion of the formation of heavy elements.
It's a common fallacy that's crept into the English written language because of the poor pronunciation and grammar that runs rampant in American Public Schools. People are often heard saying, "I should 'av' done that," when they say, "I should have done that." The "av" is pronounced with a sound very close to "of" and eventually the idiom becomes automatic.
People then write down what they have repeatedly wrongly been saying without being corrected because of the current belief that "self-esteem is more important than being perfectly correct." It is a sign of the decay of the American educational system.
For the record, I am not a "grammar Nazi" but I did minor in English at College.
Political correctness and stupidity "don't make good people" either. If you feel the need to call me out, at least do it with a real name, don't hide behind the AC tag.
Thanks, I've been working on it. Of course, at least I put my name on my responses.
I don't feel a lot of need to be polite to ignorance, and I've often found that a good wake-up call is best delivered with a figurative slap-in-the-face.
To be accurate, no fusion ever occurs "near the surface of the star". Current estimates are that when our own sun burns out in about 5 Billion years, it will have burned only about 10% of the available hydrogen in the star. Were we to have some method to "stir" the Sun, then we could keep it merrily burning along for several billion more years.
However, yes, there are more than the few steps I listed in the reactions that go towards a supernova. And several of them probably take place at the same time. As the hydrogen in the core begins to thin out, mixed with its helium waste, the force of the fusion will decrease and gravity will press down on the mix. When this happens, the outer shell often starts to drift outward, as the photonic pressure on the surface balances it against the gravity. Then as the core squeezes down, the photosphere remains balanced by the outgoing energy (which takes upwards of a million years to make the trip from core to surface) and since the rest of the star falls inward, the photosphere gets pushed out and you get the start of a planetary nebula.
Then when the pressure and heat in the core get high enough, the next stage begins. Hydrogen, mixed with Helium will fuse to lithium, helium fused to helium will give you beryllium...
Each stage will have a brief period of balance, as a rule, lasting about half as long as the previous stage, so if it took a billion years to run out of hydrogen, then the "helium burning" stage will take about half a billion years, and so on.
Each stage also precipitates another outward and inward push. Each stage makes a new "puff" of the outer shells into the rather stunning view that is a planetary nebula.
But when the star runs out of anything but iron in the core, there's probably still about 70% of the star's mass remaining that's still 90%+ hydrogen. It's not like the whole star is turning into a big iron ball.
Once you reach iron, the compression begins, and since there's no fusion beyond that point, you begin to squeeze the electron shells until they have no room to move, but instead slam into the nucleus of the atoms. When they do this, the protons and electrons fuse into neutrons (emitting neutrinos in the process). This final collapse has been estimated to take seconds, or possibly fractions of a second.
This will fuse anything left that isn't iron in the core, the collapse to neutrons is also hugely energetic. (I'm not sure where the other poster got the idea that everything suddenly changes back to helium. That would violate lots of physical laws, entropy among them.) The inner layers (up against the core) are hit with a stunning shock wave, and they begin to fuse, adding to the energy of the shock wave. The fusion rips through this inner area converting lower elements to higher ones because the shock wave is so powerful. Rapidly this energy is absorbed by electron shells further up, and are re-emitted as nasty, nasty high-energy x-rays and gamma rays. These will be so powerful that when they overtake the rings of expelled matter, they will super-heat them and you'll get glowing rings of gas lit by the wave of energy.
It's this massive wave of energy as the core collapses into a neutron star that *is* a supernova. What's left is an Earth sized ball of pure neutrons, spinning hundreds, perhaps thousands of times a second. From our observations of SN1987A (the supernova of 20-S Doradus) we know that the neutron star spinning madly is basically a pulsar, shedding x-rays as matter falls to its surface, pushing clouds of gas away under a stellar wind that dwarfs our Sun's paltry flow.
In fact, SN1987A is so massive that it should have collapsed to a black hole, but for the moment, it's spinning *so* rapidly that it cannot collapse all the way down, centrifical force holding it at the brink of collapse.
For now it's pushing the mass it expelled away from itself, where it will give birth to new stars and planets. Later, it will collapse into a black hole, somewhat dampening the party potential for any sentient life-forms in the area.
What?
The explosion in the article happened 13,000 light years away. That's a measure of distance. This has nothing, repeat nothing, to do with our solar system. Our solar system was formed as the result of a supernova *more* than 5 Billion years ago. The U238 on our planet is the remnant from *that* supernova, not from one that happened 100,000 years ago.
Sheesh.
On the other hand, if your rather confused grammar is trying to say that the precursor star to the sun (or many precursor stars as supernovas often occur in groups -- being formed from groups of super-giant blue-white stars [see Pleides]) created all the U238 4.6BYA and that the Earth must therefore be less than 4.6BY old. If that's the case, then yeah, maybe the Earth itself is less than 4.6BY old. So what? It just means that the rock it formed from took a little while to condense into its current shape. It's not like the Earth formed, oceans, mountains, and all on Tuesday the 13th of July, 4,600,000,000 BC. It takes tens of millions of years for the matter to acrete into a planet.
If you're wondering in general did all the U238 come from a supernova, then the answer is simple. Yes. So did every element heavier than iron on the periodic table. A supernova is the only place those elements can be formed in nature (at least in any quantity.)
Iron is the energy dead end. When a star runs out of hydrogen, it starts "burning" Helium, when it's out of Helium it starts "burning" boron, and carbon, and oxygen into heavier elements. But when it hits iron, that's the end of the road. There's simply no more energy to get out by fission or fusion. The star is effectively dead. The trick is, if a star can actually reach the silicon "burning" stage where iron is the byproduct, then it's so massive, it's going to go supernova anyway. Part of the energy of the supernova goes into fusing Iron and other leftover bits to produce elements higher on the periodic table. This *costs* energy, so the only place it can happen is a supernova. Thus every element higher than iron (Silver, gold, platinum, lead, mercury, uranium, praseodimium, lanthanum, radium, etc.) had to be formed in a supernova.
Welcome to the universe. You are made of exploded stars. If there had been no Phase I (metal-poor) stars, there would be no planets, no humans, no nothing, because everything else is made of their exploded corpses.
Wow, so much misinformation in one message:
The Social Security Trust Fund and Medicare Trust Fund exist on paper only. About 35 years ago a senior senator from Massachusettes by the name of Edward Kennedy came up with the brilliant idea that the Trust Funds should be invested in a "safe" investment. So, what do these funds buy? Why U.S. Savings bonds, of course. Which means that every dollar that goes into Social Security is immediately converted into money in the General Fund, and the SSTF holds an "IOU".
All current benefits are paid out of incoming funds, with each recipient being paid for by between 4 and six current workers. This situation is about to change drastically with the influx of the baby boomers, meaning that you will need between 8 and 12 workers supporting each recipient, or you'll need to raise the tax rate, or the SSTF will have to call in it's $3.7 Trillion in savings bonds.
If you go for the last option, effectively tripling the deficit, then by 2035, that 3.7 trillion is exhausted, and the Social Security Trust Fund goes completely broke. To maintain current levels, given trends in lifespans and birth rates, by 2036, the Social Security tax rate will need to be 85% to cover all the recipients, with many recipients spending as many years on Social Security as they spent working.
So, your first item is more or less a lie. The fact is that the 36% of the budget that goes *back* to Social Security, Medicaid, and the like are a line item on the budget, in addition to what comes out of the savings bonds purchased by the SSTF. In fact, the fictitious "surplusses" of the Clinton Era included this Social Security Trust Fund "investment" in order to balance the budget. Now that the CBO doesn't include this extra 4-500 billion, we have deficits. Go figure.
National Defense has always taken between 18-25% of the budget, and since it's the only one of the above list specifically authorized by the constitution, I'm fine with that.
The fact that you break Social Programs into two categories shows the disingenuousness of the argument. Social programs now represent 57% of the budget. Add in the 6% spent on education and you're up to 63% of the budget spent on "public good" programs, a category created whole cloth by Alexander Hamilton... Find Social Security in the Constitution, I dare you.
The fact that we hear the tired old mantra of "Cut the Millitary" over and over is mind-numbing.
Ask yourself this. Bill Clinton bragged from 1996 on that he'd cut the Welfare Rolls by 50%. Welfare represents an expenditure in excess of $100 Billion per year. If he really cut the Welfare Rolls by 50%, then why haven't we cut welfare funding by a penny? In fact, we've raised spending something like 13% since 1996, to serve half as many people. At that rate, we could cut each welfare recipient a check for $175,000 and end poverty in the nation.
Don't you dare whine about the millitary. At least they work for their money.
They do this trick now in their Vegas show, but they've upped the ante. They drop a plastic "line" across the stage, and from that moment, no one goes from one side of the line to the other. Then they bring out *two* guns, with *two* bullets, have a different audience member mark each one (never crossing sides) and then they go to opposite sides of the stage, pull back *all* the curtains so you can see the prop cages backstage (and so that clearly no one is running things behind the curtains) and then exchange fire through a sheet of glass on each side (both shatter) and each one catches the other one's bullet in their mouth. Then they show the bullet to the other side's signer (again, without anyone crossing the center line) and "tadah" they're the right bullet.
Great trick. I've seen it twice live in Vegas, and although I thought I caught part of the "trick" the first time, they dropped the back curtain for the second show and ruined the idea I had for the whole "trick".
Definitely worth seeing, as it's the finale of a great show.
Did you *actually read* the entire message? I said, I refuse to accept that the *ESTIMATE* that they chose to use *CAUSED* this to be the hottest year on record, when they have *PERFECTLY VALID SATELLITE DATA* that they could use.
Specifically I said, when the study that comes out using this *MEASURED DATA* instead of *ESTIMATED DATA*, when both are availble, is the one I'll believe.
You're asking me to trust someone, whose job and future funding relies on continuing climate change, to "fudge" 20% of the data, and (amazingly enough) it's that very data that makes his result exactly what will make sure that he's got a job and funding for next year.
This isn't an asterisk, to further your metaphor, this is a big, glowing sign saying "MARK MCGWIRE USED STEROIDS TO HIT THOSE 72 HOME RUNS!" It's not a minor difference, like Maris' asterisk. This is flat out changing the parameters of the experiment. It's like moving the fences in by 100 feet and claiming the home-run record is equivalent.
You need to use your brain to make critical judgements, not just accept things at face value.