Guardrails? Guardrails!?! We don't need no stinking GUARDRAILS!
Seriously though. There aren't any. Well, there's a couple on the paved section (the first 7 miles) but none on the last 13 miles (the section the racers run.)
But does Mount Washington have an annual, scheduled race period where the road is closed to everyone except racers? The Pikes Peak Hill Climb is one of the oldest auto races in the world and has been held for close to 100 years.
I was there at the time (as a consultant -- for one more month, before they cut all the consultants) and the employees were all furious. They basically quit even trying to get work done after Bernie cut the coffee. It still amazes me how shocked everyone was about how WorldCom was a steaming heap of ****, when everyone in the entire company knew that Bernie Ebbers was a crook and that the entire company was circling the bowl from the moment he took over.
I still remember our first meeting with a WorldCom group that did their network alarm tracking using an Access database and Excel. He was so proud of their system that handled 200,000 alerts a day.
I just looked at him and said, "Yesterday, we did twenty-two million alert and performance messages. It was a slow day."
It was like an elementary school flag football team trying to play a game in the NFL.
You've fallen for one of the classic Washington Beltway tricks. This chart is for "Discretionary Spending," in other words, the spending the Congress gets to decide on every year. The military budget is required, under the Constitution, to fall into this category. On the other hand, it represents less than 1/4 of the overall 2009 budget, which includes all the programs that are required, by law, to be automatically funded each year, including all of the social programs in the United States. If we take into account that the budget for 2008 was about $3.2T, and for 2009, will approach $4.5T, then we have an estimate that the entire discretionary spending (about $1T) is only going to represent about 22% of the total budget. If the Military is 60% of that, then it represents about 13.2% of the total budget.
So, maybe the 6.6% is wrong (although it's correct for direct Military spending, not including the items you added) but it's still not 60% like you claimed either.
Be careful when you read budgeting numbers from Washington, because they like to hide behind the discretionary term, while bemoaning the fact that they can't do anything about the "non-discretionary" budget items. Which is utterly untrue, of course.
I think you missed the point. Direct measurement is all we can account for with 100% accuracy. Ice core data, while compelling, is not a scientific instrument. It was not designed to measure CO2 concentration. It does not have a gauge embedded in it that says, "280ppm". It has bubbles. We *assume* that those bubbles are pristine samples of the atmosphere at the time the ice was frozen. We *assume* that the bubble hasn't migrated, dissolved, or been concentrated by its time in the ice. We *assume* that because the record of the last 100 years is close to the instrumental record that we can safely extrapolate that relationship back 1000, 5000, or even 800,000 years. (Vostok ice cores)
What if it happens to be a property of ice, left for 150 years, to migrate CO2 into the ice crystal structure until it stabilizes the bubble at 280 ppm? Is it possible? I don't know. Can we do a lab experiment to prove it does or doesn't happen? Sure, but it will take 150 years to run. We assume that we know what will happen, but we have no hard experimental proof of it.
Over time, solid objects will migrate down through ice. Isn't it possible that bubbles would migrate up through the ice? How does this affect where we find the bubbles and their dating?
That's a whole lot of "assumes" to put our 100% faith in. Now, we can *assume* that the scientist took this into account, or we can ask for the data that shows they did. When they refuse to turn over said data and corrective algorithms, they create doubt. That's why this data dump is important. The emails seem to indicate that even the climate scientists have a lot of doubt about their data, and they worked hard to prevent releasing it or their methodologies.
That's why I said 100 years of instrumental records and discounted the ice core data.
Some of the data is for work that was published back in 1999. Published, peer reviewed, and referenced in dozens, even hundreds of other papers.
A decade ago.
Is that long enough after they're "done" with the data?
When one of the emails from Phil Jones (head of CRU) says, "I'd rather destroy all our data than give it to McIntyre," for a paper published five years ago, where's the scientific integrity in that?
When there's whole email chains about how to dodge Freedom of Information requests, where's the scientific integrity in that?
Say what you want about paranoia, but actually look at the situation, please.
This just in, Physiscists have no idea what causes gravity, Geologists can't tell from the shape of a planet what it's composed of, Astronomers don't know for certain how the Earth formed around the Sun.
You mistake the argument.
1. The Earth has warmed slightly - With solid records for only the last 150 years, (some of which may be questionable, see surfacestations.org) we don't know if this is unprecedented.
2. CO2 has risen since we've been measuring it. With only 100 odd years of instrumental record, we don't know if this is unprecedented.
3. Climate is hideously complex to model. We don't know what all the sources of CO2 are, nor where all the sinks are. Added to this is the intrinsicly chaotic form of weather in general.
4. We don't know what effect water, temperature, ice, etc. has on the total feedback of the system. It could be positive, it could be negative. We don't know. All the computer models are leaning positive (as heat goes up, heating goes up.) Recent studies are showing that it may be negative.
5. Arctic ice was declining in the early half of the decade. We don't know if this is unprecedented, as we only really have 30 years of records from satellites.
6. There is good evidence that a large part of the CO2 delta in the atmosphere comes from C14 poor sources. (Ancient carbon > 50,000 years old.) This could be from fossil fuels, or it could be from prehistoric sources such as melting permafrost. Again, this cannot be proven one way or the other.
Now, here's the leap you need to make (pick one):
1) CO2 increases from man are *CAUSING* the warming. (This is a hypothesis.)
2) CO2 increases in general are *CAUSED BY* warming (A lot of the proxy data for >150 years ago shows this.)
3) The warming is a natural process, but the CO2 has enhanced it to some extent. (This is arguably the most likely.)
4) The warming is a natural cycle, the CO2 increase has nothing, or very little to do with it. (It's a coincidence.)
Choose one of the above.
A physicist can't point at a some squiggle in a particle accelerator and say "that's the gravity particle" any more than a Pastafarian can point at the Great Noodly Appendage pushing down the apple on Newton's head and say, "That's proof of my theory." Gravity is a fact, the cause of gravity is a theory.
You're talking about an AGW bias, as if it were a fact. The equivalent "fact-bias" would be stating they have "a pro-thermometer bias." The idea that Anthropogenic CO2 is the sole cause of any warming is where the debate is.
Medieval Warm Period (a period from about 850-1100 of extremely mild weather. Grapes grew in London vineyards, Orange trees grew in Berlin and modern climate theory says it never happened.)
Well, I think the big thing that this data-dump shows is that it's actually a small group of tightly knit e-mail connected individuals that are driving a whole lot of the AGW effort.
Someone else wrote that this is all Exxon Astroturfing going on to make us knock out Copenhagen. In other words, arguing that a global conspiracy of oil-company funded individuals, like a meterologist in California and a retired statistician are all on payroll along with hackers in Russia, and new posters on SlashDot, are all working to convince us of a global conspiracy to promote AGW... These people are somehow secretly communicating behind the scenes, transferring billions of dollars of off-the-books money to individuals, all without anyone being able to point to a money trail.
On the other side, we have three groups, CRU, Mann/RealClimate and GISS, who have been clearly communicating and using their supposedly "neutral" Web Site (RealClimate) to promote one-sided views of the science, and apparently "fudge" the data until it matches their theory. These people openly receive grants of hundreds of millions of dollars every year, and have access to governments, prime ministers, and corporations, all of whose funding depends on perpetuating and establishing AGW as *the* science.
So, you'd have to believe it was all a big plan to release data on a minor Russian FTP site, found by accident on a blog almost no one reads, and then forwarded to a blog that *is* read often, in an un-threaded discussion while the site owner is on a trip overseas. This well coordinated group then uses these actual emails (admitted as valid and real by Phil Jones, head of CRU) to somehow concoct a story that a small group of climate scientists are colluding to support a theory by ignoring the facts, by using their own words to that effect.
On the one hand, you have individuals scanning through, admittedly, purloined emails and saying, "Whoa! What's going on here." Opposite that, you have the post on RealClimate today saying, "Move along, nothing to see here!" Some of those emails involve apparent schemes to transfer US funds overseas to avoid taxation. That alone is "something to see," despite what RealClimate is saying. And that's ignoring whether the science was done according to any standards of ethics.
We're talking millions of dollars in budgets from publicly funded programs. If there's even a hint of malfeasance in these documents, then a serious investigation should be started. I don't care which side is the global conspiracy. Only one side is spending *my money* to perpetrate it. The oil companies can spend however many trillion dollars they want without it coming out of *my* pocket.
So, you're arguing that there's a global conspiracy of skeptics out there trying to convince us that there's a global conspiracy of AGW proponents out there.
One of the early missions is recovering an advanced satellite encryption system from a Russian base to keep it from being reverse engineered.
Apparently this mission is too late, as, during the invasion, the Russians use this reverse engineered system to send false images to our satellites, convincing commanders that there's a massive invasion air-fleet approaching the West coast. In the mean time, they also spoof the satellite to hide the real invasion group hitting the east coast (in Virginia). Thus, the first warning is the commanders in Virginia screaming as missiles hit the base and troop transports start dropping Russian paratroopers (and apparently heavy armor) into the residential areas.
The image covers about 1/2 of 1 degree of the sky, or about the same size as the full moon. Given the 0.5 degrees of arc, the distance to galactic center (about 30,000 light years), I leave it as a simple math (trig) exercise to work out the extent of the photo in light years across.
Nah, no I don't. If we take the length of the triangle as 30,000 and the angle as 2 * 0.25 degrees ( to split it into two right triangles), then sin(0.25 deg) * 30,000 = 130.9 light years, times two, gives about a 262 light year wide image, which means each pixel at 1920x1200 covers a square of about 0.136 light years (1,286,631,860,000 kilometers) per side.
For comparison, that's about 8600 AU (Earth-Sun distance). The solar system to the Heliosheath (where the Voyager probes are) is about 100 AU. So each pixel is a square, 86 solar systems across.
You forgot Reality C: There's over 3.2 Trillion barrels of known reserves around the world (1.5T of which are in the United States, 1T of which is in the Green River Oil Shales -- all of which is currently unaccessable only because we say it is [by government mandate]). Although some of this oil is more difficult to mine than it is in the middle east, where you can just about stick a pole in the ground and get oil bubbling up, as the price of oil increases, more of these reserves will be made available. As the price rises, some applications will become more cost effective to switch to other sources for power/raw materials/lubrication.
As each one of these applications turns away from oil, the price of oil will temporarily drop or stabilize. Eventually we'll either be 100% off oil, or at a level where it's sustainable for 1000's of years.
Oh wait, that's free market economics, and I forgot that our president has announced that "that doesn't work any more."
So, mandates, high taxes, and bans on exploration and new extraction will be the norm, the price of oil will skyrocket, people will be unable to adjust and will panic/starve/die. So we have scenario B, enforced by our "leaders" rather than a real crisis...
I dunno, reflective mylar? If only we could build a balloon that could reach the stunning altitude of 1 kilometer (that's about 3000 feet) and be large enough to hold up that cable (guessing around 1000 to 2000 pounds) and keep itself still...
Wow, you sure threw a real haymaker at that straw-man. Remind me never to have another battle of wits of with you... or at least to let you write both sides of the conversation like you're trying to do here.
Look, I understand you feel some desire to be justified in your sad little part of the borders of reality, but you really need a few lessons here.
Number one, every child has parents, you may not understand this, since you seem to think that sleeping around has no consequences. Apparently your mommy and daddy, or your mommy and mommy, or your daddy and daddy, or your aunt, uncle, third cousin, or foster parent, whomever or whatever group of the above it was who raised you, never explained the whole birds and bees thing to you. However, at least until the last 50 years or so in America, the tradition has been that a man and a woman get together and have children through a physical act, which I won't go into here, since you seem to understand that part, at least given your desire, in previous writings, to have it displayed happily to every three year old in America.
Now, here's the part you don't understand. Traditionally, when that man and woman had a child, they took what is called, "Responsibility" for the raising of that child. In other words, as part of having a child, they accepted that it became part of their required actions, to raise that child so that they would become a healthy, and productive member of society. Now in Feudal Europe, that meant teaching the child to be just like you, so if you were a farmer, your child was a farmer, if you were a baker, your child was a baker, and if you were a blacksmith, well, then your child was a blacksmith. The system worked, in a manner of speaking, because it assured a steady stream of labor for most of the jobs available at the time.
The system, however, was wasteful, as the children do not have the same set of abilities as the parent. Perhaps one son make a lousy blacksmith, and one son couldn't bake bread that didn't taste like bricks. And let's not get started on the girls, since all they were good for was costing a dowry to marry off. In any case, a large part of the work force (Usually around the third generation) weren't exactly happy doing what granddad did just because that's the way it was.
Eventually this system failed due to lots of social pressures, plagues, and generally, the slow scientific improvement in knowledge and the wider dissemination of books and learning.
What replaced it were other systems, parliamentary democracy (although the "democracy" in a "House of Lords" is debatable), socialist systems, quasi-socialist states, and in one country, a Representative Republic. Now, this country was a mainly a bunch of ne'er-do-well's that had been expunged from the good folk of Europe and who eventually got so surly, they kicked out their own, rightful government, in order to be "free" and establish that Republic.
Now, since they were all a bunch of people who couldn't listen to authority, were ornery, and resented a large, overarching government, they then laid out a system, written down, that basically said, "Look, we have to have some government to run the country, and by "run it" we mean, deal with foreign countries on our behalf, defend the borders from invaders, build a reasonable system of immigration, build a navy, and generally make sure one state inside the country isn't screwing all the others, oh, and anything else you need to do to make those things possible, like run the capital city.
In the meantime, we, the people of this nation, will fulfill the other half of the "social contract" as follows. We will be upstanding citizens, for those that aren't, we'll build jails and throw them in it. We will take responsibility for our actions, both legally and civilly. And we'll do it all ourselves on a local level, city, county, state, whatever is most acceptable to us, the people. If you don't like that, well, tough, because we passed the Bill of Rights, and number 10 says you ca
You have every chance of convincing me of something -- if you can make a salient point. I chose the term "pre-marital" rather than "casual" because it was part of the point I'm trying to make. I went back and forth over which of those to choose, but I settled on "pre-marital" because it makes a better point from a discussion of morality, and that's what this is. You decry my moral choice to hide what you call "a hint of sex" from my children, while exposing them to "Violence, death, and gore."
I am my children's father. They will learn their morality from me and from their environment. When the environment disagrees with the moral choices I am trying to show them as "correct", and I can control that exposure, then I will act to shield them from that exposure when I can.
Clearly you missed my whole point. I can have frank and open discussions of sexuality with my son, however, what I'm complaining about is not the "sex" itself, it was the way it was presented.
I have spent time teaching my son that having sex is a major, life-changing decision. The repercussions of being sexually active are large and important. Were they to have shown a loving, caring, relationship, culminating in a physical relationship, I'd have had far less issue with it. What they chose to do, however, was to show, as acceptable and correct, what used to be called a "back-alley stand-up".
There was nothing there but the physical act of sex. It reduced both participants to nothing more than animal passions. That's what I find unacceptable and inappropriate. I can always turn on the Discovery Channel if I want to watch two animals with brains the size of walnuts participating in the reproductive act.
I have spent time teaching my son that physical love-making should be exactly that -- *LOVE* making. What I objected to in that scene was not the act, but the fact that it was *way out of line* because it was presented in such a way as to make the Lieutenant look like "the smart one" in a situation in which he showed extremely poor judgement. Broom closet sex is just about physical gratification. Do you think he (and her) are thinking about repercussions? By the time you reach Lieutenant in the Air Force, you most likely have done 4 years at the Academy where you are drilled with "I will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate anyone among us who does." (The AF Academy creed.) Now, if any airman walked in on those two, he's up on Court Martial, dishonorably discharged, and since it's with an enlisted personnel, he's probably looking at serving time as well. She's gone with a dishonorable discharge as well. That was never shown as the massive consequences. Nope, just a quick, consequence free bang in a closet.
And yes, he knows *exactly* why I fast-forwarded over the scene, *because I told him* -- and he agrees with me. Because he said so, and we talked about it. In fact, his response, when told why we were hanging over the "skip" button was, "Why'd they have to go and wreck a good show like "Stargate" by putting in stupid scenes that don't advance the story?"
In fact, since you seem so worried about my kids, can you explain to me why this scene was in the story? What did it advance? What dramatic tension did it create? How does it improve the characters? As far as I'm concerned, even though it's clear from the rest of the show (the scene where the Lieutenant asks "Chloie" (the Senator's daughter) to talk about her father) that we're supposed to view him as a deep, feeling, empathetic character. So, they are basically setting him up as a "hero" figure. Yet, then we're supposed to just accept he also likes having casual sex with women who are required to say "Yes Sir" to his every order. That's why fraternizing across ranks is such a bad thing. That's why we spent ten years watching Sam and O'Neill tiptoeing around each other. That's a fact of the military. Deal with it.
Ask me again when you have a 9 year old daughter, and a 15 year old son. One will ask what the two are doing, the other will fantasize about it for the next three nights.
As for the neck-wound scene, the daughter was out of the room, and the son got an explanation of carotid artery/jugular vein biology during that scene.
The "execution" scene was nothing of the sort, it's a demonstration of the logical meeting the emotional. He understands that. Heck, even the nine year old understands that. It's a dilemma. You can approach it from the emotional viewpoint of "No human can be allowed to die for us, they're too precious" or from the coldly logical, "Someone is going to die. To preserve the best chances for the rest of us, who is the least likely to be needed in the immediate future." Having to make hard decisions is a *great* lesson for young children, and I'm happy to have them learn it early.
In either case, they got rid of a Senator, so he's not only useless (and obnoxious to the point of being a detriment), but, given the recent activity of politicians, is arguably less than human as well. (That's satire, maybe I should point that out, since you missed the point of the scene.)
And threats of death show up in everything from G rated movies on up, or did you miss the part in Toy Story when a sadistic lunatic straps high explosives to a soldier and tears him into small, chunky pieces, clearly displayed on the screen. That got a G rating.
Sex isn't just about what's shown as far as "tameness", it's about the moral underpinning of the scene. A lieutenant is having pre-marital sex (moral turpitude) with an enlisted personnel (disregard of chain of command) while on duty (dereliction of duty) and ignoring commands from a superior (lack of respect) and is doing so in such a way as to objectify the woman (she's just a quick shag in the closet) and demonstrate, in the end, that she's just a diversion (grabs clothes/gun and walks out.)
There were so many problems with the deeper context of that scene as to make it ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
Guardrails? Guardrails!?! We don't need no stinking GUARDRAILS!
Seriously though. There aren't any. Well, there's a couple on the paved section (the first 7 miles) but none on the last 13 miles (the section the racers run.)
But does Mount Washington have an annual, scheduled race period where the road is closed to everyone except racers? The Pikes Peak Hill Climb is one of the oldest auto races in the world and has been held for close to 100 years.
You see, I'm having a party where I'll be serving soup.
It will be served in my wife's favorite dishware.
And my son will be serving it when I tell him to.
It will start during the daylight hours.
So I told all my friends to come over for a "Soup her bowl, Son - Day Party".
I was there at the time (as a consultant -- for one more month, before they cut all the consultants) and the employees were all furious. They basically quit even trying to get work done after Bernie cut the coffee. It still amazes me how shocked everyone was about how WorldCom was a steaming heap of ****, when everyone in the entire company knew that Bernie Ebbers was a crook and that the entire company was circling the bowl from the moment he took over.
I still remember our first meeting with a WorldCom group that did their network alarm tracking using an Access database and Excel. He was so proud of their system that handled 200,000 alerts a day.
I just looked at him and said, "Yesterday, we did twenty-two million alert and performance messages. It was a slow day."
It was like an elementary school flag football team trying to play a game in the NFL.
You've fallen for one of the classic Washington Beltway tricks. This chart is for "Discretionary Spending," in other words, the spending the Congress gets to decide on every year. The military budget is required, under the Constitution, to fall into this category. On the other hand, it represents less than 1/4 of the overall 2009 budget, which includes all the programs that are required, by law, to be automatically funded each year, including all of the social programs in the United States. If we take into account that the budget for 2008 was about $3.2T, and for 2009, will approach $4.5T, then we have an estimate that the entire discretionary spending (about $1T) is only going to represent about 22% of the total budget. If the Military is 60% of that, then it represents about 13.2% of the total budget.
So, maybe the 6.6% is wrong (although it's correct for direct Military spending, not including the items you added) but it's still not 60% like you claimed either.
Be careful when you read budgeting numbers from Washington, because they like to hide behind the discretionary term, while bemoaning the fact that they can't do anything about the "non-discretionary" budget items. Which is utterly untrue, of course.
...instrumental record...
Why do you discount the ice core data?
I think you missed the point. Direct measurement is all we can account for with 100% accuracy. Ice core data, while compelling, is not a scientific instrument. It was not designed to measure CO2 concentration. It does not have a gauge embedded in it that says, "280ppm". It has bubbles. We *assume* that those bubbles are pristine samples of the atmosphere at the time the ice was frozen. We *assume* that the bubble hasn't migrated, dissolved, or been concentrated by its time in the ice. We *assume* that because the record of the last 100 years is close to the instrumental record that we can safely extrapolate that relationship back 1000, 5000, or even 800,000 years. (Vostok ice cores)
What if it happens to be a property of ice, left for 150 years, to migrate CO2 into the ice crystal structure until it stabilizes the bubble at 280 ppm? Is it possible? I don't know. Can we do a lab experiment to prove it does or doesn't happen? Sure, but it will take 150 years to run. We assume that we know what will happen, but we have no hard experimental proof of it.
Over time, solid objects will migrate down through ice. Isn't it possible that bubbles would migrate up through the ice? How does this affect where we find the bubbles and their dating?
That's a whole lot of "assumes" to put our 100% faith in. Now, we can *assume* that the scientist took this into account, or we can ask for the data that shows they did. When they refuse to turn over said data and corrective algorithms, they create doubt. That's why this data dump is important. The emails seem to indicate that even the climate scientists have a lot of doubt about their data, and they worked hard to prevent releasing it or their methodologies.
That's why I said 100 years of instrumental records and discounted the ice core data.
I'll be looking forward to getting my checks then.
Hmm. Still waiting...
Still waiting....
Gee. I wonder why I'm not getting paid for being a skeptic of people with bad scientific procedure and policy?
Some of the data is for work that was published back in 1999. Published, peer reviewed, and referenced in dozens, even hundreds of other papers.
A decade ago.
Is that long enough after they're "done" with the data?
When one of the emails from Phil Jones (head of CRU) says, "I'd rather destroy all our data than give it to McIntyre," for a paper published five years ago, where's the scientific integrity in that?
When there's whole email chains about how to dodge Freedom of Information requests, where's the scientific integrity in that?
Say what you want about paranoia, but actually look at the situation, please.
This just in, Physiscists have no idea what causes gravity, Geologists can't tell from the shape of a planet what it's composed of, Astronomers don't know for certain how the Earth formed around the Sun.
You mistake the argument.
1. The Earth has warmed slightly - With solid records for only the last 150 years, (some of which may be questionable, see surfacestations.org) we don't know if this is unprecedented.
2. CO2 has risen since we've been measuring it. With only 100 odd years of instrumental record, we don't know if this is unprecedented.
3. Climate is hideously complex to model. We don't know what all the sources of CO2 are, nor where all the sinks are. Added to this is the intrinsicly chaotic form of weather in general.
4. We don't know what effect water, temperature, ice, etc. has on the total feedback of the system. It could be positive, it could be negative. We don't know. All the computer models are leaning positive (as heat goes up, heating goes up.) Recent studies are showing that it may be negative.
5. Arctic ice was declining in the early half of the decade. We don't know if this is unprecedented, as we only really have 30 years of records from satellites.
6. There is good evidence that a large part of the CO2 delta in the atmosphere comes from C14 poor sources. (Ancient carbon > 50,000 years old.) This could be from fossil fuels, or it could be from prehistoric sources such as melting permafrost. Again, this cannot be proven one way or the other.
Now, here's the leap you need to make (pick one):
1) CO2 increases from man are *CAUSING* the warming. (This is a hypothesis.)
2) CO2 increases in general are *CAUSED BY* warming (A lot of the proxy data for >150 years ago shows this.)
3) The warming is a natural process, but the CO2 has enhanced it to some extent. (This is arguably the most likely.)
4) The warming is a natural cycle, the CO2 increase has nothing, or very little to do with it. (It's a coincidence.)
Choose one of the above.
A physicist can't point at a some squiggle in a particle accelerator and say "that's the gravity particle" any more than a Pastafarian can point at the Great Noodly Appendage pushing down the apple on Newton's head and say, "That's proof of my theory." Gravity is a fact, the cause of gravity is a theory.
You're talking about an AGW bias, as if it were a fact. The equivalent "fact-bias" would be stating they have "a pro-thermometer bias." The idea that Anthropogenic CO2 is the sole cause of any warming is where the debate is.
Anthropogenic (man-made) global Warming
Medieval Warm Period (a period from about 850-1100 of extremely mild weather. Grapes grew in London vineyards, Orange trees grew in Berlin and modern climate theory says it never happened.)
Well, I think the big thing that this data-dump shows is that it's actually a small group of tightly knit e-mail connected individuals that are driving a whole lot of the AGW effort.
Someone else wrote that this is all Exxon Astroturfing going on to make us knock out Copenhagen. In other words, arguing that a global conspiracy of oil-company funded individuals, like a meterologist in California and a retired statistician are all on payroll along with hackers in Russia, and new posters on SlashDot, are all working to convince us of a global conspiracy to promote AGW... These people are somehow secretly communicating behind the scenes, transferring billions of dollars of off-the-books money to individuals, all without anyone being able to point to a money trail.
On the other side, we have three groups, CRU, Mann/RealClimate and GISS, who have been clearly communicating and using their supposedly "neutral" Web Site (RealClimate) to promote one-sided views of the science, and apparently "fudge" the data until it matches their theory. These people openly receive grants of hundreds of millions of dollars every year, and have access to governments, prime ministers, and corporations, all of whose funding depends on perpetuating and establishing AGW as *the* science.
So, you'd have to believe it was all a big plan to release data on a minor Russian FTP site, found by accident on a blog almost no one reads, and then forwarded to a blog that *is* read often, in an un-threaded discussion while the site owner is on a trip overseas. This well coordinated group then uses these actual emails (admitted as valid and real by Phil Jones, head of CRU) to somehow concoct a story that a small group of climate scientists are colluding to support a theory by ignoring the facts, by using their own words to that effect.
On the one hand, you have individuals scanning through, admittedly, purloined emails and saying, "Whoa! What's going on here." Opposite that, you have the post on RealClimate today saying, "Move along, nothing to see here!" Some of those emails involve apparent schemes to transfer US funds overseas to avoid taxation. That alone is "something to see," despite what RealClimate is saying. And that's ignoring whether the science was done according to any standards of ethics.
We're talking millions of dollars in budgets from publicly funded programs. If there's even a hint of malfeasance in these documents, then a serious investigation should be started. I don't care which side is the global conspiracy. Only one side is spending *my money* to perpetrate it. The oil companies can spend however many trillion dollars they want without it coming out of *my* pocket.
So, you're arguing that there's a global conspiracy of skeptics out there trying to convince us that there's a global conspiracy of AGW proponents out there.
And failing to see the irony in that statement.
Hey, I didn't say it made sense, although our reliance on satellite observation is far too high, I'm just saying that's the excuse.
Spoiler:
One of the early missions is recovering an advanced satellite encryption system from a Russian base to keep it from being reverse engineered.
Apparently this mission is too late, as, during the invasion, the Russians use this reverse engineered system to send false images to our satellites, convincing commanders that there's a massive invasion air-fleet approaching the West coast. In the mean time, they also spoof the satellite to hide the real invasion group hitting the east coast (in Virginia). Thus, the first warning is the commanders in Virginia screaming as missiles hit the base and troop transports start dropping Russian paratroopers (and apparently heavy armor) into the residential areas.
Go back to "CSI: Miami" where that crap actually works.
"Look, I can tease infinite information out of three 8 bit numbers!"
The image covers about 1/2 of 1 degree of the sky, or about the same size as the full moon. Given the 0.5 degrees of arc, the distance to galactic center (about 30,000 light years), I leave it as a simple math (trig) exercise to work out the extent of the photo in light years across.
Nah, no I don't. If we take the length of the triangle as 30,000 and the angle as 2 * 0.25 degrees ( to split it into two right triangles), then sin(0.25 deg) * 30,000 = 130.9 light years, times two, gives about a 262 light year wide image, which means each pixel at 1920x1200 covers a square of about 0.136 light years (1,286,631,860,000 kilometers) per side.
For comparison, that's about 8600 AU (Earth-Sun distance). The solar system to the Heliosheath (where the Voyager probes are) is about 100 AU. So each pixel is a square, 86 solar systems across.
Now that's a big pixel...
Sagittarius A* (the super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way) is located in the "white swirly thing" at the middle right of the image.
You forgot Reality C: There's over 3.2 Trillion barrels of known reserves around the world (1.5T of which are in the United States, 1T of which is in the Green River Oil Shales -- all of which is currently unaccessable only because we say it is [by government mandate]). Although some of this oil is more difficult to mine than it is in the middle east, where you can just about stick a pole in the ground and get oil bubbling up, as the price of oil increases, more of these reserves will be made available. As the price rises, some applications will become more cost effective to switch to other sources for power/raw materials/lubrication.
As each one of these applications turns away from oil, the price of oil will temporarily drop or stabilize. Eventually we'll either be 100% off oil, or at a level where it's sustainable for 1000's of years.
Oh wait, that's free market economics, and I forgot that our president has announced that "that doesn't work any more."
So, mandates, high taxes, and bans on exploration and new extraction will be the norm, the price of oil will skyrocket, people will be unable to adjust and will panic/starve/die. So we have scenario B, enforced by our "leaders" rather than a real crisis...
Sorry, that's Steve Landesberg, who did come up with the line, "Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is the better defense."
It's called a ménage à trois. And don't get the rest of the geeks all excited like that...
I dunno, reflective mylar? If only we could build a balloon that could reach the stunning altitude of 1 kilometer (that's about 3000 feet) and be large enough to hold up that cable (guessing around 1000 to 2000 pounds) and keep itself still...
Why, what a miraculous craft that would be!
That's 0.01 LOC's.
You're Welcome.
Wow, you sure threw a real haymaker at that straw-man. Remind me never to have another battle of wits of with you... or at least to let you write both sides of the conversation like you're trying to do here.
Look, I understand you feel some desire to be justified in your sad little part of the borders of reality, but you really need a few lessons here.
Number one, every child has parents, you may not understand this, since you seem to think that sleeping around has no consequences. Apparently your mommy and daddy, or your mommy and mommy, or your daddy and daddy, or your aunt, uncle, third cousin, or foster parent, whomever or whatever group of the above it was who raised you, never explained the whole birds and bees thing to you. However, at least until the last 50 years or so in America, the tradition has been that a man and a woman get together and have children through a physical act, which I won't go into here, since you seem to understand that part, at least given your desire, in previous writings, to have it displayed happily to every three year old in America.
Now, here's the part you don't understand. Traditionally, when that man and woman had a child, they took what is called, "Responsibility" for the raising of that child. In other words, as part of having a child, they accepted that it became part of their required actions, to raise that child so that they would become a healthy, and productive member of society. Now in Feudal Europe, that meant teaching the child to be just like you, so if you were a farmer, your child was a farmer, if you were a baker, your child was a baker, and if you were a blacksmith, well, then your child was a blacksmith. The system worked, in a manner of speaking, because it assured a steady stream of labor for most of the jobs available at the time.
The system, however, was wasteful, as the children do not have the same set of abilities as the parent. Perhaps one son make a lousy blacksmith, and one son couldn't bake bread that didn't taste like bricks. And let's not get started on the girls, since all they were good for was costing a dowry to marry off. In any case, a large part of the work force (Usually around the third generation) weren't exactly happy doing what granddad did just because that's the way it was.
Eventually this system failed due to lots of social pressures, plagues, and generally, the slow scientific improvement in knowledge and the wider dissemination of books and learning.
What replaced it were other systems, parliamentary democracy (although the "democracy" in a "House of Lords" is debatable), socialist systems, quasi-socialist states, and in one country, a Representative Republic. Now, this country was a mainly a bunch of ne'er-do-well's that had been expunged from the good folk of Europe and who eventually got so surly, they kicked out their own, rightful government, in order to be "free" and establish that Republic.
Now, since they were all a bunch of people who couldn't listen to authority, were ornery, and resented a large, overarching government, they then laid out a system, written down, that basically said, "Look, we have to have some government to run the country, and by "run it" we mean, deal with foreign countries on our behalf, defend the borders from invaders, build a reasonable system of immigration, build a navy, and generally make sure one state inside the country isn't screwing all the others, oh, and anything else you need to do to make those things possible, like run the capital city.
In the meantime, we, the people of this nation, will fulfill the other half of the "social contract" as follows. We will be upstanding citizens, for those that aren't, we'll build jails and throw them in it. We will take responsibility for our actions, both legally and civilly. And we'll do it all ourselves on a local level, city, county, state, whatever is most acceptable to us, the people. If you don't like that, well, tough, because we passed the Bill of Rights, and number 10 says you ca
You have every chance of convincing me of something -- if you can make a salient point. I chose the term "pre-marital" rather than "casual" because it was part of the point I'm trying to make. I went back and forth over which of those to choose, but I settled on "pre-marital" because it makes a better point from a discussion of morality, and that's what this is. You decry my moral choice to hide what you call "a hint of sex" from my children, while exposing them to "Violence, death, and gore."
I am my children's father. They will learn their morality from me and from their environment. When the environment disagrees with the moral choices I am trying to show them as "correct", and I can control that exposure, then I will act to shield them from that exposure when I can.
Clearly you missed my whole point. I can have frank and open discussions of sexuality with my son, however, what I'm complaining about is not the "sex" itself, it was the way it was presented.
I have spent time teaching my son that having sex is a major, life-changing decision. The repercussions of being sexually active are large and important. Were they to have shown a loving, caring, relationship, culminating in a physical relationship, I'd have had far less issue with it. What they chose to do, however, was to show, as acceptable and correct, what used to be called a "back-alley stand-up".
There was nothing there but the physical act of sex. It reduced both participants to nothing more than animal passions. That's what I find unacceptable and inappropriate. I can always turn on the Discovery Channel if I want to watch two animals with brains the size of walnuts participating in the reproductive act.
I have spent time teaching my son that physical love-making should be exactly that -- *LOVE* making. What I objected to in that scene was not the act, but the fact that it was *way out of line* because it was presented in such a way as to make the Lieutenant look like "the smart one" in a situation in which he showed extremely poor judgement. Broom closet sex is just about physical gratification. Do you think he (and her) are thinking about repercussions? By the time you reach Lieutenant in the Air Force, you most likely have done 4 years at the Academy where you are drilled with "I will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate anyone among us who does." (The AF Academy creed.) Now, if any airman walked in on those two, he's up on Court Martial, dishonorably discharged, and since it's with an enlisted personnel, he's probably looking at serving time as well. She's gone with a dishonorable discharge as well. That was never shown as the massive consequences. Nope, just a quick, consequence free bang in a closet.
And yes, he knows *exactly* why I fast-forwarded over the scene, *because I told him* -- and he agrees with me. Because he said so, and we talked about it. In fact, his response, when told why we were hanging over the "skip" button was, "Why'd they have to go and wreck a good show like "Stargate" by putting in stupid scenes that don't advance the story?"
In fact, since you seem so worried about my kids, can you explain to me why this scene was in the story? What did it advance? What dramatic tension did it create? How does it improve the characters? As far as I'm concerned, even though it's clear from the rest of the show (the scene where the Lieutenant asks "Chloie" (the Senator's daughter) to talk about her father) that we're supposed to view him as a deep, feeling, empathetic character. So, they are basically setting him up as a "hero" figure. Yet, then we're supposed to just accept he also likes having casual sex with women who are required to say "Yes Sir" to his every order. That's why fraternizing across ranks is such a bad thing. That's why we spent ten years watching Sam and O'Neill tiptoeing around each other. That's a fact of the military. Deal with it.
Ask me again when you have a 9 year old daughter, and a 15 year old son. One will ask what the two are doing, the other will fantasize about it for the next three nights.
As for the neck-wound scene, the daughter was out of the room, and the son got an explanation of carotid artery/jugular vein biology during that scene.
The "execution" scene was nothing of the sort, it's a demonstration of the logical meeting the emotional. He understands that. Heck, even the nine year old understands that. It's a dilemma. You can approach it from the emotional viewpoint of "No human can be allowed to die for us, they're too precious" or from the coldly logical, "Someone is going to die. To preserve the best chances for the rest of us, who is the least likely to be needed in the immediate future." Having to make hard decisions is a *great* lesson for young children, and I'm happy to have them learn it early.
In either case, they got rid of a Senator, so he's not only useless (and obnoxious to the point of being a detriment), but, given the recent activity of politicians, is arguably less than human as well. (That's satire, maybe I should point that out, since you missed the point of the scene.)
And threats of death show up in everything from G rated movies on up, or did you miss the part in Toy Story when a sadistic lunatic straps high explosives to a soldier and tears him into small, chunky pieces, clearly displayed on the screen. That got a G rating.
Sex isn't just about what's shown as far as "tameness", it's about the moral underpinning of the scene. A lieutenant is having pre-marital sex (moral turpitude) with an enlisted personnel (disregard of chain of command) while on duty (dereliction of duty) and ignoring commands from a superior (lack of respect) and is doing so in such a way as to objectify the woman (she's just a quick shag in the closet) and demonstrate, in the end, that she's just a diversion (grabs clothes/gun and walks out.)
There were so many problems with the deeper context of that scene as to make it ridiculous.