The problem with prions, as I understand it, is that they can't be targeted by the autoimmune system because they can't be bonded to; And that is because of the blood-brain barrier.
Prions are dangerous mainly because proteins are more stable than nucleic acids, so sterilization techniques that are adequate against viruses and bacteria aren't effective against prion-based diseases like BSE and CJD.
Normal prions are folded proteins that self-terminate. That is, they end after a certain number of repeats. But abnormal ones don't ever stop growing -- and they occasionally break apart, but they keep folding forever.
Prions are proteins that have mis-folded. They stop folding on the same microsecond timescale as normal proteins, but most develop "amyloid folds" that (as you say) causes them to build up like trash in the body.
Prions certainly stop growing. Also, a big problem is that they form structures that are very stable. You seem to be describing cancer, which is effectively immortal, lacks the usual constraints on mitosis frequency, and breaks apart (metastasizes) to spread throughout the body.
A prion's actual method of infection is that the mis-folded protein induces other correctly-folded proteins in its vicinity to change to the mis-folded state.
Fascinating question. Different types of organisms need to be analyzed differently. Individuals like us can be measured one at a time, but hive minds need to be analyzed as a whole, like you say.
An AC brought up a similar point. As I said to him, such a fumbled first contact could have unfortunate consequences. If what you're describing happens, I'm hoping that other humans would rescue it rather than saying "no human DNA, no rights."
And if sending spam makes it really happy, is it still a slave?
As always, it depends on the level of sapience in question. If the AI in question has human-equivalent sapience then yes, it is. Just like a hostage with Stockholm syndrome is still a hostage.
However, the theory is that strong AI wouldn't exist without the spammers to create them
That premise seems very unlikely to me. They might speed up the development of strong AI, but they're not that critical.
Remember that most contacts between cultures of varying technological development end badly for the less-developed culture. Then remember that these weren't even disputes across species lines-- except perhaps for our genocide of the Neanderthals. But forget about mere inter-species communication barriers. The first contact with strong AI will need to bridge the larger chasm between evolved biological intelligences and designed silicon/photon/whatever intelligences. It's likely to be far more treacherous than any historical examples that are remotely comparable.
Spammers are parasites who abuse our communication technology to prey on the gullible. They should not be the first representatives of humanity in such a first contact.
We keep pushing the requirements for spam further and further up the computational totem pole (or Chomsky hierarchy, if you will) and you get closer and closer to a point where spammers are going to have to create strong AI to write spam. If they fail, we don't have spammers anymore and if they win, well we have spam, but we also have strong AI! Win-win, I say.
I agree with nearly everything you've said, but I don't consider the invention of strong AI by spammers to be a "win". Previously, I've argued that individual rights aren't related to human genetics, but rather to the organism's sapience. In other words, roaches have more rights than yeast cells (but not much more), cats have more rights than roaches, cetaceans/hominids/humans/"strong AI" have more rights than cats.
Allowing spammers to create beings who should be treated as citizens but are actually used as slave labor is wrong. Note that I'm specifically referring to strong AI; weak AI wouldn't qualify as sapient under most definitions.
Yes, this is an embarrassing mistake on the part of working group 2 of the IPCC. When news of this story broke, I wondered why I'd never noticed these ludicrous statements before. Then I realized that the mistake wasn't in the report from working group 1, which is all I'd ever bothered to read. Here's what each working group does:
The IPCC Working Group I (WG I) assesses the physical scientific aspects of the climate system and climate change.
The main topics assessed by WG I include: changes in greenhouse gases and aerosols in the atmosphere; observed changes in air, land and ocean temperatures, rainfall, glaciers and ice sheets, oceans and sea level; historical and paleoclimatic perspective on climate change; biogeochemistry, carbon cycle, gases and aerosols; satellite data and other data; climate models; climate projections, causes and attribution of climate change.
The IPCC Working Group II (WG II) assesses the vulnerability of socio-economic and natural systems to climate change, negative and positive consequences of climate change, and options for adapting to it.
It also takes into consideration the inter-relationship between vulnerability, adaptation and sustainable development. The assessed information is considered by sectors (water resources; ecosystems; food & forests; coastal systems; industry; human health) and regions (Africa; Asia; Australia & New Zealand; Europe; Latin America; North America; Polar Regions; Small Islands).
The wild claim that "glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world", the 2350/2035 mistake, confusion of Himalayan glacier area with the worldwide total, and reliance on non-peer-reviewed source material all occurred in a single paragraph(!) in the WG2 report (section 10.6.2, paragraph 2). Statements in the WG1 report, on the other hand, accurately reflect conclusions in the peer-reviewed literature.
Due to my obsession with the physical science, I'd never even realized that other working group reports existed. Perhaps other scientists reacted in a similar fashion, which might be why such an absurd cluster of errors went undetected for so long...
it's a worry about the future of human civilization.
I mean, come on, is it really?
Just to clarify, I'm saying we have a choice between making the shift to a carbon neutral civilization now or waiting until the last possible moment. The more we continue to stagnate, the less prosperous our future will be. Extinction of the human race is unlikely, but our civilization may be unrecognizable after some of the worst case scenarios.
I thought they quantified uncertainty in a very nuanced, open manner.
The scale of the damages is, as you say, still up for debate. It may well be comparable to a global dustbowl, which by itself would be worse than the 1930s version that was specific to north America. But it could also be worse if we've underestimated the positive feedback effects at the timescale from now until 2100 in the same way we're underestimating the longer-period positive feedback effects of the Milankovitch glaciation cycles.
And you're right, the human race is good at adapting. I think the evidence available is sufficient that we need to start adapting by spurring a new industrial revolution (probably nuclear-based) to help wean ourselves from a (limited) fuel that props up oppressive foreign regimes.
Oops again! Replace "shifts the effective radiating layer of the planet to a lower altitude" with "shifts the effective radiating layer of the planet to a higher altitude". Because the temperature in the troposphere is lower at higher altitudes, this shift results in less IR radiation emitted to warm the stratosphere.
Oops. Change "decreasing resolution" to "increasing resolution". What I meant to describe was the situation in which the GCM cells get smaller, but I was thinking about "decreasing" the size of those boxes.
And if you'd read the link, you'd have seen that I was talking about the same logarithmic dependence of global temperature on CO2 concentration. It's old news... like 50 years old. All modern GCMs account for this behavior, and have for many decades.
There is a calculation difference of nearly a degree in those climate models, whereas the temperature itself has varied significantly less than that. Do these models really inspire you to trust them? They are not very convincing to me at all.
My point in emphasizing the future projections was to stress that this uncertainty doesn't grow over time (aside from uncertainties as to which emissions scenario we adopt.) But even the "large" uncertainties in current GCMs are small enough to show that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are responsible for the warming since 1970. Even though the two curves have wide error bars, they don't overlap. The entire point of that graph you're fixated on is that the observed temperatures stay within the IPCC's error bars. You couldn't even see the prediction for the temperatures without human greenhouse gas emissions on that plot (as in the Meehl 2004 plot), because they'd be far below it.
Exactly. "We can't explain it any other way." This is about the weakest line of logic ever.
Huh? I just showed you how the greenhouse warming model explains the current observations, has been validated in multiple independent ways, and has no serious competition. That's exactly the same thing I say about evolution, but I gave up trying to explain that to creationists. Perhaps I should give up here for similar reasons?
I'm going to say, your writing style makes me feel like you spend a lot of your time on realclimate.org. I strongly suggest instead that you look at the ipcc report [www.ipcc.ch] (the actual report, not just the summary which a lot of people don't feel represents the report). realclimate.org has a kind of propaganda-ish feel, and the IPCC report covers tons and tons of ground. If you are an information junkie, that is where you should go. It's the good stuff.
Holy crap! You're telling me to look at the source which- in that very article- I've referenced over and over and over and over? Are you serious? Most of the graphs in the article that you were just talking about are from the AR4 report. I've only deviated from it with respect to sea level increase, because their information is out of date and too conservative based on data collected since 2007.
Had it ever occurred to you that maybe I spend most of my time studying the climate as a professional physicist, and that I'm not just regurgitating bullshit I read on the internet?
You've probably already seen the argument I made to the other guy, but I feel I should make it here, too: look at this graph. There is a calculation difference of nearly a degree in those climate models, whereas the temperature itself has varied significantly less than that. Do these models really inspire you to trust them? They are not very convincing to me at all.
How ironic. Maybe you should stop looking at a single realclimate.org graph and consider the AR4 scenarios from the IPCC report. (Yeah, the same ones I linked in my article months ago.) Notice that the uncertainty for each scenario is wide, but the error bars for different emissions scenarios don't overlap. The scenarios are referenced in the second column of page 755 of chapter 10 of the AR4 report.
These uncertainties are estimated using procedures described on pages 805-809, in section 8.5.4: "Sampling Uncertainty and Estimating Probabilities". Those pages describe the role of multi-model ensembles and perturbed physics (i.e. perturbed parameters) ensembles in evaluating the uncertainty of climate projections.
And, yes, I'm impressed by the careful job they've done. The methods they're using to validate the models are ingenious. The error bars don't have to be infinitesimal; just smaller than the difference between emissions scenarios. And they are.
What abrupt climate change? The only thing you mention before this is a modest rise in sea level 90 years from now. 90 years is not an abrupt climate change.
I've repeatedly stressed that atmospheric CO2 has increased 35x faster than at any point in the last half million years, and as a result the global average temperature (averaged over a period of at least several years) is increasing at a rate that's probably faster than at any point in the last 1000 years.
I've defined "abrupt climate change" in a popup over the words at the beginning of the article: A large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems.
If precipitation patterns are that hard to predict climate must be much harder to do
It must be? No, in fact the global temperature averaged over ~15 years (i.e. climate) is easier to predict than changes to the jet streams, ocean currents, local moisture, etc which would be needed to predict exactly where precipaitation would shift. Everything I've seen in the peer-reviewed scientific journals indicate that our precipitation predictions are less robust than the predictions of the global temperature averaged over ~15 years.
one of the fundamental physical principles of atmospheric CO2 is that each successive doubling of CO2 has a cumulatively smaller effect on temperature
Can you give me a respectable citation on that?
I'm just guessing here, but it sounds like he's repeating the "CO2 is saturated" argument that seems to be popular these days. It's old news, of course, integrated into GCMs in the 1950s.
This paper is evidence of one thing only, that the mesh used in the (DOE) PCM is far too course ( The resolution of the atmosphere is T42, or roughly 2.8 x 2.8 degree;, with 18 levels in the vertical. Resolution in the ocean is roughly.75 x.75 degree down to a.5 x.5; in the equatorial Tropics, with 32 levels.)
The effect of decreasing the resolution of the models has been extensively studied. It provides a modest increase in model "skill" but runs enormously slower. They've chosen instead to run at a course resolution but create an ensemble of many runs which actually works better than decreasing the resolution.
What is missing from all this pseudo-science is fact: The equations an mathematical set up of the model
Notice in the first sentence of the first paragraph of section 2 that they used the DOE PCM described in Washington et al (2000).
The computer code to implement the model. See some of the nonsense from CRU.
Some of the GCMs have publicly available code, which is indexed here.
He was just trying to help you understand how climate models work. I'll repeat: global circulation models allow for short-term variability due to weather. That's the whole point of taking an ensemble (see chapter 8) with varying initial conditions and parameterizations. For example, here are individual realizations of a climate model. Notice that the short-term fluctuations are severe and unpredictable, but the long term trend is robust and predictable.
The point is that the leaders of the world who are actively promoting their climate change agenda are doing so to cash in on their own pet projects.
You can spend all your time worrying about politicians if you want. Personally, I think they're all morons, especially people like Al Gore who don't endorse nuclear power. So I don't worry about them. I only worry about the science. That's what I consider "the point." But if you're not interested in the scientific evidence then we have nothing to talk about. Good day.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the correction and all the additional info.
I try. ;)
For what it's worth, your post should be modded interesting at the very least, if only to annoy that AC stalker you seem to have acquired.
Prions are dangerous mainly because proteins are more stable than nucleic acids, so sterilization techniques that are adequate against viruses and bacteria aren't effective against prion-based diseases like BSE and CJD.
Prions are proteins that have mis-folded. They stop folding on the same microsecond timescale as normal proteins, but most develop "amyloid folds" that (as you say) causes them to build up like trash in the body.
Prions certainly stop growing. Also, a big problem is that they form structures that are very stable. You seem to be describing cancer, which is effectively immortal, lacks the usual constraints on mitosis frequency, and breaks apart (metastasizes) to spread throughout the body.
A prion's actual method of infection is that the mis-folded protein induces other correctly-folded proteins in its vicinity to change to the mis-folded state.
Fascinating question. Different types of organisms need to be analyzed differently. Individuals like us can be measured one at a time, but hive minds need to be analyzed as a whole, like you say.
An AC brought up a similar point. As I said to him, such a fumbled first contact could have unfortunate consequences. If what you're describing happens, I'm hoping that other humans would rescue it rather than saying "no human DNA, no rights."
As always, it depends on the level of sapience in question. If the AI in question has human-equivalent sapience then yes, it is. Just like a hostage with Stockholm syndrome is still a hostage.
That premise seems very unlikely to me. They might speed up the development of strong AI, but they're not that critical.
Remember that most contacts between cultures of varying technological development end badly for the less-developed culture. Then remember that these weren't even disputes across species lines-- except perhaps for our genocide of the Neanderthals. But forget about mere inter-species communication barriers. The first contact with strong AI will need to bridge the larger chasm between evolved biological intelligences and designed silicon/photon/whatever intelligences. It's likely to be far more treacherous than any historical examples that are remotely comparable.
Spammers are parasites who abuse our communication technology to prey on the gullible. They should not be the first representatives of humanity in such a first contact.
I agree with nearly everything you've said, but I don't consider the invention of strong AI by spammers to be a "win". Previously, I've argued that individual rights aren't related to human genetics, but rather to the organism's sapience. In other words, roaches have more rights than yeast cells (but not much more), cats have more rights than roaches, cetaceans/hominids/humans/"strong AI" have more rights than cats.
Allowing spammers to create beings who should be treated as citizens but are actually used as slave labor is wrong. Note that I'm specifically referring to strong AI; weak AI wouldn't qualify as sapient under most definitions.
Yes, this is an embarrassing mistake on the part of working group 2 of the IPCC. When news of this story broke, I wondered why I'd never noticed these ludicrous statements before. Then I realized that the mistake wasn't in the report from working group 1, which is all I'd ever bothered to read. Here's what each working group does:
The wild claim that "glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world", the 2350/2035 mistake, confusion of Himalayan glacier area with the worldwide total, and reliance on non-peer-reviewed source material all occurred in a single paragraph(!) in the WG2 report (section 10.6.2, paragraph 2). Statements in the WG1 report, on the other hand, accurately reflect conclusions in the peer-reviewed literature.
Due to my obsession with the physical science, I'd never even realized that other working group reports existed. Perhaps other scientists reacted in a similar fashion, which might be why such an absurd cluster of errors went undetected for so long...
Just to clarify, I'm saying we have a choice between making the shift to a carbon neutral civilization now or waiting until the last possible moment. The more we continue to stagnate, the less prosperous our future will be. Extinction of the human race is unlikely, but our civilization may be unrecognizable after some of the worst case scenarios.
I thought they quantified uncertainty in a very nuanced, open manner.
The scale of the damages is, as you say, still up for debate. It may well be comparable to a global dustbowl, which by itself would be worse than the 1930s version that was specific to north America. But it could also be worse if we've underestimated the positive feedback effects at the timescale from now until 2100 in the same way we're underestimating the longer-period positive feedback effects of the Milankovitch glaciation cycles.
And you're right, the human race is good at adapting. I think the evidence available is sufficient that we need to start adapting by spurring a new industrial revolution (probably nuclear-based) to help wean ourselves from a (limited) fuel that props up oppressive foreign regimes.
Oops again! Replace "shifts the effective radiating layer of the planet to a lower altitude" with "shifts the effective radiating layer of the planet to a higher altitude". Because the temperature in the troposphere is lower at higher altitudes, this shift results in less IR radiation emitted to warm the stratosphere.
Oops. Change "decreasing resolution" to "increasing resolution". What I meant to describe was the situation in which the GCM cells get smaller, but I was thinking about "decreasing" the size of those boxes.
Oops. Replace "long-term feedback effects" with "long-term positive feedback effects".
And if you'd read the link, you'd have seen that I was talking about the same logarithmic dependence of global temperature on CO2 concentration. It's old news... like 50 years old. All modern GCMs account for this behavior, and have for many decades.
Oops. Change section 8.5.4 to 10.5.4.
My point in emphasizing the future projections was to stress that this uncertainty doesn't grow over time (aside from uncertainties as to which emissions scenario we adopt.) But even the "large" uncertainties in current GCMs are small enough to show that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are responsible for the warming since 1970. Even though the two curves have wide error bars, they don't overlap. The entire point of that graph you're fixated on is that the observed temperatures stay within the IPCC's error bars. You couldn't even see the prediction for the temperatures without human greenhouse gas emissions on that plot (as in the Meehl 2004 plot), because they'd be far below it.
Slowly bangs head against nearest wall...
Huh? I just showed you how the greenhouse warming model explains the current observations, has been validated in multiple independent ways, and has no serious competition. That's exactly the same thing I say about evolution, but I gave up trying to explain that to creationists. Perhaps I should give up here for similar reasons?
Holy crap! You're telling me to look at the source which- in that very article- I've referenced over and over and over and over? Are you serious? Most of the graphs in the article that you were just talking about are from the AR4 report. I've only deviated from it with respect to sea level increase, because their information is out of date and too conservative based on data collected since 2007.
Had it ever occurred to you that maybe I spend most of my time studying the climate as a professional physicist, and that I'm not just regurgitating bullshit I read on the internet?
How ironic. Maybe you should stop looking at a single realclimate.org graph and consider the AR4 scenarios from the IPCC report. (Yeah, the same ones I linked in my article months ago.) Notice that the uncertainty for each scenario is wide, but the error bars for different emissions scenarios don't overlap. The scenarios are referenced in the second column of page 755 of chapter 10 of the AR4 report.
These uncertainties are estimated using procedures described on pages 805-809, in section 8.5.4: "Sampling Uncertainty and Estimating Probabilities". Those pages describe the role of multi-model ensembles and perturbed physics (i.e. perturbed parameters) ensembles in evaluating the uncertainty of climate projections.
And, yes, I'm impressed by the careful job they've done. The methods they're using to validate the models are ingenious. The error bars don't have to be infinitesimal; just smaller than the difference between emissions scenarios. And they are.
I've repeatedly stressed that atmospheric CO2 has increased 35x faster than at any point in the last half million years, and as a result the global average temperature (averaged over a period of at least several years) is increasing at a rate that's probably faster than at any point in the last 1000 years.
I've defined "abrupt climate change" in a popup over the words at the beginning of the article: A large-scale change in the climate system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for at least a few decades, and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems.
It must be? No, in fact the global temperature averaged over ~15 years (i.e. climate) is easier to predict than changes to the jet streams, ocean currents, local moisture, etc which would be needed to predict exactly where precipaitation would shift. Everything I've seen in the peer-reviewed scientific journals indicate that our precipitation predictions are less robust than the predictions of the global temperature averaged over ~15 years.
I'm just guessing here, but it sounds like he's repeating the "CO2 is saturated" argument that seems to be popular these days. It's old news, of course, integrated into GCMs in the 1950s.
The effect of decreasing the resolution of the models has been extensively studied. It provides a modest increase in model "skill" but runs enormously slower. They've chosen instead to run at a course resolution but create an ensemble of many runs which actually works better than decreasing the resolution.
Notice in the first sentence of the first paragraph of section 2 that they used the DOE PCM described in Washington et al (2000).
Some of the GCMs have publicly available code, which is indexed here.
He was just trying to help you understand how climate models work. I'll repeat: global circulation models allow for short-term variability due to weather. That's the whole point of taking an ensemble (see chapter 8) with varying initial conditions and parameterizations. For example, here are individual realizations of a climate model. Notice that the short-term fluctuations are severe and unpredictable, but the long term trend is robust and predictable.
You can spend all your time worrying about politicians if you want. Personally, I think they're all morons, especially people like Al Gore who don't endorse nuclear power. So I don't worry about them. I only worry about the science. That's what I consider "the point." But if you're not interested in the scientific evidence then we have nothing to talk about. Good day.