70% of all vertebrate species died in under a million years, leaving fungi dominant. Something of a mass extinction event, eh? (In fact, Earth's worst mass extinction event.) Observe the big temperature spike at PETM. (Top right corner)
Should we be surprised that the slashdot summary exaggerates reality somewhat? But also, there are numerous errors with the Reuters article. e.g.
At the moment, the Earth is at the beginning of a cycle
What the hell does that mean? The whole point of a cycle is that every point in the cycle is a 'beginning'. Roll forward a few million and we get the same thing again. Much better to read the original Nature article.
Firstly, we are talking local effects here - the study involved specifically focused on a variety of spanish rodents. Previous studies collating data globally did not observe this effect. So this is a different thing from global warming - more of a shifting around of environments than a large scale global change. Moreover, this oscillation is fairly measurable, and predictable, and indeed well understood (that's why we can spot that the extinctions were caused by the oscillations), so it is simply wrong to blame GW on this.
Some have wondered whether previous studies failed to spot die-offs associated with Milankovitch-linked oscillations because they pooled data from different parts of the globe. "People look at it from a whole bunch of different spatial and temporal scales," says Barnosky. "They may lump together, say, Oregon and southern Utah, where climate changes might be different."
The fact is, the small scale nature of this study gives us little clue as to how significant this effect is.
Donald Prothero, of Occidental College Los Angeles, says that the fossil record used by van Dam is extraordinary, but questions how applicable his results will be to species other than rodents. "It's okay as far as it goes," says Prothero. "But I wouldn't necessarily extend the applications too far."
There is very little reason for alarmism on the back of a single paper about mice.
How is it a "good light" to make games in which Muslims are presented as violent commandos... the only difference being that they are the "first person" in the shooter and not the armed enemies for once?
I think you missed the (unintentional) irony. The fact that doesn't seem to have been mentioned is that Night of Bush's Capturing is not an original game. It's a mod for an US game, 'Quest for Saddam', where players playing US marines (with oddly Bush-like skins) mow down muslim soldiers and bin-laden lookalikes and drink coke in an attack on Iraq, culminating in fighting Saddam on the final map. The Islamist version of the game does not even change the levels - the game is completely the same with only the skins changed, e.g. swapping the player character's skin with the generic enemy terrorist skin.
That's a bit of a cheat. Hamas, horrible though they are, oppose (to various degrees) the existence of Israel, not the existence of Israelis - in short, they oppose the existence of a state including Jerusalem under an exclusively Jewish religion. It's a harsh position, but falls way short of gas chambers.
Er, that's from the Iranian president. I'm not sure what relevance this has to the Palestine situation.
Don't you have the faintest suspicion that you are creating something of a Frankenstein monster by joining all unsavoury aspects of the muslim 'side' into one cherry picked beast?
Indeed, I'm a firefox fan, but it's clear from this that IE7 did perform very impressively in the test. Of course, the problem is that he's testing it with spyware and adware and stuff that were not designed for IE7 (somewhat akin to running windows viruses in Wine...), so it is likely that over time, things will get worse, not better - in which case, the question has to be asked whether Microsoft can keep up the pace of updates.
But for now, this article is a big thumbs up for the MS devs.
Maybe I've been watching TV too much, but surely an obvious alternative is that another nation/private body did the hack, and dropped evidence to implicate China? Given that the government has been hacked once, all kinds of places would be on alert that security is weak, and would give it a go themselves. Plenty of motive and opportunity in place. What China has to gain from this hacking pales relative to what a competitor would have to gain from the increase of mistrust between two trading allies.
This is getting kinda off topic, but the up-market newspaper selection in the UK consists of the Daily Telegraph/Sunday Telegraph (right wing), the Times/Sunday Times (centre, with slight right wing slant), and the Guardian/Observer. (left wing, but less left than the Telegraph is right)
Life, as we know, mutates, and any signal you try to send with it quickly runs out. And mass producing such organisms and sending them out into space is *not* cheap, especially not relative to the alternative of sending out EM signals. (How are you going to get the momentum changes to send these things certain places?) The real killer is that it's ridiculously slow.
And such spores will also fade in the inverse square ratio - in general, anything that sprays out in an arc around an object must do so. The only way to get out of the inverse square law is either to use coherent sources like lasers, which of course only works if you know what you are shooting at, or to use some sort of self-replicating robotic message. Biology, being based on messy chemistry, just isn't good enough.
While I can make no guesses as to the intent of the submitter, the article in question looks legit - it refers to a real future article in Physics Review E, which is a pretty well recognised peer reviewed journal dealing with Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter physics.
Oh come on, clearly text adventures/interactive fiction fit all three. Not for sale anywhere, disproportionately academic base, and, well, I can look down on you if you wish...
Yes, it should be no problem to find that on the internet, as everybody was putting their articles on the internet back in the mid '70s.
Is your position then that no science journal has *ever* decided to keep online archives of articles before the 1970s? Doesn't that position seem rather tenuous to you?
Are there any articles out there from the '70s done by peer reviewed scientists debunking the New Ice Age Theory? There were from the 1980s - when we discovered global warming.
My impression is that back in the 1970s that was a great deal of uncertainty, in particular because of the lack of sophisticated computer modelling, and satellite based measurement etc that we have today. They couldn't debunk Ice Age, because they didn't have enough data, so they prudently remained silent until data made things clear - GW.
They don't have to admit that they are wrong in this case (certainly, scientists have been wrong in the past, of course), because they weren't wrong. What they did back then was decide that they could not decide either way back then with any stronger certainty than that of a guess, and in many peer reviewed articles, they say exactly that.
"Having presented evidence that major changes in past climate were associated with variations in the geometry of the earth's orbit, we should be able to predict the trend of future climate. Such forecasts must be qualified in two ways. First, they apply only to the natural component of future climatic trends - and not to anthropogenic effects such as those due to the burning of fossil fuels. Second, they describe only the long-term trends, because they are linked to orbital variations with periods of 20,000 years and longer. Climatic oscillations at higher frequencies are not predicted."
1. "American Scientist is a general-interest, nonrefereed science magazine". Still isn't peer reviewed.
And what's more, it says "Solanki and colleague Natalie A. Krivova attempted to answer that question in 2003, when they published a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research titled "Can solar variability explain global warming since 1970?" Their reckoning revealed that the Sun is responsible for less than 30 percent of the rise in surface temperature experienced since that time."
2. Also isn't peer reviewed. In fact, the two above are both editorials interpreting a number of actual published articles - in particular Solanki, which concluded no significant solar effect.
Sure, there may well be studies confirming that X has happened with the sun, but they aren't saying anything about the GW attribution question.
3. This certainly isn't peer reviewed. In fact, this article is by CEI, which was until recently directly funded by the oil companies. How much can we trust this criticism? Why haven't these criticism gone through official channels, such as comments submitted to the journal? Let's avoid these subjective issues and note that once again, we have another peer reviewed support of GW, and non-peer reviewed criticism. GGGP's assertion is still wrong.
4. This is totally unrelated to GW. First, we are referring to ice ages, which GW is not about. Second, the timescale we are talking about is 0.5 billion years, and later 'hundreds of thousands or millions of years'. This is astronomical timescales, not even geological timescales. In any case, there is no statement at all within the study itself about whether current GW is human caused or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, why do people like you just draw random assertions out of a hat and pretend that's the divine truth. Let's actually look at the science, eh?
i nction_event
M yr_Climate_Change.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian-Triassic_ext
70% of all vertebrate species died in under a million years, leaving fungi dominant. Something of a mass extinction event, eh? (In fact, Earth's worst mass extinction event.) Observe the big temperature spike at PETM. (Top right corner)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1b/65_
Thank you and goodnight.
What the hell does that mean? The whole point of a cycle is that every point in the cycle is a 'beginning'. Roll forward a few million and we get the same thing again. Much better to read the original Nature article.
http://www.nature.com/news/2006/061009/full/06100
Firstly, we are talking local effects here - the study involved specifically focused on a variety of spanish rodents. Previous studies collating data globally did not observe this effect. So this is a different thing from global warming - more of a shifting around of environments than a large scale global change. Moreover, this oscillation is fairly measurable, and predictable, and indeed well understood (that's why we can spot that the extinctions were caused by the oscillations), so it is simply wrong to blame GW on this.
The fact is, the small scale nature of this study gives us little clue as to how significant this effect is.
There is very little reason for alarmism on the back of a single paper about mice.
Er, oops. Just read the submission title and took it literally.
Come on, it's freaking obvious. What else can it be?
Nah. I think it's not so much choosing the right solution, than it is choosing the right problem.
I'm afraid she's in another castle.
According to whom? Who did the poll on Palestinian perceptions of history?
How is it a "good light" to make games in which Muslims are presented as violent commandos... the only difference being that they are the "first person" in the shooter and not the armed enemies for once?
I think you missed the (unintentional) irony. The fact that doesn't seem to have been mentioned is that Night of Bush's Capturing is not an original game. It's a mod for an US game, 'Quest for Saddam', where players playing US marines (with oddly Bush-like skins) mow down muslim soldiers and bin-laden lookalikes and drink coke in an attack on Iraq, culminating in fighting Saddam on the final map. The Islamist version of the game does not even change the levels - the game is completely the same with only the skins changed, e.g. swapping the player character's skin with the generic enemy terrorist skin.
http://www.gameology.org/node/1269
The game, while not rather culturally edifying, is in fact the very definition of a mirrored viewpoint.
That's a bit of a cheat. Hamas, horrible though they are, oppose (to various degrees) the existence of Israel, not the existence of Israelis - in short, they oppose the existence of a state including Jerusalem under an exclusively Jewish religion. It's a harsh position, but falls way short of gas chambers.
Er, that's from the Iranian president. I'm not sure what relevance this has to the Palestine situation.
Don't you have the faintest suspicion that you are creating something of a Frankenstein monster by joining all unsavoury aspects of the muslim 'side' into one cherry picked beast?
That's a stupid distinction. By that argument, nuclear bombs are less WMD than hollowpoint pistol rounds.
Indeed, I'm a firefox fan, but it's clear from this that IE7 did perform very impressively in the test. Of course, the problem is that he's testing it with spyware and adware and stuff that were not designed for IE7 (somewhat akin to running windows viruses in Wine...), so it is likely that over time, things will get worse, not better - in which case, the question has to be asked whether Microsoft can keep up the pace of updates.
But for now, this article is a big thumbs up for the MS devs.
Some search strings to try out:
e r+%22should+be+enough%22&btnG=Searcha n+be+fixed+later%22&btnG=Search+ don't+understand%22&btnG=Searcho t+very+safe%22&btnG=Searche s%22&btnG=Search+Code
http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=buff
http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=%22c
http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=%22I
http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=%22n
http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=%22but+who+car
Maybe I've been watching TV too much, but surely an obvious alternative is that another nation/private body did the hack, and dropped evidence to implicate China? Given that the government has been hacked once, all kinds of places would be on alert that security is weak, and would give it a go themselves. Plenty of motive and opportunity in place. What China has to gain from this hacking pales relative to what a competitor would have to gain from the increase of mistrust between two trading allies.
This is getting kinda off topic, but the up-market newspaper selection in the UK consists of the Daily Telegraph/Sunday Telegraph (right wing), the Times/Sunday Times (centre, with slight right wing slant), and the Guardian/Observer. (left wing, but less left than the Telegraph is right)
Maybe we should tag this article (and such future errors) 'erroneous' or something, so that they'll get fixed?
Well, once again, Crichton is full of shit.
Life, as we know, mutates, and any signal you try to send with it quickly runs out. And mass producing such organisms and sending them out into space is *not* cheap, especially not relative to the alternative of sending out EM signals. (How are you going to get the momentum changes to send these things certain places?) The real killer is that it's ridiculously slow.
And such spores will also fade in the inverse square ratio - in general, anything that sprays out in an arc around an object must do so. The only way to get out of the inverse square law is either to use coherent sources like lasers, which of course only works if you know what you are shooting at, or to use some sort of self-replicating robotic message. Biology, being based on messy chemistry, just isn't good enough.
While I can make no guesses as to the intent of the submitter, the article in question looks legit - it refers to a real future article in Physics Review E, which is a pretty well recognised peer reviewed journal dealing with Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter physics.
o lume=74&Issue=3#MAJOR4
See http://scitation.aip.org/dbt/dbt.jsp?KEY=PLEEE8&V
Oh come on, clearly text adventures/interactive fiction fit all three. Not for sale anywhere, disproportionately academic base, and, well, I can look down on you if you wish...
Because people want to see if there are any pretty pictures.
I don't know if that's any sadder than how I misread the summary and thought 'Oh, I didn't know that GNU/Hurd could mount stuff yet'....
I dunno, this sound like a good idea, to force people to change their behaviour from time to time.
Strategy != Everyone camping with the AWP
It's an ALIEN face, duh.
Yes, it should be no problem to find that on the internet, as everybody was putting their articles on the internet back in the mid '70s.
Is your position then that no science journal has *ever* decided to keep online archives of articles before the 1970s? Doesn't that position seem rather tenuous to you?
Are there any articles out there from the '70s done by peer reviewed scientists debunking the New Ice Age Theory?
There were from the 1980s - when we discovered global warming.
My impression is that back in the 1970s that was a great deal of uncertainty, in particular because of the lack of sophisticated computer modelling, and satellite based measurement etc that we have today. They couldn't debunk Ice Age, because they didn't have enough data, so they prudently remained silent until data made things clear - GW.
They don't have to admit that they are wrong in this case (certainly, scientists have been wrong in the past, of course), because they weren't wrong. What they did back then was decide that they could not decide either way back then with any stronger certainty than that of a guess, and in many peer reviewed articles, they say exactly that.
JD Hays, J Imbrie and NJ Shackleton, Science, v194, #4270, p1121, 1976/12/10:
"Having presented evidence that major changes in past climate were associated with variations in the geometry of the earth's orbit, we should be able to predict the trend of future climate. Such forecasts must be qualified in two ways. First, they apply only to the natural component of future climatic trends - and not to anthropogenic effects such as those due to the burning of fossil fuels. Second, they describe only the long-term trends, because they are linked to orbital variations with periods of 20,000 years and longer. Climatic oscillations at higher frequencies are not predicted."
1. "American Scientist is a general-interest, nonrefereed science magazine". Still isn't peer reviewed.
And what's more, it says "Solanki and colleague Natalie A. Krivova attempted to answer that question in 2003, when they published a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research titled "Can solar variability explain global warming since 1970?" Their reckoning revealed that the Sun is responsible for less than 30 percent of the rise in surface temperature experienced since that time."
2. Also isn't peer reviewed. In fact, the two above are both editorials interpreting a number of actual published articles - in particular Solanki, which concluded no significant solar effect.
Sure, there may well be studies confirming that X has happened with the sun, but they aren't saying anything about the GW attribution question.
3. This certainly isn't peer reviewed. In fact, this article is by CEI, which was until recently directly funded by the oil companies. How much can we trust this criticism? Why haven't these criticism gone through official channels, such as comments submitted to the journal? Let's avoid these subjective issues and note that once again, we have another peer reviewed support of GW, and non-peer reviewed criticism. GGGP's assertion is still wrong.
4. This is totally unrelated to GW. First, we are referring to ice ages, which GW is not about. Second, the timescale we are talking about is 0.5 billion years, and later 'hundreds of thousands or millions of years'. This is astronomical timescales, not even geological timescales. In any case, there is no statement at all within the study itself about whether current GW is human caused or not.