2. This isn't 'critical of global warming', only of calculations of its costs. No mention of 'alternative hypotheses' in the abstract at least.
3. The title of this is "Solar cycle length hypothesis appears to support the ipcc on global warming". The IPCC's position of global warming is that it exists, and it's probably human caused. So the article has analysed the alternative hypothesis of solar variations and has decided *against* it, in favour of the mainstream CO2 view.
4. In the abstract, we have the statement "This comparison shows without requiring any recourse to modeling that since roughly 1970 the solar influence on climate (through the channels considered here) cannot have been dominant." It's an unequivocal statement against solar theories in favour of mainstream CO2.
All of the peer reviewed links given acknowledge the existence of human caused GW. The only anti-GW view is from a non-peer reviewed source. The assertion of GP is still without any backing.
"You have to remember-- we went from THE WORLD IS GOING TO FREEZE! to THE WORLD IS GOING TO WARM AND FLOOD! in the space of about 10 years."
Why not apply my test above to this as well? Find me a peer reviewed source suggesting that the world is going to freeze, optionally with an environmental wacko slant to it.
The problem is that this is a global issue, which leads to several political difficulties. The countries favour mitigation do so because they feel that mitigation is cheaper than adaptation, and vice versa for the other side. Even if adaptation is as cheap as certain people predict, it is going to fall in a way that is disproportionate from the causes of the problem. Why should rural unindustrialised states pay for the consequences of a few who benefited from polluting?
And what if adaptation was more expensive than predicted? Will the polluters be punished for scuppering the opportunity to save civilisation as we know it? Whatever the intention, the appearance would be of mass genocide - richer states making the waters rise (both metaphorically and literally) and using their gained riches to move to higher ground whilst poorer ones drown. If people are truly serious that adaptation should be favoured instead of mitigation, they should put their money where their mouthes are, and give some sort of committment to dealing with their own mess.
Most of the papers that are critical of global warming are also published by SCIENTISTS in PEER REVIEWED journals; aren't they also subject to the most rigorous scientific scrutiny?
Yes, I'm sure there were plenty of Roman or Egyptian expeditions to the North Pole.
Besides, it's *Global* Warming for a good reason. Certainly, there may have been local periods of warmth in the past. But that is irrelevant because we are dealing with a global event at a time of increased vulnerability.
Uk citizens are plenty aware of CCTV cameras, and in general are overwhelming in favour of them, to the extent that many (a) petition police to install more survelliance equipment and (b) install cameras on their own property. The only concern with camera are speed cameras, which annoy motoring rights groups, and with any suggestion that cameras are replacing the physical presence of police officers.
Seriously, the arguments about 'public privacy' you've seen in the rest of the thread are not very persuasive to an UK public used to things like 'Crimewatch', where CCTV footage is published to aid criminal investigations. As far as the UK public is concerned, the system is transparent and gives real benefits, and no more intrusive than having a real police officer on patrol there in the first place.
If you have a moment, just as a quick question, how will you deal with the issue of 'experts' on controversial issues? Will, for example, Dembski be given a high authority on evolution articles? Will John Lott be invited to comment on gun control? Will Michael Moore recieve greater powers for editing articles on the US government?
Because splitting from Wikipedia to create the Palestinapedia would be an admission of defeat.
There's no such thing as art
on
Are Videogames Art?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Let's be controversial here.
I think the deeper message that we can draw out here is that there is no such thing as art. In other words, there is no unbreachable division between what is art and what is not, and there is no magical quintessence that makes something automatically artistic. Art, I propose, is just a label applied by self-appointed judges regarding their own arbitary tastes. The proper response is not to endlessly try to justify electronic entertainment as 'art' in the eyes of pretentious old men, but to note that their opinion does not actually matter. The next generation, no doubt, will have their own idea of art, and their own view of what will be culturally significant, and the scorn of today's judges have no meaning in this respect.
After relativity and E=Mc^2, physicists have preferred to measure mass in terms of energy rather than silly units like grams and ounces. In short, we give the energy equivalent for the particle if it was somehow completely annihilated. 1 electron volt refers to the energy of one electron under an electric field at a point of 1 volt of potential difference. It doesn't have anything to do with the actual mass of the electron, but rather the electrical potential energy such an electron would hold.
Neutrinos *do* have mass, and this fact is accepted by pretty much all physicists. The argument for this comes from discovery that they change states over the course of their lives, which means that they experience time, which means that they cannot travel at the speed of light, which means they must have a small mass. (This explains the apparently deficiency of solar neutrinos which was a problem in the 70s) Pinning down the exact value of this mass is more troublesome, though - for now, we know only that it's small, but positive.
What more puzzles me about this statement is that neutrinos have generally been counted as *part* of dark matter - in particular, they are proposed to constitute some of those so-called Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) which is one of two possible models for dark matter. I don't see how changing the details of these particles would change how neccessary they are, unless these guys are trying a bait and switch by redefining dark matter to be unneccessary. (Which would be a very dirty trick.)
I suspect it was done for the science programme Tommorrow's World. (Pretty cool thing giving weekly news of scientific/technological developments, now sadly deceased)
I don't buy the study, though. The geographical split is likely very significant here. There's good evidence that people decide these things based on what they feel at the time, and there's also good evidence showing that people's self-statements of happiness are influenced by where they live. Without a control group, the results are pretty meaningless.
You both get to type in labels. When you do, the other player gets notified as to how many keywords has been submitted. If any pair of labels match, then your matched pair goes onto the 'Off limits' list for that pic, and you move on to the next pair. So each pair contributes at most 1 phrase or word to the labels list for each pic. Unmatched keywords are ignored.
Clicking pass sends the message that you want to pass to your partner. If he clicks pass as well, you skip the pic. However, it only raises the flag - you can still keep guessing even if you've raise the intention that you want to pass. It just means - I'm ok to pass if you want to.
If the other player sits on his ass, then you are screwed for the next 90 seconds. If he closes his browser, presumeably your session quits out too. Score is counted both per session, and as a sum total over all a player's sessions. It works in firefox. So far, I have not seen any porn.
Your garden is not built on. Would you like a landfill site there?
(a) Landfills have to be kept carefully away from other areas due to pollution and other concerns, so they have a much greater footprint than space they occupy themselves. (b) Landfills have to be located reasonably near where the garbage is produced. They have to be geographically stable areas. And so on. Many of the places not built on are places that are not built on for a reason, and should not be landfill sites for the same reason. (c) Just because land is not built on does not mean that nobody cares about what goes on it. If YOU aren't happy to have a landfill near your home or place of work, what right do you have to ask Farmer Bob, or Park Manager Sue, or whatever to have a landfill anywhere near them?
If they could scan garbage for RFID tags and identify your purchases, then they can also LOOK THROUGH YOUR GARBAGE and identify your purchases. In fact, the former is a smaller privacy risk than the latter, because if they are mass-scanning, then you are more likely to be a statistic instead of being carefully examined as an individual. Not to mention that checking through your trash is likely to reveal bills and so on that are far greater a risk. Hell, for the same data, they can just mash together information from credit card companies and supermarkets, and they can do it secretly so you'll never hear about it here.
Legal safeguards (or incinerating your own trash) are our only real protection here, and RFID doesn't change a thing.
As for using this to institute a garbage tax, well, it won't help them win votes unless it was done sanely, so that the overall change in the tax burden is fairly unchanged. Democratic governments do not want to increase taxes unless it was neccessitated by a popular increase in spending, because their number 1 concern is to keep their jobs.
Oh, I dunno what the ACLU would say. The civil liberties case here certain isn't clean cut - it's not an issue of freedom vs security or whatever, but rather freedom of commentators vs, potentially, freedom (even life!) of an innocent accused.
There is, for example:
ACLU policy no. 229:
"Attempts by members of the general public to influence the decision of a court of law pose a conflict between the rights of freedom of speech and assembly on the one hand and due process on the other.
"Any attempt, in any form, intended or calculated to influence a jury should be prohibited. The ACLU similarly opposes threats (expressed or implied), mass or organized letter-writing campaigns or telegrams . . . and mass picketing intended to influence the decision of a judge or appellate court."
While it is possible to question how consistent the ACLU has been in this policy, I think their opposition to such a policy would certainly not be clear. To be too public in condemning such law would probably risk a very damaging split in their membership, if the response from the likes of slashdot is any hint. There may be disquiet from some individuals, but I think it unlikely for there to be much outrage.
The British Broadcasting Corporation was forced to pay up for its blatant anti-Americanism before and during the Iraq war. A frothing at the mouth anti-Americanism that was obsessive, irrational and dishonest.
The BBC - the "Beeb" - was one of the worst offenders in the British press because it felt entitled to not only pillory Americans and George W Bush, but it felt entitled to lie. And when caught lying, it felt entitled to defend its lying reporters and executives.
The incident involved the reporter Andrew Gilligan who made a fool of himself in Baghdad when the American invasion actually arrived in the Iraqi capital. Gilligan, pro-Iraqi and anti-American, insisted on the air that the Iraqi army was heroically repulsing an incompetent American military. Video from our own Greg Kelly of the American army moving through Baghdad at will put the light to that.
After the war, back in London, Gilligan got a guy named David Kelly to tell him a few things about pre-war assessments on Iraq's weapons programmes. And Gilligan exaggerated about what Kelly had told him.
Kelly committed suicide over the story and the BBC, far from blaming itself, insisted its reporter had a right to lie and exaggerate, because, well, the BBC knew the war was wrong and anything it could say to underscore that point had to be right.
The British government investigation slammed the BBC on Wednesday and a Beeb exec resigned to show they got it.
But they don't.
So the next time you hear the BBC bragging about how much superior the Brits are at delivering the news than Americans who wear flags in their lapels, remember it was the Beeb caught lying.
Much as I dislike Fox, the guy does have a point - the definition of 'planet' has absolutely no use whatsoever in science. If we are modelling the solar system, we add in objects of large mass, whether they are planets, moons, or asteroids, or whatever, depending on how much sensitivity is required. Stopping Pluto from being a planet makes no difference. Sure, it makes 'planet' more consistent. But no one in the science world truly cares. The facts of the world here in fact have not changed. Only nomenclature has.
The idea of planets is really only meaningful in the political or cultural sphere, since it's more interesting to say that we are going to send man to another planet than to just another random rock. It's also useful in education, because we ask our kids to learn the names of the planets, not every body that orbits the sun. There is really very little useful value in writing new textbooks here.
Slashdot Mirror
Weird, isn't it. The peer reviewed links you just gave me higher up in the thread just said the precise opposite of what you believe.
1. Scientific American is a popular science magazine. It isn't peer reviewed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_American
2. This isn't 'critical of global warming', only of calculations of its costs. No mention of 'alternative hypotheses' in the abstract at least.
3. The title of this is "Solar cycle length hypothesis appears to support the ipcc on global warming". The IPCC's position of global warming is that it exists, and it's probably human caused. So the article has analysed the alternative hypothesis of solar variations and has decided *against* it, in favour of the mainstream CO2 view.
4. In the abstract, we have the statement "This comparison shows without requiring any recourse to modeling that since roughly 1970 the solar influence on climate (through the channels considered here) cannot have been dominant." It's an unequivocal statement against solar theories in favour of mainstream CO2.
All of the peer reviewed links given acknowledge the existence of human caused GW. The only anti-GW view is from a non-peer reviewed source. The assertion of GP is still without any backing.
"You have to remember-- we went from THE WORLD IS GOING TO FREEZE! to THE WORLD IS GOING TO WARM AND FLOOD! in the space of about 10 years."
Why not apply my test above to this as well? Find me a peer reviewed source suggesting that the world is going to freeze, optionally with an environmental wacko slant to it.
The problem is that this is a global issue, which leads to several political difficulties. The countries favour mitigation do so because they feel that mitigation is cheaper than adaptation, and vice versa for the other side. Even if adaptation is as cheap as certain people predict, it is going to fall in a way that is disproportionate from the causes of the problem. Why should rural unindustrialised states pay for the consequences of a few who benefited from polluting?
And what if adaptation was more expensive than predicted? Will the polluters be punished for scuppering the opportunity to save civilisation as we know it? Whatever the intention, the appearance would be of mass genocide - richer states making the waters rise (both metaphorically and literally) and using their gained riches to move to higher ground whilst poorer ones drown. If people are truly serious that adaptation should be favoured instead of mitigation, they should put their money where their mouthes are, and give some sort of committment to dealing with their own mess.
Most of the papers that are critical of global warming are also published by SCIENTISTS in PEER REVIEWED journals; aren't they also subject to the most rigorous scientific scrutiny?
Please name one.
Yes, I'm sure there were plenty of Roman or Egyptian expeditions to the North Pole.
Besides, it's *Global* Warming for a good reason. Certainly, there may have been local periods of warmth in the past. But that is irrelevant because we are dealing with a global event at a time of increased vulnerability.
Because their leaders tell them so.
It's the core principle of advertising.
But how many votes does a hive mind get?
Uk citizens are plenty aware of CCTV cameras, and in general are overwhelming in favour of them, to the extent that many (a) petition police to install more survelliance equipment and (b) install cameras on their own property. The only concern with camera are speed cameras, which annoy motoring rights groups, and with any suggestion that cameras are replacing the physical presence of police officers.
Seriously, the arguments about 'public privacy' you've seen in the rest of the thread are not very persuasive to an UK public used to things like 'Crimewatch', where CCTV footage is published to aid criminal investigations. As far as the UK public is concerned, the system is transparent and gives real benefits, and no more intrusive than having a real police officer on patrol there in the first place.
Thanks Larry for coming and commenting.
If you have a moment, just as a quick question, how will you deal with the issue of 'experts' on controversial issues? Will, for example, Dembski be given a high authority on evolution articles? Will John Lott be invited to comment on gun control? Will Michael Moore recieve greater powers for editing articles on the US government?
5*7-2 = 33 = 3*11
Trust me. If it was this easy, we'd have heard of it long ago.
Good lord, no.
Take 2^4 - 1 = 15 = 3 * 5
Simple, really.
Because splitting from Wikipedia to create the Palestinapedia would be an admission of defeat.
Let's be controversial here.
I think the deeper message that we can draw out here is that there is no such thing as art. In other words, there is no unbreachable division between what is art and what is not, and there is no magical quintessence that makes something automatically artistic. Art, I propose, is just a label applied by self-appointed judges regarding their own arbitary tastes. The proper response is not to endlessly try to justify electronic entertainment as 'art' in the eyes of pretentious old men, but to note that their opinion does not actually matter. The next generation, no doubt, will have their own idea of art, and their own view of what will be culturally significant, and the scorn of today's judges have no meaning in this respect.
Mass, man, mass. It's not weight, but mass.
After relativity and E=Mc^2, physicists have preferred to measure mass in terms of energy rather than silly units like grams and ounces. In short, we give the energy equivalent for the particle if it was somehow completely annihilated. 1 electron volt refers to the energy of one electron under an electric field at a point of 1 volt of potential difference. It doesn't have anything to do with the actual mass of the electron, but rather the electrical potential energy such an electron would hold.
Enh.
Neutrinos *do* have mass, and this fact is accepted by pretty much all physicists. The argument for this comes from discovery that they change states over the course of their lives, which means that they experience time, which means that they cannot travel at the speed of light, which means they must have a small mass. (This explains the apparently deficiency of solar neutrinos which was a problem in the 70s) Pinning down the exact value of this mass is more troublesome, though - for now, we know only that it's small, but positive.
What more puzzles me about this statement is that neutrinos have generally been counted as *part* of dark matter - in particular, they are proposed to constitute some of those so-called Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) which is one of two possible models for dark matter. I don't see how changing the details of these particles would change how neccessary they are, unless these guys are trying a bait and switch by redefining dark matter to be unneccessary. (Which would be a very dirty trick.)
I suspect it was done for the science programme Tommorrow's World. (Pretty cool thing giving weekly news of scientific/technological developments, now sadly deceased)
I don't buy the study, though. The geographical split is likely very significant here. There's good evidence that people decide these things based on what they feel at the time, and there's also good evidence showing that people's self-statements of happiness are influenced by where they live. Without a control group, the results are pretty meaningless.
The seemingly random bolding of text in your comment gives me a sudden urge to buy stuff.
So if the other person keeps trying keywords that don't match, you're stuck for the 90 seconds?
Or, you quit.
My experience: One time I saw two images. (text, then a helmet) The other time I got the broken image icon.
That's probably because it's slashdotted.
This, I think, is how it works...
You both get to type in labels. When you do, the other player gets notified as to how many keywords has been submitted. If any pair of labels match, then your matched pair goes onto the 'Off limits' list for that pic, and you move on to the next pair. So each pair contributes at most 1 phrase or word to the labels list for each pic. Unmatched keywords are ignored.
Clicking pass sends the message that you want to pass to your partner. If he clicks pass as well, you skip the pic. However, it only raises the flag - you can still keep guessing even if you've raise the intention that you want to pass. It just means - I'm ok to pass if you want to.
If the other player sits on his ass, then you are screwed for the next 90 seconds. If he closes his browser, presumeably your session quits out too. Score is counted both per session, and as a sum total over all a player's sessions. It works in firefox. So far, I have not seen any porn.
Your garden is not built on. Would you like a landfill site there?
(a) Landfills have to be kept carefully away from other areas due to pollution and other concerns, so they have a much greater footprint than space they occupy themselves.
(b) Landfills have to be located reasonably near where the garbage is produced. They have to be geographically stable areas. And so on. Many of the places not built on are places that are not built on for a reason, and should not be landfill sites for the same reason.
(c) Just because land is not built on does not mean that nobody cares about what goes on it. If YOU aren't happy to have a landfill near your home or place of work, what right do you have to ask Farmer Bob, or Park Manager Sue, or whatever to have a landfill anywhere near them?
If they could scan garbage for RFID tags and identify your purchases, then they can also LOOK THROUGH YOUR GARBAGE and identify your purchases. In fact, the former is a smaller privacy risk than the latter, because if they are mass-scanning, then you are more likely to be a statistic instead of being carefully examined as an individual. Not to mention that checking through your trash is likely to reveal bills and so on that are far greater a risk. Hell, for the same data, they can just mash together information from credit card companies and supermarkets, and they can do it secretly so you'll never hear about it here.
Legal safeguards (or incinerating your own trash) are our only real protection here, and RFID doesn't change a thing.
As for using this to institute a garbage tax, well, it won't help them win votes unless it was done sanely, so that the overall change in the tax burden is fairly unchanged. Democratic governments do not want to increase taxes unless it was neccessitated by a popular increase in spending, because their number 1 concern is to keep their jobs.
There is, for example:
While it is possible to question how consistent the ACLU has been in this policy, I think their opposition to such a policy would certainly not be clear. To be too public in condemning such law would probably risk a very damaging split in their membership, if the response from the likes of slashdot is any hint. There may be disquiet from some individuals, but I think it unlikely for there to be much outrage.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1141096,00.
Much as I dislike Fox, the guy does have a point - the definition of 'planet' has absolutely no use whatsoever in science. If we are modelling the solar system, we add in objects of large mass, whether they are planets, moons, or asteroids, or whatever, depending on how much sensitivity is required. Stopping Pluto from being a planet makes no difference. Sure, it makes 'planet' more consistent. But no one in the science world truly cares. The facts of the world here in fact have not changed. Only nomenclature has.
The idea of planets is really only meaningful in the political or cultural sphere, since it's more interesting to say that we are going to send man to another planet than to just another random rock. It's also useful in education, because we ask our kids to learn the names of the planets, not every body that orbits the sun. There is really very little useful value in writing new textbooks here.
He also forgot the Redundant, who jumps on bandwagons that have long gone stale.