I call bullshit. Oh, come now. While what he's describing isn't the scientific ideal, scientists are only human, and this does certainly happen - the canonical example being of course Einstein and his refusal to acknowledge the validity of the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics. But the scientific method is, in general, stronger than the entrenched opinions of any one individual and such things do not drastically hinder progress.
When the opinion is put forward and actively defended by a whole organisation as absolute truth, on the other hand, things become a little more complex.
True, if this it is indeed true that the Higgs is just at the outside edge of the capabilities of Fermilab, the LHC will be ideally placed to make sufficient observations to learn about its properties and so forth. But my post wasn't really meant to address the LHC, but rather the next generation of particle physics - without real compelling questions coupled with a convincing case for why vast facilities are needed to answer these questions, funding may be a touch difficult to come by.
You're giving the Standard Model a bit of a hard rap there, aren't you? While it's technically true to state that it's "unproven" (as are all physical theories, pretty much by definition), it is among the most thoroughly tested scientific theories in history, and has been validated to extremely high degrees of precision. This gives most people some degree of confidence in the theory, even if it may not be fully fleshed out yet.
The Higgs boson is basically the last untested facet of the theory - if it shows up in the expected region without any additional fuss, the model is pretty much entirely successful within present experimental limits and particle physicists are back to digging through the last few orders of decimal places to discover new effects.
if we find the higgs it makes the standard model more convincing as far as its predictive power but by no means means it is correct. It makes it rather harder to convince governments to fund massive facility budgets though: "We have this theory which has proven almost exactly right in every test we've thrown at it, and now we're out of ideas. Can we have $80 billion to build a system ten times bigger to see if we can just brute force some new phenomena?"
There is a distinct lack of a focus in the near future for particle physics if the Higgs is found and doesn't raise even a little question. All that's left to do is bigger numbers and hoping something will come out of it, which is going to be a damn hard sell.
Well yes, but isn't this exactly the point the earlier posts were making? These numbers are nowhere near exact, as any such projection is probably using base data months or years out of date, and extrapolating over a non-trivial time period, they quote a figure accurate to the person? It certainly raises red flags to anyone who's ever done any sort of error analysis, probably.
Of course, it does make for a better press release. "World population density becomes more urban than rural. Give or take a week" isn't quite as interesting.
While your post is technically correct, the way you (and many others discussing microwaves) presented it is the source of a lot of confusion about how they behave, and their relative dangers. Specifically, you associate the absorption commonly seen in microwave with
900 nm and 1200 nm are absorption peaks While this is true, the type of absorption going on at these energy levels is fundamentally different to the heating which occurs in a microwave oven. Characteristic lines are typically identified by a strong resonance either with a particular transition or type of vibrational motion in the molecule's structure - this leads to the clear lines when the incident particle energy is close to the energy of the relevant transition/oscillation.
On the other hand, microwave heating is dipole heating. Many molecules (with water being an especially strong example) have an electric dipole, which they tend to naturally attempt to line up with an electric field, such as that in an EM wave. When this field is oscillating, it then causes the molecule as a whole to oscillate, causing heating while not specifically interacting with any specific molecular bond. If you check out a graph of water's absorption (here, for example), you can clearly see the difference between the resonant heating (lower wavelengths, where there is clear resonant structure) and non-resonant dipole heating (the smooth curve at higher energies).
I do think that if the difference between interactions which involve the bonds (such as the mentioned resonant processes, and the dreaded breaks caused by ionising radiation) and these heating processes it might mitigate some of the terror associated with microwaves. On the other hand, anyone who bothered to take the time to understand these issues probably isn't too worried anyway...
Well, this has been pretty thoroughly handled by sibling posts, but I thought I'd just chip in a bit too:
What about UV? That causes mutations too. Does that have as much energy as gamma (the answer: not if the amplitude is the same)? This is just crap. Any kind of radiation can have three effects on cells:
1) It gets absorbed and dissipated before coming into contact with living cells
2) It gets absorbed by cells and damages them
3) It gets abosrbed by cells and destroys them This is an incredibly limited view of what sort of interactions which can happen in radiation. Radiation which passes through a cell does not even have to interact in a meaningful fashion, let alone enter into the "damage or death" paradigm you suggest.
Taking the example du jour of microwaves, while it is true they can (non-resonantly, due to their energy) excite some rovibrational states in water molecules, the chance of this happening is extremely minor, and is in fact not the major process. It's actually dipole heating (that is, setting up oscillations of the entire molecule as it tries to align its dipole to the alternating field), which is often rather significantly overlooked as it is not only non-ionising, but in fact doesn't have any significant effect on the molecular or electronic structure at all, taking it even further from the region of potential cell (more specifically, DNA) damage which is typically associated with ionising radiation.
Indeed, even the rovibrational excitations are most likely to simply reset back to their original state through the emission of some lower-energy photons, rather than blowing the molecules apart and causing "damage" as you suggest. The vast majority of radiation is in fact quite harmless, not a "hurt or kill" scenario as the media would like us to believe.
I wouldn't so readily dismiss the potential effects of this program out of hand - while it's not quite so serious as the potential epidemic outbreaks which would be offered by people boycotting vaccinations, there is enough people who don't really understand the issue or don't care that the nutjobs who are morbidly terrified of it ("Wifi is the new asbestos! Run for your life!") to get it removed from pretty much every public place until "further research" is done to prove it's safe. Several of the national teaching unions are already apparently seriously considering banning wifi from schools and while, as I said, this isn't really significant in the grand scheme of things, giving in to ignorance and fear-mongering is never a good thing, and this program certainly doesn't help.
Now, on the one hand, you have to admit that it actually does work at cutting down EM to the brain - but the sheer pointlessness of it all hurts me, deep down inside.
You do realise that this article at no point refers to piracy or similar issues? This is dealing with actual physical theft from the stores - stock that the shop buys, and someone walks in and takes without paying for it. It's the thing the standard slashdot meme set explicitly uses as an example of "stealing" as opposed to copyright infringement. And since it's so clearly defined, this is not measured through reduced sales or the like, but is actual, explicit losses incurred by the stores (I'm sure padded to some degree, but infinitely more believable than the various RIAA-style numbers). Hence why this content protection does absolutely nothing to prevent copying or general piracy, but does significantly inhibit casual shoplifting.
I congratulate you on your devious combinations of stock lines to grab some karma which is completely unrelated to the story at hand, but do try and at least glance at the article the next time?
It's a perfectly valid question though - what sort of "Professional Thief" is involved in mass shoplifting as a matter of course? For DVDs, where copyright infringement is such a trivial task, it is infinitely more practical to simply buy or rent the DVD (assuming they don't want to take advantage of that wondeful medium for the free exchange of other people's ideas known as the internet), then duplicate it and sell as many copies as are required, earning them significantly greater amounts of real money. Given how low copied DVDs (often with good quality replicated jackets and all) drive the price, I'd be shocked if reselling stolen DVDs was even a remotely viable way to make money.
With the whole "they're smarter than those who set up the system" argument - it may be possible, but we have no idea what sort of decisions went into choosing this system. It may have been simple ignorance of the level of security provided, but it may well have been details of cost, personnel and the like which prevented them from implementing a more comprehensive system. Moreover, it's quite likely that this system was never desired to provide absolute security, but rather to clearly mark out the section of the internet which is "bad", according to school policy, so pupils know full well that by going there they're breaking school rules and are liable to be punished, as these kids were.
This leads into your second point - the punishment, and it's scope. The article is almost entirely empty of context about this, and the only information we have is that 1) Kids used proxies; 2) They were punished, to varying degrees. We have no idea about the context of what happened - What were the kids circumventing the proxies to look up? How long did this go on for? Did the kids have other records of offenses which added to the severity of their punishment? I suspect* people picking up 3 month suspensions may not have been otherwise immaculate students who simply accessed some really nifty site on Newton's Laws (blocked by the evil, evil content filter denying them information) through a proxy as a proof of concept.
And then there's the last, really baffling point - You're suggesting that if you provide a service conditional on some rules being followed, you have to accept that people will break these rules? That's just a ludicrous assertion, as shown by this very story - someone broke the rules, they were punished, and are at present denied access to the system. Seems to me that one doesn't have to sit idly by after all.
* - I say "I suspect", because that is how many of these stories go when one digs a little deeper. If there's anyone with some more details on this who is able to correct me, feel free.
It appears that nobody seems to be asking the next logical question: if the neutrinos aren't there, then what about the Sun?
Neutrinos are the required result of nuclear fusion within the Sun. They are not charged particles and they will travel through a light-year of lead. Now that Sudbury has been scrapped, there remains a severe deficit of neutrinos coming from the Sun for the nuclear fusion model.
They're not asking the question because that is not at all what this result implies. This result does not rule out all neutrino oscillations, but rather deals with a specific result (produced at Los Alamos, not Sudbury) which significantly complicated the neutrino oscillation theory by requiring an additional fourth type of neutrino. The neutrino oscillation theory used to describe the yield of various species from the sun is still quite intact, I believe.
The business entity which owns the MMO is certainly being taxed, but an idea which has been kicked about a bit in recent times is whether or not the players are taxed.
The idea arises from the notion that the in-game currency has a measurable value in terms of a real currency, (primarily in those fixed by the developers such as in Second Life or Entropia, but it's conceivable in most games because of the roaring grey market in in-game goods that generally pervades the genre) and thus the gold you earn from slaying creatures, making cool toys in second life, etc is the same as making real money, and this could in theory be taxed.
While there are numerous arguments against this (the items only being virtual, most players never receiving any income from them as they don't sell gold on ebay or what have you), a common aspect of many games is trading between players, at which point the system suddenly begins to strongly resemble bartering in the real world - something which is covered by tax laws in many countries.
I doubt anything much will happen in the current batch of "game" worlds like Warcraft, but "virtual worlds" like Second Life may well lead to a crop of laws for governing virtual property which - while they may be sensible for the virtual world model - would be likely to cause no end of hassle for the game-style worlds in years to come.
Blizzard define it fairly clearly on every press release dealing with such things - it covers those in North America and Europe with a currently paid up subscription/game time card, and some more complex definition for Asia since several of their markets are locally managed and use different billing systems.
Basically, it covers any account that could log on and play right now.
That is all well and good but it may be that the need for "dark energy" and "dark matter" may be the result of sloppy science. If scientists cannot tell the difference between a distant giant galaxy and a nearby dwarf galaxy, how can you believe a word they say about missing mass? Doesn't this article quite clearly show that people can tell the difference, however for this particular galaxy (presumably unremarkable and not very well observed, given that apparently nobody has taken a measurement of the red-shift for the past two decades) someone messed up and they were treated using incorrect data?
Mistakes happen in all fields, to say that one particular example (or, indeed, given the human capacity to screw up, numerous ones) renders a field meaningless is highly dubious. What is significant is that significant results are rechecked and errors are given the chance to be corrected - something which this story demonstrates.
Evolution says nothing of the sort, unless you presume abiogenesis can occur in dark matter as well as in traditional matter. Given the vast difference in the behaviour of dark matter compared to 'normal' matter (that is, the matter we deal with on a day to day basis), the possibility of abiogensis in dark matter is a fairly sizable theoretical leap (if, indeed, it's not outright precluded by the nature of the interactions), and so evolution is unable to play a part.
(Of course, all the above is in reference to "exotic" types of weakly interacting dark matter, not the "normal matter which is hard to see" forms of dark matter)
Nobody ever said you could enter the game as a mage and completely ignore magic and succeed And, ironically, this is almost exactly what you must do in Oblivion to optimise your levelling - If you primarily focus on your "major" skills (that is, those which define your character class at the beginning) you will rapidly end up with a character with high skills, but low stats, and be crushed. A deliberate focus on your secondary skills to the deteriment of these allegedly character-defining skills is necessary for optimal progress. It's a very unintuitive game mechanic until you actually look into the nitty gritty of how stat improvements on levelling works, and isn't particularly conducive to just playing the game and having fun.
Darn, were you being distracted by all that fun you were having? The reason many MMOs struggle is because of the idea, echoed in your post, that it is a good thing for levelling to be "a bitch". It is not. A game should fun to play, not something which you can work at for hours and end up no closer to any sense of accomplishment (or even further from one, in the case of harsh death penalties and the like). Building a game which is accessible and fun is not aiming the lowest common denominator, it's simply understanding why exactly people want to play games. I'm sure there'll still be a market of some sort for the hardcore gamers and their somewhat masochistic tendencies, but I suspect it'll rapidly fall even further into niche territory as WoW and it's successors continue to tailor towards the type of games the majority of people enjoy.
actually had the guts to fire a warning shot across a British Navy destroyers bows when they encroached on his territory.
Ah, how the stories grow in the telling - the boat he fired on was not a warship trying to remove him from Sealand, as Wikipedia would have you believe, but a repair boat belonging to the Navy which just happened to be passing by. Check the alternate version of the tale at http://geography.about.com/od/politicalgeography/a /sealand.htm, for example.
Being incredibly lazy and checking googles first hit for "oil exporters" shows, from 2004, Saudi Arabia in the lead with 8.73million barrels, Russia right behind with 6.67 million barrels of exports, and Kazakhstan down in 13th place with just over a million barrels.
So those 2 nations which would fall under the definition of "Former Soviet Union" represented 7.9 million barrels or so of exports alone in 2004 , so presumably other countries in the block contributed little, if anything, in terms of net exports.
(This is obviously all based on the proviso that two randomly chosen sources on the internet are credible, but it's a decent rough guide.)
"Former Soviet Union", I suspect. Or in other words, Russia (I am unsure of how much the other countries under that umbrella term contribute, as Russia by itself is the 2nd largest exporter of oil)
What an equivalent one looked like, say, in the mid-80s, right there where it dropped off by 30 or 40% off the peak in the 70s. Bet that would have been scary...
I'm not attempting to dismiss the issues with using non-reusable fuels or the need for alternatives (both in terms of supply, and environmental reasons) but the fact that we have a fairly complex, somewhat erratic graph with a general increase, but with some steady periods and some occasional (fairly dramatic) dips over the 40 years of "real" data, followed by what amounts to a freefall in his 'extrapolation' makes me think that it is, at best an oversimplification, and quite possibly outright misleading.
This is very true - The thing about these tests is that they are not testing your ability to produce a profound, insightful essay deeply examining an issue in the allotted time, they basically want you to demonstrate your knowledge of a few basic principles, and structure your essay around them.
I've never done the SAT, but I did do the GRE, and I'm guessing (from my non-american viewpoint) that they're much the same. In the GRE, if you take a good look at the scoring criteria, you can pretty much build up a 'perfect' answer for the essay section before you see the prompt, since you just had to hit a few key notes (pick a side, state argument or two, note opposing side, note argument in favour of that side, counter the argument, wrap everything up nicely) and do it with decent use of the English language, and there's nothing they can justify marking you down more than half a point for.
But then again, I don't think anyone is surprised that these tests measure your test-taking skill more effectively than your knowledge of the language, are they?
Hey now, slow down a little, the only reason I mentioned the whole species thing was because you yourself suggested that our own species will be displaced by some different, better adapted one, in the bit of your post I quoted.
Personally, I agree with you, and expect that humanity will be able to survive these gradual shifts in temperature - but the problem is that if it does get out of hand, there's going to be a lot of upheaval, and significant disruption to how the world works. However, the fact that you present the last ice age practically as a boon for humanity to suggest that a new one (or, presumably, comprable warming) wouldn't be that big an issue is rather baffling though - do you really not see any potential disruption to the lifestyle enjoyed by much of humanity if we plunged into another ice age/temperatures spiked by a significant amount?
Slashdot Mirror
When the opinion is put forward and actively defended by a whole organisation as absolute truth, on the other hand, things become a little more complex.
True, if this it is indeed true that the Higgs is just at the outside edge of the capabilities of Fermilab, the LHC will be ideally placed to make sufficient observations to learn about its properties and so forth. But my post wasn't really meant to address the LHC, but rather the next generation of particle physics - without real compelling questions coupled with a convincing case for why vast facilities are needed to answer these questions, funding may be a touch difficult to come by.
The Higgs boson is basically the last untested facet of the theory - if it shows up in the expected region without any additional fuss, the model is pretty much entirely successful within present experimental limits and particle physicists are back to digging through the last few orders of decimal places to discover new effects.
There is a distinct lack of a focus in the near future for particle physics if the Higgs is found and doesn't raise even a little question. All that's left to do is bigger numbers and hoping something will come out of it, which is going to be a damn hard sell.
Of course, it does make for a better press release. "World population density becomes more urban than rural. Give or take a week" isn't quite as interesting.
On the other hand, microwave heating is dipole heating. Many molecules (with water being an especially strong example) have an electric dipole, which they tend to naturally attempt to line up with an electric field, such as that in an EM wave. When this field is oscillating, it then causes the molecule as a whole to oscillate, causing heating while not specifically interacting with any specific molecular bond. If you check out a graph of water's absorption (here, for example), you can clearly see the difference between the resonant heating (lower wavelengths, where there is clear resonant structure) and non-resonant dipole heating (the smooth curve at higher energies).
I do think that if the difference between interactions which involve the bonds (such as the mentioned resonant processes, and the dreaded breaks caused by ionising radiation) and these heating processes it might mitigate some of the terror associated with microwaves. On the other hand, anyone who bothered to take the time to understand these issues probably isn't too worried anyway...
Taking the example du jour of microwaves, while it is true they can (non-resonantly, due to their energy) excite some rovibrational states in water molecules, the chance of this happening is extremely minor, and is in fact not the major process. It's actually dipole heating (that is, setting up oscillations of the entire molecule as it tries to align its dipole to the alternating field), which is often rather significantly overlooked as it is not only non-ionising, but in fact doesn't have any significant effect on the molecular or electronic structure at all, taking it even further from the region of potential cell (more specifically, DNA) damage which is typically associated with ionising radiation.
Indeed, even the rovibrational excitations are most likely to simply reset back to their original state through the emission of some lower-energy photons, rather than blowing the molecules apart and causing "damage" as you suggest. The vast majority of radiation is in fact quite harmless, not a "hurt or kill" scenario as the media would like us to believe.
I wouldn't so readily dismiss the potential effects of this program out of hand - while it's not quite so serious as the potential epidemic outbreaks which would be offered by people boycotting vaccinations, there is enough people who don't really understand the issue or don't care that the nutjobs who are morbidly terrified of it ("Wifi is the new asbestos! Run for your life!") to get it removed from pretty much every public place until "further research" is done to prove it's safe. Several of the national teaching unions are already apparently seriously considering banning wifi from schools and while, as I said, this isn't really significant in the grand scheme of things, giving in to ignorance and fear-mongering is never a good thing, and this program certainly doesn't help.
http://www.quackometer.net/blog/2007/04/electrosen sitivity-caused-by-wi-fi-and.html
Now, on the one hand, you have to admit that it actually does work at cutting down EM to the brain - but the sheer pointlessness of it all hurts me, deep down inside.
I congratulate you on your devious combinations of stock lines to grab some karma which is completely unrelated to the story at hand, but do try and at least glance at the article the next time?
It's a perfectly valid question though - what sort of "Professional Thief" is involved in mass shoplifting as a matter of course? For DVDs, where copyright infringement is such a trivial task, it is infinitely more practical to simply buy or rent the DVD (assuming they don't want to take advantage of that wondeful medium for the free exchange of other people's ideas known as the internet), then duplicate it and sell as many copies as are required, earning them significantly greater amounts of real money. Given how low copied DVDs (often with good quality replicated jackets and all) drive the price, I'd be shocked if reselling stolen DVDs was even a remotely viable way to make money.
With the whole "they're smarter than those who set up the system" argument - it may be possible, but we have no idea what sort of decisions went into choosing this system. It may have been simple ignorance of the level of security provided, but it may well have been details of cost, personnel and the like which prevented them from implementing a more comprehensive system. Moreover, it's quite likely that this system was never desired to provide absolute security, but rather to clearly mark out the section of the internet which is "bad", according to school policy, so pupils know full well that by going there they're breaking school rules and are liable to be punished, as these kids were.
This leads into your second point - the punishment, and it's scope. The article is almost entirely empty of context about this, and the only information we have is that 1) Kids used proxies; 2) They were punished, to varying degrees. We have no idea about the context of what happened - What were the kids circumventing the proxies to look up? How long did this go on for? Did the kids have other records of offenses which added to the severity of their punishment? I suspect* people picking up 3 month suspensions may not have been otherwise immaculate students who simply accessed some really nifty site on Newton's Laws (blocked by the evil, evil content filter denying them information) through a proxy as a proof of concept.
And then there's the last, really baffling point - You're suggesting that if you provide a service conditional on some rules being followed, you have to accept that people will break these rules? That's just a ludicrous assertion, as shown by this very story - someone broke the rules, they were punished, and are at present denied access to the system. Seems to me that one doesn't have to sit idly by after all.
* - I say "I suspect", because that is how many of these stories go when one digs a little deeper. If there's anyone with some more details on this who is able to correct me, feel free.
Neutrinos are the required result of nuclear fusion within the Sun. They are not charged particles and they will travel through a light-year of lead. Now that Sudbury has been scrapped, there remains a severe deficit of neutrinos coming from the Sun for the nuclear fusion model.
They're not asking the question because that is not at all what this result implies. This result does not rule out all neutrino oscillations, but rather deals with a specific result (produced at Los Alamos, not Sudbury) which significantly complicated the neutrino oscillation theory by requiring an additional fourth type of neutrino. The neutrino oscillation theory used to describe the yield of various species from the sun is still quite intact, I believe.The idea arises from the notion that the in-game currency has a measurable value in terms of a real currency, (primarily in those fixed by the developers such as in Second Life or Entropia, but it's conceivable in most games because of the roaring grey market in in-game goods that generally pervades the genre) and thus the gold you earn from slaying creatures, making cool toys in second life, etc is the same as making real money, and this could in theory be taxed.
While there are numerous arguments against this (the items only being virtual, most players never receiving any income from them as they don't sell gold on ebay or what have you), a common aspect of many games is trading between players, at which point the system suddenly begins to strongly resemble bartering in the real world - something which is covered by tax laws in many countries.
I doubt anything much will happen in the current batch of "game" worlds like Warcraft, but "virtual worlds" like Second Life may well lead to a crop of laws for governing virtual property which - while they may be sensible for the virtual world model - would be likely to cause no end of hassle for the game-style worlds in years to come.
Basically, it covers any account that could log on and play right now.
Mistakes happen in all fields, to say that one particular example (or, indeed, given the human capacity to screw up, numerous ones) renders a field meaningless is highly dubious. What is significant is that significant results are rechecked and errors are given the chance to be corrected - something which this story demonstrates.
Evolution says nothing of the sort, unless you presume abiogenesis can occur in dark matter as well as in traditional matter. Given the vast difference in the behaviour of dark matter compared to 'normal' matter (that is, the matter we deal with on a day to day basis), the possibility of abiogensis in dark matter is a fairly sizable theoretical leap (if, indeed, it's not outright precluded by the nature of the interactions), and so evolution is unable to play a part. (Of course, all the above is in reference to "exotic" types of weakly interacting dark matter, not the "normal matter which is hard to see" forms of dark matter)
Darn, were you being distracted by all that fun you were having? The reason many MMOs struggle is because of the idea, echoed in your post, that it is a good thing for levelling to be "a bitch". It is not. A game should fun to play, not something which you can work at for hours and end up no closer to any sense of accomplishment (or even further from one, in the case of harsh death penalties and the like). Building a game which is accessible and fun is not aiming the lowest common denominator, it's simply understanding why exactly people want to play games. I'm sure there'll still be a market of some sort for the hardcore gamers and their somewhat masochistic tendencies, but I suspect it'll rapidly fall even further into niche territory as WoW and it's successors continue to tailor towards the type of games the majority of people enjoy.
Ah, how the stories grow in the telling - the boat he fired on was not a warship trying to remove him from Sealand, as Wikipedia would have you believe, but a repair boat belonging to the Navy which just happened to be passing by. Check the alternate version of the tale at http://geography.about.com/od/politicalgeography/a /sealand.htm, for example.
So those 2 nations which would fall under the definition of "Former Soviet Union" represented 7.9 million barrels or so of exports alone in 2004 , so presumably other countries in the block contributed little, if anything, in terms of net exports.
(This is obviously all based on the proviso that two randomly chosen sources on the internet are credible, but it's a decent rough guide.)
"Former Soviet Union", I suspect. Or in other words, Russia (I am unsure of how much the other countries under that umbrella term contribute, as Russia by itself is the 2nd largest exporter of oil)
I'm not attempting to dismiss the issues with using non-reusable fuels or the need for alternatives (both in terms of supply, and environmental reasons) but the fact that we have a fairly complex, somewhat erratic graph with a general increase, but with some steady periods and some occasional (fairly dramatic) dips over the 40 years of "real" data, followed by what amounts to a freefall in his 'extrapolation' makes me think that it is, at best an oversimplification, and quite possibly outright misleading.
I've never done the SAT, but I did do the GRE, and I'm guessing (from my non-american viewpoint) that they're much the same. In the GRE, if you take a good look at the scoring criteria, you can pretty much build up a 'perfect' answer for the essay section before you see the prompt, since you just had to hit a few key notes (pick a side, state argument or two, note opposing side, note argument in favour of that side, counter the argument, wrap everything up nicely) and do it with decent use of the English language, and there's nothing they can justify marking you down more than half a point for.
But then again, I don't think anyone is surprised that these tests measure your test-taking skill more effectively than your knowledge of the language, are they?
Personally, I agree with you, and expect that humanity will be able to survive these gradual shifts in temperature - but the problem is that if it does get out of hand, there's going to be a lot of upheaval, and significant disruption to how the world works. However, the fact that you present the last ice age practically as a boon for humanity to suggest that a new one (or, presumably, comprable warming) wouldn't be that big an issue is rather baffling though - do you really not see any potential disruption to the lifestyle enjoyed by much of humanity if we plunged into another ice age/temperatures spiked by a significant amount?