My point of view is that if you're so psychologically screwed up that you think there is something "dirty" or "harmful" about seeing breasts then you have no business having control of a child's upbringing, let alone the government.
There is a hilarious send-up of Rand in the Illuminatus! trilogy, a great book I keep buying and lending and never seeing again. Here's a sample of the book-within-the-book:
Briefly, then, Telemachus Sneezed deals with a time in the near future when we dirty, filthy, freaky, lazy, dope-smoking, frantic-fucking anarchists have brought Law and Order to a nervous collapse in America'. The heroine, Taffy Rhinestone, is, like Atlanta was once herself, a member of Women's Liberation and a believer in socialism, anarchism, free abortions and the charisma of Che. Then comes the rude awakening: food riots, industrial stagnation, a reign of lawless looting and plunder, everything George Wallace ever warned us against-- but the Supreme Court, who are all anarchists with names ending in -stein or -farb or -berger (there is no overt anti-Semitism in the book), keeps repealing laws and taking away the rights of policemen. Finally, in the fifth chapter-- the climax of Book One-- the heroine, poor toughy Taffy, gets raped fifteen times by an oversexed black brute right out of The Birth of a Nation, while a group of cops stand by cursing, wringing their hands and frothing at the mouth because the Supreme Court rulings won't allow them to take any action.
In Book Two, which takes place a few years later, things have degenerated even further and factory pollution has been replaced by a thick layer of marijuana smoke hanging over the country. The Supreme Court is gone, butchered by LSD crazed Mau-Maus who mistook them for a meeting of the Washington chapter of the Policemen's Benevolent Association. The President and a shadowy government-in-exile are skulking about Montreal, living a gloomy emigre existence; the Blind Tigers, a rather thinly disguised caricature of the Black Panthers, are terrorizing white women everywhere from Bangor to Walla Walla; the crazy anarchists are forcing abortions on women whether they want them or not; and television shows nothing but Maoist propaganda and Danish stag films. Women, of course, are the worst sufferers in this blightmare, and, despite all her karate lessons, Taffy has been raped so many times, not only by standard vage-pen but orally and anally as well, that she's practically a walking sperm bank. Then comes the big surprise, the monstro-rape to end all rapes, committed by a pure Aryan with hollow cheeks, a long lean body, and a face that never changes expression. "Everything is fire," he tells her, as he pulls his prick out afterwards, "and don't you ever forget it." Then he disappears.
Well, it turns out that Taffy has gone all icky-sticky-gooey over this character, and she determines to find him again and make an honest man of him. Meanwhile, however, a subplot is brewing, involving Taffy's evil brother, Diamond Jim Rhinestone, an unscrupulous dope pusher who is mixing heroin in his grass to make everybody an addict and enslave them to him. Diamond Jim is allied with the sinister Blind Tigers and a secret society, the Enlightened Ones, who cannot achieve world government as long as a patriotic and paranoid streak of nationalism remains in America.
But the forces of evil are being stymied. A secret underground group has been formed, using the cross as their symbol, and their slogan is appearing scrawled on walls everywhere:
SAVE YOUR FEDERAL RESERVE NOTES, BOYS, THE STATE WILL RISE AGAIN!
Unless this group is found and destroyed, Diamond Jim will not be able to addict everyone to horse, the Blind Tigers won't be able to rape the few remaining white women they haven't gotten to yet, and the Enlightened Ones will not succeed in creating one world government and one monotonous soybean diet for the whole planet. But a clue is discovered: the leader of the Underground is a pure Aryan with hollow cheeks, a long lean body, and a face that never changes expression. Furthermore, he is in the habit of discussing Heracleitus for like seven hours on end (this is a neat trick, because only about a hundred sentences of the Dark Philosopher survive-- but our hero, it t
People who believe as you do are implicitly solipsistic, which is an inherently contradictory philosophy. (See David Deutch's "The Fabric of Reality" for a detailed refutation of solipsism.)
If you believe that other people are as real to themselves as you are to yourself, there is no justification for dismaissing the value of the quality of their experiences while focusing solely on your own. If some action you could take increases the value of other people's experiences by more than your own quality of experience is decreased, then there is still a net gain, just not for you personally.
Because it is usually much easier to know what will improve one's own life than it is to know what will improve the life of another person, and because one's own time and effort is limited, it is usually a better investment to work for personal satisfaction rather than that of another person. On the other hand, satisfaction is not a zero-sum game, so if one can help others while improving one's own mental state, the net benefit is greater than acting in simple self-interest.
Further, there is no reason to believe one must define "self" as stopping at one's own skin, rather than including one's mate, family, tribe, nation, world, or indeed all minds everywhere.
It's often good to have organizations out there who espouse more extreme varieties of one's own political views - otherwise you're the one who looks like a radical.
What a non-argument! Lead with a squishy ad-hominem, then say that for unspecified reasons you disagree with unspecified parts of the only two pages you could be bothered to read - how persuasive.
Here is some strong evidence that the problem is the schools rather than the students:
"Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered. According to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don't want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it's too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. [In the 1840s very few people spent much time in school, and they were expected to be able to read and count before they were admitted.]
At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted.1 The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to 1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men were tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it didn't worry anybody.
WWII was over in 1945. Six years later another war began in Korea. Several million men were tested for military service but this time 600,000 were rejected. Literacy in the draft pool had dropped to 81 percent, even though all that was needed to classify a soldier as literate was fourth- grade reading proficiency. In the few short years from the beginning of WWII to Korea, a terrifying problem of adult illiteracy had appeared. The Korean War group received most of its schooling in the 1940s, and it had more years in school with more professionally trained personnel and more scientifically selected textbooks than the WWII men, yet it could not read, write, count, speak, or think as well as the earlier, less-schooled contingent.
Back in 1952 the Army quietly began hiring hundreds of psychologists to find out how 600,000 high school graduates had successfully faked illiteracy. Regna Wood sums up the episode this way:
' After the psychologists told the officers that the graduates weren't faking, Defense Department administrators knew that something terrible had happened in grade school reading instruction. And they knew it had started in the thirties. Why they remained silent, no one knows. The switch back to reading instruction that worked for everyone should have been made then. But it wasn't.' "
(This is from the link in my last post. The paragraphs have been reordered.)
On your other points: It isn't the size of the wotkload, but the quality. For the kids to be interested and motivated the work has to be worth doing, ant that is not the case in our schools. Another worksheet covering what you already know is actually counterproductive. Students here also understand that with very few exceptions academic credentials are a requirement for wealth - they like to dream about the exceptions, but few actually count on going into rap. (Sports requires college, too these days.) They also understand that if they do more work in school, there is no chance of getting ahead. Honors classes get you a thicker grade of dishwater, that's all. Grade skips are essentially unheard of. Extra learning is unmeasured and will not show up on a report card.
China may eat our lunch, but it won't be because of their drill-and-kill authoritarian schools. Their long artificially depressed economy is bobbing up, but their GDP per capita still stinks. When they are no longer cheap labor and their population is elderly, they will be in the same fix as Japan or worse.
The compete-or-starve bit is stupid. We're already competing and have little to show for it. American
I am sympathetic to your point, but I think that your evaluation of what kids must learn and by what means has been overly shaped by the assumptions of schools.
The idea that students are something that schools "turn out", objects of manufacture produced by pedagogical factories, is an anti-human idea that only took hold relatively recently.*
The public schools have demonstrated that they are unable to achieve the ends you desire. Except for the "savants" part, you have given a fair description of many teachers. Anyone basing his or her judgement only on observation rather than the self-serving statements of those employed in the system would have to conclude that the schools are there to discourage learning, instill a hatred of books, infantilize their students, ensure passivity and submissiveness and prevent them from competing with adults in the economy. In short, schools' "education" is a front for totalitarian brainwashing. The reason that many students do not pursue learning as we both would wish has more to do with them learning the lessons of school too well rather than too poorly.
Let's say the power output of the body is 100W = 360kJ/hr. and none of it gets lost by radiation. The heat of vaporization of water is 2261 J/g. That is less than 160g or ml evaporation per hour, or less than 1 liter for six hours.
Your PBS history likely misses a few things about the history of American education, which has changed dramatically for the worse since the beginning of the 20th century. See John Taylor Gatto's book: _The Underground History of American Education_ A Schoolteacher's Intimate Investigation Into The Problem Of Modern Schooling (full text available online at: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm)
John Taylor Gatto quit teaching with a broadside on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991 while he was still New York State Teacher of the Year, saying that he was "no longer willing to hurt children".
Here's an appropriate Gatto quote: "Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
' to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence.... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else. '
Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia."
I have tutored homeschooled kids in electronics and coached them in invention contests. There are lots of 10 year olds out there smarter and more knowlegable than most slashdotters. I'm not worried about the US on account of the kids, it's the grown-ups that scare me.
From seeing the effects of letting kids mostly learn what they want, rather than imprisoning them in school, I'd say a system where most kids are taught by parents and/or neighbors would do the country a lot more good than the current militantly idiotic education system.
Here's my favorite word for all those wowsers and Grundys out there:
Comstockery noun [U] excessive censorship of literature and pictures which are considered obscene or immoral... Background The term Comstockery derives from one Anthony Comstock (1844-1915). In 1873 Comstock became secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. In the same year he went to Washington to lobby for stronger laws on obscenity, carrying a huge cloth bag full of publications and information on contraception and abortion. He was subsequently empowered to enforce a new law, the Comstock law, which prohibited publications 'of an indecent character' and the mailing of 'any article... intended for the prevention of conception or the procuring of abortion'. The law enabled him to go to any post office and inspect mail he suspected might be obscene, and in his lifetime he oversaw the destruction of 160 tons of literature he considered immoral.
Yes with the software-defined radio technology it would be possible to grab and decode all the analog cable channels at once. The compression would be a killer, though. The Enlight256 from Lenslet Labs in Israel might be able to do it, though- 8TMAC equivalent performance, but it hasn't hit the market yet.
1. can't happen 2. No, just a hickey on any exposed parts. Tight spandex would prevent this. 3. No, water evaporation is unbelievably effective at cooling in a vacuum. A barrier layer to keep in some of the water vapor would be needed to prevent skin drying. Overall dehydration would take quite a while. Varying the permeability and reflectivity would regulate temperature. Unless this keeps in WAY too much vapor, there is no chance of becoming sweaty in a vacuum. 4. What about them? Keep the dangly bits tight in spandex and be prepared for a little excess jet propulsion. 5. No, spandex is very difficult to rip and an outersuit would make it even less likely. Even if it did rip, you would not burst, just bruise.
Everything in your post is wrong - see www.climateaudit.org . Also peer review is no substitute for replication and full data and analysis audits, which is what McIntyre and McKitrick did. The other studies derive their conclusions from the same faulty series as Mann.
The issue is PCA, not averaging as you state. Mann now claims that the essential data for his conclusions is in the 4th PC: http://www.climateaudit.org/?m=200412
"Robustness: If 2 PCs are used in the AD1400 North American network along with conventional (centered) PC calculations, we argued in our Nature submissions that MM-type results are obtained. This is now effectively acknowledged by MBH. To try to salvage MBH98, they now argue that they should be entitled to increase the number of PCs in the AD1400 North American network from 2 to 5 and that our not doing so is "incorrect". They point out that, using centered PC methods, the PC4 (instead of the PC1) has a hockey stick shape (from the bristlecone pines) and, as long as they can use the PC4, the PC4 now drives world climate history. Doesn't this just seem silly? Now we're not dealing with a "dominant" pattern of world climate, but a PC4.)"
I'm not astroturfing. I have no connection with the energy industry or the researchers. I just enjoy exposing and correcting bullshit such as yours.
If you are going to lie, try doing it in a way that is not so palpably obvious. Which paper are you talking about? They chose not to publish in Nature because that journal has a 1,500 word limit for responses to previously published papers. They have published several unrefuted peer-reviewed papers. Many of the attempted refutations are clearly conscious frauds. As for the supposed oil money, I thought you were the one objecting to the idea that Mann should have to disclose all his funding sources. Other IPCC contributors have gotten millions for research whch they refuse to allow to be scrutinized - by comparison the dissenting voices have gotten very little. The important thing is that Mann has not released all his data and analysis and is being forced to do so now. Other climate researchers have released even less, and have so far gotten less flack, even though it appears that some of them are relying on the same faulty data sets.
I have read both sides and clearly Mann comes out the loser. Credentials in a sub-specialty are utterly irrelevant to science, and often indicate that a researcher is constrained by the politics of that specialty. The evidence and analysis are all that matters in science. The issues with ihe IPCC assertions are not minutae of climate science, but gaping failures to adhere to the most basic priciples of science. You obviously are pretending to knowledge you don't have. Read all of www.climateaudit.org if you want to have a meaningful opinion on the topic.
Our article "Hockey Sticks, Principal Components and Spurious Significance" has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, copyright 2005 American Geophysical Union (doi: 2004GL012750). A pre-publication version is at http://www.climate2003.com/pdfs/2004GL012750.pdf. Further reproduction or electronic distribution is not permitted.
Our article "The M&M Critique of the MBH98 Northern Hemisphere Climate index: Update and Implications" has been accepted for publication by Energy & Environment and is available at http://www.multi-science.co.uk/mcintyre-mckitrick. pdf.
Our research shows fundamental flaws in the "hockey stick graph" used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to argue that the 1990s were the warmest decade of the millennium. The original hockey stick study was published by Michael Mann of the University of Virginia and his coauthors Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes. The main error affects a step called principal component analysis (PCA). We showed that the PCA method as used by Mann et al. effectively mines a data set for hockey stick patterns. Even from meaningless random data (red noise), it nearly always produces a hockey stick.
This "backgrounder" provides a road map and summary of the 3 articles. While these papers have been under review, Mann et al. have opened up their own weblog realclimate.org and criticized some of our earlier work. We include some comments here on this commentary and some FAQ.
You could argue whether trying PCA on a series with chunks missing is extrapolation or just stupid.
Steve McIntyre, discussing how he came to debunk the IPCC hockey-stick graph: "In total, these are the kinds of problems we found: truncated sources, arbitrary plugging of data, use of obsolete data, geographical mislabeling. Here is one that is rather fun: There is a data series that was inserted for a grid box for precipitation near Boston and the data actually came from Paris, France. This was just a crazy goof."
All the data except the satellite data, the solar cycle data, the correctly calculated historical data...basically what you're left with is unreliable or anecdotal or based on sheer pseudoscientific voodoo like the "climate simulations". And assuming there really is warming, the CO2 attribution of the causes in such a complex and poorly modeled system is dimwitted conjecture and the supposed effects sensationalized hogwash.
This is not about freedom of thought, but about a supposed scientist who has been shown to be incompetent and who has used fraud to defend his discredited research.
Steve McIntyre, discussing how he came to debunk the IPCC hockey-stick graph: http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/188.pdf* "N ext, Mann relies heavily on tree-ring data and he calculates principal components for six regions using 300 sites. There is a listing of the sites at the Nature Supplementary Information. I organized that list and figured out how to download source data from the World Data Center for Palaeoclimatology, which is funded by the U.S. government. I would like to comment that this is a tremendous archive and should be supported. I had nothing but excellent service from them and it is extremely important that there be this type of public archive of data. Collating these 300 series was a pretty big job. I carried out a PC calculation. The results were completely different from Mann's. In fact, Mann's results were literally impossible; they didn't explain enough variance in these calculations. There was again something mysteriously wrong with this and I was really quite puzzled by it. I went back to look at the data to see if I had somehow goofed in collating the data. I had a sinking feeling, after doing this for a couple of weeks, that maybe I had put the data in the wrong year and as a result, eve9 everything was a little bit at cross-purposes. I checked to see what years his data started. Mostly it started in odd years, 1999 and 1949, not the even years we like to start with. I thought I must have inserted the data wrong, so then I went back to the original email where I obtained the data. Lo and behold, the same problem was there. I hadn't collated it wrong. Whatever it was, was also in the original data. So I wrote back to Scott Rutherford who provided the data, and pointed this out to him. He said that he didn't know what the problem was, as it was before his time. I wrote to Mann and sent him back the whole data set and said, Look, is this the right data set? He said he was too busy to respond to this or any other inquiry."....
"In total, these are the kinds of problems we found: truncated sources, arbitrary plugging of data, use of obsolete data, geographical mislabeling. Here is one that is rather fun: There is a data series that was inserted for a grid box for precipitation near Boston and the data actually came from Paris, France. This was just a crazy goof."
Steve McIntyre, discussing how he came to debunk the IPCC hockey-stick graph: http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/188.pdf* "N ext, Mann relies heavily on tree-ring data and he calculates principal components for six regions using 300 sites. There is a listing of the sites at the Nature Supplementary Information. I organized that list and figured out how to download source data from the World Data Center for Palaeoclimatology, which is funded by the U.S. government. I would like to comment that this is a tremendous archive and should be supported. I had nothing but excellent service from them and it is extremely important that there be this type of public archive of data. Collating these 300 series was a pretty big job. I carried out a PC calculation. The results were completely different from Mann's. In fact, Mann's results were literally impossible; they didn't explain enough variance in these calculations. There was again something mysteriously wrong with this and I was really quite puzzled by it. I went back to look at the data to see if I had somehow goofed in collating the data. I had a sinking feeling, after doing this for a couple of weeks, that maybe I had put the data in the wrong year and as a result, eve9 everything was a little bit at cross-purposes. I checked to see what years his data started. Mostly it started in odd years, 1999 and 1949, not the even years we like to start with. I thought I must have inserted the data wrong, so then I went back to the original email where I obtained the data. Lo and behold, the same problem was there. I hadn't collated it wrong. Whatever it was, was also in the original data. So I wrote back to Scott Rutherford who provided the data, and pointed this out to him. He said that he didn't know what the problem was, as it was before his time. I wrote to Mann and sent him back the whole data set and said, Look, is this the right data set? He said he was too busy to respond to this or any other inquiry."....
"In total, these are the kinds of problems we found: truncated sources, arbitrary plugging of data, use of obsolete data, geographical mislabeling. Here is one that is rather fun: There is a data series that was inserted for a grid box for precipitation near Boston and the data actually came from Paris, France. This was just a crazy goof."
Sounds like a lambasting to me. Also sounds like Mann is an asshole, and his realclimate.org site confirms it. Mann just spins and blows smoke and never responds in any relavant way to the massive evidence presented that he is incompetent in both science and mathematics.
The resolution to the perplexities of positivism is Bayes' Theorem.
Where p(A|X) is "the probability of A given X" and ~A means "not A" p(A|X) = [ p(X|A)*p(A) ] / [ p(X|A)*p(A) + p(X|~A)*p(~A) ]
Much knowledge can be derived from applying that: quantum mechanics, statistics, AI theory, the scientific method and more.
This article is long, so here's the relevant bit from "An Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning" by Eliezer Yudkowsky http://yudkowsky.net/bayes/bayes.html:
Previously, the most popular philosophy of science was probably Karl Popper's falsificationism - this is the old philosophy that the Bayesian revolution is currently dethroning. Karl Popper's idea that theories can be definitely falsified, but never definitely confirmed, is yet another special case of the Bayesian rules; if p(X|A) ~ 1 - if the theory makes a definite prediction - then observing ~X very strongly falsifies A. On the other hand, if p(X|A) ~ 1, and we observe X, this doesn't definitely confirm the theory; there might be some other condition B such that p(X|B) ~ 1, in which case observing X doesn't favor A over B. For observing X to definitely confirm A, we would have to know, not that p(X|A) ~ 1, but that p(X|~A) ~ 0, which is something that we can't know because we can't range over all possible alternative explanations. For example, when Einstein's theory of General Relativity toppled Newton's incredibly well-confirmed theory of gravity, it turned out that all of Newton's predictions were just a special case of Einstein's predictions.
You can even formalize Popper's philosophy mathematically. The likelihood ratio for X, p(X|A)/p(X|~A), determines how much observing X slides the probability for A; the likelihood ratio is what says how strong X is as evidence. Well, in your theory A, you can predict X with probability 1, if you like; but you can't control the denominator of the likelihood ratio, p(X|~A) - there will always be some alternative theories that also predict X, and while we go with the simplest theory that fits the current evidence, you may someday encounter some evidence that an alternative theory predicts but your theory does not. That's the hidden gotcha that toppled Newton's theory of gravity. So there's a limit on how much mileage you can get from successful predictions; there's a limit on how high the likelihood ratio goes for confirmatory evidence.
On the other hand, if you encounter some piece of evidence Y that is definitely not predicted by your theory, this is enormously strong evidence against your theory. If p(Y|A) is infinitesimal, then the likelihood ratio will also be infinitesimal. For example, if p(Y|A) is 0.0001%, and p(Y|~A) is 1%, then the likelihood ratio p(Y|A)/p(Y|~A) will be 1:10000. -40 decibels of evidence! Or flipping the likelihood ratio, if p(Y|A) is very small, then p(Y|~A)/p(Y|A) will be very large, meaning that observing Y greatly favors ~A over A. Falsification is much stronger than confirmation. This is a consequence of the earlier point that very strong evidence is not the product of a very high probability that A leads to X, but the product of a very low probability that not-A could have led to X. This is the precise Bayesian rule that underlies the heuristic value of Popper's falsificationism.
Similarly, Popper's dictum that an idea must be falsifiable can be interpreted as a manifestation of the Bayesian conservation-of-probability rule; if a result X is positive evidence for the theory, then the result ~X would have disconfirmed the theory to some extent. If you try to interpret both X and ~X as "confirming" the theory, the Bayesian rules say this is impossible! To increase the probability of a theory you must expose it to tests that can potentially decrease its probability; this is not just a rule for detecting would-be cheaters in the social process of science, but a consequence of Bayesian probability theory. On the other hand,
Anthropogenic global warming is unproven. The extent of global warming is in serious dispute. Press reports of the phenomenon are sensationalized and often falsified. (e.g. the Antarctic ice sheet is not melting overall, as has been claimed.) The degree to which CO2 causes warming is unclear - water vapor, different types of cloud cover and the solar cycle have far more effect on climate than atmospheric CO2. The computer models uniformly fail to retrodict the climate data, except where the model is unscientifically tweaked, essentially encoding the climate history data that it is supposed to be retrodicting in the model itself. Even if anthropogenic global warming is a fact, it is unclear whether it will be a net positive for humanity and the biosphere or not. In any event, climate has constantly changed naturally without human causes. The Earth has been overdue for another ice age for some millennia; if it exists, anthropogenic global warming may extend the current temperate period.
What is certain - no matter whose model you use - is that the Kyoto accords will not appreciably affect CO2 in the atmosphere, and still less will it affect climate, while it will cost many trillions of dollars in direct costs and lost growth.
For those who believe that increasing CO2 is a risk, the only coherent plans are 1. increased nuclear power investment, particularly fuel cycles that use the "waste" of current Uranium cycle plants (mostly Plutonium), or new Thorium-cycle plants.
2. Space-based solar (not just PV, but also concentrators and heat engines, with microwave power transmission to earth.
3. Speculatively, fusion power - there is as yet no reason to belive that it will ever be a practical energy source, but it shows promise.
Earth-based solar power, wind power, tide power, geothermal power, OTEC, biomass, and conservation will not provide enough energy to replace fossil fuels. Slower growth will just increase poverty and thus population, thus has no net long-term benefit.
*Your claim that: "Come 1970 and global warming was pretty much established science and by the 1980's it was scientific theory with a few crackpot holdouts which continue to this day." is simply false. In the '70s and early '80s the worry was about global cooling, not warming. Referring to scientists who disagree with you as "crackpots" shows that you are merely reacting in an atavistic monkey-mode to those you consider an out-group, screeching and hurling figurative feces. The rest of your post is equal parts incoherent, ignorant, hateful and wrong. Try harder to think rather than to just barf up the pap you can't seem to digest.
What makes you think you can trust the statistics from Cuba when every Communist nation in the world has habitually falsified national statistics? Doesn't the US have a higher Black population than Canada, and don't Blacks have higher infant mortality than Whites in every income bracket? Don't those numbers reflect the whole population, not just citizens? What percentage of Mexican females of child-bearing years actually live in the US? 3%? 5%? - or more? That has to push the numbers up a bit.
I think if you correct for race and only compare with countries with verifiably honest statistics, ou will find that the US comes out a lot better than the raw stats indicate.
Slashdot Mirror
My point of view is that if you're so psychologically screwed up that you think there is something "dirty" or "harmful" about seeing breasts then you have no business having control of a child's upbringing, let alone the government.
There is a hilarious send-up of Rand in the Illuminatus! trilogy, a great book I keep buying and lending and never seeing again. Here's a sample of the book-within-the-book:
Briefly, then, Telemachus Sneezed deals with a time in the near future when we dirty, filthy, freaky, lazy, dope-smoking, frantic-fucking anarchists have brought Law and Order to a nervous collapse in America'. The heroine, Taffy Rhinestone, is, like Atlanta was once herself, a member of Women's Liberation and a believer in socialism, anarchism, free abortions and the charisma of Che. Then comes the rude awakening: food riots, industrial stagnation, a reign of lawless looting and plunder, everything George Wallace ever warned us against-- but the Supreme Court, who are all anarchists with names ending in -stein or -farb or -berger (there is no overt anti-Semitism in the book), keeps repealing laws and taking away the rights of policemen. Finally, in the fifth chapter-- the climax of Book One-- the heroine, poor toughy Taffy, gets raped fifteen times by an oversexed black brute right out of The Birth of a Nation, while a group of cops stand by cursing, wringing their hands and frothing at the mouth because the Supreme Court rulings won't allow them to take any action.
In Book Two, which takes place a few years later, things have degenerated even further and factory pollution has been replaced by a thick layer of marijuana smoke hanging over the country. The Supreme Court is gone, butchered by LSD crazed Mau-Maus who mistook them for a meeting of the Washington chapter of the Policemen's Benevolent Association. The President and a shadowy government-in-exile are skulking about Montreal, living a gloomy emigre existence; the Blind Tigers, a rather thinly disguised caricature of the Black Panthers, are terrorizing white women everywhere from Bangor to Walla Walla; the crazy anarchists are forcing abortions on women whether they want them or not; and television shows nothing but Maoist propaganda and Danish stag films. Women, of course, are the worst sufferers in this blightmare, and, despite all her karate lessons, Taffy has been raped so many times, not only by standard vage-pen but orally and anally as well, that she's practically a walking sperm bank. Then comes the big surprise, the monstro-rape to end all rapes, committed by a pure Aryan with hollow cheeks, a long lean body, and a face that never changes expression. "Everything is fire," he tells her, as he pulls his prick out afterwards, "and don't you ever forget it." Then he disappears.
Well, it turns out that Taffy has gone all icky-sticky-gooey over this character, and she determines to find him again and make an honest man of him. Meanwhile, however, a subplot is brewing, involving Taffy's evil brother, Diamond Jim Rhinestone, an unscrupulous dope pusher who is mixing heroin in his grass to make everybody an addict and enslave them to him. Diamond Jim is allied with the sinister Blind Tigers and a secret society, the Enlightened Ones, who cannot achieve world government as long as a patriotic and paranoid streak of nationalism remains in America.
But the forces of evil are being stymied. A secret underground group has been formed, using the cross as their symbol, and their slogan is appearing scrawled on walls everywhere:
SAVE YOUR FEDERAL RESERVE NOTES, BOYS, THE STATE WILL RISE AGAIN!
Unless this group is found and destroyed, Diamond Jim will not be able to addict everyone to horse, the Blind Tigers won't be able to rape the few remaining white women they haven't gotten to yet, and the Enlightened Ones will not succeed in creating one world government and one monotonous soybean diet for the whole planet. But a clue is discovered: the leader of the Underground is a pure Aryan with hollow cheeks, a long lean body, and a face that never changes expression. Furthermore, he is in the habit of discussing Heracleitus for like seven hours on end (this is a neat trick, because only about a hundred sentences of the Dark Philosopher survive-- but our hero, it t
People who believe as you do are implicitly solipsistic, which is an inherently contradictory philosophy. (See David Deutch's "The Fabric of Reality" for a detailed refutation of solipsism.)
If you believe that other people are as real to themselves as you are to yourself, there is no justification for dismaissing the value of the quality of their experiences while focusing solely on your own. If some action you could take increases the value of other people's experiences by more than your own quality of experience is decreased, then there is still a net gain, just not for you personally.
Because it is usually much easier to know what will improve one's own life than it is to know what will improve the life of another person, and because one's own time and effort is limited, it is usually a better investment to work for personal satisfaction rather than that of another person. On the other hand, satisfaction is not a zero-sum game, so if one can help others while improving one's own mental state, the net benefit is greater than acting in simple self-interest.
Further, there is no reason to believe one must define "self" as stopping at one's own skin, rather than including one's mate, family, tribe, nation, world, or indeed all minds everywhere.
It's often good to have organizations out there who espouse more extreme varieties of one's own political views - otherwise you're the one who looks like a radical.
What a non-argument! Lead with a squishy ad-hominem, then say that for unspecified reasons you disagree with unspecified parts of the only two pages you could be bothered to read - how persuasive.
Here is some strong evidence that the problem is the schools rather than the students:
"Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered. According to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don't want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it's too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it.
[In the 1840s very few people spent much time in school, and they were expected to be able to read and count before they were admitted.]
At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted.1 The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to 1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men were tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it didn't worry anybody.
WWII was over in 1945. Six years later another war began in Korea. Several million men were tested for military service but this time 600,000 were rejected. Literacy in the draft pool had dropped to 81 percent, even though all that was needed to classify a soldier as literate was fourth- grade reading proficiency. In the few short years from the beginning of WWII to Korea, a terrifying problem of adult illiteracy had appeared. The Korean War group received most of its schooling in the 1940s, and it had more years in school with more professionally trained personnel and more scientifically selected textbooks than the WWII men, yet it could not read, write, count, speak, or think as well as the earlier, less-schooled contingent.
Back in 1952 the Army quietly began hiring hundreds of psychologists to find out how 600,000 high school graduates had successfully faked illiteracy. Regna Wood sums up the episode this way:
' After the psychologists told the officers that the graduates weren't faking, Defense Department administrators knew that something terrible had happened in grade school reading instruction. And they knew it had started in the thirties. Why they remained silent, no one knows. The switch back to reading instruction that worked for everyone should have been made then. But it wasn't.' "
(This is from the link in my last post. The paragraphs have been reordered.)
On your other points:
It isn't the size of the wotkload, but the quality. For the kids to be interested and motivated the work has to be worth doing, ant that is not the case in our schools. Another worksheet covering what you already know is actually counterproductive. Students here also understand that with very few exceptions academic credentials are a requirement for wealth - they like to dream about the exceptions, but few actually count on going into rap. (Sports requires college, too these days.) They also understand that if they do more work in school, there is no chance of getting ahead. Honors classes get you a thicker grade of dishwater, that's all. Grade skips are essentially unheard of. Extra learning is unmeasured and will not show up on a report card.
China may eat our lunch, but it won't be because of their drill-and-kill authoritarian schools. Their long artificially depressed economy is bobbing up, but their GDP per capita still stinks. When they are no longer cheap labor and their population is elderly, they will be in the same fix as Japan or worse.
The compete-or-starve bit is stupid. We're already competing and have little to show for it. American
I am sympathetic to your point, but I think that your evaluation of what kids must learn and by what means has been overly shaped by the assumptions of schools.
t m
The idea that students are something that schools "turn out", objects of manufacture produced by pedagogical factories, is an anti-human idea that only took hold relatively recently.*
The public schools have demonstrated that they are unable to achieve the ends you desire. Except for the "savants" part, you have given a fair description of many teachers. Anyone basing his or her judgement only on observation rather than the self-serving statements of those employed in the system would have to conclude that the schools are there to discourage learning, instill a hatred of books, infantilize their students, ensure passivity and submissiveness and prevent them from competing with adults in the economy. In short, schools' "education" is a front for totalitarian brainwashing. The reason that many students do not pursue learning as we both would wish has more to do with them learning the lessons of school too well rather than too poorly.
* http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.h
Let's say the power output of the body is 100W = 360kJ/hr. and none of it gets lost by radiation. The heat of vaporization of water is 2261 J/g. That is less than 160g or ml evaporation per hour, or less than 1 liter for six hours.
Your PBS history likely misses a few things about the history of American education, which has changed dramatically for the worse since the beginning of the 20th century. See John Taylor Gatto's book:)
... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else. '
_The Underground History of American Education_
A Schoolteacher's Intimate Investigation Into The Problem Of Modern Schooling
(full text available online at: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm
John Taylor Gatto quit teaching with a broadside on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991 while he was still New York State Teacher of the Year, saying that he was "no longer willing to hurt children".
Here's an appropriate Gatto quote:
"Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
' to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence.
Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia."
http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm
I have tutored homeschooled kids in electronics and coached them in invention contests. There are lots of 10 year olds out there smarter and more knowlegable than most slashdotters. I'm not worried about the US on account of the kids, it's the grown-ups that scare me.
From seeing the effects of letting kids mostly learn what they want, rather than imprisoning them in school, I'd say a system where most kids are taught by parents and/or neighbors would do the country a lot more good than the current militantly idiotic education system.
Here's my favorite word for all those wowsers and Grundys out there:
... ... intended for the prevention of conception or the procuring of abortion'. The law enabled him to go to any post office and inspect mail he suspected might be obscene, and in his lifetime he oversaw the destruction of 160 tons of literature he considered immoral.
u rces/new-comstockery-030210.htm
Comstockery noun [U]
excessive censorship of literature and pictures which are considered obscene or immoral
Background
The term Comstockery derives from one Anthony Comstock (1844-1915). In 1873 Comstock became secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. In the same year he went to Washington to lobby for stronger laws on obscenity, carrying a huge cloth bag full of publications and information on contraception and abortion. He was subsequently empowered to enforce a new law, the Comstock law, which prohibited publications 'of an indecent character' and the mailing of 'any article
From http://www.macmillandictionary.com/essential/reso
"Did the person that wrote the description EVEN READ THE FRICKIN ARTICLE?? "
Apparently you didn't.
Dude, there's more to running games than the hard disk. Obviously, "6x faster" only refers to the disk itself. From TFA:
IPEAK Business Winstone 2004 / IPEAK Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004
Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB)
4347.8 1754.4
Western Digital Raptor (74GB)
735.3 467.3
"...almost 6x the speed of the Raptor in the IPEAK trace of Business Winstone 2004 and 3.75x in the IPEAK MMCC trace"
Yes with the software-defined radio technology it would be possible to grab and decode all the analog cable channels at once. The compression would be a killer, though. The Enlight256 from Lenslet Labs in Israel might be able to do it, though- 8TMAC equivalent performance, but it hasn't hit the market yet.
1. can't happen
2. No, just a hickey on any exposed parts. Tight spandex would prevent this.
3. No, water evaporation is unbelievably effective at cooling in a vacuum. A barrier layer to keep in some of the water vapor would be needed to prevent skin drying. Overall dehydration would take quite a while. Varying the permeability and reflectivity would regulate temperature. Unless this keeps in WAY too much vapor, there is no chance of becoming sweaty in a vacuum.
4. What about them? Keep the dangly bits tight in spandex and be prepared for a little excess jet propulsion.
5. No, spandex is very difficult to rip and an outersuit would make it even less likely. Even if it did rip, you would not burst, just bruise.
Everything in your post is wrong - see www.climateaudit.org . Also peer review is no substitute for replication and full data and analysis audits, which is what McIntyre and McKitrick did. The other studies derive their conclusions from the same faulty series as Mann.
The issue is PCA, not averaging as you state. Mann now claims that the essential data for his conclusions is in the 4th PC:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?m=200412
"Robustness:
If 2 PCs are used in the AD1400 North American network along with conventional (centered) PC calculations, we argued in our Nature submissions that MM-type results are obtained. This is now effectively acknowledged by MBH. To try to salvage MBH98, they now argue that they should be entitled to increase the number of PCs in the AD1400 North American network from 2 to 5 and that our not doing so is "incorrect". They point out that, using centered PC methods, the PC4 (instead of the PC1) has a hockey stick shape (from the bristlecone pines) and, as long as they can use the PC4, the PC4 now drives world climate history. Doesn't this just seem silly? Now we're not dealing with a "dominant" pattern of world climate, but a PC4.)"
I'm not astroturfing. I have no connection with the energy industry or the researchers. I just enjoy exposing and correcting bullshit such as yours.
If you are going to lie, try doing it in a way that is not so palpably obvious. Which paper are you talking about? They chose not to publish in Nature because that journal has a 1,500 word limit for responses to previously published papers. They have published several unrefuted peer-reviewed papers. Many of the attempted refutations are clearly conscious frauds. As for the supposed oil money, I thought you were the one objecting to the idea that Mann should have to disclose all his funding sources. Other IPCC contributors have gotten millions for research whch they refuse to allow to be scrutinized - by comparison the dissenting voices have gotten very little. The important thing is that Mann has not released all his data and analysis and is being forced to do so now. Other climate researchers have released even less, and have so far gotten less flack, even though it appears that some of them are relying on the same faulty data sets.
I have read both sides and clearly Mann comes out the loser. Credentials in a sub-specialty are utterly irrelevant to science, and often indicate that a researcher is constrained by the politics of that specialty. The evidence and analysis are all that matters in science. The issues with ihe IPCC assertions are not minutae of climate science, but gaping failures to adhere to the most basic priciples of science. You obviously are pretending to knowledge you don't have. Read all of www.climateaudit.org if you want to have a meaningful opinion on the topic.
From http://www.climateaudit.org/?m=200501
. pdf.
Our article "Hockey Sticks, Principal Components and Spurious Significance" has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, copyright 2005 American Geophysical Union (doi: 2004GL012750). A pre-publication version is at http://www.climate2003.com/pdfs/2004GL012750.pdf. Further reproduction or electronic distribution is not permitted.
Our article "The M&M Critique of the MBH98 Northern Hemisphere Climate index: Update and Implications" has been accepted for publication by Energy & Environment and is available at http://www.multi-science.co.uk/mcintyre-mckitrick
Our research shows fundamental flaws in the "hockey stick graph" used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to argue that the 1990s were the warmest decade of the millennium. The original hockey stick study was published by Michael Mann of the University of Virginia and his coauthors Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes. The main error affects a step called principal component analysis (PCA). We showed that the PCA method as used by Mann et al. effectively mines a data set for hockey stick patterns. Even from meaningless random data (red noise), it nearly always produces a hockey stick.
This "backgrounder" provides a road map and summary of the 3 articles. While these papers have been under review, Mann et al. have opened up their own weblog realclimate.org and criticized some of our earlier work. We include some comments here on this commentary and some FAQ.
See my other posts on this article explaining why parent is so, so wrong.
You could argue whether trying PCA on a series with chunks missing is extrapolation or just stupid.
Steve McIntyre, discussing how he came to debunk the IPCC hockey-stick graph:
"In total, these are the kinds of problems we found: truncated sources, arbitrary plugging of data, use of obsolete data, geographical mislabeling. Here is one that is rather fun: There is a data series that was inserted for a grid box for precipitation near Boston and the data actually came from Paris, France. This was just a crazy goof."
All the data except the satellite data, the solar cycle data, the correctly calculated historical data...basically what you're left with is unreliable or anecdotal or based on sheer pseudoscientific voodoo like the "climate simulations". And assuming there really is warming, the CO2 attribution of the causes in such a complex and poorly modeled system is dimwitted conjecture and the supposed effects sensationalized hogwash.
This is not about freedom of thought, but about a supposed scientist who has been shown to be incompetent and who has used fraud to defend his discredited research.
N ext, Mann relies heavily on tree-ring data and he calculates principal ....
Steve McIntyre, discussing how he came to debunk the IPCC hockey-stick graph:
http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/188.pdf*
"
components for six regions using 300 sites. There is a listing of the
sites at the Nature Supplementary Information. I organized that list and
figured out how to download source data from the World Data Center for
Palaeoclimatology, which is funded by the U.S. government. I would like to
comment that this is a tremendous archive and should be supported. I had
nothing but excellent service from them and it is extremely important that
there be this type of public archive of data. Collating these 300 series was
a pretty big job. I carried out a PC calculation. The results were completely
different from Mann's. In fact, Mann's results were literally impossible;
they didn't explain enough variance in these calculations. There was
again something mysteriously wrong with this and I was really quite puzzled
by it. I went back to look at the data to see if I had somehow goofed in collating
the data. I had a sinking feeling, after doing this for a couple of
weeks, that maybe I had put the data in the wrong year and as a result, eve9
everything was a little bit at cross-purposes. I checked to see what years his
data started. Mostly it started in odd years, 1999 and 1949, not the even
years we like to start with. I thought I must have inserted the data wrong,
so then I went back to the original email where I obtained the data. Lo and
behold, the same problem was there. I hadn't collated it wrong. Whatever
it was, was also in the original data. So I wrote back to Scott Rutherford
who provided the data, and pointed this out to him. He said that he didn't
know what the problem was, as it was before his time. I wrote to Mann
and sent him back the whole data set and said, Look, is this the right data
set? He said he was too busy to respond to this or any other inquiry."
"In total, these are the kinds of problems we found: truncated
sources, arbitrary plugging of data, use of obsolete data, geographical mislabeling.
Here is one that is rather fun: There is a data series that was inserted
for a grid box for precipitation near Boston and the data actually
came from Paris, France. This was just a crazy goof."
Steve McIntyre, discussing how he came to debunk the IPCC hockey-stick graph:N ext, Mann relies heavily on tree-ring data and he calculates principal ....
http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/188.pdf*
"
components for six regions using 300 sites. There is a listing of the
sites at the Nature Supplementary Information. I organized that list and
figured out how to download source data from the World Data Center for
Palaeoclimatology, which is funded by the U.S. government. I would like to
comment that this is a tremendous archive and should be supported. I had
nothing but excellent service from them and it is extremely important that
there be this type of public archive of data. Collating these 300 series was
a pretty big job. I carried out a PC calculation. The results were completely
different from Mann's. In fact, Mann's results were literally impossible;
they didn't explain enough variance in these calculations. There was
again something mysteriously wrong with this and I was really quite puzzled
by it. I went back to look at the data to see if I had somehow goofed in collating
the data. I had a sinking feeling, after doing this for a couple of
weeks, that maybe I had put the data in the wrong year and as a result, eve9
everything was a little bit at cross-purposes. I checked to see what years his
data started. Mostly it started in odd years, 1999 and 1949, not the even
years we like to start with. I thought I must have inserted the data wrong,
so then I went back to the original email where I obtained the data. Lo and
behold, the same problem was there. I hadn't collated it wrong. Whatever
it was, was also in the original data. So I wrote back to Scott Rutherford
who provided the data, and pointed this out to him. He said that he didn't
know what the problem was, as it was before his time. I wrote to Mann
and sent him back the whole data set and said, Look, is this the right data
set? He said he was too busy to respond to this or any other inquiry."
"In total, these are the kinds of problems we found: truncated
sources, arbitrary plugging of data, use of obsolete data, geographical mislabeling.
Here is one that is rather fun: There is a data series that was inserted
for a grid box for precipitation near Boston and the data actually
came from Paris, France. This was just a crazy goof."
Sounds like a lambasting to me. Also sounds like Mann is an asshole, and his realclimate.org site confirms it. Mann just spins and blows smoke and never responds in any relavant way to the massive evidence presented that he is incompetent in both science and mathematics.
The resolution to the perplexities of positivism is Bayes' Theorem.
:
Where p(A|X) is "the probability of A given X" and ~A means "not A"
p(A|X) = [ p(X|A)*p(A) ] / [ p(X|A)*p(A) + p(X|~A)*p(~A) ]
Much knowledge can be derived from applying that: quantum mechanics, statistics, AI theory, the scientific method and more.
This article is long, so here's the relevant bit
from "An Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning" by Eliezer Yudkowsky
http://yudkowsky.net/bayes/bayes.html
Previously, the most popular philosophy of science was probably Karl Popper's falsificationism - this is the old philosophy that the Bayesian revolution is currently dethroning. Karl Popper's idea that theories can be definitely falsified, but never definitely confirmed, is yet another special case of the Bayesian rules; if p(X|A) ~ 1 - if the theory makes a definite prediction - then observing ~X very strongly falsifies A. On the other hand, if p(X|A) ~ 1, and we observe X, this doesn't definitely confirm the theory; there might be some other condition B such that p(X|B) ~ 1, in which case observing X doesn't favor A over B. For observing X to definitely confirm A, we would have to know, not that p(X|A) ~ 1, but that p(X|~A) ~ 0, which is something that we can't know because we can't range over all possible alternative explanations. For example, when Einstein's theory of General Relativity toppled Newton's incredibly well-confirmed theory of gravity, it turned out that all of Newton's predictions were just a special case of Einstein's predictions.
You can even formalize Popper's philosophy mathematically. The likelihood ratio for X, p(X|A)/p(X|~A), determines how much observing X slides the probability for A; the likelihood ratio is what says how strong X is as evidence. Well, in your theory A, you can predict X with probability 1, if you like; but you can't control the denominator of the likelihood ratio, p(X|~A) - there will always be some alternative theories that also predict X, and while we go with the simplest theory that fits the current evidence, you may someday encounter some evidence that an alternative theory predicts but your theory does not. That's the hidden gotcha that toppled Newton's theory of gravity. So there's a limit on how much mileage you can get from successful predictions; there's a limit on how high the likelihood ratio goes for confirmatory evidence.
On the other hand, if you encounter some piece of evidence Y that is definitely not predicted by your theory, this is enormously strong evidence against your theory. If p(Y|A) is infinitesimal, then the likelihood ratio will also be infinitesimal. For example, if p(Y|A) is 0.0001%, and p(Y|~A) is 1%, then the likelihood ratio p(Y|A)/p(Y|~A) will be 1:10000. -40 decibels of evidence! Or flipping the likelihood ratio, if p(Y|A) is very small, then p(Y|~A)/p(Y|A) will be very large, meaning that observing Y greatly favors ~A over A. Falsification is much stronger than confirmation. This is a consequence of the earlier point that very strong evidence is not the product of a very high probability that A leads to X, but the product of a very low probability that not-A could have led to X. This is the precise Bayesian rule that underlies the heuristic value of Popper's falsificationism.
Similarly, Popper's dictum that an idea must be falsifiable can be interpreted as a manifestation of the Bayesian conservation-of-probability rule; if a result X is positive evidence for the theory, then the result ~X would have disconfirmed the theory to some extent. If you try to interpret both X and ~X as "confirming" the theory, the Bayesian rules say this is impossible! To increase the probability of a theory you must expose it to tests that can potentially decrease its probability; this is not just a rule for detecting would-be cheaters in the social process of science, but a consequence of Bayesian probability theory. On the other hand,
Anthropogenic global warming is unproven. The extent of global warming is in serious dispute. Press reports of the phenomenon are sensationalized and often falsified. (e.g. the Antarctic ice sheet is not melting overall, as has been claimed.) The degree to which CO2 causes warming is unclear - water vapor, different types of cloud cover and the solar cycle have far more effect on climate than atmospheric CO2. The computer models uniformly fail to retrodict the climate data, except where the model is unscientifically tweaked, essentially encoding the climate history data that it is supposed to be retrodicting in the model itself. Even if anthropogenic global warming is a fact, it is unclear whether it will be a net positive for humanity and the biosphere or not. In any event, climate has constantly changed naturally without human causes. The Earth has been overdue for another ice age for some millennia; if it exists, anthropogenic global warming may extend the current temperate period.
What is certain - no matter whose model you use - is that the Kyoto accords will not appreciably affect CO2 in the atmosphere, and still less will it affect climate, while it will cost many trillions of dollars in direct costs and lost growth.
For those who believe that increasing CO2 is a risk, the only coherent plans are
1. increased nuclear power investment, particularly fuel cycles that use the "waste" of current Uranium cycle plants (mostly Plutonium), or new Thorium-cycle plants.
2. Space-based solar (not just PV, but also concentrators and heat engines, with microwave power transmission to earth.
3. Speculatively, fusion power - there is as yet no reason to belive that it will ever be a practical energy source, but it shows promise.
Earth-based solar power, wind power, tide power, geothermal power, OTEC, biomass, and conservation will not provide enough energy to replace fossil fuels. Slower growth will just increase poverty and thus population, thus has no net long-term benefit.
*Your claim that: "Come 1970 and global warming was pretty much established science and by the 1980's it was scientific theory with a few crackpot holdouts which continue to this day." is simply false. In the '70s and early '80s the worry was about global cooling, not warming. Referring to scientists who disagree with you as "crackpots" shows that you are merely reacting in an atavistic monkey-mode to those you consider an out-group, screeching and hurling figurative feces. The rest of your post is equal parts incoherent, ignorant, hateful and wrong. Try harder to think rather than to just barf up the pap you can't seem to digest.
What makes you think you can trust the statistics from Cuba when every Communist nation in the world has habitually falsified national statistics? Doesn't the US have a higher Black population than Canada, and don't Blacks have higher infant mortality than Whites in every income bracket? Don't those numbers reflect the whole population, not just citizens? What percentage of Mexican females of child-bearing years actually live in the US? 3%? 5%? - or more? That has to push the numbers up a bit.
I think if you correct for race and only compare with countries with verifiably honest statistics, ou will find that the US comes out a lot better than the raw stats indicate.