The alarmists are the ones who do the "it doesn't matter if two opposite things happen, both are evidence that catastrophic climate change is going to destroy the world!" thing.
Preliminary data reported from the reference glaciers of the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) in 2018 from Argentina, Austria, China, France, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland and United States indicate that 2018 will be the 30th consecutive year of significant negative annual balance (> -200mm); with a mean balance of -1247 mm for the 25 reporting reference glaciers, with only one glacier reporting a positive mass balance (WGMS, 2018).
Israel has to launch to the west instead of the east which makes everything a lot harder. They'd probably need a Saturn V size rocket to just _land_ something on the moon.
"Interesting"???
I think this is humour riffing on the right-to-left writing convention for Hebrew...
NeXTstep (and by extension OS X) uses a double float seconds since 1970 in its NSDate class. This not only avoids the Y2038 (and Y10000) problem, but gives you microsecond accuracy for dates that are inside the current era. There is also no floating-point round-off error for any whole number of seconds because they are the base unit.
The problem with using floating point for time is that the precision varies with distance from the epoch. Over the course of a century, this comes to 100 * 365 = 36500 or over 15 bits for representing (say) the number of days, which reduces the precision for fractions of a day by the same amount.
Conversely, if you want ns precision, 64 bits will only give you ~20,000 days, which is less than a century. But 128 bits will give you ~10^20 years at ns precision. Which should cover the big bang to the effective heat death of the universe...
Great news. There are a lot fo quality mineral-based sunscreens that don't kill coral.
Hawaii did it first. These sunscreens were banned there last year.
I was just there. They banned the listed chemicals, but there were sunscreens for sale everywhere that had essentially the same chemicals with slight modifications. Banana Boat in particular did this, and even had the gall to put "Reef Safe!" stickers on everything.
Bottom line: if it isn't mineral-based, its bad, mmkay?
Not true. Sufficient motivation in the form of money might very well lead to the invention of atmospheric processors that when large enough ones are built and powered with nuclear power could reduce total CO2. Of course that would require massive amounts of capitalism and nuclear energy, both things that most enviroweenies find taboo.
I suppose I'm an "enviroweenie", but I fail to see how "capitalism" can solve the carbon reduction problem. What exactly are the industrial uses of the captured CO2? Greenhouses? Plastics? Remember that the amount we would have to remove is roughly equivalent to the amount we have dug up in the last 200 years and we can only drink so much soda...
I'm all for doing this - nukes and all - but there is no way there is any kind of business model that can take this stuff and turn it into useful materials in sufficient quantities. The energy cost is just too high and the uses are too small. It's going to have to be done as a public remediation project (the mother of all SuperFund sites.)
If someone can come along and build a viable business out of this, then all power to them, but if it just consists of skimming at the public trough, then we might as well do it without the private sector overhead. It's going to be expensive enough as it is.
I actually think the most likely doomsday scenario is a bioweapon. Genetic manipulation makes it more more likely that some fools will do it inadvertently in the belief they have targeted the weapon accurately enough to only kill their genetically marked enemies.
In his novel Sewer, Gas and Electric set in 2020(!) Ruff posits that the entire black population of the US was wiped out by such a bioweapon (one of the protagonists who is black survived because he built his own submarine).
There is also a shrine to the (recently deceased) Donald Trump in a Jersey train station...
Pancakes, not muffins. If you bothered to read my post without all that froth coming out of your mouth, you might have figured that out.
Please list some cases of protein defiency that wasn't outright starvation in the past year.
If you were trying to raise children, one of whom has sensory issues, you would not be so dismissive. (Protip: it's "deficiency")
Much of the rest of your post was just gobbedly gook.
And we have spelling error number two. For someone complaining about my incoherence, maybe you should look in a mirror. Not to mention doing a little adversarial research on your own position...
Vegan's aren't interested, it's us meat eaters who are. I've tried some of these non-meat burgers and they are excellent. Environmental concerns aside, if I can eat something as delicious as that but more nutritious, lower calorie, doesn't require so much infrastructure to enforce animal welfare... Well it's a huge benefit to me.
Between vegan steak and lab grown meat we could enter a new age of delicious meat products that are healthy to eat regularly and offer new culinary delights.
This.
My teenage son is recently vegan and I'm trying to meat him halfway as it were. Along the way I've found that I actually prefer some of the new vegan burgers like the Beyond Burger to real meat. (The Impossible Burger is too greasy IMHO.) He likes them too, because before he became vegan, he was mostly constructed of bacon and hamburgers.
Despite what some vegan fanatics will try to do to the archeological record, humans have been omnivorous for our entire history, This means that we have accumulated thousands of years of cultural history around cooking and the kinds of foods we prepare. This are ingenious, nutritious, tasty and familiar to most people. Vegans are trying, but honestly most vegan recipes I investigate are made by people who seem to have no understanding of food chemistry. The best vegan baked goods recipes I find are either by non-vegans (e.g. a nice one hour cinnamon roll recipe I found by an non-vegan baker) or by people who tried a whole range of alternative ingredients in a scientific manner (lately I've been making a blueberry muffin recipe my wife found that is very good - and which lists the tradeoffs of the various nut-based yoghurts and milks involved). Other stuff I found (e.g. pancakes...) I had to hack up to make them not turn into hockey pucks, and they are still protein deficient compared to egg-based ones.
So part of the reason for these kinds of "fake animal products" is that there is a rich tradition of making an incredible variety of foodstuffs from real animal products. Vegans can try to start over, but they have about 12,000 years of culinary history to catch up on. Fakery like this is really just trying to take advantage of this rich history - which is also a good thing for promoting Veganism to those who aren't into wearing hair shirts.
This is the massive threat to humanity we've seen in sci-fi movies, usually represented by an invading alien species or some massive natural(ish) disaster, but in real life it was our own pollution that first posed a huge threat to us all.
It would certainly have set a better example had they made a point of video conferencing rather than flying however we must be mindful of the 'tu quoque' fallacy.
Videoconferencing is a terrible way for humans to communicate. We simply don't notice people who are flat and don't breath - unless we make a continuous effort. And that effort undermines our ability to concentrate on the problem at hand. Given the severity of the problem, I'd rather take the carbon hit.
While the US federal government has a distinct lack of political will change pollution, it is still possible for states to take action that will have a wide effect.
For example, a state could require an environmental tax on all products (including imports) that are equivalent to the cost the remove the pollution expelled in the production (or use) of the product. They could then use that money to fun CO2 capture systems. Naturally, you would want to ramp this up over a few years as to reduce the economic impact. While the demands of a single state would have a small impact, it would provide the political cover for other states to join in.
This would soon bankrupt coal power plants and quickly point power companies toward ramping up environmentally friendly power sources lest competition take their profits. So if some state politicians can just grow a pair and do this then we'll be on our way to environmental recovery.
Good progress is made by the brave, not the cowards who only think of themselves.
This is effectively what Washington's I-1631 on the ballot next month intends to do. You are correct that the interstate commerce clause makes it pretty much impossible to apply border tariffs on carbon pollution, but there is still a lot that can be done. In Washington, our grid is already pretty decarbonised thanks to a large amount of hydro, and our last coal plant is set to shut down in the next couple of years, so we can start looking at the non-grid problems (mostly transportation).
States as the "laboratories of democracy" can start running these experiments to solve parts of the problem right now. Have a look at the initiative's construction to see the kinds of issue that come up making this sort of policy (e.g. what do you do about the state's aluminum smelter?) This is our third attempt at pricing carbon externalities (2016's I-732 and a bill in the last session of the legislature) and we have worked out a lot of the niggly details. Even if we fail, the next state can learn from our mistakes and eventually we will get there.
However, the EU is what, 3% of the Earth's population? China and India put out more carbon in a day than the EU and the United States put together do in a year!
This is simply not true. As of 2015, China was about 3x the EU and India was about 2/3. Nothing like 365:1.
Yes well than real solution would be to let the mangroves etc move back it; If you get rid of the coastal golf courses, lawns, and artificial sandy beaches there will be no man-made fertilizers to deployed to run anywhere. As per usual this is just one typically left leaning group saying "your environmentally destructive practices are unacceptable but mine are perfectly alright because my intentions and feelings..and by the way you can't build that wind turbine in view of my house."
I'm a lefty who doesn't play golf, you insensitive clod.
Despite "free healthcare" you're gonna be waiting a long time for surgery, say 1.5yrs for cataract,
Um, no. According to the Canadian Institute for Health Care, 71% receive treatment within 112 days, 90% within 210 days. I don't know where you get 540 days from.
Could we use the revenue to eliminate the sales tax? The gas tax discourages burning fossil fuels while the sales tax discourages commerce. One of these taxes is better for the economy and the environment than the other.
We tried that here in Washington State (I-732 in 2016) in part because we have the most regressive tax structure in the country (income taxes appear to be in violation of the state constitution.) It failed, in part because of opposition from some environmental groups who wanted to dedicate the generated cash flow to other things.
Since we are talking Star Trek, this has all ready been directly answered. Riker beams up, but leaves a copy. Years later, he is rediscovered by the enterprise crew. Dr. Crusher and Jordi agree they are identical and equally "Riker" so it must be true. Eventually the duplicate wanders off to lead a life of his own. Glad I could wrap that up for everyone scientifically, once and for all.
Then there was the TOS novel Spock Must Die! that had a similar plot.
"It's called CIMON, an acronym for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion, and it's headed to space to do science stuff."
C rew I nteractive M obile C ompanion
looks like it spells CIMC to me. If they really wanted it to have a name out of an acrony why not CARLIE for Crew Autonomous Robotic Lifelike Interactive Entity?
I was wondering that too, but it's an acrostic, which is definition 3:
+2 to 3 dB across the spectrum as measured by my wife the speech therapist and a bunch of other nerds back in high school. I've also been called out for mumbling ever since kindergarten.
A few years ago I had this epiphany that they might be connected. I can often hear conversations across a room, so I assume that my own speaking can also be heard at a similar distance, so I keep my voice down. Of course I can't be heard by most people, but those I'm speaking with think I'm mumbling. I've been working on this, but its really hard because our baseline model for other people's abilities is our own.
The thing that really annoys me, is that even if most people can't do what I do, someone might, so I find it really nerve-wracking to have a semi-private conversation in a public space. But no one gets this!
Slashdot Mirror
The alarmists are the ones who do the "it doesn't matter if two opposite things happen, both are evidence that catastrophic climate change is going to destroy the world!" thing.
And the denialists are the ones who cherry-pick outliers to prove their case:
Preliminary data reported from the reference glaciers of the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) in 2018 from Argentina, Austria, China, France, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland and United States indicate that 2018 will be the 30th consecutive year of significant negative annual balance (> -200mm); with a mean balance of -1247 mm for the 25 reporting reference glaciers, with only one glacier reporting a positive mass balance (WGMS, 2018).
Israel has to launch to the west instead of the east which makes everything a lot harder. They'd probably need a Saturn V size rocket to just _land_ something on the moon.
"Interesting"???
I think this is humour riffing on the right-to-left writing convention for Hebrew...
A large portion of the population hasn't.
But this is /. so its perfectly reasonable to ask if people have seen a truly nerdy bit of sci-fi TV from circa 1970.
NeXTstep (and by extension OS X) uses a double float seconds since 1970 in its NSDate class. This not only avoids the Y2038 (and Y10000) problem, but gives you microsecond accuracy for dates that are inside the current era. There is also no floating-point round-off error for any whole number of seconds because they are the base unit.
The problem with using floating point for time is that the precision varies with distance from the epoch. Over the course of a century, this comes to 100 * 365 = 36500 or over 15 bits for representing (say) the number of days, which reduces the precision for fractions of a day by the same amount.
Conversely, if you want ns precision, 64 bits will only give you ~20,000 days, which is less than a century. But 128 bits will give you ~10^20 years at ns precision. Which should cover the big bang to the effective heat death of the universe...
Great news. There are a lot fo quality mineral-based sunscreens that don't kill coral.
Hawaii did it first. These sunscreens were banned there last year.
I was just there. They banned the listed chemicals, but there were sunscreens for sale everywhere that had essentially the same chemicals with slight modifications. Banana Boat in particular did this, and even had the gall to put "Reef Safe!" stickers on everything.
Bottom line: if it isn't mineral-based, its bad, mmkay?
Not true. Sufficient motivation in the form of money might very well lead to the invention of atmospheric processors that when large enough ones are built and powered with nuclear power could reduce total CO2. Of course that would require massive amounts of capitalism and nuclear energy, both things that most enviroweenies find taboo.
I suppose I'm an "enviroweenie", but I fail to see how "capitalism" can solve the carbon reduction problem. What exactly are the industrial uses of the captured CO2? Greenhouses? Plastics? Remember that the amount we would have to remove is roughly equivalent to the amount we have dug up in the last 200 years and we can only drink so much soda...
I'm all for doing this - nukes and all - but there is no way there is any kind of business model that can take this stuff and turn it into useful materials in sufficient quantities. The energy cost is just too high and the uses are too small. It's going to have to be done as a public remediation project (the mother of all SuperFund sites.)
If someone can come along and build a viable business out of this, then all power to them, but if it just consists of skimming at the public trough, then we might as well do it without the private sector overhead. It's going to be expensive enough as it is.
I actually think the most likely doomsday scenario is a bioweapon. Genetic manipulation makes it more more likely that some fools will do it inadvertently in the belief they have targeted the weapon accurately enough to only kill their genetically marked enemies.
In his novel Sewer, Gas and Electric set in 2020(!) Ruff posits that the entire black population of the US was wiped out by such a bioweapon (one of the protagonists who is black survived because he built his own submarine).
There is also a shrine to the (recently deceased) Donald Trump in a Jersey train station...
Protein deficient muffins? Wtf?
Pancakes, not muffins. If you bothered to read my post without all that froth coming out of your mouth, you might have figured that out.
Please list some cases of protein defiency that wasn't outright starvation in the past year.
If you were trying to raise children, one of whom has sensory issues, you would not be so dismissive. (Protip: it's "deficiency")
Much of the rest of your post was just gobbedly gook.
And we have spelling error number two. For someone complaining about my incoherence, maybe you should look in a mirror. Not to mention doing a little adversarial research on your own position...
Vegan's aren't interested, it's us meat eaters who are. I've tried some of these non-meat burgers and they are excellent. Environmental concerns aside, if I can eat something as delicious as that but more nutritious, lower calorie, doesn't require so much infrastructure to enforce animal welfare... Well it's a huge benefit to me.
Between vegan steak and lab grown meat we could enter a new age of delicious meat products that are healthy to eat regularly and offer new culinary delights.
This.
My teenage son is recently vegan and I'm trying to meat him halfway as it were. Along the way I've found that I actually prefer some of the new vegan burgers like the Beyond Burger to real meat. (The Impossible Burger is too greasy IMHO.) He likes them too, because before he became vegan, he was mostly constructed of bacon and hamburgers.
Despite what some vegan fanatics will try to do to the archeological record, humans have been omnivorous for our entire history, This means that we have accumulated thousands of years of cultural history around cooking and the kinds of foods we prepare. This are ingenious, nutritious, tasty and familiar to most people. Vegans are trying, but honestly most vegan recipes I investigate are made by people who seem to have no understanding of food chemistry. The best vegan baked goods recipes I find are either by non-vegans (e.g. a nice one hour cinnamon roll recipe I found by an non-vegan baker) or by people who tried a whole range of alternative ingredients in a scientific manner (lately I've been making a blueberry muffin recipe my wife found that is very good - and which lists the tradeoffs of the various nut-based yoghurts and milks involved). Other stuff I found (e.g. pancakes...) I had to hack up to make them not turn into hockey pucks, and they are still protein deficient compared to egg-based ones.
So part of the reason for these kinds of "fake animal products" is that there is a rich tradition of making an incredible variety of foodstuffs from real animal products. Vegans can try to start over, but they have about 12,000 years of culinary history to catch up on. Fakery like this is really just trying to take advantage of this rich history - which is also a good thing for promoting Veganism to those who aren't into wearing hair shirts.
Do a web search. Quaker abolitionists were around before Jefferson was born.
And some of themwere even vegans.
(I'm not myself, but it is interesting to see what people think are "modern ideas"...)
This is the massive threat to humanity we've seen in sci-fi movies, usually represented by an invading alien species or some massive natural(ish) disaster, but in real life it was our own pollution that first posed a huge threat to us all.
Maybe it's both. ;)
I was thinking more like Well, we've practically terraformed it for them.
It would certainly have set a better example had they made a point of video conferencing rather than flying however we must be mindful of the 'tu quoque' fallacy.
Videoconferencing is a terrible way for humans to communicate. We simply don't notice people who are flat and don't breath - unless we make a continuous effort. And that effort undermines our ability to concentrate on the problem at hand. Given the severity of the problem, I'd rather take the carbon hit.
While the US federal government has a distinct lack of political will change pollution, it is still possible for states to take action that will have a wide effect.
For example, a state could require an environmental tax on all products (including imports) that are equivalent to the cost the remove the pollution expelled in the production (or use) of the product. They could then use that money to fun CO2 capture systems. Naturally, you would want to ramp this up over a few years as to reduce the economic impact. While the demands of a single state would have a small impact, it would provide the political cover for other states to join in.
This would soon bankrupt coal power plants and quickly point power companies toward ramping up environmentally friendly power sources lest competition take their profits. So if some state politicians can just grow a pair and do this then we'll be on our way to environmental recovery.
Good progress is made by the brave, not the cowards who only think of themselves.
This is effectively what Washington's I-1631 on the ballot next month intends to do. You are correct that the interstate commerce clause makes it pretty much impossible to apply border tariffs on carbon pollution, but there is still a lot that can be done. In Washington, our grid is already pretty decarbonised thanks to a large amount of hydro, and our last coal plant is set to shut down in the next couple of years, so we can start looking at the non-grid problems (mostly transportation).
States as the "laboratories of democracy" can start running these experiments to solve parts of the problem right now. Have a look at the initiative's construction to see the kinds of issue that come up making this sort of policy (e.g. what do you do about the state's aluminum smelter?) This is our third attempt at pricing carbon externalities (2016's I-732 and a bill in the last session of the legislature) and we have worked out a lot of the niggly details. Even if we fail, the next state can learn from our mistakes and eventually we will get there.
However, the EU is what, 3% of the Earth's population? China and India put out more carbon in a day than the EU and the United States put together do in a year!
This is simply not true. As of 2015, China was about 3x the EU and India was about 2/3. Nothing like 365:1.
How?
I think there is a web site called "GoBribeMe".
Yes well than real solution would be to let the mangroves etc move back it; If you get rid of the coastal golf courses, lawns, and artificial sandy beaches there will be no man-made fertilizers to deployed to run anywhere. As per usual this is just one typically left leaning group saying "your environmentally destructive practices are unacceptable but mine are perfectly alright because my intentions and feelings..and by the way you can't build that wind turbine in view of my house."
I'm a lefty who doesn't play golf, you insensitive clod.
My wood burning stove is carbon neutral.
And solar powered.
And completely unscalable to 7+B people...
Despite "free healthcare" you're gonna be waiting a long time for surgery, say 1.5yrs for cataract,
Um, no. According to the Canadian Institute for Health Care, 71% receive treatment within 112 days, 90% within 210 days. I don't know where you get 540 days from.
Could we use the revenue to eliminate the sales tax? The gas tax discourages burning fossil fuels while the sales tax discourages commerce. One of these taxes is better for the economy and the environment than the other.
We tried that here in Washington State (I-732 in 2016) in part because we have the most regressive tax structure in the country (income taxes appear to be in violation of the state constitution.) It failed, in part because of opposition from some environmental groups who wanted to dedicate the generated cash flow to other things.
Gas prices in the US are about 1/3rd what they are in the UK, and somehow it hasn't destroyed our economy.
Maybe gas is too cheap, considering the harm it does.
Texas alone is triple the size of the UK.
Um, maybe in terms of area, but not in terms of population:
* Texas Population (2018): 28,704,330 in 695,660 km^2
* UK population (2018: 66,550,162 in 242,900 km^2
And the area is just a way of hiding the massive urban sprawl in places like Houston.
I am trained in gorilla warfare
That should come in handy.
Since we are talking Star Trek, this has all ready been directly answered. Riker beams up, but leaves a copy. Years later, he is rediscovered by the enterprise crew. Dr. Crusher and Jordi agree they are identical and equally "Riker" so it must be true. Eventually the duplicate wanders off to lead a life of his own. Glad I could wrap that up for everyone scientifically, once and for all.
Then there was the TOS novel Spock Must Die! that had a similar plot.
"It's called CIMON, an acronym for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion, and it's headed to space to do science stuff."
C rew
I nteractive
M obile
C ompanion
looks like it spells CIMC to me. If they really wanted it to have a name out of an acrony why not CARLIE for Crew Autonomous Robotic Lifelike Interactive Entity?
I was wondering that too, but it's an acrostic, which is definition 3:
C rew
I nteractive
MO bile
companio N
But the real question is "Is it a bum looker"?
+2 to 3 dB across the spectrum as measured by my wife the speech therapist and a bunch of other nerds back in high school. I've also been called out for mumbling ever since kindergarten.
A few years ago I had this epiphany that they might be connected. I can often hear conversations across a room, so I assume that my own speaking can also be heard at a similar distance, so I keep my voice down. Of course I can't be heard by most people, but those I'm speaking with think I'm mumbling. I've been working on this, but its really hard because our baseline model for other people's abilities is our own.
The thing that really annoys me, is that even if most people can't do what I do, someone might, so I find it really nerve-wracking to have a semi-private conversation in a public space. But no one gets this!
The car was already manufactured.
Sure, but I bet he's going to replace it and the one is space won't end up on the secondary market.
Not that I think it was a bad idea, but this is a very deep rathole...