Then get on there, with some facts and figures, and change it. I am So Very Tired of people claiming science has political leanings. Science isn't left or right, science IS.
Science as a methodology may not be political, but the choice of what to investigate most certainly is political.
I've run into the spelling Ockham's Razor several times recently, but when I ran into it during the 1950's and 1960's it was spelled Occam's Razor. Why should one choose one spelling over the other?
P.S.: I note that my spell checker likes Occam's and doesn't like Ockham's. It can't be a USian vs. British thing, because the places that I originally encountered it were SF books by British authors.
Relax - spelling was invented after William's day, so I think the question is meaningless;-)
If you pick 1998 as the year to start, then yes, temperatures have declined from that extraordinary El Nino weather pattern.
And, if you go back to the end of the last ice age, you'll also see a warming trend. Long before the industrial age and man-made CO2 emissions.
And again, if you go back to the beginning of the Pliocene Epoch, you'll find that the Earth has cooled since then.
What's your point?
The point is that picking a window at a precise point in the past 10 years does not have any predictive power on the time scale we need answers on. Your other bogus examples are similar: We do not need predictions about what will happen at the end of the Eocene or the end of the next glacial period. We need them for the next 50-100 years, so we look at time scales that are 1-2 order of magnitude larger. More importantly, we want results that do not depend on carefully chosen endpoints (like 1998). You can vary the starting point of any of the observed temperature records of the last 500 years and find that the vast majority of the trends are nearly identical and do not match the 1998 "trend". This is called "statistics" Go read up on it.
The banks and credit ratings agencies said exactly the same thing. All financial models that get used are thoroughly back tested
When you are predicting a change that is very different from what happened in your historical data your back testing has no real value.
I am sure you can make good prediction if things stay broadly similar to your historical data, but if you are predicting changes well outside that range.
Telling me how limited your test dataset is has done more to make me sceptical about climate change than anything I have every read before. I am going to try to find something to confirm what you have said (it is just a slashdot comment, after all), and if it is true it is enough to make me a "denialist".
Because the climate models include actual physics and the economic models used by banks and credit ratings agencies are just statistical masturbation with no anchoring to reality?
Your comment assumes that the climate models are stochastic simulators that only take the historical data as input and then try to predict the future based only on the climate record. This is simply not true - all the models simulate the physical environment and its interconnections based largely on known physical laws that have been derived independently (e.g. the radiation properties of C02). Only then are the models compared to the climate record. In the few places where there are "magic numbers" research is actively taking place to replaces those numbers with more detailed physical laws.
Taken a little further, your argument could be used against any scientific prediction - after all, empiricism is based entirely on historical data! The difference is that science assumes that the physical world is lawful and corrects its understanding of those laws as best it can. Economics, as far as I can tell, appears to be mostly puritan ideology that has been translated into mathematics.
The comparison to a gas tank is somewhat inadequate as these batteries are far heavier than gasoline; if you have a serious accident that compromises the frame of the car you really can't guarantee that the battery container is going to be unperturbed. There needs to be two or more dedicated safety measures to contain or divert the energy from the batteries away from the occupants in the event of damage.
Also: They can release their energy much more quickly (and thus more hotly) than gasoline. Gasoline requires oxygen from the air (or wherever) to burn and this limits its thermal power. Lithium cells are self-contained and have all the pieces of the reaction ready to go. (That's why they're heavier than an equivalent amount of gas.) They're only limited by the physics of the propagation of the catastrophic energy release mechanism.
Could one design a battery that needs oxygen to work? The design in the article seems to embed the oxygen in the nano-tubes, but maybe a different battery design that required airflow to generate power would be safer.
Yeah good idea, why not seize the assets of a foreign oil company, I'm sure that will go down well.
Hey, weren't you Americans crying not so long ago when Venezuela did just that to your oil company's assets over there over the past couple of years?
What about your precious Halliburton for their role in the disaster? or do they get away with it because they're an American company? How would you feel if Europe seized the assets of the likes of Halliburton for their crimes in Iraq? Or the likes of Microsoft and Apple for their market abuse? You'd probably be the first one complaining.
Seriously, the hypocrisy from Americans over the BP oil disaster is just disgusting.
Your ad hominem attack is especially amusing because I am British.
That's not to say that the Feds should just ignore the problem. But there's little more that they can do aside from telling the doctor that he has to perform the surgery.
How about not distorting the market by putting liability caps on dangerous/destructive activities? How about taking over BP because its assets exceed the damage and selling said assets off to fund national oil independence? How about dragging these people off in chains so that the rest of their greedhead friends have the fear of God carved into their foreheads?
if the head is cut off after buried...the brain will not be in decomposition?... i think that procedure will just preserve rotten meat at least...or im wrong?
At least they have set a precedent for the next person in this position.
at which point of the process does it become silly to you?
1. believing that alien life exists? 2. believing that some of it is intelligent? 3. believing they would intentionally broadcast their existence to the rest of the universe?
Such broadcasting seems dangerous to me, so it gets my vote.
The structure that looks surprisingly like a gigantic neural network is not, repeat not, the repository of a vast and vengeful consciousness of the murky deeps.
Just give them cell-phones that can do that instead. Make each cell phone have an emergency receiver.
The phone is more likely to be close to the person. It has a greater chance of being charged. People will not ignore it.
And the best part is that cellphones are spreading even in poorer countries. Implementation costs would be minimal, just make sure every cellphone receives an emergency band.
(and being waterproof with a solar charger on the back would be nice too)
Strange magical physics don't even have to be in play; the aliens only have to believe that quality X is more important than intelligence (or that quality X denotes intelligence), and if we don't have it, then we're defacto non-intelligent.
John Varley wrote some novels with this as part of the back story. The aliens felt that there were only two types of intelligence: cetaceans and a kind living in gas giants. They kicked humans off earth and left them to live like rats on the moon and other inhospitable places. In The Ophichi Hotline he even imagined us getting in contact with other species who had suffered the same fate.
It was probably true at one of them once, and if you're building a new campus today it's not a bad approach, but it's not clear where or when it actually originated.
When I was in boarding school in the late 70s, I was taking a well-worn diagonal short cut across a quad to my dorm when I bumped into the Rector (Principal) who chewed me out for not walking on the paths. When I went back a few years later (after said Rector had retired) I noticed that the path I used had been paved. So they may all tell that story because they all actually do it;-)
And this isn't significant how? I'd say a steady yearly increase like that has to have SOME factor somewhere worth discovering - even if it may not be cell phones specifically.
I noticed this too, but then I wondered if it was just better diagnosis.
Let's try a different example. Let's go for the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Statistically speaking, it's universally true. There are no exceptions on the macro scale of space/time.
Except that the Classical Second Law requires definitions that are based on a particular world view. The way I partition phase space into "useful" and "non-useful" areas is really a definition provided by the observer, not a Platonic reality.
Moreover, the Classical Second Law does not really exist - because the Classical universe is deterministic! You actually need Quantum Mechanics and notions of information transfer to make it work. See Von Neumann's "Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics" or Henry Stapp's "Mindful Universe" (for a summary).
Now, Statistics itself is an interesting example. Empiricism assumes Statistics, so one might be able to argue that it has some Platonic reality...
If the solar cycle is what determines the level of GCR that gets to Earth then it may very well have absolutely nothing to do with the tree growth its self but an indicator of solar conditions which influence tree growth rates.
I suspect this is related to one of the current global warming contrarian canards - that GCRs are responsible for increased cloud formation which in turn produces a warmer climate due to more atmospheric water acting as a GHG. Needless to say, the contrarian "science" there is as bad as it is everywhere else...
Slashdot Mirror
Then get on there, with some facts and figures, and change it. I am So Very Tired of people claiming science has political leanings. Science isn't left or right, science IS.
Science as a methodology may not be political, but the choice of what to investigate most certainly is political.
I've run into the spelling Ockham's Razor several times recently, but when I ran into it during the 1950's and 1960's it was spelled Occam's Razor. Why should one choose one spelling over the other?
P.S.: I note that my spell checker likes Occam's and doesn't like Ockham's. It can't be a USian vs. British thing, because the places that I originally encountered it were SF books by British authors.
Relax - spelling was invented after William's day, so I think the question is meaningless ;-)
If you pick 1998 as the year to start, then yes, temperatures have declined from that extraordinary El Nino weather pattern.
And, if you go back to the end of the last ice age, you'll also see a warming trend. Long before the industrial age and man-made CO2 emissions.
And again, if you go back to the beginning of the Pliocene Epoch, you'll find that the Earth has cooled since then.
What's your point?
The point is that picking a window at a precise point in the past 10 years does not have any predictive power on the time scale we need answers on. Your other bogus examples are similar: We do not need predictions about what will happen at the end of the Eocene or the end of the next glacial period. We need them for the next 50-100 years, so we look at time scales that are 1-2 order of magnitude larger. More importantly, we want results that do not depend on carefully chosen endpoints (like 1998). You can vary the starting point of any of the observed temperature records of the last 500 years and find that the vast majority of the trends are nearly identical and do not match the 1998 "trend". This is called "statistics" Go read up on it.
The banks and credit ratings agencies said exactly the same thing. All financial models that get used are thoroughly back tested
When you are predicting a change that is very different from what happened in your historical data your back testing has no real value.
I am sure you can make good prediction if things stay broadly similar to your historical data, but if you are predicting changes well outside that range.
Telling me how limited your test dataset is has done more to make me sceptical about climate change than anything I have every read before. I am going to try to find something to confirm what you have said (it is just a slashdot comment, after all), and if it is true it is enough to make me a "denialist".
Because the climate models include actual physics and the economic models used by banks and credit ratings agencies are just statistical masturbation with no anchoring to reality?
Your comment assumes that the climate models are stochastic simulators that only take the historical data as input and then try to predict the future based only on the climate record. This is simply not true - all the models simulate the physical environment and its interconnections based largely on known physical laws that have been derived independently (e.g. the radiation properties of C02). Only then are the models compared to the climate record. In the few places where there are "magic numbers" research is actively taking place to replaces those numbers with more detailed physical laws.
Taken a little further, your argument could be used against any scientific prediction - after all, empiricism is based entirely on historical data! The difference is that science assumes that the physical world is lawful and corrects its understanding of those laws as best it can. Economics, as far as I can tell, appears to be mostly puritan ideology that has been translated into mathematics.
Islam, for example, is the largest religion in the world today precisely because of its military efforts in the first few centuries of its existence.
Islam is actually #2 by almost factor of 2.
The comparison to a gas tank is somewhat inadequate as these batteries are far heavier than gasoline; if you have a serious accident that compromises the frame of the car you really can't guarantee that the battery container is going to be unperturbed. There needs to be two or more dedicated safety measures to contain or divert the energy from the batteries away from the occupants in the event of damage.
Also: They can release their energy much more quickly (and thus more hotly) than gasoline. Gasoline requires oxygen from the air (or wherever) to burn and this limits its thermal power. Lithium cells are self-contained and have all the pieces of the reaction ready to go. (That's why they're heavier than an equivalent amount of gas.) They're only limited by the physics of the propagation of the catastrophic energy release mechanism.
Could one design a battery that needs oxygen to work? The design in the article seems to embed the oxygen in the nano-tubes, but maybe a different battery design that required airflow to generate power would be safer.
Have I just described a fuel cell?
Yeah good idea, why not seize the assets of a foreign oil company, I'm sure that will go down well.
Hey, weren't you Americans crying not so long ago when Venezuela did just that to your oil company's assets over there over the past couple of years?
What about your precious Halliburton for their role in the disaster? or do they get away with it because they're an American company? How would you feel if Europe seized the assets of the likes of Halliburton for their crimes in Iraq? Or the likes of Microsoft and Apple for their market abuse? You'd probably be the first one complaining.
Seriously, the hypocrisy from Americans over the BP oil disaster is just disgusting.
Your ad hominem attack is especially amusing because I am British.
That's not to say that the Feds should just ignore the problem. But there's little more that they can do aside from telling the doctor that he has to perform the surgery.
How about not distorting the market by putting liability caps on dangerous/destructive activities? How about taking over BP because its assets exceed the damage and selling said assets off to fund national oil independence? How about dragging these people off in chains so that the rest of their greedhead friends have the fear of God carved into their foreheads?
if the head is cut off after buried...the brain will not be in decomposition?... i think that procedure will just preserve rotten meat at least...or im wrong?
At least they have set a precedent for the next person in this position.
at which point of the process does it become silly to you?
1. believing that alien life exists?
2. believing that some of it is intelligent?
3. believing they would intentionally broadcast their existence to the rest of the universe?
Such broadcasting seems dangerous to me, so it gets my vote.
The structure that looks surprisingly like a gigantic neural network is not, repeat not, the repository of a vast and vengeful consciousness of the murky deeps.
Nor is it Leviathan.
"May great Cthulhu rise and eat them!"
- Howard the Dolphin
Just give them cell-phones that can do that instead.
Make each cell phone have an emergency receiver.
The phone is more likely to be close to the person.
It has a greater chance of being charged.
People will not ignore it.
And the best part is that cellphones are spreading even in poorer countries.
Implementation costs would be minimal, just make sure every cellphone receives an emergency band.
(and being waterproof with a solar charger on the back would be nice too)
Ob XKCD
I find it hard to have "a good time" when it tastes like I'm licking an ashtray...
Strange magical physics don't even have to be in play; the aliens only have to believe that quality X is more important than intelligence (or that quality X denotes intelligence), and if we don't have it, then we're defacto non-intelligent.
John Varley wrote some novels with this as part of the back story. The aliens felt that there were only two types of intelligence: cetaceans and a kind living in gas giants. They kicked humans off earth and left them to live like rats on the moon and other inhospitable places. In The Ophichi Hotline he even imagined us getting in contact with other species who had suffered the same fate.
I've often thought Space shows - and any show in the future, really - are incredibly silly.
I mostly agree, but then I open my flip phone...
Or, maybe the "signal" is just the fact that the future may be constrained without being completely deterministic.
It was probably true at one of them once, and if you're building a new campus today it's not a bad approach, but it's not clear where or when it actually originated.
When I was in boarding school in the late 70s, I was taking a well-worn diagonal short cut across a quad to my dorm when I bumped into the Rector (Principal) who chewed me out for not walking on the paths. When I went back a few years later (after said Rector had retired) I noticed that the path I used had been paved. So they may all tell that story because they all actually do it ;-)
1. If it is cheaper to make.
Last time I checked, there was a lot more silica in the world than bees. Plus the silica is not being devastated by disease...
Since you don't seem to be able to use Google (most of the data sets and code have been out there for quite a while), here you go.
Stock markets do not allow for equal access to information.
This is also what stabilises them...
in a 29 year period rates have gone up:
14.5% for males.
5.8% for females.
And this isn't significant how? I'd say a steady yearly increase like that has to have SOME factor somewhere worth discovering - even if it may not be cell phones specifically.
I noticed this too, but then I wondered if it was just better diagnosis.
They teach the creation story as a parable, and evolution and the big bang as facts.
Which is hardly surprising as the big bang was first proposed by a Jesuit...
Let's try a different example. Let's go for the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Statistically speaking, it's universally true. There are no exceptions on the macro scale of space/time.
Except that the Classical Second Law requires definitions that are based on a particular world view. The way I partition phase space into "useful" and "non-useful" areas is really a definition provided by the observer, not a Platonic reality.
Moreover, the Classical Second Law does not really exist - because the Classical universe is deterministic! You actually need Quantum Mechanics and notions of information transfer to make it work. See Von Neumann's "Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics" or Henry Stapp's "Mindful Universe" (for a summary).
Now, Statistics itself is an interesting example. Empiricism assumes Statistics, so one might be able to argue that it has some Platonic reality...
If the solar cycle is what determines the level of GCR that gets to Earth then it may very well have absolutely nothing to do with the tree growth its self but an indicator of solar conditions which influence tree growth rates.
I suspect this is related to one of the current global warming contrarian canards - that GCRs are responsible for increased cloud formation which in turn produces a warmer climate due to more atmospheric water acting as a GHG. Needless to say, the contrarian "science" there is as bad as it is everywhere else...
Now THAT is a book I'd like to see made into a movie. Put some of the "science" back in Science Fiction.
You have got to be kidding me. I love his physical theories, but as a writer he is appalling. Wooden characters and smug self-righteousness. Bleh.