One way of stating the Copenhagen interpretation is to say that human perception and cognition is such that there is no possible way we can comprehend the universe; the most we can do is build models that are somewhat useful in certain limited ways.
While I agree with the sentiment here (There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy) I submit that the Copenhagen interpretation is a poor example. There are more compelling interpretations of the QM formalism that do not require mystical observers, are compatible with relativity and just generally make more sense.
Of course! Don't you know that one of the basic tenets of quantum physics is that the observer always affects the experiment?
While I get the joke, I would like to point out that this is one of the goofy things about the Copenhagen Interpretation. There are others (not playing well with relativity being the most significant). A description of a more reasonable interpretation that does not have problems with either relativity OR special observers can be found here. It also contains an overview of several other interpretations.
My wife is a speech therapist so we started signing to our kids pretty early. The joke is that our oldest's first word (signed) was not "Mommy" or "Daddy" but "cheese". Sort of humbling;-)
Roger Penrose discusses this in "The Emperor's New Mind". According to him, it is a consequence of General Relativity (the Weyl Tensor). The exposition is quite funny because he compares the entropy of the universe at t=0 with the odds against the solar system spontaneously occurring and the latter turns out to be more likely!
And what is the cost of stopping all CO2 emissions right now? I'm guessing the economic impact is far greater than that of 1m of shoreline which _may_ be eaten away in the next 100 years.
False dichotomy. No one (sane) is arguing for "stopping all CO2 emissions right now". A better option would be a massive investment in non-carbon energy sources.
And a 1m rise in sea level is quite significant for some areas. My father-in-law lives on Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, maximum elevation 25ft (and that is a WWII cement encased garbage dump). And in areas like Bangladesh, it could be quite lethal to large numbers of people, who have no wood for "stilts" and no foreign exchange to buy your spiffy new technology. Which you are developing largely for your own benefit by externalising your costs onto the very people you claim to be "saving".
It is currently around magnitude 18, and may brighten by a magnitude or so
If it is that bright that far away, it has me wondering what it would be like if this had happened in OUR galaxy. What would it do to us, for example? And if it is bad, does it get factored into the Drake equation?
Try to remember that Wikipedia is not a scholarly journal. Here is a reference to something written by climatologists on the subject. Note the vagueness of the definition and the list of myths.
Fact is, we're looking at a ~2000 year snapshot of an incredibly comlex system that's a few billion years old.
Um, no, we have data from ice cores going back about 850,000 years, which covers all known climate drivers short of continental arrangements and major meteor impacts.
But what I'm saying is that we don't know how we are affecting it.
Basically our psychological sense that the past is different from the future comes from the direction of the thermodynamic arrow of time
I love this one. So, is the entropy in your brain increasing or decreasing? Uniformly everywhere, or does it change? Do people who are dying experience time in reverse?
The fact is, no one has any idea why this is so. Even worse, this theory provides no explanation of why there is a present moment, an essential feature of any compelling theory of causality IMHO.
for some reason unknown to us, we had a low-entropy big bang
Very nice argument about this in Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind. IIRC it comes from the Weyl tensor, but as motivation he shows that the very low entropy universe is more unlikely than the solar system spontaneously forming from the vacuum!
STARK: The other great faiths either taught that the world is locked in endless cycles or that it is inevitably declining from a previous Golden Age. Only Christians believed that God's gift of reason made progress inevitable--theological as well as technical progress.
This guy is stealing from Thomas Cahill's The Gifts of the Jews, except that he is attributing this notion to Christians (of which I am one BTW), instead of to the Jews. Cahill's thesis is interesting (certainly more so than this guy's rantings), but even Cahill ignores similar innovations in other cultures/religions like Buddhism. As a classics scholar friend of mine observed "What Cahill knows about Buddhism could fit on a single index card."
(Doesn't say anything about the male line, that will require the history of the Y chromosome, which I don't know to have been done yet.)
I believe that it has and the Y-chromosomal Adam is much younger. I have also seen references to similar research done on the patrilineal Judaic priesthood lineages (the Levites, who often have the family name Cohen?) showing a very small cluster of genotypes.
Because it is on topic. TFA is all about a debate about the rates of occurrence, and historical distortions of the data are relevant to the discussion.
Please don't call people morons when you don't know what you are talking about.
All you have done is reduce the payment period from 1 year to 1 day. Go look up "continuous compound interest" to see the limiting case.
You are right that banks have policies to prevent this sort of scam, but they are NOT what you describe. Rather, this is what the "penalties for early withdrawal" clause famed in so many off-colour jokes is all about.
I'm not sure what this question means. Assuming you mean that "this is evidence that the climate varies on human time scales," well we all knew that. For example, from the article you cited:
"Scientists have identified two causes of the Little Ice Age from outside the ocean/atmosphere/land systems: decreased solar activity and increased volcanic activity."
In other words, the forcings for the LIA are well known and included in current models.
Oh, and next time, you might try linking to a description written by researchers in the field, rather than an uncredentialled, non peer-reviewed Wikipedia entry. Judging from the history of that article, it has seen quite a few edits in the last month alone, a number of which are backing out other people's changes. Looks like it may not be that trustworthy.
You might be interested to know that some climatologists did just that; its called ReadClimate. A vast improvement over the usual "AGW is going to kill us all! No its not! I don't understand a damn thing about testing hypotheses about complex systems, but I have a strong opinion anyway! Those dumb scientists are forgetting about water vapour - where's my Nobel Prize?!" gibberish that attends any climate posting here.
Why not Biodiesel? A Carbon Neutral technology that requires little change to the current Infrastructure and will work with current Diesel engines.
Because it doesn't scale. Every year we dig up and burn 400x the amount of carbon that the entire biosphere can fix in the same time period. Biodiesel's maximum possible contribution to the global energy budget is lost in the noise. The only things that scale are solar and nuclear.
(Incidentally, these are broad terms. Solar includes a wide range of things like wind and thermal ocean gradients. Nuclear includes geothermal power and fusion if we ever make it work.)
Also, less in magnitude is hard to say since Wilma set a record for the lowest pressure reading ever recorded in an Atlantic hurricane at 882mb (record lowest world wide belongs to Typhoon Tip in the northwest Pacific at 870mb).
Careful here. Records will always be set - that is their nature. Plots of maximum windspeed and lowest pressure in the years since 1940 or so show no trend in maximal intensity. There appears to be some sort of physical limit.
Now, within those limits, there appears to be an increase in the amount of energy dissipated that correlates well with sea surface temperatures, but there is a difference between saying that the overall intensity of the storms is increasing and saying that the maximum intensity is increasing.
ACE is not a measure of energy - it is a proxy for the energy. The correct energy calculation is the integral of the CUBE of the wind speed, which is what Kerry Emanuel calculated. That IS at a peak since the 1940s, and incidentally correlates well with sea surface temperatures. I haven't worked out 2005, but you might be surprised.
A fairly short rebuttal of this argument by actual climatologists (as opposed to the hacks at Fox News) can be found here. And please don't reply that the rebuttal was published almost a year ago - Milloy's argument has not changed.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you. These strong-AI folks really do like to run around naked...
My wife is a speech therapist so we started signing to our kids pretty early. The joke is that our oldest's first word (signed) was not "Mommy" or "Daddy" but "cheese". Sort of humbling ;-)
Roger Penrose discusses this in "The Emperor's New Mind". According to him, it is a consequence of General Relativity (the Weyl Tensor). The exposition is quite funny because he compares the entropy of the universe at t=0 with the odds against the solar system spontaneously occurring and the latter turns out to be more likely!
And a 1m rise in sea level is quite significant for some areas. My father-in-law lives on Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, maximum elevation 25ft (and that is a WWII cement encased garbage dump). And in areas like Bangladesh, it could be quite lethal to large numbers of people, who have no wood for "stilts" and no foreign exchange to buy your spiffy new technology. Which you are developing largely for your own benefit by externalising your costs onto the very people you claim to be "saving".
Try to remember that Wikipedia is not a scholarly journal. Here is a reference to something written by climatologists on the subject. Note the vagueness of the definition and the list of myths.
Um, no, we have data from ice cores going back about 850,000 years, which covers all known climate drivers short of continental arrangements and major meteor impacts.
Yes we do. Go read up on the rest of the site.
The fact is, no one has any idea why this is so. Even worse, this theory provides no explanation of why there is a present moment, an essential feature of any compelling theory of causality IMHO.
Very nice argument about this in Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind. IIRC it comes from the Weyl tensor, but as motivation he shows that the very low entropy universe is more unlikely than the solar system spontaneously forming from the vacuum!
"Wise and cruel was The Bird..."
- Robert Heinlein, The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag
Sorry, more on the Levites at Y-chromosomal Aaron (linked from the original article).
Because it is on topic. TFA is all about a debate about the rates of occurrence, and historical distortions of the data are relevant to the discussion.
Please don't call people morons when you don't know what you are talking about.
All you have done is reduce the payment period from 1 year to 1 day. Go look up "continuous compound interest" to see the limiting case.
You are right that banks have policies to prevent this sort of scam, but they are NOT what you describe. Rather, this is what the "penalties for early withdrawal" clause famed in so many off-colour jokes is all about.
Maybe people should get more than one "fact" before they open their mouth in a public forum...
In other words, the forcings for the LIA are well known and included in current models.
Oh, and next time, you might try linking to a description written by researchers in the field, rather than an uncredentialled, non peer-reviewed Wikipedia entry. Judging from the history of that article, it has seen quite a few edits in the last month alone, a number of which are backing out other people's changes. Looks like it may not be that trustworthy.
You might be interested to know that some climatologists did just that; its called ReadClimate. A vast improvement over the usual "AGW is going to kill us all! No its not! I don't understand a damn thing about testing hypotheses about complex systems, but I have a strong opinion anyway! Those dumb scientists are forgetting about water vapour - where's my Nobel Prize?!" gibberish that attends any climate posting here.
(Incidentally, these are broad terms. Solar includes a wide range of things like wind and thermal ocean gradients. Nuclear includes geothermal power and fusion if we ever make it work.)
Now, within those limits, there appears to be an increase in the amount of energy dissipated that correlates well with sea surface temperatures, but there is a difference between saying that the overall intensity of the storms is increasing and saying that the maximum intensity is increasing.
ACE is not a measure of energy - it is a proxy for the energy. The correct energy calculation is the integral of the CUBE of the wind speed, which is what Kerry Emanuel calculated. That IS at a peak since the 1940s, and incidentally correlates well with sea surface temperatures. I haven't worked out 2005, but you might be surprised.
A fairly short rebuttal of this argument by actual climatologists (as opposed to the hacks at Fox News) can be found here. And please don't reply that the rebuttal was published almost a year ago - Milloy's argument has not changed.