I'm not terribly happy seeing nuclear weapons plans on the internet. Even if all this stuff is theoretically "already known," I'd be happy with a layer of security through obscurity; it's now "known" to about half a billion more people than it had been. But I did look at it.
I expect that this is going to get Wikileaks a lot of publicity, but I think it may be harmful publicity-- whenever they try to claim that they're doing a useful service, people are now going to point at this and say "yeah, and also publishing plans for weapons."
Actually, a 20 year old Russian kid who happened to be born and live in Estonia. One of the problems of using the same words for an ethnic group and a nation.
Good point. Here in America, we would call somebody who was born in Estonia, raised in Estonia, and lives in Estonia as "Estonian," but it does confuse things, since in much of the rest of the world, identity really doesn't come from where you're born and raised. (The apex of this was Nazi Germany, of course, where people of Jewish descent whose families had been in Germany for a thousand years were labelled "stateless persons"-- oops, no reference to Godwin's law intended. (But then I don't think I trigger Godwin's law here, since I didn't mention Hitler... ooops...))
Sounds completely reasonable to me. The engineer's motto is "if it works, don't fix it," If he's got software that's working, why pay money to get software that might or might work, but definitely will require a steep learning curve wasting days, and maybe weeks, to get "upgraded" to something that will itself be obsolete in another year anyway?
Frankly, I really wish that developers would work on actually fixing the bugs in the old software, instead of dumping it all for the next "upgrade" with a completely different set of user interfaces to learn, and new gee-whiz features that almost work, or at least would work, except that everybody else isn't compatible (but will work really shiny when everybody gets on the wagon, really!).
Well, I wasn't actually the one who originally brought that up; I'd been specifically addressing the single wrong point.
However, with that said, I think your accusation of "ginning up a fake pedigree" is bizarrely off-base. The publication record on anthropogenic global warming in the 50s and 60s and 70s, seems scant in comparison to today, when it's suddenly a major issue but from the point of view of ordinary, non-headline-generating science, it was perfectly reasonable science, there's nothing "fake" about it. It didn't, however, look quite so urgent back then, when there seemed to be a plethora of other more urgent environmental concerns, like nuclear warheads, and maybe one degree of warming twenty or thirty or fifty years in the future really seemed more like science fiction than a crisis.
To some extent, today's global warming crisis is the child of the "law of conservation of crisis"-- when one crises fades, the next item on the list rises to the top, and becomes the crisis of the moment. So nobody any more seems worried any more about 20,000 nuclear warheads aimed at us by the Russians....
I was very specifically addressing the statement by TFGeditor who claimed that he had done "a lot of research (into extant literature) on climate change" and had never run across any references to global warming that predated the 1990s. In the various replies to this thread, people have many easily findable references predating 1990, going back to Arrhenius's 1896 paper, including several (easily findable) links to lists of references, and even a 1983 E.P.A. Report saying that "the warming of the earth known as the 'greenhouse effect' will begin in the 1990's."
The difficulty here is that when people on the "global-warming-isn't-real-and-there's-no-consensus" side of the debate pronounce with great seriousness that they've done "a lot of research"...and a superficial check of easily-available sources doesn't seem to show that they've done any research at all, it rather saps credibility from the argument. If this is what passes for "a lot of research," there seems be something very wrong with the debate.
You have tried to revise your argument to one that is defensible, but your new position is not the same as your original statements about global warming I believe you must be confusing what I wrote with something somebody else wrote. I am not "revising my argument", since I hadn't previously made an argument to revise. The reply you quote is the first thing I wrote in this thread.
The statement you quoted was a comment on the way in which the nature of the study methodology changed after 1990 (the year before which TFGeditor claimed that "despite a lot of research" he "never ran across any references to global warming.") It seemed relevant to me, but perhaps it was tangential to the topic.
The 1980 textbook reference I gave, by the way, discusses not merely the greenhouse effect in general (in passing, he notes, p. 88, that the infrared "greenhouse effect" plays only a minor role in the heating of actual greenhouses) but specifically discusses the effects of human input of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, giving several references to earlier work. It is indeed true that the greenhouse effect has been known for a longer time than the effect of anthropogenic gasses on the global temperature, but it is not true that it was not discussed in the literature before 1990. It was discussed, it was discussed a lot, and it is not hard to find the references.
It was not discussed so much in the popular press-- but even there, it was not absent, and if you do even a cursory search, you can find such references.
I note that the sixth reference in this list. dated 1975, actually uses the term "global warming" in the title of the paper.
This makes it extremely difficult to credit the statement by TFGeditor (737839) that "I have done a lot of research".
TFG, I'm kinda suspecting you're trolling, but just in case...
Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. J. Hansen, et. al., 1981.
Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment. Charney, J.G., et al., 1979.
A Terminal Mesozoic "Greenhouse": Lessons from the Past, Dewey M. McLean, 1978.
Greenhouse effects due to man-made perturbations of trace gases. Wang, W. C., et al., 1976.
The effects of doubling the CO2 concentration on the climate of a general circulation model, Manabe, S., and R.T. Wetherald, 1975.
Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?, Wallace S. Broecker, 1975.
The concentration and isotopic abundances of carbon dioxide in rural and marine air, Keeling, C.D., 1961
Carbon dioxide exchange between atmosphere and ocean and the question of an increase of atmospheric CO2 during the past decades. Revelle, R., and H.E. Suess, 1957.
Or, going back a little further:
Callendar, G.S., 1938: The artificial production of carbon dioxide and its influence on temperature. Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc., 64, 223-237.
Arrhenius, S., 1896: On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature on the ground, Philos. Mag., 41, 237-276.
I take it, from the tenor of your comment, that you haven't actually looked at the book that I referenced. When you say "I have done a lot of research (into extant literature) on climate change," I presume you mean by this "I did a Google search."
Since the very first reference I put my hands on indicates that you are unfamiliar with the scientific literature predating 1990, why should I pay attention to anything else you say?
As a journalist myself, I, too, am most interested in seeing those thousands of studies, especially those dated more than 30 years in the past. I have done a lot of research (into extant literature) on climate change and never ran across any references to global warming that predated the 1990s. Well, turning to the bookshelf sitting immediately to the left of my desk, how about An Introduction to Atmospheric Radiation, Kuo-Nan Liou, Academic Press 1980. It's a relatively standard text about optical absorption and scattering processes in atmospheres. The greenhouse effect is brought up in chapter 4 (Infrared Radiation Transfer in the Atmosphere) and discussed further in chapter 8 (Radiation Climatology).
Greenhouse-effect studies before the 1990s lacked the detailed numerical models that we have developed since the 1990s, since these depend on massive amounts of computer power, but the effect has been known for a long time, and it was definitely discussed before the 1990s.
This isn't an exhaustive search of the literature-- this is the first book that I happen to have handy. If the very first atmospheric science book I put my hands on that predates the 1990s has the reference, yet you say you never ran across any references to greenhouse-effect induced global warming that predated the 1990s, this seems to be an indication that you are unfamiliar with the literature.
We seem to be reading different articles. The article I'm commenting on is explicitly a commentary on the ideas in The Transparent Society, and states that it is right at the beginning. The/. post we're talking about is labelled "The Myth of the 'Transparent Society'". It is commenting on a Wired article called "The Myth of the 'Transparent Society'".
Now, you just said that The Transparent Society "isn't central to the subject of the article," and hence any comments about it means that I am "changing the subject to irrelevant issues."
OK.
Please be aware that what you are apparently talking about has no discernible relationship to what I have been talking about.
He was indeed very clear... if you mean that it was clear that he was saying things that were not supported by his reasoning, and were directly contradicted by his example.
Bilateral disclosure in a case of unbalanced power is a BAD thing. Yes, he did make that unsupported assertion-- immediately before a stupid example (don't, in fact, force you to take off your clothes-- you take off your clothes because you believe it will benefit you. This is voluntary disclosure of information; totally irrelevant to the subject at hand) followed an example of the opposite.
Unilateral disclosure than increase the power disparity is a BAD thing.
Unilateral disclosure as a means of leveling the playing field is a GOOD thing.
I thought his example of recording ALL police interrogations was clear and would be a very good across the board public policy.
All of these statements could have been taken directly out of the Brin book that he is disagreeing with. Since the article is purportedly disagreeing with Brin's arguments in the Transparent Society, I don't see in what way these statements that agree with Brin, if he had said them, could be examples of clear reasoning.
Try rereading the article.
Why don't you try reading the Brin book that he's purportedly replying to?
Well, I have mixed feelings about this... having some guy with an armed robot dispersing people because (in his opinion) they're drug dealers and (in his opinion) they're up to no good is very disquieting, even if the robot is only armed with a water cannon. I don't think it's any particular improvement that the person violating civil liberties isn't the government but some self-appointed vigilante.
On the other hand... a robot built from a Barbeque smoker?!? How cool is that!!
But the point is that the police already had the surveillance. The fact that the kid had the ability to use his own recording on his own behalf gave him power that he wouldn't otherwise have had.
Now, Schneider's point may, in fact, be true-- but the example he gave certainly doesn't support it. If he hadn't had his own recording, the kid wouldn't have had any power whatsoever against the police. This is very clearly an example where the person with less power gained by the existence of the recording, which is opposite to the point Schneider was attempting to make, and in fact is a very good example of the point Brin was making.
The nature of the relationship between those with power and those without is quite obvious, especially with respect to current privacy issues, but I always appreciate Bruce Schneier's ability to explain the issues clearly and thoroughly.
I would have appreciated that too, except his actual ability seems to be an ability to explain things in a confusing manner, with a lack of any logical argument except assertion, and using an example that actually supports the argument he's disagreeing with.
The main problem here is that when you read the original article, the case Schneider gives contradict what he says. Brin argued that the people who have power can (and will) invade your privacy anyway. They already have the surveillance cameras. In the example Schneider gave, the kid with the portable MP-3 recorder was able to fight back purely because he did have his own recording (of what turned out to be useful to him to record)-- that's precisely what Brin had argued. It's precisely the opposite of what Schneider said: "The more power you have, the more additional power you derive from the new data." Without the "new data"-- the recording-- the kid had no power; the police had all the power.
SpaceX has made some mistakes, but they are sitting in a much better position than NASA was in the early 1960's. I'll also have to admit that the reason SpaceX is in the position they are in is due to the knowledge gained by NASA and the U.S. military back in the 1950's and 1960's as well (not to mention other rocket developers), but I wouldn't condemn them for not trying.
I do want to emphasize that at no point have I condemned Space-X, and most certainly you can't criticize them for not trying. My respect for Space-X goes up a notch every time they follow up a failure with a commitment to learn from their mistakes and keep on working. This is something to be admired, not condemned. They are out there proving that they've got what it takes.
The Saturn V and Saturn I(b) rockets were designed by a team that had more than twenty years' experience, going back to before the V-1.
Actually, V-1 wasn't a rocket, it was a pulse jet; and it wasn't the Von Braun team; it was their competitors
...Indeed, the Saturns were designed by Von Braun's team that in NASA's early days had been working out of the Redstone Arsenal. The rockets that NASA was designing on its own at that time were blowing up with depressing regularity;
I expect you must be thinking of Project Vanguard. That predates NASA-- it was a NRL (Navy Research Labs) project.
if Eisenhower had let them, the Von Braun team could have put something in orbit before the Russians did.
Shuttle may have made its first few launches successfully, but they blew up their fair share of hardware during testing (the SSMEs in particular were a bitch). They had couple of decades of experience with large solids (initially for Titan III, developed in part for the Air Force's MOL program) by then, too.
Not to mention that NASA had a development budget several orders of magnitude larger than SpaceX's.
On paper, rocket science isn't that hard. The thing is, a lot of it isn't on paper as such, it comes with the experience that tells you to use stainless steel nuts instead of aluminum ones, or to make sure your LOX valves don't get condensation and ice on them that freezes them shut, or to triple check that you've got the right software loaded.
Two failures and one delay? And one of the failures wasn't that bad? For a brand new company and new rocket tech? Considering how many outright explosions and multiple failures NASA and all others did before they got it right, I'd say they are doing just fine. I bet NASA wishes they had that success rate!
The most recent launch vehicle developed by NASA the space shuttle, which was successful on its first 24 launches. After the first failure, it succeeded on the next hundred launches before the next failure.
Before that, the previous vehicle developed by NASA was the Saturn-V, ten launches, no failures.
Before that, the Saturn 1/1b, nineteen launches, no failures.
Why in the world would NASA "wish they had a success rate" of 0 successes?
The article as written makes no sense. You need energy to electrolyze the water to produce hydrogen, so you can't just carry a tank of water in your car instead of a tank of hydrogen; you still need to carry around energy in some form.
The commentary on the original article, though, links to the the press release which clarifies it. The application they're talking about is a plug-in rechargable car. When you're at home, you plug it in, the car electrolyzes water to produce hydrogen, and then, when you unplug it, you run the car on the hydrogen.
The application, then, doesn't address the problem of how to store hydrogen, only the problem of how to produce it.
Slashdot Mirror
I expect that this is going to get Wikileaks a lot of publicity, but I think it may be harmful publicity-- whenever they try to claim that they're doing a useful service, people are now going to point at this and say "yeah, and also publishing plans for weapons."
Actually, a 20 year old Russian kid who happened to be born and live in Estonia. One of the problems of using the same words for an ethnic group and a nation.
Good point. Here in America, we would call somebody who was born in Estonia, raised in Estonia, and lives in Estonia as "Estonian," but it does confuse things, since in much of the rest of the world, identity really doesn't come from where you're born and raised. (The apex of this was Nazi Germany, of course, where people of Jewish descent whose families had been in Germany for a thousand years were labelled "stateless persons"-- oops, no reference to Godwin's law intended. (But then I don't think I trigger Godwin's law here, since I didn't mention Hitler... ooops...))
Note that this wasn't a "hacking war," and it wasn't a "Russian attack". It was a 20-year old Estonian kid with a botnet. More details here
Is it, really? I've never actually seen a good engineer who lives by that...
Yep. That''s because non-engineers don't need to be told not to fix stuff that isn't broken.
Frankly, I really wish that developers would work on actually fixing the bugs in the old software, instead of dumping it all for the next "upgrade" with a completely different set of user interfaces to learn, and new gee-whiz features that almost work, or at least would work, except that everybody else isn't compatible (but will work really shiny when everybody gets on the wagon, really!).
However, with that said, I think your accusation of "ginning up a fake pedigree" is bizarrely off-base. The publication record on anthropogenic global warming in the 50s and 60s and 70s, seems scant in comparison to today, when it's suddenly a major issue but from the point of view of ordinary, non-headline-generating science, it was perfectly reasonable science, there's nothing "fake" about it. It didn't, however, look quite so urgent back then, when there seemed to be a plethora of other more urgent environmental concerns, like nuclear warheads, and maybe one degree of warming twenty or thirty or fifty years in the future really seemed more like science fiction than a crisis.
To some extent, today's global warming crisis is the child of the "law of conservation of crisis"-- when one crises fades, the next item on the list rises to the top, and becomes the crisis of the moment. So nobody any more seems worried any more about 20,000 nuclear warheads aimed at us by the Russians....
The difficulty here is that when people on the "global-warming-isn't-real-and-there's-no-consensus" side of the debate pronounce with great seriousness that they've done "a lot of research" ...and a superficial check of easily-available sources doesn't seem to show that they've done any research at all, it rather saps credibility from the argument. If this is what passes for "a lot of research," there seems be something very wrong with the debate.
The statement you quoted was a comment on the way in which the nature of the study methodology changed after 1990 (the year before which TFGeditor claimed that "despite a lot of research" he "never ran across any references to global warming.") It seemed relevant to me, but perhaps it was tangential to the topic.
The 1980 textbook reference I gave, by the way, discusses not merely the greenhouse effect in general (in passing, he notes, p. 88, that the infrared "greenhouse effect" plays only a minor role in the heating of actual greenhouses) but specifically discusses the effects of human input of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, giving several references to earlier work. It is indeed true that the greenhouse effect has been known for a longer time than the effect of anthropogenic gasses on the global temperature, but it is not true that it was not discussed in the literature before 1990. It was discussed, it was discussed a lot, and it is not hard to find the references.
It was not discussed so much in the popular press-- but even there, it was not absent, and if you do even a cursory search, you can find such references.
This makes it extremely difficult to credit the statement by TFGeditor (737839) that "I have done a lot of research".
TFG, I'm kinda suspecting you're trolling, but just in case...Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. J. Hansen, et. al., 1981.
Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment. Charney, J.G., et al., 1979.
A Terminal Mesozoic "Greenhouse": Lessons from the Past, Dewey M. McLean, 1978.
Greenhouse effects due to man-made perturbations of trace gases. Wang, W. C., et al., 1976.
The effects of doubling the CO2 concentration on the climate of a general circulation model, Manabe, S., and R.T. Wetherald, 1975.
Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?, Wallace S. Broecker, 1975.
The concentration and isotopic abundances of carbon dioxide in rural and marine air, Keeling, C.D., 1961
Carbon dioxide exchange between atmosphere and ocean and the question of an increase of atmospheric CO2 during the past decades. Revelle, R., and H.E. Suess, 1957.
Or, going back a little further:
Callendar, G.S., 1938: The artificial production of carbon dioxide and its influence on temperature. Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc., 64, 223-237.
Arrhenius, S., 1896: On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature on the ground, Philos. Mag., 41, 237-276.
The current IPCC report has a review of historical climate research, and is available at http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter1.pdf.
From your reply to that comment, it seems clear that you still haven't actually looked at the book that I referenced.
Since the very first reference I put my hands on indicates that you are unfamiliar with the scientific literature predating 1990, why should I pay attention to anything else you say?
Greenhouse-effect studies before the 1990s lacked the detailed numerical models that we have developed since the 1990s, since these depend on massive amounts of computer power, but the effect has been known for a long time, and it was definitely discussed before the 1990s.
This isn't an exhaustive search of the literature-- this is the first book that I happen to have handy. If the very first atmospheric science book I put my hands on that predates the 1990s has the reference, yet you say you never ran across any references to greenhouse-effect induced global warming that predated the 1990s, this seems to be an indication that you are unfamiliar with the literature.
Now, you just said that The Transparent Society "isn't central to the subject of the article," and hence any comments about it means that I am "changing the subject to irrelevant issues."
OK.
Please be aware that what you are apparently talking about has no discernible relationship to what I have been talking about.
...I've never read Brin, but...Were you aware that this is the subject of the article under discussion?
He was indeed very clear... if you mean that it was clear that he was saying things that were not supported by his reasoning, and were directly contradicted by his example.
Bilateral disclosure in a case of unbalanced power is a BAD thing. Yes, he did make that unsupported assertion-- immediately before a stupid example (don't, in fact, force you to take off your clothes-- you take off your clothes because you believe it will benefit you. This is voluntary disclosure of information; totally irrelevant to the subject at hand) followed an example of the opposite. Unilateral disclosure than increase the power disparity is a BAD thing. Unilateral disclosure as a means of leveling the playing field is a GOOD thing. I thought his example of recording ALL police interrogations was clear and would be a very good across the board public policy.All of these statements could have been taken directly out of the Brin book that he is disagreeing with. Since the article is purportedly disagreeing with Brin's arguments in the Transparent Society, I don't see in what way these statements that agree with Brin, if he had said them, could be examples of clear reasoning.
Try rereading the article.Why don't you try reading the Brin book that he's purportedly replying to?
On the other hand... a robot built from a Barbeque smoker?!? How cool is that!!
Now, Schneider's point may, in fact, be true-- but the example he gave certainly doesn't support it. If he hadn't had his own recording, the kid wouldn't have had any power whatsoever against the police. This is very clearly an example where the person with less power gained by the existence of the recording, which is opposite to the point Schneider was attempting to make, and in fact is a very good example of the point Brin was making.
I would have appreciated that too, except his actual ability seems to be an ability to explain things in a confusing manner, with a lack of any logical argument except assertion, and using an example that actually supports the argument he's disagreeing with.
The main problem here is that when you read the original article, the case Schneider gives contradict what he says. Brin argued that the people who have power can (and will) invade your privacy anyway. They already have the surveillance cameras. In the example Schneider gave, the kid with the portable MP-3 recorder was able to fight back purely because he did have his own recording (of what turned out to be useful to him to record)-- that's precisely what Brin had argued. It's precisely the opposite of what Schneider said: "The more power you have, the more additional power you derive from the new data." Without the "new data"-- the recording-- the kid had no power; the police had all the power.
I do want to emphasize that at no point have I condemned Space-X, and most certainly you can't criticize them for not trying. My respect for Space-X goes up a notch every time they follow up a failure with a commitment to learn from their mistakes and keep on working. This is something to be admired, not condemned. They are out there proving that they've got what it takes.
Actually, V-1 wasn't a rocket, it was a pulse jet; and it wasn't the Von Braun team; it was their competitors
...Indeed, the Saturns were designed by Von Braun's team that in NASA's early days had been working out of the Redstone Arsenal. The rockets that NASA was designing on its own at that time were blowing up with depressing regularity;I expect you must be thinking of Project Vanguard. That predates NASA-- it was a NRL (Navy Research Labs) project. if Eisenhower had let them, the Von Braun team could have put something in orbit before the Russians did.
Shuttle may have made its first few launches successfully, but they blew up their fair share of hardware during testing (the SSMEs in particular were a bitch). They had couple of decades of experience with large solids (initially for Titan III, developed in part for the Air Force's MOL program) by then, too.
Not to mention that NASA had a development budget several orders of magnitude larger than SpaceX's.
On paper, rocket science isn't that hard. The thing is, a lot of it isn't on paper as such, it comes with the experience that tells you to use stainless steel nuts instead of aluminum ones, or to make sure your LOX valves don't get condensation and ice on them that freezes them shut, or to triple check that you've got the right software loaded.
The most recent launch vehicle developed by NASA the space shuttle, which was successful on its first 24 launches. After the first failure, it succeeded on the next hundred launches before the next failure.
Before that, the previous vehicle developed by NASA was the Saturn-V, ten launches, no failures.
Before that, the Saturn 1/1b, nineteen launches, no failures.
Why in the world would NASA "wish they had a success rate" of 0 successes?
The commentary on the original article, though, links to the the press release which clarifies it. The application they're talking about is a plug-in rechargable car. When you're at home, you plug it in, the car electrolyzes water to produce hydrogen, and then, when you unplug it, you run the car on the hydrogen.
The application, then, doesn't address the problem of how to store hydrogen, only the problem of how to produce it.
I know, I know, one shouldn't reply to trolls, but I have to note that this post consists entirely of a series of nonsequiters.