There is enough methane in the Arctic to destroy life on Earth many times over.
This is not clear. A very few scientists have suggested that there's enough methane in clathrates to cause much larger temperature excursions than we've yet seen, but this is by no means well established. And I have never heard a suggestion that there's enough "to destroy life on Earth many times over."
In other words: stick to the real facts, they're scary enough.
If there is only one variable that affects the Earth's climate, it would be the output of the Sun.
True enough. But we measure the output of the sun, and have been measuring it for many decades. We know that in fact that it is not changing. So we can discard that as a source of the current warming.
If there was a second variable, it would be the kinematics of the Earth about the Sun.
Indeed; this is the Milankovitch cycles, which are currently believed to account for ice ages. The main orbital perturbations have a cycle time on the order of 100,000 years. So they are definitely not responsible for changes in temperature on time scales of less than millennia.
It's worth noting, however, that the effort involved in understanding Milankovitch variations and the feedback mechanisms that cause the cycle of ice ages was a very large part of what brought climate science to its present level.
Neither one should be considered constant,
To the contrary, both of them can be considered constant on the time scale of interest here. One because we measure it to be constant, and the second because actually, orbits are well understood.
and the former is certainly not easily modeled.
Although the second one certainly can be.
Alas, there's much more than just two variables that affects the climate.
And climate scientists have been working for over a century at the effects of these variables. So far, other than greenhouse warming (which is a well substantiated theory), the alternate hypothesis to explain the data is... nothing. There are no alternate hypotheses that fit the known data.
The goal should not be to predict or control climate, but to adapt to it as Nature does.
Uh, why shouldn't we understand (you use the word "predict") climate, exactly?
Probably should not believe and predictive models of climate that doesn't also have an accurate, predictive model of the Sun. Coupled systems cannot be magically decoupled.
You do know that we measure the sun's output, right? And have been doing so for many decades?
We know that the observed warming is not due to changes in the solar output because we measure the solar output.
Coupled systems cannot be magically decoupled.
Which is why climate models account for many things.
Yes, AI gets pretty dumb when it sees stuff that's even slightly different than what it's used to. It adds sheep to pictures if it sees a pasture: https://www.theguardian.com/te...
Violent video games were disproven as a means of aggression, and in fact were repeatedly shown to reduce it when...
No.
The result of various studies were that violent video games were not proven to cause violence. This is not the same as "proven to not cause violence."
This distinction is important in evaluating scientific studies of all sorts: not proven to cause is not the same as proven to not cause.
The subject is still heavily debated, and you can find studies that show a connection, or more that don't show a connection. Here's a good overview: https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/25...
Yeah, I'll have to agree with the previous post. Excoriating Apple because their system doesn't work with some external monitor and saying Debian is better but
...now if i could magically find the right kernel options to compile a debian kernel that both boots and supports my video card, i'll be relatively happy. oh yeah, don't use Xfce if you use displayport and want to turn your monitor off and back on; you're welcome.
is rather self-contradictory. So, the problem with Apple is that it doesn't support some external monitors, and therefore Debian is better except it doesn't support some external monitors.
Unless that was intended as irony? It does read like irony. On the internet it is hard to tell.
Is the David Brin's "Sundiver" design (with lasers dissipating the heat away from the ship) any realistic?
Unfortunately not. In oversimplified terms, waste heat radiators "really" get rid of excess entropy. Laser beams are low entropy, so they don't radiate waste heat, they radiate usable energy. Waste heat is defined as everything that is not useable energy. If lasers could radiate waste heat, you could make a perpetual motion machine of the second kind.
In less technical terms: the laser would need a waste-heat radiator.https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11923383&cid=56369001#
Just because we're doing it doesn't mean we should.
What are you talking about? We've been genetically modifying plants for as long as there have been humans and it is fine.
Different meanings of the phrase "genetically modified." Yes, when you have children you could say that you have just produced genetically-modified humans-- their genes are not identical to either parent or any ancestor-- but this is not actually the same process as using CRISPR to splice in genes.
Selective breeding and gene-splicing are very different technologies.
Walking corn plants can be herded to new fields... They also reduce the number of combines a Farmer needs, instead of needing five or six to harvest a farm working one field at a time. This will allow one to be set in a stationary position at the end of a harvest funnel, and the Corn is herded from all the fields of the farm into the combine....
And we just use a genetically-engineered dog to herd the corn to the round-up. We'll need a name for that... I suggest we call them corn-dogs.
"...which means plant scientists can tweak the DNA of soy, corn, tomatoes, or asparagus and make them taste sweeter, last longer on the shelf, and...."
You know, every two years there's another report in the news that says scientists have just created a genetically engineered tomato that will actually have flavor after being sold in the supermarket, and every single time the result is, sorry, nope, same old cardboard flavor.
The promise of grocery tomatoes that actually taste good is the illusion they keep using to sell us on the technology, and we keep falling for that empty promise. I just don't believe it anymore.
You want tomatoes with flavor, you have to grow them yourself.
Most of the common vegetables you eat are super-mutants of their natural ancestors.
Most of the common vegetables you eat are the produce of selective breeding, but this is not the same process as direct editing of genes. They are different processes that work by different mechanisms and have different kinds of results.
The equivalent of turning worms into anacondas.
That is exactly the kind of thing that selective breeding is not capable of doing. You don't make a snake, a lunged vertebrate, by selective breeding of worms.
Don't underestimate selective breeding, nor think it can't produce anything more dangerious than crossing genetics. Also, there are natural mechanisms to copy genes of one species to another. But spiders to plants would be naturally difficult.
The fact that one thing can produce dangerous results does not mean that a different thing may be dangerous in a different way.
What about the power system? Do you use the heat gradient with peltier elements, photovoltaics or is there a separate power source on board?
We looked at using a thermoelectric, but turned out a better solution was using concentrator photovoltaics, hiding most of the photovoltaics behind the shadow shield at closest approach, and then cooling the photovoltaics.
How do you make the power electronics work? Is everything including logic silicone carbide? What kind of core materials for inductors? Must be super fun to work on such a project:)
In fact we do a lot of silicon carbide electronic device research for high temperature applications at Glenn, but for this particular application, most of the electronics were hidden behind the shadow shield, and don't operate at high temperature.
What kind of materials are used that can take that kind of heat, even a fraction of the heat destroys most electrical component.
Carbon. Sublimates around 3825C or so.
Most of the spacecraft hides behind the carbon shadow shield-- almost all the instruments don't need to look toward the sun (the main interest is plasma and fields). The exception is the solar array (my part of the project!)-- this doesn't work unless it is in the sunlight:). But the sunlight is intense enough that we only need a tiny bit of the array to be illuminated, so we retract most of it into the shadow, tilt the part that does see the sun, and use concentrator solar cells that are actively cooled to keep temperatures reasonable.
Honestly, it is people like you that keep me coming back to/. , I have yet to find a single site to replace it.(sure there is hacknews and reddit...)
Cool, so you have a web page that dates back to 1996, and it shows. Dude, update it; It's an embarrassment!
It's on my to-do list. Somewhere around item number seventy or eighty, I have other things to do. Besides, the nice thing about vanilla html is that it works even if you have an old browser that doesn't support the latest doodads and geegaws.
I could find a hundred other sources saying the same thing. Those just happened to be the ones at the top of my list.
Sorry somebody downmodded you as troll: I think they saw that you were gratuitously slamming news sources, and didn't realize you were in fact actually on topic, since you were commenting on the sources I linked.
With that said, however, your comment on the sources was edging toward troll, or possibly simply prejudice. It doesn't make a whit of difference that the New York Times is "part of the big-4 media monopoly"; their Tuesday Science Section continues to be one of the best sources for science and health information. Sorry you don't like them because they don't fit your personal bias, but you very much need to understand that it is you, and not them, who has the bias.
And, by the way, if there are four of them, it's not a monopoly.
There is ample evidence showing that coffee is surprisingly good for you. Saying it has to be labelled a "carcinogen" is doing nothing to help anybody's health, but is contributing to people ignoring warning labels, which is not a good thing. California's laws are stupid and counterproductive.
True, and insightful. The sun has a visible surface, where the plasma becomes opaque. But the visible surface isn't a "surface" in any sense other than being visible-- it is a place where the density is actually far far less than the Earth's surface atmospheric density.
Cool to see the mission get some publicity --I was involved in the design (power system).
Slashdot Mirror
There is enough methane in the Arctic to destroy life on Earth many times over.
This is not clear. A very few scientists have suggested that there's enough methane in clathrates to cause much larger temperature excursions than we've yet seen, but this is by no means well established. And I have never heard a suggestion that there's enough "to destroy life on Earth many times over."
In other words: stick to the real facts, they're scary enough.
If there is only one variable that affects the Earth's climate, it would be the output of the Sun.
True enough. But we measure the output of the sun, and have been measuring it for many decades. We know that in fact that it is not changing. So we can discard that as a source of the current warming.
If there was a second variable, it would be the kinematics of the Earth about the Sun.
Indeed; this is the Milankovitch cycles, which are currently believed to account for ice ages. The main orbital perturbations have a cycle time on the order of 100,000 years. So they are definitely not responsible for changes in temperature on time scales of less than millennia.
It's worth noting, however, that the effort involved in understanding Milankovitch variations and the feedback mechanisms that cause the cycle of ice ages was a very large part of what brought climate science to its present level.
Neither one should be considered constant,
To the contrary, both of them can be considered constant on the time scale of interest here. One because we measure it to be constant, and the second because actually, orbits are well understood.
and the former is certainly not easily modeled.
Although the second one certainly can be.
Alas, there's much more than just two variables that affects the climate.
And climate scientists have been working for over a century at the effects of these variables. So far, other than greenhouse warming (which is a well substantiated theory), the alternate hypothesis to explain the data is... nothing. There are no alternate hypotheses that fit the known data.
The goal should not be to predict or control climate, but to adapt to it as Nature does.
Uh, why shouldn't we understand (you use the word "predict") climate, exactly?
Probably should not believe and predictive models of climate that doesn't also have an accurate, predictive model of the Sun. Coupled systems cannot be magically decoupled.
You do know that we measure the sun's output, right? And have been doing so for many decades?
We know that the observed warming is not due to changes in the solar output because we measure the solar output.
Coupled systems cannot be magically decoupled.
Which is why climate models account for many things.
Why does every comment thread have to eventually be about Trump?
I think we need to update Godwin's law.
Oops, wrong link. I meant this one http://aiweirdness.com/post/17... /. earlier: https://slashdot.org/story/18/...)
(discussed on
Yes, AI gets pretty dumb when it sees stuff that's even slightly different than what it's used to. It adds sheep to pictures if it sees a pasture: https://www.theguardian.com/te...
Or, any yellow and black image must be a school bus: https://www.wired.com/2015/01/...
What, I ignored the part where you made an assertion with no evidence and no citation? How silly of me.
Oh, wait, I didn't ignore it. Studies so far are not conclusive. There, I addressed it again.
Yes, this one contradicts last month's study saying that contrary to previous belief humans do NOT grow new neurons: https://www.npr.org/sections/h...
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/07/health/new-brain-cells-adulthood-study/index.html
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-the-adult-brain-really-grow-new-neurons/
Violent video games were disproven as a means of aggression, and in fact were repeatedly shown to reduce it when ...
No.
The result of various studies were that violent video games were not proven to cause violence. This is not the same as "proven to not cause violence."
This distinction is important in evaluating scientific studies of all sorts: not proven to cause is not the same as proven to not cause.
The subject is still heavily debated, and you can find studies that show a connection, or more that don't show a connection. Here's a good overview: https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/25...
Yeah, I'll have to agree with the previous post. Excoriating Apple because their system doesn't work with some external monitor and saying Debian is better but
...now if i could magically find the right kernel options to compile a debian kernel that both boots and supports my video card, i'll be relatively happy. oh yeah, don't use Xfce if you use displayport and want to turn your monitor off and back on; you're welcome.
is rather self-contradictory. So, the problem with Apple is that it doesn't support some external monitors, and therefore Debian is better except it doesn't support some external monitors.
Unless that was intended as irony? It does read like irony. On the internet it is hard to tell.
Is the David Brin's "Sundiver" design (with lasers dissipating the heat away from the ship) any realistic?
Unfortunately not. In oversimplified terms, waste heat radiators "really" get rid of excess entropy. Laser beams are low entropy, so they don't radiate waste heat, they radiate usable energy. Waste heat is defined as everything that is not useable energy. If lasers could radiate waste heat, you could make a perpetual motion machine of the second kind.
In less technical terms: the laser would need a waste-heat radiator.https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11923383&cid=56369001#
Yeah, I'm going there... what if every road required you to display your drivers license in the windshield to be scanned every time you go anywhere?
Then we would rename "driver's license" with the term "license plate," since that's what a license plate is.
Just because we're doing it doesn't mean we should.
What are you talking about? We've been genetically modifying plants for as long as there have been humans and it is fine.
Different meanings of the phrase "genetically modified." Yes, when you have children you could say that you have just produced genetically-modified humans-- their genes are not identical to either parent or any ancestor-- but this is not actually the same process as using CRISPR to splice in genes.
Selective breeding and gene-splicing are very different technologies.
Walking corn plants can be herded to new fields... They also reduce the number of combines a Farmer needs, instead of needing five or six to harvest a farm working one field at a time. This will allow one to be set in a stationary position at the end of a harvest funnel, and the Corn is herded from all the fields of the farm into the combine. ...
And we just use a genetically-engineered dog to herd the corn to the round-up. We'll need a name for that... I suggest we call them corn-dogs.
"...which means plant scientists can tweak the DNA of soy, corn, tomatoes, or asparagus and make them taste sweeter, last longer on the shelf, and...."
You know, every two years there's another report in the news that says scientists have just created a genetically engineered tomato that will actually have flavor after being sold in the supermarket, and every single time the result is, sorry, nope, same old cardboard flavor.
The promise of grocery tomatoes that actually taste good is the illusion they keep using to sell us on the technology, and we keep falling for that empty promise. I just don't believe it anymore.
You want tomatoes with flavor, you have to grow them yourself.
Most of the common vegetables you eat are super-mutants of their natural ancestors.
Most of the common vegetables you eat are the produce of selective breeding, but this is not the same process as direct editing of genes. They are different processes that work by different mechanisms and have different kinds of results.
The equivalent of turning worms into anacondas.
That is exactly the kind of thing that selective breeding is not capable of doing. You don't make a snake, a lunged vertebrate, by selective breeding of worms.
Don't underestimate selective breeding, nor think it can't produce anything more dangerious than crossing genetics. Also, there are natural mechanisms to copy genes of one species to another. But spiders to plants would be naturally difficult.
The fact that one thing can produce dangerous results does not mean that a different thing may be dangerous in a different way.
What about the power system? Do you use the heat gradient with peltier elements, photovoltaics or is there a separate power source on board?
We looked at using a thermoelectric, but turned out a better solution was using concentrator photovoltaics, hiding most of the photovoltaics behind the shadow shield at closest approach, and then cooling the photovoltaics.
How do you make the power electronics work? Is everything including logic silicone carbide? What kind of core materials for inductors? Must be super fun to work on such a project :)
In fact we do a lot of silicon carbide electronic device research for high temperature applications at Glenn, but for this particular application, most of the electronics were hidden behind the shadow shield, and don't operate at high temperature.
And, by the way, if there are four of them, it's not a monopoly.
They collectively are
Nope. That's not what a monopoly is. The word "mono" means one; "monopoly" means "one seller."
If there are four, it's not one.
What kind of materials are used that can take that kind of heat, even a fraction of the heat destroys most electrical component.
Carbon. Sublimates around 3825C or so.
Most of the spacecraft hides behind the carbon shadow shield-- almost all the instruments don't need to look toward the sun (the main interest is plasma and fields). The exception is the solar array (my part of the project!)-- this doesn't work unless it is in the sunlight :). But the sunlight is intense enough that we only need a tiny bit of the array to be illuminated, so we retract most of it into the shadow, tilt the part that does see the sun, and use concentrator solar cells that are actively cooled to keep temperatures reasonable.
Honestly, it is people like you that keep me coming back to /. , I have yet to find a single site to replace it.(sure there is hacknews and reddit...)
Thanks.
Cool, so you have a web page that dates back to 1996, and it shows. Dude, update it; It's an embarrassment!
It's on my to-do list. Somewhere around item number seventy or eighty, I have other things to do. Besides, the nice thing about vanilla html is that it works even if you have an old browser that doesn't support the latest doodads and geegaws.
I could find a hundred other sources saying the same thing. Those just happened to be the ones at the top of my list.
Sorry somebody downmodded you as troll: I think they saw that you were gratuitously slamming news sources, and didn't realize you were in fact actually on topic, since you were commenting on the sources I linked.
With that said, however, your comment on the sources was edging toward troll, or possibly simply prejudice. It doesn't make a whit of difference that the New York Times is "part of the big-4 media monopoly"; their Tuesday Science Section continues to be one of the best sources for science and health information. Sorry you don't like them because they don't fit your personal bias, but you very much need to understand that it is you, and not them, who has the bias.
And, by the way, if there are four of them, it's not a monopoly.
Indeed, this is idiotic.
There is ample evidence showing that coffee is surprisingly good for you. Saying it has to be labelled a "carcinogen" is doing nothing to help anybody's health, but is contributing to people ignoring warning labels, which is not a good thing. California's laws are stupid and counterproductive.
http://time.com/4116129/coffee-longer-life/
http://www.webmd.com/alzheimer...
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/this-is-your-brain-on-coffee/
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/11/16/456191657/drink-to-your-health-study-links-daily-coffee-habit-to-longevity
I hope they plan on only going there at night!
Comments like this are why they let us post anonymously.
Every time I give a lecture about Solar Probe I can count on somebody saying that.
True, and insightful. The sun has a visible surface, where the plasma becomes opaque. But the visible surface isn't a "surface" in any sense other than being visible-- it is a place where the density is actually far far less than the Earth's surface atmospheric density.
Cool to see the mission get some publicity --I was involved in the design (power system).
I think he'd welcome his day in court.
Apparently not. He's done everything possible to avoid it.