At least those will be equal opportunity changes since Mother Nature and the Universe don't discriminate when it comes time to bring the pain to those unworthy to survive.
You mean the poor farmer in Bangladesh will experience the same hardship from sea level rise than a Miami millionaire? One loses his livelihood and the other has to move his yacht pier up 3 feet - yes, that seems about the same.
More generally, rich people are generally much better isolated from any environmental changes, and also in a much better position to exploit them. Assume the Dutch have to rebuild their dikes - do you really think that most of the money spent will go to the guy who drives the backhoe?
Bullshit yourself. We are not "coming out of an ice age" - technically we are in an interglacial of the current and ongoing ice age. For the less technical definition of "ice age" (i.e. "glacial period"), we have been out of the last one for about 10000 years. And while the about.com article is fairly atrocious, it does say "a number of human activities are contributing to global warming" (emphasis mine). Of course, aerosol emissions by humans also counteract global warming...
Of course, research papers are not always page turners and the above is asking you to go through a lot of technical crap that, while ameliorating, is not everyone's idea of a fun weekend.
However, a research paper, especially on a well-known problem, will nearly always discuss the previous state of the art and related work. So you need to read some papers anyways. This can be hard work. Typically, older papers will use simpler and more varied language, and also present more basic ideas. As the field develops, standard concepts will get more-or-less standard terms. So newer papers will have more specialised language, but will also assume that you know the basic ideas. Skim the latest few papers and see what they cite - then pick some of the papers everybody references. Reading order is abstract, introduction, conclusion. Read the rest only if it really applies to your topic, or you'll never finish.
Peer reviewing, editorial work, actual submissions? Don't people usual GET paid for this?
No. Or at least not by Nature. Peer reviewing is done for free, assuming reciprocity (I need my papers to get reviewed, so I review others). Papers are written as part of the normal academic work, i.e. by people paid by grants or universities. Editorial work used to add value, but for most journals you now just submit camera-ready PDF. What remains as a value proposition is the organisation and the brand.
In other contexts, similar actions would definitely be illegal.
I agree, but your example is somewhat off. OBT is only providing infrastructure in a content-agnostic way. They are more like an ISP, or the phone directory, or Google Maps - or even the city that builds a street through a high-crime area. The question is if such a "don't ask, don't tell" policy is acceptable.
Are we all certain that there was ash coverage over those airports and if so, was it enough to pose a danger?
The answers are "Yes", and "nobody knows, and we don't have sufficient knowledge to make a good guess". The ash cloud was both modelled and, later, measured during test flights, and at least the spatial extend was in decent agreement with the models. Since the current stance of the ICAO is "detectable ash means no flights in controlled airspace", national ATC agencies followed that standing recommendation. There is a good argument to be made that we need more research, but that means that someone has to pony up the cash for that, and it's not a small chunk. Jet engines are very expensive toys to play with. All that money has to, in the end, come from the passengers. If RyanAir moves you 1000 km for EUR 5, imagine how many passengers have to pitch in to get, say, 14 million dollars for one engine of one model (and you haven't yet paid any researcher, or the test stand, or found a way to simulate high altitude and various ash densities). At least up to now, nobody was willing to spend that money.
I'm shocked that they could not reroute the flights south through an alternate route and that they seemed to have no contingency plans for this sort of event.
The cloud covered, among others, Heathrow, Charles de Gaulle, and Frankfurt, i.e. the 3 busiest airports in Europe (Heathrow is the busiest in the world, and CDG and FRA are not much behind). It also closed the other London Airports, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen. First, this is where people want to go. Secondly, no other airports in range have the capacity to take up this many flights.
No one should have the power to force a company to stop doing business for ANY REASON.
You mean like BigFission Ltd. dumping all their radioactive waste on homeless Jack so that he can safely dispose of it for US$10,- and a bottle of Heineken? Or TrucksRUs Trucks running red lights to shave some seconds of delivery times in the name of business? Or Bayer selling drugs that are "really safe, trust us, we asked our astrologer"? Or Delta flying through dangerous volcanic ash and dropping an airliner on Big Ben? Oh wait...
Did Airbus and Boeing say what levels of ash were OK?
As far as I know, there are no advisories from the makers. The problem is that jet engines have extremely carefully modelled airflows that keep the hottest parts of the exhaust from the turbine blades. Volcanic ash glass that forms in the engines can disrupt this airflow. It's bad enough if the turbine stalls, but in the worst case it can fail catastrophically, with turbine blades ripping through the engine casing, control lines, and possibly even structural parts of the wings. Because of a number of events, the most famous one a 747 that lost power in all four engines, ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Authority, recommends closing of the airspace if there is any detectable volcanic ash in the air. National regulators usually follow this recommendation, and for good reasons.
These guys were having fun killing people. This is not and can never be ok.
As opposed to building an army of people, who hate killing people?
That does not make for a particularly functional army.
On the contrary. Building an army of people hating killing is the only way an enlightened democracy can build an army and keep the moral high ground. The aim of an army is not to kill people. It's to avoid war, or, if wars have to be fought, to win them. Winning is not achieved by simply killing people. It's only achieved by killing more than you piss off enough to join the fight.
Well, shooting at anyone incapacitated is against the rules of law. Shooting at a humanitarian rescue attempt (which this was, or do you think the insurgents keep black vans to carry wounded to their secret underground hospital and drive their kids around them?) is plain sick.
Keep in mind this was three years ago during some of the most violent times in Iraq. What you are seeing is guerrilla warfare. The enemy does not stand out with "bad guy" uniforms and because of this, the soldiers are on edge and in a defensive posture, exposed out in the open.... Operating in an environment like this for weeks on end without a break stresses people to the breaking point. It is only a matter of time before combat fatigue sets in and you start getting mistakes. Mistakes are part of war, and this is reflected in the law of war. Killing civilians is a war crime, but the law leaves ample room for these inevitable actions under stress.
These guys were having fun killing people. This is not and can never be ok. Indeed, they are in a bad place - but its the responsibility of the political leadership that sends them there to ensure that people are not kept in a position that puts them under so much strain that they will break. In fact, the ultimate responsibility lies with the Bush government that started the war without any idea of how to end it. But everyone down to the guy who pulls the trigger can say no to such illegal acts.
And, of course, keeping such fuck-ups secret is completely and utterly unacceptable in a democracy. How can voters be expected to cast informed votes if the government blatantly lies to them?
You are wrong. See Archimedes' principle. If there is more ice sitting on dry land, that water would not contribute to sea level rise, so if more humid air causes more snow deposition on Antarctica, that would help. But polar melting is only one source of sea level rise. Thermal expansion of the water in the oceans is quite significant, too.
Well, they are obviously too baffled to comment! Or maybe too flummoxed. Or the Daily Telegraph is the kind of newspaper that thinks "Lara Croft picks up six Guinness world records" is related to astronomy and just pulls headlines out of its...
Why is it that coders typically seem to have enormous egos when it comes to their work. Everybody works hard. There's nothing special about coding. My workday include tasks that are both physically and mentally taxing, I often juggle several tasks at once and am held to a very high standard of quality. Man up, buckle down and produce because you don't work in a vacuum.
Computer programs are about the most complex things we create as humans. Even smallish programs have tens of thousands of statements, each unique in its context. You do not state your job, but I doubt your quality requirements are as high and as unforgiving as those for code. If the syntax of a piece of code is wrong it will not compile. If there is some other error, this will likely show up during testing, or, worse, during deployment. I'm doing design document reviews all of the time, and I'm considered fairly strict. But the documents I pass are not nearly as complex and not nearly as error-free as code that passed even mediocre testing procedures. Have you ever written anything where a single misplaced semicolon can break the whole document in bad bad non-obvious ways? Or where every paragraph is manually cross-referenced with at least two more? That's is routine complexity for code...
grep? grep only works if you know what you're looking for.
Exactly. I loved it when the "sceptics" started claiming widespread fraud at a time nobody could have read all the emails, let alone the rest of the data. The only way to find "incriminating" material this way is by grep or similar tools. Can somebody say confirmation bias?
I know my mailbox contains some things I would not have said in public - and I would dearly love to see some of the mail dumps from the Heartland Institute "scientists".
Prove it. Since CO2 levels have been higher in the past, it stands to reason that sealife is already adapted to higher levels of dissolved CO2 in seawater.
...because sea life today is the same as it was about 20 million years ago, probably the last time when CO2 levels were as high as they are today? Good thing evolution stopped back then - I would really miss Megalodon, Gavialosuchus and the Phorusrhacidae (Terror birds). Megatherium probably was a figment of my imagination, as was Glyptodon and the Woolly mammoth...
It is clear that sea life can adapt to such high concentration - if given enough time. But the current increase in CO2 is unprecedented in speed. Evolution will eventually catch up, but that does not mean that we will not have a major ecosystem crash if we continue as we do currently. It's probably great consolation to T. rex that life did not end 65 million years ago, but I'd rather not life through an even more massive mass extinction event than we are currently experiencing anyways.
True, I had completely forgotton about isotopes. But I'm doubtful that you could turn this into a useful test of atmosphereic CO2 composition
Well, you can. Fossil fuel has (nearly) no C14, as C14 is generated in the atmosphere and decays quickly. Fossil fuel has very little C13, as biological processes in most plants prefer C12 to C13, and fossil fuels are created from previous animal (i.e. recycled plant) and plant matter. Yes, the total carbon flux is much bigger than the human contribution, but we can measure isotope ratios very precisely. This was predicted and measured quite a while before global warming became a significant concern, as it also puts C14 ages off if not corrected for. See Suess effect, named after the chemist who described this in the 1950s.
Those of us who aren't global warming specialists don't know what to believe other than to be concerned.
May I suggest that you go with what all major scientific organizations, including all the G13 National Academies of Science say? Conspiracy claims on such a scale are highly implausible - someone paid the Chinese, the Russians, the Germans and the US? Moreover, the basic physics is simple enough to recognize that most of the denier arguments are plain nonsense.
O(n) may be easy to learn, but the polynomial hierarchy is not. And while some data structures are easy, I know many people who don't know AVL trees, SPLAY trees, B*-Trees, Skip Lists, Heaps, Perfect Hashing, Union-Find, or algorithms like Congruence Closure or Knuth–Morris–Pratt. In fact, they often don't even know that such algorithms exist or where to look for them, much less how to develop them.
For many tasks, you do not need advanced algorithms - if your code is "read a HTML form, perform a database query, format the output, send an HTML form", then basic knowledge of computer science but good knowledge of the tools and libraries at hand will easily beat out good CS knowledge, but little practical experience. On the other hand, I've more than once improved the performance of a critical system by about 90% by replacing a linear time algorithm with a logarithmic one.
A full CS degree usually concentrates on fundamental knowledge and theoretical skills. A trade school often concentrates on concrete skills and current tools. Either has advantages, but in the long run the full degree will often open up more possibilities.
If you want this class to be a runaway success and if you have a solid second job, give the John Norman's Gor
It's supposed to be a class in analyzing Sci-fi and fantasy, not in analyzing really bad soft-core BDSM porn...;-)
Well, the German editions have most of the sex edited out. Early books are 1/3rd the original length, later ones 1/4th. What remains is fairly decent (no pun intended;-) fantasy. "Slave girl of Gor" is not really comprehendible anymore, though...
I'd probably also not assign entire books. I'd assign sections or select chapters...
I disagree with this. It's very hard to extract an interesting chapter from a work of SF, because often there is much world-building and set up involved that the climactic chapters cannot be understood without a lot of the set-up. SF has so many short forms (short story, novellas, and even novels, especially juveniles) that there is no reason for extracting individual chapters.
If you want this class to be a runaway success and if you have a solid second job, give the John Norman's Gor;-)
SF is an incredibly diverse genre. You could cover the whole course with short stories, or have students each read and discuss one novel. I agree with "Ender's Game" - the original novella is not even that long. And you need some of the "idea" SF short stories by Asimov, Heinlein, Pohl, Campbell, Niven. Cordwainer Smith is a must - "The game of rat and dragon", "Scanners live in vain", "Think Blue, Count Two". Drake's "Hammer's Slammers" is quite good for modern military SF. I also like Verne ("From the Earth to the Moon" is a favorite), but the English translations are awful.
On the fantasy side, a lot that is written is unoriginal fluff. Howard's original Conan stories are good, honest, and colourful. Jack Vance's "When the Magic goes away". Certainly Leiber with Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. If they can resist "Lean Times in Lankhmar", give it up. Asprin's "Myth" books are nice and not as obvious as Pratchett (whom I never got). If you want Tolkien, "The Hobbit" is neither too long nor too boring.
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At least those will be equal opportunity changes since Mother Nature and the Universe don't discriminate when it comes time to bring the pain to those unworthy to survive.
You mean the poor farmer in Bangladesh will experience the same hardship from sea level rise than a Miami millionaire? One loses his livelihood and the other has to move his yacht pier up 3 feet - yes, that seems about the same.
More generally, rich people are generally much better isolated from any environmental changes, and also in a much better position to exploit them. Assume the Dutch have to rebuild their dikes - do you really think that most of the money spent will go to the guy who drives the backhoe?
Bullshit! First result on google.com http://environment.about.com/od/faqglobalwarming/f/globalwarming.htm Notice that there is no mention of the fact that some warming is happening because WE ARE COMING OUT OF AN ICE AGE! Fucking Morons!
Bullshit yourself. We are not "coming out of an ice age" - technically we are in an interglacial of the current and ongoing ice age. For the less technical definition of "ice age" (i.e. "glacial period"), we have been out of the last one for about 10000 years. And while the about.com article is fairly atrocious, it does say "a number of human activities are contributing to global warming" (emphasis mine). Of course, aerosol emissions by humans also counteract global warming...
However, a research paper, especially on a well-known problem, will nearly always discuss the previous state of the art and related work. So you need to read some papers anyways. This can be hard work. Typically, older papers will use simpler and more varied language, and also present more basic ideas. As the field develops, standard concepts will get more-or-less standard terms. So newer papers will have more specialised language, but will also assume that you know the basic ideas. Skim the latest few papers and see what they cite - then pick some of the papers everybody references. Reading order is abstract, introduction, conclusion. Read the rest only if it really applies to your topic, or you'll never finish.
Peer reviewing, editorial work, actual submissions? Don't people usual GET paid for this?
No. Or at least not by Nature. Peer reviewing is done for free, assuming reciprocity (I need my papers to get reviewed, so I review others). Papers are written as part of the normal academic work, i.e. by people paid by grants or universities. Editorial work used to add value, but for most journals you now just submit camera-ready PDF. What remains as a value proposition is the organisation and the brand.
I agree, but your example is somewhat off. OBT is only providing infrastructure in a content-agnostic way. They are more like an ISP, or the phone directory, or Google Maps - or even the city that builds a street through a high-crime area. The question is if such a "don't ask, don't tell" policy is acceptable.
Sorry, but if you want to bluff your way into a scientific discussion, you should not spout such nonsense.
The answers are "Yes", and "nobody knows, and we don't have sufficient knowledge to make a good guess". The ash cloud was both modelled and, later, measured during test flights, and at least the spatial extend was in decent agreement with the models. Since the current stance of the ICAO is "detectable ash means no flights in controlled airspace", national ATC agencies followed that standing recommendation. There is a good argument to be made that we need more research, but that means that someone has to pony up the cash for that, and it's not a small chunk. Jet engines are very expensive toys to play with. All that money has to, in the end, come from the passengers. If RyanAir moves you 1000 km for EUR 5, imagine how many passengers have to pitch in to get, say, 14 million dollars for one engine of one model (and you haven't yet paid any researcher, or the test stand, or found a way to simulate high altitude and various ash densities). At least up to now, nobody was willing to spend that money.
The cloud covered, among others, Heathrow, Charles de Gaulle, and Frankfurt, i.e. the 3 busiest airports in Europe (Heathrow is the busiest in the world, and CDG and FRA are not much behind). It also closed the other London Airports, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen. First, this is where people want to go. Secondly, no other airports in range have the capacity to take up this many flights.
You mean like BigFission Ltd. dumping all their radioactive waste on homeless Jack so that he can safely dispose of it for US$10,- and a bottle of Heineken? Or TrucksRUs Trucks running red lights to shave some seconds of delivery times in the name of business? Or Bayer selling drugs that are "really safe, trust us, we asked our astrologer"? Or Delta flying through dangerous volcanic ash and dropping an airliner on Big Ben? Oh wait...
As far as I know, there are no advisories from the makers. The problem is that jet engines have extremely carefully modelled airflows that keep the hottest parts of the exhaust from the turbine blades. Volcanic ash glass that forms in the engines can disrupt this airflow. It's bad enough if the turbine stalls, but in the worst case it can fail catastrophically, with turbine blades ripping through the engine casing, control lines, and possibly even structural parts of the wings. Because of a number of events, the most famous one a 747 that lost power in all four engines, ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Authority, recommends closing of the airspace if there is any detectable volcanic ash in the air. National regulators usually follow this recommendation, and for good reasons.
. In fact, the ultimate responsibility lies with the Bush government that started the war
- I think you should have ended the sentence right there.
Well, "I was just following orders" went out of style as an excuse circa 1945.
These guys were having fun killing people. This is not and can never be ok.
As opposed to building an army of people, who hate killing people? That does not make for a particularly functional army.
On the contrary. Building an army of people hating killing is the only way an enlightened democracy can build an army and keep the moral high ground. The aim of an army is not to kill people. It's to avoid war, or, if wars have to be fought, to win them. Winning is not achieved by simply killing people. It's only achieved by killing more than you piss off enough to join the fight.
Well, shooting at anyone incapacitated is against the rules of law. Shooting at a humanitarian rescue attempt (which this was, or do you think the insurgents keep black vans to carry wounded to their secret underground hospital and drive their kids around them?) is plain sick.
Keep in mind this was three years ago during some of the most violent times in Iraq. What you are seeing is guerrilla warfare. The enemy does not stand out with "bad guy" uniforms and because of this, the soldiers are on edge and in a defensive posture, exposed out in the open. ... Operating in an environment like this for weeks on end without a break stresses people to the breaking point. It is only a matter of time before combat fatigue sets in and you start getting mistakes. Mistakes are part of war, and this is reflected in the law of war. Killing civilians is a war crime, but the law leaves ample room for these inevitable actions under stress.
These guys were having fun killing people. This is not and can never be ok. Indeed, they are in a bad place - but its the responsibility of the political leadership that sends them there to ensure that people are not kept in a position that puts them under so much strain that they will break. In fact, the ultimate responsibility lies with the Bush government that started the war without any idea of how to end it. But everyone down to the guy who pulls the trigger can say no to such illegal acts.
And, of course, keeping such fuck-ups secret is completely and utterly unacceptable in a democracy. How can voters be expected to cast informed votes if the government blatantly lies to them?
You are wrong. See Archimedes' principle. If there is more ice sitting on dry land, that water would not contribute to sea level rise, so if more humid air causes more snow deposition on Antarctica, that would help. But polar melting is only one source of sea level rise. Thermal expansion of the water in the oceans is quite significant, too.
Well, they are obviously too baffled to comment! Or maybe too flummoxed. Or the Daily Telegraph is the kind of newspaper that thinks "Lara Croft picks up six Guinness world records" is related to astronomy and just pulls headlines out of its...
Why is it that coders typically seem to have enormous egos when it comes to their work. Everybody works hard. There's nothing special about coding. My workday include tasks that are both physically and mentally taxing, I often juggle several tasks at once and am held to a very high standard of quality. Man up, buckle down and produce because you don't work in a vacuum.
Computer programs are about the most complex things we create as humans. Even smallish programs have tens of thousands of statements, each unique in its context. You do not state your job, but I doubt your quality requirements are as high and as unforgiving as those for code. If the syntax of a piece of code is wrong it will not compile. If there is some other error, this will likely show up during testing, or, worse, during deployment. I'm doing design document reviews all of the time, and I'm considered fairly strict. But the documents I pass are not nearly as complex and not nearly as error-free as code that passed even mediocre testing procedures. Have you ever written anything where a single misplaced semicolon can break the whole document in bad bad non-obvious ways? Or where every paragraph is manually cross-referenced with at least two more? That's is routine complexity for code...
grep? grep only works if you know what you're looking for.
Exactly. I loved it when the "sceptics" started claiming widespread fraud at a time nobody could have read all the emails, let alone the rest of the data. The only way to find "incriminating" material this way is by grep or similar tools. Can somebody say confirmation bias?
I know my mailbox contains some things I would not have said in public - and I would dearly love to see some of the mail dumps from the Heartland Institute "scientists".
Prove it. Since CO2 levels have been higher in the past, it stands to reason that sealife is already adapted to higher levels of dissolved CO2 in seawater.
...because sea life today is the same as it was about 20 million years ago, probably the last time when CO2 levels were as high as they are today? Good thing evolution stopped back then - I would really miss Megalodon, Gavialosuchus and the Phorusrhacidae (Terror birds). Megatherium probably was a figment of my imagination, as was Glyptodon and the Woolly mammoth...
It is clear that sea life can adapt to such high concentration - if given enough time. But the current increase in CO2 is unprecedented in speed. Evolution will eventually catch up, but that does not mean that we will not have a major ecosystem crash if we continue as we do currently. It's probably great consolation to T. rex that life did not end 65 million years ago, but I'd rather not life through an even more massive mass extinction event than we are currently experiencing anyways.
Well, you can. Fossil fuel has (nearly) no C14, as C14 is generated in the atmosphere and decays quickly. Fossil fuel has very little C13, as biological processes in most plants prefer C12 to C13, and fossil fuels are created from previous animal (i.e. recycled plant) and plant matter. Yes, the total carbon flux is much bigger than the human contribution, but we can measure isotope ratios very precisely. This was predicted and measured quite a while before global warming became a significant concern, as it also puts C14 ages off if not corrected for. See Suess effect, named after the chemist who described this in the 1950s.
Those of us who aren't global warming specialists don't know what to believe other than to be concerned.
May I suggest that you go with what all major scientific organizations, including all the G13 National Academies of Science say? Conspiracy claims on such a scale are highly implausible - someone paid the Chinese, the Russians, the Germans and the US? Moreover, the basic physics is simple enough to recognize that most of the denier arguments are plain nonsense.
For many tasks, you do not need advanced algorithms - if your code is "read a HTML form, perform a database query, format the output, send an HTML form", then basic knowledge of computer science but good knowledge of the tools and libraries at hand will easily beat out good CS knowledge, but little practical experience. On the other hand, I've more than once improved the performance of a critical system by about 90% by replacing a linear time algorithm with a logarithmic one.
A full CS degree usually concentrates on fundamental knowledge and theoretical skills. A trade school often concentrates on concrete skills and current tools. Either has advantages, but in the long run the full degree will often open up more possibilities.
If you want this class to be a runaway success and if you have a solid second job, give the John Norman's Gor
It's supposed to be a class in analyzing Sci-fi and fantasy, not in analyzing really bad soft-core BDSM porn... ;-)
Well, the German editions have most of the sex edited out. Early books are 1/3rd the original length, later ones 1/4th. What remains is fairly decent (no pun intended ;-) fantasy. "Slave girl of Gor" is not really comprehendible anymore, though...
I disagree with this. It's very hard to extract an interesting chapter from a work of SF, because often there is much world-building and set up involved that the climactic chapters cannot be understood without a lot of the set-up. SF has so many short forms (short story, novellas, and even novels, especially juveniles) that there is no reason for extracting individual chapters.
If you want this class to be a runaway success and if you have a solid second job, give the John Norman's Gor ;-)
On the fantasy side, a lot that is written is unoriginal fluff. Howard's original Conan stories are good, honest, and colourful. Jack Vance's "When the Magic goes away". Certainly Leiber with Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. If they can resist "Lean Times in Lankhmar", give it up. Asprin's "Myth" books are nice and not as obvious as Pratchett (whom I never got). If you want Tolkien, "The Hobbit" is neither too long nor too boring.