Neither one of you is 100% right or 100% wrong. See...
Yes, nice summary on that site. Now how does this conflict with anything I have said? It goes into more detail, but otherwise tells exactly the same story...
And as the other poster hinted: Scientific theories are never "proven" in the sense scientists use that word. There is always the possibility that we are just a simulation in an alien's computer and he will trip over the power chord tomorrow. Compared to the concept of "proof" in a legal setting, most current scientific theories are extremely well supported.
This whole matter is pretentious, to assume that humans can change the climate so easily is pure hubris. Krakatoa erupting put more chlorine, CO2 and CFC's into the upper atmosphere, and more carbon-based pollution in a single month of eruptions than all of humankind has in the last two hundred years, way more, and global warming did not result.
Ad 1: Volcanos, including Krakatoa, are not a significant source of Carbon Dioxide. Over geological time periods they do indeed play an important role in the carbon cycle, but then we are talking about many millions of years. Volcanic carbon emissions are currently dwarfed by emissions from burning fossil fuels.
Ad 2: Volcanos put no CFCs into the atmosphere. The only significant source of CFCs are humans.
Ad 3: Volcanos do indeed inject some chlorine into the atmosphere. However, these chlorine compunds are unstable, and the chlorine quickly reacts with water vapor to form HCl, which leaves the atmosphere via precipation. Thus, the chlorine injected into the atmosphere is again insignificant. CFCs are problematic because they are so stable.
Moreover, the connection between ozone depletion and global warming is tenous. Both are processes where human emissions change the large scale composition of the atmosphere, but they only weakly influence each other.
Maybe science didn't tell the other guy that, but it certainly suggested it.
That paper is not a peer-reviewed scientific publication, although it tries to appear as one. It's sponsored by two conservative think tanks and used as a propaganda piece. Moreover, it is 8 years out of date and still uses the discredited satellite and ballon measurements (news flash - it turns out the climate models were right and the sensors were off!). It also uses a very simple, single-proxy temperature reconstruction.
It looks impressive, but is useless. Read something recent if you want to get informed. The IPCC Third Assesment Report is a good summary, and the Fourth is forthcoming, with some drafts on the web.
But to the point - this guy's making a group to find out who's mixing far-left (radical) politics with their lectures. An admirable goal, although politics of any kind should be kept from the lecture. (Barring classes on politics of course.)
Nonsense. University is where students should be exposed to radical (and that's not just far left) ideas. They are there to learn to think. This is not elementary school anymore. Students are old enough to drive, to vote, and to join the army. They are certainly old enough to be exposed to radical ideas.
That's why we have academic freedom, and why professors do get tenure. They are supposed to think new thoughts and to present them.
Universities are where (most of) the future leaders and thinkers are educated. Students must learn to judge and evaluate what they are taught. They are not supposed to blindly believe what they are told (for that, see army note above).
If a professor hands out bad marks for a well-reasoned paper, that is unacceptable. But if he requires students to understand unpopular and radical ideas, and not to rely on popular prejudices, he is doing his job.
I think people may be missing the fact that the dual core thing might be throwing a wrench into the mix,...
Exactly right. The G5 is an excellent processor, and clock for clock should approximately be able to keep up with one core of the CoreDuo. But the new iMac has a much better bus system, and, of course, the second core.
It's no coincidence that Jobs showed the SPECint_rate results that measure throughput, not the more often used plain SPECint that measures time-to-finish of a sequentially run suite of programs. So his claims are not exacly wrong...
I'll probably still wait for the second generation of new laptops before I upgrade from my TiBook.
Trivial. He is so rich, his wealth warps the very fabric of space-time. So we get an eight-dimensional fortune....
I agree that this report makes him far to poor. Given that he has funded his own space program, and built a sky-scraper-sized platinum statue during a contest (out of his small change....), 8 billion is a sad joke.
Of course, the question is what we consider canon. As far as I'm concerned, only Carl Barks counts.
There ought to be some way to discourage the first and reward the second, but the system of anonymous reviewers means you're pretty much unaccountable for what you say. How, is the question.
That's the task of the editors. If they do not check reviews and eleminate sloppy reviewers, it's their fault - and the journal or conference will suffer for it in the long run.
The Origin of Species is one of the most important and influential books in human history, and it remains the single most important book in evolutionary biology. Yet it wasn't peer reviewed, and I seriously wonder how well Darwin's theory would have fared if he had been subjected to peer review.
Wrong analogy. Monographs are not usually peer reviewed today either. An editor decides wether to publish it, usually by looking at a draft and at the reputation and publications of the author. Monographs also normally do not contain original science, but rather cover known ground in a consistent and systematic manner. Journal articles and conference articles are where new science is published.
I thought the distinctive smell was urea? Maybe it's just a top note?
Given that is is used in fairly high concentration in skin products, that it is used as a browning agent in pretzels, and as an alternative to salt for de-icing walkways, I'd be surprised if urea had any distinct smell at all. See the Wikipedia article for more fascinating information...
Fresh water is cheap and plentiful in the majority of the U.S. and that's not about to change any time soon.
Are tap water prices in the US free market prices? I remember a documentation about New York city a while back, and that mentioned that the water was heavily subsidised and so cheap that it often was not metered at all. And I cannot imagine that water e.g. in Los Angeles is priced at a fair value that internalizes all the costs...
Re:Low Flush *wastes* water, Oil based don't work
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To Flush Or Not To Flush
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· Score: 4, Informative
I don't know about your experience, but are you aware that while urine is considered "icky", it is, indeed sterile, and even mildly sterilizing? The smell is ammonia, which is what the body gets rid of with urine. It's a different thing about feces - they can indeed cause the spread of disease, and they are the hygenical reason for plumbing.
Furthermore, the mitochondria and chloroplats found in various cells are believed to have originited as parasites that eventually began to help their host. But these organelles are now a part of each cells genetic code. We already know that traits acquired through an organisms lifespan do not change their genetic code, and a parasitic organism is hardly a trait either.
Your last sentence is somewhat unclear. If a parasitic organism is not a trait, can it influence the genetic code? Moreover, your position is an overgeneralization. Yes, Lamarckism is wrong. In higher organisms, weightlifting will not make your kids stronger. But of course it is possible to change to change the genes of a living organism. We are using viruses to get new genetic material into cells in just such a manner.
There are myriad things like these that just don't stand up to the kind of scrutiny that science demands; all theories, scientifically, must be considered to be false until they can be proven; this is how the scientific method works.
Actually, science never proves a theory. A theory is considered potentially true unless proven false. To be accepted as a scientific theory, it must also explain a large number of observations, allow prediction, and be falsifiable. Nothing proven is falsifiable...
ID is not unscientific because it is wrong, but because it is useless. It can explain everything, but does not make useful predictions. In fact, most of the more refined versions are not even theories, because they are not self-consistent. The less refined versions are akin to Last Tuesdayism (Theological addition: The invisible pink unicorn will shortly return and crush all heretical believers in the FSM. Repent now!)
Specified Complexity is the probability theory that deals with the "chance" part.
Specified Complexity is neither a mathematical not a scientific theory. It is essentially a kind of pseudo-scientific Voodoo. Its proponents misuse scientific language in an attempt to get some of science's credibility. The bluff might work among the scientifically illiterate - that does not make it reasonable.
but now suppose we asserted, "there is just one pink unicorn in existence, and it's favorite number is 4." now nevermind the probability that one even exists to begin with, because we can just take that for granted and shoot down this assertion out of improbability. even if this unicorn existed, the odds that 4 would be its fovarite number would be no greater than one divided by the number of numbers, or "approaching zero".
"A little knowledge..." How do you explain that there are indeed humans (and rather a lot) whose favourite number is 4? Hint: there is more than one probability distribution.
Incidentally, C14 dating is only good for 60,000 years or so, because of the short half-life of C14. None at all should be present in anything older than that. It is interesting that C14 is apparently found in all carbon on earth, including coal deposits and even diamonds that are supposedly millions of years old.
"None at all" is wrong. Undetectably small traces would be ok if the primary source of C14 (cosmic radiation that converts N14 into C14) were the only process and if no contamination had taken place. If contamination has (possibly) taken place has to be checked from case to case. But there are quite a lot of other processes that can create small amounts of C14, i.e. bombardment with various forms of ionizing radiation.
For the C14 dating of formetly living things from historic and recent prehistoric times, these effects are small enough to be ignored. But for very old objects, and under certain circumstances, they can matter.
I'm a potential user. I have a program that has an infinite number of strategies to tackle hard search problems, and a benchmark library of 8000 problems. Much of my work is to find out which strategies work well on which classes of problems.
I'm currently using our university student lab. But this is a mix of various machines, from 300MHz Sun Ultra 60 to 900 MHz SunFire machines, some of them limited in memory, and all used by students for their own nefarious purposes (e.g. pr0n and Quake). I'd love to be able to set 100 or so identical processors to the job. I could keep them fed for months. But at $1/CPU-hour, a day on 100 machines is $2400. I can buy 6 low-end Athlon machines for that money (and they will be just as good for the job). Yes, I do save in electricity and administration, but these costs are a) low for my application and b) come out of other budgets. For scientific work, SUN's prices are not acceptable. I would be tempted at a price of 1ct/CPU-hour. I would immediately buy into the thing for 0.1ct/CPU-hour with low-priority (i.e. I get to use only otherwise free processors).
Look, as much as I love the idea of the SmartCar, no way in hell am I going to be driving one on the roads around here, with all the monster SUVs on the road. I'm green, but I'm not suicidal!
The Smart probably has a better safety record than most SUVs. Yes, it will do less damage to your partner in crash (thus you lose that satisfaction), but it does have a very good safety cell and does not suffer from an overly high center of gravity as most SUVs.
Most SUVs may feel solid and safe, and of course the industry is pushing this as a feel-good message. If you look at the actual data, SUVs are about the most dangerous cars to be in in a crash. And due to their high mass, they are also increasing the risk for all others. Driving an SUV unnecessarily is both stupind and anti-social...
The problem is not that the police will be able to track down every suspect with certainty. Even if there is only a 1 percent chance of losing anonymity and consequential repercussions, some people may be intimidated into not writing (or priniting) their opinions.
Agree to, and attempt to enforce, a bunch of far-fetched regulations that will cost the United States trillions of dollars anually?
Some people seem to paint a very weird picture of the Kyoto treaty. It does not contain any provisions as to how the reduction in CO2 emission should be achived. That is left to the signatories. In Europe, nobody issues a "you may not heat your home after October 13th, your quota is used up" directive. Reductions are mostly achieved by funding research and innovation, by sponsoring low-CO2 technologies and renewable energy sources, and, in many cases, by taxing fossil fuels. On average, this somewhat increases energy prices, but it lowers renewable energy cost. The market then does its thing...
Read your original article again. You were talking about temperature, not temperature increase. And apropos "simple math": A prediction for 3.5 degrees compare to a real increase of 1 degree is off by 250%...or otherwise a predicion of 1 degree would be off by 100%. Being "off by a factor of x%" is at best misleading.
If you want a serious answer for the rest, give reasonable cites. What is the baseline, and what is the prediction. I doubt that Hansen or the IPCC made a prediction for a single year. The scientific consensus is that by 2000, we had a warming of about 0.6 (+/- 0.2) degrees centigrade. I have no idea where your 0.11 degrees comes from.
The "best model" in 1995 mispredicted the temperature in 2000 by 300%. That's not a minor mistake, that's not within one standard deviation, that's a wild-ass guess that was totally wrong.
Well, since the temperature of the earth surface in 2000 was certainly predicted as somewhere around 14 degrees centigrade, being 300% off means the real temperature was about 3 degrees. Funny, I didn't notice that. But oops....in science we use Kelvin...so instead of 290 or so Kelvin, it should have been 75 Kelvin, or -200 centigrade...maybe we were all flash-frozen and thus lost our memory.
And all this while ignoring that one year data is statistically insignificant (and yes, that would include 2005 - but the 2005 temperatures are part of a strong trend).
If they are "friends of science", they maybe should read some current papers - and maybe not quote old ones out of context. As far as "Myth 1" is concerned, it is true that there has been (and to a small degree still is) a discrepancy between surface temperature and climate models on the one side, and balloon and satellite data on the other hand. However, recent publications have very nearly closed that gap. It turned out that the satellite data suffered from undetected orbital drift (i.e. the satellites reported night time temperatures as day time temperatures) and the balloons suffer from a number of sensor and calibration problems. If the data is corrected for these errors, there is a rather good fit with current climate models.
"Myth 4" is another mixture of truth and falsehood. Yes, water vapour is a greenhouse gas. However, relative humidity is more or less a constant in the atmosphere. Thus, the amount of water vapour (absolute humidity) is driven by the temperature. In this way water vapour increases the effect of any other heating - its an amplifier, but not a cause of global warming.
If you look over the site, you find more gems. "Myth 6", for example, not-cites the 1996 IPCC report, totally ignoring the current (2001) and upcoming reports.
Wikipedia has a reasonable good set of articles on global warming.
Sometimes a yield is so good that very few processors actually fail at higher speeds, resulting in a batch of very good chips. Since the market still wants the lower rated chips, it sometimes becomes necissary to clock a perfectly good chip lower than it is actually capable of being clocked.
Actually, the market does not want the "lower rated chips". It wants the lower priced chips. Intel does not want to sell the faster ones at the lower price to avoid canibalizing their high-end margins. So they lie about the quality of their product;-)
Slashdot Mirror
And as the other poster hinted: Scientific theories are never "proven" in the sense scientists use that word. There is always the possibility that we are just a simulation in an alien's computer and he will trip over the power chord tomorrow. Compared to the concept of "proof" in a legal setting, most current scientific theories are extremely well supported.
Ad 2: Volcanos put no CFCs into the atmosphere. The only significant source of CFCs are humans.
Ad 3: Volcanos do indeed inject some chlorine into the atmosphere. However, these chlorine compunds are unstable, and the chlorine quickly reacts with water vapor to form HCl, which leaves the atmosphere via precipation. Thus, the chlorine injected into the atmosphere is again insignificant. CFCs are problematic because they are so stable.
Moreover, the connection between ozone depletion and global warming is tenous. Both are processes where human emissions change the large scale composition of the atmosphere, but they only weakly influence each other.
It looks impressive, but is useless. Read something recent if you want to get informed. The IPCC Third Assesment Report is a good summary, and the Fourth is forthcoming, with some drafts on the web.
That's why we have academic freedom, and why professors do get tenure. They are supposed to think new thoughts and to present them. Universities are where (most of) the future leaders and thinkers are educated. Students must learn to judge and evaluate what they are taught. They are not supposed to blindly believe what they are told (for that, see army note above).
If a professor hands out bad marks for a well-reasoned paper, that is unacceptable. But if he requires students to understand unpopular and radical ideas, and not to rely on popular prejudices, he is doing his job.
It's no coincidence that Jobs showed the SPECint_rate results that measure throughput, not the more often used plain SPECint that measures time-to-finish of a sequentially run suite of programs. So his claims are not exacly wrong...
I'll probably still wait for the second generation of new laptops before I upgrade from my TiBook.
I agree that this report makes him far to poor. Given that he has funded his own space program, and built a sky-scraper-sized platinum statue during a contest (out of his small change....), 8 billion is a sad joke.
Of course, the question is what we consider canon. As far as I'm concerned, only Carl Barks counts.
I don't know about your experience, but are you aware that while urine is considered "icky", it is, indeed sterile, and even mildly sterilizing? The smell is ammonia, which is what the body gets rid of with urine. It's a different thing about feces - they can indeed cause the spread of disease, and they are the hygenical reason for plumbing.
ID is not unscientific because it is wrong, but because it is useless. It can explain everything, but does not make useful predictions. In fact, most of the more refined versions are not even theories, because they are not self-consistent. The less refined versions are akin to Last Tuesdayism (Theological addition: The invisible pink unicorn will shortly return and crush all heretical believers in the FSM. Repent now!)
Moreover, from a cladistic point of view, all reptiles are fish (and so are all humans ;-).
For the C14 dating of formetly living things from historic and recent prehistoric times, these effects are small enough to be ignored. But for very old objects, and under certain circumstances, they can matter.
I'm currently using our university student lab. But this is a mix of various machines, from 300MHz Sun Ultra 60 to 900 MHz SunFire machines, some of them limited in memory, and all used by students for their own nefarious purposes (e.g. pr0n and Quake). I'd love to be able to set 100 or so identical processors to the job. I could keep them fed for months. But at $1/CPU-hour, a day on 100 machines is $2400. I can buy 6 low-end Athlon machines for that money (and they will be just as good for the job). Yes, I do save in electricity and administration, but these costs are a) low for my application and b) come out of other budgets. For scientific work, SUN's prices are not acceptable. I would be tempted at a price of 1ct/CPU-hour. I would immediately buy into the thing for 0.1ct/CPU-hour with low-priority (i.e. I get to use only otherwise free processors).
Most SUVs may feel solid and safe, and of course the industry is pushing this as a feel-good message. If you look at the actual data, SUVs are about the most dangerous cars to be in in a crash. And due to their high mass, they are also increasing the risk for all others. Driving an SUV unnecessarily is both stupind and anti-social...
The problem is not that the police will be able to track down every suspect with certainty. Even if there is only a 1 percent chance of losing anonymity and consequential repercussions, some people may be intimidated into not writing (or priniting) their opinions.
If you want a serious answer for the rest, give reasonable cites. What is the baseline, and what is the prediction. I doubt that Hansen or the IPCC made a prediction for a single year. The scientific consensus is that by 2000, we had a warming of about 0.6 (+/- 0.2) degrees centigrade. I have no idea where your 0.11 degrees comes from.
And all this while ignoring that one year data is statistically insignificant (and yes, that would include 2005 - but the 2005 temperatures are part of a strong trend).
"Myth 4" is another mixture of truth and falsehood. Yes, water vapour is a greenhouse gas. However, relative humidity is more or less a constant in the atmosphere. Thus, the amount of water vapour (absolute humidity) is driven by the temperature. In this way water vapour increases the effect of any other heating - its an amplifier, but not a cause of global warming.
If you look over the site, you find more gems. "Myth 6", for example, not-cites the 1996 IPCC report, totally ignoring the current (2001) and upcoming reports.
Wikipedia has a reasonable good set of articles on global warming.