"During Gulf War I, General Swartzkopf (sp?) complained that the intelligence he was getting was useless, because it was facts followed by the analysis "X might happen, or X might not happen""
Sounds like the intelligence sector was working as designed, they are supposed to give facts to policy makers and not try to make policy. Policy includes military strategy.
I actually doubt that they are most interested in brute-force codebreaking through the front door except in a few rare situations.
Most of the time, it's massive traffic analysis: searching and analyzing a titanic, dynamically changing graph, nodes are IP addresses and phone numbers of the planet.
Once they find a 'target of interest', then they would usually ask the FBI or other authority just to put a tap on a specific line, or if necessary break in and install a trojan on the target's phone or computer, avoiding front-door code-bashing, which isn't generally feasible in large scale any more.
There are companies (e.g. http://www.conveycomputer.com/) which make highly parallel co-processors from FPGA's which give user-definable vectorized instructions on enormous memory bandwidth.
Because that's a pretty bad way of integrating equations of motion.
It's what I learned high school---when I actually started doing physics for real I found it was junk. At least use 2-nd order Runge-Kutta, you'll also need a variable time step.
For a game it doesn't matter likely, but even RK won't actually preserve things like energy, momentum and the 3rd invariant in 2-body mechanics which I've forgotten now.
"Too bad they are totally fucking pointless. Not only do we have reactors of the same exact type as what went kablooey at Fukushima Daiichi, but we also have reactors which are copies of it. And we have even more spent fuel lying around in pools waiting to be redistributed across our landscape."
We don't have any which have all the generators below the water line in area which can have 40 meter floods.
The size of the Japan earthquake isn't even possible in California because of the difference in fault-types (Japan & the Indonesian catastrophes were subduction---one plate sliding over the other--in California it is one plate going in the opposite direction as another)
Nuclear has very high startup costs, and then pays off by generating large amounts of electricity.
"If the government is going to heavily subsidize an energy source, which it really should do as it brings significant energy security to the country, let it heavily subsidize safe and renewable energy sources. "
Sure, if they will, with realistic engineering, give as much duty-cycle adjusted power per capital investment & subsidy. The right metric to measure is the amount of coal-not-burnt-as-a-result, not the amount of euros put in.
I'd find it funny if it weren't so depressing. The denialists of the human influence on climate use these two talking points over and over, not even understanding enough science (or more likely, not caring about truth as opposed to winning economically) that they are simultaneously contradictory!
Point 1) Water, not CO2, is the dominant greenhouse forcing!!!
Point 2) All those evil computer models that them hoaxing climate modelers put out are lying, because they stuff in these mumbo-jumbo complex feedforwards to the sensitivity computed by God's-honest-truth-Bolztzmann, in order to make the problem "alarming" instead of insignificant.
In scientific truth, yes water is a major greenhouse effect. And that's just the point of those supposedly 'mumbo-jumbo' feedfowards---it's the fact that as air warms up, it can absorb more water vapor, and yes this extra water vapor (clear, not clouds) certainly does ADD to the greenhouse effect. D'oh!
So the more you push #1 (which is true), the more you justify including the feedfowards which result in the mainstream estimate of climate sensitivity which points to a serious problem in the future. In fact it's misleading NOT to include these feedfowards.
In other news, incomes and property prices in NYC, SF and LA are increasing. Just like East Berlin was so socialist and Communist that during the Cold War there were so many people wanting to move in they had to build a retaining wall, just so the property prices wouldn't go up even more.
"Worse, one of the ways that the models have been "curve fitted" is by assuming that any deviation between the models and the historical climate is due to the unproven "drastic synergistic warming" that magically transforms slight warming of no consequence into significant warming that might be harmful (or might be net beneficial.) In other words, climate models that operate solely according to first principles do not show any warming trend that would be worth mitigating, neither in the past nor in the future. To force the models to agree with past history, they have been modified to use a "fudge factor" that arbitrarily amplifies any direct greenhouse gas effect warming non-linearly. And when those modified models with the magic fudge factors are run into the future, they unsurprisingly show significant warming. It would be amazing if they did not, since they are arbitrarily hard-coded (by fiat, not by application of scientfic laws) to non-linearly amplify the warming computed to occur by application of the greenhouse gas effect equations."
This is false. The supposed "first principles" models of global warming that the skeptics bandy about are nothing of the sort, they assume a waterless inert rock and equate "gee this much more IR flux equals this much warming" models assuming albedoless/atmosphere-less black bodies. Sometimes the computations you do in physics 101 are actually wrong because the world is more complicated. Also they assume that the oceans have no significant heat capacity, contrary to fact, and then conclude with an erroneous and conveniently low estimate of climate sensitivity. (Lord Monckton, upper class twit of the year, e.g.) They look X amount of flux increase in a certain time and measuring Y amount of temperature increase, and say "Gee you climatologists are hoaxing it all", when they just didn't understand the meaning of equilibrium concepts.
Say you ramp up the intensity of a heat lamp on a body of water and measure it's temperature increase. Scientists' theory predicts that if you increase the heat flux (or change the properties of the container), the temperature will rise a certain amount in equilibrium---and they call that parameter the 'sensitivity'. pseudo-skeptic looks at the heat-flux increase in short time T, finds the water hasn't actually gotten hot enough (yet), boldly proclaims "see it's all a hoax from those Communists".
For instance, in the screed directly above, there are unsupported assumptions that there were no other changes in the 20th century climate drivers, which is known to be factually incorrect (namely increased in cooling aerosols in the atmosphere from human combustion activities) and ignores delayed effect from heat capacity as well. These are just errors that a slightly scientifically informed layman can figure out---real climatologists know far far more about the subject.
Then when scientists try to explain that the actual physics is more complicated and you have to take into account A,B and C, pseudo-skeptic starts howling about "unreliable complex computer models" and "lying with statistics".
When you fit a linear trend (from what physics?) plus a cyclical period (from what physics?), *that* it is in itself statistically misleading post-hoc invention. And just because you can post-hoc fit some arbitrary statistical assumption does NOTHING to falsify a justified physical knowledge.
"Some AGW skeptics do prefer other specific hypotheses which are not the Null Hypothesis (e.g., the Sun is the principal driver to terrestrial temperature,) and those hypotheses do require proof. But most skeptics make no such claims."
Yes, conveniently they ignore any responsibility to explain observations with actual physics.
Repeat: climatology is not statistics, it is physics.
The null hypothesis that works much much much much better: explanations based on justified physics backed by observations, are ENORMOUSLY MORE POWERFUL at predicting the future than naive human intuition or statistical assumptions of 'status quo' without mechanistic justification.
Correct. If you really wanted to do something about greenhouse gases to the degree the science demands, you would
a) immediately eliminate all non-CO2 greenhouse forcing (faster time scale, bigger near-term win), including shutting down leaking natural gas pipelines.
b) start building immense fleets of modular nuclear reactors for base band power, and start shutting down coal plants regardless of replacement cost, then replace peaking natural gas plants with wind and solar to the degree you can average out variability.
c) impose enormous economic tariffs and blockades against any nation which refuses to do (a) and (b).
"Ones does NOT need to provide why the temperature is rising as the Null Hypothesis rules in science and the Null Hypothesis in this case is that the warming is Natural and/or unknown."
This is false. The null hypothesis is one kind of statistical methodology used in certain technical circumstances. In practice, an explicit or implicit Bayesian reasoning is usually used.
And a "Natural" cause which somehow excludes humans requires specific physical mechanism, observations and theory which are stronger than the understanding which assumes human-emitted greenhouse molecules have the same optical and chemical properties as the ones which have been in the atmosphere before humans started digging coal and petroleum. The "natural cycle" explanation would also have to explain why the human-emitted gases *do not* cause climate change. Just saying it is 'unknown' is a baloney cop-out. After all it could be mischievous invisible gremlins, We Don't Know For Sure.
Besides, there is other internal evidence pointing to greenhouse increases, e.g. that night warms more than day, winter warms more than summer, and polar warms more than topical, and that stratosphere is cooling---all of which is compatible with increases in greenhouse gases, and incompatible with increases in solar output.
And if you really want to go for the 'null hypothesis' schtick, the better null hypothesis is, "We assume the laws of physics are correct, and if you change the IR scattering of the atmosphere the surface temperature will change."
"Climate changes because nutation and precession of the Earth and Moon affect the solar incidence angle and distance not to mention the primary factor, ripples in the output of the sun. "
And changes in atmospheric composition. And in fact people have been thinking about the issue for at least 50-60 years. Roger Revelle, a primary oceanographer, wrote as much in an environmental report to the US Government. The Lyndon Johnson Administration. Is this "nobody would worry about this"?
And yes there are correlations between orbital parameters etc---and yet now climate is changing at a much faster time scale without any radical shift in our orbital mechanics or changes in the output of the Sun. The atmospheric concentration has changed as well. "Never mind that the primary gases for the terrestrial greenhouse effect are water and methane, with CO2 representing a single digit contribution to the effect"
The effect from water is a short-timescale feedback from long lived gases, which the most important one is CO2.
You appear to accept the fact that CO2 is an IR emitter. Well, the increase in IR flux from the change in CO2 is a quantitative measured fact.
"which means (for the truly dense among you) that if we stop the carbon-based economy climate change will go on exactly like before and the only thing that will happen is that you will die of cold and starvation."
When the effective solar insolation changed by a tiny fraction due to those small orbital effects (plus greenhouse feedbacks!) it made Ice Ages. An equally small change in IR flux from CO2 changes (which humans are guaranteed to cause on present course) could just as well case a Heat Age as hot above normal climate as the Ice Ages were cold.
Ice was two miles thick in New York then. Do you want to take the equivalent chance on the hot side?
"Yes, exactly: a good deal of the criticism that is purported to be skepticism of the science (and the scientists) is actually aimed at discrediting the policy implications.
The unexpected consequence is that, since it apparently much easier to cast doubt on the science than to rationally discuss policy, there has been almost no discussion of the proposed policies."
Yes, but it's really simple. A rational discussion of the policy based on facts shows that one side has a proprietary interest in what most would judge to be an immoral position. ("We don't give a crap about the future suckers"). This side knows it, so spurious attacks is the better tactic for their position. These are immoral too, of course.
"The diesel exhaust to which miners are subjected is very different from the exhaust emitted by a modern diesel passenger car."
Isn't that the point?
Exhaust emitted by a model diesel passenger car is very different because of, and only because of, strict government regulation of emissions. The strong health problems of miners, exposed to dirty emissions, is evidence the regulation was well justified.
Even after the PacMen have gone batshit deranged on the corporations-have-Constitutional-rights-to-buy-elections-too Republican candidates, not a single candidate has changed his mind about their legality. Their only response is "We need more money for ours".
"a) Drive overly defensively, to the point where you cannot make normal predictions about driving behavior. b) The cars have poor acceleration, so the cars always appear to go very slowly for no good reason. c) I have seen more Prius drivers fail to use their turn signals. I do not know why this is."
How about "Screw you, you upper-class twit, a TV is $150 on craigslist, but my family can't afford to go to the doctor and I'm going to tax you and take a tiny bit of yours."
Slashdot Mirror
"During Gulf War I, General Swartzkopf (sp?) complained that the intelligence he was getting was useless, because it was facts followed by the analysis "X might happen, or X might not happen""
Sounds like the intelligence sector was working as designed, they are supposed to give facts to policy makers and not try to make policy. Policy includes military strategy.
I actually doubt that they are most interested in brute-force codebreaking through the front door except in a few rare situations.
Most of the time, it's massive traffic analysis: searching and analyzing a titanic, dynamically changing graph, nodes are IP addresses and phone numbers of the planet.
Once they find a 'target of interest', then they would usually ask the FBI or other authority just to put a tap on a specific line, or if necessary break in and install a trojan on the target's phone or computer, avoiding front-door code-bashing, which isn't generally feasible in large scale any more.
There are companies (e.g. http://www.conveycomputer.com/) which make highly parallel co-processors from FPGA's which give user-definable vectorized instructions on enormous memory bandwidth.
This is just the thing for the NSA.
He didn't make his point, but if he did I think it would be "CISC rules! RISC drools!"
Because that's a pretty bad way of integrating equations of motion.
It's what I learned high school---when I actually started doing physics for real I found it was junk.
At least use 2-nd order Runge-Kutta, you'll also need a variable time step.
For a game it doesn't matter likely, but even RK won't actually preserve things like energy, momentum and the 3rd invariant in 2-body mechanics which I've forgotten now.
"How many people die of coal-mining related illnesses? "
From Japan's point of view, these people are Chinese and not Japanese, and don't vote.
"Too bad they are totally fucking pointless. Not only do we have reactors of the same exact type as what went kablooey at Fukushima Daiichi, but we also have reactors which are copies of it. And we have even more spent fuel lying around in pools waiting to be redistributed across our landscape."
We don't have any which have all the generators below the water line in area which can have 40 meter floods.
The size of the Japan earthquake isn't even possible in California because of the difference in fault-types (Japan & the Indonesian catastrophes were subduction---one plate sliding over the other--in California it is one plate going in the opposite direction as another)
Nuclear has very high startup costs, and then pays off by generating large amounts of electricity.
"If the government is going to heavily subsidize an energy source, which it really should do as it brings significant energy security to the country, let it heavily subsidize safe and renewable energy sources. "
Sure, if they will, with realistic engineering, give as much duty-cycle adjusted power per capital investment & subsidy. The right metric to measure is the amount of coal-not-burnt-as-a-result, not the amount of euros put in.
The real serious threats are the ones who broke into RSA and Lockheed et cetera. They aren't doing it for the Lulz, they are doing it for the treason.
But of course the FBI can't so easily get an easy win.
I'd find it funny if it weren't so depressing. The denialists of the human influence on climate use these two talking points over and over, not even understanding enough science (or more likely, not caring about truth as opposed to winning economically) that they are simultaneously contradictory!
Point 1) Water, not CO2, is the dominant greenhouse forcing!!!
Point 2) All those evil computer models that them hoaxing climate modelers put out are lying, because they stuff in these mumbo-jumbo complex feedforwards to the sensitivity computed by God's-honest-truth-Bolztzmann, in order to make the problem "alarming" instead of insignificant.
In scientific truth, yes water is a major greenhouse effect. And that's just the point of those supposedly 'mumbo-jumbo' feedfowards---it's the fact that as air warms up, it can absorb more water vapor, and yes this extra water vapor (clear, not clouds) certainly does ADD to the greenhouse effect. D'oh!
So the more you push #1 (which is true), the more you justify including the feedfowards which result in the mainstream estimate of climate sensitivity which points to a serious problem in the future. In fact it's misleading NOT to include these feedfowards.
In other news, incomes and property prices in NYC, SF and LA are increasing. Just like East Berlin was so socialist and Communist that during the Cold War there were so many people wanting to move in they had to build a retaining wall, just so the property prices wouldn't go up even more.
"Worse, one of the ways that the models have been "curve fitted" is by assuming that any deviation between the models and the historical climate is due to the unproven "drastic synergistic warming" that magically transforms slight warming of no consequence into significant warming that might be harmful (or might be net beneficial.)
In other words, climate models that operate solely according to first principles do not show any warming trend that would be worth mitigating, neither in the past nor in the future. To force the models to agree with past history, they have been modified to use a "fudge factor" that arbitrarily amplifies any direct greenhouse gas effect warming non-linearly. And when those modified models with the magic fudge factors are run into the future, they unsurprisingly show significant warming. It would be amazing if they did not, since they are arbitrarily hard-coded (by fiat, not by application of scientfic laws) to non-linearly amplify the warming computed to occur by application of the greenhouse gas effect equations."
This is false. The supposed "first principles" models of global warming that the skeptics bandy about are nothing of the sort, they assume a waterless inert rock and equate "gee this much more IR flux equals this much warming" models assuming albedoless/atmosphere-less black bodies. Sometimes the computations you do in physics 101 are actually wrong because the world is more complicated. Also they assume that the oceans have no significant heat capacity, contrary to fact, and then conclude with an erroneous and conveniently low estimate of climate sensitivity. (Lord Monckton, upper class twit of the year, e.g.) They look X amount of flux increase in a certain time and measuring Y amount of temperature increase, and say "Gee you climatologists are hoaxing it all", when they just didn't understand the meaning of equilibrium concepts.
Say you ramp up the intensity of a heat lamp on a body of water and measure it's temperature increase. Scientists' theory predicts that if you increase the heat flux (or change the properties of the container), the temperature will rise a certain amount in equilibrium---and they call that parameter the 'sensitivity'. pseudo-skeptic looks at the heat-flux increase in short time T, finds the water hasn't actually gotten hot enough (yet), boldly proclaims "see it's all a hoax from those Communists".
For instance, in the screed directly above, there are unsupported assumptions that there were no other changes in the 20th century climate drivers, which is known to be factually incorrect (namely increased in cooling aerosols in the atmosphere from human combustion activities) and ignores delayed effect from heat capacity as well. These are just errors that a slightly scientifically informed layman can figure out---real climatologists know far far more about the subject.
Then when scientists try to explain that the actual physics is more complicated and you have to take into account A,B and C, pseudo-skeptic starts howling about "unreliable complex computer models" and "lying with statistics".
When you fit a linear trend (from what physics?) plus a cyclical period (from what physics?), *that* it is in itself statistically misleading post-hoc invention. And just because you can post-hoc fit some arbitrary statistical assumption does NOTHING to falsify a justified physical knowledge.
"Some AGW skeptics do prefer other specific hypotheses which are not the Null Hypothesis (e.g., the Sun is the principal driver to terrestrial temperature,) and those hypotheses do require proof. But most skeptics make no such claims."
Yes, conveniently they ignore any responsibility to explain observations with actual physics.
Repeat: climatology is not statistics, it is physics.
The null hypothesis that works much much much much better: explanations based on justified physics backed by observations, are ENORMOUSLY MORE POWERFUL at predicting the future than naive human intuition or statistical assumptions of 'status quo' without mechanistic justification.
What's the physics of those "random processes"?
Climatology is not about statistics, it's about causative physical mechanism, and quantification thereof by observations.
Correct. If you really wanted to do something about greenhouse gases to the degree the science demands, you would
a) immediately eliminate all non-CO2 greenhouse forcing (faster time scale, bigger near-term win), including shutting down leaking natural gas pipelines.
b) start building immense fleets of modular nuclear reactors for base band power, and start shutting down coal plants regardless of replacement cost, then replace peaking natural gas plants with wind and solar to the degree you can average out variability.
c) impose enormous economic tariffs and blockades against any nation which refuses to do (a) and (b).
"Ones does NOT need to provide why the temperature is rising as the Null Hypothesis rules in science and the Null Hypothesis in this case is that the warming is Natural and/or unknown."
This is false. The null hypothesis is one kind of statistical methodology used in certain technical circumstances. In practice, an explicit or implicit Bayesian reasoning is usually used.
And a "Natural" cause which somehow excludes humans requires specific physical mechanism, observations and theory which are stronger than the understanding which assumes human-emitted greenhouse molecules have the same optical and chemical properties as the ones which have been in the atmosphere before humans started digging coal and petroleum. The "natural cycle" explanation would also have to explain why the human-emitted gases *do not* cause climate change. Just saying it is 'unknown' is a baloney cop-out. After all it could be mischievous invisible gremlins, We Don't Know For Sure.
Besides, there is other internal evidence pointing to greenhouse increases, e.g. that night warms more than day, winter warms more than summer, and polar warms more than topical, and that stratosphere is cooling---all of which is compatible with increases in greenhouse gases, and incompatible with increases in solar output.
And if you really want to go for the 'null hypothesis' schtick, the better null hypothesis is, "We assume the laws of physics are correct, and if you change the IR scattering of the atmosphere the surface temperature will change."
"Climate changes because nutation and precession of the Earth and Moon affect the solar incidence angle and distance not to mention the primary factor, ripples in the output of the sun. "
And changes in atmospheric composition. And in fact people have been thinking about the issue for at least 50-60 years. Roger Revelle, a primary oceanographer, wrote as much in an environmental report to the US Government. The Lyndon Johnson Administration. Is this "nobody would worry about this"?
And yes there are correlations between orbital parameters etc---and yet now climate is changing at a much faster time scale without any radical shift in our orbital mechanics or changes in the output of the Sun. The atmospheric concentration has changed as well.
"Never mind that the primary gases for the terrestrial greenhouse effect are water and methane, with CO2 representing a single digit contribution to the effect"
The effect from water is a short-timescale feedback from long lived gases, which the most important one is CO2.
You appear to accept the fact that CO2 is an IR emitter. Well, the increase in IR flux from the change in CO2 is a quantitative measured fact.
"which means (for the truly dense among you) that if we stop the carbon-based economy climate change will go on exactly like before and the only thing that will happen is that you will die of cold and starvation."
When the effective solar insolation changed by a tiny fraction due to those small orbital effects (plus greenhouse feedbacks!) it made Ice Ages. An equally small change in IR flux from CO2 changes (which humans are guaranteed to cause on present course) could just as well case a Heat Age as hot above normal climate as the Ice Ages were cold.
Ice was two miles thick in New York then. Do you want to take the equivalent chance on the hot side?
"Yes, exactly: a good deal of the criticism that is purported to be skepticism of the science (and the scientists) is actually aimed at discrediting the policy implications.
The unexpected consequence is that, since it apparently much easier to cast doubt on the science than to rationally discuss policy, there has been almost no discussion of the proposed policies."
Yes, but it's really simple. A rational discussion of the policy based on facts shows that one side has a proprietary interest in what most would judge to be an immoral position. ("We don't give a crap about the future suckers"). This side knows it, so spurious attacks is the better tactic for their position. These are immoral too, of course.
"The diesel exhaust to which miners are subjected is very different from the exhaust
emitted by a modern diesel passenger car."
Isn't that the point?
Exhaust emitted by a model diesel passenger car is very different because of, and only because of, strict government regulation of emissions.
The strong health problems of miners, exposed to dirty emissions, is evidence the regulation was well justified.
Even after the PacMen have gone batshit deranged on the corporations-have-Constitutional-rights-to-buy-elections-too Republican candidates, not a single candidate has changed his mind about their legality. Their only response is "We need more money for ours".
Indeed.
Siri: Thanks Archangel, but I already have all I need in the iCloud.
"a) Drive overly defensively, to the point where you cannot make normal predictions about driving behavior. b) The cars have poor acceleration, so the cars always appear to go very slowly for no good reason. c) I have seen more Prius drivers fail to use their turn signals. I do not know why this is."
a) they are old
b) they aren't aggressive
How about "Screw you, you upper-class twit, a TV is $150 on craigslist, but my family can't afford to go to the doctor and I'm going to tax you and take a tiny bit of yours."
"Siri, giants football"
If anything needed to be deprecated or "killed off"......
Princeton, not Oxford. And he had a day job and was teaching and publishing normal papers. He 'secretly' worked on Fermat on the weekends.