All leftist ideologies have always resulted in totalitarian dictatorships. It's not incompatible. Dictatorship is the only logical conclusion of any leftist philosophy.
And yet that socialist hell-hole of the entire OECD (outside of the U.S.) has no totalitarian dictatorships.
as I said above, in 1990, that was a prevailing theory that was proven to be false....
Which statement by Buchanan are you calling a "prevailing theory":
“our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide”.
Or:
“homosexuals have declared war on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution”
?
I rather doubt that these were "prevailing theories" anywhere, ever, but among ideologically driven homophobes.
By 1986 the evidence that the infectious agent HIV was the cause of AIDs was as well established as it is for any known infectious disease. Surgeon General Koop made sure that this information went to every household in America in 1988. In 1990 there was no "prevailing theory" doubting it.
Unfortunately, the actual marriage related problems haven't be framed in the proper context and hence the solutions -- gay marriage -- is completely wrong. The problem is marriage as a legal status for individuals. It shouldn't exist and no benefits for it should exist either. Extending it to homosexuals does nothing to solve the actual problems presented by legal marriage.
Yet, oddly, a movement to abolish legal marriage does not exist as far as I can see. I never run across conservatives arguing that the solution to the nations "marriage problems" (whatever they may feel they are) is to abolish the legal institution. This notion only pops in discussions of preventing gays from marrying.
As long as legal marriage exists, with the innumerable societal benefits (and responsibilities) attached, denying it to gays is denying equal protection under the law, which is unconstitutional.
Something I never understood, how did the creation story get so much later evidence in science?
The creation and big bang closely match. There was nothing and it exploded.
The great flood. Lots of water from the deep.. Now we find moons or planets with underground oceans.
How did ancient writings get some wild concepts right? Proving creationism and thus God isn't likely to happen with scientific method, but there may be more than psedoscience to it.
You have convinced me! The ancient texts that provide the earliest, least corrupt source of these stories is clearly the religion most likely to be true and valid.
All hail Enlil, father of the Gods! Enlil's commands are by far the loftiest, his words are holy, his utterances are immutable!
It is also interesting to point out to people (what my "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and all) that witch trials and burnings were not a notable feature of Medieval Europe, but were phenomenon of the Renaissance and early modern Europe. It did not end entirely until the start of the Industrial Revolution.
(It is also interesting that the early Christian church generally rejected the idea of supernatural spell-casting witches. This belief took hold in a more "enlightened" and "advanced" period.)
The witches in the Wicca religion are the witches the Christians burned. They might not have mystical powers but they have a lot of the same paraphernalia and rituals. The witches in our cultural memory are stereotypes aimed at these people. There is not two distinct ideas of witches, there is one real group of people called witches and the propaganda aimed at demonozing them. They might not really go around hexing our crops, but they very much are witches.
You have a point - the claim "Witches don't exist" is a conceptually muddled and factually incorrect statement. The intent of the claim (in the context of pseudoscience) is really that spell casting does nothing. A different topic is to point out that the myths about witches told by Christians are untrue.
I feel for you, Tom. Seriously. This is grade-school flame-war stuff like you'd see sometime on the old Usenet. Pathetic.
My suggestion: create a sig commenting on this moron (if you want passers-by to know the situation), but then just ignore him completely. Avoiding troll feeding has generally proven the best strategy.
Were the disappearance of MH370 the result of a terrorist plot, it is a near certainty that some terrorist group would have claimed credit for the disappearance....
By "near certainty", do you mean a 14% chance? That is the actual fraction of terrorist incidents that have credible claimaints for responsibility.
If the pilot/co-pilot had secretly become radicalized, and acted on their own - there would be no one to claim responsibility.
Also, is not the unexplained disappearance of large airliner with hundreds of people, very unsettling? Maybe, even a little bit terrifying? Mission accomplished.
Just about the most sophisticated, most mobile passive underwater sound detection systems in existence are the spherical arrays mounted in modern nuclear attack subs. In addition to being an important task - locating the missing flight data recorder that bears on U.S. national security (international terrorism being, well, international) - it looks like a good exercise to sharpen the crews passive sonar search skills.
There has now been plenty of time for an attack sub to reach the area from anywhere in the world.
Sub operations are routinely highly classified, so I would not expect to hear about this if it were happening. If they find something we might hear about it, or instead "laundered" cueing information might get passed to the official search teams.
The summary is actually accurate! This was quite a surprise to me, since as many other posters have correctly commented here, these claims are absurd. The Universe is not inconvenienced by the difficulty of computing something about its properties.
Perhaps this paper should have been released two days ago.
Hmm... the Incomputatibility of the Universe, maybe this is an avenue for proving the the Universe is not a simulation?
At best, a clear majority currently supports gay marriage rights, 55-59% are currently supporting it all recent polls.
I would hardly call even 59% a clear majority. Depending on how many they surveyed it's probably still within the margin
of error
You would call 59% a clear majority is you bothered to look up the margin of error (3.5%). Since this is now being found consistently by poll after poll, meta-analysis can drive the uncertainty down below 1%. And the difference between the "pro" and "anti" side is a whopping 25 points now. The "antis" are in a clear, shrinking, miniority.
According to Pew, this poll shows for the first time that there is as much strong support for same-sex marriage as there is strong opposition to it – 22 percent for each category.
So my 20% guess was slightly off. Sorry, It's 22%. I would say that my guess was still pretty accurate if you ask me.
Just for fun, why don't look up current data, not data several years old. The poll I linked to above has "strong" currently at 39%, so no, you are way off.
At best, the people supporting gay marriage are roughly 50% based on current voting records but it's probably closer to 20% for,
20% against, and 60% don't really care either way so firing someone because 20% of the population complains that you
he didn't take their side seems silly.
At best, a clear majority currently supports gay marriage rights, 55-59% are currently supporting it all recent polls, and the number has been consistently over 50% for three years now.
Your attempt to convert majority support to only "20% for" based, apparently on your own wish that it were so is ridiculous.
Eich was not just some employee of Mozilla - he was the CEO! You know, the guy who gets to decide what political causes that the "corporate person" of Mozilla will support, where is political contribution money would go, what it lobbyists say in Washington, or elsewhere. Would Mozilla, under Eich, continue to contribute to opponents of gay rights as it has in the past (it contributed to Tom McClintock's House campaign in 2010).
The politics of the CEO is a matter of considerable relevance in this day and age of virtually unlimited corporate influence.
We sent people up into space when we thought there was a 50/50 chance they'd die in the process.
...
Who is we?
Not the U.S.
Once they man-rated the Project Mercury launch system (i.e. completed development testing) they had pretty high confidence on the success of each launch. Accidents could happen, sure, but to assert that the risk was ever assessed at anything like 50/50 is absurd. A total of 9 Project Mercury launches (6 manned) were made in a row with no accidents - nothing like a "50/50" loss rate.
No, it is not that you can't ever send a person on a mission with a high risk of premature death - it is that you need a compelling reason to do so.
What is the compelling reason here? Is the compelling reason that the astronaut can collect scientific data that a robot cannot? This is a ridiculous proposition, if you give it any serious thought at all. Any instrument the astronaut can operate, a robot can operate with remote human guidance. Cameras can see anything the astronaut can see through his helmet or window, and much, much better too. Mechanical tactile sensors can be vastly more sensitive than hands reaching through thick pressurized gloves.
Or do you imagine that this lone astronaut will perform science that cannot be matched by, oh, 100,000 scientists back on Earth not tasked with life-and-death survival problems every second of every day?
And sample return missions are far more productive when you don't need to return a scientist and all of his/her life support equipment, before you get your first gram of actual sample.
Bottom line - sending a person to Mars has vastly less scientific value than spending the same amount on robotic missions, collecting data for the world's scientists.
By the time David Kahn had became an NSA fellow he had ceased being a writer about cryptography and had become an agency stenographer. Seriously - the "revised edition" of The Codebreakers published in 1996 simply has a 16 page forward that adds nothing to what he wrote in 1967. To learn anything about the vast changes to codes and cryptography over the last fifty years, you will have to go somewhere else.
I want to redefine the second and do away with the awkward 24/60/60 nonsense that is time. 10 hour days, 100 minute hours and 100 second minutes for a total of 100,000 seconds in a day.
Also the US needs to kill AM/PM, its simply unnecessary and redundant.
Good luck with that. The division of the day into 24 hours originates in Egypt 130 BC years ago, and was adopted in China by 900 AD so that this is a shared ancient system of time measurement in both West and East. The division of the day into twelve "double hours" is even more ancient in both places originating by the Ur III period of Sumerian civilization (2100 BC).
The division of hours into minutes and seconds uses the sexigisimal number system was also invented by Sumerians and used by them for angular measurement (the passage of daily time corresponding to angular motion the the sky/Earth). It was adapted for small time unit measurement (minutes, seconds) by Claudios Ptolemaious in 130 AD, then spread throughout the Old World by Islam (and later by Europeans). We have had these units as a common nearly world-wide standard for a long, long time.
The fact that an inert placebo product is being contaminated by some random active pharmaceutical is funny, true, but contamination is contamination. A consumer product is contaminated with something it is not supposed to have; and low levels of antibiotic are actively harmful, not helpful. Since a safe product is rendered measurably unsafe, it is good that this was caught. Drug manufacturers regularly demonstrate that without monitoring and regulation bad products will enter the marketplace.
I know it's a hard concept to understand, but gold only has its value based on consensus as well.
Largely true, but not entirely true. Gold is useful, and therefore valuable for that reason alone.
Expanding on the OPs point: the investment of resources into extracting gold from the Earth is unrelated to any "practical" (industrial) use. The world's current gold stock is 170,000 tonnes, but consumption by industry is about 300 tonnes, so we have a 600 year industrial supply on hand right now, even with no recycling. The price/value of gold is determined entirely by gold investors, not by industrial or even purely ornamental use*. It is only the consensus value for investment that motivates mining.
*Most "ornamental" gold is actually a form of investment.
...And no planetary scientist I talk to believes there is any way to account for the current heat of the core
The only way I can credit this assertion is in the sense of it being vacuously true, that you have never spoken to a planetary scientist.
To the extent that a problem ever existed, it was the reverse of what you say - finding ways to cool the Earth down to the level that we see today. Kelvin's model predicted an extremely hot Earth's core. Look at "A Decade of Progress in Earth's Internal Properties and Processes", Science, Vol. 213, 3 July 1981, pp. 76-77. The problem they were grappling with then was getting heat transport efficient enough in their models to get rid of just the primordial heat even without radiogenic heating (improved convection models solved this problem).
The fact that you have something so basic as Lord Kelvin's analysis completely backwards demolishes any credibility you might want to claim, coupled with your failure to back up any of your assertions with a link, citation, or one of the "simple calculations" you allude to.
Perusing recent actual scientific articles about studies of the Earth's thermal structure (see for example "A Thermal Balancing Act", Science, Vol. 283, 12 March 1999, pp. 1652-1653 and "Mantle Flow Drives the Subsidence of Plates", Science, Vol. 328, 2 April 2010, pp. 83-85) I see that the gross anomaly you assert does not exist, and that current models are dealing with the fine structure of heat flow inside the Earth.
it's widely accepted that the current status contradicts the age of the earth. Hence the mystery.
...
In the 1800s, famed physicist Lord Kelvin (for whom the absolute Kelvin temperature scale is named) was the first to calculate that even if the earth was born in an incandescent molten state (and there is no evidence for this), it would have cooled to its current temperature billions of years sooner than the 4.6 billion years accepted today. Even using generous assumptions about the thermal energy produced by radioactive decay (which also have no direct evidence), the earth would still cool to its current temperature much sooner than 4.6 billion years...
No, this is not what Lord Kelvin calculated. What he calculated was that if the Earth cooled by conduction alone it would only take 20 to 400 million years (he later settled on 20 to 40 million) for the surface to cool to the present temperature, but that the core would still be quite molten. In other words he calculated how long it would take an (effectively solid) body to achieve a surface temperature profile (how quickly it gets hot as you descend into the Earth) such that the surface temperature profile matches what we see today. The core would still be extremely hot.
His chief error had nothing to do with not knowing about radioactive decay (not discovered until his last years). It was that he did not take account of the possibility of convection within the Earth that keeps bringing hot material up close to the surface, permanently maintaining a steep temperature profile in the crust. This is something he could and should have taken into account. Primordial heat (left over from Earth's formation) - the heat Kelvin was arguing about - is still roughly half of the heat coming from the interior of the Earth -- enough that it alone could still power the temperature profile even after 4. 6 billion years.
Slashdot Mirror
All leftist ideologies have always resulted in totalitarian dictatorships. It's not incompatible. Dictatorship is the only logical conclusion of any leftist philosophy.
And yet that socialist hell-hole of the entire OECD (outside of the U.S.) has no totalitarian dictatorships.
Robert Byrd repudiated his association with the KKK, and apologized (repeatedly over the years).
Eich repudiated his opposition to gay marriage, when?
What is it with the right-wing and false equivalences?
as I said above, in 1990, that was a prevailing theory that was proven to be false....
Which statement by Buchanan are you calling a "prevailing theory":
“our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide”.
Or:
“homosexuals have declared war on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution”
?
I rather doubt that these were "prevailing theories" anywhere, ever, but among ideologically driven homophobes.
By 1986 the evidence that the infectious agent HIV was the cause of AIDs was as well established as it is for any known infectious disease. Surgeon General Koop made sure that this information went to every household in America in 1988. In 1990 there was no "prevailing theory" doubting it.
Are you same sad little troll that stalks Tom 822?
...
Unfortunately, the actual marriage related problems haven't be framed in the proper context and hence the solutions -- gay marriage -- is completely wrong. The problem is marriage as a legal status for individuals. It shouldn't exist and no benefits for it should exist either. Extending it to homosexuals does nothing to solve the actual problems presented by legal marriage.
Yet, oddly, a movement to abolish legal marriage does not exist as far as I can see. I never run across conservatives arguing that the solution to the nations "marriage problems" (whatever they may feel they are) is to abolish the legal institution. This notion only pops in discussions of preventing gays from marrying.
As long as legal marriage exists, with the innumerable societal benefits (and responsibilities) attached, denying it to gays is denying equal protection under the law, which is unconstitutional.
Something I never understood, how did the creation story get so much later evidence in science?
The creation and big bang closely match. There was nothing and it exploded.
The great flood. Lots of water from the deep.. Now we find moons or planets with underground oceans.
How did ancient writings get some wild concepts right? Proving creationism and thus God isn't likely to happen with scientific method, but there may be more than psedoscience to it.
You have convinced me! The ancient texts that provide the earliest, least corrupt source of these stories is clearly the religion most likely to be true and valid.
All hail Enlil, father of the Gods! Enlil's commands are by far the loftiest, his words are holy, his utterances are immutable!
It is also interesting to point out to people (what my "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and all) that witch trials and burnings were not a notable feature of Medieval Europe, but were phenomenon of the Renaissance and early modern Europe. It did not end entirely until the start of the Industrial Revolution.
(It is also interesting that the early Christian church generally rejected the idea of supernatural spell-casting witches. This belief took hold in a more "enlightened" and "advanced" period.)
The witches in the Wicca religion are the witches the Christians burned. They might not have mystical powers but they have a lot of the same paraphernalia and rituals. The witches in our cultural memory are stereotypes aimed at these people. There is not two distinct ideas of witches, there is one real group of people called witches and the propaganda aimed at demonozing them. They might not really go around hexing our crops, but they very much are witches.
You have a point - the claim "Witches don't exist" is a conceptually muddled and factually incorrect statement. The intent of the claim (in the context of pseudoscience) is really that spell casting does nothing. A different topic is to point out that the myths about witches told by Christians are untrue.
I feel for you, Tom. Seriously. This is grade-school flame-war stuff like you'd see sometime on the old Usenet. Pathetic.
My suggestion: create a sig commenting on this moron (if you want passers-by to know the situation), but then just ignore him completely. Avoiding troll feeding has generally proven the best strategy.
Were the disappearance of MH370 the result of a terrorist plot, it is a near certainty that some terrorist group would have claimed credit for the disappearance....
By "near certainty", do you mean a 14% chance? That is the actual fraction of terrorist incidents that have credible claimaints for responsibility.
If the pilot/co-pilot had secretly become radicalized, and acted on their own - there would be no one to claim responsibility.
Also, is not the unexplained disappearance of large airliner with hundreds of people, very unsettling? Maybe, even a little bit terrifying? Mission accomplished.
Just about the most sophisticated, most mobile passive underwater sound detection systems in existence are the spherical arrays mounted in modern nuclear attack subs. In addition to being an important task - locating the missing flight data recorder that bears on U.S. national security (international terrorism being, well, international) - it looks like a good exercise to sharpen the crews passive sonar search skills.
There has now been plenty of time for an attack sub to reach the area from anywhere in the world.
Sub operations are routinely highly classified, so I would not expect to hear about this if it were happening. If they find something we might hear about it, or instead "laundered" cueing information might get passed to the official search teams.
Perhaps this paper should have been released two days ago.
Errr... make that three days ago.
The summary is actually accurate! This was quite a surprise to me, since as many other posters have correctly commented here, these claims are absurd. The Universe is not inconvenienced by the difficulty of computing something about its properties.
Perhaps this paper should have been released two days ago.
Hmm... the Incomputatibility of the Universe, maybe this is an avenue for proving the the Universe is not a simulation?
Excellent quote AC, thanks!
At best, a clear majority currently supports gay marriage rights, 55-59% are currently supporting it all recent polls.
I would hardly call even 59% a clear majority. Depending on how many they surveyed it's probably still within the margin of error
You would call 59% a clear majority is you bothered to look up the margin of error (3.5%). Since this is now being found consistently by poll after poll, meta-analysis can drive the uncertainty down below 1%. And the difference between the "pro" and "anti" side is a whopping 25 points now. The "antis" are in a clear, shrinking, miniority.
...
Oh, and just for the fun of it I looked up the stats: http://takingnote.blogs.nytime...
According to Pew, this poll shows for the first time that there is as much strong support for same-sex marriage as there is strong opposition to it – 22 percent for each category.
So my 20% guess was slightly off. Sorry, It's 22%. I would say that my guess was still pretty accurate if you ask me.
Just for fun, why don't look up current data, not data several years old. The poll I linked to above has "strong" currently at 39%, so no, you are way off.
At best, the people supporting gay marriage are roughly 50% based on current voting records but it's probably closer to 20% for, 20% against, and 60% don't really care either way so firing someone because 20% of the population complains that you he didn't take their side seems silly.
At best, a clear majority currently supports gay marriage rights, 55-59% are currently supporting it all recent polls, and the number has been consistently over 50% for three years now.
Your attempt to convert majority support to only "20% for" based, apparently on your own wish that it were so is ridiculous.
Eich was not just some employee of Mozilla - he was the CEO! You know, the guy who gets to decide what political causes that the "corporate person" of Mozilla will support, where is political contribution money would go, what it lobbyists say in Washington, or elsewhere. Would Mozilla, under Eich, continue to contribute to opponents of gay rights as it has in the past (it contributed to Tom McClintock's House campaign in 2010).
The politics of the CEO is a matter of considerable relevance in this day and age of virtually unlimited corporate influence.
We sent people up into space when we thought there was a 50/50 chance they'd die in the process.
...
Who is we?
Not the U.S.
Once they man-rated the Project Mercury launch system (i.e. completed development testing) they had pretty high confidence on the success of each launch. Accidents could happen, sure, but to assert that the risk was ever assessed at anything like 50/50 is absurd. A total of 9 Project Mercury launches (6 manned) were made in a row with no accidents - nothing like a "50/50" loss rate.
No, it is not that you can't ever send a person on a mission with a high risk of premature death - it is that you need a compelling reason to do so.
What is the compelling reason here? Is the compelling reason that the astronaut can collect scientific data that a robot cannot? This is a ridiculous proposition, if you give it any serious thought at all. Any instrument the astronaut can operate, a robot can operate with remote human guidance. Cameras can see anything the astronaut can see through his helmet or window, and much, much better too. Mechanical tactile sensors can be vastly more sensitive than hands reaching through thick pressurized gloves.
Or do you imagine that this lone astronaut will perform science that cannot be matched by, oh, 100,000 scientists back on Earth not tasked with life-and-death survival problems every second of every day?
And sample return missions are far more productive when you don't need to return a scientist and all of his/her life support equipment, before you get your first gram of actual sample.
Bottom line - sending a person to Mars has vastly less scientific value than spending the same amount on robotic missions, collecting data for the world's scientists.
By the time David Kahn had became an NSA fellow he had ceased being a writer about cryptography and had become an agency stenographer. Seriously - the "revised edition" of The Codebreakers published in 1996 simply has a 16 page forward that adds nothing to what he wrote in 1967. To learn anything about the vast changes to codes and cryptography over the last fifty years, you will have to go somewhere else.
I want to redefine the second and do away with the awkward 24/60/60 nonsense that is time. 10 hour days, 100 minute hours and 100 second minutes for a total of 100,000 seconds in a day.
Also the US needs to kill AM/PM, its simply unnecessary and redundant.
Good luck with that. The division of the day into 24 hours originates in Egypt 130 BC years ago, and was adopted in China by 900 AD so that this is a shared ancient system of time measurement in both West and East. The division of the day into twelve "double hours" is even more ancient in both places originating by the Ur III period of Sumerian civilization (2100 BC).
The division of hours into minutes and seconds uses the sexigisimal number system was also invented by Sumerians and used by them for angular measurement (the passage of daily time corresponding to angular motion the the sky/Earth). It was adapted for small time unit measurement (minutes, seconds) by Claudios Ptolemaious in 130 AD, then spread throughout the Old World by Islam (and later by Europeans). We have had these units as a common nearly world-wide standard for a long, long time.
The fact that an inert placebo product is being contaminated by some random active pharmaceutical is funny, true, but contamination is contamination. A consumer product is contaminated with something it is not supposed to have; and low levels of antibiotic are actively harmful, not helpful. Since a safe product is rendered measurably unsafe, it is good that this was caught. Drug manufacturers regularly demonstrate that without monitoring and regulation bad products will enter the marketplace.
I know it's a hard concept to understand, but gold only has its value based on consensus as well.
Largely true, but not entirely true. Gold is useful, and therefore valuable for that reason alone.
Expanding on the OPs point: the investment of resources into extracting gold from the Earth is unrelated to any "practical" (industrial) use. The world's current gold stock is 170,000 tonnes, but consumption by industry is about 300 tonnes, so we have a 600 year industrial supply on hand right now, even with no recycling. The price/value of gold is determined entirely by gold investors, not by industrial or even purely ornamental use*. It is only the consensus value for investment that motivates mining.
*Most "ornamental" gold is actually a form of investment.
...And no planetary scientist I talk to believes there is any way to account for the current heat of the core
The only way I can credit this assertion is in the sense of it being vacuously true, that you have never spoken to a planetary scientist.
To the extent that a problem ever existed, it was the reverse of what you say - finding ways to cool the Earth down to the level that we see today. Kelvin's model predicted an extremely hot Earth's core. Look at "A Decade of Progress in Earth's Internal Properties and Processes", Science, Vol. 213, 3 July 1981, pp. 76-77. The problem they were grappling with then was getting heat transport efficient enough in their models to get rid of just the primordial heat even without radiogenic heating (improved convection models solved this problem).
The fact that you have something so basic as Lord Kelvin's analysis completely backwards demolishes any credibility you might want to claim, coupled with your failure to back up any of your assertions with a link, citation, or one of the "simple calculations" you allude to.
Perusing recent actual scientific articles about studies of the Earth's thermal structure (see for example "A Thermal Balancing Act", Science, Vol. 283, 12 March 1999, pp. 1652-1653 and "Mantle Flow Drives the Subsidence of Plates", Science, Vol. 328, 2 April 2010, pp. 83-85) I see that the gross anomaly you assert does not exist, and that current models are dealing with the fine structure of heat flow inside the Earth.
it's widely accepted that the current status contradicts the age of the earth. Hence the mystery.
Widely accepted? Then post a credible link.
... In the 1800s, famed physicist Lord Kelvin (for whom the absolute Kelvin temperature scale is named) was the first to calculate that even if the earth was born in an incandescent molten state (and there is no evidence for this), it would have cooled to its current temperature billions of years sooner than the 4.6 billion years accepted today. Even using generous assumptions about the thermal energy produced by radioactive decay (which also have no direct evidence), the earth would still cool to its current temperature much sooner than 4.6 billion years...
No, this is not what Lord Kelvin calculated. What he calculated was that if the Earth cooled by conduction alone it would only take 20 to 400 million years (he later settled on 20 to 40 million) for the surface to cool to the present temperature, but that the core would still be quite molten. In other words he calculated how long it would take an (effectively solid) body to achieve a surface temperature profile (how quickly it gets hot as you descend into the Earth) such that the surface temperature profile matches what we see today. The core would still be extremely hot.
His chief error had nothing to do with not knowing about radioactive decay (not discovered until his last years). It was that he did not take account of the possibility of convection within the Earth that keeps bringing hot material up close to the surface, permanently maintaining a steep temperature profile in the crust. This is something he could and should have taken into account. Primordial heat (left over from Earth's formation) - the heat Kelvin was arguing about - is still roughly half of the heat coming from the interior of the Earth -- enough that it alone could still power the temperature profile even after 4. 6 billion years.