Walking to school in the midnight blackness of morning during Buffalo's winter months with perpetual daylight saving time may have been fun as a kid. But finally everyone realized that having to fire up all those furnaces an hour earlier didn't save fuel.
Now IANAMeteorologist (I only run computers for them), but predicting climate change is not a sure thing, either. There are lots of basic parameters that we don't have hard numbers for yet.
One example: the amount of energy released by rainfall in the tropics. First of all, we don't know exactly how much rain does fall in the tropics. We have some gross estimates, but most of these are derived from land-based measurements, yet most of the tropical region is ocean. Then use satellites, you say. NASA is already running an experiment to attempt to measure tropical rainfall (TRMM, if you're interested). One of the major problems in any experiment like this is determining ground truth: comparing what you see from miles above the earth to what is actually happening on the ground. Ground radar is used to make comparisons, but mapping radar return to rainfall is yet another ground truth exercise: there are hundreds, if not thousands, of measured Z-R relationships (mapping reflectivity to rainfall). And the tropical energy budget is just one parameter. I'm not a climate modeller, but I'm sure there are hundreds of parameters more.
Of the many uncertainties we think we know how to quantify, there are many others we can now only begin to take a stab at. How exactly does one measure the amount of carbon dioxide exuded by biological matter decaying in a square kilometer of forest? If you're making measurements, how much do you attribute to living flora and fauna? If you think about these problems in enough detail, you see the difficulty.
Tiny errors in fudge factors are magnified by years of projection and extrapolation so as to be nearly useless for long term prediction. What will be useful for the short term is discovering where the model sensitivities lie. It sure would be helpful to see what climate looks like a thousand years from now if you tweak the CO2 parameters a fraction of a mole...
I can list three things which have allowed me to let the subscription to my local paper lapse.
Time: I'd rather spend the 1 hour a day it would take to read the paper doing something else. It is much more efficient to multitask news ingestion via video with, for example, preparing and eating dinner. (And for the record, I prefer "The News Hour" on PBS to any network or local program.)
Topics: in most cases, the coverage of items in which I'm most interested (Sci/Tek) is abysmal, and often misinformed or incorrect. Coverage of other issues is usually superficial at best: if I'm gonna take the time to read, give me depth & insight. With so many media alternatives available on the national level, it seems to me that local newspapers should focus on events and people in the areas they serve.
Intelligence: it used to be that newspapers were purposely written to the 6th grade level. At one time, I thought this was just supposed to apply to grammar and vocabulary, but it seems that newspapers (and media in general) have addressed their entire marketing strategy to 6th grade intelligence. I question whether this is appropriate anymore: certainly the local TV news shows seem to have that base covered (this is another whole conversation). Newspapers could probably stand to raise the bar and cover issues in more depth.
A notable exception to these complaints is the St. Petersburg Times (Florida), which has a suitable mix of topics, opinion, depth, and local emphasis to suit my taste. I'm sure there are large national papers I would find equally appealing (NY Times, Chicago Tribune, etc.)
Sure, the internet is the "great equalizer", provided everyone is speaking the same protocol. Just yesterday I returned to sender a winmail.dat message I didn't want to bother to decode. Every new version of MS Word that I'm aware of writes a new version of a DOC file unreadable by previous versions. It takes extra user effort to be backward compatible.
One nice thing about Open Source is Open Standards, or at least access to what the hell a program is doing to one's data.
Though music is still a niche industry when it comes to software and hardware manufacturers, I just wish that some companies would belly up to the bar and commit to Linux. I recently begged/pleaded/sucked up to Midiman to provide I/O register specs for one of their older, but more pro-oriented, audio cards: I could not seem to convince anyone that it was in everyone's interest to provide such info, which may eventually build a bigger market for their products. I need a new multi-MIDI interface, but I'm not gonna buy one until I see that it is supported by Linux. Perhaps if people hear this from enough of us, they might get the hint.
Yes, I also believe copyright was created to allow folks an opportunity to derive some benefit for their creative efforts. That the term of copyright protection has recently been extended so that a person may enjoy the fruits of one's labor throughout one's lifetime should be a "good thing". Should this same protection be afforded to faceless megacorporations? I haven't made up my mind yet.
As far as "give-back to society", pshaw. The creative work is in the hands of society if it has been published. It seems the original article's author would deprive copyright holders of their rightful income. That being said, what I do consider criminal is the strangle-hold that the recording/publishing industry has on the public's purse strings. Artists see a very small percentage return on the consumer's purchase. A high-quality, publicly accessible publishing medium would allow artists to bypass the traditional "recording industry", charge more reasonable prices for their material, and keep a larger percentage of the purchase price. I believe that THIS is what the RIAA is most afraid of.
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Walking to school in the midnight blackness of morning during Buffalo's winter months with perpetual daylight saving time may have been fun as a kid. But finally everyone realized that having to fire up all those furnaces an hour earlier didn't save fuel.
Congress is on crack.
Now IANAMeteorologist (I only run computers for them), but predicting climate change is not a sure thing, either. There are lots of basic parameters that we don't have hard numbers for yet.
One example: the amount of energy released by rainfall in the tropics. First of all, we don't know exactly how much rain does fall in the tropics. We have some gross estimates, but most of these are derived from land-based measurements, yet most of the tropical region is ocean. Then use satellites, you say. NASA is already running an experiment to attempt to measure tropical rainfall (TRMM, if you're interested). One of the major problems in any experiment like this is determining ground truth: comparing what you see from miles above the earth to what is actually happening on the ground. Ground radar is used to make comparisons, but mapping radar return to rainfall is yet another ground truth exercise: there are hundreds, if not thousands, of measured Z-R relationships (mapping reflectivity to rainfall). And the tropical energy budget is just one parameter. I'm not a climate modeller, but I'm sure there are hundreds of parameters more.
Of the many uncertainties we think we know how to quantify, there are many others we can now only begin to take a stab at. How exactly does one measure the amount of carbon dioxide exuded by biological matter decaying in a square kilometer of forest? If you're making measurements, how much do you attribute to living flora and fauna? If you think about these problems in enough detail, you see the difficulty.
Tiny errors in fudge factors are magnified by years of projection and extrapolation so as to be nearly useless for long term prediction. What will be useful for the short term is discovering where the model sensitivities lie. It sure would be helpful to see what climate looks like a thousand years from now if you tweak the CO2 parameters a fraction of a mole...
I can list three things which have allowed me to let the subscription to my local paper lapse.
A notable exception to these complaints is the St. Petersburg Times (Florida), which has a suitable mix of topics, opinion, depth, and local emphasis to suit my taste. I'm sure there are large national papers I would find equally appealing (NY Times, Chicago Tribune, etc.)
Sure, the internet is the "great equalizer", provided everyone is speaking the same protocol. Just yesterday I returned to sender a winmail.dat message I didn't want to bother to decode. Every new version of MS Word that I'm aware of writes a new version of a DOC file unreadable by previous versions. It takes extra user effort to be backward compatible.
One nice thing about Open Source is Open Standards, or at least access to what the hell a program is doing to one's data.
Though music is still a niche industry when it comes to software and hardware manufacturers, I just wish that some companies would belly up to the bar and commit to Linux. I recently begged/pleaded/sucked up to Midiman to provide I/O register specs for one of their older, but more pro-oriented, audio cards: I could not seem to convince anyone that it was in everyone's interest to provide such info, which may eventually build a bigger market for their products. I need a new multi-MIDI interface, but I'm not gonna buy one until I see that it is supported by Linux. Perhaps if people hear this from enough of us, they might get the hint.
As far as "give-back to society", pshaw. The creative work is in the hands of society if it has been published. It seems the original article's author would deprive copyright holders of their rightful income. That being said, what I do consider criminal is the strangle-hold that the recording/publishing industry has on the public's purse strings. Artists see a very small percentage return on the consumer's purchase. A high-quality, publicly accessible publishing medium would allow artists to bypass the traditional "recording industry", charge more reasonable prices for their material, and keep a larger percentage of the purchase price. I believe that THIS is what the RIAA is most afraid of.