bascule

I have a PS3, but... I use it for games. I own one Blu-Ray movie, Spiderman 3, which came with the PS3, and I don't particularly care for it. No real plans on buying any Blu-Ray movies in the near future. Why anyone would buy a standalone Blu-Ray player is beyond me...

Well, at least his last post was fairly cordial, and not i told u i was hardcore

Thanks. That's the list I've been looking for, but all I've gotten out of the proponents of this theory are unscientific ramblings about how the actual mechanisms are unknown. This is good stuff to know.

Sorry, you failed. My question was: First, you listed several electromagnetic forces. Second, you listed several other random things without qualifying why they're radiative forcings or affect other radiative forcings. You didn't address my question at all. Seconded. SkepticLance, this line: ...is complete and utter bullshit. You've been peddling this pet theory forever and repeatedly ignored any requests for any kind of scientific substantiation of it. Put up or shut up. Seriously. Otherwise this stuff belongs in pseudoscience.

Can you name some non-electromagnetic force emitted by sunspot activity that's a radiative forcing or impacts one? Because present estimates of the radiative forcing caused by CO2 (as well as all of the other major radiative forcings), when used as input for General Circulaton Models, have been used to reconstruct the historical record for the global mean surface temperature with a high degree of accuracy.

It's clear you're trying to make an argument about the latter with no knowledge of the former. The graph I linked shows the reconstructed radiative forcing of solar irradiance relative to CO2, and it does not demonstrate the trend you hypothesize. No, but it'd still be a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. As solar radiation is the actual radiative forcing impacting the climate system, that's what you should be graphing. Solar radiation can be monitored directly by tens of thousands of climate monitoring stations worldwide with a high degree of accuracy and precision. The same cannot be said with sunspot activity. Furthermore, solar radiation directly affects the climate system, whereas sunspots do not. They indirectly affect the climate system... through solar radiation.

I'm of the opinion that there's nothing outside the universe

Do I think it could be infinite? Sure... how would I know? Do I think it's actually infinite? No. Not only do I not particularly like the idea for what can only be chalked up to "gut" reasons, but as far as my layman brain can comprehend all attempts to measure omega have suggested that this is not the case. If I understand the physics stuffins correctly, an infinite universe would have to be spatially flat. This brings up a curious point though: if the universe is infinite with infinite matter, does that mean the Big Bang just represented a massive drop in the universe's density? I'm reminded of Hilbert's Paradox of the Grand Hotel... in a hotel with infinite rooms, it's possible to algorithmically rearrange the occupants (with a superprocess) such that you can always obtain more empty rooms. Is something like that what would've happened with space in the event of a Big Bang in a universe with infinite volume?

Really? Do tell! Hmm, and you don't categorize that under EM... why? Interesting. I'd like to know more about how solar wind affects the climate system, but my initial research shows that solar wind affects high frequency variations in solar radiation, and because oceans possess a large thermal inertia they damp out such high-frequency variations, to the point that the observable effects of solar wind are likely to be confined to time scales of centuries. I'd like to first know why you think that the types of solar activity you describe don't cause changes in solar radiation. I'd also like to know what sort of effects you think solar activity has on the earth's climate system that isn't directly attributable to solar radiation. Sure, but you seem to downplay solar radiation as the causal link between sunspot activity and the Earth's climate system. Why exactly is that? By what non-electromagnetic force do you see solar activity having a significant impact on Earth's climate system?

To quote your OP: This is not the case. Furthermore, understanding the effect of sunspots on solar irradiance requires, at the very least, an understanding of how solar irradiance is measured. You've seemed to skip directly from the sunspot cycle to an assumed impact upon solar irradiance and thus global climate change without understanding solar irradiance. SkepticLance has done the same. Implying the former has an effect on global climate change without understanding the latter is nothing but a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The former is irrelevant, except as an explanation for the latter. The latter is what actually has an impact on Earth's climate system. I suggest you follow swansont's advice. For starters, if you're contradicting established science, you might first start by pointing out flaws therein, rather than starting by stating your own hypothesis then failing to substantiate it.

So what exactly is it you're doing? Alleging a correlation and implying causation?

You know, one may end up thinking you're not competent to discuss the physics of solar irradiance if you don't understand the units in which it is measured...

It's time for my favorite graph again: Attribution of climate change is a difficult subject best left to climate scientists. There's a combination of forcings at play, and if your analysis is simply looking at a graph and going "that bump kinda looks like that one" you're conclusions are likely to be flawed.

Any reason you moved to C++ rather than sticking with Python? Garbage collection is something of a Faustian bargain but generally you're better off being in a garbage collected language. The main reason is the funarg problem: there's lots of higher level stuff you can do, particularly with loops, which requires garbage collection (i.e. functions which close over their surrounding lexical scope, otherwise known as closures) Beyond that, garbage collection improves performance in a number of cases. Have a look at this benchmark: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=binarytrees〈=all This is a benchmark that stresses how a language manages memory. But you may not think that at first, the actual subject at hand is binary trees, an area where you'd think C would be the clear winner. However, the winners are all garbage collected languages. Haskell, Standard ML, Erlang, and Lisp all beat C. This is because malloc()/free() lack the sort of insight into an application's memory usage that a garbage collector can have, and consequently manage memory poorly in comparison. This is the same reason Firefox uses hundreds of megs of memory. It's not so much that all that memory is in use or leaked, but rather most of it is used by highly fragmented pages which may never be reclaimed.

It'd pay for approximately 83 Superconducting Supercolliders

"Our clocks do not measure time. No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure." -- Seth Lloyd

Load up on your bascule originals here: http://fails.org/muzak/Groovy2.mp3 http://fails.org/muzak/sirens.mp3 http://fails.org/skyar.mp3 http://fails.org/dlatmf.mp3

I like Computer Science, but to paraphrase Abelson Computer Science is neither about computers nor science... it's more like magic

Yes, that would be the case. jQuery is the cool new kid on the block. My vote goes to him.

The real solution is to not use things like XMLHttpRequest directly. There's several libraries out there with cross-browser compatible APIs. Try one of those: http://jquery.com/ http://www.prototypejs.org/ and http://script.aculo.us/ http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. It is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." -- Charles Darwin

However, the only languages with semantics similar to C's are things like Pascal or Algol. If you intend on finding a good language to start with for the purpose of moving onto others, C's kind of a dead end. I did scientific programming in Ruby, as did other people I know (they've all since moved onto other jobs). For example, Ruby was used to coordinate production of these high resolution satellite maps of the Earth at night: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/dmsp/night_light_posters.html

And here's an interesting AFP story: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5izWTSSnlFq9QrIMeC-Dir8OKjnGg

Let's see, the Ayatollahs came to power as a direct result of what? The Iranian Revolution which followed mass resentment of the political leader the CIA installed... And I guess you're really missing the point if you couldn't follow that. Try again: Intervention in that reason has come back to bite us on the ass time and time again. Why do you think they hate us? That seemed to be the pivotal question in the ABC debate. Giuliani trotted out the tired old they hate us for our freedom and they hate us because we're the greatest nation in the world lines. I think our history of past intervention in the region has something more to do with that.

I think his point is that if our foreign policy weren't so interventionist, with a stellar record of supreme failures that come back to haunt us time and time again (you know, things like the Iran-Contra Affair, a result of our attempts to depose Iran's democratically elected leader and reinstituting the Shah), then they wouldn't hate us so much!