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Here's the real problem with bottled water: Tap water: - Moved by: Pipes - Power source: Gravity - End cost: Cheap Bottled water: - Moved by: Trains, Boats, Trucks, etc. - Power source: Hydrocarbons - End cost: Expensive with substantially higher collateral CO2 emissions

Well, two things here: 1) Critics of the GCM forcing weights placing CO2 as the primary forcing are yet to find an alternative set of GCM inputs which are able to successfully reconstruct the instrumental record. Lindzen and his ilk have no alternative theory to present: they are merely trying to poke holes in existing theory. That's fine, and the purpose of the peer review process, but when you're MO is to attempt to discredit the prevailing theory, proposing an alternate hypothesis, but are completely unable to substantiate your hypothesis, it doesn't lend you much credibility. 2) There's an immense disparity between the views of the climate science community and the science community and large, which overwhelmingly ascribe to the theory of anthropogenically forced climate change, and the public as a whole. As the other thread points out, at least in America 71% of the public thinks anthropogenic forcings are negligible. This is not a scientifically defensible position, yet it's the predominant one among the public at large.

In both cases, the overwhelming majority of the arguments rely on fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The implication is that the other side (in regard to both issues) isn't using science at all, but is rather engaged in an anti-science smear campaign.

Sorry, the implied question is: why is this so? Are Americans just ignorant, or has the climate science community failed to make their case for the predominance of anthropogenic climate forcings?

Those are reasons why I, as a liberaltarian wingbat/moonnut, can appreciate him.

Climate change is a process. Not all the variables have to be known: the system will evolve in a similar way. GCMs operate with variable initial conditions to simulate that which can't be known, namely regional weather patterns across time which fluctuate greatly. Climate science isn't concerned with this. Climate scientists scrutinize the instrumental record and come up with a hypothesis in the form of weighting various forcing factors affecting the climate system. After choosing the forcing weights (over time) as model input, they simulate the entire global climate system in computer simulation. If they manage to reconstruct the historical record from their input forcings, then their hypothesis is predictive and deserves credence. If not, back to the drawing board. In this description I'm completely glossing over the physical science basis by which the hypothesis is created and the model is constructed, but given that, the process is to use well substantiated physical science principle to produce both a hypothesis and model, then use the model to test the hypothesis. What exactly is unscientific about this process?

I would suggest reading more about general circulation models. It's hard to play the "too many variables" game when they've successfully reconstructed the instrumental record in computer simulation. I've quoted my original argument on this matter below. My argument isn't an ad hominem. Yours would be a strawman. But thanks for playing. Here's my original post on the similarity of anti-GW and anti-evolution argumentation: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=26338

I thought this was hilarious: http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html Also note my previous Erlang solution was suboptimal as it didn't use a proper tail call. Here's an improved one: fact(N) -> fact(N, 1). fact(1, Acc) -> Acc; fact(N, Acc) -> fact(N - 1, N * Acc).

As far as conservatives who liberal moonbats such as me can like go, you think Scarborough would rank right up there. He thinks Bush is an idiot and that the Iraq War is a giant farce. Awesome. That's almost enough to make me forgive him for his first criminal case during his lawyering years being defending a psychopathic evangelical who murdered an OBGYN because he performed abortions. But uhh, yeah... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VdNcCcweL0 So yeah, Mika Brzezinski is something of a moonbat herself. She's the daughter of Carter's NSA director after all, and Carter is clearly representative of everything wrong with Democratic politics, whatever. Something wonderful happened on that program. After the repetitive goading of Scarborough, she swore off the lead story as hand picked by her producer. That story was Paris Hilton. She was upset: That isn't news. It shouldn't be news. It certainly shouldn't be the lead story. In many ways that story, and it leading a news program, is indicative of the cracked out pop culture sludge IV which so many Americans have jacked themselves into. Mika Brzezinski took a stand. She threw out the Paris story. Hell, she tried to BURN it. Then she crumpled it up, ripped it, and eventually stuck it in the paper shredder. A bemused Scarborough, having seen his comments elicit an unexpected display, just continues to goad her. PARIS! PARIS! ROLL THE PARIS VIDEO! Mika says no, but the crew runs it anyway. What the f*ck I really feel sorry for Mika. Scarborough either has no respect for the news or what Mika was trying to do, or he's just an enormous raging dick who didn't know what to do when his snide remarks got an unexpected rise in the right direction. Either way, that was horrible. When someone tries to take back the news from the likes of Paris Hilton, that's admirable. Even if they're a little bit CRAZY about it. Scarborough belittled her entire point. She didn't succeed in keeping Paris off the news, because Scarborough got her crew to roll a clip. Paris happy visage still transmitted across the world as part of the program. She stood up for the news, and the news lost. Joe Scarborough stood up for the bullsh*t. So yeah, I hate Joe Scarborough

Ever since I read about Lee Smolin's fecund universes theory in Richard Dawkins' book The Ancestor's Tale I've been enthralled with the idea that our universe evolved by a process which shares a certain degree of similarity to the biological process of natural selection. Unfortunately, I later discovered, at least in the context of Smolin's theory, that there is no selection mechanism. Rather, fecund universes work more like evolution prior to sexual reproduction, a diffuse cloud of self-replicating universes with no real selection mechanism. Well, apparently I'm wrong: cosmological natural selection can involve a selection mechanism: http://arxiv.org/abs/0706.3379 The paper's author says: Neat stuff!

http://www.pocketissue.com/Default.asp?Page_ID=40 71% of Americans think global warming is a "natural occurrence", and 65% believe that scientists predictions are "far fetched" Contrast with the IPCC's assertions that they are more than 90% certain anthropogenic forcings dominate climate change. This reminds me a lot of the American public's view of the "evolution debate"

Re: OP Microsoft still maintains a veritable monopoly on desktop and business computer systems. Google is arguing they are leveraging their existing monopoly in desktop computer systems in order to shut out competitors in another area: desktop search. The iPhone is a new product which presently has a market share of 0. How do the two compare?

This is a thread about substantive information congruent with the official FEMA report. Much like the thread about a computer simulation the collapse of the twin towers (in a way also consistent with the official report), the 9/11 conspiracists don't seem to want to touch this one.

The OP's subject is an interesting question, however the post body is too much for my Internet attention span. Sorry.

She's not that dumb? She got a DUI, got her license revoked, then decided to drive anyway. Sounds pretty dumb to me.

Boulder has tons of separated bike lanes... just not everywhere. However I think the bike-friendliness has created a sort of adversarial relationship with cars. Couple it with the highest density in the state and it's sort of a ticking time bomb, at least until they expand the bike path network to be so large you can get anywhere

I'd suggest: algorithms. For those of you who don't own Knuth's books, a good place to start is simple data structures. Try to implement a binary tree. A general balanced tree. An AVL tree. An r/b-tree. A b-tree. A 2,3-tree. A skip list, a hash table, etc. While your implementation will quite likely be much slower than the language's built-ins, this will get you thinking about how you structure conditions, loops, etc. Beyond that, mathematical algorithms are fun. One of my first forays into non-SQL declarative programming (in Erlang) was the Sieve of Eratosthenes, and the solution almost astounded me in its elegance. I'm sure you can find a similar declarative solution to the Sieve using Python list comprehensions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_of_Eratosthenes

You could always carry around VMware and a VMware image.

Here's an interesting conjecture: http://roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q2.07/34C8BD5D-E210-4A62-BE6F-FD21E046A397.html A Windows port of Safari gets Apple more free security testing for Safari before the iPhone is released.

I prefer this one:

Probably. The difference is the automobile driver is safe and secure in a one ton steel box. The cyclist has nothing but his skin. According to Colorado state law bikes are technically cars and can ride along with traffic. There's several places where explicit instructions on the road tell cyclists to merge with traffic, particularly on narrow or steep streets where it's impractical to have a bike lane. It's also the proper way to execute a left turn (at least here)... cyclists merge with traffic then hand signal as they approach the intersection. I was probably going about 20mph at the time, on a street whose speed limit was 25mph.

I don't see how any of these lists can omit plutonium

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3132857754400064872 Notice the collapse sequence. The same collapse sequence laid out in the NIST report: 1) North penthouse collapses 2) Seconds pass 3) South penthouse begins to collapse 4) The rest of the building collapses Have you ever seen a controlled demolition occur in such a fashion? Or is this video more consistent with an internal structural failure?

So very... very wrong. What the hell. I can understand killing certain mammals. Like mice... killed in the context of biomedical research... to cure disease. Who the hell can condone killing whales? Especially to EAT? Whales are among the smartest creatures on the planet. Dolphins either match or exceed the mental abilities of chimpanzees. In my opinion killing a whale is just as bad as killing a human being.