bascule

Nothing's happened yet. People are just talking about it: http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/mld/myrtlebeachonline/news/local/17075630.htm Which is fine, but in the past this attitude lead to things like Parental Advisory stickers

I think a transition to IPv6 is possible. It will require much more powerful core routers though (with 128-bit addresses an address can't fit in a CPU register) Beyond that, good luck. The Internet infrastructure is "good enough", and now there's billions invested in it.

Historically this kind of censorship has brought together authoritarians on both the left and right. Right-wing authoritarian Democrats seem to eat it up with a spoon (e.g. Robert Novak, Joe Lieberman) as the left-leaning authoritarians dish it out (Tipper Gore comes to mind) I tend to linger on the Frank Zappa side of things. While I think it's perfectly fine that CBS fired him (after all, the advertisers scurried away when a man previously mired in racial controversy made a somewhat-but-not-really-racist remark) the government's reaction to the incident should be zero. It was really pathetic watching Imus try to suck up to Al Sharpton. It was even worse watching Sharpton skewer him over all sorts of unintended interpretations of what he said. I think promulgators of hate speech should be skewered in the public spotlight. That's the correct reaction. When the government steps in, that's when things have gone too far.

Here you go [math]q\delta^3(\vec{p'}-\vec{p})=\langle p'|Q|p\rangle = \int d^3x\, \langle p'|J^0(\vec{x},0)|p\rangle =\int d^3x\, \langle p'|e^{-i\vec{P}\cdot\vec{x}}J^0(0,0)e^{i\vec{P}\cdot\vec{x}}|p\rangle =\int d^3x\, e^{i(\vec{p}-\vec{p'})\cdot \vec{x}} \langle p'|J^0(0,0)|p\rangle = (2\pi)^3\delta^3(\vec{p'}-\vec{p})\langle p'|J^0(0,0)|p\rangle[/math]

Uhh, I've said repeatedly that mid-century cooling was due to changes in the solar cycle and a resumption of volcanic activity, resulting in reflective, increased sulfate aerosols.

Your statement is just as misleading. You're trying to use "net cooling" to suggest that there were no temperature increases whatsoever during that period. Wrong: I'd say the IPCC's statement is valid. Just because there was net cooling does not mean there were no temperature increases. You're nitpicking. Their statement is valid.

Why do you keep bringing up the Oregon Petition? And why are you claiming that 17,000 people represents the "entire scientific community"? 17,000 represents 3% of the total population of doctoral scientists in the United States, and they don't even require a PhD, all it takes is a bachelor's. Nor do they require you hold a degree in a remotely relevant field. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Petition Only 15% of the claimed signatories hold a degree in the physical or environmental sciences. 60% hold degrees in completely unrelated fields like the social or medical sciences. And what's more, it's based on outdated research and many of the reported climate scientist signatories have changed their minds: In a 2005 op-ed in the Hawaii Reporter, Todd Shelly wrote: In May 1998 the Seattle Times wrote:

I've typically heard the effects of reflective aerosols referred to as "global dimming" As you can see from the climate change attribution graph, the negative forcing effect of reflective sulfate aerosols is modeled.

If that's your concern, software engineering is probably the better way to go. If you're interested in the theory behind programming itself (semiotics) and the theory behind how computer programs accomplish tasks (algorithmics), CS is the way to go.

http://www.earthsky.org/blog/51179/scientific-consensus “The final IPCC report carries an authority and depth far beyond that of any individual scientist or small group of scientists, no matter how gifted or experienced.” -- Bruce A. Wielicki, of NASA’s Langley Research Center, Principal Investigator for CERES, a project that uses Earth-orbiting satellites to monitor how clouds affect our climate. “There cannot be a 100% proof as you have in mathematics.” -- Colin Price, Professor of Geophysics and Planetary Science at Tel Aviv University “The best way out of the dilemma of which expert to believe is to undertake the task of understanding the science itself.” -- Kerry Emanuel, Professor of Meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Naysayers are playing devil’s advocate or not qualified to discuss the science.” -- J. H. LaCasce, Department of Meteorology at the University of Oslo, Norway “...what is significant in the case of the universal scientific consensus regarding global warming is the agreement of normally distant fields of scientific endeavour.” -- Stuart S. Sumida, Professor of Biology at California State University in San Bernardino “There will always be a marginal fringe in most aspects of science.” -- John Kermond, UCAR visiting scientist with NOAA’s Climate Program Office. “One has only to examine the basic physics of adding CO2 to the atmosphere” -- David Pimentel, Professor in the Entomology Department at Cornell University “Scientific consensus is not an agreement on opinions — is Picasso better than Rembrandt, or pepperoni better than anchovies?” -- Richard B. Alley, Evan Pugh Professor in the Department of Geosciences, and Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Pennsylvania State University “It’s a lot like the debate on smoking, where for years some scientists said we can’t be sure smoking is hazardous to health. While society waited for higher levels of proof many people died.” -- P. Dee Boersma, holder of the Wadsworth Endowed Chair in Conservation Science in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Consensus at its heart is a political notion based on powers of persuasion, nuance and belief.” -- John R. Christy, Alabama State Climatologist and Director of the Earth System Science Center and Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville “the very idea of consensus in such an immature and multi- faceted subject as climate change should be suspicious ab initio.” -- Richard S. Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT. Clearly the idea of a scientific consensus itself is a polarizing issue. Are Lindzen and Christy "on the fringe" or are they correct that the idea of a consensus itself is errant?

How about going with the IPCC's summary from AR4: In context, "very likely" indicates that they are more than 90% certain.

To reiterate, yes solar forcings are causing the earth to warm, and the 11-year sunspot cycle does affect the climate, but in a cyclical manner. However, CO2 is overwhelmingly the predominant cause.

It's not a sole cause. There are many radiative forcings at play:

For those interested, Wikipedians have tracked those scientific bodies who are conspirators in the Great Global Warming Swindle. When global warming nutjobs talk about the "scientific consensus", here's who's involved: (GFDL text courtesy Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change) Statements by organizations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) In February 2007, the IPCC released a summary of the forthcoming Fourth Assessment Report. According to this summary, the Fourth Assessment Report finds that human actions are "very likely" the cause of global warming, meaning a 90% or greater probability.[2] "The world's leading climate scientists said global warming has begun, is very likely caused by man, and will be unstoppable for centuries, ... . The phrase very likely translates to a more than 90 percent certainty that global warming is caused by man's burning of fossil fuels. That was the strongest conclusion to date, making it nearly impossible to say natural forces are to blame."[7] "The report said that an increase in hurricane and tropical cyclone strength since 1970 more likely than not can be attributed to man-made global warming. The scientists said global warming's connection varies with storms in different parts of the world, but that the storms that strike the Americas are global warming-influenced."[8] "On sea levels, the report projects rises of 7-23 inches by the end of the century. That could be augmented by an additional 4-8 inches if recent surprising polar ice sheet melt continues."[9] Joint science academies’ statement 2005 In 2005 the national science academies of the G8 nations, plus Brazil, China and India, three of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the developing world, signed a statement on the global response to climate change. The statement stresses that the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action [10], and explicitly endorsed the IPCC consensus. Joint science academies’ statement 2001 In 2001, following the publication of the IPCC Third Assessment Report, sixteen national science academies issued a joint statement explicitely acknowledging the IPCC position as representing the scientific conensus on climate change science. Among the signatories are the science academies of Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, the Carribean, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.[11] U.S. National Research Council, 2001 In 2001 the Committee on the Science of Climate Change of the National Research Council published Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions [12]. This report explicitly endorses the IPCC view of attribution of recent climate change as representing the view of the scientific community: The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability. Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century... The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue. [13] American Meteorological Society The American Meteorological Society (AMS) statement adopted by their council in 2003 said: There is now clear evidence that the mean annual temperature at the Earth's surface, averaged over the entire globe, has been increasing in the past 200 years. There is also clear evidence that the abundance of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has increased over the same period. In the past decade, significant progress has been made toward a better understanding of the climate system and toward improved projections of long-term climate change... Human activities have become a major source of environmental change. Of great urgency are the climate consequences of the increasing atmospheric abundance of greenhouse gases... Because greenhouse gases continue to increase, we are, in effect, conducting a global climate experiment, neither planned nor controlled, the results of which may present unprecedented challenges to our wisdom and foresight as well as have significant impacts on our natural and societal systems. [14] Federal Climate Change Science Program, 2006 On May 2, 2006, the Federal Climate Change Science Program commissioned by the Bush administration in 2002 released the first of 21 assessments that concluded that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system (due to changes in greenhouse gases, aerosols, and stratospheric ozone) [15]. The study said that observed patterns of change over the past 50 years cannot be explained by natural processes alone, though it did not state what percentage of climate change might be anthropogenic in nature. Other concurring organizations Other scientific organizations that have issued concurring position statements on climate change include the following. * American Association for the Advancement of Science: "The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society." [16] * American Geophysical Union, also endorsed [17] by the American Institute of Physics: "Human activities are increasingly altering the Earth's climate. These effects add to natural influences that have been present over Earth's history. Scientific evidence strongly indicates that natural influences cannot explain the rapid increase in global near-surface temperatures observed during the second half of the 20th century." [18] * Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London: "We find that the evidence for human-induced climate change is now persuasive, and the need for direct action compelling." [19] * Geological Society of America: "The Geological Society of America (GSA) supports the scientific conclusions that Earth’s climate is changing; the climate changes are due in part to human activities; and the probable consequences of the climate changes will be significant and blind to geopolitical boundaries. Furthermore, the potential implications of global climate change and the time scale over which such changes will likely occur require active, effective, long-term planning." [20] * American Association of State Climatologists: This statement noted the difficulties with predicting impacts due to climate change, while acknowledging that human activities are having an effect on climate: "The AASC recognizes that human activities have an influence on the climate system. Such activities, however, are not limited to greenhouse gas forcing and include changing land use and sulfate emissions, which further complicates the issue of climate prediction... Whatever policies are promulgated with respect to energy, it is imperative that policy makers recognize that climate, its variability and change has a broad impact on society. The policy responses too should also be broad...Finally, ongoing political debate about global energy policy should not stand in the way of common sense action to reduce societal and environmental vulnerabilities to climate variability and change." [21] * Australian Medical Association: "Failure to commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions has the potential to cause significant global public health problems... The AMA believes that an effective emissions control program could be instituted without having a negative impact on the Australian economy. This can best be achieved by combining energy conservation with new alternative technologies that would reduce dependency on fossil fuels... The AMA believes that the Federal Government should implement a National Greenhouse Policy that engages all Australians in ensuring that we meet the Kyoto target and start to dramatically cut our greenhouse pollution." [22] * American Chemical Society: "The overwhelming balance of evidence indicates that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the prudent and responsible course of action at this time. Although vigorous climate research is certainly needed to reduce uncertainties and to identify potential adverse effects, it should not forestall prudent action now to address the issue. ACS believes that public and private efforts today are essential to protect the global climate system for the well-being of future generations." [23] * American Quaternary Association: "Few credible scientists now doubt that humans have influenced the documented rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. The first government-led U.S. Climate Change Science Program synthesis and assessment report supports the growing body of evidence that warming of the atmosphere, especially over the past 50 years, is directly impacted by human activity." [24] Recent surveys of scientists and scientific literature Various surveys have been conducted to determine a scientific consensus on global warming. Few have been conducted within the last ten years. Oreskes, 2004 A 2004 article by geologist and historian of science Naomi Oreskes summarized a study of the scientific literature on climate change.[4] The essay concluded that there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. The author analyzed 928 abstracts of papers from refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, listed with the keywords "global climate change". Oreskes divided the abstracts into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. 75% of the abstracts were placed in the first three categories, thus either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, thus taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change; none of the abstracts disagreed with the consensus position, which the author found to be "remarkable". It was also pointed out, "authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural. However, none of these papers argued that point." Bray and von Storch, 2003 A survey[5] was conducted in 2003 by Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch. Bray's submission to Science on December 22, 2004 was rejected [6] but the survey's results were reported through non-scientific venues[7] [8] [9]. The survey has been criticized on the grounds that it was performed on the web with no means to verify that the respondents were climate scientists or to prevent multiple submissions by the same individual. The survey required entry of a username and password, but this information was circulated to a climate skeptics mailing list and elsewhere on the internet.[10][11] The survey received 530 responses from 27 different countries. One of the questions asked was "To what extent do you agree or disagree that climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes?", with a value of 1 indicating strongly agree and a value of 7 indicating strongly disagree. The results showed a mean of 3.62, with 50 responses (9.4%) indicating "strongly agree" and 54 responses (9.7%) indicating "strongly disagree". The same survey indicates a 72% to 20% endorsement of the IPCC reports as accurate, and a 15% to 80% rejection of the thesis that "there is enough uncertainty about the phenomenon of global warming that there is no need for immediate policy decisions". Older surveys Survey of U.S. state climatologists 1997 In 1997, the conservative advocacy group Citizens for a Sound Economy surveyed America's 48 official state climatologists on questions related to climate change [26]. Of the 36 respondents, 44% considered global warming to be a largely natural phenomenon, compared to 17% who considered warming to be largely manmade. The survey further found that 58% disagreed or somewhat disagreed with then-President Clinton's assertion that "the overwhelming balance of evidence and scientific opinion is that it is no longer a theory, but now fact, that global warming is for real". Eighty-nine percent agreed that "current science is unable to isolate and measure variations in global temperatures caused ONLY by man-made factors," and 61% said that historical data do not indicate "that fluctuations in global temperatures are attributable to human influences such as burning fossil fuels." 60% of the respondents said that reducing man-made CO2 emissions by 15% below 1990 levels would not prevent global temperatures from rising, and 86% said that reducing emissions to 1990 levels would not prevent rising temperatures. 39% agreed and 33% disagreed that "evidence exists to suggest that the earth is headed for another glacial period," [27] though the time scale for the next glacial period was not specified. Bray and von Storch, 1996 In 1996, Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch undertook a survery of climate scientists on attitudes towards global warming and related matters. The results were subsequently published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. [28] The paper addressed the views of climate scientists, with a response rate of 40% from a mail survey questionnaire to 1000 scientists in Germany, the USA and Canada. Most of the scientists believed that global warming was occurring and appropriate policy action should be taken, but there was wide disagreement about the likely effects on society and almost all agreed that the predictive ability of currently existing models was limited. The abstract says: The international consensus was, however, apparent regarding the utility of the knowledge to date: climate science has provided enough knowledge so that the initiation of abatement measures is warranted. However, consensus also existed regarding the current inability to explicitly specify detrimental effects that might result from climate change. This incompatibility between the state of knowledge and the calls for action suggests that, to some degree at least, scientific advice is a product of both scientific knowledge and normative judgment, suggesting a socioscientific construction of the climate change issue. The survey was extensive, and asked numerous questions on many aspects of climate science, model formulation, and utility, and science/public/policy interactions. To pick out some of the more vital topics, from the body of the paper: The resulting questionnaire, consisting of 74 questions, was pre-tested in a German institution and after revisions, distributed to a total of 1,000 scientists in North America and Germany... The number of completed returns was as follows: USA 149, Canada 35, and Germany 228, a response rate of approximately 40%... ...With a value of 1 indicating the highest level of belief that predictions are possible and a value of 7 expressing the least faith in the predictive capabilities of the current state of climate science knowledge, the mean of the entire sample of 4.6 for the ability to make reasonable predictions of inter-annual variability tends to indicate that scientists feel that reasonable prediction is not yet a possibility... mean of 4.8 for reasonable predictions of 10 years... mean of 5.2 for periods of 100 years... ...a response of a value of 1 indicates a strong level of agreement with the statement of certainty that global warming is already underway or will occur without modification to human behavior... the mean response for the entire sample was 3.3 indicating a slight tendency towards the position that global warming has indeed been detected and is underway.... Regarding global warming as being a possible future event, there is a higher expression of confidence as indicated by the mean of 2.6.

Imus is nothing compared to Michael Savage. Or Ann Coulter. Ann doesn't even have to be actively broadcast over any distribution network, she just says controversial things and the networks are instantly drawn to repeating it. She owns the media. Wag the dog. Do I think either should lose the opportunity to share their opinion? Well, they're using technological networks other people have paid for to do so. If the owners of those networks feel the networks are being abused by these individuals, they're completely in the right to fire them and deny access. I think they should then be free to move to whatever medium best suits them (not that I expect Michael Savage will be making any moves which don't garner him a larger audience) If the question is whether the government should step in to do something here, absolutely not

http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg03319.html Well, that may perhaps be what I'm describing. Perhaps Erlang can do what I want after all. Basically, I'd like to stick a synchronous API on Actor. This would be by adding synchronous message support using continuations. The basic idea is that you'd invoke some sort of "superprocess" which could make asynchronous message calls, then defer to the underlying Erlang processes. I don't know how to even begin to describe this process, but it effectively creates synchronous messaging functions by snapshotting the program state at a given point in time, then deferring back to the higher level process, and when receive is invoked with the desired response, control could be returned to the "superprocess" by reloading its continuation. Here's an example in Ruby, on top of Reactor: http://pastie.caboo.se/44544 It's pretty hackish and probably very difficult to understand for someone who isn't familiar with Ruby (or rthe Reactor implementation I'm using, EventMachine) At the bottom though, is a synchronous echo server: EventMachine::run do EventMachine::start_server('127.0.0.1', 2500, Continuator) do |connection| connection.instance_eval do run do loop { send_data read } end end end end You can see what it does here specifically: loop { send_data read } It sends whatever it reads, in an infinite loop. This call is synchronous, but the underlying implementation is completely asynchronous.

Looks like this bit is what went boom: Yikes!

Tools like AutoWikiBrowser make this a lot easier

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1626728.ece Damn...

Why? Politically charged as it may be, it was peer reviewed by 2500+ additional scientists, many of which are IPCC critics You're comparing a petition to a scientific research paper assembled by thousands of scientists in over 130 countries? *boggle* That's even worse than icemelt linking to a think tank's web site

Wow: http://www.stuff.co.nz/4017784a13.html Imagine if all roofing material could be made photovoltaic...

My favorite bit regarding warp drive was how they'd look out their back window and see stars going backwards when they were going faster than the speed of light. Of course maybe that's part of the crazy spacetime folding bit. It's remotely plausible!

You missed

It's all fine and dandy to say that, but ultimately meaningless. The science either stands on its own or it doesn't. I still haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth, and don't really want to. It seems to me that regardless of its accuracy, it's a dogmatic advocation for policy change, and Gore's previous attempt at that, Kyoto, is in my opinion a pointless waste of money and not the right way to approach solving the problem. Gore seeks to boost himself back into the public spotlight and in doing so has increasingly polarized an already polarizing issue. However, regardless, none of that has anything to do with science!

I don't think you can define this. To begin with you'd have to demonstrate a property which necessarily follows from an intelligently designed process which cannot exist in a natural process. I would like to see how you can demonstrate experimentally that a given process cannot occur without intelligent direction. Generally proving a negative is quite difficult. Perhaps the only experiment I can think of to that effect was the Michaelson and Morley experiment in which they sought to experimentally demonstrate a property of the luminiferous ether, only to have their experiment fail to do so. This is about the only way I think you can disprove that certain types of processes can occur naturally: you must find a property which necessarily follows from a natural process, then experimentally demonstrate that such a property is absent. I don't think that can be done in this instance.