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I know you have done this before and apologize for making you do it again, but perhaps you could state your beliefs as to the current conclusions of climate science in general? Do you believe that anthropogenic climate forcings, whatever form they may take, are having a deleterious effect on the climate system which is endangering the lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people? (not to mention untold animal species)

For what it's worth, the real "skeptics" are outnumbered by climate science deniers by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude. Many of these people deny anthropologically forced climate change in general.

Contrarily, I wonder if we did that how long it would be before everyone was asking "why didn't we do this sooner?"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/13/internal-memo-confirms-bi_n_258285.html Looks like Obama negotiated to keep in place the 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug Entitlement program's concessions preventing the government from negotiating for bulk discounts. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...

Yes, the concept of a trend escapes them. "Why isn't it simultaneously getting hotter everywhere on earth all the time?" The earth has seasons? The earth and sun have oscillations? What?

I think this "compromise" is terrible and an insult. Lump me into the "I'd rather they do nothing than drop the public option" category. This bill is just a handout to the insurance companies.

I think this is mainly a sign that Democrats are actually in charge now, as opposed to being hypothetically in charge. The problems they are dealing with (many of which were created by Republicans) are still there and aren't going away. The Democrats are thus (likely rightfully) getting blamed now. Why hasn't Obama fixed the economy yet?

Dunno if there are any friends from Confoederatio Helvetica are here, but I'm afraid the other day the Daily Show just tore your country a new one: For starters, Switzerland has passed a ban on minarets, the towers of Mosques. Was the minaret situation getting out of hand? The minarets issue is an especially strange one considering, as Jon Stewart points out, that there are a total of 4 minarets in the entire country. John Oliver's subsequent interview with the Swiss ambassador notes the country took a stand on minarets, but not on HITLER. All in all it was quite a skewering of Switzerland.

My gut reaction to this is: wow, the Republicans suck. Sorry if that's harsh (or redundant), but wow. This is completely absurd.

I don't think twice counts as "often"... I'm just saying the WSJ is overembellishing

How often has this actually happened? Twice?

WTF? As if all people are born with the same set of "natural instincts"? Ever thought some of these characteristics might vary from individual to individual?

This is a pretty crazy story, suggesting the hack was the work of the Russian secret service: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/was-russian-secret-service-behind-leak-of-climatechange-emails-1835502.html

Have the Austrians given up? I saw some interesting articles lately: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1942834-4,00.html In Time's retrospective of this decade, they roundly blamed deregulation for the financial crisis. They blame the repeal of parts of Glass-Steagall Act on the existence of such entities as Citigroup, the largest and most complex financial company in the world, with total assets of $1.93 trillion. They also blame changes to the fractional reserve lending laws, that "allowed the likes of Bear Stearns and Lehman to pile $30 of debt onto each $1 of capital." So for all of you complaining about unsound fractional reserve lending, yeah, it's deregulation in action. http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15016132 The Economist had an article on the complexity of IT systems at financial institutions, and what a nightmare it is to actually collect the data needed to soundly assess the risks a large, complex modern financial organization is taking at a given point in time. And really the regulation Brooksley Born was pushing for was merely having public corporations document their derivatives trading so that the central bank can look for systemic risks. The way I see our financial system was hit by metaphorical thermonuclear explosion. The housing bubble was like an initial fission device. When it goes off, the damage is devastating. But it's easy to recover. Collateralized debt obligations were like a second stage fusion reaction. None of the computer models were able to predict what would happen when the overall system started breaking down. The result was, well, very very bad. It would've been really great if the data were actually available to assess risks, and be able to build this sort of graph in something other than 20/20 hindsight: Requiring these organizations to, by law, collect the information needed to analyze systemic risks and give it to the federal government sure seems like a good idea to me. From the Economist article I gather these organizations, through bureaucratic inertia and IT hell, seem rather reluctant to self-police even their own risk, much less the systemic risks.

The sort of gestalt interflow of neural activity we see during consciousness does not occur during dreams. Cortical activity breaks down and seems to happen at a "lower level" where the various regions of the neocortex aren't able to talk to each other at once. I haven't seen that special but they do talk about the relationship between dreams and memory. Dreaming is when the contents of the hippocampus, a sort of short term memory buffer, are replayed and propagate down our neocortical hierarchy, effectively programming our novel waking experiences into long term memory.

Because if anyone actually succeeds at making a movie out of Neuromancer, it will be a complete abomination. (Though that doesn't stop people from trying) Neuromancer is a book that I am fairly convinced could never be successfully adapted into a movie. Snow Crash, on the other hand, would probably make for an awesome movie. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Perhaps you should read about Brain/Computer Interfaces.

Oh, they're only the two greatest cyberpunk novels of all time...

Can you phrase your question as a reference to Neuromancer or Snow Crash?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/06/copenhagen-editorial Don't think I've ever heard of anything like this before, but 56 newspapers are going to carry the same editorial at once. The editorial warns that action is needed to prevent the ill effects of climate change. This is an interesting way to illustrate the urgency of the matter. I haven't heard of something like it being done before.

The temporary table will be destroyed the instant you (or your framework) disconnect from MySQL

Flagged as spam, sorry

Or instead of trying to fix it, we can mitigate it, by limiting carbon emissions.

Try using a temporary table.

Yes, the full title of the book is The Road to Reality : A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. It's an all-in-one physics textbook. I don't think this really falls into the "for Dummies" category. He'll have taught you calculus before you even begin to get to the physics. Also note it's a thousand pages long and weighs nearly 4 pounds

There are ways such programmers could be useful to you. Perhaps the one way I was most useful was helping people merge code. In atmospheric science there are thousands upon thousands of different models for various entities in our environment which affect the atmosphere. I helped merge an evapotranspiration model into a regional atmospheric climate model. Another would be in the high level design of the project. Another model I worked on went through a sinusoidal curve of CPU usage, because half the time it was I/O bound. I look at that and go "this system should really be asynchronous so that the CPU-bound work isn't sitting around waiting for I/O to complete". But what atmospheric scientist is going to think that? People who know how to do high level system in general are invaluable. Most of the people you'll find practicing "computer science" in general don't really have a clue.