bascule

I'm curious why Obama doesn't back conversion to a single-payer system... There was an interesting Politico article on the subject: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0409/21763.html

Spoken like a true politican... we're talking about a dude who had civil discourse with Bill O'Reilly. Those are great attributes of a politican, meaning he's good at disguising his own prejudices and playing it off all suave. I suppose the other word for that is "lying". Sometimes I feel the guy is lying to me, saying one thing during his campaign and doing the complete opposite once he holds office. Whatever, he's a politican, no doubt. But a damn good one

Well then, I invite you to have a discussion about climate change with jryan and see how long it takes before you start tearing your hair out.

I am almost exclusively discussing these type of people. That's what I'm discovering. I think that may be a bit too vague. Clearly there are some humans capable of actually responding to the arguments of others and defending their assertions.

From my experiences these people are not open to evidence whatsoever. These are the kinds of people who label themselves "skeptic" then don't bother to research the scientific argument, instead they judge the science based on the arguments of laymen who argue to their existing position. They have their minds made up and don't even want to bother to examine the scientific position. Good luck convincing them of anything. They are extremely stubborn and incapable of evidence-based thinking. Instead they sit around and regurgitate disinformation and propaganda being spouted by an unscientific audience of laymen. My general pattern talking to these people is one part trying to convince them of the science, one part trying to get them to defend the assertions they are making, and one part complete and utter frustration when they won't do anything but regurgitate disinformation. Oh, the whole time professing they're "skeptics". I don't know how to deal with these people. It's the same problem I have with creationists. What's a good word to describe them?

No, but you're using their graphs to make arguments they are not. The purple line is not the trend line. One of its endpoints is the 20th century mean, the other is the mean for 2008: I'm not sure why they plotted it like that, however you seem to be using it to argue that the overall trend is 0.1 C of warming (for the contiguous 48 states). And then the world, right? That seems to be what you're implying. You cherry picked the year 2008, which was unusually cold. All your arguments were based on 2008, not the overall trends. Can you do me a favor and... read harder before you try to use something like NOAA's data to present arguments that are in direct contradiction to NOAA's conclusions? http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html#q3

You're full of something... it isn't hope. Let's pretend our problems don't exist and they will disappear! It's like The Secret! Yes, that is correct. 2007-08 were unusually cold. If you look at the values coming out of the smoothing filter the difference is 1.1C. Isn't cherrypicking fun?

Building an intercontentinental power grid is also a difficult technical challenge.

Those are all valid concerns. I think you may have been overly harsh on OCaml though. The syntax is ugly but the semantics are pretty nice, and I think it does a good job of mixing functional and imperative concepts. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder though. I think Java is fairly ugly, and C++ is total garbage, especially when you start mixing in templates.

Yes, D or Java fit the bill here. Java is substantially more mature though. D is riddled with compiler bugs and two inconsistent standard libraries. Java is pretty much the "industrial strength" version of what you're describing. The same could be said of C#. In fact the only execution strategy of the .NET CLR is to compile to native code. There is no interpretation whatsoever. Java uses a hybrid strategy of compiling to native code and interpreting JVM bytecode, which arguably allows it to perform more advanced optimizations of the compiled native code.

You live in Texas? Please tell me you're in Austin. If I lived somewhere like Houston I'd go stark raving mad.

I think your arguments are more aptly applicable to "deniers" than they are to those who are applying the label. It is a label I would place on someone who has been presented with the scientific argument and completely ignores it, then goes on to continue to not only spout unscientific falsehoods, but claim the science is wrong without reasoning. My guess would be these people are politically motivated. They are tired of hearing liberals talk about global warming, so they take the contrarian position by default. From there they have their position firmly set in their minds, then they go about trying to cherry pick "evidence" to show that the scientists are all wrong. I wouldn't label you a denier, but sometimes your opposition is a bit... overzealous. From earlier in the thread: Here is the graph from Mann et al 1999: The graph does show a general downwards trend from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age. More recent simulations generate similar graphs: The blue (not dark blue) line shows Mann et al 1999. The red and dark red lines show more recent reconstructions from 2005. (Click the image for more information) I still don't understand why there is so much controversy surrounding the "hockey stick", or why for that matter the phrase "hockey stick" is inextricably linked to Mann et al 1999. Mann didn't coin the phrase "hockey stick". More recent simulations yield similar results. Perhaps you can tell me if you see anything in the more recent reconstructions that you find questionable which shared data with Mann et al 1999. I see absolutely nothing wrong with going to an advertising company. Climate science has a PR problem, especially in America. The reporting is awful, undue publicity is given to unqualified people, and in general the way the population as a whole perceives climate change is a far cry from how the general scientific community sees it. There is also a cacophony of disinformation being spread by countless sources I would label "deniers". Fear, uncertainty, and doubt about climate science abounds in the American public. It's going to be an uphill battle for climate scientists to even convince the general public that their work is credible science and they're not part of some UN conspiracy to use global warming as an excuse to take over the world.

This was pretty nifty: http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2009/07/what_does_climate_model_output.php tbXwRP0CQNA It's a visualisation of one month's worth of simulation time from a general circulation model, condensed down to a 25 second video. This particular GCM is UCAR's CCSM, with the modeling having been done at NCAR. Oh, did I mention that both NCAR and UCAR are located right here in my hometown? Interesting stuff.

I would imagine that, much like the AIDS epidemic in Africa has provided immense selection pressure for acquiring some degree of HIV immunity (or the ability to live with the virus), there will be immense selection pressure to tolerate more toxins in drinking water as people are forced to turn to more contaminated sources, because those who cannot tolerate the toxins will die. That is, unless technology steps in and saves the day...

Wouldn't the abundance of food available remove selection pressures against putting less energy into growth?

C++ is, for the most part, a superset of C, however there are syntactic constructions that are valid in C which are not valid in C++. In that regard, Objective C does better than C++. All C programs are valid Objective C programs. The same cannot be said for C++. From a purely syntactic point of view you can try to argue that. However, there are more appropriate choices for the "mother language" of languages like Java and C#. The languages (and C++) are all descendants of Smalltalk, which is in turn a descendant of Lisp. I am reminded of Guy Steele's (author of the Java specification) quote: C++ is quite likely the most complicated programming language ever created, or at the very least it's the most complex language which has ever seen mainstream success. This is due in no small part to the fact that it's really 3 different languages: the C preprocessor, a functional templating language, and the C++ language itself, which is in turn mostly a superset of C. Because of this the processing of C++ source code is in fact Turing Complete, where the processing of most programming languages is "context free" meaning that you cannot use the language processing to emulate a Turing machine. There's only one other language offhand I can think of that has a Turing Complete parsing stage, and that language is Perl. The C legacy also duplicates a lot of concepts from C++. Should you use a pointer or a reference? While the answer should generally be "use a reference, dummy!" a lot of people with a C programming background will eschew that and use pointers, and in the process may inadvertently break things like the copy constructor. Regardless, C++ is anything but "very simple" I don't think C++ will die, but it is anything but a growing language. Higher level languages will continue to erode mindshare from C++ and its popularity will continue to diminish. C++ had its day. That day is over. Newer, better languages are replacing C++ and will continue to do so.

I think a particularly interesting proposal which has not received much mainstream attention is HR 676 which would create a true universal single-payer healthcare system. The bill is co-authored by Dennis Kucinich who has been a long-time advocate of such a system. I recall in the 2004 Democratic presidential debates among Kerry, Edwards, and Kucinich (who was only there because he had not yet conceded) Kucinich asked both Kerry and Edwards to join him in support of universal healthcare. Kerry and Edwards didn't know how to respond and there was an awkward silence before Larry King, the debate moderator, exclaimed "SOCIALISM!" Of course, universal single-payer healthcare isn't socialism. The hospitals, doctors offices, pharmaceuticals, and all other parts of the healthcare system would remain privately owned. However they would receive all of their funding from a single not-for-profit non-governmental entity. This stands in contrast to more socialistic healthcare programs like Health Canada or the UK's National Health Service, where all of these entities are government-owned. The program would, in effect, destroy the entire health insurance industry in America, and pay for itself with funds which were previously going to private insurers. Kucinich has long claimed such a system will save money in the end because it will eliminate the large overhead involved in billing multiple insurers.

It's an interesting site in general because they have authors all over the political spectrum and every article is accompanied by the author's position on the "political compass" I don't know if that really holds water in my mind. If it was intended as this sort of invective that's not how I'm trying to use it. That said "denial" seems a rather apt description of what these self-ascribed "skeptics" are doing in most cases: "Denial is a defense mechanism postulated by Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence." (courtesy the always trustworthy Wikipedia)

I see that sort of thing happening among Ron Paul supporters, although he attracts not just conservative libertarians but liberal anarchists. He attracts the latter to the point that one of my Republican "friends" remarked "don't a bunch of liberals like Ron Paul?" (as if that were a bad thing) when I brought him up

Where they won't agree is when you ask what should be done, although it was rather strange to see a "libertarian" like Beck talking about the evils of corporate control and influence in government. Libertarians (capital-L intended) are typically rather que sera sera about that sort of thing. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedOf course, Glenn Beck is still a douchebag: http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200907170034 He asks: why did we bail out Wall Street instead of "Main Street"? His answer: the President [Obama] is a Marxist Let's see: 1) The bailout happened under Bush, not Obama 2) Obama hates rich people, therefore he bailed out Wall Street instead of Main Street (even though he didn't) durrrrrr.... yeah bailing out Wall Street fat cats is a Marxist, anti-rich sort of move (thanks Bush!) 3) Obama is going against the rich and trying to prevent people from being rich. I think the economy (inherited from Bush) is keeping people from being rich *facepalm* "To Ann Coulter's point..." *stab out eyes*

For what it's worth, Democrats don't agree either: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/07/17/health.care/index.html?eref=rss_topstories This is why it's best to avoid painting people with too big of brush strokes.

The other advantage I noted earlier is that, at least in the case of Haskell, your code is abstracted in such a way that it can be compiled directly to the opcodes of data parallel architectures such as CUDA. With C++, you're SOL. You'd have to rewrite the hotspots of your code specifically for each data parallel architecture you're interested in targeting.

I give up. You're hopeless.

The Glenn Beck video was surprisingly not as bad as I thought it was going to be, his snide remarks about healthcare aside. Although, what's with the red and blue signs? Is that supposed to be "Republicans fault" vs "Democrats fault"? That's what it seemed to correspond to. Whatever. I'm glad to see mostly well-informed indignation against Goldman Sachs coming from a Fox News mouthpiece like Glenn Beck.

pfft fixed