mistermack

Maybe men are in favour of women-only leagues because they don't like losing to a woman. I'm a horrendously bad loser at chess, (although you would never tell from watching), and it doesn't matter if I'm playing a master or a machine. I can start a game, knowing the person playing me is going to thrash me, and I still hate it when I lose. It's all internal, I never show it, I'm just seething at myself inside. Even though I know I'm a rubbish chess player. Maybe there are more like me out there, in the chess world, and they find it worse if they lose to a woman. I wouldn't, my irritation is aimed at myself, I wouldn't care if it was man, woman, machine or chimp that beat me. But men with an ego might take losses to women badly.

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You would think so, but it might be more complicated than one might think : https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/124518-transgender-athletes/?do=findComment&comment=1246232 I wonder how the women chess players will react to a transgender competitor in the women's competition? That would be an interesting one. No clear physical advantage for men, but they obviously have some sort of advantage. Maybe it's just a matter of numbers. But it does seem more than that at first sight. These things can be misleading though. Forty or fifty years ago, it was commonly said in boxing circles that there would never again be a white heavyweight champion. The domination of black boxers at the top was so great that it seemed like there was an inherent advantage in black heavyweights. That's gone out of the window now. You can read too much into current trends.

Pretty useless paper, It doesn't tell you anything, doesn't even mention CO2 in the summary, and just seems to be somebody's speculations. "Attribution studies estimate that about a half (40–54%; p > .8) of the global warming from 1901 to 1950 was forced by a combination of increasing greenhouse gases and natural forcing" Sounds impressive, actually adds nothing. I thought my posts were pretty much self-explanatory.

No, but they've done a great job of dodging it.

You've ignored the points I made. I'll ask directly, is it honest to constantly quote temperatures from the start of the 20th century, when any GW resulting from manmade CO2 can only date from around 1950 ? ( or more likely 1970, there would surely be a delay in temps responding to a CO2 rise) And why do the GW people feel the need to mislead in that way ? As far as the trends go, I would point out that the red arrow HAPPENED (if the graph is right). If you started measuring in 1910, and kept going to 1945, you would measure that rise of 0.6 deg in 35 years. It's not imaginary, and does resemble the latest rise, that's been attributed to CO2. You can't ignore it, by saying it was followed by a fall, or preceded by a fall. It's still a real rise that happened, and it can't have been due to CO2 levels. I'm not claiming that it's conclusive of anything. It just weakens the case that CO2 is responsible for ALL of the rise since 1950. You might fairly claim that it's likely, but to claim near 100% certainty, as the IPCC does, is stretching the truth.

You can't dodge the obvious. Prevention is so much better than cure in every health area that I'm aware of. I do get where you're coming from, I don't like abortion, I support the right to it reluctantly, it's a no-winner situation, and there's no right/wrong, just shades of grey as usual. A full term abortion really is killing a baby, I can't argue against that, but where it stops being a fetus and starts being a baby there is no answer to. I think the current rules in this country (UK) are neither right or wrong, but are as good a compromise as it's possible to reach.

Free contraception for all, no questions asked. Free contraception advice for all, no questions asked. Free counselling for anyone who wants it. The world is overpopulated. All that stuff should be free. Tax religious organisations to pay for it all. They've been tax-free for far too long.

Definitely a known effect. Ask any Homeopath. Headaches do go. That's a known effect. And if you took an aspirin, or petted a dog, or drank some incredibly dilute water, or your mother stroked your head, you will believe that there's a link for the rest of your life. Maybe when we were evolving, making that kind of connection did actually help sometimes. There was no modern medicine, and becoming attached to some herb or other that worked might help with your survival. So the tendency could linger due to that.

In this case, it was pretty obvious that the guy wanted to be shouted down, wanted to be banned, and to portray it as big brother silencing the brave little guy. I just thought, "what would disappoint him the most?" and that was being ignored. I don't think it would play out though, it would take all readers to be on the same wavelength which is very unlikely.

Maybe they could fit autonomous vehicles with an accelerometer and fixed phone, that would notify emergency services of a crash, and the location and severity, and even put them in touch with the driver, in the case of a crash. The hardware cost would be minimal in today's tech climate, compared to the price of a vehicle.

I finally found a page that tells the rural vs urban story for the US, and my guess is miles out. Overall urban vs rural mileage in the USA is actually roughly equal, which comes as a big surprise. And the death rate per million miles isn't much different between the two, something that comes as a surprise to me. In the UK, we are always being told that the motorways are by far the safest roads for miles driven. Maybe they are in the US too, but the if so, the other rural roads are more than making up for it. It varies a lot, from state to state. Here's a national breakdown :

I think in a country like the US, you have to be careful that you are comparing like with like. Collisions per million miles are going to be far higher in urban settings, than out on the freeway. How much higher I couldn't find figures for, but it would appear obvious that rolling along on lightly used wide open roads at 60mph is far less hazardous to drivers and pedestrians than nipping from lights to lights in the city. More so in a country like the USA that has long distances between urban areas. I don't know what sort of tests they are carrying out with the autonomous vehicles, but I doubt if they are doing much rolling along near-empty interstate highways. What would they learn from that kind of sterile test? It's more likely they will be running the test cars in urban areas, and if so, you would expect the collisions per million miles to be much higher than the national average. Comparing them to the national urban average might be more realistic, but I don't know if such a number exists, or indeed where they are testing these cars. Quite right. So long as you stay up there, you are extremely safe. 🙂

We do have fly-by-wire in jet aircraft. If it's ok for planes, it should be manageable in road vehicles. I wouldn't fancy having it on my motorbike though.

What I'm criticising is the constant portraying to the public of MMGW as starting from the late 19th-early 20th century, when any climate scientist would know that CO2 levels didn't start jumping in any significant way till about 1950, the year I was born. I think quoting global rises from before then is deliberately misleading. In the public mind, one deg celsius isn't a lot, so it's just a way of getting over the one degree mark. Here's the same graph, with the two major rises arrowed by me. I'm saying that to honestly portray the amount of warming that can be assigned to CO2, you can only use the second rise, the black arrow. And also, how can you ignore the fact that the first rise happened without CO2 being significantly raised? And why should the rise shown in black ALL be attributed to CO2, when something similar already happened previously?

It could be. I didn't say they were dishonest, I'm sure that they are convinced activists, but I've followed climate very closely in the past, and GISS were always on the hottest edge of the spectrum. I ended up expecting it, and they didn't disappoint. I just looked at the arctic sea-ice page, as I do regularly, and it's not looking any worse than last year, and it's nowhere near the state that's been constantly predicted over the years. It show the July state, with the average shown as an pink line. This is two months off the annual minimum : Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis | Sea ice data updated daily with one-day lag (nsidc.org)

This graph, posted by Swansont 18 months ago, is quite a bit different from the GISS graph. Finding older ones would take time. But from this graph from Swansont, you can see a period from about 1910 to about 1945 when temperatures jumped nearly 0.7 degrees in 35 years. Obviously, that's a selected period, from trough to peak, but it happened. (If the graph is right) So you have right there, a quite dramatic temperature rise that can't be put at the door of raised CO2 levels, as the rise over that 35 year period was negligible.

I don't trust that graph. I wouldn't rely on anything thrown up by NASA/GISS. They don't match what I was looking at just a few years ago, I think they are actively massaging the story with every new version. I put them in the activist bracket, rather than unbiased science bracket. What I particularly don't recognise, the the DROP that they claim, from 1880 to 1910. I've never seen that before, in global temperature graphs. Since there were no climate satellites in 1880, nor deep ocean measurements etc, the temperatures from that era are obtained from models, and it's dead easy to get the model to say what you want.

I think AI is ideal for crime detection, and offender profiling. I believe that there is already some sort of software to identify patterns in offending, but running AI over the details of offences will be much more efficient, I would have thought. There are loads of examples where police had details of serious offenders, interviews, police notes and suggestions etc, that got filed, ignored or dumped by some cop who had his own theory and ignored anything else. The Yorkshire Ripper case is a notorious example. The top cop got fooled by a few hoax messages, and the edict went out that only suspects with a north-eastern accent should be considered. The real ripper was interviewed and the reports buried, even though the interviewing cops were very suspicious of him. If the AI was pointing away from the hoax at every turn, they could have solved it much quicker. In fact, they never solved it, he fell into their hands in the end, caught in the act.

Yes but problems are usually temporary and are only relevant long-term if they are totally insurmountable, or turn out to make the whole operation financially non-viable. I haven't heard anything regarding driverless vehicles that is threatening either of those things. It looks right now like driverless is the inevitable future.

Well, I clicked on that link, and it says that all of the fatal incidents occurred in cars that had a driver present, and there were no fatalities notified in a car that was fully driverless. I don't really know what to make of that, except that supervision by a human appears to be detrimental in some way. It's very hard to picture why that should be so, but maybe the fully driverless cars go slower, or are being used in safer environments. With a totally new technology, you would expect dramatic improvements in the early days, and given that governments are not pulling the plug on driverless vehicles, it looks like it's already made it as an acceptable risk on the roads. The true judgement will come from the insurance companies.

Very well put.

Yes, normally. But a glass window is not something that evolution prepared a fruit fly to deal with. Like moths to a lamp, they might be programmed to head for the light, to find a spot to lay their eggs. I agree eggs aren't a high probability. But I wouldn't write them off.

Well, firstly, problems are not new. In the current climate, every problem is a CO2 problem. It should follow that prior to 1950, there were no problems. Just a quick glance at history tells otherwise. If we get a flood in my home town today, it's nailed, 100% as the result of manmade CO2 levels. But three years before I was born, in 1947, they had horrendous floods in Gloucester. And CO2 was hardly changed from it's long-term average. So when you say "cause all the problems" it should be obvious that they are not all down to CO2. Same thing with forest fires. You would think that there were no forest fires, till CO2 levels rose, the way that they are reported. But that's not true at all. Forest fires have always been there. And it's likely that it's land management, rather than CO2, that is the main problem today. They've cut down nearly all the old growth, and planted new, very high density forestry, that is just waiting to burn. It's self inflicted problems, caused by greed and a lack of thinking ahead.