D H

Perhaps you are mistaken. Where did you get the idea that I am excluding non-land based measurements? Your graph is obviously from the Hadley Center; they are proposing to reevaluate their dataset given the email fiasco. It will take a couple of years to accomplish that. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged 1850 to 1883 was relatively flat. The Earth cooled from 1883 to 1910 or so, at least partly due to Krakatoa. The Earth has warmed considerably since the mid 1800s. I don't disagree with that. The bulk of the warming occurred during two thirty year periods: 1910-1940 and 1975-2005. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere during that latter period was significantly greater than during the former. Yet the warming during those two periods are comparable. Some researchers attribute greater warming to the 1910-1940 period than the latter period. Other researchers attribute the greater amount of warming to the latter half. This group figures very prominently in the email fiasco. Was there a Medieval Warm Period? A Holocene Optimum?

Another graph: Those two graphs are qualitatively similar: Both show a decline up to around 1910, significant warming the next thirty years, a decline in the 1940s, more or less flat from about 1945 to 1975, and a marked warming from 1975 to 2005. However, the HADCRUT graph makes it look like the majority of the warming has occurred since 1980 (0.167 °C/decade since 1980). The Japan Meteorological Agency shows a slightly different story: The majority of the warming occurred before 1980. The warming since 1980 is key. We have had satellites observing the globe since then. What does the satellite record say? 0.127 °C/decade, considerably less than that reported by HADCRUT (and GISS). The greatest warming in the land-based datasets occur in the Antarctic, the Arctic, and Africa -- precisely the places where the differences between the satellite and land-based datasets are the greatest, and precisely the places where the land-based data has the least coverage.

More (but not much more, I'm going out soon): Is this truly our most pressing problem? Will the proposed changes "fix" it? Will there be adverse side-effects? The only thing that could justify the horrendously costly remedies proposed to fix AGW is that AGW is the most pressing problem faced by humanity. I do not think this is anywhere close to truth. I do not think that AGW is the most pressing environmental problem facing humanity. We have changed the face of the planet, often times for the worse. Some of that change is unavoidable sans killing off 90% of humanity. Some of the damage can be remediated. Remediating the damage our sheer numbers and our mismanagement of the environment will require money, and lots of it. The natural resources that we use are not infinite. Neither are capital resources. Spending monies on solving minor problem when there are much more immediate and much more severe problems is, to be blunt, stupid. It does help achieve a political agenda, however. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged How is that? Yes, it has warmed since the mid 1800s. Most of that warming occurred well before we pumped immense amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Don't confuse correlation with causation.

What caused the ice ages? We've got an inkling, but we don't really know. What caused the Medieval Warm Period and the Holocene Optimum? What caused the Little Ice Age? There is nothing wrong with "we don't know (yet)". There are lots of things in science where the truthful answer is "we don't know (yet)". That (yet) of course means that this is an interesting scientific problem to be solved. Claiming to know the answers to unanswered questions is the realm of politicians and religious proselytes.

To deny that the climate is warmer now than it was 300-400 years ago is ludicrous. Of course things have warmed up since then. However, most of that warming occurred in the first half of the 20th century -- before we started dumping CO2 into the atmosphere at a ferocious rate. To deny Beer's law is also ludicrous. Of course increasing CO2 will cause some amount of warming. The question is, how much? To get to the numbers engineered by those who figure so prominently in those emails, they had to create positive feedbacks. It is those positive feedbacks that I have my doubts with. One way to look at the climate over the last billion years is that it has fluctuated wildly. Another way to look at it is that climate has been remarkably robust in spite of significant changes in the Sun's luminosity, the shape of the continents, the orientation of the Earth, and the shape of the Earth's orbit. Such robustness suggests to me that the dominant characteristic is one of negative feedbacks rather than positive feedbacks. If the dominant feedbacks are negative rather than positive, those numbers in the IPCC are sheer alarmism meant to effect a political outcome. The same goes for making the Medieval Warm Period and the Holocene Optimum disappear. These scientists have switched from being scientists to being politicians. Lousy politicians, I might add. Any politician worth his or her salt knows that one should never commit to written words various machinations needed to achieve an end, or what one really thinks about an opponent.

Yes, let's just belittle the whole thing, shall we? This reaches much further than three or four people. Does the emails show a conspiracy? In the sense of that stupid parody, no. What they do show is groupthink. Some of the effects of that group think are just as pernicious as a true conspiracy. For example, the engineering of a false consensus and the manipulation of the peer review process. Ah yes, let's just poison the well as well. And re-poison the well. Some people are indeed acting like the tobacco industry -- the ones who engineered this false consensus. They are also acting a lot like another person caught by the release of damaging material. His response was "I am not a crook." That of course did not work.

I would venture that the reason you were able to help in this effort was because you are one of those select few who can think with both a scientific and computer programming mindset. Assuming the sci-fi version of the multiple worlds interpretation is correct, there almost certainly would exist a parallel universe in which bascule became an atmospheric scientist rather than a computer scientist. Most people you'll find practicing any technical endeavor don't really have a clue. It's sad in a way.

Sure is, reductio ad absurdum. Any proposition that admits a contradiction is non-valid; it must be rejected. triclino appears to still have a problem distinguishing between universal and existential quantifiers. The easiest way to prove an existential quantifier is by example. To prove the proposition some integers are even, all one needs to show is that 2*1=2. Done. [math]a\in S, P(a)\implies \exists x\in S: P(x)[/math]. Proof by construction is a bit tougher, exhaustion even tougher, but they all come down to the same rule, which is existential introduction. Universal and existential quantifiers are related in that the negation of a universal quantifier is an existential quantifier, and the negation of an existential quantifier is a universal quantifier: [math] \aligned \neg(\forall x\in S \;P(x)) &= \exists x\in S \;\neg P(x) && \text{Negation of a universal quantifier} \\ \neg(\exists x\in S \;P(x)) &= \forall x\in S \;\neg P(x) && \text{Negation of an existential quantifier} \endaligned[/math]

You made a universal statement. A simple counterexample *is* proof that your claim is false.

It looks a lot like a UML class diagram. It looks a lot like a UML class diagram created with Umbrello, but with the atrocious default colors overridden. Not that I know *anything* about UML. (Admit that you know that computer sciency stuff in a technical organization and the next thing you know you are stuck with some truly nasty job like coordinating your company's CMMI 3 compliance plan and V&V plan. The next thing you know after that is that your pet math and physics problems need to be turned over to someone else because the company needs you to dedicate your time to those pressing corporate issues.) Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Back on topic: This looks like a homework problem. Our job here is to help you do your own homework. I already gave you some good pointers, maybe a bit too much. Compare the scenario you posted originally to your design. Can you point out where your design accomplishes each of the items in that narrative? If not, why not, and what can you do to fix it?

Surface tension and capillary action. Have you driven a vehicle on a beach? Drive too far from the water and you risk getting stuck in the loose, dry sand. Drive too *close* to the water and you risk getting stuck in the loose, saturated sand. There is an optimal distance from the water where the sand has the greatest cohesion. Dry sand is only sand+air, and without the water there is nothing to bind the grains of sand together. Saturated sand is only sand+water, and without the air the water exerts little cohesive force to bind the grains together. To have wet, sticky sand all three phases need to be present: solid sand + liquid water + gaseous air. Imagine two grains of sand in close proximity being wetted. The water will move toward the closest points of contact due to capillary action. If there's enough water in the mix the water will bridge the gap between the grains. It is the shape of that bridge that makes the sand sticky. Suspend a droplet of water in the air and it forms a nice sphere. The surface has positive curvature. That bridge between the grains of sand has negative curvature. Instead of being fat in the middle (a sphere), the bridge between grains of sand is skinny in the middle. It forms a hyperboloid. The wasp-waisted shape that results from surface tension in turn results in the water being at a slightly reduced pressure compared to the air, and that in turn results in the grains being drawn to one another. Repeat that many, many times over throughout the volume of slightly wet sand and you have a substance with significantly greater cohesion than dry sand. What about saturated sand? Start with dry sand and gradually add more and more water. That first bit of water spreads a bit to thin to accomplish much. Add a bit more and those bridges start forming. These are ultra-wasp-waisted bridges, so they have a *lot* of cohesion. Add a bit more water and more bridges form. The sand becomes even more cohesive. Add even more water and those bridges become a bit less wasp-waisted, so a bit less cohesion per bridge. However, more bridges still form, and this more or less counteracts the fact that each bridge is a bit weaker. The cohesion will remain more ore less constant as you keep adding water -- up to a point. Eventually, those bridges become tubes, then those tubes join. The cohesion goes down. By the time the sand is saturated there is no longer much holding it together.

Most computer programmers wouldn't have the foggiest idea what to do with the SVD even if they had a potential application. From other posts, Bascule has spent a lot of time in the trenches of scientific computing. He can probably tell horror stories of the quality of the code written by scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. I've been there too; it is truly abysmal. The SVD is a prime example. The Numerical Recipes version has a cyclomatic complexity in the high 80s, IIRC correctly. That means that that particular implementation of the algorithm is essentially untestable. So if scientists, mathematicians, and engineers are truly atrocious at programming, why are they allowed to do it? The answer is simple: Bad as they are as a group at programming, computer programmers as a group are even worse when it comes to math and science. I long ago made the mistake of hiring a scientifically illiterate computer programmer to help with the computer science aspects of a scientific computing problem. Big mistake; once bitten twice shy. (Others have repeated this experiment for me. It is always a mistake.) There are exceptions on both sides. Some scientists, etc. do know how to write/design a well-crafted computer program, and some programmers are quite adept in math and science. Those exceptional people who can use both mindsets are golden. Literally golden. They can command a significantly higher salary than their run-of-the-mill cohorts who cannot cross over to the other way of thinking.

Good start. Constructive criticism, and do take it that way please. 1. No inheritance. The first part of the problem on types of books screams inheritance. How can I find out that Ringworld is a science fiction book set in the late 29th century or that Gravitation is a graduate-level physics text? 2. What's this Controller thing? There is too much information in this controller and very little in the real objects in the system. 3. For example, customers buy books, and suppliers supply them. 4. Where are the reports?

Granted: Glen Beck is an idiot. And a loon. Some loons and idiots latch on to those who disagree with the engineered consensus such as Lindzen and Choi, or Pielke Sr and Jr, or Roy Spencer, to name a few. So what? Other loons and idiots latch on to the AGW viewpoint. The views of loons and idiots are irrelevant.

I don't have time to respond in detail, but Wow!, What a whitewash.

As a sanity check, some numbers: [math]\aligned x \quad & \,\,\sqrt{x^2+x} \\ \phantom{0000}1 \quad & \phantom{0000}1.4142 \\ \phantom{000}10 \quad & \phantom{000}10.4881 \\ \phantom{00}100 \quad & \phantom{00}100.4988 \\ \phantom{0}1000 \quad & \phantom{0}1000.4998 \\ 10000 \quad & 10000.49999 \endaligned[/math]

[math]\sqrt{x(x+1)} = \sqrt{x^2+x} = \sqrt{x^2\left(1+\frac 1 x\right)} = |x|\,\sqrt{1+\frac 1 x}[/math] Assuming x is positive, this becomes [math]\sqrt{x(x+1)} = x\sqrt{1+\frac 1 x}[/math] This is still exact. For small numbers [math]|a| \ll 1,\, \sqrt{1+a} \approx 1+\frac 1 2 a[/math]. Using this to approximate the radical in the above for large x, [math]\sqrt{1+\frac 1 x} \approx 1 + \frac 1 {2x},\,|x| \ggg 1 [/math] Thus for large x, [math]\sqrt{x(x+1)} = x\sqrt{1+\frac 1 x} \approx x\left(1 + \frac 1 {2x}\right) =x + \frac 1 2[/math]

Phi for All (post #22) linked to the Wikipedia article on the Smith Act. That article says Prosecutions continued until a series of United States Supreme Court decisions in 1957 threw out numerous convictions under the Smith Act as unconstitutional. The statute remains on the books, however. In short, it is one of the myriad of statutes that remain on the books but are essentially unenforceable. One of the key cases was Yates v. United States. The Smith Act does not prohibit advocacy and teaching of forcible overthrow of the Government as an abstract principle, divorced from any effort to instigate action to that end. The Smith Act as written did not pass the clear and present danger smell test. Is Rush a clear and present danger? Clearly. Is he a dangerous idiot?

It can be a bit hard to chase down the origin of terms in mathematics. My guess: Given some N×M matrix A and an R×S matrix B, the product AB only makes sense mathematically if R=M. In that case, AB is the N×S product of an N×M and an M×S matrix. The inner dimensions, M in this case must match but do not play a part in the dimensionality of the product. An n-vector can be interpreted as being a 1×n matrix (a row vector) or an n×1 matrix (a column matrix). There are two ways in matrix theory to represent the product of two vectors: as the product of a row vector and a column vector (1×n × n×1), or as the product of a column vector and a row vector (n×1 × 1×n). The former is the "inner" product (the n's match up on the inside) while the latter is the "outer" product (the n's match up on the outside). For example, using three vectors, [math] \bmatrix a & b & c\endbmatrix \bmatrix e \\ f \\ g \endbmatrix = ae+bf+cg[/math] [math] \bmatrix a \\ b \\ c\endbmatrix \bmatrix e & f & g \endbmatrix = \bmatrix ae & af & ag \\ be & bf & bg \\ ce & cf & cg\endbmatrix[/math]

That's very nice, but the Earth's core is not rock.

You are thinking of the mantle. The core is solid.

Because space is a three dimensional.

I took iNow's statement quite differently: That is pure bunk. (Sorry to be so blunt, iNow). Laws are precisely what distinguishes real physics from the nonsense that predominates over in the speculation and pseudoscience sub-forum. Just because people are using mathematics does not mean they have moved from the domain of science to mathematics. At least in physics, exactly the opposite is true: Until people use mathematics, they are not doing physics. ================== Count me in! Mathematics is distinct from the sciences. It does not use the scientific method because the scientific method is all about relating scientific conjectures to reality. Conforming to reality is not an immediate concern in mathematics. Suppose some future physicist working in the field of string theory devises an experimental test of that theory. Now suppose that the experiment is performed and that it entirely falsifies the theory. (All it takes in science is one stupid experiment to toss a vast body of knowledge into the trash bin of failed scientific theories.) String theory has motivated the development of a lot of interesting mathematics. If some experiment does falsify string theory as a scientific theory, it will not say anything about the validity of the mathematic theorems developed as a consequence of developing string theory. Those theorems, assuming they were properly derived, remain true.

I disagree. The Stefan-Boltzmann equation is about as uninteresting to mathematicians as are the equations that accountants use to balance their books. Just because something is stated mathematically does not mean that it is in the domain of mathematics. Science requires mathematical statements. Pseudoscience does not.

All three of these responses are wrong. What is a scientific law? Here are a few: the Stefan–Boltzmann law, aka the Stefan–Boltzmann equation. Gauss's law, aka Gauss's flux equation aka Gauss's flux theorem. Faraday's law of induction, aka the Maxwell–Faraday equation. Gauss' law + Gauss' law for magnetism + Faraday's law of induction + Ampere's law, aka Maxwell's equations. Law is a synonym for equation. A scientific theory must yield predictions, and very specific predictions, of the outcome of an experiment. Laws, aka equations, are the thing that distinguish a scientific theory from hand-waving pseudoscience.