Computing power has helped a lot. But don't discount the billions of dollars poured into monitoring as well.

The current state of the atmosphere is input into the models every twelve hours or so (six hours, maybe?). Given the chaotic nature of weather, improved estimates of this initial forecast state lead to much better forecasts. And the dramatic increase in available satellite and station data (along with much improved data assimilation algorithms) has made this much more accurate.

P. Bauer, A. Thorpe, and G. Brunet. “The quiet revolution of numerical weather prediction”. In: Nature 525 (2015), pp. 47–55.

That is much more challenging to do for nitrogen. The triple-bond in gaseous nitrogen takes loads of energy to break, much more than O-H bonds in water.

It's done on industrial scales for fertilizer production. Genuinely curious as to how much it would increase the price of LEGO.

This analogy might prove interesting to you.

Another system that is incredibly complex in terms of a lot of moving bodies is a liquid. One cubic centimetre of water (the size of a sugar cube?) will have on the order of 100 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 molecules in it, crashing into each other billions of times every second.

And yet single-molecule condensed phase spectroscopy has been a thing for at least 20 years: https://doi.org/10.1146/annure.... Heck, people can make movies of individual chemical reactions happening at the femtosecond timescale!

M.P. Minitti, J.M. Budarz, A. Kirrander, J.S. Robinson, D. Ratner, T.J. Lane, D. Zhu, J.M. Glownia, M. Kozina, H.T. Lemke, M. Sikorski, Y. Feng, S. Nelson, K. Saita, B. Stankus, T. Northey, J.B. Hastings, and P.M. Weber. Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 255501 – Published 22 June 2015

I am not saying that M87 is similar to a box of water in terms of the challenges it presents. But I am saying that the combined amount of human knowledge surrounding some of these problems can make complex things doable.

What's the definition of a continent?

I have seen children taught anywhere from five to seven continents, based on the country I have been in. I think there is a good chance only two continents exist: America and Europeasiafrica, based on the definition of "a large landmass completely surrounded by natural water". Antarctica possibly (14 million square km), and maybe you could make an argument for Australia (7.7 million). So let's be generous and say four continents.

A better question may be, why do people care about the definition of a continent? What purpose does it serve to label something as a "continent"? Is a continent a geographical feature (like I imply above) or a political classification? That would help create a more useful definition.

Thank you! This has always been my issue with companies that say, "Customers are our highest priority." I am pretty sure that staying in business is any company's highest priority.

I browse continuously at -1. I rarely find reasonable and intelligent posts there which go against cliches. And I see plenty of both cliche and non-cliche posts at higher levels. I do not doubt that some anti-cliche posts do get buried, but I also would need more evidence to believe that it happens on a wide scale.

Of course, I generally read stories a day or two late, when people are no longer moderating or commenting. Maybe comments that go against the cliches are buried quickly and then unburied by the time I make it to them.

I agree that nature is big and complex. I also agree that it's a bit silly to assign any specific event to climate change, and I do wish people would stop doing it.

What do we know? We know that the global mean temperature has risen by a degree recently (observations and analysis, including models and experiments). From all the evidence we have, the rate of this change is unprecedented. It corresponds very well with increasing emissions of certain gases, and we have a physical explanation for why these gases trap heat.

To predict the future, we need models. Decades of development on complex Earth system models has not produced perfect results. For evidence of that, look at future projections of terrestrial carbon. Look at climate projections for specific regions in the year 2100, in particular precipitation. The agreement between the models used in the IPCC reports is not great for both of these areas.

But all the models agree that increasing greenhouse gas emissions will continue to increase the global mean temperature.

Humans are changing the climate. With the impact that the land surface has on the atmosphere, and the fact that over half of the Earth's land surface has changed from its natural state as a result of human activities (primarily food production, including both crops and pasture for livestock), we should not be surprised that this is possible. What we don't yet know is exactly what the effects will be.

Do you know why it's there? The Founding Fathers were paranoid about monarchs, or anything that smelled like a monarch. For example, a political dynasty.

Back in the days, the only real way to become well-known at a young age and across the country was by being the son of a politician. The Founding Fathers put the age limit in to give others a chance to catch up through their actions, in order to prevent dynastic families. It made a lot of sense at the time, given their situation and their experiences with monarchs. It doesn't prevent dynasties completely, but it does change how they occur. John Quincy Adams was elected president 24 years after his father's term, but John Quincy also had a pretty solid career in foreign policy beforehand.

I am curious as to if a 25-year-old wildly-popular musician, actor/actress, or sports star would stand a chance of getting elected nowadays if an amendment was passed to eliminate the age qualification.

+1 for reference to CSM. Perhaps not perfect, but better than alternatives I've found.

I also like how they don't try to be a 24/7 news service. They publish a few in-depth articles a day, and they are happy to wait a couple days before publishing in order to have a more well-written story that contextualizes the discussion.

I am beginning to suspect that checking the news every minute leads to more intolerance of other viewpoints.

I agree that Pollock's work was semi-random, not completely random.

From a 1999 article in Nature, Pollock's work had a fractal dimension that increased steadily during his life.

Even if it appeared to be random to most viewers, to me it suggests that he saw something other people didn't. Which probably makes him a genius (or insane). And since he was able to communicate that people outside his own mind, I would call him an artist of the highest order.

I doubt I could distinguish his works from a computer programmed to do the same thing. I can't tell the difference between a hyperrealist painting and a photograph, either, but I would much rather have a hyperrealist painting on my wall. For me, the method of production is integral to the artwork.

I feel like a major problem to this is your comment: "1000 breeding pairs of humans".

Right now, the technology to sustain a lifeboat on Mars is supported by...I am not sure how many people, but the supply chains are complex. Mining, manufacturing, transport, R&D, maintenance. Is it reasonable to expect two thousand people could maintain and create the tech, in addition to everything else they would be required to do (food, medicine)? If you never lived in the tropics and seen how quickly things break down there, it feels plausible, but we are literally talking about another world. Less humidity and salt in the air, sure, but more extreme temperatures and nasty solar radiation. Not to mention dust. How long until woman start routinely dying in childbirth because the medical equipment no longer works? All these "third-world" problems that our tech has eliminated will come back once the tech begins to fail.

I am all for space exploration, but I think we have a ways to go before we demonstrate the feasibility of a self-sustaining Mars base.

In my mind, that's the key: universities don't teach how to do research.

Universities teach how to use a number of tools found in research through coursework at both the graduate and undergraduate level. But that's very different than teaching how to do research. Even working on a semester-long or year-long research project as an undergraduate is very different than what an independent researcher will see. More importantly, how you approach the problem is very different as well.

Research is writing grant proposals. Research is designing experiments. Research is using cutting-edge tools published by groups of other scientists who probably made mistakes in the single paper documenting the tool and the results.

Universities give you a problem that is solvable, with high probability that the tool you need to solve it can be found in the preceding chapter (or chapters). I have yet to see research do that.

While I agree knowing the ten most common mistakes would be very useful, they mean very little to someone who has not yet already done research. As such, I expect a single class teaching them would have little impact.

If, on the other hand, you are proposing to redesign the whole curriculum and teaching methods to eliminate those mistakes, I think that might have a chance of being successful. On the other hand, given the amount of work that would take, you'd have to have very ambitious deans, department heads, and teaching faculty to make it happen.

I would say Finland, as well. I've heard many a Finn complain about how difficult it is to get good rye bread outside of Finland.

Then again, perhaps diets have changed. This is just based on my experience.

Well, of course dung beetles are in deep crap! They would be in a lot more trouble if they weren't in deep crap.

I get your argument, and I agree with it, but I would caution against saying that CO2 doesn't absorb IR. It does, due to internal vibrational motion (stretches and bends); just look at the absorption spectrum.

It doesn't permanently absorb the light, though, and I think that's where what you say is critical. It absorbs it for a short time, and then the vibrational excitation drops back down to the lower state. When this happens, it emits a photon of the same frequency that it absorbed. This photon flies off in a random direction, creating the scattering effect.

At least, this is my understanding of it. Absorption happens in this scattering, but the timescale of absorption is very short.