Well if a volcano jumped off a cliff would you do that too?
Thank you for making me laugh.
For some reason your comment and all this "change our climate before climate change changes our changes" weirdness makes me think of this brief anticlimactic interlude .
I'm bored, said humanity. Let's fuck with the albedo. Ratchet it up until we trigger Snowball Earth. Then we'll squeak it back a bit and have the perfect setting.
The associated EMP pulse
* will make all the WiFi Barbies hiccup
* Pebble Smartwatch with AC synchronous motor all start running backwards
* hasten return plague infested gerbils
* make Slashdot say "read rest of comment..." when is no rest of comment to read or is whitespace (oops already happened)
* make AT&T undercharge customers
* will change spelling of some words even in old dictionaries
* will change hidden embedded satanic message into incomprehensible phenomic gobblegook
* will turn chemtrail into contrail
* will contaminate Portland Reservoir with water they will drain and refill at taxpayer expense
* will do nothing out in the desert no surprise there
* will cause brain cloud
* will change Lady Gaga name to Ydal Agag and Huckleberry Finn to Fuckeberry Hinn no one will notice
* will solve discrete logarithm and knapsack problem by making people realize that despite their insolubility everyone is all ok the kids are alright so there really is no problem
* will make apocalypse crazed people reset back to factory defaults and they will walk around with default wallpaper for faces
* will reveal that we have two suns but only to drunk people
* will short out Hillary Russia reset button because it used cheap copper click disc design and was not properly shielded and we do not need woman president we need more female engineers
* will not be televised
Having the ability to touch any word on the screen and have definitions, translations, and wikipedia entries pop up as you read (which is great for many of the older books) is a fantastic benefit over and beyond the simple fact that so many of the world's classics are available free of charge wherever you have internet access is a bonus that can't be overlooked. Honestly, in terms of studying books such as Gibbon's Fall of the Roman Empire, I find myself eternally grateful for such capabilities.
I agree wholeheartedly that the eBook experience *could* be much better than physical books, but it isn't.
As an experiment, I recently picked up a reader and tried it (Sony eReader). Here's what I found:
All in all, I haven't used my eReader much.
It might be OK for narrative stories, light paperback reading that you can do in a dentist's office, and if it's a modern eBook written with proper formatting, but for anything remotely sophisticated it's insufficient.
I don't go fast enough to need to change clothes when I arrive
It's usually cold enough and dry enough that I don't need to change clothes when I cycle in to work. On the downside though you really cannot cycle in the winter - the river valley park I cycle through has ~0.5m of snow which they don't plough and the temperatures can hit -40C which is a bit nippy for cycling (although so do do it!).
On the plus side the summer is warm (20-25C) and low humidity usually which is ideal cycling weather and there is far less rain than a British summer - even those in East Anglia. Not sure about the "free" part though - bikes take money to buy and upkeep. One of the strange things I've notices switching from a wet UK climate to a dry central Albertan one is that chains wear out quickly. I cycled for 6-7 years as an undergrad/grad student without needing to replace a chain but here I had to replace it after less than 3 years.
Blinding weapons are banned? Not so.
From that article:
[...] a soldier he interviewed after an incident in Iraq a few years ago. While on duty, the soldier fumbled a dazzler he was trying to point at an oncoming vehicle a safe distance away. “He was in an awkward position and illuminated a rearview mirror in such a way that he got a beam directly back into the eye.” The beam had gone less than 6 metres when it hit the soldier in the centre of vision of his right eye, burning the retina and leaving his vision in that eye permanently damaged.
Yeah, right. Blinding lasers are banned from military use, except that the military uses them and (from the article) are being made available to police departments.
I'm missing something here - is it OK if it blinds soldiers so long as the *intent* is not to blind soldiers? Is the ban only for *combat* soldiers and not policing soldiers? Is it only banned in *declared wars*, and not *non-war military invasions*?
Can anyone explain why we use dazzlers when they appear to be on the banned list?
I think we can all agree: scientists have killed more people than any other group in history.
I dunno about that - Genghis Khan supposedly killed 40 million, which was 11 percent of the total population of the time.
Hitler killed 5 million Jews, the Hutus killed a million other Rwandans. I'm not sure how many scientists were on their side(s), but none of the responsible parties (people who made the decisions, gave the orders, or actually carried out the actions) stand out as being scientists.
I don't know that scientists kill all that many people - as individuals they're pretty weak.
As a group, they're more "enablers" than killers.
Fritz Haber was an interesting guy.
His actions - turning chemistry to the task of killing soldiers - was considered abhorrent by many people and caused much political and philosophical debate at the time.
His position was that (I'm paraphrasing) his country and its way of life were in jeopardy, and any action taken to prevent that was justified. He saw no difference between shooting an enemy soldier dead and killing them dead with chemicals.
And although he used Chlorine, the other side (French Chemist Victor Grignard) was working on Phosgene gas at the time. We look to Haber as the first use of chemical weapons, but Grignard was only a little behind and the French produced and used only a little less phosgene gas than Germany did during the war.
Modern weapons design (guns and such) supposedly favor wounding the enemy soldier instead of killing them - the theory being that the enemy has to spend more resources dealing with wounded than they do dealing with dead bodies (fellow soldiers have to help the wounded to the hospital, supplies and support of hospitals, &c.)
I suspect Haber would have seen no difference between wounding an enemy using phosgene gas and wounding them using a gun. Phosgene, when mixed with tear gas, wounds the enemy but is largely non-fatal.
I'm not sure I see the difference either.
Can anyone explain why wounding someone with a gun is more palatable than burning them with phosgene gas (or napalm or phosphorus)?
He argues about climate denial, and resorts to insults attempting to make the point. Antagonizing people is probably the worst method of teaching them.
Yes but he is at least honest about that: he is one of America's foremost science educators and he grades America's science education as an 'F' so exactly how good a teacher did you think he was going to be?
An astronomer might know a little about the optics inside his/her telescope, but the level of understanding that a physicist would have is simply not in scope.
Actually I would expect an astronomer to have a level of understanding of the optics in their telescope comparable to that of a physicist's understanding of their own experimental apparatus. If you don't understand the apparatus you use to collect the data then that data is useless because you won't know whether some interesting feature of the data is due to some new phenomena never before observed or because you forgot to plug in your GPS cable properly.
Maybe, it's more than just laws about how easy or hard it is to get a firearm?
Undoubtedly it is - historically neither the US nor Europe had strict gun control laws and neither appeared to need them. However given that both now have a problem with violence in society it is undoubtedly the case that gun control limits the damage of that violence. Having strict gun control laws in one region is useless: it is trivially easy to go outside that region, purchase what you want, and return with it with almost zero chance of being caught. It's like a "dry country": everyone there just drives a few kilometres to the county next door to purchase alcohol.
Restrictions on items only work when you implement them throughout a region where there is some border control e.g. at the national level. Once you have this there is a reasonable chance of being caught and/or the expense to avoid detection limits the number of criminal enterprises who can get around the law and so limits supply.
How about removing that rule as a first step? 'Gun free zones' are instant targets.
You might possibly have had a point if we were considering an armed robbery of the mall, although the fact that countries with strict gun control laws have murder rates that are a tiny fraction of the US suggests that the downsides far, far outweigh any small benefit.
However I really don't understand how a civilian armed with a gun will stop a terrorist bomb. Having armed civilians wandering around a shopping mall shooting anyone with a backpack, bag or briefcase who looks "suspicious" frankly sounds like a far more terrifying prospect than a terrorist with a bomb and one likely to result in far more deaths. What we need is a plan to stop them from causing "terror", not one where you do it for them
Anyway I don't know why a parent should not be a good parent if he looks for extra means of protecting his children, other than what you can do every day.
What is being asked for is not a form of protection but a dangerous abdication of responsibility. Indeed we've known it is bad for so long that we actually have a fairytale we read to our children which cautions against it. Remember the tale of sleeping beauty who was to prick her finger on a spinning wheel before falling asleep and so the king banished all spinning wheels from the kingdom. Since it was impossible to completely enforce the blockade the result was that when she saw a spinning wheel she was so curious abut it she ended pricking her finger.
The same applies to the internet: you cannot block everything. Instead you can just use the same approach that you use for everything else in life: set out the rules, supervise them so you have a reasonable chance of noticing any serious violations (if your kids are human there will be violations and you will not catch all of them), make sure there are consequences for those serious violations you do catch and finally teach them how to deal with any inappropriate content which they do manage to see.
Nobody suggests that we should combine HHGTTG and Google Glass to make glasses for kids that will turn black and the first sign of anything deemed inappropriate occurring in real life. Indeed we set up rules for our kids to help avoid such situations and we make sure that our kids know how to handle such situations if they do occur (e.g. say no to strangers, don't do drugs etc.). So why don't we take the same approach to parenting with the internet?
Seriously, who is 'Freeman Dyson'? I've never heard of him.
Think back, remember that Star Trek episode where they flew the ship inside a sphere the size of a planetary orbit? Remember what they called it? It was a Dyson Sphere.
That Dyson. The one they named the sphere after.
He's still alive.
I'm framing this in terms you'll understand, since your parents haven't yet shown you how to use Google.
On the eighth day, God created FORTRAN.
