John Snow is an expert in quantum mechanics? Who knew?!

If you actually scroll down the page a http://www.amazon.com/oc/echo you'll see it actually has two speakers, a "woofer" and a tweeter.

More interesting is the array of 7 mics. Should be possible to get some good positional audio capture and noise reduction that way.

I picked up an el-cheapo bluetooth speaker/mic a while ago, and it works decently enough. I can see people paying 10x more for a "premium" version of something like http://www.amazon.com/Wireless... I suppose... "Real" speakerphones for conference rooms with good NC and AEC are pretty expensive.

Did they also appear to have their fucking derp faces on while doing this? SCOTUS is supposed to be the court of common sense, where nothing else matters except what makes sense in the light of the US Constitution and being a reasonable human being. What kinds of goddamn idiots are these we've allowed to sit on this court?

Thank goodness this fisherman didn't also throw his old Beatles albums overboard with the fish, since those are "records" under the ordinary meaning of the word. Maybe in all these confirmation hearings, instead of asking potential SCOTUS justices a bunch of stupid hypothetical questions they won't answer anyway, we should use the time to figure out if the person is a moron who will do stupid shit like this.

Huh, huh, huh, thank you, drive through.

I mean, thru

The human race is a child sitting in the control room of an old Soviet nuclear power plant. A light started blinking red and some of us think we may have done something to make it start blinking red. What you're arguing is that rather than taking the time to understand how a nuclear power plant operates and what the controls in front of us do and what that blinking light means, we should start pushing buttons to see if we can make the red light go away.

That's suicidally stupid, except it's suicide for all of mankind which makes it worse. We're the only known intelligent species in the entire universe living on the only planet in the entire universe which is known to sustain life. We have a responsibility to maintain that life. Purposely screwing with the conditions on that planet without having a solid understanding of how the climate operates is completely insane and irresponsible. A responsible course of action is to take reasonable measures to limit known impact points (i.e. things we know for a fact have a measurable and directly observable negative environmental impact) while we seek to gain an understanding of the system as a whole.

yeah, yeah, greenhouse gases like CO2, and to a larger extent methane and water vapor reflect energy attempting to leave the biosphere back to Earth, keeping energy in like a blanket (or insulator), affecting the energy balance. My father-in-law is a mathematician at NASA GSFC, where he works on radiative transfer equations used to tune LIDAR instruments on NASA/NOAA satellites that measure cloud and vegetation cover. What would you like to know?

You can ask me about UNIX too... I did Slackware back when it came on 80 floppies, but I don't talk about that much; at least compared to the time I bootstrapped Debian on a laptop through its parallel port since it didn't have a removable drive or CD or USB.

So, modern nuclear power it is. Start mass producing CANDU reactors (CANDU 6es and ACR-1000s) around the world while pushing ahead with research to convert them to using Thorium so we never run dry. Put them everywhere that needs power and that can't use geothermal. Standardize on common-sense, workable regulations (starting with eliminating any stupid anti-reprocessing rules) and plow through any NIMBY BS put up by local ignorant fools. Within 20 years, you'll have replaced all fossil fuel electricity production with something that actually works and provides plenty of power for everyone.

Sure it is. It requires a huge up-front cash investment for construction, but running costs are quite low. Complete the work to replace other fuels with Thorium and you've got somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 years of power for the entire planet at current rates of use. Increase usage by two orders of magnitude and we're down to maybe 1,000 years if we never put another penny into energy R&D.

Oh darn.

Mail-in votes are wonderful. But probably too democratic for most.

He's correct in what he said, just not why he said it.

Good science isn't political at all; it merely describes reality. Climatology, as groups like the IPCC present it, isn't good science. It's a bunch of fudge-factor-laced models and ignored observations tightly wound around a political agenda. Basically, ignore what you can't explain, place assumptions anywhere the data is incomplete, draw conclusions that don't match up to reality, and pretend it all makes sense because you have "consensus".

That's not to say there's nothing usable in the whole thing. The problem is that we need better data collection, more data collection, and a lot more work put into understanding the underlying mechanics of the system as a whole before we start drawing wide-reaching conclusions about the drivers of the whole thing. The data needs to be put into real context and that means realizing the limitations and inaccuracies inherent in the proxy measurement techniques we have today and not trying to use some statistical fuzzy math to come up with some make-believe historical record.

But back to what he said, he's right in that the political nature of the "Global Warming/Climate Change" zealotry isn't science. It does, however, bear a striking resemblance to many cults.

Ah, yeah... I'm not demonizing the deniers, just admitting that they're likely more rational and politically savvy than environmentalists give them credit for. More scientific studies (and certainly IPCC announcements) are not going to change that no matter how much you rub their faces in it.

So anyone trying to "save the world" by cutting down carbon footprint will just have to do that much better to pick up the slack. Probably even more to make up for all the coal-rollers trolling them.

We have the benefit of watching this play out in Southeast Asia before it's politically expedient to do anything here. Having lived in Bangkok for a few years, the effects of pollution witnessed by average americans here in the US is a joke. We have a loooonng way to fall before we might have to even consider implementing things like China's One Child Policy. But legislation is reactionary, not proactive. No one is really going to do anything or even legislate anything until the shit really hits the fan. Which, even by the most dire global warming projection, isn't going to be that severe even 100 years out. So this is really going to be a blame game to see if they can spread some of the guilt around to people who don't really have a conscience about this sort of thing anyways.

The problem is even with global warming, the shit will never really hit the fan in a way that fault can be directly tied back to the polluters, and even if it was, good luck getting them to pay for the damages. Higher pollution will erode our health slightly. Sure lots of low-lying population centers will be wiped out, but those events will occur after hurricanes or tsunamis, and migrating the refugees will be part of some humanitarian rescue operation. I bet that even around that time, there will be more government intervention passed to stop the influx of refugees migrating to higher ground than there will be for government intervention to limit pollution.

I agree! Politics is just administrative overhead that should be minimized in both time and expense. My electricity comes primarily from hydro and wind, and I take public transit to work. What were we arguing about again?

Yes, yes, you're smart. We get it. Just substitute your nitpick with "Burning Things Bad". Sheesh.

FWIW, my original post included "Heat and Pollution". The "Pollution" bit that you omitted from your quote should more than cover the greenhouse gas effects, as well as the aerosols that reflect energy back to space and counteract global warming to some degree. Isn't it great how pollution causes both global warming and global dimming? And kinda ironic how our thirst for energy is so high that the stored sunlight we burn from the past also diminishes the amount of energy we receive for the future?

Heat is an issue as well. Urban "heat islands" are well documented in scientific literature. Sure, they're caused just as much by the sun warming up hot pavement as ICE emissions, but they've been demonstrated to change the micro-climates of cities. As you know, heat rises, pulling in denser, cooler air from elsewhere. And then you get all these people wondering why anthropogenic global warming is happening since it's been colder than usual.

Everyone is going to pay one way or another... some just seem to think starting with prevention will be cheaper than dealing with scrambling for a cure later on.

Others, understandably, will just keep chugging along as they're accustomed to. No reason to change your ways if the sky isn't falling. Can't get blamed for anything that happens that you don't see coming. Can't be held accountable for it either. And they probably won't.

Case in point: drought... (whether it's related to Anthropogenic Climate Change or not is irrelevant). As you may recall, farmers in CA had to ration their water rights this year. The government stepped in and enforced a 30% reduction on farms as they have during past droughts.

For the smaller farms that had already invested in more efficient drip irrigation technologies, this pretty much means they suffered a 30% reduction in crop output, since they're already getting the maximum crop output from their water.

For the larger farms that were using inefficient flood irrigation, they got a nice emergency government subsidy to upgrade to drip irrigation. So they had the same crop output as before this year, because the increases in efficiencies more than made up for reduced quota.

So as you see, under the system we have in place now, it absolutely makes sense to be as wasteful as possible from an entirely rational perspective. The early adopters will bear the brunt of the cost of cleaning things up both before and after issues arise. That's logic. That's the way it is.

For my part, I recently moved to a part of the US which is almost all hydro and wind power. Utilities are expensive. I pay more to to the sanitation dept. to clean my water runoff than it costs to deliver.

1/2 of the world's population lives in southeast Asia... including China, India, etc.
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-...
They've been enacting lots of policies to deal with pollution and resources, stuff you'd absolutely hate to have here in the West. The smart and rich ones come here to get away from the pollution and crowding at home. It's nice.

OK, I can simplify it more for you... "shit where you eat"

That's nice, but it's not going to change the stance of any Anthropogenic Climate Change deniers.

I'm pretty sure the reason they're denying that Burning Things Causes Heat and Pollution is not because they're dumb, but because they don't want to pay for the cleanup.

First rule of politics and law: never admit fault.

So everyone's wasting their time trying to convince the deniers of anything. They're never going to take responsibility for cleanup. Just start cleaning up without them.