1930s.

Of course it is. I'm not saying he's wrong. I'm saying "compelling" is a trap. Humans love stories, and scientists these days are highly encouraged to tell stories. When I was in grad school they paid people to come and teach us how to tell compelling stories.

Not reading the article is a Slashdot meme. You didn't even bother to read the first word of the article title before dashing off something silly.

The old "toss it down a staircase and the stair it falls on is the grade" trick doesn't care much about last name.

I have to agree with you though. The first few assignments I graded I tended to have high expectations. By the end those were gone.

https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...

I quote someone else saying: "The PC world might have looked very different today had Kildall's Digital Research prevailed as the operating system of choice for personal computers. DRI offered manufacturers the same low-cost licensing model which Bill Gates is today credited with inventing by sloppy journalists - only with far superior technology. DRI's roadmap showed a smooth migration to reliable multi-tasking, and in GEM, a portable graphical environment which would undoubtedly have brought the GUI to the low-cost PC desktop years before Microsoft's Windows finally emerged as a standard. But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man."

And my comment on that included (removing all the supporting links):
      "We had choices as a society. I saw some of them first hand in the 1970s and 1980s when I started in computing. I bought Forth cartridges for the Commodore VIC and C64. I worked very briefly on a computer with CP/M (although using Forth on it though). The OS choice pushed by the person born with a million dollar trust fund who "dumpster dived" for OS listings won (who did little of the development work himself) -- with an empire built on QDOS which has shaky legal standing as a clone of CP/M which is probably why IBM did not buy it itself. And we were the worse for it as a society IMHO. ...
        But that problematical path would not have been possible without political and legal decisions to base the development of computing around the idea of "artificial scarcity" via copyrights and patents which set the stage for that. We still have choices, and we can still pick different ways forward. [With] the free and open source software movements, we are in a sense returning to older ways of sharing knowledge that were more popular before artificial scarcity was so broadly thought to be a good idea for promoting progress. One should always ask, "progress in what direction"? ...
    Bill Gate's could have spent his lifetime writing free software. That being born a multi-millionaire was not enough for him is a sign of an illness that causes "financial obesity", not something to be emulated. But, in the end, it is not Bill Gates who has destroyed our society as much as all the people who want to be the next Bill Gates and support regressive social policies they hope to benefit from someday. ..
      Those who have the impulse to share and cooperate more than hoard and compete are still stuck trying to navigate the economic mess we have made of today's society through artificial scarcity, the growing rich/poor divide, the diversion of so much productivity into weapons and consumer fads, and so on. The late 1960s and early 1970s when Kildall, Moore and Kay/Ingalls were having their breakthroughs were a more hopeful time in that sense. ...
    Still, the web and HTML5/JavaScript/CSS3 are a new hope for sharing via open standards, and they have been a big success in that sense. I'm moving more of my own work in that direction for that reason (even for all their own issues). Like has been said about JavaScript -- it is better than we deserve considering its history and the pressures that we all let shape it."

So, while you and others who are posting here are no doubt right on technical limits and marketing issues, I would say the "downfall" story is more complex socially than one man and his decisions with one design.

I'll again echo a key point about Gary by someone else quoted at the start: "But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man." We need to build a society and an economy where people who make that choice get more support and respect.

Did you respond to the wrong comment? I am indeed unsure how "long wave transparency windows" are related to the definition of "order of magnitude."

Ah, you're one of those posters who likes to write comments for the mindless adoration of their fans. Indeed, my mistake. Carry on.

This is a common claim. People like to expand it into things like, well, more CO2 and warmer climates means a lusher Earth and more food!

That's probably true. Most of the land is in the northern hemisphere, fairly far from the equator. Deserts will expand with warmer temperatures, but likely even more land will become arable in the north. I'm Canadian, and my countrymen often quip that global warming sounds pretty good.

The problem is that cities need a *constant* supply of food. I grew up in a farming community. Farmers admittedly like to bitch about everything, but there's a reason for that. They'll be happy to tell you about how any change from the norm, in any direction, negatively affects their crops. Modern agriculture, especially in the developed world, isn't some old geezer waking up one day, squinting at the sun, letting some dirt trickle through his fingers, standing up and sighing "well, I guess it's plantin' time again." It's incredibly optimized. There was a documentary, unfortunately I can't find it, on all the things the USDA tracks and models in order to make recommendations for pretty much every aspect of agriculture in the US.

Canada is supposed to get (overall) warmer and wetter. Sounds great yeah? Well, a few years ago we had a really wet fall, meaning nobody could dry hay, meaning lots of livestock had to be culled the next year because there wasn't enough food for them. Warmer also means less or no persistent snow pack in the winter, so no spring runoff.

Moving New York, Miami and New Orleans because they're getting regularly flooded is expensive, but doable. Moving Capetown, LA, or a hundred other cities because they're out of water is expensive, doable. Switching Iowa from growing corn to growing wheat is expensive, but doable. All at the same time, and along with a zillion other things starts to get dicey, and definitely more expensive. And the global climate is likely to keep shifting for a long time until the heat budget equalizes and another zillion things all equilibrate.

One of the reasons Australia was sparsely populated historically, never developed large agrarian civilizations, and agriculture is still very difficult, is that its geography makes its climate highly variable. Civilization thrives in stability.

I'm not sure how you get "there is no problem" from the species will survive but civilization is fucked. Admittedly, that is the direction climate change deniers are heading: "oh, *some* humans will survive, so we don't have to do anything!"

Pick one. Look up a vanished civilization and you've got a decent chance of finding one.

I googled "vanished civilizations" and the first hit is this:

https://www.britannica.com/lis...

First on the list is the Maya:

At its height, the Maya empire extended throughout the Yucatán Peninsula, modern-day Guatemala, Belize, and parts of Mexico, making it one of the most dominant civilizations of its time. The Maya were quite advanced, demonstrating remarkable engineering skills and employing complex mathematics. The civilization appeared unable to sustain itself and experienced a dramatic decline about 900 CE. Archeologists now believe that the Maya were victims of ongoing war coupled with climate change that resulted in famine, forcing an exodus from their largest cities. Decimation of the countryside, resulting in diminishing resources, may also have played a role.

I agree that you not knowing what you're talking about is unlikely to affect much.

I do hope nobody takes my post about your knowledge of scientific notation as some kind of support for your inane belief that the Earth being massive means we can't affect the climate.

The problem with public lectures is that you have to simplify things, and that means skipping the details.

You can present a compelling story about cosmology and the dipole in the CMB. Or the quadropole, which is weirder. Or that our galaxy is in a denser than average part of the universe. Or that our galactic cluster might be in a void.

They all have different effects, in all directions, all depend on particular sets of assumptions which aren't unreasonable but also aren't guaranteed to be true, and all are compelling when that's the only story you hear.

Rotation isn't relative the same way unaccelerated motion is. The net angular momentum of the observable universe has been measured repeatedly. As far as we can tell, it's zero.

You've dismissed an insightful comment.

It's apparently not exactly clear what 1922 theory he's referring to, but we certainly didn't just take something from 1922 and use it today as is.

There's general relativity, which we keep trying to poke holes in, the idea of the big bang itself, which dates to the 40s, dark matter, from ~1930s, refined and tested in a lot of different ways since then, dark energy from 1998, inflation in the 1970s, and a bunch of other things.

If you want to point to a single theory underlying modern cosmology that's existed approximately unchanged for a long time, it's general relativity.

Oh, climate change is best at fucking up cities. They can't move, and they're dependent on a regular supply of food.