Or should it be Pigspartacus?

TSG

I'm going to repeat a point one other person made, just to make it again: In addition to the direct societal costs (which, I realize, can't even be easily quantified based on TFA: 600K? 400K? The amount charged, the amount paid, the amount paid less the patient's insurance premiums, divided by the number of people paying into policies for the two insurance companies?) and benefits (a few more years for 2 kids to have their dad around, an article investigating health care costs, a discussion on Slashdot on healthcare economics) there is also the advantage of having one more data point.

Because this guy was willing to keep trying, going through significant suffering for the benefit of his wife, his children, and a few more months of life, the medical community knows that a given group of drugs can extend the life of a kidney cancer patient by up to 17 months. The next kidney cancer patient, and the next cancer patient, and the next doctor looking for a way to treat this person who just walked in,and the next researcher investigating how these drugs work, all have a bit more information than they did before. They may decide that it's a goal to shoot for, or they may decide that the regimen is not quite useful. Either way, it's more than they knew before.

Of course, we can't determine the value of that, any better than we can determine whether the rest of the money spent was worth it. It's still a benefit we all get and should consider.

TSG

Political types have known about Obama since at least the 2004 Democratic Convention, when he gave a well-received speech.

He was popping up in pop culture in 2007 - A "30 Rock" episode had Liz Lemon saying she'd probably vote for McCain instead of Obama, and a "Gilmore Girls" episode has Rory as a journalist preparing to follow Obama's presidential campaign in Iowa.

I'd think that even non-political types would have noticed him by the Iowa Caucuses 2 years ago, though, it being a hard-fought campaign against the polarizing Ms. Clinton.

TSG

Not to answer for dintlu, and I'm really going to talk about famine rather than starvation per se, but:

"They're being prevented from feeding themselves" is not a bad answer. In Somalia in 1992, the people most affected by the famine, perversely, were the farmers, who were also part of the lowest social class.

In any case, the point is that famines are caused not by a lack of food, but by problems distributing food.

Food distribution is done poorly by governments that don't have their people's best interests in mind, e.g. because the government is a dictatorship or oligarchy and doesn't need to pay attention to what the people want. Conversely, famines don't happen in democratic societies with a free press - democracies have to respect the will of the people, and a free press would let the people know if food distribution is failing.

All of this is according to the work of Amartya Sen, who won a Nobel Prize for it.

TSG

Wish I had mod points.

Open-sourcing the data and process might help with overcoming those barriers. I don't know much about climate, but I deal with big dumps of numbers, and turning them into useful graphs and charts, all the time. If I could go to a place to get the data, I could possibly leave you more time to handle the simulation processing (and understand it better), and the data-collector more time to set up/check/confirm data (and understand IT better).

(BTW, for four-dimensional arrays, do you just mean that there's a point on a map, a point in time, and a depth for each measurement? Or are you dealing with other dimensions as well?)

  Of the others
  1) Computing power. Not sure how to get around this. Sure, could do some distributed computing, which people might be more interested in with more transparency.
  2) Big data dumps, representations of: LIke I said, possibly a good place for division of labor anyway.
  3) This is probably where transparency is needed the most. People might be okay with the fact that it's complicated, if they can dig in and see what the factors are, and at least come to an understanding about it.
  4) Sounds like more of the same as 3 - assuming that analysis largely includes the stuff that was too complicated even for the model.

Your "go look for them" is easier said than done. When I look around to check my honest skepticism, I end up at sites that are, well, polarized. It seems like either they have absolutely no doubt about what's happening or they have no doubt that it's NOT happening. In either case, it's hard to feel comfortable with their conclusions. And if someone does answer my big question ("The Vostok ice cores show previous cycles of warming, even more than we have now, soon followed by ice ages, so why is there a belief that This Time It's Different?") I have to figure whether they are biased, and how that affects their answer.

Which brings us back to TFA, and how polarization between the camps needs to be dealt with, so that everyone CAN agree on What The Science Says, regardless of policy prescriptions.

TSG

"Nuclear winter": Not necessarily, but an actual shooting war over greenhouse gases could potentially be as bad (millions die, etc.) as others that were fought over limited resources, even without nuclear exchanges.

TSG

Ice age? Not yet, but the Vostok cores show that these runups in temperature and CO2 have previously preceded a quick and large drop in temperature.

And I could be wrong, but the graph you linked, the graph I linked, and this other graph all indicate that the current temperature anomaly is well below the previous peaks. (Current temperature anomaly below 0.6C; previous peaks hit a max of about 2.0C.) If correct, your collapses/melts/openings/heaves aren't anything new, either.

I'm willing to learn, if CO2 levels are off the chart, and CO2 and temp are correlated, why temperature isn't closer to, or past, the previous peaks.

TSG

"It's not about being right"? Really?

And you miss a couple of alternate scenarios and outcomes.

Scenario 2a. Climate change is not primarily man-made, but emissions are keeping the next ice age from happening.
Activist result: Depth and speed of problem is accelerated by human change.

Scenario 3a. Climate change is primarily man-made, but emissions are keeping the next ice age from happening.
Skeptic result: Nothing happens.
Activist result: Ice age. Humans deeply impacted. millions die of starvation, cities are relocated, numerous mass extinctions, possible irreversible climate trends.

and for that matter
Activist result 1a. Convinced by faulty data that there is no hope unless emissions are controlled, governments struggle to achieve futile targets, concentrate more power in fewer hands, focus more resources on the problem, blame other countries for cheating on targets and dooming us all, attack industrial targets in cheating countries, humans deeply impacted. millions die of starvation, cities are relocated, etc.

I don't know for sure how I can be expected to show you enough data if scientists with opposing views are keeping that data from journals with threats of withdrawing their own results from the journals, but the Vostok Ice Core data suggests to me, anyway, that the change in temperature is consistent with other increases in the past, and is likely to be followed by a steep drop...soon.

I'm no climate scientist, but I felt better about taking out AGW before I knew actual climate scientists were behaving this way.

TSG

You've pretty much described Arclight Cinemas. It's a very small part of Pacific Theaters, with only two currently in existence, both in Southern California.
  Online tickets - check
  Reserved seats - check
  No extra charge....pretty sure, check. You can even print them up at home.
  No ads - check. Not sure how many trailers they limit to, but they aren't excessive about it in any case.

The downside, of course, is that Arclight is several dollars more expensive per ticket, with fewer ways to get in cheap (e.g. the normal Pacific Theaters have discount tickets that can be bought at a group rate, but they don't work for Arclight). I don't go to movies that often any more, though, so paying the extra money for a better experience works for me.

TSG

A Delta IV Heavy can get about 4 tons to geosynchronous orbit. With 2 of them, you should be able to get 4 tons to the moon. (Send one up with just fuel, the other with your astronauts, move the fuel over to the astronaut's vehicle, off you go.)

Use another pair to get the return vehicle onto the moon. Or to have a spare, there.

A Delta IV costs about $300 million. I'll bet you could get a discount if you bought a few at a time, but even so, that's 1.2 billion for 4.

(Not that I have a horse in the race for Ares v. Delta IV v. Proton or whatever - my point is just that we have the lift capability to do SOMETHING.)

Spend half a billion to man-rate the Delta IV, another 800 million for a launch pad, and you still have 2.5 billion left over for your vehicle - if you want to make a 50% profit on your expenditure, and if we cut the prize down to $10 billion instead of 20.

Heck with getting people up and back - $20 billion should be enough to get a full colony started on the moon.

TSG

Yeah, my first thought was "Whaaat?" but my *second* thought was "Marvel wanted to be a movie studio but couldn't make it work out" - this is probably more an indication of Marvel being in trouble than of Disney really looking forward to getting into the comic book market. And if not that, an indication that Marvel sees movies as its future and being unable to do them internally.

Although tween boys have always been a demographic hole for Disney, so maybe they're hoping to close it with this acquisition.

TSG

Bits and pieces of the moon come up for sale every once in a while. Sometimes legitimate, usually less so. A couple of links on the subject

http://www.geotimes.org/sept02/NN_moon.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0617/p14s02-stss.html

mention a Sotheby's auction of (very small) Russian rocks; the "Goodwill Rocks" which the United States gave to each country in the world which have sometimes ended up "for sale;" and a short length of adhesive tape with moondust stuck to it. I also recall reading of a bag used to carry some Apollo mission's moon rocks from some point A to point B - the bag was sold as surplus, and the owner realized that the black dirt inside it was legally acquired moon dust.

Taken together, there's some ability to determine the going price. A million dollars a gram (as the CS Monitor article suggests) seems a bit high to me, but it is in line with these other sales and attempted sales.

TSG

It will get worse for about the next 10-15 years. At which point this current crisis will peak -- with a peak like WWII or the Revolutionary War. At that point, it will turn out that what we'll need is a bunch of young adults who think they are the most important people in the world. And who will do what they need to do to get what they want.

It happened before, it'll happen again.

TSG

YES yes yes yes.

Place I worked at used island names. It's been years since I worked there, but if you asked me what Malta does, I can still tell you, and can quickly rebuild my memories to tell you what Rhodes and Sicily and Hawaii did as well.

They started using some more corporate-approved names just before I left, and I can't remember any of them, much less what they do or did.

RV