Exactly, and the thing that extrapolative SF authors are really, really bad at is predicting the future. Why anyone would even bother to consider Stoss's opinions on such matters is unclear.

He certainly has no particular track record of accuracy in predicting the future of aerospace technology. Has he written on the economics of hub/spoke vs alternative route configurations? Non-metalic fuselage technology? Hypersonic propulsion and the various approaches being investigated to reduce wave drag? How about his work on the medium-haul market in the late '90's? Did he invest in Bombardier in '95 and get out in 2000 for a 750% gain?

If you were to build the Concord today the design would be very different, and much more efficient. Expect a number of smaller, lighter, more efficient supersonic transports to be built in the next decade. Expect the same companies to be keeping an eye on hypersonic and sub-orbital research. NYC or LA to Beijing in a few hours would be worth money if the cost/time/safety equation can be balanced, and it's way too soon to say it can't.

My prediction is that before the end of the 21st century a sufficiently rich person will be able to book a regular flight from from NYC to Beijing or Delhi that takes less time than any regular flight from NYC to London or Paris, because hypersonic/suborbital will make economic sense in the former case but not the latter. Meanwhile, delays at airports because of security etc will mean it will be possible to get anywhere in the world in under 10 hours, and nowhere in under three hours.

First we have to agree on what kind of problem we have.

To the post-modernist left climate change is, always has been and always will be a social and moral problem, and the only way to solve it is abstinence.

To post-modernist right (the anti-science, "words mean whatever I want them to" right) climate change is a political problem that needs to be solved by political manipulation (denialism).

To anyone who isn't an ideology-addled moron climate change is a technological problem that can be solved by the usual mix of minor tweaks to tax policy and technology policy that has fixed every major issue the developed world has faced in the past century. Carbon taxes (and concomitantly reduced income taxes, a move that only a wealth-hating socialist could oppose) will actually do most of the job to incentivise industry to move in the right direction, although direct government support for conventional nuclear and advanced nuclear research would help as well.

Since no one on the left or right is much interested in doing anything with climate change except whipping up outrage in their base, not much gets done, but slowly technologists and technocrats will push our focus towards actually solutions to the actual problem.

False. Many countries are social democrat, but no country outside of a tiny number of failed states like Cuba are socialist.

Socialism, as an economic system, is defined by public ownership of the means of production and nothing else. German fascism was "socialist-like" by this definition because corporations were under government control and direction to an extent that was indistinguishable from ownership (the right of use and disposal).

It has become common in recent years to bandy about "socialism" to describe any social democratic system, but this is a debasement of the term and results in a profoundly confused debate, because social democracy is at best a very distant cousin to socialism. Social democracies have thriving private sectors that are heavily regulated but free to pursue business opportunities, capital expansion, etc, within fairly broad constraints.

In a socialist economy, there is no private sector, at least above the cottage-industry scale.

You've gotta stop using 1998 as the benchmark year.

We are indeed in a hiatus with respect to the thermodynamically meaningless quantity "global average temperature": http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=...

Anyone who claims that the hiatus is a result of cherry picking is a liar or a fool, but like the trained monkeys they are if you use the year 1998 they will bark "cherry picking" just as surely as Pavlov's dog salivated at the bell.

Far better to say, "The temperature has not risen in the past decade or so... the precise point you start with doesn't really matter in the 2002-2004 range." This will probably still get you a "Cherry picking!" response because Warmists are stupid, but they have a better chance of looking stupid when they do so.

Now of course, you also have to admit that any given decade in the past century has reasonable odds of having a temperature profile as flat as the most recent one, so making any very strong inference from the perfectly real, non-cherry-picked hiatus is going to make you look stupid too, but that's what this debate is all about: which side can look the most stupid most of the time?

Translation: "I am ignorant of what this term means to physicists, and I declare my ignorance trumps their knowledge."

This is a scientific paper being written for the author's peers, none of whom would ever misinterpret it. I've seen this issue come up in a couple of places where laypeople are confused by the language of physics.

This is not a problem with the language of physics: it is a problem with laypeople.

I'm all for clear scientific communication, but at the end of the day, communication is hard and worrying about how some random person on the 'Net might misinterpret a term you use every day in your professional work is just not a good use of anyone's precious attention.

When I write poetry I do so in a pretty technical way. If people don't appreciate that, sucks to be them, because they are not my audience. I'm the same way in scientific communication: I write for my peers, and everyone else does the same. Let the popular science authors do the translation. They need the work.

I had the same thought, but it turns out not to be the case. Given the model he's working with, the neutrinos will be as much above the speed of light as they would have been below it if they had the same real mass (0.3 eV or something like that.)

For ~10 MeV neutrinos this gives gamma absurdly close to unity, and it's as impossible to distinguish neutrinos traveling just over c from ones traveling at c from ones traveling just under c.

The paper actually mentions SN1987A and talks a bit about the time resolution required.

Widom-Larsen requires an implausible mix of scales. The effective mass of heavy electrons in the solid state is a collective phenomenon happening over distances and time-scales that are large relative to the nucleus and nuclear time-scales and affect the dynamics of the electron's interaction with the lattice, on those scales. To impute to these large-scale effects efficacy at the nuclear scale is very unlikely to be correct.

Consider a car analogy: a car moving along a freeway in dense traffic interacts with all the cars around it. If the driver accelerates, they will pull up close to the care behind and that driver may speed up a bit too, sending a diminishing wave of acceleration through the traffic, so compared to the same car alone on the road the car in dense traffic appears to have a much higher effective mass. Alone, you hit the gas and speed up a lot. In traffic, you hit the gas and speed up a little bit. That's what the electron in the surface looks like: a car in traffic.

But on the scale of car-car interactions, the "bare" mass of the car is what matters. If two cars collide you get an energy of 0.5*m*v^2, not 0.5*Meff*v^2.

Yeah, there are multi-car pileups that muddy the analogy, but they add up to nothing like the effective mass of the whole traffic block, so there. And the difference in scales between "cars and traffic" is tiny compared to the difference in scales between "nuclei and the lattice", so the effect that analogy hopefully makes obvious will be that much larger in the latter case.

While I don't disagree on the smell, Gates is richer than God, and the first thing I thought on seeing this was that if I had that kind of money I might spend a bit of it on wigged-out ideas, just in case. It's like me throwing a panhandler a buck just 'cause I can.

Pretty much. He seems unaware of the huge selection bias--and logical contradiction--implied by the claim about "the inability that humans have exhibited in rectifying uncontrollable catastrophic challenges"

We've dealt with a huge number of challenges successfully, but a pretentious git like this would never even be aware of them, so his estimate of our track-record is off by light years.

Bacterial disease: rectified.

Unwanted pregnancy: rectified.

Polio: rectified.

Smallpox: rectified.

Growing enough food to feed ourselves: rectified.

And so on.

Sure there are hard problems left. They will be solved by engineers, scientists, bureaucrats and businesspeople willing to take risks and test ideas by publicly testing them via systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference, not pretentious gits telling us how awful we all are.

For those like me, who just watched the video and didn't understand the point of view 'til quite late on, the camera is pointing back along the direction of flight.

Also, for some reason the video has strange out-of-focus side-pieces that are distracting and annoying. The view itself is gorgeous and amazing.

As others have pointed out, this is false. Here's a simple guide to the complex language of electromagnetic radiation:

1) If it was produced by an atomic process it's an x-ray, no matter what the energy.

2) If it was produced by a nuclear process, it's a gamma-ray, no matter what the energy

3) If the source is neither atomic nor nuclear, or unknown, it's field-dependent and circumstance dependent. I tend to think of bremstrahlung as gamma radiation unless I'm talking about x-ray sources for imaging or medical treatment. This is a purely cultural difference, with the terms "x-ray" and "gamma ray" being understood as interchangeable by practitioners, but with one or the other being preferred depending on context. Annihilation radiation is called gamma or x-ray depending on the field as well.

With regard to the EM radiation from storms, there are multiple possible origins. It's pretty easy to create neutrons from high-energy plasmas, as in the Farnsworth Fusor. Subsequent capture of those neutrons on nuclei will produce "true" gamma rays. On the other hand, various purely EM processes could be producing x-rays as well. So the EM radiation from storms could well be a mix of both nuclear and atomic processes. Call 'em gammas or x-rays, and don't make a big deal of it.

It's news because Every. Single. Story. on weather ends up talking about climate change. Dunno if that's politicalization or just flavour-of-the-week reporting, but it needs to be pointed out as the nonsense it is.

Climate is a distribution.

Weather is an event.

Distributions are made of events, but they are not events and they have properties (their mean and higher moments) that are emergent properties of the distribution, not properties of the events that make them up.

So long as idiots talk about climate change every time there is a warm spell or a cold snap, there will be a need to point out the difference between events and distributions, and the very small amount you can say about discerning between different distributions that largely overlap based on a single event, or even a small handful of events.

Except we have a pretty good idea of how it happens.

Do you believe in eggs? That is, do you believe in organisms--including insects--that reproduce by laying eggs? And do you believe that those eggs don't have shells?

If so, can you imagine a mutation that makes an egg very slightly motile? The outer layers of such eggs is typically some kind of protein. Suppose that there is a mutation such that after the egg has grown to a certain size there is a biochemical response that causes the protein coat to contract when exposed to light. Lots of biochemicals react to light, and some of them change shape or react with other molecules under the exposure to light in ways that cause them to change shape. It just has be a tiny bit.

Now you have an "egg" that in its later stages of development moves away from light. Such an egg might plausibly be more likely to survive than one that stays put. So over time, the eggs of such insects that are very slightly motile come to predominate. There is no way around that if the mutation is heritable, so unless you don't believe in DNA--and chemistry--you have to accept that that happens. You could also deny the laws of probability, in which case I have a lottery ticket to sell you.

Now iterate this process over a few million generations. Can you see how you might go from a flying insect that lays eggs to a flying insect that lays slightly motile eggs to a flying insect that has a motile larval stage?

What we can or cannot imagine is irrelevant to what does or does not exist, so I'm not arguing here that "evolution is imaginable and therefore true", but merely trying to extend your imagination to the point where you are motivated to look more deeply into the subject.

My own belief is that evolution by variation and natural selection is not just plausible, but mathematically necessary: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-...

Since the meaning of the gibberish on the flag is, "I am stupid! I am really really stupid!" it doesn't seem like there's much point in arguing about the conventions of translation.

In English "God" is sometimes rendered Yaweh or Jehova, but could as equally well be given as "Silly Bugger" or "Twit", and it wouldn't change the meaning of Christian gibberish, so there is no reason to quibble about how Muslim gibberish is translated. You could swap God for Allah in the translation and it would still mean: "I am stupid! I am really really stupid!"

Since God/Allah/Twit/etc is a word for something that the vast preponderance of the evidence suggests does not exist--all kinds of things are true that an all-powerful, all-loving, all-vengeful Supreme Being would not permit, and all kinds of things don't exist that such a being would create--anyone who believes in such a Being is necessarily stupid. As stupid as someone who believes in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. And since the translation should capture the gist of a sentence's meaning, "I am stupid! I am really, really stupid!" appropriately captures the gist of this one.