This study says that about 35% of all cancer is caused by carcinogens, so in fact it confirms that carcinogens cause a significant proportion of cancer.

I can assure you it was not pleasant to live through the extinction events that caused major evolutionary changes. When the dinosaurs died off, mammals also had it very rough. That's why we're trying to avoid a large, rapid rise in temperature -- it's going to be unpleasant to live through. It reminds me of the ancient Chinese curse May you live in interesting times.

It's not even a matter of whether a particular substance is a "pollutant" or "toxic". Many necessary substances can be harmful if present in high concentrations. You can die just by drinking too much water. That doesn't mean that water's a pollutant, even though too much can kill you. The argument that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant because plants need it is similarly confused -- too much of a good thing can be harmful.

To get to the heart of the matter, the EPA considers any harmful emission to be a pollutant, even if the substance emitted is necessary for life.

The Florida Keys are experiencing the effects of sea level rise.

This year is likely the warmest year on record with the rate of Antarctic ice loss tripling in the last decade and Greenland's ice loss worse than predicted. But believe whatever you want to believe, no matter what the facts.

Yes, exactly! I would say that the AI programs we hear so much about: Watson, Google's self-driving cars, deep-learning neural networks, and so on will never reach general artificial intelligence. It's like climbing a tree and expecting to reach the moon. All those programs use simple algorithms geared towards just one purpose. You present those programs with any task other than the specific one they were designed for, and they fail miserably. General artificial intelligence, the ability to handle a wide variety of tasks autonomously, is a different beast altogether.

So when will these chess playing programs attain general artificial intelligence on par with a human? With each improved player, we must surely be getting closer...

Well, if you have the idea of a rocket, yes you can put the parts together and make a rocket. But no one has an idea of how to make a working general artificial intelligence. That's the leap. What are the parts we need? How do we put them together? No one has a clue! If you know how to do it, write it up in a thesis, collect your PhD, and make billions.

There's a tremendous gap between the "AI" that researchers are working on and and artificial general intelligence. The algorithms used in AI systems are almost always very simple. These algorithms are simply not going to make this leap and become what we would consider intelligent. It's like expecting Google search to suddenly gain sentience. My favorite quote about this is "Believing that writing these types of programs will bring us closer to real artificial intelligence is like believing that someone climbing a tree is making progress toward reaching the moon."

Not for quite a while. As someone who has worked in robotics, I would say the scenario for the next several decades would resemble XKCD's What-If on the robot apocalypse.

A scientist, like any person, can say anything they want. You shouldn't believe something a scientist says just because they say it. They have opinions and can be wrong just like everyone can. I'm sure some scientists say ghosts exist and others say they don't.

Science, on the other hand, can find no evidence of ghosts. That doesn't mean they don't exist, however. Science makes no statement one way or the other on the subject of ghosts. They have never been observed, as far as we know, but could still exist.

No matter how conductive cooling fins are, you need a certain amount of surface area to get the heat away from the processor. You may be able to pack a quadrillion transistors into a cubic centimeter, but if they use 2 MW of power, even cooling fins that fill a cubic meter will not be sufficient to cool it.

Where do you get this "end of the world" thing? As for the claim of "alarmism", do you not remember the flu strain several years ago that tended to kill healthy people in the prime of their life, rather than "immunocompromised hosts"?

It's not that the reports are "alarmist". It's (1) you're not understanding the actual risk, and (2) you're pretending that the reports are predicting the end of the world.

Fuck beta! Fuck beta!

Well, that's a different way of stating the birthday paradox, but it's still not what the article is about.