The durability is impressive. It's not like cleanroom fabrication and high-purity metallurgy were exactly top of the line in 1840, so I would have naively guessed that some mixture of corrosion and non-current-generating side reactions among impurities or airborne contaminants would have trashed it in less than a century, possibly a lot less, depending on the exact arrangement of the battery, even if the energy density is totally plausible in physics-experiment-land.

Snakebites are a bit of an edge case: the production of antivenoms essentially involves inducing an immune response (in a convenient, usually large, animal) and then extracting and purifying the neutralizing protein produced. So, it is very much the case that you can prime an immune system to recognize and respond to venom.

The trouble is that snakes tend to (in the case of actually dangerous snakebites, a dry strike is just a couple of puncture wounds) introduce a substantial amount of venom into the wound, and the venoms frequently kill (or cause nasty localized tissue destruction, there are lots and lots of neat variations) substantially faster than the human immune system can synthesize the necessary counteragent, even if the person has prior exposure.

An antivenom has the advantage of being a relatively massive amount of the correct counteragent, ready to be injected into the bloodstream faster than you could synthesize it yourself.

For the less dangerous venoms, and the lower-volume strikes, acquired immunity is more useful.

Sure, there are going to be mediating forces in the environment. Melting is an obvious one. The positive feedbacks have been getting the most attention because they are really scary. It appears that there are gas clathrates in the ground and under water that can come out at a certain temperature. The worst case is that we get an event similar to Lake Nyos, but with a somewhat different mechanism and potentially many more dead. The best case is a significant atmospheric input of CO2 and methane that we can't control.

I don't think I have to discount Trenberth. He's trying to correct his model, he isn't saying there is no warming.

I've sometimes wondered whether the techniques used to produce vaccines against exogenous drugs could be modified to produce vaccines that suppress endogenous ones. If enforced nicotine withdrawl is unpleasant, I can only imagine that, say, losing the effect of endorphins might really ruin your day...

Aside from the crass pragmatists' "Well, I bet I can develop a drug that compensates for weakness of character and lack of willpower faster than most of the population can develop strength of character and lots of willpower..." Why does this bother you?

Is there evidence that people actually develop more willpower(rather than just smoking more) when these 'replacements' are available? If there isn't, surely reduction in smoking related mortality is a win regardless of willpower, and even if there is; exactly how many people of weak character are on the acceptable losses list?

On the more theoretical side, would you condemn a drug that was actually a general-purpose willpower simulant? That actually gave the person taking it all the changes associated with 'strong will' while it is in their system? Or would you consider that to be a great breakthrough, a drug that produces a highly valuable personality trait?

It is my (layman's) understanding that nicotine is not entirely harmless; but can also have some positive effects, and overall is considered a fairly low risk compound at suitable doses(it'll kill you good and proper in quantity).

Given that, why so much work trying relatively esoteric techniques for nicotine vaccines, or low-success behavioral interventions for smoking cessation, when the only real problem that is actually killing smokers right and left is the fact that they get their nicotine by huffing a grab bag of unpleasant incomplete combustion products?

Is it that there is something particularly compelling about cigarettes, such that even people with access to nicotine by other means still seek them out? Is it just an echo of drug warrior concern that somebody, somewhere, might be employing a psychoactive without suitable risk of death or imprisonment?

I don't get it.

Ah, that was ambiguous. I meant that there are zillions of 32-bit ARM devices in the field. Only a hilariously tiny percentage of those are RT devices; but given the absurdly gigantic number of ARM architecture CPUs shipped, and the fact that 64-bit ARM is still very new and a relatively modestly player even in higher end stuff(much less the 'just a bit more than a microcontroller' market, where it probably never will be, I'm assuming that 32-bit ARM is going to be sticking around for a good while yet. RT, Not So Much.

Thanks.

McKitrick is an economist out of his field. Trenberth and Fasullo cite many of their other papers and the publications to which they were submitted, but it seems mostly not accepted. But their conclusion seems to be that there were other times in recent years that the rate of warming decreased for a time only for it to return to its previous rate. I only see the abstract for Kosaka and Xie, but they state "the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase."

Unlikely. The effective death of Windows RT only affects some 32-bit ARM devices, of which there are still about a zillion in the field, and more rolling off the production line as we speak(and likely to continue to be for some time to come, unless ARM Ltd. decides to piss off every customer who cares about cheap CPUs and has no need to even touch the boundaries of a 4GB memory space.

The non-RT 'Surface Pro' devices were 64 bit x86s from the start(though there were a few devices that shipped with 64 bit CPUs and 32 bit OSes because Intel didn't have some feature working quite right in 64 bits at the time); but are unaffected, so irrelevant in any case.

This will also have no effect on systems that either have 32-bit Atoms, or 32-bit UEFI(will 64 bit Windows boot from that? it certainly caused a schism among mac models at one point), which are all x86.

You are certainly getting safer as time goes on in ignoring 32 bit OSes, especially x86; but this announcement will have no effect.

That isn't strictly true, unless you ignore the fact that x86s are available(what they'd cost if Intel weren't attempting to buy marketshare might be less exciting) at more or less the same power envelope as the punchier ARM SoCs. They still have nothing on the low end of what ARM can do; but that hardly matters for phones and tablets.

Windows/x86 devices are pretty common in similar sizes and prices to Android or iOS on ARM(and, actually, some Android/x86 devices are virtually indistinguishable from a Windows/x86 device from the same vendor until powered up). There is also still the more-or-less-complete-NT; but somewhat different UI and application layer in WP8, which isn't being axed.

I'm not sure why anyone would mourn the worthless abortion that was Windows RT. All the cruft of full Win8(more, in fact, since the 'WIMBoot' feature never made it over there), including a full desktop because they couldn't be bothered to port Office to their own new UI; but with pointless cryptographic lockdown to the wonderful world of a mostly impoverished app store. All with the mediocrity of a Tegra3, and at relatively modest savings over a real computer! What's not to love?

If they actually wanted to have a go at making NT multi-architecture again, that'd be one thing; but taking pretty much all of Windows 8, then gimping it just because you have a hard-on for Apple's app store success? An idea that stupid deserves death.

No number is larger than any other number. Quantities are larger than other quantities. Numbers are symbolic entities that can represent a quantity, or not.

I imagine that the major financial companies make this part of their economic modeling. Most of them do publish weather-related and climate-related advisories regarding commodity and company price trends, etc. How detailed do they get? The wouldn't tell and I am the wrong kind of scientist to ask. Can we make a government or public one? Yes, the level of detail is the big question.

Oh, do I have to qualify that for you, like the hottest outside of a period of Milankovitch Forcing? Gee, maybe the Earth's orbit changed, like back then, and we just didn't notice.

Let's take a look at one of the references you cited:

A section of a draft IPCC report, looking at short-term trends, says temperatures are likely to be 0.4 to 1.0 degree Celsius (0.7-1.8F) warmer from 2016-35 than in the two decades to 2005. Rain and snow may increase in areas that already have high precipitation and decline in areas with scarcity, it says.

It sounds like we have reason to be alarmed.

Well, I am trying to get through to you. You wrote that the hiatus was widely acknowledged by scientists! It's like talking with someone who believes in god - they have no facts, and no facts will convince them, and they create their own "science" which is nothing of the sort to bolster their viewpoint. So, I tried another another argument. But let's go back to the first. Nobody credible believes in a hiatus.

Calling names isn't going to advance your argument.

Orbital models only have two variables when there are two bodies. In reality we are always dealing with an n-body problem. Regarding atmospheric models, we have weather, which is too chaotic to forecast, and climate, which should not be.

We could sit back 100 years and see what is happening then, so that we have lots of good data points, but potentially at the cost of widespread famine, death, etc.

We have excellent reasons to stop releasing sequestered carbon even if we ignore global warming.