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Comment Of course it is stupid. From both sides. (Score 1) 376

There may have been a perception of power which may be enough

How? That does not seem reasonable.

Either way, it's incredibly stupid for someone in his position to get involved at all with a current student.

What he did is INCREDIBLY stupid. I'm not saying he does not bear primary fault in this. He had the most to lose also, it was just idiotic. Although if you were playing devils advocate, couldn't you claim he had a sexual addiction that compelled him to ask? That sounds as reasonable as saying the women had some kind of illness that compelled them to submit; in fact his actions speak even more strongly to there being a mental issue that overrode strong rational and moral reasons not to act as he did. The potential impact to him was proportionality much greater than any one of the women, exactly because of his position and status - and yet he appears to have contacted hundreds of women. How can you look at that and not claim he was mentally ill?

What the women did was stupid also though. They had no reason to send him nude images or video. At any time they could have simply ceased communication, and gotten what they wanted (physics education) from some other source.

Comment Where is it addressed in EITHER article (Score 1) 376

That's addressed in the article.

The fact you say "The article" makes me wonder if you read either. There are two...

The thing is, I read both articles. Neither of them address the position of power issue. One says "she felt trapped". But how? That makes NO SENSE when you can so easily block or otherwise ignore people communicating solely over social media, which offer many means for blocking annoying people. There is no means of trapping someone.

I would understand how someone might "feel trapped" if they were a student attending a college into which they had put forward substantial tuition. I would understand if they were to gain credit from a course needed to move forward in education. Even just being in physical proximity I could see it. There are a lot of circumstances in which I can image someone feeling trapped in some way, where there was a small amount of power to leverage - but not in this case. The course was free, the grades if any counted for nothing. The moment the contact started getting lewd the person should have broke off contact, and could easily have done so.

I'll leave the RRTFA to the person willing to make an argument/ask a question that takes the entire article into account, as you have utterly failed to do.

Comment What power? (Score 1) 376

i think the argument is that she couldn't refuse since the professor was in a position of power.

I didn't think the grades from these courses counted for anything (if they even were grades) so where exactly did the power come from? She was under no obligation to keep up with the course and if someone started asking me fore nudes I'd just learn physics some other way.

Comment Not evidence - outline (Score 1) 180

The point of having the journal would not be for evidence the resulting book was real, it would be simply to have vast amount of source material to create a book from more quickly, so you could have a book ready sooner after trial.

He could presumably re-create most of the information from memory, but memory is fickle and it would take a lot more time to get it out.

Comment Re:They already have (Score 1) 667

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.

Comment Re:They already have (Score 1) 667

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."

Comment Re:They already have (Score 1) 667

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.

Comment Great book of the story behind the repair mission (Score 4, Informative) 76

A photographer was given broad access across all of NASA years before the mission launched to fix the Hubble, and he put together an book of amazing photos and stories behind the mission:

Infinie Worlds by Michael Soluri. They have a hardcover and a Kindle version, not sure how the pictures would come out in the Kindle version but the hardcover is pretty large and the photos look great.

Comment Re:They already have (Score 1) 667

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.

Comment Re:They already have (Score 1) 667

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.

Comment Re:They already have (Score 1) 667

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.

Comment Re:Yeah! (Score 1) 514

If they can pull more people out of poverty, what the U.S. does won't matter to China and India because their domestic markets will be larger than the United States. Currently they have even worse social inequity than we do, and the poor performance of their own markets forces their own people to look elsewhere for work.

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