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Comment Whine whine (Score 1) 50

Whine whine... the people complaining this character or that character is overpowered. Quit whining that everything has to be NERFED just because you suck and you lost the battle. The Superman character comes with a sysop root account on the game server. So what? Deal with it and quit whining.

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Comment Re:The whole article is just trolling (Score 1) 795

https://dpa.aapg.org/gac/statements/climatechange.cfm
Is that the statement you were referring to?

Correct. They adopted that statement (or a substantially equivalent statement) back in 2007.

Prior to that, they had a denialism statement. As I said, American Petroleum Geologists were the last scientific body of national or international standing to offer any hint of support to climate denialism.

There are many scientific bodies in unrelated fields that have never commented on the subject. There's the American Petroleum Geologists and perhaps some others with statements that carefully dodge having a position, but there's not one scientific body of national or international standing opposed to the effectively unanimous agreement by climate scientists that Global Warming is real and that it is directly a result of CO2 and other man-made causes.

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Comment Re:The whole article is just trolling (Score 1) 795

Let me help you with that.
Here is the graph you're looking for, showing continuous cooling trends from 1965 to 2013.5

The bottomline is there has been no warming statistically different from natural variation for at least 18 years

The bottom line is that you have given absolutely no rational reason for ignoring vast bodies of data proving your assertion is false.

You eagerly embrace the RSS graph for the sole reason that, on this arbitrarily selected time interval, it happens to give a linear trend line with a small enough warming to dismiss as negligible.

I asked if you had an rational reason from selecting the RSS data set, and you had none. I asked what you would do if I selected a different time interval, one where RSS showed warming and UAH didn't. You did not deny that you would have irrationally reject the RSS dataset and irrationally latched onto the UAH set.

You are flatly ignoring a MULTITUDE of global surface data sets showing the earth has in fact warmed over the last 18 years.

You have flatly ignored the ocean data set, a data set which you have not contested carries 45 times more weight than any atmospheric data. A data set which reflects 90% of the climate warming as opposed to the 2% warming that happens in the atmosphere. A data set which shows a perfectly steady warming rate for many decades. A data set which shows there has been absolutely zero slowdown in warming over the last 18 years.

You ignored virtually the entirety of data. You latched onto one cherrypicked fragment that most nearly fit what you wanted to find, tailored to this utterly arbitrary 18 year example. You have given no rational reason for latching onto this cherrypicked datapoint.

Can you really not see that this is a textbook case of Confirmation bias?

Can you really not see that what you have just done is exactly what I did in the 1965-2013.5 graph I linked above?

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Comment Re:The whole article is just trolling (Score 1) 795

I prefer Satellite Data

UAH NSSTC lower tropical global mean is also Satellite data.
Can you give me any reason..... can you give yourself any reason... why you ignored one set of satellite data and embraced another set of satellite data? Note that this is a past-tense question. If you research the UAH NSSTC satellite data and the RSS MSU satellite data, you'll find that they are substantially comparable satellites, and that they face substantially equal equal difficulties measuring temperature, and substantially equal corrections trying to fix serious problems of long term skew in the data. But for my question here, doing a new look up on the satellites is irrelevant. I'm asking, at the time you picked that ONE dataset out of a long list of data sets, did you have any reason from picking that one, other than the fact that it most nearly fit your prior position?

Satellite Data, it has been "corrected" as much

I assume that was supposed to read "hasn't been corrected as much". Actually they are heavily corrected. Amongst other difficulties, the satellites are in decaying orbits which steadily skews their readings more and more each year. They also have a lot of difficulty separating the signal of lower troposphere warming from the cooling in the stratosphere (itself a central evidence of man-made global warming).

The satellite data is important, but like all methods of global measurements, there are challenges. That is why scientists don't cherry pick one data set, they take a comprehensive look at all data from MULTIPLE satellites and multiple means of ground measurements and from sea measurements and everything else they can get their hands on.

Why did you ignore one satellite over another. Why did you ignore all ground data. Why did you ignore the sea data I linked, especially after I pointed out that atmospheric temperatures only accounted for 2% of global heat being captured and sea temperatures accounted for 90% of the heat being captured.

Is it possible that you dismissed multiple lines of strong evidence because it doesn't fit your prior conclusions on the subject? Is it possible that you eagerly embraced the isolated RSS MSU satellite data set because that graph generated a negligible amount of warming on that exact 18 year time interval?

Question: If I select a different time interval than the last 18 years, and I show you that the RSS MSU satellite (the one you picked) graph shows warming or greater warming compared to the other (UAH NSSTC) satellite, would you ever arbitrarily abandon the RSS satellite data and arbitrarily embrace the UAH satellite, merely because it better fits the prior argument you wanted to make? Is that a reasonable, objective, unbiased evaluation of all available evidence?

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Comment Re:Another terrible article courtesy of samzenpus (Score 2) 385

I could burn it in the streets to get rid of it, I suppose.

I already paid the city garbage man to come over here and get it once via my taxes and he didn't do the job... I'm not going to pay a second person to do it.

If you instruct the garbage man to leave the garbage in the streets, you'll have to deal with garbage in the streets. Pretty simple. I'm not keeping it in my house.

Comment Re:Another terrible article courtesy of samzenpus (Score 0, Troll) 385

So, garbage men in Seattle now have the authority to issue people tickets.

Here in Vancouver, they just leave the garbage there in the street in front of your house, I've recently learned.

God, I hate west coast culture.

I chose to respond by going out at night and spreading my garbage up and down the streets.

Fuckers wanna play passive aggressive games? I can play them too.

Comment Re:Faulty premise (Score 1) 139

In science fiction, you generally have some quantified differences from the real physical world, and then you play within the boundaries of the ramifications of that.

In fantasy, you don't bother with any of that.

Many of the great science fiction classics were written to criticize the world we live in without being straightforward enough to be censored, and pitch different social structured and value structures.

Heinlein and Gordon R Dickson come to mind immediately.

Comment Re:Faulty premise (Score 1) 139

Well, lets take an example. I think most people who are well read in the genre would agree that Larry Niven writes "Hard" SF. So... Ringworld.

Ringworld, at it's core, was about "What if we had access to an impossibly strong substance. How might that change everything."

The setting was an extrapolation on that one question. But, it's not about the possibilities of technology, because there is no such substance. It's an impossible technology, a technology based on an ever so slightly different set of universal rules.

But the story was a human story.

Comment Re:The whole article is just trolling (Score 1) 795

The article is kind of dumb.

Ad hominem.

You really shouldn't try to use fancy words you don't understand, trying to look smart. That was not Ad Hominem. That was his opening comment giving his opinion of the article (not the person). He then proceeded to follow up his opening opinion with perfectly valid arguments.

It's some guy who isn't a scientist and who doesn't really understand the scientific method arrogantly bitching about how everybody else doesn't really understand the scientific method.

Appeal to authority (arguing that the "authority" is unimpeachable).

You don't understand Argument From Authority either, nor do you understand when it is a fallacy and when it isn't.

That's the *actual* scientific method.

No-true-Scotsman fallacy.

Not only did you get No True Scotsman wrong, you actually have it backwards. It was the author of the "kind of dumb article" that committed the No True Scotsman fallacy. It was the article author who fallaciously tried to exclude science-he-didn't-like as not being "true science".

Controlled experiment may or may not come into it at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Look at where it says "Testing".

I suggest you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... where it says "Testing": Astronomers do experiments, searching for planets around distant stars.
Astronomers, geologists, paleontologists, climatologists, and countless other fields of science are testing scientific theories when they engage in measurements and observations of the real world, which test the predictions of those theories.

But I would like to thank you for pointing out that Wikipedia section. I can see how you could read that section and overlook the example illustrating that observations-testing-predictions are a form of scientific experiment. That section should definitely be more clear. I'll leave a comment to that effect on the Talk page. ~~~~

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Comment Re:The whole article is just trolling (Score 1) 795

I think he's saying that we shouldn't be using evolution as a talking point when we want to say "see science works!" because we have no proof that evolution indeed works as Darwin described.

(1) Actually he's doing the standard right-wingnut attack on any science they don't like, primarily evolution and climate, and every field of science that supports them.

(2) Setting aside the poor choice word "proof", I think you underestimate what we've got backing up evolution. We literally have mathematical theorems proving the information-creating process of evolution. Evolution is an applied science, used somewhere or other by a majority of Fortune 500 Companies. (Specifically, software genetic algorithms that evolve "digital DNA". It's a field of programming that can solve categories of Hard Problems that are effectively impossible to solve by any other means.) We also have a continuous and complete fossil record of tens of millions of years of evolution covering much of Phylum Foraminifera. Foraminifera are tiny aquatic animals, most smaller than the period on this sentence. They live in the oceans in vast numbers, continually dying and raining down into sea floor sediment. 1970's deep sea oil exploration started bringing up long drill-cores from the deep seabed. Each core is filled with thousands of perfectly layered Foraminifera fossils. We have an effectively limitless supply of these fossils. And it's not merely every transitional form species. We can continuously trace the transitional forms along a ~150,000 year transition as one species splits into two. The only limitation on time-resolution is the small amount of vertical-mixing caused by living animals which disturb the sediment surface.

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