The cryosphere page at University of Illinois-Champagne shows that we are currently seeing more sea ice than the average, and the levels have been sharply rising the last few years.
It is the same effect: The ice on the land is melting and flowing into the sea where some of it re-freezes.
The area of ice is increasing, the mass of ice is decreasing.
The biggest suprise for me is how well Go does:
"Go is the runner-up but still significantly slower with medium effect size: the average Go program is 18.7 times slower than the average C program. Programs in other languages are much slower than Go programs, with medium to large effect size (4.6–13.7 times slower than Go on average)."
My only objection is that they classify Go as "procedural" along with C, Ada, PL/1 and FORTRAN. It may not have inheritance (a good thing in my book!) but it has many OO features including support for abstraction and encapsulation.
A scientist has an idea about reality [...]
A non-scientist has an idea about reality [...]
You helpfully describe two different approaches to tackling ideas about reality, but I'm not sure it is a good idea to personify it in this way. It is better to look at how people behave in specific situations rather than apply one or other characteristic to everything an individual does. Any individual scientist will make some theories and attempt to disprove them but they will also accept other theories without proof.
I have a science degree so I probably count as a scientist but I don't apply the scientific method to everything I do. This is partly because I am too lazy to use it for everything, partly because I know the danger of "overthinking" things and partly because there are things in my life for which the scientific method simply does not apply because they are not measurable or repeatable.
People may not always use science deliberately, but using direct experience along with inductive and deductive reasoning is the bedrock of scientific discovery.
The bedrock of scientific discovery is reason applied to experimentation and measurement, not experience. Science requires repeatability and experience is not repeatable.
More importantly, the use of logic and reason is not restricted to science.
The scientific method is not the only way to gain knowledge, but it is also not the only method in which people perform scientific studies.
If you are not using the scientific method then you are not doing science. The clue is in the name.
[Science] does not, by any stretch of the imagination, represent the sole mechanism for understanding the world.
Yes it does. Without logical arguments there is no verifiable way to ensure you know anything. Under circumstances where too much is unknown you can use very weak arguments, but they must still be backed up by some form of logical reasoning.
Again, logic and reason are not science, they are tools that are used by science that can also be used outside of science to gain understanding of the world.
Science exists because it is the only process of understanding the world in a way that can provide useful results. Or at least the only way we have found so far.
Nonsense. People understood the world before long science was invented, and very little of our useful understanding of the world comes from science. Most of it comes from direct experience or the experience passed on to us by others.
Science exists because people invented it. It survives because it is a useful tool for making predications about some of the simpler aspects of the world. It does not, by any stretch of the imagination, represent the sole mechanism for understanding the world.
An independent Scotland would already be in the EU
Not really. The SNP White Paper was clear that this was a matter for negotiation:
"Following a vote for independence, the Scottish Government will immediately seek discussions with the Westminster Government and with the member states and institutions of the EU to agree the process whereby a smooth transition to full EU membership can take place on the day Scotland becomes an independent country."
The President of the European Commission said "A new independent state would, by the fact of its independence, become a third country with respect to the EU and the Treaties would no longer apply on its territory" and when interviewed said it would be "extremely difficult, if not impossible" for an independent Scotland to secure membership.
That was before 2008.
What makes the crash of 2008 any different from the series of crashes that preceeded it? The UK has come out of it relatively stronger than most of the rest of Europe.
The UK has mostly go over losing the Empire and not being the world power that it used to be. It will be interesting to see how the US copes as the same thing happens to it over the next few decades. I fear it could go very badly...
They vote for members of the Parliament in London
Except for the members of the House of Lords, which nobody votes for. If I had a Parliament like that and got to vote against it, I would.
The House of Lords is selected on merit by elected politicians, which is completely different from the US where key governement roles are selected on merit by an elected politician.
You are argue whether the selection is actually on merit rather than political considerations, but the situation is the same both sides of the atlantic.
There is no scientific reasoning behind [...] putting a monetary value on a human life. Sometimes what Dawkins calls reason is just a mask for his prejudice.
You are confusing science and reason.
Science has no need to put monetary value on anything unless money is a parameter in a particular experiment.
Reason says that you must put a monetary value on human life when spending money that can affect human life. The UK Health Service, for example, uses a figure of around $40K per year of human life in order to decide on the cost-effectiveness of various medical treatements, valuing an adult life at about $2-3M. Aid agencies will have a pretty good idea of how much it costs to save a life in various parts of the developing world because they have to deploy their limited resources in the way that saves the most lives.
In these situations refusing to put a monetary value on a human life is just illogical sentimentality.
You're projecting. You're trying to conflate what YOU would do with what some "other" would do. You are engaging in a common fundie tactic of pretending your own fault is that of your "enemy". You assume that atheists "give a fuck".
From one simple observation you claim to know how I behave and what I believe, and you accuse me of projecting?!
> What about non-religious people forcing their views onto you or other people?
This only manifests in preventing theocrats from running around like members of ISIS forcing their views on everyone else.
The facts do not support your argument, for example the situation in Ukraine is clearly not about theocrats. And the same is true of many (and arguably most) of the recent major conflicts in the world.
We have certain laws and founding ideals that are contrary to the theocrat mentality.
You do realise that those "laws and founding ideals" are an example of the government forcing their views onto other people?
A religious person says: There is a God.
An atheist says: Prove it.
In practice it often goes like this:
A religious person says: I believe in God.
An atheist says: You shouldn't because you can't prove it
Until the religious person can prove it, or even show a shred of evidence for it, it's nothing more than some bullshit delusional fantasy
No. Until the religious person can prove it, it remains unproven, like most things in life.
I don't give a shit what a religious person believes, until they start forcing their delusion onto me or other people
What about non-religious people forcing their views onto you or other people? Is this actually about religion or just about your desire for personal freedom?
When a relative dies, christians (etc.) cry That would be illogical. They should be happy, their relative has gone to heaven! And while it may take a couple of years, they'll be seeing that relative again, right? Then why the tears?
Is it illogical that parents cry when their children leave home?
Is it illogical that you cry when you break you arm?
Just because you don't understand a person's behaviour it doesn't mean that their behaviour is illogical.
There is absolutely no reason to expect a 64 bit architecture to be faster than a 32 bit architecture unless you are doing a lot of 64 bit operations, or need more than 4G of RAM.
Right in theory, wrong in practice. If the only change was the width of the registers then it would make little difference to performance, but both the leading 32-bit architectures also gained more registers and new instructions when moving to a 64-bit architecture. ARM, in particular, made a number of performance-increasing changes to the architecure such as the removal of condition codes from most instructions.
So in practice 64 bit code usually runs faster. But don't take my word for it, look at the benchmarks for A7 running in 32 mode vs 64 bit mode.
The Islamist nutties have no military to speak of. Their success is best described as "in the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed is king". The beheading doesn't really scare me in any way. They are limited in their ability to act. They lack any kind of weaponry that reaches beyond the immediate area and they cannot spread their area of influence much more.
These "Islamist nutties" are an offshoot of the organisation that killed thousands of people in the US on 9/11
Sometimes, the appropriate answer to violence is more violence, directed at the people intent on killing people in the name of their ancient dead guy - they are behaving like rabid animals, and you don't reason with rabid animals, you put them down. And the Middle East will continue to be a genocidal pressure cooker until we understand this.
Israel has been doing this ever since it was created, and look how far that has got them. If overwhelming military might was the answer to peace in the Middle East then the Israel/Palestine problem would have been solved a long time ago.
In reality, using overwhelming military might in the middle east just creates an overwhelming amount of chaos.
Scientists will study your brain to learn more about your distant cousin, Man.
