But, just to balance the discussion, whenever Christians and Muslims and other people like that point out "but where do you find spiritual experience and meaning of life?", it's nice to point out that there's a new detox available for Abrahamic addicts.

And I guess it could also serve as a good tool for reductio ad absurdum argumentation against established religions.

... The experiment we were discussing was Spencer's radiation experiment. Not "global warming". You keep trying to apply my arguments about Spencer's challenge to the broader issue of global warming, aka "climate change", and it's not valid to do so. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-10-25]

Once again, how bizarre. The whole reason Slayers deny that an enclosed source warms is because that implies greenhouse gases can't warm the surface:

.. the CO2-warming model rely on the concept of "back radiation", which physicists (not climate scientists) have proved to be impossible. I'm happy to leave actual climate science to climate scientists. But when THEIR models rely on a fundamental misunderstanding of physics, I'll take the physicists' word for it, thank you very much. .. [Jane Q. Public, 2012-07-05]

... The only reason I agreed to work through the Spencer experiment with you was because I already knew you were wrong, and wanted the chance to show that to everybody, unequivocally. Well, I got that chance. And as soon as I get it written up (which as I have stated before will take a while), I fully intend to show everybody. You asked me if I really was willing to publish the results, no matter the outcome. Well, now that in fact it didn't go well for you, sour grapes isn't going to get you anywhere. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-10-25]

If Jane is so sure that his Sky Dragon Slayer nonsense is correct, why can't he write down a simple energy conservation equation around the heated source without wrongly "cancelling" terms? Ironically, this is the very first equation needed to understand Spencer's experiment. And Jane can't even get the first equation right. Prof. Cox is right: this isn't even degree-level physics.

Jane, if you tried just once to write down an energy conservation equation for a boundary around the source without wrongly "cancelling" terms, you'd realize all this Slayer nonsense is wrong.

... maybe Jane/Lonny could just ask Prof. Cox if the required electrical heating power depends on the cooler vacuum chamber wall temperature? I bet Jane/Lonny Eachus $100 that Prof. Cox answers "yes" to the previous question. Is Jane/Lonny Eachus chicken?

... If you want to ask him about what amounts to a pretty straightforward textbook radiation problem, go right ahead. But I already know the answer -- which, in fact, I got from textbooks on the subject -- so I don't have to bet. You go ahead, if you want to. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-10-]

In other words: bok bok bok BOKKKKK. That's what I thought. Jane/Lonny Eachus is chicken.

If Jane/Lonny Eachus were a real skeptic, he'd at least consider the possibility that Jane's "radiant power output" equation doesn't describe "electrical heating power". Jane's textbooks don't say to use a "radiant power output" equation to describe "electrical heating power".

That's why Jane is too chicken to ask Prof. Cox if electrical heating power depends on the cooler vacuum chamber wall temperature. Because Jane's afraid that Prof. Cox will say yes. If not, why did Prof. Cox say all these things?

Remember, Jane's noted that CO2 warming models rely on the concept of "back radiation". So if Jane and the Slayers are right about Spencer's experiment, then why does Prof. Cox agree that increasing CO2 warms Earth's surface?

And Prof. Cox isn't alone, not by any stretch of the imagination. For instance, Grant Petty is a professor of atmospheric science and wrote A First Course in Atmospheric Radiation. He wrote a letter:

"To all Slayers: ... The models aren’t perfect; no one says that they are. But they’re a damned sight more grounded in real science and physics than the naive but cocky “proofs” published in blogs by the self-taught, and the blanket unfounded assertions (“there is no two-way exchange of radiation because we say there isn’t”) that somehow passes for science in this group.

In each of your cases, I predict that one of two things is going to happen down the road: (1) the gaps and contradictions in your own collective understanding of physical and climate science will become so evident that you can no longer ignore them, and you just might even feel a little shame at your roles in aggressively promoting misinformation and distrust of experts among those who aren’t equipped to tell science from pseuodoscience; or (2) you will close your eyes to that evidence forever and continue to be the conspiracy theorists who believe that you’re modern-day Galileos fighting the evil scientific establishment, and everything you see and hear will be forced to fit into that paranoid world-view no matter how divorced from reality it is. ..."

Silly, it's the girth that matters! And, coincidentally, the newest iPhone is the thinnest one yet. Meaning that you won't feel a thing.

That's probably because any paper is completely useless when debating young earth creationists.

Why should it? It's my understanding that a lot of areas of industry are actually reducing their energy expenses. Is Germany a country economically reliant of aluminum smelters (where the electrochemistry can't be cheated)? (And even here, let's forget for a moment conveniently that Dutch smelters are getting into market competition problems because of cheap German electricity anyway...)

US-Americans would NEVER do such things.

They'll get some of those famous non-US-Americans (or US-non-Americans) from Gitmo to do the job for them. With implausible deniability, of course.

Whose fundamental legal principles? Do you misunderstand the concept of a sovereign nation? Each nation is different. And each nation has the right to be different, to the extent to which they can defend their difference with thermonuclear weapons. Or weaponised Ebola. Or their weapon(s) of choice.

Eh, that should have been "the closing down of the old nuclear power plants" (which have been replaced, along with some old coal-firing plants, with more modern coal-firing plants, better suitable for running in a grid with a lot of renewables).

Half of them run Windows in a VM (or otherwise emulate windows) so they can run IE, for the piles of sites written as IE-only.

I can't remember when I met a site that didn't work and told me to switch to using IE. In fact, it's pretty rare to find a site with obviously borked functionality.

Examples? Seriously, enough people use non-IE browsers (whatever it is on Macs [not used one for years] / Chrome / Firefox / Opera) and have done for getting on for a decade now that any new site has no choice but to work cross-platform.

If you're going to bring up the example of your bank, then by implication you're talking about a bank that doesn't update it's security programming for years at a stretch, and that's probably synonymous with a bank you shouldn't be trusting with your money. (I do my banking by going into the branch. It's safer and easier.)

Uh, I was expecting some alarming jump, but what you've linked looks almost like a statistical error. The trend still seems to be one of a long-term decrease, doesn't it? I guess the closing down of old coal-firing power plants threw a temporary spanner in the works, but it seems far from clear that there won't be a measurable downward trend.

I have no idea. But I propose to establish small isolated groups of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians to work it out.

In Biology, there's the concept of Stochastic Mutation. It's most commonly attributed to viruses, for example HIV is a known stochastic mutator. In these cases, some (not all, just some), types of cell mutations occur, where there's no selection pressure - the virus changes its protein coat in one of several ways (4 for HIV), and type B is just as likely to mutate back to type A or into Type C or D, as to stick where its at. In equilibrium, none of the protein coats is preferred by natural selection, and there's no pressure for one type to come to dominate. HIV also undergoes non-stochastic mutations, just like (we think) everything else with a genetic code does, and stochastic mutation has been studied for many other viruses and probably happens in more complex species.

          That's the point - evolution is essentially a two part theory, a synthesis of Mendel's genetics including mutation, and Darwin's natural selection. Cases where all the organisms subject to selection pressure are identical, are not evolution*, and cases where the organisms are not identical but there's no selection pressure applied are not evolution either, and so there really are at least two categories of biological change which are not evolutionary. It's just that 'cases where there's no selection pressure' pretty much discribes some sort of paradise where nothing dies or is limited in how often it reproduces, so there are not a whole lot of known examples of that, especially over a long term, and it would be pretty expensive to create such an environment over a short term.

* If you had some organisms, and they have 0% chance of mutating in the particular way that responds to that particular selection pressure, then you could say that they are identical in that respect. Imagine for example a bunch of Leopards suddenly introduced to an environment where there are abundant fish in deep subsurface pools which can only be reached through narrow fissures. There's really no selection pressure sufficient for those Leopards to start adapting into creatures that can squeeze through six inch wide cracks and use their gills to dive deep enough to catch those tasty fish. All the Leopards are effectively identical, in that they are identically unsuited to take advantage of the new factor in their environment, tasty deep dwelling cave fish. However, I get a feeling you would reject generalizing that sort of example into one of the cases such as you are asking for, so let's just stick to Stochastic Mutation

$1 per year might be enough. Maybe they'd just have to watch one of those ads once a year that Youtube puts in front of a Beyoncé music video, and that would cover it.

It would take a lot more than a dollar to make me watch a Beyoncé video.

That's the 22th century goal.

Darwin himself was careful to specify what he was arguing for - His first book was, after all "On the Origin of Species", not "On the Origin of Life". His theory is about how existing life divides into distinct groups, and (in a modern version of his phrasings), why species are 'distinguishabe sets with fuzzy boundries', and doesn't really touch on where the first life forms came from, one way or another. We could start from some assumed single primative life form, or imagine a world where there was somehow only one very complex life form, say existing as millions of identical clones, and speciation would still occur, and the mix of species, once formed, would still change over time, according to the theory.

Darwin made predictions which were testable, and could have been falsified - for just one, there's a prediction that the genetic code (unknown at the time), wouldn't allow unlimited blending of traits (Mendel published the first proof of this as a general fact, and Crick and Watson's work in actually discovering the code confirmed it was the sort of coding that didn't allow blendable traits). One problem I see with the "anti-evolutionists", is they keep talking like 'testability' means we have to have two copies of Earth and run the great experiment twice, or there's no testability at all, when a little real familiarity with Darwin's work reveals lots of testable predictions of the same sorts we see in many other works of science. It's sort of like how early critics of Special Relativity dismissed the 1919 solar eclipse test as not sufficient by itself, and people who wanted to reject Relativity on any and all grounds turned that into its not being a test at all in popular discussions. I suspect there's real debate needed about just what the limits of the Theory of Evolution's predictions are, but those debates need to be among people who know what the theory does or doesn't predict, what testability itself means, and other fundamental ideas.