Walls? You had walls? Why, in my day, when we hadn't crawled out of the ocean yet, we had to position ourselves under the computer, blow an air bubble for 0 and make a little vortex for 1, and watch them rise into the reader. A large fish passing by could cause a transmission error that would make us start over from scratch.

The GGP has a .sig that identifies a UK domain name. Use of plural for corporate names as collective nouns is the most common form in British English, or at least it is far more common than in American English. Rather than arguing about what is correct, it is worth noting that grammar is a social consensus that drifts with time and varies with location.

SInce you won't listen to people who weren't alive in the 80s, let me give you the point of view of someone who was already studying this stuff professionally in the 1970s. You are full of it; if anyone was indoctrinating you otherwise back then they were probably misunderstanding the huge scatter of exploratory results from climate modeling in its infancy -- the half dozen years after Budyko and Sellers in 1969 independently calculated an iceline stability problem using models so simple you would think a spreadsheet program is overkill now. The GP is correct in all points except a slight inaccuracy about the ozone hole. The catalytic ozone depletion cycle had been worked out in the early 70s by Crutzen, Rowland, and Molina (who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for that) but the Antarctic ozone hole was not noticed until the mid 80s, (Farman et al).

The idea that light was a wave moving through the ether was consistent with all available data, especially given the limitations of 19th century measurement, until the Michelson-Morley experiments. Maxwell's equations are still consistent with pre-relativity understanding, and I certainly had to learn how to work with them. The old way of thinking is not so much wrong as limited to a certain level of measurement, just as with Newton's laws and pretty much everything else before relativity and quantum mechanics. The old ways of thinking are still useful and generally correct within their assumptions. I begin to think that we need some kind of Godwin's Law against bringing up Kuhn and paradigms in an actual scientific discussion -- it seldom leads anywhere useful but usually is used just like this post to say "just because everyone who knows something thinks so doesn't mean it's right."

They lowered it to 80% of its former value? A sure sign that they're planning to give them to women this year.

I'm the parent poster and didn't realize I was not logged in -- sorry about that; I never post AC (on purpose).

A minor addition to the previous responses: most of the not-electric-guitarist (normal?) kind of people I talk to don't realize that most of us are getting our overdrive or distortion by overdriving the pre-amp, and the differences among the main amplifier types are much more obvious when they are lightly distorted from slight overdrive than when they are clean or in full metal mode. Many of the better distortion pedals are designed to emulate a particular type of amplifier's distortion, e.g., Rothwell Hellbender to sound like a Marshall Plexi or Lovepedal Les Lius to sound like an old Fender.

RTFA, they worked on English, Spanish, and Hebrew for precisely that reason.

This kind of story, where they can go seriously meta about how they fact-check their stories and how they were misled, set to mournful music, is an almost perfect This American Life setup. They will probably want to goof like this every year now. OK, I'm being very snarky, but Ira Glass is just way too sincere for my taste.

TFA is a Bloomberg summary of a Nature commentary about a survey among permafrost scientists, and the main article isn't even linked by Nature. If this was just an excuse to fire up the global warming flame thread, go for it. However, the same issue of Nature has a far more important (for global change) paper that dismisses the CLAW hypothesis in which dimethyl sulfate released from marine organisms is hugely important for creating clouds. In looking for fluff, the meat got missed.

You're lying in bed at night in a cool room with one blanket on. The blanket is warmer on the bottom next to you and cooler on the top. The top of the blanket is still warmer than the air in the room and it loses heat. Put on a second blanket. You get warmer underneath the two blankets, the top of the blanket layer is cooler than before, and less heat escapes into the room. The troposphere without additional CO2 already has about a dozen blankets on, because we're 33K or so warmer at the surface than our effective radiative temperature into space, and the recent excess CO2 is just adding another blanket to add a few more K to the surface warming. But the main point for this is that the stratosphere is mostly outside the blankets and is getting less heat.

After the fall of communism, the Russians learned that "everything Lenin said about communism was false and everything he said about capitalism was true." Paraphrase and partial quote from William Gibson, Pattern Recognition.

What I find amusing is how completely Pascal has disappeared from both historical memory and current usage. Some of you may remember the 80s for Basic on a C64, but I remember a huge bandwagon for Pascal both as a teaching language and as a working language. (I am not advocating Pascal, just reminiscing.)

And, I think the judge's almost glib comment near the end that this plaintiff has pursued over 100 previous suits to trial of this sort and can handle another one could indicate that she recognizes Righthaven's business model is Troll, which I take to be a (possibly unwarranted) good sign.