Not reading the article is a Slashdot meme. You didn't even bother to read the first word of the article title before dashing off something silly.

The old "toss it down a staircase and the stair it falls on is the grade" trick doesn't care much about last name.

I have to agree with you though. The first few assignments I graded I tended to have high expectations. By the end those were gone.

Oh, OU Phys.Soc.

Didn't know they had one that videoed lectures etc - but not surprised. I stumbled onto the OU Archaeology Soc. recently, and they had an interesting few hours of presentations there, so I think the Phys.Soc should repay a good search too.

Thanks for digging that out. I didn't come across that in my hunting (I was working from the RS end more than this guy's website.

Off to watch and write notes.

You haven't noticed any of the astronomical publications about refinements to the chain of "standard candles" across the observable universe over the last 40+ years? I remember reading about these things in the town library in the late 1970s, in the university library in the 1980s, the journals waiting, wedging the front door shut when I got home in the 1990s, and on ArXiv (it's a chi, not an "X", but Slashcode can't handle HTML) in the 2000s, 2010s and 2020s.

The process of refining those candles continues to this day. Each publication cycle approximately halves the uncertainties of the previous one. See above for the recent publication cycles.

Shrug. We can't do experiments in historical geology (what happened in the past), but that doesn't render the field unscientific - it just means we have to use more indirect arguments and slightly longer chains of inference.

Everything can't rotate because there's nothing else for it to rotate relative to.

Not only that, but if it was rotating, it would have an obvious centre and we would see everything orbiting it.

I don't think so. Not necessarily.

Consider a universe - the whole shebang, everything, no external reference frame. Separate it into two regions, of (approximately) equal size ; set one part rotating clockwise relative to the other, and the second part rotating anticlockwise relative to the first.

You now have a universe where everything (except that on the rotation axes) is rotating, but the net angular momentum is zero.

But yes, if (if) your local "observable" universe included one or other of the rotation axes, then you should have something to look at. If the axes are outside your observable section of the universe, maybe you'd be able to tell, maybe not. My maths isn't up to saying for sure, either way.

Bloody Slashcode can't even handle a perfectly reasonable HTML entity, "& chi ;" necessary to spell "ArXiv" correctly.

Found it via the 3rd name.

https://royalsociety.org/scien...

15 - 16 April 2024 09:00 - 17:00 The Royal Society ... ah, the GRauniad article is from the 14th!

Scientific discussion meeting organised by [names]

Is the universe simple enough to be adequately described by the standard [lambda]CDM cosmological model which assumes the isotropic and homogeneous Friedmann-LemaiÌtre-Robertson-Walker metric? Tensions have emerged between the values of cosmological parameters estimated in different ways. Do these tensions signal that our model is too simple? Could a more sophisticated model account for the data without invoking a Cosmological Constant?

Speaker abstracts will be available closer to the meeting date. Meeting papers will be published in a future issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.

There are abstracts of the presentations, but no details.

I guess, if I were really interested, I'd search Ariv for papers by the relevant names, but I'm not that enthused. I've got better things to do this evening.

Yeah, I'm hunting around the RS's website looking for some information about this meeting ... to find it has gone down the cracks. Their programme of meetings covers 25th Apr onwards, while the Grauniad item talks about "this week's meeting" ... and if it's going at the moment, then the videos won't be on YT, yet. (The most recent RS video is "Dr Anthony Fauci on the lessons from AIDS and COVID-19 , 1.6K views, 4 days ago"). (Not a particularly engaging set of lectures. The RI is better.)

The named organiser (https://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/our-people/sarkar) ... doesn't have anything on his website.

He's trying to play some "Say you don't have an argument without saying 'I don't have an argument' " game?

The Triassic wasn't particularly "lush". With Pangaea barely getting started on it's pre-breakup LIP and rifting, most of the Earth's continents were far form any oceans to produce moist air and rainfall, making it, on average, a fairly arid period.

Also, most oil deposits are considerably younger than the Triassic.

Did you respond to the wrong comment? I am indeed unsure how "long wave transparency windows" are related to the definition of "order of magnitude."

Ah, you're one of those posters who likes to write comments for the mindless adoration of their fans. Indeed, my mistake. Carry on.

This is a common claim. People like to expand it into things like, well, more CO2 and warmer climates means a lusher Earth and more food!

That's probably true. Most of the land is in the northern hemisphere, fairly far from the equator. Deserts will expand with warmer temperatures, but likely even more land will become arable in the north. I'm Canadian, and my countrymen often quip that global warming sounds pretty good.

The problem is that cities need a *constant* supply of food. I grew up in a farming community. Farmers admittedly like to bitch about everything, but there's a reason for that. They'll be happy to tell you about how any change from the norm, in any direction, negatively affects their crops. Modern agriculture, especially in the developed world, isn't some old geezer waking up one day, squinting at the sun, letting some dirt trickle through his fingers, standing up and sighing "well, I guess it's plantin' time again." It's incredibly optimized. There was a documentary, unfortunately I can't find it, on all the things the USDA tracks and models in order to make recommendations for pretty much every aspect of agriculture in the US.

Canada is supposed to get (overall) warmer and wetter. Sounds great yeah? Well, a few years ago we had a really wet fall, meaning nobody could dry hay, meaning lots of livestock had to be culled the next year because there wasn't enough food for them. Warmer also means less or no persistent snow pack in the winter, so no spring runoff.

Moving New York, Miami and New Orleans because they're getting regularly flooded is expensive, but doable. Moving Capetown, LA, or a hundred other cities because they're out of water is expensive, doable. Switching Iowa from growing corn to growing wheat is expensive, but doable. All at the same time, and along with a zillion other things starts to get dicey, and definitely more expensive. And the global climate is likely to keep shifting for a long time until the heat budget equalizes and another zillion things all equilibrate.

One of the reasons Australia was sparsely populated historically, never developed large agrarian civilizations, and agriculture is still very difficult, is that its geography makes its climate highly variable. Civilization thrives in stability.