Comment Re:Moore's law. (Score 1) 96
I think the DOE was predicting last year that their first exascale system will come online in 7 to 9 years.
I think the DOE was predicting last year that their first exascale system will come online in 7 to 9 years.
The Jaguar/Titan system mentioned in your link is used for unclassified scientific computing. The NSA is building a computer facility at ORNL, but that's a different system (and was never claimed to be for stockpile stewardship). They don't put classified jobs onto unclassified systems.
Exascale computers would be helpful for climate modeling. Right now climate models don't have the same resolution as weather models, because they need to be run for much longer periods of time. This means that they don't have the resolution to simulate clouds directly, and resort to average statistical approximations of cloud behavior. This is a big bottleneck in improving the accuracy of climate models. They're just now moving from 100 km to 10 km resolution for short simulations. With exascale they could move to 1 km resolution and build a true cloud-resolving model that can be run on century timescales.
True, there are some things supercomputers can do well, but the same effect can be reached with distributed computing, which, in addition, makes the individual CPUs useful for a range of other things. Basically, building supercomputers is pretty stupid and a waste of money, time and effort.
People don't build supercomputers for no reason, especially when HPC eats up a large part of their budget.
The main application of supercomputers is numerically solving partial differential equations on large meshes. If you try that with a distributed setup, the latency will kill you: the processors have to talk constantly to exchange information across the domain.
As someone pointed out, modern supercomputers are like distributed computing, often with commodity processors. They look like (and are) giant racks of processors. But they have very fast, low-latency interconnects.
The above claim is approximately independent of the characteristics of the population distribution. What is more important is whether the sampling procedure is biased/non-representative.
AccuWeather is in PA, not The Weather Channel.
Protect the Queen!
Which one's the Queen?
I'm the Queen.
No you're not.
Freedom!
Horrible, horrible freedom!
is a short story by Randall Garrett. The crew of the first starship narrowly escape the supernova from their destination star by escaping back into warp. They realize that this isn't a coincidence: their warp drive blew it up on arrival. (They eventually realize that it blew up their origin star too: the Sun.)
That doesn't take away from Silver's math, though, considering that the polls all had Obama and Romney neck and neck and Obama won by a huge margin.
But the polls didn't have them neck and neck, if you looked at the state level and added up the electoral votes. That's what Silver's math was based on. He does have some non-poll information in the mix too, but Princeton Election Consortium got the same results using pure polls.
So I could pay my phone bill on time.
There have been many articles written recently about increased solar flares, etc. It's much more likely Sol is causing global warming.
No, it's not "much more likely", it's incredibly unlikely. Solar irradiance does not agree with how the climate has changed since the mid-20th century. And solar flares have nothing to do with it.
Most of the radical environmentalists I know are watermelons
Sigh. You're a prime example of what TFA is talking about.
So you support a carbon tax, then? A true libertarian would admit that's the purest form of a free market solution you can find: correct the market distortion introduced by a negative externality by sending a price signal that internalizes the costs. Then let the market respond freely to that price signal to find the most cost-effective solution.
P.S. Your historical revisionism about "phony" past environmental problems is delusional.
Why does everybody forget that we're still in an inter-glacial period?
Of course it's warming. That's how we got out (and are still getting out) of the ice age.
Gee, if only paleoclimatologists knew about interglacials!
Oh wait, they do.
The interglacial already peaked 8000 years ago. We've been very gradually cooling since then, on average (with century-scale variability superimposed), as predicted by the Milankovitch cycles.
If we can stop the ice coming back, that would be good, wouldn't it?
If you really cared about that, you'd argue for saving our fossil fuels for later, when we need them, instead of using them all up now, when we don't. If you wanted to prevent the next glacial period, you'd slowly dole them out over thousands of years to stabilize the climate. And you certainly wouldn't use all of them (far beyond what's needed to prevent a glacial inception).
There's quite a few actually.
1. Cloud cover
2. Solar output (lagged of course, driving El Nino) variation
3. Ocean oscillations (related to solar output)
All of those fail miserably. There isn't the necessary long-term secular trend in cloud cover, at least as far back as satellites can see. Solar output has been flat for many decades and no amount of lagging is going to fix it. Ocean oscillations do contribute on decadal timescales, particularly to certain regional climates, but not enough to be responsible for the main trend. And they're not driven by solar output either (nor is ENSO).
As the graph is measuring atmospheric temperature, one can only conclude that the record low is not air temperature driven, which is the crux of the anthropogenic global warming argument.
No, that's the crux of your strawman argument. Sea ice minima depend on many things other than surface temperature, including ocean circulation (export of ice out of the Arctic), ocean temperature, and cloud cover, all of which are affected by AGW. Extreme minima often coincide with extreme weather events (short-term climate), but they are also preconditioned by the climatically-induced mean sea ice decline.
"What man has done, man can aspire to do." -- Jerry Pournelle, about space flight
