They may have just stopped telling us they are there...

They Wrote a PAPER! which is really what science is about.

From the report it says that it takes 337,807 (page 29) jobs in solar to produce 1% of the power? How is that good?

Using the report and then comparing it to the latest energy source report here: http://www.eia.gov/electricity...

I got the following table of GW produced per employee:

Coal - 13.0
Natural gas - 24.6
Nuclear - 10.8
Hydro - 4.3
Solar - 0.09 (Are you kidding me)
Wind - 2.7

This is good news? This makes solar more attractive?

I have personally been involved in helping the teachers get training to make this happen. What they did was send a bunch of elementary school teachers into normal CS classes. I'll let you guess how it turned out, but it isn't pretty. Almost none of the teachers have the background to be successful in a rigorous CS class, so the result is they hate CS more than they did before. It absolutely reinforces the idea that CS is too hard to understand. Only the government would believe that the way to help kids learn CS is to throw elementary education teachers into a regular CS classes. For most of these teachers the CS class was the most challenging course they have ever taken and most of them have been out of school for years.

It has been an unmitigated disaster.

My guess is that pretty soon they will create a Social Credit Score like China is putting in place. Then anyone who disagrees can instantly be silenced online. http://www.wsj.com/articles/ch...

But so far, it hasn't reached far enough south. What would be cooler than seeing that in the mid-latitudes?

Isn't running circles around government regulation the oldest pass time in America. Look back at how effectively the Stamp Act was circumvented, 250 years ago. The more complex the laws gets, the easier it is to get away with things like this, because even the government can't sort through the complexity of the laws.

The solution is not more regulation, but simplifying it. If a corporation can make billions, by simply hiring 50 lawyers, or 500, to find a way to make billions, that is huge return on investment. Anyone who expects an efficient and responsive government is dreaming. The only effective solution is to make it so simple, that dodging becomes impractical.

I deal with that doublespeak so much that ready Curt's summary made me spray coffee. Damn that hurt, but I will be smiling the rest of the day.

I have gotten more than a few dirty looks for playing buzzword bingo.

It is interesting to me how the topics are chosen to determine what is rejection of science and what is not. For example this week another study came out that organic is not healthier than conventional, yet the anti-free market people reject that science as bogus.

I reject the idea that CO2 is going to cause global warming, but accept lung cancer is caused by smoking and AIDS by HIV. I ignore the creationists, but accept that they are free to believe what they want to on that, but evolution all the way for me.

I have also been an R&D engineer for more than a decade. Somehow the idea that because I accept free-market principles instead of central planning indicates that I am anti-science is total bullshit.

Of course since this is a peer-reviewed paper I could be labeled as anti-science for not accepting this paper, but that is something I am willing to risk.

He is very specific about which countries are working hard to control the flow of information. China and Iran are well known for their desire to control all information. Russia is nothing new in this regard either.

I would not hate Apple if they were not the control freaks that they are. If you deal with Apple in anyway, they own you. iTunes is exactly the type of control over the users that China and Iran want over their citizens.

Keeping the Internet open is critical for many reasons. Google has been made better by the competition it has faced relentlessly over the years. Google+ is better than Facebook because they have had to innovate relentlessly. Android is getting better because they have to keep making it better because of the competition that exists.

If Apple and Facebook had their way, there would be no competition. Three cheers for Brin.

Lying with statistics is an art, but it appears that once in a while they can be useful. This really is an impressive use of statistics.

There is nothing surprising in this result for those that study the climate. The real sampling rate of glaciers is tiny and only ones that are receding get attention.

That most glaciers are less than 2,000 years old gets almost no attention. The Earth is a dynamic place and the energy involved is many magnitudes larger than anything mankind is capable of causing.

The climate is always changing, but we are not the source of the variability.

In discussions of coral and global warming, what is really being discussed is tropical coral. That is coral that lives in water that is less than 50 ft deep and is in water that is generally warmer than 18 C (64F).

All of that coral on the planet Earth (yes, all of it) is less than 10,000 years old. All of the coral that was alive 20,000 years ago died when the last ice age ended and the ocean levels changed by > 400ft. All of the Earth's previous coral died as it was too deep to survive the new depths. In the past 1,000,000 years such events have wiped all tropical coral from existence at lest 20 times.

Coral has adapted by loading the ocean up with the eggs and sperm so it can form wherever conditions are correct. This falls into the publicity stunt range of science. They got funding for something they know isn't a problem, but they get money for it anyway.

Does the Earth's climate stay the same? No.

Has it EVER stayed the same? No.

Were the ocean levels > 100 m (330ft) lower 20,0000 years ago? Yes.

Did the Earth enter the last glacial (ice age) from a warmer climate than today's 115,000 years ago? Yes.

Are CO2 levels causing the Earth's climate to measurably change? No.

I looked at the science, climate has always been changing, but mankind has nothing to do with it.

Only the fanboi's go out and blow this kind of money every 2 years the moment something like this is released. That makes rubbing this in all the more pleasurable. I will be doing the same as well. I previously read that the construction on these was substandard with sloppy thermal paste application. It would seem that the issue is real and related to the assembly.