"The meaning of the world is the separation of wish and fact." - KURT GÖDEL
"According to Peirce's doctrine of fallibilism, the conclusions of science are always tentative. The rationality of the scientific method does not depend on the certainty of its conclusions, but on its self-corrective character: by continued application of the method science can detect and correct its own mistakes, and thus eventually lead to the discovery of truth".
A guiding principle for accepting claims of catastrophic global events, miracles, incredible healing, invisible friends, or fill in the blank is:
“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” - Carl Sagan
"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable." - H. L. Mencken
I would add irrational and highly delusional to the mix when faith requires one to accept magical violations of the well known, well tested or easily demonstrated laws of Nature. - PWL
"Science is Progress and the Future. Faith is regression to the Dark Ages." - PWL
"Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness." - Alfred Korzybski
"Science is a search for basic truths about the Universe, a search which develops statements that appear to describe how the Universe works, but which are subject to correction, revision, adjustment, or even outright rejection, upon the presentation of better or conflicting evidence." - James Randi
"Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch." - Novalis
The belief that the ends justifies the means may be the true root of all evil. – Troy Brumley
A prime example of how science is distorted by – likely well meaning – scientists or science educators. Deliberately or not this video is a masterful piece of propaganda pretending to be science. Credits are due to Greg Craven, the master propagandist who appears in the video.
Greg Craven: falsum in uno, falsum in omnibus?
Greg Craven: false in one thing, false in everything?
Neither risk presented in the video is acceptable because they are a false choice and Greg Craven knows it! His logic is flawed since he presents a “binary choice” and that is his mistake, black and white thinking. His second mistake is presenting a false dilemmas when he knows the facts much better! There are so many other choices one can choose that it’s not funny. It’s typical of many people trained in the sciences and technology, as well as the general public, to think in black and white binary terms. The universe is fuzzy people. It’s about time we realized that.
The logical fallacy of false dilemma (also called false dichotomy, the either-or fallacy) involves a situation in which only two alternatives are considered, when in fact there are other options. Closely related are failing to consider a range of options and the tendency to think in extremes, called black-and-white thinking. Strictly speaking, the prefix “di” in “dilemma” means “two”. When a list of more than two choices is offered, but there are other choices not mentioned, then the fallacy is called the fallacy of false choice, or the fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses.
False dilemma can arise intentionally, when fallacy is used in an attempt to force a choice (“If you are not with us, you are against us.”) But the fallacy can arise simply by accidental omission—possibly through a form of wishful thinking or ignorance—rather than by deliberate deception (“I thought we were friends, but all my friends were at my apartment last night and you weren’t there.”)
When two alternatives are presented, they are often, though not always, two extreme points on some spectrum of possibilities. This can lend credence to the larger argument by giving the impression that the options are mutually exclusive, even though they need not be. Furthermore, the options are typically presented as being collectively exhaustive, in which case the fallacy can be overcome, or at least weakened, by considering other possibilities, or perhaps by considering a whole spectrum of possibilities, as in fuzzy logic.
Furthermore the dark vision of doom and gloom presented by the human caused global warming alarmists is exaggerated! Even Al Gore admits that he exaggerates – lies outright – just to get people to act! It’s clear that the alarmist views are not on the same footing as a rational scientific view that can be audited and examined fully in the public eyes.
Al Gore admits that he deliberately lies to and scares people for political gain on the topic of human caused global warming climate change. His lying is so blatant that he arrogantly brags about it! Wow, mastery of propaganda is certainly a strong suit for Al Gore.
“In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous (global warming) is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.” — Al Gore in an interview.
Steven Schneider, an alleged climate scientist who also advocates lying to people and scaring them with outright lies for political gain. Wow what a one man propaganda machine.
On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” – Steven Schneider, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), (Quoted in Discover, pp. 45–48, Oct. 1989; for the original, together with Schneider’s commentary on it misrepresentation see also American Physical Society, APS News August/September 1996.
Schneider has been publicly criticized by fellow atmospheric scientist, Craig Bohren, for his history of self-promotion using contradictory climate scares:
“…some of the prominent global warmers of today were global coolers of not so long ago. In particular, Steven Schneider, now at Stanford, previously at NCAR, about 30 years ago was sounding the alarm about an imminent ice age. The culprit then was particles belched into the atmosphere by human activities. No matter how the climate changes he can correctly say that he predicted it. No one in the atmospheric science community has been more successful at getting publicity. NCAR used to send my department clippings from newspaper and magazine articles in which NCAR researchers were named. We’d get thick wads of clippings, almost all of which were devoted to Schneider. Perhaps global warming is bad for the rest of us, but for Schneider and others [such as Al Gore] it has been a godsend.“
More scare mongers with a deliberate lying bent where the end justifies the means, scientists, politicians and eco-warriors alike admitting they are willing to lie through their teeth to get the job done even if it’s global warming is false! Wow.
“What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
– Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-Colorado)
“Scientists who want to attract attention to themselves, who want to attract great funding to themselves, have to (find a) way to scare the public . . . and this you can achieve only by making things bigger and more dangerous than they really are.” (Petr Chylek, Professor of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, commenting on reports that Greenland’s glaciers are melting. Halifax Chronicle-Herald, August 22, 2001)
“We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing”
(Tim Wirth 1990, former US Senator) as quoted in NCPA Brief 213; September 6, 1996
“A global climate treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect“
(Richard Benedict, US Conservation Foundation)
“We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion — guilt-free at last!“
– Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue)
Taking action can cause much worse problems for humans than taking rushing and taking the wrong actions. It’s very possible that the huge economic upheaval that is being caused by the rush to judgment by the alarmists will actually cause more harm than any real amount of actual warming.
Will Greg Craven, the guy in the video, take personal responsibility for all those that die in the economic turmoil of the implementation of useless “carbon solutions” for his role in presenting false dilemmas? I doubt it.
Besides the facts now show that the last ten years have been getting colder. Cold is the new warming. What? Yup. It’s getting colder which means the planet is warming. Weird, but that is what the alarmists claim.
Having an accurate assessment of the risks is crucial for any decision making process. This guy presents the situation in binary thinking and aims you towards his forgone conclusion revealing his bias. More propaganda based upon false reasoning steps and a very crude method of risk management. Since we already know that the alarmists claims are false (even they admit it) this guy is presenting a false choice on the alarmist side of the ledger.
Overall Greg Craven fails as a scientist to present the full set of known facts but passes as an effective and craven propagandist.
A detailed analysis of Greg Craven’s video “How the World Ends” (which have the same false dilemma argument) is illuminating of Greg Craven’s craven attitude towards factual science presentations.
Now a more rational video presentation on climate science.
What is Normal Climate?
“All we can do is adapt, it is the sun that does it, not man.“
Now is the only that that actually exists in reality. The past is but a memory. The future an illusion. Tomorrow never comes for when it does it is today and there is always another tomorrow. Now is the Time! This moment, now! Now. Now. Now. The Time is Now and never any other!
That time is NOW! Save us from Mann Caused Global Warming Climate Change Alarmists and their Soothsaying Hysteria! Save US NOW and bring to Justice to Science so that Science can Prevail over Alarmist Propaganda!
So it’s fine for the endangered human caused global warming climate change alarmists to yell “look it’s Ida, extreme weather” caused by human caused global warming climate change yet when it’s pointed out that October 2009 is the 3rd coldest in 115 years on record it’s just weather and not climate? Double standards on the “it’s weather no it’s climate vs. it’s climate no it’s just weather”?
Climate extremes cause weather extremes! Is that a fair statement? Or is it that weather extremes cause climate extremes?
Climate is weather averaged over decade long times scales… extreme climate depends on your time window and your statistical prowess poker face.
Climate is weather. Without weather there would be no climate. Two sides of the same coin flipping about with randomness generated internally within the system. (See Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, chapter 2 for how this newly discovered form of randomness operates for even very simple systems to show highly complex and extremely unpredictable behaviors).
Climate is weather. Extremes in weather are just the planet going about it’s business. As such extremes in weather mathematically show up in the decade long time scales to varying amounts.
How do we really know where each change in climate really comes from? Assigning this fraction of a degree to that cause and that fraction of a degree to this other cause ad infinitum makes no sense as that isn’t how Nature plans it out not that Nature plans it out.
Now it seems that it’s a heat budget thing with heat into a system (the planet) and heat out (of the planet) by various means. We have various forms of light and electromagnetic radiation touching and being absorbed by the planet with some reflecting off or changing and reflecting off. We have movement of the planet in it’s ever changing always unique orbit of Sol, not to mention other gravitational influences such as the moon and even other planetary bodies. We have cosmic rays and other high energy particle streams impacting the planet or going right on through. Cosmic rays from near and distant stars as we orbit the galaxy so close. We have chemical reactions and volcanoes and oceans mixing and moving and we have the hot and molten inner layers plus the rotating core providing our magnetic fields fluctuating always churning and interacting. Not to mention the bizarre lumpy gravity fields that distort the seemingly squashed spheroid of the planet into what can best be described as a total gravity mess beaten up all bent out of it’s idealized shape we can see from space. We’ve got so many processes and forces at work that we think we can apportion a fraction of a degree to this or that.
It would be really funny if it wasn’t so serious a conversation about doom and gloom. The climate change soothsayers have taking a bite out of sanity and are running a con game that has at it’s core irrational correlations that are weak at best and fraudulent at worse and outright lies in the extreme.
I would love to see an article by one of the major scientists on ALL the elements impacting the climate summarized, glossarized and indexed by the various “fractions of degrees” that they allegedly contribute and how to the climate and to the all important weather.
Climate is a mathematical abstraction. Weather is real and is happening now, the only moment in time that actually exists. The past gone. The future is an illusion and never exists. Tomorrow never comes as there is always another tomorrow when today shows up now. It’s an important aspect of comprehending time that now is all that is real. All there ever is is now and that means weather rules the climate not the other way around.
This is what we really need to be protecting against: The Real Threat to Humanity – other than ourselves – are Asteroid Impacts! We missed being hit two days ago and a month ago our atmosphere protected us from an asteroid with enough punch to product an 50 Kiloton detonation high up in the atmosphere. Ouch!
Actually it would be more like this but the above video has a better sound track!
This one is the bomb, literally an Extinction Level Event (ELE)!
“It’s to give people an opportunity to think for themselves… what happens is that most of us think that our very strongly held beliefs, you know those things we hold, our opinions, that are very strong, we think that that is thinking for ourselves but it isn’t really. The ability to think for yourself really means the ability to think something that you haven’t thought before. To think outside the allowable range of thoughts rather than just inside the allowable range of thoughts.” – Werner Erhard, TV Interview
Learn to think for yourself out side of your allowable range of thoughts and especially outside the cage of your beliefs and opinions.
The Known Knowns.
The Known Unknowns.
The Unknown Knowns.
The Unknown Unknowns.
“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.” – quote popularized globally by Donald Rumsfeld in justification of mass murder; quote popularized by Werner Erhard in the 1970’s and 80’s to make the world a better place one person at a time.
During the 1970’s and 1980’s Werner Ehard’s est Training Program used this quote (or a variant thereof that covers all four possibilities, known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, unknown unknowns) as a part of the course material. Landmark Education’s The Landmark Forum course also uses it. One point of using it is to help people see the limits of their knowledge and the edges of the metaphorical box they live in. Where are our blind spots when it comes to our knowledge or lack there of? What are the risks of ignorance? The exploration of these four domains would be extensive and take many hours of these courses.
All belief is religion as belief isn’t based upon verifiable knowledge.
“A United Kingdom court has ruled that a man can take his employer to court on the grounds that he was discriminated against because of his views on climate change. …
Mr Nicholson successfully argued that his moral values about the environment should be recognised under the same laws that protect religious beliefs.
In the landmark ruling, Justice Michael Burton said that a belief in man-made climate change is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the religion and belief regulations.” Beliefs on climate like Religion, court rules
The word “belief” is a problematic word with so many definitions that you have to pretty much define what you mean either by the context or by direction definition.
Generally when I’m down on the word belief I specifically mean “religious belief” or “supernatural belief” and not a belief that my car is still parked where it is.
I don’t think it’s responsible to say that “I believe in Newton’s Gravity Theory” as to use the word belief to talk about facts mis-communicates to the masses of people out there without scientific training. It’s better to use other words. Your “belief” that letting go of a stone has nothing to do with whether or not the stone falls.
Common uses of belief basically mean that you don’t know or don’t have evidence and that you assume it is true anyway. Since you do have evidence that dropping a stone on earth will have it fall (unless it’s otherwise supported or blocked) using the word belief is a mistake. One instead should say “I know that when I let go of a stone at chest level, it will fall (assuming that it’s not supported or blocked in some other manner).” This has clarity.
It is a big mistake for Richard Dawkins to be using the word belief the way he does with regards to scientific knowledge. He should be more careful and define his terms more precisely when talking about scientific knowledge and what is know and what isn’t since the religious masses use the word belief differently.
Sure people have a “belief” that X person will be a good political leader, but that is an entirely different category and meaning of belief than “belief that god exists” which is a statement that has no evidence and will never have any evidence in all probability not even mentioning all the evidence against the possibility of any gods existing.
As for climate change caused by man the science isn’t settled and if you think it is that is your “belief” and not a valid scientific statement. The more I learn the more I learn that we don’t yet have conclusive answers and that politics of extreme environmentalism started it and now that mainstream politicians have gotten into the act it’s now even more highly suspect. So I’d say show the evidence in a context where it can be audited by anyone which means showing all the data, raw and manipulated, detailed and comprehensive explanations for the manipulations, the statistics methods involved and why they were chosen, the software and the data used to create the graphs, all the scientists notes, photographs, and other materials used in the preparation of all the science papers. It’s clear that climate scientists (and others) have not been up to the standards of other fields and that all publically funded science needs to have it’s standards of openness and auditability raised.
I’m a very strong show me the hard evidence guy. Belief has no place in science nor in the communication of science nor in the science education process unless it specifically means “we think it could be true or false but we don’t just know yet”.
Believing that murder is wrong is a statement of one’s moral values and the word belief is often used although I’d question it’s use there. I’d not say it that way. I’d rather be more specific and say that “Murder is wrong because human life is valuable.”
Is saying “gravity sucks” a statement of “belief” or is it a succinct statement of the known laws of Gravity? I pick the latter.
“The relationship between belief and knowledge is that a belief is knowledge if the belief is true, and if the believer has a justification (reasonable and necessarily plausible assertions/evidence/guidance) for believing it is true. … Later epistemologists have questioned the “justified true belief” definition, and some philosophers have questioned whether “belief” is a useful notion at all.” – wikipedia
So “belief” is shaky ground at best, and as such it’s best to avoid using it when speaking generally about science or anything that is a statement of objective reality or it’s nature. I also use it carefully. My main use is in talking about the belief and faith stricken members of society.
Is that my belief? No, it’s a precautionary guidance principle based on knowledge gained from far too many conversations with the belief stricken who set well placed linguistic and philosophical traps.
Climate change belief given same legal status as religion In a landmark ruling, Mr Justice Michael Burton said that “a belief in man-made climate change … is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations“.
An executive has won the right to sue his employer on the basis that he was unfairly dismissed for his green views after a judge ruled that environmentalism had the same weight in law as religious and philosophical beliefs.
Facts do not matter anymore as belief in global warming is now officially recognized as a nutter religion!
(All religions are anti-scientific since they require faith above facts of Nature and Nature always wins thus the supernatural religions are false).
The Religion of Climate Change
He’s close “belief in human caused climate change is a religion” but it’s not that they’ll believe in anything its’ that they put “belief” above reason and facts and they’ve been convinced by the likes of Al Gore. It is not the lack of a belief in god that is the problem it is belief itself that is the problem, belief in god, belief in climate change caused by man (aka Mann) that is the real problem. When you are willing to “believe” rather that use reason to examine the facts of Nature that is when you take the irresponsible “leap of faith” into the land of being belief stricken with something that is more likely simply wrong than even having a hint of being right. Critical thinking and reason and the scientific method and open science with peer review by anyone are the tools we need to move forward as a society. Not belief in something. Belief and faith are the great mind killers and possibly the death of civilization as well.
The Religion of Climate Change, UN Ki Moon Cult
Yes indeed, sober scientific based discussion still has it’s place. No science is ever settled. If you think climate science is settled then you don’t know about the facts of climate science as much as you think you do. Not only that, but you also don’t understand the scientific method nor science eduction. Questions are essential of all science at all stages. To suppress discussion is anti-scientific.
To make scientific questions such as “mann made climate change” into a religion based upon belief is the height of insanity and irresponsible governance by the court and anyone else.
“It’s said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false and tragically false. Look for yourself, this is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people where turned into numbers. … It was not done by gas… It was done by arrogance… it was done by dogma… it was done by ignorance. When people believe they have absolute knowledge with no test in reality this how they behave. this is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of the gods. … Science is a very human kind of knowledge… we are always at the brink of the known… every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute power.” – Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man
Continuing Dr Bronowski’s personal view of mans major discoveries and the evolution of his thought; this programme highlights the achievement of twentieth century physics in proving that absolute certainty inside or outside science is beyond our grasp.
1) The Method of the Artist.
2) The Invisible Waves.
3) Karl Friedrich Gauss and Göttingen.
4) Max Born and Heisenberg.
5) The Principle of Uncertainty.
6) Leo Szilard.
7) The Tragedy of Scientists.
Anthropomorphic Global Warming Hits Gilligan’s Island with a vengeance.
“Just like in real life with Anthropomorphic Global Warming the professors hypothesis of the island sinking is proven false due to bad data collection, misinterpretation, and above all fear based soothsaying of the future when it’s not prudent nor scientifically possible.
Fear NOT, CO2 is life as it’s an essential plant nutrient needed for our friends the plants to grow strong and lush. CO2 is needed to feed the ever growing human population.
Gilligan’s Island Sinking due to Global Warming (AGW)?
From: MountThor | October 09, 2009 | 291 views
Unfortunately Warner Brothers chose to prevent even a fair use of Gilligan’s island from occurring. There are 98 episodes of Gilligan’s Island of about 25 minutes each for a total of about 2450 minutes. The video which was deleted was about 8 minutes and 40 seconds, say 9 minutes… that’s less than 0.37% of the total footage ever shot and broadcast which makes the amount I used fair use under international copyright laws. The copyrights were left intact as were the shot titles and a thank you for usage was added to this descriptive note (not that that is necessary for fair use situations). The footage was ONLY used since it provides a public commentary on the politics of global warming and how the data the so called science is based upon is flawed as was the science the professor used in his conclusion that the island is sinking was flawed.
I refer you to: http://www-sul.stanford.edu/cpyright.html where you’ll see that this limited in size video expert for non-profit review and critique and commentary meets all the criteria for fair use.
I subscribe to the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video.
http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/publication…
I kindly request the permission of Warner Brothers to use this limited extract for not for profit political commentary.
This documentary is a good companion to the latest documentary,”The Great Global Warming Swindle” recently shown on CH 4 UK and is available on Google video. The hoax of Global Warming / Green House was exposed 19 years ago by CH 4 UK in this documentary entitled Green House Conspiracy. Those who subscribe to the rubbish trotted out by Al Gore and his mindless followers are not new they were the same arse clowns who were telling us we were all going to freeze to death 30 years ago.
What The FUCK? Almost every aspect of this video from 19 years ago is exactly the same as it is today!!!! Wow, nothing has changed. The warmies are still crying wolf. I wonder who let them out of the asylum?
The Solaranite Theory of Climate Change starts around 3:00 into the flick.
Solaranite Theory of Rapid Anthropomorphic Climate Change: “Take a can of your gasoline. Say this can of gasoline is the sun. Now, you spread a thin line of it to a ball, representing the earth. Now, the gasoline represents the sunlight, the sun particles. Here we saturate the ball with the gasoline, the sunlight. Then we put a flame to the ball. The flame will speedily travel around the earth, back along the line of gasoline to the can, or the sun itself. It will explode this source and spread to every place that gasoline, our sunlight, touches. Explode the sunlight here, gentlemen, you explode the universe. Explode the sunlight here and a chain reaction will occur direct to the sun itself and to all the planets that sunlight touches, to every planet in the universe.“
The details of the Solaranite Climate Change Theory come to light in this following riveting conversation. Pun intended.
Eros, the leader, confronts a group of skeptical earthlings with the true nature of his plan. The scientific minds of Earth are on a treacherous course of weapons discovery that will eventually lead to a bomb that could explode the whole universe, the “Solaranite Bomb”.
Colonel Edwards: Why is it so important that you want to contact the governments of our earth?
Eros: Because of death. Because all you of Earth are idiots!
Jeff Trent: Now you just hold on, Buster.
Eros: No, you hold on! First was your firecracker, a harmless explosive. Then your hand grenade: you began to kill your own people, a few at a time. Then the bomb. Then a larger bomb: many people are killed at one time. Then your scientists stumbled upon the atom bomb, split the atom. Then the hydrogen bomb, where you actually explode the air itself. Now you can arrange the total destruction of the entire universe served by our sun: The only explosion left is the Solaranite.
Colonel Tom Edwards: Why, there’s no such thing! Why, a particle of sunlight can’t even be seen or measured.
Eros: Can you see or measure an atom? Yet you can explode one! A ray of sunlight is made up of many atoms.
Jeff Trent: So what if we do develop this Solaranite bomb? We’d be even a stronger nation than now.
Eros: “Stronger.” You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The impassioned plea continues with an appeal to intelligence and metaphor.
Colonel Edwards: You speak of Solaranite. But just what is it?
Eros: Take a can of your gasoline. Say this can of gasoline is the sun. Now, you spread a thin line of it to a ball, representing the earth. Now, the gasoline represents the sunlight, the sun particles. Here we saturate the ball with the gasoline, the sunlight. Then we put a flame to the ball. The flame will speedily travel around the earth, back along the line of gasoline to the can, or the sun itself. It will explode this source and spread to every place that gasoline, our sunlight, touches. Explode the sunlight here, gentlemen, you explode the universe. Explode the sunlight here and a chain reaction will occur direct to the sun itself and to all the planets that sunlight touches, to every planet in the universe. This is why you must be stopped. This is why any means must be used to stop you. In a friendly manner or as (it seems) you want it.
Over a period of 28 hours or so this long weekend I had a conversation with someone, CK, I met on Face Book who shared a common technical interest. We had a number of other exchanges with each other over the past few months but this one was different partly for it’s brutal honesty and partly since CK choose to jump out of what was likely the most important conversation of his life.
I managed to save a copy of the conversation moments before CK deleted my access (it was on his wall) and thus ending the conversation with us two. Likely he’s busy gathering agreement with his friends that I’m an evil no good person when in fact it’s likely that I’m one of his best new friends he’s ever had. Be that as it may, here is a non edited transcript (spelling corrections were made). Oh, from what I can tell CK is a young adult male with a gay lover and a roman catholic upbringing.
I hope this helps when talking with religious delusionals of all sorts but christians in particular since we deal with dispensing the christian miracle mythologies here.
I’ll add comments and expand my responses and even critique my own responses over the next few weeks or so as I have time to reread the transcript below and think longer it.
All the best and live long and prosper in peace. Your feed back and comments are appreciated.
PWL
ps. This Jesus and Mo comic is appropriate since CK’s solution for “resolving the incompatibilities” between science and religion is to become insane by fully embracing “cognitive dissonance” and not working to resolve the conflict even though he claims to work towards that end. More on this in the conversation. He also, as you will see, negotiates his way between these two incompatibilities by accepting part of Objectivism (it’s basic three axioms of existence, identity and consciousness) while maintaining his “faithful belief” in his invisible super friends even though acknowledging that objectivism provides “proof” that there are no gods other than those in human minds. Thus CK’s religious driven insanity.
CK: just wants to find SOMEONE who shares his philosophies… lol
PWL: What philosophy are yours?
CK: Except for the stance on matters of sexuality and religion, I’m a staunch objectivist. Go Ayn Rand!
I believe cognitive dissonance is the greatest evil in the universe.
That’s a good start to the summary. In essence, I believe you must accept a small set of axioms as true, and then use inductive logic based on that. If only I could put my axioms in words… lol
PWL: I am also a big fan of Ayn Rand.
People do work well together and can in many circumstances work towards their mutual benefit.
What do you mean by cognitive dissonance?
I’m confused by your sexuality considering you seem to be very catholic… seems mutually incompatible to me.
I’m confused by your religious stance and Ayn Rand, objectivism proves that your mythical god doesn’t exist and is just an artifact of your mind wanting comfort or what not. So you’re not a staunch objectivist if you believe in the mythical invisible super beings and thus the supernatural realm.
The real world doesn’t care about our philosophies since it doesn’t care about anything.
They are not axioms if they are not in words…
BUT then Leaps of Faith know no boundaries or limits and ignore any that are pointed out. That is the essential nature of a leap of faith, it destroys actual rational thinking with the emotional non-rational leap of faith.
“Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. The “ideas” or “cognitions” in question may include attitudes and beliefs, the awareness of one’s behavior, and facts. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, or by justifying or rationalizing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.[1] Cognitive dissonance theory is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology.” – Cognitive Dissonance.
So if you believe “cognitive dissonance” is the greatest evil in the universe why do you practice it?
Why do you consider it evil?
MD: wow :{
CK: Sexuality: Rand didn’t exactly believe they should wait until they found the right one, and then stay with them the rest of their life. Yes, objectivism does reject the almighty.
When I say cognitive dissonance, I mean holding two apparently exclusive beliefs wihout batting an eye — it’s an offense to reason. In my case (objectivist Catholic), although you’d think they are exclusive, but the reason I believe they are not is that I do not blindly believe — I observe the positive effects of faith, I observe the evidence of miracles, and I make judgments for myself. I consider the beliefs and try to reason and justify them.
If I were to just say, “well, it is” THEN faith and reason would be exclusive. But to examine faith and try to reason about it, why you believe it even when you know science, then you have used reason. You just use inductive logic rather than deductive logic.
PWL: Actually you must use actual repeatable verifiable evidence not logic or some belief stricken dogma system…
As the saying goes you are mistaken about a great many things CK.
There are no real positive effects of faith that are not available without faith!
“Religion puts your mind in a straight jacket.” – Dr Death aka Doctor Jack Kevorkian
“Creeds are a weakness of the will. All religions are to make you conform to a different way of thinking than you feel naturally.” – Doctor Death aka Doctor Jack Kevorkian in part quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“America fits all Fourteen Principles of fascism.” – Doctor Jack Kevorkian
The 14 Defining Characteristics Of Fascism: here and here.
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism.
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights.
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause.
4. Supremacy of the Military..
5. Rampant Sexism.
6. Controlled Mass Media.
7. Obsession with National Security.
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined.
9. Corporate Power is Protected.
10. Labor Power is Suppressed.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment.
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption.
14. Fraudulent Elections.
Victor Stenger author of “Not by Design: The Origin of the Universe”, “Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World Beyond the Senses”, “The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology”, “Timeless Reality: Symmetry, Simplicity, and Multiple Universes”, “Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe”, “The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do The Laws Of Physics Come From?”, “God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist” and “Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness” interviewed in depth (98 minutes).
The main battle ground is “superstition”, belief and faith verses Reason, Rationality and Scientific thinking.
Al Gore Fortunetelling and doom-saying our future warming the planet with his actual hands waving across the big silver screen in the fantasy science fiction documentary An Inconvenient Truth and in the process breaking the anti-fortuneteller law in Maryland!
A Maryland man [Nick Nefedro] who refers to himself as a Gypsy is claiming discrimination in the case of a Bethesda, Maryland law that forbids “foretelling the future.”
In Montgomery County, Maryland, it is … illegal to accept money for “forecasting or foretelling or for pretending to forecast or foretell the future by cards, palm reading or any other scheme, practice or device.” Although the law has been on the books since the 1950’s, it is being challenged in court by Nick Nefedro, a man who claims gypsy ancestry and who wants to run a business selling his services as a fortuneteller. Nefedro was denied a business permit, and he says banning his predictions is discriminatory against his heritage. The ACLU is backing his claim.
…
A possibility that no one has discussed, however, is that Montgomery County prosecutors might insist that Mr. Nefedro prove his fortunetelling abilities. Courts have an understandable and desirable bias toward protecting free speech, but Mr. Nefedro’s free speech rights are not in danger, only his ability to take money for making predictions. If his ability is real, it should stand up to scientific testing. If it does not stand up to such testing, than it is, in simple terms, fraud.
…
In reality, fortunetelling should not be protected free speech any more than yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. Whenever someone claims to make supernatural [or scientific] predictions, those claims should be subject to testing or at least subject to later review for accuracy.” – Fortunetelling Should Not Be Protected Speech
“I don’t think it’s strange for us to have laws that protect against fraud,” said Clifford Royalty, zoning division chief in the Montgomery County attorney’s office, adding that “religion [or science] has nothing to do with it. He’s not made that allegation in the lawsuit.”
“The practice is fraudulent,” Royalty said, “because no one can forecast the future.”
“it is … illegal to accept money for “forecasting or foretelling or for pretending to forecast or foretell the future by … any … scheme, practice or device.“
So this applies to ALL people claiming to FORETELL the future including weather forecasters and climate scientists who use any “scheme, practice or device” known as climate science and a computer and software to do their dirty deeds of forecasting, soothsaying and doom-saying about the end of the world scenarios brought on by Mann, oops, man, with Anthropomorphic Global Warming! Very interesting.
“The underlying purpose is to prevent people from being taken advantage of, because it’s a scam,” Clifford Royalty, a lawyer in the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office, said.
… A federal judge upheld a similar ban in Harford County in 2002, deferring to the county’s assessment of fortunetelling as “inherently deceptive” and citing a 1976 Supreme Court decision, albeit not in a fortunetelling case, that said “untruthful speech” is not protected.” – Washington Examiner
I view the matter in a simple, direct way. If someone wants to sell their services as a fortuneteller (or any other name which means the same thing [such as climatologist or climate scientist or Al Gore]) then they should have to prove them adequate to the task. Plumbers must be able to plumb. Mechanics have to be able to fix your car. Carpenters who build your house have to be able to do the job. If they do a shoddy job, the consumer has recourse.
This means that fortunetellers [, soothsayers, doomsayers, climate scientists, weathermen, movie makers, and others predicting the future] who sell their services as genuine must be able to pass some sort of test showing that they can actually do it. Otherwise they must have a massive sign that says “WE ARE NOT REAL. THIS IS FOR ENTERTAINMENT VALUE ONLY. YOU WILL GET JUST AS GOOD ADVICE THROWING A DART AT THE PAPER.”
I have no problem with those who claim they can see the future, talk to the dead, read your aura, and so on. I merely state that in the interest of consumer protection, they must prove their competency the moment they start charging for it. – Gypsy Bad Fortune.
[W]e already have laws to protect us against fortune telling. The crime is very specific: it’s called fraud. Now we just need to get some law enforcement folks interested in prosecuting it.
So how many climate scientists are working in this part of Maryland (and by precedent potentially all of Maryland)? They are all breaking the law because they don’t hang out a sign on their door or write in their scientific papers “WE ARE NOT REAL. THIS IS FOR ENTERTAINMENT VALUE ONLY. YOU WILL GET JUST AS GOOD ADVICE THROWING A DART AT THE PAPER!”
I think that climate scientists have proven with their bad science that they are not up to the task. I wonder if Pennsylvania has a similar law to address Dr. Mann’sscientific shenanigans:?
The hockey stick debate is about two things. At a technical level it concerns a well-known study that characterized the state of the Earth’s climate over the past thousand years and seemed to prove a recent and unprecedented global warming. I will explain how the study got the results it did, examine some key flaws in the methodology and explain why the conclusions are unsupported by the data. At the political level the emerging debate is about whether the enormous international trust that has been placed in the IPCC was betrayed. The hockey stick story reveals that the IPCC allowed a deeply flawed study to dominate the Third Assessment Report, which suggests the possibility of bias in the Report-writing process. In view of the massive global influence of IPCC Reports, there is an urgent need to bias-proof future assessments in order to put climate policy onto a new foundation that will better serve the public interest.
So are there any people in Maryland who want to make a list of all climate scientists in the State and charge them with “fortunetelling” under the existing Maryland law?
In fact Al Gore’s fantasy film fortunetelling the future of the Earth FORETELLING DOOM and DESTRUCTION as if it really will happen was shown in Bethesda, Maryland, and the lines were very long for many months; in fact I saw it there in Montgomery County myself of all places! These quotes sum up the case against Al Gore nicely: “In Montgomery County it is … illegal to accept money for forecasting or foretelling or for pretending to forecast or foretell the future by … any … scheme, practice or device.” + “In reality, fortunetelling should not be protected free speech any more than yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.” + “The practice is fraudulent because no one can forecast the future.” I trust that the staggering irony of Al Gore yelling mann caused Anthropomorphic Global Warming (AGW), aka FIRE, in a movie theater is not lost on you. Who wants to charge Al Gore under this law? Let’s see guesstimating 50,000 people (we need the actual statistics on this but for the sake of making this point we’ll use this guesstimate of how many) saw the movie An Inconvenient Truth in Montgomery Country in theaters and on DVD that would be 50,000 times the USD$250 fine for Al Gore violating this soothsaying aka fortunetelling law so the fine could potentially be in the range of a whopping USD$12,500,000.00. That might send a message to doomsayers, soothsayers, and climate scientists who predict the future crying wolf repeatedly without verifiable science. It also might take back some of the lucrative profits Al Gore is making by selling “carbon credits”!
Anytime science (papers in particular) is done without SHOWING ALL THE STEPS and providing all the data there is always the chance that some magic steps are involved. By magic we mean fraudulent.
I was about to start this paragraph by saying “To be serious …” but then I realized that this is actually a serious article and not a joke at all, so I’ll start it this way:
The serious nature of fraudulent claims in Climate Science MUST be addressed and those that make claims about the future that turn out to not be correct MUST be held to account for their fraudulent claims especially those that receive money for making said claims. Honest and forthrightness and the highest possible standards MUST BE achieved in Climate Science (and all other sciences) in order to protect the public from those making false claims for personal gain or out of their “beliefs” rather than out of verifiable and Open Source Science that can be vetted and tested by ANY outside party at will.
This time the Math of Zombies tells us like it is: basically were all doomed to either be eaten alive for our brains (highly nutritious component of the Zombie Diet not to mention very addictive) or be converted into a zombie and eat the brains of the rest of us. Take your pick: be the food or the eater of the food.
“A zombie outbreak is likely to lead to the collapse of civilisation, unless it is dealt with quickly. While aggressive quarantine may contain the epidemic, or a cure may lead to coexistence of humans and zombies, the most effective way to contain the rise of the undead is to hit hard and hit often. “
“Zombies are … usually … brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions …. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all.” – Math of Zombies (pdf paper)!
First off you should note that there is a fundamental flaw in the paper: it assumes that Zombie Attacks are not real but just in the movies! This is a way of keeping the secret while discussing this serious problem in academic papers! Zombies are as real as Jesus Christ! The more real you think Jesus Christ to be the more real Zombies are! Fantasies come alive in our brains and that is why Zombies of all kinds including Sweet Zombie Jesus want your brain! Don’t let them have it, remain belief and faith free by embracing Nature and Rational Thought and Science. May your brains survive the Zombie Attacks of religion, faith and belief in the supernatural and may you avoid having the delusion of an invisible friend in the sky who will save you from death with the false promise of an everlasting life! Obliterate faith and belief in delusions that can’t be proven since that is how they get your live brains and then control you sucking the independence and life out of you! Face it, the only way to exist is to not have your brains eaten by the Zombie Virus and other mind eaters!
An outbreak of zombies infecting humans is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead. While aggressive quarantine may eradicate the infection, this is unlikely to happen in practice. A cure would only result in some humans surviving the outbreak, although they will still coexist with zombies. Only sufficiently frequent attacks, with increasing force, will result in eradication, assuming the available resources can be mustered in time.
Furthermore, these results assumed that the timescale of the outbreak was short, so that the natural birth and death rates could be ignored. If the timescale of the outbreak increases, then the result is the doomsday scenario: an outbreak of zombies will result in the collapse of civilisation, with every human infected, or dead. This is because human births and deaths will provide the undead with a limitless supply of new bodies to infect, resurrect and convert. Thus, if [WHEN] zombies arrive, we must act quickly and decisively to eradicate them before they eradicate us.
The key difference between the models presented here and other models of infectious disease is that the dead can come back to life.
In summary, a zombie outbreak is likely to lead to the collapse of civilisation, unless it is dealt with quickly. While aggressive quarantine may contain the epidemic, or a cure may lead to coexistence of humans and zombies, the most effective way to contain the rise of the undead is to hit hard and hit often.
Two excellent video series by Norman J Wildberger. Very well done and designed to be easy to comprehend. While they start out very simple and basic they get quite deep yet remain as simple as possible. (The bonus series even gets into Relativity, very cool). Wildberger is the math teacher I wish I had all through high school and since, and now through his videos he can be our math teacher! Gotta love online education.
The first series is on the amazing new (and very old) way of doing Rational Trigonometry without using sin and cosine of Classical Trigonometry. It’s Fantastic.
“The new form of trigonometry developed here is called rational trigonometry, to distinguish it from classical trigonometry, the latter involving [cosine, sin and their fellow] functions and the many trigonometric relations currently taught to students. An essential point of rational trigonometry is that quadrance and spread, not distance and angle, are the right concepts for metrical geometry (i.e. a geometry in which measurement is involved).
Quadrance and spread are quadratic quantities, while distance and angle are almost, but not quite, linear ones. The quadratic view is the more general and powerful one. At some level, this is known by many mathematicians. When this insight is put into practice, as it is here, a new foundation for mathematics and mathematics education arises which simplifies Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries, changes our understanding of algebraic geometry, and often simplifies difficult practical problems.
…
Rational trigonometry deals with many practical problems in an easier and more natural way than classical trigonometry, and often ends up with answers that are demonstrably more accurate. In fact rational trigonometry is so elementary that almost all calculations may be done by hand. Tables or calculators are not necessary, although the latter certainly speed up computations. It is a shame that this theory was not discovered earlier, since accurate tables were for many centuries not widely available.”
Exerpt from the Introduction to “Divine Proportions: Rational Trigonometry to Universal Geometry” by Associate Professor Norman J Wildberger
Here are a few videos from the Rational Trigonometry series with the full series of 46+ episodes here. These first episodes lay the corner stone of Rational Trig, and it only gets better from there!!! Watch them all a number of times and do the examples. Amazing!
“Why classical trigonometry is hard:
The problem is that defining an angle correctly [in Classical Trigonometry] requires calculus [whereas Rational Trigonometry doesn't]. This is a point implicit in Archimedes’ derivation of the length of the circumference of a circle, using an infinite sequence of successively refined approximations with regular polygons. It is also supported by the fact that The Elements [Euclid] does not try to measure angles, with the exception of right angles and some related special cases. Further evidence can be found in the universal reluctance of traditional texts to spell out a clear definition of this supposedly ‘basic’ concept.” – NJ Wildberger
“Quadrance measures the separation of two points. The easiest definition is that quadrance is distance squared.
… quadrance is the more fundamental quantity, since it does not involve the square root function. The relationship between the two notions is perhaps more accurately described by the statement that distance is the square root of quadrance.
In diagrams, small rectangles along the sides of a triangle indicate that quadrance, not distance, is being measured … .” – NJ Wildberger
“Spread measures the separation of two lines. This turns out to be a much more subtle issue than the separation of two points.” – NJ Wildberger
The spread s between the two lines is the ratio of quadrances. The spread also works out to “square of sine of angle”.
“The spread between two lines is a dimensionless quantity, and in the rational or decimal number fields takes on values between 0 and 1, with 0 occurring when lines are parallel and 1 occurring when lines are perpendicular. Forty-five degrees becomes a spread of 1/2, while thirty and sixty degrees become respectively spreads of 1/4 and 3/4. What could be simpler than that? Another advantage with spreads is that the measurement is taken between lines, not rays. As a consequence, the two range of angles from 0◦ to 90◦ and from 90◦ to 180◦ are treated symmetrically.” – NJ Wildberger
You can find a couple freely available pdf chapters of the book “Divine Proportions: Rational Trigonometry to Universal Geometry” here. Make sure to check out Divine Proportions Overview Chapter 1 as it covers the basics with examples.
You will find some additional pdf papers by the professor here.
The second series is on the Foundations of Math. An excellent review and introduction for everyone at any age.
The president of the Free Software Foundation eats a toenail on youtube. Richard Stallman puts his foot into his mouth, literally toe jammed it in there! Seriously, it’s disgusting but he did it. Ick.
So know we know the truth: The Uncouth Hippie Icky Richard Stallman, the Publicly Rude Slob-Icky Poster Child of Open Source.
The worst begins at ~2:10 into the video, but watch the whole thing. Shivers. Have a bucket ready in case you need to up chuck.
Get a bathroom dude. Wash your hands with soap for ten minutes Richard.
Now we know NEVER EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES to shake Richard Stallman’s hands as we know that he doesn’t even care where he puts them.
NEVER NEVER EVER take your shoes off in public again Richard, it’s just too disgusting for people to behold.
Tasty toe jam there Richard? Ick dude, get some manners Richard Stallman. Ok this is just too much to handle.
If you can’t resist eating your toe jam, please go back to your hotel room and do it there and then wash your hands…. then come back and do the rest of your talk. Announce it as a toe jam break.
Ick, self foot cannibalism, I think I’m going to puke as I recall meeting Richard Stallman twice and shaking his hands both times. Were is the bucket?
This article is meant to publicly shame Richard Stallman so that he changes his disgusting public behavior in the following ways: (1) Never Eat Toe Jam in Public (or in private for that matter); (2) Never take your shoes off at a public event even if it’s at the beach Richard; (3) Shave off your beard; (4) Clean up your act, you’re a public figure dude so begin to act like it actually matters. Failing that we’ll accept your current behavior as your statement of resignation as the poster child of the FSF and Open Source. Please let free software be free of such disgusting behavior or free of you. Choose.
Al Gore’s wettest dreams of global destruction don’t even come anywhere close to this awesome beyond awesome film, 2012! Sorry Al, just like your film An Inconvenient Truth, 2012 is just science fiction – none of it’s going to happen (unless we don’t stop the asteroid – see below!!!!). So sit back with your drink and pop corn and enjoy the ride!
Ok, the real trailer for the film (short version):
A pretty funny review of the movie with N special effects, where N is ___!
The second trailer, medium length. Awesome!
The full on third hard core extended version of the trailer that really shows mega destruction!!! YES!!! Al Gore eat your heart out! Oh, this one can only be viewed at youtube… since they turned off embedding….
Oh the FEAR! Soothsayers predicting DOOM and DESTRUCTION!!! Yikes!!!
Nope, no hard science behind the warnings! No soothsayers can’t predict the future! Sorry Al Gore, that includes climate soothsayers in the ninny crowd of those that can’t predict the future!
But does it have Nazi’s or Zombies??? Nope, for that you’ll need to see this film.
This is the real concern that we face:
Oh, the lunacy. You’ve got to love how insane we humans really are…
Larrabee is a super multi-core Pentium processor design upgraded to 64 bits x86-64 with a new SIMD set of registers maxed out on steroids with ~250 new instructions! Sorta like SSE on steroids!
“LRBni adds two sorts of registers to the x86 architectural state. There are 32 new 512-bit vector registers, v0-v31, and 8 new 16-bit vector mask registers, k0-k7. While some core resources such as caches are shared by the core threads, that is not the case for registers; each thread has a full complement of vector and vector mask registers.”
WOW!
“LRBni vector instructions are either 16-wide or 8-wide, so a vector register can be operated on by a single LRBni instruction as 16 float32s, 16 int32s, 8 float64s, or 8 int64s, with all elements operated on in parallel. LRBni vector instructions are also ternary; that is, they involve three vector registers, of which typically two are inputs and the third the output. This eliminates the need for most move instructions; such instructions are not a significant burden on out-of-order cores, which can schedule them in parallel with other work, but they would slow Larrabee’s in-order pipeline considerably.”
GDC Session Overview: SIMD Programming on Larrabee
This video is a brief overview of Tom Forsyth’s session from GDC about Larrabee. Larrabee is Intel’s revolutionary approach to take the current evolving programmability of the GPGPU to its logical end. The Larrabee architecture features many cores and threads, as well as a new vector instruction-set extension, the Larrabee new instructions (LRBni). This talk follows Michael Abrash’s first glimpse into LRBni and examines the programming methods and hardware instructions that help programmers get the most out of LRBni’s extremely wide vector units. Starting with simple math examples that are fairly simple to vectorize, it moves through loops, conditionals, and more complex flow control, showing how to implement these algorithms in LRBni. Next, the numerous choices of data format are examined – when to use SOA or AOS (and what those terms mean!), and how to use gather/scatter most efficiently from the same data structures used in an existing engine. Finally, there is a quick look at efficient code scheduling and how to use the multiple hardware threads to help absorb instruction latencies.
Thoughts On How Larrabee Will Change Game Development
As an Intel Application Engineer, Doug McNabb enables game developers to develop for Larabee. Doug describes his background as a game developer and his thoughts on how Larrabee will change game development.
“Sometimes we forget that not all numbers are the same. This becomes very apparent in dealing with floating point numbers in parallel computing. … Floating numbers are not associative or distributive. … The more cores programmers run their parallelized code on, the more ways operations can be interleaved and the more challenges programmers face.” – Tim Mattson and Ken Strandberg, Intel
As if it’s climate science is not bad enough with intentionally corrupt or incompetently done statistics it turns out that climate models may be based upon computer programs with serious math flaws: the limits of the floating point and double precision floating point data types can produce incorrect results since “Floating Point Numbers Aren’t Real Numbers!” they are data types with limited precision. It gets even worse than that, when supposedly good programs are transformed into massively parallel programs with N threads of execution the results can vary with the number of threads chosen to run the program! Of course in climate science N can be 2 or 4 threads on a single multi-core machine but it can also be 1,000+ using GPGPUs or server compute farms.
Have the climate model programs been vetted to ensure mathematical accuracy? Is there a set of test cases that validate it after new changes have been made to the climate models? Do the test cases cover all the calculations in the climate model software? How do we know the answers are even accurate mathematically? (Of course that’s not even asking how do we know the model is relevant but this inquiry is not into relevancy it’s into accuracy of the calculations, whatever they happen to be, in climate models).
“The more cores programmers run their parallelized code on, the more ways operations can be interleaved and the more challenges programmers face. Parallel programmers must deal with a host of issues peculiar to parallel programs such as synchronization, protecting shared variables, and finding thread safe versions of common math routines (such as random number generation). One of the most subtle problems faced by the parallel programmer, however, arises from the properties of floating point numbers. Floating point numbers are the same in serial and parallel computations, of course, but when a program executes in parallel, special features of these numbers are more likely to impact your results.” – Tim Mattson and Ken Strandberg, Intel, in “Parallelization and Floating Point Numbers“
One aspect of models in science and engineering that involve calculations using the “floating point number format” is that Floating Point numbers are NOT REAL NUMBERS they are limited precision approximations of Real Numbers and as such they have their limits often caused by rounding which results in Floating Point numbers not being associative, in other words the order matters!!! What happens in science and engineering calculations on computers using Float 32 or Double floats (64 bits) especially when scaling massive numbers of computations to multiple threads on your multiple cores or on thousands of processor nodes in super computers or on GPGPU (general purpose graphics processing units) is that you get the wrong answers due to the miss use of these floating point data types.
You can easily generate numbers that don’t fit into the floating point format, and thus you produce answers from the basic arithmetic operations that don’t fit into a floating point format. In other words, the floating point numbers when operated on by the basic arithmetic operations do not constitute a closed set.
The impact of this is significant. Floating numbers are not associative or distributive. So,
A * (C * B) ≠ (A * C) * B and
A * (B + C) ≠ A * B + A * C
[Obviously the sentence is missing something here, most likely the two equations do not produce the same answers! -pwl]
This means that as you change the order of a long sequence of arithmetic operations, you can generate different answers. Mathematically with real numbers, the answers can’t depend on the order of the operations (for commutative operations) or the way they are grouped together (associatively). But with floating point numbers, if you interleave the operations in different ways, you get different results.
Here’s a good test to demonstrate the implications of this behavior by floating point numbers:
1. Fill 2 arrays each with 10000 random values between 0.0 and 1.0.
2. Shift one up by 100 and shift the other down by 0.001.
3. Mix the arrays together, sum them, and subtract a large number (500000).
Here are the results run on 1, 2, and 4 threads.
1 thread computes 170.968750
2 threads computes 171.968750
4 threads computes 172.750000
Which one of these numbers is correct, the 1-thread, 2-thread, or 4-thread value? Are any of these the true value? Would you consider that with 4 threads, the answer is correct and the others wrong? Or with 1 thread?
This is not a trick question, nor is its goal to make programmers look silly. Developers are smart people. But, many programmers steeped in sequential programming for so many years make the assumption that there is only one right answer for their algorithm. After all, their code has always delivered the same answer every time it was run. When you consider the above example, however, all the answers are equally correct. To pick one arbitrarily and call it right and the others wrong is completely unjustified.
Wait there is more! This is quite shocking isn’t it? What you were taught in math class isn’t the way that computers do math! Yikes. Most computer scientists are not aware of this problem as most never encounter it in their careers, or don’t know that it’s a problem that is happening right under their noses. Scary.
By mixing the numbers as this example does, it creates a pathological situation designed to maximize problems due to round off error. The test mixes very large and very small numbers together. The arithmetic unit aligns the numbers before adding them, which, given the large difference in their absolute magnitudes, all but guarantees that we’ll loose bits of precision in the process.
As the number of threads changes, the combinations of numbers being added also changes. With all the roundoff errors, as the way these numbers are combined changes, the way roundoff error is accumulated also keeps changing. Thus, the answers change.
So which answer is correct? The algorithm for adding them together is unstable. If you carefully add the numbers together so large numbers add with large numbers and small numbers add with small numbers, and then add the “large_set_sum” to the “small_set_sum”, you get a numerically stable result. The answer in this case is 177.750. Note that the test answers in every case considerably vary from the stable method of obtaining the answer.
Note also that, with a serial algorithm, you’d never know there was a problem. Only as the thread count grows and the answers change, does the instability of the algorithm become obvious. It’s apparent the problem is not in the compiler or even the program. The problem is with the numerical instability of the algorithm. And it’s only revealed by going to multiple threads.
The video with Tim Mattson explains it well.
Are you getting different numbers for calculations as you vary the number of threads? Your algorithm may be incorrect. Real numbers are nice; floating numbers are not nice. Floating numbers are not a closed set, the overflow bits need to be rounded and that can change the results of a calculation. Tim discusses how to work with floating point numbers and resources available to help in the Intel Math Kernel Libraries.
In the engineering applications that I’ve worked on for civil engineering of bridges we found that Double Precision Floating Point Numbers at 64 bits was simply not enough accuracy. We were able to use 80bit Extended Double Precision Floating Point numbers supported by the 8087 math coprocessor in the Intel line of chips. Even though the extended precision covered most of the cases that Double Precision didn’t there were a few cases where we had to adjust the order of our computations to ensure that we didn’t overflow the precision limits of the computation of the extended 80bit math! As you can imagine errors in bridge calculations are rather critical to life and limb.
The same is true in the Climate Models, lives and treasure both depend on correct math. The science fails when the math is wrong. Have they been vetted for numeric accuracy? How do we know that? Have test cases been written that test these limits in the climate model programs?
The same applies to random numbers in computers, they are not real random numbers either. As Tim Mattson says “We now know that god does play dice but that computers can’t!” (paraphrased). Random numbers are important in climate models since the climate is in inherently a system with randomness being generated from within. See Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science.
Computers cannot make truly random numbers. For statistical algorithms requiring random numbers, developers need to be careful in parallel code to avoid overlapping sequences from random number generators. Tim discusses different methods to use random number generators – including using independent generators for each thread and the “leap frog method” – to produce “pseudo random numbers” for statistical algorithms that work in parallel code.
Very interesting and important topic to any system that depends upon parallel computations being correct to protect limb, life and treasure.
Thanks to Intel, Tim Mattson and Ken Strandberg for this important information.
The articles linked here raise some very disturbing problems with the manner in which climate science is being conducted. This is especially important due to the HUGE public costs about to be undertaken over the next decades.
“The UK’s Met Office Hadley Centre and University of East Anglia have been refusing access to the data used for their global climate averages and scientific studies.” – slashdot
Opening Science is the way forward, the path through the darkness, the endarkenment of closed source science.
If’s it’s paid by the public purse it must be OPEN data that anyone can see and audit.
Yes, you feel certain that you are right about your science but lets see the actual data and the methods used by that science to prove that your certainty is justified.
Science is based upon the notion of being able to validate or invalidate in whole or in part the “claims” made by various “hypotheses” put forward.
When you “BELIEVE” science you’re just another religion.
When you can’t audit the work of scientists whose work is the basis of public policy then you and the public are being endarkened and kept excluded. But why? For what or whose agenda?
As long as the data, the methods, the algorithms, the statical analysis, the step by step procedures are kept secret the work is suspect to scientific fraud.
Have the guts to open your science to the light of day, it will in the end be better for it once it’s vetted by more eyes and brains and math nuts and others poking holes in it.
ANY AND ALL CLAIMS MADE BY PEOPLE WHO KEEP THEIR SCIENCE CLOSED AND SECRET is suspect of FRAUD. What are they hiding? Are they simply embarrassed to admit that they might be wrong? That they’ve made mistakes? That they are afraid that others might gain an edge in the grant process and shut them out of funding?
Open Source Science is the way forward through the darkness into the light that empower verification and falsification and thus progress EITHER way!!!
When you “BELIEVE” science you’re just another religion. In fact, open source science is the BEST and ONLY WAY to avoid science from becoming the new religion as it has, for example, in the climate debates.
The scientific method is the tool for vetting the works of science and if the work of science is closed and secret and kept close to the scientists chests by refusals to share their data, methods, source codes, procedures, etc… then their work can’t be verified and might as well be works of fiction just like those of any religious cleric or priest or nutter.
If you can’t take others vetting your scientific work then maybe you don’t belong in science?
Open Source Science raises the bar and will in the long run improve the quality of the science that is done. Some progress is being made, much more needs to be done.
Climate science makes extraordinary claims about Anthropogenic Global Warming and Global Warming.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” – Carl Sagan
Yet when asked for the data that is claimed to provide some of the evidence the data is refused on POLITICAL grounds. Very disturbing.
Regardless of the reasons that the data is not provided the bad science attitude by the MET office hinders actual science from proceeding. Very disturbing.
When you can’t test a scientific hypothesis or read all of the supporting evidence for it you must then rely on “taking their word for it” which is also known as “accepting based upon belief alone”. This is the end of science bit by bit and leads to the path of the dark side, to an age endarkenment.
When people find science open to validate themselves with experiments that they can do themselves or by reading all the evidence and vetting the work of others belief is eliminated and tested knowledge is obtained by that person bolstering the accuracy of their representation of the universe.
Belief is the enemy of science. Open Source science is the path forward that helps to eliminate belief and lay the ground work for a new scientific enlightenment accessible to the masses.
Terminate belief. Grow your knowledge based upon the scientific method. Stop being a science geek who takes it up the ass from authorities just like the religious nut jobs who take it up the ass from The Pope and his ilk.
Mars Direct is a proposal for a relatively low-cost manned mission to Mars with current rocket technology. The plan was originally detailed in a research paper by Robert Zubrin and David Baker in 1990. The mission was expanded upon in Zubrin’s 1996 book The Case for Mars.
The plan involves launching an unmanned “Earth Return Vehicle” (ERV) directly from Earth’s surface to Mars using a heavy-lift booster derived from Space Shuttle components. The booster is no bigger than the Saturn V used for the Apollo missions. Several launches are made in preparation for the manned mission.
The first of these launches the ERV, a supply of hydrogen, a chemical plant and a small nuclear reactor. Once there, a relatively simple set of chemical reactions (the Sabatier reaction coupled with electrolysis) would combine a small amount of hydrogen carried by the ERV with the carbon dioxide of the Martian atmosphere to create up to 112 tonnes of methane and oxygen propellants, 96 tonnes of which would be needed to return the ERV to Earth at the end of the mission. This process would take approximately ten months to complete.
Some 26 months after the ERV is originally launched from Earth, a second vehicle, the “Mars Habitat Unit” (MHU), would be launched on a high-energy transfer to Mars carrying a crew of four. This vehicle would take some six months to reach Mars. During the trip, artificial gravity would be generated by tying the spent upper stage of the booster to the Habitat Unit, and setting them both rotating about a common axis.
On reaching Mars, the spent upper stage would be jettisoned, with the Habitat Unit aerobraking into Mars orbit before soft-landing in proximity to the ERV. Once on Mars, the crew would spend 18 months on the surface, carrying out a range of scientific research, aided by a small rover vehicle carried aboard their MHU, and powered by excess methane produced by the ERV. To return, they would use the ERV, leaving the MHU for the possible use of subsequent explorers. The propulsion stage of the ERV would be used as a counterweight to generate artificial gravity for the trip back.
The initial cost estimate for Mars Direct was put at $55 billion, to be paid over ten years.
A giant mysterious blob is moving through Alaskan waters. The blob is made up of a gooey substance, and it has hair! Scientists don’t know what the blob is made up of, but the blob has already been found to have captured seabirds and jellyfish in its goo. Scientists have confirmed that the blob is neither algae nor oil.
Do you ever play with your food?
UPDATE: 20090722
“We got the results back from the lab today,” Ed Meggert of the state Department of Environmental Conservation told the Anchorage Daily News late last week. “It was marine algae.”
No one in the area — whether biologist, Inuit hunter or oil worker — had ever seen anything like the strange stuff, which moved slowly through the Chukchi Sea last week between the towns of Barrow and Wainwright.
It stank, trapped sea birds in its gooey mass and, perhaps most alarmingly, was pretty hairy. And most marine algae is green, yellow or red, not black.
Well, that’s too bad… the dreams of blobs sucking up people left right and center will have to await another day… however, the birds better be on the lookout!
They claim that the C02 greenhouse gas is the biggest challenge to our existence on Earth; if it’s true that C02 is a serious problem then why not a single word from them about the dangers of Water Vapor and Clouds which are the largest greenhouse gas contributor!?
When gases are ranked by their contribution to the greenhouse effect, the most important are:
water vapor, which contributes 36–72%, factoring in clouds up to between 66% and 85%
carbon dioxide, which contributes 9–26%
methane, which contributes 4–9%
ozone, which contributes 3–7%
Since water vapor accounts for the largest percentage of the greenhouse effect, between 36% and 66% for water vapor alone and between 66% and 85% when factoring in clouds, don’t boil that water for your tea or for cooking dinner as you are directly contributing to green house gases with the steam! Don’t bring that water to a boil, don’t do it! DO NOT COOK WITH WATER!!! or you are a greenhouse gas criminal! – pwl
All the politicians and extremist environmentalists want to talk about is how much money it will take to correct the imagined C02 problem. Money to them. Mo-money to them. Give them all your money to solve the C02 problem. That’s what they want, your money. Save the Earth with your money. Nice scam. Why did you vote for them again?
“With five months left to go before Copenhagen, international attention is fixed on coming to an agreement over emissions targets. The failure, at last week’s G8 summit, of the world’s 17 major polluters to agree to specific cuts in greenhouse gases by 2050 only sharpened this focus, as China and India rebuffed a firm commitment in part because industrialized nations have refused to agree to mid-term 2020 goals. But buried beneath the headlines was the other reason negotiations fell through, and the one that could turn out to be the deal breaker in December: cold, hard cash. In recent months, developing nations, with China at the helm, have grown increasingly insistent that wealthier nations should provide poorer ones with financial assistance to help them cope with climate change. This includes funding for so-called “mitigation” efforts that curb carbon emissions and for “adaptation”—the long-term adjustment to rising tides, higher temperatures, drought, and increased infection rates of a warming planet. Despite two long negotiating sessions held earlier this year, however, no country has yet started putting money on the table.” – SEED
Scam… scam… scam… scam… bigger than Madeoff.
The fears about C02 are a complete overblown scam. If you really are afraid of C02 then you should be utterly terrorized about water vapor! Not to mention the real pollution issues that are facing our planet.
The REAL indisputable pollution are things like The Great Pacific Garbage Patch and yet people worry about imaginary things, like AGW which are most likely Natural Cycles in action. Clean up the actual pollution mess and give time for the long term climate science to get some actual standards.
“The way we approach it may be better or worse, but the vast majority of REAL climate scientists have no doubt that it IS happening, and that that tons of gases we put into the air over the past couple of centuries played at least some part. why even subscribe to Seed if you’re gonna listen to the folks who aren’t actually doing the science?” – Brooks Onley, July 13
Take a good long peek at WattsUpWithThat and you’ll see that the so called climate science isn’t as sound as it’s sold to the public to be. Consensus isn’t science by the way Brooks, it’s believe based culture not much different than theology. Water Vapor is by far the biggest green house gas so we should be working to eliminate clouds by the C02 scare logic. Get real.
“Water vapor accounts for the largest percentage of the greenhouse effect, between 36% and 66% for water vapor alone, and between 66% and 85% when factoring in clouds.”
Don’t boil that water for your tea or for cooking dinner as you are directly contributing to green house gases with the steam!
As someone very interested in and dedicated to hard science the more I learn about climate science the less I’m I’m able to accept about AGW due to the many faulty claims made by the fear mongering soothsayers of global doom. The more I learn about climate science the more I see that it’s not a hard science after all but a fledgling science with some hard (yet flawed) data collection but lots and lots of interpretations based upon massaged statistical games, but above all it’s not much better than a lousy guess and not much different than the ancient practice of soothsaying.
For example, clouds are not modeled properly thus the climate models are incomplete.
“The effects of clouds are a significant area of uncertainty in climate models. Clouds have competing effects on the climate. One of the roles that clouds play in climate is in cooling the surface by reflecting sunlight back into space; another is warming by increasing the amount of infrared radiation emitted from the atmosphere to the surface. In the 2001 IPCC report on climate change, the possible changes in cloud cover were highlighted as one of the dominant uncertainties in predicting future climate change“!
Wow, so even the IPCC admits that clouds, aka water vapor in the form of clouds, are one of the dominant uncertainties in predicting future climate change! So climate science is not settled science by their own admission that there are significant areas of uncertainty!
They also have forgotten that the Weather and thus Climate are not predictable systems as these systems are governed by Stephen Wolfram’s Law of Predictability paraphrased here as: waiting till the future arrives is sometimes the only way to predict the future, especially with Natural Systems! Stephen Wolfram proved that in his book, “A New Kind of Science”, Chapter 2.
Added 20090820: Cloud cover is influenced by Cosmic Rays. The Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Institute “investigates the connection between solar activity and climatic changes on Earth”.
“Svensmark proposed that as cosmic rays fell through the Earth’s atmosphere, they formed “condensation nuclei.” Water vapor molecules could then stick to the nuclei and eventually form clouds. More clouds would reflect more sunlight, and the Earth’s temperatures would drop. In contrast, fewer cosmic rays would mean fewer clouds and a warmer climate.” – The Cosmic Climate Connection.
“During the last 100 years cosmic rays became scarcer because unusually vigorous action by the Sun batted away many of them. Fewer cosmic rays meant fewer clouds—and a warmer world.”
The more I learn about AGW the more I focus on REAL pollution as it’s clear that real pollution is a real problem. Pick up your garbage! Reduce your consumption of consumables. Don’t use that bag. Don’t buy that bottle. Reuse.
Leo Simpson explains it quite well here:
“For a start, let’s consider this highly emotive term “carbon pollution” which is constantly being bandied about. It only takes a moment’s thought to realise that there is no “carbon pollution” problem. It did exist 50 years ago, when we had steam trains and diesels with smoky exhausts and coal-burning power stations which had less than complete combustion. It used to be called soot. But it is not a problem now, in most countries. Now I know that some people use “carbon” as shorthand for carbon dioxide but it is sloppy thinking and generates worry in the unthinking masses that we are spewing all this carbon into the air. We’re not.
We are burning tremendous amounts of fossil fuels and that is putting huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the air. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that is a big worry, isn’t it? Well, maybe. But all these doom merchants who worry about carbon dioxide never say anything at all about the other greenhouse gas which is produced when fossil fuels are burnt. What is that? It’s called water vapour – the same stuff as in clouds. Is water vapour a problem? Definitely not.
Just in case you don’t believe me, consider the combustion of petrol which is mainly octane, C8H18. When this is burnt, the chemical reaction is:
2C8H18 + 25O2 16CO2 + 18H2O
octane + oxygen carbon dioxide + water
If you calculate the molecular weights of the two combustion products, carbon dioxide and water, you will find that there is more water produced than carbon dioxide. But greenies never mention it. Why? Because they have either forgotten their high-school chemistry or they are completely ignorant of it.
The point is that both water vapour and carbon dioxide are normal components of the air that we breathe. They are not pollution. They are both necessary for life to exist on the planet. If there was no carbon dioxide, plants would not grow (more high-school chemistry – it’s called photosynthesis). Without plants, no animals, including us, can live. It’s a simple as that. If there is more carbon dioxide in the air, plants grow more profusely. In fact, it is common practice to increase the carbon dioxide in greenhouses and aquariums to make the plants grow more vigorously.“
That’s very interesting, especially the point about there being more water vapor produced with the burning of fossil fuels than C02. If you or someone else is freaking out about the C02 produced then they MUST also freak out about the amount of H20 vapor being produced! Both are greenhouse gases!
I’m constantly surprised by so called environmentalists who won’t do anything about real pollution since they are focusing only on their imagined C02 soothsaying fears. Help clean up the real pollution please.
Questions:
I’m wondering how much human activity causes water vapor to enter the atmosphere: cooking, boiling water for cooking and tea, industrial water boiling, nuclear plant steam emissions, vapor from human breath, etc…
Considering that water vapor and clouds are the largest percentage of greenhouse gas (up to 85% of all greenhouse gases) wouldn’t it be better, as in more effective with immediate results, to Ban Cooking and Outlawing Making Tea than limiting C02 to reduce greenhouse gases?
He’s cooking with water, shoot to kill! Making tea, how opulent, destroy and obliterate that house! That puts an end to that particular source of greenhouse gases.
Wouldn’t it be easier technologically and cost wise to take water vapor out of the atmosphere than C02?
Are there any studies that have been done to see how much Water Vapor in the Atmosphere is allegedly from human activity? How does that compare with the amounts of C02 that are allegedly from human activity?
Maybe Nature corrects for too much greenhouse effect by adding more clouds? Any studies on that?
How much water vapor would we need to remove from the atmosphere to compensate for the allegedly human caused C02?
And if we did remove water vapor from the atmosphere using some technology wouldn’t it just be replaced by an equivalent amount of water vapor by Nature? Would we need to terrorform Earth into a desert to avoid Al Gore’s horrific soothsaid Waterworld?
How much does plastic in the oceans effect our world?
Thoughts
Someone replied “that she is with Brooks”, whatever that means.
It really isn’t about who is with who, it’s whether or not the AGW hypothesis is correct or not; if you assume it’s correct and begin terraforming the Earth the wrong way you’ll just make matters worse off. Following the logic of the AGW hypothesis would mean that eliminating C02 could trigger an ice age if you eliminate too much. How much is that? Who knows!!!
How about working on real indisputable pollution problems rather than imaginary and unproven ones for a real change?
Let’s eliminate actual “carbon aka soot” and other nasty particles from coal power stations around the world rather than focusing on the plant food “CO2″ that they emit. Plants need CO2 for their life and we need plants to have their CO2 for our life!!! Greenhouses regularly use ~3 times as much CO2 as is in the atmosphere to enhance plant growth!… Read More
Let’s clean the oceans of plastics! That’s cleaning up real pollution.
What other real pollution problems you can work on to solve that involves actual problems?
Someone else was suggesting that people just want money.
I have no plan for your money. Unless… just kidding… really no plans for your money. All I’m asking is that people do something about real pollution rather than do nothing by listening to the fear mongering of the climate of fear soothsayers. Pick up trash. Plant a tree. Don’t toss out that bag without reusing it at least once or thrice. … Walk rather than drive. Cycle without getting yourself killed (difficult in modern cities). Add solar to your dwelling unit if appropriate. Don’t toss your medicine in the trash, return it to a pharmacy for proper disposal. Recycle your electronics. Resell your things or give them away rather than tossing them. Save the oceans from plastic. Hug someone in need. Live a real life rather than one distracted by delusions that can’t be proven.
Know that climate and weather are natural cycles of Nature and that in our arrogance to save our planet we might do more harm than good so there is wisdom in taking solutions slowly; fools rush in.
The Guardian has obtained this police footage of Emily Apple and Val Swain being arrested by surveillance officers after asking for their badge numbers at the Kingsnorth climate camp last year. The two women speak to Paul Lewis about their arrest, imprisonment and official complaint
Clearly the British Police are now on par with the likes of the Iranian State Control freaks.
Maybe the officers, er if they can be called that, the thugs names will come out into the public view. Put the officers in jail and toss away the key.
“Preparing to surf a standing river wave in the St. Lawrence, where high-velocity water roars over a steep river-bottom depression, pitches back and upward, and creates a waist-to-overhead breaker. Surfers paddle into it or swing out by rope to catch the green-faced wedge, rewarded by a seemingly endless ride.
“Once you’re carving, it’s exactly the same feel as on an ocean wave,” said Chris Dutton, the founder of the Web site SurfMontreal.com, “except that instead of going straight down the line, you carve a little bit, flip around, carve back, and can go all day.”
Modern river surfing on standing waves evolved on the Eisbach River in Germany in the mid-1970s. Tidal bores have been ridden for years on the Severn in England; in Bordeaux, France; and on the Amazon. New standing waves are being pioneered almost daily in rivers in places like Colorado, and in Ontario and Alberta in Canada.”
Yeah, it’s great that Obama is a “Secular” USA President. His dad was raised in Islam and became an atheist in a Muslim country, not an easy thing to do. Nice to have someone who comprehends the distinction of a Secular State and how important Separation of Crutch and State is.
As for Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) the jury is still out and it’s not looking good for the theory that humans have caused it. The evidence and counter evidence is mounting that it’s just part of a Natural Cycle and we’ve not had much if anything to do with it.
Of course, let’s clean up real pollution on a global scale instead of playing political games with poor and premature science. All the main claims of Al Gore’s in his movie have since been proven wrong.
Check out these articles on climate science here or over at Whats Up With That for lots of interesting true facts about climate science.
Oh, belief has no place in science, so when someone says they “believe in global warming” (or they don’t) it means that they ARE treating it like a religion and don’t know what they are talking about since they don’t know the actual science, they just “believe”. Asking someone if they “believe” in global warming is also asking them their religion.
Science over belief and propaganda, that’s what will ensure a healthy environment on Earth. It is important that we don’t mess up the planet worse with the wrong diagnosis!
Al Gore has Crossed the Rubicon with his latest statements comparing Anthropogenic Global Warming (aka Human Caused Climate Change) to the battle against Nazi’s.
Godwin’s Law (also known as Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies) is a humorous observation coined by Mike Godwin in 1990, and which has become an … adage. It states: “As a … discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.
Al Gore has now achieved this critical turning point fully committed forever and can no longer retreat back across his own river Rubicon.
the “Last Page” columnist in The Smithsonian stated that when an adversary uses an inappropriate Hitler or Nazi comparison, “you have only to say ‘Godwin’s Law’ and a trapdoor falls open, plunging your rival into a pool of hungry crocodiles.
When one stoops to using a Nazi comparison in a serious debate one is basically admitting that one no longer has any serious arguments left in one’s quiver. Al Gore committed a serious error in the ways of debate, he admitted that he has no serious arguments by stooping so low.
If you don’t believe in global warming aka climate change aka we humans did it then your a Nazi and since you’re a Nazi you are a criminal and since it’s a war you can be shot. That is the implication of Gore’s thinking taken to the extremes that some might want.
So duck, the real climate wars are coming. Being armed with the facts doesn’t seem to matter any more. Now they’ll seek out and destroy Nazi Climate Deniers!
It’s really interesting to me that so many people blindly follow people like Al Gore without even looking into whether or not what he is saying has any basis in the actual reality we live in rather than the imagined reality in their heads.
Maybe Al Gore and his Nazi’s are doing us all all favor by showing how radical and radically stupid he is being? Could this be a turning point in the debate? Could Al Gore have crossed the Rubicon, the point of no return? Yes. This is a critical turning point in the debate about climate. Fear mongering from the likes of Al Gore verse actual science grounded in objective reality!
Indeed, while 1998 was the warmest or second-warmest year on record, no year since has been as warm. And while there have been more warm years than cool ones in the past decade-and-a-half, the trend, since at least 2003, has been downward.
And — this is the one I really like — according to climatedepot.com,since Al Gore released his movie An Inconvenient Truth in October 2006, the Earth’s temperature has lost 0.74F, almost exactly the amount the UN’s climate panel claims was gained in the entire 20th century. The latter stat is apropos of nothing. As a correlation of Al Gore’s bombast vs. worldwide temperature averages, it is pure fluke. But you can bet that if there had been a similar rise in the past 33 months, the headlines would be blaring that the end of the world was near.
CAUTION THIS ARTICLE HAS VIDEOS THAT SHOW POLAR BEARS KILLING ANIMALS AND ATTACKING HUMAN BEINGS FOR FOOD WHICH IS WHAT WE ARE TO BEARS!
Just saw a blatant rip off ad on a US TV cable channel for (WARNING MONEY SCAM WEB SITE LINK FOLLOWS) http://helpWWFusa.org which redirects immediately to a money grab web page. The TV ad represented that the only way to save polar bears, which are going extinct according to the ad, is to send money. Just like a good old time religion scam tv ad/infomercial.
“Rising global temperatures are threatening wildlife all around the world and putting polar bears at risk of extinction. WWF is working to save polar bears and other species, and to preserve the habitats they need to survive. We need your help to put our solutions into action. With help from supporters like you, we can continue to protect endangered animals from climate change and other global threats. Your gift of just $16 a month could mean the difference between survival and extinction for polar bears, orangutans, tigers and other wildlife.”
Who will protect the bears from the WWF?
Who will protect your wallet from the WWF?
They also have a video with their false claims that misrepresent the facts.
What a repugnant scammer preying on people’s good nature to see their world improve conning them out of their money based upon false claims.
The funny thing is that they don’t need to make false claims if they had actual viable projects and spoke honestly about them rather than pushing their [hard] soft sell scam. The bears will die without your money! What hokum. What will go out of business without your money are the WWF scammers.
Polar Bears have survived for a very long time through multiple ice ages and the warm periods MUCH warmer than now in between. Leave them alone.
The Canadian and American governments (Greenland and Russia too?) take effective steps to protect the polar bears.
Reports are that their population is rising not falling!
The latest government survey of polar bears roaming the vast Arctic expanses of northern Quebec, Labrador and southern Baffin Island show the population of polar bears has jumped to 2,100 animals from around 800 in the mid-1980s.
As recently as three years ago, a less official count placed the number at 1,400.
The Inuit have always insisted the bears’ demise was greatly exaggerated by scientists doing projections based on fly-over counts, but their input was usually dismissed as the ramblings of self-interested hunters.
As Nunavut government biologist Mitch Taylor observed in a front-page story in the Nunatsiaq News last month, “the Inuit were right. There aren’t just a few more bears. There are a hell of a lot more bears.”
I’m sure that if humans actually try too hard to help the polar bears we might actually drive them extinct!
Polar Bears have survived for a very long time through multiple ice ages and the warm periods MUCH warmer than now in between. Leave them alone. Move them don’t shoot them when they dig into garbage and they’ll be fine.
Also, when you see one up close it’s likely too late – kiss your ass good bye WWF scammers.
Bears of all kinds are LAND SHARKS.
Shouldn’t the zoo officials have taken precautions to prevent their flesh eating monster from attacking someone in the first place? These are not your cute stuffed animals that you fell asleep with at night, these are flesh eating machines designed to survive and kill anything that they can to feed including YOU!
The polar bear (Ursus maritimus) is a bear native to the Arctic Ocean and its surrounding seas. It is the world’s largest carnivore species found on land. It’s also the largest bear, together with the omnivore Kodiak bear which is approximately the same size[3], but which is a subspecies of the brown bear that is normally smaller than the polar bear. An adult male weighs around 400–680 kg (880–1,500 lb),[4] while an adult female is about half that size. Although it is closely related to the brown bear, it has evolved to occupy a narrow ecological niche, with many body characteristics adapted for cold temperatures, for moving across snow, ice, and open water, and for hunting the seals which make up most of its diet.[5] Although most polar bears are born on land, it spends most of its time at sea, hence its name meaning “maritime bear”, and can hunt consistently only from sea ice, spending much of the year on the frozen sea.
Binky (1974–1995) was a polar bear who lived at the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage, Alaska, and was famous for mauling zoo visitors. He was found orphaned on the coast of the Beaufort Sea in 1974 and was taken to the Alaska Zoo the next year.
In July 1994, an Australian tourist named Kathryn Warburton climbed over the second of two safety rails to get a close-up photograph and was bitten as the bear stuck his head through the bars and grabbed her; she received a broken leg and bite wounds. Another tourist caught the event on tape.[3] Binky kept the woman’s shoe for three days before it could be retrieved by zoo officials, and the day after the attack a news photographer took the iconic image of Binky with a shoe in his mouth that was printed in almost every press account of the incident.
You’ve got to be kidding me, naming a killing machine “binky”? WTF? Anthropomorphizing these killing machines as if they are cuddly toys or harmless as dogs is insanity. Also putting them into zoos is entirely irresponsible. Sure I like anyone have appreciated seeing them but they are evolved by Nature to be out in the wild and that’s where we should leave them. A better name for binky would be “bone crushing flesh eating machine”!
Another nutso human thinking that bears should have cute names. Anyone who gives a killing machine a cute name is guilty of any crimes that that killing machine commits as a result of it’s cute name. Give these animals accurate names: bone crusher, flesh eater, blood drinker, human taster, …, maybe then idiots will stay away. Actually don’t keep them in zoos at all. Videos are effective. Put a giant screen into the polar bear exhibits!
Unlike grizzly bears, polar bears are not territorial. Although stereotyped as being voraciously aggressive, they are normally cautious in confrontations, and often choose to escape rather than fight. Fat polar bears rarely attack humans unless severely provoked, whereas hungry polar bears are extremely unpredictable and are known to kill and sometimes eat humans. Polar bears are stealth hunters, and the victim is often unaware of the bear’s presence until the attack is underway. Whereas brown bears often maul a person and then leave, polar bear attacks are more likely to be predatory and are almost always fatal. However, due to the very small human population around the Arctic, such attacks are rare.
Protect these animals from those who exploit them! Zoos and wildlife organizations like WWF!!!
CAUTION GRUESOME: Take a quick look at the gruesome way polar bears treat humans: as food! Gruesome photos of what’s left after an attack from those lucky to get away!
I hope that you now know that these aren’t cute things to cuddle with and that they are built for survival in one of the most inhospitable zones on Earth!
Respect Nature or it’ll be resting with you in it’s belly satisfied with a tasty meal.
Paraphrasing Al Gore: “It got a little bit warmer in the arctic one day and we don’t know what will happen next year or the year after but I’m here screaming at you that the entire arctic is going to melt just because we extrapolated that it will from a very limited amount of data and Nature won’t disappoint us with it’s natural cycles by cooling off again.”
Of course 2009 is a record breaker for being cold in the arctic and at this point in the summer the arctic temperatures still haven’t risen above zero (they are hovering just below zero).
The Anthropomorphic Global Warming (AGW) Scientists approach to climate change which Al Gore adopted. The above cartoon shows why simplistic thinkers like Al Gore get caught up in silly nonsense and exaggerated claims like he’s made about AGW.
In mathematics, extrapolation is the process of constructing new data points outside a discrete set of known data points. It is similar to the process of interpolation, which constructs new points between known points, but the results of extrapolations are often less meaningful, and are subject to greater uncertainty. It may also mean extension of a method, assuming similar methods will be applicable. Extrapolation may also apply to human experience to project, extend, or expand known experience into an area not known or previously experienced so as to arrive at a (usually conjectural) knowledge of the unknown (e.g. a driver extrapolates road conditions beyond his sight while driving).
The problem with the Climate Models is that they extrapolate on so many levels and in so many ways that that they are essentially meaningless as predictors of climate.
While extrapolation is a useful mathematical tool in so many fields of science, business and medicine it’s value in prediction isn’t dependable as the systems in Nature are not able to be modeled. Yes, that’s right, Nature can’t be modeled as it’s in a category of systems that must be computed in full by the actual system itself in order to find out what is going to actually happen. In other words, Nature must run it’s course for us to know what it’s going to do!
The extremely high dilutions in homeopathy have been a main point of criticism. Homeopaths believe that the methodical dilution of a substance, beginning with a 10% or lower solution and working downwards, with shaking after each dilution, produces a therapeutically active “remedy”, in contrast to therapeutically inert water. However, homeopathic remedies are usually diluted to the point where there are no molecules from the original solution left in a dose of the final remedy.[81] Since even the longest-lived noncovalent structures in liquid water at room temperature are only stable for a few picoseconds,[87] critics have concluded that any effect that might have been present from the original substance can no longer exist.[88] No evidence of stable clusters of water molecules was found when homeopathic remedies were studied using NMR.[89]
Furthermore, since water will have been in contact with millions of different substances throughout its history, critics point out that any glass of water is therefore an extreme dilution of almost any conceivable substance, and so by drinking water one would, according to homeopathic principles, receive treatment for every imaginable condition.[90]
Practitioners of homeopathy contend that higher dilutions (fewer potential molecules in each dose) result in stronger medicinal effects. This idea is inconsistent with the observed dose-response relationships of conventional drugs, where the effects are dependent on the concentration of the active ingredient in the body.[82] This dose-response relationship has been confirmed in multitudinous experiments on organisms as diverse as nematodes,[91] rats,[92] and humans.[93]
Physicist Robert L. Park, former executive director of the American Physical Society, has noted that
“since the least amount of a substance in a solution is one molecule, a 30C solution would have to have at least one molecule of the original substance dissolved in a minimum of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of water. This would require a container more than 30,000,000,000 times the size of the Earth.”
Park has also noted that “to expect to get even one molecule of the ‘medicinal’ substance allegedly present in 30X pills, it would be necessary to take some two billion of them, which would total about a thousand tons of lactose plus whatever impurities the lactose contained“.
The laws of chemistry state that there is a limit to the dilution that can be made without losing the original substance altogether. This limit, which is related to Avogadro’s number, is roughly equal to homeopathic potencies of 12C or 24X (1 part in 1024).
Killing your child with the delusional beliefs of Homeopathy:
Going to jail for killing your child with the delusional beliefs of Homeopathy:
Calculus. (Latin, calculus, a small stone used for counting) is a discipline in mathematics focused on limits, functions, derivatives, integrals, and infinite series, and which constitutes a major part of modern university education. It has two major branches, differential calculus and integral calculus, which are related by the fundamental theorem of calculus. Calculus is the study of change, in the same way that geometry is the study of shape and algebra is the study of equations. A course in calculus is a gateway to other, more advanced courses in mathematics devoted to the study of functions and limits, broadly called mathematical analysis. Calculus has widespread applications in science, economics, and engineering and can solve many problems for which algebra alone is insufficient.
Historically, calculus was called “the calculus of infinitesimals”, or “infinitesimal calculus”. More generally, calculus (plural calculi) may refer to any method or system of calculation guided by the symbolic manipulation of expressions. Some examples of other well-known calculi are propositional calculus, variational calculus, lambda calculus, pi calculus and join calculus.
The Thriller Zombie Attack Strikes Yet Again in it’s myriad of ways infecting the population with an insatiable desire to consume Michael Jackson content.
Some think that this phenomenon is because no one truly had a happy childhood and others speculate it’s because most people just haven’t become adults yet. Either way or yet another way it doesn’t matter… this could be the last time the wave of The Thriller Zombie Attacks occur and for that many of us will be grateful. Although we need to be prepared for yet another wave as soon as the test results from The Thriller Zombie corpse inspection(s) have been released.
And woe be to the world if foul play occurred. Well some do consider that “foul play” did occur and were paid off handsomely (sorry for the choice of that word). In any event is this the last time we’ll see The Thriller Zombie Attack or will it strike again?
Seriously the NET aka The Intertubes aka the Internet has come under what is now known as The Thriller Zombie Attack since Michael Jackson died last Thursday afternoon. Google’s network defenses classified the up swelling in Thriller Zombies searching for news about Michael Jackson as a coordinated Denial Of Service Attack against it’s services and shut down for a time! Yikes.
Google has confirmed that the surge of Michael Jackson-related searches on Google News Thursday was first interpreted as an attack on its service.
Google News was inaccessible for some people Thursday afternoon right as rumors of Jackson’s death began to circulate, replaced by an error message reading “We’re sorry, but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.“
Many news services also collapsed under the load of hordes of zombies with swelling Live Brains ripe for the plucking by The Thriller Zombie even and especially in His Death. Even the money grubbing advertisers servers couldn’t handle the volume of Zombies hitting their ad servers. Server defenses just can’t handle a good sized Zombie Horde!
He will return as all Zombie Overlords like Elvis, Jesus and Spike Lee… oh wait Spike is still kicking making awesome movies… there’s still time… they will return I’m told by the people who visit my door once a week with the Watch Towers of Doom!
A zombie computer (often shortened as zombie) is a computer attached to the Internet that has been compromised by a hacker, a computer virus, or a trojan horse. Generally, a compromised machine is only one of many in a botnet, and will be used to perform malicious tasks of one sort or another under remote direction. Most owners of zombie computers are unaware that their system is being used in this way. Because the owner tends to be unaware, these computers are metaphorically compared to zombies.
There is an excellent editorial, aka Publishers Letter, by Leo Simpson in this month’s Silicon Chip Magazine about the mistaken assumptions and CULT like behaviors of the masses and those promoting irresponsible fear mongering with the scary moniker Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).
Maybe in a year or so, the seemingly universal panic about global warming will abate somewhat. Maybe the “science on global warming” will not seem so “settled”. Sure, there will always be a proportion of hard-core fanatics who think we are headed for disaster and will always call for ever more drastic action to reduce “carbon pollution”, the prime suspect for global warming. Well, I sincerely hope that these sentiments will eventually come to be regarded as fanatic belief rather than sensible concern based on real science.
Wow, some actual sane statements by a man of science. Each paragraph in this editorial packs a potent punch.
For a start, let’s consider this highly emotive term “carbon pollution” which is constantly being bandied about. It only takes a moment’s thought to realise that there is no “carbon pollution” problem. It did exist 50 years ago, when we had steam trains and diesels with smoky exhausts and coal-burning power stations which had less than complete combustion. It used to be called soot. But it is not a problem now, in most countries. Now I know that some people use “carbon” as shorthand for carbon dioxide but it is sloppy thinking and generates worry in the unthinking masses that we are spewing all this carbon into the air. We’re not.
As we eliminated the “soot” we’ll eliminate the false science regarding Climate Change using the best tools in our arsenal of thought, the scientific method. See this ground breaking Climate Change Report for details of why the AGW assumptions are wrong.
The point is that both water vapour and carbon dioxide are normal components of the air that we breathe. They are not pollution. They are both necessary for life to exist on the planet. If there was no carbon dioxide, plants would not grow (more high-school chemistry – it’s called photosynthesis). Without plants, no animals, including us, can live. It’s a simple as that. If there is more carbon dioxide in the air, plants grow more profusely. In fact, it is common practice to increase the carbon dioxide in greenhouses and aquariums to make the plants grow more vigorously.
By all means let us stop wasting fossil fuels, particularly oil. We need to conserve oil for the future. And by all means let us accelerate moves to use more solar power, nuclear power, geothermal power or whatever. But let us not be panicked into enormously expensive moves to reduce carbon dioxide when we don’t really know if it’s a problem or not.
Paul Erdős (occasionally spelled Erdos or Erdös; Hungarian: Erdős Pál, pronounced [ˈɛrdøːʃ ˈpaːl]; 26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) was an immensely prolific and famously eccentric Hungarian mathematician. Erdős published more papers than any mathematician in history, working with hundreds of collaborators. He worked on problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory.
Because of his prolific output, friends created the Erdős number as a humorous tribute; Erdős alone was assigned the Erdős number of 0 (for being himself), while his immediate collaborators could claim an Erdős number of 1, their collaborators have Erdős number at most 2, and so on. Some have estimated that 90 percent of the world’s active mathematicians have an Erdős number smaller than 8 (not surprising in light of the small world phenomenon). It is jokingly said[25] that Baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron has an Erdős number of 1 because they both autographed the same baseball when Emory University awarded them honorary degrees on the same day. Erdős numbers have also been humorously assigned to an infant, a horse, and several actors.
On August 7, 1974, shortly after 7:15 a.m., Petit stepped off the South Tower and onto his 3/4″ 6×19 IWRC (independent wire rope core [3]) steel cable. The 24-year-old Petit made eight crossings between the mostly finished towers, a quarter mile above the sidewalks of Manhattan, in an event that lasted about 45 minutes. During that time, in addition to walking, he sat on the wire, gave knee salute and, while lying on the wire, spoke with a gull circling above his head.
Port Authority Police Department Sgt. Charles Daniels, who was dispatched to the roof to bring Petit down, later reported his experience:
I observed the tightrope ‘dancer’—because you couldn’t call him a ‘walker’—approximately halfway between the two towers. And upon seeing us he started to smile and laugh and he started going into a dancing routine on the high wire….And when he got to the building we asked him to get off the high wire but instead he turned around and ran back out into the middle….He was bouncing up and down. His feet were actually leaving the wire and then he would resettle back on the wire again….Unbelievable really….[E]verybody was spellbound in the watching of it.[4]
Petit was warned by his friend on the South Tower that a police helicopter would come to pick him off the wire unless he got off. Rain had begun to fall, and Petit decided he had taken enough risks, so he decided to give himself up to the police waiting for him on the South Tower. He was arrested once he stepped off the wire. Provoked by his taunting behaviour while on the wire, police handcuffed him behind his back and roughly pushed him down a flight of stairs. This he later described as the most dangerous part of the stunt.[5]
His audacious high wire performance made headlines around the world. When asked why he did the stunt, Petit would say “When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk.”
He crossed EIGHT TIMES and danced while doing it!!! You’re kidding right? Nope…
Very amazing. Beyond words amazing. Indelible WOW!
A true tribute.
Man on Wire is an Academy Award-winning 2008 documentary film directed by James Marsh. The film chronicles Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center. It is based on Philippe Petit’s book, To Reach the Clouds, recently released in paperback with the new title Man on Wire. The title of the movie is taken from the police report that led to the arrest (and later release) of Petit, whose performance had lasted for almost one hour. The film is crafted like a heist film, presenting rare footage of the preparations for the event and still photographs of the walk, alongside reenactments (with Paul McGill as the young Petit) and present-day interviews with the participants.
What in your life gets you to take risks and get to your edge of peak performance?
Philippe Petit (born August 13, 1949) is a French high wire artist who gained fame for his high-wire walk between the Twin Towers (WTC) in New York City on August 7, 1974.[1] For his feat (that he referred to as “le coup” [2]), he used a 450-pound (200 kg) cable and a custom-made 26-foot (7.9 m) long, 55-pound (25 kg) balancing pole.
Tight-rope walker, unicyclist, magician and pantomime artist, Petit was also one of the earliest modern day street jugglers in Paris, having begun his career in 1968. He juggled and worked on a slack rope with regularity in Washington Square Park in New York City in the early 1970s. Other famous structures he has used for tightrope walks include Notre Dame de Paris, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Louisiana Superdome, the Hennepin County Government Center, and between the Palais de Chaillot and the Eiffel Tower.
The documentary film Man on Wire by UK director James Marsh, about Petit’s 1974 WTC performance, won both the World Cinema Jury and Audience awards at the Sundance Film Festival 2008. The film also won awards at the 2008 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, N.C. and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary.
Petit is one of the Artists-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. He currently lives in Woodstock, New York.
Learning to tight rope walk. Not as easy as Petit makes it look.
Since water vapor accounts for the largest percentage of the greenhouse effect, between 36% and 66% for water vapor alone and between 66% and 85% when factoring in clouds, don’t boil that water for your tea or for cooking dinner as you are directly contributing to green house gases with the steam! Don’t bring that water to a boil, don’t do it! DO NOT COOK WITH WATER!!! or you are a greenhouse gas criminal! – pwl
“With five months left to go before Copenhagen, international attention is fixed on coming to an agreement over emissions targets. The failure, at last week’s G8 summit, of the world’s 17 major polluters to agree to specific cuts in greenhouse gases by 2050 only sharpened this focus, as China and India rebuffed a firm commitment in part because industrialized nations have refused to agree to mid-term 2020 goals. But buried beneath the headlines was the other reason negotiations fell through, and the one that could turn out to be the deal breaker in December: cold, hard cash. In recent months, developing nations, with China at the helm, have grown increasingly insistent that wealthier nations should provide poorer ones with financial assistance to help them cope with climate change. This includes funding for so-called “mitigation” efforts that curb carbon emissions and for “adaptation”—the long-term adjustment to rising tides, higher temperatures, drought, and increased infection rates of a warming planet. Despite two long negotiating sessions held earlier this year, however, no country has yet started putting money on the table.” – 
