gd1

Nothing hurts the climate change 'cause' more than it being a 'cause' in the first place. Activism dressed up as science smells, and plenty of people who would otherwise be sympathetic can smell it.

She doesn't posit a plausible mechanism for her theory, does she? It's just the fallback position, "it must be climate change", just a small upgrade from "it must be god". Click on that list I linked above (and they stopped adding to that years ago!).

So what? That's not science, that's religion. That is 'god of the gaps' stuff. I suppose we can add it to the list (http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm). Maybe the story was interesting, maybe it was important, whatever. I'm not reading it on principle if they're going to cross themselves and pray to their green god mid way through. There are a number of people like myself who would actually care about ecology/environmental issues if they weren't crowded out by absolute wank like that.

>I wasn't able to find a single phd in economics there,

Sounds like a good thing to me.

I don't think he cares, because as he says, he's not about to accept a job offer for $1.15 million at a rival firm then copy encrypted code out before he leaves.

Hmm, that is pretty ugly compared to its APL derived cousins in Q/K/KDB...

  /first n+2 numbers of fibonacci sequence

  fibonacci:{{x,sum -2#x}/[x;0 1]};

And then...

  q) fibonacci[10]

  0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89

I haven't seen much J before, is that really the best implementation?

"Countries that took emergency measures to reduce public borrowing have mostly suffered weaker growth, as in the case of Britain from 2010 to 2012"

Someone is going to have to point out for me where this supposed 'austerity' happened in the UK, because I'm f*cked if I can see it.

Charts are here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25944653

Definition of a Keynesian: someone who thinks a 6% of GDP budget deficit is 'austerity'.

Yep. Agree completely. Not acceptable. It's like getting the IRS to go after your political opponents.

Mate, I'm probably older than you. It was 90 % overblown nonsense. Countries like Russia spent pretty much zero 'fixing' it and had no issues. Meanwhile the US had 'Y2K consultants', shysters selling $20 'patches' to fix your windows install, breathless documentaries about how your toaster and VCR would explode, planes would drop from the sky, the financial system would collapse...

Reliant Robin, not Renault. The French have nothing to do with it, you'll upset the proud Englishmen.

I get that argument. Sure, it may be bad for certain ecosystems we currently rely on, or for the current configuration of human civilization. But the article we're discussing mentions the next 4 galactic orbits. No one will give a toss about Miami in 100 million years. I will be surprised if it is relevant in 10,000.

Do you have any convincing arguments for why a wetter, warmer, carbon-rich world would be a downside for humans on that scale? If I were betting on us surviving, I'd take that over an ice-age any day of the week.

Considering that past CO2 levels have been well past 1500 ppm rather than the ~450 ppm at the moment, and considering that it is, after all, fossilized carbon that we are digging up and we are putting that carbon - you know the building block of life - back into the atmospheric carbon cycle where it bloody well came from, there is no reason to think some future Earth will be dystopic at all. It will if anything be more bountiful and teeming with life. More water vapour + more carbon = more life.

Here's a thought, C3 plant life goes extinct if CO2 falls below ~200ppm. No more rice, no more wheat, no more potatoes, no more evergreen trees. Life on earth would probably suffer a good deal more in the long run (in geological terms) if we left all fossilized carbon in the ground.

Strange, I read it and had the opposite reaction. With the exception of the 'steel mill' quote you mentioned, I think he got it mostly right. Even that can be argued to be right to a degree, for a time the mainframe model was in vogue and now we're moving towards the 'cloud'. The little change mentioned between 1913 and 1967 was with reference to the overall trajectory of industrial economies, not technological innovation.

The main thrust was about the increasing importance of knowledge and information, where he was spot on.

Oops, my mistake. I tend to lump the Flemish in with the Dutch without thinking.

So you're on hacker news, but you're terrified about automation and telecommunications, because it "removes any sort of human reflection". But only in this one particular application no doubt. Fitting that the towers are in Holland, maybe you can go and throw some clogs at them.

Yawn. Someone will have to update the list:

http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm

Do you care to explain why this is "insane and frightening"? Are you frequently terrified by telecommunications?

Hardly. I can recall any scene you want word for word. And I'm sure I'm not alone. What amnesia? You're talking like the love of the original trilogy is all nostalgia, and no one remembers them, and they don't really hold up. They do.

Oh really? To play devil's advocate for a moment, why don't you extend the same courtesy to them that the left do to Islam? I'm sure those lynchers were just a few bad apples, a few extremists, and you can't judge the whole organization for their actions. Right? Or maybe not.

So like he said then, very recently. Agriculture is ~9000 years, homo sapiens at least a million.

Yes, that's all true. But I've also never heard a plausible argument against the simple observation that if I kick a football it will accelerate away from me. F=ma and all that... Unless I'm standing at the bottom of a hill, in which case it will roll straight back to my feet. See, the wider system may be more complex, and have negative feedbacks that overwhelm any perturbation you introduce. The onus is on the climate scientists to show that the system as a whole will behave as they've predicted, which is a great deal trickier than your simple observation... since it's just about the most complex system imaginable. I model for a living, and I'd dead-set rather model the human brain than the climate of our entire planet. At least you've got 6 billion of those to gather data on. Or experiment on. They've got one.

Pause denier!

Here's a reference, you downvoting HN twits:

http://www.realself.com/blog/terrible-lasik-surgery-complica...

"you have to pump the pressure up in the eye to about 6x normal in order to cut a good flap, as you can't cut an accurate flap in a floppy eye. The pressure is actually higher than your blood pressure, so the eye stops perfusing with blood, and you go temporarily blind."

I meant when the blade goes into the eye. There were a few seconds after that before vision came back.

I suspect you experience true blindness (briefly) during laser eye surgery, when the flap is cut in the cornea. I remember how odd it felt - the feeling of seeing nothing at all, not even darkness.

That may well be true, but it isn't really relevant to the paradox. That's a second-order effect which needs to be established statistically, not the paradox itself which is pure graph theory. You're basically saying "You're more likely to be friends with people who make a lot of friends - that is an emergent property of a network. Also, I believe friendliness is correlated with success."

>"On average, you are surrounded by people who are more successful than you."

How does this one work? It doesn't seem to fit. I'm more likely to be friends with friendly people, more likely to have sex with people who like to have sex, why am I more likely to be around successful people?

Whatever you say buddy. The PBS article says that "The nation of Kiribati, made up of 33 tiny islands far out in the Pacific Ocean, is getting smaller".

It isn't.

"Sea levels are obviously rising...the key problem is that sea level rise is likely to accelerate"

So something they think is going to happen, as opposed to something that has, you know... actually happened.

Meanwhile, in reality:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-06-03/pacific-islands-growin...

"Climate scientists have expressed surprise at findings that many low-lying Pacific islands are growing, not sinking.

Islands in Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia are among those which have grown, largely due to coral debris, land reclamation and sediment.

The findings, published in the magazine New Scientist, were gathered by comparing changes to 27 Pacific islands over the last 20 to 60 years using historical aerial photos and satellite images."