We had dinner with Leonard and Barbara David when we were in Colorado over the holidays. He told me that he’d been working on this piece about whether it’s too big to fail.
I’ve been concerned about the risk for years. I hope it works, but it’s not the approach I’d have taken. The next big telescope will be assembled in space, not launch origami.
This is interesting, if true; their brains solve math problems differently.
…are threatened by a litigious climate. It’s almost as though some “scientists” would rather sue people than discuss science. [Paywalled]
[Update a couple minutes later]
Here‘s a non-paywalled link.
Derek Lowe on an interesting new breakthrough.
Everything you know about them is wrong.
This reminds me of how the Samoans created a lot of cultural mythology by pulling Margaret Mead’s leg.
Chad Orzel asks, what is the greatest one?
Science writer/editor Elizabeth Lopatto suffered one in a bicycle accident, and wrote about it.
One of the reasons that Rerun (who, very sadly for us, we’re going to have to put down today or tomorrow to end her suffering) has been such a great cat is her extroversion and agreeableness.
A simple proof:
as a person familiar with both mathematics and computer science, this variation is not odd, in fact it’s completely understandable. After all a computer model is based on the best possible guesses from the available data and hurricanes are “complex natural phenomena that involve multiple interacting processes” so there is nothing at all odd about there being a 850 mile variation as to where it will it. As we get closer to Sunday and we have true data to input the variation in the models will correspondingly decrease.
Now apply this to climate change models telling us we face disaster in 100 years.
You aren’t dealing with a single “complex natural phenomena that involve multiple interacting processes” you are dealing with EVERY complex natural phenomena that involve multiple interacting processes that exists on the earth. Every single additional item you add increases the variation of the data models. Furthermore you are also dealing with variations in the sun, variations in the orbits of the earth, its moon and more.
And that’s just the variations in natural phenomena, imagine the variation in industrial output on the entire planet for a period of 50 or 100 years.
Think of the computer modeling and tracking of that single hurricane and apply this thinking to the climate of the earth as a whole. How accurate that model is going to be over 100 years, 50 years, 25 years or even ten years?
Would you be willing to bet even your short term economic future on it, would anyone in their right mind do so?
Not me.
They don’t seem to be able to do it on global warming, at Glacier National Park. (We visited there in the early nineties, then went on to Banff, Jasper and Yoho).