41

The Environment / Re: Is Rising CO2 level a Problem?

« on: 25/11/2021 09:08:20 »

Vostok data I think is related to the procession of the earth. Of course this is based on time scales of centuries.

The temperature rises occurred steeply, over a period of  2 - 10,000 years, and the falls were asymptotic over 100,000 years. Precession is sinusoidal, not sawtooth. The current rise began about 15 - 20,000 years ago and is actually less steep than some of the previous ones.

One of the things I find interesting is that the range of both temperature and CO2 has been pretty constant over 500,000 years, and the cycle seems to be slowing - though that's based on a rather small sample of 4 previous peaks.

But it's good to meet someone more interested in the data than the models!

42

Question of the Week / Re: QotW - 21.11.28 - Why do ant bites hurt so much?

« on: 24/11/2021 15:18:41 »

Latin name for an ant is formica - from which we get formic acid HCOOH. Different species inject various amounts when attacked or to kill their prey. Some people are allergic but even if you have no secondary reaction, it's a powerful acid and causes tissue damage.

43

The Environment / Re: Is Rising CO2 level a Problem?

« on: 24/11/2021 15:06:17 »

Beware, ST, other moderators do not tolerate rational dissent on this subject.

I've always looked at Mars for a comparator - more earthlike with more CO2 but much cooler than you would find if CO2 were as significant a greenhouse gas as some would like you to believe.

Not sure you can ascribe Vostok data to the sun. Does it really undergo sudden huge increases in output followed by slow decreases over 100,000 years? It looks vaguely plausible but surely someone would have noticed the continuing and steepening change over the last 100 years. The evidence seems to be that it hasn't changed much since 1970.

44

Just Chat! / Re: Why do we have world problems?

« on: 17/11/2021 15:33:54 »

I think that true sociopaths, who have the ability to lie with a straight face, are mostly born rather than made, but it is possible that childhood experience may contribute to this trait. Surviving a boarding school education almost demands it if you have no other talent, and those politicians educated in the state system were probably called Billy-no-mates. A degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics will introduce you to the works of the world's most notorious parasites, and defiling a pig will pretty much guarantee a safe Tory seat.

My mother said that most Labour politicians were caught with a hand in the till, and most Tories, with a hand up a skirt, but times have changed and whilst a sly wink is now cause for dismissal (though blatant adultery is not), corruption has become as acceptable as incompetence.

45

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Do memories exist after death?

« on: 16/11/2021 15:44:35 »

You need to distinguish between "memory", the combination of hardware and software that permits storage and recall of data, and "memories" - the data within that system. There is no doubt that babies contain the hardware and bootstrap software, but are pretty much devoid of content.

So we move on to the nature of memory. In the realm of artificial memory we use a combination of static and dynamic memory hardware, and various forms of compression and regeneration software. It is arguable that we can segment the workings of the human brain in the same way.

The development of the hippocampus in London taxi drivers has been noted and implies that longterm memory is to some extent a hardware/static element. At the other end of the scale most people can remember a 7-digit phone number for long enough to dial it, but I get the impression from watching the development of pilots' radio communication that eight or nine digits is quite a feat until you acquire some "compression software" by experience: all civilian VHF frequencies begin with 1 and although communication frequencies are allocated in 8.33 kHz steps, the display is deliberately "fudged" to the nearest 5 kHz, sea level barometric pressure is usually between 900 and 1300 kPa, transponder codes are 4-digit octal (0-7 only)....so your longterm memory says you don't need to keep the whole instruction in your short-term memory to execute it.   

Most people can sing back one line of a jazz song (usually 8 or 12 bars, sometimes 16) and that is the essence of leading a crowd chorus, but to recall a whole verse or an entire 3 minute number needs lots of repetition for a beginner. An experienced musician however seems to develop some compression-decompression mechanism that allows adequate recall of an arrangement you may have only played once, years ago.  Note "adequate": like a video image, something can get lost  in the CODEC process, but the joy of live performance is to fill in the gaps!   

So my simplistic analogy is that short-term memory, like dynamic RAM, needs to be refreshed or compressed and transferred to something more akin to static RAM. To pursue the analogy to an extreme, interruption of the refresh process would destroy the contents of dynamic RAM but static RAM decays much more slowly. Evidence? Many people with head trauma never recall the previous two minutes or so, but gradually reconfigure the stuff about names and addresses. Thus we might conclude that longterm memory involves fairly permanent chemical changes that in principle could be detected in a nonfunctional brain, even if we have no idea how to decode them.

Considering how "memory techniques" work, I guess a lot of the CODEC business is done by association and probability, which may account for witness statements often being plausible but contradictory. It also explains the difference between learned language, where we consciously study the formalised structure of a foreign tongue, and language acquired by immersion. The former often gives us a good "passive vocabulary", particularly if we can recognise similarities or have studied a common root language (like Latin) and can read a newspaper or follow a conversation,  but "active vocabulary", the ability to respond  in Klingon without compiling the sentence in English and translating it, is much harder to acquire after the age of five.

Problem is that unless you know a lot about the history and experiences of your dead brain, you won't be able to disentangle the hard molecular data that has been compressed and compiled by association. 

46

The Environment / Re: Is Rising CO2 level a Problem?

« on: 16/11/2021 14:17:10 »

Don't worry about my feelings, Zero.

Mark 6:4  "A prophet is not without honor except in his own country, among his own relatives, and in his own house." This really should be Lesson 1 for any aspiring scientist.

I have no ambition to be liked, but one day to be respected. Probably too late, knowing how people work.

PS I spent half a day yesterday looking at "obvious" data and wondering what the x-ray machine was behaving so peculiarly. Then I looked at the underlying data and realised that it was working perfectly, but I was interpreting it superficially instead of wondering what was really going on. Thus I bear no malice towards the unbelievers:  Luke 23:34  "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

47

Just Chat! / Re: test

« on: 13/11/2021 10:22:23 »

fail

or pass

48

General Science / Re: Can Medicine solve Global Warming?

« on: 12/11/2021 18:23:29 »

Subsistence agriculture occurs when farmers grow food crops to meet the needs of themselves and their families on smallholdings.

is the definition I used. What's yours?

If I have n children and they do the same thing, the next generation will be n² because siblings don't mate in my culture. Again, yours may be different.

Homo not very sapiens has been around for 100,000 years but his life expectancy has almost doubled in the last 100 years and is now about 4 times that of our Cro-Magnon ancestors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population is worth a glance as it suggests that the current population is already unsustainable, even assuming  no climate disaster.

49

Just Chat! / Re: Why do we have world problems?

« on: 12/11/2021 12:58:48 »

What they do. Which is why they are not important when they are dead.

What kind of actions make them important?

Importance is determined by the beneficiary of the action. Inventing the steam engine and antibiotics seem to be generally accepted as important actions from whci subsequent genrations have benefitted long after the demise of the inventors.

50

Just Chat! / Re: Why do we have world problems?

« on: 12/11/2021 00:32:54 »

What they do. Which is why they are not important when they are dead.

51

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Math ability and Culture

« on: 11/11/2021 15:46:49 »

Maths often works backwards. Think of all the auxiliary functions that you would have learned at school if you'd stayed awake: 
"Multiply both sides by e^-bx"
"Why, sir?"
"Just do it and see what happens"
"Oh yes, it's differentiable!"

and then look up Wikipedia's list of favorite proofs where famous mathematicians have thrown some arbitrary auxiliary function into the mix without explanation, and abracadabra.....

A lot of maths is about leaning back from the problem and imagining what it looks like in 3D, or thinking of something vaguely like it that you have seen before. Did you ever ask a painter for his proof?

52

Just Chat! / Re: Why do we have world problems?

« on: 11/11/2021 11:07:40 »

It would be no great loss to the universe. All we have achieved so far is to urinate on the moon and destroy a lot of life on earth.

53

General Science / Re: calculate internal resistance

« on: 11/11/2021 10:57:56 »

V = IR

54

Technology / Re: What are some low-tech ways to address climate change?

« on: 11/11/2021 10:57:13 »

Very little extracted fossil methane is vented nowadays - it is far too valuable, so is sold as fuel and released as carbon dioxide and water. There is an increasing amount of methane from ruminant livestock and sewage, plus releases from drained bogs.

55

Just Chat! / Re: Why do we have world problems?

« on: 10/11/2021 16:01:09 »

Always a possibility: you can either go down fighting or die without trying. Most sieges were won by the invader, but in this case the invader is by definition a bit short of resources.

My flag will bear the simple motto "All disaster movies begin with someone ignoring a scientist".

56

General Science / Re: Can Medicine solve Global Warming?

« on: 10/11/2021 09:55:09 »

The source is common sense (plus a paper I wrote about 16 years ago). If humans are responsible for a phenomenon, then fewer humans => less phenomenon.

57

Question of the Week / Re: QotW - 21.11.08 - Does space traffic control exist?

« on: 08/11/2021 22:57:15 »

There has been at least one successful mission to destroy a dead satellite, but at orbital speeds I guess that microscopic shrapnel can be as worrying as a single big lump that you can see on radar.

58

Technology / Re: What are some low-tech ways to address climate change?

« on: 08/11/2021 18:02:26 »

what happens once WE Finally Fail to control the impending climate crises & then how could one cope with the new set of norms in the new world.

Like previous civilisations in Iceland, Easter Island, and probably Crete and several parts of the Middle East, we will migrate or die. Problem is that thanks to agriculture, medicine and public works, there are too many people, with too many fixed interests, to allow migration. 

59

The Environment / Re: When will our climate get to the point of no return?

« on: 08/11/2021 15:58:55 »

If you look at the data from the Vostok ice cores, we've been here every 100,000 years for at least the last half million years, and slowly returned to an ice age each time. http://euanmearns.com/the-vostok-ice-core-temperature-co2-and-ch4

I haven't seen a convincing explanation of how it happened (I'm not allowed to post my own here) but unless the laws of physics have changed, there's no reason to suspect it won't happen again.

60

Technology / Re: What are some low-tech ways to address climate change?

« on: 06/11/2021 22:17:22 »

Insist that all "climate change" conferences are held by Zoom. Problem is that it is high tech compared with the 400 private jets and God knows how many limousines and police vans  that were deemed essential  for the parasites' parade in Glasgow last week.