It’s nice to see that NASA is taking the asteroid threat more seriously, but we’re still not doing enough to actually prevent them from hitting us. In fact, we’re doing almost nothing.
Category Archives: Mathematics
Steven DenBeste
He was one of the greats of early blogging, and a brilliant man in many fields. I have to confess that I feel partially responsible (though I’m sure I was far from alone) in chasing him away from blogging with an ill-thought email. I think I later apologized, but if I didn’t, Steven, if you can read this, please accept my deepest apologies.
[Tuesday-morning update]
More thoughts from Jim Geraghty.
The Limits Of Knowledge
The climate debate has an epistemological problem that proponents of policy to deal with it want to pretend doesn’t exist. I wrote about the flawed precautionary principle years ago.
Climate
What is the import of Lorenz? Literally ALL of our collective data on historic “global atmospheric temperature” are known to be inaccurate to at least +/- 0.1 degrees C. No matter what initial value the dedicated people at NCAR/UCAR enter into the CESM for global atmospheric temperature, it will differ from reality (from actuality – the number that would be correct if it were possible to produce such a number) by many, many orders of magnitude greater than the one/one-trillionth of a degree difference used to initialize these 30 runs in the CESM-Large Ensemble. Does this really matter? In my opinion, it does not matter. It is easy to see that the tiniest of differences, even in a just one single initial value, produce 50-year projections that are as different from one another as is possible(see endnote 1). I do not know how many initial conditions values have to be entered to initialize the CESM – but certainly it is more than one. How much more different would the projections be if each of the initial values were altered, even just slightly?
This has always been pretty obvious to me. What does it mean? That we cannot model it into the future with any confidence whatsoever.
The Global Oil Surplus
But, but…PEAK OIL!
I predict that the wealth generated by cheap fossil energy will vastly exceed the costs of mitigating changes in climate, regardless of their cause.
Natural Selection
Just one more reason to not take climate hysteria seriously.
Hacker-Proof Code
…through formal software verification. This seems like sort of a big deal. Particularly in the era of the Internet of Things and self-driving cars. Of course, the weakest link in security will remain the flawed unit between the seat and the keyboard.
Microsoft’s Cancer Cure
Derek Lowe isn’t impressed.
@Rand_Simberg @Dereklowe @Eaterofsun Maybe they could just install Windows 10 into the tumors?
— Tech_Noir (@LV__666) September 21, 2016
XKCD And Climate
I’m generally a big fan of Randall Monroe, but I thought his latest was a misfire. This is a more accurate take.
The Reactionless Drive
Here’s a crazy idea: Let’s actually test it in space.
It’s worth noting that the cubesat revolution has made such things affordable.