Here's my sealion of a question. What parts of climate change research are actually backed up by the scientific method (experiments with falsifiable hypotheses and all that) and what parts are more akin to natural history or something else? To clarify, I believe humans caused the problem (it appears that stating this makes people like you more, which is weird, but ok) but I cringe every time I hear the word science attached to the debate. Is it like a social science? I think someone told me that we know for sure that greenhouse gas emissions cause ozone depletion but I can't remember anymore. What is the actual hard science here?
>What parts of climate change research are actually backed up by the scientific method (experiments with falsifiable hypotheses and all that) and what parts are more akin to natural history or something else?
I do not generally get involved in the climate change debate because it has multiple problems: it happens on scales (both time and space) that humans have difficulty observing, it is about a system with lots of feedback that could very well behave chaotically, direct observations of the phenomenon are limited compared to its timescale, experts of the subject are operating under perverse incentives, it is highly politicized and almost everything that's easy to read about the subject is blatant propaganda (see all the climate change denialist posted in this thread as well as the OP).
Your question is hard to answer because it assumes there is a shared and agreed upon definition of the word "science" that can be used to determine with certainty wethere something is science or not.
> Is it like a social science? I think someone told me that we know for sure that greenhouse gas emissions cause ozone depletion but I can't remember anymore. What is the actual hard science here?
I think it is in better shape than the average social science, the greenhouse effect and the ozone depletion are two separate phenomena, this [1] is the experiment that explains how the greenhouse effect works, the wikipedia page about ozone depletion explains the chemical reactions that lead to that.
Why doesn't a bike save you a lot of money on fuel? Keeping a car on the road is expensive, you can save on insurance too. Also you can take the bus. I know, it's a pain.
If you can simulate matter, certainly you can simulate a brain. Qualia appear not to derive from pixie dust but accumulated experience in the world. You might need to train a brain for a long time to develop qualia. You might not be able to copy qualia from one brain to another. I think these are the main objections, but I'm not sure.
Personally, I'm not convinced that simulating matter is feasible, never mind a living organism, never mind an intelligent living organism, which is what the brain is, when you account for all of it.
We know how far away Andromeda is. We know how to build a spaceship. Therefore, it is possible to go to Andromeda. Is it though? What if the Earth doesn't have enough resources? How big is your brain simulator allowed to be?
It's actually reasonable. Step 1, translate key push. Step 2, broadcast key message. What you're missing is that there's an alternate Step 1, translate joystick hat push (or mouse drag, or whatever). So Step 2 should be broadcast generic up/down/left/right input message. Step 3, translate message into movement. But what you're missing is that dependent on context, there's going to be other things besides movement that those keys do. Step 4, pan the map with N/S/E/W. Again here, you have the flexibility to work with a rotated map. Your code was probably overdesigned for the use case, but I've seen your solution many times, in books and in real life.
However, I've also solved this problem by passing around polar coordinates, it's elegant and very flexible but you have to munge some data at the beginning. You can also pass around a simple vector [{-1, 0, 1}, {-1, 0, 1}], which is basically what you describe.
I think population density is a factor. China and the US have the same area, but China has 4x the population. Consider also England and Japan, densely populated islands with great train service.
Japan > England >> USA. Just being able to take the TGV from London to Paris is mindblowing.
I define great as it being generally possible to get where I want to go on the train (this is the most important factor) and then as a bonus it's usually competitive with driving, busing, flying, cycling, or walking in terms of comfort, cost, and convenience.
China is heavily trying to also connect its less populated areas to proper train services.
They just built a new highspeed train to the Xinjiang region which is a very sparsely populated area in the north east of China.
When you take a roommate, aren't you sharing the cost of rent? Sharing can mean mutual contribution as much as it means mutual partaking. Also, what? Amazon is not a retailer? They have giant warehouses, they ship physical product with Amazon logos on the boxes, and they accept returns. They allow for 3rd party vendors, but they are still very much their own retailer. eBay perhaps, but not Amazon.
You could say that if you buy a washing machine or a pack of tampons or a computer chip you and other buyers are "sharing" the cost of the production line, designers, marketing and distribution.
Personally, I wouldn't call it sharing even though it meets some dictionary definitions.
There is a big distinction between houseshare (two people on an equal basis jointly renting from a third party), renting (one person is the property owner and the other isn't), and subletting (the person in the middle is both renter and landlord).
Only the first can reasonably counted as equitable sharing.
On reflection, I concede that AirBnB is largely landlords renting their space or tenants subletting for substantial profit without their landlord's permission. However, I think subletting is fine, as long as you aren't making a substantial profit without your landlord's permission. I've sublet many times with my landlord's permission, it's regulated by tenancy laws, etc.
Yes, but "I believe that all beliefs" is a belief statement. It is not a statement of disbelief. You are not really taking a risk. You need to say something like "I do not believe that any belief ..." Actually, to some extent you did. If we rephrase your statement in a form that takes at least some risk: "I do not believe that there exists a belief that does not stem from imagined experiences." So, from there, all we would need to discover is one such belief. The problem here is the definition for "imagined". When is an experience imagined and when not? Now, you need to take a risk by defining precisely the term "imagined".
Is a statement of disbelief a belief? I believe that all beliefs are false, except this one? I disbelieve all beliefs, except this disbelief? I disbelieve everything except I believe in the goodness of science? I disbelieve all hypotheses except for falsifiable ones with empirical evidence? I'm not clever enough for this.
This was a neat summary. I'd add that often, you can use a length of string to measure something, without actually needing to know the numerical length. But then from that perspective, a tape measure is just ~2000 pieces of string neatly rolled up.
yes, along those lines. I don't know how large a subset NaCL is though. And it's yet another target. It would be cool if you could just target x64, and if the browser is running in a box that is new enough (has such a CPU) your thread literally GETS an x64 core whenever it has focus. All of it - same as if if it were a desktop app. Like a coprocessor. (Exactly what was called a silly idea.)