22-Sep-14 World View -- Israeli-Hamas peace talks to resume

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Expand view Topic review: 22-Sep-14 World View -- Israeli-Hamas peace talks to resume

Re: 22-Sep-14 World View -- Israeli-Hamas peace talks to res

by NoOneImportant » Tue Sep 23, 2014 2:54 pm

Thanks Jack, it's been over 55 years since I read that story... strange how apparently inconsequential things have a formative impact. "...the child is father of the man...." Again, from an old piece of poetry that had a formative impact. From a Wordsworth item -- My Heart Leaps Up -- I had to look it up, couldn't remember that either. It seems to me that, in actuality, the idiom is several hundred years older than that, I seem to remember it from a poem from the early 1600s, but I could be mistaken... the memory is the first thing to go, after the knees. I've got to look everything up, and verify everything, and I still make more mistakes than aught to be legal.

My Heart Leaps Up - William Wordsworth 1802

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
1802.

Again thanks.

Re: 22-Sep-14 World View -- Israeli-Hamas peace talks to res

by Jack Edwards » Tue Sep 23, 2014 11:15 am

Nooneimportant said:
The thought of the singularity is enticing. It reminds me of an old si-fi story, I think it's an Asimov story, but really don't remember, the essence is a computer geek was idly contemplating existence, and he posed the greatest computing entity on earth the question: "... can entropy (the running down of all existence) be reversed? The response was there was insufficient information for a meaningful answer. But the question was fed forward to each succeeding generation of computing equipment, and in each case the result was the same. Finally man evolved, and shed he temporal coil existing in the form of pure energy, and yet the question continued to be considered, and in the end man was no more, and over time, eventually, all was done... all that remained was the thinking entity, the thinking entity who had finally resolved the question of whether entropy can be reversed, but there was no one left to give the answer to. So in response the entity said..."... let there be light,... and there was light."
NoOneImportant
It's an excellent short story and can be found here. http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

Jack

Re: 22-Sep-14 World View -- Israeli-Hamas peace talks to res

by NoOneImportant » Tue Sep 23, 2014 4:12 am

Lit a fire under 'em this time John... climate change (the fraudsters changed the name from global warming to climate change; as they are hedging their bets regarding the direction of the "climate change;" if you call it climate change you don't have to call the direction;) sigularity (robotics), the only thing you missed was Ebola, and maybe the super volcanos.

Where to start?

Climate change is a simple fact of life, as exemplified by the absence of miles of glacial ice covering North America, and Northern Europe. The ice was there, it is no more. The climate changed, the climate that deposited miles of glacial ice, was not the climate that melted that same ice - incontrovertible fact, the ice was deposited, the ice was melted. The same may be postulated for the seven other periods of glaciation, (as verified by ice core drilling in the Antarctic, and Greenland) and thawing that have taken place roughly every 100,000 years over the last 800,000 years. Need I say that man wasn't present for 7 of the 8 periods of glaciation/thawing?

What the climate change thugs always omit from their discussion is that water vapor eclipses all of the other "green house" gases in terms of it's ability to retain solar heat. No one desires to discuss water vapor, however, as man has, generally, no ability to affect the magnitude of water vapor resident in the atmosphere. Want to see that change? Create, in mass quantities, a practical hydrogen fueled internal combustion engine; an engine that's only by-product is water vapor, then watch the discussion change to include anthropomorphic water vapor. Disregarding the water vapor argument, another simple climactic fact of life is: the current sea level "stabilized" roughly 4000 - 5000 years ago; and again no one understands, or knows why.

The climate thug's argument isn't about "climate change", their argument is, in the final analysis, about control and their position is that they should be in control of your life -- not you. And if permitted -- that is, if you vote them in, elect them -- they will use your subordination to government to bring that about, regardless of whether their legislative mandates affect anything or not. If they are successful in their climate change effort, then why not control that future scourge of all mankind - anthropomorphic continental drift?

Doubt the above? Al Gore, that paragon of virtue, that altruistic prophet of mankind's climate change salvation was several years ago appointed as VP of Perkins, Kliner, Cauldfield, and Byers. For those unaware, PKCB is the largest venture capital company on Earth. Gore is the VP of Green investments. As such, he - Gore - has concertedly focused his energies on legislating "Green compliance" for various dubious "green" purposes; purposes to be directly inserted into, via legislation, your lives. At the expense of being redundant, they -- the legislative mandates -- will be impressed upon you at the expense of your individual, and personal freedoms. But only for the good of all mankind you understand, but not necessarily for your personal good -- some times you just have to suffer for the greater good of all mankind, and they will tell you just exactly what that entails, and what your consequences will be should you fail to comply.

So rhetorically the question needs to be asked: "is it wrong for them to profit from the mandates that they impress legislatively upon you?" Certainly not in their mind it isn't. The question might be asked: just how objective is their opinion, and their effort?

The second proposition -- the singularity, the coming of, first, machine decision making, and secondly a machine derived future existence. Having been involved in what used to be called: real-time computing for all of my adult life, I have seen the world change in unimaginable ways. It has been my charter to work in areas where computing equipment did things, made things move, controlled things, computer applications that operated with computing equipment as a central element of viewing, or controlling some real world physical process, motion, action, or phenomenon. Having read most of Chapter 7, not all of it, most of what it contains is a description of man/machine interaction. From a real world perspective, having been directly personally involved or involved on the periphery as an actively involved spectator, there are two philosophies embraced regarding the automation of complex physical/mechanical tasks. The philosophies are best understood and exemplified by Airbus', and Boeing's approach to flight mechanization - the auto pilots, and flight controls of their commercial airliners .

The Boeing approach is: the control systems knows and understand how to fly the airplane. When, however, there is an incongruity, that is, the control system thinks one thing should be done, but the pilot thinks another thing should be done... the pilot always wins, but he wins in the face of an unmistakable audible, and visual alarm. In essence there is always an off switch. The Airbus approach is that when the pilot is asking for something that "makes no sense" to the control system - the consequence is maybe so, maybe no. The result is that sometimes the pilot wins, and sometimes he doesn't. When the pilot doesn't win, the ship does just exactly what it -- the control system -- "thinks" to be the correct action, regardless of what the pilot wants, or what the pilot may request through the flight controls. Some years back there was an Air France flight leaving Brazil that was lost several hundred miles into the Atlantic, it took a couple of years but the wreckage was recovered. Initially it was believed that the flight went down, for an unknown reason(s). The recovery of the flight recorder cockpit dialog illustrates a dialog of the flight crew knowing the plane was going down, and taking what they thought was an appropriate remedy, and having the plane apparently (my conclusion) ignoring their flight commands -- the autopilot took actions that mandated disaster, in spite of the flight crew's attempt to remedy the plane's descent. One of the hypothesized reasons that the Brazil flight was lost was that an airspeed sensor failed and told the flight control system that the plane was in danger of a stall. The flight control system took actions over several minutes that the crew could not remedy -- could not convince the control system not to take. In short the flight control system drove the plane into the ocean in an attempt to remedy a problem that did in fact not exist in spite of the flight crew's desires, and best efforts to avoid that outcome.

Along those same lines a number of years back I had the good fortune to deal with a test engineer whose responsibility was to oversee the flight computer test sequence for the F-18 Hornet fighter. Anytime any change was made to the flight control system, no matter how minor the change, everything went through a "certified" retest. The F-18 is a fly by wire airplane just like the Airbus, and Boeing commercial airliners, that is, there are no cables, or hydraulics that run from the pilot to the plane's control surfaces. The fly by wire plane reads a sensor(s) in the pilot's stick -- just like a video game -- and routes the reading to the flight computer that then computes what the pilot is commanding the airplane to do. The flight computer box then sends those commands to the electrical motors that move the plane's control surfaces. The F-18's flight computer certification test sequence ran for between 900 - 1000 hours. What the test engineer knew, as all control engineers eventually come to learn, is that any mistake of a control system may result in catastrophe. So what's the message?

The world is a large place with an essentially infinite permutation of variables. If you can control the environment and thus limit the intrusion of exceptional items control systems work, and they work well, and they work reliably -- when appropriately tested. If you can't limit the intrusion of external variables, disaster will inevitably ensue.

Was directly involved with automating a 5 - 7 minute test sequence of dynamometer testing (a type of testing for measuring the performance of internal combustion engines) for a Wankel engine that GM was on the verge of producing in one of it's Michigan facilities. Pneumatic (high pressure) valves were used to control the load placed upon the engine, and control the engine's throttle. The test sequence was defined the control of the engine was established then suddenly the engine drastically over reved up to in excess of 14,000 rpm - the place where engines come apart, and explode. An after the fact failure analysis showed that in their hurry to "pipe" the compressed air to the test stand where the engine was being tested, the pipe fitters had failed to incorporate an air dryer into the high pressure air lines. Condensation -- water -- entered the compressed air lines, and thus the control elements. In so doing the commands from the processor to the control elements stopped functioning causing all load to be dropped from the engine while the engine was at full throttle. So why do we care -- what's the message? The world is complex, water has no place in engine testing, yet water crept in from an unexpected source. Engineering is an iterative process, plan, design, fabricate - then test. When it fails analyze, alter, then go through the process again. There are those who will comment that with sufficient compute power those problems may be dealt with, many hundreds of different applications in differing industries have made me skeptical. What is marginally important at one level may be the difference between life and death at a different level, and the two levels see no reason to communicate except after the fact of some extraordinary event. Man is allergic to blood, especially his own.

The thought of the singularity is enticing. It reminds me of an old si-fi story, I think it's an Asimov story, but really don't remember, the essence is a computer geek was idly contemplating existence, and he posed the greatest computing entity on earth the question: "... can entropy (the running down of all existence) be reversed? The response was there was insufficient information for a meaningful answer. But the question was fed forward to each succeeding generation of computing equipment, and in each case the result was the same. Finally man evolved, and shed he temporal coil existing in the form of pure energy, and yet the question continued to be considered, and in the end man was no more, and over time, eventually, all was done... all that remained was the thinking entity, the thinking entity who had finally resolved the question of whether entropy can be reversed, but there was no one left to give the answer to. So in response the entity said..."... let there be light,... and there was light."

Re: 22-Sep-14 World View -- Israeli-Hamas peace talks to res

by zzazz » Mon Sep 22, 2014 5:45 pm

If the Gaza war proved anything, it is that they should have built tank traps. The tunnel work was all waste.

Re: 22-Sep-14 World View -- Israeli-Hamas peace talks to res

by zzazz » Mon Sep 22, 2014 5:31 pm

software is getting better, *Humans* are finding new uses for computers---that's evidence of the singularity?

By that kind of reasoning, I have much better evidence of a much more important singularity. Just look at the ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere for the last 1000 years. The CO2 singularity clearly indicated.

Re: 22-Sep-14 World View -- Israeli-Hamas peace talks to res

by zzazz » Mon Sep 22, 2014 5:28 pm

I read the article ( http://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/oc ... -hydrates/ ) from WOR. It does describe a bacterial process that can consume as much as 90% (by its estimate) of the released methane, sequestering some of it safely in calcium carbonate and converting the rest into CO2 in the ocean, which would slow the transfer of CO2 from the atmosphere to ocean, making the atmospheric imbalance worse. It goes on to say that the effect of the bacteria is completely nil for any methane released as bubbles, which I believe is already happening, and much reduced for methane released at shallow depths. This work does not bring any doubt into my mind. More alarming, it mentions that the methane stabilizes the continental shelves and when it melts there is a threat of landslide tsunamis. They make no estimate about how large these might be, but the potential is enormous---so thank you, yet another reason to fight climate change.

Re: 22-Sep-14 World View -- Israeli-Hamas peace talks to res

by Anon » Mon Sep 22, 2014 11:50 am

John, sometimes I think you just like to stir the pot a bit.

The North American climate has certainly averaged warmer over the 60 odd years I've been alive, when I was a kid the range of armadillos was lower Texas, South Florida and some bits of Louisiana. Now, they are quite common to find in St. Louis. Armadillos don't survive extended periods of below zero weather. It's not that hard to connect those dots, especially given I could name many other animals and insects that have done exactly the same thing, moved north as the winters grew less harsh. It's possible to conceive of large numbers of people lying for money, but how did they persuade the animals to lie about surviving the winters?

As for technology that generates power without CO2 emissions, we've had that for most of a century now, it's called nuclear fission. That we don't use it, especially in the face of the very well documented hormetic effect of low level radiation exposure is a mystery to me.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2477708/

And doubtless the singularity is going to give us many more means by which weather/climate can be controlled or modified. OFC, the simple method would be to just fly large aluminized balloons full of hydrogen at their natural height of 20 miles or so, they'd simply send most of the light hitting them right back into space. Tie a few thousand of them together into a network and hang them over a city, you'll get both cooling overall and a reduction of the heat island effect, an air conditioned city for summer. The residents would probably give you a medal.

I would imagine it will take quite a bit longer for the tunnels to be reestablished than you think, there's the new wall to consider, plus the greatly expanded no mans land near the border. Any tunnels dug now, they'll be much longer and much deeper. And if you go very deep there, you'll be below the water table, which would be a major problem without a LOT of waterproof cement and some big pumps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93Gaza_barrier

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... risis-gaza

Note the "shallow water table" remarks. Thirty meters deep is about it, IMHO.

Re: 22-Sep-14 World View -- Israeli-Hamas peace talks to res

by John » Mon Sep 22, 2014 9:51 am

zzazz wrote: > If your analyses concerning the singularity had merit, there would
> have been signs of its approach long before now.
I don't know what you're talking about. Almost every week there's a
new story about some robot taking over some previously human-only
activity. In 2010 I was very impressed with IBM's Watson, and wrote
about that.

The pieces are coming into place. Sophisticated software like Watson
is being developed in research labs around the world. 3D printers
will permit intelligent robots to manufacture more intelligent robots.

These technologies are under rapid development. Within ten years,
I expect these technologies to have improved to the point that we
have things like intelligent robots filling roles like plumber,
nursemaid, and soldier (killing people). By 2030, I expect the
Singularity to have occurred.

Even if you don't want to "believe" that the Singularity is coming,
there's no question that many of the coming technology changes will
make "climate change" a moot issue, just as the automobile made the
horse manure problem a moot issue. In the meantime, there's no need
to fall for absurd financial and political scams.

** 27-Dec-10 News -- IBM vs Jeopardy! brings robotic warfare and the Singularity closer
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... tm#e101227


** 19-Feb-11 News -- IBM's Watson supercomputer bests human champions on Jeopardy!
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... tm#e110219


** Book II - Chapter 7 - The Singularity
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... 2.next.htm

Re: 22-Sep-14 World View -- Israeli-Hamas peace talks to res

by John » Mon Sep 22, 2014 8:38 am

John wrote: > There's a historical precedent for this dispute. A century ago,
> analysts were debating whether the world would be covered with
> horse manure, especially in big cities, because of the increased
> volume of horses for transportation. They didn't know that new
> technology (the automobile) would make all those concerns
> moot
JULLIEN1 wrote: > I wonder what is your source for claiming people in the beginning
> of the XXth century feared they would end covered with horse
> manure: at the time railways and tramways were in common usage and
> far more used than in our time.
The Horse Manure Crisis is quite interesting. Here are a few
sources.
Eric Morris wrote: IN 1898, DELEGATES FROM ACROSS THE GLOBE
gathered in New York City for the world's first international urban
planning conference. One topic dominated the discussion. It was not
housing, land use, economic development, or infrastructure. The
delegates were driven to desperation by horse manure.

The horse was no newcomer on the urban scene. But by the late 1800s,
the problem of horse pollution had reached unprecedented heights. The
growth in the horse population was outstripping even the rapid rise in
the number of human city dwellers. American cities were drowning in
horse manure as well as other unpleasant byproducts of the era's
predominant mode of transportation: urine, flies, congestion,
carcasses, and traffic accidents. Widespread cruelty to horses was a
form of environmental degradation as well.

The situation seemed dire. In 1894, the Times of London estimated that
by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in
horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that
by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan's third-stor y
windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable
dimensions loomed.

And no possible solution could be devised. After all, the horse had
been the dominant mode of transportation for thousands of
years. Horses were absolutely essential for the functioning of the
nineteenth- century city -- for personal transportation, freight
haulage, and even mechanical power. Without horses, cities would quite
literally star ve.

All ef for ts to mitigate the problem were proving woefully
inadequate. Stumped by the crisis, the urban planning conference
declared its work fruitless and broke up in three days instead of the
scheduled ten. ...

http://www.uctc.net/access/30/Access%20 ... 0Power.pdf

The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894
http://bytesdaily.blogspot.com/2011/07/ ... -1894.html

Great moments in failed predictions
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/19/g ... edictions/

Re: 22-Sep-14 World View -- Israeli-Hamas peace talks to res

by jimw4881 » Mon Sep 22, 2014 8:04 am

zzazz wrote:You are quite wrong about climate change not being the biggest threat." and "The methane hydrate is already melting."
I note you have changed "global warming" to "climate change" and added a Methane Hydrate kicker. Yet.... from WORLD OCEAN REVIEW (IMO a must read for general audience inquiry) comes this... "..anaerobic oxidation of methane in the sediment ... would make the potent greenhouse gas methane (CH4) harmless." ( http://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/oc ... -hydrates/ )

"Biggest threat" is not the same as a far away possible threat .... all things being possible of course. You may be right about much, but not in the case of methane hydrates ..... and "biggest threat" rhetoric only adds to my skepticism concerning climate change. The pot will not come to a boil due to climate change in any event.

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