Should discussion about The Poem be ... censored?

[PrimeJunta]

It is going to flip. It's unlikely to kill anyone much though, at least directly. It's flipped lots of times before, but there's no correlation with that happening and major disasters (mass extinctions or similar). The signs of it being about to flip are there. Whether it happens tomorrow afternoon or some time in the next 1000 years or so is anybody's guess.

 

For kiddies explanation: http://www.physics.org/facts/frog-magnetic-field.asp

[Amentep]

I know it'd flipped before and would flip again. Would be totally cool to be looking at a compass when it flipped. Unless you were in a plane trying to go north or south.

 

Anyhow, it was the thing about it destroying life as we know it was what I was wondering about. I know scientists poo-pahed it but for a minute it was a total panic bait on the news.

Edited April 16, 2015 by Amentep

[Zwiebelchen]

The flipping earth magnetic field won't "kill us all". I don't get where you read that. No serious geo-physicist would ever claim that. In fact, humanity survived lots of these flips already.

 

However, it will cause compasses to fail and possibly increase cancer rates. But who still uses compasses anyway, when any mobile has GPS already?

Edited April 16, 2015 by Zwiebelchen

[Amentep]

^Seriously, it was a local news thing here (maybe national news, but I distinctly remember it on the local news).

I should point out that local news LOVES scare mongering.

"Tune in at 11 to see what product in your home is killing you right now."

Edited April 16, 2015 by Amentep

[Zwiebelchen]

^Seriously, it was a local news thing here (maybe national news, but I distinctly remember it on the local news).

 

I should point out that local news LOVES scare mongering.

 

"Tune in at 11 to see what product in your home is killing you right now."

 

Or in narrative style of online ads:

 

"You won't believe these 12 ways of dying young!"

or:

"A housewife just discovered this unbelievable new way of getting cancer!"

[barakav]

The flipping earth magnetic field won't "kill us all". I don't get where you read that. No serious geo-physicist would ever claim that. In fact, humanity survived lots of these flips already.

 

However, it will cause compasses to fail and possibly increase cancer rates. But who still uses compasses anyway, when any mobile has GPS already?

I actually heard that there were more mutations during flipping eras as the earths' magnetic field does help in deflecting cosmic radiation that can f*ck badly with the DNA ,but I admit that I never checked this out for myself...

 

I highly doubt that the required amount of evolution will happen as fast as the progression of pollution.

 

Only a few very unpleasant species will survive on the long run.

In fact, this "unnatural selection" across the oceans has already started:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-01/14/jellyfish-blooms

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120405-blooming-jellyfish-problems

 

Unpleasant is a relative term and so is "fast" ,The meteor that destroyed the dinosaurs killed more species faster and yet life endured. It will just take another few millions. The main problem here is that humanity is in danger because the damage will hurt us eventually as there will be no fish to eat anymore and generally less edible biomass in the world and less oxygen to breath.

Typically what you will try to do in such a situation is build in this sort of thing into your physical simulator, with a parameter or collection of parameters governing the magnitude of changes. Then you can produce a range of forecasts based on what you think these changes might be. In a simple approach you might consider just throwing in a range of plausible parameters and reporting on the resulting range of forecasts; a more elaborate approach would be to state beliefs about what you think the changes are likely to be and then come up with some sort of probabilistic statement or something similar.

 

In practice these sorts of models are too computationally expensive to run extensive simulations of this type (the simulator may have dozens of different parameters and take months to run at a single parameter setting, so you can't explore the parameter space anywhere near adequately), so what you can do is try to build a statistical approximation of the complex simulator's behaviour, called an emulator. The idea is to model the simulator's output using a relatively simple global trend, with a local correlation structure (so that the emulator's prediction at "nearby" parameter choices are "close"). This allows you to use a small number of simulator runs to build a prediction of simulator output everywhere that can be evaluated quickly. Naturally, this introduces additional uncertainty, but it's surprising how well this works in practice. This allows you to choose good parameters by matching to past data, and to make forecasts in scenarios where conditions change.

 

Of course, once you've done this you've still only got a prediction for what the simulator will say at a given choice of parameters. Even if you get the "right" parameters (if that is even physically meaningful) there's still going to be a discrepancy between simulator forecasts and actual behaviour in reality, based on the collection of modelling assumptions, numerical solvers, missing processes and so on. Often this discrepancy is going to be rather large and is almost always extremely poorly understood (and rarely formally considered). There is still a lot of work to do in this area (you will often see "probabilities" being quoted in climate change reports but exactly what these probabilities really represent is rather mysterious) but improvements are being made. I see that current state-of-play as follows; until relatively recently this question wasn't really given serious consideration; now it is given serious consideration by the scientists but it's still somewhat seen as something to give to a statistician after the model has been built and run and have them just "solve" it. Whereas of course what is really needed is for these questions about the link between models and reality to be seriously considered from the first moment the investigation begins right to the end. The resources put into building and running these models currently is far more than resources put into working out what the model output really means, which is not really good. But progress is being made.

 

Probably in my limited experience one of the big reasons scientists don't like these questions so much is that they necessarily involve subjective judgements. There are calculations you can do to assess some of the model discrepancy, but if your model is just missing a physical process and you know it's not there but you can't put it in, then necessarily you just have a make a judgement about how "wrong" this is going to make the model. There are things you can do to estimate bounds on these sorts of things, but ultimately you've got to make a judgement. Scientists often don't like that (and the public often don't like that either) but as long as you're open and honest about it, and you try to show how people with different judgements might reach different/similar conclusions, then you're not doing anything unethical.

 

 

first of all a very interesting read, thank you!

 

second of all .In regard to the planktons' case this is exactly an example for a missing process in the examples that you posted but even if you will try to insert this into your model in the first place you will have two problems: the first one is that to calculate/guess the right parameters to put into your model (even with the emulator) you will need to have enough data from either physical models or real life observation and this will take time.

 

The second one is that to build the model in the first place you'll need to understand how exactly the plankton deaths influence the oceans ecosystems and no one can predict the exact biological implication of something like that (For example maybe in some areas after a certain amounts of phytoplanktons' deaths there will be an increase in the number of bacterial species that uses Rhodopsins for photosynthesis and then some of the effect will be reversed or negated)  so again you will need a lot of observational data and even then ecology is quite chaotic as there are so many underlying processes and unknown parameters.

 

About the unethical part ,I don't think all scientist are unethical ,but the media and the politicians that are using those models to spread fear definitely are...

 

Even if a model is not very precise and is poorly correlated with reality because it omits many things it will still make the headlines and cause fear without mentioning the limitations of the theory and lets face it ,this fear does help the  scientists in the monetary side...

 

Eventually the climate guys will have to use their own judgment like some biophysicists do , IMO there is just no other way to deal with such complicated systems.

 

 

I'm a proud SJW and did my best to change the subject. Take that, you SIJW you!

 

Edit: also, 540 posts and still no locked-for-length. I wonder if we're participating in a bizarre and twisted social experiment?

 

I am not trolling them because I am a SIJW ,I just want to watch the world burn!

Edited April 16, 2015 by barakav

[BruceVC]

I have been really busy at work today so I haven't been able to comment on this thread for about 30 hours...and I already feel like an outsider..I don't recognize any of the conversations or themes. The last thing I was discussing was " white people can't say they truly suffer from racism "...have you guys been replaced by Body Snatchers !!!1  

 

But on further reflection a break from that discussion is a really nice and appreciated distraction...so well  done all 

[PrimeJunta]

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

Conspiracy theories huh?

 

[Amentep]

Oby...is that you?

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

Oby...is that you?

Yes westling....oh **** wrong sock puppet.

[PrimeJunta]

Stalinism was quite fascinating in many ways. I had a couple of long talks with a guy named Yuri—a true-believer die-hard Bolshevik—who lived through the whole damn thing. Really old guy, history professor emeritus who still stopped by to give courses to foreign exchange students, but sharp as nails. He was building railroads in Siberia as a teenage Komsomolets in the 1930's, fought at Stalingrad, worked at an armaments factory, then went back to school and eventually ended up teaching history. He said the period of Communist construction—Stalinism until the Great Patriotic War—was the best time of his life: amazing sense of purpose, camaraderie, and fun, with great progress and accomplishments daily, never mind that they were often sleeping in the rough, were cold, tired, and sometimes hungry. When I asked him about the purges and the Gulag, he shrugged it off as insignificant side events; stuff that had to be done to stop things from breaking down that barely affected anyone anyway.

 

I also knew someone who had lost both of her parents and much of her extended family in Stalin's purges and the holodomor in Ukraine. Her take on the period was... rather different.

 

The things is, I think both stories were true. Stalinism was at the same time a glorious march of progress and purpose, and an inhuman meatgrinder. It all depended on where you happened to be. The mass purges were chain reactions that started out—or not—essentially at random. When someone got arrested, they'd denounce a couple of other people, who'd get arrested, and so it went. One collective got decimated, while another was untouched—only because when the chekist said "I see in your eyes that you are a saboteur," the guy replied "And I see in your eyes that you're a cuckold," followed by much laughter. (True story that too.)

 

Poor USSR. Such an epic tale of good intentions going horribly wrong. Like Viktor Chernomyrdin put it in another context, "We tried our best, but it went like always."

Edited April 16, 2015 by PrimeJunta

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

[PrimeJunta]

 

Starting at 17:03, specially for (some of) you.

Edited April 16, 2015 by PrimeJunta

[PrimeJunta]

Capitalists will never be this manly.

 

[FaustianEchoes]

Where in the original limerick does it even mentions trans people? Just mentions him sleeping with a dude.

[PrimeJunta]

[NVM, deleted.]

Edited April 20, 2015 by PrimeJunta

[gkathellar]

oh good this thread again

 

Where in the original limerick does it even mentions trans people? Just mentions him sleeping with a dude.

 

You maniac! You brought it back! Ah, god damn you! God damn you to hell!

Edited April 20, 2015 by gkathellar

[FaustianEchoes]

Edited April 20, 2015 by FaustianEchoes

[Zwiebelchen]

Thread reaching the magic number of 30 pages... time to rally the "inb4" crowd!

[PrimeJunta]

I would like to take this opportunity to announce that I have purchased a new pair of glasses.

 

Somebody pointed out "huh, they look just like Lev Trotsky's." 

 

I swear on my mother's name that that was not intentional.

 

[FlintlockJazz]

I think this topic should focus on your mom and how what I did to her should be censured to avoid traumatising you over what a dirty whore she is.

[PrimeJunta]

Oh dear, and here I was thinking we had finally managed to learn to get along.

[FlintlockJazz]

Oh, not you in particular, I was using the generic 'you' for whoever was reading the post, since the chances are the person reading is has had their mom visited by me, because I am that good.  I'm also probably their daddy.

[gkathellar]

I like your new avatar, Prime, but it needs more hatchet.

Edited April 20, 2015 by gkathellar