Climate Change Will Chase 100 Million Refugees Into Europe

Climate change has made sunnis hate shiites?

They've been doing that for a thousand years.

Scientific American used to be a serious magazine. No more. Time really never was.

But they weren't motivated to drive their opponents out of the country until rather less of the country was worth occupying.

And John Larkin doesn't really know enough to have an opinion worth communicating.

I have a complete set of Scientific American from 1959 to 1990. I used to have a few years more (1990-93ish) but threw them away and stopped my subscription. The mag went into the tank in 1990, and has never recovered. The older ones are _awesome_.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

On Thu, 17 Sep 2015 10:44:55 -0400, Phil Hobbs Gave us:

Back when they would highlight a particular nation's contributions to science... yeah those were "the thick years" I call them.

Don't be stupid, climate change will cause competition for vital resources, and when that competition is between groups with pre-existing animosity, you have violence.

"The Amateur Scientist" was amazing, both in concept and content. Readers would do their own incredible experiments (measuring G, cutting diffraction gratings, things like that) and send them in.

And not a single headline was a bad pun, no articles began with stupid cutesy lead paragraphs. There were few pics of cute animals or artists' conceptions of extrasolar planets.

If there actually is climate change, the effects will probably be net beneficial.

It's amazing how essentially all the projected AGW changes are various amounts of catastrophic. That makes no sense.

Met Office has begun hedging its bets. Unlike the IPCC, they have a longterm stake in credibility.

Manmade technology has certainly contributed to mideast violence: by providing powered transportation and modern weapons and petro-dollars and population-expanding medicine to an unstable tribal world.

Yeah, around 1990 they started going toe-to-toe with Omni Magazine. They apparently succeeded--Omni went under in 1995, and SciAm is still around in some Omnified form. If you call that success.

I think it was Dennis Flanagan and Gerard Piel who bought it after the war and brought it to greatness. Piel's son Jonathan took over as editor and drove it into the ground (intellectually).

A pity.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

My favourite Amateur Scientist columns were:

1. Vannevar Bush and a friend spent part of their retirement improving the pendulum clock out of all recognition, and wrote two columns about it. They analyzed the error sources more carefully than had previously been done. They borrowed two Shortt pendulum clocks recently retired from the NBS. After all the analysis and experiment, they improved the hinges with temperature-compensated flexures (Alloy 42 iirc), and bolted them to the cinderblock foundation wall in Bush's basement to reduce the effect of the pendulum's reaction on the frame.

1. Some guy whose name I forget built a nitrogen laser operating in ambient air. He took a sheet of double-sided G10 board, peeled the copper back from the edge to prevent arcing, and soldered two half-cylinders made from flashing copper to one edge, so they wrapped around like the spine of a hardcover book. A HV supply, a resistor, and a spark gap in the opposite corner of the board was all it took to produce giant flashes of UV. There were no mirrors, so it was really amplified spontaneous emission, but it was _awesome_. They got a joule or something of UV.

The dispersion of the G10 put a huge spike on the leading edge of the pulse from the spark gap, and (unless I'm mistaken) the position of the spark gap produced a travelling-wave arc going down the length of the copper electrodes, speed-matched to the light pulse. That made the light much brighter in that direction.

They had two brilliant 'conductors' in a row, C. L. Stong and Jearl Walker.

'How are the mighty fallen.'

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

-syrian-war/

es, and when that competition is between groups with pre-existing animosity , you have violence.

Unfortunately, it's the negative-going components that drown and starve peo ple.

Previous examples of climate change have been beneficial to the new species that have evolved to exploit the new conditions. We've got a massive popul ation that's fed by remarkably efficient agriculture which has been develop ed to exploit the inter-glacial climate we've had for the last 10,000 years .

Our population was a lot lower during the last ice age, and doesn't seem to have been all that high during the previous inter-glacial.

Sure it does. Nobody has to worry about local improvements. The local popul ation can cope with them without help. It's the catastrophes that have to b e anticipated.

The middle east stopped being "tribal" quite a while ago. The political div isions are now on a larger scale.

Good book:

and a cool book about a scientific amateur:

I won a subscription from some kind of school contest, IIRC in high school, which was around the time of the change cited above. I kept it up for a couple of years.

What I remember is that each issue seemed to have about three speeds of articles: one that anybody who had paid attention in high school physics, chemistry, or biology could understand; one that I could understand more than half of, and with a little research, sort of understand the rest; and one that was highly interesting to the five or ten people in the world working in that field and incomprehensible to anyone else. After a couple of issues, I could tell which speed it was after the first couple of paragraphs.

Matt Roberds

The earlier ones were written at a level just about right for a technically literate person from another discipline. I learned a lot of good stuff from SciAm in fields such as materials science, palaeontology, oceanography, and so on.

It was just the right level for the post-Sputnik era, which is what shook up US education the last time it got like this. (It wasn't as bad last time. Where are Khrushchev and Korolev when you need them?)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

My experience as well.

I think I grew old with the same editor in chief, and when he retired, the magazine collapsed.

Joe Gwinn

Do you recall the issue date?

I recall this article. It was A. D. Blumlein, if I recall. He invented the traveling spark gap transmission line that was the core of the laser.

Article is probably "An Unusual Kind of Gas Laser that Puts Out Pulses in the UV". C. L. Stong, Scientific American, June 1974, pp. 122-127.

This is ref 9 in

I don't recall that the SciAm article mentioned the speed match. The travelling wave speed is going to depend largely on the dielectric constant of the G10, which is probably close to 5, so the wave speed (proportional to 1/Sqrt[5]) won't be close to C.

As for the dispersion, duroid PWB material is probably far better.

Yes. I was going to give my nephew a SciAm subscription, until I read a few recent issues. Are there any reasonable replacements?

Joe Gwinn

Stop blaming the climate, it's: wars->exodus

syrian-war/

scientificamerican.com is supporting the Obama's war crimes.

joe

the-syrian-war/

I stick to geopolitics, as in colonizing and then de-colonizing in a permanently unstable manner, as in creating Kuwait for more built-in tension at the choke point of oil transportation Gulf.

joe

the-syr

Of course not. This is 2015. Decay already has set in.

joe

It will if the pulse arrives travelling at an average angle of arcsin(1/sqr t(5)). That's why the position of the spark gap matters.

(If it were coming in perpendicular to the gap, it would arrive everywhere at the same time, i.e. it would match c->infinity.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs