Re: Cosmic simulations that once needed supercomputers now run on a laptop

John Larkin is silly enough to believe climate change denial propaganda.

Back when the sun was quite a bit smaller we did need a bit more CO2 in the atmosphere to keep the oceans from freezing, but that was quite a while back.

Canned guiness apparently relies on nitrogen to get the visually attractive froth. The time I spent at Haffmans BV doing electronics for the brewing industry wasn't wasted.

Probably not. Even if every black hole looks like a universe to the creatures stuck inside it, it's a black hole because gravity has distorted the space inside the black hole into at totally closed curve, and no coupling to any outside world is possible.

The mass inside the black hole exerts a gravitational force on the universe outside the black hole but as a featureless lump.

I don't think many people deny that the climate is continually changing. What is questioned by thinking people is whether the stated causes really are the causes and whether the proposed 'solutions' are:

It's academic. Billions of people want food and electricity and transport, and will get it from fossil fuels.

It's just more developed-country selfish cruelty to not let them have it.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Common sense is so uncommon these days that lots of people don't even recognize it any more.

Every time the muslims attack Israel, Israel gets bigger. You'd think that they might understand that by now.

Coal, especially dirty unfiltered coal, can be nasty stuff to burn, but there's lots and it's cheap. Australia runs on coal.

Natural gas is a gift from heaven.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

We do need to reduce CO2 emissions rapidly. That means digging up and burning a lot less fossil carbon, and the fossil carbon extraction industry doesn't like that at all, and is spending a lot on lying counter-propaganda.

"What has become clear over the last few decades is that Stratigraphic sections across the PETM reveal numerous changes beyond warming and carbon emission. Consistent with an Epoch boundary, fossil records of many organisms show major turnovers. In the marine realm, a mass extinction of benthic foraminifera, a global expansion of subtropical dinoflagellates, and an appearance of excursion taxa, including within planktic foraminifera and calcareous nannofossils, all occurred during the beginning stages of the PETM. On land, many modern mammal orders (including primates) suddenly appear in Europe and in North America."

Unlikely. New mammal orders appearing means that a lot existing mammal orders must have died out. We are "an existing mammal order".

Why would they get electricity from fossil fuels when they can get it cheaper from solar cells and wind turbines?

It would be developed country rapaciousness to force them to rely on fossil carbon dug up by developed countries when they could get their power more cheaply from solar cells. And they can do that without setting up an country-wide electricity grid.

The fossil fuel extraction industry owns the right to a lot of sources of fossil carbon and they are being quite vicious about maintaining the value of those right despite renewable energy suppliers being able to undercut them.

Whatever "common sense" might be, Donald Trump hasn't got it, if even John Larkin thinks that he does,

And you'd think that Israel might get to understand that at some point they are going to have to treat the neighbouring Arab states as neighbours, as opposed as to adjacent land to be depopulated of Arabs and repopulated with Jewish settlers.

There's less coal than there used to be, and it's not cheap enough to undercut solar power or wind turbines.

Australia still burns a lot of coal, but the coal-fired generating plants are being progressively closed - the power they generate is more expensive than that generated by our renewable sources.

Gas fired generators emit less CO2 per kilowatt hour than coaled fired plants, but they still emit too much when we need to reverse anthropogenic global warming.

The proposition that the formation of a black hole corresponds to the big bang of a new universe is entertaining, but it does look like an elephants all the way down solution.

I fancy the two sided universe approach. All the black holes in our universe are wormholes into another continuous universe, with our super-massive black holes backing onto galaxies on the other side, and our sub-stellar black holes backing onto inter-galactic relatively empty space.

Whether it is computationally feasible is beyond my competence to assess, but at least it is neat.

I think earth is beautiful (especially the female part) and we are priviliged to spend some time here.

I guess you disagree. You seem perpetually unhappy.

A little chaos is useful, now and then. It shakes up the fatheads, the static friction.

If they work and all the detachable parts haven't been stolen.

The tsar bomba was never a practical weapon.

Certainly. Russia in its present form may not.

Today's big headline in our local newspaper is about how nice and cool it is this year, and something about pizza.

Israel gets along with Jordan and Egypt, and may coexist with Syria soon. Lebanon is probably hopeless. Eventually, Israel and the Saudis will be great buds; that just makes sense.

Israel should take the north half of Gaza and give the rest to Egypt; everybody would be better off. Except that Egypt doesn't want the gazans; they have a giant fortified wall to keep them out.

Google coal in australia . Your use and especially exports of dirty coal are awesome. Come on guys, Save The Planet.

It's been cool and beautiful here so far this year. And the plants are growing outrageously. The sky is full of birds; hummers, silly little things, seagulls, noisy wild parrots, aerial battles between the crows and hawks, owls at night. The jays eat Fritos out of my hand.

Europe doesn't need our help to start wars. That's been your expertise for recorded history.

But it makes sense that you should pay for them.

I hate grass. One of the nice things about San Francisco is that there is almost none.

If you look at exchange rates or stock values short-term, you can get as neurotic as pleases you.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Granting the sheer irrationality of Trump's recent speech to the UN, it does seem to be in need of a regime change.

Putin has some very silly ideas, but he's nowhere near as lunatic as Trump.

If your local newspaper published anything accurate about climate change, Trump would have then shut down for lese majesty. And the oil companies would stop buying advertising space from them.

The current ruler of Saudi Arabia had a journalist he didn't like lured into a Saudi Embassy to be murdered and chopped into bits which were shipped out in diplomatic bags. He and Netanyahu should get along fine. More civilised heads of state might have a problem.

Trump had much the same idea. The Gazans don't seem to like it. They have been living there for generations and seem to be foolishly sentimental about the place.

We dig up a lot of it and sell it to China, who are phasing it out as fast as they can, but still burn quite a bit - as we do at the moment. If we didn't, the Chinese would probably get upset, and take measures to install a government who would keep on shipping the stuff out.

The transition to renewables takes time - somebody has to make a lot of solar cells (China at the moment) and somebody has to buy them, install them and hook them up to the grid. It takes time and money.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

And when the next climate crisis kills you, they will peck over your corpse just as enthusiastically - probably more enthusiastically because there won't be all that many other food sources around.

Of course, if you go for a Klein bottle universe, you don't even need two sides - the black holes are wormholes to remote regions of this universe. That would be even neater.

Interesting moral position. A million casualities and exporting their best talent and destroying their economy is more than silly ideas. He's wrecked Russia for decades.

He has taught literally armies of conscripts, many criminals, how to scrounge, fight, and kill. Not good.

Oh, the local rag is all climate change, mainly from reusing Associated Press feeds.

It's cold and foggy again, as it usually is here in the Alemany Gap. Yesterday was actually tee shirt weather; not today.

It must be awful to believe that.

We sure don't.

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Choosing what you believe on the basis that it has to make you feel good is not a great survival strategy.

Trump may have made similar sorts of choices when he invested hugely in a series of schemes which didn't pay off.