Cosmologists at the
The simulation took a supercomputer 11 days to produce and could help shed light on the nature of dark energy - a repulsive force thought to counteract gravity.
for dark matter, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter
for dark energy, see:
Returning to Everest's South Col camp, he famously greeted another member of the British expedition group with the words: "Well, George, we've knocked the bastard off."
http://wave3.typepad.com/kevins_korner/2008/01/already-a-warm.html
Global temperature for 2008 is expected to be 0.37 °C above the long-term (1961-1990) average of 14.0 °C, the coolest year since 2000, when the value was 0.24 °C.
For 2008, the development of a strong La Niña in the tropical Pacific Ocean will limit the warming trend of the global climate. During La Niña, cold waters upwell to cool large areas of the ocean and land surface temperatures. The current La Niña event will weaken only slowly through 2008, disappearing by the end of the year.
These cyclical influences can mask underlying warming trends. The fact that 2008 is forecast to be cooler than any of the last seven years (and that 2007 did not break the record warmth set on 1998) does not mean that global warming has gone away. What matters is the underlying rate of warming - the period 2001-2007 with an average of 0.44 °C above the 1961-90 average was 0.21 °C warmer than corresponding values for the period 1991-2000."
It is most unlikely that 2008 will be as warm as or warmer than the current warmest year of 1998, which was 0.52 °C above the long-term 1961-1990 average because it was dominated by an extreme El Niño.
The current La Niña event is now the strongest since 1999-2000. The lag between La Niña and the full global surface temperature response means that the cooling effect of La Niña is expected to be a little greater in 2008 than it was during 2007.
...i liken the united states' position on refusal to adopt binding emission targets to a supertanker at sea. if you want to slow the thing down, it's a good idea to start braking early, except they don't seem to think so, and that by doing nothing now is somehow a better idea (because of the economy) er, last time i checked, it wasn't looking that great. sub-prime melt-down, unemployment rising, housing market slump, fear of recession...
like it's their planet, and we have somewhere else to go!
A
mr. moreno, you are one lucky bugger! it's not often you get to survive the laws of physics when probability says that you won't.
luck, chance, probablity, statistics. nutty cannot deny that all these are factors in life, but miracles? sorry. the statistics tell a different story.
i don't believe in miracles, dr. barbie, which is why "Above 10 floors, most of the time we never see the patients because they usually go to the morgue..." the difference is that all those people that do die don't get to have their stories heard. now, a miracle would be if instead of dying most of the time, these people survived, like mr. moreno.
a case of the exception proving the rule.
strange that when something amazingly lucky happens it's suddenly a miracle, and we conveniently overlook the normality of death in such situations.
i wonder how many people died in new york city yesterday in accidents. i'm sure mr. moreno doesn't see his own brother's death as a miracle...
miracle: An event that appears inexplicable by the laws of nature and so is held to be supernatural in origin or an act of God:
i say, look up occam's razor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_Razor
any evangelical iowan christians that absolutely, truly believe in god and miracles are welcome to throw themselves off a 47 storey building to put their faith to the ultimate test. i somehow doubt that they will survive. it won't be because of god's plan, but simple laws of physics. the same ones that govern us all when we walk, run, drive, fly in airplanes, or play golf (good or bad).
actually, a practical demonstration would be great, because i'm sick of hearing how great god is from all you evangelicals and seeing what a crap job he's done with his little experiment. so go ahead. you have nothing to fear anyway. if you survive your 500ft fall it will be a miracle, and if you don't, you'll be in heaven and there'll be a few less extremist voters around come election day. as i see it, it's a win-win for everbody.
as for mr. moreno, wow! all the best to him. he had to be thinking "i'm dead, i'm dead" all the way down.
i'm sure he's in for a painful recovery.
you discredit what mankind has achieved through his intellect through the ages, everyone else being wrong apart from you, ignoring what you see before you with your own two eyes, even as you and your kind type away on computers operating on the principles of science, not faith. science has had an unhappy habit of peeling away the pillars of mysticism from the church.
there was a time when people believed that flowers used to bloom because god made them so. then some clever scientist discovered that it wasn't god after all, but photosynthesis.
in short, you'd all be a lot happier if scientists and the rest of us 'normal, well-adjusted' people just went away wouldn't you? because then there wouldn't be all these uncomfortable challenges to your ridiculous claims of a virgin birth, the son of god, creator of the universe, who is so great that he needs worshiping on a daily basis, or else he's going to kill everyone by sending them to hell.
very reasonable!
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/us/politics/17huckabee.html
DES MOINES — Christine and Chuck Hurley have raised and home-schooled their 10 children here, and five of those children will be eligible to vote in the
If Mr. and Mrs. Hurley have anything to say about it — and they do, being evangelical Christians who have imbued their children with the mandates of the Ten Commandments, not least the one about honoring thy father and mother — those will be five votes for Mike Huckabee.
…“We are about the pillar issues of our faith — family, marriage and abortion,” she said. “Home schooling is just part of it.”
In political terms, she said, “family and marriage” are expressed in opposition to same-sex marriage laws, opposition to broader rights for gay men and lesbians, and support for covenant marriage laws like the one signed by Mr. Huckabee as governor in 2001.
…obviously poverty, healthcare, education, & protection of the environment, and foreign affairs figure very highly on that evangelical christian list.
if i ever have a child all i want is for that child to grow up with a healthy intellect and an open mind. isn't freedom of thought one of the very best gifts a parent can give a child, Christine and Chuck Hurley? or rather did you just want 10 versions of your selfish selves, perfect that you undoubtedly are?
what fine intellectual preparation for the world outside of iowa you have given your 10 children.
we go to school not just to learn geography and biology, etc. but also how to interact with people with whom we share different views. we play, we fight, we learn to get along. it's called an education.
no. i'll tell you what the problem is. christine & chuck hurley, along with all the other home-schooling evangelicals don't want their kids exposed to any other views other than their own. it's their faith that is weak!
if their faith was strong, and they are right, they shouldn't have anything to worry about. after all, because when they are all dead, they are all going to be one big, happy, jesus-loving family in the kingdom of heaven. right?
nutty says:
...if you are a male aged somewhere between 40 and 60, you probably did what i did as a kid and watched him on tv, attempting the impossible.
you then went outside, set up small ramps in the garden and jumped them on your bicycle (often coming off) pretending to be him. he was your daredevil hero.
very few ever get to have that sort of impact.
when i had my really big motorcycle accident, i always joked that unlike evel knieval, i couldn't even clear one car...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/opinion/24davies.html
SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.
The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.
The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which nature runs. The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion — all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they do?
When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance. The laws were treated as “given” — imprinted on the universe like a maker’s mark at the moment of cosmic birth — and fixed forevermore. Therefore, to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin. You’ve got to believe that these laws won’t fail, that we won’t wake up tomorrow to find heat flowing from cold to hot, or the speed of light changing by the hour.
Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are. The answers vary from “that’s not a scientific question” to “nobody knows.” The favorite reply is, “There is no reason they are what they are — they just are.” The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are. If one traces these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality — the laws of physics — only to find that reason then deserts us, it makes a mockery of science.
Can the mighty edifice of physical order we perceive in the world about us ultimately be rooted in reasonless absurdity? If so, then nature is a fiendishly clever bit of trickery: meaninglessness and absurdity somehow masquerading as ingenious order and rationality.
Although scientists have long had an inclination to shrug aside such questions concerning the source of the laws of physics, the mood has now shifted considerably. Part of the reason is the growing acceptance that the emergence of life in the universe, and hence the existence of observers like ourselves, depends rather sensitively on the form of the laws. If the laws of physics were just any old ragbag of rules, life would almost certainly not exist.
A second reason that the laws of physics have now been brought within the scope of scientific inquiry is the realization that what we long regarded as absolute and universal laws might not be truly fundamental at all, but more like local bylaws. They could vary from place to place on a mega-cosmic scale. A God’s-eye view might reveal a vast patchwork quilt of universes, each with its own distinctive set of bylaws. In this “multiverse,” life will arise only in those patches with bio-friendly bylaws, so it is no surprise that we find ourselves in a Goldilocks universe — one that is just right for life. We have selected it by our very existence.
The multiverse theory is increasingly popular, but it doesn’t so much explain the laws of physics as dodge the whole issue. There has to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and bestow bylaws on them. This process will require its own laws, or meta-laws. Where do they come from? The problem has simply been shifted up a level from the laws of the universe to the meta-laws of the multiverse.
Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.
This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships.
And just as Christians claim that the world depends utterly on God for its existence, while the converse is not the case, so physicists declare a similar asymmetry: the universe is governed by eternal laws (or meta-laws), but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe.
It seems to me there is no hope of ever explaining why the physical universe is as it is so long as we are fixated on immutable laws or meta-laws that exist reasonlessly or are imposed by divine providence. The alternative is to regard the laws of physics and the universe they govern as part and parcel of a unitary system, and to be incorporated together within a common explanatory scheme.
In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.
Paul Davies is the director of Beyond, a research center at
Sir,
as an amateur astronomer, I may not enjoy the powerful scientific intellect that you are renowned for. I'm not even a scientist, but I am an interested reader, and I take issue with your Op-Ed piece in the New York Times: Taking Science on Faith.
I think the use of such language here is highly questionable. Do you care to answer what NASA’s Gravity B Probe is doing in space if it is not testing Einstein’s “immutable laws”? Didn’t Einstein himself give the world a new way of thinking about space and time? Last time I checked, we still haven’t ‘abandoned’
While it may be without ‘reason’ to suggest that it is absurd is mystifying. What exactly is so absurd about the physical laws that are the key to understanding Doppler shift for instance? Are they any more absurd than the fundamental tools you would use to learn a new language? The motive for learning the language is ours, of course.
cheers!
He said Taylor's father called him around 5:30 a.m. to tell him the news.
''His father called and said he was with Christ and he cried and thanked me,'' said Sharpstein, Taylor's former lawyer. ''It's a tremendously sad and unnecessary event. He was a wonderful, humble, talented young man, and had a huge life in front of him. Obviously God had other plans.''
...Taylor was also fined at least seven times for late hits, uniform violations and other infractions over his first three seasons, including a $17,000 penalty for spitting in the face of Tampa Bay running back Michael Pittman during a playoff game in January 2006.
sorry about his death, but as for the religious stuff; i'm not buying.
...yeah, for someone who liked to hit people as hard as possible, exactly what is he going to be doing on sundays from now on? singing hymns? watching that doddery lunatic pat robertson instead of his mates play football? sure...
why when anyone dies do we automatically proclaim that they go to heaven? cemeterys don't have any headstones that suggest the other place. i mean they can't all be up there, given that sunday after bloody sunday, churches tell their congregations that everyone's a sinner. repent, repent, find jesus. ask god for forgiveness. then when you've found him, you can spend the rest of your life worshipping him. only then he will forgive you.
FOR WHAT!? being normal, like everyone else?
i'm just a normal bloke. i don't need anyone worshipping me. so why would god, the so-called creator of the universe need his little experiment on earth to worship him? if i went to a therapist and told them i needed people to worship me, do you think they would classify me as being insecure?
oh and one other thing. i know i'm going to die. no heaven, or hell for nutty. just decomposition.
and isn't it big of god to dangle the promise of everlasting life to us 'mere' mortals, given that he himself never has to face death...
"God is always in control," Pedro Taylor later told reporters. "We have no control of life or death ... we thank Him for all 24 years of having Sean here. I know it sounds short, but that's His will and it was done."
The entry is dated May 17, 1986.
‘A moment I’ve been dreading. George brought his ne’re-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I’ll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they’ll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work.’
Johnson: There is a relatedness. But what does it mean? Say we have almost 99 percent of our genes in common with chimpanzees. We also have at least 25 percent of our genes in common with bananas. There are these commonalities that exist throughout life. Do they point to a common evolutionary process or a common creator? That is the question for interpretation.
The genes are going to win when people ask me about that great degree of similarity between human genes and chimpanzee genes. I answer that genes must not be anywhere near as important as we have been led to believe. If there were that great a commonality between chimps and humans, it ought to be relatively easy to breed chimps and come up with a human being, or by genetic engineering to change a chimp into a human. We ought to see humans occasionally being born to chimps or perhaps chimps born into human families.
... i repeat: "genes must not be anywhere near as important as we have been led to believe."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/629/629/7072715.stm
The World Digital Magnetic Anomaly Map (WDMAM) shows the variation in strength of the magnetic field after the Earth's dipole field has been removed. Earth's dipole field is generated by circulating electric currents in the planet's metal core. It varies from 35,000 nanoTesla (nT) at the Equator to 70,000 nT at the poles.
...that's way better than a bar magnet, & some iron filings sprinkled on a piece of paper in science class.
