I think the focus on data-driven pipelines for discovery, rather than focus on fundamental understanding of the biology and chemistry of organisms might also play a role. But I have no "proof" to back that up, other than my anecdotal experience as a researcher in a genetics institute :p
Well yeah, but rigor is part-of the scientific mindset. One that we now try to enforce with statistics, peer-review, and reproducibility. But those are rather new ideas. Proper based evidence medicine, for example, is something we only came up with in the 60s or so. Rigorous experimental science might produce better insights in some way, because the data is better. But there is still value in other methods. An interesting example here is the advent in genetics for personalized medicine: did it deliver on the promises? No, it's still utter hype and vaporware. Part of the reason, I believe, is that it was merely stamp collecting. Sequence enough, go fishing for correlations, and hope that something useful comes of it. The current hype around CRISPR and related technology? Not because of rigorous scientific testing on large peer-reviewed data sets. Someone, was "merely" curios about bacterial immunological defense mechanisms. Curious enough to try and understand it. It was the explanation that made it worth it. Ideally they go hand in hand, but anyone who has ever been in a scientific institute will agree that this "idealized" view is rarely, if ever, true.
An interesting paper about the subject is "you can't play 20 questions with nature and win" by Alan Newell
This isn't about facts. Science is rarely about facts. Empirical science is and cannot be about proofs. Proofs and facts are for the abstract, the ideal, left to philosophers, logicians, and occasionally mathematicians and computer scientists. No, this is about something much more sinister: denying the ability to reason about and disseminate observations. All empirical science can do is look at things, do experiments and come up with logically consistent and plausible theories or hypotheses that explain them. The value is rarely in the data: the value is in the reasoning around it. Observing, for example, that beaks in birds change depending on the environment is rarely interesting. The interesting bit is reasoning that traits get passed down to offspring in a survival of the fittest scheme. Similarly, observing that combustion engines release CO2, and there is more of it than before we had them … not particularly interesting. The interesting bit is that it acts as insulation to sunlight and that a lot of ecological and climate systems act as non-linear under the influence of temperature and CO2.
Do I say this to downplay empirical science? On the contrary. However, the focus on facts is I think more harmful than it might appear in trying to protect our scientific legacy. Dump every table ever recorded on the internet as a torrent, and very little useful things will come from it. It's protecting the institutions and freedom to reason about, and talk about, those findings that is important; to be able to openly challenge them, and rigorously come up with "best explanations" (a human intellectual construct, not fact, not truth).
Gag orders to silence academic findings, that is problematic. More so than trying to "protect" facts-of-the-matter as if they are somehow the pinnacle of human intellect.
Corollary this is also why I always find "humanities are not science" or "this is not Nature worthy"-statements rather annoying. It's a no-true Scotchman fallacy. Science is more than stamp collection, it's more than peer-review, it's more than running elaborate statistical tests on randomized experiments: it's the collective human endeavor to understand the universe and ourselves, it's a mindset. A mindset that can, and should be, in constant flux as our understanding progresses (and sometimes regresses).
I know, I saw it a couple of times in Iceland and even in the Netherlands (shouted in excitement :p). In Iceland, Tromsø or similar it's easy to see with the naked eye (although not as vibrant in colors). In the Netherlands you have to be lucky (but luck favors the prepared mind…so keep an eye on NOAA satellites as they can give alerts for the upcoming hour). It's important not to look for that signature green look, but rather look for white streaks or other contrail/"cloud"-like formations, you can confirm aurora with your camera or by seeing it "dance" a little bit in less ideal conditions. Do note that solar activity goes in 11 year cycles, we've just had a peak (albeit a very mild one), next one is in a decade likely. But aurora is fickle a thing: solar, geological and weather conditions have to be right if you want to spot it at lower latitudes. And it can appear and dissepear right before your eyes.
That's fair. But I do, and can, direct criticism towards the EU for one of its member states as well (however shaky the EU might be at this moment). It might not particularly effective, given, but in my book it's still valid criticism. Maybe it's my upbringing, I don't know, but I'd like to think about 'citizens of the world'. Pollution, innovations, technology and energy know, and should not, know boundries. While this particular bit was about Wyoming there have been similar stances in other states about taxing or otherwise limiting renewable energy. At some point it's necessary to abstract. To find the "general" in the particulars. It's a touchy subject, but maybe it's time to abstract this to the federal level or even higher?
Oh downvote me into oblivion. But whatever the hell you're doing US, it's not good. It's not good for you, it's not good for the planet. It's not good for your citizens, it's not good for humans all around the planet. With all your overseas missions to "protect freedom" or some other utterly irrelevant excuse to satiate your military-industrial complex, you fail to do the one thing that might actually help. Progress. Progress beyond your dependence on fossil fuels, progress beyond the need to entice war, slavery, destruction for those who hold those mineral resources you value so dearly. Just think for a second: however much is left, however destructive it might be to the planet to extract and burn it(losses beyond imagination included), there is still a finite amount of it. You could be the front-runners in a revolution never seen before. The front-runners in an economy liberated from the need to see energy as "scarce". You're stuck in a mindset. "Energy is scarce". It's not, it's abundant. It's /everywhere/. Solar, Geothermal, Wind and Hydro-electric are not some hippy post-fact climate change conspiracy: they can and will provide you with unlimited and free energy. Just /think/ for just a second what that would do to your infrastructure. Grow food in deserts? Done. Free transport across the world? Done. Virtually free drinking water through ocean desalination? Done. Massive reductions in prices for food and other necessities? Done.
But no, you want to live in a world where energy is scarce and you're the sole "protector" of its use and freedom. Cite "jobs lost" or whatever you can think of to protect your bubble; but this path you're on is not sustainable.
On the very rare occasion I get to photograph the Northern lights in the Netherlands [1]. Conditions have to be just right, and you can almost never make it out with the naked eye. But the camera does wonders.
A couple of tips:
- Avoid the full moon, it's not worth doing it unless the Aurora is strong and you're in Iceland or something [5]
- Watch the NOAA satellites [2,6]
- Under moderate light pollution a CLS or UHC filter can help, they make clip-on ones for Canon and Nikon [3,4]. Although nothing beats dark skies.
But that wasn't the point I was trying to make. You should not be judged by not having children. In fact the default "you should have children to be happy/successful/not-be-frowned upon" is arguably the wrong one.
Schopenhauer is also famous for having an anti-natalist stance.
“If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?”
It's brushed off in first few paragraphs, but for those who are not yet a parent: you don't have to be. You can have a fulfilling, arguably happier [1], life without children. In fact, a lot of people argue against having children these days [2,3,4].
I'm fairly lucky to have a supporting and progressive family who, mostly, supported my decision for not having children. But a quick gloss over /r/childfree indicates that there is a lot of stigmatism still going on. I think it's time to do away with that.
Depends on what you mean by "using". Writing it, probably not so much. But a lot of the numerical things I use are written in Fortran (e.g. BLAS, Atlas). A lot of games I play probably have some hand optimized Assembly. And pretty much everything I touch is in some way backed by C. For natural language processing I've recently (re)discovered how useful PROLOG can be in some cases, and I may touch on that this year.
Iceland. Clean water and air, plus practically "free" electricity. Developed utilities and infrastructure. Small and mostly friendly population. The natural beauty there gets to me every time I visit. There is nothing like seeing a bright aurora, or driving through something seemingly other-worldy. And…it might possibly survive nuclear or climate catastrophe.
I'm in the same boat. I've used and loved Apple products for the better part of a decade. Used to tune in to Steve Jobs doing his keynotes. Got excited about everything they launched. Maybe that fades with age, I'm almost in my 30s now. But, I just don't care anymore. In fact, almost every new Apple product does the opposite of what I want. In my day job I do consulting on Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. And sometimes that involves CUDA. There are no Apple solutions with Nvidia cards. I'm an avid hobby photographer, the lack of storage space on these devices make me cringe. A single RAW from my dSLR easily takes 20 megabytes, do a day of shooting and I ramp up gigabytes of data. At night, I'm a hobby astronomer and play with astrophotography, this requires a lot of IO. Often I have 7 to 8 USB devices attached via various hubs. This works fine on my 3 year old Macbook Pro … the reports from flaky IO, even if you use their branded adapters, make me really reluctant to upgrade. That stuff is hard enough without having to deal with dodgy transfers or incompatible hubs. For some of this I've started using the cloud and bare metal servers in a rack … but it's not a proper substitute for doing it in a train with flaky wifi. And it drastically adds to the latency of my iterations. I realize I'm a minority, but I once honestly believed that Apple catered to my needs, that it would provide me with the best possible hardware to achieve my hobbies and professional goals. No longer so, not by a long shot.
'Unfortunately, there's an incredibly huge gap between "loss of coastal regions" and "Earth becomes a second Venus"' … maybe there's not. And that's part of the problem. Psychologically people perceive differences as "linear". It's part of how our brains are wired: to go from A to B draw a mental line and try to walk it at a constant speed. The greater the difference, the longer the line, thus the longer it takes to get from A to B. Hence the "huge gap" sentiment. But climate is not a linear system. Going from A to B could be a tiny step. Or oscillating, or dampening, or all sorts of funny things. Modelling of, for example, oceanic plankton (which gives more than 50% of the atmospheric oxygen) showed that the difference between "happy ~20% oxygen in the atmosphere" to "no oxygen ever again" is a small temperature change [1,2]. Non-linear systems are very hard. But they are fact, not fiction. That one last metric ton of CO2 could really be the difference between "life as usual" and "goodbye complex life on Earth". Communicating that fact is unfortunately even harder. Because people cannot perceive these changes, they're stuck in the linear mindset. And this worries me, because when we realize we need to really do something it's probably already far too late. If it isn't already (but in that case, science won't matter…I'd rather turn the page to "existential philosophy in the face of extinction").
To me it seems like simple risk management, even with a small probability the loss would be near infinite, whereas the loss of "doing something" is probably negligible. (carbon tax, energy transition, discouraging procreation, anti-consumerist lifestyle … probably all beneficial for humanity from a birds-eye view)
But probably consider "rampant immigration" as relevant. Unless they're up for genocide, which they quite frankly probably are, it is their problem. Genocide or not.
Not long ago I thought the same thing. We can live on the ISS, so even if there's no oxygen and temperatures will be perpetually 200ºC above current, I'm sure we can construct habitats (even small cities) that could be self-sustaining and live. But here's the catch: these things don't happen instantly. It's not a turn-based RPG where somebody decides one turn to "build self-sustaining, hermetically sealed arks", before these things become an absolute necessity we may have already lost the infrastructural or technological abilities to do so (even the raw materials come from /everywhere/ on Earth these days). Worse yet, when the social-economic inequality is the difference between life and death, I'm sure a lot of people will be very angry. And very angry people do stupid things. So you build an ark to live, but not everyone outside is truly dead yet, I'm very sure these people would like to get in. Destructively.
Yeah so we have a different story. We build Natural Language Processing and statistics software. We tried the cloud first, but it was just unworkable. Limited IOPS, outrageous prices for even a modest amount of RAM, slow virtualized CPUs, limited GPU options with terrible performance. So one day I hired half a rack, bought some machines with fast SSDs, 128GB RAM each, dual CPU with high clockspeed, and even some boxes with GPUs. The difference was incredible. Not just in performance, which was orders of magnitudes faster (going from barely workable to "pleasant user experience" without any software changes), but also in terms of cost. If we were to provision these machines on Azure or E2 we'd spend in a month what these machines cost, and our current current costs are maybe $500 in electricity + rack rental. Sure, it's a bit of a workout to put stuff in racks, but I actually quite enjoyed doing it. Sure stuff will break and things will go down. We can take the downtime at this point. And seriously, cost and performance wise there is no competition between cloud and rolling your own hardware (if you know how to do it). Also I'm perpetually surprised by how overstated the complexity of this is, yes it's tricky. But so is CSS, and Javascript these days. And unless you go "full cloud" (never go full cloud), you still have to manage fallover/redudancy/CI/provisioning yourself. It's not much different on "actual" hardware (there is no cloud, it's just somebody else's computer). If my firewall or switch catches fire, that might be problematic. But if that happens at an Amazon or Azure data center, that's also problematic. At the very least you'll suffer terrible latency because it needs to move the VMs dynamically.
Why not nuke metropolitan areas while you're at it? Most of the population is in the coastal cities anyway, who cares about New York, Shanghai or Mumbai. Quick fix. Or force serialization for > 60% of the world population. I mean sure, there are "solutions" but there is ethics to consider too …
All true, but "the scale of it all" will be truly mind boggling whatever we do, or don't do. Solving this problem will require engineering on a scale never seen before, failure to act will result in losses on a scale never seen before. So it's not a choice about scale, it's a choice about the survival of civilization.
But that's the thing right, "we" is the human population. If the US logging industry plants as much trees as it removes, then it doesn't really really matter if the global rain forests are being slashed and burned for agricultural reasons. Not to mention the massive amounts of forest fires we can expect due to increased heat and drought, which we have absolutely no idea how to deal with. It truly is a global problem. Great Green Wall is definitely a good thing! Throw in some heliostat solar (molten salt) powered desalination, and massive amounts of desert could be "greened" (good for people, economy and climate!)
Yes trees are a perfect solution. They've optimized this process through millions of years of evolution. However, we're still removing more trees than adding them per year. Quite impressively so, even. It takes time for forests to grow. A lot of its carbon sink properties are because of soil succession, which takes decades to mature.
My worry is that Trump doesn't deny it (well he does publicly), but rather privately realizes that it's already far too late. There's nothing we can do, collapse of global civilization before mid-century is probably inevitable. So what can you do, well ramp up every dirty trick you can think off … because it doesn't really matter and it makes you look good with the public (sorry to say, it does, climate change is still not popular in public discourse).
To stay within the 1.5 to 2ºC bounds, the IPCC already includes massive carbon sequestering technologies in even its most simple recommendations. This is technology that does not exist.
We're betting life on Earth (and truly, it is that dire) on tech that might be impossible to build and scale. Even if we reduce our carbon emissions to 0 today the delayed effects and non-linear dynamics are so poorly understood, that it could very well be that nothing truly can be done to avoid our mass extinction. And, this too goes for carbon sequestering; even if we magically suck the last 5 decades of carbon out of the air, some stuff that is broken can't be fixed. Thresholds, catastrophes, oscillations, bifurcations, etc are real. We really have to think in non-linear systems when dealing with climate, and that is something we're very bad at. Especially when it comes to the media-voter complex.
But picture this, you are driving your car down some road, and everything is fine. You're minding your own business. There's nobody else there, so what the heck, let's ramp up some of the speed. And you go faster and faster. Until bam, unexpected steep corner, your car flies off the road and you die. At that point going back a couple of miles is never going to fix you. It's too late.
'It's about a society on its way down. And as it falls, it keeps telling itself: "So far so good... So far so good... So far so good." It's not how you fall that matters. It's how you land.' - La Haine
Server side rendered HTML, simple forms with POST redirects. Little to no CSS or Javascript. Pick your back-end of choice: Java Spring, Python Django, Common Lisp (wink wink). Use a well known SQL server for persistence. Might be boring, but there are still a lot of cases where this is actually desirable, and it's insanely performant.
I appreciate the effort, certainly do. But, and this a big but: the amount of tooling, libraries, complexity and systems needed for a "modern" web app is almost comical at this point.