itcrowd

> Can I just point out the insanity of 3D models being subject to trademark and copyright?

Not sure if I agree. If a song is included in a game without license, it wouldn't fly either. Designs can be copyrighted and may not be copied by others without permission. If (game) designers want to use a mailbox in a game, why not make one themselves? Why use others' work without permission?

(To continue your journalist analogy)

So what happens to "the journalist" when something speculative is reported in a newspaper piece that is written by 7 people five years ago? In addition, five of the seven writers are now working different jobs in the private sector, no longer writing in any newspaper.

I agree with the last two paragraphs of your post viz. humility and reform.

> the disconnect between "most scientists agree there is a reproducibility crisis" and "most scientists believe most of the papers they read are basically true and reproducible"

Could it be that many scientists think: "there is a crisis, but not in my field!"? To be honest, I personally think this quite often (and then realize I am being naive).

There is definitely an argument to be made for increased negative (reputational) effects. However, many unreproducable results are only discovered years, if not decades, after initial publication. This makes the discovery less impactfull for the original researchers. In that timespan, many have left academia; others have more recent "shiny" publications to point to instead. It's sad, but in addition to the publish-or-perish, there's also a publish-and-forget mentality in (some) academia, in which your project is finished and you move on to the next "hot" topic. Therefore, my concern is with the efficacy of such measures. What are your thoughts on how to implement such a reputational effect? Public shaming? Should we register fraudulentprofessor.com?

> Professors aren't doing any favors by rubberstamping weak papers, or giving weak students PhD's

Agreed. However, I think this is a sort of tragedy of the commons, in which "good" behavior of some professors will not stop the onslaught of "bad" behavior of others. Certainly the good ones will be outnumbered in terms of graduates and since university performance reviews rely mostly on sheer numbers (students, papers..), there is an argument to be made that universities self-select for the rubber-stamp professor over the honest ones.

I feel a fair solution is to re-imagine the universities' performance review system, although I have a hard time coming up with concrete and good measures of how to select the good from the bad professors.

Sorry but you are simply wrong. Tony Heller (your first video) has been debunked so many times it's a wonder he still makes videos. If you want to say GISS data is manipulated, please come up with solid evidence from peer reviewed sources. Their methods have been thoroughly peer reviewed, something that cannot be said of Tony Heller.

Why did they hire Leonard Nimoy, not an actual climate scientist? The doomsday ice age scare of the 70s has been exaggerated to the point of breaking. The vast majority of scientific papers in those times showed global warming is the issue. There was some cooling starting in the 40s, mainly due to aerosol pollution of the atmosphere. This issue was tackled. Now we're left with CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

As for the temperature records, please look up how temperature proxies (tree rings, ice cores...) can be used to reconstruct global temperature. It's not like we know the temperature from 2000 years ago because the Romans had a notebook and measurement stations spanning the globe.

1) The warming is more than 0.5 degrees C.

2) The warming is global, and in addition to changes in temperature on a daily basis.

https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/graph_data/Glob...

It's cool to see how the game took the world by storm in such a short time. The "out-group" - including military personnel - was left completely in the dark as to what all kids seemed to know about: Pokemon, Gyms and Stops.

> "Plse advise the Commissionaires that apparently Fort Frontenac is both a PokeGym and a PokeStop. I will be completely honest in that I have not idea what that is," wrote Maj. Jeff Monaghan at CFB Kingston.

Not a talk from 2019, but discovered it this year: "1177 BC, the year civilization collapsed (Eric Cline, PhD)" https://youtu.be/bRcu-ysocX4

Excellent informative and hilarious talk about his (at-the-time) new scientific hypothesis to explain the end of the Bronze Age ca. 1200 BC.

Multiple civilizations collapsed within a few decades of each other with the ability to read, write and make high buildings being lost all across the Eastern Mediterranean simultaneously. The Bronze Age is magical and interesting of itself, the talk gives a great introduction as to why we know much more about it than we think.. definitely recommended.

Duration ~1 hour (feels like 20 minutes)

What's up with so many YouTube video's (including this one) having ALL CAPS titles?! It makes me not want to watch them, although it may be different for the general public for some reason ... ??

Google's paper came out in October, before the fuss about the term supremacy. This post by Aaronson is from today (19th of Dec.). The Nature letter referenced in the post was from the 10th of Dec.

The first author of this Geophysical Research Letters paper has also made a Twitter thread in layman's language to explain their paper: https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1202271427807678464

1) Claim in tweet: "This is the longest single uninterrupted train journey currently possible on Earth."

My counter claims:

1a) it is not a "single" journey (multiple transfers) which leads to 1b) it is not "uninterrupted" (multiple transfers). 1c) It is also not the longest journey possible because you can take many longer paths through Europe (mentioned in the comments of the tweet).

2) The submitted URL links to Twitter which in turn links to an article [1] with some numbers (cost estimations etc.)

[1] https://basementgeographer.com/the-longest-train-ride-in-the...

Lovely introduction to pulsed radar systems. Would love a similar piece on continuous wave systems (fmcw, for example). Thanks for this!

As a minor nitpick, I dislike the term "Holland" when referring to the Netherlands. Additionally, you're based in Den Bosch, which is not even in Holland.

(you say "made in Holland" in your logo)

Very well written and balanced article. Thanks for sharing these insights. Looking forward to another "tiny corner" of your explorations of these technologies!

Please cite the scientific articles (not newspapers) making such claims. I don't think there is any credible report of these allegations.

There's a difference between scientific predictions and popular-press predictions. Your example (“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is”) is not a scientific one, but one spread by popular press with no scientific research to back it up.

The difference is important, because inaccurate reporting by the popular press undermines science.

I don't want to feed a troll here, but I'll debunk the arguments laid out in the first Chapter of the book [1]:

> The “97% consensus” that all scientists believe CO2 causes global warming is a based on badly flawed data and is a complete misrepresentation of facts.

Science is not conducted through consensus. Who cares about the 97% figure?

> Climate predictions based on computer modeling have been a miserable failure

No, they haven't. Hansen (1988!) has been extremely accurate [2].

> No global warming occurred for 18 years and 8 months through December 2015.

Total meme-argument. There is no denying the temperature increase [3]. Debunked time and time again.

> NOAA and NASA have corrupted surface temperature records.

Evidence? This is completely unsubstantiated.

> Only satellite temperature measurements are reliable.

I don't agree, but there are multiple satellite datasets that indicate global warming is real.

> The past is the key to the future.

ok?

> Cyclic climatic patterns in the geologic past provide a basis for predicting future climate changes.

Cyclic, I'm not sure of. But "climatic patterns in the geologic past" have been studied extensively and DO provide a basis for "predicting future climate changes". Key among them: CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012804...

[2] https://skepticalscience.com/Hansen-1988-prediction.htm

[3] https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/graph_data/Glob...

The major drivers of climate change are known. Pretending the "science isn't settled" is sticking your head in the sand. Solar irradiance, CO2 and water vapor are important, but some are more important than others.

Educate yourself. Here's a link: https://climate.nasa.gov/nasa_science/science/

edit: I meant the "science isn't settled" above

edit2: Changed "All the drivers" to "The major drivers" because "all" is too presumptuous

That book can claim what it wants. I am waiting for the science to back up those claims.

Physical evidence of CO2 causing global warming has been presented for over 120 years. Arrhenius was the first to propose that such a mechanism can cause global warming [1]. Please wake up to the 20th century. Snooze, and wake up to the 21st. Global warming due to CO2 increases in the atmosphere is real.

If you have any peer-reviewed science contradicting my claims, please present them.

[1] http://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf

There has been a correlation over the past ~10k years between solar activity and global temperatures. This non peer-reviewed book seems to spread the (false) message that this correlation still holds. However, it thereby neglects the role of CO2 as a primary mechanism of global temperature.

For the past ~10k years before the industrial revolution, CO2 levels have been almost constant at ~290 ppm. Therefore, the other drivers of climate change dominated. Now that CO2 is rising at unprecedented levels (see e.g. [1]), the other influencers of climatic change are no longer the driving forces. CO2 is the world's thermostat knob [2]. It is undeniable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at...

[2] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/330/6002/356.abstract

> they had enough of these balls pop while people were sitting on them to decide to ban them

Did they, though? I can't find any news story about catastrophic failures of yoga/exercise balls at the University of Michigan (or another university). The author doesn't link or cite anything supporting this allegation. It may fit someone's "Amazon/yoga ball is cheap/crap" narrative, but I don't buy it when the underlying claim is unverifiable.

The numbers are in g/passenger-km, not kg/passenger-km, thank God.

Here's a summary of the paper I gave before when a NYT piece covered it yesterday.

For USA and Australia, high-resolution/precision lidar-based maps are available of coastal areas. For other regions of the world it is not the case (or severely limited). However, gaining an insight into the elevation of land is crucial to determine a region's vulnerability to sea-level rise. NASA’s SRTM has almost global coverage of elevation levels, but is known to be too low resolution to be meaningful for this application (esp. in urban areas). A neural network was trained on the USA lidar data to augment the SRTM data (i.e. make the resolution higher). The network was verified on the Australian lidar dataset (and they got a good match; the model was already published elsewhere before [1]). The point of this paper was to then have the newly-derived elevation maps be exposed to sea-level change. This is where the maps with flooded cities come from [which were in the NYT article].

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00344...

The new and old model data can be downloaded from the authors' website: https://coastal.climatecentral.org

I don't share your summary of this paper. I would summarize it as follows: for USA and Australia, high-resolution/precision lidar-based maps are available of coastal areas. For other regions of the world it is not the case (or severely limited). However, gaining an insight into the elevation of land is crucial to determine a region's vulnerability to sea-level rise. NASA’s SRTM has almost global coverage of elevation levels, but is known to be too low resolution to be meaningful for this application (esp. in urban areas). A neural network was trained on the USA lidar data to augment the SRTM data (i.e. make the resolution higher). The network was verified on the Australian lidar dataset (and they got a good match; the model was already published elsewhere before [1]). edit: I should add that the point of this paper was to then have the newly-derived elevation maps be exposed to sea-level change. This is where the maps with flooded cities come from.

Now, you can discuss whether these datasets are representative of other areas, whether the methods make sense, whether the assumed sea-level rise is realistic or if the outcomes of this analysis have value with arguments. But you give none.

To address your other points:

> "Even with sharp, immediate cuts to carbon emissions, it could rise another 0.5 m this century." Then later in the paper share this wildly broad range of predictions

The authors don't contradict themselves here. You even quote them: "End-of-century projections diverge more, with typical central estimates ranging from 50–70 cm under representative concentration pathway (RCP) 4.5". The RCP 4.5 pathway involves major cuts to GHG emissions.

> neural network using the highest levels predicted in the most recent models

Their neural network has nothing to do with the sea-level rise prediction. It simply tries to (better) estimate the current land elevation.

> trained on data from areas with climates and landscapes wildly different

Also verified on coastline that is "wildly different" from the USA coastal line.

> produces maps that freak people out

The truth is hard, sometimes

> and fuel political agendas

Any findings to the contrary would equally "fuel political agendas", namely those of climate change deniers. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00344...

Universal basic income

The quote is part of a speech given by J.J. Thomson in 1916. The speech is partially reproduced (including your part) in the book "The life of Sir J.J. Thomson, O. M. : sometime master of Trinity College Cambridge" by Lord Rayleigh (1942). The original book is on the Internet Archive [1]. The speech is given at pages 198-200 and your quote appears approximately halfway in the quoted part of the speech [see 2].

[1] Full biography: https://archive.org/details/b29932208

[2] Screenshot of relevant quote: https://imgur.com/a/qicgorD

"I don't understand why it's an indictment."

You are not reacting to the content of the opinion piece. Three points are made in the piece that "indict modern finance", none of them being about SoftBank's "stupid risky bet" or how that should be regulated/banned.

> But the crisis at WeWork [..] exemplifies the increasing volatility of the economic model that inflated the unicorns of the past. And it involves three trends [..]: the expansion of the gig economy, the relatively low cost of commercial real estate, and the increase in financial flows from sovereign investors in search of political capital.

(edit: not sure I agree with the content of the article, but I'm quoting the gist of it)

Cool, but I can't get a keyboard up on mobile (FF, Chrome on Android).