# New Dinosaur Age A-Coming



## rjmoses (Apr 4, 2010)

Alright, all global warming enthusiasts: Here we go:

http://news.yahoo.com/dinosaur-era-had-5-times-todays-co2-212124284.html

Maybe all the kids that have been playing with dinosaurs in the last few years know something we don't.

Ralph


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## Vol (Jul 5, 2009)

Oh No! The sky is falling! Those were some pretty large carbon footprints back in the day. 

Regards, Mike


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## Gearclash (Nov 25, 2010)

Copied the following comment to above article.

Ol' Professor Consultofactus with a morning mini-lecture! Pencils at the ready? Good! You may have heard the old adage "Figures don't lie but liars figure"? Well by preying on the average American's public school education they more or less allow you to perceive that their claims of a temperature rise are proportionally ~20 times LARGER than the actual physical truth. Let me explain: The warmists claim an observed global temperature rise of 0.5 from their baseline set in 1960 when the "average global temperature" was according to their calculations 14.8C...so now with their latest claim that the "average global temperature" is 15.3C you're left to think - geez 0.5/14.8 equals a 3.4% rise in just 50 years! Well yes and no. Yes, your math is correct and no, that's not the way temperature works. Let me introduce you to William Thomson perhaps more famously known as Lord Kelvin. Among his many works are the Kelvin scale which reflects the true nature of temperature as kinetic energy. The Kelvin scale (degrees K) has the same resolution as the far more common Celsius (degrees C) BUT unlike degrees C the Kelvin scale does not have negative values - it "bottoms out" at absolute zero. Why is this an important concept? Because only at 0K is matter absent of kinetic energy....and since 0C = 273.15K that means there's still lots and lots of energy when the thermometer reads 0C. And the truth be known the temperature of the climate is just another expression of energy. So if you look at the average global temperature the correct way, in degrees K, the 1960 "average global temperature" was 287.95K - so that 0.5C rise that sounded SO impressive in degrees C is in reality only a teensy-weensy 0.17% change in degrees K. The change in fact is so small that anyone experienced in metrology would think "within the margin of error, sans doute". So is it reasonable that over a half-century that the "average global temperature" might change? Sure, why would it stay absolutely constant? Most every other variable in the world of Earth science changes far, far more than 0.17% per half century - why should the "average global temperature" be invariant???


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## rjmoses (Apr 4, 2010)

So, if a person used Fahrenheit, you'd get an even bigger percentage! Cool! I'll pay my bills in Kelvin, but take my income in Fahrenheit! Nobody should care--right?

Ralph


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## hog987 (Apr 5, 2011)

Vol said:


> Oh No! The sky is falling! Those were some pretty large carbon footprints back in the day.
> 
> Regards, Mike


Funny true story about the sky is fallen.

We had free range chickens. I was in our little barn milking a cow and had the barn door opened. It was an over cast and windy. I cant remember if it was a piece of siding or a shingle that blew off, but it blew off and hit a chicken in the head. The thing that blew off was the same color as the sky that day. The poor chicken was shocked from being hit and looked at the piece. Look at it for a few seconds and than looked at the sky. Than back at that piece. Got scared and ran into the barn as fast as he could. From his point of view the sky had just fallen.


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## deadmoose (Oct 30, 2011)

We have all met way too many people very comparable to that.


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## RockmartGA (Jun 29, 2011)

@Gearclash - I like that theory using the Kelvin scale. However, I would counter that we humans and other organic life forms live in a very narrow bandwidth where even a 20 degree change in average temperature could turn lush farmland into a barren desert.

Personally, I don't know if the climate is changing or not. If it is, to what extent is mankind responsible. What I do know is that the entire topic has gotten too political, which will ultimately lead to incorrect decisions being made.

Case in point, I doubt you will see another coal fired power plant built in the next twenty years. Mississippi Power tried to build an Integrated Gasified Combustion Turbine plant, where they turned lignite into a form of gas to burn in a gas turbine, but the price has doubled from $2.4 billion to over $5 billion - and they're still eight months away from commercial operation. What do they call the US - the Saudi Arabia of coal?

In the meantime, there are folks making big money off the debate, which does not bode well for the rest of us.


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## hog987 (Apr 5, 2011)

Rockmart your right North America has a lot of coal. One figure I read was that Alberta alone has enough coal to power the world at current energy demands for over 200 years.

There is always a crisis. There was an energy crisis in the 70's. Global warming, global cool, climate change, cold war, world war etc. Like dad says the people in power need a crisis to fix so the masses will vote them in to advert the crisis. And there is always someone trying to make money off a crisis.


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## deadmoose (Oct 30, 2011)

hog987 said:


> Rockmart your right North America has a lot of coal. One figure I read was that Alberta alone has enough coal to power the world at current energy demands for over 200 years.
> 
> There is always a crisis. There was an energy crisis in the 70's. Global warming, global cool, climate change, cold war, world war etc. Like dad says the people in power need a crisis to fix so the masses will vote them in to advert the crisis. And there is always someone trying to make money off a crisis.


You are correct. My electric comes from coal. According to some that makes it evil. So I pay for it.


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## rjmoses (Apr 4, 2010)

All, and I mean every stinking one of them, sources of energy production have a downside, even wind and solar. Wind, as an example, has the gigantic towers and low frequency vibrations. We don't even have a clue about the effects of those.

It is terrible easy to demonize one energy source, like nuclear, and sanctify another, like solar.

Personally, I am a big proponent of nuclear. I worked as a technician at Argonne National Laboratory doing nuclear reactor research in the late 60s until Richard Nixon got elected. (We went from 6000 employees to 2500 in 6 months, but that's another story.)

The nuclear industry was killed by having to build such giant facilities to be economically viable and having to face such tremendous scrutiny, that there hasn't been a new plant built in over 20 years.

The same thing is happening to oil refineries--no new plants.

Ralph


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## FarmerCline (Oct 12, 2011)

Nuclear scares me.....if an accident happened or it got in the wrong hands and used for the wrong purpose the immediate and long term affects would be disastrous.


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## hog987 (Apr 5, 2011)

FarmerCline said:


> Nuclear scares me.....if an accident happened or it got in the wrong hands and used for the wrong purpose the immediate and long term affects would be disastrous.


Far more people have been killed or injured mining coal than have been killed or injured because of a nuclear power plant.


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

hog987 said:


> Far more people have been killed or injured mining coal than have been killed or injured because of a nuclear power plant.


Yes, but how many will die when an accident of epic proportions happens at a nuclear plant?

Last I heard they don't have the one in Japan sealed up near as tight as they thought.


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## hog987 (Apr 5, 2011)

mlappin said:


> Yes, but how many will die when an accident of epic proportions happens at a nuclear plant?
> 
> Last I heard they don't have the one in Japan sealed up near as tight as they thought.


Of course the other thing is they have been mining coal a lot longer than nuclear power has been around too.

Will one day we will have nuclear fusion happening instead of fission, this will be a cleaner source of power.


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

hog987 said:


> Of course the other thing is they have been mining coal a lot longer than nuclear power has been around too.
> 
> Will one day we will have nuclear fusion happening instead of fission, this will be a cleaner source of power.


Cold fusion would be much better, use it to process sea water in, hydrogen out and no danger of a china syndrome occurring. Or vacuum energy would be better yet.

If you absolutely have to have nuclear power, then something along the lines of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series with nuclear reactors the size of a walnut running everything from a personal shield to a house being possible.

I'm personally against more nuclear until a fail safe way of handling the waste is devised.

If you really want free energy, Larry Niven had it right decades ago, place a device in space that captures unlimited solar energy with out our pesky atmosphere or pollution diluting the energy potential then beam it to earth in the from of microwaves as done in his book Fallen Angels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Angels_(science_fiction_novel)

If you haven't read Fallen Angels then do, the whole premise of the book is what happens when the green weenies get their way, curb global warming and throw the entire planet into the next ice age. Half of the United States under a hundred foot of ice is good, global warming bad.


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## hog987 (Apr 5, 2011)

No I have not read Fallen Angles. But I have read enough to see a lot of the greenies ideas are scary. One that really scares me is to put a large sunshade in space to block a large amount of sunlight from reaching the earth. There idea to block the heat before it gets here. My thinking, dont plants grow better with the sunshine. That sure sounds like a way to cause world wide famine, but hey at least we will be cool.


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## rjmoses (Apr 4, 2010)

I'm happy to see that there are a number of science fiction readers in this group. In my experience, most sci-fi fans are well-educated, thoughtful, hard-working, kind, generous, well...I could go on, but modesty forbids...individuals.

The phrase TANSTAAFl comes to mind. Every energy source or problem solution has a cost. Often, that cost is not obvious in new technologies or is routinely accepted in old technologies.

E.g., Wind power may have unrecognized costs. There is some evidence that the low frequency vibrations emitted have a significant impact on animal life in the immediate area. Other unknown costs might include such things as the effect of air turbulence on weather patterns. BTW: Wind power would not be commercially viable with $6 billion in federal subsidies--so who's paying that cost?

Coal mining has routinely accepted costs of miner deaths. Another accepted cost is that strip mining has significant impact on the soil and runoff.

So, the question becomes: What are we willing to "pay" for energy?

Ralph


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## Vol (Jul 5, 2009)

My economics 1110 professor at the University of Tennessee in 1971 was a staunch supporter of tanstafl economics. That is where I was first introduced to "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch"....yes, somewhere, someone has to pay.

I enjoyed science fiction movies as a young child.....one of my favorites back then was, "The Day the Earth Stood Still", but as I became a teenager I had less and less interest in science fiction and had more and more interest in biological realism.  It made me feel a whole lot better.

Regards, Mike


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## Nitram (Apr 2, 2011)

Marty you are one of the few I know who wouldn't give me a blank stare at the mention of Foundation trilogy. Always felt would make a fantastic movie series with the graphics available now. Love the idea of wind power here in kansas but by the time it pays for itself have to buy new turbine


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

My father thinks sci fi is complete drivel, I get it from Moms side. Anyways it's amazing how accurately some sci fi writers describe something decades before it happens. Satellites are still placed in the Clarke orbit, one writer vividly described a space walk with amazing accuracy decades before one happened. The original Star Trek had the characters using what we call cell phones and iPads now.

When the first computers came out it was thought that only universities and government would have any use for them, not to mention the cost. Now my iPhone 5s has more computing power than the Apple II+ or the IBM 486 I had decades ago. Not to mention if either the Apple or IBM was attempted to be run off the same battery as the iPhone they would probably have a run time of about 30 seconds.

Wasn't that long ago that getting on a plane in Chicago and landing in London less than 8 hours later was science fiction. Ditto with organ transplants and joint replacements.

Right after we got back from England my Mom slipped on the ice and cracked both ankles, just splints, no casts but she wasn't allowed to do stairs. So we brought her out to the farm as we have a first floor bathroom and spare bedroom. Showed her how to access Netflix, first she caught up on any original Star Treks she missed decades ago, then she caught the two new Star Treks. She also liked Firefly and watched the first and only season, then watched Serenity. For mother's day were thinking about getting her an Apple TV so she can watch the rest of Farscape. She started in on that but only made it half way thru the first season.


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

Nitram said:


> Marty you are one of the few I know who wouldn't give me a blank stare at the mention of Foundation trilogy. Always felt would make a fantastic movie series with the graphics available now. Love the idea of wind power here in kansas but by the time it pays for itself have to buy new turbine


I also always thought Rendezvous with Rama by Clarke would be a great movie. Then if it was successful you have several books after that for more movie material.

Given the technology now, I also thought Ringworld or The Integral Trees would also make good movies.

It's interesting that James Cameron waited decades for the technology to be good enough to do justice for what he envisioned for Avatar. Mom also loved that one, have it on Blu Ray.


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## Nitram (Apr 2, 2011)

You are the first with Rama thought I was the only non proffeser to have read this one. Would it not be crazy if planet X / Woodworm were not a vessel instead of planet.


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## rjmoses (Apr 4, 2010)

The first program I developed semi-professionally was written in PL/1 and took 5 hours for a run on an IBM 360/ Model 95 with 5MB of memory. This was the supercomputer of the day and there were only a couple in the world.

The next system I developed was for data collection using a HP 2116 mini-computer, no disks, only paper tape and mag tape. The system had 8K of memory. Took about 2 hours to compile the program.

But my career really took off when I went to work for GTE and worked with factory control systems, most of which had less than 32K memory and a 2 microsecond cycle time.

I did digital music synthesis for sh**s and giggles in 16K of memory using exactly the same technologies that the iPhone uses today. Just didn't have the pretty pictures and glitz that they have.

Read, and still do, sci-fi all the time. I have had an ongoing subscription to Analog magazine for over 40 years. Still have all the issues dating back to about 1985. (My ex-wife threw out all my sci-fi books, over 600, when we split up. Could've been spite?)

But I cannot stand science fantasy; the kind with witches, warlords, etc.

Ralph


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## Mike120 (May 4, 2009)

rjmoses said:


> The first program I developed semi-professionally was written in PL/1 and took 5 hours for a run on an IBM 360/ Model 95 with 5MB of memory. This was the supercomputer of the day and there were only a couple in the world.


 I LOVED PL/1!!!!!

I could make the same calls to my IMSL Math/Statistics Libraries but could get the data definition/control of COBOL....Best of all, I never had to use FORTRAN again. It was also the first structured language I learned (but I still like go-to's) Being older, I learned Assembler and Autocoder on an IBM 1401. Sadly, I've tried learning some of the new languages but I've been away from it too long and now I'm a dinosaur.


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## Nitram (Apr 2, 2011)

Took Pascal /Assembler and Cobol classes in college seems like a previous life now...so long ago


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## rjmoses (Apr 4, 2010)

At last count, I had learned 38 programming languages including oldies but goodies like Fortran, Algol, Basic, 10-12 assembly languages, Cobol, RPG, all the common languages like C, C++, Java, and a lot of arcane languages like LISP, REPO, EDL (one system was 500,000 LOC), and so on.

For whatever reason, programming languages and operating systems just come easily to me. Last language learned was Microsoft's Powershell where I wrote a set of scripts to find all the duplicate music files in all the libraries and consolidate them into one library so that I could import them into iTunes.

Currently playing around modifying the PHP language interpreter to eliminate some of the more common language problems that cause errors.

Too bad there are only 28 hours in the day.

Just having fun.

Ralph


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

I never got further than two.

10: Basic

20: Whatever Palm Pilots used.

30: goto 10


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## Nitram (Apr 2, 2011)

mlappin said:


> I never got further than two.
> 
> 10: Basic
> 
> ...


Nice sub routine... I forgot about taking Fortran. Maybe that's why I ended up in a factory and farming!!! Lol


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

10: CLS

20: Print "I couldn't even remember enough to do that example correctly"

30: Print "Which is why I stuck with Farming"

40: CLS

50: End


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## Mike120 (May 4, 2009)

Nitram said:


> Took Pascal /Assembler and Cobol classes in college seems like a previous life now...so long ago


Pascal was a "user surly" language. I learned enough to not like it. SQL was getting popular then and a lot of the stuff I needed was in Oracle.....a lot easier too.



rjmoses said:


> At last count, I had learned 38 programming languages including oldies but goodies like Fortran, Algol, Basic, 10-12 assembly languages, Cobol, RPG, all the common languages like C, C++, Java, and a lot of arcane languages like LISP, REPO, EDL (one system was 500,000 LOC), and so on.


I only made it to 13....but it did include SLIP and LISP. it was easier to write ELIZA-like stuff in them. I had a Chinese, PhD Chemical Engineer that we kept in a "freezer" with a Symbolics work station writing my "Chemical Engineer in a box". Way too hard to maintain! We ended up giving it to Aspen Technologies in return for global royalty-free licenses on a number of their applications that used it as the core. Back in those days, we thought we could make a computer do just about anything.....Unfortunately the half-life of knowledge and the dynamic world meant you had to spend more on maintaining a application than you ever did to develop in the first place and as your user population grew, you had to spend an inordinate amount of effort "dumbing down" the user interface so normal people could use it. Being on the "bleeding-edge" was not that great!


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