The student's a fool for missing class, doing nothing about it, and sending an inappropriate email. But the prof is a douche for posting a student's personal email address on YouTube. LOL!

I'm not an expert on climate change and I assume you have not devoted your life to climate science either.

From what I can ascertain, your links suggest a hiatus in warming not a reversal of trend.

To quote the BBC link:

"Prof Tung believes that whatever the cause and the length of the pause, we are on a "rising staircase" when it comes to global temperatures that will become apparent when the Atlantic current switches again.

At the end we will be on the rising part of the staircase, and the rate of warming there will be very fast, just as fast as the last three decades of the 20th Century, plus we are starting off at a higher plateau. The temperatures and the effects will be more severe."

And the LA Times link:

"Climate skeptics have pounced on this apparent discrepancy, citing it as proof that climate change isn't real, or at least that scientists don't completely understand it. But those who study Antarctic sea ice say their curious observations shouldn't shake anyone's confidence. Dramatic changes in temperature, sea level and extreme weather around the world are proof enough the planet is warming, they say; the only question is how these changes affect the Antarctic as they ripple through the climate system."

Again, I'm no expert. I don't presume that casual Internet research will enable me to properly evaluate and scrutinise academic articles and accurately assess their value within the broader rationale for acting against the purported harm caused by climate change.

Which is why I defer to organisations of scientists. If they overwhelmingly continue to believe that climate change is a threat, then so do I. If they change their views, so will I.

Why is this not the most reasonable approach?

I don't think she stepped forward, she would have been leaning back a bit to keep balanced while holding the ball. As soon as she released the ball she had to stand upright to remain balanced. Hence when it came back it smacked her in the face. The prof should have thought of that. If he had held the ball instead it would have been better.

Also did you notice the smirk on his face when she got hit? He doesn't seem to care at all.

Yeah, I would agree the stupid is more on the prof. than on the chick.

The prof was partially to blame here. After she lets go he's only looking at the audience. He should have been watching the person at risk of being smacked in the face, to make sure they didn't step forward. Worthwords is correct though - a wall behind the head would make a lot more sense, at least when science noobs are doing it.

Given this video, I now blame the prof, not the student.

...or a student. Give the poor old prof an infarction.

German Channel ProSieben - Galileo featured Miroslaw Magola who promotes Telekinesis. Real Magneto, X- Men, Miroslaw Magola's telekinesis is achieved by projecting a portion of his consciousness in the object that he want to move.

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku : THE FUTURE OF THE MIND: The scientific quest to understand, enhance, and empower the mind.” And his quest to promote: “Telepathy. Telekinesis. Mind reading. Photographing a dream. Uploading memories. Mentally controlled robots.”

Kaku claims all of “these feats” have already been achieved. “These feats, once considered science fiction, have now been achieved in the laboratory, as documented in THE FUTURE OF THE MIND,” Kaku’s website declares.

Kaku notes that his “book goes even further, analyzing when one day we might have a complete map of the brain, or a back up Brain 2.0, which may allow scientists to send consciousness throughout the universe.” Miroslaw Magola alias "Magnetic Man," ( Magnet Mann ) known form Stan Lee's Superhumans - MInd Force who allegedly exhibits telekinetic powers aired on History and Discovery Channel born in Poland and now living in Germany. He claims he can lift objects off the floor, transport them through the air and force them to stick to his body - all using the power of his mind .

He was investigated by Prof. Dr. Dr. Ruhenstroth-­Bauer and Dr. Friedbert Karger of the Max Planck Institute and Dr. David Lewis (psychologist), a neurophysiologist at MindLab, one of the United Kingdom's leading neuro-research centers and Dr. Konstantin Korotkov, professor of Physics at St. Petersburg State Technical University in Russia and Alexander Imich from USA. More [url redacted]

To be sure, it does not take "studies" and "experts" to "prove" that smog turns healthy breathable air into unhealthy unbreathable air.

But, again, the consensus among proponents of man-made global warming pretty much all agree that the cause is greenhouse gases. And the consensus is also that cattle accounts for the main source of greenhouse gases. I honestly don't see how anyone concerned with man-made global warming can ignore this and, therefore, not be vegetarian (i.e., be congruent in their behaviors and beliefs).

I recommend reading "Hot Talk, Cold Science", endorsed by respected physicist the late Frederick Seitz, William Harper professor of Physics at Princeton, Richard Lindzen, meteorologist at MIT, written by physicist Fred Singer.

If you want to know where Prof. Singer is coming from, read this (and skeptics are not "deniers"- that's just a slur).

But before you freak out, let me restate, it matters not; clean air is good either way; do things that contribute to clean air (like end the state -- > good luck with that!).

(Better to read and have these discussions with actual working climate scientists than to bother with Internet pundits either way.)

There is also "consensus" as to the three types of "deniers." If anyone calls me a "denier," I'd be curious as to which of the three types of "deniers" you think I belong to (as indicated in the Singer article linked above). And you can then give me your scientific explanations as to why my stance is not valid.

This is something worth keeping in mind (from Singer):

"I have concluded that we can accomplish very little with convinced warmistas and probably even less with true deniers. So we just make our measurements, perfect our theories, publish our work, and hope that in time the truth will out."

The warmistas matter as much as the deniers. And the bottomline remains: what are you going to do about it anyway? As has been shown over and over, your "votes" don't count for much (or anything at all). So, what are you going to do about this (other than fume and get your panties in a twist on videosift)? The same is true with the "deniers." And the skeptics (i.e., true scientists).

Science also doesn't work by consensus. No real scientist will say otherwise. You either prove/falsify some hypothesis or you don't. You don't determine the truth in science by "consensus." Scientific consensus, as has been said, is itself unscientific.

There is no "consensus" on the acceleration speed of falling objects. There is no "consensus" on whether the Earth is orbiting the sun. There is no "consensus" on water being made up of H2O. These you can measure and find out for yourself. (In fact, Galileo had less than 5% "consensus" on whether the Earth orbits the sun at the time of his experiments. Facts matter. "Consensus?" Not so much.)

But,

“If the science were as certain as climate activists pretend, then there would be precisely one climate model, and it would be in agreement with measured data. As it happens, climate modelers have constructed literally dozens of climate models. What they all have in common is a failure to represent reality, and a failure to agree with the other models. As the models have increasingly diverged from the data, the climate clique have nevertheless grown increasingly confident—from cocky in 2001 (66% certainty in IPCC’s Third Assessment Report) to downright arrogant in 2013 (95% certainty in the Fifth Assessment Report).”

Still, this does not in any way equate "denial" of man-made global warming or whatever other "climate change." That is simply an unfounded conflation made up by the propagandists which so many here take on as gospel.

And it still does not let anyone "off the hook" about actually doing something that matters if you care about it so much.

Let me know if anyone finds any "errors" in the science of the NGIPCC articles and studies that I posted above.

Gotta love Krugman.. not as an economist but as a world class hypocrite rivaling Molière's Tartuffe. He's getting paid $25,000 a month to do zero work, while calling for the end of income inequality. <scoff> I wonder if he's ready to give up 70% of that to the federal government like he says all "wealthy" ought to do.

The headline might as well read, "Rich economist constantly holds forth on the evils of income inequality, while...." You get the point. Here's the back-of-the-envelope math on his recent windfall:

Not counting the $20,000 in non-transferable travel budget, moving bennies, etc. that they offered him, CUNY is paying Dr. Krugman a nine-month salary of $225,000. I presume he won't be working summer semesters, so let's say that's all his salary from CUNY for the year. Now normal tenured senior professors at CUNY make at most $116,364 a year. Adjuncts at CUNY make about $3,000 or so per course; you can teach at most 9 hours a semester. So let's say you're an adjunct maxed out at a 3/3 load; you make about $18,000 a year for that. So if Dr. Krugman wanted, he could pick out 6 adjuncts at CUNY and *double* their yearly income, just by giving away the amount of money he personally makes *over and above what the best-paid senior faculty make*. If he were willing to do the job (*) for a nominal fee (as you may know, Prof. Krugman has another line of work), he could literally pick some lucky adjunct at CUNY and double their entire year's income -- *every month of the year.

And honestly, @radx, what did the "progressives" expect would happen? This so-called "Democracy" can never be anything other than an "oligarchy," if not a governance by "mob rule" (and sometimes a combination of the two). If "Democracy" is the "least bad" kind of state/government possible as some (like Mark Twain) have claimed, then it's high time "the people" climbed out of the dark ages and lived without rulers, altogether.

The resultant "chaos" that would ensue would not be any worse (and in fact far better) than the kind of unintended chaos that results from the centralized power structures of state governance.

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*Which, let's be clear, involves no teaching load, and seems to mainly mean that maybe he'll drop by the office every few months to share his brilliance with whoever happens to be there. The point for CUNY is almost certainly to purchase some of the aura from his name on the letterhead

Check Tim Curry in that film 'Oscar' (1991) -His role as linguist Prof Thronton Poole reminds me of this cat's adept renderings....Incidentally, Sly Stallone's best role to date, including the Rocky films the same in which his acting fondled ballzackz....

You are thinking about QAM, Quadrature Amplitude Modulation. Thats an interesting question because QAM essentially produces the same results that the prof talks about in this video. By using interesting ways to change the beat and phase of a single carrier, one can represent a whole array of numbers greater than just a 1 or a zero with a single pulse, case in point.

In QAM, lets just use the easy example of QAM, QPSK (4QAM), where there are 4 possible binary positions for any given 'carrier' signal at a known frequency.

By shifting both phase and amplitude, you can get a 0, 1, 2 or 3, where each position represents a power of 2, up to a total value of 16 unique numbers.

Rather than just a 0 or a 1, you can have 0 through to 15. However doing this requires both a timeslot, and a known carrier window.

The fastest the QAM transmitter can encode onto a carrier is limited by the nyquist rate, that is, less than half the frequency which the receiver can sample at its fastest rate (on the remote end). As you increase the speed of the encoding, you also increase the error rate, and introduce more noise into the base carrier signal, in turn, reducing your effective available bandwidth.

So it then becomes a balancing act, do I want to encode faster, or do I want to increase my constellation density? The obvious answer is the one we went with, increase in constellation density.

There are much more dense variants, I think the highest ive heard of was 1024 QAM, where a single carrier of 8MHz wide could represent 1024 bits (1,050,625 unique values for a given 'pulse' within a carrier).

I actually had a lot more typed out here, but the maths that goes into this gets very ugly, and you have to account for noise products that are introduced as you increase both your transmission speed, and your receiver sensitivty, thus lowering your SNR, reducing your effective bandwidth for a given QAM scheme.

So rather than bore you with the details, the Shannon Hartley theorem is the hard wired physical limitation.

Think of it as an asymptote, that QAM is one method of trying to milk the available space of.

You can send encoded pulses very fast, but you are limited by nyquist, and your receivers ability to determine noise from signal.

The faster you encode, the more noise, the less effective bandwidth....and so begins the ritule of increasing constellation density, and receivers that can decode them....etc....

There is also the aspect of having carriers too close to one another that you must consider. If you do not have enough of a dead band between your receivers cut off for top end, and the NEXT carrier alongs cutoff for deadband at its LOW end, you can induce what is known as a heterodyne. These are nasty, especially so when talking about fibre, as the wavelengths used can cause a WIDE BAND noise product that results in your effective RF noise floor to jump SUBSTANTIALLY, destroying your entire network in the process.

So not only can you not have a contiguous RF bandwidth of carriers, one directly after another...if you try and get them close, you end up ruining everyones day.

I am sure there will be newer more fancy ways to fill that spectrum with useable numbers, but I seriously doubt they will ever go faster than the limit I proposed earlier (unless they can get better SNR, again that was just a stab in the dark).

It gives you a good idea of how it works though.

If you want to read more on this, I suggest checking wikipedia for the following;

Shannon Hartley theorem.
Nyquist Rate
Quadrature Phase Shift Key
Quadrature Amplitude Modulation
Fibre Optic Communication Wavelengths
Stimulated Brillouin Scattering
Ebrium Doped Fibre Amplifiers

Done. Couldn't decide on a decent title...

Halfway in, Prof. Wolff's latest monthly update is already fantastic. Nothing new, really. But his presentation of the (post-)FDR period is rather captivating. For an economist, the man really knows how to tell a story.

Edit: also, Matt Taibbi over at Rolling Stone finally published the sequel to his epic "Vampire Squid" story about the massive wrongdoings of the banking sector, and Goldman Sachs in particular. I haven't read it yet, but the last one was one of the most outrageous things I have read in the last 30 years. Truly epic shit.

I know next to nothing about economics, but after watching a couple of videos with Prof. Wolff, I have to say my interest is piqued. Along with outrage and something akin to hopelessness.