They all seem to scatter a little too conveniently. Any chance this is CGI?

I rather feel that that puts the argument in a skewed light. Essentially, we are either in full awareness of the facts and long term results of fracking or we are not. If we are not yet, why on earth would we pursue it now? We have alternative forms of energy production, it's just a whole bunch of very rich people aren't quite done selling us oil yet.

The shale will still be there, and we may have developed more efficient and safer means of extracting it. And we will have to deal without oil eventually, what better time to begin, whilst we still have some that we can get if we utterly must? We are not yet in crisis but they want to take a risk, that's got to make you ask a few questions. I don't have a detailed scientific knowledge of the subject, but i would know if it was proven safe, and it isn't yet.

Incidentally or otherwise, the first earthquake that i've ever felt in my life happened very shortly after they began a new testing site for fracking nearby - one of two earthquakes that happened in short succession after the first wave of tests. I live in the north of england.. they never happen. It's worth looking into before we start doing it.. the last person i'm going to trust with the future of this planet is an oil baron.

@BoneRemake - let me know which bit of my horseshit you want me to look past and i'll attempt to look past it and see what you describe. Or was it an empty sound-bite? My criticism was valid - newt said everything that needed to be said on that subject, and yes i can in retrospect see the value of the video as a demonstration of the fracking process. But you don't have to be a hippy to try and see positive and informed decisions made in the world, but if it makes me one then i'm glad to be one. What does that make you? No need for name calling, it generally means you've not got an argument.

I'd just like to mention that it really, really suits the pro-fracking lobbyists to try and ridicule people and try to conjure mental images of the long-haired flower-child hugging trees and not showering and wearing tinfoil hats. It turns real, intelligent, professional people who care about what happens around them into caricatures, and it belittles their reasoned and sensible argument without even addressing it. It is a tactic as old as the hills.. i'm sure you're not a lobbyist, but i can't help think they're smiling knowing that the old seeds they scattered around took root somewhere..!

Sam Harris is sharp as ever. Cenk loses damn near every point. I can genuinely not see how anyone can think Cenk "won" this debate.

@enoch I must say that I'm disappointed if that's what you're walking away with from this clip. Cenk seems to misunderstand most of what Harris is trying to say, and when he explains further Cenk brushes it off and changes the subject in, to use the wording from the video, a scatter shot way. Grabbing parallels or examples from seemingly random and unrelated ways. It feels like Harris is fighting an uphill battle which is tiring him, so there's a lot of repetitions to try and hammer the points home. Sadly they seem to fall on deaf ears.

I don't see any arrogance in the video, granted I'm missing the last 30 minutes or so.

Had to agree with you. Just way too scattered around and with too many terse unrelated hero-takes-dramatic pose shots.

Even a trailer should have some sense of flow. They got some of it right by building around the central musical theme, but didn't fill in the rest.

@Trancecoach holding a doctorate doesn't make you capable of understanding the scientific literature. If you held a bachelor's degree in one of the three sciences you'd stand a lot better chance of being able to understand the literature than someone who had a doctorate in say Art History. I would actually refer back to the Dunning Kruger effect and suggest that holding an unrelated qualification might lead you to overestimate your abilities.

And for someone who says that they *are* capable of understanding the scientific literature (and therefore the scientific method and approach), you dismiss "scientific consensus" as not being "scientific evidence". I don't understand what you mean here, but i think that's because you don't understand what scientific proof is.

I think it's a fundamental mistake that you're making. Scientists propose theories. Those theories that most accurately describe the situation and are most rigourously investigated are the ones that are accepted as being the case, and when things are found that are not correct, adjustments are made to the theory or other theories are proposed. There is never ever, ever.... EVER.. absolute evidence of anything in the way in which you request it, and that's your fundamental error, and stems from you not understanding the scientific method.

We have a lot of scientific consensus about gravity, but we do not have "scientific evidence" in the way you describe it. The evidence is ALL of the science that is done, ALL of the experiments ALL of the conclusions, positive and negative, and the consensus of the scientific community is reached and refined based on that research and ongoing research. There is no one document anywhere that constitutes "proof" that gravity is how we think it is. Not even all of the documents do that. They merely indicate to us what is most likely to be happening according to all of the knowledge and ingenuity that we've built up over the years.

I don't appreciate the scatter gun method you've used by posting all those links. You said in your latest post here that people try to confuse the issue by redirecting your request for "evidence" - the type that doesn't exist - towards other issues that you deem contentious. Yet you have almost drowned me in what appears to be about 15 different links to pages that seem to show singular examples of individuals that deny climate change. (Again, there are so many, and so many quotes, and no actual specification of what you are disagreeing with me about, that i can't rightly assess any of them.)

My point here is twofold - 1) don't try to be confusing like you accuse your opponents of, i.e. throwing as many links as possible to extend the argument to other points and 2) if that isn't what you were doing, could you perhaps condense your 15 links and selected quotes into a smaller point; that point being what it is about my previous posts you disagreed with?

Here are my points for you, simplified:
1) Scientific consensus does not mean "THIS IS HOW THINGS ARE" - it means that, on balance, according to everything we know and the opinions of those that are in the know, this is how we think things are until we know better.
2) There is no such thing as "scientific evidence" in the way you use the term; the only absolute proof is the one Descartes spoke about; the only thing you can know for sure is that your consciousness exists.
3) It is very easy to be misled by articles such as the one you linked from "the libertarian republic" website. This is also true of the last link you recommended for my research; you used that book to support your opposition to my assertion that human-caused climate change is not a matter of debate in the scientific community. Yet the same author was involved in the Copenhagen Consensus which lists as 6th most worthy of investigation (for the benefit and future of mankind), i quote; "R&D to Increase Yield Enhancements, to decrease hunger, fight biodiversity destruction, and lessen the effects of climate change"

I think that out of courtesy you should select one link which backs up whatever it is that you wish to refute, because it's not a good use of my time to have to go through each individual link, find out what you disagree with me about, and then spend time looking into it.

So, we disagree on one of the following:
1) The scientific consensus is that human-caused climate change is real, and that consensus represents the best of our current understanding as a species.
2) "Proof" in the sense you use it doesn't exist, the correct term is scientific evidence. The more evidence and the more convincing it is, the more firm the belief in a theory.
3) The article you linked from the libertarian website was unfairly representing its argument in relation to the paper it was referring to.

Please let me know. Remember - nothing is "beyond scepticism" in your words. I am sceptical about everything, including gravity, which i have an incredible amount of evidence for. However i am still sceptical about our understanding of it - i am always looking for differences. That doesn't mean that our understanding isn't the best one we have, and we should use it for our own advantage and safety.

I also note that you seem loathe to have a proper discussion with me. Our discussion could have been either about the scientific method or about the article you linked, but to throw all these links at me makes me feel you're unwilling or incapable of challenging your own opinion based on evidence. You don't even refer to the assessments of the article that i offered; you immediately discarded the article from your argument and linked me to other people that may or may not be misrepresenting the argument.

(Grand Prix of Germany - 1939)

Again hundreds of thousands converged on the Nürburgring to witness the struggle for the first Grand Prix of Greater Germany.

Seventeen racing cars stand at the race's start: Mercedes Benz, Auto Union, Alfa Romeo, Maserati und Delahaye.
The proud airship «Graf Zeppelin» with its 4 Mercedes Benz motors came to visit, too.
The field is already entering the southern bend - the battle has begun.

From a bird's eye view the racing race cars look like kid's toys.
But for the drivers 500km on the hardest racetrack of the world is all but child's play.
More than a thousand times they have to de-clutch, shift, brake.
The tiniest of mistakes endangers life and victory.
Bend joins bend; sharp inclines and abrupt falls alternate.
The machines' strain is enormous.
The machines have to provide over 7000 revs.
And all that for close to four hours - a grim ordeal for car and driver.

Breakdowns are numerous.
Caracciola, who seized the lead in lap 13, bears the great Mercedes Benz community's hopes.

Scattered showers made the track dangerously slippery, but calm and confident, the experienced master Caracciola guides his car towards the finish line.
Excitedly, chief engineers Wagner and Heeß, the designers of the Mercedes Benz racing cars, watch the contest's thrilling final stage.
The last round: Celebrated by the spectators Caracciola crosses the finish line.

Also, I think you are misinterpreting the GRRM quote about killing perceived heroes of the series once they become popular.

First of all, the Red Viper and Ned stark were introduced and killed in the same book. Their deaths were planned all along and served the story. They didn't have a chance to become popular with the fans before they died. It only feels that way because you are watching a tv adapation of the books.

Secondly, the MOST POPULAR candidates for the heroes of the series are still alive as of book 5. There is one prevailing theory based on plenty of hints GRRM scattered throughout his books on who the real heroes of the story are, and so far the books have been consistent. Of course, that does not mean they will survive the series ending.

GRRM has specifically stated that he does not want the books to become like the TV series Lost, where the writers actively tried to outwit reader speculation. GRRM said he wanted to strike a balance between giving the readers what they want, and maintaining some element of surprise.

So in summary, I don't think GRRM is killing characters unfairly just because they're popular. In retrospect, I like the series even more because so few books leave such a lasting impact on me.

@poolcleaner
i fucking love you man!

once innocence is lost,
it can never be re-aquired.
disillusion has a sister called cynicism.
a vile woman who seduces her lover "despair" like a desperate dive-bar trollop.

do not engage these corrupt entities,
for they only seek to expose your inadequacies and feed off your fears.
they amplify the conflicting messages we are all subjected to daily.
they rejoice in your anxiety and call it truth.

but thats the lie.

the scattered remnants of a splintered childhood dream,
fed by people who walked in that very dream...
and believed in its seductions...
reveals the truth....of the lie.

grieve if you must,
but allow that lie to sink into the ocean of oblivion and irrelevance,
and embrace the truth.

you are no longer bound.
you are free.

how many can say that with conviction?

*edit*sighs.meant that to be on your page..i am so fail.

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

Fibre can go a pretty long distance before it affects the signal though...

Fibre is comprised mainly of silicone, the more pure the fibre, the less dispersion issues occur at or around 1550nm (one of the main wavelengths used for long distance transmission, as we can easily and cheaply amplify this using ebrium doped segments and some pumps!)

Any impurities in the fibre will absorb the 1550 at a greater rate than other wavelengths, causing linear distortions in the received carrier along greater distances. This is called Brillouin scattering.

In the context of the above video, consider a paralell cable sending data over 100m. If one of those lines is 98m, then every bit that is sent down that line, will be out of order.

Same deal with Brillouin scattering, only on the optical level. Thats one of the main issues we gotta deal with at distance, however it only ever occurs at or around 1550nm, and only ever when you are driving that carrier at high powers (i.e. launching into the fibre directy from an ebrium doped amplifier at +15 dBm)

Theres some fancy ways of getting around that, but its not cheap.

Anywhere from say around 1260 to 1675nm is the typical bandwidth window we use today.

So, say 415nm of available bandwidth.
If we want that in frequency to figure out the theoritcal bits/sec value from the shannon-hartley theory, then we just take the inverse of the wavelength and times it by the speed of light.

7.2239e+14 hz is the available spectrum.

...thats 7.2239e+5 terahertz....

Assume typical signal to noise on fibre carrier of +6dB (haha, not a chance in hell it would be this good across this much bandwidth, but whatever..)

For a single fibre you would be looking at an average peak bandwidth of around 20280051221451.9 mbps.

Thats 19,340,564 Terabits per second, or 18,887.3 Petabits per second.

You can fudge that +/- a couple of million Tbps based on what the actual SnR would be, but thats your average figure.....thats a lot of Terabits.

On one fibre.

Source: Im a telecoms engineer

It's certainly impressive... nice sub surface scattering on the skin tone, and the bump-mapping on the eyeball really helps sell it.

If this is pre-rendered, it's a well-executed piece of animation with meticulous attention to detail. If it's real-time.... it's freaking amazing.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

As a business, Facebook seems like a house of cards ready to tumble. As a social site it actually has quite a bit of utility for someone like me who has had a scattered life over several continents - I've never had an easier way to keep in touch with friends and family.

Alright... I just got Intel from H.Q. E.T.A. 5 minutes to bedtime boys, let's wrap it up!

That and the Max line... "Stay up soldier! Here's a med kit, patch yourself up!" and a few others scattered around... but the bedtime boys one was the one that made me have to sift it...

Jews have been hated since the beginning of time, scattered throughout the world and was give a postage size stamp piece of land after nearly being decimated by Hitler.

Their new land is theirs and if they don't want to "mix" then that's is their national right.

Everyone (in the general sense) hates them anyway --except the American right- -just leave them be.

Are they excessive and overly indulged with National Pride- You bet.

But from their point of view I can understand it.

Their detainment camp was probably build by Halliburton, who built our FEMA ( American detention ) camps. A.K.A. REX84

Gotta give it up to her for being able to look Skeletor in the face standing so close. Once she started speaking with passion he was then compelled to turn his gaze from the floor to her face.....(cringe) I couldn't have met that snivelingly-sinister gaze as she did, YOW!


I'd imagine (and tout the idea constantly when people start bitching about being powerless in these situations) a most effective impact would be had in the form of protest through boycott:
For instance, the entire country buys no gasoline for a week, a month, etc.
Protest prison system woes and completely fucked drug laws by hitting more commodities, boycott cotton and coffee for six months and watch 'em squirm.

Week off Work protests stretch into month off work.
Laws violating the human rights of retail employees, the ethical treatment of squirrels in public parks, pick a cause and demand change through withdrawing your capitol and watch the cockroaches scatter!

Shut down the predictable meatbag habits and watch the shit change dramatically.

We are heading towards planet lock-down and we can make it easy for Babylon, or a pain in her ass.