I don’t see anything about relative intelligence, but it does seem to support my bald assertion from extensive personal observation that the very intelligent are more likely to believe their own BS even in the presence of physical evidence to the contrary.

One can most easily see this manifest at places like Mensa gatherings where there is always someone or other arguing for a completely whacky favorite belief despite all the world around them to see… It is common enough that I think it may be a general property of the over educated and highly intelligent: They just have a harder time getting a grip on reality, here and now.

All in all, I think the crowd here is pretty intelligent – because discussions sound like Mensa meetings. (At least those where the people not interested in climate have fled someplace else. ;-) )

So, my re-posting of my reply to Ric onto Ask-A-Scientist will again be modified to try to better clarify that situation.

I’m only too happy for people to point out the mistakes that we scientists make. Indeed we do make mistakes, which is why we go through a peer review process when we seek to publish our scientific results. Even so, we still find errors in peer reviewed publications. As the group that I work in once found, an error can propagate into further publications based on an earlier mistake. On one such occasion, we published a paper to show how three authors had made further errors based on an initial published error. We must be constantly vigilant in looking for and reporting on such situations.

rephelan (08:44:46) : please weigh in. Does it make any conclusions about the relative intelligence of warmers or deniers?

I don’t see anything about relative intelligence, but it does seem to support my bald assertion from extensive personal observation that the very intelligent are more likely to believe their own BS even in the presence of physical evidence to the contrary.

One can most easily see this manifest at places like Mensa gatherings where there is always someone or other arguing for a completely whacky favorite belief despite all the world around them to see… “”"

Well in colloquial Mexican, “Mensa” refers to a crazy lady; not to a club for self annointed air heads. Oh I know the name is supposed to relate to a “table”, but remember in Mexican Spanish, that a table is “mesa” not mensa” which as I have said is a crazy lady; well it’s a different Latin root you see, and all the ladies know why it means a crazy lady.

Did you get my email? Your last post on directions on how to contact you were rather cryptic to someone like me who studiously avoids the crosswords we have in every UK newspaper. If you did get it, can you do a quick ‘return’ and I will send you the information promised.

Tonyb .

I agree. Without sand, no pearls…

I like Flanagan and Joel Shore and RW and Phil, and others who do not sing from the same song sheet as the rest of us. It is good to have a (mostly) civilised discussion with people you will never agree with-and who will never agree with you- and who sometimes make good and thought provoking points.

Tonyb

In the majority of cases, I believe that is true; but not necessarily always.

It is my understanding that such things as phase diagrams, solubility products and the like can actually be calculated from theoretical considerations; generally quantum theory in nature.

For example the whole issue of atomic structure and electron orbitals, came about because of theoretical attempts to explaing the spectral lines of the Hydrogen atom, and subsequently other atoms.
The Balmer series and Paschen series and other accoutrements of atomic spectra led to the Bohr atom, and ultimately the theory of orbitals. All of this suddenly elevated chemistry from; “mix a dash of this with a pinch of that and you get a whiff of that other thing. Suddenly (well actually after a whole lot of hard work by many), it became possible to predict the outcome of the pinch/dash experiemnts, with surprising accuracy.

In “The Constitution of Binary Alloys”, a standard reference text (now unavailable), the phase diagrams of many binary inorganic systems are chronicled. They range from the simplest gold/silver phase diagram, where the two components are completely soluble in each other in any possible mixture, to that terror of all metallurgical studies; the Iron Carbon phase diagram; better known as the “steel” diagram.

I have no idea how it is possible to unravel the iron carnon binary phase diagram, with all its intermediate compounds and multiple paths. How experimentalists did experiments to unlock those secrets is just beyond my imagination; yet the outcome is key to monerd structural engineering.

Somehwere in the iron/carbon binary phase diagram is the key to why the Titanic sank; something to do with very low carbon (iron) rivets, instead of the steel rivets that the designers called for; which were apaprently unavailable in sufficient quantities to build the ship.

In the cold waters of icebergia Atlantis; those low carbon rivets turned to s***, and popped their heads off.

But apparently it is possible to compute these phase diagrams from fundamental physics and chemistry; well chemistry is just applied physics anyway. Fortunately such studeis are beyond my pay scale, so I am glad that there are those who do understand that.

I used to teach the atomic physics stuff at a freshman level; but much of that is long gone to the vaporous universe of senility or Alzheimers or just time elapse. I know that the s/p/d/f labels assigned to electron energy levels. or at least their quantum numbers, used to have some appearance meaning to spectroscopists. s stood forr sharb, and d for diffuse, as the resulting spectral lines had those appearanceas. Can’t remember what the other two stand for; but I guess if we need four bases for DNA assembly it is reasonable to have four different quantum number labels, regardless of how they originally came to be.

Try to get some modern egg-head Quantum physicist to explain where s/p/d/f came from; and they probably didn’t even know there ever was such a job title as “spectroscopist”.

I once wanted to be one; more than I wanted to be a fireman.

So yest the CO2 phase diagram was already the work of much experimental verification; and most of us don’t have the means or the patience to do all those experiments; so we thank those who constructed the phase diagram; so we don’t have to do the experiment; But Dr Thatcher’s simple overnighter lab demonstration, is a simple way to save thousands of words. Too bad you can’t do that with a stick in the sandy beach though.

George

Water can/does sublimate, but not under any natural terrestrial conditions. See following link for details.

How so? Is it possible that you’ve missed the whole point of the partial pressure discussion?

According to this source
, the vapor pressure of ice at -10 C is 1.95 torr, or about 0.0026. So any atmospheric conditions drier than that (i.e. less than 100% relative humidity) should make the conditions right for sublimation.

That was supposed to be “I just can’t see”…

I don’t see anything about relative intelligence, but it does seem to support my bald assertion from extensive personal observation that the very intelligent are more likely to believe their own BS even in the presence of physical evidence to the contrary.

One can most easily see this manifest at places like Mensa gatherings where there is always someone or other arguing for a completely whacky favorite belief despite all the world around them to see… It is common enough that I think it may be a general property of the over educated and highly intelligent: They just have a harder time getting a grip on reality, here and now.

Nope. I offer no proof. It’s just an early stage observation of 40+ years running total.

BTW, this “rule” has stood me in good stead for a very long time. I first started by applying it to my own BS quotient (about 35 years ago). Part of my “keeping a tidy mind” process. I do a “reality check” on things whenever possible. Computer programs especially (where we used the phrase “reality check” in a more formal sense as part of the jargon in my group of programmers.)

And that, boys and girls, is why I trust the “local weather” (from all over the planet) far more than I will ever trust any computer generated anomaly map from anyone. And why I would put actual experimental results rather close to first in my list of important attributes of science…

So my “vote” on Flanigan would be: Yes, he’s a troll. But a polite and a relatively harmless one who sometimes (accidentally?) can cause an interesting discussion to follow, while the worst of his trollishness just creates easy “softball” points to get warmed up on while having First Coffee. So I’d vote for not tossing him. Even a broken clock can get you thinking about how to make a good clock…

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/making-an-english-foot/

has a couple of links to some interesting science done while making pendulum clocks very stable. Including using both iron and brass parts in the pendulum so as they differentially expand they cancel out the thermal expansion error in pendulum length…

William:
Simply highlight the text or article of interest, copy and paste to Wordpad or almost any word processing program and print. Read at leisure.

Maybe it’s a Mac thing… but when I want to save a piece to read later, I just choose “print” in the “file” dropdown menu and when presented my options choose “save as pdf”. Then I have a PDF file I can read or print whenever.

It is a special person who can rise above that and move against that tide.

uhhh… in my diatribe above, please replace “intelligence” with “level of education”. The paper did not use “intelligence”.