Travel today. So by request, here is a Weekend Open Thread on Thatcher, who did much to kick off the CO2 global warming saga but later on became a sceptic and regretted her actions. My favorite quote (supposedly attributed to her) from Thatcher is about consensus:
“consensus is an absence of leadership”
So true.
Along the same lines, it is such a shame that the left treats her service so poorly by making an artificial push in song popularity, a false consensus if you will, to make “Ding Dong The Witch is Dead” #1 in Britain so that the BBC will have to play it on BBC Radio1. Such cheap shots speak to the integrity of their political convictions. Fortunately, the BBC decided that they had a shred of integrity left and chose not to play the clip in full. Still, it is a cheap shot.
Plus, discuss anything else within the limits of blog policy.
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_Jim says:
April 13, 2013 at 10:01 am
Jim, I would recommend buying the parts from a source such as Newegg.com. You could build a great system for 400-450$.
Is your number crunching your own code, or existing programs?
If the former, get yourself one of the high-end Nvidia cards and learn how to write CUDA-C. The Tesla Kepler series cards yield several TFlops of single precision performance (K10, K20, K20X) and just over 1 TFlop of double precision performance (K20, K20X). The primary programming language is C with differences added in for massive parallelization. Learning the threading model, and particularly how to make sure things work synchronously, is the hardest part of using these processing beasts.
Mark
Mark Bofill;
So what’s wrong with this argument?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
What’s wrong is that the calculation you used is based on a change to the amount of energy being input to the system as a whole. Doubling CO2 changes the amount of energy being put into the system as a whole by precisely zero. What a doubling of CO2 does is rearrange where the energy is at any given time with some altitudes increasing (close to surface for example) and other altitudes decreasing, but the “average” remains the same. So you can’t compare the two. The 3.7 w/m2 from CO2 doubling doesn’t occur at any given altitude, it is actually “smeared” across the atmospheric column and so doesn’t behave anything like an increase in insolation at TOA.
mods ~ hidey hole snared one. Can’t for the life of me figure out why. But TIA.
Margaret Thatcher is reviled on the left for her action against the miners, which is blamed for closing down many deep coal mines.
If the ‘Greens’ have their way in reducing the amount of coal burnt to generate electricity, what will be the effect on coal mining?
William, the poor had the opportunity for the first time in their lives, to better themselves, to buy their council house, to move where the jobs were “social mobility” was the key. The poll tax was a good idea, badly sold, that made everyone pay for local amenities, such as roads, the police, libraries, parks etc instead of just home owners. The left wing agitators kept orchestrating riots with the usual suspects (the ne’er do wells, who spend their lives scrounging off everyone else and who resent anyone else trying to better themselves) who did not see why they should pay for the facilities that they use, because they had never paid for anything with their own moneuy before.
What doomed her leadership to the bin was the handful of “wets” who wanted us to join the Euro and stuck the literal knife in her back!
Margaret Thatcher was initially enthusiastic about the EU and turned against that.
I’ve frequently noticed that people who are sceptical about AGW are often sceptical about the EU as well. (Not just because the EU impose all the crazy green directives.)
There are striking similarities between the climate saga and the Euro. Before it was introduced I thought that a single currency and exchange rate would never work with such a wide range of countries. I still cannot comprehend why the good and the great of seventeen countries couldn’t wait to join. The consensus was clear, but it was wrong.
I still cannot understand why any country would wish to give up control of their borders, banking, working hours, food safety, agriculture and fisheries, environment , etc., to join the EU.
However, like climate change decisions by politicians and others, all the consequences are beginning to emerge. It will take many years, perhaps decades for the mistakes to be admitted.
J Martin says:
April 13, 2013 at 9:22 am
“In my opinion leaving the EU is not an economically sensible action, indeed I think the UK should join the Euro, but I also think we should require that some absurdly managed countries leave the Euro.”
Thanks for your answer. And an interesting stance on the Euro – what you’re saying seems to be basically if the Euro were a sensible currency the UK should join it.
To which I would say: But it isn’t, so you better not.
Germany BTW is in hock for 1 tn EUR (via TARGET2 and some of the bailout funds); so expect us to sooner or later throw some good money after bad to avoid facing bankruptcy just now. The Euro is a prisoner’s dilemma.
We are always eager to invite other nations into it. Have some fun and some drama in your life. It’s boring without the Euro.
davidmhoffer says:
April 13, 2013 at 10:48 am
“If your app is single threaded you will be better off with a higher GHz processor as additional core count won’t help your performance. ”
If he wants to crunch numbers and his app is single-threaded, there is often a cheap workaround: Divide the problem space in as many parts as you have cores and let each core work with that part. Or, for genetic algorithms:
My personal number crunching is based on genetic algorithms so can profit from simply running on all cores available in parallel; which increases the likelihood of a positive mutation. The app itself is single threaded and is started n times. The apps communicate via files, basically stealing individuals from each other so a positive mutation can jump from the gene pool in one app to the next.
Jim Cripwell says:
April 13, 2013 at 10:44 am
——–
Thanks Jim. Actually, I could rephrase the lead in and conclusion of my argument if you like as follows: The IPCC claims a most likely value of 2C temperature increase per doubling of CO2, based on the assumptions I used. Using those assumptions, I provide an argument that doubling CO2 will cause no more than a 0.6C temperature increase. For those who choose not to accept one or more of the assumptions; that’s perfectly OK with me – not accepting the assumptions also invalidates the IPCC position on 2C per doubling.
What I was really after is, from the perspective of a warmist – Is my fly down or is there spinach in my teeth arguing this?
_Jim says:
April 13, 2013 at 10:01 am
“The goal is to get away from continual memory ‘swapping’ that takes place on the present PC”
What kind of data is it that is so huge?
Did you try an SSD? I have one running nonstop for a year now, it hasn’t slowed down noticeably and it’s maybe 10 times faster than a harddisk; when you copy loads of small files even more as no head movements are necessary.
thelastdemocrat says:
April 13, 2013 at 9:20 am
……” – including a system where citizen brigades get trained to understand industry surveillance, and carry it out themselves in a manner approved by citizens, govt officials and industry –…
If you think government bureaucracy is a barrier to economic development, just give “citizen brigades” like WWF, Greenpeace, Sierra Club etc a voice in watching over a private company’s operations.
Now, if you’d proposed something really radical, like corporate representatives surveilling government officials, I’d be on-board with that. If the likes of the EPA were being watched by reps from Exxon and BP, I think they’d need to work a whole lot harder to get things like CO2 regulated. At least we’d have a window into the dealings of government regulators rather than the way it is now, where citizens and corporations are completely disregarded in the process of making regulations.
What pi$$e$ me off about the idiots celebrating the death of Thatcher is they are kids, or at least the visible ones, who have no idea whatsoever what life was like in the ’70’s.
The UK was dreadful. Rubbish piled high with rats circling the bins. 29,000,000 man days lost through strike action in a single year. Unions abusing their power, bringing a once great nation to it’s knees etc etc etc.
I used to be a labour supporter having been brought up on a huge council estate where the rule was you took what you could, mostly from the state, but also from your neighbours. The ’70’s turned me into a Tory.
Thatcher was the first Tory I voted for, but she wasn’t the last. From being a card carrying labour voter, the unions turned me into a Tory,although I was on the front-line of the poll tax protests. Crushing Scargill was the best thing that Thatcher did for the county.
Thatcher, may she rest in peace, was the last of the conviction politicians, who rightly or wrongly stood for what they believed in not what they can get out of the system
Mark, it’s an existing commercial app; it solves Maxwell’s equations using a multitude of tetrahedron’s in 3-space.
DirkH
Did you try an SSD? I have one running nonstop for a year now, it hasn’t slowed down noticeably
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It is unlikely to ever slow down but it will eventually start to shrink. As SSD’s age, cells lose their ability to have data written to them. This is not noticeable at first because a 100 GB SSD actually has anywhere from 120 GB to 150 GB on it. As cells “lock up” they are swapped out and spare cells are swapped in. Once you run out of spares though, your drive capacity starts to shrink. Rule of thumb is that the cheapo SSD’s are capable of about 1/2 PB of write through while more expensive “enterprise class” SSD’s are capable of 4 – 5 PB of write through.
Solution to Maxwell’s equations in 3-space as excited by structures defined within that space making use of a number of ‘tetrahedrons’ in the space. Larger, more complicated structures, more and smaller ‘tets’ as they say.
I thought about that, but, there is still the overhead of the OS to make “virtual memory” available to the application during execution. As it is, I bumped up the amount of virtual storage to 64 GB on a separate HD partition so as not to receive the application-stopping message saying “insufficient memory”.
Direct-access RAM would seem to be the answer, although a large, *fast* swap file would solve the issue of lots of ‘idle’ time created now using a spinning hard drive for the ‘swap’ (actually, “virtual memory”) file.
I might do both, buy a SSD now and then see how that goes to reducing task run-times first …
.
Mods – my posts seem to be getting snagged in the spam filter … TIA _Jim
Mark Bofill;
What I was really after is, from the perspective of a warmist – Is my fly down or is there spinach in my teeth arguing this?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The spam filter ate my last response to this, don’t know what the “trigger” word was, but I will take another crack at it.
The sensitivity calculation that you have done is predicated upon a change in the amount of energy being put into the system as a whole. CO2 doubling doesn’t change the amount of energy being put into the system, it changes where in the system the energy is concentrated at any given time. Thus “radiative forciing” or RF and “surface forcing” are not comparable, and the IPCC says so.:
Surface forcing has quite different properties than RF and should not be used to compare forcing agents (see Section 2.8.1). Nevertheless, it is a useful diagnostic, particularly for aerosols (see Sections 2.4 and 2.9).
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch2s2-2.html
There are essentially two types of SSDs: SLC (single-layer cell) and MLC (multi-layer cell). You could spend a long time comparing the two, but to keep it really simple, SLC lasts longer and is far more expensive. You could expect an SLC drive to last a lifetime. The enthusiast market is pretty much entirely MLC drives. An optimistic estimate for the lifespan of an MLC drive would be ten years. Intel is known to make the most reliable SSDs, but the performance per dollar of Intel SSDs won’t compare to some other manufacturers.
David, thanks, I should have known it couldn’t possibly be that easy. :). But your answer is what I was looking for. Much obliged.
Thursday’s CME due to hit some time after midnight GMT
_Jim;
One other thing you may want to consider is just upgrading what you have. You said yourself cpu utilization is very low. In other words, you’ve got the horsepower, but your transmission only has one gear and your tires are bald. You can more than likely upgrade the ram in your existing box, and ram is cheap. Given that it sounds like you are I/O bound at the disk level, you may want to just buy an SSD or Hybrid drive and see if it makes a big difference or not. If not you can always pull them out and install them in whatever you do buy.
Mark Bofill says:
April 13, 2013 at 10:02 am
. . . So what’s wrong with this argument?
Perihelion is in January at 147.5 million km. Aphelion is in July at 152.6 million km.
Otter says:
April 13, 2013 at 7:22 am
=====
That is one very confused ‘scientist’. He/she apparently doesn’t realize that the argument is over feedback.
Funny how those who fought their way free of the Nanny State seem to be it’s harshest critics. That alone should tell you something. Who in their right mind wants to join an organizational model dependent on your continued poverty. The state never “withers away” it simply grows larger whenever possible. Imagine yourself a citizen of the UK where a bankrupt energy policy based on a fairy tale is hobbling any chance of an economic recovery. My hat is off to those who refuse to yield.