Talk-Polywell.org

JohnSmith - VHDL is a full programming language - Not what you would choose for general programs but it has much of the stuff (functions, procedures, data types, info hiding, v powerful arrays and records). Simon - I think you don't think much of compilers. The most recent GNU C compiler can do good...

Biasses or not, if you are talking about science - as opposed to technology - nobody can be unbiassed. No-one can know from where comes the serendipitous breakthrough, and what we need is intelligent curiosity untrammelled by funding panels with short-term consensus goals. Polywell counts as technol...

Operator overloading. Is one of those trade-offs. It reduces the strictness of typing, allowing more errors not caught by the type system. It also allows clearer and more readable programs by reducing unnecessary type conversions. VHDL has massive overloading of operators. std_logic_arith had just t...

Simon, Re uncertainties in modelling physics of cloud formation & atmospheric transport. This is a key issue, I agree. I will comment when I have read enough of the analysis to feel I can come to a sensible conclusion. Till then I am with the consensus. [One thing I can say now based on my own exper...

As always, the G&A article when read carefully raises questions not apparent from the headline quotes. My main concern is that they are conflating three things: economics forcasting weather forecasting long-term climate forecasting The three have different properties. As far as I am concerned econom...

There is a common strand to the climateaudit objections. Take one part of the overall evidence, poke holes in it, claim the authors are deliberately distorting the truth, use this character assasination instead of a critical assessment of the whole corpus. These words do not mean what you think the...

We all agree that CO2 affects temperature via GH (though less than same amount of H2O). We all agree that higher temperature => more H2O vapour => possible amplification factor. We all agree that CO2 in atmosphere is now at unprecedented (last 10,000,000 yesrs) levels and set to increase. The issue ...

OK, So let us compare the arguments from climateaudit & realclimate. Let us look at the detail (boring I know, but necessary) and try to reach an independent conclusion. Re the hockeystick graph it seems agreed that the Mann analyss used some questionable methodology. Wegman et al highlighted this. ...

TDPerk, It is always the detail that matters. So the answer to your question is no: what graph (in detail) was cooked, and how, and by whom, and when, with refs if possible? I find the GW debate fascinating biut mainly because there are so many slurs (on both sides), and working out the real and com...

Simon - I have come to the conclusion that the whole GW debate suffers from partial truths and misrepresentations. Specifically in this case can you tell me which page of the IPCC report discusses PDO, so we can see what precisely are their claims? I recently posted a link to an intereresting post-I...

This is going to be a not very informed post, so I apologise. And please bear with my sounding stupid! One of the interesting issues to me seems to be the extent that ion-ion and ion-electron collisions transfer energy from radial direction to tangential Could this usefully be modelled as follows (h...

Whatever the WB-6 results no-one can be sure how it will scale. Building a bigger sub-net-power device will help estimate scaling laws but still leave some uncertainty - given that the theory of 3-D non-equilibrium plasma is too complex for us to be sure. Running a WB-6 sized device continuously wil...

Re feedback - There are mechanisms to maintain stability. For example governments buying & selling oil. It is fast, and therefore can stop large oscillations (think of a bang-bang controller), but unfortunately the amount of oil you can store is limited, so any such system will meet its limits at so...

What I mean is that regional variation is vey noticeable but less significant for the overall energy budget. Here is an interesting perspective on politics & issues behind the latest IPCC report, Well worth reading, and links to the report itself. http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/sellers_ip...

Simon, Other than the fact that temperamentally you are somewhat to the right of Atilla the Hun and I probably would prosper and approve of a Brave New World - type controlled society we do not disagree so much. But the real issue with rules is one of Control Engineering: is the system more or less ...