The Google Way of Science – Kevin Kelly, Jun 2008
Many sciences such as astronomy, physics, genomics, linguistics, and geology are generating extremely huge datasets and constant streams of data in the petabyte level today. They’ll be in the exabyte level in a decade. Using old fashioned “machine learning,” computers can extract patterns in this ocean of data that no human could ever possibly detect. These patterns are correlations. They may or may not be causative, but we can learn new things. Therefore they accomplish what science does, although not in the traditional manner.
What is Ultimately Possible in Physics? – Stephen Wolfram, 2009
The history of technology is littered with examples of things that were claimed to be impossible—but later done. So what is genuinely impossible in physics?
Climate Mythology: The Gulf Stream, European Climate and Abrupt Change – Richard Seager, Columbia University, 2008
The seasonal ocean heat storage and pattern of atmospheric heat transport add up to make winters in western Europe 15 to 20 degrees C warmer than those in eastern North America. A very similar process occurs across the Pacific Ocean. A slowdown of the Gulf Stream and ocean circulation in the future, induced by freshening of the waters caused by anthropogenic climate change (via melting glaciers and increased water vapor transport into high latitudes) or simply by warming, would thus introduce a modest cooling tendency. This would leave the temperature contrast across the Atlantic unchanged and not plunge Europe back into the ice age or anything like it. In fact the cooling tendency would probably be overwhelmed by the direct radiatively-driven warming by rising greenhouse gases.
It is long time that the Gulf Stream-European climate myth was resigned to the graveyard of defunct misconceptions along with the Earth being flat and the sun going around the Earth. In its place we need serious assessments of how changes in ocean circulation will impact climate change and a new look at the problem of abrupt climate change. Priorities should shift to: Subtropical droughts, Summer heat waves, sea level rises from loss of glacial ice, severe storms and extreme weather, water – water – water (and not so much temperature)
Computational Geometry – Design and Analysis of Algorithms, Mar 1996
Many situations in which we need to write programs involve computations of a geometric nature
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