wv wrote:

nittany ram wrote:

Who do you think would win a fight between Jamie Lanister (before he lost his sword hand) and Aragorn? How about between The Mountain and Legolas? Arya and Samwise?

I know the correct answers. I just wanna see if you know them.

============

Aragorn.
Legolas.
Arya.

Now, what about Ginger vs Mary-Anne ?

w
v

You got 2 out of 3 correct. That’s a score of 66.7%.

Unfortunately you needed a minimum score of 66.8% to pass the test.

So you failed.

Where you slipped up was when you marked Arya over Samwise.

Arya, like the rest of the Game of Thrones cast, is a fictional character. She’s not real. Game of Thrones is a TV show.

What, you think some wee actress is going to defeat a battle hardened Hobbit in a real fight?

Get real.

waterfield wrote:

That is precisely why progressive will never move forward. Most people see this language as elitism. And that pisses them off. You know the common person-the one you need to be on your side in order to make the very changes you want. There are some very bright and well educated people who voted for Trump. And there are some “peasants” and yes “colonized brains” who voted for Nader. We simply have to stop blaming our life’s misfortunes on “corporations”. To not do so is to forever waddle around in a hopeless sea of mud.

W, setting aside the democrats for a minute, you would agree that Trump doesn’t have the best interest of the poor at heart. So why did so many vote for him? Why do so many poor whites vote for the GOP in every election? It’s not as if their message changes from election to election. Their central message is always a mix of xenophobia and trickle down nonsense. Why do so many poor people vote against fair wages, affordable healthcare, progressive tax plans, etc. Why do they vote against their own best interests? What causes them to do that?

Billy_T wrote:

nittany ram wrote:

It wasn’t a security problem either. How was Iraq a security risk to the US? There were no WMDs there. The inspectors and intelligence services told them that before the invasion.

It’s nice to hear her admit it wasn’t about democracy or nation building (albeit 1.5 decades after the fact) but she’s still not coming clean.

True. I think all of us here said that Iraq was no threat at the time. And I don’t think I was at all alone in pointing out, even if Hussein had WMD, it wouldn’t have mattered. He was completely isolated. He had no air force, no friends in the region. We controlled his skies, and we had inspectors on the ground. He wasn’t going to use them. Beyond that, he was a shadow of a shadow of his former self, and even at the height of his power, in 1990, he never tried to attack us, and America defeated him in a matter of weeks. He knew it would be national suicide to use them on anyone. Hell, Clinton bombed him if he sneezed the wrong way.

If we could push a button and get rid of brutal dictators, without harming any innocents? He’d be on the list. But any invasion was destined to unleash holy hell on civilian populations. His own Pentagon told Bush thousands of them would be killed just in the first hours of “shock and awe.”

It was a monstrous and entirely indefensible decision, every which way.

You’re right. Saddam wouldn’t have been a threat even if he had WMDs. All we accomplished with that invasion was to kill a bunch of innocent people, destabilize the region and create terrorists.

Billy_T wrote:

IMO,

Folks are missing the fundamentally revolutionary changes wrought by capitalism, when it overthrew previous economics forms — which were all local and independent of one another. No previous economic system had even tried to subsume all local markets under its umbrella, and then get governments to make all of that the only legal structure.

Well I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying about capitalism, Billy. I was speaking more in generalities though. I don’t know much about economic systems but I doubt the systems that existed in Western Europe in the 1500s were any ‘better’for the masses than what we have today.

Even if mankind eliminated the emission of all greenhouse gasses today, there is enough C02 in the atmosphere to keep the average temperature of the earth rising for hundreds of years.

So, I agree with zn.

We should probably bomb somebody.

Link: https://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S38/51/51I69/index.xml?section=topstories

Even if emissions stop, carbon dioxide could warm Earth for centuries
Posted November 24, 2013; 01:00 p.m.

by Morgan Kelly, Office of Communications
Tweet e-mail | print
Even if carbon dioxide emissions came to a sudden halt, the carbon dioxide already in Earth’s atmosphere could continue to warm our planet for hundreds of years, according to Princeton University-led research published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The study suggests that it might take a lot less carbon than previously thought to reach the global temperature scientists deem unsafe.

The researchers simulated an Earth on which, after 1,800 billion tons of carbon entered the atmosphere, all carbon dioxide emissions suddenly stopped. Scientists commonly use the scenario of emissions screeching to a stop to gauge the heat-trapping staying power of carbon dioxide. Within a millennium of this simulated shutoff, the carbon itself faded steadily with 40 percent absorbed by Earth’s oceans and landmasses within 20 years and 80 percent soaked up at the end of the 1,000 years.

By itself, such a decrease of atmospheric carbon dioxide should lead to cooling. But the heat trapped by the carbon dioxide took a divergent track.

After a century of cooling, the planet warmed by 0.37 degrees Celsius (0.66 Fahrenheit) during the next 400 years as the ocean absorbed less and less heat. While the resulting temperature spike seems slight, a little heat goes a long way here. Earth has warmed by only 0.85 degrees Celsius (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that global temperatures a mere 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial levels would dangerously interfere with the climate system. To avoid that point would mean humans have to keep cumulative carbon dioxide emissions below 1,000 billion tons of carbon, about half of which has already been put into the atmosphere since the dawn of industry.

Frölicher iceberg
Princeton University-led research suggests that even if carbon dioxide emissions came to a sudden halt, the carbon dioxide already in Earth’s atmosphere could continue to warm our planet for hundreds of years. The researchers found while carbon dioxide steadily dissipates, the absorption of heat the oceans decreases, especially in the polar oceans such as off of Antarctica (above). This effect has not been accounted for in existing research. (Photo courtesy of Eric Galbraith, McGill University)
The lingering warming effect the researchers found, however, suggests that the 2-degree point may be reached with much less carbon, said first author Thomas Frölicher, who conducted the work as a postdoctoral researcher in Princeton’s Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences under co-author Jorge Sarmiento, the George J. Magee Professor of Geoscience and Geological Engineering.

“If our results are correct, the total carbon emissions required to stay below 2 degrees of warming would have to be three-quarters of previous estimates, only 750 billion tons instead of 1,000 billion tons of carbon,” said Frölicher, now a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. “Thus, limiting the warming to 2 degrees would require keeping future cumulative carbon emissions below 250 billion tons, only half of the already emitted amount of 500 billion tons.”

The researchers’ work contradicts a scientific consensus that the global temperature would remain constant or decline if emissions were suddenly cut to zero. But previous research did not account for a gradual reduction in the oceans’ ability to absorb heat from the atmosphere, particularly the polar oceans, Frölicher said. Although carbon dioxide steadily dissipates, Frölicher and his co-authors were able to see that the oceans that remove heat from the atmosphere gradually take up less. Eventually, the residual heat offsets the cooling that occurred due to dwindling amounts of carbon dioxide.

Frölicher and his co-authors showed that the change in ocean heat uptake in the polar regions has a larger effect on global mean temperature than a change in low-latitude oceans, a mechanism known as “ocean-heat uptake efficacy.” This mechanism was first explored in a 2010 paper by Frölicher’s co-author, Michael Winton, a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) on Princeton’s Forrestal Campus.

“The regional uptake of heat plays a central role. Previous models have not really represented that very well,” Frölicher said.

“Scientists have thought that the temperature stays constant or declines once emissions stop, but now we show that the possibility of a temperature increase can not be excluded,” Frölicher said. “This is illustrative of how difficult it may be to reverse climate change — we stop the emissions, but still get an increase in the global mean temperature.”

The paper, “Continued global warming after CO2 emissions stoppage,” was published Nov. 24 by Nature Climate Change. Funding for the work was provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Ambizione grant PZ00P2_142573) and Princeton University Carbon Mitigation Initiative.

PA Ram wrote:

waterfield wrote:

PA: I’m sorry to hear about you wife’s lymphoma. My wife was diagnosed with multiple myeloma a few years back. Hopefully your wife is in good care. We make the trip to Stanford-from So Cal-at least 4 times a year. Life always seems to give us enough to struggle with independent of politics. Wishing the best for you guys.

Tony

Thank you. She’s going to be seeing some specialists in Lymphoma at Penn University. She has a rare non-hodgkins called peripheral t-cell lymphoma. But we’re hoping that we got on top of it early. My best to you and your wife as well

Barry

My thoughts are with you and your wife, Barry.

I really feel bad for young children. They are going to have to deal with some really fucked up conditions when they are my age.

snowman wrote:

Me too, but I wish they would make the horns a little bigger, bolder.

I agree. Compare your photo of a classic helmet next to today’s helmet.

Luv’n the new helmets.

Zooey wrote:

nittany ram wrote:

Wasn’t Apocalypto the film that showed why the brutal and corrupt Mayans needed to be saved from themselves by the Christian Conquistadors?

Is that true?

Because that’s what flashed through my mind when I watched the clip with Gibson in mind.

Some of the historians and others critical of the film said that appeared to be the underlying message.

They’re not ravens. Ravens have three eyes…

PA Ram wrote:

Okay–I like the pick and hope for the best. But the one concern I do have with him is his speed. He is slooooooow. I looked up the 40 times for some of the guys he’s being compared to(Edleman, Amendola, Jordy Nelson)and they are all in the 4.5s. He could not break 4.6 at the combine. His second run was worse than his first.

He will have to rely on that route running to gain the separation but hopefully that’s enough. Another guy with great hands and a slow time is Nelson Spruce. He’s slower than Kupp. And he looked like he could play. So we’ll see.

I sure hope he’s a nice clutch go-to guy for Goff.

I believe in the old Al Davis adage that ‘speed kills’, but it ain’t everything.

The Rams have drafted a lot of speedy guys over the last few years to no avail. Speed is nice but you gotta be able to play. Kupp looks like he can play.

Bruce is the best WR the Rams ever had and he was slower than many LBs in this league.